#until scene came along and really embraced Too Much as a concept

[harbingrs]

I should've made those tags an actual reblog response but there's no going back now.

I just love feeling like a first-hand historical source. It's one of the few perks of being Old. I was there when the deep magic was written.

...is this why old people like to 'have a yarn'? Am I having a yarn right now? Am I yarning?

[books-and-catears]

Right everyone hold on to your feels, you will shortly be boarding Angst Express 101. Just look at this brilliant and angsty ask I'm speechless. Even the pairings you asked for are so unique and well thought this is a perfect angst concept. And I really hope I could do this justice. Thank you so much for this ask @saltypaperdestiny

So very sorry for the delay, this was the longest ask I've ever written and boy was I delighted. Though I have to admit I had to cry through some of them myself. This is PART 1. Rest of the brothers and the newly Dateables coming soon in part 2.

Who loved you first? Pt1

Lucifer : Simeon

It was time, he decided. After months of being in your presence, his prideful heart had melted enough to recognise his feelings for you. You were the only he'd truly humble down for, because the affection and care you displayed was unparalled.

"MC please get dressed in something nice. I'm taking you to Ristorante Six as a thank you for helping me with Cerebus and the council paperwork" He says to you, barely containing the excitement. He couldn't wait to see the look on your face when he confessed and how you'd blush when you kissed your knuckles and your cheek and wait - What is Simeon doing in your room at this hour?

He didn't want to interrupt, surely it might be nothing to bother about. He patiently waited outside until he heard what Simeon said.

Simeon: MC... You look beautiful, what's the occasion?

MC: Aw thank you Simeon. You're always so kind. It's nothing much, Lucifer is taking me out as a thank you.

Simeon: Oh do you have to leave right away...?

MC: Oh no no. It's okay I have some more time.

Simeon: Well I originally came here to invite you to try Luke's latest attempt at some new recipes but now there's something else I feel like I must tell you. *Blushes* Something I've been holding back for too long.

MC: *joking* Oh what have you been hiding from me, angel? Speak I beseech you!

Simeon: *laughing and then going solemn* MC... *Takes your hands in his* I love you. I love you with all my heart.

MC: ....me? You love..me? But I'm not nearly-

Simeon: You're the most beautiful soul I've ever met. You radiate kindness and forgiveness and everything pure, overcoming the seven biggest evils you reside with. How can I not love you? Tell me, MC, will you accept me as yours?

Lucifer had a half a mind to storm in and laugh in Simeon's face. What a failure this attempt was going to be. His pride grew inside him as he stifled a laugh. MC was his and only his and now he would take pleasure in watching Simeon learn that. Surely MC was going to turn him down nicely but still. He creeped closer to the door, looking through the open crack.

MC: *in tears* Oh Simeon, I love you too! I never thought an angel could ever love me back!

Simeon: *kisses her knuckles* So... It's a yes?!

MC: Yes yes yes! Oh of course it's a yes! *Hugs him tight* My guardian angel who protects me in the dark, oh how I love you.

Simeon: *laughing as he picks you up and spins you around* Oh how happy you've made me MC! I'm the happiest being alive!

MC: *kissing his cheek* So am I, Simeon. I love you with all my heart.

It took Lucifer all his strength to not collapse or go into a violent frenzy. He balled up his fists so tight, the gloves started tearing at the seams. He watched you smiling so gleefully in his arms, looking so radiant. When Simeon dipped his head down to kiss you, the moonlight poured in through the window as if blessing your union.

It was supposed to be him. If only he made it to your room sooner, it could have been him. Embracing all your beauty, being the cause of the shining smile. IT COULD HAVE BEEN HIM.

At his best

"Are you really that happy with him?" he asks you later that night. The blush on your cheeks and that cheeky smile says it all.

"Congratulations MC." You look so joyous even at the thought of Simeon, how could he ruin that?

His temper is worse, more unforgiving towards all his brothers. He has to bear with your absence in the house all day. The fact that he knows you're at Purgatory hall, sipping tea and arm in arm with him pains him to think.

You bring Simeon along to the council to help him too. He outright denies and asks both of you to leave.

He only ever feels calm to see you alone, but that is even rarer with his brothers around to hog his remaining time.

Eventually makes his peace with it, maybe you're better off with someone as pure as yourself than a demon like him.

At his worst

His wrath is back. It's almost bad enough to birth another Satan. His sense of entitlement is through the roof.

He snaps three weeks later when Simeon and you tell everyone about it and decide that you'll be moving to Purgatory hall soon. Everyone claps and rejoices while Lucifer, drunk off Demonus, crashes the fun.

"Simeon, you dirty cheat, pretending to be all pure with your white wings and devious smile. How dare you?!" He says in calm and deadly rage.

"Lucifer... what's wrong-" You approach him to ask. He looks at you and you see the little tears in the corners.

"MC WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MINE THAT NIGHT. MINE. NOT YOURS. THE ONLY BEING THAT CAME CLOSE ENOUGH TO STEAL MY HEART AND YOU TOOK HER AWAY FROM ME."

Lucifer was louder now, hysterically angry, throwing his glass on the floor. "AND I KNOW THEY WOULD HAVE PICKED ME IF I GOT TO THEM FIRST! I LOVED THEM TOO DAMNIT." Simeon stood in front of you to protect you from Lucifer's rage. You hid your face in your hands, breaking down in sobs. What is happening? Where did you go wrong?

"Look at them, Lucifer. Look. At. What. You've. Done. And don't tell you've forgotten how many times you've threatened their lives before." Simeon said, holding you tight as you cried into his chest. "How dare you still feel like you deserve them?"

Lucifer sees you broken down, clutching onto Simeon for dear life, crying. You were smiling just a minute ago what has he done? Simeon blocked off his view with his pearly white wings. A reminder of what Lucifer used to be and cannot be again.

Mammon: Asmodeus

You were his human. And he was your first demon. No one was more territorial about you than him. So he finally made up his mind to seal the deal. No more lying about his feelings. He was going to claim you, once and for all. He imagined you smiling and running your hands through his hair and kissing him returning his feelings.

"MC! I brought the movie of the day!" He barged into your room excited, but you were nowhere to be found. Where could you have gone? It was your movie night with him. You were supposed to be waiting for him inside. He asked his brothers and they said you were with Asmo. He stomped his way up to Asmo's room and called out your name. No response. Not till he peeked inside the dark washroom. You were holding Asmo who looked very unstable and weak, sitting at the side of the bath.

MC: Asmo why don't you listen to me when I tell you not to drink so much!?

Asmo: I'm sorry MC *hic* I needed it today...

MC: Why? What's so scary that you don't have the confidence to do sober?

Asmo: MC do you think I look beautiful?

MC: Of course Asmo, you always do.

Asmo: Even with my runny make up, red nose and swollen eyes and this horrible complexion?

MC: *grabs his face* You're always beautiful to me MC.

Asmo: I...I stopped sleeping around MC. I couldn't do it anymore. *tearing up* Because to them, I'm only beautiful with a perfect covered up face.

MC: Asmo...they're blind and shallow demons who don't know anything! I know you, and I know how much more beautiful you are inside out. Don't listen to them.

Asmo feeling insecure about his appearance? What a big fat lie. Is this his new ploy to get to you? How irritating. It's not going to work, Mammon knows you're smarter than that. The Avatar of Lust can manipulate in many ways. Surely his human was smart enough to see through that!

Asmo: MC, I knew you were the one only who truly loved me. And today, I found the one I love too. Much more than I love myself. So I needed a drink to tell you this.

MC: Asmo...

Asmo: *holding your face gently* MC you saw past this pretty face. You saw the things I do more than what I am. Or what I pretend to be. I know it's hard to believe coming from the Avatar of Lust... But MC, I truly really love you. *looks down and sobs* But you probably can't believe me right?

MC: Asmo. Look at me. *You run your fingers through his hair and he looks up with teary eyes* I believe you. And I've loved you too. You're the only one who never hurt me. The one who willingly made a pact with me. You've been so sweet to me since I came. How could I love anyone else?

Asmo: MC I want you all to myself. Will you be mine? Only mine? I swear I'll keep you happy always!

MC: Of course Asmo. I'll all yours. I'm your little human. *giggling and kissing his head*

Asmo: *grabs and kisses you* MC, if you want, I can be your actual first tonight.

Mammon fell to his knees. He wanted to barge in and scream. He wanted to wrestle Asmo to the ground. He wanted to break his face for saying the words that were special to him and you. But your response had him paralysed. You...accepted him. You agreed to be his.

Silent tears streamed down his face as he watched you embracing Asmo, peppering kisses all over his face, running your hands through his hair, laughing and frolicking in the water with him. The colored moonlight through the stained glass danced on their skin like a scene from his favourite movie.

At his best

He cries to himself for days. Spends as much time outside as he can.

Maybe he is an idiot for thinking he had a chance with him. How could he compete with Asmo's charms.

Maybe it hurt more because Asmo didn't even have to use his charms.

Only ever tries to talk to you if he's sure your alone. One time he barged into your room and caught you and Asmo tangled up together and it broke him all over again.

He watched as you twirled around in a new outfit Asmo bought. He scoffs. He could have bought it for you too.

You both look so cheerful and in love, he decides to accept it. For the sake of his little brother and the human he loves.

At his worst

Breaks down and lets his emotions out in the worst way possible. Too desperate to win you back somehow.

Asmo and you were just telling Solomon and Simeon about your relationship when Mammon barged in through the doors of Purgatory halls.

"MC look! Look what I got you!" He came in all ragged. He knelt down and pulled out a ring. "Take me instead! I was your first wasn't I MC? Don't let him take my place please!"

"Mammon no... No please don't be this way...I'm sorry..." You kneel down next to him as he screams and sobs like a child. You feel guilty. You caused this. You lead him on. You fight your own tears as you keep apologising.

Asmo yanks you up and wraps his arms around you, staring down angrily at Mammon. "Mammon, leave."

Mammon lunged at Asmo. "I was going to tell them. That night was our movie night. You stole that night from me. YOU STOLE MY CHANCE AND MY MC!"

Asmo mocked at him with a sardonic laugh. "You still assume MC is yours without even telling them. You kept lying about your feelings and hurting them in the process. And yet, when they finally look happy, you come and make them cry. You are a scumbag Mammon."

Mammon looked at your tear stained face, nestled inside Asmo's arms and wings. He really felt like nothing but a scumbag.

Leviathan : Belphegor

Levi fell in love with you since your first act of kindness. As a shut-in whose only conversations were with his own eccentric and dismissive brothers, you were an angel who had brought him the gift of true companionship. Honestly he was okay being your best friend, until the day he started craving more. So he decided it was time to tell you.

'MC come to my room! I have a new game to show you!' It was a virtual dating game where he was going to confess digitally. You always loved his creative ways of doing simple stuff after all. He decided to play your favourite game while waiting for you. He even left the door ajar. Now he wished he didn't.

Belphie: MC do you have a minute?

MC: Yeah I was just heading to Levi's room what's up?

Belphie: I think I fallen in love with you, MC.

MC: .... Huh?

Levi almost burst out laughing hearing Belphie's confession. What kind of a bland confession is that? How can someone say that so easily? No that was definitely a joke on MC or something. Surely MC wouldn't take this seriously.

Belphie: I had a dream just now. About you.

MC: Uh huh?

Belphie: In that dream, we were up in the sky, among the stars. And you looked so pretty glittering along with them all. So I kissed you impulsively. And you kissed me back.

MC: ...that's a sweet dream. *blushes*

Belphie: *takes your hand* I woke up and my first thougt was I wish that was real. And then I realised it can be.

MC: ...

Belphie: I want to be able to kiss you always. I want to be able to take you far away. I want all your time. I love you MC. Be mine.

MC: Belphie I-

Belphie: I know, how can you possibly love your own murderer...? *Sighs* I cannot undo what I did. I'm sorry MC. I can only swear that I won't ever let that happen again.

MC: *smiles and cups his face* You were locked away for 3 millenia I can imagine your endless anger and grief for your sister. I forgave you long ago.

Belphie: So does that mean you'll accept me?

MC: You're already mine, silly. And now I'm yours. You're the only one I can relax with in the whole realm.

Belphie: MC... Come here. *holds you close and kisses you*

Levi's game screen displayed the message "GAME OVER: You lose". Levi couldn't see it clearly. His vision was blurred by the tears brimming on his eyes. You and Belphie looked to distant shadows on the moon.

He blamed himself for even thinking he had a chance with you. But maybe just...maybe if he had gotten there before? He stared at the screen and then at his spare console that he had declared yours. He picked up it, and locked it inside. Probably won't be needing it anytime soon.

At his best

He barely comes out of his room anymore. He tries to return your smile at breakfast but then returns hurriedly, leaving Beel to finish most of his food.

"Are you sure you want to play games? Wouldn't you rather go up to the attic" He mutters under his breath sometimes and then says it's nothing when you ask him.

Pains him when he sees you curled with Belphie in random places, dozing off. Might cover you with a blanket. Just you though.

Spites Belphie. A lot of people have said they look and act alike. But somehow you like sleeping more than anime and gaming?

Just accepts it as his fate. Atleast he's still your best friend, right?

At his worst

He's called the Avatar of Envy for a reason. He can barely hold it in seeing the both of you together constantly.

Belphie you and Beel were having a jolly time watching a movie and eating snacks while Belphie slept curled up in your lap. Levi happened to walk in while you were rubbing Belphie's head soothingly.

For some reason, Levi couldn't hold it in anymore. "UGH YOU FUCKING NORMIES!" he screamed out of frustration.

Belphie woke up drowsily when you stopped at stared at Levi holding back tears in the doorway. "Levi..what's wrong.." you call out to him.

He barges in and pushes Belphie off you and grabs your hands, tears falling and him screaming. "Why do you care, MC?! I'm a just disgusting shut in otaku right?! But guess what even as that I do more than just sleep and drool all fucking day! AND MORE IMPORTANTLY ATLEAST IM NOT THE ONE WHO KILLED YOU! So why him? WHY NOT ME MC?!"

"Levi...no..." You plead with him to calm down, tearing up yourself. You should have known. You should have known this would happen.

Belphie violently pushed Levi off you and grabbed him by the collar. "You were the first one to attack MC in this house. And I'm sure you would have killed them if not for Lucifer. So stop pretending you're better than me, you ridiculous creep. A shut in like you is worthless. The only thing you're good at is making MC distressed."

Levi looked at you trying to pull Belphie back, tears streaming down your face and hung his head low. It was simply an Otome game and MC didn't choose him.

Satan: Solomon

Satan took his time to fall. With late night studying session, every cat cafe date, every trip to the museum - he fell more and more each time. To the point where he wanted to spend every waking moment with you. And he was ready to tell you.

For a whole week, he kept writing and scrapping the perfect love letter for you. Then he realised you were someone who preferred simple honesty. "MC please wait for me in the library I'll be there shortly." He'd said before he dashed out to bring a boquet of your favourite flowers and a book which reminded him of you. He'd almost made it to the library, he saw you waiting inside for him eagerly. That was until someone flew in through the window.

Solomon? What's he doing at this hour? Satan peeked in through the half open library door. He wanted to be alone with you so he'd wait till Solomon was gone. He shouldn't have waited.

MC: Solomon! You scared me silly!

Solomon: *laughing* Your face just now MC...so adorable! Like a scared kitten!

MC: You wooshed in through the window!

Solomon: Okay okay my bad. Now what are you doing in the library so late at night. I went to your room and couldn't find you.

MC: Oh Satan called me out here. Told me to wait for him. Maybe there's a new book he wants to read.

Solomon: Do you guys do that often? Reading books this late?

MC: Haha yeah usually we just read in my room or his at night, in case we fall asleep.

Solomon: *sigh* So unfair.

MC: What's unfair?

Solomon: You and I are the only humans here. Why did they put us in different houses? Shouldn't we... be together more often?

MC: Well logically yes we should. Just classes and magic lessons aren't enough! You should live here too!

Solomon: I doubt Lucifer would be okay with that. But well.. here's the real reason I'm here now. *brings out a little basket*

MC: That's...that's a kitten! Hi baby! What's her name!?

Solomon: MC.

MC: Yeah what?

Solomon: No I named the kitten MC. This way I get to call your name as much as I want haha. The silly things us humans do for love, huh?

Satan had a sick feeling in his stomach. Watching you and him sitting in the moonlight, surrounded by books, cuddling a kitten and confessing...that should be him. Him not Solomon. He didn't like where this was heading. But just like you can't help but stare at disaster - he couldn't look away. What was MC going to say...?

MC: Solomon... *blushes*

Solomon: Does my affection scare you? *reaches for your hand*

MC: Of course not...I.. *gets closer and intertwining your fingers together*

Solomon: Is this your way of showing-

MC: *blushes* Yes. I love you too.

Solomon: I believe I've lived for a 1000 years just to hear those words. *kisses you against the bookshelves*

MC: I believe you've gotten 1000 years worth of romantic lines stored away in that head of yours. *Laughs and kisses him back*

Solomon: Let's take this to the moon shall we?

Satan watched as he took you and kitten in his arms and flew out the window. Satan rushed in not wanting to lose sight of you, dropping the flowers and books. Balling his fists, he choked on his angry tears as he watched you both laughing and kissing against the bright light of the moon. He felt like his own happy ending was stolen from him.

When you disappeared from view, he let out a blood curdling scream, pulling at his own hair and knocking over the bookshelf against which Solomon kissed you. The wrath inside him made him thrashing around in pain, burning him inside out. The flowers he dropped, lay there next to his sobbing body, wilting in his pain.

At his best

He manages to put on his best fake smile and go about his day. Tries hard to hide his annoyance if you bring him up.

But you seem so happy and you often invite him to new cat cafes and shelters. So despite Solomon's presence, he feels calm because of you and the cats.

Is secretly happy you get to spend more time with him than Solomon. Takes advantage of that and hogs you all to himself while in the house

While he can't hold or kiss you the way the Solomon does, you're here next to him, reading his recommended books. That's enough to soothe his yearning heart.

At his worst

The war for love is on. He doesn't care if Solomon already won. He will still declare his love no matter what.

It started out as subtle, he did what he knew Solomon couldn't. Cooking MC's favourite dishes whenever it was his turn to cook.

Tries to subtly reinforce his intelligence over Solomon when you're around. What's 1000 years of knowledge worth, Satan has been there since the first millenia ever

But the day Solomon and you announced you'll be moving to Purgatory Hall, he charged at him, his demon form angry and glowing. "How dare you think you can take them away from us? You think you can win against us... against me? You may have taken my chance with them but I won't let you take them away! They belong here with me!"

You inched closer to Satan's form. You'd never seem him this angry. "Satan please calm down-" Satan wasn't listening. He let out a feral growl and attacked Solomon.

Solomon held MC by his side and made a protection shield Satan couldn't get through. You started crying, watching his wrath take over, he must be in so much pain.

Solomon felt you curl up against him in fear and guilt. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed Satan by the scruff of his neck, like you'd do with a misbehaving cat.

"You say you want to protect them and yet look what you did instead." Solomon said. Satan looked helplessly at you, crying with your face buried in your hands. Glancing at his horns in the mirror, he called out to you sadly, "MC..."

Solomon creeped closer and said in a deadly low voice. "You love fairy tales right Satan? Well in the story of Beauty and the Beast, they could only be together because the beast was actually a human." And Satan was far from being a human.

Asmo : Mammon

It happened the day Asmo looked into the mirror and felt something missing. Suddenly his own reflection wasn't enough anymore. He pondered what it was when you happened to walk into his room and hug him from behind. And then he found the missing piece. You. He simply had to make sure you would become a part of him now.

Now contrary to popular belief, he did get nervous while thinking of proposing. This man is all about lust and a little kid when it comes to love. It's a whole new emotion and he's unsure how to deal with it. With some advice from Satan's romance books he lights your room up with candles, groomed himself perfectly, waiting for you to return to your room. Only you don't come. "What's taking MC so long?!"

He headed out and found you in Mammon's room instead. Asmo saw in the reflection off the mirror, Mammon's shirt off and him lying on his front as you poured ointment over his scars.

Mammon: Oi MC please don't be so upset...

MC: You didn't deserve this. You didn't. I did.

Mammon: MC, not again.

MC: You took my punishment. You took the blame for the broken vase for my sake.

Mammon: I didn't want ya getting hurt ya stupid human!

MC: Don't be calling me stupid and then go off doing stupid stuff yourself! *cries*

Mammon: MC...no don't cry. Please I'm sorry.

MC: Don't apologize for this! Mammon you're too kind... You keep taking blame for others, and the others just UGH.

Mammon: I've gotten used to Lucifer's punishments, MC! I'm more used to it than my brothers so I can take it!

MC: .... You're such a sweet big brother. You can't stop protecting the people you love, can you?

Mammon: *turns around to lie on his back* Now you get why I need to protect ya, don't ya?

Asmo's eyes flew open as did yours. Mammon just confessed to you. Albeit indirectly, but really did. But he felt pity for his older brother. Sure he was caring and sweet sometimes, but mostly he was a thief and a scumbag who constantly gets into trouble. He didn't stand a chance against Asmo's charms.

MC: Mammon... You silly demon. I love you too. *Lays their head on his chest*

Mammon: *blushes and coughs* Of course ya love the Great Mammon, human!

MC: *smiles against his skin* Swear to me, you won't ever do that again else I will fight Lucifer myself!

Mammon: *smiles* He's attacked ya thrice and yer face still loses its colour whenver he's around and yet yer thinking of fighting him for my sake, MC?

MC: OF COURSE!

Mammon: But I don't want that. Ya did too much for all of us when ya sacrificed your life to bring Belphie back. I should know, I held ya in my arms. *Tears up* Ya know ye were smiling still?? So calm and undisturbed as if ya didn't care what happens to ya now that all the brothers are together?

MC: You caught me...

Mammon: And I never want to catch ya like that again, get that human!? I will be a good protector as I was meant to be.

MC: Mammon... you're far too kind to be a demon. *Kisses him and gets on top of him*

Mammon: *grips their arms and holds them close* Stay with me tonight.

Asmo watched as you nodded and took off your top and lay down over him again, your skins in gentle and intimate contact and you both wrap your arms around and you presses kisses onto each other. The moonlight danced on your entangled bodies.

He stared and stared, his insides burning with an alien feeling. He hadn't known envy till you came along. His signature move would be to call both of you out and suggest a threesome, but what you both seemed to have was impenetrable. And in the mirror where he saw your reflections, he couldn't see himself.

At his best

This demon had never known love. He might have if Mammon hadn't decides to confess that very night.

But who cares? What's done is done. It's time to root for the both of you. He still has his followers to turn to.

"Mammon finally confessed huh?" He asked jokingly. Until he saw you blush and nod.

"You both must have fun together huh?" He says with a dry laugh.

Your hugs and headpats still keep him going. He takes you buy new dresses knowing it's to impress Mammon instead.

Tries so hard to conceal his tears and tantrums around you. He doesn't want to lose the small part of you that he had left.

At his worst

He cannot stay home. The sight of you both together makes him irritated and stressed both very bad for his skin.

He drinks and parties uncontrollably, bringing home demons and succubi that always seem to resemble you.

One night, Lucifer had enough and caught him by the collar, forbidding him to go to his room. Asmo giggled until Mammon and you showed up.

He swiftly escaped Lucifer's grasp and lunged at you, holding your face between his trembling hands. You look at him closely, his make up was messier than usual, the cresent underneath his eyes was darker than usual.

"MC...look at me. Look at only me. Just for a little while." Asmo said and his eyes glowed. He'd turned on his charm on full force as he leaned into you for a kiss.

Mammon pushed him back and stood before you protectively. Asmo fell back, laughing like a maniac. "Stupid Mammon they are with you out of pity! How long do you think you can make them stay with that stupid brain and sub par beauty?"

You teared up and screamed, "Asmo stop saying things like that! You dont even know anything about him!" Mammon hugged you tight, trying to calm you down.

And then in a lowly growl he said, "Asmo don't let me see ya laying a finger on MC again. Ya would see how people really see ya if you learnt to look away from your own reflection!"

But Asmo did. He did look away from his reflection. He looked at you. Only you didn't look back at him.

Keep reading Pt. 2

[mrs-gucci]

Vending Machine Room-Kinda Lovin’ {Henry McHenry x Reader}

author���s notes: hellooo! it took me a little while, but I’ve finally come around to finding Henry McHenry attractive (and it’s here in full force!). thanks again to my good friend @safarigirlsp​ for feeding this newfound thirst. the concept of this fic is kind of inspired by that one scene in the Ted Bundy movie “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” where they fuck in the vending machine room.

**now, I feel the need to say something before anyone reads this fic: yes, I’m aware that he most likely murders his wife (or a woman, we’re not 100% sure) in the plot of the movie. just because I wrote a fic about fucking him in jail or being in love with a murderer DOES NOT mean that I condone femicide (or fucking a murderer in general, for that matter). it’s fanFICTION and I’m free to write/create the stories I want. it’s also implied in this fic that he’s innocent, which is not meant to imply that he is or “let him off”, it’s just how it is in this story.

warnings: smut. some fluff. semi-public/public sex. implied bribery of prison guards. 

(possible) tw’s: prison. descriptions of prison.

SMUT under the CUT!

You look up when the visiting room doors open and your lover, Henry McHenry, is brought out in a belly chain and ankle cuffs. You smile as he sits down in front of you, trying to ignore the pang of sadness seeing him in chains.

“Hello, my love.” He says with a kind smile. “It’s good to see your beautiful face this morning.”

Your cheeks warm. “How are you doing in here?”

Henry sighs. “Better now that I’m allowed visitors. I’ll survive, as long as I know you’re by my side.”

“Oh Henry, I wish I could kiss you. I wish I could reach out and touch your handsome face.”

You say, sighing softly.

“I know, my love, I know. Soon, I promise.” He assures you. “I’m working on a little surprise for you, though. For next time you come to visit me.”

Your lips tug into a soft, genuine smile. Even here, when he has nothing, he still wants to treat you.

“You’re too kind, Henry.”

“Anything for you.” He says.

The bell suddenly rings, startling you. The guards come over and seize him, forcing him back through the doors. You can barely watch as they manhandle him like this; it always hurts you greatly to see him treated in such a way. 

“Until next time, my love.” He calls after you.

You smile.

“Until next time.”

-

It had been two weeks since you last went to visit Henry when a letter came in the mail. His cursive writing took you by great surprise, as he seems like one of the last people that’d write with such effortless technique.

My Love,

Come to the prison Thursday at 7pm. Your surprise will be waiting when you arrive.

Yours with love,

Henry

Your heart practically leaps out of your chest at this news. You’ve been wondering what Henry has in store for you ever since he brought it up, and finally, it was time to see what he’d been planning. 

The greatly awaited moment arrives the next evening. You rush to drop your stuff off from work and change into more flattering clothes before heading to the Los Angeles County Detention Center. 

A guard quickly pulls you aside when you enter, taking you to a room just off the vacant visitation center.

There, standing without any chains, is Henry. You rush to him, jumping up into his arms with a soft squeal of excitement. He catches you, immediately crashing his lips onto yours, pressing you up against the nearest wall.

“You’ve got ten minutes, McHenry.”

The guard says.

“Mmm, Henry.” You moan into his mouth.

His lips trail down to kiss at your neck, and your hands tangle in his hair, head tilting back to allow him better access.

“My love, you’re so fucking beautiful, so pretty.”

You’re overwhelmed, still in disbelief that this is really happening, that his hands are wrapped around your waist, that his lips are on your neck.

“I want to fuck you, to pleasure you. Will you let me?”

He whispers into your ear, pressing his crotch against you.

You look around, biting your lip and nodding.  “Please.”

Henry grins, carrying you to the back corner, pressing you up against the side of one of the vending machines. He sets you down and you quickly pull your pants down as he tugs his blue prison-issue jumpsuit down, exposing his undershirt and boxers. 

Your hand cups the bulge forming beneath the loose fabric and he groans, hips pushing forward into your hand.

“We only have ten minutes, my love. There will be time for this when I get out. For now, we have to be quick.”

He pulls the boxers down just enough to expose his length, which is already hard and standing proudly. You whine as he picks you up again and pushes you against the machine, pulling your panties to the side before lining up with your entrance.

His hips push forward, sheathing himself deeply inside you, a choked cry leaving his plush lips. 

“Oh, Y/N...christ.”

You gasp, gripping onto his biceps as his hands keep your thighs apart and his hips begin thrusting. Your head falls back against the vending machine as your back is moved up and down against the textured plastic surface with each of his forceful thrusts.

“My love, oh, my love.” He moans. “You feel amazing, so perfect for me.”

“H-Henry, god, I’ve missed having you like this.” You whisper.

A grunt escapes his lips. “Me too, my love, me t-too…”

His hands grip the creamy flesh of your thighs, spreading them even further apart as he begins to throb inside of you. He holds you just below the knees, lips working against yours with unbridled passion, hips pumping faster and faster. 

“It’s been s-so long, Y/N, I won’t last m-much longer. I’m sorry, y-you deserve better than this.”

“N-No.” You tug his hair gently, jaw slack as you pant heavily against his lips. “H-Henry...I have you, and that’s all t-that matters to me. I just w-want you.”

Henry smiles, kissing you again.

“Touch yourself, my love. I want y-you to cum around me first, before I fill your pretty little pussy.”

Your hand reaches down to tease the small bundle of nerves nestled in your folds, and at first contact, you gasp. Henry kisses at your slacked jaw while your head is tilted back, trying his very best to hold back, to wait for your orgasm before his.

But, as you grow closer, your walls clench and flutter around his length, making it more difficult for him to control himself. Control and impulse was already a difficult thing for Henry, but he was determined to hold out for you.

His efforts were rewarded when, a minute later, you were spasming all around him with a long, drawn out moan of his name...along with a few swears.

“Henry…fuck...yes...shit…!”

With your orgasm came his mere seconds later, burying himself fully into you before his ropes paint your insides. He lets out a series of grunts and growls as his hips false-thrust, stroking himself through his climax. 

After he’s finished, Henry lets a shaky, relieved exhale out against the skin of your neck. He pulls out slowly before gently setting you back down on the ground, supporting you when your knees tremble.

He wraps his arms around you, shoulders shaking with soft sobs as he holds you. “T...T-Thank you, my love. You a-are...amazing, incredible, absolutely p-perfect.”

“Oh Henry.” You feel tears begin to swell in your own eyes as your hands snake up to the back of his head, pulling him down closer.  “I love you.”

“I love you too, Y/N.”

His tremors come to a stop relatively quickly, like he remembers the time restriction, and he wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand as he pulls his boxers back up, then his jumpsuit. You follow his lead, pulling your pants back up over your hips.

The two of you spend the remaining few minutes kissing, tightly wound in each other’s embrace, hands roaming each other’s bodies. It’s been so long since Henry’s been able to touch you, and damnit, it feels good.

“Time’s up, McHenry.”

Suddenly, he’s ripped away from you, and you reach out for him one last time. His fingertips graze yours for a moment as he reaches out for you. 

“I promise, I’ll be out soon.” He says, giving you a small smile.

“Until next time, my love.”

You smile, bottom lip quivering as you fight the tears so desperately wanting to come out.

“Until next time.”

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep14

Do you ever wanna just watch two little girls who are actually 100+ year old witches beat the absolute SHIT out of each other for 20 minutes straight? :)

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Plus Umineko spoilers.

Part of this might just be because I’ve been high on painkillers for a few weeks now [long story short, I’ve got a lot of dental work that needs done], but this is perhaps the most entertaining episode of anime I’ve seen all year, lol. Not even in a jokey ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ way.

I feel like this is going to be the most polarizing episode of this whole show, because for better or worse it really crosses the line between Higurashi and Umineko, so whether or not you’re a fan of that whole trajectory the story’s been taking will really change how you feel about this.

Though to be honest I think on one level people are ignoring how Higurashi has always had a lot of these things in it. For one thing, the concept of the fragment space and ‘game boards’ has been a thing since Minagoroshi, and we’ve always had stuff like Hanyuu being a literal god who can manifest in the real world, and the existence of the mythical sword was hinted at in Matsuribayashi and then expanded upon in Kotohogushi. This episode also directly referenced the over the top rooftop fight scene from Tsumihoroboshi, which was just the start of Higurashi having lots of fun and silly fight scenes, like the fights between the club members and the military in Matsuribayashi, or the whole fighting game spin-off arc thing. Even in the VN there was an intentional shift from horror and mystery to high-octane fight scenes fueled by the power of friendship and miracles.

Obviously on the other hand there’s definite Umineko stuff going on here, but in general this feels like a pretty natural progression for this series to take.

Anyway, this was absolutely worth the wait, and it goes a long way toward making up for how bad the pacing in Sotsu has been thus far, lol. I still think they could have cut this down by at least two or three episodes, but still. As a climax to this whole conflict between Rika and Satoko, it was really cool.

Sort of like how Nekodamashi had it’s rollercoaster death montage, I really loved how this whole episode transitioned between fragments in increasingly seamless and surreal ways. The use of transition cuts between scenes was honestly really cool, and made it way more dynamic and engaging than it otherwise would have been to basically have an entire episode spent on one fight scene.

I think a lot of people are hung up on the exact logistics of how the fragment-hopping worked in this episode, but I don’t really think you should read into it too much. It basically operated on dream logic and heightened emotions. In the first few fragments Satoko might have waited a bit before attacking Rika, but it very quickly became one continuous sequence of events for all intents and purposes, with how their back and forth dialogue and their exact movements transitioned from one fragment to the next.

Basically it ended up becoming a fight between voyager witches who have become totally divorced from reality and just hop from one fragment to the next whenever they please.

I was wondering how they’d follow up on the gun scene, since it created this stalemate where they both know what’s going on and thus have no reason to surrender, but I really like how they decided to take this. I know a lot of people have been wanting more of a drawn out battle of wits between them, but the whole concept of them just getting into an endless fight with each other now that everything’s out in the open is extremely entertaining to watch.

It does make me even more convinced that it was a bad idea to have Nekodamashi happen in Gou, though. The immediate resolution to the cliffhanger was more anti-climactic than most people would have wanted after so much time spent leading back up to it, and the whole tone and pacing of Nekodamashi would have flowed very seamlessly into this. It also would have fixed the issue of the last two episodes being almost entirely recaps if this was instead the first time that we saw the Nekodamashi loops.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of debate about whether or not we might get a third season or some other kind of continuation to this, and I think this episode makes me way more convinced that it’s actually just going to end here, whether people like it or not. I think I’ve already said that there’s literally nothing the story needs to do anymore except have Rika and Satoko hash things out with each other, and that’s exactly what they’re focusing on now. Maybe they could spend time recapping Satokowashi, but that’d be extremely pointless. And at this point it’s pretty clear that one way or another the other club members just aren’t going to be very important to this story. There’s a bit of a loose end with their teenage selves showing up in the OP with new outfits, but that might be as simple as an epilogue scene set back in the Matsuribayashi fragment or something, and them looking ominous might be a red herring.

Also, in a more meta sense, there’s certain stuff the staff are doing and saying that make this seem like the finale of the whole series, like how in a couple months they’re going to release a congratulatory book compiling all the official artwork and interviews for Gou/Sotsu, or how they recently released a compilation CD of all of Ayane’s Higurashi-related songs, or how [I think] the artist for the Gou manga said on Twitter that the new chapter that just came out will be the last one to come out while the anime’s airing. We’re also getting two new Higurashi manga arcs starting soon, along with the reveal that the Gou manga will diverge from the anime and go into a new answer arc called Higurashi Jun.

So in general it just comes across like everything’s being wrapped up with Sotsu. I can see why people would be disappointed if we don’t get more, but with how the story’s been going, there’s just not really much material left to work with. Also, we know from TV listings that there at least won’t be a direct continuation in the next season, so if we get anything more it wouldn’t happen until January at earliest, and at this point I’d rather things just wrap up here instead of having to wait even longer to get the actual ending, lol.

I guess we won’t know how things will end until next week, but we really seem to be barrelling headfirst into this being Bern and Lambda’s origin story. Which has been pretty obvious for ages now, but this episode in particular really cements it. This whole fight is really similar to the one they have in Episode 8, and you can see throughout the episode how they’re embracing their looper/witch personas and becoming divorced from reality. You can even see the foundation for how Bern and Lambda have a twisted love for each other based on the fact that they’re basically the only people who can actually understand each other, and they’re so detached from reality that the violence between them is more like a sign of affection.

I feel like this is also going to end up tying into the miracle that Hanyuu is waiting for. At the moment we’re in a situation where it seems like they’re stuck in an infinite stalemate because they’re in a fight where neither of them wants to lose, but neither of them wants to win if it means permanently killing the other. So it seems like there might not really be any way out of this, but if they’re able to truly forgive each other and embrace their identities as witches, then they can basically step away from this entire conflict and just enjoy being with each other. It seems impossible for this to end with either of them ‘winning’ and things going back to how they used to be, so it could certainly be called a miracle if they both decide that they’re OK with that, and they take a third option where they can both be happy in a way that neither of them would have predicted at first.

This could also lead to a situation where Rika is able to ascend to a higher level by letting go of her human side once and for all, which could give her the ability to appear in the part of the fragment space where Eua and Hanyuu are, so she can save Hanyuu from getting killed by Eua’s spear.

And on that note, the whole bit with Hanyuu at the end actually reminds me a lot of the idea of logic errors in Umineko. I think people kinda over-use that term when it comes to stuff in this series where it doesn’t really fit, but that scene was actually extremely similar to the whole set-up where Battler got stuck in a locked room that he couldn’t come up with an answer to get out of, and he had to wait for the ‘miracle’ of Beatrice awakening so that Kanon could arrive and save him. Hanyuu is in a position where she’s already committed to flying straight at Eua, but the spear is right in front of her face and about to kill her once time starts again, and she has to wait for a ‘miracle’ to happen to change her fate. Which is also a lot like how in Matsuribayashi she almost got shot by Takano, but a miracle happened and Rika was able to divert the bullet. So it’d make a lot of sense in general if in the next episode we see Rika show up there and save Hanyuu.

And considering how Featherine acts in Umineko, I could honestly see Eua sticking to her word and rewarding Hanyuu if a miracle like that actually happens and saves her. So even if it’s anti-climactic, this might end with Eua accepting her loss and backing off, and maybe not even doing anything to punish Satoko for losing in her fight against Rika. Which is part of why I think the whole lingering threat of the ‘world without Rika’ might not even lead to anything and might just be a vague threat towards Satoko that never materializes.

Other than that, I think the last episode will probably also involve us going back to Matsuribayashi and seeing what sort of ending Rika and Satoko’s ‘human selves’ get once their ‘witch selves’ leave them behind once and for all. Which will probably just be along the lines of Rika going to the Saiguden to check up on Satoko, and them heading over to the cafe where the other club members [and probably Satoshi as well] are waiting for them, and it’ll just end on the note of them presumably working things out between each other peacefully.

Along those same lines, I think that the whole story of Gou/Sotsu will also get somewhat recontextualized as being a sort of deranged power fantasy that Satoko came up with in her head while visiting the Saiguden. I don’t think that’d be intended to devalue anything that happened here, but it’d be like how Umineko presents enough narrative framework for a non-magical interpretation of everything, while at the same time still acknowledging the value of the magical interpretation.

While I remember, I’m curious to see how the manga version turns out, since it’s clearly diverging a fair bit from the anime. It might just be an alternate take on the story concept, but at this point I think it might be presented as an ‘earlier loop’ of Gou/Sotsu, with how it’s been implied that Eua and Satoko have met before without Satoko remembering it. So maybe this whole series of events has repeated over and over again, presumably with Satoko ‘losing’ each time so things get reset, and Gou/Sotsu is the final iteration of that loop where they’re finally able to achieve a miracle.

I feel like the manga version is probably gonna end up being closer to what people wanted out of Sotsu, since it seems to be going in the direction of Rika knowing everything without Satoko knowing that, so they can have more of a drawn out conflict between each other as Rika tries to figure out how to win. Which is one way to take the story, but I still like how the anime ended up doing it, even if it could have been paced a lot better. I also think that the manga isn’t exactly a straight improvement over the anime anyway. There’s stuff it does well, but there’s stuff it doesn’t do well, like how the whole Nekodamashi arc feels extremely weird in the context of Rika not remembering her deaths [or at least not being given a clear reason for why she can suddenly remember them], her not deciding to go for five more loops before killing herself, and Satoko apparently not having any idea about Rika remembering her deaths, which seems to defeat the point of Nekodamashi’s rapid-fire death loops.

Either way I’m curious to see how Jun goes. I assume that we’ll still get some version of Satokowashi out of it, but I think that unlike with Sotsu they’ll spend much less time on answering the damashi arcs, and I also think at this point that the answers to them won’t be exactly the same as they were in the anime either.

Also, we recently found out that two entirely new Higurashi manga arcs will start in November, called Oniokoshi and Hoshiwatashi, which seem to be collectively referred to as Higurashi Rei, using the kanji from ‘the Reiwa era’, since it seems like the idea of these new arcs is that they take place in the Reiwa era. Oniokoshi seems to be about Keiichi’s son and a new mysterious character, while Hoshiwatashi seems to be about two entirely new characters, so I’m really curious to see how their stories pan out. I’m particularly excited about Oniokoshi since it’s being drawn by Natsumi Kei, who’s basically the primary artist for the Umineko manga, so that kinda makes me biased towards it, lol. And even though there’s basically nothing to go off of except for one preview image, it looks like it might go in a bit of a gay direction, which would be really neat. But we’ll see how it goes.

So yeah, I guess at this point with where things are going I’m gonna be really disappointed if we don’t get something like an Umineko remake after this, lol. It wouldn’t be very satisfying if it just ends on the note of ‘go and read the Umineko VN’ or something.

[anythingbutmar]

Mistake

Diego Hargreeves x reader

Summary: After you turned 18, Diego and you pretty much distanced from the other members of the academy, so when you all meet for Reginald’s funeral you have some explaining to do.

A/N: I kinda love this concept but I changed a few details of this request so the reader is not raised as a sibling and her relationship with the others is in no way familial. I missed writing, specially for Diego, so thanks anon! This is quite long too, so sorry about that. I had a lot of fun too, so let me know if you’d like me to make this into a series, cause I might do it.

Warnings: cursing, mentions of homelessness, but overall just fluff and a bit of angst.

You liked to say that the life you made by yourself happened because of a simple mistake, because you had come across the Umbrella Academy on a very particular way.

You could say you had a decent upbringing, your mother wasn’t abusive but she was pretty much the definition of overprotective, and as a child you were never told that it was because a man had literally tried to buy you on the day you were born, in fact, you didn’t know anything about him or the children he managed to adopt because your mother and grandparents wouldn’t let you get anywhere near any piece of information of whatever existed outside your little hometown.

They told you they were doing it because your father had left you when you were just a baby and they wanted to protect you from the dangers of foreign men, of course you thought that you were born from a normal pregnancy, and you believed everything, that and the fact that you could control any element to your will, which they said was wrong and kept hidden. You were homeschooled, and you could only socialize with the kids from your neighborhood which was good, but it wasn’t enough, and we all now overprotectiveness can really mess with someone’s mind.

And so, even though you went along with it for many years, when one of your only friends suggested you both snuck out for a party on the big city for your sixteenth birthday you couldn’t say no, and that was the mistake, if it is possible to call it like that.

On the best Rapunzel style you went out your bedroom window, got on a bus and drank so much alcohol you completely passed out on a strangers lap and woke up on an unknown bed with a beautiful woman smiling down at you. Well, maybe that wasn’t Rapunzel’s style, but it sure felt like it at first.

The next series of events happened so fast it almost felt like a dream. You met a handful of strange children, one of which you later remembered had brought you there while being just as drunk as you were, his name was Klaus, and he later became the best friend you ever had; then you had the most overwhelming conversation of your life, in which an incredibly mean old man explained how you were actually born and made you understand just how different and important you were, but not in the wholesome way.

About an hour later your mother stormed through the academy looking for you, but one of the girls whispered something in her ear on her dad’s command which changed your mom’s entire attitude, with her allowing you to stay as if it was a boarding school, or so she told you, but she only visited once every few months and she didn’t seem as caring as before. According to Allison, that was in no way her fault, and you believed her, because at the end of the day you trusted your newfound friends much more than the woman that lied to you your entire life.

And so, you learnt to control your ability like never before, while also enduring Reginald’s cruel treatment, but it didn’t matter at all, because in the midst of everything you found Diego, and with him came all the things you never experienced before. He brought you happiness, love, trust and overall, lust for life.

Two years later you were living your best teenage secret romance. You snuck out at nights to visit all the parts from the city that he wanted you to meet, and you shared tiny kisses whenever Reginald and the kids weren’t watching. But Diego left, just like he had planned since he was a kid, and you weren’t brave enough to follow him. It wasn’t until his other siblings started leaving too that you realized that no matter how hard it was to be outside on your own, holding on to life with him was better than anything else. It was actually thanks to Allison, the smart girl had noticed you two holding hands under the table and knew just how heartbroken you were without him. “Chase him, Y/N, you won’t have this opportunity ever again.” She said right before she left, and she was absolutely right.

It took you less than a week to find him on a motel, bruised as ever and with barely enough money to pay for another night, and in between hugs, kisses and forbidden touches you promised him that you’d both get out of there. He told you he had been on that place for three weeks and a half, but the first few days after leaving the academy he had to sleep on a park bench until he gathered enough money by playing with his knifes to amuse people on the street. It had been hard, but now that you were together everything was so much better.

After many years living in the back room of a rusty gym, both of you taking turns in wiping it’s floors while also trying to study and save people at nights, because the one thing you learned from Reginald was that you loved helping people, and Diego’s vigilantism was just as appealing to you as it was to him. Diego was accepted into the police force and you finished your studies on a cheap school, which allowed you both to get a job you liked, and when you were finally able to buy a house for yourselves Diego proposed.

“Y/N, before you arrived my life was a nightmare, and all I ever wanted was to stay as far away from that place as it was possible, and everything that reminded me of it I planned on cutting from my life, but you arrived with your sweet smile, your shy eyes and those damn legs, and you completely switched my view of the world because I knew right there that I would love you forever, and I do. I love to see you in your weird ass robe, making potions-”

“I’m a chemist babe, not a witch.” You corrected him laughing.

“Let me finish Y/N!” He laughed with you. “I love how you treated me and my siblings, and I love how you helped mom, and god! I love how you used to beat bad guys with fucking wind on our nights out! I love everything about you sweetheart, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” By then you were both crying, and of course you said yes, how could you not?

Cut to ten years later and the day you had silently both dreaded and hoped for came. Reginald Hargreeves was dead, and you couldn’t even tell if you were sad about it, after all, the man had saved you from Mother Gothel, as Diego and you started calling her after watching Tangled with your daughters, but he saved you at what cost? You now had quite a few burn scars in your body from his dangerous training, you loved each one of them because they reminded you just how powerful you were, but still, no teenager should have to go through that.

And you couldn’t even get started on Diego. You wondered how and when he would take the news. He was out on his monthly vigilante night, which was kind of a gift you gave to each other, you were allowed to leave for the night once every month on different days because now that you had kids you could no longer risk your life everyday like you used to before. The kids, oh boy, what were you gonna do with your beloved girls? You weren’t sure if taking them to the funeral with you was the right decision, you wanted to shelter them from death and all the evil things in the world, but then again, you weren’t your mother, and you had no one to leave them with.

Just as you were thinking about maybe even staying, your husband entered your home, and he looked destroyed. It was one in the morning and you had been waiting for him while thinking of Reginald, and clearly he had been thinking about the same thing. You quickly stood up and wrapped your arms around him, hugging him tightly.

“He’s d-dead.” He stuttered on your shoulder. He didn’t even sound sad, he just seemed shocked.

“Shh, I know baby, I know.” You stood there for a while, just comforting each other in the middle of your kitchen before going to bed, you needed to rest for the next day because you knew it would be anything but ordinary.

And in the blink of an eye you were ringing the bell of the academy, each of your girls holding their father’s hand, the three of them standing behind you in your small, useless effort to protect them.

Grace opened up, and you couldn’t be happier to see her. You gave her a small hug and then gave Diego some space so he could properly say hi to his beloved mother. He introduced Luna and Amber and she was delighted to see Diego in a stable, loving family, she just seemed a bit off, but you’d talk to Diego about that later.

And then... Lord help you, you entered the livingroom and ran headfirst into Klaus who instantly hugged you, twirling you around and making you laugh as you both landed on the floor.

“Y/N, love! How have you been?” He sat up, looking at the doorframe, as he seemed to notice the two pair of eyes that stared in curiosity. “Oh I see you’ve gotten busy! Hello my little munchkins, I’m your uncle Klaus!”

“Wait Y/N/N, you’re with Diego now?” Luther asked from the other side of the room. Despite his rivalry with your now husband, you were quite close to him during your small time on the academy.

“Honestly Luther, I love you, but you can be quite oblivious sometimes.” You stood up with his help and hugged him tightly, getting a comforting feeling from his embrace.

“I’m here too, you know, your brother, Diego?” He finally entered, still holding your daughters’s hands and analizing the scene.

“It’s not our fault that you can’t say hi to anybody.” Allison came from behind him, scaring him, which made the girls laughing.

“Hi Allison.” He mumbled, rolling his eyes at his sister.

“I always knew you liked keeping your secrets but this two are way too big to hide” Se kneeled down to pinch Luna’s cheek, who smiled bashfully at her aunt.

Amber, your youngest, ran towards you and pulled your hand. You kneeled to her height as she whispered in your ear. “Mommy, I want to meet uncle Spaceboy.” You smiled softly at her sweetness, carrying her towards him. She instantly jumped in his arms, which took both Luther and you by surprise, she wasn’t the most sociable girl after all, but you kinda understood, his big frame and natural akwardness made him look quite huggable.

“Damn bro, you’ve gotten big.” Diego joined you, leaving Allison to play with Luna, who was now excited to know that she had a cousin her age, and you left before the two started bickering, but much to your surprise, the presence of your daughter seemed to retain them from fighting like they used to. Maybe bringing them was a good idea after all.

“Well, this is is quite the frame” Pogo entered the room with Vanya right behind him. You all waved at them, tired already of all the hugs already.

“Hi everyone.” Vanya entered uncomfortably, allowing Allison to hug her and having a small talk.

You turned to Diego and looked at him, a warning in your eyes. You knew your husband all to well, and you could see how much the book had hurted him, but you weren’t going to let him start a fight in the middle of a family meeting.

But of course, he wouldn’t listen to you.

“Why did you do it?” He started walking towards her as you mentally facepalmed. This wasn’t going to end well.

“Really, Diego? This isn’t the right time.” Allison scolded him, standing between him and her only sister.

“Then when is it, Allison? The next time we see each other? Should we wait another twelve years?” Allison just scoffed and stormed out of the room, Luther following after her, Vanya left silently, looking hurt, and Klaus snuck out in the heat of the moment, probably looking for money.

You sat on the biggest couch in the middle of your daughters, surrounding them with your arms. “That went well.” You stared at Diego, who pocked his tongue at you.

And it was about to get worse.

After having a tiny dance party, thanks to Luther’s incredibly loud turntable, you heard a thunderlike sound and watched as a bright blue light appeared outside. You looked at Diego, knowing what to do from all the years of practice that you had together. Each of you grabbed one of the kids, running outside to meet the others, who surrounded you in a protective manner, protecting their newly met nieces.

There was a portal in front of you, which Klaus tried to close with a fire extinguisher, but you could tell it wouldn’t work, because that wasn’t made of fire, or any other element that you were familiar with, for that matter, and you were an element bending chemist, for christ’s sake.

“What the hell is that babe?” Diego yelled, trying to understand.

“I have no idea, but there’s something coming out of it!” You yelled back, and everyone turned to look at what appeared to be an old man coming out of the portal. And in a flash of blue, a small boy landed at your feet, he looked incredibly similar to the portrait of the lost sibling that hung on top of the fireplace.

“Does anyone else see little number five?” They all nodded at Klaus, who clearly wasn’t sober enough for this, or maybe the poor thing thought that was the ghost of him, and you knew he already had enough with one dead brother following him around.

“What on earth is wrong with this family?” You said, looking at the odd teenager.

                                                             --

Minutes passed as you all stared at Five, who was preparing a goddamned sandwich, in the middle of one of the most confusing moments of your life.

“You’re new.” He simply stated, looking at you.

“Umm yeah, we haven’t had the chance to meet before, I’m Y/N.” You extended your hand, which he didn’t take, the tiny bastard.

“Oh we’ve met. You were the one with the girls, holding his hand.” He pointed at Diego, sandwich in hand.

“I don’t understand, you weren-”

“Look kid, I’m sorry, but I can’t trust you, you need to leave.” Diego was ready to jump at him, but Luther stopped him and you grabbed his arm softly.

“It’s ok honey, I get it.” You whispered and left to look for Grace who was taking care of the girls.

You let out a sigh as you walked by your old room. You had been wanting to scream ever since you got there, but this was your first alone moment in the whole day, and a sigh was just as effective as a scream, it helped.

                                                            --

Then came the funeral, and it was hard. Luther scattered the ashes and you manipulated the wind so they wouldn’t look like a pile of grey shit, which actually, was an accurate depiction of Reginald, but you did it for him and Pogo, it was the right thing to do.

And after a few out of place comments, Diego and Luther started fighting right in front of your daughters, so much for the agreement. Luna and Amber started crying, hiding behind Five, who, much to your surprise, covered them with his body as he slowly took them inside. It was infuriating to see the men fighting in front of you, but you couldn’t help but smile looking at Five.

It was that moment that truly made you feel home, like you really were in family, and it warmed your heart.

-End of maybe part one?-

[brightfametexan]

The Little Boy Who Was Only Slightly Attached To His Body

(and how that came to be for a spark)

by brightfametexan

The idea of "he" was vaguely familiar to The Spark. Spark had played this game before, back when the world had changed. This body was a "he" body.

The Mother had been chosen in a carefully carefree manner. It had been a chance encounter. One day, drifting along the River, Spark saw The River Walker, gathering plants in a basket, singing a song and laughing.

Spark fell in love with her instantly. And being heavy with child she was all the more enchanting. So Spark settled in her belly where it was warm and snug; could hear her sing, felt her life pulsing. So close, so fine.

Sometimes Spark would pop out to admire her. But in those moments, others wanted in.

"Begone! She's mine!" Spark would glow with a great vibration. And laugh as they scurried away.

These others lived in the forest along the river. But these who craved the body inside his River Walker, they were a different sort. Slow, solid, desperate. Easy enough to scatter but persistent enough to demand alertness.

No one would take hold in that body. That body that grew in the River Walker.

Was it really his, this form of a human? So tiny, growing in her womb. She talked to the tiny body within her, spoke to it, of a future to come, sang it her songs. He liked to imagine she was talking to him, soothing him. When she spoke it as though he was floating along the river he loved so much. River Walker was his. His River Walker. And the body his link to her.

One day the body came forth. He felt her muscles contract, felt the pressure. This was no place to be! So he watched from afar as she fled to the hut, crying out,, writhing in pain and pressure. He tried to comfort her. filling her head, sharing calm. But she frightened, crying out, a demon was possessing her!

"I'm no demon! Demons live in dark places or fall from the sky to run in wolves or bears. I’m of the forest and the the river and the ancient stones." But his thoughts fell through her, not sticking, as she clung to her body, wrestling with the pain of birth. Clouds of her past settled over her, times of older pains. So The Spark groused and sulked on the ceiling until it was over.

When birth was done, she held the tiny, red wrinkled thing in her arms, cooed and doted, this was his portal to The River Walker, the flower picker. So he stayed, but only slightly attached to that body. Hunger gnawed, tugged the tiny form. Her breasts were soft and full, soothing the hunger, a portal to her vibrations. And she sang.

An old one came to live with them. The mother of the River Walker. She often spoke of demons and spirits, burned grasses and leaves, made signs to ward them off. Warning River Walker, fixing his form with her gimlet stare. This amused him. Did she not know that she too was a “demon”? As was she, a spirit dwelling all too tightly in the skull of that aged body. He could see, could they not? Blacknesses swirled about that old body, The Spark wondered why, what use they were? Wrapping a body thusly, to trudge through the world?

He heard the words of speech they used. They were too cumbersome. Symbols for a thought. Better just to place the thought in the other's head. It was so natural with River Walker who responded as though the intention was her own. Harder with the old one, chanting her spells.

He entertained himself by baiting The Old One. Making small objects quiver and move, making sounds in the walls. Old One would work herself into a frenzy of chanting. She scattered powders, burned herbs, chanted odd words that held fearful thoughts. How funny that was. And the child on the floor laughed.

Life was good with his River Walker. He slept by her each night, snug in his little body, leaping back and forth, from her head to his small body. He filled her space with his vibrations.

Vibrations he kept of trees and rocks; staid, majestic and sturdy. The trees resonated of time, steadfastness, the hundreds of passings of the Sun and moon. Rocks. Now were as old as the planet, abiding now as they always had since Before. Before this Earth. When he had floated the vast fields of stars looking for other magic than his own.

But River Walker gushed her own joy. Images filled her mind as she slept. The Spark was, delighted. He shared his with her, and she with him. But each dawn she only spoke of her dreams. Didn’t she see that this was all a dream?

There were images of The Old One when she was much younger, carrying The River Walker when she was as tiny as this body of his. Images of the man who'd loved her, who'd held her and entered her, planting the seed that was now his form. The man had gone off down the river and not yet returned. River Walker saddened at this thought. The Spark felt His jealousy of that Man and He felt her pangs.

And then, one day The Old One stopped. Her body stopped, coughed, dropped to the floor. Old One rose up, looking at her old form lying on the cottage floor. Old One was confused and addled, casting about for any anchor.

"Rejoice!” He beamed, “You are free! Let us go to the river, water, splash in the Sun, revel, in the trees, flit with the birds".

But The Old One was spewing terror, rushing about, would have no part of His help. Old One fled to The River Walker who was outside washing clothes. Old One flew into her, full of confusion and fear. Started, The River Walker sprinted to the cottage, saw the body that had been Old One's, and the grief filled her in an instant,rushed in like a rainstorm. The Old One, her panic was not abated, only fueled the fire of grief. So He left His body where it sat, entered The River Walker, cast out The Old One. Oh the struggle! Old One did not want to let go.

He dragged Old One out, pulled her to the trees. She bolted into the forest like a mouse. How sad. How lonely. If only she'd listened and had stayed to play. Someday he might look for her.

River Walker cried for days. Other women came to help. They built a pyre upon which to burn Old One's old body. He approved. Old One was gone now and would never be the same Old One again. Would never have to feel the tug of her old corpse from beneath some pile of earth, rotting slowly away, all the while filled with longing for what had been but now was over.

Winter arrived and He rejoiced. A clear, sharp,crystalline world. Quietness and snow. But this body, this link to his River Walker, it winced at the cold. It did not rejoice. So he walked it about in furs. Old One's hands had been upon these furs, he felt that, and River Walker assured that she'd worn them when she was His size. But mainly he felt the remnants of the creatures from whence the furs came. Felt their rushing through the forest, plunging eagerness. He'd played as a marten, matched wavelengths with the glow of the creature's single-minded fury as it hunted squirrels through the trees. Now there was a soft, dull glow of that spark. Fascinating and finally boring. He was here for his River Walker.

River Walker took him with her to gather wood. They walked the banks of the river, winter embracing them, warm in the furs. As he moved along, tossing his sparks, feeling her glow, He also sensed her preoccupations with food, shelter, and warmth.These were still abstract concepts that he pondered with no little frustration. And as he sat, deep in thought, an otter dashed from beneath a log, to dive headlong into the water. With no more thought than a meteor gives to hurtling into the atmosphere, He drove after it, in full joyous pursuit. The little body hit the frigid water, the shock knocked Him to the treetops.

The scene unfolded. River Walker screaming, dragging from water the tiny body He'd so recently worn. Puzzled and separate He floated, watching, only slightly attached to His body. She took the tiny form in her arms, sat by the fireplace, cradling it, singing songs. Her intensity moved him. He had never felt anything quite like what he felt from her. This, this was a sensation as hard to forget as it was potent.

He slipped back into the form. Now she cradled him in her arms and he drifted drowsily off to sleep.....

[silver-wield]

I’m sorry in advance. This is a long rant. I think the main reason I can't accept this "SOLDIER!Cloud loves A” thing is because I've always felt that the whole love triangle nonsense was introduced solely to make the players invested in A. Let's face it, the biggest reason people were devastated when she died is because they were invested in her potential romance with Cloud. It was the easiest and cheapest way to make sure the devs achieved their goal. (1/5)

But in their desperation to reach that goal at any cost, the devs ended up damaging other things along the way. Having Tifa in the background until A was out of the picture was such a dumb move. It’s obvious they didn���t want any other character to outshine her. Creating this illusion of Cloud loving A served no purpose in the story. And Aerith herself didn’t bond with anyone save for Cloud. These among many other things. To me, all that wavering thing was so unnecessary to the narrative. (2/5)

Things felt rushed, and A was put on a pedestal and shoved in the players’ faces along with the potential romance with her. It was clear to me that the devs just wanted people to like her so that they’d be devastated when she died. But I guess you can’t ask for too much of games/stories back in 1997. I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept people saying that SOLDIER!Cloud loved A. They hadn’t known each other that long, and 95% of the time, they had other things on their plate than romance. (3/5)

It’s not like they were dating or getting to know each other during the brief time they spent together. Also, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but saying the LTD is now ending because A is stepping out and pushing Cloud onto Tifa sounds so insulting. Like Tifa can’t win unless her competition steps out and hands her the man on a silver platter. This time around, I feel that the devs are trying to do things properly. A is finally taking the time to bond with other characters, especially Tifa. (4/5)

Her world doesn’t revolve around Cloud only anymore. Tifa is not in the background anymore, so now people can get to know her and get attached to her even early on. The romance with Tifa isn’t something that feels like it’s come out of the left field about 2/3 of the way in. There might’ve been hints but they were too subtle. Among many other improvements. Whatever the devs do, I just hope they give us the best version possible of the story this time around. Thanks for listening to my rant.(5/5)

Death to the LTD 1

Death to the LTD 2 (dialogue evolution)

Death to the LTD 3 (soldier Cloud’s acceptance)

Cloud’s hyper vigilance

That would be because the concept absolutely was introduced to make the players more invested in Aerith, so her death had a harder hit when it happened. It was a new thing back in 97 to have a love triangle and pretty much everybody was starting to do it. There’s tons of movies, tv series and books out during that time that showcase the trope.

And having 2 heroines, Aerith and Tifa, and having the hero waver between them, at the time that was something new. ~Kitase,  FFVII 10th Anniversary Ultimania pg. 11

I think everyone forgets the difference in technology between FF6 and FF7, not just graphically, but narratively, too. Back then, everything was new and everyone was still trying to find their feet and figure out evolving technology. I mean, it’s still evolving now, but those building blocks that form the base are still the same. Just because there’s now millions of polygons involved doesn’t take away the fact they’re still polygons. 

FF7 was Square’s first foray into using more sophisticated methods of game development and that impacted how the story came across. In previous games, the optional content or hidden story arcs that had to be found to be appreciated made the game more fun. The player had to wander around more and talk to everyone to get the full picture and since it worked before, they thought it’d work again. That people would replay and swap party members around to trigger the other scenes and gather the rest of the puzzle pieces for the fuller picture.

But, they forgot they were trying to make everyone love one specific character, which meant the best way to do that was to keep her in the party over everyone else. Which meant people cared less about the others until the point she leaves the party for good. And by that point, when these people replay they just want to spend even more time with her, so they still miss the other dialogues and scenes with other characters that build their storyline alongside this other character they’ve pressed everyone to care about.

And that’s how the LTD got started because they chose not to play the game fully and only focus on one character, they didn’t see the entire picture. And the guides out at the time didn’t help much on that side of things because they didn’t give narrative canon party suggestions so that players got the most out of the story in each location. 

Soldier Cloud loved Aerith?

Really? When they’ve been saying for years that soldier Cloud didn’t even exist or that we said he was really Zack and that’s why he’s into Aerith? It’s funny how the moment the devs confirm that real Cloud emerged to embrace Tifa they decided they could claim the dominant persona for their own, even though they also said that it was soldier Cloud who complimented Tifa, despite real Cloud not being the dominant persona. We even see visible evidence of the two aspects at war with each other in the honeybee inn scene before Cloud dances. That eye movement back and forth and expression of “fine, for Tifa” is an internal argument with the two aspects that soldier Cloud isn’t aware enough of to realise that’s what it is. If we take Soldier Cloud as the only personality then there’s no way he’d do that because it’s not cool, and soldier Cloud is always cool. He’s being made to dance because of real Cloud’s desire to rescue Tifa. 

Aerith steps out...

Yeah, I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but the overall sentiment is that Aerith is refusing to do what happened in OG.

More importantly, though, and the thing I focused on in my death to the LTD, is Cloud’s behaviour and reaction and feelings. Because he’s soldier Cloud. Real Cloud isn’t part of the LTD because he already chose Tifa. Soldier Cloud is the focus of the LTD because he’s the one who misinterpreted real Cloud’s feelings and focused them on the wrong girl. This time, we see clear evidence throughout all of his interactions that he is also choosing Tifa.

In the train tunnel, while it’s real Cloud’s motivation to protect Tifa, Soldier Cloud is the one who carries out the roll. Then, it’s Soldier Cloud who kisses her cheek, the same as it’s Soldier Cloud who calls her beautiful. Because he’s the one flirting. Real Cloud’s desire is the motivator for him to do it, but it’s Soldier Cloud doing the thing.  Same with every single flirty interaction. Real Cloud’s emergence is only confirmed by the devs twice in the game and both times relate to Tifa. Real Cloud’s hand twitches with the urge to comfort her and then real Cloud hugs her. 

Everything else is only motivated by his love and desire for her, which means everything else is Soldier Cloud acting on those feelings.

The single moment of wavering from him is literally within the LTD nod scene in the train graveyard when Aerith grabs his arm. He doesn’t react when she does it, stays silent, leans away. He’s not showing her a preference. Then, he looks at and agrees with Tifa, which is showing a clear bias towards her. 

Then right before Tifa grabs Cloud’s arm, his eyes start to shift towards Aerith. This is the reference to OG Cloud wavering, but then before he can even look at Aerith, he spots Tifa’s hands in his peripheral vision, gasps, then looks at and smiles at her. 

That’s the result of Cloud’s wavering. He chose Tifa. After that, there’s zero LTD scenes and in fact, there’s a humorous shot of Tifa looking towards the camera after Cloud leaps on her to save her from the falling train carriage and Aerith thanks him for saving both of them. He didn’t save both of them. Didn’t even try. 

I don’t think there’s gonna be anything to worry about going forward because one thing Nojima learned from letting things be “open for interpretation” is that his work gets butchered. 

Since FF7, other FF titles he’s worked on -

FF8: Squall and Rinoa kiss.

FF10: Yuna and Tidus kiss.

FFCC: Aerith and Zack hug

FF13: Snow and Serah kiss and get engaged.

FF15 (when it was originally vs): Noctis and Luna kiss.

If anyone learned their lesson from this LTD mess, it’s Nojima, but he’s been restricted when it comes to 7 by the suits - which is one of the hidden graffiti meta messages in the train tunnel that refers to why Cloti was never made more explicit. 

“They tell you to go with the flow so they can keep the status quo.”

Since this is the last of the FF7 compilation the suits have relaxed the reins on the LTD, so that Nojima can write the story as he sees fit, which I would guess is down to the fact they did sales projections and figured out that FF7 would be massively successful and has in fact also boosted sales of PS4 consoles because people specifically bought the console to play FF7R. With the new mysteries and twists to keep fans talking about the game until the next installment is out, they don’t need to hold onto this outdated LTD concept that everyone hates and isn’t anything the company wants to associate with because of how toxic and nasty it is. They’re a Japanese company having to hear these so called fans talking about how Tifa is a “typical Asian girl” or whatever tf they call her. It’s disgusting. Square yeeted the guys behind Genesis because of the controversy around them, so to have fans like this associated with one of their most popular and iconic titles? Yeah, that ain’t happening. 

[kob131]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S4gcMZL7s8

So Vexed Viewer is bitching about that scene in the latest RWBY Episode where Yang chews out Salem and refers to Summer as her mom.

So let’s get into this.

“I have had issues with the character Yang since Volume 2, one of which is that she refuses to acknowledge her mom Summer Rose-”

Where. Where did Yang imply that she doesn’t consider Summer to be her mom? Don’t try giving me that ‘But she’s trying to connect to Raven/calls Raven mom’ shit- The trope of an adopted child seeking out their lost biological parent is VERY common, which tells me people at large understand the concept that someone can consider their adoptive parent to be their parent but still long for a connection to the biologic one.

For me to accept that you do not understand this commonly understood trope is for me to assume you’re either too lazy to think about it or too stupid TO UNDERSTAND it. Neither of which reflects very well on you.

“She hasn’t acknowledge Summer as her mom since Volume 2-”

Summer hasn’t really come UP since then. She came up once in Volume 5...while Yang was highly emotional and knowing how that is, she wasn’t being rational or even necessarily true to herself.

Do you not understand yet ANOTHER basic concept?

“Yang had not one but TWO loving parents in Summer and Tai-”

Summer died when Yang was pretty young and Taiyang, while loving, STILL fucked up his parenting by shutting down. Just because her parents loved her does not mean Yang’s upbringing was perfect or anything. All that IGNORING what I said about the trope of biological parents.

“Yang did not know who Raven was until AFTER Summer died. They act like they didn’t have the same parents but they were raised by the same damn woman.”

Okay, I’m about to go on a seemingly unconnected tangent but bear with me:

I’ve never believed that you could clone someone and get an exact replica. Because the clone would have the knowledge of being a CLONE, therefore fundamentally altering the person from the moment they were created. You know, since the original wouldn’t be affected by this kind of knowledge.

The mere KNOWLEDGE of something can alter people. Like say, knowing you’re not biologically related to the person who raised you and thus altering your perception of yourself, that person and your relation. Even denying the physical connection to the missing parent and embracing the emotional connection to the present one would not be the same as if you were biologically connected, as that conclusion would come as the result of learning the info, processing the info, interpreting the info and finally accepting it in this specific way.

Vexed acting like Yang shouldn’t have her view changed by this revelation is ignorant of how people develop and think. Which, you know, is kind of a necessary tool for CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MEDIA.

“For some reason, the writers’ decided that the memory of Summer should only matter to RUBY-”

And Taiyang. And Qrow. And Raven. And Ozpin likely. ...

And also Yang. Since, you know, the memory of Summer and that sudden revelation and shift of her memory of Summer is what is CAUSING Yang to act the way she does. If she didn’t have some kind of familial connection to Summer, she’d act differently about Raven.

“Summer raised Yang and spent more time with her than Ruby did!”

Vexed, you do know that the common image of what a parent is and how we feel about them is in part due to being biologically related to them. Just as blood isn’t the end all be all of parenting: that same blood can still affect how we view people. It’s just one factor in a complicated equation.

“So why is she being cut out of the Summer Rose stuff?”

Because she isn’t facing ideological issues that connect her to Summer like Ruby is? So there isn’t a need here? You know, basic writing?

“So why am I bringing this up?”

I already know why you’re bringing this up. And a question remains-

Where did Yang ever say Summer wasn’t her mom?

She never says she didn’t have a mom growing up, she never indicates she doesn’t feel like Summer is her mom (aside from one instance which is an odd case in general), she never says that Raven is the ONLY one who is her mom-

In all honesty, it feels more like you made a connection between Yang and Summer in that one scene in Volume 2...then disregard everything else when things don’t go as you like there.

“Yang never bringing up Summer on Volume 5 was a missed opportunity-”

Well, looks like I was right since I’ve been in this EXACT SAME situation and I know it’s because I got overly attached to a certain idea.

“Can i get a talk about their damn mother? Pretty please, with sugar on top?”

Says the man who lies constantly about the show to make the creators, especially the writers, look bad.

Honestly, you’re lucky that you aren’t served the narrative equivalent of rat poison and cyanide topped with a middle finger: it’s what you deserve.

“Yang just mentioned Summer now face to face with Salem but dur Blake?”

So Yang only mentioned Summer when face to face with Salem...the woman you just said is implied to have helped make Summer disappear...after less than two in universe days...while not mention Summer during a time where Yang is questioning more pressing matters...in a time in the show all about questioning their choices about the present situation.

... Yeah, certainly a ‘fan scenario I’m pissed isn’t written’ thing.

‘That would have made this scene so much better!’

You mean like how you thought Weiss confronting her father about unrelated matters was a good time to make it personal?

‘Oh well, too late now!’

What, did you realize your suggestions are always shallow as shit?

“See Yang fans, I want what’s best for her just like you do!”

... Except you’ve portrayed Yang fans as being obsessive yuri shippers so either you admitted you’re just as irrational...or you’re saying Bumbleby is good.

Pick your poison.

“Oh and you’re welcome.”

Sir, shitting on the countertop is not returning your meal. Please move along.

“Hahaha, just kidding...”

Really? Because you didn’t act any different aside from being extra smug...and that’s like adding black paint to a black hole.

“What are your thoughts-”

You need to let go of your fucking headcanons.

“-about Yang remembering who raised her?”

Oh...

Can’t comment on a situation that doesn’t exist, as Yang never FORGOT.

[cinema-tv-etc]

Why The Godfather Part III has been unfairly demonized

By Caryn James1st December 2020

he mafia trilogy ended with a closing chapter that has long been vilified. But as a new recut is released, 30 years on, Caryn James says it deserves to be re-evaluated. T

The final part of the Godfather trilogy is considered such an artistic disaster that you'd think Francis Ford Coppola had forgotten how to make a film in the 16 years that followed The Godfather Part II (1974). Part III's most famous dialogue – Al Pacino as the aging Mafia don Michael Corleone snarls, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" – has become an easy laugh line.

But 30 years after its release, it is time to rescue Godfather III from its terrible reputation. Pacino's eloquent, fiery, knowing central performance is supported by several bravura set pieces that are mini-masterpieces in themselves. With deliberate echoes of the earlier Godfather films, there is singing and dancing at a family party, a bold murder during the San Gennaro street festival, a tragedy on the steps of an opera house in Sicily.

In the film’s confusing main plot, Michael gets tangled up in dealing with the Vatican  

Hindsight alone would tell us how seriously the film has been undervalued, even without Coppola's newly restored, re-edited and renamed version. It now has the title Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Calling it a coda emphasises its connection to the earlier instalments, and even hints at its lesser stature. And the word 'death' signals its dark inevitability, although the meaning of that word is slipperier than it first appears.

Twelve minutes shorter, it rearranges some key episodes, eliminates a few minor scenes and trims a line here or there. But until its altered ending, it is fundamentally the same film, better in parts than as a whole. It is too flawed to come close to the accomplishments of The Godfather (1972) or its sequel, both among the most towering and influential films of the 20th Century. They have penetrated the culture, from their language ("I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse") to their quintessentially American story of immigration and upward mobility. But the new version clarifies Coppola's epic vision, revealing how much the Corleone story was always Michael's, a deeply moral saga of guilt and redemption. He just happened to be a mob boss.

For me the tragedy of The Godfather, which is the tragedy of America, is about Michael Corleone – Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola was always lucid about the trilogy's vision, even when others were confused. "For me the tragedy of The Godfather, which is the tragedy of America, is about Michael Corleone," he says in the extras on a DVD set of the three films released in 2001. He wanted The Death of Michael Corleone to be the title back in 1990, but Paramount, the studio releasing it, did not. The film's initial reception was measured disappointment, not dismissal or horror as we now assume. Roger Ebert actually loved it. Pauline Kael did not love or hate it, but offered the withering, condescending assessment. "I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation." Expectations were high because of the legacy of the earlier films, yet low because Part III came with a whiff of desperation and of selling out. Coppola had resisted making another Godfather for years, then wrote the screenplay (with Mario Puzo) and edited it in a rush to meet its Christmas Day release. It even got seven Oscar nominations, including best picture and director. It is an odd example of a movie whose reputation has declined over the decades.

Why the film is misunderstood

Then and now, the series has largely been misunderstood. Crime movies like Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's are so seductive that audiences have embraced them for apparently glamorising the love of raw power and the concept of honour among thieves. Beneath the Mafia-friendly surface, though, they are built on ethical themes their more hot-headed characters don't grasp. The Godfather Coda tells us that crime really doesn't pay when you're ready to search your soul. The young Michael struggles with the idea of killing and crime in the first Godfather. The consequences of his decision are central to Part III, which takes place in 1979, 20 years after the events of Godfather II. Michael, a billionaire living in New York, has made his businesses legitimate and is left to grapple with his guilt for so many crimes, especially ordering the murder of his  brother Fredo, who betrayed him.

The film still has problems that no amount of editing can change. In a needlessly confusing main plot, Michael tries to take over a European conglomerate called International Immobiliare. By buying the Vatican's shares, he'll be bailing out the corrupt Vatican bank. The family part of the story revolves around Michael's nephew, Vincent Mancini, the illegitimate son of his brother Sonny. Andy Garcia is as good a Vincent as you could hope for, handsome, swaggering, rough around the edges, dynamic on screen. But his character never makes much sense. Vincent has his father's explosive temper and appetite for violence, but somehow goes from a not-so-bright thug to a shrewd, controlled crime strategist in a matter of months. His change is far from the engrossing, methodical character trajectory that takes the young Michael from idealist to murderer in the first Godfather.

And the film's most severely criticised element is no better than anyone remembers. Winona Ryder, who had been set to play Michael's daughter, Mary, dropped out weeks before filming started and was replaced with unabashed nepotism by Coppola's teenaged daughter, Sofia. Today, we know Sofia Coppola as a brilliant director, but it's easy to see why her amateurish performance made her another target of Godfather III jokes, particularly for the unintentionally awkward and passionless romance between Mary and her cousin Vincent. Coppola actually snipped a couple of Sofia's lines in the new version.

He makes a major change at the start of the re-edited film, eliminating the lovely original beginning. It set an elegiac tone by showing images of the abandoned family house in Lake Tahoe from Part II, and includes a flashback to Fredo's death, while Nino Rota's familiar soundtrack music evokes the past. The new version begins with a duplicitous archbishop soliciting Michael's help for the Vatican, a scene originally placed later in the film. The change highlights the finance plot without making it any clearer.  

The exhilarating start

But the film soon picks up with its true, exhilarating beginning. Several generations of Corleones, along with friends and business associates, gather at a party celebrating Michael. His sister, Connie, sings an Italian song, while shady-looking visitors pay homage to Michael in his office. He now has bristly grey hair and a lined face, and controls his family and business with authoritarian power. The extravagant 30-minute sequence echoes Connie's wedding at the start of The Godfather, and the First Communion party in Lake Tahoe that began Godfather II. Michael's office even has the same light slanting through the blinds that we saw in his father's office in the first Godfather, when Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone received visitors. Throughout, these call backs to the previous films add resonance while trenchantly revealing how things have changed.  Michael is burdened by conscience in a way Vito never was. "I don't apologise," Vito tells Michael near the end of The Godfather, justifying his brutality because he was trying to save his family. Godfather III is all about Michael's need to atone.  

Al Pacino's performance may have become an object of derision, but he knows what he's doing.

The party scene flows easily as it brings every character up to date. Diane Keaton is as deft as ever as Michael's ex-wife Kay, who pleads with him to allow their son, Tony, to pursue a career as an opera singer. Kay can be chilling. "Tony knows that you killed Fredo," she warns Michael. Yet she has never got over him, as we see in a later scene when they have a tearful tête-à-tête in Sicily, a scene Pacino and Keaton make painfully real.

Connie, played with glorious sharpness and wit by Talia Shire, has morphed into Lady Macbeth. Mafia princesses can never run things, but they can pull the strings. It's Connie who ruthlessly tells Vincent, "You're the only one in this family with my father's strength. If anything happens to Michael I want you to strike back." She has asked the right person.

Vincent is central to many of the set pieces. During a meeting of Mafia heads in Atlantic City, when Michael announces he is out of the crime business, a helicopter approaches the window and shoots most of them dead. Vincent rushes Michael, the main target, to safety. The intrigue and rapid-fire violence in the perfectly orchestrated scene might obscure the real point: Michael can't escape his past. That attack causes his cry: "Just when I thought I was out..." Pacino's performance may have become an object of derision, but he knows what he's doing. He is raw and angrily over-the-top in some scenes, but modulates those outbursts with quieter moments. When a stress-induced diabetic attack sends him to the hospital, in his delusional state he calls out Fredo's name. Pacino shows us a conflicted Michael, weakened yet clinging to power.

The power of the re-edited finale

The tone becomes more ominous and the themes more spiritual when the entire family goes to Sicily for Tony's opera debut. (There are spoilers here, but the time limit on spoilers has expired after 30 years.) Michael grapples with the Sicilian Mafia, for reasons linked to the Immobiliare deal, but that is less important than his inner crisis. He makes a confession to a cardinal, breaking down in tears as he says, "I'm beyond redemption." When his protector, Don Tommasino, becomes another victim of Michael's power struggle, he sits by the coffin and says to God, "I swear on the lives of my children, give me a chance to redeem myself and I will sin no more." In this version, Coppola eliminates lines in which Michael asks why he is feared and not loved, removing that plea for the audience's sympathy. Michael gives Vincent control of the family, but does he really have a clear conscience when he knows too well the vengeance Vincent will plan?

The Trump era has been full of Godfather references; Trump himself regularly attacks CNN's Chris Cuomo by calling him Fredo.

That revenge plays out in the elaborate, gripping final sequence at the opera, a counterpart to one of the most famous episodes from The Godfather, when a baptism is intercut with a series of murders. That first sequence was about Michael's rise to power; now he suffers the consequences. While the family watches Tony on stage, Coppola weaves in scenes of Vincent's crew settling scores. One shoots an enemy who plummets off a beautiful spiral staircase. Another murders a rival by stabbing the man's own eyeglasses into his neck. At the opera, hitmen are after Michael, which leads to the shooting on the steps, and a bullet meant for him that kills Mary. For him there is no coming back from that, no possible way to forgive himself.  

As the film ends, Coppola makes a brilliant editing choice. The original ending flashed ahead years to the elderly Michael, sitting alone in a gravelly yard as the camera closes in on a face still full of desolation and sadness. He falls to the ground, obviously dead.  With a tiny cut, Coppola transforms the meaning of the scene. It now ends with the close-up of Michael's face, still alive. Living with his guilt is his true death, a death of the soul and of hope. Coppola adds text at the end, which says: “When the Sicilians wish you ‘Cent'anni’... it means ‘for long life’... and a Sicilian never forgets.” Michael is doomed to a long life of remembering.

Godfather, Coda restores Coppola's original darker vision, but one element creates a jolt even he couldn't have seen coming. The locations listed in the end credits include Trump Castle Casino Resort in Atlantic City, where the exterior of the helicopter attack was shot. The Trump era has been full of Godfather references. Some are from mainsteam media, including a 2018 Atlantic Magazine article with the headline Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo, comparing a Trump tweet saying that he is “like, really smart” to Fredo famously insisting in Godfather II, “I'm smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb, I'm smart!”  Similarly, Twitter trolls routinely mock the president's circle and his grown children as Fredos, portraying them as weak and bumbling like the character,  including pasting Donald Trump Jr’s head on a photo of Fredo's body.  Donald Trump himself regularly attacks CNN's Chris Cuomo by calling him Fredo. Godfather II even turned up in court documents charging Trump's advisor Roger Stone with obstructing justice, citing an email in which Stone asked someone to protect him the way Frankie Pentangeli covered up for the Corleones. Today the location credit lands like a coda to the end of the Trump presidency, and offers a reminder of how influential the Godfather films have been, even when they were embraced for all the wrong reasons.

Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is available on BluRay and streaming from 8 December.

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201201-why-the-godfather-part-iii-has-been-unfairly-demonised

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201201-david-fincher-hollywoods-most-disturbing-director

[cilldaracailin]

Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Hello my Tumblr lovelys!

I am back with the next part of this story and I have left some gift baskets around the story with paper bags, oxygen masks, chocolate, blankets and some more chocolate. Please make use of them as needed as you read this part.

This one is for @hitmeonmytspot​ @fuseburner​ @primaba11erina​ and @turkish276​

Please don’t all come for me at once and perhaps some warning before hand would be wonderful!

Suze xxx

P.S There are a good few Irish words in this part and there is an English translation straight after. I normally phonetically sound out the Irish words but because there are quite a few, I am not going to, unless someone really wants me to.

P.P.S That might just be me on St Patricks Day years ago in my Irish Dancing costume in the picture....

6

“Cleachtadh a dhéanann maistracht – Practise makes perfect”

As she made her way back to her table, she said hello to anyone she knew and as she wandered closer to her seat, she could hear loud laughter and didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved.

“Thanks Robyn.” Taron took his bottle of beer from her and she set the other drinks on the table in front of him.

“So, you are still alive then.” She said pulling a chair over beside him.

“And you too. Claire quiz you?”

Robyn grinned at him. “Just some girl talk.”

“Bloody girl talk.” He muttered before taking a drink from his bottle.

“We have been having a very interesting conversation with Taron.” Shane said wriggling his eyebrows at Robyn.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all.” She answered him. “And have you mauled him yet?” She threw his way, grinning as Shane blushed from ear to ear.

“Robyn!” His voice was a near high pitch squeal.

“And may I remind you that you are married.”

“You are coming out all defensive already Robyn and the evening hasn’t even begun. I was asking him about his time filming Rocketman.”

“I just know what you are like.” She answered him back and felt Taron shift a little in his chair so he could be a bit closer to her.

“He wanted to know about how we filmed the under-water scene.” Taron explained. “And if the hot pants chaffed.”

Another round of laughter circled the table. “It is a valid question and as a gay man, I think it is ok to ask.” Explained Shane.

“And did you get you answer?” Robyn asked as Claire took a seat beside her, carrying a tray with some drinks for everyone else at the table.

“Was waiting for it when you arrived back on your high horse.”

Robyn stuck her tongue out at her male friend and turned her attention to her drink. “Well don’t let me stop the conversation.”

Taron looked from Shane to Robyn and back to Shane before taking a glance at Claire who nodded her head at him and after he had swung his arm around the back of Robyn’s chair, answered the question.

“Not at all. They were actually quite comfortable.”

“They didn’t go up your bum?”

Robyn was mid swallow of her drink as Shane asked the question and some of it dribbled out of her mouth and she sat forward quickly trying to catch the drops in her hand so it wouldn’t get on her skirt. She was thankful for the tissue Claire quickly got her and wiped her chin and her hands before turning to Shane and glaring at him.

“You think you are the only one who can play this game?” She asked him with an edge to her voice.

“What game?” Asked Shane. “It is a genuine question and seeing as how Taron wore some, he has experience in this area.”

Robyn turned to look at Taron and he had one of those little cute half smiles on his face. “You do not have to answer that.”

“Not the way you thought this was going to go, huh chicken”? He asked her his eyes dancing with delight as he took in her angry stare at her friend.

“Chicken?” Claire’s voice took Robyn’s attention away from Shane and to her. “He just called you chicken. Why has he just called you chicken?”

“Ugh, I bloody hate you all.” Robyn threw her body back into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, a sulk on her face and pout on her lips.

Taron couldn’t help but laugh at her. He couldn’t have adored Robyn more in that moment and if her friends hadn’t of been around, he absolutely would have tried to poke the pout from her lips but as she was already embarrassed, he shuffled a little closer to her and swung his arm around her chair again, placing a light kiss on her head instead, ignoring the stares he could feel from her friends. Both himself and Robyn had expected the same taunts and heckling he had gotten from his friends but so far it had been the complete opposite and his normally composed Robyn was infuriated with her friends and he was kind of really enjoying the little tantrum she was pulling, something he rarely saw from her.

Still grinning he turned back to Shane. “I honestly can say that no, they didn’t and I am assuming that is either down to the massive size of my arse or the wonderful abilities of the costume designer.”

“Well that is all I wanted to know.” Replied Shane.

Taron nodded. “However, I will stick to my trusty boxers though but give them a go Shane. You might like them.” He watched as the married couple looked to each and winked and Taron turned his attention back to Robyn. “Smile.”

“No.” She answered him.

“Please smile.” He asked again. “Or I will do something drastic to make you smile.”

“No.”

“You are at a table in front of your friends and I will not hesitate at all to tickle you here and now.” He whispered into her hair, pretending he was kissing her head again.

“So…” Robyn sat up on her chair. “How has everyone’s day been.” She saw the beautiful grin on his face from the corner of her eye and allowed a calming deep breath to fill her lungs, the scent of Taron’s aftershave filling her senses as she inhaled, he was still that close to her and it helped to lift her mood immediately.

The table’s conversation was filled with laughter and stories and once Taron and Robyn had again talked through what happened at the 7/11, Robyn’s friends finding it a bit more difficult to hear the story from the man she had saved, the cheeky banter slowed down and the conversation became more about getting to know everyone at the table.

“Does it get draining though?”

“Not so much draining but frustrating.” Claire had asked Taron about his re-shoots and filming the same scene over and over. “You could get it perfect and then the director wants the same scene from a different angle and you could fluff a line or not put the same emotion needed or just not feel as happy as you could be with the performance. I am a perfectionist on set and it works against me sometimes. I can get annoyed very easily with myself if I keep doing it wrong and even more so when I know my mistakes wastes time.”

“Sounds like Robyn.” Said Emma. “Total perfectionist at work, maybe a little bit too much of OCD too.”

“Which came in very handy when we had the inspection last week.” Robyn answered back.

“Well I can’t argue with that. First time I have had an inspection where my staff were complimented.”

“Me too.” Agreed Robyn. “But then I am pretty awesome.” Robyn laughed.

“Fucking awesome.” Corrected Taron, laughing with Robyn at his words.

“Ok share the joke.” Complained Claire.

“Just something one of Taron’s friends said on New Year’s.”

Claire was about to question it again when the microphone screeched a little and their attention was taken by the man standing at the top of the gym. “Beannachtaí Lá Fhéile Padraig!” He said excitedly into the microphone.

“Happy St Patricks Day.” Robyn translated for Taron, grinning as he rolled her eyes at him.

“Kinda figured chicken.” Chuckling as she lightly elbowed him in his ribs.

“So, let me quickly explain how this is going to work. Those of you who have been to one of these before know most dances comprise of four pairs, eight people in total so some of you may need to buddy up with others but it doesn’t mean a group of four can’t figure it out too. I don’t know if you have noticed that your tables have numbers on the them and they correspond to your place on the floor. To help keep everyone in place, we have also put some footprints on the floor too so you can make sure to stand on your footprints, just so we don’t have groups dancing on top of each other. You can come and go as your please but we just ask that you wait until one dance is finished before you come and go, just to keep some sort of order on the floor. I am obliged to show you the fire exits. The way you all came in, three along the wall behind me and three on the opposite side. We will begin very soon and all that is left for me to say is bain sult as duit féin agus ná bíodh imní ort faoi na céimeanna a fháil mícheart. Tá sé ach beagán spraoi agus beidh an craic againn.”

A cheer went up and although Taron clapped along he turned to Robyn with a look that just screamed help.

“Robyn?”

“He said ‘Enjoy yourself and don't be worrying about getting the steps wrong. It's just a bit of fun and we'll have the craic’.”

“Thank you. So, everyone understood that accept me.” He looked around the table at the blank faces.

“What did he say?” Asked Shane.

Robyn quickly repeated the English translation for everyone else at the table. “Not everyone speaks Irish or understands it. Maybe a few words here or there.”

“Hadn’t a clue.” Agreed Shane. “You English taking our native language.” He smirked toward Taron.

“And Taron is Welsh Shane, not English.” She patted Taron’s knee, reassuring him after Shane’s words. “And some of us paid attention in Irish class in school.”

“Wasn’t for me.”

“No but the teacher was! I am surprised you didn’t actually grasp the concept of the language.”

“It wasn’t the language I wanted to grasp!” Shane winked, earning a dig from his husband but he appeased him with a quick kiss to his lips.

Taron laughed and then smiled before looking away from the little intimate moment between the two and he turned his attention back to Robyn.

She noticed the change in direction of his body and turned to him. “So, you ready for a dance?”

“Well to fully embrace my Irishness, yes and I apologise now if I stand on your foot.”

“Well you didn’t in Aber so I think I can trust you.”

“Please remember you said that at the end of the evening.”            

Within the next ten minutes a slight buzz of excitement filled the air as the Irish music stopped and the group of people in charge of the céilí were getting set up around the gym, making sure they each knew which section of the floor was theirs so they could teach the dances to the groups, helping each group as they got into the literal swing of things.

“Ok and we are ready to go! So, if you want to make you way up to your number, we can get you all started.”

Robyn looked around the tables as no one moved. She looked to Taron and tilted her head towards the floor and he immediately stood up and taking her hand skipped with her to the dance floor in the middle of the tables, Robyn giggling at his actions as he found their table number on the floor and stood directly on it.

“And thank you so much Miss Quinn!” Robyn made a fake curtesy to the MC. “And your partner.”

“Dean!” Robyn grinned. “This is Dean!”

Taron looked to Robyn and could only smile at her grin on her face and then back to MC smiling. “Yep that’s me Dean.” He turned back to Robyn. “Seriously. Is there one person in this town who does not know who you are!” He laughed as she pulled a face at him but was distracted from returning his own, when Shane and Darragh stood beside them.

“We’re here too! Ready to Riverdance our hearts out and give Michael Flatley a run for his money.”

The four broke out in laughter and once the other tables saw Robyn, Taron, Shane and Darragh get up first to the floor, they slowly filtered their way up and took their places on the dance floor, the rest of Robyn’s friends joining them.

“So, we’re sticking with Dean huh?” Taron asked he stood beside her with Shane and Darragh opposite them in a square shape, the other four from their table behind them in the same square formation.

“Seems to working for you today.” She replied to him.

They were been given a very quick walk through demonstration of the first dance of the evening, The Walls of Limerick.

“Do you know this dance?” Taron asked her.

“This is the only one I would know. We did this in school as kids.” She told him as the music started.

“Ok well I am counting on you then to get these one two threes right.”

Robyn laughed and gave his hand a squeeze. “I think I might enjoy this more than you rocketman.”

The helpers counted everyone in and the dance started. Robyn knew Taron would have no trouble with getting the basic one two three of the Irish dancing step or keeping in time as with his musical ability, keeping rhythm and time came so natural to him but it was more making sure they went in the right direction and she almost convulsed with giggles as he crashed into her as she went to the left while he went to her right and he had to catch her, lifting her in the right direction before he set her down again.

“Stop laughing Robyn!” He muttered as they danced forwards and backwards again but she just made a face with him as she swapped places diagonally with Darragh opposite her before Shane switched with Taron and holding each other’s hands they spun around in circles.

They stood on the outer square while Emma, Tommy, Claire and Nick had their turn with the dance and Robyn was still giggling away.

“Best night ever!” She laughed. “Oh, I wish I could have videos of these dances!”

“I will get the hang of it!” Taron insisted as he concentrated on watching the dance play out in front of him again. “Not all of us have Irish dancing in our blood or did it as a kid.”

It was a pure look of concentration Robyn had never seen on Taron’s face before and he held her hand firmly when he needed too and made sure his direction was perfect the second time and as he spun Robyn around and back to their place giving the other four their chance to have their turn he did an extra little step, delighted with himself he got it perfect.

“Told you!” He grinned.

“You are a quick learner but I already knew that.”

Once each set of four had danced the set twice more the music ended and a huge roar and applause went up in the gym, Taron clapping enthusiastically with everyone else.

“Oh, Robyn this is just the best Irish thing ever. I am so glad I could come over. I desperately needed something like this to just shake all my stress and anxiety off. Thank you so much.” He gave her a sideways hug and she grinned at Claire who made kissy faces at her, Robyn returning her own to her friend as she stood close with Nick.

The next dance in the set was called The Siege of Ennis and instead of two groups of four, involved all eight, two lines of four standing opposite each other. Every group was given another brief walk through of the dance and it carried the same basic steps as the other, criss crosses, spins and even a bridge of arms. They started off great, but soon the four pairs became a tangle of arms, wrong directions and mountain of giggles and laughter, having to go back to the footsteps on the ground waiting so they could start again. On the second try and with some guidance from one of the helpers, they got through one round of the dance and needed no help for their third and fourth round.

Robyn could see that Taron was thoroughly enjoying himself and his whole demeanour had flipped from that morning, a ridiculously honest smile on his face. She was so delighted that the day had turned positive for him, hating it when he was down over his work though she was still slightly concerned about his upcoming job knowing how he was going to have to dig really deep for the emotion needed for the character he was playing, the reality of the story of an abused son making Taron want to put everything he had into it. Shaking her head, Robyn brought herself back to the present and looked to him as he happily chatted with Emma and her husband and Nick, while herself, Claire and the other married couple stood talking to each other a few footsteps down as they waited for the next dance to begin.

“You can bring him to visit us any time Robyn.” Smiled Shane. “He is a darling and dotes on you something shocking.”

“He does not.”

“Listen here Robyn Quinn, that boy is head over heels in love with you and you may not have noticed the little touches he gives you, like a hand on your shoulder or around your waist but I have and my God I am so jealous of it all.”

“I think you are going to be divorced by the end of today.” Darragh grinned to his husband. “But Shane is right.”

Robyn rolled her eyes at her friends. “We are…”

“Just friends.” They all said together, Robyn frowning at them.

“Does he have to have such a perfect side profile.” Sighed Shane.

“So, I am going to take my husband outside for some air. We will be back.” Darragh placed his hands on Shanes shoulders and guided him out of the hall, Claire and Robyn laughing.

“They are going to do what you and Taron need to be doing.”

“And you and Nick.” Robyn countered. “Which by the way, the spins are not hip to hip spins but hand to hand spins.” She grinned.

“They never specified that in the instructions.” Laughed Claire and she glanced at Nick who was a in fully animated conversation with Taron. “I just want to kiss him.” Claire sighed.

“Then go and kiss him.” Suggested Robyn. “I really don’t think he will mind. He was asking where you were earlier during the choir’s gig.”

“I was watching from afar.”

Robyn watched the hopeless look on her friend’s face. “Claire please just go and talk to him, ask him out! Kiss the man! I absolutely guarantee you that it will be a very positive result and a yes to going for a drink. He is such a wonderful person.”

“So is Taron.”

“We are talking about you and Nick, not me and Taron.”

“You go and kiss Taron and I will kiss Nick.”

Robyn looked to Claire as she gave her the ultimatum and could see the seriousness in her face. “Really?” She asked tilting her head.

“You go and kiss Taron right now before the next dance starts and I will go and kiss Nick.”

“A kiss. Sure, no problem.”

“And not just a kiss on the cheek Robyn. A proper kiss on his lips.”

“Well the same goes for you too.” She watched as Claire’s face faltered a little. “You are going to give out such demands you need to follow through with them on your part.”

“I will.”

Robyn held out her hand and Claire gripped it tight, both girls adding their second hand. It was a well-used promise handshake they had created when making a deal with each other when they kids and had become their tradition as they grew up and once the handshake was made, the deal had to be followed through with or else face a forfeit of the others choosing. Handshake given and promise assured, Robyn grinned to her friend and saluted her. She turned away and prayed no one could see her heart beating wildly in her chest. She only agreed to go through with this stupid plan because she knew Nick was desperate to ask Claire out but both her friends were so hesitant to make a move so if a little kiss from Taron, something she had with him before, would sort them out, she was very willing to do it and not just because she wanted to kiss him. Again. She just wanted to help her best friend. That was what she told herself anyway.

Taron was standing still talking to Nick, Emma and Tommy, a beautiful but tired smile on his face and he was talking with his hands, still about music, specifically the music of Elton John and Robyn knew he was in his element at the moment. His cheeks were a little red from the slight heat in the gym and the two dances they had just danced and he had opened all the buttons of his check shirt, the material now hanging loosely against his body and she was suddenly regretting her quick and sudden deal with Claire, realising she hadn’t actually thought this through properly. Claire would not be happy with a simple peck on his lips, the deal requiring much more and her hands started to shake as she strolled toward the little group. She wished she hadn’t been so rash with her plan to get Nick and Claire together. Her heart was hammering and she could feel her stomach swirling in knots, her hands shaking a lot more and all she could think of was how handsome and gorgeous he looked just causally standing there talking to her friends. He had been such a gent and so wonderful with her friends, getting to know them, willingly sharing stories of his life with them and he was just happy. Pure happiness radiated from every inch of him and it was how she liked seeing him best however now as she walked towards him, she never even considered her end of the deal with Claire and how a kiss with Taron was going to affect her or him and it was suddenly a very bad idea.

“Hey Robyn.” He said giving her one of his trademark grins that spread over his face. “I was filling Nick in on our sing song with Elton.”

A very bad idea but with her head held high she walked right up to him. “You trust me, right?” She simply said.

“Of course. Always.”

“Ok well then trust when I say this is for the greater good in the long run.”

She took one long breath, her lungs filled with a mixture of humid air in the gym and that wonderful aftershave he always wore and it made her a little dizzy but she couldn’t back out and stepped right up to him, taking in his now slightly amused face, his stunning eyes, a light brown colour even in the green glow of the gym, opening wide and searching hers as he looked down to her, his forehead creasing as he raised his eyebrows in an almost question as to what she was up too. She heard and felt the hitch of breath he took as she pressed her body up against his and with her hands going to the back of his neck, lifted her head so she could reach his lips with hers and with perhaps a little more weight at first then she meant to, pressed her lips against his, then keeping them soft and light, Taron immediately tilting his head so their noses didn’t bump, his hands going to her waist pulling her right against him.

He knew what was coming before it happened, the determination in which Robyn walked towards him and the way she looked at him told him what she was going to do, her words of ‘you trust me’ making it so obvious what was going to happen but it did not mean he was prepared in any shape of form for the force at which she kissed him. Robyn stalled against him, her lips just resting against his, not moving at all and it took every part of him not to run away with the kiss. Feeling her silky lips against his caused a rush of electricity through his whole body and he parted his lips a little so her bottom lip slipped in-between his and he did his best to hold in the moan he was so desperate to let go from his body as he gently started to create the tiniest motion of friction so their lips finally moved against each other’s. His head was spinning and he knew if he dared to open his eyes, the room would be twirling around him so instead his closed his eyes tighter and pressed his mouth a little harder against Robyn’s knowing well that her lipstick had already transferred to his lips and not caring that his fingers dug into waist for a mili-second before he brought his hands up to her face. His hands cradled her neck, his thumbs at the edge of her face in front of her ears, giving him an almost better grip on her so he could hold her face in place as he moved his lips more against hers and taking the lead, he dared to move the slightest half inch away from her, her bottom lip falling from his, before he went back in immediately for a second kiss, not even taking a breath into his lungs for fear that if he waited too long he wouldn’t get a second kiss and it was also desperation that spurred him on not knowing if and when he would ever get a kiss like this with her again.

As Taron’s nose brushed against hers once more as he moved his head to tilt his face in the opposite direction, Robyn copied his hand position and moved her hands, pulling his face closer to hers as she felt him pull away, Robyn now taking control of the kiss back, gliding her lips over his before she stood right on her toes so she could capture his top lip between hers, increasing the tight hold on his face and the pressure at which she was kissing him, drawing his lips into hers. The scratch of his facial hair felt so satisfying on her skin and as he parted his lips once more, she let his wonderful damp and velvety lips take over their kiss, Robyn pressing her body further into his, the heat from him only increasing the building temperature between them. Robyn could feel his hands holding her face a little harder than he normally would and his nose swept hers once more as he changed his head’s position again. The way he moved his lips so nimbly against hers, made kissing him effortless and Robyn was very quickly finding it so difficult to keep her restraint and she had to make herself stop kissing him knowing the forth head tilt from Taron was a sign it was long enough but she needed to get one last kiss in and as she pulled away from him went back in to have one more light feather peck, a silent sigh leaving her body as her forehead rested on his, her hands still on his face. Taron leaned in to steal one last and final kiss from her, his lips in a full grin as his slightly wet and parted lips met hers and she could feel the smile on his lips and she knew she had the exact same one on hers.

“Jesus fucking Christ in heaven! What was that!”

Taron and Robyn, whose bodies were still locked together, turned their heads to see Shane and Darragh staring at them, Shane’s eyes open wide, his hands on his cheeks too. Robyn didn’t give him an answer but turned around to stand in front of Taron and looked to Claire with a smirk.

“You’re turn.” She simply said to her friend, her hands reaching for Taron’s which were now around her waist and she was so glad he had a tight hold of her because her legs were like jelly, her head was spinning and her lips were on fire and the heat from Taron’s body felt glorious agasint hers.

Claire was mortified, not believing Robyn would even dare to kiss Taron in such a way, thinking she was going to chicken out but she didn’t. In fact, Robyn had gone above and beyond and shared a kiss with Taron that was extremely intimate, quite thorough and as she witnessed it, could firmly say it was definitely heated. Claire had been by Robyn’s side as she fell madly in love with Keith but had never seen her best friend share a kiss like the one she had just shared with Taron with Keith and it wasn’t even a kiss of a couple in love, well love that had been admitted to each other. It was just two friends kissing but it was so much more when watched from the outside. They their hands rested perfectly on each other’s cheeks and they just knew how to position their heads so they didn’t bump noses and it had the perfect amount of everything a kiss needed and as Claire stood with her mouth open as she witnessed their kiss, their first proper kiss, she was stunned. It was near perfect. She hadn’t missed that at one point Taron took the lead with the kiss, seeing how much he wanted to kiss Robyn so much more than he was letting on and it made her a little sad to know that Robyn wanted it as much as he did and the two were just holding back so much.

However, now that Robyn had fulfilled her end of the deal it was her turn and she was stood frozen on the spot. Robyn was always a little braver than she was, especially over the last three years and although she had doubted that Robyn would follow through with the kiss, her best friend had gone and kissed Taron hard and without a doubt Claire knew she now had no choice but to kiss Nick, the man she had been crushing on for at least four years.

“Claire.” Asked Robyn looking to her friend, who hadn’t moved for a few seconds, motioning with her eyebrows for her to go over to Nick.

“Nick you want to help a girl out here?” Robyn was surprised to hear Taron speak and even more shocked when Nick walked past them, over to Claire and placing his two hands on her cheeks, kissed her, a lot more deeply then Robyn and Taron kissed and a few wolf whistles went up around them.

“Will someone please tell me what is going on and why everyone is kissing everyone else and why I am not getting kissed by anybody!”

Robyn felt Taron’s chest move with his laughter and closed her eyes as he threw his arms around her shoulders and hugged her against him. “You are in trouble Miss Quinn.” He whispered to her, his breathe hot against her cheek. “And have a lot of explaining to do.”

She gave his hands a squeeze and felt the deep breath he took, taking one of her own and turned to face him, not missing the flush on his face or how his eyes were now a swirling mix of brown and green.

“What it with all the kissing!” Shane asked again, clear frustration in his voice.

“Want to go outside?” Robyn asked him. “Before the next dance starts?”

“Please.”

Without a word to those around her, Robyn lifted Taron’s arms from around her shoulder and over her head, keeping a grip on his hand and started to lead him off the dance floor. As they walked, she could hear Shane complaining again and as she walked past Claire, she gave her a little push with her left hand, breaking the kiss between herself and Nick, winking at her. “Not that hard was it?” She said as she walked past them, still keeping a tight grip on Taron’s hand.

She guided him out the front door of the club house and to the left walking down the footpath a little and to a little corner she knew of where they could talk.

“So, Robyn what is with all the kissing?” Taron asked her as he leant against the brick wall behind him, his arms crossing over his chest. “Not that I am complaining, just to put that out there.” He added, hoping that his face had cooled down a little, though his cheeks still felt incredibly hot and even the chill in the late-night air wasn’t helping to cool his overheated body down. He could still feel Robyn pressed up right against his body and he had hugged Robyn so many times before, tight gripping hugs where she was properly squished against him but when their touching bodies were from the result of a kiss, it was a completely different feeling all together. “Sometimes a man needs a bit of warning before he is assaulted with kisses.” He gave her a little half smirk, keeping his arms folded against his chest, resisting the urge to touch his lips, instead rubbing them together and licking what he knew was her lipstick from them, that cosmetic taste in his mouth a little reminder that once again Robyn had kissed him and not just a little kiss, a proper full on, lip sucking kiss and it was glorious and he saw a few fireworks set off behind his closed eyes.

“You never warned me outside the lift.”

He grinned at her response. “Robyn, I kissed your neck. You fully planted one on my lips and in front of your friends and it was more than just a little kiss. Honestly, I thought you were going to slip me some tongue at one point.”

“Ugh eww Taron no!” Robyn turned away from him and squeezed her eyes shut biting her bottom lip before she turned back and prayed her face was calm and composed. “Just no. You are my friend.”

“Hmm.” He hummed. “So chicken, care to explain what that was all about? I am guessing something to do with Claire, maybe a bet of some sorts? She looked mortified. What did you two agree too.”

“I am really sorry Taron, about the kiss.” Robyn stepped a little closer to him and leaned opposite him against the wall.

“I didn’t ask you if you were sorry. You don’t have to apologise to me over it. You did ask me first in a way.”

“I asked you if you trust me.”

“And I do.” He assured you. “And you know I do, with my life.” He waited for Robyn to start with an explanation but she was staying silent. “Come on Robyn. Spill or I am ringing Diean right now to tell him about our kiss. He has been bugging me about the New Year’s Eve kiss constantly so I know he will love this one!” Taron pulled his phone from his jeans pocket but Robyn quickly snatched it from his hands.  

“I did do it for Claire.” She started to explain quickly, still holding Taron’s phone, her eyes glancing down very quickly as his screen lit up as she accidently swiped his phone, a new picture of the two of them on his screen, one from New Year’s Eve they had taken on the beach before they went to her home. “I hadn’t actually planned just to land a kiss on you like that, I promise. She is so desperately in love with Nick and has been since he joined the choir four years ago and you know we had this match making plan and I know Nick has been fawning over Claire since I introduced the two of them after a gig we did. So, we were having our girl talk…”

“I am going to ban girl talk.” Interrupted Taron. “Bane of my life. Even Rosie and Mari have their girl talk now. No boys allowed!” He complained.

Ignoring him, Robyn continued. “Well during our girl talk, Claire told me that I wouldn’t kiss you and I replied to her with the oh so mature answer of well you won’t kiss Nick and I was like sure I would kiss you if she kissed Nick and she was like well if you kiss Taron I will kiss Nick and then she made the deal tougher by saying that it couldn’t be a kiss on his cheek, as in your cheek, it had to be on the lips and I was like well if I do this, knowing and hoping you wouldn’t mind, I mean we have kissed before, Claire would have to follow through and kiss Nick and like I said, I already know that Nick has a thing for Claire and Claire is like a love sick puppy when she sees Nick even if she won’t admit to it and then we agreed and shook on it using our special handshake which we cannot go back on so I had to go first and kiss you and then we kissed and I was like go on Claire and she stalled and looked at me as if she had seen a ghost and I mean I had just kissed you so she had to follow through with our deal and she just stood there with a blank face, and then you spoke to Nick and he just went and kissed her instead and hey how did you get Nick to do that so quick with just some words and he went straight in for a kiss but Claire totally broke our deal she needs to do the forfeit but I mean…”

Taron watched as Robyn started to talk fast and her words jumbled together as she moved away from the wall, still with his phone and placed back and forth in front of him her hands moving as she spoke and as she rambled on, Taron was grinning from ear to ear. Sure the kiss played complete havoc with his emotions and he was still light headed and buzzing from the feeling of kissing her but he did not regret it at all or how he kissed her back and as he stood away from the wall he automatically found himself biting his lip, still feeling Robyn’s against him and he chuckled as Robyn began to speak even faster. She always spoke fast, her words almost blurring together even more so when she was excited or as he found out the hard way, angry and she was doing it right now, almost without taking a breath. He stepped in front of her, stopping her mid-stride and without a second thought, he reached forward and put his hand over her mouth to stop her which she did but he pulled his hand away quickly as she licked him.

“Don’t lick people.” He grinned. “And like I said, you don’t have to apologise to me. You asked me if I trusted you and I said yes and I do and when you were at the bar with Claire, Nick and I were getting to know each other. He let it slip that he was very happy you asked him to come along as he has the biggest crush on Claire. I did a little match making of my own and told him he should tell her but he wasn’t really feeling brave enough too. After you kissed me and egged Claire on, I put two and two together and thankfully Nick took the hint and the first step and went to kiss her.”

“You little sneaky rocketman. Hatching plans of your own.”

“Except Nick and I did not have a handshake to seal the deal.”

“I am going to make Claire pay for not stepping up.”

Taron grinned. “I think she will give you whatever you want after that kiss she had with Nick.”

“Finally.” Smiled Robyn. “Those two has been making googly eyes at each other for years.” Robyn looked down to her hands as she accidently swiped his phone again and she saw their picture. “I am sorry for just kissing you like that Taron.”

“It’s ok. I think I can forgive you when you ramble on nervously like that and if we got Claire and Nick together, than mission accomplished.”

“Taron…”

“Honestly, it is ok.” He stepped closer to her and held his arms out for a hug, which she walked into. “Don’t over think it ok. I know what you are like. It was just a kiss.”

“Just a kiss.” Repeated Robyn into his shoulder but it was so much more than just a kiss and as she started to re-live that wonderfully delicate and smooth kiss, his phone rang in her hands, ending the short hug between then. “It’s your mam.” She said to him, looking at the name on the screen.

He smiled and took the phone from her and answered it with a light cheery tone. “Hey mam!”

“Hello love! I just wanted to check in with you before your night became too Irish and you would forget to call your mother back.” Hearing Tina’s words, Robyn laughed. When Tina heard the laughter, she knew Taron was with his reason for his visit to Ireland. “Hello Robyn.”

“Hey Tina!” Robyn said loudly so she could hear him.

“Hi Robyn!”

She laughed as she heard Rosie and Mari too. “Hello girls.” Robyn looked to Taron. “I will leave you to it.”

“You don’t have too and you know the girls want to talk to you. Always want to talk to you.”

Robyn grinned. “And you know I adore them but your mother wants to talk to you.”

“And you want to talk to Claire.” He returned.

“Oh my God I do.”

“So, more girl talk.” He rolled his eyes. “Go, I will follow you.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Sort out that forfeit too.”

“I will.”

Robyn turned on her heels and walked away from Taron, hearing him pick up the call as she headed back for the door, inhaling the cool fresh air was she walked. Her head was still very fuzzy and not only from the specular kiss but also from Taron’s reaction. He was so calm and acceptive of what she had done to him, literally done to him and he was his usual wonderful self and she was so confused by it all. She was expecting at least a tiny bit of backlash from what she had done but there was none. He was completely understanding and had even said he couldn’t complain about what she had done and as she pulled open the door of the GAA club she took a glance back to him. He was laughing and smiling and not for the first time her stomach dropped to her toes. Whatever doubts she had before about being in love with Taron had been well and truly squashed. She, Robyn Quinn, without a doubt was head over heels in love with the man that was Taron Egerton.

[krazyclue]

Italian in Name Only

I am a mixtape of European influences, but the two biggest are Italian and Irish, so it's maybe ironic that I've never been much for family. Not hostile toward it, more like disinterested.

 Italians and the Irish have the reputation of being devoted to their families. If there's nothing quite like a good Catholic upbringing mixed with poverty to convince people to have loads of children, then being middle-class and an only child is the antidote. Never wanted children, never wanted to be part of a family, didn't even really have a notion of them. I just never thought about it.

 Not until lately anyway, and I do not mean in the sense of having children myself. I mean of being suddenly conscious of a growing need to know what my origins are, to see how I somehow fit into the larger concept of a family. When my ancestors arrived in America, what they did once they got here, and how that differs from or mirrors what other families have found. This desire might have something to do with the pandemic and all that time spent alone when the world was shut down—the isolation making me want to reconnect and do so on a deeper level.  

Most of my knowledge of Italy is from the movies, design, and fashion. My understanding of Ireland is even more limited since I spent my only visit there wandering between pubs listening to white guys with 'dreads spinning drum'n'bass. I don't speak any Italian beyond a stray "Ciao, Bella" or "Vaffanculo." I know the second one because English soccer fans used it in a taunting chant whenever they played Italian teams ("Where were you in World War 2? VA-FFAN-CULO!!"). My father spoke fluent Italian when he was a child but forgot most of it in adulthood.  My immediate family is small and spread by time, distance, and some animosity; I know very little about most of the members of my extended one. If I have cultural heritage, it's hard to know what it is.

 I am not at all sure what made me start to think this way. It could have been watching the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante's novels. The show is a portrait of two women growing up in 50's Naples. We see their lives against a backdrop of a country coming fitfully to life after the devastation following the Second World War, its progress held back by repressive patriarchy. Grim moments often give way to more ecstatic ones before doubling back again the other way, leading to emotionally vivid set pieces that capture the personal and historical in the same scene. The score by Max Richter alone can induce yearning and seeing the young, very inexperienced cast gradually develop into compelling actors makes the whole experience unforgettable, like the best work of the Italian neorealist cinema.

 But My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples, and my family is from Tuscany. Italy, like the States, is a country of regions that do not always like each other, the north versus the south, and my ancestors would have been culturally different from the show's characters. Still, carried by the show, I find myself more and more drawn to thinking about Italy—I have roots in Germany and France as well, but for some reason, Italy is the country for which I feel the strongest connection. 

 Possibly I am entirely led by my stomach. Early in the pandemic, I started getting into Italian cooking, going carefully through a copy of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hasan, who you might call the Julia Child of that countries' cuisine. I have a copy of Silver Spoon too, a compendium of real recipes from Italian families, from which I've made a few dishes, and I have my grandmother's pasta maker, and somewhere on an index card her hand-written ravioli recipe. It took all day for her and my grandfather to make that recipe; she stirred the slow simmering meat and prepared the ingredients, and my grandfather painstakingly sealed each ravioli with a fork.

 My German grandfather may have loved his pig's feet and pickled herring, but that obsession thankfully was not passed onto me, nor, as far as I know, to anyone else in my family. I might like a good stout too, even some Irish stew on occasion, but it's Italian food that captures my imagination. I am only beginning to know how each region has shaped that cuisine and the influences that created so many varied dishes. 

 I have not kept up with my family. I hardly know most of them, and outside of my parents and my uncle, I am not in touch with any other relatives. I forget the birthdays of even the closest friends and family; I must mark them on a calendar, or I'll miss the day altogether. My uncle has become something of the family historian and has been sending emails to nearly a dozen family relations. While I do recognize many of the names, there are far more that I do not remember and at least two I only know of by reputation. There are also people I met on that list, only once or twice, and those I saw most often were back when my grandparents were making their famous ravioli to go along with the Thanksgiving turkey, and that was a long time ago now.

 Those emails coincide with my awakening interest in my origins. I know a few more names now: my great grandparents Enea and Italia Lorenzetti emigrated here in 1916 and had two sons; my grandmother's dislike for Enea, a man with old-world beliefs who thought women shouldn't drive, my grandfather's brother, who threatened to walk out if Enea told them how to run their business; a rift with the Catholic Church because a priest wouldn't baptize Enea's and Italia's daughter unless they paid him an indulgence, and that the girl died soon after.

I've seen family photos, the people captured in those images ghost-like in those black and white pictures, and since I am such a mongrel, I do not look at all like them. Of course, I'd like to know more, but really, what I want is a better sense of what Italy is and why I feel so drawn toward it, not only the particulars of my one family's experience. I will start getting to know my family, but that is only the beginning of reconnecting, not its conclusion.

As I read and study (and hopefully get to make that first trip to Italy after the pandemic canceled my trip scheduled for last October), I want to know Italy without romanticizing it. You can convince yourself that life is better "over there" when it's probably the same or worse. Okay, maybe better too, possibly much better. But I don't want to become an obsessive Italy fan. Or fall for obvious cliches—about how Italy is a place where people know how to live. Italians are all passionate and stylish, speaking with their hands, operatic and over the top, and all the other hot-blooded Italian tropes. I'm sure there's some truth there as well.

But Italy also had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks and still struggles with a government, often in disarray, that cannot impede the dominance of the Camorra clans in Naples. And Italy still hasn't quite overcome the legacy of Mussolini: a far-right movement led by Matteo Salvini remains threateningly close to taking power, a rise aided by racism and xenophobia. I do not want to idealize or unfairly condemn the place, but rather know Italy and its' people for whatever they are, so I can see how it shaped myself and my family. I want to take pictures in the streets, wander without a plan until I got lost and needed one. Maybe discover my operatic personality.

 Coming out of this lockdown, old age not quite here but getting closer, as in just around the corner smoking a cigarette close, with the world isolated from itself, without any family of my own; maybe that is what sparked this need to connect with a sense of place, a sense of family. That's what being "white" can mean—it's when you've become so absorbed into American culture that your ancestry seems like it started around about 1980 (in my case anyway). I used to joke that my cultural heritage was shopping malls and Back to the Future movies at the multiplex.

 I think that has some advantages to being part of a well-defined community or coming from a large extended family. If you have no family, you won't be assigned an identity by what they think you should be. You won't have as many expectations about your choices before you get to choose for yourself.

 The problem is that you also have no sense of history or your heritage or how your small part fits into it the larger story. You are isolated. You can claim America, the nation of immigrants, but you make a claim not knowing where your people came from, and that might be the worst side effect of assimilation: forgetting the past. I've never known much about mine. I regret letting so much time slip before realizing family and heritage are so important. Now I am going to do my best to embrace my past, whatever it may be. 

[veridium]

Commission: “The Quiet of The Comeback”

Admittedly I am very excited to share this, mostly because I always enjoy writing Ellinor and Cullen, and @bitchesofostwick is a dear friend (as if it weren’t obvious by now with all our yelling). Thank you so much, Isabella, for giving me the opportunity to write softness for the beautiful, dysfunctional earth sign power couple. I enjoyed every minute. Love you!

--

It had been an hour -- maybe two -- since she sat down to work on the last reports of the day that lingered stubbornly on her to-do list. The only thing Ellinor did to disrupt it was loosen her layered coat. Being stationed in the Basin for so long she had become used to going in no less than four layers no matter the destination. There, in the heart of Skyhold and a stone’s throw away from a lively fireplace, she nearly broke a sweat. Some habits hastily reinforced would have to be hastily overturned. One aspect that had not yet turned into habit was what it felt like to look up and see him there. Not someplace else, not across the fortress at work or worrying to himself. Over there, also a stone or two’s throw away, sat back on the couch with a boot up on the tea table, a book straddled on his thigh.

She did her best not to grant any clues that she was watching him, or worse, admiring him. Truth was she was still riding the high that began the moment she returned and saw him looking on, ready to embrace her in whatever way he could. They had experienced this multiple times now. Ellinor’s guarded nature lost resolve with them each and every time, as if the act of leaving him could become harder and harder. 

The cover couldn’t last forever, though. There came a point when she allowed her quill to stop writing just long enough during one of her peeks, that he noticed just in time. When their eyes met it was as if they had run into each other in a narrow hallway back in the beginning. Ellinor hurriedly pasted her eyes back on her work and dipped her quill.

Cullen’s remaining attention could be felt from across the room. As always. “Something on your mind?” he asked. 

Maybe a sound would be enough. “Mm.” 

He gave a tired but humorful chuckle, but she only kept writing. That is, she thought she would. Instead she straightened her posture and looked at him. He glanced all-too-readily.

“This work is on my mind,” she tried to reason. “My eyes are tired and get to wandering.”

“They wander with specificity,” he noted. 

“They wander with...with non-specificity.” Her confidence melted into fatigue as she leaned back into her chair. Her vision glazed as her fingers rubbed over her fatigued eyes.

“Ah. Right.” Cullen then closed his book and set it atop the table. 

“Look, I--”

“Lin, why don’t you...wander with specificity over here, for a moment. I promise to ensure it is worth your time.”

Ugh, what? And why? There was no issue. This was what she had longed for all those weeks in the Basin, just some sense of normalcy. She had committed to it in theory. Staring back at him her first thought was to protest. However, in the same way his chuckle proved her no match, she was moved again by the kindness of his gesture. Mouth pressed in a thin, straight line, she stood up from her seat and walked over. Nervousness embraced her with every step closer until she was beside him, legs tucked underneath her seat and an arm hooked over the top of the couch. 

“What is it?” 

Cullen, who had no right to criticize her for overworking -- if that was his intention -- did not answer immediately. He looked to her, and then to the table in front of them. 

“It is a blessing I do not take lightly to have you here, to have us be together with no pressing crisis to surely be there in the morning. That is all I wished to say.”

She softened even moreso, her chest caving a little. “Cullen, I…”

“I know it is not exactly what we have been used to.”

“...Well, you have a point.”

His chuckle returned, more heartily so. Wonderful. She sighed, perhaps the deepest exhale she had made since she rode in through the gates and saw him there on the other side. 

“I like it, too. I wanted nothing more than this...this…”

“Rest?”

“Hey, do not say it as if you understand the concept more than I do.”

His brow raised a bit, a grin playful to match. It made her blush with slight regret, but was she incorrect? No. Just nonplussed as to what the matter was, really, underneath the sentimentality. There was one, wasn’t there? But wait...

“This is not an argument or discussion,” she said, looking to the fire, “is it?”

“No, not ideally, anyway.”

“So we are just...talking. Observing how much we enjoy each other.”

His grin grew. “A strange idea, I know.”

She stifled a smile of her own and elbowed him in the shoulder. For as annoyed as she seemed, it was nice to look at him again and match smiles rather than self-conscious peeks of each other from across the room. As if there was any reason for them to be so far apart in this hour. Ellinor was reminded that she had gone too long in such a way, not just a room’s distance, but an entire mountain range between them. 

“We haven’t always been good at this,” she observed. It was real, then, once more: the new ‘normal.’ 

Cullen retorted, first blowing air through his nose. “In my view, we have improved leaps and bounds.”

“You think?”

“I know.” 

He looked to her, and the way he did invited her even more to come closer. Conceding only so much, she did just so, sitting with her side up against his nearly inch-for inch. She eased in, and he sent his arm around her. Her head fit nicely in the crook of his shoulder. It always did, she could never forget. The scene before them had grown that much warmer and softer. The book on the table, crookedly resting. The fire dwindled but not so much as to leave them in the dark. The need to fill the empty space with work was depleting before her very eyes.

“What else do you know, then?” 

Cullen didn’t move an inch. He felt perfectly comfortable, like every part of him was in the exact place it needed to be, no adjustment or flinching.

“I know that you could have taken this coat off hours ago.”

“I am not,” she chirped.

Silence. Knowing silence. It ended only to the sound of her sighing.

“A Ferelden seduction line. Thanks.”

His chest bubbled with his pleased chuckle. She could feel his mouth and chin anchor closer to the top of her head. He was right, and she knew he was right because the sensation of his warm breath, however slight, against her hair only invigorated the sweat she felt all evening. 

“Do you think it’ll always be this...difficult?”

“What will?”

Her eyes opened and closed slower than before, matching the more rested beat of her pulse. For a split second she wondered if she should say it, if doing so would expose the sentimentality she tried so hard to contain within herself. 

“Coming back. Knowing when to slow down, to...to not let it all pass by.”

“It is my belief...”

“I know, I know,” she said, and pulled herself up just so she could look at him at eye level. He was still. Steady.

“Do you, now?” 

“Yes. We are both bad at it. There will likely be mistakes, that is the nature of...” 

She was putting on her best impression of him. She wished to say more, assume more, but her fatigue had her end there. Cullen merely watched. In fact, he beckoned her closer into him, just enough that she felt its pull. Though she knew him better than most anyone, the look on his face was a mix she could not immediately decipher. Then he placed his hand on her face, thumb brushing against her cheek. There was a bit more nervous light in his eyes as if he were still getting used to the idea that she could do such a thing.

“I do not spend all of my time thinking of all of what we could be better at,” he said. “Though it is...compelling.”

She smirked. “So you admit it.”

“I do also, from time to time, think of all of what we are good at. All of what you are good at.”

Her lips parted. “And…? What are we...what am I good at?” They were closer now. So much so, she could feel the warmth of his breath again, this time upon her face. Only this time she could care less how feverish it made her. 

“So far, you have done well to come back to me. And for that, I worry little about what we look like when we are together again. But you are right, we could allow ourselves to relish it far more. Even if I find great comfort in being able to witness you work several feet from me.”

The mistakes and the imperfections of it all, however provoking, fell through her grip like water then. There was no argument or discussion worth having that was worth going a minute longer without being back in his hold. At least, not for that night. All she wanted was to say “enough” to the demands of the day and relish that he was right. He was right, and she loved him for it. 

Back in her place beside him she let herself melt into the moment. Hearing his breathing go slow along with the beat of his heart, she grinned soft and took hold of his hand.

“In my observations so far,” she said, “I find I enjoy you a lot, actually.”

A hum of gentle agreement. “And I, you.”

[penninstitute]

Case #0180717

Statement of Damien Piper, regarding his life. Original statement given July 17th, 2018.

I am dangerous. That is a fact.

To share my story when I am a threat and a menace is ironic. After all, who hears out the beasts? Who wants to? You know that their teeth are sharp. But part of me cannot stand keeping it a secret. Withholding information - it’s a burden that weighs you down, and one that can only be alleviated through sharing the truth. It isn’t a secret to you, I’m sure. You, dear Archivist, who reads this now - you will know, sooner or later, against your will. Such is our nature. Such is fate.

With that, I give you my story.

I am a musician, and have been since I was young enough to still have my mother with me. I didn’t keep her for very long, because when I turned 12, she was taken, and I got another mother in her place. That other mother didn’t make music like my true one did. Its tune was scratchy, and ragged. It didn’t like my guitar, while my real mother liked it

It killed my father when I was 16. So I killed it. And after that, I was alone, later thrust into the hands of foster care with nothing but an instrument from another time.

My new foster parents were pleasant enough. They had three other children that they were taking care of, and I got along well with them. School, however, was a different story. I got bullied a lot, called various names, beaten and bruised on certain occasions - all not very fun things. I bore it, though. The last time I took action was when I killed the other mother, and since then I hadn’t the strength or will to do it again. I let myself be pushed around. I didn’t have the energy to fight back. That, I speculate, made me a prime target.

The only solace I found was with my guitar. It was a hand-me-down, given when I was 10. The instrument helped ease the discomfort of the harassment in school at first. Soon, however, the abuse worsened. And again I ignored it, telling myself I had no business trying to resist.

I think this was when it started growing, that throbbing, beating something inside of me. There was a connection being forged against my will inside my heart. Thankfully, I graduated without any fuss, but that feeling still lingered. It was only a matter of time before it would show itself.

On the night of my 21st birthday, I wrote my first and last song.

It came to me in the middle of the night, a strike of red lightning that scorched me and kept me awake until I’d written every last word down. And when I finished, I sat there, staring at it, uncertain of its conception but certain of its purpose. I knew what this song would do. I knew what I would do.

I was going to perform at a bar tomorrow evening, some dingy little establishment few would’ve heard of. The audience milled around in the dank space, sleepy and lethargic like the place itself, and the whole scene spoke of laziness. And there I was, clutching my instrument with white knuckles, desperately aching to start playing. That inspiration from the night prior had grown to a crescendo inside of me. If I didn’t let the crimson song out soon, it would’ve surely consumed me.

Onto the stage I got, and I introduced myself, trying to temper the tension in my jaw. I held my guitar tightly and poised my fingers fatefully over the strings. Droopy eyes turned to look at me.

I strummed the first chord, and I sang that song.

Do you know what euphoria feels like? I’m sure you could attempt to draw up descriptions; I’m sure you will even say that yes, you know what it’s like. It’s unlikely you could understand what my euphoria felt like, however. Despite this, I will try my best to tell you.

It is like a pure, unbridled, madness. It is a joy you can’t resist, a song that fills your ears and swallows you whole, dragging you down into the depths of mayhem. It is motion, movement, that commands your limbs to move and begs you to dance.

And dance the audience did - they moved, oh they did. They swung at one another and howled with rage. Broken glass flew and knives went deep into vocal chords, splitting them open and spilling the song onto the floor. Bodies were broken. Bones snapped. Chaos and bloodshed reigned.

And through it all I sang.

Mind you, I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t my choice to continue singing. Being possessed by that feeling is… not something you choose. It takes you and it makes you sing.

It was a long time before I finally stopped. The experience had left me greatly winded. My throat was raw, and my eyes watered with emotion that I wasn’t sure about. I glanced up tentatively at the messy scene around me.

The human body has a lot of blood in it, didn’t you know?

Red. Red. Red. So much of it throughout the bar. And it was very quiet too. Seeing as there was no one to stop me, I left.

That is the end of my story. Since that day, I have done the same thing over and over and over and over again. They whisper my name in the back alleys. They talk of that mysterious band, Hamelin - the band that, they say, has music which is to die for. I can assure you, it is.

Perhaps you are wondering why I would willingly expose myself like this. After all, sharing my crimes puts me at risk of being arrested, and surely a beast doesn’t want that?

Well, it’s true I don’t fancy being arrested, but at the same time I felt I had to tell you. To serve something the way I do - it’s a burden, all forms of servitude are. My kind just so happens to be an extremely deep lifelong debt I can never repay.

Do I regret it? Sometimes. Sometimes I feel something heavy in my chest, a deep seated guilt telling me - rightfully, I’ll add - that I’m a monster, that the slaughter left in my wake is an act that can’t be condoned no matter the reason. Other times I enjoy it, letting myself really get lost in the music, embracing that madness. Most of the time, I try to ignore it. It doesn’t always work.

Did I choose it? In a way, maybe I did. Or circumstance was just cruel.

Regardless, now you know. Hate me, fear me, inspect me like some prized specimen - do what you wish. But whatever you do, I implore you to be aware, for it may come for you just as it did for me.

FOLLOW-UP NOTES

This statement has a direct connection to Case #0140111 – the band described there, Hamelin, is the same name Damien Piper uses here. The connection between violence and music is… not one I would’ve made on my own. It’s an interesting association.

Mr. Piper makes… interesting claims, but Blair has found several consistent reports about violent brawls in establishments across the country, all of them ending with no survivors–and all of them occurring on nights where the band Hamelin is playing.

It’s interesting, for sure. No contact information for Damien Piper was in the file, so we aren’t able to reach out to him for more information.

[cawfulopinions]

Persona 4 Golden and the Problem of Appealing to a Wider Audience

I’ve been questioning how to go about writing this essay ever since I first finished Persona 4 Golden back in 2013. When I first finished the game, I came out of it not liking it very much – mechanically, it felt unbalanced; and writing-wise, I found it poorer than its original. My opinions on the game have shifted somewhat since then, helped along by the release of Persona 5 and the realization that many of the game’s mechanics were testbeds for that game. However, with time, I’ve found that I can articulate a lot of the problems Golden has with its writing a lot better. What I’ve ultimately settled on is looking at the Persona 4 we were originally given, then looking at its rerelease, and seeing what changed there and why I didn’t like it. Let’s jump in, shall we?

(Note: There will be complaining about Marie. My opinions on that subject sure as hell haven’t changed in the past seven years. Also, there will obviously be spoilers.)

I. A Brief History of Persona 4 as a Franchise

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (later spinoffs would drop the subtitle) released in the west in 2008 as a follow-up to the very strange (at the time) and very niche Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Persona 3 was notable for deciding to go for an urban setting, an avant-garde aesthetic, and heavy philosophical themes, something that was rare for RPGs before 2010 (though not for its own franchise). While Persona 4 kept the philosophical focus of Persona 3, it decided to dial back some of the artsier aspects in favor of a more down-to-earth, focused story. Where P3 told a story about the inevitability of death and took place in a very modern Japanese setting, P4 decides to tell a story about the lies we tell ourselves and takes place in a rustic, rural setting.

Some of the first things that Persona 4 tells you after getting to its setting, Inaba, are that the town really only has one tourist attraction, it’s far from anywhere of real note, and its local businesses are all being driven out of business by the construction of a corporate superstore. It’s relatable, particularly to anyone who’s watched their local mom-and-pops go out of business after a Wal-Mart decided to move in.

The tone of this setting permeates through Persona 4 – all of its characters are pretty down-to-earth, and though there’s some cartoonish exaggeration in their writing, they feel more like real people than your average RPG character. Yosuke is the new kid in town who struggles with feelings of inferiority, something that’s not helped by his dad running the superstore that’s driving everyone out of business. Naoto is a girl with aspirations of becoming a detective, but hides her gender out of a belief that if she does so, she’ll be taken more seriously by the male-dominated police force. Even the game’s idol character, Rise, is someone who quit the business because the pressures of the idol industry became too much for her. Most games would take the opportunity to have an idol character written into the cast as an excuse for a pandering song and dance sequence and to play up her “waifu” aspects. Persona 4 spends the first hour after Rise’s introduced having her in and apron and slacks, serving tofu, and dodging paparazzi.

Persona 4 is not perfect in how it approaches its characters – in particular, Kanji and Naoto’s storylines have gotten a deserved level of flack for having essentially written coming-out stories for a gay man and a transman, and then immediately backing off and “no homo”-ing them. There’s a number of Social Links that end with the character deciding to go do the socially acceptable thing for them to do instead of following their own hearts, too – Yukiko’s comes to mind. But the character conflicts and stories told in the game’s Social Links are grounded and relatable.

The grounded-ness of Persona 4 was what really made it stand out in 2009, a time where RPGs and games as a whole were mostly concerned with showing off the cool things they could do with their engines (keep in mind, this was the early era of the PS3, and Persona 4 was a PS2 game). Looking back, it’s easy to realize that Persona 4 was made as grounded and rustic as it was because of budgetary concerns, but what was done with its limited budget was incredible. It looked at its setting and tone and embraced them, and that helped to make the game stronger.

And it worked! Persona 4 was easily Atlus’s biggest success in the PS2 era. Though the game was hard to find in the United States due to its short print run, it was inescapable online, and the early Let’s Play era helped keep it in the public eye. There’s a large number of people in the English fandom who only knew Persona 4 existed back in the day because of the hiimdaisy comic and the Giant Bomb Endurance Run. Meanwhile, the game was huge in Japan and topped sales charts for weeks.

Source: Gamasutra

And then Atlus almost went out of business! Oops!

Here’s what we know about Atlus at the time that Persona 4 came out: it wasn’t doing good. The PS2 Shin Megami Tensei games were all desperate attempts to try and find success, something that Persona director Katsura Hashino has been fairly public about in interviews. Dataminers examining the PS2 SMT games have found evidence that suggests every game was built on top of the previous, with every game using SMT: Nocturne’s models and basic gameplay system until after Persona 4’s release. Persona 3 and Persona 4 are so similar under the hood that model swap mods are everywhere for the two, with literally the only adjustments necessary being a reordering of animations to account for Persona 4 having a guard animation and Persona 3 not.

Persona 4 was a huge hit, but it wasn’t enough to save Atlus. The last games released under an independent Atlus were Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (one of my personal favorites) and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (a massive failure for the company). Following Strange Journey’s release, long-time franchise artist (and, more importantly, producer and creative designer for Strange Journey) Kazuma Kaneko near entirely disappeared from future SMT titles, only credited for writing the scenario concept for SMTIV and as a demon design supervisor for later SMT titles.

Soon after Strange Journey’s failure, Atlus was snatched up by Index Corporation. Very little is known about the internal culture during the Index era, but evidence suggests that it wasn’t great. The first few games Atlus produced after this point were all remakes, save for the strange, marriage-drama focused Catherine, a game that was assuredly in development before Atlus was bought out.

It was the original games and spinoffs that Atlus produced after they were bought by Index that started to show a shift in tone. Devil Survivor 2 is a notably different game than its predecessor (which was made while Atlus was independent). While I won’t get into that too much here (that game’s worth an essay on its own), it decided to trade it’s classical SMT-style aesthetic for something more bombastic and widely-appealing. Many of the characters in that game are better summed up by what anime tropes they appeal to than by their own character arcs, and the game’s plot is an unsubtle ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it worked. Devil Survivor 2 very notably sold better than its predecessor despite being a DS game in the 3DS era.

At around the same time as Devil Survivor 2 was released, Atlus was preparing to release the first anime adaptation of Persona 4. Persona 4: The Animation was released in October of 2011, directed by Seiji Kishi (of Angel Beats! fame) and animated by AIC. I’ll leave my thoughts on Seiji Kishi as a director out of this and focus on the content of Persona 4: The Animation instead.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Persona 4: The Animation is a comedy anime.

The anime is a fairly faithful adaptation of the game in terms of plotline. It follows the game’s story to the letter, hitting every plot beat. When it needs to get serious, it gets serious, and when it nails its emotional beats, it nails them well. While I’ll go on record in saying that I flat out dislike the anime, I won’t deny that certain episodes, like the Nanako arc, are done very well. However, when it doesn’t need to be serious, the anime decides to look at Persona 4’s subtlety in its character arcs, and says, “Subtlety is for cowards.”

There’s an argument to be made that there isn’t time for subtlety in a 24-episode anime, which is why everyone’s character arcs needed to be compressed and character traits shaved down to only the most exaggerated bits. I disagree. You can easily show character without exaggeration in short-form media – the entire short story genre is built off of that exact concept. The decision to shave everyone down to their most basic traits was a decision made to make Persona 4 more accessible to a general anime-watching audience, who likely came in expecting a more action-packed, high energy deal.

And it worked.

For many people, Persona 4: The Animation was their first experience with Persona, period.  The anime was incredibly popular, and it’s clear that at this point, Atlus (or, more likely, Index) realized they’d struck gold. Persona 4: The Animation was the start of a large spate of Persona 4 spinoffs, all of which adopting the character exaggerations of the anime in some form or fashion. Any time you see a scene in a P4 spinoff where Chie’s reduced to her love of meat and kung-fu? Blame the anime. Further original games after this point seemed to take a more mainstream shift as well – Shin Megami Tensei IV and its sequel, Apocalypse, are both very different games than their predecessors, with characters and plotlines seemingly written to appeal to Persona 4’s audience.

Atlus eventually managed to claw their way out from under the hand of Index, mostly because Index got caught up in a huge fraud investigation! Oops! Sega bought a whole bunch of Index at this point, and Atlus has more or less kept on trucking under Sega since. However, the shift in internal priorities hasn’t changed much – Persona 5, while still a good game, is much closer tonally to the games that came out under Index, Shin Megami Tensei V has been AWOL ever since its first preview, and the less said about Catherine Redux, the better.

II. Less is More, and Maybe Inaba Doesn’t Need A Nightclub

Which, after a long detour, brings us back to Persona 4 Golden.

Golden is a remake of Persona 4 with additional content, released for the Playstation Vita (RIP) during the height of its popularity in Japan. Like Persona 3 FES, a previous patch/remake for Persona 3, Golden primarily exists as a gameplay patch to Persona 4 with additional story content in places throughout the game. While most of FES’s additional story was segmented off into the controversial “The Answer” section, Golden’s additional content is peppered haphazardly throughout the game. Because of this integration into the main story, Golden’s issues are more pronounced than FES’s were – in FES, you could just not play “The Answer”. Golden isn’t letting you go home without at least pushing you toward Marie’s dungeon.

Golden feels like it was developed with an understanding that anyone who’s playing it has watched the anime, and decides to lean into chasing that mainstream appeal while also throwing out the intrigue of its plot and setting. This is first evidenced when you boot up the game and watch the opening. While it hits all of the same beats as Persona 4’s opening, Golden’s opening has a much cheerier tune to it, focusing on a dance sequence and colorful visuals instead of the larger tone of the game. It’s not like the Persona 4 opening is completely absent from the game, but you have to go out of your way to watch it, and first impressions are very important.

This change in opening tone is only one example of the general tone of the changes that Golden takes. While there are big issues with the game’s writing (specifically one big one, which, whooo boy, we’ll get to her), most of the issues are in the little things – the new gameplay elements, the new areas you can visit, and the new scenes that were added to the game.

I talked a lot about how important P4’s setting is to its game for a reason: most of Golden’s changes are ones that disrupt the carefully crafted tone and setting of the original game. From things like slice of life scenes about the party buying scooters for themselves, to a winter trip to a ski resort, to a goddamn idol concert on the roof of the supercenter driving everyone out of business, it feels like the game is trying to pull away from its rural setting and down-to-earth tone to appeal to the lowest common denominator: teenage boys who live in Japanese cities.

A big sticking point for me personally has always been that you can visit Okina City in Golden. In Persona 4, you visited the nearby city occasionally in social link events, but never explored it on the whole. It gave a sense that Okina City was somewhere inconvenient to go to – someplace worth going to for a day trip with your friends, but too out of the way to visit on the regular. In Golden, the city and all of its trappings are just a loading screen away. Having a larger setting change like this so easily accessible detracts from Inaba’s setting – it makes the anxieties that several characters have about being trapped by the town feel fake. It detracts from a feeling that’s so integral to the game’s tone.

Also, the first time you go there outside of a Social Link is because Yosuke wants to pick up chicks with his cool new motorcycle.

The first trip to Okina City is ultimately indicative of a larger problem with most of the added scenes in P4G have: because they were written after the anime, they’re written to appeal to anime watchers. You can immediately tell when you’ve entered a scene that is original to P4G because the writing almost immediately drops in quality – characters become less complex, scenes have nothing to do with the plot or character development, and, to be quite honest, the jokes get worse. The Okina City sequence ultimately just ends with a fat joke and another “no homo” moment with Kanji. It’s… really bad.

There’s four more of these additional sequences throughout the game, and they’re all similar slice of life sequences that rely on anime tropes to propel them. The next after this is a beach episode with the rest of your party. After that is the idol concert on the Junes roof, which gets a hastily written tie-in to the plot when an antagonist says that the concert was how he found the party. After that is the entire winter sequence of the game, which caps off with a ski resort trip that leads into the game’s extra dungeon (which we’ll get to), which THEN leads into the game’s second hot springs cutscene, which has even less purpose than the first one.

None of these scenes have any real substance – it feels like they were just included because they actually had the budget to include them this time around. It’s possible that Okina City and the nighttime areas in Inaba were originally intended for the original version of P4, and I’d believe it – the way nighttime jobs are implemented in the original version of the game is particularly awkward, and you visit Okina City enough times in Social Links that I fully believe it was intended for the full game. As for the idol concert sequence, it 100% only exists because they got Rie Kugimiya as Rise’s VA, but couldn’t fit a sequence where she sang into the original version of the game.

The problem is that these inclusions ultimately detract from the original story. They take a game with a pretty firm idea of what kind of tone it wanted to have and muddle it because, fuck that, we have a budget this time and we need more anime tropes, idols, and tsunderes for those kids who came in after watching the anime.

Which brings us to Persona 4 Golden’s biggest issues: its additional Social Links, the winter semester, and its new ending sequence.

III. We have to talk about Marie.

Like Persona 3 FES before it, Persona 4 Golden adds new Social Links to the game. The first of which is the Jester Social Link, which deals with Tohru Adachi, a local police officer and a major character. While I’ve never been a huge fan of this Social Link (I’ve always felt like it made the identity of the culprit too obvious), it’s fairly well received by the fanbase and I can see the argument for its inclusion, so I’m not going to spend time discussing it here.

The other is Golden’s new Aeon Social Link, who manages to encompass most of Golden’s issues in a single character.

Marie is a completely original character to Golden, the first of a long chain of Atlus “remake waifus” – characters who are added to a remake of a game that are intended to appeal to the otaku crowd, rarely fit in with the rest of the game, and introduce large changes to the game’s plot. These characters rarely work because the narrative wasn’t built around them, and the retcons these characters introduce are often detrimental to their games’ original plots or themes.

Marie has all of these problems. She feels like she was written by committee – designed to appeal to an otaku crowd with a fancy design and tsundere personality. On top of that, she’s voiced by a big name seiyuu (Kana Hanazawa), and her plotline is used to fill in gaps with the game’s ending sequence, since the original game struggled with setting it up and the anime barely even bothered to touch it (Persona 4’s True Ending was shuffled off into an OVA in the anime adaptation).

From the moment you first see Marie, it’s obvious that she doesn’t belong. It’s not that her character design is bad, but it doesn’t match with the rest of the game’s tone. This is something of a pattern for her. The first time you meet Marie, it’s in the middle of a scene that was originally dedicated to the protagonist meeting his new family in Inaba. It’s jarring, disrupts a scene that was about setting up the protagonist’s larger family dynamic, and interrupts the flow of the game’s opening sequence.

Personality-wise, Marie is probably the most tropey of Golden’s characters – she’s a tsundere with amnesia, has a mysterious past, writes bad poetry as a hobby, and has a very obvious crush on the protagonist. Romancing her is almost mandated – you’re required to complete her Social Link to access the winter semester of the game, and during the game’s new ending, she calls out the protagonist on television to talk about how much she loves him. You can choose not to romance her if you want, but the game does its best to push you into wanting to do so.

Marie ultimately becomes one of the Velvet Room’s new attendants, though a lot of the evidence suggests that she was intended to become one of your party members originally. This is partially because she has a unique Persona related to her, and partially because the game takes every effort to emphasize how much of a buddy she is to the party. Marie’s Social Link ranks are time gated, usually becoming available after a new party member joins your team. All of these early scenes are dedicated to the protagonist going on dates with Marie, and then a random party member will show up and immediately become friends with her. Probably the most egregious case is during any mid-game hangouts where you don’t rank up, because the entirety of your party will just show up at Junes at the same time as you and Marie. It’s so obviously artificially constructed and honestly feels insulting to the player.

This artificiality feels like it was a writer’s saving throw to justify why the team would go into Marie’s dungeon to save her. The problem is that it’s also an unnecessary move to take. The majority of Persona 4’s plot is about the party entering dungeons to save people that they don’t really know from a serial killer; it stands to reason that the party would decide to help Marie without that extra motivation. But no, it was important to the writers that Marie is also big friends with the party, so we got what we got instead.

Marie’s dungeon comes after the skiing trip that caps off the winter semester, a portion of the game that is only available if you’ve finished her Social Link. The skiing trip is mostly more slice of life/comedy scenes, right up until you get thrust into the TV World to help Marie. The dungeon itself is… notoriously bad. You’re stripped of your equipment and items, and can only use items found within the dungeon to fight back. On top of that, the dungeon constantly drains your HP and MP, and the boss of it can only be damaged by using items that give her elemental weaknesses, because she starts off immune to everything. Here’s hoping you didn’t bring Chie for that fight like I did!

As you go through the dungeon, it’s revealed that Marie was secretly Kusumi-no-Okami, a minor Shinto god in service to Ameno-Sagiri (the game’s first final boss). Kusumi-no-Okami’s purpose is that she’s supposed to observe humanity and suck up all of Ameno-Sagiri’s fog after the conclusion of the game’s plot, which will inevitably kill her. The dungeon ends with the party trying to appeal to Marie to convince her that she doesn’t need to die, and then beating her up to save her. It’s… not particularly well written, but if that was all to Marie’s character after that, it would be fine. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The game proceeds as normal after that point as you approach the actual final boss, Izanami-no-Okami. During the fight with her, there is a sequence where the protagonist is encouraged to keep going by all of his social links. In the original version of the game (assuming that you’ve done their Social Links), this sequence ends with Dojima and Nanako, the family he’s been staying with the whole game, encouraging him to keep going. In Golden, Nanako’s line is immediately followed by Marie showing up, once again taking a sequence about familial love to make it about Marie. It’s… kind of gross!

Then you beat Izanami, and in the scene immediately afterwards, it’s revealed that, just kidding, Marie wasn’t Kusumi-no-Okami after all! She was actually Izanami-no-Mikoto, the good part of Izanami that was shaved off so that she could do her whole evil plot. Once you beat Izanami-no-Okami, she absorbs that evil part back into her and everything is all hunky dory! Conflict resolved completely, no need to worry about it anymore!

The “Marie was actually Izanami all along” reveal undercuts the finale of the game significantly. It comes immediately after what was the final scene before the ending scene, where Izanami pledged to leave humanity’s direction to humans in recognition of your feats. It’s an unnecessary doubling down on a finale that was already pretty definitive, if somewhat bittersweet, by making it unambiguously happy. This remains a theme for Golden’s ending sequence.

Persona 4 ends with the protagonist leaving his friends behind at the end of the year. Though the killer is in jail and the mastermind defeated, Inaba is still in the same melancholy state as it was when the protagonist came to it, and ultimately, he has to leave his friends behind. There’s a bittersweet-ness to its happy ending – no matter what, you have to move on and trust that things will be okay without you. Obviously, the protagonist comes back – there wouldn’t be so many spinoffs if he couldn’t – but it’s important that Persona 4 ends the way it does at that point. It puts a definitive close on the game.

Golden, however, adds an extended epilogue sequence where the protagonist comes back a year later. In this sequence, you find out that Inaba’s businesses are recovering, Namatame (the false antagonist) is running for office with a lot of support from the town, Adachi (the actual antagonist) has been on good behavior in jail, and your party members are all making tracks toward happiness for themselves.

A theme of esoteric happiness runs through this entire sequence – it feels like it entirely exists just to tell the player not to worry, everything is fine now, don’t worry about any other points of conflict. If it was just one of these things, it would have been fine, but the gatling gun of happy endings makes every one of those little victories feel lesser for it. Marie, of course, is inserted into the ending sequence of the epilogue to cap off her involvement. The esoteric happiness started with Marie, and it ends with Marie.

Golden’s epilogue ties every conflict in the game up into a neat little bow, in a way that’s almost entirely at odds with Persona 4’s down-to-home nature. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t acknowledge the uglier parts of life that Persona 4 was all about confronting. It’s the same kind of lie that Izanami accused humanity of wanting to nestle itself into. Marie’s involvement in Golden sums up a lot of that game’s problems, but the epilogue brings them into sharp relief.

IV. So now what?

I wouldn’t call Golden a bad game – I’ve heard a lot of people call it the superior version gameplay-wise, and while I disagree with that (it’s got some balance issues thanks to its new mechanics), it’s definitely the most accessible version. But when it comes to how it relates to its original, Golden throws a lot of what makes it good out the window in favor of appealing to a more general audience with slice of life sequences, more familiar tropes, and a character who mostly exists to sell merchandise and tie up Persona 4’s ending in an unambiguously happy manner.

I realize I’m in the minority here when I talk about what I dislike about Golden – you’ll find a lot of people who dislike Marie, but not a lot who dislike the rest of the package. And if you have a Vita and haven’t played Persona 4 already, then you might as well use it as your entry point into the franchise. However, I can’t help but feel like Golden is the exact point where Persona as a franchise shifted from trying to tell philosophical stories with more grounded characters to chasing mainstream appeal. Even Persona 5, a game that tries to tell a story about very real societal problems, has a lot of the same problems as Golden does, and from what I understand, these problems only got worse with Persona 5 Royal.

At the end of the day, Persona is going nowhere anytime soon – Persona 5 is the best-selling game in the franchise period, and the influence Persona has had on JRPGs in general cannot be understated. But I wouldn’t mind if some of the things I disliked about Persona 4 Golden didn’t come back.

[magicalhideoutengineer]

Nobody expected Johnny Depp to send those photos, though in retrospect they probably should have.

Director David Yates was finishing filming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when the images arrived in his email. Depp had yet to shoot his climactic scene: Magizoologist hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) reveals that the fugitive dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald has been hiding in plain sight the entire film, disguised as dapper auror Percival Graves (played by Colin Farrell). The Farrell-to-Depp switcheroo was to be the film’s biggest shock when it came out in theaters, but first it was the director’s turn to be surprised.

Much like Depp had done when crafting his takes on Willy Wonka and Capt. Jack Sparrow, the actor huddled together with a makeup team to design his own creative look for J.K. Rowling’s villain.

“I had an image in my head of the guy,” explains Depp, who felt emboldened in his creative choices by a Skype chat with Rowling about the role. “She said, ‘I can’t wait to see what you do with him.’ It was beautifully left as this open gift.”

So Depp sent photos of himself as Grindelwald to Yates. His first-draft makeover was “slightly more extreme” than where Grindelwald ended up, the director recalls. “We saw this character as a combination of poet, rock star, visionary, and sociopath, beguiling but lethal,” says Yates, who also helmed the final four Harry Potter films.

After some back-and-forth (at one point a “foppish, romantic look” was considered and rejected), the production embraced Depp’s concept of Grindelwald as a pre-WWII vision of Aryan fascism — an ultra-white, pasty-faced platinum blond, with an undercut haircut and pale mismatched eyes.

“I almost felt like he’s maybe two people,” Depp says. “He’s twins in one body. So a gamy eye is more like the other side of him — a brain for each eye, and he’s somewhere in the middle.”

When Depp’s Grindelwald was unveiled in the final moments of Fantastic Beasts, fans were indeed stunned, but also concerned. The dark wizard looked so strange. Was he supposed to be comedic? So for the second title in the planned five-film franchise, The Crimes of Grindelwald, the evil wizard’s appearance was “softened and refined,” made to look more natural. Judging by the enthusiastic fan reactions to the film’s final trailer at the end of September, the tweaks worked.

Grindelwald’s evolution was just a small example of how the Fantastic Beasts team leveled up for the sequel. Where to Find Them bore the burden of launching a new Wizarding World franchise with a different cast, setting, time period, and characters. While the movie was largely a success — with solid reviews and $814 million worldwide at the box office — members of the filmmaking team quietly felt that the sequel could (and should) be an improvement over its predecessor.

“When we made the first film [the actors] all thought it was great,” recalls Ezra Miller, who plays troubled young wizard Credence Barebone. “But the department heads — Yates, [production designer] Stuart Craig, [costume designer] Colleen Atwood — were all like, ‘It’s not good enough, it has to get better, it has to get way better, and here are all the things that were wrong with it.’ [Crimes] is a serious push by some of the greatest artists in the game to elevate in a way that’s inspiring to watch and be around.”

That elevation began with Rowling’s script, which largely shifts the action from New York to Paris — a new locale, sure, but returning to Europe feels more Potter-esque. And while the first film was focused heavily on Newt, the sequel is more of an ensemble piece that deepens returning characters, introduces several new ones, and plays like a life-and-death, wartime noir thriller (no whimsical three-minute scenes of Newt demonstrating a mating dance at the zoo with a horny Erumpent).

The setup is that Grindelwald escapes while being transported to a new prison and rallies an army of supporters with his pledge to unify the Wizarding World and rule Muggles. That leaves Hogwarts professor Dumbledore (Jude Law), the dark wizard’s former childhood friend (and perhaps more?), to enlist his expelled former student Newt and, by extension, his American friends — rebellious auror Tina (Katherine Waterston), her telepathic sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), and affable No-Maj Jacob (Dan Fogler). But that’s only the beginning.

“The script is labyrinthian,” says Redmayne, whose introverted beast-wrangler is a bit more comfortable in his own skin this time around. “You’re going down this maze, and Jo [Rowling] is weaving the stories together with such intricacy. Along the way, connections to Harry Potter and secrets are falling at your feet. And there is one…” The Oscar winner pauses, knowing he’s treading into heavy spoiler territory. “I got to the end and my jaw dropped. There was one thing I didn’t see coming.”

“Darker” is a word the cast uses a lot. “Complex” and “fast-paced” are others. The film is more, well, adult — The Crimes of Grindelwald may be the most grown-up of all the Wizarding World titles.

EW caught up with Fogler shortly after he saw the completed film for the first time, and he was as excited as any fan stepping out of a cineplex. “It reminds me a lot of The Empire Strikes Back,” he says. “The first movie is so positive. It’s sweet and lovely. But this time everybody is really put under fire. People are gonna see this, like, a hundred times just to get everything. They’re going to be going nuts that they have to wait for the next one. And Jude Law, oh God, he’s perfect.”

Ah, yes. From the moment that first photo was released of Law as a dashing Dumbledore, even the most discriminating Potter purists admitted he was spot-on as the beloved wizard (and some are rather hot for teacher, with hashtags circulating like #Dumbledaddy and #Dumbledamn). Adding Dumbledore to this prequel pleased Rowling, too, who spent more time visiting the set during this shoot than the first film.

You might assume Dumbledore would be the least mysterious part of this tale since we already know so much about his past and future. Not so. “There are things to resolve from Albus’ life, some of which we know from the story, some of which we don’t know about yet,” Law says, and then comes up with an even better tease: “This is a good riddle. One of the reasons Dumbledore trusts and likes Newt so much is Newt understands and forgives beasts and monsters. And there’s a part of Dumbledore — only a part — that sees himself as a bit of a beast.”

The friendship between Newt and Dumbledore might feel a bit wistful for Harry Potter fans: It’s like a glimpse into what might have been if the future Hogwarts Headmaster had somehow been able to carry on his friendship with the Boy Who Lived into adulthood. Yet Newt, unlike young Potter, can quickly spot Dumbledore’s “for the greater good” manipulations.

“One of the things I love about Newt is he has this naivete and gentleness on the surface, but he’s got quite a steel core,” Redmayne says. “He adores Dumbledore, but he also knows when Dumbledore has crossed a line and isn’t afraid to call him on it.”

Newt’s whip-smart Auror love interest Tina is back as well, going on a mission to hunt down Credence in Paris. “She’s more confident this time. No one is questioning her intellect and instincts,” Waterston says. Yet her character’s love life is a mess thanks to some long-distance-relationship misunderstandings. While fans know Newt and Tina eventually end up together, the duo clearly have no idea. “It’s fun to play something out where the audience is one step ahead and Newt and Tina are the clueless ones,” the actress says.

Newt also has a tense relationship with his older brother, Theseus, played by Callum Turner, who broke his wand during his first day on set during an enthusiastic screen test. Theseus is an uptight careerist and Head of the British Ministry of Magic’s Auror Office, who’s pressuring the rebellious Newt to fall in line with the wizarding government’s plans.

“Theseus wants his brother to stand up and fight [Grindelwald],” says Turner, but the two have conflicting ideas on how to #resist. That Theseus is engaged to Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz) — Newt’s schoolboy crush — complicates matters as well.

Yet perhaps the most intriguing new character is the one fans only discovered last month: Nagini, a circus performer who gives customers one heckuva transformation act as she morphs into a massive snake. South Korean actress Claudia Kim wasn’t told which character she was playing until she arrived for her last audition. A Harry Potter fan since sixth grade, Kim instantly realized Nagini was cursed to eventually become Voldemort’s murderous serpent.

“I was speechless,” she recalls, and then was told that for this final test, she had to pretend to transform into a snake — on the spot. “I instantly felt the heartburn, a lot of insecurity, but you have to empty your head and let your instincts take over,” she says. “If I find [the audition tape] I will destroy it!”

Once on set, Kim worked with a contortionist to perfect her act, infusing her performance with varying degrees of snake-ness. “David would give directions like ‘Can you do 2 percent more snake?'” she says, laughing.

Since her casting was announced, however, some have objected to a person of color playing a character doomed to subservience. Those close to the production disagree with that perspective and note that Kim simply gave the best audition for a standout role. “Claudia Kim is a living god,” Miller declares. “You’re about to get your head blown off. Prepare yourselves for Nagini. This is a tragic and beautiful story.”

Miller should know, as it’s his character, Credence, who teams up with Nagini to form a power couple of sorts: two lost souls with unique magical abilities they can’t entirely control. “Credence has joined the circus, as one does when you’ve killed your foster mom and fled the country,” Miller says glibly. “He’s trying to figure out who he is. They’re two people who don’t really trust anyone who are learning trust for the first time.”

Another challenged couple (actually, every major character in Crimes of Grindelwald is arguably part of a couple, and that’s why the Paris setting is so apt) are Jacob and Queenie, who flee America due to its strict policy against No-Maj/wizard relationships. And guess which charismatic politician is surprisingly in favor of such unions?

“Grindelwald actually sounds like he’s all for love — if you love a Muggle, you should be allowed to be with them, and you should be allowed to marry,” Fogler reveals. “But wizards, he feels, should be on a pedestal. This is very tantalizing to some.”

So hold up. Could the nicest couple in this story, Jacob and Queenie, join Team Grindelwald? They’re not saying, of course, but Sudol notes: “Grindelwald’s like staring at the sun — you’re not supposed to, but he’s hard to look away from. He does very, very bad things.”

And he does them with flair. One of Depp’s improvisational additions was giving the wand-waving Grindelwald a conductor-like rhythm during a key sequence. “When Johnny conducts a barrage of spells he’s like a conductor guiding an orchestra — except instead of creating music he’s effectively creating fiery mayhem and death,” Yates says.

Indeed, the film’s title promises crimes. And that this dark wizard’s deeds are wrapped in divisive rhetoric at rock-concert-style rallies peppered with populist appeal sounds kind of, well, familiar. Is Rowling making — unintentionally or not — some kind of modern political point? Sudol certainly sees one.

“The film is terrifying that it’s so relevant,” she says. “We really need to focus on trying to find commonalities amidst the instability of the world’s climate. When a lot of crazy things are happening, it’s very easy to lose true north.”

Which brings us, quite appropriately, back to Newt, the story’s moral compass. At one point in the movie, Newt tells his brother, “I don’t do sides.” That’s almost a revolutionary stance in hyper-partisan times. But it’s also one that, given the forces at play, is perhaps unsustainable. “You really get the sense that Newt’s always gonna make the right choice,” Fogler says. “In this day and age, that’s very refreshing.”

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One:  The Dark Curse

Chapter 190:  Carefully Controlled Anger

He spent the night watching Regina as she prepared the Sleeping Potion, dipping the apple over and over into the Sleeping Curse, applying layer after layer for the apple to absorb until it was finally a deep black color. With a wave of her hand, she turned it red again and he knew, with certainty, that it was done. But so was he.

He had a plan; a preliminary plan, but a plan nonetheless. A plan that would, with any luck, get David free, get Regina to see her own failings, get the potion of True Love to a safe place, and allow David to break the curse about to be placed on Snow White. The first step was going to be the trickiest, he acknowledged that, but he was certain he could do it. He just had to watch the right person, the only one in the Queen's castle that wasn't truly loyal to her...and of course, wait for the right time.

When afternoon came, he found the Queen back at her old estate, the one she'd lived at with her Mother and Father before she married the King and was named Queen and Step-mother. She walked the house, the grounds, and finally came to rest in the stables, looking around in near tears when, naturally, Snow came. With David in her clutches, Snow had very little choice in the matter. The minute she arrived, Regina turned and marched out of the stables, bidding the girl to follow her. They walked along the grounds and out onto a hill with a grave. It was a grave he recognized. She'd placed it there after "the experiment" had failed, and she'd placed Danial in the ground. Snow had never seen it, not until now.

Words were exchanged. It was clear that sometimes they spoke as normal individuals, calmly, cordially, even respectfully at times. But then the conversation grew heated and, if the vein in Regina's forehead was any indication, loud. And then the moment came. Regina pulled the apple she'd worked on the previous night from its satchel. After a brief explanation, the Princess finally took the apple, willingly, and with tears in her eyes, bit into it.

The effect was almost immediate. There was something wrong, small movements that looked like gagging, like her body was trying to reject it, but her mouth wouldn't open, or perhaps she was trying to hold onto it. And then Snow collapsed without grace. Her knees fell out beneath her and she dropped hard to the ground. Her breathing slowed, he knew that her heartrate would as well. Her fingers uncurled. Regina beamed, staring at her with pleasure.

He felt anger, even despite the fact that he knew he had to let this happen for his plan. Instead of giving into his anger and going after Regina, he followed the apple. Angry as he was, Regina was going to be dealt with later, but that apple had been infused with something powerful and wasn't even half used. He hated what she'd done, but he wasn't foolish enough to let that apple get away! He wasn't about to let magic like that lay out in the middle of nowhere. After rolling out of her fingers, it continued down the hill. He watched for it to stop, watched it roll end over end until-

His mouth dropped open as a small portal opened up, just big enough for the fruit, and pulled it through. It was gone. He turned away from the scene on the hill, commanding his cauldron to find it. No image came to him. He picked up his crystal ball and commanded the same thing but…nothing! For the first time since he'd had the ball there was nothing but darkness to meet him. The crystal couldn't find it, the cauldron couldn't find it. That did not bode well. Something like that meant that the apple was no longer in either this time or this space. Seeing as how time travel was impossible, he deduced someone from another world had pulled it from this world into theirs.

Fine. He was angry, things seemed far from good or fine. But the apple wasn't the goal, it wasn't the conception of the Swan, for now the goal wasn't even Bealfire. It was True Love's Kiss.

Step one…free David.

He returned his watchful eye back to Regina just in time to see her disappear, he watched Snow's body in his crystal ball all the while he used the mirrors in Regina's palace to root out the Hunter. Regina was bound to feel victory. She was bound to feel powerful and strong and bound to want to celebrate that. With no one else to celebrate with, he had the very distinct feeling that she would summon her in-house sex-slave for her own amusement. But he had no intention of letting something like that happen. Not on this night.

The dwarves were the ones to find Snow White. Granny and Red joined them eventually and it was the wolf girl who finally thought to take a dagger from her grandmother, place it beneath her friend's nose, and find no breath within her. They mourned and cried together, hugging and embracing as they lifted the girl into their arms to hug her. But it was useless. When they finally began to gather her body, he stopped to look in on Regina, alone in her tower.

Using her mirror he observed her sitting at her vanity draped across her chair with not a care in the world., her eyes fixed on him but really just looking past him. She was staring into her own mirror, watching something. Judging by the look of satisfaction on her face he could guess easily enough what that might have been.

"It would appear sacrifice is overrated. Speaking of…"

She waved her hand at him, at the mirror in front of her, and the image he had of her waved a bit, indicating magic had been used. He glanced back into his ball and found the image of David in his cell, clanging at the bars and crying out. "Snow! What have you done to her? What have you done? Where is she?! Where is she?!"

It sickened him. Almost enough to go now himself and free him. But he was waiting for the opportune moment. The moment when Regina rose from her chair, went to her chamber of hearts and pulled on forth with glee.

"Come to my chambers tonight, huntsman. We're going to celebrate."

That was what he'd been waiting for. In his crystal ball, he watched the huntsman's eyes widen, he watched as he turned green and wrinkled his nose as if he was going to be sick and then…he rose from his bed in the servant's quarters and obeyed her commands. Now, enough was enough.

He summoned the anger he'd felt last night, forgot the fact that he had a plan, that he was now committed to the plan. He recalled all the years he'd searched for the Curse, all the pain and anguish it had taken to get it in the first place! And then he was ready.

"Foolish girl…foolish stubborn girl," he whispered in a menacing tone from the shadows of her room.

Regina turned to look at him. "You'll keep your voice down in my palace!"

"Quiet!" he snapped. He made sure there was poison in his voice, demanded her attention, but didn't raise his voice. He wanted his anger to be carefully controlled and tamped down; like a parent. "I do the talking now."

For a moment, she complied. He saw her back straighten and fear overshadowed her eyes before she shook her head and turned her back on him. "Go home, Rumple. This is my palace, I am Queen here, and I won't be talked down to by you as if you were-"

"Cora? Well, maybe your mother had her reasons! Parents do when their children act like spoiled, selfish brats."

She turned and narrowed her gaze at him. A look like that would have caused a lesser man to shudder. He didn't even flinch.

"Watch your tongue."

"I told you it was childish," he growled with a sneer. "It is bound to fail! And now it's cost you your greatest asset! You gave away gold coins for a copper pot!"

"You don't know anything! I've won!" she shouted at him. "My plan worked! The girl slumbers! The dwarves have taken her body and are fashioning a coffin for her pretty little figure to lie in for all an eternity."

"Until he breaks the curse!"

Suddenly her mouth clamped closed with an annoying clap. Oh, and there was the rub in this plan of hers, what he'd seen coming ever since she told him her plan. She'd been so focused on cursing her step-daughter she hadn't considered how the curse might be broken.

"Oh, have we forgotten so soon?" he taunted. "All curses can be broken, Regina!"

"Oh please!" she cried after a minute. "He doesn't know that she's cursed. It's a powerful potion, she looks dead, sounds dead, feels dead, and give it a few days, but she'll eventually smell dead. Even if he weren't locked up in my dungeon, what kind of man kisses a dead woman?"

"You doubt, Regina. You doubt the possible all because of logic and reason and not emotion. You forget how you kissed your own beloved after he perished, trying to bring him back, you don't think he'll try just as hard?! You're a stupid little girl! One day, you'll learn your lesson just as I've learned mine. I was wrong to give you something so strong. I shouldn't have put so much faith in such a weak witch!"

He turned, making it look like he wanted to leave but what he really wanted was to get a clear view of the hallway outside the Queen's door. Was that movement? Someone coming down the hall, to please his master? Right on cue.

"It'll never happen!" Regina shouted, her voice cracking and betraying her emotions. He'd made her nervous. Good. She'd made him nervous when she gave his curse to her friend. "I've won! Snow White lay asleep in a coffin, by the time they finally realize she's not dead it will be too late. I still have the Prince in my custody. I'll see to his execution in the morning."

And that was certainly movement. The hunter was behind the door, hiding away, listening to their conversation or at least the tail end of it. All he'd wanted him to hear was that last bit, the part about Charming's execution. He'd cared enough to spare Snow White, with any luck he'd care enough to also spare her Prince.

"You try that, Regina…" he muttered, looking at her over his shoulder. "You try, but when you are sick of sniffling about and ready to give revenge true consideration, we'll talk."

He took another step toward the hallway and saw the Huntsman speeding away from her room, perhaps going to make a plan, he hoped? His work here was done.

"I gave that curse of yours away!" Regina shouted before he could disappear. Brave girl. At least she owned her mistakes, even if he knew the point of her shouting that was to cut him deep. It did. He was hurt and angered by it and so, incredibly, tired of being here in this realm while Baelfire was in another, breaking curses, arranging meetings, knowing every damn thing just to stay one step ahead of stupidity. But he wouldn't show it. He was so close he was finally starting to taste it! He wasn't about to fold now.

"I know, Regina," he whispered without looking at her. "Someday, you will learn...I know everything."