#trust if he could just walk away from social interactions without it damaging his reputation in an inconvenient way then he would 100% | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

magdaclaire · 4 years ago

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partner

read it on ao3

a/n: This fic is at least a little based on the fact that as soon as I met my boyfriend, the very first day I met him, I spent 5 and a half hours with him, and he became my best friend. Some people, you just know. Partner.

He’s got, probably, three million things to do today. Football practice before school, the 6am slot because lacrosse had booked the 7am, and a Student Council meeting at 7am anyway, first period math, second period english, a lunch interview with one of the kids from the school newspaper (“Are you ready for the game against the Bronx Hydra? Do you ever feel like you’re going to let the team down? Now that you’re… not at your best shape?”), actually eating lunch, maybe getting a glimpse of his friends, and he’s still got half the day left after that. He’s only done the practice and the meeting so far. He could do this math in his sleep, of course, because high school Algebra 2 is child’s play, but it’s so time consuming, as if not showing his work is evidence of cheating. Everyone here knows that James Rhodes doesn’t cheat, but some people are just waiting for him to slip. It’s fine. He won’t slip. He’ll show his work. He’ll be perfect. He’ll do it all.

“James,” a clear voice cuts into his monologue as he walks into English, his bag slung over both shoulders evenly because only rebels and boys who don’t care about their future throw around their things, Jamie. He turns loyally and puts on a perfunctory smile, smiling down at the principal he recognized from voice alone, because of course he did. Nicholas Fury is a man of slightly shorter stature than James, but rather large presence, and he has his hand on the shoulder of a rather beautiful young man, despite the fading bruise above his right eye. “This,” Fury says, putting an undue amount of emphasis on the word, “is Anthony Stark. Anthony, James Rhodes. James, I’d like you to show him around a little. He’ll be in this class, and Miss Harvelle will be assigning you as his study partner. I trust you’ll be treating him well. That’ll be all, Mister Rhodes.”

With that, and no explanation to boot, Fury turns and leaves. Typical. He had done the same thing to Clint when he had brought Natasha in, and she had barely spoken any English. He hopes this one speaks English. He knows this one speaks English. Everybody knows who Anthony Stark is - even though he usually goes by Tony in the tabloids. Maybe he goes by Anthony in everyday life though, James can’t assume. Just because somebody is tangentially famous because of who their Dad is doesn’t mean you know them, right? And, everybody has heard that Howard is kind of a dick - it’s all over social media. But, that’s not James’s business.

“Tony,” the guy says, still not looking directly at James.

“What?” James asks, startled. He hadn’t really been expecting Anthony to talk. Anthony’s eyes snap to him, and those pretty brown eyes are sharp, dangerous in their analysis and wow. It’s a lot of attention, a lot of terrible, awful attention. It might say something about James that he doesn’t quite mind it.

“I prefer Tony. Where do you sit? If we have to sit together. Honestly, I don’t care. If he’s not seriously, I’d prefer to sit anywhere else,” Tony says, looking James up and down. James raises an eyebrow, shifting his bookbag on his shoulders.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, slightly defensive. Tony snorts.

“You wear your bookbag on both shoulders, like a fuckin’ narc. You get assigned the new kid, like a fuckin’ narc. You wear a letterman, which means you play sports, which means you have cronies, which means not only are you able to get away with shit because you’re a narc, you’re a narc with backup. I’m not interested in being a chew toy. Count me out. I’m gonna go sit in the back with that kid who’s definitely high even though it’s second period, which means he definitely smoked between classes, because that’s a kid who isn’t a narc. See you around, quarterback,” Tony says, the bell ringing in perfect timing for him to slide into the seat next to Brock Rumlow.

James doesn’t know what to think.

“James, is there something you need? Please, take your seat,” Miss Harvelle requests from the doorway, and James hadn’t even noticed her come in, given his distraction. He clears his throat, but finds he has exactly nothing to say, thrown completely off kilter by that interaction. He slides into his own seat, the desk next to him empty, and he wonders what the fuck just happened to him in here on this day, really. Brock Rumlow laughs from two rows back, a barking laughter that James hears probably everyday because of just how little Brock cares about his classes and the reputation he holds with teachers, but it holds more of James’s attention this time. Because Tony is back there. A kid he just met.

James turns his attention to the front of the classroom and doesn’t allow himself to look back there again for the rest of the class. Miss Harvelle doesn’t insist upon the study partners thing, not like Fury said she was going to, and James tries not to feel disappointed by that. It’s not because Tony is pretty or anything. James isn’t that easily distracted by a pretty face. He has enough to do today.

He catches Tony after class anyway. With a tap on the shoulder, Tony follows him reluctantly to the stairwell that has emptied out for students heading en masse to the cafeteria. James thanks whomever for the small blessings of his life.

“Hey, I think we got off on the wrong foot there. I don’t know what you think I’m gonna do to you, but I’m not a bad guy, Tony. You can ask anybody. Fury wants me to show you around, and you don’t seem that bad either. Maybe we could try again?” James offers, putting out his hand for a shake. Tony narrows his eyes, ignoring the hand to cross his arms.

“I was really rude to you, Rhodes. What do you mean that I ‘don’t seem that bad?’ And maybe you just put on a good face, honeybear. Doesn’t mean you’re a good guy,” he says, looking smaller, actually, in his defensiveness. Something in James, something that he’s never had before because he’s never been an overprotective friend, not even of Pepper or Wanda, and never of Nat because she could fucking kill him with a spoon, but something in James wants to wrap him in a blanket and take him home to meet his mom. Something has made him damaged, and Jesus Christ, what is his fucking damage?

“Come meet my friends, Tony. Come meet my friends, come sit at our table, and everything will be okay. Okay? I promise nobody will do whatever you’re thinking is gonna happen. You have my word,” James promises, looking in Tony’s eyes then. He tries to put as much of himself as he can into that eye contact, and he watches as something in Tony wants to believe him. He watches as that desperate kid wants to believe in something, anything, wanting to protect him and like him and get to know him, and he watches as Tony lets himself believe in it, even if just for a lunch period. Tony sighs, looking put upon, but somehow, James knows, James just knows, that he’s okay with this.

“Alright, I’ll come with you. Don’t be a baby about it. I’ll come. Lead the way. I don’t know my way around quite yet, and you’re supposed to show me around anyway, right, Rhodes?” Tony says, his voice taking on a teasing note that isn’t half bad, and James grins. Not bad. He takes Tony’s wrist in his hand and guides him toward the cafeteria, leading him directly toward their table, not toward the line at all.

“The food here is trash, and Thor always brings enough food for everybody, even extras, so you’ll be fine,” James promises, his hand still not having moved from Tony’s wrist, though now it was a little further down. His fingers are now wrapped around Tony’s palm without him having realized at all. He doesn’t remove them, just drags Tony over to meet his friends.

“Rhodes! We’ve been waiting for you - Thor brought that kroppkakor shit you like, and he won’t let anyone else get into it until you have first dibs,” Bucky says from the table, perched on the side of Clint’s lap like he nearly always is. His legs are in Steve’s lap, who is also balancing Bruce on the side of his lap, like they can’t just sit in their own seats. Tony snorts derisively.

“Even your friends call you Rhodes?” he asks, looking at the other boy incredulously. James raises an eyebrow.

“Bucky over there, his first name is James too. Don’t want everybody getting confused on who is getting talked to, so it’s easier. Why? What would you call me?” James challenges, nudging his shoulder. The others, silenced by a newcomer, look on interestedly. Even Pietro and Wanda have stopped their usual squabbling to show their interest.

“Isn’t it kinda obvious? Rhodey. Rhodeybear. Rhodey is the obvious take here,” Tony says, a bored front forced into his voice, but his hand is tense in James��s. Rhodey’s. Yeah, okay, he can see where that could work. That isn’t half bad. He tosses it around in his mind a little bit, and maybe his distraction is why he doesn’t notice Mary Jane Watson saddling up beside him, clipboard already out.

“Come on, Rhodes, you and I have an interview to get to, and you’re already late. My photographer and dramatic artist are already in the interview room,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulder. He holds in a groan at the mention of who will be waiting. The photographer is fine, but the artist. Michelle Jones, one half of the dynamic duo (Mary Jane being the other) known as MJ&MJ, is the bane of pretty much every male’s existence. She hates guys, especially upperclassmen.

“Come on, Tony, right? I heard you introduce yourself in English. Stay with us, okay? Let Rhodey do his interview. He’ll be fine. Stay,” he hears Clint coaxing, only then realizing the grip he still has on Tony’s hand, and the fact that Clint must have turned up his hearing aids to have heard a conversation in a full classroom at 9am at all. James lets go of Tony, but leans in to talk to him anyway.

“You don’t have to stay with them, not if you don’t want to, but I think you should. They’ll like you. It’ll be okay,” Rhodey says gently, leaning in just a little too close, before MJ snags his arm.

“Let’s go, Rhodes,” she says, and then they’re off. The interview goes about like he expects it to, with the prying questions he didn’t want to answer. He does fine on his braces, he’s not scared of the Bronx Hydra, their own team, Shield, plays good enough football that it’s fine even if Hydra wants to dry and play dirty. It’s not like they’re playing hockey and somebody can try to cut a tendon with their knife feet. He gets a laugh out of Parker with that one, which is always fun; the kid is just a freshman, and he just lost his uncle, so startling a laugh out of the kid is a point of pride. He and Rogers have been trying to get him to join the team - he’s small but he’s fast, they’ve seen him run from Thompson, as many times as they’ve tried to get him to stop giving him a reason to run - but he’s stubborn.

“It’s been nice, kids, but I’ll be back to my friends now. Let me know when that’s hitting the paper,” Rhodey says as he leaves the newspaper room, which is really just one of the old conference rooms that Michelle bullied her way into keeping. He pretty much sprints back to the cafeteria and checks his phone on the way; ten minutes til the end of lunch. Awesome.

“Hey Rhodey,” Tony greets him when he gets back, sitting between Bruce and Maximoff like he was born to be there. Rhodey laughs, shouldering Pietro sideways so that he can sit beside Tony, just because he wants to and just because he can. Snorting, the Sokovian takes no offense, just sliding closer to his sister like it was his idea in the first place. Pretty much all of them just move Pietro - he’s a wide receiver, tall, sure, but real thin, and light because of it, and even with his braces and Bucky’s arm, they’ve both carried Pietro on their shoulders a couple of hours each.

“Hey Tony. Enjoying my kroppkakor?” he asks, because low and behold, Tony is already eating his kroppkakor, which Thor was supposed to be saving for him. Tony, who is proving to be a little shit, eats a forkful of it cheekily, grinning.

“It is delicious, and did you know that Thor makes it himself? Yeah, his mom used to make it, but when his brother started poisoning him, you know, as a prank, Thor started making his own food so he could make it and store it in his room and always know where it was and be sure and stuff. Isn’t that so funny?” Tony asks, giggling. It sets James’s teeth on edge, and he leans in, sniffing Tony’s jacket. The smell there makes him want to go out to the back lot and knock Brock Rumlow’s block off.

“Tony, are you stoned?” he asks, even though he knows the answer. Tony’s face goes dark.

“Are you my fucking mom? Wait, no, ‘cause she’s in Argentina, just like she’s been for the last fucking month. Couldn’t even come home for me getting kicked out of school, could they? Never good enough or bad enough to fucking matter for a good goddamn, even when it’s not my fucking fault I’m getting kicked out, so why should you fucking care if I’m stoned, Rhodeybear? We just met this morning, partner. You’ll be fine,” Tony says, standing up roughly, patting Rhodey’s face. Every single person looks at James before any of them follow Tony, and it’s him and Clint that struggle out of their seats to do it. He looks at Clint, begging him with his eyes to sit back down, to which their archer complies.

Great. One less thing to worry about.

He catches Tony at the exit of the cafeteria, catches his arm and leads him over to an alcove that is relatively devoid of activity. He’s already decided on investment. He’s a man of commitment. So stay committed, Rhodes. See it through.

“I fucking care, Tony. I fucking care because I’ve decided to care. It’s time to get good with that, alright?” he asks, crowding Tony against the wall, just a little bit. Tony leers up at him, a false smile taking over his face.

“Is that what it is, Rhodes? Do you want something else from me?” Tony asks, scanning Rhodey up and down. Rhodey pushes down the impulse to be flustered, pushes down the impulse to say no, why would you say that?, pushes down the impulse to lie, and instead sighs. Smiles. He leans his head down, and looks at Tony honestly.

“Maybe one day, when you’re not as fucked up, and I mean more than just sober, Tony. I don’t know what shit you’ve got going on, and I know it’s something - you don’t have to tell me, but you need to tell someone. My friends, they’re good people. You can tell them, you can go to a counselor, you can tell an adult, you can go to therapy, but anything but this, okay? I’ve known you for one day and I can see the self-destructive on you from a mile away. You need to tell somebody what’s eating at you, Tones,” Rhodey rambles, running his fingers along his short shorn hair, the speed across textured curls leaving a buzzing feeling in his fingertips. He’s nervous, maybe more than nervous, but it needs to be said. Tony looks like he’s been punched in the gut.

“Jesus, Rhodes. Don’t hold anything back,” he says, coughing, “couldn’t have said that when I was sober?”

“Maybe don’t get high in the middle of the school day then,” Rhodey quips, a huff of laughter escaping despite himself. The bell rings then, with Rhodey having eaten exactly nothing for lunch, with Tony still half high and neither of them at all prepared for the rest of the day, and that is the first time that James Rupert Rhodes skips class in his entire junior year of high school. He and Tony peel out of the high school in Tony’s obnoxious cherry red custom Ferrari, because of course he drives something terrible, and they go get lunch at the Avengers’ favorite diner. The Avengers is something that their friend group calls themselves, which is a story that gets told that afternoon. They exchange quite a few stories that afternoon.

Tony comes down more as he eats more, and Rhodey tells stories to fill the space; he doesn’t want Tony’s trauma when he’s too out of his head to hold his jaw shut. Apparently, he had given Rumlow eighty fucking dollars for six consecutive hits off of his pipe. First of all, who hits a pipe six times in a row? Second of all, eighty goddamn dollars? James doesn’t fight. But Bucky and Sam sure as fuck do, Bucky boxes, metal arm or no, and Sam does whatever the fuck Sam does, and if James texts them underneath the table, that’s none of Tony’s business. He lets Tony Stark buy him a milkshake for skipping his fourth period (because apparently, that’s a separate offense from skipping third), and they have a nice afternoon.

When the high has completely faded, Tony does tell him.

“I was kicked out of my last school, a private school, for fighting. Howard paid to keep it out of the media, and paid enough to keep Jus- Hammer’s parents to keep from pressing charges. But, Rhodey, you gotta know, I didn’t fight anybody. Justin was my best friend. His… lackeys, they backed him up, they lied. Anything to get baby Stark kicked out, you know? I skipped a grade, fourth grade, and they never forgot it, still resented me, and I-” Tony is rambling and ranting, and Rhodey needs to get him back on track. He takes Tony’s hand from across a shitty diner booth, holds his hand across the table.

“It’s okay, Tony. Just continue. Tell me what happened,” he encourages, his voice much calmer than he feels, because he has a feeling he knows where this is going. Tony still has a bruise on his face. He doesn’t know if he still has bruises anywhere else.

“The night that Justin… decided we weren’t friends anymore, he punched me in the face. It wasn’t even that good of a punch, but it surprised me, you know? And, uh, two of his cronies were in our room, because me and J were roommates before I got kicked out and he let them in, but… yeah, he and they… beat the crap out of me, I don’t know. Lied about it. Really committed to it, you know? I thought Justin was… he was my friend, you know? God,” Tony says, shuddering. Rhodey squeezes his hand.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything is okay. You’re gonna have better friends now, Tony. Nothing like that is ever gonna happen again,” Rhodey promises, dipping his head to look Tony in the eyes. Tony smiles bitterly.

“How do you know? You gonna follow me to college, Rhodes?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. Rhodey shrugs a shoulder, sitting back and splaying out confidently.

“Depends, where do you wanna go?”

#ironhusbands #rhodeytony #tony stark #james rhodes #could be read as mostly platonic #high school au #bullying cw #past bullying #justin hammer cw #im not tagging all of the characters that's too much #mine

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eleanor-writes-stuff · 6 years ago

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i miss the thought of a forever you and me [one-shot]

Kylo Ren has spent what seems to be the entirety of his adult life working towards a partnership in Snoke's firm. Now that future is finally within reach, and only one thing stands in his way.

So maybe he hasn't spoken to Rey in eight years. And maybe he's still not quite over her. But getting in touch with his ex-girlfriend to have her take down their old webcam videos shouldn't be an issue... right?

This is far from my best work, but I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month so here, have a two-tropes-in-one fic: exes getting back together and ‘we were young and broke and webcam porn seemed like a good idea’. Is that last one even a trope? Who knows. I wrote it anyway. If a bunch of fluff and pining sounds like a good idea, this might be the fic for you.

Also available on AO3.

Kylo Ren has been working towards this moment for the entirety of his adult life.

“If all goes as planned,” Snoke finally says after a long, roundabout conversation about legacies and partnerships and apprentices becoming equals, “the announcement will be made this Monday.”

The announcement – the one that will cement his place as a partner of the firm, the one that will ensure his name lives on forever, the one that will overshadow anything and everything that has come before. “Sir, this is–”

Snoke holds up a hand, all paper-thin skin and arthritis-curled fingers; it’s a wonder, really, that the man is still alive at all, let alone sharp enough to continue running his firm. Some will see this announcement as a sign of weakness, as the beginning of a transition of power – and perhaps they’ll be right. Two years ago, Kylo would have entertained the thought in the back of his mind, might even have come up with the outline of a plan to begin the process of supplanting Snoke entirely.

As it is, he can barely even muster the energy to fake excitement at the news.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself just yet, boy,” Snoke warns him. “Once the announcement goes out, it won’t take long for everyone to start looking you up. While I trust that Kylo Ren has been nothing but professional, I cannot say the same of Ben Solo – and I refuse to have another Hux situation.”

Just last week, Hux had been his sole competitor for this very partnership – until a quick Google search by Snoke’s assistant had yielded pictures of Hux in a Nazi costume plastered all over the Internet. The idiot had worn the costume not one, not two, but five Halloweens in a row, and any effort on his part to contain the damage would have been hopeless.

He was fired that very day.

“I assure you, sir,” Kylo speaks firmly, with all the confidence of someone who was born into the spotlight and has almost never done anything stupid, “that will not happen.”

Snoke pins him with a look that might have been intimidating once, back when he still cared about the man’s opinion and approval. “See that it doesn’t. Take the rest of the week to get your affairs in order.”

He’s dismissed with a limp wave of Snoke’s hand – has he really grown that frail in just a handful of years, or was Kylo simply too blinded by his promises of greatness to notice before?

Kylo thinks he sees that same blind loyalty in Mitaka as he walks past the assistant’s desk. The man is terrified of him and had been just as scared of Hux, but that hadn’t stopped Mitaka from bringing his findings to Snoke anyway, even at the cost of making a lifelong enemy out of Hux.

Maybe someday, Kylo thinks as he returns Mitaka’s curious gaze with a curt nod, you’ll wake up too. You’ll realize that the voice whispering in the darkness is filling you with empty promises, that greatness and power mean nothing without all the other things he’ll make you sacrifice first.

But then what? Kylo himself came to that realization years ago, and here he is anyway because what else is there? Maybe that’s the truly frightful thing about Snoke – even if he can’t deceive you forever, he’ll make sure that there’s nothing else left for you, that there’s no reason to break free of his trap.

Maybe once there would have been a reason, a person–

But that was years ago. Now there’s no one else, and nowhere else, so he might as well just stay and keep going down this path strewn with material comfort and little else.

Kylo returns to his office and settles in to retrace every single step he’s ever taken online. There’s nothing left of pre-college Ben Solo – he’d made sure of that the summer after high school in a foolish attempt to present himself with a clean slate for college, as if his last name and his parentage didn’t cast a longer shadow than anything his idiot fourteen-year-old self could have said on Myspace. After college there was no more Ben Solo, only Kylo Ren, and an intensive Google search (he’s on the seventh page of search results by the time he clicks away) reveals nothing but a handful of professional profiles used for networking and the occasional write-up about him or his cases.

Which leaves him with one last concern: college Ben Solo.

College Ben Solo has a Facebook account that he never posted on, one he used only to interact with his classmates and lecturers. He has a Twitter account with zero tweets, and an Instagram account with zero posts but a hundred or so tagged photos.

That was the only reason he’d signed up for Instagram in the first place: to see what kind of pictures his friends were posting of him, to see (and like) everything Rey tagged him in.

He would have deleted his Facebook account years ago, but he’s a sentimental fool and that was where he and Rey first got to know each other, really, when she chose to write to him instead of the literal dozens of others in their class for help. (It’s Rey from poli sci. I wasn’t in class today. Did I miss anything?)

He should have deleted his Twitter account the day he graduated, but sometimes he scrolls through all of his Favorites and their relationship plays like a movie in his head, each milestone – no matter how tiny – recorded for posterity in 140 characters. (The summer before their third year, a picture of her rolling her eyes at the camera and him talking to a realtor in the background: house-hunting with the pickiest guy in the world. I swear to god, @Ben_Solo, if you don’t pick an apartment by today I will kill you.)

And Instagram… Instagram is an exercise in masochism. Pictures of them in class, when Holdo was running late and she was bored. Pictures of them hanging out at parties Hux dragged him to and Finn dragged her to. Pictures of her tucked into his side on movie night, of him turning his face away from her camera while he made them breakfast, of the two of them building an entire life together. (A caption to accompany the last picture of them she ever posted, her head on his shoulder and his arm around her waist: Who needs a space heater when you’ve got this guy? #lifehacks #savingafortuneonheatingthiswinter #agirlcouldgetusedtothis)

It’s painful to look back on, every single bit of it, but there’s nothing here that would actually have a negative impact on his reputation. His Twitter account is already private and his Facebook reveals nothing but a string of perfunctory, impersonal birthday messages from former classmates. He double-checks that his Instagram account is locked, and then he looks up her account too – just to be safe.

Rey Niima | Cali Full-time software engineer, part-time app developer, occasionally an actual human with a social life.

The bio’s changed since he last saw it a year ago – I almost never post but don’t worry, I’m (probably) not dead – but the account’s still locked, which should mean no one can see her pictures of him. He’ll have to check with someone who’s more familiar with social media – maybe Phasma, who’s gotten surprisingly good at this stuff since she started developing a social media presence for her gym – but Kylo’s pretty sure this means he can keep all of his shrines to the past without exposing himself as a lovesick fool to the public.

All except one, that is.

Kylo exits Instagram, sets his phone aside, and reluctantly turns to his laptop. He types a URL into the box – one he visits far more than he’d like to admit – and watches as a few dozen thumbnails for corresponding videos begin to appear.

Because while college Ben Solo had maintained a minimal, barely-there presence on social media, there’s one particular corner of the web where he had been very, very active.

There’s a reason he waited until he was safely locked away in his own house to conduct this online purge, and the revealing thumbnails make him glad he did – limbs splayed wide open and miles upon miles of bare skin but no faces, never any faces, they were always so careful about that. It’s probably the only reason no one’s ever found out about this.

He’s never forgotten about it – having sex with your girlfriend in front of a live online audience isn’t exactly something you can just forget about – but Kylo’s felt fairly confident in their anonymity for the past few years. No names, no faces, shitty audio that completely distorted their voices – they’d thought of everything, discussed it all at length when she first approached him with the idea. But now… now he can’t risk it any longer. So as much as he’s going to miss being able to watch these whenever he really, really misses her–

It’s time to call Rey up and ask her to take down all of their videos.

“Hello,” she says distractedly – he can picture her pressing the phone between her ear and shoulder, her hands busy at work and her mind half-focused on a dozen different things. The image is so vivid it hurts, and her voice – the voice he used to wake up to a lifetime ago – isn’t helping.

He takes a deep breath. “Um, hey. It’s…” Not Ben, not for a long time now, but would she even remember Kylo Ren? The name he only adopted towards the end of their time together, the name she laughed at once or twice before telling him to stop being an idiot, Ben Solo is a perfectly good name–

Over the phone, Rey makes an almost imperceptible sound – a gasp, maybe, or a sharp inhale. “Ben,” she breathes, not even the slightest hint of a question in her voice after all these years.

He was always Ben to her, even right up until the end. It doesn’t feel right to change that now. “Yeah, it’s me. Sorry to just call you up like this–”

“It’s okay,” Rey cuts him off, her words tumbling out in a rush. Maybe he should’ve asked if this is a good time to talk. “Really, it’s fine. What’s… what’s up?”

“I’m… this is going to sound weird, but I’m in town and I need to talk to you about something… private,” he grimaces as it finally hits him how ridiculous this all is, how pathetic and see-through his excuse is. They could’ve had this phone call even on opposite ends of the world; he could’ve checked the website after to make sure she’d gone through with it. There’s absolutely no reason for him to have flown across the country just for this.

But here he is anyway.

Rey is quiet for the longest while. “Oh,” she finally says. “I… um. Okay, I guess. Do you want to tell me what this is about or would you rather–”

“I’d rather tell you in person,” Kylo says quickly, before he can lose his nerve and fly back without ever laying eyes on her. “Can I- are you free now?”

“Now?” she echoes questioningly. “I’m kinda at work right now, Ben.”

Because of course she’s at work, of course she has a routine and a life and none of it is going to stop just because he’s unceremoniously dropped himself back into her existence. His life in New York feels so distant now, almost like a dream, but it’s unfair of him to expect her to drop everything and rush to him the way he’s rushed to her.

“Of course,” he mutters. “I’m sorry, I forgot that–”

“But my lunch break is in two hours, if you’d like to drop by then,” Rey offers haltingly, her tone somewhere between a suggestion and a question.

“Yes,” the word tumbles past his lips without a moment’s thought. “Yes. Great. That’d be great.” He clears his throat to shut himself up and stop rambling at Rey.

“Great!” she agrees brightly, her cheery tone the slightest bit hysteria-tinged. “So I’ll just text you the address?”

He could easily look it up himself, of course, but he’ll take any form of contact with her – Kylo’s not above admitting that to himself. “Yeah, sure. Thanks. See you in a bit, Rey,” he makes himself say, because who knows how long he’ll keep her on the phone otherwise, keep her voice in his ear and her presence in his life.

When Rey speaks, he likes to think he can hear a smile in her voice. “See you, Ben,” she says quietly, and a moment later her voice is gone and his phone is buzzing with a message containing directions to Resistance Tech.

The company sounds vaguely familiar – he must’ve read about her getting a job there at some point, maybe gleaned it from one of her bios or a congratulatory post on Finn’s Facebook account. There’s so little about her that he actually knows, but the bits and pieces stored in the back of his mind are still more than he should have, more than he’s entitled to, given that they haven’t spoken in eight years.

He wonders when she stopped working with Skywalker, and why; wonders if she still hates coffee and chugs way too much Coke in the mornings to get her caffeine hit instead; wonders if she ever reaches out across the bed at night only to remember there’s no one there anymore, the way he still does.

Thirty minutes later he hops into an Uber and stares out the window at the bright sun and the swaying trees, thinks of how much Rey must love this place, all her favorite parts about her desert home and their rainy college town rolled into one city.

The car pulls up to Resistance Tech more than an hour later, and his Uber driver tells him that’s considered good time given that it’s the middle of the day and they made their way here all the way from the airport. He thanks the guy, shoulders his weekend bag, and opens the door to a beautiful, sprawling, horribly familiar sight.

Rey never stopped working with Skywalker, Kylo realizes belatedly. Resistance Tech is just the new name his mother had chosen for the company when she decided to quit politics and partner up with her brother.

The receptionist calls for someone to escort him upstairs when she recognizes his name, and Kylo finds himself deposited in an empty conference room on the seventeenth floor shortly after.

The hallway outside is barely lit, and the entire floor seems abandoned for now. He sits down for a bit, re-reads Rey’s message a couple of times before he takes to restlessly pacing the length of the conference room and then parting the blinds to look at the courtyard below.

Benches and picnic tables dot the open space, and food carts begin to appear seemingly out of nowhere as lunch hour draws near. He thinks he spots Finn amongst the throng of employees spilling out of the building, accompanied by a man and a woman, and idly wonders if maybe he’ll catch a glimpse of Rey rushing to get a bite before she comes up to meet him.

An achingly familiar voice draws him away from the window.

“Hello, Ben.”

She’s eight years older but somehow still exactly as he remembers her, all thin sweater slipping off one shoulder and loose hair framing her face and a soft little smile on her lips. He’s seen her like this a thousand times, in memories and dreams that always leave him wanting.

“Rey,” he whispers, curling his hands around the back of a chair to anchor himself. The urge to wrap his arms around her, to sweep her off her feet and pick her up the way he used to, the way that never failed to make her laugh in delight, is overwhelming. “You look… the same. Beautiful, I mean,” he adds in a hurry before she can wonder whether that’s a good thing. “You look beautiful. That’s all.”

“Um, thanks. I like your hair,” Rey replies in kind as she steps into the room and shuts the door behind her. He resists the urge to run a hand through his hair self-consciously; he hasn’t worn it short-short since he was a teenager, grew it out to hide his ears even when they were together, but now it’s shorter than it ever was in college, only half of his ears hidden underneath black waves.

She used to run her hands through it absent-mindedly, coo at how soft it was and lament that there wasn’t more of it for her to braid. He wants nothing more than to feel her blunt nails scratching down his scalp again, her fingers tangled in his hair to hold him close.

“Sorry to make you come all the way up here,” Rey says as she takes a seat and motions for him to do the same. “It’s just… I know you and Leia still aren’t talking that much, and you never know where she’ll be during lunch hour. I thought this would be the safest option.”

Leia. Back in college she used to call his mom Mrs. Organa, and they’d met all of two times when Leia dropped by campus unannounced to confront him about the growing rift between them. Now she knows his mom well enough to be on a first-name basis, has probably spent more time with her in the past year than he has in the past decade.

Kylo slowly takes a seat opposite her. “Thanks. That’s… very considerate of you.”

Rey simply nods in acknowledgement, and they stare at each other across the wide conference table until–

“Why are you here, Ben?” she asks softly, no hint of hostility or frustration in her voice. Maybe the years have mellowed her out, maybe more than a decade of not having to fight for survival on a daily basis has drained her of the hardened, confrontational nature he remembers from their earliest interactions and allowed her true personality to emerge - the one he’d begun to see glimpses of during their last year together, the one he used to think he’d have the rest of his life to get to know.

“I…” he can’t help but drop his eyes down to the table, finds himself focusing on the way she fidgets with a bracelet around her wrist as he speaks. “I’m being promoted, next week. Snoke’s making me a partner.”

Her hand stops moving at the mention of his boss. “Oh. Um, congratulations,” Rey offers weakly.

Kylo forces himself to look at her. “Thanks. But… that’s why I’m here, basically. Snoke demands that all of us carry ourselves in a manner befitting of the firm’s reputation, which means no hidden skeletons or potential scandals. And now that he’s about to announce me as a partner…”

“You’re worried people out there might do some digging,” she fills in, nodding in comprehension.

There’s no need to talk about what exactly people might find, what kind of scandal they’d have on their hands. There’s only that one thing.

“Do you still have the login information?” he asks bluntly.

“I…” Rey pauses, and the slightest furrow emerges between her brows; he wants to lean across the table and smooth it out, wants to tuck her hair behind her ear and– “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I still remember everything. But um,” she gives him an apologetic smile, one marred by a wince. “I’m not that comfortable logging in here at work, so maybe…?”

Kylo nods. “Right, of course. I completely understand.”

“I’ll do it as soon as I get home, I promise,” she assures him. “Really, I should’ve done it years ago. It just… slipped my mind, I guess.” The casual shrug, the light tone – none of it is the least bit convincing. This isn’t the kind of thing that just slips your mind.

He plays along anyway, just as guilty as her of… whatever this is. Keeping a shrine to the past? Getting off to your own homemade porn? Holding on to memories of the happiest time in your life? “Yeah, same.”

Rey moves as if to get out of the chair, as if to leave, and he panics, grasps desperately at straws for something to say–

“How long are you in town for, by the way?” she asks, getting to her feet but making no move to leave.

“I… I don’t know,” Kylo realizes out loud. “I just packed a bag and hopped on a plane. Fuck, I haven’t even gotten a hotel.”

She studies him, head the slightest bit tilted to one side in suspicion. “Ben, did you fly all the way here just for this?”

He can’t exactly admit that his brain had short-circuited at even the slightest possibility of seeing her again, that he’d fly halfway across the damn world if it meant getting to be in the same room with her for five minutes. “No,” Kylo croaks, clears his throat and aims for nonchalance. “No, definitely not. That’d be… that’d be ridiculous. I just. Work’s about to change in a big way and I needed some time to myself, you know?”

Rey simply stares at him for the longest while. “Right,” she finally says. “Of course.” After a moment’s consideration, she adds, “This might be weird but we did part on good terms and all, and you just said you haven’t found a hotel yet so… I mean. I have a spare room. That you can stay in, if you’d like.”

It takes him a second too long to process what’s happening here, to understand that Rey is inviting him into her home for the night. “Yes!” he blurts out when it looks like she’s starting to regret the offer. “I mean, yes. I’d love to. If it’s okay with you.”

“I wouldn’t have offered otherwise,” Rey smiles. “So I’ll just send you the address and let you know when I’m home?”

“That sounds good,” Kylo nods, following her lead as she moves out of the room. “Thanks, by the way. I know this is all really unexpected and–”

She turns in the doorway, places a hand on his arm. “It’s no problem, Ben. Really, I don’t mind.”

It burns where she touches him, in the best way possible.

But Rey drops her hand as if she’s been singed, and quickly leads him out of the room and down the darkened hallway. “I’d walk you out, but then people might stop us to talk to me and who knows if they’ll recognize you.”

“It’s okay,” he says as they wait for the elevator. “I know my way around.” After all, he used to spend entire summers exploring this place as a child. “Hey, what happened to Skywalker, anyway? Why the name change?”

They get into the elevator and Rey presses two buttons – twelfth floor for her office, he can’t help but note. “Luke disappeared on some kind of soul-searching mission shortly after Leia retired from politics and came here to join him,” she explains. “So your m- so Leia said that if he was going to make her do all the work of running the company, she might as well make the company her own. Gave it a total overhaul, rebranded and everything.”

Twelfth floor, an automated voice chimes before he can voice the thought that that sounds entirely like something Leia would do.

“Well, this is me,” Rey says as the doors begin to slide open. “I’ll see you at home?”

It feels like a dream to hear her say that again after all these years. Rey realizes her slip-up the second she steps off the elevator, and her eyes grow wide as she frantically shakes her head. “I mean, at my home. Which you don’t share. Because you’ve never been there. Because we–”

Kylo smiles, braces one hand against the door while the other reaches out to finally, finally tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “See you later, Rey.”

Her eyes close when his fingers graze her jaw, and he thinks she even leans into his touch. But then there’s a voice from down the hall, an awfully familiar one, and their eyes meet in a moment of total panic.

“Rey, is that you? I was wondering where you’d gone! Would you like to have lunch together?”

Leia’s voice grows dangerously close.

“Go,” Rey urges, and Kylo turns his back on her to conceal himself while he frantically jabs at the button to close the doors.

He finds himself in a café five minutes away from Rey’s office for the rest of the afternoon, scrolling through Instagram and Twitter despite his better judgement.

But the way she said see you at home, the way she sighed and leaned into his hand–

At five, his walk down memory lane is abruptly cut short when his phone lights up with a text.

Leaving work now, home in twenty. Come over whenever.

Kylo makes himself sit still for another ten minutes, even if it’s the hardest thing he’s done in recent memory. And then he calls for an Uber and promptly gets stuck in traffic.

Rey opens the door nearly an hour later and laughs at the sight of his disgruntled face. “You called for a car, didn’t you?”

“Mistakes were made,” he acknowledges, stepping into her apartment. For a moment there it’s almost like he’s stepped back in time, like he’s walked into their old home again.

But her plants are in proper pots now, not chipped mugs and emptied-out jars of food with the labels still on them. And the furniture is significantly nicer, not a single piece rescued from the curb and given a total makeover. It still screams Rey though, at the very heart of it, and he instantly feels more comfortable here than he has anywhere else since they moved out.

“That’s why I bike everywhere,” Rey says as she closes the door behind them, oblivious to his reaction to her home. “Have you eaten? I was thinking of calling for Thai. There’s this great place–” her voice carries as she heads for the kitchen, and he follows her once he’s successfully snapped himself out of it.

“Thai sounds great,” he tells her, watching her retrieve the menu from a drawer stuffed to the brim with brightly colored flyers. The genie drawer, Rey used to call it back in their kitchen, even put up a nice little chalkboard label proclaiming it as such. Like so many other things about her, it had been both endearing and heartbreaking to see how excited she would get about something as mundane as being able to simply place a call and know for sure that your next meal was taken care of, that you wouldn’t have to starve that day.

They settle on their orders, and Rey heads into the living room to get her phone and make the call. He looks out her kitchen window while waiting for her, pictures her standing in this very spot every morning, quietly cradling a mug of tea in a stolen moment of peace before the day ahead. It’s what she used to do, at least, back when their kitchen was barely functional and the view from their window was just a dirty alley.

“Hey,” Rey says as she returns to the kitchen, and when he turns around she has her laptop in hand. “I thought we might as well get it done with, while we’re waiting for food to arrive,” she explains, her smile too tight and close-lipped to be anything but nervous.

“Good idea,” he nods, and moves away from the window to join Rey at the kitchen island. There are two small barstools tucked under one end, and he follows her lead when she slides into one and logs into her laptop.

Rey types in the URL. “So,” she says a little too loudly as they wait for the page to load. “Excited about your promotion?”

“Not really,” Kylo mumbles as thumbnails begin to pop up.

They’re… well, as explicit as you’d expect them to be. But nestled amidst all of that is the occasional image of them just wrapped up in each other, Rey’s arms around his neck and his hair falling forward to obscure them from view as they kiss.

And always, always the slightest hint of a smile on her barely-visible face. He’s beginning to forget what it felt like, to have Rey smile into a kiss. Because for all the tiny details that furnish his longing dreams, there are just as many that have started to slip through his fingers – and he hates it, hates the way each missing detail feels like a fresh cut over a barely-healed wound, hates that time is chipping away at his most precious memories, hates that they’ve been apart for so long, that they’ve been apart at all.

Kylo sighs. “What happened to us?” he murmurs unthinkingly, and from the corner of his eye he catches movement – a flinch?

“Life,” Rey says easily, suddenly fascinated by her own hands. “We went down different paths, grew apart… it happens. People change. You changed,” she shrugs.

She’s never said so before, ended their relationship with a casual looks like we’ll be going to opposite ends of the country, let’s keep in touch rather than any complaints about him changing. He inhales sharply, snaps his head up to look at her. “What do you mean I changed?” His voice is too sharp, too demanding and accusatory, but it’s too late to take it back now.

Rey looks him in the eye, doesn’t falter or hesitate as she confronts him. “When I met you, you said you’d never go into politics because you wanted to actually make a difference, and you knew you wouldn’t be able to do that from within the government,” she reminds him. “And then the next thing I knew, you were working with Snoke and defending the very people you used to rail against, the ones who stood in the way of the change you used to want.”

Kylo takes a deep breath, counts to ten and pays close attention to his tone before he speaks. “I grew up, Rey,” he tells her stiffly, evenly. “That boy – he was naïve and idealistic and he would’ve starved to death working pro bono for every sob story he came across,” or so Snoke has said a hundred times, whenever he feels Kylo is in need of a reminder and some gratitude. “Snoke saw my potential and rescued me from that.” It feels wrong to parrot his mentor’s words back at Rey, especially when he himself stopped believing in them a long time ago. But what else is there to say?

“He didn’t rescue you,” Rey spits bitterly. “He hollowed you out and destroyed everything that made you you! He stripped away your morals and your beliefs and filled the void with a fuckton of money to hide it from you.”

“I’m not– Rey, I’m still me!” He gets to his feet so abruptly that the force of it sends his stool skittering across the floor. “I’m still the same person you knew, I’m still the man who took a job he couldn’t care less about because I wanted a roof over our heads, because I wanted to give you everything–”

Rey shakes her head at him. “I never asked you for everything, Ben. I was happy with what we had, I was happy with you.”

What they had? What they had was a tiny apartment and a mountain of overdue bills and a barely-defined thing between them because Rey never asked for anything but she never let him ask for anything either, never agreed to a proper date or labels or anything real, anything that would have given him the power to hurt her.

“I wasn’t!” Kylo snaps, running a rough hand through his hair, tugging at a tangle in frustration. “God, how do you think I felt, Rey, knowing that other people were getting off to my girlfriend just so that we could pay rent? The things they said about you–”

“Hold on,” Rey stands up, raises a hand in protest. “I was never your girlfriend, we were just–”

“Just what, Rey?” he snarls. “Just living together? Sleeping together? Talking about our future together? I don’t know about you, sweetheart, but that sounds like a relationship to me.”

Rey’s breathing hard and glaring at him and out of nowhere it occurs to him that this is their first fight, that they dated for three years and have been broken up for eight but somehow this is the first time he’s ever raised his voice at her.

“The only reason,” she says slowly, deliberately, bites off each word with thinly-veiled anger and coats it in false calm, “we were living together was because neither of us could afford to pay rent separately. You said so yourself, when you suggested it.”

“For fuck’s sake, Rey,” he sighs, brings a hand up to pinch at the bridge of his nose where he can already feel a headache coming on. “Did you really think that was… I mean, come on. If all I wanted was a roommate, I would’ve just asked fucking Hux. He would’ve had a bigger budget. He would’ve had his share of the rent on time every month.”

And this cannot be news to Rey, but still uncertainty casts a shadow over her features as she asks, “Then why…?”

Kylo shakes his head, closes his eyes and runs a heavy hand down his face. “Because I wanted to be with you,” he whispers, something so obvious he’s always just assumed Rey – and the whole wide world, really – must’ve seen it from the very start. “Because I loved you.”

Rey makes a tiny sound – he can’t tell if she’s choking or gasping, not with the doorbell drowning her out so that all he can see is the way her lips part infinitesimally in shock.

“I’ll get it,” Kylo sighs when the bell rings again, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket. The fact that Rey doesn’t even react when normally she’d be fighting to split the bill makes him wonder if he’s broken her.

Did she really not know? How? God, the way he’d look at her, the way he’d hold her close and sigh her name – wasn’t any of it obvious enough? Wasn’t it written in big red letters across his forehead that he had been a fucking goner for her from the very start?

When he comes back into the kitchen, Rey is still standing in the exact same spot. He leaves her be, busies himself with taking plastic containers of food out of the bags and setting them out on her countertop.

“Ben?”

He turns around to find her hugging herself, arms wrapped around her waist and shoulders hunched in on herself so that she looks even tinier than usual, lost and scared and–

“Did you mean it? That you loved me back then?”

Kylo brings his hands behind his back, wedges them between his body and the kitchen counter to subdue the urge to cross the room and hold her. Rey stares at him unblinkingly, even as her arms grows tighter and she grows smaller, even as she sinks her nails into the soft flesh of her waist.

It hurts, to see her like this. Eight years and still all he wants is to always be there for her, to make her feel happy and safe all the time.

“I think I still do,” he admits quietly.

Rey makes that sound again – it’s a sob, he can hear it clearly now – and runs into his arms.

The food grows cold, forgotten on the countertop as they stumble into the living room.

After, snuggled up together on her tiny couch that’s so small she has to sprawl out on top of him rather than beside him, he gives voice to a dream he buried long ago.

“I thought I was going to marry you.”

Rey lifts her head from his chest, props herself up with her palms braced just above his shoulders. “What?”

“Back in college,” he explains, one hand drawing circles into her hip while the other brushes her hair out of her face. “Back when we… I’d look at you, sometimes, and out of nowhere I’d think, I’m going to marry her someday.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Rey asks gently, leaning in to brush the lightest of kisses against his lips.

“Didn’t want to scare you off, at first,” Kylo shrugs. “And then everything else happened so fast and we’d already made plans to move to opposite ends of the country. You know what’s crazy?” he asks, exhaling a short, bitter laugh. “Even then I thought we’d make it. I thought maybe I'd work with Snoke for a couple of years, save up enough for us to be okay while I looked for a better job where you were. Or maybe you'd hate it with my uncle and decide to fly out and find something closer to me. But then…”

But then there was talk of keeping in touch, a request to just text me once in a while, Ben, it won’t kill you to stay social, and with it came the heartbreaking realization that they weren’t anything worth holding on to, not to Rey.

He tears himself away from the memory. Just minutes ago she had hidden an endless string of I love yous in the crook of his neck, and that’s enough for him now. That has be to enough, because it’s already more than he’s ever dared to so much as daydream of.

“You never said anything,” Rey murmurs now, dropping her head back onto his chest. “I thought…”

“I wish I had,” he whispers into the silence, shifts slightly to nuzzle her temple.

Rey pushes against his chest, moves until they’re both sitting on the couch facing each other. “But…” she pauses, takes a deep breath as if to brace herself. “But things are different now, right? I mean, you’ve got everything you wanted now, what with the promotion and–”

He laughs bitterly, anguished enough for Rey to fall silent and stare at him wide-eyed. “Rey, you are everything I wanted. The rest was just… I don’t even know anymore,” he admits in defeat, can’t think of a single reason he left her behind for such a hollow life. “I hate it, all of it. I hate my job, I hate my apartment, I hate my life.”

She stares at him thoughtfully, nibbling on her bottom lip as she considers the situation at hand. The shirt he’d scooped up from the ground to drape around her shoulders is dangerously close to falling off as she shrugs and says, “Then quit.”

Oh, how he wants to. But – “And then what?”

Rey shuffles closer on her knees, climbs into his lap and plays with the hair at the nape of his neck. “Then come here,” she suggests easily. “Look for a job.” And then, after the slightest pause– “Marry me.”

His ears are ringing. He can’t possibly have heard that right, because Rey is still giving him that nonchalant look, still absentmindedly playing with his hair. “What?”

“That was your original plan, right?” Rey reminds him. “Quit after a few years with Snoke, move here to find a job, marry me someday,” she says it so softly, so lovingly, and in her eyes he sees all of it, sees that life he gave up on years ago. “I know it’s been a while, Ben, but… it’s not too late, if you still want it. If you still want us.”

“I– of course I still–” The idea that he might not is impossible to even wrap his head around. “But… Rey, are you serious? I know what I said, and I meant it, but you don’t have to… I mean, we can take it slow, if you want.” They’ve already wasted eight years, after all. What’s a few more so long as it means he gets to be with her, wife or not?

Rey shakes her head, surges up to kiss him all desperate and needy and so, so sure in her actions, her suggestions. “I’ve spent every single day of the last eight years,” she confesses against his lips, “trying to pretend that there isn’t a giant you-shaped hole in my life. So yes,” Rey gives him one last peck before she pulls away, “yes, I’m serious. Come back to me, Ben. It’ll be different this time, I promise.”

Her eyes are wide and earnest, and of course he knows exactly what she’s talking about, feels his heart get stuck in his throat at such a promise. “I feel like I should be the one asking to come back,” Kylo mumbles, thinking of how he left her behind all those years ago, of how much Rey has always hated being left behind and sure, this time it was different, it was just a day before she left for a new life of her own, but still. Maybe if he’d fought harder then, if he’d been willing to make sacrifices… “Feel like I should’ve been the one to ask you to marry me, too.”

“And you will,” Rey smiles, taking his words as a yes. “This isn’t a real proposal, Ben Solo,” she warns him playfully, jabs one finger at his chest. “You’re still going to have to gather up the nerve to ask me properly, some day. But for now... for now it’s a plan.”

She looks at him expectantly, as if there’s any world out there where he would say no to this. “It’s a good plan,” he tells her, pulls her in for a lingering kiss and rests his forehead against hers. “I like it.”

“Good,” Rey murmurs against his lips, and they don’t talk again for a good long while.

“We should probably still take those videos down though, right?” she asks the next morning, right after he hangs up on a puzzled Mitaka who’s still struggling to process his resignation.

Ben chucks his phone far, far away before Snoke can start to bombard him with calls and angry emails, pulls Rey into his arms and drags her back down under the covers. “I guess,” he sighs mournfully, dotting kisses along her bare shoulder.

“Babe,” Rey laughs, squirms in his arms when he focuses on a particularly ticklish spot under her ear and turns to face him. “You do realize that I have backup copies, right?”

He had not, in fact, realized that.

“God, I love you.”

Anything Reylo is usually soothing to my soul so I'm posting this in the hopes that at least some of you will enjoy this silly, tame take on the 'we were young and broke and needed the money, plus we were already having sex anyway so why not?' trope. (Seriously though, is that a trope? I don't know anymore.)

As always, I hope you guys enjoyed this even the tiniest bit. If you did, please don’t hesitate to like/reblog/leave a comment/scream at me in the tags.

I'm planning to participate in the Reylo AU Week happening later this month, so... see you guys then. In the meantime, thanks for reading!

#reylo #rey/ben solo #rey/kylo ren #kylo ren/rey #ben solo/rey #modern au #star wars #rey #ben solo #kylo ren #fic: a forever you and me #fic archive #my fics

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voeux-envie · 6 years ago

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BEYOND THE TITLE TRACKS

Plato had a point when he said that music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t listen to a song on a daily basis. For some people, songs are a source of entertainment, a means to make them feel all sorts of emotions from happiness, sadness, love, anger and so much more. To me, songs are more than that. They’re like poems (which they are) but better. They’ve got a melody that’s hard to resist. And yes, I called them “they” because songs are like persons. Each one has a story, a message, and a purpose. Like an old friend you’ve never met yet knows you best, finding the perfect song that describes exactly how you feel and what you’re going through is a magical and extraordinary experience–if you let it be. And this is how I fell in love with music.

When you think of Taylor Swift, the first thing that would probably come to your mind is a mainstream love song of hers you’ve heard on the radio or the amount of celebrity boyfriends she’s dated in the past years from online articles you’ve probably scrolled through on social media. This is how the media portrays her to be: a mainstream American pop singer whose only goal in life is to sing about her exes.

Taylor was only sixteen years old when her first studio album came out in 2006. I was four years younger than her, but there wasn’t any other artist I could relate to as much as her. As a teenager, she helped me go through the toughest and most confusing phase of my life. Not a lot of people know that Taylor wrote more than just love songs. This is what the media fails to tell. She wrote about friendship (Fifteen), what it’s like to feel betrayed (I Did Something Bad), and what it’s like to be an outsider (A Place in this World), to be alone, and to be bullied (Mean). She wrote songs about her family (The Best Day), about a child who passed away from cancer (Ronan), about not wanting to grow up (Never Grow Up), about her relationship with music and her fans (Long Live), and so much more. Her self-written songs were authentic, personal, and relatable. It was as if she was writing my own life story while simultaneously giving me life lessons. She knew how to express my thoughts and feelings better than I could. Because of her, I fell more in love with songwriting. It became more than just a hobby to pass the time. It became therapeutic. The next thing I knew, I was on YouTube watching video tutorials on how to play her songs on the guitar and piano.

Clean, a track from her album, 1989, is one of my favorites to listen to on Spotify. During her 1989 World Tour concert, she gave a speech about what this song meant:

“Let me tell you, people are mean to each other, but no voices are as mean as our own voices are to ourselves... Let me tell you the things you are not, okay. You are not somebody else's opinion of you... You are not damaged goods because you've made mistakes in your life... You are your own definition of beautiful and worthwhile. It's not about being perfect... One thing I have learned in 25 years, and I'm still learning, is that if you get rained on, you walk through a bunch of storms, life is constantly coming at you. That doesn't make you damaged, it makes you clean.”

It wasn’t just her songs that made me connect to her, because what made me like her even more was her personality, her humor, and her outlook in life. If you look beyond what she posts on Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, you’d realize that she not only uses it to update fans about her life, but she also uses it as a platform to personally interact with them. Tumblr is her safe haven. This is where she’s most active and where she’s most like herself. Since 2014, she’s liked over 27,000 posts from her fans, commenting and reblogging their content. By using this platform, she proved that she’s not an untouchable celebrity that’s high up in the clouds. She was and still is a fan of her fans and saw through their eyes, forming a strong bond with them. This proved to be an excellent marketing strategy. The Swifties are the ones who naturally do the promotion for her.

When it’s album release season, one thing Swifties look forward to are her Secret Sessions. This is an event where she personally messages her fans on social media and invite them to hang out with her and bake pastries at her house. She lets them hear the unreleased songs on her new album and talk about them before its release date. There aren’t a lot of celebrities who would go so far as to trust their fans to let them in their own homes. This just goes to show how much she treats her “fans” as more than just fans.

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Despite everything she’s done to create good image of herself, the media always has a way to tear her apart. As a celebrity, she was constantly criticized for her every move: from the clothes she wore to the people she dated. People called her a snake, saying she was deceitful and manipulative because of Kanye West’s rap single Famous, where he degraded her with his lyrics. Because of this, haters spammed her Instagram and Twitter posts with snake emojis. But instead of letting this get to her, she used her craft—her music—to fight back. Before her latest album, Reputation, was released, Taylor took a break from social media. She deleted all her posts because of the hate she was receiving. She came back armed with songs and used the symbol of a snake to her advantage. It became the whole theme of her album. She decided to turn the tables around and use their hatred as her strength. This is how Reputation was born.

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Aug 23, 2017 at 7:01am PDT

Aside from her album, she also wrote poems to talk about what she went through.

Excerpt of Why She Disappeared:

"Whatever you say, it is not right."

"Whatever you do, it is not enough."

"Your kindness is fake."

"Your pain is manipulative."

When she lay there on the ground,

She dreamed of time machines and revenge

Said a prayer of gratitude for each chink in the armor

she never knew she needed

Standing broad-shouldered next to her

was a love that was really something,

not just the idea of something.

"without your past,

you could never have arrived-

so wondrously and brutally,

By design or some violent, exquisite happenstance

...here."

And in the death of her reputation,

She felt truly alive.

Those who only know her from the surface would say she has a bad reputation, but for fans like me who have been following her career from the start, I see her as a strong, mature and down-to-earth woman–one whom I aspire to be. How the media psychoanalyzes every single aspect of her life does not tell us who she really is. Those who care enough to really listen to her music beyond the title tracks do.

References

Taylor’s Social Media Accounts

Official Website: https://www.taylorswift.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taylorswift/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylorswift13

Tumblr: http://taylorswift.tumblr.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/06HL4z0CvFAxyc27GXpf02

Articles

https://studybreaks.com/culture/music/taylor-swift-criticized-exes/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/if-you-think-taylor-swift-sings-only-about-her-exes-then-you-dont-get-taylor-swift/2017/11/01/76c0227e-b9a8-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.01a2fdf44bf1

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/taylor-swift-tumblr-safe-space-fans-posts-reputation-album-release-social-media-a8045511.html

Plato’s Quote: http://www.sjsu.edu/people/thomas.leddy/courses/66/s1/Plato-on-Music.doc

Why She Disappeared Poem: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-why-she-disappeared-poem-annotated

1989 Secret Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKnl7STzSMU

Instagram Snake Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BYI48JxniO3/

Clean Image & Speech: https://soundcloud.com/igor-astapov/taylor-swifts-clean-speech-1989-world-tour-foxborough-ma

Album Covers: https://www.theprospectordaily.com/2017/08/26/a-look-at-taylor-swifts-lead-singles-over-her-career/

Taylor’s Tumblr Replies: https://twitter.com/tswiftla/status/559017810740137984

#articles #journals #taylor #swift #reputation #passion #1st article #music

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