#the whole *walks out of photoshop covered in blood* routine !

[thedeadthree]

-`. introducing LILIA LAURENT and the band two headed mother.

for @infamous-if featuring @umbertors dead romantics ! 🎸 -`. THIS IS TWO HEADED MOTHER // -`. GOOD BAD IDEA

(TEMPLATES: 1 . 2 . 3 // COLORING // BACKGROUND)

TAGLIST (please feel welcome to ask to be tagged or removed!): @fragilestorm, @griffin-wood, @risingsh0t, @florbelles, @marivenah, @kingsroad, @roofgeese !

[return-of-a-space-cowboy]

Picture perfect (yandere Prompto Argentum x female reader)

a chapter i wrote awhile back

warning stalking

It was raining outside. Unlike most of the 11 year olds Prompto was by himself. He honesty didn't mind being alone, it gave him time to look over all the photos he had taken that day but he wished that for once someone would strike up a conversation with him and not judge him by his weight. "Hey fatty, we're talking to you!" a voice yelled out. Prompto looked up to see two of his peers standing near his desk. "Want me to get you another chair, the one you're sitting on looks like it's about to collapse" one of them said rudely. "Valentine's days coming up, I guess you're gonna steal everyone else's chocolates since no one's gonna give you any" the other said before snickering. Prompto didn't response, he only knew it was going to add fuel to the fire. "Hey, stop ignoring us!" The two yelled in Union. A young girl with (h/c) walked over to the duo and slapped them in the back of the head. "Why don't you two can it!" She said. "Owww... (Y/n), that hurt" they whined before running off. "Prompto don't listen to them, they're just a bunch jerks" she said. Prompto looked at her in surprise. "Um... You didn't have to do that, they probably ran off and told a teacher about that" he said shyly. "I don't care they deserved it, I would do it again anyway" she said sitting at the desk next to him. She looked at the camera on his table. "Oh wow you have a camera, that's so cool!" She yelled in excitement, her eyes lighting up in curiosity. "Ye... yeah" he replied. "Can I see some of your photos please" "Sure, just please be careful" he said while handing her the camera. She slowly scrolled through all the images, taking in every little detail. "Wow these are amazing" she said while handing him back the camera. "Thanks, I've actually never shown anyone else my photos" he replied. "Well I'm glad to be the first and I noticed that you don't have any photo's with people in them" she said. "Well it's just that I've been to shy to ask people..." He mumbled while lightly blushing. "Well... I'll be your model!" She said with a big smile on her face. "What!!" He yelled in shock. "If you want to take a photo of me you can" she said. He held his camera up. "S...smile" he said his face decorated with a light blush. She gave a large grin as he pressed the button.

📷📷📷

4 years later

📸📸📸

It was the first year of high school and all the studying in middle school had gotten Prompto into a decent high school. The last bell of the day rung signaling that school was finished and that the club gatherings would begin.

He started walking through the crowd to the photography room. He started walking down the stairs before someone shoved past him, causing him to bump into someone, he quickly grabbed onto them to stop them from falling down the stairs. "I'm sorry" a feminine and slightly familiar voice said. He let go of the person, a girl around his age with (h/c) hair and (e/c). "No I'm sorry, it was my fault" he replied. She looked at him for a few seconds then started to look around in a panicking manner. "Have you lost something?" He asked. "Yes, my textbook " she said while looking around. He too started looking around. He turned around and found the Textbook just a few steps away from him he picked the Textbook up. He looked at the name printed on it (y/n) (l/n), the name of his grade school friend. "(Y/N)!! Is that you!" He yelled out in shock. She turned to him and looked at the label on his camera. "Prompto! It's been so long since I last saw you" she replied "Wow you've changed!!" The two of them yelled in union. Silence filled area not so after as they both stared at one another.

Prompto couldn't help but admire the way she had grown. Her hair was styled in a way that framed her face perfectly, her body had feminine curves but her eyes still gleamed like when they were kids. At the same time she had admired how much he had changed. His body was tall and lean and his masculine features were prominent.

"Your still into photography Prompto, that's good to see" she said while giving him a grin. "Yes, and what have you been doing with your life over these years?" He asked. "I've been doing creative literature" she replied while checking the time. "We should probably head to our clubs now, hope to see you again soon Prompto" she said, running off.

As she left he felt numbness overtake him. He couldn't understand how her appearance could mess with his emotions. Why did he feel so incomplete without her in his presence, as if she had stolen a piece of him and taken it with her. He just couldn't understand what he was feeling.

📷📷📷

Prompto finally arrived home. He threw his bag down on the bed and took off his school jacket. He looked at the clock, 6:30. Enough time to heat up some leftovers, clean himself up and hit the books, maybe if he was lucky he would have some time to spare.

After eating dinner and having a shower he sat down and grabbed his bag and placed it on the floor next to his desk, he started taking things out when he saw a book. Thin line the book he had to read for his English class. Didn't understand why the teacher decided not to give the class background context on the book like he usually does, something about wanting everyone to make their own meaning of it. He opened up the book and decided to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

📸📸📸

You and I are meant to be together. You make me feel complete. You are perfect in my eyes. I could say it a million times, yet it still wouldn't be enough.

📷📷📷

As he read through the book he realised that the words on the pages matched up with the feelings he had ever since grade school. Now he knew what those feelings were, he was in love.

📸📸📸

I watch you from afar. As stunning as always. Every moment is priceless.

📷📷📷

Prompto watched (y/n) walking home, taking a photo every once and a while. Her hair flowing in the light breeze, the moonlight glowing off her skin. Just perfect, no amount of Photoshop work could replicate her beauty. He loved every part of her, from head to toe.

He displayed each one on his walls or place them in his wallet just so he can always see her.

He laid on his bed staring at the wall opposite of him, covered in photos. all of them were of his dear (y/n).

📸📸📸

He walked down the stairs to the cafeteria, he walked in to see Noctis waving at him. With no hesitation Prompto sat down next to him. "Hey, how was last period?" Noctis said. "Fine I guess, I was maths so it was really boring" Prompto sighed. "All the guys are talking about white day already, would you believe that" Noctis sighed. "You've never liked the attention, have you?" Prompto asked. "Not really, all the girls get super competitive and considering that I want to ask a girl out this year..." Noctis said before getting cut off by his friend. "Wait, who is it!!!" Prompto nearly yelled out. "Will you calm down, I don't want anyone to hear about that" Noctis hushed "Who is it?" Prompto whispered while poking him. "It's (y/n), to be honest I've had a crush on her since grade school" he said while lightly blushing. Prompto couldn't help but feel his blood boil at his best friend's words. He thought he could win her over with his royalty and wealth, if he had all that he would be spoiling her in the fineness luxuries the world had to offer, give her whatever she wanted.

He had the urge to punch him, which confused him. why would he want to hurt his best friend over a couple of words. He pretended that it was nothing and continued talking to his best friend but deep inside envy was coursing through his veins.

📷📷📷

For the rest of the day he had been in a foul mood. The final bell of the day signaled the students to leave. He got to his locker and took out his bag and shoes before leaving. He walked out of the school grounds before taking a hoodie out of his bag and putting it on and pulling the hood up to counsel his face. This had become a daily routine for him now, watching (y/n) walk home. Most would call it stalking but he didn't see it that way. It was a long trip at such a late time. I was dangerous for a frail girl like her. He wanted to make sure she returned safe and he couldn't help but take photos of her. She was the perfect subject, the perfect model.

For the whole trip he could tell she was on edge. She keep looking around or going into shops. At one stage she saw the hooded figure stalking her and she panicked and ran out of his sight.

📸📸📸

The next day at school she had been paranoid, Prompto could tell by how she acted. Maybe he should have hid better. The poor girl looked like a lamb that had been separated from the herd.

The lunch bell rung and everybody left class, rushing to the cafeteria. Prompto walked amongst all the others before being stopped by a hand tugging on his sleeve, he turned behind and saw his beautiful, angelic (y/n). "Oh (y/n), what's wrong you've been acting strange today" he said trying to sound clueless. She looked up at him before replying. "Some creepy guy has been stalking me lately and..." She mumbled. "Do you want me to walk you home?" He asked patting her head, her hair was so soft he just wanted to nuzzle into it. "Yes thank you, I'm just afraid that..." She thanked. "I'll make sure that nothing happens to you" he hugged her in his arms, he just wished he could hug her forever.

📷📷📷

Walking (y/n) home was a honor to him, not having to hid in the shadows and act secretive but being around her made his heart beat like crazy and his whole body warm but like all good things it had to end.

"Thank you Prompto for walking me home, I really appreciate it" she said to him as she unlocked the door. "I don't mind, honestly I enjoyed this time we had together, I actually wouldn't mind doing this more often, gives us time to catch up" he said while placing a hand on her shoulder. She turned around and wrapped her hands around him. "Bye Prompto" she said while hugging him. He couldn't help but sigh, her embrace was so warm and welcoming. "Hey (Y/N)" he murmured "Yes" she said. "I was wandering if you could help me with a project I have in photography..." He shyly asked. "Of course! It'll be just like old times!!" She squealed while hugging the oxygen out of him. After what seemed like forever she had finally let go. "Tell me the details tomorrow, OK" "OK" "Good bye, see ya tomorrow" she said as she walked in. "Good bye" he mumbled to her before closing the door.

📸📸📸

(Y/N) was waiting outside of Prompto's house waiting for him to come back so that they could start the photoshoot. "I wonder if he still keeps the spare key under the mat" she said as she knelt down and shifted the mat, it was. She put the key in the lock and twisted it until it clicked, she opened the door and entered the house. The house was nearly pitch black, all of the blinds were closed and a light musky smell clung to her nose give her a strange and unwelcoming feeling.

'I should go to the bathroom and get my make up done' she thought as she walked up the staircase. She opened one of the doors slightly, what she believed to be Prompto's bedroom. 'I'll just leave my bags in her' the (h/c) haired girl thought as she walked in and saw the most horrifying sight.

The room was littered in photographs of her, most she never knew were taken. She gasped, Prompto was the stalker all along! Before she could make Take another step a pistol was pointed at her. She looked at the weilder, her familiar blonde haired friend with a horrified expression on his face. "You! You were the one who was stalking me all along!" She yelled at him, he still held his pistol to her. "(Y/n)... I wasn't ready to tell you-" he shuttered. "You! I don't want to see you anymore!" She screamed at him. Prompto felt something in his brain beginning to crack. "But-" "No buts, I don't want to see you even remotely near me, if you even so much as get close to me I'm gonna file a restraining order!" She screamed over him as she tried to get past him, but it failed. He just stood there, as still as a statue while his mind began to wonder into a dark inky abyss. A smile began to appear on his face. "Tell me that you love me" he said while giving her a sickeningly sweet smile. "What if I say no?" She replied. He cocked the gun, readying to take a shot.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

At first, I was nervous about tackling news stories. 

I knew the stakes from my summers at the Whitehorse Star, had seen how small fuck-ups could have large consequences. Telling someone else’s story is a huge privilege, a power you have over them, and it can be intoxicating. But if you do it wrong, you will hear about it. I preferred the lighter elements of the job, like taking pictures at the Pride Parade or typing up an exhaustive feature on the Capitol Theatre’s production of Chicago. I was a hype machine, excitedly Photoshopping my images and then sprawling back in my desk chair with the newly printed paper’s pages flung open to reveal my handiwork. I floated through the summer of 2014 high on the experience of it all, letting myself fall in love with each new artist I interviewed.

Some people believed the proliferation of artists in the Nelson area was thanks to the town being situated on a bed of magical quartz, but I figured it was more a case of kindreds being attracted to one another. People were looking for a life less ordinary, far from the city. Most locals had some sort of regular job and then spent the remainder of their time investing in creative endeavours, whether that meant painting a mural, starting a food truck or playing in an 80s cover band called Val Kilmer and the New Coke. I started learning the names of local authors, meeting up with poet Tom Wayman and short story writer Myler Wilkenson. I wrote a feature about a photographer named Ryan Oakley who had crowd-funded a book called Humans of Nelson, based on the viral hit Humans of New York. It featured daily portraits of people he met during his lunch breaks, along with a pithy quote that captured their essence. One young singer named Anilah had just landed her Enya-esque tracks on some TV show, a spoken word poet named Magpie Ulysses was releasing a chapbook and a popular saxophonist named Clinton Swanson was playing relentless gigs around town. I giddily funnelled their stories on to Facebook and Twitter, where I obsessively watched the engagement numbers climb. Within a month or two our web presence had exploded, and pretty soon Calvin was bragging that we had the best social media numbers in the Kootenays.

But every now and then, things got dark. The first heavy story that landed on my desk involved a quartet of teenagers who had gone missing the day before I arrived in town. It was eventually discovered that they’d commandeered a canoe and gone adventuring right into a windstorm on Slocan Lake—a body of water so enormous it almost looks like the ocean in places. Authorities were able to recover the canoe pretty quickly, and found a young girl near death. Though they rushed her to medical services, she died in the hospital. There was no trace of the others, three dudes ranging in age from late teens to early twenties. The grief was heavy in the community, and right away I felt it settle in my chest — a clenched fist of empathy. I interviewed the RCMP as they conducted a large-scale search, checking in each day to hear if there was anything to report. At one point it looked like they were going to call it off, but then the families hired a husband-wife duo from the U.S. who had a submersible specially designed for these sorts of retrievals. Within a few days they’d located the boys, down in the darkness, and dragged them back up into the light. I shuddered when I thought of how they must’ve looked after that long underwater, after being cradled to the surface with a claw. The people I interviewed talked about the closure that brought to the families, and I quoted various people silver lining it, but it was the sort of tragedy that was so random it felt cruel on a cosmic level. Like a deity reaching down from heaven to smudge out a few people with his thumb.

“We cannot presume what happened. Our best speculation is misadventure. It wasn’t a very big canoe,” RCMP officer Darryl Little told me. 

“It was more of a swift water canoe than a lake canoe. There wasn’t much space below the gunnels and we figure the wind came up and that was it.”

During those weeks I kept running into people who knew the kids, and saw the impact plain on their heartbroken faces. One woman burst into tears while I was renewing my car insurance. I decided to interview the school district psychologist, Dr. Todd Kettner, to get his insights into the community’s grief process. We met at Lakeside Park and shot a video of him sitting on a park bench, calling out the provincial government and Premier Christy Clark. They had docked his pay during the teacher’s strike, right while he was in the midst of putting in overtime to coordinate a critical incident crisis management plan for the Slocan community. He was the only psychologist for the district, which according to him was chronically under-funded. For him it wasn’t about the dollars they took off his cheque, it was the overall neglect rural schools were receiving that really set him off. In an online open letter that went viral around the province he laid out some of the routine cases he was dealing with from day to day, underlining the ways the community was failing to support students with mental health issues.

“I was awakened Sunday morning by a phone call informing me that a student at one of the 21 schools I’m responsible for was on life support in ICU after an accidental drug overdose,” he wrote.

“Monday morning, while continuing to support the staff at the school where the hospitalized student learns, a dedicated and caring school administrator and I were informed that we were needed at another school to help the staff there prepare to gently inform their students that their classmates’ parent had been killed in a tragic accident.”

Kettner was eventually reimbursed for his pay cut, but didn’t see any change at an institutional level. At the end of the day he was still doing his job the best way he could in seemingly impossible circumstances. In the newsroom Tamara filled me in on the realities of SD8, and the issues were deeply systemic. The whole system was cash-starved because the undeclared income of the cannabis industry meant that, on paper, it was the poorest district in the province. The local high school was past capacity, there were multiple elementary schools that should have been demolished years ago, and sitting through board meetings meant hearing about financial snafus of the highest order.

“Those school board meetings, Will? Worst part of my job, easy. You wouldn’t believe how boring they are. All the ‘motion to accept this’ and ‘motion to accept that’. Makes me want to blow my brains out,” she said.

“The key is, you have to get to know the trustees, the superintendent. Once you have them as a connection, they can pretty much talk you through anything.”

“You think the strike will last much longer?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Those teachers are pissed, and they’re not going to back down.”

Around this time I came to an instinctive conclusion about the type of reporter I wanted to be: not aloof, or unfeeling, but the type that engages to an almost scary degree. If I was going to write a story, I wanted to understand it on a far deeper level than I needed for the paper, I wanted to be the guy in town that was the ultimate expert on that topic — right down to its human nuances.

The story commanding my most fervid attention was the trial of Andrew Stevenson, the bank robber that Cass had told me about. Calvin, Tamara and I spent a good half an hour scouring through Facebook trying to find a photo of him and his co-accused, Krista Kalmikoff, so we could have something to illustrate Greg’s stories about the court hearings. We were unsuccessful. The guy was being charged with seven robberies over the course of about six months, of both banks and pharmacies. The NPD had identified addiction as the driving force behind the crimes, and had been able to predict the exact day of his last robbery: April 25, 2014. In my free time I interrogated anyone who knew anything about what happened, picking up scraps of information here and there. A drunk woman at a party described seeing him come careening out of the bank’s parking lot on a bike, cutting in front of city hall and hurtling down towards the lake as cops sprinted after him. I wanted, so badly, to know what this guy looked like. Calvin sent me down to the court to get a shot of him walking in handcuffed—a goon shot—but then it turned out he was appearing by video link. Foiled!

As I got to know the NPD cops, attending one of their award ceremonies, I met a soft-spoken sergeant named Nate Holt. He had thickly muscled arms, a neatly trimmed blond beard and spiky hair that was nearly white. Not only was he holding an award for bravery, he was also one of the guys who was at the bridge that day, with Andrew Stevenson's stolen money raining down from the tree like confetti. I pictured the bank robber squirming on the rocks, trying to crawl away, while they descended on him like blue wraiths. The thing about Nate was you could feel the toll his work took on him, and you could see it in the way he carried himself. He was piggy-backing a lot of sadness. One suicidal dude came at him with a butcher knife and Nate didn’t even pull his gun. No, he got close enough to tackle him in a bear-hug, wrestle the knife out of his grip and save both of their lives. Sometimes I thought about those two men, rolling on the Baker Street sidewalk in that guy’s blood, while shocked residents looked on. I couldn’t believe that someone could have an experience like that and return to work the next day. But that’s exactly what he did.

Before Paisley moved into our new place, Muppet and I got a few days of lackadaisical meandering. I took her to Kaslo May Days with me, slaloming along the highway up Kootenay Lake in a state of giddy bliss, thinking yes I think I made the right decision while I gazed out at the water. I spotted a weird gargoyle sculpture on top of a house on Front Street, and wondered to myself what the deal was there. I spent a lot of time wandering through parks with my camera, approaching strangers and asking to take their photos. Cass would later jokingly call these spreads “All the people Will met at the park the other day”. Eventually I decided I had to see this bridge Andrew Stevenson jumped off, so I got on the highway out to Castlegar and went looking for it. We turned off the highway and followed a switch-back down to the Columbia River, just a few kilometres up from a massive hydroelectric dam. I parked at one end of the bridge and walked Muppet out across the dusty concrete to the middle so we could see the spot it happened. It was a clear, sunny afternoon, and I eventually identified the small cedar he’d attempted to jump into. Below was nothing but a rocky slope to the river, twenty feet further on. This was where it all ended for him, after evading the cops six times. Maybe it was the new pot I was smoking, or maybe it was something else, but I was feeling an electric need to understand this story. I’d been struggling for years on a novel that wasn’t coming along, partially because I was finding it difficult to invent new parts of the narrative, but here was a true fucking story that I could actually throw my weight into. I stood there for a long time, while cars rocketed by in the distance and wind hurtled through the canyon. The air smelled delicious.

I stood there drinking a Slurpee while Muppet panted happily.

The Kootenay Goon