#that cheating? I mean I put these rules on myself. only I would really care if I broke them. but it feels wrong to | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rispwr · 5 months ago

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still with you - JK - SPECIAL - CH. 3

pairings : ex!jk x ex!reader, barista/producer!yoongi x reader

genre : fluff, angst

context : after finally leaving all of those memories behind and make new ones, your current partner yoongi still holds a grunge against your ex for everything he put you through. "if karma won't hit him, i will."

will jungkook get what he finally deserves?

word count:1k+ words

warnings/contents : yelling, ruining a family, cheating, exposing, rape, domestic violence, jungkook here is really mean, adultry

songs : house of balloons, swim, into it, goodluck, babe, so high, bloodline

Jungkook's POV

“We can’t just throw everything away, Jungkook. Think about our daughter!” Ae-ri’s voice was desperate as she pleaded with me, her eyes brimming with tears. She stood in front of me, hands clasped together as if begging for mercy.

I stared at her coldly, my heart hardened by the lies she had spun. “She’s not my daughter,” I spat, the words laced with venom.

“You made sure of that when you kept this secret from me.”

“She needs both of us,” Ae-ri insisted, stepping closer as if proximity could change my mind. “We can still be a family, for her sake.”

I shook my head, the anger inside me simmering just beneath the surface.

“No. I’m done with you, Ae-ri. I want a divorce. And as for the child… I’ll fight for custody. I’m not letting you drag her down with your lies.”

Ae-ri’s face crumpled, tears spilling over as she tried to reach out to me. “Jungkook, please… Don’t do this.

We can fix this.

I’ll do anything.

Please, don’t take her away from me.”

But her pleas only fueled my resolve. The betrayal was too deep, too unforgivable. “It’s over, Ae-ri,” I said firmly, stepping back from her grasp.

“I’ll see you in court.”

at the court

The courtroom was tense, the air thick with the weight of what was at stake.

Ae-ri sat across from me, her face pale and drawn, while I remained stoic, determined to sever the ties that bound us.

The proceedings were bitter, each of us fighting for custody of the child we had both come to love, though under false pretenses.

But in the end, the judge saw through the façade.

The lies, the deceit, the toxic environment we had created were no place for an innocent child. The ruling came down like a hammer, final and unyielding.

“The court has decided that it is in the best interest of the child to be placed under the care of a child shelter center,” the judge declared, her voice firm and impartial.

“Neither party will retain custody.”

The words echoed in the silent courtroom, the finality of it sinking in.

Ae-ri gasped, her hand flying to her mouth as she realized what this meant.

I felt a hollow ache in my chest, the reality of the situation crashing down on me.

As we left the courtroom, I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. This wasn’t how I had imagined things would end. But there was no turning back now.

The child we both loved was now out of our reach, lost to the consequences of our actions.

The weight of what had happened settled heavily on my shoulders.

I had wanted revenge, but instead, I had lost everything. The lies and betrayal had torn apart not just our lives, but the life of an innocent child who was now caught in the crossfire of our mistakes.

As I walked away from the courthouse, I couldn’t shake the image of that small, innocent face, now destined to grow up without either of the people who had once claimed to love her.

The guilt gnawed at me, but it was too late to change anything now. Karma had come full circle, leaving behind nothing but regret and sorrow.

Eun-ha was determined as he walked into the child shelter center, holding tightly onto the documents Yoongi had given him.

His heart raced, knowing that this was his only chance to reclaim his child and make up for the lost time.

The sterile smell of the center greeted him as he approached the front desk, where a woman with a kind but tired expression sat behind a computer.

“Good afternoon,” Eun-ha said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I’m here about a child- my child.”

The woman looked up from her computer, her gaze softening as she noted the seriousness in his tone. “What’s the name of the child?”

“Her name is jeon bo-ra,” Eun-ha replied, his heart clenching at the mention of her name. “I have documents here proving that I’m her biological father.”

He handed over the papers, and the woman took them, her eyes scanning the information carefully. She glanced up at Eun-ha, her expression now a mixture of understanding and concern.

“I see,” she said, her voice gentle. “It’s not often we have a parent come forward like this, especially after a custody case has been decided.”

Eun-ha nodded, swallowing hard. “I didn’t know about her until recently. Her mother kept it from me. But I’m here now, and I want to take responsibility for her. She’s my daughter, and I want to make sure she’s safe and loved.”

The woman studied him for a moment, sensing the sincerity in his words.

“I understand this is important to you, Mr. Eun. However, there are legal procedures we need to follow. I’ll need to verify these documents and speak with the appropriate authorities.”

“Please, do whatever you need to,” Eun-ha said quickly. “I just want to make sure she’s okay. And… I need to ask that Jungkook and Ae-ri aren’t informed about this. They’ve caused enough pain already.”

The woman nodded, understanding the delicate nature of the situation.

“I’ll make sure your request is noted. We’ll do everything we can to protect the child’s well-being and respect your wishes.”

Eun-ha let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

She offered a reassuring smile. “We’ll take care of it. I’ll have someone bring bo-ra to you once we’ve verified everything.”

As Eun-ha waited, he felt a mix of anxiety and hope. He had missed so much of his daughter’s life, but now he had the chance to be the father she needed. He thought of Yoongi and how much this discovery had changed everything. For bo-ra's sake, he was willing to do whatever it took to ensure she had a loving and stable home.

After what felt like an eternity, a staff member appeared, holding the hand of a small girl with big, curious eyes. Eun-ha’s heart swelled with emotion as he knelt down to her level, tears threatening to spill over.

“Hi, bo-ra,” he said softly, his voice trembling with emotion. “I’m your dad.”

“I’m here to take you home,” Eun-ha continued, his voice thick with emotion. “you’ll be safe with me, I promise.”

The staff member gently gave bo-ra to go to him, and after a moment’s hesitation, Eun-ha opened his arms, and to his overwhelming relief, letting him hold her close.

As he hugged his daughter for the first time, Eun-ha felt the weight of the past few months lift off his shoulders. This was what mattered...the chance to be the father she needed, to give her the love and care she deserved.

“Thank you,” Eun-ha whispered to the woman in charge, his voice breaking with gratitude. “Thank you for giving me this chance.”

She smiled warmly, understanding the significance of the moment. “You’re welcome, Mr. ha. Take good care of her.”

Eun-ha nodded, holding his daughter tightly as they left the center together, ready to start a new chapter of their lives, one filled with love and the promise of a better future.

#jungkook ff #bts #jungkook #bts x reader #rispwr #jungkook smut #bts smut #yoongi #mintyoongi #jungkook angst #angst #homewrecking

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coleas97 · 6 months ago

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Monday, the 5th of August

I am in a similar position as before with a few minor changes. I feel good in most ways and shit in others, I am taking the separation from my wife quite hard. Some days I am filled with deep regret for enforcing the current boundaries and some days I know it is entirely for the best. I still wonder about her: what she is doing, who she is with, etc. The who she's with absolutely kills me but I try not to be hypocritical. She has not attempted to reach out to me once. Which I know she is not able to due to the conditions placed on her. However, her finding it easy to abide by the rules is out of character. I was hearing of things she has been saying about our relationship through the grapevine, which put a ton of my worries at ease. However my step mom has asked that friend to no longer give me any information. It is for the best.

In other news, the girl from America I was seeing is no longer speaking to me. As I predicted, I fucked it up with insecurities and for lack of better phrasing, being completely fucking psycho.. which she actually handled quite well. It was a strange area in between wanting her to not be so attached and wanting her not to leave.

She said she knows it's temporary and therefore that's why she is so willing to stick around as I quite literally cry over my previous relationship. This made me feel as if perhaps her feelings were not as strong as she said they were (which should not have mattered considering I've no interest in seriously pursuing her). I would suggest no longer seeing each other if she's not into me, mostly just to hear that she was, and when she'd tell me she was, I'd feel nothing. I begged her for reassurance I did not need. Constantly. She gave it to me every time. Looking back, I reckon I just wanted to hear that I was still worth her time. Or someone's time, rather. Depression and low self worth yet again manifesting within me, and wrongfully using her kindness to wash it away temporarily. I urged her to tell me she loved me during sex, she did, and I essentially used that against her. How could she say she loved me after knowing me for short time and only saying it when I asked her to? That must mean she is a disingenuous person. (A tactic of my ex). And I took that insecurity and ran with it. She cried trying desperately to defend herself and I remember feeling so shit about making her cry. The next morning I'd ask her if she's seeing other people, and she told me she was talking to others, and although the question was calculated in a way, I did not expect to be genuinely triggered by her answer. Realistically I do not actually care if she's speaking with others.. but I guess her failing to be forthcoming when I was brutally honest from the start set off my triggers from being cheated on many times. I immediately asked her to leave and told her seeing her was pointless, she said I was being hypocritical given I was still getting over my ex. I agree. I told her I wasn't going to see her again, she said she didn't care, that I'm an asshole, I strung her along, I'm emotionally unstable, etc. She was right about all of it. She tried to say goodbye to Axel on her way out, I stopped that from happening, she called me a sociopath, and stormed out. She blocked me, told Sid I was shitty to her, and Sid talked to me for about an hour and a half, essentially saying not to let my ex turn me into an evil person.

August's prompt is anger.

Anger is an interesting thing. When I was younger, I recall breaking things, yelling, etc. Now, I'm not really someone who yells or is mad in a way that mirrors an outburst.. although it does happen. I recall coming home with a scar from being in a physical fight with a mate from school, and my mom taught me that in moments of anger, completely stop. Don't think about anything, don't say anything, just stop. A few practices later, and that became something I practice even now. I allow myself the time to register that I am indeed angry, and then choose very often to do absolutely nothing about it. Often times, I find it's not worth the stress that comes along with being upset about something or at someone.

Arguments with my ex always made me question whether or not I truly knew myself. There simply is no one on this Earth who has made me as angry as she used to make me. Many times the method of simply stopping in the moment did not work, and I would react in ways I would later regret.

Many things trigger anger for me but I have noticed over the years that my feelings being ignored really sets me off. Most people have this idea of me that I am very calm, and I am in general.. however I think because of that people often tell me upsetting things and expect me to remain neutral. I believe most don't realize how easily something can upset me. I am extremely sensitive which you would only know from spending a significant amount of time with me. I am still working out how to make sensitivity a strength versus dealing with it as a struggle. It comes in handy sometimes in interpersonal relationships or in dealing with my son, but overall is something I would like help to manage. It would make a better person and more importantly, a better example.

In moments of anger, I believe I am the type to need space. At least, initially. My mind often does what it wants in terms of filling in the gaps of why something may have happened the way it did or why someone said something. To avoid this, I often need resolution as soon as possible after taking time for the initial feelings to settle. In my previous relationship, I was not given the space to calm down and therefore it would make me more heated and less rational. Then, stress. Stress of being literally followed and asked a million questions when all I needed was space. Stress of not being able to think clearly. Stress of wondering if I was making sense or not. Many things stressed me out. That's one thing I do not miss about my previous relationship. Everything operated on her time. If she wanted to talk something out, we were talking something out and I did not have a choice but to participate when she wanted to. Most times she would insult me instead of properly call for a resolution but I'd often pull her into a room or ask her to step outside with me and we'd talk it out that way. I like to be very direct when I can, and I admire that quality in others. Make it uncomfortable if it needs to be. I am okay with that.

Anger as a secondary emotion is an interesting concept to me. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Perhaps in a calm state of mind like now, I am able to wholeheartedly agree and say that anger definitely comes from pre-existing emotions. I get angry from feeling hurt most of the time. However, in the moment when something makes me angry it gets sprung on me rather quickly and I feel it comes from nothing or nowhere. It's that something happens, anger, and then later I'm able to figure out why I got that way. Which I suppose is still in support of anger being a secondary response? Again, I'm unsure.

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thedreamspace82 · 1 year ago

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Time and time again I’am reminded of the poor choices I chose to make, I do feel I wasn’t 100% behind them in terms of what happened next entirely. I should have followed my gut, I think most I’am scared to move home, and I know I’d only be coming home for you and my brother. That town reminds me of a lot of bad memories with my family and mom. Moving here literally saved my life. I wouldn’t be here if I had stayed back home. I’am scared a bit you’ll never move here but also that’s not something I could ask of someone. I’am 1 human and you are a set of 3. So I can’t be selfish cutie, do I believe I married the correct person? Absolutely not, not for 1 second do I believe that. Do I believe or feel in love with her no I don’t, I felt a shit ton of pressure behind it all, and honestly I’ve given it my all here because I had a rule with myself that I never wanted to marry twice but honestly I probably will. Iam exhausted with love, it should never be this hard with the right person.

Laying here appreciating your “ can I call you” on my way home tonight. I look so forward to when you call. I try to leave you be most days and I simply just keep you on my mind in hopes you’ll feel it on your side. Do you ever feel like if you were with the right person you’d been a million times better than you are now? Like someone rooting you on and pushing you? Fuck I dream about you. We’re going on many years, I’d love a hug from you and to hug you. Simple connection with you. I imagine my life in the future very different than where and what I’am doing now.

Wanna know what I’ve always found to be comforting? The fact we both are missing our moms, the fact we both grew up really rough and had a lot of trauma happen to us, we practically trauma bond in this relationship. We’ve always put everything out on the table for eachother to see, hiding nothing. And the fact that we struggled through school and both struggle to spell or know the difference between their and there. We are misfits and I fell in love with the misfits parts of us. I don’t care what anyone says but you are down right my soulmate. A blessing I didn’t see coming. This bright beautiful smile that always gets me. You can lift me out of anything and I mean anything… all your pet names, the way you show your love so passionately. Like I’ll never fucking understand how someone could cheat on you or would even dream of it. How someone could treat you poorly or unfair and lack love towards you. Iam jealous of the placement of people in your life. They take advantage of the minutes and moments they have with you, I’d treat that 1 minute with you like it’s my last to be with you. You’re fucking gold and I love you, this universe loves you, my soul loved you before I realized I did. You know when the hear and mind and gut are all on board.

I dream of just 1 entire day uninterrupted with you. No phones, no wifi, just you. Laying in bed talking, showering, going on a drive, going and grabbing a drink, give anything for that. I was not joking that I’am coming down in the next few months, a tad home sick for my peoples, you, grandma, brother and bestfriend. Missss you fucking all so much it hurts.

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criticalbennifer · 2 years ago

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“I Just Said, Fuck It”: How Jennifer Lopez Broke All the Rules to Get to the Top

By: Alex Morris

February 7, 2022

On a warm December day in her West Hollywood offices, actress, singer, dancer, producer, mogul, brand, and multi-multimillionaire Jennifer Lopez was trying not to say too much. “I’m trying not to say too much,” she says, verbatim, as she sits on a leather chesterfield wearing a serene expression, a loose ponytail, and a white sweatsuit that exposes several inches of midriff. “I’m really happy. I don’t want to say anything else.”

It wasn’t always thus. For a brief and beautiful moment in time, saying too much was kind of Lopez’s thing. Hearken back to the late Nineties, when she was married to some waiter no one had ever heard of and would meet reporters in a bikini top by her Beverly Hills pool and let loose with things like: “This two-bit town isn’t big enough for me.” And: “I was like a rocket, he was like a rock.” And: “I have the ‘stardom’ glow.” And: “The fear of being alone drives my life.” She’d talk about how Oliver Stone smelled of spicy lavender and how Woody Harrelson flicked his tongue (“very nasty”) and how Madonna should just stay in her lane and stick to singing. Asked about Gwyneth Paltrow, she had this to say: “Tell me what she’s been in? I swear to God I don’t remember.”

So it’s clear that Lopez knows how to dish, that she could dish if she wanted to. And, on a meta level, you’d think she might, considering that the task at hand is to discuss her latest film, Marry Me, which she produced and starred in and for which there is a soundtrack that she also developed and performed on, meaning that it is a Lopez project par excellence. The movie concerns a certain Kat Valdez, a global superstar who is moments away from getting married in front of millions of fans when she learns that her fiancé (Maluma, steamy) has been unfaithful. In a panic, she does what approximately zero people would do at that particular moment and instead marries some random guy from the crowd (Owen Wilson, very adept at being “some random guy”). Moderate hilarity ensues, though maybe not as much as you would imagine for a movie that also features Sarah Silverman.

To put a fine point on it: Jennifer Lopez, a global superstar who has (allegedly) been cheated on time and again and who was (possibly) left if not at the altar then adjacent to it by Ben Affleck — who, in a magical twist of fate, she is dating again some 18 years later — is playing a global superstar who blah, blah, blah, you get it. Art imitates life. You are ready to dig into the emotional resonance.

“There’s a lot about [Kat] that only somebody like me could understand, right?” Lopez concedes. “I had to keep reminding myself: You know what it’s like to be onstage in front of an arena full of people and something embarrassing happens. That’s happened to you. What do you do? What does it feel like when it all falls apart and you go home and you’re on the TV and they’re making fun of you as if it’s not painful? How does that feel? You know what? You’ve cried in a puddle on the floor too. That’s what it feels like. Or going underwater at that point where you feel like you’re drowning, suffocating in your own decisions that you know are not the right ones.”

You concur that certainly all that feels not great, though perhaps the not-greatness is obscured cinematically by all those beautiful rooms and designer clothes and product placements and impeccable lighting. That’s why it might be nice to talk about these things in a more personal way. For example, those decisions that she knew were not the right ones — would she care to elaborate on those?

She would not. At least not directly. “You start realizing there are no rules,” she says obliquely, feet propped up on the chesterfield and two caramel tendrils of hair falling into her perfect face. “There’s only what you feel is right for you. Because that’s the person you’ve got to live with at the end of the day. Any time I’ve gone against my gut and my instinct, I’ve ended in misery.”

OK, but what is an example of a time you ended in misery?

“So many things. I can give you a small example. Just, like, anything in fear. Anything where you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe I should do this because if I don’t, people won’t see me for a while.’ Then you’re just, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. That was a stupid move. That didn’t turn out well.’”

Is there one specific situation that didn’t turn out well?

“I’m trying to think of something specific.” She pushes back a tendril. She scratches her leg. “It’s so hard.”

What about her relationship with Affleck? Is that finally, belatedly, turning out well?

“I won’t talk about it a lot. We’ve both grown. We’re the same, and we’re different. And that’s what’s nice.”

Nice? Nice?

“Yeah … having a second chance at real love … yeah.” Now the leg is shaking. “Like I said, we learned a lot. We know what’s real, what’s not real. So it’s just — the game has changed. Again, I’m trying not to say too much.”

In fairness, there is much that Lopez is willing to discuss, if we rewind a bit. She is happy to share that she was around eight years old when she set her sights on something bigger than the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx where she grew up, attending Catholic school and watching Happy Daysand tacking Menudo posters on the light-pink walls of the room she shared with her younger sister, Lynda. “I wanted to accomplish things,” she says. “I had that competitive kind of spirit.”

Her father was a computer-repair technician, her mother a kindergarten teacher who would come home from church on Sunday and record the Top 40 countdown on cassette tapes. Jennifer, the middle of three girls, would dance in front of the mirror in her room, pretending she was Rita Moreno in West Side Story. Her first job was earning $10 to sweep the hair and clean the sinks of a beauty shop owned by a family friend. Later, at 15, she sold bootleg perfume from “a bootleg kind of perfume store behind the gas station.” As a girl, she dreamed of owning one of those large Barbie styling heads, but when she tried to steal a Barbie from her cousin, she tripped and fell down the stairs. “It was almost like something pushed me down. God was like, ‘Don’t ever take a Barbie from this house.’” She gives credence to things like that, “psychic ability and premonition and things being meant to be.”

As a kid, Lopez was not a special snowflake. She was the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who were hard on her because the world was hard on them. Her mother, Guadalupe, had wanted to be an actress. People told her she looked like Natalie Wood. Then she had three kids in four years and began selling Tupperware for extra cash. She was not a natural nurturer. She was not a hand-holder. She expected her daughters to excel, but also made them aware of their limitations. She would sometimes slap them around. “It was that type of mentality: That’s how you keep kids in line,” says Lopez. “That’s how they were raised, and that’s how I was raised. Listen, my mom was also a fun mom. My mom was also the mom who got me into musicals and introduced me to all kinds of music. I am an entertainer because of my mom. But I’m also able to survive the things I’ve survived in this business because my mom was tough. I don’t think she could realize what she was preparing me for, but she did.”

Lopez mostly toed the line until she turned 16 and started dating a neighborhood kid named David Cruz. He took her to prom. They started sleeping together. Lupe worried Jennifer would get herself pregnant, so Lopez took to sneaking out her second-story window to meet up with Cruz on the sly. Returning home required stealth use of a ladder. “I was good at sneaking out,” she says. “But when I did get caught, it was bad.”

Not quite as bad, however, as the fight that went down when she informed her parents that she had dropped out of college to devote herself to dance full time. “They definitely had their doubts. I mean, I would too. Listen, if we were growing up in the Bronx right now, and one of my kids came to me and said, ‘This is what I want to do,’ I’d be like, ‘Okaaaay.’ You’d just think to yourself, ‘Oh, really? How are you going to pull that off? You’re going to call a rich Hollywood producer and they’re going to put you in a movie? You’re going to get discovered? Like, get real.’” She laughs out loud at the absurdity of landing where she has. “When you grow up in those neighborhoods, to dream bigger is only to set yourself up for disappointment.”

Lopez left home for good, hastily throwing some things in a bag and sleeping for a time on the sofa of the Phil Black studio. She lived off small dancing gigs — $25 here, $50 there — and dollar pizza and Cup Noodles, treating herself every so often to waffles at a joint called Good Enough to Eat. In 1991, she joined In Living Color as a Fly Girl, though she hadn’t actually booked her L.A. audition. “Keenen [Ivory Wayans] told me he let the girls pick because he felt like I was such an obvious winner,” Lopez says. “The cameras were there. He was like, ‘Let’s have a vote,’ and they all picked this other girl.” Afterward, Wayans called her. “He said he and Rosie [Perez, the choreographer] were going to make it right. So they let her finish out that season, and then the next year they brought me in.”

Such details go a long way toward explaining the friction Lopez faced after moving to L.A. in 1991. Her first week on the job, one of the girls told her they’d had to postpone a photo shoot because they were waiting for Lopez to lose weight. Plans to turn some of the Fly Girls into a group that would have predated the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child fizzled. Bored and adrift in L.A., she started taking acting classes and found out that she had a real knack. In 1996, with videos for Janet Jackson and the New Kids on the Block under her belt, as well as parts in a handful of TV shows and a couple of movies, Lopez beat out 22,000 other women for the role of Selena Quintanilla in a biopic of the beloved Tejano star. Her performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination and made her the first Latin actor to earn more than a million dollars for a role. Within a few years, she had filmed Jack, with Robin Williams; Blood and Wine, with Jack Nicholson; and Out of Sight, with George Clooney. She was, as she said at the time, edging into “the bottom of the A list of actresses.”

So she did what approximately zero people would do at that particular moment and decided to record an album. One of the musicians who had been in Selena — and in the real Selena’s band — gave her a song to use as a demo. The Work Group, a division of Sony with which she’d signed, didn’t pay the demo much mind until it landed on the desk of Sony chairman Tommy Mottola, who had allegedly had a falling out with another Latina artist and was looking to make a point. He set Lopez up with a room in the St. Regis Hotel and the mandate to get an album done, pulling earworms from lesser-known artists and gifting them to her. It worked. On the 6 (named after the subway line Lopez would take to get from the Bronx to Manhattan) went triple platinum and sold more than 8 million copies worldwide, to the surprise of many. “She wasn’t on the radar,” says one Nineties pop star who ran in the same circles. “But she was a workhorse, single-mindedly hellbent on success. She was going to get there one way or another. I don’t think she had any other intentions than to be a global superstar.”

“She wasn’t very good in the beginning, but she got better,” says Maria Christensen, who wrote and recorded “Waiting for Tonight” with her band 3rd Party and then licensed the song to Lopez. “The engineers thought she was a never-give-up kind of person. They would comp vocals, do a bunch of takes and put them together. She would just work so hard, sing it over and over. She would just go until she couldn’t go any more.”

That worked, too. Lopez’s second album, J.Lo (titled after a nickname given to her by late rapper Heavy D), debuted at Number One the same week that The Wedding Planner was the number-one box-office movie in America. No one had ever held those two slots simultaneously before.

So then she made some more movies (31 and counting) and some more albums (nine, with Marry Me) and a world tour and a Vegas residency and many appearances as a judge on American Idol and several clothing lines and countless brand partnerships and a skin-care line and a set of twin humans and roughly one million perfumes, and despite it all, she still feels like her success has been “slow and steady.” She thinks back to the moment she knew that her life had changed for good, a night in the late Nineties that she spent jet-lagged, pacing her London hotel suite and staring at the many pairs of designer shoes lined up against one wall. “I was like, ‘I remember having holes in the bottom of my sneakers,’” she says. “I was just like, ‘Is this happening?’ It was almost like a fucking fairy tale. And it wasn’t about the wealth of it. It was about the change, the disparity in it. That hotel suite was bigger than the house I grew up in. Way bigger.”

By now, she’s no doubt gotten used to the wealth, but the disparity sticks. “I think I’m an underdog,” she continues. “I always feel like I was scrapping from the bottom. Always. I always felt like I wasn’t the one that was supposed to be in the room. That’s part of being Puerto Rican and from the Bronx and a woman. You know what I mean? All of that stuff. Not being born into a family with money. Not knowing anybody in the business. I just went out there and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to just try. I’m going to try to get in here.’”

Lopez has a history of doing interviews in one of her many perfect homes, but today she had wanted to meet in her office, which was passed off — without apparent irony — as her true natural habitat, the place where she Gets Amazing Shit Done. The bland corporate hallways give pause, but once you’re through the thick, wooden door, the office seems less an office than an immersive experience in extreme luxury. There is a viewing/music room with an acrylic Steinhoven piano, a huge, circular green velvet sofa, and a gas fireplace producing a green flame as if it were combusting legal tender. There is a sleek kitchen with various healthful drinks lined up in the high-end fridge like battalions. There is a mirrored glam room with a blond, herringbone floor and brass accents. There is a holiday gift from Tom Ford sitting idly on the marble ledge of the unmanned front desk, under the gleaming letters BRX — for “Bronx,” of course — and across from a floor-to-ceiling rendering of New York as seen from above. The glass walls that divide the rarefied air are so pristine that at one point earlier in the day, Lynda had walked right into one with a thud. “Pay attention, please,” said Lopez’s longtime manager, Benny Medina, in a tone that may have been joking, though it was hard to tell for sure. He’d been in the middle of explaining how the office is Lopez’s vision because she does everything with vision and taste and the type of control that listens to input but maybe only to a point. “She let me pick my desk,” says Medina as pop music wafts from no discernible direction or source. Everywhere is the scent of Le Labo Santal 26 and a precipitous view.

Lopez has settled into a sort of listening room toward the back of the office so that she can play the Marry Me soundtrack, and soon she is closing her eyes and rocking her shoulders as she sings along to measured songs about love and heartbreak and loss of control. Less than a week before, Affleck had let slip to Howard Stern that he “probably still would have been drinking” if he had stayed married to Jennifer Garner, and the public had lost its collective mind at the implication that marriage to one of America’s handful of sweethearts might have driven him to regularly “[drink] a bottle of scotch and [fall] asleep on the couch.” Suddenly, access to Lopez had been tamped down. Today’s scene seems designed to display her ironclad control over her brand and her image. The songs are catchy, but the lyrics give little of Lopez away.

Then again, few celebrities have had to deal with the shitty parts of fame to quite the extent that Lopez has — the body-shaming shit, the sexist shit, the racist shit — and the time she spent dating Affleck before probably marked the height of it. “Instead of being celebrated, they criticized. They marginalized. They reduced her. They wouldn’t give it to her, ever,” says her friend and producing partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas. “Here was a woman who had the Number One movie and the Number One album. That had never happened. And they were writing about Puffy. [A year later] Maid in Manhattan was Number One. But here’s what the press said: ‘Ben Affleck sleeps with the help.’ She just didn’t get the credit that other — I don’t know how else to say it — white actresses got. And I know, because I worked with them.”

South Park called her a “mean-spirited bitch” in an episode that poked fun at her Latin heritage. Conan O’Brien said that, as stand-ins for the couple in a sketch, he’d cast “our script intern” as Affleck and “our cleaning lady” as Lopez. “It was brutal,” Lopez says now. “It was brutal. It’s one of those things that you bury very deeply so you can move on and get about your business.” She was able to compartmentalize, until eventually she wasn’t. “It’s funny because Ben and I were together, and we were so in love. It was one of the happiest times of my life. But also, there was this other thing happening where we were being criticized, and it really destroyed our relationship from the inside out, because we were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life.”

Some of those things Lopez will talk about. She talks about going to therapy, and about how she’s “become much more spiritual” since having kids. She says that she prays often and repeats affirmations throughout the day (“I am whole; I am good on my own; I love the universe, the universe loves me”). She says that she woke up this morning at 8 a.m. to a swelling of gratitude in her heart. Her sister had flown in from New York a few days back. Her mom was arriving. Christmas was around the corner, and many beautiful gifts had been bought and many beautiful plans had been made. “I try to always live from a place of gratitude,” she says. “But today, especially, if you ask me what my first thought was, it was, ‘Thank you. Thank you, God, for this day. Thank you for my life, what it is.’”

Having expressed that gratitude, she says she slipped on her Gucci slides, padded into the bathroom, slipped off her short set, and turned on the shower, resolved, as always, to be her best self today. “I will always try to be manifesting that in my life, to be doing the best I can and make the world a better place,” she says. Also: “I’m really happy, probably more than I’ve even been in my whole life.” She connects that happiness to Affleck, though she won’t specify what about him makes her happy or what made her less happy before. Or rather, she will specify some of those things, but she asks me to turn my recorder off before she says them — an act that seems calculated to show the calculations she’s making. She talks about reading You Can Heal Your Life, which taught her that she could control how she thought about things, even if she couldn’t control the things themselves. She says, “For me, it’s always been very important to figure myself out.”

Part of that process of figuring herself out has involved figuring out how much of herself to share, especially now that her public persona reflects not just on her but on her children. “It’s a real juggling act,” she says. “People can be super judgy. You know, you let them into your house and then they talk about your fireplace or, you know, ‘Oh, is that real? Did they stage that?’” But it has also involved some soul-searching on her three divorces (to Marc Anthony, most recently) and her two called-off engagements (to Alex Rodriguez, most recently) and the multiple breakups she has had to undergo in the public eye and what it says about her that she hasn’t been able to create the nuclear family she’s always wanted. “When I was in my forties,” she says, “it was like, ‘Well, you’re not really loving yourself. You’re allowing things to happen in your life where you’re overachieving in your work, and your personal life …’” She pauses. “‘Is not…’” She trails off again. “And it fueled my artistic life, which is great in a lot of ways, because it made me want to overachieve. It made me want to feel better. It made me want to do better and be successful and be better as an artist and grow, and I have. But also, you just want to feel good in your life.”

She looks about the room and then decides to go on about why maybe she didn’t. “It’s not really even your first love that teaches you what love is,” she says. “It’s your mother and your father, what you were taught as a child that life is and love is, through how your parents are with you. Those are the things that you have to go back and work on and examine, when you are having relationships and repeating patterns and going, ‘Oh, what is this happening for?’” Her parents divorced when their children were grown. She doesn’t want to go into too many details, but whatever transpired, she does want it known that she feels she’s moved on. “I don’t begrudge it,” she says later. “I really feel like [my mom] did the best she could. And when I think of it that way, it’s easier to get past the punishments and the spankings and things that happened. I don’t want to raise my kids in that way, but I understand.”

Then again, she’s not sure her parents understand her. “How could they?” she asks. “I think they are confused by my life.” And they are not alone. “When one person becomes famous in a family it causes a lot of discord. It can be complicated for both sides. It got complicated for me, like, ‘Is this still, you know, my family who loves me and accepts me and understands me and feels like I’m the same person, or do they see me as different as well?’ For them, it was like, ‘OK, well, now she’s this, and what does that mean? How much do I expect? How much do I ask for and how much do I not?’ There’s confusion. There’s resentment and very mixed, complicated, adult feelings. You know, ‘What is all this?’”

These are all heady feelings to try to capture in a musical rom-com, which is probably one of the reasons Lopez felt that Marry Me would be a good, safe project for her, one in which she could comment on some parts of her life without having to say too much. The movie is certainly an unexpected follow-up to Hustlers, in which her electric performance as stripper-turned-criminal Ramona earned her a Golden Globe nomination and much acclaim. But Lopez says that she had long wanted to do a movie and soundtrack simultaneously (she refers to the Marry Me album not as a Lopez album but as a Kat Valdez album), and anyway she still isn’t often considered for gritty, hard-hitting parts. “I don’t even know half the movies when they come out at the end of the year,” she says. “I have the top agents in the world, but [those projects] don’t come to me.” She founded Nuyorican Productions — which produced both Hustlers and Marry Me — specifically to “take my career in my own hands.”

In fact, one of the defining features of Lopez’s fame is that, despite the wealth and luxury it has provided, there is still that disconnect — between where Lopez came from and where she is, but also between where she is and where she thinks she could be. One year she was on the cover of 46 magazines. Her music has helped make Latin pop mainstream. But she never won that Golden Globe. Nor was she nominated for an Oscar despite near-universal consensus that she should have been. It wasn’t even that long ago that she was basically broke. This was when her twins, Emme and Max, were toddlers and she was in the process of divorcing Anthony and her label had dropped her and her album sales were lackluster and she was over 40 and no one would cast her in their movie and she wanted to trade in a car. “And my business manager was like, ‘Nope, you can’t do anything right now,’” she says. “I was like, ‘Really?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s not make any moves right now. Let’s just wait until you can work again.’”

So Lopez did work. Despite warnings that it would be the nail in the coffin of her career, she took a job on American Idol, beaming herself into American homes two nights a week and comporting herself not as a diva who insisted on being surrounded by white lilies and insured her ass (that’s not a thing, for what it’s worth) but rather as a hardworking single mom who got all teary when contestants soared or failed. She launched her first world tour. Nuyorican picked up Hustlers to the clamorous admonitions of (male) industry types who thought that the strippers should be softened and made more “likable.” Lopez ignored these comments and spent her last prepandemic year learning how to slay on a stripper pole. She shot Hustlers — for which she did not take a salary �� in 29 days. When she was asked to perform at the 2020 Super Bowl with Shakira, protestations erupted that NFL bigwigs thought it took two Latinas to do the job of one white man. Lopez took the job anyway and used her platform to fill the field of Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium with Latino children — including one of her own — singing in glowing, white cages as those NFL bigwigs presumably lost their minds. During the pandemic, she has prepped for and shot not one but two movies, orchestrated a documentary about her life, finished postproduction for Marry Me, marched with her children for Black Lives Matter, performed at Biden’s inauguration, broken off her engagement with Rodriguez, rekindled things with Affleck, and spent this past fall in Canada, waking up at 5 a.m. to work out so she could be in hair and makeup by 6:15 so she could be on set for The Mother by 7:30. In between shots, she had parented from afar, FaceTiming the twins on the way to school, hosting Zoom dinners, and imploring them to “Brush your teeth! Get in bed!” from more than 1,900 miles away.

In other words, she has worked so hard. She has endeavored to say only the right things and do only the right things and live in that place of self-love and gratitude. But she still feels that disconnect. “It’s just 20, 25 years of people going, ‘Well, she’s not that great. She’s pretty and she makes cute music, but it’s not really this and that.’ You know, I think I’ve done some nice work over the years, some really nice work. But there is a club that I just wasn’t a part of. And I always acted like, ‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m fine. I’m OK.’ But it hurts to not be included. I don’t know if I will ever be. There is an inner circle, like, ‘We are the great artists.’ And then there’s the pop artists.” Dreaming big can set you up for disappointment. She’s known that since she was just a girl in the Bronx sneaking out the window to meet her first boyfriend.

Not that long ago, Lopez called David Cruz’s mom. He had passed away from heart disease, and when Lopez heard the news, she realized that she still remembered his home number by heart, so she picked up her phone and dialed it. His mom answered. “I was like, ‘Hi. It’s Jennifer Lopez,’ and she was like, ‘Jennifer…’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and she started crying. I was like, ‘You know I loved David.’ She was like, ‘I know. He loved you, too. He always loved you.’” She pauses. “You get lucky, you have a first love like that.”

She reaches for her iPad. Cruz had taken her to prom, and she suddenly wants to see the picture. “I’m just trying to look up ‘Jennifer Lopez prom picture,’” she says, mashing her fingers into the screen and slightly furrowing her brow, assuming that the picture — like most of her life — would be available for public consumption. She’s right: A moment later, she holds up a grainy black and white image of her 17-year-old self, smiling broadly in satin and lace. Cruz stands behind her, sweet-faced and grinning. “I made my prom dress. A pink halter, mermaid. Pink satin with lace on top. I drew it and gave it to this dressmaker in the neighborhood and was like, ‘This is the dress I want to make.’ I had a vision.”

“As opposed to when you used to cut my bangs, which was wrong,” offers Lynda, walking into the room. Lopez shrugs. Not all visions can be visionary.

Then again, she believes in vision, she believes in fate, she believes that things happen for a reason. She trusts that she will one day get her due. She does not foresee another public breakup with Affleck in her future. “I don’t think we would have got back together if we thought that was where it was headed,” she says. “We feel like what we found again is so much more important, and how we protect that and how we live our lives — what to share, what not to share — is the balance that we have now, the benefit of experience and the wisdom that we gained over the years.”

Beyond that, what more can she say?

#jennifer lopez #jlo #rolling stone magazine #press/article #2022

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septimus-heap · 1 year ago

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See. I am someone who gets mean under stress. Ive said a lot of horrible things I didn't actually mean with the full intent of hurting someone just bc I was stressed and tired. And it's obviously not a GOOD thing but it's something I understand and I can totally see myself saying smth similar to what silas said if I was in the same situation. So while it's definitely awful and uncalled for I also like. I get it. Idk if it's how it was meant to be read but idk if silas is ever quite so bad mean for no reason at other times?? So I choose to believe in this version of events <3 also yeah he probably IS aware that being eow isn't like. Super easy. But also as he says when they're on the boat he thinks marcias just been Detached from everything, she hasn't had to deal with the struggles of ordinary life under custodian rule, she's been living a privileged life up in the tower and silas has been struggling to feed his family of 9. Especially after like 17 years since he was an apprentice and actively involved in this stuff I can totally see him sort of. Forgetting how hard being eow really is. Of course Marcia hasn't had it easy and if silas stopped to think for a minute he'd probably figure that out but why WOULD he stop to think. He has no reason to

No silas has explicitly NOT been to the tower in 10 years (nicko say smth like "dad remembered the password from 10 years ago"). So while I'm assuming he at least had contact w ppl from the tower?? (how else would he do his job??) I don't think he'd have exactly been aware of a lot of stuff like. Marcia having no friends. And all the work being put in to stop the custodians. Bc I imagine that's the kind of thing that u do NOT want anyone outside the tower to ever have a chance of hearing. Tbh idk if he'd even consider that marcia might be upset abt endor?? Bc he's still got this mindset that Marcia doesn't care about people. So surely her deputy is just the most capable person for the job and nothing more. I think he'd think that to marcia, endors death is a loss to the tower but not necessarily a loss to marcia. Bc marcia doesn't care about people, right?

YEAH PROPAGANDA. I imagine silas wouldnt willingly believe any of it but well. There's only so many times u can hear smth said as if it's fact before u believe it a little bit. And I don't think he liked marcia even before the everything so it makes sense he'd be more willing to believe horrible rumours abt her

Marcia DID put her trust in silas but really did she ever give him a reason to trust her back?? She trusted him with a princess, sure. But ONLY a princess. Who marcia presumably had very little or no emotional attachment to. Silas has to trust marcia with his daughter who he's raised for 10 years. He's not trusting her with a nameless infant he's not just trusting her with the task of "keep this child alive" he's trusting her with "keep my child alive and safe and happy and well fed and warm and comfortable and and and-" and along with his general dislike for marcia and 10 years of propaganda I'm not ar all surprised he didn't trust her. (also. This may be just me but marcia is SO suspicious in the first book. Like oh, the extremely ambitious apprentice who's mentor died the day she graduated. And she was one of only 2 who survived the murder (the other being a baby who ofc wouldn't remember anything and could easily be manipulated when she was older). The murder that left her in the position she had been trying to get since she was a small child. Hm. I know alther would remember if she'd killed him herself but marcia having had a hand in his murder genuinely wouldn't have seemed too strange if it was revealed in magyk) ALSO THE CHEATING THING YEAH. Can u IMAGINE Marcia running away from being eow for SILAS. AND 3 of his kids????? I'm sobbing tbh it's so fucking funny

Marcia never having been on a boat is SO weird tbh. Its the entire fuel behind my selkie Marcia au. How the fuck did she go from mainland europe to the uk without a boat. Is the channel tunnel still intact or smth?? Hello ????

I know Silas is a fan fav; but at the beginning of Magyk I HATE this man. During the assassination attempt and subsequent fleeing I think you could reasonably argue that Marcia is having the worst time of anyone in the party (if she is second to anyone it’s Sep, and even then it’s close). This woman has relived the worst day of her life, gotten stinky and slimy (and we all know she’s ND so that would be hell) and then harnessed so much magyk she almost ceased to be a human while everyone acted like she was doing nothing that hard at all, in order to save everyone’s lives for a SECOND time in this sequence of events (and don’t forget in all of this she also managed to save Sally Mullin too).

Then, just as she thought they might be safe for a bit (it’s midnight on this beach and she was awoken very early by alther if you recall from the Scene of Hair Curlers™️, so she’s probably creeping up on 20 hours of being awake) Alther comes and tells her 1) the one terrible thing she thought she’d done enough to stop happening had, in fact, happened. 2) the only person we hear Marcia mention with any kind of positive attitude; and by extension, someone she could trust, is dead. 3) that person was murdered as a direct result of number 1. 4) Not only has this insane sociopath that would very much like her dead not only invaded her place of work, that clearly makes up part of her identity, but also 5) moved into her HOME (siri play my tears ricochet by taylor swift) which is an absolute violation.

The Very Short List of people Marcia trusts and cares about gets another person on it murdered, and Marcia does not have the time to mourn her AT ALL because she knows she needs to focus on how she can undo this mess without causing the death of a ten year old girl. And what does Silas say? ‘The custodians are simply a load of thugs any *decent* ExtraOrdinary Wizard would have seen off years ago’. Be so fucking real right now. Fuck you man. She saved your sorry arse TWICE. She kept you and your family alive for TEN YEARS. SHES THE ONLY REASON YOU DIDN’T WATCH YOUR TEN Y/O KID GET VIOLENTLY MURDERED. SIT TF DOWN.

#it's not even a band of travelling wizard it was just like. Her and her parents #it's so weird abdhdbjdnd.#ANYWAY YEAH. the point im making is that marcia WAS having a very shitty day but for most of it silas genuinely did not know #or at least didn't know the extent of it #which isn't an excuse for him acting shitty but also #I would be more willing to be mean to someone who I think is cold calculating and unshakeable #than the person marcia Actually is #WE know marcias ND and probably has sensory issues. Silas doesn't #ALSO. silas not being useful is another point for him I think #all this stuff is happening. Ppl he loves r in danger. And he cannot do ANYTHING to help #anyway yayy we can be incoherent together <3333 #I love UR takes also. However this fandom (me included) DOES favour marcia A LOT. So sometimes I have to play devil's advocate a little #defend the other side a little bit. U know #not that marcia isn't my favourite. I love her forever <3 but also if we're going to analyse Marcia like this we also have to do silas #so it's fair. Right.

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vanpalm3r · 3 years ago

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thinking about jade and tori and the lyrics

"she'll lie and steal and cheat / and beg you from her knees / make you think she means it this time / she'll tear a hole in you, one you can't repair / but i still love her, i don't really care" and

"won't you take all your clothes off of me / and put them in a pile at your feet / and just look me- look me in the eyes / why won't you look me in the eyes? ... and when you touch me / i can barely keep it together / i can't keep it together / and when you touch me / i am beside myself" and

"do you know that i've been holding my breath all of this time? / weren't you gonna love me if i just did everything right?" and

"do you think i care about your new job and your new hair? / do you think i cry about your new friends and your new guy? / ...i do" and

"how could i deny a diamond in the rough? / you let me in your world until you had enough / you knew that i wanted you to bend the rules / how did i believe i had a hold on you? / you were always stronger than people suspected / underestimated and overprotected / when i went away it was the only option / couldn't trust myself to proceed with caution / the most that i could give you is nothing at all / the best that i could offer was to miss your calls" and

"why do you remind me? / why do you make me forget? / you walk right by me / and you're always far from me / because it feels good / because it is good / because it isn't / i know that it is" and

"loving you is habit forming" and

"she stings like means it, she's mean and she's mine" and

"i'm a party in the village you make fun of with your friends / but you show up time and time and time again / i'm the drink that you keep filling and spilling on your hands / you can clean it up like nothing happened / ... you keep the lights down low, keeping your eyes closed, but it won't change the feel of my body" and

"as long as it's us two / fuck being remembered i think i was made for you / so why'd you wanna erase me? / darling, valentine / you always know where to find me / if you change your mind" and

"but if you get married, i'd object / throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect / but i'd rather lose my dignity / than lose you to somebody who won't make you happy" and

"can the killer in you tame the fire in me? / i know there's something waiting for us / i am sick of the chase / but i'm stupid in love / and there's nothing i can do" and

"'cause if i didn't have a mean bone in my body / i'd find some other way to cause you pain / i won't bother telling you i'm sorry / for something that i'm gonna do again / when i could spend the weekend out on a bender / do i get callous or do i stay tender? / which of these is worse, and which is better?" and

"was it something i said? you left me crushed / were you losing your head over something that you lost? / and did you feel it, too? when we both went blind? / you wouldn't even look me in- oh, darling, you wouldn't look me in the eyes" and

"you're too real for me / you should go to something better / i'll give you to someone better / i have friends that'll be on earth for longer / i have friends that won't feel like monsters / being unwanted / and wanting too much / feeding the idea of you / leaving you starving" and

"and at the bar, on TV / they were talking about the casualties / 400 and counting / and my only question / was how would you feel if one were me?"

girl help i'm drowning in sorrow about two people that don't exist and hypothetical scenarios that never occurred between them in their source material

#long post #very long post #jori #victorious

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mosscloakenthusiast · 2 years ago

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Treebark Week day 5 - stay/run

The sun was setting, painting colours across the sky. Martyn was trying to rest, staring out of his small windows to watch the sun sink towards the horizon. For the first time in a while, he felt at peace-

“MARTYN!”

He barely had a second to turn before Ren had climbed his way into the Bleeding Heart Bastion, panting from the effort of getting up to his isolated base. He looked exhausted - eyes near filled with tears, usually well-kempt hair a mess down his back, sunglasses somehow cracked. Part of Martyn noted that he still looked pretty. He ignored that part. His friend clearly needed help.

“Martyn, I’m sick of this GAME!” It was one of those monologues, then. Martyn sat down on the floor, beckoned for Ren to do the same. “I can’t sit right now dude, I’m STRESSED!” Ren began pacing, Martyn settled into watching and being occasionally supportive. “I’ve just come from THERAPY with SCOTT-”

“Oh was it you I heard across the cliff?” Ren pauses pacing to shoot him a pained look. “Ah. I see why you’re here.” Martyn took a deep breath. He had heard two people fighting during what he had assumed was one of Scott’s therapy sessions. Clearly, he had assumed correctly.

“Yeah, dude. BigB is CHEATING ON ME, and now I don’t know where to GO!” Ah. Not great for Ren - Martyn tried not to seem happy that Ren’s new relationship hadn't worked out. Told himself he still didn’t have a chance, Ren would have asked him ages ago if he was even somewhat interested-

“Run away with me.”

What?

“What?”

“Run away with me. Leave this blasted server and stay with me instead.”

“I - Ren - there’s a border?”

“Yes. Right. So, we run to a corner of the world, build walls, and work until we can figure out how to break it.” Ren paused, as if trying to analyse Martyn’s reaction before continuing, “Look. We’ve been close since day one, right dude? And we have that whole broken hearts club thing, so it’s not like we’re caring about the ‘no previous alliances’ rule, and BigB told me I dress like you and I think it’s because I miss you and-”

“Ren.”

“Right, sorry, just - angry. Confused. You’re looking really beautiful in this lighting-” He gestured towards the window, where the last of the sunlight was seeping in “- and there’s just no-one else I’d trust enough to leave with me, basically.”

The guy Martyn’s had a crush on since he'd known him was asking Martyn to run away with him. He called him beautiful. Martyn wanted more than anything to do whatever Ren asked. But he knew he couldn’t, and he could feel his heart breaking as he realised the situation Ren had put him in.

“Ren, hanging out with Pearl because we think she’s a witch is different from running away together. We can’t break the no-alliance rule. You know that. This isn’t fair. You’re making me make the decision so you don’t have to, and you’re only asking me because you don’t like Scott and you think I’m the next most likely to break the rules-”

“That’s not true-”

“Well, Scott broke the rules. They killed him at the end of the last game.”

“I don’t care!”

“I’m sorry, Ren. I can’t. You know I can’t. Cleo would kill me- I-”

“I love you.”

Fuck. What was he supposed to say to that?

“You don’t mean that.” He settled on. Because he didn’t, right?

“I’ve loved you since Dogwarts. I didn’t know how to tell you, but hey, it could be worse than “quit your soulmate, run away with me”, right?”

Martyn sighed, standing up so he’s face to face with Ren, who had stopped his pacing again.

“I love you too. Always have. But, and I hate myself for it, I can’t follow you on this one.”

Ren paused. Took a step away. “I hate you too.”

“Well, that makes this easier for you, then.”

Ren stared at him for a moment, then left. Martyn waited until he couldn’t see Ren from his window before he started crying.

#treebark #treebark week #adventreebark #adventreebark 2022 #based on that one 'lets gouge out our eyes and make out' scene from tma #hence why its so dialogue heavy #enjoy the angst!!#is set after ren's therapy session w bigb in double life session 3

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crysdrawsthings · 3 years ago

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tell me about you WH 40k poor little meow meow!

Would be my pleasure! I hope you will reblog the meme tho, so I can ask you about blorbos from your shows! Adding pictures for you, so you will have some context, so all goes under the cut.

I am also only few books in, sooooo. This list is subject to changes.

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most) - most definitely Magnus the Red. Like, there might be competition for other positions, but here this is just, yep, this would be Magnus.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped) - Blinky the Void Dragon/Blinky the C'toaster. Admittedly, I am cheating here, because I made a superior, mecha-dragon design for him, but still.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave) - Belisarius Cawl and his, thankfully, augmented back on which he is carrying the whole imperial science by this point, tbh. But genuinely I have very little idea on who is actually appreciated or not.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week) - frankly, I feel like whoever I will name, I will soon be informed, that actually, this character has three books, model and dedicated rules to be played on a tabletop. I always liked Kairos Fateweaver, but he is not obscure. I also really love Khepra from Mechanicus the Vidya Game, which is a popular game. Also Iacton Qruze, a space marine who is constantly described as like, grandpa level old in my books. And Ing Mae Sing too, she was pretty MVP in her few appearances. Picture attached: Khepra! She is very nice and cares about her troops c:

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave) - is there even such thing as an unproblematic fave in WH40k? I feel like everyone has done at least a few war crimes. Let's cheat again and say Oona, my own take on [REDACTED] out of existence eleventh primarch. And in the case of Oona - a truly pathetic fave.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason) - I was in doubt if I should put Fulgrim here on in poor little meow meow, but the glorious bastard snake (with the admittedly tragic story) goes here. And by torment I mean to make an overabundance of meemes and just dumb pictures, as shown below. Honorable mentions: another primarch, Leman Russ. And also Emperor of Mankind himself, truly a parent and leader of millennia.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell) - I was expecting myself to say Erebus. But then I reminded myself that while he, at least, has a redeeming quality of being a good character, even if a horrible, horrible person, I can't say the same for Kor Phaeron. So Kor Phaeron gets the superhell. Here they are together, Kor Phaeron on the left, Erebus on the right.

#warhammer 40k #wh40k #wh 40k #primarchs #adeptus mechanicus #blinky the void dragon #ask games #thank you for asking #crysandthings

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crumbledcastle28 · 4 years ago

Text

Chapter 8: An Apology

Warnings: depression, suicidal thoughts, references to an incredibly painful past, references to murder, references to torture, lots of crying, references of being shot/stabbed. This is really heavy, so please proceed with caution.

Author’s Note: Thank you to EVERYONE who has shown any support for this! I am very proud of this series and it makes me very happy people are enjoying it 💜

(I cannot remember where I got this gif from, so if it’s yours please let me know so I can credit you!)

After Mando left, you sat in your silent sobs for what felt like hours.

It could have been hours for all you knew. It’s not like you cared anyway.

All you did was sit in your guilt and shame, allowing yourself to digest all you’ve done. You have been pushing this down for so long, and now it feels like there is no stopping it.

A person can only pretend for so long, and you would give anything to just go back in time and reverse it all.

So many faces flash in your memory of people you’ve killed and cheated for the Empire, and it’s an absolute hell. None of these people deserved what they got. None of them. And yet you still did it.

No matter how many excuses you make for how you became a part of the Empire and all the torture they put you through, you still did it. You are still an enemy to the people you held so dear after so little time.

You are a monster.

After a while, you hear Mando’s footsteps entering Kuiil’s house again. You don’t even know where Kuiil is, you honestly forgot he even existed.

Maybe he will forgive me, you think to yourself. We were in a similar situation?

You see Mando’s helmet enter through the doorway and you feel the smallest, tiniest fraction of butterflies you once had for the man returning.

But the butterflies are immediately squashed when you remember you are about to be thrown out. Again.

Just because you handled it once before doesn’t mean you have the strength to go through that now. Especially after everything you’ve done.

You feel his eyes scanning your pathetic, patched up form on the ground, and the storm inside of you starts to rumble again.

Please… please not again.

He sits down on the opposite side of the ship, resting his hands on his knees. He folds his hands, and you swear you hear him take a deep breath.

“She needs to calm down, that’s all,” he says, referring to Cara, and you find some strength to nod. Your eyes are burning and your muscles want to explode from exhaustion. Your mind is keeping you awake, while the rest of your body just wants to sleep.

“I…. I wouldn’t have let her kill you,” he says, and you shut your eyes, feeling the tears start to rise again.

Why, you think to yourself. It would be easier for everyone if I was just dead!

You still somehow keep yourself together, wiping your nose with your sleeve. He can see how much pain you are in, but you were praying he didn’t pity you. You didn’t deserve it. Especially from him.

“I have only heard stories about red lightsabers. They belong to an evil, dark side of the powers that the kid has,” he says, and you nod.

He has to understand. You know he understands. He always has.

“They’re called Sith… right,” he asks, and you finally make eye contact with him.

“Yes,” you croak out. Your voice sounds like you hadn’t talked for a hundred years, but Mando just nodded.

Yes, you think to yourself. I am a Sith.

The fact that Mando knows who and what you are now is the weirdest combination of feeling a weight lifted off your shoulders, but at the same time, one double the weight has been added.

He was talking so gently. Like he didn’t want to rub it in your face.

He has to be doing this so I don’t kill him when he kicks me out, you think.

Why else would he have any respect for me? No one else ever has?

He takes a moment to process, and then he asks, “The Emperor was a Sith… wasn’t he?”

You feel like a sword has been stabbed through you one final time, but you don’t want to make him feel like he’s hurting you, so you just nod slowly.

You have to save your strength for when he asks you to leave. You know he will ask you in that calm, gentle voice that will haunt you forever.

He understands you fought for the Empire. You killed, destroyed, and lied for them. Their blood is forever stained on your hands, and now you got Mando bloodied.

He deserves an explanation, or at least an apology, so you mumble a quiet “um,” signifying you were about to speak.

Even if he doesn’t believe you, he needs to know you didn’t want this. Ever.

“My uh… my parents sold me,” you mumble while sniffling.

You can tell his interest is peaked because his entire body leans forward, silently asking you to continue.

How can he even look at me right now?

You proceed to tell him the story of how your parents were servants to an evil family who never gave them a fair pay. They were incredibly poor, and they had you outside of wedlock, so they were looked down upon even more in their society. They hated you for it. They took any chance they could get to get you away from them.

When the Empire came to your planet looking for recruits, your parents jumped on the offer. They didn’t mind the extra handful of credits that came with it too.

“No matter how much I hated them, they were still my parents,” you say.

“I didn’t want to leave them, so when the stormtroopers went to drag me away, I got so angry. I didn’t know it at the time, but the force channeled through me in my anger. I used all my strength, and sent them all flying through the air,” you say, while laughing uncomfortably at the memory.

Your eyes still burned and your muscles screamed for relief, but you had to keep going. Mando deserved to know the truth.

“That’s the last thing I remember of that day, and the next thing I knew, I was sent into training. I went through countless masters, but none of them could control me. I was just so angry. All the time,” you said with a sigh.

“I would refuse to do what they asked, and even when I did what I was told, I would hurt them instead. I never listened.”

You took a deep breath. This next part was going to hurt.

“They finally realized that I could not be controlled, so they….. tortured me,” you say, trying not to allow the weakness in your voice to show through.

If you got emotional, it was more likely Mando would think you were crazy. You had to keep pushing.

You cleared your throat, and continued.

“They made me do everything, Mando. They made me tear down towns, cities, planets. And if the people didn’t succumb to the Empire’s rule…,” you say, and you can’t even finish the sentence.

“I finally got away years later, and I escaped to Tattooine. They tried to stop me, but it was no use. I could beat any stormtrooper or Imperial guard they threw at me,” you say.

“They hurt me enough to know that I wouldn’t come back…… I hadn’t even come close to helping anyone but myself until I met you,” you say.

You take a deep breath and rub your eyes.

You did it, you think. He knows.

You let him digest your story. He listened intently and respectfully the entire time you were speaking. He never interrupted, he never became angry, he just stared at you and digested it all.

It was quiet for a while, until he stood up.

“The Empire killed my family,” he said, and all your composure went out the window.

You assumed that the Empire hurt him, it has hurt everyone, but this is on another level. It felt like you had been shot again, but this was way more painful. Your heart shattered for him.

You always knew the universe was cruel, but you had done horrific things, so you always thought it was payback. Now you knew the universe was truly cruel.

“I am….. so sorry,” you manage to say through your burning throat. Tears were streaming down your face, but you managed to stay relatively quiet. It’s not like crying for them would bring Mando’s family back.

He moved to you slowly and kneeled down in front of you.

You couldn’t meet his gaze. You just stared at the floor and wiped your eyes. You were hurting him, just like you hurt everyone else. It felt like hell on earth and you were convinced you were the worst person that ever lived.

“You… you don’t have to believe me Mando. I know I hurt so many people, and even if I didn’t want to, I still did what they asked,” you say, trying to fill up the space.

“You can kick me out, kill me. Anything. I just want you to know that I didn’t choose this. I swear on everything I would do anything to be any other person in the whole galaxy.”

You finish and finally meet his gaze, begging him to say something. Anything.

He stands to leave, and you finally accept your fate.

He gets to the doorway, your final hopes of forgiveness leaving with him.

“I believe you,” he mumbles, looking back at you.

“We will talk more tomorrow” he says, and he leaves you.

Tag list:

@leahkenobi @pinkninja200 @bookloverfilmoholic @farfromjustordinary @440mxs-wife

#din djarin #din djarin fluff #din djarin imagine #din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #the mandalorian #mando #the mandalorian fanfiction #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian x you

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emperorsfoot · 2 years ago

Note

For the ask box game:

I want you to know that an older fic of yours about Evil-Lyn’s parents, Fall of Zalesia, had some of the most fascinating, meaningful, & sensible societal worldbuilding I have ever read.

The Ram & Shepardess roles as well as the customs between them & everything else about their community in the aftermath of war was something so richly made but with no equal that I have found before or since.

The polyamorous/polygamous(?) nature & rules of their relationships as well as the existence and acceptance of those who do not partake was…brilliant.

I do appreciate the portrayal of respect, concern for safety & consent, & devotion in sympathy with healthy open relationships the characters portray. It is written so well and conscientiously to the many perspectives therein. It’s so honest and refreshing.

((This next part is a bit tmi but, an ex admitted cheating on me & in the same sentence excused the action as stemming from polyam desires. I was blamed for not mending the situation by agreeing to an open relationship. The funny thing is that, before the fact, I would have been open to try & my ex knew that, but after…I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

I would never hold it against polyam ppl & their relationships but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t made me sensitive to related topics. I have since moved on and hardly recall that past pain anymore when consuming content with polyam themes.))

Fall of Zalesia invokes an unmarred sense of wonder & curiosity to see & understand how others live & love that I had not fully felt since before I was hurt. Thank you for sharing your work so that I may indulge in this experience again. I feel like I have gotten a piece of myself back. :’))

You are a phenomenal writer. 🌻❤️🌻

(P.S.: I know there are many dark and serious themes in this story. I don’t mean to romanticize, I’m just in awe of how cool and thoughtful your writing is. Take care!)

Anon, your story is so moving, I am near tears. I stopped writing "Fall of Zalesia" because I thought I was the only one who was into it. I had no idea that someone else was not only enjoying it but being affected so deeply.

Yes, my headcanon of ancient Zalesia was a sex-positive society and part of sex-positivity is accepting those who don't want to participate in sexual acts, as well as accepting and making space for those who want to explore multiple partners. Rules are build into their society specifically for poly relationships.

The Shepherdess is the head of her household and hold authority over her husbands and sons, as well as he daughters until they achieve the age of adulthood and gain their own independence. If two or more people who do not have a formally recognized union want to sleep together, they must seek permission from the Shepherdess(es) that are the heads of their respective households. (This is why Maligna tells Nick that if he desires another Shepherdess he should tell her before the communion orgy so she can "negotiate" with the other woman and agree on the boundaries of their couplings.)

Before I stoped writing, I also had plans to explore gender identities within Zalesia. I don't recall if I even put it in or not, but in an earlier chapter when I explain that Nick's uncle was Ace I say something along the lines of "Bash-Or is a mischievous goddess and likes to put people in the wrong bodies". I was planning to have one of the younger Rams who returned from the war with Nick, now that the war is over and all the soldiers finally have time to consider other things besides just survival, that they would realize they're not really a Ram, they're a Shepherdess and Maligna would take her on as an apprentice.

I still think about this fic more often than you realize.

Now that I know someone else is interested and it means something to someone, I might try and go back to it. (I hope I can still find my notes.)

Thank you so much for sending this Ask. It really means a lot to me!

To anyone curious, this is the fic we're talking about:

#fall of Zalesia #Nikolas powers #Nicholas powers #the faceless one #zalesia #motu #masters of the universe #evil-lyn #evil-lyn's parents #ao3 #renkonnairu

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aggressive-positivity-network · 4 years ago

Note

do any of the mercs play board games?

Mercopoly (Board Game

Headcanons)

Scout:

You think he has enough of an attention span to play something that doesn’t involve sweating out his energy drinks?

Hell no!

He gets very bored very quickly, especially with something complex like chess.

He’ll play cards sometimes, but only Crazy Eights and Go Fish - that’s all he knows how to play.

However, there is one true board game he plays occasionally: Candy Land.

It’s one of the few board games that you don’t really have to read the rules for, and there isn’t any writing on the cards.

However, he only asks to play it when he’s not feeling very well.

Medic even has a page in his medical journal for the mercs that says, and I quote:

“The Scout has an extremely short attention span, and if an activity isn’t active or immersive, he will not stay long. If at any point he chooses a sedentary activity, a check-up is in order.”

As sad as it is, a request to play Candyland is a good way to know if Scout needs a little extra reassurance or support.

By the end of the game, Scout usually feels more himself, whether he wins or not.

Engie is especially good with Scout when he’s this way, being the one of the most emotionally sensitive of the group. But he also knows Scout would never admit straight-away how he was feeling, so he usually has a more fun way of getting answers.

“You feelin’ more like a King Candy or a Lord Licorice?”

“...Fudge Monster.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah...”

Spy:

If you ask him, he will most likely go off on a tangent about chess, and how it’s a game of strategy, deception, and crushing your enemy with your wit.

He scoffs at any other game, and constantly makes fun of several of his more intelligent peers for finding interest in them.

“You are mercenaries. Blood-thirsty killers of men. And you are playing ‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos’ like a hoarde of kindergartners?”

But one thing he cannot resist is Sorry.

He considers it above normal board games because it has strategy - or at least that what he says.

He actually just likes it because it’s a game of revenge, which is like a drug to him.

He’s gotten so good at it that if he asks you to play Sorry with him, it’s almost guaranteed that he’s mad at you and just wants to let off some steam by giving you a horrendous loss. However, occasionally, he’s the one who loses.

Spy isn’t a poor sport, exactly - he’s too cultured for that - but sometimes his pride outweighs his manners and he convinces himself that the other player cheated through made up signs of deception.

He simply “allows” them to win because he “doesn’t want to make a fuss.”

But god help the unfortunate soul who decides to rub their win in his face.

Sniper had won five games in a row, and it was clear Spy was getting hot under the collar.

Sniper ended their games with a mischievous, “You’ll get ‘em next time, tiger.” and a small pat on his shoulder.

Spy immediately saw red, grabbed Sniper’s hand, and before the aussie knew it, he was against a concrete wall with a butterfly knife to his throat.

“I could kill you right now. Your final cry for Medic will be drowned in blood, and I would leave you here to die a painful, dramatic death. You’ll be replaced with a rusted trash can of a bot until they could grow another clone of you. Every memory will be gone. The team will be shrouded in grief, not because of losing you, but losing what the clone can never have. And I shall bide my time, ask the clone to play the same game, and kill them when they win. Another clone, another kill. And again. And again. And again. You think the Manns give a damn as long as their work is getting done? You will never be able to form a single thought before I spill your blood - caught in an eternal prisoner’s dilemma where you always lose.”

After gathering his bearings, Sniper finally spoke.

“Is this about your takeout?”

Spy scoffed.

“Do you really think - !”

“Tonight, my treat if you don’t kill me.”

Spy squinted.

“Egg rolls?”

“And an extra order of crab rangoon.”

“Your treat?”

“Yep.”

“How do I know you won’t poison me?”

“Chemical test before and after the food arrives.”

“How do I know Medic isn’t in on it?”

“Miss Pauling as a witness and Scout as an overseer. Pauling’s main objective is to keep us alive, and Scout can’t do bloody anything subtle, even if he wanted to. You can also play back the cameras in the lab, if the mood really struck ya.”

Spy held Sniper against the wall for a minute or two while he thought it all over, then let Sniper fall to the ground.

“I don’t need your sympathy, bushman. But you had better keep your end of the deal. I am the only backstabber around here.”

Demo:

Can’t even stay awake long enough to play most board games.

On the rare chance that he’s sober, he, Engie, and Medic like to play Monopoly.

Here’s the thing: you should never ask a drunkard, an engineer, and a sadist genius to play Monopoly together. It will not end well.

They have been playing the same game for years, with new rules in place and physical extensions to the board in order to try and end the game. Every other Friday, they take the weekend to try and finish it.

However, it all ends up fruitless.

Demo is usually the one keeping the peace, since he is the least competitive out of the three. That isn’t to say he isn’t clawing for the win as much as the other two, but he is definitely the least invested. He’s mostly staying out of principle.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, ‘s ta ne’er give up, e’en when the goin’s gettin’ tough. Roll the dice, doc.”

Despite his confidence, he’s not even sure what he would do if he or anyone else won. It would seem more like a relief than a celebration.

Medic:

He’s the one who started the Eternal Monopoly game, which has led to some theories that the game itself came straight from hell, and is one of the many punishments used on sinners. The box does smell a bit of brimstone…

He seems to enjoy the chaos that each round brings and the challenge of coming up with new rules to the game. To any outsider, his commentary and directions are complete nonsense.

“According to zhe ‘Calvinball Rule,’ as stated by Engineer, and the ‘Double Kill,’ as stated by myself, since the current time ends vis a three and ve all received at least two kills zhis veek, ve need to double every other roll and whomever loses zhe resulting game of ‘Bim Bum’ vill have to go to zhe Purple Jail.”

The rules and mechanics are like an unholy amalgamation of Monpoly, Sorry, chess, D&D, Bluff, and poker.

However, when Medic isn’t stapling pages of rules together, he likes to play a nice, relaxing game of checkers with Heavy.

Both of them are excellent checker players, but neither of them care who wins.

In fact, they usually talk over the game, taking the other player’s pieces as one of them shares a story from that day’s battle.

They’ve even played while Heavy was in surgery - leading to many unfortunate times when Medic had to fish a piece out of Heavy’s intestines.

One would think that a genius doctor would also have a passion for chess, but he expresses his disdain for it almost every time the checker board is brought out.

“Ach, people think chess is such an intelligent sport. Let me tell you, liebling, it is terribly overrated. If zhe devil can play chess, anyvun can. He might as vell just give souls avay, vis those shaky claws of his.”

Engineer:

Being the engineer, he is usually the one to add to the Eternal Monopoly.

Pieces, board extensions, cards, trivia - it gives him a nice break from all the weaponry.

He’s usually the one who remembers all the mechanics and rules, and serves as the judge if rules contradict each other.

“Alright, now let’s see here…we’ve got the Infinity Loop over here, but now you’ve got the Time Travel card…how many years? Infinite? Ho boy…looks like I’m gonna have to add a Hilbert’s Hotel square somewhere. Hold on…”

Despite his affinity for Eternal Monopoly, Engineer will play almost any board game. He learns new rules and figures quickly, and enjoys the challenges that brings.

However, if he’s particularly burnt out, he likes to take a break by playing Jenga. He and Spy have a friendly rivalry, since Engie can tell which blocks are supporting and Spy has quick fingers.

Spy, oddly, is a lot more amiable losing in Jenga - he knows Engie won’t think less of him - but Engineer hates when the bricks fall over. Not because it means he lost, but because, to him, it’s a failure on his part…even if it was someone else that knocked it over.

He’s made several blueprints for the perfect Jenga game, but has concluded that no human hand could put it into practice.

During one particularly bad day, Engie bumped the table, causing the whole column to come crashing down. Spy had already recovered from the noise, but Engie was still standing there, stone-faced.

His eyes were covered by his goggles, but it was clear he was crying.

Several of his machines had broken on the job, and to him, this was just another egregious mistake.

Spy carefully put the blocks back in the container, and Engie came to his senses.

“I’m real sorry, Spy. Maybe another time…?”

Spy only nodded. He was thinking.

The next time they played, Spy brought out a different container.

Instead of wood, the bricks seemed to be made of a sturdy foam.

“They fall a bit more…quietly,” Spy explained. He dropped one, and it only made a small bouncing sound. “Pyro uses these, but they allowed me to borrow it.”

Engie was a bit skeptical at first, since it was a new material, but he got the hang of it rather quickly. He was almost ecstatic the first time it fell - the blocks barely made any sound at all!

After a few games, Spy had to leave for an assignment. Engie put a hand on their arm.

“Thank ya, Spy. Maybe you ain’t the cold-blooded backstabber I thought you were.”

Spy chuckled, but said little else. He didn’t want to admit that noise sensitivity plagued him as well.

Pyro:

Pyro loves board games, and has quite the collection in their room.

Each plastic piece is at least a little melted, and all the boxes have two or three scorch marks.

Hungry Hungry Hippos, Candyland, and Uno are among her favorites.

He is an absolute beast at Uno, though.

They take each game very seriously, especially when they can convince the whole team to play.

As you can imagine, it’s pure chaos - it even led to a rule in the Merc Guidebook: “When playing Uno with three or more players with the inclusion of a Pyro, at least one Mann Co. representative and/or a mediating Medic must be present.”

Pyro has been known the hide cards, bribe players, or even try to set flame to competition. Playing Uno is almost like a mission, with weapon preparation and Spy posing as other players.

The mercs even have a betting stand that Sniper runs. All parties have lost a lot of money that way.

It’s pretty much the only time outside of battle that the team remembers how cruel and malicious Pyro can be.

Sniper:

Conventional board games aren’t exactly his forté, but he does enjoy a bit of cards every once in a while - Solitaire being his favorite.

He even has a pack of cards in his Sniper Square for that exact purpose. It allows him the pass the time without having to look away from his targets too often.

On occasion, he could be pressed to play poker, but only if the stakes weren’t monetary (i.e candy pieces, crackers, duties, etc.).

His favorite part of every match is shuffling the cards. Pretty much every merc could shuffle cards, but Sniper could make them almost float with how quick his fingers and wrists moved. He always began the game with a new trick he learned, which delighted his fellow players (usually Spy, Engineer, Medic, and Demo).

You could always tell if he had a busy day because he would avoid tricks with too much movement, which would be murder on his sore fingers and hands.

Pyro is currently learning card tricks from Sniper, and show off what they learn at the beginning of every Uno game.

Heavy:

He isn’t a huge fan of the bright, plastic-y board games that Pyro has, although he will play them if asked.

It’s mostly because of how complicated the rules are and the fact there are almost never a Russian translation for the directions.

He always prefers checkers, cards, or mancala, which he almost exclusively plays with Medic because he’s the only one who speaks fluent Russian.

Heavy can play a mean game of mancala, though, and it’s the only game he can beat Medic at.

Soldier:

The only games he will play are Battleship and Uno - but only after Miss Pauling convinced him it was “American enough” because the game had red, white, and blue cards.

He prefers the electronic Battleship because of the sound effects and voices. However, if it’s out of batteries, he’ll make his own sound effects.

Miss Pauling is the best at pretending to be a commander, so she’s usually the one playing with him - but, sometimes, Demo gets in on the action, too.

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galactichoneybee92 · 3 years ago

Text

Disorganized Thoughts on Sex Education Season 3

I binge watched the entirety of season 3 on Friday, and after sitting with it for a couple days, I have composed myself enough to offer some thoroughly disorganized thoughts on what I’ve seen.

While I did enjoy many things about this season, I don’t understand the people who claim it was the strongest. In fact, I believe that it was the weakest. I don’t know what exactly happened during the delay, but I swear they have to have lost staff. Writers, perhaps editors? Whoever usually reins things in a bit, keeps the show grounded, and everyone in character. Whoever had that job, they’re either gone, or they’ve just stopped giving a fuck which, while relatable, is unfortunate in regards to this show. Now what do I mean by that? Let me elaborate:

1. This season was gross. And I don’t mean in general, like I didn’t like it. No, I mean that the writers decided that being sexually explicit wasn’t funny enough and decided to add just a fuck-ton of fart jokes and toilet humor. And I get it, okay? This show prides itself on being crass. But you can be crass without being disgusting. I acknowledge that this comes entirely down to personal preference, but I can’t stand toilet humor and I feel like this season really ramped it up. Every episode was someone farting or talking about shit, or that god forsaken thrice cursed bus scene. Sex doesn’t gross me out, talk about sex all fucking day I don’t care, but I don’t need to watch an extended scene of someone digging their own shit out of a bus toilet in a sock and chucking it out the window onto someone’s car. And even just smaller things, like Aimee talking about the flour constipating her or her taking a massive shit in Jean’s toilet when she and Maureen were there. Those scenes weren’t necessary for the plot in any way, which leads me to believe they were just there because someone thought they were funny and if that’s you’re thing go off, but it most definitely isn’t mine.

2. Ruby and Otis. And more importantly, what was the point of Ruby and Otis? Now don’t get me wrong, I like Ruby as a character and I found their relationship interesting. And I think that it would have been even more interesting if the writers had devoted more time to properly developing it- Ruby was getting better as a person but she wasn’t there yet. I liked it once Otis started standing up for himself more, and demanding respect in the relationship and as she started to actually care for him she did come to treat him more respectfully. I think with more time they could have been really good. But they didn’t get that time- she said she loved him and they didn’t even work through that fiasco before he was kissing Maeve at a gas station. Overall it had a lot of potential but the way they played it left me just sitting here like...why? Like from a narrative standpoint what was even the purpose? Because from where I’m sitting it really only served as yet another roadblock standing between Otis and Maeve and even though I shipped them like CRAZY in season 1 and 2 the constant unnecessary roadblocks are getting a little old. Which leads me to my next point...

3. Why was Maeve and Otis so unsatisfying? That’s not actually a rhetorical question, I can tell you: Because the writers put so little effort into what is supposed to be the main couple on the show. I feel like they put more effort into keeping them apart and then when it comes time to put them together they’re just kind of like NOW KISS, they only talk like once after and then they ship Maeve off to America. Now I’ve heard rumors that Emma Mackey might not want to return to the show for season 4 so if I had to guess at all of this I would say that both this point and the last was a sloppy attempt to cover their asses in the event that they can’t get her to sign back on. If she does return, they can explore the relationship between her and Otis in season 4. If she doesn’t, they’re probably going to put him back with Ruby. But they couldn’t just write her off without at least touching on the relationship they spent the past 2 seasons building, even though Otis and Maeve barely interact in this season, which is frankly another reason why it felt so shoddy. They spent exponentially more time talking to other people and then half the time when Otis was talking to her he was super cringe.

Overall, despite loving their relationship initially, the characters have changed so much from their original dynamic, and have interacted so little, that I really don’t even know what’s pulling these characters together. It’s disappointing to admit that I’m kind of over it but honestly even the writers don’t feel invested. it kind of feels like they put them together because the audience expected it and after 3 seasons of anticipation the payoff was generally underwhelming.

4. Otis. Just...Otis. I understand that Otis was introduced as being a very nice helpful character in season one. He was the quintessential good guy. And then in season 2 he got to explore being a douche for a bit- which is fine. He is a teenager and he was going through some shit. But I really felt that by the end of season 2 he should have resolved that particular plot point. And he was a little better in season 3 I guess? But he didn’t really progress until the end of this season and from a writing standpoint I feel like they really dragged that out for too long.

5. What’s with this show and it’s hard on for cheating? Like seriously, why does almost every relationship have some kind of infidelity. Like, were Otis and Ruby officially broken up when he kissed Maeve? Maeve certainly hadn’t broken up with Isaac, and this was almost directly on the heels of their very emotional sex scene. There was the issue with Jean and Jakob last season, and Eric cheating on Rahim with Adam. And then Eric (for some reason) cheating on Adam this season with random Nigerian dude whose name I can’t remember. Just...why is this a thing?

But also can we just talk about how weird the break up was? And out of left field? Like they literally spent the whole season developing their relationship, and then they get to Nigeria and after hiding the whole time he is subtly able to talk about Adam to his grandmother. And he sounds so proud, and so nice when he’s doing so, and not at all like he’s planning to end this wonderful relationship he’s describing. And then when he gets back, guilty after cheating on said boyfriend (like he should be) he asks Adam, seemingly as a test, if he would go out to a club with him. And Adam says no because that isn’t his scene and like...Eric knows that isn’t his scene. But at the same time, I feel like if Eric had sat him down and been like “You don’t have to wear makeup or dress outlandishly, just come to the club with me because it’s important to me” I really think Adam would have gone. And if the clothes and make-up were a dealbreaker like...why? You know who you’re dating. And while wanting him to tell his mom isn’t an overwhelmingly outrageous request, when you start getting into his physical appearance then that’s just actually trying to change him as a person and that’s just a really shitty thing to do.

6. I promise there will be some positives in this list at some point but before that...what the fuck Eric? Like, I understand that Eric wants to get out there and explore his options, find someone more comfortable doing the things that he wants to go do. That’s realistic I guess, your high school relationships don’t work out and just because Adam came out for him he still isn’t obligated to stay in a relationship with him. But from a fictional narrative standpoint? What the fuck is this? Adam and Eric were one of the most popular ships on the show. They have been foreshadowed since season one, and had so so much effort put into developing them both as characters. Adam has come such a long way. They have brought him so far out of him comfort zone that Adam in season 3 is almost a completely different person to Adam in season 1. They spent so much of this season further developing the relationship they established last season, and for what? To break them up at the very end? WHY?

7. Following on the heels of point 6, Aimee and Steve. They didn’t need to break up. I understand the direction the writers were taking this- Aimee wants to be single for a while to fully process her trauma and get to know her own body again. And that’s valid. I just don’t like it because I very strongly suspect that she will have a new love interest next season and that all her stuff about being single isn’t going to be shown. It will all happen off screen during whatever time skip they employ between seasons and then they’re going to use the fact that she is single to introduce a new more dramatic love interest for her since golden retriever boy Steve wasn’t interesting enough for them. Maybe that’s just me being cynical but if anyone can come out of season 3 NOT feeling a little cynical it would probably be a miracle.

8. A positive! Finally a positive! I love the relationship between Adam and Rahim. Do I want them to date? Not particularly. I wouldn’t be mad if it happens, but I really just like them as like awkward begrudging friends. Some of my favorite scenes this season were the interactions between the two of them (Once again, the disgusting bus ride notwithstanding) I like Rahim a lot more when he isn’t interrupting my ship (which is a habit of mine. I liked Ola a lot more once she broke up with Otis)

9. I don’t think Viv was out of character. Some people have been saying that she was, but I don’t think so. She has always been ambitious and even Jackson understand that about her in the show. And even when she was working for Hope and carrying out her rules, she was never an antagonist because she never gave up her personal morals to do it. For example, when Hope had them divided into boy and girl lines, Jackson asked her where Cal should go. She told him that boys went to the left and girls went to the right but as soon as Cal was like “Im not a boy or a girl,” Viv was immediately like, “ Oh! Right! Let me ask Hope.” She approached the situation in a way that made it clear that she recognized this issue as a legitimate problem and when she went to Hope it wasn’t framed like “This person is being an issue refusing to choose,” but instead like “We didn’t account for this possibility, that was our bad. How should we fix it?” Later on, on the class trip, Viv even lied to Hope and told her everything was fine because she didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Viv took the opportunities presented to her, but I never interpreted it as her being an antagonist in any way.

10. I love that Viv and Jackson remained friends, and I love that Viv has her sexy long-distance boyfriend who sexts about wheat XD Her sexting was one of my favorite scenes- well written, laugh out loud hilarious. No complaints. Sexy boyfriend was indeed very sexy and honestly, Viv absolutely deserves him.

11. Mr. Groff better apologize to Adam next season, or at the very least have any kind of fucking conversation with his son at all or else why the fuck did I watch SO MANY scenes developing him as a sympathetic character? They could have spent that time developing ANYONE, but instead we were focused on him so like...I’m going to need some kind of payoff. Make it relevant

12. I want more bonding scenes between Adam and Maureen. I love Maureen- I love her friendship with Jean and I love how she always chooses her son over her estranged husband (as she should) I especially love her very loving and supportive relationship with Adam, even though Adam is terrible at communication. It’s a self indulgent wish, I’d just like to see more.

13. Isaac. I made many posts after the season 2 release, about how much I despised Isaac. Unlike Ola, I find that I didn’t have a complete change of heart but I don’t hate him AS MUCH as I did before. I still don’t like him though and while you might think “Yeah but you hate anyone who stands in the way of Otis and Maeve” no. This is historically accurate and yet, this season? Not true. For example, I don’t hate Ruby. Do I think her inclusion in the story was handled poorly in a way that made the entire plot point unnecessary? Yes I do. I also feel that way about Isaac, but less so because I feel like the relationship between him and Maeve deepening was better foreshadowed and was kind of the natural conclusion given the events of the previous season. As a character though, I still don’t really like him, and after 2 seasons of him I don’t think it has anything to do with him interfering with Maeve’s relationship with Otis- I just legitimately don’t like him. And I don’t like him with Maeve. I think the biggest irritant this season was the way that, after confessing about deleting the message he was like “yeah I fucked up but only because I like you so much, just forgive me” And then at one point I believe I remember Maeve apologizing to him for her reaction to everything. But then when he found out that she kissed Otis (admittedly a shitty thing to do) he got so mad and like, held a fucking grudge about it. And I get it, he has a right to be mad, but also boy you were the one groveling like 2 episodes ago get over yourself. They both fucked up in different ways but he acts like he has the moral high ground all the time and it gets really annoying. I don’t know, maybe I’m letting my general dislike of the character color my perception of events, but this show has managed to change my opinion on characters before but it still hasn’t made me like him so I think it’s just not going to.

14. What the hell were they trying to do with Hope? Like legitimately, what? Because I can’t quite figure it out. And that’s mostly because I feel like they were trying to make her a nuanced and sympathetic villain, but they broke a cardinal rule- To make a villain sympathetic you must also ensure that nothing they do is inherently irredeemable. For example, principal Groff. He was a grade A dick for the past 2 seasons but I still feel that, now that we have a sympathetic backstory, if handled properly he could still come back from this. He can see the error of his ways and if he works really really hard to make amends to his family he could perhaps have his character turned around. In Hope’s case however, I would argue that they did makes her nuanced, but failed to make her sympathetic because as a character she went too far. If they had stuck to her just being a general tyrant of a headmaster - enforcing strict rules and regulations but doing so out of insurmountable pressure from her own bosses - and then softened us towards the character by showing us her willingness to help Maeve get a scholarship, her troubled marriage, and her inability to conceive, it could have worked. The trouble is when they brought in her racism and general bigotry. Those weren’t flaws brought on by stress, those were deeply rooted character flaws that the character isn’t going to overcome because by the end of the season the character hasn’t even admitted them to herself. The issues were addressed by others, but not by Hope herself, leaving me to believe that the character herself still views them as a nonissue. I would be very surprised if she even appears in season 4 and moreso if they manage to even half-way redeem her. I’m relatively certain we won’t see her again, which makes me question the effort put into her character development.

15. I like Jakob as a character, I don’t like him as a love interest for Jean, but I LOVE him as a father figure for Otis. It’s very conflicting because I want him to stay in Otis’s life, but I don’t like him as a romantic interest for Jean. also it’s pretty clear he isn’t Joy’s father so that’s going to be an awkward fucking conversation. If she even tells him. The way the show is going I kind of feel like she won’t, or will at least put it off for as long as possible.

16. I want more interaction between Otis and Jean. Positive interaction, not just her being intrusive or Otis being a little bitch. I like their mother-son dynamic when they’re getting along so I just generally want more of it.

17. Adam. Adam has become my favorite character in this show and I just generally want more of him and his relationships with others. I love his relationship with his mother but I want more if him and Emily, and him and Ola and now him and Ruby. I want to see him and Ruby discussing the Kardashians. I want him to train Madam and enter her in more competitions and just ultimately grow his social circle. Get all the love and support for god’s sake this boy needs it.

Im sure there are plenty of things I’m forgetting and you can ask me about them if you like but for now it’s late and I’m tired.

#sex education season 3 #sex education season 3 spoilers #sex education #otis milburn #eric effiong #adam groff #jean milburn #maeve wiley #Aimee #I don't know Aimee's last name #My bad

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imagineaworlds · 4 years ago

Text

I Love You (Part Fifty) -- Aaron Hotchner

Written By: @desperately-bisexual

Request: None.

Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sub switching (Dom!reader, sub!Hotch). Bondage (ropes and handcuffs). Sex toys (vibrating cockring). Gag (using a suit tie). Edging. Name calling. Impregnation kink. Stop light safe word system. Cock warming for aftercare (to prevent sub dropping). Oh, boy. Sin. Just pure sin. The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying “good girl”.

Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Greenaway!Reader

Word Count: 6855

Timeline: Right after part forty-nine.

Criminal Minds Discord Server

I recognized that look in his eyes. It was the same one I had every time I was in his position. Lust mixed with fear of the unknown of what was to come. There was an insatiable desire to reach out, to touch me, to kiss me, to hold me, to fuck me; all of which he couldn’t have. This started as his game, one which he thought he could win at every time. To his surprise, though, I managed to win— likely just this once, but still— and I was going to take advantage of this opportunity, there was no doubt. Hence, the look in his eyes.

Hotch’s whole body tensed as he heard the click of the black box opening. He was watching me intently, trying to figure out my next moves before I could even make them, but he didn’t have enough experience in the position he was in to build a profile about my behaviors just yet. I didn’t keep him waiting too long like he enjoyed doing with me. I grabbed the longer lengths of rope that we had rolled up in the bottom of the box, and I showed him as soon as I had a grip on them. He tensed again, his erect cock twitching slightly in his pants at the sight of me unraveling the lengths of rope.

I smirked as I laid the untangled ropes over his thighs, just to see how he would react. He jumped slightly. He was on edge… I couldn’t blame him when I always acted the same way. It looked like he almost wanted to plead for mercy, just like he always made me do. It was nice to see him like that, having already relinquished control, excited to know more about my plans.

As I crawled onto the bed, my legs straddling his thighs, Hotch instinctively made a move to reach out for me, but he immediately stopped himself when he remembered the rules. No touching. I grinned slightly before biting my bottom lip seductively. He looked so good for me, his chest bare, his blue dress pants still on, his forehead already beginning to sweat as he anticipated my torture and love. I wondered if that was how I always looked while trying my hardest to obey the rules despite how hard he tried to make me break them. I wanted him to reach out, I wanted him to dare to touch me, to kiss me, to buck his hips up to beg me for more. I wanted him to break the rules in order to give me an excuse to torture him more. He was already in trouble for using me in the car the other morning at the park, and then forgetting that it was Valentine’s Day today. He told me that he would make it up to me, and he was certainly trying his best.

When we got home from the bar, Hotch tried pushing me against the wall and claiming dominance, but I had to remind him that I was the one who won our race the other day, meaning that I still had to claim my prize. He whined— Aaron Hotchner, of all people, whining in my ear— and he grinded his hips against mine for friction, but I pushed him away.

“I won’t let you cum at all if you keep it up,” I said sternly.

I bet Hotch was regretting the competition altogether, but most importantly, how his strict dominance had been teaching me a thing or two about how to put him in his place. We didn’t switch often because I liked being out of control, and he liked watching me writhe; but there were times like this where I found it arousing to see him realize that he had no choice but to be obedient. It was like that night we were going to JJ’s Superbowl party a couple years ago. That night had never left my mind, and I always wondered if we would have another scene like it. I mean, there were times where Hotch liked having me on top… Actually, if we weren’t doing a scene, he preferred it. But there was something different about making him submissive to me. The thought alone was so intoxicating I felt like I could have jumped in then and there, but would have been the point, then?

When we had finally moved to the bedroom, I tore off Hotch’s suit jacket, pulled off his tie as quickly as I could, then shoved him onto the bed. He let me do with him as I pleased, keeping in mind that I had earned this, even though I technically cheated. He had a few days to argue this, but he never did, and he still wasn’t. He wanted this, and that made me want him more. Yet, I paced myself, taking my time unbuttoning his shirt. I had an obsession with his chest and how he would constrict with the slightest of touches. He had always been like that, even long before Foyet attacked him, but now it was twofold because of that. While I was first scared of touching him after that, he insisted that he was fine and he liked how handsy I got with his chest, and he never wanted that to stop. It took some time to get used to it, but now it was easy to ignore the scars and just focus on how he shivered under my touch.

“Please,” he whispered quietly, letting the plea just barely fall off his lips like he hadn’t meant to do it because he was too focused on staying still.

“Please… what, baby?” I asked with the same quiet, considerate tone. I wanted to keep him at ease, to make sure that this was still fine and that he wasn’t going to hate it. He liked what happened the night of the Superbowl, and I liked the trouble that it got me into, but Hotch, by nature, wasn’t a submissive. If there was any chance that he was going to be uncomfortable, then it wasn’t worth it. I loved him too much to not care about what he wanted. “Tell me.”

“More.” He bucked his hips.

I put more of my weight down on his thighs to keep him still. “Hands,” I demanded quietly.

Hotch immediately held his wrists out of me, pressing them together because he already knew what was coming. I kissed his knuckles gently as I collected his wrists in my grip. His fingers stretched, trying to hold my face tenderly. Despite how fast we were moving and how aroused both of us were, the urge to leap into action and just fuck each other crazy hadn’t settled yet. Maybe it was the fact that it was Valentine’s Day, or maybe it was the fact that we were taking it slow to make sure that this was something we both really wanted, but we left some time to just be sensual and catch our breaths. Besides, it didn’t hurt that the slower I would take things, the more desperate he would get for me, which, in my book, was a win.

“Just breathe,” I told him as I leaned down and kissed his lips. He let out a sigh through his nose before leaning up slightly to kiss me harder. While he was distracted with still trying to prove his dominance the only way he could, through our shared kiss, I started wrapping the rope around his wrists. He gasped at the bite of the rope as I pulled it tight. “Just breathe.”

As I tied off the rope to create an inescapable restraint, I leaned up from his lips to watch him struggle and pull. He tried with all his might to separate his wrists, his biceps bulging and his chest tightening as he did so. Just as I wanted. When he realized that he wasn’t going anywhere and that I was getting a little too much out of watching him spar with his restraints. Displeased with the way he profiled my excitement, I grabbed the ends of the rope, the extra lengths I had left for the rest of my plan and tugged. He whimpered at the feeling but fell silent as I leaned over him to tie him to the headboard.

While I had strategically leaned over him in a way that my cleavage would be right in his face, I hadn’t expected him to crane his neck up and attack my collarbone with a nibbling kiss. My strength weakened as he started leaving a mark and bucked his hips up again.

“Stop it,” I growled in his ear.

“I need you,” he whined. I swear, I could never get over that. “Please.”

“Not yet.” I leaned back up and slid down his thighs a bit more so that he couldn’t reach me in any way and if he tried to buck his hips again, it wouldn’t do anything to give either of us the relief we wanted. “Pull.” I wanted to admire my work. I wanted to take a moment to just be in his shoes for once and see what was so appealing about watching me struggle.

He did as he was told, yanking at the rope to test his mobility against the headboard. Nothing. He had maybe two to three inches of wiggle room away from it, but that was it. Hotch slumped. “I hate you.”

“Now you get it.” I smirked.

I reached down and started fiddling with his belt buckle, my hands so close to where he needed me most, but not yet daring to venture there. Hotch immediately stopped moving. Every inch of him was still, the only thing to notice was his wide eyes and the way he was biting his lip. When I finally got the buckle undone, he released his lip, letting out a breath of relief, even though I hadn’t done anything to free him yet. As I pulled off the belt, though, carefully sliding the leather out of each of the loops, Hotch rose his hips to help me, but then obediently lowered them when I was done.

Suddenly, Hotch let out a loud moan as my wrist accidentally passed over his hardened length. “I’m going to spank you so hard you won’t be able to walk for a week,” he hissed as he calmed himself down.

I tsked my tongue. “Nuh uh, that wasn’t the deal of the competition. You can’t punish me for anything I do tonight.”

“Fuck the rules—”

A breathless moan escaped him as I caught him off guard by palming him through his pants on purpose this time to get him to stop talking. “You always have such a mouth on you…” My fingers danced over his tip as his pants continued to strain around him. “I always get punished for talking back, but you…” I did it again and he moaned once more. “You’re worse because you think I’d never do anything to you.” I stopped touching him all together and rolled off the bed. “Maybe, just maybe, this’ll do the trick.” I opened up the black box again and pulled out a toy for Hotch. I turned to face him, rolling it in my hands, taking note of how he gulped and widened his eyes. “You trust me?” I inquired. He nodded instantly. “Color?”

“Green, baby.”

He seemed more eager than I had ever seen him before. I didn’t realize that he would be into this. I thought that he might have found it to be a bit much; but then again, we had reviewed everything in that box together, talking about what they did and what Hotch would be interested in using. While we mainly focused on the toys that we could use on me— since that was our dynamic— we had still discussed this. But I never thought in a million years that he would actually want to use this.

As I sat back down on his thighs, Hotch shifted to get more comfortable, and I let him. “Hotch,” I put a hand on his chest to signify a pause and to clarify sincerity, “you tell me if we need to stop. I’m serious.”

His eyes searched mine for a moment before he said, “Kiss me.” I obliged, knowing that we both needed it. “I love you.”

I winked at him as I moved down to kiss his cheek, jawline, neck, collarbone, pecks, stomach, and… He sucked in a breath as I worked my way down to where he needed me most. When he thought that I would finally touch him, I grinned to myself and started kissing back up his body. My hands held his sides, my thumbs running over his scars out of habit.

I loved every bit of Hotch, no matter what he looked like. While I could have argued all day that I definitely loved him more with the beard, he always knew that I was joking. But his scars were just as much a part of him as his eyes and nose were. They had bad memories attached to them, of course, but they reminded me every day how lucky I was to have him still and how I would do anything for him. There were hundreds of different instances where I nearly lost him, but the scars were a reminder that even if the worst could happen, I would still have him. He was there, in my arms, between my legs, and he was all mine. I loved him. Every fucking inch of him.

He liked leaving marks on my neck, I could show the same courtesy. So, as I nibbled lightly and sucked a patch of skin on his neck as payback for earlier when he did it without permission, my hands squeezed his sides again to feel him tense up underneath me.

When I was content with the obvious hickey my lips started making their way down again. I could feel him still straining in his pants, begging for release, begging for attention. I wasn’t going to give him anything, though. Not yet. Hotch liked teasing me, to dance around what I needed most in order to put me on edge, to make me more desperate for him. The more I wanted him, the better our sex was. He knew that, I knew that, and that was exactly why he did it every damn time. After four years of knowing Hotch, and learning about his tricks as a dominant, I knew a thing or two about torturing him and making him need me more.

“You’re so hard, baby,” I cooed, kissing the buttons on his pants. “What are you thinking about?”

“You know what I’m thinking about,” he hissed.

“Tell me.”

Hotch lifted his head to squint at me, but I didn’t double back on my order. My fingers played with the waistband of his pants, putting the idea into his mind that I would pull them off if he just answered.

“I’m thinking about finally being inside of you.”

I undid the first button. “And?”

He caught onto my game and eagerly made his next play. “Having you ride me.” The next button popped open. “Cumming inside you…” I slowly started pulling his zipper down. “Feeling you clench around me as you cum around my cock.” I grabbed the waistband again. “I can practically already hear you screaming my name.” He threw his head back as he worked with me to help me pull his pants off. “And…” he fell silent as his pants fell to the floor, leaving him in his underwear.

“Don’t stop.”

He gulped. “I can’t—” He shivered as I ran my hands up and down his thighs slowly. “I can’t think of anything.”

“Try.” I grabbed the waistband of his underwear now, hesitating to pull them down until I got at least one more thing from him.

“I— Please…”

“One more.”

“I can’t wait to feel the toy on me—”

His mouth fell agape as I pulled his underwear down, his erection finally springing free. When he was finally nude, finally presented bare for me, I took a moment to admire him. I had never seen him look so panicked yet so in love. He seemed like he was scared of what was to come, but he was excited for the pleasure that would come out of it. Just as I always was. I liked that the tables were turned around for once. He spent years torturing me like this, and I was finally getting the chance to get back at him. This was practically a once in a lifetime kind of experience, considering how careful he’d be in the future to make sure I’d never get this opportunity again.

I was going to ruin him.

I took my index finger and carefully reached out to run the pad of my nail up and down his length slowly. I was barely hovering my touch over him, and he was already bucking around to feel me. I eyed him sternly, pulling my hand away before I could even touch him for a single moment, and he whined, letting his body fall limp again. Slowly, I shuffled down his thighs, moving them apart slightly so that I could rest between them while sitting on my knees. Hotch lifted his head off the pillows so that he could watch me as I bent down, my face level with his cock, begging for my attention, and my ass up in the air. I bet he was thinking about fucking me like that because his erection twitched with anticipation, and I smiled before sticking my tongue out.

Starting at the base of his cock, I licked a gentle stripe up his shaft. He moaned and pulled at the ropes. I pulled away from him to give him a look that warned him to be careful. When he was settled again, I brought my index finger to hip tip and slowly caressed it, spreading his precum around. He wiggled anxiously, twitching against my touch. He was so fucking sensitive. I loved it. This whole time, he wanted me to touch him, and while it was probably a relief to feel something, it was probably torture that I was only touching the places where it was nearly painful if teased for too long.

“Please— Y/N—” He threw his head back. “Fuck— Baby girl— Ah—” I flattened my tongue on his tip, licking up the mess I had made of him. “Y/N—”

“Stop making noise,” I demanded. A smirk suddenly flashed on my face as a thought occurred to me. “Or I’ll gag you.” Using his own threats against him was so satisfying, but the look on his face was priceless.

I tasted him again, this time circling his tip with my tongue, my fingers dancing lightly at the base. Through my lashes, I could see him holding back moans and pleas by choosing to pant and bite his lip instead. I decided to push further, see what reactions I could get out of him. How much longer until he would break? I tested it by leaning forward slightly, allowing myself the angle to wrap my lips around his girth.

“Y/N!” He tugged as hard as he could, his legs pulling up and in towards his body slightly.

I had hardly even put my mouth on him, and I already broke him. He was such a mess. Even more so when I took my mouth off of him and squeezed his thighs. “I warned you.” I stretched to the side of the bed, not quite getting off of Hotch, but not applying the same weight on his legs as before. I reached down to the floor and grabbed his red tie that I had torn off of him earlier. When I settled back on his thighs, I rolled and crumpled the tie in my hands, forming it into a loose ball that would unravel if I stopped applying pressure around it. “Open.”

“You’re not seri—”

Before he could utter anything else, I shoved the tie in his open mouth. He yelled behind it, but he was muffled now, unable to enunciate anything.

“You’re right about gagging; it is nice to finally be left to work in silence.” I smirked and sat up, reaching to the side for the toy I had grabbed from the black box earlier.

He pulled at his restraints, knowing what was about to come. While he probably didn’t want to stop me entirely, he probably wasn’t too keen on the idea of me torturing him with it until I was content with his squirming and pleading.

“Hold still.” I grabbed his face and made him look at me. “Knock for Colors.” He knocked three times before I could even go through them with him again. “I love you,” I whispered as I dragged my nails down his chest slowly. His abs tightened at the feeling, earning a wider smirk from me. “Remember to breathe.”

I turned the toy around in my hands, finding the right way to go about putting it on. His breath shallowed as he focused on breathing, just as I instructed. I gripped the outside of the toy and slowly started lowering it over his cock. His hips lightly bucked in response at first, but then he fell apart into a puddle of loose moans behind his gag as I continued to slide it down every inch of him even slower.

“Fuck, baby,” I couldn’t help but moan at the sight.

The cock ring was so tight on him… I could feel him flexing inside of it, trying to adjust to the cold plastic feeling that was nowhere near as satisfying as being inside of me, but it was still a relief to feel more than just my light touches that were slowly killing him. Then, as it settled towards his balls, Hotch let out a relieved groan, his eyes screwing shut, his head falling back. My eyes focused on his face, trying to get a read on if he was still alright, but then I saw that there was a smile hidden behind his gag. And I thought that I was the masochist.

“I can’t believe you,” I chuckled. Hotch opened his eyes slowly to look at me. “You’re worse than me.” I ran my finger up his length again, yearning a light scream from him. “Color.” He knocked three times after hesitating a moment to let out another moan as I fisted my hand around his length. “Do you remember what this does?” I asked, tapping the cock ring lightly with my other hand. He nodded. “You’ll knock if you want to stop?” He nodded again. “Good.”

My hand moved up and down his dick, stopping just above where the cock ring began. I couldn’t believe how hard he was, and I couldn’t believe that he actually loved this as much as he was. I expected that he would enjoy it, but he’d get frustrated and ask to have it taken off… But he was loving every second of it, despite how tight it was around him. The best part hadn’t even come yet, and he was already puddy in my hands. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what his reaction was going to be when the next step approached.

“Baby—” he moaned through the gag, clear enough for me to understand.

“You want it?”

He nodded. “Please…”

My fingers that had been tapping at the cock ring stilled for a moment as I searched around for the switch on the top. There was a pack at the top of the ring that held a mini vibrator bullet. When turned on, it shook the ring around him, but the best part was that when I would ride him, it would be pressed right against my clit.

Hotch suddenly tugged at the restraints as I found the switch, turning on the vibrator. My hand that was wrapped around him started pumping again slowly to ease his tension, but it actually only seemed to make it worse. His whole body was tensing up. He was focused on pulling against the restraints, trying to see if he could somehow free himself. When I wiped my thumb over his sensitive tip, he immediately went limp again— which was exactly what I wanted.

“Oh…” I pouted on his behalf. “Are you a little sensitive?” He nodded excessively. “If I just…” I leaned down and pressed my tongue to his tip again. For just a moment, I felt how his length was shaking due to the vibrator, but also because he was already so close. I sat up. “Poor thing.” I tore my hands off him and he tugged again. “It took you three hours to realize that you forgot about Valentine’s Day. I’m almost tempted to edge you for three hours just because of that.” His eyes shot wide as he looked up at me again. I chuckled quietly. “What? You don’t want that?” He shook his head. “But I thought I get to do whatever I want tonight.” He shook his head. “You’re already so close,” I chuckled as I took note of how hard he was shaking. “Aren’t you?” He didn’t answer, which meant that he was. I tsked my tongue and turned off the vibrator. Hotch cried out behind his tie. “Color.” He knocked three times. “So good for me,” I bit my lip. When I knew that he had calmed down a bit since his edge, I carefully reached down and turned the vibrator back on. “Does that feel good, baby?” I asked after noticing how he was just a puddle of broken moans.

“Yes, baby girl,” I heard through the gag.

I smirked and put my hand around his length again. He cried out my name as I pumped as fast and hard as I could, stopping just short of the ring every time. Every few seconds or so, I’d take a moment to run my thumb over his tip, feeling how he just kept leaking for me. When I felt him getting close again, I turned off the vibrator and stilled my hand, but I didn’t pull away. Hotch bucked his hips, fucking my hand, thinking that it would tip him over the edge, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. We both knew that he wasn’t getting off that easy. So, he stopped. He hoped that his obedience would convince me to keep going, to make a mistake like letting him cum. But I wasn’t naïve. He was playing the same games I always played with him. Look where those always got me.

This time, once he was calm again, I didn’t turn on the vibrator. My hands continued their movements up and down his length, but this time there was no added stimulation from the toy, and I could see that it was killing him. He really did like it. I mean, over the past few minutes, he had proven to me that he appeared to like it, but I could tell by the way he was begging for me to turn it back on that he genuinely enjoyed the torturous pleasure the toy gave him. The way it squeezed around him, the way it jostled when he’d wiggle, the way it shook his length whenever I turned it on… he loved all of it.

And a thought hit me.

“My needy, little whore…” I whispered under my breath before turning the toy back on.

To my surprise, Hotch smiled and moaned at the slight degradation. It was nothing compared to some of the things he said to me— or could say to me but elected not to; but it came out of the blue, and he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe switching wasn’t as hard for him as I thought. Somehow, it seemed to come naturally to him, which was so odd considering how dominating he was. He loved controlling me, but there was some part of him that was revealing itself that night that was eager to just be used and controlled for once.

I turned the toy off mid thought when I felt him twitch in my hands.

“Fuck—” he screamed. “Baby—”

“I’m sorry, my love,” I cooed, leaning down to kiss his chest gingerly.

He panted against my lips and my chest that was pressed against his stomach. He had been so close that time, and I practically caught him before he could cum, or I could ruin him. Hotch was used to edging. We had done it a thousand times before, but I had never dared to ruin him before. His refractory period wasn’t short at all, and he always got extremely sensitive after climaxing. While that was certainly the ideal type of partner to ruin, Hotch probably would have hated it. Even if he wanted to try, I was sure that he’d end up disliking it, and then he’d feel uneasy by not getting the pleasure of actually tipping over the edge. Besides, his favorite thing to do was to cum inside me and stay there until he was sure that every drop was out… I couldn’t take that away from him when I was already torturing him in every other way. I wasn’t that cruel.

“You okay?” I asked quietly.

He knocked three times, but I just wanted to make sure, so I reached up and gently pulled the gag from his mouth. I made sure to hold his jaw open as I did so, barring him from snapping his mouth shut instinctively, which could’ve hurt him. As the tie left his mouth entirely, I helped him carefully close his mouth so that he could swallow his spit and catch his breath. He stopped panting and stared up at me lustfully.

“I love you,” he whispered. I turned the vibrator back on. “Maybe not—” he moaned. I squinted at him and turned it back off. “Wait— No. I’m sorry, baby, please. I’m sorry.” I turned it back on. “Thank you,” he sighed as he buried the back of his head into the pillow under him.

“And to think that I was actually about to ride you,” I teased. I wasn’t actually quite there yet, but he didn’t know that. His back talk, however, wasn’t helping his case. He told me that he couldn’t wait to be inside me, and I could use that to my advantage. Like now. “I was finally going to slide down on you like this…” I slowly lowered my fists over every inch of him, earning a moan from both of us. “And you were going to cum in me.”

“Please, baby,” he whined desperately. “I’ll do anything.”

“Oh, I’m sure. But all you’re going to do is lay there and beg while I keep edging you.”

“I won’t last…”

“And I won’t care.”

“Y/N—” He paused when I cupped a hand over his neck. “Please—” I squeezed lightly. I felt him gulp against my hand. “I’m close again,” he warned, his voice hoarse.

“Beg.”

“No,” he refused, shaking his head vigorously. He was trying so hard to not give in still, despite how desperate he was. I knew the feeling.

“Beg.”

He whimpered and squirmed as he got really close. I was watching him, though, making sure he wouldn’t tip over the edge before I wanted him to. “Fuck, baby. Please. Please, let me cum. I’ll be good for you. Please. Anything. Please.” He let out another moan as his cock twitched. “Please!” He pulled at his restraints, his legs also flexing. I turned off the vibrator before he could cum. “No! Please! Y/N, please, anything, please!”

“Shh…” I cooed, running my nails down his chest lightly to distract him. “You did good, baby. Do you want me?”

He nodded. “Please, baby. Please…” He sounded so deliciously defeated. I loved it. “Ride me.”

I desperately reached for the hem of my shirt, ridding myself of it before anything else. When Hotch saw me in my bra, he let out another sigh, and his cock twitched again, earning a smirk from me. I lifted myself off him slightly so that I could start fidgeting with my black dress pants. I hadn’t been able to change since getting back from California, though it would have been better to wear something nice to the bar earlier, and for this special occasion with Hotch; but it was what it was. I struggled to shuffle my weight around so that I could get out of my pants and underwear while still straddling Hotch. He was still, watching me intently. I could tell that he was trying to be good so that I wouldn’t change my mind about finally fucking him.

“B—Bra—” he stuttered through a sigh once I had my panties off and I sat back down on him. He had been so good for me, taking his edges so well, begging just like I wanted him to; I could do that one thing for him. Besides, he wouldn’t get to touch. I liked that. “You’re so beautiful,” he complimented as I unclasped my bra and it fell off my shoulders. “Please, let me touch you.”

I shook my head. “No.” I put my left palm on his chest and grabbed his length in my right hand. “Still green?” He nodded. “So fucking good for me…” I sighed as I lowered myself down on him painfully slow. His mouth fell agape as he let a sigh mixed with a moan gently escaped him. “So hard for me, baby. Do you like being my little edge slut?”

“Fuck,” he cursed, throwing his head back again.

“Answer me.”

“Yes. Yes, baby. I do.”

As I sat down on him entirely, I took a moment for both of us to adjust before turning the vibrator on the cock ring on again. “Shit,” I moaned, falling forward against his chest slightly before I caught myself. I could feel him shaking inside of me while the vibrator was also pressed directly against my clit. I suddenly understood why it was so hard for him to relax with those edges I gave him. “Fuck… Fuck…” I kept my palm pressed against his chest for balance, but my other hand went back up to his neck to keep his head against the pillow. When he was pinned and puddy in my hands, I started riding him. “Hotch…” The vibrator moved against my clit as I rocked my hips.

“I won’t last long, Y/N.”

I had to catch up to him. Though it wouldn’t take long, I knew that I had a lot of desperation to make up for. Hotch had been edged countless times, and he seemed ready to explode whenever. Me, on the other hand, I just needed him to hold on a little longer. The vibrator and his cock were already getting me close as I bounced and rocked on him, but he just had to wait. He could do that for me.

He looked at me with pleading, lustful eyes that made me moan again. I leaned down, my hands still pressed to him, and I kissed him hard. He tugged at his restraints again, trying to touch me and hold me, or maybe even grab ahold of my hips to make me fuck him faster, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Y/N…” he moaned into mouth.

“I’m close, baby. Just hold it. You can do it; I know you can.”

His eyes screwed shut. “I’m trying.” I kissed his jawline. “I’m gonna cum, baby.”

“Hold it.”

He was whimpering and whining, his hips still to prevent adding extra stimulation. I didn’t relent, though. I was so close. His cock hit my walls roughly, reaching a deep spot within me that made my knees weak.

“Cum in me, Aaron. Do it.”

I moaned against his jaw as I started falling apart. My stomach tightened into a thousand knots as the vibrator pushed me towards the edge. When I felt him orgasm inside me, his cock twitching, his cum shooting in me, I came for him. Just as he had asked for previously, my walls tightened around him, squeezing every drop out of him that he had to offer while I continued to fuck us through our orgasms.

“Y/N—” he gasped as the vibrator continued to torture his sensitive length. I rolled my hips again. “Fuck,” he hissed angrily. “Stop. Please.” I obeyed, slowing down my pace until I came to a steady halt. “The toy, baby, please— The toy—” He tugged against the restraints as hard as he could before I reached between us to turn the vibrator off. He sighed with relief and relaxed. “Fuck,” he chuckled.

“Was that okay?”

He smirked up at me. “I finally know how you feel.”

“And all it took was four years.”

“Untie me,” he begged, pulling at the restraints again.

I pouted and grinded myself down harder on him. “But you look so good like this, baby.” He hissed between his teeth, tensing up again at the feeling. I grinned and ran my fingers down his tight chest. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” I whispered, leaning down to kiss him. His cock moved inside me as I rested my chest against his, our lips locking, his tongue fighting mine for dominance. When he started to win, however, I pulled away from him. “Hold still,” I cooed, stretching over him to start untying him from the headboard. When he was the slightest bit free, he let his arms fall down against the pillows. “Shh… come here…” I gently grabbed his tied wrists and brought them forwards towards me. “So good for me.” I kissed his knuckles again to comfort and distract him while I started undoing the rope around his wrists. When he was released and the rope fell on his chest, I kissed where the rope marks on his wrists were. “So, so good.”

Hotch leaned up slightly. “Did you enjoy your reward?”

I smiled shyly at him and nodded. I was falling down from Dom space, returning to how I usually was around him. I wasn’t crashing, which was a relief. It was a slow, steady, peaceful decline as the euphoria surrounding the situation died out. That mindset included taking the toy off him to make sure he could relax entirely. So, I carefully lifted myself off his length, both of us groaning at the feeling. I wasn’t sure why, but the running every morning and the rough fucking was getting to me more than usual. He was always big inside me, but it was different when my body was already weak while trying to build up muscle from the different kinds of workouts. The empty feeling of him leaving me was nearly unbearable, and I could tell that he was somewhat disappointed, too.

I looked at him as I sat on his thighs, my fingers hovering over the toy. “Just keep relaxing, okay?” He nodded. I gently pinched my thumb and index finger around the ring and started pulling it up. He hissed and fisted the sheets on either side of his body. “I know, baby…” I cooed, still moving. I knew that the sooner I got it off, the sooner he could relax, and we could call it a night. “You’re tensing,” I warned, feeling his thigh muscles constrict beneath me. “Almost there. I swear.” He let out a shaky breath and relaxed again so that I could pull it off the last two inches or so. “You did so good,” I complimented. “You still okay?”

He nodded again. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I stretched to put the ring on my bedside table, just to get it out of the way for the time being. Hotch grabbed my hips in his hands. “Baby?” I hummed a listening tone. “I need you.”

“Still?” I chuckled.

He shook his head. “Not like that. I just need to feel you.”

I couldn’t believe that. I mean, I knew that he enjoyed sitting inside me for a while afterwards just because it was too overwhelming to move sometimes; but what he was proposing was different. I didn’t object, though. Not at all. It was an innocent gesture— well, not innocent, but it was more so than what just happened, at least. So, I gave in. We moved together, adjusting slightly to make sure that he was comfortable, and then I grabbed his length, though it wasn’t hard now, and I carefully sat on him again. We both sighed with relief, grateful to feel each other again. And then when I was settled, I finally caught my breath.

“Okay. I’m officially sore,” I sighed as I collapsed over his chest.

His body shook slightly as he laughed and wrapped his arms around me. “Sore from?”

“Training.”

“Mhm. Sure.”

I kissed his peck. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

----------

criminal minds family: @peggy1999 @gorgeousdarkangel @alex--awesome--22 @oceaneblu @brithedemonspawn @absolutemarveltrash @bshelley322 @rousethemouse @sunshinepower17 @weexinling @pettttyyyc @Braty-angel

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds fanfic #Criminal Minds Fanfiction #criminal minds smut #criminal minds imagine #aaron hotchner #Aaron Hotch Hotchner #aaron hotchner fanfic #aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotchner imagine #aaron hotchner smut

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random-imagines-blog · 4 years ago

Text

Teenage Queen {Viktor Krum x Reader}

Requested by: Anonymous Wordcount: 2835 Summary: Related to one Champion, ex of another and the budding love interest of a third. It’s one weird year.

Your final year at Hogwarts was not turning out to be as perfect as you had expected. You were just hoping that everything would go as normal; no deadly and dangerous adventures for your little brother Harry and his friends, no fighting with your boyfriend Cedric. Just a perfectly mediocre year where you focus on your studies, get good NEWTS and move on to train at your dream job. And then along came The Triwizard Tournament. Well, at least it was for Seventh Years only, and you had no intention of entering - and your fourth year brother certainly wouldn’t have a part to play in it, would he?

You couldn’t have one simple year at Hogwarts, could you? Not that you blamed your brother but ever since he had come along in his first year, things have been going wrong left, right and center. First, your boyfriend Cedric had been chosen as the Hogwarts champion, which he didn’t even tell you that he had entered. You were mad about that, but then when it came to the interviews and Rita Skeeter poking around, you had enough of it. Even his friends were coming along and asking questions about your personal life, since he was the only one of the FOUR champions to have a partner. This ended up in you breaking up with him, because he didn’t see the big deal about all of the intrusive questions. It was mutual, eventually, but you had to wear him down in order for him to see that it would be better if you spent some time apart.

And then Harry, sweet little Harry Potter who couldn’t catch a break, was chosen to be the Fourth Champion, which was entirely unheard of. You had charged into the room where the champions were and you gave Dumbledore a mouthful of words, as well as the Minister of Magic, but the rules were the rules and he had to compete. You tried throwing back that the rules had stated that it was only for Seventh Years, and that there was only to be one champion per school, but they claimed that their hands were tied. After that, you took Harry’s hand and pulled him out of there so the two of you could talk alone.

You were devastated. Especially in the coming days when it became apparent that a lot of people, including his best friend, thought that he had put his name in the Goblet of Fire. It was completely far away from Harry’s personality, and you vowed to help him through everything, studying your ass off on his tasks on top of your school work. He still had Hermione, though, and that was a relief. You were more worried about him than you had been about Cedric, whom you were convinced would do absolutely fine in the Tournament, and probably didn’t need your assistance.

You were sitting by the lake one day, doing your extra-curriculars. You took just the necessary classes this year, having dropped Divination and Arithmancy so you wouldn’t have to study as hard. But you were doing studies of your own, particularly in Russian. You wanted a job in which you got to travel the world, so you decided that taking languages, a course only done through talking books, was a good way to go. You were fluent in French, and learned more about pronunciation through the Beauxbatons students, but you didn’t know much Russian, so you decided to take that up so you could communicate with Durmstrang as well.

You were coming along pretty well, though your pronunciation needed some work. You were practicing in the weak sunlight of the Scottish Autumn, muttering to yourself. “Ya chuvstvuyu-” You started to pronounce, then realized it didn’t sound right, so you tried again. “Ya chuvstvuya,” You put more emphasis in, “-tvoyu lyubov segodnya.”

“Ochen khorosho!” The book praised back to you. You smiled, the romantic phases being something that you wanted to master. Okay, so maybe you weren’t entirely over the break-up with Cedric. It wasn’t him in particular, it was just having someone to care about, someone to care about you that you missed.

“Who var you talking to?” A puzzled voice said. You looked up from the speaking book to see that there was a student in front of you. You were so into your book that you hadn’t even noticed anyone approaching. The sun was behind him, casting his face in shadow, though the robes showed Durmstrang.

“Myself,” You said, then held up the book to show what you were doing. “Practicing Russian. I’m on the chapter of romantic phrases.”

The student looked delighted, and much to your surprise, he sat down with you, looking over the pages. It was only as he leaned over to take a closer look, his finger running across some of the words, which made the book giggle aloud, that you realized exactly who it was. You turned red at this realization - because it was nonother than celebrity champion Viktor Krum, who you had just seen at the World Cup. You remembered the way that Cedric had gushed over how good of a seeker he was, and how amazing his flying techniques were.

“This one good-” He said, pointing to a certain phrase and then said it out loud. You read along with it, your eyes following his finger, but he added more to the sentence, words that you weren’t sure of.

“What does that mean?” You asked, realizing that you were still as red as a rose at his close proximity. You tried to tell yourself to act natural, pretend that it wasn’t a celebrity - a very handsome celebrity - that was this close to you, but you found it impossible. It wasn’t everyday that someone came into your space like this. The last person had been Cedric, but the two of you didn’t spend any time together since the break up. Just nods in the hallways, and awkward grins if you had a class together. You haven’t tried to date anyone else since, though Rita kept coming up with stories about you cheating on him with other boys. You hoped she wasn’t snooping around now with that damn quill of hers.

“You var my paradise,” He said, in his heavily accented English. That part was in the book. “-My...” He looked around, as if having trouble with translation. He pointed up at the sky, and then did little flapping motions with his hands. When you gave him a puzzled look, he put his hands above his head, his index and thumbs together to make a circle.

“Heaven?” You asked. He shook his head so you took another guess after piecing it together. “Heaven?" He nodded, with a smile and then continued to look around. He then pointed straight towards the sun, which was hiding behind clouds. “Sun?” You guessed once more. He nodded again.

“You var my paradise - my heaven - my sun.” He said, looking quite proud of himself. And he was saying it while he was looking right at you, which just made you feel all the warmer. You hadn’t really given anyone attention since Cedric, and since most of Hogwarts thought you two were the dream couple, no one else had tried to hit on you. But here was Viktor Krum, reciting such lovely things for you in a language that you were only beginning to understand.

“Beautiful,” You muttered in his mother tongue, and he beamed as he recognized the word. Until it was no longer light enough to study, and you had to conjure up a light and keep it in a jar - thank you Hermione for that idea - in order to see anything, he helped you along with your studies. And yet, you never seemed to get past the chapter of romance. He introduced you to new phrases, and would practice with you until you had the pronunciation down perfectly. The book had been quiet for a while, having no critiques for you, you were doing so well. “Thank you so much - you taught me a lot,” You said, getting onto your feet.

“You’re velcome,” He said, bowing his head respectfully, jumping up effortlessly. You scrambled to put your book into your bag, and he helped you, holding your bag open for you. “Maybe you can help me,” He suggested. You tilted your head, questioning what this man could ever want help with. The first task had gone swimmingly for him, he was a Quidditch star, he was handsome to boot. “With een-glish.”

“Oh, of course!” You said with a grin. “I would love to help. Why don’t you meet me in the library on Saturday?”

Four different boys asked you to the Yule Ball, and you had said yes to only one of them - sort of. Unfortunately for Harry, it wasn’t his best friend Ron who just seemed desperate to go with anyone. When you told the two boys that you already had a date, your brother kept questioning who it was. He seemed to have a theory that you were back with Cedric, which couldn’t be further from the case. You just left them guessing, looking forward to seeing their faces when you appeared.

Thanks to the small fortune that your parents had left for you and Harry, you were able to afford a stunning dress. And with some small alterations, you could probably make it last forever. It was your favorite color, floor length with see-through sleeves and a pinched waist to really bring out your body shape.

That, along with your confident smile and you were ready to go.

Your date wasn’t in your house, in fact he wasn’t even from this school. You flushed as you remembered exactly what Viktor had done in order to ask you, and you had to applaud his trickiness. He had written out ‘Will you go to the ball with me’ in Russian, and asked you to translate it. You had done so, thinking that perhaps he wanted to ask out one of the many Hogwarts girls who had fawned after him throughout the hallways, but instead of repeating it back to you, he had said ‘Love to.’ It took you a minute to realize what he had done, and you couldn’t stop laughing once you had it figured out. You agreed with that, and your date was set.

You were going to the Yule Ball with a champion. That was what worried you the most. The attention that you were going to get since you and Viktor had to participate in a dance in front of the student body. He hadn’t had the time to practice, since his own Headmaster was keeping him busy with studying for the tasks, but you did have another willing partner. Your brother Harry. It was easiest with him since he had to do the same dance at the same time.

As you walked down the stairs with a couple of other girls who were meeting their dates, you were nervous to see if all of that practicing had paid off. You caught your brother’s eye as he went down the stairs and gave him a confident wink. He had asked out one of the Patil twins, you had heard, and you were very much looking forward to teasing him about it after all was said and done. Your date wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs in the herd like many of the other males, but further back, trying not to bring attention to himself. He stepped forward when you reached the foot of the staircase, maneuvering expertly through the people in his red suit, and held his hand out to you. You took hold of it, making many in the crowd gasp.

“Krum?” You heard your brother and his best friend say in unison.

You gave a teasing little wave to them as you were lead into the Great Hall, which had been transformed into a beautiful ballroom for the occasion. It looked like a winter wonderland in here, and it took your breath away. You were given a grand entrance, where Viktor, Fleur and Harry were also introduced, before taking part in the dance. You couldn’t help but notice that you were also getting looks from Cedric, who was here with Cho Chang, a pretty Ravenclaw.

You ignored all of those looks, focusing on Viktor, and Viktor alone. He remained the stiff, very concentrated man that you had gotten to know through your studies, though once in a while, when no one was looking, he smiled. The dance went off without a hitch, which was amazing considering he had to lift you. That’s the part that you were nervous about, but his strong arms managed to do the task and you felt safe throughout. You did feel a little better once both feet were on the ground.

Once the dance was over, and the band began playing something less traditional and upbeat, you were able to blend more into the crowd. “I get us drinks,” Viktor winked, giving you a thumbs up as he departed from your side for the first time of the night. You felt even more flushed by the wink than you did by the dance, so you leaned back against one of the columns and took a glance to see who had brought whom.

You smiled as you watched Harry and Ron sitting, refusing to dance with their dates. An older Gryffindor had asked Hermione, and the two of them were out on the dance floor. For the first time, it seemed like the school was entirely at peace. Houses with other houses and schools with other schools. You couldn’t help smiling as Hagrid danced with Madame Maxime. Even Dumbledore had a turn on the dance floor.

“May I have a dance?” A familiar voice said from next to you. You turned to look into those honey colored eyes that had made you swoon the year before, but now - now you just felt nothing. And it was great to just feel nothing.

“I don’t think so,” You said, smiling through your rejection. “Viktor will be back any minute with some drinks. I’m absolutely parched.”

“He wouldn’t let you dance with an old friend?” Cedric asked, raising an eyebrow. You saw through what he was doing, unfortunately. Playing the nice guy. You realized that him seeing you with Viktor must really have gotten under his skin.

“I’m sure he would,” You said, demurely. This was like something right out of a book for teenagers. A love triangle - but you weren’t going to let it be that way. That required feelings for the third person, and you no longer had that. Still, you felt like some sort of Queen with all of the attention that you were getting. “But I honestly just want to save every dance for him. He’s a wonderful dancer, must come with being a professional athlete. Did you see him out there?”

“I did,” Cedric conceded. “And I saw how happy you were - so I’m happy for you, y/n.”

“I’d hope so,” You said, spotting Viktor coming forward. You excused yourself from Cedric, and went to meet him, taking the glass of punch from his hands. You noticed that for the first time in the night, he wasn’t looking at you, but was scowling over at Cedric. You had told him about your past with Cedric, and about your brother being Harry. It hadn’t worried him at all that you were close with two of the other contestants, or at least it hadn’t until now. “Thank you,” You said, laying your hand upon his arm as you took a sip from the glass goblet.

“Vhat did he vant?” Viktor asked, pointing his chin towards Cedric, who was still standing by the column, looking at you solemnly. You shook your head as the ugly beast called jealousy made an appearance.

“He wanted to tell me that he’s happy for me, that I’m here with you,” You said, smiling, since it was a truth, though maybe not the whole truth. “And I must say, I share the feeling.”

The stoic look remained on Viktor’s face for a moment more. You didn’t like it. This was supposed to be a happy occasion. You leaned in and pressed a kiss onto his stubbled cheek, and grew excited as it seemed to light up. He was finally smiling once again, and you both turned so your backs were towards your ex. “Vant to dance?” He asked, draining his own cup.

“With you?” You said, leaning in so you could rest his head on his broad shoulder. “All night long.”

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