#the two prequel volumes just came in today

[kuuchuuburanko]

can't believe im in my litchi hikari club revival era

[boarishcurse]

Children Of Strange Magic

A Sleepybois Family Fic unrelated to the DreamSMP, also known as “the boarish curse AU”

(For the sake of clarity, Techno and Wilbur are referred to as such even before they change their names.)

PREQUEL

      “There was no need for such an act of violence!” The High Cleric spat, waver of fear in his voice overpowered by condemnation. The figure that stood before him simply stared with ice-cold eyes and shrugged. “It was in the way, and I needed the resources.” The High Cleric looked at his surroundings, the once-thriving village decimated, townsfolk fleeing and falling to the monsters of the night with their guardian no longer there to protect them. The High Cleric knew that within all the surrounding lands, he alone possessed enough magic to face off against this figure of destruction, knowing now that the large black wings were not those of an angel but rather the heralding of murder the way crows circled doomed bodies. He also knew it was futile to fight, that no one here he could save. But he would not let this injustice go unrepented.

      Summoning every last ounce of magic within his body, draining his lifeforce of it to be sure it was enough, the High Cleric spoke in an ancient, forgotten language, the remnants of which only could be seen now etched into the blades of powerful swords and armor. His words drew purple in the air, swirling around him. It was all he had. “Your boarish nature shall have its price upon you! A curse upon thee! Your children will bear your sins for all the world to see, and your lineage shall never know peace from the actions you have shown here today!” The words stopped swirling around the High Cleric and surrounded the figure, sinking into his skin and burrowing deep into his blood. And with that, the High Cleric had no more magic within him. “Right, that’s enough out of you,” The figure said, seeming no more than irritated despite all the cleric had done. A blade came down, and then all that was left of the village was blood staining the earth.

PART ONE

[Under the cut]

      “Boarish nature, fucking--” Philza muttered to himself under his breath as he anxiously went about his morning routine, far more distressed than one would expect for the activity he was attempting-- which was the simple act of making two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In all honesty, he had forgotten about the curse. The High Cleric that had cursed him-- that he’d killed-- had been dead for so many generations, and society and technology had progressed and advanced so far, that even after remembering about it he didn’t think the magic would still be viable. Apparently, magic didn’t work like that. At first, Philza hadn’t been sure, but even now that he was, he didn’t know how to bring it up. He didn’t know how to tell them. But he was going to have to eventually. Which worried him, because--

      “Daaaaaaaaaddd!” A distressed voice called from the bathroom, as if on cue, and Philza sighed, setting down the half a sandwich he’d managed to make in all his time worrying. “Coming, I’m coming!” He shouted back, but apparently not fast enough because he was called again at an ear-splitting volume this time. “DAAAAAAAD!” Philza burst through the bathroom door, half-breathless, half-exasperated. “What? What is it? What’s wrong?” 

      Wilbur was staring into the mirror, anxiously poking at his teeth with his finger, mainly his lower incisors. “They’re bigger than yesterday,” He pouted. And sharper, Phil noted, but he certainly wasn’t going to say as much. He stared at Wilbur in bewilderment. “That’s it? That’s what the big ruckus was about?” Wilbur looked insistently towards Phil. “There’s something wrong with them, Dad, I can feel it.” Phil sighed. “It’s just-- it’s just your adult teeth still growing in, we’ve talked about this,” he lied. Phil looked towards Technoblade, the twin distinguishable only by his haircut and the look of pure exhaustion on his face. “What about you, Techno, you alright?”

      “I was until I had my eardrums shattered,” Techno complained. Phil looked carefully at his mouth when he spoke, noting that Techno, too, had longer and sharper lower incisors than he ought to. Wilbur instantly turned on his brother. “Are not! They’re big on you too!” Techno looked at Phil, who just put his hands up helplessly. Techno sighed in frustration. “Wilbur, please. It’s too early for this. I could be growing a tail and I wouldn’t care right now.” Wilbur’s eyes went wide and Phil sighed-- having lost track of how many times he’d done that already this morning-- knowing where this was going now. “Techno, leave, I have to check something.” Techno just shot him a look. “You leave, I’m trying to get ready for school!”

      Phil straightened up and got himself steadied, pushing aside his and their worries about strange teeth. “Right. Unless it’s an actual emergency, don’t call for me unless you don’t want sandwiches today and only want bread. For god’s sake I haven’t even gotten a full one made.” Techno and Wilbur stopped their bickering to look smugly at Phil. “How long does it take to make a sandwich?” They both asked in unison, and Phil rolled his eyes and shut the door.

---

      “When I was very young,” Phil starts, before Technoblade immediately interrupts. “Like our age?” Wilbur needles him in the side with his elbow. “Don’t be stupid, Phil was never our age.” Phil chuckles softly, and looks at Wil. “That’s true,” He says simply, for lack of a better explanation. He continues again. “When I was very young, I did something very cruel.” He pauses for a moment. “What’d you do?” Wilbur is the one who interrupts this time. “It doesn’t matter anymore. But what does matter is that I was cursed for my ‘boarish behavior’.” Wilbur’s eyes widen, while Technoblade nods sagely. “Boarish behavior. I get it.” Wilbur hisses under his breath “I knew it!” in reference to his teeth.

      Phil nodded, the boys smart enough to make the connection on their own. They could be rowdy and chaotic, but they were both clever, and they took in the information quite well. They sat waiting with curious and concerned eyes, waiting patiently now for Phil to continue talking. “The good news is, I talked with a cleric about it. I had to search for a while to find one who knew what he was talking about, but when I did, he was quite helpful. He thinks there’s a way to slow it fairly indefinitely, but that part’s up to you boys mostly. I know it’s late, so we can talk specifics tomorrow-- nothing is going to happen overnight. I promise.”

      He’s so proud of his boys. They take the news so well, nodding and being rational, even though Wil is a little pouty. “It’s not fair that you were mean so we got cursed.” Phil nods in agreement and sighs. “That’s true, but unfortunately that’s how they did stuff back then. Curses worked through bloodlines. It was so long ago I didn’t think the magic was still there,” He admitted, hoping desperately his boys will forgive him. “We forgive you,” Techno says, almost immediately, after sharing a glance with Wilbur. “People change-- it’s not your fault that the loser who cursed you didn’t know that.” Phil flushes a little. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that-- but he’ll take what he can get. They didn’t know the specifics, anyway.

      “So the good news is that there’s a way to slow it or halt it for potentially forever, but there is other news,” Phil says, and the boys stiffen and brace themselves. He waits until they’re fully braced. “Right. So. Firstly, you’re going to have to pick a new name for yourselves.” He is met with confusion. Understandable. “I have to show you something.” He takes his kimono off, revealing the undergarment that he wears during the day. “This,” He says, pointing to it, “Is a garment made of silk and magic. It functions similar to an enderchest.” He unfastens the front, shuffling out of it the way he always does-- and the room is covered nearly wall to wall by his dark wingspan.

      Phil smirks to himself at the looks on Techno and Wilbur’s faces. They’re speechless, in awe, to think this could be their dad. “You’re an angel,” Wilbur gasps, and Phil smiles again. “Not quite.” He won’t be elaborating any time soon. “I’m trusting you boys with this information,” Phil says sternly, and they both nod with wide eyes and the pure feelings of wonder that few but children experience. “But I am not fully human. And,” He sighs, wings unfolding and resting comfortably against his back, “Unfortunately, neither are you two anymore.”

      “This means,” He says sharply, holding up a finger to silence the open mouth that meant Wilbur was preparing to interrupt again, “That we’re going to have to move to an area that’s friendlier with non-humans. So tonight, we’re going to learn a bit about the culture-- starting with True Names.” Well, his boys were nothing if not eager to learn about different cultures, he’d admit that. They were able to focus on their intense curiosity, leaning forward as Phil crouched back down to explain.

      “Right. So non-humans-- called whatever their species name is, or ‘hybrids’ if they’re part human part something else-- are often a little more connected with magic than most. They try not to teach magic in human-centric schools, because it can be very dangerous, and different types of magic are specific to different non-human beliefs. You following?” Wilbur has a question on his lips, but he holds it, and instead they both nod eagerly. 

      “Most magic, though, derives from the concept of a True Name. That’s always the name that’s given by a loved one, usually your parent. There are a few exceptions, but this is by and large the case. See, knowing a True Name means you can cast stronger magic on that person, like a blessing-- but also like a curse.” He pauses. Lets the information sink in. They had a long day at school already, and this is a lot-- but they soak up the information with glee, and Phil is eternally grateful. This could have gone so much worse. He’s sure it will be at some point, but for now, he can explain as much as he needs to keep them safe.

      “So non-humans never tell others their True Names. Especially other non-humans. Unless they’re someone you love with your whole heart, and you’re certain they feel the same. That’s why you need new names-- if we’re going to a place that’s friendlier with non-humans, you’re going to need a name that isn’t your True Name. So it’s basically just going by a nickname. You can think on it though, yeah?”

      To Phil’s surprise, neither of them do. “I’m going to be Technoblade,” Technoblade says instantly, “Because I saw it once and it sounds cool.” Phil nods, a little confused but remembering that his boys are only eight after all. “You can always change it later,” He says, more as an affirmation to himself than anyone else. Maybe it’ll grow on him. “I can just be Wilbur,” Wil says, “Like Wilboar. Because it’s almost my name, but it’s not really-- and I’ll still be me even if I’m not human.” He says it almost confidently, but there’s a pleading look in his eyes. It’s a question. Phil gently puts his hand on Wilbur’s shoulder and ruffles his hair. “Aw, don’t worry mate,” He says sympathetically, “Magic can’t change who you are inside unless you want it to, unless you let it. You’ll be fine. You’ll still be my son.” He looks to Technoblade. “You too. Nothing you do will change that. I promise. The both of you.” 

      Now he can accept questions, and the two can sense it, clearly bursting with them and ready to learn. He’ll answer a few as best as he can before the two have to sleep. “Are you gonna have to change your name?” Technoblade asks, and it’s a surprisingly clever question. “Nope. Unfortunately, I was around before last names existed. This is the only name I’ve ever had.” He wonders if any of that affected the curse. Did it even matter, now that it was in motion and the caster long dead? Hmm. “How old are you?!?” Wilbur asks, bewildered at that answer. Phil cackles. “I’ll never tell,” He says teasingly. 

      Sensing that was about it for the night, Phil gets up and the boys follow suit-- he’s ready to cart them to bed if necessary, but they seem more than ready to sleep-- or at least whisper between themselves conspiring and wondering. In the hallway, the two pause. Technoblade and Wilbur do the twin thing, and look at eachother, before gently (for siblings at least) poking and prodding the other in an effort to not be the one to ask, before they come to a conclusion. “What about Hazel?” Wilbur asks, and Phil’s heart hurts a little bit. They have a good point. 

      “Hazel is coming with us,” Phil starts, and finds it a bit amusing when both of them relax a little. Did they think they were just going to leave him behind? “He’s your sibling after all. And he’ll likely be affected by the same curse, just not ‘til he’s about your age. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, and I imagine you two will be a lot more grown-up by then.” They both nod in relief, before silently bickering again and Technoblade speaks this time. “So do we get tomorrow off?” He asks, and Phil cackles so loud he wakes Hazel up on accident. “Yes, fine--” The boys high-five-- “But don’t expect to spend the whole day lounging around. We’ll have stuff to do.” 

      “That’s fine!” They shout, racing into their room, and Phil would tell them off for potentially waking Hazel if he hadn’t just done so a few seconds ago. “Go to bed!” He calls sternly but lovingly instead, and goes in to check on Hazel. He hushes the child, cooing and not bothering at this point to hide his wings. Hazel will grow up knowing. Wilbur and Technoblade will always have that shared moment of discovery. Each its own blessing and curse. The new world was so strange. So many different ways to navigate it, and none at all like how it used to be. That was okay, though. Change was a part of everything. Change was a part of the seasons, a part of cultures and species, a part of curses and blessings, and something his boys would do as they grew up. He looked at his sleeping son, and thought about his other two sons as well, even if chances were slim they were sleeping just yet. The world was so worth living in.

[idontblushsrry]

Love Language|| Jujutsu Kaisen

“I wanna be fluent in your love language. Learning your love language.” 

A/N: If you didn’t guess from the tagline this is inspired by the song love language by Kehlani. I’ll probably do more of these with different shows and what not because why not. If I missed anyone lmk and I can make a part 2. Also please tag spoilers appropriately esp for manga readers, that being said spoilers for the prequel? manga on Yuuta’s part.

Characters: Itadori, Fushiguro, Kugisaki, Maki, Inumaki, Okkotsu, Gojo, Nanami, Sukuna

Warnings: said it b4 but spoiler warnings in general but esp on Yuuji, Yuuta, and Maki’s parts

Plot synopsis: The 5 love languages; physical affection, quality time, words of affirmation, gift giving and acts of service, and how each jujutsu kaisen character shows their love and affection for you. Ft. a gender neutral reader!

Word count: 2352

Itadori Yuuji

Love Language: Quality time and physical affection

Ok listen-

So for physical affection, Yuuji’s just that kind of person

He is all about giving to you

He’s holding hands with you if you’re ever walking anywhere, and if you’re not a hand holder pls pls pls let him hold your pinky he likes the reassurance

No but seriously he loves to hold you like yall could be walking in completely opposite directions and he’ll try to find some way to hold onto you until the very last second

And even then he’s all ‘:( babe imy’

‘Yuuji we just talked 2 minutes ago’

Another way he shows his love is through quality time

I think for him this is the biggest thing overall, esp as a jujutsu sorcerer bcus you never know yk but also because you’re important to him

Like remember how he literally went to occult club so that he could get out of school in time to go visit his grandpa...ye :(

He also loves finding dumb touristy things to do with you while in Tokyo or anywhere yall go together on a mission 

If you get together before he died and came back then that time he had to spend away from you literally killed him

Like my mans was goin THROUGH it

He almost considered spoiling Gojo’s secret

When he sees you again, he’s not gonna let go for like a solid day

Fushiguro Megumi

Love Language: acts of service and words of affirmation

This boy loves you so much

He loves to tell you all the things he loves about you when you’re alone

But he’s a little awkward with his words sometimes, hence where acts of service come in

He’ll immediately offer to hold your things, run to help you train or study, and if you’re cold? He’s fully prepared to never see his jacket again

Also he can’t cook but he’s fully prepared to suffer hearing Sukuna and suffering through Yuuji’s antics if it means he can learn how to make your favorite food

He also will surprise you by making you a playlist of all the songs that you’ve had stuck in your head and sends it to you randomly out of the blue one day like ‘thought you might like this’

However the best of both worlds is when he leaves you little notes throughout the day or sends you texts asking if you need anything or just encouraging you to keep going 

Negl he’s lowkey the president of the Y/N support club bcus-

You need anything? It’s yours

Cravings? Sad? Angry? What do you need bby, I’ve got it for you

Also he’s totally the type to be like you need help fuckin this person up? 

Also before yall started dating, Fushiguro was a mess

He was constantly asking to spar with you and go on missions, basically anything he could do to be near you  

End of the day, Fushiguro loves you and makes sure you know it whether it’s through his actions or his words

Kugisaki Nobara

Love Language: physical affection

So, she’s not the best with words, she tries but like someone help her bcus she is LOST

Like when she had a crush on you she was like “c’mere dumbass i wanna give you a hug”

In fact, she still is like “c’mere” but now you are dating :)

She loves you though and at first she doesn’t really know how to show it 

But one day you both come home from training and you just look at each other like ‘yeah today sucks’ and yall both just held each other for the rest of the day 

After that, she decided that she wants to do that with you but like always

She’s holding your hand, kissing your cheek when you go shopping, etc. etc.

She really loves to cling to you because she always has this fear that maybe one day you’ll get killed or just disappear so she figures might as well hold onto you for as long as we’ve got

After missions, she’s running up to you and if you aren’t prepared for the tackle, you’re probably gonna fall

On dates too, like if you guys have to meet up for a date, she’s tackling you

On the subject of dates...

She doesn’t mind PDA, and while she might hold your hand or arm so that you don’t get separated

She also doesn’t mind wiping food off your face and eating it, only to then kiss the spot on your face the food was previously at

She will split her shopping load between the two of you, however she will be slightly pouty if she’s carrying more than you (she then cheers up when she realizes she can do more shopping to “balance” the two of you)

In private she’s very cuddly and kissy which honestly isn’t that bad until it gets hot

At which point she’ll just say turn on the ac or convince you to walk around in a tank top (or something like it) so that she can continue holding you

Tbh she prefers the big spoon, but if she’s ever upset you let her be the little spoon >:(

All in all a very loving girlfriend who tries her best to show how much she loves you by glomping you at any given moment. 

Zenin Maki

Love language: acts of service and quality time

So you’re telling me that Maki wouldn’t immediately go out of her way to make sure her and her s/o can spend as much time together as possible?????

Like she’s super observant (which can cause her to be a bit harsh, see Yuuta) but she can always tell what’s bothering you

So if you’re upset that you haven’t been spending enough time together due to her being out on missions or otherwise busy she’s immediately running to finish her stuff and spend time with you.

((She’s very sorry, but on the bright side she brought your favorites!))

Maki is also an acts of service type

This mostly ties in with her kind of direct action way of thinking

She thinks she’s slick but you can always see her sneaking around to do small things like grabbing your laundry for you and folding it

She’s very much like if you love someone, you gotta prove it

Overall, dates with her are very intimate and personal to the two of you

Like she’ll take you to a frog pond you landed in during a fight once

Or you’ll take her to a street fair that serves this exclusive food that Maki mentioned wanting to try 

However, Maki shows her love through quality time and acts of service and while she does receive love from these to a degree, she is very much a words of affirmation gal

She’s not insecure in her day to day life but she has her moments, everyone does

Sometimes, she’ll feel like shit and a failure and all she wants is for you to say that she’s doing amazing and that she’s a great girlfriend.

Inumaki Toge

Love language: Physical affection

Because of his curse, he can’t exactly express how he feels about you through words

He does text you frequently throughout the day (I’ll have to do a hc abt that someday)

But he’d prefer not to be on his phone to communicate if you’re right in front of him

So he does the next best thing and just smothers you in physical affection

He loves kissing you the most

Like he could spend hours just kissing you if you let him (please let him)

But in public, he gets if you’re not a big fan of pda he’s willing to tone it down as long as he gets kisses later in private

He’d still prefer it if you held his hand or linked pinkies maintaining touch in some way

Also, unrelated, but it means so much to him if you try to understand his sushi language

He knows realistically the foundation of any relationship is communication so already he’s at a disadvantage because of his curse 

But if he sees you like take notes after he says something or start to need him to text you to translate, his heart is swelling

Like ‘omg this person loves me enough to learn a whole new language <333′

Another tangent but before you were together he was struggling so muchhhh

Like how does one express their feelings for someone without words?

If you’re Inumaki, you buy some flowers and text said person to meet you at a cafe

It took an embarrassingly long time for you to realize it was a date, but once you did, you ever so gently linked pinkies with Toge

Okkotsu Yuuta

Love language: words. of. affirmation. 

He’s literally so sensitive please tell him you love him regularly

In return he’ll be sure to tell you how much he loves you too

He knows that he can’t really be there for you as much as he’d like but he likes to let you know that he’s thinking of you

Doesn’t matter the time, if you call, he’s answering

If he doesn’t he’ll cry he’ll immediately call you back and is apologizing for missing your call

You assure him it’s no big deal but the man has his volume turned all the way up and changed your ringtone to one specific for you by the time you’ve even said hey

Aside from that, he really is sensitive

He’s been through a lot especially with Rika as well as growing up alone and bullied 

So for him, it’s everything to hear that you like having him around and don’t think he’s too much or anything like that

Of course, he gets better with time, trusting you and having the confidence in himself to not need constant assurance

That being said, if you ever just whisper in his ear, “I love you, Yuuta.”

That’s not your boyfriend, that’s a puddle of love on the floor

(Maki, Panda, and Inumaki had a field day when they saw him, Fushiguro now questions if Yuuta really is a respectable 2nd year.)

Gojo Satoru

Love language: gift giving and quality time

So Gojo doesn’t exactly get to spend a ton of time

Between missions, him beefing with higher ups, and you and him playing parent the baby sorcerers yall don’t exactly get time to go out much

In which case Gojo tends to default to two options:

He’ll either go the extra mile to try and spend time with you 

Whether that be an at home date where he tries and fails to surprise you with a home cooked meal

Or a date out at a restaurant or cafe (which you tend to visit after his home cooking efforts)

OR he’ll bring you various souvenirs from his missions

He loves to spoil you, and if he could he’d probably bring you back a whole store’s worth of stuff

But alas, airport security regulations

Anyways, he loves to spoil you especially if he can spoil you with sweets because it benefits him in two ways 

He treasures all the time you spend together, and he does try to overcompensate for his absence with gifts

Despite your assurances, it’s kind of a guilty pleasure at this point (just let him, trying to argue just goads him on further)

He doesn’t only buy you small things, he enjoys buying you outfits

And he especially likes seeing you in them 

Kento Nanami

Love Language: acts of service

Y’all remember the episode where he killed that curse that was bothering that baker lady?? Yea that

He’s literally such an acts of service boyfriend it’s not even funny

Before you got together, he would memorize your coffee order and bring you a cup pretty much everyday like clockwork

Now that you’re togehter, he wakes up before you so h=that when you wake up there’s the smell of coffee throughout the house

When you come out of you’re shared bedroom and he’s just scrooling through his phone like “mornin’”

Of course you already made the bed and ironed his clothes because relationships are give and take

And then when you leave for your jobs in the morning, he kisses you and holds the door open for you

He’ll draw a bath for you if he gets home before you, if you let him join or not is up to you

Also, if you ever get sick, he���s actually the best

Like he isn’t the best cook but he can heat up soup and tea

He’ll run to the store while you’re asleep and when you wake up, there’s like a whole tray of food in front of you and he’s like ‘it’s important to eat and drink so your body can heal’

And when you inevitably fall asleep after eating and taking medicine at his insistence, he tucks you in and clears away the dishes, exiting with little more than a kiss to your head

Ryoumen Sukuna

Love Language: gift giving and acts of service

So like Sukuna never says he loves you...ever

But he does notice if someone or something’s making you uncomfortable, and if so, said entity’s head will be presented to you later that day

You also just so happen to be the only person he can tolerate being around him for longer than 20 seconds

He also loves to give you jewelry, he likes seeing you adorned in something from him

He also isn’t gonna just handle all your problems for you, he will push you to become stronger by training with you 

He’ll also expect this energy to be reciprocated, as long as you’re pushing yourself to be better, he’s content with that

(He wants to see you grow because he’s scared that if he ever gets caught lackin one day you’ll end up dead)

He’ll never tell you or admit it, but Sukuna truly does care for you and hold you in a regard that he doesn’t have for others

So be grateful jkjk

[kyber-queen]

Someone New (Rex x Jedi!reader)

Summary: This is a lil prequel for the Like Real People Do universe, but it can be read as a stand-alone!! Shiny!Rex is completing additional training under Jedi!reader and he’s painfully in love, big brother Cody gives advice (Codywan if you squint), some mutual pining and confessions!! 

Rating: Teen

Word Count: 2.1k

Warnings: Mentions of blood, mentions of blasters, awkward Rex, kithes

Author’s Note: I wanted to write something happy for this series since its ending brought me so much pain. This is an elaboration of one of the memories Rex brings up in Pt. 4 -- I hope you all enjoy!! Also-- shebs means one’s backside in Mando’a if you were not aware :D

***

Shots fired off in quick succession to your left, the sheer volume of the mock battle around you rattling your brain. You were holed up behind a barricade next to Rex—the other troopers you were running the simulation with had scattered themselves behind various other blockades. Their helmets were turned expectantly towards you. You glanced over your shoulder at Rex, his visor trained on your face as he waited for your command. He’d been specifically selected to complete additional tactical training, and he had proven himself to be a fast learner and a skilled tactician. He had quickly assumed the position of your right-hand man, pointing out possible troop formations that even you might have missed. Your reliance on him during training quickly extended beyond the battlefield arena—you considered him a friend, and a good one at that. You cared about him, sometimes more than you knew a Jedi should.

“Sir, we’re bogged down from the front, and they’re looking to circle around from behind. Where do you want us?”

You acknowledged Rex with a tilt of your head, scanning the battlefield and eyeing the heavy artillery cannons protected by a row of battle droids—if you could dismantle the cannons, your troops could make a final push to the citadel under lighter fire.

“Cover me—I’m going to take out the artillery,” Rex nodded as you turned to address the rest of the men.

“Stand your ground—pick off the battle droids until we can take out the cannons,” you called.

Assuring that everyone had heard your orders, you leapt up from behind the barricade and started off towards the artillery cannons with a sprint. You made it maybe ten paces before the ground in front of you erupted with a bang.

Your vision flashed and your ears rang, and your body sailed through the air until you felt something solid collide against your back. Hands came to steady your waist, and an all-too-familiar voice sounded from behind you.

“You alright, sir?”

Rex. You absorbed the feeling of his strong hands gripping your waist, looking over your shoulder to see his masked gaze focused on your face. You shook off the momentary stun.

“I’m fine—focus on the cannons,” you shouted.

“Roger that,” he called.

Rex flexed his fingers, the sensation of your waist underneath his fingertips lingering far longer than it should have. He gulped. He trusted you—far more than the average trust built between a trooper and their commanding officer. You had singled him out on the first day he was stationed with you, mentioning that the Marshal Commander had issued a glowing report of his promise as a tactician. Since then, you and Rex had become near inseparable. Somewhere in between the late nights spent developing complex battle strategies and running over military codes, Rex found you invading more and more of his thoughts. It grew beyond just friendly trust—it’s like you put some Jedi curse on him. Your face plagued him during mess, while he was sleeping, in the kriffing refresher—every kind smile and friendly touch played over in his head tenfold. He knew the butterflies in his stomach were traitorous, but when you said his name with that sweet smile on your lips, every rule and regulation went out the window.

“Rex, blast it!” You gestured your saber at an approaching battle droid, still charging ahead to the cannons.

Rex shook himself from his ruminations, silently berating himself for his distraction as he fired at the droid. He was well and truly fucked.

***

“You did well today,” you smiled, bumping your shoulder against Rex’s pauldron. “Keep that up and you’ll be an ARC in no time,”.

Rex preened at your praise, punching in the code to enter the locker room with a grin. The door slid open with a clank.

“Keep an eye on those detonators, by the way,” he teased. “Almost had to scrape you off the duracrete,”.

You rolled your eyes as he followed you into the locker room.

You made a beeline to the sink, splashing water onto your face, which was still flushed with exertion from the training simulation. The locker room buzzed with excitement at a battle well-won. You glanced up from your reflection in the mirror, watching as a few straggling troopers stripped off their armor before heading to the refresher. You turned back to the sink, scrubbing your face and neck clean.

When you next looked up from the sink, your gaze was returned by a certain bleach-blond trooper.

His towel was slung low over his hips, and your eyes widened as you traced a bead of water from his temple all the way down to his chest. You followed it across his abdomen, watching as the water droplet slipped underneath the towel. Your cheeks flushed. Rex was your friend. Every single thought racing through your mind at that moment crossed every line drawn by your friendship, not to mention the regulations specified for the clones and the creed of the Jedi order. You were ashamed to admit to yourself that this wasn’t the first time you had considered him in that way, either. The crease in his brow when he focused, his gentle smile when the two of you organized a successful strategy, his voice low in your ear as he leaned over your shoulder to point out a stray troop formation you had missed—he drew you in, no matter how much you resisted. On the day you met him, his force signature reached out to yours. Since then, neither meditation nor mindfulness was enough to keep him out of your head. It was just your luck that you were certain he would never feel the same.

Your eyes flashed back up to Rex’s reflection in the mirror. You both looked away.

Rex was trained to be observant—he didn’t miss the way your eyes traced his body. Your gaze was electrifying. You were a Jedi. You had enchanted him within the first week of training, and now, Rex was certain he’d do just about anything you’d ask. You had no business falling for a shiny, yet the fire behind your eyes gave Rex hope. You treated him like a person, not an expendable soldier. With every evening you spent at his side reading tactical manuals and discussing new techniques, he found himself becoming more and more entangled with you.

***

“Cody—can we talk?”

Cody looked up from his paperwork, shuffling a large stack into place.

“What do you need, Rex?”

Rex entered the room fully, shuffling over to the desk and leaning rather awkwardly against it. Cody noted Rex’s strained expression with a deep sigh.

“It’s not the Jedi, is it?”

Rex nodded apologetically.

Cody took a deep breath, drumming his fingertips across the other side of the desk.

“You know their code, right? No attachments?”

Rex nodded again.

“Rex—vod’ika—almost every trooper I know has had a crush on a Jedi. It works out maybe one out of 100,000 times, if at all,”.

Rex’s brow furrowed.

“I know, Cody, I just—”

He trailed off. Cody shook his head with a sigh, meeting Rex’s eyes with a sad look on his face. Cody knew the second Rex had mentioned his additional training sessions with the pretty Jedi knight that nothing good could come of it. It was dangerous for Rex and the Jedi, both—Cody knew firsthand. Still, Rex was his brother, and Cody would help him where he could.

“Alright, here. Use Mando’a—natborns’ll go wild for it. And remember, you’re a man of action. A soldier. If you think they care about you the way you care about them, do something before they lose interest,”.

Rex nodded, listening intently. His head tilted in curiosity.

“Does that work for you?”

Cody smiled softly.

“Almost always,”. The smile disappeared. “And Rex?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t do anything stupid. It’s been a while since I’ve heard about a brother being reconditioned, but—” He trailed off, looking intently at Rex, before placing a strong hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Just—be careful,”.

Rex nodded, uttering a quiet ‘thank you’ before walking back out the door.

***

You leaned against the wall of the locker room, drumming your fingertips absentmindedly. You waited patiently for the troopers to clear out of the refresher so you could take a shower with some semblance of privacy. Almost all the clones had left for the barracks—except for Rex. He had lingered around the locker room today, for whatever reason. He’d been off recently, you had noticed. More skittish, less talkative. At least he wasn’t darting off to the barracks without a second glance, today. He emerged from the ‘fresher stall in the bottom half of his blacks, a towel tossed over his broad shoulders. You watched his back tense up as he reached for his blacks top in his locker.

Rex’s gaze met yours for a split second as he pulled his shirt over his head—his face was flushed bright red. You were perplexed. Rex was your closest real friend on base, and he had been acting downright strange the past few days. Did you offend him in some way? Had you managed to screw up your friendship without even saying a word? At your training session today, he had just about choked on his tongue when you got him pinned while sparring.

“Rex, you alright?”

The trooper met your gaze with a hushed breath of air that might have been a chuckle were he not so damn nervous. Cody told him to do something, right? He needed to make a move.

Rex closed the gap between the two of you with three quick strides, reaching a calloused hand up to cup your face.

“Cyare,”. His voice was hushed, almost reverent. Butterflies erupted in your stomach.

You opened your mouth slightly, but before you could respond, his lips crashed into yours. His teeth caught painfully at your bottom lip, and you jolted away with a gasp of surprise and pain.

He had kissed you.

You brought two tentative fingers to your mouth, pulling them away to reveal a tiny drop of blood. Your hand dropped to your side.

You met Rex’s eyes—it seemed as if all the color had disappeared from his face.

Rex knew he had fucked up. You were staring at him, silently, with an entirely unreadable expression across your face. This was it, he was going to get reconditioned. Cody’s words echoed through his mind. Don’t do anything stupid. And what did he do? He kissed his Jedi commanding officer, and not only that, he busted their lip open. Cody could tell him he told him so while hauling his defective shebs all the way back to Kamino.

“I-I’m sorry,”. Rex’s voice was barely a whisper.

You heard the tremor in his voice. Your heart ached, and the concern melted from your brow. Cyare—that meant beloved in Mando’a, you thought. He cared for you, too. You reached up to Rex’s face, curling your fingers around his jaw. You pulled him down to your height and into a kiss far gentler than the one before. Your lips slid softly against his, reveling in the warmth of his mouth on yours. His hands circled your waist lightly as he continued to press those soft, gentle kisses against your lips. He certainly was a quick learner. You felt his contented sigh against your cheek as you traced his jaw with your thumb. You could get drunk on kissing him. You pulled away slowly, Rex’s lips chasing yours as he stole just one more kiss from your smiling mouth.

His hands lingered on your waist, so light that you could barely feel them touching you. You rested your forehead against his. His force signature was warm and bright—more so than you had ever felt before. Rex’s unsteady voice broke the silence.

“I wanted you to know,”.

You hummed in response, your hands cupping his face as he melted into your touch.

“I care about you too, Rex,”.

His hands strengthened in their grip around your waist as he held you closer to him.

“So, what happens now?”

you searched his eyes, and warmth blossomed in your chest. All you knew was that you cared about him, and that was enough. You’d have to be careful, you noted. Pursuing this was going to be dangerous, for the both of you, and possibly painful. Your future was clouded—the force offered neither judgement nor advice.

Your thumb coasted over the apple of his cheek, and Rex let his eyes flutter closed for just a moment at the gentleness of your touch. When you next spoke, your voice was soft and hopeful.

“We’ll figure it out as we go,”.

***

Like Real People Do Taglist: @pinkiemme @callme-eds @porgnugget @obi-robi-kenobi

[stilemawillow]

Romantic? More Like NO [Levi | Reader]

Prequel: Fairy Tale NOT Like

"Levi, I really am irritated right now." Hearing her voice from the female showers made him just as irritated because she might’ve been pretty but she had no tact and it was too early for him to get another headache.

"As if I don't fucking know that already. I'm irritated, too." He was leaning on the wall next to the door and leaning slightly to the side would expose her whole body to his eyes but it was a thing he - one, shouldn’t do and two, wasn’t interested in doing. He’d be lucky if Mikasa Ackerman didn’t show up for her early shower because if he were to be seen waiting on a grown-ass unknown woman by the door, he’d quickly go from Humanity’s Strongest Soldier to Humanity’s Biggest Pervert.

"You're not the one having to play a ninja around an army's headquarters." She snapped from the inside.

"Yes, but I'm the one who has to play the stupid ninja’s bodyguard around the headquarters of the army I'm supposed to be second-in-command in." He hissed in return, listening to the slowly decreasing sound of water hitting the floor.

"Just tell me one thing." The warmth was first, then he turned his head and the tip of his nose almost bumped into hers. Pupils dilating in surprise, his orbs followed the droplets rolling over her skin but his corssed arms stood ridig as if glued to his chest. "What am I going to wear now?" Her sweet voice was laced with fake innocence but her lips wore a small smirk. He snorted but kept quiet. "You're not going to give me any of your clothes, are you now?"

The situation was so messed up right now.

After he’d brought her the coffee, Levi had hastened to point out her stink and immediately after force her into the showers, dismissing her concerns on what she’d wear afterwards by telling her he had a plan. He, in actual fact, had not even an inkling of a plan. Every option he could think of was either humiliating, incriminating or straight-up perverted.

If he gave her his clothes and they were seen together, there would be assumptions. Her dress was already with the piles of laundry that would be washed today, stealing somebody else’s clothes was plain ridiculous, asking another female cadet for an outfit would lead to even more assumptions and making her sneak around the HQ in nothing but a towel was a scene out of a book Hanji would write. He considered finding clothes for her on his own but leaving her alone was too risky. And since the showers would start filling up soon, he had no choice but to take her with him.

"You're going to wear something. Follow me and be quiet." He ordered, heading down the hallway and looking around every time a sound erupted from a room. It could’ve been a snore, the shuffle of clothes or a blanket - it didn’t matter because Levi was paranoid. Then his heel made an unstable plank creak in the silent space and he mentally shat himself.

He was supposed to be a soldier, a former thug, flexibe and agile, and strong, but no--- he couldn’t even walk without making the floor creak like it would break. He held back a groan and resumed walking only to feel something pulling him back by the wrist. (Y/N)’s determined expression faced him the moment he turned back. He awaited her words with a thinning patience. They were making progress and she just had to stop him for God knows what.

"You do know that even if people see us together they wouldn't speak, right?" Her question - naive, stupid and anything but reasonable, made him want to facepalm against the wall.

"And how does that help us?” He frowned. They were so close to the staircase. Why did she have to stop and ask stupid questions?

"All I'm saying is you can make anybody who sees us keep their mouth shut.” She reasoned, making his brow twitch in annoyance. His voice, however, managed to stay quiet.

"It's not that easy."

"Because they’d talk about it behind your back?"

"This isn't even a---" His voice grew in volume as his patience ran out but his incoming outburst was quickly cut off by a muffled voice coming from behind the door they were standing next to.

"Armin, did you hear that?"

"Fucking shit." Levi cursed under his breath, exchanging a panicked look with (Y/N). That was Jean Kirstein’s voice. His brain went into overdrive  - they couldn’t run up the stairs, couldn’t wait to be caught here either.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the other side of the narrow hallway into the first room he saw, which was seemingly the last one in row. He hastily opened the door, gripping (Y/N) and feeling his heart on its way to burst. He wouldn’t allow to be caught with a half-naked woman by his own squad.

He heard her call his name as the door was shut - she was pressed against the wall, feeling her towel slip. She held her breath and the fabric fell to the floor, except she couldn’t pick it up since one of her hands was captive and the other was the only thing holding her upright and quiet. The raven-haired man was staring at the door but he would look at her sooner or later.

"I think I heard someone." Armin's voice sounded as he exited the room and looked around, three pairs of footsteps following close behind. (Y/N) couldn’t tell Levi not to turn - a whisper could ruin everything. So she’d keep quiet because the raven seeing her naked in the dark was better than them being found.

"Berthold, do you see anyone?" A masculine voice was heard, one that Levi recognised as Reiner Braun's.

"It's too early for this Reiner." Berthold stated quietly, probably trying not to wake the other cadets.

"I bet I heard someone, guys." Jean's voice sounded next and Levi knew he was fucking doomed. Four damn cadets were going to find him in a closet with a half-naked woman - great.

"Maybe the girls were just heading to the shower."

Levi turned around and his eyes widened. He could hear (Y/N) gulp, then he drew a sharp breath and bit back every vocal reaction which came to mind.

"Maybe we can get to see Mikasa today."

Realising that he’d been stopping her from covering herself, the male let go of her wrist and watched her shakily cover her breasts as her free hand began blindly searching for her towel.

"As if. Come on, Jean. If she doesn't kill you, Eren will try."

The cadets’ conversation was white noise to his ears, his eyes couldn’t leave (Y/N)’s body and his ears could only hear his blood rushing around his body at the sight.

"And maybe after that Corporal Levi will end you completely."

He caught the sound of his name but paid no attention to it, fixed on the woman who finally found the towel and attempted to hide herself. Only then did it occur to him his gaze brought her discomfort. He faced the other way quickly, momentarily stunned by his own rudeness.

"Why would the Corporal even care?"

He heard an almost audible sigh come from her lips once she was covered so he turned, watching her hands grip the upper part of the towel as her gaze avoided his eyes at all cost. Her previous confidence was nowhere to be found.

"He is in charge of Eren after all. If Eren ends up getting hurt during the fight, both the Corporal and Mikasa will beat you up. He's obliged to do it, while Mikasa..."

"Is Mikasa."

"Anyways, let's stop talking about this. Do you know the time?"

"We have time before breakfast."

"But the Corporal will punish us if we end up sleeping in."

"I’m with Berthold, let's go for the showers."

"No, we better sleep a little more."

He made a step in her direction, to which she tried to retract and her foot hit something which then dropped to the side with a loud clangour. Fucking bucket. (Y/N) looked at Levi like a deer in headlights and he, despite his stoic persona, related the same panic she did. He cursed under his breath.

"Did you all hear that?" Jean's startled voice reached their ears as they stood motionless as possible in the closet, fearful of doing as much as breathing.

"Is there an intruder?"

"Jean, come on. Who would sneak into the headquarters? They must be crazy or stupid. The Commander would make Corporal kill them or something." Reiner said and (Y/N) eyed Levi.

"Not knowing the Corporal and being stupid are vastly different - one is called being uninformed." Jean argued, much to Reiner’s dismay.

"And the other is called being crazy. Now let's just go to the showers."

(Y/N) was about to stifle a giggle when Levi’s reflexes acted - knowing when something wouldn’t go as planned. His hand covered her mouth and she held in a yelp as her balance was knocked off and her back hit the wall with a thud.

"Okay, I definitely heard that one! Is someone pranking us?" Jean's voice grew in pitch and volume, meaning he was approaching the closet.

"Jean, what’s all the fuss about?" Another voice (Y/N) didn’t recognise joined the conversation, to which she glanced at Levi in confusion, mouth still covered by his cold hand.

"The suicidal bastard was freed from his cell." Jean's mocking remark almost made (Y/N) snort.

"Hanji came to unlock me for showers and breakfast." The other voice responded just when (Y/N) picked up the unmistakable speech of her hyperactive friend. She felt herself tensing alongside Levi.

"Hello, kiddos! What's up?" Hanji greeted, to which Jean had an immediate reply.

"I heard a sound---"

"Jean is being delusional." Reiner cut off, setting the other boy off.

"No, I definitely heard something! Someone is sneaking around!"

"Who do you think is sneaking around the headquarters?" Hanji questioned curiously, clearly doubting the cadet’s accusations.

"I don't know! Probably a cadet who went to town. They do it often." Jean tried to reason with Hanji and the others, but they weren't ready to accept his seemingly delusional point of view yet.

"I know people do that, Jean. I do it to meet up with (Y/N) and the plank in front of Erwin’s office always creaks." The mad scientist complained and Levi made a mental note about Hanji sneaking out. And about the creaky plank. Armin and Eren went on to ask who (Y/N) was, which just prompted Hanji to rant. “An old friend of mine. She's extremely sweet! And such an eye-candy! Levi couldn't get his eyes off her yesterday!"

Levi couldn't get his eyes off her now either, but he wasn't going to let that information become public knowledge. He was sure she’d sensed it too - the sexual tension drowned by the panic and anticipation they felt.

"Corporal couldn't what?" Eren sputtered, almost choking in shock.

"What was Corporal Levi doing with (Y/N) yesterday?" Armin's voice rang, announcing to (Y/N) and Levi the erasure of Hanji’s brain-to-mouth filter.

"Oh, we went to that ball Eren was whining about! It was fun, Levi took (Y/N) as his escort, he had a suit, flowers and everything!" Levi would’ve facepalmed if possible, whereas (Y/N)’s discomfort grew to the point she contemplated giving his handsome face a slap and walking out of the closet. It would ruin only his reputation either way - but that was the problem.

The whole Survey Corps would suffer if their most valuable member was caught breaking the rules. His authority normally prevented people from badmouthing him but even that wouldn’t save him if rumours of him having a lover got out. It was something (Y/N) couldn’t allow - besides being interesting to her, he was also willing to land her a job.

"And what happened then?" The question derailed her train of thought and she was back in the dark closet, painfully pressed against the wall. She tried to change that by moving just a little and that was when the old forgotten bucket came back into play.

"Oh, well, Levi---"

(Y/N) gasped as her mouth was released and her foot slipped on the bucket - then Levi’s fast reflexes saved them a very painful fall by pushing their bodies back against the wall, except it cost them their low profile.

"Okay, that's it! Now everyone heard that one, right?!" Jean's voice echoed as the others shuffled about.

"You weren't lying after all." Hanji’s statement was heard over the shameful admittances of the other cadets confirming they’d finally heard it themselves.

"Is there someone... in that closet?" The words that exited Berthold's mouth made (Y/N)'s eyes fill with fear. Levi’s composure was also slowly starting to leave him.

"You know the only way to understand."

"Rock, paper, scissors - loser opens the door?"

Besides his composure, his self-respect evaporated at his own squad’s stupidity. He felt more humiliated listening to their problem-solving tactics than imagining himself getting caught with a half-naked woman in a closet. A few seconds of silence later, a small sigh left somebody’s lips, to which the duo in the closet exchanged worried glances.

"Armin, go for it." A voice was heard and said blond sighed again before asking:

"Why do I even have to---"

"Just do it." Jean insisted and the others hummed in agreement.

"You won't die."

"On three." Hanji announced.

Armin’s steps approaching the closet were heard. (Y/N) felt her heart was about to burst and Levi could already picture decades of reputation crumbling to the ground. Years of being a cold-hearted ass with a deadpan, years of fear and respect and not an ounce of regret.

"One..."

The woman met his gaze, feeling his fingers twitch in the slighest over her waist. She mouthed a small apology and he shook his head. He wanted to blame her for everything but he couldn’t stoop that low.

"Two..."

Her fingers were digging into his rigid shoulders when he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look.

"... three!"

There was the opening of a door. Nobody was saying anything---

Thud.

Crash!

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

"Shit! That scared me." Jean's voice was just as muffled. Levi slowly opened his eyes to witness the confusion on (Y/N)’s face in the dark.

"It was just a racoon." At Armin’s statement, both their heads whipped back to look at the closed door with wide eyes.

"Mystery solved. At least Jean hasn't gone delusional yet." Hanji mocked cordially, making said boy give an exclamation of indignation. Everybody else was chuckling and (Y/N) and Levi hadn’t begun getting over their shock.

"Now let's go to the showers."

"Okay, okay."

"I'm going to visit Erwin. See you at breakfast, kiddos!" Hanji was off, her footsteps fading up the stairs.

"How did that racoon even get in there?" The boys discussed, voices dropping.

"I don't have an idea..."

Once their footsteps had faded down the hallway, Levi let go of (Y/N), deciding it was safe for them to go out. He dusted himself off and slowly opened the door.

"That was a close call." (Y/N)'s words made him sigh as they slipped back into the empty hallway. He noticed her voice had a sweet ring to it when she was nervous.

"Tell me about it." He snorted and observed the open door of the other closet, right next to their hiding spot.

"I'm sorry about that." Her apology was mumbled in mild shame as he clicked his tongue.

"I raised my voice. Whatever, let's just go." She followed him up the stairs, noting their luck and making him hum along in agreement - it was something he’d never know had made her knees feel like jelly. To her next question of what they would do now, he had an answer at the ready. "I'm bringing you to my office. We dress you up and send you off to town." There was a pause on her end, then a ‘why’ Levi considered rather stupid. "Because you can't stay here."

"Did you forget why you brought me here yesterday?" Her inquiry made him frown but it was just so it wouldn’t betray his ‘oh shit’ face. "Maybe because I had no home at the time?" She pressed further, making him curse as he turned to face her. “You did forget.” Her blunt statement made him snort, rolling his eyes and deciding to play it cool.

"And what of that?" He asked, annoyed and with his arms crossed.

"Well, it intervenes with your plan. And you promised me a job. I can find myself a place to stay but it won’t happen fast, so I’m sorry for being insolent but I’m going to hold you to your word.” Hands on her hips, she was glaring and he avoided looking anywhere but her eyes. She was right and he knew it.

"Let's just go to my office. Discussing this in the middle of the hallway is no good." He commented with a click of his tongue, watching her lips purse as her eyes narrowed. However, she still complied. They passed Erwin’s office, tactfully avoiding the creaky plank and soundlessly slipping in his office. A sigh left his lips as he locked the door.

"Now. You’ll need a plan." (Y/N)'s serious voice helped him shake off the relief he felt. He rolled his eyes, annoyance brimming. He wanted to avoid thinking of a new plan, and the complications that would surely come with it.

"You still need clothes, so we'll find you some. And after that...” He trailed off, making her eyebrow quirk as she waited for his brain to think of the best course of action. “I suppose I’ve got only one choice.” He concluded with a sigh, leaning back against his desk and contemplating. Rumours could spread but it was the only way to keep his word whilst creating the least misunderstandings. “I have to introduce you to everybody.”

"Ready?"

"Never been, never going to be. Let's just do this." Her statement evoked a snort from him as he suppressed the chuckle at the back of his throat. She seemed more nervous than him and it was amusing to say the least. Still, he held out on giving her advice on how to fix it because something told him she wouldn’t manage either way.

The raven-haired male entered the mess hall and she walked at his side; suddenly there were gazes on them, on the baggy clothes she wore that kind of looked to be his size, and whispers slithering round the room. He ignored everything and approached his squad’s table, sitting down and watching before him his usual cup of tea whilst his squad stared at him in bewilderment.

"Uh, Corporal Levi... who is she?" Eren’s hesitant question made Levi glare at the brunet - he was a tad bit anxious but he needn’t admonish his subordinates verbally because of it.

"I'm a friend of Levi's. (Y/N), nice to meet you all." The woman flashed them a smile and voiced a casual introduction before Levi could even begin to speak. He wouldn’t, however, get angry at her, she seemed to be doing well.

"Corporal, I made your tea, it's a bit cold, but---"

"It's fine, Eren." Levi cut him off, taking a sip from mentioned beverage and sighing. So far so good. He briefly glanced at the superiors’ table where he usually sat, finding his Commander’s insistent gaze on him. He wanted to avoid everybody who knew (Y/N) but an encounter was inevitable so he was only stalling even though he was well aware Hanji had already seen them walk in and had probably informed Erwin and Mike of their presence. 

"So, Corporal, how did the ball go yesterday?" Mikasa asked boredly while Eren pouted on her left, disappointed still that he hadn’t been invited. Levi and (Y/N) exchanged an alarmed look but neither gave out their concern. The Corporal looked back at his squad: Jean and Eren were impatient to hear his answer, Mikasa was quiet as per usual, Armin was silently observing, Connie and Sasha were gorging on their food and Ymir and Christa were whispering of other topics.

"Not that it's your business but it was shitty. Eren, you can stop whining about not getting invited, it wasn’t worth it either way." The raven took a sip from his cup, watching the four reactions his words caused. Eren’s face dropped as he dismissed his frustration on the matter, Mikasa visibly became suspicious and Armin’s gaze grew uneasy due to the fact he might’ve already pieced everything together and, finally, (Y/N) snorted with laughter and coughed to cover it up. “What seems to be so funny?” Levi faced her with a scowl.

“That was a complete lie, sir. You almost got drunk, you watched an eating contest and you were hit on multiple times by gorgeous noble ladies. I'm afraid you liked your night out. " (Y/N) explained with a smirk, making Jean and Eren gape as Mikasa and Armin's eyebrows raised to the tops of their foreheads. He glared at (Y/N), noting how she’d omitted to mention herself during the story she told - it was something that ticked him off. And he had no idea why.

"Not like you're one to talk - you did get drunk, you fainted, you danced terribly and about half the males in the hall were undressing you with their eyes." He retorted and she looked at him, visibly surprised, while his subordinates curiously observed their exchange.

"Was that a subtle compliment or just a horrible attempt at an insult?" She asked with a terribly attractive smirk, which wasn't good for his moody insides as of lately. His stomach did loops at random ever since he met her, his heart would sometimes skip a beat and his skin would get irritatingly itchy when she touched him. He couldn’t go on to think normally, an image of her smile always had to interrupt him and it was fucking annoying - this whole thing.

"Neither - it's summing up your night there." He clicked his tongue and watched her smile - exactly the thing he didn’t need after the kind of inner monologue he had.

"Whatever it is, I don't mind it. Although I must thank you for making my night so nice." She added at the end, making his eyes narrow. (Y/N) bit her bottom lip to stop herself from grinning, but it was inevitable and the fact she tried to hide it put Levi at a loss for words. Staring at her face and her eyes there was hardly anything for him to think besides:

Fuck, I think I want to kiss this woman right now. His eyes widened at the notion and his rational mind slapped him so hard he suppressed the urge to turn his head to the side in reality. Instead, he only shook it and cursed himself multiple times while sipping on his tea.

"I've done nothing deserving of your gratitude." Levi mumbled in a cold voice once having calmed down while (Y/N) only smiled at him, this time without saying anything.

He wondered whether he’d actually taken a liking to a woman he met just the night before. He knew nothing of her yet he couldn’t simply ignore her like he usually would - he wanted to learn a bit more. He didn’t think himself a naive fool as to let her influence him to this extent - but then again she couldn’t be a witch either. Had it been any other woman, things would’ve been different - and then it clicked. Things were like this because it was her, because she affected him and because she interfered with how he usually thought and acted. He didn’t know why but one thing was clear and it was something he’d never admit to himself, Hanji, (Y/N), Erwin or anybody else. He’d die before saying it out loud.

"Corporal is everything alright?" Jean Kirstein's voice snapped him out of his thoughts and softened his expression. Levi looked up with a sigh.

"I have something to do." Groaning inwardly, he pushed himself off the bench and stood up, meeting (Y/N)’s worried gaze and hastening to ease her concern. "You stay here and chat with them or whatever. I'll be back." He headed towards Hanji, Erwin and Mike. Before doing anything else, he had to distance himself from (Y/N) and cease all contact with her after his part of the deal was done. For that to happen, he had to talk to his Commander. He’d promised her a job and, under the man who’d loved her or not, he’d get it for her.

"You're in." He stated coldly with crossed arms.

"I am?" She was literally beaming.

"I already said it, idiot. Are you fucking deaf?" He snapped but her grin was still and so was her posture.

"This is great! Now I get to spend time with my friends, I have a job and a home. Thank you so much.” (Y/N) piped excitedly and he only snorted.

"Anyway, until we find a free room for you you’ll be sharing with somebody.” He stated absentmindedly, feeling just a bit ticked off on this particular topic. Not that he had a reason to feel irritation because he’d known her for a day and she didn’t mean anything to him. That was how things should’ve been.

"Hanji?" (Y/N) guessed as she took a seat in the chair in front of his desk and he looked at the papers before him, pretending to read and trying his hardest not to pay attention to her. He reasoned why she wouldn’t be staying with Hanji and she went on to ask if it would be him she’d share a room with. He almost let out a snort and answered her question with a cold ‘no’. “Then who?” She pressed curiously, making him grit his teeth. He didn’t understand what he was so angry with. Maybe himself.

"Erwin."

"You're kidding me." She blurted out, to which he glared at her. She didn't seem overjoyed by the fact she was about to spend an unknown period of time with the handsome, tall and successful man that had feelings for her, instead she looked confused.

"Do I look like I enjoy joking around?" His questioned was a hiss and his eyes were cold and unforgiving. Her brows twitched.

"But Erwin’s the Commander, it’ll be troublesome for me to stay with him." (Y/N) reasoned, (e/c) hues gleaming as she spoke.

"He volunteered to take you in. Guess his feelings aren’t entirely gone." Levi commented after giving a spiteful click of the tongue, making (Y/N)'s eyes narrow at his visage.

"And how do you feel about that?" She inquired curiously, almost as if seeking confirmation on a topic she knew the answer to. The question ticked him off.

"What does that have to do with me?" He was playing unemotional and oblivious - he knew it had a little if not a lot to do with him but he refused to admit it. She shrugged, stating she’d just asked, and, without thinking at all, he got ahead of himself. "It doesn't make me feel anything. Did you expect me to argue with my Commander over you? Assert myself as the person who shelters you? If anything, I feel relieved to finally get you off my case. Whatever fantasies you might be harbouring, the reality is that I escorted you to a ball because I needed somebody and now you may go next door to let Erwin instruct you on your job."

Levi's scowl may have been terribly scary, but on the inside, he was on the verge of hitting himself because of how unreasonably rude he was being to a woman he thought he felt something for. (Y/N)'s reaction wasn't one of shock, nor one of heartbreak - it was one of deep indifference. And indifference was a mask he used all too often to let himself be fooled by it. She was offended and hurt as she stood up and headed to the door, then, with her hand on the doorknob, she turned her eyes to him.

"Just for the record - I expected nothing from you and I harbour no fantasies, you're right when you say Erwin still has feelings for me, but you're wrong when you say you’re impartial. Even if you don't like me, I have to say I took quite the liking to you." He could almost hear how her voice broke at the last word. "I’m just sorry I won’t have the chance to say it to your face as a woman instead of a stupid peasant."

The door closed after her, leaving behind the voice which had betrayed her upon the word ‘peasant’. If he’d known more about her, he would’ve realised how it hurt her to say it because that’s what she’d been her whole life - a faceless nameless stupid peasant. But he didn’t know. He leaned back in his chair after realising he’d tensed with the intention to stand and go after her. Shoulders slumping, he groaned and closed his eyes at the thought of having made her cry. He was getting a headache.

"A lovers quarrel a day after your first meeting. Fucking way to go." He praised himself mockingly and wished to endure the worst headache in existence if it would give him the chance to fix this situation. It was an unrealistic wish but he wanted it nonetheless. He tried beating it into his head that he’d known her for a day but he wanted to see her smile again and it was a pity he probably never would.

He started this conversation so angry and ended it so regretful that it was a pitiful thing to watch.

"Is this your way of saying 'sorry'?" She asked with disbelief as he looked at her with pleading eyes.

"You could say so." He nodded weakly and she snorted.

"It's not romantic at all." She placed her hands on her hips and his brows furrowed as he glared at her.

"Is it supposed to be?" He inquired and she smirked slightly. He hadn’t realised how much he missed that - it had been a goddamn month since it had been directed to him last.

"Of course, after all the indirect insults you threw at me."

"If it makes you feel better if I was still a thug, I'd want to fuck you senselessly." His deadpan statement was an attempt at brightening the mood and it brought him so much more when she began laughing - a month since he’d heard that one too.

"Enough of a compensation. But I don’t get why before is different from now since you’re the same person." Her objection made his eyes narrow - of course they weren’t much different in nature but he couldn’t let himself rush into something he hadn’t had ever. He didn’t need love and support - he’d been fine without them until now. Sex was another thing he could get but preferred not to because she, unlike him, probably connected it to something more emotional. 

"I have boundaries now and I’m more self-conscious." She snorted with laughter once more, though he would be surprised to hear why.

"Of what - the perfect body, the flawless face, the smooth voice or the heart of gold under all the piled-up bad experience?" Her mocking question made it hard for him to distinguish whether she’d meant to tease or compliment him. Maybe both - it sounded like her.

"Of the fact I’m far from flawless yet I'm supposed to be a role model to young cadets. Of the fact I fight and promote that others die as they fight. Of the fact I’m worshipped by kids who don’t really know me, kids I’ll probably outlive." His voice was low and deep, tired, morose. Silence followed. Then (Y/N) nudged his shoulder and he watched her empathetic smile. She couldn’t say anything to make him feel better. "Does this mean you accept my apology?"

"Of course. Who can resist when it’s obvious you’re trying so hard?" (Y/N) chuckled when the raven glared at her but quickly calmed down, only to glance shyly at the ground right after. "I'm sorry, too. I rushed to snap back at you."

"You've nothing to apologise for, I deserved it.” He countered, making her blush slightly before she patted his shoulder with a smile.

"Since we're going to be seeing each other often, let's talk when something like this happens again, alright?" Levi rolled his eyes before nodding - way nonchalant than the furious ‘yes’ pushing at his lips. The small ‘fine’ he uttered earned him one of her grins. His stomach took a turn. He focused on his heartbeat - either it hadn’t skipped or he’d been lucky enough not to have heard it. "But next time be a bit more romantic." She joked whilst getting up, to which he only glared.

"Romantic? More like no thanks. I’m not romantic and will not attempt to become romantic." He stated coldly as they walked out the mess hall and headed towards their respective rooms.

"I can teach you." She suggested with a small shrug and he snorted at her.

"As if you're any better."

"You don't have a way of knowing. I may just be a hidden romantic." (Y/N) flashed him yet another terribly attractive smirk and it would've been a lie to say it didn’t make his heart beat faster but he was adamant not to admit it.

"Or I may just be the princess of the walls." He teased, his voice rid of all emotion. The woman next to him was still able to sense his sarcasm. He rolled his eyes and she slapped his shoulder playfully, laughing and feigning offence - it ended in vain. Maybe he could learn to accept the fact he regarded her in such a way after a few months. Just a few. And maybe if he got the chance he’d tell her too. Or not. He was fine with just watching her smile and , by god, if somebody took that from him he would kill to get it back.

Such determination was so him in spite of the topic, he never understood how all of this became so natural to the point it happened every day.

[we-are-dreamers42]

Nightingale: Too Broken Too Fix Part I

Bucky Barnes x OGcharacter

photo by me.

This is the backstory or prequel of Alexandra Thomas before entering the official world of the Marvel Universe.

Word Count: 1,748

Series List

Alexandra had one thing on her mind. To get revenge from the men who abused her for years, and to save the others she’s left behind.

When the words are like this it’s a memory.

WARNINGS: There are mentions of sexual abuse, violence, death and swearing

Chapter 2

8 Years Later

Tourists were fucking stupid. They’re always keeping their wallets in their back pockets. I slipped by one man who was too busy looking at the ocean. I reached my hand into his back pocket pulling out a brown wallet. I pulled out the cash, and noted his name. Then slipped it right back into his pocket without him noticing.

Once away from the pier I counted almost six hundred dollars. Good enough for today. It was a long way back to the apartment I shared with Roxy. We live in the poorer part of the city, but it pays less rent. Saving more money the better. 

Found out taking revenge on people didn't pay the bills. So when we're in a pinch we resort to pickpocketing. It’s not the best way to get money. I even felt bad about it, but it had to be done.

Once I got home I lifted the loose floorboards that hide a duffle bag full of cash, and a notebook. Half of it was full of my targets' names, and the other half was the people I’ve stolen from.

“How much did you get today?” Rox asked, walking out of her room when she heard me come in.

“Just enough for rent this month.” I wrote: Jonathan Burg of Milwaukee $250, and the others I took from today.

“I don’t see the point of the list.” She said,

“Once this is all over I want to reimburse all these people. They didn’t ask to fund my vendetta.” I put the notebook back, and replaced the boards.

“Yet you kill people.” She sat down on the couch, and turned on the news.

“Those men deserve it. Jon from Wisconsin doesn’t.”

“Why not take a bank job when Timmy offers.”

“I’m not robbing a bank. I’m not a criminal.” She whipped her head to look at me, giving me a questionable look. “I prefer vigilante.”

“That’s not what the news is saying.” She turned up the volume on the TV.

“Last night what people are calling The Mask struck another Politician in his home.” They showed my symbol that I left after every one of my kills. It was Roxy’s idea. “The count is six dead, and two in critical condition. Totalling out to twenty five dead in the last year. One of the survivors who will stay anonymous recalled a woman dressed in black, and a black mask broke in. She attacked with knives, and a gun. If anyone has any information please call the numbe-” I muted the TV.

“The Mask really? They couldn’t think of a better name? That’s fucking stupid.”

“I told you to name yourself.”

“Names are stupid. I don’t want a bad nickname attached to what I’m doing. I’m not trying to be infamous.”

“Yet you are no one else who can break into a highly guarded mansion, and take out half a dozen men half her size.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Well that’s what is happening. If you don’t like it think of something or else The Mask is going to stick”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever I’ll think of something. For now I’m going to scout the next one.” I grabbed the case that contained my rifle, and left.

I sat on the roof fifty yards from an outside cafe. I looked through the scope of my sniper rifle. He wasn’t here yet. So I sat back, and waited. Every week two of my targets came to this cafe, and talked. Didn’t know what, and I really didn't care.

It’s almost four in the afternoon. The park inbetween me, and my targets were filled with people. It’s risky to try, and take them out now, but I’ll never find a better time. I’m high enough where there was no risk of shooting someone else, but it’s a sunny day. The risk of being seen was very high. I kept my mask on to mostly hide my face, just in case.

As I waited I started carving my symbol into the bullets. At first I was against leaving a calling card, but Roxy made the point that it’ll strike fear into the men I hurt. There was no way they hadn't noticed their clientele were being murdered, but leaving something behind to remind them that they’re next. Kinda made me excited. They knew that I’m coming, and it scared them. That’s how I felt. So as they die I know they feel what I did.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t like killing. This was the only way to be sure those men never hurt anyone again. They had money, and endless resources. If I outed what they do the punishment would not justify the crime. I’ve seen it countless times over the last eight years. Men with money would never get what they deserve. This ensured that they did.

It was getting harder to reach all my targets. They were either always in a heavily public setting or surrounded by half a dozen to a dozen guards at all times. So my job was getting a little more difficult, but It’s nothing close to something I couldn’t handle.

Finishing the last carving I loaded it into the gun, and waited. Ten more minutes till they arrive. Maybe I should think of a name. I thought. I got to think of something meaningful, nothing stupid.

Vigilante Assassin. Iron Assassin. No, Night Stalker, fuck no. Then it hit me. I was back in my cell. It was within my first year there. 

“You will get out of here one day.” Elaina said. She had just gotten back. Whenever she came back she acted all weird. Like she wasn’t fully aware of what she was saying. “Promise me Nightingale.”

“Why do you call me that?”

“The Nightingale symbolizes love, and emotion. They associate creativity and purity. That’s why they are my favorite bird. No matter what Alexandra remember you are a Nightingale. No matter how this world tries to change you, stay pure.” She looked over at me. “Promise when you get out of here. You will do what’s right.”

“I promise.”

Perfect.

The  two men sat down at their tables. I positioned my scope on them. With precision I shot the first man through the chest. Before the second man could get up I shot him through the head. Like I’ve done dozen times before I packed the gun back in the case, and scaled down the fire escape. Once on the ground I took off my mask, and walked away as I heard the sirens behind me.

By the time I got home the event was already on the news. “The Mask strikes again. This afternoon two well known CEOs were shot dead at The Corner Cafe. There are no witnesses of the shooter. Motive, and connection between all the victims is unclear. Just that they are wealthy men. The FBI have been called in to help investigate.”

“I see it went well.” Roxy said as she got ready for work. She was a bartender at a shitty bar filled with criminals. It sucked, but it had its perks. The only reason she was working there was to familiarize us with the scums of the city. With them it was easier to navigate weapons, and people willing to train me.

“Tell Logan about my snipe today.” He was the one who taught me everything about guns. Even though I didn’t like using them. It’s nice to know how to use them when I got in a bind.

“Come with me, have a drink, and tell him yourself.”

“I got something I have to do tonight.”

I stalked the anchor of the local news from the studio. I waited around the corner in an alley waiting. Right when he passed my sight I gripped the back of his shirt, and pressed his front into the side of the building.

“Who are you? I have money, I'll give you whatever you want.”

“Shut up. I need you to stop using the dumb ass name. My name is Nightingale. If I hear a whisper of The Mask. You’ll be the first person I’ll visit.” I let go, and walked away. He fell to the ground.

“Wait! Why are you doing all this?” I paused, and looked back.

I got down to his level, and pulled out my knife. I put it to his throat. Even if I told him why they wouldn’t care. They’ll just see what they wanted, but I couldn’t help myself from being a little dramatic. “I’m not the bad guy here. Those men. They deserve what they got. No one knows what happens behind closed doors.” 

Cryptic, but it worked. I had a thumb drive that could prove everything. But I’ll just hold onto that till my mission is done.

That next day the story was everywhere. Nightingale was even trending on Twitter.

“Nightingale, really?” Roxy said as she watched me practice throwing my knives at a plank of wood propped against the wall.

“There’s a story behind it.” I threw another perfect shot.

“Why don’t you use guns? We have so many.”

“Guns are loud, and not really a fan.”

“You used a sniper.” She pointed out.

“Only when necessary.” I threw one more. I threw it so hard that it split through the thick wood and was embedded into the wall. “Fuck.” Pushing away the wood I saw the knife was half way through the wall. The concrete wall.

“Are you ever going to explain to me how you can do that?” She referred to the other gashes just like this one all over the wall. “Or how you can run faster than a car or jump between buildings like jumping a curb.” Slowly as I trained myself through the years I’ve found I can do things no one else can. I had no explanation. 

I pulled the knife out with ease. “I told you I don’t know.”

There was a moment of silence before she huffs “Well I’m going to work. I’ll be back at ten, and you better be ready.”

“Ready for what?” Shit what did I forget about?

“We’re going out for my birthday tonight.”

“Oh I knew that.” I said casually, but really was freaking out. I completely forgot.

“You forgot didn’t you?”

“No. I just didn’t think you wanted to go out.” I lied flawlessly.

“Liar.” Fuck. “I’ll see you tonight.” She called out the door.

Chapter 3

[cuthian]

Unfinished Business

Hi everyone!

Welcome to this little prequel to Becoming a Memory, Becoming a Treasure.

In this, we'll see how Alex and Reggie ended up messing around for so long, why they kept messing around and how they dealt with the changes in their lives as they happened.

Thanks to everyone on the JatP discord server for being my soundboard when I needed one ;)

I have NO clue how long it'll take me to write the second part of this, and I sincerely apologise if it takes me a few weeks - it very well might, since Uni is kicking my butt.

Love Annaelle

Unfinished Business

“You and I will Always Be Unfinished Business.”

— unknown author

PART ONE

DECEMBER 1991

ALEX

See, Alex… Alex was fine with the breakup.

He was. It’d been his idea too—he and Luke were much better off as friends, as bandmates, than they were as boyfriends—but… well, Alex had been in love with Luke, brief as it might’ve been, and he found it harder than he had thought he would to see Luke flirting with someone else.

“Hey,” Reggie said, popping up beside him with two bottles of soda in his hand, watching Alex twirl his sticks restlessly between his fingers. “You okay?”

He handed one of the bottles he was holding to Alex and it wasn’t until Alex had taken a few sips that he realized Reggie had somehow conned him out of his drumsticks, which had now taken up residence in Reggie’s back pocket. “I’m fine,” he said belatedly, but even he could tell that it was unconvincing at best, and Reggie frowned at him.

“You don’t have to lie to me,” Reggie told him, eyes wide and his expression sincere. “Can’t be easy, what with Luke…” he glanced over his shoulder to their best friend, who seemed to be doing his best to get intimately acquainted with the girl’s tonsils.

“Just,” Reggie sighed. “If you need something, I’m here, okay?” He looked to the side, where Bobby was trying—and failing—to impress the bartender, probably to score a beer of some kind. “Bobby too.”

“Yeah,” Alex sighed, sagging back against the stage. “Just… I don’t want this to affect us. The band. I agreed with the breakup, I still agree with it, I just…” he shrugged helplessly and Reggie nudged their shoulders together lightly, and brief as the contact was, it did make him feel better.

“People say it takes a while to get over your first girlfriend,” Reggie said sympathetically. “I’m sure that’s true for boyfriends too. But I’m sure there’ll be others.” He grinned bright and happy and Alex was kind of helpless to smile back. “You’re awesome, bro. Everyone else’s gonna see that too.”

Alex’s cheeks flushed, but he smiled too.

“Thanks, Reg.” He leaned sideways a little to press their shoulders together. “You’re a good friend.”

“Always the tone of surprise,” Reggie chuckled, but he smiled too.  

---------------

MARCH 1992

Alex sat cross-legged on Reggie’s bed, flipping through one of his comic books as Reggie tried to convince his six-year-old sister to get dressed for her ballet class.

“Mags,” Reggie pleaded, “Come on, you love dancing.”

“I don’t wanna go,” Maggie whined, flopping onto the floor dramatically, kicking her legs out so Reggie couldn’t drag her leotard up her legs anyway, and Alex couldn’t help but smile at the scene.

They’d come over to Reggie’s house to do homework, because ever since he’d come out to his parents, they’d been weird about him having friends over, and as soon as they’d walked in the door, Reggie’s mom—her pupils dilated so much that it couldn’t be healthy—had shoved Maggie at them, telling Reggie to keep her occupied until she was picked up for ballet class.

Alex didn’t mind.

He loved hanging out with Reggie’s baby sister—they all did, even Bobby, though he sometimes grumped about it—and even their homework deadline didn’t really bother him enough to be resentful about it. Reggie, however, seemed a lot more put out by it than he usually was and that, combined with his squirrely, snappish behavior the rest of the week  made Alex sure that there was something bothering his friend, and he planned on finding out what it was.

Originally, Luke was supposed to be here too, because no one was as good at wheedling stuff out of Reggie as Luke was, but his parents had grounded him after staying out past his curfew with his newest girlfriend—Alex vaguely wondered how long this one would stick around.

“Okay,” he sighed when Maggie full-on wailed as Reggie wrestled her into her leotards. “Okay, let’s try this a different way.”

He got up from the bed and kneeled on the floor in front of Maggie. “Hey kid,” he said, shooting a wink at Reggie, “Why don’t you wanna go to ballet?” He pouted and said, “If you don’t go, who’s gonna teach me all the dances?”

Maggie stopped kicking her legs and looked at Alex with wide, teary green eyes that were just like Reggie’s. “You’re gonna dance too?”

“Well,” Alex said conspiratorially, leaning towards her a little, pretending to keep Reggie out, even though he knew Reggie could still hear them perfectly well, “I would love to learn how to dance, but I’m not allowed to go to the classes anymore, ‘cause I’m too big.”

Maggie gasped theatrically, and Alex made sure to keep his expression solemn as he nodded. “So,” he said. “If you can go to the class and then teach me all the moves, I’ll be able to dance with you.”

Maggie nodded at him with wide eyes. “Okay, Alex!”

She then turned to her brother again and said, “Reggie, you have to do my hair!”

Reggie exhaled shakily but smiled at her anyway. “Yeah, okay, Mags. Go get your brush.”

Maggie ran from the room, chattering at a loud volume about all the things she was going to teach Alex as soon as she came home from class. Alex leaned back on his heels and looked at Reggie, who was still staring out into the hallway. “Are you okay?” Alex asked quietly, resting his hand on Reggie’s shoulder.

Reggie looked back at him, eyes wide, and Alex could see him considering to lie.

“You can tell me anything,” he said immediately. “Now, or later, or in three weeks or a year. Anything.”

Alarmingly, Reggie’s eyes became glassy with unshed tears for a second before he blinked hard and swallowed. “Yeah, okay.” He turned away from Alex, and all Alex wanted to do was hug his friend to make whatever was bothering him go away. “Can we talk about it later?” he then asked hoarsely, still not quite looking at Alex. “When Maggie’s—”

“Yeah, of course,” Alex nodded, just as Maggie skidded back into the room clutching her sparkly blue hairbrush and glittery butterfly scrunchies.

They spent the next half hour trying to get Maggie’s hair into a knot-free, neat bun that had an appropriate number of butterflies—apparently, the correct number of butterflies was all of them—before the doorbell rang and Maggie ran downstairs with her bag slung around her shoulder, screaming goodbye at them and reminding Alex she would be teaching him the moves she learned today before the door slammed shut behind her.

Four minutes later, Reggie’s mom shouted, “I’m going out. There’s money on the counter for pizza. Make sure to give your sister some,” and the door slammed shut again.

Alex looked at Reggie in concern, because as soon as the door slammed shut, he seemed to shrink in on himself, and Jesus—Alex really wanted to know what was going on. “Reg,” he tried, but Reggie just shook his head and got to his feet, starting to get his school books from his backpack without looking at Alex, and he was worried now.

“Reggie,” he sighed, getting to his feet slowly. Reggie stayed at his desk, but he’d stopped moving, and when Alex brushed his hand against his arm, he exhaled in a shuddering gasp.

“What if I like boys too?” Reggie suddenly blurted, turning to look at Alex with wide, terrified eyes. “I’m not gay—I’m not, because I love girls, but I—” he looked around a little wildly and shrugged helplessly, “There’s—I—sometimes I look at Lu—at guys and I wonder what it’d be like to—”

Alex stared at Reggie, mouth hanging open just a little, because he wasn’t—he wasn’t sure what to say.

“I don’t know if I want to kiss another guy,” Reggie said desperately, “But then sometimes it’s all I can think about, but then I still can’t stop staring at the cheerleaders, or I still get blown away when Claire Johnson wears those really short shorts, you know, so it’s not—I don’t think I’m gay.” He looked up at Alex with a pleading expression and said, “How did you know?”

Alex heaved a sigh, running his hand through his hair as he sat down on Reggie’s bed heavily. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess… the same way you knew that you liked girls.”

“But I don’t know that anymore,” Reggie cried, throwing up his hands before he collapsed on the bed beside Alex. “How do you even know you wanna kiss a guy?”

Alex couldn’t quite take his eyes off of him, couldn’t focus really, and—

And later, Alex wouldn’t be able to justify, even to himself, what made him say it, but the words that came out of his mouth were, “I don’t know. Just kiss me, see how that feels.”

Reggie’s eyes snapped open and his jaw dropped, and Alex’s cheeks abruptly flushed.

“I mean, you don’t—” he stuttered.

“No, okay,” Reggie blurted, sitting up so abruptly he nearly smashed his face into Alex’s. They stared at each other, and Alex suddenly felt like the biggest asshole ever, because was this—was he taking advantage of Reggie? Alex had never really questioned his sexuality because he’d always kind of known that he liked boys a lot more than he liked girls.

He’d thought that maybe there was something wrong with him for a little while, but he’d never doubted.

“Reg,” he whispered, “You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Reggie cut him off, leaning in so close Alex could feel the heat radiating from the other boy’s skin, his eyes fastened on Alex’s lips.

“Okay,” Alex breathed, and Reggie’s slim, strong fingers curled in the fabric of Alex’s shirt, drawing him closer so they shared a single breath before Reggie’s lips brushed across his.

Alex held his breath for a long, drawn-out moment before he remembered that he should probably kiss Reggie back, that that was actually what Reggie had asked for. It was… it was a really simple, almost sweet kiss—their lips pressed together chastely and Reggie's lips were really soft and tasted like the apple he’d eaten earlier, and Alex kind of wanted to press harder, hold him tighter, but he didn’t dare to because he didn’t know what Reggie needed or even wanted—or even if that were something Alex himself wanted.

They kissed chastely for an indeterminable time, before Reggie leant back, smiling lightly.

“So,” Alex choked, cheeks burning with heat when Reggie chuckled. “Boys too?”

Reggie nodded and smiled a bright smile. “Definitely boys too.”

--------------

MAY 1992

Alex had grown used to, over the years, leaving his bedroom window open just a crack so either or both of his best friends could crawl in after intense fights with their parents. There was a conveniently placed tree just outside his window that both Luke and Reggie had utilized several times to climb up into Alex’s room when they just needed to get away for a little while.

He’d woken up to find one or both of them in his room—even in his bed—dozens of times over the years and he was so used to it that he barely even stirred anymore when he heard someone crawl into the window, tiptoe into the room and drop a backpack.

There was a sudden thump and a muffled curse, and Alex, his eyes still mostly shut, raised his head from his pillow just enough to slur, “Mrgi?”

“Yeah,” Reggie whispered back, “Go back to sleep, it’s just me.”

“Mmkay,” Alex hummed and let Reggie shove him over a little so he could fit into the bed with him, settling against his best friend more comfortably.

He fell asleep again immediately.

When he woke up the next morning, Reggie was still there and they were lying very nearly nose to nose, sharing Alex’s single pillow—and with how often his friends crashed with him, he really should get another pillow. Because they were lying so close together, it took Alex a minute to notice the discoloration around Reggie’s eye and the faint trace of blood in one of his nostrils.

“Reggie,” he whispered, devastated to see him hurt like this again, reaching out to touch the bruised skin lightly, but Reggie caught his hand before he could make contact.

“It was my fault,” Reggie choked. “I got in their way. I should’ve stayed out of it.”

Alex dropped his hand, resting it on Reggie’s bicep instead, rubbing his thumb across the soft skin there. “It’s never your fault, Reg,” he said sternly. “It’s on them, not on you.”

Reggie looked away. “Maybe.”

Alex’s heart twisted painfully and he hated seeing his friend like this. He’d always hated seeing Reggie—sweet, cheerful, bubbly Reggie, who somehow always managed to make Alex and the others’ bad days better just by being there—so put down by the shitty stuff that his parents did.

He hated it more when Reggie showed up with bruises.

It happened rarely—very rarely—but it had happened before.

“You deserve so much better,” Alex told Reggie quietly. “I’m gonna keep telling you that until you believe me. And Luke and Bobby too.”

Reggie looked back at him and smiled weakly, and it felt like the most natural thing he’d ever done to bridge that tiny gap between them and press his lips to Reggie’s. He felt, rather than heard, Reggie’s surprised little inhale before the other boy relaxed and kissed back, shuffling just that little bit closer and resting his hand on Alex’s cheek.

“Okay?” Alex whispered when they broke apart to breathe.

Reggie looked at him, green eyes wide and surprised, and then smiled, slowly. “Yeah. Okay.” He was quiet for a second and then said, “I mean, it was way better last time, without the morning breath—” and then laughed hysterically as Alex hit him in the face with the pillow.

--------------

MAY to NOVEMBER 1992

See, the thing… the thing was that it kind of kept happening.

They didn’t talk about it much – if at all – but Alex still kept finding himself secreted away in a corner, kissing the living daylights out of Reggie, or dancing up against the other boy after one of their gigs, or holding hands as they walked home or spooning when Reggie inevitably ran to his house during his parents’ intense arguments.

And the thing was… the thing was that it was nothing like what he’d had with Luke.

With Luke, he’d had butterflies in his stomach every time he looked at him, his insides turning into warm mush when they kissed and his cheeks heating in a blush whenever Luke held his hand and aimed that thousand-megawatt-smile at him.

He’d been proper in love with Luke.

Whatever it was that he and Reggie were doing, it didn’t feel like that.

It wasn’t any less meaningful because of that though.

Alex loved Reggie, as much as he’d ever loved Luke, but he was not in love with him – Reggie was his best friend and one of the most important people in his life, and no matter how much they fooled around, he didn’t think that could ever change.

--------------

JANUARY 1993

“I’m not in love with you,” Reggie told him dryly one afternoon when Luke was out on a date and Bobby went to work a shift at a nearby coffee bar, and he and Alex were alone in the studio. Alex, who had actually been enjoying just hanging out with his best friend without having much to do, looked up at Reggie, who’d been messing with his guitar, with a frown.

“I—” he blinked. “I know? I’m not in love with you either.”

Reggie’s expression cleared, and he grinned widely. “Oh, good. That would’ve been weird.”

Alex snorted a laugh. “Really? We’ve been messing around for months, but me being in love with you would’ve been the weird part?”

Reggie wrinkled his nose and shrugged dramatically. “Well, I mean, it took you and Luke forever to act normal around each other again after you dated and I don’t want that to happen to us, you know.” He plucked at the strings of his bass restlessly, pouting just a tiny bit.

Alex smiled tightly and looked down.

He couldn’t deny he had worried about that too the first time Reggie had kissed him, or the first time he’d kissed Reggie, or the time after that, when it’d become clear that this was something they did now.

“I guess,” Alex sighed, “we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Reggie nodded vigorously and then carefully settled down his guitar before he moved over to Alex and straddled him. Alex, who hadn’t quite been expecting this, stared at him, his hands settling on Reggie’s waist automatically. “I,” Reggie said with a smug grin, “am gonna kiss you again.”

“Uh,” Alex tried, but before he could say anything, Reggie did exactly that. Alex gasped, because he really hadn’texpected this, but he didn’t resist as Reggie kissed him hungrily, deeply, their lips sliding together wetly before Alex remembered he could be an active participant and took control of the kiss, licking his way into Reggie’s mouth and—oh.

Sometimes he forgot why he and Reggie kept messing around.

Sometimes he forgot that they were great at this.

His hands and arms moved of their own accord, an arm slipping around Reggie’s waist, the other boy’s fingers tangling in his hair to keep him in place.

Kissing Reggie always kind of felt like an electric shock, like trying to contain a livewire, Alex’s skin burning and tingling where Reggie touched him, and a burning throb ignited somewhere deep in his stomach. He kissed Reggie back fiercely, sloppily even, but with everything he had, and anchored his fingers in his best friend’s belt loops as he held on for dear life.

Reggie groaned quietly against his lips, a deep, wanton sound that made something deep inside Alex’s stomach clench. It felt like a slow fire burning its way through his veins; as though Reggie had lit a fire somewhere deep inside of him that no one but him would be able to quench or satisfy.

And right then, Alex didn’t care anymore that Luke or Bobby could walk in on them, that they’d have to explain something they couldn’t even really explain to themselves—

But then Reggie moved again, tilting his head a little, and his tongue slid against Alex’s again—and it was too much, Alex couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think—he jerked his head back, gasping for breath as Reggie stared at him, his lips wet and a little swollen. “I don’t—” Alex choked, “I mean—I couldn’t breathe—”

“Oh,” Reggie said, and then, “Should we stop?”

Alex panted heavily, fingers clenching in Reggie’s shirt. “No,” he heard himself say. “No, I don’t want to stop.” Reggie grinned, delighted, and leaned in to kiss him again—a short, hard kiss—before he pulled back again and said, “Take off your shirt and lie down. I wanna try something.”

Alex flushed crimson. “Reg,” he choked, but Reggie shook his head and got to his feet.

“Nuh-uh,” he smirked. “Don’t protest. If I do this right, you’re gonna love it.”

Alex went to protest again, unsure of what Reggie had in mind, unsure if they should be doing this in the studio at all, but then Reggie kissed him again, and shit—

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a few risks every now and then.

When the kiss broke, Alex inhaled sharply and let Reggie divest him of his shirt and push him down onto his back, Reggie’s hands skimming down his chest, fingers slipping teasingly underneath the waistband of his pants. “See,” Reggie muttered, pressing a kiss to the underside of his jaw, then his neck, and then his chest, “Luke talks a lot when he’s drunk. About girls, about kissing, about sex—”

Alex groaned when Reggie scraped his teeth on the sensitive skin just above his belly button.

“—and sometimes,” Reggie chuckled, “he talks about you. And now… Now I kind of wanna know—” he edged Alex’s underwear down just a little, “—if it really is that much fun.” He glanced up at Alex from beneath his eyelashes and Christ, he was gonna kill him—

And then Reggie ducked down and took Alex in his mouth and Alex’s brain kind of fizzed out for a while.

--------------

MARCH 1993

Playing a book club had been Luke’s idea.

It had not been his best, but it certainly wasn’t his worst idea either. The group of fifteen women and a few men, all their parents’ age, had been enthusiastic about the songs to the point that all four of them had wondered what kind of book club they’d wandered into, and they seemed pretty set on feeding them so much food they could roll out of the door.

Alex had been herded over to one of the armchairs once they’d finished their set, a plate filled with snacks pressed into his hands and Luke sitting on the armrest beside him, both of them staring, bemused, at Reggie.

Reggie, who had walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water and walked back out with a girl their own age, flirting like his life depended on it—that in itself wasn’t so very unusual, but the thing was… the thing was that it was working. The girl, a pretty blonde with a bright grin and a Queen t-shirt, was hanging off his every word, and Alex was…

Alex was baffled.

She kept laughing at whatever Reggie said to her, putting her hand on his arm and flipping her hair over her shoulder and—and—

Reggie was not that funny.

He was an idiot and an amazing friend and a great songwriter—even if all he wrote were country songs—and a pretty damn good kisser, but—

But he was hardly ever funny on purpose.

“You’re seeing this, right?” Luke asked, sounding as baffled as Alex felt. “I’m not dreaming?”

Alex raised an eyebrow at his best friend and ex-boyfriend and snorted, “You dream about Reggie trying to pick up girls?”

Luke snorted a laugh and slapped at his shoulder before stuffing another cupcake in his mouth and leaning back to watch Reggie’s attempt at picking up a girl. Alex was… Alex was pretty sure he was supposed to feel jealous or annoyed or hurt or something—things one usually felt when watching the person they were intimately involved with flirt with someone else—but all he could think about was that he hoped it worked out for Reggie.

He looked for a few more minutes before he let Luke drag him into a conversation about their setlist and a song they’d been working on together. Luke was trying to convince Alex to take lead vocals on at least one verse, but Alex wasn’t thatconfident about his voice—not compared to Luke’s anyway.

Still, he let Luke chatter at him about it—maybe it would be cool to do lead vocals.

Reggie looked breathless and giddy by the time he collapsed on the other armrest of Alex’s chair, cheeks flushed and his hair messy. Alex and Luke turned to him as one, and Alex didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know that Luke would be smirking at Reggie with the exact same expression that Alex wore too. “You having fun?” Luke drawled, one hand on Alex’s shoulder as he leaned towards Reggie.

Reggie grinned and shrugged. “Hey, I can’t help being this irresistible.”

Alex snorted in disbelief, and Reggie’s mouth dropped open in exaggerated indignation. Before any of them could say anything though, Bobby appeared from wherever he’d been hiding, coming up behind Reggie and slinging an arm around his shoulder—Reggie nearly toppled over into Alex’s lap—crowing, “Holy shit, man. How’d you manage to land the hottest girl here?”

Reggie blushed and looked down, bashful all of a sudden, but when he looked up, he met Alex’s eye right on to offer him a small, apologetic smile, and…

And that was that.

Alex found he didn’t mind.

Much.

--------------

LATE AUGUST 1993

“I had sex with someone at Bible Camp,” Alex blurted without thinking, cutting across Luke’s story abruptly. They were in the studio, laying back on the shitty little bed they’d put together in the loft, in case Luke or Reggie or even Alex wanted to spend the night there, and Luke had been trying to tell him what he’d missed in the three weeks he’d been at camp, but Alex had been holding this in for what felt like weeks—though it had only been four days—and he needed to say it.

Luke looked at him with a stricken, astonished expression, and Alex swallowed thickly.

“I slept with someone at Bible Camp,” he repeated, slower and calmer, although his voice wavered just a little and tears burned in his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling, resolute in his decision not to look at Luke, because he wasn’t sure if he could keep talking if he’d look at him. “We’d been flirting since the first day, and I liked him, and he was such a good kisser and—”

The words felt like they were being torn from his lips rather than a voluntary admission, and he curled in on himself automatically, pressing his hand against his breastbone hard, wishing the physical discomfort of the gesture would be enough to make him forget.

It was naturally, not, as he had known it wouldn’t be.

“My parents signed me up for ‘specialized’ group activities this summer,” he continued resentfully. “Which was really just a very fancy way of saying they signed me up for conversion therapy, and—and he… I just—” Alex exhaled shakily and pressed his knuckles against his eyes until he saw little bursts of light erupting behind his closed eyelids.

His head felt heavy and his mind was tired and worn and he just wanted to sleep, but also he needed to get this off his chest and—

Suddenly Luke was kneeling upright beside him, one of his hands on Alex’s shoulder and the other on his thigh. “Start from the beginning,” Luke ordered him gently.

So Alex did.

“I guess I wanted to get back at them,” he admitted. “And I liked him and he liked me. So we just… I just…” he thumped his head back against the mattress. “I don’t even know why I’m upset—it was… it was fine, we had fun, and then we home and—”

“Alex,” Luke whispered, before dragging his fingers through Alex’s hair soothingly.  

Alex let out a shaky breath at the touch, rolling his head just a little to the left so his temple rested against Luke’s knee. They’d been so very careful around each other for years, since their break up, and Alex hadn’t realized how much he missed the affectionate touches.Physical touch had always been a sure-fire way to ground and steady him when he felt untethered and unstable and he’d just… he’d just missed the casual affection from Luke.

He squeezed his fingers when Luke slipped his between his own and rested their hands against his chest. He stared ahead blankly as he tried to form some semblance of coherent thought. He felt lighter, oddly, after getting it off his chest, but the knot in the pit of his stomach had not lessened at all, sitting uncomfortably, making his gut churn uneasily.

“I don’t know why I’m upset,” he repeated quietly, shamefully, because he’d… he’d wanted everything that they’d done and he’d enjoyed it too, but…

But…  

Luke tugged on his hair softly and smiled before replying, “You’re allowed to be upset when your first time doesn’t go the way you always thought it would.”

Alex looked up at Luke and swallowed thickly. “I guess,” he whispered, “I guess I still thought… after everything, I still thought it’d be you. And then it wasn’t.” Luke let out a small, hurt sound, and Alex shook his head immediately. “No, don’t, I—I’m not pining over you, I’m not in love with you… anymore. I guess I just… never adjusted that expectation.”

It was true—he’d realised he was over Luke quite a while ago. It’d taken him a while to get used to that revelation too, and even longer to decide whether he hated being over Luke more than he had hated having a broken heart.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, even though there wasn’t anything he should be sorry for.

“Don’t be,” Alex told him seriously. “I got over you a long time ago. Maybe I should’ve waited for someone else, you know? Or maybe it’s just my brain trying to overcomplicate matters because I didn’t stop to think once while we—”

Luke smirked, and Alex felt his cheeks flush crimson. “I’m gonna stop talking now,” he groaned as Luke laughed, reaching out to slap at Luke’s knee reproachfully, but all Luke did was chuckle and flop down beside—and half on top of—him again.

They sat in silence for a while longer, piled together in one big tangle of limbs, passing a bottle of soda back and forth as they stared at the ceiling, Luke humming under his breath quietly.

Alex was just about nodding off, head lolling onto Luke’s shoulder, when the door suddenly slammed open, and they both jumped, limbs flailing as they nearly tumbled off of the loft. “What the hell, bro?” Luke bellowed as he untangled himself from Alex, glaring at the figure that had appeared in the door and was now looking up at them with wide eyes and parted lips and—

Oh. Reggie.

Reggie looked terrible.

His hair was soaked with—with—

Alex couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked far from pleasant, and his eyes were rimmed with red and he was far paler than healthy.

“Reg?”

Luke was already scurrying down the ladder, and Alex followed immediately. Reggie had been doing pretty good, these past few months, ever since he’d met Ella—the girl he’d met at the book club gig—and started dating her. Even his parents’ constant fighting hadn’t seemed to bother him as much.

“Hey, Reggie,” Alex said, as soon as they reached Reggie, who was still standing in the doorway, almost like he hadn’t really registered they were talking to him. “what happened?”

Reggie’s eyes flitted from him to Luke and back again, and he was wearing an unreadable expression that was wholly unlike him, and Alex had no idea what to make of it. “I—,” Reggie finally said, voice even and void of emotions, “I told Ella that I—that I like boys too. She broke up with me.”

There was a short, painfully awkward silence, in which Luke looked stunned and Alex tried to think of something to say before Luke cleared his throat loudly and said, “Well, that’s her loss, bro.”

Reggie looked up at him with teary eyes. “She threw her milkshake at me. And she said—she said that I couldn’t like both, so that I—obviously I was gay and I shouldn’t have led her on.” He looked on the verge of tears as he said, “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t think I was, I swear.”

And Alex hadn’t had any particular feeling towards Ella before, but he hated her now, and he could tell Luke felt the same.

“Shit, Reg,” Alex said. “You know you didn’t. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Yeah, bro,” Luke piped in, reaching out to grab Reggie’s shoulder to shake him gently. “I like both too, remember?” He shot Reggie one of those warm, gorgeous smiles that Alex had once fallen in love with, that still made him feel better when they were directed at him—and that surely had the same effect on Reggie, who was smiling weakly now.

“She still broke up with me,” he murmured dejectedly.

Alex didn’t have the heart to say anything sarcastic this time and just slung an arm around Reggie, hauling him in for a tight hug, because he could tell that what Reggie needed was someone to show him he was still wanted. “She doesn’t know what she’s missing out on,” he whispered as Reggie’s arms slowly came up to hug him back, and Luke pressed close on Reggie’s other side.

“We love you, Reg,” Luke said firmly.

He propped his chin up on Reggie’s shoulder and shot Alex a small smile that Alex returned wryly.

They’d be okay.

--------------

OCTOBER 1993 (WEDNESDAY)

“I don’t think he’s doing okay,” Alex told Luke in an undertone, glancing over at Reggie, who was talking to their English teacher with an apologetic grimace—he’d forgotten his essay at home in his rush to get to school in time. In fact, he’d only been on time at all this week because Alex had managed to get a secondhand car a few weeks ago and had been picking him up every morning.

“Yeah,” Luke sighed, glancing over at their friend too. “Yeah, I don’t think he is either.”

Since his breakup with Ella a month and a half ago, Reggie had been more subdued in everything they did—he’d stopped slipping his country songs into Luke’s notebook, he hadn’t brought Maggie over to their rehearsals in nearly three weeks and he hadn’t climbed into Luke or Alex’s window in over a month. He looked constantly exhausted and Alex was sure that if he, Luke and Bobby hadn’t taken to buying double lunches and prodding Reggie into having their leftovers, he wouldn’t have eaten anything at school either.

Bobby, who’d been listening quietly, added, “Not much we can do though, is there?”

“I might be able to,” Alex said slowly, turning to look at his other two friends slowly. “My parents are going to the Hamptons for a week starting Friday. Since I’m no longer welcome,” he spat the word resentfully, still pissed at his parents and extended family for being such bigoted assholes, “I’ll have the house to myself. Maybe we can all hole up there for a few days. Get Reggie out of his parents’ house for a while. He can even bring Maggie, we’ve got the spare room.”

“That’s a great idea,” Luke crowed happily, grabbing at his shoulder and shaking him. “It can be like a band retreat!”

Bobby sighed, and Alex wanted to frown at him even before the other boy said, “I don’t wanna spoil things, guys, but there’s no way my parents are gonna be cool with me spending an entire school week with my bandmates. Plus I got three shifts this week, and Luke… I thought you were trying to patch things up with your parents. How’re they gonna take you running off for a whole week?”

Luke sighed heavily and Alex frowned.

“Well, what if you guys come over starting Friday night?” Alex suggested, because he still wanted to get Reggie away from his parents—away from the constant fighting. “We can just do the weekend.”

“That works,” Bobby shrugged.

Luke was biting his lower lip and frowning, but he nodded eventually. “Yeah, I can probably swing that.” He glanced over at Reggie and offered, “Do you want me to convince him?”

Alex shook his head. “Nah, we’ve got social studies together later. I’ll talk to him then.”

Luke nodded and reluctantly retreated to his seat when the teacher finally managed to shake Reggie, who drooped back to his seat with hunched shoulders, and Christ, Alex just wanted to hug him.

He turned his attention to their teacher though, resolving to corner Reggie and talk to him later.

--------------

OCTOBER 1993 (FRIDAY)

In the end, Reggie had barely required any convincing at all.

That in itself told Alex that the fighting at Reggie’s parents’ place had to be extremely bad. When he asked about Maggie, Reggie revealed that Maggie had been spending the night with different friends each time because Reggie had called up their parents to tell them their mother was sick and they didn’t want to risk Maggie catching it.

Alex hated that Reggie needed to take on that kind of responsibility but found it admirable too.

Eventually, Alex bade his parents goodbye on Friday evening, ignoring just how coolly they treated them, and waited for Reggie and the others to show up. While they wouldn’t be staying the whole weekend—or the rest of the week—like Reggie, Luke and Bobby had both admitted they could use some quality band time that wasn’t spent rehearsing, and had convinced their parents to let them spend Friday and Saturday together.

Reggie showed up exactly twenty-three minutes after Alex’s parents left, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and the bags under his eyes darker and more pronounced than they’d been the previous day, but grinning so brightly that Alex couldn’t help but smile back at him.

“Hey,” he said, stepping back to let Reggie in.

“Hi,” Reggie said, still smiling brightly, waiting until Alex had shut the front door before he walked right up to Alex, dropping his bag unceremonious to the floor and curling his hand around the back of Alex’s neck. Alex barely had a chance to blink before Reggie leaned up onto his toes just a little and kissed him soundly on the lips.

They hadn’t done this in months, not since before Reggie and Ella had started dating, but it was still so very easy to kiss Reggie back and sink into it. He curled his fingers in Reggie’s hair and let Reggie tug him closer by his belt loops until they were pressed together entirely.

Slowly, somewhat reluctantly, he leaned back, although Reggie kept his fingers hooked in his belt loops so Alex couldn’t retreat very far. Reggie looked up at him, green eyes wide, and swallowed thickly. “Okay?” he whispered softly, hopefully.

Alex looked at him intently, tried to think rationally about this, because while they’d done this before dozens of times, Reggie clearly wasn’t doing okay, and Alex didn’t want Reggie to end up doing anything he’d regret later on.

There was, however, no regret anywhere in Reggie’s expression and… and they were eighteen years old, Reggie was his own person, and Alex trusted him.

He trusted him to set his boundaries.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, leaning their foreheads together. “Okay.”

--------

OCTOBER 1993 (SUNDAY)

It’d been nearly three a.m. by the time Luke and Bobby had gone home the previous night and almost four a.m. by the time he and Reggie had stopped talking—and kissing, there had been kissing too—long enough to go to bed themselves.

Unfortunately, Alex’s brain was programmed so that he woke up around eight a.m. at the latest, no matter how late it’d been when he went to sleep, and so here he was.

He guzzled down his coffee, leaning heavily on the counter as he tried to boot up his brain enough to decide what to have for breakfast. It was way more difficult than it reasonably should be.

“You look like you’re thinking way too hard for this time of morning.”

Alex looked up from his cup to find Reggie leaning against the low wall separating the kitchen from the living room in his pajamas, his hair spiked up in gravity defying angles, but the bags under his eyes less pronounced than they’d been on Friday already.

“I was trying to figure out breakfast,” Alex croaked, straightening up a little more.

Reggie yawned and padded into the kitchen, settling on one of the high chairs at the island, blinking lazily. “Are there cornflakes?” He asked.

Alex yawned too. “Probably,” he shrugged, turning to open one of the cupboards, staring into it for a beat too long before he located the box of Coco Puffs. When he turned back, triumphant, the box in his hand, Reggie’s expression had gone from sleepy and barely focused to contemplative and serious, and Alex was so unused to seeing such seriousness on Reggie that he immediately went on alert, nearly dropping the box.

“Reg? You okay?”

Reggie nodded slowly, leaning his chin on his hand as he stared at Alex. “I wanna have sex with you,” he said casually, and Alex did drop the box of cereal then.

“Shit,” Alex breathed, looking down at the mess on the floor before looking back up at Reggie with wide eyes, cheeks burning with what he was sure was a very dark blush, desperately trying to decide which minor disaster to deal with first. The Coco Puffs crunched slightly under his heel when he moved though, and he heaved a sigh before turning to retrieve the dustpan from the cupboard under the sink.

By the time he’d turned back, Reggie had picked up the box of Coco Puffs and was trying—and failing—to contain the spread of Coco Puffs throughout the kitchen.

“You know you can say ‘no’, right?” Reggie said timidly when Alex started sweeping up the spilled cornflakes, looking shyly up at Alex through his eyelashes. “I won’t be mad or anything, I know it’s—” he fell silent and the knot in Alex’s stomach eased off a little.

“Reg,” he sighed, setting down the dustpan and reaching out to rest his hand on Reggie’s arm. “I just—I was surprised. And… you’ve always said you only wanted to sleep with someone when they meant something to you. I don’t want you to do anything you regret.” He swallowed thickly and looked away. “Take it from someone who should’ve waited a little longer.”

He didn’t quite dare to look back up at his best friend, instead busying himself with collecting the final stray Coco Puffs and dropping them onto the dustpan.

“Alex,” Reggie whispered, nudging his fingers against Alex’s jaw until he had to look up. Reggie’s expression was devastatingly earnest and somewhat baffled. “Alex, you’re one of the most important people in my life,” Reggie said seriously. “You’re my best friend. I trust you. You’re never not going to mean something to me. How could I ever regret that?”

And Alex… Alex couldn’t say no to that—but he couldn’t just say yes either.

He got to his feet and emptied the dustpan in the trash before he turned back to Reggie. “It’s not,” he started slowly, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back against the kitchen island, facing Reggie, “that I don’t want to. But… Reg, I want you to be sure.”

Reggie bit down on his lip and purposefully walked up to Alex, taking his face in his hands and pressing their lips together firmly. Alex melted a little, because Reggie was good at this and he could feel Reggie smile against his lips as he wrapped his arms around Alex’s neck. “Just turn off your brain for once,” Reggie told him in a low voice as soon as he’d leaned back, eyes dark and heavy lidded. “If I don’t want to, I’ll tell you.”

“Yeah,” Alex breathed. “Yeah, okay.”

Reggie grinned and then kissed him again, rougher and more passionate and Alex sank into it, because this was… God, being with Reggie was so easy. The next time Reggie pulled away, they were both breathing hard, and Reggie’s fingers were clenched in his hair and Alex was grasping at the back of Reggie’s shirt. “Yeah?” Reggie asked again.

“Yeah,” Alex breathed, a smile spreading across his face. “Yeah.”

And Reggie laughed, relieved and happy, before he leaned in and kissed him again.

--------------

“Is it go—”

Alex groaned loudly and dropped his head forward to rest against Reggie’s shoulder.

“Reg,” he sighed, “I swear to God, if your next words were going to be ‘is it gonna fit’, I will stop and I will kick you.”

Reggie cackled, a high-pitched sound that abruptly turned into a moan when Alex scraped his teeth over his collarbone in retaliation.

-------------

After, when they were breathless and sweaty, both of them on their backs in Alex’s bed, one of Reggie’s legs slung across Alex’s, the sheets tangled around their feet and their clothes scattered randomly on the floor between the kitchen and Alex’s bedroom, Reggie turned his head towards Alex with a smug, satisfied grin and said, “I told you that this was a great idea.”

Alex chuckled breathlessly and threw a hand up over his head, shaking his head in exasperation.

He was vaguely surprised, actually, that the sense of dread that he’d felt when he’d slept with Mike at Bible Camp wasn’t making an appearance now, but then… it made sense too. It was like Reggie had said earlier—they were such important people in each other’s lives, there was no way Alex would look back on this and regret sharing it with Reggie.

“Yeah,” he finally admitted. “You have your moments.”

-------------

FEBRUARY 1994

Luke sat on the couch, playing a lighthearted, easy tune on his guitar as Alex let Maggie guide him around by the hand. She’d been showing him the steps to all the dances she’d learned in her dance classes enthusiastically, as she had been doing for years—it’d become a tradition, by now, for Reggie to pick up Maggie on Wednesday after dance classes and bring her over to the studio, where Alex would entertain her by letting her teach him the ballet moves she was taught.

Luke and Reggie usually ended up playing songs for them, and Bobby would either sulk about band time being spent with Reggie’s little sister or join them and make up songs for Maggie.

Today, Bobby had to work until five though, and Reggie was napping up on the loft, because when he’d turned up with Maggie he’d looked so tired Alex and Luke were both worried he was gonna fall asleep where he stood. They’d ganged up on him and bullied him into taking a nap, and had resolved to keep Maggie occupied for as long as Reggie needed to catch up on some sleep.

He hadn’t been spending nights with Luke or Alex as often anymore, had cited the need to be home to take care of Maggie as the reason why, but Alex suspected that something else was going on too.

He’d tried to ask Reggie about it when they were alone too, however rare those moments were, but Reggie had become increasingly good at diverting Alex’s attention—and Alex wanted to believe that Reggie would come to him or Luke or even Bobby if something was really wrong.

“Alex,” Maggie tugged on his shirt and frowned at him reproachfully. “You’re not paying attention.”

“Yeah, Alex,” Luke chuckled from his spot on the couch. “Pay attention.”

Alex flipped him off before turning back to Maggie, who was pouting at him. “I’m sorry, Mags,” he said sincerely. “What was the next move?”

“A pirouette,” Maggie insisted, pushing at his hip. “You’ve already done that one.”

“Of course I have,” Alex grinned, straightening up and spinning in a circle. “Like that, Lady Margaret?” He asked teasingly, winking at her as Luke laughed.

Maggie wrinkled her nose. “My name’s Maggie, Alex. And you were doing it wrong,” she said bossily, shoving at him lightly. Alex grinned, but let Maggie move him around as she liked, twirling and turning at her command as Luke laughed and tugged on his guitar strings to produce one of the many songs he and Reggie had written for Maggie over the years.

When Maggie had tired herself out, she flopped dramatically on the couch beside Luke and demanded he show her how to play the guitar. She’d already had drumming lessons with Alex last week—while she was definitely enthusiastic, all they’d really accomplished was teaching her how to be very loud—and she seemed determined to learn every instrument the boys knew.

Luke only grinned before moving the guitar over onto Maggie’s lap and carefully positioning her hands on the chords as he explained how to pluck the strings and how to move her fingers.

Alex couldn’t help but smile at the sight—they did look adorable, Luke with a wide grin and Maggie with a tiny furrow in her brow as she looked down at her hands—before he checked his watch. He glanced up to the loft, where he assumed Reggie was still passed out cold, and then back down at his watch.

He didn’t think Reggie’s parents would even notice if either of their kids didn’t show up, but he didn’t want Reggie to get in trouble for keeping Maggie out too late either.

When he looked up again, Luke caught his eye and Alex could tell the same thought had occurred to Luke. He helped Maggie settle comfortably on the couch with the guitar before he got up and approached Alex. “Do we wake him up?” he said in a low voice, glancing up at the loft.

Alex heaved a sigh. “I really don’t want to.” He glanced towards Maggie, who was still happily plucking on the guitar strings, before returning his gaze to Luke. “You’ve noticed, right? He’s been off, lately. I thought it was getting better, but—”

“Yeah,” Luke sighed. “Yeah, I noticed.” He crossed his arms over his chest and chewed on his lower lip. “He won’t talk to me either, it’s driving me nuts.” He glanced back up at the loft, then at Maggie and then finally back at Alex. “I can walk Maggie home. Can you stay here with him? My mom’s been on my case about school and staying out, I can’t—”

“Yeah,” Alex nodded. “Yeah, no worries, I’ll stick around.”

Luke smiled tightly and clasped his shoulder before he turned back to Maggie and hustled her into packing up her things into the sparkling purple and blue backpack they’d all gotten her for her last birthday. When Luke had wrangled her into putting her shoes and coat back on, she ran over to Alex and threw her arms around his torso.

“Bye Alex,” she squeaked, and Alex couldn’t help but grin.

God, he loves this kid.

“Bye Mags,” he grinned, running a hand through her hair soothingly. “See you next week, ‘kay?”

“Yes,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I’ll have new steps to teach you.” She squeezed her arms around him one more time before she let go and turned to Luke, grabbing the guitarist’s hand. Luke grinned at her before he looked back at Alex, raising his eyebrows in silent question.

You got this?

Alex nodded lightly. He knew Luke didn’t know just how close he and Reggie were, he knew that they probably should’ve told him about whatever the hell it was that they were doing a long time ago, but… but it’d been going on for so long that it felt weirder to bring it up now than to not say anything.

Luke exhaled and then smiled. “Okay,” he said. “okay, let’s go, squirt.”

Alex grinned at him and Maggie as they walked out, closing the door behind them. He waited for their voices to fade away before he sighed, kicked off his shoes and climbed up to the loft.

Reggie was sprawled out on his stomach in the middle of the bed they’d built themselves with a multitude of pillows and blankets and a shitty little mattress, face buried in his pillow and the blankets wrapped around his legs. He was snoring lightly, and Alex couldn’t help but smile at the sight of his best friend sleeping soundly for the first time in God knew how long.

He climbed into the bed too, laying back against one of the pillows next to Reggie and closed his eyes.  

Reggie wasn’t the only one dealing with a… tense situation at home. Alex knew his parents were waiting for an opportunity to kick him out, waiting for a reason they could do so without embarrassing themselves in front of their church friends, because God forbid it became common knowledge that they had a gay son.

He expected he had a few more months at most—they’d likely expect him out as soon as he had his high school diploma in hand.

He didn’t really mind.

He was tired of pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

It took him a few moments to realize that Reggie had stopped snoring and another second to notice that the other boy was stirring beside him. “Hey,” he said quietly when Reggie’s eyes—barely visible behind his messy hair—blinked open slowly.

“Hi,” Reggie breathed. “Where’s Maggie?”

“Luke walked her home,” Alex explained, rolling onto his side so he was facing Reggie. “We didn’t wanna wake you up. You looked like you needed the rest.”

Reggie blinked again and then whispered, “Thanks.”

They lay in silence for a little longer before Reggie huffed and rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. The conflicted, confused expression had returned as soon as he woke up properly, and Alex hated seeing the expression on Reggie’s face.

“Reg,” he sighed. “What’s going on? Are your parents—”

“No,” Reggie shook his head. “No, not… not more than usual.”

Alex frowned and reached out to rest his hand on Reggie’s arm gently. “Then what is it? We can all tell something’s bothering you, Reggie. We wanna help.”

Reggie snorted a derisive laugh, a sound entirely unlike him, and shook off Alex’s hand. “Not with this you don’t. You especially, Alex, trust me.” Alex blinked at him in shock for a second before he sat up, eyeing Reggie contemplatively.

“Reg, come on,” he cajoled. “You know there isn’t anything you can do that’d push me away.”

Reggie shook his head again. “You say that now.”

“And I mean it,” Alex insisted. “Reggie—”

“I’m in love with Luke.”

Reggie sat up abruptly, looking wild and upset as he said it, and something in Alex’s chest twisted painfully. He wasn’t sure if it was because Reggie just confessed to being in love with the only person Alex had ever been in love with or because he’d been hoping, somewhere deep down, that Reggie would’ve said “I’m in love with you,” instead.

He wasn’t even sure if that’s what he wanted.

But.

But.

It would’ve been easier, wouldn’t it, if they’d just be in love with each other?

Why couldn’t things just be easy, for once?

When he looked back at Reggie, the other boy was staring at him with wide, watery green eyes, and it didn’t matter how Alex felt about this. “Reg,” he sighed. “I’m not gonna hate you for falling in love with Luke.” He managed a smile and admitted, “Out of everyone, I absolutely understand how easy it is to fall in love with that dumbass.”

Reggie exhaled shakily, relieved, and then threw himself in Alex’s arms.

Alex folded his arms around him and held on tight—he wasn’t sure what to say to make Reggie feel better about this, because while he had experience in getting over Luke, he wasn’t sure if that’s what Reggie wanted at all, or if he’d try to talk to Luke about it.

Either way, Alex was going to make sure he was there for Reggie.

Whatever he needed.

--------------

I also sketched Alex and Reggie kissing (the first time after Reggie and Ella break up). Check it out here.

--------------

READ IT HERE:

Start from the beginning:

Becoming a Memory, Becoming a Treasure:

(1)  (2)  (3)  (4)  (5)  (6)

Unfinished Business:

(1) (2)

Or read it HERE (BaMBaT) or HERE (UB) on AO3 :D

[ryanccoleman]

“All goodness is in jeopardy”: Dead Girls at the End of the Decade

“As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.”

This essay was originally set to be published in December 2019 on Much Ado About Cinema, to coincide with the premiere of Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin.

There is a film that premieres today, the last month of the decade, called Knives and Skin. Directed by Jennifer Reeder, the film depicts the surreal transformation a community undergoes when one of its own, a teenage girl named Carolyn Harper, goes missing and later shows up dead. Knives and Skin may in fact be this decade’s last work of art to employ a narrative device come lately to be known as the “dead girl trope.” This term refers to the use in story of this conceit—a beautiful, young, presumably innocent, usually white girl has gone missing or wound up dead (almost always murdered), plunging the incredulous family/community/town surrounding her into chaos and calling a charismatic detective to chase after answers.

Much lately has been made of the dead girl trope—researching its origins, examining its variations, interrogating its largely uncontested whiteness and cisness. Of course stories of dead and missing women have been around as long as women have died and gone missing, but since the early ‘90s the trope has clogged up the culture, and even moreso in the past decade. Every day we are inundated with stories of women battered, disappeared, manipulated, and killed. We cannot afford to be flip or numb, to treat these stories as just that—fiction, as anything separate from the culture they have a mutually parasitic relationship with. The most important question people have begun to ask of the dead girl trope is whether it has any capacity to attack the misogyny it depicts and uproot the racism and transphobia which support it. Or does recycling the trope again and again, even by creators with the most altruistic intentions, do anything other than entrench the idea that violence is the logical conclusion to the question of a woman?

As the final installment in a decade long saga of women on the verge, how does Knives and Skin measure up? To answer this question we have to do two things. We have to understand the real world stakes, and we have to go back to where this bad dream began.

“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.” -Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.

In the world, women are abducted, disappeared, if returned at all returned in bruised condition, mass graves are discovered, long buried reports of abuse are painfully unearthed, and women are killed. In Nigeria, in 2014, 276 schoolgirls abducted from the town of Chibok by Boko Haram and driven hundreds of miles into ungoverned territory. Five years on, 112 are still missing. Bereft parents have died waiting for their daughters to be returned. “Even in a hundred years,” one mother told a reporter from Al Jazeera this year, “we will keep believing that our daughters will return home.”

In Canada, after years of fierce organizing from within indigenous communities, the government finally launched an inquiry into the murder and disappearance of thousands of indigenous women stretching back decades. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, as it’s called, attribute it to "state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.” Indigenous leaders name it: genocide.

In our own country, thousands of immigrant women are detained, many having fled their homes due to domestic violence, state-sponsored sexual violence and femicide only to wind up in dehumanizing internment, their children confiscated from them like personal effects. A rising number of mass shooters explicitly name the hatred of women as a call to action, their patterns of domestic abuse (86% of the 22 mass shooters analyzed in a recent Mother Jones report had demonstrable records) shored up too late. Trans women and gender non-conforming afab (assigned female at birth) people face an epidemic of transphobic, misogynistic, often racist violence from intimate partners and total strangers alike. Violence in the street is entrenched by the indifference of the state—of the 22 trans women murdered this year to date, 18 cases remain unsolved.

In the culture, the flood of women’s bodies rises from our ankles to our thighs. Scanning best of the decade lists—it’s easy to see if you’re looking, and even if you’re not, it’s hard to ignore—dead and missing girls are everywhere. Though the carnage is not distributed evenly across formats—there is for example a remarkable lack of dead girl stories in film when compared with the superabundance in television and podcasts—the sheer volume is staggering.

Podcasting emerged as the most exciting new storytelling medium this decade, transforming from local radio curio to culture-spanning phenomenon attracting big tech money and A-list celebrity buy-in. The medium, built on the backs of stories of dead and missing women, has proven unable to go on without them. The show that kickstarted the podcast revolution was Serial, a solemn journalistic inquiry into the unsolved murder of a teenage girl. Serial set off a true crime boom as much as it set a template for much of the medium. Though few shows have applied the same rigor to their dead, damaged, or missing subjects, none have needed to in order to become wildly popular. Simply put, there is no dead woman that eludes the reach of the podcaster, and without dead women, there would be no podcasts as we know them.

Finally, my god, television. It’s not that a number of the best shows of the decade centered on the story of a dead or missing girl; there were in fact so many they constituted a thematic center for the entire medium this decade—The Killing, The Fall, Broadchurch, Pretty Little Liars, How to Get Away With Murder, Making A Murderer, Top of the Lake, True Detective, The Night Of, and The Jinx, to name some of the heavy hitters.

One more show waded into the morass this decade, and most notably—it was the reason for all this mess in the first place.

David Lynch came back to television after 25 years with Twin Peaks: The Return, a third season to his legendary 1990 television series. By all accounts, those original eight episodes launched the beautiful dead girl craze we’re still in the vicious throes of. The entire Twin Peaks universe—Lynch and Mark Frost’s surprise smash first season, the meandering second season in which ABC rescinded creative control from Lynch because he refused to identify the dead girl in question’s killer, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch’s controversial 1992 feature prequel which features Laura Palmer, dead girl, as an alive protagonist rather than a silent mystery, the new season, and all the apocryphal literary spinoffs—centers on the beautiful, murdered, porcelain-white body of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, washed up on a riverbank in the pilot episode.

Every piece of writing on the dead girl trope addresses Lynch, if not exclusively, then in a fulsome manner. Alice Bolin, who published a comprehensive book of essays on the trope last year called Dead Girls: Surviving an American Obsession, first engaged with the subject in a 2014 essay on Twin Peaks for the Los Angeles Review of Books. And indeed, nearly every review of Knives and Skin I encountered while researching for this essay references Twin Peaks as an obvious ancestor to Reeder’s film.

Why? The aesthetic comparisons are evident—moody score, weird acting, woodsy small town setting, beautiful missing, and then dead, girl. But the comparison is broader than that. It’s almost compulsory, unavoidable. The impact Twin Peaks had on culture is impossible to understate. But the depth to which the twin images of Laura Palmer’s ghostly, smiling, peroxide and permed homecoming photo and her dead, drowned, blue-faced and plastic-wrapped crime scene photo, which the show flashes to in alternation, have seeped into our core imagining of what women fundamentally are in life and in death has absolutely not been reckoned with.

This Knives and Skin grasps. The film’s Laura Palmer, called Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley), behaves much in the same way. In her first and only alive scene, she and a boy drive up to the shore of a lake at night. Without knowing anything about the film the first time I watched it, I tensed, anticipating exactly what ended up happening. Carolyn and the boy, Andy (Ty Olwin), walk from the car to the lakeside, silhouetted in the glare of the headlights. Before kissing, the two bicker about Carolyn’s glasses, whether they should stay on or be taken off. Andy says “keep ‘em on, I don’t care.” Carolyn responds: “I do care. I actually don’t want to see what’s about to happen.” The next time anyone in the film sees Carolyn, she’s dead.

If Knives and Skin does anything perfectly it’s this. The Laura Palmers of fiction and the Laura Palmers in fact, all around the world, have fused, like the twin images in Twin Peaks—alive: radiant, dead: serene, and in both cases speechless, compliant. It recalls Maggie Nelson’s question after seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

An avatar of young womanhood as always arcing toward extermination has emerged with a juggernaut’s relentlessness out of the scrum of the past three decades of dead girl TV. The characters in Knives and Skin live in this world. Carolyn Harper knows what happens to Carolyn Harpers. She doesn’t want to see “what’s about to happen” because she’s powerless to prevent it. The tagline of the film, “Have you seen Carolyn Harper?” lands as a joke by the end of the film. Carolyn Harpers are all we ever see.

Knives and Skin doesn’t so much rage with righteous injustice over the unfair and unthinkable death of one young girl as it does turn the palpable, ten-ton heavy despair of unfair and unthinkable death as the condition of young girls back on the viewer. “You guys doing okay,” Carolyn’s mother asks three of her daughters classmates who’ve brought her condolence casseroles. Carolyn’s body has just been discovered. An ice cream cake made for her birthday melts into a pale pool of sludge on the table before her. “Yes,” they say, emotionless. “You lying?” They nod again, “yes.”

Reeder has taken us back to the world of Twin Peaks in a time where dead girls are taken for granted, taken as givens. They still, however, even in this most melancholy meditation, destroy communities and upend lives. I’ve said that Knives and Skin doesn’t rage with injustice over the death of Carolyn Harper. But should it?

The reference point that floated into my head while watching Knives and Skin the first time, that I couldn’t shake the second time was not Twin Peaks, but its much maligned and misunderstood prequel, Fire Walk With Me. Lynch made Fire Walk With Me after Bob Iger and ABC tried to stage manage the surprise success of season 1 by forcing him to reveal Laura’s killer. “‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ was a question that we did not ever really want to answer,” Lynch later told TV Guide. Season 2, largely without Lynch, was as a result baffling, anticlimactic and sensational in all the wrong places. The show was cancelled less than two years after debuting. Fire Walk With Me was a vengeance quest, Lynch’s intent to bring closure and justice to the story of a Pandora he had never intended to let out of the box.

Fire Walk With Me is brutal. Its examination of trauma is surgical, uncompromising, and to the bone. For the majority of the film the camera is glued to Laura, who walks, talks, dances, laughs, gobbles like a turkey, screams, cries, and eventually dies. As a spectator you are shoved in close proximity to Laura. Unlike the silent, pliant Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks, Sheryl Lee’s Laura in Fire Walk With Me is fully alive, every fantasy concocted about her by the characters in season 1 as well as the fans in the audience is in sharp, contested relief. She feels everything done to her immediately, unbearably, and so do you.

Many critics hated Fire Walk With Me, and it was a commercial flop. The film was booed at Cannes. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Everything about David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a deception. It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” In a discussion on the dead girl trope for The New Republic, Sarah Marshall offered a remark that speaks directly to the film’s icy reception: “a dead woman is utterly incapable of offering up even the most cursory contradiction to the narratives that entomb her as readily as any casket.” Fire Walk With Me was one huge, bleeding contradiction.

The original bad dream, the dead girl’s nightmare we still haven’t woken up from was actually unpacked all those years ago, just months after it all began. Laura’s killer was her father, Leland. Her father had been sexually abusing her since she was a child, her mother knew, and within hours of Laura finally perceiving this fact in its full reality, he killed her. All of the weirdness, the quirkiness, and horror of Twin Peaks, along with the enduring, eroticized, and profitable trope it popularized emanates from this very personal, achingly common story of childhood sexual abuse. Is it any wonder people hated it? Or why the Laura Palmer of the original series is the figure we’ve chosen to preserve, pressed flat into the pages of culture forever?

“All goodness is in jeopardy,” the Log Lady warns Laura before entering the roadhouse where her life will begin to tailspin before its eventual crash. This is the essence and the power of the dead girl story. Though we have erected a world that is impossible for women to navigate unscathed, we continue to vest them with the symbolic responsibility of innocence. As if Laura’s singular life was the first domino in a chain that led to the unraveling of the entire world. But wasn’t it? 

Many have pointed out the racial and gender-specific freighting of the dead girl trope. Could Laura Palmer have been Latinx? How would the movie change if Carolyn Harper had been African-American, or trans? The answer on every level, symbolic and real, is drastically. What these depictions unconsciously reflect is the priceless value of white life. Imagine an entire town shutting down operations to mourn and search for a missing black trans woman? We can’t, because when trans women are murdered the only efforts to organize and demonstrations of rage come from within queer communities, often queer communities of color, who have historically adverse relationships with law enforcement. Black women face an escalated threat of violence due to the interlocking forces of white supremacy and misogyny. Yet the disappearance and death of black women and other women of color have historically never been met with the same uproar as with white women who meet the same ends.

It’s not that Knives and Skin is a failure because it seems more interested in the aesthetic allure of a dead girl than in drumming up indignation for the circumstances that configured her death. And it’s not that Twin Peaks was a failure because it prioritized white and cis tragedy over all others. Both Reeder and Lynch have done something profound when it comes to thinking and feeling through trauma, sexual violence, and grief. What remains important is to ask is whether each successive appearance of the dead girl trope is amounting to something, not on the individual but on the collective level. As Bolin has written, “It becomes harder and harder to subvert something that’s been used so many times.”

Have we seemed to make much progress from Fire Walk With Me to Knives and Skin? Honestly, no. But have the horrors real world misogynistic, racist, transphobic violence ceased? Even if rates of violent crime are in fact down in the United States, one disappearance or death like the kinds depicted in Lynch and Reeder’s work would be too many. The most successful iterations of the dead girl trope have grappled with these tough, interceding concerns, like race—consider Top of the Lake and The Night Of. The least successful amount merely to prodding a dead woman’s body with a stick just to see how it feels—consider every episode of My Favorite Murder. The most that I can hope is that future creators considering employing the dead girl trope take the long view of all that came before and ask, is it worth it? Does the dead girl in my story deserve this? What kind of justice, in fact, does she deserve?

copyright © 2019 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[midnight-in-town]

Are there manga/anime you didn't expect you like it, but you did?

Hello! Haha, omg, actually I hardly ever start a series if something in the summary or the art style doesn’t intrigue me, so I always go in because I’m interested in a thing I read or saw about it.

However, there are definitely series I didn’t expect to like as much as I first thought I would. The series I blog about the most (be it manga, animes or games) are generally such cases of “wow I didn’t expect to like it so much and now I’m doomed forever”. xD

I’m supposing you are looking for some examples, so here we go for the ones I remember the most vividly:

Ace Attorney

I received the first game as an unexpected gift when I was a teen, even though I knew nothing of the story or its characters. 

Played the first case, was like ‘uh ok it’s nice and funny’ then things start to kick in in case 2 (’spirit mediums????’) and until the end of the game, which had me yelling everywhere in excitement considering how good cases 4 and 5 were. Then I played JFA, loved it obviously and T&T was not yet out in English by then. 

That being said, it only took the first game to dive pretty far into the well crafted world that is Ace Attorney, but I always enjoyed how the universe expands with each game.

And today, aside from the DGS prequel games which I haven’t played, I know the series by heart! It’s my first Internet fandom and still a favorite: I love how the games evolved (even if the first trilogy remains my fave), I love how good the character developments in these games are, I love the plot twists, the slight supernatural powers, etc. 

Still a fave to this day and probably 5ever! Also these games are the reason why & how I became fluent in English and, just for that, they changed my life quite permanently, haha. xD

The Suzumiya Haruhi series

My first anime! 

Kinda related to Ace Attorney actually because, at some point in the Suzumiya Haruhi anime they make a parody of AA as they’re solving a “murder case”, and that’s how I discovered the series (as I was browsing about AA on youtube).  

So I started watching it with no real idea in mind, but as it turned out, I loved how awkward it is, haha! The movie (an adaptation of the fourth light novel) is also my absolute favorite as far as animated works go. 

UDDUP

My first manga! And quite a great one at that! I remember finding the first volumes in a bookstore, thinking “wow the covers are so pretty?”, which is why I started reading it, haha.

Thanks to it I came to discover manga, so I’ll always love it a lot, just for that.

What I enjoyed the most though is how realistic and well-built the universe is. The cast of characters is also quite diversified, which is not something you find often and a very enjoyable fact. You can read more about it here and here.

Berserk

I already expanded on how I came to discover it here. :)

Blade of the Immortal

Ah, my latest favorite discovery! I had seen panels and screenshots of it passing by on my dash for years, but the summary had never struck me as that interesting. How wrong I was, haha.

Then someone I follow was asked about it and answered something about how “it was too violent” for them despite how enjoyable the story was. So I thought “hey maybe I should check this out”, which I did. 

I only have one advice: go read it!! It’s truly a masterpiece on the level of Berserk or Urasawa Naoki’s Monster!

Pierre Bottero’s Multiverse

He is a French author, so I doubt you’ve heard of him. He used to be quite famous in France in the fantastic/fantasy realm of fiction writers. 

His multiverse is made of 4 different trilogies and a stand alone book, which was supposed to be an introduction to a final trilogy tying everything together, but then he died in a car accident.

These books are probably my favorite book series ever. I read the first one thinking “okay it’s good but” and then I went to read the rest of the first trilogy and I absolutely loved it. 

I didn’t know back then that he intended on developing his ideas into multiple books, so I ended up following his book releases for years quite faithfully, until his death actually. May he rest in peace. <3

Katekyo Hitman Reborn

One of these series I started because I was bored & everyone was yelling that it was super good. 

I checked the anime for a few episodes, ended up bored out of my mind and dropping it for a few months. Then I came across some characters’ design (the Varia’s to be precise) and I was here like ‘??? where are these characters in the anime?’ so I went back to see more of the anime from where I had stopped.

As it turns out, the episode I had stopped on was quite good and I ended up watching it for all the laughs that it caused me, until the actual plot kicked in after 20 episodes or so. xD

Anyway, there was a reason everyone was yelling it was super good despite how peculiar it is at times, haha, and I ended up being no exception and drawn to its charms. x)

Avatar: the last Airbender

Ahhh, well, this is one series I discovered rather late! I was away on vacation with some friends and we were discussing stuff from our childhood that we still liked today, when this one friend started to mention ATLA.

And the thing is, I remembered watching some TV episodes but I couldn’t envision that this was a series with a particular or well-defined plot, because it left me no impression at all as a kid. 

But my friend was quite eager about how good it was and our other friend was watching LOK at the time (without knowing about ATLA) so they both made me want to check what ATLA truly was like. 

I ended up watching the whole thing a few weeks after in, like, two or three days, without being able to stop screaming about it, haha. :))

There you go Anon. :) I actually have many more examples, because I hardly ever know what to truly expect whenever I start a series. The MO is: the more it surprises me, the more I tend to love it!

Have a nice weekend!

[rosecolouredash]

Displacement ; Hockey!Cashton

Summary: In physics, the term refers to an object’s overall change in position. In psychoanalysis, it is the unconscious transfer of an intense emotion from one object to another.

Warnings: A blend of softness and angst for your reading pleasure.

Notes: Here it is my friends, the next part to Momentum and Collision. I don’t think I’ll never not get weepy from all the messages and asks about this lil series. Keep your eyes peeled for more (did someone say prequel? No?? Just me???) because let’s face it, I’m not ready to let this au and hockey!cashton go just yet.

It was a Sunday morning when you opened your eyes from slumber, a thoughtful look on your face. You had dreamt about Ashton and the days prior and since he’s come home to your shared apartment from the hospital.

That was over a week now.

Shifting your gaze forward, your eyes were met by the sleeping visage of your boyfriend, the captain of the Timberwolves hockey team. He was still wrapped up in his mind and in his dreams. You took a moment to study him. The comforter you shared was pushed halfway down his waist, revealing the black t-shirt he wore to bed. His hair was a tousled mess, most likely due to the movement he made during sleep. You had the urge to run your fingers through his bed head but decided against it; not wanting to wake the second sleeping boy who’s tanned arms held you around your torso.

Calum was also fast asleep. Turning your head, you gazed upon your other boyfriend and envied the way his lashes lightly kissed his caramel skin. His pouty lips were slightly parted as even breaths escaped them.

You frowned when you thought back to when Ashton got hurt and how erratic Calum’s breathing was then, compared to now. Luke shared with you - in private - how he feared his best friend might have passed out from a lack of oxygen when they had checked on their unconscious captain after he got hit.

Mindful of Calum’s arms encircling you, you turned onto your side so that you could fully face the boy. You reached up and lightly traced his cheek with the pad of your thumb. He let out a soft sigh which made you cease your movements. You smiled when he unconsciously pulled you closer. When you repeated your actions, they earned you a flutter of eyelids and for your stare to be met by warm brown eyes.

“Good morning sweetheart,” he murmured, sleep heavy in his voice.

“Good morning,” you said in return, lifting your head up to plant a delicate kiss on his nose.

He pulled back a little and then gave you a peck on the lips.

“Ash still asleep?”

You turned your head while Calum looked over to the other side of the bed. The two of you watched the steady rise and fall of Ashton’s chest.

“Looks like it,” you deemed, gazing back at Calum.

“Good.”

For lack of a better word, Ashton has had trouble sleeping since the incident.

“It’s like our roles have reversed.”

At the comment, the look Calum gave you was almost apologetic.

Ashton was the early-riser between you three or at least, that used to be the case. It never mattered whether your two boys had hockey in the morning or not. The captain was always up and ready to greet his sweetheart and his soulmate with a kiss and a smile. Nowadays, you or Calum or sometimes you both - like now - woke up before him. At first, you were confused at the sudden change in your boyfriend’s sleeping patterns but ultimately blamed it on Ashton’s adjustment to coming home from staying at the hospital for a couple of days.

You and Calum continued a conversation in hushed tones to allow your boyfriend the sleep he deserved. Unknowingly, you both missed the slight crease in Ashton’s brow and the frown that graced his face before it vanished just as quickly as it appeared.

—

You didn’t remember how the dispute even started.

Calum and Ashton had come home one afternoon, from practice, the latter frustrated for some reason. The defenseman had disappeared into the kitchen to grab himself a glass of water which left you to tend to Ashton. Your questions about his day were innocent enough but the captain’s responses were cut and dry.

You hadn’t thought anything of it.

At one point, something in Ashton just snapped.

For as long as you’ve known him, Ashton has never yelled at you. Not like that.

He regretted it, immediately; the volume at which his voice had taken to speak with you.

In a split second, your face had shown fear.

Fear for Ashton.

Fear of Ashton.

Before he could come forward to offer you comfort and a sincere apology, Calum had reappeared.

He stepped between you two and you gripped at your boyfriend’s arm while he stared down at your other.

“That was uncalled for,” Calum spat. Ashton visibly winced at his harsh tone.

“What’s up with you lately?”

Practice was particularly brutal today, to the point where the two were almost at each other’s throats over a disagreement on a play. This happened frequently, as of late. Both Michael and Luke were aware that Calum was still hung up over the fact that he let Ashton get hurt in his presence. Now, whenever they discussed plays on the ice, the alternate captain would find any means to not include Ashton in them, especially if he needed to get physical.

Ashton, on the other hand, was worse for wear. The lack of proper sleep and the constant thrum of his head made him highly irritable. Not knowing how to cope, Ashton took it out on the team; barking out orders and drills like a sergeant which was so unlike his usual level-headed captaincy.

“It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore.” A frown graced the dark-haired boy’s face, his eyes pleading, “like we don’t even know who you are anymore.”

The apartment went silent as Ashton looked between his soulmate and his sweetheart. He let out a deep sigh, turned around and made his way towards door.

Both you and Calum called out to him, in a panic, to stay.

He paused when his hand reached the doorknob, “I’m sorry for yellin’ at you, sweets.”

You peeked up at him from behind Calum.

Hazel eyes reflected the sadness in his voice.

“Just give me some time, alone.”

With that, he left.

—

You and Calum had settled into bed for the night; Ashton still nowhere to be found. You had called Michael and Luke in hopes that they’d heard from him but to no avail. They hadn’t seen him since practice that afternoon.

When you heard the jingle of keys and the door to the apartment open, you and Calum shared a look. Not sure with what was to transpire, the two of you positioned yourselves so that you faced away from the bedroom door and feigned sleep.

Ashton was heard as he walked down the hallway leading to your shared room. The door made a click as he opened it. Light from the hall filtered into your mostly dark room, safe for the moonlight already streaming in through the window. You could only imagine how Ashton looked as he peeked his head inside.

“You two awake?” He whispered.

Neither of you made a sound.

Ashton chuckled softly, the sound of it a little bitter and sad, as he opened the door fully to step into the room. He made his way over to the foot of the bed and sat on the edge; he faced away from you and Calum.

“I’m such a coward,” Ashton murmured.

You frowned at the statement as your boyfriend continued to talk as he was unaware of yours and Calum’s listening ears.

“I couldn’t admit it,” he continued.

Calum rested his chin on top your head, concerned about what they were about to hear.

“I think there’s something wrong with me.”

You felt yourself and Calum go rigid but still made no sign to let Ashton know that you were awake.

“I know the doctors had cleared me but—” Ashton put his head in his hands, “—there’s still this constant pain in my head and nothing I do can fix it.”

It made perfect sense. The change in his sleep schedule or sometimes lack thereof. His moodiness - on and off the ice.

“Not telling you two, that was my first mistake.”

Ashton would never want to cause you or Calum unnecessary worry. He thought he could deal with this himself but he was scared and it was getting to the point where he needed your help.

“I know Cal’s still berating himself over the ordeal—”

Calum’s grip on you tightened. The guilt that weighed down his chest was ever-present.

“—and that our sweetheart’s been dreamin’ about it too.”

Your heart sank in your chest as your boyfriend voiced this truth. Ashton must have realized this whenever he was stuck awake, late at night, because you often mumbled in your sleep.

“What’s more painful than this damn head injury is knowing that I’m inadvertently hurting the two most important people in my life.”

After his confession, the room went silent.

You were still collecting your thoughts when Calum had another plan, in mind.

“You’re an idiot.”

Ashton froze in place, then turned his body towards what he thought were his two sleeping lovers.

Sitting up, Calum turned on the bedside lamp.

You also sat up, not being able to hide that you both had been wide awake the whole time. The sting of tears creeped at the corner of your eyes as you nodded, “if you think allowing yourself to suffer this alone was the right choice, for us—” you started, gesturing between yourself and Calum, “—then you’re gravely mistaken.”

Before Ashton could respond, you and Calum crawled over to sit on either side of him.

“We’re going to figure this out,” Calum reassured as he took ahold one of Ashton’s hands.

“Together, if you let us,” you added, leaning your head on your captain’s shoulder.

Ashton was rendered speechless though a warm feeling came over him as his soulmate and sweetheart discussed what they were to do next; the first being a trip to the doctor’s the next morning.

—

It was another Sunday morning a couple of weeks later that you opened your eyes from sleep - a peaceful look on your face. For once, you had a dreamless night. Out of habit, you shifted your gaze forward and were stunned to find beautiful hazel eyes staring back at you, lovingly.

With a sweet smile and a quick peck on your lips, he greeted you.

“Good morning, sweets.”

Tagged: @irwinkitten @calpops @rosecoloredash @lilbabycalum @gorgeouslygrace @rainingcal @casht0n-hoodwin @lockthisheartinchains @americanhorrorstudies @lovableah

[morebedsidebooks]

Tokyo Babylon by CLAMP

An early work from Japanese group CLAMP, who celebrate 30 years in professional comics this year, Tokyo Babylon– A Save Tokyo City Story is at least to me one of their most memorable works. At the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century this supernatural comic focusing on 16-year-old Subaru Sumeragi, his twin sister Hokuto, plus 25-year-old Seishiro Sakurazuka, and tapping into the onmyôji revival in fiction of the late 80s, fashion influences of militaristic dress and Japanese idols or actresses, alongside the unstable social climate of the time is one of my favourite co-authored titles.

Tokyo Babylon first reached English speaking audiences via a two-episode OVA in 1994-95. Released a few times since I own a North American DVD from Central Park Media.

As adaptations go either OVA episode stand fairly alone. The song Kiss Kiss, used both in and as an ending theme of the first installment, written in English by Hideaki Matsuoka is still a tune from the first beats that I can endlessly start singing the lyrics.

The second installment though may be the stronger. I remember it most for animating a particular foreboding scene from the third chapter of the comic.

For the comic to be translated it would still take 10 years after the OVA, in 2004 the US branch of Tokyopop releasing the seven individual volumes. Tokyopop USA would also bring over the celebratory 15th anniversary CLAMP no Kiseki collection. Volume 3 dedicated to Tokyo Babylon, Subaru and Seishiro even getting chess pieces that were releases with each book. (Seishiro came with vol 4.)

Then in 2013 Darkhorse, who relicensed much of CLAMP’s catalogue, would release two deluxe collections of the series with translation by Ray Yoshimoto, Alexis Kirsch, and Carol Fox. It’s the preferred edition for the new translation, Carl Gustav Horn also editor. Plus, colour images many particularly striking since CLAMP made special effort and uses primarily red, blue, black and yellow.

Greeted as an early publication with m/m themes (serialized in Japan in Wings) and prequel to the unfinished X/1999 series, Tokyo Babylon is in one-word darkness. Not just in the nighttime shadows despite the lights of a megalopolis like Tokyo, ominous media headlines, or occult pestilences plaguing its residents but, human hearts. A deep, demanding darkness. From material grudges, the harshness and isolation of life in a huge city, suicide, rape, child murders and abuse, bullying, cults, animal cruelty, sex work, prejudice and illness all with a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere of the end times invoking back to Babylon in Mesopotamia it is Subaru’s job and fate to face it all as a talented occult practitioner and next generation head of his renowned family.

Though it is Subaru’s twin sister Hokuto who lightens everything both encouraging, chiding and teasing her brother while coming up with daring clothing ensembles, looking forward to sales at departments stores and still loving her aerosol hairspray even if it’s contributing to destroying the environment. (Yes, CFCs better known as Freon are actually a thing. Which is why there is this agreement called the Montreal Protocol and some chemists won a Nobel Prize back in the day. Along with HCFC’s and HFCs addressed in it not being harmless either. My hairspray today uses a respectively environmentally benign propellant with a low Global Warming Potential value regulated by VOC standards for example.) At best Hokuto is importantly dissimilar to Subaru, embracing self and living life to the fullest holding her own principles. At worst a mimic of a kind of shallow woman invoking a certain type of fangirl amusing herself sometimes over the love life of her brother. (Many characters really can’t help distracting themselves when it comes to Subaru.) Though she actually has sincere and heartfelt reasons for playing matchmaker.

And of course, that brings us to Seishiro. Tokyo Babylon stands out in part and likely is remembered for his relationship with Subaru. Love confessions, dates, first played as jokes soon espoused as serious, then revealing much more. The series X is where this culminates, including flashbacks and elaboration these characters there years on in the storyline from events of Tokyo Babylon. But Tokyo Babylon isn’t a love story, at least not in a way that word should signify.

For all its supernatural trappings at its heart Tokyo Babylon wrestles with the everyday. Every day terrible things happen. Things that should not, or that we didn’t expect to happen to us or, to those we know. It poses questions about strength and empathy, when each experience is nevertheless individual how we might harm, or help. And the wounds that are profound and lasting. I would say this is my favourite story by CLAMP, despite its ability to make me cry at more than one point. Or maybe that’s exactly why— one can find something cathartic in its pages.

 Tokyo Babylon by CLAMP is currently OOP in English, Darkhorse Omnibus ISBN# 9781616551162, 9781616551896

Along with the OOP seven-volume edition and 12 volume Clamp no Kiseki from Tokyopop USA

Likewise, the OVA English releases are also OOP

Too, a live-action adaptation titled Tokyo Babylon 1999 from 1993 draws on material from the third and fourth volume of the comic. First among CLAMP’s works to receive such treatment the film has become an obscurity though and was never released in English.

X/1999 by CLAMP is available in English in print and digital, translated by Lillian Olsen, six collected omnibus volumes from Viz Media, recommended for older teens

[dp-pastandpresent]

Clockwork: Origins of Darkness, Ch. 4

Prequel story to “Past and Present’.  You don’t have to read P&P to read this, but it will help.  

Description:   We all know Clockwork is the ‘Master of Time’, but how did he get that way? And why is he so obsessed with a certain prophecy? AU.

–

Clockwork was spending all of his time searching for the moment that the boy would pass on and then return to Earth, and yet all he could find were the moments he had witnessed over and over. The bits in the '60s with him and the girl sick in bed, and the moments in the 2000s with the ice cream.

'Why can't I see more! What happens BETWEEN these two scenes?'

Finally, one day, it happened.

He hadn't scanned the "real-time" channels in a while, having only been focused on what was and could be. But today, some instinct in him told him he needed to do a scan.

While he had been alive for centuries, the real time on Earth was the mid '60s, which happened to be the time that one Daniel Fenton was going through high school.

Clockwork had been so obsessed with the moments he had already seen that he had forgotten that these moments were actually coming up in Earth time. It wasn't until he started doing his scan that he spotted something he hadn't before – a new moment with the boy.

There he was, young Daniel Fenton, about age 18, sitting on a pink bed with the girl that Clockwork had come to know as Sarah. They were listening to music, talking about graduation and life after the summer.

"Freeze."

The screen froze, and Clockwork flew closer, taking a hard look at the two.

"This is the age he is in the 2000s. Which means, his death must be coming. Soon, very soon, fate will take control."

As if fate were answering, the screen turned to static, only to quickly turn back to a scene of Daniel walking the streets.

"Turn up. "

The thoughts of the young boy in front of him suddenly became clear as he listened in.

He hadn't always been able to hear thoughts, but recently, and with much practice, he had discovered that the thoughts of this boy could be heard at the correct volume.

'Sarah, we've been together since pre-school, and after graduation tomorrow, everything changes.'

Clockwork continued to watch and listen as the boy contemplated what his future could bring, until finally, he stopped in front of a local market.

"Freeze."

The screen froze again as Clockwork spoke out loud.

"I've seen that market before. A headline in a paper that flashed through my scans once or twice. A bomb. Fire. Unidentified bodies…."

'Daniel.'

'No. Do not force him to go into that store. Do not force his story to end that way. There must be a better answer.'

'This isn't a coincidence. He's destined to do it…'

'Not if you choose another path.'

"There is no other path. Unfreeze."

He touched the screen with his staff, sending wave lengths through it that he then saw, very briefly, touching the boy.

Daniel put his hand on the store door, one thought going through his head.

'And tonight, you need to take a chance.'

--

"CRASH!"

Clockwork turned his body away from the screen at the sound of lightning outside his window. Lightning that he had come to learn meant only one thing…

A new gravestone was appearing.

--

"Oh, dear girl. I wish I didn't have to hurt you through all of this. But please understand, it's for the greater good."

Floating above a sea of stones, he looked down upon the blank one, waiting for the precise moment to turn.

A distant clock struck twelve as his form went from very young to very old within seconds. He pointed his staff at the blank stone.

"Daniel Fenton. We will meet again."

--

He had done it. Successfully manipulated the timelinechanging the destiny of the boy permanently. But now what?

He knew that the boy would return, and that somehow, he would have a hand in this return, but how? How was he going to bring back someone from the graveyard, when it had never been done before?

Luckily for him, we had planted the answer within his realm.

You see, we wrote more than just history books when we first started our documentation. Yes, many of us were historians. But some had other interests. One such interest was alchemy – science, potions, experiments. And within those books, was the key to resurrection.

We had never planned on resurrecting anyone at first. Why would we need to when so many ghosts were already inhabiting the Zone? But as we learned about Clockwork's story, we came to learn that he would need to try his hand at this procedure. For only in its success could his undoing begin.

--

"This list of ingredients is really long…"

Clockwork was sitting in his reading chair, having finally found the alchemy book he had never quite found a use for until now. While he didn't consider himself a scientist, he knew he had to give it a try. But man, the process of resurrection had to be the hardest one in the book.

"Some of these things are from realms halfway across the Zone! But I can't leave now…"

Clockwork had taken to becoming a recluse, leaving his realm even less (which wasn't saying much) than before, for fear of a rogue ghost making its way into the Graveyard and tampering with Daniel's stone.

True, he had put up even stronger time barriers now, but one could never be too cautious.

"If only I had a minion…"

"Aha!"

He tapped the top of his staff, and a ghost in a full body suit appeared in front of him. He was holding a steel scrubber in one hand, bristles poised against the suit as if ready for a polish.

"Nice to see you too Skulker," the young Clockwork grinned.

"What do you want?"

"I have a proposition. I need your help."

Skulker raised an eyebrow at this, dropping his scrubber. "You, the Time Master, want MY help? I thought I was just a lowlife hunter?"

Remembering the time he had called Skulker a waste of space, Clockwork grimaced.

"Yes…I may have said that once or twice…but now…I need your help."

"And what's in it for me?" Skulker asked, walking towards the screens where yet another scene of Danny's life was frozen.

"Access to my realm. Anytime. And a lot of money."

"I'm listening." He turned to his captor.

"I need some items. Some rare items. Things one doesn't usually look for."

Skulker turned his eyes to Clockwork, his eyes squinting curiously.

"What for?"

"That is not your concern. Your concern is helping me get these things."

"And if I don't?"

"Well…there may be another wanted sign on Walker's jail wall in the near future."

Skulker froze.

"You wouldn't!"

"Try me…"

He thought for a moment, not sure if he really wanted to "try" the Master of Time.

"Fine, where's my list?"

--

It took a while, almost 50 human years to be exact. But Clockwork had known it would. After all, he was coming to learn the secrets behind why his screens only showed so much, and that meant that Danny wasn't meant to return until the 2000s.

He filled his days with experiments. Building up a small lab in the back of his realm, complete with body chamber for the boy's return. Each time Skulker brought a new item, he added it to his stocks, waiting for the moment of resurrection to show itself.

When he wasn't experimenting, he was watching the screens. He had also discovered that may moments affecting Danny's destiny would only show themselves in real time, and as such this meant being patient. He finally found the girl, the granddaughter to be exact, and watched as she grew, knowing that there must be a moment coming when Danny's story would collide with hers.

He kept an eye on Danny's family, too, and found that the stories of humans coming to the Ghost Zone the Observants had fed him all those years ago were in fact true. The sister, Jazz, had become a major player in this discovery, having become obsessed in ways even Clockwork hadn't expected. Soon, she was working on a portal, one that would link their worlds.

But then she stopped. She grew sick. Clockwork watched as she laid in her deathbed, son Jack by her side, and forced him to promise to keep up the research.

He didn't know how this would affect his mission, but he had a feeling this portal could be a way to bring about Danny's destiny, so he continued to watch.

--

It was 2017 when it happened. He had been watching the Fentons again, and this time they had finally made their breakthrough. The portal was set to open soon, and he could sense this was it.

As if reading his thoughts, the screen changed and showed him a scene from the near future that he hadn't witnessed before.

"And so, without further ado, we will now plug in our Fenton Portal and introduce the world to a whole new realm of mystery and wonder!" Maddie Fenton declared.

With the anticipation rising, Maddie quickly typed a passcode into the keyboard on the wall, then grabbed the giant plug and inserted it into the adjacent outlet. There were a few green sparks, then…nothing. Jack's face, which had been wildly excited, changed quickly to disappointed.

The screen froze, and Clockwork let out a sigh of frustration.

"This must be it. Must be the moment I've been waiting for! But why can't I see more?"

He forced his screen to skip back to the beginning of this scene and put it in slow motion, analyzing every frame he saw. It wasn't until the green sparks appeared that things clicked.

"Those green sparks! They're not electricity, they're ectoplasm! The portal NEEDS ectoplasm to work! Which means it needs ghost energy. And who better to provide that energy than the boy!"

He had finally figured out how and when the boy would make his return to Earth, but now he needed that last ingredient.

[falseroar]

Anniversaries Prequel: A Little Magic

((In the middle of everything else going on this week, it’s the one year anniversary of the beginning of my WKM fanfic, Can You Wake Up? which has kind of kept going throughout the past year in other series. So to celebrate, here’s this short Anniversaries series. There’s only four parts (not counting this one), but they’re a little (or a lot) longer than normal, because I wanted them to come out on specific days.

Also you should know I nearly called this series the Beach Episodes.))

“So, that’s the general idea,” Marvin said. His bright blue eyes, highlighted by the cat mask he wore, flickered back and forth between the two of you. “We just need to test it out.”

Jameson twisted his mouth as he considered the magician’s offer and spoke, his voice silent but a speech slide with his words flashing before Marvin and yours eyes after a slight delay. “Sounds fascinating, but are you sure it’s safe?”

“I’ve done the research and the spell itself is good, we just need to make sure the timing delay works.” He looked at you as he added, “The last thing we want is any surprises on the big day.”

You nodded, even though you could understand why Jameson looked so nervous. Something about this spell Marvin had dug up just in time sounded too good to be true, but then you weren’t sure how long he had been searching for it, either.

“And,” Marvin added as he held up another book, “I have a reversal spell right here if it doesn’t go back the way it should.”

Jameson tapped his finger on the long table that took up most of the space in the room. As far as you knew, the conference room in the Septic ego house was barely used outside of the occasional Bro Average video shoot, and Marvin had claimed that it would give you all more privacy than the other rooms. Plus, it gave him extra space to spread out all of the books and materials that he apparently needed for this spell.

“I still don’t see how this can work as a surprise if we need all of this,” you said, and the magician shrugged.

“We already know who we want it to affect, and for how long. Knowing that much, I can easily set it up beforehand so it can be triggered at the right time, even by someone else.”

“But why an hour?” Jameson asked Marvin. He glanced at you, his brow furrowed. “That seems like a long time!”

“It’s a nice, round number, and easy to scale,” Marvin answered. He grinned and added, “Plus, it’s just long enough for us to have some fun if it does work…Or, you know, fix it before we get in trouble or risk spoiling the surprise.”

His smile faded as he locked eyes with you and added, “Of course, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Y/N.”

“No, I want to at least try,” you said and, seeing that Jameson was still concerned, added, “I’ll be okay, really.”

He returned your smile out of reflex, but he still seemed less than sure as he said, “Then take it away, magic man!”

Marvin nodded and began to read aloud from the thick leather volume that took up most of the space in front of him. The words blurred together into a variety of whispers and it was hard to keep the masked magician sitting across the table from you in focus. Beside you, Jameson also blinked and shook his head as if trying to stay awake.

But it was when Marvin turned the page without pausing for breath that you felt something lurch in your stomach and had to lean forward, your forehead almost touching the table, to keep from being sick as the room spun around you. It wasn’t until the speech slide flashed across your vision that you realized the spinning and the spell had stopped.

“Golly! …That don’t look right, Marv.”

For a moment, you wondered how you had ended up on the floor as you stared down at the polished wood beneath your hands and knees, but it slowly occurred to you that there was carpeting in the conference room, not hardwood floors. You looked up and the room seemed to twist again before settling into the image of Marvin across the wide expanse of the table between you, his mouth open but no sound coming out, and the shape of Jameson looming large to your left and behind you.

Both stared down at your small form as you slowly got up to your feet and patted yourself down. Aside from the size, you otherwise seemed fine.

“…Marvin?” you asked, and a choked sound came from the magician before he clamped a hand to his mouth.

“Mark is going to kill me. Dark is going to kill me…They’re going to fight over who gets to kill me first.”

“Or maybe they’ll team up and do it together,” Jameson added, receiving a glare from Marvin in response. The ego leaned down so that he was on eye level with you and you quickly backed up until you were around the center of the table. That close, Jameson was just too big. “How do you feel?”

“Better now that the spell’s stopped, but…” You gestured down to yourself and turned around to face Marvin. “What went wrong?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know! It should have worked, I went over it again and again, I—” Marvin paused in the act of flipping the page back to the start of the spell. With a dawning sense of horror, he turned the page again before using his thumb to peel apart what turned out to be two pages, stuck together by…yeah, you don’t want to think about what was sticking them together. He groaned and his forehead hit the table with a thump so hard it nearly shook you off your feet. “I mixed two spells together.”

“Can you fix it?” you asked and felt a sudden surge of relief when you heard the muttered yes come from the magician’s slumped form.

He tilted his head up so that his chin now rested on the tabletop and studied you for a moment. “A simple growth spell should do it?”

You exhaled through your teeth and said, “Not really sounding sure there, Marvin.”

“Don’t worry, I can fix this,” he said, making an effort to sound more sure of himself as he sat up and began flipping through the second book. The frantic flipping of the pages sent breezes of air your way that smelled of dust and old paper, and you had to turn away to keep from coughing or sneezing.

“Well, now we know if the first spell doesn’t work, we always have a backup plan,” Jameson said. He reached out carefully with a single finger and gently, gently touched the top of your head. “A tiny Y/N would make for an adorable birthday present!”

“Knock it off!” you said, pushing his finger away but trying not to laugh. “I don’t think I’d ever live it down if the others saw me like this.”

“Ah, we can fix this before any of the others find out, and definitely before I get into trouble,” Marvin said, just a split second before someone knocked on the door.

The world around you went dark as Jameson dropped his bowler hat on top of you, and through the fabric you could hear the clatter of chairs knocking back before Marvin asked in the guiltiest voice ever, “Who is it?”

“Howdy bitches!” You heard the giggle that immediately followed that greeting and didn’t need the speech slide from Jameson to realize who it was.

“Jack! What brings you around here?”

“I thought I’d drop in for lunch with you guys today,” Jack said, by the sound of it walking fully into the room. “Huh, I thought Schneeps said Y/N was in here with you two.”

“They, uh, had to go home early—” Marvin said, just as Jameson’s speech slide crashed into view with the words, “They went to their room—”

Both stopped short, and the three of them failed to see you facepalm in the darkness beneath the hat before you reached underneath the brim and lifted it up and over until the hat rolled back.

“Hey, Jack,” you said, and he immediately clamped a hand to his mouth. Well, now you knew where Marvin got that gesture from.

“I can fix it?” Marvin said, one hand tugging nervously on the corner of his blue cape.

“Marvin was trying to help me with a spell,” you said quickly, before Jack could say anything to the ego. “We were just testing it out, and something went wrong.”

“Just a LITTLE wrong,” Jameson said and grinned when Jack couldn’t fight back a smile at that.

“You…” Jack swallowed back whatever he was going to say, looking a little disappointed in himself for laughing at that. “What have I told you about trying out your magic on the others?”

“Have a camera running in case it’s funny?”

You shot Jack a look and he shrugged. “Funny’s funny. Can you really fix it?”

“Just a simple growth spell,” Marvin said again as he turned back to his book. “Just give me a second.”

“Then I’m going to do this,” Jack said as he pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Don’t you dare,” you warned, but he’d already snagged one picture, and then he and Jameson were kneeling beside the table, camera angled to catch you standing behind them.

“You guys suck,” you said after he was done, as if you didn’t stick your tongue out or make faces in more than one of those pictures.

“Okay, got it!” Marvin said, and pointed his finger at you as he began to read from the second book. You saw green sparks fly around his finger, but when he finished the returning back to normal thing failed to happen. He tried again, and again, before dropping the book and sinking back into his chair with a groan.

“…Mark might actually kill us,” Jack said and the magician’s head hit the table.

“I should have stuck to card tricks.”

“But you’re much better at real magic than that flim-flam sleight of hand!”

Marvin muttered something dark into the surface of the table.

“Marvin?” You called his name but the ego just groaned again. You looked up at Jack and Jameson, both of whom looked completely lost as to what to do now, and walked over to Marvin. It took several seconds to cross the distance of the table before you could reach out and pat the top of the magician’s head. Your arm sank halfway up to your elbow in his long green hair but he shifted slightly, showing that he at least felt it. “I know you can figure this out. You’re Marvin the Magnificent, right?”

“…That’s what it says on my underwear.”

“Could’ve gone without knowing that,” you said, and the ego chuckled.

“Perhaps we could take a second look at the original spell?” Jameson suggested. “Or spells. You said you had a way to undo one of them.”

“Well, I had a way to undo what the spell was supposed to do, in case the timing effect failed—”

Marvin looked up so quickly that his forehead knocked you off your feet and you had to cling to the top of his cat mask for support, only to have the table disappear from beneath your feet.

Marvin hissed and quickly caught you in his hand before you could fall. “Sorry about that, but I just realized, the hour effect, see?”

He put you down on the book and pointed at the first part of the spell, as if any of the words scrawled beneath your feet had meaning for you.

“Uh, what?” Jack asked.

“The spell, I was testing how it would respond to a kind of timer,” Marvin explained. “All we have to do is wait an hour from when I cast it, and it should wear off!”

“You’re sure?” you asked, wary of getting your hopes up this time.

“Yes, yes, it makes sense, the timing and who it’s supposed to affect are in the first parts of the spell; it’s just when I turned the page that I missed what it was supposed to actually do.” Marvin ran his finger down the page as he spoke and then flashed a smile at you. “I’m sure of it. All we have to do is wait an hour.”

You frowned, thinking about what Marvin said. “But why did it just affect me then?”

The magician shrugged. “It could be a side effect of mixing the two spells. It was supposed to affect one of you and then the other, but it’s not like there was anything to transfer in this case.”

Jameson pulled out his pocket watch and tapped it before saying, “I told you an hour seemed like a long time!”

Jack exhaled and it was only then you realized just how worried he had been. “But we can handle that, and no one needs to tell—”

He broke off as a tune started to play somewhere in the room. At the same time, you felt the vibrations running through the table and book beneath your feet and glanced back at your phone, normal-sized and lying where you left it by your seat.

Jack leaned over to look at it and said, “It’s Wilford.”

“Yeah, I better answer it,” you said. Last time you missed a call from him, he barged into the room you were in with his gun drawn, reciting lines from Taken. Not the best way to wake up at 3 in the morning.

Jack propped up the phone and you had to use both your hands to get the green answer button to respond and to turn on the speaker so he could hear you.

“Hey Wilford,” you said, and immediately had to clamp your hands over your ears when he responded in his usual loud, booming voice.

“Y/N! Where are you, you scamp?”

“I’m at the Septic egos’ house today, remember?” you said, taking a step back from the phone as you did so.

The distance didn’t help as Wilford’s voice boomed out again. “Well, get back over here! We’ve got things going on here, you know!”

“Uh, I’m kind of busy here, Wilford,” you answered. “If this is about the meeting—”

“Meeting?! We have a meeting today? You should have told me, I’ll be there in a second to pick you up!”

“No! I mean, no, that’s okay, Wilford,” you said, trying really hard to ignore the other three right now. “Mark said he could handle the meeting by himself this time, remember? And you’ll be there to help him, right?”

“You know, it almost sounds like you don’t want me coming over there,” Wilford said, laughing even as his tone changed.

You looked up at Jack and the two egos, who silently tried to gesture and mouth answers all at once. Even Jameson was avoiding using his speech slides, as if afraid Wilford might “hear” him.

“That’s because…I’m working on a surprise for someone else, with the Septic egos,” you said. “And I really need to keep it a secret from the others. You understand, right?”

“Oh, a secret,” Wilford said. “Say no more, Y/N, I can keep a secret better than anybody! Why, I can even keep a secret from myself if I want to, and don’t even get me started on keeping secrets from the audience.”

“…Okay? I mean, thank you for understanding, Wilford, I—”

“I’ll just be by to pick you up after the meeting’s over!”

Before you could respond, he hung up and the phone went back to its lock screen.

“…I really hope you’re right about that time thing, Marvin,” you said, trying hard not to imagine what Wilford might do if he found you this size.

“I suppose we have nothing to do but wait,” Jameson said, but then a mischievous grin crossed his face and he scooped you up in hands. “And use our remaining time to show the others!”

Your protests were soon drowned out by Dr. Schneeplestein, Jackieboy Man, and Chase cooing over you as Jameson proudly showed you off.

“You all. Suck. So much,” you said when he finally put you down on the coffee table in the living room.

Your only consolation came roughly forty-five minutes later, when it turned out that Marvin was right about the spell only lasting an hour and you were back to normal size, if a little embarrassed to be sprawled out on the couch on top of Chase.

Well, maybe not your only consolation.

After all, it turned out that Marvin’s spell had worked even better than he thought, if not quite in the right way. Jameson crossed his arms as he dangled by his vest from Jackieboy Man’s thumb and forefinger, his speech slide a little faded as he said, “An hour is way too long!”

“He might be right,” Marvin said to you quietly as the two of you stood and watched the others at a distance. “Are you sure about an entire 24 hours?”

You bit your lip but nodded. “If you think we can get everything figured out in time.”

“We’ll work out every little problem,” Marvin said, and shrugged at the look you gave him. More serious this time, he added, “And we’ll all be there for you, the day after. Promise.”

((End of the prologue. Thank you for reading! There’s a hint or two on what’s coming up over the next few days, but I’m hoping there will be couple of surprises along the way.

Link to Part 1: The Best Laid Plans

Tagging: @silver-owl413  @skyewardlight @cherrybomb-jaguar @blackaquokat  @catgirlwarrior  @neverisadork @luna1350  @oh-so-creepy @purpstraw  @weirdfoxalley  @95fangirl  @lilalovesinternet-l @thepoolofthedead  @a-bit-dapper @randomartdudette  @geekymushroom @cactipresident  @hotcocoachia @purple-anxiety-blog @shyinspiredartist ))

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Fifty years ago, Japan’s Kaiju Boom was at its peak, with Ultraman and Ultraseven on TV and films from four of the country’s five major studios in the theaters: Toho’s Son of Godzilla and King Kong Escapes, Daiei’s Gamera vs. Gyaos, Nikkatsu’s Gappa, and Shochiku’s The X from Outer Space. Wouldn’t you know it, in 2017 there were five kaiju movies and two Ultraman shows too, as the transnational Kaiju Boom rolled on with no end in sight. Let’s take a look back at all that transpired.

1) Kong is King

If cinematic universes are the future, then the world’s greatest kaiju are lucky to have Legendary Pictures in charge of theirs. Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island, the second entry in the MonsterVerse started by Godzilla in 2014, hit theaters during a busy March to rave reviews and respectable box office. Packed with monsters, helicopters, talented actors, and 70′s hits, it kept the action contained on the giant ape’s home; a restrained blockbuster by today’s standards. If the film’s post-credit scene ate up the conversational oxygen a bit too much, well, that’s the price you pay for teasing Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah, and Mothra in one scene.

But that wasn’t all for the Eighth Wonder of the World this year. BOOM! Studios’ Kong of Skull Island comic concluded with its twelfth issues. It was succeeded by a one-shot, Kong: Gods of Skull Island, and a strangely apt Planet of the Apes crossover, still being published. Legendary got in on the act too with Skull Island: Birth of Kong, a prequel/sequel to the film.

I have proposed a moratorium on Kong titles with “Skull Island” in them. Unfortunately, this confusing trend is set to continue, with Jonathan Penner and Stacy Title currently writing a King Kong Skull Island TV show for MarVista Entertainment and IM Global Television.

2) Godzilla is King of the Whole Stinking World, What Now

Another year, another new Godzilla movie. It’s been a while since we could say that, hasn’t it? Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, the first in an animated trilogy by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita, was released in Japanese theaters this November. A worldwide Netflix release will follow on January 17th. The next two are coming this year, presumably so Toho can atone for not releasing one in 2015. Godzilla: The City Mechanized for the Final Battle (or however it’s ultimately translated), due in May, will feature the return of Mechagodzilla.

Shin Godzilla, meanwhile, made kaiju history earlier in the year, becoming the first film in the genre to win Picture of the Year at the Japan Academy Awards. (It also netted prizes in six other categories.) On the American side of things, Legendary finally started filming Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Godzilla vs. Kong (2020) found a director in Adam Wingard.

On the home video front, Shin Godzilla hit DVD and Blu-ray around the world, and Criterion picked up the rights to almost every film in the Showa series, plus Rodan and The War of the Gargantuas. Physical releases have yet to be announced -- they’re currently streaming on Filmstruck -- but seem inevitable.

3) Sturm Organs, Chaiyo Vanquished, and the Phantom Channel

I could have made this post the 2017 Ultraman Year in Review without changing the format of the photoset one bit, although the tone would have been a shade more bitter.

Ultraman Geed, starring the son of arch-villain Belial, ran for 25 episodes. Ultraman Zero and his mild-mannered salaryman host Leito ended up stealing the show. (It also gave us the phrase “Sturm organs,” which I never want to read again.) Cruchyroll, as is tradition now, announced it was simulcasting Geed about eight seconds before the first episode aired.

Ultraman Orb: The Origin Saga, the prequel to last year’s series, concluded on Amazon Prime Video in Japan. A promised English release never worked out, although the fansubbers picked up the slack.

Ultraman Orb the Movie arrived in Japanese theaters on March 10. It wasn’t very good, but Ultraseven made a hell of an entrance.

Keeping the Orb train rolling, the 24-minute Ultra Orb Fight aired over the course of eight episodes of Ultraman Zero: The Chronicle, another one of Tsuburaya‘s compilation shows. 

Ultraman X the Movie and Ultraman Ginga S the Movie played in a handful of American theaters, with English dubbing from William Winkler Productions. Winkler also dubbed the three Zero movies this year; no word on when they’ll be released, nor what happened to the physical/digital releases of the X and Ginga S movies.

Tsuburaya Productions uploaded scores of Ultra Fight episodes to its YouTube channel. Unfortunately, no subtitles were provided; the show’s narration was significantly more intensive than Redman screaming attack names.

Toku, a ludicrously obscure on-demand channel, picked up the rights to a ton of Ultra shows, most of them without official releases in the U.S. -- Leo, 80, The Ultraman, Neos, Nexus, an English dub of Max, Ultraseven X, both seasons of Mega Monster Battle, and Neo Ultra Q. No one has recorded any of them. The channel is affiliated with Amazon Prime, but only 80 (free on Crunchyroll) and Neos (already fansubbed) are available through it. go90 also has Neos and Ultraseven X (also already fansubbed).

In November, Tsuburaya finally regained the international distribution rights to the first six Ultra Series from UM Corporation, setting the stage for more abrupt Crunchyroll additions in 2018 and beyond. Before the ruling came down, UM licensed Ultraman to a Chinese company, BlueArc Culture Communications, for three years. Dragon Force: So Long, Ultraman was released in Chinese theaters in October. I thought this ruling would make it rather difficult to see, but, uh, it’s on YouTube already.

The Ultraman manga by Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi reached Volume 11 in Japan, with a 3DCG film adaptation by Production I.G and Sola Digital Arts due in 2019.

4) She is Colossal

Director Nacho Vigalondo and Voltage Pictures survived a Toho lawsuit to bring us a bizarre tale of alcoholics in an upstate New York town who have the ability to summon and control giant beings in Seoul under very specific circumstances. Kaiju are often metaphors for issues that are accordingly massive in scope, like nuclear warfare or environmental devastation. Here they embody more personal problems -- not a totally novel concept, but one handled with far more depth than, say, Ultraman 80. The movie was a thud at the box office (the producers apparently ordered an upgrade to the VFX after rave festival reviews), but will hopefully find a second life on Hulu.

5) What Do You Find Between a Dragon’s Teeth?

Based on a 2014 short, The Dragon Dentist is an anime film (well, a two-part TV special that’s 90 minutes long) in which dragons and humans have reached an unusual agreement: the humans clean the dragons’ teeth, and the dragon rain down destruction on their enemies. If that sounds strange, well, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Unless Planet of the Monsters pulls off a miracle, it has my vote for best kaiju movie of 2017. Section23 released it on Blu-ray in October with an English dub included.

6) A Jaeger is You Times a Thousand

Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel that refused to die, is mere months from release, and its trailer made a big splash at New York Comic Con this year. Mysteries abound about the plot, but we have details on an art book, prequel novel, prequel comic, novelization, and plenty of toys. (Still waiting on that tabletop RPG and the return of the Create-a-Jaeger site.)

7) Reddo Continuation, and Other Printed Works

IDW may be finished with Godzilla, but Matt Frank is far from finished with kaiju comics. He sold The Last Hope, his Heisei Gamera prequel doujinshi, at G-Fest this year, and announced in October that he would be writing and drawing a comic about Redman, the murderous Seventies “hero” of recent YouTube fame. Phase 6, the same company reprinting Godzilla: Rulers of Earth in Japan, is the publisher. Other kaiju comics this year: Season 3 of Xander Cannon’s always-excellent Kaijumax (which I need to finish reading), Greg Pak’s Mech Cadet Yu (which I need to start), and Marvel’s crossover event/miniseries Monsters Unleashed (which I am too intimidated to start).

And in the realm of prose: Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski published their long-anticipated Ishiro Honda biography, providing a comprehensive look at the legendary kaiju director’s life and career. Raffael Coronelli threw his hat into the authors’ ring with Daikaiju Yuki and Y2K: Yuki Conquers the World, post-apocalyptic epics about the Pantheon Colossi and the human heroes who join with them to protect the world.

Oh, and some guy named Michael Callari announced he was writing a book on the Gamera series.

8) Every Monster Has a Country

The movie-mockers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have been linked with giant monsters since the beginning, and this year’s Netflix revival saw them taking on two more: Reptilicus and Yongary, Monster from the Deep. The former led off the season, and the novelty of a monster from Denmark led to one of the show’s greatest songs.

9) In Memoriam

As I wrote in August, “Monsters, of course, live forever. The people who bring them to life are never so lucky.” 2017 saw the passing of four giants of the kaiju genre:

Haruo Nakajima (b. 1929) -- Suit actor and fight choreographer for Godzilla and countless other Toho/Tsuburaya monsters from 1954 to 1972.

Yoshimitsu Banno (b. 1931) -- Director and co-writer of the Godzilla vs. Hedorah, assistant director and co-writer of Prophecies of Nostradamus, executive producer of Godzilla (2014).

Yoshio Tsuchiya (b. 1927) -- Eccentric actor with a long tokusatsu filmography, including the titular role in The Human Vapor, the Xian Leader in Invasion of Astro-Monster, and Shindo in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

Chikara Hashimoto (b. 1933) -- Suit actor for Daimajin in Daiei’s trilogy and Daimon in Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare.

[innerchorus]

Koutetsujou no Kabaneri: Geographical Locations

(sorry this is super long but I can’t use a Read More because of the damn apostrophe glitch...)

In the absence of a proper map of Hi-no-Moto, I thought it’d be useful / interesting to compile all the information and theories I know of concerning the location of stations etc in order to try and map the journey of the Koutetsujou throughout the series and beyond. If you happen to have any contributions or corrections then please add to this list! I’m also interested in hearing guesses other than my own for stations that were seen or visited along the way that don’t have a confirmed location.

To start with, Aragane Station.

Aragane Station is located within Izumo Province (confirmed in prequel novel), ‘an old province of Japan which today consists of the eastern part of Shimane Prefecture,’ within the Chugoku Region. (The map shows Japanese provinces in 1868, at the end of the Edo Period.) Aragane is the location of the opening of the anime series, and after it is overrun the main characters decide to head towards Kongoukaku aboard the Koutetsujou.

(I’ll cover Kongoukaku later on, but for now let’s assume that the assumption of the Japanese fandom is correct and that it’s further east than Aragane.)

Prior to the Koutetsujou’s arrival at Aragane Station, it travels past Hayatani Station, which has fallen to the kabane. I don’t know of an exact location for this station, but given that we know Mumei is heading towards Kongoukaku, it is likely to be located to the west of Aragane.

Following the departure of the Koutetsujou from Aragane Station, the next stop is Yashiro Station (and I hope you’re ready for speculation because again, I haven’t seen any official info regarding location).

There was previously a town named Yashiro that merged with two other towns to become the city of Kato in Hyogo Prefecture, so I decided to look into that location as it lies between Aragane’s location and where Kongoukaku is likely to be. The Koutetsujou’s journey to Kongoukaku involves the risky decision to take a route through the mountains in order to reach their destination faster, and looking at a map that shows the topography, Yashiro / Kato is a potential fit, though possibly a little too far south (and perhaps just too far). As an alternative, there is the site of Yanahara Mine, but although geographically it looks promising, after checking details I’m not truly convinced (it primarily produced copper and wasn’t operational until some time in the 1950s).

(If you’re interested, you can see the distance between an approximate location assigned to Aragane Station and the mine site here, it’s worth toggling on the ‘terrain’ option too.)

After leaving Yashiro Station, the next stop is Shitori Station (no information about location, let me know if you have any ideas).

The last stop before Kongoukaku is Iwato Station. This station functions as a ‘gate’ that controls access to the Shogun’s stronghold (at least from the east) but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s as close in proximity to Kongoukaku as it first seems, only that the sole way to reach Kongoukaku from that direction by rail involves being permitted to pass through Iwato.

And that brings us to Kongoukaku itself.

There is no confirmed canonical location for Kongoukaku, but Japanese fans consider it to be built near Lake Biwa, like Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, while the design of the stronghold itself is modelled on Goryoukaku, with the shape being hexagonal rather than pentagonal (see images above).

This map gives some idea of distance from Aragane Station (somewhere in the east of Shimane prefecture) to Kongoukaku (eastern shore of Lake Biwa). Total distance as the crow flies is around 300km, but the actual journey in the series would of course be longer as their route was not direct.

I placed the marker on the map above at the location of the site of Lake Dainaka (now reclaimed land), as I’ve seen it suggested that this lake is the one Kongoukaku uses as its moat (either that or another of the nearby lakes existing at the time). For a closer look at the size and position of this lake, there’s a useful map here, look for 大中湖.  The water of this lake was only 2.7m at its maximum, a shallowness that would allow it to be built on.

The Wadatsu Oohashi (Great Wadatsu Bridge) that Biba mentions in episode 10 is equivalent to the Biwako Oohashi, though if the location is the same, the site of Kongoukaku doesn’t precisely match that of Lake Dainaka as that’s not directly opposite the modern day bridge.

(I was also wondering when Ikoma falls out of the train after being stabbed, whether the water he falls into is Osaka Bay. There are actually a few modern train lines that run along that stretch of coastline before routes veer inland towards Lake Biwa.)

So, that concludes the named locations in the anime series.

...but I’m not finished yet!

As you know, the game (Koutetsujou no Kabaneri: -Ran- Hajimaru Michiato) is due to be released later this year, and this article gave some information about the setting for the game’s events. With the fall of the Amatori Shogunate that governed the west of the country, the characters continue eastwards, with the game taking place in the region of Hokuriku, along the northwestern coast in Honshu.

(The map shows Hokuriku in red and the Chubu region that it is part of in darker green.)

I think we can expect a couple of things from this; sea and snow. Hokuriku lies right along the Sea of Japan, and has ‘the highest volume of snowfall of any inhabited and arable region in the world’ (source). The home station of the game’s three new characters is 勝木駅 , which Google Translate has as Katsuki Station (it could potentially be Gatsugi Station instead), but although it must be somewhere within this region, I don’t know exactly where. 

That brings us to the next installment in the story after the game, a movie with the title of Koutetsujou no Kabaneri: Unato Kessen, set to be released in 2018. So far, very little is known about it other than that it’s set 6 months after the end of the anime series. The teaser video shows some unknown locations and characters but doesn’t give much away, making it hard to speculate about geographical location.

...but how about this?

I don’t think it’s likely that the Koutetsujou will return the way they came just yet (though if the story has a good end, then surely the reopening of Aragane station will require it eventually) so let’s assume they continue in the direction of travel we’ve seen so far.

海門 / Unato is left untranslated in the title (Koutetsujou no Kabaneri: Unato Decisive Battle) so I’ve assumed that’s a place name.

A search for ‘unato’ gives no real results (and nothing that matches the kanji) but if you choose to search instead for the kanji themselves then that gives ‘kaimon,’ a literal translation of which is ‘sea gate’. So, kaimon is a ‘strait’ or a ‘channel’ (check it out on Jisho and have a look at this list of straits of Japan). I obviously don’t know whether this holds any meaning for what we’re going to see in the movie, but what if it did? I’ve often wondered where the kabane outbreak first began in Hi-no-Moto, and I’m quite partial to the idea that it arrived in Kyushu and spread from there. The eastern region of Hi-no-Moto apparently has better technology (it’s the source of the blueprint for Ikoma’s mechanical arm) and I wonder whether that’s partly because the people there had longer to develop such things before the kabane reached them, and perhaps continued trade with other countries for longer (while the fearful and soon to be kabane-infested west, under the rule of the Shogun, would undoubtedly have closed the ports and focused solely on the building of walled stations to hide inside rather than pursue the means with which to fight the kabane, whether that be technological advancement or trade / info from abroad).

And it made me wonder about the furthest end of the country from Kyushu, the island of Hokkaido. Hokkaido is separated from Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait, which is 19.5km at its narrowest point.

...what if the people of Hokkaido were able to prevent the kabane from crossing the strait? The distance between may be enough (it was found to be a zoogeographical boundary). And if not that, what if they have some other reason for refusing to allow access to those trying to cross it? (I mean, you can go wild with speculation here... I wonder whether foreign countries have had more success in blocking or exterminating the kabane or even developing medicine or a way to control / use the kabane... It’d be kind of ironic if, as well as the kabane themselves, Ikoma and co. have to deal with an invading or occupying force who want the land for themselves.)

(...the only glimpse of water in the Unato Kessen teaser)

I could certainly see there being some kind of unique situation in Hokkaido that the main characters aren’t yet aware about, thanks to both its own geography and the Shogun’s attitude towards the sharing of information. Either way, I hope the continuation of the Koutetsujou’s journey will lead to some answers and hopefully a cure.

[stacks-reviews]

New Releases 11/7/17

Happy New Release Day!

In Books --Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju Volume 4 by Haruko Kumota “After Sukeroku’s expulsion, Kikuhiko’s path to stardom seems clear, but the idea of inheriting the Yakumo name is a cold comfort. Sukeroku, disgraced, makes the heartbreaking decision to put his art aside and take responsibility for his new relationship with Miyokichi. As years pass and distance grows, Kikuhiko decides it’s up to him to bring his friend back to the theater. His determination takes him to the country, where Sukeroku now lives with his spirited young daughter. Kikuhiko is ready to stay as long as he needs to convince Sukeroku, but old wounds may come back to haunt them both.”

I haven’t had a chance to pick up volume 3 yet because we did not get a copy in where I work. And I haven’t had a chance to order it yet either. 

--Fantastic Beasts Illustrated Edition When I first head about this illustrated edition I thought it was going to be of the movie Fantastic Beasts so I wasn’t very interested in this one. But it turns out it is for all of the creatures mentioned throughout the HP universe. Now I really want this one. Just not sure when I’ll be able to.

--My Hero Academia Volume 10 by Kohei Horikoshi “The League of Villains has kidnapped Bakugo, and the resulting negative publicity has thrown U.A. into a huge uproar. With the public’s trust in heroes threatened, the faculty convenes to figure out what to do. But Midoriya and the students of Class 1-A have plans of their own - an operation to rescue Bakugo that could get them thrown out of school.”

Picking up right where volume 9 ended. Midoriya and his crew try to take back Bakugo but fail. And a few pro heroes are lost in the conflict. After their recovery in the hospital some of Class 1-A devise a plan to legally (meaning without using their powers) to try and save Bakugo. Which sounds like a bad idea all around. 

It’s a really good volume that ends on an evil cliffhanger. I need volume 11 but that won’t be out till 2/6/18.

--Perfect Shadow by Brent Weeks “Gaelan Starfire is a careful, quiet, simple farmer. He’s also an immortal, peerless in the arts of war. Over the centuries, he’s worn many faces to hide his gift, but he is a man ill-fit for obscurity.

When Gaelan must take a job hunting down the world’s finest assassins for the beautiful courtesan and crime lord Gwinvere Kirena what he finds may destroy everything he’s ever believed in.”

I HAVE BEEN WAITING YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT. I love Brent Week’s Night Angel Trilogy so when I heard there was a prequel novella I was pretty excited. Until I noticed it was ebook only; after a brief limited printing run that I found out much later on. But after waiting and waiting, it is back in print. Right when I was about to break down and buy it digitally. I am ecstatic to finally have it to go with the others. Now I just wish I had the trilogy in hardcover. I just have them in the mass market paperback box set. 

It includes the novella Perfect Shadow and a Night Angel short called I, Night Angel. 

--Renegades by Marissa Meyer “The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies - humans with extraordinary abilities - who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone...except the villains they once overthrew.Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice - and in Nova. But Nova's allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both.“

From the author of the Lunar Chronicles series comes a new series. I really like the Lunar Chronicles. I recommend it a lot at work. Though I still need to finish it. Cress (book 3) has been sitting on my shelf for a little while but I’ve been trying to focus on the arcs I have. And have been failing. Anyway, I really like her other series and am excited to try out a new series by her.

--Twinkle Star Volume 4 by Natsuki Takaya “The second semester of school is starting, and Chihiro's kinder attitude toward Sakuya is making her heart race! When he recommends her a book to read, she's positively overjoyed. But on the way home from a night of stargazing with the Star Appreciation Club, Chihiro suddenly approaches her! What does he want to talk about...?”

After this just one more volume of this series should remain. I still haven’t had time to go past volume 1 of this series. I’ve had to put a lot of series on hold while I tried to cut back during the second half of this year. I will pick it back up again someday. Hopefully by next year.

In Movies/TV Shows --Cheer Boys “Catch an exciting new take on the high-flying team sport, inspired by a real all-male squad in Japan. When Haruki Bando and his friend Kazuma leave judo martial arts, no one would have guessed they would turn to cheerleading! Rocking the college campus with a killer routine, these amateurs manage to draw in a crowd and enough new members to compete in regionals.”

I started streaming this on Funimation during its season. I watched about half before I got into another gaming kick and haven’t picked it up again yet. I did like what I saw of it but it probably isn’t my favorite sports series. But I think it is still worth checking out. 

--Project Ito: Genocidal Organ “In Genocidal Organ, while developed countries rely on advanced surveillance to free them from the threat of terrorism, other nations are plagued by genocide within their own borders. Strangely, these massacres all link back to one American by the name of John Paul. Special agent Clavis Shepherd is sent to capture the target, but nothing can prepare this soldier—or the world—for the truth behind humanity’s darkness.”

The third and final Project Ito film. At least for now. I have been waiting on this one ever since the films were announced. I did watch Empire of Corpses and enjoyed it. Though I need to rewatch it soon because when I first watched it I was exhausted from work and kept having to rewind cause I kept nodding off for a few minutes at a time. I finally picked up Harmony a few months back but haven’t had time to start it yet.

--Revolutionary Girl Utena Set 2 “Utena and Anthy have become close during their time as roommates. So when Anthy casually mentions she has a brother, Utena can’t help but feel shocked. She thought she knew Anthy, but the longer she and Anthy are friends, the more she discovers she doesn’t know. What other secrets could Anthy be keeping? However, Utena won’t have time to dwell upon such matters. A new group of duelists has emerged from the shadows. These new challengers wear black rose signets and also seek revolution, but their methods are different than those of Ohtori’s Student Council. They don’t wish to possess Rose Bride. They are want kill her.”

Set 2 of the 20th Anniversary is now out. Contains episodes 13-24 of this great series. I have only seen it once all the way through. It is one of those series that you’ll have to watch over and over to get all the references and to catch all the imagery it contains. 

--Westworld S1 “Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, explore a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged without consequence.”

Season 1 of this series is out today. I don’t have the channel that it is on so I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’ve heard nothing but great things about so I can’t wait to try it out sometime. Though I would like to watch the movie it is based on before I try out the show. I have heard the soundtrack before because we used to have it as an in-store-play where I work. It is an awesome soundtrack. It was a staff favorite and we played it a lot.

--Your Name “Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives until they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This occurrence happens randomly, and they must adjust their lives around each other. Yet, somehow, it works. They build a connection by leaving notes for one another until they wish to finally meet. But something stronger than distance may keep them apart.”

Was very disappointed when this came out in theaters because it never came anywhere close to where I live. I don’t think it played anywhere in my state for that matter. I did pick up a copy because I want to know if it really is worth the hype. I haven’t watched it yet because I decided to wait till my friend and I could get together to watch it together. 

There is a standard version (DVD and a combo pack) as well as an LE. The LE, “contains two-piece double-sided collectible chipboard box with rainbow holographic finish.” Like what they did for Death Parade’s LE. Which both are nice but makes me nervous that it would fall out if I picked it up wrong. It also comes with a 60 page art booklet, an art digipack, and a two disc OST. The second OST is shorter. It has five songs; if I remember correctly, that are sung in English by RADWIMPS.