#this is for the girlies whose love language is gifts/acts of service

[twelfthgnome]

HELLOOO! Hope you are doing well!

I just wanted to say that I really like your work and make a small request if you don't mind. My birthday is in a few days (October 20) and I wanted to know if you could write something about how Alec Hardy would treat you on your birthday?

Since that i really really like your fic about alec, thanks! <3

Thank You For Being a Friend

A/N: happy early birthday, love! Hope you enjoy this fluffy goodness, let me know your thoughts <3

Summary: DS Y/N Warner spends her birthday at work with her boss/partner DI Alec Hardy

Tags: fem!reader or fem!pronouns, fluff, established relationship, cussing/sexual inferences, just fluffy goodness

She'd sat in her car for a full 10 minutes, considering the merits of actually going into work. For one, it was her birthday and that could mean kind coworkers, an easy day, and loads of sweets. But, on the other hand, it was her birthday and that could mean everyone forgetting, giving her the shit end of the stick and being stuck in the office until at least 11pm. She glared at her mobile that still proudly declared that her boyfriend/boss DI Alec Hardy had not sent a Happy Birthday text. Or even a good morning text - though they weren't the sort of couple who did that anyway.

Y/N couldn't quite tell if he forgot or just wasn't a texter. Though she knew both could be true. She grumbled as she unbuckled, going inside like she knew she was going to anyway. The petty part of her knew she wasn't going to announce her birthday, they'd have to be the ones to remember.

The waiting had made her late, and Katie was not shy in saying so as she walked in and placed her stuff on her desk.

"You're late." The young officer said without bothering to look up from her papers.

Y/N rolled her eyes, "good observation."

"You're the Detective Sergeant, you shouldn't be late," Katie said, at least looking up this time through pursed lips and narrowed eyes.

Alec came from his office, spectacles on his nose. He looked quite nice today, his shirt freshly ironed and tucked into a neat pair of slacks. Even though he'd been more freshened in the past few years than his once more sickly ways, he hadn't looked that well in ages. Y/N found her brows shooting up in surprise.

"Lay off, Harford," Hardy grumbled without looking up, headed straight for the front of the office where he could delegate tasks for the day. The young officer's cheeks flushed though she maintained a calm expression as she gathered her notes to listen to her superior. Y/N tried to fight the little smile on her face.

"Few things for today, we've got a list of party goers from the Bakers this past weekend. Looks to be about 30." Alec Hardy went through each of the items for the day, a whole list of things that sounded boring and fascinating for the primary two cases and the smaller things. It came down to the final two, collecting witness statements or parking tickets. Y/N loathed parking duty more than anything. It was boring, tedious, and she quite fancied entirely useless to the whole of police work. But she hadn't heard Hardy call for her yet, and on days when it was something as simple as witness statements he'd shove the parking tickets to her. And on her bloody birthday, she groaned internally. "Warner, you're with me for the statements. Harford, parking tickets."

The DC's eyebrows shot up and she held back a very nasty scoff, "I've already got loads to do with the footprint of the thief!"

"And you'll find time for the tickets."

"You don't need two people for the statements," she argued.

"And I can always find another DC, can't I?" Alec finally said, removing his glasses to look Katie directly in the eyes. She cowered under him, though it was the reluctant sort of cower of someone who thought their opinion to be better. "Right, get to work."

People spread out quickly to do their tasks, Ellie popping by to press a quick kiss to Y/N on the cheek and murmur a happy birthday. They’d been friends long enough that Ellie knew Y/N didn’t want to make a big fuss over her birthday if nobody already knew. But she told her that she best have the best day and to cut Alec some slack, “he’s not great with the social stuff, but he cares.”

“I know, I know.”

Ellie grinned, “you have a great day and pop round mine after? Open a bottle of Chardonnay and watch Golden Girls?”

“Sounds amazing.”

"You ready, Warner?" Hardy asked as he left his office, hair just slightly mused and adorable glasses perched on the end of his nose. She smiled, he didn’t often wear those when he wasn’t reading. She loved them, but doubted he knew that.

"Yes, sir."

Ellie pinched Y/N’s elbow as she left to go to her desk for paperwork. DS Warner tried to stop the glee as she reached for her things to do witness statements with Alec. That was the sort of thing she enjoyed, actual footwork. An interrogation would have been nice but those didn't just get scheduled the way a nice ol' statement could've. She would take what she got, Alec telling the young DC to fuck off and to enjoy her time with him.

They walked dutifully down to her car, and to her surprise Alec plucked the keys from her hand and slid into the driver’s seat. He didn’t drive often. Not that he couldn’t, or hated it, but because when his heart condition was flaring up and the bastard was too stubborn to get the pacemaker, she had become the accidental designated driver. So seeing him drive was out of the ordinary.

“You’re driving?” She asked as she slid into the passenger’s seat.

Alec scoffed, adjusting the heat so it was damn near freezing, “you act like I don’t have a license.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Shut it.” His arm came to rest on the back of her seat while he backed out, and she allowed herself to stare at him, just a little. He was her man, after all. She had a little right to do so.

They drive in companionable silence for just under thirty minutes as Alec pulled up to the home of one of the partygoers. This particular man, Teagan Garrett, was on the middle of their list. Just unnoticeable that he didn’t strike any alarm bells, but with no solid alibi at the time of the robbery. Which left them straight at the middle.

DS Warner enjoyed doing this, even if some found it tedious. She didn’t have to spend her day holed up in an office, wondering what the next move was and not knowing where her information was going. Whenever she was in the office, she felt it wasn’t accurately reaching the people on the ground, but that was another issue for another day. Today was her birthday, and she was going to spend it well.

And about 15 minutes later, she was spending it happily eating a Danish in the car as Alec drove to the next house. Garrett wasn’t suspicious at all, but he made a delightful cherry Danish that smeared red on her lips but she didn’t care. Y/N ate it happily and smiled out the window, watching the hills blend together.

Before they left the car for the next one, Alec touched her shoulder gently to get her attention.

“Darling, you’ve got…” he lifted a hand, cradling her jaw as he swiped at the cherry filling along the corner of her mouth. Then, without breaking eye contact through those spectacles, Alec popped his thumb in his mouth, licking it clean of the filling. Her mouth fell open in slight shock, feeling her body thrum under the energy of it. There was a look in his eyes, a quirk of his mouth, that seemed to suggest he knew exactly what he was doing. But he said nothing more as he gathered his belongings and left the car.

She blinked, took a deep breath and one last clench of her thighs before getting out of the car as well. Alec Hardy was already several steps ahead of her, a knowing smirk before putting on his disgruntled detective expression. Y/N didn’t know how to feel. On one hand she wanted to grab him by the back of his neck and force him to use that tongue elsewhere, and on the other she wanted to bash him with her purse for getting her so riled up before the next meeting.

If Y/N had paid much attention to Alec’s actions throughout the day, she would have noticed that he both treated her and teased her continuously. He’d give her a cuppa just the way she liked, then compliment her so blatantly before they had to leave she was bright red. It happened that way all day, and by 10am she’d even forgotten it was her birthday and that Alec had forgotten as well. It was just a bizarre day full of danishes and sexy eyes - though she certainly wasn’t complaining.

By 5pm, her feet were exhausting her. Ellie’s earlier invitation of opening a bottle of wine and watching Golden Girls until they pass out to the floor sounded like an amazing idea.

“D’you mind if we go to Miller’s? Got a packet to pick up.”

Her brows furrowed, “oh, um, yeah. I’ve actually meant to go there myself.”

He nodded this as good news, squeezed her thigh, then continued the drive. She looked out the window to avoid his confident smirk that he’d fired her up, knowing he had. It didn’t take long to reach Ellie’s, and Y/N noticed the lights in the Latimer home were off. She wondered where they were this time of day, it wasn’t like Beth to go out for dinner.

Alec parked and the two of them walked up to the house, his hand resting on the small of her back. She wanted to lean into his comforting touch.

“Have I told you yet you look good today?” Y/N mentioned softly to Alec, looking up at him.

He let out a small smile, “I should tell you that.”

“You already did.” She pointed out.

With a soft touch, Alec grabbed her waist and pulled her against him. All he did was press a soft kiss to her forehead, but it was enough to make her let out a sigh of relief. She wanted to use Alec as a personal comforter and sleep for the next decade.

Ellie swung the door wide open, smile bright and arms wide to scurry the couple in. Her and Alec disappeared into the dining room as Y/N shucked her shoes off.

“Ellie?” She called, not knowing where they’d gone. “Alec?”

“Dining room, darling!” Y/N walked on sore feet through the kitchen, prepared to badger Alec about why he’d run off the second the door opened. But she stopped, staring with wide eyes.

In front of her, Beth and Chloe Latimer, Ellie, and Alec all stood awkwardly around a table covered in her favorite things. A tastefully done dish lie in the center, the smell enough to make her mouth water. And a chilled Chardonnay already opened and poured into a glass in Alec’s proffered hand.

“Happy Birthday!” The girls all squealed out at once, causing Alec’s face to scrunch up in annoyance. The sight made you giggle.

Chloe Latimer went and grabbed Y/N’s hand, leading her to the head of table, “come, come, I’ll prepare a plate for you!”

“Oh my, thank you all so much. This is astounding!”

Ellie shot a pointed look towards DI Alec Hardy, who offered her the chilled glass of wine. He came close enough to whisper and said, “you didn’t think I forgot, didya?”

She flushed, feeling awful guilty now. It wasn’t that he was a bad partner, she’d never thought that. Their lives were beyond stressful, birthdays seemed superficial sometimes.

“You hate these kind of things.”

He cocked his head to the side, “you don’t.”

She set her glass down to grab his face, but he beat her to it, lips meeting hers with that unrestrained passion she found so pleasantly addictive. His beard scraped her skin but she’d found in recent months that she loved that feeling, and he knew it.

Y/N would have loved to carry this makeout session farther, but then she felt a chip thrown at her face by Chloe, and gingerly removed herself from Alec. Her cheeks were flushed bright pink. Beth and Ellie both waggled their eyebrows at her, then burst into laughing upon realizing they did it at the same time.

It was shaping up to be a rather lovely birthday after all.

[marklease]

Dreamies and their love languages

Only 5 dreamies today for the 5 love languages, see if you can tell whose who 🤭

Quality Time

Words of Affirmation

Gift Giving

Physical Touch

Acts of Service

apologies to the jisung and jeno girlies in advance you guys will get more content soon 😭🫶

requests still open! enjoy 💕

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: K-Pop Conquers the World

I admit it: I’ve come to prefer Korean pop over American pop. The familiar argument, that Korean producers replicate American pop conventions with sly distance and scientific expertise, won’t fly — given the present mediocrity of the American Top 40, what’s to like? Rather, the auteurs behind K-pop have mastered a sort of transhistorical bricolage that stateside comes naturally only to indie bands and the occasional hip-hop beatsmith, turning the planet’s entire history of recorded music into the K-pop producer’s playground — a massive compendium of discrete ingredients available for ransacking, for twisting into concise pop structures. If this is the counterargument to the plagiarism charge, I don’t entirely buy it either, since it could just as easily produce surreal garbage. Maybe it’s just that when a musical cottage industry starts training kids to be pop stars since before adolescence, some of them turn out really talented.

I.U.: Palette (Loen/Fave)

Since going “mature” four years ago on her breakthrough album, Modern Times, I.U. has specialized in several international ballad styles, none of them originally Korean. Assuming an air of dreamy sophistication, the former ingenue has dipped her toes into lounge-jazz, bossa nova, neodisco, Celine Dion facsimile, and any number of styles consistent with notions of cosmopolitan urbanity. Leave it to an aesthete this shrewd to identify each genre’s good parts and isolate them in palatable replicas for her fanbase. The floaty, feathery R&B she offers on this album is typically delightful.

Qualities that would repel in an Anglophone or Francophone singer fascinate in her: her choices in stylistic sources position her as the final link in a chain denoting moments of self-conscious self-differentiation. Slow R&B burners this fluffy, not to mention cocktail ballads this demonstrative, would already qualify as shamelessly retro if Justin Timberlake sang them; I.U.’s translation of this mode into Korean adds an extra layer of distance, such that the music turns obsessively self-reflexive, containing mirror upon mirror. Awareness of form ensures a willingness to stretch formal boundaries, and this album uses blank space to such masterful effect that each song blurs the traditional distinction between ballads and dance tracks. Piano, strings, quietly subtle rhythm guitar, and cannily minimal drum machine create thin, restrained, readymade shapes. While she sings straightforwardly around the melody in the foreground, her breathy backup vocals — or strings, or a softly ostinato keyboard texture — fill in the empty spots between the lines drawn by the discrete instruments, tricking the listener into imagining vast expanses of space. Paradoxically, the effect is intimate; the songs and their singer have room to breathe, especially on “Love Alone,” the album’s centerpiece — a slow, haunting, excruciating ballad extraordinaire. Swaying with stark power while stealing from Brazil the concept of saudade, the song’s gentle, plucked acoustic guitar harmonics accentuate a melody inextricable from the rawness of her voice. Nine more songs in this vein produce an album of exquisite delicacy.

Thrilling in its reticence, Palette is primarily a triumph of arrangement, of instruments positioned next to each other in complimentary proportions. Hence, you can feel the ache in I.U.’s singing. Play it at night over headphones and gasp at her every whisper.

Day6: Sunrise (JYP Entertainment)

Each release by this guitar-toting gang has leaned a tad more heavily toward arena rock, and their full-length debut is where they turn on their distortion pedals and crunch up a storm. Pounding energetically as they do, there’s nevertheless a dull predictability to this move that makes me wish they’d lighten up again.

As their eye shadow and punchy, theatrical dynamics would indicate, they draw as much influence from mid-’00s American emo bands as from late ‘00’s Korean indie-rock, but their strengths are inversely proportional to those of most emo bands. Theoretically I’m not sure whether Dashboard Confessional is a band anybody should emulate. As with those avatars of bathetic yearning, Day6’s ballads, so huge and soaring and plaintive, are kitsch masterpieces — the magnificent “I Smile,” its solemn, arpeggiated guitar chime ringing out through the air, flaunts heartbreak the way a jock might bare a set of washboard abs. Their upbeat songs, however, land with a joyless thud, beholden to excessive notions about how hard the drums must hit and how gritty the guitars must sound. If the mix were crisp rather than merely polished, the guitars might crack sharply and provide serviceable contrast with the songwriting’s earnest sensitivity, but instead the band bulldozes the material into a blunt thrash. Comparison with Daydream, last year’s sublime mini-album, reveals much; when their power pop was still agile on its feet, their amusement at getting to act like heartthrobs shone through. Here the distorted whomp obscures such frivolities. The difference is slight but exhausting.

Many of their hooks remain fetching — ”I Wish,” “I’m Serious” (what a title!) — but taken together they equal an album overwhelmed by hasty rock loudness. Barring a resurgence in rhythmic spring, I hope they shift their focus to ballads exclusively. Adducing a bleeding heart may just inspire emotions extreme enough to satisfy.

Ignito: Gaia (Mnet)

I’m skeptical of foreign language rap — each language’s cadence clicks with a different set of rhythms, and not always those specified by received Anglophone convention. Thankfully, Ignito concedes nothing to such expectations, and the Korean rapper’s second album delivers sensationalist energy while realizing the language’s sonic potential for rapid-fire delivery.

Musically, this album turns being loud and obnoxious into a battle cry. Producer Kontrix’s beats — which combine synthesized strings, power chords, sinister showoff lead guitar, giant slabs of slammed electronic boom, and, on “Metal Rising,” a massed choir — recall prior hip-hop accompaniment less than they do Kavinsky, the Star Wars soundtrack (prequels only) interpreted for synthesizer, and any music imbued with the sort of grandiosity whereby a hero has only four minutes to save the world. This is maximalist orchestral technocratic schlock of the highest order, conjuring a mock sense of shock at its own presence — “oh no, it’s me!,” cry the electronic violins and the blues guitar. The bullheaded arrogance necessary for a rapper to choose this as his musical setting astounds, and Ignito delivers. He’s got the voice for it: deep, aggressive, froglike, inhabiting a defiantly angry yet infuriatingly self-assured tone that matches the orchestration exactly. Lacking sufficient knowledge of Korean rap to place him in context, I’ll compare him instead to Kevin Gates; both convey the sense that their tongues are too big for their mouths, so they can only blubber their lips. But Ignito’s flow is quicker and more multifaceted, more mindful of internal rhymes, more willing to stretch a line and break the meter. Treating macho puffery as a kinetic skill, the album plays like a pushy show of technique. He’s got the eye of the tiger, and you’re gonna hear him roar.

No clue what the lyrics are saying beyond an English chorus or two, and I’m not sure I want to — given his manner on the microphone, he might be an unpleasant character up close. I’m grateful to the language gap for rendering delectable such a vivid portrait of gruff masculinity in the abstract.

Lovelyz: R U Ready? (Woolim/CJ E&M)

Whatever the virtues of sugary soda and tacky plastic product, a reasonable consumer could wonder just how many girly electropop albums one needs. The answer is a zillion, obviously. This Korean girl group’s second album, as tangible as Silly Putty, terrifically demonstrates why.

So cheerful one might consider them a parody of pep, PC Music’s fantasy of what the perfect K-pop band would sound like, Lovelyz inhabit a childish cuteness that, contrary to expectations, isn’t common in K-pop proper — even the danciest stars typically court the adult contemporary market as well. With song titles like “My Little Lover,” a singer (one of eight) named “Baby Soul,” and a musical style whose cartoon simplicity codes as pre-erotic, Lovelyz instead pursue the diminutive. The album thrills in its one-dimensionality. Fizzy bright synthesizers squeak, whirr, and pop like balloons pop; synthetic slapped funk bass bounces like a rubber ball; hyped-up drum machines get the party going; breathless vocals project utter delight at the fact of their presence in such a playful environment. Imagine a digital electronic template as sweet and clean as Britney Spears’s, with the mood altered from flirty ambiguity to the joy a child feels upon seeing a pile of birthday presents, each shinier than the next, wrapped in glossy paper and tied with a bow. I’ll extend the metaphor: the singers, ebullient as they are, represent the kid. The spritzy beats, and by extension the whole album, represent the most fabulous gift one could have hoped for. What a treat to witness such joy.

This album ticks off so many of my taste boxes — sleekly stylized product, formalized genre exercise, crafty simulations of emotional structure, sonic textures you can taste and feel — that it inspires the sneaking suspicion that these elements all belong to one mode. They don’t necessarily, though. The album’s just perfect, that’s all.

The post K-Pop Conquers the World appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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