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shadowsong26fic · 7 years ago

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Hurray for AU Outlines!

All right, so I got a request to do #11a from my List of Things I’ll Never Write as an outline, soooo here goes!

Note that, due to the fact that the only people who are bigger Drama Queens than the PT Trio in life are the PT Trio having died and been sent back to have a second chance to Make Things Right, this skews a little bit towards the Melodrama and Feels area, rather than straight Funny like some of the others have been.

(Also, as a trigger/content warning, there’s some bits that could be read as passive suicidal ideation).

Previous outlines can be found in the tag.

The actual prompt:

11. Both Anakin And Padme Unfuck The Timeline And Are Bound And Determined Not To Let The Other One Know They’re From The Future

11a. The Same Thing Only Obi-Wan’s Also Time-Travelling

(For those of you who read It’s Like Déjà Vu (All Over Again) [which was prompt #11 above] last summer, portions of this might be familiar.)

So, we start with Anakin. Anakin gets to have his heartwarming death scene, his final moments with his son, a brief and hazy Moment with Obi-Wan and Yoda on Endor…

And then he blinks. And…he’s not a ghost anymore.

He’s standing in the Jedi Council chamber

(which is a whole lot bigger than he remembers; when did that happen?)

“I will train him. I take Anakin as my Padawan Learner.”

…did he seriously just say that? Wow, no wonder Obi-Wan resented me at first.

…wait a minute.

At first, he thinks it’s just—not exactly a dream, per se. But that old saying, about how your life flashes before your eyes when you die?

(this is a bit late for that, though; because he definitely remembers standing with the others on Endor and watching Luke)

(also this is a weird place to start)

(not to mention unfair)

(if he has to relive it all, couldn’t he at least have seen his mom again?)

Still, it’s the best explanation he’s got, so he decides to run with it.

The next couple of days are—very strange

(Obi-Wan and—everyone is so young. He’d forgotten how young they all were, back then.)

Parts of it he remembers clearly, but most of it is fairly vague, or like—a list of facts. This thing happened, then this, then this.

(He overhears Obi-Wan saying he’s dangerous. Why did you forget that, old friend? he wants to ask.)

(Just because he came back, after all, doesn’t change what he did. If Obi-Wan had killed him properly on Mustafar, or stuck to his guns back here and not spoken up for him—well, maybe not that second; maybe that just would have given the Emperor more access to him.)

(But, on the other hand, had he not been in the Order, in the position he’d been in…)

(Not that it really matters at this point, after all. He’s just an observer, reviewing bits and pieces of his life.)

(Right?)

All of that changes when they get to the hangar.

He climbs into the fighter cockpit, just like last time.

(Artoo is behind him, a comforting, familiar feeling.)

And then, three and a half decades of training and self-discipline go up against a nine-year-old’s inherent attention span and patience.

And lose. Badly.

(Look, he’s never been good at sitting still, okay? And a part of him is nine years old again, which just makes that even worse.)

He turns on the starfighter early, since he’s not just pushing buttons at random, and fidgets a little, waiting for the destroyers to show up so he can shoot them and then “accidentally” turn on the autopilot and head off into space.

(It really was an accident the first time. Which was then his first taste of real flying—of combat, too—and one of the things he’s actually genuinely looking forward to reliving.)

Then Maul shows up.

(A not-insignificant part of him appreciates the sheer Drama of his entrance, lbr.)

(the part of him that reacts like the forty-something soldier/Drama Queen and not a slightly overwhelmed nine-year-old.)

On a whim, he activates the fighter’s guns and fires off a shot.

He doesn’t expect it to work.

(This is all a dream, right? Just reliving things because the Force thinks I need to be punished, right?)

Except—it does.

what.

It doesn’t kill Maul, of course. But it does throw him off his game, and damage his saberstaff.

Suddenly, advantage: Jedi.

For a long moment, Anakin is frozen. What the hell. I can change things? THIS IS REAL?!!!

He shakes it off after a second—locks down the panic/reaction, drawing on those three and a half decades of training and self-discipline.

He has a battle to win. He can think about the rest of this later.

When he makes it back down to the surface (after a much smoother/neater destruction of the control ship, tyvm), things are—well, part of it went the same and part of it…

Qui-Gon survived. That’s a big one.

Obi-Wan did kill Maul again.

(possibly properly this time; we’ll see)

The next few weeks are…kind of a blur, honestly.

Look, it’s a lot to process. Above and beyond the whole time travel is real and I can change the past and omg I can see all the people I loved again and omg the people I loved will see me again I’m fucked etc. etc., a nine-year-old’s brain really isn’t built to process forty-some-odd years’ worth of memories. Most of them pretty horrific.

In the end, it turns out his memories are…not vague exactly, except kind of they are. He doesn’t remember a whole lot of detail. A few moments, of course, stand out, but for the most part, it’s just the broad strokes.

Which is not to say that he doesn’t remember the details, just that he can’t consciously recall them. He basically has to enter a deep trance to dredge up any specifics.

When the dust settles, he was accepted into the Order—but apprenticed to Qui-Gon this time.

Probably for the best, he thinks. I didn’t know him the first time around, after all.

He decides, for many, many reasons, to conceal his knowledge of the future and especially how he got it.

And now, he just has to decide—what to do with his knowledge.

His first instinct, naturally, is to run off and stab Palpatine in the face.

Of course, there are a couple problems with this. First of all, he is tiny and ineffectual. He would attempt and fail and just get himself killed.

(This, incidentally, is why Anakin has to land this early because lbr without a damn good reason holding him back, he would just go murder Palpatine in the face.)

(Being Tiny and Ineffectual is pretty much what’s gonna do it.)

(And while a part of me is delighted by the mental image of nine-year-old Anakin murdering Palpatine in the face, it makes for a very short story and does not fit the prompt sooooo.)

And second of all (though this doesn’t occur to him until after he tries climbing out the Temple window and stops himself because Tiny and Ineffectual), remember the above bit about vague memories?

….yeah, murdering Palpatine in the face without knowing the full context (…assuming he even knew about it/cared to know about it in the first place) could have serious consequences.

Like…quite a bit of the Master Plan is already in motion.

The clones are already in production, almost certainly.

Dooku may already be Tyranus, who the heck knows.

Palpatine didn’t create the problems that led to the Separatist movement and the War (or if he did it was much earlier than this), he just exacerbated them.

So, without Palps imposing some measure of control over the chaos…

Chance are, he’d just unleash a different kind of hell. Maybe it would be better, maybe it would be worse.

But he really doesn’t want to take that chance.

He was given this opportunity to set things right. He’s not about to waste it by just breaking the world again a whole new way.

He decides (though he knows it will be Extremely Difficult), to keep his head down and try to figure out exactly what the context is, put things in place to unravel the preliminaries as best he can, and then murder Palpatine in the face.

Of course, Anakin has never been very good at playing the long game.

(Even as Vader)

And he learns, pretty quickly, that Qui-Gon…has many talents, and is a very good Master for him in many ways but…yeah, not so much that.

(Qui-Gon may, in fact, be worse at long-range planning than he is. He never thought he’d see the day…)

So, after a year or two, he gives in and admits he needs additional help. And there’s really only one person he can turn to.

The problem is, Obi-Wan has been…not very much at the Temple since Anakin arrived. And when he is, he tends to avoid Anakin and Qui-Gon as much as he can.

But they were friends before—while they were alive, and then again, after Luke saved him and they found each other in the Force again.

Anakin is sure that, if he just has the opportunity to talk to Obi-Wan, they will be again…

Of course, before Anakin can approach Obi-Wan, guess whose turn it is now to land in the past!

Obi-Wan wakes up in the middle of a mission, about a year and a half after Anakin got back.

He realizes he’s time-travelled pretty quickly. He sort of vaguely remembers this mission? It was one of the ones he went on just after being Knighted, when Anakin was still too young and inexperienced to accompany him.

(Not a very memorable mission, though. The Force is being kind; he’s going to get enough shocks to the system over the next few days.)

So, once he processes that, he’s pretty happy about it. He can change the past! Fix things! Save Anakin! Not lose EVERYONE all over again!

(well, all right, he’s too late to save Qui-Gon but still)

It’ll take some doing, of course; to unravel everything Palpatine’s already put in place. Make sure he ties up all the loose ends.

(it might well take him the full ten/twelve years he has, even; he’ll need to find actual evidence of what he knows, probably, and explain how he got there some credible way, in order to actually get this right.)

But first…

But first, he gets to see his brother again. And, yes, they found each other in the Force, and everything was all right in the end, but…but this is a second chance.

He’s very much looking forward to it.

So, he wraps up his mission and sends a preliminary report back to the Temple, and then thinks—I’m not too far from the Arkanis sector.

That’s a problem we really don’t need eight years from now.

Besides, from everything he’s heard of her, Shmi Skywalker deserved so much better.

He gets to Mos Espa, and tracks down Watto (he never saw me before, I can do this discreetly and not have to deal with the Council asking Questions I haven’t yet decided how to answer) and finds out—

“The Jedi came through and bought her from me over a year ago.”

And there’s a sort of…brain-glitch moment there, where two conflicting sets of memories over the past two years try to integrate.

At which point he’s absolutely positive that someone else is time-travelling, and he figures it’s either Yoda, Anakin, or Qui-Gon himself. He won’t know for 100% sure, though, not until they actually meet.

I have to get back to the Temple now.

He makes his excuses to Watto, grumbling rather convincingly, he hopes, and disappears off into the sunset, back to his ship and Coruscant.

He gets to the Temple hangar, and Anakin is actually there, waiting for him. And he knows.

Anakin’s eyes go huge, and his shields slam down. He’s clearly unsure exactly how to proceed. He had this All Figured Out, and suddenly he’s dealing with his Obi-Wan, the one he loved and lost and found again, instead of the one from this timeline, and…and…

Obi-Wan nudges his shields a little, and offers a very brief smile—it’s okay, we did find each other again, you came back.

Anakin brightens and tries to hide it.

(badly, as always)

But they’re still in the Temple hangar at the moment, and Anakin is probably Supposed To Be Elsewhere right now.

“Meet me on the roof tonight,” he murmurs as he passes.

Anakin nods, then scampers off to whatever he’s supposed to be doing.

(Obi-Wan decides it’s probably better to approach Qui-Gon after he and Anakin have talked properly. But that’s his next step.)

Anakin’s very Nervous again when he gets up to the roof that night. He’s had all day to fret about it, after all.

But as soon as Obi-Wan gets up there—a couple minutes after Anakin does—he immediately hugs his little brother.

Anakin clings tighter than he remembered knowing how to.

And for a very long moment, they just stand there, clinging to one another, on the Temple roof.

(they don’t speak)

(at this point, they don’t need words)

And then they start talking—Anakin reveals how long he’s been here, and admits that he’s a little lost how to proceed.

“My memories aren’t totally reliable,” he says. “I think my brain was too small when I landed. And you’d think it would get easier as I physically matured, but…”

“Maybe in a few more years,” Obi-Wan suggests.

“Maybe.”

Obi-Wan agrees with Anakin that they shouldn’t just go for Palpatine right away.

(for one thing, if they don’t have any actual evidence, that risks pitting the Senate and the Jedi against one another which would…would not end well.)

So, they decide that Obi-Wan will try to research, find actual evidence that leads them to Kamino and Geonosis. Because “I had a vision” might satisfy the Council (“we came from the future” is slightly less likely, but still within the realms of possibility), but even if they manage to cultivate allies in the Senate, they will never convince that august body of Palpatine’s evil with that alone.

“With any luck, this won’t take too long. I know more or less what I’m looking for, and I have a little more freedom to maneuver.”

“Because you don’t have a small child tagging along this time?” Anakin suggests dryly.

“Partly, yes,” Obi-Wan says, with a smile. “The point is, I’m sure I’ll find something that leads me to Kamino, and we’ll go from there.”

“Without letting him know we’re on to him.”

“Ideally, yes.”

Anakin, they decide, will try to figure out how to deal with the chips. Just in case.

“It might take some time,” he warns. “The interface between the organic and the machine parts is where I always had trouble. Even with the…the suit, later.”

Obi-Wan nods. “But we have eight years,” he says. “Surely, between the two of us, we’ll pull this off.”

“Hey, we’ve pulled off wins against worse odds before,” Anakin agrees, with a very familiar spark in his eyes.

(Obi-Wan’s heart soars a little at the sight.)

For two years, everything goes reasonably well. They make progress, Obi-Wan foils a few schemes (so do Anakin and Qui-Gon).

(Obi-Wan also patches things up with his old Master)

The three of them are a family. They’re actually happy.

But there is a Problem on the horizon.

Palpatine hasn’t quite figured out that Obi-Wan and Anakin are on to him. Obi-Wan is too careful for that, too used to being undergound, and Anakin doesn’t have the access to really make an impact.

But Qui-Gon—Qui-Gon hasn’t been allowing Palpatine the access he wants.

Naturally, the solution to this problem is to arrange his murder.

Neither of the boys takes Qui-Gon’s death well.

For Obi-Wan—well, it’s like Maul all over again; better in some ways because he had more time with his Master; worse in others because just when they reconnected he lost him again.

For Anakin—oh, the guilt. Beside which, he had actually bonded with Qui-Gon this time around, so…the guilt and the grief and everything in him wants to lash out.

(that’s what he does when he’s grieving, after all)

(he lashes out)

(and the worst of it is—the worst of it is, he knows exactly why this happened)

(and it’s all his fault)

(Qui-Gon was killed because of him.)

Obi-Wan figures out this is going down (or at least the first part of it) which is what pulls him out of his own grief spiral and goes to calm him down.

And Anakin starts to withdraw because—because how can he face Obi-Wan, after this—

“Don’t—don’t—don’t shut me out, Anakin, please—”

And that’s all it takes and they both basically break down and cling again, just like on the Temple roof two years before, only…only…

A few days later, they have a strangely familiar conversation at a too-familiar funeral, and Obi-Wan takes over Anakin’s training.

The two of them fall into old patterns—or, well, something very, very close to them. Since they’re not willing to read the Council in on things, they’re also running regular missions along the side. But they continue to interfere with Palpatine’s plans whenever they detect them, and keep looking for the full web so they can safely remove the spider at its heart.

Palpatine, of course, has backup plans for his backup plans, so he can always course-correct. On the other hand, frustratingly, he doesn’t have any more access to the boy than he did with Jinn involved, and cannot risk another murder.

So, he keeps trying to gain access, and keeps adjusting his overall plans as necessary.

Some ground is gained, but some is lost. Their slow underground solitary war does show some progress, if glacial. And the day to day missions take up enough of their time and focus that, while they are making strides in the longer game, years pass before they even realize it.

And then, Anakin and Obi-Wan are at last sent to mediate a border dispute on Ansion.

They are once again arguing about Anakin’s Trials, just like the first time around.

But this time, they’re taking the opposite sides.

“No, Master, I’m not ready, I need a restraining bolt, I can’t do this.”

(remember what I almost did after he died, Master? You pulled me back. I need you there to pull me back.)

“Anakin, you are clearly ready, I don’t think you do at this point, and the Council is starting to Drop Hints at me about holding you back.”

“No. No, no, no, I can’t do this.”

Obi-Wan sighs and drops the subject for now.

Anyway. Ansion. Anakin seems uneasy, on edge.

“I don’t know. I feel like this mission is Significant somehow, but I can’t place it.”

(karking unreliable memories)

Obi-Wan doesn’t really recall it, either.

“It’ll come to one of us if it really is that important.”

They complete their mission, and then, on the way back to Coruscant—

“Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan, I figured it out.”

“What?”

“Why this mission is so important.”

“Yes?”

“It’s the last one. Before—before Kamino. And First Geonosis. And…Varykino.”

“Oh. …oh.”

Obi-Wan tries to figure out a solution—had things really gone that far already? Where did the time go we’re not ready yet—and the best he can come up with is trying to switch places; perhaps using Anakin’s Trials as an excuse to send him to Kamino, while Obi-Wan guards the Senator.

“If the Council goes for it, I’ll do it,” Anakin says.

But first, they have to deal with the initial half of the mission—seeing Padme again; meeting the bounty hunter, finding, at least, a genuine breadcrumb that will take them to Kamino.

AND NOW, at long last, GUESS WHOSE TURN IT IS TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIME!

Padme wakes up on the approach to Coruscant.

Like Obi-Wan (and unlike Anakin), she figures out she’s time-traveled pretty quickly.

(she mucks around with the landing gear, and is able to do just enough to save Corde’s life, even if she can’t totally prevent the explosion)

And that just confirms it—she’s in the past, this is real, she can change things. She can save the Republic. Save Anakin.

(even if she was wrong when she died, and she doesn’t think she is, she knows there’s still good in him now. She can save him, here and now. She is not going to lose him again.)

Speaking with Palpatine himself again is—not easy. Mostly because she is nearly overcome with the desire to rip his karking face off.

(she focuses on the mental image of Corde in the medcenter instead, because she’s angry about that, too)

(it seems to work; his slimy, false sympathy is exactly as it was the last time)

(This, incidentally, is why Padme has to land so late. The same reason, basically, why Anakin had to land so early—without a damn good reason, she would just haul off and murder Palpatine in the face.)

(And she’s smart enough to know that she has to wait until she takes steps to counteract the inevitable power vacuum, especially with Dooku still out there.)

(But if she landed before he was this entrenched….?)

(Yeah. Murder. All of the murder. Right in the face.)

But then—after suffering through her audience with Palpatine—then she gets to see Obi-Wan and Anakin again.

And there’s a moment of—the last time she saw him, he did go mad and try to murder her. What if she reacts to that, instead of the person he is in the here and now?

(…I will cross that bridge if I come to it, she decides.)

Of course, when she sees him again—

This is her Anakin. Not the one she lost on Mustafar, the one she found at Varykino.

(well, not quite; maybe a little later; a year or two into the War, after he had Ahsoka, before things got too bleak and never-ending; when he was a little bit scarred, a little bit shadowed, but still the golden boy she loved.)

Anakin is just as much of A Mess as he was the first time around.

(if not more)

(Obi-Wan would very much like to bang his head against the wall but he is A Professional, so instead he steps on Anakin’s foot and takes control of the conversation)

(he’s also extremely—if decorously—happy to see Padme alive again like this)

Padme does not actually sleep that night; she remembers those creepy worm things and she knows they’re coming this time.

(“maybe one of us should hang out on the roof, pounce on the droid before it cuts through the window,” Anakin says, “and by one of us I mean me can I please go dive off a roof onto a droid?”)

(“fine, as long as you don’t mock my driving when I pick you up. And we are not taking your shortcut again.”)

(“you never let me have any fun.”)

(“I’m letting you jump off the roof!”)

(Padme watches Anakin fall past the window a few hours later, crashing into the droid and disappearing from view)

(...that’s...different...)

But, long story short, they get their dart breadcrumb. As promised, Obi-Wan speaks to the Council, but they refuse to switch the assignments from what they see as the logical one.

(Anakin is kind of torn between terror and elation and Angst)

(“everything will be fine,” Obi-Wan promises him)

Padme is mostly pleased. She’s still pissed that she has to miss the Military Creation Act vote, but, on the other hand, cementing her relationship with Anakin is almost as important in the long run.

(especially since the War, at this point, is inevitable)

(at some point, while they’re getting ready to go, Anakin mentions Qui-Gon to her; and she has the same sort of brief brain-lag memory-integration Moment Obi-Wan did on Tatooine eight years before)

(Anakin panics for a second “what did I do wrong this time DDDDDDD:”)

(but she does recenter, and figures—well, this isn’t all that much more weird than the concept of time travel in and of itself; question is, does this make her job easier or harder…)

(one thing she is absolutely sure of, though, is that Anakin can never know what she’s seen. It would break him, and she will not let that happen. She’s going to get it right this time. She’s going to save him.)

The two of them continue on to Varykino, and Padme notices more strange things that don’t quite add up.

Anakin is—shy. Definitely interested in her; just as transparent as the last time, but every time they start to get close, to touch, to kiss—he pulls back as if he was burned.

And what follows is, essentially, a role-reversal of their canon courtship.

(complete with Melodrama by the fireside, where Anakin tells her they Can’t Be Together and then flees the scene and Padme promptly bursts into tears because, to her, it feels like her husband of three years just left her, nevermind that he isn’t her husband yet, and…)

(“It would destroy us,” he says; knowing how it would.)

(“I look at you, and I can’t breathe,” he says; hearing the echo of the monster that still lives inside him.)

(“I am here to protect you,” he says; meaning so much more than she can possibly understand.)

(because, whatever else happens, she can never know what he’s done. It would destroy her. And he cannot let that happen. He’s going to get it right this time. He’s going to save her.)

So they spend the next few days Pining. There is so much pining going on, guys.

(lightyears away, Obi-Wan is very glad he’s lightyears away from all of this.)

Obi-Wan’s thread is basically a much smoother, more deliberate progression of his canon plotline.

Again, he needs actual Evidence that will be acceptable to the Senate, not just the Council.

Of course, when he gets to Geonosis, he has absolutely no intention of getting arrested again. He could do without reliving that particular adventure, thank you very much.

So he picks somewhere less exposed to send his message summoning reinforcements.

(and still gets spotted and captured, because the universe likes to mock his pain)

Anakin facepalms a little, but—well, he needed an excuse to go to Geonosis.

If I can get this part right this time, if I can kill Dooku right from the start—I can’t think of a better way to hamper the Emperor’s plans.

Padme promptly announces she’s going to rescue Obi-Wan, just like she did the first time.

Anakin tries to talk her out of coming along.

(It is very, very difficult, he now remembers, to talk Padme out of anything. Especially where Righting Wrongs and Triumphing Over Evil and Saving People is concerned.)

(he loves her so much when she gets that look in her eyes; a part of him is dying a little but he follows her; he will always, always follow her)

Anakin smiles that little crooked smile of his, the one that means explosions and death-defying recklessness and somehow saving the day nonetheless.

(she loves that smile; almost as much as she loves the full, bright, soft one that’s just for her; a part of her is dying inside, knowing that she might never actually see it again, but she stands at his side; she will always, always stand at his side)

They work their way through the factory, doing a little bit better than the first time, since they know their way around.

But, because they are still Reckless and Unsubtle, they get caught.

As they’re being brought into the arena, just like before, Padme tries one last desperate confession.

(she’d hoped it wouldn’t take a mutual near-death experience like it did for her, but it’s worth a shot)

(and he knows he shouldn’t—not until after Palpatine is dead and his mission is complete—but…but she loves him. She said so.)

(and he kisses her, once, before they’re wheeled into the arena.)

The next bit goes…eh, more or less as it does in canon.

Until they catch up to Dooku in that cave.

…well, okay, for a few minutes longer. Anakin, overconfident and riding the most glorious high of his life, still rushes in heedlessly.

He manages to catch the lightning, but he’s lost vital ground, and he’d—forgotten how skilled Dooku was.

(in his defense, he had defeated him legitimately before murdering him last time!)

Eventually, he sees an opening—the opening—for a clean kill.

But he’s at a bad angle, and Dooku is too focused…

(Obi-Wan will figure it out, he reasons, in the split second he notices it, and steps forward to make a sacrifice)

Dooku misses the fork, takes the bait, makes for the opening Anakin has given him—and strikes true.

But leaves himself open to Obi-Wan who does not hesitate to take his shot.

So, here is what has and hasn’t changed—Anakin still loses his right arm; but Dooku dies at First Geonosis.

Obi-Wan deactivates his saber and steps over Dooku’s body, running to Anakin.

“I’d forgotten,” Anakin mumbles, “how much that hurt…”

“You didn’t have to do that, my friend,” Obi-Wan says, trying to push soothing, comforting pulses along their bond as they wait for help to arrive.

Anakin shakes his head. “Needed t’distract him. So you could get him and he wouldn’t get away this time.”

Obi-Wan sighs.

Padme bursts in a moment later.

“Ani!”

Obi-Wan shifts to allow her room; lets her cling to Anakin’s remaining hand.

(he is, of course, completely unsurprised by this turn of events)

Later, when Padme and Anakin get back from Naboo, they confess to Obi-Wan almost immediately.

“I thought,” Obi-Wan says, when he and Anakin are speaking privately afterwards, “that you were going to try to—that you were going to wait until Palpatine was dead. Just to be safe.”

“I know. But…but it’s really, really hard to…I couldn’t say no to her, Master,” Anakin says. “She…I’d forgotten how much she…I’d forgotten.” And then he smiles, softly.

“Don’t misunderstand,” he says. “I don’t disapprove. I just—you…you are aware I knew from the beginning last time, right?”

“I—wait, what?”

“You two,” Obi-Wan says, patiently, “are not remotely subtle.”

“…you never said anything…”

“You made each other happy,” he says. “Besides, I was hoping you would come to me, eventually.”

“I should have,” Anakin says.

Obi-Wan doesn’t disagree. “Just…don’t shut me out this time, all right? Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together. But I can’t help you if you don’t let me.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“And—are you sure this is how you want to proceed?” Obi-Wan says.

Anakin thinks for a minute then nods. “She loves me. And I love her. And she asked me and I couldn’t…yes, this is how I want to proceed.” He pauses, laughs a little. “And I never could say no to her, anyway. Not until I was too far gone to listen to anyone. So, if I’m still listening to her, if I still can’t say no to her, I’m doing all right. Right?”

Obi-Wan is Very Very Tired right now. And wants to bang his head against the wall.

(it’s the same problem they’ve been running into with his Trials, all over again)

He chooses not to answer that just now. Instead, he says, “all right, but you have to tell her.”

Anakin’s face drops. “I can’t,” he says. “It would only hurt her.”

“Someday, the truth will come out,” he says. “And the longer you wait, the worse it will be.”

“I can’t,” he says. “What good would it do, to tell her about a horrible future that will not happen?”

“I won’t make you,” Obi-Wan says, after a moment. “But keeping this from her is a mistake. I genuinely believe that.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Anakin says, reluctantly, but has no intention of changing his mind.

And so, the War.

Anakin does have the chips sorted, mostly, and he and Obi-Wan start very carefully working through the 212th and 501st, with the intention of moving on to the rest of the army as soon as they can.

They also have the Actual War to fight, which takes up a lot of time and energy. Even with Dooku dead, the Separatists have enough steam to keep this up for at least a year or so.

Padme is carefully, carefully manipulating events so Bail or Mon (Bail is a little more experienced, but Mon, not being Chandrilla’s ruler’s consort, will have an easier time transitioning from representing her home planet to overseeing the whole galaxy) will be able to take power after Palpatine is removed.

And spending as much time with Anakin as possible.

(He doesn’t really object to this. He’s enjoying this all while it lasts.)

Obi-Wan and Anakin talk, early on, about whether or not to request Ahsoka—eventually settle on yes, because she’s good for them. They all work so well together.

(besides, Anakin is almost entirely happy for this brief moment; this was the best year of his life the first time around, and he has the opportunity to have his family back together and…)

(Obi-Wan doesn’t disagree.)

Ahsoka, of course, has no idea of all of this going on under the surface, but she bonds with her Masters and with Rex and with Padme (who is so happy to see her again she has trouble hiding it)…she’s so relieved that her being assigned to Master Skywalker has worked out so well for everyone involved.

But eventually, things must come to a head. And, after a year, Anakin gets a little nudge.

(It’s time.)

This is—oh, we’ll call it during the Tiny Angry Boba Fett arc.

(this was not one of the missions Anakin remembered with any clarity, incidentally.)

(it was somewhat disconcerting to see tiny Fett, though.)

(having on a Very Significant Occasion worked with the full-sized version…)

Obi-Wan is in the field doing…I honestly can’t recall what he was doing, but it might be different in this timeline anyway. Point is, he’s off fighting.

Ahsoka, of course, is off with Plo, Investigating.

Anakin is stuck at the Temple recovering from his injuries.

(with Mace Windu right there)

(as some of you may be aware, I am very fond of inversions and role-reversals and parallels…see also the Rabbit Hole AU; and there’s a future Precipice plot thread that you can probably guess, given that…)

(they’re still not friends; they probably never will be; but they work together at least as well as they did the first time around)

(maybe a little better, even, because Anakin understands him, somewhat)

And Anakin gets that little nudge and, while Mace is asleep or meditating or something, sneaks out. He goes, at long last, to confront Palpatine.

Palpatine is slightly surprised, but not at all displeased, to hear that General Skywalker has requested to meet with him.

(he’s made little drips of contact through the years, but never quite enough to catch on, fortunately)

(at last, he thinks, the seeds he planted are bearing fruit!)

And then Anakin gets into the office.

(and turns on a recording device he’s built into his arm)

(he’s not quite sure why that’s so important to him to install it, but it is)·

(some deep-buried part of him remembers everything that led to Ahsoka’s trial and is covering ALL HIS BASES)

And then he drops his shields.

Palpatine pauses for a split second, calculating his best response.

Option one: kill Skywalker here, find a way to explain it—ah, yes; an assassin, the young Jedi heroically saved his life, unfortunately sacrificing himself in the process. This is the safest option; Skywalker knows far too much, after all. Best to dispatch the threat quickly.

Option two: subdue Skywalker and take some time to learn how the hell he got this much knowledge of the future. This idea is not without risk—harder to explain away, for one thing—but given how several of his schemes have quietly unraveled over the past few years, it might be a bigger threat to remove his only potential source of information. There may be others who have this knowledge, after all.

He settles on Option Two.

Just as Anakin had hoped, Palpatine begins to stall, drawing out the conversation, looking for an opportunity to subdue him nonfatally.

Keep him talking, Anakin thinks. Long enough to say something truly incriminating, and help Padme and Obi-Wan with the aftermath.

(but just for the two of them; he’s pretty sure he’s not walking out of this confrontation alive.)

(he was already injured, after all, and while he’s mostly healed, it’s a profound disadvantage in a fight like this)

(and he’s made his peace with that)

(he’s not really built for peacetime, after all)

(nor does he deserve it, really)

(he just…he wishes it hadn’t come so soon.)

(it’s too early; Luke and Leia won’t exist now, and that’s—that’s something he really, really wants to happen; but…he trusts the Force to tell him when the time is right, and the time is right to end Palpatine now; he cannot risk failing by delaying)

(so he regrets, a little, but he has faith in Padme and Obi-Wan, absolute faith, that they will see this through, after he does his part.)

Palpatine notices the instant Anakin’s tactics change; realizes there must be a recording device somewhere; how could this happen, how could this notoriously unsubtle child get that past me? His arm. It must be in his arm; I need to make sure it’s destroyed when I kill him—

He lashes out; lightning, of course—but not quite quickly enough to stop Anakin running him through.

Anakin staggers a little, fighting to stay conscious as the lightning burns through him, his arm sparking madly (but the part of him that planned for this planned for that too; the recorder is safe); and Palpatine—Palpatine has one last trick up his sleeve.

He has a knife in his boot, a last-ditch self-defense weapon; dipped in poison because he never does anything halfway. He buries it in Anakin’s side, using his last moments to make sure he takes Skywalker with him.

MEANWHILE, back at the Temple

Mace wakes up, and immediately notices Anakin is gone.

He gets up, snags a passing Healer, brushes aside her remonstrances.

“Was Skywalker discharged?”

“What? No, of course not, why--?”

Mace doesn’t bother answering. Just pushes past her and bolts after Skywalker.

He gets to Palpatine’s office in time to see the lightning and both stabbings.

And, despite the concussion, as he is in a much clearer/steadier frame of mind than Anakin was the first time around, Mace is able to evaluate the situation more or less accurately, and does not draw on Anakin.

Instead, he asks, “….Skywalker, what the hell is going on here?”

Okay, he can clearly see that Palpatine was the Sith Lord—which is going to take a hell of a lot of explaining what the hell—but how Skywalker knew—

“That’s…a very long story, Master.” He detaches his prosthetic, and passes it over. “Evidence. I recorded everything.”

Mace stares at Anakin. Stares at the prosthetic. Stares at Palpatine’s smoldering body.

(his half-healed concussion-induced headache is getting worse by the millisecond)

He finds the recording, skims through it—

“…all right. I’m going to get the guards to secure the scene,” he says. Then, eyeing Anakin, “also a medic. Stay put, Skywalker.”

“Sure,” Anakin says, and closes his eyes.

Mace turns off the recording and heads off, holding on to the arm.

And Anakin—Anakin is really feeling the poison burning through him now. He yanks the knife out—he tries to purge the toxin, but he’s not strong enough; not after the lightning; not while he’s bleeding like this.

Padme, he thinks. I can’t—I can’t see Obi-Wan, I can’t see Ahsoka, I can’t see everyone I love to say...but I have to…I have to…

(Obi-Wan, of course, is already on his way back to Corucsant. He has a Very Bad Feeling right about now, and picks up the pace, flying with a recklessness that Anakin might appreciate, if he were here)

He drags himself to his feet, wraps his cloak tightly around himself and hopes it will hide the blood, before sneaking off.

He manages to get to Padme’s apartment without passing out; rings the buzzer.

She comes to the door. “Ani!” She blinks, then stiffens, alarmed. “What…what happened to your arm?”

“S’all right,” he says. “S’evidence. I need…I need…”

She takes his hand and pulls him over to the couch. “Evidence? What do--are you all right? You don’t…you don’t look well. I thought you were stuck in the Temple? Ahsoka said something about an explosion…” She presses a hand to his cheek, checking for fever; but he feels cool to her touch.

“I was,” he says, then takes an unsteady breath. “I need…there’s some…some things I need to tell you; Obi-Wan kept saying I should, for months, but I…I couldn’t…please, just…just let me finish, before you say anything?”

And he turns such haunted, weary eyes to her that even if she wanted to, she couldn’t say no.

“Of course,” she says. “You can tell me anything, you know that.”

He nods; his breath is coming a little short now, and her face is starting to blur in front of him. “I…I just assassinated the Chancellor.”

That was—that was not at all what she’d been expecting to hear. “What?” she whispers.

“He—he was evil, Padme, or I wouldn’t have—you have to believe I wouldn’t have—the…the…the proof, there’ll be proof soon. And I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t…” He blinks. “The reason I knew is because…because I…in another life, I…I helped him to…to destroy it. Everything. We…we burned it all to the ground, but I got…I got another chance, I got sent back and I…I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, I did such…such terrible things, and…” He stops, trying to catch his breath. “I’ll go. I’ll—”

She catches him before he can rise. “I know,” she says. “I know, I…”

He stares at her. “…what…?”

“I got sent back, too.” She kisses him, gently. “And I couldn’t…I didn’t want to hurt you, I didn’t want you to hate yourself for things you hadn’t done yet, so I…I didn’t say anything either. But it’s okay, because you…you came back, I always knew you could, I told Obi-Wan, and…and we’re both here now. That’s what matters. We’re both here, and you’re you again, and...”

His head is spinning. “You…you don’t…you thought I was…?”

(her face flickers in front of his; warm brown eyes replaced by earnest blue ones, I’ve got to save you; you already have)

“I knew you were,” she says, and kisses him again.

And then she feels something wet on her hand.

“…you’re bleeding!”

He catches her hand. He’s really short of breath now, and she can feel his heartbeat fluttering under her fingers. “S’all right,” he says again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she says. “You’ll be okay, I’m gonna get help, we’ll get you fixed up, you’ll be—”

He shakes his head. “Maybe—maybe it’s…it’s better this way, I can’t…I can’t break…”

“Don’t talk like that,” she says. “It’s not, it’s—no, Ani—”

“Least I…least I got to see you again,” he says, then, “I love you. Always, always loved you.”

“No,” she says, “no, no, no, you can’t—we—we fixed it, Ani, I don’t think we get another do-over you can’t…you can’t do this, don’t leave me, please, please, stay with me…”

And then he passes out.

When he doesn’t answer, she yells; all pretense at secrecy forgotten; for one of her handmaidens to go find a doctor.

Obi-Wan, meanwhile, has landed on Coruscant and follows his instincts, heading straight for Palpatine’s office. He arrives not long after Mace realizes Anakin has slipped off again.

“Obi-Wan,” Mace says. “What are you doing here?”

Obi-Wan takes in the scene with a glance—the blood; Palpatine’s body which looks so much smaller and less intimidating in death—and all he says is, “where’s Anakin?”

“I’m not sure,” Mace admits. “I turned away for a moment and when I got back he was gone.”

“He—how badly was he hurt?”

“Badly,” Mace says, “or I wouldn’t have left him alone. He was conscious, and lucid, but I didn’t think he could stand, let alone…”

“Damn it,” Obi-Wan says, half under his breath, “damn it, Anakin, you promised you wouldn’t shut me out, we were supposed to do this together—”

“…what.” Mace says.

…oh, not good, Obi-Wan thinks, realizing he’d just said that out loud.

“Obi-Wan, do you have any idea what the hell is going on here?”

“I—”

And then he spots the dagger on the floor, where Anakin dropped it.

Very, very carefully, he picks it up by the handle.

Mace catches his thoughts immediately. Explanations can wait. “I’ll pass this on to the medics,” he says, taking it from Obi-Wan’s hands. “Go find Skywalker.”

(as if Obi-Wan needs to be told)

(as if Obi-Wan really needs to look that hard)

(use your feelings, Obi-Wan, and find him, you will)

Padme looks up when her door opens, still cradling Anakin, hoping it’s the doctor that Elle ran for, but—

“Obi-Wan,” she says, and their eyes meet—

And he knows.

“…when he wakes,” he says, his voice shaking just a little, “when…when Anakin wakes, the three of us need to have a very, very long conversation.”

Her eyes widen, comprehending, and she nods.

And, just as he did for her on Geonosis, she shifts her position, making room for him.

He rests a hand on Anakin’s forehead; healing isn’t his strong suit but he does everything he can to hold Anakin there with them, until the doctor finally, finally arrives.

And, because this is already waaaaaaaaaay longer than I thought it would be, a brief epilogue/summary:

Anakin spends the next couple weeks pretty out of it, while Obi-Wan accounts to the Council and Padme and Mace explain Palpatine’s death.

(but he does survive; it would hardly be a proper fix-it if I gave him an actual Cyrano ending, now would it)

Bail is appointed interim Chancellor while everything is sorted out, but steps down/does not become permanent Chancellor. Probably Mon does.

When Anakin is conscious and lucid enough, he is debriefed; after a great deal of discussion with Mace, with Yoda, and, most importantly, with Obi-Wan and Padme and Ahsoka, he decides to leave the Order.

(Padme takes a brief leave of absence from the Senate, and takes him to Varykino to continue to recuperate, and so they can really figure out where they are as a couple now, with everything they know, with everything they lived through and then averted. But she does go back to work after a month or two)

(Obi-Wan takes over Ahsoka’s training; but it’s more or less understood that he will resign and join the others after he sees her through to her Trials)

Ahsoka actually stays with the Order in this timeline; becoming weaponsmaster after Master Draillig retires.

(but when the twins and their eventual little sisters are born, she revels in being Aunt Ahsoka, and visits as often as she can)

And from there…well, all kinds of things could happen, with the Galaxy reshaped and set back on track.

The important thing is, though, Our Heroes have all the time in the world to figure it out.

#au outlines for the win #shadowsong writes star wars #shadowsong26fic

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shamelessnerd · 7 years ago

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First Cosplay Experience

SO! It’s taken me too long to do this, but.... here we go.

On November 9th of this year, it was announced that Gail Simone (one of my favorite writers, mainly because of the awesome goodness and miraculous character save she did for Huntress after years of other writers slowly driving the character into the ground would be at the New Jersey Comic Expo.

Freaked.

Out.

Such little warning and it just so happened that an online friend called Cali lives about 5 minutes away from the expo center. Cali was more than happy to let me crash on her couch and we’d go to the expo together. I was thrilled.

And then I despaired.

My cosplay was nowhere NEAR ready for this. Ever since a drastic turn of events in my life in late April of this year (greatly inspired by Huntress herself), I have been on something of a personal crusade -- to make the most accurate, badass, awesome and amazing Huntress cosplay the world has ever seen. I declared to everyone that I would construct this most true-to-character portrayal, I would live off myfitnesspal and I would appear before Simone and get on bent knee asking her to campaign for the return of the REAL Huntress. The Helena Rosa Bertinelli that had such a dramatic change on my life, who was unlike any other character -- fierce, independent, fearless, funny, and passionate as hell. I wanted to show that people out there still remember Helena, that she is still deeply loved, and that she is, above all, sorely missed. I wanted everyone to remember who Huntress is, what she is, and stand defiant in all attempts to consign her to forgotten archives.

I vowed I would do this.

And here I faced my last opportunity to see Gail in person and I thought for sure that I would not be ready. My representation would fall flat. The impact of the meaning, of appearing as the deadly vigilante (not a sexy portrayal, though she is that too -- but I wanted badass armor) as true-to-life as could be, would be too little for what I hoped to achieve.

But then I had an idea. And, hilariously, this idea came from a kind of little-known comic called Gotham City Garage. Basically, this is what would happen if Mad Max tangled with the DC universe, giving characters fast motorcycles and lots of leather and tattoos and absurd amounts of studs. A little mental checklist informed me that I had most of the materials on hand already. So I set to work.

A leather jacket and purple t-shirt (from the Salvation Army), a fake tattoo, and a lot of help from my friend and her husband to make the armored bracers, I had a costume. We walked in like badasses. We weren’t there for 3 minutes before a vendor asked for our picture.

DREAM TEAM RIGHT THERE, BABY! #RedHunt

I. Felt. AWESOME. I felt like I was Huntress! And let me tell you -- that feeling was addicting. I never wanted it to end. According to my friend, I walked in there like I wanted to kick teeth in and that’s pretty much how I felt. Like a badass.

And of course, I got to see Gail.

(That’s the smirk that says, “Please fight back. I love it when they fight back.”)

So, full disclosure here.

I SWORE to myself that I would not cry and gush when I met her. I wouldn’t. I. Would. Not. I would be dignified and composed and erudite. I would say everything I wanted with precision and eloquence and I would convey just how deeply her contribution to Huntress had influenced me and saved me from an abusive relationship. I saw it play out in my mind a thousand times. It would be profound and serious and meaningful.

I breathed deeply. I mentally chanted, “You are Huntress, she doesn’t cry. You’re a badass. Huntress doesn’t let anyone see her weaknesses. You are Huntress. Now make her proud, dammit.”

I stepped up to the booth.

My friend (who had gotten a gift for me signed by Gail at New York Comic Con weeks prior) introduced me.

Gail looked at me. She had this expectant look, a friendly smile.

I took a breath and....

I started freaking crying.

Chernobyl melted down more gracefully than I did.

I got ticked off at myself, actually, because I SWORE this wouldn’t happen. Hoping to distract myself from the critical meltdown that was going full steam ahead, I tried to squeak out my speech I had written prior.

I think I got out a fifth of it.

My mind has kinda blacked out the memory of what happened. Out of self defense, I think. I wasn’t mortified. I was soooo past mortified. But I had to go through, because know what? I’m passionate about this. Huntress means a HELL of a lot to me and I had to say something to make sure someone knew, that they truly Heard The Voice Of The Fans. Not just for me but for others I know love Helena Bertinelli, such as @purpleladyofthenight and @thelastofthebertinellis and so many many others out there that have yet to be found or heard. I (stupidly) had decided I’d be at least one voice for Helena’s fans, someone who is crazy and idiotic enough to walk up to a famous writer and say, ‘Hey, we really love this character, mind undoing this injustice and bringing her back?’ No one asked me to do it, not everyone is gonna want the same writer, but I just had this idea (and I still do) that at least the message is heard. That it might get passed on up the chain. Someone noticed. And maybe that’ll give us some hope to getting her back.

Except I was nowhere NEAR as composed and erudite as I wanted to be. Not. One. Bit. I babbled. I gushed. I gushed like the damn Niagara falls during snowmelt times. (I hail from the land of Michigan, I know these things.) I was actually afraid the Pros-Aide stick the mask onto my face might get compromised from my stupidly crying idiot tears. And I think my friends ushered me away before I could gush TOO much. Damage control and all that.

Like I said, I really cannot recall a lot of it. I think back and get choked up. It’s all a blur muddled with a faint tinge of horror and embarrassment. I don’t pry too deeply. I think my brain is protecting me and I’ve read enough comics to now that can be an immense blessing. I am Genre Savvy. Cannot fool this chick!

But yes, horror and gushing aside, it was wonderful! ^_^ She’s a lovely person and DEEPLY forgiving of my determined attempts to wear my pants on my head or something. I did get her to sign my Wonder Woman journal and it’s something of a mission of mine to gather the signatures of the artists and writers I simply adore. (Nicola Scott and Matthew Clark’s names are proudly inscribed on the inside cover.)

It’s really a whole new experience when you cosplay at a con. I’d been to a few of them, but never in character. There’s this... I dunno. VIP feel, I suppose, but that could’ve just been me. I loved getting stopped for pictures! I think we were stopped about 6 or 7 times for pictures and I loved each and every one! KNOW THIS: I want everyone reading this to swear, “I, who am about to go to a con, will not hesitate to ask a cosplayer for pictures, because that is why they do it and it makes them feel awesome.”

Good. Now I expect ya’ll to abide by that.

Amusingly, I heard someone say, ‘Oh look, it’s Batgirl!’ I turned around to see a dad pointing at me and talking to his young daughter. I cheerfully said, ‘Nah, not anymore. I had the gig for a while but I don’t need the Bat or the symbol to do what I want. What has to be done.”

The guy just looked at me and said after a minute, “Oh! Huntress!”

I felt AWESOME.

Perhaps the most memorable moment is when a teeny widdle Wonder Woman (probably 6 years old??) wanted to take a picture with me and Red Hood, but was too shy to ask. Her father did on her behalf and I was thrilled. She had a little stuffed monkey toy and I, channeling Huntress ENTIRELY, asked the monkey’s name. He didn’t have one yet because she just won him at a booth, so I suggested Minksy. (I swear to god I do not know where that name came from.) This was acceptable. Then we posed for a picture.

So somewhere out there is a stuffed monkey doll owned by a Wonder Woman that was named Minksy by Huntress. Real life stories here alone, peeps.

You can check out another group picture of myself, my friend Cali and her hubby on Dinner And A Podcast over here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bbr7giAFN1O/ The trivia questions weren’t really trivia. They just asked the real name of the character you were cosplaying as and I, being a DEVOTED Helena Bertinelli fan, said Helena Rosa Bertinelli.

The guy was stumped as to what to ask next. He scrambled for a JLU question which I answered no problem and got a free comic. Woot!

I’ve been unable to find any further images of the expo, sadly, but it was amazing. I never wanted to stop being Huntress and I’m sure as hell gonna do it again!

~COSPLAY STUFF BELOW~

Just a bit of info on the Bikerpunk!Huntress cosplay I whipped together with cheap deals and a lot of help from my friends!

1. The boots are Volatile Combat Boots for women, available on Amazon for about $58. I do recommend you get a half size up. I usually wear 8 to 8.5 and I got a size 9 to accommodate for my insoles. They fit beautifully! I had to get these puppies because any good Huntress pic shows she don’t screw around with no damn high heels. She wears big, bad, stompy combat boots to deal damage. These boots fit the bill and they’ll be great for many other cosplays as well.

2. The leather belt is from Cabela’s. I painted it purple using Angelus Leather Paint. It’s very dark here because the belt itself was dark brown originally, but it really shows beautifully in the light.

3. The belt pouches are lifted directly from the tutorial from furiescosplay for the Batgirl belt. These are just phone cases I got from the Dollar store, painted purple, and slipped on. Done.

4. The GORGEOUS Huntress mask I’m wearing is from TigerStoneFX. I used Pros-Aide adhesive to keep it snug. However, there’s some finagling with the strap that I have to do to make sure it fits really good and snug.

5. On my blog you can find a short video tutorial on Batgirl bracers. These are essentially how we made mine as well.

6. The fake tattoo. WHY the fake tattoo? Glad you asked! It’s because Huntress has a cross motif (we all know this) that’s formed by the white stripes down the front of her uniform and across the hem of her cape that crosses her chest. However, considering how tattered my shirt was for that BikerPunk (tm) feel, there wasn’t really... space to get that cross shape. So I had a lightbulb moment. Let’s make a fake tattoo!

I put my graphic designer skills to use, found an image I liked, outlined it to a vector image, blew it up to fit on an 11 x 17 paper, and then spent about two hours cutting out every little detail with my Xacto knife. Then, with some help of my friend and rather inconveniently placed papercut, put the stencil on me and started coloring in with a black Sharpie. Rub on some baby powder, LIGHTLY spritz with hair spray, you got a fake tattoo. It fit the biker-y feel (and Gotham City Garage has a very similar thing with Nightwing so I didn’t feel bad about it at all) and got the cross image in, too!

7. Make up I’m still working on. But for any aspiring Huntress cosplayers out there, I recommend the lipstick color Amethyst by Nyx Cosmetics. Make sure you get the lipstick AND the lipliner! It lasted all day and I even had trouble getting it to come off in the shower! The other color I had toyed with getting, Oh, Just Put It On is actually an extremely dark shade of purple, nearly black. So unless that’s the palette you want, use Amethyst. It’s also a helluva lot more affordable than Kaoir (the only other lipstick seller I could find with such a vibrant purple) and I can attest to its staying power.

8. The gloves were also Salvation Army finds. I cut off the fingers (and had to use a teensy dab of E-6000 at all the seams to seal them off because the stitching was unravelling -- oops!) and also painted them with the Angelus Leather Dye. That stuff goes a long way and gets great color in just a few coats.

So that’s it. My First Big Adventure in Cosplay! It only gets bigger and better from here, right? Wish me luck and remember -- don’t get stuck on the details. Just GO for it!

#Huntress #Huntress cosplay #cosplay #first cosplay #biker punk Huntress #cosplay tips

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rogue-rook · 7 years ago

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many highlights from The Suffering Game from a first-time TAZ listener

also featuring bits from the Lunar Interlude IV: The Calm Before the Storm

that’s a fucking ominous combination of names, THANKS MCELROYS!!!!

griffin: “kravitz, who’s the bounty hunter for the raven queen, who’s the goddess of the natural passage of life and death” that’s an awesome title, wayyy cooler than just “goddess of death”

kravitz and taako is a good ship, im glad its a thing people ship

the BOB opened a wine and pottery place and i gotta give them credit for being so considerate of their employees and also being on top of the best hipster ass trends…justin named it the Chug and Squeeze. its the rowdy one

kravitz: "how much more dying do you think is gonna happen?" taako: "us dying? or like other regular dying?" kravitz: "any dying at all" taako: "there's gonna be some"

kravitz getting all agitated by the umbra staff and the probable lich inside it is making ME nervous

sweet angus macdonald, boy detective, is easily my favorite non-dead or death related npc

i cannot believe merle has kids

also merle called them the tres horny boys and im like my nickname of grubby grifters is way better and much less likely to horrify young children

sweet ango: “you can swear in front of me, its okay" merle: “oh shit thank god”

aw shit magnus has been having sleepless nights over the shit he doesn’t understand, poor sweet magnus

aw shit he’s gonna confront the voidfish!

a voidfish memory!!!! THERE ARE MULTIPLE VOIDFISH! aw shit there’s some big bad evil out there! AW SHIT THERE’S A BABY VOIDFISH!!

leon the artificer: "oh god, just put it in the machine, please god! im in hell and YOU'RE SATAN!"

garfield the deals wizard: “ah, angling to make a DEALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL” merle: “that was 42 L’s”

garfield: “i know what I want! YOUR SIDEBURNS!!!” everyone: “ohhhhhh”

garfield: “how about a tiny little scraping?” yall WHAT THE HELL DOES GARFIELD WANT WITH HIS HAIR???

OH NO!!! TAAKO IS GETTING THE FUCKING SWORD OFF OF GARFIELD!!!! HE BOUGHT A PERSUASION OBJECT AND THEN AN OBJECT THAT HE CAN USE TO CONVINCE A PERSON TO TRADE THEIR MOST VALUABLE ITEM! AND HE’S GETTING THE GODDAMN SWORD!!! HE METAPHORICALL LAUNCHED HIMSELF THROUGH THE METAPHORICAL HOOPS REQUIRED TO GET THAT FUCKING SWORD WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT!!!!!!! I AM SHOOK!!

griffin: “holy shit that was funny. as soon as I realized what you were doing, i was sent into a panic spiral!”

griffin: “i wish it hadn’t taken me 40-some episodes to discover the power of the epilogue”

the director: “taako, are you okay?" taako: "yeah, i’m fine! you're not my mom"

oh no the director lost 20 years of her life to a wager in wonderland and im like aw fuck this arc is gonna fuck ME UP

justin: "taako went on a date with death and now that i say this out loud, that sounds soooo cool!"

justin: “its not that taako is embarrassed about his sexuality, its just that he doesn’t think its anybody's goddamn business, especially these fucking clowns!”

magnus: "and you are?" sweet ango: "im angus macdonald, boy detective and your very good friend!" magnus: "um, sounds familiar...nah i tousle his hair and say ‘of course i remember you!’"

merle: "we're just jumping right in?" the director: "would you like to take 20 minutes to buy shorts again?" merle: "they were good shorts"

griffin "well now you have....CAPTIVES? you have now pokemon-ed these two boys!"

im like pretty sure griffin called magnus “madness”

merle: “please be hawkeye!” griffin: “yep, its the guy himself, hawk-guy, uh, no”

damn yall this twisted horror movie wonderland shit popped off magnus’s pinkie and stole merle’s dark vision

“welcome to the monster factory” YOOOO CROSSOVER!!!! MY SECRET WISH FOR THE FINAL PAM TO STEP IN TO THE ADVENTURE ZONE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE REALIZED!!

griffin: “you guys are basically fucking demigods right now. you're basically benicio del toro's character in the marvel movies” i had to google what the fuck griffin meant by that and i have seen almost al the marvel movies so i would easily label that as the Deepest Cut

taako: “do you think that wet ropes are conductive?” magnus: “more so than dry ropes!" [sounds of justin dying of laughter away from the mic"

oh god taako’s finally gone back to the ethereal plane and these glowy-eyed creeps are back!!!!! im so creeped out!!!!!

griffin: “damn, you're the danger squad!!” taako: “well, somebody dropped a washing machine on me and i got squished into a ghost!! so its not foolproof” well now ive got this mental image of taako as like a smushed goomba

griffin: “there’s NO healing in wonderland!” man griffin is getting just a tad TOO into this whole Playing God shit

griffin: “the severed head is just laying there...cuz its a head”

cam the body-less head: “im sorry i can't greet you with a formal hand shake, but i seem to have misplaced my...my everything”

cam: “what brings you to wonderland?” magnus: “looking for a bell” cam: “must be a pretty good fucking bell”

cam: “what do you know about liches?” magnus: “they get stitches, i think!” justin: “LICHES GET STITCHES! okay” aw shit yall liches are becoming a plot point and the one single spoiler i know about (lup) is getting mE HYPED!!!

justin: “i know what you should give up! your B-I-B-LE!” and then justin fucking SANG AN IMPROVISED SONG ABOUT MERLE’S DUMMBO BIBLE

lydia the evil elf lich bitch: “are you three heroes ready for your ONLY chance at love??” magnus: “uh, pass” i feel like somewhere julia’s just laughing and cheering her grubby hero husband on

justin: "is it, griffin? is it real low? is it almost like some liches of your imagination sucked my hit points away from me?! would that account for the low-ness???” griffin: “that’s like real low” justin: “IT’S LIKE SO CRAZY LOW, HUH?”

travis: “yeah, merle’s a deeply religious person, when he needs something!”

griffin: “taako’s arms shrink into his chest, and his head gets real long, and he grows a tail, and he turns into a tyrannosaurus rex!” travis: “meanwhile magnus is setting mannequins on fire” yall this fight got real real real wild super quick!!!

oh god magnus’s SOUL GOT KNOCKED OUT OF HIS BODY

“I’ll be having my body back, you undead fuck” YOOOOO THAT SHIT WAS SO DOPPPPEEEEEEE

griffin: “i've reached a point where when i hear justin say 'im going to cast' i assume the next words are a thing that's going to break the sequence of the shit that you've written down”

justin: “im going to cast Animate Objects on the mannequins, and I can animate up to ten of them” griffin: “HOLY FUCKING SHIT, WHAT? HOLY JESUS FANTASIA!”

HOLY SHIT WHAT?? magnus’s kid memory has a different sky than the one he’s in now, and im like WHATTT???? THATS SOME MORE PUZZLE PIECE SHIT!!!!! MULTI-PLANAR PUZZLE PIECE SHIT!

clint: “i want to change Divine Word into Divine Wood" griffin: "and you pop the most righteous boner”

the fact that the umbrella ATE edward the magical evil elf shit even though taako is unconscious as hell is AWESOME

LYDIA THE EVIL ELF LICH DESTROYED MAGNUS’S BODY!!!! that’s some GARBAGE luck my dude

merle: "i have a spell called Raise Dead" magnus: "he's not dead" justin: "he's only mostly dead!" griffin: "OH MY GOD" justin: “we got monty python, we got princess bridge, this podcast has it all!

griffin: "just have somebody heal you! don't act like you got revived from the power of your cool catchphrase!" justin: “i can’t say a cool catchphrase twenty minutes after we won!” griffin: “okay what are you astrally projecting into the atmosphere???” taako: “LICHES.....GET.....STITCHES!”

jesus, magnus’s great life goal and plan is to be reunited with julia, that’s some tragic heartbreaking shit

rowan: “my day was pretty shit” magnus: “oh, are you a mannequin?” rowan: “oh my god is that MAGNUS??” magnus: “yeah, so, maybe like keep your shit to yourself, unless you’re a fucking mannequin”

justin: “hey, i have a question, among like retrieving our belongings, did magnus, he did get himself a new arm, right, he got his arm back?” travis: “yeah, plugged it back in like G.I. Joe”

“you made something, and you’re terrified of it...[..]..you removed your uniform, and its a bright crimson uniform with an insignia patch...[...]...you decide they’re the ones who are going to be able to keep this cup safe” PUZZLE PIECES!!!! PUZZLE PIECES!!!!! HOLY SHIT YALL!!!

they’ve come back around to the start, where wave echo cave is and the gerblins arc took place, and im so EXCITED!

“sturdy. denim. blue” I CALLED IT AND I WAS SOOOOOOO FUCKING RIGHT AND IM SO HYPED TO BE RIGHT!!!!!I IT WAS BARRY THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME!!!!

this arc felt like a million goddamn years, cuz of all the, ya know, SUFFERING, it actually felt more tedious and exhausting than fucking petals to the metal, but it was pretty good, i liked it. i also feel like the grubby grifters have earned a new nickname: the grubby heroes

#balance arc #the adventure zone #the suffering game #taz #taz highlights #mcelroys #mine

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uncpanda · 8 years ago

Text

Three Parts of a Whole: Part One

AN will be at the bottom! I suggest reading it.

You stare at the images in the mirror. They’re large, and big, and make wearing shorts next to impossible. They wrap around your hips and down your thighs. They’re a lot bigger than the others you’ve seen. Your grandmother had liked to joke that it meant big personalities.

Like always, you look for the names. And like always, you don’t find anything. Then again, that’s the way it’s supposed to go. Magic or fate, whatever you wanted to call it, ruled people’s lives from the day they were born. The marks slowly appeared over the first week of one’s life.

From there they would grow and change along with their namesake. They were meant to reflect a person’s soulmate. Or, in your case, soulmates. You’d woken up to completely different marks several times in your life, and you couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to change the people you were connected to. You did your best not to think about it. You had enough on your plate as it was.

You had to be at the mountain in a little under an hour. There were missions that needed to be fulfilled and your particular talents were needed. It doesn’t take long to collect the things you need. You stuff your suit into your backpack, make sure your hair is pushed back, slip on some comfortable shoes, say goodbye to your parents, and step out into the cold January air. You thrive on the cold. In fact, you live for it.

You slip into the abandoned alley way, before pressing your hand against the dumpster. You blanch when it touches something sticky, but a moment later a door opens and you step in. You feel the familiar tingle of the zeta tube, and second later you’re walking into the mountain. “Tundra, 023.”

You ignore the computerized voice in favor of the kitchen. You grab a cup of coffee, and settle down at the table. It isn’t long before your friend finds you. Artemis smiles at you, and you smile back before she takes a seat. There’s a moment of silence before she says, “Soooo?”

You shrug, “Nothing yet.”

“Damn. The suspense is killing me.”

You laugh at your best friend. The girl had been fascinated by your soul-marks since she had first caught a glimpse of them. You didn’t understand it, but went along with it. “I think you’re more excited about this than I am.”

She shrugs, “I’m curious.”

You smirk, “You know what they say about curiosity.”

“That dealt with a cat, I’m an archer.”

You both laugh, before the announcement goes out over the loudspeaker. Standing, you grab your cup of coffee and follow your friend into the main hall. The entire team is there, and that alone is enough to tell you that the mission is big. When League members start showing up, you start preparing yourself mentally.

You listen in detail as Nightwing and Batman explain the mission. You’d been stuck at home when the initial takedown of the Croleteans had taken place, but now it was time for the major takedown. With their boom tubes out of order the Croleteans were being forced to build a new ship. Your mission was to take them down.

As the briefing ends, you watch as everyone goes to get ready. Everyone but two. Your eyes focus in on them and you ask, “Is it weird seeing them like that?”

Artemis’ eyes flash to you, “Why would it be weird?”

You shrug, “Well … you and Wally were pretty hot and heavy there for a while.”

She smiles at you, “They’re soulmates, they’re meant to be together.”

You scowl at the word, and Artemis laughs, “So much animosity.”

“I think people make soulmates and their soulmarks into a bigger deal than they are. Who is fate to determine who I’m meant to spend my life with?”

The smile Artemis gives is soft, one of someone who had found their soulmate. “Fate is a funny thing. A lot of the time it gives us the thing we need most, without us even realizing it.” You watch as her eyes drift to Kaldur.

You watch as the Atlantean turns and smiles at your friend. Their smiles are nearly blinding. You can feel the love in the air. As your thoughts turn to the marks on your own skin you get nauseous. You were less than ten hours away from finding out exactly who your soulmates were.

Artemis’ voice brings you out of your thoughts, “Plus I know you’re curious.”

You sigh. You were curious, you wanted to know who they were, but at the same time …you didn’t like the idea of being forced together. You’d watched as people you’d known your entire lives, people who often didn’t like each other, fall in love after finding out they were soulmates. You didn’t understand how you could go from hating someone to loving them just because a mark revealed a name. It seemed like a straw house built on a foundation of sand.

A part of you couldn’t help but worry. You thought about everything that could go wrong; you could never meet them, they could be jerks, they could disapprove of your after hour activities. Your grandmother liked to say everything would work out, but magic and fate could only do so much.

As the second pair of lovebirds approach you can’t help but feel out numbered.. The two year age difference between Wally and Dick wasn’t a big thing in the big scheme of things. What amazed you, was how Wally had hidden it until Dick had turned eighteen. You’d once overheard him explain to Connor that he had waited so that Dick could have time. Time to sow his oats, and then time to decide that he wanted Wally.

Artemis had gotten hers around the same time. The breakup had been mutual. Even more so when she had found out that Kaldur was her soulmate. The Atlantean had found out two years into Artemis and Wally’s relationship, and valuing Artemis’ happiness over his own, he hadn’t told her. After finding out, she had kissed him, and then threatened to serve him as sushi if he ever kept something that big from her again.

As subtly as possible, you scoot away from the group. You’d known Dick and Wally for several years. You were a year younger than Dick and three years younger than Wally. At the beginning everything had been fine. You’d had little interaction with them, other than missions. Your main friends had had been Rocket and Artemis.

But in the past two years, they’d become increasingly annoying. You’d been banished to baby missions with younger members, and your frustration had been growing ever since. Any attempt at talking things out turned into a full on fight. You’d been ready to take things to the League when Artemis had calmed you down. Gradually you’d returned to your former status, but you still held a grudge.

“Tundra.” You wince at the use of your code name.

For the most part codenames were left for the field, but Dick seemed determined to keep things formal. It was something you found more than a little ironic since Zee had shared every sordid detail of her relationship with the former boy wonder.

Turning around slowly, you give a tense smile, “Yes?”

He pauses, before shaking his head, “Nevermind, we’ll talk later.”

You give a sharp nod, before going to change. You choose sphere over the bio ship. You find the ship stifling with so many people on it. You prefer the cool night air anyways. You focus on the wind, and it’s sting against your cheeks. You’ve almost completely zoned out when Conner asks, “Only a few hours left, hunh?”

Your eyes flash open, and you scowl, “How do you know about that?”

He stares at you, “I’ve read your file, I know when your birthday is … plus people talk.”

Your eyes narrow, “Who?”

He smiles, “Everyone. Soul marks are a big deal, a sign of something bigger than just us.”

You collapse back into your seat, “If that’s true, why aren’t you with M’gann?” It’s a low blow, and you know it. Whatever had happened between the two had created tension within the team.

You expect him to blow up, instead he sighs, “Fate tells us who our perfect match is, it doesn’t make things work. The choice is still ours.”

“I wonder about that.”

He smiles, “You’ll see.”

“Know something I don’t?”

He laughs, “I know plenty that you don’t.”

You roll your eyes, and spend the rest of the trip in silence. The two of you wait on the grass, just to the side of the mountain. When Superman lands you watch as the two brothers hug. You listen to them talk quietly, while keeping an ear out for the signal.

When the request for backup comes, you wait for the super-bros to go before following. The ice comes easily, allowing you to lift yourself up and through the new hole in the wall. You glide on the ice, all the way down. From there it’s hand to hand combat.

You use your powers sparingly. You find that inserting a bit of power into a fight occasionally, works better than always going all out. It also left you with the advantage of surprise when needed. You take down three of Manta’s troops when the first tingle starts to hit.

The sensation surprises you, and you take a punch to the jaw for it. The blow sends you flying, and that’s when you start to feel a pin pricking sensation over your skin. The pain has you gritting your teeth, and leaves you unable to stand, which makes you a sitting duck. You try to summon the ice, but you can’t focus, and lack of focus can lead to dire situations.

The pain increases, and finally you let out a scream of agony. Then, arms are wrapped around you, and you’re outside. You try to focus on the cold of the wind against your face. And then you’re in the water. It soothes a bit of the pain, but not much. A second set of arms wrap around you moments later, and you begin to blink in and out of consciousness.

All you hear is a soothing voice, reassuring you, before darkness takes you.

AN: Welcome to my first triad fic O_O I’ll admit, I really struggled with this at first, especially since I have three soulmate AU’s going on. The idea for this one was suggested by an anon!

To address the last part of this chapter. There is a reason for the pain. I figure if you’re going to get something as perfect as your other half/s given to you by fate, then going through a bit of pain isn’t the worst thing. It also symbolizes the journey, fate’s giving you your match, but it’s up to you to make it work. I hope I’m making sense, either way, this is set in the YJ Universe season two, there will be some changes … as you can already see!

Questions, thoughts concerns, click here

#wally west #dickgrayson #wally west imagine #wally west x reader #dick grayson x reader #dick grayson imagine #kid flash #kid flash x reader #kid flash imagine #nightwing x reader #nightwing #nightwing imagine #dick x wally x reader #triad #dc imagine #dc reader insert #dc universe #dc

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tellywoodtrash · 7 years ago

Text

ishqbaaz 05.06.17 lb

plain text version here.

apologies are the laaaaaaast thing on his mind once you did THAAAAAT, anika. 😏😏😏

haaaaaaaaye. 😍😍😍

i swear, shivaay is never more attractive to me than when he’s all puppy-eyed and apologetic. 😚😚😚

… like i get that you two are in the middle of a very deep conversation and all, but i just can’t help but wonder: standing in the middle of a pool in fulllll clothes, it just doesn’t look very comfor… ok never mind. 🤐🤐🤐

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG 😧😧😧

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HE SAID “meriiiiii saanseinnnn ruk rahi haiiiiiii”!!!!!!!!!! 😍😍😍

but also, why won’t this man just say the words I LOVE YOU? like, sab kuch toh keh diya aur kar liya, bas yahannnn pe hi aake kyun atak jaata hai? 😕😕😕

or are we saving that for a later waala “i love you dammnit!!!!!!” type track? 🤔🤔🤔

ok i’ll stop complaining. haaaaaye. meriiii bhiiii saansein abhi ruk rahi haiiiiiii. 😚😚😚

HooOOoOoOOooOLLLLLLYYYYYY MOTHER OF GOD. 😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧

well, it’s been nice knowing you all, but i’m sorry, I’M FUCKING DEAD NOW. ☠☠☠

R.I.P. ME.

ok seriously, i’m quitting my day job and starting a “marriage/sex counselling for tellywood couples” kinda thing. i see big money in my future. 😣😣😣

the 101 course is for all the tellywood wives, who ask their husbands “yeh aap kyaa kar rahe hai???” when the men dare to make a move towards them. 🙄🙄🙄

“i don’t care.”

what he’s not saying: i haven’t got some in a super long time, possibly ever, and you’re not making it easy on me, prancing around everyday in these backless tops, and especially right now; standing here plastered to me, all wet and sexy. please cut me some slack. 😗😗😗

“room mein chalein?“

lmaooooooo now that billu’s made a move, uski self-control ki dhajjiyyan hi udd gayi hai. 😆😆😆

ughhhh he’s sooooooo cute and giddy and excitedd and smileyyyyy. 😍😍😍

girl, why couldn’t you have smiled at HIM, and shown him that you were into it tooo? nahi, uske saamne toh you look like you’re being tortured. 😒😒😒

OHHHHHHH MY GODDDDDD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. WHY IS MUMMMEHHHHHH HEREEEEEEEEEEE?!?!? DON’T BE KILLING ALL THE LADY BONERS LIKE THIS, SHOW!!!!!!!!! 😩😩😩

OMG FUCK OFF PINKY. 😑😑😑

@ANIKA: CALL SHIVAAY BACK INTO THE POOL AND MAKE OUT WITH HIM IN FRONT OF HER FUCKING FACE JUST TO SPITE HER!!!!!!! 😤😤😤

"humaare beech ki doooriyaan khatam karna” lolololol tellywood and its ridiculoussss euphemisms for sex. 😂😂😂

“kya karoon?” ok girl, i’ll tell you. bang him first, and then use the baaki ke do din to come up with a plan on how to vanquish mummeh. 😇😇😇

with occasional bang breaks during those two days too. 😏😏😏

prinku is a fucking idiot to trust kamini again, if not just ranveer. 🙄🙄🙄

i really dgaf about anyyyyy of these irrelevent losers. where the fuck is my boy mahiiii ve???? he’s the only one i care about in this track. 😫😫😫

arre waah, anika has a new sessssssssky black salwarrrrrr for “sleeping” innnn. 😏😏😏

LMAOOOOOOOOOO IN THOSE 5 MIN, LOOK WHAT HE’S DONE TO THE ROOM. THIRSTY MUCH, SHIVAAY???? 😆😆😆

whyyyy is everything in this house SUCH A PRODUCTION???? baat baat pe ghar sajaaa dete hai. like… calm the fuck down. you know, you caaaaan do things without having the whole place look like a fairy light factory/flower market threw up in here. 🙄🙄🙄

i don’t get it, she came into the room all changed? like… where did she change??? does she keep a whole different wardrobe elsewhere in the house coz she can’t change in her room? 🤔🤔🤔

also does this room have a bathroom or not? when this set was used for beintehaa, we used to see the attached bath all the time, but they never show us that area on this show… 😐😐😐

ok i’ll stop blabbering about bathrooms and the architecture of the room when there’s clearly more important things to focus on. I JUST HAVE A LOT OF NERVOUS ENERGY RIGHT NOW OK?!?!!?? 😖😖😖

bro, at least close the fucking doooor. matlab, itniiiii bhi kya jaldi? 😶😶😶

pffffffffft. this corny ass fucker. 🙄🙄🙄

question: how did he even arrange all this shit??? lord, did this loser have the servants on standby with all this stuff for the past few weeks?? 😟😟😟

*5 minutes earlier*

sopping wet shivaay running into servants’ quarters yelling “THIS IS NOT A DRILL, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, I’M FINALLY ABOUT TO CLOSE THE DEAL. PLAN: SUHAAG RAAT IS A GO, PEOPLE, 👏🏽 MOVE 👏🏽 MOVE 👏🏽 MOVE 👏🏽 !!!!!” *runs back out* *servants finally relieved, coz the sexual tension was killing them too*

welp. he said it. no mincing wordssss. 😧😧😧

is she being purposely obtuse??????? 😕😕😕

lmaoooooo, billu’s already beginning to lose his… “excitement”. 😂😂😂

lmao yepppppp, look at her face; she’s definitelyyyy fucking with him. 😂😂😂

and not in the fun way, that he had in mind. 😆😆😆

LOL LOOK AT HIM SHARMAOFYINGGGGGGGGG. GOD, THIS IDIOT BOY. 😂😂😂

pappu toh tum bana rahi ho is bechaare ka, anika. 😐😐😐

lmaooooo, billu ji ka para chad raha hai. and again, not in a funnnn way. in the old, phone-smashy kinda way. 😬😬😬

god knows how many phones are going to get sacrificed to shivaay’s sexual frustration. 🙃🙃🙃

jesus christtttttttttt shivaay, you talk too fucking much, and in the lamestttt, cheesiest fucking way possible. just kiss the goddamn girl. she’ll get all the info she needs from that. 🙄🙄🙄

GIRL, THAT’S NOT THE KIND OF JAGRAATA HE HAD IN MIND!!!!!!!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

a reminder for our viewers at home, that this is a 33 year old man that you’re watching, who can’t seem to tell his own damn wife that he wants to have sex with her. yes, you heard that right. 33 YEARS OLD. 😒😒😒

“woh waala. dusre type ka.” LMAO CHEAPDA. 😆😆😆

“dealllll hi toh sign nahi ho rahi hai yahan par. 😒"

LMAOOOOOOO. 😂😂😂😂 also, return that Businessman of the Year award please. we’re giving it to a man who’s not THIS terrible in the bedroom. 😋😋😋

FUCKING FINALLY. AWAIIII KE 5 MINUTE BAATON MEIN BARBAAD KAR DIYE. 😒😒😒

ugh fuck off kamini. i hope for their sakes, that prinku/ranveer are scamming her. 😑😑😑

not that i particularly care. you three could die tomorrow and idgaf. 🙄🙄🙄

OK THE SCENE CHANGES ARE SO DAMN ABRUPT. COULD THE EDITING TEAM PLEASE WORK ON THEIR TRANSITIONS PLEASE????? FOR A SECOND I WAS LIKE EW I DON’T CARE ABOUT RANVEER/PRINKU’S SUHAAG RAAT. 🤢🤢🤢

if both his hands are on her face, why’s she still holding her hand behind her back? 🤔🤔🤔

… was she NOT fucking with him? i was absolutely positive she was??? DON’T TELL ME SHE REALLY DID NOT KNOW WHAT WAS HAPPENING? 😱😱😱

godddddd. this guy really TALKS too much. just get to it, you chatty cathyyyy. 😑😑😑

again, how long has he been holding on to this lingerie that he bought for her???? this thirsty ass fucker. 🙄🙄🙄

"TUMHE sharam aa rahi hai toh MAIN (mooh) kyun ghumaaoon??” hahahahahahahahahaha 😂😂😂😂😂

ouffffff, pooo baniiiii parvatiiiii. matlab jaise 20 years of sanskaari star plus bahus’ bhoot ek saath ghus gayi ho iske andar. 🙄🙄🙄

lmaooooo his face at being called a “2 rs cheapda husband” 😂😂😂

“pehenti ho ya… pehnaoon main?”/“khud pehenogi ya mujhe pehnana padega?”

oh hot dayuuuuummmmm. 😧😧😧

such a bittersweet callback to the last time he said this - the day they got married, when he forced her into tia’s joda. how far they’ve come since then. 😌😌😌

also, a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. 😂😂😂

I’M SORRY I JUST CAN’T STOP LAUGHING AT HOW HAPPY/EXCITED HE LOOKS. THIS STUPID ADORABLE BOYYYYYYYY. 😚😚😚

god this ridiculous comedyyyy musicccc. we get it, it’s funny. no need to go SO over the top with the audio cues. 🙄🙄🙄

also lord, that… thing… is so ugly. 😟😟😟

maybe next time, just get her a voucher shivaay. you clearly can’t be trusted to shop for anything but 10 crore ke kangan. 😕😕😕

LMAO BILLU, LIKE, IS *THIS* THE HILL YOU WANNA DIE ON? GETTING HER TO WEAR THIS STUPIDASS THING? PEHENEGI BHI TOH WAISE BHI 5 MINUTE MEIN NIKAAL KE PHENKNA HI TOH HAI. FOCUS ON THE ACTUAL GOAL, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. 😂😂😂

did she just… run OUT OF THE ROOM, looking like that???? lord above.😣😣😣

billu doesn’t look too displeased though. aaaaah love. 😌😌😌

ouffff, justttt send the pics to whoeverrr you’re going to, aur khatam karo siyaapa. awaiiiii ka time waste. 😒😒😒

also this is soooo clearly anika’s old house. matlab, do they just have this one set for all non-oberoi mansion locations???? 😕😕😕

note: she’s back to their first meeting waala outfit. the last time she wore this was the morning after daksh tried to murder her, and these two made a fresh start to their marriage. interesttttttting. meaning today marks another new phase to their marriage as well. will it be a good phase, or is it the beginning of the endddd???? 🤔🤔🤔

good vibes only, lord. i can’t stand more sadness in my life rn. 😞😞😞

“kal raat ki apni embarrassment calculate kar rahi ho?” lmaooooooooooo this snarky little shit. 😂😂😂

also, did she not come back to the room after running away??? where did she sleep??? 🤔🤔🤔

an image of her sleeping between gauri and omkara just came to me and now i can’t stop lol-ing. 😂😂😂😂😂

he’s soooooo fucking cute whenever he asks her what she’s up to. genuinely interested/amused by this crazyass girl and her daily antics. 😚😚😚

“raja bete, bibbe munde, sundar bachche” 😂😂😂

why is there a half abandoned mehendi pattern on her hand? it looks really weird. 😬😬😬

ok i never thought there’d be someone more awful than me at math, but thank god for anika. she makes me feel so much better about myself. 😌😌😌

… is this a thing for world environmental day or something? like… what’s the point of this randomass conversation about water consumption? 😑😑😑

“aur tum, jo mujhpe paani phenk phenk kar kitnaaa paani waste karti ho."

lololol. way to turn the tables, billu. 😆😆😆

ughhhhhhhh, he’s too cute. just too fucking adorable. 💖💖💖💖💖

ughhhhhh, fuckkkkkk offfff pinkyyy, you fucking dementor. 😡😡😡

stop it anika. you’re scaring my bechaara billu. 😭😭😭😭😭

oh, this idiot is back home. 🙄🙄🙄

not that anyone particularly cares. ab toh shaadi bhi ho gayi, paraya dhan and all that. oberois have washed their hands of her, mentally. 😐😐😐

oh gooood, billu knows something’s bothering anika. 😌😌😌

god the outfits for tomorrow fill me with such intense rage, ke kya bataaaon. not only are they eye-bleedingly ugly, it reminds me of the whole nakuul’s shitty insta caption BS. don’t even wanna watch tomorrow’s ep. 😡😡😡

also, why is everyone shocked? do i even want to know? 😕😕😕

i bet she went and brought mahi ve. 😐😐😐

#ishqbaaz #ishqbaaaz #ib episode liveblogs #episode liveblogs #050617 ib lb

18 notes · View notes

imsarabum · 8 years ago

Text

Responses to {Part 22} I Won’t Stop You // Jeon Jungkook, Vampire!AU Asks~

Please ‘Keep Reading’ to find my response to your ask ^^ As always, I have copied and pasted all asks into this post in regards to last night’s chapter to avoid clogging up people’s dashboards and to avoid spoilers for those who may still wish to read the chapter. Thank you ^^

(I have also included asks that I received in the hours before IWSY was posted ^^)

@jynxy24 said: I'm re-reading IWSY and liking whatever I havem't liked because I'M EXCITED FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER AHHHHHHHHHHH

That’s so amazing that you’re reading it again before reading the new chapter omg c: You’re awesome!!

Anonymous said: I'm not really sure why, but the description of Jungkook's manor gives me a kind of Irish vibe. Maybe it's because of the country kinda aura idk but it's so vivid to me, like near the coast hidden on a cliff behind a forest 😂

It’s funny that you should say that because I am currently in Ireland whilst writing the series! My mother is Irish so~ I’m quite touched that you see it like that! :3

Anonymous said: You know how Taehyung said he reads fanfics sometimes? Do you think he's reading I Won't Stop You?

I don’t think he would be able to understand IWSY because of it being in English (thank goodness lol bc I’d be so embarrassed) Unless someone translates it into Korean haha! But, no, I don’t think he is reading it thank gOD

@coppertopging said: *enters with goofy happy dance* 🎶it's tuesday!!🎵🎶

Yay!! Can I goofy dance with you?!

@qigoyangi said: Just have to say I love Iwsy it's defenetly number one in my list of best jungkook fanfic and I'm sooooo excited to hear what the reader/I really is/am. Thank you soo much for writing and I love you °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

asdfghj thank you so much!! ahhh I really hope you enjoyed the update love ^^

Anonymous said: OMG I JUST REALIZED I MIGHT GET TO FIGERE OUT WHAT SHE IS IN LIKE LESS THAN A MINUTE IM HYPERVENTILATING

GASP THE REVELATION!!

@mondimple said: Hi~~ I just wanted to say that I really love your series IWSY 😍 I cant stop to read it again again while waiting for next chapter! You're the best 💕

Thank you so much for liking it honey! *hugs you* you’re amazing!

@mocking-butts said: I've been sitting on my computer waiting for the next part because im so excited and i can't sit still I know i won't be disappointed with this chapter. Hit me with the feels please.

Awh bless you love! I really hope I didn’t disappoint with this chapter, and I hope you enjoyed it my love ^^

@hemhings said: I thought yesterday was Tuesday and when 9:30 came I was like "what's going on?" Until I seen that it was only Monday😖 but it's Tuesday today!!!!! I'm super excited for this update! Thank you for writing this story💕💕

Thank you for getting super excited for it! And you’re so welcome, the pleasure is all mine my dear :D I hope you enjoyed it!

Anonymous said: THE ANTICIPATION WOAH IM SO EXCITED FOR IWSY 🙏 You're a really great writer. I can't say that I've ever really waited for a fanfiction's new chapter until now due to the series being amazing. 💕

I’m so grateful that you’re so excited for new chapters when they drop ^^ That’’s so amazing to me and I thank you a million times! ^^

@cursingmelly said: Okay so it seems I'm not the only one crying over your blog, refreshing the page every 2 minutes because your story is like the only thing that makes me happy right now x) You're amazing really, I wish i had your talent. I was thinking about starting a writing blog but when I read works like yours i feel so intimidated. >.<

Oh my god no, please don’t feel intimidated! You have nothing to be intimidated about, trust me. I feel like I am the least intimidating person to walk the earth I’m actually such an antisocial marshmallow lol! I am so happy to hear that my story can make you happy, that brings such a huge smile to my face; you have no idea :) Thank you darling, you’re amazing!

@talkmemeytome said: 13 MINUTES TILL IWSY GETS UPDATED YES MATE

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT BABY!

@moonlighthollow said: YEY OMG I'M SOOOO EXCITED!! it was such a crappy and emotional day for me i really need some distraction...🙇

I’m so sorry you had such a crappy day my love *hugs you tightly* I hope your day got better and I hope your week will be amazing!

@adoppelna14 said: I'm over here like: *refreshes tumblr account every 3 seconds to see if the new chapter is out*

Eeeee I hope you enjoyed it love!!

Anonymous said: i CANNOT BELIEVE I HAVE TO WAIT ANOTER WEEK FOR THAT BOMB ASS SMUT !!!!!!

*giggles*

@jackyslittlesally said: Were you quoting Hercules in chapter 22 of IWSY? If so, that's dope! This entire story is dope! Well done! I've never been so excited for a fic before :)

As far as I am aware and to the best of my knowledge - no, I was not quoting from Hercules. Which part are you referring to? And thank you so much for reading and for being excited to read it too! :D

@im-that-chesire-jax said: ARE THEY GONNA GET FREAKY NEXT CHAPTER??? GOD I HOPE SO

MAYBE ;D

Anonymous said: Wow!! New chapter of IWSY was great!! I'm so impressed with how you made a whole history of vampires in your universe~ It's really great and creative, I just find it so.. cool?? That's probably lame but oh well. Also that ending!! Why would you do that to me?? I'm honestly going to cry

Ahhh I’m honestly so happy that you like the lore I created~ It’s not lame at all! It’s a huge, huge compliment and I take it with both hands - seriously. Thank you so much my love ^^

@the-unreal-fan said: THE NEW CHAPTER OF IWSY IS JUST 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

@mysr3 said: Saraaa Atmosphere in this chapter is so good! But really? more secret? I told myself beforehand that You will leave us hanging but at the end I cant handle it well. I think I have guess what would happen next (not in next chapter but later on) which I really hope it come true! Did I just smell smut is coming next week? Love this series, the characters interaction is good. "stormed like an angtsy little teenager to his room" remark LOL Thank you!PS I mentally survived the weekend! Thank you Love

I will always be here to shake up your day~ I gave you answers and more questions - I feel accomplished! hehe~ and yes...the smell of smut is definitely in the air haha :3 Thank you so much my dear and I’m so happy that you mentally survived the weekend! Have a great day love ^^

@jynxy24 said: THE BAMES ARE SO COOL WHAT! Domitor, Humani Generis. HOW DO YOU COME UP WITH THESE NAMES! I can't even spell correctly at times! AND WE FINALLY FIND OUT WHAT READER IS! AHA! I love how innocent the reader is :3333 (unlike me) AND I KNOW THE NEXT PART WILL PROBABLY HAVE SMUT SO PLEASE xD This chapter was so cool omg, thanks, Sara. Stay awesome, love ya!

The names are Latin! Domitor is Latin for ‘tamer’ and Humani generis is Latin for ‘human descent’ hehe ^^Thank you so much Jynxy~ I love you too and I am so happy that you enjoyed the update!!

Anonymous said: I don't want to wait another week for the smut that appears to be fast approaching. T^T

You’ll just have to learn to be patient ;D hehe~ Thank you for reading the chapter love!

Anonymous said: OHHHHHHH MY GOSH IWSY GETS ME SHOOK EVERY CHAPTER. I was so glad there wasn't any secrets anymore for Y/N but apparently there's more? Anyways, I'm sooooo ready for the next chapter ;)))))))))))))))))

yes...it would seem there is one or two more things to be revealed. Did you think I would reveal everything? *giggles* Thank you so much love! I’m glad you’re looking forward to the next chapter ^^

@cursingmelly said: How are you even real? This chapter.... I can't even.

*pinches self* I think I am real! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? :O

Anonymous said: Omg Sara you're going to be the death of me.. THAT CHAPTER IS TOO MUCH TO HANDLE. The whole story, the vampire history, the fight between Jungkook and the Reader AND THEN THAT HOT ASS CLIFFHANGER?! UGH. How am I supposed to sleep now x.x

Ahh thank you so much my dear ^^ I am so glad you liked it! And I hope you managed to get some sleep with a little image of sexy VampKook to help you drift off c:

Anonymous said: Wow! You truly never cease to amaze me! The chapter was beyond perfection, really. The vampire lore you created is extremely detailed and completely different from what I've read about vampires. I loved the fact that you decided to dedicate nearly a whole chapter to this! I was so looking forward to it and you did not disappoint! I can't wait to see what's next! Thank you for creating this amazing story! (Oh and by the way, are we gonna have ANOTHER smut scene in the next chapter?! Yay!)

*cries* thank you so much! I was so excited to reveal the lore and I’m so happy that it is being well received :) I’m so glad you enjoyed it and...yes...maybe *winks*

Anonymous said: that ending. things are about to get kinky and freaky

It would seem so *wiggles eyebrows*

Anonymous said: Chapter 22 of IWSY was 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼 but like JunGKooK dAMN tHaT LAsT paRT tHo

Thank you so much for reading it my love! And yes, the last part had me feeling a little hot when I was writing it :3

@theninjachan said: bihhhhhhhh this scene: "the person who gave me the ability to love…is the person whom I fell in love with – the person whom I want to love until my end of days” a biTCH IS CRYING AT 6AM in the mORNING plus i'm highkey obsessed with jungkook and his sister chaewon bickering...how do i put this, their interaction is so human?? and serrena discipling them just like any other mother would do was quite amusing. and that "other little matter" they left out??? oh boy oh boy i can't wait for tuesday!

I guess even Vampire siblings can fight and have arguments! :3 hehe thank you so much babe, I’m so happy that you’re looking forward to reading the next chapter! And thank you so much for reading this one too ^^ Have a great day!

@mocking-butts said: I have made the most ungodly noises after reading this chapter oh my goodness gracious you're killing me here I can't wait for next week!

Hi again lovely! Ooooh, ungodly noises are my favourite :3 Thank you so much for reading babe! I hope you’ll enjoy next week’s too :3

Anonymous said: WELL WELL WELL I wasnt expecting that OMG Sara I CANT WAIT for the next update I can already feel da heat -wifey anon

Hey there wifey anon! I’m glad I could ring you the unexpected :3 Thank you very much for reading it, and I hope you’ll enjoy all the heat next week ;)

Anonymous said: Is this dom Jungkook????????????????? OMG tell me it is!!!!!! Owwwww I can't take this Princeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!

...maybe ;D hehe ^^ VAMPKOOK WITH A PRINCE KINK OH DAMN

Anonymous said: I just have one thing to say about that IWSY part... I. Am. Shooketh'd. Good day. 👌🏼👏🏼✌🏼

hehe I am glad I could bring the shookness to you ^^ Thank you so much for reading love and I hope you have a good day!

@animeimmortal said: Wow ok first of all I was killed and brought back to life by that last scene, second of all the amount of thinking you must have done about the whole historical BG like wow and third of all that last scene I hope it has a continuation in the next part 😉 cuz damn that started nice. Like probs this fanfic is in the top three of my favs like its taking the first place now I swear I love I so much ❤ love ya~ ❤

Thank you for appreciating the background and history - it did take me a while to put it all together so I’m feeling relieved that you like it! I’m super honoured to hear that this is part of your top three - thank you so, so much my dear. You’re incredibly sweet for saying that! I love you too honey and I hope you have a great day :D

@moonlighthollow said: I don't even know how many times i said that and you're probably annoyed already😂but Jesus Christ!!!This was SOO good I'm so inlove with your FF i seriously love it so so much you have no idea 😍at the beginning where serrena talked about domitors etc. This was SO well written damn sara😲I'm so impressed of your writing skills👌 biggest fangirl ever🙋 Ps: all characters actually fit SO WELL to their"real"personality if that makes sense (tae, jimin, kookie)😂 i can image them being like this lol

No! I will never be annoyed at you sweetie :D sdfghj thank you so damn much, this really means so much to me you have no idea. Everything you said touched my heart and it makes everything so worth it for me. Thank you a million, billion times for writing this to me, I really did smile so much ^^

@fatimaloveskpop said: I just recently started reading I Won't Stop You and I AM SO IN LOVE WITH IT.Not exaggerating but it's honestly the best au or vampire au that I've read on tumblr.Your writing is incredible and you're so creative.I absolutely love your work.Tuesdays have become my favourite day of the week. ❤❤❤❤

sdfghjk gah thank you so much for saying that babe, you made me smile so big! *hugs you tightly* thank you for reading it and enjoying it and thank you for being so lovely and sweet, I appreciate it so much ^^

@jungkookbangtaned said: I totally loved today's chapter of I won't stop you! Apart from being well written and really well described as always, today's facts made me fangirl... Omg like this was very good😍 I love the whole back story and the questions you left us with😍사랑해

Thank you so much for loving the chapter! And I’m super happy that you loved the back story :3 Sorry for more questions, but at least a lot was answered for, right? c: I love you too babe and I hope you have a lovely day!

@noceurash said: I WAS AT SCHOOL AND REMEMBERED IT WAS TUESDAY- my friends yet again had to hear me being excited to read the next part of I won't stop you pfft. Ily!! Have a good day hun <3

Ahh thank you for reading it during school omg! Haha don’t worry about your friends having to hear you fan girl - fan girl to your hearts content!! I love you too and I hope you have a good day as well ^^

Anonymous said: THE ENDING OF THE CHAPTER THOO 10/10

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Anonymous said: I like how you gave is insight of that vampire history! I actually find this chapter very informative and I just really enjoyed.... one thing...... THAT ENDING GOT ME IN THE FEELS AND LIKE NOW THERE IS A PRINCE KINK AND IT ALL SUCKS CAUSE I'M V BIASED...... Good job by the way~(sorry I seem way too bipolar here😂)

Thank you for appreciating the back story! I’m so glad you liked it and found it informative :D And muhaha YES VAMPKOOK WITH HIS PRINCE KINK ;D Uh oh...Taehyung is gonna have to keep a firm hold on you....:3 thank you for reading the new chapter my love and I hope you have a great week!

Anonymous said: SARA!!!! I feel like I say this every single week on Tuesdays... but IWSY prt 22 was BEAUTIFUL!!!! I'm so sorry for being so repetitive, but your writing is the legit definition of beautiful (1. pleasing to the senses or mind aesthetically. 2. of very high standard; excellent) and so are you! ily so much!!!at then end though... what is the 'other little matter?' oh well.. I can't wait for next week! <3 - army anon

ARMY ANON!!! You don’t have to be sorry at all, your wonderful words always give me so much courage and motivation to keep doing what I do and I appreciate them so, so much :D I love you too! And - the other little matter will be revealed in time :3 You will find out soon, I promise! Thank you for reading and i’m so happy you enjoyed the chapter ^^

Anonymous said: You know what would be a spicy yet bad idea? If Y/N just so happened to be bitten OR she was pregnant ( ͡O ͜ʖ ͡O) with lil hybrid Jeon who would be Domitor, Human, AND VAMPIRE. That'd be such a risk and a mess. Woooow. Where do you get all your information from? It all sounds soo true!

That indeed would be a spicy recipe for a disaster c: And as for my information - it’s mostly my imagination of how I have always interpreted Vampires along with a huge love for the previous lore that I grew up loving within the Vampire/horror genre ^^ I wanted to do something different but still keep certain elements alive ^^ Thank you so much for reading it!

@bangtansmistress said: Can I just say that I love your story to pieces and I look forward to it every Tuesday. And I am highkey hoping that sometime when Yoongi & Y/n are face to face again that maybe there's a chance she will give him his emotions back and he won't have to die because 😭😭😭 Bad guy turned good is my shhiiiiiit. Anyways, THANK YOU FOR YOUR AMAZING WRITING SKILLSSSSS I LOVE IT SO MUCH❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Ahhh thank you very much for reading and enjoying IWSY so far!! Hmmm yes, I wonder if she will be able to tame him and turn him good? We’ll just have to wait and see :3

@myoddparade said: I've been following IWSY since you first posted chapter 1 and I've never been so amazed by a piece of literature before! Your writing skills are no joke and I hope you understand how utterly talented you are! I've been meaning to write a message of support for awhile but never got around to it till now, I sit here every Tuesday waiting for that update and the feelings you express through your writing gets me every time! Carry on doing what you're doing because you're damn good at it! x

Aghh!! Thank you so much for having followed it since chapter one! That’s incredible :3 Thank you for your patience with the story! Ahh, you are so incredibly kind to me, thank you for saying such lovely and wonderful things. You have really made me smile with this - so thank you for that. I will keep going and I will try hard not to let you down!!

Anonymous said: SO ITS LIKE 8:36AM RN AND WE HAVE THIS PROGRAM WE'LL BE HAVING IN SCHOOL AT LIKE9AM BUT IM STILL HERRLying AND READING AND SCREAMINGNSBSJSJ ok so the first part i was quiet since i was trying to understand how evrrything works then AT THE LAST PSRTJDIDKDI JUNGKOOKS A FUCKING DOM YES OH MY FOD DOMINATE ME MY LORD

LMAO YOUR ASK WAS AMAZING TO READ HAHA THANK YOU SO MUCH! Yes...dom VampKook with a Prince kink hello~~ Thank you so much for reading it and enjoying IWSY!

@koreaisanaddiction said: SARRRRRAAAAAAA!!!!!!! "what are you going to do to me" "everything." WHHYYYYYYY!!!!! i mean im so PUMPED!!!! but then i though christian grey even though i never watched or read 50 shades. and then i thought wasnt that originally a twilight fanfiction (which yet goain never watched or read) and now im so confused by the who"she'll find out in time" thing like FUCK!!!! all i know is im so pumped for the smut. your sucjh a good writer i got my friend into your story. LOVE YOU!!

Hehe, I wonder what everything means? :3 I’ve never read/saw 50SOG and nor do I care much for Twilight~ I mean, I can appreciate the authors hard work and writing her own lore. But I’m afraid the characters within the movie completely ruined the story for me. I personally thought that the acting was very bad :( I love you too my dear and thank you so much for reading and for also getting your friend into it too!! ^^

Anonymous said: This was just what I needed before I go to surgery tomorrow! I freaking love this story so much. I learned so much in this chapter but WTF WHY NO GIVE US THE GOOD STUFF. THEY WAS GETTIN READY TO BUMP UGLIES AND I WAS LIEK 'oh shit jungkook. Get you a piece of dat ass' THEN IT WAS LIKE TO BE CONTINUED AND JSHDDJKGNKEHSKFJKLD. I LOVED IT. (Side note: have you considered making a vmin chapter/spinoff so we can have more of teh fluff?) Thanks for another lovely chapter. I love you 💜 ~LilKookieAnon

Hello LilKookieAnon! AND WHAT? YOU’RE HAVING SURGERY? Oh my god I hope you’re okay and that you’ll recover soon :( Please let me know and keep me updated, okay? ~~ And yes, actually! I have considered writing a side chapter about Vmin, but it will be when IWSY is completely finished ^^ I love you too my dear and I hope you’re okay ^^ Thank you so much for reading despite going for surgery tomorrow!

Anonymous said: Once again your cliffhanger killed me!!! I love this series sm adgjklobxsfh tysm 😙😙😙

You’re welcome for another cliffhanger ;D Thank you very much for reading!

Anonymous said: Next chapter be like now chicka wow wow 😏 lol but seriously though, another amazing chapter 😁

Bow chicka wowow lmao oh my god I havent heard that in so long :3 Thank you for reading and enjoying it babe!

@clara-licht said: IWSY is way too amazing 😭😭 I've been wondering though, what kind of blood do they consume? You said it's synthetically manufactured, but aren't they human blood as well? Are they blood donations from humans? If so, do they donate knowingly it's for Vampires or not? And do Vampires have favorite blood type? 😂 Thank you!

Hi babe! Thank you for thinking IWSY is amazing, that really means so much to me! ^^ And yes - synthetically manufactured as in, they do not directly consume human blood. In the world of IWSY, synthetically manufactured blood is blood that is essentially a copy of human blood. Because Vampires are so intelligent and advanced, they have been able to do this perfectly ^^ I’m afraid I can’t provide answers for your other questions as I won’t ever give away spoilers! I hope you can understand c: Thank you for reading it love!

@toxic-seoul said: Omg part 22 revealed a lot more than I expect & I'm so amazed on how u came up with it all. You're truly an outstanding author tbh I love everything about this series. I want to ask something a bit serious tho. Are you okay? I know you've written other stuff but I'm not sure if you've had any pressure when writing those. With a series like IWSY I feel like authors can be easily intimidated or anxious about updating weekly and meeting expectations of readers cuz of how popular it is (cont.) idk I just hope you're doing okay mentally and physically. I know it might be a lot of pressure. You're doing amazing tho and I support you a lot, along with many others. I really hope you don't feel obligated to continue this series as well (even tho I'm sure u enjoy writing it & in love with it as much as us readers lol) anyways sorry it got deep lol I really hope you're taking care of yourself & I also hope for the best for you even tho I don't know u personally 💕

First of all, thank you so much for reading IWSY and for enjoying it, I am really happy that you liked the revelations in this chapter and you are way too kind to me^^ ~~ To be honest, you are absolutely right. I do feel a lot of anxiety and pressure when I post a new chapter. I’m always worrying “Will they like it? Will they understand the emotion I’m trying to convey? Will they enjoy what I’ve written about?” I am always hoping that the people who read my fanfiction realise how much time and effort I dedicate to it. Because you’re right, it makes me happy to write and to make people happy at the same time. I seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to type this encouraging message, you have no idea how much this means to me that you took time to check up on me like this. Sometimes I feel like I have so much going on that I can’t breathe, but it’s messages like yours that keep me going and give a bit of life back into my system. You’re absolutely golden and I cannot thank you enough. I’m so emotional right now xD

Anonymous said: bruh why did u hav to end it like dat? Jfc. How do you jump into the next week? Help

*time travels to next week* hehehe ~~~

Anonymous said: I'm so curious as to what happens if Yoongi were to get his hands on Y/N in IWSY- I just love this series so much! You're such an incredible author and person- I just ❤❤

Yes...I wonder what might happen?! Hehe~ thank you so much for being so kind and sweet to me, and thank you for reading IWSY too! :3

@deboracorrea25 said: OMG!! All this revelations in IWSY, and I'm still very curious. What are her true powers? What does Yoongi want to do with her? So many questions, so many things to come. And this Prince is driving me insane! I just love this Jungkook vampire! Thank you for another amazing part. Love you!

Questions were answered and more questions were given too! :3 Prince VampKook is such a hottie~he’s gonna snatch us all R.I.P :3 hehe~ Thank you so much baby and I love you too! I hope you have an awesome day :)

Anonymous said: YOU'RE SUCH A CLIFFHANGERRR!!!!! WHY STOP AT THIS BOOTIFULL MOMENT?? I KNOW, YOU KNOW WE ALL WAITED FOR THIS KINKY JUNGK SO WHHAAYYYYYY???!!*cries in korean* (btw im speaking abt the latest chapter of IWSY

I apologise for any hurt or frustration I may or may not have caused you c: I hope you’ll enjoy what’s to come! ^^ Thank you for reading the chapter my dear ^^

#I Won't Stop You #IWSY #imsarabum #Responses #Asks

34 notes · View notes

asreoninfusion · 8 years ago

Note

1-4,7,10, 11,13,14,16, 19-21, 25,26,30,34, 39,52,54,55, 61,62,65,67 also 69 - (b) - How mature do you think i am on a scale of 1 to 10 giggity giggity!

That’s a lotta questions! :o I’mma put this one under a cut, lol.

01: Do you have a good relationship with your parents?

Yeah, my mum especially. To the point where we’ve been discussing buying a plot of land for my hobbit house and splitting the payments and I’d be 100% fine with doing that and trusting there to be no issues with the money and also we’d probably build the house together. She’s on board with my hobbit house plans.

02: Who did you last say “I love you” to?

Uuuuuumm, I don’t think I’ve said it for a long time, I can’t remember. I imagine it probably would have been my mum, but more likely in writing that in person ‘cause I’ve been away at uni and haven’t seen any of the family in a few months now.

03: Do you regret anything?

Many stupid small things and instances where I’ve embarrassed myself by being socially awkward. Nothing major though.

04: Are you insecure?

Depends on what about. I am content about some things, like being able to achieve things independently and get by on my own and also I’m generally perfectly happy with how I look, except for in photos which pisses me off because I know I look better than I do in photos and it annoys me that they make look bad. Fuck photos.

But then I am hideously insecure when it comes to dealing with other people like ahahahaha I am so bad it’s embarrassing. I need to go back to self-isolating I can handle that so much better. Every time I try to interact with people I end up fucking up somehow and hating myself.

07: What did you last eat?

I still haven’t eaten today, so it would have been dinner last night. I tried some of Domino’s new meatball things at a society/social thing last night, they weren’t that great.

10: When was your last physical fight?

Uhhh. Do sword fights count? Cause I imagine it would have been when I was taking the sword fighting lessons. That was like three years ago now.

11: Do you like someone?

Presuming this means like like as in crush-type like, no.

13: Do you hate anyone at the moment?

Nn, hate is a bit strong. There’s a few people in the aforementioned society that I am wary of, because they’ve made comments that are kind of racist or transphobic or otherwise Not Cool, but I’m too fucking weak-ass to call them out on it.

14: Do you miss someone?

Not really. It’s kind of weird, like, I say I’m close to my family but at the same time long periods of separation seem totally normal and I don’t miss them much at all idk.

16: How exactly are you feeling at the moment?

I... am still not entirely okay about last night’s society thing and the guy who was making transphobic comments. Like, if there’s one thing I really fucking hate, it’s people who spout opinions - usually opinions that are shitting on other people’s existences - when they clearly know fuck-all about what they’re talking about. Making judgements without knowing the full situation kind of thing.

But I don’t feel like I know enough either to really stand my ground, so I say nothing because, as I mentioned before, I am fucking disgustingly weak. Like, evil flourishes if good people stand by and do nothing and all that jazz.

So, I feel gross about the comments, and I feel gross for not saying anything, and I just want to barricade myself off from the world because I can’t fucking handle anything, and then I feel gross about that too because ahahaha that is not how to respond to conflict.

(The amount of weakness + running away from my problems has gotten so bad I can’t even project onto Cloud anymore, even though he used to be my go-to identifier for that kind of shit. orz)

19: Would you go back in time if you were given the chance?

Mmm, I don’t know, that could end badly. I don’t think there’s anywhen I’d want to go to enough to risk it. I’d rather just go somewhere else geographically in the current time.

20: Where was the last place you snogged someone?

I have not snogged anyone at any point ever.

21: What are your plans for this weekend?

Too much plans, I wanna sleep. But I want to get the tables and graphs done for one lab report and do a decent chunk of the research for the case study thing I have to do for next week. Then I’m gonna hang out with a friend this evening. Tomorrow there are mentions of a group of friends going to the Chinese supermarket and getting together and cooking stuff?? (We’ve done that before but there has been very little in the way of organisation/confirmation of anything this time round so idk.) And there’s the social for the BDSM club people tomorrow evening as well.

This is too much people I’m gonna burn out by the end of the weekend aaaaaahh. DX

Also I needed to try a wash my hair at some point, because we do not talk about how horrifically bad that situation is. (I look at those posts that occassionally crop up with neurotypical people horrified that someone with a mental illness might not shower for two or three days because spoons and I die imaging the reaction if they knew how godawful I am with that shit.)

25: Do you miss anyone from your past?

Nah. I’ve moved countries enough that I am very good at forgetting people and moving on, I’ve had a lot of practice. That’s probably not entirely a good thing, but.

26: What are you craving right now?

Breakfast.

30: What’s irritating you right now?

I think I already gave a far too detailed answer for that in question 16. >>

34: Who/what was your last dream about?

Oooooh. I did have quite an involved dream, but I can’t remember it all that well now. I think the vine guy was there briefly for some reason.

39: How old were you when you had your first kiss?

I have not yet had a first kiss.

52: Do you believe everything happens for a reason?

Nah, sometimes shit just happens because people are assholes. Most times there will be a way to rebuild and make something better out of whatever situation, but I wouldn’t say it ‘happens for a reason’ as if people were meant to suffer however they have.

54: Is cheating ever okay?

No. I mean, I don’t understand it anyway because being ace I’m just here like ‘wtf??? is it really that damn hard to keep it in your pants???’ lol. But if you are interested in having more than one partner, good communication and polyamorous type arrangements are a much better way to go if everyone’s on board with that.

55: Are you mean?

Never intentionally, though I imagine my awkwardness sometimes can be interpreted as rudeness.

61: Is it cute when a boy/girl calls you baby?

It would depend on the person saying it. I used to have a friend a very long time ago who called me and our other friend ‘babe’, that was cute. If I trusted the person and it was done in a joking but affectionate kind of manner within a friendship/queerplatonic relationship I’d be fine with it. If it was someone I didn’t know so well and, like, if they’re trying to be sexy with it like a ‘hey baby’ kind of thing, that would be weird and creepy ‘cause no thank you.

62: What makes you happy?

Long hikes in lots of nature when the weather is nice, people saying nice things about fic or that thing that happens where we all bounce ideas off each other and end up with fic of art and art of fic, uni work that is actually fun to do and I feel accomplished when I make something I’m proud of, randomly having a gigglefit over recalling stupid funny things (mostly dumb vines or Markiplier, lol), when my voice cooperates and I can sing well.

65: Your best friend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do?

That is awkward as hell because I can guarantee I won’t feel the same way about them, soooo. If it was my best friend of the same sex that has more potential, since I would consider a queerplatonic kind of relationship with someone I was really close friends with and trusted a lot, but I’d be 100 times more comfortable with it if that person was female as well. (Or nonbinary, or trans, actually... now I think about, it’s only cis males that make me really nervous about being liked by. A generalisation, I know, but if any demographic is going to feel entitled to more than I’m comfortable with, it’d be them.)

67: Who was the last person of the opposite sex you talked to?

Probably someone at the uni society thing yesterday, I guess.

69: Do you believe in soulmates?

No, certainly not as a universal thing. Like, it’s sweet to some people click so well it feels like they’re soulmates, but I don’t think that can be expected for everyone.

#ask meme #memery #antarcticanammonite

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mysteryshelf · 7 years ago

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BLOG TOUR - The Grand

Welcome to

THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!

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The Grand

by Dennis D. Wilson

on Tour October 1-31, 2017

Synopsis:

Chicago cop Dean Wister takes a forced vacation when he is on the brink of a breakdown after the death of his wife. During his summer solstice in Jackson Hole, where he met her years before, he is called in to consult by local police when a notorious Chicago mobster is found dead in the Snake River. Dean’s investigation threatens to uncover the secrets of a group of memorable suspects, ranging from rich tycoons to modern day cowboys, and threatens to derail the Presidential prospects of the Senator from Wyoming. As Dean follows the leads from Wyoming to Chicago to Washington D.C., he also struggles to cope with the personal loss that threatens his mental stability, as the nocturnal visits from his deceased wife suppress his will to let her go and make him question his purpose in life. The climactic scenes contain reveals the reader will never see coming. A funny, romantic, sexy, roller coaster thriller.

Book Details:

Genre: Crime Thriller Published by: Water Street Press Publication Date: December 2016 Number of Pages: 304 ISBN: 978-1-62134-330-1 (ASIN: B01N682LXW) Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Kindle 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗

Read an excerpt:

SENATOR THOMAS MCGRAW sat back in the hand-distressed, buffalo-hide easy chair and contemplated the room around him. This was his first visit to the brand new, custom-designed mountain home of his lover. When their affair started a little over a year ago, what a sweet and savory surprise it had been to both of them. A business relationship grew into friendship, and then suddenly and unexpectedly exploded into something else— a red-hot, cross-country, obsessive romance fueled by shared erotic tastes. The senator felt sexually liberated under the spell of his exotic lover, and he was pretty sure those feelings were mutual. True, they needed to be discreet for a variety of reasons— indiscretion had nearly cost them everything— but they had worked it out. Although hectic schedules limited their rendezvous to only a couple of weekends a month, the deprivation and anxiety of anticipation made these weekends that much more satisfying. He was generally in a frenzy by the time he could get to her.

The room was the den of a typical ten-thousand-square-foot vacation home of the rich and powerful in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Decked out in nouveau western, its reclaimed timbers, Wyoming sandstone, and river rock were either complemented by— or detracted from, depending on your esthetic point of view— the original modern paintings depicting bold and most definitely non-earth-toned western landscapes and various forms of neon-colored wildlife. As Tom sipped his twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, he studied the visage of a purple and orange moose head sculpted from California mahogany hanging dispiritedly over the fireplace. Damn, any self-respecting Wyoming moose would be embarrassed to know that this is some guy’s idea of what a trophy moose should look like. His personal style was more traditional Western— big wooden beams and a glut of real dead animal heads on the walls. But, the sex was still new and novel, unlike anything he had felt before, and he was willing to overlook these stylistic differences for the time being or, who knew, maybe for a long time. As his mentor had told him a long time ago: “Pussy is a powerful motivator.”

“I am soooo happy we were able to start our weekend a day early,” his lover called from the other room. “I’ve been so horny this week that I’ve been bouncing off the walls. I brought back something special for you from Chicago. Just give me another minute, sweetie.” Charlotte Kidwell dressed, and undressed, to accentuate her best features: her big green eyes, her long, toned legs, and her perfect bubble butt. Her regular head-to-toe salon appointments, personal trainer, and strict dietary regimen were essentials to the healthy, put-together appearance that women of her age and social status often have, if they have the money and motivation to work at it. In her younger days, her insecure attempts to add sex appeal fell short, and she’d ended up with an oddly unfeminine look with her clumsy and unsuccessful experiments with cosmetics. But middle age had actually softened her features, and as she became more adept at the finer points of female grooming, she began to realize how much she resembled her sister. During what she referred to as “The Sexual Awakening,” she had finally developed the confidence in her sexuality to consciously emulate her sister’s makeup and dress. Her older sibling had always exuded effortless sexuality, and throughout high school and college had gone through more boys in most years than Charlotte had dated for her entire youth.

The senator had certainly surprised her. Although his belly professed his lust for food and drink and a disinclination for exercise, his face was the opposite, exuding an irresistible cowboy masculinity. At middle age, most people have to choose between a wrinkle-free face and a toned and youthful body. What was it her friend in Chicago called fat? “Nature’s botox.” He had chosen his beautiful face at the expense of his body, but that was fine with her, because he was a sexual artiste. Certainly no one who knew him could possibly conceive of the hot spring of sexuality that was percolating beneath his surface. In spite of their distinctly different personalities, she considered him her soul mate. The first man in her forty-four years who had ever laid claim to that title. The thought made her giggle.

“Hurry up, baby, and get your pretty little ass out here.”

Appearing in the doorway, she framed herself with the hand-on-the-hip pose so popular with women much younger than herself. “You like? I know this little specialty boutique in Chicago, and it ain’t Macy’s Intimate Apparel.”

He liked the look very much. The red lace push-up bra, matching thong panties, silk kimono, and six-inch stilettos appealed to the man who’d had a weakness for strippers in his younger days. Though the untied robe looked more like a cape than boudoir attire, and the entire outfit reminded him of a porn movie he once saw— Superslut, a parody of Superwoman, he had to give her an “A” for effort. “Wow, you look like a very sexy Little Red Riding Hood. And where in the world did you find a bra that makes those pretty little A cups of yours look like Cs? Now turn around and let me admire your world-class bootie.”

She did a little twirl for him, grinned, and pushed together her bra cups to emphasize her cleavage. “It’s called a miracle bra, and see, it does work miracles. Now you just sit there and sip your whiskey. I have another surprise for you.” She strutted over to the bookcase, flipped a switch, and AC/ DC’s “Shook Me All Night Long” filled the room. And she began to dance.

“Oh my.” Tom took a big swallow and relished the burn. “You are just full of surprises tonight.”

“Just sit back and enjoy, Senator. I’ve got a few more surprises coming your way.”

Watching her rehearsed moves, the familiar hunger began to stir below his opulent belly. And then, in a maneuver that would have been impressive for a woman of any age, she turned away from him, spread her legs, touched her toes, looked straight up at him from her bare inverted V, and twerked. She had been practicing all afternoon, and when she saw the image of her quivering butt in the mirror she couldn’t wait to see his reaction.

“Oh, my god, where did you learn that?” The stirring rising now to a different level. And he was also wondering… her dance routine looked really professional.

“I have a very good friend in Chicago who does this for a living, and she’s been giving me some lessons.”

“Judging from that pose, sweetie, your friend must be an instructor in ‘stripper yoga’.” The senator, feeling the fire down there, leaned forward and reached for that perfect ass. “Get over here and let me take you the way I like, the way I know you like.” Putting his hands on her bare cheeks and grabbing two hands full, he left his chubby fingerprints as indentations on her flesh. Crazed now, pulling off his pants and underwear but not bothering with his shirt and tie, he pulled her thong aside, mounted her, grunting, sighing. Both of them grunting, sighing, grunting some more. And now just the sounds of flesh slapping flesh. And AC/ DC, urging them on…

Hayden Smith was running late. He was always running late. It was common knowledge in town that you had to book every appointment with Hayden an hour early to get him to show up on time. Attorney, county commissioner, real estate broker and developer, owner of a property management company— all that, plus trying to live up to the moniker of Teton County’s most eligible bachelor as determined by Mountain Woman magazine, well, that could take a toll on a man, even a man as fit and athletic as Hayden. And it was taking its toll on Hayden today. Sometimes he thought there was little point in taking any time off because you had to work twice as hard just to clear your schedule.

The last item of the day on his long list was to make sure all was in order in the home of his newest property management client before their arrival the next morning. But what he really was thinking about, as he put the key in the door, was that he was already an hour late for a dinner date at the home of one of Teton County’s richest and most beautiful socialites. And so if he hadn’t been fantasizing about the evening’s upcoming sensual activities, and if he hadn’t assumed that it was his cleaning crew that had left that open bourbon bottle on the counter, and if he hadn’t been formulating the words he was going to use to chew Pablo’s ass about getting control of his maintenance team, and if he had checked his voicemail after his last two meetings instead of engaging in licentious banter on the phone with the young socialite, then he might have reacted differently to the pounding bass of one of the most iconic rock anthems of the 1980s. He might not have followed the mesmerizing sound of Brian Johnson’s sandpaper voice into the den, assuming that he would find some of his employees having an unauthorized party; and he might not have witnessed the sight in front of him that would not only drastically change his life but would also set in motion a chain of events that had the potential to change the course of American history.

If he had looked directly at the man’s face, he almost certainly would have recognized one of the most well-known faces in Wyoming, soon to be equally famous throughout America. However, Hayden looked everywhere but into his face. The man, still dressed for business on top but naked from the waist down, was humping a pretty redhead doggie style, and Hayden was fascinated that with each thrust, her red stilettos would come off the ground about twelve inches, and then at the end of the thrust, the tips of her heels would bang down on the pine floor. Thrust, bang, thrust, bang, thrust, bang. Later when he played that video clip back in his mind, he captioned it “porn star tap dancing.”

He looked all around the room, but his eyes kept coming back to those red shoes, maybe because he didn’t really want to look at the man’s jiggling ass, or maybe because when his eyes followed those shoes north he was treated to a pair of the finest legs and most delicious bootie that he had ever seen. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have just turned around and walked right out of the house and he would have been able to go back to his great life as Teton County’s busiest and most eligible bachelor. But for whatever reason— the shock of the scene, or his own perverse voyeurism— he did not turn back around. He knocked on the door jamb with his clipboard and stammered loudly enough to be heard over AC/ DC. “Ah, ah, ah, I thought you weren’t coming in until tomorrow. I just came to check on the house. Is everything OK? I mean, just call me if anything isn’t OK. Sorry to interrupt. I’ll just let myself out…” And then he backed out of the room and nearly sprinted out the door.

Tom jumped up with impressive agility considering his exertion and girth, partly hopping, definitely bobbing. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”

Charlotte rolled over onto her side. “What the fuck, I left him a message that I was coming in today. What was he thinking?”

And the senator just kept repeating, “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit.” Then, catching his breath, added to his mantra, “I’m sure he saw me, I’m sure he saw me, I’m sure he saw me.”

His lover, handing him the rest of his twenty-three-year-old Pappy, said, “Here, drink this,” trying not to let the panic sound in her voice. She thought for a moment. “We’ll call Mario. He’ll know what to do. If that asshole tells anyone it’ll hurt Mario as much as us. Well, maybe not quite as much as us, but you know what I mean.”

Tom sat down for a minute, his white dress shirt soaked through, wheezing from the exertion, from the excitement, from the fear, his heart a thumping kettle drum in his chest. Neither of them said a word for a minute, then two. Finally realizing the heart attack wasn’t coming, he took a huge breath and said, “OK, call him.”

Charlotte punched the number into her mobile phone. “Mario? Sorry to bother you, but we have a problem. Some asshole just walked in on the two of us. Walked in on us… you know. What do you think we were doing? How could he not recognize him? Yeah, he’s my property manager. Hold on. Honey, would you hand me that business card on the table?”

THE FIRST TIME Dean Wister had visited the Tetons was twelve years ago, the summer before his senior year in college. Although he said it was adventure he was looking for, it was escape that he was really seeking when he answered an ad to guide for one of the rafting companies that run whitewater trips down the Snake River, just south of Teton National Park. It was a grueling twenty-four-hour drive from his home in Chicago to Jackson Hole, the mountain town at the foot of the spectacular Teton Range, and the route that he was taking, I-90 across Illinois, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, was one of the most monotonous and boring stretches of highway across America. Hour after hour he would stare at the road between truck stops, trying to keep alert for the highway patrol and the erratic driving of drowsy long-distance truckers. He tried listening to music and audio books, but his mind wouldn’t let him focus. Lately, he had a lot of trouble focusing. He’d once tried meditation, taking a Transcendental Meditation workshop with his wife, Sara, but meditation wasn’t for him. His mind would inevitably wander from the rhythm of his breathing to some problem from work that he was trying to solve. Dean had always been more of a ruminator than a meditator. And so he ruminated for hour after hour. He ruminated about all that had happened over the last twelve years. He ruminated about the horror of the last year. And he ruminated about what the future might, or more importantly, might not, hold.

That first trip had also been a time of transition for him. His mother died after his freshman year in high school, and his dad was killed in a work accident at the lumber yard just before Dean started college. As an only child he had led a solitary existence growing up, but by the time he left for college he was officially an orphan, no parents to cheer him as the starting safety on the University of Illinois football team, and no siblings to share the empty and confused feelings of losing the only responsible adults he had ever known. His hometown of Summersville, West Virginia, was near the banks of the Gauley River, one of the most famous whitewater-rafting rivers in the East, and the gray, small-minded, and cruel little town resembled what Mayberry may have looked like if Andy hadn’t been born. Until he was seventeen, Dean had never met a college graduate outside of a classroom, and growing up with his nose stuck in a book most of the time, his peers, and even most of the adults he knew, looked down on his habit as a sign of either homosexuality, laziness, or both. Maybe it was resentment for not living the fantastic and interesting life of the characters in the books that he read, or maybe it was the bullying that he experienced from his literature-averse peers, or maybe it was his sense of insecurity and inferiority from his hillbilly background, or maybe it was just his nature— for whatever reason, there was a well of anger deep inside of Dean.

The bullying stopped the first time he stepped on a football field. He loved to play defense, and putting the hammer to the ball carrier or receiver was equally pleasurable to him, whether in practice or during an actual game. He loved the rush of power he felt when a body crushed beneath him as he delivered the blow. As he would take aim at his target coming across the field, he imagined his body as a sledge hammer and he would launch himself, helmet first, at his opponents, relishing the pain he received nearly as much as the pain he delivered. As his scrawny adolescent body matured into a six-foot, one-hundred-ninety-pound defensive back, his football hits became ever more fearsome, and attracted the attention of a recruiter for the University of Illinois. Football would end for him upon college graduation for, as a pro scout told him, “Son, you sure have the meanness for pro football, but not the speed.” But that was all right; football had served its purpose.

The first time his dad had taken him along to run the rapids of the Gauley he was only nine years old, but after that he was addicted to the river. Working as a gofer for one of the rafting companies, imagining himself as one of the cocky swaggering guides, he would do anything to be near the river. The owner of the company took a liking to him, and broke the rules to put him on as a guide at sixteen. He worked on the Gauley through high school and college. But, with the death of his father, West Virginia held too many painful memories; he needed to get away. He heard from some fellow guides that the Snake River in Wyoming, south of Jackson, could be fun. Sure, its mostly Class 2 and 3 rapids were nothing compared to the Gauley, but he had always wanted to see the Rockies, and it was about as far away from West Virginia as he could imagine. That summer on the Snake, in the Tetons, revealed another side that he didn’t know he had. He learned how to cap that well of anger, to regulate the flow, to use it instead of letting it use him, and for the next decade was able to let it out only when his job demanded it. He discovered that there was another well, an untapped well, within him. A well of love and sweetness, of kindness and generosity. And the auger that tapped that well was Sara.

He’d just sent some food back at the Pioneer Grill, the coffee shop in Jackson Lake Lodge in Teton National Park. His order of sautéed Rocky Mountain rainbow trout appeared on his plate as buffalo meatloaf. His anger rising at this inexcusable display of disrespect and incompetence, he called over the pretty blonde server and pointed at the food in front of him. “Miss, do you think you would recognize a Rocky Mountain rainbow trout if you saw one?” She’d looked first at the gravy-smothered brown glob, and then directly into his twisted angry face, and behind her best smile said, “Apparently not, but I can recognize an asshole when I see one.”

Dean was overmatched by the spunky girl with eyes of a deeper blue than the summer skies over the Grand Tetons, and he fell in love on the spot. They laughed at the story forever, and she still called him “meatloaf asshole” on occasion, either when she was feeling especially fond or, more often, particularly annoyed with him. She loved to tease him and ridicule his quirks, calling him “schizo” for the many paradoxical elements in his personality: jock/ intellectual, hot head/ sentimentalist, loner/ showoff. But when she would call him “schizo” and flash him her irresistible smile, it would always soften his mood, and he was able to laugh at himself.

As a trust-fund baby of a power couple in Chicago’s legal community, Sara’s suburban childhood was exactly the opposite of Dean’s. Her bookworm ways were admired by her parents, friends, and her community. The vivacious blond with the sharp wit and the ability to fit in with every social group was a psych major at the University of Chicago, less than a two-hour drive up the interstate from Champaign if you are a hormone-crazed college boy, more like three hours for everyone else. Her well of anger was only a fraction of Dean’s and reserved exclusively for bullies and people who abused children, animals, and the less fortunate. But if you happened to occupy that territory, her fierceness could make even Dean flinch.

When he thought of their first summer, it played back in his head like some film made from a Nicolas Sparks novel. As he watched the movie, alone in the theater seat of his Jeep Cherokee, he smiled at the “meet cute” first scene in the coffee shop, marveled at the on-location, awe-inspiring backdrops of the Snake and the Tetons, was moved to tears by the scene where he makes love to Sara for the first time. And he couldn’t criticize the filmmaker’s decision to leave every sex scene of the summer in the movie. There they are making love on the window seat in the tiny apartment shared by Dean and his four other river rat roommates. There they are making love after a picnic at Schwabacher’s landing, the Tetons reflected like a painting in the beaver pond. And there they are on their last day of the summer, on a picnic in the alpine meadow they had discovered on their long hike into the mountains. The meadow they had named “Sara’s Meadow.” The meadow where Dean proposed. The meadow they pledged to return to each year on their anniversary. They talked of it often, and relived the moment every year on that special day. But they never came back. Life, and careers, and bullshit got in the way.

Careers included the single-minded ambition they shared. Dean’s resulted in a meteoric rise to detective in the Chicago Police Department and, after being handpicked to join the Midwest Organized Crime Task Force as the only local police detective among FBI and ATF agents, his days and weeks became an unending blur of clues, criminals, and cases. Sara’s graduate degree at Northwestern led to a tenure track appointment at Loyola University. But tenure track meant running never-ending, back-to-back-to-back marathons of teaching, research, and publishing. Their career ambitions allowed no room for children, or travel, or a return to Sara’s Meadow.

And then, over the last year, came the bullshit. Dean was working eighty-hour weeks on a high-profile case involving government and police corruption, and many of the Chicago cops whom he considered friends turned away from him. And then, just when they thought they were getting close to breaking the case, the investigation was shut down and he was reassigned. He was exhausted, disappointed, stressed, and his friends treated him like a traitor.

And then there was Sara. She had been diagnosed with cancer just as Dean began the investigation from hell. After her initial treatment, she received a clean report, and he was too preoccupied to notice when she continued to lose weight. A check-up a few months later showed that the cancer had returned. The rebound was aggressive, additional treatment failed to stop the spread, and she continued to get weaker and weaker in spite of what she would call “frequent invitations for happy hour cancer cocktails with my oncologist.” She even made up names for the cocktails based on the side effects she would experience afterward. There was the Diarrhea Daiquiri, the Migraine Martini, and the Vomit-rita. No subject was out of bounds for her wicked and irreverent sense of humor. Once, when she was bedridden near the end, Dean asked her how she was feeling, and in her best Sally Field Mama Gump imitation, she said “Well, Forrest, I’ve got the cancer.”

Dean wanted to take a leave to stay at Sara’s bedside, but she made up her mind that that was not an option. And when Sara made up her mind about something, he had learned to let her have her way. So Dean was relegated to spending every hour that he wasn’t working by her side, holding her close, imagining how they would live their lives differently when she was well. The night she died, she asked him to describe that day in Sara’s Meadow. And when he finished, she said, “Promise we can go there when I get well. Will you take me there next summer?” He nodded, unable to speak. She slept peacefully that night for the first time in quite a while, and in the morning she was gone.

Strangely, although she was the center of his universe, the only person that he could say he ever truly loved, he showed little emotion when she died. He didn’t cry. He felt almost as if he were an outside observer of these terrible events. He experienced only numbness. An unrelenting, withering numbness. A numbness interrupted only by random bursts of anger that disturbed even the hardened cops he worked with. Dean was not unaware of his problem, and tried to channel the anger by hooking up with Manny Cohen, a mixed martial arts coach and self-proclaimed king of “Jew-Jitsu”. He loved the physicality of the MMA bouts, and that the jiu-jitsu moves he learned permitted him to disable much bigger and stronger fighters, even if he was on the ground being pummeled. He justified the training as part of his law-enforcement skills, but he knew what it was really about— the ability to inflict some of the horrible hurt he was feeling on others.

The changes in Dean since Sara’s death were most troubling to his boss, Carlos Alvarez. Carlos had been crushed when, on the verge of busting a Chicago mob guy who had both political and police connections, which evidently reached all the way to Washington, the whole operation had been shut down. In his heart, he knew it was those same connections he was investigating that had defeated him. He looked at Dean and watched one of the most competitive spirits he had ever known flicker out, starved for the oxygen that Sara could no longer supply. The case they had put their hearts and souls into for the last year was ripped out of their hands and Dean, who normally would be just as pissed off as he was, seemed to be only going through the motions.

But the most disturbing problem, as far as he was concerned, was Dean’s refusal to mourn Sara. Carlos watched as Dean’s isolation became extreme, and he refused all offers to talk or socialize. Dean’s robotic demeanor and increasingly unpredictable violent outbursts were scaring him. When Carlos sent him to meet with the psychologist assigned to their department, he refused to cooperate. He insisted that he was fine. But Carlos knew he wasn’t fine. He saw a man on the brink of a breakdown and finally decided that drastic action was needed to rescue the man from himself. One morning he walked into Dean’s office and handed him a letter worded as an authorization, which was actually an order, to take a three-month leave of absence.

“But where will I go? What will I do?” Dean said, seemingly incapable of entertaining any change to his barely functional routine. Carlos looked toward the picture on his desk, the one taken twelve years earlier. It showed Dean standing on a whitewater raft. Sara was sitting in the boat looking up at him with a combination of love and lust in her eyes. In the background, the grandeur of the Tetons loomed. “You have to get out of town. You have to get away from here, from all this. And I know where I would go if I had no obligations and three months off. I’ve been envying that picture since the day you moved in here.”

What his boss didn’t know, and what Dean couldn’t tell him, or anyone else for that matter, was the real reason that he wouldn’t see the psychologist— something that would make him seem crazy to outsiders. Hell, he often had that thought about himself. Not every evening, but maybe two or three nights a week, he would spend the night with Sara. He would wake up a couple of hours after he went to sleep, and she would be there, sitting in the chair next to his bed. He would get up, and they would talk just like they used to, about everything, what was happening in his life and in his job, or what was going on in the news. They would make love, and it was every bit as passionate and real as before she was sick. When he would wake up in the morning, she would be gone. At first, he tried to convince himself that it was all a dream, until one night he washed the sheets before he went to bed, and the next morning her perfume lingered on the bedding. She was really there, and she was as real as anything he had ever experienced.

He had nothing against psychologists. He had seen a therapist in college after a particularly hard break-up and had found it very helpful. In fact, he visited that same therapist when Carlos was pushing him to see the department shrink— he wasn’t about to have his craziness officially certified to his employer. And his own therapist confirmed what he instinctively knew himself. “Your hallucinations of your dead wife will go away when you allow yourself to fully mourn her.” But that was exactly the problem. Her very real apparition was the only tangible thing he had left of her. Her visits were the only thing that let him get through the day, that kept him from becoming totally out of control, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from him. He was determined to hold on to whatever was left of her, for as long as he could.

Sara was the one that convinced him to take the trip. She told him during one of their nocturnal visits that he could use the time off; that she knew he was stressed out. He agreed on one condition. That she would come with him. She gave him her mischievous smile, the one that had captured him that first day in the coffee shop, and said, “That’s not a problem. I’m not going without sex for three months. And the ghosts here are too creepy to sleep with.”

That first summer twelve years ago, he had come into town from the south, getting off I-80 west of Rock Springs, approaching Jackson via Alpine and driving up through the Snake River canyon so that he could view the whitewater section he would be working. Wyoming is mostly high plains except for the northwestern part, which is an endless vista of scrub grass, prickly pear, sage brush, with occasional red-rock battleships and gargoyles. On that first trip he was able to view the Wind River Range in the distance outside his window, but he didn’t really get a good view of the Teton Range until he reached the outskirts of the town of Jackson. This time he had decided to take the Northern route via I-90, because he wanted to see the Black Hills, one of the few topographic areas of interest that is easily accessible from the interstate. So he was not really prepared for what happened when his Jeep rounded the bend on Route 26, east of Teton National Park, and he looked west. The fragrance hit him first. He had the windows in his Jeep rolled down and, as the road increased in elevation, the air turned cooler and became infused with snow runoff blended into mountain streams and the bouquet of lodgepole pine forests to form the unique perfume that his unconscious associated with his first summer there. He was looking down for a station on the radio when he felt the jolt, as if a switch was flipped in his brain, and when he turned his face back to the road, the windshield was suddenly and magically filled with the panorama of the majestic purple, snow-tipped peaks of the mountain range that symbolized all that had been true and pure in his life. All that was lost and would never ever return. The image struck him like a bullet in his chest, sucking all the air from his body. The next thing he knew, he was out of his car, on the side of the road, on his knees, gasping for air, heaving, sobbing. “Oh, Sara. My sweet, sweet, Sara.”

***

Author Bio:

After a career working in an international consulting firm and as a financial executive with two public companies, Dennis D. Wilson returns to the roots he established as a high school literature and writing teacher at the beginning of his career. For his debut novel, he draws upon his experiences from his hometown of Chicago, his years living, working, hiking and climbing in Jackson Hole, and secrets gleaned from time spent in corporate boardrooms to craft a political crime thriller straight from today’s headlines. Dennis lives in suburban Chicago with his wife Paula and Black Lab Jenny, but spends as much time as he can looking for adventure in the mountains and riding his motorcycle.

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