#or trying to just remotely look after myself in the entire fucking progress

[htelover24]

Curse Breaker pt2

WARNINGS PLEASE READ: mentions of suicide death and depression.

A/N: this was really hard to write I really hope you like it.

Reader is immortal and struggling to be completely blunt. Billie moves in next door. Can she help reader feel something again? Is it fate?

BEEP…………BEEP………..BEEP.

From what I understand that’s a heart monitor. Before I can open my eyes to confirm over 5 doctors rush in and inject me with something cold I feel it slither its way into my veins causing a shiver run through my neck down to the heals of my feet.

“Ma’am do you know how lucky you are!?” A doctor practically shouts at me.

“Yeah, lucky my ass” I say under my breath.

The doctors leave giving me my time to process “beating death.” All I can think is how the hell im going explain this to that goddess of a woman.

As if on cue she barges in looking out of breath. She sits down and catches her breath before speaking.

“How did you get your hands on cancer medication.”

What really blows me is that she’s serious.

“I’m sorry but the first thing you ask me after I just fucking died is that!? Not if I’m ok?!!” I say is utter disbelief.

No way this is what I’m revived to absolutely no way. I died in front of her!! What the actual fuck. I lost my life. I’d be fine with even a “what happened.” I was not prepared for such an irrelevant question.

She looks at me like she knows she’s messed up. Her eyes a filled with guilt and pity….. I hate that look especially on her beautiful face. No face like hers should look at me that way. It makes me feel like have to accept it, like I have to play the role of a suicidal helpless orphan.

“I’m sorry I really am I-.” She takes a deep breath

“I just didn’t know how to react after having you die in front of me like that a-and, when the doctor told me what the cause was I felt….. odd about the whole situation, because you don’t have cancer” She says the last part with a suspicious tone.

No way in hell is any sane person thinking anything remotely suspicious when someone dies in front of them. AND HOW THE FUCK WOULD SHE KNOW IF I HAD CANCER OR NOT.

“Look since you saw it happen I guess I do owe you an explanation, but it’s a long story.” I say hoping maybe she didn’t have time to listen to me.

I silently beg in the corner of my head like little me in the corner of my bath tub when I heard the news. I want nothing more than to never talk about that disastrous, gruesome day. I plead for anything to get me out of this, to lock me out from that memory entirely.

My eyes begin to water as my hands grip the thin blanket of my hospital bed, visibly shaking. I know in my head and in her eyes I look like a child still trying to forget something awful, yet she still says.

“I’ve got all the time in the world, take yours.”

Fuck. Fuck it all. This all wouldn’t have happened if I just died. If I took my last breath at my door I would’ve never been in this predicament. This is bullshit.

I force my tears from falling. I feel them dry underneath my eyes. I take a deep breath feeling my lungs fill up with air causing my them to lighten. I have no clue why the air now feel like water. I feel the same prickle of torture in my chest I felt just yesterday in my bath tub. The agony of this memory inflicting physical pain in my body. The crushing weight on my vertebrae becomes exhaustingly familiar. The whole memory the whole moment my life came its closest to ending……

Im crying…. No I wouldn’t even say that. I’m weeping and wailing. Shame and denial fogging my vision. My ribs clamp together in an attempt at shield my heart from its past as if it’s still not in the same state as before, as if the wounds aren’t still open, as if I’ve healed……

Damn it. I’ve made no progress since then. If anything I’ve regressed. I’ve lost myself. I try to take my like every chance I get. I was reckless enough to open the door and die in front of someone.

Her presence is so warm it only fans the heat overflowing out of me. She’s so different. I hate it. What gives her the right to see herself into my life uninvited. The right to see me break like this.

I know I’m just throwing the flames at her to cool myself, but she seems to expect the fire with that same stupidly pretty smile.

“Give it to me. I can take it.” Is the only thing I can make out through my sobs before I feel arms around me.

I scratch, shove, and kick like that scared child I am, but she doesn’t budge. I bite and weakly punch at her chest, not used to the unfamiliar feeling of care. It’s uncomfortable. Living is uncomfortable. She is uncomfortable. I just want her off me.

I give up and just lean my head on her chest.

“Please let me go.” I say in a broken monotone voice. As if I’ve emptied myself out of any emotion at all.

She does as she was asked and sits back down in the chair beside my bed.

“Go whenever you’re ready.”

“You’re right. I don’t have cancer, but my family did. All of them, every last one had it.” I say weakly.

“You keep saying had. Did they beat it?” She says in a hopeful tone.

“For such an observant person you sure cant see when something is spelled out for you huh?”

“No they didn’t beat it. They all died right in front of me.”

“Little 11 year old me didn’t understand the concept of death at that time.” My voice cracked.

“So I tried everything I could to get them to ‘wake up’. I shoved their medicine down their throats until my hands came up bloody. I cleaned their bodies with soap and water every day because they wouldn’t‘get up and do it themselves’. I was convinced they weren’t dead. I continued to brush their teeth and take care of them until cps was called by my school to come by and do a wellness check.” A tear slips from my eye.

“The person that came in was mortified to say the least. When she broke the news to me I giggled because in my head obviously they weren’t dead. I told her to leave and that me and my family were fine.”

“She looked at me with that same look you gave me earlier… pity. She left and told me that she believed me and that I can continue playing dolls with my family for a little while longer. I had no clue what she meant by that but I was happy that she was leaving. ‘Dead my ass’ was the only thing going through my head the rest of that day.”

“She came back though. She tore me away from my mom’s body. I remember screaming ‘I DIDNT FINISH BRUSHING HER TEETH’ like it was the most important thing in the world to me.”

“She told me that they were dead and like for real. I was yelling at her that it wasn’t true and that they were fine.”

“More people showed up that day and took their bodies I remember hearing one of them say, “we won’t even need to clean them up, little shit did it for us” as if my family weren’t people too, like they were just dolls like the other lady said.”

“That same day I took their medicine thinking they’d come back asking for it eventually. After 2 weeks I lost it. I would scream until I threw up. I thought I needed the medicine. So I took some…. That was the first time I died.”

The blonde looked at me like she just saw the devil himself.

[shootout-at-university-fair]

Four Years' Worth of Ramblings (and Pondering Life at Twenty)

It’s been about four years since I was even remotely active on here, even longer since I’ve made original content on this website. Well, in those four years since I’ve last used this blog, it’s safe to say I’ve officially grown up. I think I made this account when I was about 13. At that time, turning 20 genuinely felt like it would never come. As time tends to do, of course, it progressed - so here we are.

Given that I live in a country that would rather focus on banning social media apps and protecting genocidal governments that line their own pockets instead of, you know, helping its own citizens like a government is supposed to do, and one that is certainly fucked no matter who we end up electing this year, it just felt right to return to the website that radicalized me in the first place (especially when really the only other option is… *shudders* twitter).

I must say, it simultaneously feels weird and comforting to come back. As I enter my senior year of college (has it really been that long?), I’ve begun to look back at what has shaped me into the woman I am today. I know this website certainly had a hand. As I previously stated, this website truly formed my moral compass, at an age that I desperately needed something to. To those who have followed me in the past, and might still be lurking here today, I genuinely thank you for making me the woman I am today.

Now… what exactly has happened in these last few years? Well, a lot. These last four years have simultaneously been the best and worst years of my life so far (and seriously, from how my 2024 has mostly been going, fuck 2024). Let’s start with the negative and end with some positive things, shall we?

I've certainly had my share of shit thrown at me over the last few years, from having to file not one, but two Title IX complaints at my college within three years and going through my fair share of manipulative and abusive relationships (both platonic and romantic), to having - and overcoming an eating disorder. Somehow, I've survived (albeit with some added mental health medications and diagnoses - I expected most of them, but definitely not the borderline diagnosis).

It hasn't been all bad, though. Actually, some of these last few years have been really great. I finally have some real friends IRL (they're a bunch of losers - one is @hunter-blossom-5 if you want to see what the vibe is like, but they're my losers and I wouldn't trade them for the world), and I've fallen in love. Well, I mean, I've fallen in love several times over these last few years, but for once, I've fallen in love and know it's the right type of love: the love where even if the world is ending, it doesn't feel like that because you know that they will be beside you the entire time, and even more after? Yeah, I'm talking about that love. I know he has an account on here, but he's never told me what his username is. I hope that if he's reading it, he knows who I'm talking about - I love you, babe; always have, and always will.

I'm not sure exactly why I stopped posting, but I just did. I actively tried to distance myself from my days on here IRL. If you told me even two months ago that not only would I be revisiting so many of my old interests from my teenage years in my twenties, and being so open about my love for them, I would have thought you were insane. Something in the last few months in my brain just itched and longed for who I once was, the version of me I was when I was on here the most. Throughout a lot of these four years, I was incredibly rude towards the younger me present on this account, trying to bury her deep down to fit in more. I think I've been too harsh on her in my past, and just wish that I could go back in time, take back all the negative shit I've said about her, and just give her the largest hug - she definitely needed that more than the criticism I leveled instead. Well, time travel doesn't exist, and Back to The Future has taught me to never have yourself at two different ages meet. I think coming back here, showing her that as you get older you can still be you, is the best I can do for her in our universe.

Most of you have known me simply as mutantjediavenger on this platform. Some of you have known me as Ella, but for all who comes across this blog today, you can just call me El. You've earned it.

[makorays]

Why are the red people winning?

Australia has gone fully labor party (conservative) and now anyone you talk to from Australia is anti LGBTQIA+

The east Is against LGBTQIA+

America is being converted rapidly to anti LGBTQIA+

Online if your struggling with gender or masculinity or non binary or any of those things your more likely to have someone tell you to "suck it up" or "do some pushups get a 6 pack" then actually tell you about new stuff

Femboys are now seen as evil for some reason

When ever I do anything remotely against the masculine code of conduct I get people calling me slurs and telling me to kill myself or yelling haram at me

Even long time people who were supportive now have converted

And I see no future for people like myself in a world like this

I know our generate will likely see the end of the world but THIS? Why does everyone hate progress all of a sudden?

Last month there was an incident in our school where a group of boys attacked a group of gay kids and the teachers took the side of "they shouldn't flaunt their sexuality" but they weren't flaunting anything

You know about politics mako pls explain?

pessimism is a cuck's mindset. what are you, a bottom? you're just gonna sit there and SUBMIT to your perception of the tides of history? the world is probably not going to end in our lifetime, and even if it does, humanity will probably find a way to keep going through the ashes.

i don't think you truly grasp just how fucking AWFUL things used to be for people like us. you think it's bad now because conservatives are rallying super hard all of a sudden, but imagine being gay or trans back when openly admitting to either of those things could get you straight-up arrested. and those people existed just as much back then; they just had to suck it up because they were cursed to be born in a time in which open hostility to them was such a norm that they couldn't even THINK of living as their true selves. trans people throughout all of human history have had to endure incurable body dysphoria because the medicine wasn't there to help them. things are SO much better now. (and for the record, everyone back then thought the world was gonna end too; ask any old-enough american what living in the cold war was like.)

that is not to say things aren't looking scary right now. conservatives had a wake-up call and realized they're losing harder than they've ever lost before, so they're lashing out and trying to do everything they can to push us back into the dark ages. it is important to be vigilant, to vote them out, to do what you can to make sure their mind virus infects as few people as possible. but their ideology is entirely based around losing. they're literally openly and proudly anti-progress, which is self-evidently fucking stupid, and the conservative party has spent its entire existence taking L after L after L as we gain more civil rights.

they're doing some serious damage right now, a lot of peoples' lives are going to be worse for a while. but it's a downward spike in an overall upward trend. do you really think they're gonna win this time after they lost the previous 99 times? even the nazis ended up ultimately losing after they "won".

this is all from an american perspective, of course; a lot of other countries still have a long way to go. 99% of human history has been spent with minority groups not having basic human rights, and america has only just recently begun clawing its way out of that tribalism and into something actually civilized. i think countries like china and russia are gonna remain fucked for quite some time, unfortunately. but they'll probably get there too, one day. once the progress has been made, all you can do to go backwards is flail like an infant and complain about the woke mob being too compassionate towards their fellow man. not super effective at causing lasting damage.

oh also you need to either develop some keen debate skills to convert your friends or find better ones because that shit cannot be good for you

[mymagnificentself]

the thing is, ive always been special or "gifted" or whatever growing up, or at least things would just come easy or naturally to me so that i wouldnt have to do much (and could endulge my lazy nature) and still be pretty well above average, if even still one of the smartest ones (that people would come to for questions and whatnot).

so, accordingly, ive never learned how to deal with frustration (in general, but especially of not Getting something right away) and just generally how to deal with Not Being The Best, or even just Not Being Very Good at something.

and now thats come back around to bite me in the ass bc im still going around with that would-be sense of "superiority" that ive gotten so used to, only now with starting work and school on a completely new topic (taxes if anyones wondering) that ive never had anything to do with and thus respectively, No fucking idea about

with people who very much have had some experience or pre knowledge about it, or are just generally BETTER at it than ME

is absolutely fucking with me.

suddenly basing all my sense of self worth and whatnot on how well i do academically (and by extension at work), without being willing to put any Real effort in it is starting to turn into a slippery slope Downwards :)

and the funnest thing(s) about that, is that since its like a self sustaining system, once its in motion its very hard to get oit of it again.

like, not doing well in class→frusttation, discontent, no motivation→stop paying attention, putting in the effort→ understanding less and less→feeling more and more stupid and incapable→↑frustration and overall ↓↓↓ plummeting mental health

not to mention that the entirety of this piece of shit christmas business is already stressing me out as fuck, honestly WHY the fuck is it even that big of a thing, then as well winter= lack of sunshine (and apparently i am already lacking vitamin d anyways, which ↑makes depression worse (not to mention i literally dont even get to see any fucking sunlight lately whenever im at work, and not even get me started on how stressed out and and anxious ive been about pretty muchEVEry FucKiNG thing regarding WORK))

also this is the first winter in.. a feeewww years that im not on meds anymore (and honestly whos shitty idea was that anyways, especially now that im what feels like Constantly stressed out about *something* or rather *nothing* bc i know in fact its absokutely fucking insignificant but that doesnt change anything so fuck me i guess)

so in conclusion, my brain is fucked (more than usual) and i dont even think that it has nothing to with me bc i know its totally my business to deal with that somehow contructively but honesly, if anyone else comes at me with exercise and that i need to be active and positive and Do Something i will shove their head so far up their ass theyll be able to make a great fucking ventriloquist

[bigwishes]

Questions Answered

I have gotten quite a few questions in my ask inbox and DMs. a lot of them are a very similar vein and I haven’t answered them because been busy with the holidays. Now I have a bit of time I thought I’d smash some out (still feel free to DM me if these answers create more questions or you had one I didn’t answer)

Q1) Do you take roids/plan on taking roids? A1) No, and I don’t think I ever will. For a few reasons, 1 being I like the idea of being natty even if it means Ill never really reach my goal and 2 being my family already has some thinks like heart disseise that is genetic and I don’t really feel like dealing roids onto the table Q2) How long have you been working out/ Why didn’t you start earlier A2) consistently I have been working out for about a 8 months, although a lot of that has been learning what I am doing and studying form so I can push myself in 2023 without injury. As for why I didn’t start earlier I grew up in a remote community in the outback and we didn’t have a gym, I learnt what bodybuilding was about 18/19 and push ups only get you so far, but now I live closer to civilisation and am trying to get my grind on. Q3) what kind of guys do you like other than bodybuilders? would you date a twink? A3) I like other kinds of guys, a bloke doesn’t have to be a bodybuilder to catch my fancy but he does need to be into fitness and lifting and that’s more out of a shared interest thing. I want to date a guy who’ll work out with me and push me in the gym, go on hikes with me and other stuff and just in my experience twinks aren’t for me.  Q4) do you have a picture of what you wanna look like? A4) yep,

again unknown how close I’ll ever get to my goal going full natty but my plan is to put on as much muscle as I can naturally gain.

Q5) do you want to compete A5) I have thought about it, it’d just be a minor thing, nothing too big but possibly? don’t really know yet. But I do know I definitely want a poser when I have some more mass, those things are fucking hot.

Q6) will we ever get pics? A6) probably not. Sorry for people who wants pics of my progress but no. I dunno there may be a chance in the future when I like my body a bit more but even then I’d need to be careful as I am studying for a government job.

Q7) do you have other fantasies or just muscle growth? A7) yeah, a few others. It kind of came out of no where a few weeks ago but race change, the idea of staying the same person but at the same time becoming an entirely different person is very hot to me. Also sweat and B.O

Q8) Do you actually want to be sweaty all the time? A8) in fantasy yes, but I know in reality that is not possible with work. However there is nothing stopping me from hitting the gym and enjoying the stink for a few hours after. Not to mention it takes about 20-30 minutes of scrubbing to even wash it out because I am hairy as and it gets stuck. [as a bonus answer same goes for burping, I know I wouldn’t be able to forever but there is something about it that makes me feel sexy when I’m belching after a work out]

Q9) can I fund your growth for pics? A9) I’ve had a fair few guys message me asking if I have a pateron or somewhere they can send me money to see my progress and fun my progress and whilst the gym is expensive no, but unlike the pics in general where I dunno if ill get to a point of liking myself to post pics I don’t think I’ll ever make a pateron to fund my progress. Q10) what is something you think you’ll do when you get bigger? A10) Flex and wear underwear haha, once I start getting bigger I definitely see myself flexing in the mirror in my underwear for at least an hour a day. Hopefully one day Ill have the perfect storm of being big, having a massive pump, sweating up a storm and belching out my protein bloat.

Hope all the people who have been waiting for their answers got their questions answered. If not or if you have more you can always send in an ask or DM me.

[glossvante]

Behind Closed Doors 01

Rated: M | 18+

Pairing: Jungkook x Female Reader

Genre: High school/Step-Siblings, Explicit smut.

Word Count: 5.1k

Part: One | Two |

Warning: Step-siblings, Explicit & graphic sexual content, Alcohol consumption, Language

Summary: After moving to a new city, a rager of a party and an intense, all consuming, mindless fuck with a tall dark stranger seemed to be exactly what you were craving. A one night stand never hurt anyone, right? Until of course, that stranger turned out to be your new step brother.

Note: I’ve been looking for a new step-sibling Jungkook fic for a while and couldn’t find one so I decided to write it myself sdjkdjfjk. This chapter is more setting up the rest of the story but I hope you guys like it! Also, the other bts members make brief appearances as the story progresses, as well as a few blackpink girls. I’m newer to tumblr so if you like the fic please show some love & some feedback and I’ll upload part two soon. Love you guys and hope you enjoy ;).

Part One

You realized your room had turned into somewhat of a shit show while getting ready, as per usual. Nothing you couldn’t fix later though, you had enough on your mind right now. You were mildly panicked while getting dressed because you had to look at least somewhat attractive tonight. It was the first party you’d been invited since you moved here 3 weeks ago and you wanted to make a good impression. Moving away, changing high schools and leaving behind all your friends in the middle of the year wasn’t the most ideal situation for you, to say the least. You tried as long as you could to avoid accepting the reality of everything but the first day of school is when it really hit. Considering the fact that your last school wasn’t even half as big or well-funded as your new one, it was an adjustment figuring everything out. You were anxious about not knowing a single person the entire day until you met Lisa and Jennie in physics. The three of you guys sorta just clicked and became friends with ease. They showed you around and it relieved some of your social anxiety to know that there were at least a few cool people here.

Earlier in the day, Jennie texted you, inviting you to a party at her ex-boyfriends place. You hadn’t met him yet and were slightly confused as to why Jennie parties with her ex but she explained that her and Taehyung were cool with each other now. She also mentioned that pretty much everyone else in your senior class was going to be there too. Hence why you needed to look hot as fuck.

You studied your reflection in the mirror, deciding wether or not to change your outfit for the third time in the past 10 minutes. Yup, you needed to. You lifted the dress off of your body with a sigh and returned to your closet, hoping to find anything remotely cute at this point. Shortly after making another mess, you came across an old satin black dress. You picked it up and held it to your body, wondering if it would still fit, it had been a while since the last time you wore it. It couldn’t hurt to just try it on, you thought. You slipped the dress on over your head and adjusted it to your body before reaching towards the small of your back, praying to God it would zip up.

Finally, you were able to get it closed. You turned your body at all angles in the mirror to get an extensive view of your look. The dress had become a bit too form-fitting and an maybe an inch too short on you over time but you looked...good. Finally, you thought, you could work with this. You knew your mom would never let you get away with it though. To compromise, you decided to throw a sweatshirt on over the dress to cover up, at least until you left the house. You threw your lipgloss, phone, and all the necessities into your handbag and rushed downstairs to say goodbye to your mom.

You opened her rooms door and stuck your head in, shocked to see her getting ready to go out as well. “Where are you going?” You asked, confused. She didn’t mention she had any plans. “John invited me out. He said it’s a surprise.” She said excitedly, with half of her attention focused on styling her hair. “Again? The same guy?” You asked. After your parents divorced when you were young, your mom became somewhat of a serial dater. No one guy was ever right for her or stuck around long enough. If you were being honest, you stopped keeping track of your moms love life a while ago. “Yes the same guy.” She replied with a slight attitude. You were taken aback by that, this had to be the longest she’s been consistently seeing one guy. You knew she was glad you guys were able to find a house in the area, so she could see him more often but you didn’t think much of it at the time. Maybe she was finally starting to get serious with someone. You hadn’t met him yet but now, you were starting to get curious. “Alright, I’m gonna go but have fun on your date.” You replied getting ready to turn and leave. “Wait, you’re hanging out with Jennie tonight right? Tell her I say Hi.” She said. You almost forgot for a moment that you lied to her about the party. So what if she thinks you’re going to a girls night out with Jennie? You figured the less she knows, the less she’ll worry. And technically speaking, you weren’t really lying to your mom, you actually were going to hang out with her tonight. Or at least that’s what you told yourself. “Yeah, uh I will. See you later! Love you!” You said. “Okay bye, love you!” She replied as you left, shutting the door behind you.

-

You almost thought you had the wrong address when your gps began taking you up into the hills. Even though you were new to the area, you knew only rich people lived up here. Your jaw dropped when you finally pulled up to your destination, going back to your texts to make sure you put the right one in. It was a massive house, like some shit you’d see in a magazine or on TV. Jennie’s ex must be rich rich you thought to yourself. There were a bunch of cars parallel parked on the side of the street, so you pulled in and did the same. It really did seem like everyone was here. You quickly checked yourself in the car mirror, reapplying your lip and fixing your hair before heading inside. You could hear loud music pour out of the function as soon as you stepped out of your car, thankfully there weren’t many other houses nearby to complain about the noise. One of the many perks of living in luxury you supposed.

Your anxiety started to kick in as you headed in through the front door with a few strangers, losing them in the crowd as you entered. Woah. You definitely didn’t go to parties like this at your old school. Red neon lights saturated the air in every room, a dense cloud of smoke lingered above the crowd and the music followed you wherever you went. You tried to take it all in as made your way through the crowd hoping to find a single recognizable face. You walked through the living room and entered the kitchen, shocked by how many bottles of alcohol were just laying around, expensive ones too. You poured yourself a diluted mixed drink in attempt to calm your nerves.

“Y/N!!!!!” You heard you’re name in a high pitched scream from behind you. It was Jennie, she jumped up and gave you a hug from behind. “I was looking for you! God you scared me.” You admitted with a laugh. “Oops sorryyy.” She apologized, she was entirely too giggly and spoke with a slur. You could tell she was a few drinks ahead of you. “You look so hot tonight what the fuck?” She exclaimed, a too little loud. “Thanks.” You said with a smile, flattered by the compliment. “What are you doing?” She asked looking down at your cup. “You need a shot! Not whatever this is. Do one with me!” She pleaded, you considered it for a moment. “I don’t know, I don’t wanna get too drunk.” You explained. She rolled her eyes at that. “Okay bitch, first of all why not, and second of all come on! A couple shots never hurt anyone.” You saw the look on her face, Jennie could be pretty convincing when she wanted to be. Fuck it right? After all, you were at a party. “Okay fineee.” You agreed reluctantly. She was ecstatic at your response, immediately reaching for a dark liquor and pouring both of you a shot. You clinked glasses before taking them down, feeling an immediate bitterness in your mouth and a warmth in your chest. “That tastes like shit.” You told her, wiping a drop from your lips. She laughed at that. “Trust me you can’t even feel it after a few.” She poured another shot for you and herself. You both braced yourselves and took it back. She lied, the second one definitely tasted worse. You cringed from the taste. “The faces you make are too funny.” Jennie teased while laughing. She reached for the bottle one more time and started to pour another round. “Are you trying to get me drunk? Cus if you want me or something just say that.” You said, trying to holding back your laughter. She shoved you in response, only mildly amused by your words. “I hate you.” She handed you the last shot and you both took it down.

No Idea by Don Toliver began playing loudly from the speakers and Jennie screamed in response. “Ah! I love this song! Dance with me?”Jennie asked, extending her hand to you. You rolled your eyes before taking it, allowing her to drag you to the living room. You weren’t exactly a talented dancer, like Jennie, so usually you’d feel a bit awkward while dancing but that wasn’t the case tonight. Maybe it was just because the crowd was so live or the music was thumping or those shots you just took, but you were feeling right. Jennie put her hands on your waist and pulled you closer to her, guiding you into the rythym. You both moved as if your bodies had synced with the music, dancing all over each other. For a moment it felt like you and everyone else in the room were on the same wavelength. While dancing, you locked eyes with a guy leaning against a the wall, a distance away from you. His eyes were dark and peircing, shaded by long locks of his jet black hair. He took a sip of his drink and a slight smirk crept onto his face as he realized he’d caught your attention, as if he’d had his eyes on you for a while. You kept your focus him on while you were dancing, observing him as he gave you a long look from your head to your toes.

In the midst of the moment, the two of you were interrupted by Jennie. “There’s no fucking way.” She said, shocked. You quickly turned your attention to her, wondering what she was talking about. Her smiled had faded and her body stilled as she looked at something in the crowd. As if she had seen something she wished she didn’t. “Jennie.” You said concerned. You tried to follow her line of sight to see what was going on, scanning the room. “What’s wrong?” You asked loudly, leaning into her. “Fucking Taehyung.” She gestured towards a far corner. You turned to look, only to see a guy you assumed to be Taehyung with his tongue halfway down some girls throat and his eyes on Jennie. He winked at her, like he was glad that she had seen. Gross. You couldn’t help but feel shitty for her. Guess everything with them wasn’t cool after all.

“I’m sorry. Fuck him.” You said loudly, trying to console her over the sound of the music. You could see she was hurt but she hid it behind a wall of anger. “Two can play at that game you know.” She replied calmly. “I invented that game.” You hadn’t really seen her like this before, she was lethal and you could feel it. She pulled away from you. “I’ll be back.” She shouted. “Wait what? where are you going?” You asked, worried about her. “I’m fine I just have to do something. I’ll find you later okay? Sorry!” She said, before walking away, leaving you in the middle of the crowd. You didn’t fully believe her when she said she was fine but if she wanted some time alone, you were gonna let her have it. It didn’t stop you from worrying though.

You sighed before shuffling your way out of the living room and to a quieter spot against the wall. You pulled out your phone to check it. You sent a few snaps to some old friends and a text to update your mom so she wouldn’t worry. After that, you headed back into the kitchen in search of something to drink that wasn’t hard liquor. All that dancing made you thirsty. You opened the fridge, allowing the light from inside to pour out, mixing with the neon red tint already in the air. You bent over to look inside for a water bottle, juice, or even a godamn soda. After shuffling some things around, you came up dry. All you could find was extra beer. Did these people only drink alcohol? You shut the door of the fridge in disappointment and turned to walk away, only to be stopped by the view in front of you. The same eyes you spotted from a distance earlier were now right in front of you. You studied all of him for a moment, just now being able to get real look at him. He was leaned against the kitchen island coolly, looking right at you. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he was attractive, in pretty much every single physical way there was. You found yourself admiring his style and shiny silver rings over his black ink tattoos. You nearly let yourself get lost in his picture before the thought occurred to you. How long had he been standing there? You immediately felt timid, realizing that if he was there for long enough, he for sure had a perfect view of your ass while you were bending over in the fridge. Now was probably a good time for you to stop starting at him say something, like anything.

“Hi.” You said, regretting it immediately. Hi? Really? In your defense, it was all you could get out in front of his naturally intimidating presence. At least you broke the silence, you thought. “Hi.” He responded with a soft smile on his face. “How come I haven’t seen you around here before?” He inquired, taking a sip from his red solo cup. “I uh.. I just moved here a couple weeks ago.” You explained, wondering why he had taken a sudden interest in specifically you. “Ah that explains it.” He said nonchalantly. “Explains what?” You raised an eyebrow. “Why we haven’t hung out before.” He finished. It was obvious to you he meant more with his words by the look on his face. “So is that why you were watching me earlier? You wanna ‘hang out’ with me?” You teased, being thankful that alcohol gave you more courage than you ever would have sober. He chuckled at that before taking a step toward you. You notably felt your heart rate increase. There was a part of you that wanted to take a step back, increasing the space between you two but you ultimately ignored it. He leaned into you to speak in your ear, just loud and close enough so you could hear his words and feel the warmth on his breath on your neck. “You know why I was watching you dance, just like I know why you’re still standing here, talking to me.” He withdrew slightly, now facing you. His focus shifted from your eyes down to your lips for just a moment before returning. Fuck. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t melt a little right there. He was confident if anything, and nothing turned you on more. You could smell the alcohol on him, his lips still wet from his most recent sip. Lust and drinks were dangerous combination and he seemed determined to get his fix.

”So what are you going to about it?” You asked calmly, faking just enough confidence to pretend like he didn’t have you dying inside. A devilish smirk appeared on his face as if he were playing out the answer in his head. You could feel yourself get warmer, your cheeks had to have been noticeably red by now. You had an overwhelming feeling he could see right through you. He didn’t give you an answer and instead, pulled away returning to his drink, seeming all too satisfied with himself and his effect on you. “Hey!” You heard a voice call out to you from a distance, both of you turned to look at the source. It was Jennie, finally returning. Worse timing just didn’t exist, you thought. She gestured at you to come near her and you nodded in agreement. Hesitantly, you pulled away from the kitchen but not before sharing one last loaded look with those dark eyes, as if there was more to be said, more to be done, and not nearly enough hours in the night for any of it. He let you leave without a word, and the interaction lingered fresh in your mind.

You walked up to Jennie. “Hey! Where’d you go?” You asked. “I kinda did something bad.” She admitted. You were instantly curious and slightly worried at the same time. “Don’t scare me, what happened?” You asked. She hesitated a moment before answering. “I kinda... blew Tae’s best friend. In his bed.” She laughed, covering her smile with her hand. What? You were wondering if you heard that right. “No you fucking didn’t. Who?!” You inquired in awe, shocked but impressed at the lengths this girl would go to for revenge. You made a mental note to not get on her bad side. “Jimin.” She pointed him out in the crowd so you could put a face to the name. “He’s always had a thing for me so it was easy.... and quick.” She joked, now making you laugh, you shook your head, still in a state of disbelief. Okay so obviously, Jennie wasn’t the best at dealing with her hurt and her & Taehyung definitely didn’t have the most healthy relationship but they’ve been on and off for like two years now, you figured they’re probably used to shit like this. And even if you didn’t completely agree with her method of revenge, Taehyung had it coming. You knew she was on one tonight, already hurting, and you figured it’d be easier just to be supportive. “Honestly, he kind of asked for it when he made out with that bitch in front of you.” You pointed out, she laughed at that. Your smile faded as you looked to your left to see a more-than-pissed-off Taehyung walking towards you two. Looks like news traveled here, fast. “Jennie.” You gestured towards him to let her know he was coming, by the look on his face it was obvious he knew. “Here come the fireworks.” Jennie announced under her breath. He walked up to you both, sparing you a moments glance before grabbing Jennie by her arm. “What’s up babe?” She asked casually. He wasn’t having it. “We need to talk.” His voice was so low it was kind of scary, he pulled her to the side and she went along, only with some resistance.

Once again, you were on your own. You decided to find a bathroom to freshen yourself up a bit in the mean time. Unfortunately, all the ones downstairs were occupied or had muffled moans from behind the door. You decided to head upstairs, hoping to find an unoccupied one there. Most of the doors were locked, storage, or closets. You were close to giving up before you found a room at the end of the hall was empty and unlocked. A bedroom. You didn’t think anyone would mind if you used the mirror, so you walked in real quick and did. You rearranged your hair and reapplied your lip gloss.

As you were finishing up your last coat of gloss, you heard the door creak open behind you and shut. You immediately turned to look, surprised to see the same guy from earlier. “Hi.” He said with a smile, leaning against the door. “You stalking me now?” You teased, putting the gloss back into your handbag and setting it on the side table near you. “Can you blame me? We didn’t get to finish our... talk.” He said, locking the door behind him. With the sound of that click, it became clear your meeting had a different context. You could feel the atmosphere in the room change to become... heavier almost. He approached you, deleting the space between you with each movement. It also didn’t help that you already had your back against a wall, there really was nowhere to go this time. You swallowed a lump in your throat you didn’t realize was there to begin with. “You know...” He began, getting closer to you now than before, “I can’t stop thinking about you in this fucking dress.” He spoke lowly. You saw his lust-filled eyes staring back at you as his hands reached down to your waistline, tracing the edges of your body. You felt chills follow as his hand found its way from your hips down to your outer thighs, lightly grazing your ass. “Yeah?” You asked, at a loss of words due to your proximity to him. You were rendered practically helpless to his touch, there wasn’t much your body allowed you to do in his presence except submit to his will. “Yeah.” He replied. Once he reached the lower hem of your dress he let himself teeter at the edge. You bit your lip, maintaining eye contact, knowing what you craved at your core, praying he knew too.

He let hands linger on you a moment before he slipped two fingers under the lower band of your dress, you immediately felt the coldness of his hands against the soft skin of your outer thighs as he lifted the fabric slowly, just high up enough to have access to you. And all you did, was let him. He placed a hand at your center, feeling the wetness that had soaked through your panties. You blushed, embarrassed at the wet mess you’d become throughout the night. “Fuck, you’re so wet...” He said, speaking in a tone much lower than before. “...all for me?” He asked. It definitely was. The built up tension mixed between you two was enough to get you there. You were flustered by his practically immediate hold on you, all you wanted to do was anything he wanted you to. All you wanted to say was everything and anything he wanted to hear. “Mmhm.” You nodded, your faces closer than ever. He seemed satisfied with your response because in turn, he gave you the friction you were craving. Your breathing became unsteady as he let his hand grind against you outside the fabric of your panties, pressing his middle finger into your slit with the perfect amount of pressure. He created just enough need burning inside of you for you to know it wasn’t nearly enough. He enjoyed teasing you, it was all over his face. You needed more. You craved more.

And as if he could read your mind, he finally slipped his hand underneath the waistband of your panties and stimulated your clit with his bare hand. You let out a a whine as he felt all of you, high off the sensation of skin to skin contact. Every warm and wet bit of you was in his hands. “Fuck.” You said breathily. He moved softly, in small circles at first, setting every single one of your nerve endings on fire. He could see the satisfaction in your face, you couldn’t hide it even if you tried at this point. He increased his pace, hearing the sounds of your scattered whines and whimpers gradually increase in volume. He was relentless, reaching the most sensitive parts of you and exacting completely and utter pleasure. His forehead rested against yours as your eyes shut in pleasure. It felt as if there was some overwhelming magnetic pull drawing you into each other, you couldn’t really tell who leaned in first as your soft pink lips collided desperately with his. You moaned into his mouth. He slipped his tongue inside your mouth, gliding perfectly against yours in a heavenly rhythm. You felt a kind of intimacy within the kiss that was rare to you. Of course he was a good kisser, like really good.

You lightly bit his lip as he slipped a finger inside of you. It was as if kissing you only set him off more. You adjusted to him with ease considering how wet he had you before even touching you. He began pumping in and out of you, creating a new sensation only adding to the hopeless mess you’d become due to him. He moved inside you at the perfect angle. You reluctantly pulled your lips away from his for a moment so you could catch your breath. “Please.” You moaned softly, stunned with pleasure. “Please what?” He asked sternly, as if he wanted you to use your words, describing the sensations you were feeling, how he made you feel. “Please d- don’t stop.... please? It feels so fucking amazing.” You pleaded, feeling your impending climax within reach. He inserted another finger in you, curling them both inside you to hit your sweet spot with every pump. Fuck. That was it. How did he seem to have every inch of your body figured out already? In response, you, without consciously realizing it, began grinding your hips into him hopelessly. Your mouth opened in pleasure.

“Are you gonna cum for me?” He asked lowly, studying every part of you, he was so enamored with the moment, there was nothing in this world that could pull either of you away from this. You were almost too high off him to respond, but you nodded frantically as another moan escaped your lips. “Yes.” You admitted. You could feel your orgasm nearing as you slowly lost your others senses. “You’re gonna cum all over my hand?” He asked, moving himself faster somehow, you didn’t think it was possible. “Fuck, yes.” All you could feel now was him, pushing you to the edge, moving his fingers to penetrate inside of you at a pace you’d never felt before. “Cum for me.” He ordered, ready to witness you fall apart in front of him, all because of him. You obeyed, feeling a wave of euphoria crash into you and travel to the depths your body, cumming hard. Your cunt pulsated around his fingers as your body trembled in complete physical pleasure. This had to be heaven. The only thought in your head while you were in the clouds? You wanted more. How could you still crave more?

When you opened your eyes, returning back to planet earth, your breathing returned to normal again. All you could see was him in front of you. Those dark eyes were filled with want. You let your eyes trail down to the bulge between his legs. His cock was begging to be released from the restraining fabric of his clothes. Poor guy, he was so focused on you the whole time, he needed immediate relief. You slowly reached your hand down to the waist band of his pants. He didn’t make a single movement, as if he didn’t want to miss a moment of you. You slipped your hands underneath his pants, tracing the length of him from outside his briefs. He was so fucking hard. You wondered how he managed to fight the urge to turn you over and fuck you right there against the wall.

You dropped down to your knees and lowered his clothing, allowing him to reveal all of himself to you. You looked him in the eyes as you let your tongue wet the underside of his cock until it reached the head. He watched intently as you let your tongue slide across his slit before taking the tip into your mouth, swirling your tongue around his hypersensitive head. Teasing him, just like he did you. You heard a suppressed moan from deep inside him. That was enough to motivation for you take all of him into your into your mouth. The warm wet softness surrounded him as your mouth fit tight around his cock. You heard his breath hitch. The sight of your face on him mixed with the sensation, it was just enough to drive him crazy. He was leaking with so much precum, you could taste it. He slowly began rocking his hips into your throat. You felt him sink into further and further into pleasure with each thrust. He threw his head back as you finally took him deep into your throat. Holding your breath, you rocked yourself back and forth on his cock. The soft tightness of your throat bobbing up and down on the head of his cock was overwhelming enough for his eyes to roll back into his head. “Fuckkk.” He moaned breathily, it was obvious he was already close to his limit.

“S-stop.” He said hesitantly. You ignored it and continued, determined to make him cum as hard as you just did. “Don’t make me cum. I-...” He paused what he was saying, distracted by the wave of pleasure he felt as you took him deep into your warm throat again, disregarding his words. “I’ve been dying to get inside you all night.” He admitted breathily, in attempt to get you to stop sucking his cock so he could stuff it inside you instead. Your insides throbbed at the thought of it. Although you wouldn’t mind having him inside you, like at all, you knew he was close to riding out his orgasm and you wanted to see the look his face when he came, from this angle. You looked up at him innocently and kept going. He tried to back up slightly, but you didn’t let him. “Fuck.” He said under his breath, tired of trying so hard hold back his release. Everything he was saying went out the window as he gave into his most primal desires, rocking his hips into you, chasing his orgasm, and contradicting himself once more. “God you feel so fucking good.” He mumbled as his thrusts gradually became sloppier and more desperate. He reached a hand down to entangle in your hair, pushing himself deeper into you as his body tensed up and stilled. He let out a moan as he came down your throat. You could feel the warmth of the large pool of cum in you, you swallowed it all cleanly.

He pulled out of you once his orsgasm faded. Seeming satisfied that you swallowed. You stood up and cleaned off your mouth, and readjusted your dress. Assessing how bad the damage was to your appearance from what you two had just done. He put himself back in his pants and did the same in the mirror. There was an kind of afterglow that surrounded the both of you. You looked at him through the reflection in the mirror. “Sorry I didn’t stop.” You said with a smile, realizing afterward that you probably should have. He returned a smile and shrugged. “It’s fine. You can make it up to me next time.”

He left you with those words and exited the room. You found yourself wondering what he meant by “next time” and if there would be one. How could there be? You didn’t even know the guys name, or number, or anything substantial about him really. You shrugged it off, deciding not to think too much into it, sometimes a one night stand was just that. A one night stand.

End of Part One

[cryinginthebackseat]

you’ve got more poison than sugar - part i

AO3    part ii

Fandom: Call Of Duty 

Pairing: Russell Adler x Bell

Words: 4.009

Summary: Russell Adler should have known better that it wouldn’t take an entire nation or continent to bring him to his knees.

Warnings: just swearings, sexual tension, blood, mentions of past abuse and brainwashing. adler being that manipulative asswipe like usual. 

Author’s note: i don't know what i'm doing. one moment, i was watching the walkthrough of the new call of duty game, found myself curious, acutely curious by that guy with the scars and shades on- a younger, shadier (no pun intended) Robert Redford in Spy Game and oh my... fast forward to 2 weeks later, here we are.

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A house somewhere on foreign soil,

Where ageless lovers call,

Is this your goal, your final needs,

Where dogs and vultures eat,

Committed still I turn to go.

I put my trust in you.

A Means To An End - Joy Division (1980)

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It's mystifying how little she talks. Or when she does, it's always in fragments. Like a crossword puzzle in your local newspaper, but several letters are missing. He initially thought maybe MK-Ultra fucked her head or worse, if it hasn't worked at all, but the more he watches her, the more he realizes it's just the way she is. And it's ironic because he named her Bell. He expected her to chime like a goddamn goldfinch yet here they are. 

But he won't be fazed. Russell Adler is a man who's stopped at nothing in getting what he wanted before, he sure as hell won't stop now for a close-mouthed science project.

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“We've got a job to do, Bell."

It intrigues him, every time, the way the words trigger something deep within her psyche, the way her eyes change, her body stands a little straighter, like a machine ready to function at his disposal. It reminds Adler of one of those cartoons he watched when he was a kid about wizards and magic words, except there are no musical dance numbers playing in the background or a talking cricket perching on his shoulder. This is his power over her, over the USSR, over Perseus. That monstrous filth. It really does take a beast to tame another. 

Although he surmises calling Bell one would be superfluous. 

She barely looks like one, but Adler knows too well than to underestimate her. Just because Bell hasn’t shown her set of claws, that doesn’t mean she’s harmless, delicate, like a miniature China Doll in his breast pocket.

Bell never offered him her reply before, but now, now, she nods, head almost bows, obedient pretty thing, and says:

“Yes, Adler.”

So it goes.

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It takes West Berlin for Adler to realize she’s left-handed. 

She wears her watch on her right hand, smokes with that same said hand only when she’s writing or moving her pieces for an impromptu late-night game of chess against Lazar. And she always wears her gloves all the time- leather, black, lined with silk and pretty, small buttons on the cuffs, covering those striking red nails underneath. Whether it is for the theatrics or an old habit of hers, he can't really tell.

He doesn’t know why he begins to take notice of these mundane details about Bell, but rationalizes because he’s never been in the same room with this version of her, post-brainwash Bell, for more than 10 minutes. And for all intents and purposes, there’s still a lot of question marks surrounding her character; who is she? Where did she come from? What is her connection to Perseus? 

Are they in a possession of a walking, breathing bomb about to destroy them all or the West’s only salvation?

He supposes he’ll find out soon enough.

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Adler hears Bell from his table, typing busy on the computer- barely blinking- all soaked up in that caffeine-infused energy at 1 am. She's always like that, he learns, when it comes to working, always with that steel determination, pulling out all the stops as long as it gets the job done- that Soviet discipline at it's finest.

Reminds him a little of himself when he's young.

Adler walks up to her. 

“You done for the night?” A shake of her head is her only response. He sighs. “You should go home, Bell.” 

“You go. I’ll lock up behind you,” Bell replies, low and monotone; that youthful stubborn.

If she was any other person, he would probably commend her for such fierce willpower, but she is Bell, the walking conundrum, his ace in the hole. Call him paranoid, but the idea of her having the safehouse for herself does nothing but raises every alarm in his head.

“No, we’re going home,” he says instead, tone brooking no argument and she frowns at the screen, her fingers stop moving then looks up at him with those goddamn empty eyes. "Come on, it's late anyway."

She doesn't say anything. Adler wishes he could read her mind- or crack that lovely skull on the back of her head, dissect her brain, learn its secrets and answers. 

Adler has his gun with him. It wouldn’t take long. A quick, true shot to the heart to keep the brain intact. He’d have Hudson contact one of his people inside BND and he'd deliver the brain himself if he has to. They could do it. He heard they’ve been studying inmates' brains for decades now, anyway. 

Before he has a chance to entertain the idea further, though, Bell nods once and rises up from her seat. 

Bell walks past him. Her scent, like honeysuckle on ice, hits him like an uppercut in the face. Adler inhales, as if against his will. 

He thinks he could get drunk on it.

“Hop in. I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” he says once they’re outside, regretting the decision the moment the words left his lips, but he knows he can’t just leave her on her own at this late hour.

The irony isn’t lost on him, though, considering he just thought about unspooling her brain a few minutes ago.

Bell complies without a protest. Getting inside the passenger seat, wordless still, fingers toying with the radio. An angry, krautrock music comes blaring all over his car. Adler winces, but at least the riot is loud enough to muffle the one's brewing in his head. 

"How's your memory these days?" 

Bell shrugs. "Nihil novi sub sole." There's nothing new under the sun.

Good, he muses. The least she knows about herself the better.

Though that doesn't mean he's out of the woods yet.

"Listen, from now on, I want you to keep me informed if there's any new progress about your memory or if you've developed any new symptoms. I want to know everything." He steals a sidelong glance at her, making sure she is listening (she always does, but Adler needs an excuse)

(An excuse for what?)

"Alright, Bell?"

"Of course," replies the woman in question.

"Good." Adler shifts his attention back to the road. "Good." Taking a long drag, he considers trying to appeal to her sentimental side. It's not something you'd improvise last minute- at least not with someone you brainwashed to believe you are her mentor/confidant for the past decade, but he's itching to know where he stands with her.

"You know, I'm just tryin' to look out for you, kid."

Her lips twitch but the rest of her visage remains impassive and faraway, more like a flick knife than a woman. The correlation is uncanny.

That's when she inches closer. The space between them bridged. He freezes. Hyper-aware of just how dangerous this is, but can’t bring himself to pull back, to look the other way. Not when her hand reaches out to pluck the cigarette from his mouth, eyes still glued to his, and curls her lips around the filter. One heavy pull, and then she rolls down the window and tosses it out on the side of the road.

"Thought I'd reciprocate the sentiment."

And with that, she leans back in her seat before Adler could even process what has just transpired.

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“Welcome back to the land of the living, kid,” Adler greeted her, about a month ago. 

Park had insisted that he had to be there for her when she woke up (naturally, Adler had balked at the idea, but at the English woman’s fact-of-the-matter explanation, also because it had somewhat dawned on him last minute the logic behind her machinations- “both of you are supposed to have known each other for years now. If she doesn't see you by her side, she’s going to wonder why”- thus, here he was)

“How are you feeling?” 

Bell blinked owlishly and stared at the older man with those bottomless, cat-like eyes that had haunted him since January.

Her gaze eventually softened as recognition flickered across her face.

“Like someone just hit me in the chest with a bulldozer,” she said hoarsely. “Where are we?”

“St. Dismas’ hospital, Pittsburgh.” Adler got up and fetched her a glass of water from the table. “Although not a bulldozer, but bullets did. That, and you hit your head really hard on your way down. Thought we’d lost you there, Bell.”

Bell drank in silence. She’s still watching him, thinking. This was the first time he realized that he couldn’t exactly read her expression and somehow that threw him off.

“What happened?” she asked, one hand mid-air, like she was deciding which to touch first, hesitating and abandoned the idea. 

“You don’t remember?” She shook her head. Adler pretended to look remotely distressed about it. “The doctors warned me about this. It must have been because of the fall- heck, I could even still hear that sickening crunch from here.” He dragged his chair closer towards her bed.

“We were in Amsterdam. Remember Fohler?” she shook her head again. “Well, we’d been tracking this son of a bitch for months, but we were chasing him in Amsterdam. He was running away and climbed up some scaffolding. You were about to go up after him,” he recited the fabricated story he, Park and Hudson had crafted. “He shot you and you fell and hit your head against the pavement.”

Bell looked away first, silent. Her hand gingerly touched the back of her head and winced, albeit only slightly. 

Adler was almost impressed, if not, disarmed by how calm and composed her reaction was to all of this. But then again, after having had witnessed first-hand how the woman barely flinched under any kind of interrogation technique they threw at her- a personality built for wrestling tigers- he really shouldn’t be surprised. 

“Bell, what is the last thing you remember?”

Bell frowned. “Not much. I remember ‘Nam, but-”

“Vietnam? Kid, that was thirteen years ago.” Adler watched the way her throat bopped, like she was swallowing her own blood and the color drained from her face, just like the first time he’d seen her, and proceeded to drop the bomb:

“Bell, the year is 1981.”

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"Bell dear, would you mind taking a look at this?" 

Park's voice sails from across the room. She says it like it's a compound word: Bell-dear. Like the two words belong together. Bell-dear. 2 syllables, 1 word, 9 characters and that just might be the weirdest thing he hears this year and he heard many things.

"Bell dear?" Adler asks much later, his gravel-and-smoke voice reduced to a whisper, when she delivers a document to his table.

Park shrugs as if that explains everything. "What? I like her." 

He's tempted to say you really can't put a term of endearment and someone you brainwashed into submission in the same sentence, but what else is new?

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They wind up in a bar. It’s called Die Stube and the place’s brimmed with artists and all sorts of leather-clad, Bowie-esque dramatic, chromatic blue eyelids young people chattering over a dirty cloud of smoke.

The two of them colonize a lone booth in the back. It’s dark and the quietest. She orders a beer and he, a scotch and they drink in silence. There are moments where her head would twist to the side, as subtle as a needle and survey the phantasmagorical scene before them, like studying something from a petri dish. 

While he’s watching her.

Only to tear his gaze away to the nearest object he can find.

It lands on his watch.

"It’s almost ten. Hudson's contact should be here soon," he announces, if anything to distract himself. She nods mutely in reply, as always, and runs a finger around the rim of her glass.

"The place ain't much of your scene?" 

She shrugs, like it's self-evident. "I didn't know this was a scene, though."

"Well, that’s West Berlin for you. A worry-free playground for the hedonists, hipsters and proto-electro NDW enthusiasts with drugs on tap," Adler says, sipping his drink in practiced nonchalance. "Always makes my head spin."

"I guess I remember it differently," Bell replies, tinged with something akin to begrudging. 

That warrants his full attention. "What do you remember?”

Bell shrugs again and lights a cigarette instead, menthol, one of those long, skinny cigarettes they only market for women; biding her time, making him wait. She lets the smoke flares from her nostrils so her eyes are veiled.

"It’s hard to explain, but I suppose it’s grittier?” she gesticulates, searching for the right word like she’s skim reading the entire Oxford dictionary in her head. “Bizarrely, infinitely grittier and dimmer? Like being in an underground tunnel and there's not much to see."

Interesting. Maybe she’s recalling one of her ops for Perseus or her mind is confusing her with the world on the other side of the wall.

“Maybe you’re remembering one of our clandestine ops here. It was a few years after Vietnam,” Adler supplies, passing over the tale like bait.

She falls for it, hook, line and sinker.

“Ah, I guess that also explains my fluency in German.”

“I taught you that.” It’s only logical, he decides, that she learned from him. She’s supposed to be his protégé after all. 

An elegant brow quirk. "You did?"

"Yeah, though you were already fluent in Latin, Russian, Vietnamese and Portuguese when we first met anyway. You have quite a natural ear, kid.”

She gives him a look. He really can’t categorize it, but it makes it a whole lot harder to fight against her stare.

 “What else did you teach me?” 

If they were anyone else, the lines could have a potential to entice, to seduce, that winsome, catty-eyelashes coquette, but they aren't anyone else and Bell does not voice it like that. Yet the implication behind the question stirs something in the pit of Adler’s stomach anyway, that tight knot of confusion as it is buried with something else and he finds himself, once again, uncharacteristically speechless.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

That particular question of her stays, even hours later, unbidden. Interspersed with her scent and face. 

His emotions are a minefield whenever she’s near now. It evokes that newfound rush of terror within him, like walking on a tightrope or being thrown into the pit to face hundreds of hungry lions, bare hands. It makes Adler questions his every decision, and he can’t have that in his line of work. 

Adler lights his sixth cigarette, contemplating everything, nothing. Anything to distract him from her. It's 4 am and he’s exhausted, but his mind won’t stop whirring. This isn’t like him at all- like he's lost somewhere in a Dali-style labyrinth that is his head and he wonders if this is a byproduct of his fear or fascination or confusion for the young woman.

He fears it is all of them.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

(They're only 10 minutes away from East Berlin when he senses it, something akin to burning on his peripheral vision, pulling him like weight.

Bell is staring at him from across the seat.

He cocks his head slightly to the side.

Adler catches the quick, telling quirk of her lips, like she's about to smile but lights a cigarette instead.)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Did you hear that?”

Krauss has just crossed the wall and their soles are slippery from the rain. She's panting. Her breath is white like a fog. Adler muses it must be from the running, until his iris trails down to where her hand is clutching his jacket sleeve, the leather creasing like a modulation signal.

“What is it?” Adler asks, hushed. There are no Stasis here, but even one can't be too careful.

“The TV.” She’s gaping at the broken TV next to them. Adler looks at the said object, frowning, then back to her. “Y-you didn’t hear it?”

"Heard what? Bell, the thing's dead."

Bell withdraws from him. Stepping back until her back meets the walls, her eyes seeing and unseeing, like a lens finding focus in the dark, then she closes them, as if trying to regulate her breathing. Adler has never seen her scared shitless of anything before. The sight confuses as it intrigues him. 

"Bell, what's going on?" Adler steps closer, but he dares not to touch her. 

She shakes her head, dismissive. In just a span of seconds, Bell dons that mask she likes to wear again; deadpan and frustratingly distant. A spike of annoyance drives through him. Just when he thinks he can get through her, there she goes again, retreating behind her palisades.

"Nothing." Bell turns away abruptly and she’s walking again."Let's just go. The others are waiting for us."

He doesn't pry about whatever she heard on the TV- Adler knows better than to beat a dead horse, thank you very much- not even after they save her from Volkov's clutches, after she bashes his head against the steel door and reeks his blood all the way home, it seems superficial at the time.

Until two days later.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The day starts, as it mostly does for the team, with a briefing. 

Fifteen minutes in and something like a gasp pulls his attention to her. 

That’s when he notices it; her hands are shaking, coffee spilling out of the mug over her hand. A shatter follows. Her mug smashes to smithereens at her feet. She’s swaying, near collapse, like a house of cards about to fall, a hand on her nose.

Adler catches her before she tumbles to the floor.

“Bell!” His arm around her waist tightens, trying to keep her steady. Lazar rushes to their side in a flash and helps him move her to a nearby chair. 

"Jesus Christ," he curses, more to himself than to her as he watches blood, a bead of angry red, trickling down her nose. "Sims, get me a washcloth from the bathroom."

He kneels before her once Sims returns with a damp cloth. Nicotine-stained gloved fingers tentatively grasp her chin, holding her still. 

“Kid, you alright?” Adler asks, worry bleeds into his voice without him realizing it. He firmly presses the cloth under her nose, his other thumb touches the pulse at her throat- it's almost sickly affectionate. “Bell, talk to me."

Bell looks at him, discombobulated, like he's a figment of her imagination, then blinks. Again and again until she heaves a deep breath.

"I-" she hisses. One hand flies up to her head. "Fuck. My head.”

Adler’s eyes immediately search for Park’s. A knowing look passes over her face and he knows without saying that she's thinking the same thing, like they're attached to the same brain-wire:

MK-Ultra.

There’s a fraction of pause, then Lazar asks, "Should we give her something?” 

Before Park can voice her answer, Bell beats her to it. "I already took an anticonvulsant this morning. It should have helped.”

“Wait, this has happened before?” Adler asks.

Bell looks away, a hesitating look shadowing her face. He fears the worst.

“Bell…” he tries again, a slight warning to his tone.

She sighs loudly, as if mentally preparing herself before walking into a storm. 

“Yes. Two days ago."

His mind instantly refers to East Berlin, the TV. Trying to connect the dots in his head. It seems far fetched, but now he wonders if she saw something that triggers this. Although he's never read about this on other subjects before, the correlation is just impossible to ignore.

Fuck. He heaves a breath, willing himself to calm down, to think. They can't afford complications at times like these. Not when there's so much at stake right now.

Adler snaps his attention back to Bell when she tries to scramble awkwardly to her feet, swatting his hand away. The hand on her neck immediately reaches for her waist again and pushes her back down onto the chair. His grip's tight enough to leave marks on her skin, but he doesn't care.

"Bell, for fuck's sake, stay still or so help me," he says, exasperated, not letting go of her waist. 

"I feel better now." Stubborn little shit.

He is tempted to scream at her face and grab both of her shoulders and shake. “The hell you’re not. Stop fighting it. You’ll only make things worse.”

Her face sours, if only for a millisecond before it morphs into guilt. “I’m sorry.”

Adler watches her for a long moment. It’s only now that he realizes that he’s still holding her waist and the cloth on her face. 

He backs away from her like he’s been burnt. 

“You should have told me. I thought I made it clear the other night to keep me informed regarding this,” he scolds. 

“I’m sorry,” she utters again and she looks so pliable like this, a blank canvas perfumed with obedience and lethal mind. It makes him almost feel sorry for what he has in plan for her once the shit show is over.

“Look, just go back to the hotel and take a day off.” Her mouth cracks open. He raises a silencing hand. “That’s an order, Bell.” But she merely scowls, looking more like jagged ice than a person. Hudson may have just met his match, after all.

“I told you I’m fine.”

“That’s not how it looks to me.”

“It is. It’s my body and I know what I’m feeling, and I’m telling you, I. Feel. Fine.”

His jaw clenches. “Are you disobeying a direct order, agent?”

Bell doesn’t answer, but her whole face remains challenging and hard. Undeterred.

Adler holds his breath. He feels the whole room collectively does the same. It’s like staring down the barrel of a gun and there’s an awful sort of danger to be found in that. 

Just when he thinks an imaginary bullet would dig itself into his skin, however, Bell utters, “Of course not.”

And so the woman resumes to her normal, docile self at a drop of a hat. Even when Park steps in and whisks her out of her seat, drives her back to her hotel with Lazar on shotgun. 

It doesn’t assuage his worry, though. He’s still restless throughout the day, like a roaring ocean inside a bell jar. She’s never done this before, openly rebels against him. Now, the situation is just bad. Not casually bad or almost-got-shot bad, this is the-entire-Europe-could-turn-into-a-nuclear-wasteland bad, an-armageddon-waiting-to-happen bad. 

What if this is the beginning of her old self trying to scratch her way out of the surface? Adler’s blood goes cold at the thought. He is going to have to keep a close eye on this development.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

West Berlin - 1 am, local time.

“How is she?”

“Stable. I’ve administered another dose of Propranolol before I left the hotel. She should be fit as a fiddle in the morning.”

“Tell me, what do you think happened to her?”

“My theory? Traumatic brain injury. A cumulative product of torture, trauma-based mind control and chronic stress. I've read reports about cases like these before in MI6. None of them is still alive to recount the tale, unfortunately."

Adler grips the phone. 

“How long do you think we have?”

“Theoretically, 2-3 weeks tops.”

“But?”

He hears Park sighs on the other line. “But then again, none of the subjects I’ve encountered before were like her. So, I suppose it’s still a little too premature to determine at this point."

Adler kneads his temple, feeling the start of that familiar Bell-induced headache forms in his head. Can things just be fucking simple for once? 

“We don’t have that much time anyway, Park. And if Hudson gets a wind of this, he’ll want her gone by morning. I can’t let that happen. Not…” he pauses. “Not when we are this close.”

"What are we going to do about her, then?" 

Adler sighs.

"Raise the dosages of her drugs,” he says. “And keep an extra eye on her. I think we may be heading into uncharted waters now.”

Tagging: @mvalentine cause you said to tag you with everything i write so  👁👄👁

[mikaze-discord]

Quartet Night: Love letters

Annnnnd these are the love letters written for Quartet Night!!!

Please enjoy under the cut~

REIJI KOTOBUKI

From Anon:

I've always been drawn to characters with complex (and fairly dark) personalities, so liking Rei-chan was honestly inevitable for me.

He looks like a very bright and cheerful character at first, which he is, but sometimes that part of him is a little misleading because, in actuality, he's a character that holds a lot of negative feelings about himself due to a past that he can't seem to move on from. He holds a lot of those feelings to himself because he doesn't want to burden anyone else with them. He's a reliable, cunning, and ultimately selfless character that chooses to shoulder a lot on his own out of his infinite care for others, and perhaps a secret sense of atonement, all hidden behind his bright demeanor and goofy smile, and it's endlessly interesting to me.

Besides the duality of his personality, he has a lot of other endearing quirks to love about him. He loves his mom a lot and is a mama's boy. His old-man jargon and catchphrases never fail to amuse (I still can't get over the way he says "my girl"). His obsession with anything even remotely British is something my APH England phase can relate to. His style of music brings a lot of pleasant feelings of nostalgia for me, and his pretty voice suits them a lot. And most of all he's just a very good boy overall. I rate 99999 out of 10 would love and support him and also maybe pay for his therapy because god knows he needs it. Happy anniversary!!

From another anon: 

Would you like to hear a story? You do? Very well then, may this story be one you enjoy.

What do I like about Reiji kotobuki? A Lot of things actually!

Well, I've always really liked Reiji as a character as he seemed to be one of the more interesting characters to me, due to how complex he is with his backstory and general just personality.

I have always really enjoyed how Reiji just solves problems too? Like he is just such an outgoing person who deserves all the support!!!

Like the best word I can use for Reiji is just, unique. Everything about him is just so Reiji. From the way he talks, to his nicknames or even his texting style. Like have you seen how many people use emoticons when texting as Reiji? It's just so him.

I like his way of thinking too! I feel like some of the interactions in the games are just so interesting, just seeing Reiji’s point of view. How he deals with a sort of survivor’s guilt and all of that.

Personally, some of my most memorable roleplaying moments were watching a Reiji rper in action, like just seeing them interact and flow so seamlessly with the other characters was just so fascinating to wee baby rper me. Such a large part of playing Reiji is just how you flow with the people around you and comedic timing. I have so many funny moments where Reiji was just interacting with people and it was just so inspirational (?) like I couldn't stop the smile on my face. I had learnt alot from them. I still consider them my roleplaying senpai almost! I don't talk to them anymore but I really had an amazing time just seeing their spin on the character.

I don't find him to be a romantic partner towards me nor do I see any of the characters in that light, but I've always found Reiji as such a personal character. Not even just towards me, like even with other utapri stans. The most relatable character always seems to be Reiji.

I've always been pretty similar in many aspects to him and I often find myself relating to him in numerous ways like his vibe is just relatable! I have often found myself trying to make other people laugh and have fun that many times I'm spreading myself thin and feel unappreciated...Reiji really helped with that.

This is where i start getting into the really personal stuff LOL feel free to skip if you dont wanna hear the angsty backstory.

I had really come to love Reiji when I had just...hit a low. I had a group of friends who I enjoyed hanging out with and just talking to, but they weren't very good friends per say. I often had to schedule every activity we did and I spent days and nights trying to think of concepts that might be fun. They took it for granted.. I had spent 4 months trying to make a game for them, and they had constantly pushed back times that we would play it. Using excuses to not play it, without telling me out right what they did not like or even why. The site I used was later taken down without notice and thus I had lost all my progress. Later, they had mentioned how they would like to play it except that later ended up being two years later. I really wish I could've solved things with that friend group like Quartet Night did but that didn't happen. That is when I started seeing things Reiji’s way? Not to say that it was the same or similar scenario to Reiji but I had just associated it with him.

RANMARU KUROSAKI

From Anon:

Ran is such a fun character! He sounds like a "rough outside, soft inside" kind of character, but his roughness is more like an integral part of him and it's through it that he shows he cares rather than setting it aside. That's what made me want to rp him. I also like how he is such a strong guy who's always determined to do his best in everything he does despite so much having gone wrong in his past. And it's very satisfying to see him form bonds and start to trust people.

From @mikaze-san:

Originally, my favourite Utapri boy was Ai, and it had been the robot boy for several years upon entering the fandom. In fact, it only switched to Ranmaru sometime late last year but regardless, I would still die for this man. Part of the reason why I switched is because I’ve always been a fan of Suzuki Tatsuhisa and I have a huge bias towards any man who wears nail polish without fearing being “feminine” because fuck gender roles.

As someone who studies fashion, I think Ranmaru is very coordinated and confident when it comes to portraying himself that way. He knows he’s not very good at expressing his emotions and utilises his passion for rock and playing the bass to portray those feelings through his songs. It’s also incredibly inspiring to know that he bounces back from pretty much anything considering his backstory and the stuff he deals with in the game/anime.

But my main reason for loving Ranmaru so much stems from the fact that I admire him a lot and want to be more like him. For a long time last year, I got to roleplay as Ranmaru in a few Utapri groups and through those experiences, I gained a better understanding and appreciation of the characters that I wrote for. In some weird way, by highlighting his flaws, character progression and how he dealt with different emotions, I ended up providing insight into how I dealt with similar issues by looking at them from a 3rd person perspective.

I used to be very shy and was very shut off from friends and family, and due to this I’ve always admired people in my life or fictional characters that are so confident in being who they are. Ranmaru particularly struck that chord in me because his bluntness knows no end. He’s very opinionated and doesn’t fear confrontation, in most cases being the one to provoke it. He speaks his mind openly without being overly anxious of the consequences. This is something that I feel is especially relevant today with being your authentic/unapologetic self is such a trend.

It’s something I’ve also noticed with having met people in or outside of this fandom, the notion of idolising a fictional character containing traits that we want to see in ourselves. Which made me think about a lot of my favourite kinds of characters which at the end of the day all boil down to sharing one similar trait: Being a bitch.

And in Utapri, Ranmaru embodies that. So naturally it’s very easy for me to idolise him.

(Tldr: I like his bitchy attitude.)

AI MIKAZE 

From Arashi:

It's hard to put into words why I love Ai Mikaze, perhaps it's because I'm subconsciously drawn to him, maybe it's because his hair and eyes are my favorite color, maybe it's because his voice is that of an angels, there are many reasons why I love him. I couldn't tell you a definite, "These one or two reasons are the entire reason I love him", but I'll try to sum it up.

I grew to love him by admiring his personality, his smile, his determination to reach his goals, everything about him made me happy. He's strict and a little scary at times, but when he sees people caring for him, he becomes happy and in a way, sentimental. He's not sure how to explain the way he feels, but he tries. I think I admire how he holds all the little things precious to his heart as he learns about them, and he wants to understand how to care for others and how they care for them in return. Even after six years, he still remains the most dear to me. I think that he now has a sentimental value to me, because even if I 'loved' another character more for a while, I will always come back to Ai. Ai deserves the world, and I'd give it to him if I could. He'll always be special to me, and I think that he very much deserves that.

From Maronda: 

My love for Ai started after I found Shining Live by chance and started to play. At first I wasn't particularly attached to any of the characters and decided to go back and watch the anime to maybe remember some context other than who Starish was. When I got to the episode focused on Ai and his "secret" I was absolutely thrown off by it all. I ended up feeling like I had so many questions and I knew that the anime would give me little to no answers, so I frequently turned to rambling on the internet about it. Eventually, this fixation on weird things about him seemed to turn into a clear fondness for him, and friends made me realize just how much I liked him. Knowing the cold and often strange aspects of his personality was due to something out of his control was something I resonated with as someone on the autism spectrum. He reminded me of some of the ways I used to think and behave.

I also began to notice other things I loved about him. Things like how soothing I found his voice, the pleasant shade of light blue in his hair and eyes, how ridiculously pretty he is... but the best things are the endearing parts of his personality. Though he's somewhat harsh, he's still entirely genuine. His curiosity is absolutely precious and his occasional awkwardness in expressing emotion or understanding the emotions of others made me empathize with him. And if you look at the Ai in Shining Live and compare it to the Ai in the anime and games... he really has changed a lot and grown as a person. He now seems so much gentler and understanding, and he clearly values the friendships he has now too! I think he's a wonderful character and ever since friends of mine encouraged me to selfship I've essentially been in love with him, but it also makes me happy to see other people appreciate him for other reasons as well. He's just so lovable!

CAMUS

From @uta-no-fakku-sama:

At the very beginning of my UtaPri interest, Camus never really caught my attention. That is until he became my first My Only Prince UR. I’ve come to appreciate him a lot more ever since, and now he’s become my favorite QUARTET NIGHT member! Along the way, I learned more about him and realized he’s one of the more complicated characters to understand. Nonetheless, I absolutely adore him. I tend to tease and make fun of him a lot, but deep down I truly do like him a whole bunch!

From @/waddamaloooon on twt: 

A little Camus appreciation post

(alternatively known as; how this guy managed to harshly take my heart and step on it like the gumin I am.)

Hello, this is Suikamaru, here to share a tiny story of why I, and eventually you, love Camus Rondo Cryzard.

At first glance, his looks appealed to me, but not his behavior (and ironically enough, his voice) so I didn't bat an eye on him. I've always been on a neutral leaning to dislike opinion on Camus, which is quite understandable because have you SEEN the way he acts. Unfathomable.

…..To a Young Suikamaru, that is.

I've grown, so naturally I've changed preferences regarding characters, ikemen, and who to stan and who to avoid like the plague. I will lie if I said that I expected to like that blonde confectionery devouring machine at any point of my life.

But it did happen so who are we fooling here.

It dawned on me that Camus is the type of character that you cannot appreciate unless you go in depth into his lore, backstory, and see him for who he really is. Because then everything else will make sense. And that never happened in my case until I started roleplaying as him.

I realized that he's not just a two faced, sweet toothed mean man. He's a perfectionist, someone who's always been raised since his childhood days to be nothing less than complete, who has locked on his heart and emotions to devote himself completely to the purpose given to him. He has the looks and brains for what though? He should be a little stupid honestly.

But his intelligence gave him the complexity that he just needed for his characteristics. Because as aforementioned, he's not someone to easily like or fall in love with. And I think that's quite rare in characters, and very much appreciated due to the fact it gives the fans a chance to not actually stay on a flat level of knowledge regarding their favorite characters.

I've slowly started to see myself in some aspects of him, which was the number one factor of liking him. Then came the Maeno magic when I realized Camus shares the same VA as another character that I love as well. (Hamelin, from SinoAlice.) From then, everything went downhill.

In a good way. I think..

Well, that is all from me, please read about this handsome man and appreciate his hard work both as an individual and as an idol. There is SO much to him that's p much overlooked and I'm getting broke from spending my money on his living expenses rent free in my head. Take him off my head.

[arashikitten]

Monkie Kid Soulmate Au

Thank you, MKD, for helping me create this monstrosity. 

I noticed there weren’t any soulmate au’s for Monkie Kid yet so I decided to make one Myself!

In this au, there are three types of soulmate a person can have: the typical romantic soulmate, platonic soulmate (i.e. best friends, family, things of that nature), and enemy soulmates (rivals, nemesis, mortal enemies, things along that line). People can have multiple soulmates, and in fact it is very common for people to have three or more at any given point! It is also possible for someone to have only one or two types of soulmate: for example, someone who is asexual might only have platonic soulmates and/or enemy soulmates. 

As for how one identifies their soulmate, a small mark/symbol will appear on the wrist, palm, or back of the person a year before they meet their soulmate in person, at which point the mark will take on color. The placement of the marks often determines the type of bond: a mark on the palm indicates a romantic bond, on the wrist indicates a platonic bond, and on the back indicates an enemy bond (that being said, there have been instances where this rule does not apply).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the meat of this au!

Red Son is born with two soulmarks: A stylized, cartoon bull head, and a large, red and gold fan. They both appear on his back, and from a young age, he tries to ignore the possibility that his own parents may one day become his worst enemies. He grows up very close to DBK and Iron fan: he wants desperately to maintain a good relationship with them, and he ends up cutting off any sort of interaction with anyone else.

DBK gets sealed under the mountain, and Red’s world shatters. Both he and Iron fan grieve for a long time, and Red Son now feels even more alone. 

So, he starts attempting to free his father from his prison under the mountain.

Fast forward about 300 years, to when MK is born without a single mark. He grows up and for ten years, his palms, wrists and back remain blank.

Then, about a month after his tenth birthday, a small, grey dragon appears, wrapped around his wrist, along with a grey cartoon pig wearing a chef’s hat (Pigsy) and a small cicada (Mr. Tang). 

Six months later, MK gets kicked out of his home, living on the streets for five months until, late one night, Pigsy finds him in the alleyway next to the noodle shop (The small stylized monkey face on Pigsy’s wrist glows with color. He and Tang adopt Mk two weeks later.). 

Mei walks into the shop about a month later, while Tang is telling MK a story from Journey to the West. All three of the soul marks on her wrist light up, and she and Mk become best friends over a game of Monkey mech.

Six years later, Red Son wakes up with a grey, stylized Monkey face on his palm, and a small dragon wrapped around his left wrist. He despises them both; he begins wearing finger-less gloves, if only so that he doesn’t have to see the grinning face of the Demon who sealed his father away staring up at him every day. Besides, he doesn’t need other soul mates: Once his father is free, Red Son’s family will be whole again, and they will rule the world with an iron fist (Note that at this point, Red is in complete denial that DBK and Iron fan could be his enemies: the fact that their marks showed up on his back indicates that they will become his worst enemies, so Red has spent his entire life trying desperately to ensure that doesn’t happen.). (He still fails in the end)

Mei and Mk both wake up that same morning with a new soulmark: A small, stylized flame that appears on Mk’s palm and on Mei’s wrist. They both gush to each other about it over a bowl of noodles, Mei is excited to get a new bestie while Mk is freaking out over the fact that he may have a boyfriend/girlfriend in a years time (Note: I 100% headcanon Mk as both gay and trans: but I like to think he struggled a bit more with his sexuality. At this point, Mk is still questioning it a bit, but by the time the events of episode one roll around, he’s pretty sure of his identity. Mei is ace, Red Son is Bi, Pigsy is Pan, and Mr. Tang is gay.). Mk also gains a small peach on his right wrist, and he and Mei speculate as to why only Mk got a second mark (Way up on Flower Fruit Mountain, Sun Wukong gains a new soul mark for the first time in 400 years. This prompts him to begin looking into possibly getting a successor).

Mei, Mk, Pigsy, and Mr. Tang also get two marks on their backs: a demon head and an iron fan. Mk and Mr. Tang, upon seeing what exactly the marks are, absolutely freak out. They both firmly believe that the marks represent DBK and Princess Iron fan, and the implication that two very powerful demons might be going after them in a year’s time is more than enough to scare the two. Pigsy and Mei are a bit more skeptical, citing that DBK and Iron fan are just myths, and even if they weren’t, DBK would still be trapped under the mountain by the Monkey King’s staff. 

This only freaks the other two out more, as that carries the implication that DBK will be free to wreak havoc on the world in a year’s time. So, MK and Mr. Tang begin to delve even deeper into the lore surrounding DBK and Sun Wukong, desperately trying to prepare just in case (Sun Wukong actually happens to overhear one of these study sessions while he’s out searching for a successor, and is impressed by Mk’s knowledge of him. He decides to keep an eye on the kid, and eventually makes the choice to make him his successor.).

As the year progresses, MK gets three new enemy marks:a dark grey spider on his shoulder (It scares the hell out of MK the first time he sees it, and he smacks it multiple times before realizing that it’s not an actual spider. He then proceeds to panic even more when he realizes it’s a soulmark.), a more menacing version of Mk’s own soul mark that appears on his lower back (three guesses as to who that one belongs to), and finally, a pale grey skull right in the middle of Mk’s shoulder blades, larger than any other soulmark so far. With each new enemy mark, Mk becomes more and more nervous: Just what will happen to give him so many enemies?

Meanwhile, Red Son gains only one new mark: the same pale grey skull, right in between the fan and the bull head. This one worries Red Son the most: while he has never actually seen the white bone spirit, he’s heard several disturbing horror stories over the years, and the idea of becoming allies or gods forbid, enemies with the cruel creature makes the fire demon nervous. 

Then, we get to the pilot. Red frees his father, MK gets the staff, and the chase across the city ensues. Red returns to the lair empty handed and bruised. He heads to his room to patch up, when he notices a small flare of bright, emerald green on his wrist. Pulling off the finger-less gloves, Red Son sees that the dragon is now a bright, glowing green. The mark on his palm has also taken on a color, bright reds mixing with vibrant golds as the colored monkey mark on his palm smiles up at him. 

That’s when it clicks: The only two people he’d encountered today, aside from his mother and father, are the Noodle Boy and the mysterious person on the bike. 

Red Son furiously vows that he will never, ever side with the Noodle boy, even if it kills him, and he will remain steadfastly loyal to his mother and father (From then on, he takes extra care to hide his palms and wrists from his parents, out of the intense fear that they will cast him out if they learn of who exactly the marks represent.) (it doesn’t work).

Meanwhile, Mk is freaking the fuck out. He can wield the Monkey King’s staff, he just saw one of the most powerful demons get freed from a 300+ year prison, confirming his theory that DBK and Iron fan are the two marks on his shoulder blades (Both of which, Mk notes, gained color that day, further confirming that they relate to DBK and Iron fan.), he got chased all over town by Red Son (who Mk recognizes from the myths), and to top it all off, the flame mark on his palm turned a bright, royal blue sometime between him leaving to deliver noodles, and him getting back to the shop, and the only other person that Mk encountered during that time that even remotely fits the mark is, you guessed it, Red Son. 

Mk relays all of this to the gang, at which point Mei notices that the flame on her wrist has also turned bright blue, providing even further confirmation. Mk is very much bummed out by this, because out of all the people that could’ve been the fire on his palm, of course it had to be the demon who attempted to kill him.

Still, Mk pushes that to the side in favor of focusing on finding the Monkey King. 

The pilot continues much in the same way as in canon, with one notable exception: When Iron Fan shows up on the gang’s way to Flower Fruit mountain, she sees the small blue flame on MK’s palm. Putting two and two together, she realizes that her son is soulbound to MK, and that this bond may eventually cause Red to turn on his parents, which is why Iron Fan and DBK begin to push him away in later episodes. 

After that, things resume canon again: MK survives and gets to Flower Fruit Mountain, Wukong tells him that he chose Mk to be his successor (Which is when the peach mark on MK wrist gains color, and Mk proceeds to lose his entire shit over the fact that holy fuck, he’s soul bonded to Sun freaking Wukong. Wukong finds this both utterly hilarious and a little bit adorable.), the big fight between DBK and Mk happens, yada yada yada. The day is saved, and Mk goes home with his newfound powers.

Episode one is where we begin to see more long-term changes. By this point, both DBK and Iron fan know that their son is bound to the little thief, most likely romantically, and that their own blue flame mark is located on their backs, implying that Red Son will most likely turn against them in the near future. So, they start to distance themselves from him. 

They send Red to take control of the weather station and defeat MK, something that both of them know will end in failure. Red Son is oblivious to this (not really) and gladly takes on the task, desperate to prove himself. And t first, it seems that Red is actually successful!

...Before Mk comes back with a new grip on his powers and absolutely destroys Red Son. 

Red Son goes back to the lair, sparks still flying off of him, and on his way to his room, he overhears quiet conversation between his parents.

Curious, he quietly listens in, and finds out that not only do his parents know about the mark on his palm (How??? How did they find out???), but they are also planning on a way to get him “out of the picture”. 

Red Son absolutely panics at this revelation, and begins to spiral into waves of self-loathing and intense anxiety. Now he is desperate to remain on his parent’s good side by any means necessary, and so he buries himself in plans and research on powerful artifacts that he can steal for his father. 

While that’s going on, Mk meets the spider queen (The Spider on his shoulder becomes purple and green, and Mk spends three hours scrubbing at it in the shower that night), the whole clone thing happens, Mei gets her sword, and the calabash incident goes down (the main difference here is that when Mk hears that Red Son was also sealed away with his parents, Mk feels inexplicably upset about it: as much as he dislikes the fire demon, there’s still a small part of him that desperately wants them to be friends.). At this point, both Mk and Mei have kinda just accepted that the blue flame mark exists, and they don’t pay it too much attention, even if Mk kinda wants to know more about the hotheaded fire demon.

Then the race rolls around. At this point, Red is a nervous, paranoid wreck, his self esteem (which really wasn’t all that great to begin with) is deteriorating at a frightening speed, and he is desperate for a chance to prove to his parents that he is loyal, that he’s not worthless. 

So when he hears that the winner of this year’s great wall race will receive a peach of immortality, he rushes to apply for it. He excitedly tells Iron Fan, fervently hoping that she’ll at least listen to him, only to be crushed when she dismisses him out of hand, saying that even if the peaches could do  anything for them, it wouldn’t change all of Red Son’s failures in the past. Red Son, disheartened, still joins the race, and is absolutely furious when he sees that both Mk and Mei (When Red found out that she’s a descendant of one of the great dragons, he started calling her “Horse Girl” under the assumption that the dragon she is descended from was the dragon horse from Journey to the West) also entered. He starts arguing and bantering with them, and for just a moment, Red feels... content. Not happy, per se, but the constant anxiety and paranoia begins to lessen for a moment.

Then DBK and Iron fan show up, and Red Son goes silent. His back goes rigid, and his eyes glaze over a bit. Mei and Mk both take notice of the Fire demon’s sudden change in demeanor, and even though they still both think he’s a bit of a prick, they can’t help but be a bit concerned. 

Mk is actually about to say something to Red when Jin and Yin hijack the commentator’s box, and the race starts. 

The race goes mostly the same as in canon, with the main exeptions being that Red is far quieter and more focused, and Iron Fan’s taunts are much crueller and more demeaning.

Mei and Mk win, with Red Son getting second place. Instead of attempting to steal the peach trophy, Red Son just... watches them, looking almost broken as he watches the two celebrate. Mk, noticing the strange behavior, reaches out to ask if Red is ok (The reaction the fire demon had to his parents showing up set off all sorts of alarms in Mk’s head, because that had been exactly how he reacted back when he still lived with his parents.), only to be interrupted by DBK’s reemergence from the mountain. 

Iron fan tells Red Son that they are leaving, and Mk immediately picks up on what’s going on. He calls out to Red  just before Iron Fan’s winds whisk him away, and terrified look that the fire demon sends him confirms Mk’s suspicions.

That night, Mk comes up with a plan: He’s gonna get Red Son away from his parents, or die trying. The only other person who knows at first, is Mei: She also has Red Son’s soul mark, and while she’s not as keen on the fire demon as Mk is, she still doesn’t want him to have to deal with abusive parents.

While Mk is doing that, DBK and Iron Fan have fully leaned into the enemy role, disowning Red Son and keeping him locked away in the lair. Red just breaks down at this, and begins refusing to eat or move. All that time that he’d spent, desperately trying to maintain some sort of good relationship with his parents, for nothing. The only people that he could count on turned against him, and that loneliness hits him like a freight train. 

The only thing that brings him comfort, oddly enough, are the soul marks on his left palm and wrist: he takes to rubbing them whenever he feels particularly bad. By now, his feelings toward Mk and Mei are much closer to something positive: they both seemed concerned about him after the race, and where that might’ve pissed him off a few months earlier, now it comforts him with the knowledge that at least someone out there gives a damn. 

We get to episode 8, when Mk gets the skeleton key. Instead of Red Son being the one to steal the key, Iron fan is the one to do it, and she reveals her master plan:

She and DBK plan on releasing the White Bone Spirit from it’s prison, in order for it to possess Red Son so that both will be fully under their control.

Iron Fan gets away with the key, the White Bone Spirit possesses Red Son, and DBK and Iron Fan use him to wreck the entire city.

Mei and Mk do their best to avoid fighting Red Son: it feels so wrong every time they do clash, because they both know it’s not Red Son, they know he’s not the one in control, but it still hurts that they couldn’t get him out in time, that one of their soulmates is suffering like this. 

The final straw comes a week after the initial possession.

Mk is forced to fight a possessed Red son to protect a badly injured Pigsy. Mk begs for Red to fight back, to break free, knowing that the continued possession is taking a toll on the demon’s body. Mei joins him, insisting that Red is stronger than this, that he needs to think about the people that care about him. 

That is enough to allow Red to break through, just for a moment.

He steps back, tears streaming from his eyes as he brokenly whispers that if even his own parents can’t be bothered to care about someone as weak, as broken as he is, then who the hell would? Mei and Mk hate him, his parents disowned him, and it’s not like he really interacts with anyone else.

He is immediately taken by surprise when the two teens blurt out that even though they might’ve started out on opposite sides, that they never fully hated him. Mk in particular says that they were actually worried about Red Son after the race, that they were planning on getting him out before Iron fan stole the skeleton key, that they were still planning on helping him escape, that they really, actually care.

Red Son finally breaks free, and Mk seals the White Bone spirit away again. Mei and Mk beat the absolute crap out of DBK and Iron Fan, who end up escaping  again.

They take Red to one of the few remaining hospitals, so he can recover from his possession, and they make sure to get him some serious therapy while they’re at it. 

Red Son wakes up two days later to see Mei and Mk sitting by his hospital bed on either side of him, and they give him a warm smile when they see that he’s awake.

He cries for a bit as he realizes that it’s over. He’s free now, even if he doesn’t have anywhere to go anymore, and there are two people in the world who keep that blue flame close to their chest instead of turning their backs.

For the first time in over a year, Red doesn’t hide the marks on his wrist and palms.

After all, why should he from the ones who care for him the most?

[radramblog]

What happened to Dirk in Homestuck^2?

Why am I doing this to myself.

I memed a little yesterday when I was posting that article around social medias about Homestuck jokes, because once again we are in lockdown and I am therefore Stuck at Home. Canned laughter goes here. But there’s a topic related to the comic- or more specifically, its aborted sequel, Homestuck^2, that I’m interested in delving into a little bit. I’m going to avoid talking about spoilers as much as possible, but considering said comic takes place not only after the events of the massive sprawl that is Homestuck but also the more linear but still messy Epilogues, some amount of sus shit is inevitable.

Anyway. Much maligned is what the Epilogues and 2 did to everyone’s favourite decapitation target, Dirk Strider, and I have a theory as to why it happened this way.

To begin with, let’s summarise what and who Dirk is through the course of the comics. Fair warning from me, though, it’s been a while since I read through this.

Dirk Strider is a teenager who grew up in a post-apocalyptic future Earth, completely devoid of physical contact with other people and only really ever gets to talk to 3 other people, only one of whom is in anything remotely resembling a relatable situation. He struggles with self-identity, having created numerous robots including an artificial intelligence based on his own brain, aka Lil’ Hal. He’s somewhat of a control freak, and a bit of a cold aloof asshole, but means well, and is pretty gay. NBD. The kinda guy to set up a plan meticulously and thoroughly, not informing any of the moving parts even if said parts are his friends, and often involving some form of self-sacrifice.

Throughout the comic he further reckons with self-identity problems and his own self-loathing including entering a relationship with Jake which doesn’t go well and he eventually breaks off since he knows his overbearing and manipulative behaviour is Not Cool and Pretty Toxic but doesn’t know how to shut it off. Eventually he reaches the God Tier as a Prince of Heart, gaining the power to literally annihilate souls, which he never actually uses since he gets yeeted into deep (Paradox) space and then everything goes to shit. Except none of that happens because of the Retcon (aside from the God Tier bit) and we don’t actually see how that shit progressed in the canon timeline. I think. Dirk’s arc, as it were, doesn’t really come full circle- while he does assist in Dave’s character…growth? he really isn’t the focus of that conversation. This immediately precedes the action climax and there isn’t literally any dialogue after that so that’s what we’re left with.

I like Dirk in Homestuck a lot. It’s hard not to, considering the flashes heavily featuring him (Unite/Synchronise and Prince of Heart: Rise Up) are genuinely excellent, along with many of his music themes being absolute bangers. He gets to interact with Caliborn a lot, with a pretty great banter, there, and the whole splintered personality thing is a really interesting hook for a character. I think he’s my favourite of the Alpha kids, a controversial pick considering I know everyone loves Roxy so much. I think, I’m not as in tune with the fandom as that statement implies I am.

And then the Epilogues/Homestuck 2 came.

Now I read the Meat half of the epilogues first, but that’s more interesting, so we’ll tackle Candy first (this is going to get real confusing for those who haven’t read this comic, huh).

In Candy, Dirk almost immediately kills himself, citing the irrelevance of the timeline as cause, an act considered by whatever mechanism governs God Tier deaths to be Just because he hates himself (and also bc of things we’ll get into), so it actually sticks. This isn’t super relevant for the discussion, but that’s just kinda so unbelievably fucked up? Entirely? I’d imagine if you read Candy first you might get entirely turned off by this, which I’m sure a lot of people did.

Meat is where the, well, meat of post-canon Dirk is. You see, a concept very quickly introduced in the tail end of the original comic is the Ultimate Self, an idea where you somehow encompass every different timeline iteration or alternate version of yourself. This was pretty clearly tacked on to make it so characters whose arcs all happened in the retcon timeline could have their not getting an actual arc explained away, but it didn’t land then and it sure doesn’t land for me now. Anyway, in Meat, Dirk becomes his ultimate self, making him near-omniscient and able to control the fabric of the story himself- for much of this story, he is the narrator. And he uses this power to fuck with all his friends really distressingly without their knowledge (or consent), including breaking up a marriage, in order to further his own goals which largely appear to be just keep the story going so to not fade out of relevance. It’s a plot that makes no sense with his previous characterisation, but I guess now that he’s the Ultimate Self he’s a different person? But I liked old Dirk, and I don’t like New Dirk. He’s a villain now, but he made a much better anti-hero.

But this would be fine if he (or the epilogues, or Homestuck^2) were written well. But they aren’t. Dirk’s dialogue is long, painfully drawn out, with tangents that tend to amount to pure wank, misused literary references and pointless metaphors that go on and on, filling the screen with a bright orange screed that hurts to look at as much as it does to comprehend. It’s not fun. And we’ve seen Dirk communicate before, obviously, the story of Homestuck is built around chatlogs, but it wasn’t like this. He was sarcastic, dryly witty, blunt at times. Even when he was literally talking to a different version of himself it didn’t get that masturbatory.

I was so confused about what the hell happened to Dirk, because I had no idea what the hell someone writing this character was thinking when they turned him into this. And then, the 21st page of Homestuck^2 dropped.

And it all came together.

What Ultimate Dirk and Terezi are referring to is Pony Pals: Detective Pony, a children’s book about some girls who hang out with ponies and solve a mystery. It’s a real book, buy it for your 5-year-old.

Except they’re not referring to that, they’re referring to the Homestuck Canon version of Detective Pony- a birthday gift from Dirk to Jane, heavily edited and to be much more obscene and eventually developing into it’s own story, stated to be “tough, emotionally draining, but cathartic in all the worst ways possible”.

Except the quote “Remember Longcat, Jane?” and references to philosophy, dead languages, and ancient earth culture aren’t referring to the three pages of the Dirk-edited Detective Pony we see in the actual comic itself. That quote doesn’t appear there.

That image is from Detective Pony, by Sonnetstuck- the 40,000 word fanfiction from 2014 that serves as a completed version of Jane’s copy of the book. An expansion of what we see in canon. And it’s a tough, emotionally draining read, but cathartic in all the worst ways possible.

It’s a very good fanfiction.

In the later bits of Detective Pony, we can start to see the origins of what would become Ultimate Dirk’s signature style of writing. Long blocks of rambling text, orange dripping down the page, references to philosophy and history and language that go on and on. And it probably does look familiar to those who read the Epilogues and ^2. 

But there are a couple of key differences here. First of all, it’s just better written? The way these rambles circle back on themselves is so excellent, the absolute absurdity of this being written on top of a pony book for little girls, the humour (beyond some of the more immature stuff), it’s just a really well-written piece of fiction. Hell, you don’t even need to be familiar with the character of Dirk to enjoy it. It’s a harrowing piece, but it’s also self-aware- because it’s not supposed to be tough, draining, cathartic etc. just for Jane- it’s clearly that for Dirk himself.

The second part is, of course, that this is a fanfiction. It’s not canon, it’s not official, this is by someone who really likes Dirk for people who really like Dirk. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, so if you bounce off it (and I’m sure a lot did), then you don’t have to keep reading it, it’s fine, thanks for playing. As much as Homestuck^2 tried to doll itself up as “dubiously canon” it’s still the official continuation of the story, and that means if it’s as difficult to get into as Detective Pony, that’s going to be a problem for a lot of people.

The other part of it is that Detective Pony’s exploration of Dirk’s character is, well, in character. When the man himself steps in as a character in his own book, the explorations of what he is as an author, who he is as a person, make perfect sense for what we see of him at the start of the comic. He is that manipulative, blunt person, and he is aware of his faults. He’s the kind of person to hide a lamentation on his own failings inside an impenetrable maze of a story layered on top of a book about fucking ponies. Ultimate Dirk does not act like Dirk, outside of the “manipulator” angle, something that Dirk was aware of and trying to improve in the comic. But I guess people don’t have arcs, right?

It’s so interesting to see the seeds of Homestuck^2 laden within Detective Pony- because the meta angle that and the epilogues take is also represented in said fanfiction. While the nature of canon is a facet of the work, the idea of authors and narrators fighting for control of a story, different ideas in mind for the characters, one being more personally connected to them than the other, it’s all there. When I wrote about Fallout 4 in the past, I mentioned being worried that Bethesda took the wrong lessons from Skyrim- seeing something successful and trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle. I think Homestuck^2 is an extreme example of this- the writers of the comic saw Sonnetstuck’s masterwork and thought, yeah that’s great, we can do that. But they just can’t. And with the comic crashed and burning, the probably won’t ever get a chance to. Dirk is forever stuck as this amalgamation of himself that looks nothing like any individual version of him ever did.

At least we will still have Detective Pony, and many other excellent fanworks, for actually good Dirk content. I admittedly haven’t looked into much fanfic written during/post-epilogues, and I’m kind of afraid of what I’ll see- I can only hope the fanbase didn’t take the same wrong lessons as the official team did.

[mst3kproject]

The Navy vs the Night Monsters

Of course, it’s not like bad things stop happening now that 2020 is finally over… we just get to start counting again from zero. Kind of like how I’ve started counting thirty-six Episodes that Never Were per year, beginning with this one. It was co-directed by Wyott Ordung from Robot Monster and features familiar faces like Russ Bender and Mamie Van Doren, the latter for once not playing a teenage delinquent.  It also has one really obscure MST3K connection: it was based on a story by Murray Leinster, which the sharp-eyed will remember as the name of the ship attacked by Evil Count Zarth Arn’s lava lamp weapon at the beginning of Starcrash!

A plane carrying specimens of Antarctic flora and fauna makes a rather rough and unexpected landing at a naval base on remote Gow Island in the south Pacific.  There appears to be nobody on board except the pilot and a few penguins – the former is in a catatonic state, and the latter are... well, penguins... so what happened to the rest of the passengers and crew is a complete mystery.  Did the pilot go mad and kill them?  Did the penguins?  Or did it have something to do with those mysterious ancient trees discovered growing around a geothermal spring in the heart of the frozen continent?

The first ten minutes of this movie are spent trying to be a comedy.  Before we get anywhere near the plot, we first have to listen to the guys on the plane try to be funny about their lunch and their tastes in women.  Then on the island, we watch a guy who can’t seem to figure out how to inflate a balloon, followed by a dude talking to his dog, and then a really icky bit where two women convince a man he had sex with both of them, which he buys because he was too drunk to remember.  Only then do we finally establish what’s actually going on.  The impression one gets from this beginning is that The Navy vs the Night Monsters is going to be peopled entirely by Jackass Comic Relief characters, and I actually turned the film off and sat on it for a couple of days to psych myself up to watch the rest.

When I finally turned it back on, to my relief the movie turned out not to be quite that bad, but it’s still pretty damned bad.  The dull and unfunny opening is followed by an abrupt shift of tone, as a man maddened by terror jumps from the plane to his death!  The only thing set up by the opening that turns out to be relevant is Spaulding the meteorologist’s crush on Nora the nurse, when she’s in love with the base’s second in command, Lieutenant Brown.

I complain frequently about useless love triangles in movies.  This one is very useless, and all the more so because the script totally forgets to resolve it.  Spaulding hates Gow Island but stays because he’s in love with Nora – he wants her to go back to Miami with him and marry him.  When he puts this idea to her, however, it becomes obvious that Nora can’t stand him, and it’s clear enough why: Spaulding is an asshole and he treats Nora not as a partner but as a possession.  Never does he show any sort of tenderness towards her.  Every time they speak to each other, he seems to end up shouting, and his jealousy of Brown repeatedly leads to violence.

Brown, on the other hand, treats Nora with respect and actually shows vulnerability around her.  He’s been left in charge while the base’s commander is on the mainland attending an important meeting, and he’s really feeling the pressure as the base is surrounded by tree monsters in the dark.  He talks about his anxiety and Nora comforts him, and the audience rolls their eyes because it’s perfectly obvious which of these guys she’s going to pick.  And sure enough, at the end she’s in Brown’s arms… but nothing about the whole situation is exactly resolved.

Brown and Spaulding did get in a fist fight, though it wasn’t explicitly over Nora, but nobody ever talks about the problem. Spaulding never realizes that he’s treated Nora badly, and it never seems to even occur to him that she might prefer Brown over him, or even that she has emotions or preferences at all.  He definitely never seems to understand that he’s lost.  Brown and Nora seem to feel a need to hide their love affair from the other base staff, but we’re never given a reason why (although I guess ‘Spaulding’s a dick’ is reason enough).  Nora never tells Spaulding that she prefers Brown… maybe she’s afraid he’ll assault her?  I hate everything about this situation, but nothing more than the fact that as the movie progresses we get hints that Nora may be warming up to Spaulding, as if she’s supposed to consider these two guys equal contenders for her affections!  Fuck everybody who wrote this, seriously.

It’s kind of sad to see Mamie Van Doren in a role like this after meeting her in things like Untamed Youth and Girls Town.  Those movies were gross and exploitative, but Mamie’s characters were central to their plots and she filled those shoes reasonably well.  She wasn’t Oscar material but for what the films were, she was enough to carry them.  The Navy vs the Night Monsters is a little closer to being a ‘real movie’, but in this respect it represents a step down for her, as she is relegated to being something for two men to fight over.  Furthermore, Silver from Girls Town and Penny from Untamed Youth were both characters who required some range – Nora the nurse mainly spends the whole movie being annoyed with the men in her life.  Van Doren could have done much more if anyone had bothered asking it of her.

Let’s see… what else do I hate about this movie? I hate Private Chandler, the guy who stays a Jackass Comic Relief character once that opening is over. Shockingly, The Navy vs the Night Monsters actually kills him off, but he’s not nearly as annoying as Dropo or the guy from Outlaw, so his death merely feels mean rather than having any entertainment value.  The guy was just about to actually get laid by one of the women who’d made fun of him earlier – though she, like Spaulding, showed no sign of being sorry for past jerkitude.

I hate the monsters.  Normally I have a soft spot for plant monsters.  They’re a cliché in their own way, I guess, but they’re a fun idea.  The ones in The Navy vs the Night Monsters kill and digest people with acidic sap, and a character theorizes about how and why such a thing would evolve, which is cool. The execution, however, sucks. While the poster for the film shows us a humanoid Treebeard-looking thing, the actual monsters in the film are dumb-looking stumps that waddle along like a couple of guys trying to move a piece of furniture corner-by-corner because it’s too heavy to lift.  The result reminds me of The Creeping Terror, in that you have to want to get eaten by these things.  At one point a guy walks right up to one, inspects it, and escapes its clutches merely by backing away slowly!

The trees reproduce using insect-like larvae that are, themselves, lethally venomous.  This is also a neat idea which is, once again, ruined by the execution. The tiny ones are being pulled along the floor by a sometimes-visible string, and then they grow into stumps that look like they should be stools around a boy scout campfire, which move even slower than the adult trees!  There’s a scene where the characters are holed up in the base under an onslaught of these, with planes arriving to napalm them just in time, and it is ludicrous in its attempt to feel threatening.

I do like that Gow Island is a bleak middle-of-nowhere rather than a tropical paradise.  The landscapes kind of remind me of the Falkland Islands, though the weather on Gow is evidently better.  You can see why some of the characters hate it here, surrounded by barren scrub inhabited mostly by ten thousand smelly, raucous seabirds. Unfortunately this backdrop makes the ‘comedy’ opening seem even more out of place, though it’s also kind of nice that they didn’t give us any stereotyped ‘natives’ as either comedy or monster fodder.

As for a theme… well, The Navy vs the Night Monsters is clearly about an invasive species.  The biologist, in suggesting how the tree monsters evolved, points out that they are suited to the hostile environment of Antarctica in ways that make them nearly unstoppable anywhere else.  We’re told that they devoured all the penguins the scientists were bringing back for study, and as well as eating the people, they wreak havoc among the Gow Island seabirds and reproduce out of control.  The parallels to things like cane toads in Australia, or housecats just about anywhere, are obvious.

This isn’t something the characters care about, though, even the ones who profess to be scientists.  At the end, enough of the trees are destroyed that the humans can safely evacuate, and what happens after that is clearly Gow Island’s problem, not humanity’s. I really would have liked to see the script go into this a little more, but then, The Navy vs the Night Monsters is not a movie that wants to go into anything, even stuff it sets up in some detail.

At the end, The Navy vs the Night Monsters feels pretty half-assed.  Somebody wanted to make a movie, and then put in the bare minimum effort possible to have all the parts present.  They clearly understood how movies work, but they didn’t have the money and didn’t want to go to the trouble.  The result is deeply mediocre.  There’s a few laughs out of the dumb stump creatures, but mostly it’s just bad.

[inkribbon796]

Lost in the Lightning Storm Ch. 1: Lightning in a Bottle

Summary: Henrik is a naturally curious person, and with there being something between him and Anti, he just wants to know what kind of person he’s dealing with.

Chapter: 1, 2

Henrik had more than a bit of a problem.

Anti had stopped making his presence so apparent, almost like he was trying to avoid Henrik but still watch him. It gave Henrik time to think about a lot of things. About what he wanted, and if even pursuing a relationship with him was even remotely a good idea.

The glitch demon was angry, violent, prone to random fits of destruction, and left gifts outside of Henrik’s office like a deranged cat. But he also saved Henrik from fights, wasn’t attacking him, and it was clear that although he left organs and teeth for Henrik that he meant for Henrik to actually like the gifts.

So Henrik was unsure of what to do about Anti. He was mostly curious about how a relationship like that would progress. But Anti had a history with the Septics that reminded Henrik that this tepid infatuation could end with Henrik’s blood and guts smeared all over the walls.

Henrik had spent a lot of time thinking about it as the gifts and stalking kept coming. So to clear his head, he headed towards the base.

The German doctor meant to find Logic, ask for some surveillance equipment, but when he walked into the comms room the Side wasn’t alone in the room. He was with Tubbo and Nate.

Logic was busy managing several different screens as the situation was calming down as Tubbo was holding some remote and shouting information into a headset. Both of them were on their feet. Nate was next to them, looking braced to rush out of the room.

Henrik paused as Logan fell back into his chair and let out a sigh of relief.

“Holy shit,” Tubbo commented, and started to drive his remote again. He was bringing his little bee drone back to him. What came back faster to him were three little bee familiars which buzzed around his head and settled into his suit. “That was ridiculous.”

“Now do you see why I keep you away from the Duke, his particular breed of unpredictability makes him exceedingly dangerous,” Logan explained.

“Is everything alright?” Henrik asked as he walked in.

“It is now,” Nate answered with a sigh of relief.

“Vat[1] happened?” Henrik looked at the screens.

“The Duke decided to live up to his title of “Intrusive Thoughts” and terrorize a baseball stadium full of people and make them hallucinate,” the logical Side explained. “At the most inopportune time, of course.”

“Of course,” Henrik rolled his eyes. Then he turned to Nate, “Ahhh, Nathan, it is so good to see you. It is a rare thing to see you in ze base zese days.[2]

“Been busy,” Nate commented. “Just wanted to meet the new guys, they seem alright.”

“Damn straight,” Tubbo smiled back at him, before continuing to pilot his bee drone back to him.

“Heard this place was haunted now,” Nate smiled.

“Ahh, yes,” Henrik smiled. “Big Man has a bro’zer currently viz Marvin. He calls himself Ghostbur und can phase z’rough valls.”[3]

“No shit, he like Big Man?” Nate smiled.

“Nein,”[4] Henrik smiled. “He vas[5] much calmer, und[6] quieter.”

“Really? That’s hilarious.” Nate laughed, but he was just staring at Tubbo, he seemed to be studying the young apprentice.

Henrik was about to leave and give up on his questions for another day. But Nate got up.

“Coffee?” Nate smiled.

Shrugging, Henrik followed but they didn’t go to the common room area for coffee, they left the base entirely.

“I like researching demons,” Nate told him, their topic veering to what Nate had been up to since Henrik had last gotten to sit down and talk to him, “and glitches have always been interesting to me. Even more so after I found out that Logic was a demon. I used to think they were all chaos incarnate, and they are, but they’re more than that. Logic is a way different demon than Anti, and both of them are different from the Jims, who I’m fairly certain are just super weird glitches.”

“Really?” Henrik asked, confused.

“Yeah,” Nate smiled as they kept walking down the road to this little coffee shop. “Makes me really glad I started distancing myself from the hunters. The only research they care about is if it makes killing demons easier or safer for them.”

“So you wish to become a university professor on ze[7] demons?” Henrik smiled.

“Dude, if that was possible, I would,” Nate promised. “The process from a human soul to a demon one. What they lose? What they gain? Can you predict who’s actually going to turn into a demon? What type of demon are they going to turn into?”

They took the time to get their coffees and take their seats outside the coffee shop as Henrik thought about Nate’s words. “I assume zat[8] you have taken copious notes about ze[7] demons already in Egoton?”

“Course I have,” Nate smiled. “As much as I was able.”

“Vat[1] do you know about Anti?” Henrik asked. “I know vat he is now, but vat about before. Vho vas he before he vas a demon?”[9]

“Huh,” Nate let out a loud puff of air and tapped his fingers to his coffee mug. “Never tried to look him up that far back.”

The singer looked down at his coffee before looking back up in thought. “I think Mare said something about Anti being a little over a century old. That’s probably just in demon years, so who knows how old he was when he actually died. But he’s a glitch demon so . . .”

Nate let out another pensive breath of air, rubbing the inside corners of his eyes, “He was probably killed by lightning. But that was around the same time as an industrial revolution so he could have died in a factory accident and still turned into a glitch. His turning would have probably been sometime in the early 1900’s, late 1800’s maybe.”

“Und[6] could he be found?” Henrik asked.

Nate looked a little concerned, “Maybe, finding him would definitely be easier than finding Dark or Mare. They’re older than him and Anti is also a glitch so that narrows it down. Even if he did die in a factory accident.”

“I cannot imagine a vorld vere he did not get into some type of trouble viz ze law,”[10] Henrik commented, pushing up his glasses.

“Yeah that might make it easier,” Nate agreed. “Usually a soul doesn’t change too much from how it used to be in life. There’s some drift but not too much.”

“Yes, but—” Henrik thought out loud before Mare seemed to appear out of nowhere and turned over a bag of cookies right into Nate’s lap.

“The fuck are you doing?” Nate shouted.

“Shut up and eat them, you still reek,” Mare spat at him, digging some loose cookies still in the bag and pushing them into Nate’s hands. “Anything’s better than how you smell right now.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Nate tossed the cookies back in Mare’s face so hard they bounced off his face as they crumbled.

“I don’t like that kid’s aura,” Mare crossed his arms. “He smells weird.”

“Which kid?” Nate argued loudly, Henrik was watching Logan leading Tubbo down the street, the two obviously coming from the base and going out on a patrol. When Tubbo spotted Nate and Mare arguing the two stopped to watch them cautiously from across the street.

“The little goat demon with the bee theme,” Mare slapped down a hand to hold it about at Tubbo’s height. “I didn’t know you guys were picking up spawnlings off the street. I thought that was Dark’s shtick.”

“Bomble? What do you mean he smells?” Nate demanded. “What does he smell like?”

“How are you still alive?” Mare let out a frustrated sigh. “You know how toast smells when it gets burnt?”

“Yeah?” Nate agreed.

“Okay so imagine that burnt toast also set the toaster on fire, and that’s pretty much it,” Mare told them. “Anti doesn’t smell anything, but I can. I don’t know why! I checked with Dark, he can smell it too. But he doesn’t think he smells like toast.”

“Vat[1] did Dark say he smells like?” Henrik questioned.

“Death,” Mare told him. “At first I thought he was joking, like he was just being overdramatic, but then he told me he smells like a village that was on the verge of death from illness. Like a household taken over by the Plague. And after thinking about that, I’m inclined to agree. He kinda does smell like sickness. More like the burnt toast and toaster thing, but I get it. Dark is really old and he would go for that explanation. Don’t know how Anti doesn’t smell it, but he smells like bad news.”

“Zat[8] is very interesting,” Henrik hummed, everyone in the Coalition knew that Tubbo was a bomb expert and that the Coalition had some samples of a couple of his projects under lock and key so no one else could use them.

“Doesn’t help that everything he comes into contact with also winds up smelling like him,” Mare complained. “I thought Pixels had had something blow up in his face because he smells like him, all the time now.”

“Did you tell Logic about it?” Nate asked.

Mare huffed out, “Yeah but he had no idea what I was talking about, couldn’t stand to be in the base because the kid’s got the place carpet bombed.”

“King und[6] Host do not seem to have a problem viz[11] it,” Henrik thought out loud.

“Then their noses are broken, or maybe they have a tolerance to it, I don’t know,” Mare threw up his hands in defeat. “Point is the kid reeks, where’d you dig him up from? He die in some kind of explosion or something?”

“Not zat ve know of,”[12] Henrik sighed. “But he does have an affinity for explosives und bombs.”

Nate looked confused, “Does a person’s death influence their aura?”

“Kinda,”[13] Mare shrugged. “Sometimes it’s a little weird in how it manifests. I can tell if a demon was splintered from another demon, or came from a human soul. Wil probably became a demon in some insane asylum. Dark, it wouldn’t surprise me if his ringing is tied to how he died.”

Mare’s nostrils flared as the direction of air changed and the demon turned to glare at Tubbo who was quickly buzzing across the street and Logan yelled after Tubbo and raced to keep up.

The older demon hissed and took a step back. Logan physically put himself in-between Mare and Tubbo, physically baring his arm in front of the young man to keep him back.

Tubbo just nonchalantly hovered in the air as his wings buzzed. Mare wrinkled up his nose and glared at Tubbo, who was looking quite smug.

“Hey,” Tubbo smiled. “Heard yeh we’re talkin’ about me, mate?”[14]

“You smell,” Mare spat.

Tubbo finally touched his feet to the ground and leaned over to smell his arm, but his helmet shield was still down, so all he did was uselessly shrug. “I showered this mornin’[15].”

“Not what I meant, your aura reeks,” Mare told him. “What’d you do to it?”

Shrugging again, “Just me, bossman.”

“I’ve never,” Mare looked personally insulted. “I’ve never smelt a glitch aura like yours, you must have done something to it.”

“Huh,” Tubbo thought on that before he realized something, “interesting, so I don’t smell like honey anymore?”

“How the flying fuck do you smell even remotely similar to honey?” Mare demanded, almost sounding angry.

“Dunno,”[16] Tubbo shrugged. “E’eryone in the Server always said I smelled like honeycombs. Why do yeh think I started goin’ with the bee aesthetic?”[17]

“Yes, I was wondering how you arrived at the theme you did,” Logan commented.

“You’re lucky I’m in your territory or I’d take your face off,” Mare snarled and he disappeared into a puff of dark black-purple smoke.

“Nice ta[18] know I’m a natural demon deterrent,” Tubbo boasted proudly.

“I don’t think you smell bad, you smell like any normal person,” Logan commented.

“Maybe it’s a glitch thing, then,” Tubbo shrugged.

Logan was quiet at that.

“So I was right, you are a glitch then,” Nate commented.

“If I’m not a glitch, then I don’t know what qualifies, big guy,” Tubbo chuckled.

“Fair, but you and Big Man came from the same gang,” Nate was just watching Tubbo, the young man’s wings buzzing nervously. “How many glitches does the Server have?”

“Like, still? Or before me an’[6] Big Man left?” Tubbo’s tone sounded extremely guarded.

“Not including you two,” Nate qualified.

Tubbo paused to think, “Uhmm. Skeppy, Foolish, Sam, Karl . . .” He kept silently counting for a little bit. “Seven? Eight? Dream is really big on collecting glitches an’[6] empaths. There are even more empaths.”

“Did he ever say why, specifically?” Nate asked. “Glitches are really territorial, so are empaths for that matter, I wouldn’t think it would be so easy to have so many close together.”

“Well, yeah, it was hell,” Tubbo agreed. “But it helped that a lotta us were turned demons, we always kinda existed in the same type ‘a space e’en before we turned so we would have less reason ta kill each other.”[19]

“Yeah but people don’t just collect demons because they can,” Nate told him. “Do you know why he’s doing it?”

“I dunno[16],” Tubbo shrugged. “I always figured it was some kinda[13] power trip thing.”

“I think we should keep moving,” Logic interjected, he’d been watching Tubbo get more and more fidgety and nervous so he stepped in and whisked the young man away from Nate. They went off to go meet up with the other Core Sides and survey the damage that Remus had caused.

Nate and Henrik watched him go.

“That huge pact Dream has really bothers me,” Nate admitted. “Seven or more glitches all in such a tightly packed area, with that many empaths thrown in as well is a recipe for disaster.”

“How so?” Henrik asked.

“Anti and Dark are at each other’s throats and they’ve got different territories the size of cities,” Nate reminded. “By my research, Dream’s got a couple dozen young demons all in an area the size of three football fields and they haven’t all slaughtered each other. You don’t get that without a lot of coercion. It just . . . I don’t like it.”

Henrik thought about that, “Are you still going to do more research today?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Nate shrugged. “Write some music too.”

“I vill[20] join you,” Henrik offered.

“Sure, but why? If you don’t mind me asking?” Nate gave him an odd look.

“I vish to find Anti, und figure out exactly vat type of person zat I am dealing viz,”[21] Henrik explained.

“If you start knocking on that door, just know that demons don’t like talking about what turned them into demons. Some demons are too traumatized by it, others see their old human selves as weaklings. Anti is probably going to fall into the second category. You are going to start a shitstorm.”

“Zat[8] is alright,” Henrik dared as he stood up. “Anti und I already have been on bad terms, und zis vould be no’zing new.”[22]

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Post A/N: Tubbo’s familiars are named Spinz, Spunz, and Spoonz. His bee drone is named: Bee Innit. (Named after the canon bees Tubbo had in his New L’Manberg apiary.)

Tubbo’s aura actually smells like radiation, with a thin honey undercurrent, but demons older than the 1960’s can’t place specifically what his aura smells like and the radiation drowns out his original aura too much.

Accessibility Translations:

1. What

2. Ahhh, Nathan, it’s so good to see you. It’s a rare thing to see you in the base these days.

3. Big Man has a brother currently with Marvin. He calls himself Ghostbur and can phase through walls.

4. No

5. was

6. and

7. the

8. that

9. I know what he is now, but what about before. Who was he before he was a demon?

10. I can’t imagine a world were he didn’t get into some type of trouble with the law

11. with

12. Not that we know of

13. Kind of

14. Heard yeh we’re talkin’ about me, mate?

15. morning

16. Don’t know

17. Everyone in the Server always said I smelled like honeycombs. Why do you think I started going with the bee aesthetic?

18. to

19. But it helped that a lot of us were turned demons, we always kind of existed in the same type of space even before we turned so we would have less reason to kill each other.

20. will

21. I wish to find Anti, and figure out exactly what type of person that I am dealing with

22. Anti and I already have been on bad terms, and this would be nothing new.

[sserpente]

24 little kinks | Doors 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 🎄

“You remember that chocolate advent calendar I got you for December?”

“I do,” he chuckled and pressed a tender kiss to your temple. “You made me display it in the kitchen so I would not eat it all at once.”

Your smile widened. “How about we get another one?”

Loki raised an eyebrow, only now paying proper attention to the sex toy ad. Then, he frowned. It was an odd mixture of disgust, genuine curiosity and even a hint of arousal flashing in his blue eyes.

A/N: It’s been snowing all day here, I couldn’t stop grinning when I woke up! 😍🌨❄

NSFW warnings: public orgasm, knife play

-

Loki paid Banner a visit the following morning, to check on any progress made with the alien artefact they had found. Not even he had a clue what exactly it was and without his beloved books from Asgard, it would take him ages to do the necessary research. Hence, the God of Mischief spent the whole week teleporting from library to library, even visiting Doctor Strange in his sanctuary, for any useful information.

Thor had rarely seen his brother so passionate about a mission before—but perhaps it was simply because Loki harboured a deep hatred for the creatures he had once meant to use against humanity for power. Little had he known how much the sceptre had influenced his tainted heart back then.

Besides, the sooner the Chitauri were gone, the sooner he could go back to peacefully enjoying Christmas with you and let you pamper him with your traditions, customs and delicious treats. They never failed to calm him down after an exhausting day, after all.

At least, despite his lack of time due to the amount of research he did with both the Avengers and Strange, you still got to open your advent calendar.

Before he left, Loki eyed the nipple clamps inside door nine suspiciously, worried he would hurt you with the metal toy.

“How am I supposed to use these on you? They look like torture instruments.”

You hummed. He was right. You had never tried nipple clamps before but you assumed that the general rule was—as long as it felt good, keep them on, play and have fun, as soon as it started to hurt, take them off immediately.

Loki knew your body almost better than you did. He’d also know when to stop.

“I’ll look it up online while you’re gone.” In the meantime, you would also get some Christmas shopping done. You were late this year and there were only three weeks left for you to purchase everything you needed. Loki’s present you’d pick up no earlier than on Christmas morning. You couldn’t wait for his reaction.

Two hours later, you wished you had taken the God of Mischief with you. The shopping centre had been transformed to a Winter Wonderland. Giant trees towered up to the ceiling, richly decorated with thousands of ornaments and baubles; holiday lights hung from every railing and festive Christmas wreaths made every single store a little jollier.

You bought both Loki and yourself a giant candy cane before you returned home with two full bags of gifts for your friends—among them a pair of black silver earrings with a tiny storage function for Natasha and a giant box full of poptarts for Thor. All you were still missing was a present for Tony. That man was a billionaire. He could afford anything he wanted in a heartbeat… you pursed your lips. It might be harder than you thought to find something for him.

-

“Ready to open four doors at once?” Loki had just stepped out of the shower and was welcomed not only by the scent of homemade Christmas biscuits you had just shoved in the oven but also you wearing a Christmassy red pullover along with a black skirt and equally black and almost knee-high boots. He almost purred at the sight when you approached him.

You had promised him to open the calendar before you left for Tony’s Christmas party. Because of all the panic and havoc the Chitauri attack as well as the discovery of another otherworldly artefact on Earth, both of you had almost forgotten it was tonight—on Friday the 13th. You both wondered whether that was a good or a bad sign.

You had promised to bring some biscuits and Loki had promised to behave and not to play tricks on the party guests—at least for as long as Stark and the other superheroes treated him with all due respect; and you simply hoped, sincerely, that Loki would be able to enjoy himself tonight. Christmas parties were a wonderful thing.

People came together after a long time of not having seen each other, they had mulled wine and hot chocolate, talked about what they are getting their loved ones for Christmas and sometimes even sang Christmas carols together.

“I thought you’d never ask, my sweet.”

Loki was dressed dangerously… scarce with only that towel around his hips. He knew you were very well aware he could magic on his infamous and outrageously handsome black suit to cover his well-defined chest, strong thighs and that v-line which made your mouth water whenever he wanted… you cleared your throat, eliciting a cheeky smirk from him when he followed you into the bedroom. Excitement cursed through your veins when you thought about what adventure the calendar would take you on next. You were yet to use those nipple clamps too, after all.

Two of the four boxes you had missed were rather big and heavy. Sheepishly, you handed one to Loki and allowed him to unpack it first. Door ten revealed a small vanilla-scented candle. You realised immediately what it was.

“It’s for wax play,” you stated, grinning to yourself as Loki fingered the candle with his head tilted slightly. He glanced at you with a playful glistening in his blue eyes.

“After all those little doors I had not yet considered how very depraved you are, my sweet little (Y/N).”

What could you say to that? Loki had seen the amounts of erotic novels on your bookshelf. They were a lot more enticing than porn could ever be—and they provided you with loads of information on sex toys.

“Come on, you love it.” You replied. Loki winked, making your heart jump.

“What is in yours?”

Quickly, you opened the next box. Perhaps you should always wait a few days and then open several doors at once to be more creative in bed… door eleven revealed a… oh.

You chuckled. It looked like a vibrator, although shaped a little unusual—not to stimulate your g-spot but to stimulate… the prostate.

“That’s for you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a prostate massager. A vibrator for men.”

Loki frowned, clearly suspicious of the device. “And how exactly am I to use that?”

“It goes up your… butt.”

His gaze was outraged, his lips slightly parted when he looked back up at you.

“Absolutely not.”

“Loki… it’s meant to make you feel good. Lots of men say vibrators like these make them cum like crazy. At least give it a try.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No!”

You sighed. It wasn’t so bad—and it certainly wasn’t like you had asked to peg him. But fine… you’d convince him at some point.

“Oh fine…” Perhaps you’d be luckier with the next box. Loki took it from you impatiently. Yep… he would definitely like this one better. It was a little black flogger.

“Much better… I remember promising you to spank that lovely backside of yours, do you?”

You swallowed thickly. “Right now?” You chirped.

“Oh no… when you least expect it.” Loki tested it on his palm, bringing it down forcefully. The sharp sound sent shivers up and down your spine—pleasant shivers. “Oh yes… I am looking forward to using this on you. Last box, my sweet.” He mused. Blinking, you cleared your throat yet again and tended to the last box. Door number thirteen. Curiously, you pulled out a pink vibrator egg with a white removal cord and a remote control.

“That appears to be…”

“Oh, I believe I do know what that is, my sweet.” His eyes locked with yours. Loki’s grin was downright malicious. Your eyes widened. “You can’t expect me to… not tonight!”

“Especially tonight… you asked me to enjoy myself. I can ensure you that now, I will.”

He pushed you down on the bed, his towel falling in the process. He was semi-hard, the thought of putting that vibrating egg in you arousing him endlessly. Part of him wished he could simply skip that superficial Christmas party and fuck you already… but then again he loved teasing you—and he loved an interesting foreplay almost as much as he loved sinking his length into you.

Loki used his thumb to brush over your entrance, testing your wetness. Just like he had expected, he found you dripping, no lube needed for inserting that little toy. You moaned when he pushed it all the way in at once, testing the vibration with the remote control. You flinched, pressing your legs together. Oh dear…

The God of Mischief smirked. Good thing those toys came charged already.

“We will be late for Stark’s Christmas celebration, my sweet.” The constant buzzing made you even hornier than you already were. Damn… this was only the lowest setting. How on Earth would you survive the evening? The vibrator inside you hit all of your sweet spots. If he kept going like this, you would be coming undone for him soon.

Biting your lower lip, you forced yourself back up on your feet, adjusting your skirt. Loki simply flicked his wrist, wrapping himself in his all-black suit—except today, he had exchanged the black tie with an emerald green one matching the season.

He stopped you the moment he switched off the vibrator.

“Hold on. I want you to wear these along with the toy.”

Loki handed you a box he materialised—it was the crotchless panties you had bought along with the calendar in the sex toy. Your eyes widened. Loki would make sure to drive you crazy during that Christmas party, that you were sure of. Leaking through your panties was one thing but leaking all the way down your thighs? Entirely another.

-

Tony had outdone himself. The compound, although smaller, was decorated twice as much as the shopping centre you had been to today. It had been rather chilly on the way here—not short of a miracle since Loki had made you wear that thin excuse for panties.

He had not used the remote since your arrival. You were chatting with your friends—enjoying biscuits, drinking wine and painstakingly spending a lot of time with Tony to figure out what to get him for Christmas.

Loki was by your side the entire time, he’d even gotten involved in a few conversations—but thus far, the Christmas lights Stark had put up everywhere seemed to have been a lot more interesting for him than the party guests.

You had almost forgotten about the vibrator inside you—right until Tony put an arm around you and the instant punishment was the lowest setting of vibrations stimulating your walls, making you flinch. The good thing was, thanks to his raving about his current Iron Man project—you now knew what you’d get Tony for Christmas.

Loki seemingly pretended to focus on one of the wreaths on the wall, one of his hands in his pockets, fingering the remote. When he caught you staring at him warningly, he smirked… and then pressed a button to increase the power.

You suppressed a moan, clenching your fists. If Tony hadn’t been tipsy already, he might have noticed your sudden discomfort but luckily, nobody paid attention when you excused yourself and returned to Loki who was still grinning like a cat who got the cream.

“Enjoying ourselves, are we?” Anger flashed in his blue eyes. “Who gave him the right to touch you?”

“Loki, please, calm down. Tony is a friend, that gesture was purely companionable. Besides, I was merely trying to find out what to get him for Christmas.”

The God of Mischief growled quietly. There was not a lot he called his own. There was no throne, no kingdom, no army and no people he ruled, and certainly no women that threw themselves at his feet. All of those privileges had been snatched from him even before his birth in the cold of Jötunheim. Thor was the hero, he was the villain. Some things would never change, even if the Avengers pretended they did for the most part. But Loki would never allow them taking you from him. The only woman who took him the way he was, who listened and understood… who loved him. He could not possibly, in spite of his silver tongue, phrase how much he loved you too.

He took the freedom of jealousy, sometimes. Especially when he was in the possession of a little remote which could control your pleasure.

His torture continued for several more hours. Every now and then—whether you were dancing, talking, eating or checking your make-up in the bathroom, Loki would startle you by switching the egg on, slowly or quickly working you towards orgasm and then letting you cool down again. The panties only added to your arousal, knowing that if Loki slipped his hand under your skirt, he’d have instant access to your private parts, testing your wetness for him.

At some point, you wished he’d take you in the bathroom already, grant you some relief. But he didn’t. Loki let you suffer. It was almost midnight when you sat at the bar with Nat. You knew Loki was close by—you could practically feel him staring daggers at your back, yet when you glanced back, you saw him engaged in a chat with his brother. The vibrator was quiet… for now.

You had crossed your legs—making sure not to take any risks. You had just finished another glass of wine when the egg suddenly hummed to life again, making you flinch and sit up straight in an instant.

Natasha eyed you down. “You seem tense, are you alright?”

“Just tipsy…” You lied. Gosh… you felt like crying and smirking at the very same time.

“Tipsiness looks different.” You sighed. Nat was perceptive; of course she was, she was a master assassin. Loki switched to a higher setting—and he kept doing so until the vibrator had reached its peak. Thankfully, because of the Christmas music in the background, no one could hear the buzzing between your legs. What people would notice, however, was you cumming. If he didn’t stop… your breathing quickened.

“(Y/N)… what the hell is wrong with you?” She paused, eyeing you up and down a few times. “Bože moi, please don’t tell me Loki and you didn’t… did he put a—“

Your eyes widened. “Nat! Oh God, shut up! No! Nothing is… I mean, I’m just… he didn’t… If you lose a word about this, I’ll…”

The assassin lifted an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed. “I wish I never asked.”

“I’m… I should leave.” You squeaked.

She hummed in approval, shaking her head slightly when you stormed towards Loki before your orgasm washed over you like a tidal wave. You squeezed your eyes shut, clutching at his black suit with a suppressed moan, your pussy contracting around the still vibrating toy. You would have dropped to your knees if he hadn’t supported you instinctively, letting your pleasure consume you. Luckily Thor had just left to pour himself another drink.

“My… that is quite a show you are putting on for me. Tell me, did you enjoy it? Knowing I control your pleasure, your orgasms wherever we are?” He chuckled when you didn’t reply. Finally, the vibrations stopped. You took a deep breath. “Am I right to assume you wish to return home now?” He then asked innocently.

You nodded briefly, allowing him to lead you back to the entrance to pick up your jacket. Your goodbyes were rushed and quick but you couldn’t care less as long as Loki finally brought you away from here.

-

You were angry with him; angry for putting you in such an embarrassing situation! You doubted Natasha would blab, still, her knowing in the first place was shameful as was. But there was more to your rage. You were angry with yourself too, for you had enjoyed this, thoroughly. You had loved how sexy and sneaky Loki had made you feel among the party guests, wearing those crotchless panties and having a toy inside you, with him, just like he had said, controlling your pleasure. Natasha had picked up on that aspect rather quickly too, so you figured. Damn it.

Once you were back in your bedroom, you reached between your legs. You pulled out the toy with a silent popping noise, throwing it on the bed.

“Loki, what were you thinking?!” You pointed at the wet toy as if it were to blame for what happened tonight. “Do you realise that Nat smelled the rat immediately? She probably even witnessed me… oh my God!”

Burying your hands in your face, you shook your head.

“What does it matter? Let them all see what is mine and what they will never have. Let them see what we share.” He spat, arousal glistening in his eyes. Rest assured, Loki had imagined fucking you before the Avengers’ eyes before. He would not actually do it… but the thought of demonstrating them how much you wanted him filled him with both pride and arousal. Natasha Romanoff knowing about your intimate… connection during the Christmas party did not worry him. He would not have taken it this far if he had had doubts the assassin would act on what she saw tonight.

“You’re such an animal sometimes!”

Loki lifted his chin, approaching you slowly and threateningly—yet you did not dare move away from him. “If that truly is the worst insult you can come up with when you are angry with me, my sweet, I gladly accept.” He growled. Unceremoniously, he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you flush against him. “Is there anything else you would like to say?” A barely visible smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth, his lips only inches from yours. Oh…

“Yes!” You hissed. “Fuck me already!”

Loki happily obliged. He threw you on the bed effortlessly, removing your boots with magic. A dagger materialised in his hand, the green shimmer making you squint for a second. It was almost pitch black in your bedroom.

“Keep still…” He ordered softly. You nodded, unsure of what he would do next. You gasped for air when you suddenly felt the cold blade against the sensitive skin of your neck, the metal tip slowly trailing down to your collarbone ever so slightly, right until he reached the hem of your pullover.

“I have been waiting to take these clothes off of you ever since you put them on, my sweet.” He purred in your ear, making you shiver. Loki cut those annoying layers of fabric between you two open like they were made of paper, revealing your bare skin. You had relinquished wearing a bra tonight—a circumstance which he thoroughly enjoyed.

As light as a feather, he used his dagger to draw an invisible line all the way from between your chest down to your navel. Any wrong movement could mean serious injury and blood—the thrill of him using his weapon of choice to bring you pleasure catapulted your arousal to another sphere. Loki always knew how to keep things exciting in bed.

You stilled almost completely when the tip of his blade reached your skirt and crotchless panties. One tug with the sharp end—and they fell off of you and on the mattress. You flinched when you suddenly felt the knife on your outer lips, tracing your vulva lazily.

“Loki…” You whispered. The God of Mischief took your hand for reassurance, signalising you were safe with him. In all honesty though, you were already on the verge of orgasm again. All you needed was a little… just a little stimulation to come undone for him.

It was like he read your thoughts. You never learned when his own clothes disappeared—only when he thrust into you without any forewarning, claiming you fast and roughly. The dagger disappeared, instead, his skilled fingers began to explore you relentlessly all the while he fucked you into oblivion. Your fingernails dug into his back, wanting him even closer, your legs wrapped around his hips so he could bury himself inside you even deeper.

Tonight, there was no love making. Tonight, there was primal fucking, giving in to your most depraved urges for one another. Neither of you lasted long. Loki came inside you with a loud grunt the moment he made you climax with his fingers rubbing your clit demandingly—almost forcing that orgasm out of you. You contracted around him repeatedly, milking him for all he was worth all the while he spilled his warm seed into you, throbbing against your walls.

Once you had come down from your high and your jar of bottled-up emotions had emptied again, he flipped you over so you came to lie on top of him, still joined. Your eyes were already half-closed when you felt him draping a blanket over the both of you.

“I love you so much…” You mumbled, right before you fell asleep. His quiet ‘I love you too, my sweet (Y/N)’ was already part of a wonderful dream.

-

A/N: Do not worry, I have not forgotten what the other doors revealed. ;-) Doors 14 and 15 will be opened on Sunday, December 15th!

These doors also contained three anon requests! :-)

Check out my blog to find more Imagines and take a glimpse at my first (to be) published novel! Also, if you enjoyed this story, I would appreciate so much if you supported me on Kofi! ko-fi.com/sserpente

[ladyfeldspar]

By the power vested in me by my RNG, I give you...

6x09: Free Hat (aka the reason I broke the second disc of Season 6)

This is hella long, sorry not sorry.

Some days I think season 6 is my favorite season.

Tweek standing behind the other three at the SP sign will never cease to make me happy. <3

I hate ET because I think he's a creepyass little alien and I don't appreciate seeing him first thing in this episode. 😂

Okay but I love when Kyle's saying, "...to make ET more PC," he's doing little air quotes with his one hand, like:

Stan: "That's gay." Back when saying things like that was only mildly offensive and wouldn't cause riots.

I've never seen Saving Private Ryan, and I know that it's said that it can be really triggering for people who have actually been to war and everything and I don't want to diminish that in any way, but whatever I paused on here looks like some kind of nether realm squid ghost monster and it's amazing.

I love the progression of their expressions here: angry, unimpressed, concerned, and "why is this happening?!"

And they're all so excited for Star Wars, that's the cutest fricking thing! I would love to see Tweek and Craig watching Star Wars together, just try and tell me that wouldn't be adorable!

ALL OF THEM ARE SO MAD! I fucking love when Tweek gets the little angry eyebrows.

I will never ever not want to hug him whenever I see Tweek shiver like crazy while the other kids just stand perfectly still.

The message in this episode is actually so good though. "Movies are art and art shouldn't be messed with!"

"Yeah we could form a club that takes food stamps from poor people and then we could sell them back to the government for a profit!" Tweek’s face here is priceless.

Poor Tweek. There's kind of a pattern in these episodes where multiple times he tries to stand up for himself or walk away from the main kids, but Cartman bullies him into staying and it just breaks my heart. As opposed to Craig in the Pandemics who's just like, "Fuck this." And as much as I adore all of the S6 Tweek episodes, I'm really glad he didn't stay hanging out with them for any longer and that he went back to the group of guys that are actually his friends. <3

"I'm not, I'm not a team player!" 😭 That being said, I could listen to Tweek talk all day.

"You have to offer fabulous prizes if you want people to show up to your stupid crap!" is just the S6 version of, "More people will come if they think we'll have punch and pie!" 😂

Stan: "Tweek, you go make fifty hats." Look, okay, I don't hate Stan, all right, but what the hell dude, go make your own hats! Why would you give the anxious kid a big responsibility like that!? At least have Kyle help him or something. Like you say you need to get the gymnasium ready which means what, make a banner and set up some chairs? And you're telling me you couldn't have split up the making of the hats? Jesus Christ.

(Yeah, okay, I know, chill out, they're 8.)

I posted this on my Tumblr before, so I'm not going to do it again, but that TINY LITTLE SHRIEK THAT TWEEK DOES after his dad says his name. I just. Literally. Die. Of cuteness. Every single time. It's my favorite Tweek shriek of the entire show, hands down.

On another note, his bedroom is so empty in this episode compared to in Tweek x Craig! I wonder what changed between here and then.

Tweek being able to calm himself down with some meditation is honestly so cute. And look at his happy place! I would love to have this on a shirt or a bag or just like as a piece of art hanging on my wall or something.

Cartman's giant face showing up there. 😂 I remember the first time I saw this episode that actually startled me so much.

"I was up, all night, making hats! I only slept for an hour- and then I DREAMT about making hats! But I only made fifteen!" - This has been one of my favorite lines since forever. I make it my status on things a lot and then everyone asks me why I was making hats all night. 😂

I love Stan's expression here.

"I don't have nearly 1000 hats!" "They're gonna kick your ass, Tweek!" 😡😡😡

Look at this shot! It really looks like Stan is the only one remotely concerned about Tweek's well-being here.

We get so much of Tweek yanking on his hair in this episode. </3

How am I less than five minutes into this and I have talked this much?

The townspeople are literally so stupid. Good job, Skeeter.

Stan makes good speeches when he wants to. Although, you know, you shouldn't make promises without fully knowing what you're doing.

Only Tweek would think going on a TV show is terrible news. (Just kidding. I agree with you, Tweek.)

I've never understood the "1-2-3, dibs!! "Knee!" thing. Like I know what dibs is, but where I come from knees were never involved.

Typical Cartman. I feel so bad for Tweek, but I love when he looks down to see "Advocate of Toddler Murder" underneath him. Cartoon logic is the best logic.

There's also a lot of good Tweek shrieks here too.

"It's easy!?" "Yes... It is easy."

"We believe that films have to be taken away from people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas because they're insane." The way Kyle matter-of-factly delivers this line kills me every time.

They honestly made SS and GL look so creepy. 😂

I like that Cartman's voice kind of cracks when he's like, "That's Steven Spielberg and George Lucas!"

Someone just let Tweek go home, please!

"Uh, we thought we were speaking for the children." "Yeah, we're children."

"I'm not a Jew!" 😂 Thank you, George Lucas.

Okay, full disclosure, when I first saw this I hadn't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and I didn't get the big deal. 😂 But I do now!!!

"He...killed 23 babies in self-defense?" "Hat was attacked maliciously and unprovoked by a gang of babies in West Town Park. When that many babies get together they can be like pirahna!" 😂 I say this all the time.

Skeeter. 😂 Honestly, you are no help at ALL.

Second time this episode Tweek tries to say no and walk away.

"People aren't that into you, Tweek. They find you kind of annoying." This is so meta because I remember people complaining all the time that Tweek was a one-note character and that he had nothing really to add to the show and I just want to say SUCK IT TO ALL THOSE PEOPLE BECAUSE LOOK HOW LOVED TWEEK IS NOW. Everyone who was on board the Tweek train from the very beginning say, "Cupcakes!" 😂<3

These kids, man. I love that it’s so easy for them to just get into all these places.

"Get it, Tweek!" "Huh-uh!" I love the way Tweek says no. But, I mean, AGAIN, he tries to say no and Cartman bullies him. I don't think he ever really wanted to be in their group in the first place. I think they picked him arbitrarily in Professor Chaos because they saw him as weaker than them, and then Cartman just didn't let him quit.

The little debate about melting his icy heart with a cool island song is also something I quote often. AND THEIR LITTLE OUTFITS! I love that Tweek's is green and pink! I don't know what the hell is going on with the sleeves on everyone else's though.

"Those rams can do to us what they will, Mr. Lucas." 😂

Oh, George Lucas. You were so close to being a hero.

Stan: "Fuck you Steven Spielberg!" I've watched this censored so many times that hearing it uncensored is so fricking satisfying.

RUN TWEEK RUN!!!

The walkie talkies are such a nice touch. 😂

"The one with the cocaine problem escaped, Mein Director."

Mannn, I miss when they used to throw live action "commercials" into the episodes like this. This also is from the time where I was like hella attracted to Trey Parker so seeing his face is always welcome. 😂

"We always meant to have Imperial Walkers and giant Dewback lizards in the background, but simply couldn’t afford it."

Oh my God, I'm always so proud of Tweek for talking to this huge crowd of people and trying to get them to help him! His little talking through his teeth, like, "We are not talking about Hat right now, okay?!" He's trying so hard!

"Oh God, I'm gonna have to do this myself! Oh, God!" just breaks my heart! YOU CAN DO IT, TWEEK! 13 seasons from now you'll have someone who helps you believe in yourself, just hang on!

Tweek with the bazooka, oh my gosh, always makes me so happy. I can't tell you how much I wanted him to just blow them all the fuck up the first time I saw this.

"All I want are my friends. Except for Cartman, you can keep him." YEAH, TWEEK!

I hate that Steven Asshole Spielberg manages to talk enough crap to make Tweek hesitate. He was so close! I wonder how he would have felt if he actually did it though, Maybe it's better he didn't? It might have made his anxiety worse if he actually blew people up now that I think about it.

"In the tropical isles with the coconut trees, the air is fresh and the people are free, but here in the mountains there's no freedom like that, there's a man in prison and his name is Hat!" This gets stuck in my head so often.

It makes it so much better having actually seen Raiders, especially for this part. I honestly thought the melting faces was just a South Park thing but nope.

I also really love what they look like turned away with their eyes closed too. <3

Like what even is going on in this scene. 😂

Oh my God, okay, and I know that Hat is a terrible person and I want to clarify just in case, I do not think killing babies is funny, but just the way that baby crawls up the person's arm to avoid getting passed to Hat is always so so funny to me and I can never explain why.

Tweek being the only one to be appropriately horrified by the fact that Hat is being given a baby.

"Sometimes the things we do don't matter right now. Sometimes they matter later. We have to care more about later sometimes, you know? I think that's what separates us from the Steven Spielbergs and George Lucases of the world." This is still so relevant.

The ending of this episode is also so much better after actually seeing Raiders. 😂

And we close off with a 9/11 joke. Perfection, Matt and Trey, thank you & goodnight.

[makeste]

I just took that Bakugou introspection as Horikoshi's way of telling the audience that yes Bakugou can keep up with OP Deku because there has been so much muttering across the fanbase that Bakugou won't be able to. I don't see the melodrama of Bakugou only seeing his strength as a means to keep up with Deku or that his pride is problematic. I think him having an idea for his hero names means he knows what his strength is for. He's always been strong as a person (when Deku was not) (pt1)

Losing his quirk doesn't need to be the gateway to force him to develop the kindness and consideration he's already been showing, nor would it be karmatic balance between him and Deku- especially when any scenario that takes his quirk benches him from the story or cheapens the stakes by him getting it back relatively fast. Deku's 15 years of quirklessness can't be balanced. Additionally, Bakugou only lost in the story when he was too close minded to learn, once open minded he started to (pt2)

grow. It doesn't send out a good message, if after all that growth he still gets punished. His declaration of spirit to not lose, be it to Shigaraki or Deku is not a bad thing, he is the underdog with an indominable will and he is declaring his spirit as the symbol of victory. Bakugou may lose his quirk, I don't know, but your reasons I disagree with because we interpret those panels differently. They give the audience a point of reference to guage Bakugou's ability.

you make some excellent points, anon! and you see, it’s strange, because up until this chapter and his monologue, I was in full agreement with most of what you’re saying -- that he’s already figured out all of that hero biz, that he’s already in the process of sorting his shit out on his own, and that Horikoshi is simply waiting for the right moment to finally show it.

but after reading his internal dialogue in this chapter, I’m just not so sure anymore.

in the past I’ve done a lot of guesswork on Kacchan’s thought processes based on his subtle little actions and microexpressions, and on what we’ve already been told about his character thus far. I call it “guesswork”, though, because it very much is that, because we so rarely get an actual glimpse into his head to see what he is really thinking. so when Horikoshi actually does give us one of those rare glimpses, I’m inclined to pay very close attention, and prepared to make any necessary adjustments to my current understanding of his character if need be. he is very, very complicated, and despite my spending an absurd percentage of my free time analyzing him up and down and front to back, that absolutely doesn’t mean that any of those analyses are actually right, lols. I’m constantly updating my internal databank of Kacchan knowledge both from interactions with the rest of the fandom, and -- when Horikoshi actually deigns to give us some new information -- from the canon itself.

anyway! so when I read this chapter and saw Kacchan yet again comparing his progress to Deku’s in his head, and thinking -- even now, even in the moments right before an intense battle!! -- only about his rivalry and about keeping up, that immediately set me to updating my mental bakuwiki in regards to his current character growth status. so he definitely has his hero name picked out already, we know that much. and so presumably has thus already figured out what kind of hero he wants to be. right? right.

and yet he still apparently has not revealed the new name to anyone. even after three months. like yeah, we get it, you made a promise to tell Jeanist first, etc. fair enough, but still! it’s an interesting bit of hesitation to take note of. and then there’s also the matter of Horikoshi’s interview from back in December (which I’ll link in a comment once this is posted), where he talked a lot about Bakugou and made a point of saying that his character growth wasn’t done yet, and that he still needs to apologize to Deku. which is as good a confirmation as any that such an apology is indeed forthcoming.

so why, then, does it seem like we’re still no closer to that moment, even after Kacchan seemingly had a mysterious epiphany at the end of the internship arc, and even after we subsequently went through a three month time jump? Kacchan isn’t one to be slow about it when he decides to make progress. his growth in all other aspects has come by leaps and bounds. and yet when it comes to his relationship with Deku -- his friendship with Deku, except that he still can’t bring himself to acknowledge that’s what it is, and insists on thinking of it as only a rivalry -- it seems like he reached a certain point, and then just... stalled. like he’s not willing to go any further past this. and there are many reasons for why that may be the case. but at the root of all of them is pride.

and I’m not saying he needs to give up that pride, because that’s a huge and very important part of who he is. you said his declaration of spirit not to lose isn’t a bad thing, and I agree. but that doesn’t always make it a good thing either, and I don’t want to get so swept up in my love of the character that I start refusing to acknowledge the downsides of that trademark pride as well. pride, like anything else, is nuanced. it can be both good and bad. it’s good when it motivates you and pushes you to do your best and to achieve your goals. but it’s bad when it makes you inflexible, and when it prevents you from taking actions which would benefit you and others, just because doing so would mean humbling yourself in a way that is scary and which feels like it runs counter to your ultimate goals. because you want to be someone who always wins. and so any time you do experience a loss, you go through an entire mini-crisis, because it feels like your very purpose in life is being threatened.

I don’t know if “problematic” is the word I would use for this aspect of him. I feel like that word is fairly overused, especially in fandom, and now has certain connotations of “this is objectively bad behavior which should be called out and shunned.” and I don’t think that’s the case at all when it comes to Kacchan’s pride. he’s already learned how to put it aside in order to work with others and save others. and that’s great! he already is a great hero by this point, imo. if Horikoshi decided to just end his character arc here and not take it any further, I would actually be just fine with that.

but I think that there is still the potential for more. I think that we are still not done here yet. because this manga consistently surprises and amazes me with the way it goes the extra mile when it comes to character development. Kacchan and Deku didn’t have to reconcile their differences and learn to respect one another after only 120 chapters (I say “only” in a very sincere and not sarcastic sense here, because that really is an insanely short timeframe compared to most other manga). but they did. Endeavor didn’t have to see the error of his ways and decide that he wanted to become a better person, and he definitely didn’t have to be shown apologizing and admitting his wrongdoings and even going so far as to back out of his family’s lives for their sakes and even build them a house so they could move on apart from him. but he did! and that’s insane, you guys. name me another series that goes that hard in trying to redeem a guy whom virtually every single member of this fandom would have once described as ultimately devoid of any redeeming qualities. I can’t think of any.

but BnHA is just like that. it goes hard. it doesn’t back off. nothing about its character arcs is remotely half-assed. and so if a character is showing signs that they are still angling for more growth? that there are still things they need to learn? then I’m inclined to think we are going to roll up our sleeves and get that growth, one way or another.

this story consistently amazes me because whenever I look at a certain aspect of a character’s development and say to myself, “oh hey, that’s pretty awesome, even if it’s still not ideal,” Horikoshi goes and nudges it down another notch towards being ideal. like, the dude just doesn’t settle. and so that’s one of the reasons why I’m convinced this is a very real and even likely possibility. because this kind of development, to me, would be very, very, very close to my ideal. is it strictly necessary? absolutely not. would it fucking blow my mind as a development, however? I kinda think it would, ngl.

-- that is, with the one addendum that since I do love my son very dearly, I wouldn’t want it to actually be permanent. so in order to be truly ideal, such an arc would also have to include a way for him to climb back up again after experiencing that fall. which some might find contrived or “cheap”, as you put it. but that’s a risk I’m very selfishly and biasedly game for all the same, lol. I am more than willing to occasionally suspend my sense of disbelief in the name of character development, and honestly, I don’t actually think it would cheapen the stakes in any way, because just because Kacchan’s main character status gives him cool perks like a one-time get-out-of-losing-your-quirk-for-free card doesn’t mean the same would apply towards anybody else. and for that matter, it wouldn’t detract from whatever soul searching Kacchan does during that period while he fully believes that he will be quirkless for the rest of his life, either. it doesn’t have to be permanent in order to have a permanent impact.

lastly, in regards to it balancing things out between him and Deku, I don’t mean that Kacchan becoming quirkless would (a) be some sort of necessary and deserved punishment for him, or (b) be even remotely equivalent in any kind of way to what Deku experienced while growing up. that is very obviously not the case, and I can’t stand that kind of thinking, that redemption is only about punishment. maybe “karmic” isn’t the word I should have used then; I meant it as a way of signifying something spiritual in the push-pull balance between the two of them, not in the “what goes around comes around you were a jerk and now you’ll finally understand what it feels like” sense of the word. that’s a big yikes, lol. so yeah, just to clarify that part of it!

what I mean by balance is that it would serve as a catalyst to Kacchan finally being able to understand Deku’s side of it. finally being able to see things from the point of view of his rival-friend who’s had the exact opposite arc as him in terms of what he had to do and go through and learn and unlearn to get this far. it would serve as a means of finally bridging that one last gap of understanding between them. it would bring things back into balance because it would bring them back into balance, by giving them the push to finally mend that one last broken part of their former friendship. the part that’s still untouched by both of them, because they’re both afraid of disrupting the current semi-stable truce that they have now in their relationship. even if it’s not perfect. not, if you’ll pardon my use of the word yet again, ideal.

tl;dr I see Bakugou’s introspection as being a lead-in to something potentially game-changing both because I want it to be, and because, as strange as it may seem, the manga has conditioned me to think this way now. to have expectations. to anticipate more depth, more growth. so it may be the case that in this instance I’ve taken those expectations too far and I need to temper them back down and swing them in a less angsty, more traditionally shounen direction. and like I said, if that does wind up being the case, I won’t be upset.

but maybe, just maybe though, this manga will in fact go there once again. if for no other reason than that it can. “Horikoshi really went and did that” is a sentence I’ve gotten very used to typing since I started reading this manga. and so, well, let’s just wait and see.

[carryonsimoncarryonbaz]

SKIN DEEP—a fic

So Rainbow had a pretty funny exchange on Twitter yesterday about the Watford crew and teenage acne, and in particular if Baz would have acne. Which she said he most certainly would. So, being me, I had to go write a fic about it. Because I have no chill and even less self control. So here is a slightly crack-y fic, set at pre-canon era Watford, as hormones start to surge and Simon becomes pimple obsessed.

Screen shots of Rainbow’s tweets at the end of this post, to prove this lunacy had a real life prompt.

Simon and Baz fourth year, as the ravages of adolescence commence. Pimples, blemishes and spots. Questionable concoctions. The roots of Baz’s immaculate skin care regimen. Some things even a vampire can’t avoid.

Skin Deep

Year Four

Simon

I’m just about to splash water on my face when I notice them in the mirror. I mean, I’ve been expecting this to happen. I saw the older boys go all spotty at the homes. There’s no way I’d be lucky enough to be spared.

But fuck it all. I’ve got one on the side of my nose, two on my chin and one right between my eyebrows. How did I get all these pimples in one night?

I’m half tempted to think Baz spelled me. But that’s not his style, he doesn’t sneak about doing something like this, even though he’s a prick and a plotter. No, he did things like this when we were first years, but now when Baz spells me he wants everyone to know what he’s done.

Makes a production of it, the wanker.

Like when he knocks my boater off. Spells my shoes untied during class, so I trip when I stand up. Or seals the lid on the butter dish at breakfast.

If Baz was going to spell me spotty he’d do it in on a Monday, right before class, when everyone would notice. Not in our room, on a Saturday morning, when we’ve got nothing to do and nowhere to go.

He’s still asleep so if he did do it, it must have been in the night and really what would be the bloody point of that?

I have to reluctantly admit it’s probably not him this time. It’s me. I was just hoping this particular stage of puberty would just pass me by.

The other milestones have been coming one right after another though, so I guess I’m not that lucky.

I’ve got hair in more places now.

And I grew three inches this summer (Baz grew four, the tosser, so he’s still taller than me).

He’s taller but it’s like he fits in his body. Glides when he walks. Smooth as silk on the pitch. Bloody infuriating, is what it is.

I feel like a marionette on a string, my arms and legs all out of sync, knocking into furniture and tripping over my own feet, even when my shoes are tied.

And my voice has been doing that stupid thing where it gets all deep mid-sentence, and then it goes up so high I sound like Madame Bellamy. It’s bloody awful. Baz always gives me shit about it --“going to break into song for us, Snow?”

He’s such a prick.

I lean in closer to the mirror. The ones on my chin are small. It’s the nose one that’s a disaster.

No help for it. I’ll ask Penny if there’s a spell at breakfast. Though I doubt there is, seeing as Agatha’s been spotty for weeks and I know she’d use a spell, if there was one. Penny says Agatha spells her hair to be that straight and shine like it does. I wasn’t sure I believed her but some days it’s got a bit of an uneven wave to it so I wonder if Penny may be right.

*******

“No, Simon, there isn’t a spell.” Penny is using her patient voice with me, which means she thinks my question is unbearably stupid. She leans across the table to peer at me over her glasses. “You’ve hardly got any.”

“I might only have four now. But just you wait. They’re bound to get worse. With my luck I’ll be covered in them.”

“You don’t know that. And even if they do get worse it’s human nature! The universal teen experience!”

I groan.

“It won’t be that bad, Simon. Besides everyone’s spotty.”

“Baz isn’t spotty.”

She rolls her eyes. “Not Baz again, please.”

“Have you seen him, Penny?”

“I see him every day, Simon.”

“Yes, but have you really looked?”

“Obviously not as intently as you.”

“I live with him!”

I get another eye roll.

“He’s not got one spot! I tell you, it’s proof he’s a vampire. You can’t go through normal adolescence and be as pristine as all that.”

“Everyone goes through puberty at different times. He’s probably not at that stage yet.”

“He’s taller than me!”

“He’s always been taller than you.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“It’s not like he has any control over that, Simon. It’s genetics.”

I know that. I know height isn’t something that you can magick. But it just doesn’t seem fair that each time I grow enough to catch up to him, he grows too.

He did it last summer. Did it again this summer. Even grew over the Christmas holiday this year, the jammy bastard.

And now I’m sprouting pimples right and left and he’s across the dining hall with his flawless, pearly grey skin. Not a spot to be seen.

Typical.

****

I can tell I’ve got more when I wake up. Bloody hell. The old ones dry up and get crusty and new ones take their place.

My face feels heavier this morning. I grimace and I know there’s one on the side of my nose again. It pinches when my cheeks move so it must be massive. And the one on my chin itches— it’s probably grown overnight, red and welted around that nasty white center. I can’t even imagine what my forehead looks like.

I’ve tried everything.

Washing my face twice a day.

Alcohol to try to dry them out (didn’t do a thing, except make my skin all flaky so I looked like I had dandruff and the pox).

I borrowed some ointment off of Gareth. (He’s worse off than me, the poor sod, just a face full of them.) (Which should have tipped me off that whatever he was using wasn’t working.) (Got an earful from Penny about that.)

I had some sort of allergic reaction when I used his, so my face was itching, red even in the areas between the spots, and felt like it was on fucking fire.

Practically scrubbed my face off trying to wash it away.

Of course, Baz walked in right as I came out of the en suite. Did a double take at the sight of me, the wanker, then raised that eyebrow of his and curled his lip up in a sneer. Leaned forward and studied me for a moment. My face got even hotter. I don’t like it when he stares at me like that, all intense and focused. Like he’s plotting the best way to end me without triggering the Anathema. Makes my stomach twist, it does.

Made me wish my wand wasn’t half way across the room.

But I know Baz won’t risk the Anathema. He’s never done anything remotely threatening in our room. (It’s another story out of our room.)

He’d crossed his arms over his chest after he was done inspecting me and smirked, the tosser. “You know, Snow, between the excessive quantity of moles, infinite number of freckles, and extraordinary collection of pimples you have on your face, I don’t think I can actually see anything resembling skin anymore.”

He’s going to make me trigger the Anathema one of these days.

I ended up having to see the nurse for it, when I couldn’t stop scratching at my face. She rolls her eyes almost as much as Penny. It’s not like I can help being there so often. I’ve got missions. Important work for the Mage. It’s what I do.

She’d shaken her head at me and cast some spell that made the itching go away but didn’t do a thing for the bloody spots. Looked bored and put upon even doing that, she did.

This teen experience is a bloody nuisance.

I’m more and more convinced Baz is a vampire. The entire class looks poxed except for him. Like we’re in the middle of a plague while he’s all alabaster skin, unblemished and smooth, immaculate and bloody flawless.

Perfect, just like he always is.

Wanker.

Baz

Snow is an absolute spotted mess. It was entertaining at first, to watch him peer at himself in the mirror, hear the muttered curses as he would catch sight of each new blemish.

But I’m actually finding myself almost feeling sorry for him now.

Almost.

He’s standing at his mirror, turning his face this way and that, grumbling to himself as he inspects his reflection.

It’s something he does on a daily basis since his skin condition deteriorated so precipitously. I should probably stop needling him about it.

But I won’t because he actually seems quite bothered by it. Can’t let him think I’m going soft.

I wasn’t joking the other night, when I mocked him. I don’t think he has a span of skin left that doesn’t have some manner of spot or blotch or freckle on it. At least he’s stopped with the alcohol washes. He was shedding more than a snake when he was doing that, leaving errant flakes of skin all over the bathroom sink.

Disgusting.

Whatever he’s doing certainly isn’t making anything better. Making it a far sight worse by my estimation.

He’s literally a textbook illustration of acne vulgaris. The full range: from red and bumpy spots, to glaring pustules, to crusted over, scabby craters.

More like a walking dermatologic visual in actuality. You could slap a label on him: progressive stages of teenage acne and the entire range of pigmented facial anomalies.

Although they weren’t really anomalies before the acne got to Snow. His moles and freckles just seem to fit with his tawny skin—vast arrays of constellations scattered across his face, mapping out patterns against the smoothness of his complexion.

I don’t know what I’m thinking. What absolute nonsense. Snow’s freckles are a travesty.

And he’s anything but smooth complexioned. He’s more of a lunar landscape than Shakespeare’s damask’d roses.

I can’t be arsed to mess with him now though. I’m too comfortable under my blankets.

It’s far too early for anyone to be up, but Snow’s probably readying himself to head off on one of the Mage’s blasted missions again. Despite the fact that it’s a Sunday morning and by all accounts he should be doing what the rest of us are—having a lazy lie-in.

I watch him from under half-lidded eyes, the blankets pulled up to cover the bottom half of my face. He growls one last time, savages his curls in an attempt to tame them, and then charges out the door. It slams shut behind him, further proof that Snow has no regard for the niceties of sharing a room.

Thanks to all his thumping about, I’m now wide awake. I try to go back to sleep, try to will myself into a drowsy oblivion, but that ship has sailed. No Sunday lie-in for me and I lay the blame directly on Snow.

I stay under the covers for a bit longer, dreading the chilly walk to the en suite, but eventually my need to piss outweighs the comfort of the bed.

It’s not until I’m washing my hands and happen to glance up at the mirror that I notice.

There’s a pimple on my nose. Not just on my nose—at the very tip of it. Right in the fucking center of my face. If it were anywhere else—my forehead or my cheeks, for example—I’d have some chance of hiding it. But this. I can’t hide this.

And I can’t hide the one on my chin either. Bloody hell.

I shouldn’t even have pimples. I should by all rights be immune to this. I don’t get sick, I’m not prey to infections—how the bloody hell have I ended up with acne, for Crowley’s sake? It should be one of the perks of being undead—imperviousness to the ravages of teenage skin eruptions.

For half a minute I wonder if Snow has spelled me, in retribution for my insensitive commentary on his facial imperfections. But there is no possible way Snow could have managed a spell this precise, this nuanced. I’d be covered in boils, like Job himself, if Snow had attempted to pox me.

That’s not to say that this is acceptable. It most assuredly is not. And there’s no bloody spell for it. Dev’s been spotty since last year and he and Niall have yet to find anything that does more than slightly diminish the redness.

It’s fine. This is fine.

It’s not fine.

I need to call home and talk to Daphne. Surely she’ll have some advice for me.

Simon

The sunlight filtering through the window wakes me up. I’m still knackered from yesterday. Didn’t get back until well after midnight and I’ve got class in just a bit. I stretch and groan as my shoulder pops. I wrenched it trying to free my sword from that basilisk’s skull last night. I roll my neck and pull myself to a seated position.

Baz is already up. The door to the en suite’s closed but I don’t hear the water running.

My stomach growls. I’ll have time for seconds if I get to breakfast early enough. I’m just about ready to head down there when Baz comes out of the bathroom, steam drifting behind him and bringing the scent of his shampoo with it. It’s some posh brand, in sleek, artistically shaped bottles.

Penny says it smells like cedar and bergamot. I’m not sure what cedar and bergamot smell like. All I know is that the scent is unfairly pleasant.

Unlike Baz, who isn’t pleasant at all.

He looks murderous at the moment, eyebrows lowered, eyes narrowed. He’s an arse in general but more so in the mornings. He’d sleep late if he had the chance—he’s rarely out of bed before nine on weekends, the tosser, not unless he’s got exams to study for or an away match.

I’m trying to stay out of his way as I leave but I make for the door right as he crosses the room to his wardrobe and we do this awkward half step to avoid each other.

And that’s when I see it.

He’s got a pimple on his nose. Right at the tip of it, where it comes to a bit of a point. It’s nothing compared to any of mine. I’d hardly notice it on anyone else but this is Baz.

It’s stark against his pale skin, raised and just slightly reddened.

Fuck. He’s got one on his chin as well. Two, actually.

Baz has spots.

Trivial and hardly noticeable ones, but still.

I open my mouth to say something then think better of it and hightail it down to breakfast.

I still can’t quite believe it.

Baz has spots.

Penny is disappointingly unimpressed by this unexpected and highly irregular development.

“Simon, we all have spots. This is not some earth-shattering revelation. It’s puberty. A normal part of human development. We’ve been over this.”

“No, but this is Baz. Baz, Penny. He’s not human.”

Penny rolls her eyes again. She rolls her eyes rather a lot, I’m thinking. “He is if he has spots, Simon. I’d say this disproves your vampire hypothesis for good.”

“Maybe vampires aren’t immune to acne.”

“Simon.”

“Maybe it’s some plot. He probably magicked them up himself, the scheming prick.”

“You’re relentless! First you’re outraged that he doesn’t have spots, now you’re complaining that he does! For Merlin’s sake, Baz has finally shown himself to be as imperfect as the rest of us, so let it go, Simon.”

“He’s not imperfect. Far from it. Even his pimples are impeccable—small, unobtrusive, uh . . . restrained.”

Penny stands up, takes her plate and glares at me over the top of her glasses. “That’s enough, Simon. You’re being absurd. No one has perfect pimples.” She stomps across the hall to deposit her dishes, turning back to give me a disapproving look.

I scowl at her. Baz walks in as Penny goes out.

She’s wrong this time. Penny’s not wrong about much, but she’s wrong about this.

Baz’s pimples are fucking perfect.

It’s so fucking unfair.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23383057