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queer-overwatch · 7 months ago

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another Sombra rq!!!! I love her sm ok,, ty for the last request btw bc LLORD I LOVED IT 🛐 okay this time I'm thinkin sombra x fem reader who REALLY adores the way olivia looks and stares at her all the time but then reader is super insecure abt herself,,, as always any format!! have a blessed day!!

Sombra x Insecure!Reader

Yippie! FYI Sombras my dps main so everytime we get a request for her I'm like "MINE" and yoink it before Xorn even has a chance to see it lmao, hope your happy with me doing everything for Sombra >:3 -Frisk

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"I don't know what he was doing, something stupid obviously" Sombra, you're wonderful, pretty, smart, amazing girlfriend, was talking shit as per usual, though this time it was about Reaper.

You were trying to pay attention, really! But it was hard, especially when Sombra was in the best lighting ever, and her hair was just slightly messed in a way that makes it more gorgeous than you could put into words.

It was hard to focus on anything but her, especially with how pretty she always was. Despite how bad you knew it was, you couldn't help but compare yourself to them sometimes. It wasn't normally on purpose, it was just hard to not feel out of place dating someone so perfect. She was so smart and the absolute best at her job, even when working with people so "incompetent" as she'd say. "Hey, querida, are you listening to me?" You're snapped out of your thoughts by Sombra flicking you on the forehead, staring at you seemingly annoyed. Good lordy even her annoyed face is pretty, you've really got an obsession. "Hm? Yeah! Yeah I'm listening, sorry." You reach out and grab the hand she used to flick you, rubbing her knuckles with your thumb as you nod for her to continue talking. "Right, well anyway, I don't know why these old people keep coming to me with their tech problems, I'm not tech support! The only person who I told I'd help is Siebren!" You nod along, half listening to her rant and half in your own head. How did she manage to look so beautiful even while pissed? You had no clue what her secret was, not to mention her amazing fashion sense. One time you tried to dress like her, took one look in the mirror, and immediately put on the baggiest clothes you had.

You loved her, obviously, and were always more than happy to take her out on dates, using any excuse you could to admire her, but you refused to dress up the way she did. Dresses just didn't look right, no matter how you styled your hair it didn't look the way you wanted it too. God forbid you try and go to the beach, you'd be sitting in the shade in a hoodie and sweatpants before you let her see how...disappointing you were. "Anyway, how was your day, estimada?" She drags you around, checking on some expensive looking technology you couldn't even think of touching, let alone understanding how it worked. "Boring, I didn't do much, never do really." You laugh off her question, trying to make a bit of a sad joke to distract her. She stares at you for a bit, silently judging what you think is everything about you. Maybe she finally realized that she was far too pretty to be with someone like you. You didn't think you were like, hideously ugly, but maybe she did?! What if she was planning to break up with you, who would want to date you if you were rejected by the Sombra!? "Fair enough, a day off does sound nice, actually. I'd love to laze around all day in pajamas, lucky you!" She pinches your cheek, teasing you as she finally looks back to one of her many screens. "Really?" It was hard to imagine, the usually dolled up Sombra, lazing about and dressed so casually. You were sure she's still look just as amazing as usual despite it, she was somehow so effortlessly perfect. You were, uh, there. "Maybe you should take a day off then! I'm sure they can handle one mission without you, even if your team is as useless as you say they are!" You grab her shoulders, spinning her to be facing you with what you can imagine is the biggest smile she's ever seen on your face. Any opportunity to be able to simply bask in her glory was an opportunity you were going to make use of! You could imagine it now, her sitting there, watching tv in an oversized T-shirt and shorts. There was no way your imagination could do it justice, you had to see her like that in real life or you'd simply keel over and die. "Maybe, I should be free tonight actually" She shrugs noncommittedly, but you could see the slightest hint of red in her cheeks! That meant it was a yes!

"Perfect! I'll go find some movies for us to watch! You better hurry finishing up whatever it is you're working on! I love you, be ready at 8!" You dash off, leaving her with a peck on the cheek and a timer to set.

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Scrambling around your room, you desperately try and make yourself look presentable but also try to make it look like you didn't try and this is just how you are 24/7. Sombra was always so flawless, you couldn't ruin their night by being ugly! You check your phone and nearly throw it across the room. It was already 7:58! What if she was waiting for you and she thinks you stood her up and gets mad?! You'd never forgive yourself if you made her wait on you! Glancing in the mirror, you stop worrying about the time, or what movie you'll watch, or how your little date will go. Everything was suddenly replaced by pure shame. All that time you spent trying to look on par with your girlfriend, and this is how it came out? All that effort and energy and materials for..this? Was it even worth it to try in the first place? You loved Sombra so, so, so much, but no matter what you did it felt like you were playing the role of the ugly girl obsessed with a movies main character that's just there for comedic effect.

You're knocked out of your own thoughts again by a tap on the shoulder, getting a feeling of deja vu. You turn and see Sombra, as perfect and gorgeous as ever.

"You ready yet, slowpoke?" She takes your hand, dragging you out of room before you can bother to respond. Leading you to her own private corner of Talon's base, a forgotten storage room that she'd stolen and made her own, a password for the handmade high-tech door and everything.

She shoves you down onto a beanbag and takes her spot next to you, dragging one of your arms around her shoulders and handing you a remote for the tv she'd snuck into the room years earlier.

"You gonna pick something or not?" Again with her teasing, this time though it didn't feel like her words would sink into your brain and repeat in a much meaner tone when you looked in the mirror. This time it felt soft, less stressful.

You nod, smiling and throwing on an old action movie you were reminded of last week. You both got comfortable, and you felt her rest her hand on your stomach, head against your shoulder.

It felt nice to be touched, especially by someone like her. It was hard to imagine, someone like her loving someone like you, but if she could love you, maybe you could learn to love yourself too.

#sombra overwatch #overwatch x reader #sombra x reader #olivia colomar #fem reader #angst kinda #I but a happy ending bc im a sucker for happy endings <3 #Xornk

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crystalromana · 1 year ago

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@rearranging-deck-chairs

First off- I really do need to relisten to The Furies but the TARDIS wiki is going to have to do for now. This is going to be in list format because I am a scatter brained idiot. Also River’s timeline is so vague and being vague about timeline stuff is BF bread and butter so I feel like almost everyone is going to have a different view of River and that makes things difficult. She lies-the narrative lies its very distilled doctor who.

(I am so sorry if this doesn't make any sense I tried)

1a.) I don’t think that she was always thinking that he didn’t love her back. I think that was a late marriage hiccup. Angels take Manhattan and eleven burning through the rest of his days with her I think caused some marital issues but it comes up against the fact that Moffat could only vaguely hint at these adult issues and not really explore them in the show itself.

1b.) (as a sidebar I think that seeing eleven ask her mom to stay and then him being so hideously miserable should have caused issues but that goes into squicky territory for alot of people esp since she (presumably) had interactions with post angels-eleven before she herself did angels)

2.) This is never directly addressed in canon (so far) but it is on the periphery but given how they are non-linier I don’t understand how neither River nor the Doctor feel like they are trapped into their marriage to each other because it’s already written out (somewhat done with eleven but meh)

3.) TDoRS River both wants the Doctor around and desperately hates when he is actually involved in her escapades. Him being involved usually causes her to go more directly nuclear. She’s very protective of him in ways I don’t really think that he would appreciate.

4.) All of this memory wiping of her meeting the Doctor’s past selves and how judicious she is with the amnesia is so sad? Like how alone must she feel. She doesn’t really put down roots.

5.) River is told that she only loves the Doctor because he was nice to her and given how she was abused in her upbringing she got mega attached to him because of that.

6.) Unfortunately “Love is for children- I owe him a debt” is resonant

7.) The vague sense of melancholy only gets worse if you consider her relationship with the Pond’s too.

Anyway the worst part is that there's all these delicious ways one could look at River/Doctor but at most it just gets vagued at because you can’t do emotional stuff like this in EU content. And because Big Finish doesn’t have Matt Smith or Karen Gillian (and didn’t use Arthur Darvill in TDorS when they had him).

#I can try to explain this more if you have any questions I am Very Scattered #text from zee

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sparkywrites25 · 2 years ago

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Lost - Chapter 5

Story Summary: Petra survives her encounter with the female titan but when she’s hurt and goes missing, her comrades believe her to be dead and make for home. Now she has to try and survive long enough to get back home. If she can manage that, what will be waiting for her there? What will Levi do if he’s faced with a second chance at having Petra in his life?

Chapter Summary: A haunted Petra resolves to end her situation.

Pairing: Levi Ackerman x Petra Ral | Rivetra

Taglist: @lunar-rainclouds @captain-natey @wholeheartedly-alex

September 849

Petra cried out as she lurched from one tree to the other in a string of clumsy hops. Her fingers, having left one branch behind, reached out towards another. The rough and splintered bark cut into her already bleeding hand. At this point, she barely noticed the pain in her palm which is more than could be said for the agony within her ankle right now. Having caught her balance, she leaned against the tree to catch her breath.

She should have been more careful about the landing, she reflected. She’d dropped too hard onto that foot and then moved at a wonky angle way too fast. She gazed back over her shoulder. The open plains and scattered trees of the landscape of Wall Maria greeted her. No hideously gigantic brutes met her eyes but she could hear their footsteps slamming into the ground in the distance along with the battle cries of her comrades as they cut through them. They couldn’t keep them occupied forever without having to kill them all and there were many of them. No doubt more would show up soon. Fate was not so kind as to stop at a dozen or so titans.

“Petra!” The captain’s voice barked at her, accompanied by the sound of his gas. She heard his footfall - no doubt far more careful than hers - quicken as he approached her. She didn’t look towards him at first, staring into the bark instead as she caught her breath. Anything to delay the inevitable chide of Captain Levi over her poor footwork and the waste of a good soldier being out of action.

“Sir!” she answered after about half a second.

“How badly are you hurt?” he questioned as he reached her. He knelt down before she answered and his hands gently took hold of her ankle. She flinched, hissing.

“I don’t think it’s broken,” she explained as she finally turned her gaze on the top of his dark head. “But I can’t walk on it.” She bit back a cry as Levi’s hands moved over her ankle, moving it slightly. It was hard for him to be able to tell anything over her boot but she didn’t object as he examined her foot anyway.

“May just be a sprain,” he said, getting back to his feet. “How did it happen?”

“Just a bad landing, sir. My fault. I moved too quickly after hitting the ground.”

“It happens.” Levi’s tone was dismissive of the blame. “Let’s get you back to the others. Think you can ride?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she assured him.

“Good.” Before she knew what was happening, his arm wrapped around her back and his other slid under her knees. She was swept up into a bridal hold at once.

“Sir - I can hop!” Petra protested despite the pain of her ankle’s movement and the fact that being pressed against her captain’s chest was really very nice.

“Yeah and it’ll take you about an hour to get anywhere..” Levi’s scoff cut through Petra and she bowed her head.

“I guess that’s true. I’m sorry to be a burden, Captain.”

Once she was adjusted in his arms, Levi strode forward. A small “Tch” sounded from his throat. “You’re not. You can still serve a purpose. You can act as relay once we resume the formation.”

“We’re continuing south?”

“Yeah. Almost all of the titans are taken care of.”

“There’s no more coming?” Petra’s brows shot up high. “That’s… lucky for us.”

“For now, it is,” Levi agreed, tucking her body closer against his chest as his pace increased. “It won’t last.”

This was usually the point in the conversation when Petra would tease her captain about his negativity and speculate that the Scouts were due for some good luck. It had become something of a tradition for them both. Both of them knowing that they weren’t going to sway the other but stepping into that conversational dance all the same. Petra liked to see the small shift of Levi’s lips as he teased her for her “charmingly naive and optimistic” view on life. If she felt considerably more bold then she might well have teased him in return about his dark and gloomy outlook. No, Petra corrected herself, it would be stupid to do so. She knew very little about the captain’s life down there but whenever something was brought up about it, his eyes would darken and a kind of warning shield would appear in his gaze. An unmistakable “don’t talk to me about this” look.

However Petra did none of her usual teasing as her eyes left the captain’s face and swept over the battlefield. Blood and broken bodies lay scattered across this area and Petra’s stomach lurched with regret as she recognized some of the fallen faces. Among them, steaming piles of flesh signalled that vengeance had been taken. She wondered how many of these had been taken down by the captain.

“How many so far?” her question was quiet. The implication was even quieter. How many could she have saved if she hadn’t injured herself?

“We don’t know yet.”

“Okay.” Petra turned her face away from the view of bloodied bodies and took a deep breath, steeling herself for now. There would be time to lament the fallen but there was still work to be done. She wouldn’t make a titan’s attempt on her life any easier by falling apart now.

“How did you end up so far from the rest of the squad?” Levi asked after a few minutes of carrying her in silence. “You were working with Gunther, weren’t you?” Silver-blue eyes met and held her amber ones.

“We took care of the abnormals,” Petra explained, “well, most of them anyway. The last one charged a group of new recruits. Three of them got trampled and the other two were so out of their depth-”

“You went to their aid,” Levi said.

Petra nodded. “I couldn’t not.”

“No. If you’re available to help then you should. These brats won’t become veterans unless they actually survive.”

Petra smiled slightly. “Yeah although I was also following your orders to handle the abnormals. The last one just took a bit of a detour.”

“And that’s when you hurt your ankle?”

“No. That came later. I killed the abnormal and took down a couple of seven-metres nearby. I was fighting a ten-metre after I got rid of them. That’s when I hurt my ankle. I landed too hard after killing the ten-metre..” Petra suppressed a shudder at the memory of the impact of the landing. She should have latched onto a tree. There were some close enough to reach. It would have slowed her fall.

“Good job, Petra. We’ve got more recruits who are still with us, thanks to you.”

“I’m sure the others saved some too,” Petra mumbled, still gazing upwards and away from the bloody battlefield. “I was just doing my job sir.”

“And I’m just recognizing that,” Levi answered firmly. He began to slow down and a deep frown etched its way onto his face. “It’s just a shame you didn’t show that kind of initiative when you were in the forest taking Eren away from the Female Titan .”

Petra returned the frown. “What are you talking about? Who’s Eren?” she questioned. Yet something about his questions did ring a bell. But how could they? She had never encountered an Eren before. Was she mishearing the captain? Had she hit her head or something?

“What happened? Your survival instincts take a trip or what?” Levi snapped at her, his brows so furrowed that his forehead wrinkled. “You thought you’d hide away in a shitty hole in a tree instead? Aren’t you planning on coming back to the Walls?”

“What-? Captain, I don’t know what-”

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Day 20 since the expedition

Petra returned to reality with a soft gasp and a rustle of dried leaves beneath her.

Her vision quickly cleared. Fading sunlight shone over her legs and feet. The speed with which clarity came to her was encouraging, as was the lack of aches and chills in her body. When she reached to touch her arm, it wasn’t sweat-soaked. She sat up slowly, testing her movements. The aches of stretching straight after waking appeared but nothing else troubled her. She brought her legs behind her and stretched her arms out along the trunk wall with a yawn.

She could almost imagine that the last week or so of fever had been a dream except for the empty feeling within her. Like a great deal of her strength had been emptied out. Even so, Petra thought as she rolled her neck, she’d felt a lot worse.

There had been no more physical appearances of anyone since Oluo had appeared. Honestly, Petra supposed she must have been dreaming of him. She’d never encountered ghosts at any point in her life and the fact was that she had been sick and tired back then. Not to mention it hadn’t been too many days since she’d knocked her head. Maybe Oluo was just her brain’s way of trying to cope with it all by having her dream of him.

There had been other moments though. Ones that Petra could only attribute to homesickness and her recent fever. Murmurs and quiet talk around her, usually sounding like someone she knew back home. She could have sworn she had heard Eld whispering a joke to her as she drifted off one night. On another night, she’d heard him grumble about titans. At some point she even heard Oluo calling out to her when she was between naps. None of these encounters had lasted longer than a few minutes though. None of them had featured him.

Petra played with her fingers. It would have been nice to dream of the captain, in night or day. She smiled a little at the thought of seeing him sitting across from her. She wondered how that conversation might have gone. Probably a more direct and no-nonsense take on the conversation she and Oluo had had.

Her heart ached thinking about him. The possibility of never seeing him again invited the urge to cry. She could feel the emotion shooting up her throat and she swallowed it back with some difficulty. She sniffed hard and lifted the back of her hand to her eyes. Don’t give in. You can still make it back to him.

She would take it, Just having the chance to go back and serve under him again. She could learn to be happy with just that because it was so much better than not being back home, with him, her friends and family. She would take what she could have and be grateful. She would never take her home and her job granted again. She wouldn’t let herself. Not after this.

Reaching for her bag of supplies, she eyed the meagre remains with a grim smile. Despite the need for nutrients, she’d been lacking in eating the amount she should during her illness. That would account for the empty feeling and lack of strength. But it did give her the opportunity to fill up a bit now.

“I’ve got to get out of here soon,” she mumbled as she opened up one of her ration bars. Even if supplies allowed, there was little point in staying. If a horse was going to go astray and show up, it would have appeared by now. There was no point in waiting around any further now.

Despite her overall improvement, her appetite remained hesitant and so Petra had to really coax herself to finish the bar. She drained the rest of the water in her canisters too. By the time she’d done all of that, the sun had completely set and dusk was awakening in the forest.

Leaning back against the trunk wall, Petra closed her eyes and welcomed the quiet calm of the forest, taking all the rest that she could for now. She would need to conserve as much energy as she could in the coming days. No taking more chances that necessary. No wasteful expending of supplies. If she could fill up her water tonight and get some more food, she could prepare herself for the journey home. But to gather those supplies, she was going to need to rest up for a bit. Wait for the food benefits to take hold.

She shivered a little at the prospect of going home, of not spending another night in this little hiding hole, of seeing people again, of taking a hot bath and not having to hunt for food. Of not having to look at any titans for a long time.

The food helped considerably and within an hour or so, Petra felt like she had considerable energy and strength to set off for the night.

—————————————————————

It was encouraging to be able to walk through the forest without exhaustion weighing over her like too many blankets, to not feel her energy draining away with just a few steps. The fresh air felt comforting on her face and in her lungs with each breath. She felt almost normal again.

Her hands kept firm grips on her triggers, her eyes watching the shadows. The possibility of encountering wolves didn’t seem nearly as daunting now that she could hold herself upright decently and wasn’t aching all over, wanting to lie down and fall asleep, consequences be damned. If wolves came upon her now, she’d be more ready.

There were, however, a few titans around and most were in the four to seven metre classes. She eyed them as they slumped against the trees, their massive eyes glassy with lifeless energy and immobility. Even with all she knew about titans, Petra still held her distance. She had plenty of blades left but very little gas. She couldn’t afford to engage any now except for any she met on the way back.

The way back, Petra reflected with a smile, that sounds good.

Beyond the immediate vicinity of her sleeping pace, the forest appeared to be clear of the titans. Petra reached the forest pool after a while. Her legs throbbed from the exertion and her shoulder ached from the weight of the bag. Sinking down onto the ground, Petra began to fill up her canisters, regretful of how quickly her body had protested at the exertion. I used to be able to walk for several miles without feeling like this. Now look at me. As she filled up her first empty water canister, she felt a shift in the air near her. Dropping the container and grabbing her triggers, Petra whirled around.

“You’re in bad shape, Petra,” the voice of Gunther spoke as if on the frail breeze drifting among the nearby bushes. “How could you let things get this bad?” A small tutting sound followed by one of his great heaving sighs reached her ears. “You’re already this out of shape just from walking around for a bit?”

Petra’s eyes searched through the dimly illuminated forest. Gunther did not show himself before her like Oluo had. But his voice and the lingering impression of his words still hovered over her. Her pulse began to quicken. How was it she could hear him? Was this all a dream? Was that why she’d felt so pain free? Was her conversation with Oluo all a dream? It had to be, surely. Nothing could bring the dead back.

Petra cupped some water and splashed it over her face, She had to get out of here and soon, if she was losing her sense of what was real and what was not.

“Needing to wake yourself up?”

Once again, Petra’s eyes darted around but Gunther’s words remained just a voice spoken in the empty air. Petra grasped her canister and dipped it into the water to fill it up and disguise the tremor that was beginning in her fingers. She took a breath and capped the water once it was full.

As she started on the next water bottle, Gunther spoke again. “I’m not sure that theres any point, Petra. It’s not likely you’ll make it home, the state you’re in.”

Petra frowned at her reflection in the pool. Granted, she didn’t look her best or even feel it, but still, the stubborn child inside her refused to even entertain the idea of sitting down and waiting for this all to be over. She bit her lip. She wasn’t going to argue with Gunther. He wasn’t really here and he wouldn’t be so discouraging. He may have been tough but he would never advocate giving up. This was just a dream, she was sure of it.

“You’re worse than I thought,” Gunther remarked. “Don’t you remember anything of our survival training? Why did you waste so much gas and food waiting for a horse? You could probably have made it back home overnight. You weren’t that injured.” A heaviness creeps into his voice. “Now you might have screwed your chances.”

Petra bowed her head over the water, closing her eyes.

“Don’t ignore me, Petra,” Gunther chided. “This isn’t a situation where you can afford to be in denial.”

Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

“You’re already alone,” Gunther reminded her, his voice softening, “and that’s doing no good for you. Do you expect to live on memories out here for the rest of your days? Is that how you’ll manage? Really? Come on, Petra!” He spoke louder and Petra shivered from the realness of his voice and the little happy jumps her heart made for hearing his voice again.

It’s a dream. It’s just a dream.

“Petra, please. You need to get yourself together.”

He sounds so real, Petra lamented as she capped that water canister too. She rubbed at her temple while bagging up the canister. Just keep going.

“You’re not dreaming, Petra. But you need to wake up to reality. All this acting like a horse is going to come and save you is a delusion. It’s dangerous, Petra.”

“This isn’t real,” Petra murmured. “You’re not real, You died, I’m just dreaming you up.” She clung to these words with desperation.

Despite this, she couldn’t escape the feeling of how vividly cool the night air felt against her face and how her hands dripped with very real-feeling water. The aches in her legs were worsening from her crouch and she could feel her heart thumping hard in realization.

Ghosts aren’t real, she tried to tell herself, so it has to be a dream. If not what else could it be?

“Petra, snap out of it.” Gunther commanded. “You need to think like a scout. Stop hiding away in this forest. It’s beneath you, Petra. You made Levi Squad for a reason didn’t you? Or have you forgotten about all that?”

Petra flinched, eyes filling with horror. I want to wake up now. I want to wake up now. Please, someone wake me up.

Another shift in the air beside her and Petra heard Gunther sigh. “I guess I’ll be seeing you soon then if you won’t help yourself.”

Petra shook her head and cupped some water in her hands, bringing it to her mouth to drink. “No,” she whispered with quiet determination. “I’m not going where you are,” she muttered. Even so, a tear or two began to slide down her cheek. “I can’t. I can’t go where you are. Not yet.” —————————————————————

Another hour or so of hunting for food supplies was more physically draining than Petra wanted to think about, Not only that but the berries she managed to find were very few. A couple of meagre handfuls that were added to her bag.

It’ll have to do, Petra chided herself.

She wrapped her arms around her chest as the night temperatures lowered around her. She quickened her pace back to the tree. With less titans in the area, it was taking longer to actually locate the clearing in which her temporary home resided. The faster she walked, the more yawns that were dragged from her and unwillingly, she had to slow her pace again when fatigue caught up with her.

She stopped and leaned against a tree, her body sagging against it as she caught her breath. She rubbed at her face, attempting to wake herself up but it only made her arms ache even more with the movement.

Look at the state of me. I’m so weak. She cursed herself. She was hardly fit to be a soldier right now. All of that training back in the Cadet Corps felt like it had deserted her. Like she’d wasted many years of her life.

Fighting back another yawn, she forced herself onward, borderline staggering through patches of silvery moonlight, seeking out the familiar and still gigantic shapes against the trees.

She couldn’t do this again, she knew. She couldn’t spend another night like this. If foraging was going to exhaust her then what chance did she have of making it home? No. She couldn’t leave it any longer.

Seconds and minutes began to blur together along with her vision as exhaustion weighed her down.

Please, she begged, please just give me enough strength to make it home. Who she was praying too, she wasn’t sure. Maybe Maria, Rose and Sin, maybe someone else. Anyone who was out there.

Her stumbling increased and she had to reach out to catch herself on trees. Her already cut hands were scratched even more but the pain refocused her enough to keep on moving. The world blurred to shades of silver and black.

Panic began to seep into her mind. I’m not gonna make it. I’ve overdone it. That’s it. I made a mistake. I’m going to be stuck down here when the titans wake up. Heat twisted inside her chest. She felt her ribcage closing in, stealing her remaining breath as fury burned inside her. You stupid fool! What happened to being on the Scouts’ elite squad? Where has that gotten you now? she wondered as she tumbled down onto the ground.

For some long, terrible seconds, she thought about closing her eyes and giving in to the oppressive need for sleep. Maybe she would be too passed out to be really aware of any titans grabbing her. At least until it was too late. Her tired brain pondered that that may not be so awful. She’d seen people go in worst ways after all.

It was a fair few seconds before she realized that there was pain in her lower left side. Something sharp and thin, digging in there. Lifting herself, she found herself staring at a piece of a fallen tree branch - a very petite and slender piece but with jagged pieces splintering off all over. She rolled herself away from it with a silent curse, rubbing at her side. However, the pain did do one thing to help. It brought her attention back into something resembling focus for a moment and she gazed forward.

Ahead of her lay a clearing. A clearing with some hulking shakes slumped against the trees. Petra squinted and stared at them under the moonlight.

Wait, are those the titans near my…?

Hope blossomed and, reinvigorated by the possibility, Petra dragged herself up onto her feet. She stumbled forwards into a slow walk, advancing closer and closer.

Victory punched her as she stepped out into hear clearing. Her eyes quickly located the markings she’d left under the moonlight. Lifting her gaze, she soon spotted the familiar darkened hole in the tree. Petra exhaled and stepped towards it with determination shining in her exhausted eyes.

This is the last night I spend with you, she promised as she fired her cables once more and flew back up into her hideout. Tomorrow I’m heading for home.

#my fics #fic: lost #attack on titan #attack on titan fanfiction #shingeki no kyojin #shingeki no kyojin fanfiction #levi ackerman x petra ral #levi ackerman x petra ral fanfiction #levi x petra #levi x petra fanfiction #rivetra #rivetra fanfiction #levi ackerman #levi ackerman fanfiction

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evaemiel · 11 months ago

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Emiel - week 5 of #alphabetsuperset

“I’m scared.”

“So am I.”

“And I’m angry.”

“Yeah. So am I.”

“I’m supposed to write this story about us, and I can’t. What is there even to say?”

“Hmmm. Do go on.”

“Most of the other parts of my ‘self’, our ‘self’, I can decouple, but you? THERE’S LITERALLY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US. Even as a story, even as fiction, I can’t seem to intellectually make sense of it. You’re not a friend, lover, or family, or some sort of animal-like quality, or an archetype, or a mythical being that I can repurpose for the sake of artistic exploration. You’re me; I’m you, in the most prosaic sense.”

“But you did give me a name?”

“I gave myself a second name.”

“Which, coincidentally, is the second name we already have. Since birth.”

“Yes. That made it easier? To take what was already there, embedded in our history? Our first name is so hideously feminine, a male second name balances it out. Don’t you think?”

“Of course, I think so too. I know who we are.”

“Obviously. Sorry, I’m still struggling with the format here.”

“Heh. But I don’t think our first name is all that bad. If anything, someone wanting knowledge of good and evil – and questioning authority – seems like the right kind of mythological creature to represent us.”

“Maybe. But then Emiel means rivaling, imitating, or trying to be equal to.”

“Very correct. Couldn’t be more on the nose, if you ask me.”

“We’re our own rival?”

“That’s how it seems to work for us most of the time. No?”

“… it’s a bad habit.”

“So, two names now. She and he, together; ‘them’. I like the conceptual approach there. Subtle.”

“Thanks. It sure took us a long time to come up with that. While it was staring us in the face. It’s a bit disappointing, really; it turns out maybe we’re not that sharp after all.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t describe us as sharp. I’d say we’re extremely anxious not to miss anything that is happening, so we try to capture as much raw data as possible, then run it through the vast human analysis machine, and ultimately become resigned to overthinking every minute detail and nuance of it all. A solid approach for a philosopher.”

“That’s a little shy of calling ourselves an educated idiot.”

“Yes… so we agree the name is very fitting.”

“My gods, it really is. UGH. We’ve just been wasting our time going in circles about this; why couldn’t we have just… I don’t know, gotten to this point sooner? Why didn’t we —”

“Hey, hey. Look at me. It’s fine. At least now we’re here. We know we’re one and the other, both and neither, and none of that matters, and it’s the most important thing. We will live in this contradiction as we always have. It’s cool, I promise.”

“I really don’t want to have to explain this to people over and over and over.”

“Then we don’t.”

“We don’t?”

“Nah, if they can’t figure out something off about us, then why would we bother?”

“But if they ask?”

“Then we tell them.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like we just did.”

#writing #writeblr #alphabet superset #short story

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fytoo · 5 years ago

Text

worldklass_too:

TOO YOU from #찬 x #지수

TOO NEW 래퍼 'MC갈매기'의 탄생?!

지수의 찬 작업실 방문기 🎧🎹

🔗 youtu.be/9yrRr3BiYTg

🔗 vlive.tv/video/174666

#TOO #티오오 #TenOrientedOrchestra

#TOOYOU #CHAN #JISU

#too #chan #jisu #p: ig #s: ig #d: 200212 #e: ???#sorry this is formatted hideously

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barffy-writes · 3 years ago

Text

Odd, Terrifying, and Wonderful: Ch. 4

Summary: Bruce holds a Wayne Foundation fundraiser at his mansion; Hal feels incredibly out of place. "I should've assumed that the people of the high society would be assholes."

(Ch. 1 for new readers)

Read on AO3, or just keep reading below! The formatting is easier to read if you read on my personal Tumblr page.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked worse than I do right now. Covered in blood with a broken nose as Green Lantern is significantly better than this.

Hal studied his reflection in the glass window of his apartment building, disgusted by the hideously oversized white suit he was wearing. He wished he could use his ring, but it's awkwardly flashy and Bruce would likely notice it.

The last thing I need is him finding out that I’m Green Lantern. He’d probably think I’m some sort of freak.

Or am I more of a freak if I show up looking like a bad Michael Jordan impersonator?

He only had a couple of hours to get ready for the fundraiser, and the only suit he owned was the suit he wore to prom. He tried it on, promptly splitting his pants right up the back seam. He laughed so hard he thought he was going to faint; then he texted Clark a picture of him stylishly posing with the incriminating split of the fabric. The next message he received was from Lois, who informed Hal that Clark was literally crying from the inflicted hysteria. While Hal was happy that doing a shit-ton of squats every day was paying off, he realised that he’d need to get a rental suit. Quick.

Walking into the nearest suit rental store to his apartment, Hal instantly realised that he had made a mistake. The whole place was carpeted, which was somehow matted and sticky at the same time. He wanted to leave, but the owner walked to Hal: a short, joyful looking guy who wore an odd amount of bling.

He began talking to Hal in a very thick, but endearing, Russian accent. “Hello, my friend! You come for suits?”

Hal peered around the store, which only had suits and nothing else at all. He wondered what else he would be here for. “Uh, yeah, I am. I need it for 7:00, you got anything?”

Hal checked the time and was taken off guard.

6:30? Since when did it get to be that time? Damn, I need to hurry up.

“Yes, I have many suits! But for your size... I’m not so sure.”

“That’s alright, I’ll take whatever.”

The store owner started to meticulously sort through each and every suit in the store. It was excruciating for Hal.

He opened his phone at 6:40.

And again at 6:50.

At 6:55, when the man finally brought a suit to him, Hal took it without a second glance, quickly paid for it, then sprinted outside.

He located the nearest alleyway, practically ripping off his clothes and throwing himself into the suit. Unfortunately, hiding behind the dumpster was not a good enough cover, meaning he had several onlookers watching him. Some very confused onlookers. Or very horny onlookers.

Great. Now I can’t use my ring.

Hal sprinted back to his apartment block.

6:59.

He didn’t have time to even go into his apartment, so he scrunched his clothes up into a ball and hid them in a potted plant by the (perpetually broken) elevator. He went back outside and regained his breath. He stood up tall, looking at his reflection, realising how utterly crap his suit was.

Too late to do anything about it now.

Exactly as 7:00 struck, a sports car pulled up in front of Hal. The window rolled down, revealing Bruce in the driver’s seat.

Huh. I would've assumed that he had a chauffeur.

“Holy shit,” said Hal.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Everything alright?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. It’s just your car... Your car is really fucking cool. I don’t know that much about cars though.”

“Yes, if I remember correctly, planes are more your deal?”

“Yep. But this car might convince me otherwise. What type is it?”

“Lamborghini Murciélago.”

“Fuck, a Lambo? That must’ve cost a shedload.”

“Wasn’t exactly cheap.”

“Not like you exactly have to worry about money,” laughed Hal, “but regardless, this was well worth the price.”

“Thank you,” said Bruce, “let’s head off, shall we?”

Hal nodded and walked around the car, climbing into the passenger’s seat. As he closed the door, the thick smell of cigarette smoke invaded his lungs. Instinctually, he pulled a face at the miasma, without even realising he had done so.

“I see you’re not a smoker; sorry about the smell.” apologised Bruce.

“You try-hard,” mocked Hal, “why in this day and age are you smoking cigarettes? Do you think it makes you look cool? Yeah, lung cancer is all the rage these days.”

Bruce shook his head in exasperation as he pressed a button, which rolled Hal’s window down. “Better?”

“It’ll do.”

As Bruce began driving, Hal realised that the car was probably going a little faster than it should be.

Little is a bit of an understatement.

Bruce seemed to be purposefully avoiding any main roads.

Maybe to beat the traffic? Still, that doesn’t justify him going 60mph with a 20mph speed limit.

But Hal didn’t care. He kind of enjoyed the rush. He leaned toward the window, feeling the cool wind run through his hair.

---

Fuck, he’s cute.

Bruce quickly glanced at Hal, wishing he could take in every detail. A singular glance wasn’t enough. Even forever wouldn’t be enough.

Instead, Bruce kept his eyes on the road; he was a reckless driver, but not an idiotic one.

---

Bruce pulled into the driveway of the manor and Bruce parked the car. He got out of the car, then moved to Hal’s door and opened it for him. Hal got out and thanked him, but was interrupted by Bruce gently pushing his hands through his hair. Bruce looked down into Hal’s eyes and smiled as he said, “The wind tousled your hair a bit, I was fixing it.”

“Maybe I liked it that way!” said Hal, hoping to distract Bruce from the fact he was blushing furiously. But Bruce physically couldn’t look away.

This man will be the death of me.

Get a grip, Bruce, this isn’t even a date. Jason was probably right when he said I should go to therapy because, clearly, I have some issues.

“Welcome to my home!” said Bruce, as he held open the door.

Hal stood for a second, in complete awe of his surroundings. Bruce couldn’t initially figure out if it was a good or a bad reaction.

“So, what do you think?” he said, nervously.

“I knew you were rich, I mean, you own an entire conglomerate. But holy fuck... this is insane!” shouted Hal, garnering a few odd looks from other attendees. But Bruce didn’t care, he was too busy trying to not show how enamoured he was by Hal.

“Y’know, Bruce, I think I'm the youngest person here!” Bruce groaned in reply, shuddering at the fact that he was probably right. No, he was definitely right. Hal laughed at him, earning one of those ‘if looks could kill’ stares from Bruce. The only other person he earned that expression from was Batman, but it always appeared like he genuinely wanted to kill you.

“Bruce, hello!” They both turned to see a very old and rich looking man, then Bruce shook his hand. The man saw Hal and said, “Do you mind if I steal him for a bit? Need to discuss a bit of business.” He winked at Hal, who promptly looked at Bruce for an answer on what that wink could have possibly meant. Bruce had no idea, so he shrugged in response.

“Yeah, of course. I’ll see you in a bit, Bruce?”

Bruce nodded, looking as if he didn’t want Hal to go.

Damn it. If I was Batman right now, I'd punch this man in the face and pull Hal back to me using my grappling hook.

---

Hal turned and scanned the room for food. He set his sights on an unexpecting waiter, who he promptly marched to, distracted by secretly tapping him on his shoulder, then stole five bruschette when he wasn’t looking. Hal shoved all of them into his face in one go, trying to compensate for the small portions.

I feel so fancy. Look at me, climbing up the social ladder! Hal Jordan: capitalist yuppie. I like that, it has a ring to it.

Another waiter came over to Hal and offered him a glass of wine, which he happily accepted. Hal found an empty table and sat on one of the five chairs, then proceeded to swirl his wine, in an attempt to look posh. Unsurprisingly, he gave up after about ten seconds when he realised that his shitty suit already outed him as a peasant among the royalty.

A person strolled over to the table, then asked, “Do you mind if I sit with you?” His tone was polite, and his voice gentle; Hal didn’t feel like talking to the upper crust, but it would’ve been awkward if he said ‘no’.

Hal looked up to the man standing above him - he seemed familiar, but Hal didn’t recall ever having talked to him. “Sure, go ahead,” he said, after taking a swig from the glass. “I’m Hal, by the way.”

“Dick.” said the other man.

“Excuse me?”

“Dick? Short for Richard?” He paused, looking thoroughly embarrassed. “My name is Dick. I wasn’t calling you a dick.”

“Oh, fuck, sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it, I get it a lot. I should change my name or something.”

“Nah, it’s a common name… For kids born in the 40s.”

“Okay, now you are being a dick!” he laughed.

Look at you go, Hal! You’re doing the impossible! A rich bitch likes you! I’m gonna shove my way into the one percent!

Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

“How ya doing, good looking?” said another stranger, advancing towards the table.

Hal didn’t look up: instead, he downed the wine and, while looking at the empty glass, replied, “How original. Didn’t expect to come here and get hit on.”

Dick sighed, cringing at the stranger.

“Oh, I’m not trying to hit on you, it seems that Bruce has already got that base covered.” Hal looked up, trying to keep his calm and not punch him.

I should've assumed that the people of the high society would be assholes.

He also recognised this person, but still couldn’t place it.

Dick turned to him, his brows furrowed. “This is my brother, Jason. What the heck are you on about?”

“I saw this dude—“ began Jason, pointing at Hal.

“Hal.” corrected Dick.

“I saw Hal and Bruce come in together. The logical conclusion is that they’re on a date. Am I not allowed to have a laugh?"

Hal realised how he recognised them. “Oh crap. Bruce is your dad, isn’t he?”

Dick nodded, as did Jason (albeit, slightly reluctantly).

Yikes, seems like he's got some daddy issues.

Hal sunk into his seat. They were with Bruce while he was being held at gunpoint. They were the ones saving the other four men. That's how he knew their faces. “It’s not a date. It’s just that we met the other night, and Bruce messaged me asking if I wanted to meet up again.”

Two more people walked over, one teenager and one child. Hal was surprised that the kid hadn't sneaked out of the event, given their typically short attention span and hatred of adults. But this kid seemed a little different.

How can someone look so young yet so old simultaneously?

The teenager was carrying a large mass of drinks, a mixture of different types of wine (Hal didn’t care what, as long as it had alcohol in it) and sodas. Hal and Jason poured themselves glasses of wine: Jason considered which one after reading every label diligently; Hal chose the one that was nearest him.

The kid took a look at Hal and instantly said, “You’re the shirtless dude that Father was talking to the other night, right?” He framed it as a question, but there was a strong tone of certainty in his voice.

"Ohh!" said the other three - evidently, they had all recognised Hal too, but couldn’t place him.

Hal cleared his throat and averted his eyes, “Yep. It sounds incriminating when you phrase it like that. But yes, that was me.”

There was a moment of silence, the tension so awkward that it could be cut with a knife. Dick tried to make conversation, saying, “These guys are also my brother, Tim and Damian. Tim, Damian, this is Hal.” He hoped that either of the two would say something, but they stared at the floor instead.

There was another long pause.

Oh fuck, this is torture.

Jason pulled out a seat, then asked, “You were chatting Bruce up for a long time when you first met. He’s probably touch-deprived, you could’ve poked his arm and he’d probably propose.”

“I wasn’t chatting him up - he was the one who came to me!”

“Ah, so he was the one chatting you up?”

“No one was chatting anyone up! He came over and thanked me for saving a man’s life!”

Tim and Damian both sat down; thoroughly entertained by Jason teasing Hal.

Damian leaned in, “So this isn’t some failed date?”

“No! I’m sure he’ll be over here soon, there was just this dude who needed to talk to him.”

“Then why are you here? What’s your motive?”

“My motive? I don’t know, I like Bruce’s company?” Jason winked, nodding as he silently said “company” while performing an obscene gesture.

Hal decided to make Jason regret poking fun, so he leaned in, and whispered (quiet enough that no one else could hear), “Yeah, you’re right. I came here tonight to attend this party then fuck your dad.”

Jason shot up out of his seat and shouted, “Aw fuck, man, gross!” His brothers (and half of the people in the room) judged Jason, with absolutely no clue of what was going on.

Hal shrugged and said, “It’s your fault. And if it’s any consolation, I didn’t come here with an ulterior motive.”

Jason composed himself a bit, “Yeah, okay, I deserved that.”

This couldn’t get any worse. I’m not even on a date and I’ve already whored myself out as a joke.

Hal saw someone waving to him in the corner of his eye, so he peered up and was met with a smile by Clark.

Never mind, this just got worse.

Usually, Hal would be happy to see Clark. But at this moment, he didn’t want to see anyone. He wanted to be lying in bed eating his feelings of embarrassment away. Unfortunately for Hal, Clark walked over to the table.

“Hey, Hal - funny bumping into you here! I’m here as press,” said Clark, as he pointed to the camera hung around his neck. “What brings you here?”

“He’s on a date.” said the four siblings in perfect unison. Clark had met them before at a previous event, so he gave them a small wave but still looked confused as to why Hal was sitting with them.

“Congrats! Who are you with?”

Before Hal could correct Clark and say that it wasn’t a date, Bruce finally returned from conversing with the growing wave of tycoons. He beamed at Hal as he walked, noticing too late that he was surrounded by his children and a journalist.

---

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

I’m regretting having invited Hal out tonight. My children have already hounded him, and I seriously hope that I’m not going to show up in the Daily Planet again with another ‘Mystery Man’ headline.

“I see you’ve met my kids,” said Bruce, donning his best fake smile (which was executed very poorly).

“I have! They’re quite cool. I mean, Jason’s a bitch, but I like the rest.” Everyone else on the table laughed, apart from Jason who was pretending to look offended.

“And you’ve met Clark Kent?”

“Oh yeah, Clark and I are actually best friends. Funny coincidence, right?”

“You’re best friends and he still wrote that article about you walking around shirtless?” Bruce could see Clark visibly cringe.

Good. My kids keep bringing that up. You deserve to be mildly embarrassed.

“In my defence, I didn’t take that photo, and I was told to write that article by my boss. I didn’t even know it was Hal” said Clark.

“Excuses, excuses.” teased Bruce, as he leaned on the back of Hal’s chair, propping his chin on Hal's shoulder.

He's as warm as Venus; meanwhile, I'm as cold as Neptune.

Jason glared at Bruce and waggled his eyebrows. Bruce rolled his eyes in response, refusing to move, even if his position was slightly flirtatious. Unbeknownst to Bruce, Hal’s heart rate had just increased to a dangerous frequency in response.

---

And so they all talked for the rest of the evening, only broken once by Bruce when he had to deliver a speech to all the guests. When he returned, his kids all made fun of him for sucking up to the hundreds of big shots in the room, Clark congratulated him on holding the successful fundraiser, and Hal said nothing - he just dragged a chair over for him to sit on and held his hand beneath the table.

Eventually, Hal let go to pour himself another glass of wine.

Then another.

And another.

By the end of the evening, Hal was completely wasted. It seemed he was wanting to take advantage of the free alcohol, with little care for his internal organs.

I really pity his kidneys.

When the night was over and everyone had left, Bruce’s family all went to their rooms, leaving him and Hal by themselves. Bruce gazed at Hal, who was amazingly not ill but was babbling sheer nonsense instead:

"Do you think Shakespeare was super ultra gay? Or just regular gay?"

"Without World War Two, there'd be no tentacle porn."

"Why do some superheroes wear underwear on top of their costumes? If they didn't want people to look at their groin, wearing a red pair of underpants would only make people look more."

I wish I was like this when I’m drunk. But no, I get depressed. Hal, on the other hand, teaches me the entire script of ‘The Sound of Music’.

Bruce gently picked him up at some point during ‘Edelweiss’, then carried him upstairs to his room. He laid him on his bed, then put the blanket over him, careful to not wake him up. Bruce figured he should prop his head up (remember kids: don’t let your drunk friends choke on their vomit!), which was surprisingly easy to do. Hal was out cold. Bruce had to check his pulse to make sure that he was still alive.

I can’t exactly leave him alone, what if he wakes up and does something stupid? The first time Dick got drunk, he did a triple back somersault out the window. I had to jump out the window after him and catch him - I used my body to break his fall! It took months for my ribcage to heal…

Bruce sat on the floor and put his arm on the bed, resting his head on his bicep, and soon fell asleep. It was the best sleep he’d gotten in years.

---

Note: Regarding the line: "He's as warm as Venus; meanwhile, I'm as cold as Neptune." Neptune is actually the second coldest planet; Uranus is the coldest. I imagine that you all know why I didn't want to compare Bruce to Uranus.

#batlantern #dc #fanfic #batman #green lantern #fanfiction #bruce wayne #hal jordan #friends to lovers #enemies to lovers #bruhal

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tagsecretsanta · 4 years ago

Text

From @MissSquidTracy

to @scattergraph

Secret Santa does not own this work, full credit to the author above!

Gordon liked to think of himself as the fashionista of the family.

Sure, his Hawaiian shirts sometimes drew attention of the unwanted kind, but the aquanaut was a firm believer in using clothing as a means of non-verbal communication. John was living proof of this theory.

Unfortunately, all of the freedom associated with self-expression went down the toilet with a resounding ‘flush’ when tradition dictated your attire, even if only for a day.

“Seriously, grandma?” Alan grouched, his bottom lip poking out to form his signature pout when he spied the Tracy matriarch descending the stairs with an armful of colourful sweaters.

“Zip it, kid,” Sally rasped, her tone offering no room for negotiation, “This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Tracy Christmas Album, and I’ll not have your attitude souring the occasion.”

Scott and Virgil shared a look of mutual disgust as Sally handed them two hideously baggy and itchy looking jumpers.

“Don’t you two start as well,” Sally warned, yanking a loose thread off the sleeve of John’s before tossing it towards the redhead, “Anyone caught sulking will be in the kitchen with me for the rest of the afternoon. I’ve just finished a fresh batch of liver and onion stuffing and could use a taste tester.”

Five jumpers were yanked over five heads in perfect unison.

A nod from Sally affirmed her satisfaction with her grandson’s new-found cooperation.

Gordon grimaced and scratched absently as the coarse fibres tickled the soft skin of his neck. Posing for the annual Christmas album photograph was a tradition that stretched right back to their days on the ranch, yet he found himself becoming more disillusioned with it the older he got. Maybe it was the discomfort of wearing an unnecessary extra layer in Tracy Island’s heat. Maybe it was the disappointment of no longer having snow to wake up to on Christmas morning. Maybe it was the absence of his parents, and for the last three years, at least one of his brothers.

“Who’s on the roster for today?” Kayo asked, striding into the room and wordlessly scooping up the one remaining jumper that was equally as ugly as the abominations adorning the torsos of her male colleagues.

In an effort to preserve the family element of the season, Scott had devised a strategy where just one member of International Rescue acted as the primary point of contact for any rescue calls that came through on Christmas Day, be them sea, earth or space based. Last year, Virgil had volunteered and been called to Nigeria to deal with a flash flood. The year before, Kayo had drawn the short straw and ended up assisting with the evacuation of a small town in Chile when a nearby volcano blew it’s top. The year before, Gordon had helped clear away the debris caused by a three-way semi collision on one of Australia’s busiest highways. The aquanaut had been instrumental in ensuring three hundred people made it home in time for Christmas, despite it coming at the expense of his own.

Fairness dictated that Virgil, Kayo and Gordon were exempt from being called upon this Christmas unless absolutely necessary. Accordingly, the honour of being ATD (available to deploy) fell to Scott, John, and Alan to hash out.

One quick round of rock, paper, scissors later, and Scott found himself wondering what brothers three and five would look like with their heads shaved.

“Alright, scoot in!” Sally ordered, returning with Alan’s tablet which she held aloft in an attempt to get a good angle, “Scott and John, you two stand at the back. Gordon and Virgil, you kneel in front of your brothers. Kayo and Alan, I need you both to sit at the front. We’re going for a tiered approach this year.”

A healthy amount of shuffling ensued as each Tracy (plus Kayo) moved into position and tried desperately to make himself/herself look decent. Scott yanked on the hem of his jumper in an attempt to cover up his belt. Virgil tried to hoist his up so that he wasn’t rocking the off the shoulder look. John scrubbed at his nose as the acrylic material began to trigger one of his many allergies. Gordon fanned his face with a hand as sweat began to bead across his forehead. Alan tugged fruitlessly on sleeves that fell woefully short of his wrists, and Kayo demanded that Virgil tell her honestly whether the shape of her jumper made her look fat.

Sally was firmly of the opinion that jumpers had to be vomit-inducingly ugly in order to be ‘festive’. The designs adorning each of the six knitted atrocities in front of her offered indisputable visual evidence of this belief.

Scott was brandishing a bright blue snowman, while Virgil sported a dark green reindeer (complete with light-up antlers). John was the unwilling wearer of an orange gingerbread man, and Gordon was proudly modelling a yellow penguin (complete with a squeezable beak that sang Jingle Bells if you so much as looked at it). Alan appeared indifferent to the red elf plastered across his chest, and Kayo was trying to make the best of her rapidly unravelling black turtledoves.

“Smile!” Sally sang, her finger poised, “On the count of three, everybody say cheese! One…two…three!”

“CHEESE!”

Click.

Flash.

The end result was less than impressive. Scott had blinked at precisely the wrong moment. The grin plastered across Virgil’s face was nothing short of horrifying. John’s eyes were almost as red as his hair. Gordon was shamelessly modelling a chunk of leftover spinach in his right canine. Alan had twisted his head to peer at Virgil at the last second and was a blond and red blur…

Unsurprisingly, Kayo was the only one who’d managed to look straight at the camera and smile like a normal person.

After reviewing her rather substandard snap and tutting in disapproval, Sally tightened her grip on the tablet and ushered her dispersing grandsons back into formation with a ‘shoo’ motion of her free hand, “Come on you lot, form up. Nobody leaves this room until we have a decent photo. How you boys can look so good in real life but so bad on canvas is beyond me. Your dad always said-“

The sudden departure of an elf wearing Tracy brought all dialogue to an abrupt halt.

“Sorry, grandma!” John yelled as he made a beeline for the stairs, the redness of his nose akin to Rudolph, “But this wool is giving me a nosebleed. You’ll have to take the next shot without me, or just make the one we have work. It might be for the best, as you know how Alan gets unforgivable gas whenever he’s forced to pose.”

The youngest Tracy let loose a honk of outrage, but was dutifully ignored as, one by one, his other brothers began to filter out of the lounge. Excuses of varying degrees of believability bounced off the walls as three more bodies scampered to freedom.

It took all of ten seconds for most of the lounge’s inhabitants to disperse, leaving Kayo and Alan alone with a somewhat disappointed looking Grandma Tracy.

“Oh well,” the Tracy matriarch sighed, reaching to pick up the blue snowman that had been ejected over the first floor bannister, “There’s always next year.”

Kayo smiled thinly and made a mental note to spend next Christmas with her father.

-x-

As well as being the family fashionista, Gordon was also a self-appointed expert in gift giving.

His affinity for making people smile helped tremendously, since it made the process of choosing something his recipient would find meaningful much easier. He wasn’t adverse to buying his brothers practical gifts that they could use in their everyday lives (the tea cosy he’d bought for John the Christmas of fifty four was still in active service), but he knew they had all of the utilitarian gadgets they could ever want or need, courtesy of Brains and their nine figure bank account.

Cue unicorn poo bath bombs, flamingo slippers, and personalised face cushions.

This year however, he’d outdone himself.

Unbeknownst to anyone outside of the family, Gordon was quite the expert on upcycling. He had a knack for seeing potential in things that other people had written off as trash (like Scott, for instance), and took great delight in working with his hands.

It had taken several days, but he’d finally managed to relocate one of their dad’s old hoverbikes from the ranch to Tracy Island. It had taken up most of the room inside Thunderbird Four’s dry tube station, however he’d managed to offload it in the hanger and perform the desired modifcations in the (relative) privacy of Four’s module.

Alan had stopped believing in Santa when he was seven. With Lucy dead and Jeff away for three quarters of the year, Scott had taken it upon himself to safeguard whatever remained of his youngest brother’s innocence. Every year on Christmas Eve, without fail, the eldest Tracy donned a red suit and beard and made a big (and often loud) show of depositing presents under the tree. Unfortunately, a rather heated debate one year over Santa’s handwriting (which looked suspiciously similar to Virgil’s), had culminated in the death of Alan’s wide-eyed belief.

Gordon had found the whole debacle rather heart-breaking. Sure, he’d been a year younger than Alan when he himself had stopped believing, but the process had been much gentler. He’d made the innocent mistake of asking John one year to help him with some basic calculations regarding the speed and size of Santa’s sleigh, however had ended up on the receiving end of a lecture from his redheaded brother on reindeer anatomy and wind resistance.

His belief had died peacefully in its sleep nine hours later.

Still, having a belief squished verbally was a lot less harsh than having it squished visually. Poor Alan.

Gordon smiled to himself as he inspected his handiwork. He’d outfitted the storage compartment on the back of the red hoverbike he’d abducted to look like the back end of a sleigh. He’d toyed with the idea of enlisting the help of a couple of real life reindeer (or ponies) to act as draught animals, but had decided against it after reviewing the vaccination and transport requirements.

Despite managing to complete the modifications inside Four’s module, Gordon had been forced to relocate his creation elsewhere when he and Virgil had been called away on an impromptu rescue involving a couple of unqualified divers. With his back against the wall, the aquanaut had picked the first alternative hiding place that had come into his head.

The roof.

As ridiculous as it sounded, the glass roof of Tracy Island’s lounge was anchored into numerous rocky outcroppings that, when utilised effectively, provided excellent cover. So long as nobody glanced up, of course.

A sigh of pride bubbled up Gordon’s diaphragm. He might not be able to reverse the damage caused by Virgil’s handwriting gaffe, but he could at least give his youngest brother a laugh and deliver his gifts in style instead.

So preoccupied was the aquanaut with buffing out an imaginary mark from the hoverbike’s bumper, that he failed to notice the Island’s automated weather system bark out the alarm for a storm warning.

Thankfully, John didn’t.

-x-

Scott had checked high and low.

And then high again, just to be sure.

The eldest Tracy was stumped. Gordon had somehow managed to vanish clean off the face of the earth.

Not that such a discovery would usually cause the eldest Tracy any concern (the aquanaut had a knack for evading capture), but Christmas lunch was due to be served any minute and they were one body short at the kitchen table.

“Gordon?” Scott called, shoving his head into the bathroom for what felt like the billionth time that hour. He’d tried calling the aquanaut’s phone, but had been sent to voicemail both times. His biometric tracker showed that he was still on the island, however couldn’t generate an exact location for him. EOS’s heat signature scans weren’t much better, courtesy of the wonky connection brought about by the oncoming storm.

“I’m stumped,” Scott huffed, admitting defeat with a bemused shrug, “He’s gone. I’ve checked the hanger, the changing rooms, his room, the bathroom, and the gym. Nothing. It’s like he’s poofed into thin air.”

Virgil opened his mouth to reply, however was cut off by the arrival of John, whose expression was an expert blend of concern and flippancy.

“I’ll give you three guesses as to his location,” the redhead began, “If you win, I’ll do your laundry for a week. If you lose, you have to eat my portion of grandma’s stuffing.”

Scott quickly did the math. It was a risk he was willing to take.

“Is he stuck inside his launch chute?”

“No.”

“Is he swimming in the lagoon?”

“No.”

“Is he hijacking Thunderbird One again?”

“No.”

….

“Well?” the eldest brother demanded, hands on hips. He had no interest in John drawing out his victory for any longer than necessary.

The redhead allowed a small smile to grace his face before gesturing with an index finger towards the ceiling.

Scott blinked as his blue gaze clapped onto a jean-clad butt scrabbling around atop the reinforced glass, oblivious to the small audience he’d amassed as he tried to evade the rapidly intensifying rain.

“The roof?” Scott honked, one hand fisting itself through his hair, “I take my eyes off him for two minutes, and he ends up on the roof?”

“Whoa, whoa!” a new voice piped up, it’s baritone depth failing to bring Scott any relief, “He’s where?!”

The eldest Tracy said nothing, opting instead to stab a finger upwards. Ever the cooperative one, Virgil cast his eyes in the desired direction, a small frown infecting his face as he did so.

“We should probably get him down,” the engineer announced, cringing when Gordon slipped on the now wet glass and starfished on his back, “He’s still wearing his Christmas jumper, and the blasted thing will short-circuit if it gets damp.”

A loud ‘thwack’ echoed around the lounge as Scott’s palm got itself well acquainted with his face.

-x-

John had never been one for big displays of emotion.

A polite smile or, in extreme cases, a shoulder pat were usually the preferred methods his brothers employed whenever they wanted to convey feelings of endearment towards him.

Christmas was an exception, however, and it was without a shred of his usual awkwardness that the redhead enveloped his fish brother in a tight hug, the scent of singed fabric tickling his nostrils.

Virgil’s extraction of their younger brother hadn’t quite been quick enough, and it was with a suitable amount of humility that Gordon shuffled back into the safety and dryness of the lounge, a thin trail of smoke rising from the beak of his thoroughly soaked penguin jumper.

“How bad was it?” John queried, biting his cheek to keep his humour in check as he took in the static strands of hair atop Gordon’s head. The aquanaut looked as if he’d just stuck his finger inside a plug socket which, on reflection, wasn’t as much of an inaccurate analogy as the redhead had originally thought.

Gordon ignored his space brother in favour of slowly shuffling towards the staircase, an involuntary yelp escaping when his traitorous jumper suddenly gave off a stray spark.

Virgil snorted and flicked a hand through his hair to rid it of the rainwater it had collected, “Nothing to worry about on the health side of things, but man John, you should have seen it. He nearly took off like a firework.”

The redhead quirked an unimpressed brow, “Serves him right for skipping over the electrical safety briefings I sent down last week. You’d think he’d have a better understanding of how water and electricity don’t mix, what with his ‘Bird being the only one kitted out for aquatic reconnaissance.”

A shrug was offered by Virgil in lieu of a response, “I’m sure all will be revealed once he’s properly earthed himself. Meanwhile, I’d better get that hoverbike down before it crashes through the roof and lands on someone’s head. Can you send Scott up to help? I could use a couple of his grapples.”

John threw his brother a mock salute before breezing off towards the kitchen, only to stop when he caught sight of a familiar blue outline on one of the sofas.

“Be there in a minute!” Scott mumbled, his cheeks bulging like an oversized hamster as he chomped his way through an indulgent looking doughnut.

John felt his gaze darken as he took stock of the stray sprinkles in the corner of his eldest brother’s mouth, “Where did you get those?”

Scott held a finger up as he swallowed, thumping his chest when a stubborn piece of dough got lodged, “Mainland, to make up for grandma’s sprout and salmon tart. Help yourself, there’s plenty left. I’ve only had three.”

The lack of control Scott had when confronted with unhealthy snacks never failed to amaze his brothers.

“You want to take it easy,” Virgil warned, motioning with one hand to his waistline, “Too many of those could send you to an early grave.”

Scott flicked his hand dismissively and reached for a fourth doughnut.

“Don’t care. I won’t be the one carrying the coffin.”

- FIN -

#thunderbirds are go #Gordon Tracy #alan tracy #Scott Tracy #Virgil Tracy #John Tracy #tag team secret santa #secret santa 2020 #MissSquidTracy

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yume-fanfare · 4 years ago

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hi i am that anon from like 29th Dec (last dang year) who said i read ur tsuki no hime and loved it and that u understand Aizou. i have read more of ur stuff since then and now i NEED to ask you for writing advice, on both characterization and general writing tips since I didnt mention it before. Sorry about that! i just forgot i sent an ask and i do not get notifs at all (or does anon asks not get notifs?) Also, ART STUDENT! That's why the nice art and art leaning!! I feel smart for sensing it

oh yup, tumblr doesn't send notifs for anon asks! but i'm glad you did see the answer anyway

this post is hideously long, so answer under the cut!

so, on characterization: it is mostly a matter of what would they say, rather than what you want them to say. the joke about "the characters do what they want to" instead of what the writer wants is pretty much true if you want them to be in character lol (that's why sometimes a little bit of OoC isn't too bad)

checking the source material is the most important thing: look at prior similar interactions the characters have had and how they reacted

this is kind of hard with LIPxLIP, as there aren't that many translated texts about them but with honeyworks the most canon and reliable thing to use as reference are the mvs. the mvs are drawn in a way that can pretty much be understood even if you don't have the lyrics, and sometimes it's even better if you can't read them, to properly focus on the images better

look at their expressions closely: while aizou is always explosive in his anger, yuujirou often has a more indifferent expression. so, when they fight, aizou is probably the one to blow up first while yuujirou maintains his composure better. it's kind of the classic "this was only a brief passing panel but i am going to expand on it" www

but the thing about fanfiction is that it's always a bit of a character analysis in itself. you don't start writing having already a color-coded folder of possible situations and reactions a character would have for each setting. you just throw the characters in a scenario and then think from there onwards, and eventually you'll be able to have the folder of situations and what you think their reactions would be like. (though, this links back to the prior point, if the characters have gone through a similar situation in canon, use that as guide! plus, finding little references to canon when reading is always fun)

for general writing, i'm going to mostly talk about my own experiences and process! i'm in no way a professional though

the basic is reading a lot. not just books but also fanfic. in fact, since you're writing fanfic, i Encourage you to read fanfic. even if your story ends up novel length, the way of treating the story is different from that of an actual novel. for example, because you're working under the premise that everyone knows the characters already. the general style of fics is different as well.

in fact, the style is the main reason i'm saying this slfkslfkslkf

read a lot of stuff and find a style you like. think of it as sewing together pieces from here and there to make a frankenstein amalgamation: this person's metaphors, the comparisons from here, the descriptions from there

personally, i adore the "long one-shot with a long title formatted (like this)" fics that are mostly feelings and descriptions and as little dialogue as possible, and some that occasionally play with the "show don't tell" rule, and some months ago i read a book whose descriptions amazed me because you could feel what the character was focusing on the most, rather than being general descriptions of the situation (i actually have a lot of thoughts about descriptions but that's a post for another day). but also i really like dialogue and plot-driven stories, descriptions can get boring and before trying to break rules, you have to be really good at following them

but, let's go step by step: developing an idea

for this i'm going to mostly reference the multichap i finished a while ago as an example

i started with just a few vague concepts in mind: non-idol au with aizou who does some sport and likes music but is insecure about his singing and yuujirou who does some music related thing and encourages him to sing in a way that's somehow related to the hozier song to noisemaking (sing), because it's what inspired me to write in the first place

then, from then onwards i wrote down what would happen in the first chapter of the story bullet-point-list-style, including things like the roommates part or the clubs the boys were in (at first yuujirou was in the choir club lol the change was a last second decision that idk why i took) and then bits of dialogue here and there that would be The Turning Points. those first dialogues were for the fight at the end of ch 1, the apology-date in ch 3 and then some vaguely unused ones for the "yuujirou encourages aizou" part, as those were the first key moments i thought of

because, since it's enemies to friends to lovers, an important aspect was character development

not all fics have character development bc not all of them are long enough (if you're aiming for short and sweet then there's no need). but if they do, i recommend you write down how the character was at the beginning of the story and then how they were at the end and then fill in the middle later, think of what those key turning points that made the character change were (the more little things you add, the more gradual it'll be)

samishigariya illustrates this very nicely: the song starts and finishes with the same lines, but the ending ones feel more light-hearted. the beginning has pre-arisa ken and pre-getting-along-with-yuujirou aizou, when they were the lonely people the title mentioned, and the ending, when they're not lonely anymore. the in between can be seen in depth during the other songs: ken before arisa was a playboy who didn't take love seriously, but after meeting her he realized that games were not all there was to love; and aizou used to be quite cranky and high-key a loner, but then he "meets precious things and knows of love". i will not elaborate on that because this isn't an aiyuu post but Oh You Know

for the fic, aizou would go through that same process, more or less: someone who doesn't really form meaningful connections with people but who, in the end, would end up having quite a bunch of people who care about him as his relationship with yuujirou advances too

since the relationship was the main focus, i wrote a very simple outline for how it would develop throughout 5 hypothetical chapters that was just: 1. civil w each other but mostly bad > 2. bad > 3. half friends > 4. pining > 5. date

and then with that in mind and the bullet point list, the final basic outline ended up like this:

there were scraped ideas and ideas that made it in later, but i believe having a simple outline, a bare skeleton to add things to, is important. stories need continuity, development requires a prior buildup

it's especially important in multichapter fics where you post as you write, you need to have a more or less clear idea of what's going to happen because you can't ignore scenes you've already posted

shorter stories don't need it as much, you can think as you go, but it's still helpful to know where you're going with things to avoid getting stuck

and, on getting stuck: don't be afraid of deleting things. if you can't figure out how to continue things, then delete the situation and start again. it might feel like you'd be wasting time but in the end, it is so much better than being stuck on the same scene for weeks

in fact, you don't have to write in order. jump to the next scene and you'll figure it out later. you Can write the scene you want to write and then build everything else around it

it's normal to write a scene and then realize it would make more sense later in the story, or that it would be better if you added another scene earlier, or sometimes you just find it easier to jump from one part of the story to another. rely on your outline to keep track of what you've written, what you have left to write and what's the best way to arrange your story. make your story understandable

which bring us to editing

there's a lot of much better posts on editing stories, but yeah ctrl+f is your best friend: don't repeat yourself too much. and be sure to vary sentence and paragraph length, as well as sentence structure, to give dynamism to the writing

now, i've mentioned before the show, don't tell rule, but i'm going to talk a bit more about it because it's quite important

once again there's a lot of posts that explain more in depth what it is, so i'm not going to expand too much on that, but, very basically, try to avoid things like "then some time passed and they became friends". explain it: what happened exactly? how did they become friends? if it's important, show it to us, instead of summarizing

since things like these make the story longer, it also gives room for more development and proper explanation for things that happen

for example, the fic was originally going to start with them already in the room, and the whole situation would have been explained in a single paragraph somewhere, but by actually adding the scene where they first arrive to the dorms and argue with the lady at the main desk, the story flows better and it let me actually describe their first meeting

and uuuhhh i think that's all? this took super long to write i hope i didn't forget any super basic stuff lol

i want to add that for enemies to lovers i greatly recommend this post bc it's super good but yeah i think that's basically it, if you have any more specific questions just shoot me an ask

#god this is so long #how should i tag this #tutorials #i guess #anonymous #preguntas

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alison-anonymous · 5 years ago

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flawsome bandits pt. 11 ♡ sonic

Flawsome Tessering

Part 11, coming at you! This part doesn’t have too much Sonic x Y/n, but don’t worry my darlings, I am saving that for the next chapter ;) This one includes some mother-daughter relationships and tons of foreshadowing. Enjoy!

Warnings - slight angst, robotnik x stone mentions

♡♡♡

“Why so down, Sonic?” A man with a head as smooth as an eggshell asked his pet boulder as it sat next to him in his poorly repaired drone. The boulder had tiny little dents in its craters that were obviously created by Robotnik to form a dopey grin and two misshapen eye sockets. The man chortled to himself as he tapped the cracked glass where an electric blue quill sat, charging up his entire machine. “Aww, are you sad because I’m coming back home?”

Robotnik stared intently at the little boulder, watching as it practically began to sweat under his intense gaze. He finally sat back up and let out yet another loud chuckle, filling the silent air around him for miles. “Sorry to disappoint, bud, but you and your little girlfriend are going to be toast as soon as I wrap my hands around your puny little necks~” He sang out the last part, his time spent in isolation taking an immense toll on his sanity. His tethered and gloved hands expertly found their way across his very dented control panel, clicking on a bunch of buttons that ended up making the drone begin to whirr. The air surrounding him that reeked of fungus began to churn at the new winds.

“Come on, baby,” Robotnik grumbled, pushing his prized invention to the limit as it began to levitate its misshapen and damaged body a couple feet off the ground. The engines worked in tandem with one another, struggling to compensate for the extreme damage that had been inflicted upon them. Even Robotnik’s expert repair jobs using the emergency kits Stone had made him place in every one of his drones wasn’t enough to make up for it all.

He guessed Stone was right for once. Shocker.

The erratic energy being extracted from Sonic’s quill mingled with the artificial power he was able to save. As the drone began to sputter, he quickly grabbed onto the throttle in an attempt to steady the drone, even his hideously long mustache hairs twitching with anticipation. He had to do it. He had to make this work. He couldn’t stand another second trapped here with Mushroom Bertha, Mushroom Kick-Sonic’s-Ass, Mushroom Carl, and Mushroom I-Want-A-Hedgehog-Skin-Rug or IWAHS for short. After a couple of minutes spent in agonizing suspense, a little glimmer began to form in the air before him. A malicious grin made its way across his lips as he realized that his plan was working.

The energy coming from his drone was enough to cause a small rip in the universe, mostly due to Sonic’s alienated DNA and ability to tesser between universes. The tear grew a decent size wider, its edges glowing an abnormal white and a very faint image of what he presumed to be Green Hills glimmered within it. It was right there. He was going to make it! It was barely big enough for him to pass through, but it was all he needed. With a surge of energy and Robotnik practically gritting his teeth until they chipped, the drone shot through the portal in a flash of blinding light, crash landing onto a very mossy green ground. The impact made Robotnik slam his face against the throttle, but luckily his gigantic mustache hairs cushioned the blow. The drone slowly began to let off steam, already having used all of its juices to float for less than thirty minutes. A steady blow of steam began to shoot up into the air from one of the drones' important capsules, and Robotnik was quick to regain consciousness, standing up and practically falling back down into his seat from the excitement. He looked around the area, hoping taking over his entire internal chemistry as he looked at his surroundings. The hope died almost instantly as he came to a horrific conclusion.

This… this wasn’t Green Hills!

What the actual fuck?!

There were oddly misshapen trees and abnormal creatures waddling around the perimeter and LOOP-DE-LOOPS?! The anger got the better of him as he picked up the boulder sitting next to him and screamed at the top of his lungs.

“God damnit, Sonic! This is all your fault!” And the tiny boulder was sent flying out of the drone to land against the grass, where it rolled down a hill.

It was safe from the evil man’s clutches at last.

Robotnik let out another frustrated groan and slammed his fists down onto the dash, causing even more smoke to secrete from vital components of the drone. But he didn’t care right now. He had been working on building up all of that power for months. To have it all lost getting him somewhere that wasn’t even where he needed to be - where those goddamn hedgehogs were! And now he was stuck in this crazy backwards land with nothing to defend himself with. At least back with the mushrooms the only predator was sleep deprivation.

And of course, that was self inflicted.

“Oh thank god.” A sudden voice broke through his frustrations. Robotnik’s head snapped up so quickly he was sure he heard his neck crack. He was expecting the worst: three headed bear, snake crossed with a lizard, horse sized horsefly, something deadly and positively hideous. So when he saw a little black and red hedgehog staring at him intently with ruby irises and what looked to be a gun and a little bag situated around his hips, he was very, VERY surprised.

“Well, who the fuck are you supposed to be?” Robotnik couldn’t help but blurt. The hedgehog looked incredibly relieved as he came closer to the drone, showing his gloved hands in a means of presenting no harm.

“My name is Shadow. I was created by your assistant, Agent Stone.” Robotnik’s heart stopped at the sound of his name. “He sent me through the different universes to find you. It’s taken forever, but I finally did it. I have more rings left to get us back to the planet where Hedgehog Sonic and Hedgehog Y/n reside.”

Robotnik was floored, to say the least. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Agent Stone, the little guy who made delicious lattes and who knew him better than anyone else, MADE a hedgehog and sent him to help Robotnik defeat the two once and for all?

He owed him a thank you. Or maybe more than that, if you catch my drift ;)

“W-Well then, I suppose it’s nice to have you on board, Mr. Shadow. Unfortunately, my drone was a bit destroyed during the movement here, so unless you have a giant bag of tools next to your gun there, I-”

“Don’t worry, Sir, I’ve got it handled,” Shadow interrupted him, turning around to point into a throng of bushy trees. “I met an Echidna along the way who might be of use to us. Perhaps we could brainwash him into assisting us.”

Damn. Agent Stone really did a number on this guy. Robotnik liked it.

♡♡♡

A few hours later and a lot of impressive manipulation, Shadow and Robotnik had recruited yet another member onto their team: Knuckles the Echidna. He was a very burly red thing with intimidating eyes and an unfortunate lack of brains. But, he had resources and his muscle could even out Robotnik’s brains and Shadow’s apparent fiery temper. They were able to convince him that Y/n and Sonic were two beings from a far away planet that were power hungry and had a plot to destroy the entire universe, including this planet. Of course, Knuckles was petrified and said that they must be stopped immediately. The guy was also pretty handy with supplying the needed instruments to fix up Robotnik’s drone.

Of course, it wasn’t the best job, but it would have to do for now. After Robotnik had done his little patch job, the trio were beginning to prep for their return to earth.

“I assume that you are very excited to defeat the two hedgehogs, Doctor,” Shadow spoke with authority. “But I think it would be better to hide out in a secluded spot for a little while in order for us to build up our resources. We wouldn’t want to go straight into battle without being prepared.”

Even though Robotnik was really looking forward to crushing Bonnie and Clyde, he had to admit that Shadow had a point. He nodded slowly. “We’ll hide out in the woods in order to gather resources and start the formation of Metal Sonic. Agreed? Agreed.” Even though he wasn’t looking for a confirmation, the two nodded despite. Everything was going according to plan. Robotnik had gathered two allies and had already begun his plan to form a metal-based version of Sonic. For two reasons, really. The first was to use Sonic’s greatest power and turn it into his weakness, and the second was to try and trick Y/n into not being able to fight the one that she loves. They were going to destroy the two hedgehogs once and for good, donating their bodies to Robotnik’s favorite charity: science.

But what these little twerps didn’t know was that a certain fox had been spying on the three of them ever since Robotnik had crash landed a couple feet away from his lab. It was finely secluded within the weeping willow trees, so he hadn’t been able to see it. But his security measures sure saw the mustache guy.

The little fox’s stomach began to fill with dread as he thought about all of this. These guys were obviously up to no good. Anyone who loved the color combo red and black was obviously up to no good. Especially someone who grew their mustache past five inches.

On each side.

Those two hedgehogs they had been mentioning… What were their names? Bonnie and Clyde? Funny named for hedgehogs, but he guessed that their world was different than his. He began to rummage through the different gizmos and gadgets he had spent ages on until he finally gathered all of the materials he needed. His little gloved fingers found their way to his energy-tracker as he calibrated it to their energy sources. Funny, he thought. One of them was stronger than the other.

He narrowed his eyes in determination, steadying himself as he thought of the realm they lived in and tossed one of his golden rings. The second the portal opened, he jumped through, landing on what appeared to be a cliff looking over a small town. Relief filled his orangish-yellow chest as he looked across. He hoped he knew what he was doing.

Extending his two tails, he leapt off the cliff.

♡♡♡

“M-Mom?” Maddie stirred in her sleep.

“Mommy?”

The young mother’s eyes slowly opened to be greeted with the sight of her daughter who had tears streaming down her cheeks. The sight of her daughter in distress kicked all of the sleep out of her as she instantly shot up in bed and immediately started wiping away the tears. Most of them got brushed into the fur around her eyes, but she didn’t care.

“N/n, baby, what’s wrong?” She asked softly, trying her best not to wake up her husband who still lay sound asleep behind her. Y/n only continued to cry harder, her e/c eyes glowing in the dark.

“I-I’m sorry, Mommy. I-I didn’t w-want to see i-it, I-” Maddie gently shushed her, standing on her feet and expertly lifting up the frail hedgehog onto her hip, holding her like she was a toddler.

“Y/n, honey, you’re not making any sense.” She glanced over at the clock and realized it was barely five in the morning. What on earth was she doing up this late? Y/n was in such hysterics that all she was able to do was plant her face into Maddie’s shoulder and continue to cry, her chest feeling like a million daggers were being dug into it. Maddie’s heart was ripping at the seams for her daughter, as the last time she had seen her this upset was when Sonic had died. She quickly and quietly took the weeping hedgehog out of her room, making sure not to make a sound as she closed the door to leave her sleeping husband alone, and continued through the darkened halls until they made it to the main bathroom. She closed the door behind them and set the hedgehog onto the counter, grabbing a wad of tissues and quickly dabbing her eyes while Y/n wrapped her arms around her trembling torso.

“I-I’m s-sorry-” She hiccuped, choking on the mucus being created from her tears. Maddie’s gaze softened.

“Sweetie, what on earth could you have to be sorry for?” To her surprise, Y/n’s eyes only filled with guilt and self-disgust as she looked down at the floor.

“...what happened?” Maddie gently cupped her daughter’s furry face in her hands and stared into her liquid e/c eyes. The deeper she looked into them, the more she was able to picture Y/n before she had turned into a hedgehog, back when she was a human. The little hedgehog exhaled a shaky breath and wrung her hands together.

“I… I woke up to singing. And I followed it outside, and there was this… thing out there. It was calling to me, and when I touched it, this is going to sound insane, but it showed me pictures of the future. I-I saw Robotnik, and I saw me and Sonic with two other people and then… the last one… M-Mommy, it looked like someone was trying to k-kill me-” Maddie’s heart stopped in her chest, her eyes widening in horror. Fresh tears began to spill down Y/n’s cheeks even faster. “I-I don’t want to die!”

Maddie quickly enveloped her in a tight hug, pressing her daughter’s head into her chest and stroking her quills gently. “Shh, it’s okay, baby. You’re not going to die.”

“H-how do you k-know that? M-my powers are growing a-and I don’t know how to s-stop it, I don’t want to kn-know how we’re going to d-die, I-”

Maddie hushed her, continuing to stroke her quills. They sat like this for quite some time, with Maddie consoling her hysterical daughter until her sobs finally died down and were replaced with melancholic sniffles. Maddie’s heart continued to pound, however, fear and confusion coursing through her veins. She was trying with all her might to wrap her brain around the matter, but she was the one who had had the worst time figuring out how Sonic and Y/n’s powers worked in tandem with one another. Even Tom relatively understood better than she could. She knew that Y/n had vocal telekinesis, but seeing the future? Little wisp-like creatures? It didn’t seem like those had ever been mentioned or used before.

What was going on? Was her daughter truly in danger?

Her grip around her tightened. Y/n exhaled softly and it was then that Maddie realized she had fallen asleep. A small smile crossed her lips as she picked her daughter back up and began to make her way back into the living room. She could have just taken her to her bedroom, but in all honesty, she felt safer leaving her with Sonic than by herself. As she walked through the darkened hallways, she tried to silence the red alarms blaring endlessly throughout her mind.

Something was wrong.

She could feel it. She didn’t even need magical powers to feel it. Her breath hitched in her throat as she made her way down the stairs, making sure not to trip as she entered the living room. Sonic still lay sound asleep on the couch, not having moved an inch since Y/n had woken up. Maddie gently set her daughter down on the couch, resting her head on Sonic’s chest and covering the two with a fleece blanket. Her fingers softly traced Y/n’s jawline as she slowly stood back up, a small, yet sad, smile staying on her lips.

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” she whispered into the silence. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

♡ a.a.

#sonic #sonic x reader #sonic imagines #sonic the hedgehog #sonic the hedgehog x reader #sonic the hedgehog imagines #sonic the hedgehog movie #sonic the hedgehog movie x reader #sonic the hedgehog movie imagines #sonic the hedgehog 2020 #sonic the hedgehog 2020 x reader #sonic the hedgehog movie 2020 #sonic the hedgehog movie 2020 x reader #flawsome bandits

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youngwriter0318 · 4 years ago

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Enchantress (My formatting got fucked up)

I stood before the queen, waiting for my sentence. No doubt, I’d be sentenced to death. Alice, Queen of Hearts, was ruthless.

“Aoife the Enchantress,” she spat. “You shall be banished from this land, never to return!”

A collective gasp danced in the air, and even Edward, the king, stared at his wife in shock. She always killed, never banished.

A crimson smile spread across my face. “As you wish, my lady.” I curtsied and allowed the guards to bound me in chains of silver. They believed the silver would stop my magic, those poor tragic souls. I was more powerful than I let on, even if I was only ten.

The guards gently lifted me into the back of a wagon surrounded by silver bars. I laid my head on the hay and allowed sleep to take over.

Rrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnggggggg! The bell sounded, letting us know we needed to be in class. I was early, as always. All throughout the halls, kids were talking about the new girl coming today.

“Good morning students!” Ms. Speare chimed. “As you’ve all heard, we have a new student! Her name is... Ay - oy - fe?” She laughed nervously. “Um... she’ll be in this period. I’ll need someone to show her around once we introduce her...”

My hand shot up before she could finish the sentence. Why was I raising my hand? I hated having the teacher’s attention on me. What was wrong with me?

“Do you have a question, Anwyll?”

“No, I want to give her the tour,” I improvised.

Her face lit up. “Wonderful!”

She opened the door, asking someone to come inside.

The girl followed her and whispers filled the room. She was different, that was for sure. She could have belonged with the emos and goths but she didn’t. She had a group that was entirely her own. She had to be pagan.

“Class, this is Ay - Oy - Fe”

“Actually, it’s pronounced Eef - Fyuh. It’s Celtic for beauty. Although sometimes it is used as the Gaelic form of Eve.” Her voice was soft and quiet.

Trinket started to snicker, “Beauty? Please! What’s beautiful about you? You look like you got dragged through a dumpster.”

“Trixie! Detention!” Ms. Speare glared. “Anyone else have something to say?”

“I personally think she’s pretty, I’ve never seen red hair before. It’s rare and getting rarer by the day. And her cloak! It’s gorgeous!” Conor mused. My best friend, always trying to hide his biggest secret. She was pretty though.

I stared at Aoife. She was wearing leather combat boots with jeans that hugged her body. Her shirt stopped about mid-thigh and had a rune on it, surrounded by other runes. I couldn’t see her eyes because the shadow of her cloak hid them. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders like a waterfall of flames. Her cloak was black, trimmed with gold.

Wait... why was I romanticizing a girl I didn’t know? And a waterfall of flames? Seriously, Anwyll?

I couldn’t stop staring at her; she radiated with power.

“Anwyll!”

I glanced at Ms. Speare. “Yes, sorry?”

“Are you going to give her the tour?”

“Yes! Right!” I stood up and grabbed my stuff, unnaturally tense.

Aoife looked amused as if the situation was funny.

As I showed her around the school, Aoife stayed silent. Finally, tired of her silence, I asked her what her schedule was.

All she did was hand it to me and watch me read it.

“You have the same schedule as me.”

She nodded.

“You’re not supposed to have hoods on in the buildings, Aoife.”

“And why not?”

The lights flickered.

“It’s against school policy.”

“Why?”

I stared at her. “I don’t know, I don’t make the rules!” My voice echoed.

She turned and anger flickered across your face, “Do not snap at me! You do not know me or anything about me! If you snap at me again, I will make sure you never speak again!”

Rolling my eyes, I continued to show her around. I noted that she had calmed down quickly. She had a splash of freckles across her face; it was kind of cute.

Thunder rumbled outside and the lights went out.

“Great! Now we can’t see!” I complained.

“Relax, it’s just a bit of darkness.”

Suddenly the hall lit up with a green glow. Looking around, I saw the light was coming from her hands.

Thrusting her hands upward, the hall exploded with light. “Bet you don’t see that every day.” Aoife winked and then ran out the doors.

Foolishly, I followed her outside. Curiosity crushed me as if I were the cat it so desperately hated. Rain hammered down on us and she spun in circles with her head back. Her hood fell off and when she opened her eyes, I saw they were gold as if God melted down the precious metal and poured it into her eyes.

Wonderment washed over me. This girl was special.

I stood in the lunchroom, wading through the line. Trixie and her groupies were talking about me. What a shame, too drunk on popularity to see the hideousness of their souls. I grabbed a tray and made my way through the line as lunch ladies put food on my plate.

“My lady, do you by any chance have pomegranates?” I asked, hopeful.

The lady stared at me and laughed, “Are you trying to play medieval? No, we don’t have pomegranates.” Shaking her head, she served the next student.

Someone tapped my shoulder. I looked to see Trixie. “Yes?”

“Aoife, I’m sorry about what I said in class.” Liar. “I hope we can be friends? I think your cloak is pretty. What’s the design on the back?”

A gentle smile eased on my face, showing all sincerity towards her curiosities. After all, these mortals rarely took the time to learn about other cultures. “It’s a Celtic rune for prosperity on the back of a crow. And the runes surrounding it are for good luck, loyalty, justice, protection, and a lot more.”

“And on your shirt?”

“The rune for abandonment and deceit.”

She frowned. “Why that?”

“My past.” The truth, my past is full of pain and betrayal, so why not flaunt my strength and watch my enemies cower.

“Just some advice, Aoife: if you want people to like you, don’t be so dark.”

I shrugged. “I don’t want someone to like me for who they think I am, I want them to like me for who I really am.” I stared into her eyes. “I know you don’t want to be my friend, you just want to manipulate the situation so you can pretend I am the villain. But I am not fake like you. So I say this with absolute sincerity, I hope the devil uses your spine as a ladder to pick apples in the gardens of Hell.” I smiled my sweetest smile at her and turned. Checkmate.

I could feel her watching me with her beady eyes and her pink glossed lips pressed together in a thin line. I win.

Trixie launched towards me, her friends screaming, “No!”

Ever so calmly, I sidestepped her and she flew into the table. “Oh, dear! Are you alright, Trixie? Let me help you.” I offered her a hand, allowing healing energy to flow from my core to her body.

Then smiling with pride, I walked up to Anwyll’s table. “Hello, Anwyll of class 105. Hello, stranger who attempted to make me feel good about myself.”

They stared in shock.

“What?”

“You stood up to Trinket!” the stranger said.

“You mean Trixie?”

“Everyone calls her Trinket,” Anwyll explained.

Sighing, I plop down next to Anwyll as the stranger stared in awe.

The stranger finally spoke again. “Tell us about yourself, Aoife.”

“No, I don’t even know your name, stranger. Why don’t you tell me about yourself.”

“My name is Conor.”

I stared at him.

“There’s nothing interesting about us,” Conor said.

I began eating the chicken tenders on my plate as they watched me. It was rather awkward having two boys stare at you while you eat, not knowing you’re an enchantress. I have wandered alone for thousands of years, just to have two high school boys watch me eat my chicken tenders.

“How did you do that thing in the hallway? With your hands?” Anwyll inquired. He had startling blue eyes and black hair, I noticed. Studying him further, I noted a light scruff growing on his face. He must shave regularly. He was about two inches shorter than Conor, an inch taller than I was in my boots, putting him at a grand height of about five foot seven.

“What are you talking about?”

“You made the hallway light up with the green light earlier! Before we ran out into the rain.” Gazing blankly at him, I played dumb. This boy expected me to answer him? Mortal boys were foolish. Conor stared at him as well. Cue the awkward tension again.

Read the full excerpt here

I plan on continuing the story and making it into a book so let me know if you like it and I can try to keep you updated on the progress!

#fantasy #magic #short story #excerpt #fiction #writers #young writer #writer #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writeblr #writing #self publication #excerpts of stories #amwriting #amediting #young author #blog

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joel-furniss-blog · 7 years ago

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Japanese Body Horror and Ero Guro

The entire sphere of popular culture revolves around recognisability. We are drawn to forms and symbols we can easily identify, clear cut representations of ideas in understandable formats that do not confuse. In essence we relate to what we know. It’s why abstraction as a concept has never successfully breached into the mainstream and why we have the idea of sensationalism of celebrity figures. One of the most recognizable forms we understand is the body, we see them every day and we all have them, they’re immediately relatable as their own empathetic vessels. What I mean by that is that we can relate to certain physical aspects that we see, specifically physical feelings like pain. When we see someone in pain we can’t help but feel sorry for them, or if we imagine an uncomfortable injury we automatically cringe at the thought, it’s a natural bodily reaction to help our fellow man and prevent the cause of pain in order to stave off the relation pain presents: Death.

Yet with the taboo of death comes the previously mentioned fascination with it, and its cousin pain. This is apparent in pop culture, with the horror fiction genre of body horror, a genre in which the horror aspect is derived from the graphic transformation, degeneration, and destruction of the human body through decay, disease, parasitism, mutation, and mutilation. This sub-genre of splatter cinema has been prevalent within western society since the mid 1900’s with movies such as George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. These films use the topics of pain and death to stimulate the audience’s emotions, to get their heart racing and then allow reassurance when they realise their objective safety. These films once again use the trope of recognisability to help them succeed, the all use human forms as their ‘villains’ as well as a driving force that we can understandably relate with whether it be fear of the unknown, supernatural malevolence, or the common man deranged. What I wish to focus on however is when we deal with the unrecognisable, fear through the indescribable and the hideously grotesque. This is where the genre of body horror truly shines, through its creation of abstract, Lovecraftian horrors that we cannot hope to understand.

These types of body horrors can be seen in works such as John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and Ridley Scott’s Alien, films that leave us unsettled in their displays of inhumanity, where the full forms of these indiscernible pulps of flesh are so peculiar and impossible to describe that we find them immensely troubling. This level of abstract grotesqueness is not often seen within western societies, but in the east and most notably Japan, it is much more understood and even weirder. The most famous examples of the Japanese classes of body horror films can be seen in films like Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime Akira which sees a character mutate into a large, fleshy, all-encompassing mass which eventually settles in the form of a giant infant. Another example is Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, in which an unnamed character (titled Salaryman) is cursed by having his body slowly form metallic growths until he is eventually almost entirely metal and begins trying to destroy humanity. In recent times the genre of Japanese Body Horror has taken on a much more humorous and spectacular approach instead of the bizarre yet enamouring storytelling of previously mentioned works. Titles such as Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha to Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police. The newer generations of films seem purposefully bizarre in an effort to seem both funny and grotesque but with their predecessors they share an often satirical underlying comment on Japanese media and society, a point I wish to expand on later. With the medium of manga (comics) the grotesque horror can be expressed through a more traditional visual art format as well, often with gruesome results. Notable artist Junji Ito has seen moderate western success with series such as Uzumaki, which tells the story of a city plagued with an affinity for spirals, so much so that they begin carving never-ending spirals into their own flesh or the disturbing Tomie, where the titular character’s beauty drives men and women to do unspeakable acts. While these films and mangas are useful in helping me research elements of death and the grotesque, I believe that they alone are not substantial enough to affect my work. Fortunately in my research I have managed to find a related element that can help me.

Ero guro nansensu often shortened to ero guro or simply guro, is a literary and artistic development found circa 1930’s Japan. The movement’s name displays its intent, with ero meaning “erotic”, “guro” meaning grotesque, and “nansensu” meaning nonsense, the genre literally means “erotic grotesque nonsense” seemingly perfect for my project. Despite the name implying a sense of the absurd abandon, the artistic movement is firmly cemented within real world Japanese social topics through representations of corruption and decadence. This relevance to the Japanese social and political landscape gives the works of the movement a difficult line to follow but allows for a larger field of artistic liberty, the work may not even include elements of sex or death but rather figures similar to the previously mentioned body horror, where the subjects are malformed, horrific and generally unnatural. In the opposite vein, items that do focus on the pornographic and gory are not necessarily to be classed as ero guro which in recent times has become bastardized within Japanese media to simply mean the combination of gore and porn in order to arouse, rather than to satirize the cultural climate.

The satirical elements of the period were set within the pre-war phenomenon that explored the deviant, bizarre, and the ridiculous, usually taken up by Japan’s bourgeois during the liberal Taishō period in Japanese history where the social atmosphere was described as being “skittish” and perpetuated in “nihilistic hedonism” by historian Ian Buruma, in simpler terms it was a calm before the storm that would be World War II. The art symbolized an intellectual rebellion within the tail-end of the Taishō period, when Japan as a country became increasingly militant, spawning an expanded sense of artistic revolution paired with the eruption of hedonistic sensationalism in exploring Japan’s long-standing fascination with the taboo. Inspirations for the taboo-breaking nature of ero guro can be found within Japan’s history, the most famous example being The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, a traditional shunga woodblock print completed in 1814 by artist Katsushika Hokusai, which represents an ama diver engaging in a sexual affair with two octopi. Other artists belonging to the traditional ukiyo-e genre began exploring elements of death and sexuality during the latter part of the 1800’s, usually with the theme of representing Japanese historical moments, examples are found in Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s representations of decapitation and disembowelment and Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s portrayals of bondage and sexual violence. The theme of the unnatural and surreal body horror also have examples here, with one of Kuniyoshi’s prints showing an anthropomorphic tuniki (commonly referred to as a Japanese racoon dog) with a large, bug-eyed monster emerging from under his robe, which is actually one of his testicles. While the Japanese respect for history and legacy does explain its recognisable relation to their predecessors, the ero guro movement is also steeped in present day context at the time, such as the 1936 Sada Abe incident, where a geisha and prostitute erotically asphyxiated her lover and proceeded to castrate his corpse and carry his genitals around in her kimono which was a key moment in the movements history, with the elements of bondage, sadomasochism and sexual mutilation cropping up in several ero guro works. As it is a difficult artistic movement to understand, especially for western audiences, their remains little research on the subject and few seminal pieces to analyse, but I think ero guro’s legacy far exceeds its humble status.

Ero guro’s explorations of the grotesquely unnatural and the sexual taboos in such an bombastic, radical and ground-breaking manner has gone on to cement it within Japanese culture in mediums such as pinku eiga (meaning pink film) a type of Japanese theatrical film that features nudity and sex as the main focus, to the previously mentioned body horror movies that all see their own satirical commentaries underneath, over-the-top and veiled representations hidden under the guise of fear or comedy, a way of expressing ideas not just limited to eastern media but visible in the west too. With the disturbing ero guro and bizarre Japanese body horror films they use their ridiculousness or moral abhorrence as a way of radical expression in a famously conservative country, a creative way to “stick it to the man” while also inspiring younger generations. These direct dealings with sex and death also act as draws, either sexual arousal or morbid curiosity help bring people in and create publicity. It makes people turn their head and gawk, either making them offended or, in some cases, inspired, a form of garnering attention we see in western media as well. It’s similar to a bait-and-switch, draw them in with the taboo visuals, the un-mundane exploration into the darkest parts of the mind, and when they pay close attention, they will realise that the piece is steeped in a deep history and contextual relationship with the current culture. Yet this approach can often be ham-fisted and lame, ero guro pulls it off simply, and while some of this interest might be manifested within the idea of the “orient”, I believe that with understanding its method can be utilised within my own work.

#contextualresearch #studioculture2

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cordonianchoicesqueen · 6 years ago

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Rewritten: The Royal Romance: Ostentatious Displays (Part 13)

A/N: Haven’t had an opportunity to write all week due to corporate events and travelling but feels great to be back in the world of TRR. I think I’m going to start taking more creative liberties with cutting down the choices chapters as some times they read a little forced when converted into this format... y’all better be excited for diamond heavy parts coming up next

Summary: Riley is exiled to the rejects table at the ball and expected to dance a waltz she doesn’t know the steps to. Olivia makes a power move that causes unrest in her allies at court.

Choices Chapter: Book One, Chapter Eight

Disclaimer: Characters and main storyline from Pixelberry’s Choices.

Word Count: 4000+

Warnings: none

Link to Full Series: Rewritten

Tags: @krsnlove

Ostentatious Displays

I pulled the drapes aside in my beautiful room at the Nervaki’s Chateau and took in the wondrous view of the mountains. New snow fall made the duchy of Lythikos look untouched and fresh. Today, I would be expected to attend a ball during which I would take part in a dance I didn’t know the steps of.

Later in the day, I went over to Hana’s room to get ready. I used to love getting ready with my girls before parties and Hana was exactly the type of person I needed when I was feeling down. She had picked out a stunning sparkly, shimmering dress for the night’s proceedings. “Ta-daa! How do I look?” she exclaimed, spinning for me and posing. “You’re going to set the ball on fire!” I cheered her on. “Everyone’s going to be talking about your dress.” “You think so?” she grasped at the satin, excited. She was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, inside and out. She had a heart of gold, the cumulative talent of a hundred people and looks that girls would do anything for. “I’ll force people into awkward conversations about it if I have to,” I laughed. “Come on, what are you going to wear?” she asked. “Oh I,” I mumbled, “I was just going to wear the dress I wore to the races…” “You’re going to wear the same dress twice in a week?” she raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have anything else,” I bit my lip. “Nonsense, you can have one of mine,” she said, throwing open her wardrobe. The closet was full to the brim with gorgeous dresses of all colours and shapes. I ran my hand across the fabrics feeling their softness against my fingertips. “This one will be perfect for you,” she said, bringing out a sparkling blue ball gown with sequinned corset and flowing skirt. “I designed this one a few years ago, it’s probably about your size.” I tried it on and it fit like a glove. “I can’t believe you designed this,” I breathed, unable to look away from myself in the mirror. “I can’t believe how good you make it look,” she said, making me break into a huge smile. “The dress doesn’t make the lady. The lady makes the dress. You look spectacular. Shall we be off?” “After you, Lady Hana,” I bowed to her.

We entered the ballroom to see that it was coated in gold: gold chairs, gold chandeliers, golden flowers. Both Hana and I were immediately offered a glass of champagne by a member of the chateaux’s staff, which we eagerly accepted. This was opulent wealth like I had never seen, except maybe at the palace but even then that had had a more natural feel to it. We spotted Maxwell across the room and made our way over. Maxwell bowed to us, “Ladies… it’s a pleasure to see you both tonight.” “That’s… unusually formal of you. What gives?” I questioned. “Tonight, I am representing the Duchy of Ramsford at this important social event,” Maxwell said, pointing his nose high in the air pretending to be dignified. “That sounds like something Bertrand would say,” I said. “He’s been calling me all night to remind me,” Maxwell whispered back. “Ah… you’ve got to be on your best behaviour or else Bertrand will get on your case?” I nodded, understanding. “Pretty much,” he said, obviously bored. “Wow, Olivia hired a full orchestra to play tonight,” Hana said, pointing over at the sixteen-piece orchestra. “I’ve heard you’re quite the musician yourself, Hana,” Maxwell commented, warmly. “Oh no… I’m not,” Hana said, rapidly shaking her head. “Really? I feel like I remember hearing that you were a virtuoso pianist,” Maxwell said, confused. “I still play from time to time, but only for fun,” Hana flatly said. I glanced around the room, noting the fancy name cards at each golden place setting. My gut told me that this seating plan was not going to land in my favour if it had been organised by Olivia. “Where are we sitting?” I asked Maxwell, suspicious. “About that,” he said looking at his feet. “Turns out I’m sitting at the head table with Olivia and the Prince… But you two are at the farthest table at the back.” “Olivia is making us sit at the back… The company will be much better at our table,” I said, linking arms with Hana. “No offence, Maxwell.” “None taken. Hell, I’d join you guys if I could,” Maxwell shrugged. “Er, I mean, I should say, Olivia has greatly honoured me.” “Don’t worry, we won’t tell Bertrand,” I whispered. “Sorry to leave you guys,” Maxwell frowned. “Don’t worry about us, Maxwell. Riley and I will make the best of it,” Hana said. “Just remind me when we are making the seating chart for my wedding with Liam, exactly where I will put Olivia,” I teased as Maxwell walked away to join the head table. Hana and I made our way through the tables to the back corner only to spot a very familiar face already sat there, drink in hand. “Welcome,” Drake said, arms wide, “to the table of exiles.” “I’m actually glad to see you,” I said, dropping into the chair next to him. “Here I was worried that we’d be stuck with some stuffy nobles.” “It’s probably meant to be an even bigger slight that we’re with a commoner,” Hana hissed. “Olivia really missed the mark,” I said. “Thanks, Brooks,” Drake said, looking confused. “That actually means something, coming from you.” “You don’t seem bother at all, Drake, to be seated in the back,” Hana commented sitting on Drake’s other side. “What can I say? After enough years of getting treated like this, you build up a thick skin,” he sipped his whiskey. “Besides, back here? Out of the spotlight? At least we can relax.” We watched as a swarm of servers appeared, carrying mouth-watering dishes of food to other tables, starting at the head table far across the room. Each time they reappeared they seemed to go to every table but ours. “The food looks amazing,” Hana said, eyes wide. “I hope they serve us soon! I’m starving!” “I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Drake said, taking a hip flask out his pocket to top up his drink. “Where we’re seated, we’ll be the last to eat. If there’s even any left by the time they get to us.” “But... the lobster bisque… do you really think we’ll go hungry?” Hana said, alarmed.” “Not if I can help it. This can’t be too different from hailing a taxi in New York,” I said, armed with my server knowledge. I scanned the room for a target. A server walking in our general direction entered my line of sight. “Hey,” I said, “Sorry to bother you but... Do you know who I am? I am Riley of House Brooks, First of Her Name, the Unblemished, Queen of Times Square and First-“ The server walked straight past me and I shrugged. At the very least I had got a half smile from Drake and a giggle from Hana. “A+ for effort, Brooks. But these guys deal with uppity nobles all the time,” Drake said.

Half an hour, a few glasses of wine and a couple whiskey shots from Drake’s flask later, we were still waiting for our food. Hana’s stomach had growled more than once and Drake kept licking his lips when the smell of the food wafted over from other tables. I was starting to feel pretty tipsy with the ratio of food to alcohol I had consumed. “The service here is terrible,” Hana eventually exclaimed. “All by design,” Drake said. “Even if it’s on purpose, at least it’s not the worst service I’ve had,” Hana said. “You’ve had worse service than this?” I asked. “Believe it or not, I’ve been to a wedding where food wasn’t served until midnight. They got hideously behind schedule and decided to do an open call for speeches before dinner. It took hours,” she said, grimacing at the memory. “Heavens,” Drake rolled his eyes. “Drake,” I scolded, whacking him with my clutch. “I can tell you a real horror story,” he said. “Let’s set the scene. Casual get-together. Lots of people I don’t know but that’s fine. There’s a bar, a man’s true best friend. So I figure I’ll grab a drink. I go up to the bar and they’re out of whiskey!” “That’s practically a crime!” I teased him. Completely missing my sarcasm, he said, “I couldn’t believe it either. How do you have a party without whiskey?” “You can’t!” I said, my shock dripping in sarcasm. Suddenly recognising that I was making fun of him he said, “Here I was thinking you were being supportive.” “You continuously underestimate my ability to make fun of you,” I smiled. “I gotta stop doing that,” he said. “From what I’ve seen though, Olivia has got quite a stash of alcohol here.” “From what you’ve seen?” Hana questioned, suspiciously. “I did some exploring and I happened across her wine cellar,” he said, equally aloof. “It’s actually pretty impressive... We could go there for a drink tonight, Brooks… if you’re not afraid of sneaking out after hours.” Before I could respond to his dare, a server appeared at our table with the first course and I was completely distracted. “Finally!” Drake said, smile wide, spoon already in hand. I took a ravenous spoon of the lobster bisque. It was cold and with no lobster. “Yuck,” I said, then remembered the number of times I’ve eaten worse food. I was becoming a different person. I had eaten pizza I had dropped on the floor in my apartment a dozen times but now cold soup upset me? “So it’s not just me,” Hana said, sadly and threw her spoon down into her bowl. Drake poked at it, “I wanted one thing today… and they’ve taken it from me.” As if to save us from our pitiful moment, the orchestra began to play. Olivia stepped up on a small stage, looking glamorous in a long, black dress and expensive gems dangling from her ears. “Hello, dear guests, and welcome to the Nevrakis family’s chateau,” she said, more warmly and dignified than I’d ever seen her before. It was like she was auditioning. “It means so much to me that you would join me in this place that’s so dear to my heart. I hope you enjoy the festivities tonight as much as I will. Now, everyone please join me up front to begin the Cordonian Waltz.” “But we haven’t finished eating,” Hana hissed. “I don’t think she cares,” Drake said, crossing his arms like a moody teenager. “Well… let’s do this,” I said, mustering any courage I had left. Hana stood up with me, leaving behind our cold soup and Drake, looking even more uncomfortable than before. “Aren’t’ you joining us, Drake?” Hana asked. “Waltzing… isn’t my thing. I’ll be here with the… food,” he said looking down at his disappointing meal. We abandoned Drake at the table, knowing when to pick our battles. We joined up with Maxwell and headed to the dance-floor to find partners. I looked over people’s heads for Liam, hoping his dancing prowess would save me and would get a little time together. I balled my hands into fists, feeling the nails dig into my palms as I spotted him… asking Olivia if she would like to dance. “Of course. Anything for you, Prince Liam,” she said, taking his offered hand. He wrapped his arms around her and she giggled as he spun her onto the dance-floor. They were entranced in one another’s eyes. No one else was in the room. Except I was and watching them… it made me feel like I was going to cry. I hid my face from Maxwell and Hana as I composed myself. It was silly of me to feel so possessive over Liam. He was not mine. I was not his. Yet... “It would be unspeakably rude for Prince Liam to not dance this waltz with the hostess,” Hana tried to comfort me, placing a hand on my arm. “I guess that’s what happens when you have home court advantage,” I managed. “That doesn’t mean you won’t dance though… In fact, Lady Riley, may I have the honour of this waltz,” Maxwell smiled, bowing and offering me his hand. I placed my hand on my heart as I pouted jokingly, “It is I who would be honoured.” I took his hand and together we joined the loose circle forming on the dance-floor. Maxwell put one hand on my waist and raised my hand into a classic ballroom pose. I was just going to have to follow his lead and believe whole heartedly in beginner’s luck. “Wait a second…” he whispered, “Do you even known the Cordonian Waltz?” “Not exactly,” I hissed back. “Sorry! I knew I was forgetting something… Bertrand would never have neglected to mention it,” Maxwell panicked. I squeezed Maxwell’s hand in mine, “if he were here, I’d be stuck dancing with him and we’d be having much less fun. We’ll get through it together, right?” “Right,” he said, his usual playful smile back. As the music picked up, I tried my best to follow Maxwell’s steps and whispers. He led me into a pretty glide down the length of the ballroom and I giggled. The novelty of waltzing at these incredible events still hadn’t worn off. I saw Liam looking at me as Maxwell and I twirled past. Olivia, took back his attention and turned them into an elegant spin. I let Maxwell swing me around in time to the waltz and I forgot about Olivia and Liam for a moment. It was just me and my incredible, supportive friend succeeding. Maxwell then twirled me so that my back was against him and kept our feet moving. I could feel his body pressed up against mine as I tried to keep up with his steps. “This is rather scandalous for the ballroom,” I said, feeling his hips moving against my own. “The Cordonian Waltz is a romantic dance… in the old days, it used to be that this waltz was the only way couples could flirt,” Maxwell explained, his breath tickling my neck. “It’s very intimate. I’ve always loved those scenes in movies though. Like in Pride and Prejudice when she gets to dance with Mr Darcy and for that dance they are alone,” I said. We swayed together for a few more beats before Maxwell let go of my hands, gently pushing me forward. “Time to switch partners,” he hissed. “You should have the steps by now. You’re doing amazing, you’ll do great.” I glided forward to the next partner and found myself wrapped up in Liam’s arms. My hand laced onto his strong shoulder and his hand found my lower back, pulling me closer to him. I looked up at his eyes and for a moment we said nothing. “Why, hello there,” he finally said, releasing the tension with his award-winning smile. “Fancy running into you,” I jibed. “You mean, on the dance floor of a private ball during a choreographed waltz?” he asked. “Well when you put it that way, it seems inevitable, I’d run into you… but to be fair,” I looked away from him as he twirled me round, “I haven’t seen a lot of you lately.” “True,” he exhaled. “I’ve been a little preoccupied. Olivia is the hostess… and I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t spend time with all the women here.” “Liam…” I wanted to tell him everything; all my worries, my feelings, my thoughts. I wanted him and I to be on the same page. I wanted to trust him. “Liam,” I started again, “I understand. We’re kind of just in an open relationship right now and it doesn’t feel great to watch you with your other girlfriends but it does feel great when I get to spend time with you. You’re not just marrying for you… it’s for the crown.” Liam’s brow creased and the lights of his eyes dimmed, “Yes. No matter how I feel… Well, we’ll have to see what happens in the coming weeks.” My heart hurt hearing his response. I wanted reassurance, not rationality. I felt like he was trying to let me down before breaking my heart entirely. He lead me into a twirl and held me against him, my back on his body. I could feel every muscle and curve of his body as we swayed together. He smelt so good and I thought of his body on top of me in the hedge maze. I closed my eyes. Liam leant in close to my ear, “but, Riley, you should know… you are special to me… I need you to know that.” My body melted into his for a moment and it was just us. Alone. No outside influence, no crown. Just two people, still getting to know one another, but who already needed each other desperately. My trance was broken when he span me out of the move and back into his arms, facing him. Our eyes locked as we struggled to find the words we wanted to say in this moment. Olivia coughed, “Lady Riley, I believe he’s my partner now.” I, very, reluctantly let go of Prince Liam, taking one last full look at him. He stood so tall above me, but not in an intimidating way. I loved the dimples he got in his cheeks from smiling when he looked at me. His eyes were the brightest blue I’d ever seen. He looked dignified at all times in only the best clothes. Yet, what I liked most was the warmth I felt when I was around him. As I moved away, it was always as though my heart got colder. I joined Maxwell, my head spinning. “Watching you two together,” Maxwell whispered, gently, “I can tell that Liam cares for you a lot.” “Yeah but our relationship is so strange,” I let my smile slip from my face. “It’s not like he can just sweep me off my feet and carry me out of here.” “When you’re royalty, the rules are different,” he said. “I know that… and yet…” I trailed off looking at Maxwell’s face as it registered shock. I turned to look at what he was staring out and was just in time to see Olivia lean in close to Liam. They kissed passionately in the middle of the dance-floor. My hands fell from Maxwell as I stared at the man I was falling in love. I gasped, along with a number of other ladies on the dance floor. Liam pulled away from the kiss, resting his forehead against Olivia’s. It hurt to admit how good they looked together. Olivia’s face was the definition of smug. I felt the strings of my heart pull and tears rushing to my eyes. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him in close to her. After way too long of a moment, the Prince gently pulled away. “Liam,” Olivia said, seductively, playing with his bow tie. “Olivia… uh… let’s talk… outside… perhaps,” Liam said, taking her hand and leading her towards one of the doors. I watched them walk away, as Maxwell moved me over to the side-lines where everyone stood gossiping. I focused on making sure that I didn’t start to cry. “Well that was a bold play,” I heard Penelope hiss. “Little Olivia is growing up. How sweet,” Madeleine said, dryly through gritted teeth. “Aren’t you upset by that?” I said, turning to Madeleine. “Ostentatious displays are for those who are either unrefined or insecure. I am neither,” she said, cold as ever. “We always knew that she and the Prince were close,” Penelope said in defeat. “It was a power move, if you ask me,” Kiara said angrily, showing real emotion in front of me for the first time. “Right, excuse us,” Maxwell said, leading me away again until out of earshot of the other women. “We have to play a little politics here.” “Right. Get strategic and get an advantage while Olivia plays her cards,” I said, nodding, liking the idea of a plan to distract me from the pain in my heart. “Look at Kiara. She’s clearly upset at Olivia’s display and she’s all alone right now. This is your opportunity to fight for another ally. Get on her good side,” he said. “If you can drive a wedge between her and Olivia it might weaken Olivia’s position. If Kiara has good things to say about you, it helps your position.” “I’ll give it a shot,” I said, crossing the ballroom and approaching Kiara as she stood alone. “Excuse me, Lady Kiara.” “Oh, Lady Riley,” Kiara said confused. “Comment ca va?” “Ca va bien, merci,” I said, remembering a tiny bit of conversational French from school. “Magnifique. What can I do for you?” she smiled, almost impressed at my small showing of language skill. “What did you think of Olivia’s little display there,” I said, helping myself to some of the appetisers at the table next to us. “I can’t believe her,” Kiara said, aggressively. “She wouldn’t have the guts to do that anywhere else. She’s gone mad with power here!” “I think Olivia went too far,” I said, biting some cheese off a cocktail stick. Kiara sighed, defeated like Penelope, “she’s only doing what we all wish we could be doing. If anything, I do have to give her credit for pulling it off.” “That doesn’t mean we have to stand by and accept it,” I pushed. “We need to stick together. Otherwise we don’t stand a fighting chance against Olivia.” “Are you proposing an alliance?” Kiara asked, flatly. “You should be my ally because I’ll support you too,” I said, diplomatically. “Olivia’s friendship is a one-way street. Why should you always let her get her way?” “You make a fair point,” Kiara grit her teeth. “We all need someone to speak well of us. We can help each other out,” I offered her some cheese on a stick. “Not a bad idea,” she said, accepting my food offering. “We could both benefit from a little well-placed support here and there.” “I’m glad we see it the same way,” I smiled, although it felt weird to have just negotiated friendship. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I should mingle with what time I have left. A bientot,” Kiara curtsied.

As the night went on, Liam and Olivia were notably missing for most of it. I mingled with other guests, making people laugh and telling stories of New York like old folk tales. I even danced some more with Maxwell, perfecting some steps to other dances. As the evening ended, I still couldn’t shake the image of Liam and Olivia kissing out of my head. As I was on my way out of the ballroom, too tired to keep fighting through the façade, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. When I turned, my heart skipped a beat. “Hello, Lady Riley,” Liam said, concern showing through his smile. “Liam… you kissed Olivia,” I said, helplessly, the words scratchy against my throat. “It was an unexpected advance. She caught me by surprise,” he said, quietly so no one else would hear. “You should have thrown her off you,” I hissed at him. “It was incredibly public.” For the first time, I felt my trust in Liam fade. Now, having seen them kiss, I couldn’t help imagining them kissing on the lake, up on the slopes, in his bedroom... Had they gone to the maze together to share moments like ours? “I thought it would be better to handle it quietly and cause less of a scandal… I didn’t want to embarrass her,” he said, stoic as always. “I guess that’s a fair point,” I exhaled, trying to calm myself down. He moved closer to me, taking my hand in his and holding it between us. Our hands joined, a sign of trust. A sign that we were in this together. His finger’s gently caressed my knuckles. “I know we haven’t seen each other much this trip,” he said, gazing into my eyes. “It’s been a hectic few days,” I half smiled. “A strange few days. I spend all these events rushing from person to person, trying to say the right thing and keep all the nobles happy,” he said, turning my hand in his, feeling every curve. “But at night, I find myself lying awake for hours in the grand suite, unable to sleep.” I huffed, “Grand suite? That sounds fancy.” He dropped his serious tone and replied, “It’s the best room. It’s upstairs at the end of the quiet east wing. It comes with everything… even a hot tub under the stars, overlooking the mountains…” “Sounds… romantic,” I said, letting his words wash over me. “It would be, with the right person,” he whispered, searching my eyes. “Unfortunately, I’ve got no one to share it with.” “I’m sure Olivia would love an invitation,” I raised my eyebrows at him. All pretence dropped and he said genuinely, softly, “Olivia is not invited.” After a moment, I whispered back, “Maybe I can help you.” “Oh? Are you sure you can manage it?” Liam smiled and I felt the warmth I usually felt with him return to my whole body, like a drug. “I’m not making any promises,” I teased. “Prince Liam? If I might interrupt?” Penelope said, approaching us and making us spring apart. “Of course. I know we haven’t spoken all day, Lady Penelope. Lady Riley, goodnight,” he shot me a discrete wink and kissed my hand before walking away, leaving me in the doorway to the ball...

#cordonianchoicesqueen #cordonia #choices #choices trr #choices app #playchoices #choices fandom #trr #trrgang #maxwell beaumont #prince liam #riley brooks #hana lee #drake walker #olivia nevrakis #the royal romance #rewritten

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humanities-angstiest · 8 years ago

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Know I’m Lying

Sooo...I wrote klangst. First time posting on tumblr so fingers crossed I don’t format wrong or whatever.

Tags: Keith/Lance, Established relationship, emotional hurt/comfort, thats pretty much all this is, sad keith and good boyfriend lance

The breaths stuttered in and out of him, sharp and singular and not deep enough to do his lungs any good. It hurt to the point that not breathing at all seemed the better option, at least until he could regulate it. Still, Keith gasped for air, clutching the cotton fabric over his chest uselessly with trembling hands. The space surrounding his body was too open, the air at his back unable to support or protect him. From what? Keith didn’t know. The world, probably, just to cover all his bases. He slid off the edge of his and Lance’s bed and onto the floor, his back against the firm mattress as he curled inward to make himself smaller. Keith cursed himself for spiraling into self-pity but continued to sob hideously and unapologetically in the empty apartment.

The panic — stupid, illogical panic — sharpened his thoughts, racing from reason A all the way to reason Z for why Lance would leave him. He already did leave, Keith’s mind helpfully reminded him. Walked right out their apartment door twenty-four minutes ago.

The gross sobbing abated as exhaustion set in, leaving Keith calm enough to reflect on why he was breaking down in the first place. He roughly wiped away the wetness under his eyes and inhaled as deeply as he could through his stuffy nose. Of course Lance wanted to get dinner with their friends. They hadn’t hung out all together in three weeks, too busy with exams and part-time jobs to relax for a meal together. Keith, however, did not. Not tonight. The thought of seeing their friends after time apart built an icky feeling in Keith’s chest, a dark sludgy glob of guck clogging his insides and pressing too hard against his heart. Hunk and Pidge were good friends, he had fun when he hung out with them. These reminders did nothing to filter out the guck.

Keith knew this mood of his was irrational but he indulged it. He didn’t want to leave the apartment. He didn’t want to be around people, didn’t want to monitor his facial expressions and focus on holding a conversation. There was an unfounded fear that too much time had passed and Hunk and Pidge weren’t his friends anymore. Dinner with them would be awkward as they worked to reconnect. It was easier to back out of plans.

Calming himself to reflect reopened the floodgates because at the end of memory lane was the memory of Lance and him fighting. Lance wouldn’t understand; he loved being around people. Not Keith. Some days, like today, the thought of going out in public and having thousands of eyes pass over him was too daunting. Keith knew they didn’t care, no one was closely scrutinizing him. It didn’t matter what he wore or if he tripped when he walked; anyone who saw him would forget in a minute. Logic didn’t stop his thoughts from convincing him he would be a spectacle, observed by everyone and picked apart under their eyes. It was his mind picking him apart, his voice saying the nasty things, but the faces were random, an endless crowd armed with the self-deprecating thoughts his mind supplied.

Lance didn’t understand why Keith was adamant about staying in the apartment and avoiding Hunk and Pidge because Keith didn’t explain. How could he explain that, at least for today until his thoughts could be contained and shoved back in a dark corner of his mind, he could not spend time with their friends and enjoy it? From Lance’s point of view, his boyfriend was being selfish, wanting them to cancel plans and stay home because Keith didn’t feel like going out. That was the nicer word Keith imagined Lance used for him. He already forgot the words Lance shouted at him before storming out, a small blessing his mind afforded him, but it didn’t let him forget how he shouted at Lance to leave. Keith’s words echoed in his head. His voice, angry and seemingly unsympathetic to Lance’s desire to see their friends, telling Lance he didn’t want him around. His eyes told a different story, begging Lance to ignore the words he was too proud to take back. It made no difference what his eyes said. Lance left to get dinner with Hunk and Pidge, leaving Keith to crumble when the finality of the door closing behind the blue-eyed male settled into the stifling quiet of the apartment.

Lance wasn’t coming back. Why would he? What did Keith offer him, except hurtful words? Keith was a mess. It only made sense for Lance to leave him. Lance was sunlight. Warmth emanated from him like a beacon, drawing people in. His warmth could be calming or energizing, but it always brought joy. If Lance was sunlight, Keith was moonlight. Some degree of chilly depending on the season, making a person not want to be in it for long. Lance leaving him was inevitable, because Keith would never leave Lance and Lance would never stay with someone like him.

Air once again evaded Keith’s lungs. His nails dug into his crossed arms and he rocked slightly, pitifully attempting to comfort himself. The sound of gasping sobs interspersed with hiccups filled his ears, covering the sound of the front door opening, bags dropping, and Lance frantically shouting his name as the Cuban ran towards the source of the noise.

Hands gripped Keith’s strongly, prying them off his arms but leaving behind crescent marks. Keith looked up from under his bangs to see his boyfriend’s worried frown. Tears were gathering in the corners of Lance’s eyes. He was a sympathetic crier, and that fact almost made Keith laugh but his dark thoughts weren’t done with him yet and the only thing he could think about was how Lance probably came to pack a bag to stay at Hunk’s until he found another place to live and was too good-hearted to leave when he found his ex crying on the floor of their room.

“Hey, Keith. Keith, sweetheart, what’s wrong? Shh, I’m right here. Shh.” Keith’s sobs grew louder at the familiar pet name. When Lance removed Keith’s vicious grip on himself he kept Keith’s hands grasped in his, but Keith moved them to Lance’s shoulders, sliding down to strong biceps and then pushing into the space between arms and torso to wrap around Lance’s back. Keith fell forward into Lance’s chest, partly from his own movement and partly from Lance pressing them tightly together.

“Babe, shh. Please don’t cry. Tell me what’s wrong. I hate seeing you cry.” Lance rocked them, making hushing sounds against Keith’s ear until the black-haired male’s tear ducts ran dry and his breathing calmed to an acceptable rate of inhales to exhales.

“Keith?”

Keith snuggled against Lance’s chest, his voice a rasping whisper. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Lance sighed. “It was a stupid fight.” Lance rubbed his hand up and down Keith’s back before shifting away to stand up. At the look of returning panic on Keith’s face, Lance knelt down and cupped Keith’s cheek in his palm.

“Hey, we’re fine. I was just going to make sure the take-out is okay. I may have dropped it in the entryway when I heard you crying.” Lance shrugged a shoulder with a small smile.

Keith released a stuttering sigh, tilting his head into Lance’s palm and placing a gentle kiss against the warm skin. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

Lance frowned. “We already apologized. It was a dumb fight. I should have listened better when you said you didn’t feel like going out. I know you wouldn’t blow Hunk and Pidge off if everything was fine.” Lance’s eyes traveled up and down Keith’s curled form.

“I’m sorry.” Lance’s eyes widened at the crack in Keith’s voice and the silent tears slipping down his red-tinted cheeks.

“Stop apologizing. You have nothing to be sorry for.” Lance brushed his hand through Keith’s soft hair, focusing on keeping the tremble out of his hand. He had never seen Keith this distraught, and it scared him because he caused it.

When Lance angrily left the apartment half an hour ago, the cool night air soothed him on his walk. Even for him, being around people could get exhausting. But the night was quiet, gentle, distant enough to let him breathe and think while still encompassing him in its soft glow. He loved it.

Keith had been reserved all day, more so than usual, though it didn’t strike Lance as odd until now, after their fight. Keith was whining four days ago about stupid exams keeping friends apart and how he really needed to tell Pidge about this documentary on deep sea creatures he watched, so Lance should have realized that his refusal to meet Hunk and Pidge for dinner was not Keith’s standard reluctance to go out.

Lance texted Hunk to cancel and changed his course, stopping by the Korean restaurant Keith loved to order take-out. As he waited for their food, he wondered what Keith was doing back at the apartment. Lance imagined him grouchily sitting on the couch, flipping through channels and yelling to the wind that Lance was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend.

Would Keith even want him to come back? He did yell for Lance to leave. But at the same time… Lance sighed upon the realization that Keith was subconsciously testing him. Keith was too simple and good for tactics like that, but regardless, the gauntlet was thrown down and Keith waited to see who Lance would choose, his boyfriend or their friends. And Lance didn’t realize until too late. Keith would never ask Lance to pick him over Hunk and Pidge. All Keith wanted was for Lance to stay with him tonight because their friends would still be there tomorrow.

Glad that he figured this out now instead of in the middle of dinner with Hunk and Pidge, Lance added a small skip to his step as he walked home, ready to share take-out with his boyfriend and cuddle on the couch. He wasn’t ready to find his boyfriend a hyperventilating mess on their bedroom floor.

“I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’m right here, Keith. We’ve fought worse than this. I’m still right here. You and me, ‘kay?”

Keith sniffled and wiped his tears away, shivering slightly from the coldness inside him. Lance removed his green jacket and draped it over Keith’s shoulders, helping Keith slide his arms in. Lance smiled warmly at his small boyfriend pulling the edges of the jacket closed with sleeve-covered hands.

Lance shuffled so he sat back against the bed and pulled the tear-stained male into his lap. Keith sunk down until his head rested on Lance’s shoulder.

“You and me, Keith. I’m not going anywhere.”

#klance fic #voltron #klangst #fanfic #my writing

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theraroth · 7 years ago

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Death Awaits Us All (from 2016)

I wrote this around August 3-4 2016, for a lit blog that rejected it outright for its brutal honesty and horrific accuracy concerning what we were soon to see as the presidency of Donald (BAAAAARRRRRFFFF) Trump. Presented with minimal edits, I give you:

DEATH AWAITS US ALL...enjoy (or not, it’s your choice):

The rust monsters have sacked my brain. Writing anything creative is a near-impossible hateful sojourn through corridors of frustration. I was recently accosted by the corrosive evil of reorganizing a college level class in order to conform, at least in spirit, with the format of a dreadful textbook thrust upon me, like skin rot contracted from an outhouse in a leper colony. There’s no task as phony and unfulfilling and soulless as revising lecture notes. You can feel your creative juices drying up like a sun-blasted desert oasis. There goes another part of me I can never recapture. Pandora’s Box fits into the analogy somehow, but I am unable to weave it into the narrative adequately so I instead rely on brutal confessions of academically induced impotence, if there is such a condition, and if not let me self-diagnose as Patient Zero for a heretofore undiscovered malady.

Where was I?

Somewhere, out in the desert watching heatwaves rise up from boiling sands…painting a picture with a broken brush is no mean feat, but I think I have risen to the challenge. Rise…risen. Nope, still hopelessly ossified and amberized. I coined that word, I believe. Or I’d like to believe I coined it.

Pointless!

So I’ll conjure a point from nowhere: I was rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country, his last published work before succumbing to a head injury at the gruffly tender age of 84 (it was his opinion that old farts like himself had “just gotten here,” so he was therefore little more than a pup, and who am I to contradict a master?). The book, a glib examination of George W. Bush’s America, has aged more rapidly than Vonnegut’s cantankerous literary turns, hobbled in part by the limited scope of the subject, but in spite of that limitation, it ventures into less dated territory or at a minimum more open territory free of political intrigues anchored to that desolate era, and one of these vistas for free range thoughts was in the author’s note at the end in which Kurt mentions that he had recently bonded in a friendly manner, not a love interest mind you, with Ralph Steadman, the artist indelibly linked to Hunter S. Thompson, the late gonzo journalist who, in the context of this aside, had recently taken his life in 2005. And where in the fuck, you ask and rightfully so, is all this digressive bullshit headed? It’s headed toward one of those strange coincidences which plant the idea that perhaps coincidence is a term of art humans created to dismiss the only tangible proof of a higher power manipulating the strings of the world, for I had just received in the mail a copy of Ralph Steadman’s The Joke’s Over, with a forward by, of all people, Kurt Vonnegut. So when I read the passage about Steadman and Vonnegut acquainting, a series of events whose connective tissues were dark to me suddenly coalesced into a definitive line of causality. Kurt met Ralph, Ralph wrote a book, Kurt wrote the forward for the book.

Isn’t it amazing that two people I have admired from afar somehow interacted out of the blue and “cross-pollinated,” so to speak? How does that shit happen? It’s a small world doesn’t do it justice. Nor does that hideously saccharine shit of a song do justice to my ears, real or the virtual stereo in my head that blares it as punishment for writing this, or possibly for writing, period, why-oh-why did I ever travel down that path? it yells at me in a chorus of squeaky castrati frantic to know the whereabouts of their balls…sorry boys, but, snip, snip, all gone but for the empty skin pouch.

If any of this makes sense, I apologize. It was never my intention to impart wisdom. There are more than enough shit-bird seers and visionary with all the answers in the world for a million lifetimes. So I guess one more can’t hurt or at the worst can’t inflict more harm than has already been inflicted. Death by a million papercuts…which cut was the killing stroke, the first or the last or one of the ones somewhere in the middle? Don’t answer that. Only a real asshole thinks he can answer the unanswerable.

Trump.

Balls, I’ve been tap dancing around the proverbial elephant in the room, tap dancing around heaping mounds of elephant shit so pervasive and voluminous I am drowning it in. We all are. Fuck. I need respite from the ugliness or I’ll goddamn well explode. And we can’t have that, can we?

But beware! If you speak of the devil, he shall come forth to heed your call. And in line with that warning, just as I was resigned to submerging and drowning in the muddy trenches of the Trump travesty, some blasted interloper knocked on the rustic steel door I rely on as a barrier between myself and the cruel world beyond. A wave of dread crept up my spine. Dusk time visitations never go well. Could be the authorities paying a call to impart bad news or some Jesus hustler at the end of his shift off-loading surplus pamphlets on the house closest to the tax dodge. God, I hate those fuckers. They have a habit of ignoring the NO SOLICITORS sign taped to the glass. Perhaps a large billboard broadcasting I EXTERMINATE FUCKING JESUS FREAKS might get their attention. When I opened, I came face to face with a fresh brand of trouble: the new neighbors were stopping by, not to say hi, how’s it hangin’? boy it sure is hot and whatnot, but to raise unholy hell (vs holy hell) about ground ivy, a common broadleaf, encroaching on their newly sodded lawn.

My inner cynic lives for these moments, affirmations that people are the real hell on Earth, as they clearly intended to start a territorial dispute over a goddamn plant native to every square mile of land in the world’s innumerable temperate zones, which, as far as they were concerned, excluded their yard. My only recourse? Consult the local ordinances online. Damn them straight to hell, I thought, for I’d sworn to on everything that is holy in the ecumenical sense that I would NEVER EVER consult the local ordinances, out of respect for the fact that I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about local ordinances or other petty nonsense crafted by bureaucrats with measuring sticks, prepared to issue citations for overgrown lawns or minute infringements of sacred lot lines. This is the kind of meaningless tripe that sucks your life down the fucking drain, pisses away the hours and scours your nerves to raw fucking bloody pulpy scum. So it was with utter disdain that I broke this promise to the Powers That Don’t Give a Fuck and combed the local ordinance site, state of the art for 2008, and tracked down the arcane passage detailing what manner of flora presented a nuisance to the neighborhood and would bring the wrath of the gods down upon my head, and lo and behold ground ivy was not among the offending species of plants.

But the neighbors more or less told me as much when it was mentioned in passing that they had consulted the ordinances and were at a loss to find a passage with the clout to enforce their milquetoast suburban pursuit of a simplified, unstable, monochromatic, aesthetically drab and understated ecosystem aching to wither and die if a fucking drop of acrid dog piss falls on its tender shoots. I’m not eager to engage in a death struggle over botanical differences. However, people have died for lesser causes.

Trump.

Darkness descends. Evil abounds. Feet itch. Is there no one who can save us? Okay, there’s Hillary. I have confidence in her ability to topple the tyrannical Trumpenstein “turd tornado” (tip of the cap to Ben Shapiro for helping fulfill my alliteration quota for the month). But I cannot shake the creeping doom. It skulks the hallways of my mind. I hear the thundering hoof beats of the Apocalypse fast approaching. I see other horrifying apparitions that defy description. Lots of wriggling tentacles, gnarly horns shiny with the blood of the innocent, severed nipples—a bowl of them, sitting out like Halloween candy as demonic children (well, children) paw through them seeking the tastiest morsel of nipple flesh. Michael Phelps’s perfect swimmer-nipples figure into the picture, adding a certain glistering, chilling symmetry to an otherwise asymmetric tableau involving hell spawn hungry for nipples, and even more macabre, Halloween was EIGHT DAYS ago.

November 8th promises to be the premiere of a new mediocre, bound-to-disappoint horror flop from M. Night Shyamalan, THE TRUMPENING. Okay, that scared the shit of me. You see, a word I’m 99.9% sure I just made up was ALREADY IN MY GODDAMN SPELLCHECKER. Relax, damn it. There is a logical explanation. Right. Spellcheck for all capital letters, by default, is turned off, and I tend to eschew tinkering with default settings unless they really piss me off, which is harder than it seems. But ’tis the season for rampant, unchecked, unabated, relentless paranoia, and what concerns me most is that the second my new novella arrives on the scene in the fall, there won’t be anybody to buy it. Apocalyptic settings dampen book sales almost as much as the very concept of a book does. Past authors and critics have predicted the end of the novel as an art form, and they were wrong, but their inaccuracy was a matter of poor timing not poor judgment. It is dead, and we killed it, and I cannot envision a novella, even a competently written one with an occasional dash of brilliance, resurrecting the dust and bones of the theater of the imagination. We are adrift in the briny wastes of instant entertainment gratification, and never again shall we touch the shores of useless art made beautiful by intense admiration.

I only wax poetically against my own interests because I am congenitally unable to believe in karmic justice. Karmic injustices proliferate with the ease of ground ivy, and unlike a relatively innocuous plant they swallow everything in their path. Take the savagely unjust conviction of five boys (four African Americans and one Hispanic) railroaded in 1990 for raping, beating, and sodomizing a female jogger in Central Park. After languishing in prison for 6-13 years as sex offenders, exculpatory evidence exonerated The Five of any wrongdoing (a serial rapist serving life in prison confessed to the crime, which led to a round of DNA tests, and none of The Five’s DNA was extant at the crime scene). And who shelled out an estimated $85,000 for full page ads in all four major New York newspapers urging the reinstatement of the death penalty, citing the Central Park assault as just cause and inflaming prejudice against the defendants before the case had been tried?

Trump.

Karma is officially deader than Vaudeville, deader than Caesar, deader than analogies in the “deader than” form. For a “law and order” candidate, Trump has a penchant for viewing mob rule as a functional arm of the Constitution. Deferring to the wisdom of “2nd Amendment people” to prevent Hillary from appointing judges belongs to the white-lighting-fueled ruminations of Tennessee moonshiners vigilant and on the eye for “revenuers” and “guvment men” and cannot be tolerated as just a bit of harmless bluster on the campaign trail, even if the candidate in question is a bloviating armchair politician with the discipline of a baboon wildly masturbating between salvos of shit-flinging.

I could go on and on about the other five billion instances in which Trump comported himself with the aplomb of a one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed lemur performing open heart surgery with a broken whiskey bottle. But when for the love of Zod does it fucking come to a satisfactory conclusion?

November 8th.

I hope?

No, hope doesn’t factor into it. Or faith. Or other invisible forces of the universe. It all teeters on the electorate getting off its asses and voting for Hillary. Every stay at home vote is a vote for Trump. Every vote for Lexus-liberal, vaccine-doubter Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. Every disgruntled Millennial write-in vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote for Trump. But it’s possible every vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Hillary. Libertarians exist in a kind of pseudo-Republican limbo populated with potheads who bawl for small guvment between bong hits. Trump’s xenophobic, bigoted rhetoric loses its shine once the pot haze clears a skosh and it dawns on them that their dealer, Raul, is a Cuban/Mexican cross-dresser with a lapsed green card, and their backup plan, Timmy the Titwillow, is a gay bartender at a nightclub six blocks from the Pulse massacre.

Never underestimate the influence of self-interest in the electorate. Or for that matter self-deceit.

For as long as Trump is in the race he has a chance of winning, however remote, and we could be living the last fruitful days before a literal madman takes control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. If things should take a turn for the worst on Election Day, our only chance for a temporary reprieve from utter annihilation is to pray that that twisted septuagenarian imbecile can come to some kind of arrangement with Ivanka to stick his thrombosis-savaged pecker insider her every Sunday on an onyx altar carved in the image of the Great Old Ones. But given the obviously degenerated state of his body, it’s doubtful even an overdose of boner pills could conjure anything remotely resembling an erection, perhaps a tiny bubble filled with pus and blood and shattered pieces of dick vein floating around in the mucosal soup.

But I kid our future overlord. All in good fun and jest. Lucky for me, the dark, dank confines of a North Dakota gulag are a rich source of inspiration. Besides, I could use a change of setting. A place where I can write the last and greatest Great American novel before the steepening decline of the written word smashes into history’s wall. And upon that wall there is inscribed but a single word:

TRUMP

For the record: damn, was I spot on to worry! And I nailed the culprits of this fucking nightmare, less the Russian collusion, Who could have seen that coming, besides

HILLARY?

Right?

#politics #donaldtrump #2016 #elections #hillary clinton #nightmares

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