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devilfic · 3 months ago

Text

❝right place, right time❞

X. we don't fight fair.

parts: previously plot: you and bruce talk some more about your arrangement. everyone wants to know what's going on with you two. pairing: battinson!bruce wayne x gn!reader. cw: surgeon!reader, secret identities, slow burn, angst is back baby, but so are the romcom plot beats, somebody get gordon a drink and get one for me too. words: 7.6k. a/n: LOTS of plot this chapter, but also some maybe cute things coming later. in between the horrors :D

It takes more coaxing than you would like for Bruce to let you leave alone two days later. Even with proof of a patient, he insists he send you in his car, with his driver and his guards. One of the cops on your detail had confessed they were feeling redundant, leisurely as they were anyway, parked outside General with coffees barely keeping hot in the November chill, “Just the one today, right doc?”

You snuggle deeper into your coat, hands eagerly grasping at the warmers in your pockets, “Just the one. If everything goes smoothly, I’ll be out before lunch.”

“Well, we’ll be here. Holding down the fort.” The two of them snicker to themselves. Glancing to the side, you see Bruce’s men: one in the driver’s seat of his car and the other waiting by the entrance for you. Unlike your detail, they dared not crack a smile for fear of looking too cheerful. You wouldn’t admit it out loud (because these cops were being paid to keep you alive), but you felt like your life was in much better hands with people who weren’t currently goofing around on the hood of their car.

“Right. Thanks, fellas.” You can’t be bothered to sound sincere, and from their general lack of acknowledgement, they don’t seem to care.

You spin on your heels, preparing to follow Bruce’s guard into the hospital, but nearly crash into a woman walking behind you. The collision has you stumbling and jumping back, Bruce’s guard jumping forward, and the woman baring her teeth at you in a… smile?

Her teeth glint bleach-white off the gathering snow, a few shades lighter than the hair smoothly pinned at her crown. Unlike everyone else shuffling past on the icy sidewalk, she is perfectly content with standing right in front of you under the porte-cochère. You supposed the black, mink coat wrapped around her person kept her all warm and toasty. You felt jealous. Then you felt like you should apologize for ramming into her, but nothing came out.

“Apologies, I didn’t mean to scare you,” The extravagant woman speaks first, glancing over her shoulder at the guard who now looms between the two of you, prepared to defend if need be, “Oh! Hello, pleasure to meet you.” She reaches a hand out to the guard and when he doesn’t go to take it, she snatches his hand up from his side in a firm handshake.

You’re more forthcoming with your hand when she turns to you, though you’re not at all sure why she’s bothering to introduce herself. Anyone else would’ve moved on by now. And flipped you off while they were at it.

“Ma’am, is there a problem here?” One of the cops pipes up from behind you, eyes fixed on the woman.

Her smile grows wider, “Not at all, officer. I just thought this all looked so… curious.” She gestures between the cop car and Bruce’s car with one French-tipped finger, “You wouldn’t happen to be a celebrity doctor, would you? Plumping up the pillow-faces of our city’s darling socialites, perhaps?”

You try to scoot around the woman, but she moves with you, keeping perfect eye contact with you the whole time, “I’m real sorry, but I need to get going. I have an appointment-“

“With Bruce Wayne?”

You flinch. The woman looks… familiar, now that you’re looking at her more closely. Her name escapes you. “Excuse me?”

“Bruce Wayne. That’s his car- well, one of them anyway. A source of mine says it’s the same one from two days ago when you both arrived together for… something. And the same one from a few weeks ago; if I recall, Mr. Wayne made a generous donation—a whole wing!—to Gotham General earlier this month. And now you’ve been spotted using his car. What’s that all about?”

The same cop from before flanks your side, locking you in with Bruce’s guard and this mysterious woman, “Lady, they’re busy. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“I only want to ask a few questions.”

“And they don’t have to answer. If you keep this up, I’m gonna write you up for harassment.”

She looked like she’d been waiting to hear that. She reaches within the folds of her coat and pulls out a badge, brandishing an ID for the cop to read, “Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”

You peer at the ID yourself, at the impeccably styled photograph of the same woman with the same blonde hair falling in loose, Hollywood curls that frame her smile. Beside her photo is her name: Vicki Vale. You suddenly remember where you’d seen her before.

Vicki knows you know, too. You try to sidestep her for the door but she crowds in on you, barreling through the arms that attempt to hold her back, “Are you Mr. Wayne’s doctor? Is he sick? Is he dying?”

Your lip curls back in a snarl, “What ever happened to HIPAA?”

That amuses her. “Is he in the car right now? Is that why you’ve got all this security? Is Bruce Wayne paying for your protection after you were taken hostage a few weeks ago?”

The cop grabs Vicki by the upper arm, managing to wrangle her away from you, but she only pivots to the car, tapping her nails on the tinted windows and calling out for Bruce to comment. You almost feel sorry for her, in the way you might feel sorry for a rabid dog walking in circles on a busy street.

You feel a hand on your back and Bruce’s guard ushers you quickly into the hospital, even as Vicki shouts after you for clarification on Bruce’s whereabouts. His expression, as always, is flat.

When you’re far enough away from the lobby, you ask, “Does that kind of thing happen to… him a lot?”

The guard doesn’t bother to pause in his stride, doesn’t even bother to look down at you as he answers, “Yes.”

You supposed if you had to deal with people like Vicki Vale all your life, you’d become a recluse too.

At the very least, you hadn’t said anything damning. She would have nothing to go off of with whatever soundbite she managed to grab from you, and God save her editor when they’d inevitably have to cut out her getting threatened by a cop.

She’d been waiting for you, though. How she knew you’d be here, at this time, meant she’d either been tailing you or she had someone on her payroll doing it for her. The thought makes your stomach churn.

Bruce had been in your office twice, but you had never been in his.

It was bigger, obviously; it’s two floors below the penthouse with a receptionist outside and some hallways leading to God knows where. The receptionist—Jennifer, who insists you call her Jenny—is very forthcoming with refreshments as you wait outside for Bruce’s meeting to finish. You decide there’s no better time than now to pick apart the marble floors and TVs on the wall replaying WE’s corporate reel.

The lobby downstairs was modern, clearly remodeled, but Bruce’s office and penthouse were comparatively frozen in time. You could almost picture the first Waynes walking through here all those years ago. Everything—from the luxurious leather chair you were sitting on, to the warm low light, to the gentle clicking of Jenny’s fingers on the keyboard, to the empty glass of sparkling water she’d given you had almost made you forget that you were currently living in the penthouse upstairs.

The door to Bruce’s office opens, breaking you out of your contemplation. A man in a fine suit walks out, chatting with Bruce, though you couldn’t see the latter from where you were sitting. You can only catch the last half of their conversation: something about an auction?

You don’t have much time to think on it. Jenny quickly rises from her desk and slips into Bruce’s office, and a few seconds later comes out to invite you in.

You don’t see Bruce at first. The room is just as big as you imagined. Bruce’s desk is right across from the doors, backlit by large windows letting in the noonday light. It’s a heavy, wooden thing that is far bigger than it really has any business being with next to nothing actually on it. And, notably, he is not sitting at it.

It takes you a second to spot him to your left at a built-in bar, washing out a glass of what looked like dark liquor down the drain. It isn’t until Jenny shuts the door behind you that he looks over at you, setting the empty glass on the counter.

Today, he’d forgone a sweater for a white button-up with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. You noted the healed over cuts and scars on his arms and wondered if people asked about them the way you had, enchanted (rather than perplexed) by stories of martial arts hobbies with no concerns for where he went at night. He watches you thinking about it, but before you can ask, he speaks first, “So, you met Vicki.”

Your shoulders slump just at the mention of her. Bruce catches it and a smile, however small, warms up his expression. “Unfortunately.”

“Bet she made an impression.”

You cross the room in a few strides, undoing your coat and throwing it over a nearby chair, “She’s tactless. She said her source recognized your car and now she wants to know what we are to each other,” You pause in your ranting when you see him pour a bit of brandy into the glass next to him, “Is that for me?”

He casually hands it to you, “You look like you need it.”

You don’t have the marbles to take offense to that at the moment. You knock back the shot in one go, then go to pour yourself another one as Bruce watches you. After you throw back the second one, you realize that he hasn’t responded to you. “Weren’t you listening? I said she’s following us.”

“Plenty of reporters are, she’s not special.”

“Wh- sorry, what?”

Bruce shrugs, “Vicki Vale isn’t the only reporter in Gotham who knows what cars I drive, who I go to lunch with, or where I put my money.”

“Isn’t that…” You start to ask, but the way Bruce is looking at you makes you feel like your perfectly reasonable question has a perfectly obvious answer already, “…isn’t that bad?”

“Not when I know what cars they drive. I know who works for them. When I don't want to be seen, I’m not seen. They don’t have that luxury.”

“You keep tabs on all of them?”

You watch Bruce lean against the bar to face you, one hand in the pocket of his- okay, whoa. Either his thighs were getting bigger or his pants were getting tighter. You don’t remember his other suits being this… formfitting. You can’t help but notice how they stretch as he reclines, and though your eyes flick back up to his before he can catch you, he makes no mention of it… even if his eyes narrow some. He waits until he’s sure he has your undivided attention, “I like to be informed. Especially since we’re selling a narrative, now.”

“A narrative.” After a moment, it clicks in your mind. “That we’re together. The narrative we never agreed on selling.”

Bruce brushes right past that, “So what’d you tell Vicki?”

You pour yourself a third shot, though it’s a bit more modest. You cap off his brandy and move away from the bar as if it would silence the siren song of day-drinking, “I told her that asking if you're dying is a HIPAA violation.” Bruce's mouth twitches as if containing a laugh. "What?"

You watch him contemplate telling you, and then, as if he suddenly thinks better of it, he shakes his head. “You just reminded me. If we do agree to do this, I will have to fire you. Patient ethics."

“Which is another reason why we probably shouldn’t do it.”

His head tilts, “Probably?”

You flush. You sip on your drink, folding your other arm around your waist as he questions you with his eyes, “I just… I’m frustrated. I hate this. I hate that the safest choice here is to hide away while you take care of it. It’s not that I don’t trust you to do it, I just don’t want to run away.”

Bruce watches you in that way of his, calculating and assessing. “Going in alone is running away too. You’d be Isaac bound at the altar.”

“And you, Abraham? Delivering me to a cruel god?” A rush of exasperation sours his expression. “I’d be stopping him. It’s me he wants.”

“And what about your parents? Your friends? Judith? You’d be fine leaving them to bury you?”

“Of course I’m not- of course not.”

“Then you don’t have to do it. Trust me.”

“I do trust…” You stare at him for a moment, “I trust you. I have to. But you get that this is weird, right? Getting together for the press? Putting all eyes on us? You get why this feels weird for me, don’t you?” Bruce is quiet, holding your gaze steady. You know that this plan wasn’t his first choice, and yet he didn’t look nearly as put off by it as you were. Perhaps it was another way you two differed. Something else to chalk up to being so rich that things like this- maneuvers like this become necessary. “Why do you want to do it?”

He pushes himself off the bar, taking a step and then another until he’s squarely in front of you. You have to squeeze your hands into fists to tamp down the immediate flight response you feel being this close to him, seeing this almost unguarded side to him. It was different from the deer-in-headlights deal he had when you first met: open, but unsure. It rocks you that he doesn’t look so unsure anymore. You swallow and keep his gaze, but it feels like a lot more work for you than it is for him.

“You said you don’t want to hide, and I don’t want to make you. We need a good reason for me to stick by your side. This is a solution.”

“You don’t need to stick by me. I’ve got a detail, remember?”

“I don’t trust two cops to keep you safe.”

“Your guards, then. You’ve got more than enough to do the job for you.”

Something in Bruce’s eyes flicker, “Maybe I want it to be me.”

Your courage slips. Your lips part, sounding out words you can’t bring yourself to say. What do you say to that?

He wants it to be him. He wants to be the one to keep you safe.

Logically, you know he’s right. GCPD’s finest couldn’t hold a candle to his strength and dexterity. They couldn’t even keep him out of their servers. And his guards were better, but they were still fallible. A gunshot or a stab wound would take them out just as easily as it would anyone else. The man before you had survived both of those things and more.

Uncanny warmth unfurls your fists. It curls around your rib cage, through each bone, around each lung, worming its way up your throat and unspooling in your mind. You feel warm all over. It is a terribly strange feeling to have for Bruce Wayne, but you’re having it all the same.

If he was still just Batman to you, you might’ve done something you couldn’t easily take back.

You suddenly wish for the times when that was the case, when blindfolds were commonplace, so you wouldn’t have to look him in the eye or think through how one might have gone through with those thoughts, if one had the chance- “As far as reasons go,” you struggle around the lump in your throat, “That’s not the worst.”

Bruce smiles.

He skirts around you and heads for the desk as you watch him go, the scent of him finally permeating past your defenses. He didn’t smell like green apple today—more sandalwood or pine—and as you debate on the specific notes, he comes back to you with a flier in hand. It takes your scent-drunk mind a minute to read it.

Gotham City Food Bank presents: The Thanksgiving Bachelor Auction!

You stare. Bruce is still holding the flier out to you, expecting a reaction. You can’t really think of one. “Uh.”

“I’d like you to come.”

“Why…?”

“The food bank puts together Thanksgiving baskets every year for the needy: turkeys, tofu, yams, stuffing, the works. They do a charity event to raise money to stuff the baskets. It’s for a good cause.”

“That’s awesome. What does this have to do- oh, fuck.”

Bruce raises his eyebrows. You recall what the man from earlier mentioned about an “auction”. You snatch the flier away to look at the finer details. It would be this weekend, there were six bachelors planned (including Bruce), and each person was encouraged to bid big for charity. Dinner would be provided. It sounded nice.

“You can bring Dr. Madison,” Bruce offers, “I think she likes me.”

She does. She painfully does. You could imagine her emptying this month's and last month's paycheck on a date with Bruce. Taking him to the nicest (and least vandalized) sushi joint in the city, engaging him with tales of the kids she's saved and her love of Broadway. Pampering him with praises for his charity work, admiring him openly and easily, charming him the way she charmed him at General.

She is a charming, sweet, beautiful woman. Bruce would look very good with her, even for charity. You wonder what things would've been like had he broken into her apartment instead of yours.

“Just wait 'til she finds out you personally invited her," you force a laugh, "She's going to have to take out a loan."

"I didn't know you were planning to bid on me, too." He's joking. Obviously, he's joking, if the barely restrained smile is anything to go by.

"In your dreams, maybe." Bruce shrugs. "But... I thought we were creating a narrative. Letting someone else buy you for a night isn't very romantic." You hate how hesitant you sound, like the idea of it displeased you. You don’t mean to sound that way, of course. It's just that if anyone were going to go on a date with Bruce... shouldn't it be you?

“The dates are just for fun. You'd be my real date.” His real date. God. “It would make you look like a good sport." He sees you mulling it over, still unsure. He folds the flier into his pocket. "Or not. We don't have to tell them anything yet. I wouldn't want to make it awkward for Dr. Madison if-“

If what? If she found out you were "dating" Bruce days after telling her to her face that you didn't know his relationship status? God forbid she rub it in your face after you spent so long being indifferent about him. “It's fine. We'll come. But maybe hold off on calling me your real date until you’ve fired me. Officially. You know.”

“I'll have my people talk to your people.”

You feel queasy at the smile he gives you, so casual and reassuring. You could really use a lie-down right about now. “Okay. Well. I’ll see you at home.”

Bruce blinks, but you’re already heading for the doors of his office before you've realized what you just called his place. You hear a quiet “see you” from behind, but you don’t dare to look back.

“Please don’t agitate the inmates. We are liable for anything that happens to you on the premises, but if you go poking around where you shouldn’t, that’s on you.”

The corrections officer hands you a clip-on badge with your name on it, but when she goes to ask Batman for his ID, she hesitates.

“He’s with me.” Detective Gordon assures her from his other side. The officer’s eyes narrow. James raises an eyebrow, “I talked to the warden about it. If you’d like to bring it up with him.”

That seems to be all the convincing she needs. She passes James his badge and gestures for you three to continue on down toward the visitation room.

It had been a hassle getting Bruce through the metal detectors, and it had been distraction enough that it didn’t weigh on you just who you were going to see until you were already in the room.

It was wide, with vending machines and a couple of tables scattered about, barred windows allowing a look into the unusually sunny afternoon outside. A handful of inmates were already there: some visiting family, others meeting with lawyers. It made it easy to spot him. Lucien was the only one alone, and from the looks of him, he was more happy to see you than you were to see him.

As you three walk over, he stands from the table, grinning ear-to-ear. You barely remembered his face from when you were younger, save for the same patchy beard that had yet to fill in after all these years. He greets Bruce first, holding out a hand, “Wow. You know, I’ve never seen you up close before. Kinda glad about that.”

Bruce does not shake his hand. Lucien’s smile is unwavering. His eyes slide past yours to meet the detective’s, and James shakes his hand out of pity.

It isn’t until you and James sit down that Lucien finally looks at you dead on. “You look good.” You feel your stomach lurch. It didn’t feel good to hear, especially when he looked at you like freshly caught prey. When you make no move to reply to that, he shrugs, “I almost didn’t recognize you. I hear you’re a doctor now. Really worked your way up from gutter trash, huh?”

Your expression hardens and he snickers.

James cuts in for you, “Mr. Goulding, we requested a visit because we think you might be able to help us with an ongoing case you were involved in. Can you tell us what you remember about Dimitri Young?”

Lucien’s eyes slither back to James, “Not much. Kid wasn’t with us long. He was… skinny. Cried easy. Up Nat’s ass all the time.”

“Were you close with Ms. Young?”

“Yeah, yeah. You could say that. We worked with each other. Ran the trade for a while with a couple other kids. Got a lot of customer service experience back then. She was… nice. Shame what happened.”

James raises an eyebrow, “Seems like you were on good terms. And after Natalie was killed, did you keep up with Dimitri? Visit him at Arkham, maybe? Write him letters?”

Lucien glances at you. “Well… it was tricky. Thanks to the good doctor and friends, I had to steer clear of the whole thing for a while. Felt bad for the kid, though. When I heard about the plea deal… I’d have taken life here over Arkham. I don’t care how fucked up the kid got over Nat’s death. What they’re doing down there?” He looks over at James and grimaces, “That’s the real criminal shit.”

You remembered that. His lawyer had pleaded insanity under the guise he’d get parole on good behavior, gain sympathy for having lost his only family so brutally. You remembered what Bruce said too; he’d been good. He was doing good until he saw you.

James gears up to ask another question but Lucien cuts him off, “Are they gonna talk or are they just decoration?” He points his finger at you and Bruce who hovers over your shoulder.

You wring your hands underneath the table, feeling Bruce’s eyes burning into the back of your skull. The truth was that you had a list of questions to ask him. You’d stayed up all night writing them down, rehearsing them.

Now, you could only remember Natalie and the barrel of her gun.

Lucien was there, too. He was on the frays of the memory as he always was. The shootout had yielded successes and failures, and Lucien, who’d been there that night—who laughed as Alex laughed and laughed harder when the bullet nestled itself into the meat of her brain—had not been found for years after that. You thought sometimes that you saw him on the street, but his appearance in your memory was just as frayed.

It all comes back to you now that you’re sitting in front of him. The everyman, a person meant to blend into the crowd. It didn’t surprise you that he’d managed to stay out of here for so long.

“…You don’t have to if you’re not ready.” James’ voice floats in between your musing, making you aware of his and Lucien’s eyes on you. Lucien is still smiling, strands of golden hair slipping out of the small bun at the back of his head.

“Why did you stay with the Vipers for so long?”

Your question surprises him, like he hadn’t expected you to have a voice after all these years, “I was open to new opportunities. But they paid well and you’re almost guaranteed a good position if you don’t get gunned down before 18. I was running my own little unit of teenyboopers before I got locked up.”

You frown. How casual he is describing it all. “They didn’t toss you aside as soon as you got too old to control?”

“No, no. That was your friend’s big issue, wasn’t it? Scared to be controlled. Nah. The boss man liked me. You know they like ‘em young, easy to impress upon and all that. They want the lifelong loyalty. I’ve never been that devoted, you know? But I liked the money.”

“Do you know what happened to Dimitri?” This question, Bruce asks. For the first time, you see Lucien’s smile dim some.

Lucien clears his throat, “No. Kid kick the bucket?”

“He broke out with some inmates not too long ago. He’s on the street hunting down people related to Nat’s case.”

Lucien looks from Bruce to you, then breaks out into a fit of hysterical giggles. The sound is grating to your ears. “Holy shit. He wants to kill you.”

“He’s killed one person already,” James stresses, trying to save you the humiliation. “We need to know if you think he could be working with the Vipers again. We believe someone is supplying him with… venom.”

“Venom? Fuck me. That’s expensive, especially those newfangled strains they had on the street when I was out. Can really fuck you up if you’re not careful.”

“Did the Vipers have their hands on that kind of stuff? You were a lieutenant after all.”

“Maybe. Not as much as they did drops. That was all the rage. Venom’s too volatile and, like I said, it can really fuck you up,” Lucien exhales hard through his nose. “If Dimitri’s on that, he’s not gonna last. Especially if the Vipers are giving it to him.”

You frown, “Why especially?”

“I mean, come on. Same reason you and your friend beat the shit out of him all those years ago,” You flinch at the memory. “He was weak and nobody gave a shit about him except Nat. My guess is the kid probably went back to ‘em for help, and they saw an opportunity to make him a lab rat.” You feel Bruce shift behind you as his cape brushes what little of your arm you were allowed to leave exposed here. Lucien’s eyes drift up Bruce’s body, sparkling with some new recollection, “And with Mr. Vengeance on the streets, I imagine juicing your best men up with venom oughtta make a nice challenge.”

Lucien watches as you process what he'd realized instantly. Behind the feigned impassivity, some little bit of him seems to find this just as awful as you do. Even if it's just pity, a shake of the head as foresight grants him the knowledge that what comes next will undoubtedly be a tragedy.

It had to have been Dimitri’s first time on venom when he attacked Russo, and as uncoordinated as he was, he had put up a fight against Bruce. You couldn’t imagine what he’d be like if he got better at it. If he got more of it. And he would, if the Vipers had any sense. You knew they didn't give a shit about you, or Russo, or Alex, or Dimitri. They were just hoping that his rage would make a casualty out of the Batman.

He was going to kill himself for the chance. And the Vipers wouldn't care. They would leave his doped up, bloated carcass in the street like they had left Nat.

You realize that you aren't breathing when you feel a cool hand on your upper back, closing around your scruff and sending a jolt of awareness through you. You almost think that it's Dimitri—having crawled out of your racing thoughts and come to take you once and for all—before realizing that it was Bruce, hovering so close now that his cape brushed your shoulders. His leather-clad thumb brushes against the nape of your neck, and when you look up to see him looking down at you, you catch him imploring you for something. Urging you to get out of your head.

Looking at him reminds you to breathe. You take one deep breath in, holding his gaze, and turn back to Lucien.

When you do, he looks different now. His eyes linger on Bruce’s hand. When you ask him your next question, he doesn’t seem to delight in the drama of it anymore, “After Dimitri was put away, what did the Vipers do?”

Lucien stares at you, then past you. His tone is solemn after a few moments of silence, “It was business as usual. They packed up what they could, moved to their other safe-houses in the city, relocated and reallocated. They talked about… the kid costing more than he was worth. Handful of us pitched in and got Nat a grave. I’ve been a few times. Not recently. It was nice.”

“Where?”

His eyes narrow at you, “Why do you give a shit? You feel guilty? Wanna leave some flowers for the dearly departed?”

You feel your lower lip wobble and you curse the feelings burning inside you. You were trying so hard to keep it together. “Do you think any of the Vipers would bother to tell him?”

He stares at you for a minute. Someone new walks into your peripheral view. It’s one of the correctional officers warning you about time. Something soft coats Lucien’s voice then, "She's in St. Agatha’s cemetery, near the treeline. The name on the marker is Adelpha Lions. We couldn't bury her as Natalie.”

Adelpha Lions. St. Agatha's. You think about bringing her flowers, but the thought leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.

The officer from before comes back to escort the three of you out, and Lucien doesn't bother to acknowledge her or James thanking him for his time. He only watches you, leveling you with a look of such contempt that you feel your chest hollow out, breath stolen again. He watches you well until the door to the visitation room swings shut.

Bruce and James walk ahead of you, though you notice that Bruce lags behind, glancing back at you every once in a while to make sure you're keeping up. James mentions something about keeping an eye on the cemetery, just in case Dimitri does know about it, and it leaves the same terrible taste in your mouth from before.

You know you ought to say something, but you find yourself drifting after them, mind elsewhere, stuck on the way Lucien looked at you. It was like a switch flipped when he saw Bruce touch you.

Why had he touched you? So blatantly, so intimately? He had to have known how that would look. Could it have been that he didn't care? Or, that he cared more about you?

You peek at Bruce’s profile as you walk; the cold lights above you both make the black of his cowl stand out, but they also make the blue of his eyes that much more piercing when they suddenly zero in on you. Your name is called. You look to the side and see James staring at you, expecting, worried almost, “You good back there?”

“Sorry. What?”

“I said I’d like to talk to you.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Alone. If you don't mind.”

You look at Bruce. His eyes have focused on James now, searching for what he might want to talk about. You wished you could read minds. You decide it couldn't hurt to ask, “Can I ask what about?”

“Just some... questions. We haven't had the chance to really speak since the night you were attacked. I'd like to follow up with you." You bristle when you realize he expects Bruce to fully leave. James notices, glancing between you and Bruce. "I’ll drop you back at Wayne Tower, since your detail says that’s where you’re staying now.” When you don't make a move to confirm, he sighs, jerking his thumb toward the exit, "...I'll let you two talk."

You watch him walk toward the parking garage, just as Bruce crowds up against you, dropping his voice to a whisper, "He wants to know about me."

"Yeah, no shit. What do I say to him?"

"I told him I'd look into Bruce Wayne to keep him off my trail. There's not much I can do since you told him what you saw." You can hear the irritation bleed through his words. "As far as he knows, Bruce Wayne could be a suspect and you could be in danger."

You curse under your breath, "So I need to clear your name."

"What exactly did you tell him the night you were attacked? Exactly."

"I... I said that I had reason to believe... uh, confidential information was leaked to Bruce."

"Did you tell him exactly what the information was?"

"No."

"Did you tell him where you saw it?"

"No. Just that I knew you knew something you shouldn't. But he knows I had no proof."

Bruce goes quiet. You see him looking off to the side, eyes flicking to and from as he thinks about what to say next. Each second feels like a minute, and you keep watch over the direction James went for fear he'd come looking for you after too long.

You feel Bruce's hand take your upper arm and he brings you closer, tucking you away from the security cameras overhead and into him instead, "Can you lie?"

"You want me to lie to a detective?"

"We don't have a lot of options here. Can you lie?"

You frown, biting into your bottom lip to ground yourself. The pain focuses you some, "What do you want me to say?"

It's your luck that James is patient. A few minutes later, you find him propped up against the trunk of his car, hands in his pockets as he waits patiently for you and Bruce. Bruce gives you both a single nod before heading off to his own car, leaving you alone with the detective and the world of questions he could be gearing up to ask you.

But before you prepare yourself for the first one, James walks around to the driver's side door, flashing you a playful look, “You ever seen the Bat Signal up close?”

The answer was obviously no, but now that it was right in front of you, you wanted nothing more than to see it turned on. You'd seen it light up the cloudy night sky a million times it felt like, and it never failed to take your breath away. It's far too sunny out to see it now. As the chilly breeze tries to sneak under your clothes, you turn to watch the sunlight glint off the skyscrapers, enjoying the little bit snowy Gotham afforded this late in the year.

The city’s still loud from this high up, but it’s different. Kind of like how it felt watching the city from the penthouse. Up here, it felt secluded. Private. Perhaps that’s why James picked it. He kicks the base of the floodlight with his shoe and it barely tremors, “Was a hell of a time trying to get this thing up here. Chief's still coming around to it.”

You think about the burner phone in your pocket. Bruce’s relationship with the rest of the GCPD was… strained at best, but he and James seemed close; you wondered just how deep their relationship went, exactly. Apparently, not deep enough to tell him who he was.

His voice catches your attention just then. “You living with Wayne, now? How'd that happen?"

You breath out a heavy sigh, “I uh… yeah. He offered. After the whole thing with Dimitri. Just until he’s caught.”

“That’s awfully generous.” You don’t respond to that, so he presses more. "Did he offer or did he...?"

"He offered. No coercion." That wasn't entirely the truth, but you had no room for nuance right now.

“Do you feel safe with him?”

“I do.”

“You seemed worried when we first talked about him. You said he had your file.”

“I... I said that I thought he had access to it. Because of something he said."

James’ eyes narrow at you, watching you with his head tilted. “What'd he say to you?"

"He just mentioned something about the... the case. I told him where I grew up and it jogged a memory."

"Is that so?"

You cursed how apathetic James could make himself look. You had no clue if this was working on him, only that you had to follow through with this, seams tight, no loopholes. "He heard about the shooting. His butler, Alfred, he's always been really protective of Bruce. Everyone knew the Vipers snatched kids with no one to check on them, I think he just wanted Bruce to stay safe. Make sure he didn't make the wrong decision if he went out and got himself in trouble. Like I did."

"So, you told Wayne where you grew up, he brought up the shooting, it triggered something in you. You assumed he knew about your file and you felt threatened. That's why you went to the Bat."

"Yeah."

"And now... nothing?" James raises an eyebrow, gesturing to the empty air. "It's all good now?"

It wouldn't be a good story if it was all good. You twist away from James, leaning against a nearby pillar, "Not exactly. I don't know if he really knows or not, it just felt like a scary coincidence. You know? But I told Batman and he said he'd look into it. I trust him above all else."

"You seemed so sure the night I interviewed you."

"I was looking for patterns."

James hums. "The Bat seems to really like you."

That a was a shift. You perk up a bit. “What do you mean?”

“He speaks highly of you. Says I can trust you like I trust him. If you say you feel safe for now, I trust you." Your skin prickles with flattery. "There's just something that's not quite making sense to me."

“Oh?”

"When I looked into your file, nothing looked out of place. GCPD keeps a log of who accesses a file, and from what I could tell, it hadn’t been touched in years. It looked fine… at first.”

Had this been a few days ago, this information would have shook you to your core. It still does, but for an entirely different reason now.

“I’m—admittedly—not great with computers. Normally, I’d ask the guys down in IT about this kind of thing, but seeing as… anyone could be involved, I had my daughter take a look at it. She-“

“Your daughter?”

James pauses. You were no cop, but that didn’t sound particularly legal. Then again, you didn’t have much room to speak. “She… she showed me the metadata, beyond just the stuff we usually see up front, and she found something. The database logs who accesses what because poking around files you have no business looking at can get your badge taken. Needless to say, she found more than a few things wrong.”

“Oh?” This time, your “oh” sounds decidedly more nervous.

“The name and badge number of the last person to access your file was scrubbed from the frontend, but it was still available on the backend. It was an officer, Paul Brown. When I pulled him aside to ask why he needed your file, he claimed he didn’t know anything about it or you. He seemed to be telling the truth, but doing some further digging, I found a trail of cases he’d been accessing over the past two years. Cases related to certain notable figures in the city.”

Notable figures. Like Bruce? Was there more he hadn’t told you?

"I found a connection between those cases and some recent movement from the Penguin. Turned out the guy was a mole feeding intel to Cobblepot. And not just him. I was checking the files he accessed against a timeline of events, and I have reason to believe he’s been feeding a couple of politicians the same need-to-know information. Politicians like Daniel Roberts.”

“Councilman Roberts.” You feel your blood pressure rise as James nods, “Detective, I don’t mean to be rude, but should I even be hearing about this? This sounds serious, way too serious for me-“

“You were there that night at the party Wayne threw, and so was Roberts.”

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean anything. There were tons of politicians there who support the mayor. Bruce is interested in politics. Doesn’t mean he’s in bed with them.”

Your defense seems to intrigue James. He rests an arm on the floodlight, “Did the two seem chummy at the party?”

“They didn’t really… talk. I mean, he intervened when I got into an argument with Roberts, but-“

“An argument about what?”

You could kick yourself. It was like this man had a skill for drawing the truth out of you. “It was stupid. He said some stuff about Batman and it got me riled up. Bruce put out the fire.”

“Roberts is the most vocal anti-vigilante member on the city council. Now I know he's connected to a dirty cop, and that he's in Bruce Wayne's circle. Doesn't that seem a little strange to you?”

You swallow, “What exactly are these questions leading to, detective?”

James moves away from the floodlight, approaching you slowly, cautiously, as if he expected you to take flight the second he got too close. “You told me that night that you knew Wayne had information about you he shouldn't have. I found the thread, I pulled it, and now I find Wayne at the center all over again. I'm looking for patterns, too. So, I'm going to ask you again," You watch him reach into his pocket and pull out his phone, flipping the screen to you. In big, bold text, it reads, "NOD IF WE'RE BEING RECORDED" "Are you sure you're safe?"

You should win an Emmy for how you school your expression into one of complete nothingness. All the while in your head, you are cursing the very bed Bruce was conceived upon. You curse him for leaving you here to explain all this, but most of all, you wish you’d kept his bottle of brandy.

You shake your head. James blinks. "I'm sure." You watch him exhale heavily, shoving his phone back into his pocket. "I'm telling you what I believe, detective. I believe I was wrong about Bruce Wayne."

"Maybe. But maybe there's more out there I still need to find."

"You're a good detective, James. Thank you for caring so much. If you can't trust me, trust Batman. If there's something to find, he'll find it."

You can see the slight shake in James’ shoulders. You wonder if he’s starting to freeze up here. You reach into your pocket and hand him one of your warmers, and though he recoils when you first hold out your hand, he thinks about it for a moment, then takes it. "You and the Bat..." He starts, rubbing his thumb against the heat pack in his hand. "He tell you who he is?"

You dodge the question as stealthily as you can, "Did he tell you?"

James considers your question, stern-faced and shivering, “No. But I have my theories." After a moment, he side-eyes you. "You didn't answer my question."

"It's... not for me to say."

He's not satisfied, and you didn’t expect him to be, but he looks too tired to argue now. He runs a hand along his face and looks out onto the city horizon. Under his breath, you hear him whisper, “Yeah. I figured.”

"He trusts you a lot, you know. For the record. I can see why."

You watch him reach into the pocket of his coat and pull out a lighter and cigarette, bringing it to his lips to take a long, deep drag. He holds one out to you, but you shake your head. You'd never been one for smoking (you'd seen the effect it had on the insides), but you could envy the temporary peace on James' face as he blows out a cloud of smoke. "Not a lot of that to spare these days."

a/n: this was a bitch to write with a headache

#bruce wayne x reader #bruce wayne scenarios #bruce wayne fic #bruce wayne #batman x reader #batman scenarios #batman fic #the batman #battinson x reader #battinson #dc #mjwrites #bw; rprt

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transvampireboyfriend · 5 months ago

Text

@steddie-week Day 1: Secret relationship

Rating: M Words: 2362

Modern AU

"I'm gonna get us some more popcorn" Steve says, slapping his hands against his thighs.

Eddie gives him side eye because it's only been ten minutes since the movie started and they're supposed to be discrete.

Steve silently shrugs at him, raising his eyebrows and pointedly looking at everyone in the room.

He's right, no one even reacted to Steve's statement. Jon and Argyle are absentmindedly playing with each other's hands, eyes locked on the screen; Chrissy and Robin are still whispering to each other; Jeff is still showing something to Freak and Nancy on his phone and Gareth is still dozing on and off next to Chrissy.

Okay then, Eddie thinks, and tries to communicate the same to Steve with a shrug of his own.

Steve smiles a small thing, and winks at him.

A blink and you'll miss it wink, but Eddie still has to bite the inside of his cheek to tame his answering smile and try to subdue the heat rising to his cheeks.

7:05 his watch reads when Steve leaves the room.

Five minutes should be fine right? For Eddie to follow without making their friends suspicious?

Eddie looks at the TV and tries to focus on the movie, but all he can see are colors.

He doesn't know what they're watching, was too distracted by the hair on Steve's arm when they discussed it.

The hair on Steve's arm, which Eddie only discovered yesterday, is so soft and fun to kiss.

And lick.

And mouth at.

Jesus, it's been a whole month since their first date, a little more than that since they first kissed and Eddie still acts like a lovesick fool.

7:06

Eddie starts bouncing his leg impatiently.

On second thought, popcorn takes like two minutes to be ready. And say it takes Steve an additional minute to put it into a bowl, then he'll be back in less than five!

Eddie's wasting precious time!

He stands abruptly and everyone does turn to look at him at that.

"Sorry," he smiles sheepishly, "need to use the bathroom. Be right back."

His friends turn back to the TV with hums and noncommittal grunts and Eddie at least has the sense to walk towards the hallway and not go through the kitchen's front door.

It's a redundant but necessary detour and in a few more seconds, he's opening the kitchen's side door.

Steve greets him by throwing his arms around his neck, "What took you so long?" he asks, leaning forward to bring their lips together.

Eddie hums against him and lets go of the door, letting it swing closed in favor of grabbing on to his boyfriend.

His arms circle Steve's waist and pull him closer as they kiss.

"Didn't wanna be too obvious" Eddie murmurs against Steve's lips, noticing there's no smell of popcorn or any sound from the microwave.

Steve hums, then grabs Eddie's face with both hands and soundly kisses him once, twice.

"I think I'm about ready to tell them," Steve comments when he pulls back, lowering his hands to Eddie's shoulders.

"Yeah?" Eddie asks, feeling his heart pick up its pace.

Steve liking him back is one thing, getting to be together like this another, but him telling everyone about it? Eddie hadn't even dared to dream that big in the year or so that he spent pining after the most beautiful boy he's ever met.

Steve nods, a smile growing on his face.

"Cool," Eddie comments, unable to hide the huge grin that's surely showing his dimples.

Steve giggles, that wonderful sound reserved only for Eddie, and nods again, "Mmhm" he agrees, leaning forward again, placing his mouth on his and tangling his fingers in his hair.

Eddie searches his tongue the way he knows Steve likes, steals his air and sucks on his lower lip when they need to part, enjoying the way Steve's body goes boneless, melts against his hold.

"God, I love your mouth," Eddie sighs, making Steve laugh softly against him,

"Are you staying over tonight?" Steve asks, pleasantly scratching the back of Eddie's skull,

"If you want me to, babydoll," Eddie offers, thoroughly enjoying the blush that the ridiculous petname elicits as Steve scoffs and looks away from him.

Eddie takes the opportunity to smack a kiss on his cheek, feeling Steve's smile get wider.

He turns back to Eddie and his smile fades a little, Eddie turns his head to the side, worry creeping up inside him.

"Please stay," Steve asks, with something serious in his eyes,

Eddie understands. Maybe more than Steve would expect him to. So he makes it his priority to reciprocate his boyfriend's seriousness and moves both his hands up to hold Steve's face,

"For as long as you'll have me, sweetheart," he promised, hoping Steve can hear his sincerity, can understand how much he means it when they look into each others' eyes.

Steve smiles with something like wonder and brings their lips together again.

Eddie moves one of his hands to the back of Steve's head, and grabs onto his hair there, circling the other around his waist again and walking them back until Steve softly bumps the kitchen counter.

Steve sits on top of the counter with practiced ease, using Eddie's shoulders to jump up and then opening his legs like he always does.

And like always, it drives Eddie insane.

He takes his place between Steve's legs, kissing him insistently, his hands moving from his waist to the top of his thighs, rubbing there as he goes to kiss his neck, when the door opens.

Eddie's heart stops.

In the span of a few seconds which seem infinite to him, Eddie freezes, looks up from Steve's neck to his face, finds him staring ahead with eyes as wide as plates and straightens up, letting go of Steve's thighs to turn around and find Gareth rummaging through the fridge.

An agonizingly long minute passes.

None of them say anything, Steve staying atop the counter and Eddie frozen in place, until Gareth straightens up with a can on his hand, and looks at them like he hadn't even realized they were there when he came in.

Eddie can only raise his eyebrows.

"Sorry, Jeff did want a coke after all," Gareth says, like it explains anything, "You know how he is," he comments,

Eddie stares.

"Did ...you want us to pause the movie?" Gareth asks.

Eddie blinks.

"Uh, no. That's okay," Steve answers,

"Alright." Gareth says slowly, "...Cool," he concludes, and then he exits the kitchen without another word.

Eddie frowns, a little mindblown, immediately turning back to Steve and finding a similar frown on his face.

"Did you-?" Steve asks,

"No!" Eddie cuts in, scandalized and a little panicked, "Of course not! We agreed we wouldn't tell anyone!"

Steve's frown dissipates to give way to a soft smile. He places his hand against Eddie's cheek. "I know," he affirms, "sorry."

Eddie rolls his eyes a little, letting Steve know no apology is necessary and he sighs, calmer now that he can see that Steve's not freaking out.

He leans into his boyfriend's hand more.

"Do you think Robin-?" he ventures,

"I don't think so," Steve answers softly, "Last I heard Chrissy doesn't even know yet. And that was last week" he comments, moving his hand to tuck Eddie's hair behind his ear, absentmindedly caressing the strands after.

"I don't think she would tell Chris without telling me," Steve assures him,

Chrissy does suspect. Eddie met her a little later than he met Steve but she's rapidly become his best friend and regularly refers to Steve and Eddie as 'a couple'.

Eddie used to blush hard at the comments, before they got together. And she never pushed, but it was the thing that got him to notice that his looks were returned, got him to understand that Steve doesn't actually treat anyone else the way he treats Eddie.

Now he just sort of scoffs when she mentions it, but he hasn't told her either. Wanted to let Steve set their pace.

"I mean he is known to be distracted" Eddie offers about Gareth,

Steve laughs silently, "There's no way he didn't notice me up on the counter and you between my legs, baby,"

Baby.

Eddie blushes. He can't get over the pet names, especially when Steve only uses them in private.

He returns his hands to rest on top of Steve's thighs and leans up to kiss him, trying to cool the heat in his cheeks.

It does not work.

Steve rubs their noses together when they pull apart, resting his hands on Eddie's shoulders, "You wanna tell 'em?" he asks,

"If you do," Eddie says, "but tell me if there's anything that should change" he requests,

One of Steve's hands holds his face again, his thumb softly moving back and forth on his cheek.

"Like what?" he asks, barely above a whisper,

"I don't know," Eddie answers, racking his brain for an example, "like, ...are you into PDA?" he asks in the same tone, not wanting to burst the bubble they created,

Steve strokes Eddie's hair again, turns his head and purses his lips, thinking,

"I'd like to hold your hand" he settles on.

He's gonna kill Eddie, one of these days, his heart will grow so big from how sweet Steve is, that it'll explode.

Eddie has to press his lips together so he doesn't smile ear to ear.

"That's not PDA, I don't think,"

"No?" Steve innocently asks, he knows what he's doing, the bastard. Eddie wants to melt.

"No, angel,"

"You want us to kiss with tongue in front of everyone?" Steve asks, in the same tone, but with a shit eating grin,

Eddie snorts loudly, has to lean his head on Steve's shoulder to suppress his laugh.

"No, I don't think I want that," he says, straightening up while his shoulders still shake with his laughter,

"Good," Steve says, looking smug, "Me neither,"

He places a kiss against Eddie's temple, gently scratches the back of Eddie's skull and asks, "What about you? Do you have anything?"

"Was thinking I like the things you call me in private," Eddie murmurs, emboldened by the tender touch,

Steve smiles softly, but wags his eyebrows.

Eddie laughs again, almost shy, "Shut up." he protests, "You don't even call me anything different in bed,"

Steve joins him, laughing softly, but then his eyes soften too.

"Hmm," he hums, leaning down to close the distance between them, "I can save the pet names just for you" he murmurs,

Eddie leans up the small fraction left to join their lips again, and Steve softly kisses back.

"Anything else?" Eddie asks as they pull back,

"Can I have shotgun privileges? And hold your hand while you drive?" Steve requests,

" 'Course you can" Eddie grins, sure that there are hearts in his eyes when he leans up to briefly kiss Steve's jaw,

"What else?" Eddie asks,

"Want your hands in my hair" Steve answers easily, in the syrupy tone he always gets when Eddie gets his mouth anywhere near his neck,

"Anytime," Eddie grants, softly biting where he just kissed,

"You?" Steve asks,

"Would you wear my clothes out of the house?" Eddie tries,

Steve smiles and kisses both his eyelids, making him chuckle a bit "I'd love that",

"Something more?" Steve gently probes,

"We can figure out the rest as we go?"

"Sounds like a plan."

---

"Eddie and I are together" Steve proudly announces to his friends after the movie's over and the pizza's gone.

He takes Eddie's hand in his and Eddie smiles at him so wide, his cheeks hurt.

Robin squeals. Eddie turns to look at her and sees Chrissy doing the same, with a confused frown on her face.

Eddie thinks that's weird, but when he looks at the rest of their friends he finds expectant looks on their faces. Like they didn't understand or something.

After a beat, Nancy asks, "What do you mean?"

"Uh. We're dating," Steve answers, a little nervous now. Eddie softly squeezes his hand.

"Yeah, you have been for like a year, right?" Chrissy answers this time, "Certainly since I met you guys,"

Eddie gawks at her, "What?"

"Robin, did you tell her?" Steve asks,

"I didn't!" she defends,

"Tell me what?" Chrissy asks, turning to her,

Eddie cannot believe his ears.

"Wait," Jeff says, "you weren't dating before?"

"Before what?" Jon asks,

"Before we met Chrissy?" Gareth tries,

Eddie's whipping his head back and forth between them as they speak,

"When did we meet her?" Argyle asks,

"Was it last year?" Freak adds on,

"Shush! " Nancy urges, pulling everyone's attention to her,

"How long have you two been dating?" she asks Steve and Eddie,

"A month?" Eddie says, his head spinning,

"And a half" Steve finishes,

Robin snorts and the group erupts into protests,

"No way."

"What?"

"Nu-uh,"

"What the-"

"Oh my god?? "

"There's no way!"

Eddie nods at them, "Yeah, how long did you all think we had been dating for?"

"Before we met Chrissy!" they answer almost in unison.

"What? Why?" Steve asks,

"Because you go on dates," Jeff answers,

"What!? " Eddie's beginning to sound like a broken record,

"Yeah, you guys go shopping, and to the record store" Argyle explains,

"And to dinner at each other's places" Freak finishes,

"I do that with all of you!" Eddie protests,

"Yeah, as a group," Gareth counters,

Steve turns to look at him and presses his lips together when Eddie looks back.

"Don't you dare," Eddie warns, already trying to swallow the laughter bubbling up his throat,

"Wait, so you thought you were always sitting next to each other by happenstance?" Chrissy asks,

"You save our seats together? " Steve asks her like it's the most heart warming thing he's ever heard,

Eddie lets go of Steve's hand in order to bury his face in his own, he can feel his blush against his palms.

"You know we could hear you making out in the kitchen right?" Nance asks,

Eddie groans loudly just as Robin bursts out laughing.

"You platonically watched a movie together on Valentine's?" Argyle asks skeptically, "At the theater?"

"Oh my god " Eddie complaints,

That's what topples Steve. His laughter filling Eddie's ears.

He has to come out of his hiding place to look at him, seeing Steve joyful is what he was put on this Earth to do, Eddie thinks.

"You platonically got him a sunflower bouquet for his birthday?" Jon piles on,

"He said he'd never gotten flowers before!" Eddie defends as everyone laughs,

Steve chuckles, rubbing Eddie's back soothingly,

"What was I supposed to do?" Eddie turns to him,

Steve smiles brightly and places a kiss on his shoulder.

Eddie smiles back, placing a hand on Steve's knee.

As embarrassed as he is, he's really glad everyone finally knows.

Sneaking around was fun, but nothing can compare to having Steve like this.

#steddieweek2024 #steddie #steddie fluff #secret relationship #stranger things #they're idiots <3 #after they're done making fun of them Chrissy's like ''well. congratulations. i guess''#this got away from me but i can't resist writing them being all gooey with each other im sorryyyyyy #steddie headcanon #<- writing tag #.

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hatchetmanofficial · 6 months ago

Note

Hey! I’m a new person inside the fandom, and I wanted to say, I’m in LOVE ❤️ — with the game!! But there is some stuff that confuses me, such as the plot outside of the game… And with outside (game characters) such as the Boss, Stitches, Buck, and Alan’s other co-workers. Is there a place where you can find a YouTube channel or on here (Tumblr) that has the beginnings everything? As I also seen that there was a collaboration with another game, for yours, so were characters made for this game or were they pre-made by another developer/game and was added to yours?

I’m sorry if this sounds redundant on your account!! I don’t mean to sound really dumb. I’m just really excited to find out more about the lore in game (when it releases)/out (here). But I hope the game development is easy for you! — AND I’M SO IN LOVE WITH YOUR ARTWORK!! The sprites are so cute 🥺

i have a good portion of the MDHM lore in this post

However, its not the entire lore or how it even starts. Other than this Tumblr blog, there isn't a reliable source where all of the game is explained. Not even the fandom wiki of MDHM.

You can look up youtube videos about facts on MDHM, but a lot of those videos are just regurgitated trivia I have already said on this blog and/or misinformed. So take youtube videos with a grain of salt.

All characters of mdhm I have personally made bc I like designing ocs. It only shares the same universe with SDJ

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mountttmase · 1 year ago

Text

Not Yours

Note - happy Tuesday 🩷 thank you to the anon for this request. It’s not something I’d normally write but I quite enjoyed this one so I hope you all do too. Feedback would be very much appreciated 😉

Pairing - Mason Mount × Reader

Word count - 4.8k

Warnings - smut

Don’t answer the door to anyone.

That’s what your mother had always told you growing up when on the rare occasions she would leave you home alone. The sound of the doorbell still sending shivers down your spine as in your mind it meant danger; however now you were living alone sometimes you had to answer the door.

Tonight was one of those times.

It had just gone half ten. You were in your pjs all ready to go get tucked up into bed when the unmistakable sound of the doorbell rang through your flat. Stopping you in your tracks almost instantly.

Who the hell could that be?

You had an idea, not wanting to open the door for them at all so you approached the door as quietly as you could in order to look through the peephole. Relief washing over you instantly as the person you wanted to see least was not on the other side of the door. In fact it was probably the last person you ever expected to see so you carefully stepped back and slowly opened the door.

‘Mason?’

‘H-hi y/n’

‘Is everything okay?’ You asked, picking up on demeanour instantly. Mason had always shy and reserved around you in the short time you’d known him but this was something different and you watched him gulp down a nervous lump before nodding.

‘Um yeah, well no actually I uh- sorry I just-‘

‘Would you like to come in?’ You interrupted, sensing he needed a little push and his eyes softened ever so slightly as he gave you a lopsided smile.

‘Please’ he nodded, so you moved to the side before leading him into the living room so he could take a seat on your sofa.

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘No thank you’ he replied, carefully sitting down and keeping his clasped hands in his lap. He was more nervous than usual and you were perplexed as to why he was here.

‘So, to what do I owe this pleasure’ you asked and you really wanted to know the answer. You and Mason weren’t exactly friends but you always felt like you could be. He was always sweet to you and once he had a drink down him, the pair of you had had some great conversations. He was kind and polite and always asked you questions about yourself but as soon as he was sober he was back to his usual shy self. You couldn’t tell if Mason had had a drink tonight but the way he was acting made you think he hadn’t.

‘It’s uh- it’s about Cam’

Cam.

Cam was your boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend as of yesterday but also one of Mason's very good friends. In fact Mason was just about the only one of his friends you could stand sometimes and you wondered why he bothered to keep them around.

‘Look if he’s sent you round to try and butter me up for something it won’t work. He ended things and I’m not gonna let him treat me like his plaything that he can pick up and put down whenever he wants. I’m done’

‘Wait what? You broke up? When?’ He asked, his face full of confusion and you could tell he really had no idea what was going on.

‘Yesterday’ you told him solemnly. ‘He came and got me from work. I thought he was taking me out to dinner or something but he told me he was done and just left me in the middle of town on my own I was humiliated’

‘Shit. I’m so sorry y/n’ he breathed, hands unclasping as if he was about to reach out and comfort you but in the end he decided against it.

‘It’s fine, I think it’s for the best anyway’ you shrugged, ‘I actually feel pretty alright, like he’s a bit of a twat thinking about it’

‘You can say that again’ he mumbled and you smiled before rolling your eyes. Hoping you could change the subject and find out why he was really here.

‘What can I do for you then?’

‘Oh um well it seems a little redundant now and I don’t wanna upset you any more than you are’ he explained but if it was about Cam you wanted to know.

‘No it’s okay. You came all this way it must be important’

‘Y/n I don’t think-‘

‘Please, Mason. I want to know’ you argued and after a short sharp exhale of air his eyes dropped to the floor so he could speak without looking at you.

‘Look y/n there’s no easy way to say this but… he’s been cheating on you’ he told you softly. ‘I found out about an hour ago. I think he knew I’d say something to you if I found out before but we were out and he was bragging about it a bit and he’s so drunk he showed me a video of him and this other girl, you know... Apparently it’s from a few months ago’ he told you sadly. ‘I just thought you deserved to know’

‘Oh’ you breathed, your whole body tingling as soon as the words settled into your skin. You can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed your mind that he would do that to you, but you never had any evidence that he had so you forgot about it and moved on. To now hear this coming from Mason was making your head spin and you weren't quite sure what to do with yourself.

Cam knew you were insecure at the best of times and even more so around other women but he always made out like you had nothing to worry about. Maybe his words had had a little less conviction lately but to know he’d lied to you like he had made you feel sick to your stomach and you had no idea what to say next.

‘Are you okay?’ Mason whispered, but you could only nod. Biting down on your bottom lip to stop your emotions from spilling out but he could obviously tell something wasn’t right. Carefully wrapping and arm around your shoulders in order to comfort you in some way and even though you could tell he was still a bit shy he let you melt into him as you turned and tucked your head into his neck. Needing comfort from where you could get it right now. ‘I’m so sorry’

‘It’s not your fault, you didn’t do it’ you laughed, hot tears falling from your eyes no matter how much you tried to sniff them away. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying, we’re over anyway so it’s not like it matters or I can do anything’

‘You’re allowed to be upset. You only broke up yesterday’ he told you softly and you allowed yourself to be sad for a little bit.

You didn’t talk, he just held you to him as he rubbed slow comforting circles into your skin with his thumbs as you played with the hem of his shirt. Wondering how you’d got here and why Mason was in your flat in the first place. He was Cam's friend and as much as you appreciated his honesty needed some answers.

‘Why are you here Mase?’

‘I told you. You deserve to know’

‘But why? You’re Cams friend. Don’t your priorities lie with him?’

‘Not at all. Not when it comes to this’ he said softly and you felt yourself nuzzling into him further as he held you to him. As much as Cam had proved to you people can be shit, Mason was everything he wasn’t and had slightly restored your faith in men a little bit by the way he was comforting you.

You both fell quiet again, just sat there listening to each other's breathing as he held you together. Your thoughts running away from you as you thought over your time with Cam and your sadness began to turn to anger quickly. He’d lured you in, just like they always do, and once he was bored he went behind your back before tossing you aside.

You liked Cam, you wanted to make it work and maybe you put up with more than you should have in hopes you could turn things around. Only realising in the last few months of your relationship that you could probably do better than what he was offering to you. But you held on to the idea of the boy you once knew, in hopes that maybe you could change him.

Leopards rarely do change their spots though.

You felt low. Lower than low in fact. Not wanting to give Cam the power of making you feel like shit but you weren’t sure how to feel any differently right now. Tears stinging the backs of your eyes again as it all hit you and you couldn’t stop the words tumbling out of your mouth.

‘Do you ever wish you could be someone else?’ You whispered ‘like just for a day? I just wanna be enough for someone, you know? For myself even at this point’

‘Hey, stop that’ he whispered. Moving slightly so he could look into your glassy eyes and the look on his face made your heart swell in your chest. ‘I promise you, you’re more than enough. I never got why you were with him in the first place like you’re so far out his league’ he told you, a small chuckle falling from your lips as he wiped your eyes gently. ‘I’m serious, I know he’s my mate but he’s an arsehole. You deserve so much better’

‘I’m just really angry’ you laughed bitterly. ‘I wanna get him back so badly. Like make him feel like shit too. Not just for cheating on me but for all of it. Make him hurt like I hurt’

Mason was silent but you could tell he wanted to say something and when you looked up at him he was smiling down at you shyly.

‘What’s going on in that little brain of yours Mase?’

‘Firstly, it’s not little’ he winked and even though you knew he was talking about his brain you still blushed at his words. ‘And secondly, I may have an idea’

‘Oh yeah?’ You laughed, turning to face him and you didn’t miss the subtle bite of his lip.

‘Call me insane but If I was you I’d fight fire with a little more fire’

‘I don’t understand’

‘Do to him he’s done to you. I get you’re over but he didn’t tell anyone that tonight and was making out you were still his. Show him you’re not’

‘You mean… get with someone else?’

‘Precisely. And let’s say evidence or something gets sent to him to prove it then that’s just a bonus’ he laughed and you could’t help but like the idea. Sure it was insane but you were past the point of acting rationally.

‘Okay, let’s say I want to do that. I’m never gonna find someone quick enough for it to hurt him in time’

‘Well I know one person who would be happy to do it right now’ he winked. Surely he didn’t mean himself but after you raised your brows at him he gave you a subtle nod.

‘Are you serious?’ You laughed and even though he was smiling himself, you knew he was. ‘Why Mase? What’s in this for you? I know he’s not your favourite person in the world but damn’

‘I have my reasons’ he chuckled, eyes falling into his lap. ‘Two years ago, before you were on the scene, I was talking to this girl for a few weeks and I really fucking liked her. Her name was Juliet' he confirmed and the name struck a chord with you instantly.

‘Cam’s ex was called Juliet’

‘Exactly. Took her from right under my nose and has never let me forget it’ he told you and you nodded lightly.

‘So it’s like payback for you?’

‘I guess so, yeah. But that’s not all this is to me though, you know that right?’ He reassured you, threading his fingers through yours gently. ‘I like you. A lot. I know you’re not supposed to fancy your mates girl but fuck… everytime I saw you I wished I’d got there first somehow’ he confessed with a laugh and suddenly his nervous behaviour all clicked into place. He wasn’t shy, he just liked you and the thought made you blush. ‘That’s why I’ve not ever been able to speak to you properly before, not when I’m sober at least. You scare the shit out of me and I knew I’d fall for you. I’m not like him and I’d never do what he did so I kept away from you but I’ve always liked you. I’ve just had enough of sitting by and watching him treat you like crap when you deserve so much more’

‘So this is a bit of a win win for you huh?’ You teased, watching his face turn red as he nodded shyly.

‘We don’t have to, maybe it’s going a bit far but it’s just an idea. I get you won’t have the same feelings towards me but I’m not all bad’ he chuckled but you just found his self deprecating side endearing.

‘I’m up for giving it go if you are’ you whispered, hand reaching over to touch his arm and you watched the goosebumps rise up almost instantly on his skin. ‘You know if we do this though, that’s it for you and him’

‘I know’ he winked. ‘I’m kinda counting on it’ he laughed and one look at his lips as he smiled made you want to kiss him instantly.

‘Come on then lover boy’ you laughed, swinging your legs over his lap so you could get close to him. ‘How about we just kiss first, see where that takes us?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive’ you winked, resting you hands on his chest but he made no move to try and get closer to you. ‘Are you still sure?’

‘Yeah, sorry. I’ve just thought about doing this a million times before but I never thought it would happen’ he told you softly and his words made you melt. ‘God I feel so awkward’ he laughed his hands resting on your waist as you cupped his jaw and you knew you’d have to make the first move as he was starting to loose it a bit so without thinking about it too much you lent forward and placed your lips on his.

You thought it might feel a bit wrong, kissing Mason like this but he made you feel more in this one exchange than Cam had in months. A shiver rolling down you spine as he moved his mouth against yours like it was something you did everyday. It felt natural and you didn’t want part from him anytime soon so you held him to you even tighter until he began to smile.

‘You don’t know how long I’ve waited for that’ he whispered against your lips, making you giggle before pulling your face back to his so you could kiss him again. Deeper this time as he slipped his tongue inside your mouth and you moaned at the feel of it.

He was a good kisser. He knew exactly when to speed up or slow down, he was gentle with you but still strong and you could feel your insides churning as his hands began to explore your body.

You weren’t sure if it was the thrill of what you were doing or just Mason himself but you hadn’t felt this turned on in a long time so when he began to slide his hands lower to grip your bum you let a low moan fall from your lips before moving to straddle his waist. He was looking up at you like he was in awe and the low groan that spilled from his lips as you peeled your shirt from your body gave you more of a confidence boost than anything else ever had.

‘You still wanna do this?’ He breathed, tearing his eyes away from your bare chest to look into your eyes and make sure you were 100% happy. ‘You can back out whenever, yeah? Just say stop and I will’

‘I wanna do it’ you confirmed, his soft eyes lighting up before he was getting serious again.

‘Only if you’re sure. Even if you just wanna get a picture or whatever and stop we can’ he told you but before you could reply your hands were reaching for his own shirt. Legs almost giving way at the sight of his body laid out underneath you. You’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t help but reach out to trail your fingertips over him. Pride filling you as you watched his muscles dance under his skin but the little smattering of hair that trailed into his jeans had your mouth watering.

‘I think I wanna suck your dick’ you blurted out. Your mouth running away with you before you’d even thought about what you were saying but it’s like you were in this lust filled trance and all you could think about was being in between Masons thighs.

‘Jesus Christ, y/n’ he groaned, helping you off of him so you could settle in between his legs and as soon as your hands reached for his fly he helped rid himself of them as you took his boxers off with them. Letting him sit there bare infront of you and you could tell he was a little unsure of himself. He had no reason to be though, you’d never been so turned on by just looking at someone before so you quickly dropped your shorts so he didn’t feel as self conscious before climbing back into his lap.

‘I don’t want a picture, I want you to film me’

‘Are you sure?’ He laughed, taking your phone from your hand before opening up the camera and sliding along to the video setting.

‘It doesn't have to be anything long, just a few seconds’ you confirmed and once you were settled back between his thighs he met out a shuddery breath. ‘Can I start? Or do you need a minute?’

‘Go ahead’ he chuckled but you could tell he was a little apprehensive so you went slowly. Kissing over his thighs as you took him in your hand to hopefully get him hard but there was no need. He was ready for you so you quickly licked your lips and took him into your mouth.

The breath he let out at the feel of you made your thighs clench together as you slowly got to work, hands gripping his thighs as you bobbed up and down on him until you felt his hand in your hair. You looked up at him through your lashes and his dark eyes were staring back at yours before he finally hit the record button, taking him in as far as you could whilst working the rest with you hand as your mouth moved.

You’d never been this into it before, hoping that would come across on camera as you made Mason feel good before you heard the video end and he placed your phone to the side of him.

‘I’ve got the video’ he told you through a moan, hand in your hair to grab your attention and when he was able to pull you off you both were looking at each other with wide eyes.

‘Can we carry on?’ You panted, not having nearly enough of him yet even though you’d gotten what you needed from him technically but you felt like you were just getting started.

‘You want to?’ He asked, a bewildered look on his face but you nodded shyly. Itching to feel him in some way so when he lent forward and his hands made contact with your hips you stood up so you could straddle him again. Your core now pressed up against his length and the feel of it made whimper.

‘Please Mase’ you whispered, biting your lip but he didn’t move. In the end you simply reached down and took him in your hand, lining him up with yourself to see if he would react and the subtle push of his hips into you let you know he wanted this just as much. So you gave him what you both wanted, sinking down onto him and the feeling was like nothing you’d felt before.

‘God, you feel insane’ he groaned, holding your waist and you lent to pick up your phone so you could watch the video quickly. You could just about tell it was you but there was no way you could tell it was Mason and watching him disappear into your mouth just made you want to grind down on him.

Without thinking too much about it you sent it to Cam, withholding your number so he couldn’t tell it was from you before turning your attention back to Mason who was looking back up at you with a cheeky smirk.

‘You ready?’ He whispered but you responded with your hips. Rolling them forward and watching his eyes disappear in the back of his head somewhere before you began to bounce on him. His hands guiding you just how he pleased but the sound of your phone continuously pinging made you pick it up in hopes Cam had seen your little surprise.

‘Mase he sounds pissed. And he’s calling me’

‘So answer it’

‘I- fuck, I don’t know’

‘He wants to talk so lets talk. Put it on loud speaker so I can hear’ he mumbled so you did as he asked, hitting the answer button without a second thought before putting it on loud speaker.

‘H-hello?’

‘Y/n, what the hell is going on?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s wrong with you? Why did you send me that video? I know it’s you so don’t deny it’

‘I’m not’ you told him, trying to hold your moans in but Mason was hitting you in all the right places and making it difficult for you to hold back.

‘When was the video taken?’

‘About three minutes ago’ you confirmed, followed by a whimper as Mason bounced you up and down even harder. ‘Hurts doesn’t it’

‘You’re fucking insane’

‘I’m fucking something, but he’s not insane’ you laughed, feeling Mason rest his forehead on your shoulder as he tried to hold in the giggles himself.

‘Wait, what? Are you with them right now?’

‘Unlike you I had the decency to wait until we were over before fucking someone else but yeah he’s here’

‘Tell me who it is’ he bellowed down the phone, your eyes on Mason's dark ones but you could see the mischievous twinkle in his eye.

‘You really wanna know, huh?’ You teased, a shuddery breath falling from your lips before you went for it. ‘Fuck Mase, that’s it right there’ you told him, feeling his hands wander up to your chest so he could palm them gently.

‘Mase? I swear to god, y/n-‘

‘What, Cam? You can’t do shit. I’m not yours anymore, remember. But you were mine when you decided to do the same with someone else. This is just payback’

‘You’re lying. This has to be a joke’

‘Fuck, y/n’ you suddenly heard Mason moan as you slightly adjusted your hips. ‘Did he ever make you feel this good baby?’ He asked with a wink.

‘Nuh uh, you’re so big Masey’

‘That’s it’s, who's making you feel this good huh?’

‘You are, Mase. F-fuck I’m so close’

‘You hear that mate? Or do you need another video to be sure?’ Mason laughed before attaching his lips to your neck.

‘Fuck you’ Cam suddenly spat and with that he hung up the call.

You threw your phone to the side, focus entirely on Mason and the way he was making you feel so when he suddenly stopped your hips you were confused.

‘Lay down for me?’ He asked, one hand reaching up to settle on your lower back as he adjusted both of your positions and you let him move you so you were laid down. Him towering over you now as his eyes raked over you hungrily. ‘You’re perfect, you know that right?’ He told you seriously and you felt a shiver roll down your spine.

‘Mase, I-‘

‘Cam, and any other prick who made you feel like you weren’t enough. I want you to forget them, yeah? Just focus on me’ he told you, but you couldn’t look away even if you wanted to. His eyes had captivated you and you were both trapped in each other's stare as he lent his forehead gently on yours before pushing himself back in.

You let him control the tempo this time. One hand by your head to hold himself up as the other travelled right to where you needed him to be. Rubbing slow circles on your clit as he slowly pounded into you.

This felt different to any sex you’d ever had. He was focused on you, making sure you felt good first before he let himself go and before long his name was falling from your lips as you clenched tightly around him. Your high coursing it’s way through your veins as he made you feel like no one else ever had.

You let him slump down on top of you, his weight feeling comforting as he slowly traced shapes on to your ribs and even though his breath was ticking your neck you swore you would've laid there for a lifetime. Just soaking in each other’s presence and comfort and you got your breath back.

‘That video, he won’t use it against you will he?’ Mason asked quietly. Almost as if he didn’t want to disturb your peace but you just smiled and you brushed your hand through his hair.

‘I shouldn’t think so. He knows I have a fair few pictures of him that he wouldn’t want anyone to see so he’ll keep it to himself’

‘Pictures of what?’ He asked with a laugh and you had to bite back a smile as you pictured them in your head.

‘Let’s say they involve fluffy handcuffs and rabbit ears. Not worn by me though’

‘Ah okay’ he chuckled, face nestling down in your neck again and you couldn’t get over how cute he was or how much comfort his touch bought you and you couldn’t help yourself from placing a few soft kisses to his hairline. ‘When you’re ready, do you think maybe I could take you out?’ He asked quietly, that shy tone lace throughout his voice again and your heart squeezed at the way he was still nervous around you.

‘How does next Tuesday sound?’

‘I’m serious’ he laughed. ‘I’m happy to wait for you, you know that right? Cause yeah this was fun and whatever but i do actually care about you. I know this is probably all new and a bit weird for you so I’m happy to wait or we can hang out a bit more and see what happens?’ He offered and you felt warm at his kind and considerate he was.

‘I’d like that’

‘Really?’ He asked, his voice sounding shocked before he leant up to look at you.

‘Yeah, I mean I’m not blind Mason. I’ve always thought you were handsome and a nice person and I get why you were a little shy with me now. If anything you’re probably way too good for me-‘

‘Stop that’ he huffed, ticking your side as he looked at you with a pout. ‘I don’t like it when you say stuff like that about yourself’

‘Sorry’ you whispered, but his face softened instantly.

‘Just give me some time, yeah? I promise I’ll show you that you’re more than enough, Not just for me but for anyone. I’ve never done anything like this before, you know? Like swooped right but I just don’t wanna miss this opportunity when I know I could make you so happy’

His words made your eyes fill with tears. Never had anyone wanted to fight for you like this so you gently pulled him back down to you so you could place a gentle kiss to his lips. Feeling him smile against you as he deepened it but he was pulling back soon after. Not wanting to push things too far.

‘I might need a little time too. But I think we can make this work’ you told him softly and the reassuring smile he gave you melted your insides. ‘Will you stay tonight?’

‘Are you sure?’ He asked, dropping his forehead on yours but you knew you couldn’t be without him now so you nodded lightly. Nose brushing up against his gently before he planted a quick heavy kiss on your lips.

‘Please. I don’t want you to go’

‘Okay’ he smiled. ‘I’m all yours’

Thank you so much for reading 🩷 I really hope you’d enjoyed it and I’d love to know what you thought 😘

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sakiofwaterdeep · 19 days ago

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Heyy! (⁠づ⁠｡⁠◕⁠‿⁠‿⁠◕⁠｡⁠)⁠づ

I just read your Astarion fic and it's great! It's only one, though.. and I'm hungry for more.. MORE, I SAY! MORE! ♡⁠(⁠˃͈⁠ ⁠દ⁠ ⁠˂͈⁠ ⁠༶⁠ ⁠)

Can you do Astarion with a soft and gentle fem/gn Tav please? •́⁠ ⁠ ⁠‿⁠ ⁠,⁠•̀ Like, imagine having a soft and gentle Tav and because of this, Astarion can be a teeny bit sass and mean to her.. IT'S JUST LIKE YOUR FIRST ASTARION FIC! I'M KINDA IN LOVE WITH IT ʕ⁠´⁠•⁠ ⁠ᴥ⁠•̥⁠`⁠ʔ.. but what if the tadpole gave him insight of Tav's life.. and he be like, "oh dang.." ಠ⁠益⁠ಠ

SORRY, IF IT'S KINDA REDUNDANT! IT COULD BE JUST A PART 2 OF YOUR FIRST ASTARION FIC ༼⁠;⁠´⁠༎ຶ⁠ ⁠۝ ⁠༎ຶ⁠༽

ur wish is my command <3

(tw - hints to sad backstory )

the campfire crackles and pops, lighting up the camp as everyone sits by themselves, doing their own things. well, apart from astarion - he's completely putting all his focus into looking at you.

currently you're sat with scratch, laughing as the dog playfights with you. astarions eyes are staring into you, he's trying to figure you out. he's trying to figure out how no matter what you are always kind to others, to random strangers and most of all to him - even after the things he's told you that he has done.

earlier that day you had a complete injured stranger you had found by a tree. fixed him up as best as you could, and took him back to his home. of course, astarion had rolled his eyes and asked "why you are wasting time when we could be on the way to baldurs gate right now?" but you ignored his sass and helped this stranger.

scratch lifts his head from your touch and looks up at astarion who's still staring at you, to which you follow scratch's gaze. astarion is quick and swift, quickly looking down at his book before you had met his gaze but you already know.

"go on boy" you say, throwing his ball to shadowheart, "go get"

scratch runs off with a happy bark as you stand up form your kneeling position, striding over to astarion with a small smirk on your lips, "you were staring"

"i was not staring darling, dont flatter yourself" he lies through his teeth, pretending to read his book, turning the page. you notice he looks - annoyed? at you?

putting your hand on his book, you close it shut and gently take it from him, to which he feigns a exasperated sigh and looks up at you, "yes, my dear?" his 'my, dear' sounding sarcastic but his sarcasm doesn't bother you.

"whats bothering you as something clearly is, and i think that something is me, so speak, please" you say gently - gently. you're always gentle, and why? for what?

"its just-" astarion pauses, letting another sigh, "you're always too nice, too sweet, i dont understand, what for?"

you pause for a moment, biting your lip before looking back into astarions eyes. using the tadpole, opening a way for astarion to look into your mind you speak, "...connect to mind"

and astarion hesitates for a moment, but the look you're giving him lets him know its alright. he connects with your tadpole and slowly the reason upon your politeness and kindness towards anybody reveals itself to him. horrible things happened to you, on parr with his history of cazador.

severing the connection, astarion shakes his head lightly to get back in the moment. his face has fallen into a sadder expression yet his eyes softer looking at you. "i-.." for once, he has no words.

yet there you after, even after revealing the true horrors of your past, your face is kind and your eyes are gentle, "its alright" your voice soft.

"i...had no idea" astarion says, his voice low, he's reflecting on his actions, you can tell "thank you. thank you for showing me"

"yeah, its alright. i just, dont want to treat people the way i was treated" your voice is soft, and quiet but it's evident you're a bit upset, astarion is quick to catch onto that.

and it's not like you and astarion haven't hugged once or twice before, infact the two of you had done heavier stuff than that not long ago, but feeling his arms wrap around your waist before you have any chance to say or move is surprising, but nonetheless, welcoming.

a smile graces your lips, your body flushes with a warm happiness, arms quick to wrap around his neck holding him in return.

"but, seriously darling, we do not need to stop for every person you see on the side of the road" he quips, his usual sassiness coming back to which you chuckle in response.

"no" astarion can't fight the small smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

#astarion imagine #astarion x reader #astarion #bg3 imagine #bg3 x reader #bg3

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theemporium · 2 years ago

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could you do a stiles x siren reader where they are studying but end up having sex and once they finish the reader is a bit scared because she thinks stiles only had sex with her because of how alluring she is but turns out that he genuinely likes her because she’s a good person! being a siren is a plus in his book 😘😘

“When will I ever need this in my life?”

Stiles lifted his head from his book, peeking at the page you were currently staring at and let out a snort. “Probably never.”

“So why do I have to learn it?” you whined, head falling to rest on the textbook that was starting to become the cause of your headache.

You had been struggling with a few of your classes. In between dealing with splitting time between being on land and in water, helping fight whatever supernatural problem had lingered into Beacon Hills and getting a somewhat normal sleep schedule—it had been hard to keep up with classes, let alone do well in them.

Stiles had been kind enough to offer some help, thus leading to the odd studying sessions you two planned in between your hectic schedules. But it still felt a bit redundant to learn how to calculate the volume of a cone when you had just spent the night before stopping a sacrificial cult take over Beacon Hills.

“The unfortunate way of the world,” Stiles said with a sigh before reaching for the textbook you were using as a pillow, and instead throwing it on the floor beside his own stuff. “Let’s take a break.”

“I need a nap,” you grumbled, words slightly muffled before you turned your head to look at the boy. Your eyes widened a little when you realised how close he was.

“A nap sounds good to me,” he murmured with a soft smile.

“I thought you’d be too restless for a nap,” you teased lightly.

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Funny one.”

“I’m hilarious, I know,” you grinned back, only for your smile to damper slightly when he reached out to push some hair behind your ear. You could practically feel your cheeks burning.

“You can take a nap if you want to,” he said in a soft voice. “I’ll just find something else to do in the meantime.” And you hated the way his sincerity choked you, making your chest feel warm and tight all at once.

You surprised yourself when you leaned forward, pressing your lips against his for a split few seconds before you pulled away, your brain seeming to catch up with you. “I’m so sorry–”

Stiles didn’t give you a chance to continue before he was kissing you again, a lot more sure and passionate than yours had been and you couldn’t help but sink into the kiss. You didn’t even fight him as he rolled you onto your back, crawling on top of you as his hands began to wander under the fabric of the hoodie you had been wearing.

But there was a voice in the back of your head, screaming and yelling and ruining the feeling of his fingers sliding along your sides.

“Stiles, wait,” you whispered against his lips, eyes closed when the boy pulled away.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he murmured, eyebrows furrowed in concern as his hand gently cupped your cheek.

“I—” but you paused, unsure how to even say the words screaming in your head. Because you knew how this went, you knew that nobody was able to resist the pull of the allure and even if you didn’t mean to use it, it happened.

You knew that the second the deed was done, he would be snapped out of it and you didn’t think you could handle Stiles being pissed at you for being caught in the allure.

“We shouldn’t,” you whispered, unable to bring yourself to look at him. “You’ll regret it.”

Stiles frowned. “Why would I?”

“It’s the allure, Stiles,” you sighed as you finally glanced up at him. “It’s making you want to do things you might not realise you don’t want to do.”

Stiles blinked before a smile grew on his face, unable to hold back the laugh that was threatening to escape. “Yeah, because the three year crush I have on you has nothing to do with it.”

Your eyes widened. “What?”

“Baby, trust me when I say, doing this—” he paused as he gestured between you two. “Has nothing to do with your powers or you being a siren, I promise.”

“Stiles—”

“It’s got everything to do with the fact I think you’re beautiful inside and out,” he murmured shyly as he flashed you a smile. “And that I’ve been practically obsessed with you for ages. Ask anyone really, especially Scott. He would tell you just how—”

You leaned up to press your lips against his, smiling as the boy quickly melted into the kiss.

“You like me for me?” you whispered against his lips.

“I like you for you, baby,” he whispered back.

You smiled against his lips before pushing him to sit up, giving yourself the space you needed to pull your hoodie over your head with your t-shirt quickly following. You laid there, sprawled across his bed with just your shorts and bra on, and it took everything in his power to not come there and then.

“Shit,” he hissed out. “This is way better than my dreams. Like, way way better.”

You raised your brows. “You dream about me, Stilinski?”

“All the time.”

“And what did you do to me in those dreams?” you asked as you trailed your fingers along the hem of his shirt, tugging on it when you wanted him to take it off and he quickly followed the demand.

“I, uh,” Stiles’ cheeks burned hot. “Well, I…uh…”

“Show me, Stiles,” you whispered as you sat up, pressing soft kisses along his bare chest. “Show me what you did in your fantasies.”

“Fuck,” he groaned under his breath.

#stiles stilinski #teen wolf #stiles stilinksi x reader #stiles stilinski x you #stiles stilinski x y/n #stiles stilinski one shot #stiles stilinski smut #stiles stilinski fic #teen wolf x reader #teen wolf x you #teen wolf x y/n #teen wolf one shot #teen wolf fic #teen wolf smut

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forecast0ctopus · 9 months ago

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Any advice on drawing McCoy? I’m not used to drawing ancient wrinkley bastards (affectionate) and it’s surprisingly tough v-v

FOR SURE lmao i made. a diagram. just a warning that i am going to be irritating and long winded because u just hit a topic i really like sorry lmao

so first off i did some traces just to show whats there vs redraws to show my interpretation

ive said this on other asks but again jsyk, tracing isnt bad!! its a tool. theres some stuff with intellectual property and whatnot but using tracing to study shapes and forms is a really valuable practice.

also just taking some time to learn facial structures and anatomy is super useful, reading what bones and muscles are where and how they interact with one another. taking this info and staring in the mirror and moving your face around and thinking about it. just really furthers understanding of how the face works. trying to sound normal about this but i love anatomy and motion and physics and whatever

anyways im going to go through all the numbered points so there's no confusion. 1. forehead lines - self explanatory. more prominent when brows are raised 2. crows feet - at the outer corners of the eyes, more prominent when smiling or squinting 3. nasolabial folds - the folds that go from the corners of the nose to the corners of the mouth. more prominent when the mouth is wide, like smiling 4. brow furrow - self explanatory, most prominent when brows are furrowed. mccoy tends to have two right next to his eyebrows, kirk has one in the middle. everyones face works different lmao 5. chin crease - caused by how the chin and lower lip interact. 6. nasojugal groove - start from the inner corners of the eye and can extent over the cheeks. everyone has these and idk why people dont like them i think theyre really cool!!!! but Society. i guess. :/ 7. eye bags - caused by the skin sagging beneath the eyes. mccoy isnt even that old in tos i think hes meant to be mid 40s by the end of the 5 year mission, hes just got really prominent eye bags lmao 8. idk what the name is for these, but when the mouth is wide and pushes the skin to the sides, these folds sometimes form outside of the nasolabial folds 9. philtrum - the groove above the upper lip. i dont usually draw this but mccoy's struck me as prominent enough that i usually draw it on him 10. masseter - the muscle that moves the jaw up and down. its a pretty rugged muscle and while i wouldnt say mccoy's is especially prominent, it kind of extends that nasojugal groove from certain angles/positions 11. orbicularis oris - mouth muscle, usually easier to see when lips are pursed or frowns are pulled. mccoy's is pretty prominent from 3/4ths or side, his mouth tends to protrude in profile 12. this isnt a muscle but more of a line defining the planes of the face, but since i drew it i felt i should explain lmao

a few points:

im an animator i tend to exaggerate and emphasize certain things so i usually make him more square.

i like to combine eyebags and crows feet for brevity/flow, same with nasojugal grooves, eyebags, and masseter lines. my approach is always subject to change based on pose, expression, reference image, etc.

i take out details that i deem redundant or cluttering and keep what details i need to make things feel Right

all this info is applicable to any character of any age, its just in how you apply it and facial proportions that willl change how old a character is perceived to be

there's a lot more with drawing a Character rather than an Actor, just because the features are there doesnt necessarily mean things will feel correct? its very much in the mannerisms and poses and expressions

i only went over my approach to his likeness but not really body type or posing or anything idk if u want that i could always try to answer that later haha

_______________

anyways all that info kind of exists nebulously in my brain while i draw its not like im sitting there thinking Must Draw. Nasolabial Fold...... i jsut do what feels right with the visual info i have. also i love specificity in faces.... i dont like to be a hater but when every character is drawn the same it pisses me off a little lmao. so

also dont take my word as The Only Way to do anything i just draw how i like to draw and no one should feel like these are things that Must be done to be a good artist or anything do whatever the hell u wanna do

#anyways my apologies that was. a lot #it will happen again if asked of me.#anon #ask #everyone has this stuff going on with their face and its really cool but capitalism and the beauty industry and whatnot #have been rotting peoples brains since the moment they came to be #the more u look at and appreciate how ur skin an muscles and bones interact with one another the more fine u are with your own face #trust me #because its really cool. like mechanically and stuff #idk if its like theraputic or something but maybe it is or maybe i think about it all way too much #how i draw #ive got some other similar things under that tag i think pertaining to merlin but still similar info

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flavor-of-the-week-writing · 1 year ago

Text

Coffee and Regret • Lip Gallagher

Pairing: Lip Gallagher x Reader

Tags: Angst, reference to past relationship

Notes: References Season 8 Episode 12. Does anyone even still write for this? I don’t know, I just started rewatching Shameless and this poor baby…

- - - - - - -

“So… you slept with her?” You pinch the bridge of your nose, eyes shut tight as you struggle to adjust to the sudden brightness of the overhead kitchen light. Lip sinks down in his chair, his head held in his hands, elbows propped up on the island.

“Yeah.”

“And she told you she loved you?” You shake your head a little, trying to clear some of the fuzziness from your tired mind.

“Yep.” His fingers tighten in the curly locks. The coffee pot began making the familiar and comforting bubbling sound as the sweet scent of caffeine began filling the kitchen.

“And you said it back?”

“Yep.”

“But you don’t?” You grabbed two mugs out of the cabinet, setting them on the counter with a soft ‘clink’.

- - - - - - -

“No. Maybe. I… I don’t know,” Lip sighed, defeat clear on his features. You gave him a sort of crooked half-smile, the kind you only ever gave him when it was obvious he fucked up but you didn’t wanna say it. You yawned as you filled the mugs with coffee, taking in his exhausted expression.

“Huh…”

You slid a cup of coffee over to him, taking a seat on your own stool next to his and taking a long drink of the bitter-sweet liquid.

“Huh?” Lip repeated, mocking the sound. “This is the part where you say something, I don’t know… helpful?”

“I don’t know what to say,” you defended yourself quickly. “Sounds like a mess.”

“Wow.” Lip raises his upper lip in a kind of snarl, his tone becoming sharper. “Thanks for the observation, captain fuckin’ obvious.”

“Hey, don’t be an asshole to me. I told you not to get involved.” You sit back in your chair, the mug held tightly in your palms.

“Yeah, well…” Lip rolls his eyes, the knuckles of his balled up fist hitting softly on the counter as he thinks. “I got involved, anyway.”

“And that’s not my problem. Sierra fucks up your head and you know that.” You regret the statement as soon as you say it, knowing it’s always been a sensitive topic. Lips eyes snap up to you, narrowing slightly.

“It’s not her fault.”

“Look, I’m not blaming her,” you shrug, folding your arms across your chest. “I’m just saying when you’re around her you lose your shit.”

“I didn’t lose my shit!” His tone is harsh, snapping the words in an icy venom. You recoil slightly with a sarcastic scoff.

“Nah, you’re obviously cool, Lip. That’s why you’re in my kitchen at,” you pause to look at the clock on the microwave, “3:42am.”

Lip deflates even further, instantly regretting his tone. He runs his hand harshly across his face.

“I’m sorry, ok?” His voice softens, sad blue eyes avoiding your gaze. “I just… I didn’t know what to do and it was either come here or a bar.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you picked here.” You hesitate for a moment, sighing finally when you decides to just be honest. “You want my opinion?”

Lip nods - barely, but it’s there.

“If you loved her, like… really, truly loved her… you wouldn’t be questioning it.”

Deep down he knows you’re right. Guilt bubbles up in his chest and he has to swallow it down before he starts crying right there.

“I don’t wanna hurt her.” His voice is quiet. Weak, almost. You slide your stool closer to him, trying to offer some sort of comfort in your presence.

“I know you don’t,” you nod softly and place one hand on his back, the other wrapped around his bicep in a form of side-hug. “But not being honest with her is going to hurt more in the long run.”

Silence hangs thick in the air as he contemplates your words.

“I want a fuckin’ drink,” Lip laughs softly, an almost self-deprecating quality to it. He knows it must sound redundant at this point, how many times he’s shown up in your kitchen, confiding in you just how much he wants to drink and forget his problems.

“How about some creamer in your coffee?”

He snorts softly at the suggestion but nods.

“Yeah. Ok.” Lip pushes his mug closer to you, watching the little splashes of creamer and the swirls of the coffee. He sighs deeply, running his hand roughly through his hair. “Shit was never this complicated with you.”

“Yes it was,” you scoff and raise a brow at him. “You have a terrible memory if you think it wasn’t complicated with us.”

#lip Gallagher #lip Gallagher x reader #lip Gallagher x you #lip Gallagher x oc #shameless #lip Gallagher fan fiction #lip Gallagher angst #lip Gallagher oneshot #lip Gallagher blurb #lip Gallagher fanfic #shameless fan fiction #shameless fanfic #shameless angst #shameless oneshot

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insanityclause · 6 months ago

Text

“It must have been in about 1979, I was in New York on holiday. I was sitting up with a friend, and we were both stoned as owls.” Jane Wymark was retelling her brush with a piece of theatre history. She recalled the sound of a telephone cutting through the sour, rising smoke. Wymark answered. Distant and absurd on the other end of the line, a telegram message from her mother. “It said something like: ‘Wonderful job. Hamlet, please come home.’”

After several minutes of laughter, it occurred to Wymark that the call might not be a joke. “So I rung my mother up, and said ‘I’m really sorry if I’m waking you up in the middle of the night for no reason, but is this real?’ And she said, ‘Yes, come home right now, because they want you to play Ophelia.’”

Wymark was being parachuted into a production of Hamlet that was being talked about as among the best of the century. Derek Jacobi, a Shakespearean actor then in his forties and recently made famous by his star turn as the Roman emperor in the television series I, Claudius, was in the title role. In some quarters, Jacobi’s poetic, volatile performance was being talked about as the Hamlet of his generation.

A film of the production would be broadcast in America and viewed by more people at once than any in history. When The New York Times asked Jacobi how he felt knowing that a generation of viewers would come to consider his interpretation definitive, he replied: “That way lies madness.”

One night, Wymark recalled, the cast were taking their bows in the furnacelike auditorium. “By the time we got to the end of the show we were pouring sweat,” she said. “Well I wasn’t, because I’d been dead for a while, but Derek and the guy playing Laertes were just sopping. We’d done all the usual curtain calls and everything, and then Peter O’Toole comes wavering on to the stage.”

O’Toole, then almost 50 and skeletal-gaunt, was carrying in his hands a little red book. As the audience hushed he explained that the book was given to the actor who was considered the definitive Hamlet of his generation. When O’Toole had played the part in 1963, the actor Michael Redgrave had given him the book. Redgrave had been given it by someone else, a great actor of the previous generation, and now O’Toole was passing it on to Jacobi, who in turn could give it to whomever he pleased.

The notion that each generation has its definitive Hamlet is a critical will-o’-the-wisp that has dogged the play almost since it was written. The Edwardian essayist Max Beerbohm called Shakespeare’s most famous part “a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”, but only one actor in thousands gets to “give” his or her Hamlet in a professional production. “Everyone — great, good, bad or indifferent — wants to play Hamlet,” the actor Christopher Plummer once said.

Why? The question feels redundant. If you are someone who needs to perform, you are someone who needs to perform Hamlet. In Withnail and I, the 1987 cult comedy film about actors and their ambitions, the bloated, fey, lecherous character known as Uncle Monty has a short speech on the subject: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”

Earlier this year, I set out to find the red book.

As a trophy, a tradition, a secret succession, it seemed to embody some of the most romantic ideas about the part. I felt that in mapping its passage from player to player, I could trace a shadow history of the thing that has been driving the whole theatrical world for centuries: ambition.

This is what brought me to ask the retired Wymark about her encounter with the book. And this is how I eventually came to be standing outside a rambling, gabled cottage in north London, uncertain about whether to ring the bell until a vast Shakespearean sneeze told me I was at the right place. The door opened and I shook hands with a neat, elderly man who looked just like Derek Jacobi. The living room, decorated with antique furniture and hung with flower paintings, left an impression of a precisely chosen life. I said that I wanted to ask him about a red, leather-bound book, handed down from actor to actor, that had passed through his hands decades ago. I said he might be the oldest living actor to have held it in his hands. He furrowed an alpine brow and fixed his pale blue eyes on a tiny point just past my left eye. “Oh God,” he moaned, in an agony of remembrance. “It was a little copy of Hamlet . . . ”

Of course, there is no definitive Hamlet. This is true, and so obviously true that people have been saying it for hundreds of years. “There is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.” This is true! Hamlet is sour, obedient, suicidal, sarcastic, self-indulgent, flip and outright murderous before the end of his second scene. Modern scholarship has been wincingly keen to stress the heterogeneity of possible responses. As I once heard a professor say in a university seminar, should we be speaking of Hamlets, rather than Hamlet?

Perhaps. But we should also be honest: that sucks and we hate it. We also can’t ignore the genealogy of great Hamlets that exists, stretching all the way back to Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s star performer and business partner, for whom the role was written. That the character and the play are both radically unstable and look totally different in different hands seems to have made us more eager to pinpoint a single actor’s performance as the one. Producers, theatre managers, actors and journalists have connived to reinforce that idea.

Hamlet does offer an actor a scope and centrality that no other part does. “It’s the great personality role in Shakespeare,” Jacobi explained when we were sitting down, his hands conducting the silence around him as he spoke. He had settled in a winged leopard-print armchair, like a portrait of himself. On the side table was an Olivier Award, a small bronze sculpture of the great Laurence Olivier himself, the man who won both Best Actor and Best Picture for his 1948 film of Hamlet, and then launched the National Theatre in 1963 with a production of the play. “You use much more of your own personality as Hamlet,” Jacobi said, “rather than becoming Hamlet by going out and acquiring things. . . Hamlet will look how the actor looks, sound how he sounds, move how he moves. You play yourself as Hamlet.”

Jacobi first came to prominence as a teenage Hamlet, in an eye-catchingly serious schoolboy production at the Edinburgh festival fringe. In his early twenties he joined the germinal National Theatre and played opposite O’Toole’s Hamlet as Laertes. In his forties, he was given the red book by O’Toole, filmed in the role and toured the world. He was sworn to revenge under sheets of pelting rain outside the real Elsinore castle in Denmark. He soliloquised and played mad by the Egyptian Sphinx as the sun set.

A particular challenge of playing the part, Jacobi told me, is delivering lines so famous they risk breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief. In his production, the second act began with Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Unusually, it was played as a speech delivered to Ophelia, rather than on an empty stage. In Sydney, at the end of the tour, Jacobi was waiting nervously in the wings. “I thought, ‘This is probably the most famous line in all drama. What if I forgot it? What if I went on and my mind went blank?’ And I went on, and I started . . .

“To be, or not to be, that is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or–

Or–

Or–”

Blinded to the astonishment of a thousand spectators by the force of the footlights, Jacobi realised he’d dried. Dried completely. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten the words. It was like he’d never known them. An entire minute of silence passed, until he was audibly given his line by Ophelia. Somehow, he got through the performance and the rest of the run. Afterwards, Jacobi didn’t go on stage again for two years. When I mentioned the incident, his eyes turned tight and hooded. He asked to talk about something else. Sensing my cue, I returned to the red book.

“Oh God. Rich!” he called into the next room. “Who did I give the book to?”

“You gave it to Ken Branagh,” called Richard Clifford, Jacobi’s partner, from offstage.

“Ken! I gave it to Ken,” said Jacobi. Then, calling back: “Who did Ken give the book to?”

“Tom Hiddleston!”

“Tom! He gave it to Tom.”

I asked how he had received the book himself and he went back into the trance of remembrance. “Now, I was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. And at the curtain call one night, Peter O’Toole came on to the stage with this book and gave it to me. And he had originally been given it by . . . Oh . . . ” He trailed off, unable to remember Redgrave.

“Oh!” cried Clifford from the kitchen.

“Oh!” cried Jacobi in the living room.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson. That was the name of the first owner of the red book. Forbes-Robertson was a legendary Victorian actor who played Hamlet into his sixties. The book itself was a Temple Shakespeare, a handsome reader’s edition of the play printed around the turn of the century and bound in red leather. He probably bought it in a West End bookshop, pacing around between rehearsals. Or so I’m told by Russell Jackson, an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham. “It would have been instantly recognisable,” he told me. “You can hold it more or less in the palm of your hand.”

In 1996, Jackson was working as a script consultant on a film of Hamlet directed by Branagh, who was then in the middle of a hurtling, flame-tipped ascent to near-unprecedented eminence among Shakespearean actors. As a leading man who had run his own theatre company and could direct and star in internationally released film adaptations of the plays, there was no one to compare him to but Olivier. He was now at work on a princely four-hour fantasia, shot amid fake fallen snow at Blenheim Palace with himself in the starring role.

He had cast his old hero, Jacobi, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle Claudius. On his last day of shooting, after the traditional applause that follows a final take, Jacobi asked for silence. Jackson kept a diary at the time: “[Jacobi] holds up a red-bound copy of the play that successive actors have passed on to each other, with the condition that the recipient should give it in turn to the finest Hamlet of the next generation. It has come from Forbes-Robertson, a great Hamlet at the turn of the century, to Derek, via Henry Ainley, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole and others. Now he gives it to Ken.”

Hamlet had been a pivotal document in Branagh’s life. As a teenager in 1977, he had seen Jacobi play the role at the New Theatre in Oxford. In his memoir, he remembers it as one of the moments that inspired him to become an actor. “I didn’t understand it at all, but I was amazed by the power of it because it seemed to be affecting my body. I got the shakes at times.”

Two years later, Branagh went to interview Jacobi, who was then playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. “I got a note from someone called Ken Branagh, saying, could he interview me for Rada’s magazine?” Jacobi told me, referring to the prestigious London acting school Branagh attended. “He was a personable young man. He asked good questions. As he left, he said: ‘I’m going to be playing Hamlet one day, and you’re going to be in it.’”

“Ken,” Jacobi added with a smile, “wasn’t slow in coming forward.”

It was no secret that Branagh had set his sights on matching, even reanimating, Olivier’s career. With his movie of Hamlet, he was threatening to run away with the crown. But while the film won plaudits from some critics, it made back only around a quarter of its budget, and Branagh was nominated only for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, a curiously backhanded compliment for a Hamlet that advertised itself as the complete text.

Branagh held on to the book for more than 20 years, passing over several acclaimed Hamlets (David Tennant’s agonised spectre foremost among them) in that time. “I took special pains to make sure it was preserved,” said Branagh, who was reached with written questions via an agent and an aide during the shooting of his new film. “I felt the book was something rather treasured and private, and not something that you in any way crowed about. You were a temporary custodian.” In 2017, he finally handed the red book on to the actor sometimes thought of as his protégé, Hiddleston.

So there it was. Redgrave to O’Toole to Jacobi to Branagh to Hiddleston. But still, something wasn’t adding up. I began desperately ringing round old actors asking for snippets of information about the red book, and started reciting the list of names from Jackson’s diary entry: Forbes-Robertson, Ainley, Redgrave, O’Toole, Jacobi, among others. Every time I read the list, everyone said the same thing. Where the hell is Olivier?

Here is a story about Laurence Olivier. Once upon a time, in the early 1800s, there was a great Shakespearean actor called Edmund Kean. He was the Hamlet of the Romantics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that watching him was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Kean was also renowned for playing Shakespeare’s other great soliloquist, Richard III. As the hunchbacked villain, Kean would rage and swagger and strut about, swishing a great sword in his hand. That sword was passed to William Chippendale, a member of Kean’s company. Chippendale gave it to an actor called Henry Irving, who gave it to the great Ellen Terry who, we understand, gave it to her great nephew. His name was John Gielgud. Gielgud gave the sword to his contemporary, Olivier, telling him to pass it on to the great actor of the next generation. And Olivier kept it.

He is rumoured to have been buried with it. Certainly, the sword has not been seen since his death. (One of the last people to see it was Jacobi, who confirmed to me that Olivier still had it as a very old man.) Is Olivier really lying in his grave with no tongue between his teeth and Kean’s sword beside him? If he is, it feels like a little parable about the sharp, inward points of ambition. Here was a man who got everything and more from a life in the theatre. But he couldn’t bear to part with a prop sword.

The question of why Olivier never received the book becomes more pressing when you read the letters he received playing Hamlet from the Edwardian actor Henry Ainley, the book’s second owner. On opening night, January 5 1937, Ainley telegrammed Olivier in his dressing room: “THE READINESS IS ALL.” Later that night he wrote: “You, my sweet, are the Mecca . . . Pay no heed to the critics, they do not know. You are playing Hamlet; therefore you are a king [ . . . ] You rank, now among the great.”

Ainley’s hornily free-associating letters seem to imply a physical affair at times. “Larry darling, I have been tossing (now now) about at night thinking of you,” he writes in one of the letters, currently kept by the British Library.

“Well, you know what you did. I can’t walk [ . . . ] And the child has your eyes.” Yet it is Olivier’s fame that Ainley most obviously covets. “Soon you will be like [me],” he writes in another. “Your public, your following all gone, dear old boy! The harlequinade. We do not endure!” There is no mention in their correspondence of the red book. Whether Ainley had already given the book away, or felt compelled to hang on to it, or simply had forgotten it, remains a matter of speculation.

It’s not the only agonising gap in the archive. In 1963, an older Olivier cast Peter O’Toole in the production of Hamlet that would open the National Theatre. O’Toole had already played a wild, revelatory Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958, in which he famously climbed the proscenium arch mid-performance. It was an interpretation that harnessed the young actor’s modernity. “He’s a lean, lank, individualist Teddy Boy!” one reviewer enthused.

But in 1963, Olivier had other ideas. “It was very strange,” remembers Siân Phillips, O’Toole’s then wife, now aged 91. “Larry [Olivier] had talked him into this terrible costume. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a Peter Pan collar and clean, beautifully cut dyed blond hair.”

Phillips thought Olivier seemed to want to trim the edges off her husband. “Larry had this new kind of concept of a very tidy Hamlet, which was the opposite of what [O’Toole] did best. But he had such regard for Larry, who was flattering him enormously. He just did everything asked of him.” Phillips had put her own starry career on hold to let O’Toole have the spotlight. She did his filing and kept track of gifts he had been given, making sure people were thanked, which was why she found it strange that she’d never heard of the red book.

Together, we wondered if the unhappy production had made it a sore point for her husband. “The thought did cross my mind once or twice that Olivier might be trying to sabotage him,” she said. “But how could he want to do that on the opening night of the National Theatre?” On the other end of the phone, I thought of Kean’s sword.

Perhaps this is harsh. Perhaps we can understand the desire to have and hold on to a physical token of fame, strength, adulation, applause, youth — the things that slip away from even the greatest artists. All performers live in fear of unemployment and redundancy, and even the successful ones are loved, fiercely and temporarily, for being someone they’re not. “Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing,” wrote William Hazlitt, the English essayist.

“British theatre has traditionally privileged innovation,” the Shakespearean scholar Michael Dobson told me. In France, he explained, you could see Phèdre performed with the same gestures, the same intonation, for hundreds of years. “The British are always inventing new things, like gas lighting and ways of doing ghosts with mirrors. It’s never the old, boring Hamlet your parents used to like. It’s always got this young, original, absolutely real actor in it, instead of those stylised old geezers.”

In which case, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about great actors who fell from fashion. It was Burbage who first delivered Hamlet’s acting advice to the players: “O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

Until the modern day, actors didn’t play big roles just once or twice in their careers, in a long run of performances. They performed them frequently. Even in Shakespeare’s time, actors became associated with certain parts in the minds of spectators. Burbage died in March 1619, and the funeral baked meats were hardly cold when he was replaced by another actor, Joseph Taylor.

An unreliable but enticing story has it that Burbage taught Taylor, and Taylor taught the next great Hamlet, Thomas Betterton. Betterton was the Hamlet of Restoration theatre, among the first to play opposite women. Confronting his father’s ghost, Betterton’s Hamlet could “turn his colour”, as though his face had drained of blood with fright. Betterton made his face “pale as his neck cloth”.

Betterton died in 1710, immortality assured. Within a few decades his reputation had been all but vaporised by the greatest actor of the century, David Garrick. Garrick was almost a religion among theatregoers. “That young man never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival,” was the poet and critic Alexander Pope’s verdict. Garrick was both a shameless showman and pioneering realist. He played Hamlet in a mechanical fright wig that made his hair stand on end when activated.

Garrick was replaced by John Philip Kemble, a severe and statuesque Hamlet. In the early 19th century, Kemble was outmoded by Kean, whose ascendant star was quickly selling out theatres. “Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got,” wrote Jane Austen, struggling to get seats. Out with the old. Next came Samuel Phelps, the actor-manager who first made a point of performing the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays. He was toppled by Henry Irving, a drawn and gothic actor. Irving was supposedly the inspiration for Dracula; his theatre manager was Bram Stoker.

Enter the melancholic, effeminate figure of Forbes-Robertson, the first owner of our red book. His Hamlet, first performed in 1897 and still being revived into his sixties, was in some ways the last definitive stage performance in this unofficial, highly debatable but surprisingly enduring tradition. “Nothing half so charming,” George Bernard Shaw wrote of his performance, “has been seen by this generation.” Orson Welles described one recording of Forbes-Robertson as the most beautiful Shakespearean verse-speaking he ever heard. You can still listen to it on YouTube, uploaded from an ancient LP.

“The next reference to the actor’s art,” creaks the old voice above the hiss of imperfectly transcribed sound, “is Hamlet’s advice to the players, written, obviously, by an actor who has complete command of his calling.” In a voice ponderous with time but still capable of lightness and precision, he begins the passage in which Hamlet gives notes to a theatrical troupe. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

Forbes-Robertson would have seen more clearly than many of his successors how rapidly the galaxy of theatrical ambition was expanding. He was the first great Hamlet to play the part on film, in a lumpy silent production in 1913. If that film looks stagey and stylised to modern eyes, then looking back at these nested revolutions in realism, it’s also obvious that old actors have always looked that way in the eyes of their successors. Naturalism is just the style each era brings with it.

Hamlet’s advice was itself part of this reach towards the endlessly receding goal of the real. To an Elizabethan audience, the travelling troupe with their heroic verse and stagey couplets would have seemed obviously to belong to a previous generation of players, one playwrights like Shakespeare, and plays such as Hamlet, were making redundant. Hamlet says to the players what the theatre is always saying: be young, be modern, be new.

You can’t ask too much of very famous actors. Basic professionalism demands that they don’t tell you anything too interesting. They live like criminals, travelling under pseudonyms and booking the front seat on aeroplanes. We abhor in their personal lives the basic human latitude we praise in their work. “I am myself indifferent honest yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,” Hamlet says to Ophelia. “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth?”

I had hundreds of questions for Hiddleston, the 43-year-old star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and current holder of the red book. Unfortunately, Hiddleston is not an easy man to reach. As the man who plays Loki in the Marvel series (global gross about $30bn), he has been watched at his craft by an unimaginable number of human eyes. He does his work in green-screen and widescreen settings that would also have been unimaginable to 90 per cent of the people named in this article. Where Burbage played Hamlet without an interval, Hiddleston’s fame is a postmodern mosaic, put together in franchise films with an average shot length of two seconds. Given that he commands multimillion-dollar fees for these acts of cinematic pointillism, you may imagine his time is precious. I was able to reach him by phone for 15 minutes during press week for Loki season 2’s Emmy campaign. “Good morning,” he said, dialling in from Los Angeles. “I mean, sorry, good evening.”

Hiddleston played Hamlet in a fundraiser production for Rada directed by Branagh in 2017. He told me how he had left drama school and joined Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl theatre company, standing out as Cassio in a somewhat legendary modern Othello, in which Ewan McGregor played Iago opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead. Branagh saw the production and persuaded Marvel studios to let him cast this relative unknown in Thor, which then grossed almost half a billion dollars. Afterwards, they sat down for lunch and Branagh suggested Hamlet. “And I said, ‘I would absolutely love to do it with you. What an honour.’”

The production played for three weeks in Rada’s tiny theatre, with tickets that were won by lottery. Among the critics, Michael Billington, Britain’s most decorated theatre writer, was one of the few to have got a seat. “If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury,” Billington wrote in his review. On Saturdays, Hiddleston remembered, there were gala performances for graduates and theatrical somebodies. “I think at the first one almost everybody with the last name ‘Attenborough’ in the UK was in attendance.”

On one of these evenings, a glass was clinked with a spoon. Jacobi began to speak, explaining something about a book that had passed from actor to actor. “And then Ken was at the microphone, explaining that the responsibility of the keeper of the book is that they pass it on to the next generation. And suddenly Ken said, ‘I’d like to present it to Tom.’”

We were 10 minutes into our 15. I looked at my list of questions — on frontispieces, annotations, signatures, printing quirks — about the red book. Hiddleston was in LA. The book was in London. He was not contractually obliged to talk to me, as he was to the other journalists who were waiting on iPhones all over the world. All that was sustaining this conversation was the actor’s private enthusiasm for the kind of acting he is rarely, if ever, able to do anymore.

Hiddleston began to talk at length. He said the gift of playing the part was to be presented with the most beautiful, profound poetry written in English about the question of being alive, of death, of the possibility of spiritual life after death.

An email arrived saying our time was up. “It has the effect of making me feel more alive,” Hiddleston was saying. “Learning and internalising those great soliloquies, and having to perform them, there is no escaping those big questions of what it means to be alive,” he went on, the minutes ticking by. “And actually I find it very reassuring to ask those questions. I find it repetitively reassuring to say those words. Because it actually makes your life mean something.”

#tom hiddleston #kenneth branagh #Derek Jacobi #hamlet #the red book

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pseudoartistpostsstuff · 1 year ago

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Yandere time and hyrule headcannons

I'm not sure if you've seen the hype around sky being in his undershirt and being ✨pretty✨ in the recent update, but could I please request reader fawning over Yan!sky in his undershirt or some general hc's for him?

Thank you both for requesting!

Notes: I wasn't that online on tumblr around that time, so I only saw it now lmao.

Anyway, I did both headcannons and a oneshot, hope you'll like it!

Also, yes, I merged those two requests since headcannons can be piled into the same post.

I'll probably sound redundant in a lot of these, simply because I didn't write this at one go and when I got to it again I may have forgotten that I wrote it before. My memory is not the best, forgive me.

There are more headcannons for Time because he's my favorite, sorry.

I need a master list, seriously.

Edited before sleeping, I'm sleepy and probably messed up one or two paragraphs of this.

The oneshot in question.

TWs: Yanderism, Mentions of food and bad eating habits and a little of my fairy/fae brain rot.

Don't mind grammatical errors, please!

Headcannons for yandere Sky, Time and Hyrule.

Yandere! Lu! Sky x Reader

For starters, Sky is sweet, but he is very manipulative.

Therefore, don't be surprised if you notice you stopped doing many of the things you used to do when you first got through the portal.

Most of the time it's not even bad things!

He might team up with Hyrule and Wild to take care of your main health, like eating habits. If you're a picky eater then expect Sky to slowly transition you into eating a little bit of everything, in no time you'll be eating like Wild does.

Then again, he'll also make sure to get the ingredients to the foods you do eat without struggling, also getting Wild to make a separate meal for you, should you not eat that one specific recipe Wild made for dinner.

You'll probably be getting help from him when it comes to self-care habits as well, like, the max of skin care and hair care you can get at Hyrule. He will make the effort to talk to people who know more about your skin and hair type, those who have it and take care of it well.

But, we can't ignore the genuinely bad things he will try to influence you into doing...

Privacy? Gone.

Not only will he be around you most if not all of the time, but he will also always be paying close attention to you and what you're doing.

So if you believed keeping a journal in your language would help you keep some things to yourself, then think again. The privacy of using your language instead of hyrulean to write in your jornal will soon turn into a mere illusion. Despite being more quiet and seemingly the less imposing of the Links, Sky has already gone, and will keep going through lengths for you, which includes learning the language you use.

Of course he noticed you kept a private journal, and despite you trying to lie about the contents of it, it's only a matter of time until he is skillfully scanning through the pages with his eyes like he's reading his favorite book. Memorizing any and all information he can find about you.

As manipulative as he is, he is also delusional, he doesn't have any idea of what he is doing, he simply doesn't know that what he is doing is wrong on so many levels.

He's not doing anything on purpose, he's just trying to protect you and get you to like him, like a normal guy!! At least, Zelda liked it when he did this with her back then, just how different are you two?

Genuinely, Sky would have a hard time figuring you and your emotions out. You're a human being after all, and he respects that those things are not supposed to be easy to figure out. In fact, he highly respects and appreciates that you're complex.

Not that he'll respect boundaries, nope, no way.

You're a puzzle he's very much looking forward to figuring out. Honestly, the only puzzle he'd ever want to figure out.

So, I'll probably elaborate this later, but the chain as Gods. Sky would be very much a Thor. That means silly blonde lightening man.

Imagine hylians from Sky's era used matching earrings alike engagement rings, like, Sky just randomly inviting you to an overly nice picnic, just to hand you blue earings just like his.

And if you don't have your ears pierced anywhere it'd be even better in his eyes, since he'd just adjust it to be a "normal" ring.

It was actually an engagement ring, but you didn't know that, or any of the other Links, really, since this tradicional custom got lost in time.

Yandere! Lu! Time x Reader

I think pretty much everyone knows Time is a teasing bastard.

Don't get me wrong, he can be pretty mature, but trust me, it's not really common for him to act like that.

Time is used to pretending, he used many different masks to become different races in his journey, that was needed from him at the time, the same way that being the mature one is being needed from him right now.

Just because he is deeply traumatized emotionally and physically from his job as a hero doesn't mean his personality is lost as well.

It didn't change that much since he was a child, not really.

He is addicted to making you flustered, so if you get flustered easily I'm sorry for you.

If making you blush is a challenge then I'm just as sorry for you, because Time isn't quite known for giving up easily.

And he's good at making people embarrassed, too.

The amount of women who were in love with him is everything I need as proof.

But the worst part? He doesn't have bad pick up lines.

Look, Time is a toucher, so yes, his love language is physical touch, that makes sense to me.

That doesn't mean only cuddling, of course, it can mean cuddling and hugging when you're alone, but do expect a few more things.

I was gonna say hand holding in public, especially in crowded places, but you know what? Guiding you by holding the back of your neck is simply easier to him, and a lot more obvious "back off!" to strangers who look at you for far too long.

Also, randomly leaning against you, the two of you may be just walking and suddenly you feel a large mass lightly leaning against your own body, almost making you stumble. you might just be standing in front of the dinner table, reading a recipe book and once again you just feel that familiar presence right behind you, but instead of hugging you from behind he's just there, like he is reading the book along with you.

Remember how you were reading that one recipe book? Well he might give it a try and help you make something in the kitchen just to spend time with you. Like, you're just pouring ingredients in a bowl and he's there "helping" you by wrapping his arm around your waist to give you "emotional support", as he calls it.

He is, in reality, just standing there watching you cook, trying his best to resist the urge to distract you and simply annoy you, because he is still trying to make it seem like he is a mature, grown man, and definitely not one who is eyeing the flour in his reach and thinking about launching a handful of it at you.

You did see his hand slowly reaching for the flour in the corner of your vision. He only stopped once you threatened to scoop out his remaining eye should even a speck of flour hit your face.

Yet, Time is a creative man, flour was only one of his plans.

He's got wandering hands and wandering lips. And he can and will make use of those just to distract you.

And that's how Time became banned from the kitchen when you were the one cooking, only being able to join you for cleaning later.

So yeah, his love language is physical touch, but it is also disturbance.

In that matter, he's not very different from Wind when you two are alone. If you ignore his flirtatious moves, that is. But he's quite different when you two are with the others, especially if you've done, or is doing something to annoy him, then he has to keep up that mature facade of his.

He believes the others won't take him seriously should he reveal his actual personality, so really, when you're around others you'll only get glimpses of it from time to time.

It is mandatory from the Links to be stubborn, but Time takes the cake.

Maybe it is his age, but he will never change his mind, ever. No point in arguing.

So when he is silly, he is silly, but when he is serious he is terrifying, no exaggeration.

The worst part is that older people have a lot of respect in Hyrule, so no matter what he says, his word is law.

Now, don't get me wrong, by now, pet names are just a thing Time always does with you, in a way you barely hear your own name coming from his lips unless he's being really serious about something.

But actual words of affirmation? Not his thing.

He'd much rather be as clingy as glue to you when you're alone.

But, not like Sky's soft, light cuddles. Time Will basically smother you.

Seriously, it may be his sheer muscle mass, but he'll drap himself over you in a way you'll feel yourself surrounded by him.

In fact, the first time he did it you probably almost suffocated.

You'll get used to it eventually, though. Hopefully.

He's pontual and very strict as well, he and Hyrule are probably gonna be bickering in most matters involving you, like, for example, "five more minutes" naps.

Don't even try to trick him, you'll hear stuff like "I was your age once" and shit, the man will act like he's a hundred years old or something.

Then again, he might be, after all, he is older in mind than he is in body.

He was forced to mature quicker and went through a lot of trauma, that, and he also had to go back in time a lot of times.

Now that I think about it, he probably lived for longer than your grandparents. Just saying.

Yandere! Lu! Hyrule x Reader

Don't get him wrong, Hyrule is very much full of love, really. He cares about everyone equally.

Yet, as corny as that is, your name isn't "everyone", you're not anyone, you're you, how could he even think about possibly treating you the same way as he treats everyone else?

You're put on a pedestal, everyone else is treated equally by him, except you, you are treated like you are divine and not mortal like he is.

So you'll feel like a toddler 24/7 around Hyrule, he is not as stubborn as Time, he's just… Persistent.

The other Links will find themselves teasing him for it a lot, even if deep inside they are just the same.

Play nice, walk on the line and you'll have a Hyrule at your beck and call. If you know how to do it right, you will be able to use his babying to your own benefit, because trust me, his persistence can work on the Links much more than yours, after all, they trust him for being another Link.

I feel like he'd also help you keep pets, it may be his fairy nature, but he is just good with animals, especially with forest animals. Be them small or big.

Although he definitely has a soft spot for smaller pets, even more if you're the one asking him to bring along a pet you found.

Surprisingly or not, Hyrule is probably one of the most protective Links if you happen to lean more towards the naive/vulnerable side of the spectrum.

It's a general fairy headcannon of mine, but since fairies take care of forest and the animals there, specially the smaller or more vulnerable types of animals, then it's not new for them to be also quite protective towards humans close to them.

Bonus points if they have those traits.

But then again, you're Hyrule's darling, you may be as strong and independent as a Link yourself, but he'll still see you as in need of his care and attention at all times.

That also may or may not be another reason why Hyrule treats you like a toddler.

So yeah, coddling. Lots of it.

Hyrule is also a fan of small things, trinkets. Natural or shiny... Precious or useless... In his eyes all are treasures.

Treasures you'll find your bags and pockets full of.

He is absolutely a rock, cristal guy.

Imagine, you're just walking to another village, and suddenly Hyrule stops walking for a few moments, just to speed walk towards you again just a bit later, cleaning something he is holding in his hands with the help of his sleeve.

Then he hands you a small, clear rock, grinning.

Better get used to this, it's probably gonna happen at least once every day.

So yeah, love language is gift giving and acts of service.

I feel like he's very awkward with words of affirmation, he didn't spend a lot of time saying or hearing those, after all. Like most of the Links.

#yandere x reader #tw: yandere #yandere linked universe #link x reader #linked universe x reader #yandere link x reader #lu sky #lu sky x reader #lu time #lu time x reader #lu hyrule #lu hyrule x reader #yandere lu sky #yandere lu time #yandere lu hyrule

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