#there was a second i was fully expecting runaway bride

[stardustalien]

something i love about how they handled the polin angst this season is that i still always felt the love colin and penelope had for one another. at their wedding, you can feel it wasn’t just obligation but bc they love one another.

i never doubted for a second they still loved each other, even with all the hurt feelings and messy situations between them.

[prettygirl-gabi]

Breaking Free

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Rating:General Audiences

Warning: Fluff, slight (very light) angst, happy ending

Category:F/M

Fandom:Seventeen (SVT)  (boyband)

Relationships: !non-idol Seungkwan x !Runaway bride f reader

Summary: When the reader flees her wedding, Seungkwan steps in as her unexpected ally, guiding her through a whirlwind escape that sparks new possibilities and unexpected feelings.

Trope : Runaway bride

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Hiiiii everyone who is reading! Welcome to the eleventh installment of my new mini series called "Oi! Not this again!" They do not have to be read together or in order! I hope you all enjoy!

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I sat in the backseat of a speeding cab, the city lights blurring through the rain-streaked windows. My phone vibrated nonstop, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I already knew what the messages would say. They would be from my parents, angry and disappointed. From my fiancé, demanding answers, his words cutting even through a screen. From everyone I left behind, wondering why the perfect bride-to-be had suddenly disappeared.

I hadn’t planned for it to be this way. The wedding was in two days, and I had been walking around in a daze, going through the motions. The dress was ready, the flowers picked, the venue a beautiful testament to a future I never asked for.

And then I ran.

The car jolted to a stop outside a small apartment building on the quieter side of town. I hurriedly paid the driver and stepped out into the cool night, my breath catching in my throat as I stood in front of the familiar door. I knocked, my knuckles barely grazing the wood, but within seconds, the door flew open.

There he was. Seungkwan.

He stood there in sweatpants, his hair disheveled, clearly not expecting anyone at this hour. His eyes widened as he saw me, drenched from the rain, my wedding ring still gleaming on my finger.

"Y/N?" His voice was a mix of shock and concern. "What are you doing here? Are you okay?"

I couldn’t speak. The words were stuck in my throat, and I felt the overwhelming weight of everything I had done. I thought I’d feel liberated, but all I felt was fear. Seungkwan stepped forward, taking my hand and gently pulling me inside.

"Hey, hey, it’s okay," he said softly, closing the door behind us. "Come on, sit down."

I collapsed onto his couch, my body shaking from the cold, the adrenaline, and the uncertainty of it all. He quickly grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around me before sitting beside me, his eyes searching my face.

"What happened?" he asked again, his voice softer this time. "Did something happen with the wedding?"

I nodded, unable to meet his gaze. My voice barely a whisper, I said, "I couldn’t do it, Seungkwan. I couldn’t marry him."

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He simply waited, giving me the space I needed to explain, to let it all out.

"I never wanted this," I continued, the words spilling out of me in a rush. "It wasn’t my choice. My parents… they’ve been pushing this on me for months. They think it’s the right thing, that it’s what I’m supposed to do. But I don’t love him. I don’t even know him, not really. And tonight… I just… I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t go through with it."

Seungkwan’s hand found mine, his thumb gently brushing over my knuckles. "You’re safe now," he said, his voice filled with a warmth that immediately made me feel grounded. "You did the right thing. If you didn’t want to marry him, you had every right to walk away."

"But what if I made a mistake?" I whispered, tears welling up in my eyes. "What if I ruined everything? My parents will never forgive me. They’ll hate me for this."

"They won’t hate you," Seungkwan said firmly, squeezing my hand. "They might be upset right now, but you can’t live your life for them. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to make your own choices."

I looked at him, his face so full of sincerity that for the first time in days, I felt a flicker of hope. He had always been there, quietly supporting me in ways I didn’t fully understand until now. Whenever things got too hard or overwhelming, it was Seungkwan I called. He was the one person who never pressured me, never tried to control me.

"I don’t know what to do now," I admitted, my voice trembling. "I don’t even know where to go."

Seungkwan smiled, a soft, understanding smile that made my heart ache in a way I couldn’t describe. "You don’t have to figure it all out tonight. For now, just stay here. We’ll figure it out together, okay?"

I nodded, my shoulders finally relaxing a little. "Thank you," I murmured. "I didn’t know where else to go."

"You don’t have to thank me," he replied, his hand still holding mine. "I’m just glad you came here. I’m glad you trusted me."

We sat there in silence for a while, the storm outside fading into the background. Seungkwan didn’t push me to talk more, didn’t try to fix everything in that moment. He simply let me be, offering his quiet support.

Eventually, he stood up, giving me a small, reassuring smile. "I’ll make us some tea," he said. "You should change out of those wet clothes. I’ll get you something comfortable."

As I watched him move around the apartment, I felt a strange sense of calm settle over me. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel the crushing weight of expectation. Here, in this small, cluttered apartment, with Seungkwan’s quiet, unwavering presence, I felt… safe. I felt like I could breathe.

When he returned, he handed me a pair of his oversized sweatpants and a hoodie. "It’s not much, but it’s comfortable," he said with a sheepish smile. "The bathroom’s down the hall."

I changed quickly, the warmth of the clothes enveloping me like a much-needed hug. When I returned to the living room, Seungkwan had set two steaming mugs of tea on the table. He sat cross-legged on the couch, patting the spot beside him.

I sat down, wrapping my hands around the mug and savoring the warmth. We sipped in comfortable silence for a while, the tension between us easing with every passing minute.

"Seungkwan," I said after a while, my voice soft. "I don’t think I ever told you how much you mean to me. You’ve always been there, and I… I don’t know what I would’ve done without you tonight."

He looked at me, his eyes reflecting something I hadn’t noticed before. There was something deeper there, something unspoken between us that I had been too afraid to acknowledge.

"You don’t have to say anything," he said quietly, setting his mug down and turning to face me. "I’ll always be here for you, no matter what. Whether it’s as your friend or…"

He trailed off, his gaze dropping to the floor. My heart skipped a beat, and suddenly, everything felt different. The air between us crackled with something new, something that had been there all along but had only just come into focus.

I swallowed, my voice barely above a whisper. "Or?"

Seungkwan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at me, his eyes full of vulnerability. "Or something more," he finished softly.

My breath caught in my throat. There it was, the thing I had been running from just as much as the wedding. The truth of it all. The real reason I had come here, the real reason I had trusted Seungkwan with everything.

"I think…" I started, my voice trembling, "I think I’ve always felt that way too."

His eyes widened, and for a moment, neither of us moved. But then, slowly, Seungkwan reached out and took my hand in his again, his fingers lacing through mine.

"You don’t have to decide anything tonight," he said softly. "But just know, I’m here. No matter what happens next."

I smiled, feeling the weight of the world lift off my shoulders. For the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t afraid of what came next.

Because I wasn’t alone. I had Seungkwan. And maybe, just maybe, that was enough to start again.

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            ‐Thank You For Reading!🩵🩶

                          -prettygirl-Gabi✨️🎀

[roadtogracelandx45]

Runaway Bride|1| Supernatural Mafia AU

@ohnoitsthebat

masterlist coming soon

Prologue

“I promise Jo, it’s just a quick trip to New York and back.” Ellie Scott said as she put a few more things into her suitcase, her cousin Jo Harevelle was sitting on the neatly made bed glaring and folding her arms under her chest.

 “With your mother, it's never a quick trip.”  “I know but you know how she has been since Dad has been gone and Terry has been locked up.” “She has gone insane? This is the 4th time in 6 months that she has called and has expected you to drop everything and get on a plane.’ 

Ellie pursued her lips together tightly, at first she had been thrilled that her mother had started to be involved in her life more often but when it was trips to New York or Chicago to meet the sons of upper members of the crime family they belonged to. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be involved.

Angela desperately wanted her oldest daughter to solidify their spot in the family that had been floundering since her second husband had ended up in prison and they started losing clout. Her best hope lay with Ellie, a daughter that she sent to live with her former sister-in-law and her husband in South Dakota because she wanted to start fresh, and having Ellie there wasn’t the fresh start she wanted or needed. 

“You know she is just doing this because you are a young single female that can marry up in the family.” Jo started but she was cut off by Ellie waving her hand in the air, “I know Jo, just let me enjoy this pretend time right now. Okay? You have your mom and Bobby. I don’t have that.” 

“What are you going to do about Dean if this ends up being a marriage scheme?”  Jo interrupted, she wasn’t going to have the same fight she always had with Ellie about Ellen and Bobby being Ellie’s parents too. The only thing that had been missing was Angela’s signature on the paperwork, fully signing over custody.

Dean Winchester was the man that Ellie had been in love with since she was 16 and they had an intense relationship to say the least. One minute it was hot and then it was ice cold.  He said he loved her and then slept with another girl. She would get mad and sleep with Sam, his younger brother, or Cas, his best friend.  “I don’t know Jo, maybe it’s time I move on and stop being Dean Winchester’s plaything.” She said as she put a jacket on top of the clothes that she had just put in her suitcase. Jo couldn’t help it, she started laughing, “Honey, you two are in love. A fucked up love but still love.” “Don’t use that word. That word is evil.”  Still laughing, the younger cousin got off of the bed and hugged her, “Come on, I will drive you to the airport. The sooner you get there, the sooner you can get back and you can help me talk mom into letting me skip this upcoming school semester.” “Yeah, that would be the day.” Ellie teased before pulling away, “Come on before the boys get back from Vegas and I can’t leave for another week.” Jo was right the sooner she left the sooner she could get back and have her life back to normal.

[casasupernovas]

opinions: rose tyler overshadowed the entire russell t davies era of doctor who. when she had her undoubtedly sad exit in doomsday, i was fully expecting to never see her again. i mean it fits right? she's stuck. trapped. it's tragic. i wasn't surprised that she came back - ratings. but i wasn't expecting was for her to overshadow the rest of the russell t davies era. i was expecting them to address her absence in 'the runaway bride' because it was taking place literal seconds after the tearful goodbye on bad wolf bay, then we would get to series 3 of doctor who. new series, new companion, much excite! and smith and jones is brilliant...until the moment new companion martha jones steps into the tardis. almost immediately the tone changes and the doctor says she is not replacing rose and restricts their travels to just one trip. characterisation aside, i remember watching and hoping this wouldn't be a re-occuring theme but i was wrong. rose is mentioned in almost every single episode of season 3.

part 2

[aquarri]

NB/GF/Trans Harry Fics

- Ever Since I Tried Your Way by flowercrownfemme (25,896 words)

In 1949 Harry left his bride at the altar, running away from the only life he'd known. When a kindhearted farmer offers him a ride in his truck and a place to sleep the two find themselves inexplicably drawn together. Isolated on Louis' farm with nobody but a field of dairy cows to intrude, the men are finally able to explore the parts of themselves they've spent their lives hiding away.

- Time Passed by coffinofachimera (66,311 words)

Louis struggles with their relationship as Harry grows into his identity.

- Just Like a Woman by superglass (16,625)

Louis is a writer living in Paris for the year. Harry is the charming art student and au pair of the family across the courtyard. Paris 1970s au.

- noboby knows like me by enbyharry (3,552 words)

Harry does his best to cope with a secret life in the summer of '74.

- fallin' and laughin' at the drinks we spilled by enbbyharry (14,284 words)

- Second Spring by vondrostes (103,012 words)

Two years into their relationship, Louis and Harry encounter a new beginning.

- Angel of Little Deaths by superglass (54,468 words)

Louis is a lonely artist in Florence, Harry is a runaway Parisian student. 1970s au.

- imagines just sailing away (away, away) by ohpleaselarry (11,885 words)

2021 is ending in an hour and seemingly out of nowhere, one Harry Styles discovers himself - or, rather, herself.

- you (lost and lonely) by docklands (2,433 words)

Harry and Louis have a couple of days together before Louis goes on tour. Sometimes, however, dysphoria hits Harry harder than he can handle. Louis makes it alright.

- starin' back from the lookin' glass (there stood a woman where a half-grown boy had stood) by 4ureyesonly28 (23,703 words)

- We're Not Who We Used To Be by jaerie (7,527 words)

Louis comes back to his childhood home and sees an old friend who has changed quite a lot since the last time they saw each other.

- venus as a boy by docklands (4,505 words)

When Harry goes to a friend's movie night, the last thing she expects is to meet an enigmatic and handsome stranger who sweeps her off her feet. Louis might just think she’s the most wonderful thing alive.

- Man Made Beauty by jaerie (4,788 words)

aka jaded Louis asks innappropriate questions and gets a thorough education.

- when i said forever by finelinegynandromorph (20,623 words)

or, harry is struggling to find meaning in the rainy countryside. louis is a steady constant as harry wades through the mire of past trauma. dark and moody, with some light at the end of a muddy tunnel

- It's Thursday. Let's Get (un)Dressed by bananaheathen (9,117 words)

When Louis is peer-pressured into downloading TikTok over the holidays, he fully expects to hate it. And he does hate it. All of it. Well... except for aspiring OOTD influencer, @.harrystyles

- (sequel) Meet Me In The Hallway by bananaheathen (15,846 words)

The sequel where we find out what happens in the New Year after Harry and Louis' one-night stand in It's Thursday.

- Tupelo Honey by superglass (54,830 words)

Louis is a roadie for a rock band, and Harry is their groupie. 1970s au.

- Hold Me Tight (Or Don't) by HelloLovers13 (13,629 words)

Falling in love with Louis is easy enough. Separating Louis from the singer persona Harry has been a fan of for years, however, is not.

But she's not the only one making assumptions.

- breathe me with your hands (show me a safe place) by hemakeshimstrongx (30,075 words)

[or: harry makes flower crowns and spends time in a field. louis turns up one day, and while he's curious by nature, harry never could have anticipated any of this. he never could have anticipated louis.]

- but she doesn't know who i am by jaerie (9,170 words)

Prompt #807: The discomfort of walking on a deserted street at night behind a woman who probably thinks you're stalking her.

[writer-k-pop]

Runaway Bride

네가 있고 내가 있다. 우린 없다. There’s you and then there’s me. There’s no us.

Description: Two years after your break up with Dino, you now accidentally ruin his wedding. Over two glasses of wine, the conversation turns to the past and Dino wonders if there’s a second chance but what will your answer be? Warnings: Swearing? Genre: Angst, NonIdol!Dino x Fem!Reader Word Count: 4k

Seventeen Masterlist | Masterlists

If someone would've told me a year ago that I'd be walking up to an event center, accompanying my boyfriend, Jooheon, to the wedding of his best friend, Korra, and her fiance, Dino, who also happens to be my ex-boyfriend, I probably would've busted a lung from laughing so hard.

Yet here I am.

And here's the kicker. I haven't exactly told Jooheon that I know the groom of this wedding. I know him very well.

I plaster a smile on my face as a couple of Jooheon's friends come up and greet us. I'm hoping that my smile is good enough to hide the fact that my stomach is in butterflies.

It's not like I tried to keep it a secret. Well, after the invitation came I did but that's not the point. Korra is one of Jooheon's closest friends but I never had to meet her in person. For the 6 months Jooheon and I've been dating, we just always missed each other and never found the right timing to meet up. And then her wedding invitation came. I knew she was seriously seeing someone, I just didn't expect her fiance to be Dino. I couldn't say anything to Jooheon about it immediately and by the time I should've said something, things had already gotten out of control and it became a secret I had to keep.

"I'll be fine. He might not even see me." I think to myself, patting out a kink in my dress. "it's only what, a small ceremony and then I could fake a stomach ache and ditch the reception." I try to come up with more backup plans but each one sounds more ridiculous than the last.

"Let's get inside," Minhyuk claps Jooheon on the shoulder, "I want a good seat."

"I still can't believe that Korra is getting married." Hyungwon says in awe as we make our way towards the entrance.

"It's crazy, isn't it?" Kihyun mirrors Hyungwon's awe from behind me.

My hand tightens around my purse as we pass through the doors, my nerves shooting straight through the roof. Luckily, as I am smooshed between Jooheon's friends, I don't see anyone I recognize and I hope that means no one could see me.

As a cluster we make our way into the sanctuary and where Changkyun immediately claims the 5th row from the front on Korra's side. They always say there are no sides at a wedding but come on, everyone knows there are always sides.

Jooheon's friends file in first and Jooheon motions for me to sit first but I don't really want to be in the middle of their conversations. So I opt to sit at the edge. Jooheon doesn't protest and enters the row first.

As we wait, I scan the luxurious space while the low mumble of conversations creates an excited buzz. A buzz that I feel none of. The muted greys, greens, and pops of pink light up the space with a soft glow but as I search through the colors, I can't find a trace of Dino in them. The colors are pretty and beautiful for a wedding but I always pictured Dino to have a wedding of more vibrant but still reserved colors. But of course, that was when I was wishfully thinking of our wedding.

On Dino's side, I spot a few of his friends and their dates. I quickly move on from them, not wanting one of them to notice me and I didn't want to analyze the new and old dates. His family who I spent many meals with sits near the front. A smile touches my face when I spot his grandmother excitedly talking to his mother about something. His father joins them in their row and he nods when his mother asks him a question.

Realizing that my choice of seat probably wasn't the best, I turn to Jooheon to ask him to switch spots. But before I can even take a breath, someone from the back of the hall makes an announcement.

"If everyone could take their seats, we will be starting very shortly." The conversations quiet down some but don't completely vanish as people plant their behinds on the stiff folding chairs.

Then I try again but 'very shortly' apparently means immediately as a soft song plays from the halls speakers.

Everyone turns their heads towards the back and Korra's mother makes her entrance with a small bouquet in her hands. After her, three of Dino's friends make their way down the center aisle one by one. Then Dino's best friend follows suit. They all are wearing light grey suits and each looks as good as the last time I saw them.

Dino then appears in the doorway in a similar suit and nothing in my peripheral remains. Like it all disappears and he's the focal point in that moment. I forcibly throw glances in every direction, trying to think of a way so that I don't have to look at him as he walks by but once he takes his first steps, it's clear that he's staring at the altar and not paying attention to anything or anyone else. The steps he takes seem calculated and the suit, though probably really nice and expensive, doesn't look the greatest on him, at least in my opinion.

As he gets closer, I study his face and actively try ignore my heart, thumping quite loudly in my chest.

'Is it nerves? Is he trying to concentrate on something to distract himself? It's probably nerves.' I reason with myself and turn to Jooheon to ask him.

But Jooheon's disappeared. I guess in my nervous haze, I failed to feel him move.

I tap Shownu, in the next chair, to get his attention.

"Where did Jooheon go?" I quietly ask him, leaning over the seat between us.

Shownu shrugs, "Bathroom, I think?"

I nod, not believing a word he says and when I readjust myself into my chair, Dino has made it to front where his best man gives him a supportive smile. The officiant takes his position soon after. Then the music changes to a slightly more chirpy tune, announcing the arrival of the bridal party.

Three ladies, dressed in soft muted green dresses, make their way down the aisle. Each with a smile and a bouquet of their own. Then the maid of honor makers her down in a slightly more flamboyant muted green dress. She gives smiles that border on the line of condescending and a shiver runs down my spine.

The ring bearer, a tiny child, then sprints down the aisle with their parent chasing after them. Their little race erupts a small chuckle from the audience. Then two kids, one male and one female, appear, each with a basket of flower petals. They make their way down, spreading the petals to create a glorified pathway for the bride.

Then the Bridal Chorus plays and everyone begins to stand up and wait for the bride's grand entrance.

I stand up and take one last look at the unmarried Dino. Just as I begin to turn around, his eyes look in my direction and a lightening bolt cracks through my body.

With a quick heart beat and a somewhat hyperventilating breath, I fully turn around and pray that he wasn't actually looking at me. Hoping that he was only looking in my general direction and my mind only thought he was looking at me.

'Yeah, that's it.' I think to myself before focusing back on the empty entrance.

People around me begin to shift uncomfortably as the song continues to play but the bride is nowhere in sight. Nervous looks are shared after a couple minutes of nothing.

"It's probably nothing." Korra's mother reassures us as she makes her way up the isle.

But when she gets halfway up, a large bouquet of flowers is thrown into the hall and Korra's father runs in seconds after.

"She's running away!" He exclaims with wide eyes. The song immediately stops and the audience releases a large gasp. My jaw drops.

"With who?" Korra's mother then sprints towards then past her husband.

The rest of us are still standing unsure of what to do. The atmosphere becoming a bit stuffy.

"That's Jooheon's car!" Korra's mother's voice shrieks in happiness.

Jooheon? The Jooheon that I came here with?

I scoff in disbelief yet part of me can kind of believe it. Maybe it was from the way he always talked about her. Or maybe it was the cloud of disappointment that seemed to hang over him whenever this wedding was mentioned.

The hall erupts with conversations. Dino's side is filled with anger, confusion, concern, etc. While Korra's side is almost relieved that she ran off with Jooheon.

In a frenzied crowd, Dino's side of the hall quickly makes their exit and when I try to search for Dino, he's completely disappeared.

Korra's parents make their way to address our side of the hall once Dino's side has left.

"Well, we shouldn't let good food go to waste." Korra's mother says with a hand on her heart, "We did pay for it after all. If you would make your way to the reception hall next door, we will serve you some dinner and alcohol."

The people around me nod and continue their happy chatter. But I can only register the sound. My mind is occupied on Dino. I wonder how he's dealing with this. Probably not well. He's always been one to get pretty invested in relationships.

"Oh, Dino." I whisper in pain just from imagining what he's going through.

A hand places itself on my shoulder and pulls me back to reality.

"You coming?" Shownu asks me. I look around and find that 90% of the people have already left. I should probably go too if I don't want to look weirder.

I nod and take a deep breath, "Yeah, uhm, yeah."

We follow behind the others and my ears perk up to the conversation Hyungwon and Minhyuk are having.

"I can't believe he actually did it." Minhyuk giggles.

"I know. He is so much better for her." Hyungwon gossips back.

"Wait," I stop them before Minhyuk can change topics, "You make it sound like you didn't know he was going to run off with Korra." I glance between the two with a questioning look.

Minhyuk shakes his head, "Of course we didn't know. We just know their unmentioned history and he's talked about stealing her away once or twice but we didn't know he was going to do it on her wedding day."

"We didn't think he was crazy enough for that kind of stunt." Hyungwon adds.

"Hey, there's an open table over there." Kihyun points off to the left when we reach the reception hall. They start to make their way over to it but I grab Shownu's arm.

"Hey, you know, I'm not feeling too good about staying so I think I'm gonna head home." I tell him with an apologetic smile.

"No, yeah, of course." Shownu nods in agreement, "Hey, if you need anything now or in the future, don't hesitate to give me a call. You're cool."

I touch my hand to my heart, gratitude rising. "Thanks. I will." Shownu has always been one of my favorites. Always so caring and sweet.

Walking away, I am suddenly stopped by a pair of hands.

"I’m sorry to bother you, but have you seen the groom?" An older female asks me, very worried.

Turning to look at her and her worry becomes mine when I recognize her.

"Mrs. Lee."

"(y/n)?" She blinks in recognition and releases me, "What, what are you doing here?"

I scratch the back of my head, slightly embarrassed. "I, uh, I'm the girlfriend of the guy who ran away with the bride. Er, I was, at least." I watch the confusion pass over her face before pity took over. "Why are you looking for Dino?" I question quickly before she can really pity me.

"We told him to wait by the car for us so we could take him home but he wasn't there when we went." She explains, "And we looked all over the center but he's nowhere. You haven't seen him have you?"

I shake my head, "No, I haven't. But I will look."

Mrs. Lee grabs my hands in hers, "Thank you, dear, thank you. Let me know if you hear or find anything."

I nod and grip her hands back, "I will. I promise."

She starts to walk away but stops abruptly, "Do you need a ride home? Since your date has well..." She doesn't finish.

I shake my head, "I'm okay. I'll do one last sweep here and then take a taxi home. You should go home and rest." I lie through my teeth, already having an inkling of where Dino could be.

She nods in agreement, "Alright." And then she walks away.

I run my hands through my hair and take a deep breath. Then, without much knowledge of what I'll say when I find him, I make a beeline for the room where the caterers are set up.

"Uh, ma'am, you can't be back here." One of the employees looks at me blankly when I step through the door.

"Yeah, I know that, but you see, I'm here on behalf of the groom who was left at the altar so if you wouldn't mind." I sass at her, not dealing with any crap.

"Oh." The employee's face falls in pity for Dino the groom, "What can I do for you?"

"Could I get a couple bottles of wine in a bag please?" I ask, ignoring the other stares from around the room.

"Of course." The employee says and runs towards the wine cooler. She pulls two bottles out and tucks them into a paper bag. "Here you are." She presents the bag to me with a small smile.

"Thank you." I pluck up the bag and race out towards the street.

I wave down a taxi in record time and tell him my home address. I honestly don't know why I think he's at my apartment. I just kind of know. Like deep, deep down in my gut kind of knowledge. The one where you don't question and just do as it says. And it's saying to go my apartment.

After paying and stepping out of the taxi, my gut flips when I see my apartment light on and the silhouette of a person leaning on my deck railing. Then, as fast as my legs can carry me in heels, I ride the elevator up to my floor and click clack all the way to my door.

When I reach my door, I take a deep breath to calm myself before punching in my code. The one I haven't changed in years.

Once inside, I slip off my shoes and cautiously make my way towards the open deck door. I lay the bag of wine bottles on the couch and flinch as the clanking glass rings louder than I expected. But Dino doesn't move.

He stays leaning on his forearms that are resting on the rail with his gaze fixed on the city lights in the distance as I step out onto the deck. He doesn’t move even as I lean forward, mirroring his position. Only once I've stilled for a few seconds does he speak.

"I prayed I was hallucinating." DIno says, gaze still fixed on the distance. "But when I got here and you weren't, I knew I wasn't hallucinating."

I glance over at him and wish I hadn't. His face looks tired and like he's been aged several years. His eyes are so downcast that I wonder if they could go any lower. His lips and cheeks look like they haven't laughed or smiled hard in a long, long while.

"Are you okay?" I ask, reaching out a hand but pulling back in fear of crossing boundaries.

Dino scoffs, "Would it be terrible to say that a small part of me almost saw this coming?"

I shake my head, "No, it wouldn't be the worst thing."

"She was always talking about that Jooheon and how similar they were and how much he understood her." Dino dips his head down before bringing it back up, "We even had a few fights about it. But we somehow were able to smooth it over. I guess this time she really said 'fuck it.'" He shrugs, "I mean, I'll be alright. I'll get over this. I always come out okay."

"Yes, you do." I agree with him and look straight ahead.

"What about you?" He asked, now it being his turn to look at me, "I heard you were seeing someone. Was it someone Korra new? That would explain why you were at the wedding."

I chuckle, "The universe just knows how to fuck with us." I sweep my hair over my shoulder and a soft breeze wraps around us, "My date to the wedding uh, was the one who convinced your bride to say 'fuck it.'" I tell him, avoiding his gaze, afraid of the embarrassment I would feel.

"Oh." Is all Dino says.

I smile, "That's all you got?" I question his seemingly calm manner.

"I mean if I were to actually to speak my mind, I would be talking about how I'm going to kick his ass. Not only for taking my bride but dumping you like that." Dino explains.

A chuckle reverberates through my chest, "That's more like the Dino I know."

He lets out a huffed laugh, "And you still haven't changed your passcode even though I'm pretty sure I told you to."

I shrug, "No one's broken in yet so there's no need to change it."

I've been trying to ignore it but there's a very obvious topic that we're both ignoring. Even though it's sat RIGHT between us. But for now, we ignore it with a few minutes of silence.

"You should let your mom know where you are." I suddenly remember why I came here in the first place, "She was worried about you."

Dino's head drops to his hands and he sighs, "God, I don't think I can face them. I'm so embarrassed. I mean they weren't 100% on board with it but they still supported me full heartedly. Ugh. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go home again."

Ignoring boundaries, I lay a hand on his shoulder and give it a reassuring squeeze, "I think she's more worried about you rather than in a rubbing-it-in-your-face mood. Just send her a quick text and say that you're alright and with me. I'm sure that'll soothe her heart immensely."

Dino looks up me for a second before nodding. "Like always, you know what to say."

While he pulls out his phone and texts his mother, I walk back inside, grab two glasses from the kitchen, a wine opener, and one of the wine bottles from the bag. I return to the deck and Dino has made himself comfy on one of the deck chairs.

He takes one look at the wine bottle and glasses in my hand and cocks his head to the side in question. "You never had wine stocked at your house." He remembers with squinted eyes.

I smirk, "I swiped them from the caterers." Dino takes the glasses from my hand and then I get to work opening the bottle. "It is still half your wedding after all, you should be able to enjoy a little of it."

With a satisfying *pop*, the wine bottle is open and I pour his glass before my own.

"Well, Korra's parents paid for a solid 95% of the whole thing." Dino informs me, "They wouldn't let me pay for much of anything."

"Then the two bottles I swiped is the perfect amount for the 5% you did pay for." I sit down and raise my glass out to him.

"Is toasting the best thing to do?" Dino looks at my glass wearily, "One of us got left at the altar and the other got dumped by the man who is responsible for the other's empty altar."

"I think a toast is the perfect thing to do in our situation." I answer him, honestly, "We both need a fresh start and this toast can represent the start of that."

Dino nods in agreement and raises his glass to meet mine.

"To another reset." Dino says.

"To another reset." I repeat after him and we take a sip. The wine immediately makes my mouth pucker with dryness. "Not the worst wine I've had." I try to think positively.

"But it's still pretty bad." Dino adds on, pursing his lips and giving the glass a dirty look. "Korra always liked her wines extremely dry."

"She picked out the wine?" I guess.

He nods, "And the food." He raises his eyebrows, "Thankfully you didn't bring any of that." He pauses and peers at me, "Did you?"

I shake my head, "It crossed my mind but no, I didn't."

As I swirl my wine around my glass, I feel Dino's gaze burning holes into my forehead.

"There's you and then there's me. There's no us." Dino softly says, "You remember that?"

My hand stops mid swirl. Of course I remember those words. They're what I said to him when we broke it off. Well, when I broke it off really.

"Yeah, I remember." I say staring at the wine in my glass.

"Do you still think that?" Dino hesitantly asks, almost like he's wishing for a certain answer.

I sigh and meet his gaze. His eyes are still as soft as ever and I can tell he still cares for me. Don't get me wrong, I still care for him, just not as much.

"Yeah, yeah I do, Dino." I answer him and I watch as his features fall, "There was a reason you and I couldn't work then and it's the same reason we can't work now."

"Tell me the reason. Maybe we can change it." Dino inquires, hopeful.

I shake my head, "It's not something either of us can change. It's just who we are as people."

Dino's hands fall into his lap and he just stares at them.

I chew on my lips, hating that I'm depressing him like this. "Don't get me wrong, Dino, I know we're meant to be in each other's lives. Lord knows my life would be a mess if you weren't in it but I don't think we're meant to go as far as being together."

Dino nods, telling me that he's hearing my words.

"We tried, and while it was a good run, it wasn't the best run." I continue, "It feels weird to admit it but these past couple years of not talking sucked. Like royally sucked. I got into so much trouble."

Dino chuckles, finally looking up, "Whatever you got into isn't as bad as almost getting married only to have your bride run away with some guy."

I smile seeing him pull himself out of the depressive state slightly. "I dunno, I got into some pretty deep shit."

Dino whistles and lifts his wine glass again. "It must be pretty bad if it's worse than nearly getting married."

I shrug, "I couldn't help it, I didn't have my bestie there to stop me."

"You better find one then." Dino tells me, taking a sip.

"But I like the one sitting in front of me." I pout.

"Do you really think we could just be friends?" He asks, giving me a questioning look.

"I mean it'll take some time but yeah, I think we can." I honestly answer him, "Plus, who else is going to stop you from almost getting married next time?"

Dino laughs, "The next time I propose to someone, it's going to be the last time."

"And the next time I go to your wedding, my date won't steal your bride." I smile, lifting my glass. "Friends?"

"Better be best friends." Dino corrects and taps his wine glass against mine.

And that's how we spend the rest of the night. Out on the deck with two glasses and two bottles of wine. Telling all of our adventures from the two years we were apart. The good, the bad, the successes, and the whole lot of trouble we got ourselves into. And all it took was two years and a runaway bride.

[drwcn]

Think lan zhan and jiang yanli could be friends like wei ying and wen qing are friends? If they had the chance I could see it. Totally imagining lan zhan being bewildered at first, but than actually seeing why wei ying loves his sister so much. Also totally see them silently judging idiot people together and working together to keep wei ying mentally safe. Yanli teaching him how to cook and things about her brother.

YAS！ LWJ and JYL judging people together is Mood. I will die on this hill.

(and bc i hate sleep, i got inspired by your ask and wrote this brain vomit from my btsf!verse that no one asked for, and yet i shall shamelessly impose on the world. It’s a different take on jiang yanli chewing out jin zixun and lan wangji being there and being generally awesome. ) 

Jin Zixun is causing a scene. 

Again. 

In broad daylight in the middle of one of Jinlintai’s gardens no less. The Jins had planted lovely peonies, which are all in bloom now. Jiang Yanli had intended to enjoy them for an hour or two, but it seems her morning plans are about to be ruined. What she initially dismissed as a minor nuisance is quickly becoming an irritating fixture in her life. She has half a mind to be rid of this no good Jin cousin for good, and for that matter, she can count a good number of people who would oblige her. 

Standing toe to toe with Jin Zixun, Wei Wuxian is shaking with fury from whatever the other man had said. Not that anything even remotely tasteful has ever been produced by Jin Zixun’s mouth. It’s only productive function is eating, as that seems to be the only time he’s quiet and therefore marginally tolerable. 

Jiang Yanli already feels a headache looming just from the reminder of his mere existence. 

Lan Wangji is the first to notice her. He has one hand wrapped around Wei Ying’s wrist and another around Bichen’s sheath, pressing it across Jin Zixun’s chest to deter him from taking another step closer. Upon seeing her entourage approaching, he steps back and bows respectfully. 

“Sect Master Jiang.” 

Like wise, Jin Zixun reluctantly gives a half-hearted bow. She ignores him. For now. 

Remembering himself, Wei Wuxian flinches and quickly follows suit. “Zongzhu.” He greets her quietly. [zongzhu = sect master]

He doesn’t call her shi-jie anymore, at least not in public. 

Since the day she declared herself Sect Master of Yunmeng Jiang, A-Xian has been on his very best behaviour. Every word, every conduct, has strictly been adherent to what is expected of someone in his status and station. But Jiang Yanli could only frown. True, he is her left hand man, her lieutenant, her zuo-hufa, but he is firstly her brother, and she will not stand for him being pushed around by some second rate cultivator just so she could be spared “conflict”.

Turning her head slightly over her shoulder, she makes a small motion for Binghu (冰湖) and Shuangxue (霜雪) to stand down. Dealing with a gnat like Jin Zixun is too menial a task for upstanding cultivators like her personal guards. No, A-Xian is her brother, so Jiang Yanli will deal with this herself, and those who crosses her will only ever be sorry. 

“A-Xian, what’s going on?” 

“Nothing, zongzhu. A minor disagreement is all.” Clearly lies. 

Jiang Yanli looks to Lan Wangji. The younger man does not let go of his betrothed’s wrist, but he does lower his eyes out of deference to her. “Zhangjie, Jin Zixun-gongzi suggested that your brother Jiang-gongzi should be disqualified from tomorrow’s hunt on account of his unorthodox cultivation method. He said that he who could not protect his own golden core has no place amongst cultivators.” [zhangjie = a formal way of saying older sister]

Zhangjie. Rather bold of him to call her that, seeing he and A-Xian are not yet legally wed. But perhaps his choice of words is deliberate, used to remind her that Wei Wuxian is not just her subordinate, but her family. She’d be offended if the gesture isn’t so genuinely endearing. Lan Wangji is a quiet one, but so fiercely protective of Wei Wuxian. Out of this wretched war and all the underhanded maneuvers she’s been forced to take, nothing has pleased her more than this marriage alliance that she and Lan Xichen arranged.

“Lan Zhan…” Wei Wuxian frowns and admonishes him quietly.  

“I spoke the truth.” 

Jiang Yanli casts Jin Zixun an aloof side glance, then says, “Perhaps I have confused the rules. Clarify for me, Wangji, is spiritual cultivation required for the hunt tomorrow?”

“No.” 

“Does cultivation affect the participant’s performance and ability?”

“No. Not if they follow the rules of conduct.”

“The Hunt is a strictly skills based competition is it not?”

“It is.” 

“Well then, I think that settles that. A rather simple mistake, Jin Zixun-gongzi, but I wouldn’t fret too much if you didn’t remember. This has been trying times for us all.”Jiang Yanli’s smile is bright but scorching, like the desert sun. 

Colour rises in Jin Zixun’s cheeks. He turns up his nose and huffs, “Has Yunmeng Jiang fallen so low that there’s no one left but deviants, servants, and women?”  

Wei Wuxian starts towards him, fully intending to throttle the man, but Jiang Yanli calms him with a gentle hand. Unflustered, she turns her full attention to the Jin cousin. The smile on her face does not dim, but her eyes are glacial. 

“Deviants, servants, and women. It’s true. We are that. But what can be done? It is unfortunate that there’s not enough reliable cultivators to count on, that even deviants, servants, and women must be forced to take up arms against a tyrant. How tiresome that we must not only fight our own fights, but you cultivators’ fights too.”

“How dare you -” Jin Zixun bristles, which is about as intimidating as an angry ferret, in Jiang Yanli’s considered opinion.

“Shall I remind you when you led your troops into enemy territory last winter in a bullheaded attempt to boast your ego, whose squadron came to your aid when you were trapped, starving in the snow? Whose food fed your men’s bellies, whose blankets and tents warmed your bodies in that storm?” Jiang Yanli does not raise her tone, but holds nothing back. “And who, after you so pitifully grovelled, omitted your incompetence from the report to your uncle and Sect Master.” 

“I -” Jin Zixun darkens from red to purple, unable to come up with a single word of refute. Typical. 

Jiang Yanli plows on.

“If we deviants, servants, and women are not befitting polite company and the gentlemanly sport of hunting, then you sir, with so little grace and gratitude for the people who saved your life and the lives of your kinsmen, are not fit to even stand in our presence.” She takes a step closer, forcing him back. “You’re right. I am a woman, but Wei Wuxian was raised along side myself and Jiang Cheng, as close to us as flesh and blood. That you have called him a servant is untrue and a grave offence, which I will not accept. So remembering that, Jin Zixun-gongzi, you will apologize to my brother, Yunmeng Jiang’s zuo-hufa Wei Wuxian. Immediately.”

It is Jin Zixun’s turn to shake, too humiliated and furious to say a thing. It’s clear that he’d rather the ground swallow him than apologize, but as servants and disciples start to crowd around them, whispering and pointing, it seems he has no choice. Jiang Yanli is still a sect master, and Wei Wuxian is a much respected hero. 

“Apologies, Wei-gongzi.” 

“What’s going on here?” Behind Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, Jin Zixuan and Qin Su can be seen making their way towards them from the other end of the lang. The latter of the two dips in a proper courtesy of a gentlewoman, but the former only manages an awkward cultivator’s bow without meeting Jiang Yanli’s eyes.  

“Nothing that needs to worry you, Jin-gongzi. Just a small misunderstanding, all cleared up now. Is that not so, Zixun-gongzi, Wangji, A-Xian?”

“Barely a tiff.” Lan Zhan lies with a straight face. Wei Ying says nothing. 

Jin Zixun forces himself to nod once. 

Jiang Yanli quickly forgets that such a person ever existed. Stepping up to the two that just joined them, she offers her usual sweet smile. “I don’t believe I’ve had the opportunity to congratulate you both on your upcoming nuptials. Such wonderful news! Qin-meimei, Madam Jin has asked me to consult on the design of your fengguan, I hope we shall see more of each other so I can make better judgement of your preferences.”

Qin Su blushes. “Jiang-jiejie - eh - Jiang-zongzhu, you tease me! There’s been so much to do lately, we’ve not had time to send out the invites. I - Congratulations to your family too, Hanguang-jun, Wei-gongzi.”

Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian return her well wishes politely, though somewhat with a stiff back. Jiang Yanli internally frowns, wondering perhaps things aren’t going as well she is led to believe… A matter she needs to think on later. 

“Well, I must be off now. I wish I had the endurance of a cultivator, but alas the summer heat is somewhat getting to me. Do enjoy the peonies though, Qin-meimei, Jin-gongzi, they are lovely this year. Wangji, A-Xian, come.”

Jiang Yanli leaves the garden at a leisurely pace, her head held up high, followed by her brothers and her entourage. As she turns at the round archway, she spares a discreet glance towards Jin Guangshan’s son and his future bride, a pairs of unfortunate siblings trying to fit into each other’s lives and unknowingly heading towards a disaster.

She decides to let that one stew a little longer. For now no real damage is done - Jin Zixuan is far to awkward even if Qin Su finds him handsome. The marriage won’t go through; she’s not so cruel that she will actually let that runaway carriage go off the proverbial cliff. However, the key to every offensive strike is timing, and now is not the time to reveal the truth to them. As long as Madam Qin is medically incapacitated, the secret holds, and she will stay that way for a while yet. Jiang Yanli muses that she rather likes the landscape now the way it is, and longs to see the day Jin Guangshan and Qin Cangye gets what’s coming to them.

-

1. zongzhu = sect master2. zuo-hufa =  the “zuo - left” hand man of the sect master. Their function is to serve and protect the sect master, as the word hufa literally means protector. 3.  Binghu (冰湖) & Shuangxue (霜雪) - YJL’s bodyguards. Binghu means ice, lake, Shuangxue means frost, snow. 4.  zhangjie = a formal way of saying older sister.5. lang =  A long, belt-like structure, Lang, the covered corridor is a roofed passage usually with low railings and long side benches. 6. meimei = younger sister. jiejie = older sister. When used in conjunction with last names, this is a way for women who are familiar with each other to address each other. I7.  fengguan 凤冠 = it’s the term for the headpiece that brides wear on their wedding day. 

[chiseler]

TWO ALONE: A Noir Pastoral

It gets darker in the country than in the city.

Urban areas are thought to teem with crime and vice, but for city dwellers used to crowded, well-lit streets there’s a special terror about lonely rural roads at night. To the wary urbanite, the country—while it may be pretty for a Sunday outing—is a place of isolation, ignorance, backwardness and intolerance. This distrust feeds a strain of the rural gothic that trickles through Hollywood movies, always marginal and often subversive. Less common than the swampy, overripe Southern gothic, this genre of bucolic noir portrays farm life as mean, hard-bitten, joyless, and rife with exploitation—less salt-of-the-earth than salt-in-the-wounds.

F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1929) set the template. Here Murnau inverted the pattern of Sunrise (1928), in which George O’Brien’s restless farmer is corrupted by an immoral city vixen and redeemed by a his wholesome, pure-hearted peasant wife. In City Girl, the eponymous heroine spends her days slinging hash in a Chicago lunch counter, sweating and footsore, batting away passes from endless hordes of male customers. At night she goes home to the roar of the El outside her cramped little room, blows the dust off her pitiful potted flower, listens to the chirping of a mechanical bird toy, and dreams of a better life outside the city. But when she marries a naive farm boy and goes home with him to the wheat fields, she’s briskly disillusioned. She has to contend with her harshly disapproving, bible-thumping father-in-law, who dominates her spineless husband; with a crowd of lecherous hired hands whose leering and pawing are worse than anything at the lunch counter; with thankless toil and her in-laws’ grim obsession with profit.

City Girl was caught in the changeover to sound, made as a silent but released in a mangled form with added musical and dialogue scenes. (The silent version has since been recovered and is now the only version available.) Among the changes that came with the adoption of sound was an intense urbanization of Hollywood’s output. The difficulty of location shooting and the influx of actors and writers from New York may have been the causes, but the whole tone of pre-Code movies is urban: wised-up, fast-paced, slangy.

Even when someone tried to make a film extolling the virtues of rural life, it seems they just couldn’t stop sneering and shuddering. The Purchase Price (1933), a total mis-fire by William Wellman, follows the basic trajectory of City Girl but is made with complete disregard for narrative logic or credibility. Barbara Stanwyck plays a nightclub singer so fed up with life on the Big Street, and with her seemingly amiable racketeer boyfriend, that she decides to flee to North Dakota as a mail-order bride. There she behaves like a brainwashed gulag inmate, cheerfully undergoing her re-education-through-labor: waking at dawn in a room so cold the water in her pitcher is frozen, and slogging through back-breaking toil in support of a churlish ingrate husband. (Played by the charmless George Brent, he pounces on her without preamble on their wedding night, and is so deeply offended by her rejection that he refuses ever to give her a second chance.) Of course, who would want to earn a cushy living warbling a song or two in a silver lamé gown when she could don an unflattering apron and a pair of galoshes and tote heavy pails of water along muddy paths while fending off cretinous rustics and suffering the scorn of a man with a chronic sniffle? Umm....

Somehow I imagine that the men who wrote The Purchase Price (the screenplay was by Warner Brothers regular Robert Lord, having an off day) were about as fond of clean country living as Oscar Levant, whose freak-out upon finding himself on the remote Neshobe Island is memorably recorded in Harpo Marx’s sublime autobiography, Harpo Speaks. He describes how Levant dissolved into panic when dragged off to this idyllic spot: “‘Birds!’ he wailed. ‘There are birds here! The sickest creatures on God’s earth! Trees! Even the trees are psychotic! Bugs! Don’t tell me there aren’t any insects here because I know there are!’ He grabbed my arm. ‘Harpo,’ he said, ‘What have you done to me? Take me away from here. Take me away from here!’”

Rural gothic films succeed where they avoid Purchase Price-style hypocrisy and are unapologetic in their antagonism. The completely unexpected Two Alone (1934) is such a triumph. It is unexpected both because this kind of dark, brooding, romantic, Borzagean tale was out of fashion in 1934, and because no one involved in the film had a distinguished record elsewhere. Director Elliott Nugent started as an unpreposessing actor (he’s the wimpy love interest in the talkie version of The Unholy Three, and had his best role as an emotionally damaged ex-pilot in The Last Flight) and as a director churned out mainly lightweight fare and earnest mediocrities like the 1949 Great Gatsby. The cast is headed by bland B leads—lovely Jean Parker, whose acting is rudimentary, and perennial kid-brother Tom Brown—and by a crew of usually predictable character actors. But nothing about this film is predictable.

It opens with barnyard footage that prepares you for a quaint rustic comedy (an expectation encouraged by the presence of ZaSu Pitts’s name in the credits). But the scenes of farmer Slag (Arthur Byron) rousting his family out of bed for another workday have a nasty edge: he’s a mean bastard, his wife (Beulah Bondi) is a sour-faced shrew, and their daughter is all one would expect from such a love match. The next shock is our first view of Mazie (Parker), bathing naked in a stream, her fully exposed rear ogled by Slag in a creepy Suzanna-and-the-Elders scene.

Mazie is an orphan and essentially a slave to her foster family, who exploit her powerlessness to the full. When the stingy, iron-fisted Slag growls self-righteously that “No one ever gave me anything,” one can hear the echo from today’s G.O.P. candidates. The protestant work ethic has drained this family of the last drop of humanity; they’re more miserly with compassion than with coin, and their flinty obsession with squeezing every penny from their workers and their land is related to Slag’s predatory lust and his wife’s barren prudishness. (When a hired man quits, Mrs. Slag confronts him with a shotgun and goes through his suitcase to make sure he didn’t steal any spoons; he jokes unkindly that she doesn’t need the shotgun to protect herself from him.) When Mazie falls in love with Adam (Brown), a reform school runaway who becomes another de facto slave, their romantic and sexual union is the ultimate threat to the Slags: a combined threat of rebellion, of idleness, of emotional warmth, of fertility, of freedom.

These themes are woven cleverly through the film. There is an ambiguous scene at the beginning where the middle-aged hired hand George Marshall (Willard Robertson) talks to Mazie by the well as she’s fetching water. Robertson was a character actor distinguished by his hard slitty eyes, and he usually played cops and sheriffs—the kind you know won’t believe your story. Here, he’s kind to Mazie, but his interest seems suspicious, especially when they talk about her unknown father, and Marshall opines that “no substitute has been found yet” for a biological father. It later turns out that Marshall is her father, that he has sought her ought and plans to rescue her. Hence the well, where Mazie looks at her reflection and imagines she is seeing her mother’s face, becomes a symbol of revelation—truth emerging from the well, as in the old adage. Yet it remains an ominous image too: in the end Mazie will throw herself into the well as Slag attacks Adam, who is now the father of her unborn child.

We first see Adam literally falling off the back of a truck, where he has been hitching a ride, and tumbling down a dusty slope. Tom Brown has a baby face that usually shone with gee-whiz, schoolboy cockiness under slicked-back hair. Here, with his hair tousled and a look of wary bitterness on his dirt-streaked face, he’s surprisingly attractive and forceful. Adam was sent to reform school after beating up his father, who abused his mother; Slag sees a chance to benefit by concealing Adam and blackmailing him into working for no wages.

Mazie and Adam bond first like brother and sister. Their awakening to something more comes in a dark, weirdly sexy scene that suggests anything but innocent pastoral romance. Left behind while the Slags are off at their daughter’s wedding, the young couple sits around a fire outdoors with Sandy (Charley Grapewin), a harmlessly demented dipsomaniac whose daughter (Pitts, in a very minor role) locks him in the shed to keep him out of trouble. Sandy starts telling them about the customs of Indian weddings, in which the groom has to chase down the bride. As he beats hypnotically on an upturned bowl to imitate the tom-toms, Adam and Mazie are unnerved and then possessed by the drumming; they run off into the dark woods and kiss.

Later, after they run away together, they succumb again in a field full of cloyingly sweet night flowers. But their sexual passion leads them into a love as pure and faithful as anything in Borzage. Their position as outcast waifs who find salvation in one another recalls Lucky Star—where crippled Charles Farrell and ragged farm girl Janet Gaynor develop an achingly delicate love in a bleak, slovenly rural gothic setting. The loveliest moment in Two Alone comes when Mazie, who has just realized she’s pregnant, faints and is carried into the house by Slag, who shoos Adam away. Ordered back to her chores as soon as she revives, Mazie goes to the porch for firewood. Through the window, we see Adam standing outside in the lashing rain, waiting to find out if she’s all right. It’s a beautifully framed and lit image that illustrates, without mawkishness, Adam’s devotion and the forlorn yearning of the young lovers kept apart.

Perhaps it’s unlikely that this story would end well, that the one good father would win out over all the bad fathers. George Marshall shows up in the nick of time after Adam has brawled with and been shot by Slag, and Mazie has thrown herself in the well. Adam still has to go back to reform school, but it’s a generally hopeful ending—and it comes as a great relief. It’s a tribute to the small film’s emotional power that we really don’t want to see the the luckless young lovers suffer any more.

Two Alone feels out of place at the tail end of the pre-Code era; it looks both backward to silent melodramas and forward to rural gothic noirs like Borzage’s Moonrise (1948), Jean Negulesco’s Deep Valley (1947), and Delmer Daves’ The Red House (1947). In Deep Valley, Ida Lupino is an isolated girl whose parents’ frosty, sick, mutually punishing relationship has reduced her to timid, stammering neurosis. She blossoms after meeting another wounded soul (Dane Clark), a convict escaped from a chain gang that is building a road through the remote woods; but he can’t free himself from his compulsively violent nature, and finds escape only in death. Clark had his finest hour in the gorgeous and haunting Moonrise, as a young man ostracized by his nasty Southern backwater town because his father was hanged for murder.

The past lingers longer in small towns and lonely farmsteads than in cities, where anonymity and change constantly wash around the inhabitants. This makes rural noir a more natural phenomenon than is commonly assumed, since the fatal grip of the past is a central noir theme. The Red House is a psychological haunted-house tale, and if one is not too distracted by the incongruity of Edward G. Robinson and Judith Anderson playing both siblings and farmers, it achieves a dense atmosphere of decay and blight. One-legged Pete Morgan (Robinson) relies on both spooky rumors and a hired redneck with a shotgun to keep people out of the woods around a ruined farmhouse that harbors the macabre secret of the woman he loved and killed. The woman’s daughter, ignorant of her past, is Morgan’s adopted daughter, and as his mind crumbles he begins to mistake her for his long-lost love, a disturbingly incestuous delusion. There’s a campfire-story creepiness about this film, you can almost hear the twigs snapping and see the light flickering, making the woods beyond blacker.

Bring a flashlight. It gets dark out there in the country.

by Imogen. Sara Smith

[noirornothing]

An Instrumental Drive

Part Two -- 1285 Words 

Part One, Three, Finale

“Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.” The rest wager it will all crumble at the hands of a man named Banjo McClintock. 

C.C. Tinsley is inclined to agree. 

Twenty-four hours to find an art thief and a stolen vehicle. Tinsley rubbed his eyes, laying flat on his bed, still fully clothed. He hadn’t managed to find his way into something more comfortable, despite it being well past midnight. There was far too much in his mind to be bothered with the thought of pajamas.

He rested his hands across his stomach, clasped over his abdomen as he pondered where a man named Banjo spent his nights. A jazz club, maybe? Or more likely, he’d fled town the second he’d hotwired the car, never to be seen again.

He’d have to explain it to the Chief in the morning, and there was no guarantee he’d even be allowed to work the case. Ricky had given him an alias to use for the registration with just enough accurate information to make the listing seem legitimate. It still made him feel a bit rotten.

He’d worked hard to find a place in the force, among dozens of rough city-dwellers. If it hadn’t been for his past expertise as a private investigator, he was certain they’d have eaten him alive. But, by some miracle they seemed to appreciate the lifestyle. Some even acted a bit jealous as he recounted tales of runaway brides and suspicious dealings after dark. If they lived it for a year or two, he had the feeling they’d change their tunes.

The clock read 12:41 A.M. and there was no denying it was correct. The day had come to an end, and he knew it was time to give in. But Ricky’s parting words ran through his mind again and again, like a record on repeat.

He sighed, bringing his hands behind his head as his eyes drifted shut. Twenty-four hours. Within seconds he’d drifted off, button-down and all. That night he dreamt of wild car chases, vivid artistry, and an erratic thief who had no idea just how deep his own grave had been dug.

--

The phone rang at 7:28 A.M., shrill and unpleasant. Tinsley shot up straight, slightly dizzy as he reacquainted himself with his surroundings. He looked down at himself—clothes from the day before rumpled. His hair, he assumed, also in major disarray. The phone continued its onslaught until he hauled himself to the desk, still swaying with sleep.

“Tinsley here.”

“Ah, Mr. Tinsley. I hope you start your days as early as I do, because it’s a fine one this morning.” The voice was crisp and artificial, like a radio commercial.

“I’d love to say I do,” he slid into the desk chair, grasping at one of his many notepads, “and you are?”

“Armand Watcher, owner and curator of the Vincent Gallerie. I’ve been told you’re the detective working the McClintock case?”

Ricky had kept up the habit after all. He couldn’t say he minded being called a detective—it’s what he’d wanted his whole life— but the thought of that nickname travelling back to the station wasn’t all too appealing. Still, it seemed to help his case with Armand.

“That’s correct,” a dangerous assumption, “I understand might like your paintings back."

“Very much, detective. They mean a great deal to me,” raw emotion cut through the salesman jargon, so sudden that Tinsley had to question which side of the man was more genuine. “When I woke up this morning and couldn’t look upon them—I nearly had a fit! I’d like to see them back as soon as possible.”

“…of course. I don’t suppose you know anything else about this McClintock character?”

“He slipped past two of my best men and got through the gallery without a second glance. I have to know how it happened detective, and how he got his name on the guest list.”

Tinsley thought about this. “Who was in control of the invitations?”

He didn’t know much about high society art, but he figured it was a tight-knit community.

“I drew up the majority of the list and sent it off to my secretary, Ms. Norris. I’ll give you the name of the office—”

Tinsley wrote with quick strokes as the man listed off the pertinent details. He stole another glance at the clock: 7:36 A.M. Just about an hour and a half until he was due in at the station.

“—and I’ll see to it that you’re well rewarded for your efforts, detective.”

It wasn’t a very reassuring sentiment. There was a unique class of people in the city who used lines like that, and every day he became acquainted with more of them.

“With one day and a little bit of luck, you might have the answers you’re looking for.”

The man thanked again him, and quickly ended the call. Tinsley’s hand hovered over the phone, debating which call to make next. He looked down at his notes. Ms. Norris. He dialed the number, wondering if she was as much of an early bird as her employer.

“Office of Armand Watcher, Fran speaking.”

It wasn’t the type of voice he’d been expecting. She was concise and tossed out her words like a used napkin. As if they meant nothing at all.

“Am I speaking with a Ms. Norris?” She said as much. “I was hoping I could book an appointment with you today. My name is ah, Detective Tinsley and I understand you might have some information regarding the recent theft of your employer’s property.”

It was quiet on the line for only a moment, “I have eleven o’clock open.”

“Then I’ll mark it down. See you soon, Ms. Norris.” She made some affirmative noise and hung up. A perfectly abrupt middleman—no bullshit and only the necessary pleasantries. Tinsley could imagine why she’d be an asset in her environment.  

He scanned through his notes once again, raked a hand through his hair, and made for the shower instead. He’d long-since realized that people got what they wanted when they looked their best.

--

The nameplate on the desk read Chief M. Mann. Tinsley knew the M to stand for Morgan, but it was something which he figured he should take to the grave. The Chief was a secretive man, well-renown for tearing down anything which got in his way with absolute efficiency.

“It’s a report, Tinsley, I can see that,” he said, green eyes cutting through him like broken glass, “but what can you tell me about it.”

“It should only take me a day, Chief.” He’d removed his hat and held in in front of him, like a fallen angel ready for the smiting. Only the detectives got to keep their hats on.

“It this a favor,” his teeth were impossibly white. The man himself was supernatural, darting from case to case and never faltering. Tinsley could imagine the Chief had joined the ranks of the city’s killers to get where he was, but he supposed it was as justified as bureaucratic murder could be. Kill or be killed was the station’s unofficial motto after all. He’d seen it printed on a memo once.

“Yes.” He shifted side to side, the icy cogs of judgement upon him. Whereas Ricky chided him with fire, the Chief was more akin to a vicious rain of hail.  

“I trust your judgement, Tinsley.” The Chief had both elbows resting on the desk, like a sphinx. He had shuffled the report into his files as Tinsley had answered, a silent gesture of acceptance. “See that it is done within the eyes of the law.”

“Of course.” He bowed his head and dipped out of the office as quickly as he could.

It was only after he’d returned to his own desk that he realized he hadn’t breathed in a while.

[thenotsoelegantswan]

madamxmayor​:

regina could feel the bartender’s knowing gaze sliding over her as the chair next to her was claimed but she refused to as much as look at emma. the hurt still sat too deep. she had opened her heart to the other woman, had let down her guard and emma had shot her down. and not because she didn’t return regina’s feelings but out of some twisted sense of obligation. which had somehow only made matters worse. regina knew it had to have been henry who had told emma where to find her, because she had intentionally given zelena the wrong address. fully aware of how much her sister loved to meddle. but it seemed she had underestimated how much that ran in the family. setting their drinks down in front of them, the bartender moved over to the side to give them some privacy and regina wasn’t sure whether she wanted to thank him or hurl her shot glass after the man for leaving her alone with the blonde. i couldn’t do it. a hollow chuckle pressed past regina’s lips. that answered that question then. “what do you expect me to say to that, emma?” she asked, her voice cracking around the other woman’s name.

emma had the sudden realisation whilst sat at this random hotel bar, that it wasn’t just killian’s life she had screwed up today. it was becoming apparent, everything the savior seemed to touch lately, broke. regina’s response wasn’t entirely surprising, it shouldn’t have went this far before the to be bride, became a runaway one. she had no big speech planned regarding what she would say to regina, how she could put her feelings and thoughts into words. the trekking across country to find her, had been her first priority— the rest to follow. only, the rest hadn’t yet followed. instead, she sat beside the brunette in a painful silence. tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, trying desperately to find the right words. only what did come, was pathetic, really. “nothing, you don’t have to say nothing.” the second the words came out, emma’s forehead creased, eyebrows meeting. you’re an idiot, swan. she hadn’t came all this way just to say something as pointless as that.

turning herself on the stool so her body was completely facing regina, she sucked in a breath before beginning. this was it, her one chance. “i’ve been an idiot, and i know that’s no excuse for my actions regina but i was afraid. afraid to let everyone down, to leave another hurricane of wreckage behind.” this wasn’t coming out right. shuffling on the stool, the blonde was becoming frustrated with herself. “i should have listened to my heart and not what i thought would make everyone else happy. you’re the person i want to wake up beside every morning, to be the one i pull back into bed every time you try and get up. i want to make memories with you, the life lasting type that when we are old and grey — thinking back on them still has my heart skipping a beat. i want to love you like you deserve to be loved, to hold your hand through every obstacle in life and come out the other side stronger, because we did it together. what i’m trying to say, pathetically i know.. is that its YOU. you’re my person regina mills and i don’t care if i have to wait years and spend everyday proving it to you, I won’t ever give up fighting for you, for us.” even pouring her heart out, still hadn’t seemed enough. if it showed regina exactly how much she meant it, emma would have gladly removed her own heart and given it to the brunette.

[bambamsgotjams]

Runaway Bride || Jeon Wonwoo

Title: Runaway Bride ~ Jeon Wonwoo

Words: 3k

Genre: Angst, Fluff

A/N: This is based off of a dream that I had the other night and I guess I kind of got carried away with it at one point. But nevertheless, I hope you guys enjoy. Feel free to send in feedback as well as requests! xx

[y/n] paced back and forth behind the closed gates of the venue she and her fiancé Wonwoo were to be wed at. Every bride gets nervous on her big day. It was a normal occurrence to have those last minute doubts of the fear of spending the rest of your life with someone you love. The common questions ran through her head such as, what if I really don’t love him like I thought? Or what if I’m not ready for this, what if I’m not cut out for being a good wife?

Of course there were always those who reassured her that Wonwoo would never have proposed in the first place if he really didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her. She listened to them and their comments did make her feel slightly better but because of her stupid anxiety the anxious thoughts and worries would always come tumbling back and causing her stress both day and night just thinking that he only did it out of pity.

 Wonwoo was in love with [y/n], anyone with eyes could see that. Perhaps he was blinded by her or even cast under a spell, but whatever it was, he knew fully that he wanted to marry [y/n]. Ever since they started dating, [y/n] had always been cautious over every little detail in their relationship. She was fragile she had stated on their first date. She told him she would never fall in love with the fear of falling to hard and getting hurt. Wonwoo ignored her warning anyways and made it his goal to make her feel like she could fall in love again without getting hurt. He himself had been hurt before and he knew what it was like. [y/n] was the hardest girlfriend he ever had. She made their relationship a challenge, but Wonwoo told himself that since he was madly in love with her, it would be worth it. Every little worry and every little problem would all be worth it if he could spend his life with [y/n].  [y/n] always had a hard time believing that.

 [y/n] played gently with the ruffles on the skirt of her beautiful wedding gown. For once she felt beautiful; her dress, her hair, her makeup, and with it all she had finally felt like a princess. Her head popped up when she felt a gentile touch on her shoulder. [y/n] turned her head to look at her mother who stood by her side smiling fondly at her daughter.

 “You are beautiful [y/n],” Her mother stated in a calming tone, “Don’t let your anxious thoughts tell you otherwise.”

 “Thanks, Mom.”

 [y/n] sighed at turned her head back towards the gate and peaked through the white bars, seeing the small group of guests taking their seats along with a couple paparazzi who came to snoop in on the idol’s big day. Out of all the people in the venue, she could just barely make out her fiancé standing at the alter and waiting patiently for his wedding to begin.

 “[y/n],” She heard a voice choke out.

 [y/n] turned her head to see her father standing behind her, looking at his daughter in awe at her beauty.

 “I always knew you were the most beautiful girl, but now you have just taken that to a whole now level. No words could describe how you look right now, that Wonwoo is a lucky guy to be taking your hand in marriage.”

 [y/n] blushed at her father’s words as he pulled her into a tight embrace.

 “Thank you, Daddy,” She responded with a small smile.

 “I can’t believe that only in moments I will be giving my precious girl up to another man,” He stated as the pulled away.

 [y/n] stood silently as she continued to fiddle with her dress. Her mother walked up beside her and handed her a boquet of small flowers and smoothed out her gown. [y/n] watched as the flower girl and ring bearer walked up to the gate and turned their heads to see if the bride was ready to go.

 “Are you ready?” Her mother asked as she pushed a fly away strand of hair out of her daughter’s face.

 [y/n] bit her lip and gave  a small nod, “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

 Her father walked over to [y/n] and held out his arm for her to take. Once the ring bearer and her maid of honor walked through the gates, she head the faint sound of the wedding march begin to play, signaling her that the guests were now waiting for the bride to walk down the aisle. Both she and her father took a step through the gate, [y/n] holding her breath the entire time. They slowly made their way down the aisle as the anthem played in the background. [y/n] looked around and noticed the clicks of the cameras beginning to go off so they wouldn’t miss a single minute of the bride. Her eyes darted around until the locked on the one person she was hoping to see. Wonwoo stood agape at his bride, his lips parted slightly as his jaw dropped at the sight of the beautiful girl in front of him. He knew [y/n] was beautiful, but this is something he never thought he would see, his beautiful girl had managed to outdo herself and become something so beautiful his mind couldn’t even comprehend what was happening.

 [y/n] heart began to race as they reached the alter. Her father kissed her hand before releasing her over to Wonwoo. He had to clear his throat to gain the grooms attention, Wonwoo immediately snapping his head towards the sound and blushing in embarrassment for staring at his bride like she was an angel. Wonwoo reached for her hand and gripped it tightly in his own once [y/n] took it. He lead her up the alter and reached for her other hand once they were at the top. She hesitantly took his hand and gave him a nervous smile from behind her veil. The priest looked from the bride to the groom and motioned for the anthem to come to its end. The priest nodded at the two before he began his wedding statements.

 “Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to join [l/n] [f/n] and Jeon Wonwoo in matrimony commended to be honorable among all…”

 [y/n]’s mind began to wonder as the priest continued on with his statement. Everyone seemed to be staring at her. She never did do well in crowds. Wonwoo knew that and noticed her discomfort. Her grazed her hand with his thumb gently to try and reassure his bride. [y/n] looked at him through her veil and saw the wide smile that was printed across his face, she swore she saw tears beginning to form in his eyes. Wonwoo was always sensitive with these things, he had cried after she agreed to be his girlfriend and after she agreed to marry him. There was no doubt that he was going to cry if she says yes. Key word: if.

 Her eyes then darted from her groom and to the man who stood behind him, his best man and best friend Kim Mingyu. Mingyu noticed her stare on him and gave her a small thumbs up to let her know that she was doing great. She bit her lip and looked down towards her toes as she felt jolts run through her veins as her mind began to grow more and more nervous as the seconds passed by.

 “You may now share your wedding vows,” The priest announced as he looked towards Wonwoo.

 Wonwoo gripped [y/n]’s hand tightly as he began his vows.

 “I, Jeon Wonwoo, take [y/n] to be my bride, my friend, my faithful partner and my love, my only love from this day forward. In the presence of our family and friends…and paparazzi, I offer you my solemn vows to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, and in joy and sorrow. I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both live and so on.”

 [y/n] was speechless as she watched a couple tears stream down Wonwoo’s face. She knew how much he really did love her, but she felt that nothing she could say would ever prove how much she loved him. She could never top that, people expect the bride to outdo the groom with her speech and make him even more tearful with joy and love. But she can’t do that, to be honest, she could barely even remember her vows.

 “I-I, [l/n] [f/n], take you Jeon Wonwoo to be my husband…t-to have and hold from this day forward. F-For better…or for worse. For richer, for poorer, i-in sickness and in health…to love and to cherish. From this day forward, until death do us part….U-Until death do us part…”

 She stopped suddenly as she found herself forgetting the rest of her vows. The crowd began to murmur in response to her embarrassment. Wonwoo motioned for the priest to go on as a diversion to try and distract the crowd from [y/n]’s mess up. He knew that she meant every word. He knew that she got nervous easily, it was a side effect of being anxious. He squeezed her hand to reassure her that he understood every word she was saying.

 “Do you, Jeon Wonwoo, take miss [y/n] to become your wife?” He priest asked.

 Wonwoo looked at [y/n] with a giant smile.

 “I do.”

 The priest then looked over towards [y/n] and looked into her eyes through her veil.

 “Do you, [l/n] [f/n], take mister Wonwoo to become your husband?”

 [y/n]’s heart pounded against her chest, she swore that the entire crowd could hear it. Everyone looked directly at her as they waited for her answer. The sounds of the cameras clicked caused jolts of anxiety to rush rapidly through her veins. The negative thoughts of spending the rest of her life with Wonwoo began to rush through her mind once more.

 He doesn’t love you.

 He’s only doing this so you won’t be alone, he never wanted you.

 You will never be good enough to become a wife for this man.

 “I-I,” She started as she looked from the audience and back to her groom. She bit her lip and shut her eyes tightly as she shook her head.

 “I can’t. I’m sorry,” She said as she quickly picked up the edges of her gown and ran back down the aisle and through the gate.

 Wonwoo couldn’t do anything but stare in the direction his bride went in shock. The crowd began to murmur once more, stating negative things about [y/n] as she did so. The paparazzi began to file in questions towards Wonwoo like crazy. He didn’t know what to do. Had he really caused all this pressure upon [y/n] to make her say no? Was it really his fault?

 Wonwoo looked at the maid of honor who only gave him a shrug in return along with a look of pity. He then looked behind him at Mingyu who began to walk towards the confused and heartbroken groom.

 “Dude, I’m so sorry-“

 “Don’t even start,” Wonwoo cut his best mate off, “It was my fault. I should be apologizing to her.”

 Mingyu looked down the aisle where the bride ran off in then to the paparazzi before looking back at Wonwoo. The paparazzi kept trying to file in questions to the parents and guests, some even trying to get past security to ask Wonwoo himself. Surprisingly none of them had ran after the bride to ask why she said no.

 “Go after her,” Mingyu said as he noticed Wonwoo’s concern.

 Wonwoo looked at Mingyu and shook his head.

 “I can’t, the press will try to deal with it. I’ve already caused her too much pain, I can’t do it again.”

 Mingyu placed a hand on Wonwoo’s shoulder and gave him a smile.

 “I’ll distract them, don’t worry about it. You have a bride to chace,” Mingyu said as he walked over towards some of the paparazzi who were trying to get to the alter and began to ask questions as Wonwoo managed to slip out unnoticed.

 Wonwoo followed down the direction he watched [y/n] run off in. He cursed to himself as he tried his best to find any clues as to where she ran off to. After a couple minutes of looking, he eventually found [y/n]’s bouquet of flowers thrown on the ground in front of the venue’s garden. He walked inside and saw his bride sitting on a bench in the corner of the garden, right in front of a small fountain. He walked up to [y/n] and knelt down in front of her, lifting her chin slightly so they could make eye contact.

 “Wonwoo,” [y/n] said quietly as she sat there in shock. She didn’t expect him to chase after her.

 “Are you okay?” He asked as he placed a hand on her knee.

 [y/n] looked at her groom, his eyes soft and filled with concern for her. Her hands shook slightly at the sight of her broken groom, the man she loved.

 “I couldn’t do it,” She told him, “Not with all those people watching, and not with my mind racing.”

 “You had those thoughts again, didn’t you?” He asked as he moved to sit on the bench next to her.

 Wonwoo didn’t need an answer, he already knew that’s exactly the reason why she ran away. [y/n] tilted her had back down and let a couple tears slip from her eyes.

 “I’m sorry,” Was all that she could say.

 “Why are you apologizing?” Wonwoo asked as he stroked her arm gently. It always had relaxed [y/n] in the past and lucky for him, it seemed to be working now.

 “I ruined this day, you were so excited to get married and I couldn’t do it. Every thought I had told me that this isn’t what I wanted, but I do. I really do want to marry you, but I won’t ever be enough. I won’t be enough for your love and I won’t ever be good enough to be your wife. I’m just…me. Just anxious, messed, and psychotic [y/n].”

 “You’re not psychotic,” Wonwoo stated, “You aren’t messed up and you are enough for me. In fact, you’re more than enough!”

 [y/n] looked over at Wonwoo and watched as he continued to speak to her.

 “Can’t you see how much you mean to me? [y/n], if I didn’t think this was going to work out I wouldn’t have proposed. I didn’t know that you weren’t ready, but I was. I should have taken that into account. I thought that maybe we could have worked this out, but I think I did it a little too soon. You should have told me. It’s you [y/n]! I would wait a million years just to marry you if I needed to. You’re my girl, my angel. You’re my everything and I would do anything just to see you happy.”

 [y/n] sniffled slightly and rubbed her eyes to wipe away the tears.

 “Do you really mean that?” She asked.

 Wonwoo swiped his thumb under her eyes to help wipe her tears away. He too began to tear up but did everything he could to stay strong for her.

 “I meant every word I have ever said about you,” Wonwoo responded, “I am truly, deeply, and madly in love with you [y/n].”

 [y/n] giggled slightly and turned to look at her groom. Wonwoo smiled at the beautiful sound that escaped her lips.

 “That’s my favorite sound,” He stated bluntly, “Your giggle is music.”

 [y/n] blushed and watched as Wonwoo lifted up her veil to reveal her face fully to him. He smiled wider if all was even possible. He caressed [y/n] cheek gently before placing his lips softly against [y/n]’s. [y/n] kissed him back, forgetting fully about all the worries and anxieties that had flowed through her mind only minutes prior. This kiss was different from anything they both had experienced from each other. Their kisses were always passion filled and always gentile and loving, but this one created sparks. It was something that neither of them wanted to give up. Soon enough they both had pulled away to allow themselves to breathe.

 “I’ve always loved kissing you,” Wonwoo stated as he continued to caress [y/n].

 “Me too,” [y/n] responded.

 The two of them sat in silence; the only sound that could be heard was the sound of the rushing fountain and birds chirping in the garden.

 “I do love you,” [y/n] said, “And I do want to marry you. Today.”

 Wonwoo smiled at her words and squeezed her hand.

 “Then how about we walk back down that aisle together and finish up our ceremony? So we can go home together today, not as fiancés, but as husband and wife.”

 [y/n] nodded and grabbed Wonwoo’s hand in her own tightly, kissing his cheek before they both stood up and walk out of the garden. Wonwoo grabbed the bouquet of flowers before exiting and handed them to his bride, both of them walking hand in hand back to the venue, the thought of marriage and spending their lives together clouding their minds.

 Nothing could break them apart.

[fr-blackiebelle]

The Sunrot Resurrections: Part III - The Chieftain and the Lord

First | Next | Back

@incalyscent, @tangelojack, @yuushanoah-fr, @serthis-archivist, @pinkangel725

Aramis thought that his granddaughter was strong for taking such a long time in dying.

Juarve had been in the Wyrmwound longer then Matisse who was baptized in it, and even longer then Damaris, who had walked through it to save a child. The time was reflected on her skin, red and raw as it was.

Great swaths of flesh corrupted black and purple and green stretched over her ribs, her hips. The pustules grew dreadfully large, and when they burst they leaked a yellow and red pus that drew flies. They all smelled infected to him.

But, to her credit, Juarve was silent. She did not moan or cry out, though tears flowed freely down her ruined face. Her nose was gone, leaving only a pair of mishapened black pits, as was her ears and eyes. Her antlers had melted down into stubs, like a spent candle. They both fell off at his touch.

Her skin, where the cysts hadn’t formed, was scorched and cracking. Great ravines of red streaked up and down it, tearing wider whenever she moved. Her hands had been eaten away, and Aramis could see the white of her bones and tendons in the little that remained. Her feet and wings were the same.

He had taken hold of her in the Wyrmwound, when she was thrown in as sacrifice, and pulled her out alongside himself.

He had died. He had died with smoke in his lungs and fire and traitors all around him.

But he was resurrected. His fur was the same as before, perhaps even healthier and not dull with malnutrition. He felt jittery. There was a light inside him, in his chest and belly, and Aramis could see the jagged shadows of his ribs when he looked down.

When he had crawled from the Eleven Hells, throwing his granddaughter down beside him, two ghosts from the past stood before him, both as dead as he. They had sunk to their knees and bowed their heads.

There was Mars, who had abandoned him when the fire broke loose. The fae looked the same as he did, though the light in his pale green eyes was jubilant and his back was a little more stooped.

Then there was Toril, who had been dead for decades. The pale guardian stood as strong as the day they met, proud and powerful. One of her eyes was red, and the other was light. Both her and his advisor wore armor, of a fine make, likely from the Ruins.

After they were through with bowing and pledging obedience, they rose and set to work on dressing Aramis in a armor of his own. The cuirass was fine ebony, inscribed with runes and filigree, with teeth of steelscale to give shape to the tops of his shoulders. The pauldrons were of a darkened steel, and fastened with leather straps that stretched across his breastplate and back. His gauntlets were heavy ebony, fully enclosing his fingers and stretching to his elbow. The tips were pointed like claws.

Besides those, he was given a plated tail guard, a kilt, a sash, a wing banner, and his headdress. It was not the same one he wore before, Mars confessed, but he had it made to memory. Aramis found that he had missed the weight of it.

As Mars helped him don his armor, his hands smoked and burned whenever he touched the metal, while Toril was not burned. Aramis questioned this, and was told that both their armors had a massive amount of Light enchantments on them.

It was difficult for Mars to handle them, as a Wind dragon, and Plague or Shadow dragons would be badly affected by it as well. Too much exposure would likely lead to a overexposure of Light magic. The Lady of Light had aided in their rebirth, which was why Toril’s eye shone gold and Aramis’s chest shone like a lantern.

Once he was suited up, it was time for the journey through the Boneyard. North was where Ives had taken the clan, and by the sounds of it, he had been busy.

Mars explained as they traveled. “Ives has taken it upon himself to forge alliances. Many of them have fallen through, with hostages returned or runaway, but some of them have worked out well.”

Hellreek was not a figure of folk lore, they were quite real and they had one of his bastard daughters. Rusvai, the youngest. She apparently insisted on dressing all in white to differentiate herself from him. In exchange, they had one of Akeelah’s sons. He was gentle, though his mouth was death.

When Aramis asked of the relation between the clans, Mars nearly laughed.

“Virulent,” Mars said, with a practiced tone of mirth, “Is in bed with Hellreek. Quite literally these days.”

Half of Virulent was courting and bedding one Hellreek or another, he learned. One of Naomi’s sons had a mirror back at the lair, on a clutch of his eggs, while one of his sisters was at Hellreek’s lair, with a son of the legendary Death From Above.

Just the other week, Ives had sent a strong mirror pup to Hellreek, in exchange for pick of the nest of any clutch laid to their warriors. If there was any friendship at all in the Wasteland, there was friendship between Hellreek and Virulent.

They called it the Hellrot Alliance.

The conversation changed to Ives, of the self-styled Lord Chieftain of Virulent. He had taken the Vogelzang skydancer, Cosette, as bride. The same one that he had given to that drunken oaf so many years ago. He had fathered a army off of her, and gave most of the children away as hostages, so he could foster a child from another clan’s leader.

The conversation changed to his grandchildren, of the black and grey beasts that wanted the Lord Chieftain’s favor so badly. Six of them remained in the clan, as well as a great-granddaughter, a great great granddaughter, and two bastards Aramis had gotten off of Amiria.

If they were to quarrel for the crown, grey-blue Tergailia would have the most supporters, though the blue-grey guardian, Iliutas, would win in a fight if they fought honorably.

Ilgeslys would win if they fought dirty. Kivka would kill the victor.

The conversation changed to Vogelzang, of the overthrow of Humboldt and the fleeing of Valjean and Mariele. They stole one of Sieghilde’s children when they fled, and all of them were infected with shadow magic. Cosette’s mother had to be sealed in a suit of armor and bound in prayer ribbons to keep her together.

They had barely spoken to Vogelzang since Merchannwyl took charge, and rarely received shipments anymore. They had not received word of Lorelei’s death, as of yet.

On the horizon, the great cliff of Dragonhome appeared.

The Lord Chieftain had hidden the entire clan in a great series of caverns, charming the entrance with protective wards that he thought would protect them.

They camped within sight of it, not setting a fire. They would approach tomorrow.

Aramis expected a fight.

  As they approached Clan Virulent, as soon as they came over the rise, they were contested.

Two guardians stood at either side of the entrance, though they were too far away to make out faces. Before long, a swarm of four came from the cavern to meet them.

The first to reach them was a brown, stout Imperial. He had a grand rack of antlers, and wore worn leather clothes. A wolfskin cloak was tied at his throat with a small bronze medallion. He walked with his chin low to the ground, like a stalking dog, and moved to cover their left, besides the cart. (Mars had vanished, he noted. Likely hiding in the back.) Aramis did not know him.

The second was another Imperial, taller than the first but still short. His skin was a pinkish-tan, with redline markings. His mane was wavy and pink, and he wore a solidscale breastplate. The rest of his armor was leather, dyed reddish-brown, and polished steel. He walked with his head high, like a scared dragon pretending not to be. He covered their right, to stare down Toril. Aramis did not know him.

The third was a guardian, lean and graceful. Her scales were a lovely blue-grey, though her true horns and her broad wings were a dull black. A crown of heavy black antlers sat upon her head. She was obviously the leader of the bunch, and judging from her antlers, Aramis presumed they were kin.

She had put great care into her ensemble - a woven chest piece of black and red leather that went to her waist, with a red kilt and red breeches underneath it.  A bow, grand and deadly, was in her hands, and the quiver of arrows was bound around her waist with a belt. She wore a cloak that was half red, half purple, tied at her throat with a ash-lace collar.

Her arm guards were leather, dyed a similar grey-blue as her skin. Her left arm guard was scaled with polished steel on the top, leading up to a single ebony pauldron. The banner that hung from it was a midnight purple, decorated with the black antlers they all beared. Ives had removed the headdress from Virulent’s device. He would fix that, soon enough.

The guardian stood tall before him, eyes fixed on him.

Aramis’s voice was rough and deep. He cut off his granddaughter before she could start.

“You’re Iliutas, aren’t you? I believe we are related.”

This took her at a surprise, and it flashed on her face. Aramis was thinking that she had to have been of his great-granddaughters, since Cosette was a skydancer.

The slight shock vanished, and her voice boomed elegant and strong.

“That I am, though I can’t say if I we’ve met before. Do you have business with Virulent or the Lord Chieftain?”

“I do. I would like to see Ives, as soon as I can.”

“And who are you? So that I may tell him.”

“An old friend.”

  It took Ives long enough to emerge from the cavern.

The two imperials had waited with them while Iliutas headed back, and it was close to a half hour before she returned to the surface, a red ridgeback and a black tundra (comically small besides all these giants) alongside her.

The Lord Chieftain walked with his guards on either side of him. He walked with purpose, with his head and antlers high. His blue-black mane was braided, he wore fine armor, and he did not wear a headdress.

The red ridgeback at his side did not have a nosehorn. He was missing a eye, and the other eye was a bright pink. His backspines and wings were chipped and torn. Aramis recognized his tarnished armor, he recognized the dragon he had raised from a hatchling.

Ivarr stopped when he recognized his Chieftain.

Ives stopped when he recognized his father.

They both screamed.

Ivarr’s scream was a wordless wail, like a parent who was told their child died. His legs went out under him, and the ridgeback went down to lie among the dust and bones, his hat fallen over his eyes.

Ives’s scream was a pained bellow, like a bull with a struck side. He was backing up, shaking his antlers and braids, his red eyes wide.

“YOU ARE DEAD, I WATCHED YOU DIE. I WATCHED YOU DIE.”

Iliutas had stopped, looking back at her Lord Chieftain. She stood tense, all the guards stood tense, but they did not attack.

Then, at the entrance to the caverns, a horn blew. A low, mournful note that echoed throughout the Wasteland, echoed from the Pillar to the Icefield. Three heartbeats later, the warriors of Virulent came tearing out.

The pink-maned Imperial leapt at Toril, and she took him with her teeth. She slammed into him, knocking him onto his wings, and moving atop of him. She pressed her golden gauntlets onto his throat, and golden smoke billowed forth at her touch.

The worn-leather Imperial lunged for Aramis, and the Chieftain prepared to meet him . . . only for Ivarr to attack from beneath. His hat had flown off, and he came down upon his fellow guard with particular savagery, threatening to open the Imperial’s belly with his claws, while the Imperial wrapped his jaws around his neck.

And Ives, the Lord Chieftain of Virulent, took a step towards Aramis, towards his father.

Both of them bared their fangs.

They rushed at each other with the ferocity of bulls, and met each other with their heads down. There was a great crack as their antlers hit, and a tine went spinning off into the dust. Both of them reared, claws against each other’s chests, roaring as they did.

Ives tried to bite at his throat, and Aramis did the same. Ives was wearing a gorget, he was not.

He was taller than his son, but Ives weighed more, and was more heavily muscled. He was half Snapper, and had the jaws of one. Ives shouldered him, and knocked him backwards. Ives was on top of him, gold and red smoke curling upwards from his black hide wherever the armor touched him.

No, Aramis thought, seeing colors unimaginable, I will not die again so soon.

Gathering his strength in his hind legs, he kicked out and tried to dislodge his son.

Nevertheless, he did not let go.

He cursed himself for having laid with that Snapper in the first place, cursed himself for not keeping the runt instead. In desperation, he reached up and grabbed at his sons face, trying to find some leverage, trying to make him falter, trying to -

Aramis’s gauntlets had sharped claws.

The thumb had caught Ives in the eye.

His howls were hellish.

His son released him and reeled backwards, ripping off and throwing down his own gauntlets to touch his ruined eye. He stumbled, and came down to his knees, clutching his face with his naked hands.

“Do you yield?”

Ives lifted a hand away, the other still cradling his jaw. The eye had been put out, and ran red down his face and neck, running down his gorget and down his breastplate in a great swath.

And where Aramis had touched his son, the fur had burned. It had scorched black, with gold cracking in the raw flesh underneath.

The remaining eye burned with hate and fear, surrounded by red and gold and black.

Ives spat a mouthful of blood, and it struck the ground at the Chieftain’s feet.

[robbieinterviews]

Margot Robbie: Bazaar Archive, 2015

From Australia's Gold Coast to The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie is the latest girl from nowhere to become a Hollywood star

Jean Harlow was Hollywood's first 'blonde bombshell'. Not that there hadn't been fair-haired actresses in films before, all the way back to Clara Bow. But the star of Platinum Blonde was something else: 'a glowing white sexpot', according to the great lexicographer of cinema, David Thomson.

Finally a tragic figure, dead at 26, Harlow is by no means Thomson's favourite Hollywood blonde, nor Martin Scorsese's, though the latter gallantly chose Gwen Stefani to play her in The Aviator. Much more Thomson and Scorsese's speed is Carole Lombard, the smart, funny screwball star. Lombard died young too, but unlike poor Harlow, she was nobody's fool.

Neither, based on an afternoon and an evening spent in her company, is the very latest bombshell to detonate: Margot Robbie, a dazzling 24-year-old Australian who, in her breakthrough as Leonardo DiCaprio's trophy wife in Scorsese's priapic epic, The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as in her first lead role, opposite Will Smith in Focus, plays the archetypal blonde on the make: flirty, ambitious and sexually available.

I meet Robbie for lunch at the Ham Yard Hotel in central London. She arrives in a hurry – we'll soon learn she does everything in a hurry – in a vintage Rolling Stones singlet; ripped black jeans from Frame Denim; ankle boots from AllSaints; a Carven coat; and carrying a red Chanel bag.

One doesn't have to be a professional casting director to recognise that Robbie is as perfect a specimen of young womanhood as a film-maker could hope to find. With her honeyed skin, her mega-watt eyes and her widescreen smile, it's almost as if she'd arrived pre-CGI'd, a Disney princess sprung to life. Were the makers of Frozen ever to consider a live-action version of their animated phenomenon (as if they aren't already), they could do worse than cast Robbie as Elsa, the vanilla-haired ice queen, so uniform are her features, so uncomplicated is her appeal.

As a lunch date Robbie is equally fit for purpose. She's sunny, lively, unpretentious – in a word, Australian – and obviously determined to extract the maximum enjoyment from any situation. But she's no pushover: as will become clear, Robbie is also driven, dedicated and resolute. There is grit behind the grin.

Robbie is a country girl from just outside the Gold Coast, a small city in southern Queensland. In this, too, she is part of a noble tradition: the girl from nowhere who becomes a star. The Gold Coast might as well be the moon as far as Hollywood is concerned, but then, so might Kansas City, Missouri, where Jean Harlow started out; or Fort Wayne, Indiana, home town of Carole Lombard. Or even, for that matter, Orange County,where before she was Madame de Tourvel and Catwoman, Michelle Pfeiffer was a supermarket checkout girl. Pfeiffer's breakout – her bombshell moment – was as Elvira, the junkie gangster's moll in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). She entered the movie, and the dream lives of moviegoers, in a glass elevator, sheathed in clinging aqua-blue, her back turned to us and to Al Pacino's lust-stunned hoodlum. Pfeiffer wasn't entirely unknown in 1983, but this is where she made her indelible mark.

Margot Robbie was not without experience when The Wolf of Wall Street was released, on Christmas Day 2013. She'd done three years on the daytime soap opera Neighbours and had had a role, too, as a runaway bride in Pan Am, a jet-age American TV drama – Mad Men at 30,000 feet – that was grounded after a single series. Plus she'd played posh totty, with a very serviceable English accent, in a Richard Curtis rom-com, About Time. But to most cinemagoers she was unknown when she breezed into Scorsese's bawdy satire of late-20th-century overconsumption.

Robbie's character, Naomi Lapaglia, was described in the screenplay as 'the hottest blonde ever'. Along with 'every other actress in town', she sent in her video with no expectation that it would even be watched. It was Ellen Lewis, the eminent casting director and veteran Scorsese collaborator, who passed Robbie's video along to the director; Lewis it was who put Stefani into Jean Harlow's shoes for The Aviator and Cameron Diaz into Scorsese's Gangs of New York. When the call came for an audition, Robbie was in London. She remembers the date – 3 June 2012 – because it was the Queen's Diamond Jubilee weekend, and she'd been invited to join some fellow Aussies for a picnic: an all-day event that turned into an all-nighter.

Over to Robbie for what happened next: 'I get home at six in the morning to all these missed phone calls and my team is saying, "You are on a plane in a couple of hours to New York to read with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio." So: race to the airport, get to New York, go straight to see Ellen Lewis, she takes one look at me, I'm wearing jeans, flat boots, and she says, "No. Here's what you're going to do: SoHo's right there. Lots of stores. You're going to get a really tight, short dress and the highest pair of heels you can find."'

Cut to the audition the following day. 'OK, so: big open room, video camera, Ellen Lewis is filming. Just me, Marty and Leo.' In the scene, Robbie's character and DiCaprio's character, the degenerate financier Jordan Belfort – the Wolf of the title – are on their first date. 'We get three lines into it and he says something and, subconsciously, I roll my eyes. And Leo's like, "What was that look for?" And I'm thinking, in my head: "That's not a line! Is he really asking me that? Should I explain?" And then I realise he's ad-libbing. I'm like, "Oh, shit. He's improvising! I need to improvise now!"

'So I'm failing miserably. And Leo's phenomenal. He's powerful. He can do his part and he can do your part at the same time with his eyes closed. I'm barely getting a word in. When I do it's not anything interesting – I just look pathetic.'

Next scene. The characters are now married, and mid-argument. Robbie again: 'In my head I was like, "You have literally 30 seconds left in this room and if you don't do something impressive nothing will ever come of it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance, just take it." And so I start screaming at him and he's yelling back at me. And he's really scary. I can barely keep up. And he ends it saying, "You should be happy to have a husband like me. Now get over here and kiss me." So I walk up really close to his face and then I'm like, "Maybe I should kiss him. When else am I ever going to get a chance to kiss Leo DiCaprio, ever?" But another part of my brain clicks and I just go, Whack! I hit him in the face. And then I scream, "Fuck you!" And that's not in the script at all. The room just went dead silent and I froze.

'I'm thinking, "You just hit Leonardo DiCaprio in the face. They're going to arrest you because that's assault. You're definitely never going to work again, that's for sure. They'll probably sue you as well in case there's a bruise on his face and he needs to film something else."

'And then all of a sudden Marty and Leo just burst out laughing. Marty says, "That was great!" Leo's like, "Hit me again!"'

A week later they called her back in and offered her the part. 'I walked out, got in the elevator, and did that silent stupid dance you do.' She was 22. The film changed her life. 'Totally. None of this would have happened without it. Or if it did, it would have taken another five years, 10 years.'

That last bit sounds speculative. But I suspect she fully believes she would have got here anyway, eventually, without Marty and Leo and Ellen Lewis and that panicked celebrity face-slap. The way she tells it, she never lacked for self-belief.

Maggot, as she is known by friends and family, is from fruit-farming stock on both sides, the third of four children – girl, boy, girl, boy – raised by a single mother, Sarie. Her childhood was spent shuttling between the mountains near the Gold Coast and a small country town, Dalby, where most of her extended family lives. It was, she says, a relatively simple life, rural and outdoorsy.

Sarie – the spitting image, I'm told, of her famous daughter – is a physiotherapist who worked with the elderly when her children were younger, and now does the same for disabled kids. ('Heart of gold,' says her daughter, whose most cherished accomplishment to date is the fact that, on her mother's 60th birthday last year, Robbie was able to pay off the mortgage on Sarie's house.)

Robbie's contact with her father, a former farm-owner, is, she says, limited. When I ask what qualities she shares with her dad she says: 'None. Nothing. I'm not like him at all.' It's the only time she seems reluctant to expand on a topic.

She studied drama at school but had no expectation that she would ever do it professionally. But when she was 16 – simultaneously cleaning houses, making sandwiches in Subway and working in a surf store to make ends meet – she was approached to act in a low-budget B movie, shooting nearby. She's embarrassed, now, about this and another one – she says she's never seen either and doesn't think they were even released – but they were her start. She found an agent, auditioned for a TV show and, at 17, found herself for the first time in Melbourne, friendless and all but penniless, sleeping on the couch of a 'scary-looking dude' called Mark who turned out to be 'the loveliest person in the world'.

She put in repeated calls to the makers of Neighbours and finally won an audition and a part. She got the call when she was in Canada, on a snowboarding trip with her then boyfriend, 'driving around in a van that didn't have a door'. She had to borrow the money for the flight home and turned up on set in Melbourne with a snowboard. 'I started immediately – I didn't even get back to the Gold Coast to pick up clothes for a couple of weeks. Worked five days a week, 17 hours a day, full on. That was my life for the next three years.'

Here's the really ambitious part. Almost as soon as she got the job on Neighbours, she started preparing for Hollywood: saving money, taking acting classes on her days off, employing a dialect coach to teach her to speak with an American accent, endlessly badgering her new agent to get her auditions in LA. Five days after her three-year Neighbours contract ended, she moved to California.

In LA she auditioned for a TV remake of Charlie's Angels and was offered Pan Aminstead. That took her to New York, where she spent most of her 21st year; and, in the summer of 2012, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the stardom that amorality can bring.

Robbie's character is introduced in DiCaprio's voiceover, reverentially, as 'a former model and Miller Lite Girl', as if there could be no greater qualification for a wife and mother – or higher aspiration for a woman. We glimpse her briefly, writhing on a bed in her underwear. But to meet her properly, DiCaprio must wait until he throws a party, which she enters, like Pfeiffer's Elvira, in an electric-blue dress, on the arm of another man, quickly disposed of. Her cutie-pie voice is laced with vituperative venom and a thick Brooklyn twang. She seduces DiCaprio by the simple expedient of quickly removing all her clothes and later teases him by flashing him in their daughter's nursery: 'Mommy is just so sick and tired of wearing panties,' she mews. Then she pushes her stiletto heel into his face.

'She might be manipulative and conniving, but she's fearless,' says Robbie of Naomi. 'She grew up in Brooklyn and she wants a better life and she's like, "I can get it from this guy." And the way she manipulates him and drives him crazy is with her sexuality. She is such a bad-ass. She's like, "Fuck it, if that's what it takes, then I've got that. I've got it in spades. Boom!"'

Boom, indeed. As you might expect, one of the more impactful Hollywood debuts of recent years opened plenty of doors, and Robbie has been glad to step through them. In Suite Française, the screen adaptation of Irène Némirovsky's novel of France under Nazi occupation, Robbie had a small part, her first non-blonde, as a defiant farm girl. For Focus, out now, she's back to bombshell, as a thief who steals the heart of Will Smith's con man, with the help of a pink bandage dress that she hated wearing and a killer black bikini. The film is a glossy divertissement, with just enough verve that you don't really mind the fact your pocket is being picked. And of course, Robbie looks sensational.

Also in the can: Z for Zachariah, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine as the other points of a post-apocalyptic love triangle. Then, later this year, Robbie will begin work on a comic-book blockbuster, Suicide Squad, with Smith again, plus Cara Delevingne and Jared Leto. And, just as Michelle Pfeiffer parlayed Elvira into Catwoman in Batman Returns, so Robbie's turn as Naomi wins her the part of a comic-book femme fatale, in her case Harley Quinn (say it out loud for a clue as to what she'll be wearing).

Before that she'll be swinging through the trees in a new big-screen Tarzan, with Alexander Skarsgard as the lord of the jungle and Robbie as Jane. That one took up most of her 2014, shooting in England – which was convenient, because in January of last year she decided to become a Londoner. She shares a house in Clapham with Sophia, her assistant and best friend from back home, as well as three Englishmen, all met on film sets over the past few years. 'It's the most fun ever,' she says of life in leafy south London. 'We're like a little family.' An ideal family weekend? 'Infernos!' she all but shouts. She's then incredulous to discover I've never heard of the place. 'You don't know what Infernos is? Well, according to the sign outside, it's the best club south of the river. It's notorious.' Incredible but true: at least every other Friday, a visitor to Infernos will likely be able to witness Hollywood's hottest bombshell on the podium, giving it everything she's got to the Backstreet Boys or 50 Cent, or the Baywatch theme. 'Anything goes at Infernos,' she says. Before the young men of London begin a stampede to Clapham, Robbie has news. 'I'm officially off the market,' she confesses, confirming that she has a boyfriend: an Englishman, Tom Ackerley, an assistant director she befriended while shooting Suite Française in Belgium.

It sounds to me, I say, like she's having a rather good time. In fact, she says, the only clouds on her horizon are those that always shadow modern rise-to-fame stories: a rapacious tabloid press, pestilent paparazzi and mean-spirited below-the-line internet commentators. The unwelcome attentions of the press are well documented; so much so that even though the experiences are extreme – Robbie tells me she is frequently left 'shaking like a leaf and almost in tears' following a paparazzi pursuit, and that just passing through an airport has become so traumatic that 'I can't sleep for three nights before a flight because I'm so anxious about it' – she understands that people are tired of hearing it.

Less often discussed are the pressures the entertainment industry puts on those same young women to conform to strict codes of behaviour, if only to ensure that their personal brand remains intact so that they can win endorsements. 'For example,' she says, 'for a while, photographers stood outside my house waiting for me to look my absolute worst. They would follow me and wait and wait and wait and hide. The minute I eat a burger, drink a beer, have no make-up, they will take 10 million pictures and pick out the three that look the most heinous and post those. Then everyone tears it apart. But I can deal with that, that's fine – if you want to be an actor you have got to deal with that kind of stuff and I can.

'But then I get a whole bunch of phone calls from the studio that I'm currently working for. "Why are we paying for a personal trainer?", "Why is she eating a hamburger?" They're angry, your team's angry, you're having to appease everyone.'

Hold on, I say. They're angry with you for being photographed having a burger?

'For having a hamburger. I'll sit on the phone for hours and get berated for that.'

The sense of being constricted is powerful. While filming Focus in Buenos Aires last year, after Will Smith declined to join her and friends on a trip for ice-cream, Robbie challenged him. 'I said, "Come with us, we're having such fun, come get ice-cream." And he said, "I can't". And I said, "I think you think you can't because you're so used to being in a big black car. But maybe if you just tried it you'd realise that it's actually not that crazy.

'And he said, "OK, Margot, let's go get ice-cream." Walk out, boom! Crowd of people mob him, he's surrounded, his bodyguard has to fight these people off him. And afterwards I said, "I'm so sorry, you're right. In future we'll bring you back ice-cream." It sucks.'

Is she prepared for that, if things keep going the way they are? 'No, I would hate that. I don't ever want that life. I mean, I've seen what people like Leo and Will's lives are like. It's weird, though. Once you have this momentum, it's kind of too late to turn it around. I don't really have an answer to it. I haven't played out the scenario in my head where I can't go to get ice-cream because there's a mob of people. I haven't had enough time to dwell on it, I suppose, which is probably a good thing. Just keep moving and figure it out as you go.

It's probably not a great plan, but it's my plan.' She laughs, and shrugs. The night of our interview I meet Robbie again, at Harper's Bazaar's Women of the Year Awards, where she collects the prize for Breakthrough star. Stunning in a backless canary-yellow dress, she makes a witty and gracious speech and then returns to the table where we're sitting with Sophia, one of her managers, and her friend, the model Suki Waterhouse. Robbie insists we do a tequila shot with her, and then another. But she can't really let her hair down because she's on a plane to Australia in the morning.

All her life Margot Robbie's been in a hurry. Now, for the first time ever, she occasionally would like things to slow down. 'I'm like, "This is spiralling out of control. Give me a week off. I'm tired."' I tell her I hope she'll have a chance soon to catch her breath. But then she reconsiders. 'I've never really been good at moving at any other kind of pace anyway,' she says. 'I don't know how to.' Spoken like a true bombshell.

[salecheapggdb-blog]

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