#this is the most boring text post in the history of the world I’m so sorry akdkkejejeje

[itspileofgoodthings]

I should do more things like I tag my tumblr posts tbh.

[bao3bei4]

ON THE TSHIRT METHOD TO WRITING ESSAYS IN YOUR OWN TIME: 

i have had a couple people mention to me that they would like to write essays too, but they are a little out of practice. so i thought i should gather some scattered thoughts into one place. this is not a systematic guide. i am young and inexperienced and still working out things for myself, but this is my basic process and some things that have helped me, summarized. 

my biggest single piece of advice is to write with your proverbial pussy. you are not writing for a grade so don't act like it. forget rigor, forget academic style, etc. read what you're interested in, and write following up on the threads that you're interested in. don’t sweat the details. just do you.

if you still need more advice..... here’s a long winded post. 

step zero: if you have no clue what you want to say yet 

read. and read a lot.

but be realistic. be kind to yourself. your attention is a precious resource, and it is getting eaten up by shit out of your control all the time. if you’ve had a busy day, you may still have the brain power left to read. i almost never do. lol. so make sure to carve out time on a day off, if possible. otherwise you might end up completely fried, reading the same sentence over and over, and ending up scrolling on your phone LMAO. <-- painful lesson also to this end, if you haven’t picked up a denser book in a while, start with shorter articles, especially ones written more recently. if your attention wanders, try getting a physical book instead. the most important thing is just starting things you’ll actually read.  i’ve seen a lot of people (and been that person) who was like. “oh i’m going to start with THE canonical text in a subject i’m interested in” which makes sense right? but that book is inevitably long and dense and convoluted and boring. you can come back to it later. this shouldn’t feel like a chore! 

genuinely this is the most helpful thing you can do is just. read anything. it may be difficult at first (or always), but it is still the easiest way to engage with the foremost experts from around the world and the entirety of written history on any subject you are interested in. there’s not really a substitute to this. 

note: you may say that people can and do come up with brilliant ideas independently of their access to written works. this is true! but if you are one of them, you should skip this section/post, because you already know what you want to say.  okay that was a little too facetious. let me revise: when i say that, without reading, it will be hard to come up with more complex ideas than what you have now, that isn’t necessarily pejorative. maybe your current ideas and impulses are original and meaningful and complex. if they aren’t, however, you don’t have to resign yourself to it.  your experiences in real life are the most valuable thing you can bring to the table, but it can be very difficult to articulate and contextualize them without community—whether that be irl, or the simple textual company of other writers. you can let other people help you and teach you.  basically, this is a long winded way of saying something extremely simple: reading is not the only way to gain knowledge, or even the best. but it is an extremely consistent and relatively egalitarian way.** **scihub and libgen and sometimes the public library are your friends. (my local library’s book coverage is spotty) who cares about piracy. LMAO. 

you may surprise yourself by how nicely you fall into little spirals. you read one thing. and you are enamored with the way the author approaches their subject. so you end up reading everything else they’ve written, and then you start on the authors they list that inspire them in their interviews. maybe you just read one article that’s a little dry but it cites something else that seems far more interesting. read that next. and so on. 

if you are struggling to read that’s okay. you have options. start a book club (or just get a friend who also wants to read more). if that sounds like too much work, pick a friend to keep updated on all your new facts. you just want to get used to reading something, and telling someone your favorite parts again. skim books. skip the boring parts. drop them entirely and find a more interesting one. no one’s going to quiz you. this is for your own enjoyment. 

also important here: read books that make you want to write. sometimes this is because the methods and/or prose of the author are so exciting, you want to do something just like that. sometimes it’s because the content is so exciting, you want to say something about that too. sometimes they speak so powerfully to your own life, you want to tell people this is me!! i see this!! there are books i just enjoy reading, sure, and i do read them. but you know how, like, a good movie makes you want to tell stories too? good theory should do that too, in my opinion. 

step one: you have some ideas now. 

these ideas don’t have to be set in stone. but you should have an idea now of what you might talk about. personally, for me, i have two interconnected types of essay ideas. 

interventions. this is like [tumblr voice] Why Is Nobody Talking About This. i see some sort of hole. maybe i know how to fill it, maybe i don’t. 

free associations. basically i read one thing, or some analysis of one thing. and then it reminded me of another thing. and i’m like. i want to tease apart their connections, their similarities, and their differences. 

there are more types of ideas, i’m sure. but these are the ones i consistently have. with me, the second kind is more common. very rarely do i find that my thoughts are that original. rather, i’ve found that one of my strengths as a writer is being able to make connections that other people haven’t made, or haven’t made in depth before. IN MY OPINION. 

so i find it quite flexible. maybe i watch a movie, and it reminds me of my own life, because i think two women in the movie could be sad queer freaks. and i’m a sad queer freak. or it could be that i think scum villain could be analyzed through the framework of freudian psychoanalysis. you get the idea. 

at this stage of the process, i don’t have a thesis, necessarily. but i have a couple phrases i’m drawn to. i have a bullet point or two. i have vibes. 

to use an example from this blog, one of my friends hui once mentioned that that one fan image was going around again. we were going ughhh it’s victorian not chinese! together and they said “you should write a meta on it.” i wasn’t sure quite yet what i had to say. but i knew a couple things. 

this is, incidentally, because i had done some research into chinoiserie before, because i had cited the zuroski book for a paper i had to write for an english class some years before on pride and prejudice and its use of descriptions of material culture, an essay that in turn was inspired by my random yet deeply felt conviction that jane austen hated me personally and wanted to kill me.  this is why i encourage reading a lot. i think. 

to work on this stage, make lists. lots of them. i have a .txt file where i keep every essay idea i have. a lot of them are a sentence. or they're lists of books or theorists i think i could make something out of. or they're theses that feel true, but i’m not sure why yet. 

it took me a while to get to this point. just like with writing fic, there was a period when i first started where i was like. i only have one idea. i’m going to write it, and then i’m never going to write again. and then i had just one more idea. after a while. eventually you will find you have so many ideas and the world is full of possibilities. it’s a muscle you have to flex. like reading. and telling people about what you’re reading. 

actually, i feel like there was a step 0.5 here that i completely skipped. 

step zero point five that i skipped: how to generate ideas

my very truly complete “first time writing something semi-academic that was original” (with a loose definition of the word original) was literally just me reading literary criticism of one book, and saying “i think this author’s thoughts can be applied to this other book” and found some textual evidence that supported that the process could be replicated. 

this is like, writing with training wheels on. eventually i got better at it (see aforementioned chinoiserie essay. i hope you agree.). but that was a good place to start for me. it made the proverbial blank page less intimidating, knowing i had a scaffolding. 

i suggest trying this. see how it goes for you. read around until you find some piece of criticism, or just some theory about how something works, that you like. and using your newfound hammer, go look for some nails. 

note: i know this expression is meant to like. be a negative thing. but you do have to start somewhere. it’s okay if it sucks. it’s just for your practice and your enjoyment. 

be cautious of stances. weak writing (in my OPINIONNNN) tries to unilaterally defend or condemn a behavior. what you need to do is treat your writing as a bit. and then you need to run with it. you need to take it farther than what is reasonable. if this bit is truly actually deeply true, then what does it mean about yourself? it’s like using a new set of pronouns as a joke or something. you know what i mean? (that was an example of what i’m trying to communicate here)

what else is key to look out for... look for oppositional pairs or tensions. look for perverse incentives and vicious circles. look for embarrassing ideas. that is, what would be extremely embarrassing if it was true? (or to admit that it was true) you may go—tshirt, here you’re just describing things that are sexy. yes, exactly, that’s the point. you want things that thrill. 

just keep reading and making notes until everything echoes with something else. now you’re ready for step two. 

step two: refine your ideas further. 

let me do this by demonstration. once more extending my earlier example of my chinoiserie essay, i knew that i really wanted to take zuroski’s points and basically... steal them. this is called “citation,” i guess. but i thought the following insights were useful to me: 

british women were invested in chinese material objects 

they incorporated them into their own subjectivity

past a certain point, they no longer “consumed” these signifiers, but these signifers became theirs 

critique of one was able to stand in for critique of the other

and from being on fandom twitter, i already had the following insights: 

people deliberately blurred the lines between china and england when it came to fans and tea

people also liked talking about victorian modesty when it came to china 

so it seemed like victorian england and china had a privileged relationship, in a lot of people’s minds in fandom. 

so it didn’t really seem a stretch to say... how can we look at one history, and apply it to our present? 

it was a bit of the combo of the two: i saw something i didn’t see people were talking about, and it reminded me of something else i’d read before. 

something that helps me a lot is tweeting about my essay ideas. if you have me on my private account, you already know this. it forces me to explain myself to someone who doesn’t know what i’m talking about in a very succinct way. oftentimes, i tweet something out while i’m brainstorming, and then i steal the phrasing back into my essay. see? tweets can be writing too. 

this is microdosing on step zero’s “read something and practice telling a friend about it.” now you’re writing something and telling a friend about it. 

step three: okay now you can like. open a google doc 

make an outline. i know i know i know. i’m sorry. you can start just barfing thoughts if you want, but eventually everything that was on the top of your head will be out. and now you can start thinking about structure. the reason the outline is important is because it makes clear the logical progression from one idea to the next. 

i know i usually bounce around in my writing (a tendency which has been magnified here because this is so casual LMAO), but i always want to make sure that my points are substantiated. if we want to talk about how a causes b, we should prove a, we should prove the causal link, and only then can we infer b, for instance. it doesn’t really matter what order that happens in (or even that we set about it that way), but the more complicated your idea is, the longer checklist you need. it’s just a checklist. that’s all. 

as you start writing, you’ll probably need to read some more. you’re going to want to say something you think is true, but you’re going to realize that you haven’t proved it (or you can’t). go look to see if someone else has proved it. 

maybe you’re right. add that evidence in. maybe you’re wrong. now your essay has a new direction. there is a living thing beneath you. actually, on that idea— 

i tend to structure my outlines (if i’m not sure yet what my point is) by pasting a bunch of quotes in a document, and reorganizing them until they make sense, they seem to flow. and then i start explaining why, until i realized i have begun to walk off in a new direction. always embrace that new direction. eventually you will find that you have not been taking twists and turns, but actually you were dizzily walking along a straight path. (unless you have been unfocused and you are trying to say too many things at once. ask a friend to read your essay if you’re not sure which is the case.) 

quotes are the smallest unit of your analysis. work with evidence. or, at least, i do. it makes writing an essay like solving a mystery. the idea of just spontaneously generating something new fills me with terror. rather, i want to autopsy something, trace its steps, and then discover how it came to be dead. this may not be true for you. but it’s true for meeeee and this is my post. 

tl;dr

0. read something and tell someone about it/post it out

0.5. come up with a bit and run with it

1. think "why is no one talking about this" or start free associating

2. come up with weird connections and tell someone about it/post it out

3. collect all of your posts and ideas into a gdoc and organize them.

anyway i like reading posts like this because i’m incredibly nosy. so i tried to write out the sort of thing i like to read from other people. i don’t suggest you actually try to replicate it (if anyone would even want to.) practically basically i just encourage you to try any single part of this that you think was interesting or relatable or helpful. personally, i suggest reading a book and posting your favorite lines from it. if you do this a couple times, i think you will find the seeds of an essay waiting for you in your own posts. 

[darkdoverpseeker]

🕊️ howdy 🤠 28 y/o demiboy (he/it) CST timezone but has a terrible sleep schedule. Please be 24+. I prefer to write on discord with Tupperbox active.

My writing style is third person, past tense, and length depends on energy level. I can write 3-15+ paragraphs or I can write rapid fire texts. All depends on plot and what I’m given. I prefer MxM.

I do not double.

Here are a list of plots I have muse for ☺️

• the most dysfunctional or unhinged pairing. I’m not gonna guarantee a ship seeing as this character is greyromantic. Hes Slowburn Material��️ and the pay off is best. A platonic bond would be fun to see 🥰 He’s a hothead who is super abrasive and straightforward. Trauma coded™️. There is no fixing him. He’s not available for uwu soft subs - they’re just boring to him. Two strong personalities would be preferred. Will they kill each other or comfort each other? Who knows! That’s the fun in it. Killer & killer or perhaps brutal and mortal enemies? 👀

• OC Scream mumu!!! We both play a Ghostface & Final girl. Who are they? Only the wheel knows 🥰 it’d be starting at the first movie but set with 21+ y/o muses

• OC Hunger Games!!! Either 1x1 or mumu; either will be okay ☺️ starting with the first movie and building everything from there with our own characters and directions to agree on and plot. The world is our own.

• Misery loves company but the company loves the misery type of plot. Toxic as ever. Maybe digs into abuse for a dead dove aspect. They’re addicted to each other like a bad habit. This requires switches or dom/dom. Muse A and Muse B have the WORST jealous ex syndrome when it comes to each other. However, when something goes wrong, they’re going back to each other with tails between their legs while the other soaks in the attention. It’s the worst aspect of “I’ll always be here”. Their friends want them separated but there’s too much history to erase to let it all go. Fighting to the point of screaming at each other but not all the time. When it’s just them, it’s like candy land and sunshine. It’s when others are around that things begin to get rocky.

• Power imbalances or statuses. Bosses son ready to take on the company & an intern or lesser position meeting his future boss. Could also be age difference too 👀 I’d prefer to play the younger submissive in this scenario. They could have went to school with each other or the older man could be a family friend. It’s just kinky and secretive with threats of reporting everything to the big boss man.

• Michelin star chef & his staff or the restaurant bartender. Things aren’t going well for my chef. He’s stressed from everything and perpetually grumpy. He’s gotten cattier, more demanding and strict with previous rules, and he seems to be taking shots on the clock. He’s staying at work late and often sleeping there. Then Muse B pokes around the corner to find a drunken star stumbling in yesterday’s clothes. Where to go from there? We can plot!! I have ideas but throwing out inspo 💞

• You type plot. Stalking, anonymous calling, kidnapping, etc to be in play. Muse A would go to any appearance Muse B made. Whether it’s a concert they’re performing in or attend or a convention or vip section or after party or whatever Muse B is in, Muse A stays until they leave. Muse A talks to Muse B so casually. They start a relationship. Later, dots start connecting and Muse B eventually finds out about everything. Whether it turns to kidnapping that leads to Stockholm Syndrome or finding a way out, Muse A is trying to stay ahead of the game.

Sorry for the long winded post!! Im starved for content.

like if interested !

[hobohobgoblim]

An open letter to JD Vance from MarkedMelungeon

JD,

Openly, in front of the world, you have tried to understand yourself and your hillbilly roots in the American context. You bore that very painful journey in front of the mainstream, and they largely propped you up as whatever kind of token benefited their agenda.

You tried to quantify and understand the cultural differences between yourself and your grandparents, and between post-hillbilly transplants and the rooted hillbillies still on their ancestral turf.

I am related to you through several lines, including the Vance line that goes back to Bad Jim. Also the Bunch and Bowman and Sizemore lines. That ain’t even all.

You have McCoy in your tree, though— which might be what’s wrong with you. You are a walking feud at war with yourself.

Just kidding.

I mean, you do have McCoy, but so did most Hatfields. Your internal feud is something else.

You got closer to getting it than you realized. Let me help you get a little further.

In the coal camps, our story isn’t anything like the rest of American history. You can’t understand that if you think you’re Scots-Irish. You think that because you don’t realize how much the Yarvin-Musk-Posibiec-Theil (et al.) mentality has been the status quo since at least the Middle Ages.

One needn’t look any further than Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism to find that the “Unhumans” book you blurbed is essentially a serf and turf war playbook lifted straight from Spencer’s dystopic fever dreams.

I’m Melungeon, and so are you. I’ve done hundreds of Melungeon family trees, including yours, for people from the coal camps. You are all the way Melungeon and not very Scots-Irish. That’s important to remember.

In fact, you and Barack Obama and I descend from Virginia’s first enslaved African family, the Bunch family. If I did more cross comparisons, I would maybe find other direct ancestors you share with Obama.

But, across the border into WV (same hollers your Vance family came from), there were some political differences that changed our trajectories and circumstances by our grandparents’ generation. You need to understand those.

WV state was formed as a result of class and racial warfare. People who aren’t from here never get it quite right because they try to understand it through an American lens, or a Southern lens, and without the context necessary.

Most regions are not made up of an underclass who lived for centuries in isolation as a closed culture resisting assimilation.

West Virginia became a state because Virginia had as much as 20% of its population being “free people of color,” and there were a lot of mixed ethnic Melungeons, Romani, and Natives who were being recorded as “white” on the census but who didn’t see themselves that way.

With Virginia’s resources depleted during the Civil War, the “mongrels” and “amalgamists” and “miscegenists” (as my and your ancestors are regularly recorded in historical texts) essentially staged a coup and were given the mountainous region of Virginia as their own state.

Of course, that’s not the whole story, but it’s the part that matters regarding our cultural differences in central Appalachia’s coal camps. We were the “hillbillies.”

We hated the North and the South. We called ourselves mountaineers because we didn’t want to be the North or the South. We just wanted to govern ourselves.

While slavery was abolished on paper, though, it was not abolished effectively as far as our lives were concerned.

But before the coal camps, and before the Civil War, “Free people of color” didn’t usually fare well and enjoy the rights they had on paper. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, we were at risk of being captured and enslaved at any time, and since we weren’t allowed to defend ourselves in court, we had no way to contend with that.

Our ancestors couldn’t always have businesses, couldn’t legally start families, they had to compete for work against the unpaid labor of slavery, couldn’t pass on an inheritance to build generational wealth, and had no way of achieving the “American dream.”

So, we went into the deep woods, set up militias, built cabins by hand, formed our own communities, fed ourselves by hunting and foraging, mined our own coal, made our own booze for use as currency, and had plenty of blacksmiths and tradespeople in our ranks.

Horses couldn’t tackle the dense and steep mountains. We as a people were semi-nomadic, very skilled at animal husbandry and horse training and riding. We knew our hills and trails and had them signposted in ways only we could read so that only we could navigate our terrain. Outsiders didn’t see it as worth it to “try that in a small town.”

Soldiers couldn’t get past our militias. We even had our own internal government. A lot of our infamous feuds were a result of our own people selling out and using the broader American systems for profit or against insiders.

Your mamaw was what I call Old Ways Melungeon, and you tried hard to reconcile the differences between her generation and your own.

You got close a few times.

“I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with.” (From Hillbilly Elegy)

You tried to keep your Mamaw from being seen when she would pick you up and drop you off and lied to your friends about her, claiming you lived with your mom and were mamaw’s caregivers.

You can’t get in the headspace of a person from a culture with a history that’s fabricated.

First, there is the difference between being Poor and being broke, which is an extreme divide you missed, even though you managed to document and illustrate the differences in some nuanced ways.

As the Ohio-born generations you and other post-hillbilly transplants in your town represented, you write:

“This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class.”

In another section, of your grandmother:

“When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt—with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip.“

At least she didn’t pull a gret ol’ big hawkin’ chaw of tobaccy from a buckskin pouch she kept in her bra, JD, right? As I write this, I’m wearing an oversized men’s WV t-shirt with a mine hat, shovel, and pickaxe on it. It’s been worshed so many times, the threads are unraveling at the base.

I bet your mamaw used to cut all the unraveling threads off the rags and towels and clothes as soon as she saw them, right?

Yes, we may wear the same raggedy clothes for a long time, may continue to keep a rusted vehicle on life support for a decade past its prime, and we aren’t trying look like or act like we are anything but Poor.

You said, “I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with.“

Yes, being Poor is a badge of honor because we refused to participate in the myth of the American Dream or run on that treadmill expecting to get anywhere. We instead turned solidified a culture into what is like an amalgam of a tribe and a labor union.

We knew way before Ronald Reagan that no crumbs of trickle-down economics were going to reach us, and we weren’t trying to sit beneath the bottom rung of the class hierarchies and beg.

Being Poor was better than being delusional. We didn’t need to look like success. Our success was measured in how free we were from caring about what others thought about us.

You were broke, JD, and so were your parents. Your grandparents were Poor. That’s the aching difference.

Thanks to “dewokeification” (to use your word) efforts, our schools erased all our true history from history books because it made the states “look bad” and might lend to future uprisings if people knew what their ancestors fought for so we could all have it better.

And now you’re trying to do even more of that. You want to take from our children the truths they deserve to offer some sanitized version of history that excludes dissenters— and dissent is rooted in our culture because without it we are giving away our free will.

I mean… you have a book with over 3 million sales about white Scots-Irish poors, and no one even countered it. You look white enough. You blamed ignorance and poor education on hill people’s problems and cited a cable news report about “mountain dew mouth.”

In the same chapter, you wrote about Mamaw’s first time almost killing someone. “When she was around twelve, Mamaw walked outside to see two men loading the family’s cow—a prized possession in a world without running water—into the back of a truck.”

That’s right. That cow was necessary for survival. We didn’t have water or electricity for 50+ years compared to the rest of the country, even though we mined the coal that powered everyone else’s homes. We also made the glass for sodie pops, a royal crown treat discounted and for sale at the company store. We could buy it with scrip.

They still don’t have water, JD. The mines have ruined it, and you want to deregulate the mines even further so billionaires can cut corners.

You said of mamaw, “She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal. […] She’d tell me, like a general giving his troops marching orders, “There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.”

That’s right. That’s the Melungeon honor code. That’s another core difference between the Poor and the broke.

Most white Americans are broke, not Poor.

You almost caught that, too.

You mentioned two books you read as a teen: William Julius Wilson’s book, The Truly Disadvantaged, and Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. You wrote, “Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.”

Murray was also writing about the Black American experience. You find those so relatable for the same reason I’ve spent my life outside of the coal camps primarily in community with Black folks— because Melungeons have a similar history and we culturally co-existed until Jim Crow as mixed people until we were Black or White. Native wasn’t even on the census.

I couldn’t relate to a white American experience, either.

You were close, JD. You mention the disdain, distrust, and disconnect from politics and police, too.

We were a closed culture, JD.

It was us against the slave owners, us against machines, us against Indian Removal, us against corporate mine oligarchs, us against day schools and residential schools— and we fought hard.

You almost got there.

You said, “Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

You said these conspiracy-theory-believing lunatic white post-hillbilly people were no longer capable of participating meaningfully in society, and now you are pumping them full of the same drugs you identified in your book— the “social heroin” you accused Donald Trump of being.

But here’s what I really want to address.

In an article you wrote about your conversion to Catholicism as conceived by neoreactionaries, you said this: “And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I had seen destroy lives and communities was ‘sin.’”

Boy…

Your Uncle Pet would’ve gotten out the electric saw on you for that. You better warsh your own mouth out with soap.

Your ancestors hated rules and law and order. You made them seem like patriotic, police-championing Southern white nationalists at your RNC speech.

We went to war because it was far safer than the mines where we had a 50% chance of survival, not because of some idealistic sense of duty to protecting the myth of the American dream.

We had guns because we had to defend ourselves.

And now, here you are, shucking corn for billionaires and being the utterly dishonest hype man managing PR for exactly the kind of men who have always tried to buy people like you to infiltrate your ancestors.

You’re a scab.

You just endorsed a book that divides people into “haves” and “have nots” and that claims the “have nots” are communists who will rape and kill the innocent, virtuous “haves” if they’re not reigned in and neutralized. “Crushed.”

You are trying to manipulate people into thinking they have a messiah in Trump and Musk.

Your Mamaw would be disgusted that you made her legacy into everything she stood against, priming people to support a police surveillance state that sees forced assimilation and dehumanization as the best way to empower billionaire oligarchs.

You tell people the way forward is to follow a book that says this:

“So mock the unhumans. Humiliate the unhumans. Ridicule the unhumans. Disgrace, debase, and deride the unhumans. Put the unhumans to shame. Tease and taunt and parody the unhumans. Scorn, scoff, and sneer.”

And despite this despotic approach to “have nots,” it also reads:

“One more thing: Never apologize. Ever. You will not express remorse. You will not explain yourself. You will not ‘add context.’ This is your life; the unhumans come to destroy it. Imagine saying you’re sorry to them. Couldn’t be us.”

You are promising poor white people a seat at the company table with “Great Men” like Elon Musk if they do the dirty work of “crushing” “have nots.”

You told that RNC story about your mamaw joining the ancestors and there being 19 guns in her house. You know why?

Let’s talk about another Harris. Mary Harris, also known as Mother Jones— the kind of “communist” revolutionary that “Unhumans” book claims wants to “rape and murder” and “kill, steal, and destroy.”

Mother Jones is a saint in the coal camps, like John Brown and Bill Blizzard and John Henry. Here’s what she said of the hillbillies:

[quote]Here the miners had been peons for years, kept in slavery by the guns of the coal company, and by the system of paying in scrip so that a miner never had any money should he wish to leave the district.

He was cheated of his wages when his coal was weighed, cheated in the company store where he was forced to purchase his food, charged an exorbitant rent for his kennel in which he lived and bred, docked for school tax and burial tax and physician and for "protection," which meant the gunmen who shot him back into the mines if he rebelled or so much as murmured against his outrageous exploitation.

No one was allowed in the Cabin Creek district without explaining his reason for being there to the gunmen who patrolled the roads, all of which belonged to the coal company. The miners finally struck – it was a strike of desperation.

I then spoke to the crowd and in conclusion said, "Go home now. Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You're going to need it."

"What will we need it for, Mother?" some one shouted.

"For guns," said I. "Go home and read the immortal Washington's words to the colonists."

He told those who were struggling for liberty against those who would not heed or hear "to buy guns."[end quote]

You waited until your Mamaw was with the ancestors and you tokenized her just like you tokenized yourself to do the work of the “haves” and demonize the “have nots.”

Yes, you are an “oppressor class,” and you are perfectly entitled to lick boots of company men all the way to the top— but you are erasing the ancestors and their struggles all the way to a future that your and my ancestors would have and did fight to their last breath to prevent.

Shame on you. You advocate against even apologizing for dehumanizing people who don’t want to live under authoritarian rule.

You’re not a hillbilly. You are a Pinkerton.

And no matter how hard you try, and no matter how destructive the black hole of your ambition and arrogance is, real Vances aren’t bending a knee to billionaires and disrespecting our ancestors.

Not yesterday, not today, and not in a technofuturist hellscape where some California edgelord gets to play god at their expense.

If you knew who you were and how badass your ancestors were, would you still have sold them out? If you had an identity, would you have tried to discover your worth in IQ points or billionaire endorsements? Would you have waged a war against have-nots who organize against authoritarianism and exploitation?

Would you still be driven by shame? Would you still be hiding your mamaw because she looked too low class?

You’re the performative identitarian you scapegoat, putting on costumes and exploiting identities to be someone else.

And you won’t even apologize for it.

You’re never going to fall for your own garbage, and no self-respecting Melungeon would, either.

[littleladymab]

OC in 15

BACK AT IT AGAIN with another tag for an OC in 15 lines of dialogue, this time from @mysticstarlightduck (you can find their post here!)

Rules: Share 15 lines of dialogue from an OC that capture their character, personality, or vibe. Bonus points for using dialogue without other scene details, but you’re free to include those as well!

I did Ayn on my first version of this, so obvi I have to do Jonas this time around. I could do like a 100 lines for Jonas, he's so iconic.

Half of these are from his text convos but those are some of the most indicative lines (or emoji) of who he is as a person, so.

(ps I'll have some more tag memes up tomorrow! When I'm back at a computer proper and not my tablet hehe)

“Huh? Oh. No. I mean, fuck yeah, you know I’m all about brunch, but I meant to that meeting thing.” 

“Not you, you boring turds,” I tell them. “Go back to your mindless business.”

From: Jonas Quinn  Everything I do for you comes from a place of love  From: Jonas Quinn  And spite

“Alright, motherfucker, what the shit.”

From: Jonas (Meliora) But you never know... (ી(΄◞ิ౪◟ิ‵)ʃ)♥ From: Jonas (Meliora) I just might make... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) From: Joans (Meliora) AN APPEARANCE! ლ(́◉◞౪◟◉‵ლ)

From: Jonas (Meliora) ─=≡Σ((( つ•̀ω•́)つ

 “You could definitely use a haircut. The split ends were crying out for my help all the way across the room.”

“Bitch, please,” I spit out, frustration reaching a boiling point but not yet spilling over. Customer service voice, Jonas. Customer service voice. “I don’t plan on hiding behind a tiny ass little screen the entire time. I got my ways, and I’m going to use them.”

“Oh, look who it is: Mr. Foo-Foo and the Second-Rates.”

“Check your listing in the phone book! It’s either under Self-righteous Asshole or Lord Bastard on High.”

From: Quinn, Jonas ღ╰⋃╯ღ•̥̑ .̮ •̥̑)

From: Quinn, Jonas Yeah, right i’m quaking in my fashionable winter boots

“See, it’s hot when Fletcher nerds out over history. Leave your hoity-toity Old World pretentiousness for bedroom talk with Ayn. Maybe she gets a kick out of it, I don’t know, but major ughhhh.”

“That was code for ‘get the fuck out of this conversation space, you dumbfuck’. Go join Kaito and the others, why don’t you.” 

“Barback, bring us your best bottle of booze.”

[uvobreakmylegs]

The Sixth Floor Game

heavy inspiration from the Elevator Game, as well as the Three Kings Game and a little bit of Silent Hill 3

demon!Shalnark

Warnings: blood, death, kidnapping

The Sixth Floor Game is a ritual that will put you into contact with otherworldly forces and, if done correctly, can take you to a world that exists outside of our own. To play this game, you must follow all of the instructions that have been written below. Take care to remember all of them, as one mistake could result in death.

First you must enter a dark and empty building that has an elevator and only five floors in between the times of 3 and 4 AM. The only items you can bring with you are a fully charged cellphone, an item of sentimental value to you and an offering for the demon.

It is not recommended that you give an offering that bares any resemblance to that of a clown or magician.

When you enter the elevator, you need to ride it up to the 5th floor and leave the offering just outside the elevator doors and then head back down to the 3rd floor. When you reach the 3rd floor, you then need to exit the elevator and use your phone to call the last person in your call history. The game begins when you call that number.

When the line is picked up, you must say “I want to visit the 6th floor”.

Be warned that at this point you may hear strange noises on the other end, as calling the number at this time and place has put you in contact with a demon. It is possible to gauge whether the demon is happy with your offering or not based off the things he may say, if anything at all. Do not hang up on the demon; you will go back up the elevator when he hangs up on you.

There are three possibilities awaiting you when you go back to the 5th floor to see what has happened to your offering.

If the demon doesn't care for your offering but hasn't been upset by it, you will find it in the same place as you left it outside the elevator. You must then collect the offering, go back down to the first floor and leave the building.

If the demon has been offended by your offering, you will find the offering destroyed in some way. Leave the building immediately if you find this, as it means that the demon is angry with you and will try to kill you if you stay too long.

But if the demon likes your offering, there will be no trace of it when you get back up to the 5th floor. If this has happened, you must close the elevator doors and then hit the button for the 5th floor again. This time, instead of the doors opening again, the elevator will begin to move up, taking you to a 6th floor that shouldn't exist.

The amount of time it will take to reach the 6th floor varies from person to person, but it should not take longer than two minutes.

When you reach the 6th floor, you will find yourself in another world. Accounts of what this other world looks like also varies from person to person. Some have said that the floor they entered was run down and wrecked to pieces in some parts. Others have said that the floor didn't look any different from the other floors. Regardless of the state of the floor, the one thing that is consistent is a giant glowing red cross that can be seen if you look outside. You will see nothing else outside aside from the cross.

It is not recommended that you to try to open any windows or try to climb down the building.

You are free to explore this other world until you are ready to leave. It does not matter how long you stay in the other world. When you want to leave you must simply walk back to the elevator and hit the button for the first floor. It is possible that you may come across the offering that you left for the demon earlier while you explore.

Do not take the offering back; it now belongs to the demon.

Reality on the 6th floor can be distorted and you may find yourself becoming confused. If you find yourself entering into such a state, take out the sentimental item you brought and focus on it. It will keep you from losing yourself and allow you to continue as you explore the other world.

Above all else, while exploring the other world, you must never look behind you. Even though the demon may have liked your offering, he also likes trickery and will try to make you turn around to look at him by making noise or by speaking to you. If you look at the demon you will be unable to leave the 6th floor and he will keep you there forever as he has claimed you as his.

It is not recommended that you speak to the demon even if you don't look at him.

Regardless of the outcome of your offering, when you have returned to the 1st floor you must exit the building and you cannot enter the building again for any reason until the time is 6 AM.

If you have upset the demon with your offering, it is not recommended that you try the game again.

There is no reward for playing this game. There is only the experience of leaving this world and venturing to one beyond our own.

This game is dangerous and could result in the death of the player, so please consider the possible outcomes of playing before you decide to do so.

You finished reading aloud the instructions displayed on the sketchy-looking site and looked to your friend Farah, who had her hands clasped together as she looked hopefully at you and the rest of your group who had gathered in her apartment.

“Well?” she asked after a moment, “what do you think?”

“.... Why does a demon have a phone?” you asked.

“Yeah and what phone company does he use?” Cliff asked after you, “or do demons have their own phone companies.”

“You're missing the point!” Farah exclaimed.

“And the point is....?”

“We need to try this!”

There was a collective groan throughout the apartment. The other one in the group, Carmen, rubbed their forehead as they told Farah “you're our friend and we love you, but I don't think any of us want to repeat that time we tried summoning ghosts in a public bathroom.”

“This is nothing like that!” Farah insisted, “it said that we need a building with five floors and an elevator! I promise, there won't be anything gross!”

“Where do we get a building like that?” Carmen asked.

Farah pointed to Cliff.

“You work security overnight at that one office building, right?”

“Do you seriously think I'm going to risk my job for this?” he asked.

“We won't do anything bad! We'll just play a game and leave some stuff on the top floor. If the demon doesn't like it we'll take it with us. It's literally in the rules that we need to clean up after ourselves.”

Farah stopped herself, but you could tell she wanted to continue about getting a chance to visit another world. She loved the supernatural and those kinds of urban legends, but she never wanted to try these things on her own.

Carmen sighed.

“Is anyone else even remotely interested in trying this?” they asked.

Neither you or Cliff said anything at first, and Farah's face began to fall as no one volunteered. Then, when it looked like Carmen was about to speak again, you tentatively raised your hand.

“It might be fun,” you said. At least in terms of memories of 'dumb shit you did when you were younger'.

Farah beamed while Carmen gave you a look that screamed 'I hate you'.

With you willing to give the game a chance, the other two ended up conceding to do the same, and Cliff had been convinced by Farah to let you all in a week from that day when he worked at that particular building. With his shift being 11 PM to 7 the next morning, there would be plenty of time for you to play the game and then let him get back to work. As long as nothing was messed up by the end of it, there would be no harm.

At first you were rather stumped on what to give the demon as an offering. Farah was the same, but she ended up deciding on a horror anthology book from the 1920s. Carmen just got a shirt they had been wanting since they were certain that this ritual wasn't going to work and they wanted to spend the money on something that was useful to them. Cliff went out of his way to get a particularly creepy clown doll. He claimed that he wasn't annoyed by all of this, but you found yourself questioning that statement when he sent a picture of it through the group text. You had no clue where the fuck he had found something that unsettling.

The night you all had settled on was approaching and you still didn't have an offering. It shouldn't have been that hard, and yet you felt like if there was the chance that you were going to run into some otherworldly creature, you didn't want to half-ass it and make it upset. If the supernatural was real it seemed better to try and keep it on your side.

You found yourself browsing a few online forums where people were discussing the game. Unsurprisingly, most said that the ritual didn't work, and the few that claimed that it did had written some uninspired stories about how the demon had told them how they were going to die or when the world was going to end, with at least one mentioning the coming of the Antichrist. When you scrolled down to the end of the page you were pretty bored of all of the comments you read and you were about to exit the page when one particular comment caught your eye:

the demon likes bats

It was buried beneath the comments of others, and nobody had interacted with it. Common sense would tell you that this was just more bullshit, but it just seemed like such a random thing to make up. Nowhere in the instructions had it mentioned bats, and no one else on the forums had said anything about it either. The user who had posted it hadn't interacted with anything else and seemingly just came on to put out that little tidbit. For that reason, you found yourself wondering if their ritual had been successful.

You leaned back in your chair while you considered the information.

Bats, huh?

And then by complete chance the next day, when you were in the mall trying to find something because it the date you'd set for the game was only hours away and you still had nothing, you spotted something through the window of a toy store: a pink stuffed bat plush.

It was rather overpriced, but if that comment was correct, then it should be worth it. If not, at least you got something cute out of it.

Surprisingly it was Carmen and Farah that had been less than impressed by what you had brought.

“I didn't realize you wanted to offend the demon too,” Farah commented bitterly.

“Maybe the demon likes pink,” you responded as you shrugged.

Nothing more was said about it as Cliff opened the front door of the building. In exchange for doing this, he made the rest of you go about the building to turn off all any lights that had been left on which you all grumbled about but agreed was fair enough. By the time you were finished scouring the building, it was 3:13 in the morning.

It had been agreed that Farah would go first, and the rest of you waited in a darker spot of the parking lot while she went in, watching the building to see if you could spot her movements through the windows. You had pulled out your phone, as you were the last person she had called. It would probably be proven pretty fast if this was real or not if she called you and it went through to you, though Carmen had said that they felt it was likely that Farah would probably not call and just say that she had.

You checked to make sure the sentimental object you had brought was in your pocket: a small, stuffed bear keychain that you had gotten as a present from a childhood friend. It was special to you, but you didn't feel like you'd be absolutely devastated if anything happened to it.

Farah came out a few minutes later, carrying her book and looking disappointed.

“It didn't work,” she said as she sighed.

“Did you call?” you asked.

“Yes,” she answered, somewhat indignant. To prove that she had, she pulled out her phone and opened up her call history. It listed her last call as being made to you only a few minutes ago. When you opened up your own call history, it showed that she had called you over an hour ago.

….. Okay. That was weird.

Carmen went next, and it was the same story with them, as they came out a little bit later still holding their shirt. Unlike Farah, they didn't seem too upset.

Cliff went after, holding that creepy clown doll and waving it around a bit as he walked to the elevator.

It was quiet again after that. You, Carmen and Farah waited patiently in the parking lot while the electric lampposts around you hummed. Cliff had been talking earlier so you hadn't noticed it, but it seemed eerily quiet outside. Usually there were bugs or other forms of wildlife at night that would keep things from being silent, but right now there was nothing; only the humming electricity of the lot and the occasional comment from Carmen.

Farah seemed anxious as she looked at the building, her hands playing with the charm on her phone while she waited for any sign of Cliff. The thing with the phone history seemed to convince her this was for real and she seemed nervous about Cliff's offering. Carmen didn't appear to be the same way and seemed more impatient, who'd begun to tap their foot as they waited.

“Did you hear anything when you called?” you asked the both of them. They looked at you, and both shook their heads.

“It was quiet when I called,” Farah said.

“Same here,” said Carmen. Farah smiled at that.

“That means that it's real, right?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Carmen wasn't the best person to be around when they were tired and cranky, and you could see that Farah wasn't trying to take it personally. But looking back to Carmen, you noticed a slight furrow to their brow, and the impatient tapping seemed to have increased. At first glance you would have assumed that they were just really done with this whole thing, but as you kept looking, it seemed less like they were annoyed and more more like they were apprehensive.

“Cliff's taking a while,” they commented.

It was taking Cliff longer than the two of them, you realized, and you were about to try and crack a joke about him making it to the sixth floor when you saw the elevator doors in the lobby slide open, followed by Cliff walking out.

More like storming out, actually.

“What the hell?!” he exclaimed as he shoved open the main doors.

“Don't shout!” Carmen responded, “this is your job that we're not supposed to be doing this at, remember? What're you going to do if someone calls the police on us?”

Cliff ignored them, looking to Farah as he continued “are you serious? You want this stupid thing to be real that badly?!”

He was holding something that he then thrust in front of Farah's face. It was the clown doll that he'd brought.

Or at least, what was left of it.

It looked like it had been stepped on repeatedly, the body broken and the head having been caved in. One of the legs were also missing, you noted.

“You.... You think I did that?” Farah asked.

“Who else!” Cliff yelled.

“I've been here the whole time!” she shrieked back.

“She has,” you added as you felt the need to jump in, “none of us have moved from this spot.”

“Oh fuck off,” he answered, “I needed to return this. What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Maybe you shouldn't have gone out of your way to be an asshole,” Farah spat back.

It quickly devolved into an argument between the two, with Carmen pulling you back when you tried to jump in again. It made sense why Cliff was upset, but Farah hadn't done anything.

“.... Should I not go?” you whispered to Carmen after a bit.

“No!” Cliff exclaimed, this time at you, “you should go! Do this stupid thing, and then let me get back to my work!”

“You're not allowed to go back in for the rest of the night,” Farah pointed out.

By that point Cliff was done, and he stormed off to another area in the lot. Carmen motioned for you to go while Farah quietly steamed. It wasn't the first time those two had fought, but the arguments seemed to be getting nastier every time they happened. Best to get this over with so they could be separated and have the time to cool down.

You walked through the darkened lobby of the empty office building, your path illuminated only by the streetlights outside. There was something about darkness and artificial light that somehow made it feel more foreboding, more dangerous. Even though you were an adult there were still thoughts that ran about in your head of creatures that you couldn't see awaiting you in the dark, and those thoughts made you tense a bit. It was such an irrational fear, but one your brain wouldn't let go of. The argument between your friends had only put you more on edge as well.

The elevator doors slid open, the bright blinding lights hurting your eyes for a second before they adjusted to them, and you stepped in the car, pushing the button for the fifth floor.

Fifth floor, leave the offering, then down to third.

There were some bits of Cliff's creepy clown doll that were in front of the elevator when you reached the top floor. It vaguely occurred to you that the instructions said to leave immediately if the offering had been destroyed, but it seemed like Cliff had tried to clean up some. Though that made sense, since he didn't want to leave a mess behind after his shift.

You pushed away some of the leftover bits with your shoe, and carefully placed the bat plush laying on its back in front of the doors.

Down to the third floor, then.

You checked again to make sure that the bear keychain was still in your pocket during the ride down, stepping out when the doors opened after you confirmed that it was.

Now to make the call....

There hadn't been anything saying you needed to wait until the doors closed to begin, but you waited anyway. When the double doors slid shut behind you, you hit the button on your screen to call Farah, the last person on your call history.

It rang twice before the call was picked up. Just as Farah and Carmen had said, it was silent on the other side. You cleared your throat before saying the words that had been instructed.

“I want to visit the sixth floor. Please.”

There was nothing that said you needed to be polite, but you figured it couldn't hurt.

You still didn't hear anything from the other end, and that silence continued for several more seconds. You held the phone close to your ear, straining to hear anything, any sort of indication that someone was on the other line. The “demon” was supposed to hang up first, you remembered, so you were stuck until something happened.

“.... That's actually cute.”

The male voice you heard on the other end was unexpected, but you didn't get a chance to say anything back before the phone call ended.

You stood very still for a few moments.

That.... That hadn't been any of the others who were still outside. Unless they had gone so far as to hide someone out there and have them answer the phone when you called Farah and all of this was just an elaborate prank. But none of them were really the kind of people to do things like that.

Remembering the instructions from the site, you turned back to the elevator and got on when the doors opened, pushing the button for fifth floor once again.

If the demon likes your offering, there will be no trace of it when you get back up to the 5th floor

The ding of the elevator signaled that you were once again at the top floor of the building, and when the doors slid back open and you looked to the spot where you'd left the bat, you found.... Nothing.

That space you had cleared from the broken bits of that doll was empty, the white tiled floor shining in the light that came from the elevator.

….. If this was all just a prank by your friends, you weren't sure if you'd be able to trust them after this.

The doors closed once again, and you took a deep breath before you pushed the fifth floor button.

The elevator began to move up.

There wasn't a sixth floor; you'd double checked that the building only went as high as five.

You told yourself to wait until the doors opened before you jumped to conclusions. You'd need to see this “other world” before you could say for certain that all of this was real.

The website said that it could take up to two minutes, but mere seconds later did the doors slide back open.

Everything looked normal. Just another floor of an office building.

Or it would have looked normal, had it not been for the fact that everything was bathed in a red glow that came from the outside.

Clutching your phone in one hand and the keychain in the other, you took a small, tentative step out of the car, looking to either side of you.

The hallways were empty. Nothing jumped out at you.

Slowly, you walked over to a window.

In the distance stood a glowing red cross.

…. This was real.

This was actually real.

It was almost too much to process for your shock-addled brain, and you had to wonder if anyone else who had been successful had the same reaction as you, to just stare dumbly at the scene before you.

It then occurred to you to get proof for when you went back.

You pulled up the camera on your phone. Or you tried to at least. Of all the times for your phone to act up, it needed to be when you needed to get a picture so people would believe you. The app kept taking forever to pull up before it would close and you repeatedly tapped on the screen as you tried to make it work. Somehow you managed to snap a few pictures of the cross before the camera closed again and you weren't able to open it back up. The lighting and your uncooperative phone made the pictures appear quite blurry, but one would be able to tell what they were looking at. No doubt some people would claim that it was fake, but it was enough to satisfy you.

You checked the time, finding it to be 3:30, if the phone was to be trusted. You wished you had checked before you came up here, but it was a bit too late for that now.

You stepped away from the window and went down one of the halls, looking all around before you remembered that the site said that you shouldn't look behind you. Or was that only when you heard the demon? Regardless, you kept glances behind yourself to a minimum as you made your way through the floor.

Aside from the red light that covered everything, it looked like a normal office floor, filled with different offices and supply closets and nothing that was particularly interesting to you. The one strange thing was that the red cross outside seemed to move along with you, as when you would move to a different room you would still be able to see it clearly outside. You went back to the windows a few times and tried to see if there was anything else outside, but all you found was an endless darkness with no signs of any kind of life or structure. Unsurprisingly there was also no sign of your friends down below, though it would have been hard to see where they were standing outside anyway given the angle.

The red light made you slightly sick after a while, and you tried opening up the flashlight option on your phone. But it refused to turn on. In fact, nothing on your phone was working now, and when you looked at the clock, the time was still 3:30.

Either time was being distorted or your phone wasn't able to function properly. Given how your phone was acting earlier the latter would seem to be the most likely option, but you also weren't sure what the rules of this place were. There was nothing that said that this world was bound to time in the way yours was.

The website had said that you could stay up here for as long as you wanted, right?

You began to see things out of the corner of your eye, little bits of movement in the darkness that dared you to look at them. You did a few times, mentally slapping yourself as you remembered what the instructions had said as you were now desperately trying to remember everything that had been written so you knew what you could and couldn't do. It was amazing and terrifying at the same time as you recalled what the site had said about possibly dying to this game, and at one point you felt so overwhelmed that you thought you were going to throw up. You managed to keep it down, but after that you decided that it was time to leave.

When you started to head back to the elevator was when you felt a headache coming on. It was mild at first, but when you went further along your route to the exit it started to hurt more, turning into a stabbing pain that jammed into your skull.

Had the website mentioned this? You couldn't be sure. Where were you even going again?

You stopped at an open door, leaning against the open door frame to rest. There was movement from inside the room, and without thinking you looked over to it.

The bat you had left on the fifth floor sat in the room in front of a whiteboard. A whiteboard that had been absolutely covered in drawn on hearts and your name repeated over and over.

…. The website hadn't mentioned that.

“Do you think it's a good place for him?”

The voice you heard came from a few feet behind you. The same voice you had heard over the phone.

You needed to get out. Now.

You brushed your hand against your pocket as you tried to stand up straight again, still fighting the pain of the headache when you remembered the little bear keychain.

It will keep you from losing yourself

With that thought in mind you pulled it out and focused on it, and the pain seemed to lessen by a good amount.

“You've got a thing for cute stuff, don't you?”

The voice came from directly behind you this time, like whoever was speaking was staring down over your shoulder as they were practically on top of you.

Don't look don't look don't look

You pushed off of the door frame, the keychain still in hand as you power-walked back down the hall. The headache was still there a little bit but it was nowhere near as debilitating as it had been before.

The voice whined from behind you.

“You're leaving already? You just got here.”

Don't speak. Don't look.

It was following you. You could hear the footsteps that trailed after yours, keeping up with your pace and almost being purposefully loud. Sudden noises accompanied the footsteps, making you jump and urging you to turn around. It was a natural thing to react to sudden sounds like that and you needed to catch yourself a few times from looking behind.

It was trying to keep you here and you didn't want to stay to find out why that was.

You turned several corners and walked down many halls, and the elevator wasn't anywhere in sight. That wasn't right. You had made a mental note of where the location of the elevator approximately was. As much as the headache was still messing with you, you should still be able to make it back. You knew where it was, goddammit.

…. Was it just you, or were these hallways getting longer?

A chuckle came from behind you.

“You didn't think I'd let you go that easy, did you?”

You started to run.

You weren't sure how long you continued like that – time didn't seem to be a thing up here. Around you the halls extended, stretching out and prolonging your time in this hell as you turned corner after corner and you still couldn't find the fucking elevator. The temptation was there to look behind and see how long the halls had become, but the laughter that followed you kept your eyes straight ahead.

Turning another corner, the doors to the elevator came in sight, and you let out a gasp of relief as you ran faster. Just a little bit more and then you'd be free.

…. The elevator seemed to be was moving away from you, messing with you just as the halls had done before.

You could hear him breathing directly in your ear as you ran. Still trying to freak you out, still trying to make you turn around. He hadn't touched you at all, though, and you wondered if there were rules for him that prevented him from doing so.

The attempts to get you to look back at him seemed to be getting desperate. If this thing was getting to a point where even he was desperate, you didn't want to know what the hell he'd do to you if you made the mistake of turning around.

Despite it all the elevator was getting closer. Escape was literally in your grasp-

And then something in the floor shifted that caused your knee to buckle and you were sent flying face down on the flat white tile.

The phone and keychain went flying out of your hands and there was blood in your mouth as you bit your lip. Your head ached again, though you weren't sure if it was because of him or because you'd just landed on the solid floor.

You lay there for a few moments, catching your breath as you tried to compose yourself.

You then became aware of the presence that was standing over you. He was quiet now, but you could feel his eyes burning holes into your back, as if trying to will you to look at him.

Pushing yourself up on shaky arms, you began to crawl forward, your hands searching for the phone and keychain that had gone flying and had vanished into the darkness, the light from outside now much duller than it had been when you'd first arrived.

Don't look don't look don't look

He can't touch you

He can't force you to look back at him

Just keep facing forward and-

A horrifically loud shrieking noise sounded through the hall. It was the loudest thing you had ever heard in your life, the noise so great that you felt the floor vibrating, and your hands immediately went to cover your ears to protect your hearing as best you could.

Don't you dare fucking look back

With your hands still over your ears, you crawled forward on your knees. It was slow and it had gotten so dark that you couldn't see the elevator anymore, but it was still progress. When your knee brushed against your phone you ignored it. Who gave a fuck about proof anymore? You just wanted to get out.

But you were still trying to keep a lookout for the keychain. It had helped before; if you could find it, it would probably make getting out easier.

You put out one hand on the floor as you blindly searched for your sentimental item, your eyes scrunching up in pain as the horrible sound continued.

For a split second your fingers brushed up against something soft.

You grabbed it.

Immediately after the shrieking noise stopped.

For just a moment, there was relief, even though you still had that noise ringing in your ears. But it took only another moment for you to realize that something was wrong.

You hadn't grabbed that bear keychain. It was larger and heavier.

Opening your eyes, you found that you were holding that fucking bat plush.

“Ah. You messed up.”

A hand reached from behind you and grabbed the plush out of your grip. A different hand was placed on your shoulder and you were spun around on the floor.

A fair-skinned man with what looked to be blonde hair stared down at you, one hand still on your shoulder as he waved the bat in front of you.

“You're not supposed to take this back, remember?” he asked as he smiled at you.

“No.... I didn't...” you trailed off.

“But you did, though! You grabbed and picked it up,” he said.

That wasn't possible. You had left that thing behind in that room that felt so far away now. But as you glanced to the side you saw that, to your horror, you were sitting next to that room again, the hearts still visible on the whiteboard. You were barely able to note that it had gotten brighter and that somehow the red lighting seemed less harsh before he was talking to you again.

“So you lost and now you don't get to go back,” he told you.

“No.... You cheated.”

It felt so juvenile to say that out loud, but it was all that could come out of you in your current state.

Strangely though, he didn't deny it.

“Can you blame me?” he asked, “I've never gotten a visitor as charming as yourself. When I heard you on the phone and saw what you left me, I just needed to keep you.”

He looked at the bat plush again and smiled at it as he sat down in front of you.

“Did you just pick this at random, or was it something else?”

You struggled to comprehend the question, and it took you a bit before you were able to blurt out “someone else said you liked bats.”

“So you mean you went to the trouble of looking up what things I liked? That's adorable. I love it!” he exclaimed.

You tried to subtly scoot away from him as he sat in front of you but you were noticed instantly.

“Where do you think you're going?” he asked. The look he gave you was so innocent.

“I-I need to go home. I want to go home,” you insisted.

“That's not an option, remember?” he asked, waving the bat around again.

You shook your head.

“You cheated. I should be allowed to leave because you did that.”

He laughed.

“There's no rule against cheating. As long as I didn't touch you it was fine. Don't be a sore loser.”

“Fuck you.”

You spat out those words in a bout of frustration, trying your best to sound strong, but it probably just made you seem more pathetic.

He only hummed at that, just staring at you for a moment.

It had been getting steadily brighter, the red going away with every passing second and you were able to make out different colors. The purple and teal on his clothes, the shade of blonde his hair was and the blue of his eyes were visible to you for a few moments.

He set the bat plush to the side, and the world began to darken again as red and black took over.

“That's okay,” he said, more to himself than to you, “you're scared and that kind of reaction is normal, so I'm not too mad.”

It was getting harder to see him, but you could see movement about him, things about his body changing. Horns that slowly curled out from his forehead. The tips of his fingers that darkened around long claws that took the place of his fingernails. Large, bat-like wings that unfolded from behind him and spread themselves.

You caught a glimpse of his teeth in the low light, and they looked sharper than they had before.

Panic shot through you as you began to scramble away from him, but your escape attempt was short-lived as something wrapped itself around your legs and pulled you back towards him.

A tail? Oh God that was a tail.

He was on top of you, and he caged you in his arms as he leaned down to whisper in your ear “don't worry, I'll go easy on you this time.”

You tried to push him away, but he ignored it.

“Oh! Before I forget, I should introduce myself shouldn't I? I'm Shalnark. Nice to meet you.”

With that, his lips claimed yours in a searing kiss.

Your friends had been waiting a while.

Farah and Carmen stayed where they had been directly next to the building while Cliff hadn't moved from where he had stormed off to. Farah had been getting upset as she had become convinced that you were being an ass to her as well with how long you were taking. It was all Carmen could do to try and keep her calm.

Because of his distance away and how distracted they were, neither of them noticed the state Cliff was in.

They only noticed when he began to violently cough.

With Farah still slightly bitter from their earlier argument, Carmen was the one to check on him, asking if he was alright as they walked up to him.

Cliff gave no answer as he had begun to cough up blood.

Carmen's hands fumbled when they pulled out their phone to call emergency services, and they yelled at Farah to go inside and get you. The sight of the blood Cliff was coughing up had Farah sprinting towards the building, throwing the front doors open as she made a beeline for the elevator.

Carmen didn't notice it at first when Farah fell to the floor. Only when the ambulance had been confirmed and they looked back to the building to see if the two of you were coming out did they see her body lying limply on the floor.

Ambulances and cop cars arrived eventually, and both Cliff and Farah were declared dead at the scene. The autopsy reports later would declare that they had been poisoned. A thorough search of the building would find no source of where the poison had come from.

Nor did they find anything from you.

Carmen had told them that you were in there, but when they searched they found no trace of you. No personal belongings and nothing to even indicate that you had entered the building. When the search for you grew beyond the confines of the office building, there was still no trace of you. You simply vanished into thin air.

The case would puzzle investigators before they would ultimately put it aside for other cases that needed their attention. It would only gain some traction online when the files were released to the public and certain parties saw that you and your friends had been playing the Sixth Floor Game. For some people it added weight to their beliefs that the game was real and needed to be avoided. For others it was just a coincidence.

Regardless of what they thought, you remained a missing person that would never be seen again, forever immortalized by your unexplained disappearance and an urban legend.

[homoose]

Love Has a Learning Curve: Part II (x reader)

Summary: Spencer and reader spend a lot of time together. And then he spends some time away.

Pairing: Spencer Reid x fem!reader

Category: fluff, hurt/comfort

Warnings/Includes: typical CM violence, Spencer gets hurt but there’s no graphic descriptions 

Word count: 5k

a/n: This chapter is a little bit of a different style, because it had a lot of ground to cover! So we’ve got a few different vignettes of their first few months together— first dates and sleepovers and Spencer’s first long case away. I also worked some requests into this chapter.

———

Y/N stretched out across the bed, humming and burying her face into the pillow. She sighed and then drew in a deep breath. Her eyes blinked open as she recognized the new scent on her sheets— cedar and spice and a hint of floral. 

She moved her hand across the bed to find the sheets were cool, then raised her head to see the room was empty. The apartment was quiet, but the aroma of freshly brewed coffee crept in through the bedroom door left slightly ajar. She ran a hand over her face and reached for her phone on the bedside table, tapped the screen to check the time and saw a missed text from Anita.

Anita: How did it go???????

Y/N: Good! We talked a lot. And he spent the night.

Anita: W H A T

Anita: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

Y/N: Calm down. It was just a sleepover. Emphasis on the sleep. 

Anita: Sure it was 👀

Anita: 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

Anita: 🍆🍑🍒💦

Y/N: I’m going to mute this thread.

Anita: You’re such a prude!!!!!!!

Anita: But also

Anita: This mf is still on THIN ICE with me

Anita: So tell him to sleep with one eye open 

Y/N swiped the message thread to mute the notifications and sat up to drop her legs over the side of the bed. She stood and did a cursory once over in the mirror above her dresser, retrieving the sweater hanging on her closet door and slipping into it. Then she padded to the doorway, pushing the door open and quietly moving into the living room.

Spencer was on the couch, still in her shirt, with a book in one hand and her favorite coffee mug in the other. Roald was curled up in his lap, fast asleep. Spencer turned the page of his book, then brought the mug up to his lips. The simple domesticity had her chest tightening, and she let out a small, contented sigh. 

Spencer lifted his head at the sound, a smile stretching across his face as soon as he saw her. “Morning.”

“Morning.” She shuffled toward the couch, and he closed his book. She peered over the couch and gestured to Roald. “I see you’ve got a friend.”

“Indeed. I kind of feel like I can’t leave now.” He looked up with a small crease in his brow. “I made coffee. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” she assured with a smile. “Nice mug.”

“I didn’t want to wake you up, but I didn’t want to go through your cabinets,” he explained, looking a little nervous. “This one was on the dish rack, so I figured it was okay to use, but I can—”

“Spencer.” She leaned against the couch and smoothed a hand over his hair, meeting his eyes and smiling gently. “Is there more coffee?”

He nodded and looked down at the cat on his lap. “Yeah, I— I’d get up, but I don’t want to disturb him.”

Y/N laughed and pressed a quick kiss to his hair before retreating to the kitchen. “Oh, of course. We wouldn’t want to disrupt the king.”

…

They spent the morning on the couch, reading quietly and sipping their coffee and trading the occasional smile. She tucked her sock covered toes underneath his thigh as the sunlight crept across the floor. He brought his hand to rest on her knee and turned to the last chapter of his book, and she wondered if he was consciously slowing himself down so that she could attempt to keep up. 

Eventually, Roald yawned and stretched across Spencer’s lap, standing and hopping down off the couch in search of food. Spencer ran his hand down Y/N’s leg and circled his fingers around her ankle, rubbing his thumb lightly across the skin. She looked up from her book with a soft smile, wiggling her toes under his thigh. 

She closed her book and sat up a little closer to him on the couch. “So. I’ve been thinking.”

“Sounds dangerous,” he teased. 

“Ha, ha.” She rolled her eyes, and then her gaze shifted back to him and she chewed a little at the inside of her lip. 

No matter how hard she tried to quell it, the idea continued to nag at her subconscious— that even though he’d poured his heart out to her, even though he’d said that he loved her… that somehow she was still building him up in her head, seeing things that weren’t there, and making this into something it wasn’t. She was well aware that getting too comfortable too quickly was a surefire way to scare people off. 

“Our tea dates weren’t really dates,” she hedged. “So we haven’t really had a first date.”

He gave her ankle a quick squeeze. “No, I suppose we haven’t.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I don’t want you to think I’m in the habit of inviting men that I’m not dating to spend the night.” 

He set his book on the coffee table. “Of course.” 

“So, um.” She tilted her head and drew her brows together. She needed to hear it, directly from his perspective. “Are we— do you consider us to be, um.” She closed her eyes. “Are we dating?”

She felt him lean toward her on the couch, felt his warm palm cupping her cheek and his thumb stroking across her skin. She opened her eyes slowly to see him looking at her with a tentative smile. “I hope so,” he breathed. 

She barely stopped herself from letting out a relieved sigh, slightly embarrassed to have needed the reassurance. He didn’t seem to notice, instead closing the rest of the distance between them to press a soft kiss to her mouth. Their noses bumped together awkwardly, drawing a laugh from them both. 

He withdrew from her mouth, pressed a kiss to her bumped nose, and then sat back a little, considering. “If you’re free today, we could knock ‘first date’ off the checklist.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You have a checklist?”

“Well, a metaphorical one,” he clarified quickly. “I’m not, like, keeping track in a journal or anything.”

She laughed, bright and loud and almost carefree, and then swung her legs over the side of the couch. “What did you have in mind, doctor?”

…

Spencer Reid’s idea of a perfect first date was the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, and it was just about the most Spencer thing Y/N had ever heard. 

“I should have put two and two together with the no technology thing,” she surmised.

“I know letters have sort of gone out of fashion with the advent of phones and email, but— letter writing is an art form!” he defended, waving his hands. “And think about how incredible it feels to get something in the mail. You don’t get that same rush with a text message.”

She thought back to receiving a perfectly wrapped package with his handwriting scrawled across the brown paper. “Mm, you do have a point there,” she conceded.

He led her through the exhibits, explaining the various displays with more facts than the placards themselves could ever contain. She watched with a smile as he gestured wildly about with his hands, his eyes wide with the joy of sharing the information— of sharing it with her. She nodded, and mmhmmed, and asked the occasional question. But she was mostly just so unbelievably content to listen to him talk about anything and everything. 

He stopped mid-sentence in the Serving the Cities exhibit, dropping his hands and looking at her sheepishly. “Sorry, I— I’m boring you.”

She drew her brows together in genuine confusion. “What? No, you’re not. I’d never heard of the, um— new— no. The— new tubes?” 

“New York City's pneumatic tube system,” he offered. 

She smiled gratefully. “Yes, the pneumatic tube system. Underground mail tubes moving at 35 miles per hour? That’s kind of amazing.” She shook her head. “Why don’t they use it anymore?” 

“The Post Office Department suspended the service to conserve funding during World War I,” he explained automatically. “They restored partial service in 1922, but it eventually just became too costly to continue.” He seemed to catch himself, shaking his head and continuing, “But I— I’m sure it’s all here in the exhibits, I should just let you—”

She grabbed his hand, and he closed his mouth to stifle the rest of his rambling. She used her free hand to gesture around at the displays. “There’s a lot of information here, but to be honest, I— I haven’t really been looking at the placards.” She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks as he stared at her. “I, um— I’d much rather hear it from you.” 

She watched his eyes alight with surprise and wonder, and she wanted to personally fight anyone who had ever made him believe that he was boring. He took a step closer, eyes flicking down to her mouth, and her lips twitched up into a smile. He leaned down to meet her halfway in a sweet kiss, mostly just upturned mouths and huffed breaths. 

He lingered slightly as he pulled away, still studying her with a little bit of shock. She intertwined their fingers, pressed their shoulders together, and nodded toward the next display. “So, what else can you tell me about the history of the mail system, Dr. Reid?” 

The pair of them continued through the museum, their fingers threaded together and Spencer murmuring facts into her ear. They spent three hours walking through the exhibits, pausing here and there to gaze quietly at the details of a particularly interesting display. When they finally completed their circuit, Y/N insisted on visiting the museum gift shop. 

There were postage stamp tote bags, mail carrier t-shirts, mailbox ornaments and more— all incredibly overpriced and generally ridiculous and not of interest to either of them. But the stationery display caught her eye— sets of parchment with embossed letterheads, fancy letter openers, and wax stamp kits. She ran her finger over the raised design on one particularly intricate stationery set, and Spencer peered over her shoulder. 

“I’ve always enjoyed letter writing. Partly because I tend toward the arcane, but also because it feels… intentional and personal,” he explained. “It takes time, and energy, and care.”

“It’s a very deliberate and lovely way of showing that you care about someone,” she agreed.

“Mhm,” he hummed, smiling softly. “I still write a lot of letters to my mom. When she was still in Vegas and I didn’t see her very often, I wrote the letters because she didn’t always recognize my voice over the phone.” 

He drew his brows together and ran his fingers along the top of the stationary display. “Now I write them so that she can have a— a sort of record of my life, I guess. So that hopefully when the memories aren’t there anymore, she can still read them and feel like she’s a part of the story.”

Y/N reached for his hand again, and he accepted it with a bittersweet smile. “We did the same thing for my grandma,” she told him, returning his melancholic smile. “Lots of letters and photos. I never thought of it that way, but it was sort of like keeping her in our stories.” 

She turned back to the display and picked up the package of stationery, turning it over in her hands. He gently plucked it from her grip, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. “I think you need some nice paper for the next few chapters.” 

“Oh, you don’t have to—” she started. 

He cut her off with a press of his lips. She grasped a little at his waist as he kissed her and wondered if she would ever get used to kissing Spencer Reid. When he finally pulled back, she had to catch her breath. 

“I’ll take half,” he murmured. “I was hoping I could, um— help you write them.”

She squeezed his waist gently, heard the chains of insecurity clinking and breaking as he chiseled away at them piece by piece. “I’d like that.”

…

Two weeks later, Y/N convinced him to try painting— specifically, Paint & Sip Night at the art studio around the corner from her apartment. 

“I’m going to be terrible at this,” he warned her, looking over his shoulder at where she was tying the strings of his smock. 

She tugged the strings around his waist to gently pull him back toward her, leaned up on her tiptoes, and pressed a kiss to his cheek. She knotted the strings tight and barely restrained herself from sneaking a little squeeze of his bum— although she did not stop herself from looking. 

“It’s not about being good at it. It’s about having fun.” She used her hands on his waist to turn him around. “And if you’re not having fun, then we can go home,” she shrugged. 

He smoothed a wrinkle from her smock. “I always have fun with you.” He smiled and scrunched his nose at her, and she returned the nose scrunch with a laugh. 

“All right, everyone!” The instructor clapped her hands together. “Are you ready to paint a masterpiece?”

Forty five minutes later, Spencer peered over at her canvas and huffed out a breath. “God, look at that texture. How are you actually good at this?”

Y/N turned and looked at his painting. “Yours looks good, too,” she insisted. 

“Michael could— and has, actually— done better than this,” he scoffed.

“Well, I like it.” She tilted her head. “It’s giving me... Monet vibes. It’ll look perfect in my living room.”

“You are not hanging this in your living room,” he laughed. 

“I’d like to see you try and stop me,” she teased, turning back to her work to follow the next instruction. 

She watched him as they worked— his tongue slipping out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, his fingertips tapping across his thighs in consideration, his huffed breaths here and there when a stroke didn’t look the way he wanted it to. She finished a little bit before him, adding her tiny signature to the bottom of her canvas before standing to move to his side. She slid a gentle hand around his waist and looked over his shoulder at his work. 

He sighed and gestured to the corner of his canvas. “This whole section looks… weird.” 

She studied it for a moment. “I think maybe it’s just because it’s sort of one note?” She pointed to the rest of the painting. “Like, you played with layering the colors everywhere else. Here it’s just the blue. You could add some purple maybe? Or green,” she mused. 

“Yeah, I guess I can try that.” He shrugged and leaned over to the paints, gathering some purple on his brush.

She moved out of his way but rested her chin lightly on his shoulder as he worked. He moved the brush meticulously in small strokes, layering and creating dimension in the corner of the piece. When he finally set the brush down, he leaned his head to rest on top of hers. 

“Okay. So it looks much more…” he trailed off. 

“Cohesive,” she offered. 

She could feel his smile. “Yeah,” he agreed. He lifted his head to look at her. “Seriously, how are you so good at this?” 

She moved her chin from his shoulder and gave a nonchalant shrug. “I guess my many years of finger painting experience had to pay off someday.” She nodded to his finished painting. “I don’t know what your going rate is, but I have to have this.”

He swiveled on the stool to capture her hands in his, lacing their fingers together and pulling her in between his legs. “It’s yours.”

She feigned shock. “For free?”

“I didn’t say that,” he corrected with a sly smile. He dropped her hands to bring his own to her hips, pulling her in closer. “But it’s sort of an on-going payment deal. I’m asking at least 30 kisses per month.” 

She pressed her lips together to avoid breaking out into an absurd grin. “You drive a hard bargain.” 

“Take it or leave it. That’s my final offer,” he shrugged. 

She pretended to mull it over, lips pursed and eyes on the ceiling. He huffed out a laugh, and she cracked a smile, bringing her fingers up to tangle in his curls. “Deal.” 

…

Y/N: I don’t even know if your phone is capable of receiving pictures, but look what I hung today!

Spencer: It receives pictures! I wish I hadn’t received this one though. I cannot believe you actually hung that horrific thing on your wall.

Y/N: I’m going to commission you for a piece for the kitchen ;)

Spencer: You’re hilarious.

Y/N: You love it.

Spencer: I do. 

Spencer: I wanted to tell you... I have my first therapy appointment tomorrow afternoon. 

Y/N: Spence!!!

Y/N: I am so proud of you. It’s going to change your life. 

Spencer: You’ve already done that, Miss Honey. 

…

Y/N: How did it go?

Spencer: I cried? A lot.

Y/N: That happens to me, too! Good therapy will do that. Other than the crying, how do you feel? 

Spencer: I feel… amazing. Lighter, I think? I’m actually kind of bummed that I have to wait two weeks to do it again. 

Y/N: I know I said it already, but I’m so incredibly proud of you. 

Spencer: I quite literally would not have done it without you. 

Y/N: Happy to give you a little nudge whenever you need it, doctor. <3

...

The BAU’s caseload had been uncharacteristically slow, and the two of them took advantage of every moment. On one particularly gloomy Saturday afternoon, they were sprawled across Spencer’s couch and sipping on their umpteenth cups of coffee. He scribbled notes in the margins of his students’ latest essays, while she typed out her lesson plans for the upcoming week. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him set down his pen. He stifled a sigh and she held back a smile as she typed out a short vowel word chain. She could feel his eyes on her, could practically smell the smoke coming from his overworked brain. 

When he didn’t break the silence, she looked up over the top of her laptop. “Can I help you?” she teased.

His cheeks colored with a very pretty flush— the same one she’d pulled from him in the carpool loop all those months ago. “Two of my students just… aren’t getting it.” He gestured to the papers in front of him. “I’ve tried extra office hours, extended time for work completion, and it just— doesn’t seem to be helping.” He looked at her with pursed lips. “I was, um— I was wondering if you had any ideas? That I could try.”

Her eyebrows shot up into her hairline. “You— you’re asking me for help?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “You’re the best teacher I know.”

Now it was her turn to blush. “Oh. Well, um…” She set her laptop on the coffee table and sat up, considering. “Have you tried differentiating your lectures?” At his raised eyebrow, she continued, “Like— having a PowerPoint or a recorded version that they can revisit? You’re kind of a fast talker, so it’s possible that they’re struggling to retain the information because they can’t keep up with your delivery.”

“Huh.” He tilted his head with a furrowed brow. “I... didn’t consider that my oratory speed could have an impact on student achievement. But of course— that makes total sense.” He gave her a sheepish smile and his best puppy dog eyes. “So… how much coffee do you think you’d require to, um— help me make a PowerPoint?”

She sighed dramatically but couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “At least another two cups. And one of those peanut butter sandwich cookies from Soho.”

He set the papers aside and leaned over to plant a kiss on her upturned mouth. “I’ll buy you a dozen.”

…

In late May, their luck ran out. 

First there was a case in Arizona— brutal and ritualistic murders scattered through the desert with almost no cooling off period. On the eighth day that he was in Phoenix, Y/N’s phone rang on the bedside table. She reached across to pick it up, smiling at his name on the screen.

“Hey,” she answered, moving her computer off her lap and getting comfortable. 

“Hi,” Spencer murmured. 

“How’s the case going?”

“It’s, um— it’s going okay, actually,” he assessed. “We’ve made a lot of headway in the last twelve hours, and I think we might be narrowing in.”

“That’s great.” She stifled a yawn behind her hand. 

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” 

His tone of voice had her sitting up a little straighter in bed. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he insisted, but his tone didn’t shift. 

“You don’t sound fine,” she prompted. 

“I just—” He blew out a breath, and she could almost hear him running his hand over his face. “I miss you. And maybe that’s weird, because we’ve only been together for seventy four days, but—”

“Spence,” she interrupted. He sighed, and she continued, “It’s not weird. I miss you, too.”

“Eight days isn’t even that long, but I just— I’ve never, um.” The line was quiet for long enough that she almost thought the call had dropped. And then his voice came back, softer than she’d ever heard it. “I’ve never had someone to miss.”

Her heart physically ached for all the time he’d spent without someone to miss— and without someone to miss him, and cherish him, and— well, love him. She still hadn’t said it back. She wanted to say it right then, but it felt wrong to say it for the first time over the phone. And there was still that nagging little fear— of his inevitable reconsideration and rejection— keeping her from pulling the metaphorical trigger. 

“Well. I’m happy to fill that position,” she settled on— and hated how inadequate it sounded. She leaned back against the pillows, prepared to make him feel it even if she couldn’t say it. At the very least, she could help him take his mind off the monsters— if only for a few minutes. “Teach me something, doctor.”

He laughed a little through the phone, and she knew her plan was working already. 

“Okay,” he started, and she could hear the muffled crinkle of the hotel duvet. “Um— did you know that the Sonoran Desert is the only place in the world where saguaro cacti grow?”

“Wow. No, I didn’t,” she smiled, ready to learn everything there was to know about the giant, prickly plants. “Why is that?”

“Experts believe there are two main factors that limit the cacti from expanding into the Mojave — temperature and rainfall. It’s also possible that...”

...

On his tenth day away, the letter showed up. 

Y/N,

I’m writing from the balcony of the hotel room overlooking the desert— well, more so the parking lot of the desert— and I’m reminded of the duality of this landscape. The arid climate and rugged terrain can make it a mercilessly hostile place. Yet at the same time, this environment is one of the most enigmatic and enchanting, and it’s teeming with life if you look close enough. 

This job can illuminate the cruelty and brutality of humanity, but it so often reminds me of the resilience and the goodness of people, too. The duality of the desert parallels the duality of man, I suppose.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been out here. I think you’d like it. I’ve thought of another poem that makes me think of you, and of the way that I finally feel like I can breathe. 

With thee, in the Desert –

With thee in the thirst –

With thee in the Tamarind wood –

Leopard breathes – at last!

       - Emily Dickinson

Love, 

Spencer

…

They had barely deplaned after the culmination of the case in Arizona before they were called back out to Colorado, this time for six days. She barely heard from him at all, save for the occasional text, and even then, it was never more than ten words. She spent her waking hours worrying and dreamt the same terrifying dream every single night— being chased until her legs gave out, never sure of what she was running from and never able to slow down. 

It was 2:27 in the morning when her phone rang, rousing her from her restless tossing and turning. His name on the caller ID had the worry jumping into her throat, but she answered as calmly as she could.��

“Hi.” She yawned into her hand and let out a little sigh.

“Hi.” The tenor of his voice was quiet and weary. “I know it’s unbelievably late—”

She sat up and interrupted, “Are you okay?” 

He was quiet for a moment, and her worry intensified. “I, um— I’m… I’m downstairs.” 

She turned on the bedside lamp. “Like, right now?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed quietly. “I— I’m sorry. I should have called first before just— showing up at your door.”

She was already climbing out of bed. “No, no, honey, don’t be sorry. I’m coming to buzz you in.”

She shuffled through the dark apartment, fumbled for the intercom to press the buzzer. She could hear his feet on the stairs before she even made it to the door, unlocking the deadbolt and pulling back the chain. As the door swung open, he was rounding the top of the stairs and turning the corner of the landing. 

It took him five strides to cross the threshold, and then he was tumbling into her arms and burying his face in her shoulder. The impact knocked the breath out of her, but she recovered quickly, bringing her arms around him and holding him tight. 

He didn’t speak, just breathed into her hair and clutched a little desperately at her back. She stroked a soothing hand over his curls and pressed a kiss to his shoulder.

“I’ve got you,” she murmured. “You’re safe, Spence. I’m right here.”

She shifted her weight slowly back and forth, rocking him gently and petting over his hair, steady and rhythmic. He burrowed his face into the crook of her neck and let out a shaky breath, and Y/N felt his tears on her skin. She brought both arms around his shoulders then, squeezing him tightly. “I’m right here, honey,” she repeated. “I’m right here.”

He cried quietly into her shoulder as she ran soothing hands over his back. She knew this was more than just missing her— it was the cruelty and brutality of man that he saw every day, the layers of hurt that would probably always be there. But she knew the resilience was there, too. And she was determined to always show him the other half of the chasm of humanity.

After a long while, he pulled back, still sniffling. Y/N reached out to grasp his face in both her hands, sweeping the tears from his cheeks with gentle thumbs. Her heart panged at the way his eyes were shining and ringed red, full of complete exhaustion and raging emotion. 

“What do you need?” she asked. “Water, tea, a snack, a shower?”

He shook his head. “Just you,” he mumbled.

She felt the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “You’ve got me. Always.” She pressed one, two, three chaste kisses to his chapped lips. “Let’s get cleaned up and changed and into bed, hm?”

She had him wash his face and brush his teeth, and then she moved him to sit on the closed toilet lid. “Close your eyes,” she said softly. 

He could barely keep them open as it was, and she didn’t even want to think about how little sleep he’d had over the last three weeks. She cupped his face in her hands for a long moment, rememorizing every curve and angle. 

First, she swiped a cotton pad soaked with cucumber toner across the high planes of his cheekbones and along his nose. She allowed it to dry, and then dropped gentle kisses to his forehead, his cheeks, his nose, his chin. Next, she took a dab of moisturizer on the tips of her fingers, rubbing in circular motions along the path her lips had traveled. Finally, she pressed a few drops of her favorite lavender and chamomile face oil onto his cheeks, soothing away the last, damp remnants of agony. 

When he opened his eyes again, they were already a little clearer, a little calmer, a little lighter. He let out a long, slow breath and laced their fingers together. She squeezed his hands, and then pulled him up and into her side.

She led him into her bedroom, stripped him out of his cardigan and button-up and trousers, and helped him into the soft, oversized school fundraiser shirt that had become his. And then she took his hands in hers once again and pulled him toward the bed, getting him settled and tucked in on his side before coming around to shut off the bedside light. He whined at the loss of contact, and she shushed him gently as she climbed in next to him. 

“C’mere.” She lifted the duvet, and he moved to lay his head on her chest, wrapping his arm around her middle and pulling her impossibly closer. She tucked the covers back around him, and then brought her arms around his shoulders, hugging him tightly. 

She stroked his hair quietly, listening to his breathing as it evened and slowed. He was asleep in minutes, snuffling gently into her chest. His grip loosened with every breath, and he settled more comfortably against her side with each exhale. 

She let the tears she’d been holding back slip over her lash line and pressed a soft kiss into his hair. The faint snores vibrating from his chest muffled her quiet voice as she whispered the trio of words she couldn’t quite bring herself to say in the light of day.

———

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[stormhaven13]

How do you explain Edelgard using the Slithers as pawns to "free humanity from tyranny" when they are a direct danger to anyone and everyone? Rhea is not the "bigger" threat when the Agarthans turn people into beasts and still actively pursue genocide of a race/species while all Rhea does is reactionary.

When Edelgard invaded the Holy Tomb, she threatened to kill anyone who stopped them from stealing Crest Stones, is it not understandable that Rhea would take some huge offense to that? Not to mention the "Flame Emporor" being involved in other crimes as well.

If Edelgard needed to "use" anyone (lets face it, she was the pawn all along cause the Slithers ultimately got what they wanted in the end, Rhea dead and possibly being used by them and the other few Nabateans leaving Fodlan for good and Sothis and her power disappering from Byleth) she would have used the Church to wipe out Slithers before forcing Rhea to step down.

So. I don’t really know why you’re asking this as if it’s a big gotcha. Like your whole point of “Edelgard is really the pawn”. Yeah. That’s. That’s just the point, that was the whole intention of TWSITD. They literally made her to be a weapon, and she could not get out from under their thumb. So instead, she decides to use their plan to enact her own, to try and change the world for the better.

I’m guessing you haven’t done Edelgards route in Three Hopes, because it actually looks at one of your points. The whole premise is that given the first opportunity she uses the church against TWSITD, which requires a massive series of coincidences and her plans going perfectly, and all that does is annoy Thales rather than outright beat him. I haven’t had time to finish it yet, so I don’t know how it ends, but yeah. Three Hopes’ Black Eagles route is exactly what you said.

The thing that makes it pretty clear that this ask isn’t really in good faith is that I’m not a particularly active blog, so if you looked at the stuff I’ve posted you’d see that I’ve never said I don’t like Rhea, or think that she’s always being unreasonable or whatever, im really not sure how you’ve drawn that conclusion. Best guess is you saw my response about Seteth and Flayn being only spareable by Byleth and made a few logical leaps.

I personally don’t have a huge amount of interest in Rhea, but there’s plenty of nuance to her character rather than the kind of flat and boring characters of TWSITD. She makes an interesting antagonist in Crimson Flower, which is my favorite route, but I just don’t personally have a lot to say about her that other people haven’t already said.

And the fact that you seem to think TWSITD has more power than Rhea is frankly a bit laughable, and requires ignoring most of the text of the game. Are they a threat, absolutely there’s a reason they are the final antagonist of one of the routes, but the whole point is that they are attacking the far stronger force of the Church.

Do I think Edelgard using TWSITD the way she does is “morally right”? No probably not, especially on routes other than Crimson Flower where she feels forced to rely on them even more. But she has been put into an impossible position, where there are no morally right options, and we aren’t given enough text to really analyze what her other options would have been, besides in Three Hopes, which makes it pretty clear that that path would not have been possible in the original Three Houses.

But all of that is not the point of Three Houses, none of the house leaders, or Rhea, are “perfectly moral”, they are all put in difficult situations that require impossible choices, and to differing degrees they all do “bad” things in various routes, or in their histories. The point, at least to me, is that what happens when someone like that is given an out, what happens when they’re given support is that they improve. All of them, when given support, learn to trust again, to rely on others. I personally just find Edelgards version of that the most compelling, for reasons others have said far more eloquently than I am willing to try now. If you want to understand why people like Edelgard, I encourage you to go look (just look, no need to start arguments) at other posts in the tag about her.

TLDR: I’m a small blog who has never said I dislike Rhea as a character, or view her as this total monster or whatever. I simply like Edelgard not just despite, but because she is flawed, she is human, because she makes sometimes crappy choices in the pursuit of a better future against impossible odds. Three Hopes specifically answers and examines one of these points in great detail, so I invite you to either play it yourself, or watch a playthrough if that’s not possible. Do I personally find Crimson Flower to be the most compelling path, yeah I do. I’m just not black and white about it, and just because I don’t personally find interest in a character doesn’t mean I think that they’re a bad character, or unreasonable, or whatever. You’ve ascribed thoughts to me that simply do not exist.

[where-fantasy-meets-reality]

A Twist of Fate

(GIF not mine) 

W/C: 2.1K

Warnings: Fluffy overload  

A/N: So, this is my first ever posting any kind of writing. I have written before but I have never had the courage to post anything. But, @mrskenobi19​ and some other friends gave me the courage to put this out there. I own nothing, I was just having fun. Hope you all enjoy 😃

----------

“....Ugh, crap….”

The rain was now coming down in a heavy downpour, like someone had turned on a shower head with you standing under it, as you made your way through the slightly crowded city sidewalk. The dark sky rumbled as you noticed the clouds roll across it.

Most people had taken cover once the storm had started, but not you. Seeing as you had your umbrella with you, you decided to plow through it.

At the time that had seemed like a good idea, after all, that is why you took the umbrella with you when you looked at the forecast this morning; that is until the wind picked up.

Now the rain was actually flying at you. The bottom of your pants were soaking wet and the water dripped off your umbrella onto your hands, soaking the cuffs of your rain jacket. Your shoes were starting to make that squishy sound from trudging through the puddles on the sidewalk as you maneuvered your way through the crowd of people who had decided to brave the storm like you.

Why hadn’t you worn your rain boots again?

“...Because it wasn’t supposed to be this bad…..just a light rain the weatherman had said...”

You huffed frustratedly under your breath, answering your own question.

The wind was blowing your now damp hair across your face, making it even more challenging to see.

Trying to secure your umbrella tightly to you in a one handed grip, you used your other hand to now brush the hair that the wind kept blowing out of your face.

But just as you let go, a surge of wind came rolling behind you, threatening to knock you off your feet.

While you had managed to catch your balance, your umbrella had not fared so well. The strong gust of wind had blown it inside out.

“Prefect!” You hissed as you stood in the middle of the now empty sidewalk, fighting with the broken umbrella.

Whatever little part of you had been dry was now absolutely soaked. The rain was falling down through your hair, down your face, to your eyes, blurring your vision.

The faster you tried to fix the umbrella and be on your way, the more it seemed to jam.

And all of this for a cup of coffee.

You were so focused on your umbrella that you didn’t notice when the rain seemed to stop falling on you. Looking up, you realized there was a large umbrella covering you.

“Hello there.”

You looked up to notice that a man was now standing over you, as you were slightly crouched down, still trying to fix your umbrella.

His voice had a wonderful accent to it. English? Or was it Scottish? His thick auburn hair seemed to be blowing in the wind as much as yours had been despite its short length. His beard was neatly groomed. But his eyes, his eyes were really what caught your attention. They were the prettiest blue you had ever seen, almost like the blue of the ocean on a summer's day. They really stood out against the dark gray sky that framed him. His navy sweater and grey peacoat certainly helped enhance his looks.

You regretted wearing your sweatpants.

“I’m sorry, but I saw you struggling and I was wondering if I might be able to help?”

How long had you been staring at him? His soft smile and his head nod as he gestured toward your broken umbrella snapped you back to reality.

“Ah….Yeah….I think it’s broken, a huge gust of wind knocked it back and I can’t seem to fix it.”

His expression turned to a slight frown as his brows furrowed.

“...Oh dear….Well, that's dreadful...I’m terribly sorry…..”

Was he staring at you too? Your eyes had locked with his for a brief second and it seemed as if the whole world had stopped spinning. It didn’t matter that you were both standing in the middle of the city sidewalk in the pouring rain; there was only him.

“....Well, are you going somewhere close by? I’d be happy to escort you. I had originally approached, hoping I could be of service. But, if not then the least I could do is see that you get to your destination as dry as possible.”

“Who was this man?” You thought to yourself. How lucky could you be that not only was this stranger good looking, but that he was also kind and helpful.

For the first time, you smiled. “Are you sure, you don’t have to, I don’t want to impose on you.”

You really didn’t. Plus, you were only going three doors down from where you stood and it’s not like it would matter if you got any more wet than you already were.

His smile was warm and genuine. “It’s no trouble at all. In fact, I offered.” Extending his arm out toward you, his eyes seemed to speak more words to you than he did. “Where can I take you too?”

Sheepishly, you took his arm. “...It’s just a few doors down, I was originally heading to that cafe over there.” You point to the building with a red door.

His eyes closed momentarily as his mouth curled into a side smile. “Well….what a coincidence, I am too.”  

Sticking his umbrella into his elbow, he now held his free hand out toward you. “I’m Ben by the way.”

Chuckling, you shook his hand. “Y/N”

Starting the walk toward the cafe, you noticed that he made it a point to keep pace with you and make sure that you both were actually able to share the umbrella. Clearly your escort was a gentleman.

Approaching the red door, he unlinked arms with you, moved to the side and held it open. “After you my dear.”

Blushing with a smile, you didn’t say anything as you stepped over the threshold.

Why couldn’t you stop smiling?

As you heard the door close behind you, you turned to find him shaking his umbrella off on the carpet.

As the two of you approached the counter, you turned to him. “Allow me to buy you a coffee, as a thank you.”

He shook his head as he shrugged his shoulders. “No, that’s not necessary, I was glad to be a help.”

“I know, but I insist. It’s the least I can do.” You annunciated the word “I” as you echoed the phrase he had said to you on the street corner.

He chuckled, a deep throaty sound; and it made your stomach flutter. “Okay, okay….you win this round.”

You noticed he said “this round.” Would there be another “round”?....The more you looked at this stranger with kind eyes and a warm smile, you did find yourself hoping that there would be another “round.”

After placing the order, the two of you stood off to the side waiting.

“So….what brings you out to a cafe in the middle of a rain storm.”

His eyes seem to light up. “I had planned on meeting some friends here. Well, I say friends but they’re more like my younger brother and sister; I’ve known them both for ages.”

His eyes lingered on you as if he was memorizing your face. “....And how about you?”

You laughed nervously. “Sadly, I am just a coffee addict. I thought I could make it here and back in time before the rain got too bad.”

His playful smile caused you to mirror his expression. “Ah, I see.”

The sound of the barista calling your name out broke the bubble that you two seemed to think you were in.

Moving toward the counter, the two of you grabbed your respective coffees.

Now what? The two of you were looking awkwardly at one another. It was as if you two wanted to say so much but at the same time you both said nothing.

Your eyes darted to the floor nervously as you tried to think of something to say

The sound of him clearing his throat caused you to look back up at him expectantly.

“.....if you aren’t doing anything you’re more than welcome to join me. My friends are hardly ever on time for anything and I’d love some company while I wait.”

He turned to the side and pointed at one of the free tables under the large windows.

Your wide smile creeped over your face. “I’d like that….thank you.”

The two of you sat down at one of the tables he had originally pointed to, but not before he pulled your chair out for you.

It didn’t matter that you were absolutely drenched and uncomfortable in your clothes. Or that you had left the television on in your apartment thinking that you would only be gone for five minutes. You could only focus on Ben.

The conversation flowed easily between you two. He was a history teacher down at the local high school and you had always loved history. Additionally, the more you two talked, the more you seemed to have similar interests in all the same areas. How many other men had you met that could enthusiastically talk about the finer points of movie musicals with the same enthusiasm that they could talk about serious dramas? Food, music, books, current events...the topics were limitless. The man even went from quoting Shakespeare to Spider-Man in just two sentences.

All of it made you not only laugh, but your walls slowly came down for this charming and intelligent man. You had completely lost all track of time to the point where you hadn't noticed that it stopped raining.

“So, do you come here often?” You asked him.

“I do. I usually stop in on my way to or home from work….Sometimes both depending on how the day went.” He chuckled.

“Oh, I get that.”

The sound of his cell phone buzzing on the table caught both of your attention.

“I’m sorry, excuse me.” He said picking up the phone and reading the text.

“......Huh…..Typical….” He smiled as he shook his head slightly back and forth.

You gave him a raised eyebrow look, asking a silent question.

“Well….it seems Anakin and Ahsoka are so late that they would rather we catch up for dinner instead….” He chuckled as he put the phone down. “Why am I not surprised?” He said looking back at you.

You looked at your watch. Wait….what? Dinner?! How late was it? You looked out the window. When had it stopped raining? How enchanted by this stranger were you? You needed to move along before you bored him to death.

Brushing your hair behind your hair, you stood up. “Well I should probably get going, I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

Standing, he gave you another one of his infectious smiles. “It was a pleasure. I enjoyed your company very much. It was lovely to meet you Y/N.” He stuck out his hand once again for a handshake.

Smiling, you shook his hand. “It was lovely meeting you too Ben.”

As you turned and headed for the door you couldn’t help the sinking feeling in your stomach that you could possibly never see this charming and interesting stranger again. Before you had any idea of what you were actually doing, you stopped. Running with the surge of courage you had before you thought too much about it. Turning on your heel, you casually looked at him.

“Maybe you could lend me your umbrella again sometime?”

His glazed eyes that had been watching you walk away cleared as he blinked rapidly at you, taking your words in. The thoughts he had been lost in would never become a reality.

“I would like that very much.” He gave you that smile again.

You tilted your head to the side, giving him a thoughtful expression. “I wonder if it’s supposed to rain again tomorrow?��

The glee in his blue eyes was unmistakable as he understood your hidden question. “...You know, I believe it is….Around 3, actually I think the forecast said…”

“ 3’oclock huh…..well…..I may just have to bring my broken umbrella to get a coffee in hopes that a kind stranger helps me out again.”

“....Hmmmm that does sound like a twist of fate….perhaps I’ll have to stop in for a coffee myself after school, see if anyone needs help with their umbrellas…”

With a polite head nod, you slowly backed towards the door. “Enjoy the rest of your evening Ben.”

He raised his coffee towards you. “You as well Y/N.”

As you walked down the bustling sidewalk, the sunshine was now shining across your face, drying your damp clothing. You sighed happily as you replayed your afternoon with Ben. You really liked him. I mean, what wasn’t there to like? He was kind, polite, funny, charming…..and not to mention beautiful…...a twist of fate indeed.

Waiting till tomorrow at 3 would be practically impossible, but the prospect of seeing Ben again would make it all worth it.

[ohheyitsokay]

just us

Pairing: Jack Daniels (Agent Whiskey) x (f) reader

Wordcount: 1.9k

Warnings: discussion of not wanting children, brief mention of trauma (the accident), brief mentions of sex, generally sweet and cozy

Summary: Jack and you both grow into what you want (and don’t want?) for the future

Notes: Okay so this WILL NOT be everyone’s cup of tea - that’s fine. There’s enough breeding kink in this fandom for everyone else, I just wanted to explore... not wanting kids, definitively, and one way that journey could look. Obviously, this is an incredibly personal topic, and there’s no way this one snapshot could possibly be perfect, so please just keep that in mind!

>>

Years ago, you met Jack volunteering with low-income students after school. Your friend, who was running the program, roped you in, and you were glad to have other helpers.

He was surprisingly good with the kids. They loved his accent and his hat and the silly expressions he made. Still, in-between his ridiculous stories, he always pushed them to do their best and was persistent in pursuing their success. Unlike some of the other volunteers, he didn’t seem to have any agenda and his selflessness was contagious, and you told him so. The bus had just left, and you finally had the chance to talk to him- you couldn’t help but be honest.

He shrugged his broad shoulders, watching the kids wave through the windows, even down the road.

“I just want them to get their chance to succeed, ya know?”

You did. Gently, you reached up and squeezed his shoulder, and his brown eyes met yours for the first time.

“Thank you,” you said before leaving to go clean up. You hoped he could hear the sincerity in your voice.

The next time you volunteered at the same time, he stayed back to help you clean. He was silent at first, but then he began to talk to you, asking real questions and giving you real answers.

The friendship grew fast, one of the ones where you could feel in your bones how close you’d be. You moved from laughing with the kids as you gave him the tiniest portion of snack, to him driving you home sometimes.

And for the first few years, the two of you really were the best of friends. Lemonade and long drives together became game nights and movies with groups. You’d help him text when he got too flustered, he reminded you that all men were giant boys sometimes. He told you about his past, about the accident and wanting to heal from that, and what he was working on. You shared the skeletons in your closet, you fears and hopes and dreams. You became each other’s constant, as you grew, always cheering the other one on and sharing just the right words at the right time.

Then, after a long, terrible day, he drove over to your house with pure, kind-hearted intentions and ended up kissing you.

-

“The rest, as they say, is history,” you finished.

Jack’s boss was grinning, along with his wife.

“How adorable!” she cooed, squeezing her husband’s hand.

You and Jack had been together for years now, and recently moved to a small town so he could be closer to his mama. This branch of the statesman was a lot more casual, so you were over at their house with some other couples, barbequing in the backyard. In many ways, you loved the little southern community but it was times like these that you felt like you were pulling teeth.

Jack was so high-profile, and bless his heart, he loved to show you off. It was sweet that his boss let him off early sometimes and the local florist knew your date night, but honestly, people in this town were so invested in your relationship it gave you anxiety. Everyone wanted to hear your story, to be in the know, worst of all: ask about it. So it was unpleasant, but not a surprise when the lady continued, asking, “So how many kids are the two of you going to have?”

Her eyes glimmered with expectation, completely unaware at how you were fighting not to grimace at her intrusion.

Jack looked at you, his hand instinctively finding yours. His thumb rubbed your skin softly, as if he was trying to press his support into you. It worked, in it’s own way, and you collected yourself, smiling because you knew she meant well, and because you had practiced.

When you were younger, if and when it came up, you hadn’t been attracted to the idea of children like some others were. You had thought, or maybe trained yourself to say, maybe someday, but not right now. Because for most people, that was enough. You knew logically, that some did change their minds or grow into it. Sometimes you had hoped that would be you.

Now, you didn’t even offer that, just making a joke and guiding the conversation in a different direction. You played your part well, continuing to chat as you ate, being as delightful and adorable as you always were.

Jack knew, of course he did. After that very first night, when he had kissed you, you had been honest with him. motherhood was not your purpose, passion, or dream. He loved you then, and he loved you now, you reminded yourself. He had loved you through the time you’d talked about it again, when he told you that you were his soulmate. Still, before, you had always left it on the table. Maybe someday, in the future.

He watched you closely, watched your eyes when you laughed at the questions, felt you hand in his when you were in the spotlight.

Jack adored you with every fiber of his being. He loved waking up with you in his arms, and falling asleep to the rhythm of your heart. He liked the way your eyes met his and spoke volumes, and how you knew what he was going to say and let him say it anyway. Sometimes he thought he would stop time itself if it would keep you from being hurt.

So now, he shifted closer and closer to you, invading your space until he could share his warmth with you. Your hands left each others so he could wrap his arm around you, and he tried his best to use himself to make a little safe haven for you. He would do anything to create a bubble so you could breathe.

Your eyes found his, and you leaned into his warmth. No words were offered but he knew he had done a good job when he could feel some tension slide off your shoulders.

Still, over the next few days, the conversation haunted you. It felt like a pin, pricking your mind and heart in quiet moments. You ignored it, what else could you do? It was a familiar feeling, and you knew sooner or later, it would go away. After all this time, hadn’t you made your peace with it?

It was almost completely gone, one night, as you lay with Jack, skin to skin under the sheets. He’d be silent for awhile, in what you could only assume was one of his rare, post-sex dazes. He murmured again and again how much he loved you before it faded off and he had settled for holding you close.

“Sweetheart?” he said suddenly, pulling your attention back to him.

“Yeah, Jack?”

“One of our friends from home is pregnant, I forgot to tell you she called yesterday.”

You felt liked the world was spinning. Why was be bring this up right now?

Somewhere far away, you heard yourself make a happy noise and say that was exciting for them.

Your lover’s warm arm pulled you closer, back onto his chest.

“That’s gonna be one helluva cute baby,” he added. You agreed, but had no idea what to do or say.

Was he trying to tell you he was thinking about kids? About babies?! You were full on panicking now.

Had this, plus the questions from before finally pushed him to reconsider? 

“I’ve… darlin’, I’ve been thinking a lot about kids lately,” he whispered into your hair. There was something about his tone you didn’t recognize. You were tense, unable to move away, respond, be normal at all. Of course, he noticed.

Jack half sat up, moving you so he could face you, his arms still holding onto you with purpose.

“Wait- shoot, dang it, I should’ve said that differently,” his eyes were boring into yours. The whole time you’d known him, you hadn’t been able to look away from him when he was baring his heart for you like this. This was Jack. He has never, would never hurt you. You trusted him with your whole life.

Several deep breathes and a quick kiss allowed your heart to calm, and you eyes told him it was okay for him to go on.

“I have been, sweetheart, but not like… that, I – well, I,” he seemed to be struggling, the tiny lines between his eyebrows deepening. You waited, hands finding his skin and mimicking the comforting movements he always did on you. All the while you were reminding yourself that listening to him would always be better than interrupting or assuming.

“I just wanted to tell you, the longer we’re together, how much I like it,” he said, finally, words rushing out of him, “How the more I think about it, how much I sort of want it to just stay like that.”

Your heart was racing now for a whole new reason.

“When I think about other people’s kids, they’re cute but… I don’t need one,” he said, and you noticed the more he talked, the more he relaxed, too. “You could be a fantastic mother, I know you could, if you ever want that,” he added, and you smiled, shaking your head just slightly.

“I guess I’m just selfish, love,” he finally seemed to conclude, having pushed and been fully vulnerable with you. He sank down next to you again, saying, “I want you all to myself. I want to take you on adventures and change the world with you and just have you be all mine, all the time.”

You still couldn’t speak. The world wasn’t spinning anymore but it might as well have been upside down. All your fears - that he was hoping you’d just change your mind, that you were holding him back – were wrong. On his own terms, in his own way, and in his own heart Jack Daniels had flipped to the same page as you.

Never in your life had you expected this, even considered this a possible outcome. It was almost too good to be true.

You had to ask, just one more thing.

“Jack, what about…” you swallowed, clinging to him. “What about… before?” You didn’t need to explain. What about her, and his son? Before the accident? What about the time you’d met, and he was pouring into the futures of children?

Jack was still for one heartbeat, two, and three. Then his hand moved from your waist to touch your cheek, his large palm enveloping it. You hadn’t realized there was a tear until he brushed it away with his thumb. There was tenderness in his eyes as he held you.

“Just us,” he whispered, before kissing you, “that’s all I need.” His eyes were honest, and for the first time in your life, you felt fully seen. 

“Just us,” you said back, as vulnerable as he was.

The two of you held each other then, basking in the moment of pure, raw love. You allowed yourself to sink fully into the mattress, pressing together like you were just falling for each other for the first time. In some ways, you were. Everyone has a different story, and you two had just written another chapter in yours. Jack laughed then, a beautiful, free, almost giddy sound.

Relief had sunk into your bones, the two of you finding something in each other that you’d never had before. The feeling you’d had when you first met - the one that sunk into your bones - promising you two would be close, came into your mind. You considered it, realizing it was more than right, knowing you both before you even knew yourselves.

Jack kissed your hairline, still letting out small burst of quiet laughter. His voice was filled with joy as he asked, “Can we get a dog, though?” and you laughed too.

“Yeah,” you said, and he was kissing you, smile almost too big.

<<

taglist: 

@fangirl-316 @scribbledghost @0celestialbitch0

[duckprintspress]

What is a Story?

When Duck Prints Press put out our call for applicants, we asked everyone to submit “a sample of their work (between 1,000 and 2,000 words)… [that] must function as a short story.” When we reviewed the 100+ samples we received, we noticed many areas where writers commonly struggled. Based on what we learned, we’ve planned a number of blog posts to discuss these challenging areas, and we’ve decided to tackle one of the most frequent issues first. Many otherwise strong submissions lost points on our rubric line regarding “plot and events,” and specifically, they scored a 1 or a 2 because “the story has no plot (for example, is a vignette).” 

So, this begs the question, what is a story, and, of course, what isn’t a story?

(note that throughout this post, I use the word “narrative” to refer to any amount of text that may or may not be a story, and I use story only in a more narrow, specific sense.)

What is a story?

The answer is deceptively simple: a story is any narrative that has a plot. But...what is a plot? There are many ways to define a plot, but at its most basic, a plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and by the ending, something has changed. If, at the end of the story, nothing has changed, then it’s not a story. However, even if something has changed, it’s still not necessarily a story, because characters and time-frame also influence the definition. A narrative without at least one character is not a story. Likewise, a narrative time-frame, if it’s discussing events at a meta-level (“this happened, then this happened, then this happened”) may show that changes occur, but it’s still not a story - it’s an overview or an outline. The lines, of course, can be blurry - and where any given author, reader, or DPP reviewer draws the line between “this is a story” and “this isn’t a story” will vary. 

How is a story communicated to the reader?

To function as a story, the narrative must include characters. Now, character doesn’t necessarily have to mean person, or even require sentience, but there must be some point of view being explored, and if the character is an animal or an inanimate object, writing it as a character will require a degree of anthropomorphizing. The key aspect is that the character has some form of agency - some ability to interact with and influence their surroundings. This character will have a point of view and a perspective that affects how they perceive the story’s setting, and by the end of the story this character should have either changed themselves, or changed their surroundings, or changed their relationships. The circumstances around this character must be different by the end of the story than they were at the beginning - or else it’s not a story.

What is change?

As part of the narrative, one or more characters in the story must engage in some form of activity that results in the world around them changing. Writing advice most oftenly calls this “conflict,” but honestly? I hate that word. The classic couching of “person vs. self, person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, person vs. fate” as the available types of conflict is tired. Defining the only kind of change as conflict and specifically describing it as “x versus y” is to automatically get a potential writer thinking in terms of antagonism. While antagonism is one available type of change, it’s not the only, and while many pieces of writing advice point out that these “versus” constructions don’t mean enmity by nature...why not simply choose a less confusing construction, one that doesn’t require addenda to explain the existence of narratives that clearly are stories but are less “versus” and more “and” - “person and self,” “person and person,” “person and nature,” “person and society,” “person and fate.” I’ve opted to use the word change, because one of the clearest ways to tell if a narrative is a story or not is to look at the nature of the character(s) are at the beginning, and look at the nature of them at the end, and say - what’s different? Maybe they’ve built something. Maybe they’ve reached a new understanding. Maybe they’ve conquered a challenge. Maybe they’ve altered their perspective. Maybe they’ve learned something. Maybe, they’ve changed the world, or maybe, they’ve just changed a light bulb - but something has changed.

Before some writing snob comes at me and says, “okay, fine, we dare you to come up with a plot that doesn’t fit into the classic five conflict types” ...of course we can’t. That model functions because all stories can be shoehorned into it, as long as very loose definition of “conflict” and “versus” are used. But because it’s described in oppositional terms, a lot of writers get distracted by that terminology and think there has to be, well, a conflict, in the narrow definition of the word. And that’s clearly absurd - many of our favorite fanfiction tropes, for example, are fluffy and comforting and soft precisely because they’re not about conflict, they’re about harmony. Yes, “enemies to lovers” is wonderful, but so is “friends to lovers.” Two people going on a date that ends with a marriage proposal is a story: they started out as a couple and ended engaged. Something has changed - their relationship status. But to call that “person versus person,” while perhaps technically correct, is ludicrous. Now, to keep it interesting, there might be some “person versus self” - “I’m not worthy of this love, omg do they really care for me, oh will society give us problems if we say yes?” which is how it can be shoehorned into the “conflict” model. But be it ever so soft, and their love ever so accepted, and their faith in each other ever so steady - if there really is no conflict, just those two people meeting up and having a nice night and ending in a proposal...it’s still a story. To say it’s not a story because there was no conflict, only an advancement of their relationship...yes, a story like that is borderline to being a vignette or “slice of life” narrative. Certainly, if there’s zero sources of tension, it may not be a very interesting story, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a story. 

What else does a story need?

Honestly - not much. Don’t get us wrong - a story is stronger if it has a setting so that it doesn’t just take place in endless blankness. A story with multiple characters but no form of dialog (verbal or non-verbal) may be a little flat. A story where something changes but some of the introduced plot elements aren’t resolved will feel incomplete to a reader. A story without any negativity could be boring. Stories lacking these elements may not be good stories...or they could be amazing, and innovative, showing how a tale can be told without elements we usually consider essential! As long as something or someone has changed, and the story is told in a narrative, descriptive format that includes a character - it’s a story.

What isn’t a story?

Things that aren’t stories fall into two broad categories:

Narratives that have description, characters, dialogue, setting, and other story elements, but nothing changes. Examples of this are “slice of life” narratives and what, in fandom-parlance, would be called an episode coda or canon insert - a chunk of narrative deliberately meant to make a bridge between two established events but in which nothing can change because the surrounding events remain established. (A coda or insert might be a story, it varies.)

Narratives that are either entirely “show” (for example, a vignette) or entirely “tell” (for example, a synopsis),  These can also be seen as relating to time - either there’s little or no passage of time (usually the case in vignettes) or far too much passage of time (usually the case in synopses). Narratives like this may or may not include a character, but even if they do, they’re still not stories. Why not? Because any story that is entirely “show” and involves minimal passage of time is unlikely to result in change, and instead will be an extended description of a moment. And any story that is entirely “tell” and depicts a large swath are overviews - there’s no element to actually grab a reader and no reason the reader should care about this dry relationship of events. That’s not a story - it’s a history textbook.

Drawing the lines between these categories can be difficult, and to some extent will come down to taste. Anyone who says there’s a hard-and-fast rule in writing is a liar. Just because a synopsis or a “slice of life” narrative isn’t usually a story doesn’t mean they will never be one. But, in general, if you’re looking at a piece of work and you’re trying to determine if it’s a story or not, there are some signs that will strongly suggest it’s not a story:

There are no characters.

There is no setting.

Nothing has changed between the beginning and ending of the narrative.

The entire narrative is an extended description of a single person/object/setting.

The entire narrative could easily be reworded into a sequence of, “thing one happened, then thing two happened, then thing three happened, then thing four happened.”

The narrative feels like a “pause,” or a “bridge” that takes place between two events that aren’t depicted in the narrative.

A central conflict or issue is introduced or described in details, but nothing is done to try to solve the issue.

Now, for the most important part of this discussion of what isn’t a story: writing something that isn’t a story isn’t a bad thing! Especially in fanfiction communities, we live for self-indulgent narratives that make us happy. We love to see those “moments between.” We live for a thought-out thousand-year history for some setting that didn’t originally have that much background. These kinds of narratives are fun to write, and especially when they’re part of an existing franchise, can be a delight to read. We are not saying that there is literally anything wrong with writing a narrative that isn’t a story. 

That said, Duck Prints Press’s applicant call specifically asked authors to submit a writing sample that was a story, with the eventual goal of selecting authors to write short stories for an anthology. Which is to say: there’s nothing wrong at all with writing “slice of life” stories, codas, canon inserts, vignettes, or synopses - it’s simply not what we asked people to submit in this specific case, and we’ve come to see that a lot of people submitted non-stories without an apparent understanding of the difference, and we wanted to explain that difference.

But, to everyone reading this: write whatever brings you joy, in as much detail or vagueness as makes you happy, and share it with whoever you want. Just also understand, that for many types of narratives, if you’re asked “is that a story?” it’s not. That’s not to create a hierarchy - they’re all equal as art forms, they’re just not the same.

Okay I kinda understand this in theory but what do these differences actually look like in practice?

In long-form works, it’s usually relatively easy to recognize what is a story and what isn’t. Almost every novel ever published has a plot, and has things change, and is therefore a story. (though there are exceptions - Wikipedia lists a few longer vignettes and, when done thoughtfully, it can be astonishingly effective.) However, in shorter works, it can be difficult to tell the difference - and, as previously mentioned, the lines can blur.

In the interest of giving an idea of what the differences are, here are a few examples I quickly cooked up to try to show you all, since I’ve done a lot of “telling” so far (this blog post: also not a story, ha!) and very little demonstration. These are each around 150 words, to show that even in a tiny word count, any of these narrative structures is a viable choice. (Sorry these aren’t high literature - I just threw them together for this post, so I’d have something that suited.)

(read more)

A story - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, where something changes:

The door slammed open. Looking up from her embroidery, Victoria blinked as Margaret strode into the room.There was an air of expectancy that was inexplicable to Victoria; she grew more confused when Margaret approached and dropped to one knee.

“What are you doing?” Heart pounding, Victoria attempted self-restraint, but she couldn’t rein in her hope, because it almost looked like...it seemed like...but--

“Proposing,” announced Margaret, pulling a velvet-covered box from her pocket and opening to reveal an emerald set in a gold band.

“But you can’t!”

Margaret tilted her head to the side and frowned. “Why not?”

Objections occurred to Victoria, but examining them...she couldn’t think of a one that Margaret wouldn’t demolish with her usual brilliance. “You know what? You’re right. Who’s to stop us? And...I accept.”

And as Margaret slipped the ring onto Victoria’s finger, she knew: there could be no objection. Nothing had ever felt so right in her life.

“Slice of life” - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, where nothing changes:

“What a day!” said James, dropping onto the couch with an exhausted sigh. 

“I know what you mean,” Tom agreed. He fumbled a hand across the cushion separating them, and James delighted in the simple comfort of threading their fingers together.

A beep, beep, beep sounded in the kitchen, announcing that the microwave had finished nuking their leftovers.

“You getting that?” asked Tom.

“It’s your turn!” James countered.

“But I don’t want to let go of your hand.” Tom gave his hand a squeeze, and a pleased glow suffused James’s chest.

It was Tom’s turn to retrieve their dinner.

But Tom was right - holding hands was wonderful.

“Let’s get it together,” James suggested. 

Hesitating, Tom remained still as James sit up and gave a tug on their joined arms, then he broke into a smile and rose at James’s side.

“I love the way you think.”

“I love you, too, darling”

And together - always together - they got their dinner.

“Bridge” scene, episode coda, or canon insert-style fic - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, where nothing changes:

Arriving home after the battle, Sandy opened the rough-hewn door and shed her damaged armor. Her dented cuirass had left an aching bruise across her chest; she carried it to the smithy out back for repair in the morning. A gash on her thigh throbbed where an arrow had pierced the straps holding her greaves in places; she brought them to her leather-working station. Nicks and fissures marred her once-gleaming sword blade. All Sandy wanted was to collapse in bed, but resisted the pull of relaxation, because blood limned the damaged places red, and repair to the damaged weapon couldn’t wait. Taking a seat, placed her feet on the treadles that set her whet stone to spinning and set about polishing out every imperfection.

Yes, she was exhausted.

But her sword must be cleaned, and smoothed, and honed, and prepared.

Sandy must be prepared.

There would always be another battle to be fought.

Vignette, a narrative without a beginning, a middle, or an end, which may or may not have a character, and nothing changes and in which the emphasis is on showing, rather than telling (but, as in this example, a combination may be used):

The wind blew chill down the narrow mountain pass. All was silent, save for the rush of the breeze. All was still, save where gusts stirred the tall grasses and the branches of trees that reached, claw-like, toward the sky. 

Once upon a time, a stream had carved this cut through the cliffs, forcing its way through soft chalk and hard shale, leaving jagged stones that emerged from the steep pass walls like teeth. The stream was long dry, now, only water-smoothed stones strewn across the ground to show where it had ever been.

Once upon a time, travellers had traversed the dried-up rill bed, pounding down the dirt, knocking the rocks aside, leaving scars where their fires burned. They’d lived, and laughed, and explored, and sought...and left, never to return.

Now, there was nothing: nothing but the storm.

And all was silent.

And all was still.

And the wind blew, chill, down the narrow mountain pass.

Synopsis, a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end, which may or may not have characters, and where something changes, and in which  the emphasis is on telling rather showing:

Emperor Xiang Zhen was born in 9884 to Dowager Empress Luo Zexi and the warlord Xiang Yijun. After his birth, there was a long period of strife. Those who supported Xiang Yijun’s claim to the throne battled those who still supported the Dowager Empress’s deceased husband Peng Zhenya. Eventually, the factions found common ground when Xiang Zhen came of age, and he was enthroned in 9902. 

With his reign came peace and prosperity. The arts flourished. Scholarship advanced, and many great Dao masters arose, using cultivation to rid the land of evil’s left by the long war. Xiang Zhen longed to join a Night Hunt himself, but he was trapped by his political position. He didn’t dare risk the fragile stability in the Empire. If something happened to him, the results could be catastrophic. So he studied, and ruled, and adjudicated, and endowed, and endured.

Xiang Zhen did as he must.

But, oh...he wished he weren’t alone.

I know this is long, so we’ll leave this discussion at this point. Hopefully you found it helpful, and please do let me know if you have any questions! Duck Prints Press is always here to offer support to writers, and we love getting writing asks!

[snuggetfish]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever see Majima interacting with modern technology or even struggle with it. I know he didn’t go to prison for years and emerge into a drastically different world like Kiryu and Ichiban, but I wonder what he thinks of modern technology. I could see him possibly struggling with it, or not even bothering to stay up to date on it. Idk, it’s just an interesting though to me lol

Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot too! Especially with how much the series likes to poke fun at the “old guys” for being clumsy with tech. Looking, at you, Taiga “Seedy Rawm” Saejima... 😂 You make a good point, though. All of these dudes - Kiryu, Ichiban, Saejima - have spent decades in prison. It makes sense that they’d be behind on the latest gadgets and I think once you’re behind, it’s easy to keep coasting on an inertia of sorts. “Why learn when I can keep doing it like I’ve always done it?” Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

So on the scale of tech skills, I would say Saejima is tech illiterate, Ichiban and Kiryu are somewhat literate, in that they’ve been taught to use specific devices and/or sites (smartphones for Ichiban, blogs for Kiryu) but are lost when it comes to anything else. And Majima... I wanna say Majima is tech literate, but not always tech savvy.

If I had to sum up how I see his attitude to technology, it’s: inquisitive, but impatient. He’s a curious guy by nature, evident in how he was eager to try that guy’s “cutting edge” bag phone in Y0 and how later on Goromi mentions she’s done a bit of everything throughout life, including “in-game gold farming”. 

Majima will happily give anything a try if it piques his interest and I believe this would extend also to cool new gadgets. For instance, if he spots one of the younger family members showing off their smartwatch, he’ll confiscate it for an afternoon to poke at it and pester Nishida with questions about every button whose purpose he can’t immediately discern. Also, given he boasted that Majima Construction would build Kamurocho Hills by looking it up on the Internet, I think he’s at least aware of search engines, forums and online guides. Even if he somewhat overestimates the usefulness of the info they provide hah.

As with most things, were he to put some proper effort in, he could get the hang of just about any device, however... he gets bored easily and dislikes fiddly stuff. If it’s got lots of tiny parts and needs more than than 10 minutes and 2 steps, Majima’s not doing it. In Dead Souls he tells Saaya he even finds texting a pain in the ass: 

So I think he would only really master simple tech that serves his whims. He spots an ad about a fancy new tracking device, with a big screen and all the bells and whistles? He’s sold. Kiryu-chan better watch out from now on, because he’s not escaping his ambushes any more. He hears a pitch on smart TVs? Nishida’s gonna be hauling one into his apartment the very next day, together with a huge zombie movie collection on Blu-ray.

In a nutshell, Majima’s perfectly capable of adapting to a modern world, but for the most part he’s just too busy or too plain disinterested to adopt every new invention that comes along. And, for things like photos or important messages, his sentimental side wins out. Don’t tell anyone, but he’d prefer to have those in physical form, printed out or handwritten  💙

Ok in closing let me do another comparison between the guys because I had too much fun picturing these:

Saejima is the guy who’s got 5 malware toolbars installed on his browser, all because he misclicked and didn’t even realize what he was doing. He’s also got at least 3 different facebook accounts because he keeps landing on the “sign up” instead of the log in page. Also his taskbar is either on the right or on top of the screen because, again, he dragged it there by accident.

Kiryu is the guy who’s got 10 malware toolbars installed, plus some cursors, because he purposefully downloaded them. He “thought they were cool”. Haruka has to come purge them every 6 months. He’s got one facebook account, whose password he keeps on a sticky note on his computer. He uses it mostly to post dad angle selfies and comment on every single one of Haruka’s posts.

Ichiban is mostly the same, just that his PC is a shrine to his friends. He’s got them as his desktop background and he makes sure to leave one of those sparkly “Hope you have a blessed morning” gifs on their profiles every day.

Majima is the guy whose computer is as barebones as it gets. No personalization, just a folder thrown haphazardly on the desktop, with meeting notes taken by Nishida during the family’s usual “crazy scheme brainstorming sessions”. He gets the occasional moaning porn pop-up because... well, because he’s got a questionable browsing history. Says he doesn’t use facebook, but in fact does have an anonymous account to stalk the people he knows. And when he’s really, really bored, he’ll watch a baseball stream and leave heckling comments like “man, I coulda farted that ball straighter than ya hit it”

[gallavictorious]

What staple fics of the fandom would you recommend for someone just starting to read gallavich fic?

Hiya there, nonnie – and welcome to the glorious world of Gallavich fic, if you're new to it!

On the one hand, I'm very much the wrong person to ask because staple fics tend to be AU:s and that's not really my cup of tea. On the other hand, I am a librarian, so never let it be said I balk at giving recommendations about stuff I haven't actually read or isn't necessarily to my personal liking. 😉

To make this list, I sorted Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich fics by bookmarks on AO3 and selected the first ten that I've either seen talked about a lot or have had at least a look at myself. This is admittely not a great way to curate a rec list, so for better and more initiated recommendations, maybe check in with the the amazing ladies of @gallavichfanficlibrary? They'll have you covered! If anyone else feels like chiming in with fandom classics for nonnie, I'm sure they'd be grateful. 🙂

Sexual Harassment in the Workplace by shamlessquestions

AO3 Summary: Mickey just needs to keep his head down and stay out of trouble at his new job. Still trouble always manages to find him and when it takes the form of his red haired boss, Mickey's not sure he can resist even if he wanted to.

Comment: The Gallvich fic with the most bookmarks and the most kudos on AO3. You’ll hear this one mentioned a lot! Fair bit of explicit sex scenes.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Ian Gallagher by shamlessquestions

AO3 Summary: "It's fuck all about heat or chemistry or any such shit, Gallagher. You and me...it's just a thing that cannot happen. The sooner we both accept that, the better off we'll be."

Comment: Mickey's the right hand man of a Chicago mobster. Club dancer (and college student) Ian starts ”dating” said mobster. Gallavich sparks fly. High stakes and quite a bit of action in this one. Explicit sex scenes.

Take Me In by MintSauce

AO3 Summary: Mickey's Dad finds out about Mickey being gay and even though Ian's not there, but he finds the Gallaghers are still willing to take Mickey in.

Comment: If you enjoy Mickey becoming friends with all the Gallaghers and bettering himself/beginning to heal from the abuse at Terry's hands, this might work for you. Heavy focus on Mickey, as Ian isn't actually there for most of the fic (though he's never far from Mickey's thoughts).

Like Real People Do by grayola

AO3 Summary: At the age of 26, Mickey Milkovich gets his first apartment, his first wifi connection, and his first kiss. How he gets from wifi to kissing is a complicated story. Mickey is socially anxious. Ian is a frustratingly lovable escort working through an app. Mickey downloads said app. The rest is history.

Comment: Fan favourite from last year. Very soft. Not a lot of plot, just Ian and Mickey falling very, very deeply in love (and dealing with their mental health issues in a lowkey, everyday sort of way). Heavy use of texts and messaging, making for something of an old-school fic feel. Explicit. A companion piece, told from Ian's POV is currently being published: Everything About You.

eighty-four by kissteethstainedred

AO3 Summary: “I slept with Mickey Milkovich last night,” Ian whispers.

“So?”

“So—” Ian stares at his phone for a second. “I slept with Mandy’s fucking brother.”

“Ian, what do you want me to say? Congratulations? You’ve been dating Mickey for almost a year,” Lip says, sounding confused as fuck. Ian blinks. That can’t be right. Ian’s only seen Mickey in pictures with Mandy. He’s never even met the fucking guy. How can he be dating him?

Comment: College fic. Time loop, so great if you’re a fan of that! Mandy plays a prominent role. At 13k words this one is way shorter than any other fic on this list.

Our Stubborn Love by TheWaywardBride

AO3 Summary: In which, after years of being separated by more than just prison walls, Ian and Mickey try to find their way back to each other.

Comment: Canon-divergent slow burn told from a bunch of different POV:s. Something of an ensemble piece, although Ian and Mickey are the focus. Doesn't shy away from Ian being in a very bad place post-5x12.

None the Wiser by loftec

AO3 Summary: AU. Slow burn. The real time accounts of Ian visiting Mickey's dingy diner and slowly becoming his friend.

Comment: WIP, with irregular but still happening updates. Domestic, with strong focus on the character's emotional lives. Mickey's a father to Yev, even though him and Svet are long since divorced. They're not kidding about the slow burn.

This is the Road To Ruin by bricoleur10

AO3 Summary: The day Ned asks Ian to rob his house the redhead almost says yes – why shouldn’t he, after all? Ned seems nonchalant enough about the whole thing, he’ll get some free expensive shit out of the deal, and if he plays his cards right maybe he can even convince Mickey to be his accomplice – but something stops him from going through with it.

The third-eldest Gallagher has never been much of a believer in fate or divine intervention or destiny or anything like that – can’t be, with the life he’s led – but he just might have become one, had he only known how that one seemingly insignificant decision had changed the course of his entire life.

Comment: Straight up canon divergence, capturing the early season Gallavich feels before hurtling down the road not taken. Some angst, but with a happy ending. Mandy and Lip play prominent parts.

Cooperative Gameplay by grayola

AO3 Summary: At nineteen years old, Ian Gallagher’s stuck. Stuck in a minimum-wage job he hates. Stuck in the same boring routine--sleep, wake, work, take your meds, Ian!, try not to lose it day after day after day. But after his little brother introduces him to MICK MILK, a frustratingly hot horror gamer he watches on YouTube, Ian's life will never be the same. ♥️

Comment: WIP (but with regular updates). Darker than Like Real People Do, but with a similarly emotional focus. Depicts online fandom on Twitter and Instagram in a rather knowing way. Explicit sex scenes. This fic, and these versions of Ian and Mickey, currently has its own fandom.

The Boyfriend Experience by anomalously

AO3 Summary: The Prompt: Ian: sex worker (male escort, explicit videos: stripping, masturbation, etc) Mickey: client who's an avid fan who gets up the courage to hire ian for "the boyfriend experience" I saw a porn star who said she only sleeps with 1 client & it inspired me.

Comment: WIP, last updated in 2017. Commonly held to be worth reading in spite of not being finished. Quite a bit of explicit sex, occasionally with a bit of BDSM thrown in.

[absynthe--minded]

so @praalgraf asked this in response to my post about editorial decisions Chris made that I personally disagree with, and I promise it’s not an annoying question! It’s just impossible to quickly answer, sadly

The History of Middle-Earth is not exactly an easy series of texts to get through, because it cycles between “chunks of text by JRR Tolkien” and “commentary by Christopher Tolkien, which is often (in my opinion) Not Great and draws scholarly conclusions that I disagree with but has footnotes with further quotes from still-unpublished things his father wrote”. It’s organized roughly by chronological order, beginning with Tolkien’s earliest writings and ending with what he was working on just before his death. It’s not just the Silmarillion - there are also several books that preserve drafts of The Lord of the Rings, in the middle of the twelve volume set. And they’re dense, and often contradictory, and require a lot of dedicated study to really get through and understand. I’ve been doing this for ten years and I finally feel like I Get It but there’s so much more I could be learning that I can’t wait to discover. And we’ve got the new book coming out this year, The Nature of Middle-Earth, edited by somebody who isn’t Chris - that’s going to be so much fun, holy shit.

I can’t give a comprehensive list of where everything is that I cited in that post specifically off the top of my head, but what I can do (and will do right now) is share my recommendations for anybody interested in further delving into the magical world of the Histories. This is a combination of content and worldbuilding, things that I think are relevant as a basic groundwork for understanding the texts better and learning where a majority of popular fanon comes from. You don’t have to read further than this unless you want to - you don’t have to read any of this unless you want to, obviously - but consider these a nice primer if you’re curious what the wider Tolkien canon looks like. They cover linguistic essays, sociological examinations, annals and timelines, and character development. My recommendation is to read them in order as listed below, and stop at any point if you feel like you’re bored out of your skull. It starts with “most relevance to The Lord of the Rings” and goes from there. Also, these are just my recommendations - other people might have different things to say, and this is a question you’ll get five answers for if you ask five different people. I’m also assuming that you just want to See More - if you want to read the commentary, for example, do it, but I know it’s dull and boring and not really Important in a lot of cases. I don’t have an authority on what constitutes The Definitive HoME Reading List, but I hope this is helpful!

[willow-salix]

TAG MiniBang 2021

Because the combined bad influences of Flyboy and Sonata were at work here we also decided to bend the rules a little and post early...

I was privileged to work with one of my best friends on this project,  @misssquidtracy​ . We went a little rogue (seems to be a theme for us) and shared both parts of the challenge with both of us contributing to the art and the writing. Squiddy provided a beautifully done pallet knife piece as the background for my foreground art and we plotted the story together to ensure that it worked for both of us. We had been looking forward to sharing the writing but unfortunately, due to life constraints on her part she was only able to write a little of the fic but what she did add perfectly compliments the tone and style of my writing. 

Big thanks to @tagminibang ) @godsliltippy​ ) for organising this event.

So, here it is, our offering to the TAG Mini Bang. We hope you enjoy it. 

Ting ting ting

“Not again,” Virgil groaned, hauling himself up the stairs from the kitchen to the lounge. He regretted ever giving Gordon that bell, he really did. Yes his brother had gone through a tough time, yes he had scared the hell out of them when the Chaos Crew had left him at the bottom of the ocean in his mangled craft, yes they were incredibly grateful that he was alive and mostly whole, but if they had to hear that dinging one more time they might possibly murder him themselves. 

“Yes, Gordy, what do you need?” 

“I’m lonely, and I’m hungry, come and sit with me for a bit?”

“Sure-”

“But maybe make me a sandwich first?”

“A sandwich?” 

“Yeah, with extra cheese and a pickle on the side, not too large a pickle but not too small that it’s gone in one bite. I want to taste it, you know, but not be overwhelmed.”

“Sure-”

“And can you get me a drink too? One of my special milkyshakes, you know, with the ice cream and frozen banana in it?”

“Coming right up,” Virgil sighed, heading back down to the kitchen again.

“Gordon still demanding everything and anything?” Scott asked as he jogged in from the poolside. His T-shirt was sticking to his chest and his hair was damp with sweat but he still looked like he could do it all again. Not that they would have time, they were lucky if they got to do any planned exercise at all, usually they were forced to skip it and work out on the job when a call came in.

“Of course he is,” Virgil growled, slapping a slice of cheese on a piece of bread with far more force than necessary.

“What did the cheese do to you?”

“It’s guilty by association.”

“Ah,” Scott said, like that explained things perfectly. 

A few slices of chicken received the same treatment and Scott wondered if the meat had actually been dead when it arrived on the island or if Virgil had simply smacked it into submission so well that the chicken had flown clear into next week and arrived as sandwich filling.

“Can you fix his drink?” Virgil asked.

“Can’t gotta shower this off before Grandma accuses me of stinking up the place again.”

“Any excuse,” Virgil scowled. “It would only take you a second.”

“A second too long, bro, I’m escaping while I can and you’d be wise to do the same,” Scott said, heading for the stairs and freedom.

“How can I escape when Gordon needs help?”

“You’re forgetting one important thing,” Scott told him wisely. 

“I am? And that would be…”

“John’s home.”

Virgil snorted out a laugh. “He’s less likely to do it than you are.”

“No, you're misunderstanding me. If John’s home that means…” Scott let his sentence trail off into silence heavily filled with insinuation.

“Sel’s here,” Virgil finished triumphantly, catching on perfectly.

“Give that Tracy a prize,” Scott grinned, shooting triumphant finger guns his brother’s way as he headed up the stairs. 

And they said that John was the genius in the family, they hadn’t seen Scott at his most devious. Virgil wasted no time in yanking out his phone and texting the witch to come and take over.

“Here’s your sammich, Squidward,” Selene cooed, plonking the plate down on Gordon’s lap while smacking a kiss to his forehead. “Virgil started it but I finished it for you, Brains called him down to his lab with some kind of air filter emergency so I took over. I brought you some of those crisps you like from my private stash too.”

“The cheesy curl ones?” Gordon asked hopefully.

“Yep,” she grinned, waggling a family sized bag of Quavers in his general direction.

“Did you bring my drink?” Gordon asked around a mouthful of chickeny goodness. Say what you wanted about Virgil but he made a damn good sandwich, even if Gordon could taste that this was made with a little less love and a little more impatience than usual.

“No, sorry, did you want one? Virgil didn’t say that. I’ll go get you something, just wait right there.”

"Not like I can leave if the mood takes me," Gordon grumbled as he opened the chip bag. 

She was already gone, only to race back in a few moments later with a can of coke.

“What? What’s wrong, boo?” Selene asked when she saw the pouting look of disappointment on Gordon’s face.

“It was supposed to be one of my special milkyshakes,” he whined.

“Right, got it, my bad!”

She was gone again, taking off to the kitchen where, upon closer inspections, she did indeed find the beginnings of a milkshake. There were two scoops of ice cream already in the blender, melting in the warmth of the room. A half peeled banana sat abandoned on the counter next to a carton of milk. 

“Typical,” she groused as she set about breaking up the banana, pouring the milk and setting it to blend as she tidied the mess away. Once done she poured it into a tall glass, added a straw and a few slices of fresh banana to decorate the edges, just as he liked it, and delivered it to the waiting aquanaut.

“Great, thanks, Sel,” he grinned, handing her his now empty plate and swapping it for the glass. She put the plate on the coffee table and sat on the couch opposite him.

“Anything else I can do for you?”

 “Sit with me and keep me company?” he begged, looking so miserable and pathetic that she couldn’t say no.

“Of course I will.” 

Gordon swung his injured leg up and she moved to sit next to him on the couch, placing a cushion on her lap for him to rest his cast covered foot on.

Gordon settled down with a contented sigh, sucking happily on his straw, the milkshake level in the glass steadily dropping.

“I’m bored,” Gordon bitched five minutes later.

“That peace lasted a long time,” Selene laughed, putting her phone down on the side table to give him her full attention. “What can I do to help? Do you want to watch something or play a game?”

Gordon made a face. “You’re crap at games, Sel.”

One eyebrow rose in disbelief. “I wouldn’t exactly say crap…”

“You tried to play with Alan and died three times in two minutes, lost all your lives and were forced to float along behind him as a ghost for the rest of his turn.”

“Anything is crap when you say it like that,” Selene huffed. 

“Only when it’s true.”

“Tell me then, oh great games master, what do you want to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Then don’t moan you’re bored,” she pointed out.

“I mean there’s nothing to do. No one is around.”

Selene gestured to her chest. “Am I suddenly invisible?”

“No, of course not,” he scoffed. “That would be far too cool, why don’t you have witch powers like that?”

“Because I live in the real world, not a movie?”

“Lame,” he declared, dismissing it.

“Back to the original point that I am, in fact, right here. Therefore your comment that no one is around is redundant.”

“I meant no one I can do anything with.”

“Thin ice, bub, thin ice.”

“I meant like my brothers or someone. Alan is busy revising for his final exams, Virgil’s with Brains and I’ve no idea where Scott is but I think he’s avoiding me, which is just mean if you ask me. I’m a delight.”

“Yeah, you sure are,” she drawled, not sounding too convinced. “You’re also forgetting a brother.”

“Who?”

“John? You know, gorgeous ginger love of my life that’s chilling in his room right this minute? That brother?”

“John? No way.”

“What’s wrong with John?” she squawked indignantly. Her man was the most perfect of people, amazing and fabulous, just all round awesome. Although she might be a tad biased.

Gordon shrugged, scrunching his nose up in a ‘meh’ kinda way that said everything and nothing.

“No, come on, tell me what you meant,” she demanded.

“No offence, Sel, but John’s a bit…”

“A bit what?” she asked, her tone warning him that he was in very dangerous territory.

Gordon, with the grace of an elephant and confidence of a man that knew he was injured and therefore wouldn’t get slapped, plowed on.

“A bit boring.”

“Boring?!” she hollered, her voice travelling to the four corners of the island so effectively that Alan lifted his head, wondering if some distant God was echoing his thoughts as he slogged through his history homework.

“How very dare you!” Selene continued, working up a good glare that Gordon was completely immune to. He simply sipped the last of his milkshake, smacked his lips and raised an eyebrow, daring her to do something about it.

“He is not boring.”

“Matter of opinion,” Gordon shrugged, handing her the glass to put down on the table. 

“Right, that’s it, you can besmirch my fun factor but I will not allow you to do so to my man. That’s a step too far.” She gently, for which he was thankful, shoved his leg off her lap and dragged his hover chair over from its spot beside Virgil’s piano.

“Get the hell in, hoppy, we’re going for a ride.”

-x-

"You deal with him, he's driving me nuts and pissing me off at the same time."

"Me? I'm the very picture of perfection, I could never drive anyone nuts."

John declined to comment on that one for fear of never stopping, he had twenty-four years worth of stories after all. 

“The pissing you off is subjective too,” Gordon finished triumphantly. 

"He's your problem now," Selene announced, shoving Gordon's hover chair further into the room before making her escape, slamming the door shut behind her. 

John closed his eyes, praying for patience. His fiancée was well known for her legendary patience when it came to pampering and mothering his family whenever any of them were sick or injured. She'd spent almost every day with Gordon since his run in with the Chaos Crew and had done so with relentless cheer, for her to have given up now was not a good sign. 

"What did you do?" 

"Nothing!" Gordon protested hotly.

"Are you sure?" 

Gordon averted his gaze, suddenly taking great interest in a dust particle dancing across the shaft of sunlight filtering in through the window, "Yes, I'm sure. I wasn't doing anything. That was part of the problem."

"Ah," there it was. "Is there anything I can do to help?" 

"I'm so bored," Gordon wailed. "And your girlfriend is being mean to me."

"Fiancée," John corrected him, not looking up from his work. 

"It's not my fault I hate sitting around doing nothing all day. I’ve gone from a physically and mentally intensive, fifty plus hour a week job, to sitting on my ass from dawn until dusk. Can you blame a guy for getting twitchy?"

"Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice at the moment," John reminded him, quite needlessly he thought. 

"Gee, thanks for the reminder," Gordon huffed, trying to cross his arms although the cast and sling he was sporting prevented it. That just seemed to annoy him even more. 

"I can't do anything right now! How do you do it?" 

"Do what?" John asked, squinting through his magnifier at the small window frame he was carving from a piece of polymer clay. 

"Just sit around all day."

John raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "I don't sit around all day."

"OK, float around then. It's not like you're actively running around like the rest of us are."

"I'll pretend I never heard you say that," John scowled, wishing Selene had dumped his brother into the sea instead of into his quiet, peaceful room. 

"You're sitting around right now," Gordon pointed out, gesturing to the desk John was  sitting at, which was currently doing double duty as a work table for his latest project. 

"One day you'll learn to appreciate the benefits of a quiet, occupied mind and a still body," John told him. 

Gordon sighed, propping his good elbow on the desktop, his chin resting in his upturned palm as he watched his brother fiddling with tiny things that seemed utterly useless to him. 

"What are you even doing?" 

"Working on a series of book nooks for Sel's side of the bookcase," John answered, sounding slightly distracted as he measured the finished window against its place in an intricately carved brick wall. 

"Why?" 

"Because she likes them."

"I mean why are you making it? Can't you just buy her one? It's not like you can't afford it."

"Where's the challenge in that? Besides, things are always more special when you make them yourself."

Gordon yawned and leant forward to rest his head on the tabletop. 

"Do you want to help?" John offered, although honestly Gordon's version of helping was always patchy at best. 

Gordon scooted closer to look over John's shoulder, eyes darting over the rectangular box that he was building the nook inside. About the size of two thick books sandwiched together, the nook already had a little cobbled street and two shop fronts in place. The tabletop was scattered with a selection of impossibly tiny screwdrivers, picks, scalpels and other instruments of possible torture that he couldn't hope to name. 

"Pass," he announced decisively, flicking the control of his hoverchair so he spun in a wide circle, pointing to the door. "I'm out."

"Peace at last," John sighed, flicking his magnifier back into place over his right eye as he set aside the window to be baked later and reached for a fresh blob of clay. 

-x-

"What ya dooooooing?" Gordon yodelled, slamming the bedroom door open so hard that it smacked into the wall and shook several picture frames. He scooted his way into the room without even waiting for an invite. 

"Gordon!" John huffed, clutching his heart where it was trying to leap out of his chest from the shock of his brother’s sudden, and very noisy, entrance. 

"Hi, I got bored, thought I'd drop in on my favourite big brother," Gordon grinned as he glided his hoverchair closer. 

"Are Scott and Virgil busy?" John asked, that would be the only reason Gordon would have promoted him to his favourite. 

"Yes," Gordon admitted, "but that's not the reason why I'm here."

John turned his head to shoot him a raised eyebrow of doom, clearly communicating without words that he didn't believe him in the slightest. 

"So, what are you doing?" 

"Working on this book nook," John replied patiently, holding up the small cauldron he was crafting. 

"The same one?" 

"Yes."

Gordon’s eyes nearly fell out of his head, "Still? It’s been four days!"

"Yes," John hissed out, starting to get frustrated by the constant questions. 

"Why?" 

"Because it takes a long time. If you're going to do a project you should do it right."

"At the speed you're going it's gonna take forever," Gordon snorted, casting an assessing eye over the work John had already done. 

"That doesn't matter," John assured him. "It's not really about the time it takes or the end result, it's about the process, the journey to get there."

"Sounds lame to me," Gordon yawned. 

"Obviously," John drawled, rolling his eyes. 

"What do you mean by that?" Gordon demanded to know, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. 

"Because it's you."

"Hey! Rude."

"Accurate," John said, placing the little cauldron down and selecting another piece of clay which he placed on a ceramic tile. 

"Why?"

"Because it requires a calm mind. It's good to slow down sometimes and just be still."

"Says the console jockey." 

Console Jockey? He did not just say that!

"So you don't think my job is stressful? Or as tiring and important as yours?" John snapped, wondering if it was bad form to smack your injured brother around the head with a partially constructed book nook. He glanced at the nook, he had put a lot of work into it… It would be a shame to waste it. That thought alone saved Gordon. 

“Well, yeah I get that it might be a bit stressful, but it’s not like you have to do much that puts you in danger, not like us,” Gordon continued, digging his hole even deeper, a hole that John was looking forward to shoving him into.

“We all have our specialities, you couldn’t do your job without me doing mine,” John retorted, trying very hard not to let Gordon’s comments get to him. Gordon would never understand what it was like for him to be stuck so far away from the action, away from his brothers when things were going wrong. 

Gordon, thankfully for him, had been unconscious from the moment he had activated his emergency code. He hadn’t heard the frantic calls going out over the comms as the family mobilized to help him.  He hadn’t heard the desperate scramble as Thunderbirds took off, racing to the scene. But John had heard it all. 

John had been the one to stay on the line with Gordon, talking to him the entire time, knowing that he probably wouldn’t hear it but feeling that he needed to say it all the same. He wanted to know that if his little brother regained consciousness for even a second he would hear a familiar voice, that he would know that they were coming, that they would rescue him. He would know that he wasn’t alone.

 He knew what it was like for people that were in danger, knew the comfort they got from someone talking to them, listening to their stories, being there for them verbally if not physically. John was often the one that spent the most amount of time with those they rescued, keeping their spirits up as much as possible until his brothers got there. 

His brothers were seen by their rescuees as the real heroes, the ones that leapt in and plucked them out of danger, but John was the one that got them that help, the one that made sure the rescue played out as best it could, liaising and coordinating until the job was done. But Virgil, Scott, Gordon and Alan were the ones that got the thanks , the ones that got the hugs after they dropped their charges off, not John. 

Not that he minded too much, he knew that his job was just as important as theirs, maybe even more so because, when someone put out that call for help, when they sent their desperate plea out into the world, they deserved to know that someone would always be listening out for it, that someone would hear and that help would come.

He knew all of this, and he knew that Gordon did too, it was just the frustration of inactivity that was making him say the things that he was. John just wished that that knowledge made it easier to listen to. 

“I might not be doing the physical rescuing,” John continued, feeling the need to push his point home. “But I work just as hard, when you’re home you’re off duty until a call comes in, you can relax, swim, watch movies and laze around until you’re needed. When I’m up there I’m on duty 24/7 and even when I do manage to catch some sleep it’s not deep or particularly restful. Any little noise, any call that triggers the system's keyword algorithm gets transferred automatically, I have to go from asleep to awake in seconds to take it.”

Gordon was quiet for once, watching him closely. John didn’t like it, it made him feel like an exhibit in a zoo. And here we have the little seen Tracy, see how he stays inside his hide and hardly ever ventures out… he knew how they saw him, why they likely thought he had the easy job. 

“These help, they give me something else to focus on. I need to keep my mind active and challenged while still trying to relax.” John paused, trying to think of a way to explain his thinking that Gordon might understand. 

“These are almost like a meditation,” he started. Gordon understood meditation and finding your zone. “Creating something out of almost nothing. It keeps my mind focused, helps with finger dexterity and hand eye coordination with the added bonus of it relaxing me. It’s good to slow down and take some time to do something creative, you should try it some time.” 

Gordon listened to his brother and he tried to take in all his words, he tried to understand the meaning behind them, he really did, but it just didn’t make any sense to him. He understood about wanting to be lazy, to sit around and do nothing sometimes. He loved to laze on the couch with his snackies and an Into the Unknown marathon playing out on the holoscreen, but that was watching something exciting, interesting, to him that was relaxing. This...whatever it was that John was actually doing, made no sense whatsoever to him. The idea of trying to relax by actually thinking...that was the most alien concept of all. 

Gordon knew, probably better than his family gave him credit for, what it was like to be mislabelled. Within every sibling pool, there were the mandatory roles: the serious one, the caring one, the smart one, the funny one, the calm one, the angry one, the one who sang in the shower, et cetera. He’d proudly embraced the role of ‘the funny one’, and had diligently flown the flag for the humour camp for as long as he could remember. If a brother came home from a rescue in a slump and needed a cheery pick-me-up, it was Gordon who stepped up to the task, irrespective of his own mood. His smile and laugh were infectious, and he had yet to encounter a frown he couldn’t (eventually) turn upside down.

But with every ‘role’ came misconceptions. Scott was serious, therefore people were quick to automatically assume that he was a killjoy.  Similarly, John’s intellect and preference for solitude often went hand in hand with him being branded antisocial, since there was apparently no possible way someone could enjoy their own company so much, yet still pursue and maintain meaningful relationships with actual people.

Gordon was no stranger to this treatment. He liked to laugh and be spontaneous, and consequently, was often regarded as the Tracy who didn’t take his work seriously, the Tracy who had the attention span of a gnat (albeit a very handsome one), and the Tracy who couldn’t be trusted with anything that required delicacy, be it physical or emotional. His affinity for making people laugh, though an exceptional quality, frequently acted as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, his relentless optimism made him the most effective of the bunch when it came to emergencies involving children and young adults. On the other hand, it sentenced him to a fate where the bad jokes he cracked would always be two steps ahead of the secret deep thinker that lay within.

“Let me see it again,” Gordon sighed, trying his best to be a supportive and understanding brother, since he did feel a little bad about the things he had just said. He hadn’t meant to say them, they had just come out. That was the trouble with being laid up from an injury, not only were you out of action but you were in pain, and pain made you grumpy and less likely to monitor the things that came out of your mouth the way you should.

He knew that John worked hard, hell he knew that what his brother had said was right, John was never truly off duty. They were all aware that he didn’t get enough sleep, enough down time, enough time to relax and just be. They knew that if John was on Five he would consider himself on duty, at work, and therefore he’d never allow himself to take time out. Things had changed since Selene had blundered her way into his life, now he spent a lot more time on the Island, which meant that he was finally taking some time out for himself. If one of the ways he chose to do that was by crafting ridiculously tiny things out of clay to stick in a hollowed out box that was his business. Gordon wasn’t there to judge, he was there to spend time with his brother.

John moved aside a little so Gordon could get a closer look, trying to resist the urge to smack his hand away every time Gordon reached for a tiny piece that had taken him hours to perfect. 

“These are really small,” Gordon mused, poking at a window that John had just finished painting, leaving behind a smudged fingerprint. “Woops, sorry, Bro.”

“Maybe you should try making something of your own,“ John suggested, carefully removing the window from his brother's possession and picking up a brush in order to attempt a fix.

Gordon nodded and John passed him a ceramic tile and a miniature rolling pin. 

“How about you try cutting me out a few shop sign bases?” John suggested.

“Do I get one of those scalpel things?” Gordon asked, a little too eagerly for John’s liking.

“Maybe we can work up to that,” John hedged, subtly moving the scalpel out of his brother’s reach and passing him a square cookie cutter. “Use this cutter for now.”

Gordon shrugged and spent a few minutes rolling and squishing the clay trying to get the thickness to the exact measurement that John insisted on. It wasn’t easy or fun.

“Nope!” Gordon announced, giving up and pushing the tile away. “It’s still boring. Pass.”

He swung his hoverchair around and headed in the direction of the door. “Later, Bro.”

“Oh...OK...later, I guess,” John stuttered, wondering just what he had done to deserve such a chaotic family as his.

“Oh, hey, boo, where are you go- WAHH!”

John’s head shot up as Selene’s yelp rang out from the hallway.

“Sorry!” 

“So you should be, you little shit,” she grumbled to his retreating back as she thumped into the room.

“What happened, love?”

“Let’s just say that if his chair had wheels I’d have lost a few toes,” she said, wincing in imagined pain. 

John scooted his desk chair back and patted his lap in offer, one that she happily accepted.

“So, why was Gordy doing his boy racer bit? What did you say to him?”

“Me? What makes you think I said anything to him?”

“Because I know you two?” 

“Fair,” he sighed, sliding his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do to help him.”

Selene turned her head to look at him, not liking the helpless look on his face.

“Babe, you are helping him, you’re there to keep him company or talk to him if he needs it, that’s more important than anything. What happened to make you think that you weren’t helping?”

“He was asking me about these again,” John nodded towards his work area on the desktop. “But he didn’t seem to understand, that or he just didn’t want to.”

“He’s Gordon,” she sighed. “You know what he’s like, he’s full on, he’s in your face and he’s not at all subtle. Taking his time with things just doesn’t compute with him.”

“It would do him good though, if he doesn’t learn to embrace it he’ll be exactly the same as he was last time.”

“Was he really that bad?” she asked, concern lacing her voice. 

John nodded. “He doesn’t do inactivity well. When he had his hydrofoil accident his therapist talked him into signing up for a virtual college degree in Environmental Management of Rivers and Wetlands. It was supposed to take him at least a year as a part time course with ANU in Canberra, but he blew through it in the first semester and earned himself a distinction for his insights on the impact of Anthropogenic Noise on Wetland Habitats. His professor was so impressed he offered him a fully funded PhD, citing his time with WASP and the time he spent in the bathyscaphe as practical experience that would make up for his lack of degree. Obviously he turned it down, but he still likes to rub our faces in it now and then.”

“Wow,” Selene breathed. “Forget his professor being impressed, I’m impressed.”

“He has a phenomenal brain,” John said, a small but very proud smile on his face. “When he actually decides to use it to its full potential, that is. There is nothing he can't do when he chooses to focus on something, he’s all in. It really helped him to feel like he was gaining something and moving forward even though he was sitting still.”

Selene nodded, understanding completely. She knew that all of her boys were wicked smart, but Gordon always presented himself as the least academic. He was more of a doer, wanting to be out in the field, learning as he went, diving in head first to every situation. 

But as Selene and John both knew, appearances could be deceiving.

“If that’s what helped him last time, then we need to find a way to convince him to try something new,” Selene insisted. 

“I tried, he’s not interested.”

“That was with your things, babe. We need to find something that’s a little more him, and I think I know just the thing.”

-x-

“I have arrived!” Gordon yodelled, announcing his entrance in his own unique way. He slid his hover chair in through the open door like the boss that he was, bringing his shining presence in to brighten up his middle brother's obviously dull existence. “Didja miss me?”

“Like a hole in the head,” John grumbled, turning to look at the grinning face of his brother. His eyes immediately began to water as they were assaulted by the far too bright colours of the shirt Gordon was wearing, a tie dyed monstrosity that Selene had made for him for his birthday. 

“A little more gratitude, if you please," Gordon huffed. 

“Grandma finally released you?”

“Yep,” Gordon stretched out his injured leg and patted the air cast on his now slingless arm. “Got time off for good behaviour.”

“I find that hard to believe,” John teased, then nodded to Gordon’s arm. “How’s it feeling?”

“Not too bad, my grip still isn't great but Grandma promised me that once the bone has finished knitting I’ll just need to exercise it and build the muscle strength up, then it’ll be as good as new.”

“That’s great, it won't be long before you're able to go back out with Virgil and stop, how did Sel put it, 'haunting the house like the ghost of Christmas future'?"

"Can't come soon enough," Gordon sighed, butting his chair right up close to John's, knocking his arm in the process. "What you do- you're still doing that? Still? It's been a week!" 

"It's not like I get a huge amount of down time," John pointed out. "I'm only here now because Sel said she'd dump me if I didn't make an effort to come down earlier in the evenings so I could actually eat a meal with you all."

"You actually believed that threat?" Gordon laughed. 

"Of course not, she'd never dump me, but I thought I had better humour her and let her feel like she at least had a little sway," John shrugged, pushing aside the little piece of doorstep he had been painting. "Honestly, it's nice to come down for a meal and family time, I hadn't realised how much I'd missed it until it was happening again."

"I guess we all got a bit too caught up in International Rescue after we lost Dad," Gordon admitted. 

"Like we had nothing else in our lives," John nodded, completely understanding. 

"Yep."

Gordon fell silent and John let him, concentrating on mixing the perfect colour acrylic to add a few highlights to his stones. 

"Can I have a go at making something? I bet I could do it quicker than you," Gordon asked, reaching towards what Selene called the sharps tub. John smacked the lid down on it just in time. 

"Actually, we got you a present."

"You did?" Instantly distracted, Gordon sat up straighter, excited by the prospect of a gift. "What did you get me?" 

This," John answered, opening his desk drawer and extracting an interestingly shaped bottle, upright with a thicker, rounded bottom and a thinner neck, ending a cork stopper. 

"Wow, is that an original?" Gordon asked, taking the bottle carefully and turning it to  study it from all angles. He knew exactly what this shaped bottle was, there had been a collection of them in Commander Shore’s office that he would stare at every time he got called in for some reprimand or another.

"19th century," John nodded. "Sel found it in a little shop in Mayfair. They assured her it was a genuine, used on a ship, captain's decanter from around the time of the civil war. They hadn’t fully traced it when Sel bought it but they think it came from one of the ships that fought in one of the smaller skirmishes around 1861.”

“This is really cool, thanks,” Gordon smiled, still turning the bottle over and over.

“It’s to hold this,” John continued, drawing Gordon’s attention back to him.

Grinning, John delved back into his desk drawer and pulled out a rather faded and quite dusty box. He brushed the dirt off the top and slid it over to Gordon. 

"A ship?" Gordon frowned. 

"Yep, Selene and I thought that you needed a little project of your own, so she had the idea to get you a ship in a bottle. You don’t see them a lot these days, but apparently her Grandfather had a couple and they always fascinated her.”

“So you put the ship in the bottle?”

“Yep, instructions are inside, go nuts.”

“Pfft, instructions,” Gordon snorted. “No one needs instructions, they’re a waste of time.”

-x-

“Ouch,” John hissed, hopping in place on one foot as he bent down to pick up what looked to be a tiny piece of mast that had attacked the sole of his foot. “Gordon, why are there bits of ship all over my floor?”

“Because I dropped them,” Gordon replied, his voice muffled due to the tongue of concentration that was peeking out from between his teeth.

Huffing, John gathered all the pieces off the floor, both pieces of ship and bits that they had been cut out of, and deposited them on the desk next to Gordon.

“How’s it coming along?” John asked, settling in his own chair. He’d only been gone a day but Gordon had managed to take over the entire bedroom, spreading his belongings, bottles, snack wrappers, his phone and a discarded hoodie, all over the place, as well as half the contents of the vintage ship box.

“It’s ridiculous. I think it’s missing pieces or something, it’s broken.”

“Well it was an old kit, but we were assured that it was complete,” John frowned, sliding the tray over that Gordon was supposed to be storing all the pieces in. “Have you checked the contents list and matched each piece to make sure they’re all there?”

Gordon looked at him blankly, like he was talking a foreign language.

“Did you check that everything was there before you started?" John elaborated.

“Of course I did,” Gordon promised, crossing his fingers and hoping his brother didn’t see. 

“Against the list?” John clarified.

“I eyeballed it, OK?”

“Not good enough,” John insisted. “That’s not how you go about doing things like this, you can’t just slap them together and hope for the best.”

“Why not?” Gordon whined. It worked for him in almost everything else he did in life. 

“Because this happens," John gestured to the mess surrounding them.

“Fine, I’ll read the damn instructions.”

Leaving Gordon to it John slid his almost completed book nook over and picked up his paintbrush to start adding some finishing touches before he started on the wiring for the lights. He’d barely done more than five minutes when Gordon started huffing.

John waited a little longer, trying his hardest to ignore the ever increasing sounds of frustration and impatience from his brother. In the end he couldn't stand it a moment longer, he had to ask the most loaded question ever.

“What’s the problem?” John asked, pushing his own work aside.

“These instructions don’t make sense,” Gordon bitched, flapping the paper in John’s face. “Look at the little picture here, you have to stick this little pole into that hole in the deck but the deck doesn’t want to stay together and that piece there keeps sliding and the pictures make no sense.”

“That’s because you missed around eight steps in between,” John told him, praying for patience. 

“No I didn't, I followed the pictures exactly,” Gordon insisted. 

“The steps aren’t in the pictures,” John explained. “See right there?” he pointed to the words above the pictures. “The pictures are a diagram of each finished stage, not how to get there. They are for reference only, not instructions.”

“Urghhh, this is going to take forever,” Gordon pouted, crossing his arms. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that by the end of it you’ll have something unique that no one else does, something you can be proud of and know that you built with your own two hands.”

“I’m not sure it’s worth the effort,” Gordon muttered.

“It is,” John promised. “I’ll help. How about I read out the instructions and you follow along? We’ll get through it quicker that way.”

Gordon wasn’t convinced, but John looked so hopeful that he didn’t have the heart to refuse him, especially since he and Selene had gone to so much trouble to get the things for him in the first place. He might be a miserable little sod, but he wasn’t that ungrateful. He knew that they had gone out of their way to get something they thought he’d like, the least he could do was make the thing, even if he knew he wouldn’t enjoy it. Maybe John was right, working together they could get through it quicker, and that could only be a good thing.

“Alright,” Gordon agreed, “let’s give it a go.”

Slowly, methodically, John read out each piece that was needed and Gordon located them, storing them neatly in a wooden box that Selene provided when she popped in to bring them drinks an hour or so later. She stayed just long enough to steal a kiss from John and drop one on the top of Gordon’s head before she beat a hasty retreat, not wanting to get roped into helping. She wasn’t the best at following instructions and didn’t want to get grumped at.

By the time they had all the pieces checked and catalogued they had discovered there were indeed two pieces missing, but thankfully they were easy fixes, just a small , round piece of wood to represent a porthole, which they could easily make a replacement for and a piece of mast. One snipped toothpick later and that was sorted too.

John started with the first set of instructions, reading them out patiently as Gordon found and fitted them together. 

“So, how’s work been?” Gordon asked, like a chatty hairstylist, as he carefully dipped the end of a thin dowel into a small pot of wood glue. 

“Same as ever,” John deadpanned, “a bunch of idiots that got themselves into trouble and needed help, and only half of them related to us.”

Gordon sniggered, glancing at John, seeing the sly smile on his brother’s face. He’d forgotten just how amusing John could be when he delivered something sarcastically witty with such a serious tone. Gordon hadn’t realised how much he’d missed it, wondering just what his more serious brother would come out with next. John was always like that, he seemed so quiet and reserved but, when he was relaxed and in company he was comfortable with he’d take you by surprise by letting loose a zinger that you couldn’t help but laugh at.

“Let’s not talk about work,” Gordon suggested, “we haven’t hung out properly in ages, you’re either up in Five or there are other people around.”

“Is that your way of saying you’ve missed me?” John teased.

“Maybe,” Gordon allowed, “but if you ever tell anyone I said that I’ll deny it and tell Grandma you want her to make your birthday cake this year.”

John held his hands up in surrender, although he couldn’t hold in the laugh that bubbled up as he reached for the instructions again.

“OK, let’s get this done before we stop enjoying each other’s company.”

They worked slowly but steadily over the next few hours, putting together the structure for the first mast. Once it was done they called it quits and abandoned it for another day, the smell of something tasty coming from the kitchen proving to be too much to ignore.

-x-

 “Gordon, that’s my finger.”

“Oh, sorry, can you just like… I don’t know, yank it off?”

“If I wish to leave half my identifying fingerprints behind, yes.”

“Do you really need them?”

John didn’t dignify that with an answer, the look he threw at his brother communicated his thoughts perfectly. 

“OK, OK, I’ll get some dissolver from Virgil’s studio, wait right there,” Gordon instructed him, grabbing his crutches and hobbling his way out of the room. 

John sighed, keeping his hand perfectly still, the hull of the boat dangling from his fingertip. He was still there five minutes later when Gordon clumped his way back in, Selene hot on his heels. She had the glue dissolver under one arm, a large bag of chips under the other and a plate of sandwiches in each hand. 

She dumped the plates on the desk, then the chips, before turning to see the state her fiancé was in.

“Do I even want to know?” 

“Probably not,” Gordon winced, dropping down into his abandoned desk chair and reaching for a plate.

“Can you at least help me before you start stuffing your face?” John asked, waggling his hand, which made the boat sway violently from side to side.

“Can’t, eating,” Gordon mumbled around the massive mouthful he had just taken.

“What did I say?” she demanded to know. “No hurting the hands, you know how I feel about that.” 

John wiggled his fingers again, drawing her attention to his plight. He looked so pathetic with the half built little ship swinging from his hand that Selene took pity on him, intervening when he looked like he was about to grab the thing and yank it off himself, fingerprints be damned.

“Oh for the love of the Gods, let me do it!” Taking his hand she used a paintbrush to smear glue dissolver around the area of skin it was stuck to. She took her time, rewetting and using the brush bristles to push the dissolver under the boat, trying to  ease it free from his skin with minimal pulling.

“Thank you,” he sighed, sitting patiently while she worked. Thankfully it didn’t take her too long, although it took a lot of cursing under her breath and the odd ouch from him to get there. 

“One boat,” she announced, placing it triumphantly on the desk. 

“Fanks,” Gordon said, spraying chip crumbs as he did so.

“Welcome,” she said, brushing at her leg which had unfortunately been in splatter range. Still holding John’s hand she bestowed a kiss to each of his abused digits before releasing him. 

“Right, I’m out of here. Play nicely, you two, I don’t want to have to send Grandma in to babysit you both.”

“It won’t come to that,” John assured her, reaching for his own sandwich. “We’ve not got much left to do now. We just have to attach the rigging to the masts, check that they fold properly then insert th-”

“I’m out, I don’t need to hear anything about insertion, not after you just glued a boat to your hand,” Selene declared, her exit swift and to the point, the door shutting firmly behind her.

“She has a point,” Gordon admitted, swallowing his last bite. He pushed the chip bag in John’s direction, although there was barely more than a handful and a few crumbs left in it. 

“But we’ll never admit it to her face,” John insisted, steadily munching through the large sub she had brought for him. 

“Never,” Gordon agreed. 

-x- 

Gordon sighed dramatically as he crutched his way down the hall from his bedroom. John’s bedroom door was open but his brother wasn’t inside. The ship, now fully rigged, sat beside the bottle on the desk, just waiting to be placed inside once some sand had been poured in as a base. Gordon had chosen all different shades of blue to represent the sea and had even watched a few videos on how to do sand pouring art, something he’d never expected to find even remotely interesting, yet he couldn’t bring himself to go in and make a start on it.

John had barely been home the past week and when he had it had only been for food and enforced sleep. Even then he had been known to sneak out of bed the second Selene was asleep, being discovered on numerous occasions sitting at their father’s desk until the small hours working on this, that or the other. 

Emergencies, and therefore the need for their services, had seemed to increase three fold, something Selene was blaming on the moon phase and mercury going retrograde and, for want of a better explanation, they were all inclined to agree. There was no rhyme or reason for the surge in idiots that were calling in at all hours of the day and night with trucks caught under a too low bridge causing a pile up, hands stuck down toilets, drunks climbing to the top of electricity pylons and repair men getting trapped inside ATM machines they had been fixing.

His brothers had been on the go near constantly, whether it was from rescue call outs or working on their plan to find their father,  but none more so than John. While Selene had always been good at what she liked to call Tracy Wrangling, none more so that when she was dealing with a stressed out Scott, even she had admitted defeat and left them to their own devices. Self preservation was key after all. 

John had been dealing with not only rescue calls and Chaos Crew sightings, but signal tracking, GDF liaising and general hoop jumping, all of which had kept him far too busy.

It had been over a week since they had done anything to their project and Gordon was feeling the loss. Not so much of the project, although that really had helped with his frustrations at his lack of physical ability, not that he would ever admit that to John, but in spending time with his brother.

Much to his surprise he’d found that he was reluctant to work on it alone, it had become their thing to do together. It was a time where they would hang out, shoot the shit, reminisce about childhood memories, times that they had spent together talking about their hope for the future where they would find their father alive and bring him home.

Both of them knew that it wouldn’t be easy, that if they did manage to find him there would be no telling what physical or mental state he would be in. Gordon knew from experience just how tough physical injury, limitations, and recovery could be on the mind and the body,  especially in someone who had been as active and viril as Jeff Tracy. 

They all knew, although no one seemed to want to talk about it, that as hard as it was going to be to actually locate him and hopefully bring him home, that would only be the beginning of what could potentially be an incredibly long and difficult journey of rehabilitation and reintegration into the family and the world as a whole. 

John had been right, taking some time to be quiet, to slow down and think while keeping your mind and hands busy really was a productive way to spend your rest hours and, stupid as it sounded, Gordon didn’t really want that to end. 

He was only a week or two away from potential cast removal and a return to physical activities like his beloved swimming and strength training in their home gym and, while he couldn’t wait to get back to it, he knew he’d feel the loss of his enforced quiet time. 

He glanced again at the abandoned ship on the desk and turned away, clumping down the hall towards the stairs. So it would take them a little longer to get it finished, Gordon was fine with that because for once he wasn’t feeling the need to rush.

-x-

“Remember to pour it slowly,” Gordon instructed as he held the funnel in place, its long pipe reaching right down into the bottom of the jar. “Start with the darkest one, that’s going to be our base colour.”

“I’ve got it,” John assured him, selecting the tub of midnight blue sand and scooping some out into a smaller pot to make things easier. At Gordon’s nod he began to slowly and steadily pour the sand into the open neck of the funnel. As he watched Gordon expertly directed the tube, allowing the sand to pour out to pool in the bottom of the bottle.

At Gordon’s signal John stopped pouring and waited while Gordon carefully removed the tube and used a long metal skewer to poke and prod the sand into something that looked vaguely like waves.

“The next colour up,” Gordon requested and John did as he was asked. They repeated the process four more times with different shades of blue, John pouring in a little at a time, Gordon directing the tube to deposit  more in one place than others, mimicking the movement of sea waves as best they could. In between each layer Gordon used the skewer to poke and mix the colours here and there, blending the layers into a smoother transition.

“That’ll do,” Gordon said confidently, twisting the bottle so John could see the full effect. 

John had to admit that he had been pleasantly surprised when Gordon had announced that he had ordered some coloured sand and looked up how to do sand art on the internet. He hadn’t really known what to expect, although he would admit, if only to himself, that he had thought that Gordon would be a little heavy handed and impatient, but once again he had proved him wrong. He really had done his research and the result was a beautiful mix of colours that really did give a perfect impression of a gently moving sea.

“That’s looking great.”

“I know,” Gordon grinned, modest as always. “Where’s that resin gone?”

“Here,” John answered, pushing it across the desk towards his brother. “Make sure you read the instructions and measure the amounts accurately or it won’t set and you’ll ruin the sand and the bottle.”

“Yeah, yeah I got this,” Gordon assured him as he did indeed read the instructions through properly. Once he had familiarised himself with the ratio of resin to hardener, he measured carefully and poured them into a mixing jug. Once it was fully mixed he slowly, gently, poured the mixture a little at a time into the bottle on top of the sand. With each little pour he waited for the resin to trickle down between the grains, slowly adding to it until all the sand was covered. 

“And now we wait,” John said, carefully placing the bottle in the patch of bright sunlight coming in through the window. 

“Wanna watch a movie?” Gordon offered casually, not really expecting his brother to agree. John hardly ever watched anything with just him, they had vastly different tastes in movies and John usually made some polite excuse to escape.

“Sure, sounds good.”

“Really?” Gordon goggled, his eyes almost falling out of his head. “You don’t have anything more important to do?”

“More important than watching a movie with my little brother? I don’t think so,” John grinned, retrieving Gordon’s crutches from where they were leaning against his bookshelf and tossing them to him one by one. “Come on, last one to the lounge picks the movie.”

“Hey, no fair!” Gordon yelled, scrambling to his feet as he fumbled with his crutches. “You’ve got legs like a giraffe and neither of them are broken!”

“Sucks to be you,” John tossed over his shoulder as he took off down the hall to victory.

-x-

“Careful,” John warned.

“I am being careful,” Gordon snapped. “I got this.”

“Your hand’s shaking.”

“Thanks for that, Captain Obvious.” He steadied his, only slightly shaky, hand by propping his elbow on the desk for stability. “OK, let’s do this.”

They both held their breath as Gordon maneuvered the body of the boat through the opening in the bottle, making sure each sail stayed carefully folded down and the strings remained untangled before he fed it down the neck and into the bottle.

“Phase one, complete,” John intoned in such a serious voice that Gordon couldn’t help the laugh that he snorted out.

“Pass me those long nosed tweezers?” Gordon asked, holding out a hand.

John slapped the requested instrument into his brother's hand like a nurse in an operating theater, provoking another burst of laughter.

“Thanks.” 

“Welcome.”

Making sure the strings of the sails were still dangling outside of the bottle, Gordon carefully moved the body of the boat further down into the bottle with the metal skewer until the stern touched the top of the resin and sand layer. 

“Now the sails,” Gordon whispered, hardly daring to breathe as John moved in to help, taking over the holding of the strings while Gordon reached in with the tweezers.

Gently, working together, they started the delicate process of tugging gently on each string, unfolding the paper sails and locking them in place.

“String one.”

“Got it. Watch number four sail.”

“Yep, thanks...OK… can you just give string five a little pull? Perfect.”

“Sail three is flopping!”

“Gah, hang on, just got to tighten that...yep that’s got it.”

“Maybe if I gather…”

“Yep, that’s good, do that again.”

“This next bit is going to require a delicate touch, maybe I should-”

“Hey! I can be delicate!”

“It’s not coming up...back sail two is stuck, release it...careful!”

“There, saved it.”

John gently pulled the strings a little more and there it was, their ship, sails proudly upright and everything. He kept hold of the strings, while Gordon held on to the boat with the tweezers as they carefully lifted the bottle from its side to its proper upright position.

Using the skewer John maneuvered around Gordon’s hand and nudged the boat into a better position before he carefully released the strings. They both held their breath, hoping and praying that the sails wouldn't collapse the second the strings fell. 

The boat, with its sails, stayed strong.

“Yes!” Gordon cheered, holding up his free hand for a high five, grinning when his brother’s palm smacked against his own.

“Scalpel,” Gordon joked as John handed it to him so they could lop off a little of the trailing strings. Then, using the skewer, they arranged the strings around the edges of the boat. 

With the boat finally upright and in place, they added another layer of light blue coloured sand with a sprinkling of white to mimic the tips of the waves. They finished it off by pouring in a little more resin, both to set the sand and hold the boat in place, using the tweezers to make sure it was correctly positioned.

“Phew,” Gordon breathed, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his cast covered leg. “We did it. Go team.”

“We did,” John smiled. “And it looks damn good.”

“It really does,” Gordon agreed, shifting his head to look at the bottle from all angles. 

“Nothing left to do but let it dry and put the stopper in,” John said. “How do you feel now it’s done? Was it worth the time?”

“I still think we could have done it a lot faster if you’d just let me skip a few steps in the instructions and do it my way, but it wasn’t that bad,” Gordon admitted. “I’m oddly proud of it.”

“You should be, you did good,” John leant back in his chair, crossing his arms as he relaxed. “Are you going to stop teasing me about my book nooks now?”

“Pssh, no,” Gordon snorted. “Ships are cool, yours will always be boring.”

He didn’t see the bottle of water coming until it was too late.

-x-

Gordon walked straight to John’s room from the infirmary,  feeling oddly free without his crutches and casts. Six weeks was a long time, after all.

The bottle with its little ship sat exactly where they had left it in the center of John’s desk next to the abandoned book nook that was still not finished. It took him very little time to insert the cork stopper and pour a little of Selene’s spell bottle sealing wax around the top, a bright, cheery yellow wax that matched his beloved Thunderbird Four.

He smiled as he thought of his little craft, waiting down in her dock for him, ready to be taken out when the next call came in. It had been a long and frustrating time but finally, blessedly, that time was over.

He poked an experimental finger into the wax seal, checking that it had set properly. It had, and he couldn’t help feeling a little sad about it. It had been a project that at first he’d had very little interest in, but slowly it had turned into so much more. Not just something to wile away a few hours but a chance for him to reconnect with the brother he spent the least amount of time with. 

Years ago, back when he had been small, John had been his everything. When Alan had been too tiny to be of any use and Scott and Virgil had been too old to be bothered with him hanging around, it had been John that had been there for him. It was John that had patiently listened as he read aloud from his sealife books, who had watched movies with him, played with him, and spent the most amount of time with him. Back then, their three year age difference had seemed like so little but so much at the same time, an older brother that made him feel wanted and included when the other two saw him as an annoyance.

Gordon couldn’t quite put his finger on when things had changed, when they had slowly drifted apart. John had seemed to grow up so much faster than he had, Alan had welded himself to his side, looking up to Gordon as he had to John  and things had never been the same again. 

It had been too long since they had been able to just hang out, to laugh, to tease each other without things going too far and one of them getting annoyed. It had been nice and Gordon had realised that he didn’t want to go back to nothing but hollocalls to Five when an emergency came in or the odd family dinner and movie night where he had to share with the rest of the family. John was the only brother that Gordon didn’t spend one on one time with as standard and he realised that, no matter how much he might blame it on John being so far away, in reality it was as much his fault as John’s.

Gordon picked up the bottle, leaving a box in its place. The model kit of the Mercury Project space capsule and its launch pad had been hard to find even with his junker contacts. In fact, he had almost given up and  admitted defeat before he'd thought to look at the label on his ship box and sent the shop owner an email.

Smiling to himself, knowing that there was no way John would be able to resist that challenge, he took the finished bottle, with its little ship, to his room where it would take pride of place on his bookshelf, a constant reminder that even in the worst of times, positivity could still be found.

“Thanks, Bro.”

[p1x1e-sims]

Historical Simblr Tag Game

thank u for tagging me my queen @cassimopeia

1. What has been your favorite time period to play in or which one are you most excited for?

I adore Edwardian era fashions, so I had a lot of fun playing the early 1900s and 1910s! I’m also really excited to play the 40′s, bc again, more fashion. Also some story drama with the war...😋

2. Do you have a favorite piece of historical cc? (CAS or BB)

I loooove the stuff from @linzlu and @happylifesims

3. Who is your favorite sim currently?

Right now, I’d say it’s Theodore bc that's my goofy son, but I also think Irene is moving up in the ranks (might make her my heir)

4. What is your favorite world?

Brindleton Bay all the way! I have a soft spot for rustic seaside towns. I just think it’s so gorgeous there all the time, and Seasons definitely adds to it.

5. Are you more gameplay or story focused?

The writer in me instinctively leads toward a story focus, as I can’t help but have a penchant for causing drama with my characters. I do love just playing with my sims sometimes for fun without posting them though as I feel like posting gameplay is a little stale sometimes

6. Do you like to play with pets in your historical saves?

Yes! I think I care about Pockets the cat more than any Townsend child

7. What's your biggest immersion breaking pet peeve with the game?

Texts and calls on their cell phones 🙄 also when I don’t have room for too many cc items, a lot of the furniture can seem kinda modern, which is annoying at times (which is why I don’t take many pictures in their house)

8. What's your favorite in-game historical item? (CAS or BB)

Laundry day comes in clutch for those old methods of laundry! It’s nice to see my sims laboring over a wash bin instead of just throwing them in the washer and dryer. I also love a lot of the furniture from Cats and Dogs, as they have an old rustic vibe that’s perfect for my game.

9. What would you like to see as a new pack or asset to the game?

More old school appliances! Typewriters and rotary phones etc etc. Since we have the off the grid lot trait and now cottage living, it would be nice to have some more vintage items to buy

10. What pack do you think is invaluable as a historical simmer?

If I had Cottage Living, it would be Cottage living…but sadly there is no way I could download it without my laptop blowing up 💔 So Cats and Dogs is a close second! Very rustic vibes in the world and the build and buy

11. Do you have a favorite mod to enhance historical gameplay?

I don’t have much room for mods, but I know that the Timeless mod and mods that disable electronics are really good for immersion! Hopefully I can download those soon

12. What's your ideal family size for playing?

About 4-6! (Pets included) 1-2 sims families are soooo boring I’ve found, but having a couple children and a pet or two really adds to the fun!

13. Do you use poses?

@ts4-poses is my new best friend. I can never find a good angle for gameplay actions, and pose makers are awesome at what they do, so I’m always on the lookout!

14. Do you use any overrides in your game?

Just a skin and eye overlay to make the sims faces look softer/more realistic

15. Do you, or did you, play off-the-grid during your game?

Yep! During the 1890s and 1900s I used it, and it was actually really challenging. But since Paul married rich, he had electricity and lighting by the 1910s

16. What lifespan do you play on?

Normal! I think it’s a sweet spot as Long makes everything boring and Short makes everything rushed

17. What inspired you to start playing historically?

I originally wanted to have a legacy story because of @softpine story. And when I found the queen who is @pixelnrd I wanted to start a historical story, because I’ve always been a big history buff

Tagging @sister-magnolia and @antiquatedplumbobs if y’all haven’t done it already!