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dastardly-imbecile · 1 month ago

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NOTDEER

AO3 HERE

Simon nods at you. He’s tall enough that, at the angle your phone points, the slant of light only reaches his neck, face still obscured in shadow. You can make out, through the barest changes in shades of gray, the suggestion of a nose, the theory of a brow, hypothesis of the lips. Indistinct enough that you could not draw him, defined enough that you can recognize him. --- When you cannot trust your own memory, alone on a trip in the woods, what else is there to do but submit? OR the incomprehensible monster who haunts your campsite is an alcoholic

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Wordcount: ~7.5k

Inspired by this wonderful drabble by @ceilidho. Also, mandatory nods to the 'Goatman' and 'Fleshgait' creepypastas.

TW: this is some halfbreed horror story, so there WILL be graphic depictions of violence and death! Read at your own discretion!

It starts like any good romance: a grove of darkly flowered dogwoods and a rousing campfire, a bit too much to drink and a night just cold enough that you have an excuse to huddle together.

It starts like any good horror movie: a storm and a drenched forest, clouds blotting out the stars and the sounds of many toothy things in the realm beyond your sight.

It starts like any story ever, which is to say a hapless protagonist and a presence that watches, that waits.

It starts like this: you are sitting around the campfire with three of your friends, trying to spear your marshmallow, fallen into the fire. Giving up, once it grows indistinguishable from all the other lumps of charcoal.

Darren laughs too hard at that, puts an arm around you when he goes to grab a new marshmallow. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: Darren’s had a crush on you, ever since you drunkenly hooked up with him at a party in high school, and he’s just the right combination of too forward and too coy to be annoying. Makes rowdy, boys-locker-room jokes, sneaks looks at you to see if you laugh. Loudly talks about some new date around the group, bemoans his singleness in your private messages.

You haven’t brought it up. No use making things awkward. No use letting him down gently, not when he’ll deny your claims, make it into some big, pick-me delusional-woman deal.

Besides, you’d be lying if you said you didn’t like the attention a little bit. You’d be lying if you said the night and the campfire and the shitty beer buzzing through your veins doesn’t make any warm body look a bit appealing.

“Hey,” Kelsey says from across the campfire, “grab the bottle.”

You’ve known Kelsey since third grade—the longest out of everyone at this circle. Were neighbors, close enough that when the fighting between her parents got bad, she’d come crawling through your window and you’d sleep in the same bed, back-to-back. She was your first kiss, during spin the bottle in middle school. Sure took that a lot better than Darren did.

He does, changing course to reach for the beer. His arm brushes you, not entirely accidentally. You meet his eyes, smile, and the surprise that lights in them makes your grin widen.

With a bit of sloppy, tipsy incoordination, Kelsey fills her own red cup. The liquid is piss-yellow, and it tastes like gasoline, but anything is good when you’re already drunk and a hundred miles from the nearest liquor store.

Wordlessly, Lou holds out his own cup. You don’t know him all that well, as a matter of fact, but he’s some friend of Kelsey’s from college and she insisted on bringing him along so she doesn’t, quote, get all caught up in your pining third wheel bullshit. Quiet, but the type of funny that makes you think he’s been saving all his humor up. She pours him one, and then, without needing to ask, you and Darren.

Above, there is the distant rumble of thunder. You realize that you can’t see the moon anymore—it was full, ten minutes ago, and you suppose it’s technically still full, but out of sight, out of mind, all that. The campfire is the only source of light in the woods, that and the flashlight steepled by Lou’s feet, and it gives the whole clearing a sort of airy, unreal sense. Heat mirage, wavering light making everything a bit less solid.

Kelsey pours a fifth cup. Sets it on the ground. Darren raises his eyebrows. “Wow.”

��What?” She asks. He laughs, like she’s being dumb—which is one of the reasons why you’ve never even tried dating him—and juts his chin out at the extra cup.

“Going double, really?”

“What?” She repeats, looking down, then back, “it’s for Simon.”

“Who?” You ask, tilting your head.

“Simon? Remember? Jesus, he lived on the same street as us. Remember, when Mom and Dad were divorcing, he let me stay at his house for two months because your folks didn’t like me?”

You remember the last part of that—your parents had developed an aversion to Kelsey because she dyed her hair and got a septum piercing, and they were the type to call that a bad influence—but not the first. As far as you’d known, she’d gone off to stay with her cousins for that stretch of time.

“No,” you say carefully, “who-”

Darren interrupts you, gesturing around the fire. “And where is Simon?”

“He just got up to take a piss,” she snaps, and the conversation’s getting heated, too heated, pushed along by the same things that made it fun—that being, alcohol and two groups who don’t know each other all that well and sleep deprivation—tipping over the edge of delirious entertainment to irritation.

“Kel,” Lou says, careful and slow, “maybe you shouldn’t drink more, actually. Nobody named Simon came with us.”

She pauses. There is a strange, slow moment, where time stretches like taffy and the fire seems to freeze, and her face falls in a way that makes her look unlike herself. It’s what you imagine a doppelganger to look like—all the right features, all the right proportions, but a different person behind the eyes, windows to a different soul.

“Sorry,” she says, and it’s back, all her spirits in the right body, “I don’t know… fuck, I’m mixing some shit up. Yeah, I don’t…”

Another peal of thunder. You look up at the sky. When you were a kid, you always had this wriggling thought in the back of your mind—that you should not look at the sky, in case something looks back, peels you open from epidermis to intestine and puts you back together wrong.

No, you didn’t. Where the fuck did that come from?

“I think it’s gonna rain,” You observe. Darren throws back his beer, throat working in an effort to chug it, up-down-up like a ship on turbulent waves. Across the campfire, Kelsey looks at her cup with faint distaste. After a moment of consideration, chucks it into the large back garbage bag hitched to the nearest tree—Lou follows, though his cup is considerably emptier, and you as well, after a moment.

Guess who drops his cup on the ground?

“C’mon,” Kelsey says, pointing. Darren looks at it, picks it up with a two-fingered grip like one might a piece of toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe, chucks it into the bag.

“My bad,” he says, “Smokey the bear’s gonna get me, huh?”

“He’s for wildfires,” Kelsey snaps, “you’re just a fucking asshole.”

She doesn’t like him much. That’s also why she insisted on bringing Lou.

He holds up his hands in a back off sort of resignation, pushes himself to his feet. You follow—as you do, a raindrop strikes the corner of your eye, teeters perilously close to falling in. By the time you blink it away, there are more—upon your arms, your legs, striking with the force of slow bullets, which is to say not like bullets at all. Shitty metaphor. Blame it on your BAC.

When you make the trek back to your tent, Darren sticks with you for a bit longer than would necessarily make sense—it’s only when you don’t spare him a glance, while unzipping your tent, that he finally peels off.

You turn around—the same instinct that makes you double-check the oven is turned off—to examine the campfire. Stupid, because the rain, extinguishing even the embers, but it does make you realize that Lou left his flashlight there. It illuminates the clearing, the four logs, and the absence of the fifth cup.

Kelsey must’ve thrown it away. Didn’t see her do it, but Smokey Bear and all that jazz.

Doesn’t take long for you to fall asleep. A full day of hiking—well, insofar as hiking means trekking a case of beer halfway up a mountain, which you think very much counts, actually—has given your body plenty to be tired about.

—

When you wake up, it’s the middle of the night. If the darkness beyond your tent does not tell you that, then a quick glance at your phone does—the stark 2:54 splayed out across the screen.

More pressing is the pressure on your bladder. Most of you wants to stay warm and comfortable in your sleeping bag, but the rest needs out, so you shove your way free. Stumble around a moment before you manage to unzip your tent. Can’t bother to look for your flashlight, so you grab your phone, use it to illuminate the way out into the edge of the clearing and into bliss. Not really needed, in any case—Lou’s is still on, and the rain has stopped, which makes the trip remarkably clear.

When you turn around, you almost scream. There is a silhouette in the center of the glade, made stark by the stuttering light of the abandoned flashlight. Tall enough to dwarf you in the vertical direction, broad enough to do the same in the horizontal, and the only reason you do not shriek is that freeze manages to claw a victory over flight and fight.

Instinctively, you put your hand out in front of you, phone still in it—and, when that tinny light lands upon the figure, all the panic suddenly bleeds out of you like a punctured lung.

It’s just Simon. You met him in the campus coffeeshop, junior year of college, because he was sitting in your usual study spot. It was a silent competition, for a few months, to see who could get to the spot first, until one day, fed up, you sat directly across from him at the table. Another month of silent stalemate, both working across from each other, until you’d broken the ice by asking why he was ordering tea at a damn coffeeshop, and the rest is history, so to say.

He’s a good friend. Kelsey likes him more than she likes Darren, for sure, and he and Lou could spend a century in happily companionable silence.

“God,” you groan, “scared the shit out of me. What’re you doing?”

He nods at you. He’s tall enough that, at the angle your phone points, the slant of light only reaches his neck, face still obscured in shadow. You can make out, through the barest changes in shades of gray, the suggestion of a nose, the theory of a brow, hypothesis of the lips. Indistinct enough that you could not draw him, defined enough that you can recognize him.

“Same thing as you,” he replies, “felt good?”

You snort. “You’re so weird. By all means, the spot’s yours.”

He doesn’t move, as you step around him, though you get the sense his head is turning, keeping his eyes upon you.

“Remind me,” he says, casual, “how long’re we staying here?”

Right. He’d been a last-minute addition to the groupchat. You’d only added him because you’d remembered him mentioning, offhand, that he did some hiking. Well, in his words, less nature walks, more hunting.

Thank God he’s not one of those guys that poses with dead deer like they’re fish.

(Guess who is?)

Though, maybe you wouldn’t mind too much if he was. Since you were a kid, you’ve always wanted to cut a deer open, dig your hands into its guts and pull everything out, line them up all neat on a white table like you’re playing offal-solitaire. Push a finger into its eyesocket until you touch the brain, fuck yourself on its antlers.

You blink. “Sorry,” you say, “spaced out. Uh, three days I think? A fourth, for getting back home.”

“Good,” he replies.

A moment where you stare at each other, and then you add, a coy smile tugging at the corners of your lips, “fine if I use the kettle for coffee first tomorrow? You’ll have to wait for your tea.”

When he laughs, it’s a deep, burrish sort of rasp that digs into your sternum. “Fine by me, dove.”

—

You don’t remember making it back to your tent, but you must, because when you wake up, you’re back ensconced in your sleeping bag. The only proof you have that you went out at all is that you forgot to plug your phone back in, and it lays by your head. When you blearily prod at it, the screen does not light up, and you groan when you realize it must’ve died.

Oh well. Get off that screen, enjoy the marvels of nature, all that. Lemons into lemonade. Water into wine.

You’re not the first one up—that’s Lou, who’s busy heating up a cast iron over the replenished campfire, boxed pancake mix to his right. He nods at you, and you nod back, perfectly content to stay silent when it’s this early—talk can wait until the sky’s finished birthing the sun.

You circle around to the other side of the fire, set up the kettle over the grate. By the time the water’s boiling, Kelsey is out, and by the time you pour out four mugs, Darren pushes his way into the open.

“Hey,” you say, “where’s our teabags?”

“Didn’t bring any,” Kelsey replies, “none of us drink tea?”

“Oh. Simon must’ve brought his own,” you reply, and the group freezes for a second. Not in the strange, unreal way from last night, but instead in the way that happens when someone’s just made a very poor taste joke.

“Who the fuck is Simon?” Darren asks, looking up from his half-burnt pancake, “some bloke you and Kel know?”

She frowns. She hates when he calls her Kel.

“I…” you say, glancing at her. Past her, to the line of tents, to the four tents, not five. “I swear… I talked to him last night?”

The last words are uncertain. Did you? You remember him, of course, tall and broad, but now, if you try, you cannot see his face in your mind’s eye.

“...I think Kel freaked you out,” Lou says, “must’ve been a dream.”

“I think they’re fucking with us,” Darren says, and you shake your head, though you can’t tell whether it’s to deny him, Lou, or yourself.

A dream makes enough sense—went out to piss, sure, forgot to plug your phone back in, had some tired-drunk-hallucination midway through. Kelsey’s little thing messed with her head, and maybe she’s the one fucking with you, and it worked a bit better than intended.

When you think back on college, in that coffeeshop, you find that you don’t remember a single thing about a hulking man in the corner of the place. Makes less sense the more you think on it—why would he be there, not a student? Why would you talk to someone like that? Back then, at least, you were timid enough that you wouldn’t correct a waiter on your misheard order, let alone sit yourself down across from a stranger.

Weird dream. You scrub a hand over your face.

“Sorry,” you say, “must’ve… I don’t know.”

“Maybe lay off the alc, huh?” Darren asks, like you’re not only attracted to him when you’re drunk. You nod anyway.

The day passes as lackadaisically as any day with four twenty-somethings alone in the woods can go, which is to say, easily. You while away a few hours in the morning just strolling through the desire paths that circle your clearing, listening to the birds sing overhead, the squirrels bouncing through great leafy branches. Even see a deer at one point, as it leaps over the path, and it dredges some quiet, half-grown memory from some quiet, half-there part of your mind, a dream within a dream within a bender.

Lunch is canned ravioli, and the afternoon is a few rounds of poker played with sticks and rocks. Darren suggests—a few too many times for it to be funny—to turn it into strip poker, until Lou starts taking his pants off, and then he shuts up.

“There’s a lake a few miles from here,” Kelsey says, consulting a map as dusk conquers the horizon, “we should go tomorrow.”

“Didn’t bring swimsuits,” you observe, “or fishing rods.”

“We can skinny dip,” Darren suggests.

A moment of silence, to emphasize that he’s being ignored, and then Lou says, “scenic hike, then.”

It’s settled. When night is fully upon the forest, Darren walks to the cooler, and as you once again lose a marshmallow to the flames, he yells back to you.

“Who drank everything?”

“What?” You call back. A moment of silence, the sound of rustling and the clinking of glass bottles.

“All the beer! We brought a 12-pack up, and we had nine after last night, and there’s only seven now.”

“Jesus,” Kelsey drawls, “you were counting? Alcoholic, much?”

“It’s not counting, it’s common fucking sense. Three bottles last night, so there should be-”

“Maybe it was Simon,” Lou says. The way he’s leaned towards you implies that it was a comment meant for your ears only, but he’s a bit too loud or everyone is a bit too sensitive, because they stop their argument immediately.

Your eyes fix upon the marshmallow in the fire, past the point of softening and edging into char. When you were in third grade, a firefighter came to your school, gave a presentation in front of the class. You remember he described a burning house and a woman who wasn’t able to get out. Hid in the bathtub instead. When they went back inside, she was melted into the porcelain. Human lard, he said, smiling, smells just like Sunday morning. Anyone like bacon?

Yum. Your tongue prods at the back of your teeth, and you try to remember what you ate for dinner.

A tense moment, nobody sure how to respond to that, whether to brush it off or to play in it. Eventually, it’s Darren who half-laughs, half-groans, “shut up.”

He lumbers back to the fire, carrying two bottles in his hands.

“So,” he says, handing one to you and one to Kelsey to pour, “again, who is he? Some neighbor kid?”

“No,” she says, staring at her hands, “I think I met him… somewhere else.”

“I think I met him in college,” you blurt, and she brightens immediately, meeting eyes with you.

“Yeah, me too! That’s it.”

“I think,” Lou says, “the problem with that is that you went to different colleges.”

Darren snorts. You consider passing him the cup, but rapidly change your trajectory to Lou. “Woah. Can’t even get your story straight.”

A new furrow has worked its way into Kelsey’s brow, and she tilts her head. “Did he go to our high school, then?”

“I’d know him,” Darren says, and she shrugs loosely. Looks like it takes a conscious effort to clear herself up, to smooth out the tension in her skin and reach down her throat with a hand and wring her kidneys out like bloodsoaked rags.

“Dunno, then. Maybe he’s one of my mom’s friend’s sons. She introduced me to a ton of those, back in high school. Or maybe I am messing with you.” She smiles impishly, but you don’t have to examine her eyes to know that she’s lying, that she’s trying to cover.

The topic passes, eventually, but the mood it sets does not. Lou’s some massive horror buff, apparently, and he regales you with the type of story that takes you back to ten-year-old summer camp. Even Darren gets into it, and you’re reminded why you came on this trip with him in the first place—when he’s not being horny or being an asshole, he’s surprisingly funny, good at setting the mood.

“...drip, drip,” he says, “and you’ll never guess, what she sees when she’s looking at the trees above the car-”

“Oh my god,” Kelsey moans, “it’s way too fucking dark for this. I’m going to bed.” She points an accusing finger at Darren, “and if I catch you dripping water over my fucking tent-”

“Would never,” he says lightly. She giggles as she stands, staggering to her feet, out from the dome of the firelight and off to the dark lumps of the tents beyond.

After only a minute, Lou follows, yawning and murmuring a quiet, “night.”

And then, there were two. You glance over at Darren, and through the haze of tipsiness, in the flickering light, he looks almost good. Firelight is better than a diet—it casts all the planes of his cheek in chiseled levels of light and shadow, cuts off the extraneous until all you can see is the shape of a person.

He must notice, because he grins.

“You scared too?”

You return the grin. It feels like slipping on someone else’s skin. “Maybe.”

“I can think of something to help that.”

You swat at him, laughing. “And that is?”

“Come to my tent. Find out.”

“God, you’re corny. Fine.” You point at the campfire, “you go ahead. I’ll put out the fire. Smokey Bear, you know.”

He chuckles, and for a moment, you almost think this might not be a mistake.

The fire’s almost entirely burnt out already, but you give it a few more minutes as you go fumbling about for the shovel. Must trek all the way to the cooler before you find it, buried under a tarp, and by the time you return, there is someone sitting on your log.

Simon, you know instinctively, from the hunch of his back, from the rasp of his breath. You grin as you come up behind him.

“There you are. Thought we scared us to sleep, and you were just too chicken to tell us.”

He laughs. It’s deeper than Darren’s, sends a tremor rattling through your chest.

Carefully, you sit down next to him—he left your space free—and stare into the fire. You don’t feel particularly like looking at his face right now. Maybe you’re afraid of what the firelight will do to it, how the shadows will cut him, shave away the flesh to expose the bone.

You’ve known Simon since high school. He wasn’t a part of you and Kelsey and Darren’s group—new student, transferred in sophomore year, bit of an outcast, from arriving late in the game and for being generally offputting. Dark clothes, dark eyes, unspeaking.

It wasn’t until you started talking to him, after being assigned to tutor him in maths, that the wider student body warmed to him. Still, Darren’s never liked him—sees him as competition—and Kelsey’s never liked him—still thinks he’s a bit weird—and Lou, you’re pretty sure, doesn’t like him either, though you can’t say why.

“Can’t believe you drank the beer,” you say, “and didn’t tell Darren.”

“Wasn’t v’ry good,” he replies, “prefer bourbon.”

You cast him an askance look. “Who’s bringing bourbon on a camping trip?”

He doesn’t respond. Eventually, you add, “next time. For you,” and he huffs out a muted bolt of laughter.

“You gonna fuck him?” He asks, after a moment. You chew on your bottom lip.

“Maybe. What’s it to you?”

You dated Simon briefly, senior year. Your hookup with Darren was a rebound of a sort, in that way, and you don’t think he took it very well—to this day, he still glares at him, still clenches his jaw when he makes some stupid comment. Earlier, when Darren made that joke about strip poker, he looked like he was going to launch across the clearing and pummel him.

Crash to the ground, break his nose, dig his fingers into his eyes and crush his chest. You remember a factoid—something about lungs, when spread out, something about the length of a tennis court. You bet Simon would do it, slowly unpeel every nerve from the walls of his chest and string them up around the trees like he’s toilet-papering a neighbor’s house.

Your heart beats a little faster. You bite down harder on your lip.

“He won’t make you cum,” he says, and you shrug loosely.

“Then who will?”

He tilts his head like you’re asking a really stupid question. You suppose you are.

When his hand clamps down upon your upper arm, it startles you—for some reason, you haven’t been expecting him to be solid, are not used to the feeling of his fingers on your skin. He’s cold, despite the fire.

Wordlessly, he yanks you to your feet, drags you to your tent. You don’t necessarily mean to pull your feet, to resist a tiny bit, but it feels right—makes it righter when he yanks open the zipper to your tent, near-throws you inside. It’s spacious enough that two people can fit, low enough that he must duck, and Simon hunches his back in such a way that the shadows obscure his face, paint him in broad strokes of gray.

You hardly have a moment of peace on the ground, back against your sleeping bag before he’s kneeling, putting a hand in the nexus of your thighs. Such an insistent pressure that you scrabble to tug your pants off, leave long scratches down your stomach with the clumsiness of speed. The cold air almost stings against your bare sex, but before that’s too much a problem, Simon’s lowering himself. There is a brief moment in which his face is in the light, but you blink, and you miss it—and, by the time you’re looking again, his tongue is hitting your cunt, and stars bloom in your vision.

His hands were cold, but his mouth is warm, and he licks a long stroke to your clit. Focuses on that, for a moment, sucking on it gently, which is enough for your legs to wrap around his back in half-greed half-gratitude.

When he bites down upon it gently, the brief nip of teeth, you moan. When you were a kid, your neighbors left their bedroom window open one night, and you watched the husband fuck the wife upon the bed, intertwined as closely together as the friendship bracelet Kelsey gave you. After he was done, he peeled off the wife’s skin and ate her whole. Started with the toes and ended with the eyes, shoved her bones down his throat like a fire-eater.

How does one eat an elephant?

One bite at a time!

You laugh. Simon knows you well enough that he doesn’t ask you why.

Instead, he brings his mouth down to your hole, circling it with his tongue, as his hand goes up to rub at your clit. You push forwards into his face, desperate, greedy, and he strokes his hand down your thigh. He’s warm now, warm as you are.

“More,” you manage to pant, when he extends his tongue into your opening. If anything, he slows—teasing bastard—and now, it’s with a luxuriating sort of tension that he inserts a single finger into your cunt. Follows, a moment later, with another, curves them down and uses his thumb to spin a slow circle over your clit.

It’s enough to send you over the edge. Your body shakes, walls clenching in on a gaping nothing, and though the climax leaves you limp-boned and hazy, it’s clear that this is only the start for Simon. He rises to his feet to shuck his pants off, followed by his underwear, which does much to reveal that he’s already hard.

Good. You’d be insulted, honestly, if he wasn’t. He kneels, and you reach out a hand to run over his cock, feeling out the shape of the veins, stroking a single finger over the tip and smearing his precum about. He places a hand upon yours, gently shifting it off, and the other goes to your waist. Without what seems like an effort at all, he flips you from your back to your stomach. Now, you are facing the wall—he may as well have no face, no body, just a pair of hands and a dick.

“Eager dove,” he murmurs, and you arch up towards him, wanting to be filled, to be contained and released, but all he does is stroke a slow, almost reverent hand over your ass. “Had my eye on you, you know? Ever since I saw you.”

“Please,” you half-moan half-snap, and he finally obliges with a thrust forwards that takes the breath from your lungs. There is an immediate burn. It is not given time to fade, time to adjust, before he’s pushing himself deeper—you shudder, clenching with the effort it takes to accommodate him. The hand upon your ass, he brings up, brings back down again, a sting to distract from the pleasant ache within you. Less a slap and more the way a man thuds a new car, more possession and less the intent to hurt.

“Not leaving,” he says, and you don’t quite process what the words mean. Simply nod—you’d not if he told you to break your phone and slit your throat with the glass, you’d nod if he asked if he could cut you chin-to-clit and crawl inside your body. He bends closer, close enough that his chest is pressed to your back and his chin notches into the crook of your shoulder.

You’re already sensitive from his previous workings, and with this—him, hitting spots inside of you that you do not think anyone else could, not in any sense of the word—it does not take much to bring you over once again. A full-body shake that stars from your core, expands outwards like ripples in a lake, violent enough to make you click your teeth together. Warmth, seeping inside of you, and when he tenderly pulls back, it gushes out in a stream that might as well be blood.

There is movement behind you, shuffling, and by the time you regain the wherewithal to turn back around, sit up, he’s already pulling his pants on, back to you.

“You’re leaving?” You ask, trying not to sound insulted. True love you did not think this was, but he could at least stay the night.

“Some business t’ take care of,” he grunts, “I’ll be back soon.”

It’s a good enough excuse that you let your head fall back upon the pillow. You don’t hear your tent zipper being pulled open, but when you look back up, he’s gone.

—

Kelsey screams. Once, again, again.

You wake up.

She screams.

It spurs you into action, and you leap from the warmth of the bag, fumbling with how quickly you unzip the tent. Burst into the open air—see, from your peripheral, Lou doing much the same thing.

Once you’re out, it’s not hard to see why.

Hanging from a tree directly above the campfire, by his wrists, is a man. Is Darren. His chin is tucked into his chest, and he is naked, stomach cleaved open.

Strangely, there’s no blood, no puddle. You stare at it, some yawning emptiness that might be horror opening inside of you, look down, then up, then down again.

His dick is cut off. You think, in some ironic world, that would be funny.

Lou reaches Kelsey first—she stands at the edge of the log circle, looking up, face ashen and eyes wide. It reminds you of, when you were in seventh grade, when you walked into her house after school and found her Mom dead in the kitchen, a knife embedded in her neck. It was her Dad. They never found him—Kelsey’s always been scared that he’ll find her, someday, do the same thing.

Your hand twitches. It was you. You killed her. She never found out.

You rub your forehead with your hand. Maybe you’re getting a migraine. You can’t remember what you were thinking about.

“We have to go,” he says, after a moment, voice high with panic, “c’mon, don’t… don’t stay for anything, we have to go.” He whirls around, meeting eyes with you. “Hey! Where’s Simon?”

Silence. Kelsey, after a moment.

“You’re joking.”

He hesitates, face suddenly as stricken as hers, all blood drained out. “I…”

She whips around, face almost nose-to-nose with his, “you’re fucking joking, who the fuck is Simon, what-”

“I was with him,” he swears, backing away a step, head swiveling around—like Simon will materialize at any minute—“I… he came into my tent, told me he couldn’t sleep. We played poker and he took all my rocks.”

“No,” you say, distantly, like your voice is not your own, “he was with me.”

With me seems like a better word than fucking my brains out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kelsey says after a moment, half-sobbing, “whatever- whatever the hell he is, let’s leave.”

“My phone,” Lou says after a moment, dashing towards the tents. You follow, and when Kelsey catches up to you, her hands lock onto your arm. They’re warm. You place your hand over hers, and wonder how long it takes to make a corpse feel real.

When he emerges, phone in hand, there’s little hope upon his face.

“Dead,” he says, “flat-out dead, not no service, dead.”

“Mine’s dead too,” you say, recalling that first night, forgetting to plug it back in. You haven’t remembered to do it since.

“We need to leave,” Kelsey repeats, “no point in checking.”

You don’t need any further reminding. The path that led you to the clearing is easy to find. It’s significantly lighter, going down, with not even a pack upon your backs—makes the journey feel quick, even if it’s agonizingly slow. You do not stop for anything—not food, not water, all done with a numbness of your feet and the strange fog in your mind.

“I should’ve known better,” Lou says, as the sun reaches his zenith—it comes out with the certainty of a thought that’s been stewing for hours—“I’ve watched a thousand horror movies, obviously. You both think of a man that doesn’t exist and you get confused when we prod you on it, and we’re in the woods, oh my god.”

“Don’t start,” Kelsey snaps. Her voice has stabilized from earlier, but she still has that wide-eyed, deer-in-headlights look.

“It was so obvious,” he repeats, “and of course, Darren dies first, because he’s the confident asshole, and…”

That feels a tad insensitive, but you suppose the charitable part of his brain has short-circuited.

“And what the fuck does that make you?” Kelsey asks, “the meta guy? You die next. You’re fucking Randy Meeks.”

“I know,” he replies, and that quiets her. It puts you on that line of thinking—that of horror movies. Logic dictates something along the lines of a final girl, unless your filmmaker is avant-garde or a sadist, so it could go either way for you.

You don’t realize you’ve turned back around until you’re short of breath—until you realize that somehow, you have made a 180 on the trail, and are now going uphill. It takes another five minutes before Lou notices, before he stops in his tracks, and says, “we… we got turned around.”

“What?” Kelsey asks. He points up the slope.

“We’re walking up. I recognize that tree! We just passed that rock! Oh my god.”

He puts his head in his hands. She stares dully up the trail, as if uncomprehending, before slowly turning around.

“Let’s go.”

There’s not any hope in the words. Another bit of time—you don’t have any way to tell, but you think it might be an hour—before, once again, you are climbing up.

“There’s not really any point,” you observe.

“No,” Lou says, and he turns again.

When the sun begins to sink below the horizon, when the sky darkens like a bruise, you break back into the clearing. Logs to one side, tents to another.

Darren is gone. You look up at the tree, and see not even a rope mark—and, without the puddle of blood, there is no sign that he was ever there at all.

“Fuck,” Kelsey says. Turns, kicking out at one of the logs, screams the word, then collapses to her knees, sobbing. Lou kneels by her side, rubbing a hand along her back. Looks up at you, after a moment.

“We’re sleeping in the same tent tonight. All three of us. He seems… he seems to only get one of us at a time. There is no Simon.”

“There is no Simon,” you breathe, digging your fingernails into your palms. No Simon. You did not meet him in college, did not meet him in high school, he was not in your tent last night and you have never felt his hands upon your skin.

When you were a kid, you’d repeat that mantra to yourself, there is no, there is no there is no there is no there is no there is no there is.

When you were a kid…

You blink, and you are in the tent. Must be Lou’s—cramped, with all three of you, but you and Kelsey are sharing a sleeping bag, and Lou is in his own. You stare at him, sleeping, and then crawl out into the cold air. Sit for a moment, in the tent, look at the darkness around and the things beyond it that you cannot see.

Quietly, you unzip the flaps, pull yourself into the open. Walk a slow circle around the camp, half-contemplating, half enjoying the cold air.

On your third loop, you see Simon, sitting in what used to be Darren’s tent. Your heart stutters briefly in your chest, but you relax just as quickly. He’s so familiar that it hurts.

You’ve known Simon since first grade, when he would chase you around the playground, and make you kiss him when he caught you. Kelsey’s always hated him. So has Darren. Even Lou, from the first moment he laid eyes on him. When you told them that you were bringing him along on the trip, Kelsey dug her fingers into your neck and strangled you until your nails were bloodied from scratching at her skin.

“Hey,” you say, ducking down to sit next to him. You didn’t think to bring a light with you, on this trip, so he’s shaded in darkness, but you can hear the movement of his body, feel the soft brush of his lips as he leans down to kiss the top of your head. “Mourning?”

“Somethin’ like that,” he replies, “Lou thinks he can get you out?”

“Yeah,” you reply, “he’ll try again tomorrow, I bet.”

He laughs. You wonder if he has a mouth to laugh with.

“Not gonna work, Dove. You know that.”

You shrug listlessly. “Makes him feel better.”

One heavy, warm hand settles around your wait, tugs you closer, until you’re half-onto his lap. You nestle your head on his shoulder. He smells like blood. You dig your nose into his chest, inhale deeper.

“I love you,” you say. His fingers dig in, the tiniest bit, pinpricks of sensation down your side.

“I know. Love y’ too much, sometimes.”

“Is that possible?” You ask. He laughs, and you swear you can smell it, swear you can taste it.

“Guess not. I’d just do anything to keep you. Anything, y’hear?”

“Anything,” you whisper. You’re so close to his heart that you swear it goes straight through, you swear you can dig your teeth in and tug it out and speak to it directly, mouth wrapped around his aorta.

—

When you wake up, you’re sprawled on the ground outside of Darren’s tent. Stumble to your feet, steadying yourself with a hand upon the flimsy material, walk around listlessly until Kelsey pushes her way free of last night’s abode. She looks around, surveying the space, before her eyes lock on you.

“Where’s Lou?” She asks. You blink once, taking in the tender hope, the wish—she wants you to say, bathroom, or in my tent, or, over there, behind that tree, peekaboo!

You swallow once, and whisper, “I don’t know.”

It is like some invisible wall collapses, making her suddenly smaller. “What do you mean-”

“I mean he’s gone,” you reply, running a hand through your hair, pretending it’s someone else’s, someone you never knew and someone you know as intimately as yourself, “I mean he’s… he’s dead, probably.”

“No,” she says, “no, we were all together- he couldn’t get us, it’s not possible, I- where were you? Why are you out here?”

“I saw him last night,” you whisper, “Simon. I… I went outside.”

“No,” she repeats, “why the fuck would you do that? Is it you?” The accusation comes with the force of a slap—you’re half-surprised one doesn’t accompany it. She backs away a step, pointing, “is he yours? You’ve- you’ve seen him the most, haven’t you, and he fucking killed Darren because you hated him, and he killed Lou because he was trying to get us out, and, oh my God.”

Another step. She turns, still staring at you over her shoulder—like you will pounce, like you will come for her—begins a halting run down the path. Accelerates to a sprint, by the time she’s out of your view. You place a hand to your chest, and feel the beat of your heart, and wonder what’s wrong with your legs.

Not ten minutes later, you spot her over the horizon, still running—if at a flagging pace. She turns, when her eyes meet with you, but it’s short order before she’s back in the clearing, collapsing on the log before you.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” you say, not turning towards her. Almost surprisingly, your voice wavers, and some animal instinct buried in your hindbrain twitches, caught in the throes of death. “He… it… whatever he is, I didn’t summon him, I didn’t ask for anything. I see him, and I know him, and what am I supposed to do?”

She’s quiet for a long moment. Pushes herself up to a sitting position.

“Tell my Mom that I love her. And my Dad.”

You can’t remember having a family. You can’t remember being a kid, can’t remember meeting those people that were once your friends. Again, you think of the doppelganger. Maybe you’re the clone, maybe you’ve slipped into the skin of whoever used to inhabit this body.

“I don’t know if I’m making it out either,” you reply. She laughs.

“What, he’s gonna kill you? Please.” Again, a peal of laughter, and she can’t seem to contain herself, one hand wrapping around to cup her stomach.

“I didn’t say I’d be dead.”

That sobers her.

The sun falls across the horizon. She walks to the cooler eventually, digs around in it. Comes back with a single bottle of beer.

“Go fucking figure. Only one left.”

She opens it, takes a swig, holds it out to you. You oblige, turning it about in your hand, take a cautious sip. It brings you back to the firelight, to the time of hours ago, to the life that you cannot be sure you lived.

You see him before it’s fully dark. Behind Kelsey’s back, in the treeline, face hidden by the drooping leaves and the curve of the shadows.

“You should go,” you tell her. She stares at you.

“Yeah? Where?”

“Let her go,” you say. If there is one favor you can give to your former life, then it’s this. If there is one favor he can give to you, it’s this.

You don’t see him nod, but you push her anyway, urge her to her feet.

“Go. Quickly. You’ll… you’ll make it.”

You don’t know if it’s any kinder, honestly. Deer chews its way out of the snare, must live the rest of its life with an amputated leg. Still, she gives you a single, wide-eyed stare, before she jerkily walks to the path, takes to a jog in the dying light.

There is nothing between you and Simon, not anymore. You stand up, walk into the trees, and he comes towards you in the same measure. Keep walking, until your chest is bumping against his, nose pressed into his chest and legs arranged between his, some half-dissolved hug.

You have known Simon for as long as you’ve known yourself, and where your skin meets, you can’t quite tell who is who, which limbs you can control and which limbs you cannot.

“They’ll come looking,” he says. You say.

“Is that a problem?” You reply. He replies.

“No,” he whispers, hand coming around to sink into your back, “good hunting.”

“Good hunting,” you echo, and it feels like you could stand here forever, as still as the trees around you.

You look up at his face. Meet his eyes.

When you lean up to kiss him, it is the only thing you have ever been certain of.

#x reader #cod #call of duty #cod x reader #simon riley #simon ghost riley #ghost x reader #simon ghost riley x you #simon riley x reader #send help: local author cant stop writing about cannibalism #horror

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koiukiy-o · 4 months ago

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orphic; (adj.) mysterious and entrancing, beyond ordinary understanding. ─── 003. the framework.

-> summary: when you, a final-year student at the grove, get assigned to study under anaxagoras—one of the legendary seven sages—you know things are about to get interesting. but as the weeks go by, the line between correlation and causation starts to blur, and the more time you spend with professor anaxagoras, the more drawn to him you become in ways you never expected. the rules of the academy are clear, and the risks are an unfortunate possibility, but curiosity is a dangerous thing. and maybe, just maybe, some risks are worth taking. after all, isn’t every great discovery just a leap of faith? -> pairing: anaxa x gn!reader. -> tropes: professor x student, slow burn, forbidden romance. -> wc: 2.4k -> warnings: potential hsr spoilers from TB mission: "Light Slips the Gate, Shadow Greets the Throne" (3.1 update). main character is written to be 21+ years of age, at the very least. (anaxa is written to be around 26-27 years of age.) swearing, mature themes, suggestive content.

-> a/n: well well well... this took a long damn time. apologies, apologies, but the science had to be figured out. these two are absolute NERDS, i fear. oblivion is absolutely delicious on those who claim to possess and pursue the knowledge of the universe. i fear you will be suffering for a WHILE if youre not into the slow burn HAAHAHAH. also,, if you guys ever want to see the actual equations and notes i took to write some of the science for this chapter, i could post it as well,, hehe,, -> prev. || next. -> orphic; the masterlist.

Hushed voices, the occasional shuffle of papers, the muted hum of thought is all that fills the air in the library. You sit at your usual table, papers strewn before you. The assignment has consumed your thoughts since it was given to you—an open-ended challenge demanding structure, logic, proof. Model something that physics refuses to acknowledge.

Your notes are chaotic, an evolving web of connections scrawled in the margins, crossed out and rewritten. A familiar frustration gnaws at you—the feeling of standing on the precipice of understanding, just shy of articulation. You run a hand through your hair and exhale sharply, staring at the mess of your own making. You need structure, a foundation to hold onto. If the soul exists, then it cannot be an anomaly—it must be governed by laws, patterns, something definable. If every human mind is unique, then what makes them so? The answer cannot be randomness. There must be an underlying form, a universal template from which all variation emerges.

You tap your pen against the page, mind turning. If identity is not a static entity but a recursive function, shaped by initial conditions and iterative transformations, then no self is ever fixed. The soul would not be a singular essence but a structure in motion, a process of becoming. And if this process holds, then consciousness cannot be isolated. The soul, then, is not merely a singular phenomenon—it is networked, existing not only within itself but through its connections. But what is it that determines it?

If this recursion is real, then it must not be a property of human existence but a fundamental principle of consciousness itself, a universal law.

It isn’t proof. It isn’t even a complete theory yet. But it is a start. A framework, a way forward. You stare at the words in front of you, pulse steady but intent.

Your fingers ache from gripping the pen too tightly, your vision blurring as you stare at the same lines of text, reading and rereading without truly absorbing them. The library’s stillness, once a comfort, has become suffocating—a static silence pressing in around you, the air too thick, the rows of bookshelves seemingly endless, as if space itself is closing in.

You lean back, dragging a hand down your face. A glance at the clock startles you. How long have you been here? Long enough that the lamps cast long, slanted shadows over your scattered notes. Long enough that exhaustion has settled into your limbs, dull and insistent.

You need air. Movement. A change in surroundings before your thoughts begin looping endlessly in place.

Gathering your papers into a loose stack, you shove them into your bag with little care for organization. You rise, stretching the stiffness from your spine before heading for the exit. The fluorescent lighting of the library hums overhead as you step out, the cooler evening air brushing against your skin like a quiet relief.

Minutes later, you find yourself at the café, drawn by the promise of warmth and caffeine. As the quiet hum of the city presses in, you click a few buttons on your phone and lift it to your ear.

–

The aroma of freshly brewed coffee lingers in the air, grounding you. You wrap your hands around the ceramic cup, letting its heat seep into your skin. You sit near the window, coffee cup nestled between your hands, eyes skimming the notes spread haphazardly across the table. The light overhead buzzes softly—old wiring, probably—but the sound fades into the background as you focus.

You’re not here to have a breakthrough. You’re here to map the boundaries.

The problem with studying the soul—if you can even call it that—isn’t just defining it. It’s figuring out where to look. If it exists as more than a philosophical concept, then there have to be parameters. A framework.

You flip to a blank page in your notebook.

What is the soul?

A real question. Not in the poetic sense, not in the way people speak about it in hushed tones and late-night confessions, but as a function. A thing with properties.

You write:

— The soul is not isolated. If it were, it wouldn’t interact with the world. People change. Learn. Influence each other. Whatever the soul is, it isn’t locked away inside a single person.

— It has persistent traits, but it is not static. Memories shape behavior. Experience alters perception. The thing that makes you you isn’t a fixed point, but it also isn’t random. There’s continuity, even through change.

— It extends beyond individual experience. Connections leave an imprint. People carry each other—sometimes in ways they can’t explain. If the soul exists beyond metaphor, then its effects should be traceable.

You take a slow sip of coffee. These aren’t conclusions. They’re places to start.

At the very least, if you’re going to chase something this impossible, you have to know what it isn’t–

"Trial and error."

The voice is measured, almost idle, but it cuts through the noise of the café like a well-placed incision.

You jolt, pen slipping from your fingers. Anaxagoras is standing beside your table, hands in the pockets of his coat, gaze flicking over your notes with mild interest. His presence isn’t overwhelming, but it shifts the air in a way you feel immediately. Like a variable introduced into an equation.

"You can’t just—appear—like that," you say, exhaling sharply as you retrieve your pen.

He lifts a brow. "I used the door. Perhaps you weren’t paying attention." His gaze drops back to your notebook, reading without asking, though you suspect if you told him to stop, he actually would. "Trial and error," he repeats, as if the phrase itself is under scrutiny. "A method you seem to be employing."

You sit back slightly, fingers curling around your coffee cup. "You say that like it’s a bad thing."

"Not at all," he replies, voice as even as ever. "It’s an honest approach. Just an unpolished one."

You huff a quiet laugh. "Practicality aside, it’s the only thing I can do at this stage. I'm defining parameters, not solving anything." You tap your pen against the page. "Or would you rather I skip to the part where I give you something half-formed and empirically worthless?"

His mouth curves—just slightly. "I appreciate the restraint."

"High praise."

Anaxagoras doesn’t acknowledge that, but his gaze lingers on your notes a moment longer before he straightens. He doesn’t sit, doesn’t ask to join, but he also doesn’t leave immediately.

Instead, he says, "It’s getting cold."

You blink at him. "What?"

"Your coffee," he nods toward your coffee cup, still mostly full. "You’ve been holding it for minutes without drinking."

You glance down at it, then back up at him. "I didn't realize you were keeping track."

"Well, far be it from me to disrupt your... inefficiency." he remarks, stepping back.

You glance toward the door. "I'm actually waiting for someone."

Anaxagoras tilts his head slightly.

"A friend," you clarify, though you're not sure why it feels necessary to do so.

He makes no move to leave, and you take another sip of coffee, not minding the silence that settles between you. It's surprisingly comfortable, even in its brevity.

Then, the door swings open.

Ilias strides in, scanning the café—then stops dead when he sees the two of you. His eyes flick between you and Anaxagoras, narrowing with immediate, delighted suspicion. And then, with exaggerated slowness, he pivots on his heel, turning straight back toward the exit.

"Oh, for—come back," you call, exasperated.

Ilias replies, raising his hands in mock surrender but grinning as he turns back around. "Please. Continue your—" he gestures vaguely, "—whatever this is."

Anaxagoras exhales, barely more than a breath, and finally steps away from your table. "I’m leaving."

Ilias watches him, expression far too entertained. He mutters just loud enough for you to hear, "I can't believe you invited me to your impromptu date."

You glare at him, but before you can retort, you catch the faintest shift in Anaxagoras' posture—nothing overt, no reaction beyond the briefest pause in his step. Then he continues toward the door, leaving without a word.

You groan, rubbing your temples.

Ilias collapses into the seat across from you like a man overcome by the sheer weight of his own amusement. "That was," he announces, "the single most deliciously awkward thing I have ever witnessed."

You mutter a quiet curse under your breath, flipping to a fresh page in your notebook.

"And yet," he sighs, folding his hands under his chin with a smirk, "here I am—like the universe itself has conspired to place me in this exact moment.”

Ilias is still grinning as he leans back in his chair, stretching lazily. “You know, if you ever need a chaperone for your secret intellectual rendezvous, I’m available.”

You roll your eyes, gathering your notes with more force than necessary. “It wasn’t an—” You stop yourself. There’s no point. Ilias seemingly lives for provocation, and you won’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, you shake your head and lean back in your chair, stretching your arms with a sigh.

Ilias, ever the dramatist, makes a show of settling in across from you, propping his chin in his hands. “You’re unusually quiet,” he muses. “Brooding, even.”

“No.”

“Hmm.” He taps a finger against the table. “That was an awfully long pause for a simple ‘no.’”

You roll your eyes but don’t bother arguing. Instead, you glance out the window, watching the people moving along the street, the steady glow of passing headlights. The café hums around you—low conversations, the occasional clatter of a cup against its saucer. It’s late, but not late enough to leave just yet.

Ilias orders something sweet, drumming his fingers absently against the table while he waits. You sip the last of your now-cold coffee, your mind still lingering elsewhere. A glance at your notes does little to pull you back. The thought won’t let go.

You don’t even realize you’re frowning at your notes until Ilias nudges your cup with his own.

"Thinking about your not-a-date?" he teases, grinning.

You glare at him half-heartedly, but there’s no real heat behind it. “Thinking,” you say simply.

Eventually, Ilias finishes his pastry, brushing crumbs from his fingers before stretching with a yawn.

The two of you step outside together, the shift from the café’s warmth to the crisp night air making you shiver. The city has quieted, the usual rush of movement settling into a steadier rhythm. You walk side by side for a while, boots clicking against the pavement, the hum of distant traffic filling the spaces between conversation.

Even as Ilias chatters on about something inconsequential, the ideas still linger at the edge of your mind, waiting to take shape.

By the next morning, the café is a memory drowned out by the quiet rustle of students filling the lecture hall. The usual pre-class murmur settles into a steady rhythm—books thudding against desks, the sharp clicking of laptop keys, the low hum of voices exchanging half-hearted speculations on today’s topic.

You slide into your usual seat at the front, your notes open in front of you, though your pen remains idle between your fingers. The thoughts that have followed you since the library refuse to resolve, circling just beyond reach. There’s something missing—something foundational, yet frustratingly unformed.

At the lectern, Anaxagoras sets down his drink with practiced ease, the cup making a soft, deliberate sound against the wooden surface. The hall quiets.

He surveys the room with that same composed intensity, his gaze flickering over the assembled students before settling briefly—too briefly—on you.

“Continuity,” he begins, his voice carrying effortlessly, “is a deceptively simple concept. We assume that when two systems interact, they influence each other only at the moment of contact. That once they separate, the interaction ends.”

You straighten slightly. A slow prickle of recognition runs down your spine.

Anaxagoras picks up a piece of chalk and sketches a familiar equation on the board—one you’ve seen before, but never in this exact context. Your fingers tighten around your pen.

“But,” he continues, underlining a key term, “this assumes a linear, local model of influence. What happens, then, if we acknowledge that certain interactions leave something… persistent? That even after separation, a trace remains?”

The rustling of papers around you barely registers. Your thoughts lurch forward, bridging gaps in ways they hadn’t before.

You shift, almost without realizing, and Anaxagoras glances in your direction—briefly, but with intent. He knows.

A student two seats over raises a hand. “Are you talking about quantum entanglement?”

Anaxagoras tilts his head slightly. “A useful analogy, but not a perfect one. Entanglement suggests an instantaneous connection regardless of distance. What I am asking is more fundamental—does influence itself persist, even outside direct interaction?”

A murmur ripples through the hall. A few students exchange looks, some hurriedly scribbling notes, others frowning as they try to grasp the implications.

Your heart beats a fraction faster as the pieces align. The answer should be simple. If two variables are no longer in contact, the influence should end. The system should reset. But—

“They don’t go back to what they were before,” you murmur, half to yourself.

Anaxagoras sets the chalk down. “Louder.”

The words form before hesitation can stop them. “Even apart, they still retain the effect of their interaction. They update each other, whether they remain in proximity or not.”

The silence that follows is the kind that shifts the atmosphere of a room. Not an absence of sound, but a space filled with quiet recognition.

Anaxagoras watches you, his expression unreadable, but you swear something flickers in his gaze.

You grip your pen tighter. “There’s a kind of imprint,” you continue, voice steadier now. “An effect that doesn’t disappear even after separation. A persistence beyond time or proximity.”

He nods once, the movement precise. “Nonlinear. Nonlocal.”

A slow breath escapes you.

The clock on the wall ticks forward. A student coughs. Someone flips a page too loudly. The world presses back in, indifferent to the shape of revelation.

Anaxagoras turns away first, back to the board, where the equation remains half-finished. He picks up the chalk again, his voice returning to its usual cadence, folding the moment neatly back into lecture.

His gaze flickers back to you for a moment—steady, contemplative, threaded with something unreadable. Interest, perhaps. Amusement, restrained but evident in the slight tilt of his head. And then, just low enough for only you to hear:

“You were closer than you thought.”

You exhale, staring at the marginalia scrawled in the edges of your notebook—sharp, decisive, yet somehow restrained. Outside the window, the campus air carries the crisp scent of rain—not quite fallen, not quite gone. And yet, the thought lingers, refusing to leave you.

-> next.

taglist: @starglitterz @kazumist @naraven @cozyunderworld @pinksaiyans @pearlm00n @your-sleeparalysisdem0n @francisnyx @qwnelisa @chessitune @leafythat @cursedneuvillette @hanakokunzz @nellqzz @ladymothbeth @chokifandom @yourfavouritecitizen @somniosu (send an ask or comment to be added!)

#❅ — works !#honkai star rail #honkai star rail x reader #hsr x gn reader #hsr x reader #anaxa x reader #hsr anaxa #hsr anaxagoras #anaxagoras x reader #guys a/n 2 #if you guys have any suggestions for a playlist for this series pleeeeasseeed drop it in the comments <3 #i have 7 songs so far but unfortunately my taste is too corrupt for this series :sob: ANY recs i will take them all HAHA (desperate)#if something isnt linked right pls lmk !!

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lieutenant-lithuania · 13 days ago

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I loovveeee reading yan batfam x neglected reader — and I do not mean to offend anyone at all!— But there is a pattern that I noticed going on where reader is neglected, runs away and accepts it and lives a normal life till the batfam finally realizes and takes them back. And I love them! Believe me, I eat them up like a man on death row. But I also wanna see something different... Sorry for the change from 3d Person in the first imagine to 2nd person in the second story :')

Maybe when Y/N runs away they swear to become better than Bruce and becomes a billionaire popular for disliking the Wayne family, and no one is the wiser because Y/N changed their name. And they reject any invite or offer from Bruce or anyone from the family when they want to talk to them. Y/N dangles the fact that they can easily spill the fact that they're the bat vigilantes. Something happens and Y/N decides to ruin their life like they ruined theirs. But the batfam kidnaps them and stages it as another villain out for money taking them. Y/N is obviously angry and demands to be let go. They refuse, and keep Y/N. Slowly though, they see how Y/N really grew up and finally see them for their true self�� not the frail child that was too scared to harm a fly— but a strong and smart person that built an entire company successful enough to rival Bruces money and reputation.

Or maybe you try your hardest to impress the family by achieving things people their age wouldn't even dream of, but were always discarded nonetheless because they didn't fully want to become a vigilante. Seeing that you will not be part of the family unless you join the business, you became disheartened and run away. You start to search for work and end up coming face to face Deathstroke. He initially wanted to capture you to get to Bruce, but you bluntly told him that you do not affiliate with the family anymore and that you ran away. Deathstroke is intrigued and decides to give you a home. And when he saw you potential, he immediately offered a position. Not as his sidekick, but as his partner in crime. You were hesitant at first, but then the memories of being dejected by your own blood ran back through you in the form of pure rage, and you agreed. He helped pick up the pieces of your broken self and gave you a purpose. He showed you basic appreciation that no one else ever did, taking on a parental role in your life. So when the batfamily had to fight against you, they were beyond shocked. You chose to become a villain. At some point after you reencounter, they catch you off-guard in your home and take you back. They thought Deathstroke brainwashed you, made you join in your despair. You were quick to deny that theory and told it to them straight. They treated you like a liability— a stranger. In your entire life of living under the same roof as them they never showed you a single ounce of recognition where Deathstroke handed it over to you in no time. They had to win you back, but it is much much harder when you don't see them as your own family.

#yandere x reader #yandere imagine #yandere #yandere batfam x reader #yandere batfam #yandere batman #yandere batboys #yandere batfamily #yandere batfamily x reader #yandere dc #Platonic yandere

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somerandomdudelmao · 10 months ago

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I'm not sure if someone already asked this, but do you have any tips for artists who want to start making comics of their ocs? I have a story in mind but I'm scared to make that first jump into comics! Any advice would help greatly!

This is my first comic about my original characters, so I'm probably not the most reliable source of experience haha

But my personal favorite rule to follow is make sure your characters are interesting to watch even if your reader doesn't know their lore. At all.

I have a VERY large amount of experience drawing fandom comics and many of those comics have spread beyond the fandom. They were read by people who didn't know or like the characters beforehand.

After analyzing them I came to the conclusion that:

1 - Characters personality and their backstory are two different things. Totally different.

2 - The character's personality should be interesting even to those who don't know the backstory.

So my theory of comic creation goes something like - "Personality is mandatory, life circumstances are optional."

The personality of a character is how they talk, when they sleep, what they eat, what facial expressions they make, how they treat those below and above them, and so on. If your character turns into just some dude when their backstory disappears, you need to breathe more life into them, not plot.

This isn't some high quality wisdom btw just my personal observation👍 I don't always follow my own rules:D

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as-if-and-only-if · 3 months ago

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I'm interested in forming a sort of...math & physics reading group network. well, with some very important modifications to the concept of "reading group".

for example, right now, I'd like to learn algebraic geometry, qft, and/or refresh myself on representation theory with someone—maybe just one or two people—meaning that traditionally, we'd pick a text for one of these topics, discuss the material (asynchronously or synchronously?), exchange exercises, etc.

but currently (being Between Institutions), my best bet is posting on tumblr. and that's a pretty good bet, tbh! there are a lot of us here!

though, wouldn't it be great if there were a way to coordinate groups like this across institutions? you make a post proposing a group, specifying your goals and constraints...

even that would be a boon. but I think the concept of a "reading group" itself could be changed in interesting ways. this is what I'm really interested in.

there are variations among reading groups themselves already. sometimes you have directed reading groups, where someone already knows the material and "leads" it; some people are looking for more or less people involved; and there are probably things to explore for making sure that reading groups stick through it instead of falling apart when some motivation flags. default meeting times help with this, for example.

there are many experiments to be done! I think lessons for group-making can be taken from a maybe-surprising source: theater. there are a lot of things that make groups which put on shows more robust and rewarding than reading groups. a sense of building to something; many factors that create informal group cohesion (e.g. such a structure should make sure it creates more-informal "cafe" time in addition to more-formal "practice" time, just as rehearsal in physical spaces facilitates that casual sort of interaction on its periphery); ways to get into the right headspace during discussions (just as warm-ups do in theater; the engagement with this material is an event); clear goals (e.g. "understand ___"); successive shared accomplishments...to that end I wonder if it makes sense to form math troupes, which do successive reading groups together, drawn from its members.

it might be useful to envision some sort of public-facing artifact created as the culmination of this learning, whether a presentation, or an article, or some novel application or research...the crucial question is: how do we choose a goal that we find meaning in?

one idea, for example, is to have a collection parallel reading groups learning different things, and end by presenting to each other! that way we know what we learn will be meaningful to others, too, from the beginning. in general, I think it's important to feel that our own development of insight and understanding can be meaningful to others and to the group. it's nice to participate; it's nice to be able to offer something that is valued. what form can this take? how can you set up the interactions such that everyone has a part to play, and so this meaningfulness is tangled up in participation in the group?

I've also got a couple of ideas for "activities" that let us engage, re-engage, and play with the concepts we're learning with each other, beyond the text itself. how can we give ourselves the opportunity to toss around the concepts we're learning? I believe that the fun ultimately comes from the understanding itself, and therefore that any group exercise which lets us effectively play with the ideas will be fun.

it's a lot to ask people to come up with structure like that themselves, but using a pre-existing structure is not so difficult! sort of like how it's hard to make a TTRPG itself, so simply saying "go off and roleplay" isn't that helpful, but it's easy to use the structure of an existing one to run a game.

you might say, well, the existing form of a reading group is fine. okay! existing reading group structures can be low-stakes, relaxed, and accessible...but they can also fall apart easily (especially when not tied to an institution, in my experience), and you have to get lucky to find a truly rewarding one. I find reimagining our mechanisms of learning pretty exciting, and I think the space of ways to learn math with each other is underexplored at this level (emphasis on the with each other). there's a lot of potential!

anyway! reply or tag with "!" if this is something you could maybe be interested if done well? or if you're at least curious! I'm just taking a temperature. :)

#math #mathblr #physblr

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threeacttragedy · 7 months ago

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Entry 15 – The One Where I Try to Convince You of Just About Anything

“Don’t compromise yourself. Wait for the right person because you’re worth it.”

These were Nicola’s words the night of the London premiere when she was asked what dating advice she had for viewers. This quote has always stuck with me. Not because it’s actually great advice or emits wisdom well beyond Nicola’s years but because I can still remember the odd sense of foreboding that I felt as I listened to her words. They were just as poignant, if not more so, than the words that first invited me aboard this ship (Luke’s comments in Australia about friends-to-lovers).

And, although Luke “agree[d] with all of the above,” Nicola’s comment always struck me as making Luke uncomfortable. That interaction seemed off somehow. Awkward and strange in a way I wasn’t used to after two months of watching a rom-com style World Tour. In hindsight, and in a rather ominous way, the discomfort I felt alluded to what would happen later that evening – Luke “hard launching” Antonia.

As I was scribbling out today’s post and, honestly, struggling with how I wanted to structure it, I realized that it was not necessarily post-Papsmear (a/k/a Hot Boy Summer) people had an issue with. Instead, it seemed many people were having a hard time understanding – and accepting – Antonia’s existence in the Lukola-verse. This confusion, of course, led many to their own internal battlefield of trying to rationalize Luke’s behavior during that relatively short seven-week period. The reality is no one wants Luke to be the “Bad Guy;” therefore, people struggle to look at Hot Boy Summer with neutrality.

Don’t worry, I’m guilty, too.

I mean, Papsmear went down like a guillotine on a French – uh, well, nevermind that part. Let’s just say it did not go over well with the fandom. After months of “Romancing Mr. Bridgerton,” Luke was photographed walking into a hotel with Antonia snapping at his heels, sending the Lukola fandom into convulsions. What made it worse was that this was the night of the London premiere, the last leg of the World Tour. So long, motherfucking London!

The dark side of the fandom painted Luke as a monster – a man who, in less than three minutes, pissed on the Season 3 World Tour and broke Lukola hearts all over the world by seemingly choosing Antonia over Nicola. And, not only choosing Antonia, but flaunting her. People felt betrayed, shadowed by the possibility that Luke and Nicola had hoodwinked them with a fake PR romance and dumbfounded that Mr. I’m-Publicly-Single had a “girlfriend” (yes, that word is always up for speculation in this fandom). But, as with every dismal situation, you had the light bringers – the true-to-heart Lukolas – firing up on all cylinders and calling, “Foul!” in the direction of Antonia. A few of the less classy ones even picked up bits of old salad they’d found in a dumpster and tossed it in her direction (heehee, did you get my Dad Joke?).

And so Hot Boy Summer began…as did the confusion surrounding it.

In the beginning, I absolutely wanted Antonia to be the villain. But I’ve found that the more I write, the more indifferent I have become on the subject. Of course, that didn’t stop me from theorizing with friends. In fact, at one point, I had so many thoughts on the matter, if I had mapped them out on paper, they’d have resembled a spider’s web, with the hub being Papsmear. However, what I’ve discovered is that each of those theories, regardless of how simple or convoluted they were, took root in one of three central ideas.

That’s what I want to discuss today – those three central ideas from which every one of your sub-theories likely takes root (unless, of course, you’re the conspiracy theorist that believes Antonia is AI generated…). I want to lay out why I believe these theories are plausible (yes, prepare yourself to read some shit you almost certainly won’t find entertaining) countered by why I believe they may be out in left field. Maybe, just maybe, they will shed some light on Hot Boy Summer. But, also, maybe they won’t.

Okay, our three central theories are:

A) Luke and Nicola were simply PR-ing the fuck out of Polin.

B) Luke and Nicola were legit in their feels and Antonia became the jilted girlfriend.

C) Antonia was a PR girlfriend because [feel free to insert any reason you please].

We’re going to get the one nobody wants to consider out of the way first.

THEORY A: Nicola and Luke had a PR card up their sleeve the entire time.

I don’t like this theory any more than you do – the idea that Luke and Nicola were merely playing the part of two infatuated costars during the World Tour. However, this theory does exist, so there is no point in pretending that it doesn’t.

The backbone of this theory is that Luke and Nicola came to some kind of agreement to behave in a certain flirtatious manner during the World Tour to promote viewership of the show. As annoying as this theory is to the Lukolas, it is not unrealistic. For example, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney recently admitted to using the dating rumors that began while they were filming to build buzz around their movie, “Anyone But You.” Regardless of how reckless I find this behavior to be, I don’t doubt that we will start seeing it utilized more and more because it does help build interest in a project. That said, and although she admittedly leaned into the Powell romance rumors, Sweeney had an easy out once their press tour ended – she was (and still is) engaged to her long-time partner.

Now, let’s apply this PR romance to Luke and Nicola. It is entirely possible that these two simply played into their natural chemistry and allowed the romance rumors to fuel Polin. We could even go as far as to suggest that Netflix & Co. supported this PR romance because more viewers equaled more money. This, to some degree, also fits with the narrative that Luke seemingly kept Antonia out of the spotlight during the World Tour and, although it was terrible timing, launched her at the London premiere because he was tired of the fake PR. We could also make a convincing argument that this theory aligns with Luke and Nicola never addressing the status of their relationship (i.e., by never openly admitting they were “just friends,” they leave room for speculation and shipping).

To be honest, this would be a nice and tidy answer for how the World Tour went down, with Luke stepping in an elephant-sized pile of dog shit on his way out of the London afterparty and Nicola swooping into to play PR Hero by promoting Season 3 throughout the summer. Meaning, Hot Boy Summer was simply what it appeared to be at surface level – Luke running off with his girlfriend while Nicola continued promoting Season 3 on her own. Sure, this theory would leave us all feeling like we had just been kicked in the teeth, but we could absolutely package it up quite nicely and tie it with a little pink bow. However – nothing is ever that simple, is it?

There are some things that make me question the plausibility of this Luke-and-Nicola-PR-Romance theory, namely, (a) Luke and Nicola’s World Tour behavior, (b) comments made by interviewers, (c) the Claddagh ring, (d) the side trip to Galway, and (e) Chaos Week.

Regarding Luke and Nicola’s behavior towards each other during the World Tour, I don’t believe I need to go into too much detail here. Again, we all watched the same World Tour, and we all had the same reaction to their chemistry. Hell, the Jakolas started out on this side of the fandom because they also saw something between Luke and Nicola. However, to play Devil’s advocate, I will suggest that Luke and Nicola could absolutely be the next Daniel Day Lewis and Meryl Streep, method acting their way through the World Tour. But, in my honest opinion, they’re not. They’re both lovely actors but they don’t compare to the two I just named (sorry, but also not sorry).

I honestly debated with myself as to whether I wanted to include interviewer comments under this section. I finally relented and decided to do so because, for me, it was one of those things that made me question the plausibility of Luke and Nicola being strictly PR during the World Tour – because, yes, I did consider that back in May. For example, in response to Luke drinking from Nicola’s tea cup in Australia, when asked about it, the interviewer, Rachael Evren, responded, “They’re in[ ]love it’s fine.” Also in Australia, we listened to the back and forth between podcasters, Laura Brodnik and Em Vernem, debate Luke and Nicola’s real-life relationship:

Em: “I can’t believe you got her to say such juicy things about their chemistry.”

Laura: “They’re best friends and stuff, yeah, people think they’re together. They’re not, they’re just best friends.”

Em: “No, but they are.”

Laura: “Oh, don’t start that rumor. I want it on the record I’m not saying that.”

Em: “Well, I feel like after you watch Bridgerton Season 3 you would be like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re definitely dating.’”

By the time Luke and Nicola reached Canada, you had interviewers being quite obviously taken with their chemistry. For example, The Morning Show in Canada – have you ever watched Carolyn Mackenzie’s face when Luke and Nicola get into that Ryan Gosling discussion? Or, have you listened to the surprise in Karen Koster’s voice (“it’s like the carriage scene”) after witnessing Nicola touch Luke’s forehead on Ireland AM? Then you had Meredith Shaw from BT Canada and Ciara Kelly from Newstalk boldly asking Luke and Nicola about their real-life relationship, and Ben Shepherd from This Morning calling them out about the Carriage Scene (“you’re blaming the soundproof carriage, not the fact you got lost in the moment”).

And, then we had the written print:

On May 16, 2024, Shondaland’s Valentina Valentini wrote: “But throughout the past three seasons, it’s been a slow-burn anticipation for Newton and Coughlan, who have genuinely become real-life best friends in that span of time. Parallel to that, their on-screen characters have given us such a perfect crescendo of what it’s like to fall in love over decades that I’m not entirely convinced that the real-life people sitting in front of me are not actually in love. ‘Yeah! We’ve kept that one really secret!’ Coughlan jests when I hint at the possibility.”

And, in her June 14, 2024 publication, Fashion’s Annika Lautens wrote: “Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton can’t stop looking at each other. I mean, they really can’t. As I enter their suite in the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto to interview the Bridgerton stars, all I can hear is laughter. Coughlan is leaning over to show Newton something on her phone. He throws his head back, giggling. It feels extremely intimate but, as the world has seen through countless clips on TikTok and on the third season of Bridgerton…this is just your average Tuesday for the two co-stars.”

These third-party reactions alone – in my opinion – debunk the Luke-and-Nicola-PR-Romance theory, but we will keep moving along.

I am not going to reexamine the Claddagh ring or Chaos Week in this entry as I have already gone into extensive detail of both in my blog Entries 6 and 14, respectively. If you’re behind on the significance of the Claddagh ring or Chaos Week, please take a moment and read those for more context. However, I will briefly discuss that special trip to Galway.

I’ve never quite followed why Nicola and Luke took that side trip to Galway. There was no special visit to Brighton – or wherever Luke’s family lives – so why Galway? I often find myself straddling the line between logic and delulu when I put my thoughts about Lukola on paper. I mean, from a logical standpoint, they were in Dublin so visiting Nicola’s hometown while they were on the island isn’t that farfetched. But to film it? Okay, yeah sure, Nicola is Shonda’s alleged favorite child, so I suppose it’s possible Shonda granted Nicola’s wish to flaunt Bridgerton in her hometown. I can honestly see this fitting into the Luke-and-Nicola-PR-Romance narrative. But –

It also doesn’t fit.

Sending Luke and Nicola to Galway was too close to home. It crossed the line between what could be excused as PR and what was clearly personal.

Not only did we have Nicola wearing her Claddagh ring in Galway in a manner that suggested she was in a relationship, but we also had her introducing Luke to her mother for the first time in what appeared to be an emotional moment. I have tried to convince myself this Mother-Meets-Luke thing was perfectly normal costar behavior. I have tried to convince myself that her sister-in-law’s reaction to Mother-Meets-Luke didn’t make me side-eye the entire situation. I have tried to convince myself that the Irish folks I’ve spoken with are exaggerating the significance of the Mother-Meets-Luke moment. I have also tried to convince myself there isn’t additional footage out there of this Galway Gathering just waiting to surface.

But, ugh, I just cannot convince myself that Luke and Nicola were strictly PR. This theory is as confusing as Sanrio telling us that Hello Kitty is really a human girl.

Verdict: NOT GUILTY.

Yes, we are marking this one as debunked.

THEORY B: Antonia became Luke’s jilted ex-girlfriend.

Hey, hey, USS Lutonia! I’ve got your flank.

No, actually I don’t. If the USS Lutonia was ever afloat, it sank somewhere off the coast of Italy. Sorry, but not really because I didn’t mourn you even a teensy bit.

I will preface this section by asserting my opinion that Luke and Antonia are not currently in a romantic relationship. Outside of “insinuation” posts made by Antonia, there is no evidence directly linking Luke to Antonia after July 30. Feel free to try to convince me otherwise but, when you do, make sure to include at least one photograph of Luke and Antonia in the same place at the same time with convincing evidence that it is current and that they are a couple (and, no, I will not accept blurry or Photoshopped images or metadata pulled from Instagram as evidence). That said, I will not argue with the idea that Luke and Antonia could have dated at one time. In fact, for this theory to play out, we have to agree that Luke and Antonia dated at some point.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Luke and Antonia dated before, during, and for a period after the World Tour. In this theory, the chemistry between Luke and Nicola was real (seriously, I think we’ve debunked that PR theory). The Claddagh ring and the side trip to Galway both suggested a romantic relationship between Luke and Nicola. Regardless of how real things were between Luke and Nicola, Luke still had Antonia lurking in the background. Perhaps Luke didn’t know how to break things off with her; maybe his friends and/or family made it difficult; maybe Antonia made things difficult. Everything came to a head at the London premiere, with Luke stepping on a landmine with Papsmear. But, because they can’t help but gravitate towards each other, Luke and Nicola found themselves back together – either immediately after Papsmear or, at the latest, by early August – and have continued their affair since. Oh, and Luke finally got around to breaking things off with Antonia on or after July 30.

This would – in a scorned woman kind of way – explain the “trolling” behavior Antonia was accused of during and after the World Tour. Those random posts that insinuated she was “with Luke,” even though the only evidence that directly linked her to Luke were (1) leaked and/or since-deleted pictures and videos from sources other than Luke, or (2) pictures of Luke’s friend group, which included Antonia, that, from time-to-time, alluded to Luke’s presence. Speaking of the friend group, the fact that Antonia appeared to be part of that group would support the idea that it was difficult for Luke to completely shake Antonia. This theory would also support the cat-and-mouse game played out on social media between Antonia and Nicola, which seemed heightened during and after Hot Boy Summer. Surely, you noticed that pattern by now. At the end of July, Luke’s friend group suffered some kind of catastrophic blow and Luke abandoned ship, officially breaking things off with Antonia as he went. This would explain the continued trolling for which Antonia has been accused; she hates Luke and is jealous of Nicola. Yeah, I can see this theory working. In fact, this is my preferred theory because it is the simplest. However –

For this theory to work, you must accept that Luke and Nicola are not perfect. That the two of them started an affair behind Antonia’s back. That “Nice Guy” Luke isn’t quite as sweet and kind as you have been led to believe; perhaps he’s even a bit of a fool. That “Good Girl” Nicola intervened in someone else’s relationship, making her the “other woman” and a tad disingenuous. Does this make Luke and Nicola horrible people? No, it makes them two people who found themselves in a situation they didn’t know how to handle properly.

That said, this theory has its flaws.

For starters, it does not explain Luke’s apathy towards Antonia during and after the World Tour. I am not going to deep dive into my thoughts on this as I have already outlined them in “Entry 1: The One About That Weird Ass Cressida Post” and “Entry 13: The One Where the Ashes Blew Towards Us with the Salt Wind from the Sea.” But, I will reiterate that, to date, Luke has never acknowledged a relationship with Antonia, and he has never made an effort to rescue her from the fandom’s jaws of death. The only consistent link between the two of them was the friend group (that seems to have disbanded) and “insinuation” posts made by Antonia. I am sure there are people out there who will disagree with my next statement, but I don’t consider a New Year’s Eve kiss or a date to a tennis match a “relationship.” That would be like saying “I love you” on your first date (I know, I’ve offended at least one person with this remark – I apologize but I’m still leaving it in). It’s the lack of interaction between Luke and Antonia that makes me question whether they were ever in a real relationship; and therefore, I must question the validity of this theory.

And, because I know some of you will bring up those goddamn Instagram likes, the only comment I have is, “Get the fuck over it.” For real, it is far more fun to sit back and laugh at the “obligatory likes” than it is to freak out about them. Those likes are the only visible interaction between Luke and Antonia, and it’s becoming less and less frequent. The sad reality is, when Luke stops throwing a like in Antonia’s direction or unfollows her, she may lose the followers she gained after being linked to him. But, honestly, at this point – almost half a year later! – Antonia losing followers is her problem. And as much as I hate to admit it – this whole “like business” suggests some sort of arrangement was put in place post-breakup.

Verdict: HUNG JURY.

It’s a plausible theory – if I could be convinced Luke and Antonia were ever in a real relationship.

THEORY C: Antonia was the Real PR this whole time.

I hope you’ve read “Entry 1: The One About That Weird Ass Cressida Post” and, at a minimum, the “Mrs. Danvers” section of “Entry 13: The One Where the Ashes Blew Towards Us with the Salt Wind from the Sea” because they both detail my blubbering bullshit thoughts on Luke and Antonia’s “relationship.” I’m not going to rehash them here because I’m confident most of you also find this “relationship” suspicious for the exact same reasons I do.

For the longest time, I believed the absurdly popular “Antonia was the Real PR” [conspiracy] theory to be the fandom’s excuse for not wanting to believe Luke could ever be in a real relationship with Antonia, and that (gasp!) he could have chosen Antonia over Nicola (I mean, what a prick!). In truth, I refused to give this theory much weight until my dad – yes, that guy – said to me, “Sounds like PR,” during one of our fireside Lukola chats. My father has a whole sub-theory on this, actually, and yes, I will explain it momentarily.

Honestly, I hate this theory because it’s complicated. And, damn straight, I’m going to throw some Benjamin Franklin at you and say, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” This theory takes things beyond two celebrities playing into romance rumors to boost interest in their project, and brings in a third wheel, Antonia, to – fuck, I have no idea – blur the lines a bit?!

Alright, time for Dad’s theory…

Per my father, this was not just any PR deal; it was an arrangement struck with a “friend of a friend.” No need for an actual third wheel; just someone who was already part of the friend group that could provide the illusion that Luke might have a girlfriend. All they had to do was plant the seed and let the rumor grow, all while never outwardly confirming or denying it; that way the PR relationship could disappear as easily as it was planted.

I allowed my dad to carry on with his theory because, as he pointed out, Antonia being part of the friend group explained why (1) Luke didn’t mind her being around over the summer (it wasn’t personal, it was business), and (2) Luke had no romantic interest in Antonia (she was simply a “friend of a friend”). The fact that my father picked up on this “fandom dilemma” intrigued me.

After listening to my dad’s theory (there’s more, I promise), I spent an afternoon researching “PR relationships” and whether they existed or not. Turns out, they do. Well, they do, if we trust Mr. Google’s search results. It’s a bit of a quid pro quo thing. For example, one, usually more famous person, strikes up a “relationship” with a lesser-known person. The lesser-known person receives exposure while the more famous person receives [fill in the blank]; both gain some kind of benefit from the arrangement.

Now, the question of why Luke would need a PR relationship is – seriously – “fill in the blank” material. Some people have suggested it was to keep Luke and Nicola’s real-life relationship private; some have suggested it was Netflix stepping in to protect Polin if Lukola went south; others have suggested it was to bolster Luke’s image. I find the latter reason offensive because it assumes that having Nicola by his side wouldn’t help his image. But the other two sub-theories are reasonable to me (but also don’t really matter in the scheme of things).

The problem with the Luke-and-Antonia-PR-Romance is that it seems to have gone terribly wrong. What very possibly started out as an “illusion” became “real” with Papsmear. What I find interesting is, like the New York City premiere, Antonia was only seen in the background of the London premiere. Even as Luke was leaving the London afterparty, she went to the car while he met with fans. It wasn’t until they were papped at the hotel, that Antonia was suddenly “next to” Luke grabbing at his hand, thus “launching their relationship.”

Ruh-roh.

My dad’s theory goes on to assume that – after Papsmear – whatever “deal” Antonia was given (for example, Luke’s online support of her Instagram page or invitations to attend certain events over the summer) would be carried out as agreed. However, during that time, Antonia would return to her place in the shadows. I will confess that this is what seemed to happen – Luke never acknowledged a relationship with Antonia and evidence of their relationship seemed virtually non-existent. To the general audience, Antonia was simply a “woman in the background,” unrecognizable by most.

Assuming this PR theory is true, I’d like to believe Antonia was simply doing what she had agreed to do – feed into the illusion of a relationship with “insinuation” posts, for which she could later claim plausible deniability. However, I find this hard to believe when leaked photographs and videos started to surface in July and they were always preceded by DeuxMoi (see, I’m starting to support this theory).

At this point in his theory, my dad quoted a line by Paul McCartney, “You took your lucky break and broke it in two.” What he was saying was Antonia was given an opportunity and, due to her own actions, she mucked it up. She became fame hungry and the insinuations of her being in a relationship with Luke became harder to dispel when they were being leaked online by third party sources. However, as I reminded my father, we cannot prove Antonia was involved with any of the pap pictures. We can speculate, sure, but please keep in mind we cannot prove it.

Did I warn you my dad deep dived into this? Because, haha, he sure did.

By mid-July, per my father’s theory, Nicola was fully aware of the game Antonia was playing and recruited (not the right word, but we’ll go with it) JVN to fire subtle insults into Antonia’s camp with the intent of discrediting her.

The game ended after the Italy pap pictures were published, with Luke seemingly cutting ties with his entire friend group, which included Antonia. However, the game didn’t actually end there, at least not for Antonia. Due to whatever agreement Luke and Antonia had in place before Italy, Luke was still obligated to fulfill his part of the deal. We’re just going to speculate here that part of that included those “obligatory likes” of Antonia’s Instagram posts.

Thank you, Dear Dad, for that rather practical theory.

My issue with this is that Antonia’s antics repeatedly bring hate to Luke’s doorstep. Every time Antonia posts something on Instagram and Luke likes the post, the fandom – namely, the Sincerely Ignorant – get riled up and start slinging hate missiles at Luke (at this point, Luke can’t have nice things). And Antonia slipping things in like that balcony from the Spanish resort doesn’t help to dissuade the fandom from believing her to be a petty bitch.

My initial reaction to this theory was, no way, because at this point Antonia would have breached her contract and Luke wouldn’t still be bound by it. But then I realized, in order to breach it, one had to prove Antonia violated it. Okay, fine. But why not negotiate terminating the agreement early? Oh, well, yes, I suppose it is possible that the cost to do that outweighed the benefit. And, since those “obligatory likes” still seem to be in place – even when they bring Luke hate – I’m going to make a wild guess the agreement remains. For now.

In closing, and since I mentioned that Spanish resort nonsense, the fact that Antonia only ever posts things that insinuate she may have been in the same location as Luke supports the idea that Antonia is simply doing what she agreed to do – create an illusion. So, before anyone starts bashing Antonia, recognize she may simply be complying with her end of the arrangement. She may be just as ready to get out of that agreement as we imagine Luke to be. You know what I’d love to see? Antonia unfollow Luke and be like, “I’m out, bitches!” Honestly, I’d probably give her an “atta girl,” if she did that.

Verdict: HUNG JURY BUT WILLING TO CONSIDER A RETRIAL.

I hate to admit it, but I think this is a plausible theory. Not full proof, but strangely (and annoyingly) credible.

***

Alright, so there you have it. The three central theories that act as the spider web’s hub to all your sub-theories – because I’m certain you have them. You’re welcome to spin off in whatever direction you please, and no, you don’t need to loop me in – because, in truth, I don’t care that much anymore. And that’s not in any way meant to be negative.

For the longest time, trying to rationalize how Hot Boy Summer played out was the missing piece of my Lukola puzzle. I mean, I needed the answer. I needed it so badly; I practically presented an entire Lukola documentary to the wisest person I know – my dad – so he could solve it for me.

Dad: “Why does this matter?”

Me: “I don’t know, it just does. I just want to know what happened.”

Dad: “Will it change your opinion about whether Luke and Nicola are together?”

Me: “No.”

Dad: “Then why does it matter?”

Me: “I don’t know. It just does.”

Dad: “But you’re never going to know, are you?”

Goddammit, no, I’m never going to fucking know.

And, that is the reality of this situation. No matter how many hypotheticals we present, no matter how many sub-theories we create, we will never know what happened over Hot Boy Summer. We will never be able to justify Luke’s behavior during that time. We will never be able to explain with certainty Antonia’s role in this whole shebang.

You may not like that answer. In fact, the theories I presented today may have fueled your ambition to continue trying to solve Hot Boy Summer on your own, or with your friends. I admire that determination. But I also admire those who can let go and accept that it is what it is.

And what it is – and what it will almost certainly always be – is unknown.

#lukola #luke newton #nicola coughlan #my thoughts #my opinion #speculation only

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reidmotif · 10 months ago

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my fic + author recs!

i have been suuuper disgruntled by the fic community recently and how casually and thoughtlessly some fic writers/readers seem to be indirectly insulting people’s work. this community and its fics are so varied, and i think they deserve to be appreciated. which is why im reccing a bunch of my fav fics!! please give these writers sooo much love!!

(about all of my recs are nsfw, but some authors mentioned do have sfw fics. please explore and follow the warnings outlined for each fic!!)

“i know your wife and she wouldn’t mind” by @stairain

gotta start out with stairain. i would pretty much credit my whole desire to write fanfics to the fact that i religiously read their whole masterlist a summer ago. they are a fantastic writer, and i love how they captured spencer here. take a look!

“i want you” by @smurphyse

i HEAVILY recommend smurphyse as an author. their series, room 405 is probably one of my most reread fics ever. their threesome and foursome fics are beyond supreme. i love this one shot they’ve written, and i hope you guys do too!

“loverboy” by @sundrop-writes

while i dont think this person writes for cm anymore, their fics for it were fantastic. i love how they captured sub spencer, and i think this is one of my most reread fics ever.

“puppy eyes” by @misserabella

i am in looove with the way this person writes. while i dont have a link to it, “sick love” changed my brain chemistry. sub spencer save me sub spencer save me.

“summer of sin” by @mercy-burning

hoooly shit. if you know me, you’ll know i probably reccomend this fic to everyone i know. i just genuinely can’t say anything besides telling you with my whole heart to check it out. awesome way to close out your summer honestly.

i would love to write blurbs about my love for these fics for everyone, but i fear the post would become too longwinded. here are some links and authors i recommend just as enthusiastically as i did the others above.

@reiderwriter

@foxy-eva

@fortheloveofwonderland

@incognit0slut

@beelmons

@imagining-in-the-margins

@criminalmindzjunkie

@andiebeaword

@reidsrambles

@eideticmemory

@sinfulspencer

@wheelsup

@beautifulbrainrot

@moon-light-jukebox

@gubsbuubs

@minswriting

@golden1u5t

@ginkgo-phyta

@gubler-me-up

@reidbae

@crypticreid

“who’s counting” by @samuel-de-champagne-problems

“behave back there” by @writingmar

“mile high club” by @littlexdeaths

“next to you” by @zombiefiilm

“testing the limits” by @reidsdimples

“follow my lead” by @mismatched-sockss

“welcome home” by @spencerreidenjoyer

“incentive” by @reidslibrarybook

“the very first night” by @writer-in-theory

this request from @donald4spiderman

“malicious compliance” by @aliteralsemicolon

“all zipped up” by @ipseitydelrey

this request from @thedancingcostumeyoungadult

this request from @astrophileous

“scream for you” by @hornyhornyhimbos

“thin walls” by @byersbootyshorts

“just my type” by @reidgraygubler

welcome to the small blurb after where i say something that’s been bugging me. i think it’s corny to indirectly insult people’s work on here. i think it’s corny to imply a “correct” way to write a character, especially in terms of writing about a characters sex life, a sex life that has no canonical basis to it! (i am talking about spencer here, if it is not obvious). i think it’s thoughtless, arrogant and all around odd to engage with that type of behavior. the variety of fanfiction that exists here is such an awesome thing, and i think itd be so incredibly boring if we all thought the same thing and wrote the same thing about the same characters over and over again.

if you’re a writer and you’ve felt that your work has been unappreciated or rejected, or have read something that left you feeling off about your own work, i am very sorry. every contributor to this fandom is awesome. you deserve every flower ever. 🌷🌷🌷

and if you’re reading this and feel called out.. examine that! i make this post off of a general vibe i have examined in the past few weeks. there is no level of entitlement you hold that allows you to dictate how and what people should write.

i say these words with little malice. id like to hope everyone is capable of being a little better everyday, and i hope any amount of reflection can lead to that.

anyway, that’s all ❤️ baiiii enjoy reading!!!!!

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fairyhaos · 11 months ago

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how seventeen act with their bookworm s/o

requested by my dearest 🍒 anon!

masterlist

seungcheol

just. buys you everything you want. bookmarks, books, book signing tickets, bookshelves, hell he'll even build you your own library to house your books if that's what you want. he'd buy u anything you want anyway tbh, but he knows how much you love reading so his gift-giving tendencies have shifted towards the side of fully letting you indulge in your hobbies. what can he say? he likes seeing you happy.

jeonghan

sometimes he'll just sit there and watch you read bc he thinks that you're just really cute. likes to watch all the different facial expressions you make whilst you're reading through different passages, and laughs when you give horrified gasps whenever the characters make terrible choices. gets bored whilst listening to you explain the plot, but Loves when you explain the drama to him like you're teenage girls gossiping over the latest drama

joshua

doesn't know how you have the time or patience to just sit there reading words for hours, but he supports your hobby for sure. sometimes when you're feeling down, he'll take you to the nearest bookstore and buys every single book you so much as hint at having an interest in. buys you handbags that are big enough for books to fit inside so when you two go out with others, you can bring ur emotional support book for when things get too boring 🫡

junhui

goes “ooh what are u reading???” when he catches you holding a new book. you tell him the title and the genre, but as soon as you begin explaining the plot, his eyes are glazing over and he's already clocked out of the conversation. he tries his best to listen, he really does!!! but he supposes it just isn't for him :(( watches the movie adaptations w you if there is one tho and let's you rant about the deviations the directors made from the novel

hoshi

gets insanelyyyy jealous when you find a new fictional character to fixate and fawn over bc like, hello???? your boyfriend is literally right here????? why are you crying over some character that doesn't exist????? but then you argue that you put up with his tiger agenda so he can at least put up with this. doesn't like reading the books, but loves you explaining it aloud to him, hand gestures and all. he thinks it's really cute.

wonwoo

entertains all your theories about the lore and character backstories of the novels you've been reading lately. you could look like that one guy in the corkboard meme with the red string and he'll just smile indulgently and ask you to tell him more. he's bought you about 70% of all the books you own, and he's not stopping any time soon. he'll stop when you run out of books to read, probably. and by the looks of it, that's not happening any time soon.

woozi

absolutely loves all those fantasy/ dystopian kinds of books the most. at first he was like “:// no thanks i have work” when you first asked him to read some books but now he likes reading them in his free time bc he gets to discuss lore with you in the evenings. likes watching the movie adaptations if they exist, bc then you both get to either applaud the accurate adaptation or complain loudly at the horrible inaccuracies that distort the plot beyond repair

minghao

forces you to take rest breaks every now and then when you're going on a whole reading binge bc it is Not good for your eyesight okay and he worries about you >:((( brews theeee best tea of all time for u and he'll sit down next to you in bed with his own book as you both read throughout the rest of the day. those are the best kinds of days, tbh. nothing gets better than sitting next to the person you love most and doing the thing you love most too

mingyu

he's the type to watch you with soppy eyes as you're reading your book beside him in bed. raises an eyebrow at you fondly when you finally finished, the “how was it?” clear in his eyes, and he just laughs delightedly when you simply explode with all the pent-up emotions as you rant to him about the ending and all the drama and tension that went on in the lead-up to it. loves that you're so passionate about your books. thinks it's super endearing.

dokyeom

asks for book recs every. single. month. then adds them to his list before promptly forgetting about them and asks for recs again. thinks that everything you read sounds like theee most interesting thing in the world which is why he's always asking for the titles, but he's just always so busy you know?? he did somehow actually read ‘the song of achilles’ bc of your rec, however, and cried over it for 2 days straight

seungkwan

likes to have, like. a mini book club between the two of you where you both read the same book bc then he gets to fully understand your rants and also bc he actually gets kind of invested??? his favourite genres are those modern slice-of-life ones bc then he gets to trash talk with you about all the bad decisions the characters are making in their lives

vernon

you read books, he plays games. the both of you can sit together in complete silence and be utterly content, and the arrangement works for you both. (seungkwan thinks you guys are crazy for just being able to sit there with your respective hobbies and Not Talk.) he bought you a kindle for christmas which turned out to be the best present ever bc now you never go anywhere without it. you thank him for it at least 3 times a day.

chan

thinks your love of books is one of your biggest charms. he met you on the train where he made the mistake of asking what book you were reading and ended up sitting through a 25 minute explanation and missing his stop, but it was okay bc he liked hearing you talk and ended the day with your number in his phone, so he counted it as a win. definitely a win in his opinion bc now he gets to listen to your book explanations as your boyfriend <3

request guidelines

reactions tags: @weird-bookworm @minhui896 @slytherinshua @haowrld @belladaises @newgirlygirl @moonlitskiiies @mirxzii @wonranghaeee @yonabutnotyuna @crackedpumpkin @wqnwoos @kthstrawberryshortcake-main @kawennote09 @a-wandering-stay @icyminghao @valenhui @sweet-like-caramel @odxrilove @kyeomyun @chansburgah @pepperonijem @jeonride @kellesvt @kikohao @astrozuya @eightlightstar @onlyyjeonghan @aaniag @starshuas @all-american-fangirl @f1uffyjun @sea-moon-star @nonononranghaee @isabellah29 @mcu-incorrect @hrts4hanniehae @suraandsugar @pan-de-seungcheol @dokyeomkyeom @melodicrabbit @bananabubble

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nonbinoclard · 6 months ago

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>>> TUNES TO LOSE YOUR MIND TO <<<

KEEP IN MIND: This is a living playlist! Songs may be added and removed at times to further curate the vibe I'm going for. I'll try to keep this post updated, but you can just check out the link for an up-to-date track list.

(EDIT: Song discussions are not finished! I have a lot more to say. I'll reblog when I've updated.)

This is set in a sort of nebulous time between Harry's life right before Martinaise and the night before he lost his memory. I wanted this playlist to feel erratic-- full of manic energy one second, then slow and bleak the next, dreamy, unreal, then right back to ridiculous.

(In no particular order. Shuffle for full emotional whiplash effect.)

I Don't Like My Mind - Mitski

I don't like my mind, I don't like being left alone in a room [...] And then I get sick and throw up and there's another memory that gets stuck / Inside the walls of my skull waiting for its turn to talk / And it may be a few years, but you can bet it's there, waiting still

The days before cleaning out the rooms... also, eating an entire cake and throwing it all up again feels very harry-esque... Overindulgence

A whole cake, so please don't take / Take this job from me

End Of The World - Hether

I mean, I could just post the entire set of lyrics as evidence, tbh. Struggling to find meaning and purpose in his life in the wake of heartbreak (5 year old heartbreak, but who's counting anyway)

I wake up in the morning and I wonder / Why everything's the same as it was I can't understand / No I can't understand / How life goes on the way it does

Cane Shuga - Glass Animals

Baby, don't go / I'll stop breathing coke / No more bloody nose / No more John Does Burn through my love / Just like your drugs / I've had quite enough / Or lack thereof

This is about the last moments of Harry and Dora's relationship to me. The chorus (a kind of circular, endless, self-aggrandizing internal monologue likely fueled by stimulants, implied in the song) continuing after the second verse kind of reflects the solution for Lonesome Long Way Home.

"11 Voyager Road. You no longer live there. Those times are gone, and so are those people. Why did you come here? Why are you still here? And where’s the dealer? You have to get back to work. That’s all you have now."

Hot Venom - Miniature Tigers

Hot venom is mixing with my blood / I can feel it on my fingers and taste it on her tongue / It feels so good to fall in love with you

I've heard a lot of people say this song is about heroin addiction, which is thematically appropriate for this playlist, but also. Harry's unhealthy obsession with Dora/Dolores Dei. Adoration (and hatred) so strong it's killing him.

Her venom makes me strong / Stronger than I am on my own / Before too long, I'll wake up to it gone / Wondering how I ever was happy [...] You can't go back now; that's not how this works / And as long as she's gone, I can never be happy

Who Is She ? - I Monster

This is just straight up about Harry's recurring dream to me. Just. Gestures at the lyrics.

Oh, who is she? / A misty memory / A haunting face / Is she a lost embrace? Am I in love with just a theme? / Or is Ayesha just a dream?

I feel like it falls in line really well with the idea that Harry's mind has been affected by the Pale-- a lack of memory, or maybe mixed memories, in a misty haze beyond the boundaries of reality. (and maybe Dolores Dei has started haunting him via Pale? Like some theories I've read.)

Somewhere across the sea of time / A love immortal such as mine Will come to me / Eternally

I Don't Miss You at All - FINNEAS

Dummy - Portugal. The Man

F the World - The Northern Boys

You Stupid Bitch - Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV Show)

These shards are a metaphor for my soul Won't stop the self-pity 'cause I'm on a roll

This song perfectly captures the inherent melodrama of a mental downward spiral imo. Catastrophic and all-encompassing. This is what I think it sounds like in there (Harry's head).

You ruined everything / You stupid bitch / You ruined everything / You stupid, stupid bitch / You're just a lying little bitch who ruins things / And wants the world to burn / Bitch / You're a stupid bitch / And lose some weight

Oleander - Mother Mother

Intermission - Scissor Sisters

Skit #2 - Kanye West

Self explanatory. He's got no money. He's got no clothes. He has no car and he has no hoes.

We broke, broke broke phi broke We ain't got it Broke, broke, broke phi broke We ain't got it Don't spend no money, ain't got no clothes Ain't got no cars, ain't got no hoes

Nobody - Mitski

My God, I'm so lonely, so I open the window To hear sounds of people, to hear sounds of people

This one is more about the feeling of the song itself rather than the lyrics specifically; I love the upbeat tempo that continues through the song (trying to remain steady, continue working), how the beat is simple at first then builds into a kaleidoscope of sound by the end of the track (overwhelmed by the world), then ending in a distorted loop (trapped in a cycle). This song has always felt really authentic to my own experience with mental spirals. The themes of loneliness tie it all into a nice bow.

I'm A Broken Heart - the bird and the bee

Not Allowed - TV Girl

Party Time - The Northern Boys

Comfortably Numb - Scissor Sisters

(Do The) Act Like You Never Met Me - TV Girl

Novocaine For The Soul - Eels

Basket Case - Green Day

Do you have the time / to listen to me whine About nothing and everything all at once? I am one of those melodramatic fools / Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it

I just think this one fits him well during Martinaise... just shaken up and unloading trauma onto unsuspecting strangers like a can of soda (bad analogy lol), depending on the dialogue you choose.

I went to a shrink to analyze my dreams She says it's lack of sex that's bringing me down I went to a whore, she said my life's a bore So quit my whining 'cause it's bringing her down

Sometimes, I give myself the creeps / Sometimes, my mind plays tricks on me It all keeps adding up / I think I'm cracking up Am I just paranoid, or am I stoned?

Also it's just a little pathetic, which just... it fits. Sorry Harry.

Labyrinth - Miracle Musical

#disco elysium #de fanart #disco elysium fanart #de #harry du bois #my art #jams #character playlist

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txttletale · 2 years ago

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niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

#ask #avowed inframaterialist reading group #i obviously do not 100% agree with all the points made by and conclusions reached by these works #but i think they are valuable and useful to read

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less3nthedamage · 3 months ago

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I have thought so since I finished reading Dark Heir but my recent reread has really solidified my theory about the collar forcing James to act not according to Will's desires, but his own.

I think it would have satisfied Sarcean more not to have complete control over James by force but rather to envision a collar that would force James to act on his own desires rather than his moral codes or what his duties to the Sun King demanded.

We see very little of Sarcean himself in this book but my basis for claiming that this would have pleased him more is very simple: because Sarcean is Will and we know Will.

Yes, he is possessive and jealous, but choice is very important to Will. The difference between someone following him willingly or not is massive to him. He agonizes over the possibility of James only wanting him because of their proximity to the collar, we see the elation when he thinks James has accepted him for who he is, he even boasts in his head about how he managed to have his friends follow him willingly.

So, returning to the past. Because Anharion desired and loved Sarcean, the collar compelled him to fight by his side, even though he found that morally reprehensible and it eroded his reputation.

And I think when we get flashbacks to the past we will see this dynamic of love/hate play out between the two of them. Anharion loves Sarcean, which makes the collar compel him to do his bidding, and he hates Sarcean because he has forced him to act against his values and better judgement.

Sarcean is satisfied, or as satisfied as he can be in this past life, because every move Anharion makes to protect him is born of a genuine (if buried and repressed) desire to do so. In this way, without having true allies or equals, and without truly having Anharion (as his loyalty and his support are not given freely), at least he has this tangible evidence that what Anharion and he felt for each other was real, and still is.

While seeing Anharion compelled by the collar would please him, it would also cause him to be resentful and sadistic towards Anharion. After all, what Sarcean wants (as Will wants) is something freely given. We even hear James say it in the end of Dark Heir, when he tells Will/Sarcean what he wants to hear, saying "I will rule with you, by your side", not "I will be ruled by you", or anything else. Sarcean wants to "possess" Anharion as much as he wants Anharion to desire and concede this possession.

So, let's get into James' POV at the end of Dark Heir and how this fits into my theory. James has no love/hate relationship to Will in the current time. Will has been fiercely loyal and protective of him. Smart, charming, assuring. A great leader. So when we get his perspective, it makes sense to me that it be pretty straightforward, devoid of the intense love/hate contrast that Anharion/Sarcean had in the past.

I feel like his point of view has made some believe the collar controls his opinion of Will/Sarcean completely, but I don't believe that is the case. James likes Will so much he asked him to collar him! I think the collar, in present day, is compelling James to act on Will's behalf, yes, but beyond James' actions, I think his inner dialogue is actually his own. And I can't wait to see how it contrasts with how Anharion felt.

#dark rise #will kempen #dark heir #cs pacat #james st clair

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lime-bloods · 1 year ago

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I honestly didn't ever expect that I'd be in the position where I'd be using this blog not just to analyse what has come before in Homestuck, but to look toward the comic's future and do some real old-fashioned theorycrafting. but the time has come. so here goes; lime-bloods' Beyond Canon theories as of the July 6th 2024 update:

Vriska's Going to Hell

were all gonna help you! / whether you like it or not

a select few eagle-eyed readers already noticed that the sound used in last month's (Vriska: Figure shit out yourself.) is called "hell_tierwav". while it was easy to dismiss this as irrelevant composer shenanigans at the time, it's now become clear exactly what this was foreshadowing. whether it would be more apt to call this "Hell" or "Purrgatory" is probably up for debate - but whatever you call it, Vriska's been placed in a dimension seemingly tailored specifically for her personal torment.

while Vriska characteristically interprets the recreation of her childhood home as a symbol of how badass she was, the ghosts of her past - both literal, as the shades of the trolls she killed as Mindfang, and figurative, in the form of sprites wearing the faces of her dead friends - show us in no uncertain terms that Vriska's childhood home is the stage where traumas play out.

Erisolsprite puts it succinctly with his welcome to hell, but pay close attention to what exactly we're being welcomed to: this update ends on page 665. so as of this next update, we'll be starting on page 666.

Does Homestuck Have Hell?

the exact bubble of reality Vriska's currently found herself in seems to be an entirely new construction of the likes we've not yet seen in Homestuck - but that doesn't mean this kind of cosmic torment is without precedent. because while 666 is a number with Satanic connotations in the broader cultural context, it also has a very particular meaning of its own within the world of Homestuck. indeed, the latter half of the comic almost revolves around it, culminating in a climax in Act 6 Act 6 Act 6.

specifically, this repetition of a single digit is emblematic of recursive storytelling. to summarise what you can already read about in detail in my essay The World / The Wheel: when Caliborn is 'gifted' the Act 6 Act 6 supercartridge, which he is told is an "expansion" of Homestuck, it's a trick. there is no "expansion"; he's going to be trapped in a story that never ends because it keeps dividing into smaller and smaller versions of itself forever. the only way to truly beat the devil who trapped the heroes within a story is to trap him in his own story.

that's what Caliborn's "Hell" is, and that's also exactly what the Alternate Calliope achieved in Act 7 by creating the black hole which Vriska knocked Lord English into, ending Homestuck's story - something that Calliope even hints at in this very update, when she refers to the black hole as "containment"; not an accident, but a deliberately crafted prison. black holes are a symbol of recursion and regression; being sucked into one means being forced to live out your whole life over and over again, forever. so really, this is all we ever could have expected to happen when Vriska stepped into a black hole within a black hole! the presentation of the narrative even subtly hints at this; events in Beyond Canon that take place in the black hole are enclosed (in brackets), and now events that take place in a black hole-within-a-black-hole are contained within {curly brackets}, because you should always use a different kind of brackets to differentiate nested parenthesis from each other!

it is absolutely no coincidence that when Caliborn closes the curtains on his appearances in Homestuck, thinking he's won when really he's been condemned to a hell of his own making forever more, it's with a tribute to this exact same Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff strip.

IF YOU REMEMBER JUST ONE THING I SAY, OF SO MANY GREAT THINGS SAID BY ME, THEN PLEASE REMEMBER THIS. I WANTED TO PLAY A GAME.

So What Does That Mean?

one of Beyond Canon's central missions is expanding upon Homestuck's exploration of the relationships between author, text, and audience. as discussed above, a large part of Homestuck's thesis is the evil of forcing characters to live the same lives and the same stories over and over without the chance to grow or move on, and Beyond Canon picks up on this by placing Dirk in the position of trying to keep Homestuck going forever purely to appease its fans, while the Alternate Calliope continues to oppose this ideology. and while the alpha Calliope outwardly seems not to have taken a hard position on where she stands in this cosmic battle, the question posed by her device seems to be an entirely new one: can it actually be a good thing to regress, to return to ground that the story has already covered? can this path lead to something new, rather than merely stagnation?

it's so relevant that Vriska is being confronted with the crimes of her past, not only in the form of all the trolls she was personally responsible for killing but also in the form of the exact same punishment she condemned Lord English to with her heroism - complete with the herd of horses that are always present at Caliborn's demise! but where being condemned to an eternal cycle was fitting punishment for Caliborn, someone who refuses to break free of cycles of abuse and instead chooses to enact that same abuse on the world around him... if Vriska is someone who can break free of these cycles, who can change and become a better person despite what happened to her, will this punishment have the same effect? or, as Davepeta seems to believe, is forcing Vriska to reckon with her own past and traumas exactly what will allow her to break free of that cycle?

DAVE: [...] ill just be over here in the hyper gravity chamber training to beat lord english KARKAT: WE HAVE A HYPER GRAVITY CHAMBER???

it's hard not to be struck by the parallels in design and purpose between the Plot Point and Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber, and not just because of the Dragon Ball enthusiasts present on Beyond Canon's writing and art teams: albeit in typically Strider-bastardised form, the Time Chamber got a shoutout in Andrew Hussie's own Homestuck (see quote above), in a reference that was even picked up on by prolific theorist bladekindeyewear at the time. for the uninitiated: the Hyperbolic Time Chamber allowed its users to train for extended stretches of time, sometimes even spanning years, while a significantly smaller time period passed in the world outside - something that is actually true of real-life black holes! and with the Plot Point's own emphasis on time, represented by the hourglass included among its mechanisms, it seems to me that an essential part of making the 16-year-old Vriska ready for the trials ahead will be giving her the time to undergo the same growth her adult friends have experienced.

considering that Beyond Canon is already playing in the Ultimate Self space, where there are levels of power beyond merely the "god tiers", it also doesn't seem too farfetched to speculate that Vriska, forced to reckon with the fact that becoming a powerful Thief of Light isn't the be-all and end-all of personal growth, will take another leaf out of Dragon Ball's book here and ascend "beyond Super Saiyan". perhaps this is even the "hell tier" so cheekily alluded to in the Plot Point flash? certainly this kind of evolution would be the perfect way to challenge Dirk's belief that the Ultimate Self is the only logical final step for a character's development.

whatever the case, I believe we can take Davepeta at their word here. I don't think it's just a joke that by the end of this ordeal Vriska Serket is going to be fucking RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPED!

#homestuck #beyond canon #upd8 #vriska #vriska serket #davepetasprite #caliborn #black holes #theory #< apparently ive used this tag before but i cant say what for. will have to check later

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rowansender · 5 months ago

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Art Communities and TTRPGs

I recently read an article by @toyourstations (which you can read here) about art revolutions, both online and in physical space. It makes the point that art communities online are generally fairly insular, rarely reaching out beyond a small circle of other artists. To combat this, the article argues that you as an artist should find a way to exist in physical space around people who are not in your small group and share your art there. It's a topic that I had been thinking about a lot lately as I've been making a conceited effort to connect more people in the indie ttrpg space and encourage more community amongst artists.

I've noticed a trend that relates to both of these topics. It seems to me that people in the indie ttrpg community online rarely interact with other's works. I see in other art mediums an outpouring of interaction on even the most sophomoric works. Yet amongst ttrpg writers, I see posts of well made projects with little to no interaction or feedback. This is purely subjective and my experience may be skewing my view on the topic but it seems to hold true.

I have a few theories.

This is obviously a fairly small community, but there are at least other artists here that would have opinions about the projects they see. Are people scared to interact; to give criticism, both good or bad? You would think in such a small community of creator/artists that people would be sharing ideas and writing critique.

The most cynical theory is that creators don't want to boost up other projects as they see them as competition. There is a feeling that there is only enough oxygen in the room for one or two projects to exist and you don't want to lift up other projects when it may result in the starvation of your own.

There is also the time investment. It takes time to read and interact with ttrpgs. Playing/testing them is a whole other level of commitment. But there must be some people who at least read or skim projects. Why do they not leave comments. Does it really come down to the size of the community? Are there just not enough people interested in projects outside of their own?

----

I do feel that I need to state that this opinion is not a reflection of my personal project's engagement. I am fairly happy with how they have performed considering my size and reach. This frustration is mostly a product of seeing other projects and artist gain zero traction when I think their projects are worthwhile. This also goes beyond Tumblr as a platform. Obviously there are a million factors that play into this, but I think a community initiative to engage more with smaller works could change the landscape of the ttrpg community online.

#indie #ttrpg #artists #online artists #ttrpg design #ttrpg community #dnd #tabletop #roleplaying game #indie ttrpg #rpg

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bettelaboure · 2 months ago

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⊹Course in Chemistry: epilogue⊹ | Choi Seung-Hyun

series "Course in Chemistry" epilogue

⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹

⊹ Pairing: Choi Seung-Hyun x Reader

⊹ Warnings: sexual tension, embarrassment, mature language, peer pressure, and high school dynamics involving gossip and judgment

⊹ Summary: Y/N meets Seung-Hyun years after their last encounter and their chemistry is still there

⊹ Author's note: that's the end. thank you for being with me on this short journey. i hope you loved to read the series as much as i loved to write it. your love and support is what keeps me going🤍

⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹ ⊹

The air was thick with anticipation, the kind that wraps itself around your chest and pulls tight. Outside, the streets of Seoul buzzed with energy, lights flashing in every direction as night descended upon the city. The last stop on BigBang’s world tour was here—Seoul. It was the culmination of years of hard work, of sweat and sacrifice, of late-night rehearsals and sleepless flights. And here, in the heart of the city, the crowd was waiting.

Inside the stadium, the backstage area was a maze of polished floors and glowing lights. You stood in the shadows, just beyond the curtain, watching the chaotic flurry of activity unfold. The buzz of voices, the clatter of crew members running past, the distant thrum of bass and drums as they tested the sound system. It all felt surreal, like something you’d only ever seen from the outside.

But this time, you were here—finally, after all these years.

You never imagined this moment would come. Not after all the years apart. Not after the goodbye, the silence, the distance. The last time you saw Seung-Hyun—T.O.P now, you reminded yourself—was at the beginning of his journey, before the world knew his name. Before the stages and lights, before the music and the fame. You were still in school back then, navigating your own life while he was off chasing a dream that seemed impossibly distant.

And now, here you were. No longer that awkward student who had to be tutored in English. No longer that girl who was tangled in the mess of first loves and unspoken feelings. You were different now. You had grown, shaped by the years, by the life you built for yourself—one that didn’t include him. At least, not in the way you once thought.

You were a professor's assistant at a local university now, specializing in English literature. The irony wasn’t lost on you—how much you’d once hated the subject, but here you were, navigating academic texts and theories with ease. It was a life you had found some kind of peace in, even if you often felt like you were living in a world you didn’t quite belong to. But it was safe. It was stable.

Unlike Seung-Hyun.

You had kept up with him, of course. How could you not? His name, his face—always there in the headlines, always there in the background of your quiet life. You'd heard his voice on the radio, seen him on the cover of magazines, and seen him in movies. You couldn’t escape it, even if you tried. And deep down, there was always that part of you—the one that still felt tethered to him, no matter how much time had passed.

A knock on the door broke your thoughts, sharp and unexpected.

You turned quickly, and the manager, a harried woman in her late thirties, stood there, looking around the room. "T.O.P. has asked for you," she said, voice laced with the urgency of someone juggling multiple tasks at once.

You blinked, unsure whether you'd heard her correctly. “What?”

She smiled at your confusion. “He asked to see you. If you’re ready, I’ll take you to him.”

Your heart skipped. For a moment, everything around you seemed to blur—her words, the buzz of the crew, the humming sound of the music that filtered through the walls. It was like time had snapped back to that locker room, those quiet moments in the space between the chaos of the world and the comfort of his touch.

“Yeah,” you managed to say, voice steady even though your pulse was anything but. “I’m ready.”

The hallway was long and narrow, decorated with posters of BigBang’s latest world tour. You passed dressing rooms, empty rehearsal spaces, and dozens of crew members rushing in every direction. The manager led you to a private area, one with a door that looked out onto the stage. It was quiet in here, and the first thing you noticed was the cool air, the scent of cologne, and the unmistakable presence of him.

Seung-Hyun.

He stood by the window, facing the city skyline, his back to you. His silhouette was framed by the glow of the lights outside, but he didn’t turn around as you entered. His stance was familiar—calm, collected, but there was something different. Something... distant.

“Who would have thought that T.O.P himself would want to see me?” you said softly, but with a rasp in the sound, your voice breaking the silence.

He turned slowly, and for a moment, neither of you moved. It was as if the world had stopped, leaving only the two of you in this suspended moment, suspended in time.

His face was different, of course. Sharper, more mature. The years had carved out new lines in his features, the edges of his jaw and cheekbones more defined. His hair was darker now, styled in a way that contrasted sharply with the way you remembered him. But his eyes? They were the same. The same deep, dark gaze that seemed to see through you, even now. The same eyes that had always held more than what was on the surface. The same eyes that had once caught yours in that locker room, making your heart race like it had no control over itself.

You were both different now. Grown. Changed.

But in this moment, there was a part of you that hadn’t shifted at all. And you saw it in him too—the way he was looking at you, as if you were the one thing that could ground him, even for just a moment.

For a few seconds, neither of you spoke. Then, with a careful step forward, he spoke your name.

“Y/N?” His voice was low, the words trailing like he hadn’t fully believed you’d be standing here, after all these years.

“Yeah,” you replied, your voice steadier than you felt. “It’s really me.”

There was a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips, but it was more bittersweet than anything. “I thought about you a lot,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper, like the confession was something fragile. “More than I should have.”

You nodded, your chest tightening with the weight of those words. You’d thought about him too, more times than you could count. But what was the point in saying that now?

“You still hate English?” he asked, his voice warming with the hint of a teasing edge.

You couldn’t help but smile at that, despite everything. “It’s not so bad anymore,” you said. “I actually... I teach it now.”

Seung-Hyun’s eyebrows shot up, clearly surprised. “You teach it? Who would have thought? Back in the day, you were ready to kill me for giving you a 7th grader’s book,” he said, his gaze shifting from your face to your hands, as if trying to map the years between you.

You shrugged, feeling that familiar discomfort of old emotions threading through the conversation. “It’s not what I thought I’d be doing, but it works. I found my place.”

He nodded, taking a step closer to you. The movement was slow, deliberate. He wasn’t in a rush, and neither were you. He was giving you the space you needed, as if waiting for something more to reveal itself.

But you weren’t sure what that something was anymore.

“Do you think about that night?” he asked suddenly, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

The question caught you off guard, and for a moment, you didn’t know how to answer. You thought about it, of course, more than you’d ever admit to anyone. But that was a different time. A different life.

You nodded slowly. “Sometimes.”

“Yeah. Me too,” he murmured. “I guess... I guess I never really got over it.”

The words hung in the air like a confession. A secret he was only now ready to share.

For a long moment, neither of you spoke. Then, T.O.P. reached out, his hand brushing lightly against yours. The touch was light but enough to make your heart race, enough to remind you of the chemistry that had always been there between you.

“I should be going on stage soon,” he said, pulling his hand back slowly. He hesitated, then added, “But... can we talk later? When I’m done?”

You blinked at him, the sincerity in his voice making your stomach flutter. This wasn’t the same shy boy you remembered, the one who stumbled over words. This was a man—older, more experienced, but with that same warmth behind his eyes.

“I’d like that,” you said, your voice soft.

He smiled then, the kind of smile that made your chest ache with memories you thought were buried. “I’ll find you after the show. I promise.”

You nodded, and as he turned to walk away, you watched him disappear into the backstage crowd. The weight of the moment lingered in the air—unspoken, but understood.

And as the lights of the stadium flared, and the roar of the crowd filled the arena, you felt the longing pulse in your chest, a quiet echo of something that had never truly gone away.

T.O.P. was out there, performing for thousands, but here you were—waiting for Seung-Hyun, just as you always had been.

The night exploded into sound as the stadium lights flickered and dimmed, signaling the start of BigBang’s grand finale in Seoul. The crowd roared, a wave of energy so powerful it felt like it could shake the very ground beneath your feet. The music pulsed, heavy with the beats that had become anthems for millions across the world, and the lights swirled in every direction, as if the entire venue had turned into a living, breathing organism, undulating with excitement.

Seung-Hyun—T.O.P.—was out there now, commanding the stage with a presence that was impossible to ignore. You could see him, even from the backstage area where you stood, hidden in the shadows. The crowd’s response to his entrance was deafening, their screams sharp, full of adoration. And it made sense, of course. This was the culmination of years of hard work, of struggles, of sacrifices. And him, with his deep, commanding voice and icy charisma, was at the very heart of it all.

He was different, undeniably so. His posture was straighter, more confident, the way he held his body and moved across the stage a clear reflection of everything he had become in the years since you'd last seen him. The red leather jacket he wore was a far cry from the baggy hoodie he used to favor. His hair, darker now, was slicked back, adding to the sharp edge of his features. His eyes, though—those deep, soulful eyes—were still the same. And they were fixed on the crowd, on the thousands of faces that adored him.

But when his gaze flickered for a moment, even briefly, in your direction, front row, you saw it. The subtle change in the way he moved, the tightening of his jaw, the soft flicker of recognition that passed between you. And suddenly, you were back to that locker room all those years ago, the tension between you thick in the air, palpable, undeniable.

You stepped back into the shadows, trying to steady your breath. God, how had so much time passed? He was a star now, a god in the eyes of so many, but he was still the same. He was still the same.

The show seemed to go by in a blur, the thumping bass and flashing lights an almost overwhelming symphony of sound and color. You couldn’t tear your eyes away from the stage, though, watching him. Watching them all. But most of all, watching him. His performance was everything you remembered and more. The way he moved, the way he commanded the stage with that effortless swagger, the way the crowd screamed his name—everything about him screamed "celebrity." It was clear this was his world now, and you were just a spectator.

But it wasn’t just his stage presence that had you hooked. It was the moments when his eyes would flicker, even if just for a second, toward the shadows where you stood. Those moments felt like a thread connecting the past and the present, like he was reaching out to you without anyone knowing.

By the time the final song was over, and the last notes of Fantastic Baby reverberated through the stadium, the crowd was in a frenzy, but you were already on your way to the backstage area, making your way through the maze of corridors to the spot where you had agreed to meet him.

The anticipation gnawed at you, sharp and raw, as you stood by the door. The thought of seeing him—of being this close to him again after so long—stirred something inside you that you hadn’t expected. The same chemistry, the same attraction, flared back to life.

And then the door opened.

Seung-Hyun stood there, just beyond the threshold, his red jacket now discarded, his t-shirt clinging to his toned frame. His face was flushed from the stage lights, his hair a bit tousled, but his eyes were locked onto yours, intense and unwavering.

You both paused for a long, loaded moment, just taking each other in. You could feel the heat between you, the chemistry that had never really gone away. His lips curled up into a slow, knowing smile, and there was no mistaking the way he looked at you. His gaze was hungry, searching, and it ignited something deep inside you, something that you had buried for years.

“So…” Your voice was low, like a whisper shared between two people who had shared too much time apart. “You still think I’m trouble?”

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, your heart racing in your chest. There it was again—the teasing, the playful edge that was so very you together. The boy who had always known how to make you smile even when you didn’t want to. You couldn’t help but smirk.

“You’re still full of yourself, aren’t you?” He shot back, unable to keep the laughter from his voice.

His eyes twinkled with that familiar mischievousness, and he took a step closer. The air between you thickened. His scent—woodsy, musky, with a hint of cologne—invaded your senses, making your breath catch.

“I’m just confident,” you replied, your voice dipping lower, and his gaze dropped briefly to your lips, before returning to meet your eyes. “I don’t remember you complaining about that before.”

Your chest tightened, the distance between you feeling too great, and yet, impossibly small at the same time. Everything about this moment—the proximity, the familiarity, the lingering touches in your memory—felt like a spark on the edge of an explosion.

“I was always trouble,” you whispered, but the words held no accusation—only the playful sting of something unspoken.

His smile deepened, and without saying another word, he reached out. One hand came to rest on your waist, pulling you slightly toward him, while the other cupped your chin, gently lifting your face so your eyes locked. His thumb brushed the skin just below your lips, the touch soft but intimate, sending a shiver up your spine.

“You’ve always been trouble,” he murmured, his lips dangerously close to yours now. “But maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted.”

You met his gaze, steady and unflinching. Everything about this moment, about him, felt so familiar, like you were coming back to something you had always known. There was no fear, no hesitation, just an undeniable pull—magnetic, powerful, dangerous.

And then, without warning, he kissed you.

It wasn’t the tentative, awkward kiss of two people who had just found each other again after so long. No. This was raw, a collision of desires that had been simmering for years. His lips were urgent, almost desperate, and you met him with equal intensity, your hands finding his chest, gripping him as if you needed to prove he was really here, really in front of you.

The kiss deepened, and time seemed to stand still. The chaos of the concert, the noise of the stadium, the distance between the two of you—everything faded away. There was only this, only him, only the way your bodies seemed to recognize each other as if no time had passed at all.

When you finally pulled back, breathless and trembling, Seung-Hyun. rested his forehead against yours, his eyes closing for a moment as if he was grounding himself.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his voice rough with emotion.

You swallowed hard, the words catching in your throat, but when you looked at him, you saw the same longing in his eyes that mirrored your own.

“We’ve both changed,” you whispered, your voice almost a question.

“Some things don’t change,” he replied softly, a small smile tugging at his lips.

And then, without another word, he kissed you again.

He looked at you like he was seeing something rare—something lost and found again.

“I kept thinking about what I’d say if I ever saw you again,” he said quietly, voice low and full of restraint. “And now… none of it’s enough.”

You reached up, fingers brushing a damp lock of hair from his forehead, letting your hand linger there, thumb resting lightly against his temple.

“You don’t have to say anything,” you murmured.

That was all it took.

His lips found yours again—hungrier now, but no less reverent. He backed you gently against the cool glass of the window, his hands resting on either side of your face before sliding down to your waist. The kiss deepened quickly, the air between you dissolving. Your arms wrapped around his shoulders instinctively, pulling him closer, needing him closer. Every press of his body against yours was a memory reawakened—your hips, your chests aligned like they always had belonged.

It wasn’t just lust, though it simmered beneath the surface like a live wire. It was years of unspoken words and unresolved tension, tangled up in each touch. His mouth moved from your lips to your jaw, to the sensitive spot just beneath your ear, where his breath turned hot and uneven.

“You still taste the same,” he whispered between kisses, the sound of his voice laced with a groan, as if it pained him to say it.

Your hands wandered under the hem of his shirt, palms splaying across the toned, warm skin of his back. He hissed softly when your nails grazed him lightly, pressing his hips tighter to yours. You gasped—his body, all hard lines and simmering control, molded perfectly against you. His hand slid up your spine, slow and purposeful, and you arched into his touch.

The glass behind you fogged faintly with each breath, the world outside Seoul a distant galaxy as your bodies collided again and again in kisses that grew slower, deeper, more dangerous. The weight of years—the missed chances, the unspoken feelings—clung to you both.

He pulled back slightly, forehead against yours again, panting softly. His fingers traced along your ribs like he was trying to memorize them.

“I don’t know if this is the wrong time,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, “or the rightest thing I’ve ever done.”

You slid your hand along his jaw, thumb brushing the soft stubble, smiling softly even as your heart pounded.

“I think we stopped worrying about timing a long time ago.”

He kissed you again. Slower this time. More certain.

And that was how the night ended—pressed against each other in a quiet stadium that had just witnessed the final roar of a world tour, rediscovering something that had never truly disappeared.

Not lust. Not even love, exactly.

But something fierce. Something that still burned.

Taglist: @petersasteria @redhoodedtoad @mirahyun @sherrayyyyy @sherxoo @dilfismz @breakmeoff @janie-osuih @forevervibezzzz1 @kuinnoa @juliskopf @maskedcrawford @szonyix6277@ldydeath

Series taglist: @1950schick @zaaraaax0 @tabibabib @sofiaaaah @pepsicolapussi

#fanfic #bigbang #big bang #choi seunghyun #choi seunghyun scenario #t.o.p bigbang #choi seunghyun x reader #top x reader

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