#shame they’re French! she can do better

[theoppositeofprofound]

All I’m saying is that Latin American Cristabel Oct coheres perfectly. She’s Catholic. She makes all her friends watch NGE. She’s firmly anti-imperialist but *gestures at the church*. She’s a good Carmelite girl, who once suggested John should retreat to his room for a few weeks of silent meditation on the nature of the soul. She makes M— edit no nudity cuts of those R-rated shows about Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz so she can get her historical drama fix without breaking her vows. They met doing hospital work in an overwhelmed refugee camp and stayed pen pals. She writes old fashioned letters in bubbly script with hearts over her ‘i’s. She thinks rugby is barbaric and still sits down to watch every match. She’s never come to blows with a Jesuit but she’s come close.

[precious-little-scoundrel]

Johnny & Ella vibez

Engaged in just such a foil with Mrs. Roberts who started the fund for St. Jude’s, Ella spies a commotion out the corner of her eye. A flock of peacocks, or young men in varying stages of military fatigues, swagger through the open french doors and help themselves to the punch and ignore the water. She finds them intriguing only because they’re not in dress uniform and they’re under sixty years of age which makes them entirely unique besides herself at this venue. They also have broad shoulders under navy cloth and Ella has recently undergone a series of unpromising school dates that have ended in nothing but miserable dissatisfaction and Ella finds herself watching handsome, established, working age men with the resigned dreaminess of a soon to be nun.

Still, it’s bad manners to have shown up in fatigues. One tall one, blonde and with biceps untempered by his navy broadcloth is honest to god wearing boots at this venue. She wouldn’t consider herself a snob, but Ella is also keenly aware of the governor a few seats over from Mrs. Rubens.

With that stunning statement the man proceeds to dig in the inside pocket of his jacket, pulling it away from his body so that Ella can see a crisp dress shirt beneath molded to muscle by the damp of sweat. Finding what he was fishing for her withdraws his hand and without fuss presents a check to her with a startling amount of zeros.

“Oh, heavens.” Ella absorbs her miscalculation with sickened shame at letting her temper her the better of her manners, “I am, -Lieutenant, I am so very sorry. Mistake on my part, absolute prejudice I-I really do apologize sir, please don’t think-“

“Pretty rough night, hmm?” he waves her off with a shrug and an easy smile, smiles do come easy to his face and she enjoys watching them flit on and off in the glow of the inside lights, “My offer for the ice still stands.”

“Well don’t tell the people at Killeen Texas that.” John replies in sweet warning, leaning towards her just a tad as their elbows draw closer on the marble countertop, “They’ll be real sad to have their fame taken from them and -I don’t think those sorta folks could handle the notion of such a productive first night.”

It’s 1976 and the way his eyebrows waggle shouldn’t turn Ella’s pink cheeks positively crimson but they do. Only her mama’s instilled propriety keeps her capable of keeping eye contact with him, although her eyes burn from the heat of her own blush.

[jeniffercheck]

hot & heavy (underestimated and overprotected)

shivlina paris au: pre-canon, karolina does not yet work at waystar, all shiv canon applies. CWs below the cut.

words: 19k

read here or on ao3

cw: drug abuse for shown/referenced cocaine use throughout the fic, domestic violence is referenced throughout with one conversation that goes into minor details, there is nothing graphic. please let me know if you think i've missed anything!

--

It starts before Karolina’s even realized it has.

Breathless and nameless in the warm-toned bathroom of an old colleague’s brand new speakeasy, a passcode-secured hole in the wall that Karolina thinks is better fit for Astoria than Paris, and her eyes shut tight as her shoulder blades dig deeply into the wall behind her, shoved between a doorframe, a red velvet ottoman that probably costs more than her monthly rent, and a pale-skinned girl with a vicious hunger for Karolina’s lips. Her soft hands grab at Karolina as if they’re the last two women on Earth, and for a second Karolina worries that they actually might be.

Then she remembers that it’s just another Thursday in France.

When they’re finished, it’s lingering eyes with quick hands fixing messed up hair and their displaced clothes, slightly shameful at the sound of a toast happening beyond the thick, dark mahogany of the bathroom door; two wallflowers skipping the party. While washing her hands, Karolina realizes she’s still wearing her ring. Vic had given it to her years ago, something like a promise that neither of them intended to keep, and on a whim, she takes it off. As she dries her hands, she finally asks for the woman's name.

“Shiv.”

“Like a knife?” Karolina asks, unable to contain her surprise.

“Like a shiv,” Shiv corrects, her eyes slightly rolling. She pulls out a small bottle, recognizable white powder filling the inside. She opens it up and brings the spoon to her nose, but she pauses before she does anything. “Want some?”

Karolina waves her off.

“Not my poison,” she says, and Shiv just shrugs, as if it’s her loss. She sort of makes Karolina feel like it is, what with the high society elegance of the silver canister, and Karolina thinks it’s a sort of upper-class gauche; the old money secret that you can be trashy as long as it’s behind closed doors. She briefly thinks if she were a hot, twenty-something spending time in Paris she might keep her blow in a five-thousand-dollar tube as well, and by the time the powder is snorted and the door is open, Karolina realizes Shiv never asked for her name.

  —

  Karolina accepted the job on a whim. Or, at least, that’s what she’d said. In reality, it’d been in the pipeline for months, if not years. It wasn’t her endgame, but it was always in her line of sight, and the only obstacle was in her own home, a sobbing, living person, begging her not to go. She can’t remember now if she even batted an eyelash when she chose the job. In that moment she felt like she’d had nothing left to cry about. Whether it was the dead conversations or the dead bedroom or dead, stale fucking air, she wasn’t sure, but she just knew staying in that place felt like a dead end, and doing this? It felt like the rest of her life could be in front of her.

(That’s what she told herself when she packed up her bags and got a storage unit for nearly ten years’ worth of coexisting with someone, and shipped her cat off to France, and then she wrote in her journal that sometimes things have to fall apart to come back together. A lame excuse for someone who always seems to find things falling apart.)

  —

 She sees Shiv again.

Except this time, it’s not under the cover of a hidden bathroom––it’s a wide-open rooftop, and it’s only a matter of time when she finally lands in Shiv’s line of sight, for the second time in her life. Shiv’s having a hushed argument that Karolina desperately attempts not to eavesdrop on, but with Shiv’s growing volume and Karolina’s growing inability to follow the French in the conversation in front of her, she doesn’t think it’s her fault when she hears Shiv snap, “I don’t want you here.”

It’s then, that Shiv’s eyes land on Karolina’s, and it’s a sharp enough glare that Karolina doesn’t know whether Shiv’s scowling at her, the situation, or if maybe perhaps the entire world, but Karolina tears her eyes away anyway, slightly embarrassed that she’d been caught staring at all. She can’t miss out of her peripheral though, when Shiv all but runs away from the man, nearly clipping Karolina’s shoulder as she escapes. Karolina’s gaze moves back to the man, eyes following Shiv with something wistful in his gaze, and she almost feels bad for him, the way you’d feel bad for a puppy who’s running around without an owner.

It’s the kind of scene she knows, recalling all of the parties she’d dragged Vic to, chatting up businessmen who’d inevitably flirt with her and then Vic would get mad and Karolina would remind her that it doesn’t mean anything if she entertains a little misogyny to get fucking ahead and Vic would make her feel guilty for apparently not having any morals, and they’d end the night early and pissed, Vic in the bedroom and Karolina sleeping on the old couch that she was never allowed to get rid of even though it made her wake up with an aching back and half of her limbs asleep, and she’d slink out of the apartment before the sun was even up just to hide out in a coffee shop until it was reasonable for her to enter the office without getting looks, and she’d let everyone think she was just that dedicated to her job.

The group surrounding her pulls her back in with their laughter at what she assumes was a joke, and she plays along, but she really has no fucking clue what’s going on in this conversation.

She’s halfway through another vodka Red Bull when she can feel her phone vibrate multiple times through her purse, and she’s grateful for the interruption as she’s able to finally sneak away, having had her fill of business talk for the night. That’s when she finds Shiv again, beyond the open bar and the DJ, where the sound is muffled and the view is obstructed. The perfect place for Karolina to answer some e-mails, and for Shiv, the seemingly perfect place for a smoke break. Right in front of a sign that says, interdit de fumer. Karolina’s unable to contain her quiet, “Oh,” and her slight laugh at the sight, and then she recalls the death glare from earlier.

“Sorry—” she starts, a mess of an apology already brimming at the tip of her tongue, but Shiv just quirks one of those perfect eyebrows, and returns her gaze to the skyline.

“It’s fine,” she says, leaning on the railing. “You can stay.”

Karolina sends her a small smile, then realizes she can’t even see it, and she shakes her head at herself, eyeing Shiv one more time before leaning against the wall behind her. She sifts through the emails, skimming through what seems to be a vendor switch-up, meaning she’s going to have to make sure all the logos are swapped on materials they’ve already approved of. Typical.

“Jesus,” she huffs, before she’s even realized she’s speaking. She attempts to look apologetic as Shiv looks back, Karolina picking her eyes up from her phone to apologize for the disturbance. “Sorry—work.”

Work. The dreaded thing she can never escape. Shiv doesn’t say anything though, returning to her cigarette and her fucking demure gaze into the city. Karolina eyes her out of curiosity. She looks so familiar, but Karolina would remember a name like Shiv. Then Shiv’s voice rings out, and she doesn’t have much time to consider it anyway.

“It’s not as impressive as I’d hoped,” Shiv says, looking out into the skyline. “Even with the Eiffel Tower.”

Karolina looks ahead. The Eiffel Tower peaks out above everything, illuminating the city with its lights alone. She remembers a time when Paris was a daydream for her, a small cut-out from a magazine that she kept inside every planner from middle school through college. She realizes she can’t even remember whether her first visit here had been for a work trip or a vacation, but she remembers being disappointed.

“The Eiffel Tower makes everything look smaller,” she says. “The rest of the city kind of pales in comparison.”

Shiv cocks her head at the statement, as if she’s inspecting the balance of the buildings. Once you notice it, it’s hard to look at Paris the same. All the hype for one structure. It’s like going to New York City for the Statue of Liberty. You get there and realize you’re not even allowed to climb to the top, and then you find out that it’s in fucking New Jersey.

“I guess you’re right,” Shiv says. Karolina doesn’t think she’s right, but Shiv says it as if it looks true, so it must be. Or maybe other people don’t have time to sit and think about why the Parisian skyline is so much worse than other cities. They have partners and kids and lives. Karolina has her cat.

“I’m Karolina,” Karolina says, and it causes Shiv to turn around again. “Since you never asked.”

Shiv smirks.

“Who says I wanted to know your name?” she asks, and the words themselves are harsh, but the teasing smile remains.

“I wanted you to know,” Karolina says, bouncing her phone against her palm.

“Okay,” Shiv says. “Karolina.”

It’s then, that Karolina decides she likes the way her name sounds coming out of Shiv’s mouth. For a second, she tries to tell herself that it’s too soon, that she doesn’t need to get involved with anyone else while the corpse of her and Vic is still cold, but then she remembers that too soon would’ve been years ago. That things had been over long before they actually were, that she and Vic were choosing security over happiness. They’d settled. This, Karolina thinks, feels far from settling. It feels like fun.

“Was that your boyfriend?” Karolina asks. She watches the way Shiv’s eyebrows immediately flex at the word boyfriend, but she recovers quickly, that easy smile barely faltering.

“Nope,” Shiv says. “I barely know him.”

Karolina frowns.

“He wasn’t bothering you, was he?” she asks, because even if she’s not looking for trouble, this is still technically her event, and she’s willing to throw someone out if it’s making a guest uncomfortable. She’s chivalrous like that.

“No,” Shiv says again. “He’s just hopeful, and—fucking relentless.”

“That’s a kind way to say desperate,” Karolina jeers, unable to stop the retort. She’s about to apologize for being brash but Shiv laughs, and by God, if it isn’t a glorious sound.

“He is fucking desperate,” Shiv says, taking a drag of her cigarette. It’s on its last life, barely clinging to the butt, and she puts it out, then fully turns to face Karolina, leaning her back against the glass railing. It’s held together by various scraps of metal and bolts, and it makes her skin crawl, watching someone put all their trust into a sheet of glass to stop them from plummeting twelve stories to their death. Shiv looks entirely unconcerned.

“You feeling desperate?” she asks.

“This is a work event,” Karolina immediately says, because it is, but she knows the argument is weak, and it’s possible that she doesn’t really care either. It’s possible that she’s having fun adding in a little chase.

“And the other night wasn’t?”

“That was social,” Karolina says, or so she’s been telling herself.

“Yeah,” Shiv says, sounding very unconvinced by Karolina as well. “Why don’t we go somewhere else and be social, then?”

Karolina’s phone buzzes in her hand again, and she resists the urge to check yet another email that she knows she won’t be able to solve until the morning anyway. She doesn’t consider herself a risk taker, but this doesn’t feel like a risk so much as feeling desired, and she can’t remember the last time anyone desired her. So, she makes a decision that she hopes doesn’t haunt her.

“Your place or mine?”

  —

  The apartment in Paris feels like a breath of fresh air. She hasn’t lived alone since her early twenties, back when she still thought a daily commute from Queens to Manhattan was something she could stand to do every day. Her last apartment had become suffocating. It was a pit of festering resentment that burned like cheap candles, leaving invisible soot on the walls; something you can’t notice until it’s too late and the damage has already been done. Like her childhood home, the scent of cigarettes settled so deep into the carpet that it followed her everywhere, even sometimes thinking she can still smell the residue in her hair if tries hard enough. One day they were happy and the next they were caught in the world’s slowest-acting quicksand, unable to dig themselves out of the trap they’d wandered into.

Karolina often recalls their final fight, her using the word we and Vic always using you.

But this apartment is all hers. She can rearrange the furniture as many times as she wants until it feels right, and she can leave the windows open overnight because there’s nobody there to complain about the noise. She can leave her mugs in the sink or on the coffee table or on the nightstand and she can clean them when she wants. She works into the early hours of the morning, and nobody’s pissed off because it’s what she wants to do. Fucking freedom.

  —

  The calls start.

Karolina had elected to get a new SIM card when she got to the country. For the longest time, her only contacts were from work, the veterinarian, and her mother. Now, Shiv’s name sits clear on the bottom of the list. It was a moment of weakness, trading numbers, because Karolina doesn’t know what Shiv’s intentions are beyond late-night summons, and Karolina knows it’s risky territory, getting involved with someone when she feels hot off the press of emotional encumbrance, but Shiv keeps calling. 11pm on a Tuesday, 3am on a Saturday, an egregious 8pm on a Monday and Karolina knows she’s in trouble because she says yes without a hitch.

“The Americans in Paris,” Shiv jokes, and Karolina wants to tell her that she’s not American, not really, but they don’t know each other beyond what gets them off and even though this is the most intimate she’s been with a new person in years, and because of it, Karolina thinks the rest of it, the things about her that aren’t visible on her body, are far more intimate than taking her shirt off. She almost thinks the whole ordeal lacks intimacy.

It’s procedural. Shiv asks if Karolina’s free, Karolina says yes, and then they decide whose apartment they’re going to. Shiv will offer her a bump that she’ll say no to every time, and Karolina will pretend that it doesn’t unnerve her that this girl does coke every time they fuck, and then Shiv will go down on her and she’ll forget that she was nervous at all. Then, once Shiv’s high has kicked in, they’ll switch, and Karolina will try to be careful, will try to please, and she’ll touch Shiv slowly, asking, “Is this okay?” and Shiv will just grab Karolina’s hand, guiding her to go harder, never having said yes at all.

  —

  Karolina gets attached.

And maybe attached, isn’t the right word, but she starts to like Shiv. She starts to like Shiv a lot more than just wanting to fuck a couple of times a week. At first, Shiv is hesitant.

“Coffee?” Shiv repeats, and she makes it sound like the craziest idea in the world. Karolina wonders if it is a crazy idea, getting involved with some apparent socialite with a coke habit and a penthouse in the middle of Paris.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Karolina quickly asserts, “I’d just like to know who I’m getting into bed with.”

“Isn’t the mystery part of the thrill?” Shiv asks, but it sounds forced, not at all like her usual pension for teasing foreplay, so Karolina takes a risk.

“Maybe…I like spending time with you,” she says, and she waits, breathlessly for what feels like hours but is really only seconds, for Shiv to say anything, but the line just goes dead.

It stings a little, but Karolina thinks she’s faced worse rejections in her sometimes-sorry life, and she tries to move on. She leaves her phone in work mode the rest of the day, seeing only emails and team chat notifications, and tries to focus on why she’s in Paris at all. Tries not to let it feel like the end of the world, because it’s not, and she isn’t some unlovable creature that was put on this planet to always be within an inch of absolute contentment, no.

When she gets home, she fears her phone like it’s radioactive, and she sits next to Oliver and listens to him purr and she nurses a big glass of wine. She turns off Do Not Disturb in one swift click, eyes nearly closed and hands out in front like preparation can actually stop anything from hurting less, but there’s a notification from Shiv. Delivered nearly two hours ago, and she opens it up, and feels stupid, first and foremost, but also relieved.

Shiv sent one word, when?

That’s how Karolina finds herself at a cafe, morning blocked off with important “meetings” because she’s ahead of schedule with work and Shiv said she’s already busy this weekend. It’s an expensive place, one she wouldn’t tolerate going to for any extended period of time, but it was Shiv’s choice and anyway, Karolina’s never been the best authority on caffeine sources anyway, what, with her war-stock of 5-Hour Energy.

When Shiv arrives, Karolina attempts to not look as surprised as she feels. Shiv looks different in the daytime, hair pin-straight, and accessories purposefully understated, her outfit is a decidedly European collage of neutral tones with an obvious American aftertaste at the comfortability of it all. Big sunglasses cover her eyes, and her purse looks large enough to carry an entire fucking clown car, and Karolina thinks she looks like a walking ad for The Row.

“Long night?” Karolina asks as Shiv sits down, gesturing to the sunglasses. Shiv ignores her, grabbing the coffee cup that had been waiting for her instead.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“What I’m hoping is your usual,” Karolina says.

Shiv looks at the ingredients marked off on the label, and she lets out an amused laugh, “You sneaky little bitch.”

Karolina wouldn’t say that’s not one of her personality traits, but she didn’t have to sneak too hard to figure that one out.

“You have a habit of leaving receipts next to your key bowl,” Karolina says, having half a mind to look a little sheepish. “I might’ve taken a look.”

“Well, remind me not to leave state secrets out on my nightstand,” Shiv says, taking a sip of the coffee.

“Do you have any?” Karolina asks, to which Shiv just leans back in her chair, shrugging slightly.

“Maybe a few,” she smirks.

“Is that what you do for work?” Karolina asks. “State secrets?”

It’s apparently the wrong question, because the smirk falls, and Shiv shifts in her seat like the state secrets are actually real and Karolina’s just caught her sitting on a big one.

“No,” Shiv says, voice tight. “I’m on a sabbatical.”

This doesn’t shock Karolina, given the way Shiv’s eyes are always a little glassy and her nose a little red, the way her hands always shake slightly when she’s not paying attention to what she’s doing, and the way her body is always under a specific amount of control, as if losing control of anything would mean losing control of everything.

Karolina won’t mention it though, not here, not now, and it’s obvious she shouldn’t push the subject further, so she nods. She changes the subject to something that’s been bothering her.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?”

Karolina tried asking her, a couple of weeks ago when it was late and Shiv had given her at least two glasses of wine, and Karolina just couldn’t put her finger on it. Shiv vehemently denied it then, but Karolina can’t let it go, especially now, seeing her out in the daytime.

“I can guarantee you, we haven’t,” Shiv says, and she sounds so sure.

“Weird,” Karolina mutters, returning to her coffee.

“Shiv isn’t—it’s not my full name,” Shiv says then, almost sounding nervous. “It’s more of a nickname.”

“What’s your full name?” Karolina asks, leaning forward.

“Siobhan.”

Karolina tries to rack her brain for any memories of a Siobhan. She thinks that’s definitely a name she’d remember, but the only Siobhan she can even think of is—wait.

“Siobhan Roy?”

“In the flesh,” Shiv says, sounding especially unenthused.

Karolina wouldn’t say she’s starstruck, because she’s rubbed elbows with billionaires before, but fucking the billionaire heiress of the largest media conglomerate in the United States? That’s a little more than she’s used to.

“Don’t make it a thing,” Shiv says preemptively, like she can see all of the different outcomes of this scenario working their way through Karolina's head.

“I’m not,” Karolina says, even though she’s definitely lying because this most certainly is a thing, but they’re in Paris and everyone who gives a fuck about Siobhan Roy is across the ocean, so she can act calm for however long this date lasts and then murder board herself to death later in case there’s some crazed paparazzi somewhere that’s desperate to get Shiv in tomorrow’s issue of Page 6. “I guess it makes a lot more sense now, knowing your parents didn’t name you after a prison weapon.”

That does crack a small smile out of Shiv, and Karolina’s happy to have eased at least some of the growing tension.

“I still wouldn’t say that wasn’t their intention,” Shiv says.

Karolina thinks it’s supposed to sound like a warning—a slight, careful, now, don’t get cut—but Karolina and warnings are friends. She knows how to heed warnings and navigate through them. Warnings themselves don’t scare her. It’s what comes from the things that have no warnings. The things you can’t see coming.

“So, now that you’ve interrogated me—what are you doing in Paris?” Shiv asks. Shiv can’t ever seem to get away from the topic of herself quickly enough. She figures now, that Shiv is just a Google search away, and Shiv doesn’t have the same luck with Karolina unless she wants to read the most standard LinkedIn profile in existence, so Karolina entertains her.

“I’m leading a PR team for Fashion Week,” Karolina says. “Ad campaigns, interviews, press releases—”

“Wait—a PR team, or the PR team?” Shiv asks, something like impression on her face. Karolina suddenly feels bashful, like bragging in front of a billionaire is some kind of fruitless endeavor that’s just going to leave her embarrassed and humbled, but Shiv looks interested, and she asked Karolina not to make her name a big deal, so that’s exactly what Karolina’s not doing.

“Well, I suppose it’s the PR team, when you put it that way, but it’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” Karolina says. “In my position it’s mostly phone calls and emails, appeasing the higher-ups so they think everything is running smoothly. The boring stuff.”

“I mean, still,” Shiv says, and she seems genuinely impressed. “Didn’t realize I was hooking up with fashion royalty.”

Fashion royalty. She remembers Vic’s, “Are you fucking serious, Karolina? Paris? Really?” and it’d felt more like a curse than anything.

“Paris Fashion Week can’t be the most extravagant thing you’ve been around, Siobhan Roy,” she deflects, and Shiv rolls her eyes at the sentiment.

“I mean, it’s no Met Gala, of course,” Shiv says, playing along.

“Well, I’ve worked the Met Gala too,” Karolina then says. “But I’m sure there’s something.”

“Fuck you,” Shiv says as she laughs, raising her sunglasses back into her hair, and Karolina finally has the opportunity to take all of Shiv in. Beyond the sleek hair and the jewelry that’s worth at least a few months of Karolina’s salary and the perfectly fitted clothing, she understands why Shiv was hiding behind sunglasses, because she can’t control the image of her own eyes. They’re bright and alert but still adorned with that never-ending irritated glimmer, a red ring of death that warns onlookers of her decaying. They also remind her that Shiv is just a person, not the heiress to a crime empire like The Washington Post tries to convey or the untouchable debutante that Karolina’s own publications perpetuate; she’s just a person. Karolina releases a breath.

“Who’s the worst celebrity you’ve met?” Shiv asks, and Karolina smirks.

“I didn’t meet him personally, but I remember a certain Roy was on the cover of GQ some years back and my staff had some choice words about the experience,” Karolina says, and before she has the chance to elaborate, Shiv laughs loudly.

“His alpha male days,” Shiv muses. “That cover was­–”

Karolina quirks an eyebrow, “It was what?”

“It was awful,” Shiv says, throwing her arms up in surrender but still smiling in amusement, “I’m sorry, it was!”

Karolina can’t bite back her own smile, because really, she has no emotional investment in GQ.

“A lot of readers wrote in after that issue thanking us for having a real man on the cover,” Karolina says, and Shiv scoffs.

“That real man is now into the art of microdosing on meditation,” Shiv says, throwing air quotes around the words, and Karolina hums.

“Maybe they should do another cover story,” she says, and Shiv feigns disgust at the thought.

“How long have you been working in fashion anyway?” Shiv then asks.

Too long, is Karolina’s first thought, but even if she’s not totally obsessed with the clothes and the celebrities and the parties, she’s enjoyed the path, and the money.

“My whole career,” Karolina says. “I started at a publication right out of college, and it just stuck. I’ve been working my way up since then.”

“And now you’re here,” Shiv says, smirking into her coffee again.

“Now I’m here,” Karolina laughs. “Having coffee with someone from fucking New York.”

“Not the Parisian romance you were expecting?” Shiv asks.

“This is a romance?” Karolina asks, and Shiv’s eyes narrow slightly.

“I mean, you practically begged me to come,” Shiv says. “Kind of felt like you were asking me on a date.”

Karolina tries not to let her panic show at the word date. It very well could be a date if either of them wanted it to be, but despite Shiv’s pension for flirting, she’s not exactly forthcoming with her feelings, and Karolina has no clue what Shiv could possibly be feeling in this moment.

“I just thought, you know, if we were going to be benefiting from one another—we might as well be friends too,” Karolina says, taking the easy route.

“Friends?” Shiv asks. She says it as if the concept is foreign, like friends is a thing that never quite works out, but Karolina thinks she’s just keeping her cards close to her chest, the same way that fucking in the dark is supposed to somehow make Karolina see her less or the way that wearing sunglasses that block half of her face is supposed to make Karolina understand her less.

“Why not?” Karolina says, knowing she’s won when Shiv just shrugs.

“Fine,” Shiv says. “Friends.”

  —

  “I can’t believe you have a fucking cat.”

Karolina watches in amusement as Shiv and Oliver have a stare-down in her foyer. Stare down is probably the wrong phrase, because it’s more like Oliver is sitting there, looking sickeningly adorable with his short grey fur and his bright green eyes, and Shiv is glaring at him from in front of the doorway, like a tabby that’s just wandered into the wrong alley.

“Shiv, this is Oliver,” Karolina says, picking him up. He meows as she does so, and she can’t help but laugh at what seems like pure disdain on Shiv’s face.

“Oliver?” Shiv asks, bewilderment clear. “You named your cat after a fucking singing orphan?”

“No,” Karolina immediately fires back, not even having it in her heart to distinguish the fact that Oliver Twist was from a book first. “He’s named after an Agatha Christie character.”

Shiv takes a very long breath, like she’s contemplating agreeing to try this friends thing at all, and then she steps forward.

“You’re a dork,” she says, holding her hand out. Karolina turns so that Oliver can see Shiv better, and he sniffs her hand for a second and before retreating, and curls his head back into Karolina’s arms.

“I don’t think he likes it when you insult his mother,” Karolina says, petting him fondly.

“Well, I don’t like when his mother edges me because she forgot to feed him,” Shiv says, and it’s Karolina’s turn to roll her eyes as she heads into the kitchen.

“You can get yourself off, Shiv,” she throws behind her shoulder. “Oliver can’t even open the fridge.”

Shiv follows her, footsteps hurrying.

“You keep his food in the fridge?”

“That’s where cat food is kept,” Karolina says, setting Oliver down on the ground, and Shiv pulls a face when he immediately jumps onto the counter.

“And you let him on the counter?”

Karolina pulls out his wet food, and a bottle of kitchen bleach, making a point to place it in front of Shiv.

“I’ll wipe it down when he’s done, fair?”

Shiv just huffs, a sound of disbelief.

“You’re a crazy cat lady,” she mutters.

“Shiv, I have one cat,” Karolina exclaims, still unable to contain her laughter.

“Yeah, and that’s fucking insane,” Shiv says. “And you brought him to France!”

“Should I have left him in New York?” Karolina asks. “Given him up to the feral cat colony on Rikers Island?”

“The what on Rikers Island?”

“Oh my god, Shiv, here—” Karolina grabs Oliver’s treat bag, pulling one out and handing it to Shiv. “Hold out your hand to him.”

Shiv does as she’s told, and she holds out her palm, a single treat at the center. Oliver rushes over to her and sniffs it inquisitively until he picks it up, Shiv shuddering as he does so.

“What was that?” she asks, clearly disgusted.

“His tongue?” Karolina says, but she’s laughing. “You’re a hopeless case.”

“You’re the hopeless case,” Shiv says, sitting down on a stool. “God.”

They make eye contact and they both start laughing, and Karolina forgets for a moment that they’re just supposed to be fuck buddies. That they’re not dating and this isn’t a normal occurrence, and even though Shiv has agreed to be friends, that comes with limits. Still, Karolina basks in the light, not wanting to let go of what it feels like to share a life with someone again, even if it’s for a small moment, and even if she doesn’t like Karolina’s cat as much as Karolina would like her to. By the time Karolina has finished feeding him and has wiped down the counter with enough bleach to satisfy Shiv, Karolina’s convinced her to stay for wine.

They’re talking about everything and nothing, random books that they’ve both read that Shiv hated and Karolina loved, movies that they’ve both seen that Shiv loved and Karolina despised. Their knees are almost touching, and every time one of them shifts they both bolt into action to separate, as if the fact that their hands have been inside one another is leagues different than the fabric of their pant legs come together. Karolina watches as Shiv, cheeks rosy from the wine and smile easy from a joke that Karolina’s successfully recounted, pulls her hair back, and that’s when Karolina notices a scar, a little pinkish and normally covered by the fall of her side part, poke out from under Shiv’s hairline. It’s barely visible, only moving past the hair by a few centimeters, and she doesn’t think she’d have noticed it at all if she weren’t sitting so close to Shiv.

And in her own wine-drunk nightmare, Karolina can’t stop the question from stumbling out of her mouth.

“How’d that happen?” she asks, and she regrets it instantly as Shiv’s smile falls and her posture stiffens.

“Uh—it’s a childhood scar,” Shiv says. She swallows harshly, and Karolina knows she’s lying. “My brother, uh, Roman, he—he threw one of his toys at me. I don’t remember what it was now. Probably the red Power Ranger or something fucking stupid like that.”

“I’m sorry–” Karolina says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You’re fine,” Shiv says, taking a sip of her wine, and then like she flicks a switch somewhere Karolina can’t see, her spunk is back, and she’s cocking an eyebrow, “I showed you mine.”

Karolina wonders if it’s some sort of test and she feels slightly uneasy about the pretense under which it’s falling under, like Shiv didn’t almost just freeze up at the mention of a forehead scar, but Karolina plays along because she bit Shiv, and even if it was an accident, she can handle Shiv biting back.

She rolls up her sleeve, holding out her right forearm to Shiv. There’s a jagged scar along the side of it, one that still makes her previously bolted bones still ache on rainy days.

“Back in high school I did whatever I could to piss off my father,” she explains. “There were these guys at school that liked me, and they had these cool motorcycles so, I’d go riding with them sometimes—I think you can guess how that ended.”

Shiv grimaces.

“I think you have me beat,” she says, and Karolina knows Shiv’s trying to deflect and that Karolina should be trying to let her, but she can’t stand that kind of sentiment.

“It’s not a competition,” she says.

Shiv eyes her, and she can only hold the contact for a few seconds until she looks away. Karolina just pulls her sleeve down, watching as Shiv readjusts her hair, scar no longer in view.

“You should tell Roman that,” Shiv says. “When I started losing my baby teeth the first thing he did was break an arm.”

When Shiv looks back at her, it’s like she’s begging to change the subject, and Karolina complies.

“Roman’s your other brother, right?” she asks, and Shiv nods.

“He’s the middle child,” Shiv says. “So, you know how it is.”

But Karolina doesn’t know how it is. Vic was an older sister, and she would get so mad when Karolina just couldn’t understand that apparent burden. You’re an only child, you don’t get it. She always thought it was a low blow, because, for her, only child wasn’t some sort of crown to claim her spoils with. It meant only successor, only option, only target.

Karolina wonders now if that is a sibling thing, saving your pain for important moments, letting it all blow up at once; breaking an arm when your sister loses her teeth. Maybe Vic did have that part right—Karolina never had to compete for her pain, it was given to her freely. Served with a silent, festering breakfast and a drunkenly belligerent dinner, every day: at least your dad didn’t hit you, Vic. Karolina had thrown up after that argument, the thought that he’d given her some sort of badge to throw in people’s faces when she needed it feeling more like a thorn that was stuck in her side, just so she could rip it out and say—See? I’m bleeding too!—when it felt convenient. That’s what pain is to Karolina. Convenience. To try and compete with it just feels greedy.

“I actually wouldn’t know,” she admits. “I’m an only child.”

She wonders if Shiv can tell that she accidentally bit her back.

“Really?” she says. “You’ve got the feel of, like, an older sister of seven, or something absolutely criminal like that.”

“My parents barely knew what to do with me,” Karolina says, forcing a laugh. “Thank god they never got up to seven.”

Shiv laughs as well, but she eyes Karolina as she does so and it feels not at all dissimilar to the way Karolina so often looks at Shiv, wondering what’s going on beyond the surface of her words. Shiv seems to push past the instinct to dig though, something she’s a lot better at doing than Karolina.

“Well, props to you,” Shiv says raising her wine glass slightly. “I fully would’ve blown my brains out if my brothers didn’t exist, so—congrats.”

Karolina doesn’t say that it’s a miracle she didn’t, and she holds up her glass anyway even though it feels less like a cheers and more like a commiserating tap, but there’s an understanding tone to it. There’s no, “God, you’re lucky.” It’s a, “Damn, that fucking sucks,” and she thinks maybe she’s misjudged Shiv in that moment because she’s not seeing this as a competition, she’s trying to take herself out of the race.

“Parents—they do what they can, right?” Karolina says, but she flashes her eyes sarcastically and Shiv chuckles hollowly.

“Right,” she exaggerates, and it’s then that Oliver jumps up on the couch. Karolina observes as Shiv stills, but she surprisingly doesn’t move away, letting Oliver go where he pleases. “What made you want to become a parent to…this?”

“You mean my cat?”

Karolina watches in amusement as he slowly crawls the small space in between her and Shiv, and he sniffs Shiv’s clothes. Shiv just watches as well, still seemingly frozen in her position, and Karolina stifles a laugh as Oliver picks up a paw, gently pressing it into Shiv’s leg.

“Why is he doing that?” Shiv asks.

“He’s inspecting you,” Karolina says.

“What am I, a fucking bomb threat?” Shiv replies. She slowly brings one of her hands up to him and pokes him in the forehead, and Karolina isn’t quite sure what Shiv’s intentions were, but Oliver takes it as a sign to ram his head into her hand and Shiv pulls it back quickly.

“He wants you to pet him,” Karolina says, and Shiv rolls her eyes.

“I’ve met a cat before,” she says, but the way her hand hesitantly returns to his body and runs across his fur doesn’t have Karolina convinced.

“Are you sure?” she asks, hiding a smile behind her wine.

“I must have,” Shiv says. “Who hasn’t fucking met a cat?”

He seems to like Shiv’s scent or something, because it’s certainly not her energy, and he moves closer to her until he’s lying in her lap. Shiv continues to pet him, and Karolina can hear the loud purrs as they leave his body, and she sneaks a look at Shiv, who’s become solely focused on Oliver. Karolina suddenly wishes she hadn’t left her phone in the kitchen, because she thinks it’s the sort of scene she’d like to look at a million times over, Oliver’s peaceful face and Shiv’s in quiet awe.

“I think he likes you,” Karolina says. Shiv doesn’t look up, but Karolina thinks she can see something of a smile coming out of Shiv, and she doesn’t stop the petting.

“I’m sending you my dry-cleaning bill.”

  —

  She doesn’t see Shiv for a little over a week.

Karolina had gotten a little busy with work and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t missing Shiv, didn’t miss her sharp glares and the charged banter, and she knows Shiv would never admit to as much, what, with all of her French exploits that Karolina makes explicitly clear she wants to know nothing about, but she thinks she can hear it when Shiv calls her out of the blue, and Karolina can feel the nervousness seep through the phone receiver.

“Do you want to, uh, hang out—again?” Shiv asks. “Like, not what we normally do, um—dinner, maybe?”

And it’s wrong of Karolina to tease, but it feels natural as the words come out.

“You asking me on a date, Roy?”

Her own heart pounds a little as she waits for Shiv’s response.

“Would you want it to be?”

Karolina doesn’t even have to question it.

“I think I’d like that, yeah,” she says.

“Good,” Shiv says. “I’ll send you the details.”

And then Karolina has to wait.

Has to painstakingly wait, and it feels like she’s nineteen again, going on a date with a girl for the very first time, except this time she’s thirty-nine, and it’s probably something like her millionth date with a girl, and she’s fresh off the tail of the longest relationship of her life. She’s not quite sure which thought is worse, but then she remembers going home for college break and facing her father with an un-hidable hickey on her neck, and she decides that she’s overreacting.

And then suddenly they’re on the date and Karolina forgets why she’d been nervous at all. It’s just Shiv. Ridiculously beautiful but indisputably infuriating Shiv.

“You’re sure you can’t get Oliver a pen?”

“The answer hasn’t changed since the last ten times you’ve suggested it,” Karolina says. “And like I said, he’d just jump it.”

“Whatever,” Shiv mumbles, stabbing her salad. “I’m just saying, the cost of one cat pen would surely save you on all of those lint rollers. It’s just basic economics.”

“How about the next time you come over, you try putting Oliver in his carrying case,” Karolina says. “Then let me know how you think he’d feel about a pen.”

Shiv eyes her suspiciously until she narrows her gaze, giving up with a light-lipped sip of scotch. Which, by the way, Karolina said did not impress her.

“That feels vaguely like a threat,” Shiv says, putting down her glass, and Karolina just shrugs.

“Want to find out?”

Shiv has half a mind to give it a rest, still shoving her fork into her meal with the ferocity that could only come from a woman who’s just lost an argument about a cat three separate times in a row, and Karolina tries her own hand at a question that she’s asked before.

“Will you tell me what you actually do for work?” she asks. “When you’re not on a sabbatical?”

Shiv doesn’t look happy to answer the question, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to go running this time either.

“I’m a political strategist,” Shiv says. “I manage election campaigns.”

This catches Karolina off guard. Not that she’d ever been big on keeping up with the Roy dynasty anyway, but she sort of assumed they’d all just have bullshit jobs. Political strategy seems, real, for lack of better words.

“Trying to get in the White House one day?” she asks. She’s half-joking, but Shiv seems to consider the serious side of the question.

“Maybe at one point I would’ve hoped,” Shiv says. “Now…I don’t know.”

The words hand in the air, and Karolina gives them the space settle. Before she can get a word in, Shiv is sharing more.

“I’m thinking of getting out of the business,” Shiv says, meeting Karolina’s eye. “I don’t know if it’s for me anymore.”

“Hence the sabbatical?” Karolina assumes.

Shiv shrugs as if that’s partially it, but Karolina figures she won’t push that line of questioning any further.

“What was the last campaign you worked on?” she asks, but that seems to be the wrong direction as well, Karolina noting the way Shiv’s posture stiffens in the way it always does when Karolina asks something that unsettles her.

“Uh, just—it was a congressional candidate,” she says, her words stilted.

“State secrets?” Karolina asks, and she feels bad as Shiv looks away, knuckles going white as she grips her glass.

“Something like that,” Shiv says.

Karolina sighs. Talking to Shiv sometimes feels like she’s solving dozens of tiny puzzles at once, saving information and storing it for later, pulling out old facts when she finally thinks she’s found the missing piece. She wants to tear the puzzles apart, to tell Shiv that it’s okay to be scattered, that she doesn’t have to keep things so close to her chest, but Karolina knows how hard that can be. Because that’s cheating, right? If you give someone all the answers to your heart? You’ve made it too easy for them, and then they get greedier and greedier until they hold all of your cards and you have nothing.

So, Karolina gets it; trusting is hard. That doesn’t mean she can’t leave the line open.

“You know––there’s a shorthand we use in my line of work—maybe you use it too, but it’s for when you need a filler name, like maybe you can’t say it now, but you might want to say it later,” Karolina explains. “It’s just, TK—to come.”

Shiv nods, just the slightest bit, and Karolina continues.

“Just—if you ever wanted to talk about any, state secrets, or something,” Karolina says. She quirks a teasing eyebrow at the last part as Shiv looks back up, and Shiv reveals a begrudging smirk as she does so. Karolina doesn’t think of it as any kind of battle won, but it does maybe make her feel like somewhere deep down, Shiv can accept more between the two of them. A date is just a first step. Trust is a whole new game.

“What about you?” Shiv asks. “What does a woman do after Fashion Week?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina says honestly. “I only thought as far as taking this job. It was risky, but, it would’ve been stupid to pass up, right?”

“I mean, I for one, am glad you took the job,” Shiv says.

“Oh?” Karolina muses. “And why is that?”

“I guess…I just like having you around,” Shiv smirks, and Karolina can’t help from smiling as well, because Shiv is trying. Maybe she doesn’t want to share the big stuff, not yet, but she wants to share, and that’s more than Karolina thinks she can ask out of her.

“Yeah?” she raises an eyebrow, waiting for Shiv’s inevitable but to drop, because Shiv might be showing earnestness, but Karolina knows that honesty can’t come without a little protection.

“And it’s nice having someone around who can order all of my meals in French,” she adds.

“There it is,” Karolina says, still smiling. “Using me for my services.”

“Trust me,” Shiv says. “Those aren’t the services I use you for.”

Karolina blushes. She fucking blushes.

“And what services are those?”

Shiv gestures to the waiter for their tab.

“You wanna go find out?”

  —

  Karolina doesn’t need to find out. She already knows. That every time they get into bed, tangled limbs with the lights off, Shiv wants her rough and Shiv wants her fast. She wants just enough, never more, and never less. Karolina knows that when they’re finished, she can stay, but not too close, and when they wake up in the morning and Shiv needs to get amped again because the alternative is not leaving her bed for three days, Karolina can’t say anything. She does wonder if this is the only reason that Shiv keeps her around, that for whatever reason, Karolina acts as a bystander to it all. A happy medium disposed to bend at her will.

Karolina obliges, maybe because she’s so lonely that it doesn’t matter, or maybe because she thinks Shiv is so lonely that it does matter. Regardless, she’ll wake up with Shiv in her arms and Karolina will pretend to shift in her sleep, give Shiv enough time to wake up and escape her grasp before she thinks Karolina will even know it’s happened at all.

But that night, after Shiv’s satisfied and Karolina can feel the growing knot in her stomach get even larger, Shiv extends a hand. Karolina takes it, and wakes up the next morning still connected.

  —

  It’s in the small things. The way Shiv texts to ask how work is going, or the way she sends Karolina a delivery from her favorite lunch spot if she knows it’s been a busy day. It’s in the way she invites Karolina shopping with her, asking for her opinion on which top she thinks will piss off the snobby Francophile who lives on the floor below her more and the way Shiv can never help but to smile when Karolina just asks her which top she feels better in. It’s in the way Shiv will pull Karolina behind the curtain when the store associates aren’t lurking, and she’ll kiss her with a giddy look in her eyes because Shiv knows Karolina hates worrying about getting caught but loves how much Shiv enjoys it.

It’s in the small things. Which is why the big things hurt so much more.

The second Karolina is through the door, she can tell something is off. She’s caught off-guard by Shiv’s forwardness, and even though it’s not unwelcome—it’s not like she doesn’t know what Shiv called her over to do––something feels different.

“Can we slow down?” Karolina asks, trying to ignore the sensation of Shiv’s mouth inching up her neck.

“Why?” Shiv asks. “It took you fucking forever to get here.”

“It took—fifteen minutes,” Karolina says through stilted breaths, hands involuntarily gasping at Shiv’s hair. “Shiv—can I fucking take my coat off?”

Shiv sighs and leans away, resting a hand on the wall beside Karolina’s head. Karolina shrugs her coat off, sending Shiv a pointed look, and she lightly presses it into Shiv’s chest.

“Hang it up for me?”

Shiv rolls her eyes as Karolina smirks, but Shiv grabs it anyway, disappearing into the hallway. When Shiv returns, Karolina’s smirk immediately flips into a grimace.

“Shiv, your nose is bleeding,” she says, immediately looking around for tissues or anything. Shiv brings the back of her thumb to her nose, cursing as it comes away coated in fresh blood.

“Fuck,” she says, barreling past Karolina and towards the bathroom. Karolina follows her, watching with worried eyes as Shiv attempts to get the bleeding to stop. Under the bright fluorescent lights, Karolina can actually see how worn-down Shiv looks. The more time she’s spent with Shiv, the more time she’s spent looking at that silver vial. The knowledge of it taunts her now, and she’s starting to regret answering Shiv’s call.

“How much have you taken today?” Karolina asks. She tries to keep her voice even, like it’s curiosity at play and not an accusation, but Shiv’s already high on the defensive.

“Just a little extra,” Shiv says, removing a bloodied tissue from her nose. “That’s all.”

“What’s a little extra, Shiv?”

She watches as Shiv dabs a clean tissue around the area, looking satisfied when no more blood comes away from it.

“Does it matter?” Shiv asks, washing her face.

“Of course, it matters,” Karolina says then, eyes closely following every one of Shiv’s movements. Now that they’re up close, she can see it clear as fucking day. The extra-shaky hands as she dries them, the black of her pupils taking the place of that usual crystal blue, the way she seems extra hungry for Karolina. “You’re acting like a damn rail station.”

“Very funny,” Shiv says. She grabs Karolina’s hand as she exits the bathroom, attempting to lead Karolina toward the bedroom, but Karolina shrugs her off.

“Stop,” she says. “I’m not finding this amusing, Shiv.”

Shiv’s eyebrows furrow then.

“I’m just having a little bit of fun,” she says, her frustration seeping through her voice. “Fuckin—lighten up.”

Karolina rolls her eyes. She thinks it’s a juvenile blow, one that she’s heard too many times before. It’s not so different than the frigid and the anal and the uptight, and sometimes, Karolina thinks, she’ll take those. She’ll take the criticism when it’s necessary or it’s fair, because sure, sometimes Karolina does need to lighten up, but not when Shiv’s version of letting loose is going to the bathroom and doing as many lines of cocaine that her heart can take before trying to fuck Karolina into the next morning.

“What did I tell you when we first started doing this?” Karolina asks, Shiv just rolls her eyes in return as well.

“I’m not even fucked up right now,” Shiv argues, and Karolina takes that as a challenge she needs to prove wrong. She scans the apartment for anything else, and immediately an open liquor bottle hanging out on the coffee table.

“You drinking in between lines?” Karolina asks.

“Jesus Christ,” Shiv mumbles, rubbing her forehead. “I’m fucking fine.”

Karolina thinks it has to be some sort of sick joke, Shiv standing in front of her with God knows what absorbed into her body, bloody and sleep deprived, just begging to be fucked. Karolina isn’t even sure where to begin on the list of reasons why Shiv clearly isn’t fine.

“I can’t know that, Shiv,” Karolina argues, because it’s true. This girl will tear herself inside out, on her knees, bruised and bleeding like some prisoner of her own war, screaming––damnit, I’m fine!––just to keep the truth away from herself.

“Oh my god, Karolina,” Shiv groans. “I’m not gonna go cry rape just because I let you hit it while I’m high.”

The words feel so appallingly harsh that Karolina doesn’t even know where to begin, so she doesn’t. And maybe it is Karolina’s fault, just a little bit, because if she were being truly honest, the consent is only a small part of it. The bare minimum.

If she were being honest, she’d tell Shiv that it makes her feel used. That it makes her feel like she’s some ethical weapon of self-destruction to Shiv, because it’s not self-destruction if it’s coming from a different person, right? Shiv doesn’t only keep her around for moments like these, right? She can hear Vic, somewhere in the back of her mind having the last laugh. Maybe this is Karolina’s penance, for fucking everything else up too.

“I’m going back home,” she says. “Enjoy your fun.”

She doesn’t turn around as Shiv begs her to wait, and doesn’t respond to the texts that begin piling up as soon as she walks out the door. She lasts two days––both of which take everything in her not to behave in a way that would guarantee the entirety of her team quitting by the end of the week––before caving, sending a one-word yes when, for probably the twentieth time, Shiv asks if they can talk. She comes home from work that day to find Shiv waiting outside her apartment, a bag of Karolina’s favorite takeout in her hand.

Karolina approaches her tentatively. She knows the silent treatment was wrong, but Shiv was wrong too. And Karolina’s not big on saying things she’ll regret.

“Hey,” Shiv says.

“Hey,” Karolina echoes.

“Look, Karolina—I’m really sorry about the other night,” Shiv says, cutting right to the chase. She thinks the apology sounds unnatural coming from Shiv, and she knows Shiv must not hand out concessions often.

“Yeah?” Karolina says. “What are you sorry for?”

Because if Shiv wants to act immature, then that’s how Karolina will treat her. She’s surprised when Shiv continues to comply, and she nods to herself as if this is what she deserves. She’d half expected Shiv to fight back, not come running home with her tail in between her legs, and Karolina doesn’t feel any satisfaction. She just feels like shit.

“For being an asshole,” Shiv says, and Karolina raises her eyebrows, as if to say, “That’s all?” and she watches Shiv fight the urge to roll her eyes. At least she still has some bite. “And for—violating your boundaries, or whatever. It wasn’t cool of me, I know that.”

Karolina does think it’s a decent apology, as far as Shiv’s standards go, but she’s still upset, because if she and Shiv don’t have trust then they don’t have anything, and maybe what’s more upsetting is that it showed her the trust still isn’t there. That she’d been building it up in her mind for nothing.

“I had one rule, Shiv,” Karolina says, stepping closer. “One fucking rule—don’t call me over when you’re like that.”

Like that. Karolina knows they’re dancing around words now. Dancing and dancing until they get so tangled up that they both come spinning out. Shiv’s eyes dart around, but the street is empty. The cool weather reminds Karolina of a quiet afternoon back home, when she’d have time to leave work early and get to walk the streets of her neighborhood while all the kids were still in school, and she lived far enough downtown that she never saw any tourists. Then she’d get home and she’d feel like Vic was disappointed to see her. Like she’d ruined the afternoon by just returning to her home.

Enter Shiv, begging Karolina to let her in.

“I just—I wasn’t thinking,” Shiv says.

“Obviously,” Karolina can’t help but fire back, and she doesn’t trust herself to say more. A breeze goes by, and she watches as a chill runs through Shiv. She holds her hand firmly in her pocket, wanting to reach out but fearing what would happen if she did.

“Can we go inside?” Shiv asks.

And Karolina’s still mad, of course she is, but there’s a small part of her that just wants to let it go, wants to say fuck it and just give Shiv another chance. She ignores the scary thought that she’s already given Shiv chances, but she’s not sure if chances are something she likes to quantify anymore. She’s certainly burned through enough chances to last a lifetime.

“Fine,” she says, and Shiv follows her silently into the apartment as Karolina does her best to stay relaxed, to remain calm. When they get inside, she leaves Shiv in the kitchen as she goes to change and tries to breathe through the uncomfortability at being angry with someone she cares about. She hates being angry. It makes her fingers twitch and her skin crawl, and it makes her feel all too close to her father in the way that she can’t be certain if it’s the ghost of his touch grabbing her from behind or inching up from somewhere deep within her. Or if maybe it’s just her, inescapable and lurking in her own mirror.

They’re both silent as she returns, pulling out plates and silverware and the food that Shiv’s brought which, really, does smell fucking amazing even if Karolina is a little upset with herself for falling for a bribe, and Shiv attempts to talk to her, but Karolina just shoots her down with one worded answers until Shiv gives up, crestfallen like a kid who keeps trying to get their voice in at the dinner table until they realize that nobody in the room cares about what they have to say. But Karolina isn’t disinterested. She’s fucking upset. Majorly upset.

“You know––I’m not afraid that you’re going to accuse me of something,” she eventually says. Shiv’s head shoots up at her voice, but quickly falls back down, and Karolina’s shocked when the movement looks something like shame.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Shiv says quietly. “It was fucked up.”

Karolina looks up at her, and her heart pounds a little because she doesn’t want to say what she’s going to, but she needs to say it, because Shiv needs to hear it.

“It felt like—” But Karolina cuts herself off. Shiv’s looking at her again, eagerly awaiting the words, like she’s ready to absorb the critique and the reprimand and the disappointment and carry it with her forever, ready to mold herself into whatever Karolina could possibly ask her to just so long as Karolina doesn’t leave. Karolina pockets the words for a rainy day. “Just—don’t do it again, Shiv. Please.”

And Shiv nods.

“I won’t.”

And then Karolina lets Shiv stay over, because she’s mad but she’s not a monster, and she doesn’t think she’s much of a match against Shiv’s sad fucking eyes anyway.

They’re lying in Karolina’s bed, so close together yet somehow worlds apart, and Karolina’s watching Shiv pet Oliver, his small frame nestled in between them.

“He likes you,” Karolina says, her voice still thick with upset.

“He’s soft,” Shiv says.

“Most cats are,” Karolina tries to joke, but it falls flat between them. Shiv is silent, contemplation swimming through her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, eyes still on the cat. Karolina looks away as well, doesn’t want to see the sadness on Shiv’s face.

“It’s fine, Shiv,” Karolina says. “I already said it was.”

She thinks Shiv might leave it there, and she’s about to close her eyes when she hears Shiv’s voice again.

“What were you going to say earlier?” she asks. “About—how it made you feel?”

Karolina watches Oliver shift, twisting his body so his head lands directly where Shiv’s hand is.

“Like—” she swallows. “Like you were trying to use me to hurt yourself.”

The air in the room quickly becomes thick with the words, and she waits for Shiv to deny it, to pick a fight, cry, to do something, but she just lays her hand near Oliver and settles into the bed, her voice dense with a heaviness that Karolina wishes weren’t real.

“I won’t do it again.”

  —

  They try their best to get back to normal, and whatever normal is, it’s definitely not in the voicemail Karolina receives only days later.

“Hey, Karolina, it’s me, um—I know this is an odd request, like, really fucking odd, but—my dad—he’s coming through on a business trip and wants to get dinner, and, look—say no if this is totally fucking insane, but, I don’t know, do you—do you want to come? Just as friends, obviously, this wouldn’t mean anything, but with your career and his business I think you might have shit to talk about and I—I just don’t know how I can let him see me like—uh, yeah, um—if someone was there to just take the heat off then, I don’t know. Let me know.”

Karolina doesn’t think that she sounds desperate as much as she sounds scared, and while it is an absolutely nutty idea, Karolina feels compelled to help. She’d also be lying if she said she wasn’t a little bit enticed by the idea of getting a personal sit-down in front of Logan Roy, but really, who in their right mind wouldn’t be? So, she says yes.

She ends up at a restaurant with bottles of wine that cost more than her fucking life insurance policy, settled at a small and intimate table with her fuck-buddy, and her fuck-buddy’s dad, who also happens to be the king of Manhattan. He doesn’t seem impressed when Shiv shows up with a stranger, at least not at first, but Karolina’s attractive, and she’s smart, and she knows how to craft a statement, and so she makes a joke about Sky News and the BBC and how she should’ve appreciated traditional American news media when she was still back home, and that cracks him open wide, a prideful man, unable to resist the temptation of competitive praise.

“Dad, Karolina is the Head of PR for Fashion Week,” Shiv says. “Both seasons.”

“Oh?” Logan hums, narrowing his gaze onto Karolina. “They’re working with an agency in the States?”

“No,” Karolina says, gripping the base of her wine glass. “I was previously working with Condé Nast and developed some professional relationships in Europe. One of my previous clients is on the board here, and they had an open position. Lucky timing, maybe.”

She tries to smile at Logan, but his personal demeanor is unflinching. Still, she doesn’t falter.

“Well,” he says, as if that’s that, “It’s good they’re letting women lead these days.”

Karolina sneaks a glance at Shiv, who’s trying to stifle a laugh into her drink as her father continues. It’s a performative politeness, Karolina can tell, but, hey, at least he’s being nice, right?

“You know, I always told Shiv she ought to aim higher,” he says. “It will be good for her to be around a professional.”

“Uh-huh. Sure, Dad,” Shiv says, rolling her eyes.

“And Shiv?” he says. “What are you up to?”

He sounds curious at best, but there’s an edge to his voice, and Shiv certainly doesn’t seem to like the sound of it. Karolina still wonders if for some reason, Shiv purposefully poked the bear.

“You know,” she waves her hand flippantly, “Meetings with different contacts. Keeping my options open.”

Karolina waits for a cue to jump in, to put out the fire that’s surely building in front of her, but Shiv looks determined to keep it under her control.

“And the Washington situation?” he asks, and for a second, it’s as if Karolina isn’t there at all. An intruding third party, eavesdropping as Shiv shifts in her seat, yet still taking the scene in, watching the way Shiv purses her lips and staunchly avoids looking in Karolina’s direction.

“It’s handled,” Shiv says stiffly.

Logan eyes her and Shiv meets his gaze with an unflinching sort of conviction, until Logan nods to himself and suddenly, like he’d cast some spell to lift a dark curse, the table feels light again. He looks at Karolina with a very easy smile, and she suddenly understands where Shiv gets it from, her ability to just switch. To hit some button and transform herself into whatever the situation has called for.

“How do you two know each other?” Logan asks, and Karolina scrambles, because she realizes she has no idea what Shiv had told him.

“Um—through a mutual friend,” Shiv says. “You remember Lisa Arthur, right? She heard we were both in Paris and said we should connect.”

Connect is a good word for it, Karolina thinks.

“Uh-huh,” he says to Shiv, then turning to Karolina gain, “This one staying out of trouble?”

She can’t miss the frantic eyes Shiv throws her as he asks, but it’s a no-brainer.

“Oh, I’m afraid she’s nothing but trouble, sir,” Karolina says, and there’s a slight pause before Logan’s laughing, and Shiv nervously joins in with a slightly relieved laugh of her own, meanwhile Karolina’s just thanking God she wore black so that nobody can see the sweat dripping down her spine.

“This restaurant was a good choice, Siobhan,” Logan says to Shiv, and Karolina can’t be certain, but it seems to her like they’ve won Logan over for the night.

  —

  They’re lying in bed, separated by mere inches, but Karolina can feel the ghost of Shiv’s breath on her bare shoulder. She’s closer than she usually is, and Karolina pushes her luck. It’s not something she likes to test very often, and she doesn’t think the universe looks down kindly on those who take more than their fill, but she can’t but feel like the universe has often given her more than her fill. So, she’ll take, just this once.

“The Washington situation,” Karolina says out loud, “is that about—why you’re taking a break?”

Shiv is quiet, but Karolina’s still keeping the windows open at night, so the room is a little cold, but the moonlight is shining through just enough to illuminate them in the darkness. She can see Shiv’s eyelashes batting as they both lay awake.

“Yeah,” Shiv says. “But it’s nothing. Just a—a low-hanging fruit. Dad shouldn’t have brought it up in front of you.”

Karolina swallows thickly. She has a million more questions that she won’t ask, because that was her push. That’s all the luck she’ll test for tonight.

“Okay,” she says, turning onto her back. “Consider it forgotten.”

Shiv doesn’t respond to that, and it’s quiet for a moment until Karolina hears her voice again.

“When we first met, you asked if my parents named me after a knife,” she says into the darkness.

“I did,” Karolina mutters. She remembers thinking the name Shiv more closely resembled a comic book character than a socialite. Siobhan made a lot more sense. Siobhan Roy made the most sense.

“My dad named me,’ Shiv says. “I don’t think my mom really had a say.”

Karolina tries to check-in to the mental game that she and Shiv always seem to be playing. The reading between lines, the talking in circles, and she thinks maybe she can tell what Shiv is trying to get at. That in some, fucked up way, Shiv’s dad is important to her. Regardless of what Karolina knows, or thinks she knows. Shiv gives a little, so Karolina gives a little as well, because despite whatever Shiv thinks, or thinks she knows, she and Karolina are seeming more alike than not every day that passes.

“My dad always hated my name,” Karolina admits. She breathes out deeply, not having thought about it in a long time, the way it seemed like he’d spit her name every time he had to say it. Like he couldn’t get it out of his mouth fast enough.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

Why. Karolina sighs softly, pondering the same question she’s asked herself so many times before. There’s really only one answer that she ever came down to.

“Maybe because it was mine.”

Shiv doesn’t say anything, but Karolina can feel the bed shake and the sheets rustle, and she realizes that Shiv is moving closer to her, fitting her head in the crook between Karolina’s shoulder and her neck, and wrapping a hesitant arm across her torso. Karolina immediately meets Shiv’s hand with her own, because she doesn’t want Shiv to feel unwelcome in her space for any longer than the half a second of hesitancy Karolina feels as Shiv nestles in, and she feels a special kind of calm wash over her as they both settle into the contact.

When Karolina wakes up, Shiv is still there.

  —

  “What do you think the artist is trying to say?”

Shiv is leaning down, talking lowly into Karolina’s ear. She says it in a teasing tone, clearly making fun of the pretentiousness of it all. They’re at an art gallery opening, another event Karolina’s gained the privilege of attending through her client connections. It’s above her social league, that much is apparent, but Shiv had seemed interested when Karolina mentioned it in passing, and so Karolina RSVP’d herself and a plus one, the thought of Shiv willingly joining her as a date too good to pass up.

Karolina eyes the painting. It’s a minimalist gallery, certainly not Karolina’s favorite for deciphering beyond what would look good on her walls, but she attempts to humor Shiv. The piece they’re in front of is a fully blacked-out canvas with a series of neon orange circles taking up the space inside. She imagines someone who likes this style of art might have something to say about the crispness of the circles or the contrast of the colors, and she thinks the technique must have something to do with why the painting has a charitable price tag of over four hundred thousand, but even still, she actually finds the nature of it pleasing.

“I like this one,” she says. “Something about the way the colors are presented, it’s nice.”

“Sure, it looks nice,” Shiv says, still looking unimpressed. “But it just seems too easy. I’m pretty sure this is what Roman used to make before eating the mac and cheese colored crayon when he was eight.”

Karolina fights against the urge to ask Shiv why her brother was still eating crayons at age eight, and she just marvels at Shiv’s relaxed state, no regard for whether the artist could be lurking behind her, or whether a gallery investor could be in the sea bodies in front of them. She doesn’t have a care in the world, and it’s like Shiv seems to revel in the discomfort of it all. Karolina’s come to realize that Shiv can walk into a room and immediately decide whether the people within it are worth her time, and the moment she walked in, she decided this gallery was bogus and that switch flipped in Shiv. She’s walking around with her hand on the small of Karolina’s back, whispering insulting quips about the guests and the artwork every so often. There’s a mischievous giddiness to her, an American heiress in a room full of French people who have no idea who she is.

“Does it have to prove something?” Karolina asks, turning to Shiv. “To be worth looking at?”

Shiv seems slightly taken by the question, but then she raises her eyebrows, the emotion only fleeting.

“I didn’t take you for a connoisseur,” she says, and then she looks at the painting again. “I guess you’re right.”

Her eyes glaze over the painting, and Karolina wonders if it’s actually doing its job, making her feel. Shiv seems to be someone who is always trying to prove her worth, as if that’s something that needs to be proven at all. Shiv squeezes Karolina’s hand and tells her that she’ll be right back, and Karolina doesn’t have to wonder why the painting suddenly made Shiv so upset, because it’s not about the painting at all. Shiv just needs another fix.

So, Karolina holds Shiv’s champagne and tries to undo the knot in her stomach, but it only grows with every tormenting second that Shiv takes, and Karolina hates that this is a condition of their affair. Hates that she’s just supposed to pretend this is normal, and hates that she feels powerless in stopping it. Shiv eventually comes back from the bathroom with watering eyes that she knows there’s no use in trying to hide anymore, and Karolina meets those eyes with angered ones of her own that she really tries her best to hide, but can’t, because they were having a good night, and now they’re not.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Karolina ends up saying, because it’s true and she means it, but Shiv doesn’t get mad. She just shrugs her shoulders and gazes at the painting again.

“I wish I wouldn’t either.”

  ––

  When they get back to Karolina’s apartment, shoes kicked off and bodies tentatively heading for the bedroom, Karolina waits for an okay that never comes. Shiv’s sitting on Karolina’s bed and Karolina’s lingering in the doorway, and they come to a standstill, Karolina like she’s waiting for permission and Shiv like she’s waiting for an order. Karolina leans against the doorframe as she eyes Shiv. She looks smaller in the yellow light of the room, patiently waiting for Karolina to take the lead. She’d been silent in the car back, and Karolina suddenly worries that Shiv thinks she’s upset with her.

Which, maybe Karolina is, but not in the way that should worry Shiv.

“Want to watch a movie?” Karolina asks, cocking her head slightly. She doesn’t let herself react to Shiv’s surprise, or the hesitancy with which she looks back at Karolina, doesn’t dare give Shiv a reason to believe that Karolina wants anything more than what she’s asking for.

“You’re, um—you’d be fine with that?” she asks. She sounds like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, like she’s holding her breath because Karolina’s testing her and it wasn’t an exam that she’d had the time to study for; but it’s not a test. Karolina doesn’t need a headboard apology, she just wishes she knew the magic formula to making sure Shiv never has to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that’s despite herself.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Karolina asks.

Shiv looks away, trying to hide the way the question hits her, and Karolina elects to ignore it, grabbing the remote and climbing into her bed, far from the end where Shiv is sitting. When Shiv looks back at her, Karolina holds out the remote as if to say, your pick, and after a moment of hesitation, Shiv grabs it. She scrolls through the options for a while, pausing on a few enlightening selections before absolutely blowing Karolina’s mind with what she does choose.

“Practical Magic?” Karolina asks.

“What,” Shiv snorts, “Karolina Novotney isn’t into Practical Magic?”

She has to feign offense at that, because her DVD collection (currently most likely covered in layers and layers of dust in her storage unit back home) would be highly insulted by the thought.

“I am,” she says. “I just didn’t think you would be.”

“I guess I’m full of surprises,” Shiv says, smiling sweetly.

“You just have the hots for Sandra Bullock,” Karolina says.

“Something tells me you have the hots for Nicole Kidman,” Shiv says, twirling a lock of her hair. “Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Shut up,” Karolina says, and she crosses her arms, because fine, maybe she’s always had the hots for Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic. Shiv and her frustratingly beautiful red hair don’t have to have anything to do with it.

She looks over to Shiv and it takes about two seconds before they both burst into laughter, and the tension is broken as Karolina reaches out for Shiv and pulls her into her chest. Shiv collapses into her willingly, and the ever-present graveness of everything feels a little bit lighter.

It can only last for so long though, and it’s not until the credits are rolling and the evil boyfriend is long-dead and they’re just lying there, Karolina running her fingers through Shiv’s hair while thinking way too much about why Shiv would’ve chosen this movie, that Shiv takes charge of the conversation.

“You know when you said that the Eiffel Tower—that it’s so big the rest of the city pales in comparison?”

That feels so long ago now, almost a few months of Shiv filling up Karolina’s mind since that night.

“Yeah,” Karolina says. “I remember.”

“Do you think that can happen to people?” Shiv asks, voice peaking. Karolina looks down, but all she can see is the top of her head and her wringing hands.

“Maybe,” Karolina says. Because people can become consumed by things and never return. They can get chewed up or swallowed whole and be spit out all the same, and it can define them, the thing that took them. But that wouldn’t happen to Shiv. There are already pages and pages of things Karolina can say about Shiv that have nothing to do with the thing that consumes her. Karolina doesn’t even know what that thing is, and it’s then she realizes that there’s something paradoxical to it, because how can Shiv become overshadowed by something that she won’t let exist?

Still, if it did come to light, Karolina doesn’t believe it could tower her. Not when she knows how bright Shiv’s presence is, “But not to you.”

“How can you know that?” she asks.

“Because I’ve seen you in front of the skyline, Shiv,” Karolina says. “All I could see was you.”

She can feel her heart pounding, and she knows Shiv must feel it too, the rhythmic beating vicious from inside her ribcage, but she finds that she doesn’t care. If Shiv doesn’t know how she feels at this point, then it’s a lost cause anyway. Shiv doesn’t immediately respond, and when she does, it’s not what Karolina is expecting.

“I’m sorry that I’m such a mess,” she says, and Karolina’s erratic heartbeat turns to something more like aching, because Shiv actually does sound sorry. Sorry that this is her life, sorry that she’s dragged Karolina into it, sorry that she can’t feel the same way Karolina feels about her.

“You’re just hurting,” Karolina says, and Shiv stills, because Karolina knows it’s not something she was supposed to know, not something she was supposed to figure out, but she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to look at Shiv and not figure it out. Even still, Shiv hasn’t let it consume her. She stands tall among the wreckage.

“Maybe,” Shiv eventually says, confirming weeks of observation in just one word.

  —

  Sometimes, Karolina really just wishes everyone in the world would do her a favor and keel over.

“I don’t care what we have to promise them,” she says, holding up a finger to an expectant Shiv, fresh coffee in hand. “Just put whatever they want in the scope and we’ll deal with it, okay?”

The employee on the other end agrees, some Junior Manager named Jacques—as if it couldn’t get any more fucking French—and she hangs up as fast as she can, setting her phone down roughly onto her kitchen counter.

“Jesus—fucking, Christ,” she huffs sharply, leaning her hands on the counter. She knows setbacks are par for the course in an event like this, but they’ve been dealing with absurd requests from talent and vendors all week, and there’s only so much that she actually has the time to make happen. Not to mention that it’s a Sunday, and she can’t remember a single moment in the last ninety-six hours that she wasn’t either sleeping or putting out a fucking fire.

She takes a deep breath, trying to evaporate the ugly adrenaline of anger that’s forced its way into her system, and then she feels a weight against her back and two arms snaking their way around her torso.

“If only this was London Fashion Week,” Shiv says lightly. “Then you could just call them all wankers and get on with your weekend.”

“I don’t like cursing at my employees,” Karolina says, ignoring the joke.

“Okay,” Shiv says, drawing out the word. “Then how about you just ignore them for an hour so that doesn’t end up happening?”

Shiv squeezes at Karolina’s side a little bit, a reminder that she’s still here, that human life beyond client scopes and emails.

“I have to take care of a few more things,” Karolina says, trying to escape Shiv’s grip.

“It’s nine in the morning on a Sunday,” Shiv says, lightly fighting against her. Karolina gives up, not that she’d been trying very hard anyway, and she turns around, leaning against the counter. Shiv quirks an eyebrow. “I think they’ll survive until ten.”

Karolina isn’t sure that’s so true, since they clearly couldn’t survive until nine, but she relents, leaning forward into Shiv’s chest with a sort of purposeful reluctancy, not all that dissimilar from the way Shiv likes to act when she’s pretending she doesn’t want Karolina around. She wonders if they’re less of a match and more of a reflection, constantly catching each other in the act with nonjudgmental eyes but consequential curiosity all the same.

Shiv brings her arms up higher, swallowing Karolina in her embrace, and for a moment, she lets herself imagine that this is real. That she’s back home and it’s a time in her life where she still knows the Bodega guy’s name and she still keeps cat treats in her purse for the tabby that lives in the pasta aisle at her supermarket, and she hasn’t chosen capitalism over love. She imagines a Shiv that doesn’t scare her, one whose face isn’t so chiseled, and hands aren’t so unsteady, whose cheeks still carry the same, sweet pink but whose eyes don’t look so constantly at odds. One that she met in a way she could tell her mother about—a mix-up at the dry cleaners or a small talk at the crowded DMV—so the dull throb of shame for never having brought home a man might hurt a little less. She wonders if there’s a world where she can have that again. Where she can have Shiv in a way that doesn’t feel like everything is always seconds away from total destruction.

She wraps her arms around Shiv as well, and briefly wonders what would happen if she just never let go.

“You okay?” Shiv asks.

Karolina doesn’t know if there’s a right answer. Things have never been better, but there’s still an emptiness. What are you supposed to do when you think you might be falling in love with someone who doesn’t even seem to understand what love actually is? Karolina’s no expert either, but she knows enough to understand that Shiv’s experience is obscured, and she knows enough to understand that Karolina’s absolutely fucked.

“There’s just a lot going on,” Karolina says, and she tries not to let it sound how she means it, which is that work is a lot, and Karolina’s life is a lot, and Shiv is a lot. She can feel Shiv’s nails lightly graze her back as her hand curls slightly into the fabric of Karolina’s shirt.

“Is it too much?” Shiv asks, and Karolina knows they’re not talking about her job anymore.

“No,” Karolina says. “I’ll handle it.”

Because she will. She’ll get the vendors the extra two partners they’ve requested even though the pre-parties start in five days, and she’ll find twenty extra park benches (that certainly don’t exist) to splatter their logos across even though they’ve never needed that many park-bench signs before because, really, pigeons don’t go to fucking Fashion Week, and if in the middle of all of it, Shiv calls her in the middle of the night skiing down a slippery slope and too drunk to realize that the bed she’s asking for is in Karolina’s apartment, she’ll be there. She’ll handle it.

“You know you don’t have to be perfect around me,” Shiv then says. “You’ve eaten my shit, right?”

And Karolina guesses that she has. That she’s shown up for Shiv night after night and Shiv just wants to return the favor. Because in some sense, Karolina is asking Shiv to trust her. To let down her defenses and believe that Shiv won’t chase her away just because things aren’t currently built for a white picket fence, and Shiv is asking Karolina to do the same. To trust her, just a little bit, to handle some of the hard stuff. Karolina isn’t so sure that the Shiv she knows has that ability, isn’t sure she’d pull the lever on the trolley if it were coming straight for her, but she knows that Shiv must exist somewhere, that at some point she had to, so Karolina gives it to her. Gives her the reigns for just a singular thirty seconds, an inconsequential test trial that can’t result in bodily harm or sudden death.

“Fine,” Karolina says, maybe with a little more attitude than she’d wanted, but Shiv wants to be trusted with the real her, and sometimes the real Karolina is snippy. Shiv’s hand relaxes and Karolina focuses on the pressure of Shiv’s fingers on her body, and it does feel good, letting Shiv be the bigger person.

“I have to run some errands,” Shiv says, grip not loosening, “so, why don’t you go answer those emails and curse out whoever you need to, and I’ll be back with lunch?”

Karolina bites her tongue, not wanting to ask what those errands are, because she’s pretty certain it has something to do with the low stash she saw when Shiv asked Karolina to grab her phone from her purse the night before, and she just nods into Shiv’s chest. Lets Shiv feel like she’s doing something right for once, because in a way, she is, and then she lets Shiv go, trusting her to come back in one piece.

(She only ends up cursing out one person.)

  —

  Karolina continues to pretend. She pretends like Shiv agreeing to be her plus one to the week of events doesn’t make her heart skip a little, and like when Shiv texts her and asks what jewelry Karolina will be wearing to make sure their metals don’t clash it doesn’t feel more romantic than anything else she’s ever experienced before, and that when Shiv is standing next to her, hand on the small of her back, strategizing about all of the ways to maximize the business potential in the room because Karolina still doesn’t have her next job lined up rather than grumbling about the snobby rich people and begging her to leave early, it doesn’t somewhat feel like maybe they’re the two most powerful women in the room. That maybe, she’s met her match.

It’s a double-edged sword though, and Karolina can’t pretend that Shiv’s mood doesn’t shift at the end of each night. That the second the lock clicks in either of their apartments she’s taking off her earrings with a rigid spine and pensive eyes and Karolina can’t ignore what that means, can’t stand the thought of Shiv just playing along to make her happy. So, Karolina pushes again, hoping that it won’t be too much.

Shiv’s standing in front of the mirror, switching out her necklace for her everyday chain.

“You’re beautiful,” Karolina says, hovering in the doorway. She smiles as Shiv meets her gaze through the mirror, and Shiv gives her a small smile of her own, before changing out her earrings. Karolina walks into the bedroom, stopping in between Shiv and the bed, still looking at Shiv through the mirror.

“You know, you really don’t have to keep going to these events,” Karolina says, sitting on the bed, “if you’re tired of the charade.”

Shiv meets her eyes through the mirror and Karolina can see the moment she turns herself back on, as if she’d forgotten was a machine supposed to be willing and able for any bidding.

“I don’t mind,” Shiv says, closing her jewelry boxes. She turns away from the mirror and when she faces Karolina, she’s replaced her face again, this time with something distracting. She moves forward, not stopping until she’s leaning into Karolina, one hand placed precariously over Karolina’s chest. “Besides, it’s kind of hot when you get all, oui m’dame, to your boss.”

Karolina nearly takes the bait, wants to thank Shiv for sticking by her side in the best way she knows how, but it gives her pause, because that’s what it’s about, is it? Karolina doesn’t want Shiv to come just because it’s going to win her points. She wants Shiv to come because she wants to be there,

“Hey, wait—” Karolina says, lightly pushing Shiv back. “I just—I don’t want you to feel obligated, you know? I’m not going to be mad if you want a night off.”

Karolina thinks she’s struck a nerve at the way Shiv’s lips twitch just a little and her eyebrows dig a little deeper into her forehead. She’s touched a sore spot that perhaps had been lingering all along. She wonders about the TK of it all and worries that maybe she has gone too far, but Shiv’s face returns to neutrality almost as quickly as it’d left, and Karolina thinks the attempts at hiding her uncertainty would work if she just didn’t know Shiv better by now.

“I’ll tell you if I don’t want to be there,” Shiv says, brushing Karolina’s stray bang away from her face. “Yeah?”

Karolina wants to take the sentence at face value, but she’s not so sure she can trust that from Shiv. She wants to, but can she?

“Will you?” she asks, and she searches Shiv’s eyes. Shiv stares back, likely going through all the things she can say to dissuade Karolina from the image of Shiv she’s built up in her mind, but it’s no use, Karolina knows who Shiv is, and Shiv knows that. Still, it doesn’t change anything. Shiv nods, and Karolina has to believe her.

“Believe it or not, I sort of enjoy the company,” Shiv says, a small smile returning to her, and Karolina knows that’s her cue to drop it. Knows that’s all Shiv will give her, a promise of honesty that they both know she’s not intent on keeping.

“Sort of?” Karolina says, leaning back expectantly.

“Well,” Shiv says, following her movements, “Maybe a little more than sort of.”

Karolina doesn’t stop her this time, letting Shiv give what she wants to give, and although she can’t shake the feeling that the tender hands and the roaming lips are supposed to be more like compensation than they are desire, she still accepts them, and when they’re finished Shiv lays Karolina’s arms and she remembers that it wasn’t so long ago that Shiv couldn’t even bear to touch her afterward.

“Shiv?” Karolina says, and a quiet, “Hm?” reverberates on her chest. Karolina presses a featherlight kiss into Shiv’s hair and Shiv just burrows herself deeper into Karolina. Karolina imagines this is real.

“I like the company, too.”

  —

  “I’m going to have to go back to New York soon,” Karolina says. Her eyes are half closed, enjoying the warming weather on her balcony as Shiv smokes a cigarette. Their hands are loosely connected, Shiv dragging her thumb lightly across Karolina’s palm. The runways have started, and Karolina’s job is almost complete. Things are slowing down for her, just wrap up meetings and after-action reports.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

“Because it’s where I live,” Karolina jokes, but neither of them laughs.

“Do you know when?” Shiv asks.

“A few weeks,” Karolina says. She opens her eyes, squinting at Shiv in the sun. Shiv taps her cigarette harshly over the ashtray.

“Can you stay longer?” Shiv asks, quietly, and Karolina frowns, because Shiv never asks for anything, not out loud at least, and if she did, Karolina can’t think of anything she wouldn’t do. But this is something she has no control over. Something she can’t deliver on.

“My visa is going to expire,” Karolina says. “They need to kick me out so the next group of tourists can come in and be disappointed by French espresso.”

She fights again to find some amusement on Shiv’s face, but she finds nothing even close to it. Shiv looks away from her then, but her grip on Karolina’s hand becomes tighter.

“I hadn’t realized how long it’s been,” she says.

Karolina hadn’t either. Months of entanglement, from a chance meeting in a random club to this.

“Just because I’m leaving—” Karolina says, “—this doesn’t have to end.”

She watches Shiv’s face for even a hint of what she’s thinking, but Shiv just stares out into the view in front of them, a couple of rooftops that have their own inhabitants enjoying the freak warm weather. Karolina wonders if things for them always feel this grave as well, or if they’ve reached a point in life where everything’s stopped being so dire. She really thought she’d be there by now.

“That’s a pretty long distance,” Shiv eventually says, and Karolina puts down her book and reaches over to grab Shiv’s arm, lightly grazing her thumb across it.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she says.

Shiv looks at her and then looks away again, sighing.

“I’m not going back.”

“Why not?” Karolina asks. Shiv’s bouncing a leg now, and Karolina knows they’re getting into dangerous territory, but they both need to know what’s going to happen after this. Karolina doesn’t know if she’d survive the cold turkey, and Shiv might act like she can, but Karolina doesn’t want to find out whether or not that’s true.

Shiv takes another sharp drag of her cigarette and her eyebrows furrow.

“I can’t,” she admits. Shiv says it like even the thought threatens to break her, but Karolina wonders if it’s too late for that. That despite her best efforts, Shiv is already long shattered.

“What are you afraid will happen?” Karolina asks, her voice calm.

“I don’t know,” Shiv says. “There’s nothing left for me there.”

Karolina knows why Shiv would say that. That her family legacy and the big fancy parties and the distant father who favors her overbearing brothers aren’t anything she’d want to go back for. That whatever happened in Washington carved a wound so deep that she needs uppers to get out of bed and downers to slow her heart enough to get into it, and that it’s easier to ignore and forget than to remember and let go. But Karolina still doesn’t think there’s nothing for Shiv there.

“I’m not nothing,” Karolina says, and Shiv finally looks over again. Karolina thinks she can see a twinge of pink over Shiv’s nose, a little extra glossiness in her eyes, and it’s a gut-wrenching thought, the idea that Shiv is fighting a battle in her mind that she won’t let Karolina into. She’s throwing her own body in front of the archers as if that’ll save either of them from destruction when in reality, it’s the thing that hurts them the most.

“No,” Shiv says. “You’re not.”

Karolina hates seeing Shiv feel so alone, especially when she’s right next to her, touching her, existing with her. She thinks Shiv feels her emotions like she’s the only person on the planet who has ever had them, and Karolina wishes she were more tactful, because anything Shiv is feeling, Karolina’s certain she’s felt before.

“I don’t really have anything to go back to either,” she says, and Shiv immediately shakes her head.

“You have a great life,” Shiv argues, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv doesn’t, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv is dragging her down, somehow, and Karolina wants to laugh. Her life has become hollow. Hollow work for a shallow industry, distant friends that she doesn’t check up on enough, too many lost lovers to count with the most recent feeling like her culminating failure. She considers that maybe she’s just been hollow from birth, and she wonders if Shiv can feel that shared between them, that absence that can linger in a child forever if parents aren’t careful enough.

She realizes then, that maybe it isn’t about tact at all. If she wants Shiv to give, then she has to continue to give as well.

“I chose Paris over my relationship,” Karolina admits. “Before I left, she gave me an ultimatum—and I chose the job. Nine years, gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Shiv says, and it sounds like she means it. Karolina shrugs, hands still linked with Shiv’s.

“I’m just saying, I don’t have a life to go back to,” Karolina says. “I’m starting over.”

Shiv seems to get that message, the idea that they could start over together, and she roughly wipes at her face, Karolina assuming it to be a tear that she can’t see from where she’s sitting.

“Why’d she give you an ultimatum?” Shiv asks, ignoring the sentiment.

“She thought I loved my career more than I loved her,” Karolina says.

“Did you?”

Karolina will never forget when Vic asked point blank, “Do you?” and Karolina hesitated. She hesitated, and that was it. In that split second, they could both fill in the blank.

“Maybe,” Karolina says instead. “Or, maybe in the end I just wanted to love her more than I actually did.”

She hates the way remembering makes her feel so cold, how instead of comforting each other through the end, Vic had just told her to get out, and she did. She left without a fight. She just gave up.

“Love is fucked anyway,” Shiv says, but Karolina stills, unsure if that’s true. She decides to bite, praying that it doesn’t send Shiv away.

“Were you—you and TK, were you in love?” she asks nervously.

Shiv drops their hands at the mention of the codeword, and she crosses her arms, folding into herself. For a second, Karolina thinks Shiv isn’t going to give her an answer, but she’s surprised when Shiv does.

“I thought we were,” Shiv admits. “But when he—”

She cuts herself off, and Karolina just waits for Shiv to fill the silence again.

“The way it ended,” Shiv eventually says. “It didn’t feel like love.”

Karolina doesn’t let her mind wander. She’s silent as she tries to come up with something to say that doesn’t feel like she ripped it out of a get well soon card in the pharmacy, but then Shiv steals a glance at her, a very quick one, and her voice rings out again.

“What do you think love should feel like?” she asks.

Karolina looks at Shiv, carrying more pain than she’ll ever truly know, yet here she is, being honest with Karolina. Asking her the big questions, letting herself be vulnerable with someone new, and Karolina realizes that maybe she has done something right for once. That love and trust and a career and happiness might not be as far out of reach as she’d thought. She closes her eyes and faces the sun again, letting her body soak up the warmth.

“Maybe like whatever this is.”

  —

  Shiv won’t say it, but Karolina knows they’re exclusive. Knows that Shiv considers Karolina hers and that if Karolina strayed, Shiv would care. That if Karolina left, Shiv would care. That Shiv cares. She also knows it’s too soon for Shiv. That old wounds aren’t yet old, and that she still can’t trust Karolina not to accidentally rip them open, that Shiv just needs time. They both know that they’re running out of time.

What Shiv doesn’t know, is that Karolina is prepared to wait.

  —

  Sometimes, it feels like Karolina is still catching up. Things go well for so long that she forgets exponential growth can stutter and stagnate and sometimes even fall, despite her efforts, despite how much she wills for things to be smooth and perfect. But even in stagnation, there are lessons learned, there are things that change and that still constitutes growth, right?

Shiv calling her panicked and breathless at two in the morning and asking if she can please just come over is horrifying and heartbreaking but also very different than a Shiv who a few months ago couldn’t even hold Karolina’s hand, right?

When she gets there, it’s not quite the scene she’d been expecting. Shiv’s call had her fearing the worst, but the apartment is calm and clean, and she can’t quite figure out what the issue is until she finds Shiv, curled up on the couch, an American news channel on her TV. Shaking hands carry her nail beds to her teeth, and her slightly angered face is partially hidden by the way she has her knees pulled into her chest, listening intently to the soft hum of the television. Karolina’s eyes travel towards the TV; on it is a special report, some greasy bastard with enough pomade in his hair to supply an entire class of pre-tween boys who’ve just discovered the world of manscaping and shifty eyes that look like the secrets he’s sitting on could take his entire campaign down in one fell swoop taking up the screen, and Karolina thinks she puts the final puzzle piece together.

She sets her bag down and walks over to Shiv with cautious legs, cautious arms, and a cautious mouth, and she sits down on the couch, listening to the report. It’s a fluff piece about an after-school meal program in DC.

“Did you work on that initiative?” Karolina tries asking.

Shiv doesn’t move, the only sign that she even heard Karolina’s question being her cheeks sucking in as she shifts her jaw, and her eyes drop from the TV, as if she can’t speak while looking at him.

“Uh—” she sniffs, and digs a hand into her hair for a second before her hand rubs harshly on the back of her neck, “yeah.”

Karolina nods, steeling herself before asking her next question.

“Is that him?”

The silence is suffocating. If she couldn’t see the tight rise and fall of Shiv’s chest, she wouldn’t be sure she was even breathing at all, and Shiv’s face immediately twists, as if the question itself was the last straw in her ability to hold back the tears. She watches as Shiv fights against the instinct to blink, fights against the instinct to let herself cry, to fall apart and to let Karolina see this, and eventually, something gives, because Shiv may be great at pretending, but she’s not superhuman.

She blinks and the tears run down her face slowly, and then, so slightly that Karolina would’ve missed it if Shiv weren’t the entire center of her world currently, Shiv nods.

Karolina releases a deep breath and steals another glance at this man’s smug face, still not even knowing exactly what he’d done, but feeling a familiar rage course through her system. It’s one she keeps on reserve, one she doesn’t often pull out because it’s so red-hot that it feels like she can’t come back from it. The kind she’d used the first time she stood up to her father. It’s then that Karolina notices the small ATN on the corner of the screen, and she knows that if she were anywhere else but alone in an apartment with Shiv, she’d allow the anger to be blinding; but for now she’ll just have to let it be sadness, and protection, and reassurance, and whatever else Shiv could possibly need from her right now.

She doesn’t think she can stomach the sight of him any longer, and doesn’t think Shiv can either, so she grabs the remote and that’s what finally springs Shiv into action, latching onto Karolina’s arm as if it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.

“Wait—” Shiv says, and her eyes tear away from the remote and back to the TV, then to Karolina, and they’re full of such a timid desperation that Karolina wishes she could just open Shiv up and find the faulty wiring, wipe whatever horrible memories seem to be trapping her in this moment and just fucking fix it, but she can’t. What she can do is get this prick’s shadow out of Shiv’s living room before it does consume her. Before it swallows Shiv whole in a way that she feels like she can’t come back from.

Karolina gently brings her hand over where Shiv’s is still latched onto her arm, biting the inside of her cheek when Shiv jumps at the touch, but she doesn’t stop, just guiding Shiv’s fingers to uncurl and then she connects their hands together. She holds on tightly, rubbing her thumb across the top of Shiv’s hand.

“I’m going to turn it off,” Karolina says softly. “Okay?”

She waits for Shiv to react, not daring to break the eye contact Shiv is maintaining until eventually, Shiv is the one to break it, and she nods; hesitantly, but she nods. Karolina immediately turns it off, cutting off his arrogant voice in the middle of some sentence about education reform and the thought of him makes her feel sick, the theatrics of this pedestal he’s posing on when she can see Shiv right in front of her, the consequences of his pedestal in her peripheral, touching her hand. The consequences are real, not some bullshit bill that he’s only getting passed as some sort of mutually beneficial hush deal.

She turns to watch Shiv closely, waiting for any sign of what her next move should be. She doesn’t let go of Shiv’s hand and Shiv doesn’t make a move to let go either, and Karolina is almost ready to speak up again when what little is left of Shiv’s resolve cracks fully open, and Shiv drops her head into her free hand, letting it all out as if this is the first time she’s allowed herself to feel the depth of her emotions since this whole thing had started. Karolina takes deep breaths herself, not wanting to get swept away in her own emotions, and she rests her free hand on Shiv’s back, waiting for any sign that Shiv might not want the contact. Shiv doesn’t react, and Karolina wonders if Shiv even remembers she’s there.

She doesn’t know what to say to even begin trying to make it better, and she feels entirely out of her depth. She just resorts to being there, because Shiv had asked for her, and if this is what Shiv needs, then fuck, Karolina would sit here for months. The French police will have to drag her out of the country kicking before she leaves Shiv, that’s for damn sure.

She draws the same pattern over and over across Shiv’s back until eventually, Shiv leans down, laying her head across Karolina’s lap. As she does so, the tears lessen some, not quite all-encompassing but still burdensome, nonetheless. Karolina is surprised when Shiv speaks, her voice gruff and guarded, and Karolina knows just from the sound alone that she would give anything to take away an ounce of the pain.

“I thought coming here would make things better,” Shiv says. “Like maybe the distance would stop it from feeling like so much.”

“Treating the symptom,” Karolina says, moving her hand to play with Shiv’s hair. Shiv doesn’t say anything to that, and Karolina takes the turn to speak again, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Shiv sighs, her breath shaky.

“He just really hurt me,” Shiv says, her voice cracking slightly, and it’s so simple that it makes Karolina want to scream. She can feel the sting of tears in her own eyes, and she blinks them away. There’s no complexity to it. He hurt her bad enough that she raced to an entirely different continent to numb her days with booze and blow, in a country where she barely speaks the language and nobody would ever notice her, to whittle herself into nothing. To carve herself hollow with sex and drugs until there’d be nothing left to take from her. Nothing left to lose.

Karolina’s fingers move towards Shiv’s hairline, both her and Shiv stilling when she brushes against the scar she’d asked about what feels like so long ago now.

“Did he do that?” she asks, though she isn’t sure she wants the answer. At first, she doesn’t think she’s going to get another one, every question she asks feeling like a deeper hole that she and Shiv might not come out of unscathed, but she has to try, and it seems Shiv does as well.

“The handle of a kitchen cabinet,” Shiv says, clearing her throat. “He said he opened it too fast. That he forgot I was there.”

Karolina hates how clinical the answer is. He said it was an accident. He didn’t see me. He said. He said. He said.

“Is that when you left?” Karolina asks, and she doesn’t want to ask it, doesn’t want the confirmation of whether or not it’s the last scar, if it’s not the only scar—somehow worse if it’s the only visible scar— but it doesn’t look new. It looks old and angry and most of all, it looks sad.

“Uh—no, that was…it was the first time,” Shiv says. “I guess I believed him, or—or, I wanted to, maybe…”

“It’s confusing,” Karolina jumps in. “When you love someone, and they do that.”

“Yeah,” Shiv whispers.

Karolina removes her hand from Shiv’s hair and drapes her arm over Shiv. She’s trying to figure out what her next move should be when Shiv’s fingers run along the surgical scar on her forearm. She remembers she decided to start sharing more. That she owed it to Shiv if she expected the same from her.

“Do you remember when I told you about that?” Karolina asks, and Shiv nods.

“Motorcycle accident,” Shiv says.

Karolina nods even though Shiv can’t see her, and she eyes the scar, less faded than it should be for something almost twenty years old.

“When I broke it, I had to get surgery—a plate and seven screws,” Karolina says. “After it healed, my father, he’d um—grab my arm in that spot. Never hard enough for it to hurt, but just hard enough so that we could both feel the screws under my skin. I don’t know if he even remembered they were there the first time, but every time after that, it was with purpose, you know?”

Shiv grazes the scar again, as if she’s afraid to touch it.

“He wanted to remind you,” Shiv says. “Of your weakness.”

“Yeah,” Karolina says grimly. Not that she needed reminding, and not like she didn’t continue to test him anyway.

“Are they still in there?” Shiv asks. “The screws?”

“No,” Karolina says. “I had them removed once I could afford it. That’s why the scar hasn’t faded so much.”

It was a day of freedom. Something tangible that she could rip out of her body and be rid of, but she knows Shiv doesn’t have that same luxury.

“TK—” Shiv says, even though Karolina knows his name now, “When we got back from the hospital—he told me it was a good thing I wouldn’t be the one on TV, and he held that over me, every time we got into an argument in public or somewhere he couldn’t—somewhere he didn’t have power he’d find a way to say it. And now, every time I look in the mirror he’s just fucking there. He’s always there.”

Shiv’s voice cracks again and Karolina just holds her tighter.

“It’ll fade, Shiv,” Karolina says, because there isn’t anything else Karolina can assure her of.

“I just wish I could erase him,” Shiv says. “Pretend none of this fucking happened.”

Karolina won’t pretend like she knows everything, but she thinks she knows this one thing. She’s banked her entire life on it being true.

“He’ll fade too,” Karolina says. “It won’t always feel like this.”

Shiv just grabs Karolina’s arm and holds it close to her chest, and as Karolina feels Shiv’s heart beat fiercely into her bones, she knows she is telling the truth. She listens to Shiv’s quiet breaths, and looks around the living room, the sweat from the early morning dew on the windows making the glow of the room much warmer than it currently feels. It’s a big apartment, too big for one person, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to leave Shiv in a week. She doesn’t know that she can. Even still, this is bigger than her.

“Shiv?” Karolina asks, hesitantly.

“Yeah?” her small voice croaks out.

“I think––I think maybe you should see someone,” Karolina says, and she can’t stop her own voice from cracking as the words come out. “You can come back with me, and we’ll find someplace private in the city, or maybe somewhere upstate and I––you know, I wouldn’t be that far, then.”

Shiv’s response comes in the form of the smallest, most defeated sound that Karolina thinks she has ever heard, a quiet, “Okay,” with an affliction that Karolina hopes she’ll never have to experience come out of Shiv again.

“Okay,” she whispers back.

“Will you stay tonight?” Shiv asks, and Karolina just runs her free hand soothingly through Shiv’s hair once more.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

[burningvelvet]

this is a long analysis on titanic (1997), re: my last reblog on titanic’s depiction of rose coming into her own sexuality, being sexually dominant, & actively pursuing jack romantically, + LGBT themes, feminism, & the cal/jack/rose triangle as a freudian representation.

—this is one of the great and unique things about this film and also i’d like to point out that although we see jack liking rose first, rose is the one who actively pursues him every step of the way which is almost never seen in films. the roles are almost always reversed. she’s the one who lies to protect him, she’s the one goes to see jack again on the deck under the guise of thanking him, she’s the one who snatches his art book and asks about the nudes, she’s the one who asks to be drawn and specifically drawn nude, she saves him with an axe, she’s the one who initiates sex, etc.

i despise it when people talk about titanic like it’s the most boring cishet movie of all time when it’s one of THEE most progressive/subversive imo (in terms of popular mass media). jack is one of the only major male romantic figures i’ve ever come across who never says anything sexist even in jest, who never dominates their scenes together whether emotionally/romantically/sexually, and who genuinely helps the female protagonist become a better person rather than vice versa. i can’t even think of comparable male characters, so yes in a way he is the perfect example of a manic pixie dream boy. i would go as far as to call their dynamic a subtle gender role reversal and i don’t know why this isn’t talked about more.

there’s also been a lot of queer interpretations and analysis on titanic which i think is apropos. jack and rose have been seen by some as being butch-coded/lesbian-coded ever since the movie came out, and you can also make a case for rose representing (metaphorically or literally) the experiences of gender-envy or being GNC, especially in the scene where jack nonjudgementally teaches rose to “ride like a man, and spit like a man” — and she says “why can’t i be like you, jack?” — etc. — jack actively encourages her to go against the gender norms and i don’t think it’d be a reach to say that he would be supportive if she was LGBTQ+ and vice versa & that they’re both clearly allies regardless of interpretation. Take for example Rose’s line to Kack: “I know what you must be thinking— poor little rich girl, what does she know about misery?” & Jack’s response: “No, no, that’s not what I was thinking. What I was thinking was, what could’ve happened to this girl to make her feel she had no way out?” — As Rose says, Jack “sees” people, and validates/recognizes them in a way that is similar to the queer theories on queer kinship, allyship, & solidarity. Rose and Jack find each other and feel kinship for each other through their mutual progressive/bohemian values in a way that is commonly experienced by LGBT people finding other LGBT people, which is heightened by Rose/Jack’s mutual attraction & their blooming relationship being socially frowned upon (due to classism + Rose’s engagement).

I also think it’s important to point out that sexuality is a core theme of the movie in general, & this is esp important considering it takes place in 1912. From Rose’s Piccaso painting of the prostitutes, to Rose’s comment at the table about Freud re: male overcompensation, to Cal slut-shaming Rose, to the nude French prostitutes, to Rose saying she’d rather be Jack’s whore than Cal’s wife. The theme of being a “ruined woman” is rampant. Many of Cal/Rose’s scenes are laced with subtle sexual implications with him wanting Rose to be sexually submissive/passive/exclusive/available (“do not deny me”) and her clearly not being interested in that role (Cal asks her why she didn’t come to his rooms late at night when he asked her to, and he’s always the one initiating contact, & she clearly hates him). It is also very clear that Rose sees her wifely duties as performative, and to some extent her gender itself is performative (see: the scene where she watches in anxious disgust as she sees a little girl being taught how to act like a lady through table etiquette, and Rose immediately runs off to Jack). I also think it’s ironically symbolic that Cal gives her his mens coat toward the end, and we see pictures of young her wearing pants and riding horses “like a man” as her and Jack fantasized, etc.

I also think it’s intentional that Jack is slightly tomboyish/androgynous looking, younger, and open-minded, whereas Cal is older, dominant, and represents a sort of Byronic “tall, dark hair, handsome, rich” version of masculine appeal. There’s also the split in politics, class, etc. — they represent opposite ends of male sex appeal while both being attractive. The love story wouldn’t be effective if Cal was unattractive bc his sex appeal is necessary to the narrative. Jack and Cal’s contrasting versions of sex appeal are what make this love triangle so effective yet conflicting (aside from their differences in personality and Cal being abusive/Jack being supportive) because the contrast between Jack/Cal highlights and brings out Rose’s sexuality and her transgressive sexual desires. She refuses to be sexually passive for Cal. In nearly all of their scenes together, Rose and Cal are constantly competing for sexual dominance through their dynamic—whereas with Jack, Rose doesn’t have to compete for dominance bc Jack accepts her for the way she is and actively lets her take the reigns and sexually guide him, and Jack feels comfortable in the role he plays. During the drawing scene and in the car scene, he’s presented as being shy and nervous but is still clearly enthralled by her, whereas Rose is suddenly the comfortable/confident/more knowledgeable one, even making jokes when Jack reacts to seeing her disrobe. Typically in cishet romances, the roles would be reversed, which is what Cal desires—that’s Cal’s tragedy, that in the end when he searches for Rose during the sinking and then later on the Carpathia, he’s mourning a fantasy of who Rose was, & tried molding her into a submissive version of herself & destroying her dominant/masculine side.

For these reasons, I believe Jack also represents a part of Rose’s subconscious mind, and that the lines “he exists now only in my memory,” “it was the ship of dreams, and it was, it really was,” are symbolic of this. I see their relationship as being more importantly a deep bond of friendship and a connection between two kindred spirits than being solely romantic. To use a Freudian model, Jack helps bring out Rose’s “id” whereas Cal tries to supress it and bring out Rose’s “superego,” and Rose ends the film by forming a healthy “ego”—this is what makes the Cal/Jack/Rose love triangle so riveting and effective, because it represents this clash of values and this tug-of-war thru this Freudian Trio.

I’m considering turning all this into an actual academic essay atp lmao

[weirdestbooks]

The Fires of Hatred and Passion are Much the Same (Wattpad | Ao3)

bold is french

France took another drag of her cigarette, before blowing the smoke into Britain’s face, a small smile on her face.

“France, please be serious,” Britain said, sighing deeply. France’s grin widened a beautiful kind of amusement in her eyes.

“Come now, mon chéri, learn to have a little bit of fun,” France said, offering out the cigarette. Britain ignored her outstretched hand, causing France to let out a small huff of annoyance.

“We need to focus,” Britain argued, not wanting to be dragged back into one of their back-and-forths that always ended with more longing than they should. He didn’t want to be reminded of the terrible longing he had for her, the terrible longing for something more than the insults, barbs, and war.

“Fine, fine, if you insist.” France said, taking another drag of the cigarette, “But you’re missing out. Come on, cigarettes are good for stress, and you are always so stressed out.”

“You’d be stressed too if you had to deal with as many brats as I do,” Britain commented. France laughed, rolling the cigarette between her fingers, amusement in her eyes. It was a beautiful picture, one that Britain tried to commit to memory.

“Oh, and you call me the whore. Then again, maybe I am one, but at least my children like me. Say, how’s your relationship with America again?” Britain clenched his fists, trying hard to keep calm, the air of longing broken by the rage that flooded through him, another reminder that no matter how badly either of them wanted this, it would not come to pass, not unless something made their countries closer.

“Better.” He forced out through gritted teeth, not liking the reminder of how much his control had slipped from one of his most docile sons or that fact that the sinful woman he felt so much longing for knew she could use it against him.

“Just like ours, ma petite île,” France said, getting closer until their faces were inches apart. Britain scowled and pushed her away, pushing aside the unwanted thoughts of kissing her and then taking her to bed.

“You can’t flirt with me and expect that I’ll fall for your feminine charms,” Britain said, ignoring the very poignant fact that he already had. But he could at least lie to France and keep some semblance of control. France laughed, something that told Britain that his lie was not working. Strangely, he was less upset by that than he should have been.

“Oh, Britain, I’m not trying to make you fall for me, but I’ll be sure to put you down as interested next time I’m bored,” France said. Britain flushed, embarrassment flooding through him. He hated it when France caught him off guard like this.

“I’m not interested, whore.” he snapped. This was not a time in which he could indulge in his feelings, even if that offer were oh-so tempting. He would have to deny the temptress for now.

“Oh, be creative, why don’t you? I’ve heard much more creative insults come from your mouth. Let’s not pretend like this detour isn’t the usual.” France said. Britain rolled his eyes.

“What, you mean all the talk about how Satan sent you to torment the Earth? Because those aren’t insults; they’re facts. You sin, and you sin and still have the audacity to call yourself a Christian because you feel no shame about any of your actions.” Britain said. Sometimes, it felt as if this France was sent to torment him specifically with the sinful longing he had begun to feel since the turn of the century.

“We’re both sinners. We both don’t feel shame for those sins, so we might as well be unashamed sinners together,” France said, her voice low. It was so painfully attractive, and Britain knew France knew it.

“We’re supposed to be enemies, so what exactly do you think we can do together? We would have to wait for time to allow us to do so. You and I both know that secrecy isn’t what you’re best at.” Britain said, taking the cigarette from France’s hand and taking a long drag.

“Ma petite île, I can keep a secret if you want me to,” France said, taking the cigarette back and pressing a gentle kiss to Britain’s lips, a kiss that tasted so much like the cigarette. Almost subconsciously, Britain began to lean into the kiss before France pulled away.

“Just because you want to doesn’t mean you can,” Britain said, feeling slightly breathless. France smiled.

“That’s true enough, mon chéri,” she said, her tone light and airy, her voice confident and beautiful, “But I know we both can’t wait for that day to come.”

France kissed him, this time, less gently, this time more of a promise that maybe someday the mutual attraction that had been building for some time could go somewhere, a promise that they could be something more to each other.

As far as promises go, this one was pretty nice.

[purecommemasolitude]

Chucked all my thoughts while watching le rouge et le noir for the first time here so have them without show context

Also while missing a good chunk of the show cause I accidentally went on another page without saving the draft schwoopsie

so ding dong is bonheur de malheur with more inexplicable doorbell noises

this man is a MENACE

ohhhh the way the lighting only illuminates mme de rênal half the time during this time is excellent

and then she's an immobile doll for him to position and place bouquets in her hand?? wonderful

the way julien sounds so edgy every single time he talks. king relax

this use of the turntable is quite good but is this man literally climbing a mountain right now

NAPOLEON????

oh putting julien on the top section for the musicians as the first (i think?) actor to do so as he sings about wanting to ascend in his life position... sublime

a) why is his napoleon locket HUGE. couldn't you find a smaller one b) "like you, I'll be the eagle... and she'll be my prey" girl. as far as i can tell at this point in the show you do genuinely like her. why are you describing her like that

NOOO NOT THE MAID

also it's been so long only watching zuka shows that seeing people actually kiss instead of stage kiss is genuinely shocking

"julien... whose portrait are you hiding in your locket?" "i can't tell you... but know it's a man" omg bisexual king 🤩🤩😍😍

I really can't tell if it's a choice here or if he's just really off-time

his gritty voice is fine for solos but i do wish it wasn't present in the love song duet :/ UNLESS it's a hint that he doesn't really love her in which case phenomenal

(Okay now at DLNJVR and it appears he did actually love her and it wasn’t a clever galaxy brain moment. Shame)

glad to see the good old "your character Does Not sing this song but here sing it for the cast recording" trick of french musicals again

ahh the fancy home crumbling once he learns of the affair >>

HE'S GONNA FUCKING KILL HER????????

Okay okay I thought we were going for an INTENSE genre shift right there

Gotta admit I’m not the hugest fan of any of the men’s voices

The house rebuilding itself as he composes himself >>

No Louise :((((( let me tell you if I were her husband I would treat her right

He is SO edgy. Salieri Mozartl’operarock better watch out

DLNJVR actually goes ways harder live than I would’ve thought

His voice works really well for it and her section is very nice

“Admit it, father, you only laugh when you’re with your moody little priest of a secretary. And he’s not even funny.” You’re so real for that queen

Also that line is a very nice way of establishing the timeline

Anyway I love all the women characters this musical should be about them only

Ohh when everyone is still except for them on the turntable >>> I love staging

I forget their names but this couple is also acceptable they’re so fun (it was the Valenods)

Why?? Does she flip pages with both hands???

“Do they surround me because they see me as their prey?” You’re one to talk sir.

Also I thought Sans elles was a breakup song for sure but this does make sense

Misogyny 🤩

The song does translate quite well to stage though I am enjoying it

Wait why is he going to meet her anyway. You just sang about how much better off you were without her

This is such a silly scene I’m a fan

IL AURAIT SUFFIT YEAHHH

LOUISE DD:

LOUISE SINGING THE OUR LOVE WON’T BE AFFECTED BY THE SPACE BETWEEN US LINE AUGHHH

That probably could’ve used more buildup to be effective but I love il aurait suffit too much to care it’s probably my favourite le rouge et le noir song

The way I wrote so much and then it got deleted because it didn’t save. Sigh

I don’t care enough to retype alas

The ones I remember clearly enough will be turned into separate posts

The main gist of it was that I liked Geronimo Mathilde and Louise and not much else

Recontinuing

Mathilde’s dad looks so familiar I must have seen him in something else

Why does Côme always look so sullen

Tbf I assume a lot of it is not being able to see his facial features that well due to the low video quality but like

Girl the way they skipped Geronimo in the cast countdown??

NOÉMIE GARCIA??? I DIDN’T KNOW SHE WAS IN THIS

Aw I like how they’re having people applaud the techies and band as well as the actors :)))

Reprises of the biggest songs at the end of French musicals :)))

Lesbians real

I joke but if Mathilde and Louise had just loved each other and forgotten julien everything would’ve worked out Fine. It definitely would not have but I can pretend

All in all it did slightly disappoint my expectations but overall it was a good time

The music slapped, as expected

And the set design & staging was really neat, and far surpassed my expectations after i saw it was mainly screens

[moonlightdancer26]

thoughts on camille o'connell?

I’m not the biggest fan of her character tbh, from the moment she was introduced she was portrayed as this perfect smart saint-like girl who could “fix” the big bad beast (Klaus). There wasn’t much of her that interested me, but despite that, I still liked her and appreciated Leah’s amazing acting. But after she became a vampire, I really did not like her, she became much more annoying and irrational. [The same happened with Elena: I L O V E D her as a human, but once she became a vampire I could hardly stand her.]

That being said, I really hate how mean Klaroline shippers are to her, I’ve seen so many on tiktok hating on her and even body-shaming her. It’s really unfair imo and Cami (and Leah) don’t deserve that. I’m a diehard Klaroline shipper and I think they’re totally superior (I think Klaus was meant to have more of a connection with Cami’s character, but Klaroline still managed to outshine them with their dynamic and incredible chemistry), but I dislike how Cami stans immediately assume that we just don’t like her because of Mother- I mean Caroline. While that can be said for MANY Cami haters/Klaroline shippers, it shouldn’t just be brushed off as “shipping wars” (I’m the biggest Ship Wars hater ever so like??😭). I’m a huge multi-shipper and I think Klamille had some really cute moments, but I still don’t like the ship very much, and I think Cami deserved better than to have her character be revolved around Klaus and his redemption.

I’m currently rewatching The Originals actually, and while I have a slightly blurred memory of the last season (which is part of the reason why I’m rewatching), a lot of my old feelings towards the characters and ships are flooding back, which is why I’m sure some of y’all have noticed an increase in TO content on my blog lmao.

ALSO I HAVE A VERY LARGE COMPLAINT, why do they pronounce the “ll” in her name? 😭😭 It triggers me sm because the name is literally French and is supposed to be pronounced like “Ka-mee.” When she was complaining about guys assuming she’s French because of her name-tag I felt instantly called out 💀 I do ofc still pronounce her name the correct way whenever I talk about her or say her name.

So to sum it up, I definitely don’t hate her but her character still didn’t appeal much to me. And I still think she deserved better than Klaus and to have her character be reduced to simply his love interest.

Anyway, thanks for asking anon. I love it when I get asked about my opinion on things that aren’t about HP. <3

[sandbees]

Now I need a whole ass fic of an Addams!Yuu, because that's my whole childhood rolled in one and the aesthetic is just 👌🏻

Can you imagine Yuu keeping everyone on their toes by making Ramshackle even more of a safety hazard by making mortal traps? And if they ask her she would just answer that she was showing her love and that it was normal in her world 🤗

Cue to the boys wondering about what kind of world she came from 🤣🤣

THIS IS PERFECT 👌

Grim: Oh, before you enter the house, you gotta ring the bell.

Vil: ...What bell?

Grim: That one. *Points at a...uh, basically a noose* Otherwise you’ll open a trap door filled with spikes.

Ace: ...That wasn’t there before?

Yuu: I didn’t install it until after Heartslybul’s...fiasco. It honestly wasn’t that much. *Pulls noose*

*Very loud bell ring and then the door opens*

Ace: What the fuck?

_=_

Yuu: *Holding a headless doll*

Leona: ...Why do you bring that with you everywhere?

Yuu: It reminds me of my cousin’s doll. Her name was Wednesday and she had a doll like this. Sam was very kind to give me one of his dolls for me to play with.

Leona: ...why is it headless?

Yuu: Oh! Wednesday’s doll was headless because it was based on Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who was beheaded long ago during the French Revolution. :D

Leona: ....

_=_

Vil: Ugh, I just want to throw these roses Neige sent me...

Yuu: I’ll take them off of your hands!

Vil: Ah, thank you, Yuu- what are you doing?

Yuu: *Cutting the flowers* Oh, these flowers don’t have thorns...what a shame.

Vil: ??? *Low-key freaked out*

Yuu Addams scares everyone, and also scares them even more when they visit/see Ramshackle. It’s a creepy and dangerous house to be in if you’re not familiar with how it works. And honestly, the only ones who could avoid all of the traps (or activate them and not get harmed) are probably the Diasomnia gang.

PFFFT IMAGINE LILIA HELPING YUU SET UP THE TRAPS. “Oh, thank you for helping me with the guillotine Lilia, I was afraid I couldn’t set it up by memory.” “Fufufu, no worries. I can clearly remember how they were set up so long ago.”

If Yuu wasn’t magicless (everyone is convinced that they are), they would have been sorted into Diasomnia.

:00 Yuu and Malleus bond over being misfits and out of place, and also because people fear them. It’s like a really sweet goth aesthetic couple that are very adorable together.

Also a mother that is very homicidal 👀 if ever Yuu’s mother magically arrives, Yuu introduces them with a smile that everyone just nods along and accepts that their mother is also a serial killer. (“So that’s where Yuu gets all the murderous tendencies”)

THE MOTHER WOULD DEFINITELY USE VIOLENCE TO THREATEN CROWLEY TO TREAT HER KID BETTER. “Hey, you better pay my kid so much more or we’re going to have some problems. :)”

Yuu happily introduces their mom to their friends. The boys are a little scared of Yuu’s mom, as Yuu’s mom smiles threateningly and says, “Oh yes dear, I’m sure they’re wonderful friends. They haven’t harmed you, right?”

(Everyone prays for the overblot’s safety when Yuu mentions all the overblots they’ve been through.)

[thecloserkin]

fic rec: This is How It Works by Sena

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 12k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: it’s not a “Jess finds out” fic so much as a “Jess confronts her own ignorance” fic, and holy hell is that a fresh take

When we say “Stanford era—Jess finds out,” the finding out refers both to the incest and the monster-hunting—Sam’s two deepest, darkest secrets. Nobody refracts Samdean through Samjess the way Sena does. Instead of quaking with shame and trepidation that Jess has hit upon the truth, Sena’s Sam seems unfazed about the ways in which he and Dean are decidedly not normal. Like, he’s aware they’re not normal. But his secrets are not this world-ending force or toxic substance that’s radioactive to his other relationships. Being a hunter and being in love with Dean? He doesn’t try to repress or deny or hide it, he just…compartmentalizes.

The first time Jess lays eyes on them together Sam is dressing an ugly gash on Dean’s arm and calling him an idiot (fond). It’s the casualness of Sam’s military-neat stitches that grips her with a cold foreboding. Sam and Dean are so matter-of-fact about it though that there’s no oxygen in the room to ask “btw how did you come by that skillset.” So Jessica swallows her questions and her doubts. Dean is literally trying to hit on her while being sewn up in her bathroom, and Sam’s rolling his eyes to signal “there goes my brother the horndog sorry about him,” and none of this is a performance, exactly; it’s just not the whole truth.

Look, I salivate at any and all Outsider POVs on these boys’ possessive behavior, but this isn’t that. This is the photonegative of that. This is Sam and Dean knowing with fatal certainty that what they are to each other—no other attachment can touch it.

Our girl Jess is a quick study. Jess isn’t annoyed that her boyfriend’s brother has showed up with zero advance notice and needs to crash with them for an unspecified amount of time. Jess wants to get to know Dean better, because she intuits that Dean is the key to unlocking all the doors Sam has kept closed to her. Yet as sharp as she is, there’s no chance she’ll figure out the truth until and unless it’s staring her in the face. The truth is just so far outside the realm of possibility that it would never occur to a normal person. This is Sam and Jess showing off their fancy french press to their houseguest:

"This is good," Dean says, like he's surprised. "Maybe you should work at Starbucks, Sammy."

Sam grins and Jess wonders how Sam and Dean can seem so comfortable together, so close, while Dean doesn't even know the basics.

”I do work at Starbucks," Sam says.

You hear that? That’s the sound of me SHRIEKING because what Jess considers “basic” information and what our boys consider “basic” information are …not the same. The fic does this a lot, exploits the gap between what Jess notices and what the reader notices: The minute Dean rolls into town Sam cannot keep his hands off of Jess and they fuck like bunnies:

"Sam," she whispers. "We can't."

”Why not?" He slips his fingers into her panties, strokes her gently.

Jess' breath catches and she grips his shoulder to steady herself. She loves the way he touches her. "Your brother," she says.

EXACTLY!!!! His brother is the reason he is like this!!!! It kills me that she’s afraid Dean will hear and Sam is hoping Dean will hear.

I can’t really blame Jess for not seeing what’s right in front of her eyes, though, because Sam and Dean behave exactly like—well, like a pair of brothers who don’t have a lot of interests in common and who are constantly engaging in that low-level sibling one-upmanship and gentle ribbing:

”Hey, I'm just stunned that you've actually got a girlfriend, let alone one that looks like that." Dean looks back over at her and Jess can feel the heat behind his stare.

Sam smacks Dean in the back of the head. "Keep your eyes in your head, dude."

”I’m only human," says Dean.

A perfectly normal exchange, right? The other stuff isn’t there unless you’re looking for it. The way Dean goes out of his way to always refer to Jess as “your girlfriend” instead of by name—you think he’s doing that for Sam’s sake or his own? Sounds like Dean’s trying to rein in his notoriously poor impulse control by laying lines down in the sand.

So Jess overhears Dean and Sam having sex in the living room. She doesn’t walk in on them—she deliberately chooses not to see anything she isn’t supposed to—but there’s no mistaking the sounds Sam makes when he’s having sex. Her primary reaction is not revulsion or outrage but resignation. It explains a lot about the way Sam is:

Jess watches him for a long time, and he doesn't look any different. She thinks he should, though she knows it's ridiculous. He's just Sam, the way he's always been, the way she's never known he was.

And this is when she confronts him:

”Don't," Sam whispers. "Don't even think that you can understand."

”Maybe I can't, but that's not my fault. You don't tell me anything, Sam.”

She doesn’t want him to do penance for cheating on her, she just wants him to let her in!!!! Get yourself a girl like Jessica Moore.

I feel like a lot of fics romanticize the way Sam and Dean grew up in each other’s pockets, how they’re made for each other and no one else; otoh other fics will pathologize how that childhood trauma warped them and made it impossible for them to let other people in. I like how this fic doesn’t shade that codependency as either good or bad, it’s just a fact about Sam and Dean, just like the fact they’re tall.

Anyway Jess has barely any time to process the incest bombshell before the monster of the week comes knocking at the door. It’s … a lot. I’m going to quote this dialogue at length because it’s like Sam is having two different conversations, in two different languages, only he switches back and forth so seamlessly it’s like he doesn’t even notice. Like it’s another day at the office. The only one who notices is Jess:

Sam pauses and looks at Dean with incredulity. "A chupacabra?" he asks, and Jess thinks for a moment that Sam thinks Dean's crazy, just like she does. Then Sam says, "Christ, Dean, chupacabras feed on animals, not humans, and they definitely don't tie humans up and feed on them for days before finally killing them."

”I know," says Dean, raking his fingers through his hair. "I know, OK? It's not a chupacabra chupacabra, it's just...it's a bloodsucky kind of humanoid kind of mothman-ish thing, but no wings."

Sam rolls his eyes.

”It looked like a dog at first, if that helps," Dean says. He hurries into the hall and looks both ways before darting off towards the living room.

”Great," Sam grumbles. "A shape shifter."

”Sam?" Jess asks. She doesn't know what else to say. She wonders how she never knew before that her boyfriend was not only delusional, but completely insane.

”Come on." Sam takes her hand and pulls her out of the bedroom. In the living room, Dean's unpacking a duffle bag full of guns and knifes. He tosses a box of shotgun shells at Sam, and Sam palms them quickly and slides the box into his pocket.

”Why the hell didn't you ever salt your doors?" Dean asks as he stuffs a gleaming silver revolver into the back of his jeans.

”I did."

”Yeah? Because I just checked and there's no salt."

”It's inside the doorjamb. And there's salt in every windowsill."

”You said you replaced those because they had water damage!" Jess can feel her voice climbing higher and higher with every word, but she can't stop it. "Sam Winchester, what the hell is wrong with you?"

”Oooh, she just used your full name, dude," Dean says as he hikes up one pant leg and stows a knife in his boot. "You're so in trouble right now."

The fact that Dean can tease Sam at a time like this, when he fucked Sam on Jess’s couch last night, when he’s gearing up to hunt a monster with Sam today…it’s enough to fry Jess’s brain.

"I'm sorry," Sam whispers into her hair over and over again. She doesn't know what he means, if he's sorry about not telling her the truth, if he's sorry about having sex with his brother, if he's sorry about cutting off some demon-thing's head right in front of her.

He’s sorry for all of it, of course. It’s all one big tangled ball of yarn.

Ok but can we talk about the ending of this fic, because it is perfection. Jess, having seen the shape of this thing between Dean and Sam, understands that to love Sam means loving Dean too. But just because there is a part of Sam that belonged to Dean first, that will always belong to Dean, does not mean he only belongs to Dean. Jess does what any sensible girlfriend would do, which is go for the package deal that will net her all of Sam, with nothing held back this time:

”I’m not in shock," says Jess. She kisses Dean again and he kisses her back for just a moment before he pulls away.

”You're not thinking straight," he tells her.

”We could share," she whispers against his mouth.

Dean jerks away from her and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

”What?" she asks. "You don't kiss anybody you're not related to?"

”You're drunk," says Dean.

The next morning:

Jess bites her lower lip. "About last night, when I--"

He grins at her and shakes his head. "Don't worry about it. Hell, I'm a damn handsome devil. Ow," he says when Sam punches him in the arm. "Anyway, Jess, it was nice to meet you. You take care of my boy, here."

That ambiguous formulation, my boy, absolutely slays me because it crystallizes the thesis of the whole fic: the cognizance that whatever else Sam Winchester may be, he was Dean’s first. I mean…genius. Showstopping. Nonpareil. This fic made me so sad and angry on behalf of Jess, whose soul is so generous and so perceptive, and who deserved so much better from the showrunners, from the Winchesters, and from us.

[separatist-apologist]

I have an idea for a one shot, Elucien, Nessian, and Feysand cutest couple contest and Elucien wins but then Eris and Arina walk in and actually win 😂

Okay anon, I'm sorry I sat on this for so long but it took me a hot minute to figure out how to write this.

I think you wanted fluff? Anyway you get unhinged insanity. This is the mating game (like the newly wed game) and if ANYONE says I got any of these couples besides Elucien wrong, it's because this is my first time writing them in earnest.

This is SFW though there are impolite sexual references so exercise good judgement. References to HENrietta the chicken (no apologies).

--

--

“What is this, again?” Nesta groused, crossing one leg over the other.

“It’s the mating game,” Gwyn, ever cheerful, replied. Beside her, Azriel helped organize a stack of cards, offering them to Gwyn without a word. The red-haired priestess perched on a stool to survey the group of people sitting in Rhys and Feyre’s drawing room. Though the game ought to be fun on its own, there were bottles of liquor just out of reach on a nearby table surrounded by cups and snacks.

“Why doesn’t he have to play?” Rhysand demanded, jerking his head towards the spymaster. All heads turned to look at Gwyn and Az, the two newest mates in Rhysand’s inner circle.

“Because he doesn’t want people knowing his personal business,” Gwyn offered. Azriel’s cheeks flushed as Lucien, Rhysand, and Cassian all glanced anywhere but at the females across from them. Twin black, leather couches had been rearranged for the game, with males on one side and females on the other. Behind the males, a roaring fire kept the howling wind outside from leeching cold into the softly lit room.

“Can we start or—”

“Not so fast,” Eris Vanserra stated, bursting through the twin glass, French doors theatrically. Behind him Arina, bundled in a puffy red coat, rolled her eyes and shook out long, blonde hair.

“I invited them,” Elain murmured quickly before Cassian or Rhysand could protest. “Arina is my best friend.”

“Hurtful, baby sister,” Eris intoned, joining the other males across the room. Arina plopped between Nesta and Elain, squeezing her friend tight. Azriel offered Arina a large stack of white cards and a black marker while Gwyn offered the same to Eris. It was impossible not to notice how Azriel’s eyes avoided Eris despite how desperately Eris was clearly trying to provoke him.

“The rules of this are simple,” Gwyn, perhaps sensing a squabble brewing, began explaining the rules of the game. “I ask questions about your mate, and you answer. The team with the most right answers wins that knife in the corner, generously donated by my mate, not to be used on anyone in this room.” Her eyes slid to Eris as she said that last part. Behind Azriel sat a gleaming silver hunting knife with a black, leather wrapped hilt placed just beside a matching leather sheath.

“Males first,” Rhysand decided and though Gwyn rolled her eyes, she didn’t contradict him.

“Want to take bets on who wins?” Cassian whispered.

“Shush,” Feyre shot back.

“The first question: What would your mate liked you to have served them when you accepted the bond?” Gwyn asked. All four females immediately turned to their cards. Elain began scribbling immediately, her lips upturned in a smile that very much said her and Lucien had discussed this before. Arina, too, was writing though her shoulders shook with laughter.

Nesta frowned, looking over at a furiously scrawling Cassian. “Did I not give him exactly what he wanted?” She whispered.

“No cheating!” Feyre elbowed Nesta though she hadn’t written anything either.

“Ten seconds,” Azriel warned. Everyone turned back to their cards, the only sound the squeaking of markers on slippery paper.

“Time.”

“Okay, we’ll start with Feyre. What would your mate likedyou to have served them when you accepted the bond?” Gwyn asked, teal eyes twinkling.

Feyre glanced towards Rhys, who was grinning openly. Azriel narrowed his eyes.

“No mind sharing,” the spymaster warned the pair of them.

“We’re not,” Feyre replied earnestly though the glitter in Rhysand’s violet eyes told the room he had definitely tried. “I wrote exactly what I gave him.”

“Turn your card, Rhys!” Gwyn replied excitedly. Rhys’ grin only widened.

“Oh for fucks sake,” Nesta snapped when Rhys revealed Feyre herself.

Beside Rhys, Lucien began shaking with silent laughter.

“Nesta?”

“I wrote what Feyre wrote,” Nesta replied, turning a card that read a biscuit.

“Oh…babe…we are going to lose,” Cassian said sadly, turning a card that read A nice roast.

“Ungrateful, is what you are,” Nesta grumbled.

“Elain?” Gwyn asked hopefully.

“Lucien said he would have been fine with dirt,” Elain replied, her card written neatly to reflect exactly what she said. Lucien turned his own card excitedly to reveal the word dirt written in impossibly nice calligraphy.

“The bar is so low,” Gwyn mumbled. “Okay, Arina, give us what you’ve got.”

“Eris wanted an apple pie,” she replied, flipping her card with a wink. Eris grinned, revealing his own card that had a drawing of an apple pie, followed with a little arrow pointing to his description that read apple pie.

“We cannot lose to Vanserra’s,” Cassian told Nesta.

“Then do better,” she hissed.

“Next question,” Gwyn interrupted, her teal eyes bright with amusement. “What is your mate afraid of?”

Everyone collectively groaned as they wrote. “This feels like political subterfuge,” Eris grumbled.

“Like anyone cares about your fears,” Azriel mumbled as a reply.

The responses were only a little better. Feyre and Rhysand both guessed my mate dying as their response. Nesta wrote endless warwhile Cassian responded with nothing, causing a booming laugh to escape Azriel’s mouth. Elain and Lucien also wrote my mate dying, and Eris, grinning at Arina, clapped his hands when she wrote falling into a pit trap. He’d done another drawing of a stick figure falling into a hidden hole causing the room to burst into speculation as to whether it had happened or not. The twinkle in Arina’s eyes suggested it very much had.

“Next question. What was the first thing your mate thought when they saw you for the first time?” Gwyn’s enthusiasm was unmatched and Azriel scooted just a little closer to Gwyn, his own hazel eyes bright with affection.

“Don’t get this one wrong, darling,” Rhys told Feyre as he wrote.

“I just know you two are cheating somehow,” Cassian complained.

“If we were cheating, we wouldn’t be losing to the Vanserra brothers,” Feyre shot back. “No offense, Lucien.”

“Some offense taken,” Lucien joked.

“Turn over your cards,” Azriel demanded.

Feyre went first. “I wrote, my mate is a human.” Rhys groaned, flipping over a card that read, “most beautiful female I’d ever seen.”

“That’s what I thought!” Feyre replied, outraged. Rhys merely shrugged. “We were thinking the same thing.”

Nesta, smirking, turned her card over next. My mate is terrifying.

Cassian cackled, revealing a card that read Nesta scared me.

“I know that’s romantic but…wow, Cas,” Azriel teased. Cassian merely shrugged.

“I always knew my perfect female would terrify me.”

“Same,” Nesta agreed with a smile.

Elain flipped over her card which read, oh no.

“You two sure are romantic,” Gwyn joked when Lucien’s card said the same.

“How do we know they’re not cheating?” Rhys demanded; eyes narrowed. Lucien sighed, exasperated.

“Perhaps we spend more time talking than the rest of you,” he suggested. Rhys considered that.

“Maybe. But only because my mouth is occupied—”

“C’mon!” The room complained. Even Gwyn narrowed her eyes at the High Lord, who displayed not one ounce of shame. Arina went last.

“Eris thought about how to get me naked,” Arina replied, revealing her card. True to form, Eris had drawn a rather crude image that caused Lucien to take the card from his elder brother and rip it in half.

At the end of the first round both Lucien and Elain and Arina and Eris were winning, with Feyre and Rhys coming in second and Nesta and Cassian in last place. They were given some time to talk with one another while Gwyn flipped through her cards, but the males were only interested in a rare bottle of whiskey Rhysand had recently acquired.

“This is why we’re losing,” Nesta complained when Cassian did two shots consecutively with Lucien.

“Hardly,” Elain teased as Azriel chuckled in agreement. Cassian narrowed his eyes towards his brother and Azriel shrugged.

“I heard enough up at that house.”

“Okay, okay, let’s do round two so we can all drink,” Gwyn insisted, urging everyone back to their spots. Elain winked at Lucien as Eris called, “We can’t let Lucien and Elain win.”

“Hey!” Elain cried.

“Full offense, Elain,” Eris added, earning a sharp elbow to the ribs from his younger brother.

“First question,” Gwyn called over the chatter. “What is your mates perfect day?”

The males all immediately began scribbling responses while the females watched suspiciously. Feyre went first. “In my art studio.”

Rhys groaned as he flipped his card. “In my bed.”

“You had to know I wasn’t going to write that,” Feyre chided.

“Ah but you were thinking it,” Rhys crooned.

Cassian, too, flipped over a card revealing a wholly inappropriate answer. Nesta sighed as she flipped hers over.

“Seriously? With my girls eating cake?”Cassian asked with disbelief while Gwyn rose from her stool to high-five Nesta.

“Hell yes, Cass. You know I love you.”

“Do I?”

Lucien was quick to flip over his card. “In the garden.”

Elain beamed, her own card reflecting his answer.

“That’s a euphemism, by the way,” Lucien informed the group, his cheeks-tinged pink from the alcohol. Elain spluttered, clearly embarrassed for all Lucien noticed. Cassian high-fived him with what he clearly thought was some covertness.

Eris was the last to flip his card which, true to form, depicted a rather crude drawing. Beneath it he’d written, getting absolutely wrecked.

Arina laughed. “You know me so well.” Her overturned card read Non-stop fucking.

“More information than I ever needed,” Azriel grumbled.

“Jealous?” Eris taunted. Azriel leveled an unyielding stare.

“In your fucking dreams.”

“I do dream of you,” Eris replied with a mocking grin.

“Who doesn’t?” Gwyn asked, defusing the situation with a smile. Next question, gentleman.”

“Don’t be gross this time,” Elain murmured, sending Lucien the sweetest death glare to ever exist.

“What are your mates biggest pet peeve?” Gwyn asked. All four males hesitated, glancing towards their mates as they wrote.

As usual, Rhys and Feyre went first. He wrote Tamlin which earned a round of laughter though did not match Feyre’s response (unlabeled paint tins). Cassian guessed Nesta’s answer right (being told what to do) and for the first time, Lucien guessed Elain’s answer wrong.

“Weeds?” Elain asked with an eye roll as she flipped a card to reveal mismatched patterns.

“Ah I almost wrote that,” Lucien said with a sheepish grin, reaching for the bottle of whiskey in Cassian’s hands.

“Are we going to let Eris win?” Nesta asked incredulously as he flipped over his card. It was a drawing of his face with big x’sfor eyes.

Arina laughed, her card reflecting his answer.

“I’m so afraid to go to Autumn Court,” Cassian mock whispered to Rhys. The High Lord nodded as he poured out more shots.

“Last question!” Gwyn told the room. “What is the best gift your mate ever gave you?”

All four men immediately began writing.

“Cassian I know what you’re thinking—”

“You don’t,” Cassian interrupted with a grin that told everyoneexactly what he was thinking.

“That’s my sister,” Elain reminded Cassian, who merely laughed.

Feyre got a little weepy when Rhys flipped over his card to reveal Nyx written in elegant script. She went and plopped into his lap, twining her arms around his neck. “Is that what you wrote, darling?” She showed him her card which did, indeed, have Nyx written on it.

“Ugh,” Nesta and Elain complained at the same time when the two began kissing. Cassian interrupted their moment with more crudeness.

“What?!” He asked with a laugh when she tossed her card at him. “We were losing anyway and these two—” He jerked his thumbs towards Rhys and Lucien –“Are being gross and sentimental. Is that what you want? Open, public displays of affection?”

“Were you not already?” Azriel asked with one arched brow. Nesta’s cheeks immediately reddened.

“What did you write?” Cassian demanded, picking up his card. His face softened at what he saw. “Oh Nes.”

“Oh no,” Azriel muttered when Nesta attacked Cassian’s mouth with her own. “Someone stop them.”

“Hey,” Lucien snapped next to Cassian’s ear. “Save that for later.”

“What did the card say?” Gwyn asked curiously. Nesta showed the red head her card, displaying my freedom to the room.

Lucien flipped his card quickly. “See, this is what I meant,” Cassian grumbled when Lucien revealed the word you to which Elain, beaming, revealed a second wrong answer.

“Did you really write Lucien’s best gift was the chicken you two share?” Arina asked with disbelief, looking at Elain’s card.

“Henrietta is our baby,” Elain protested. Lucien chuckled but did nothing to contradict her assertion.

“Alright Eris. What did Arina write?” Gwyn asked.

Eris had drawn a picture of what was clearly Arina in a crown. “My High Lady,” he crooned, his russet eyes filled with affection. Arina smiled, her card the same.

“It was a nice surprise,” she admitted.

“I can’t believe you two let Eris win,” Rhys chided Lucien and Elain, now sitting on the same side of the couch holding hands.

“You know, while all of you were fucking instead of getting to know each other, Arina and I spent vast amounts of time separated. We wrote letters,” Eris informed the room with just a touch of defense. Arina perched herself on the arm of the sofa Eris sat on, her hand resting on his shoulder. “I could tell you her whole routine since the moment she was bornuntil this morning.”

“I’d rather have done the fucking,” Cassian announced. Lucien choked on his whiskey as Rhys nodded in agreement. “We’ve got forever, I’m in no rush.”

“I’m boring, anyway,” Rhys added. Feyre elbowed him hard.

“This is not how I thought this was going to go,” Gwyn admitted. Azriel, his hands on her shoulders, was walking her to the half empty bottle of whiskey.

“At least we have alcohol to numb the pain,” Feyre joked. There were giggles in response.

At least they had each other.

[pxtopia]

My dream smp playlists

i recently made some spotify playlists that have to do with the dream smp and I’m adding any song that reminds me of a certain character!! i wanted to make a post of all of them cause I’m honestly really proud. These are constantly updating and I’m gonna be adding more characters / storylines 

The Dream smp / Wilbur Soot / Technoblade / Dream / Tommyinnit / Quackity / Jschlatt / Georgenotfound / Ranboo / Tubbo / Dreamnotfound / Philza Minecraft / Karl Jacobs / Fundy / Niki / Jack  Manifold / Sapnap / Ghostbur / Badboyhalo / Captain Puffy / Awesamdude / Eret / Hannahxxrose / Foolish Gamers / Pogtopia / L’manberg 

DISCLAIMER: !!! these playlists are about the characters / relationships from the dream smp and have nothing to do with the ccs and their real life !!!

i hope you like them they’re constantly being updated :D

DREAM SMP: The city of fallen angels 

WILBUR: I am the villain in your story, I guess there’s only one way to go from here. Take my sword and cut through me, find peace in my solitude, find happiness in the hate I now attract, find love in the destruction of my own happiness and most importantly, find contentment, in the death of the life I have always known.

TECHNOBLADE: i still don’t care about your bright, feeble existence. but then you never cared much for mine, did you?

DREAM: the art of lying is a science: i’ll put on my lab coat and tinker inside your head until all you see is what i want you to see. you’ll wonder, “have i gone blind? or was i blind all my life.” and ill slyly grin, baring my teeth, tucking my demon’s tail away and out of sight, pleasantly answering, “i don’t know, you tell me.” not many can see behind the thick draping of those velvet curtains, but i see. i see everything. and you see nothing, because i’ve kept everything from you. take a scalpel and slice through my chest, peel back the thick draping of this velvet flesh, crack the cage of ivory bone, have a peek inside at all these holy terrors. they’re living in me. i am them, and they are me. 

TOMMY: And I traveled far, I reached for the stars, but those stars don’t reach back they’re better left alone 

QUACKITY: Excuse the shit out of my goddamn french

SCHLATT: At lease we’ll be entertained while the world goes to hell 

GEORGE: His soul burns so brightly, I fear I’ll catch fire. Ignited by passion, consumed by his light. I risk losing myself in the flames of lust burning into the night.

RANBOO: The situations becoming dire, my treehouse is on fire, and for some reason I smell gas on my hands

TUBBO: Thats what an angel is. Dust pressed into a diamond by the weight of this world.

DREAMNOTFOUND: I was in love with you before I even knew what love was

PHILZA: “What if I fall?” Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?

KARL: The world fell apart…Didn’t you notice?

FUNDY: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

NIKI: Finding nothing but brightly colored failures, and shame colored relics, of what used to be.

JACK: There is a bitter triumph in crashing, when you should be soaring

SAPNAP: Im everything you can’t control

GHOSTBUR: I told the stars about you

BADBOYHALO: Take a look around and what do I see? It's looking like the whole world's goin just a little crazy. And I know it can't be all of them and just not me, so I guess I'm going just a little crazy

CAPTAIN PUFFY: No god worthy of worship would demand such horrors to be committed in his name 

AWESAMDUDE: Life went on, but it was never the same

ERET: this place is always better when youre here, i dont know how long youre going to stay, but its been the most fun

HANNAH: she had a galaxy in her eyes and a universe in her mind

FOOLISH: I go to seek a great perhaps 

POGTOPIA: The world had drained me for everything I had. I couldn't draw my face if god asked.

L’manberg o7: We deserve a soft epilogue, my love. We are good people, and we've suffered enough.

[ptergwen]

call me cupid

w/c: 3.5k

warnings: very mild angst and a few swears

summary: despite your hatred for valentine’s day, peter attempts to make you a card

a/n: happy valentine’s day my loves!! i hope y’all get to spend some time with your people today and eat lots of chocolate <3 love you & enjoy mwah

-

it’s no secret that peter is terrible with words. he gets so flustered he can’t talk or forgets what he wants to say altogether. school presentations are torture. ordering food out is impossible. he’s accepted it at this point, that speaking just isn’t for him.

the one place it doesn’t come across is on paper. peter is ridiculously smart, and he knows all the right words to string together, which is why writing you a valentine should be no trouble at all. should be no trouble at all.

to tell the truth, he’s been sitting at his kitchen table with a blank sheet of paper in front of him for what feels like hours. nothing is coming to him. he’s not sure why this is so hard. you’re his girlfriend, he loves you, he’s said it so many times in every way he could think to. what’s different about it now?

everyone puts way too much pressure on giving the perfect gift when they should really just be enjoying each other’s company on a holiday about love. or, in your words, a meaningless holiday that was created by capitalists as another excuse to take people’s money. 

alright, you aren’t too fond of valentine’s day.

it makes anyone who’s single feel like shit and anyone who’s in a relationship lose their shit.

only mj agreed when you shared your criticisms. ned and betty gave you looks like you were insane, and flash muttered something about you being undateable. peter had laughed and swung an arm around your shoulders, but he didn’t fully agree.

although valentine’s day has its flaws, peter likes to see it as twenty four hours of extra appreciation for the people in his life. you can buy chocolate for your friends and family. it doesn’t have to be a significant other, really. him and ned would do it before he had you and ned had betty.

peter wants to remind you how loved you are even if you’re not into the festivities like he is, that bringing him to writing your card. it’s a simple and clinically underrated way of expressing his gratitude. he’d write you love letters every day if he didn’t suck at them.

may comes out of her room to see peter in the same place he’s been since he got home from school. she looks at him through her glasses, smiling as she comes into the room. he’s tapping his pencil on the table, eraser down, searching his mind for anything to write.

“still nothing?” may asks him, making her way over to the cabinets. peter puts down the pencil and sighs. his shoulders slump. “nope. i haven’t gotten past the intro.” “intro, huh?” she teases her newphew and grabs a jar of sauce. “y/n isn’t your teacher, kiddo. you’re not writing her an essay.” she looks at peter over her shoulder. a sheepish smile creeps onto his face.

“you know what i mean.” he reads over the only words on his paper at the moment. dear y/n. he’s starting to feel like spongebob the one time he wrote a paper. “what are you making?” peter asks may so he can temporarily take the focus off his unwritten valentine. “pasta,” may shakes the box in her hand. “and meatballs.”

“should i dial 911 now or wait until we’re in flames?” peter jokes about her awful cooking skills. may shoos him off and puts the box of pasta on the counter. “worry about your own kitchen nightmare.” she nods at the sheet of paper tormenting him. frowning, he glances back at her. “i’m the worst, may. i really don’t know what to write.”

may struggles to open the jar of sauce as she replies. “i thought you said- jesus.” it pops off. “y/n doesn’t like valentine’s day.” she slides over a pot from the stove and dumps the sauce in. peter stares up at the ceiling. “she doesn’t.” that’s probably why he’s having such a hard time. “why are you writing her a card, then?” may questions, turning on a burner.

“because, i dunno, it’s nice? it’ll make her happy? she might not care, but i do.” he mumbles the last part. he’s a bit of a hopeless romantic, so he hasn’t quite adjusted to the idea you had of not getting each other presents. you’re treating it like a regular day. some takeout and cuddles is all you’re doing.

peter would rather buy you things until his pockets are empty. not that there’s much in them, anyway. the point is that you deserve proper spoiling instead of corny words in his shitty handwriting.

“peter, honey. it might be better to stick with what y/n wants,” may suggests while stirring the sauce in the pot. she’s well aware that a few paragraphs from peter won’t change your mind. your opinions belong to you, and there’s nothing he can do about it, though he does have good intentions.

ignoring what may just said, peter makes a request. “what if you help me write it?” she faces the stove again. he can picture her playful smile when she quirks back, “she’s not my girlfriend.” “no, but you’re a girl... a woman,” he corrects himself, earning a scoff from may. “you’d probably know what sounds good.”

“you know y/n better than me, peter. do it on your own,” she exhales and turns back around with the wooden spoon in her hand. “it’ll be more... heartfelt.” peter hates that may is right because he’s completely stuck. his heart is being stupid today. “okay. i’ll try.” he gives her a slow nod. “why don’t you take a break? come stir the sauce. i’ll start the pasta.”

peter gets up from the table and grabs the spoon from may. she pinches his cheek on her way to the sink, getting a tight lipped smile from him.

this is not good.

-

the next day at school, peter asks around the lunch table for advice while you’re on line getting food. he feels guilty about it because may told him not to. he’s never going to get your valentine done if he doesn’t, though. it isn’t the worst thing in the world to bring on some co-writers.

“ok, what do you have so far?” betty asks, fully invested in the situation. she’s hoping this will switch up your views on valentine’s day. peter pulls out the same piece of paper from last night and says verbatim what’s on it. “dear y/n.” he looks up at ned and betty, the corners of his mouth twitching down. ned motions with his hand for peter to go on.

“that’s it,” peter confesses and folds the paper back up in shame. “dude, you told us it was a work in progress,” ned winces, betty taking his hand that’s resting on her shoulder. “where’s the progress?” betty patronizes him. they’re making him feel worse than he already did. what great co-writers he’s collaborating with.

peter throws a hand up, an eye roll included. “yeah, it’s terrible. can you help me or not?” mj narrows her own eyes at peter from the other end of his bench. she’s not interested in participating when the conversation is about forcing you to celebrate a holiday you don’t like.

“ooh!” betty squeals and squeezes ned’s hand. “you should make a list.” ned grins, leaning his head on hers. “genius, babe.” “a list of what?” peter furrows his eyebrows as he looks between the two of them. “what you love about y/n,” she explains, ned adding on, “stuff you do together, or you appreciate.”

“put whatever you come up with into sentences and voilà,” betty says in her best french accent. “oui oui,” ned agrees, both of them giggling. that doesn’t sound half bad. peter could manage a list about you. “thank you so much, guys. you literally just saved valentine’s day,” he confidently tucks his paper into his pocket. “it’s what we do,” ned tells him coolly.

“you never asked what i think,” mj cuts in, staring down her friends, who reluctantly meet her gaze. she pushes her bag of goldfish aside and raises an eyebrow. “mj, we know how you feel about valentine’s day.” peter presses his lips together. “y/n feels the same way,” mj reminds him dryly.

it’s true, but he doesn’t want to hear that right now. he’s having a breakthrough.

like clockwork, you appear at the table. you slip into the spot next to peter and put down your lunch tray. “what’d i miss?” you comment on the obvious tension, eyeing betty for an explanation. mj gives it to you. “valentine’s day discourse,” she tells you knowingly. peter shifts in his seat, uncomfortable, like he’s been caught doing something he isn’t supposed to.

he technically has.

“yuck,” you murmur, winding your arms around peter’s neck. “yuck, yuck, yuck.” he finds your words ironic because you then kiss his cheek, and peck his lips when he turns his head. peter puts a hand on your side and lets his eyes go up and down your face. a smile spreads across it, which he returns without thinking about. mj huffs in disapproval. she’s seen enough pda.

-

peter makes his list later that night. he decided he isn’t being inauthentic because he’s coming up with everything himself. he breezes right through it, jotting down what he loves most about you across the paper. it’s a mess. scribbled out misspellings and shreds of eraser, single words and whole phrases covering both sides. he’s proud of his actual progress.

he’ll write the official letter tomorrow since you’re coming over tonight. he at least has his material. the next, thankfully final, step is to reword it.

you’re ranting to peter about some drama with one of your teachers. he listens intently as always, chuckling when you crack jokes and grinning the entire time, feeling so lucky to have the most passionate, say whatever is on her mind girlfriend ever. seriously, it’s inspiring to watch.

“no, like, i never know what’s going on in that class,” you snort, peter snaking his arms around your middle from behind. “because you don’t pay attention,” he hums with his face nuzzled into the back of your neck. “because it doesn’t make any sense!” you defend yourself. his lips brush against your bare skin, drawing a giggle out of you.

“back to what i was saying,” your voice drips with sarcasm. the two of you naturally gravitate to his room, you walking in first. “she called on me, and i- what’s this?” you escape peter’s arms and head over to his desk. crap, he was working on your valentine and forgot to put it away. it caught your attention because it’s surrounded by crumpled papers and glitter.

peter was... experimenting... with designs for the front of the card. he’s learned that he isn’t too artistic either.

“wait, don’t read that,“ peter tries, but you’ve already got the list in your hands. he anxiously sucks his lower lip into his mouth and comes to stand next to you.

you first see the ‘dear y/n,’ then focus in on a few other words. my person forever, which makes you coo at the paper. insane (in the best way), which makes you gasp dramatically. i know you don’t like valentine’s day, but...

you drop the card back on the desk and let out a breath, shutting your eyes as irritation creeps in. it wouldn’t be fair for you to be mad at peter because it’s a sweet gesture, it really is. just, not for you personally. you’re on opposite sides of the valentine’s spectrum. you despise it, he sort of loves it. you’d hoped to meet somewhere in the middle.

“i thought we said no gifts,” you keep your voice level and spin around to look at peter. his face is painted with guilt. “it’s a card,” he murmurs, then meets your eyes with his brows knitted together. “i can’t even give you a card?” “i mean...” you shrug and shake your head. “look, peter. we had an agreement. i’m not doing valentine’s day.”

his disappointment comes out in the form of hanging his head. “yeah, you’re right. sorry.”

may tried to tell him this would happen, mj tried to tell him, and now you’re telling him. he should’ve expected it. he isn’t sure why he’s being so mopey about it because he was fully aware of your hatred for anything with the word valentine in it. it still hurts. peter just wishes you’d let him have the one day to love you and only you, give you some special attention.

“it’s nothing against you, babe,” you reassure him, noticing the shift in his mood. you put a hand on his shoulder. “i really just don’t like valentine’s day. it feels so... fake to me.” peter musters up a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. it drops when you loop your arms around his torso.

“if i celebrated, you’d be the first person i’d wanna spend it with.” you punctuate your words with a kiss to his cheek. he rests his chin on your head, you nuzzling your own cheek into his sweater. he’s feeling a bit better now. it’s not about him, that’s what he needs to remind himself. “thanks, baby,” peter speaks lowly into the air. you hum as if to say no problem.

scratch literally everything he’s done.

-

peter rolls over in his bed, rubbing at his eyes as his alarm goes off. it’s today. happy valentine’s day to... himself. he doesn’t think you’d want to hear it.

he’s not as broken up about everything as the other day. you have your reasons for not celebrating, and peter accepts them. hey, he still gets to spend the whole day with you. you’re technically having an unspoken valentine’s date.

he gets up from his bed with a yawn and starts to dig through his drawers for an outfit. you should be over soon.

before you head over to peter’s, you decide to make a quick stop at cvs for a few things. you ended up feeling pretty terrible about snapping on him essentially for loving you. it was over a harmless valentine, something to make you feel good and be an outlet for the hundreds of romantic bones in his body. basically, you were bitter about having a thoughtful boyfriend.

you want to make it up to him by giving him gifts instead. you’ll never be down with the whole exploitive and capitalistic side of valentine’s day, but there’s a deeper meaning to it than what you give it credit for. you see that now. peter was able to show his love for you through a homemade mess of a card, and you felt it. the price tags don’t matter. the meaning does.

dressed in his nicest sweater with his hair all styled, peter answers your knocking at his door. a grin instantly paints his face as he takes you in. you’re bundled up in a coat and holding a bag by your side. “hey,” he greets you and lets you past him. you shut the door behind him, returning the smile and winding an arm around his neck for a hug. his drapes around your back.

“hey. happy valentine’s day.” “happy valentine’s-“ peter realizes what he’s about to say and what you just said, then stops himself. “what?” he breaks the hug, squinting at your odd behavior. you’re the last person he’d expected to hear that from. “it’s valentine’s day. so, happy valentine’s day,” you tell him like it’s nothing.

he stays quiet while you shrug off your coat and throw it over one of the kitchen chairs. you bring your bag along with you, peter following you in. he’s suspicious. intrigued, and suspicious. it’s been less than a day since he last say you. you had a change of heart that fast? you aren’t the biggest valentine’s day anti he knows anymore?

“where’s may?” you wonder aloud, taking both of peter’s hands in your now free ones. he eyes the shopping bag you put down while you lace your fingers together. “with happy. they’re getting brunch.” he’s never particularly psyched to talk about their relationship. it’s always been in a joking way, though. now, he sounds genuinely upset to go over may’s whereabouts.

“they’re so cute,” you comment, tugging on peter’s hands so he looks at you. “you good?” “great,” peter half lies and nods, then presses a reassuring kiss to your cheek. he’s not bad. puzzled is the word. what you say next only adds to it.

“good. i have a few things for you,” you beam at him and grab your shopping bag off the chair. that’s what that’s for? peter isn’t fully sure what you’re up to. it doesn’t stop a smile from stretching across his lips, though.

“what happened to no presents?” he tests you as you reach into the bag. “well, i feel bad about how i acted the other day.” you pull out a heart shaped box of chocolates. “the card was really sweet, and i was too caught off guard to appreciate it. i’m sorry, pete.” peter’s eyes twinkle at you, gazing as you give him a smile with a hint of shyness behind it. you’re leaving your comfort zone and entering his.

“i was wrong and cynical and just, yeah. happy valentine’s day,” you add on and shove the box into his hand. he finally grins, so wide and then lets out a breathy laugh. “thanks, y/n. i know it was probably hard to shop being surrounded by this stuff.” he holds up the box. he’s right. you’ll unfortunately be seeing pink and red for weeks. “it was, but i did it for you.” you happily open up your arms for him.

peter puts down the chocolates and pulls you into his arms, his cheek squished against the side of your head as he hugs you to his chest. “oh my god, i love you so much,” he mumbles out, you squeezing him in response. “i love you, pete.” you press a quick kiss to his neck and hold him at arm’s length so you can see him. “i have something else for you.”

“baby,” peter coos, a pout on his lips. “you don’t have to do all of this. i would’ve been fine without the chocolates, even.” “stop, you deserve it,” you shut down the part of him that’s way too nice and selfless. “you’re my real present,” he says lower and with a toothy smile. shaking your head, you reach behind you and into the bag.

he can’t believe you’ve switched stances on valentine’s day. you’re the present pusher, and he’s refusing them. peter thinks it’s some sort of miracle that you’re not only acknowledging the holiday, you’re also partaking in it. his hopeless romantic side tells him it’s actually love, and it is. that’s the cheesy, hallmark movie truth. you suffered through shopping at a heart themed cvs because you love him. simple.

you return with a pink envelope that you place into peter’s hand. his face softens as he closes his fingers around it. “y/n, you made me a card?” “kind of,” you laugh at his overstatement. it’s obviously pre-made. you’d used a pen to fill it out in the store, scribbled a few words and tucked it into the envelope.

“it really doesn’t compare to yours, though,” you simultaneously warn and compliment him. peter dismisses you with a lighthearted click of his tongue. “oh, shush. that was only a rough draft.” “which proves my point even more. open it.” you grip onto the bottom of his sweater and grin.

he keeps his eyes on you while ripping open the envelope, then looks down and chuckles at the gag of the card. it has r2d2 and r4d4 from star wars on the front. inside is already written, “r4 is red and r2 is blue. if i was the force then i’d be with you.” you giggle to yourself, watching him read what you wrote next. i love you more every day, especially on valentine’s. xo, y/n.

peter holds the card to his side and slings an arm around your waist. “they make star wars valentines?” he murmurs, another smile breaking out on his face, one that you of course return. you use his sweater to pull him closer. “apparently. perfect for you.” peter tosses the card down next to the chocolates, both arms now holding you.

“thank you so much, baby. you’re an angel,” he sighs and pecks your lips after. “call me cupid,” you answer.

you give him a longer kiss back, tilting your head up to deepen it. your hands find their place on his biceps, earning a hum from peter as he moves his lips against yours. you can feel his love in every little movement, how he hugs your waist like you’re made of glass, rests his forehead against yours. when your lips mutually detach, peter speaks first, voice slightly husky.

“happy valentine’s day, cupid.”

you breathe out, peter closing his eyes in content.

“happy valentine’s day, r2.”

[theclockworkmonk]

Out of the Mouths of Babes — Chapter 5

AO3 | FFN

Previous chapter on Tumblr

Written for Hinny Ficfest 2021

Prompt: “Uncle Ron said something about Harry knocking Ginny up, but I don’t know what he means,” Teddy said.

*******

Harry barely reacted in time to put up a Shield Charm before two Stunning Spells shot across the kitchen table at him and deflected up into the ceiling.

"WHAT THE FUCK!" Ginny and Ron shouted at the same time, Ron flailing and tipping over backward in his chair.

"I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" Charlie screamed at Harry.

"Is he pressuring you into this?" Bill growled at Ginny.

"There is no reason to resort to something so drastic!" said Percy.

"And it's definitely not something to laugh about," said George.

Fleur was babbling a mile a minute in French, tears welling in her eyes and trying to get Victoire to stop crying.

Molly had collapsed into Arthur's arms and fainted.

"Have you lot all lost your minds!?" shouted Harry. "Why is it so important that I keep it?"

"What use do we have for it, anyway?" asked Ginny.

A second explosion of angry shouting erupted as all the Weasleys talked over each other.

"How in the WORLD is all this the appropriate response to Harry and Ginny living together!?" pleaded Hermione.

"THAT'S NOT — wait, they're living together!?" said Percy.

Hermione gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.

"Oh please," George rolled his eyes, "Anyone with a brain already knew that."

"What!? Why didn't you say anything!" said Charlie, "We could have stopped this before it happened!"

"Gee, thanks, Hermione," growled Harry as she blushed harder.

"Then what the hell are all you gits talking about!?" barked Ginny loudly to cut through the cacophony of testosterone. "As annoying as you always are when treating me like an innocent girl, it makes more sense than getting upset about Harry's stupid Wizengamot seat!"

"Harry has a Wizengamot seat!?" asked Percy in awe.

"Don't get any ideas, Perce, Harry's taken," said George.

"Of course we're not talking about that!" said Molly, her voice shaking as she regained consciousness and stood up straight. "We're talking about the baby!"

Harry and Ginny looked sideways at Victoire.

"THE NEW BABY!" Molly shrieked, growing more exasperated.

"What, Hermione's baby?" asked Ginny.

Molly fainted again.

"Ex-CUSE me!?" cried Hermione as every head in the room spun to face her, Ron's turning a sickly shade of green.

"Oh...I shouldn't have eaten all those biscuits," Ron muttered fearfully, holding his stomach.

"Wait, Hermione's pregnant too?" asked Percy.

"No, I am not!" said Hermione forcefully.

"Wait, what do you mean 'too?'" asked Ginny. "Who else is pregnant?"

"THERE IS NO 'ELSE!' I AM NOT PREGNANT!" Hermione screamed. "Can we please establish that first?"

"Love, just calm down," said Ron softly, placing his hands gently on her shoulders. "It's okay, we can handle this. Why don't you just sit down…."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Ron, even if I were pregnant, if you start coddling me you'll regret it. Ginny, why the hell did you say that I'm pregnant?"

"Well she kept dropping hints left and right that someone was pregnant!" Ginny gestured wildly towards Fleur, who until now was doing a good job of avoiding the chaos, and blushed self-consciously when it was her turn to be the focus of all the anger.

"Ginny, just stop it!" Fleur lashed out. "I was trying to encourage you to come clean!"

"...Me?"

"Ginny, we know about the baby," said Arthur calmly. "We've known for days."

About a dozen different emotions collided violently inside Harry. He couldn't imagine what the expression on his face might look like. He slowly turned on the spot towards Ginny.

"I'm sure you're about to say something all noble and comforting," said Ginny dryly. "But you don't have to be that good of a boyfriend yet. No, I'm not pregnant."

"I applaud your performance, Gin-Gin," said George, "but nothing stays secret for long in this family." He jerked his head toward Ron.

"Wha—Why are you jerking your head towards me, don't jerk your head towards me!" Ron panicked.

"Why is he jerking his head towards you, Ron?" Ginny seethed.

"Hell if I know!" Ron said defensively. "Don't get your knickers in a twist, this is the first I've heard of any new babies!"

"Sorry, Ronniekins, but you spilled the beans to Teddy, and he sold you out," said George.

"You told Teddy that I'm pregnant!?" Ron flinched as Ginny smacked his arm.

"Using much more vulgar language," Molly whimpered, still trembling and desperately clutching onto Arthur for support.

"I did not tell Teddy that you're pregnant!" Ron spoke up. "I never even—"

He stopped speaking and his eyes bulged out. He and Hermione faced each other, realization dawning on their faces.

Ron's voice is small. "...Oh—Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop it!" he cowered as Hermione started furiously hitting him.

"You — complete — idiot Ronald Weasley!" she shouted with each hit.

Ginny's older brothers were looking far too pleased with themselves for her taste.

"Okay, so can we stop this charade now?" asked Bill.

"Okay, I don't know what this latest domestic incident is about," said Ginny, pointing at the sparring couple, "I just know that I'm not pregnant."

"Teddy heard Ron saying that Harry had knocked you up!" said Charlie.

"No….but I might have said that it was likely that he would knock her up."

Harry gaped at him. "Why were you discussing me knocking up Ginny at all!?" he demanded, as he physically restrained Ginny from attacking Ron.

"Because you both were being so bloody shameless!" Ron shouted back. "It's enough to drive anyone mental! Don't try to annoy your brother by having no self-control and then get mad when he says you have no self control!"

"I want the record to show that I did not partake in this line of reasoning and told him he was being ridiculous," said Hermione.

"Thanks for the support, Love," said Ron.

Bill, Charlie, and Percy all seemed to have deflated like balloons. Their faces matched their hair and they were looking anywhere but Ginny's furious face.

"Well...erm…." said Charlie, trying to keep his face stern, "Ron's right, you should still—"

"Oh, do not try to still chest-beat after you've all been exposed as idiots!" Ginny hissed. "You've all been absolutely terrible to Harry and me based on what a toddler overheard!"

"She is right," Fleur scolded her husband, rejoining the row now that she had calmed Victoire down, "If you zink zat she is pregnant, you should not start fights to stress 'er out! Shame on you!" Bill hung his head.

"You know, I really don't think that trying to manipulate Ginny into talking about it is much better," said Harry flatly, "You all need to mind your own business!"

"Yes, don't think I'm going to forget this any time soon!" Ginny waved a threatening finger at all of them. "Not only treating me like an idiot child who's been taken advantage of, but actually thinking we're stupid and reckless enough to unintentionally get pregnant in the first place!"

"See, Molly dear?" Arthur told his wife gently, "it was all just a misunderstanding." He had guided her into a chair and was trying to calm her down. Her breathing was quick and shallow and her eyes were darting around madly.

"...No. No, it all fit…" she shook her head violently, "They're covering it up. You need to tell the truth, Ginny!"

It was clear that there was no reasoning with her, she had become delirious by now from all the chaos and panic.

Ginny groaned. "All right, you want to settle this? Fine, let's settle this." And without another word, she marched out of the kitchen into the sitting room, threw some floo powder into the fireplace, called out "Diagon Alley!" and disappeared into the flames.

The kitchen was finally quiet for the next few minutes as Molly's breathing slowly but surely slowed down to merely anxious instead of an outright panic attack. Bill and Fleur were bickering quietly in French, while Hermione silently gave Ron her best "I told you so" look for not watching what he said around Teddy.

After what felt like an eternity, the fireplace roared to life again and Ginny marched back into the kitchen, dusting soot off her clothes.

"Where did you go?" asked Harry.

She held up a vial of clear liquid. "Apothecary," she said shortly. The unique shape of the bottle was instantly recognizable.

"Oh, well that's just great," said Ron tiredly. "Harry Potter's girlfriend hastily buying a pregnancy test potion, I'm sure that won't be in the headlines tomorrow."

Ginny ignored him as she skimmed over the card that came attached to the potion. "Okay, yeah, blue for boy, pink for girl, white for not pregnant."

She uncorked the flask, set it down on the table, used her wand to cut off a single strand of her hair, and lowered it into the solution. The clear, colorless contents of the bottle instantly started bubbling furiously.

"See?" Ginny barked furiously, "So, now that we've gotten this circus over with, I would greatly appreciate it if you gits kindly butted the hell out of my love life, and we can all….just….move….on…."

Her voice trailed off into nothing as her eyes remained locked on the vial on the table.

Which was now a bright, vibrant blue.

[spiderlilyserendipity]

omg violet you write so well!! if you can, could you write a taehyung nsfw of while on vacation, tae's girlfriend wakes him up early with kisses and promises to do "whatever he wants" if he gets up with her and explores the city and tae holds her to that promise when they get back to their hotel starting with some steamy (private) hot tub sex?

Anon, you are awesome but you have ruined my brain. I got so carried away writing this fic, it is double the size I thought it would be. Many thoughts, head full typa situation. Thank you. This one is titled Only One. Enjoy <3

WC: 4475

Genres: Smut, fluff, angst

Tags: established relationship, anniversary dinners, tae x oc take a trip to Paris

Warnings: dom/sub relationship, dom!taehyung, sub!reader, sir kink, punishment, praise kink, use of the word slut once, colour system as a safeword, insecurity, possessiveness, possessive sex, aftercare, taehyung is very 🥵🥵🥵 in this one y’all

(*Cis female reader*)

“Y/N, Y/N, should we take a picture over there?” Taehyung asks, batting his eyes cutely.

You smile but roll your eyes at Taehyung’s enthusiasm.

Not to be mistaken, if there’s anyone who loves their boyfriend, it’s you. You would live and die for Kim Taehyung, but there’s a special reason for your eyeroll today.

It has been only two weeks since Taehyung got off tour, and at that a world tour. You know Taehyung must be very tired from constantly travelling, hence why you let your boyfriend get his full rest the first week. But the thing is you haven’t seen your lover in a year, and you want to make some memories with him. 

You know he will get too busy once the post-tour lull passes over everyone at the company and everything goes back to regular schedule. Then, Taehyung will get sucked away by album preparations, promotions once it’s out, and inevitably: another tour.

You love that Taehyung gets to do what he loves for a living. You also love how cool he looks on stage. But most of all you like getting to spend time with him. 

To be honest, you were going to go see Taehyung in Paris during the European leg of the tour. It had been your anniversary, and the two of you had plans to get dinner together and enjoy the city. But then life happened and your plans came crashing down, preventing you from seeing Taehyung until the tour ended months later.

But past you had thought quickly, knowing the day Taehyung would return home and shifted your ticket instead of cancelling. So a week after Taehyung got home, you presented him with a second plane ticket to Paris, France that you bought last minute just for him.

You thought Taehyung would agree with making up for your missed anniversary, but Taehyung had frowned instead. “Babe, I seriously don’t want to go anywhere for a while. I’m sick of hotels and planes.”

“But I’ve never been there, baby. It would be so romantic!” You convinced him eventually, your pout winning him over. Taehyung had sighed, then called his manager to let him know.

So excited from Taehyung agreeing, you had leapt up into his arms and kissed him like crazy. “Ahhh! I’m so excited!”

Taehyung had held back a grin. “Okay. But no touristy stuff.”

You pout. “But that’s the most fun part!” When Taehyung pouts back, you try to convince him again. “Baby, I promise I’ll seriously do anything you say if you do all the embarrassing touristy stuff with me.”

“Anything?” Taehyung asked you, arching a brow. 

You took his hand, nodding eagerly. “Anything. Let’s just have fun!”

Taehyung grinned at you. “You better keep your word.”

You had kissed him, grinning at him. He watched you with a fond smile, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. “You bet I will.” You vow.

It isn’t until you actually land in Paris that you realize what anything Taehyung is imagining.

For all his great qualities, Taehyung is not subtle about what he wants. Especially when he wants you.

The first three days, Taehyung lets you drag him around under the condition that you both wear disguises to avoid being noticed. You comply, picking odd hours of the day for activities that would be very busy at other times of day. You hit all the touristy spots in early mornings before the crowd, hide away in small tucked away cafes and restaurants with Taehyung during lunch hour, then spend the day browsing vintage stores for jewellery and clothes. 

It’s all fun and games except for the teasing that Taehyung will not stop. It’s hard for you to name a time of day where Taehyung’s big hands hadn’t been resting on your waist or his lips idly pressing a kiss to your cheek in passing. You know very well the game Taehyung is playing. He is slowly working you up, getting you used to his constant touches. Then, he will withdraw them, leaving you needy. 

Despite Taehyung’s teasing, the two of you still have a great time. You buy souvenirs for your friends and things for yourself. Taehyung also buys you clothes and jewellery, loving to spoil you. But what you love the most are the small establishments he brings you to, full of tasty food and where no one knows his name. You know the game Taehyung is playing, but you let him guide you to an isolated table towards the back and feed you food off his own utensils. You let him wipe the corner of your mouth for some smeared sauce, let him lick it off his thumb. Sometimes, you even get a little on your face on purpose. Taehyung notices when you do that, and lets you get away with it. After all, this isn’t a favour he’s doing you. This is your anniversary trip. He can’t be the only one getting away with teasing.

The following three days, the two of you hit the museums. Taehyung shows you around, explaining things he had seen on previous trips to Paris. You listen to him, happier to see him happy than to really look at the art. You take pictures of your boyfriend inside the museum and really anywhere it won’t catch too much attention.

Over those three days, Taehyung’s touches decrease. He reduces it little by little, but you know him well by now. Taehyung isn’t trying to be subtle, rather the opposite. He wants you to notice, to get riled up when his touch is gone. 

You tell yourself you don’t mind it, but both of you know it’s a lie. You ignore the smirk on Taehyung’s face every time you intertwine your hands or wrap an arm around his waist to guide him through the back roads. You will get back at him at dinner tonight.

After lunch on the final day, you tell Taehyung to head back to the hotel on his own. You say you are going to buy a new dress for your dinner date tonight, and that you want it to be a surprise for him. Chuckling, Taehyung just passes you his blackcard and tells you to have fun.

You buy a dark green coloured gown, Taehyung’s favourite colour, and a matching necklace and earrings set of emeralds. You smile at the sight of your ass being cupped by the silky material. This is sure to drive Taehyung mad. After all, tonight is the final night. Both of you know exactly how tonight will end.

You catch a cab to the five star Taehyung made a reservation at. You pay the taxi driver excitedly, getting out in your all new outfit, new heels, and even a new purse! You were sure to impress Taehyung.

You walk into the restaurant, telling the waiter who you’re here with. He lets you in, guiding you upstairs to your table.

You frown as you see your table. From this angle, you can’t see who, but Taehyung is talking to a woman. You approach quietly, catching neither of their attention. Luckily (or unluckily) for you, they’re talking loudly. You don’t speak much French but you don’t need it to deal with this woman. You hear her mention the word “model” and a woman’s clothing brand. You hear her repeat “model” a second time as she blatantly roams her eyes down Taehyung’s figure, then up at him. That’s the part that makes your blood boil. You know she is aware of your presence. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what kind of relationship you and Taehyung have.

But she still challenges you anyway, openly eyeing your man in public. If you could speak more French than basic small talk you would rip her a new one. 

Fuck it. You think, making your way across the room. Who needs to know the language?

“Oh, baby.” You say in a sweet voice. They both look over at you. The woman looks visibly irritated, pursing her perfect lips in annoyance. What a shame you like to flirt with other women’s men. You think, slightly in awe at her beauty. I’d like you in any other situation. “Is this a friend?” You ask.

You see a hint of a smile before Taehyung bites it back. “No, Y/N. We just met tonight.”

You smile pointedly at the woman. She frowns at you. “Ah, I see. Well, it was nice meeting you. We haven’t had dinner yet, so.” You say, pretending to be apologetic for cutting the conversation short. All three of you know you’re not, but it’s the thought that counts. Or doesn’t. You couldn’t care less.

“Colour.” Taehyung asks the minute you’re back in the hotel room. 

“Green.” 

“Poor baby. Got so angry that I took my eyes off you, huh?” Taehyung teases, hooking his fingers in the band of your underwear. He pulls back, making it snap against your hips. You whimper. “What’s that? Are you trying to say something?” Taehyung taunts you.

He cranes his head to look at you. He cups your face and makes you look at him. He makes a fake-worried face. “That’s odd, you were talking perfectly fine a few hours ago. Was it something in the food that’s making you feel sick or are you just embarrassed from being a possessive little slut in front of sir?”

His words make you shiver. He grins as he feels it against his own abdomen. “It seems like you’re really sick, Y/N. I guess we'll just have to go to bed.”

He begins to unwind his arms from around your waist, but you grab them, holding them against your skin. “S-Sir.” You whisper.

“There’s my girl.” Taehyung says proudly, rewarding you with a kiss to your temple. “Let’s talk about what you did wrong tonight, shall we?”

“I-I was possessive. I got jealous because you were talking to that model.”

Taehyung’s eyes flicker at the last word. “Oh, you heard?” He snaps the band of underwear against your skin again. You wriggle, but he refuses to let you go. “What a bad girl. Eavesdropping on sir’s conversations. What if she had been a potential colleague and you ruined everything? But you didn’t think of any of that, only your. own. feelings.” He emphasizes each of the three words with another smack. “You’re just an ungrateful little slut, aren’t you? I bet you would open your legs for any man that offered you this kind of treatment, huh?” He growls in your ear.

“I-I’m sorry.” You whisper, voice cracking.

Taehyung stops. “Colour.” He says, thumbs gently stroking at your sides.

“Green.” 

“Y/N.” He repeats more firmly. You sniffle. A tear rolls down your cheek. Taehyung thumbs it away immediately. “We don’t have to. I’m sorry. Do you want to take a bath together? We can cuddle after. Anything you’re comfortable with baby.”

You shake your head, looking away from him. “I’m really okay. I...I want my punishment.”

Taehyung turns you to look at him. He watches your face, looking for any unwillingness. He cups your face and makes you look at him. He smiles finally when he sees the familiar, hazy look in your eyes. You are already slipping into subspace.

“Follow me.” Taehyung says.

You walk behind him, still naked except for your panties. Taehyung is still entirely clothed in his suit and tie. He leads you to the fancy living room of the suite, and closes the curtains. You wait until he sits down to approach him. You observe his spread legs and the stern look in his eye. The air in the living room is freezing cold, but it only adds to it. This is one of the many things you love about Taehyung. How incredibly sexy he looks when he is in control.

Without being asked, you get on the sofa on your hands and knees. You drape your body over Taehyung’s lap, ass up in his lap. You fold your arms over the sofa’s armrest, turning your head to look at Taehyung. 

Taehyung’s warm hand caresses your ass. He kneads at the flesh roughly without breaking eye contact with you. On the outside, he looks indifferent, dark eyes sultry. He makes it look like he couldn't care less if it was you or another sub being bent to his will. But you know it’s part of the scene, that he’s watching you this intensely for your reaction and it is only your reaction he ever wants in a setting like this.

“You can safeword out if you need to.” He reminds you. You nod, putting your head against the armrest. “Count.” He tells you, before the first smack comes down.

You flinch on instinct, but his arm pins the backs of your thighs down. “One.”

Another smack but to the other cheek. You hiss under your breath. “Two.”

Taehyung gives the next three in succession. “F-Five.”

“Colour?” Taehyung re-checks. You reply green again. He delivers two more. “Six, ah, seven.”

The next two smacks are harsher. “Eight, nine一!” As you’re counting, Taehyung gives the final one. This one is the hardest of all, making the two of you sink a little lower into the sofa. “T-Ten.”

You are crying now, falling deeper into your subspace. Taehyung’s warm hands smooth over the places they hit. His voice murmurs sweet nothings in your ear, reassuring you.

“S-Sorry.” You continue to cry. “I didn’t mean to be like that.”

“I know.” Taehyung reassures you. He helps you up into a sitting position. It burns to sit on your still painful ass, but you do so anyway because it’s Taehyung who asks you to do it. “You took my punishment very well, Y/N, just like a good girl.”

You shake your head, sniffling. “I don’t wanna be ‘a good girl’, I wanna be your good girl.” You say. Taehyung frowns slightly as he wonders what that means, then looks shocked when he realizes what you’re saying.

“You are my good girl, baby.” He says softly, wiping away your tears. “No one but you.”

“But i-it was our a-anniversary dinner and you were letting her flirt with you. You just一just let her do it. And when I called you baby at the restaurant, you only called me Y/N.” You confess, giving up your fake confident act. The truth is that despite your anger in the moment, you had felt very insecure. It wasn’t like you could blame the woman for finding your boyfriend hot, anyone would. But the fact that Taehyung never said anything back and just put up with it instead of correcting her bothered you. Was it embarrassing to admit he was dating you in front of a woman who was so obviously his equal in elegance? This thought bothered you throughout the whole dinner. 

You didn’t plan on telling Taehyung about it, since he didn’t know you sometimes felt this way. One of the reasons you insisted on travelling to make up for your missed anniversary was this doubt. Maybe if you showed him around this fancy city and you made good memories with him, he might appreciate it. Maybe then it would ease your doubt of if you were worthy enough to be his.

You had never admitted this aloud to anyone, but you actually wondered If Taehyung had women in other countries that he went on dates with during tour. You know Taehyung is a good person but after all, he is a young man with sexual needs. And at that, a very attractive man who could get with just about any woman he wanted. So yes, seeing him talk to the very attractive woman had angered you, but it also made you feel like your worst fears might be true. 

“Y/N, talk to me, baby.” Taehyung pleads you, his worried brown eyes searching your face for any answers.

“...Can I ask you a question?” 

“Of course, my love.” Taehyung responds. “Ask me anything you want, baby.’

You sniffle. You play with his suit blazer. “Can you promise to not get mad at me?”

Taehyung looks like he might cry when you ask that. “I promise.”

“When you go away for tour...is there anyone else?” You watch your own tears fall onto Taehyung’s dress shirt. Taehyung looks shaken. “It might seem random but I’ve always wondered. I promise I’m not just acting up because of tonight.”

Taehyung continues to watch you, looking worried and at a loss for words. You put on a fake smile. “Sorry, it’s probably nothing. Let’s just go to bed.” 

Taehyung holds you by the waist, stopping you from getting up. “Y/N.”

“I said it’s fine. It’s okay. Really, even if you had another woman. I can’t control what you do when you’re not with me. A year is too long for a couple to spend apart anyway, it’s only natural that your feelings would change. It’s okay. Anyway,” You breathe shakily. “Anyway I’m still yours. As long as you like, of course.”

“Of course I like it.” Taehyung insists, tears glistening in his eyes. “I love you. Tell me how long you’ve felt like this.”

You hesitate. “Y/N.” There it is again, that firm tone that you hate outside of scenes. 

You look down at your hands. “Maybe two years?”

Taehyung is crying now, and he cups your face in his hands. “You’ve been thinking like this for two years? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“...I didn’t want to burden you. You’re really busy on tour.”

Taehyung purses his lips. “Can I show you there’s no one else?”

You nod. Taehyung lifts you up, and you wrap your legs around his waist. He holds you by the backs of your thighs instead of your ass, careful not to hurt you. “The bed?” He asks. You consider the feeling of the rough sheets against your sore ass. 

You shake your head. “C-Can we use the hot tub?”

Taehyung kisses your forehead. “Anything for you.”

Taehyung sets up the hot tub for both of you. He takes your panties off for you, sliding them down your legs. He kisses you deeply, sweetly. You whimper into the kiss, his tongue completely in control of your mouth. When you part, a strand of saliva comes loose. When you part far enough, the saliva ends up on your chin. Taehyung wipes it with his thumb. A darkness has entered his eyes again. “Get in. Let me show you how much I love you.”

You get in the hot tub, relishing the feeling of the hot water. It stings a bit, but it’s easier to sit then the bed would have been. You sit with your legs spread slightly, calves tucked under you and feet beneath your ass. Neat and pretty. Just the way sir likes it.

Taehyung strips quickly once you’re in the water. Your eyes roam over his beautiful body, at the hard muscle of his chest, his bulging biceps, his caramel thighs, and his rigid cock. “Come here.” Taehyung orders as he gets in the water. You do so, climbing up into his lap. He kisses you hungrily, like this is the first time all night. You are surprised at the intensity of this kiss. You cannot recall a time Taehyung has ever kissed you so passionately in your years together, even in your roughest scenes. 

“So pretty.” Taehyung growls when you two part again. He wraps one arm around your waist to press your chest against his, then attacks your neck. You gasp as he makes love bites, all the way down your neck. He has never made this many before in total, yet he makes them everywhere tonight. He litters your collarbone and the top of your chest with them, making them bloom red at first but you know they will be a deep purple shade tomorrow. “How can you not know what you mean to me, when you’re this fucking beautiful? You drove me crazy in your dress tonight, no, you drive me crazy every fucking time I see you. Maybe even since the first time I met you.”

“S-Sir.” You moan at the praise, face heating up. Taehyung pushes you back against the wall of the hot tub. You tilt your head back against the tiles as he touches you everywhere. He uses his hands to tease at your nipples, making them harden. Even as he does it, he is grinding down on you. You can feel yourself getting wetter by the second. 

“You fucking know I am.” Taehyung snaps, losing the careful composure he wears during scenes. “You’re my one and my only. Look at yourself, so fucking lewd, all worked up by my touch. You have me wrapped around your finger and you still think I’d have another woman.” He continues, cursing in between his sentences at your sweet sounds.

“S-Sorry.”

“Don’t ever be sorry.” Taehyung cuts you off. You let out moans as he starts rubbing at your clit, hard and fast. You grind against his hand. In his dom persona, Taehyung would never tolerate you doing this, but both of you are too far gone tonight to follow the rules to a T. “I will clear this misunderstanding tonight. On your knees, princess.” 

You lean on top of the towel Taehyung placed for you on the tiles. Taehyung places his own knees outside of yours, and you feel his hard cock against your ass. Taehyung eases two fingers into you, wet from your arousal that it’s an easy fit. “Nnn, sir.” You plead, grinding down on him. 

“You won’t get more until you say what I want to hear.” Taehyung says next to your ear. He presses his chest into your back, pinning you to the edge of the hot tub. “Who do you belong to?”

“Sir! I belong to sir!” You cry out, and Taehyung picks up the pace.

“So fucking pretty.” Taehyung praises, kissing the marks he left on your neck. “Only you get treated like this, understand? No woman could ever be loved like this by me. Every time you forget I will bend you over my lap and make you come on my cock over and over until you get it in your head.”

You let out a particularly loud moan at that, making Taehyung smirk. “Does my princess like that, hmm? You want to get bent over and take my cock all the time? Want me to fill you up with my come, plug you with a pretty little toy, and make you go about your day?” Taehyung inserts another finger and the stretch has you whining. “Answer me.” He demands.

“I do. Ah, fuck, Taehyung. Please. I do.” You plead, tilting your head to the side. Taehyung meets you immediately in a passionate kiss. It’s all tongue and teeth, completely different from Taehyung’s usual style. Is this really what he can do when he lets go? You wonder, getting drunk on his kisses alone. You thought Taehyung had been rough before, but it’s nothing compared to tonight.

“Turn around.” Taehyung says, withdrawing his fingers. 

He takes in your needy expression, leaning in to kiss you again like he can’t get enough of you. “Can I come in you, baby? Have you been taking your pill regularly?” 

“Yes. Yes.” You chant. Taehyung laughs breathlessly, grabbing a fistful of your hip in one hand and lining himself up to your entrance.

When he enters, both of you moan. “So good. Whose are you, princess?”

“Yours, only yours.” You answer breathlessly. Taehyung grips your thighs and lifts you slightly, allowing him to enter you more deeply. 

Taehyung abruptly picks up the pace of his thrusts. You grip at his shoulders for support, unable to stop the noises that fall from your lips constantly. Not only is Taehyung going fast, he is also going incredibly deep, rubbing right over your G-spot. 

“C-Can I come, sir?” You beg.

Taehyung nods, and you move one hand between your legs to rub at your clit. As you tip your head back, Taehyung holds himself deep inside you. Both of you come at the same time, you clench hard around him and Taehyung pumps his seed inside you. He kisses at the marks on your neck as he comes, and you dig your nails into his back. 

You move your hand to his hair once you finish, stroking it gently. Taehyung pulls back from the wall, his hand smoothing down your back to ease any discomfort you felt being pressed against it. You don’t even notice until the postcoital bliss dies down that your ass was now more sore than before. But Taehyung does. 

“Let’s take a shower.” He tells you, helping you up. You both get out of the hot tub. Taehyung runs a small handcloth under the tap. He comes over and wipes your vagina down first, then cleaning himself. 

The two of you get in the shower together. You let Taehyung wash your body down, scrubbing gently and avoiding touching your ass. You grab his shampoo off the ledge and put a good amount in your palms. “What are you doing?” Taehyung asks, surprised that you turned around while he was washing your back.

“Taking care of you.” You mumble, washing Taehyung hair for him. You grab the detachable showerhead from the side. You shield his eyes with a hand as you rinse the soap out.

Taehyung smiles fondly at how concentrated you look. “Baby, a dom is supposed to look after their sub following a scene. Not the other way.”

You shrug. You probably heard that somewhere. Your brain is too foggy right now to think. “But I want to.”

“Oh yeah?” 

“Yes.” You answer, smiling at how nice Taehyung’s hair looks now that it’s clean. “Because I belong to you.”

Taehyung lightly pecks your forehead. “And I’m yours.”

Later, when the haze of your subspace wears off, you two are laying in bed together. You’re wearing one of Taehyung’s shirts and a pair of panties. Taehyung is shirtless and in a pair of boxers. Taehyung has just finished putting lotion on your sore bottom to ease the ache for tomorrow. 

You lay on top of Taehyung’s chest, and Taehyung tucks the blankets tucked in around you. You snuggle up against his chest, content in his strong arms.

“Y/N, I know I already proved my point, but you really are my only one.” Taehyung tells you. You don’t reply so he cranes his head to look at you. Taehyung smiles fondly to notice you’re already asleep. He kisses the top of your head. “No problem. I guess I have the rest of my life to prove it to you.” He mutters to himself.

You smile to yourself with your eyes closed.

Requests are open (✿◡‿◡)

[scripttorture]

One of the central characters in a fantasy story I'm writing has torture as part of her backstory. She was captured by an evil race, and one individual in particular put her through a "training" regime designed to turn her into a useful/trustworthy slave. Specifically the goals of the training were:

- destroy her sense of self / agency

- overwrite her ingrained response of healing herself when injured (she has magical healing powers)

- an affectionate or worshipful disposition towards her captors

- immediate obedience to any command

I feel like both physical and psychological torture / mental conditioning are probably appropriate, though I'm leaning away from including sexual abuse. I honestly don't know much about torture at all and the only things that come to mind as producing a result similar to what I'm looking for are the Game of Thrones torture sequence and the use of obdience collars in the Codex Alera book series. The latter is very interesting to me because it is a magical device that inflicts pain in reaction to disobedience but also inflicts pleasure to reward obedience.

I guess I'm just wondering if you have any advice for what kinds of methods would be good to include in a process designed to produce obedience, rather than torture for its own sake or to extract information, as well as if there are any common pitfalls I should try to avoid in writing about such a thing.

The training itself won't be in the book, but I need to be familiar with it for backstory purposes because later in the story this character encounters her torturer again, and is subjected to some further abuse before she finally overcomes her fear and kills him.

Alright well I’m going to be straight up with you: the scenario you’ve presented is a very common torture apologist trope. It’s incredibly unrealistic. And it’s unrealistic in ways that support torture by claiming it can be ‘useful’.

 Which probably means that you’re new to the blog and haven’t heard me give this talk before. That’s OK, we all learn sometime and it’s not my intention to shame you for the fact you’re not as obsessed with this stuff as I am or couldn’t afford to shell out for the books.

 Torture does not produce obedience. The best evidence we have right now suggests it encourages active resistance.

 If you got a lot of your inspiration from Game of Thrones then frankly I’m not surprised you came up with apologia. The torture in that series is incredibly badly handled. And a big part of the point of running this blog is that most people are getting their information on torture from shows like that. Which happens because the research is inaccessible and hasn’t been popularised the way fictional tropes (sometimes fictional tropes literally started by torturers) have been popularised.

 The important thing is what you choose to do now.

 I’m going to break down the problems here and make some suggestions for what you could do instead.

 Firstly: there is no torture or abuse that will guarantee obedience. Pain does not make people meek or compliant or willing to follow commands.

 Torture survivors are not broken.

 They are not ‘controlled’ by their torturers and the suggestion that they are is used in the real world to bar real survivors from treatment. It is also used to bar them from entering safe countries and to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed visas or passports.

 The best statistics we have for any sort of compliance under torture come from analysis of historical French data where torture was used to try and force confessions (something we know torture can sometimes do).

 The ‘success’ rate averaged at 10%. Under torture 90% of people will not comply long enough to sign their name.

 Secondly: torture does not and can not ‘make’ a victim feel ‘worshipful’ towards their torturer. The suggestion is kind of like asking if someone can tap dance immediately after removing the bones from their legs.

 Torturers have no control over a victim’s emotions. They have no control over their symptoms. They have no control over their beliefs.

 And there is no such thing as a torture that can change someone’s mind in a way torturers can control.

 Once again, this fictional trope is used by politicians and the media to justify marginalising real torture survivors.

 I have read hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts from torture survivors. I’ve read historic and modern accounts. I’ve read accounts from all sort of people from all over the globe. I have never seen a survivor say anything positive about their torturers. I have never seen anything close to toleration.

 A lot of survivors are blisteringly angry at their torturers. A lot of them feel overwhelming levels of spite and some report literally putting themselves at risk of death in order to spite their torturers. And yes, a lot of them are afraid too. None of these emotions are mutually exclusive.

 Affection is impossible. We are not wired that way.

 Thirdly: I understand that ‘evil races’ are a long standing fantasy trope but it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the racism inherent in that idea. That some people are ‘born bad’.

 I’d strongly suggest you look up the Black, Indian and First Nations people that I know are on this site critiquing these kinds of fantasy tropes. Because they will be able to explain it better then I can.

 Fourthly: the term ‘psychological torture’ is a pretty common dog whistle for torture apologia.

 Most of the time tortures that people dub ‘psychological’ are things with real, physical effects that lead to lasting injury and death. They just don’t tend to leave obvious external scars. I use Rejali’s term ‘clean torture’ for these techniques. Researchers distinguish them from scarring tortures because they are harder to detect and prove in court.

 The majority of survivors today will have experienced clean torture. They will have no obvious physical scars. But they will still be disabled. They’re ‘just’ less likely to see any form of justice for it.

 Fifthly: torture is a terrible training method because it decreases a person’s ability to learn.

 Torture causes memory problems. It also often causes lasting physical injuries that make performing basic tasks more difficult. And it causes a lot of serious psychological problems which make performing basic tasks more difficult.

 A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture.

 I probably sound quite angry here.

 I write fantasy and I also write about torture a lot. But I can’t imagine that it’s just flavour for a fantasy world or some artefact of the past. Torture is a real, present threat in the country that I grew up in. If I was to return now I could, literally, be tortured and executed.

 If you want to include torture in your world, in your story then you are committing to telling someone else’s story. You are representing an incredibly marginalised group of people and you are presenting that representation to a third group, one that has never had contact with real torture survivors.

 Are you comfortable with the idea of telling your peers that survivors are still controlled by ‘the enemy’? That they’re passive? That they don’t have the capacity to make their own decisions?

 Are you comfortable knowing that the popularity of this message keeps millions of genocide survivors in refugee camps, blocked from citizenship, aid and safety?

 I understand feeling attached to a story and a character. And I understand that this information is hard to find. Hell I’m probably going to end up with the only English copy of one of the pivotal textbooks because I’m shelling out to get it translated.

 You say you want to write a torture survivor. With respect I don’t think you know what a torture survivor looks like.

 I think the most helpful, and kindest, thing I can do here is describe what torture does to people. Because I can’t tell you whether that’s something you want to write. I could try and rebuild this scenario for you (and if you decide you’re interested in that after reading all of this and all the links then I suggest looking through the blog tags for ICURE, torture as training, Black Widow and Overwatch.) But I think you need to decide whether you actually want to write a torture survivor first.

 Here’s a post on the most common torture apologia tropes.

 Here’s the post on the types of memory problems torture commonly causes. I strongly recommend picking at least one.

 Remember that this would never go away. Improvement and recovery in torture survivors means learning to live with symptoms. The symptoms themselves are permanent.

 It’s a hundred different alarms set up on their phone to try and make up for the forgetfulness that makes them miss appointments. It’s the little bottle of perfume in their pocket to bring themselves back to reality when they get intrusive memories at work.

 Here’s a post on the other common symptoms.

 You want something in the range of 3-5 of those, though more are likely if your character is held for years. Each of them should be severe. Every single symptom should have a large, negative, impact on the character’s daily life.

 Do you know anyone with chronic pain? It warps their world. Work can become impossible. Basic household tasks like getting dressed, cooking, cleaning the dishes are done through gritted teeth or not at all. Hobbies and ‘fun’ activities dwindle as they struggle to find a way to do them that doesn’t hurt. Interaction with other people, even loved ones, can easily become barbed.

 Because the pain makes everything more difficult. It means everything takes more energy, more effort. Which means that things fall by the wayside, whether that’s by a pile of mouldering dishes in the sink or snapping at a child. It means tears and the social judgement that follows them. It means the world narrowing as it gets harder to go out.

 Do you see what I mean? Every part of life.

 That’s an example for one symptom. You need to work out at least four. Then figure out how they interact. Then figure out what the character can do to make her life better.

 With chronic pain that can mean painkillers but it’s always more then that. It’s re-learning how to do things; how to put on trousers without aggravating the bad knee, how to sew with one hand. It means learning to cut down on what they do and it means learning a new sort of flexibility; accepting that there are days when the pain is too much.

 It can mean having the same conversation about disability over and over again. With family, with friends, with colleagues. ‘I can’t do that.’ ‘I can do that sometimes but not always.’ ‘That will hurt me.’ ‘I can’t use that chair.’ ‘I can’t get my arms that high above my shoulders.’ ‘I need help with this.’

 And that sometimes means learning a kind of patience that is really barely held back rage. Or perhaps I’m projecting a little with this last one.

 If you’ve never met a torture survivor, if you’ve never looked at a survivor’s work, then all this is difficult. You’re trying to imagine something from first principals with nothing to fall back on.

 So let’s bring some survivors into the discussion here. Some reality.

 Who’s listened to Fela? How about Bobi Wine?

 Fela Kuti was the father of modern Afro beats music. He was tortured multiple times and during one attack, which destroyed his home, his mother was murdered by the military. When he got out of jail Fela marched her funeral procession past the biggest barracks in Nigeria’s biggest city. He wrote two songs about this attack and he doubled down on his opposition to the military government.

 Fela’s music started causing riots.

 You can read what I have to say about him here. You can listen to his music on youtube.

 Here’s an interview with Bobi Wine, which was conducted shortly after he was tortured in Uganda. He talked about how he was determined to go back and continue fighting. Which he did. He even ran against the president.

 I’ve also got a short piece on Searle who was a cartoonist captured by the Japanese during World War 2. His drawings of what happened in To the Kwai and Back are worth seeing. Especially if you want to write atrocities on this scale. They will show you the scale and how to focus on the small, human elements despite that overwhelming scale.

 Alleg’s The Question is pretty much a must, it’s one of the most thorough accounts from the Franco-Algerian war.

 Monroe’s A Darkling Plain is also a must, it’s a series of interviews with survivors of various different conflicts and atrocities. Some are torture survivors. Some are not. It is essential reading because it shows the variety in survivors as well as giving a sense of their lives beyond the symptoms.

 Finally Amnesty International has literally hundreds of interviews and studies available for free online.

 The most important decision for any story with regards to torture is whether it should be there at all.

 So much of this topic is intimidating and so much of it is difficult to write. Not just in the ‘oh this is horribly effecting’ sense but in the ‘I have twelve things to juggle in this simple scene’ sense.

 Ask yourself what torture adds to this character and this story. What does this backstory actually give this character?

 Because if the point is to have her vulnerable and then ultimately triumphing violently over her attackers I don’t think you want a torture scenario. You could get the same thing from a bad guy trying to drug her and having the kidnapping fail when she fights him off, clumsy but effective nonetheless.

 And she could still come out of something like that traumatised.

 Right now I really don’t see this adding anything but torture apologia to your story.

 Handling torture well in a story means accepting that it can’t be the same story without it. It means watching the characters and narrative warp under the weight of it. It means lasting effects, for all the characters and for the world itself.

 I believe you are capable of writing that if you want to, pet. But this ain’t it.

Edit: I’m having trouble seeing the beginning of the answer here. Can anyone let me know if there are formatting issues again please? The first word in the htmal is ‘Alright’ but what I’m seeing on tumblr starts 8 paragraphs in.

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[solarstcrms]

↪ LOOK WHO MISSED FAMILY DAY . . .

harmonia, goddess of harmony & concord  (fc: lee dahee)

baekwon angier-eun  (fc: namkoong min)

selene angier-eun  (fc: gabrielle union)

kratos, god of strength & power  (fc: lol ... )

jaekyung angier-eun  (fc: kim minjae)

charlene angier-eun  (fc: sydney park)  //  @princesschxrlie

** below is just a little family info off the top of my head lol. but i would like to say that kratos probably looks something closer to, like, kim jongkook? but also who knows for sure... the truth is between paige and kratos himself at this point ldgkjfdg **

random family trivia let’s go !

baekwon is a ‘go with the flow’ kind of man. when selene spent that summer in jeju and he fell madly in love, it really opened his eyes. sure, he was heart-broken when she left, but they were teens. he moved on, and even better, now he knew he wanted to be out there, wandering the world.

it was years later doing just that when he ran into harmonia. they were really similarly-minded so things between them were very casual, until she came to him with a child. she disappeared just as quickly and suddenly baek had to figure out parenting, quick.

when he bumped into selene again, jae was already two and selene was pregnant. in reconnecting, though, they rekindled things very quickly and it’s only the logical next step for baekwon to lock things down right there and promise to raise selene’s child as his own. just like that.

selene comes from a family of prestige in the fashion world. with her grandfather’s money, her dad started the angier fashion house, but selene is the one who really pushed them to global success. she still designs for angier proper, on which her full name is credited, and runs things from belgium.

speaking of angier, every few years they update their global ambassador with the hottest up-and-coming icon and it’s a highly vetted position. the current ambassador is nl’s own freya waldron, or freja!

until recently, jae and charlie were both under the impression they were half-siblings who shared a dad. they’re still kind of fucked up about being lied to for their entire lives, but they’re still a tightly-knit duo. charlie will always be jae’s baby sister, and you can fight him on that.

using nepotism to her advantage, selene got baekwon a cushy job in a subsidiary company where he manages employee relations. they were both shameless about it but he’s a trophy husband now, he doesn’t give a fuck about shame!

actually, speaking of nepotism, jae is the only one allergic to it. charlie didn’t have any weird hangups about skipping all the boring steps to work where she wants to and she’s actually an incredible asset to angier, so who exactly is gonna tell her that she’s wrong?

jae, on the other hand, kept the angier out of his name from an early age to prove he could get where he wanted on skill alone. he worked his way up the industry ladder until it was impossible to keep his family name secret, but by then it was obvious he knew what he was doing.

he doesn’t use it at nl, though, because he never got out of the habit. anyone there who knows anything about the angiers already knows who he is, and those who don’t, won’t care, so why bother bringing it up?

the angier family and the arnault family (of louis vuitton) are the two most influential families in the french fashion community, so natually, they have a long ongoing beef / rivalry that spans generations.

jae’s biggest and last job was when he worked for louis vuitton (lol) and when he essentially had a breakdown in the middle of work and then ghosted them, the arnaults had him blacklisted. it’s why he can’t get work in fashion anymore, not that it’s stopped him from trying.