#throwing things left and right

[porcelainpot]

POINTS

SO YOU'RE FROM WHO I READ THE FIRST CHAPTER, I FORGOT TO FOLLOW YOU WHEN I READ IT, OMG

/•Harmless Fun 3•\

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

You and Johnny smoke weed.

#

Morning dawns too early for your tired eyes. Whether you have slept at all or only dozed, you can’t say. More than half the night was spent grappling with the crippling regret of having gotten off to the aftermath of your gay roommates having sex. By the time the sun is rising on your shame, you can hear the sound of someone out in the kitchen making coffee. 

Which begs the second question. How are you meant to face them after hearing what you did? Just remembering it makes your skin go hot. When you can avoid it no longer—when the smell of Folger’s is slipping beneath the crack of your bedroom door—you slip into the bathroom and splash cool water on your face. 

Your hand is on your doorknob when you remember what you’re wearing: a ratty old tank top and panties. In your old apartment, you wouldn’t have thought twice about walking around in the public space like this—but that was before. Rushing to a box, you dig through and find a pair of shorts to tug on, slipping on a shirt over your tank top while you’re at it, hoping it disguises your lack of a bra. 

Johnny is not nearly so shy. Standing by the coffee pop leaning heavily against the countertop while he scrolls on his phone, he wears nothing but a low-resting, loose pair of sweatpants. All the saliva in your mouth dries up at the sight when his head snaps up at the sound of your door. He grins at you. 

“Morning, lass. Sleep well?” 

“Great,” you lie. “I was so tired I passed out.” 

“Me too,” teases Johnny. “All the work I wasn’t allowed to do really knackered me. Coffee? There’s tea too, but I never got the taste for it like Ghost did. Simon, I mean.”

“Coffee would be great.” 

He leans up and God. For all the jokes he made last night about having a ‘bum leg’ there’s nothing else bum about his body: he’s cut, all tanned skin pulled taut over soft muscle, the terrain of his body broken up here or there by the odd scar. He has a smattering of dark hair on his chest that thickens below his navel where it trails downwards, bordered on either side by his Adonis belt. 

On his neck—more like his collarbone—there is a livid lovebite. You can still see the impression of teeth, even across the room, pretty purples and fresh reds and it makes all the blood rush to your cunt until every stumbling step you take to the kitchen emphasizes your sensitivity. 

You take the mug from Johnny trying to meet his eyes and not the hickey on his neck. You mutter: “Thanks.”

“I cook too. Regular little housewife, I am.”

A housewife perhaps, but one to Simon. Too guilty to let him cook for you, you end up elbow to elbow with him while you both cook together. You glance towards their bedroom door once or twice when Johnny grows too boisterous, sure that soon he would wake Simon. 

But both your plates are clear without a sign of the larger man. After doing your share of the dishes, you dress properly, prepared to spend the day running necessary errands for the new apartments, including buying your own share of groceries. 

With Johnny’s Be safe, hen still ringing in your ears, you slip into the elevators and—nearly bump straight into Simon. He’s dressed for running, sweat glistening on his pale arms. He had just tugged his mask down past his chin. His mouth quirks into the semblance of a smile, tugging at a little scar on his lip—

—lips that left that mark on Johnny. Suddenly you are stammering, stepping aside out of Simon’s way, greeting him with more awkwardness than you had the very first time you met. He watches all your social fumblings with quiet amusement before disappearing into the apartment, his greeting to Johnny within cutoff abruptly by the closing of the door. 

Jesus Fuck. Could you be any more awkward or obvious? 

#

The next days come easier. The three of you fall into an easy routine. Simon is usually awake late and up early, running not just to keep in shape but from PTSD related nightmares you learn from Johnny. Johnny himself has his good days and bad days, days when the pain in his leg is too much for his general good humor to overpower. Those days, he is prone to melancholy and sulking. He plants himself on the living room couch and ‘can’t be arsed’ to move. Both men are troubled, their time on active duty leaving wounds that are fresh on their bodies and their minds—but it’s only part of them. 

And there is so much good. Johnny’s cooking (“my ma taught me”) is better than good. They both clean up after themselves and don’t mind picking up your slack on days when you pick up extra shifts and come home exhausted. 

One day bleeds into another and you come to find the awkward first interactions are in the dust in the rearview mirror. You no longer feel like a guest living in their guestroom. You’re home. 

One day you come home to the apartment smelling like oil paints. Simon is nowhere to be found (typical), but Johnny is at his easel, a palette set up with Winsor Newton colors: burnt sienna and vandyke brown and lamp black and titanium white and phthalo blue. The smell of turpentine stings your nose, but you don’t say anything; it’s a little unspoken, but you get the idea that the painting on Johnny’s easel was begun before his accident, and though he periodically puts paints on the palette, he has yet to add to it after all these months. 

He turns and brightens at the sight of you. 

“There she is. A sight for these sore eyes.” 

You roll your own. You’d learned by now that Johnny was a flirt—and it didn’t matter if Simon was in the room or not. As a matter of fact, perhaps it is in your imagination, but he seems to lay his flirtation on extra thick when Simon is in the room. The larger man never says anything, though he does give the occasional long-suffering sigh.

“Painting?” you ask. His paintbrush is still clean. 

“Just giving up on it!” he says cheerfully. He sets the paintbrush and the palette down, reaching for his cane. You don’t mention how heavily he leans on it as he comes around the couch and collapses, reaching down to arrange his bad leg in a position that is comfortable for him. “Do me a favor, lass? You’ll have to go climbing. On top of the cabinets, you see that tin? Be a love and fetch it for me.” 

You do as he asks, using one of the chairs from the kitchen island to stand on. It isn’t a tin at all but a solid glass container with fasteners on each side to maintain a nice, strong seal. You deposit it on his lap and are thinking of fetching him a pain pill while you’re in the mood to play Lassie when he opens the container and the smell hits you. 

Weed. 

“Do you smoke?” he asks. 

“Not often,” you admit. You didn’t have the budget for it. 

“Can’t let our best girl go without,” Johnny says, eyes twinkling. He calls you that a lot—’our best girl’. It makes something disgustingly needy inside of you preen its feathers. If only I were yours, you think. He takes out a pre-roll. “I haven’t smoked in a while either. This will probably be enough for the both of us.” 

And God, it is. He abandons his cane inside and you both cram together on the tiny balcony, shoulder to shoulder, passing the blunt back and forth. Johnny takes these deep drags, chest practically heaving with all the smoke he struggles to take in, every inhale ending in a series of light coughs and his fist pounding at his chest. 

“Not a bad view, is it?” he asks you, watching as you hold the smoke in your lungs for as long as you can. He takes his own hit and then passes you the blunt again, careful to keep the burning ember away from you, like a gentleman. His shoulder brushes against yours, and you feel a warm combination of the weed and his proximity thrum through all the vessels in your head and chest. 

You look out over the city. This high up, a good deal of the buildings are below you. The sky is still bright and blue, wispy clouds stretched thin here and there. You look at the streets and find yourself looking for Simon. “Not bad at all.” 

“That’s why I wanted to paint it so goddamn bad,” he admits. “Something pretty like this should be on paper. Canvas, I mean.” 

“Why can’t you finish? The painting,” you add when he raises a brow at your accidental double entendre. You bump his shoulder a little, careful not to truly send him off balance. He wraps his arm around your waist and pulls you to him while he thinks, taking another drag that almost finishes the blunt for good. 

“Dunno, really. I guess I was a different person when I started it. Seems wrong to have a different person finish the painting.” 

“I think that’s cool,” you admit, leaning against him. Weed makes you like that; touchy feely. “We’re changing all the time. Even if you hadn’t gotten hurt, you still wouldn’t be the same person who started it. Does that make sense or is that the weed talking?” 

“Definitely the weed,” he says solemnly.

You try to stay a little clear headed, though by the time you both are stumbling back into the apartment, you are leaning heavily on each other, giggling like school children. 

You make a bowl of popcorn, eat it all, and then make another. At one point, Johnny drops his sweatpants to show you the place in his femur where three pins lie. It takes all your strength to keep your eyes on the scar running along his tan skin and not his soft package three inches up and six inches to the right.

 Simon arrives home during the second bowl of popcorn. He is sweaty—does the man run for a fucking living? With a body like his, you might be persuaded to consider it—and immediately wrinkles his nose at the scent that has permeated the apartment despite you and Johnny’s best efforts. 

“There he is!” Johnny says, sleepily. “There he is, come home from the war.” 

“It’s pronounced run.” 

“Come give me a kiss, LT,” Johnny insists. 

Stuffing his earbuds in their container, he walks around behind the couch and plants a kiss on Johnny’s temple. Johnny makes an unhappy, demanding sound. He turns his upper body, reaching up to cup Simon’s jaw (briefly getting his fingers tangled in the mask below his chin) and brings him down for a full kiss. You look away at the first flash of pink tongue, feeling the heat in your face and about two feet lower.

When they’ve finished, Johnny says: “And what, no kiss for our girl?” 

You turn, eyes wide, mouth agape. Simon’s brows are a hair raised. Even he seems to think this is somewhat bold of Johnny. Before you can open your mouth to insist otherwise (it’s the only polite thing to do when your roommate offers your husband to kiss you), Simon says: “Give her one from me.” 

And he disappears into the bedroom, shedding his shirt along the way and giving you a nice peek at his muscled back, glistening in sweat. Johnny is giving you a sly look—does he know? God, he does, doesn’t he? Everyone knows how you feel about the two of your roommates. Paranoia threatens to send you spiraling. 

Then Johnny’s arm comes down around your shoulder, and the soap bubble of paranoia around you pops. 

Belly full, high, you fall asleep against him before Simon is even out of the shower. Sometimes you have moments of lucidity: Simon’s appearance and being jostled over as the two of you make room for him on the couch. The movie ending and another starting. A third bowl of popcorn. But each time you slip back into awareness, you are tucked underneath Johnny’s arm, nose full of his scent, warm and safe. It’s hard to want to wake up from that. 

The last time you wake up, it is to darkness. 

The movie has ended. Credits have rolled. 

Voices, quiet as whispers just barely audible over the sound of the late night traffic. 

“...scare her off.” 

You struggle to tune in to the conversation, eyelids heavy. “...didn’t seem scared. She wanted it.” 

“You didn’t give it to her.” 

“She’s high,” whispers Johnny. “She can’t consent.” 

“What a good boy you are.” 

Johnny sucks in a little breath. “Don’t, Si…” 

“Hm.” 

“She’s right fucking here.” 

“Asleep.” 

“A temporary condition, in case you didn’t know.” 

“I don’t see you stopping me.” 

Stopping him…your eyes crack open, lids so heavy you can barely move them. Somehow the three of you have fit together on the loveseat, you tucked beneath Johnny’s arm, and Johnny nearly laying across Simon’s lap. One of Simon’s hands—huge, so huge even compared to Johnny’s thick thighs—rests on his husband’s sweatpants-clad leg and is creeping northward. The sight is like a punch to your lower gut. The breath goes out of you in a shaky rush that neither of them seem to notice, the electricity between them too strong for anything to interfere.

“You can do it. You could stop me.” 

“Affirm,” Johnny whispers. His fingers flex against your shoulder unconsciously, and you feel his head whirl toward you, ducking down a little to make sure you are still asleep. You let your eyes fall shut just in time, keeping the rise and fall of your chest even and slow. His exhale brushes against your face and then he is turning away, back towards Simon.

“Then why don’t you.” 

“Cause I…” 

“Hm.” 

“Cause I don’t want to…” 

“Think you’d like it if she woke up,” Simon murmurs, his hand coming to palm Johnny’s rapidly hardening cock. He maps the shape of it through the cotton sweatpants like he’s learning the shape all over again. “You want her to see how desperate you get. That’s the real you, isn’t it, Johnny? You’re only ever just a stiff wind away from turning into a slut.” 

“Your slut,” Johnny breathes. He can’t thrust his hips against Simon’s touch, not without risking waking you, but he does reach out and put a hand over Simon’s, convincing him to use a firmer touch. You risk opening your eyes more, watching as the both of them stroke along the length of his cock slow like syrup. “Your slut, LT, only yours—” 

“Don’t lie to me.” The words put you on edge, but the tone—it’s all in the tone. Simon doesn’t sound like a man who is angry. He isn’t acting like one either, his thumb finding the head of Johnny’s cock beneath the cotton and teasing it softly. It jerks beneath the fabric, and you can’t help it. A sound slips past your lips, something desperate and needy. You clench your eyes shut, feeling both of them go stiff  and silent beside you. 

“She still—?” 

“Think so,” Johnny whispers. He says something else, but it is too quiet to be heard. 

The couch springs creak as Simon stands, and then you are taken up in the larger man’s arms. He still smells like his shower gel, his shirt freshly laundered. For a moment, the change in altitude as you are lifted has your eyes fluttering open, but Simon mutters something quiet that makes your eyes feel heavy all over again, though you don’t sleep, not as he carries you into your room and lays you on the bed, not as he draws back the covers and tucks you under them. 

You are only fast asleep before the sounds begin on the other side of the wall.

[still-searching-for-something]

Today was Yom HaShoah, the day that Jews remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945.

This is a really simple opening statement, but bear with me--I think it gets a lot more... 'yeah, buts' than most people may realize. And I think a good way of illuminating that is to break down the difference between how gentiles and Jews commemorate and remember it.

In my experience, gentiles seem to view the Holocaust as the ultimate example of mankind's barbarity to mankind. Like, the distillation of evil, the most obvious example of dehumanization and bigotry brought to its horrifying and extreme conclusion. They emphasize Nazi Germany's responsibility, elevate the instances of non-Jewish Frenchmen and Poles and Germans who made efforts to save Jewish lives, and generally view Nazi oppression as a catastrophe of whom Jews were one of many victims. And they emphasize the Allied Powers' role in ending it by liberating the camps and invading Germany. Hence why International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27th, the day Auschwitz was liberated.

But Jews have a different perspective.

We view the Holocaust as the most extreme manifestation of--but far from the conclusion to--mankind's barbarity to Jews. Not to his fellow man, per se, not to some universalized insert minority here slot, but to Jews, particularly and deliberately. The Nazis could never have accomplished their genocide were it not for the two millennia of anti-Jewish hatreds and dehumanization embedded deep in the institutions and political structures of European society. They didn't have to persuade Europe that the Jews were incurably evil, the Europeans already believed that. The Nazis had 99% of their work done before they'd even come to power, work that was done by the the Russian Empire, the Romans, Martin Luther, Christian Passion Plays, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the centuries of blood libels, the Fourth Lateran Council, the New Testament, the Spanish Empire, and on and on and on and on. It's as if some people think Hitler just woke up one day, out of the blue, with a total hatred of Jews and managed to use propaganda to convince the previously 100% tolerant Germans to hate Jews, too. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the Holocaust.

The sole responsibility of Nazi Germany in the Holocaust is also just... not true. Vichy France rounded up 13,152 Jews in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, with not a single German participant, and sent them off to be murdered in Auschwitz. Vichy passed antisemitic legislation without any outside coercion--French Jews were hiding as much from the French police as they were from the Gestapo. France, of course, was the home of the Dreyfus Affair--antisemitism was and is a deep part of French society. And it isn't just France. Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Lviv pogroms, killing maybe around 8,000 Jews, Poles perpetrated the Jedwabne pogrom, and that doesn't even bring in that countries like the US, Switzerland and Ireland and Britain blocked Jewish emigrants, and I could just keep going on, but I think you get the point. Quite simply, six million Jews interspersed throughout Europe don't get murdered if it isn't without the collaboration of--or at minimum, silent assent and indifference--of all of their neighbors. The Nazis were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, of course, but almost all of Europe collaborated on some level, too. And this is a history that gets wiped away in favor of the comforting narrative of the Allied Powers bursting into Auschwitz, killing Nazis, and being horrified by what they've found, and then the poor people in the surrounding towns having NO IDEA about what had been going on. I think this narrative is why gentiles have International Holocaust Remembrance Day when Auschwitz was liberated--when they 'came to the rescue'--and why we have Yom HaShoah on the day in the Jewish calendar that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began--when we died on our own terms in spite of our murderers.

Think of the tiny, unwritten, centuries old minhagim of small Jewish shetls and towns like Trochenbrod, which were entirely annihilated. The end of the burgeoning Yiddish cinema. Yiddish going from 13 million speakers to 600,000 today. See how many entries in this list of shetls end with "town/city survived, but all/most Jews exterminated." Imagine for a moment, the potential rabbis and scholars and actors and scientists and artists who could have lived, had they survived or been born of Jews did. Three and a half million Polish Jews, to around 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews today. Imagine if Thessaloniki were still a majority Jewish city. How many Jews worldwide would be alive today had the Holocaust never happened? I've heard estimations of 32 million, compared to the real life 16 million. To kill such a massive number of people from an already tiny minority group--that has real consequences. The cultural loss for the Jewish people is staggering and beyond human comprehension.

And yet, the Nazis deliberate targeting of us is, in many ways, being pushed aside. Magnus Hirschfeld was gay, yes, and advanced the Institute of Sexology way ahead of its time and yeah, the Nazis were homophobic. But they were homophobic for antisemitic reasons. They viewed his work as Jewish perversions BECAUSE Dr. Hirschfeld was Jewish. In fact, they viewed homosexuality as a creation of the Jews. But so many progressive queer people, especially those who run in antizionist circles, seem to be trying to co-opt the Holocaust as being their trauma, downplaying Hirschfeld's Jewishness and holding the Institute up as proof that queer people were the 'real' victims of the Holocaust, entirely shutting out the millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and Slavs who were murdered. You can also see this in anti-mask conservatives comparing masking mandates during the pandemic to anti-Jewish legislation in the Holocaust, or the comparisons of the ongoing war against Hamas as being a 'modern day Holocaust.'

This phenomenon, Holocaust universalization, gets so much pushback from Jews for a reason--it downplays the anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. It's softcore Holocaust denial. And it's so ridiculous we even have to say that, as the whole point of the Holocaust was to be anti-Jewish, to be the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." It's 'All Lives Mattering' the Holocaust. Holocaust universalization, and Holocaust inversion--the phenomenon of talking about Jews, Zionists, or Israelis as perpetrating a 'new Holocaust'--minimizes and trivializes the astounding damage and traumas and death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust. It's a polemical lie, so incendiary and so insulting--imagine telling a sexual assault survivor that they're morally no better than their rapist--that the only thing it can be is antisemitic. It is beyond reprehensible to talk like that, but it's so mainstream and acceptable to do it. Activists who say these things need to examine their own rhetoric, because it's dangerous, antisemitic, and adjacent to Holocaust denial. Not a place I think anyone should want to be.

The Holocaust is not a lesson Jews should have learned, an educational seminar, a 'card' Jews play, a choose your own adventure novel, a philosophical meditation on the nature of mankind's evils, or an empty slate upon which to project modern politics, warfare, or your ideology onto.

The Holocaust is, quite simply, the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945. And today was Yom HaShoah, the day we remember that.

[itsactuallycorrine]

I see your ‘Buck gets mad at Eddie for the cheating/Kim delusions/being complicit in Eddie’s lies’ takes and I raise you:

Eddie feels cornered when confronted with his bad decisions and lashes out to push Buck away, hurting him as only a person who truly knows you can, and he essentially isolates himself

[kaeyachi]

One of the probable reasons as to why Kaeya didn't arrive on time for Crepus and Diluc when they were attacked was because he, and the knights with him, had no vision, and thus, cannot use a teleport waypoint.

Him receiving his cryo vision when he was supposed to get scorched by Diluc was genuinely the biggest slap to the face given to him by Celestia. It arrived just in time to save HIM.

Even now, the vision only heals and shields him alone as a manifestation of his desire to keep living from that fight... but he can't use it to help others.

[another-goblin]

I'm pretty sure if Neuvillette and Zhongli were to meet, they would find a way to resolve their disagreements peacefully.

But imagine, we teleport to Chenyu Vale just to find the whole region reduced to a giant smoking crater with two angry dragons hissing at each other in the middle of it.

I mean, Morax's fighting style involves radical large-scale rearrangement of local geography. And the full extent of Nevillette's true power is still unknown.

[orange-artblog]

joking around was fun but now I did a ~final of Esther‘s design xp

she‘s a supposed Aim (post dark cream) x Axel (errorink) kid made out of the magic of headcanons and inside jokes (/j)

Aim is by @zu-is-here / Axel is by @ari-cuno

anyway I went and had some more fun with her

alsoo this

[dittolicous]

i dont care where you live in the usa or w/e... if you dont vote for biden you are throwing away your vote and enabling trump. because *everyone* thinks their vote doesnt matter and piddles around because of that. hell, everyone thinks 'its only me, it wont make a difference' about THOUSANDS of things, like littering, picking seashells, taking stones from rivers, etc. and in all of those situations THEYRE FUCKING WRONG. if anything unites us, its our damn ability to think we alone are the outlier despite everything indicating otherwise.

and miss me with that 'biden is just as bad/is a murderer' shit. 1) cool, and how do you plan to change things in a mr. nazi-dictator trump world? how are you ACTIVELY making a difference? 2) CHANGE IS INCREMENTAL. the reason things suck so much is because the left keeps taking slow change as 'no change' and giving up before we can gain any momentum to make big change!

if you vote in hamas or w/e to protest... you might as well throw dirt at all those suffering innocent people. you arent saving palestine that way. that is not a helpful protest. you'll only enable trump to win by throwing away your vote. it is the one bit of actual power you have, so USE IT RIGHT! stop in-fighting for one moment! look at what is possible to achieve in reality! dreams arent fulfilled overnight!

when you feel like your vote doesnt matter, remember this - you have to try anyways

[opikiquu]

aventurine pl. Plea s e . PLLEEEEEEASE

[jokerx-art]

snow day on loaas, a little ews doodle i did a few months ago. sharing as a lil nice treat for everyone

i mean it's always snowy there but whatever

[bsky]

~

close up on the 4 in the bg

[speeding-fox]

I can't stop drawing Silver. He has a tight psychic hold on my brain.

[antisocialxconstruct]

[barks digitally]

[storywestistrash]

i am actually so tired of the way westerners treat eastern europeans

[gaymars97]

Hey y’all i’m done with my finals btw- *trips and drops this*

Wip on a “Maya lives but has huge scars and has her left arm privileges revoked” au idea

[star-racing]

would anyone be interested in seeing snippets of my voltron fic as I work on it or do we not really care until it's all finished and the fic is ready to be updated?

[thelyingjoke]

what if we were both kind, well-liked and self-sacrificial people who feel responsible for a whole group of others, going as far as murder to try and help them, stopping them from fighting and trying to sacrificing themselves for me, tearfully (and fruitlessly) asking them to promise to be friends with each other from now on, with the person who feels guilty for our situations crying out for us as we approach our impending execution

[windwardstar]

you know it might just be that my tendency to overwrite might have something to do with the fact my chapters end up being 15k even after undergoing mitosis