#she considers him her oldest friend except for her literal wife

[asher-writes]

Character Views start vs end

writing neon glow in gold dust gives me so much lore its very tasty.

[madame-mortician]

For Pride Month I wanted to discuss LGBTQ themes in Horror (slashers in particular) because it’s so interesting how queer themes have been present in this genre for MANY decades now, it’s insane that there are homophobic slasher fans lmao.

I mean, literally 3 out of the Top 6 slashers are LGBTQ lmao. Chucky, Pinhead and Freddy are LGBTQ, and technically Jason/Michael at a stretch (this is if you seen them as asexual, which I mean they kinda are, you think Jason gives a shit about sexual attraction? Bro doesn’t give a shit about anything except his mother lol)

Anyways, as I was saying, Chucky is bisexual, as is Freddy and Pinhead is Pinhead. It seems most classic slashers were either (A): Silent, emotionless killing machines or (B) Comedic and evil psychos. Most of the silent slashers have little to no character outside of killing, and things like sexual attraction (or attraction in general) would just not apply to them, not really because they’re asexual, but rather because they don’t think about anything other than killing. The comedic characters have way more personality and usually they have actual lives and relationships outside of murder, so they actually do have bonds with people, romantic or otherwise. It really comes down to who had an outside life, since Michael spent his whole life in a hospital, and when he’s not incarcerated he’s killing people, bro has no friends, relationships, aspirations, hobbies he just kills. Freddy on the other hand, has a life, he has friends, a house, a wife and a job, he does stuff he isn’t just mindlessly killing people all day. The characters like him are more likely to actually have attractions because they don’t completely focus on murder and do think of other things. Pinhead isn’t a comedic jokester but he’s also not a silent killing machine, so him and some other exceptions are odd cases. Pinhead especially in regards to this topic because Pinhead’s whole motivation revolves around physical attraction, so unlike the other slashers who’s ideals are focused on murder and the other stuff is not the priority, Pinhead focuses on the attraction and puts the other stuff second. Of course in his case that “other stuff” is eternal (and internal) damnation and torture, but considering he sees this masochism and sadism as pleasure and is attracted to it, his killing stuff is basically the attraction stuff.

Moving away from that, back in the 30s, Dracula’s Daughter was released. It was a sequel to Dracula and focused on *gasp* his daughter as she tries to stop being a vampire. The entire film is her seducing women to eat, whilst mourning her loss of humanity. It’s pretty interesting actually, because she acts exactly like Dracula, with her victims being women who she assaults in rather seductive ways, however the difference is she feels guilty about her monstrous form, unlike Dracula. It’s been considered one of the oldest queer horror films ever, and it’s not hard to interpret the Countess’ “vampirism” as an allegory for lesbianism, especially since she tries and fails to cure herself of it and feels guilty the whole film for it, unlike Dracula who’s allowed to like women because of his gender. It was probably intended to be homophobic due to the times, however this actually raises an interesting topic I want to discuss.

Part of older horror, especially the homoerotic ones, is the characters who can be interpreted as part of the LGBTQ, typically being bad guys. Most of them are the blasphemous villain who the good guy defeats, with the message obviously being that gay people = bad, and people should be scared of them. The interesting part though, is the modern interpretations of these things. These were supposed to be homophobic, cautionary tales advising people that queer people were evil villains and they never get a happy ending in these films and yet, modern audiences have reclaimed these characters and almost “praise them.” Like a reclaimed slur that becomes a compliment to people in that community, characters who were canonically LGBTQ, but were only so, so that they could be the bad guy of the fable, were now being reanalysed and adopted by modern audiences as progressive and queer characters. Sure Dracula’s daughter is certainly and canonically a lesbian, but the movie makes it abundantly clear that this is a “bad thing” and that she is a bad person for this… yet modern audiences saw she was gay and reclaimed her. I probably should mention I think this is a good thing as it’s kind of petty and really funny to grab characters meant to hate on us, and then we admire them.

I see it sort of like this:

“I’ve created a story about a gay person, who is evil and the villain, and dies at the end and the message is that gay people are bad and straight people are good.”

“I love this gay villain! I love that they’re LGBTQ like me, and I love villains, they’re so cool!”

“No, wait, you’re supposed to be rooting for the heroes-“

“Fuck yeah, gay people are awesome.”

Of course nowadays representation isn’t as big an issue as back then. Back then the only gay characters you’d see would be evil or stereotypical, and now we do get diverse characters so it’s definitely not an issue as much anymore.

I probably should also mention a LOT of 80s-90s slashers had LGBTQ people working on it, like as directors, writers or actors, so that’s why there’s a suprising ammount of homoerotic themes in those (Looking at you A Nightmare on Elm Street 2)

[warwickroyals]

beginning - previous - next

post is long af, but i have things i have to establish and alyssa's readers need to learn warwick lore if they hope to understand anything i have planned!

ps - can't believe i wrote dialogue for contessina, she's always been my favourite of helena's children

@thegrimalldis

[CONTESSINA, TEXT] Wilhelmina. When your father and I allowed you to move abroad it was under the assumption that you would be responsible and focus on school

[CONTESSINA, TEXT] Spending over 25K in under a month is unacceptable and proves that you're not ready to be living on your own

[MINA] Is she serious?

[CONTESSINA, TEXT] I have tried calling you twice already. Why don't you answer? Your father wants to speak w/ you.

[MINA] She cannot be serious, oh my God!

[MINA, TEXT] Mom relax.  School IS my priority but ppl here have standards. WMU isn't boarding school i cant wear the same ugly clothes every day!

[MINA, TEXT] Im sorry i missed ur call but theres nothing to talk about. Im exactly where i belong. No matter what ppl at home think . . . im living for myself now

~

[TELEVISION] By late 1967, the relationship had been going on for over half a decade.

[TELEVISION] The flame hadn’t died, Louis was still quite obsessed, and it was around that time members of the family—his mother, his grandmother—worried he was considering marriage.

[TELEVISION]   The relationship just wasn’t tenable, especially for the time. I mean, Queen Anne famously told her grandson a royal consort must without exception be wealthy, winsome, and white. The point stuck, Farrah Nassar was none of those things.

[TELEVISION] So, already we’re seeing the standards Prince Louis was held to, with those in mind it

becomes easy to understand why he eventually settled on Irene. Irene was the quintessential royal bride in many, many ways. 

The Wynnes were one of Sunderland’s oldest aristocratic families. Lady Irene’s ancestors had been in North America since the Mayflower and had walked the halls of our most esteemed institutions for generations. Top politicians, military commanders, and socialites. Queen Consort wouldn’t be a daunting title for a Wynne, or so everyone assumed—

[???] MINA, MINA, MINA!

[MINA] I’m coming, I’m coming, Jeez

[ZELLA] It was bad, Mina, so, so bad.

[MINA] You also smell “so, so bad”. Like gasoline and alcohol and . . . death

[MINA] Was it basketball again? Don’t say it was basketball, again.

[ZELLA] No, it was his stupid girlfriend. [IMMITATING TRE] "Naw, Zel, you don't know. She's so good. She runs a charity for pugs with proptosis. Her little brother has cancer. I can't mess this up." All because I told him it was a bad idea to bring her to my birthday party.

[TV SUBTITLES] Her parents and sisters were ecstatic. Irene received a lot of positive encouragement from her mother, Countess Wynne, in particular.

[ZELLA] I told you not to invite him. He’s a total cornball. It wish he would just hurry up and marry her. I’m not trying to play—I don’t even wanna fucking talk about it anymore. Which one is this?

[MINA] Uh, the doc? Women of Warwick it’s about—

[ZELLA] Whatever, just play it, I need a distraction.

[TELEVISION] I think early on Irene realized something was amiss. Farrah would just keep popping up. At family picnics and charity galas. Louis tried to pass her off as a friend, but Irene sensed the intimacy.

Irene was deeply hurt.

[TELEVISION] She would come to her mother in floods of tears saying, “Mommy, I

 can’t do this, Louis is in love with someone else.”  Countess Wynne, romance author, staunch

traditionalist, and . . .  Stepford wife—sorry—told her daughter that Farrah wasn’t a threat, that

 Louis would lose interest in her once marriage and children came along—

[ZELLA] I relate to her so badly. 

[MINA] Irene? Because same, I mean, our families are sorta similar.

[ZELLA] No, Farrah.

[MINA] EW! Don’t ever say that again, I will literally cut you off.

[ZELLA] Why?

[MINA] Because, like, how do you even do that? Like, how do you sleep with a married man with little children and feel literally no remorse? She is definitely going to hell.

[ZELLA] I'm not saying what she did was right, I'm just saying that we never hear her side of the story.

[MINA] Yeah, because she ran away like a coward after everything blew up in her snake face.

[ZELLA] C'mon, I’ve watched too many of these things with you. There are reasons to feel bad for her.

[ZELLA] Farrah was, like, an outsider, right? People always said that she didn’t deserve the things Irene had so, like, people got super fucking angry when the cheating came out. They thought she didn’t deserve that love—Don’t look at me like that, I’m spitting! Why has everyone forgiven Louis for the cheating but not her, then?

[MINA] Why do I get the feeling this is just about stupid Tré and his stupid car and his stupid maybe-girlfriend with the pug obsession? He’s a bum, Zella, forget about him.

[ZELLA] You’re not going to guilt-trip me into relating to Farrah, it’s not that deep.

[MINA] Can I guilt-trip you for going on dates with someone you hate, though?

[ZELLA] At least I’m actually going on dates, Mina.

[MINA] It’s called having standards. Why would I settle when there’s so much bigger and brighter?

[ZELLA] Not this again, Lord.

[MINA] A princess belongs with a prince, that’s the way the world works.

[ZELLA] No, that’s how the Grimalldis’ world works, and everyone else is just living life.

[unsafepin]

Saw’s Adam Faulkner-Stanheight and Queercoding

In today’s day and age, I believe any relatively media-literate person would be able to tell you what “queercoding” is in the lamest of terms.

It’s the flamboyant male sidekick in Disney movies who is comically gender non-conforming and is played for laughs. It’s the punky girl in sitcoms who seems to despise all men and is mean to everybody she encounters, while still having a heart of gold she extends to her female friends. That's, no offense to media critics who spent years unpacking the never ending layers of undeniable queerness in these characters, baby’s first queercoding. For the context of this essay, let’s call this extremely obvious type of coding “Cishet Queercoding” - coding largely done by cishet people, easily recognizable by cishet people. What I want to unpack in this essay is “Queer queercoding”.

The most obvious example that comes to mind and got plenty of media attention recently is, of course, Supernatural. You’ve got to hear me out here. In its grueling 15 season run, a hodgepodge of people of different ideas and ideas for the show worked on Supernatural, but fundamentally it was a show conceived by cis straight men for cis straight men. This resulted in its two leads, Sam and Dean Winchesters, being comically masculine. Dean’s demonstration of masculinity (enjoying rock’n’roll, women, cars and alcohol, preferably at the same time) is so comical every queer person who laid eyes on this character immediately went “Oh, okay, you’re overcompensating”, while the writers of the show simply tried to fulfill their ultimate cishet dude fantasy. No one is this macho all the time, except if you are performing cishet masculinity.

Hence by my definition, “queer queercoding” isn’t necessarily LGBT characters by LGBT folks for LGBT folks, but rather coding a character as queer (accidentally or not) in such a way it’s painfully familiar for LGBT people but largely goes over the head of cishet folks. So where does Saw fit into all this?

Saw’s whole premise is a complicated, morally gray mix of one man both exacting revenge on people who wronged him and teaching them to appreciate the sanctity of life. While the main antagonist, Jigsaw, isn’t afraid of collateral damage, his main targets are people who somehow ruined his life and don’t appreciate their own. This is why Dr. Lawrence Gordon finds himself in the trap - for cheating on his wife and cold heartedly breaking the news of untreatable cancer to Jigsaw. His companion in the trap though - a downtrodden twenty-something photographer Adam Faulkner-Stanheight - seems to only be there as an accessory to Gordon’s torture. He doesn’t have any immediate connection to Jigsaw and his only connection to Gordon is that he was hired to spy and photograph his activities. Gordon’s condition to escape the trap is that he must kill Adam. Adam doesn’t get a solution to escape.

Adam’s only function in the film is seemingly to be an audience self-insert and then to suffer. The audience for gory, tacky horror flicks is obviously much closer to Adam’s character than to Gordon’s thus while we can sympathize with the latter’s struggle, the former’s is much more visceral. Adam’s only crime seems to be taking a job to earn some money and not being satisfied with a life that’s frankly hard to be satisfied with (In his own words - “I remember going to sleep in my shithole apartment and then waking up in a literal shithole”). And he dies in the end - abandoned, on the edge of escape, not knowing what he did to deserve this fate - while his fellow prisoner, as we later find out, becomes Jigsaw’s apprentice and goes on to torture other people.

Cool, so I’ve explained why Saw is scary beyond a guy cutting his foot off, why is Adam queer again? Well, besides his artistic career, general cynicism about life, comically crippling addiction to nicotine (queer existence and addiction to substances is a well-documented problem in real life, a coping method for living in an unaccepting society) and a cut dialogue line revealing he doesn’t speak to his parents (I don’t think I need to explain how many queer children were disowned by their caretakers), being put in a narrative only to suffer, die and be outlived by some cishet douchebag is possibly the oldest queer trope in cinema. Leaning into symbolism even more, Adam was cunning and on-guard the whole movie, obviously recognizing the only other person in the trap with him is just as likely to be a foe as an ally, but by the end he put his life entirely in Gordon’s hands. He shot Adam to escape and Adam still helped him, believing he will return with help. To make it painfully obvious, Adam was punished for putting his trust in another man. Adam Faulkner-Stanheight, bleeding out from a bullet wound inflicted by Gordon, still embraced him and begged him not to leave.

I don’t think it was Leigh Whanell’s, screenwriter and Adam’s actor’s, intention to make a veiled kill-your-gays metaphor. On the contrary, I think that the ephemeral queerness of suffering elevated this movie far beyond its successors. It becomes a commentary not only on needless violence, sanctity of life, but on how queer people suffer both in media and in real life. Perhaps by not considering this perspective, Saw was able to look queer pain in the eye and not flinch.

[revengerevisited]

So I’ve been kinda dancing around my original story idea for a little while, and I got this idea in my head of ‘what if I release chapter 1 and then get feedback without telling anyone what the story is about first so it’s more of a surprise?’ But honestly? I’m realizing since I already released a preview-of-a-preview for chapter 1, and it might be a little while until I finish chapter 1, plus I honestly kinda feel like I’d rather work on sketches of my character designs than write at the moment, I might as well go ahead and tell you guys. X’3

So! I watched a couple anime recently both centered around the premise of... monster girls! These being Monster Musume and Monster Girl Doctor, but then I noticed there’s also Interviews with Monster Girls, A Centaur’s Life, and the infamous Interspecies Reviewers, and I asked myself... Monster girls are pretty popular right now, yeah? But where’s all the monster boys?! And that’s how I got the idea! I re-watched some of my favorite anime based on Otome Games, Kamigami no Asobi and Uta no Prince Sama for inspiration as well, and a few ones I hadn’t seen before like Dance with Devils and Magic-kyun Renaissance for inspiration as well.

So now I’ve got my premise that I shared earlier: This is the story of Millie, a young woman down on her luck who happens to live in a world where monsters aren’t just real, but commonplace. She started working as a maid in a mansion-turned-art-school whose students are a group of very attractive monster boys. The twist is that these aren’t just any monster boys; they belong to various rare and exotic species with deadly reputations...

Note that character and place names are technically place-holders for now and may change if I come up with better ones. Now, I don’t wanna spoil anything story-wise, but I think I can introduce my setting and some of the characters that you’re gonna meet. The story is set in a modern setting, though it’s vague if it’s actually Earth or just some generic world similar to it, as I try to avoid referencing real-world places or events. This is a world where humans and monsters live together after a Great Interspecies War happened in the past, but tensions have mostly relaxed by the time the story takes place. The war could be thought of as the equivalent of our own World War One, one in which there was a truce decided after many years of stalemate fighting.

The city everything takes place in is tentatively named Dullahan, and was built directly after the war to commemorate peace between human and monster kind. It’s considered an artistic cultural center, and it’s got a lot of interesting entertainment places to go to, arcades, theaters, aquariums, etc, that the characters can have a lot of different shenanigans in. The other main setting is the Beaufort Academy of the Arts, which was actually a mansion that was converted into a small private school. This is where all the characters live, and our main character Millie works as a maid there.

Before I go into the characters, I should start with the various monster species. There are 12 species, divided into 2 groups: common monsters and exotic monsters. The common monsters are centaurs, harpies, lamias (snake people), kobolds (dog people), ogres, and merrows (mermaids). These species are all pretty standard, and will be mostly background characters and npcs. The main characters, and love interests for Millie, will be of the exotic variety: arachnes (spider people), sirens (deep-sea mermaids), mandrakes (plant people), dragons, manticores (with a liontaur body-type), and scyllas (octopus people).

So what differentiates a common monster from an exotic one? Well, while the Interspecies War was between humans and monsters in general, some monsters were already at least partially integrated into human society, and the rest followed soon after the war ended. These monsters were almost as common as humans, and either herbivorous or omnivorous, with the exception of the carnivorous lamias who prefer to eat eggs over anything else. On the other hand, the so-called ‘exotic’ species were not only much more rare, but they had a very different food preference... one which earned them the now derogatory nickname... man-eaters.

Naturally, most ‘man-eaters’ weren’t exactly welcomed into human --nor common monster-- society with open arms, not that most of them wanted to. For the most part, species as powerful and dangerous as them didn’t want to play nice with those they had once --and in some cases still do-- regard as prey, and so hid away into the furthest reaches of the world. Which of course makes them perfect material for all our leading men and Millie’s various love-interests!! Oh yes, while all of these monster boys are perfectly civilized --well, for the most part-- they still belong to species that many both human and monster alike continue to fear to this day. While they aren’t exactly fish out of water (well, except for the siren) there’s still plenty of awkward misunderstandings and interesting scenarios that can be played out.

So! Let’s have a quick run-down of the characters, keep in mind that none of these names are final and could change later on. First there’s Millie, a hardworking young woman who’s had a recent streak of bad luck. Through a misunderstanding she gets hired as a maid in a mansion-turned-art-school. She’s very sweet and tries her best to help others, but she’s not as innocent as she appears; she’ll understand your innuendos just fine, even if she doesn’t really say any herself! Next is Richard and Lara Beaufort, a husband and wife who run the school. Richard is rather laid-back, yet he’s also a master of all kinds of art, painting, sculpture, photography, dancing, singing, you name it! Lara is his arachne wife, a rather boisterous woman who owns a high-class fashion company. The secret to her clothing’s success?? Arachne silk, of course! The school was her idea, a way to help better integrate exotic species into society. Will her mission succeed? Only time can tell.

Richard and Lara have a son named Simon, our first love interest and a human-arachne hybrid who takes almost entirely after his mother in the looks-department (hybrids tend to look like one species or the other, rather than a mix of both). He’s a bit withdrawn due to dealing with bullying as a kid; most people --human and monster alike-- are afraid of his spider-like appearance, so he doesn’t get out much-- to the point his parents worry about him being a shut-in for life! He’s also a gamer boy, and has a secret soft side for gothic poetry, although he doesn’t want to join his parents’ art classes. He actually disapproves of his mother’s exotic species integration plan, as from what he’s experienced he feels it’s a waste of time.

Simon’s best friend and Millie’s second love interest is Louis, a mandrake who lives in the woods behind the manor. Louis is extremely shy and more than a bit lonely, even more so than Simon, and he doesn’t speak very often out of fear that the sound of his voice will hurt others around him. Mandrake screams can induce insanity or even kill those that hear them, hence his fear. Being part plant, Louis has mild shape-shifting abilities and is able to transform between child and young adult forms at will, although he’s actually the oldest of the group. He also isn’t a student at the art school, although he has an interest in floristry.

Now for our actual students! Forrest is a manticore, which in this world means he has a body similar to that of a centaur, but with the lower half of a lion instead of a horse, and a scorpion-like tail tipped with a deadly venomous stinger. Despite his species’s name literally meaning ‘man-eater’, Forrest is extremely friendly and cheerful, and is very sporty too. His passion is photography, and he also loves eating food-- any sort of meat dish is fine by him! He’s also a fan of fantasy tabletop roleplaying games, and will often make references comparing them to everyday life; he always plays the knight who saves the princess!

Anthony is a childhood ‘friend’ of Forrest’s, though he’s loathe to admit it. Highly intelligent and highly snobbish, Anthony fancies himself an intellectual-- and he’s not exactly wrong. Being a dragon, he likes to hoard things-- in his case, knowledge. Anthony loves to read, and is most often found in the library. His skill is in drawing and painting, and all his paintings’ invariably morose subject matter worry Millie. Still, this haughty dragon could definitely learn to loosen up a little, and be a little more kind; perhaps his stay at the academy --and his interactions with Millie-- will open his mind to appreciating the feelings of others. He does, at the very least, greatly respect Master Beaufort as a master of the arts.

The other two students are denizens of the sea, and have been friends for a very long time. Emil is a scylla, and like all scyllas he’s a little eccentric, and just can’t seem to keep his tentacles to himself! While Forrest is obsessed with eating, Emil’s true calling is cooking, and he loves making all kinds of dishes, especially anything seafood and/or foreign. Emil also is highly appreciative of women’s fashion, and absolutely adores everything to come from Madam Beaufort’s clothing brand-- so much so that he actually wears them himself! His pretty-boy looks and penchant for wearing women’s clothing actually has Millie mistake him for a girl at first, though he’s very much unafraid to show her his romantic side, or at least what he interprets as romantic... 

Keeping Emil’s pervy antics in check is our sixth and final monster boy, Oswald! As a siren, Oswald spent most of his life in the sea, and still has a lot to learn about humanity. He’s a pretty cool guy but gets a bit embarrassed about his species’s troublesome past as the cause of many shipwrecks at sea, and would prefer to not discuss it. His passion is rock music, and his main instrument is the guitar. He also loves to sing, but refrains from doing so due to the hypnotic effect it has on other species. His lack of legs, tentacles, or a snake-like tail means that like other merrows and sirens he requires a wheelchair to move around on land, and often feels frustrated that he can’t show off how adept he is at traversing water. He’s also easy to embarrass and obsessed with not allowing anything to ‘ruin’ his manly image, including allowing Millie (a girl!) to help carry him around.

So there you have it, all my monster boys! I left out a few things, as those would be major spoilers, but those are my ideas for the characters for now! I’ll try to draw and post some sketches of their designs later. Hopefully I haven’t forgotten anything, but this won’t be the last time I talk about monster boys. Any questions or comments would be very much appreciated! Nsfw questions are allowed (all the boys wear pants for a reason, after all), though I’m currently not sure if this series will be 16+ or 18+, if you catch my meaning. Lemme know how interested you are in this story, or if you’re not interested please let me know that too! 

[pagingevilspawn]

Would you please write a fic about alex and jo help their daughter with her homework, they would be kinds cute help them study

cross my heart, hope to die, please stick this pencil in my eye

there’s a reason this took me forever. reason number one, two, and three; proofs. i was unable to write this because of proofs. i got this ask and LIKE A CHILD decided that i wanted to make my fictional characters suffer as much as i did. so once i was done with proofs, i had to write something about proofs, which made me exhausted because i hate even talking about proofs

that made no sense, but here’s this thing that i made. lots of it was my real life monologue, screaming at my computer bc of fucking proofs. enjoy. (also, let’s appreciate the fact that i updated three whole days in a row)

(also, another installment of the “payton loves evan peters too much” series, where i name jolex babies after his AHS characters)

Alex Karev sat in the drivers side of his SUV, making a right onto the upcoming street as he listened to the song playing on the radio. He drummed his fingers along the steering wheel absentmindedly, pulling up to the curbside of James Madison Middle School, waiting patiently in his seat until he heard the five minute warning bell ring.

When the loud bell goes off, he exits the car and makes his way to the other side, learning against the door so his kids would know it was him. Too many parent’s owned black range rovers, and the last thing Alex needed was for either one of his kids to climb into the back seat of some stranger's car. 

He didn’t need to wait long for children to start piling out of the school in large crowds. Middle school was so different from elementary, for his kids at least. He remembers when they would come sprinting out of the building as if their lives depended on it, but now they just casually strolled, no matter how much they liked or disliked school. 

A few minutes later he catches sight of his daughter, who’s eyes light up when she sees him. He wasn’t supposed to pick them up today, the nanny was. But he had gotten off of work early and had insisted with Jo that he be the one to pick up the kids. It was a task he wished he got to do more often. 

“Hey.” his daughter greets him with a smile on her face. He steps aside and lets her enter the side door, where she flops her black backpack on the floor and settles into the seat, pulling out her phone and begins to start scrolling through it. 

“Dad!” he hears another voice exclaim, quickly tracing it to his son, who was currently running to the car, backpack bouncing up and down behind him. The sixth grader moved across the property quickly, greeting his dad with a fist bump before sliding into the back seat.

He closes both of his kids doors before making his way into the driver's side, revving up the car’s engine before he drives down the long block, whatever music his daughter decided on playing through the radio. 

Alex winces when the music begins to blare through the car, “Brynn, turn that crap down would you?”

Brynn’s face looks scandalized. “It’s not crap. It’s art.” she emphasizes, turning it up even louder and screaming the words. (Poor Brynn couldn’t sing, and she knew it)

“I came in like a wreeckingggg ballll I never hit so harddd in loveeee all i wanted was to break your walls all you ever did wre-e-e-ck meee.” she yells, using her phone as a microphone, hair flying around wildly as she moved up and down, side to side in her seat.  

Alex rolls his eyes, unable to hide the smile on his lips. His wife and daughter were too much alike sometimes. He turns the knob himself, sending his daughter a look, silently telling her not to do it again. 

“I think it’s crap. Just like how I think you sound like a dying cat whenever you sing.” his son pipes in from the back, a signature Karev smirk plastered on his lips as he keeps his gaze locked on his phone. 

“Shut up Rory,” she sneers, “Nobody likes you.” 

Rory fakes a laugh, looking back to his phone, and then to the scenery outside his window. They passed house after house until they finally reached their destination, John Quincy Adams Elementary School.

“Wait here,” Alex instructs the two kids, who murmurs their we know’s, more focused on the devices in their hand to the words coming out of his mouth. 

He makes his way to the ‘log cabin’ that sat at the front of the school, giving a friendly smile to the woman sitting at the sign out table, a crappy fold out plastic table that had definitely seen better days. “Faye and Bridgette Karev.” 

The woman slides the forms across the table, handing him a pen. “Sign here and here. I’ll go get them right now.” She stands up from her seat and heads inside to tell the two girls that their father had arrived.

Alex sprawls his messy signature onto the page, huffing before leaning up against the gate. His girls could take anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes to pack up their things. Luckily today didn’t seem to be the latter, because before he knew it, the two youngest Karev’s came bouncing towards him. 

“Daddy!” “Daddy!” 

The seven year olds gave him a large hug, showing him matching toothless smiles. When Jo and him found out that she was pregnant for a third time, they were overjoyed. They had always wanted more than two kids, but hadn’t really been actively trying. They were excited to expand their family of four into a family of five. When they discovered that she was not carrying not one, but two babies, they were shocked. Jo wasn’t expecting to get pregnant at thirty-nine, much less with twins. Brynn was seven at the time, and Rory was five, so they were worried about how their kids would react when they found out two new babies would be joining the Karev household. 

Rory --surprisingly-- took the news really well. He was excited with the fact that he could have baby brothers. (Oh well. Alex Karev only seemed to make girls, Rory being the one exception.) 

Brynn was a bit more reluctant. She had heard from her friends at school how much babies cried and stole all the attention. She loved both her parent’s equally, but she was a Daddy’s girl through and through. The thought of losing both of her parent’s focus was terrifying. What if her Daddy called her new siblings names like Bug or Princess? Those were her names, and her names only. She couldn’t let the new babies steal her names. 

It took a while, but after multiple long talks and countless acts of reassurance, but Brynn eventually came around to the idea. Before they knew it, Brynn was just as excited for the upcoming babies as they were. Jo was worried throughout her whole pregnancy. Since she was almost forty, she was now considered to have a geriatric pregnancy. Just the word ‘geriatric’ did nothing to soothe any woman’s nerves, but add that to the fact that Jo was a surgeon and knew all the risks of pregnancy, and she was practically a mess the first few months. As it turned out, the twins ended up being her easiest pregnancy, since Brynn decided to make her entrance into the world four weeks early and while she was carrying Rory she had the occasional spotting that terrified her to her core every time, worried that she was miscarrying. 

The twins ended up being born at thirty-five weeks, perfectly healthy. The only thing that gave Jo any trouble at all was the severe morning sickness, which turned out to be all day sickness. 

But in the end it was way more than worth it. Faye was pretty much Jo reincarnated, just like Brynn. Every aspect about her was exactly like her mom. Her hair, her eyes, her face shape, chin. The only thing that she inherited was the Karev crooked grin, which all of their children had. (She didn’t even have a big Karev head when she was born!) 

Bridgette on the other hand, was all Alex, except for the eye color. Between her potty mouth, sassy attitude, and overall appearance, she was the female mini evil-spawn. 

The Evil Spawn Jr, title belonged to Rory, who was basically the male version of Bridgette. Same spunk, same mischievous smirk. Jo was always telling him that she didn’t know what she did to deserve three devil’s in her house. Alex always found that one really funny. 

“You guys got everything?” he questions the two, who nod their heads up and down enthusiastically, skipping to the car and greeting their siblings. 

He drives the twenty-five minutes back to his house, the twins chattering about in the back seat. 

“And then Julie showed her her math problems, and I tried to tell her they were wrong, but she just wouldn’t listen!”

“Tommy was sooo annoying. I kept telling him to stop making noises with his pencil, but he just rolled it back and forth so many times!”

Alex laughs under his breath, listening partially to the twins’s conversation. They sounded exactly like how Cristina and Mer used to rant about completely different things to each other, so it never failed to make him think back to the ‘olden days’ as he and Meredith liked to call them. 

If someone were to tell cocky, intern Alex that he would be happily married to the love of his life for (legally) fifteen years, father of four kids, and lived in a house that literally had a white picket fence on the outside of it, he would’ve sent them to a long term psychiatric care facility, because there was no way he would ever have that life. (A life he always secretly wanted, tucked into the very tiniest corner of his brain so it could never venture farther than a fleeting thought here or there). 

“--We’re here,” he calls out, shutting off the engine as he parks in the driveway, the kids unbuckling their seatbelts and scrambling out of the car, eager to escape the confines of the vehicle and enjoy the peace of their rooms. 

Once all five were inside, he watched as the four children parted ways. “Faye, Bridge, you have thirty minutes of reading down here. Ror, you have that history test you need to study for, and Brynn, you know what you need to do.” he says, his two oldest tromping up the stairs as the twins take their place in the living room on separate seats, already engrossed in the books they needed to read as part of their daily homework assignments. 

Alex lets out a tired sigh as he flops onto the couch, more than tempted to grab the remote from the side table and flick on ESPN, but knew that he couldn’t. As much as the girls loved reading, they got distracted from books really easily. Loud horns, cheers, and buzzers wouldn’t be the way to go if he wanted any work to get done. Instead, he plucks the iPad from the coffee table, picking up where he left off that morning with an online medical article.

Before he knew it, Faye and Bridgette’s timer had rung out and they started on their math homework on the kitchen island, something that they finished with ease. Another trait Alex was grateful the children inherited from Jo, her smarts. (Specifically in math)

“Ugh!” he hears a loud exclaim from upstairs, causing him to look up from the device in his hands and glance towards the steps, half expecting an angry looking Brynn to come storming out at any moment. He huffs, focusing his attention back to the iPad in hand when no mini Jo comes down. 

“No! There are no other ways!”

Another loud groan of frustration. 

“Son of a butthead! There are NO more ways! None! I don't know how the frick to prove that the freakin angle is congruent!”

Alex debates ignoring it and letting his daughter figure it out on his own, that is until he hears something hit a wall. He quickly makes his way up the stairs and to Brynn’s bedroom, standing in the doorway for a few seconds, trying to observe the scene. 

Brynn’s normally pristine room had books scattered on the ground, blankets thrown to the side, and an open notebooks posed at an awkward angle on the floor. 

Well, at least he knew what hit the wall.  

Brynn sat on her bed, literally glaring at her computer screen, partially debating whether or not to throw the expensive device across the room. She didn’t break eye contact, as if she was in a staring contest. Alex wanted to laugh, but he knew a deathly glare would be sent his way if he did. 

He knocks on the wood door, sending a questioning glance Brynn’s way as she finally breaks her stare with the inanimate object. “Everything okay?”

The brunette huffs loudly, bouncing back onto the bed as she lets out a groan. 

“I hate proofs.” she turns her head to look at her dad, Jo’s signature puppy dog face plastered on her features. He couldn’t help but chuckle. It was crazy how much Brynn looked like Jo. Add that onto the fact that she too shared a love for flannels and jeans, she was pretty much what he imagined a fourteen year old Jo to look like. When he first found out that Brynn was going to be a girl, he said to Jo, ‘I’m gonna need a gun.’ 

Luckily, that never happened, partially because of the fact that Alex hated guns and Brynn had yet to have a boyfriend. He was more than thankful for that. Especially since he’d seen couples at Brynn’s school canoodling in what they thought was private, even though they were in full view of everyone. He’d be fine with his not-so-little little girl dating when she was twenty-five, no earlier. Any man before that would not be very fortunate. 

“I’ll help,” Alex says, taking a spot next to her and Brynn begins to show he dad the problems on her screen, going on about how she was struggling to figure it out. 

Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

____

Jo Karev was thrilled when Bailey offered to take over her service for the rest of the day. Her husband had gotten off early, and Bailey knew how much of a struggle it was to spend quality time with family as a surgeon. 

She thanked Bailey so many times she lost count, all while boasting a large smile. She couldn’t remember the last time both she and Alex had been home before five o’clock. All she wanted was to go home, snuggle with her babies, and spend time with her husband. Well, her babies weren’t technically babies anymore, Brynn was fourteen, Rory was nearly twelve, and the twins were seven, but nevertheless, they would always be her babies. (Who cared if Rory was five foot three and already almost as tall as her? He was still such a mommy’s boy.)

She drove home with a smile on her face, humming along to the songs on the radio. She was so happy. She wanted to take her kids in her arms, and watch action movies on the couch while they pigged out on pizza together. 

When she pulls up in the drive she practically bounces up the steps to the house, swinging open the door and dropping her coat carelessly onto the rack. She hadn’t texted Alex to let him know she was coming home early, in hopes to make it a joyful surprise. 

Her heart stopped momentarily at the sound of yelling coming from upstairs. Arguments between Brynn and Alex were few and far between, but when they did happen, they were nasty. Alex always felt like crap for days afterward and Brynn stayed quiet, both at home and at school. 

“Do the reflexive property again!”

“Dad we already did that!”

“Well do it again!”

“Why?!”

“Do you see any other way to do it?”

“How is that going to help!”

“It just is!”

“Dad, we've done the reflexive property five times now!”

“You think I don’t know that!”

“Say that segment DA is congruent to AD.”

“But-”

“There are literally no other fucking ways to do it! It’s fucking shit! Thats what it is!”

“You act as if I didn’t already freakin know that!”

A loud groan. 

“What the fuck even is this one! We’ve managed to do three of them already. Try proving the triangles congruent now. Push random ones, like Side-Angle-Side.” 

“This is crap! ‘You don’t have enough proof to show that the blah blah blah.’ Stupid freaking thing! Freaking worthless!”

Jo is unable to suppress her giggle, clasping a hand over her mouth, trying not to make too much noise. It was a relief to know that the current screaming match going on wasn’t an argument. 

“They’ve been at that for an hour and a half now.” she hears her son pipe in, drawing her attention to where he sat on the couch. 

Jo sets her bag down on the table, greeting her son with a large hug, “Hi bubs.” she mumbles into his hair, feeling his arms wrap back around her. In private, Rory was the biggest cuddler, touchy-feely person you’d ever met, but in front of his friends he tried way too hard to show he was ‘too cool’ for hugging his mom, so Jo took in these moments and held them close to her heart.

“An hour and a half huh?” she chuckles, running a hand through her son’s gelled hair. 

Rory snickers, hazel eyes shining with mischief, “Yeah, dad won’t stop cursing and Tissy just keeps screaming alongside him,” he sits back onto the couch. “I’m surprised neither one of them had lost their voice yet.” he smirks his crooked Karev smirk, focusing his attention on the TV where he had opened up netflix, where he was currently binging Bates Motel. The name ‘Tissy’ came from when he was younger and couldn’t for the life of him say either Brynn nor Sissy. It seemed to have stuck all these years, and he was the only one who ever called his older sister that, even ten years later.

She sees him cringe, “I never called you mother right?” he asks, eyes not leaving the screen, where a certain Norman Bates is practically spooning his own mother in the bed, claiming that he couldn’t sleep. 

Jo snorts, ruffling his hair fondly, “Definitely not. And if you ever do, you’re dead Ror, hear me?”

Rory rolls his eyes playfully, giving his mom a grin. “I won’t. Promise.”

Jo heads up the stairs, the loud yells continuing to echo through the halls, which she chooses to ignore. 

“Dad for the fiftieth freaking time-”

“--What’s going on here?” Jo questions, causing both her husband and daughter to break away their concentration from the computer screen. 

Brynn’s face lights up at the sight of her mom standing in the doorway, more than thankful to have someone who actually knew stuff help her with her math. “Mom!” she exclaims, getting up from her place on the bed to give her mother a hug. 

“Hey baby. Care to explain to me why the second I walk through the door I'm greeted with screaming?” She questions, eyebrows raised as she sees Alex sheepishly avoid eye contact, suddenly finding the pictures that hung on the wall very interesting. 

Brynn smirks, “Well, Dad sucks at math so-”

“--Hey!” Alex interrupts, crossing his arms over his chest. “I haven’t done this crap in like thirty years!” He defends himself.

Jo rolls her eyes and smiles of her own gracing her lips as she reaches the bed and takes a look at the problems on the computer. “Proofs?” she asks from confirmation, earning a nod from her husband and daughter. 

She hums, “Given: segment CA bisects angle BAD and segment CA bisects BCD. Prove: triangle ABC is congruent to triangle ADC.” she murmurs to herself.

The brunette laughs when she sees the fact that the pair had put down some form of the ‘reflexive property’ not one, not two, but seven times.

She grins triumphantly as she remembers how to do the problem, the skills seemingly coming back to her after years of them being dormant. “Next statement is angle BCA is congruent to DCA because…” she scrolls through the possible options the box provided, smirking when she found the right one. “An angle bisector divides an angle into two congruent angles.”  

She watches as an angle pops up on the screen, only encouraging her to continue, “Then… angle DAC is congruent to angle BAC because an angle bisector divides an angle into two congruent angles.” 

Another angle comes up. 

“Finally,” she smirks, glancing to the side of for a brief second to take in the draw dropped stares of the two behind her. Brynn was a whiz at math like her mom, but proofs was something she’d been struggling with since they’d started learning them yesterday. Geometry was no joke. Her and her dad had already gotten almost all of the problems done, but it had taken so long to do a few measly problems that they’d lost track of just how long they'd been sitting in the room, arguing back and forth over different possibilities to try. 

“Triangle ABC is congruent to triangle ADC, reason being Angle-Side-Angle.” 

She grins, wiping her hands together as she hits the submit button, a large green check with a correct! floating on the screen, going over the ways to solve the problem. 

Alex glares at her. He’d been working on these fucking proofs for so long now, and Jo just comes in and completes it in less than a minute?

“I hate you.” he gruffs, still glaring at both his wife and the computer. 

Jo giggles, leaning over and pecking her husband’s lips. “Love you too.” 

She begins to walk out of the room, stopping and calling out over her shoulder as she reaches the doorway, “Now you just need to make sure the twins did their homework!”

[know-the-way]

I know it’s really stupid of me but I was kind of hoping for a redemption arc for Faustus. 😅😢

It’s not stupid, not at all! It’s natural to want to see the best in people, particularly when you believe they can be better than what they are now, so it’s completely understandable.

And, ya know, if the show gets picked up - he may have one yet still, we don’t know!

To me, this season really highlighted what the purpose of Faustus’ character is supposed to be, imo. Thinking of episode 4, we’re shown three different levels of corruption through three different characters.

The first is Harvey. Pure, sweet, golden boy Harvey is revealed to have some deep-seeded hatred of witches. Does he have any reason to hate witches? Well, let’s check - he lost a brother, got manipulated, controlled, and lied to by his first love, and has been in an endless cycle of extreme danger for the past year of his life. I think it’s fair to say we all understand that prejudice is not okay, but is it equally understandable why Harvey has some hang-ups about magic and witches? I personally think it is. (Not to the point of joining a literal witch hunt or angrily accusing your distressed best friend of killing your dad at her 17th birthday party 🙃, but understandable nonetheless.)

I personally think the intention with Harvey’s character being a cadet in Blackwood’s army was to demonstrate how, even when we believe someone to be morally good and just, they can become someone else when they endure pain and that pain is never properly addressed.

Did Sabrina apologize to Harvey for everything that happened between them? Yes. But did she repeat the same troublesome behaviors in different ways after that? Also yes. She didn’t demonstrate change in her actions, and a loootttt more happened with Harvey and the witch world in a negative way beyond his relationship with Sabrina, so the mistrust he feels isn’t entirely unjustified.

Then - “oh wow, oh my God, my second love has also hid being a witch from me, can I catch a fucking break here? Why should I ever trust another witch in my life?”

Answer: because they are humans, none being wholly good or bad, and they love you.

Roz talks to Harvey, tells him she believes he’s good, and demonstrably proves her own “goodness” by sacrificing herself to save others at Dr. C’s. Roz shows Harvey that she means what she says and her feelings for him are real - that she is a scared, broken human like him, just trying to do her best with what life has given her. Hence, when the moment of truth comes - Harvey remembers his humanity and proves his own “goodness” by saving her. But if Roz had never spoken to him, never acknowledged what he’d been through and that his feelings were valid... if no one had ever truly cared about his pain? It seems apparent that Harvey would have continued down a very dark path.

Which brings us to...

Mary. Mary has been literally murdered, had her identity hijacked by a demoness, her fiancé is dead, she doesn’t remember several months of her life, and her previous favorite student is a witch who has seemingly performed magic more than once on her.

Mary has every right to fear witches at this point. She has had zero trustworthy interactions with the witch world and from her perspective - her entire life has been stolen and no one cares. No one checks in on Mary, no one validates her pain, and as a result - no one in the witch world seems to have any compassion, humanity, or kindness in them. Enter the Pilgrims of the Night, who recognize her pain and fear without even knowing her, acknowledge it, and offer her solace in their congregation on the basis that her experience with witches is shared by the Reverend Lovecraft and his flock.

They prove themselves to her when the advice the Reverend/Faustus gives her (“let the dark in”) saves her life. My God, someone finally seems to care if she lives or dies!

People who care about others are good, so the church and the reverend’s mission must be good, too. Therefore, she is absolutely invested in whatever is asked of her and will blindly follow their lead in order to protect others from experiencing what she has. To me, Mary in the perverted universe represented the crossroads of corruption - where you truly believe what you’re doing is the right thing, even if it hurts others because those “others” have hurt you... and they will surely hurt again if you don’t stop them.

However, I think if Mary was finally told the truth - the full truth - and Lilith herself apologized for being the first piece in the puzzle... along with all the other witches... AND they showed that they actually cared about her well-being... Mary could find her way back through forgiveness. Or, at the very least, she could understand and process everything so that she could find a way to heal that doesn’t involve persecuting others.

And now, there’s Faustus. We aren’t entirely clear on Faustus’ history altogether, but we do know he’s had many experiences of being slighted by the churches of darkness (despite following the rules to a T).

He was rebuked by Edward for wanting to marry Zelda after mentoring him for who knows how many years, lost the office of high priest to him, and when he finally gets the title - here comes Edward’s self-righteous brat to fuck him over again. There he is trying to carry out the Dark Lord’s request to get Sabrina to sign her name in the Book of the Beast, even though she insults their doctrines and faith at every turn, and the coven and academy he’s had working like a well-oiled machine for the past 16 years is being slowly ripped apart. Why is the Dark Lord allowing this? Why is he having to endure a meddlesome child’s antics? Why is he not being rewarded for doing exactly as he’s been asked and returning the Church of Night to stability after Edward nearly destroyed it altogether? Like hello Dark Lord, can you throw me a fucking bone here?

Small victories - he finally secures Zelda’s hand in marriage and an audience with the anti-pope. This is what his life should’ve looked like two centuries ago, but no matter. He’s correcting it all now and by Satan, nothing is going to stop him this time.

But then...

Oh cool, Sabrina is here to intervene again and has presented the text of his old rival for consideration along with his (clearly superior) manifesto. What’s that, you say? Oh, she’s also gonna crash my wedding, accuse me of murder, and spread claims about my manifesto without having even read it? Wow, ahaha, sounds hilarious... except why am I not laughing?

He arrives in Rome and gets an inkling that the Dark Lord may finally be taking action about this heretical little monster because he’s offered the title of anti-pope by the unholy high council themselves. Finally, some appreciation! He just needs to hang on a little longer, eliminate these small meddlesome threats, and soon he will reside over a peaceful kingdom far removed from anymore mortal nonsense.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you mean Sabrina convinces the council he’s unfit to be anti-pope? This is bullshit, man! You know what? Fuck this place, I’m gonna make my own damn church and ensure no other headstrong witches like Sabrina Buzzkill Spellman can ruin it. That’ll finally return things to ord- MY WIFE KEPT MY OWN CHILD A SECRET FROM ME?! WHAT THE FUCK?! Alright, that’s it, The Spellmans are clearly here to poison others (ironic foreshadowing) - time to wash my hands of them completely, I am so over thi- what’s that? The Dark Lord’s here? GOOD. About time this asshole showed up to set people straight and remind them that the values of his unholy church, which Faustus has exemplified perfectly, must be respected.

You mean for me to bow down to whom now? The halfbreed brat who has been directly and willfully wreaking havoc on the congregation he’s patiently and painstakingly lead back to greatness? Are you fucking serious, m8? No. Absolutely not. No. I’m getting out of here, and since I won’t have the little twat poison anyone else, I will literally poison them instead. Be free, sheep!

It’s up until this point that I believe Faustus was still mostly at the crossroads stage, same as Mary. He believed everything he was doing was the right thing, based on the teachings from the religion he devoted his entire life to, and that he’d be rewarded for serving the Dark Lord so faithfully - until the Dark Lord proved several times in succession that his religion was all a lie. That three+ centuries worth of groveling and abiding and waiting has meant absolutely nothing.

So now we have the Eldritch terrors. Beings more powerful than the oldest gods. He spends 15 years isolated in a time bubble purifying himself, devoting everything to them, and won’t it be so glorious when they welcome him into his ranks? He’s set them free now, after all, they owe it to him.

But doing the same action over and over and expecting a different result is what? The definition of insanity, friends. Of course the Eldritch terrors reject him, too... of course Sabrina gains their attention and veneration instead... of course he should have tried to seize their power for himself a long time ago... so, fuck it all, he’ll do that now. There is no right and wrong, there is no observed justice - if there was, he would have been rightfully recognized for all the time, effort, and pain he’s endured only to receive nothing in return.* No one ever acknowledged his pain... no one ever even considered it. Over time, that takes its toll.

(*Clearly, I mean this to be from Faustus’ perspective and not my own.)

Of course, he has inflicted more than his fair share of pain himself and I am of the personal belief he needed to pay for that, but... equally imagine being hurt over and over and watching those who did it walk away, not only without reprimand, but with the belief that they were right and just to do it? Could it slowly drain on one’s soul to watch the rules apply to some and not others? Debatable, I suppose, but I personally think yes.

So... I say all of this only to point out that there is still potential to acknowledge his pain. And thus, there is imo still potential to understand, communicate properly (I am very interested in any conversations he and Sabrina may have had during their training - I know he said she took a vow of silence, but clearly some talking occurred for Sabrina to learn so much about the void from him), grow, and finally - for him to be given the chance to repair everything he had a hand in breaking. It wouldn’t be an easy or painless task to get to that point, and no one would be faulted for not trusting him to do so, but I think there is potential for it. If they get picked up and they want to finally allow the characters some time to reflect and process shit, they could include Faustus in that.

[madmadmilk]

okay, fucking WOW. i need a place to rant and scream and cry a little bit. no need to read this,,,, (TW: homophobia, family)

wow.

wow.

wow.

i consider myself to be a pretty tolerant and open-minded person, i'll even ration out some patience towards ~prejudiced and idiotic people~ (if i have to). i 1000000% won't entertain their wack ass opinions, but i may not... totally cut them off for it. i just let them be...

but oh how fucking terrible.

(i'm working on clearing out the list of people i tolerate, ha)

but yeah. i have just been burned HORRENDOUSLY by my boyfriend's dad's-side of the family. i've put up with so many little things, but i may draw the permanent fucking line here....

maybe it's because i curate HAPPY, POSITIVE, and INCLUSIVE places for ME to hang out: within my family, with the friends i make, who i chose to share info with, with social media, with the movies and books i watch and read– i only make room for things that make me feel safe, and make my loved ones feel safe. it's pointless to live my life any other way than this. but maybe it has actually made me intolerant of having lasting relationships with people who make me feel otherwise

like..... it horribly feels like,,,, i fucking forgot how UGLY people are on the outside of this bubble. how truly IGNORANT, INSENSITIVE, DISGUSTING, and plain old MORONIC people are, when i'm forced to interact with them.

god. damn.

anyway here's what happened:

my bf's birthday is on sunday. he's celebrating with his lovely mom's side on saturday with a small picnic. then with his dad's family on sunday. (pretty much everyone is vaccinated except for me and him btw). but yeah, his mom's "party" is just him and i coming over for barbecue. his dad's would be something at home, and he told my BF to invite some friends over too, as long as the numbers stay below 10. fair, i guess. it just so happens that my boyfriend is closest friends with MY cousins right now; quarantine and PC gaming has brought them very very close together. it warms my heart that my family and my boyfriend accept each other so well.

sidenote: i'm cool with his mom's side. but his dad's side makes me feel like i need to consistently have my fists up and scowl on. they are horribly prejudiced.

so yeah, my boyfriend brought up inviting my three cousins over to his family. 3 whole brown filipino-chinese guys lol. extra detail but,, the oldest one is gay, and he asked if his boyfriend of 5 years could come over. [in my family, my cousin was super depressed before coming out– but since then, he is proudly himself and just... himself lol. idk he's just my cousin, and he's someone who has introduced me to so many cool things in life.]

>> so, out of courtesy, my BF tells my cousin about his homophobic family, and my cousin is still down with it cos he can deal. and again, out of courtesy, my BF tells his dad and his fucking step-mom about it too.

and they fucking ambush my boyfriend about it over (their) dinner. (i am not there) intially, they were excited to meet my family, as we've been dating for nearly 8 years and they haven't even met my parents yet. but once my BF explained that the plus-one WASN'T a girlfriend, and was instead a boyfriend of my cousin's,,, his step-mom lost her cool. she is loudly homophobic, and dismissive saying that she doesn't want to serve gay people in her house. she can """tolerate""" it outside, but she would never want to see them dirty her home.

my boyfriend is a sensitive, but seething soul and he was so appalled that he couldn't even speak. he was just shocked that her intolerance still finds new levels. his younger step-brother defended him, but in a 'gays are not even a big deal moom' kind of way. and the his step-sister/cousin was like, 'not a big deal chill.' and it just made him feel worse, because they're trying their best to calm the situation, but they're still stupid as fuck about it. i'm not sure what he was able to say befor ehe left....

but he just texted me crying saying that he feels so bad that he couldn't stand up for my family, our family. i told him it's alright– i understand the sudden pressure to answer, and that they are just the most selfish brand of people in the world. they're so stupid that i'm not sure they could even hear him. it's horrible, horrible horrible to witness this, even when you aren't being "discriminated" against. it is disturbing to see the ugliest side of people, YOUR FAMILY.

augh.

it makes me think that i've been protecting MY parents, MY sibling, MY extended family from theirs, by not introducing them sooner. they have never let me feel at ease enough to bring people that i love into their fucking stratosphere. god. they have said so many off-handed things for 7-8 years and i just can't stand it. why would i let my mom, or my fucking dad hear this? be around this? NO.

i'm literally simmering, because i told my BF that if my family ever came over while his family said some dumb shit, that i would become a villain in their home. i won't hold back, because those are MY cousins. god damn. i'm literally seething– because, at the same time, they would NEVER do stupid shit in front of me.

they are scared of me. of my opinions. of my voice. of my relationship with their son.

i had them on my facebook once, but once they supported That Fucking Guy, i visibly unfollowed, unfriended and spoke up against them. i draw lines, they know that about me. they know not to cross me or else i will snap back faster than their own son.

unfortunately for my boyfriend, he lives with that side of his family because of finances and other stuff. his older sister's have ex-communicated his dad because he cheated on HIS mom with HER brother's WIFE. that's why my boyfriends cousin is his step-sister too.

i can't stand this.

i know i protect myself with happy spaces, but that is so fucking unsavory. i'm not sure if i want to put up with them for the sake of my boyfriend. he's not even sure if he wants to put up with them. i don't want to judge but wow.

unbelievable.

i'm gonna go for a walk

[dreamofasupernaturalchamber]

Dabb's Dream of a Red Chamber: Dean, Sam, Cas, Jack, and the roles they play

In my last post, I explored how Dean starts off as Qin Keqing in S14 but becomes Lin Daiyu later on in the season. The transition point is 14x13-- the 300th episode. I always found it funny that Dabb chooses the Ruyi Baozhu to start this episode. It's a Buddhist item, and of course, SPN becomes very Buddhist toward the end (which is why everyone hates the finale). What I want to talk about today is Baozhu as both a pearl and a name.

This name appears in Dream of a Red Chamber. Who is Baozhu? One of Qin Keqing's maids who volunteers to be adopted by her after her death so she can play the role of the daughter during the funeral. She then becomes a nun after the funeral-- fitting, no, considering her name? Let me tell you this: a monk (and this gets interesting, but I'll get to that later) arrives at Lin Daiyu's home when she's young and says the only way she'll live a long life is if she becomes a nun. Obviously she doesn't choose this route. But going back to SPN--Dabb twists the Baozhu into another Buddhist message-- so why not use some other artifact from Buddhist lore? Why Baozhu?

I think it's because Baozhu is the combination of the Bao from Baoyu's name, and Zhu, which means pearl. The emphasis is on the pearl, which makes sense-- Dabb isn't going to involve yu, or jade, when Cas (the character corresponding to Baoyu) is secondary in this episode. Dean is the one who makes the wish, and so the treasure is going to represent him.

So who is associated with pearls in Red Chamber? Qin Keqing, for one-- she has maids who carry "pearl" in their names. And Lin Daiyu, who is the reincarnation of the Jiangzhu (Crimson Pearl) Fairy. She's also associated with the Jiling Pearls, which foreshadow the Jia family getting dragged into the royal family's power struggle.

But Dean is nothing like Lin Daiyu, readers might say! He's not sickly. We'll get to the sickly part later-- let's first talk about Lin Daiyu and what she represents.

First and foremost-- Lin Daiyu represents rebellion. Not literal rebellion (although if I'm not wrong, the Jia family gets into huge trouble for aligning themselves with the wrong princes), but rebellion against societal conventions and patriarchal feudalism. The last thing Baoyu wants to do is take the imperial exams and become an imperial bureaucrat-- but this is exactly what his family wants him to do. This is what Baochai, Shi Xiangyun, Xi Ren, and all the girls want him to do-- except for Daiyu. Daiyu tells him, "You should do what you want." And so they think of each other as zhiji, which I suppose can be translated as soulmate, but really means "a friend who knows me." A zhiji is a friend who knows your soul.

And this fits Dean and Cas-- Dean is the one who encourages Cas to rebel against Heaven. Dean is the one who asks Cas what he wants. Dean is the one who bucks convention; he's the subversive one, the one who represents free will.

(And as a side note, Qin Zhong, the younger brother of Qin Keqing, is another one of Baoyu's more subversive loves-- he dies just as Baoyu's oldest sister is made the highest ranking imperial concubine, which indicates that Baoyu's attempts to buck against feudalism are destined to fail and foreshadows Lin Daiyu's death. Qin Zhong, Qing Zhong-- his name tells us that Baoyu is a lover.)

Dean doesn't die from what looks suspiciously like TB, which is how Lin Daiyu dies in the last forty chapters of Red Chamber-- however, we know that those chapters are ghostwritten and doesn't fit her panci, or the poem that foretells her fate, the hints that she's married off for political purposes, or Zhiyanzhai's footnotes which indicate that she dies of a broken heart. Zhiyanzhai is very likely the coauthor of Red Chamber, and their notes indicate they were there for most of the events of the story (Red Chamber is thought to be a retelling of how the author's family fell upon hard times-- of course, there are other interpretations too, which I will talk about in a separate post). Dean dies from a broken heart two times. The second time takes.

Now let's talk about Cas and Baoyu. Baoyu is usually considered the reincarnation of Shen Ying Shi Zhe, who is a heavenly monk in another dimension. He waters the Crimson Pearl Grass every day, and she becomes a fairy as a result; it's hinted that he falls in love with her, which threatens his cultivation/enlightenment, so he runs off to the human world to gain more enlightenment, and she follows him and decides to repay her debt by crying all of her tears for him (the lyric "don't you cry no more" comes to mind). Yes, Lin Daiyu is the fairy this blade of grass becomes. Yes, Shen Ying Shi Zhe is responsible for giving her life, much as Cas is responsible for lifting Dean from perdition.

Cas also falls from Heaven to experience love, but up until Dabb took over, this was usually framed as a positive thing. I'm-- not quite sure Dabb actually frames it as a positive thing. Cas's ending calls to mind the endings of the gods/fairies who fall from grace because they fall in love in Chinese folklore-- they either become human, or they become enlightened and regain their standing in the heavens. Baoyu's real ending is unknown, but it's not hard to guess that he becomes enlightened and goes back to being Shen Ying Shi Zhe-- which would match nicely with Cas's ending.

There's another version of Red Chamber (there are multiple versions-- again, remember, this is a work of metafiction, and this will come into play later) where he's considered to be one of the rocks Nuwa was going to use to patch a hole in the sky, but was discarded. We usually interpret this rock as the piece of jade Baoyu was born with, but I do want to point out this version, because Cas, given his performance in the later seasons, also fits this description.

Then there's Sam-- he contains shades of Baoyu (he marries someone after Dean dies, but he's never happy, which is what happens to Baoyu; this is foretold in a song Baoyu hears in Bo Ming Si), but I'm going to argue that he is Baochai. Who is Baochai? The other girl in the love triangle-- Baoyu loves Daiyu, but marries Baochai instead (this plays out differently here). What does she represent? She represents money (there's the gold radical in chai, and it's often said that her union with Baoyu is a marriage of gold and jade, and her family is exceedingly wealthy). She represents adherence to tradition. She and Daiyu are like "sisters" at one point, but that falls apart because Lady Wang hates Daiyu and wants Baochai as her daughter-in-law instead. And even though Baochai and Daiyu top the first volume of the beauties, they share a poem that foretells their fate; all the other women get their own poems. And what's Baochai's fate?

It's a one liner-- a gold hairpin (chai) buried in snow. I've seen all sorts of theories flying around that she's supposed to die in the snow, but honestly, I think the ending in the ghostwritten chapters is probably close to what was planned for her. She marries Baoyu, but he leaves to become a monk and she lives alone in the Jia family. In the ghostwritten ending, she also has a son. Her room at the Jia's mansion (she lives with them)? It's compared to a Snow Hole; she's a minimalist when it comes to interior decoration.

And let's look at Sam's ending. He basically lives in a shrine to the dead with his one son, and it's clear his marriage was short-lived (no pictures of the wife). His ending is a perfect match for Baochai's.

And then there's Jack. I compared Jack to Baoyu in the previous post, and again, if you look at the stories of Shen Ying Shi Zhe and the rock (especially when you consider that Jack was born to stop the apocalypse/make the world a better place), you can see the similarities. But he also represents other characters-- Daiyu and most likely Prince Beijing, who's the head of the four princes, or the old guard; those two characters are connected through Baoyu, which makes for a nice trio of characters.

How does Jack represent Daiyu? There's the way he's not entirely welcome in his own home (Lin Daiyu lives with the Jia family, and Lady Wang dislikes her immensely.) There's the way he dies in 14x08-- from what looks suspiciously like TB, just as Daiyu dies in all the TV adaptations and in the ghostwritten chapters. He changes identities after this death -- he becomes the prince.

Let's finally talk about Prince Beijing. He's young-- under twenty. The Jia family is close to him. He clearly plays a role in the power struggle-- if we're going off the real prince he's based on, then he should be in the faction against the dowager emperor, which means he's loyal to the emperor, but most analyses claim that he's not loyal to the emperor. One piece of evidence for the latter viewpoint: he attends Qin Keqing's funeral in full regalia, which is considered disrespectful, and hands Baoyu a bracelet of Jiling pearls that the king gave him to symbolize their brotherhood. That's-- not what you do with what the emperor gives you. It's just not done. (That being said, I can see the real prince getting away with that, because he was the real emperor's favorite brother.) Baoyu then hands Daiyu those pearls, and she throws them away. Later on, Baoyu will hand Daiyu the prince's straw coat and she tosses it away again. She doesn't accept anything from Beijing until she's forced to. We can interpret this as Daiyu disapproving of Baoyu's alliance with Beijing (and there are other interpretations that assert Beijing is responsible for marrying off to distant lands, but since the last forty chapters were never written...).

This fits Jack. He's TFW's only hope against Chuck, who is both the emperor and the dowager emperor in this story. Cas has faith in him, just like Baoyu likes Prince Beijing. Dean doesn't have faith in him, just as it's implied that Daiyu doesn't have much faith in the prince either. This is where the meta gets very interesting, because who is Chuck? The writers? The network? What does it mean if he's both the emperor and the dowager emperor? I'm going to talk about this next in a post on the meta structure of SPN and Red Chamber.

What I want to point out before I end this post is that it's very likely Dabb planned these very controversial endings for Dean, Cas, and Sam-- I doubt censorship had anything to do with it. SPN may have been a story about a fight between the writers and the network, or it may have been a Buddhist story, but either way, I'm pretty sure SPN ended exactly as Dabb meant it to end.

[worldwidemochiguy]

MFEEU! Second Generation Profiles 💕✨

↳ MFEEU! Tae Masterlist 

↳ Link to Yoongi’s MFEEU one shot and Hoseok’s 

↳ General Masterlist :)

The kids 

Jin

↳ No children (he’s happy being a godfather!!)

Yoongi

↳ Yoona 

Hoseok

↳ Seojoon 

Namjoon

↳ Namgyu 

Jimin

↳ Jihae 

↳ Jihyun

Taehyung

↳ Haneul 

↳ Haewon

Jungkook

↳ Minho

↳ Mina 

(wow i just realised i gave the rapline all one kid and the maknaes two kids huh)

When they’re born: 

first it’s Kim Haneul 

↳ the next year is Kim Namgyu and Park Jihae

↳ the next year is Park Jihyun and Jeon Minho

↳ the next year Jung Seojoon

↳ the next year Jeon Mina and Kim Haewon

↳ and five years after that... Min Yoona 

Profiles :)

Kim Haneul 

Tae and his wife’s first child

The eldest of all the mfeeu kids

Very protective of all her younger siblings, especially Haewon 

Minho has a crush on her for the loooongest time (she sees him as an annoying little brother) 

Abuses her privilege as the eldest to get all of her dongsaengs to do whatever she wants (apart from Jihae) 

She inherited her mother’s sincerity and tae’s determination 

Her and Namgyu are like the only responsible ones

Taehyung is very happy leaving the business in her hands once she’s old enough

As she grows older she realises the special feelings she’s always felt towards Jihae are different than how she cares for her sister

She loves Haewon of course, but with Jihae it’s different. She wants to always take care of her, spend every minute with her, kiss her. 

They start dating when Jihae turns 15. both Jimin and Jihyun tell her she better take care of Jihae or else. Haneul has no intention to do anything other than that.

Kim Namgyu

Namjoon and his darling’s first and only child

Strict with all of his dongsaengs but would let Mina get away with murder

He’d probably help her with it tbh

Haneul’s right hand man, slated to help her with the business once he’s older

He inherited his father’s intellect. He helps all his dongsaengs in their lil homeschool lessons and once he’s finished his work he’ll leave the classroom they have set up and go and sit with his father

(Namjoon is the softest dad ever oh my god 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺)

Namgyu has dimples that pop out every time Mina calls him ‘Namu’ 

Him and Minho have a brotherly relationship. He, along with Jihyun, help Minho to get over Haneul. 

He’s known that he loved Mina since she was 5 and he was 8, but of course he waited until she was 18 because of the age gap between them.

Mina had no such reservations. She asked him to date her when she was 14 and he had to gently turn her down because she was way too young to be dating a 17 year old. 

She would stubbornly ask him every year on her birthday if she was old enough to date him yet, and on her 18th birthday he finally answered with ‘yes’ and kissed her

That was probably the worst day of Jungkook’s life.

Park Jihae

Jimin and his girlfriend’s first child

Despite being one of the oldest, she is babied by the entire group, ESPECIALLY Haneul

She’s so soft like oml 🥺🥺🥺

she inherited her father’s stature so by the time they’re all teenagers she’s the most smol (along with Mina who’s only an inch taller than her)

(by the time Yoona reaches her teens she’s also taller than Jihae)

Jimin’s little princess

She barely leaves his lap for the first five years of her life

Shes so clingy as well 🥺🥺🥺

She follows Haneul around holding her hand bc she doesn’t want to get lost 

She really likes doing ballet. She tries to teach Haneul but they soon stop bc to put it lightly Haneul is hopeless

She is the softest big sister to Jihyun. 

The only time she gets mad at him is when he sometimes refuses to call her noona 

Once Mina and Haewon are born the trio has been completed

They are the unofficial maknaes of the group, along with Yoona who they treat like their own little dolly

They coordinate their clothes and everything. your squad wishes. 

She’s the most oblivious person though. she doesn’t even realise she’s in love w Haneul until her 15th birthday when Haneul kisses her. and then she’s like oh. oh.

they are the softest girlfriends ever bls i can’t 🥺🥺

Park Jihyun and Jeon Minho

Jimin’s second child and Jungkook’s first

I put them together bc they’re honestly inseparable 

They’re the troublemakers of the group, rivalled only by Mina and Haewon.

Jihyun was born two months before Minho, he insists that Minho calls him hyung

Minho refuses

Jihyun is the more responsible of the two, but barely. Namgyu’s kind of like their older brother, they both look up to him a lot. 

Seojoon is their dongsaeng who they lovingly bully

Minho has a massive crush on Haneul. 

He isn’t yandere for her, he just has a thing for noonas like father like son 

At one point he tries to have a rivalry with Jihae because Haneul likes her so much but it doesn’t work bc Jihae is so sweet she doesn’t even realise what he’s trying to do and also Jihyun is super protective of his older sister and he nips it in the bud

After that he resolves to get over Haneul because he doesn’t want anything to come in between him and Jihyun. 

Jihyun and Minho are definitely soulmates. Hoseok is convinced they will date at some point. There’s a betting pool which Jungkook refuses to enter bc he thinks its wrong to bet on his sons love life. Jimin on the other hand has lost almost a million won because he keeps betting that they’ll announce that they’re dating soon. 

Jung Seojoon

Hoseok’s pride and joy

He’s so similar to his daddy guys it’s adorable 🥺

He has so much energy all the time, it is common to see his little head popping over the edge of Hoseok’s desk as he jumps around the room

Namgyu loves him but he doesn’t understand him at all

Seojoon loves to play dress up with Mina, Haewon and Jihae

He is not trusted with Yoona bc, though his intentions are absolutely pure, she usually ends up crying 

Always breaking the rules. a loveable rascal we have here. 

He knows when to push boundaries but he’s largely well behaved bc his dad taught him well 🥰🥰 (unlike many of the other fathers who spoil their kids) 

Seojoon knew he loved Haewon since his fourth Christmas. Seojoon was hunting for the presents and when Haewon caught him, she joined him in searching instead of ratting him out.

From that moment on they were partners in crime. 

It was only inevitable they started dating, obvious to literally everyone except Taehyung who refused to believe his daughter was a rule breaker in any shape or form.

Jeon Mina and Kim Haewon

Jungkook’s and Tae’s youngest girls 🥺

I put them together for the same reason I put Jihyun and Minho together. They’re inseparable 

They were actually born within two days of each other. Haewon was born early and Tae always says it’s because she couldn’t wait to meet her best friend (besides him, of course)

Look Haewon even has his nose mole 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

They rival Jihyun and Minho in terms of general naughtiness 

Seojoon helps them out sometimes, and in that time Mina always giggles at how silly Seojoon and Haewon act around each other

but all Haewon as to do is mention Namgyu and Mina stops making fun of her and starts blushing

Haewon and Mina talk about Seojoon and Namgyu literally all the time

When they’re older they trick their parents saying that Haewon and Mina are hanging out together and Seojoon and Namgyu are hanging out together and then they swap

Namgyu would normally disapprove but it means he gets more time to spend with Mina so he’s not snitching 

Mina is sooo bitter when Haewon starts dating Seojoon bc Namgyu is apparently ‘too old’ for her so she can’t date yet

once Namgyu finally gives in on her 18th birthday and kisses her, she calls Haewon  up screaming with excitement (little does she know Namgyu at that moment is calling Haneul and freaking tf out)

when they get married to their boyfriends they have a joint wedding 🥰🥰 Namgyu was originally against it but Mina gave him her infamous doe eyes which she inherited from her father and he allowed it reluctantly

Min Yoona

Yoongi’s unplanned but very adored daughter

By the time she’s born, Yoongi is in his mid to late 30s

To be honest, Yoongi had been happy helping to raise his friends kids, i mean they were all practically his godchildren and there wasn’t a week where he wasn’t babysitting at least three of his friends children

But sometimes he would watch Tae teaching Haneul to dance standing on his toes, or see Hoseok playing hide and seek with Seojoon, and he would feel this strange ache in his heart

When they found out Yoongi’s wife was pregnant, they considered not going through with the pregnancy, but ultimately decided against it after one of the members let slip that Yoongi’s wife was pregnant and then all of the kids ran up to Yoongi with eyes as big as dinner plates, asking eagerly if they were going to have another little sister. 

As soon as Yoongi saw Yoona for the first time, he realised how stupid he was for not wanting children earlier. but he was almost grateful that he hadn’t had them earlier, because if he had then they wouldn’t be Yoona. And Yoona is perfect.

She’s babied by the entire group. Mina and Haewon are only five when she’s born and they love playing with her. She’s never left alone for a moment —  like Yoongi feared she would be since all of the other kids were so close in age and Yoona was so much younger. 

All of the children want their chance to play with Yoona and even the members love being able to play with a baby again after their children had outgrown it. 

If Yoona ever tries to start dating… oh boy. 

just to recap, the couples are...

↳ Kim Haneul and Park Jihae

↳ Kim Namgyu and Jeon Mina

↳ Jung Seojoon and Kim Haewon

[365days365movies]

March 18, 2021: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (Part One)

Look, it’s Woody Allen again! Why is this elephant here?

Ah, right. The documentary on HBO, which I have not watched since I last talked about Woody Allen? Why? Well, from what I’ve heard, it’s not the most accurate documentary, and has a bit of bias loaded into it. And again, I don’t know nearly enough about the whole situation, but...I’m also not interested in potentially biased accounts. So, I’ll take the time to educate myself.

Shame that I rarely have any time, then.

Yeah, I just made one of the oldest jokes on the internet ever. Sue me. SUE ME I DARE YOU

You may be asking, then, why am I doing the whole movie thing? Well, in truth, this is a form of escapism for me. I mean, who doesn’t like sitting down and watching a good movie, putting away your worldly cares for about 2 hours so that you can dive into another world entirely? I mean, the worlds that’ve been built by film over the last century never ceases to amaze me.

From Avatar’s Pandora to Mustafar in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, to the Great Barrier Reef in Finding Nemo, or the world of Monsters, Inc. There are so many unique worlds, not to mention the characters who inhabit them, and the directors and filmmakers who craft and show them. I just love movies, honestly. Which I could literally be in the world of some of them, even for just 2 hours.

But enough of that, what’s this film about? Eh, whatever, LET’S JUST GET INTO IT! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap (1/2)

We’re brought in on “Cheek to Cheek”, as sung by Fred Astaire, which is, not gonna lie, a guilty pleasure song of mine that I find myself singing in quiet moments. This leads us to a movie poster for the film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is being admired by Cecilia (Mia...Farrow). Ohhhhh.

You may remember Mrs. Farrow from her eponymous voice role in The Last Unicorn, which was made a few years before this film. And she’s also known for Rosemary’s Baby, The Great Gatsby, and...her marriage to Woody Allen, which ended in divorce and a massive lawsuit. Said lawsuit involved Farrow’s accusation of sexual abuse to their adopted daughter, Dylan. And that’s what the HBO documentary is about!

WOW. AWKWARD. Apparently, the two got married in 1980, and made thirteen films together, this one included. Which seems both awkward, and like straight-up nepotism, but whatever. Tim Burton did the same thing with Helena Bonham Carter, so whatever; it’s not unprecedented, is what I’m saying. Back to the movie, though.

Cecilia is a waitress, along with her sister (played by Stephanie Farrow, Mia’s actual sister). She’s new at the job, and not great at it. But, her and her sister still have nice conversations about films, as Cecilia’s quite the cinephile. After work, Cecilia meets her husband Monk (Danny Aiello), an abusive gambler who’s unemployed and not doing much about it. It’s the middle of the Great Depression, and things are hard all over. Monk seems to handle this by playing dice, and not particularly well.

Cecilia unsuccessfully tries to get Monk to see the newest movie with her, so she goes to see it alone that night. The film itself is a comedy about a rich Manhattanite named Henry (Edward Herrmann), alongside his wife Rita (Deborah Rush) and friend Jason (John Wood). They take a trip to Cairo, where they meet a young archaeologist named Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), who’s there to seek the mythical Purple Rose of Cairo. They invite him back to New York with them, and he accepts. There, he falls in love with Kitty Haynes (Karen Ackers), a singer at the Copacabana.

Cecilia is head over heels in love with the movie itself, and dreams about it at work, before going to see it again with her sister. They go to an early showing, and when she comes home, Monk’s drunk and spending time with a woman named Olga. Understandably enraged by this, Cecilia packs up her belongings to move out. Monk tries to get her to stay, the abusive cheating douchebag that he is. She notes that he hits her, and he defends his actions. Monk’s a real piece of shit. And she leaves, despite his absolute shit. God, I hope she stays away.

Unfortunately, she’s essentially forced to come back to the apartment that night, and returns to work as well. But not for long, as she’s basically immediately fired. Now jobless and stuck in an extremely shitty marriage, she has nowhere to go...except for the movies. And she goes back over...and over...and over again, five times in a row that day.

But the seventh time she sees the movie...something happens. Something fascinatingly unusual. The film, specifically Tom Baxter himself, watches her back.

Holy shit, that’s awesome! Tom Baxter notices Cecilia in the audience, and before his “madcap Manhattan weekend” is set to begin, Tom notes that she must really love this movie, and also that he’s noticed her all 6 previous times she’s seen the film. And then...he leaves. He leaves the movie!

He turns to color, and he jumps out of the screen to sweep Cecilia off of her feet. And EVERYBODY sees this, including the people IN the movie and in the theatre. I also love the fact that as soon as he turns to color, a woman faints, which is super fucking funny to me for some reason. Tom runs off with Cecilia, free after 2,000 monotonous performances.

Now that Tom’s met Cecilia, he’s never going back. The audience and the film stars are in complete disarray, and without Tom present, the movie can’t go forward, and the film characters descend into arguments about whose movie this actually is. It’s uh...it’s fucking hilarious, actually.

The enthusiastic Tom Baxter goes with Cecilia to a closed amusement park, where Cecilia once again expresses confusion at the whole affair. He notes that she’s been looking at her with every one of his performances, although she doesn’t understand why. But he calls her fetching, and is clearly quite smitten with her. And she appears to be returning that affection.

When Tom tells her that Cecilia is in love with him, she notes that she’s married. Still, he asks her to meet him that night at the amusement park. After all, how many times does a movie character leave a movie to meet somebody? Not an everyday occurrence.

Meanwhile, the film characters continue to be freaking the fuck out. The Countess (Zoe Caldwell) and Larry Wilde (Van Johnson) show up as well. The audience appears to be enjoying this less than I am, and they start to backtalk the movie, calling it boring. The movie backtalks the audience right back, and it continues to be hilarious.

Eventually, this becomes an attraction in and of itself. They suggest turning the movie off, but that risks stranding Tom Baxter outside. It also means that the film characters wouldn’t exist, which Henry is EXTREMELY upset about. As the news arrives to cover the small theatre’s anomaly, the people in the film itself start to play pinochle, as a few people linger around to watch and interact with the characters. The theatre manager (Irving Metzman) calls the production company, RKO, and they get on the phone with a Gil Shepherd.

Meanwhile, Cecilia manages to get out of the house, despite Monk trying to keep her there to massage his back, the absolute douchebag. She goes and meets Tom, and they go dancing together. This is just as the actor who plays Tom, Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels) is called by RKO while he’s at a party. Gil seems like kind of a typical Hollywood jerk, but he’s interrupted by an agent, who tells him that they need to get control of...well, whatever the hell this is.

Apparently, RKO is telling Gil that if he can’t get “his creation” under control, then he’ll essentially be blacklisted, especially considering that there’s no telling what Tom’s doing out there. And what Tom is doing is attempting to pay for a meal with Cecilia, only to find that his money isn’t real money. The two dine-and-dash, and they escape in a car back to the amusement park. 

There, the two kiss, with Tom expecting the screen to fade out in preparation for them to make love. He’s surprised when it doesn’t happen, and it’s neat to see his adjustment to the world outside of films. He wants to continue with the lovemaking, but she’s still faithful to her husband. He stays at the park, and she returns home, where she still hasn’t told Monk about her new unemployment status.

The next morning, Gil and co. arrive at the small New Jersey town, and Gil ends up running into Cecilia, who confuses him for Tom. Gil realizes exactly what’s going on, and reveals who he is to her. The two start to talk, and Cecilia just fangirls EVERWHERE. She agrees to take him to meet his character.

Great place to pause, I think! See you in Part Two!

[kikyozoldyck]

what are your thoughts on each of the hokage? as characters/motivations/sexiness lol? like from hashirama → naruto?

HASHIRAMA SENJU: Hashirama is a democrat. He’s not half as progressive as he thinks he is. He excuses his bigotry by saying shit like ‘some of my closest friends are Uchihas!’ I think he’s an interesting character because there is something compelling to a narrative about a man who wants to create a better world but is unable to due to his own internalized prejudices and unresolved traumas (however we get none of that in the show). Sexuality wise, I think he’s bisexual and polyamorous. I touched on this briefly in Entropy but I think that the Senju are polygamist which is why the brothers Senju all look so different. I also feel like Hashirama and Mito hosted some insane orgies and key parties in their big ass house. [ 8/10 kage hats ]

TOBIRAMA SENJU: I’ve said this before but Tobirama is as far right as they get. He’s not progressive and he doesn’t claim to be. He only cosigned Konoha because he was tired of Senju being slaughtered. He’s a character I hate but also find really interesting from a family systems point of view. I think that his place as the “functional oldest” in his childhood carrying into adulthood is intriguing. I honestly don’t think we get enough background into him as a character considering his legacy is probably the most prevalent of anyone in Naruto -- Sage of Sixth Paths included. He was literally the creator of most jutsu and the architect of most Konoha’s systemic oppression of the Uchiha. Sexuality wise, I think he’s straight and polygamist. I think he would be fine having multiple sex partners for himself but would absolutely lose his shit if his wife looked at another man for too long. [ 6/10 kage hats ] 

MINATO NAMIKAZE: This might be an unpopular opinion but Minato Namikaze is a little bitch and I want to beat his goofy ass up every time I see him on my screen. (Honestly, this may be because I have very strong feelings about Hokage Kushina and could literally go on for years about how making Kushina the fourth hokage would’ve been a more narratively satisfying decision.) Minato sucks. He left Naruto to become an orphaned child with no family. He assumed that the village was going to accept Naruto despite knowing how bigoted Konoha is and how poorly jinchuuriki get treated. His most valuable decisions as Hokage were letting a traumatized child join the ANBU ranks with little to no regard for his mental health and dying. He literally did the same thing that Gaara’s dad did to Gaara except for some reason the fandom loves Minato. He’s not even an interesting character. The only valid thing about him is that Kushina tops. Anyway I’m gonna beat his man’s ass and then fuck his wife and raise his son as my own. [ 10/10 punches from mar] [ 3/10 kage hats ]

HIRUZEN SARUTOBI: Hiruzen is a centrist. He’s an idealist and he’s easily influenced and manipulated. I hate this bitch, not because he’s evil or anything but because he’s so fucking boring, like he’s not particularly offensive or interesting. This being said his speech about the village while he’s dying always makes me cry so that’s half a kage hat I think. He’s straight and an incel. His wife has never cum once in their entire marriage. [ 4.5/10 kage hats ]

TSUNADE SENJU: She’s a democrat but her policies are more left leaning. I love this woman so much literally everything about her makes me want to cry. She’s my favorite character in all of Naruto canon. I think she’s so interesting -- I could literally write an entire essay on how powerful the decision to make her the 5th hokage instead of Jiraiya (despite that being Hiruzen’s choice) and how that it’s a symbol of Konoha’s healing as a whole. Her defending Naruto to the elders during the Pain Assault Arc literally makes me tear up just thinking about it. She didn't even hesitate to defend Naruto with everything she had. You could tell nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, was going to lay a hand on Naruto if she was around. She would threaten every elder in the village before she'd let them even INSINUATE that Naruto wasn't worth something. I’m literally gonna cry as right now I love this woman.  She’s bisexual and gives the strap out like she’s Oprah fuckin Winfrey.   [ 100000/10 kisses from mar ] [ 10/10 kage hats ]

KAKASHI HATAKE: Despite popular belief, I actually do like Kakashi. I just think he probably smells like a wet dog and shouldn’t have been made 6th Hokage. I understand it as a narrative choice because Minato was his sensei and Obito always wanted his sharingan eyes to look out over Konoha but I still absolutely hate it. It's just that I feel it detracts from Tsunade's ending to the series in a way that didn't need to happen. The title of Hokage has always played such an important role in Tsunade's character. The point of her introduction arc is to bring her back to make her Hokage. It's a dream both her dead younger brother and lover shared and that allowed her and Naruto to have the bond that they do. It's what makes her decision to agree to become Hokage such a powerful one. He’s bisexual too, and tbh he’s the king of casual sex [ 8/10 kage hats ]

NARUTO UZUMAKI: I haven’t seen Boruto so I’m just going to rate Naruto on what kind of Hokage I think he is. A leftist kingkage !!!! Ended the systemic oppression of the Uchiha!! Outlawed slavery in the Hyuga clan !!! Honestly so progressive, so HANDSOME, so funky fun. I love him my baby, my son, my solider, my poet, my king. My second favorite character in Naruto canon. He’s so unwaveringly good and so steadfast in all his beliefs. (He’s a little bit of a bootlicker but I think that comes from a constant fear of being rejected for showing the slightest bit of rage.) [ 12/10 kage hats ]

[celestines]

                have   you   seen   JUNG   SOMI   around   campus   ?   i   hear   they’re   a   SECOND   YEAR   ,   SUMMER   witch   with   a   specialty   in   FORTUNE   TELLING   .   i almost   never   see   them   without   their   FENNEC   FOX   .   if   they   ever   want   to   be   a   FORTUNE   TELLER   someday   they   should   ease   up   on   being   OVERSENSITIVE   &   POSSESSIVE   .   at   least   you   can   say   they’re   ANIMATED   &   LOYAL   ,   too   .

              hello  angels    !    im   xan   and   im   late   as   usual   but   that’s   just   the   way   it   is   …   😔   im   22   ,   from   the   est   timezone   &   i   go   by   she   /   her   pronouns   !   i   truly   …   never   know   what   im   doing   with   intros   they   just   turn   out   super   long   &   messy   so   aha   …  are   u   ready   for   this   ?   here   is   intro   number   one   out   of   two   baby   !   😋

━  ˙ ˖  ☆     QUICK  STATS  !

full  name  :   jung   somi   .

nickname(s)  :   mimi   .    

zodiac  :   leo   sun   ,   sagittarius   moon   (  click   !  )

sexuality  :   bisexual   .

alignment   :   chaotic   good   .

pinterest   :   (   tba !   )  

━  ˙ ˖  ☆     BACKSTORY  !  

she   was   an   accidental   pregnancy   ,    born   shortly   after   the   marriage   of    her    parents   ,   but    they    were   far   from   mad   about   it   .   her   father   was   a   well   regarded   summer   warlock   ,   a   famous   entertainer   known   for   his   long   and   successful   career    in   the   spotlight   with   his   sister   ,   a    man   who’d   been   the   object   of   many   summer    witches’   affections   .   it   was   a   shock   to   everyone   when   he    retired    from   show   business   to   settle   down   with   his   old   academy   sweetheart   ,   a    soft   spoken    spring   witch   with   a   passion   for   healing   .   

somi’s   father   was   delighted   that   their   first   born   was   a   summer   witch   ,   but   her   mother   intended   to   raise   all   their   children   with   a   blend   of   beliefs   from   both   the   spring   and   summer   covens   ,   and   that’s   exactly   what   they   did   .   since   her   father   had   been   a   famous   entertainer   ,   his   social   circle   extended   far   beyond   just   the   summer   coven   .   although   it   was   obvious   he   had   pride   as   most   summer   witches   and   warlocks   do   ,   he   was   never   the   type   to   discriminate   even   against   those   from   the   winter   covens   ,   a   habit   he   learned   from   his   wife   .     

somi   was   their   only   child   for   the   first   half   of   her   life   (   as   her   parents   were   relatively   young   when   they’d   had   her   )   .   because   of   this   she   was   spoiled   by   the   excited   new   parents   ,   attention   and   support   never   lacking   at   home   .   she   was   raised   to   believe   she   could   do   whatever   she   put   her   mind   to   ,   no   matter   how   big   those   dreams   were   . 

  however   ,    once   she   entered   her   teenage   years   and   her   baby   fat   was   gone   ,    and   she   could   no   longer   rely   on   being   “   that   cute   and   friendly   girl   ”   to   get   her   where   she   wanted   to   go    ,    things   got   a    little   harder   .   she   had   no   problem   with   confidence   ,    but   motivation   was   not   one   of    her   strong   suits   ,    unintentionally   growing   up   with   the   mentality   that   things   would   just   magically   fall   into   place   if    she   wanted   them   hard   enough   .

this   was   also   around   the   time   her   parents   had   their   second   baby   ,   a   boy   born   in   the   spring   .   naturally   he   became   the   object   of   her   parent’s   attention   which   only   made   somi   feel   more   lost   ,    like   maybe   she   wasn’t   as   special   or   important   as   her   parents   had   made   her   feel   .   but   when   her   parents   had   another   child   a   little   over   a   year   later   ,   another  summer   witch   ,   somi   realized    it   was   pretty   dumb   to   be   jealous   of    babies   ,   and   that   it   would   be    better   if   she   focused   her   time   on   becoming   the   type   of   older   sister   her   siblings   could   eventually   look   up   to   !

once   she   started   at   arcane   somi   vowed   she’d   take   her   studies   more   seriously   and   not   get   too   distracted   by   her   social   life   .   while   her   talent   for   fortune   telling   had   manifested   pretty   early   on   in   her   life   ,    and   while   she   was   good   at   it   ,   she   would   be   lying   if   she   said   she   was   interested   in   studying   it   in   a   scholarly   way   .   (   she   has   way   more   fun   sneaking   off   the   island   with   her   best   friend   and   fortune   telling   for   humans   for   some   quick   cash   )   .   still   ,   she’s   trying   her   best   to   keep   her   grades   up   ,    all   the   while   making   sure   she   doesn’t   miss   out   on   a   single   party   ...   and   boy   are   there   lots   of   parties   ...                 

━  ˙ ˖  ☆     PERSONALITY  +  TIDBITS  !

she’s   a   leo   and   it   shows   JWDBJWDBJWDW    full   of   energy   and   confidence   at   almost   all   times   so   it’s   pretty   easy   to   tell   when   she’s   upset   because   she’ll   finally   be   quiet   .   a   big   social   butterfly   with   no   real   opinions   about   house   rivalries    ,   BUT    she’s   super   proud   to   be   a   summer   witch   so   if   you   try   to   put   her   down   because   of    it   that’s   when   she’d   be   upset   /:

she   might   be   the   oldest   sibling   in   her   family   but   that   definitely   doesn’t   show   .   has   big   i’m   baby   energy   and   is   quite   literally   the   embodiment   of   this   emoji   🥺   at   all   times   but   especially   when   she’s   trying   to   get   out   of   trouble   .

blindingly   loyal   to   her   friends   and   the   people   she   loves   to   the   point   where   if   they   murdered   someone   she   would   wholeheartedly   believe   they   were   right   in   doing   so   .   friendships   are   very   important   to   her   and   so   is   getting   back   the   energy   she   gives   out   .   she’s   the   type   to   drop   anything   to   help   a   friend   in   need   !

struggles   a   lot   with   acting   out   when   she   feels   neglected   or   like   someone   doesn’t   care   about   her   as   much   as   she   thought   .   usually   it’s   short   lived   dramatic   bursts   of   anger   ,   and   she   might   give   you   the   silent   treatment   for   an   hour   or   two   before   finally   confessing   how   she’s   feeling   (   and   yes   ,   asking   you   for   reassurance   )   .

she   can   also   be   a   little   possessive   at   times   both   platonically   and   romatically   .    absolutely   loves   the   thought   of   being   everyone’s   favorite   person   but   she’s   also   aware   it’s   highly   unrealistic   </3   still   ,   that   won’t   stop   her   from   being   a   little   dramatic   about   it   ...   as   a   treat   .

she   has   a   huge   heart    😌    and   it   would   be   easy   to   just   cast   her   off   as   a   softie   because   in   lots   of   ways   she   is   one   .   eliciting   real   anger   from   somi   is   pretty   rare   ,   but   hurting   someone   she   cares   about   is   the   quickest   way   to   get   you   there   .   she’s   100%   the   type   to   not   like   someone   because   one   of   her   friends   has   a   problem   with   them   which   can   sometimes   be   hard   considering   she’s   also   the   type   to   try   and   be   everyone’s   friend   ...   it’s   complicated   😭   

she   hates   bullies   😡   will   threaten   to   fight   them   despite   having   no   combat   skills   .        

her   love   life   is   also   complicated   ...   she   gets   crushes   super   easily   and   her   infatuations   are   always   super   consuming   ,    like   she   swears   she’s   gonna   marry   the   person  consuming   ,   but   her   attention   is   always   broken   by   someone  else   so   they   never   last   .   she   wants   to   find   her   true   love   at   the   academy   the   way   her   parents   found   each   other   🥺   she’s   a   romantic   and   proud   <3     

gets   grumpy   when   she’s   hungry

her   familiar   is   a   fennec   fox   named   pancake   and   they’re   the   best   of   friends   except   when   somi   is   acting   up   JDBWJDBWJDW 

 she’s   in   the   art   club   !   originally   joined    because   she   thought   she   could   be   a   muse   and   sit   in   the   middle   of   a   circle   and   have   everyone   paint   her   ...   but   she   stayed   because   she   really   does   love   art   !

so   lazy   and   she   says   she’s   trying   but   she’s   probably   rotated   through   at   least   3   different   tutors   because   they   couldn’t   stand   it    /:   she   just   thinks   the   classroom   isn’t   the   right   place   for   her   and   that’s   ok

will   tell   you   your   fortune   even   if   you   didn’t   ask   ...   it’s   her   party   trick   she’s   still   going   strong   

nothing   good   happens   when   she   drinks   .   is   a   lightweight   AND   a   chaotic   drunk   but   it’s   pretty   fun   to   watch   

has   a   lot   of   respect   for   anyone   older   than   her   in   grades   above   her   UNLESS   they   use   their   seniority   to   be   assholes   ,    then   she’ll   no   longer   look   up   to   them   </3      

━  ˙ ˖  ☆     WANTED  CONNECTIONS  !  (  all  open  to  all  genders  )

tutors   !   past   failed   ones   who   tried   to   help   her   out   &   maybe   a   current   one   whose   patience   she’s   testing   SJDBJWDBJWW

someone   she   defended   once   and   ever   since   then   she   keeps   asking   them   if    there’s   someone   they   need   her   to   fight   even   though   they   literally   did   not   ask   and   they   both   know   somi   would   lose   

unlikely   friendships   !    maybe   your   muse   usually   steers   clear   of   summer   witches   ,    or    maybe   your   muse    and   somi   just   have   opposite   personalities   ,    either   way   they   became   friends   despite   their   differences   

maybe   an   ex   or   two   .   their   relationship   would   have   been   short   lived   despite   how   into   it   somi   seemed   .   maybe   they’re   still   kinda   resentful   about   it   ,   or   maybe   they   feel   as   if   they   dodged   a   bullet   .   or   maybe   an  ex   that   dumped   somi   before   she   could   dump   them   and   she   hasn’t  been   able   to   let   it   go  

current   infatuations   !   her   list   of   crushes   is   ridiculously   long   ,    but   there   would   be   a   handful   of   people   who   have   surpassed   crush   status   and   she’s   full   on   head   over   heels   for    .   i   feel   like   this   would   work   really   well   with   3rd   or   4th   year   witches   since  somi   already   tends   to   idolize   them   ,   but   it   definitely   isn’t  exclusive   to   older   witches   !   maybe   they   have   no   idea   how   she   feels   (   although   she   makes   it   obvious   )   ,   maybe  they   pretend   not   to   notice   to   tease   her   ,   maybe   they   try   and   use   her   feelings   to   their   advantage   ,   or   maybe   they   just   think   it’s   cute  the   possibilities   are   endless   hehe

second   years   she   can   bond   with   🥺   maybe   a   first   year   she’s   taken   under   her   wing   despite   only   being   grade   above   them   and   acts   like   she’s   showing   them   the   ropes   SJDBWJDBWJDW   but   they’re   realizing   her   best   places   to   nap   and   not   get   caught   tour   won’t   really   help   them   ...

people   who   only   really   know   her   from   parties   !   maybe   they   don’t   really   hang   out   outside   of    parties   so   it’s   kind   of   awkward   when   they   bump   into   each   other   ,    but   as   soon   as   they’re   in   a   setting   with   alcohol   it’s   all   good   again

sibling   like   friendships   !   i   would   definitely   love   some   older   sibling  figures   in   her   life   since   she’s   never   had   one   🥺

people   who    were   big   fans   of    her   dad   JWDBWJBDWJ   since   he   was   well   known   i   think   it   would   be   funny   to   have   people   know   her   because   of   him   and   even   more   funny   to   have   them   be   fans   because   somi   would   pretend   to   be   grossed   out   if   they   ever   tried   to   tell   her   how   awesome   they   think   he   is   </3 

enemies   (:<   she   tries   not   to   have   any   ,   but   she’s   bound   to   butt   heads   with   people   .   she   can   definitely   be   a   lot   ...   maybe   it’s   a   personality   thing   ,   or   a   we   have   different   values   thing   ,   or   maybe   there   was   an   unfortunate   incident   where   your   muse   stole   somi’s   favorite  pen   then   lied   about   it   to   her   face   and   to   this   day   they   are   her   sworn   nemesis   because   of   it   ...

a   sub   point   to   the   enemies   ...   JDWJDBWJD   i   think   it   would   be   so   funny   to   have   someone   she   started   out   as   enemies   with   but   who   she’s   starting   to   realize   she   might  actually   have   a   lot   in   common   with   and   actually   get  along   with   but   they   both   try   to   deny   it   because   they’re   so   used   to   hating   each   other   although   it’s   clearly   not   the   case   anymore       

i   wont   lie   to   u   this  got   longer   than   i   thought   it   would   😭😭😭   im   sosososo  sorry   for   the   length   …   also   i   feel   like   my   charas   always   change   a  lil   once   i   actually   start   plotting   &   writing   so   sorry   again   if   u   see   me   finally   writing   as   somi   on   the   dash   and   ur   like   literally   who   is   that   …  JSDBWJBDWBDJ   PLEASE  come  message  me  on  discord  to  plot   !   if   u   prefer   im’s   that’s   perfectly   ok   too   im   just   warning   u   now   it’s   gonna   be   a    much   slower   process   so   if   u   want   speedier   replies   …  u   can   message   me   @ glo lovecore ʕ´• ᴥ•̥`ʔ#8172   maybe  …   give   this   a   like   if   u   wanna   …   plot   hehehe   thank   u   for   reading   all   this   im   sorry   again   ur   so   brave   for   making   it   x   

[spiltscribbles]

Hamilton Friends AU  |  The One With The Engagement

Notes: Okay so this is so late, I beam the craziness f this summer. But a huge Thank you to the ever lovely @aswithasunbeamwho prompted me this perfect Friends episode to write in a Hamilton AU. You’re an amazing soul and I hope you enjoy<3<3

.-

“Your face looks weird.”

“Rude.”

“Just an observation,” Angelica, as appraising and blunt as ever, chides at Alexander with a probing finger to his cheek. In turn alexander just scowls her way and sticks out his tongue for good measure.

“She is correct my friend,” Lafayette, currently trying to balance a fifth book on his head after proclaiming that yes, in fact he is as graceful as any of those fucking Disney princesses, tacks on. “As if your face has gone all goopy permanently.”

“It’s like you’re staring at Eliza even though she’s not here,” Hercules clarifies with a shrug.

“You’re all awful people and I don’t know why I’ve ever agreed to be your friend.” Alexander huffs.

“We’ve gone and made him all sour,” Peggy snorts and Laurens begins to mimic his peeved off expression in-between his own cackles.

“Awful!” Alexander reiterates. “Awful, awful people.”

“Answer the question at hand loser,” Peggy charges on, standing up from the sofa and swinging her weight to her left hip, defiant. “Why do you look so eerily unbothered, so, un-Hamilton like. For Pete’s sake even when you’re happy you look like there’s a hundred different things that are annoying the fuck outta you.”

“Harsh.”

“Accurate.”

“Fine,” Alexander twists his lips in annoyance of getting caught out. “If I tell you lot you better swear on everything you own that you won’t breathe a word.”

“Mysterious,” Laurens leers.

“It is Burr, he has died a most awful death! This is the source of your happiness, no?” Lafayette accuses.

“Ah, erm…. Not quite yet?”

“Well get on with it then,” Angelica scolds with no real heat. “Some of us have actual lives to get too.”

“”Drag race is on tonight and me and Ange have got a bet going.” Peggy explains.

“Which I will win,” Angelica sniffs.

“Fine, fine,” Alexander harrumphs, long acquainted with the larger than life personalities of all the Schuyler sisters, his heart contracting and stomach swooping once thinking of one in particular. Of her long, dark hair, and impossibly bright eyes, and the way her smile makes it feel like Alexander’s floating in midair. 

Eliza.

She’s quite literally the most beautiful, brilliant, strong willed and even stronger hearted woman he’s ever known. She’s everything Alexander wishes he was and nothing but wonderful. He knows that, is positive, even if he concedes that she in fact is not an angel sent from the heavens above. Eliza’s not perfect just because Alexander swears she is. He knows that she is a bit of a clean freak, that she can get neurotic if plans aren’t followed through exactly as she had laid out. He knows that she was brought up oblivious to her insane level of wealth and that sometimes it takes full blown arguments for her to speak her mind instead of trying to spare him or anyone else of their feelings. Alexander knows all these small quirks and he doesn’t care because they only make him love her all the more. He loves Eliza more than the sun and stars and all the galaxies above combined, he loves her so much that somedays Alexander thinks his chest might crack with it. 

But it never does, and she’s always there, and what they have is everything Alexander has ever wanted, and Eliza is someone who he never thought he could have. All this to say that he has absolutely no doubts in his mind when he pulls out the small velvet box from his trouser’s pocket and opens it to reveal the sparkling engagement ring he’s spent months saving up for.

“wholly fuck,” Peggy balks, scurrying closer to snatch it out of Alexander’s grasp, Angelica right on her coattails.

“No way!” Laurens crowed the same time Lafayette let out a strange, indecipherable squeal that Alexander is almost positive was only partially in French, partially in English and  then a hodgepodge of other languages he’s never even heard before— all the books cascading down to the wooden floors  in a crescendo of thuds.

 For his part, Hercules just begins to tear up with a stiff lip and quivering hands. “Get the hell outta here.”

“You guys don’t like it,” Alexander asks with a shit eating grin.

“Don’t be cheeky dork,” Angelica reproves, never taking her eyes off the ring, swatting at Peggy to give her a chance to hold it.

“Don’t speak that way to your future brother-in-law,” Laurens snickers, claps Alexander on the back with an encouraging hug. “I’m so proud of you Ham, you’ve finally found the one.” 

Alexander gives his oldest friend— the man he once thought would’ve been his forever if they hadn’t had such contradictory views on what that meant— a watery smile. “thank you Laurens, but don’t get too excited, Betsey’s still gotta say yes.”

“She’s crazy about you,” Peggy says airily, waving off his worries with a lazy hand. “Of course she’s gonna say yes.”

Alexander bites down on a smile, casts his gaze to the floor so to hide his reddening cheeks. He’s still in such disbelief that this is his life. He’s got the world’s greatest friends, an amazing job that he actually enjoys, and now he might actually get to keep the dream girl. So far away from the lonesome days and hard nights of St Croix. Far away from dying mothers and flighty fathers and cruel brothers who never bothered to keep in touch. This, right here, these people, Eliza, the Washingtons, hell even Burr on a good day… They’re his family, the people he’d die for and who he’s sure would die for him too. What a strange feeling that is, to love and be loved. How strange it is that he gets to keep this sense of belonging, of balance.

“God, now enough with the sappiness,” Peggy gripes. “I can see it on your face Hamilton, and just because you’re technically my brother now doesn’t mean I won’t beat your ass if I feel like it.”

“Charming,” Alexander deadpans.

“I thought so,” Peggy says with a magnanimous grin.

“So what’s the plan? How are you gonna pop the question?” Hercules interjects from where he’s now examining the rose gold band and round cut diamond accented with sapphires. 

“I was planning to take her to that really posh French restaurant near fifth avenue that Laf showed us. Bets loves hearing me speak French,” he explains with a wink.

“My people’s language does arouse a certain, how do you say, sultry emotion.” Lafayette leers.

“For the love of God stop talking about having sex with my baby sister.”

“Right, ahem.” Alexander concedes. “Well after that I was gonna order us a bottle of her   favorite, ridiculously priced champaign.”

“We use to drink it when we’d summer in our villa in the South of France,” Peggy explains, totally impervious to how fantastical that sounds to Alexander.

“Friends with too many rich people,” Hercules mutters morosely, handing the ring off to Lafayette, face scrunched up in displeasure all the while.

“Do not hate us for our good fortunes mon grand,” Lafayette sniffs. “Especially now that Alexander is considered part of our lot after he and Eliza’s inevitable union. One that is written in the stars mind you.”

“What’s written in the stars?”

Alexander’s heart stutters to a rapid staccato just as soon as he sees the door to the apartment swing open, revealing a disheveled, but radiant Eliza strolling through, one perfectly manicured brow kinked. 

Before Alexander can take a breath, Lafayette impulsively stuck the ring— the symbol of his undying love and eternal devotion to Eliza— into his fucking French, snail eating mouth.

“Gross,” he hisses, to which Lafayette just tossed him the bird.

“Ah, the fact that Thundermist is totally beating Vivian October tonight,” Peggy blurts out in a totally high pitched voice. Jesus fucking Christ half of them work in politics and the other half are lawyers, save for Hercules whom’s perfectly content as the head of Ralph Lauren merchandize. But still, Alexander expected that they’d all be better at lying than this pathetic display!

He’s subsequently shown up the moment Eliza flickers her gaze towards him, a knowing smile blooming across her face that makes Alexander’s heart ache with want. He supposes it’s more the person who they’re all lying to rather than the act itself. 

“You and Ange need to stop making everything a competition love, it’s teetering on ridiculous.” She toots, tosses her and Alexander’s mail to the counter before excepting the peck he can’t help but offer her.

“You know how daddy is with his horses,” Angelica argues. “It’s in our blood.”

That just makes Eliza role her eyes, totally fond, before she excuses herself to change out of her pencil skirt and red bottom heals.

“Hey is there paint on your top?” Laurens asks, brows furrowed.

“Oh yeah,” Eliza blushes. “The kids had arts and crafts today at the orphanage and wanted me to help out so I just set all the paperwork to be done tomorrow instead.”

“THat’s my top!” Angelica squawks, affronted.

“It’ll come out,” Eliza shoos her off with a lofty tip to her head.

Once she’s shut the door on her to change, Alexander cuffs Lafayette on the back, hard. 

“This is the love you show me after I successfully kept your little romantic gesture a secret,” he harrumphs.

“Now I’ve got your French cooties all over it!” Alexander hisses.

“Many a men and women would have died to get my delightful French saliva within a ten mile radius of them.”

“We really need to talk about your ego one of these days,” Peggy snorts.

“I have Adrien as my wife and you lot are blunders in love, I shall not permit any judgment from any of you.”

“Hey, I’ll be joining you in that marital bliss soon enough,” Alexander contends, totally giddy smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

“Gross,” the remainder chorus in varying degrees of exasperation, dosed  in pride.

.-

Alexander’s really never had the best luck, most especially when it was the romantic sort. Before Eliza he’s never had a relationship that lasted over six consecutive months, or one that he didn’t constantly feel as if he had to garnish a facade of brilliance and magnetism that he’s never truly felt he had any right to own. Before Eliza Alexander never was able to picture himself settling into the domestic sphere quite so willingly. Never thought he would’ve yearned for quiet Sunday mornings in bed where Eliza’s head was propped up on his chest, and the early morning light would cascade atop her cheekbones and lips and glimmer in her hair. Those mornings where all Alexander could focus on was counting the quiet breaths she would let out and plotting out all the ways he could always make her look so at peace and lovely. Alexander never thought he would ever want the house in the suburbs with a large yard and rose gardens and everything his mother had tried to give him when she was still here. Alexander never had wanted it until Eliza came and he realized he could have it with her.

He remembers one particularly pitiful night towards the end of L2 when he had just cut ties with Cornelia Lotts because he had woken up that morning and had just not found her as interesting as the night before, which obviously meant he had drunken himself silly at some sleazy bar and tried picking up someone knew, just for the fun of it. Instead he was met by Angelica’s expectant,  irritated glower once he was three drinks in, telling him on no uncertain terms that the reason his love life sucked so hard is because he always went for the obscenely wealthy and tragically pretty folks that always infested ivy league institutions. The same folks with too large egos and too little self worth to ever consider having an actual relationship with someone outside of their social circle— A circle that the Schuyler family were the crown jewels of is what Angelica didn’t have to say but Alexander heard in screaming clarity all the same.

“Fuck you.”

“You wish loser.”

That was when she tugged him by the ear to get out of the city with her for the long weekend to clear his head. When he slept in her family’s country home upstate. When he had stumbled downstairs in the middle of the night to be face to face—for the first time— with the sister he’s seen millions of pictures of and heard even more stories about  by a beaming Angelica. The one who had just spent the year after graduating Yale in the peace corps. That was when Alexander’s heart had first swelled and he was a goner.

“Eliza.”

“Yes love,” Eliza smiles up at him through her lashes now, so many years detached from their first meeting. Years composed of unrequited crushes and tentative laughs that morphed into a strong friendship and shy words of sincerity. Eventually leading them to first kisses and first nights and all the in-betweens Alexander’s never gone through with any other relationship. Nothing else felt as vital, as permanent, as the one he shares with Eliza. Nothing else felt like it deserved his efforts in quite the same ways that he’s always known Eliza has. Nothing else has made him experience this distinct sort of want.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” she giggles, mouth partially hidden from the lip of the flute of champaign she’s nursing. “Is everything alright deer? You look a little pale.”

Alexander’s throat closes up and he rinses his hands with anticipation.

“Yeah, yes. Everything’s Perfect Bets, it’s been perfect for a while now… Honestly ever since you agreed to actually go out with me. You. You make things perfect.”

Eliza doesn’t answer him in so many words, just cups her hands around hiss face and kisses him nice and thorough. Alexander wonders if how she makes everything inside of him go golden with every press to the lips will ever fade.

He seriously doubts it.

“Now, let me get this out, okay?” Alexander begs, squeezing her hands with his own and kissing the tops of each of her fingers gingerly. 

“Oh, Andre.”

Alexander’s heart stills and the breath from his lungs escapes— It feels like something awful and freezing has just clutched his heart and rinsed it dry.

“No, Alex—- I’m Alex.”

That only makes Eliza role her eyes at him before nudging her head to where a ridiculously handsome, obviously well off man stands.

“Oh, yes…. erm that is Andre.”

“Maybe he won’t see us,” Eliza offers before he’s lead directly to the recently vacated spot besides them by a completely oblivious host.

“Maybe he’s blind now?” Alexander says hopefully.

“Lizzy Schuyler is that you?” 

Alexander curses every ounce of bad luck he’s somehow accumulated before standing up to exchange awkward pleasantries  and spending the remainder of the night refraining himself from knocking Andre/s lights out every time he stares a tad bit too longingly towards Eliza for his liking.

The pampered bastard.

.-

Still inwardly fuming while drinking his morning coffee, Alexander was accosted by someone cuffing him on the back of the head, hard.

He isn’t surprised to turn around and Find a surly looking Angelica glaring at him, hands on her hips and mouth curled in a distinctly predatory fashion.

“What happened last night Hamilton?”

“How do you know something happened?” 

“Well when I gushed to look at Liza’s hand this morning, instead of a rock on her finger she just looked at me like I was insane! I had to pretend I wanted to read her palm.”

“So confirming the insanity suspicion then?” He asks owlishly.

“Hamilton!” She says in a hiss.

“I couldn’t do it, okay.” Alexander snaps back, waspish.

“You chickened out,” Angelica accuses, depositing herself on the sofa besides him in the small cafe and snatching the muffin from his hand.

“No.”

“Then what? You changed your mind? My baby sister not good enough for you?” She needles, prickly as he’s ever seen her.

“Don’t be ridiculous Anne.”

“Then wh—“

“Andre showed up,” he blurts with absolutely no tact.

“No fucking way,” Angelica gapes, dropping the aforementioned muffin.

“I’m cursed aren’t I?”

“Kinda,” Angelica consoles with a pout, cradling his head on her shoulder.

“Ah oh, not a good sign.” Hercules observes once taking a seat with his own latte.

“Hamilton’s cursed,” Angelica informs him, matter-of-fact.

“Why this time?”

“Because Eliza’s fucking perfect ex-fiancé somehow showed up last night with his own date and sat there besides us looking all handsome and waxing all poetic and reminiscing about how he and Eliza were caught fucking in her childhood bedroom her sophomore year of college and making her laugh and I couldn’t get a damn word in edgewise!”

“Oh not the thanksgiving story,” Angelica winces.

“So I reckon you didn’t propose?”

“I was gonna do it tonight instead, but thanks to Mis babble mouth over here,” he elbow checks Angelica. “Eliza most definitely suspects something is up now.”

“Hey! It’s not my fault that you apparently committed some sort of horrendous crime in a past life.”

“Who asks to look at someone’s hands!” Alexander hurls.

“People who think their sister was just proposed to!” Angelica defends.

“It’s fine you guys, we’ve just gotta throw her off the trail a little. Make her think marriage’s the furthest thing from your mind.” Hercules placates. 

“Yeah, yeah Herc, you’re right.” Alexander nods, is thrown to alert the moment the cafe’s bells chime— indicating a new customer— and it’s Eliza’s soft timbre that rings in his ears.

“I swear, I don’t care what Laf says, French people are total weirdos.” She sheds off her jacket and assumes the seat in Alexander’s all too willing lap. “I walk into his place to pick up some papers I left there and the first thing he wants to see is my hand to see if it’s proportionate to his.” With a huff, she grabs the coffee mug from Alexander, face scrunching up adorably at the excessive amount of sugar he always mixes in. Totally oblivious to how his heart is pulsing and his face is infused a bright red.

“Oh— Hah, how weird,” Angelica titters awkwardly. 

“Why do you sound so strange Ange?”

“No she doesn’t,” Alexander quickly pipes in.

“Yes…. She does.” Her brows furrow, the smallest dent between her eyes telling Alexander that she’s suspecting something. “What’s going on?”

“We were just reading this article in the New Yorker is all,” Hercules explains, saving all their asses. “It’s making her worry about her relationship with Mr Big.”

“His name’s Church, stop comparing our lives to Sex In The City characters,” Angelica admonishes with no heat.

“Whatever Miranda.”

“So what’s this article that’s got you all frazzled Angelica?” Eliza asks worriedly.

“It’s about marriage,” Alexander answers instead, seeing his opportunity and plunging for it.

“Marriage?” 

“Yeah, just about how it’s a total scam. I mean think about it Bets, legally timing yourself to another person? Doesn’t that sound Orwellian to you? A ploy by the government just to get our money and to keep us in check if you ask me.”

Eliza’s frown somehow, impossibly, sinks deeper.

“That’s not what you think Alex, is it?”

“I mean, ah yeah—“ His voice most certainly does not screech like he was a character from Saved By The Bell. “I mean you know me Eliza. I mean marriage didn’t keep my dad around for my mom.”

He can’t believe he just used that card on her. He totally deserves to go to hell for that one.

“It doesn’t always have to end up like that hon.” She cards a hand through his hair, kisses his cheek gingerly. And yeah, eternal damnation here Alexander comes.

“Eliza like 60% of all marriages now days ends in divorce,” Angelica contends. “Can you even name a couple that hasn’t been separated at least once.”

“Our parents,” she sniffs.

“But is it worth taking that chance,” Alexander says, reminds himself of how happy she’ll be tonight after he pops the question, when Eliza shakes off the hand that’s trying to lace their fingers together.

“Yeah, Yeah Alex I do think it’s worth that chance! And you know I do!” She starts to get up now, properly mad. “I mean don’t you guys want to promise yourself to the person you love in front of all your nearest and dearest. Be bound to someone so intimately and permanently. To get to show off your love to the world to see!”

“Sounds kinda selfish to me,” Alexander counters and Hercules and Angelica mumble their agreements.

“Okay,I’m running late for work.” In a cloud of carefully concealed fury, found in the pinch of her shoulders and downturn of her lips, Eliza collects her bag and jacket before storming out. A quiet fury in total opposition to her sisters’ brash words and ear shattering shouts.

Alexander yet again reminds himself of her beaming face when she doesn’t dip down to give him the customary kiss goodbye. 

“This’s gonna workout just fine.”

.-

[storiesbyjes2g]

Maya Pruett

Maya is the oldest of Jonathan & Skyla’s children and the wild one. She’s got her mama’s face and her daddy’s personality times two. Skyla calls her “Pumpkin.” She lives at home still and is the Director of Communications at Sim.tv. Maya is a daddy’s girl to the core. The other man in her life is the beautiful Ranveer Singh. Although they have been dating for a while, she is positive he is the one. Her best friend is the one and only Penny Pizzazz.

Background

Maya’s birth was a much needed ray of sunshine in the Pruett family. She was born into the family drama, but she was also born after a long period of infertility. Her parents were over the moon about her arrival, and so was the rest of the family. To say the little girl was spoiled rotten would be an understatement.  

Academically, she was a fair student in high school. She made good grades but didn’t put forth more effort than she needed to. She was much more interested in getting her then best friend, Anthony Nunes, to see her as more than a friend. He wasn’t particularly cute, but she liked him for some unknown reason. Maybe it was the whole opposites attract thing. He was smart and nerdy while she cared less about school and just wanted to kiss someone. Regardless of what she saw in him, she was sold on him quite hard. 

Much like her father, she had little regard for boundaries, got in trouble and ended up being grounded until her young adult birthday after staying out late and disobeying the terms of her punishments. 

Maya was older than Anthony and had to wait more than a week for him to age up. She was willing to do that until she met Akira Kibo. His lips kept calling her name, and she wanted to kiss him shortly after they met. It didn’t help that he kept toying with her.

(Read more about Maya under the cut!)

They went out shortly after, and she did kiss him. Her parents urged her to talk to Anthony seeing as how they were still technically together. She knew this but was so nervous about breaking his heart and kept delaying the conversation. She delayed it all the way to his birthday, but he ended up coming by instead to break up with her. He met someone too, and they dated for the rest of school and got married right after graduation. (translation: MCCC got him lol) It may have been wrong for Maya to kiss Akira, but what Anthony did felt deceitful. On top of that, a short while later, she had to quit seeing Akira because he unknowingly slept with her cousin, Juliana, and she ended up pregnant. Between those two, other sleazeballs she met in clubs, and not knowing what to do with her life, Maya was bummed. She still lived at home and was not working, so she got her bff, Penny, to get her a job where she worked. She figured getting a job may be a good start on finding some direction in her life.

Juliana had her baby—Carlee—with no help from Akira; he never even met her to this day. As a matter of fact, Akira ended up getting married as well compliments of MCCC. The story explained it as he was a bargaining chip his parents used back in Japan to land this huge deal. Both families used their children, so Akira’s new wife was reluctant as well. They agreed to see other people and act like a couple when their parents were in town. Akira basically asked Maya to be his mistress, and she was so disgusted.

Meanwhile, Maya had a group of friends she partied with. Naturally, some people in the group began to pair up, and there was one guy she considered dating except that she was kinda gun-shy after all her drama. She didn’t want to make any more mistakes or get caught up with another douche bag, so she calmed herself and took things slow. She observed and took only what this friend offered and no more. Sadly, he was one of those guys who enjoyed women taking the lead. He only ever gave her flirty touches and said nice things, but she wanted more than that; she wanted what her parents have.

Soon, she met Ranveer. She was caught completely off guard by him. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen, and he literally walked up to her and asked to do a karaoke duet with her. Maya had always swore she would never do karaoke because she was too popular and didn’t need a video of her making a fool of herself going around Simstagram. But, as she peered into his almond shaped dark eyes, she could not say no. 

Ranveer had always been clear with what he wanted, making her decision to leave her other friend alone easy. When he wanted to hang out, he asked her. When he wanted to kiss her, he told her. Maya is head over heels in love with this man, but he’s almost too perfect and makes her feel inadequate. He is gainfully employed, lives on his own, is drop dead gorgeous, has a great personality, is funny, works out religiously, and is a genuinely good person. Maya is gorgeous too, and employed, but she lives at home, is terribly lazy, and doesn’t enjoy many things outside of partying, sports and watching TV. She feels like he deserves someone more like him but does not want to give him up.

Personality & Fun Facts

Maya is a fashionista and rabid sports fan. Her shoe closet contains stilettos and designer sneakers. She has always been a wonder to her male friends. In the same breath, she would flirt with them and trash talk their team. She is a Llamacorns fan, and Ranveer is a Plumnuggets fan. Game nights with those two are quite interesting. Maya hates the Plumnuggets with all her heart and would usually detest anyone who likes them. She really does hold that against Ranveer, but he’s so dang beautiful! She could never hate him and enjoys watching games with him and ripping his team to shreds.

Check out this post for 50 fun facts about Maya!

https://storiesbyjes2g.tumblr.com/post/185465556367/50-questions-for-your-sim-i-was?fbclid=IwAR1mqzJf-vr6HQ12TKqhvQJGLkvngbv7G6PPPolhe3SIKJE46SlaodWA524

[juleschurchill]

a letter from the desk of mayor churchill

Dear Ms. Timbers,

 I have spent the last morning watching my daughter get pummeled by the District Ten boy and barely come out alive. I was on a stage in front of the entirety of District Seven as my Jules was thrown into the mud, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. I had to keep my composure as my first-born child was nearly murdered in cold blood.

 Because of my station and my role as a public figure, I do not have the advantage of viewing the brutalization of my oldest child in private, but instead, in the middle of the District center. 

You can imagine the toll this takes on me.

@larktimbers

 I trust that you are doing everything in your power to bring my Jules home, but you’ll forgive me if I push you a little harder on it, as a father. Or, even as a mayor--objectively, Jules would be an excellent Victor by every parameter, and she would be excellent for both the Capitol and for Seven. I truly believe this. 

Ms. Timbers, in these next few paragraphs, I’m going to be frank. I ask that you forgive me later, for it. 

I am aware that more than a few people in this District believe it is a sort of justice, what Jules is going through. The reaping, the violence, they might be taking a certain pleasure out of it. I know that old men with calloused hands and young men with broken backs dislike my family and families like mine, hate everyone who doesn’t toil their time in those damn forests. 

I am a good Mayor to this District. I dislike public whippings and executions, I use them as sparingly as I can. But I realize that the poorer citizens of this District resent those with more. I realize why this is. 

Jules also know this. I explained this to my children once, when I had a little too much whiskey and tonic and my dear wife wasn’t there to shush me. There has to be someone to hate that’s not the Capitol. That is the purposes of mayors and merchants, and to a certain extent, Victors. We both owe the Capitol a debt, and we repay that by turning our backs on the rest of the District, becoming less like our people and more like our masters in the Capitol. 

So, you and I, Ms. Mason, my family, and the others like us are not typical citizens of District Seven. Perhaps we are even traitors to our own kin. I don’t know. 

I have always been friendly with the peacekeepers. I am regularly invited to the Capitol. I have regularly had Capitol citizens in my own home. I am despised for this.  

So, some call it justice that Jules suffers this torture, and that I must watch my own child go through this unfairness. They certainly feel some sort of schadenfreude from it, and perhaps that was purposeful on the part of the Capitol. 

Don’t mistake my meaning, here. I am aware that the reaping is completely, utterly random. I am aware that to suggest otherwise would be considered by some to be treason. But the reaping of Jules serves as a reminder to this District, and perhaps to myself. It is now clear that my family is no no better than anyone else. We might be rich, might be powerful, but my daughter would be killed too, slaughtered in front of the entire world to see. 

I cannot allow that to happen. 

Jules, as you have probably already found, is an exceptional child. She’s bright, incredibly smart, smarter than me by far. She can do things I would only dream of, if given the chance. She has the ambition to achieve any goal she thinks of, and she could think of anything. She deserves to live, deserves to grow old with grandchildren in an old house filled with books. 

I keep thinking of her as a child, as a baby. You have children. You know, or will know this, eventually. 

 She was so tiny, when we took her home from the hospital. I could barely her, it made me too nervous. I thought I might break her, she was so fragile, so precious already. But, fragile. She was sick all the time, that first year. If I were not myself, she would have died. If I was a lumberjack, or anyone else in the District, I never would have been able to afford the medicine I bought to try and fix her coughing, to stop her pink skin from turning blue with her labored breathing. 

She got better, eventually. Of course she did. Jules has always gotten better, always found her way out of binds.

I don’t know what I did to deserve her. I don’t know who to thank for her, because she is so much better than I deserve. She was my little assistant from the time she could walk, always curious about the family business, always wanting to help me. And she actually did, especially as she got older. Smart as a whip, my Jules. She could’ve held her own with the damn President if she had gotten the chance. 

She’s still a little girl, though. She’s tiny, and fragile and skinny and it’s my job to protect her. And I cannot. 

(I’ve ruminated on that, these past few days--I am the most powerful man in Seven. I cannot protect my own daughter. What is the point of power if I cannot protect the ones I love the most? What good is it?) 

I have done what I can to bend the odds in her favor, given my limited position. I have friends in the Capitol, and they’ve invested in her safety, they’re betting on her, sponsoring her. I fear the debts I am incurring on her behalf, and I fear she may have to repay them--but Jules must come home, and I do what I must.

You must do what I cannot. You are her mentor, but now, especially as Arion Barker is dead, you are her sole protector. She is your priority, and she’s had every advantage I could think to give her. The rest is on your shoulders. Whether or not she dies in there is up to you, her future is in your hands. This is, of course, not ideal. But, this is the situation we have been dealt. 

I would do anything for Jules, my little Jules. I would die for her, I would kill for her. She deserves heaven and earth to be moved for her. She deserves to come home, to live longer than eighteen years.

 If you ever require money or anything else that would help in ensuring Jules’ safe return to me, do not hesitate to contact me through the messenger I sent. 

Yours, 

Aaron Churchill

(Mail tended to get “lost” in Panem. At the very least, read by appropriate middle-men. As attempts by the Mayor of District Seven to influence the games in any way was illegal, perhaps downright treasonous, Aaron Churchill wanted to avoid such things. He had to call in favors to get the letter in the right hands, and no one else’s. 

Justinian King was an heir to a Capitol publishing empire, completely in control of every word printed in Panem. Newspapers, novels, textbooks, pamphlets, nearly everything went out of King’s Publishing, a sparkling glass tower in the middle of the downtown Capitol.

The man used a lot of paper.

So, he visited Seven a lot. Aaron knew him well, knew his quirks and his grating way of speaking. He called as soon as the reaping aired in the Capitol, not about shipments of tariffs (what Aaron’s number was supposed to be used for) but to gush about Jules’ chances in the games.

“Oh, she looked so terrified up there, but you could tell she was putting on a brave face, such a good girl. It’s always interesting, when the upper-crust of the districts get reaped, because it’s like, they know more about, like, social situations and they’re clean and everything, but they’re usually not very good at fighting--”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. He wanted to curse out Justinian, to threaten murder or destruction, but he was half a world away, and Aaron needed a favor. 

He hated needing favors. But instead of telling to fuck off, he laughed with a good nature. 

“Oh, I think my Jules is a fighter. Wanna hear about that? Or maybe some deals we can make after the games. As long as I’m not planning a, ahem, a funeral.”

By the end of conversation, Jules Churchill had her first sponsor, her first die-hard sycophant. Justinian Kings showered money on the cause of Jules Churchill, pushed for articles to be written, for TV spots to be aired. He hand-delivered the first letter from Aaron Churchill to Lark himself, waltzing past the Peacekeepers and up to Lark’s door in the casual way only Capitolites could, with no fear of their guns or power. 

He slipped the note under the door, all ghost-white with a single blood-red wax seal with the old sign of the Churchill’s on it, the old sign of power that meant everything in Seven and N O T H I N G in the Capitol.)