#so now it’s like do i semi aggressively vague post about you again so that you know that i’m 100% not over you

[mcheung]

need a song for what i’m feeling rn bc what on earth is happening 😭

[youhavehitawall]

So I just wandered in off of the rest of tumblr (I saw a picture of a Cars-universe road train, and that got all my attention right away). What is this "Backwater Downs" thing?

anon i think you are my New Favourite Tumblr Person , so welcome! there is no way to explain this shortly so please settle in. (and excuse how long it took me to answer, i tried to pare this down as much as i could and failed)

Backwater Downs is one of several "expansion packs" to canon that i've been developing. It runs concurrent with the movies and also with "The Carbecue AU" (Carbecue focuses on expanding canon characters, while the Downs is for OCs) It takes place in one of the remote opal-mining communities, vaguely inspired by the Grawin opal fields near Lightning Ridge. BWD is significantly more remote, though, and relies almost entirely on a road train for their living resources! Aggie, or Augustus, is the road train in question. She’s a Kenworth C510, and she spent many years hauling hundreds of tonnes out of large pit mines further north, before “retiring” to the lighter work of transporting livestock and living goods through the outback. She’s found a home in Backwater Downs specifically, and often chooses to stay there in the wet season instead of returning to dock in Alice Springs. Her nickname “Aggie” refers to the machine used to separate opals from dirt and clay, which is what she does during her downtime there! She’s mostly very quiet, but she has a razor sharp wit and she uses her time on the road to study. She probably has like seventy university degrees now. The Downs has less than fifty cars in the region, most of which I've developed, but there are three guys i talk about constantly:

Regiment 'Reg' Blitzborough, a rusted out semi/racing coupe cross who grew up in the military with his father. Reg is intelligent and passionate, and the town appreciates his jack-of-all-trade work, even if he’s stubborn and annoyingly overbearing as well. He’s partially deaf from his service, and he has chronic pain from the mixup of heavy truck gear and lighter racer parts being incompatible. He also smells like diesel and old swampy water, and keeps a pleco in his cabin to keep the algae down. (he refills his cabin every year. Because he’s also stark barking mad.) His father Michael briefly retired in BWD when Reg was a bitlet, but has since passed. Michael had the disposition of a brick wall and the only thing he ever loved was his son. Reg has a small convoy of trucks that helped raise him and that he considers parental figures, but he’s withdrawn from them all since Michael’s death. He also has two siblings and two nephews, which he only found out very recently. "Ratchet" is a ‘58 Plymouth Fury with a Cadillac DeVille cross, and used to play both sides of the Law before being gravely injured in a high-speed chase. The resulting damage gives him some mobility issues and has rendered him mute, so he communicates in a bird-whistle version of Morse code, and a fairly vague version of sign language (cars do not have hands you see). He’s ironically verbose and has an excellent eye for detail, but often misses social cues and so comes off as bitchy or aggressive. He’s been accused of “maladaptive behavioural tendencies” and “post-traumatic stress disorder” but he’s not quite ready to accept that damage yet. He can have trouble distinguishing reality. Most days, he works for Leo Curbjumper in the “Club in the Scrub” (a real place!) as a waitress. He’s won most attractive BWD resident every year since first arriving, and has all the locals under his tires. He also has four brightly-coloured siblings that swore to kill him on sight if he ever set a tread in America again, and several nieces he's never had the chance to meet. "Austin" is a ‘51 Hudson Hornet and the official Health and Safety Manager for BWD. He lets Reg do most of his work, instead focusing on his massive archival project of pretty much everything to ever exist. He specialises in personal records - war diaries, stories told around the campfire, anything and everything. He’s a fantastic liar and good at keeping his mouth shut. Austin believes in the Story, and in Names, and things like the Soul. He has a very thick southern Minnesota accent, mixed with the dozen other places he’s lived. He’s quiet but competitive, cheerful, and infuriatingly stubborn, and his favourite animal is the turbo-chicken. He used to be part of Ratchet's family but the whole murder thing applies to him too. He can play the drums!

I'm going to stop myself here because otherwise it'll never end but thats the basics!!! (also sorry it took four months to answer, in my defense i thought it was only three weeks)

[fenristheorem]

My OC, Fenris

... and the Eldarya AU that she’s in, because I just can’t see her in the original Origins storyline with her differences from Guardienne/Erika. And I think my AU has some pretty interesting ideas. I’ll explain it after I introduce her.

Yea, I know, Fenris Theorem, Fenris, it all connects, huh? Hehe. I like the name, that’s all.

(This page is informational, so it’s written in a bit more of a note-taking fashion rather than a story fashion. It’s written in a very choppy manner but it’s comprehensible despite not having any stress on having it beautifully written.) 

This page just introduces you to my OC. I decided to create a page on her for the poll (now ended) because I think some people will really like small excerpts on her story with Lance, but obviously you need to know about her before deciding that for sure. You’ll notice that some theories I may have posted on Lance in the past are a part of this AU - these theories have been in my mind and I posted them only because I thought they could exist in the actual plotline (it’s where a lot of my theories come from, and then some ideas fit into the AU, and then some ideas could exist in the actual plotline as well based on what I observe), so this is where some of those theories come from.

For the poll - if anything, I would recommend reading the paragraph titled “*Her story in Origins (where many things are explained in moderation, because if I went in-depth I wouldn’t need to write stories on this):” above all else because that describes what I will be writing if the poll results shows that that’s wanted. Everything else is just extra information for you to know my OC and the AU better. The paragraph is at the bottom of the post.

Above all else, this is an AU, and a fantasy world. I like to try to give rationality and logic to a lot of things, so you’ll read a lot of me explaining things, but at the end of the day it’s all fantasy and can be perceived - and therefore approved or unapproved of - in a multitude of ways. If you like my AU but find it illogical in some ways, that’s no problem! Just enjoy reading about it if you enjoy the ideas within it. 😊

~ This is long so continue below the cut ~

A lot of this information can be a bit vague at first but it comes together when I explain the basic plot.

Her basics: She goes by Fenris but her actual name is Dakota. However, people usually call her Kota, or occasionally Ko (Fen is used later for Fenris, first by Ashkore / Lance, but later when she was discovered by the guard as well). She was 18 when she came to Eldarya via mushroom circle (like Guardienne/Erika). The guard test placed her in the Obsidian guard - she’s very happy with that outcome. Was in a relationship with Valkyon before leaving him for Lance (*explained later).

Physical Appearance: Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of her and nothing in Eldarya describes her and her clothing very well, so you’ll just need to imagine the physical features that I describe on Eldarya’s Guardienne sprite. Also, she’s pretty flexible with how she styles her hair and dresses, so I don’t think a single picture of her would describe her well.

Fair and light in skin tone, perhaps a slight tan-ish tone. Thin, but broad shouldered. She’s well-muscled (later on, less so when she first arrived), which gives her a bit of thickness, but not too much. Nicely curved. About 5 ft. 5 in. (167.64 cm). Dark hair, but not exactly black, with brown-hazel eyes. Her hair is medium-length and is usually braided in a multitude of styles. Her eyes occasionally glow a brilliant gold (explained under ‘abilities and genetics’ and ‘her story in Origins’).

Usually wears dark, ancient / tribal-like clothes (think Norse Vikings) with thin, form-fitting but strong armor around her forearms, lower legs (below the thigh starting from knees) and chest/midriff. She wears a good amount of red, blue, gold, silver or dark green clothing and accents with the black base for color. Usually nothing over-the-top, she likes to have her own unique style and express herself but doesn't like to draw unnecessary attention. Doesn't like most faux fur as it doesn't look nice in her opinion, but may wear some that she likes occasionally. Is more likely to wear real fur from hunted animals, but doesn't wear it too often. She wears a sword on her hip, and has a few semi-concealed daggers placed on her body (thigh, boot, torso) for quick use if needed.

Personality: She has a wide spectrum of how she acts depending on people, situations, what she knows, and her current mood. She's typically quite calm, and doesn't seek for trouble or drama, however, she does like to hear the recent news/gossip from around the guard; to stay updated on things, know what may effect her, try to think ahead and just for the sake of knowing. She's very curious and typically observes the situation around her, but in a very subtle way. Is a planner and likes to think ahead, and usually knows how to react to anything because of her observations and forward thinking. Around friends, she's very kind and welcoming. They can talk about anything to her and she'll keep her mouth shut - she has a good loyalty streak (but it does have a limit). However, she doesn't have any friends that are like family to her, but on the day she does find friends like that her loyalty will truly be endless. It's ride or die, and she'll always stand by their side. She has a major independent streak and can’t be around people for too long, otherwise she’ll crack and get a bit irritated more easily. She likes her alone time. In general, she's very cordial with people. Again, she doesn't like to cause unnecessary trouble or drama - she's had a rough past (discussed under ‘history’) and quickly shuts down anyone doing so in a professional but aggressive, don’t-argue-with-me sort of way. She can be harsh, cold and withholding - especially with people she genuinely dislikes - but doesn't like to act this way. On the note of people she dislikes- it's hard to get her to truly dislike someone, but it can be a bit easy as well. In general rule, as long as someone is conscious of the reality of the world around them and doesn't seek to cause issues, she's fine with them, but the instant someone starts continually spreading rumors that are clearly false, or acts (especially in a way that hurts others) solely in their selfish interests, or takes part in willful ignorance (purposely ignoring an issue that you know shouldn’t be ignored), she keeps note of that person and reminds herself to be wary of them in the future. They could be a source of trouble or misinformation that may need to be stopped, and she won’t be very forgiving. However, this is just a general rule, it doesn't always apply - remember she can change based on the situation and what she knows. She recognizes that sometimes people dislike things that are good for them, or like harmful things, and sometimes the villain is actually the hero, history and set rules are created by the winners and anyone against it is considered the villain, and sometimes you need to be cruel to be merciful. She's fully aware that sometimes the bad of life is good, and may defend that, but she's always sure to think long and hard about it before giving a decision like that. A lot of terrible things have happened to her, so she tries to avoid being a source of those terrible things for the world. She feels emotions very deeply and can be a bit impulsive, but fortunately she’s not typically hurt or gets others hurt due to her impulsivity. Again, she is very curious and observes things a lot, so she can usually get a good read on anything new she comes across and work from there, or she can use other information she knows and apply it to the situation. That being said, she won’t drag her friends or anyone else into her occasionally dangerous impulsive decisions. She’ll offer it if they’d like to join her, but she won’t pressure them. Their safety is their decision, and she’ll do her best to protect them although she can’t truly guarantee it. Being in the Obsidian guard, she can’t really condone anyone to risk their safety for fun, especially if it’s her idea. She has a good sense of responsibility when she works for what she believes in, and will sacrifice some of her comfort and fun making sure that she follows her responsibilities if needed. On the topic of her guard - when she first came to Eldarya and joined the Obsidian guard, she wasn’t too bad of a fighter upon basic training, but it was when she started training with Ashkore / Lance where her skills greatly improved until she was perhaps the best fighter in the guard, rivaled only by a few other warriors - including Valkyon. She’s not against helping others improve, but she’s very careful with what she tells the guard - if anyone knew her skills were due to Ashkore, she’d be in massive trouble and may be treated as a complete accomplice. She doesn’t like to lie unless truly necessary, so she’ll usually withhold lots of damning information, and she thoroughly thinks over everything she says, any possible answers to theoretical questions, how her words can connect with other things, and how it might be taken from someone else’s perspective, before revealing any information. Did I mention she’s very cunning and smart, especially after knowing Lance? She has prior knowledge in how to utilize sarcasm and wit, but that’s also improved after meeting Lance. 

She changes in time to be quite a bit more harsh and unforgiving when she starts working with Lance.

(For media reference, think of Lagertha from Vikings and Octavia from Netflix’s The 100. She’s a bit of a combination between the two, both in personality and appearance, although Octavia represents her a bit better in appearance.)

Abilities and Genetics: When she first came to Eldarya, she had no idea of her faery genetics. She never felt as though she belonged with humans and always felt that something was off, but she truly thought she was human genetically - until the guard had her take a test and realized she apparently had some faery blood in her (like what actually happened in the original plotline). She went a good while not knowing about what her genetics were, until Lance told her she was a dragon. She learned her abilities under his mentorship, and found that - to be more specific - she’s a shadow dragon. Her shadows appear usually like a pitch black fog, but can be manipulated into almost any form; hard or soft, thin or thick, curved or straight. It has a bit of a cold feel, but she can’t actually control the temperature of her shadows. She can adjust the color of her shadows along a grey-scale until it looks like any grey or silver, even looking like normal fog, but she can’t make it lighter than silver. She can also make pre-existing shadows darker or lighter depending on what she wants. Being a dragon, she also has a dragon form and can shift into a half-transformed body (like what’s seen with Tia). She has premonitions and prophecies as well. This ability typically manifests in dreams and can come to her the night before it manifests in reality, or even sometimes years in advance - there’s really no way to know. She struggles a lot trying to learn this - and to learn the difference between a premonition dream and just a normal dream - and has some basic understanding of it’s rules. She has absolutely no control over when she has these dreams, but she can occasionally put herself in a bit of a calm, meditative state where she can observe her surroundings enough to faintly feel energies, and from there she can receive some premonitions. When she receives premonitions or prophecies while awake, her eyes glow a brilliant gold - this stems from a more spiritual side of her genetics (*explained later). This ability to very hard to control, though, and can rarely be done despite her persistence in it. 

History: She... didn’t have a very peaceful life. Since her birth, her parents had basically been at war with each other. She grew up under a distinct combination of good influences and bad influences from both parents, but for the most part her mother was her major support as her father failed to be there for her. Neither extended family had much impact, but her father’s family knew of the terrible things he did and didn’t do anything. She continues to hold a grudge against many humans for being forced to live an endangered upbringing when she and her mother were so clearly crying for help. However, she’s aware that this is also what drives her some days, as she didn’t live through all of that just to die shamefully with an unlived life. In time, her grudge against humans has calmed, but it flares back up whenever she’s reminded or learned about something terrible that humans have caused or do currently - it’s a continuous battle and she has a hard time giving an honest opinion on humanity due to her complex emotions. She came to Eldarya when she was 18 (like Guardienne/Erika) and the rest is history (*and is explained below).

Relationships: Miiko is... alright. It’s a bit of a love hate relationship sometimes, but Fenris is usually quite cordial with her. Nevra and Ezarel were irritating at first, but Nevra’s lovableness and Ezarel’s humor slowly grew on her. She liked Valkyon when she first arrived and somewhat quickly pursued a relationship with him. She didn’t mind Leiftan - he was always very kind and left her alone while being cordial (remember, she’s not an angel in this so Leiftan wouldn’t be into her like how he was with Guardienne/Erika). Karuto is like the good father she never had, but she puts her foot down with him on occasion - she doesn’t like to be told what to do, scolded, treated like a child or anything. This is only because she views him in a bit of a fatherly way, and doesn’t want a repeat of her original father. She makes sure he knows that she truly appreciates him, though. Jamon is a bit of a brother if anything, but he’s really just a close friend / colleague that she likes a lot. She appreciates his gentleness and protectiveness for everyone. Ewelein is basically a second mom, she reminds Fenris a lot of her mom back on Earth and has a deep respect for the Elf. Chrome is a bit like an irritating little brother, but she also has a sisterly affection for him. Ykhar and Kero are the panic colleagues; she has a hard time seeing them doing anything else than panicking. She worries a bit for their health as long-term stress is destructive and tries to be as comforting and as nice as possible with them without betraying her personality and morals. Karenn and Alajea are close friends, almost sisterly, but not exactly so. She’s a bit closer with Karenn than she is with Alajea. Cameria is similar to Karenn in the way that she has a bit of a sisterly relationship with Fenris, but in more of a battle partner way. They have a tendency to train together a lot, and they heavily trust each other to have their back in war. Huang Hua is a bit of a friend / leader - she respects the phoenix a lot and has a bit of a close friendly relationship with her. Feng Zifu is a bit of a father figure in the manner that she respects him a lot. She likes to listen to his advice and appreciates his formality.

The AU: So before I explain the plot of the AU, I need to explain a few basics of how I set up the world. In this AU, the crystal breaking could destroy Eldarya, but if it’s shattered in a certain way with certain spells and chants, it’ll release the spirits of the dragons (who sacrificed to create the crystal) and allow them to retain a sort of half-living form - basically they’re alive but... not? It’s weird to  explain. Why does the crystal breaking in this way not destroy Eldarya? The sacrifice allowed a release of energy that originally created the world and then primarily manifested into the shape of the crystal that maintains that world, so this ritual that would be preformed upon it’s shattering would basically allow the energy of the dragons to maintain the world while allowing them to roam around in a different form - hence why they’d be half alive in a way. They’d be physical, but they have additions and limits on what they can and can’t do because they’re still technically dead. However, this isn’t common knowledge (because the guard protects the crystal, they’re the ‘only’ source of ‘accurate’ information on the crystal and both Yonuki Kaze and Miiko have stated that if the crystal breaks Eldarya will fall), only Lance has figured this out (and many of his mercenaries believe him or are working with him because of his destructive habits), so due to this, his ambitions are sort of split in two; destroy the crystal to revive the dragons, and destroy anyone who may try to stop him. In terms of history, Lance in this AU witnessed Miiko (and Nevra - there’s a history behind that that I won’t go into right now) sacrificing dragons to the crystal when he was a part of the guard to try and maintain balance and confronted her about it, only for her to threaten him (in basic; she was convinced sacrificing was the only way to keep balance, and that’s because Yonuki Kaze influenced her into thinking that, so from her perspective Lance coming along and saying it was wrong and had to stop was basically him saying to let the world die) to not tell anyone and stay out of it. Lance then spent a while researching and devising an idea on how to actually balance the world and this included destroying the crystal in a specific way to release the energy (technically there are two ways; the sacrifice was supposed to happen with dragons AND angels, so the ritual was devised to work with the two, but a ritual originally for two races used only with one is basically a ritual preformed improperly, and therefore bound to yield improper results - hence the infertility of the world and shiftiness of it. Undoing the ritual would allow the world to stay while “canceling out the sacrificial imbalance”, but if an angel or demon were to willingly sacrifice - preferably alongside a dragon at the same time - then it would be solved in that way as well). Lance tried to explain this to Miiko later, only to barely get past “I have another idea” before being shut down again. He kept quiet because he feared for himself and his brother (and the only reason Lance could have known that dragons were being sacrificed - without being a dragon himself - is that Miiko said it during the sacrifice he saw, so he didn’t want to raise suspicion onto him and his brother). Later on, Lance is sent to lead an army in a foreign land and is nearly killed, but he saw a chance to escape the guard and took it. From there he’s been Ashkore.

Basically this AU - instead of being “oh no, he’s trying to destroy the world because he’s angry and hurt” - is actually more like “if you had listened the world could be stabilized and also a powerful race could be revived.” It takes the trope of hero and villain and twists it, so the villain is actually a bit of an underdog, villainous hero while the hero’s are - in a way - villains who are heroes because their damning stories haven’t been revealed in a wide-spread manner. Overall, it’s supposed to blur the lines of good and bad, and right and wrong - showing that both sides have good and bad within them, and which side is ‘good’ can depend solely on perception and one’s life anecdote.

*Her story in Origins (where many things are explained in moderation, because if I went in-depth I wouldn’t need to write stories on this): Dakota came to Eldarya by accident via mushroom circle and was placed into the Obsidian guard. She adjusted in time (and willingly took the potion in episode 13 to ease her family / mother of pain and worry) until she got used to things and entered into a romantic relationship with Valkyon. She was sent on basic missions and such and met Ashkore a few times in war (and around the guard), and then she met him accidentally while alone later on outside of the guard. He offered to train her (more like threatened if she didn’t?) and she accepted in time. They trained at night, which was a bit of an issue as she now shared a room with Valkyon and, therefore, had to sneak around. Her skills quickly improved, and her relationship with Valkyon began to decline as he began to become a bit confused / suspicious about her sudden and seemingly random upturn in skills. There were feelings of neglect as well. This carried on for many months and Dakota learned more about Ashkore as well as herself. He eventually admits that she’s a dragon and that he’s investing some of himself into her because of that, and she does her best to explore her abilities with him after that. Eventually she accidentally discovers his actual identity, but keeps quiet about it. As they grow closer, she begins to ask more about him and his reasoning, and he explains his motives for going after the crystal while brushing on the topic of why he’s ruthless to some, but leaves others alone. As she discovers the truth about the dragons and Lance, she realizes that her feelings to the guard were based on lies and false implications, and she begins to grow mentally and emotionally closer with Lance. She becomes less empathetic / sympathetic with Valkyon and eventually sleeps with Lance. This happens a few more times and they enter a sort of limbo where they don’t talk about their relationship with each other but know there’s something heavy going on. Back in the guard, she’s still with Valkyon, and she begins an internal war on what exactly her plan is knowing that she’s sleeping with two guys on the opposite side of a war and that it can’t continue. Her and Valkyon break up in time and she invests her full time into training with Lance, expressing interest in joining his cause. They begin to work together and he gifts her with a specific outfit / armor (that can alternate between identity concealing and revealing for her comfort and safety) so she can go on missions with him. They develop an elaborate scheme to allow her to go on long-term missions with him without suspicion from the guard. She’s eventually sent on a mission and it’s on that mission that she discovers her relation to an ancient dragon named Fenris, and then expresses her interest in taking that name to Lance and the rest of his allies that she’s met (from then on she’s known as Fenris with Lance and Dakota in the guard). Back at the guard, she continues training with Lance and maintaining some sort of odd relationship with himin secret. She’s found elaborate ways to get out of the guard without their suspicion so she can spend many days at a time alone with Lance in a cabin he has hidden in the forest. Over the span of many months / years, she goes on missions with the guard to foreign towns / establishments that are attacked by Ashkore - whether she knows that prior or not - so as she trains she also has actual encounters where she needs to truly fight Lance without actually hurting him while looking as though she’s truly trying to hurt him. When she’s allegedly away on some missions from the guard, she wears the armor that Lance gave her to campaign with him and this occasionally leads to her fighting against the guard if they’re around. In this time and when they’re alone, Lance and allies calls her Fenris as she’s requested them to do. Eventually they go to Memoria together and find out that they have a deeper connection than they think - Fenris (who was an ancient dragon that Dakota took the name of due to her relation with him) and Tia actually knew each other and had a complex history that carried forward to Lance and Dakota / Fenris, and there’s a prophecy of sorts surrounding them. Their relationship after that is still complex, but is more stable as they confirm an attachment to each other. Lance’s identity is eventually revealed to the guard, and sometimes later Fenris is revealed as well, and Lance - in very short, important seconds - offers her to join him completely outside the guard’s walls. She accepts and they flee the guard for a while and plot. Eventually they attack the guard in a final push and get to the crystal, successfully breaking it with... some losses. From there is the skip to ANE, but New Era is... complicated. I haven’t yet thought how she fits into ANE, as many things would be different. Maybe I won’t put pressure on creating her story in it, but if I do I might list it here. Her story in ANE would need to be based off of her story I have here in Origins.

If I write excerpts of this, there may also be many more adventure scenarios that are written but aren’t mentioned here (Lance offering to “help” the guard bring down another greater threat and then turning his forces on them in the midst of war for his own gain, sending them on a wild goose chase, the guard tracking them through rough, unforgiving landscapes trying to catch them, etc.) depending on how the details of her story manifest.

I apologize; that’s a lot to read but I can be very specific and this AU has a lot of important detail that separates it from the original Origins storyline. And this talks over my OC’s details and an AU, which is a lot since there’s not a lot of referencing because I’ve never talked about either before... However, if you’ve read all the way through this post - congrats, and I hope you’re interested in it!

Again, writing excerpts about my OC and her storyline in this AU is an option you can vote on in my writing poll that determines what I’ll write now so I can post later when I can’t access my Tumblr for a few weeks, so if you’re interested in reading about this then please read the info I have about the poll here and feel free to vote!

[a-spectacle-in-the-morning]

“A Whole Lot Left to Lose” -- Rafael Barba

Summary: You slept over at Barba’s place after turning up the night before embarrassingly drunk. Now you have to deal with waking up in his bed, further workplace awkwardness, and serious arguments about coffee.

Notes: Follow up for this, which is a follow up for this. I’m still unwilling to admit this is becoming a series even though it definitely is turning into one. Catch me on the sixth part saying “a follow up for this, which is a follow up for this, which is a follow up for this…”

And sorry my posting has been so sporadic. School and life caught up to me and I had a nasty case of writer’s block.

--

You awake to mid-morning sunlight and unsettlingly soft sheets. For a sweet second your brain idles, still half asleep, and you relish in the softness of your unknown surroundings. Then your thoughts snap into focus. You’re in Barba’s bedroom, curled up in Barba’s bed, absolutely tangled in Barba’s sheets. And you’re still in last night's clothes. Incredible. Nothing adds to waking up with an increasingly pounding headache like remembering how you made an idiot of yourself in front of the guy you’re catching feelings for.

The analog alarm clock on the nightstand reads around 9:30 and you let out a sigh of relief. You’re not scheduled to go into work until noon, and for a brief moment you consider trying to apologize to Barba before you leave. But then a vague memory of stumbling through his living room and spinning like a toddler unexpectedly comes back to you. Sneaking out without confrontation is clearly the only option. 

The door to the room is slightly ajar and you lay silently for a second to listen for sounds of movement. All you hear are the faint sounds of morning traffic, so you force yourself out of Barba’s bed. You spot an acoustic guitar resting on a stand as you tiptoe across the floor. If you ever shake off the embarrassment of this whole ordeal you’ll have to ask him about it. 

When you get to the living room you find the couch oddly empty. You had assumed after Barba had given you the bed he would have slept out here. Curiosity outweighs caution, and you wander in search of his office. He said he had a lot of work to do last night, you had just assumed he would’ve been finished by now. There’s light coming from underneath a door near the front foyer and you risk cracking it open to peek inside. 

Assistant District Attorney Rafael Barba, who you’re accustomed to witnessing completely decimate opposition in the courtroom while wearing stupidly expensive three piece suits, is asleep at his desk. An array of paperwork is splayed out beneath his head. You have a weird urge to step fully into his office to place a chaste kiss on his forehead or maybe wrap a blanket around his shoulders. You’ve clearly been watching too many rom-coms. Instead you just take a few more seconds to appreciate the sight in front of you then gently shut the door. 

When you get home you are instantly happy for the familiarity, but the couple of hours before your shift are not as relaxing as you’d hoped they would be. You try to catch a few more hours of sleep, but your bed doesn’t seem as comfortable as it usually is. You try to mindlessly watch something on your phone, but you keep checking to see if Barba has texted you. By the time you finally settle, make yourself a box of mac and cheese, and finish eating it’s time to head into work.

-

If there were to be an action figure for Barba it would come with about twenty pairs of suspenders and some form of a cup of coffee. Possibly a white mug, like the ones he uses with the machine in his office, or something disposable from a local coffee shop. Either way there is no way his favorite caffeinated drink would be in the kind of over-sized thermos you used to take to class with you in college. Bizarrely, that’s exactly what Barba’s currently carrying with him as he makes his way towards Liv’s office. 

Instead of striding past your desk like he usually does, Barba slows before fully passing you and stops. The hairs on the back of your neck raise and suddenly his hand is flat on your back; right between your shoulder blades. His fingers press just a bit deeper into your back and you realize that he’s leaning over you to place something on your desk. The thermos that caught your eye just a few seconds ago now sits between your computer and a newton’s cradle your dad got you as a graduation gift. 

Before you can look over at him or turn or even say thank you Barba’s hand is sliding off of you. His middle finger traces a line from the center of your back just below your neck, all the way off your shoulder. Intentionally or not the action sends goosebumps down your entire arm. You don’t realize you were holding your breath until you hear Liv’s office door shut and you let out a massive sigh.

The world around you returns to focus. God, when did it get so out of focus? And you immediately wish you were anywhere in the world than at your own desk. Carisi has the most dumbstruck look you’ve ever seen. You’re afraid his jaw might drop off if it dangles that low for much longer. And when you try to avert your gaze elsewhere you land on Amanda’s devilish grin. The two of you aren’t amazingly close, but you’ve gotten a few drinks together and without even telling her she’d picked up on the tension between you and Barba. You’d told her that even if he was into you you weren’t ready to dive into a relationship with him. He was a lot and you were busy.

But now Barba had walked straight up to your desk, touched you intimately enough, and handed you coffee like he knew you hadn’t slept well. Like he was the reason you hadn’t slept well. That’s what every other member of the SVU seemed to be thinking, at least. Except for Fin who looked to actually be falling asleep at his desk.You can’t blame him. You certainly could use a bit of unconsciousness yourself right now.

-

It’s nearing five and your thoughts are churning in your head. A massive storm is sloshing around up there and leaving you with absolutely no energy. You’re one of the last ones left; Sonny and Amanda having left for dinner about an hour ago. Fin packed up shortly before them and Liv shortly after him. Normally you would’ve finished your work before everyone else. Tonight the paperwork is taking twice as long to get through as normal. You want to blame it on your hangover, but the headache is nothing compared to the onslaught of distracting thoughts about Barba.

After reading each sentence you’re bombarded with an even lengthier montage of the ADA. You’re just getting the image of him in pajamas out of your brain when you remember the weight of his hand on your shoulder this morning. At this rate the thirty pages you have left to get through are going to take hours.

You would throw it in for the night and head home, but you’re afraid the distracting thoughts will get worse. And probably more graphic. With your focus completely shot and a whole lot left to lose you decide to head over to One Hogan Place. You make sure to grab the thermos before you leave.

-

“What the hell were you thinking Barba?” you remain surprisingly monotone as you practically slam the thermos onto his desk. 

Barba sits looking at you wide eyed for just a second before a little sly grin ghosts his face. You’d rushed over from the SVU, making sure to get here before Barba left. Your face is probably flushed from the cold and the slight jog you just did. The jog also got you a bit worked up, hence the aggressive placement of the thermos.

“That you would be hungover and need a pick me up?” Barba offers.

“You can’t do this kind of shit. People talk.”

Barba remains seated behind his desk with the smuggest look. He isn’t responding. Why isn’t he responding? He always has the wittiest comebacks and he’s just sitting there looking at you. You take a chance and make your way around to stand next to him. He doesn’t rise from his seat, but he swivels in his chair to face you.

“You don’t want them thinking we’re something we’re not, right?”

Barba laces his fingers together in his lap and leans back in his chair. “Let me make sure I have this right: you want me to be… meaner to you?”

“No, you-” you squint down at him. “Will you just shut up for a second?”

Barba’s smile grows, but he stays quiet.

“I couldn’t think straight because of you. Do you know how frustrating that is?”

“I think I have an idea-”

“Hey! I said zip it, counselor. You don’t have an idea. No idea. Because every five minutes it was back to you up here,” you tap at your temple for emphasis. “And then I’m finally focused enough to read a sentence or two in the unholy stack of paperwork in front of me, I glance up, and this,” you hold out both of your hands, palms upwards, and direct his gaze at the thermos, “this is sitting there.”

Barba’s smile has dropped. It’s been replaced by something unreadable. Wonder? Amusement? Confusion? Maybe a bit of annoyance? You can’t quite place it and it’s incredibly frustrating.

You let out a deep sigh and turn to lean against his desk. “Sorry. I’m not usually like this. I don’t make these grand” you wave your arms around, “whatever the hell this is…” 

Barba stands and moves to wait in front of you, but remains silent.

“Sorry for busting in here and verbally attacking you,” you shrug. “And for dumping this on you. And for probably making this uncomfortable. You know what? Maybe I should just leave and we can forget about all of this. Go back to whatever bizarre, semi-flirty thing we had going on before.”

Barba clears his throat, putting his hands into his jacket pockets. “Are you finished?”

You nod. 

“Can I speak now?”

You roll your eyes, but nod again.

Instead of making a counterargument he takes his hands back out of his pocket and steps closer to you. Then his hands are on either side of your hips pressing into the wood of his desk. Maybe this is his counterargument: being this close to him is otherworldly. Everything comes down to the green of his eyes and then his lips are on yours. Before you have more than a second to process what’s happening he’s pulled away again. 

He pats his desk once then steps back. “I think I have an idea.”

If you had asked yourself this morning, with your pounding headache and mountains of overwhelming embarrassment, how your day would end, kissing Rafael Barba would be the last thing you would’ve guessed. 

You stare at him for a few seconds, unable to breathe, then awkwardly say, “Sorry for making you sleep at your desk last night.”

Barba lets out a sheepish laugh. “You saw that, huh?”

“Happen often?” you glance over at the coffee machine, already knowing the answer.

“More than I’d like to admit.”

There’s a beat of silence. You glance up at the framed Harvard Law degree that you noticed on the first day you met him. Still ostentatious. 

“How about you make up for those drinks you owe me by taking me out to dinner?”

“Oh, so the coffee counts for nothing?” Barba jabs.

You reach out, emboldened by the kiss, and straighten out the lapel of his jacket. “Coffee is its own thing, Barba. This is about whiskey.”

“Ah, I see,” his gaze follows your hand as it drops from his chest. “It might take more than one dinner to make up for the tab you racked up last night.”

You squint at him, stepping away from his desk and towards the door. “If you’re gonna be a dick about it I’ll ask Carisi instead.”

Barba pushes his chair in and starts packing up his things. “Just give me a minute. Where do you want to go?”

--

I know I said there would be some smut with my next Barba fic, but I really wanted to continue this story and these two ain’t ready for it yet. It was enough work to get them to kiss, goddamn it. I’m thinking of continuing with at least one more part though, so high probability of smut adjacent stuff soon!

And apologies for the growing fixation on coffee in my fics. I’m not a huge caffeine addict, but I’ve recently been really missing my favorite coffee shop in one of the libraries on my campus. I can still remember the last dark roast I got days before classes were moved online…

[curly-bangtan]

#15 with yoongi - fluffy or smutty :D

#15: “you’re so annoying and needy… fine just come over here.”

Warnings: oral (f), lil bit of dry humping cos u know i love that shit teehee

A/N: Wow I love writing Yoongi, might have to bang out all the drabble requests for him while I’m at it… Didn’t mean for this to get smutty but oh well.

.

You let out a whine, high-pitched and exaggerated, and flip the page of your novel. Glancing up, Yoongi doesn’t seem to notice the slight irritation in your tone, or if he does, he doesn’t show it.

Hmph. Why is he like this?

Another sigh leaves your pouting lips. At this point, you’re not even absorbing the words you’re scanning into your head anymore, so you put the book down in defeat. Click click, goes his mouse. Your boyfriend is completely immersed in his music production, his big black headphones caging his ears, isolating him from the rest of the world. The rest of the world being you.

You throw your arms back to stretch like a cat, ruffling the neatly made covers of his bed. It’s a pet peeve of his, the way you never make the bed. You’d always tune him out when he would lecture you about not leaving your room in a mess; just because he’s your daddy doesn’t make him your dad too. But right now, you kind of miss his low monotonous voice droning on and telling you off.

Because even that, or just anything, is better than him not giving you the attention you’re craving.

But it’s also not in your nature to beg. He either notices that you’re lonely or he doesn’t. It’s his duty as your boyfriend to care about you.

“Ow!” You suddenly yelp.

Nothing is hurting, you’re just testing whether he can actually hear you or not.

Yoongi’s neck immediately snaps around, round poker face searching yours. You quickly pretend to rub the imaginary paper cut on your finger. His gaze lingers on your hand, flickers to your face, and to your disappointment, turns back to the screen.

Not even a word. Wow.

Feeling cranky at his apparent lack of concern, you whip your phone out and start scrolling so aggressively that the pad of your thumb feels raw. You can’t even muster enough care for the people on your screen. Cool, Yeji went to Tokyo with her boyfriend. Sure they look cute, sure you wish you and Yoongi were in Japan right now too, but whatever. Who gives a shit. Aggressive scroll.

One of Yoongi’s best qualities is how hard-working he is. One of Yoongi’s worst qualities is how hard-working he is.

Of course you love how he reaps the benefits of his diligence. His newest record got approved by his agency again and is currently being worked on in the studio with a new up-and-coming artist. You genuinely cannot be prouder of him. He does what he loves, and loves he does. That’s really admirable nowadays.

But, but, as his girlfriend, you would really wish for him to pay some attention to you every now and then. You don’t ask for much, just an occasional kiss, or even acknowledgement that you’re in the same room would be nice, thank you very much.

“Yoongi, I’m tired.” Code for: Yoongi, can you come over and spoon me so we can sleep already?

He grunts a response that vaguely resembles ‘go to sleep, I’ll be done a sec…’ which would be inaudible to any ears except your own, because by now you are trained to be able to distinguish his low grumbles and murmurs. You want to throw your book at him. Wait, that’s not even a bad idea. Because that would at least get his attention, piss him off.

Instead, you trud over and switch off the lights. But not before you change out of your clothes into his favourite SG shirt, the beige one since he’s wearing the black, purposely not wearing pants so he can catch a glimpse of your ass when you get up.

Yoongi clears his throat but averts your eye, the blue light of the screen illuminating his face in the new darkness.

You want to strangle him. Stupid sack of rice. What man ignores his girlfriend prancing around in his T-shirt and a sexy red thong?

Slightly too dramatic, maybe, you start pretending to call your friend Jimin. “Hey! What’s up?” You purposely don’t keep your voice down even though you know how much Yoongi appreciates a calm ambiance while working. A ball of satisfaction sinks in as you notice his shoulders perk up in attention. “That’s great! … Nah, I’m not up to much, just really bored and sleepy.” Emphasising volume on really. “Yeah, Yoongi’s good, working again of course. You know how he is. Haha, yeah I saw her post too, she’s in Tokyo with her boyfriend. I want to go so badly with Yoongi but he’s busy all the time ‘coz he’s doing really well with his music and all that… Wait seriously? Let’s actually go together!”

Okay, maybe you’re getting carried away with your narrative. But can anyone blame you?

Yoongi’s chair swivels so abruptly at you that you drop your phone, startled. He rests his headphones on his neck and watches you with that annoyingly blank expression of his.

Swiftly, you pick your phone back up to orchestrate your fake goodbyes with ‘Jimin’, excusing that you’re going to bed soon. You stare back at your boyfriend, awaiting him to finally say something.

He sighs. “Jimin smashed his phone today.”

Oh.

You feel the flames rush to your cheeks, soaking in embarrassment. You don’t even know what to say because what the fuck does one say when one gets caught pretending to be on the phone with someone?

“Is your book boring?” His back is turned from the screen, shadow casted on his face, yet you can tell that he’s frowning lightly.

You still can’t say anything. Mind in a state of malfunction at the humiliation.

“Let me see your paper cut.”

Shit. Caught twice.

“Um. It’s nothing, not even any blood, you won’t be able to see it.” Heat continues to flood your face. His bullshit sensor aas never failed him before, why do you even try to lie to him?

Yoongi exhales in exasperation, clearly fed up. And you feel small, diminished, guilty. “You’re so annoying and needy. I’m working, I said I’ll be done soon.”

“Yeah but you say that every time…” You half whisper half whine. “I just miss you, that’s all…”

For a moment, he just looks at you, expression unreadable as usual. You think he’s going to turn back to resume his work, but then he sighs and says, “Fine, just come over here.”

The smile immediately blooms across your face, it’s the pure and genuine kind of smile that infects all of your facial features. And in the darkness, you spot the slightest smallest quirk upwards of his lips too as you crawl across the bed to plop yourself onto his lap. His hands instinctively run up your bare thighs and rest on your ass as you straddle him. The chair turns from the momentum you induce so your back is facing his computer and his face is once again lit up.

Your arms snake up his chest and around his neck, their permanent place of residence. You bask in every drop of his attention, loving the way he silent studies every inch of your face.

“You called me annoying and needy.” Brows drawing, you pout at him, luring out more of his care.

“That’s synonymous with cute, don’t you know me?”

You giggle, forehead falling onto his. Your legs feel warm on top of him, especially as he begins to feathering up and down them, his fingers tickling your ass more and more each time. Goosebumps.

“You can’t walk around with no pants like that, baby girl.” You feel a sudden pulse on your clit at his name for you. His pinky is fiddling with the lace of your thong now, and habitually you press your crotch onto his. “You’re so impatient.” His other hand reaches for your face, touch trailing down your jaw so soft it feels like a ghost. “So demanding.” He squeezes your ass.

Nose brushing, Yoongi glimpses up at you through his lashes and you know you’ve won. He has succumbed to you.

His kisses taste like midnight coffee. Slow, lethargic, but no less passionate. He removes the headphones from around his neck without breaking the seal between your lips, hauling you further up his lap until you feel his semi-hard member jab at your core. And when you dare grind your clothed slit over him lasciviously, you both shudder at the friction, his own hips buckling up to meet you. His fingers dig into the flesh of your bottom, guiding your idle rhythm.

“It’s ‘coz I want you.” You whisper into his mouth. “I always want you.”

The throaty groan he releases is enough to gather a rich dampness between your legs. You wonder if he can feel how wet you are as you rub yourself over him.

“Well, if you had waited a little longer,” he pauses to nibble the skin of your neck, “you would have found out that I was planning on eating you out tonight as soon as I’m done with this track.”

Your breath snags in your throat, almost as if he had bitten into your jugular. Hands traveling up his shirt, you cosset his soft milky skin, he himself mirroring your action.

“And… are you done with this track?”

“No. But priorities.”

Yoongi lifts you off his lap onto the desk, his mouse gliding away at the contact with your side. And slowly, head burrowing under your shirt, he sucks purple petals onto your breasts, teasing your nipple between his teeth. Then comes the languid trail of kisses from your sternum down to navel, tongue marking a wet path to your cunt.

As he tugs your panties off, he peaks out from under your shirt, gives that lazy lopsided smirk of his that made you fall in love with him in the first place, then disappears underneath again. Kissing your thighs nearer and nearer to you slick, he props your legs over his shoulders and you can’t help but pull him closer with your ankles.

Fuck, you’re already a goner.

When his warm mouth meets your clit, you jerk up, narrowly avoiding slamming your palm onto his keyboard. If making music is what Yoongi is best at, then devouring your pussy is what he’s second best at.

Your moan is unsuppressed. Each time his tongue flickers around your clit, you feel a pulse of desire ripple through you. He doesn’t stop, showing no mercy because this is what you had ask for, so this is what you shall receive. You want him? You have him. And when he inserts two fingers while he sucks on your swollen bud, teeth scraping at your folds, you call out his name like he’s your religion.

He makes you come thrice that night. All times on his desk.

.

05/11/19

© Copyright 2019

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 10: Friday

I just had this feeling this morning like I didn’t want to go to work and eh... that was probably right. Nothing really bad happened, I just felt very strongly that I did NOT want to be there.

My coworker wanted to talk to me at like 8:30 in the morning (you know those silly little ‘don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee’ signs?? literally do not talk to me before 9:30 EARLIEST) and I was supremely incoherent. Then later a different coworker essentially took out his bad mood on my department including on me personally, and it was... dumb. I got his point but I’m just, as I tried to explain to others later, unkeen on being talked to about actions I took under others’ explicit instructions. Also, in part because of that, in part because I thought he was semi-unreasonable, and in part because I just truly didn’t want to do what he was asking/telling me to do, I did not really budge on the issue. Which was very awkward because as I said I did get his point. And of course the issue is SOMETHING DUMB which is always how it is. All of these fights are 100% shit that would sound idiotic if you tried to explain it to someone else, which is why I’m vaguing right now.

And the nametags thing came up on Teams (thanks @ the same coworker), and the only good thing about that is that the director explicitly said she was against the idea so I feel pretty confident that it won’t be mandated. Also I could detect some panic in other people about it. I do NOT like the way this is being handled AT ALL. Plus it’s just the hill I’ve decided to die on (because I think I can win--so I guess it’s better to say this is the hill I’m going to defeat my enemies on) so I gotta get annoyed at it. I refrained from contributing to the conversation but I did like the director’s anti-nametag post, which I think gets my point across.

Also I felt like I spent a lot of time doing not much, to be honest. Still didn’t go to stupid compact shelving. Devoted too much time to the crap in the above paragraphs. Talked to BL over in admin and heard some more unflattering stories about a particular administrator. Like, incredibly unflattering. Which is stuff I do want to know but it contributes to the overall Mood of the day, which again is ‘I don’t want to be here.’

I took a very late lunch, and that in turn contributed to me not paying enough attention to the time and leaving late.OH AND I got 3 important emails in the last ten minutes of the day. Two were very expected because they were coming from the West Coast but the last was like.. do not make me deal with this right now.

I didn’t deal with almost any of it but I did get so distracted that I left about five minutes late, and so I missed the bus. I wasn’t too upset about it since the weather was nice anyway and I didn’t mind spending some time downtown. But I did waste time trying to see if I could catch said bus, and then more time trying to go to my favorite coffee shop, which had closed at 5. But since it was 5:15, there were still people inside (cleaning up, which is fair) and people outside (drinking coffees they’d bought before 5 I’m sure, also fair), and the sign said hours were until 7 so I spent a few confused, embarrassing moments going ????? what is the truth?

So ultimately I went to a different cafe, a newish one that opened in 2019 I think. I’ve always avoided it in part because the floor is very loud and in part because I felt like I was cheating on my main place lol. (Not that I never get coffee anywhere else... just that this place is so close to my usual place, I always feel like, if I’m in the area, I might as well go to said usual place.) I did find the inside very disorienting. The pattern of the floor is just truly A Lot. They did have these weird teacup ornaments hanging from the ceiling though. I got an iced latte, which was fine, and this delicious spinach and feta pastry. I feel like I should stop by more often for baked goods. I settled outside with what I’d gotten, mostly because of the floor, partly because it actually was nice out, and partly because I’m not currently comfortable with indoor dining, even in places with almost no one in them.

I only had like 25 minutes to kill at that point, but it was nice. I had a notebook with me and I did a teeny bit of planning on the Southern Gothic AU (still behind on this!!). Mostly I listened to the conversation next to me. I couldn’t entirely help it; the girl’s voice was carrying. She was talking to her guy friend about some recent issues they’d been having in their friendship. I was honestly...kind of impressed with them? I could mostly hear her--he was talking too but his voice didn’t carry as much--but it just overall sounded like a really open, emotionally honest, generally calm talk. Like certainly there were strong emotions in play (not exactly going to judge whether they were “warranted” given the apparent facts of the dispute, since I just ranted about a disagreement over something so dumb I don’t even want to name it in public) but they were just... expressing feelings that were difficult, and expressing displeasure with others’ actions, without yelling or being passive aggressive, etc. I mean even that they’d picked this time and place to meet specifically to discuss it I thought was commendable. And they were definitely friends, not bf/gf, because the disagreement involved his girlfriend (once referred to as his “partner”...sorry lol I judged that a LITTLE since they looked like they were maybe 21 years old--partner in WHAT??). The girl mentioned her therapist, which put a lot of her tone and vocabulary into perspective. Not necessarily in a bad way, I mean, it seemed to be working? But as someone who has never been to therapy, but is self-taught, so to speak, in gauging and describing my own feelings, I could... discern a sort of purposeful vocabulary that almost sounded scripted. I wrote down some specific quotes but I don’t want to put them in a public place. I’ll draw my respecting-strangers’-privacy line in the sand there. But a lot of, like “when you do x, it makes me feel y” kind of controlled explanations.

Anyway, I got very invested in that. Partly for future writing purposes, partly out of curiosity and partly because... I don’t know that I could have that kind of conversation NOW and I’m fairly sure I could not have when I was in college. I mean.... I don’t know... I’ve blocked out a lot of the pretentious/serious/about-our-feelings talks I did have. And what sticks out now are all the times I didn’t do that--all of the many, many issues with TA38... Even the way B and I have literally NEVER acknowledged the handful of times we hooked up in 2009.

You’re never gonna sound COOL talking about your emotions, your wants and your needs; it’s always gonna sound, imo, like a Therapy Script. And I don’t even always think you gotta have those talks. After graduation, R and I literally had this exchange where we said ‘well we both made mistakes last year, and we could try to untangle it now, but it’s just gonna bring up a lot of bad feelings. It’s done now anyway. Blanket apologies given, blanket acceptance of apologies, let’s move on.” And we did and it was fine. But if we’d had better conversations while we were living together, that would have been a different situation.

All of which is of course complicated for me personally because I am extremely conflict-averse. EXTREMELY.

Anyway, I ran into BL at the bus stop and we talked a bit there and on the bus, which was fine but kinda exhausting tbqh especially because of the topic of conversation. I got home at 6:30 and must have crawled immediately into bed and gone to sleep, but I barely remember it at all. Woke up at 10:30 and had no idea what time it was or what day it was or what I was doing.

Had dinner and then somehow went down a rabbit hole that started... somewhere?? and ended with me looking up my childhood home on Google Earth, which you KNOW is the sign of a mentally stable person who is doing just fine okay.

Now it’s the absolutely disgusting hour of 2:30 in the morning... Idk I wanted to go out tomorrow and take advantage of the nice weather but we’ll see how that goes. The thing is I feel like I need a full day to sleep but I only have two (2) days and in that time I gotta do laundry, cook for the week, preferably write one (1) whole chapter of this fic, and possibly also go on the aforementioned excursion. Which is a lot for me. It doesn’t really... fit.

Everything’s just so much all the time and so on.

[sheliesshattered]

Here are the first few scenes (~2500 words) of the new AU that suddenly grew legs and started going tonight. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to pursue this, or if this is more of an exercise in skimming off the top layer of whatever odd stuff is floating around in my head so that I can get back to working on the stuff I want to work on, but I would be curious to hear reaction to this either way. Tagging a few people who I know follow my Doctor Who writing, but anyone who reads this, feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Vaguely inspired by this post, fwiw.

Working title is Poltergeists and Real Estate (Do Not Mix) but that may very well change as this grows a plot and becomes less of a crack-fic. Oooor it may end up sitting in my over-populated WIP folder forever, we’ll see.

Thoughts? Lemme know. Tagging a few people, but open to comments from anyone. @praetyger, @megsann13, @claraaoswald, @puddlejumper72-blog-blog​, @tounknowndestinations​, @chipsandcoffee​, @the-chumblies​, et al

Poltergeists and Real Estate (Do Not Mix)

There was a certain amount of irony, Clara reflected, that her first reaction was I’m going to kill him.

Her ‘special friend’ had just cost her the sale of her grandmother’s house. Again. As in, not for the first time. This had to be roughly the twelfth adorable little family or nice couple that had stepped inside her ancestral family home only to turn tail and run before she’d even had a chance to tell them about the antique hardwood floors or the fully restored kitchen. At this point, her ‘special friend’ wasn’t even being subtle about it anymore.

The longer the house sat on the market, the fewer calls she was getting to schedule walk-throughs of the property. She was beginning to worry that word of the house’s strangeness was getting around the real estate community. If things kept up at this rate, she was going to be permanently saddled with an inheritance whose tax burden she could barely afford, in the form of a one hundred and thirty year old, gorgeous, sprawling, haunted house.

Clara used her key to let herself in through the front door, grumbling under her breath. As soon as she closed the door behind her, the cabinets in the kitchen began to rattle ominously.

“Oh, shut up,” she snapped, dropping her purse and keys on the small table in the entryway. “It’s just me.”

The door to the upstairs washroom slammed shut.

Clara groaned and buried her face in her hands and counted to ten before looking up again. “Listen, I get that you’re cross with me for bringing people by, but I am beyond livid with you, so let’s skip the part where I yell and you throw things and just agree to be angry with each other in silence, okay?”

The house went quiet in a manner entirely too creepy for her liking. If not for the undercurrent of petulant passive-aggressiveness, she might have actually been scared.

Not that Clara had ever really been scared of the ghost that lived in her grandmother’s house. He had never once made her feel unsafe, not since she’d first seen him as a child. But the sudden silence was still unnerving. 

“Well, good,” she said into the preternatural stillness, more to prove to herself that she wasn’t scared than anything else. “It’s nice to actually be able to hear myself think, for once.”

The top step of the staircase creaked once, as if to make a point.

“Still shut up,” she grumbled.

She went about the short list of tasks she’d come to see to, putting away the food she’d set out for the potential home buyers, watering the house plants, closing the curtains, and flicking on a few lamps to make the home look lived-in. Of course, she didn’t envy anyone who tried to break into the house while it sat apparently empty. At some level, a poltergeist was better home protection than a dog ever could be. For the right owner, it might even be a selling point, she mused. Perhaps she ought to rewrite the home listing.

Her chores complete, Clara returned to the foyer to find her purse where she’d left it, but her keys conspicuously missing. She sighed, hands on her hips, and turned towards the cold spot she could feel forming near the foot of the stairs. He was nothing but a faint wispy outline in the light of the setting sun filtering through the stained glass window over the door, but even that outline was familiar enough that she was able to find his eyes and fix him with a displeased glare.

“Where are my keys?” she demanded. She still hadn’t forgiven him for his behaviour earlier, and she was in no mood to play find-the-lost-trinket tonight.

“I didn’t want you to leave before I could apologise,” the ghost said, not quite meeting her gaze. His voice raised gooseflesh along her arms, as it always did, but she much preferred the low rumble of his Scottish brogue to the slamming of doors and rattling of cupboards. Not that she would ever openly admit that to him.

“So apologise and tell me where you’ve hidden my keys!”

“Clara,” he said, and she clenched her teeth against the shivery reaction she always had to the way he said her name, like it had been invented just so he could say it. There were days when she lived for that rush — and many, many more nights, in her love-struck teenaged years — but today was absolutely not one of them.

“...Was there more to that sentence?” she asked when he didn’t go on. “Saying my name doesn’t constitute an apology.”

He glanced up at her, looking more solid as the sunlight waned. “I’m sorry that I upset you. That wasn’t my intention.”

“No, your intention was to make certain I can’t sell this house, and don’t bother to deny it.”

He chewed his incorporeal lip for a moment, then shrugged. “I won’t deny it. I don’t want you to sell the house. But I’m still sorry I upset you.”

Clara sighed. “I have to sell it. You know this. And someday, I’m going to bring by someone too brave or too stupid to fall for all your clattering, and that’ll be that.”

“Don’t say that,” he pleaded, his eyes flashing blue in the gathering dusk.

“It’s the reality of the situation,” she said evenly. Another irony not lost on her: arguing the state of reality with a man dead nearly a century. “So you’d best start making peace with that. Now, where are my keys?”

The ghost hesitated. “You don’t have to leave,” he said. “You could stay?”

“I never stay the night in this house. That was your advice to me, more than twenty years ago. No sense in breaking with tradition now.”

“I think maybe I was being overly paranoid at the time.”

“And I think maybe you’re acting like a lonely old man, now,” Clara snarked back.

“Alone in a house that you of all people are dead-set on evicting me from? I can’t imagine why I’d be lonely!” 

“Keys, now!” she snapped. “Traffic is already going to be horrendous—”

“All the more reason to stay,” he said petulantly.

“But,” she went on forcefully, speaking over him, “I have tomorrow off of work. If you tell me where my keys are, I’ll come back first thing in the morning. I still need to finish going through all those old boxes in the attic. We can spend the day working on that together, okay?”

“You’re going to drive all the way home only to turn around and come back in the morning? Why not just—”

“Or I could spend the day doing something fun with people my own age, very far away from here. Your choice.”

“Oh, fine,” he said, shoulders sagging. “Your keys are hidden in the parlour, I’ll show you where.”

“Thank you,” she said mildly, and followed him into the parlour.

--

As promised, Clara arrived back at her grandmother’s house early the next morning, take-away coffee cup in hand. There had been a moment, whilst she stood in the queue to order, when she’d found herself thinking she ought to order two coffees, bring her ghost a peace offering to smooth over their row from the night before. Thankfully she’d realised how ridiculous it sounded before it was her turn to order, but she still felt strangely off balance as she unlocked the door and let herself in, like she had forgotten something important.

“Hey,” she called to the empty house, as soon as the door was closed behind her. “It’s just me, no need to go rattling the hinges on my account.”

He appeared in a shadowy corner of the foyer, smiling at her shyly. “Good morning, Clara. You look lovely today. Have you had a wash?”

She narrowed her gaze at him, trying to ignore the way her heart flipped over at the way he said her name. “Why are you being nice?”

“Because it works on you,” he shrugged nonchalantly. He hesitated, then added, “And because I really am sorry about last night.”

“Well, apology accepted,” Clara said. “And I’m sorry I yelled at you. The process of selling this place has been entirely too stressful, and I’m really starting to worry it won’t happen before the property taxes are due,” she sighed.

He ran a semi-transparent hand through the hair at the back of his head. “Yeah, about that...”

She suppressed a groan. “What did you do?”

“Post came early today,” he said, sounding more apologetic than he had earlier. “I didn’t open it, but one of the envelopes has a rather official looking return address. I left it on the dining room table.”

She dropped her keys and purse on the table by the door and trudged off to the dining room, unable to contain her groan when she saw the envelope in question. Opening it, she found that he was right: property taxes were due in six weeks, the total even higher than she had anticipated. It was more than she made in a month at her teaching job. Even with the small amount she had stashed away in savings, she would hardly be able to pay it and the rent on her flat, and still expect to feed herself.

“What about the rest of your inheritance?” he asked, sounding genuinely worried.

“I put it all into fixing up this place to sell,” she said.

“Which I’ve made impossible,” he murmured.

Clara covered her face with her hands, fighting back tears and hoping he wouldn’t notice. Yes, he was the reason she hadn’t been able to sell the house to any of the dozen or so families who had shown initial interest. But he was also the only one in her life who even knew or cared what she was going through.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told him honestly, still hiding behind her hands. “If I don’t pay it, they’ll just add late fees on top of that already ridiculously large sum.”

She felt a coldness drift across the back of her hands, felt her hair stir in a non-existent breeze, and wished, not for the first time in her life, that her ‘special friend’ was the sort of friend who could offer a hug when she so desperately needed one.

“I don’t suppose there’s a secret stash of diamonds in the attic?” she asked him, only half joking. “Or a map to buried treasure?”

“Your great-grandmother was a very adventurous woman,” he replied, voice sounding distant and thoughtful. “I don’t know what all is up there, but anything is possible.”

Clara dropped her hands from her face and squared her shoulders, not looking at her ghost until she was certain she wouldn’t spontaneously burst into tears. “Well, let’s hope there’s something up there that will help.”

--

The attic had never been Clara’s favourite place in her grandmother’s sprawling house, cramped and dusty and full of ancient boxes that gave off a far creepier vibe than the literal ghost had ever managed to do. But on the plus side, it was also windowless, dim enough that he was able to appear to her in a fairly solid state and even move lightweight objects around as though he were a real person existing in the real world.

She had removed all the larger pieces from the attic ages ago, furniture and blanket chests and boxes of old clothes, all sorted through and distributed to extended family or donated to charity, or else restored to the best of Clara’s ability and set out to decorate the house in a manner befitting its age. All that remained were boxes of keepsakes, photographs and journals and old letters, small family things that required far more of her attention.

If not for the threat of the taxes due, it might even have been a pleasant day, sitting together amidst the dust and papers, slowly unveiling the history of her family, layer on layer, like an archaeologist digging through levels of sediment. 

“Oh my god, these photos of Mum,” she said, turning the yellowed photo album towards him so he could see them, in all their early 1970s glory. “She must have been, what, about fifteen in these?”

“Her first formal school dance,” he confirmed, leaning in to examine the photos. “With that older boy, what’s-his-name. Your grandfather did not approve.”

Clara snorted. “Can’t really blame him. Look at those side-burns. I’m not sure I would have let her go out with him at all.”

“They had a huge row about it, if I remember correctly. In the end, your grandmother took your mother’s side, and she was allowed to go.”

“Why didn’t you ever appear to any of them?” she asked, flipping through the pages and pausing to linger on what looked to be polaroids of a football game. “You were here all that time, but you never talked to anyone until I came along?”

He shrugged. “You were the only one that was you.”

“Thanks. That clears it right up.”

“It’s the only answer I’ve got,” he objected.

“I scared the daylights out of Mum and Gran when I told them about you, I was probably all of six years old at the time.”

“Five, I think,” he said quietly.

“God, five. I might have a heart attack if my five year old started talking very confidently about her special friend the ghost that lives at grandma’s house. I just assumed they knew about you, too. Why wouldn’t they?”

“I’m not sure I could have talked to them, even if I wanted to. And I never did want to.”

Clara looked up at him, studying his face in the dimness. Without direct sunlight, he looked almost human, almost alive, the blue of his eyes and the salt and pepper of his hair seeming so very real, so very close at hand. He still seemed as ageless to her now as he had when she’d first seen him, more than two decades earlier. Ageless and ancient, wise and funny, solemn and sardonic. She thought perhaps she knew his face better than any other, living or dead.

“But why didn’t you ever want to talk to them?” she pressed.

“Why do you need a key to enter the house?” he asked in response.

She felt her eyebrows come together in consternation. “Because the door is locked.”

“But why that key?”

“Because... that’s the key that fits. That’s the key that goes with that lock.”

He shrugged, most of his attention on turning the page in a journal he’d been perusing. “You are the key that fits. I don’t have a better answer than that.”

[ducky-tm]

so a long ass time ago, like three years ago, i got an anon talking about the song “say you won’t let go” and how it’s just THE victuuri parallel and i threatened to write it. idk who that anon was but when i found that post again i felt semi inspired

because victor specifically talked about how he was starting to lose .... his spark basically and how a) meeting yuuri at the banquet and b) seeing him skate his stammi vicino inspired him again. and i think it’s safe to assume he’d been feeling like that for a while like that’s not something that just sets on suddenly (usually) and so even just seeing yuuri so free at the banquet, a skater he , maybe not admired, but respected at the very least, acting like that dancing like that when he’s usually so closed off.... i’m sure is sparked something in him. (and like, not to say that yuuri can’t handle his alcohol but THAT much alcohol mixed with VERY aggressive dancing.... he almost definitely threw up that night)

and then of course The Moment when yuuri hugs him and looks up at him with years of admiration and love swimming in his eyes and asks him to be his coach..... he may not have been (nearly) as drunk as yuuri but his look of shock could absolutely be interpreted as a sobering look. but because yuuri is drunk he really can’t be sure how serious he’s being so he probably does tell him, hey lets get you to your room you should sleep this off you’ve had an eventful night. but he can’t help the feeling growing in his chest already like this (very cute) drunken fool has just stolen his heart. but again, victor may be a confident skater and person in general, but he can’t just confess to these feelings to a man that a) may not mean what he’s saying and b) will probably not remember his confession anyway. he knows that there’s no stopping this feeling now but for possibly the first time in his life he didn’t know where to go from there. 

fast forward through the events of YOI into a vague future and victor remembers their first unofficial night one morning while yuuri still sleeps next to him and his heart is overwhelmed with love and the need to keep yuuri with him forever. so he sneaks into the kitchen and makes yuuri breakfast in bed because its not competition season and yuuri deserves to be treated right. he carries the tray to their room and sets it on yuuri’s nightstand and kneels next to the sleeping beauty himself. he looks at yuuri for a moment before kissing his forehead and laying a hand on his shoulder, being as gentle as possible while waking him. and yuuri’s always been a little grouchy in the morning but with the smell of fresh coffee and gentle kisses he eases into reality a little easier. 

they exchange good mornings and sweet smiles and it really feels cliche they way they just stare at each other. victor mentions he made breakfast and yuuri has maybe never loved a man more. he asks what the occasion is and victor’s cheeks flush just a little, not with embarrassment but with love? devotion? he tells yuuri he was just thinking about the night they met and yuuri does go red with embarrassment even though things obviously turned out alright. 

“i just remembered how it really felt like love at first sight,” victor explains, “and it made my heart feel the same way it did that night, exceptionally warm and full. like just you looking at me could make my whole world right again. and how i never want to be not with you. i know you feel embarrassed, still, but i just feel grateful. i thank my lucky stars for that night because it brought me you.” and suddenly yuuri isn’t sleepy at all he’s filled with anticipation. 

“i know we joked about our rings being engagement rings but,” victor isn’t nervous, he knows exactly what to say next, but still he swallows and takes a deep breath before continuing, “i want to marry you. i want to live the rest of my life right next to you. i want to wake up every morning with you right there and i want to raise kids together and i want to wave them off on their first day of school with you right next to me. i want you, yuuri. more than any gold medal, more than any titles. your love is worth more than any of that.” 

and of course yuuri says yes. how could he not when the man he’s admired, respected, loved, for so long is finally his? and they kiss and finish breakfast and they don’t start planning the wedding for a long time because they know they have all the time in the world. time to love each other, grow together, live and love. 

when they do get married their vows are about as cheesy as you would imagine, talk of growing old and gray together. they don’t say til death do us part because not even death could stop them loving each other. they do promise to never let go, and help each other, and to bring out the best in each other. because that’s what they’ve always done and it’s what they’ll continue to do.

[dangerouscommiesubversive]

philip, in a gathering of riders (like, post-big fight or random get together, being possessive of shoutaro (consciously or not)

At some point I will need to tell you about the Unified Kamen Rider Cross-Time Discord, which is a running joke between me and my husband.

Anyway, this comes at the end of the fictitious crossover event that we saw the very beginning of in this previous prompt response. Don’t ask me where it fits in any timeline, I have no idea.

For the most part, Philip doesn’t struggle with issues of self-esteem. He’s perfectly confident in himself and his place in the world, in his relationships, as one half of W, one half of Fuuto’s number one detective agency, the voice of the Earth. He knows who and what he is. Shoutaro’s the one with insecurity issues, as if he could ever be anything less than the finest, kindest, bravest, most beautiful person in Fuuto and in fact the world.

(Philip is very certain of this. He’s checked. There is, of course, always room for debate when it comes to subjective judgments, but he’s 99.9% sure that he’s right.)

Philip never concerns himself with his place in the world--unless, that is, there are other Riders present.

If only they weren’t all so...fit. If even one of them was on the small side and somewhat physically frail, he would perhaps feel a bit better about the fact that he regularly passes out in front of them. But no, they’re all taller than him and aggressively healthy, and furthermore they’re kind in a way that makes him irritated with himself for resenting them. In the heat of battle he can ignore it, but it’s terrible to manage when the moment’s crisis has ended and they’re trying to relax and socialize for a few minutes with other people who understand.

This most recent incident has occasioned a larger team-up than usual--there’s Eiji, of course, who’s actually always a pleasure to see, and Fourze at his most enthusiastic, and Wizard, looking even more dashing than usual. Decade also brought a couple of additional friends, apparently from other worlds entirely, and Kiva in particular is intimidatingly stylish. There’s even someone new, whose name Philip hasn’t managed to catch yet, a sort of citrus samurai whose entire transformation mechanism is extremely intriguing.

Everything is loud and messy and complicated, and Philip has a number of lookups to do before they even begin to fight, so of course everyone’s looking at him when he falls less gracefully than usual and gives himself a bloody nose.

“Should we maybe take care of that before we head out?” Shoutaro thinks at him, worried.

“I’ll be fine, I’ve survived worse. There are more pressing concerns.”

“If you say so, partner.”

They acquit themselves admirably in the fight, there’s some cleanup afterward, and then they de-transform and there’s that long moment where Philip isn’t quite W but not quite conscious in his own body again, and he opens his eyes to Kiva crouching next to him and holding out a hand. “You’ve got a bloody nose,” Kiva says, in his incongruously soft voice, “are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Philip says stiffly, but he does take the outstretched hand and let himself be helped up. “Thank you.”

He can see Shoutaro coming over to him, and that’s a relief, but then his partner’s approach is obscured by the new Rider, who de-transforms, puts away his little fruit device--a Lockseed, Philip will have to look them up later--and says, “Hey, I have tissues if you need them.”

Philip stares at him and feels blood rushing to his face, which of course does nothing to help with the now-sluggish nosebleed. “That would. Ah. That would be very helpful. Please.”

“I tripped during a performance once and took a header down the stage steps, and Mai kinda chewed us out when she found out that none of us had any kind of first aid stuff or even a handkerchief or anything, so I carry them all the time now.” The man smells like oranges. “I’m Kouta, by the way. Gaim. You’re Philip, right? You’re...also W somehow? I think I missed the introductions because I showed up in the middle of things.”

“That’s right, yes, I’m Philip.” Which is useless and repetitive, and Philip curses silently as he’s shaking Kouta’s large, warm, lightly calloused hand.

Thankfully, at that point Shoutaro gets to him. “Hey, partner, I’m sorry, Gentarou had something he wanted to ask me and you know how long that handshake of his takes.” He looks around, to Kouta and Kiva. “Uh, thank you for checking on him, normally it doesn’t go like that.”

Kouta smiles brightly. “It’s cool, I’ve had, like. A lot of bloody noses in my life.”

“Same here. We haven’t met, have we?” Shoutaro holds out his hand. “I’m Shoutaro, you met Philip, we’re W.”

“Kouta. Gaim. Um, do we do name names or Rider names, which is better? I haven’t been doing this for very long.”

Philip takes Shoutaro’s free arm, suddenly intensely disliking the idea of his partner’s hand in that warm, comfortable grip. Shoutaro shoots him an odd look before replying, “Regular names are fine, it gets exhausting calling everyone by a title like that. Where are you from?”

#

He survives another half an hour or so of socializing, distracted from his vague feelings of inadequacy by all of the interesting new things to learn. He doesn’t get a chance to look at Kouta’s transformation devices, because whenever Kouta gets within three feet of him his throat closes up, but he does get a chance to talk to Kiva, who never de-transforms and spends most of the time semi-hiding in a corner. It’s nice to know that someone else is at least somewhat shy, and Philip learns a number of compelling facts about the various non-human sapient species of his world. He keeps one eye on Shoutaro at all times, though, and Shoutaro keeps glancing over at him, feeling worried.

Finally, everyone is exhausted and it’s late and some of them have to teleport home or travel across dimensions, or in Fourze’s case an exam in the morning for which he should have been studying. All Shoutaro and Philip have to do is drive.

Once they’re back at the agency Shoutaro locks the door, turns around, and says, “Philip, are you mad at me for some reason? What’s up?”

Philip feels himself blushing again. Why is he blushing so much today? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re still wearing your driver, partner, I know you’re upset about something. So what don’t you like about that fruit kid? He seems nice, but you kept going tense whenever I started talking to him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Philip mutters, “he’s extremely pleasant.”

“Then why did you—wait.” Shoutaro’s eyes go wide. “Wait. Are you jealous?”

A long pause before, “Of course I’m not jealous, don’t be ridiculous,” which is obviously a lie.

“Why? Was he hitting on me, did I not notice him hitting on me? You know I’m not great at that.”

“No, he wasn’t at any point flirting with you. He’s just…attractive.”

“I guess?”

The tension goes out of Philip’s body, which is a surprise to him, because he hadn’t realized that he was so tense. “You don’t think he’s attractive.”

“I mean, he’s not exactly my type. Like, he wasn’t really my type before I met you, but also you’ve kind of permanently warped my idea of what’s attractive, I measure everyone in degrees of Philip now and so far nobody’s managed a score as good as yours.”

Philip stares at him and then has to stifle a laugh. “Shoutaro, that’s the most absurd thing you’ve said to me in…” he counts on his fingers, “two weeks.”

“Sure, but it made you smile, that was the point.”

[solastia]

Dear Authornim | 2

Pairing: Kim Seokjin x Reader

Word Count: 1,862

Summary: You’re a writer of BTS fanfiction. rockstarjin is your favorite reader that you’ve actually come to be friends with…and maybe had a bit of a crush on if you were honest. You’re up for quite the surprise.

Warnings: Not really much this chapter. Single instance of the word whore, but no one was calling someone that. It was just a comment. Semi-vague sort of sexting (you’ll see). 

Notes: I might make a separate chapter after this is done - like a bonus type thing - featuring some comments from rockstarjin, if you guys are interested. I wasn’t sure if everyone would want to see them or if they’d bore you, so I kinda glossed over that. Let me know if that’s something you’d want! Commissioned by @kimseokmomjins

Being a writer - even if it’s simply for fanfiction - you take comments and reviews very seriously. A good comment or review can lift your spirits and leave you smiling for a whole day. A negative comment often leaves you questioning everything and going over your chapters with a fine-tooth comb. The rare unicorns were the readers that took the time to leave long and detailed comments, stating exactly what they liked and disliked about the latest chapter. Many of these were filled with valuable suggestions and helped you decide the path that your stories would take. 

One such unicorn was named rockstarjin, a reader that had been following your work for nearly a year now. His first comment had practically been drabble-sized, and had covered everything from his enjoyment over how realistically you characterized Kim Seokjin to how he was certain he would never use the “W” word (he literally typed out “W” word instead of whore, something you still teased him over to this day). 

That first review of his was only one of many. He took the time to give detailed reviews on every single chapter you posted until you discovered that in your head you were practically writing for him. It had even gotten to the point where several of your stories were ideas that the two of you had chatted about on tumblr for months, working through every detail. He still seemed a little iffy on the smut, but he’d gotten you to consider the idea of writing Seokjin as “Less aggressive” in the bedroom. 

Your friendship had grown until you were now friends on practically every social media app - nevermind that his profiles were always suspiciously void of personal information. The more that you talked to “Rocky” (you started calling him that months ago since he didn’t seem excited about telling anyone his name, though he knew yours), the more you looked forward to interacting with him. 

You couldn’t even explain really why you were getting so attached to some blank face behind the screen. You didn’t even know all that much about the real him, just small observations from chats. Like, you knew that he seemed similar to Seokjin in a lot of ways, which is probably why he claimed him as a bias. 

Rocky was very fond of puns and dad jokes, often sending you one first thing in the morning on KKT instead of a hello or good morning like a normal person. This morning it was, “Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing.” You were ashamed that they always made you laugh at least a little bit, but it made you happy that one of the first things he thought to do in the morning was send you something. 

He was also fond of talking to you about food and recipes, acting affronted whenever you mentioned not knowing what something was. He would literally bully you into going to the grocery store and buying the ingredients he’d list out, demanding pictures of the final product like he was Gordon Ramsey. You had to admit he had good taste in food, even if you didn’t think your cooking skills were quite on par with his. It sometimes made you wonder if he was a chef, but the one time you’d brought it up he’d claimed to be too damn tired to cook and was living vicariously through you. Of course, that led to you asking what he did that got him so tired and he gave you another vague answer, stating he was in entertainment. Whatever the hell that meant. 

It bothered you sometimes that even after all this time he was disinclined to tell you anything, but you couldn’t help it as your feelings slowly evolved from those of friendship to...well, something more. You were a little hesitant to use the L word, considering you only knew what he wanted you to know, but you definitely had a crush at least. Not surprising considering he seemed to be everything you were looking for. He was considerate and compassionate, funny, creative, and so many other things. However, the fact that he was so very loud and proud about his love for Seokjin made you avoid looking at your feelings too closely. Because while you were over here pining for him, the only person that praised Seokjin more than Rocky was Kim Seokjin himself. And that could mean any number of things. 

Even when he helped you with smut ideas he got you excited. He had slowly gotten you to lean away from always writing Seokjin as some powerful dom - something your other readers had begun to notice and comment on - and now most of your scenes had him as being the more submissive one. He seemed to like it best when the main character was more of a soft dom, willing to take charge and take care of Seokjin. Rocky claimed that a man like Seokjin who was always working hard and worrying about one thing or another would relish the idea of being taken care of. You had to admit it made sense. 

You sigh and glance at your phone again, noting the lack of notifications. Your morning pun was the last you’d heard from Rocky today, something that had been happening for a few days now. Considering BTS was on tour right now, you’d expected a lot more messages about how he thought Seokjin was especially handsome today. Instead, for almost a week it had been nothing but your morning jokes and once he sent you a picture of his fancy looking dinner complaining about the portion size. You were beginning to really miss him, but you figured he must be busy. 

You wanted to scream with him today, considering BTS was finally going to be in your city in a couple days. You’d bought the tickets months ago, and Rocky had even convinced you to get pit tickets, something you never do because it’s basically a gladiator stadium up there. You were currently waiting for one of the boys to show up on vlive since the last concert before they traveled to your city had just finished a bit ago. It had been a fantastic show and Seokjin had looked as beautiful as always. You hoped he would be the one to go live, but that was rare unless he was with another member. 

Suddenly, your phone beeps and shows a message on KKT. 

Rocky: Kill me

You smile widely, excited flutters starting in your belly. It was ridiculous how pleased you got just to hear from him. 

You: Is there an option B? 

Rocky: We could run away and start a new life on a deserted island. Our descendants will become known as the most beautiful people on the planet. 

You blush and force yourself to cough to cover up the giggle that threatened to escape. 

You: Is that so? 

Rocky: Naturally. They all take after me, of course. 

You: Of course. 

You: What brought this on? 

Rocky: I’m so damn tired. My body hurts and I just want to sleep for a week. 

You: Oh no! Do you have time to soak in the bath? Epsom salt works wonders.

Rocky: I’ll be able to soak later. Right now I’m just forcing myself to stay awake long enough to eat. I feel like a zombie. 

Rocky: Hey, why did the zombie cross the road?

You: Why? 

Rocky: TO EAT THE CHICKEN 🤣

You: 🤭 

You: Really though, take care of yourself. I don’t want you getting sick on me. 

Rocky: How would you take care of me?

You gasped, peering hard at the phone. This was new. Of course, you could be reading this the wrong way, and he’s simply asking to ask. 

You: Depends. Are you asking for tips or in the white boy “What would you do if I was there with you” way?

Rocky: Let’s try it this way. Say I’m Kim Seokjin. I’m tired and hurting after another long night of performing. You’re waiting for me in my hotel room. How would you take care of Jin?

You: Omigosh, are you voluntarily helping with a smut scene? 

Rocky: Sure 

You: Ok, let's see. This scene can’t get too crazy if he’s tired like that. I think mostly I would focus on his comfort. 

So, he’d show up and I’d already have a bath waiting and food on the way. Maybe some aromatherapy candles are lit and some quiet instrumentals in the background. I’d let him soak until the food got there, hang out in the bathroom with him and let him vent to me if he wanted. 

After his meal, I would put a towel on the bed and have him lay on top so I could rub him down with massage oil. Naked, of course ;) 

I’m sure he gets it from professionals, but I think he’d appreciate it right after a concert and bath. 

Then, it would just depend on what kind of story it was. I could either rub him down like that until he falls asleep, or it could go the smut way. There are lots of options for that too depending on the story. I could give him a handjob while I talk sweetly to him, I could ride him and tease him, maybe peg him if he’s into that. Anything that would keep him soft and pliant, because the goal is to get him comfortable and happy. To show him he can just let go with me, let me be in charge of his pleasure. Show him he’s loved and cherished.  

Rocky: Fuck

You: Too much? 🙊 

Rocky: No

The phone was silent for a whole two minutes. Surely he’d heard worse from you, so you didn’t think you’d freaked him out or something. When another message came in you breathed a sigh of relief. 

Rocky: So, I’m gonna be in your city for the concert

You: No shit?! I can suggest so many great places for you to eat!!!

You: Or if you wanted, we could meet up? No pressure and I totally won’t be offended if you don’t want to. Stranger danger and all that. 

Rocky: You know what

Rocky: Let’s meet

[twiceminded-archived]

(Awhile back I wrote a cognitive assessment for Alfend, but today I’ve decided to expand on it! So here goes!)

(Long-ass fuckin post under the cut, lots of negative psychological stuff, and child abuse mentions.)

Amnesia - Certain memories have been surpressed by conditioning. Only Fendi suffers this, and his memories of his stay in the hospital are especially shaky because of it.

Anxiety - A given, considering what he’s been through. Many things make Alfendi nervous, due to events that have happened in their life. Al typically responds with agitation, while Fendi simply compartmentalizes the feeling and sets it aside.

C-PTSD - One would expect PTSD only due to a singular event, but Alfendi’s very early life involved emotional and verbal abuse. Due to these repeated reactions towards his behaviour, Alfendi now has a myriad of problems that persist later on in life. Al inherited the majority of those behavioural issues. Some of these will be expanded on further down the post.

Cynicism - Not exactly something either of them can help, but it’s hard to keep faith in humanity and in people when you constantly see the worst of them... and when the system fails you, where else do you turn?

Defensiveness - Absolutely. Press either of them on something they’re sensitive about, and they get defensive. Al angrily goes on the attack or stands his ground, but even Fendi can lose his temper and go off if he’s cornered, if he doesn’t just lapse into silence first.

Denial - Yep! Deny, deny, deny. They’re getting a little better about it, but there’s been no real significant progress in making either half admit truth in the face of pressure.

Depersonalization - Comes with the dissociation! And with the personality death. If this body belonged to someone before you, is it really yours? How real are you if you’re just a construct, or a fragment? Too many of these questions, and they start to lose touch with the physical world and perceive things as happening to just the ‘body’, not ‘them’.

Depression - Yeah, there’s not much to elaborate on with this. The depression is real.

Displacement - Is it really a surprise that Al has this? He can’t be aggressive towards the general public, his family, his friends, or his co-workers, so the next best thing are troublemakers who do something to deserve his ire. Who’s going to care if he dumps all of that simmering rage onto someone he’s sure is a murderer? (Well...)

Dissociation - Yes. I mean, it’s very much one of the most obvious things about them. The two of them dissociate semi-regularly, detaching from their surroundings to calm down -- and also ‘switch’ to suit the situation, as people with dissociative identity disorder often do. The blueprints for this were laid by Alfendi’s terrible childhood, before Hershel took him in.

Dysphoria - Is it really his body? Fendi isn’t sure. Al’s more certain, yet at times Fendi feels like he doesn’t belong in it. But he’s there to stay, and he has to look after this body and the alter in it anyway. At times, however, he just doesn’t feel right...

Emotional detachment - Not exactly a bad thing. Fendi makes use of his while in the workplace, where keeping a cool head is pretty important when you’re trying to get the truth out of someone. However, he takes it out of work and... stifles his emotions because he’s been led to believe that too much is too dangerous. And given the horrible feelings he has after losing his temper, maybe he can’t help it.

Flashbacks - Al has these, since Al carries the majority of childhood memories. While Fendi may freeze up when yelled at, Al will freeze up and recall being back in his first house. These flashbacks often throw him into a defensive mode due to their distressing nature and ability to evoke powerful emotions. Don’t scream at them, they hate it.

Flat affect - 100% Fendi. Another word for this is called ‘emotional blunting’ and if that isn’t Fendi I dunno what is. Typically this turns into straight-up apathy, but sometimes the flat affect is done to hide whatever emotion has just struck him.

Guilt - Fendi locked a sentient part of himself away for four years. When he realized the true reason why he had done this, he was struck with guilt that has never really gone away. But he hates guilt, so he refuses to even acknowledge it.

Hallucinations - Part of that psychosis! Fendi hallucinates voices and occasional movement out of the corners of his vision. The voices are almost always persecutory in nature, and the phrases they pick might come from the things he represses. The words don’t always make sense, however.

Hypervigilance - To a point where it can become exhaustion for them. Not always a problem but when it is, it’s usually because one of their traumas have been triggered or a phobia has been recognized. When combined with paranoia (hypervigilance isn’t the same thing), they become an absolute wreck.

Intellectualization - Done all the time by Fendi. ‘Thinking to avoid feeling’ is one of the cornerstones of his personality. Engaging emotion logically helps take the edge off of it, and makes it easier to fold up and put away.

Isolation - They’re getting better at this, but paranoia threatens to sabotage their hard work. Isolation is safer, isn’t it? But God is it lonely, and they’re sick of being lonely. As Alfendi makes more friends, he’s relying on this less and less.

Panic attacks - Perhaps ‘inevitable’ isn’t the right word; maybe ‘expected’ is. They can work themselves up into a fear-induced frenzy that then results in a panic attack. Unfortunately, agoraphobia (one of Alfendi’s most pronounced phobias) contributes heavily to panic attacks, so this man just cannot catch a break... Thankfully, they’re quite verbal about panicking and know how to deal with it at this point.

Passive-aggression - Fendi’s societal weapon of choice. Al is typically aggressive and only that, but Fendi much prefers to simply ‘accept’ before quietly undermining the person who has raised his ire. Some of his snark is quite passive-aggressive and indirect.

Paranoia - This is the big one. This paranoia is the source of so many of his problems. It has thoroughly invaded his life and so profoundly affected his behaviour that if somehow his paranoia were to be cured, he would undergo quite a personality change. (It, however, cannot be ‘cured’.) Though Alfendi is right to be on edge due to his job, mild celebrity status, prior incidents, and those who oppose him, he takes things a bit too far. He HAS to be safe, HAS to be as unreachable as possible, and his tragic dream is that one day nobody will be able to hurt him ever again. What has happened to Alfendi has thoroughly broken his ability to trust, and no matter how much work is put into helping him take down his paranoid tendencies, it only takes one betrayal (perceived or otherwise) to make him shut down...

Phobias - Yes! The most pronounced one is agoraphobia. Though most people assume it’s a fear of open spaces, that’s just a literal translation. Fendi fears that if he’s put in danger again, he won’t be able to escape -- thus, being inside will keep him safer. Obviously both of them are terribly phobic of anything that can extensively alter the mind, and despise the thought of losing control. The mere suggestion of having someone else in command of them is enough to terrify them both. There’s more! See if you can find them all!

Projection - Occasionally an issue for Al, he’ll misplace his aggression or own vaguely murderous tendencies in someone else. Not like the murderers can exactly argue...

Psychosis - Actually, they both have this! Psychosis comes along with paranoia for the ride. Being able to tell real threats from threats spun out of imagination is not a skill they have anymore -- hence, the paranoid tendencies.

PTSD - Getting shot in the fucking chest and almost dying is pretty goddamn traumatizing. So is being manipulated and taken adantage of to be used as a scapegoat, but it’s a tossup if that can be classified as a PTSD event or C-PTSD event.

Rationalization - You ever see all of those excuses Fendi makes for keeping Al down? That’s literally this. He’s rationalizing it.

Repression - Gestures at Fendi again. This is different from suppression in that feelings are being pushed into the unconscious to never be dealt with!

Self-harm - Oops! This is never done to a life-threatening extent, but Alfendi tends to scratch at his arms when he’s losing his grip on his own thought processes or is overwhelmed. Sometimes he draws blood, sometimes he just gets his skin under his fingernails and that’s all...

Somatization - The amount of stress Alfendi has occasionally manifests into pain with no definitive origin.

Splitting - While Fendi can see shades of gray in people, occasionally Al will split on someone, seeing them as all good or all bad. This is not especially healthy and has led to several friendship collapses in the past. The splitting mechanism was inherited from the original Alfendi.

Sublimation - While Al does project his aggressive emotions onto people from time to time, he’ll also transform his urges and dedicate his aggression to other things, such as his knife-throwing hobby and cooking. 

Suicidal ideation - Fendi once had this problem. It was fixed. Now he does not want to go away, ever.

Suppression - Sometimes it’s better to just stop thinking about certain things, you know? This can be perfectly healthy, just... there’s a point where you have to stop! While Al does have a better idea of where to stop suppressing, Fendi has decided the line is way the fuck elsewhere and suppresses much more often.

Thousand-yard stare - Ever seen Al in the middle of a flashback episode? He isn’t looking at you. He isn’t looking at anything. All he can see is what he went through, and he’s not here right now. Alternatively, when either of them are having a period of extreme dissociation, you’ll see it -- that dead gaze, that soulless expression...

Triggers - Plenty of them! Screaming is one of them. Don’t scream. Thunder and gunshots, too, put them off significantly and throw them into the beginnings of a shutdown or the start of a panic. There are others...

Trust issues - OH I WONDER WHY

Violence - Al is occasionally consumed with the thought of it, and itches for the times he can commit it in the name of self-defense which is kind of terrifying! He thrives off the threats he can make and the reputation it gives him. Is it any wonder Fendi worries about the choices he might make?

Whiplash temper - Alfendi was on the receiving end of this as a child, and unfortunately there is a legacy of abuse. He used to be doing better about his temper, until his personality shattered and Al not only reverted but became slightly worse than his predecessor in that regard.

[storiesofsass]

AceAro Charlie Discourse

Is the most pointless discourse I’ve ever come across. Like y’all are fighting over your own projections. I’m not even gonna put this in a read more, I’m here with facts.

One side is attacking and straight up bullying the other over a statement made by JK Rowling that was 

1. Vague as fuck. Charlie could have easily fallen in love with MC and the statement ‘Charlie prefers Dragons over Women’ would still make sense. Hell, I prefer Cats over people and I would rather be surrounded by Cats than people, doesn’t stop me from being a dumb bisexual.

2. Said by JK Rowling after the fact when she had all the time in the span of 7 whole ass books to mention that fact in any way ala Dumbledore being gay. We all know asking her to clarify would have her pull bullshit forced representation which is there for nothing more than free press and never touched on again.

This becomes even more pathetic when you factor in 

1. None of the canon characters is romanceable in the game. None of them. And Charlie has no other personality but dragons in HPHM anyway.

2. We actually know nothing about Charlie really outside the bare minimum. Charlie’s the forgotten Weasley for a reason, he’s barely mentioned throughout the books even in scenes where he’s in and his time in Hogwarts like Bill’s is never mentioned neither is his love life. He’s more of a plot device than a character in the books.

3. The game is pretty much non-canon and affects absolutely nothing in canon. Hell, the only thing that connects this game to the main canon is a throwaway line from Ron is book 2. 

So we’ve already established that most of the AroAce Charlie crowd or that least those who are sending anon hate and making passive aggressive posts in the tag are the My headcanon is canon and those who don’t agree with it are (insert whatever here) so really they aren’t worth anyone’s time. Becomes even worse when you realise that they are hypocrites and doing nothing but policing other people headcanons while ignoring that they are fighting over a headcanon too. 

Be careful with my headcanons because of what, a vague ass statement and a line in a non-canon game. The same game also teased the ship. 

What you gonna do? Throw me in fandom prison? You can’t do shit because it’s my headcanon and I’m allowed to ignore canon if I so choose. 

Now, my fellow Charlie and MC shippers. Ya’ll is pathetic too. Stop enabling them. People like this are often nothing but bullies and antis who care about nothing than patting themselves on the back for being ‘Woke’ and not actually caring about the actual representation at hand. By making posts whining about people hating over your ship and dismissing any solid counterarguments, you are only making yourself look even worse. Sometimes it’s better to block and move on. These guys live off of the validation they get from the discourse. As I said, the game is not canon, we know really do know jack shit as to why Charlie never married. Hell, we could easily retcon that JK Rowling style and still do less damage to the canon than Cursed Child. 

But does that matter? No. Because at the end of the day, we’re also aggressively projecting on some level and like them, it does not give us a high ground of any sort, while it’s wrong for them to attack us, it’s wrong of us to retaliate on any level. 

To end this long ass post off, nobody and everybody are valid in his house because we know absolutely nothing and the sooner we realise that and go back to adoring 1 (one) Dragon Child while savouring any new piece of semi-canon information we do get about him because there isn’t much. To anyone blocking me because I don’t want to participate in your circle jerk, every block adds ten years to my lifespan, grows my crops and clears my skin because I’m dealing with one less toxic person. 

[ursoself-satisfying]

an OC sneak peek [2/?]

ok heres another w the accompanying oc!!! its ginger n maryanne 4ever!!!!! i lov them sm!!!!! but anyway heres another excerpt from around the same time n its MORE angst n I hope u like my vagueness lol,, PLEASE GIVE ME FEEDBACK!!! LEMME KNO WHAT U THINK!!!! ilyall enjoy ::””)) IM GONNA PREFACE THIS W THE FACT THAT IK IRL BRIAN IS A PURE MAN N THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN N ANITA IS A GODDESS BUT THIS IS JUST FOR THE DRAMA ITS TOTAL FICTION I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NO DISRESPECT TOWARDS ANY OF THEM its got some cheating ig so be aware that anita is my mom n the loml pls dont call me out ::(( 

---

“Anything to drink?” He asked casually, causing the girl to squirm in her seat. Her discomfort was amusing to him, as she was the one who had traveled out in the first place. She was present of her own volition but acted as though her emotions had such an irresistible hold on her, or rather Brian did, that she was there out of a primal need rather than any conscious decision.

“No- No, I’m ok, thank you.” The tall man glanced back at her with a soft, sad air about him. This feeling often came with their interactions as of late, despite their past. He averted his gaze from her body and turned his attention on pouring himself some tea instead. They existed in simple silence for a few moments, the only sound in the small kitchen was that of the kettle on the stove and the pouring of boiling water in his cup. He stood at the counter and took a long sip before turning slowly to sit across from his unsolicited guest. A feather soft smile graced his lips as he took her in. Even in an unfortunate situation, she was unbelievable, the same as ever.

The woman bit her lip before leaning forward and uncrossing her tense legs, “So, uh, wh-”

Brian set his drink down with a small clink on the table, the sound meant to interrupt her question. He just stared into the hot earthy contents for a moment and stirred it slowly. “Anita’s at her semi-annual retreat this week without me.” He cleared his throat, “I couldn’t spare the time between the post-production bustle and having to prepare for the cosmos convention.” His smile was thin and he took a sip of his tea before continuing, “I’m home alone for a while,” his eyes traced the woman’s silhouette before meeting her gaze as she was doing the same to him, “but I think you knew that.”

“Look-” She started quietly, but ultimately she could maintain the eye contact long enough to finish and slouched for a second instead. Ginger looked down at his comment, avoiding the aim of his accusatory glance. With a huff, she sat up and turned to face suddenly face him directly. “Maryanne kicked me out for the night.”

The elder of the two raised his brows and put his cup down with a concerned expression. “She kicked you out?” He asked incredulously.

The redhead swallowed, “Shes ‘moving on’.” She spat her words at him with a clear distaste for her lovers choice of actions as well as words.

The long fingers of the guitarist slid across the table and laid open for an embrace. Ginger glanced up at him cautiously before deciding his soft eyes held genuity and she laced her hand in his. The tips of his digits wrapped around her like they were made to fit with one another. Her hands in his caused a wave of emotions to ripple from the contact and Brian could barely handle it. He sniffled and slowly let his thumb slide over the never aging skin of the woman he once adored, and though he would tell himself otherwise, he still adored.

“I'm sorry,” he began, but she shook her head violently with an angry frown. She unintentionally squeezed his outstretched hand but he squeezed right back.

“Don't be. She’s just-” Ginger sighed, “She's different now, you know?”

Her aura slowly shifted from that of deep warm hues to softer cooler tones, from red and oranges to blues and purples like a dying flame coming down from its hottest point. Brian could feel the shift shoot through her and he prepared himself to stand and hold her the minute she needed him to.

Ginger looked up to meet Brian's sympathetic stare. He had always been the key to their emotions and it unlocked some kind of flood gate in her. She could feel it rush all at once in seemingly every part of her body. “I just don't wanna lose her, Brian!” She let it our like a gust of wind from her mouth, a storm of repressed worried. “I can't-! Not like I lost you!”

Just as he knew he would be needed, the man stood and went to her side. She stood as he approached and let him engulf her in his long arms as tears escaped and ran down her already red cheeks. She was shaking, having no way to handle or process the realization their return had thrust upon her. Brian held her sobbing head close in his chest, stroking her short hair and tightening his limbs protectively around her warm body. She could feel him place a small kiss on her head, whispering and cooing to her as he once had long ago, “Hush now, it'll all be alright, my darling girl,” his voice would waver now and again as he calmed her, “my sweet, beautiful, darling, darling, girls.” The smaller hands of the woman held dependently to the collar of his sweater and she choked back a final sob before attempting to speak again.

Her small voice came out with a rasp, raw from her cries, as she tilted her head back to meet the eyes of her familiar love, “We made things work, Brian. Why can't we just be like that again?” She pleaded with shining green eyes that took the man to another scene for a moment, one of discovery and firsts, one full of ecstasy and elation, but one so different than his present. “We were happy, Harold. Why can't we be happy again?” A weak attempt at a smile graced her lips at the loosening of her tongue, unfolding the old name like opening an old scrapbook.

Had her hands not been traveling up his changed face to tether him to his physical body, her use of his other name, so intimate and exclusive, would have had him lost right then and there in the sensation she provided. She cradled his face and her shaking lips begged to be kissed, tangling her fingers in his grey curls to entice him. Drifting closer and closer until he was bent to breathe down her neck, the temptation became too much.

It may have started at the neck but it moved in hot streaks from the necks to jaws to lips on lips. While Ginger's hands were preoccupied with the buttons of his shirt, Brian’s were holding her as close to him as he could, sprawled out on her back dangerously close to her ass. She mapped out his chest with the tips of her nails while her tongue did the same with his mouth. Nothing needed to be mapped, really, because for her it was like walking down a road to your first home. Even after you've left it, you'll always remember how to get there, no matter how much shrubbery grows over the path or how long it goes unattended. Brian was their home and they always seemed to find their way back to him, regardless of the distance put between them.

Brian thought she was exactly the same. Everything about her physically was just as she was when she left him. He then pulled away at the reemergence of that memory. As he separated from her, she mewled in protest, the loss of connection cold on her. That was right, though, she had left and he had stayed. Years and years had gone by and he had made a life for himself, more of a life, or in the very least a life without them.

“Brian,” Ginger moaned, trying to snake her arms back around his neck, “baby, what's wrong?” Her eyes were closed and her shirt was half haphazardly pushed up but her exposure only made Brian suddenly feel sicker.

“You know what's wrong, my love.” His languid fingers worked to pry her needy form off him with much difficulty. Her pouts turned to frowns and he gently, if not reluctantly, pulled her clothes back in place on her but she swatted him away as he spoke. “Ginger, darling, all of this is what's wrong.”

He motioned to them, to the empty house, to the hairs sticking to her face like sunny, golden, cherubic looking locks. She was glowing, but wasn't she always? She was in his eyes but that only made it all harder. “What?” She spat, “That- That I still love you? That's wrong?”

So much of it hurt him but he- He had to. It was really the only acceptable course of action. The teenager in him beat on his heart like Roger on a gong and begged and pleaded for there to be another way, for him to run away with her like he was 17 again, but he was old and his heart no longer reverberated in his chest like it used to. “You're the most intelligent creature I've ever encountered, my love. You know why all this is wrong.”

The tears returned and rolled down her face in record time as she bit her lip. “Why can't things go back to the way they were? It was perfect-”

He sighed, “The world is always changing-”

“I love you, Brian Harold May! And you still love me! I know you do! Isn’t that what you taught us?” With calculated steps, she aimed to close the distance between them but the older man kept her at arms distance now. “If we're in love then we should be together!” With every word, her speech became less and less intelligible through her sobs. “I just- I don’t understand!”

His heart shook as it shattered in his chest at her final words, a final crash to end an epic saga. “Things are a lot more complicated now, Ginger. You'll understand someday-” He held back his own tears and watched her pace the floor in front of him.

“Don't be so fucking condescending!” She snapped, stopping to look him in the eyes, the same eyes she saw when she first arrived. They were the only consistent thing in her long life, the love he held in his gaze. It softened her against her will. She wanted to be angry, not for the first time ever, but for the first time for personal reasons.

Brian paused at this. He had never seen her exhibit this much emotion before especially not aggression. All this time and he wasn't sure if he’d ever seen her this mad. “I'm sorry-”

“Don't be.” There she was. She was back to being cold. Face dry and slack, she was a woman of logic and decision. She collected herself and her things, jackets, and bags scattered around the room, refusing any help or assistance offered by Brian.

He didn't do a thing to stop her in the end. He knew she would find somewhere else to go, to stay, someone else to keep her warm. He had no doubt about that. She was well loved and well read, but ignorant in the ways of society. He worried but he couldn't have stopped her if he’d wanted to anyway. He desperately wanted to, but he knew the second his skin sparked on hers again he wouldn't be able to stop this time. No one in his life deserved that, his kids didn't deserve a father like that and his wife, God, she deserved more than he was being right then.

The door closed with a slam and Brian watched from the window as she got in her car but she didn't leave. She just sat there, hunched over her steering wheel and what he could only assume was yelling. Her mouth was wide and her eyes were shut tightly. He hadn't even realized the tears falling from his own eyes. He didn't wait for her to leave, he couldn't take the site of her any longer, not here not like this.

Behind some of his amps, Brian kept a box. It was filled with old photos, some bits of clothing, and all sorts of pieces of art. His favorite, of course, was the photos though. There they were, all together, smiling and in love. The three of them, they were- They were unstoppable, untouchable. It was golden with them, always. God, he thought how did it come to this? How could their story have arrived at this conclusion? And all Brian could assume was that this simply wasn't yet the conclusion.

[stupidpianist]

9 october 2018

18:06: It’s 18:06 while I’m starting this post and I’m, like, “therapeutically” listening to Glenn Gould perform Chopin’s third sonata over my speakers, and I have this apples and cinnamon candle going to my right. My brain is saying, “burn, baby, burn, yeah, that’s right,” at the candle, I think.

Deciding to do this through mutual “peer pressure” I’m getting from continuously reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle for the last several years, and more recently from Megan Boyle’s just-published Liveblog, which I’m now, like, fifty-one pages in, feeling increasingly obsessed with each subsequent page (i mean like the books are peer pressuring me i don’t mean like ppl are, attacking me, or something, for not doing this). I’m gonna quote the start of her liveblogging experiment:

“Starting today, march 17, 2013, i will be liveblogging everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability. right now there is no one i talk to frequently enough to effect by my failure to follow through with tasks i said i’d do. the only person ‘keeping tabs’ on my life is me. as time has been passing, i have been feeling an equally uncontrollable sensation of my life not belonging to me or something. like it’s just this event i don’t seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake. maybe i wasn’t invited. clerical error. i witness myself willfully allowing opportunities to fade away, because sometimes, for whatever reason, it is hard for me to do things that i know will make me happy.

i can’t control getting older but i can control what i do as i age. also, i feel like my memory is deteriorating. i used to like documenting my daily activities. that seemed to help me remember more. lately the things i’ve been doing haven’t felt worth remembering, but i feel like that could just be a mind trick, and if i start writing more again, i’ll convince myself everything is basically the same as however many years ago it was when i felt more satisfied or hopeful or whatever it is i don’t feel now.

**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING** **I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME OR THINK ABOUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS OR ENJOYING READING THIS, IT’S JUST GOING TO BE WHAT IT IS: A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME FEEL MORE LIKE IMPROVING MYSELF**”

Feel strongly that this, p. wholly, encompasses why I’m gonna try doing this again, too. Previously “in my life” I used to make, like, daily videos, or “vlog”-type things, and for another period, I wrote one short story a day, and for another period, I wrote, like, a letter-a-day to the general public describing what I did that day, and during each of these periods, I think I felt my general productivity, motivation, mood, well being, increase notably.

Also feel strongly that I won’t be able to, nearly as accurately, follow my day minute-by-minute as Megan did, will probably revert to something I write at the end of each day, or something, I’m not sure yet, or, like, maybe smaller posts as the day goes on? I don’t know give me a couple of days to figure it out please, I really don’t, I’m not sure.

Feel excited by this, feeling like, “yeah, this is a good thing to do, yeah, yeah, you do this, George, just ‘give it a shot,’ ‘go for it,’ ‘you got this.’”

18:22: Just got a text from my mom that said “the big pile is beans! Silly” in response to my replying “too spicy!” to a photograph she sent me, of a mound of flat beans, and a couple of cayenne peppers next to them. I just replied, “I meant the big red peppers.” I’m grinning a lot.

(earlier today) 09:00: Woke this morning to the sound of workers on the floor above mine still renovating apartments. They do this aggressive, rhythmic hammering, which then stops for a few seconds, then resumes for a seconds, then stops for a few seconds, then resumes again. Made it extremely hard to “sleep in,” which I wasn’t even planning on doing, but after cancelling all of my alarms, I sort of just drifted in-and-out of sleep in a weird numb stupor. 

12:00: Eventually got out of bed, feeling semi-disgusted at myself.

Decided to go with a “classic” outfit today, something from my youth, something from years past, something timeless. Chose brown pants with repeated cartoon raccoon pattern on it, grey long-sleeve shirt, “Don’t Give Up. Never Give Up.” black hoodie. 

13:00: Felt “mild amazement” that I was “somehow, already” dressed, in a vaguely positive way.

I was like, “yes, yes, yes, keep riding out this positive emotion,” and made a “G Fuel” energy shake. Strawberry shortcake flavour. Highly recommend. Chugged smoothie while idly watching YouTube videos of tech topics. Had a moment where I was like, “oh crap, dude, you’ve only got, like, five hours of productivity left in the day, you gotta leave, get out of your apartment dude, leave, leave now,” and then, sort-of panicking, grabbed backpack, headphones, iPod, put on shoes, ran out of apartment to McLennan library.

13:16: Yeesh it was so warm today, like, what happened? We gonna get autumn or what, huh? You too chicken to “bring on the cold”? Got to the library, sweating like a disgusting piggie. Chose a computer in the Cybertheque area, couldn’t sit next to the windows where I usually like to sit to squirrel and people watch out my peripherals. I was all, “man you’re gonna get so much done, you’re gonna get all that goodass studying done aren’t you, you’re gonna breeze through these readings,” and then NOPE nada that is not what happened at all. I just pulled up Spotify and played Grouper and then read more of Megan’s Liveblog for like three straight hours, with “intense focus,” I felt, like, “undeviating focus,” like, “laser-like focus,” like, “hawk-like attention to detail.” Felt mildly insane, like, I absolutely could not believe how engrossed in the book I was.

I WASN’T ALL UNPRODUCTIVE look here me out please, you have to at least be on my side a LITTLE: okay here’s the productive things I did okay:

-checked electricity/hydro bill

-checked when midterms were

-checked work schedule for the week

Look I know I know it’s not a lot but please just shut up for like two seconds gosh

A strange thing that started happening—even though my mood started, like, at 7.5/10 when I got to the library, after three hours it dropped, like, severely. Like a lot, I have no idea why, just the natural curve of the day I guess but like by 17:00 I was at a 3/10 if that and was like, “I gotta get out of here, get out of here, yo, hey, stand up, walk outside, get some of that ‘sweet, sweet’ sunlight before the sun disappears for another twelve or thirteen hours, go, log out of the computer, move your butt, move faster, go go go go” and then the “go”s continued faster and faster until I was outside, and, like, dancing a bit to the album I was playing (Prequelle, by Ghost. Been listening to a lot of Ghost recently. Been really “Ghost”ing it up, if you smell what I’m cookin’.)

Then while walking I was like, “alright, okay, it’s ‘time,’ when you get home, just start writing, just ‘do it,’ it doesn’t matter if you have nothing to say, you’ll thank yourself later,” and alsoo another part of my brain was going “start yoga, you promised [your best friend] Alli you’d start yoga, you even told me you wanted to start yoga, why haven’t you started it yet????”

18:40: Earnestly feeling a lot better, yeah, yeah, I am!! I’m gonna finish this post for today but wow that actually helped a lot. I know that Megan’s liveblog experiment ended up having net-detrimental effects on her life, we’ll have to see “how this goes.” Also unfair to compare each experiment as hers was minute-by-minute, and mine is like totally not minute-by-minute to such a significant degree that the data sets can’t be cross-referenced, I feel? I don’t know.

Do any of u ppl have a yoga mat you are looking to sell or could let me borrow? My apartment floor is linoleum and almost as uncomfortable as it is unpleasant to look at. I have, like, this rug from Ikea, but it’s not really in a good position for “yoga-like purposes,” nor is it especially padded, or furry, or like, whatever, you know what I’m trying to say. Gonna use it for now and just “see how it goes,” maybe it’ll actually be just fine? Gosh I don’t even know, feel so unsure about everything. Feeling hopeful, though, feeling “very hopeful,” this was a lot of fun, yeah, yes; gonna try and put in more detail tomorrow, with more timestamps “for accuracy,” or something. Feel strongly that this will be possible, will be bringing around a notebook to “log things in” now that htis project has started, yeah, uh-huh, mhmm, yes yes yes

[savrenim]

I keep almost opening tumblr to write a Big Long Post About My Life Because Goddamnit This Place Used To Be My Diary Until Suddenly I Got Involved In The H*milton Fandom And A Whole Bunch Of Strangers Started Following Me, and then, like. suddenly got more self-conscious. as well as better at dealing with stuff in my life so I haven’t really felt the need to vent, when did I become a semi-responsible semi-functional adult. but you know what? what the hell. there are things that I actually vaguely do want to vent about because dear gods has my life Been Ridiculous of late.

I am approximately 3/4 the person that I used to be? which is a dramatic way of stating that I used to be about 200lbs, I didn’t actually know because in theory I’ve aggressively avoided scales since high school because I used to have pretty bad anorexia and then orthorexia and binge eating then, it got better after I decided I don’t care about anything physical and just cut off all thoughts about anything like that and refused to acknowledge anything more than following the rule of eating three meals a day, but in practice I go to the doctor yearly and can access my medical records online and every once in a while can check with a friend and being steady over the last year or two meant that I was about 200lbs.

I was 153lbs the last time I checked, and I’ve been checking weekly just to make sure that I Don’t Keep Drastically Losing Weight, because this has all been since March. not even the beginning of March, the second half of March. I almost definitely lost thirty pounds in a month, a month and a half. and then have at least been losing weight more slowly after that? it has been fucking insane and I hated every second of it, wheeeee. (what happened in March was I got sick with the flu, couldn’t eat for a week, lost a fair bit of weight from that, and then my appetite/taste buds solidly shifted after only eating lentil soup back to super healthy vegetarian rice and beans and what-not that I’d been eating at the beginning of the school year, instead of take-out type deal, and I was actually getting sleep and going to more Tai Chi and every other week my car was breaking down so I was walking places a bunch and sudden lots of exercise + change in diet + not as stressed as first semester and getting sleep actually is a fairly healthy way to lose weight?)

but boooooy did it freak me out when I suddenly fit into jeans from the start of college that I had kept thinking I’d never fit into them again because Holy Fuck All Of My I’m Starving And Am Going To Die instincts kicked in and all of my actual close friends are online friends which meant besides one comment from a Tai Chi instructor directly after I’d been out for three weeks from slowly recovering from the flu (which actually was the nicest way anyone has ever commented on my weight, it was an “oh you’ve lost weight” “yeah I had the flu pretty bad, that’s where I’ve been for three weeks, couldn’t eat for a week and have been slowly getting back to solid meals” “oh yeah that really sucks, happened to a friend of mine last year, I think there are still pictures it’s scary” instead of a well you look good response, Thomas P is great and I love him) but absolutely no one was commenting and it made me feel like I was going crazy and I had no idea how much I weighed so how much I should be freaking out and no data even to compare that against, which was why I eventually broke and got a scale so that I could at least have datapoints and figure out when I was steady again because gods I just wanted to be steady

and, like, that was one of the literal worst parts of losing weight in high school, it was ballooning from 100lbs to 200lbs and all the not-so-subtle judgement from my mother when I came back various breaks during college and the number of times I had to threaten not to come back at all if she so much as commented on my weight so she found other ways of commenting about “why are you skipping aikido tonight, you only have so many times to go to the studio before you’re back east,” and, like, the constant fight of her either deciding to pay for my food or that she wouldn’t pay for any of it because I ate too much of it, and then, like. after having lost so much weight needing to get new bras and honestly some new clothes despite the fact that I haven’t bought fitted clothes since the very start of college because I’ve just been so fucking afraid of my weight ballooning again and not being able to fit into anything, considering I don’t really have money to drop on a new wardrobe as I get everything as cheap as possible or hand-me-down anyways and then wheeee that brought up all the shitty memories from high school where my mother refused to get me a new uniform when I weighed too much for my old one so I spent a year squeezing into skirts that left imprints on my waist and wearing long sweaters to cover the fact that I couldn’t zip them up, and, like. suddenly losing weight also triggered the fear of am I going to gain it all back then more and be stuck with a wardrobe that even though it was designed loose in the first place, still won’t fit me, which is ridiculous because I’m steadying out and it’s not like my diet or patterns are going to change again, just. gods have these past few months brought up a fair bit of past trauma and I a little bit wish more people had reached out to me and responded but I bugged the right people and they hella listened and made sure enough that old instincts and old fears didn’t get involved and, like. I like this body? I’m more flexible and my balance is a bit better and I can punch differently but just as well and I need to get used to groundfighting and throws with it but lack of mass is made up for in other ways. gods I love Tai Chi and it is the one thing that has kept me sane through all of this because no matter what my body looks like the thing that’s been most important to me is that physically, I’m dangerous, and that’s not about weight. that’s about strength, that’s about training, I’m in that studio now eight hours a week because that is the maximum number of classes they have for adults and I can practice on my own and just. the one time that I feel fiercely okay and goddamn happy about the fact that I have a physical form is knowing that if someone messes with me, I can defend myself, and proving it to myself over and over and over.

but yeah that’s been going on.

then there are the kittens can you tell how much my life has been made better by the kittens, I love these kittens so much, the story behind the kittens is that I saw a cat meowing outside, thought it was a stray kitten because of how small and starving it looked but knocked on doors to see if it belonged to any of my neighbors before I just took it to a vet type deal, and it belonged to the woman behind the first door I knocked on, who asked me why, do you want her, which I thought was weird, then said woman shouted at me from her window as I was taking out trash that seriously, this cat just had three kittens, she needed money and to get rid of them, was I interested in buying any of them off her, I was just going to get Talvus and then it was a combo of “she gave me the kitten at 4 weeks which then I couldn’t get him to eat anything because he hadn’t been weaned yet and kittens can’t be separated from the rest of their litter until 12 or 13 weeks or they don’t socialize correctly” that just. waaaasn’t good. as well as the other two kittens were adorable and I’d named them and it seemed for a little while like my girlfriend might be able to take one so I went “listen just give me all three at 8 weeks once they’re weaned and I’ll take it from there”

and I’m so fucking glad I did this

she was keeping all three of them in a cage most of the time, they weren’t using her litter box because she was barely cleaning it so she was surprised to hear they weren’t peeing all over my house, I’m actually taking them to get vaccinated and spayed/neutered which I can only afford because the Friends of Animals program exists but also, holy fuck have I been spending a lot of my savings between kittens and needing to drive everyone everywhere so a whole bunch of tolls and gas money to my fiance staying with me for a bit but that both meant buying more expensive groceries than I usually do because she eats meat as well as a whole bunch of errands to run and little things that add up (and then she got strep and just. it was a nightmare.)

right my car has been breaking down too, that’s been exciting, thank you my grandfather for dying and leaving enough inheritance-wise that I have been able to afford getting a different used car despite wheee leaking money left and right this summer but fixing up this one consistently because if I don’t I’m even More Fucked despite it not being worth it has legitimately burned through a solid quarter of my savings. like. I don’t have the right to say that I’m worried about money because I do still have some savings and a stipend coming in each month from research that pays for food and groceries so it’s not like it’s gotten tight so much as I have had to just deal with savings exist because sometimes emergencies come up and you Gotta Spend Them and hopefully I’ll save more next year and having a car that doesn’t break down every other month is going to help

considering the old car is in now perfect working condition I’m giving it to a friend of mine for $300 with the stipulation that if it breaks down at all over the next year I will refund them any of that $300 that they don’t make selling it to a junkyard because I didn’t want to waste a perfectly fine working car and my friends are even more poor than me I just. also am hemorrhaging money left and right and gods maybe that will help.

my fiance and I figured out that we’re probably never going to live together. from a combination of we have very, very different schedules to she needs so much structure in her life that slowly wears away at my spoons to not even give it to her but to re-arrange my own schedule and contribute to the logistics of her making it happen for herself, like, I can sit at the table in my apartment and work for eight hours on research and pause because there’s food in my kitchen to grab a thing to eat, she needed to go to a coffee shop every morning to be able to concentrate because if it wasn’t going out with a goal of doing something and being somewhere she wouldn’t be able to concentrate and it would mess up the entire day, which, like. wasn’t terrible because I usually walk for coffee anyways and can work anywhere but having that be a Necessary Logistic that I Have To Push For In The Morning Because God Help Anyone Who Tries To Wake The Sleeping Dragon (even though said sleeping dragon prefers to be on schedules where she wakes up at 6:30am, unlike my usual 10:00am, and we tried to compromise for 8:30am but guess who was the one who was always up first because I actually listen to my alarm and then dear gods is it stressful to wake people up)

(as well as this is not all her, it is also me, like. I need everything to be perfectly organized in terms of logistics so if someone hasn’t eaten yet it will bug me so I will ping them every half an hour of “you’ve forgotten to eat lunch, can we make lunch happen for you,” or there is a very specific state of clean that I need the apartment to be, or I’m incredibly antisocial at times, I can’t deal with someone touching me or fall asleep next to them if I’m stressed or if it’s hot so spent a couple of nights on the couch, as well as I’m picky about exactly the way the chores get done so needed to do all of them, the tl;dr is I think I have discovered my ideal living situation is living alone, at least most of the time and maybe having a house to visit on weekends, because I love her and love to spend time with her but also need a lot of space and long periods of quiet to do the work that I need to get done)

which, like

absolutely none of this is detrimental to our actual plans for our relationship, considering our actual plans are “we both are very busy people, she actually does have a group of people that she lives with very very well and that actively work well into her schedule, I have my kittens and my math and my facetime and my weekends with people, and the basis of our relationship is the commitment and the external alliance and the face that we present the world as well as the fun of getting to be gay and go on cute dates every once in a while, it’s not that we live well or lifestyle well together, it’s that we powercouple well together, so pick and choose the things that work and keep those.” which also works really well for she’s thinking of raising kids and I’m probably going to bounce around location-wise in post doc positions for a while before I find somewhere I might be able to settle with tenure, and, like. that’s not a good environment to raise kids in.

(we’re poly. we’re so poly. can you tell how poly we are. it’s one of the things that solidly makes us work, because we don’t have to force the other one to be everything, she’s found someone that she solidly likes that we’re calling prospective duckling papa, I also solidly like this person, so. kids might actually be a thing on the actual horizon, although probably not in the house that I’m spending most of my time, so that’s interesting. and terrifying. and expensive. and hopefully at least five years away.)

and then also I...finally had a conversation with a friend that I’ve been meaning to have for a while? that I really hope and I really think I did get across the whole “I care about our friendship the way that society mostly expects people to care about and be committed to romantic relationships, which is almost why it’s weird to just call you a friend which is why we are having this conversation, not because I Am In Romantic Love With You Again” of basically just “considering I’ve been thinking about and mapping out the actual relationships in my life and the ones that are steady and that are going to stick around, you know that I love you, right, and that you’re one of the ones that I really really want to stick around” and, like

gods do I love this person so much. and just....the role they have played in my life over the years? the way that I can talk to them and the things that I can talk to them about and share with them and math and physics and stories and DnD stories because gods do I rant about that to anyone who will listen and they get it pretty bad, oops, but they put up with it. and just the sum of who they are to me right now? is one of the most important people in my life. and I get so self-conscious of “but do I mean anything back to you at all, of course no one cares about me and this is Entirely One Sided but that’s okay I’ve always been the person who was going to jump in front of the bullet because I go more intense than other people” but, like. besides the friends that actively know that they are surrogate siblings to me. There’s my fiance, that I trust actually loves me as much as I love her, because we are very gay and we talk about it all the time. There’s another friend that is actually one of the few people that I’m physically comfortable with because both (a) he is as asexual as me so I can actually make out or cuddle with him while knowing that there is zero interest in sex happening in the encounter, and (b) has spent years slowly setting boundaries and slowly negotiating comfort levels together and has been an amazing friend and fantastic part of my life in other ways and, like, so yeah, I love him, and he’s well aware of that, and he loves me, and I’m not self-conscious about that, but, just.

there is this part of me that always goes “nope you don’t matter to people” or at least the people that matter to me unless I have Lots Of Data to back it up and you know what I have fucking data to back this one up and this person explicitly told me that they care about me too

and it bothers me to love a person a bunch and then go “but oh gods I need to be so careful and delicate about saying it because what if They Get The Wrong Message and I don’t want to make things awkward on their end” which also is complete bullshit because this person has heard me talk about how I think and feel about things for years so if anyone is going to actually know that I’m not lying or sidestepping the truth in what I mean when I say I love them it’s going to be them but just. I guess time to build up the confidence that it is okay to directly express how much I care about this person the way that I have gotten comfortable expressing the way I care about other people in my inner circle because at least now I have their word that they know, they’re okay with it, they care about me right back too type deal

and that is all the drama that has been going on in my life

[vampirequeenoffan]

yes hello im feeling your trollhunters opinion!! do u also feel like Merlin is super shady? I don't think he did a single thing since he showed up that can be considered 'good', he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself, and after what he did to get Jim to turn into a troll (cutting him off from his entire support network, playing on his insecurities) I thought he'd turn out to be the Ultimate Villain of the show right up until the end, when he wasn't.

HOOOBOY do I ever have FEELINGS about this (which will once again be under the cut because SCREAMING)

First off, holy fuck, THANK you. Your message means a lot to me (as do the other nice messages and comments I got on my post! It feels great to know I’m not the only one who felt like there was something wrong with this ending).

Second.

Yeah, what in the fuck is up with Merlin? I liked him for a good thirty seconds after he was introduced– I’m a bit of a sucker for the ‘ancient and powerful being of legend is actually Not At All What Anyone Thought trope’ tbh. But the novelty quickly wore off and you’re absolutely right– I totally thought he was going to be the show’s Ultimate Villain. I usually love asshole characters, so the fact that Merlin is so much of an asshole that I hated him is… impressive, in a weird way. And the list of characters I’m crazy about contains several serial killers, so the bar is real low.

Let’s break this down.

Merlin, upon reentering the picture, does the following:

–Gets passive-aggressively mad at the Trollhunters for not getting him his staff

Which, y’know, could’ve been avoided if he’d just asked to have the staff in the same room with him when he’d been buried. He also had no reason to be mad, considering his plan was to release Morgana all along, and had the Trollhunters actually taken back the staff they then would’ve had to fight their way into Trollmarket in order to free Morgana, which… would have been difficult. That, or they’d have had to turn the staff over to Gunmar anyway, so again, no reason for Merlin to be mad.

Personally I totally agree that they should’ve left Morgana in there, or at least had some semi-automatic weapons ready when they did release her (because if the USA is going to have shitty gun control laws we might as well use them to destroy evil witches, amiright?), but this is about Merlin’s reaction, not mine.

Also, if this was his plan all along, he could’ve left instructions about that. So that, y’know, Drall didn’t die trying to stop Gunmar from taking the staff. You know. That little detail.

–Repairs Jim’s amulet

On the surface this is good, except that, again, he wouldn’t have had to do this if he’d written the directions to his tomb on anything else. He could’ve even had the instructions in like, the spirit room that the dead trollhunters live in, if he was really that determined to make sure it was trollhunter-specific. 

–Threatens to eat Toby

????????¿¿¿¿¿¿¿???????

What even happened here. What. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, it really added to the ‘what the fuck even is going on with him’ vibe that Merlin has, but why? Did he just… hang out with trolls too much? But only the evil trolls did that. What even was happening here. And why Toby? Was it process of elimination because he though Claire was hot (which, uh, creepy) and he needed Jim, or was this a… fat joke? I honestly have no idea.

–Gives them a laundry list of complicated as fuck items to collect

Merlin is an asshole who should’ve gotten his groceries himself. Nuff said. Oh wait, not enough said, because one of those things was literally lightning in a goddamn bottle, which they needed the help of actual goddamn aliens to get, so Merlin, with no knowledge of modern technology, really should have known he needed to at least get that one by himself.

What a guy.

–Destroys Jim’s vespa

Okay, this probably seems petty. ‘Merlin literally kickstarted the apocalypse, why do you care about the vespa?’ Well, because it wasn’t just any piece of machinery. Jim had been wanting a vespa for a very, very long time– for him, it was a dream, then a symbol of normalcy, and then it became even more than that when he finally got one– by building it with Blinky. It was a project he undertook alongside his father figure, likely took weeks of work, and was a physical reminder of how much Blinky cared about him.

Merlin destroys it and uses it to make armor.

Now, there’s some symbolism here. Merlin is destroying the vespa– symbol of Jim’s old life– and using it to forge armor– transforming his old life into something that protects his friends. It’s not unlike what his amulet has done to him, or what Merlin later tries to do by making Jim into a troll. Which, yeah, I’ve covered being a shitty tactical decision and I’m going to go over even more reasons why it’s terrible in a minute.

Point is, dick move. He could’ve used literally any other kind of metal, so the only upside here is symbolism and, let’s be real, it’s a metaphor is not a good reason to do dumb shit.

–Champions releasing Morgana

I was really happy that everyone yelled at him about this one. I was less happy that that was all that happened. Merlin did, clearly, just want his magic back. If he didn’t, he would have just left Morgana in her goddamn crystal like a sensible person, or at the very least agreed to help take out Gunmar before handling Morgana. It’s just common sense to divide and conquer– yes writing a paper is very hard, but it’s a lot easier to do that when your house isn’t on fire. Dealing with problems separately makes them all a lot less taxing, or in this case, a lot less deadly! There are so many people that would still be alive if Merlin, after being asleep for hundreds of years, had just been able to wait a few more goddamn weeks to have his fingersparkles back.

–Emotionally manipulates Jim into becoming a troll

This fucker. This assclown. You’re absolutely right– he cuts him off from everyone he knows and refuses to let him go rescue his mom, does that shitty parent thing where you guilt someone by saying “It’s your choice whether or not to do the right thing…” and spews some shit about destiny and just generally uses his title of Old Guy Who Knows Stuff to tell Jim that he Has To Do This, but it’s Totally Your Choice.

I thought, when Jim’s mom rescued herself (go Barb go!!!) and came running up to the bathroom door, that he would stop. Because that was the whole reason Jim was going to go through with the transformation– it was the only way Merlin would let him go save his mom. The fact that he just kinda… ignored the fact that they were out there yelling for him? Yeah, that was dumb. Even if he wanted to go through with it, he should have talked to his friends and family first. That was, uh, the whole lesson he learned from going into the Darklands alone. We’ve been down this road, Jim, it’s depressing.

And then Merlin’s just… useless. He can’t beat Morgana, his tactics suck ass, and the only thing he does from that point on is try to get other people to die for him– looking at you, Aargh. I’m so glad you’re still alive.

So, to reiterate, Merlin shows up, fucks shit up, and then doesn’t fix any of the fucked up shit. On top of that, he’s an asshole the entire time– the “real battle of Killahead” line was just the tip of the douchebag iceberg (though ‘all you folks who died during this battle didn’t matter’ was a hell of a way to kick that off, I agree). But… why?

You’re right, we don’t know why he and Morgana started this pissing contest. We don’t even know why he took her on as an apprentice in the first place, or what connection the two of them had to trolls at all– presumably a strong one, considering how much they both tried to fuck with the future of the species. Before we met Merlin, none of these things had to be defined– Morgana and Merlin were vague enough as figures that we could imagine any number of things that had led to the current state of being. I, personally, imagined Merlin as being more invested in humans than trolls, which made sense to me because he was on the side of the trolls that didn’t hurt humans and his amulet placed a huge amount of value on Jim’s humanity. But then it’s revealed that Merlin actually doesn’t give a shit about humans at all, as he apparently eats them, doesn’t mind putting the entire town of Arcadia in danger, and tells Jim that his humanity doesn’t matter and he’s better off being a troll.

Same for Morgana. I thought her whole deal was that she wanted trolls to be the dominant species, but then she says Gunmar is disposable and doesn’t seem to give a shit about his conquest of the surface? If she didn’t actually care about trolls conquering humans, why in the hell did she want to bring about the eternal night?

So, again, what was happening and why were they so invested in the future of trollkind? If it wasn’t, like I thought, about whether humanity or trolls should be dominant, what possible reason could they have for interfering? Presumably at one point they got along, because Morgana was Merlin’s apprentice, but the only reason we get for her hating him is that he took her hand to make the amulet. . . except, wait, he did that after she started trying to bring about the eternal night. Forget why she cared about that, if he didn’t care about humans then why did he?

TLDR, Merlin’s an asshole, his decisions make no sense, and when you poke at things he creates plotholes in the entire series that weren’t there prior to his introduction. Also he’s the worst.