#to those who are wondering how i can accurately tell you the number of pages it's thanks to thestorygraph (great app btw)

[lenteur]

Reading two books in two weeks-ish after months (more like a year) of not finding the motivation to pick up a book? I am so proud of myself :D

[ratralsis]

Player Agency and the Utter Lack Thereof

I just don't understand Case of the Golden Idol. I spent a few days playing it, made it to the end, didn't buy the DLC. Just did the main story. And I don't get it. I've never played a game that seemed so uninterested in me as a player in my life. At no point did I ever feel that I had any agency whatsoever, and that's a new feeling from a video game.

If you aren't aware, it's a game often described as being a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn in that you look at scenes and determine, using logic and deductive reasoning and process of elimination and more than a little guesswork, how to fill in the blanks in a notebook which describe them.

It's unlike Return of the Obra Dinn in that Return of the Obra Dinn had you playing as an actual character whose actions meant something. In Case of the Golden Idol, nothing you do means anything. Nothing you do affects anything. Nothing you do changes anything. Your task is not to play as a character in this world. You cannot fail. You cannot succeed. You only fill in the puzzles and move on to the next one. And I've never, ever seen a game do that quite so hard as Case of the Golden Idol.

You can argue, well, in Obra Dinn, you weren't REALLY much of a character. But you were! You were the insurance guy, with a fucking magic watch, and you were trying to provide closure to the families of those who died at sea!

In fucking Mario Picross on SNES, you talk to Mario and Wario after a certain number of stages and they congratulate you, the player, for doing the puzzles! Case of the Golden Idol won't even do that! You're nobody! Nobody congratulates you, because there's no "you" to congratulate!

You start Case of the Golden Idol and everything unfolds in the specific way that it was meant to. That it was always meant to. That it, in fact, already did. You have no influence over things. There are no decisions. As a player, you open the game, view a scene, and then describe it to yourself. Once you've described it accurately, you move on. You're not telling it to someone to illuminate the mystery of the events. Characters in the story know the events. There are witnesses, living people, in just about every scene who can tell you what's going on. But you can't interview them, or ask them. They don't know you're there. They weren't being recorded surreptitiously by someone. They're just existing in the world of Case of the Golden Idol, and you're…

I don't know who you are. I don't know why you're doing this. Any of it. You can't stop what happens. The game just ends, abruptly, in the only way a game about a Golden Idol can end, which I won't spoil in case you haven't finished it yourself and you'd like to.

It left me scratching my head and wondering why the game was so loved. I guess people like puzzle games, and I kind of, do, too, but I felt nothing when Case of the Golden Idol was complete. It's why I didn't buy the DLCs. It's why I won't buy the sequels.

Even fucking Sudoku puzzles can be fun if you're aiming for a record time. Tetris lets you compete against yourself for better scores. You can't keep playing more Case of the Golden Idol puzzles hoping for a faster time or higher score, because each one is so unique to itself that there's no way to redo them.

So I can't compare it to stumbling across a random Sudoku puzzle on the ground which you play and then walk away from. It's not even that. It's more like finding a 10-page short story that has a quiz at the end of every page that makes sure you understood what you've read so far before you can move on to the next page, and then it ends.

I just don't get it. I guess, for some people, the quiz itself is fun enough to make the framing device worthwhile, but the framing device is the heart and soul of a video game to me.

Anyway, that's my take. If you liked the game, awesome! It's well put-together and I'm glad it exists even if I don't understand it or like it and I wish the developers well. There exist many things in this world which are simply not for me. The older I get, the more of them I find, and that's just the way it is.

[animehouse-moe]

The Knight Blooms Behind Castle Walls Volume 2: A World of Color

Yes yes, it's back for both the second and second-to-last volume. It's got all of what the first volume does, but adds some nice little pieces here and there and expands on the nature of being a knight outside of what you might "expect". It's still fun, it's still quite interesting, and it's still impressively accurate.

So I'll cut to the chase to make this a short one. There's nothing to really expand on here in terms of "story". Rosa is still a page for essentially all of this volume, and the day to day pieces still exist. It's more so what we learn from it.

I think the piece that really stands out, and is shown throughout is Rosa's approach to honour, chivalry, and knighthood. We as readers get to explore what she feels best defines a knight, and where she sets her sights on her future. Who she not only wants to be as a knight, but as a person.

It does a lot to express Rosa's character and her strong sense of duty and passion for what's around her through both implicit and explicit pieces. Dreaming of fighting off an enemy to save your home, or slumbering in a forest with nature, or standing up to an adult for what you think is right. Rosa checks off all the boxes to be a really outstanding person. And it's quite wonderful to experience, and in a sense hearkens back to her conversation with the Bard. There are an infinite number of ways to create the story of a Knight, and alongside its passion for history, this story endeavors to weave a tale of Rosa and Knighthood.

Also, if it wasn't already clear, this manga has some really pretty art. I think the character designs can are sort of neither here nor there, but the clothing and environment work is really well done and is very strongly driven by the author's passion for its history.

Now, moving on to more separated pieces that I like about the story! They don't paint knights as some ineffable existence. They retire, they get injured, they wander and misbehave and all manner of other things. Of course, we've seen Sir Hirundo as a great example already, but this volume introduces a new character: the baker, Grus. A rock hard man that many didn't believe would be able to move on from violence, but found passion and happiness in providing for and aiding the people around him through peaceful fashion.

Next up, we've got the dyer, Gardenia. She's a woman that took over the business from her father, which is uncommon at the time. As such, she lives a decent way away from the rest of the village to avoid any potential issues (but also for historical justifications). It does a really great job of balancing the point that anybody can do anything, but also makes sure not to misrepresent the time period. Within that though, it takes creative liberty and gives us one of the only real forms of art in the story so far. It's really pretty in that sense of pent up expression through calm avenues.

And I think I'll leave off with this last little bit. A simple doctor's visit that's handled really, really well. They don't make a big deal of it, they don't crack some weird joke, and they're incredible considerate. Right away, the Doctor waits for everyone else to leave the room before saying anything to Rosa, and from there tells her where to go regarding that info if she's uncomfortable with speaking about it to them. Clear cut, well addressed, and very appreciated.

The Knight Blooms Behind Castle Walls is really clear cut in what it wants: historical fiction with a romanticization of knighthood. And it's executed wonderfully on both of those. It's not going for some lofty story of goal or anything, but it wants to nerd out over it and show off how cool all this stuff is. It's a very passionate title, and it understands that. It's not trying to make it work for 10+ volumes, but rather, it seems to know just when to cut conversation on your favorite topic before people start to get bored. The pacing is brisk enough that you don't end up sinking when taking in all of the info, but it's not too fast that you can't relate to or understand Rosa. Just all the right notes for something simply enjoyable.

[mypoisonedvine]

Side Effects | Bruce Banner x reader

summary: you never know what might be in the beakers at another chemist's station. you never know which of your colleagues might come along just in the knick of time to become the only antidote to your affliction.

word count: 3.6k

warnings: smut! (dub con due to sex pollen), semi-public sex (because technically someone could have walked by but unlikely), guilt/hesitance, kinda pining??, fingering, creampie,

a/n: yes, this is an accurate depiction of emergency shower protocol in a chemical lab and yes it is every lab technician's worst nightmare. thankfully the other stuff is not an accurate depiction of any known chemical, lol.

You wiped your forehead with a tired sigh, staring down at the calculations in front of you before using your pen to scribble over them before tearing out the page and throwing it away.

“You still do that by hand?” Bruce interjected, making you look up at where he was leaning in the doorway to the lab, watching you work.

“Oh, Dr. Banner!” you greeted with a smile, wondering if it was too ecstatic. You weren’t so good at the ‘playing it cool’ thing like he seemed to be.

“We have all those fancy screens and digital whiteboards, you know,” he explained as he stepped in and looked around at your work. “Not to mention the computer can do that stuff for you.”

“I know,” you scoffed, “but I always feel better doing it myself, on real paper. Not that I’m having any luck at the moment…”

"Here, I'll give them a quick look while you take a break," he offered, glancing at the numbers from over your shoulder. "You just get up and stretch your legs for a minute, doc."

You always thought it was sort of silly for him to call you that when he was a doctor as well, but you didn't complain.

Regardless, you were about to tell him that it was fine and you didn't need a break, but he was leaning in closer to take your seat and the proximity was so intimidating that you hopped up and went along with it anyways. He sat down and pondered your calculations while you circled the lab, taking a moment to appreciate how nice it felt to stand up and move around after sitting for so long.

"Your handwriting is…" Bruce trailed off, adjusting his glasses.

"Feminine and graceful?" you finished sarcastically.

"Sure," he chuckled.

"Yeah, just like me—" you started to quip, but mid-sentence you (ironically) stumbled and tripped, using a nearby table to catch yourself— but you accidentally grabbed onto a beaker, which tipped over and smashed onto the ground. The liquid inside spilled onto the floor just before you did, and you winced as you fell into the puddle of the unknown substance.

“Shit!” you hissed as you scrambled to get up, looking down at your clothes and seeing they were covered in the fluid, which was beginning to evaporate, or steam, or something. Remembering lab safety protocols, you instantly began to strip, closing your eyes and wishing Bruce hadn’t come in just before this. As you shirked your lab coat, shirt, and skirt, you walked to the emergency shower, pulling the lever and gasping when the chilly stream of water poured down on you. Bruce looked at you with wide eyes before being kind enough to turn around as you shivered and removed your bra and underwear, now completely naked and weakly scrubbing yourself with your hands in hopes that none of the chemical had gotten onto your skin.

“What is it?” he asked nervously, turning his head back enough that you could hear him over the flow of water, but hopefully not so much that he could see anything important.

“I don’t know,” you answered, “it’s not mine. It’s something Dr. Sutherland was working on…”

“Is it… are you in pain at all?” he asked, even more concerned, and you tried to decide if you could feel any effects.

“N-no…” you answered hesitantly. You felt hot, and strange, and you were covered in rolling chills, but you figured that was just the situation you were in— naked in a tepid shower in front of your coworker who just so happened to be incredibly sexy.

“I should call poison control,” Bruce offered as he reached for his cell phone.

“No, I’m fine,” you denied as the water flow slowed down and you wiped your face, confident that you looked like a complete mess— but at least you saved yourself from whatever was in that beaker, right?

“Here,” Bruce offered an emergency blanket to you after pulling it off a nearby shelf, and it was not at all absorbent but it helped with the draft as you stepped away from the shower which was still leaking the last few drops of water onto the drain on the floor.

“Thank you,” you nodded nervously, shivering and dripping and looking back at him with no idea what to say at all.

“Do you feel alright? I should check you for burns,” he suggested. “I— I won’t look…”

“Please,” you sighed, pulling the blanket a bit to expose your chest and stomach. He brushed his hand over the skin there, making you instantly whine as heat burned just under your skin, clouding your mind and making you crave even more.

"Did that hurt?" he asked anxiously, pulling away, but you stepped closer.

"No it's… it's good, it's so good."

He furrowed his brow as he looked down at you, putting the back of his hand to your forehead. "You're burning up, doc, you must be running a fever of 105."

"Touch me more, please," you whimpered. It was like you were in a dream, everything foggy and distant, and the only time that anything made sense was when he touched you. Or maybe it was that his touch sent you further into delirium; you couldn't be sure.

He gasped when he looked at your quivering legs only to find slick arousal running down the inside of them, threatening to drip onto the floor.

"Oh," he sighed.

"Please," you begged mindlessly, "Dr. Banner, I n-need you…"

"No, you need medical attention."

You whined and grabbed as his shirt, humming at the feeling of his warm skin just beneath. If the forearms that he often left exposed in rolled-up sleeves were anything to go buy, his chest was probably toned and tanned, lightly dusted with dark hair… you were all but drooling at the thought. "Please, Bruce… just help me," you pleaded, looking up into his eyes which were swirling with conflict.

"I can't," he shook his head. "I'd be taking advantage."

He must have seen the heartbreak of rejection make you wince, because he tried to soothe you with his hands resting on your arms— even just that contact making you suppress a moan.

"I've wanted this for so long," he explained, "and you— you haven't. You're unwell, you need to go to a hospital."

You sobbed a little at the idea of being taken away from him and examined by strangers, when you knew the solution was right in front of you. "No, no Bruce they'll touch me! Nobody can touch me but you, I only want you."

He scoffed, but you heard the weakness in it and you needed him to give in soon before you melted from your own hear. "You're deranged— delirious," he reiterated.

"It'll feel so good, please Bruce, I'll be so good for you— anything you want, I'll do it, I'm yours."

"Stop talking like that," he winced. "I can't… I can't."

"I need to feel you inside me, Dr. Banner, I need it more than anything. It's just gonna get worse… please, help me. I want you. I trust you."

"You'll hate me in the morning," he asserted. "God, this is so wrong…"

But much to your relief, he reached down and hesitantly slid his thick middle finger through your folds, gasping gently as he felt how wet you were. "I should t-take you somewhere private."

"No, need you now— right here," you pleaded, trying to chase his touch with your hips.

"But if someone came by—" he began to fret, glancing at the door; but his attention was turned back to you by your hands weaving into his hair.

"Nobody else stays this late, god, Bruce please I just need you so bad—"

He cut you off with a sudden kiss, which was enough on its own to make warmth bloom in your gut, but then he started to move his finger again and you shuddered with a moan that was muffled by his lips.

"Maybe I can make you come like this," he offered as he pulled back just enough to whisper to you, "would that help you? It'll take the edge off."

You bucked and moaned against his fingers, just those subtle touches driving you wild. "N-no, it has to be inside! You have to fuck me, I need your cock."

He breathed through his teeth, like he was almost considering it, but then looked away. "I can't," he shook his head.

"Can't or won't?"

He frowned. "Won't. I'll get you off with my fingers, otherwise it would be… too selfish."

"Bruce, I'm literally begging you for it," you sighed, the irritated tone that you'd intended lost in the moans he elicited by rubbing your swollen clit.

"I know," he winced, "I know and it's killing me that I can't give you what you're asking for… I swear if it wasn't like this…" he trailed off as you looked up at him with your bottom lip between your teeth.

"What would it be like?" you asked lowly. "Tell me how you would fuck me."

For all his shyness before, there was a brief switch in his demeanor as he leaned in, breath hot against your neck as he whispered, two fingers sliding into your channel at the exact moment that he spoke.

"So fucking hard."

You whimpered, knees wobbling a bit as you tried to ride his fingers— but he wasn't pushing back, wasn't giving you enough force to balance against when you sought more friction. "P-please, Bruce— I know you want to, please, please baby I need it so bad…"

"I know," he breathed, free hand cradling your face as his thumb stroked your cheek, and it was so needlessly compassionate, so effortlessly soothing that your heart had no choice but to clench at his tenderness. Other parts of you clenched as well, in much more literal ways, but the heart thing was more important.

You gingerly reached forward and palmed his cock through his pants, moaning when you felt how hard it was. "You're desperate, too," you informed him with a little smile. "It hurts, doesn't it? It aches."

"Yes," he answered tensely.

"I'm hurting too. I'm aching, for you. Please, Bruce, help me."

As he pulled back and examined your face, he chewed his lip and contemplated. He couldn't stand to see you in pain, but he couldn't comprehend what he had to do to help you. Well, okay, that's not totally accurate because he had actually "comprehended" the idea of making love to you plenty of times. But that was just a fantasy, a very misguided one that he only indulged in in his weakest moments. And in those fantasies, shockingly enough, you were always completed lucid and of sound mind and body. He sadly could not say that for you at the moment, and of course he couldn't because of course when you were sober and healthy, you didn't see him that way.

Bruce prided himself on his logic, his integrity, his patience. Suddenly, those qualities were falling prey to a much deeper, carnal instinct that saw this not as a predicament but as an opportunity. Logic states, after all, that it would be wasteful to have everything he wanted thrown into his lap and to let it go to waste.

"Fuck," he groaned as he kissed you again, fucking you faster with his fingers. You moaned and went for his belt, barely managing to open it with your hands shaking so much; part of you had considered just trying to rip the leather off of him, and with the force of your need it seemed almost plausible.

Finally getting his trousers opened just enough to reach inside, you purred as you reached in and navigated past his boxers to wrap your fingers around his hard cock. It was so thick and smooth and hot and you almost wanted to drop to your knees and take it in your throat right then, but you had better plans.

He pulled his fingers out of you slowly, grinning against you at the way you whined, before wrapping his arms around you and quickly instructing you to jump.

It was infuriating, how easily he caught you when you wrapped your body around him. Infuriating and so painfully sexy.

He never broke the kiss as he walked the two of you to your lab table, sliding the papers aside and onto the floor to set you on it. You started on his aggravatingly-small shirt buttons while he pushed his trousers and boxers down the rest of the way, and god his cock was right there between your legs, so close but very much too far away for your liking.

You didn't have the time or energy to get his shirt off, settling for just running your hands over the exposed skin instead. He grinned and watched the path your hands made, hissing slightly when they wrapped around his shaft— for a second you swore you could feel it throb.

"Don't make me wait anymore," you whispered your plea, sighing a little when he nodded.

"Okay baby," he agreed.

"Been waiting so long," you whined.

"Me too," he nodded, and with a little push, his cock slid all the way into you and filles you to the brim. Even when you were completely drenched, the girth of him was so wide that it stung, that it tore you open, but you loved it. Your head fell back and just from him being inside you, you came. The substance had you so needy and sensitive that that was all it took. It wasn't enough yet, of course. You knew you needed more. But God, he felt so good you could hardly breathe.

"Baby," you heard Bruce gasp, his fingers digging into your hips. Your chest twisted when he laughed a little, breathless and just teetering on the line between complimentary and mocking. "Did you just come?"

You considered playing dumb, but nodded instead.

His smile was apparent when he pressed his lips just below your ear to suck on the delicate skin there, his teeth trailing up to nibble your earlobe lightly. You hoped he would leave a mark, you hoped he would leave lots of marks that you could remember this by for weeks to come.

"Couldn't help yourself, huh?" he asked breathlessly, whispering so quietly you could barely hear it over the beating of your own pulse which echoed in your ears.

"You feel so good," you justified, "so fucking good, Bruce."

"You too," he sighed as he finally pulled back and slid into you again, the friction making your back arch instantly. "Even better than I imagined."

You smiled and wrapped your legs around his hips, forcing him to push deeper with each thrust. When he pushed you to your limits it felt like you might just fall apart right there, but it was so worth it.

As if that wasn't enough, he reached down and circled a thumb over your overstimulated clit, grinning down at you at the sight of you writhing and bucking wildly in his arms.

"Fuck!" you cried as you tightened your hands on his shoulders into fists hard enough to risk tearing through his shirt.

"Too much?"

"More," you pleaded instead, crying out when he gave you exactly what you wanted with fast, rough thrusts into your drenched walls. "Yes," you sobbed, "yes, fuck— m'gonna come, Bruce, gonna come again."

"Go ahead," he encouraged, voice so much rougher than normal, "show me how good it feels, baby."

It felt like his words were the thin that pushed you over the edge, as if your body somehow both understood and obeyed his command. You could feel a renewed wave of slick leak out from you, enough that you could hear the wetness in each slap of his hips against yours. His name was somewhere in the litany of curses and praises that spilled from your lips, your mind too clouded with hazy pleasure to keep track of what you were actually saying.

"Just like that," he groaned, "doing so good, fuck, say my name just like that every time I make you come."

An easy enough stricture to follow, especially when it seemed like he was all you could think about. He looked so different with his clothes half-shorn and his eyes dark with lust. He hadn't taken his glasses or labcoat off and you weren't sure which of those you were happier about.

His lips and hands were all over you; you couldn't even keep track of everywhere he was touching you, that's how overwhelming it was. "God, you're so fucking perfect," he groaned against your skin, finding a hardened nipple as his tongue explored you and wrapping his lips around it. "You are so goddamn sexy, you know that? I love seeing you with your legs spread for me like a needy little whore. I love hearing you moan and knowing I'm the one making you feel this good."

He took a moment to look at you and soak in your shocked reaction to his words before leaning in to continue.

"I love feeling you come for me," he purred in your ear.

"Then you're gonna really like what I'm about to do," you shivered.

"Yeah? You can gimme another one already?" he smiled. "Such a good girl…"

You really couldn't help it, it felt like everything he did only enhanced your pleasure— his words, his hands all over you, not to even mention his cock inside you. As much as the hedonistic corner of your brain was happy to let this go on forever, the ramifications of constant orgasms were finally catching up with you as you wondered how much more of this you could take.

"F-fuck, are you close?" you asked weakly. "Want you to come for me, Bruce, please."

"I-I'll pull out," he suggested, although the way he looked down at his length sinking into you and pulling back out, covered in your abundant arousal, didn't exactly indicate that he was willing and able to actually make good on his offer.

"No!" you yelped, pulling him closer by his unbuttoned shirt. "It needs to be inside, Bruce, please come inside me."

"Fuck," he hissed through his teeth.

"Please, Bruce, please, promise you'll come inside."

"I will," he sighed, "fuck, I will baby, I promise I'm gonna fill you up so good, you're gonna have my come so fucking deep inside you…"

"Yes!" you moaned, completely unabashed as the unknown substance had apparently absolved you of any shame whatsoever. "Yes, I want it, Bruce, I want your come."

The moment you felt his seed start to paint your walls, you felt relief begin to wash over you. Your mind and body relaxed, the overwhelming heat under your skin subsiding into a comforting warmth, the desperation that had burned in your gut satiated at last.

And that left you staring up at him in realization of what you had done, just as he looked back at you with the same.

"God, I'm so sorry—" he shuddered, moving to pull away. Instinctively your legs wrapped around his hips again, holding him close.

"N-no, wait," you groaned, "it's okay. Don't go."

"You don't hate me," he said, the exhaustion in his tone making it hard to tell if it was a question or a statement.

"Never," you sighed with a weak smile, sitting up to clutch his face and kiss him again. "God, Bruce, now I'm just wondering what took us so long."

"Our lab safety is just too good, clearly," he smiled as he kissed you again, pulling back a little too soon to examine your face where he held it in his hands. "Are you okay? You should still probably go to a doctor…"

"I'm already with a doctor," you smirked, "and his treatment was very effective."

"Yeah, that was…" he trailed off, wide eyes as if he were reminiscing about what had only just transpired.

"Sorry for being so… desperate," you cringed. "I didn't mean to… um… impose…"

He just laughed and kissed your forehead, making you feel your cheeks warm a bit; ironic that with everything that had just happened, this was what made you blush. "A beautiful, amazing woman that I've been dreaming about for months begs me to take her in the laboratory… really inconvenient."

"I mean, cleaning up these papers and the broken glass is gonna be pretty tedious, along with the incident report," you frowned.

"I'll help you with it," he offered.

"Tomorrow," you decided. "Right now, I'm taking you to my place."

"Is that so?" he asked with a bemused smirk.

"Yep. We both are in serious need of a shower, and then I wanna go again," you grinned wickedly.

"I thought you said you weren't feeling the effects of the chemical anymore," he recalled, voice tinted with concern.

"I'm not," you reassured, "I'm just feeling the effects of you."

[korasonata]

Joe and Cleo model streams extended cut Part 2! (Streams 3 and 4)

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STREAM 3

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Cleo (reading chat): “Be careful with that thing” Im very careful with knives. Except for that time when I wasn’t.

—

Cleo (in response to chat asking about her friend Corpse): Corpse is not my husband. Ok? And they wouldn’t be anyway. Because they.

—

Cleo: I’m very confused Joe. I don’t know how to feel.

—

Cleo: Ok. I can do that. We can do that chat! I believe in you and myself…I- I don’t. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t.

Joe: That’s why you got me here to believe in you!

Cleo: Awww, thanks Joe!

Joe: You’re welcome Cleo!

—

Cleo (reading chat): “Black beer or clear beer?” No beer! I don’t believe in beer, it’s fictional. That’s just how it goes.

Joe: Yeah. Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.

—

Joe: One of my viewers asks “are you and Cleo real life childhood friends?” Yes, obviously as you can tell from our accents—

Both: We grew up—

Joe: On the same block—

Cleo: Yeah.

Joe: Uh, along the Thames there—

Cleo: Yes.

Joe: You know, we took different paths in life. Cleo obviously went to university and perused geology and teaching, whereas I ended up with an asbo and a bunch of weird telekinetic powers and things just kind of went wild from there.

Cleo: Yeah.

Joe: But now we’re back together again.

Cleo: Yeah! I mean— I mean after you saved the world a few times. It’s, ah…it’s necessary it— it felt right. To come back together.

Joe: Yep. It’s just— it’s just…it was time.

Cleo (reading chat): You thought Joe Hills was from Glasgow? Oh no no no no no no. No no, same— it’s a cockney accent, can’t you tell?

Joe: Yeah, that’s why I’m so good at rhyming.

Cleo: *snickering* I don’t think they believe us.

—

Joe: What is the British equivalent of a coffee shop?

Cleo: Umm…a coffee shop.

—

Joe: It looks like piece 3/4 will make sense at some point in the future.

Cleo: But today is not that day. And to be honest, tomorrow’s not looking great either.

—

Cleo (reading chat): *laughing* Joe thinks everyone is as well adjusted as he is!

Joe: Oh, I’m terribly adjusted! Do not adjust your Joes! It won’t help, we’ve tried!

—

Joe (reading chat): “You all heard Cleo say Joe would look good in shorts right?”

Cleo: *heavy sigh*

Joe: I mean, I’m gonna say, I’m not getting as much exercise as I used to, so it’s- don’t get your hopes up Cleo.

Cleo: I- I-…I mean, there’s only one person I wanna see in shorts and it’s not you, so we’re all good.

—

Joe (in British accent): Spot on.

Cleo: Better. You’re getting better at that you know. You’re not great, but you’re getting better.

Joe: Yeah. Well the thing is I need to be able to blend when I’m there. You know I don’t wanna call attention to myself in my accent.

Cleo: …Joe?

Joe: Yeah?

Cleo: Nothing you ever do is blendable.

Joe: …That explains why I’m so bad at painting. And making margaritas. Just kidding, I’m great at making margaritas. The secret is to get real Cointreau.

Cleo: I…Don’t— I’ve never really had a margarita.

Joe: WHAAAAAAAAAT??!!?!

—

STREAM 4

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Joe: So, I’ve got to cut up the last couple pieces from my fourth page out of 17.

Cleo: Is this where I tell you I’ve got about 6 pages left on the dot?

Joe: Out of how many, though?

Cleo: Out of about…14?

Joe: Wow, so you’re like, halfway there.

Cleo: Well, literally the instructions say I’m halfway there. Although—

Joe: Oh really? They congratulate you on that?

Cleo: W—no, they—they—……thanks Joe…

—

Joe: I bet whoever makes those models, now that you and I are getting them back in vogue, it’s like “oh no! If only I hadn’t sold the last one to Cleo, I could sell 1000 of these today.”

Cleo: I mean, I don’t think anybody in the stream is going to go out and buy one when they’ve seen what it’s done to us. And our souls. Or lack thereof.

—

Joe (reading chat): “If Joe is Jar Jar and Cleo is Padme, who’s Bail Organa?” …I dunno, VintageBeef.

Cleo: *laughing* Just—Just VintageBeef.

Joe: Just VintageBeef.

Cleo: It just is! You and I both know that, so you guys need to know it.

Joe: Yeah, cause like I don’t think Bail Organa had any kids.

Cleo: Yeah he did, he had Leia.

Joe: Well, but he adopted Leia.

Cleo: Ok.

Joe: And VintageBeef seems like, of all the Hermits, the one to most likely actually have the capacity to take on that sort of responsibility? I don’t know…

Cleo: No no, I can— I’m just running through the Hermits in my head, and I’m just like yeah that—that reads. That reads pretty well.

—

Joe (Dude bro voice): Has your heart even been weighed by Anubis, bro?

Cleo (dude bro voice): *laughing* Do you even lift? (Regular voice)…or no. That’s the opposite of what you want to do with a heart…

—

Cleo: I threaten to murder people all the time. One might say it’s part of my brand.

—

Cleo (reading chat): “Death threats are Cleo’s love language” *laughing* You’re not wrong.

—

Cleo: I’ve made plenty of mistakes! Learn from me! Like plenty of mistakes, which is why I’m doing this in my 40s. Joe just made his mistakes faster, that’s why he’s doing it in his 30s.

SILENCE

Joe: …Most of the jokes I wanna make about that, I—just in case my kid is tuning into the stream I’m gonna not—

Cleo: *laughing*

Joe: Because I am legally required not to disparage my ex-wife in front of her.

—

Cleo (in response to someone saying Joe’s hands are sufficient): No, my hands are sufficient. Joe has dexterous, wonderful hands. Get it right chat.

—

Cleo (about her Garrus mug): Next stream I shall use this for my beverage which I shall pretend is coffee. Which is what I used to do to the children at school.

Joe: Wait, you would pretend you were drinking coffee? What were you actually drinking? Rum?

—

Joe: My best is still the same, but my worst is getting less bad.

Cleo: That’s depressing and accurate. All at the same time.

Joe (tiredly): Yay! I strive for accuracy in all of my depressing statements. Cause it makes it harder to rebut them.

Cleo (softly and with care): I know.

—

Cleo (mocking people who push boundaries): If you were a PIN, what would you be?

Joe: *laughing* Like a PIN number?!

Cleo: Yeah!

Both: *laughing*

Joe: If you could be any PIN code—

Cleo: If you had an—what—what was your favourite PIN code, for example?

Joe: What’s your favourite 4-digit number?

Cleo: *laughing* What’s the 4-digit number you remember most in the world?

Joe: What’s the easiest to remember 4-digit number?

—

Cleo: I’m not going to get sushi from the Asda!

Joe (voice steadily getting higher): Oh my gosh, I am so glad that my face camera is off when we do those collab streams with Xisuma. Because like *laughing through the pain* a lot of them are just me screaming internally, but I’m not pushing to talk. And the reason I’m not pushing to talk is I’m also kind of screaming externally? And it’s just like, it’s just— *very high pitched incomprehensible gibberish*

Cleo: You—you do wonder sometimes with, with—with him. *laughing* See, thing is sometimes I’m not sure if he’s being serious or not, so—

Joe: If he says that he buys sushi at the Asda, I’m like 99% confident that he’s being serious.

Cleo: *laughing* He’s adorable and needs to be protected from this world.

[bigskydreaming]

I am once more begging people, BEGGING, to at least READ Batman #416 if you’re going to cite every moment of Dick meeting Jason and then blowing up at Bruce, except in a totally ‘that’s not at all how it happened’ kinda way.

If I have to read ONE MORE sizzling hot take about how Dick blew up at Bruce and stormed off at the end of that encounter, when THIS is how it ACTUALLY ended....

Ah yes, the famous Dick Grayson temper, better described as ‘someone else loses their shit at Dick and fandom twists it into the exact opposite so he’s actually the bad guy all along.’

Was Dick heated before that point? Yup. Did he have reason to be? Also yup. Did Bruce, however, have reason to be heated that Dick had the gall to be coming back to his childhood home to confront him about the fact that after eighteen months of not speaking, when Bruce is the one who CHOSE to not even say goodbye to Dick or make any effort to still make a place for Dick in his life after firing him, with the only possible indication in all that time through which Dick was expected to come up with even an INKLING that Bruce missed him was discovering from reading the paper that Bruce had given his old mantle to a new, even younger partner? Its gonna be a big fat NOPE from me, guys.

There’s an exchange between them a few pages before this that always resonated with me....

Bruce: The truth is, I taught you everything I could. It was time for you to step out on your own.

Dick: So you figured the best thing for you to do was drive me out of your life, right? That’s exactly what you do to anyone who gets too close. Always hurt them before they have a chance to hurt you. It didn’t matter to you that I didn’t have any life other than the one we shared.

Like, I can not express any more clearly why it drives me so B-A-N-A-N-A-S to see people spin this so that it was Bruce that was somehow the victim of his son’s tempestuous, nomadic ways. Like he was somehow left behind, that Dick outgrew him or moved on, and everything Dick felt about Robin after the fact was him throwing spoiled temper tantrums that someone dared pick up something he no longer wanted. Umm. No times infinity and beyond.

Bruce was the one with all the power. Bruce was the one making all the choices. All Dick had, at most, was the choice to either stay somewhere Bruce seemed intent on driving him away from, or go somewhere else. This issue clearly expressed that like. Bruce wasn’t open to talking. Not when he fired Dick as Robin, there was no negotiating that, and even throughout this whole encounter here, where Dick comes here and says “I think you owe me some explanations” because based on everything Bruce was doing and how radically opposed those actions are to the last interactions he and Bruce had, which had a HUGE impact on Dick’s life, yes, he WAS owed explanations here, make no mistake....even here, Bruce spends the whole encounter acting like he’s being unfairly interrogated, like its trying his patience to even have to deal with Dick being there at all....

Phones work two ways, Bruce. There’s two people in this dynamic. If you haven’t heard from Dick in eighteen months, its equally true that he hasn’t heard from you in eighteen months. And if you missed him so damn much, you know what was always a perfectly valid way to express that, which DIDN’T involve anyone else? Picking up the damn phone and calling Dick and telling him that.

Bruce acts like that was never even an option, like HE was the one stuck with limited choices based on Dick’s behavior throughout all this time, and that’s just flat out, unconditionally, one hundred percent, NOT TRUE. Bruce was the one in charge. The one calling the shots. The one with the resources, the power, the authority. Dick was ALWAYS the one who had more to lose, of the two of them.

And Bruce knew all this when he took Dick in. He knew all this when he took Robin away from Dick while the latter was still a teenager, still living at home. And he was the one who failed to even so much as OFFER Dick an alternative take on how he could still be there, still be in Bruce’s life, part of his family, still share in being part of his life, the life the two of them had shared, now that Bruce had made the choice that Dick no longer had the option of living out his part of that life in the manner they’d BOTH built up for him originally.

And yet for so many years, fandom has added insult to injury by acting like the cherry on top here, Bruce giving away the very mantle he took from Dick, like this was somehow completely reasonable because in comparison, Dick is the one being unreasonable. People completely gloss over that little act of Bruce’s to focus instead on how Dick reacted, instead of giving that betrayal of trust its own fair due and focus, and the problem is....they don’t even actually focus on how Dick actually acted! Again, notice it was Dick who approached Bruce, and Bruce who told Dick to leave. It was Dick who had actual cause to be angry, but Bruce who blew up and broke shit because Dick dared demand answers. 

And this is the way Dick leaves things with Jason, btw. I know people know this part by now, mostly at least, about the phone number and such, but how many people have actually SEEN how that played out rather than just heard it summarized in a dry recitation of events that underplays just how that interaction went?

Like, that wasn’t just Dick acting like this was being FORCED upon him and bleeding reluctance at every turn. He went above and fucking beyond to make Jason feel welcomed and secure in his position as Robin. But that’s not how the narrative goes in fandom, is it? Even when acknowledging this part, people act like Dick was at most doing the bare minimum, instead of acknowledging that Dick didn’t owe anyone this at all. No, it wasn’t Jason’s fault he became Robin, but NONE of this was Dick’s fault, Dick’s choice, or Dick’s RESPONSIBILITY. He wasn’t living at home, in Bruce’s life, and he wasn’t adopted yet let alone even still Bruce’s ward at this point. He’d aged out at eighteen. Dick had NO actual ties to Bruce and by extension Jason at this particular moment in time, and thus no ACTUAL obligations to either of them, no matter how much fandom harps on him having failed Jason as a brother back during this time when more accurately, Bruce was actively failing Dick as a father - as in not even being one, but Dick’s responsibilities towards a family he didn’t have at the moment are supposed to be still intact? NOPE. Don’t think so.

But Dick, INSTEAD, puts Jason FIRST, puts him OVER his obviously hurt and bitter feelings to focus on what’s best for Jason here, and gives him literally everything he CAN to do right by Jason here. He gives Jason his own old costume and clear approval, cementing Jason’s place as Robin in a way not even Bruce could when giving it to Jason, because it was never Bruce’s to actually pass on. Jason even wonders earlier in the issue if Dick might want his old role back, and Dick puts that fear to rest, without any hesitation or doubt.

In addition, Dick offers up support and solidarity he doesn’t owe Jason, doesn’t owe anyone, because its HIS time, HIS support, its not something someone can take for granted and yet too many people do....especially considering that in the hyper-fixation on how much support and time Dick supposedly DIDN’T offer or grant Jason, most people pay next to no attention to the fact that it wasn’t like Dick was being given time or support by Bruce, ie Dick is going out of his way to offer stuff he’s not even getting himself, because he RECOGNIZES from that what its like not to have it. Basically what I mean is all that talk about Dick being a hypocrite for doing to others what he complains about Bruce not doing for him? Patently untrue, as we see here, because this is Dick actively acting upon what he’s missing out on by making sure that others don’t miss out on it because of Bruce’s failings or emotional repression.

And look at the end result.....Jason’s enjoying his teamup with Dick, these aren’t two people who look pained at being forced into proximity or acting like the other is a burden to be around or thinking the other doesn’t really want to be here. They were comfortable from practically the word go, because Dick knows how to make people uncomfortable but he also knows how to make people comfortable, and he made the CHOICE, the INTENT to make sure he was someone Jason felt WANTED to be there with him, the complete opposite of someone who is taking out their bitterness or resentment on their replacement or at least not trying to hide it very well.

So my question is.....what the hell else is it people wanted Dick to do? When they cite this issue specifically, at least, when they talk about the time Dick went to Gotham to confront Bruce about Robin, when they talk about the phone number or the costume or the teamup or the things that so often get mentioned in passing like they’re insignificant or the bare minimum or mere formalities that do nothing to take away from all the supposed OTHER asshole behavior that Dick allegedly heaped on Jason despite never actually happening anywhere, even a little bit, and thus that some people claim is just an extrapolation of how Dick PROBABLY acted off the page, given his clear resentment and jealousy....umm. Huh? Based off THIS? Seriously, I mean it. What ELSE was Dick supposed to have done, to counter that take, what else could he POSSIBLY have done to do right by Jason here, that he didn’t actually already do? What exactly did people want from this character, in order to not hold this eternal grudge they have against him for what a big old jerk he was to Jason, who did nothing to deserve it - with that part being true at least, and literally WHY Dick made the point to recognize that and not take out his feelings on Jason?

Like, this will never not be an axe for me to grind because like. The SPIN fandom always gives all this, when look at the last page of this issue......Bruce is watching from a distance, and even he’s like thanks Dick, and that honestly bugs me so much. Because in the end, the only one of these three characters who DIDN’T get what he wanted here, was Dick. Jason got the validation and security as Robin he was looking for, the approval of his predecessor, and words of advice and an offer to listen and be there should he ever want to talk. Bruce got Dick’s validation of the actions Bruce took that he had no right to take when giving his old mantle to Jason, but that Dick ratified all the same, even if it was for Jason’s sake and not Bruce’s. Bruce still got the closure on that particular mistake of his, with the evidence that Dick was willing to see past it for Jason’s sake rather than drag it out....like. Dick is the only one who didn’t get what he was looking for there, he didn’t even get an apology from Bruce for overstepping when he passed on Dick’s mantle, an acknowledgment that this was WRONG, the most Dick got was Bruce admitting for a single panel that he missed him.....before telling Dick to leave and get out and effectively taking back anything Dick could have possibly taken away from that admittance. Because what the fuck does it matter if someone misses you if even though they finally have you right there in front of them, they still tell you to leave again anyway?

In conclusion, I hate this issue, lol, because everybody seems to know what’s in it and yet practically nobody ever seems interested in referencing what’s ACTUALLY in it. Instead just forever playing telephone with the most bad faith interpretation of Dick’s actions possible.

[scapegrace74-blog]

New Ways of Turning into Stone, Chapter 6

A/N Where does the time go?  I lugged my laptop 7,000km round trip with the sole intention of working on this fic, but that apparently didn’t happen.  For those who found the last chapter hard to bear, I apologize in advance.  I am not quite finished being cruel.  With that said, trigger warning for character death, childhood disease, suicide ideation.  The chapter title is Sleeping in the Clouds.

The first five chapters are available on my AO3 page.

Five Months Later

A persistent mechanical bleating lifted Claire from the indeterminate depths of medicated sleep.  The emergency contact number she provided to all her patients was programmed to forward to her mobile, where a particularly aggravating ringtone ensured she would never miss a call.  Even at one am on a Tuesday night.

Fumbling for the device, she glanced at the unfamiliar number before answering.

“Doctor Beauchamp speaking.”  Her voice was gritty and rough.  She reached for a half-filled tumbler of water while waiting for the caller to identify themselves.  Over the line she could make out muted traffic noise, and perhaps a distant foghorn, but no-one spoke.

“Hello?” she inquired, torn between concern that a patient needed her and frustration that she might have been woken by a misdialed number.

“If you’re one of my patients, you need to talk to me so that I can help you.”

There was an intake of breath, a weepy sniffle, and then the click of the call being terminated.  A prickle of gooseflesh washed over her.  She couldn’t say exactly how, but she knew who had called, and that he needed her.

One of the grim perks of her job was that she had backdoor access to reverse look-up for telephone numbers, in cases where there was a threat of self-harm or harm to others.  As Claire hastily donned socks and grabbed a winter coat, she waited on hold for the PSAP operator to provide an address.

“We’re in luck, Doctor Beauchamp.  It wasna a mobile number.  In fact, tis a telephone booth.  Gote Lane, in Queensferry.  Down near the... umm, next tae the bridge.”

Without so much as a thank you, she hung up and frantically punched the app for an Uber.

Fifteen nail biting minutes and an excessive tip later, she stood in front of an empty phone booth.  Predictably, the directory had been torn out, leaving only a thin metal cord and car-key graffiti inside the cramped interior.  But on top of the phone itself she found a familiar ecru business card, her name and credentials embossed in black font.

“Damn it, Jamie,” she muttered to herself, palming the card.

If he’d hung up and started walking towards the bridge, she might be able to catch him if she ran all out, but something called her towards the nearby shore instead.

The tide was out, leaving a narrow strip of beach and sharp, slimy rocks exposed to the heavy air.  Her nostrils were assaulted by the briny vegetative rot of the retreating sea.

On a weathered bench facing the river, encircled by a cone of foggy streetlight, sat a man, his eyes trained on the smudgy lights of the Queensferry bridge hovering high above.  Even bundled in a heavy black jacket and watch cap, she would recognize his long limbs and the set of his shoulders anywhere.  She let out a long breath of relief.

She approached the bench cautiously, not certain if her presence would be welcome.  Instead of turning to greet her footsteps, Jamie addressed the bridge.

“Maggie passed t’day.  I called ‘cause I wanted ye tae know, but then I couldna find the words tae tell ye.”  Despite his refusal to look at her, his words were calm and without a hint of the bitterness she’d expected.

“Oh, Jamie.  I’m so terribly sorry.  I didn’t know her well, but she was a very special little girl who loved you dearly.”

He nodded in acknowledgement of her words, but didn’t reply.  She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, suddenly aware that she was still wearing her pajamas, her hair doubtless a veritable cumulus of tangled curls.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.  “I still have some contacts at the hospital, I could...” she broke off, knowing it was ridiculous to offer professional assistance when she’d been the one to sever their relationship.

“Would ye, if it’s no’ too much tae ask, would ye mind jus’ sittin’ here with me fer a bit?”

He finally turned to look at her, and she could see the spider web of red veins that surrounded his irises, testimony to his heartbreak.  His mouth, usually such an accurate barometer of his mood, was strangely inert.  She nodded, unable to deny him such a simple request.

It was the time of night when the daytime symphony of the city broke into its component parts, every passing car, every lapping wave a single instrument singing its own plaintive song.  They sat in silence for long enough that she could feel the damp creeping up the legs of her pajamas.

“Maggie loved tae cross that bridge,” Jamie said at last.  “She’d lower her window, rain or shine, and stick her wee arm out, sayin’ it felt like she was flyin’.”

Claire smiled at the image, trying to picture the little girl with the giant imagination.

“What colour was her hair, Jamie?” she asked.  “Was it red, like yours?”

“Nah, dark, like Jenny’s and our Da.  But wi’ curls like mine and my Ma’s.  A little like yours, actually, Sassenach.  That is, before the chemo took it away.”

She grimaced, not knowing what topic to choose that wouldn’t lead Jamie on a path directly back to his grief.

“She fought sae hard,” he continued before she could attempt another distraction, “but the cancer wouldna let her win.”  Tears were rolling down his cheeks, glinting in the sodium light like stars, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.  “She was the best person I knew.  Sounds strange tae say of a wee lass, but she truly was.  An’ it made me a better person tae love her.  What the fuck am I gonna do now?”

Jamie was looking straight at her, as though he truly expected her to offer useful guidance.  All her training, her professional distance, fell away in the face of one broken man.  She swallowed, searching for words that weren’t a platitude.

“You’re going to go on living, because she can’t.  Because your happiness, when you are ready to feel it again, will be a gift to her memory.”

Jamie sniffed, then wiped his sleeve across his face.  He placed his hand on the bench between them.  Without allowing herself to think, Claire reached for it, finding his skin surprisingly warm.  There was an agonizing fermata, when all the instruments held their breath, and then he turned his palm upwards to meet her own.  Beneath the fog the river slipped by, blending endlessly into the sea.

"Look, Jamie, I know it’s not the right time, but I want to tell you that I’m sorry.  For the way I treated you, and ended things, and...”

“Nay, Sassenach, it’s me who should apologize.  I had no right tae throw my diagnosis at ye like some kinda weapon.  An’ when I think of how I heedlessly brought up yer becoming a mother.  I, of all people.  Weel, suffice it tae say I’ve spent many an hour regretin’ my words an’ actions.”

She squeezed his hand, wordlessly declaring them equal in remorse.

“How have ye been?” he inquired, peering at her as though trying to read her state of mind on the planes of her face.  She chuckled, looking away when the intensity of his gaze became too much.

“About the same, I suppose.  Better some days than others.  Geillis has started ordering my lunches for me, so I no longer have any excuse not to eat.”  Jamie nodded, seemingly pleased with this news.

“And you?  Are you still seeing Dr. Rafferty?  I... uhh, I know his office requested your file.”

In fact, Giles Rafferty had called her the week after her confrontation with Jamie, wondering why his new patient’s record of treatment contained no more than his biographical details and the time and date of each of his appointments.  She told him the same thing she’d told Geillis when she asked the same question in significantly cruder terms: that her weekly interactions with Jamie had never led to a professional diagnosis or a recommended course of treatment.

“Aye. He’s a good man, although tragically immune tae my charms.  Unlike some.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Fraser,” she warned, although his rakish grin warmed her from the inside out.

“I’ll be darkening his doorway wi’ some frequency, after t’day,” he continued with a return to solemnity.

And yet you called me, Claire wanted to say, but didn’t.  When his beloved niece had slipped away, hers had been the number he had dialed, despite everything.  The very idea made her thoughts flit about like fireflies.

“I missed ye, Sassenach,” he confessed quietly after a time.

“I missed you too, Jamie.”

They sat together through the thin hours of the night, talking, sharing memories of Maggie, but mostly in silent companionship.  As dawn brightened the eastern sky, the fog began to lift, revealing an overcast sky.  The lights of the bridge blinked out, and the city’s music began anew.  Claire wished futilely that day would never break, knowing that it would bring them both the pain of two very different kinds of goodbye.

Her hand, when Jamie finally let it go, felt strange, as though it had been separated from its source.  She tucked it quickly into her pocket.

“I.. errr, I need tae be goin’,” Jamie said by way of apology.  “Ian and Jenn will be needin’ me.”

“Yes, of course.  I’ll just, um, call myself an Uber.”

They were both standing, neither seemingly knowing how to part.

Jamie opened his mouth, paused, shook his head in frustration, then looked away.  Her traitorous hand escaped her pocket and found its way to his chest.

“I’ll be thinking of you.  All of you.  If there’s anything, anything at all..”

“How long until your no’ my doctor anymore?  Ethically speakin’.”  He was looking at her in a way that made the fireflies whirlpool about.

“What?” she asked to buy herself some time to breath.

“Before I go an’ face everything that is wrong about t’day, I want tae ken, how long must I wait before I can kiss ye again wi’out riskin’ yer reputation?”

“There’s no written timetable,” she stalled.  “It’s a question of a doctor exerting undue influence or the exploitation of the patient’s trust, and there’s really...”

“Those rules are meant tae protect the patient, aye?  So I should be allowed tae waive them, no’?”

“Jamie...”

“Fine, let me rephrase my question.  Doctor Claire Beauchamp, when can I, James Fraser, ask ye tae look upon me as a potential suitor and no’ a former patient?  Six months?  A year?  Two years?”

“You really are the most infuriatingly stubborn man,” she huffed.

“Aye, I ken.  Sae, two years?  Do we have an agreement, Sassenach?”

“Fine, yes, two years, but Jamie, I don’t expect you to...”

A finger was placed across her lips, silencing her protests.

“Two years are naught if I can kiss ye again once they have passed.  Until then, Claire, please take care of yerself.”

She stood by the bench long after Jamie was gone, staring out across the river.  A flock of geese flew by in formation, broad wings nearly touching the surface of the water as it reflected the steel gray clouds above.  She thought of little Maggie, and her birdhouse surrounded by clouds.  A sob wrestled its way up her throat, surprising in its urgency.  And then, she allowed herself to cry.

[twinklelilstarkey]

Stopping You - Michael Gray [Part 9]

Words: 8.2k+

Summary: When finally able to leave the hospital, memories awake buried feelings in both Y/N and Michael.

Warnings: Female!Reader. Mentions of wounds and physical pain. Emotional Cheating. A very slight mention of smut. A character being touch-starved. Being horny [ :) ]. Self hate (discrediting their own sadness and feelings; hateful inner voice). 

Prologue    Part 1    Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    Part 5     Part 6    Part 7   Part 8     Part 9     Part 10

It has been 2 days ever since you woke up.

The doctors don’t seem to be planning on letting you go home this soon since the wound is supposedly still “too fresh” and because “you’re too at risk of ripping stiches”. Which to you, what they are actually trying to say is “you can’t stand still so we will force you to sit the fuck down until you’re good enough to go back home”.

It does sounds more accurate, doesn’t it?

You’re already able to sit up on your own even though it still hurts like a bitch. And you’ve been playing more and more chess with Michael now that Finn and Polly are back to work.

It, honestly, hasn’t been that bad.

It’s still a little tense between you two when stuck in silence but can anybody blame you after all that happened?

But tense or not, you still like his company, nonetheless.

You know, also, that Gina has been making some visits at the hospital. Not to see you of course, but to see him. They always talk to each other behind the doors of your room, in the hallway, whispering and shutting up whenever a nurse or doctor would walk by.

You would’ve been lying if you said that you weren’t curious. But still, it is not your place to make questions about personal matters. So, behind the glass of the doors you stay.

The door of your room swings open again, letting a wave of cold wind hit you and you look up to see Michael, who is staring at the ground.

“Please, Michael. You have to listen to me, this makes no sense-” Gina says loudly, making Michael turn quickly and glare at her.

You look at the two of them confused and Michael whispers something at his fiancée before turning to walk back out of the room, but he doesn’t, he just stands by the door. Gina looks through the glass in the doors at you and you lift an eyebrow as if to question her glance.

She looks away and you grin while looking back to the papers in your lap.

“Go home, Gina” Michael whisper yells at her and you try your best to act as if the conversation is not making curiosity crawl under your skin.

The blonde, standing behind the door, sighs and takes a step back. And after that, all you can hear is her thick heels sound over the stone of the hospital’s hallways.

Michael sighs as her steps echo through the empty side of the hospital and he turns back to you, seeing you smirking while reading whatever is there to read in all the family’s money withdraws.

“Trouble in paradise?” You poke, not even lifting your eyes at him.

He doesn’t answer at first, he just walks towards the chair he had been previously seated and sits down ungracefully.

You chuckle under your breath at his silence and flip over the page, reading the handwritten numbers of everything that has been gained and wasted over the name of the Shelby family.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He pokes back.

You finally look up from the papers and he has a teasing look over his eyes, now.

He’s already comfortable enough to make jokes and tease you back, and, honestly, he almost doesn’t seem like the same Michael from the day after the event.

You don’t hate it. At all.

“Anything is more entertaining than this” You admit, looking back down to your papers.

“I don’t doubt it” He agrees.

You two stay silent again. Minds focusing on two completely different things.

Michael’s travels to Ginna’s words while yours goes back to the numbers.

Gina had just tried to make him follow the plan again. Hurt the prey while it’s weak, she said. But again, he doesn’t agree at all with her words.

Her tone is not understanding anymore, or even slightly sweet. Her tone is what seems to be a way to try and achieve an authorial one. Her words carry venom as she spills the, so, simple task of overthrowing Tommy Shelby.

Michael’s not even sure if she always talked like that and he never noticed, or is it just sounding different now because he can’t stop comparing his fiancée with you. 

He honestly deeply hopes that he could just erase that plan from Gina’s mind, she almost seems obsessed over it. Judging by how tired she looks every time she visits, she must have not been sleeping lately.

How and why did this plan even seem good at all? As Michael always been so power-hungry? As he always been so thirsty for success, or felt pleasure over imagining himself sitting on the family’s throne?

No human doesn’t love success, that is the truth. Especially if it all is signed at the bottom with your family’s last name. But what Michael was planning with Gina is nothing of the sort. This was not about making your own money and achieve your own success. This was taking somebody else’s and claiming it as yours.

And that is nothing but dirty and foul. How could he have thought that this was good in the first place?

Fuck the American companies who shamed his family’s business over the not being the ideal business partners. His family is serious and hard working. They came from absolutely nothing. Unlike all those men, who swim in their, nothing but dirty, money.

He must talk to Tommy, to let him know about what they said. The news are going to be old, and he should’ve just told him everything when he had just talked to them. But he didn’t. And he regrets it now. Deeply.

Better late than never, right?

“When’s the wedding?” You ask, breaking the silence in the room.

Michael blinks his thoughts away and looks back up at you to already find you staring. You look curious.

“We- Uhm… we haven’t decided yet” He answers, short and simple.

You nod while pursing your lips forward in thought.

“And have you decided on where is going to be?” You ask, “At least in what country?”

“Gina wants to marry and live in America” He replies, fidgeting in his seat as his hand reaches his pocket.

Michael moves slowly to grab his cigarettes and his lighter from his pocket as you stare.

You don’t exactly know how to react. You’re quite disappointed with his answer, but you’re sure you’ll be able to accept it with time. At least to slow the bitter truth that is Michael finding love and moving abroad. Again.

But why should you care?

It’s true that you haven’t found love in another someone, but you also haven’t tried. In the time Michael was away, you occupied your mind and your heart with work. With papers just like the one’s that rest over your lap now. But you could start all over again with another person. Right?

But do you even know when you stopped loving him? When you gave up in love?

The answer is no. You don’t remember, nor do you feel it missing in your chest. You care for many people, yet you love less. You can count in your fingers how many people you would actually shed a tear if their life came to an unfortunate ending.

It would consist in people like Polly and Finn. People who took care of you at your lowest but also didn’t let you go when you stood in your own feet.

Michael moves forward to tap down the ashes of his cigarette on the ashtray beside you and you force yourself to look back at your papers.

Is Michael one of them?

(…)

“What’s with that face?” Michael asks as walks out of the bathroom.

You look up from your plate of food, the disgusted scowl still in your face.

“This is horrible” You tell him, cringing as you hold your fork in your hand.

Michael chuckles and you look back down, your fork pokes the small pile of overcooked rice and you swear to God that it just jiggled.

How is that even physically possible?

As you’re too ingulfed in your horrible meal, Michael walks to stand next to you and eyes your food from up close. You look over at him and the same exact features of disgust fill his face.

He looks at you as amusement overcomes your emotions and you giggle before looking at the food again.

“That looks…” He starts and you look up at him as he stands straighter, “Delicious” He says, trying his best to motivate you to eat.

You look at him with both a smile and a frown, and he looks at you, biting his lip to contain his other possible descriptions of your so wonderful meal.

“It could honestly be worse” He says, and you gasp.

“Worse?” You ask, smiling in amusement but also confused with his words.

“Yes…?” He answers, “I ate worse when I was here”

“You did not” You disagree.

“I did!” He defends himself.

“You did not!” You repeat, shifting in your seat.

“Y/N, it was way worse. You threw it at the wall once and it stuck!” He emphasizes the last word.

You bite in your laughter at the memory and shake your head.

“Still think it’s worse”

“Then…” He breathes in, serious look on his face, “You’re blind” A small smile cracks at the end.

You laugh a bit and look back at the metal tray. You poke the rice again and it jiggles one more time, making the man beside you chuckle through his noise, under his breath.

“It’s horrible, Michael” You say, slightly upset over this being one of the only meals you have today.

“It is” He finally agrees.

You sigh and put down your fork, falling back against your bed and your pillows.

“You should still eat-”

“I prefer to starve” You answer with a deep breath.

Michael grabs your tray from the small table in front of you and walks over to put it on the counter next to the door. He grabs the apple and throws back to you, landing beside your legs.

“You could’ve hit me” You say.

You grab it and let it rest over your lap as he walks back to the bed.

“Excuse my horrible aim, your highness” He teases, and you roll your eyes, “You’ve done worse to me before”

“Did not” You defend yourself.

“Yes, you did”

He sits down on the side of your bed, next to your legs.

“Like what?”

“You hit me with a jar once, with a rock back in the field, almost stuck a fork on my hand-”

“Those were not on purpose!” You say with a smile.

He smiles back.

“Don’t care. If I was as a careless as you, I could’ve been decapitated by now” He continues, and you giggle at him.

“Decapitated?” You repeat.

“Yes!” He says loudly, “Don’t you remember when you had that machet-?”

“Excuse you?” You ask, sitting up, “That was nowhere near your face!”

“Because I pulled away!” He says as loudly.

You let out a fit of giggles at the memory and the sight of his widen, terrified, eyes back on that day, and Michael stares at you with a smile.

“Good to know my suffering is that amusing”

You giggle away your worries but all of a sudden, you stop laughing abruptly. Your hand rests under your chest as pain starts to spread over your torso. The painkillers probably exceeded their ability to work, over not being able to cover all the pain since you kept on moving.

“You okay?” He asks, worried, smile completely disappearing.

“Yeah, yeah” You say, a small smile of reassurance on your lips, “I think so”

“Want me to check?”

You think for a second and your mind starts overthinking, what if you just popped a stitch?

“No… I think I’m okay”

He looks at you for a little longer and you lean forward a bit.

“I’m good, Michael, don’t worry”

He stays silent while eyeing, worry filling his thoughts, just like yours, and you sigh.

You bring your hand under your hospital gown and touch the thin bandage carefully. Michael watches as you do it, and you almost sigh in relief as you don’t see any blood on your fingertips.

“See? I’m okay”

He nods and you sit up straighter.

“No more laughing for you, then” He says, patting your leg, and another smile starts appearing in your face.

God, you missed this.

(…)

Michael reenters your room as silent as he can and closes the door slowly. The room is now back to its natural darkness of the night, as it is just 5 past 11pm.

You’re still laying on your side in bed, in a deep sleep, just like when he left you to get something warm to drink.

He walks towards you at slow pace, cold fingers wrapped around his paper cup, holding a fresh and hot coffee. He sets it down by your nightstand, letting the steam lift off the liquid into the cold air of the room.

Michael stares down at the vacant part of the bed by your side and lets himself sit next to you.

His mother had just left. You slept the whole way through her visit, but she didn’t seem to mind. She had a lot to talk with him, mostly business.

“She looks so peaceful while she sleeps.”

That’s what his mother had told him as they stared down at you, sleeping under all your blankets before she had to leave. He didn’t answer her. But he agreed.

“You care for her, Michael?”

“Of course, I do.”

The smile she gave him at the sound of those words was unexpected. It was sweet and loving, just like the look she used to give him back when she saw you two together. Back when you were truly together.

It reminds him of all the memories of all the times you would try to annoy him in family dinners.

He doesn’t know why those memories specifically, but he remembers a lot.

The way he would stare at his mom just to try and ignore you further, all because he was “mad” at you. As if he could ever be mad at you. You wouldn’t even hurt a fly at the time. You wouldn’t even screamed back in arguments.

His mother would only smile at him from the other side of the table while seeing you sigh dramatically and lean back on your chair over the lack of response from your pokes and pinches.

Your distressed feelings wouldn’t last long since you would go back to whispering his name right as the family would restart a loud conversation.

You would give up by dessert. You would just grab his hand and lay it over your lap to play with it, obviously bored with all the business talk.

So many things have changed now.

Without even acknowledging it, Michael brings his hand to your cheek. You flinch a little over how cold his fingers are but after that, you give no other reaction. He moves your hair out of your face and smoothly caresses it.

Michael almost feels like his fingers are vibrating. It’s been so long ever since he had touched you like this. Your skin is almost like silk under his calloused fingers.

His finger traces your eyebrow, brushing it carefully as he stares at you, scared to awake you with any sudden movements.

You look so peaceful while asleep, like everything potentially bad in this world had vanished and you were left to just live all there’s good.

He pulls his hand away after some seconds and looks down at you. He grabs onto the top of your blankets and brings them all the way up to your neck, covering any of your exposed skin from the cold wind that is forcing its way in by the small cracks of the windows.

His hand goes back to your face almost at the same second, almost like he misses touching it. It has been so long since the last time he had done it, it almost feels unreal.

In your deep and peaceful sleep, you move your head over the pillow as his movements slow, making his fingers graze over your skin again. Michael doesn’t move, he just lets you do whatever so you can lay comfortably without any interruptions.

The sound of the harsh wind surrounds the room in that same second, hitting and whistling its way against the old windows.

You dip your head a bit under your covers and Michael chuckles through his nose, under his breath. It was almost like watching a cute little chipmunk hiding back inside its tree over the cold.

Without even realizing, in the moments of silence his brain used to create an alternative reality, all he can think of is how much he wants to hold you right now.

His thoughts are completely oblivious to his reality. The one where you two share as much physical touch as two roosters, both fighting for dominance in a chicken filled world. But he can’t help it. He misses you and your touch. He misses your sweet and long hugs, and how warm you always were.

Not even 2 hours ago you two had been playing chess and everything was so… different. He can’t quite understand why, but something in your interactions was pulling the strings of his heart.

It was like 3 days ago when you were discussing your disgusting lunch, where you laughed so hard you two freaked out over ripping a stitch.

Those moments felt unreal to him. Made him feel warm on the inside.

A few hours ago, maybe it was the way you would laugh at his struggles to win the game after his complete horrible plays, or the way you would smile as he looked down at the board thinking.

But it was something.

You’re staring down at the board, chin resting on your fist as you look down at the chess pieces. Your mind going miles a second with all the plays you can imagine, repeating over and over again to see if they made any sense.

You’re surely slow at this game, slower than you were before, but Michael isn’t complaining.

He leans back on his chair, his victory smile already spreading over his lips while you struggled.

“Stop that” You whisper at him, not looking up.

“Stop what?” He asks, humor thick on his tone.

“Stop thinking you’ve already won” You explain.

You look up with a smile on your face as the competitive bones in your body vibrate for you to be able to win this and show him that you’re more than capable to win him 2 times a night.

Michael is already staring. Your gaze meets his almost immediately, it’s both warm and welcoming as the soft and playful nature of your conversation floats in between you.

You bite your tongue and force yourself to look away and back to the board. Your mind is back to blank, you can’t remember the play you had been repeating in your mind.

“The clock is ticking” Michael teases, making your smile widen.

“Stop” You say waving your hand in the air, so he shuts up.

“Better get ready to lose” He sings his words, and you sigh dramatically.

You cover your ears with both of your hands and force yourself into going back to the “chess mentality”. Michael continues to smile down while looking at you and you bite your lips to try and stop yours.

“Ten seconds left”

You glare at him playfully.

“You’re lying”

“Am not, look at the clock”

You ignore him and go back to the board.

“6… 5… 4…” Michael counts down dramatically.

In the middle of the stress and pressure forced upon you, you move one of your pieces without a second thought. As you place it down, Michael shuts up.

You look up at him and he is just staring you amusingly.

“Are you sure about that one?” He asks and you frown.

You look back at your piece and your eyes widen. Why would you do that? You just handed him the whole game in a gold platter.

“No!” You exclaim, hands flying to your face in embarrassment.

Michael’s laughter feels the room and you hear him move his own piece. Your heart swells at the sound of his cackles and you uncover your face to check the board again.

“I’m not playing anymore” You say, voice muffled by your hands.

“Are you officially giving up?” He teases.

You look at the board again and a fake sad look overcomes your face.

“Yes” You sigh.

Michael laughs again and you can almost feel your lips pulling up again. He starts rearranging the pieces and you stare at him as he does it.

“No need to be that sad over this, you’ll eventually get better” He teases.

“Fuck off” You curse.

He smiles widely at your words and you smile back. You continue to stare at him as he carefully places everything back, both of you silent.

As he finishes, he looks up at you.

“Ready to lose?” You ask him and he leans back in his chair.

“As if that will ever happen”

You smile at him while shaking your head and move your first piece, his eyes still on you as you do it.

The fall from those thoughts back to reality is as harsh as one can be.

He shouldn’t even be touching you right now, you probably don’t even want him to. All you’ve done lately is talk and make jokes, doing this will ruin everything.

Michael, right in that same second, retracts his hand away from your face and stands from the bed’s side. He breathes in sharply as he looks down at you and snatches his coffee back from the nightstand.

He shouldn’t be doing this.

He walks away and takes his seat back against the window.

He can’t do this.

(…)

Finally. The day of your freedom. Well, at least some of it. The day you’re finally leaving the hospital.

Polly is not working for the day, but Finn was forced to stay put and do as told. So, it’s just you and her.

You don’t know where Michael is, honestly. He stayed these past few days and nights with you at the hospital, always present in the room whenever you would fall asleep or wake up.

Whenever you would awake, he would be sitting close to the window, smoking and deep in thought. But not today. Your room was empty, with no sight of life except for your own. It was insanely cold there too. Everything felt different, and also extremely uncomfortable.

Polly appeared 2 hours after you woke up and sat up in bed, and many talks with the nurses later, they give you the good news of finally being able to go home.

You know that Polly is in the hallway talking to someone and it has been doing so for some good minutes since she left.

And since she ditched you for whoever that person is, you are now left alone in the bedroom to try and find a way to get dressed. She had brought you clothes from your house, and those same ones were a suit, and, of course, underwear. Some large suit pants, heels, and a silk dress shirt.

She picked those clothes without probably even realizing that you can’t really move at all. And because of that, you can’t stop cursing her enough.

You love that woman, but she does some things that make you question that same love.

You stand over the cold tiled floor with your wobbly legs and shivers run through your body. Why is everything so cold today?

You strip your hospital gown and put on your underwear, hands, or should you say, body shaking in both cold and, of course, pain.

You’ve now learned how you use your torso for almost every movement in your daily life, and you can’t hate this experience more than now.

You take a seat back on the bed and throw your dress shirt over your shoulders, carefully moving your arms, that feel sore, into the sleeves. The white fabric is freezing against your skin, which just makes you want to get dressed faster.

You button some of the buttons at the end of it quickly and grab your pants, pleading that they will bring you some warmth.

Now, how the fuck are you going to get them on?

Putting on your underwear already hurt as it did, and you did it quickly. But what about something like pants? You know, what you need to adjust a thousand times, so they sit well, and that are baggy enough for them to just slide down your legs when not buttoned at your waist.

Where is Polly when you need her?

Right in that same second, the door of the room opens, and you sigh in relief. Polly must have finally remembered the fact that you struggle to even sit for too long.

“Shit, sorry” Michael’s voice sounds behind you and you throw your head back in disappointment.

“It’s fine” You say, annoyance in your tone, but not over him. “It’s not anything you haven’t seen before”

You lean your head back forward and don’t even care to look over your shoulder at Michael, it’s not like you were naked, so it’s not like he’s seeing anything too bad.

You hold your pants in your hands, thinking deeply of every possible way of how you can get them in both of your legs without leaning too forward, like you did with your underwear (and now regret), and quick enough so they don’t just slide off and fall back to your feet.

“Do you need help?” His voice again.

You sit silent for some time, thinking. You could ask him to call over his mom, but what if she’s talking to someone important?

“Yes, please” You admit, giving up.

You hear Michael’s steps behind you, getting closer to the bed, and as soon as he appears next to you, at the end of the bed, you notice that he’s wearing a full suit, unlike any other day. Coat, blazer and vest. His, now, usual way to wear suits.

“I can’t put these on without them falling or hurting myself” You explain with a hint of embarrassment.

He doesn’t say anything, he just lets his eyes fall to your hands and to your pants. Without making you wait any longer, he stands in front of you and takes the piece of clothing from your hands, exposing the skin of your thighs to him and to the cold room.

He crouches and carefully slides each leg of yours into the pants, you don’t even have to do anything, he’s just doing it all.

“Can you stand?” He asks, his voice deep and low, almost in a whisper.

You nod, not looking away from his hands as they rest over your knees, and he takes a small step back for you to have enough space.

As your feet touch the ground again, Michael pushes the rest of the pants up to your torso, where the mostly unbuttoned shirt is. His fingers drag over your skin as they move to pull your pants up, and you almost gasp.

His blue eyes travel from his hands for the first time to your exposed skin. To your stomach, mostly visible over the unbuttoned shirt, to the bandage and to your chest, partly covered by your bra. His eyes almost feel heavy and his breathing quickens at just the sight. You notice it before he even can.

You look up at his face and right on that second, Michael lets go of your clothing. You don’t say anything at first, still feeling his eyes on you, and you swallow harshly as you feel the familiar tingles travel down your torso to the end of your belly.

God, you don’t remember the last time you, actually, felt turned on. It has been so long. But this surely is not when you expected this feeling to come back.

His gaze is so familiar that you almost have to slap yourself to not let your mind travel to so unholy memories. But, deep down, you would be lying if you said that you wouldn’t want him close to you again.

You clear your throat and finally look away.

“Thank you” You whisper.

Michael snaps back to reality and looks up at you. He gives you a small nod and takes another step back, this time, a bigger one.

You lean against the bed, so the baggy waist of the pants can rest over it and not fall, and you bring your shaking fingers to the buttons of your shirt.

You aren’t shaking over the cold or pain anymore. You’ve never felt so hot in your life. You’re shaking over how many emotions you’re feeling all at once.

You struggle a bit at the beginning, but you finally get the hang of it after some embarrassing seconds. Michael watches as your skin disappears under the thin fabric, as well as the small white bandage that covers your wound.

You don’t care that he watches, honestly. You don’t trust your voice all that much right now, so you can’t hide your emotions by teasing him about it, but he surely knows that he shouldn’t be looking.

He has a god damn fiancée.

You finish adjusting your clothes and quickly grab the blazer from the top of your bed, sliding it over your shoulders quickly.

You walk over past Michael to the small mirror in the corner of the room and you do what you can with your hair, since you seem like a mad woman with this much frizz on it.

The door of the room opens again, and you look through the mirror to find Polly.

“You were able to get dressed on your own?” She asks surprised, sparing her son a quick look of confusion.

“I’m a big girl” You answer before Michael can even open his mouth.

You turn back around and walk towards the bed, letting Polly laugh slightly at your comment. You pay attention to your feet as you put on your heels and Polly decides to talk to her son.

“Are you going to talk to Tommy today?” She asks while walking closer to him.

“Yes”

“When?”

There’s a slight pause.

“In an hour” He answers.

You look over your shoulder confused, and they notice it, looking at you with two different looks.

Polly looks like she’s seconds away of explaining to you what this conversation is about, but Michael, god, he looks like he’s about to plead you on his knees to not even ask.

“Can we go home now?” You ask, fulfilling Michael’s silent wishes.

“Of course,” Polly answers.

She’s the first one to start walking out of the room, yet Michael only moves when you start walking after her.

You look over your shoulder a few times to make sure you’re not forgetting anything behind, and Michael does the same, helping you out with an extra pair of eyes.

You follow Polly through the hallways you do not remember walking down before, and you can’t help but feel a little lost and overwhelmed with how long they are. They all look the same, same paintings, same number of windows, same color of the walls. It’s like a maze.

Some nurses stop to look at the three of you and you look down at the stone under your feet, not wanting to show any sort of discomfort or pain over moving, to anyone but the people close you.

Polly opens the crowded hallways of the hospital with her presence as you reach the actual part of the hospital that everyone is using.

Michael stands now beside you, both hands on his pockets while carrying himself with as much confidence as his mother. You almost feel uncomfortable over how different the energy is between them and you.

As you three move around a turn in the hallways, all types of people move as quick as they can out of your way, but a man is not quick enough.

His shoulder hits yours and you look up at him as a reflex. His eyes are filled with worry as they meet yours, his lips read inaudible apologies as you walk away.

Michael’s hand rests over your shoulder that just got hit, and he pulls you in closer to him, away from the crowd. You look away from the man as he shifts his eyes over to Michael, and you move your gaze back to the ground.

Michael glares at the unknown man and holds you in closer protectively, making the man almost cry in apology.

He looks away and looks down at you, finding you staring at the ground. You feel a slight squeeze over your shoulder, but you don’t look up at Michael, you just look up to look at Polly’s figure in front of you.

You all reach the front door of the hospital and a man, who doesn’t even work at the hospital, opens the door for you three. Michael lets you walk in front of him, letting go of your shoulder, and you wait for him by the door before following Polly to the car.

Most of the things you’re doing right now are not even controlled by you, your body is doing them before you even realize. Leaning against Michael, walking close to Michael, letting him touch you, waiting for him so he can stay beside you.

You don’t know what’s going on, but you’re in too much discomfort to even question it.

You reach Polly’s car and Michael opens the door for you. Polly walks around the car to go to the driver’s seat. You struggle a bit to climb up the seat, but you feel Michael’s eyes on you as you do everything.

You finally sit and the door closes beside you. Michael takes his seat at the passenger seat, beside his mother, who starts the car right in the same second.

You lean your head back and sigh under the loud noise of the car, your eyes closed at the soreness of your whole body and the slight pain of your torso.

The drive to Polly’s house is quiet. Nobody dares to open their mouth to ruin the silence as you suffer from the lack of painkillers in your system on the backseat.

You ended up halfway through the drive finding yourself not looking at the road or outside of your window but looking at Michael. He is at a fair distance for you to see his side profile just right, while you’re hidden from Polly’s eyes in the review mirror.

Your mind is blank as you do it, no memories come to hunt you, nor does any other negative feeling. You are at peace for these minutes. Something you haven’t felt for some time.

As Polly’s car comes to a stop in front of her house, you look away from Michael, careful so he wouldn’t notice.

You wonder what has gotten you so focused on him lately.

It’s weird and rather unfamiliar to look at him and not feel some kind of hatred. Maybe it is the fact that he saved your life, a few days ago. But it’s hard to say. There’s surely something else.

It could honestly be anything at this point too. It could be your way to say that you’re thankful for what he did, or even your way to show yourself that you don’t hate him anymore. But do you?

The door beside you opens and you jump in your seat for being so rudely awaken from your thoughts.

“You alright?” Michael asks from beside you.

You just nod.

He steps away from the door and you see Polly already walking inside the house, not even waiting for you two.

You slide slowly off your seat and stand aside from the door so Michael can close it. He does that and you both walk silently inside his mom’s house.

“Are you staying for lunch, Michael?” Polly screams all the way from the kitchen.

You take your jacket off and he looks over at the kitchen to look at his mother, who awaits his answer.

“Uh, no” He answers, also taking his jacket off. “I’m having lunch with Gina, today”

You swallow hard as you turn around and hang your jacket on the wall. Michael is quick to do the same and you keep your distance from him, walking towards Polly.

“Alright, it’s just us then, Y/N” Polly says with a smile to you and you give the same exact smile.

“Guess so” You say, trying to mimic her excited tone but failing horribly.

Michael looks over at you as you answer with an annoyed tone, but you can’t see him over your back being turned to him. He glances at his mom confused and she just gives him a quick shrug.

“I can stay if you want me to” He says, looking at his mom.

“Oh no, don’t worry about us” Polly says, waving her hand in the air to dismiss him, “Y/N is going to be working for most of the day anyways”

Michael does a quick nod, and you walk in the kitchen, leaning against the counter.

Your heart is beating faster than normal, you really weren’t expecting him to offer to have lunch with you two. Was it because of your tone?

Polly walks over to a cabinet and starts to grab the things she will need for whatever she’s making for lunch.

Michael appears next to you and takes a seat on one of the highchairs next to you. You ignore his presence and lace your own fingers together over to counter to hide your sweaty palms.

What is going on with you?

(…)

“Can you please let go of that and eat?” Polly asks you and you look up from the papers in front of you.

“Sorry” You say with a slight smile.

You grab your fork and eye the freshly made meal in front of you. Your mind is heavy with so many thoughts that it’s hard to even want to stop to work. You need to distract yourself, or else you’re going insane.

Could you be liking Michael all over again? Is that what’s happening?

He will hurt you again, you know. He has a person that he loves, now. Gina. You’re nothing to him anymore, just a friend… Oh… Can you even be considered a friend?

Have you even forgiven him yet?

You’re jumping to conclusions just because he is close to you. He has no interest in you anymore, Y/N. Grow out of it. Stand your ground. You’re being ridiculous. Since when are you this weak?

You bring a hand over your forehead in frustration and you rub your skin to try and make the thoughts go away.

“What’s wrong?” Polly asks as she looks up from her lunch at you.

“Nothing” You say, shaking your head a little.

“You lie to me now?” She comments, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “Be honest, come on”

“It’s nothing bad, Pol, I swear”

“Just tell me what it is about” She asks, curious, “You’re supposed to be relaxing, and you’ve been all tense since you got here”

You lean back on your chair as well and put your fork down.

You’re falling in love again. You want to forgive him. After so many years of fighting for your worth. Everything in the garbage now. All because he showed you the simplest of human empathy over being shot.

Your heart is beating rapidly against your chest as your gaze shifts over to the ceiling, your body seeking comfort in the memories that rest so deep and distant in your mind as your negative thoughts fight for dominance.

“I feel weak” You comment, “It’s ridiculous, it is. But I can’t help it”

Tears water your eyes in that same second and you sigh loudly at how ridiculous this whole thing is. You shouldn’t be crying. There’s nothing to cry about.

“Why do you feel that way?” Polly asks softly, worry heavy on her tone.

You wipe your tears away quickly and sniffle shortly, not wanting to show how upset you really are.

“I don’t know. I was okay before all of this. All I could feel was anger in me, or I just felt normal, and now-” You gasp for air as a sob fights its way to your mouth, “And now all I feel is sadness. It’s like… It’s like everything is crashing down on me”

Polly stares at you confused. Yes, you haven’t been your so happy self with her since you got home, but she just thought it was because you were tired.

You looked just fine back at the hospital yesterday when you were playing chess with Michael.

She stands in her chair and walks over to you as you wipe your tears forcefully, hating to be this distraught over something you don’t even fully understand.

“What is this about?” She asks, resting her hand over your cheek.

You shake your head, and you swallow your tears quickly. You’re stronger than this.

“I just feel like everything is going backwards” You admit, staying silent for some seconds, “I’m not healing anymore” You breathe in, “It’s like the wound is reopening again and it’s all my fault.”

You don’t use the actual words of what you are feeling. You’re too embarrassed to admit it out loud. But, at the same time, you’re scared that Polly might think you’re weak, or even ridiculous. Just like you do.

You’re at fault here, nobody else is. You made your bed by acting all nice and sweet with him, and now look at what you’ve done. You ruined everything.

Polly eyes you as she rethinks your words, not taking them literally and not thinking about your actual wound, and leans over at you, eyeing you eye to eye.

She frowns a bit as you calm down slowly after your confession and her thumb smooths your skin away carefully.

“Is this about-” She stops herself about instantly. It has to be.

You look away from her embarrassed and she eyes you sweetly. Her other hand coming up to cup your other cheek as she makes you look at her.

She understands it.

It’s like love is crushing you. Crushing your every little bit of strength all over again. Like it’s destroying you and destroying everything you’ve built in these 2 years.

As if your walls are falling, and all its bricks are laying on top of you. Punishing you for not fighting whoever attacked them or threatened to destroy them.

Polly continues to stand silent and pulls you into a hug, you lean forward in your chair and wrap your arms around her, right away. She wraps hers the same way and squeezes you close to her.

Kisses lay over your head as she hugs you close to her and you feel your chin start to shake again.

You’re falling again.

(…)

“Are you listening to me?” Gina asks and Michael looks up at her.

“No, sorry” He says shaking his head a bit, “I was thinking about work”

“It’s okay,” She forgives, “I was saying that I talked to some people back in America today…”

Michael holds a frown almost instantly.

“-And we’ve talked about all sorts of wedding venues” He tenses up, “The price range changes a lot from whether we want an outside reception or not”

“Hum…” He itches the back of his neck, “Yo-you’ve already decided on a date?”

“Of course!” She answers with a smile, “You said back at the ship that the sooner the better and I’ve checked with a lot of people and…” She stops to add suspense to her speech, “We can get it done next month” She announces.

Her excitement is not even slightly mirrored by her fiancé.

“What?” She asks, smile falling off her features, worry in her tone, “Do you not like the idea?”

Michael opens his mouth to answer but closes it right away, so she continues.

“I thought it would be a good thing.” She explains, “Since we’re not doing- what we were supposed to be doing, for now, and it’s always better to come back home earlier than expected- Do-do you not agree?”

“I uhm… I just thought we would have a longer engagement, that’s all” Michael says quickly. “But uhm…”

There are a few seconds of silence until he rethinks her words.

“For now?” He repeats confused, “Gina, god. We won’t be doing our plan anymore. You know that better than anyone.”

“Michael let’s not talk about this, please” She says as she brings her glass of wine to her lips.

“Gina, just listen to me.” He says calmly, “We’re not doing anything. I’ve talked to Tommy today and he’s already dealing with all of this”

“What?”

“I’ve talked to Tommy about-”

“Our plan?!” She asks scared.

“No.” Michael says in a scowl, “I told him what they told us, that they didn’t want to work with us. That’s all”

“Why would you do that?” She asks, disappointment and anger being the only expressions readable on her face.

“Because Gina… We are not doing this anymore” He repeats.

“You shouldn’t have done that” She says, shaking her head, “You should’ve asked for my opinion, for my side on this. You can’t decide everything on your own, I was in this too”

“I had to. It feels wrong to betray my family” He explains, feeling helpless, “How can you not understand?”

There’s a quick silence between them.

“I can’t understand because it was so sudden, Michael. I don’t know what happened when I wasn’t with you here, but we came into this country with a plan. A perfect plan that would only help us both. And now…” She sighs, “You just don’t want to do it anymore?”

“I’ve said this before. It doesn’t feel right to take everything out of my family’s name and put it in mine.” He answers calmly, “I can’t do it to them”

She shakes her head disappointingly.

“We can still live our lives after this plan, Gina. We did it for a year. We can still do it now” He insists. “Our relationship wasn’t about this before, and surely isn’t now”

His words didn’t sound right to him. It didn’t sound like he was convincing Gina anymore; it was like he was convincing himself.

And she noticed the hesitation on his words.

“Why did you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you are actually thinking twice if our relationship was just about business”

“You know that’s not true, Gina” He says disapprovingly.

“Well, it sounds like it” She says, anger on her tone, “I don’t know what has gotten into you Michael. Or what girl got on you, but you have to remember who really is on your side here.” She emphasizes the world ‘girl’.

“What are you talking about?”

“When we came here, she laughed over what happened with you at the Crash. Laughed, Michael. She wasn’t on your side” She exclaims.

He looks down at his food.

“I was always by your side. I was there when we saw all the numbers go down. Where was she? Here, probably cursing you and blaming you for everything that happened”

“It was my-”

“No, it wasn’t. We’ve talked about this. The warning that your cousin gave to you to pull out could’ve been just a false warning, you did what was right-”

“I don’t get where you’re going with this.” Michael interrupts.

He looks back up.

“She is not your fiancée, Michael. I am. I get it that she was in your past, for whatever reason, and that she got hurt. But we came into this country for a reason. Our. Plan. And she made everything stop.”

He stays quiet.

“There shouldn’t be sides for you to pick, Michael. I should be your priority.” She scoffs, “If we’re not here doing anything, then we might as well just leave.”

He stays quiet, again, but this time he shakes his head.

“See? You’re picking to stay here. Again.” She nods. “She’s your priority, Michael. And you should feel disgusted with yourself”

She looks away from him as Michael doesn’t agree or disagree, he just stares blankly at her in silence.

She breathes in deeply and grabs the napkin off her lap.

“I’ll see you back at the hotel. We can talk about this later” She whispers at him.

She rises from her chair and walks away from the table, leaving her dinner not even half eaten and most of her wine still on her glass.

He watches her as she walks away and out of the restaurant, yet his heart doesn’t budge, not even a little. He feels relieved as she walks away, but this new conversation is still difficult for him to process.

There is something stopping him.

Stopping him from disagreeing with her words. Something that is keeping his mind clogged in these situations. Something that whenever close, it makes his heart speed up and question his loyalty. As horrible as that sounds.

He knows what, or rather who, that something is. He doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s there.

And everything is coming back with it. Whether he likes it or not.

Taglist: @ohhersheybars @woodland-mist @onlythechicagoway @soleil-dor @finn-shelbys-bulldog @oh-theres-a-woman @peakyxtommy @ms-reader @beautycinders @lovemissyhoneybee @graceedwards @jadesbabylon @marvelismylifffe @a-dorky-book-keeper @peakascum @shanetoo @hufflemendes @cherrytop02 @http-cherries @burnitup @livingforbarnes @iccyyyybitch @ravennaofasgard @carezzesuigraffi @fernweh-fangirl @hufflepeople @huskyhunny @desertgremlin @fireawayxx @lemur46 @sugarcoated-lame @i-sneeze-to-appease @gabytodd​ @cococola-cocaine​

If you’d like to be apart of the taglist, let me know.

Hope you enjoyed this! If would like to make any questions about the characters or when the next part will be available. My ask box is always open.

[lloydskywalkers]

any port in a storm

Pixal and Lloyd and the evolving nature of friendship, as highlighted by the regular burning down of your city. 

(desperately trying to break through writer’s block and classes again, this was supposed to be under 2k and it is...very much not hdfjkgh but! i’ve been meaning to write for Pixal and Lloyd for a while so here are a whole bunch of feelings about the two of them and s8)

Pixal meets — truly meets — Lloyd Garmadon shortly after his brother’s been blown to pieces.

She says truly, because if you ask her, Pixal will tell you she met Lloyd Garmadon at exactly 8:48 in the evening outside his father’s monastery, moments before a horde of nindroids led there by Pixal herself descended upon them.

But Lloyd argues that since they said about two words total to each other, it doesn’t really count as meeting, and by the time Pixal’s spending the better part of her day with him running high and low around Ninjago City, she’s learned that it’s easier not to press the point.

Lloyd can be stubborn, like that.

She’d first learned that when she’d met him, just after they’d lost Zane. That loss hadn’t lasted long, especially for Pixal, but the immediate aftermath of it had been devastating. She’d watched with blank eyes as the team had fractured, splitting at the seams as they all fled their separate ways, too heartsore and dizzy with grief to do much otherwise.

All of them had fled, save Lloyd. She hadn’t paid him much attention before that point, the surprisingly small bearer of the Golden Power. Of course, he wasn’t the bearer of that power anymore, but his eyes alone had shown the experience of it. There’d been a brief, lost look that had crossed his face as the others had mentioned leaving, before it had been swept under a mask of stubborn, determined blankness. He wouldn’t be leaving. Someone had to stay behind and watch out for things, he’d claimed, even as the loss had bled through his voice.

Pixal hadn’t quite grasped the concept of empathy at that point, but she’d felt something dangerously close to it.

At any rate, the only interaction they’d had alone was brief. In fact, the only one Pixal can truly remember — and her memory never fails — is the quick exchange they’d had in the hospital lobby directly after the battle. The hospital was for Mr. Borg, and for the ninja’s minor injuries.

There was nothing any hospital on earth could do for Zane.

Pixal had found herself next to Lloyd in the waiting room, trying to distract herself from those thoughts while Lloyd stared at the stark white tiling with dull eyes.

“They never mentioned what your power was,” she’d asked him, almost absently. Collecting data, processing information — anything she could do to distract from the crushing grief.

“Oh.” Lloyd had blinked, startling back into awareness. He’d suddenly looked painfully young. “It’s, ah, I guess it’s just green, now.”

It had been Pixal’s turn to blink. “Green.”

“Yeah.” Lloyd had bit his lip, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly, two habits he’ll never quite lose. “I mean — it’s more than that, but it’s like — energy, I guess, is the best way to put it?”

“Interesting,” Pixal had remarked.

“Yeah.”

They’d stared at each other in silence after that, before they’d both been called off to other errands — and then they were having Zane’s funeral and then Pixal was making realizations she never got to tell anyone, and that had been that in her early introductions to Lloyd Garmadon. Quiet, awkward, and possessing an incredible power he hardly even knew the name of.

Looking back, Pixal figures her introduction hadn’t gone much better.

They’d continued as passing acquaintances as time went on, separated by danger and the confines of Zane’s head, and Pixal had figured that’s all they’d ever be. But then their Sensei goes missing and, despite Pixal’s increasing disappearances on Zane as she rebuilds her own body, she’s been given the role of watching out for Ninjago city along with Lloyd.

She quickly learns that quiet is not a term fit for Lloyd Garmadon when you’re trapped alone with him.

************

“How is there not a single station playing actual music?” Lloyd seethes, flicking through the channels almost manically. “It’s two am, who’s gonna be listening to your stupid commercial for toothpaste now, are you kidding me?”

“Statistically speaking, this is the prime time for long-distance driving near Ninjago City,” Pixal supplies, her voice a hint scratchy where it comes through the his car’s radio speakers. “Or, if you factor in the construction in the east district, there could still be traffic from late-night bars.”

Lloyd groans, thunking his head against the steering wheel as another ad screeches through the small space. “Wonderful.”

“Your vocal tones suggest you find it otherwise.”

“Dont trust ‘em, my vocal tones are traitors.” As if to solidify his point, Lloyd’s voice cracks in the middle of his sentence, shooting up an octave higher. Lloyd goes bright red, and thunks his head against the steering wheel again.

Taking pity on him, Pixal aims for reassurance. “It is normal for your voice to break, Lloyd. It shouldn’t last too long.” She pauses, momentarily scanning through another article. “On second thought, this one suggests it could also take two to three years for your voice to stabilize.”

Lloyd gives a strangled moan. “End me.”

“Unfortunately, that would defeat the purpose of why I’m here in the first place.”

Lloyd tilts his head, cracking an eye open as he glances at the camera feed he knows she’s watching him from. “Unfortunately, huh,” he muses. “So you’re saying if Zane hadn’t made you promise to look out for me, you would end me?”

“That — no, that is not — of course I wouldn’t end you,” Pixal backtracks. An odd feeling flickers through her, almost as if she’s lost her place, floundering.

Or embarrassed might be more accurate, she thinks wryly. She briefly considers projecting a a glaring face at Lloyd from the monitor. This is his fault. She rarely stuttered before Lloyd started teasing her at all hours of the morning.

“I mean, you wouldn’t be the first,” Lloyd continues, conversationally. “And if we’re being honest, I’d definitely rather you be the one to off me, instead of like, random bad guy number eighty-five—”

“I know you think you are funny,” Pixal cuts over him. “But casually planning for your death is something Kai listed I was not to let you do. Also, it is not nearly as funny as you think it is.”

“Ouch,” Lloyd mutters, though he looks chastised. “Never mind, you just took me out in one sentence.”

Chastised might be the wrong term.

Pixal studies him through the monitor, then sighs. “I am, however, honored you think highly enough of me to offer the right to murder you,” she gives in.

She’s rewarded as Lloyd breaks into a bright grin.

He still looks painfully young these days, but it’s less obvious. His voice is pitching lower and he wears his hair different, and he’s gained a whip-like tendency to quip at people, as Pixal’s experienced firsthand. Kai calls it sass in grumbling but fond tones, and Nya calls it snark somewhere between the fourth book series she’s sent for Pixal to try.

The ninja have been kind like that, sharing the interests they have in an attempt to make her feel…well, more human, she supposes. Less confined to a voice in a computer. Of course, Pixal isn’t confined to a voice in a computer anymore, but they don’t know that yet. She’ll tell them someday soon, she promises herself. Any day now.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to keep up with Lloyd by lurking in his car radio, as he spends half his time in there anyways.

************

“You’d think we’d have found their hideout by now,” Lloyd notes, as they wait in a darkened alleyway again. It gives them an excellent view of the major highways, so if the rumored biker gang does show up, they won’t miss it.

If they show up being the key point.

“Whoever their leader is, they certainly know how to keep a low profile,” Pixal answers, closing out another dead end police report in frustration.

“It’s weird,” Lloyd says, propping the notebook he’s sketching in on his knee as he squints at the paper. “Normally the boss types aren’t this quiet. They like to show off, y’know? Make a big scene, dramatic speeches and all.”

“Are you referring to the villains, or yourselves?”

“Touché,” Lloyd snorts. “But still, you gotta admit it’s weird they haven’t even made any demands. What’s their end game here, elaborate advertising for motorcycle design?”

“I would hope not,” Pixal says. “Their color coordination is lacking.”

Lloyd fights back a smile, his pencil scratching as he shifts his notebook again. “I don’t know, I kinda like the punk look.”

“I noticed that, when you tried to redecorate the car.”

“Hey, skulls are cool.”

“They are also conspicuous, especially when they come in acid green colors.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Lloyd sighs, making a face as he scrubs the eraser across the paper. Pixal tries to tilt the camera further, to see what he’s drawing tonight, but the angle he’s holding it at remains just out of sight.

She could probably guess what he’s drawing, if she tried. The notebook is one they’ve been steadily working their way through on these late-night patrols, the pages filled with little hangman games and Lloyd’s sketches of animals and his teammates. He’s drawn her a few times from memory, and she’s been tempted to ask him to draw her in the new Samurai X armor more than once.

Soon, she tells herself.

“What are you drawing?” she finally asks, curiosity getting the better of her.

Lloyd’s cheeks tinge pink, and he quickly plasters the notebook to his chest, hiding it entirely from view. “Nothing.”

Pixal waits, letting the silence fill with her judgement. “Lloyd, I have seen your drawings before.”

He doesn’t reply, and Pixal tries again. “It gets boring, being stuck with the car monitors for eyes.”

“I know you can hack other cameras,” Lloyd mutters, but he sighs, relenting as he turns the notebook over. Pixal’s eyes rake over the detailed sketch — it’s a comical little thing of her and Lloyd, jammed together on a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a darkening ocean. She can spot the smudges where he’s redrawn her head several times, and the numerous attempts he’s made at his own hair. Pixal studies Lloyd’s portrayal of himself, which is noticeably lacking in facial features. While Lloyd draws the others plenty, it’s a rare occasion that he draws himself, and she can’t help but be curious.

“I thought you were drawing the others again,” she admits.

“They’re on the ship,” Lloyd says, absently. “I’ll draw them when they remember to pull us back in.”

There’s nothing bitter in his tone to suggest it has any bearing on their actual lives, but the lost expressions Lloyd ends up giving their tiny caricatures feel familiar nonetheless.

“Zane has assured me they will be back as soon as they can,” Pixal speaks ups quietly.

Lloyd finally looks up fully, and flashes the monitor a smile. “I know,” he says. “So we better have this thing busted by the time they do, or they’ll never let us run a city on our own again.”

“If only we were truly running the city,” Pixal grumbles. “I could do a better job in two days than the current leaders could do in a year.”

“I’d vote for you,” Lloyd says, sincerely.

It’s a sweet gesture, but Pixal is unable to resist. “You don’t know how to vote.”

“Yes I do, it’s not hard!”

“Really? Then why are you not currently registered in the Ninjago voting system?”

Lloyd makes a strangled noise. “That’s a thing?”

She’s unable to keep the smugness from her voice. “I make my point.” Lloyd scowls, and scribbles a mustache on his drawing of her in revenge.

Pixal thinks it looks nice nonetheless.

************

She can’t really hold it against Lloyd for talking as much as he does, considering she does the same. It gets dull, sitting on patrol for hours on end, and there are only so many hours of light reading they can do before the silence begins to drive them both insane.

Pixal finds herself talking about more useless things with Lloyd than she has in her existence, pointless conversations in circles with each other. She also finds she doesn’t entirely mind. She’s become quite good at quipping back and forth with him, at least. It’s different than the kind of talk she has with Zane, lacking in the depth of feeling with the love they share. Her exchanges with Lloyd are lighter, though that’s not to say they’re less sincere.

For example, Zane hasn’t tried to teach her how to redesign a gi in poor lighting in the early hours of the morning because he’s bored out of his mind, that’s for sure.

“I’m teaching you how to sew,” Lloyd corrects, wincing as he accidentally stabs himself with the needle. “And I’m not redesigning the whole thing, I’m just adding some designs to spice it up.”

“I did not know you were allowed to wear colors other than green,” Pixal comments.

Lloyd pauses, squinting at the monitor. “You’re teasing me,” he finally says. “You’re making fun of how much green this gi has in it.”

“I would never,” Pixal replies, her tone flat and even. “The intricacies of your human humor evade me—”

“Human humor, nice—”

“—unlike the unusually bright shade of green you’ve chosen will fail to evade any eyes of your enemies.”

“I knew you were making fun of me!” Lloyd accuses, then flinches as he stabs his finger again trying to point at her. “And bright colors are our thing. Being subtle is, uh…not. Usually.”

Pixal is losing the battle to laugh at his expression by the minute. “I am shocked.”

Lloyd glares at the monitor, shifting his sewing to rest on his knees as he slouches in the car seat. “How’d you even get so good at sarcasm, anyways,” he mutters. “Zane still doesn’t get it half the time.”

“Perhaps it is part of my glowing personality,” Pixal says. Lloyd gives a huff of laughter, relenting.

“Fair enough,” he says, shifting in his seat again. “Fine, you win. The green is probably too bright, but that’s not the point. I’m gonna show you how to do a backstitch."

Pixal falls quiet, letting Lloyd gesture with the needle as he explains. There are a hundred, a thousand tutorials she could pull up online, digitized knowledge instantly learned on all the countless types of stitches she could use, sorted and categorized in neat columns of use and effectiveness. All of them more detailed, more easily understood than Lloyd’s absent rambling and unsteady hands as he struggles with the end of a knot.

Not one of them will care whether or not Pixal learns the odd way Zane likes to loop his stitches, or will quietly add which stitches knit skin back together quickest.

So Pixal ignores her programming, and does her best to follow Lloyd’s rambling instructions, watching as his scarred fingers tug another thread of dull gold through the green mess of fabric, the city quiet around them.

“You never did tell me where you learned how to sew,” Pixal says, as Lloyd starts up a new thread of black on the other side of the gi. “Was that something the others taught you in training?”

“They’d have to know how to be able to teach it,” Lloyd snickers. “And, uh, no. I taught myself to back at Darkley’s.”

“Oh,” Pixal falters. She’s heard about Darkley’s, both from Zane and the legal reports she’s read online. Neither gave a positive impression of the place. Her mind is suddenly filled with images of a younger Lloyd trying to give himself stitches, and her heart twists.

Lloyd starts, seemingly having picked up on her train of thought. “I mean, I did it for fun, mostly. I like sewing,” he explains. “It’s useful. You can pull things back together, and fix ‘em.”

Pixal is quiet, but she hopes Lloyd takes her silence as agreement with his motive. She likes to think he knows her well enough for that, by now.

************

Pixal finds, somewhere during their fourth month alone, that she’s glad the team elected to stick her and Lloyd together. Not because she doesn’t want to be with Zane — there’s never a moment she doesn’t miss him, and with every day that passes her resolve to keep her secret from him grows weaker, as the longing for actual connection grows stronger.

But there are conversations she can have with Lloyd that she can never have with Zane, and the dangerous thing about spending time with Lloyd, Pixal finds, is that they’re more similar than she’s realized.

“Sometimes I think I’m jealous,” Lloyd whispers to her one night. It’s one of the bad ones, the ones where their enemies struck too sudden to stop, and the mission ends in the hospital. “I think I’m jealous of Zane, and I hate myself for it.”

Pixal is quiet, trying to pick apart the tone of his voice in the words he’s just spoken, and factors in the victims they’ve just left behind at the hospital. She finds herself no closer to an answer.

“Is it the metal skin part?” she finally asks, though she knows that’s wrong. “The, what was it, technical immortality?”

“No,” Lloyd shakes his head. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he says emphatically, his fingers fluttering at over the steering wheel, tapping incessantly with unspent energy. “I don’t want to, but that’s — it’s not what I’m scared of. I’m more scared of how I go out.”

He swallows, and his fingers move to dance over the woven bracelet on his wrist instead, twisting at the tiny beads and tracing senseless designs in constant, steady movement. It’s a motion he does often, and it had puzzled Pixal at first. She’d decided to write it off as an odd tick, a way to spend excess energy.

Now, she recognizes the desperate kind of reassurance that movement gives. She understands too well the need to remind yourself that you can move — that your body will obey you and you alone.

Pixal thinks back to the other factors in tonight’s accident, of the way the drugged man’s eyes had cleared when they’d finally turned him over to the police, the way he’d sworn he’d never do such a thing in his right mind. She thinks of the way the first victim had thrown themselves over their companion.

That victim hadn’t made it to the hospital.

“Ah,” Pixal says, quietly.

She’s silent again, and she thinks back to when she’d met him, the very first time. She recalls the way her programming had rebelled against her in favor of the Overlord, corrupting her body and forcing it against her, twisting everything she was and wanted to be into something different.

She thinks back again, to the searing-hot anger, the terror, the despair as she was torn apart, piece by piece like a machine, burning out at the whims of another. Her end purposeless, her demise belonging to someone else, just like every other part of her.

She thinks of the last glimpse she’d caught of Zane, bright and beautiful as a supernova. Burning with the terrible brilliance of his own, determined choice. Terrible, because the death of something always is. Beautiful, because it was his own. Zane died, not a machine, not a weapon, not a tool of anyone or anything, but as himself. Zane died to save the ones he loves. Pixal could’ve died for spare parts.

Never again, she promises herself. If she goes out, she goes out on her own terms. This time, they choose the end of their own destiny themselves.

In hindsight, it’s the kind of promise they’re both too young to make, but neither of them have ever seen themselves as such, and promises like that are easy.

“Love can be terrible, sometimes,” Lloyd murmurs. Pixal watches him scrub at the blood on his uniform, and thinks how ironically well-timed it is that he finished the stitching on his new gi this morning. “Sometimes I forget how ugly it can be.”

************

The end of their nighttime stakeouts begins with a break-in at Mr. Borg’s tower. Lloyd argues that she should get to call it her father’s tower, if she wants, but the ninja aren’t the only ones Pixal’s hiding herself from.

And then Lloyd gets very tense at the thought of fathers very fast, and they never finish the conversation.

They stay at the edge of the bridge long after the parachute, emblazoned with the unmistakable visage of Lloyd’s father, disappears from sight. Pixal wonders if it’s burned into Lloyd’s eyes, like the way she’s read black spots linger in humans’ vision after they’ve looked at something too bright. The way Lloyd stares at the river, his shoulders tense and his teeth worrying at his lip, she thinks she might be right.

They’re waiting on the report from the commissioner —they’re waiting for anything, anyone who can offer them any explanation of what’s going on. Pixal’s reminded of how much she loathes this kind of waiting.

“It could be—” Lloyd begins, then breaks off, his voice wavering. He swallows, and Pixal can see the way his fists clench tightly from the cameras they’ve put in his car. There’s a fierce part of her that longs to reveal herself, to meet his eyes herself and offer some semblance of comfort. But there’s a time and place for things, and Pixal isn’t ready.

“It could be anything,” Lloyd finally continues, his voice small. “It could — it doesn’t mean anything. It could mean nothing, right?”

Pixal is silent, her mind racing. She’s run the calculations over and over in her head already, scouring the internet for anything related to the bikers. She’s been foolish, she realizes — they both have. Letting the gang go unnamed for so long, thinking nothing of it. Now, with the name flashing vibrant across Pixal’s vision, a part of her wants to let them go nameless just a bit longer.

Before she can answer, Lloyds phone goes off with a sharp ping, just as Pixal’s sensors alert her to the message from the commissioner. Lloyd snatches for his phone like it’s on fire, and Pixal’s already scanning the message frantically, as if she can salvage this if she’s fast enough, save Lloyd from this one pain.

Lloyd’s gotten much better at reading quickly though, these days.

She can pinpoint the moment he reaches the last paragraph, because his breath hitches. There’s a long, pressing pause of silence, Lloyd’s hands trembling as they clutch weakly at his phone. Then it’s punctured by a reedy, wheezing gasp, and Pixal’s suddenly wishing she’d revealed herself after all.

Instead, all she has is her voice as Lloyd crumples, crouching over in visible distress. Pixal’s mind races, recalling everything Zane’s ever told her about his team, the way their panic manifests in different shades. Lloyd’s is quiet but desperate, rapid breathes that stutter as his eyes slide more and more into a frightening kind of blankness.

“Lloyd, please, listen to my voice,” she begs, trying to reach him in the only way she can. “Please, you have to breathe—”

“He’s gone,” Lloyd rasps, unhearing of her words. “He’s s’posed to be gone, it’s supposed to be over, I’m supposed to be done—”

Pixal fights back the sense of overwhelming helplessness. She knows loss. She knows how to finish his sentence. He’s supposed to be done grieving, done mourning, done clinging to false scraps of hope that his father isn’t lost forever only to be met with heartbreak.

And now, to be met with the possibility of something so much worse.

“We’ll stop them,” she tells him, unflinching. “We won’t let it happen.”

Lloyd’s eyes are a vivid green where they stare at her through the monitor, almost ghostly in the misting light reflecting from the river.

He’s silent, but Pixal is, too.

Pixal remembers the way her head had spun when she’d first picked up the traces of Zane in the system, how the world had rushed then steadied, flooding with color as she’d realized he might not be lost after all. She remembers the surging, overwhelming flood of joy, that someone she’d thought she lost might live after all. She remembers being so happy, at even the smallest chance to get him back, because the voice was Zane’s, without a doubt.

She watches the color seep from Lloyd’s expression as his shoulders shudder, the words from the commissioner’s message almost echoing through the air. Watches the terror as the both of them fill the silence.

Will we?  

The radio scratches, as if echoing Pixal’s anxiety. Love can be terrible, sometimes. She’s underestimated how it also be so cruel.

************

She’s also, apparently, underestimated how the universe on the whole could be so cruel.

She should’ve revealed herself to them from day one. That way, when Harumi’s corrupted programming suddenly ravages through her like an electric shock, she could be reassured they’d at least be familiar with the person they were fighting.

Instead, she doesn’t even get to scream. Pixal’s only able to force out a desperate, broken warning before she’s lost again, drowning in her own body as she’s forced under. Furious panic grips her as she screams without lungs, bashing herself against the overwhelming helplessness that’s taken over her.

Not again, not again, not again—

Her limbs creak and jolt against her will, lashing out at the people she cares most about, and Pixal can’t even rage back in her own voice. She’s sworn, she’s promised herself she’d never let anyone do this to her again — she’s sworn she’d die before she let someone reach into her head and snatch control away, and yet here she is, frozen as her body’s used to target her friends.

If she could cry, she might.

There’s not much more to say than that. She breaks free, her body her own once again, but by then it’s too late.

************

If Pixal had the same gift of foresight that Zane did, maybe she would have seen it coming. Maybe she’d have remembered how similar her and Lloyd are, and that this kind of pained desperation always yields impulsiveness and mistakes.

She doesn’t, though. She barely even manages to do what she’s trying to, which is convincing Lloyd to join the others while they celebrate their victory. Their off-key singing is something he normally wouldn’t hesitate to join in on, she thinks, and she hates Harumi a little more.

Maybe she’ll try his mother next. The expression on Lloyd’s face screams unapproachable, and remains fixedly sullen.

Almost to her surprise, he meets her eyes as she draws near— it’s odd, being able to meet his back — and his own eyes are dark, from despair over Harumi or despair over his father, Pixal isn’t sure. She’s thinking it might be both, when his eyebrows crease, and a flicker of concern cuts through them instead.

“You good?”

It takes her a moment to realize why he’s asking, but the answer is obvious. Her head tilts downward, and she watches as her fingers curl and uncurl. Her movements, her choices. She lets out an even breath.

“As I can be,” she replies. Lloyd nods, and his eyes are understanding. His lips twist in a scowl.

“She shouldn’t have done that to you. That was a low blow.”

Pixal’s mouth curves into a humorless smile. “That it was. She’s rather good at those, isn’t she.”

Lloyd’s eyes shadow again, and he looks away, crossing his arms. “This isn’t supposed to be about me,” he mutters.

“Yes, it is,” Pixal counters. “It is why I came over here, in the first place. She hurt—”

“All of us, and who’s fault is that,” Lloyd snaps, his arms crossing tighter.

“I would hope you know it’s hers,” she says, holding firm.

Lloyd looks away again, biting his lip, and Pixal shifts anxiously, rolling her wrists. The sensation of control sliding away still haunts her, worse than it had the first time. She should be better than this, she tells herself hotly. She’s lived without a body long enough that losing it so briefly shouldn’t effect her this much.

Curse her programming, she thinks, tapping agitatedly at the banister. She knew she should have reinforce it sooner.

“Hey, um.” Lloyd is looking at her again, hesitant. He twists at his bracelet, and his eyes lose a fraction of that darkness. “Kai made this for me, after Morro,” he says. “I kept shredding the sleeves of my uniform, so he told me to mess with this instead, when I needed to remember that…that I was in control.”

He shrugs, hesitant. “We could make you one too, if you wanted. It helps, having something.”

Pixal lets out a steady breath, despite not actually needing to. The action is grounding, she’s found. “I would like that.”

Lloyd gives her a ghost of a smile in return. “Soon as this is over, then.”

There’s a heavy weight to his words, and Pixal’s eyes narrow.

“Lloyd,” she says. He looks at her, his eyes dark. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

He’s quiet, not meeting her eyes, and this is where Pixal should stop him. This is when she should see the end of the road they’ve been on since they started this, and force him to turn before it’s too late.

“I know what I’m doing.”

She doesn’t.

************

Lloyd is battered and bleeding by the time they drag him onto the ship, a gruesome portrait of cruelty. Pixal is frozen as she watches him writhe in Kai’s hold, his screams cracked and wet as he thrashes erratically like a broken thing.

Nya is already barking orders before they’ve even gotten Lloyd fully on the ship, and Zane is running scans with a horrified, wavering focus. Pixal follows Cole as he carries Lloyd to the medbay with a blank numbness, the rush of wind streaming past the Bounty sails thunderously loud in her ears.

This isn’t Lloyd, she thinks, staring at his crumpled form. Lloyd isn’t this battered, broken shell of a person. Lloyd isn’t hazy eyes that fail to recognize them and frantic murmuring through bloody lips. Lloyd is bright-eyed and gentle and would rather die before he screams the way he does when Cole moves him to the table.

Lloyd is her friend, and this is where that promise they made has led them. She knows why Lloyd set out for the prison, hot on the collapse of his own star. She also knows he wouldn’t have chosen to burn out like this.

Cole calls out for Zane, his voice ringing in panic as Lloyd screeches in pain again. Pixal thinks of quiet words in the safety of his car, and she feels sick. This is the ugliness of love, the terrible, hideous side of it.

And Lloyd would hate it, if he could see himself, if he were any semblance of lucid. He’d hate to know just how much better he was at breaking himself than Morro ever was.

Zane is gentle as he pushes past her, but Pixal can feel the tremble in his hands. He’s every bit as rattled as she is, if not more so — Zane’s heart is larger and softer than hers has ever been, and he cares about each and every one of them with a painful intensity. It’s a cruel thing, to have to pull those same people back together with your own hands.

Kai’s eyes are streaming as he clutches at Lloyd’s wrists, pinning him in place. Zane’s hands waver again over one of the jagged wounds near Lloyd’s ribcage, the green of his uniform already dyed dark in blood, soaking over the careful stitches Pixal watched him put in himself.

Pixal finally finds her footing, reminding herself of the solid wood beneath her feet. She recalls the steady, smooth stitch Lloyd’s scarred fingers traced out for her.

“Here.” She takes the needle from Zane’s hands, squeezing his briefly before letting go. “I can do it.”

She sets the needle against Lloyd’s skin and wonders what kind of stitch it’d take to pull your heart back together.  

************

Pixal cannot cry. It’s one of the features Mr. Borg spent hours debating, weighing the pros and cons of giving her the ability before he was truly sure how rust-proof she was. He’d never gotten the chance to, as the Overlord had interrupted him, then Pixal had lost any body to give the ability to cry to, which had eliminated the need entirely.

She cannot cry, but she can hurt, and the rain that streams through her hair, dripping down her forehead spotting raindrops on her cheeks, could be tears if she pretended.

She doesn’t, though, because tears are a waste of water and overall useless in the grand scheme of things. She doubts they’d have helped her fare any better in the battle with Colossi, either.

Tears won’t bring anyone back.

Lloyd cries anyways. She can’t see him, but she can hear it in his voice, the way it wavers and breaks over the radio, nasally tones pronounced.

He’s barely able to gasp a few coordinates to her before he cuts the radio off abruptly. Pixal’s spent enough time with him to envision his scarred fingers snapping it off with a particular desperation, green sparking from his hands in distress.

She reminds herself those sparks are gone, now, bled away into nothing like the vivid green of Lloyd’s eyes had. The thought makes her sadder than she’d expected. She had a joke, about his eyes, she had wanted to make. Now that she has a body, and her own set of glowing green eyes, she’d — there was something he would’ve laughed at, she thought —

It doesn’t matter, now. Neither of them are likely to laugh anytime soon.

The coordinates blink brightly in her vision, and she’s almost surprised she managed to key them in. She’s running on autopilot, she supposes. It could be ironic — she’s been so desperate for control, it’s been so important that she’s the one feeling. Now, she’d give anything not to feel at all.

She lets out a shaky breath, dispelling the mist in her vision left from the rain. She leans forward, just over the edge of the building she’s crouched on, and her loose hair falls forward, silvery and synthetic and horribly tangled. Irritated, she reaches for another hair tie, and her hands falter around her wrist.

Lloyd had promised her a bracelet there. But he’d promised Kai would make the bracelet, hadn’t he, and Kai couldn’t make the bracelet if he was dead, could he.

Pixal blinks, her breath hitching. She’s been so numb to the pain of Zane’s loss, it hasn’t yet occurred to her that she’s losing Kai, too. And Jay, and Cole, and—

She sucks in the same shuddery kind of breath she’s seen Lloyd do, and carefully fists her hand in the area of her uniform above her chest. Her fingers dig in tightly, clutching in a hopeless attempt to feel some sort of comfort she knows she’ll never find.

But perhaps, for these few seconds, she can pretend the action is holding her together.

************

“It was inevitable,” Pixal tells Lloyd blankly, as he rasps out his third apology in the dark cover of their small hideout. “That one of us would fall, eventually. It had nothing to do with you.”

Lloyd swallows thickly. “It could’ve — it should’ve been—”

He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. Pixal’s hand shoots out, clamping tightly around his wrist, and there’s a beat of gratitude that she doesn’t need to rely on her voice alone anymore.

“Don’t.” Her voice is strung tighter than the tension in their shoulders. “You cannot change anything. You can’t, Lloyd, and you should not wish to — to change it that way.”

Lloyd jerks his hand free, wiping miserably at his eyes. He sets it back down within her reach, though, and if Pixal were any different, she’d take it.

But Pixal isn’t that different from Lloyd at all in the end, and neither of them reach for the other’s hand, no matter how desperately they crave the contact. Fear is more familiar, and it’s easier to give into it than it is the clawing need for comfort in your chest, after all.

“Still,” Lloyd finally whispers. “Still.”

Pixal swallows. She doesn’t disagree. If one of them had to fall, she knows she gladly would have taken it upon herself. She knows the others care for her, certainly, but she also knows her place in the grand scheme of things. They were six before she came along, and even now she’s kept far too many secrets to be fully counted among them.

She listens to Lloyd’s quiet, cracked voice, and she wonders if he’s thinking that they were five before he came along, younger than Pixal got to know him as.

Now they’re three, hollow and heartbroken. Though counting herself as one whole feels like cheating, right now.

Pixal squeezes her eyes shut, and wonders what it’s like to cry. Perhaps it helps, though Lloyd doesn’t look any less miserable.

************

“I was thinking,” Lloyd tells her, during one of the precious few quiet moments they have while trying to overthrow Garmadon and Harumi. Pixal’s turning the tiny tea flower he’d given her over in her hands, a part of her mind already marking articles about flower-pressing, another part wondering if it’s already too late to save the blossom. “About that promise we made, before all this.”

Pixal finally tucks the flower into the pocket of her uniform, pressed close to her chest. If anything, it can be a reminder of the lives that are safe — the life that’s coming back to her, if she has to drag him back from another realm herself. “And?”

Lloyd’s hands twist together. “Maybe we should focus more on staying alive.”

Pixal coughs out a laugh, breathless and startled. Lloyd wrinkles his nose at her, but his eyes are amused, even with their light lost. “I mean, the emphasis would be on keeping everyone else alive, but it’s kinda hard to do that if we’re dead, so…yeah. Priorities.”

“Staying alive should always be a priority,” Pixal corrects him, but she tugs the edge of his armor out of place with a smile.

“Why didn’t you teach me how to graffiti?” she nods at the designs on the green leather. “Or was this another Darkley’s tradition.”

“This is a refined art, called whatever I had on me that showed up on dark green,” Lloyd grumbles, fixing his armor. “I’ll teach it to you when we get out of this.”

“Another reason why staying alive would be a more productive focus,” Pixal points out. “I’ve heard teaching is easier when you’re alive.”

“And I’ve heard you’re a real riot,” Lloyd mutters. “It’s a promise, okay? I promise to teach you how to do cool armor design if you promise not to disappear into another realm on me.”

Pixal nods, adjusting her own armor tighter as screams ring out from a street nearby. “A promise, then.”

She keeps both the promise and the flower, the tiny blossom dried and faded by the time she’s escaped from the prison, heart racing with leftover adrenaline as Zane sweeps her into his arms. She clutches back every bit as tight, listening to his breathless laughter as cheers rise from the streets behind them, the smoke drifting across the early morning sky above them pale against the lightening blue. Pixal buries her face in his shoulder and breathes, tucking the moment away in her heart where it won’t fade. There’s a future stretching out before her, and she’s got the limbs to walk her path on her own, but all she wants right now is the steady ground beneath her feet and the bright laughter of what she’s managed to keep.  

Lloyd meets them shortly after, his own promise kept as he tears his gaze from his father, handing him off to the authorities before sprinting for the others. Pixal barely snags a moment alone with him, and even then no one’s particularly keen on letting him out of their sights.

He meets her eyes as they pick their way through the wrecked streets, the city more alive around them than it’s been in weeks. In the dark of the early morning, Pixal’s eyes glow a bright green, reflecting oddly in the windows they pass. It’s always been her preferred color, in contrast to Zane’s bright blue. Lloyd glances at her, his own eerily green eyes glowing back. He bites his lip, but it’s to hold back real laughter this time.

“My eyes were green first,” she tells him.

“Sue me,” he shoots back, before Kai’s throwing an arm over his shoulders again, tucking Lloyd neatly in between him and Nya. Pixal smothers a laugh at the look on his face, and tightens her own arm further where it’s linked firmly in Zane’s.  

It’s going to be an easy promise to keep, she thinks.  

[criticallyacclaimedstranger]

Fic: Frankie's Sweaty Balls

Fandom: Triple Frontier

Ship: Frankie Morales x Jay ‘Lady’ Ray (there's a series, go check it out in my masterlist, I may have to create a series masterlist soon!)

Warnings: Language, talk of face fucking, talk of breast cancer (no one actually has breast cancer, there's no cancer scare!).

Summary: Morning in the Morayles household isn't always fun and games.

a/n: The last week has been tough and I'm not really out of the woods yet. Writing is.. I can't even talk about that right now. But this came to me today and I had to jot it down. It's not a masterpiece and bitch there are probably fifteen spelling mistakes, but it made me smile. And I needed that.

The coffee is black and aromatic but it’s not doing much good to Jay’s foul morning temper. She glances out the window and notices that the forecast last night was accurate; dark clouds are covering the entire sky, ready to release rain. No gardening tonight, then. Fuck.

She sips the coffee and listlessly sticks the tablespoon into the yogurt in front of her. The bowl in front of her is filled with Greek yogurt, nuts, and seeds; her preferred breakfast, but this morning she’s not feeling it.

Frankie sits on the other side of the table, downing his coffee, gnawing on toast, and reading the morning paper. He also keeps an eye on little Alma, happily drooling oatmeal all over herself and the highchair Frankie’s carpenter dad made for her.

“Sweetie, could you try getting some of that breakfast into your mouth as well?” Jay sighs and directs Alma’s hand with the tiny spoon into the laughing mouth of the one-year-old. Alma spits it out and laughs even more and Jay, in no mood for parenting, turns to Frankie for help. He looks up from the paper and tuts at his messy daughter.

“Need some help to find your mouth, chiquita?” he smiles, trying hard not to just laugh as he gets some tissue and wipes Alma’s mouth before helping her to a spoonful of oatmeal. Alma obediently swallows it without drooling.

Jay presses a smile for her daughter and tells her what a good girl she is, then goes back to being moody. Frankie helps Alma finish breakfast, wipes her clean and gives her a toy to chew on while he finishes his own breakfast. He turns a page and reads, absent-mindedly stroking his bearded jawline.

“They got this breast cancer special here, baby,” he tells Jay. “246,660 new cases of breast cancer are expected every year, and about one in eight American women will develop breast cancer at some point of her life.”

“Charming, thanks for those numbers,” Jay mutters, not really wanting to hear breast cancer statistics. Her own breasts are tender as hell and she’s due for her period, which is the reason for her irritability this morning. It was much easier when she was in the army and didn’t have a period at all. After Alma, however, she’s like clockwork again for the first time in fifteen years, and she’s decidedly not enjoying it.

“Says here that the number of new cases has gone down a little these last few years,” Frankie reads on, “because of extensive campaigning about regular breast exams. Women are better at checking their tits, basically.”

“No wonder, given the yearly scare campaigns,” Jay points out and shoves a spoonful of yogurt into her mouth. It doesn’t taste well this morning.

“You know, I’m up for breast exams any day…” Frankie winks across the table, oblivious of her grumbling. Jay puts down the spoon and glares back at him.

“You know, that’s so typical!” she says acidly. “They not only scare and worry women with it so they spend half their lives being afraid of a disease they may not even get, but they also make it into a fun, sexy thing! Like, oh I don’t know, ask your partner to help you out, you’ll both enjoy that! Have your husband squeeze your tits for you. Either you have cancer, or you don’t, but at least he gets to feel you up! Not to mention how easily men can seem like the good guy, all they need to do it talk about breast cancer and tit exams! They’ve made breast cancer sexy, for fuck’s sake! And that’s not even mentioning pinkwashing!”

Frankie sighs deeply and gives Alma her sippy cup with milk.

“Jesus, Jay. No need to go all feminist on me. I was just trying to help. And don’t swear in front of the kid.”

“Yeah, well, why aren’t there any huge campaigns for testicular cancer, huh?” Jay goes on, now slipping into a rant. “I’ll tell you why: Because there’s no sex appeal in it! Who the hell wants to feel a couple of old wrinkly balls up, huh? You can always make money out of tits but it’s a lot harder with balls.”

“You’re welcome to examine my balls whenever you want and you know it,” Frankie replies with a good-natured grin. He seems determined not to get provoked this morning and it drives Jay insane.

“Besides,” he adds teasingly, “you know my balls aren’t old and wrinkly. I seem to remember you stuffing your mouth with them the other night.”

“Ugh, do we have to talk about your sweaty old balls at the fucking breakfast table?” Jay groans. “Have some fucking decorum! In front of Alma and all!”

“Look who’s talking. Besides, you brought it up.”

“Fu-fu?” Alma says, her voice wondering. “Fu-fu-fu.”

“Oh, there you go,” Frankie sighs, brows drawn together as he looks critically at the girl. “If my daughter’s first word is the f-word, I swear to God –“

“Ba-ba-ba-ba!” Alma smiles sunnily at her dad, who doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry.

“It would be even worse if it was balls,” Jay snorts and pushes away her cup of coffee and the remains of her yogurt before getting up.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Frankie calls after her as she leaves the kitchen. Jay stops in the doorway and turns back at him, grimacing.

“Lost my appetite when I started thinking about your gross, sweaty balls,” she tells him sourly, but only gets a chuckle in return. Frankie quickly covers Alma’s ears with his hands before retorting.

“You’ll end this day with those balls slapping against your chin when I fuck your filthy mouth, and you’ll love it,” he tells her with a nasty grin before removing his hands from the sides of Alma’s head and ruffling her dark locks.

“Baba fufu!” Alma exclaims and laughs.

“Jesus Christ.” Jay shakes her head and leaves the kitchen to get dressed.

[honey-dewey]

To Serve the King

Pairing: Din Djarin/Reader

Word Count: 2,870

Warnings: No major ones, Reader gets called a slut once. 

Very few understood what went on behind the Mand’alor’s helmet, but that didn’t mean they didn’t support him. However, leaving someone wrapped in revealing silks and fine jewelry on the throne when he wasn’t around might’ve been one of the odder things they’ve seen. 

Din Djarin was many things, but a confident Mand’alor was not one of them. They called him Mand’alor the Reuniter, officially. That was the name they put in the books and would write for all of history. However, he was well known as the Mudhorn Mand’alor, or the Mand’alor who never removed his helmet. 

He’d been settled as the Mand’alor for a while now, slowly reuniting the people of Mandalore, hence the name he’d been given. It was slow going, and because he was often away on odd jobs, he needed someone he could trust to keep his throne safe while he went away. 

To most, however, an ex-slave wasn’t the first choice. Hell, it might even be the last. 

Yet, that’s who the great Mand’alor trusted with his beskar throne. 

He’d picked you up on Tatooine, after you’d thrown down with Fennec when she’d found you hiding in Jabba’s old palace. You’d been bruised and beaten up, but you’d held your own and seemed to be pretty loyal, so Din had taken you back to Mandalore and offered you a job. You weren’t a complete fool, so you accepted. 

Now, almost six months later, you were comfortable as the throne keeper. Maybe a bit too comfortable, but that was Din’s problem to deal with. Dressed in revealing silk and soft chiffon, you often sat upon the throne when he hunted. When he wasn’t out hunting, you were seated at his right or in his lap, depending on your mood. 

Some, most even, speculated that you were still a slave, considering the only beskar you wore was an ornate collar. But others considered your boldness and wondered if you were truly the pilot and Din was just your puppet. And others still were certain that you and Din were exchanging sexual favors behind the scenes, taking into account the fact that you both slept in the same room. 

None of them were right. 

You were no longer a slave. You wore the collar out of respect for Din, knowing that he had the power to remove it kept you respectful and by his side, but he would absolutely let you go if you asked. You were also not the mastermind. Despite being smart, you had no desire to rule a planet. And as for the sexual favors, well, you admired Din, and thought he was likely handsome under the helmet, but you could never see yourself seducing him, or vice versa. At least, not yet. 

What you were was his advisor and his unofficial right hand man. He’d offered you the job, and you had insisted on the uniform. It kept you unassuming and out of people’s minds. No one suspected a throne warmer to be anything but a bubble headed slut. Which you definitely were not. 

Din had, upon realizing people would likely be after your head, cleared out a bit of his room for you, which was where you were now. Tucked away in a small alcove was your bed, raised up high above your desk and bookshelf. You enjoyed sleeping this close to the ceiling. It gave you a sense of security. 

Also amongst your things was a wardrobe built into the wall. Inside hung most of your day clothes, as your leisure clothes were folded away in the wardrobe’s only drawer. 

The only thing separating you from Din was a thick black curtain that you controlled, often tugging it shut so you could have privacy. 

Now, you were settled at your desk, pouring over papers Din had given you to check. It was slow going, but worth the trouble. You scratched out a mistake and corrected it, adjusting the number of exports to accurately represent Mandalore’s involvement with the galaxy. 

“Hey,” Din said, knocking a bit on the side of the wall before pushing the curtain open. “You good in here?” 

“Yep,” you mumbled, putting the final piece of paper down and smiling. “Just finished looking over the import and export papers. Everything looks good.” 

Din sighed. “Perfect. I’m leaving for two days. I have a meeting with Fett and Skywalker on a planet not too far from here.” 

You nodded, standing and stretching. “I guess I better get ready, hm?” 

Din chuckled lightly. “What will you wear?” 

Opening your wardrobe, you examined your options, eventually deciding on one. “This.” 

The outfit in question was mostly sheer, with strategic patches of fine silk to cover you appropriately. The chiffon fabric was a beautiful royal blue, while the silks were a blue so dark they may as well have been black. You slid into the outfit, adjusting it and smiling. Din may have worn head to toe beskar to protect himself, but this was your armor. Slipping on your silver anklets and sapphire studded jewelry, you walked out onto the main bedroom, seeing Din waiting there for you. 

“My king,” you said formally, a sly grin curling across your lips. 

Din sighed. “Here.” He held out your beskar collar, securing it around your neck. He was the only one with a key to unlock the ornate clasp that kept it in place, but you didn’t mind. You would survive for a few days without removing the collar while you waited for your Mand’alor to return. 

You two headed out to the throne room, where you settled down on the throne, waving to Din as he left. He promised he’d be back by nightfall the next day, and you grinned, teasingly replying that you couldn’t wait for his return. Throwing your legs over one of the arms of the throne, you lounged back. Time to do your job. 

The first people that came in were merchants from a nearby planet. Rug makers who were down on their luck. They didn’t have much to trade, but you promised them that you would take a look at their exports and see what you could do. Some of the council members seemed hesitant to let them go so easily, but you waved your hand and they left without a word. 

Over the day, you had many encounters like that. Small ones you could easily talk over and come to a simple conclusion. In between meetings, you read a book on the throne, entirely engulfed in the story. The council filtered around you, often attempting to talk you down from your decisions. You always responded in the same way. By flicking a book page and sweetly telling them it’s what the Mand’alor would’ve done. 

By the time the sun had set, you were preparing for your final meeting. A scheduled one with the Nite Owls, who had come in with the leader of an assassination attempt for the Mand’alor. 

The assassin in question was dragged behind Bo-Katan and Koska, his hands cuffed and a length of chain linking his ankles. He looked exhausted, kneeling before you with sleepless and pitiful eyes, his shoulders hunched. You examined him further, occasionally asking Bo-Katan a question. His hair was choppy, clearly dirty and in desperate need of a proper trim, although he did have well maintained facial hair. His skin, naturally sun-kissed, was pale with lack of light, and his eyes, which kept drawing you in, were surrounded by sleepless bruises. 

“Oh for the love of Mand’alor, uncuff him,” you instructed. “He’s starved, exhausted, and in no condition to fight anyone. The least you can do is treat him like a human being and not a kriffing animal.” 

Bo-Katan did as asked, uncuffing the assassin. You leaned forward, happy today had gotten some form of excitement. “Do you have a name?” 

The assassin shook his head. You sighed, standing up and stepping down off the dais and standing before the assassin. “A pity. Can you talk?” 

“Yes.” 

You nodded. “Good. I’m sure Bo-Katan treated you well on your journey here. He wasn’t any trouble, was he, Ms. Kryze?” 

Bo-Katan shrugged. “He’s a survivor. Took us months to hunt him down.” 

You knelt down, taking the assassin’s face and slowly turning it from side to side. Noting a bruise that could only have come from a fight, you made up your mind, standing and holding a hand out. “Stand.” 

He did, taking your hand and using it to wobble to his feet. He was taller than you, but you didn’t mind. All you could see in your head was yourself, knelt before the Mand’alor, body aching from a life of fighting, desperate for any kind of out. He’d held your hand just as you did to the assassin, offering you a steady life. 

“Listen well,” you said, still holding the assassin’s hand. “On this planet, there is an honest life to be found. A life of comfort, a life that isn’t ruled by a need to hunt or fight. If you’ll accept, we can give you that life.” 

The assassin’s face went slack, his hand gripping yours tightly. “And why would I want to live like you?” He hissed finally. “A pretty little palace slut. That’s not what I want.” He stepped forward, but you knew better. Using his iron grip on your hand, you tossed him clean over your shoulder, whirling around to press a knee firmly to his sternum, your dominant forearm steady on his throat. 

“Then you give me no choice,” you said, voice as firm as your position. “I’ll be returning you to Bo-Katan, and she can have her way with you.” 

He was wrestled to his feet, Koska grinning as she recuffed him. 

“Ms. Kryze,” you said, moving back to the throne and sitting upon it once more. “Show our guest how we treat those who would attack us.” 

Bo-Katan nodded, hauling the assassin out. You sighed, collapsing into the throne. “You’re all dismissed,” you said loosely, waving away the council members, all of whom had been dead silent for your final meeting. 

They left, leaving you alone on the throne. How Din did this day in and day out was a mystery to you. You were exhausted simply from one final meeting. 

Standing and heading back to your shared room, you slid past Din’s portion and finally shrouded yourself in the familiarness of your room. 

You had a horribly restless sleep that night, and awoke early to the sound of someone entering the room. You feared for all of two seconds before you heard the telltale sounds of beskar armor. Din was home early. 

Sliding out of bed, you tossed on a knee length robe and opened the curtain, seeing Din standing next to his bed. 

“Oh Maker am I glad to see you!” You said, eagerly approaching him. “I had a very long day yesterday.” 

Din huffed, settling on the side of the bed. “Oh yeah? Tell me about it.” 

You sat with him, cross legged and playing absently with the hem of your robe. “Well. It was super simple until the end. Just a bunch of boring meetings and deals, most of which were transcribed for you and I can give you the highlight notes later. But then, Bo-Katan came in with the leader of that would-be assassination group she told us about last month. He was a complete dick! Called me a slut and almost hurt me.” 

“You fought back?” 

“Yeah.” You scooted closer to Din. “Sent him out with Bo-Katan. I’m sure she’s disposed of him by now.” 

Din sighed, leaning back on the bed. “Sounds like you did good.” 

You smiled, the praise warning your chest. “I think I did.” 

You almost fell asleep there with Din, the both of you laying with each other. He’d had a long trip, which he told you about. He’d not slept in his anticipation to return, Grogu coming home with him for a while. The little green child was curled in your lap. You’d met him a few times, and he liked you tremendously. His acceptance of you was part of the reason Din trusted you as much as he did. 

Before you could truly fall asleep, Din nudged you awake, mumbling he had a meeting to attend. You stretched, slowly crawling out of the bed and picking a less revealing and more comfortable pale green outfit. It was still fit for a throne warmer, but wasn’t as scandalous as your previous day’s attire. 

Walking out with Din, you grinned upon seeing Bo-Katan seated at the small, round meeting table. There was no one else in the room. 

Din, as per custom, sat across from Bo-Katan, with you sitting at his right. 

“So,” Din said, starting the meeting officially. “The assassin, you dealt with him?” 

Bo-Katan’s lips curved into a smile. “In a way, yes.” 

Din shifted. “What does that mean?” 

“We got rid of him,” Bo-Katan clarified, leaning back in her chair. “Although I think his encounter with your stand-in was enough to scare him into not messing with us ever again. But, as per the instructions, he was dealt with in an appropriate manner. I doubt we’ll be hearing from the other assassins in the group any time soon.”

“Good,” Din said, relaxing. “Shall we tell them?” 

“I suppose,” Bo-Katan hummed. “It was such fun yesterday to see them fight, but now is as good a time as any.” 

“I’m sorry,” you interrupted, leaning forward and putting a hand on the table. “Are you talking about me?” 

Din nodded. “After seeing what you can do, and how you negotiated yesterday, I think it’s fitting that I ask you to be my interplanetary advisor. This would mean making trips with me, handling most if not all of the papers, which I think you do anyway, and basically doing what you do now on a larger scale.” 

You were stunned. It made sense, all except for one little bit. “But you didn’t see what I did yesterday. You were gone.” 

Din made a small noise that you assumed was a chuckle. “Just because you don’t recognize me doesn’t mean I’m not there,” he pointed out, and you almost asked him what he meant when he slowly took his helmet off, revealing the face of the assassin from yesterday. 

You were silent for much too long before finally taking a frustrated swing at Din. He dodged easily, a smile on his face. “Did I do something wrong?” 

You shook your head, your next move a very powerful hug for Din. “I cannot believe you let me take you down yesterday,” you said happily, still holding him. “Oh my kriffing maker, I can’t believe it!” 

Eventually, you pulled away, examining Din’s face. His cheekbone was still bruised, but he looked healthier, like he’d had a proper meal and bath. “Y’know,” you said, tugging at a small curl that was flopped over on Din’s forehead. “I knew you were handsome under that helmet. But this is unexpected.” 

“Good unexpected or bad unexpected?” 

“Oh definitely good unexpected,” you replied. “Was anyone else in on it?” 

Din shook his head. “As far as the council knows, the man from yesterday was legitimately an assassin and is now dead.” 

Over the next few weeks, you shifted in your job, traveling with Din and leaving the council to handle affairs on Mandalore. He was excellent fun on trips, looser and more at ease when it was just the two of you on a ship together. He introduced you as his official right hand man, a title that made you glow with pride. 

And yet, you still dressed the same way. 

Of course, your wardrobe had expanded to include some cold weather outfits, but it was still a mess of chiffons, silks, and expensive furs. You still wore the collar, but Din had insisted on one slight change. You and him visited his armorer, a reserved woman who never removed her helmet, no matter the circumstances, and Din had her make you a pendant for the collar. A beautiful mudhorn signet, just like his. It sat on the dip between your collarbones, the cold metal a constant reminder of your connections to Din. 

“Ready?” He asked, holding his hand out. You were about to step out onto Coruscant to make a deal with several other planet’s leaders. You had draped yourself in embroidered blue silks and chiffon, the collar on display and the hem of the skirt sweeping the floor. It was a fancy occasion that called for fancy clothes. And yet, Din was beside you in his armor, no decorations or anything. 

You nodded. Despite the importance of this meeting and the horrible terror of the various what ifs, you were calm. “Of course. Are you?” 

Din chuckled. He’d put his helmet on, but you could still gauge his facial expressions. “Sure.” 

Stepping off the ship together, you knew people would talk. They always did, exchanging hushed whispers behind their hands. Maybe, if you weren’t dressed as you were, the whispers wouldn’t be as prominent. But you enjoyed your outfits, and didn’t mind the quiet gossip one bit. 

In the end, it was only Din who you sought to please. He was your equal, and yet he was your superior. You desired his smile, his pleased moods, and you would do anything to make him happy. After all, you were there to serve your king.

[4aloysius-porteu]

i really wish i hated you || tsukishima kei

masterlist | 1 | 2 | chapter 3

pairing: tsukishima kei x f! reader

sypnosis: It was an accident that (Y/N) met a certain tall, blonde male; a memory she isn't fond of remembering, but it is where it all started. And ever since, she magically makes her to his path. The image of the bespectacled man dwelled in her mind more than she thought. Tsukishima pushed away his softer emotions and denied their existence, or at least that's what he told himself. But then, he couldn't believe that this girl he labeled as a clumsy, unlucky creature who smashed his glasses is slowly bringing these strange emotions back to him. She might be irritating and dumb sometimes, but he couldn't get himself to completely hate her. Either that destiny was stupid, or he was blessed or cursed.

genre: fanfiction, fluff

wc: 2.6k

She has met the tall, blonde, and bespectacled male yet again.

"Oh, the midget stalker is here."

"You again?! Seriously, I think it's you who's following me!"

"Hah, what do I get from following an extremely short person like you?" He said, borrowing her words from yesterday.

(Y/N)'s eyebrows creased further in irritation. "Why do you keep mentioning my height?!"

"It was you who started it. Anyways, can you shut up? Do you know that you're in a library?"

She didn't retort back and simply sat on the chair with her arms crossed. It was a fine day then —BOOM— this giant decided to appear out of nowhere. She was trying to forget this person who's associated with some of her embarrassing moments but those just got smashed back to her mind. (Y/N) sighed and pulled a book at the bottom of the stack to start reading, but noticed that the blondie is still standing near the edge of the table, hesitating to sit down while glancing somewhere and back to her.

"What?" (Y/N) frowned.

"Why am I unnecessarily stuck with you on this table?" He sighed, pulling out the chair.

"Because all of the tables here are taken? If you're worried about your glasses being knocked off, don't worry, I won't do anything reckless anymore."

"That's a nice reassurance," He settled down and brought out his studying materials.

Both of them shared the table in the crowded library. Ignoring the people, between them was a silent atmosphere. No one was talking as they both minded their own studies; he was reading quietly and turning pages of a huge book while (Y/N) wrote key points from the printed work and highlighting her notes. Sometimes, the other would leave to return books to their shelves and came back with new stacks. This went on for a few hours until her pen ran out of ink. She scribbled at the back of her notebook in hopes that the ink just got stuck, to no avail. She sighed, resting her head on the notebook. But she really needed to take down notes for her upcoming entrance exam.

"Hey." (Y/N) reluctantly said.

The blonde male looked at her, confirming if he's being called, "What?"

"I'm sorry to interrupt your business but... do you have a spare pen?"

He stared at her with a straight face and placed his chin on the top of his knuckles, implying his refusal to lend one.

(Y/N)'s mentally gritted her teeth. I'm just going to borrow a pen and he's making it hard for me?!

Swallowing her pride, she said, "Look, I need to finish my notes. I'll return it to you right away when I'm done. I promise. Please?"

He scoffed as brought out a pen, "An inkless pen is all it takes for you to become a less lively puppy? You better keep your promise."

A puppy?! "You didn't need to compare me to a puppy but, thanks."

She continued her work but her focus was a bit shaken. This happens whenever she's interrupted or took a break away from writing. Soon, her focus vanished and boredom took over. She tried to read a book to review ideas but her brain won't cooperate. She groaned, her head and arms fell to the table again. The blonde saw but chose to ignore her.

She closed her eyes for a second, however, her gaze fell to the blank paper in front of her face. Her hands are itching to do something other than reviewing and writing, so she put down the pen she borrowed and took a pencil out of her pocket. She placed a pile of books near her notebook so that the male won't notice what she's doing. There, she started to sketch the base of the figure.

She would observe the four-eyed guy who's busy reading some sort of article while taking notes. He has a calm expression on his face rather than an irritated scowl or a mocking grin he usually has. He wears a long blazer and probably a long-sleeved shirt inside. His blonde hair is short yet the edges are a bit curly and his upper eyelashes are prominently long. This was the first time she stared at the jerk's face who she kept bumping into random places that irked the hell out of her, but for some reason, she felt that she had seen this person before the accident in the park, albeit she doesn't know where. (Y/N) came to a conclusion; he was a little good-looking.

The girl looked back to her drawing and shook her head at her own ideas. I can't believe I actually thought that this guy is handsome. How can such a mean creature be blessed with such looks?! Ugh, don't mind, (Y/N). I'm only drawing him because he seems like a great canvas subject, it's not like I haven't done this to other people before...

She went on drawing and drew details to the sketch similar to the boy in front of her. To make the drawing more accurate, she stole small glances at him. She kept things low key because it'll be another embarrassing event if he found out what she's doing. She made the lines smoother in one swift move. The hair and clothes' folds are already well-drawn while she focuses on the detail of his eyes and glasses. She was about to shade when the male finally caught her.

"What is it?" He questioned, closing his book with a low voice and creased eyebrows.

(Y/N) froze on the spot. As much as she doesn't like it, she maintained eye contact with him, thinking of the best alibi that he couldn't argue with. Then, she remembered that she doesn't know his name.

"Uhm... nothing. I was just wondering if you have a name." While talking, her finger subtly moved to grab the nearest object it could get to cover her drawing.

"I have, but why would I mention it to you?" He cooly replied.

"It's alright. I'm not asking you to. Unless you want to be referred to as he/him or the tall, blonde glasses guy all the time?" (Y/N) countered.

He silently turned a page before answering, "Well, it's not like we'll meet every day."

"Oh," was her only reply. Looks like he will stay a nameless guy in her head for a long time. She was about to get back to her business when he spoke.

"Tsukishima Kei."

(Y/N) looked at him in surprise. "I'm not going to repeat it." He added.

She smiled, having clearly heard it right away. "Can you tell me how it is written?"

He looked at her to check for ill intentions but found nothing in her eyes. He hesitantly wrote the characters of his name on a piece of paper.

"I'm (L/N) (Y/N), nice to meet you again, Tsukishima-san." She'd like to initiate a handshake for peacemaking, but she knows how he'd only decline it. She wrote her name for him to see as well.

Tsukishima Kei. She repeated in her mind. What a nice name.

With a notebook covering the upper portion of the paper where she had drawn his portrait, she wrote his name at the bottom. She proceeded to the shading and background features. Backgrounds are one of the things she hates in art because it takes too long to draw one compared to the subject itself. Luckily it's only a sketch so she won't have to suffer. Although she doesn't know if Tsukishima had seen whatever she's doing so she's still cautious. She peered at him for the nth time so she could distract his peripheral vision. Maybe to test the social initiative skills she hasn't used for a long time too.

"Uhh, can I ask something?" She started.

"Hm?" He responded without taking his eyes off the page.

"What school are you from?"

"Amemaru Middle School."

(Y/N) hummed, thinking of another question, "Then, what school are you enrolling to? It must be an upper class one since you had to read those large books and all."

"Not really," Tsukishima closed the book, "I plan to go to Karasuno High School. They may not have a difficult entrance exam, but these readings are for decent grades and some stock knowledge."

"Decent grades, huh... you look like you could achieve more though. I'm pretty sure you'll ace it." She answered, "I was from Kitagawa Dai Ichi. I'm taking an exam in Shiratorizawa soon."

"You're going to that high-class academy? I see, I failed to notice that because you don't look like one. Have fun clashing with other elites there."

"Elites? What are you talking about, you still believe there's such a hierarchy?" (Y/N) chuckled.

"There is though. A gap between them and mere humans in terms of skills and power."

"In the end, they're still humans though. Be it numbers, hard work, or some unique strategy, those 'mere humans' you say will always struggle to step on equal levels with those on the highest rank."

Tsukishima only hummed and stared down at her, "Perhaps I was wrong on assuming you're an elite. You're clearly not."

"Are you underestimating me?" She challenged.

"No, I was just saying. Can I ask something though?"

"What?"

"Why are you suddenly talkative?"

She was caught off guard but tried not to stutter, "Me? Talkative? I'm always like this."

"Really?" He raised his brows, totally not buying it.

"Ugh, fine! I'm tired of studying!" She sighed, "I was scribbling some doodles on my notebook because I'm bored so I thought it wouldn't hurt to talk to Mr. Beanpole in front of me. Forgive me and my awkward social skills."

"Your social skills are not bad. I'm just thankful you aren't using the precious ink of my pen for drawing." He said, stacking the books he used.

She gasped, panicked inside, "You aren't looking at my drawing, are you?"

He got up to return the books,"Don't worry, it's none of my business."

She exhaled in relief, spared from another memory of embarrassment. Her eyes followed his walking figure and watched his movements. She looked at her drawing to compare and used her fingers to define lighting. When Tsukishima got back and placed new reviewers on the table, (Y/N) asked him once more.

"Do you ever get tired of studying?"

"Sometimes I take a break, but I can only do that if I have finished everything."

"What a diligent student you are."

"I hardly see any benefit in being dumb and slacking off all the time."

"Eh, I hardly see any benefit in studying Algebra and Calculus. I have a lot of questions. Do you use derivatives in counting money or salary? Do you use trigonometry in dividing pizzas or corn chips? Why do I need to find the limit of a function if numbers are infinite? Why do I need to get the formula of a certain point in each line or curve I draw on the graphing paper? What is the correct answer for?" (Y/N) complained.

Tsukishima looked at her blankly, doubting her chances of passing the Shiratorizawa's board exam. "I couldn't argue with that, I'd rather read a book composed of words than formulas, but you don't have a choice. Although, if you plan to be an engineer or something, that'll be a different perspective."

"No, thanks, I won't eat math books for breakfast. Other subjects are interesting enough to keep me awake in class, but numbers don't really entertain me."

"Then, what do you do?" He asked, writing on his notes.

"Not much. I just draw, paint, listen to music, and watch anime."

He let out an amused hum, "How about you? What do you do other than to study?" (Y/N) asked.

"I play volleyball, listen to music, and read narrative books."

"Volleyball? So that's what your height is for! I thought it's just for cleaning and reaching high places."

"That's rude."

"If I am, what do you call yourself? Besides, I don't want to make wrong assumptions."

"You just did."

"...right. I'm sorry."

The sense of familiarity took over (Y/N)'s brain, telling her that she definitely had met this Tsukishima guy before. Her face scrunched a little, trying to search her memories and connect the dots. Her eyes found his face again.

"Why do you keep looking at me?" His eyes narrowed, his annoyance towards the girl slowly rising.

"I HAD met you somewhere... before that accident, where did I see you?"

He was about to say something when (Y/N) stopped him, "Shh, I'm thinking."

He crossed his arms and frowned at her. Volleyball, Amemaru MS... She was about to say it but Tsukishima spoke first.

"Were you one of the audience who watched the middle school volleyball inter-high a year ago?"

"I was! Wait, you remember?"

"That was the only place where I could find someone from Kitagawa Dai Ichi." He confirmed.

"Correct. I was a part of the school paper where I was assigned in the sports category. I took a picture of you when my senior was interviewing you! You were the tallest middle blocker in the games! How could I forget that! So that's why whenever you irk me, it was familiar!"

"How am I annoying you? Aren't you the one who kept on talking right now?"

"I've figured out that there's no kind bone in you. And the way you keep on stuffing the spikes from the opposite team. It was never-ending that they didn't have a chance to score properly." She pouted.

"What do you expect from a middle blocker? It was my job to block spikes."

"You could've gone easy on them."

"The game would lose it's sense if that's the case."

"Fine. You're not wrong." Their conversation was cut short after she ceased talking. At least she found out where she first met Tsukishima. She finished the portrait sketch. Grinning, she believed that she captured his features accurately in her drawing. She'd like to hold it near him and compare to make sure though. Satisfied with her work, she went back on turning pages.

"So, you've finally decided to continue to study?" Tsukishima prodded.

She smiled, "I guess. Thank you for talking to me. That was a great stop."

Both of them worked quietly, but now, the irritation they felt towards each other lessened. After some time, a person in the speaker announced that the library will be closing before 6 pm. Tsukishima returned all the books he borrowed and packed his things.

"You're going home?"

"I don't want to come home late. You aren't finished with your notes yet?"

"Yeah, maybe I'll leave five minutes before six."

"Alright. I'll get going now." He swung his bag over his shoulder.

"Hey, wait! Your pen!" (Y/N) abruptly remembered seconds after.

"I don't need it anymore. It was useful, apart from its close on running out of ink."

"But it's yours and you told me to keep my promise!"

"Whatever. Keep it or throw it." He walked out and wore his headphones, having no intention to listen to anyone.

She sighed and checked the ink. More than half of it is gone, but she can use it again if she wishes. (Y/N) placed her fist to her cheek while writing.

Random Tsukishima Kei facts:

In the second prototype chapter (unserialized, one shot, the first idea of the author on how haikyuu will go) Tsukishima was a second-year, which was changed in the serialized version where he's a first-year. His initial height in the prototype chapter is 184cm, a little shorter than his official height (190.1cm). In an extra sketch, Furudate commented, "Tsukki and Tanaka being in the same year would spell chaos!

©4aloysius.porteu.2021. please do not repost, copy, or edit. plagiarism is punishable by law. 

[bestworstcase]

farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 9-10

it’s been a hot minute! previous installments here, in case you’d like to refresh your memory first.

- this chapter opens with rapunzel observing that cassandra is angry and concluding, correctly, that it’s because rapunzel followed her. i think this is a very interesting choice for howland to make. tts rapunzel is not like this. she often, particularly in s1, fails to notice when cass is frustrated with her and is startled when that frustration erupts into anger after repeated pushing. she is also generally quite bad at linking cause and effect together like this; she might recognize that cass is angry, but miss why. she stomps all over cassandra’s boundaries in large part because she doesn’t know any better. she can’t see how her behavior is hurting cass. but lagoon rapunzel does know better. she’s far more emotionally intuitive, and she can see right away that sticking her nose into cassandra’s business upsets cass, yet she will continue to do it. part of me wonders if this change is to facilitate the character growth lagoon rapunzel gets (which tts rapunzel does not)? it’s much easier, after all, to fix poor behavior if you’re able to see how it’s hurting people you care about.

- rapunzel here also observes that cassandra’s “eyes were wide and vulnerable,” indicating how afraid cass was of the water situation. cass denies that she was afraid when rapunzel asks her. this has a lot of similarities to how cass acts in fanon, cassunzel fanon in particular—outright denying her feelings, even when rapunzel accurately identifies them. and i know i’m beating a dead horse here, but tts cass is not like this. tts cass readily expresses her feelings to rapunzel—except when she thinks rapunzel isn’t willing to listen to her. in COTB, her reticence with rapunzel comes on the heels of rapunzel doing something cassandra pleaded with her not to do. in RATGT, rapunzel outright tells her to ‘be okay with’ the way rapunzel treats her, and in RDO cass bottles up her feelings and refuses to talk until rapunzel forces her to. actively hiding her feelings is a behavior she develops after becoming friends with rapunzel, because rapunzel continually dismisses or ignores her feelings. this is probably not the last time i am going to harp on this over the course of this little reread. it’s a huge pet peeve of mine.

- re: romance novel: “I hadn’t seen Eugene since the night before. After Cassandra left my room, I sent Pascal to follow her. I instructed him to come get me if she went anywhere.” ksdkjf

- cassandra, of course, wants the lagoon to be their—or rather, ideally, her—little secret, because she’s decided this is the thing that will prove she’s ready for the guard. her approach to getting rapunzel on board with this secret-keeping is to imply that frederic and arianna might compromise corona’s national security if they are informed. i think this is very funny.

- (again, contrast this to what happens in tts: when cass begs rapunzel to keep their midnight excursion a secret, she explains her reasoning in detail, because tts cass knows how to communicate like an adult.)

- “It’s so…blue” jksdfl cass has a way with words huh

- i do not think ms howland knows what a lagoon is, because what she is describing is absolutely not a lagoon. it appears to be a cenote. i suppose ‘rapunzel and the lost cenote’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though, does it?

- cassandra reveals that she doesn’t know how to swim. i will get into this in a moment.

- corona has 315 miles of coastline, according to ms. howland. for purposes of comparison, rhode island has around 380 miles of coastline. now! in addition to those three hundred odd miles of coastline, corona has 212 lakes, 121 ponds, 67 rivers, of which 17 are significant in size and let out into the sea. with some cursory research i haven’t been able to get a precise count of the number of freshwater bodies of water there are in rhode island, but wikipedia tells me that about 90% of the inland freshwater in the state is contained in 237 lakes and ponds, which is a bit less than corona’s 333 total lakes and ponds, so… assuming the other 10% of rhode island’s inland freshwater is contained in a few dozen smaller lakes and ponds, those numbers are quite close as well. and according to wikipedia, rhode island has 59 rivers, of which 17 are ‘considered major rivers either geographically or historically.’ 

there is not really a point to this digression except that i think it is interesting. rhode island is 1,214 square miles in size and based on the general closeness of these numbers i have decided to tentatively conclude that corona is meant to be roughly similar in size. let’s call it a nice even 1,250 square miles for the sake of ease and to account for the greater number of lakes and ponds. 

this is quite a bit larger than the kingdom appears to be in tts—unless the kingdom is very lopsided and island city is situated within a couple dozen miles of the nearest border—but it’s also quite small for a country. (europe has a few very small microstates and city-states, but excluding those, the smallest country in europe is almost twice the size of rhode island). 

for my own writing, i decided that corona was quite a bit larger than this—bitter snow corona is in the neighborhood of 13,125 square miles, of which about ⅓ was formerly saporia and another ¼ is the disputed territory/province of malinar, meaning saporia is/was about 4,375 square miles, malinar is about 3,288 square miles, and pre-conquest corona would have been about 5,462 square miles—but, if you’re writing fanfiction and looking for an approximate ‘canon’ size for corona, 1,250 sq miles is not a bad guess. just remember that that big old wall rapunzel’s so eager to get to the other side of has to be within about twenty miles of the island capital in order for horses to be able to comfortably get there and back in less than a day! so either the island has to be very near the nearest border, or the wall isn’t actually corona’s border but rather a defensive wall around the capital or something like that. 

- now back to cassandra, and the matter of her inability to swim. i think, given that they live on an island and the generally high standards to which he holds his daughter, it beggars belief a little that the captain did not force the issue of her learning how. it’s a safety matter. if you live near water you need to be able to swim.  but, fine, she has a phobia, whatever. it’s for the romance novel���

- but i hate this. i hate it. ms. howland expects me to believe that:

1 - cassandra hasn’t been in swimming lessons since she could walk

2 - cassandra’s phobia was so severe that the captain never forced the issue of her learning to swim, while living on an island

3 - rapunzel magically knows how to swim, because the three or four minutes she spent almost drowning in a slowly flooding cave and then being spat out into a river and dragged to the bank by eugene was sufficient for her to become a great swimmer.

4 - all it takes for cassandra to overcome her debilitating phobia of water is for rapunzel to spend maybe ten or fifteen minutes gently coaxing her into the water and teaching her how to tread water

5 - swimming in the lagoon with rapunzel then becomes one of cassandra’s most treasured pastimes, and

6 - merely a few months after this, cassandra is a strong enough swimmer to (in fitzherbert pi) DIVE INTO THE FUCKING OCEAN FULLY DRESSED WITH HER BOOTS ON in order to rescue shorty before he drowns.

and NO!!!!!! NO! THAT’S NOT HOW SWIMMING WORKS THAT’S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS!!

now i get it. i get it. this is a romance novel and the symbolism of rapunzel liberating cassandra from her fears and teaching her a valuable new skill that they bond over and becomes their shared special secret thing to do together is obviously powerful and a staple trope for the genre. but it makes so little sense for this to be a skill that rapunzel has but cassandra does not. it feels almost infantalizing of cassandra and aggrandizing of rapunzel. like… rapunzel is an exceptionally competent young woman, yes. but no she can’t fucking swim you can’t learn to swim from that one time you almost drowned in a FUCKING cave. fuck!

- i’m still on the first page of chapter 10 and i am steamed.

- “It’s amazing how fast you can pick something up when your life depends on it.” FUCK you, ms. howland. you don’t learn how to turn sommersalts or swim laps by almost drowning. at most you might teach yourself how to doggy paddle.

- this scene would have worked just as goddamn well on the romance novel front if cass were the one who knew how to swim and rapunzel desperately wanted to learn and made big sad puppy eyes until cass caved and agreed to teach her. like! ffs you could even squeeze in the phobia stuff - rapunzel freaks out when she gets to a certain depth because it throws her back to being in that cave and cass, who has plenty of experience dealing with her own panic attacks, is able to gently calm her down.

- but that would require ms. howland to allow rapunzel to be bad at something. grumble.

- i don’t think rapunzel is qualified to give cass exposure therapy.

- this is nitpicky but i’m annoyed. this is not how you clean plate armor. “First you hang your suit of armor up to make sure every piece is properly aligned and that there’s no rust” WHAT? it’s not… like, it’s not like a onesie. plate armor is a bunch of individual components tied or buckled to an arming doublet or, in some cases, to other pieces of plate. you can’t ‘hang up’ a suit of plate armor the way you’d hang up, like, a jacket. you can put the pieces together on an arming doublet that you’ve hung up on a dummy, but… why would you do that in order to clean it.

“Then you attach the foot coverings” gjksdfjk just… the mental image of cassandra painstakingly putting a suit of armor together on a fucking mannequin and buckling the sabatons to the greaves or what the fuck ever she means by this and trying to clean the set that way is destroying me

“Then you need to polish the chest plate, with a soft cloth, work in circles, going outward” okay yes but you’d do the cuirrass separate from the rest of the set and you’d do the inside too and cass ought to know the proper name for all of these pieces please it’s not hard

“The arms can be tricky because the joints” WHAT. for arms you’ve got, like, a pauldron (or spaulder and rondel), rerebrace, couter, vambrace, gauntlets. these are separate pieces. you clean them one at a time, inside and outside. does howland think you just… don’t need to clean the inside of a set of plate armor? does she think the inside isn’t just as if not more susceptible to rust as the outside? does… does she realize that you can take plate armor apart i am CONFOUNDED

WHAT is a “mouth cover” in this context. is she refering to a visor. hinged pieces like on an armet? does she mean a bevor? the bevor isn’t even part of the helmet aljksdflkjsfdj

cassandra refers to cuisses and greaves as “thigh plates” and “shin [plates]” respectively i’m die. she also completely skips the poleyns. i do not think this cass has ever cleaned a suit of plate armor in her entire life.

i am losing. my. mind.

- in the immediate aftermath of cass learning how to tread water i think rapunzel asks her more personal questions than she does in the entirety of tts itself. like, it’s almost jarring how much more interested both rapunzel and eugene are in cassandra as a person in this book than they seem to be in tts. compare this conversation to the way cass opens up to rapunzel in beginnings - here, it’s prompted by rapunzel asking questions, expressing interest in cassandra’s feelings and encouraging her by telling her she’s brave. in beginnings, rapunzel builds a pillow fort in cass’s room because she wants to force a bonding moment and cass, after initially trying to kick her out, relents and volunteers some personal information as a kind of apology for being hostile. the vibes are completely different, so different that it feels like i’m not even reading about the same characters.

- like can you imagine tts rapunzel saying something like “it’s your story, that makes it important” to cass? lmao

- cass reveals that she’s afraid of water because she got dragged out by the undertow at the beach when she was small, and her dad saved her and then got so mad at her that she remembers being as afraid of him as she was of the water. this is not unrealistic per se, but… if cassandra was as scared of her dad that day as she was of drowning, then… shouldn’t that have more of an impact on her relationship with him? like…he screams at her after she almost drowns and she walks away with this debilitating phobia of the water but zero lingering fear of him?

- this chapter has given me a headache

- re: romance novel: “Rapunzel gripped my hand. This time I didn’t flinch.” snrk. 

[babyspiderling]

Under the Lights  Daveed Diggs x reader

Before I even paste this into Tumblr, I want you all to know that this took me two days of constant writing, and FOUR pages on google docs. I know that the second I hit paste, it’s going to be like one page. Anyways, here’s Daveed x reader.

2010

“Hey, Y/N, I brought you muffins!” A woman with a mouth full of pins, her hair up in a messy bun, measuring tape sloppily tied around her neck, and a pincushion on her wrist, exited a space separated from the rest of the apartment by a thin curtain. Seeing her best friend and roommate enter with goodies, a bright grin fluttered onto her face. “Wanna see what I did while you were gone?” He nodded and followed her to her half of the work room. On a mannequin, a beautiful dress was fleshed out much more than it had been when Lin had left this morning. It had been nothing more than a sketch on paper for the Newsies show. As a major in history with a minor in design, Y/N was accepted by Disney to create the costumes. It didn’t hurt that The Lin Manuel Miranda of In the Heights fame was on her list of references. She had decided to start with Medda’s dress first. Medda was a personal favorite of hers and was excited to do her own spin on it. A deep purple sash had been half pinned under the bodice and sadly hung from its haphazard placement. “The sash would look better if you hadn’t distracted me with food dork.” He smiled and pressed the folded paper bag into her hand. “Alright. I’m going to finish this for Alan. It’s a miracle I have this job. I’m not screwing it up. I also meant to tell you that one of my guys are going to be here tomorrow for a measure and design session. Sweet kid. Amazing dancer.” Lin grinned teasingly as he set his laptop down on his desk. “Am I getting replaced? Is he going to be your new roommate and best friend?” Y/N stuck out her tongue at her best friend and continued her work. The sounds of humming and a machine whirring mixed in with the excited clacking of keys to make a strangely beautiful symphony. 

2013

“Y/N! I need your help!” In the tiny apartment in the upper east side, an over-caffeinated Wesleyan Alumni burst through the front door, a paper bag of bagels clutched tightly. At the yells, another Alumni ran from her section of the apartment.  “Lin! What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He thrusts the bag into her searching hands, and lets out another shriek. “Y/N! I’m fine! They want to put The Hamilton Mixtape through a workshop! And if we get this right, they’ll move us to a real show!” Shoving his shoulders, she muffled her screams behind pinched lips. “Lin, you can not go scaring me like that! I’m going to get gray hairs before we even get to the off Broadway! What do you need my help with?” He pulled her onto the ratty couch they had in the little space. “I need a costumer. You’re the best in the business. Not to mention I’ll be with you all the time, so there’s no chance of miscommunications!” Standing from her forced seat, she cradled Lin’s head in her hands. She saw the excitement glimmer in his eyes and softened. “Lin, of course I’ll help you, I am a history major after all. Who else could make it historically accurate while still being functional? Thank you for even considering me, and for the bagels.” She pressed a kiss to the crown of his head. Giving a crooked smile, she pointed a finger in his face. “If you ever scare me like that, I swear I will never cook or bake for you again.” He smiled sheepishly and shrugged in apology. “Sorry, but hey, you’re my costumer now!” She smiled and bumped her hip with his. She dug through her pads of paper and snatched her laptop off the charger. “Alright. Give me your tracks and I’ll get started.” 

July 27th, 2013

“Alright, I’m here. Sorry I’m late, I got halfway down the block before I figured out I left my notes on the desk. Who do we have here?” Three men held my attention, understandable since they were the main cast. I recognized Brian D’arcy James from other productions, there was another man with big hair and bright eyes, and finally my eyes fell on Christopher. I smiled at him and gave him a quick hug. “Oh my God! What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in so long! How’ve you been.” He chuckled and pulled me in again. “I’m good. I was missing our Vanessa for a while, but you’re working with us now so I won’t have to miss you anymore! Lin told me about the project and I couldn’t turn it down.” He turned me to the stranger at the clearing of a throat. “Oh, this is Daveed. He’s playing Thomas Jefferson and Lafayette. He raps.” I looked at him up and down, remembering the songs Lin had written for him. I cocked my head, and he looked at me with nervous eyes. “This will work. This is going to work great actually.” I saw his shoulders relax and sag with relief as I walked back to the table set up for the behind the scenes people. I gripped my pen in my hand, ready to jot down every little thought that passed through my mind for the time of the workshop. 

After hours and hours of rehearsals and run throughs, I’d filled up a notebook and a half for costumes for the characters. This time around Lin wanted his cast flexible. Those whose characters were not in the second act were recast as another role, so I had to figure out how to do quick changes not only for the nine main cast members, but for the entire ensemble. As Lin and I packed up our things to head home, the man with the beautiful eyes stopped me. “Hey, Vanessa, right?” I heard Lin and Christopher snicker somewhere behind me and I shot them a look. “Actually, it’s Y/N.” His eyes widened in embarrassment and his hand lifted to rub the back of his neck. “Sorry, I just thought it was Vanessa since that’s what Christopher called you.” I shook my head and smiled. “Oh, no. That’s just a little joke between us. I was the demo Vanessa when Lin was trying to sell In the Heights. I’m the reason why Vanessa never speaks Spanish. I took French all through high school and college.” He nodded and rocked back and forth on his heels. “I’ve got some questions about costumes and everything you do. Could I have your number to keep in contact?” I nodded and pulled out my phone, switching it with his and I plugged in my contact information. “Alright. I’m headed home, but I’ll make a schedule for measuring and design sessions. I’ll see you tomorrow?” He nodded enthusiastically, making his hair bob with his movements. I waved goodnight and followed Lin out of the building. 

“So, Daveed.” I looked up from my buzzing phone to Lin out of the corner of my eye, giving him an eyebrow. “What about Daveed?” He shrugged and wore a small smile. “You texting him?” I put my phone down to look at him headlong. “And if I am?” Once again he shrugged and got up to grab a snack. “Nothing, just remember your worth.” I shake my head good naturally. “Alright Dad. Now, I’ve got to sketch out what my brain was screaming during the workshop. And how to create every outfit as a quick change. Thanks loser.” 

July 15th, 2015

“Alright everyone! We’ve practiced these changes for weeks! Remember your number, remember your cue. You all have been a wonder to work with and to create for. I love you all and break a leg!” Everyone is dressed in white for the opening number, and I am proud of my work. “Oh, and Daveed;” Daveed looks up at me, a strange look in his eyes. “Yes, Y/N?” I looked him in the eyes, stoic and serious. “If you rip your pants during Guns and Ships again, you will repay me by organizing the scrap bin.” He swallowed visibly and nodded his head. I smiled once again and put my hand out for a group theatre circle. “Break a leg!” Everyone scurried to their cue spot in their costumes and Lin hugged me from behind. “Thank you for doing this for me. I never would be able to have costumes this good if it weren’t for you.” I turned in his arms and smiled. “I’m glad I did too Lin. Now go, they’re calling your name.” I listened from my side of the stage, getting everything in order for the main cast. I pulled Daveeds coat off quickly and held out his blue one for him to slide on. “Hey, Y/N, maybe after the show we can-“ “Diggs! Get to your cue!” I smiled and nudged him. “Go. Talk to me after the show.” He gave a quick kiss to my cheek and went to do his thing on stage. As I pinned the rose to Renée’s dress, her sweet voice teased at me. “You do know that he loves you too, right?” I know what she’s talking about, but I pretend to play dumb. “Who loves me? Nevermind, neither of us have the time for this. Go kick ass out there.” She scrunched her eyebrows at me and pointed her finger to say “This isn’t over.” 

The first act went by in a flash, costume changes and character changes took up all of my time. After I had hung up every dress, every coat, every pair of trousers and corset, Daveed had changed and packed up all of his things. I had just finished mending the lace cuff on his magenta sleeve when he had walked in. He wore a sleeveless Oakland jersey with a matching hat pressed onto his freed hair. “Oh! Daveed! Perfect timing! I was just finishing up here. What was it that you were wanting to tell me?” At my question, it was like a switch had been flipped in him. He went from the cool and collected suave man who the fans fantasized over to a shy and awkward man who had run out of words. Self-doubt and insecurity filled my inner dialogue as I watched him shut down and clam up. I was filled with the fear and anxiety that he had come to ask me to stop staring, to stop caring. I let the silence carry on for a while longer until Anthony called for us to leave. “I, I should probably go, then. You were amazing tonight, not a single trip or stutter. I am so proud of you.” I swallowed down the tears making their way up my throat and gave him a watery smile. I grabbed my bag, and started to make a hurried exit until my wrist was caught by a large and calloused hand. “Wait, no. Y/N, I wanted to know if you wanted to grab something to eat, go do something when we don’t have a show. You know, like maybe a date? Unless you don’t want to, then it’ll just be us as friends. I’d actually really appreciate it if you just forgot this whole ordeal and-” I smiled and blushed at his sweet ramblings. I stepped up onto my workbench and gripped his face in my hands. Taking a deep breath I leaned in and connected our lips, praying to every spiritual being in the heavens that they would allow him to kiss me back. I guess praying did me good because after getting over the shock of being interrupted, he kissed me back with the same fervour. Once more, we are called to leave the theater and we break apart, panting lightly with swollen lips and pink cheeks. He helped me down from my step and I lifted myself onto my toes to give a peck to his cheek. “Alright big guy, let’s go home. Lin’s either knowing of what we were doing, or he’s pacing in our living room, police on speed dial. And I would love to go on a date with you.”

[neighbourskid]

Dave? Dave.

It's been quite a bit since I've written anything here, huh? Well, I guess as it has been for pretty much everyone, life has been kinda strange for a while now. Despite vaccine roll-outs and continually changing safety regulations, there's still a global pandemic on, and everyone is trying to navigate this reality the best they can. For once, we are all, generally speaking, in the same boat now (sure, there are huge differences between countries because capitalism fucking sucks and rich greedy humans are once again proof that things need to change asap, but overall, we all have to deal with this pandemic).

But I don't actually want to talk about the pandemic, it just exists as a frame of what I do wanna talk about.

As I have mentioned before, when the pandemic hit, I was in the last semester of my undergrad studies and writing my Bachelor thesis. Or that's what I was supposed to do, anyway. I did do a lot of reading for it, early in the first lockdown after university closed and we were all attending from home. I was lucky, I had no classes, I only had like three scheduled meetings to check in on progress of the thesis, but otherwise I was free of zoom calls and attempting to attend university digitally. So I read.

After a while, reading became taking a book with me into the sun, glancing at one or two pages, and then just napping for most of the day, and spending my evenings either playing video games or watching some tv show or movie. At some point, I felt like now was the perfect time to rewatch all fifteen seasons of CRIMINAL MINDS, so I did that, instead of writing my thesis. I still occasionally read, but most of the days I just felt exhausted and unmotivated so I stayed in bed and binged my crime show.

As the deadline for the thesis started approaching, and the time I had left fell under a month, a switch in my brain seemed to be activated and, oh, hello, suddenly there was a certain drive there for that thesis again. Which lasted exactly until an email from university dinged into my inbox a few days later, informing me that I would get another month for my thesis, due to the pandemic. And away that motivation and drive went, immediately.

Not much later I had a session with the therapist I was seeing at the time, because of the hormone treatment I had started early that same year. I had talked to him about my concern that I might have ADHD before because I didn't feel like there was anything we needed to talk about related to my transition, so I brought it up again here. I told him how my thesis was going -- or rather, how it wasn't going at all -- and finally, as I told him about some of the issues I experienced while trying to do work for it, he acknowledged that I may indeed have some attention regulation issues. He prescribed me medication to try out, and -- wonder oh wonder -- suddenly I was writing my thesis. I ended up finishing it on time (even though a week before I had a moment of "all of this is garbage, I will never pass, I should start the whole thing from scratch") and got a decent grade for it, too. I've been on those meds since.

Over the last, I don't know how many years, I've always known that there was something a bit wonky about my brain. There were always these things that seemed to come so easy to other people, and try as I might, I just couldn't make them happen. I, presumably, had a lot of neurotypical friends. I also have friends with depression, BPD, anxiety disorders and other neurodivergencies. I have family members with autism. I know my mom suspected I might be on that spectrum as well.

Reading up on many of those things I never felt like any of them described what I was experiencing. There were certain traits, sure, but mostly there was a lack of what I actually did experience in most of them. Even ADHD, when reading about the "required" issues and traits, doing those self-diagnosing questionnaires, I just never saw what I felt represented. And then I started reading about what people with diagnosed ADHD had to say about how they experience things. I ignored the more medical or clinical information, and just looked for people talking about how they navigate their lives with ADHD. And then all of a sudden it was, oh, yeah this, this is relatable. This is where my brain's at.

Suddenly it made sense that caffeine didn't do nothing for me, that a nice, warm cup of coffee put me right to sleep. It made sense how, after only a month, suddenly a well beloved hobby or tv show was suddenly of no interest whatsoever. Staring at the wall for three hours instead of doing a simple task. Drawing in class so that I could pay attention to what is being said. The inability to remember much of my life before 6th grade. Having to bounce my leg so I could read a simple text. Needing to visually break a book down into chapters with colourful post-its to keep me from being overwhelmed by the length of the book. And so many other things. Suddenly, there was a reason for that.

I've always liked doing personality quizzes. Or doing stuff related to my zodiac sign even if I don't believe in astrology per se. Finding out what my Enneagram number is. Or my Myers-Briggs type. Not because I think those things define me or describe me to a T, but because they give me a vocabulary. They give me options. I love answering a bunch of questions and then getting a wall of text telling me This Is Who You Are and then I get to pick out what is accurate and what isn't. It gives me words to describe who I am that I didn't have before.

And it is the same thing with posts or videos of people with ADHD. It gives me a vocabulary for the things I experience and it lets me express those things in a way I wasn't able to before. Before, I was like, doing things that my brain doesn't want to do, feels like running headfirst into a wall because there is no way above, around, or underneath it. There is no door, no ladder, no tunnel, no nothing. There is only running headfirst into it until maybe, hopefully, it cracks. Preferably before my head does. But that is exhausting and most of the time, I prefer to not get through the wall at all, if what it takes is going headfirst through it. Now, I know that what that is, is a dopamine deficiency. The task that needs doing, the task that this wall is, doesn't give my brain enough dopamine. There is no satisfaction, there is nothing to gain from that task, so the brain isn't interested.

One of the things that I recently discovered and helps me a lot in this quest of figuring out how my brain works, is this guy Connor on tiktok, who also has ADHD. His videos are both hilarious and informative. And also incredibly relatable. They might be silly haha funny videos on the dear old internet, but I walk away from most of them going, oh! oh that makes sense, good to know.

He occasionally talks about how ADHD is completely misnamed and how Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder does not actually accurately describe what exactly people with ADHD lack. In one of his videos, he calls it DAVE instead. It's silly, and sounds a bit dumb, but I kinda like it. Dave. Dopamine Attention Variability Executive-Disfunction. Dave. I like Dave.

Y'know, I don't mind having ADHD. Presumably, I've lived with it my whole life so far. And it's annoying as shit some of the time. Especially when things need to get done and they just won't. But I don't mind that, especially now that I know that this is what it is. I've always feared that if I finally do go to a therapist and try to figure out what my brain is up to, they'll just tell me that I'm fine and there's nothing to worry about. And at first, my therapist did say I was psychologically unremarkable. But I guess if you've lived like this your whole life and nobody has really picked up on it, even a therapist doesn't notice (it's called masking, I've learned, thanks Connor).

But knowing is good. Knowing means I can learn things that help. I can take medication when needed. And, looking at the grades I'm currently getting in my graduate studies? Hells yeah, taking that medication and knowing how to deal with certain aspects of my brain helps a lot. It is incredibly funny to me that the best grades I have gotten in my entire academic career have been achieved in my Master's studies during a global pandemic. There is currently an actual real possibility that I may graduate summa cum laude. In my MA. That is insane!

Anyway, I am avoiding tasks by writing this right now. Oh, the irony. I'm gonna try and do those tasks now. Y'all take care. Cheers!

[what-goesaround-comesaround]

Let's talk about some Irish newsies-

Hey! So I thought it'd be cool to look into the research I've found indicationg that some of the newsies might have Irish ties! (I'm Irish so that might explain my interest) I'm not an expert at all or anything, this is just the research I've collminated while scouring through newsies facts.

Oh course this isn't set in stone, this is just information I've found so if I've got anything wrong, please tell me! I was inspired by this post to do my own research. (A lot of my research has to do with the original movie but stick around for some fun facts about surnames?)

And now, onto Jack Kelly :

^This is David's description of Jack in Newsies : a novel by Jonathan Fast which can be found here on pg 9. Both surnames "Kelly" and "Sullivan" have their roots in Irish history.

^on pg 27 of the same book David describes Jack again as "an Irish boy". I just thought this would be worth noting, seeing how David wants to make it obvious to us, the reader that Jack appears to be Irish or of Irish descent.

"Kelly", originally anglicized from the Gaelic "Ó Ceallaigh" meaning 'descendant of Ceallach', an ancient Irish personal name, originally a byname meaning 'bright-headed' or 'troublesome' (fitting huh?) Source found here.

Fun fact for you livesies fans, the reigning chieftain of Ui Maine (mid Galway, South Roscommon, sometimes referred to as "O'Kelly's Country") O'Ceallaigh (c1351), was a renowned patron of the arts. Source found here.

Another fun fact : Jack means Seán in Irish.

Bet you weren't expecting that. Or maybe you were. Anyway, source is found here. I also remember it being a topic of conversation in 3rd class Irish class. Wonder how Spot and Jack would feel about that.

^On pg 23 of the original 1992 movie script found here Jack describes himself as a "mick" which was a commonly used derogatory term used against those of Irish decent/Irish immigrants at the time. However this line was not included in the movie. Source found here.

Now for "Sullivan". The original Irish for the surname Sullivan is O'Suileabhain, however the actual derivation of the name is debated. There is no doubt that the root word is 'suil' meaning eye, but whether it is to be taken as 'one-eyed' or 'hawk-eyed' is usually left an open question. Sources found here and here.

The surname is associated with the southwestern part of Ireland and was originally found in County Tipperary before the Anglo-Norman invasion. Source found here

Also, in both movie and stage versions Jack tells us his father "taught me not to starve" indicating his father may have taught Jack about the horrors of the Famine/An Drochshaol/The Great Hunger that plagued Irish families for years after. Source is found here.

Okay! On to Spot Conlon :

^This is David's description of Spot Conlon from the same book, pg 51 (okay he may not outright say he's Irish but they really said "throw all the stereotypes at him like red hair". But seriously in the Hard Promises script and the Newsies script he's described the same way. I guess they really invisioned that red hair huh?)

Spot is interesting seeing as he is the leader of the Brooklyn newsies, Brooklyn being an infamously known place for Irish immigrants to live due to the Great Hunger/An Drochshaol (translated meaning "Hard Times") or as it's more commonly known as "the potato famine" between 1845-1852. Source found here. At least 1 million people died from this and another 1 million immigrated, a lot to America (although the exact numbers are disputed.) Around this time New York becoming the busiest port city in the world. There was labor work to be had in Brooklyn, in the manufacturing and loading and unloading of goods to be sent around the country and around the world. Irish immigrants who had been left poor and malnourished by the famine had no other option but to take on this manual labour to earn money. Many took jobs by the ports and settled by the Watershed i.e. near the ports. This could be a reason to why we're first introduced to Spot and his "cronies" at the port in the movie. Source is found here and here.

Supposing Spot was born between 1880-1886 (he's quoted to be 14 in real life in this article however it's stated in the Newsies Novel on pg 51 to "be around Jack's age" and it's stated in original script before Newsies was rewritten to be a musical and was still a drama, "Hard Promises" he's quoted to be 19 on pg 28. So take this with a grain of salt.) the U.S. census, which counted both place of birth and parents’ birth place as well, estimated that one-third of all New Yorkers were of Irish parentage. By 1890 as Brooklyn neighborhoods were expanding east and south, the amount of people with Irish stock is at 196,372. Source found here.

Also how people will usually use the name "Seán" or sometimes "Patrick" for Spot (one of the fandom wiki pages cites it as his real name here but admits to having no proof of it). Both of these are traditional Irish first names, Patrick being popularised by the patron saint of Ireland St. Patrick/Pádraig. Might have heard of it-

Now for his surname.

Conlon is an Irish family name, it being a variation of the anglicised version of Ó Connalláin. The name may be derived from two Irish Gaelic words "Con" (the genitive case of Cú, meaning "hound") and "Lón" meaning lion - thereby implying a person who has the characteristics of a lion born of a hound - strength and speed. Source found here.

Conlon had a Gaelic form of Ó Conallain or Ó Coinghiollan in Connacht however it's Ó Caoindealbhain in Munster and Leinster. Fun fact, Connal or Connall is claimed to be a pet name for a sprout or little sprout. Source found here.

The history regarding the Conlon surname is complicated to say the least- however it can be traced back to County Meath, where the Conlon descendants are from an important sept near Trim, which traces back to Laoghaire, King of Ireland circa 432. O'Coindealbhain was also anglicised 'Quinlivan' in Munster. Source is found here and here.

This post isn't letting me include the video of Jack, David and Boots going to Brooklyn to negotiate with Spot and the Irish traditional music in the background but I'll make a separate post about that.

Now, onto Racetrack Higgins.

I'm going to keep this kind of brief. We know Racetrack is described as "tall, skinny gambling Italian beanpole" in the Hard Promises script on pg 1 and he's described as "an Italian beanpole" on pg 5 of the Newsies Script. However the surname "Higgins" is Irish as far as my research has told me, not Italian.

The real Ed "Racetrack" Higgins lived in Brooklyn and is quoted to be the real leader of the Brooklyn union, and was elected vice-president of the general union after Kid Blink and David Simmons were accused of selling out. Source found here. I haven't been able to find much information about Racetrack Higgin's life after the strike or his family life which could connect him to Ireland however I thought it would be interesting. If anyone is curious about the real Racetrack Higgins this source has been really useful!

'Higgins" is an Irish family name with ancient royal connections. It is an anglicisation of O'hUigin, from the Irish word 'uiginn' meaning Viking. The original holder of the name was a grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Tara, and all of the O'Higgins claim a common descent from him. Ancient records show that several members of the O'Higgins claimed a hereditary right to be file or poet in the courts of the Irish Chiefs and Kings. Source is found here and here.

Because of their loyalty to Gaelic culture and religion, the Higgins suffered under the English Crown in Ireland and had lost all their lands in Sligo and Westmeath by 1654. Some of them remained in Ireland as tenants on their own lands, but many of them migrated to Spain where they achieved high office in the service of the King. Source is found here.

Fun fact, Racetrack has the same surname as the current (9th) President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins!

Lastly, on to Crutchy/ie Morris!

^This is from the 1991 original script of Newsies when it was called Hard Promises and was written to be a drama. Obviously this wasn't the movie that we have today but I thought this would be a cool add on. I couldn't find a lot of information about the real Crutch Morris, whom Crutchy/ie is based on. The surname Morris isn't strictly Irish, it's a popular surname throughout the British Isles however with this piece of information I thought it would make sense to research it anyway.

"Morris" (Ó Muiris in Irish) was introduced to Ireland by the Normans, along with the variant Firzmaurice (Mac Muiris). A branch of these Morrises moved to Galway in 1485 CE and later became one of the Tribes Of Galway. The name may also have been an abbreviation of Morrissey (Ó Muireasa), a branch of the Uí Fiachrach clan. Sources found here and here.

The ancient Irish name Ó Muirgheasa (variant Ó Muirghis), a personal name thought to derive from muir, meaning "sea" and geas, meaning "taboo" or "prohibition." Source found here.

The Morris family does have an Irish family crest/coat of arms which I'll post at a later date, further cementing themselves in Irish history.

This is most of the information I have regarding the origins of the characters and their surnames however I could go on about the music in Newsies, the family crests, the housing circumstances of poor Irish immigrants in New York at the turn of the 19th century ect.

If you want to learn more about what life was like for Irish immigrants in New York I recommend reading the non-fiction book The Gangs Of New York (or watching the movie. It isn't completely historically accurate but give a decent overview of what was life) or reading this article by the Irish Times.

I've barely scratched the surface of this topic and hope to go into it father in the future!

May I leave you with this gif of the boys doing some Irish (inspired) dancing and David with his twirl combo!

Ps. If the links aren't working for you I'd be happy to provide a list of the resources I’ve used throughout my research on a separate post if needs be.

pps. @maggs-is-a-muppet @annihilatedthenightstalker @newsies-bun @letter-from-the-refuge thanks for the motivation last night 😌