#tashi duncan save me

[kisses4kaia]

something about kissing a pretty girl in the back of a downtown, hole-in-the-wall, parisian jazz bar. maybe she bought you a drink, maybe she charmed you with her cool, relaxed baggy jeans that sat perfectly low on her defined hips, or perhaps it was the lack of makeup on her face—save for a strikingly favoring red lip that enticed you. anyway, the low, moody, lighting enchants her golden brown skin with a dusty, soft glow (she’s talking about politics and you can’t really focus because she has a small pizza sauce stain right above her cupid’s bow that you feel an indomitable urge to taste). somewhere, billie holiday is playing faintly, but her drowsy blues can scarcely be made out over the laughter and buzzy chatter of the purely human setting you found yourself in. she’s beautiful and all smiles and jokes, god, how she makes you laugh.

maybe it’s 3 am by the time she takes you, hand in hand, stumbling down the quiet streets of south france, finding a new endeavor to embark on for the both of you. you’re dog-tired, it occurs to you, but you’re having so much fun with this woman you faintly realize you haven’t learned the name of that you put your exhaustion on the back burner of your mind, to be dealt with some other night. not this one. no, this one is her’s. this night is for the two of you. just tonight.

[jclolz22]

imagine being so dedicated that you print out a polaroid picture of tashi because it goes with your bot idea and is the reason for the bot

[grimsneverendingfuneral]

grimmm HAVE you seen challengers?????

YES I HAVE

i saw it in theatres last friday. i was literally sitting on the edge of my seat the entire time. one of the best movies i've seen in theatres in a while. since then, i've been reading everyone's theories and conjuring up my own analysis.....

i'm actually going to go see it again with another friend tomorrow lol.

i also love tennis now. like, i wanna play tennis, wanna watch tennis. i love tennis. tennis is erotic as fuck.

[unadulteratedloathings]

Good luck, Champ.

[jclolz22]

puhlease don’t even get me started

tashi duncan’s strap would save me.

[tashism]

peak puppy and puppy relations. guys i can’t stop thinking about this

[compress1repress]

part 4 of tashi x reader text au

they are forced to be doubles partners (vaguely enemies to lovers - the enemies part does not last long) with bonus artrick (art is really stupid & patrick is going through the horrors about it)

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

had to add the gif bc it always sends me how aggressive it is 😭 sometimes this is necessary though... as in art's case

[asheepinfrance]

if you haven't gotten sick of seeing me on your timeline, i'm not doing it right. i'm like a challengers fan fiction cold sore! i'm not sure if i like this, but then again, i say this about everything i've ever posted and still make it publically available. i hope it's cute and just yearny (??) enough because what is a challengers fan if not a yearner? i will probably post something again in the next 24 hours maybe less so.. who's ready for a patrick fic? patfic. woah... hope you enjoy and feel free to leave tips and critiques as per usual<3

Societal conventions of platonic relationships are boring, and that’s why you all rejected them. I mean, sure, every time you said that you weren’t dating one of them the response was always “You know you can tell me anything, right?” but seriously! You’re all just very good friends. Best friends, more accurately. So, yes, you helped each other out. That’s what friends are for. Patrick needs a fake girlfriend for one of his parents’ parties? You and Tashi are on it. Art wants a date to some tennis gala? You’re all jumping at the chance. It’s not like it’s hard to fake something like that, because you’re all close already. A kiss on the cheek and a hand on the waist are essentially nothing. You wouldn’t bat an eye if it happened outside of one of those contexts, either. So it’s fine when it does, and it doesn’t make your heart race.

It also never bothered you to admit that they were incredibly beautiful people, because that’s just a conclusion that you can draw by having eyes. Even without your little set up, you’d certainly feel that way. So Tashi’s birthday party, which she’d dragged you all to some club you can’t legally be in for, was fine. It was fine that Tashi was dancing with her arms outstretched above her head like a prayer, slightly offbeat to the timing of the song, and yet still so in place. She’s dancing like she forgot there’s always eyes admiring her, skirt swaying around her long legs, eyes closed like she’d absorb the moment if she concentrated enough. And she looked gorgeous, the way she always did. Which you’re allowed to say, because best friends always support their best friends. And sure, when she opens her eyes and waves at you from her spot on the floor you start giggling despite having had nothing to drink, but it’s because you’re happy for her. It’s extra fine that Patrick soon comes up to join her, large hands to sharp hip bones, and they start swaying like one unit, and they both look lost in one another until suddenly they’re lost in you. You don’t bristle when Art leans into your side and mumbles that someone ‘looks really good, huh?’ and you don’t quite make out if the sentence started with ‘he’ or ‘she’.

It’s fine when Tashi pulls you up to some makeshift platform of a stage for karaoke, screaming the lyrics just a bit too loudly into the microphone, and clinging onto you for dear life. There’s a second mic hanging limply to your right, but it’s been deemed unnecessary because she’d insisted on pulling you close and sharing the one in her hand. From this close, you can smell the perfume she’d chosen for the night, which you note isn’t her signature, and the faint coconut of her shampoo. You can make out two sets of smiling eyes from the same shitty table you’d claimed, nursing drinks in calloused hands that still manage soft touches. 

It’s fine when you get a little solo and you manage to squeak out a few notes, voice thick with nerves and lack of proper use, and feel the way that three people’s worlds have stopped to take in each sound before they pass. They’re committing you singing to memory, and you’re not sure what’s telling you as much, but you know it’s true. It’s fine when the song’s over and Tashi leads you back to the table with a hand on your lower back, and her fingers are so long that your mind drifts without your permission, and your steps become a bit more rigid than they’d usually be. 

It’s fine when you’re pressed between Patrick and Art in the rented limo Patrick had arranged using his parents’ money, and two different hands meet your thigh, and you can just barely feel Patrick’s pinky grazing the hem of your skirt. It’s fine when Art begins feeding you praise like it’s his life’s goal to make you drown in it, because the compliments sound sweeter in his voice, so you can take that sickening butterfly flutter in your ribcage and crush it under the stiletto point of your heel. 

It’s fine when you’re all laying on dew-dampened grass somewhere near Patrick’s apartment, staring up at the sky, and the crowns of your head are all touching, because there’s a need to not acknowledge the obvious, and a deeper need to indulge in it. There’s a voice in the wind that’s rustling Tashi’s hair and creasing Art’s shirt that’s telling you to just give in to yourself. You wonder if it’s only talking to you. It’s fine when you turn to look at Patrick to find he’s already looking at you, and he’s got the wonder in his eyes you see on people gazing into a Van Gogh. He’d take staring at you over any painting in a heartbeat, he’d tell you if you asked. 

It’s fine when you find yourself in Patrick’s bed, goosebumps littered across cold-air-kissed skin, with your back to Tashi’s chest, and she’s cradling your head like it’ll fall off if she doesn’t hold it up herself. You find yourself liking the feeling of Art’s lips scattering feather-light kisses across the inside of your thighs. You lean further back against Tashi when she starts cooing some kind of praise you’re too hazy-minded to make out, but it sounds nice with the inflections of her voice, demanding but soft. You don’t mind watching Patrick’s lips connect with Tashi’s, then with Art’s, because you can focus in on how their bodies melt and their fingers bend. You can pick up on each little click of a broken kiss, and each sigh of a newly formed one. The night’s some kind of haze of warm hands, adoring eyes, and wandering lips with glints of white teeth that you can’t quite put in place. What you can definitively say is that it felt like coming home. It felt like sleeping in your bed for the first time since you’ve been away, and it molds around your shape like you hoped it would. It feels like falling asleep with Tashi’s hair in your face and a pool of Patrick’s drool building atop your stomach and not caring. It feels like getting a kiss goodnight from Art because he’s just as naked and giddy as you are.

It’s fine to admit to yourself that you’re in love when you don’t want to be. Love apparently didn’t care that you wanted a step-by-step plan, a playbook, a set of rules to follow. Love didn’t care that you’d been planning on keeping things simple, because lack of acknowledgement means lack of potential rejection. Love didn’t care because love is like a mother, it knows what’s best for you, even if it’s less than pleasant to sit with. But love was deeply breathing against your neck and snoring a little too loudly. Love was going to wake you up at sunrise to make them all hangover cures, should they need them. Love was going to let you fall asleep and dream about it, just to wake up and realize it’s still there.

[tuesdaygray]

thinking about. the consistent thread in challengers (2024) of wanting your life to be about more than "hitting a ball with a racket."

how tashi is the first character to bring this up and whether or not she means it (she's really only planning to do a year of college) she knows inherently that being well rounded is practical. that she's not from the same place as the country club, tennis academy, daddy's money kids. this should be an unattainable dream for most, but it's hers and she has it and it's terribly ingrained into her life but "what if this doesn't work out?" and then it doesn't. she gets injured and she gets stuck in this loop of the past, in her own potential, in what could have been. when it feels like everyone is counting on you to do and succeed at one thing ("she's going to make her family millionaires"), the one thing that is the framework and catalyst for everything you know, how do you come back from that? her life could now, realistically, become about something else because she actually can't have her dream anymore, but she becomes obsessed, holding on with white knuckles and performing alterations because she can't let it go, until she admits sardonically in a mostly abandoned applebees that her life really has only been about one thing.

and patrick. who challenges tashi's original statement. who has no problem devoting his life to tennis because it's a "good way to avoid having a job." who never had any dreams beyond playing the sport he's always had a knack for, coasting by on natural talent, never having to try. realizing too late that what really made it worth it was tennis as a relationship, not the selfish ego stroke it had been when he was good enough to win tashi's number. and he's stuck in arrested development, just like her. he never grew up, he never let go of the past, of what it felt like to play doubles with his best friend, of what it felt like to watch tashi at the top of her game. but he's painfully aware. he's made his bed and he's tangled in the sheets and he loves it and he hates it and above all else, he misses the way it used to be.

then there's art. whose decision to go to stanford is never questioned because it's unspoken general knowledge that he couldn't have gone pro right away. he never expected to be this big time professional player, he was always just concerned with doing a "really good job." and because of this, art's life is the one that probably should have been about more, the foundation was laid for it. but he's stuck too, a passive actor in a life he chose and was probably never meant to have. the holder of and heir to tashi's and patrick's unrealized dreams. (was it ever his dream?) and after eight years, after attaining it and living it without a real passion for it, he's ready to give it up because, out of the three of them, he wants his life to be about more than "hitting a ball with a racket" because it's "embarrassing to be doing this shit when you're 40." but he's the one who bears the weight of success, alone at the top, where the people he loves can only dream of knocking him off. so shouldn't he be grateful for it?

[zweigsangel]

tashi u are so stronger than me, i wouldn’t have waited even a second and i would have jumped on him

[goodluckchamp]

Catholic!Tashi Duncan

We talk about Catholic Art so much but what about Catholic Tashi? We see her wearing a cross necklace at the party in her blue dress, and she mentions that she never went to boarding school because her parents didn't want her to get with boys like Patrick and Art... it's giving religious parents. Tbh I don't see her as this really religious person but I think it stays with her sometimes. Like, she never really properly prayed until she had to. Until she's lying in the hospital bed, knee wrapped up, hands gripping the sheets. Maybe she did pray then. One that sounds more like bargaining than faith. Did she beg for her knee back? Did she regret getting with Patrick, losing her purity— that this was some sick and twisted punishment from God? Maybe that's when she lost it all, her faith, her love, her tolerance— when she lost her ability to play tennis.

[cowboygideon]

SAVE ME TASHI DUNCAN SAVE MEEEE

[jclolz22]

i belong with you — tashi duncan

tashi duncan x fem!reader word count: 1.4k

author's note: please pretend the last picture isn't two white girls, and i’m sorry if this writing isn’t up to par, because i’ve never really written like this before so the bar is low... also thank you to annie for this idea/request; i love your brain

After an intense match against UCLA and a particularly grueling week filled with practice, practice, and more practice, Tashi was more than happy to get back to her dorm. It’s tough being Stanford’s star tennis player, regardless of how easy she makes it seem. Seeing you there waiting for her made her even happier and grateful that her week was over, so she could finally rest, decompress, and destress with you. “Hey, baby,” you started saying to her as you watched her place her tennis bag down next to her desk. Her fatigue made her even more glad to see you. 

“Hey. I am absolutely exhausted,” she tells you as she sits down in between your spread legs on the floor, her back pressed up against your chest. She couldn’t help but let out a content sigh as you gently ran your hands up and down her arms.

Though, she was a little confused as to how you managed to get into her room. “Wait… how’d you even get in here?” You laugh at her obliviousness, and tell her “I may or may not have managed to snag your key this morning. You’re telling me you didn’t realize your door was unlocked when you came in here just now?”

Tashi sits up, creating a small space between the two of you, and she turns her head to look back at you. “Um, no? I didn’t even think about that, honestly. You know how busy I’ve been this week.” You nod, acknowledging the week she’s had and how tiring it’s been for her. “I know, babe, I know. I just find it a bit funny, is all.” 

You pull on her hair tie, making sure to be gentle while letting her curls free from the ponytail they were just in. She turns her head to face forward again, and lets you run your hands through them before separating her hair into three equal parts to braid it. It’s no shock to you that Tashi enjoys the feeling, and the fact that you’re always so careful and tender makes it even better.

“Wanna hear what happened to me yesterday?” You figure that talking about something that happened to you could maybe make her feel less stressed and get her mind off her weariness for a little bit. She lets out an “Mhm,” and you start to tell her your story as you bring each section of hair over one another to make the braid. “Alright, so I had to stay after class yesterday to talk to my professor, and she asked me like, the funniest and stupidest question. And it was the old one, y’know, for my writing class.” Now she’s more intrigued, because what kind of question could your professor ask you that’s funny and stupid? She knows who you’re talking about, though, and she has a little bit of a suspicion. “What’d she ask you?”

You laughed and continued to braid her hair. “Remember how she saw us kiss last week?” “Yeah,” she says and you carry on with your story. “Well, she first told me that she really liked my last paper, and then asked me if you were my ‘best friend!’” 

You think back to that moment, and you remember how you couldn’t contain your laughter. You literally laughed in your professor’s face after she asked you that. Maybe it was a little rude, but you weren’t expecting her to ask you something about your personal life, nor were you expecting her to totally deny the fact that you’re dating Tashi. 

“Uhm… no, Dr. Clark, she’s not my best friend. She’s my girlfriend, actually.” You told her after your laughter ceased. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to offend. So you and Tashi, you’re… girlfriends?” She sounded a bit confused, and you could tell that she hadn’t actually had ill intentions. “Yes, ma’am, we are. Actual girlfriends, not just ‘best friends’ or ‘girls who are friends.’” A look of realization dawned on her face, and she apologized again. “I see. Well, I do apologize, again. Truly, I didn’t mean to be rude. I hope you can forgive my ignorance.” And you did. It was a misunderstanding, and you knew that you shouldn’t hold a grudge against her for growing up in a different time period when she didn’t have control over it. 

“Are you being serious? She asked if we’re best friends?” Tashi’s voice is even, but you get the feeling that it’s teetering on upset. “I mean, yeah, she did ask that, but obviously I told her you’re my girlfriend. Like, my actual girlfriend. And besides, she was just a little confused. You know she’s all old and… senile, I guess. She didn’t actually mean any harm; I cleared up any confusion she had.” You had to make sure Tashi knew that, or else she’d want to have a word with your professor. “But she basically ignored the fact that we’re dating,” she starts, but you quickly stop her. 

“Look, I get how it sounds, but it’s not like that, okay? She really just didn’t understand, and I helped her. It’s fine, Tash. She grew up in a way different time, it’s not her fault.” She sighed quietly and agreed, calming down to let you finish. 

“I’m proud of you, y’know. For winning today.” You say softly to her, changing the subject. You can’t see her face, but you know she’s smiling. “I do know, actually. You always remind me. But thank you.” And by the sound of her voice, she is happy and flattered.

As soon as you finished braiding her hair, you placed delicate kisses along the exposed skin of her left shoulder, leading up to her neck and the spot right under her ear that gets a small shiver out of her every time. “Come on, wanna read The Great Gatsby again?”

“Yeah, sure.” Tashi turns her head back to kiss your cheek before standing up and holding her hand out for you to take. You place your hand in hers and stand up too, grabbing the book from her shelf and reminiscing a bit when you see how beat up it is, and thinking about how many annotations there are in the margins from the numerous times you two took turns reading it individually before you’d read it together.

She’s already laying down, head propped up on a pillow. You smile at the sight, this beautiful girl before you, and the fact that she’s yours. “You look pretty comfy there, don’t ya.” You send a wink her way and you love the giggle it gets out of her. You’ll never tire of hearing it; never tire of her. 

“C’mere,” she starts, and you can’t help but oblige. After handing her the book, you climb onto the bed and cuddle up close to her, laying your head on her other pillow. “This is one of my favorites. And you can’t lie, I know it’s one of yours, too.” She laughs a bit, before saying “Well I wasn’t going to say anything to refute that.” 

“Sure you weren’t. I know how stubborn you are, Tashi. You like to argue just for the sake of arguing.” Now she’s rolling her eyes, which is very Tashi of her. “How about you just shut up and read the book already. Please?” She lifts her head up and you see the pout forming. She then peppers kisses all over your face, trying to butter you up. You, being the weak woman you are, can’t stop yourself from giving in and starting the first chapter. 

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”

As you continue reading through the chapter, with Tashi’s head resting on your shoulder and her body pressed up against yours under the covers, you can’t help but think about everything that’s led to this moment. Even something so small, like re-reading one of your shared favorite books, is meaningful and special.

Tashi feels the same way, even though she won’t admit it. Not yet, anyway. And she’s always known that she belongs on the tennis court. It’s ingrained in her, practically since the day she departed from her mother’s womb. But in her heart, she also knows that she belongs with you. Nothing and no one can ever change that.

[rodrickheffeley]

the way this scene completely rewired my brain.

[vanesawye]

tashi duncan | bouncin'

[girliism]

playing with girlfriend tashi’s long princess hair. brushing it after the shower. braiding flowers into it. letting your fingers run through her soft strands while you guys are cuddled up together. helping her wrap it at night when she’s too lazy and can’t be bothered.