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#so now i can play music but it's stuck saying 'loading playlists'
jakeperalta · 1 year
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my apple music app is broken
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toooliix · 7 months
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hey! alright so i may have done a thing
so for the past,,, idk 3 weeks? ive been going on a deep dive into spelling bee mostly to sedate my own curiosity of needing to know everything about what i'm interested in. as it turns out, there is a LOT of content with this musical, so i'm here to talk about my findings! note: i will be keeping this EXCLUSIVE to the original 2005 off broadway cast. as much as i'm a brown university girlie through and through, the original cast is where the content is. OKAY FIRST: youtube findings
a lot of small videos were made usually with logainne and leaf. you'll be quick to learn that they made the most off stage content. i have a public playlist with these videos, along with interviews, the original boot, and a few other things. the cast album isn't in it because that's audio only and i want visuals damnit. (plus its on spotify and easy to look up so.) the exception is 25apcsbmt12doc because its pretty underground and the purpose is to get word out about niche things.
second: myspace pages a lot of the spellers have myspace pages! this is like. a common thing!! only two were archived (leaf and logainne) and are able to be accessed! i'll talk about the others in a bit. they contain new information and i personally find them very interesting!
leaf logainne
HOWEVER: three are currently able to be accessed through modern myspace without needing an account. the format is off, but it's accessable.
barfee 25apcsb account panch third: other
there's two different things here so i'll separate them :]
3.1: r/v club
r/v club is a short film by rebecca feldman (one of the people that worked on spelling bee) that includes logainne! it can be found on her site with other short films. i believe this is the only one with her in it HOWEVER i have not checked therefore i could be wrong. it's set post-spelling bee, i believe. also jesse is in it but not as leaf.
r/v club
3.2: official site
spelling bee had a site!! and official merch!! its just a cool thing i think. it'll be mentioned again in the last section
spelling bee site
fourth and final: lost media (to my knowledge)
okay, spelling bee has.... QUITE a bit of lost media. again, this will be separated into parts.
4.1: C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E
before spelling bee was a thing, crepuscule (albiet mispronounced) was an improv play made by the farm. (same group who made r/v club) a lot of the characters were similar or the same, and it has a similar premise. however, it wasn't a musical. from what i've heard, there USED to be a boot of it, however i haven't found one of my own. i would love to be corrected.
4.2 myspace pages
remember how i was going to say this was going to come up again? hi thats now. outside of leaf and logainne, other myspace accounts were made! mitch (comfortcounselor), olive (mydictionary) + (oliveostrovsky), chip (chiptolentino), marigold (marigoldconeybear) an olive and barfee joint account (ilovemydictionary), and a leaf and logainne joint account (schwartzylogan). there's also another leaf account with the very confusing name of panchspell the issue with these is that theyre not archived, so you'll need a myspace account with a verified email to view these. in the year of our lord 2024 that's not exactly an easy find, especially since verification emails no longer send. plus, one of olive's accounts is dictionary.com now so,,,, who knows what it looks like there. most also need a connection, which makes things even MORE difficult. i hate how close but out of reach these accounts are.
4.3. spelling bee game
yeah they had a game. it's on the site, and it's eternally stuck at loading characters from my experience. here's the link anyway! game
4.4 the dirty bee
oh jesus its the dirty bee. so for context, in 2006 when the show was running, a few nights were booked for spelling bee that were meant for mature audiences and were 18 plus. it's catered towards people who have already seen the bee and want something new. it was inspired by jay (panch) and putting in words or sentences researsals that were clearly for funnies because he was bored. alas it became a derivative of the musical. all we know is what an article provides (theres more than one but the one linked gives the most info) and that chip quote unquote "finished off" at my unfortunate erection according to jose. there's rumor that chip is canonically bi in it but theres no sources so,,,, can't confirm that one.
article
(the quote is said in the reunion "stars in the house" and is found in the playlist)
conclusion:
there's genuinely so much shit in this musical i find it fascinating. this post WILL be updated with any other finds or information. PLEASE dm me or let me know if i got something wrong or if you have something to add (though do add a source, please and thank you)
ALSO: reblogs are greatly appreciated!! shoutout to the wiki, @/honkmaster69 and the people i spam in dms for helping and tolerating me <33
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chorusfm · 5 months
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Liner Notes (April 27th, 2024)
It’s been a few weeks, but we’re back! This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here. If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here. A Few Things * Whew, it’s been a while! The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. There have been many family commitments on the weekends, and then two weeks ago, I was out of town on a business trip. It was the first time I’d traveled since the pandemic year, and the trip down and back from Mexico City was filled with every example of why I dislike traveling. Canceled flights, airline chaos, the dreaded SSSS on my boarding pass. It felt like a calamity of errors each way, leading to 12+ hours of travel on both days. Let’s say I’m not a fan. There’s a reason I like working behind a computer in the comfort of my home office. But, I’m back, and the calendar looks much clearer from here on out. So, I hope to get back into a regular weekend writing routine. But, enough about me; there’s a whole lot to cover. * Apple has started allowing game emulators on iOS. The first one I’ve seen is Delta, and it’s pretty wild that it works as well as it does. I downloaded some nostalgia-as-fuck games, tossed them in the Files app, loaded them into Delta, and was playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 on my fricking iPhone. Wild, wild stuff. * I’ve written many times over the last couple of years about FRND CRCL and their most recent pop-punk gem. But I just have to call out this t-shirt. Could there be anything more me? The Friends parody? It’s perfect. Also, the album still rules. In Case You Missed It * ”We Got Older, but We’re Still Young” * South Star Festival Announces Lineup * The Get Up Kids Announce New Tour * The Starting Line Thank Taylor Swift * Update from Adam of Fenix TX * The Menzingers Announce’ Rented World’ Shows * The Starting Line Talk With Variety * Saosin Detail Version 4.0 * Emo’s Not Dead 2025 Cruise Announced * Albums in Stores – Apr 26th, 2024 Music Thoughts * The most significant release of the last couple of weeks is, obviously, the new Taylor Swift album. After some time with it, my thoughts are starting to solidify a bit. It’s good, but it absolutely suffers from its length and overall sameness to a lot of the songs. Too many never quite elevate and instead feel stuck in first gear. In a fun twist of fate it’s not unlike what I thought The 1975 were suffering through for a couple albums. The lack of an editor who can say: let’s take the best batch of songs and hone in on them, workshop them, and make them incredible. Less can be more, and in an era where the biggest music star on the planet is already verging on overexposure, a scalpel was desperately needed on this project as a whole. He says as the album breaks all kinds of records, has seven billion vinyl variants printing money, and is sure to be the best-selling album of the year. And there’s a handful of super solid songs here. “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Down Bad,” and “Imgonnagetyouback” are all standouts for me. The Starting Line reference in “The Black Dog” is an all-timer. The smile on my face hearing that for the first time could have powered a small town with the electricity pouring out of me. * Cold Years’ new album A Different Life came out this week, and they completed an absolute scorcher of a three-album run. Truly one for the ages. They’re doing the whole Gaslight Anthem meets Green Day punk thing as well as anyone in music. This should dominate playlists as the weather starts turning to the summer months. Highly recommended. * I cannot praise Florrie’s upcoming album, The Lost Ones, enough. It is a pitch-perfect pop album. The most recent single, “Kissing in the Cold,” gives a really good feel for where the album is headed. Now, if she would just have a vinyl option that’s not over $60 shipped to the States, that would be excellent. * The new Mariana’s Trench single is a welcome return to form. I didn’t dislike… https://chorus.fm/features/articles/liner-notes-april-27th-2024/
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goboymusic · 2 years
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I think I can say my generation is somewhat responsible for popularizing #Pokemon, as we were the ones watching the first season of the anime every morning, buying the first Pokemon video games, trading cards and merch. We obsessively compared and traded cards on the playground and discussed the latest game discoveries and glitches. I personally played through the first three generations (red, silver, ruby) before music became a bigger interest (mainly @blink182 and @greenday).
I was really into the idea of meme songs at the time of making “#Dragon Fire”. The goal was to make something that would be memeable. Something totally ridiculous, but catchy. Hollering the words “Dragon Fire” every eight seconds throughout the song fit that bill.
If you want an example of a meme song, you can find playlists of them on YouTube and music streaming services. The whole meme song idea was utilized for a number of songs on GoBoy 4 and 5, such as “Dragon Fire,” “Magic Unicorn” and “Dick” (excerpts from post 69).
The ambient background synth and chorus melody arose while eating lunch on a weekend. After jotting it down in Logic Pro, the program unexpectedly quit before I saved. Thankfully, Apple’s auto-saving is stellar.
Having so few vocals / lyrics resulted in the song being completed in just a few days. Songs that take that short of an amount of time to complete leave me with little to reflect upon for storytelling, whereas songs that take an entire month to complete give me much to say. Hell, you can binge multiple tv series, get shitfaced multiple times, solve multiple complex problems at work, travel around the country and experience loads of human drama over the course of one month. For “Dragon Fire,” there’s not much to say (excerpts from post 64).
For GoBoy 4, I tried to choose 2-word combinations that would be memorable, i.e. Erotic Memories, Magic Unicorn, Dragon Fire, Money Monster.
This is GoBoy’s SUPER minimalistic phase. Some will be turned off by the simplicity of GoBoy 4 songs.
After dabbling in bubblegum pop for the 2nd half of GoBoy 3, my original plan was to focus on lyrically driven content for GoBoy 4. The release of ”Everything Will Be Okay (Song 69)” changed my mind, as the focus on dark lyrics impacted my mental state for months afterwards. Focusing on the dark elements of your own life for long enough can turn you into a neurotic mess (the original song “Everything Will Be Okay” had a 3rd verse the delved darker). My focus would shift to bubblegum pop from that point forward, which would impact this song. Music would be made for enjoyment and catchiness, not necessarily for conveying a message. I don’t regret this shift in focus… yet (excerpts from post 60).
In April, 2021, almost all of GoBoy 3, 4 and 5‘s songs were restructured to be under 3 minutes (preferably under 2m 30s), including this song. I became okay with releasing songs around the 2 min mark after realizing The Beatles and The Beach Boys had some songs around that length. In an attempt to increase replay value in this streaming era, most of GoBoy’s songs are now purposely around 2m 20s (excerpts from post 37).
A bass boost was added to songs 37-99 in Nov, 2021, while I was stuck at home with covid. As a result, this song feels more powerful. The bass boost isn’t a simple plugin nonchalantly added to each song. It’s a process that took about 3.5 hours per song, or one whole month to complete all songs. Admittedly, I pushed the bass boost a little too far for some of them. The bass in some songs sounds like a freaking earthquake (unnecessarily pronounced low frequencies 20 - 50 Hz). Might dial that back someday. The bass boost was also applied to every song on GoBoy 6 and beyond (excerpt from post 37).
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snackhobi · 4 years
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pairing: namjoon x reader / word count: 9.3k / genre: pwp/smut
summary: You’ve been letting your laundry pile up for a little too long. Fortunately, your neighbour Namjoon is there to lend you a hand.
warnings: sexually explicit content, masturbation, edging (kinda), unintentional voyeurism (briefly), oral (f receiving), multiple orgasms (f receiving), bigdick!joon, dirty talk, unprotected sex, rough sex, creampie, overstimulation (reader gets fucked dumb), praise, aftercare (please heed the warnings, and let me know if I need to clarify/add any!)
--
For most people, Sunday is a day of rest. But not for you.
Sunday means chores. Sunday means tidying up, dusting, vacuuming. Sunday means finally doing all the Adult Things you’ve been too busy/lazy to do for the rest of the week (or even longer than that, as evidenced by your overflowing laundry basket). Sunday means work. 
You slap at your vibrating phone, fingers sliding uselessly across the screen as you fumble to cut off the chirping alarm, and then you groan. “Ugh." You bury your head into your crumpled pillow. And then, once more, with feeling: “Uggggggh.”
You roll around in your bed, thrashing a little like a child having a tantrum, before you flop on your back and stare at your ceiling with your limbs akimbo, a starfish.
“Why?” You whine out to no one in particular. “Why me?”
Fortunately you live alone, so there’s no one to witness your sulky behaviour.  You would put off getting all your errands done, but you’ve already been doing this for so long that you’re practically out of clean clothes to wear. That’s one part about living alone that’s a double-edged sword- you have your own space where you can act however you please, which is Great, but also you’re the only one responsible for keeping on top of things, which is Less Great. You can’t rely on other people to get things done for you.
You’ve never been a morning person, and the fact it’s so nice outside already does nothing to brighten your mood; it’s the perfect kind of day, the chilled bite to the air mellowed by the sun in the cloudless, pale sky, and you’re going to have to spend it indoors. Ugh. You eventually grit your teeth and pull yourself out of bed, waking yourself up with a cold shower. Once you force a cup of overly sweet coffee into your system and the caffeine hits you so that you’re fully awake and ready to go, the world suddenly feels a lot more bearable. So you’re unperturbed when your underwear drawer comes up practically empty.
“Oops,” you say. “Oh well.”
It’s practically empty, but not entirely; there, at the back, there’s that pretty lingerie set you’d bought on a whim in a sale and then promptly never worn. Honestly you’d be happy to go without, seeing as no one else is here and you have no one to look pretty for, but you find that you never get anything done if you’re not in a bra. It’s like a Pavlovian response that you've ingrained into yourself: when you get home, your bra comes straight off, no ifs, buts, or maybes. Bra off means it’s Relaxation Time. Bra on? That means it's time to get things done.
But, yeah, if you’re going to wear the bra, you may as well wear the matching thong, right? It came as a set so you’d basically be committing a crime if you didn’t wear them together. You take one moment to admire yourself in the mirror, turning this way and that to appreciate how it makes you look, before promptly ruining the illusion of sexiness by covering it up with a pair of old sweatpants and a too-large tank top. They're the only bits of clothing not in your laundry basket that you don't mind getting dirty while you clean, so, you have to make do.
The worst part about doing chores is getting the whole process started, but you’ve been doing this long enough that you have a routine. Bra on, hair up, mental checklist ready. You toddle through to the kitchen with your laundry basket, picking through for the colours and whites, feeling entirely too accomplished once you get the first load sorted. This kickstarts the whole chore procedure and once you get stuck in, you actually start to have fun; you’ve got your noise cancelling headphones on and your cleaning playlist is full of songs that get you pumped up, and you sing along to the music as you get started on your next job.
You wiggle your butt to the rhythm of the beat while you hoover, pushing your vacuum into the corners of your flat and ruthlessly sucking up the dust bunnies that have gathered there. You're in the middle of belting out one particularly long note when a spider scuttles out from under your sofa and the note rises into a little scream; you act on pure instinct and suck the spider up into the hoover, watching as all the long hairy legs fold together and get schlorped into the vacuum’s nozzle before disappearing forever. You feel immediately relieved but also immensely guilty when this happens- spiders are awful and you hate them but usually you’d try your best to catch them under a cup before flinging it outside, so the fact you’ve maybe just killed it? You really are just awful. (But thank God it’s gone.)
Maybe that's enough hoovering for now.
You empty the dust bag into the bin, mindful of the fact that the spider might still be alive and come crawling out onto your hands. Thankfully it doesn’t, but you’re not going to take any chances; you draw the bin liner shut and tie it tight, before deciding that the best course of action is to put it into your outside bin, in case the spider decides to come back with a vengeance. 
You hoist the bag up and pause for a second to glance down at how the straps of your too-loose top have slipped down your shoulders to reveal the top of bra, the intricate lace trim of the cups and extra straps that criss cross your chest- definitely an, uh, interesting outfit choice for a quick trip out of your flat. You make the executive decision to shrug on a hoodie and zip it all the way to your neck to preserve your modesty and save you from the chill outside. Once that’s done it takes two seconds to slip your feet into your (fake) Converse shoes, another few seconds to fiddle with the lock on your door, struggling with the latch- it’s been a bit janky for a while and you keep forgetting to sort it out- before you hop your way downstairs and  to the outside shed where everyone's bins are stored.
Ewch. It doesn’t smell that great in here. You make quick work of dumping your rubbish and escaping from the hut, shutting the door firmly behind you to try and keep the stench locked inside, before almost falling over when you feel the telltale sensation of a cat curling around your ankles. He’s meowing up at you but your headphones have been drowning him out, so you slide them off your ears and hook them around your neck so you can actually hear him.
"Oh, hi, baby!" The ginger stray likes to hang nearby the building, always friendly and happy to see you, even if he seems to like sneaking up when you least expect it. He meows at you again as you squat down to stroke him, butting his head into your palm as his tail curls in delight. "Aren't you just the most gorgeous boy? Yes, you are, aren't you?"
The cat ends up putting his paws onto your knee to butt his face against yours, and the next thing you know, you have an armful of cat. You laugh and continue to pet him, cooing at how cute he is as he purrs back. "Awh, baby, you're so sweet," you say. "I wish I could take you home, but my meanie landlord says we can't have pets."
“I was thinking of starting a petition, actually, so the landlord gets rid of the No Pets clause in the tenancy agreement. You’re welcome to sign it if you like.”
You glance up from where you’ve been allowing the cat to shove his nose against your chin, standing up straight to address the man who’s talking to you, cat still clutched in your arms. “Oh! Hi, Namjoon-ssi. That’s such a good idea, I love that. Stick it to the man. I’d definitely sign it. How are you today?”
Kim Namjoon, aka your neighbour from across the hall, is smiling at the cat in your arms. Namjoon’s the perfect neighbour and ideal tenant- quiet, tidy, considerate, although he does have a tendency to lose his keys and gets locked out of his flat on a pretty regular basis. 
It’s actually how you’d started to talk in the first place. When you first moved in you’d given him a small box of chocolates to endear yourself to your same-floor-friend, only exchanging small nods and pleasant greetings for a while after that, but after you’d found Namjoon waiting sheepishly on his own doorstep- “My friend has a key but it’s going to take him a little while to get here,” he’d explained- you’d invited him into your own flat to wait, rather than just in the hall. 
Since then you’ve started to have chats whenever you see each other, and occasionally knock on each other’s doors whenever you ask to borrow things like sugar or a screwdriver or whatever, and you always invite Namjoon in for a cup of tea when he’s waiting for one of his friends to rescue him from his own forgetful nature. You’re still toeing the line between Friendly Neighbours and Kind Of Friends, but one thing you already know and admire about Namjoon is his ability to actually be a mature and put together adult. Sure, you drink a decent amount of water, you have a skincare routine with multiple steps, and you usually manage to eat your 5-a-day, but a lot of that feels like you do it because you’re expected to, sort of like a child playing make-believe. 
Namjoon, meanwhile, manages to just ooze the sort of gravitas that comes with being a fully realised human being, someone who actively participates in the world around them because they’re entirely engaged with things and basically just Super Mature Adult (even if he apparently loses/breaks things on a fairly regular basis). Hence why you’re not at all surprised at the petition thing, or when Namjoon proceeds to tell you that he’s going to spend the afternoon at his friend’s uncle’s strawberry farm, picking fruit, because of course Namjoon is the kind of guy who supports local, organic, free range produce. (Wait. Can strawberries be free range? Or is that just eggs?)
“Ahh, I love strawberries! That’s so cool,” you say. “It must be fun.”
“You’re welcome to come, if you like,” Namjoon says. He’s always gracious so you know he’s just saying this to be polite, but you can’t help but think it would probably be really nice to spend time picking fruit and talking with him.
“Ah, I’d love to, but unfortunately I have prior commitments. I’m catching up on chores,” you admit ruefully. You’re still absently scritching the ginger cat’s chin as you speak, the animal purring up a storm in your arms and shedding all over your clothes, although you don’t notice or care. Namjoon is incredibly endeared- not that you notice that, either. “Hence the runway-ready outfit.”
Your hair is so messy it looks like some sort of wild possum has been nesting in it, your hoodie sleeves are so long they threaten to swallow your hands, and you’re not even wearing your cheap knock-off shoes properly- you’re stepping on the back collar of them in your bare feet so they’re basically glorified flip-flops at this point. Total fashionista. (Not.)
Namjoon, however, seems surprised at your dismissive tone. “You look cute and cozy,” he says.
You snort in an unladylike way, lifting the cat in your arms a little- you can’t gesture properly with an armful of fur, especially when the stray takes this as an invitation to crane upwards and shove his little face into the crook of your neck, knocking against your headphones. “Cute baby,” you coo at the cat, before turning your attention back to Namjoon. “You look cute and cozy,” you echo. It’s a little chilly today and Namjoon’s wrapped up, long scarf curled around his neck, beanie on his head, hem of his coat fluttering around his thighs. Super cozy, and again, a well-put-together adult. 
You muffle a sigh. He’s a well-put-together and hot adult, tall and built, so handsome in his casual outfit, effortlessly masculine. You’ve been lowkey crushing on Namjoon for a while now, as futile as that effort is- you haven’t seen any evidence of a special someone in Namjoon’s life, but there’s no way that man is single. Even if he somehow is, he’s like, a bajillion light years out of your league, hyper intelligent and kind and gorgeous, in comparison to your… um… your… well. Yeah. In comparison to that. 
He’s nice to you and he smiles whenever he sees you, though, and your weak little heart can’t help but flip flop in your chest whenever you see that dimpled little smile, even if you know you don’t have a chance in hell that he really thinks that you’re cute. He’s just being polite. 
The cat in your arms gives a little wriggle, apparently sated for the day, and you carefully squat down to deposit him onto the ground. He gives you both one last little mewl before scampering off and you fondly watch him go. “Let me know when you have that petition written up,” you say, brushing the cat hairs off your sleeves. “I better get back to my flat, I need to finish the rest of my laundry so I can continue the facade of being a functional adult. Have a great day, Namjoon-ssi, and I hope you enjoy the strawberries! You’ll have to tell me how they are.”
“I will,” he says, eyes warm as he smiles, those little dimples appearing in his cheeks. Ugh, you want to touch them so much. “Good luck with your laundry.”
Namjoon’s beautiful smile fuels you for the rest of the day, buoying you up as you scrub the walls of your shower and bleach your toilet, bright yellow gloves a size too large for your hands as you spritz your bathroom counter. You might not be a legitimate adult in the same way that your neighbour is but you can give it a damn good go; even if the rest of your life is maybe a bit more chaotic than you’d like, you can at least get your surroundings in order.
And you do. By the time you’re finished with hoovering and mopping your floors and reorganising your clutter, your flat feels brand-spanking new again, fresh and clean and airy. You’d even lit a few scented candles earlier and you give yourself a pat on the back for your forward thinking as you snuff them out, the delicate smell of vanilla lightly filling the apartment. All that’s left is to go to the kitchen and put the final load of laundry in the tumble dryer and once that’s been emptied and sorted, you’re all finished. Mission accomplished. Chores done.
Once the tumble dryer has started its cycle you reward yourself with a cup of tea, a blackcurrant and blueberry fruit infusion that you’d gotten as a Secret Santa gift at work and hadn’t used yet, saving it for a special occasion. You hum to yourself and continue to wiggle your hips to the music trickling out of your headphones as the kettle boils, watching the purple that bleeds from the tea bag once the hot water cascades over it. It looks rich and vibrant and it smells so good- but then you make a little face when you take a sip. Fruit teas never taste as good as they smell. It’s not bad but it’s a little disappointing, really, a subpar reward after a hard day of work. 
You stand in the middle of your kitchen with your mug still in your hand, eyes unfocused as you stare into space, trying to think of things in your flat that you could use to reward yourself. You’ve already used up those fancy gel eye masks that Jimin had given you for your birthday, and you’d let Jungkook have your sheet masks when he’d said his favourite brand was out of stock; Taehyung had pilfered all of your bath bombs as part of an experiment (the experiment being that he wanted to know what colour his bath water would turn if he used all your different bath bombs in it- the answer was ‘an incredibly underwhelming, if glittery, sludge brown’), and he still hasn’t gotten around to replacing them.
Pay day isn’t until next week and you’re tight enough on money at the moment that you don’t want to order out for dinner- living alone means you have to pay more rent so you have to be more careful with money- so you’re out of ideas. 
That is until motion out of the corner of your eye catches your attention. You glance over at it, pulled out of your reverie; the old tumble dryer has been in this flat longer than you and it’s showing signs of wear and tear, base warped a little from age, noisy and wobbly as your clothes are being spun inside. You pause, mug dropping a little in your hand as the thought briefly flickers through your mind, before you bite your lip and throw caution to the wind. Fuck it. You live alone and you’ve had a long day and you deserve some kind of reward. 
You abandon your unfinished mug of tea in the sink before eyeing the shaking tumble dryer. You hoist yourself up, straddling the corner of the machine, a little shiver running through you when you feel the vibrations through your legs and thighs as you settle into place; it takes time to situate yourself, thighs spreading as you tilt your hips forward and press your heat against the rumbling dryer. You shift on your hands, palms braced against the top of the machine as you wriggle into the best position- the second you get just the right angle you let out a little gasp, eyes squeezing shut when you feel how the shaking machine is sending vibrations throughout your entire body.
You keep your eyes shut as you continue to find the right rhythm. You rock your hips forward each time the machine rocks back, rolling the weight of your body down towards your clenching cunt; the vibrations are so strong that you can feel them through your sweatpants, lace of your thong rubbing against your clit in a deliciously rough way, sending little shockwaves of pleasure through you.
As you continue to work yourself up, your skin starts to feel overheated under your clothes, even with the chill spring air seeping into the flat- you fumble with the zip of hoodie, letting the material sag open before you brace yourself with your palms again. You feel how the hoodie slips down your arms, baring your shoulders, and you tilt your head back, revealing the line of your neck as you arch your spine. Each rumble of the machine rolls through you, wetness starting to slicken your folds as you grind down a little harder. It’s a steady, slow climb towards your peak- you shut your eyes to focus fully on the pleasure building between your legs, the way your clit feels swollen and almost over-sensitive from the strong vibrations from the dryer, the way your pussy clenches whenever you get the angle just right.
You start to gasp, biting back moans when you feel how your orgasm is getting closer. You lift one hand from the top of the dryer to run your hands over your skin- your neck, your throat, tracing over the straps of the bra that are digging into the swell of your breasts. It’s good, really good, but it’s not enough; every time you feel like the peak of your orgasm is about to crest, it ebbs away again, and you let out a little whine from the back of your throat. 
With your eyes still shut, you try to conjure up images that’ll arouse you and send you tumbling over the edge. Hands on your body, lips against your skin, your mouth. Normally when you masturbate you try to keep away from thinking about anyone in particular, because you feel like if you see that person in the future they’ll just telepathically know about it and you end up feeling awkward and guilty (even if you know it's illogical)- but today you can’t help it. Your mind slips to the thought of Namjoon this morning and the way he’d smiled at you, and once you start thinking about Namjoon, you can’t stop. 
Namjoon’s smile. His mouth. His tongue. His hands, his fingers. His tall, beautiful body, pressing you down against a mattress, trapping you against him. You take the hand that’s been trailing over your collarbones and lift it to your mouth and press two fingers past your lips, trying to imagine that it’s Namjoon. Imagine that it’s the weight of his cock on your tongue, hard and heavy. You bet it’s as gorgeous as the rest of him. You bet he tastes so good, hot and salt and maybe a little bitter, heady and masculine; you let out a low moan around your lips as you run the pads of your fingertips over your tongue, saliva pooling in your mouth.
All the while, your music has been playing on, heavy beat thrumming through you as you forget the outside world and focus on the reality you’re conjuring in your mind. Namjoon’s cock in your mouth. Namjoon’s mouth on your cunt. Namjoon’s skin against yours. Namjoon fucking into you, hard and deep. Your blood rises in your veins, toes curling as you can feel how your orgasm is getting ever closer now that you’re this turned on, your cunt leaking with arousal; the thought of Namjoon wanting you as much as you want him is dizzying, as unlikely as it is. The Namjoon in your mind fucks into you with a particularly rough thrust and in the real world you respond with a moan, garbled around the fingers between your lips. Fuck, you’re so close. 
Just as you're nearly there, your playlist ends and everything lapses into silence, your reverie shattered. The moment is gone. Your orgasm slips away from you again and you whimper, unintentionally edging yourself yet again. 
Your eyes flutter open briefly when your haze is broken, although you squeeze them back shut so that you can get back to picturing Namjoon and finally bring yourself to completion- but then your eyes fly open again, fingers stuttering in your mouth and hips going still as your entire body stiffens, blood turning to ice in your veins.
The very real Kim Namjoon is standing in the doorway of your kitchen. There’s a look of utter shock on his face, his lips parted, eyes so wide it looks like his eyeballs are going to pop out of his skull, frozen in place. You don’t know how long he’s been there. You don’t know if he’s just walked in on you. Really, though, it doesn’t matter if he’s been there for five seconds or five hours- he’s seen everything, the way there’s saliva dripping from your mouth around your fingers, tank top barely hiding your lingerie, the way you’ve been bucking your hips against the dryer. Utterly desperate and debauched and depraved. 
There’s a small, white plastic bag in Namjoon’s hands with a pretty strawberry logo on it, drooping further and further towards the floor as his arms go slack. You don’t notice it until it’s slipping loose from his fingers and landing on the floor. 
Berries go rolling out of the sagged plastic and across the tiles but Namjoon doesn’t seem to notice. That single point of motion in the room seems to kickstart your brain into gear, your flight or fight response screaming flight, and you practically throw yourself off the tumble dryer. Your brain is entirely empty of logical thought right now and the only thing you can think of is that you need to get away and hide forever. 
You rush past a still frozen Namjoon, stumbling down your hallway towards your open front door- you notice that the latch is stuck, not clicking into place when you’d come back inside earlier and leaving the door unlocked, you idiot. Namjoon always knocks and it must have swung open as soon as he rapped his knuckles against it, and you wouldn’t have heard it over your goddamn music. You absolute, utter idiot.
You’re not thinking about how illogical it is to flee from your own home to get away from someone. You’re just thinking about your escape. Taehyung’s flat is the nearest and it won’t take long to run there and you can survive without shoes; you’re still barefoot but you don’t have time to grab anything. You have to run. 
You’re just stretching out for the door when you feel large hands grab you from behind. You flail, door swinging shut as your fingers brush against it before you’re being pulled backwards by the arms that have slid around your waist. You start to struggle, squirming in the hold, pushing at the hands trapping you as you instinctively still try to get away from the shame and embarrassment; Namjoon’s body is warm and solid against your back, his muscles effectively trapping you in place, and you can feel how his voice rumbles through him as he speaks, audible through the silence of your headphones.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
You’ve never heard Kim Namjoon sound like this. His voice is authoritative, commanding. The part of your brain that acts on pure instinct- the part that just told you to go hurtling out onto the street without shoes- responds instantly, and you immediately go lax in his hold even though you’re still internally panicking.
“I was planning on going to the moon,” you say, unable to cover up how your voice is shaking, even if you’re trying to hide behind sarcasm. It’s your only defence right now. Your skin prickles with embarrassment. “Where else do you think?”
Namjoon lets out a chuckle, and your toes curl at how deep the sound is. “The mouth on you.” He sounds amused. You can’t look him in the eye. “Were you trying to get away from me?”
“‘Trying’ is the operative word.” You’re still staring resolutely at the door- it’s swung shut and the latch has actually clicked upwards this time. Traitor.  “As you can tell, I’m not doing a very good job. The sooner I go, the sooner I get the paperwork started for my move to Fiji.”
“I thought you were planning on going to the moon.” Namjoon’s hold on you is still firm. You’re utterly helpless. “Changed your mind?”
“Going to open a diner in Fiji to raise funds for my moon mission. It’s a long plan.” The spike of adrenaline that had burst through you is already dissolving in your system, leaving you feeling limp and strung out. You can’t see Namjoon’s face with how your back is crushed against his chest; when you glance down all you can see is how big his hands are against your stomach. Despite yourself, you shiver. As panicked and embarrassed as you are, arousal is still trickling through you, and you hate yourself for the effect that Namjoon is having on you right now. You try to sound calm and unaffected as you continue to speak, but you feel breathless from the lingering pleasure tingling between your legs. “Can you let me go now, please?”
“Is that really what you want?” You’ve had your hands on his wrists from how you’d been trying to push them away, so you feel how one of Namjoon’s hands starts to slide downwards, slow as treacle, and your breath hitches as his fingers slide under the waistband of your sweatpants. They don’t go any further than that, palm splayed over your hipbone, but you feel your pussy clench at the warmth of his hands on your skin and a whimper slips out of you. “Or do you actually want something else?”
Your fingers dig into his wrists. When you open your mouth to reply, your words fail you and instead you just let out a little breath.  You’re in utter disbelief at what’s happening right now, unsure of what’s going on- you’re not an idiot but there is no way that Namjoon is implying what you think he’s implying. Absolutely no way. Not a chance in hell. What?
As you continue to stay silent, brain trying to catch up with the situation, Namjoon doesn’t move.
“Use your words, baby,” he murmurs. “I need to know that you want this.”
Oh, fuck. When Namjoon calls you baby it feels like a switch has been flipped inside you; like he’s slipped a missing fuse into place and your entire body has lit up, full of energy and electricity from his touch. It’s overwhelming. “Of course I want this,” you confirm, trembling, and then: “I want you.”
Namjoon responds by finally moving his hand downwards. You watch as it goes, how he pauses when he makes contact with the fabric of your underwear, the unmistakable texture of embroidered lace under his touch. He drags his fingertips across the straps that cross over themselves, an arrow guiding him to his mark; your entire body goes tense when his fingers glance over your swollen folds, slick through the fabric.
You gasp. You’re still trapped against him by the strong arm curled around you, but your hands are free- you pull your headphones off and let them fall to the floor, twisting your head around so you can finally look at Namjoon’s face. His eyes are hooded and dark. He looks nothing like the cute and clumsy man who waves you good morning every day; he looks like some hungry animal, a predator who’s been waiting for the right time to swallow his prey whole.
“Namjoon,” you breathe. He gives you a small smile that’s more of a smirk, utterly at odds to his usual dimpled beams.
“You don’t have to settle for an old tumble dryer, gorgeous.” He kisses the bare skin of your shoulder, right next to where your bra strap is resting, eyes locked on yours. His lips are so soft and you shiver. “Let me help you.”
“I’ll have you know that tumble dryer was very close to getting me off, actually.” You’re so turned on right now but you can’t help the words slipping out; a lifetime of snark doesn’t leave you the second you start feeling horny. “So it’s less you helping me, and more you giving me something you owe me, seeing as you took it away in the first place.”
Namjoon’s silent for a second, and you wonder if you’ve gone too far- if you’ve run your mouth too much- when he hums. “Ah,” he says. “That’s true. You’re right.”
“Huh?” You say eloquently, surprised, but then he takes the hand out of your sweatpants and you whine. “Hey, put that back, you’re not done yet.”
Namjoon lets out a little chuckle. “No, I’m not,” he agrees. “But I want to see this pretty lingerie properly. You’re all covered up and that just won’t do.”  
He punctuates this statement by taking both of his hands to your hoodie, where it’s been caught at your elbows, and sliding it off you. He drags his large palms down your arms as he does this, cool against your overheated skin; goosebumps appear in the wake of his touch and you shiver again. You have no idea what's going on right now. Everything feels like some sort of fever dream but you're not about to start complaining.
“If you’re about to see me in my unmentionables I’d least like a kiss first,” you say, pout audible in your voice. The truth is you’ve thought about Namjoon’s plush lips more often than you’d like to admit, how beautiful his mouth is, and it’s got to be illegal for Namjoon to have been touching you for as long as he has without letting you have at least one taste of his kisses. “Please?”
“Turn around, baby.” You instantly comply, all but throwing your arms around his neck as you look at him with an innocent, bambi gaze; he still has that half-lidded set to his eyes but you can see how that ravenous hunger is softened by his smile. “God, you’re gorgeous.”
“Shut up and kiss me,” you say. You might sound like the protagonist to some cheesy romance film right now but the truth is that you’re still aware of the heat between your legs, the ebbed arousal that’s still coiling low in your stomach, and as much as you want to kiss Namjoon, you want to cum, too. “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss m-”
Namjoon kisses you. He cuts you off mid sentence by slotting his mouth against yours, open around the word he swallows, and he immediately presses his tongue past your lips; you yield to him, letting him press his lips to your cupid’s bow as you lick his lower lip, soft and full. Just as good as you thought. No- better. His hands stay steady around your waist, but yours keep moving as you keep kissing- his shoulders, his nape, his hair, his jaw. Every part of him is so warm and solid against you and you just can’t get enough.
You slant your head to get deeper, tongues slipping into each other’s mouths in a way that borders on lewd, rubbing against each other as you trade saliva, your mouth full of the taste of Namjoon. You swear there’s a lingering taste of strawberries. You feel better, a little more in control now that you know Namjoon will indulge you even if you’re being a brat, and you can finally chase the thing that got this whole sequence of events started.
“I wanna cum, Namjoon,” you murmur against his lips once you finally part, breathless from his kisses. “Will you help me cum? Please? Pretty please?”
Namjoon’s lip curls back from his teeth in a silent growl, and a shudder runs through you at the sight; seeing your usually composed neighbour act like this because of you is a heady sensation. “You won’t be able to walk when I’m done with you,” he says, and your pussy throbs with need at his words.
“Jesus Christ, Namjoon.” Your eyes are wild. “I want you to fucking wreck me.”
You get no warning before Namjoon is literally sweeping you off your feet and you squeal in surprise when you feel them leave the ground, but Namjoon’s grip on you is steady as he lifts you in a bridal hold. You feel breathless at this physical representation of his strength- you’ve only seen his bare arms once (that had been a nice morning) before but you definitely hadn’t forgotten about how thick they are, as evidenced by the way he’s carrying you. 
Normally you’d probably be chewing him out for lifting you without warning, but right now there’s a very base, animalistic part of you that goes belly up at the very obvious reminder of Namjoon’s superior power. The instinctual part of you that had initially told you to run away from him now seems entirely content with the fact you’ve been caught, and so you stay quiet in his arms. You cling tight to him as he walks to your bedroom without the need for directions, your flat the mirrored twin to his; you keep kissing his neck as he nudges the door open with his foot, running a hand down his chest, feeling the flex of his muscles through the fabric of his shirt. 
He’s so fucking hot, what the fuck.
He’s hot, and strong, but gentle, too. When Namjoon sets you down he’s so careful even though he could easily manhandle you in any way he wanted, and you give him a kiss as a thank you. It’s a brief moment of quiet, that little kiss, but then Namjoon is pulling you back towards him and his hands are all over as he helps you strip; Namjoon’s eyes are heavy on your body as he drinks you in, finally wearing nothing but the lingerie he’s been so desperate to look at.
He sees the way the interweaving straps rest against your skin with the perfect amount of pressure, little swells letting him know that he’ll be able to trace the touch of lace on your body even after he’s ripped it off you. The lace cups of your bra do nothing to hide how your nipples are standing to attention, begging to be touched. But the most eye-catching thing, the thing that Namjoon can’t stop looking at, is how sodden the lace between your legs is; your inner thighs are slick with your arousal, shining, and you haven’t even cum yet. 
“Look at you. So gorgeous,” Namjoon says. “Gonna make you cum over and over, baby.”
His hands feel so good against your skin as he skims his fingers over your panties, but he doesn’t take them off, and you let out a needy little noise. “Please,” you whine. “I need to cum, Joonie, been waiting so long.”
Namjoon watches as you reach to fumble with the clasp of your bra and reaches for your hands, stopping your motions. You blink up at him, confused, but then he’s turning you towards the bed and bending you over it, motions firm and undeniable; not that you would try to defy him, anyway. You brace your palms against the mattress and instantly arch your spine so that your ass is pushed out, enticing as possible.
You’re wondering if you’re going to have to beg for Namjoon to touch you but it seems what little patience he had has run out; his warm palms are immediately against your ass, touch reverent as he slides his hands over your skin, and you press back into that touch, wanting more of it. His hands skim up your sides and his fingers dance along the edge of your bra before reaching for the hooks, unfastening it so that it slips down your arms and onto the bed before you shove it aside. 
He bends over you, chest broad and warm against your naked shoulderblades, arms coming around your body so that he can cup your breasts in his large hands; his palms cover so much of your skin, your sensitive nipples, and you gasp at the shock of sensation that shoots through you as he drags his hands over them before using his fingers to pinch the hardened nubs. You twist your head and make a little noise, and Namjoon obliges you with a kiss, grinning against your mouth with each desperate sound he muffles with his plush lips.
Eventually, though, he pulls away from you. You glance over your shoulder to see that he’s gotten to his knees, still staring at your soaking core, before he hooks one of his thumbs into the fabric covering your aching pussy and pulls it aside before pressing his mouth against you.
“Oh, fuck!” Your body goes weak and you slump forwards onto your elbows and shove your face into the bed, and Namjoon follows when this moves you away from him, tongue buried in your cunt as he eats you out with no mercy. He’s utterly shameless, noises slick and lewd as he drags his wet tongue over your entrance and clit, swallowing down all the arousal that’s leaking out of you, ravenous. You reach behind you with one of your hands to grip his hair, and when you grind back against his face he lets out a satisfied hum; you gasp at the vibrations against your lower lips, oversensitive from all your edging.
“Gonna cum,” you say, twisting your head so that your cheek is pressed to your rumpled blanket. “I’m so close, oh, God, Namjoon-”
He’s been rubbing his tongue up and down your clit in a particularly sinful way, and after one more particularly hard stroke, you finally, finally reach that precipice you’ve been reaching for all day. You shove your face back into the blanket as you cum, all your gasps and moans coming together in one long cry as your toes curl and you tighten your fingers so hard into your sheets you almost pull them off the mattress. Your entire body trembles as your cunt pulsates with pleasure, each ripple of your pussy feeling like it’s passing through your whole body, and Namjoon doesn’t let up for a second, lapping down each wave of cum that flushes out of you. You feel utterly weak as you flop forwards against the mattress, boneless and shaky, but Namjoon’s mouth is still on you and you let out a whimper, oversensitive.
“It’s too much,” you gasp. “Namjoon-”
He takes his mouth off you immediately. “Sorry, baby,” he apologises, pressing a kiss against the swell of your ass. You want to sag your lower body against the bed but his hands are keeping you up, fingers digging into the soft skin of your ass and hips. “You just taste so good. Can you lie down for me?”
“Yes,” you say into the blanket, your voice a muffled slur. You’re so eager to please him even though you feel so weak from your post orgasm haze, and your muscles feel like jelly as you try to lift yourself onto the bed. Namjoon obviously notices how fucked out you are because he helps flip you over so that you’re on your back, staring up at him.
You continue to stare at him as he sheds his clothes. You let your gaze shamelessly rove over his body as it’s revealed- the honeyed tone of his skin, the muscles that shift underneath it, his shoulders, his arms, his chest, the long legs, the thick thighs, the trail of hair that dips down to his-
“Holy fuck.” Your voice is reedy with desperation, and Namjoon laughs.
His cock has to be the biggest you’ve seen in real life, long and thick, fully erect even though you haven’t touched it yet- the fact that you’re apparently arousing enough to bring him to full hardness is flattering, honestly. Even as you stare at it, it twitches, a dribble of precum oozing from the flushed head, almost an angry red from neglect. You watch, enraptured, as he circles his fingers around it; it doesn’t look any smaller in his large hands. He pulls on his cock, long and slow, before he spits onto it and fucks into his fist as you watch him, spreading the wetness over himself.
“Gonna fill that hungry little pussy with this cock,” he says. “Gonna give you a reward for being such a good girl. Is that what you want?” Namjoon watches you as he thumbs at his slit, precum weeping from his tip. “Does my good girl want this cock?”
“I want it,” you beg. You do, you want it so bad. His mouth and lips and tongue felt so good but it must be nothing in comparison to how good it’ll feel to be filled up  by Namjoon’s heavy, long cock. “Fuck, Namjoon, please, I want it.”
You lift your hips so that Namjoon can slide your panties off you. He stares at the strings of wetness that cling to them as he peels them away from your core, finally bare to the cool air of the room, and you suck in a breath. He wastes no time, climbing onto the bed and settling above you, cock swaying between his legs before he grasps it and tilts it towards your entrance. 
You lift your hips again, tilting them towards him for an easier angle- and immediately cry out when he broaches you, head pressing past your entrance. You’re so turned on and flushed wet that the initial slide in is easy, but as he gets deeper and deeper you can feel the stretch, your pussy forced open for him, feeling like you’re being split open with how big he is- you’ll feel the burn tomorrow, but right now your body is ripe and ready for him to take you, cunt clenching as he bottoms out in you. You experimentally tense your muscles and the two of you gasp in a breath, shocked pleasure at the sensation.
“Fuck, baby,” Namjoon groans. “You feel so good.”
He holds still for a moment to let you adjust, leaning down to kiss you. It’s deep and slow, tongue swiping into your mouth as you part your lips for him and let him take what he wants. When he leans back, all that softness is gone- your legs fall apart as he starts to fuck you, hips snapping forward as he ruthlessly presses his cock into you. He’s so big and he’s striking so deep it feels like you can feel him in your stomach, and you arch your back into him and cry out each time he strikes home.
The pace he sets is rough and aggressive, the slap of skin against skin and wet noises from his cock driving into your pussy filling the silence of the room, every part of you hypersensitive to every sensation- Namjoon’s weight pressing you into the mattress, the shaking bed, the rising smell of sweat and sex, the firmness of his hands on you. He leans back and you catch a glimpse of his hungry eyes before he puts his hands under your knees and hitches your legs up so that you’re practically bent in half when he fucks into you again- you cry out at the change of angle, how this lets him splay his large hand over the line of your hipbone as he starts to rub his thumb across your clit, continuing to fuck into the whole time.
“Gonna c-cum again,” you hiccup between thrusts, the air punched out of you each time that hot cock spears into you. “Joonie, gonna- gonna cum aga- oh!”
Your spine arches as your orgasm rips through you, coil of pleasure exploding like a firework as you cum for the second time that day, walls tensing around Namjoon’s cock; he continues to thrust into you, even when your cunt clenches so tight it feels like there’s no space inside you for his length. He keeps forcing your body open for him even as you keep falling apart around him, and you keep taking it, loving it. The only thing you can register is the delirious, mind-numbing satisfaction, sobbing out as Namjoon’s cock continues to fill you- you feel like he’s fucked you dumb, like your body was only made to be fucked by him, sloppy and open and wet. Each time he fills you up again it forces a noise from your throat, sounds of almost animalistic pleasure spilling from your lips, all semblance of coherent words gone.
When Namjoon pulls out of you, even though your body feels weak and limp and entirely fucked out, you whine at the loss. The next second, though, he flips you over, nudging your ankles apart before sliding back into you. The change of angle has him dragging against your sweet spot, balls slapping against your clit, overwhelming off the heels of just cumming, but you just take it, drooling into the pillow as your brain gives over to the all-consuming pleasure.
“So pretty when you cum around my cock.” Namjoon’s bent over you, murmuring praises that you barely register as he litters kisses over your shoulders and the side of your throat. “Greedy little pussy takes my cock so well. Such a good girl for me, aren’t you, sweetheart?”
“Wanna be a good girl for you.” Your words are a slur, your brain foggy but eager to please, answering the question. “Joonie.”
“Gonna fill you up so good,” he says, lips pressed against your ear as he whispers filth to you, still mercilessly fucking into you. “Gonna fill this pretty little pussy with my cum. Do you want my cum, baby?”
“Wan’ it,” you moan. There’s heat curling in your abdomen again, pussy tightening as another orgasm creeps up on you, the promise of Namjoon’s hot cum filling you pulling you closer to the edge. “Want your cum, Joonie.”
His fingers tighten around your waist as he starts to jackhammer into you. His cock feels like it’s splitting you open even as his rhythm starts to falter, and after one particularly hard thrust your eyes roll back in your head as you tumble over the edge again, cumming so hard it’s a wonder you don’t pass out. You let out a strangled moan and Namjoon curses as you tighten around him, your entire body trembling under his hands as you give yourself over to the waves of pleasure crashing through you. 
His rhythm falters before he lets out a shout and his cock jerks inside you as your tightening cunt pulls him into climax. Hot cum fills your pussy as he empties himself inside you, aftershocks of your orgasm drawing his seed deeper, painting your insides. You lie there and take it, face turned into the pillow as you focus on the sensation of his twitching cock, the way your body is milking him even in your exhaustion, like it’s desperate to satisfy him even when you can barely speak.
You shiver when you feel him slowly pull out. He’s stroking his hands over your skin, kissing your shoulder blades and nape as he turns you over, gentle as he touches you. “You did so well,” Namjoon praises, smiling at you. “So good for me.”
You still feel fuzzy but you latch onto Namjoon’s words as he kisses you on your forehead, your cheeks, your nose. Words seem so hard to string together right now but you try your best, voice small and weak. “Did good?”
“Absolutely perfect, baby,” Namjoon says, and you let out a happy sigh. You stay quiet while Namjoon slips out of your bed before returning with a damp cloth. You let your muscles go entirely lax as Namjoon rolls you onto your back and gently spreads your legs; he watches as his own cum drips out of you before he gently swipes the mix of cum that’s smeared across your pussy, mindful of your sensitive clit. You bask in his touch, feeling like a cat bathing in sunlight as he cleans you up, stroking his hands across your skin.
He gathers you in his arms and continues to murmur praises between kisses and touches. You slowly come back to yourself as he keeps lavishing attention on you, skin warm against his, turning into his touch as your brain starts to flicker back on. 
Namjoon brushes his lips against your forehead as your higher thought processes continue to fall back into place, although you’re still a little hazy. “You okay, sweetheart?” 
“Yeah.” You feel thoroughly fucked out after three back-to-back orgasms and your pussy feels raw and you’re not sure when you’ll next be able to walk in a straight line, but none of those things detract from how fabulous you feel right now. “More than okay. Wow. When I said I wanted you to wreck me, I didn’t realise you’d do such a good job.”
Namjoon smiles at you, and you finally get to indulge yourself, lifting a hand to stroke a finger across his dimples that deepen as you touch them. “I’m always happy to oblige,” he says, and you grin as you brush your nose across his neck, nuzzling into him.
“You really are the best neighbour,” you say. “Did you seriously come over to give me a bunch of hand picked strawberries? That’s what that bag was, right?”
“Of course.” Namjoon’s fingers continue to rub circles into your shoulder. “I thought you deserved a nice treat after a day of chores.”
“Oh, I feel very thoroughly rewarded,” you giggle, before pulling your head back to look Namjoon in the eye. “God. I was so mortified at the beginning, though. I seriously thought I was going to have to pack my bags and move away.”
“The strawberries wouldn’t be enough to persuade you to stay?” Namjoon strokes his knuckles down your cheek before resting his thumb under the swell of your bottom lip, pushing up a little so it looks like you’re pouting at him. “After I spent all afternoon picking them and thinking about you, and how lovely you’d look while you ate them with this pretty little mouth of yours?”
You relax into his touch, letting him rub the pad of his thumb over your lip, all but kissing his finger each time your mouth shapes itself around another word. “You think about me?”
“I thought it was obvious,” Namjoon says, stroking over your lip one last time before cupping your chin in his palm.  “I don’t genuinely lose my keys as often as you think I do. Though I do still lose them a lot,” he adds, a little sheepish, and you laugh.
“So you’re saying that if I give you a spare key to my flat, I should have back-ups on hand just in case?” You tease, leaning into the hand that’s cradling your chin. “Good to know.”
“A spare key?” Namjoon looks a little taken aback, and you blink at him.
“Yeah,” you say, like it’s obvious. “Y’know, unless you want me to go back to using the tumble dryer.”
The hand that’s been on your shoulder tightens a little as Namjoon digs his fingers into your skin, possessive. That part of you that’s gone belly up for him preens at the attention, still eager to please him and make him happy, loving the sensation of being so desired by someone who you thought was out of your reach. “No.” Namjoon’s voice is a rumble in his chest. “I’ll make you cum whenever you want, sweetheart.”
“Mm.” You hum quietly before kissing his cheek, and then Namjoon uses the hand under your chin to turn you towards him and presses his mouth softly to yours. “You might regret saying that. I’m very demanding. Starting with this- do you want to go get those strawberries so I can have a taste?” You flutter your lashes at him, and Namjoon chuckles as he indulges you. 
You watch the flex of muscles in his thighs and ass as he walks from the room, still in a bit of disbelief that you’ve touched him and kissed him and been so thoroughly fucked by him. Kim Namjoon is a ten course meal (not including drinks or dessert) but here he is, naked on your bed as he feeds you the sweet, ripe strawberries that he picked with his own hands, kissing the taste off your lips between each bite.
You feel utterly pampered and taken care of, reclining against the pillows as Namjoon feeds you another strawberry. You reach out for the largest you can see and return the favour, letting him lick the sweetness off your stained fingers and giggling at the sensation. 
“The dryer’s finished its cycle, by the way,” Namjoon says after he’s finished kissing your fingertips.
“That’s nice,” you say as you carefully pick out another strawberry and rest it against the dark red flush of Namjoon’s lips. “But I’m busy feeding the world’s most beautiful man right now, so it can wait.”
Namjoon smiles at you, eyes lovely and warm as he parts his lips to accept the fruit, before leaning down to press his berry stained mouth against your own.
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Hi there, I hope you're doing good. I wanted to say I appreciate the way you just reached out and interacted with us, your followers. It's so cool and I'd also like to know you a little better as I like your writing style so much (planning on reading more this week.). Anyway, I'd like to know more about your writing process. Like how did you get into fanfics and all that? How do you go from an idea to the results you deliver? 😁
Hi love, 
it’s the last week of the summer break for me, the weather is lovely and nothing is keeping me from writing. So in short, things are pretty good right now, thank you. I hope you’re well yourself.
Also, thank you so much for reaching out and sending me this fantastic ask. I’m afraid the answer is rather lengthy, so I’m putting it under the cut.
All right, how did I get into fanfiction… Well, I think I may have been into fanfic for much longer than I realised, in any case a long time before I even knew such a thing existed. I think it all started when I was about 14 or 15. Me and my best friend at the time had a little journal we used to pass back and forth from week to week. We would write little stories about our celebrity crushes for the other to read. So basically, what we did was similar to an analogue version of tumblr, I guess. Sadly, my friend moved away after a while and even though we kept on writing long letters to each other, it just wasn’t possible to keep that journal any longer. 
After that I stopped writing altogether for a very long time and I didn’t come back to fanfiction until some time around 2017 or 18, I think. For reading only at first, but when the Russos killed off Tony Stark in Endgame, I just couldn’t accept that. So I came up with a very long and very badly written solution to fix that ending and give precious Tony what he deserved. (Sounds rather pretentious, doesn’t it?😂) 
From then on it was still quite a way to go before I finally found the courage to post my first story on here. I switched from writing in German to writing in English, which still is the greatest challenge for me now, to be honest. And in the end it was “Daughter of the Sea” that made me brave enough to share my writing. 
Now, how do I write… Inspiration can strike literally anywhere. It may come from a song, a poem, a scene in a movie, an interesting place I see or learn about that sparks an image or scenario in my mind. Most of the time, these ideas are just nice daydreams I play around with and develop into the rough outline of a story to entertain myself, but I know things are getting serious when I come up with the first dialogue. I love writing dialogue, I think it’s what I enjoy most. Usually the rough draft of the dialogue then expands over the next few days until a full scene begins to form around it. 
Music also plays an important part for me. I don’t think there is a single story I wrote that doesn’t come with its own soundtrack. So, I put together a playlist, which usually grows while piecing together the story, and listen to it on repeat (I have a rather lengthy commute to work, meaning I have the luxury of doing that for about two hours or more each day). 
When I’m still in the outlining phase, the process is rather chaotic. I jump from scene to scene, adding a few ideas or snippets of dialogue whenever they come to mind. But once I seriously get into writing, I like doing that chronologically. That might not be the most clever idea as it sometimes slows or stops my writing flow altogether when I get stuck on a single sentence or word, but I can’t seem to help it. 
Apart from that, it depends largely on my work load and social life how quickly I finish a story or chapter. And on my fickle muse and its capriciousness, of course. After finishing the first draft, I usually don’t edit the story too much anymore. That might be due to the fact that English is not my mother tongue and I am very careful with crafting my sentences and looking up words on the first pass already, so I mainly check for typos or language mistakes only before I release it into the world.
That’s basically it. I hope this all makes sense and answers your questions and that I didn’t bore you with too much unnecessary information (I tend to do that sometimes). 
Please feel free to send more asks or DMs anytime. I really enjoy talking to all of you. It’s what I came here for. 
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Note: Inspired by @sapphirescrolls​ https://sapphirescrolls.tumblr.com/post/633710107595767808/i-had-an-obnoxious-encounter-whilst-driving-so-ya
Summary: Going home there is always traffic.
Warning: bondage, forced sex, non consent, kidnapping
Dark Thor x reader
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It felt like you had been stuck in the car for over an hour. It was so infuriating that one lane could clog up traffic so badly.Throwing your head back on the seat you start to stare aimlessly at the taillights in front of you.
Incoming traffic rushed by, but out going was yet again a drag. You could've sworn the construction workers were just fucking about instead of working. If there were any other options as a home route you would have taken it, but unfortunately there wasn't one.
Since the weather had been unusually fair you decide to roll the windows down.  
"Hey Siri, play my rush hour playlist" you call out to your cell.
The robotic voice came alive on your command, changing from the radio to your music. Tapping your finger on the steering wheel in time with the beat you sing to yourself while sitting through this slow torture.
"HEY!" Someone called out. Checking your rear-view you scanned to see if someone behind you was trying to get your attention. From what you saw the driver behind you seemed to be on his phone so maybe you were just hearing things.
"HEY!" Even with the music blaring that voice pierced through.
Scanning all around this time your eyes land on a giant of a man in an orange safety vest and hard hat. One of the road workers was waving his hands in the air trying to signal you. Scrunching your brow you look at him curiously. His bright smile was certainly infectious as he began dancing when your attention was focused on him. He was surprisingly on beat, but the sight of it was so goofy you had to laugh and the more you watched goaded him to do more.
*HONK HONK HONK
"Okay, okay" you say to the car behind you even though they couldn't hear you. Turning your focus back on the road and get in gear. He had distracted you so much that you hadn't noticed traffic move on a bit. Without giving him another glance you drive onward to home.
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The construction on the road had been going on for over a month and you truly couldn't tell what they were working on out there. At least it never hindered you going into work. As you passed the closed lane in the morning you would glance over at the abandoned equipment while you wait at the light to change colors again.
When you were in the office your days were filled with meeting after meeting. The first one was just about to start and you were the only one in the conference room. Walking over to the window you watched the construction workers start their day along the outstretched roadway.
"Hey Y/N, you coming to lunch with us tomorrow?" Cathy's voice broke you from your trance at the window.
"What's going on tomorrow?"
"Tiffany is having a going away lunch. It's going to be at Zoe's kitchen since it's just right across the street"
"Ugh I hate that place, but I will go."
Moving from the window you take the seat next to her at the conference table. "Do you take Woodway avenue to go home?" You ask the curly haired accountant as she opens her laptop.
"I used to, but the traffic has been so bad." She answered. "I normally go over to Sam's since it's the other way. By the time I leave there traffic is normally cleared out."
"Oh, wow. How long has this been going on?" You integrate her.  
"I had been dropping hints to him for a while, then one late night a few weeks ago"Cathy's mysterious grin spread on her lip.
"Cathy! In the office" you try and lower your voice after the shock. She only shrugs while you shake your head in disapproval. "Any who I was sitting in traffic yesterday and heard someone shouting. I look over to see this road worker shouting at me then he starts dancing like a fool."
"Was he cute though?"
"That’s besides the point"
"So he was cute then...Next time take a picture I wanna see this construction hottie" she jokingly asked as more people started to file into the conference room.
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When you got into your car at the end of the day you were happy to leave, but not excited about what lay ahead. Your gas indicator was dangerously low today and you cursed yourself for not filling up your tank last night. You knew it was enough to get home, but the gas at the station a few blocks from here was cheaper than the one by your apartment.
As the dead lock breaks to allow you to drive more than a few inches you signal so that you can get over in time to reach the station.
Pulling in you parked in front of the pump. The tank was on the passenger side so you walked around, popped the cap and grabbed the hose.
The bell on the gas station door chimed behind you. Spilling from the doors a group of road workers presumably on break or grabbing snacks for their journey home. Your head reflexively turned towards the noise then your eyes locked with the golden haired goofball from yesterday. When he saw you his face lit up like a Christmas tree.
"Hey!" he shouted and waved at you excitedly dancing his dance making you snort. When your hear the click from the hose you turn away. Pulling out the nozzil you put it away and walk to get back into your car. Glancing up you spot him looking back at you, waving goodbye as he and his group walk over to a large  red pickup truck. You wave back then startup reluctantly ready to sit through this traffic jam again.
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In the rear-view you spot the massive truck he got into. It trailed a few cars behind, but it wasn't hard to miss.
Even after you broke free of the jam it seemed to be heading in the same direction as you. To ease your mind you drive into McDonald just before your turn off point. It was another late night of coming home and cooking for yourself wasn't going to happen.
After you placed your order through the speaker you see his car pull in too.
You are just being paranoid. He is probably hungry. You're overthinking things.
Paying for your food you then leave and speed on toward your street. Peeking at your rear-view you spot his truck again in the far distance.
Calm down. This is a popular road a lot of people take this route.
Shaking off the paranoia as you spot your street sign. Signaling you pull into the turning lane. As you waited at the light you watch as the truck gets closer, but the light turns green before you can see if he gets into the same lane. Turning on your street you breathe a sigh of relief when you saw it kept going straight instead of turning down your road.
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The next day lunch came around before you knew it. Leaving your desk you go and grab Cathy. When you do she's shamelessly flirting with her new office bae, Sam.
"You ready to go or..." You ask leaving enough space for innuendo as you poke your head in through Sam's office.
"Yes, yes" Cathy turns to you pouting. "I'll see you tonight" she pecked him on the cheek before heading to the elevator with you.
Exiting the office you two head out toward Zoe's, chatting about the usual office gossip. The bustling sound of the road work buzzed around your office building. The walk to Zoe's would be brief, but noise and the smell of tar had you regretting the choice to go out for lunch.
"Oh my gawd there he is" you point in the direction of the statuesque blonde currently jack hammering the road. In his bright orange vest you could see pools of sweat seep through. His sleeves clung to his toned arms, his muscles flexed as the machine pounded and you wondered what the rest of him looked like underneath.
"Oh damn" Cathy exclaimed practically drooling at the sight of him. You had to nudge her ribs to stop her from staring.
The pedestrian light turned green as you two approached allowing your little group to cross the street. As your pumps hit pavement you heard his distinct call. Cathy turned her head to look before you did. When your eyes landed on him, he did his little dance this time adding in a crotch grab then blowing you a kiss. The shock of the lewd gesture had you both scrunching your faces in disgust before turning away and continuing on. He shouted at you more but you refused to give him anymore attention.
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You checked your traffic app to see if there was anyway to avoid Woodway, but all the road lines were colored red. Signaling that they would be just as bad as going around.
Instead of sitting in traffic again you decided to stay in the office later. Spending an hour in the office sounded better than an hour in traffic.
You passed the time shooting off a few emails, scheduling a few client meetings and reading through some paper work you had put off earlier in the day. Checking your watch after all that done you were satisfied that enough time had passed so you pack up to leave.
Pulling out of the parking garage you were relieved that traffic had indeed cleared up. Though it was late you were tired of fast food. With all the road work you found it easier to get drive through than cook. Breaking from routine you head to the grocery store.
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Walking down the various aisles while you load up your cart. The smell of fabric softener wafted through the air. The fragrant smell reminding you that you were running low on detergent.
Going down the aisle you find your favorite brand and smell the clean scent of the box.
"Hey!" The familiar voice of the construction worker startled you causing you to drop the box of detergent on the floor. "Oh sorry" his accent caught you off guard as well, he had only ever said one word to you before this point. Walking up closer as you bent to pickup the box.
"It's OK." As you rose to straighten. Your eyes roamed his stature you noticed he held a case of beer in one hand and his cell in the other. From the distance in your car you had thought he was tall, but now as he stood so close you had to crane your neck to meet his gaze.
"I just want to say sorry for the other day...I was trying to do that Michael Jackson dance and well..." He trailed off.
"That's what that was?" You cocked a brow at him. "Michael would probably roll over in his grave if he knew." You playfully kid him. He erupted with such laughter you were slightly embarrassed at the volume.
Clutching the detergent close to your chest you take one step back while he took one step forward. He stopped laughing and just smiled down at you.
"My name's Thor"
"I'm Y/N"
There was a thick silence that fell before you spoke again. "Well, I should go" you move your cart and start to push it away.
"You're checking out right me too" his smile was so infectious, but you couldn’t match his energy.
He followed beside you as you made your way to the checkout line. His presence almost suffocating as he walked quietly next  to you.
He waited behind you in line and you thanked your lucky stars there wasn't anything embarrassing in your cart this time around. When the cashier finished you waved him goodbye and walked off as fast as you could, but he caught up to you before you could exit the automatic doors.
In the dim light of the parking lot his pickup truck stuck out like a sore thumb in the distance. Luckily it was on the opposite aisle from yours.
"Sooo news on when that road might be fixed?" You try and break the awkward silence.
"Oh I don't know. I just do the work they don't tell me anything" he answered rubbing the back of his neck.
"Well, I guess I will see you tomorrow" you say as you approach your car. Waving goodbye you separate and push your cart to the back of your car. He looked like he wanted to say something more, but you had already started on your jaunt to the trunk.
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Loading the car you peer over to see Thor in his truck lit by the light of his cellphone through his windshield. After closing the trunk you hop in the car. Starting the car you ready yourself to back out.
*POP
"What the fuck?" You exclaimed as your car gyrated in a peculiar manner. A worried crinkle rested on your forehead as you contemplated the obvious.
Putting the car back in park you take your phone and get out to examine the tires. The front driver side was fine, but when you walked to the rear the back was tattered and flat. Bending down you look for what could have caused such damage.
"You okay?” Thor boomed from behind you. His branch of an arm resting on his open window as he watches you bent over examining the flattened wheel. His truck now parked beside yours.
"Yeah, just a flat." You reassured him. You unlock your phone and lookup triple A while Thor hops out of his truck. "I have someone coming it's fine Thor" you try and wave him off, but he doesn't leave. Thor's arm wraps around your waist pulling you flush to his chest. Your phone drops from the surprise embrace. "What the hell are you doing?" You shout at him while digging your nails into his arm as you try and pry free.
He didn't answer you and the more you struggled the tighter his hold seemed to be as he inched closer to his vehicle. Thor opened the back door of his truck with one hand as you fought to get out of his other. Your feet lifted from the ground as he brought you up and tossed you in. When your back hit the leather of the seat you rise on your elbow and scurry backwards until your back hit the opposite window. Turning to open that door Thor yanks your ankle so hard that your entire body lays flat along the cushion again.
You somehow free your ankle and kick over a tool box behind the passenger seat in the process. The contents spilling in and out of the truck. The next kick landed in the center of his chest, but he catches it right before its impact.
"This isn't funny Thor let me go!" You demand. Thor ignored you and proceeded to pull off your shoe. Once removed he then tosses it over his shoulder.
His eyes stayed laser focused on you while he placed kisses on the top of your foot then trailed them gently down your leg. You try freeing yourself from his clutches again until Thor stopped. You watched on as he opened his mouth wide on your thigh then sinking his teeth into your meaty flesh. You whale loudly from the pain then shoot forward to grab a fist full of hair. Pulling it as hard as you can until his hands encircle your wrist. Pushing them together he holds them with one hand while the other digs through the mess of tools on the floor.
"You know you were always the highlight of my day?"
Your eyes grew wide at the sight of the thick white plastic strips. Twisting and thrashing under him he only scoffs at your attempts. Looping the zip tie around your wrists then around the handle of the back door. The tightness of the restraints only increased as you struggled, your fingers starting to tingle at the loss of circulation.
"Construction was actually supposed to be finished a long time ago, but I made sure to get the project delayed."
Hovering over you once he locked you in place his once infectious smile turned sinister. Lowering himself back down his meaty palm glided up and down your exposed thigh. Pushing your skirt past your waist he starts to pull your panties down as your legs continue to flail. Catching your knees with his hands he forces your knees to bend so that he could comfortably wedge himself in-between.
"You don't have to do this. You don't have to do this" your words were filled with panic and fear. There was nowhere to move as his head lowered down.
"Wait, wait. I have money. Just in my purse" you sob. "Thor your a nice guy please, donnnnnnnnnnn't" your whiny sobs did nothing to stop his assault.
He flung your panties out of the door and stared at your folds before lowering himself further. His hot breath sending shivers up your spine.
He hummed as he flattened his tongue on your folds. Your hips bucked involuntarily when he sunk his tongue inside you.
Dipping it in and out causing a moan to spring from your lips. No matter how hard you begged he did not relent it was as if your protests urged him on. Holding your legs apart you felt his fingers dig into you. The pain of his grasp and the overwhelming sensation of his tongue drove you mad.
"Oh sweetheart you taste so sweet." He said pulling back from your panting form.
Your shirt was still tucked in your skirt so Thor haphazardly pushed it up and out. Moving the fabric halfway up your neck to expose your breast. When he pulled down on your bra a strap broke.
"Sorry about that" Thor chuckled as he took both breast in his hand, pushing them together then began kneading them like dough. He hissed as he played with you as your protest fell on deaf ear.
Moving his head down to your chest Thor rubbed his course beard harshly over your breast. Inhaling each deeply before trailing kisses all around the top. His hands released your breast and you watched on in horror as he tossed his shirt, pushed his pants down his waist along with his boxers.
"No no no" you cry out as Thor pushed up almost level with you. The weight of him almost crushing your chest. His hand clasped your chin and forced your head forward to face him when you tried looking away.
"I am going to make you so happy Sweetheart"
The back door remained open as he pressed the head of his cock into your mound. Feeling the pressure of him pushing into you Thor devoured your lips before you could let out another cry for help.
Thor took his time as he eased into you. His tongue invading your mouth as you felt him stretch you. He smelled of sweat and tar. His hair cascaded over you while his hands roamed your body. Squeezing and pinching on your fatty flesh so hard that your body jerked and jolted.
Thor's speed increased as time went on and you felt your pussy grip and hold him. Betraying you to take pleasure from his forceful violation. His cock plunged deeper and deeper as your cries turned to heavy mewls. He pulled away from your lips with a deep groan.
"That's it Sweetheart" he praised as your cunt gripped his cock repeatedly. "Mmmmmmm Fuck shit!"  You came around his cock unwantedly while he continued to praise you for being such a good girl for him.
Your pussy grew wetter as you stayed at the mercy of his control. Thor moved to plant one hand on the window and snuck the other under your ass. When he gripped your cheek hard your back arched and the move allowed him to sink deeper into you. The truck rocked as he fucked harder into you. "Hear how wet you are for me." His cock ravished you, stretching you beyond your limits.
"MMMm shit!" You exclaimed as you came again around his pounding cock. As your cunt squeezed his dick you felt his cock begin to twitch inside of you. Then a warmth overflowed inside your convulsing pussy. Thor's hold would surely leave bruises as he dug into you. As a warmness bloomed in your core he stilled himself and as it leaked out he plopped down on top of you, crushing you under his weight, you felt his seed seep out of you.
After another few minutes he got up and off you. Putting on his discarded shirt and pulling up his pants. He slid out of the back seat closing the door leaving you still bound.
You heard him pop the trunk of your car and the familiar sound of plastic bags. It took a while before he reappeared at the drivers door and got in.
"All right I moved your groceries! Let's go home we both have work tomorrow." He said then started the trucks engine and set off out of the parking lot.
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bluewinnerangel · 3 years
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Harry said that he fell in love to What makes you beautiful and then proceeded to film Watermelon Sugar-a song about the first stages of a relationship- on the very same beach they filmed wmyb at (out of all the beaches in the world!!!!). I can find no other explanation but Larry. I wouldn't be surprised if he filmed Golden on the Amalfi Coast because it's another place that holds meaning to them. I'm nauseated and I can't believe we let him get away with this shit but also I love him very much for being such a sap.
I'm just gonna use this ask to put all my WMYB/WS thoughts together. I KNOW, clearly WMYB means a lot to Harry. To me WS is also about that, is describing their relationship stages at the time of WMYB. That dare I say That summer evening sounding just like a song works as a nod to WMYB. I think either Louis just dedicated the song and its message to Harry (like, singing it to him, using the lyrics to tell him these things, whateverlemmehavemyheadcanons) or Harry just projected it onto Louis lol, or both, either way it stuck. There's parallels/nods in their later work beyond the WS music video. (said that here but lemme just copy: )
Niall's to blame for that headcanon:
The coffee’s cold (at the beachwood cafe), he (louis) turned around and said “I hope you know you’re beautiful, have you ever been told?”. She’s (harry) a little shy ,as he walks away, she slowly breaks a smile. The skies are blue (and I keep thinking back to), haven’t been for a while -Mirrors
I mean damn dude. And if you reaalllyy listen to Mirrors and compare it to Harry's lyrics and general feeling, plus Louis', plus just everything what we think to see what they're like and all that, sorry but Mirrors actually really being about Harry??? Point me to where that doesn't make too much sense.
And then there's Perfect Now
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I wouldn't say "no other explanation but Larry" tho, sorry to be a bit sparkle dulling here but it was their first big hit, what lifted them off the ground into what they are now, and in a time everything was just summertime butterflies bigtime everything is amazing before gradually turning to *vaguely gestures*. So I think these feelings could still be there the way they are without a ~love interest~ in the mix. (I mean I don't think so because explain why mermaid keeps singing about someone's loaded gun then but it's not impossible)
Also then there's the deranged Louis' playlist puzzle that I'm always debating to bring back then it comes to Harry's songs, because on one hand I feel like that gives a unique look into the meaning of Harry's songs and/or how Louis feels about them / his POV, on the other, it's just insane. It's just really... really insane. I don't think I can ever reach that far again.(narrator: that was a lie) But let's just go there for a second, assuming he really did that, there's Call Me Out by the Sea Girls paired with WS and oh my lorde I blast that shit so often, it's actually what made me enjoy WS because at first hearing it played everywhere and it just seeming this simple summer hit bop I just didn't enjoy it much. But now I have it snuggled with this one on my playlist and it's good shit. I'll just copy the bit from the monster that's that mess that won't let me edit
Reaching even further: Since Watermelon Sugar’s whole music video is a big fat reference to “What Makes You Beautiful”, a song Harry has said he fell in love to. One could then interpret Watermelon Sugar as to be written about that time. Then pair that with a song that not only shares the subject, but is specifically about how the initial stages happened a long time ago yet still wanting it now, yeah, uhm...
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(related: everything Watermelon Sugar, also this anon)
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tillthelandslide · 4 years
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Oh F*ck It
A/N: Hi everyone. I actually quite like this one, so I hope you all like it too. I appreciate any and all feedback. All of your support has been amazing, especially the wonderful people on my taglist, you guys know I love you all so much xx
Side Note: Part 7 of Jersey Love is on hold for the moment so I can finish writing and editing other stories and make my way through my requests. Hope thats okay. Love you all so much - L
Tag List: @harrysthiccthighss @thereisa8ella @magdelen69 @henrythickcavill @hc-geralt-23 @kissthatlifeaway @darkbooksarwin @august-w-princess @speakerforthedead0 @pixie1484 @constip8merm8 @tigerbroadwaybaby @agniavateira @summersong69 @aestheticallywinchester @stephartrave @al-wiisa @henrycavillfanpage @intenselikes @anat2507 @ellixthea @aguspalazzo @1ookatthestars00 @wintersoldierslut @michelehansel @cavill-sass @thecavillstache @xelizabethvalentinex @sesamepancakes @tumblnewby @thefangirlsblog @sugarmelonwater @madbaddic7ed  @bakika @abundanceofsoph​ @noisymist
(if you would like to be added to my tag list, feel free to message me,    if you are new to my blog then I post Henry Cavill fanfics and make    Henry Cavill fake Instagram posts, my requests are open so feel free to    request anything  and I will try my best to make your vision come to  life. Edit: requests are still open but there might be a delay as I am  working my way through the current ones and all other stories I am  writing)   
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Love. What a load of bullshit, you hated the idea of love. The idea that people could love someone despite how shitty they were pissed you off. Sure you knew people weren't perfect but come on, some people could just do better, be better. You felt genuinely awful when you found yourself thinking certain people didn't deserve to be loved. And you had begun to think that the thought in your mind meant you too didn’t deserve to be loved.
People often told you, "Y/n, you're too kind", "Y/N you're too good for him" and that too pissed you off. How could you be too good for one person and not good enough for someone else? That was the story of your life, the people you loved, didn't love you back, and the people that loved you, well... They fell under the formerly mentioned category of "not deserving love" and you suppose that fact was the reason you were yet to find someone. You were stuck up, only you thought it but it was still true. Someone who thinks there are people who don't deserve love, is stuck up, surely? Your friends and family would tell you that they agreed that some people don’t deserve love but it didn’t make you feel better, it made you hate the human race just a little more than you already did. You were kind, you knew that, only the people closest to you knew of these thoughts that you hated to have and the rest… they knew you as a lovely girl, a positive woman who worked hard and was strong. But that was the facade you presented.
You wish you were the type of person that believed everyone deserves love, but you weren't.
So here you were, sitting in your apartment drinking a beer all by yourself, waiting until your only true friend finished filming and came and listened to your moaning. Who is that friend you ask? The one, the only; Henry Cavill. How the fuck he was your friend you'll never know. He was about 7 years older than you but that didn't stop you from being best friends with him. He was a genuinely nice guy, the most humble person you knew (even in his position), he was kind and loving and you always told everyone he was the best thing that ever came into your life. He may be a recurring guest star in the filthiest of your dreams and fantasies but you'd never let him know that. You had the biggest crush on him but covered it up with witty and sarcastic humour, sure the two of you flirted but neither of you had the guts to progress your friendship, his fans knew you as his best friend and you thought it would stay that way until he inevitably found a girlfriend.  Little did you know that Henry felt the same way about you, in fact he was very much in love with his best friend, people said that you were too young but when you were together age was never an issue, in fact it was something Henry forgot about most days, only really thinking about it when someone had to comment on it (usually an ignorant reporter or pap)
You heard your door open, the jingle of keys, a coat being thrown somewhere, the sound of footsteps leading away from you into your kitchen, you heard the fridge open, you heard a beer open, all before you saw his face.
"Make yourself at home why don't you" you said, as he came into your living room and plopped himself down next to you. You instantly found yourself smiling and breathing him in, his usual scent invading your senses, making your eyes flutter shut for a second or two.
"Always do" he said simply, wrapping an arm around you to hug you.
"Ew get off" you joked, as you hugged him back, taking a deep breath as your head found a comfortable place in his shoulder..
"How was work?" you sang, making him jokingly groan at your singing.
"Good" was all he said and it made you chuckle.
"Henry Cavill everyone" you said, talking to an imaginary audience.
"How are you?" he asked, taking a sip of his beer.
"Shitty as ever my friend" you said, clinking your bottle with him as his eyebrows lifted.
"Why are you so dressed up?" he said referring to your current attire, he took your appearance in, smirking to himself and trying his hardest (as ever) to keep his thoughts to himself. He always thought you looked amazing, the most beautiful person he had ever laid his eyes on but tonight, he thought you looked phenomenally gorgeous and unfairly hot.
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You were wearing black skinny jeans and a black satin shirt which had been undone when your plans got cancelled, revealing lace lingerie underneath. You didn't care that it was revealing and you were infront of Henry, it just didn't matter to you, you were comfortable with each other and to be frank, he had seen much more of you before.
"I was supposed to have a date with Damien but he cancelled. Couldn’t be bothered to get changed" you said, making him groan and tilt his head back.
"That douchebag again? " he said, which made you laugh, he sounded too posh to say douchebag.
"What's wrong with him?" you asked, making him chuckle and drink his beer.
"Well for one, he's a dick, two he treats you like shit and 3 he's a dick" he said laughing.
"Yeah well he wants me so eh" you shrugged, downing your drink, knowing that wasn’t a valid reason to keep seeing him.
"Really? He cancelled on you" he said matter of factly.
"Ouch. Hurt my feelings why don't you. We get it I'm repulsive nobody wants me" you said, making him frown at you as your hand placed itself over your heart feigning heartbreak at his words.
"That's not what I meant and you know that's not true" he said, downing his drink too.
"What's the truth then?" you asked, turning to face him, your back sliding down the sofa slightly.
"You have terrible taste in men" he said, laughing which made you hit him "ouch" he said, rubbing his arm, his forehead creasing as his eyebrows furrowed at you.
"Sorry, did I hurt you big guy?" you joked, hitting him again, making him grab your wrist to stop you.
"Seriously Y/N stop" he said, making you chuckle and pull your hand away.
"God why is dating so hard? Honestly I'm just going to give up" you said, making Henry groan in agreement.
"I mean if Superman can't find someone then I've got no hope" you said, making him chuckle, his eyes following you as you stood up.
"Another one?" you asked, making him nod, you walked to your kitchen, opening the fridge and pulling out two more glasses of beer, popping the lids off..
"I miss sex" you heard Henry say making you laugh.
"Me too" you said, coming back into the room, passing him another beer, you walked to your speaker turning them on and taking your phone out of your pocket, throwing it to Henry who caught it one handedly, this was a common occurrence for the both of you, you’d give Henry your phone and he would play whatever he wanted from your music library.
"You and Damien haven't?" he asked, glancing between your phone and you as you resumed your position next to him, your head resting against his shoulder, looking at your phone in his hands.
"No we have but it was shit, didn’t get me where I needed to go if you get what I mean" you said, laughing to yourself.
"Why keep seeing him then? He's a dickhead and he can't make you cum? What's the point?" he said, making you laugh, finally shuffling a playlist of yours.
"Oh if you're fans heard you now Cavill" you said laughing to yourself, the music filling the room.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, bringing the bottom up to his perfect lips, downing a considerable amount, making you smirk and do the same.
"Just that they think you're so perfect. King Cavill they call you. Here you are, speaking all improper, having a beer with your clearly delusional and repulsive best friend and talking about cum" you said making him laugh alongside you.
"Eh, don't think they'd mind" he said, turning to face you.
“That’s true, think you could practically do anything and they’d bow down” you laughed, in your mind you understood perfectly why they acted the way they did and you truly loved every single person who loved Henry because they represented everything you were, everything they saw and thought about Henry, you thought, but considerable more because you knew him, all of him, not just the person he presented himself as.
"And stop calling yourself repulsive, you're not repulsive, far from it actually" he said.
"Calm down Cavill. Carry on being so sweet and I might think you’re in love with me" you joked, shoving his chest lightly.
"Yeah because that's not possible" he mumbled, you not hearing what he said.
"Huh?"
"Nothing"
"You look exhausted" you said, looking over his features, he had bags under his eyes and the skin around his face was drooping, you still thought he looked handsome but still, he needed to rest more.
"Thanks" he chuckled deeply, closing his eyes and leaning his head against your sofa.
"You work too hard" you scolded him, your hand moving to play with his curls the way you knew he liked. It calmed him and even though this was a fairly romantic thing people did, you did it anyway. Your friendship was weird like that, you could go from acting like best friends to acting like a couple (without the sex, much to your dismay). His eyes closed and his head tilted upwards as you did, a small smile resting on his lips, before they blinked open a few times.
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"I enjoy my work" he said, humming at the feel of your gentle fingers in his hair. You could tell he was getting sleepy as his features softened and he no longer joked with you, the beer now long forgotten in his hand. You took the beer from his hand, placing it on the table, stopping your movements in his hair. Moving a pillow into your lap and saying his name, making his eyes open.
"I know you do, but you need to rest more, now lie down." you said firmly, gesturing for him to place his head on the pillow, to which he followed your instructions. Your hand resumed its movement in his hair, pushing the curls out of his face, running through the strands and occasionally stopping to massage his head.
"Maybe you need an older man, one who knows to treat you right” Henry said suggestively, wow he really is tired you thought.
“Treat me right? Are you talking about in or outside the bedroom?” you laughed.
“Both” he snickered.
"Going to set me up with one of your hot friends?" you said, trying to see if he was indeed talking about himself.
"I was talking about me." he said. Ah. So he was.
"Jheez you must be so exhausted" you said, trying your best to change the subject.
"I'm being serious" he said, his eyes still shut, groaning slightly as you weren't paying attention and accidentally tugged his hair.
"I'm too fucked up for you Henry. Besides you could have anyone you wanted" you said, hoping to some higher power that the topic please be changed.
"You're not fucked up, just a little messy, a little mess never hurt anyone" he said.
"You could have anyone you wanted" you repeated.
"Don't want anyone else" he said, suddenly sitting up from your lap and turning to face you.
"That beer must have gone straight to your head Henry. You don't know what you're saying"
"Don't be like that. I'm an adult, I can handle one fucking beer" he said, his tone turning you on a little. The song switched to Sail by AWOLNATION and the bass was loud, adding to the tension between you.
"Cmon Yn don't tell me you haven't thought about this" he said gesturing between you.
"I haven't" you lied.
"That's a lie. I see the way you look at me when you think I'm not looking" he said.
"Don't get me started" you warned.
"What's that supposed to mean?
"Oh c'mon Henry! You're always so protective when I tell you about guys I'm seeing, and you can't say that's just you being my best friend!" you shouted standing up from the sofa, walking to the other side of the room, turning down the music just a little.
"Yeah well, I know you have dirty dreams about me!" he shouted back making you gasp "I heard you one night when you stayed at mine, you moaned my name in your sleep"
"Yeah well, I always see you looking down my top at my tits" you said, making him look down at your boobs.
"Henry!" you shouted, your arms crossing over your chest protectively for about a second before you dropped them, not really caring if he looked.
"What! They're nice tits" he said make, a smirk on his face that you wished wasn’t there
"Well you have a nice face" you shouted back, you had no idea why the both of you were shouting at each other.
"So do you!" he shouted back.
"Yeah. Well you have rock hard abs like a fucking god? Like seriously what the hell dude?" you asked.
"Well you're fucking beautiful" he quipped back.
"Well, you have perfectly rideable thighs and sometimes when we cuddle I feel you against my arse… and c’mon how are you so big?" you said, glancing down to his thighs, flicking to his jean clad bulge, your mouth literally falling open as you did, making him chuckle at you. He hardened in his jeans as he heard you calling him big.
"It's nice arse. You have a nice arse" he said. It seemed like this was becoming a competition of who could complement the other more, you still had no idea why you were both shouting, probably to relieve the tension that was pent up inside the both of you.
"So do you! And you have really nice eyes, with the little bit of brown in the left one” you said, making him realise how much attention you paid to him.
“Not many people realise that about my eyes” he said, his mouth agape as he paused his shouting, the both of you trying to catch your breath.
“That’s because I like you.” you said, not shouting anymore.
“I like you more.” he said, still making it a competition.
"Well maybe we should just be together then if we like each other so much" you said.
"Maybe we should!" he shouted, the both of you realising that you had been moving closer to one another with every passing comment you had made, the both of you now standing chest to chest, the both of them raising and falling against each other. His eyes flicked down to your lips, to your eyes, to your breasts, back up to your lips before finally resting back on your eyes, the usual blue shade completely taken up by his pupils.
"Oh fuck it" you said , jumping into his arms, your legs wrapping round his waist, he caught you perfectly as you kissed each other. He carried the both of you back to your sofa, his lips moving perfectly against yours, as he placed the both of you on the sofa, you resting in his lap, your centres being instantly pushed together.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long.” he said, breaking the kiss to tell you.
“Shut up and kiss me then” you said, his lips smudging against yours, the both of you moaning into the other, tongues finally fighting against each other, the feeling foreign but perfectly euphoric.
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You shifted yourself against him, feeling him large and hard against your core. He pushed your open shirt over your shoulders, it fell to your forearms, you pulled your arms out of the sleeves, flicking the shirt in a different direction. Henry’s lips paused against yours to kiss at the exposed skin at your neck, moving down to your chest. You pushed your chest against his lips as he sucked at your bosom making you gasp and rut yourself against his bulge.
“I need you” you sighed out, his head snapping backwards to look at you, his hand coming to gently grasp your face, his thumb caressing the apple of your cheek which was now flushed and warm.
“I’ve wanted this for so long” he smiled at you, he lifted the both of you up, placing sweet kisses against your lips as he carried you to your bedroom, placing you softly against your bed, your head falling softly into your pillows. He paused above you, slipping his shirt over his head, before looking over you, his features soft as he did, a sweet smile on his face as his cheeks flushed.
“You’re beautiful” he said, making you smile up at him. You reached out for him, gesturing to him, he simply shook his head, needing a moment more to take you in.
“Please Henry. Come here” you said cutely, he finally obeyed your wish, resting over you, his core flush against yours as he rested his arm by your head, his fingers drifting over your face, before he placed tender kisses against your lips. His tongue sensually making its way back into your mouth, pleasure erupting between you as he pushed his hips against you, causing you to gasp, your lips opening against his. His grunt was resounding and stirred something deep inside you that wanted to hear the noise over and over until it was the only one you knew.
“Henry” you sighed as his fingers grasped the button of your jeans, popping them open easily, his fingers slipping down until they were pressed against your core over your underwear, a moan slipping from your lips, into his mouth as his tongue fondled yours. Your hands finally reached out, resting over his muscular shoulders, the muscles contracting against your soft touch. You moved them gently down his chest, moving your lips there too, pressing an open mouth kiss against his hairy chest as his fingers continued to move against your core. Your back arched and your eyes fluttered shut. You continued the movement of your hands southward, pausing over his abs to get a feel before landing on the button of his jeans, popping them open easily and beginning to push the material down past his thighs, over his plump bottom before he got up to remove them fully, giving you the chance to do the same to yours.
You were left in your black lacy one piece, you popped the buttons at your core, revealing your wetness to him making him groan loudly as he moved back over you. You took in his black boxers, seeing a clear and large bulge straining against the material. Your eyes flicked up to his and he took you in again, smiling to himself that this was finally happening.
“Kiss me” you said simply, his lips pressing against yours again. Your hands found the hem of his boxers, pushing them down, your hand finding his large shaft, grasping it lightly, your feather-like touch had him panting into your mouth, his eyes bursting open and his lips pulling away from yours as he snapped his head down, seeing your small hand wrapped around him. He had never seen something more simple yet the sight was nothing but erotic in his mind and he had to refrain from fucking himself into your hand. You began to move your hand up and down his shaft, spreading the precum that had formed at his tip to fully cover all of him. He rested his forehead against yours, eyes fluttering shut again as he moaned deeply.
“Baby I’m not going to last, need to be inside you” he said, speaking the truth. The pet name had your mind spinning and your stomach and core fluttering.
“Yes please” you begged sweetly making him chuckle.
“You sure you want this?” he said, grasping himself and placing himself against your core, tapping his tip against your clit making you sigh lewdly, precum spilling from his tip onto your clit at the sound.
“I’m sure” you confirmed, making him push into you gently, the both of you gasping, foreheads resting against each other, eyes looking into the others, making the whole ordeal more intimate.
His head arched upwards as he bottomed out, a loud groan falling from his lips.
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“You okay?” he asked, his fingers caressing your cheek, moving to your bottom lip.
“Give me a second” you said, the stretch was nothing you had experienced before and you needed a second to compose yourself. His lips found yours and moved against yours slowly, drawing a moan out as his fingers found your clit.
“You can move”
“You sure?” he said, making you nod. He pulled back slowly and you moaned loudly, feeling every ridge and vein against your walls. He pulled out until just the tip was inside you, slowly pushing back in, making the both of you moan out loudly.
“Fuck” he said, repeating the action a few times, his thrusts were deep, sensual and slow, you could feel every part of him and it had you seeing stars already.
“Henry” you moaned, you had never felt anything like this, you were no virgin but no man had ever made you feel this good before. He pushed back in, his hips hitting against yours as he sped up his thrusts slightly, his member reached untouched places inside you and found your g-spot straight away, your back arched, hands flying out to grasp his shoulders for support.
“Henry” you repeated, his eyes opening to look in yours, worry written across his face “faster” you said, making him chuckle.
“We’ve got all the time in the world for that my love. Need to feel all of you. This way” he said, his words reinforced with a particularly slow and deep thrust making you gasp out.
He felt like he was being winded but it was perfect, every thrust was deeper causing pleasure to shoot inside of him, making deep and loud grunts fall from his lips which were moving against yours.
“Y/n” he moaned, as he made a particular hard thrust of his hips, his member pushing inside you harshly making the both of you swear at the feeling.
“Oh fuck” you moaned, his fingers moving against your pearl with every thrust he made. You began pushing your own hips up, meeting him halfway, creating a new feeling of pleasure.  
“Look at you, absolutely glowing. Taking me in so perfectly” he said, looking down to where you were intertwined, officially moving as one being.
“You’re so deep Henry” you said, your lips fluttering over his neck, sucking against a vein which had appeared there.
“No one’s ever been this deep before have they?” he said, his hips still delivering slow and deep thrusts inside you, elongating the pleasure you both felt.
“Only you” you said and Henry knew you couldn’t have said anything more perfect and complementary.
“Oh I love you” he said, surprising you with his words, you looked at him, the both of you smiling and moaning against each other. Tears formed in your eyes, your hands grasping his face gently, kissing his lips.
“I love you too Henry. So much” you said, making his hips move faster against you, his dick still reaching deep inside you, pushing deliciously against your g-spot, pulling high pitched moans from your chest, your back arching and your hips rising off the bed.
Henry’s hands landed on your lace clad waist, leaning backwards on the bed, carrying you with him so you were on top, causing his member to fall some from your core.
Your hand steadied him against your core as you lowered yourself against him until the hilt, the hair at the base of him tickling against you as your legs draped over his thighs. You began raising yourself up before dropping yourself down, his cock somehow reaching deeper inside you, his hand supporting your movements but grasping your waist, helping raise and lower you against him. He leant back against the bed, his mouth agape as looked over you.
“Fuck Henry. Can you feel you, here” you said, grasping his hand and pushing his hand against your stomach making him moan.
“I. Love. You. So. Fucking. Much” he said, delivering particularly hard thrusts upwards into you in between every word.
“Fuck. So close” you said, lips bruising themselves against his again.
“Never felt this way before” he said, his words making you moan again. They had you seeing nothing but white as your walls fluttered against him, a near pornographic noise falling from your lips as you reached your high.
“There’s my good girl, that's it” he said, encouraging you as you came around him.
“Cum for me Henry. I need it, need to feel it inside me” you said, making his hips stutter as he came suddenly at your words, his eyes flickering in their sockets as he came. His load shooting upwards into you, coating your walls with him. Yours and his juices slipping out of you and onto his cock.
“Oh fuck” he grunted, his chest heaving as he breathed heavily, yours doing the same as you collapsed against him as he fell back, his back hitting your bed, his hands grasping your comforter. You felt him softening inside you, your walls still pulsing around him as you rested your head against his sweaty chest.
“That was fucking amazing” he swore.
“You’re the best” you said, making him growl and flip the both of you, his length falling from your warm and wet cunt, he was coated in a mixture of the both of you making you smile.
“Why didn’t we do that sooner?” he said, now lying on top of you, his arms supporting his weight.
“Because we’re idiots” you said, both of you laughing breathlessly.
“Be my girlfriend please?” he said, pushing hair out of your eyes as you smiled up at him.
“It would be my pleasure” you said, kissing him slowly, he let out a deep exhale from his nostrils.
“You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me and I want to tell everyone that you’re my girl. Will you let me tell everyone you’re my girl?” he said making your heart burst with joy.
“You better, everyone’s got to know you’re my man” you said, laughing up at him.
“I’m your man” he said, repeating the words more to himself than to you.
“You’re my man” you confirmed, making the both of you smile, you giggling as his lips began to attack your neck again.
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hopelesshawks · 3 years
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Love and Admiration Part 19- Goodnight Princess
18+ Bakugo x fem!pro hero reader
Summary: (Y/n) has known Bakugo since middle school, admired him since high school, and had a crush on him since the first time they met. Even now, a top pro hero in her own right, she can’t shake her school girl crush. Too bad Bakugo literally has no idea she exists. Well that’s not entirely true… He does know pro hero Mercury exists, but (y/l/n) (y/n)? Never heard of her.
Warnings for brief depiction of sexual harassment (not from Bakugo), unprotected sex, fingering, oral (female receiving), degradation, praise kink, dacryphilia (crying kink), overstimulation, and dirty talk
Masterlist Help Lulu <3
As you walk up to the AHA building you spot Aizawa talking to a man with his back to you in a black bomber jacket, a white hood pulled over the back, with a black baseball cap on. Curiosity drives your feet forward a little faster until you get close enough that recognition finally hits and causes you to slow down again. Even with his back to you you’d recognize Bakugo Katsuki anywhere. Part of you wants to turn around and run home, message Aizawa some half hearted excuse about getting tied up in a villain attack and no longer being able to help out. Before you can though Aizawa notices your arrival and waves you over. “Here’s who you’ll be working with,” you hear your former teacher tell Bakugo and just as it sinks in that Bakugo was also clueless as to who he’d been working with, he turns around to see and your heart skips a beat. Yes he looks unfairly attractive the way he always does but what really caught your attention is his outfit. Right there in the center of his white hoodie is a black Mercury symbol, the same symbol stamped somewhere on almost all your merch and the same one you’ve been using as your profile picture on social media since your debut. Bakugo follows your gaze down to the incriminating symbol, his cheeks going bright red. He mutters out an excuse about tossing bags in the car so he can turn away although you’re a little surprised when he extends his hand out to you expectantly. You consider the man in front of you who still won’t meet your gaze. Hurt still burns unpleasantly in your chest but you hand over your duffel bag and with little more than a sheepish glance and nod as acknowledgment, Bakugo moves to the trunk of the car to load it up. “You and Bakugo can handle this right? I saw the news call you a dynamic duo so,” Aizawa asks and you nod immediately. “Yea, we’ve got this. You got nothing to worry about,” you assure the older man. “Good. Get into town, get some rest, one of the local heroes will fill you in on the situation in the morning,” he explains. You nod your understanding and then go to join Bakugo in the car. Once you’re settled in, Bakugo starts up the engine and pulls off into the night.
The silence is awkward. You stare out the window as the cityscape slowly starts to thin out. Once Bakugo pulls the car out onto the highway it doesn’t take long before you’re leaving the city lights behind entirely. When the silence becomes too oppressive you pop open the glove box and root around until you find a USB port. You use your phone charger to plug in your phone, scroll through to one of your chiller playlists, and press play. Music floats through the speakers and you feel yourself relaxing although a quick glance at Bakugo reveals he doesn’t feel the same. He’d discarded his jacket in the backseat once he’d gotten in the car and, as usual, had pushed the long sleeves of the hoodie up to his elbows. As a result it’s easy to see the tense line of his shoulders and the popping veins in his forearms. His grip on the steering wheel is so tight his knuckles are almost white. You’ll be genuinely surprised if there aren’t permanent indentations of his fingers in the steering wheel by the time you two reach your destination. You’re tempted to just let him stew in whatever emotions he’s feeling at seeing you again for the first time since you’d hooked up, but then your eyes fall on where your hero name is written on the sleeve of his hoodie and you decide you’re feeling just generous enough to break the silence.
“You’re wearing the hoodie I got you.”
“Yea.”
“Why?”
Bakugo’s hands somehow tighten even more on the steering wheel before he bites out “Because I like it,” defensively. You roll your eyes and return your gaze to the window. No one can say you didn’t try. You’re about to give up and lament your fate to the groupchat when you hear Bakugo sigh next to you. “That’s not it. I mean I do like it but I didn’t think your dumb ass was gonna be here and it’s not the only reason,” Bakugo confesses. “Insulting me is not a strong start but what’s the other reason?” you ask. The pause is long before Bakugo speaks up again to admit, “I’ve missed you.” The incredulous look you give him almost makes him wince. “You’re the one who stopped messaging me you asshole!” “I know that!” “Then you don’t get to miss me!” “Well I don’t know what the fuck to tell you cause I do!” “Then why’d you ghost me?” “I panicked!”
Both of you go silent after that particular admission. This time it’s Bakugo who speaks up to break it. “Look I don’t date,” he sighs. “Who the fuck said I wanted to date you?” you ask defensively, your cheeks heating up the slightest bit. “Will you shut the fuck up? I’m trying to apologize.” “Apologize better.” “If you shut the fuck up I will.” “I don’t think apologies are supposed to include telling the other person to shut the fuck up.” “I’m trying here (y/l/n),” Bakugo growls and the almost desperate edge to his voice is enough to make you swallow your next retort, instead motioning for him to continue. “I don’t date and I don’t usually fuck people I enjoy having around. I already fucked up with you enough so I didn’t want to do it again. I panicked and that only made shit worse until I didn’t know how to fix it, ok? People care about me and I’m shit to them, that’s just how it goes. I’m sorry you got caught up in it,” he finally admits.
You weren’t expecting that level of honesty from him, nor were you expecting his answer to be so vulnerable. You turn to face him as much as you can within the confines of the seat of the car and take in his body language. Had he always been this insecure about his relationships with the people around him? Maybe if you hadn’t spent years cataloging his every move and expression from afar you would’ve missed it, but looking at him now he looks cracked open. You get the distinct impression that as small as his list of people he likes is, the list of people he’s allowed to see him like this is even smaller. “That’s not true,” you offer but that only makes Bakugo scoff. “It’s not!” you insist. “I don’t need your fucking pity,” he grumbles. “Jesus Christ you really are an idiot. Midoriya, Kirishima, and Denki all have plenty of other friends asshole. If what you said were true they would’ve dumped you a long time ago so cut the pity party bullshit and give me a real fucking apology so I can forgive you already,” you insist, and it reminds you a little of how he’d encouraged you during the reunion. The glance he shoots you is calculating, as if trying to assess how much you mean those words. “You’re going to forgive me?” he asks skeptically. “With an actual apology? Yea. I swear to god you’re the only one who still sees you as the same person you were when we first got to UA,” you reply with a roll of your eyes. “I’m sorry for ghosting you,” he grumbles out, cheeks slightly flushed as he does so. “Good. You’re forgiven. Now what songs should I play the rest of the drive?”
The ride gets a lot easier after that. You’ve missed Bakugo and it’s nice slipping back into the groove the two of you seem to have with each other. He talks shit about your song choices but you still catch him humming along or tapping the steering wheel to the beat a few times. He reveals he got around to finishing your favorite movie and so you guys spend a long time talking about that and your recommendations for other movies going forward. It’s comfortable and before you know it Bakugo is driving past the welcome sign for the tiny town the two of you will be working in. There’s only one hotel. It’s small and could probably use some updating but it’ll do just fine for the short duration of your trip. As the two of you grab your bags and start to head inside Bakugo asks “What are the odds the old man sprung for us to get our own rooms?” “Doubtful, you know the association is cheap as fuck. It has to be. You’re stuck with me,” you tease. “Guess that ain’t so bad,” Bakugo shrugs, which causes your heart to pound a little harder in your chest. “I’ll check us in if you wanna grab some shit from the vending machine,” Bakugo offers and you easily agree, the two of you heading in opposite directions to complete your tasks.
As you make your way over to the vending machine you catch the attention of a middle aged man, likely another guest, who follows you over that direction. “Well hello beautiful, what’s a pretty little thing like you doing around here?” he calls as he makes his way over. You roll your eyes but otherwise ignore him as you instead focus on selecting something from the machine in front of you. “C’mon hot stuff, don’t ignore me. I can tell you’re a big city chick, probably been around the block right? What’s one more?” he insists, sliding his body in front of you. “Do you mind? I’m trying to grab something,” you reply as levelly as possible. It’s moments like this where you hate the spotlight of heroism. You would love nothing more than to make the man blocking your way move but that would be unbecoming of a role model for future generations. “Aww don’t be like that doll, lighten up,” the man grins before having the audacity to move away from the vending machine just enough to smack your ass. You are livid, your hand immediately grasping hold of his wrist to stop him from touching you again. You whirl on him to tell him off but before you can he’s being wrenched out of your grip and violently tossed to the floor. Before you can even fully process what’s happened Bakugo stands like a wall between you, all fury and fire and brimstone. You haven’t seen him this angry in a very long time and even if the man who’d been hitting on you doesn’t know who Bakugo is, the glare and overall body language is still enough to have him cowering at Bakugo’s feet. “If you ever fucking touch her again, if you so much as fucking look at her, I will make you wish you were never fucking born,” Bakugo growls out and god maybe you do have a murder boner like Nejire said because you should not find any of this hot but you definitely do. The older man scrambles to his feet with a nod and runs off with barely a glimpse behind him and certainly not one in your direction, allowing you and Bakugo to heave a sigh of relief. “I know you had that handled but dude pissed me off,” Bakugo explains. His voice is still rough and anger-laden and you try to ignore the way it sends shivers down your spine. “Thanks Bakugo,” you reply, grateful both for his defense of you and his acknowledgment that you don’t need defending. “Katsuki,” he corrects you immediately. “What?” “You’re not mad at me anymore right?” “No?” “Then call me Katsuki,” he insists gruffly. You can only nod in response, afraid that if you open your mouth something embarrassing will come out of it like how incredibly fucking hot it was watching him defend you or how saying his first name right now is bringing back a few too many memories of when he’d first demanded you use his first name in the alley.
Bakugo leads you to your room as you try in vain to rein in your rampant thoughts. Even as you finally arrive all you can think about is the feeling of his lips on yours, the feeling of him filling you up, and what it was like to, for a moment, be the sole owner of his attention. He tosses his stuff on his bed and sits down as you move towards your own but your mind insists on picturing him fucking you relentlessly into it. “What’s up with your face dumbass?” Bakugo suddenly asks and the question makes you jump about a foot in the air, warmth filling your cheeks as you realize you’ve been caught mid-fantasy. “Nothing is up with my face!” you defend and you hope it’s the truth because you can feel how much wetness has pooled in your panties already. Bakugo rises up and stalks towards you and you can’t help but feel like prey, stepping backwards away from him until he’s got you crowded up against the wall. The similarity to that day in the alley is not lost on you and it only makes things worse. “What’s running through that head of yours princess?” he asks and the nickname is too much, a breathless curse slipping past your lips unbidden. You don’t have much time to be embarrassed by how obviously flustered you’re getting because one of Katsuki’s hands finds your waistband as if on instinct at the sound of you breathless. “If you don’t stop I won’t be able to hold back,” he admits and you can tell by the flush in his cheeks that he means it. “I thought you don’t sleep with people you like,” you reply with bated breath. “You’re the exception,” he growls out, pressing closer before seeming to think better of it and closing his eyes, breathing deeply through his nose as if trying desperately to control himself, before adding “if you want to be.” “God yes,” you reply and no sooner have the words left your mouth is he pressing a bruising kiss to your lips as if he’s been quietly suffocating and you’re the last bit of oxygen left.
Katsuki tugs you away from the wall and you go easily, allowing him to push you towards your mattress until you’re lying down on it and he can comfortably hover over you, his lips barely leaving yours the entire time. It doesn’t take long to get you both down to your underwear, the entire process a blur. “You’re such a fucking mess for me princess,” Bakugo practically purrs as he runs his fingers along the damp fabric of your panties. Your hips buck up into the attention eagerly as you nod your agreement at the statement. “Yea, it’s only for you,” you tell him breathlessly and it might’ve been embarrassing if not for the way it draws a deep, satisfied growl from Katsuki’s chest his mouth dropping to your neck and then your chest and working further and further down. “Think you deserve a better apology then I gave you in the car,” he says suddenly looking up the length of your body to find your eyes. “What do you mean?” you ask with what little breath you have in your lungs. “I’ve always been better at doing shit than talking. You thought that apology before was good just wait,” he grins up at you cockily and it already has your stomach doing somersaults even before his teeth find the waistband of your panties and start tugging them down your legs. The moan you release at the sight is completely unfettered as your already dripping wet pussy clenches desperately around nothing. Katsuki is nothing if not a tease so even once he’s done with your panties he doesn’t immediately head to the main course. He lavishes attention on your inner thighs, leaving countless hickeys in his wake but no matter how much you whine and squirm he shows no signs of moving his mouth to where you really want it. “Katsuki,” you finally whine desperately. “What is it princess?” he asks and you can feel him smirking against you, the bastard. “I don’t think apologies are supposed to be teasing like this,” you pant. “Oh really now? You got something to say about my apology princess?” Bakugo asks, the smirk sliding away. “I think you’re not much better at this kind of apology than spoken ones.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“I didn’t realize my princess was such a whore. You want my mouth that bad? You want to cum that bad?” Katsuki asks and there’s an edge to his voice you’re pretty sure means trouble for you but you nod anyway. “Please Katsuki.” “Well if my princess wants to be a greedy fucking slut then so be it,” he agrees in that same lethal tone before diving in to devour you with an intense voracity you’re unprepared for. You moan loudly, hands grasping hard onto the blankets as he licks a hard swipe all the way from your twitching hole to your sensitive clit before pulling the nub into his mouth and sucking hard. He continues to lave attention on your sensitive clit even as he shoves two fingers into your dripping cunt and starts setting a brutal pace. Eventually he brings his free hand to take over for his mouth and stimulate your clit while he moves his tongue to join his fingers, stuffing you absolutely full. The attention is almost overwhelming and it isn’t long until you’re seeing stars, crying out Katsuki’s name. As you come down from your high you realize Katsuki is still pumping his fingers slowly in and out of you. “Katsu- ah!” you cut yourself off with a shout as he resumes massaging your swollen clit. “S-slow down,” you moan but if anything it only makes him move his fingers more aggressively. You grit your teeth, grasping the blankets even more tightly. “What’s wrong? Thought you wanted this,” he taunts as he pushes you into your second orgasm of the night.
Your entire body is tingling now, thoughts filled only with Katsuki, but he still hasn’t stopped and you’ve never been so overstimulated in your life. “Kas’ki ‘s too much,” you moan, eyes watering as he continues to relentlessly massage your almost painfully sensitive clit. “Don’t tell me my greedy little slut is done already. I still haven’t filled you up yet,” he teases you as he finally removes his finger only to line his dick up with your entrance instead. “Come on baby, I think you’ve got one more in you. Don’t you want to be good for me?” he asks and every inch of your body is saying that you should tap out but instead you find yourself nodding. “Use your words baby.” “Wanna be good for you,” you pant and the devilish grin you get in response has your heart practically in your throat. Slowly but surely Bakugo starts pushing into you. It’s so much, too much, stimulation but even as tears start to run down your cheeks you can’t bring yourself to tell him to stop. He curses under his breath as he finally bottoms out inside you, taking a moment to collect himself so it won’t be over too soon. As he starts moving he lavishes you with praise while all you can do is whine and whimper, alternating between barely intelligible expressions of how fucking good it all feels and broken cries of his name. “God you look so fucking beautiful like this. You know that? Fucking gorgeous,” he groans as his hips move faster and faster. You can tell when he’s close, his rhythm starting to get sloppier. “You ready to give me that third one baby? Can you do that for me?” he asks and you nod frantically, coasting along that razor thin edge between pleasure and pain. He leans down to kiss you then, swallowing each broken sound you make, as he rocks into you harder and harder until you’re both too strung out to do much more than pant and breathe into each other’s mouths. You topple over the ledge first but Katsuki isn’t far behind, your walls fluttering and clenching around him. You sob out his name one final time as praises pour from his lips about how perfect you were for him. “Knew you could do it for me princess. So good for me,” he sighs as he continues to paint your insides white.
When Bakugo is finally spent, he rolls over and practically collapses next to you. You both have to take a minute to recover, chests heaving as you try to catch your breath. Unsurprisingly, Bakugo recovers first so he carefully pulls back the covers before bringing them back up to drape over the two of you. “You good?” he asks, eyes scanning over your body as if trying to catalogue any damage he might’ve done. “More than good,” you sigh contentedly. “Good. C’mere,” he commands and you’re more than happy to oblige, allowing him to pull you against his chest. He carefully wipes the tears away from your cheeks before wrapping you more fully into his arms. “I take back what I said,” you mumble into his chest, exhaustion creeping in as the steady beat of his heart starts to lull you to sleep. “What are you on about now?” he asks, but the fondness in his tone belies the harshness of his words. “You’re fucking amazing at apologies,” you mumble. “Shut up and go to sleep dumbass,” he replies but you can practically hear the pleased smirk in his voice.
“Goodnight Katsuki.”
“Goodnight Princess.”
A/N: Apologies are difficult for Bakugo. He’s a very actions speak louder than words kinda guy. Also as funny a trope as the whole “forced to share one bed at a hotel/motel cause there are no other rooms” trope is, it’s more meaningful to me if there are two beds and they still choose to share.
Taglist: @pixelwisp @oliviasslut @larkspyrr @heroacadema @kozukatsuki @captaincyberqueen @undead-nyx @ineedtofocusfr @i-heart-fictional-boys
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cantquitu · 4 years
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Music Week, 15 December 2020
Tom Hull began writing as Kid Harpoon during the noughties indie boom, and is now surfing the crest of a wave, as the songs he helped shape on Harry Styles’ Fine Line smash have defined 2020. Joined by Universal Music Publishing Group’s Mike McCormack and manager Jeffrey Azoff, our Songwriter Of The Year reveals how he became a unique modern hitmaker...
I remember eating cold baked beans in Nambucca a few times,” says Tom Hull, shuddering at his music industry past. “I really didn’t have much money.”
In fact, says the songwriter and producer who goes by Kid Harpoon, “I was definitely skint.”
Music Week congratulates Hull on all this at the start of a conversation to celebrate his Songwriter Of The Year honour, immediately prompting him to remember Nambucca and his days scrabbling to launch his Kid Harpoon songs, a lively mix of folk, punk and pop.
“If someone had told me then that I’d be doing this, I’d have been fucking over the moon,” he says. “I was talking to someone the other day about when I got nominated for an Ivor Novello for [Florence & The Machine’s] Shake It Out. I was doing sessions for Dizzee Rascal and I remember telling Cage, his manager, that it was the first thing I’d been nominated for. He said, ‘You’ve got to be nominated for fucking loads, mate, before you win, don’t get too excited’.” I remember thinking, ‘What?’ And since then, I’ve been nominated for this and that and never won. The day after I had that conversation, Mike McCormack from Universal Publishing phoned me and said, ‘Music Week called, you’ve won Songwriter Of The Year’. I was like, ‘Fucking yes! I’ve won something. It’s taken eight years, but I’m stoked.”
Adele was emerging at the same time as Kid Harpoon, and Hull says that her manager, Jonathan Dickins, once told him, “You never learn from your successes, you only learn from your failures.” He also says that he and Caius Pawson at Young Turks have spoken about how they “made every mistake” with his record. But that often brutal experience – he was acclaimed and popular among his peers but never quite cut through – means he can relate to the artists he works with on a deeper level. He’s in tune with their anxieties. All of which makes his delight at hitting the big leagues all the more intense. Some of the Kid Harpoon classics have been dusted off, too: Stealing Cars made it onto a Gucci playlist, while Styles would play Riverside to arena crowds on tour before going on stage. “Harry thought it was funny,” Hull says, smiling.
Universal Music Publishing Group’s UK MD is equally made up that the spotlight is shining on a writer signed by A&R consultant Frank Tope in 2010. Mike McCormack helped renew the deal in 2017, and praises Tope along with Darryl Watts and Taylor Tester in the US for their part in what is now a worldwide success story.
“Tom is a brilliant bloke, I’m telling you, he was over the moon when I told him,” McCormack says. “In the scene he came from, his best mates were Adele and Florence, he watched them go off to stratospheric success and stuck to it, ground it out and believed in himself. Finally, 10 years later, he’s getting the recognition.”
In fact, McCormack likens Hull to Steve Mac – recipient of this honour in 2018 – saying, “The best guys never really get the recognition, they’re not self-publicists.”
Now, the time has come for Tom Hull to self-publicise the bejesus out of himself, and we have a riotous time as he does so. He’s on such a roll during a long, meandering conversation that he steps in something nasty outside partway through. Hull is up in Scotland with his wife and two children, and he’s having a wander while he takes Music Week through his story so far, and unravels his special bond with Harry Styles.
Hull has spent much of the past three years working with Styles, and went into the relationship with some serious experience behind him. Grammy-nominated in 2016 for Florence + The Machine’s What Kind Of Man, he has worked with a range of acts including (deep breath) Jessie Ware, Calvin Harris, Haim, Shakira, Skrillex, Lily Allen, Years & Years, James Bay, Mabel and Shawn Mendes. Indeed, Mendes’ Wonder album was one of Hull’s primary 2020 projects. Like Fine Line, Wonder was completed with Hull at the epicentre of a small, secluded team. Clearly, Fine Line, recorded primarily in Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La in Malibu and Real World in Bath by Styles, Hull, Tyler Johnson and Mitch Rowland, has become a blueprint, a crystallisation of everything he thought he knew, backed by millions of record sales.
“It’s huge, it’s a defining moment for me,” he says. “I’ve always known that writing as part of a project is a big thing in what I do because it gets the most out of the artist and out of me. It’s digging in with the artist and discovering things. I don’t like to think that I’m very dominant in the studio like, ‘Do this, do that, do this’. I work with people and find what makes them special and unique.”
Hull worked on Styles’ debut, but Fine Line was his first full album project since his own. And now he’s done a similar thing with Mendes, more will follow.
“In the past, I’d found that you’d write songs and, if someone else was producing them, they might not quite get the vision you had with the artist and things could take a wrong turn quite easily,” he says. “It was big for me to bring everything that I’d learned to work with Harry on helping his project come together in a way that was like, ‘Right, we’ve got this, it’s something exciting.’ It feels like a bit of a watershed moment, I’ve found what gets the most out of me and it feels quite seamless.”
Seamless is a nice fit for Hull’s style. Earlier this year, pre-lockdown, he went for a coffee with Mendes, “Just to see what happened”, and before he knew it they were in his home studio. He’d barely blinked and they were in New York, writing more songs, and then, after lockdown hit, they were isolated together working on Wonder in Carmel, California.
This, says Hull’s manager Jeffrey Azoff, illustrates his magic. “Part of what makes him such a good songwriter and producer is that he’s such a good person that you’re immediately disarmed, no matter who you are,” he says. “You get a sense of comfort and respect right away. It’s more than nice, he has a calming effect on anybody he’s around.
“I’m telling you, that’s his secret sauce,” Azoff continues. “His ability to disarm and make you fall in love immediately has carried him a long way. When you combine that with his talent, I’m not surprised to see him doing so well.”
Azoff, who took Hull on as his second client after Styles and keeps the songwriter’s diary calm to give him time and space to focus, also makes a point of praising his talent. “I’m never in the room, but everyone tells me he’s a virtuoso,” he says. “I’ll ask who played guitar on a certain track or who played drums on a different one, and it’s funny how often I’ve cited a different instrument and Tom’s been the one playing it.”
Hull’s success is no surprise to anyone who knows him, but events in 2020 have conspired to make it feel pre-ordained. He, Styles and their team have shown that a record made in isolation can be a smash hit, and its singles went on to fly in a year when isolation became a theme for the whole world. This year, too, Music Week research showed that the number of songwriters behind the Top 100 UK hits had decreased from 5.34 in 2018, to 4.77 in 2019. All of which reflects a move towards more thought, more time and fewer collaborators – cornerstones of Hull’s approach. His work this year has also borne that out. We can’t reveal who else he’s been working with (the names are massive), but we can tell you that Hull has been ‘bubbling’ in a safe way with different artists all year.  
“I’ve found a real stride in doing projects as opposed to jumping around doing lots of little things,” he says. “The thing that gets the most out of me and people I work with is when you take the anxiety out of having to deliver something in two days and you commit to a week or longer. Then you can experiment, you can be cynical and try something more commercial if you want, or you can go really left. It’s lots more fluid. For me, 2020 has been more conducive to that. Normally, everyone’s got a million things going on. As much as I love working like that, it doesn’t always pan out.”  
Hull’s sensitivity meant that he didn’t get involved in the rush for remote sessions earlier this year. “To me, there’s a lot of emotion involved and artists have a lot of anxiety, maybe something to get off their chest or something they’re insecure about, I find that hard to figure out via Zoom,” he reasons.
He has a group of close friends in the game, songwriters of all levels, and their group chats this year have revolved around the idea of artists, songwriters and producers reconnecting with their roots. “At the beginning of Covid, I was working on some production stuff, but I was also re-learning songs, on piano and guitar,” he says. “There’s been a lot of that going on and it’s sparking a more music-centric writing process, as opposed to listening to the radio and reacting to what’s happening right now.”  
Hull says that, instead of rushing around obsessing over the latest chart smash, songwriters are starting to take their time. “I’ve had artists this year coming in saying, ‘I’ve just learned this…’ And you’re like, ‘Woah’,” he says. “It’s easy to get reactive to the current music, but because the world slowed down, people looked backwards at things they grew up with and worked on their skills. The real exciting stuff will be when the world resumes, people will get back into that busy thing, but they will have reconnected.”
Harry Styles understands how to connect with Kid Harpoon better than anyone. Last year, during rehearsals with his band, Styles spoke to Music Week for our cover interview and his comments about Hull and the musicians who made Fine Line hit home all the more now. “There’s a language where if I describe what I want something to sound like, they know how to make it happen, which I think is really priceless,” he said. “It’s pretty rare these days to have a producer or writer who cares about your album as much as you do. It creates a thing where it’s about the album being the best it can be, rather than songwriters’ cuts.”
Once again, we circle back to the idea of Tom Hull’s methods and values standing apart. More than just a watershed for him, Fine Line is giving writers everywhere plenty to think about.
“It’s a hard market [for pop] at the moment, you have a lot of hip-hop on the radio and it’s changed with Covid,” says Hull. “If you look at records like Taylor Swift [Folklore] and Shawn, it feels to me like more of those big pop artists are looking to explore where they came from and what got them excited about music. I definitely saw that with Shawn and you can hear it with the Taylor record. Artists are going back to their roots and working with fewer people.”
For McCormack, the story is quite simple. “Sometimes there’s a bit of a demarcation between songwriter and artist, a career songwriter can sometimes not just have that empathy that someone who’s been an artist has,” he says. “Because Tom tried very hard for a very long time to be a success on his own terms, he can completely understand what an artist is going through. Harry was really brave to go down that road and Tom was brave to commit his last three years to making it work. Most publishers and songwriters work on the basis of, ‘If I work on a load of projects, I’ve got a lot more chance of success’. He’s decided to put all of his eggs in one basket, and look at the result. It’s been an extraordinary success.”
For Hull, his favourite Fine Line moments are those that chime with the very reason he ever picked up an instrument or wrote lyrics in the first place (plus the “glorified lads’ trip” he and Styles took to Japan to write songs, one of which he says may yet see the light of day). He takes us back to the kitchen in Shangri-La, sunshine streaming in and Styles on an acoustic guitar, strumming the three chords of Golden.
“We were just singing the main, ‘Da, da, da’ melody doing harmonies,” he says. “For everyone that’s around music, sometimes when you play, you can’t help but grin because it just feels so good. We were all smiling, drinking tequila and singing Golden. It was one of those moments where, you think, ‘If all else fails, this is worth it because this is fun, this is what music should be about and this is how records should be made’. That’s how you make records. You can arrive at one, finish at six, hammer it out and get great songs that way, but for me, those memories and the culture we had was the special thing about it. I don’t know if that made it stand out, but that’s how we did it and I think it translated.”
Given the all-encompassing level on which Fine Line has resonated, it’s surprising to hear what Hull says next. “Harry’s like a brother to me, he’s been such a big part of what I do, behind the scenes as well,” he explains. “I learned so much from him about how to be brave. Our big thing was, if it fails and everything tanks, if you make a record that you absolutely love, then you still have something you will stand by. The danger is if you try and make one that pleases some people, and it tanks, then you don’t like that record.”
The fact that the album turned platinum ahead of its first birthday in a year that saw the campaign soar without the boost of a world tour shows their instincts were right. Crucially, it also leaves Hull with the world at his feet.  
“The first time I met him, you could see the determination and the charisma,” says McCormack. “He’s so likeable. Artists just love him. This is the beginning of him being a proper global, premier league writer and producer.”
“I couldn’t be more proud of Tom,” says Azoff. “He’s gaining confidence and he’s getting even better, which is scary.”
Our story finishes back in Nambucca, where Hull first started. He’s come rather a long way since. “It’s a totally different ball game,” he smiles. “Now, I’m trying to pull something out of someone and using all my experience to help a vision come together. I get to do things I like, I’ve done things with Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Florence, and written pop songs with Harry that have gone massive. It’s that fulfillment of jumping into new things. It’s a journey of figuring out what you’re good at, and I feel I’m getting closer to that now. It seems to be kicking in… And it definitely pays a lot better!”
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sugarcomatosed · 3 years
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i love your stories so much!! and was wondering if you can give some writing tips perhaps? 🥺👉🏻👈🏻
Breaking this up into sections for you + putting it under a cut cause I went overboard. 😅
General Writing Tips
These work for both academic and creative writing.
Make an outline.
It doesn't have to be a formal one, but having at least a general idea of the scenes you want to include is helpful. If I know my fic is going to be a longer one (like Don't Hesitate was and my current WIP is), I break down the larger story beats i want to hit on a piece of paper or my iPad.
It's good to know what you're planning to do, in a any piece I usually have a single specific scene I want to do and depending on what it is, I might either just do the scene I want to or turn into something longer.
Draft, draft, draft.
I cannot stress the importance of going through and reviewing your work. This is a big part of any sort of writing.
Your first idea isn't always your best idea. As you work on a piece you might find your original idea is holding you back, focus shifts! Don't be afraid to let your work change as you go. It's not always easy to let go of your original idea but if you find it's not working, you have to let it change. Sections will need to be rewritten, things have to be readjusted to fit with later sections. Reread for clarity while you're drafting and look to see if this makes sense to you, or reads well to you. If you can't follow it and you wrote it, chances are your reader can't either. Did you use the same phrase again and again? Find and search it on your doc to double check.
Sometimes you have to cut things you really like because they just don't contribute to the fic anymore. Save those bits and use them somewhere else!In a lot of my longer pieces I will write a paragraph, realize that's not where it should go and cut/paste it into another part of the doc because the pacing/scene doesn't make sense where I had it originally, but it works somewhere else.
If you're stuck, skip around, come back and then stitch the bits you have written together.
Don't Focus on a Word Count
This might be controversial, but I'm of the opinion just because something is longer does not make it better. Some works are short, and that's okay! I very rarely try to aim for a specific count of words unless it's for a prompt exchange or a personal challenge. I write till I feel the piece is done. Some stories require more words, some require less.
Don't Hesitate is a great example of this again, because all I wanted to do was a bittersweet first kiss fic, but jumping write into the kiss wouldn't get the full effect I wanted. Meanwhile, with Old Habits all I wanted to do was write dumb comedic kisses, we didn't need a 2k preamble.
Get Someone You Trust to Edit
My go to editor for the past six years or so is one of my good friends. She has edited everything from college papers to my fics for me before I post them to read for clarity, find any funky phrases or misspelled words I missed, and I do the same for her when she asks! A fresh set of eyes makes a world of a difference. Find someone to trade fics with or ask a friend! They might have good suggestions you never thought of, or be able to tell what you were going for when you don't even know yourself.
I also rely on my friends a lot to brainstorm and talk my ideas out before I start because it helps me think and figure out what I need. It's super common for me to text someone and say "im gonna spitball at you, that okay?" and then spend twenty minutes chatting through my ideas.
Have Reference Material
For my 13sar fics, I regularly go back and review/screenshot videos of the dialogue to make sure I am staying consistent with story events, character nuance and small details. You don't have to go crazy, but it is really helpful to have your source material to go back to and check yourself against. In non creative writing I always had a pile of papers highlighted with my own notes on the margins.
Take Breaks/Pace Yourself
Know your own limits, and if you are working and working on something and it's not coming out leave it alone and come back to it. I'm really bad at this personally because when I get an idea in my head I want to see it through but sometimes you gotta step back! It's not healthy to keep working on things and overwork yourself. Stretch, get up go for a walk.
Write What You Want to Write
Don't focus on what people want to read. Focus on what you like. Find a topic, a scene, anything that you are passionate about and the rest will follow. The only time I write fic for other people is when I am writing for a friend. Even prompt requests I only take open ended ones, if I am not interested in writing it it's not gonna happen. I know it's super hard and I get really anxious sometimes about letting people down now, or worrying people won't like something but then I step back and remind myself this is a hobby and I'm doing it for fun.
Play to Your Strengths
You shouldn't try to write like me, you should try to write like yourself. Find what skills you have and use them to your advantage!
I can't give you a step by step list to write like me, because nobody in the world has my background! We're all unique. Everything I've listed so far I know because I'm not a beginner anymore! I'm in my twenties and have come from a strong academic writing background.
I took on an intensive course load in high school, and then went onto college for a sociology degree. I very rarely had test based finals and at the end of each semester would have five 10-15 page papers to submit. Straight up some of my skills come from having read and studied the works of anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I am not saying you should read anthropology/sociology texts. Unless you like that sort of thing lol
I also have 6+ years of theater experience (acting & directing), I use this all the time for my writing. When I think about a scene, I think about how I would work through it as an actor, how the character would move, and how would things read to an audience. The GOTE ("Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and Expectation") method of acting by Robert Cohen is really useful hear if you want a more technical breakdown of what I mean by that.
This leads to a lot of what we called "business" in acting, doing small tiny things while you talk or move around on stage to give the sense you're a real human. I don't have to think or try on these sort of things because they're in my skill set already!
Things I do Personally
As in, these are not transferable skills this is just the stuff I do while working on projects.
Find a Vibe™️
I come into any fic with usually a goal I want to hit, a line of dialogue or something I want to capture. Just like, the general idea of a feeling a song even if the lyrics don't match up. Make a mood-board, a playlist, just find something you wanna do. It's less about the actual words on the page and what you're aiming to do.
Look to things that inspire you
Don't Hesitate got written because I wanted to write a fic that captured the same vibe as a scene in Macross Frontier, where two characters have a bittersweet kiss before the final battle and that scene still has me fucked up six years after watching it.
My current WIP is doing the same thing but with the song All I've Ever Known from Hadestown. Two characters working through loneliness, the sudden feeling of falling in love and the frustration that feeling can bring on sometime.
I don't plagiarize them word for word, but these are scenes that inspire me! I also patchwork quilt ideas together. Using Don't Hesitate again, I also ended up pulling from a bunch of shoujo anime, Toradora, Sailor Moon, Yona of the Dawn, Princess Tutu...specific scenes I enjoy to blend and create something new.
Goof Off While You Write
I name my documents stupid things, I write dumb placeholder dialogue or vague sentiments like "insert better word here", I make memes when I'm struggling and roast myself and my predictable tastes.
I spent twenty minutes texting a friend Juro's name with different letters spelt out and then the "fuck your chickenstrips" vine saying it was Juro during destruction. Just have fun with it!
Listen to J-POP On Loop for Hours at a Time
i am not kidding I do this all the time. Perfume, AKB48, anime idol osts, Sailor Moon's OPs/ED, vocaloid songs. I like technopop and Japanese is good because it usually doesn't distract my brain since I only know random phrases, but still know what the meaning og the song is.
I love music, it helps me vibe out.
Thank you so much for enjoying my work ;o;
I hope this is useful to you in some way! I'm so sorry it's so long winded but I am overly thorough and love to teach people ;w;
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THE MASTERPIECE: CHAPTER 5/5
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Pairing: Modern!IVAR x Reader x Modern!HVITSERK
Spotify playlist: here (only for those who like latin urban music)
Warnings: strong language
Words: 2432
a/n: OK dear readers, I hope you get finally all the answers you needed. I hope you enjoy it as much as @deans-ch-ch-cherrypie and I did.
Summary:
Ivar and Hvitserk had always prided themselves in being the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. They had a comfortable life full of everything they wanted: houses, cars, money, and the most beautiful women. And with all of that came the security of always having the upper hand. But what happens when a bewitching girl from Ragnar’s past arrives into their lives claiming his fortune?
“So, you don’t remember half of the night?”
“Only bits and pieces,” Ivar admitted, with a mortified countenance.
“Wow. Well, I’m happy that you finally fucked yourself into oblivion, little brother. Welcome to the club.” Hvitserk’s grin made Ivar’s lips twitch in annoyance. “Anyway, I just called you here to say that this morning I gave her that painting that dad loved so much and she said she would give us our inheritance back in exchange. We should be fine now.”
“Wait a moment. You did what?!” He could feel his blood boiling with every question that he shot at his sibling. “Couldn’t you tell me that at home? And would you like to explain to me why you didn't consult it with me first, you idiot?” Ivar stood up fast as a lightning bolt. One of the bones in his leg gave a considerably loud creak but he masked the pain by wrinkling his face in anger.
People started staring at them but as always, Ivar didn’t care what others thought of him.
“I don’t get it. What’s this frenzy about?” Hvitserk was pretty proud of the deal that he had sealed with Y/N and he currently felt embarrassed by Ivar’s behavior. “Please sit down, Ivar.” He spoke softly avoiding his eyes.
“No! Shut up and listen to me! In that fucking picture you gave her there was a key hidden behind the frame. It opened up a locker or a box, I don’t know! But something valuable for sure! Father put it there so no one could find it. I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone about it. I thought we could take the painting with us if our plan to talk to her failed and she left us without any money. She wouldn’t notice it anyway. Father must have stored a lot of important papers and expensive things somewhere. Now that we are one step closer to being poor, they wouldn’t be a bad thing to have.”
“But how did she know it was that painting for sure?”
Ivar looked like he was putting together some clues inside his brain. “Wait a second…” His expression fell in an instant and he knew himself to be the biggest fool. “I think- I think she drugged me...”
“Druggedyou?!” Hvitserk’s olive eyes narrowed.
“Yeah. The second time we met. I remember feeling very strange after she served me that wine and she started asking questions about father. Then the rest of the night passed in a blur.”
“That makes no sense. Y/N asked me for that painting before she drugged you.”
“Well, we still don’t know how, but she knew our father at some point... Maybe she remembered that Ragnar liked it and I was the idiot who told her it had a key in the back...” Ivar offered the best explanation he could think of. His teeth clashed together in anger.
“At this point,” Hvitserk rubbed his forehead with exasperation. “I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter how she knew. All that matters is that she probably beat us to that locker and took everything that was inside.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Ivar found it uncomfortable to ask Hvitserk that question because he truly didn’t want to know.
“Last night. She slept in my room.”
“Meaning you slept withher,” Ivar emphasized and rolled his eyes.
Hvitserk ignored his bitter comment.
“You know there’s something I still don’t understand.”
“And what’s that?”
“If you guys slept around so much, she could’ve easily taken the key when you weren’t looking. Why did she have to wait a whole fucking month?”
Hvitserk straightened up in his seat and looked at Ivar with a strange expression. “Uhh... Well... Before Y/N left this morning, she told me something...”
Ivar raised an eyebrow urging him on. “Go on.”
“I mean...” Hvitserk exhaled and grimaced slightly. “You really wanna know? I know you fell for her, brother...”
“Didn’t you?” Ivar deflected swiftly with a quick scoff.
Hvitserk shook his head calmly. “No. She was just great in bed. Although I can’t really blame you.” His tone was much softer than before.
Ivar glanced at the dirty dishes in front of them and wished with every bone in his body that Hvitserk would remove his eyes from his face so he could bask alone in his shame. “So, what did Y/N say?”
“She told me that she liked me a lot but that it was time we stopped seeing each other for good. Maybe... maybe she wasn’t ready to let go before?”
“Are you implying that she didn’t leave before because she fell in love with your pathetic ass?”
“Maybe... I don’t know.” Hvitserk heard Ivar's choice of words very well but he didn’t insult him back. He rarely took the bait anymore.
The fact that Hvitserk’s voice hid no hint of arrogance or pride anymore only made it worse because that meant he was being sincere.
“Or maybe...” Ivar spat back with animosity. “Maybe she was just a sadistic cunt that enjoyed playing with us until she got bored.”
Hvitserk shrugged. “Perhaps...”
“In any case, we need to find out where she is now.”
“So, call her!”
Ivar put a hand inside his pocket and clawed around until he produced his phone. He dialed the number and waited, fingers trembling with rage.
“You have reached a number that has been disconnected. If you feel this is an error, please check the number and try again.”
They exchanged a look, seemingly reading each other’s minds. Ivar threw a bill on the table and they hurried to get to their car.
Yet it was useless. They searched for her in her house but she was nowhere to be found. The neighbors swore they hadn’t seen her so they rushed to the car again until they reached their home. Even though they knew that technically, ever since Y/N signed those papers, everything they owned had ceased being theirs, nobody prepared them for the sight of the bare walls of their house.
There was a big crew working diligently to empty the mansion of all the furniture and art pieces. Their clothes hung from movable racks and every utensil, down to the most insignificant silver fucking spoon was packed in boxes.
“Ivar and Hvitserk Lothbrok?” A stuck-up-looking guy with a load of documents in his hand addressed them.
“Yes?” Ivar answered since his brother was too occupied staring ahead as if he’d fallen into a trance.
“Ms. Y/N Y/L/N sold your house and will be keeping all the profits since, as you know, the property belongs to her. You can come to collect your personal belongings at this warehouse tomorrow. Along with the deed to your new house.” He produced an ivory-white card with the name of his company on it.
“H-house? What house?” Hvitserk finally pulled himself together for long enough to stutter out a question.
“As this document states, this house is located in...” The real estate agent ran his index finger over the paper searching for more details. “...in Kattegat.” He stated plainly.
Ivar couldn’t believe his ears, his voice raising considerably high. “You mean, father’s abandoned farm in the middle of fucking nowhere? The one that smells like cow piss and pig shit?”
The man raised an eyebrow sternly. “Oh, so you already know the house, that’s great. Y/N specified that the cottage was to be your only part of the inheritance.”
Ivar took a shaky step back in surprise, his legs wobbling in the process when thinking about how that nasty hateful woman had managed to utterly destroy their lives in less than a month.
“Now, could you kindly exit this estate? You’re trespassing on private property. Thank you.”
~~·······~~
Y/N’s POV
Dear diary,
I realized last night that I had been avoiding taking the painting because I was afraid of what I could find. But it was time to face the truth and unfortunately, I also had to say goodbye to my boy toys.
It took me less effort than I expected to find that locker. I made my way to the biggest bank in the city and once there, everything was easy. I just had to show them the key and the inheritance certificate and they led me into a room where the big bulletproof box was set in front of me. It felt cold and lifeless. The metal walls of the room with no windows made me feel like a caged criminal. Some probably would say that of me, but I’m only reclaiming what I’m owed.
My restlessness was evident in the way that my hands were trembling and my legs felt spongy.
I popped the lid open and I saw that the box was almost empty. Just a few stacks of money, some pieces of jewelry, and two yellowed letters.
One was already open and I recognized my own handwriting. But the other envelope was brown and the writing had faded, barely readable anymore but I would recognize Ragnar’s handwriting anywhere in a pinch.
I took the first letter and eyed the familiar words.
~~·······~~
Dear Ragnar,
I hope you are doing well. I saw the contact details from your company in an ad. So, I decided to take a chance to tell you everything that’s on my mind since you disappeared overnight and I never heard from you again.
I know about Aslaug and her rich daddy. I know marrying her must’ve seemed like too perfect an opportunity to pass up but you owe me an explanation, Ragnar.
You know very well that all that you achieved at first was because I used my magic skills in your favor. When no one else believed in your dreams, you turned to me for aid. Don’t forget that it was me the one who helped you build your empire before you turned greedy and married that pale emaciated chick. And don’t forget that I was the one who satisfied your every addiction, with my herbs and with my body, just the way you liked it.
You once promised me that you would never leave me. That you would always be by my side.And then you failed me.
I’ll never forget how you told me that I was your Valhalla on earth.
So, I’m waiting for you, my love.
With love,
Y/N
~~·······~~
I wrote that letter years ago, just a few months after he left me and I’m still as empty as I was back then. My tears fell one by one on the sheet of paper and the letters in them dissolved. Reading these lines again hurt. I felt the same sorrow as I did then until my tears of sadness turned into tears of anger.
Then I blew the dirt away, read my name at the top of the second letter, and started reading with eager eyes and an accelerated heart.
~~·······~~
Dear Y/N,
I never forgot about all of those words. You were the best thing that ever happened to me but you have to understand that I had to think of things to come. I wanted my future sons to be the emperors of a world that I would carve for them. I wanted the Lothbrok name to go down in history. And Aslaug was a necessary part of it.
But I regret all of it now. I see that perhaps it’s best if they make their own path. I regret ever leaving you and I’m sorry for the pain that I caused you. That’s why I’ve decided to leave everything to you once I die, in the hopes that I can right the wrongs I did and that you will someday forgive me. Please, treat my sons kindly. They don’t deserve to pay for my mistakes. I know you will do the right thing and not leave them in complete destitution.
My heart will always belong to you, Y/N.
All my love,
Ragnar
~~·······~~
Ragnar thought that by leaving me all of his money I would forgive him for his abandonment. But even though I love him, I could never forgive him. He was a simple and humble farmer, but greed corrupted him; it made his soul fester inside. And when he left, my heart turned to ashes. I thought I could feel something for Hvitserk but I was wrong. It’s impossible for me to love anyone ever again.
Ragnar is still a coward to me. He just used me to get high, or whenever he needed a good fuck. He exchanged me for the pretty daughter of some wealthy art collector who would help him get access to the highest corners of society. In my book, that could only mean that he never cared about me at all.
He chose to discard me like a used doll as if he hadn’t spent the longest days in my bed, consuming every intoxicating herb and exotic potion that I put in front of him, and loving every second of it. Ragnar fucked the best whenever he was high, and lucky for me, in those days, he was always high.
I played the same trick on the boys I used on Ragnar. Seeing my naked body and perfectly rounded breasts always got him in the perfect mood and he could only focus on me, forgetting about everything around him.
He never wanted his new family to know about us because I was the one supplying him with his drugs and his good luck. But he never saw me as a necessary part of his life. I don’t understand why I had so much faith in him. How could I be so stupid?
Ivar and Hvitserk deserve to suffer. Since I can’t make Ragnar bend over in agony, they will pay in his place. I will call my lawyer and by the time they get home, they will be out in the streets.
I will never regret any of the things I did. They had to be done. Unfortunately, I will be too far away to see the stupid look on their faces when they realize that our old muddy farm, where Ragnar and I used to live when we were younger, is the only thing they will get to keep. Hard work and misery are the only things they will know from now on...
My name is Y/N, and this is the story of how I ruined the Lothbrok dynasty.
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harrytheehottie · 4 years
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I remember eating cold baked beans in Nambucca a few times,” says Tom Hull, shuddering at his music industry past. “I really didn’t have much money.”
In fact, says the songwriter and producer who goes by Kid Harpoon, “I was definitely skint.”
Music Week congratulates Hull on all this at the start of a conversation to celebrate his Songwriter Of The Year honour, immediately prompting him to remember Nambucca and his days scrabbling to launch his Kid Harpoon songs, a lively mix of folk, punk and pop.
“If someone had told me then that I’d be doing this, I’d have been fucking over the moon,” he says. “I was talking to someone the other day about when I got nominated for an Ivor Novello for [Florence & The Machine’s] Shake It Out. I was doing sessions for Dizzee Rascal and I remember telling Cage, his manager, that it was the first thing I’d been nominated for. He said, ‘You’ve got to be nominated for fucking loads, mate, before you win, don’t get too excited’.” I remember thinking, ‘What?’ And since then, I’ve been nominated for this and that and never won. The day after I had that conversation, Mike McCormack from Universal Publishing phoned me and said, ‘Music Week called, you’ve won Songwriter Of The Year’. I was like, ‘Fucking yes! I’ve won something. It’s taken eight years, but I’m stoked.”
Adele was emerging at the same time as Kid Harpoon, and Hull says that her manager, Jonathan Dickins, once told him, “You never learn from your successes, you only learn from your failures.” He also says that he and Caius Pawson at Young Turks have spoken about how they “made every mistake” with his record. But that often brutal experience – he was acclaimed and popular among his peers but never quite cut through – means he can relate to the artists he works with on a deeper level. He’s in tune with their anxieties. All of which makes his delight at hitting the big leagues all the more intense. Some of the Kid Harpoon classics have been dusted off, too: Stealing Cars made it onto a Gucci playlist, while Styles would play Riverside to arena crowds on tour before going on stage. “Harry thought it was funny,” Hull says, smiling.
Universal Music Publishing Group’s UK MD is equally made up that the spotlight is shining on a writer signed by A&R consultant Frank Tope in 2010. Mike McCormack helped renew the deal in 2017, and praises Tope along with Darryl Watts and Taylor Tester in the US for their part in what is now a worldwide success story.
“Tom is a brilliant bloke, I’m telling you, he was over the moon when I told him,” McCormack says. “In the scene he came from, his best mates were Adele and Florence, he watched them go off to stratospheric success and stuck to it, ground it out and believed in himself. Finally, 10 years later, he’s getting the recognition.”
In fact, McCormack likens Hull to Steve Mac – recipient of this honour in 2018 – saying, “The best guys never really get the recognition, they’re not self-publicists.”
Now, the time has come for Tom Hull to self-publicise the bejesus out of himself, and we have a riotous time as he does so. He’s on such a roll during a long, meandering conversation that he steps in something nasty outside partway through. Hull is up in Scotland with his wife and two children, and he’s having a wander while he takes Music Week through his story so far, and unravels his special bond with Harry Styles.
 
Hull has spent much of the past three years working with Styles, and went into the relationship with some serious experience behind him. Grammy-nominated in 2016 for Florence + The Machine’s What Kind Of Man, he has worked with a range of acts including (deep breath) Jessie Ware, Calvin Harris, Haim, Shakira, Skrillex, Lily Allen, Years & Years, James Bay, Mabel and Shawn Mendes. Indeed, Mendes’ Wonder album was one of Hull’s primary 2020 projects. Like Fine Line, Wonder was completed with Hull at the epicentre of a small, secluded team. Clearly, Fine Line, recorded primarily in Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La in Malibu and Real World in Bath by Styles, Hull, Tyler Johnson and Mitch Rowland, has become a blueprint, a crystallisation of everything he thought he knew, backed by millions of record sales.
“It’s huge, it’s a defining moment for me,” he says. “I’ve always known that writing as part of a project is a big thing in what I do because it gets the most out of the artist and out of me. It’s digging in with the artist and discovering things. I don’t like to think that I’m very dominant in the studio like, ‘Do this, do that, do this’. I work with people and find what makes them special and unique.”
Hull worked on Styles’ debut, but Fine Line was his first full album project since his own. And now he’s done a similar thing with Mendes, more will follow.
“In the past, I’d found that you’d write songs and, if someone else was producing them, they might not quite get the vision you had with the artist and things could take a wrong turn quite easily,” he says. “It was big for me to bring everything that I’d learned to work with Harry on helping his project come together in a way that was like, ‘Right, we’ve got this, it’s something exciting.’ It feels like a bit of a watershed moment, I’ve found what gets the most out of me and it feels quite seamless.”
Seamless is a nice fit for Hull’s style. Earlier this year, pre-lockdown, he went for a coffee with Mendes, “Just to see what happened”, and before he knew it they were in his home studio. He’d barely blinked and they were in New York, writing more songs, and then, after lockdown hit, they were isolated together working on Wonder in Carmel, California.
This, says Hull’s manager Jeffrey Azoff, illustrates his magic. “Part of what makes him such a good songwriter and producer is that he’s such a good person that you’re immediately disarmed, no matter who you are,” he says. “You get a sense of comfort and respect right away. It’s more than nice, he has a calming effect on anybody he’s around.
“I’m telling you, that’s his secret sauce,” Azoff continues. “His ability to disarm and make you fall in love immediately has carried him a long way. When you combine that with his talent, I’m not surprised to see him doing so well.”
Azoff, who took Hull on as his second client after Styles and keeps the songwriter’s diary calm to give him time and space to focus, also makes a point of praising his talent. “I’m never in the room, but everyone tells me he’s a virtuoso,” he says. “I’ll ask who played guitar on a certain track or who played drums on a different one, and it’s funny how often I’ve cited a different instrument and Tom’s been the one playing it.”
 
Hull’s success is no surprise to anyone who knows him, but events in 2020 have conspired to make it feel pre-ordained. He, Styles and their team have shown that a record made in isolation can be a smash hit, and its singles went on to fly in a year when isolation became a theme for the whole world. This year, too, Music Week research showed that the number of songwriters behind the Top 100 UK hits had decreased from 5.34 in 2018, to 4.77 in 2019. All of which reflects a move towards more thought, more time and fewer collaborators – cornerstones of Hull’s approach. His work this year has also borne that out. We can’t reveal who else he’s been working with (the names are massive), but we can tell you that Hull has been ‘bubbling’ in a safe way with different artists all year. 
“I’ve found a real stride in doing projects as opposed to jumping around doing lots of little things,” he says. “The thing that gets the most out of me and people I work with is when you take the anxiety out of having to deliver something in two days and you commit to a week or longer. Then you can experiment, you can be cynical and try something more commercial if you want, or you can go really left. It’s lots more fluid. For me, 2020 has been more conducive to that. Normally, everyone’s got a million things going on. As much as I love working like that, it doesn’t always pan out.” 
Hull’s sensitivity meant that he didn’t get involved in the rush for remote sessions earlier this year. “To me, there’s a lot of emotion involved and artists have a lot of anxiety, maybe something to get off their chest or something they’re insecure about, I find that hard to figure out via Zoom,” he reasons.
He has a group of close friends in the game, songwriters of all levels, and their group chats this year have revolved around the idea of artists, songwriters and producers reconnecting with their roots. “At the beginning of Covid, I was working on some production stuff, but I was also re-learning songs, on piano and guitar,” he says. “There’s been a lot of that going on and it’s sparking a more music-centric writing process, as opposed to listening to the radio and reacting to what’s happening right now.” 
Hull says that, instead of rushing around obsessing over the latest chart smash, songwriters are starting to take their time. “I’ve had artists this year coming in saying, ‘I’ve just learned this…’ And you’re like, ‘Woah’,” he says. “It’s easy to get reactive to the current music, but because the world slowed down, people looked backwards at things they grew up with and worked on their skills. The real exciting stuff will be when the world resumes, people will get back into that busy thing, but they will have reconnected.”
Harry Styles understands how to connect with Kid Harpoon better than anyone. Last year, during rehearsals with his band, Styles spoke to Music Week for our cover interview and his comments about Hull and the musicians who made Fine Line hit home all the more now. “There’s a language where if I describe what I want something to sound like, they know how to make it happen, which I think is really priceless,” he said. “It’s pretty rare these days to have a producer or writer who cares about your album as much as you do. It creates a thing where it’s about the album being the best it can be, rather than songwriters’ cuts.”
Once again, we circle back to the idea of Tom Hull’s methods and values standing apart. More than just a watershed for him, Fine Line is giving writers everywhere plenty to think about.
“It’s a hard market [for pop] at the moment, you have a lot of hip-hop on the radio and it’s changed with Covid,” says Hull. “If you look at records like Taylor Swift [Folklore] and Shawn, it feels to me like more of those big pop artists are looking to explore where they came from and what got them excited about music. I definitely saw that with Shawn and you can hear it with the Taylor record. Artists are going back to their roots and working with fewer people.”
For McCormack, the story is quite simple. “Sometimes there’s a bit of a demarcation between songwriter and artist, a career songwriter can sometimes not just have that empathy that someone who’s been an artist has,” he says. “Because Tom tried very hard for a very long time to be a success on his own terms, he can completely understand what an artist is going through. Harry was really brave to go down that road and Tom was brave to commit his last three years to making it work. Most publishers and songwriters work on the basis of, ‘If I work on a load of projects, I’ve got a lot more chance of success’. He’s decided to put all of his eggs in one basket, and look at the result. It’s been an extraordinary success.”
For Hull, his favourite Fine Line moments are those that chime with the very reason he ever picked up an instrument or wrote lyrics in the first place (plus the “glorified lads’ trip” he and Styles took to Japan to write songs, one of which he says may yet see the light of day). He takes us back to the kitchen in Shangri-La, sunshine streaming in and Styles on an acoustic guitar, strumming the three chords of Golden.
“We were just singing the main, ‘Da, da, da’ melody doing harmonies,” he says. “For everyone that’s around music, sometimes when you play, you can’t help but grin because it just feels so good. We were all smiling, drinking tequila and singing Golden. It was one of those moments where, you think, ‘If all else fails, this is worth it because this is fun, this is what music should be about and this is how records should be made’. That’s how you make records. You can arrive at one, finish at six, hammer it out and get great songs that way, but for me, those memories and the culture we had was the special thing about it. I don’t know if that made it stand out, but that’s how we did it and I think it translated.”
Given the all-encompassing level on which Fine Line has resonated, it’s surprising to hear what Hull says next. “Harry’s like a brother to me, he’s been such a big part of what I do, behind the scenes as well,” he explains. “I learned so much from him about how to be brave. Our big thing was, if it fails and everything tanks, if you make a record that you absolutely love, then you still have something you will stand by. The danger is if you try and make one that pleases some people, and it tanks, then you don’t like that record.”
The fact that the album turned platinum ahead of its first birthday in a year that saw the campaign soar without the boost of a world tour shows their instincts were right. Crucially, it also leaves Hull with the world at his feet. 
“The first time I met him, you could see the determination and the charisma,” says McCormack. “He’s so likeable. Artists just love him. This is the beginning of him being a proper global, premier league writer and producer.”
“I couldn’t be more proud of Tom,” says Azoff. “He’s gaining confidence and he’s getting even better, which is scary.”
Our story finishes back in Nambucca, where Hull first started. He’s come rather a long way since. “It’s a totally different ball game,” he smiles. “Now, I’m trying to pull something out of someone and using all my experience to help a vision come together. I get to do things I like, I’ve done things with Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Florence, and written pop songs with Harry that have gone massive. It’s that fulfillment of jumping into new things. It’s a journey of figuring out what you’re good at, and I feel I’m getting closer to that now. It seems to be kicking in... And it definitely pays a lot better!”
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moonlit-imagines · 4 years
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A Bug’s Life
Peter Parker x Lang!reader
warnings:
a/n: i love this concept and also anon u r sweet and i just found out theres a marvel supervillainess named dragonfly but since i havent heard of her until today im using that name!
prompt: anonymous: “Can you please write a Tom Holland!Peter Parker x Female!Reader where the reader is the older sister of Cassie Lang (Antman’s daughter) and her and Peter fall in love with each other. ✨ Thanks so much! 😘”
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Okay, so when you were a kid, you had always dreamed of being a superhero. You never thought you’d know your idols personally, though. You see, when your dad, Scott Lang, came back from prison, a lot changed. Suddenly, he was a superhero and no matter how much he didn’t like it, you wanted to be apart of it.
“Y/N, no, please. You’re just a kid!” You dad argued with you in the presence of your “uncles.”
“Scotty, I think it’d be good for her, you know? Like, she’s so smart and she’s got a lot of talent! I think she could learn a thing or two from Hope and Dr. Pym, right?” Uncle Luis egged on.
“Yeah, dad! Me and Hope have already been experimenting with some stuff and, I mean, Mom’s been bugging me over getting into some extracurriculars...” You reasoned with him.
“Yeah, y/n, like photography club or soccer, not being a crime-fighting bug!” Scott pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, but when he looked back up, you were giving him puppy eyes. “Don’t...don’t do that.”
“Please, dad? I just wanna follow in your footsteps. You’re my hero.” You pouted your lip and didn’t break eye contact with him until he let out a load groan.
“Your mom is going to kill me.” He mumbled while you celebrated with Luis.
You became known as Dragonfly, Ant-Man and Wasp’s sidekick partner. It wasn’t long before you were affiliated with the Avengers and other heroes from across the galaxy.
The first time you stepped foot into the Avengers Compound was unbelievable.
“If only I could tell eight-year-old me how cool she’d grow up to be...” You whispered as your dad led you through the place. You were specifically requested for recruitment following a backround check that proved that you were qualified to train as a junior scientist! The program had just been started thanks to the young Spider-Man, one of the many heroes you had met before and would actually get to know after today.
“Alright, kiddo, it’s not too late to back out.” Your dad told you.
“It’s gonna be fine, dad! You know you can visit me anytime and I’ll come to see you and Cassie every chance I can get.” You gave him a warm smile to let him know it’s alright.
“I know...I’m just gonna miss you, you know?” He shrugged, but before the conversation could continue, you were greeted by Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk.
“Welcome! Nice to see you again, Scott.” Bruce shook your dad’s hand, then turned to you. “And it’s wonderful to finally meet the girl behind the mask.” He shook your hand.
“Nice to meet you, too, Doctor Banner.” You fit your small hand into his abnormally large (and green) hand.
“I’ve heard great things about you, Y/N. I’m excited to see your talent up close.” Dr. Banner chuckled. “I told Peter to meet us here, he probably forgot.” He walked to the wall and pressed the speaker button to the intercom. “Peter, can you meet us at the South Entrance?”
Moments later, a teenage boy came barrelling towards the three of you.
“Sorry! Sorry I’m late.” He apologized profusely. You giggled at the disheveled appearance of him. His hair was sticking up in the back and his flannel was half-tucked into his pants. “I’m Peter!” He stuck his hand out for you to shake. “Peter Parker. Spider-Man.” You took his hand gladly and shook it.
“Y/N Lang. Dragonfly.” You introduced yourself. “It’s been a while since we’ve fought together.” You pointed out. “Maybe that’s a good thing.” Peter’s eyes furrowed at that comment. “You know, not fighting.” You added.
“Oh, yeah, definitely!” Peter agreed.
“So, let me guess: you overslept?” You referenced Peter’s bold look and he quickly fixed anything noticeably wrong to him. Bruce and your dad were just observing the chemistry between you and Peter, exchanging entertained glances.
“Hi! I’m y/n’s dad, Scott. Ant-Man.” Scott interrupted as he waved to Peter.
“Oh! I remember you. You got really big in Germany and I had to web your knees until you fell down.” Peter brought up old memories and you covered your mouth to stop from laughing.
“Yep! That’s me.” Scott eyes got slightly wider. “So, I really wish I could stay, but I have a meeting with a client tomorrow morning that I can’t miss. Alarm company doesn’t run itself, you know?” Silence. “Anyways, uh, y/n.” He motioned you a bit closer so you could say goodbye. He crouched down and grabbed both your shoulders. “I love you so much and I am super proud of you. This is an awesome opportunity, kiddo!”
“Yeah, I know.” You said in a sort of disappointed tone.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asked.
“I’m just gonna miss you.” You frowned.
“Come here.” Your dad pulled you into a tight hug. “I’m gonna miss you, too.” The hug lasted at least sixty seconds before he pulled away and kissed your forehead. “Okay, now here’s your bag, go do some science!” He gave you your suitcase. “I love you, Pumkin.”
“Love you, too, dad.” You smiled, almost holding back tears. You really didn’t want to say goodbye to him, but it’s apart of life. Scott watched as you, Peter, and Banner walked down the halls of the Compound. Bruce and Peter were showing you your new room!
“What’s crime like on the West Coast?” Peter asked you. “I’ve only fought crime on the East Coast. And Europe. And Space.”
“Crime is the same coast to coast. It’s crime.” You shrugged.
“Well, that’s cool. Sorry, I’m not good at small talk.” He chuckled.
“Peter, you’ll be able to show y/n her room and give her a little tour, right?” Bruce asked as he slowed down.
“Yeah, no problem.” Peter nodded.
“Alright, great. I’ll be in the lab if anyone needs me.” Bruce walked away and left the two of you to it.
“Okie doke.” Peter clapped his hands together. “Well, this is the hallway.” Is exactly how he just began the tour. The Compound was actually, surprisingly, bigger than you expected. “And that’s the training room, there’s the kitchen, your room has it’s own bathroom, but there are other bathrooms all over the place. There’s a shopping list on the fridge if you ever have any requests, but fruit snacks are banned since I ate two full boxes in one day and threw up.” Peter gave that wonderful anecdote.
“Wow, that’s...impressive?” You tried to come up with something.
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘disgusting.’” Peter and you shared a laugh as you approached your new room. He opened the door up and you stepped into the biggest bedroom you’d ever seen. “It’s taken some getting used to, you know, the big room, the big bed, the huge bathroom, all of it.”
“This is amazing.” You mumbled.
“Yeah! And Bruce said we can go shopping and decorate the room any way you’d like. I just got my license, so I’d be cool with driving.” Peter proposed.
“Yeah, I think that’d be pretty cool.” You agreed as you threw your suitcase onto the bed and started unpacking. “Uh, I’m kind of hungry...know any places to eat around here?” You started putting shirts on hangers and filling up your huge closet. You noticed Peter hadn’t answered your question yet, so you turned around to see what he was stalling for. He was just watching you. “Am I really that interesting?” You joked.
“What?” Peter blinked. “Oh! Yeah, sorry, yeah, there’s a few places around that we can go to. Assuming you’d want my company, of course. It’s your choice, really.” Peter rambled and you approached him.
“Duh, I gotta get to know my housemate better!” You pulled Peter out of the room and in a random direction. “Am I going the right way to the garage?”
“No.” He answered and you quickly changed directions. You were oddly comfortable with Peter already, and he wasn’t exactly against it. You were super sweet to him and you two have a lot of shared experience. Teen heroes trying to make a difference. And bug-themed.
Peter drove you to his favorite (and closest) restaurant for dinner, and on the way, he played his music on the playlist. Left Hand Free by Alt-J played through the speakers as you sang along.
“You like this song?” He asked and you nodded without a pause in singing. “Good, so do I. You have a really good voice.” He complimented, which definitely made you blush.
“Thanks, now sing with me!” You nudged his arm leaning on the console and resumed your singing.
“I don’t really sing.” Peter chuckled and saw you roll your eyes, then sighed. “Fine. You win.” He began to join you in song.
Well your left hand’s free, and your right’s in grip. With another left hand watch his right hand slip towards his gun, woah woah woah...
“You’re not too bad, yourself, Peter.” You told him as he pulled into a parking spot at the restaurant. The two of you walked in together and the waitress immediately recognized Peter.
“Hey there, Peter! Good to see you!” She greeted and grabbed two menus. “I see you’ve brought a date.” She raised her eyebrows and smirked.
“Oh, uh, she’s not—” Peter stuttered before you took over.
“Yep, it’s our first date! I’m y/n.” You introduced yourself.
“Well, it’s nice to see him with someone. Follow me, you two.” She let you over to a table and told you she’d be back for drinks in a minute. As soon as she left, Peter turned to you.
“When were you going to tell me this was a date?” Peter cocked an eyebrow with a crooked smile to match it.
“I’m sorry! I hope it’s okay I told her that.” You innocently replied.
“It’s more than okay.” Peter leaned forward. “I’m happy to be your date. We are moving a bit fast, though.”
“Are you sure? This is actually pretty slow for people our age. By now, they’d probably be confessing their love for one another.” You joked and he rolled his eyes.
“You are so right!” He snorted. “Jeez, it’s been so long since I’ve talked to someone my own age!” He sighed. “What about you?”
“I hang out with adults all day long. The only kid I hang out with is my little sister. Do you have any siblings?” You asked him.
“Only child.” Peter answered. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Cassie. She’s sweet but it’s kind of weird coming back after the Blip and seeing her all big and everything.” You made random hand gestures to demonstrate that she was bigger.
“I know, right! I have classmates that I saw as infants that are now bigger than me!” He explained. The waitress came back and got you your drinks and took each of your orders. Back to the chit-chat. “Okay, now tell me, what got you into the hero-game?”
“Okay, well, my dad had just gotten out of prison, right?” That sentence itself made Peter choke on his drink. “Oh, calm down, it was a non-violent offense. He actually exposed corruption, that’s why I look up to him.” You explained.
“That’s good, that’s good. I’m glad. Go on.” He took another sip from his drink.
“Yeah, so then he robbed Hank Pym, who actually wanted my dad to rob him, then a bunch of ants broke my dad out of jail after he got arrested again for stealing from Dr. Pym, then my dad became the new Ant-Man and took down some bad guys, his new girlfriend, Hope, who is Dr. Pym’s daughter, took a liking to me and started showing me the ropes, so me and my Uncle Luis convinced my dad to let me make my own suit. Then Dragonfly was born.” You explained in full detail. “What about you?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, I got bit by a radioactive spider that was being experimented on in a lab, then I had a short-lived wrestling career, then my uncle who raised me died and I became Spider-Man.” He smiled and your jaw dropped.
“Holy shit, are you okay?” You asked.
“Oh, yeah, I’m good.” He admitted as you guys recieved your food. “So, anything else I should know about you?”
“I dunno.” You shrugged. “I like Star Wars.” You told him.
“Me too!” Peter exclaimed.
“No, you don’t. My dad told me Spider-Man called AT-AT’s ‘walking-thingies.’” You shook your head and laughed at the thought of that.
“Okay, so I’m not a huge fan, but our next date can be a Star Wars marathon?” Peter proposed.
“Yes!” You agreed a bit too enthusiastically. Peter smiled and the waitress brought an ice cream sundae with two spoons to the table.
“It’s on the house.” She told you two with a wink.
“Looks like we’re sharing.” You grabbed a spoon and got to work. Peter got chocolate all over his chin. He was kind of a messy eater. “You’ve got a little something...” You grabbed a napkin and wiped his chin clean.
“Thanks.” Peter picked his spoon up and moved it towards you. “Have you tried any of the brownie yet?” You took a bite of what he offered.
“Wow, that’s amazing.” You spoke through your mouthful.
“I hate to brag, but I make a pretty mean batch of brownies.” Peter bragged.
“You’re gonna have to prove it, Pete.” You wiped your face off and cleaned up your spot a bit. “You ready to get back to the Compound?”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s get going.” Peter left some cash on the table to pay the bill and walked you out to the car. The car ride back was filled with jokes and even more stories about your super-adventures. “So, you’re telling me that the first time you shrank, you cried?”
“Yes! Dude, it was an emotional experience. I’m telling you, I was not prepared for something so cool.” You defended yourself. “Now tell me something embarrassing about your powers.”
“I got stuck to a bathroom stall at school and they thought I was skipping class so they sent an aide and I was crying out of fear.” He admitted with pity in his voice.
“Oh, my god. That’s awful.” You giggled and grabbed his hand. “Have you recovered yet?”
“No, unfortunately not, but the handholding sure does help.” Peter squeezed your hand tighter.
“I’m glad.” You smugly replied and closed your eyes to listen to the music. You were kind of exhausted from traveling, so you knew you’d pass out the moment you hit your bed. Soon, you arrived at the Compound and Peter kissed your cheek to get you up.
“We’re hoooome.” He said in a singsong voice as your eyes fluttered open. “Sorry, that was weird.” He apologized, but you grabbed his face and pulled him in for a long kiss. More like a brief makeout, but potato, poe-tah-toe.
“You’re really cute, you know?”
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monabela · 4 years
Text
hey uhh..... advent denest!! this is just the first chapter, every day from now until christmas there will be a new one featuring a christmassy/wintery prompt for that day, but I won’t bother you with that here--check out the ao3 link! :D (maybe I’ll get some other chapters on here too, just to remind everyone, but I’ll think about that)
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Snowfall Music
pairings/characters: Denmark (Søren)/Estonia (Eduard), mentioned Finland (Tuomi)/Sweden (Torbjörn), Sealand (Peter), Ladonia (Lars), Vietnam (Vinh), Czechia (Kveta) word count: 4782 summary: Eduard has enough to occupy him this December without having to look after his young cousins, or trying to organize events on his radio show, or having to field strange phone calls day after day, but it seems the end of the year has it out for him.
And somehow, Søren manages to brighten every dark day. Hopefully, he'll stick around for a while.
also on AO3 - further chapters posted there!
--
“Today on Radio 8, I have some pretty special guests on the show. Now, this was a surprise for me as well—” Eduard opens the audio channels of two of the other microphones in the studio— “but I’m excited they’re here, so welcome to my cousins, Pete—”
“Once removed,” Lars interrupts, raising his eyebrows and wrinkling his freckled nose as if he thinks Eduard is a bit dim. He probably does, come to think of it. The boy is just at that age.
“Alright,” he amends anyway, “my first cousins once removed, Peter and Lars. They’re my first cousin Tuomi’s sons. Is that better?”
“Yes,” Lars replies imperiously. Peter is rolling his eyes, and Eduard has to stifle a laugh while he turns on some background music.
“Their parents are on a trip out of town for the week, so Peter and Lars have been entrusted to Uncle Eduard for the time being—first cousin once removed Eduard, I know, Lars, but I’ll start saying that when you start calling me that.”
“I will.”
“I don’t doubt it. Why don’t you two introduce yourselves, and then you can think of a song you’d like to hear.” He prays Tuomi hasn’t managed to instill too much of his taste in music in his sons just yet, because although they’re ostensibly a rock station, he doesn’t think his listeners are quite ready for metal that heavy.
“I’m Peter,” Peter all but shouts into his microphone, so Eduard lowers his volume slightly. “I’m twelve, and I, ah, I play hockey, I guess?”
That sounds about right.
“And Lars?”
“Well, I’m Lars, I’m also twelve, and I have a podcast.”
“A podcast, really? What’s it about?”
“School and things,” he replies, and nothing else.
“That’s great,” Eduard enthuses anyway, because he does think it is. “You must be excited to visit the studio, then. Would you like to work in radio someday?”
Peter is shaking his head quite frantically and making slashing motions with both hands, but the damage is done, as Lars huffs, wrinkling his nose again and leaning in close to the microphone.
“Radio is very different from podcasts. You just talk around the music.”
Eduard blinks. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
Eduard looks helplessly over at his production assistant, who seems uncharacteristically amused by the whole exchange, her eyebrows twitching ever so slightly.
“Where did you get that sass from?” He knows it must be Tuomi, unless his husband, Torbjörn, has very deeply hidden depths. And, before Lars can actually reply, “Peter, what should we listen to? What music do you like?”
Lars is opening his mouth, but Peter forestalls him, yelling, “Imagine Dragons!”
So Eduard starts a jingle as he lines up an Imagine Dragons song from the station’s playlist and an older rock song to play after that, pushing the slides for the microphone channels down. When he looks at Lars, the boy is just glancing away, attempting to seem disinterested in everything going on by crossing his arms and pressing his lips together. Eduard shakes his head fondly as he scrolls through some of the messages people have sent the show, including some asking if his cousins will help him judge his weekly dumbest pun contest, which he doesn’t imagine will benefit the already low bar for that one, so that’s perfect.
When he asks the boys about it, Lars starts to say something undoubtedly disparaging about how his podcast never has puns, but Peter quickly interrupts again. Eduard is around them enough that he knows this has been their usual behavior for the past few years, and more often than not, the brothers remind him strongly of himself and Tuomi at their age. They always were more like siblings than cousins, and when their older cousin Erzsébet was asked to babysit, she never seemed inclined to stop them.
Granted, he wasn’t doing podcasts when he was twelve, but he does remember using the house phone to call the local radio station multiple times until his parents started threatening to take the phone bill out of his allowance, and then how was he going to buy CDs? The radio show hosts actually wondered what happened to him after a couple of days without word and his parents had to call in to explain. It’s a fond if embarrassing memory.
The show continues in a slightly messier fashion than usual, mostly due to Peter’s attempts to interrupt every single sentence his brother starts to say and Lars stubbornly talking over him, but it’s fun. Eduard reminds himself to make a compilation or something to give Tuomi and Torbjörn when they get back home.
He lets Lars pick a song as well, as his afternoon show nears the end of its first hour. While the mildly surprising requested obscure progressive rock plays, he becomes aware of movement out of the corner of his eye.
Turning, Eduard huffs a laugh when he spots the sheepish-looking freckled face peering through the studio’s windowed door.
“Boys,” he says, ignoring that Lars just glares at him for daring to interrupt his very intent listening, “looks like your uncle finally showed up.”
Peter’s face lights up when he sees the man on the other side of the door, waving enthusiastically. Søren waves back, face splitting in a grin. Although he is Torbjörn’s brother and not a cousin, he doesn’t bear much more resemblance to his brother than Eduard does to Tuomi. He’s tall, but not as tall as Torbjörn is—or Eduard, for that matter—and his eyes are a darker blue pronounced by nearly-black eyebrows that don’t match his coppery hair at all. Eduard has always thought of him as not handsome necessarily, but definitely interesting, and he’d be lying if he said he minded having to look after his cousins with the man.
They’re not close, but he and Søren have spent some time together, albeit mostly when Tuomi and Torbjörn needed someone to look after their sons for a while.
Now, Peter is moving his hands in a flurry of signals Eduard can’t make much of, except that he points at him at the end, and Søren is quickly signing back, his eyebrows jumping wildly.
“He can come in, you know,” Eduard tells Peter, slightly bewildered. He ignores the annoyed look his production assistant is giving her soundboard. At least, he thinks it’s annoyed. It can be hard to tell, with Vinh.
Peter dashes to the door to let in his uncle, who ruffles the boy’s unruly blond hair, waves at Lars—who ignores him—and grins at Eduard with a sheepish edge to it.
“Hey,” he says, “thanks so much for looking after ‘em! Sorry I couldn’t get there in time. Hope they didn’t cause too much trouble for you.”
“Lars is having loads of fun,” Peter declares, then proceeds to duck out of the way when Lars throws a wad of paper at his head. Eduard shrugs at Søren.
As Lars’s song ends, a commercial break begins, and Vinh wanders away to grab some tea and probably gossip about him with the other hosts, so Eduard puts his headphones down and turns his attention fully to Søren. The man is dressed in the same leather jacket he always seems to be wearing and a T-shirt, but doesn’t appear to be cold in the slightest. He has stuck both hands into the pockets of his jacket, but he still moves them wildly when he speaks. A backpack is slung over one shoulder.
“Thanks again. I really couldn’t get out of work, so I’m glad you could take the boys to yours.”
“Of course, no problem.” Eduard pushes his glasses up. “We did have fun, right, boys?”
Predictably, the response is lackluster, since Peter and Lars are too busy swatting at each other with Eduard’s papers.
“I promise we did,” he tells Søren a little forlornly, receiving a full laugh in response, blue eyes glittering in the studio’s bright lights and crinkling up at the corners.
“One day, they’ll learn to appreciate us, Eduard.”
The dubious expression he pulls in return must be funnier than he imagined, because Søren laughs again, extracting a hand from his jacket to clasp his shoulder. He smells pleasantly like the winter air outside, and like hair gel.
“I aspire to help ‘em keep as many secrets from their parents as possible, so they’ll be forever in my debt.”
“You have to wonder if that’s worth incurring Tuomi’s wrath.” Eduard turns back to his soundboard and patches the newsreader in from another location.
“I can take Tuomi.”
“I think that’s your brother’s job.”
Søren makes a strangled sound that might be a laugh and that makes Eduard grin, shaking his head.
“Are you staying for a while? The boys have a pun contest to judge, and I’m sure my listeners would like to hear from you.”
“Sure, sounds great,” he says, his grin softening surprisingly. “I just gotta ask you to keep the background music to a minimum, if you can.” He gestures vaguely at his ear, and Eduard remembers something.
“Right, you don’t hear so well, do you?”
“Practically deaf without my hearing aids, kind of a bummer when you’re on a radio show, I imagine.” He smiles, his eyes crinkling up.
“That’s why pa taught us sign language,” Peter pipes up. “Dad is so bad at it. Uncle Søren, I’d like it if you stayed.”
“Sign language,” Eduard repeats, because of course that’s what that was, but also, how has he never realized that before now? He’s more-or-less known Søren for over fifteen years by now. “Well, I’ll watch the music. Let me know if it still bothers you.”
Vinh returns just as the short second commercial break is ending, inclines her head towards Søren, who waves and does not seem the least perturbed by her lack of outward response, and they set off on the second hour of the show. Eduard lowers the volume of the background music to nearly zero, gesturing at Vinh to leave it.
“While we were away, my first cousins’ once removed actual uncle finally showed up, after he promised he’d pick his nephews up from school—”
“Hey,” Søren interrupts, “you’re painting me in a bad light here, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“It’s the light of truth.”
Astonishingly, Lars snickers at that. He apparently doesn’t care who gets made fun of as long as it’s not him.
“Well, he’s here now, so hello, Søren. He works for the same company my cousin does, so… Is it your fault that we’re saddled with these kids now?”
“Well, I did introduce their parents to each other, so I suppose…” Søren winks at Peter, who sticks his tongue out. “Hey, Eduard, I hear these two got to pick a song to listen to. Do I get a go at that?”
Eduard laughs. “No, no. You need to do a better job of picking them up from school for that. Maybe next time. Actually, I think we’re overdue for some Christmas music. It’s December, after all!”
Peter crows triumphantly. Søren just grins, shaking his head at Eduard, who shrugs in turn, amused.
The hour goes by fairly quickly. Søren animatedly asks the boys questions about their school day during songs that even Lars answers sometimes, and Vinh doesn’t seem to mind him, which is high honor.
By the time the host of the early evening show has arrived and is setting up her stuff while the last song of Eduard’s show plays, he has received quite some messages asking if his cousins or their uncle, who, according to one of his frequent listeners, ‘sounds like a rad dude’, will return. He gestures Søren over from where he’s now already making merry conversation with his colleague, who looks more bewildered than anything.
“What’s up?”
“Well, it seems my listeners like you more than they like me.” Eduard gestures at his computer screen, and Søren grins as he leans over next to him to read the messages. He’s taken his leather jacket off. There are freckles on his bare arms too, and he is making Eduard cold just by looking at them.
“Y’know, the only way to make ‘em rethink that is if I do come back, ain’t it? I can just be an all-round terrible co-host.”
“I like that idea,” Eduard replies, before turning his microphone on as the song ends. “Bruce Springsteen and Born to Run, and it’s the end of another afternoon. Kveta just got here—” he turns his attention to the next host, who nods— “Kveta, anything we can look forward to today?”
“No family members, I think, unless anyone wants me to prank call my stepbrother again.” She laughs. “I’ve got some great new tracks, and there might be some live music going on.”
“Very nice.”
“Of course. So, Eduard, are your family members coming back?”
Søren, who is still next to Eduard, pokes him in the side, then leans further forward to speak into his microphone.
“I’ve always dreamed of being a radio star.”
“I think he’s coming back to usurp me.” Eduard turns to Søren, almost poking his nose into the man’s spiky hair. “He’s already using my mic. And who knows what Peter and Lars will do, they’re twelve.”
“I guess that’s true,” Kveta replies. “Wow, Eduard, he’s really up in your face. I feel like someone should be shielding your cousins’ eyes.”
Peter laughs from where he’s now standing next to Vinh, peering at her screen. Vinh raises her eyebrows at Kveta, who smiles, bites her lip, and looks away. Eduard has to smother a laugh.
“Again, they’re twelve. And I think it’s time we all start heading home, so I’ll leave you to it, Kveta. Please don’t bother your stepbrother too much.” He tilts his head towards Vinh, quirking his mouth, and Kveta glares but sounds upbeat as ever when she replies.
“Can’t promise anything. Now, next hour, we’re starting off with some new music, so stay tuned. Eduard will be back tomorrow afternoon at four.”
The commercial break starts, and Eduard sets about packing up his things, gesturing Peter away from Vinh so Kveta can talk to her a bit before her own production team takes over. Most days, he’d stay at the studio for a while, but he decides to go home right away—Lars and Peter left some of their school supplies at his house that they’ll probably need tomorrow. So, after saying goodbye to Vinh and Kveta, he herds his cousins and Søren out of the studio and towards the elevator, which they ride down to the parking garage. Søren swings his backpack around and pulls out a knit red scarf.
When they reach the garage, the man grasps Eduard’s shoulder as they exit the elevator, stopping him in his tracks. The boys are already racing towards the car, which Eduard also wouldn’t have taken on most other days, preferring to use the bus, but he figured it’d be smarter to take his cousins that way.
“Hey,” Søren is saying, “I biked here, so—”
“In this cold? Do you want a lift?”
He blinks. Scratches his temple.
“There’s a bike carrier on my car,” Eduard adds. “It’s pretty new, I—”
“Uncle Eduard!” Peter calls, waiting by the back door of the car. Eduard holds up a hand—while Lars reminds his brother it’s first cousin once removed Eduard—and pulls the key fob out of his bag to unlock the door for him, then turns back to Søren.
“It’d be no problem; I could take you all over to your place after we stop by my house.”
“We should do dinner,” Søren says, à propos of nothing, his face bright in the gloom of the garage. “Yeah? I owe you one. What kinda food d’you like?”
“I… No, it’s fine, they’re my cousins, it was no trouble at all! I don’t need anything, Søren.” Eduard laughs awkwardly, fiddling with his glasses and looking towards his car. Peter is peering over the backseat.
“We could take the boys out somewhere—this weekend, maybe, before Tuomi and Torbjörn get back. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy.” His hand, still on Eduard’s shoulder, squeezes gently with every other word as if Søren is trying to get his usual gestures across that way. Or, now that he thinks about it, those are probably actual signs. He smiles.
“Well, maybe. I don’t have a show on the weekends.”
“Yeah?” When he pulls his hand back, Søren’s fingers glance off Eduard’s neck. They’re warm. “I’m sure we can find something even Lars will approve of.”
That sounds dubious, but Eduard will hold out hope. Søren agrees to a lift, though, and they figure out how to put his bike on the carrier without difficulties before piling in and driving over to Eduard’s house.
Søren traipses inside after Lars and Peter, peering around curiously.
“Nice place,” he tells Eduard, who waits in the hall while his cousins collect their things. And, “Hey, you should stay for dinner at mine.”
“Søren…”
“Just sayin’, why eat here all by your lonesome when there’s plenty of food at mine? You gotta go there anyways.” At this, he pokes Eduard’s arm gently. “I mean, if you need some alone time after dealing with those two, I ain’t judging.”
Huffing a laugh, Eduard shakes his head. “I don’t know how Tuomi and Torbjörn do it.”
“Together, and with practice, I guess. Wanna come?”
Eduard contemplates it for a moment, looking into the living room and thinking about the leftover spaghetti he has in the fridge.
“Alright. Thank you, Søren.”
Søren smiles, softer than seems to be the norm for him, his cheeks dimpling gently. It’s like a little ray of sunshine on a December day.
“Boys!” he yells, clasping Eduard’s shoulder again when he winces. “Sorry. I’m no good at regulating my own volume.”
Lars is glaring at his uncle, having already been standing in the doorway to the living room with his school bag in hand and having heard him loud and clear.
“Sorry,” Søren repeats, this time signing it as well, putting his hands together as if in prayer.
“What?” Peter yells back from somewhere else. Seconds later, he skids into the hall, his sneakers leaving black marks on the wood floor. “What.”
“Eduard’s coming over for dinner. Got everything?”
They both nod, and Peter claps Eduard on the back as they all head back out. Søren laughs. He takes his scarf off when he gets into the car this time.
“Hey, are you allergic to anything? Or vegetarian?”
“I’m not, don’t worry.” He checks over his shoulder that his cousins have their seatbelts on, then starts his car. “I mean, I don’t eat a lot of meat these days, but I won’t say no.”
“Hm, yeah, that’s good. I oughta be better at that.”
With Søren’s instructions—gestures included—Eduard finds his building on the outskirts of one of the older suburbs easily. Søren tosses Lars the keys to his apartment and the boys run off while Eduard helps him get his bike down from the car, then waits while he parks it somewhere in the shared storage space.
“Alright! C’mon, Eduard, I don’t really want ‘em to break my kitchen down.”
After taking the stairs, they reach Søren’s apartment on the second floor. The door has been left open, and little lights twinkle around the frame.
“Hey!” Søren says, surprised, as Eduard curiously looks around the narrow hall. It’s much neater than he somehow expected, probably just because of Søren’s slightly chaotic mannerisms. Since he sees that his cousins have lined their shoes up by the door, he takes his own off as well, putting them next to Peter’s.
Entering the living room, he understands Søren’s surprise. Peter and Lars are rushing to set the table, apparently trying to outdo each other in speed. There is a tiny Christmas tree on a dresser that suddenly seems quite precarious.
“Be careful,” Eduard says, a little feebly, and Peter grins at him, his hands stacked with far too many plates for four people. It seems to be going alright for now, so Eduard leaves them be to seek out Søren.
“Uh, Søren?” He walks into the kitchen. It’s a surprisingly large space, and Søren already has some pans out and is reaching up for a cutting board. He doesn’t appear to have heard Eduard over the clattering happening in the living room.
“Are you sure about… That?” Eduard asks, when the man has a hold of his cutting board and spots him.
“What, the boys? They’ll be fine.” Something crashes loudly, and Søren pulls a rueful face at the door. “I jinxed it.”
“We’ve got it, Uncle Søren!” Peter yells.
“I’m gonna just… Hey, Eduard, can you get some water boiling while I go check on that?”
“Of course,” he replies, holding a thumb up. Søren pauses on his way out of the kitchen and smiles.
“Of course,” he repeats, moving his hand forward while he first holds just his pinkie up and then opens his whole hand. He does it again, slightly slower, and Eduard tries to replicate the sign. “Hey, great!”
Before he rushes off to assess the damage, he makes an okay sign with one hand.
Eduard fills a pan with water, assuming it’s for the rice Søren’s put on the counter, and turns the stove on to heat it. Søren returns quickly, carrying almost all of the plates Peter was hauling around.
“I think Tuomi and Torbjörn are raising ‘em too well,” he says, putting the plates away. “I don’t think I ever voluntarily set the table until I moved out. Can you slice these peppers?”
Eduard can, while Søren pulls some chicken out the fridge to fry it.
“They’re just hungry. Besides, didn’t they just break a plate?”
“Just the one, it’s fine. I definitely wouldn’t have done a chore if I was hungry. Gotta wonder how Torbjörn turned out so decent.”
“Keeping you in check?”
Søren laughs heartily at that, leaning his hands on the counter so that his shoulders shake visibly. He’s just in his T-shirt again, and Eduard can see now that it is merch of a band he plays sometimes and likes well enough, although he wouldn’t call himself a fan. He slices the bell peppers and some cauliflower, and smiles as a delicious spicy scent fills the kitchen a while later.
Peter sidles into the kitchen as Søren covers the pan to let it simmer for a while. He looks like he’s about to lift the lid again.
“Hey, hey, watch out,” Søren says, pulling his hand away. “That’s hot.”
“I just wanna see.”
He’s always done that, as far as Eduard knows. He can clearly recall a load of pictures of toddler Peter pressed up against the glass of ovens and washing machines and microwaves. He wonders when he’ll grow out of it, or if he’ll be like Tuomi, who still watches whatever he’s cooking for at least ten minutes, but then Tuomi is bad at cooking and might just be making sure it’s not going to explode.
Peter stubbornly crosses his arms and stares at the pan.
“Are you planning on staying there?” Søren asks.
“Probably,” he replies brightly, turning his head to address his uncle. Søren throws a fond smile at him and ruffles his hair before he can duck away.
“Eduard, by the way, I still think we should get dinner this weekend,” he says, pointing a finger at Eduard, who accepts that with a helpless gesture, mostly aimed in an amused Peter’s direction.
“Is that where you get that stubborn streak from?” Eduard asks him, and both Peter and Søren burst out laughing at that.
“It’s like you’ve never even met his parents!”
“Pa says no one is allowed to play Monopoly anymore.” Peter shrugs. “Not that I wanted to, Monopoly’s boring, but Lars got real upset about it.”
“Dad stole all my hotels!” Lars yells from the living room, sounding extremely indignant. Tuomi really is that sort of person, Eduard thinks, glancing at Søren in amusement, but Søren is narrowing his eyes and looking at Peter questioningly.
“Dad stole Lars’s hotels,” the boy relays, and Søren nods, now returning Eduard’s look.
“No Monopoly, got it. I’m sure I got some other games, though, we’ll check it out later.”
Peter grins, nodding. Eduard fears that both his cousins have inherited Tuomi’s competitiveness.
Dinner is good. Eduard is used to eating by himself, or sometimes with Vinh or another coworker, often the early afternoon duo—he tends to spend that time looking at his phone, or, in the latter case, trying to mediate yet another argument between them. It’s nice to have someone to talk to instead of just listening to music or reading news articles.
Søren still gestures wildly while he’s eating, cutlery and all, sometimes even half-forming signs, but he somehow manages to avoid flinging any food as he does so. He says it’s an acquired skill, then launches into a story about throwing soup into Torbjörn’s hair when they were teenagers that has Peter laughing so hard he nearly chokes and Lars, in turn, yelling at him not to throw up or he’ll kill him.
“I’m not,” Peter replies, glaring fiercely even as he breaks out in a hacking cough again, and then quickly signs something at his brother that makes Lars glare back. They definitely inherited that from Torbjörn. Eduard gently claps Peter’s back, and even though he doesn’t think it’s helping much, Peter eventually quiets. His breathing settles back into a normal rhythm, and he takes a large gulp of his water.
“Peter, don’t confuse your cousin,” Søren says, making a downward slashing motion with both hands.
“Sorry, Uncle Eduard,” Peter tells him. He picks his fork back up.
“It’s fine,” Eduard replies, after realizing Søren is talking about Peter using sign language, which he doesn’t understand. Lars, on the other side of the table, rolls his eyes and touches his hand to his shoulder, which makes Søren sigh and shake his head at him.
“It is difficult, Lars.”
Eduard gestures for him to leave it be—wondering as he does so what his gesture might actually imply—and Søren doesn’t say anything else about it, but he does grumble, later, while they load the dishes into the dishwasher, that he knows his brother made it a point that they shouldn’t use sign language to exclude anyone on purpose.
“Probably ‘cause our parents had the same rule,” he explains, leaning back against the counter and crossing his arms. His T-shirt stretches across his shoulders, quite nicely, Eduard thinks. “Although that was mostly ‘cause we were better at it than them. Still are, and my mom would still put me in timeout too, 39 years old or not.”
“That sounds fair. I really didn’t mind, though.”
“It’s the principle of the thing, y’know?”
There is a ruckus from the living room. Søren raises his dark eyebrows questioningly.
“They’re, ah… They’re arguing over which game they want to play.”
“Yeah, that seems about right. Are you staying longer or are you heading home?”
“I should probably be going, I like to do some preparations before I go to sleep.” He adjusts his glasses. “Thank you for dinner. You’re always welcome at mine, too.”
“Might take you up on that, Eduard.” Søren runs a hand over his hair and pushes away from the counter. “I’ll probably see you around before the end of the week, I need your help with those kids.”
“Like I said, their parents do it together too.”
That gets him a lopsided grin and a wink that he doesn’t know what to think about but quite likes anyway. Eduard goes to collect his coat and shoes, bids his cousins a good night before they both try to convince him their choice of board game is the right one, and heads out. Søren walks him down to the parking lot.
“I’ll see you, then,” he tells the man, biting his lip when he gets another lopsided smile.
“See you ‘round, Eduard.” He waves shortly when Eduard pulls up in his car, illuminated for a moment by the headlights as he turns off the parking lot. Still just in his T-shirt.
Back home, Eduard leans over to get his papers out of the glovebox, and his hand brushes against something soft. Blinking, he picks it up from the passenger seat and lets the soft wool run across his hands. Søren’s scarf, he realizes, and takes it inside with him.
He’s sure he’ll have the opportunity to return it soon enough.
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