#which i recognise is a privileged position to have and possibly ignorant

[eddieydewr]

Hi! This may be a bit of a rant but there is something I really wanna share with someone so I hope you don't mind.

I have a friend who I knew 'cause we were in the same club at uni. He's very eloquent and smart, so I really respect him (but mostly from afar 'cause I was shy lol). And then I saw him post about ST season 4, and about Will in particular so I mustered up my courage and messaged him "hey have u seen the parallels between Will and Vecna?". And we started talking about other ST-related stuff. We even ranted a lot about vol 2 after watching that lol. We also talked about books and TV shows and overall, I was glad ST helped me make more friends.

When the free Palestine movement became popular last year, I was not surprised when I saw him post about Gaza or Rafah 'cause well... he's just like a typical queer, chronically online, twitter user lol (both complimentary and derogatory, sometimes I find his humor funny, sometimes I just wanna roll my eyes). We have never talked about this topic and honestly I really don't feel like. I just simply carry on sharing posts and stories about discrimination against Jewish and Israeli people and anti-Hamas stuff.

And then recently I saw him posting overtly anti-Israel things, like "u think this is hot now, wait til you go to hell for supporting Israel". Not gonna lie, I chuckled when I saw that 'cause first of all, I am an atheist so whatever man I don't believe in hell anyway. Second, I don't know what other non-Jewish people who support Israel (as in 'its existence is legitimate and the people there deserve peace', not the government itself) may feel about hell, but as far as I'm concerned, Jewish people don't seem to put that much weight on the concept of hell and heaven, right?. So like "bro you should have choose something else more menacing than that lol"

Now I can scroll through that post but what irks me the most is what he chose to share today.

https://x.com/redstreamnet/status/1841561550378651724

I find it so freaking ironic how after everything that has happened in Iran recently (and how many Iranians have spoken out against the Islamic republic), this is the first Iran-related thing he posted about. Like I'm so close to just forward to him a video of Iranians celebrating the death of Nasrallah or comments/posts of Iranians thanking Israel for it, or overall just people between these two countries wishing each other peace and freedom. I'm not sure if I can call what I'm feeling "anger" 'cause it's not exactly strong as when I see people deny October 7. But there is surely a sense of resignation.

I don't see those pro-pal people as bad or evil. I actually believe that most of them have good intentions, but to me, they are too caught up in their self-righteousness and black-and-white views to acknowledge the grey area of this whole mess.

I saw you own up to your own hypocrisy a few days ago and ngl I admire you for that lol. I only think of humans as "paradoxical by nature" so a person saying conflicting stuff is normal to me. But it's annoying as hell when someone doesn't think they are capable of hypocrisy or double standards.

Anyways, have a great day. Thank you for reading all this. Sorry it's kinda long. Being concise is not my strong suit lol.

hey anon, let’s hug. if you want?

i rly don’t have much to offer bc my brain is currently mush, you probably just wanted to vent and that’s ok. i just didn’t want to leave you on read. 💚

look, i’m using jquinn even though he annoys me atm but i just couldn’t resist, lmao. like yeah, #me.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

it’s important to read accounts of prostitutes who are against criminalisation. their voices are the only ones that matter after all, even if i dont agree with their conclusions.

you will notice patterns/types that repeat which i would like to describe here.

the impoverished one: usually has people in her life who financially depend on her (family, child, partner, or even friends). doesnt stand a chance on the regular job market due to a lack of education/education not being recognised, being an immigrant/language barrier, having a disability, mental illness or substance abuse problems, being a single mother or because any job she can get is not viable due to work schedule or low salary. sees prostitution as her only option. would maybe like to save money to open a business one day because she actually doesnt like being prostituted.

the grooming victim: usually entered prostitution young because friends or family told her about it, maybe an aunt, a roommate or a cousin are prostituted too. her social circle has normalised the sexual abuse so she doesnt recognise it as such. these can also be “high class escorts” like influencers turned yacht girls.

the coping one: usually a woman who has been in prostitution for quite a while, potentially tried to exit and failed before. clings onto the few regulars that actually take her comfort into account (as much as is possible in prostitution) and treat her with respect (arguable how much sex buyers respect women but okay) to defend sex buyers. her social circle is usually other prostitutes. maybe even is friends with the brothel owner and sees the brothel as her family. has accepted her fate and tries to cope by defending it.

the privileged one: usually well-educated, chose prostitution against other viable options. claims criminalisation would take away her bodily autonomy and ignores that she could still have sex with random men under the nordic model. in a position where she can pick and choose who buys sex from her. falsely sees paid sex as “liberation” because she sees financial gain as empowerment no matter the sacrifice, or thrives on male validation: her self esteem and self worth depend entirely on being fuckable to men.

the lobbyist: while all types can do lobby work, this person usually is a prostitute turned madame or someone who earns money with prostitution advocacy, for example as head of a lobby group, sometimes they are backed financially by pimps and brothels. their opinion actually doesnt matter because they changed sides.

as always with typologies take this with a grain of salt. this is just meant as an orientation to understand where these voices are coming from.

[theoreticallysensible]

The Hell Without Poetry

I started reading Proletarian Nights by Jacques Rancière, about contradictory aspirations held by artisanal workers in early 19th century France. One of the most interesting points so far are the fact that some workers had a culture of emulating bourgeoise fashion and not saving money, both to differentiate themselves from the domestic servants they felt they were superior to, and to signal that they deserved the same privileges as the bourgeoisie but rejected capitalist ethics of accumulating in order to exploit others.

I’ve just gotten into the famous Gauny section, where Rancière goes off an a tangent about this philosophical joiner (someone who makes wooden building components). The first of his books I read was The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which similarly takes up a single historical figure in order to develop their ideas into a universal, ahistorical frame by blending his voice with theirs. I find the idea really interesting, and it makes me wonder if I could do the same for the people I interviewed for my dissertation. I like how it deconstructs the boundary between historical actor and theorist, emphasising that all people are both, but it only works of course if the people you’re quoting are doing a substantial amount of philosophising. I also don’t want to lose marks for a stylistic gambit.

One of Gauny’s ideas is that work is work, always demeaning no matter what its content is. Rancière points out that this is similar to the philosophy of a preacher at the time, who valorised work for its essential self-sacrifice (Max Weber pricks up his ears), because it allows our body to fulfil its debt created by the wage given by the employer. This is obviously ideologically beneficial to the status quo because valuing just particular aspects of work rather than work it and of itself would suggest that those parts should be expanded i.e. that work can be better or worse and might be improved.

However, Gauny twists the message by separating the effect it has on the body from the effect on the soul. He admits that there is a pleasure to physical self-sacrifice - even though hard work of the sort he was doing can have awful long-term consequences, there’s pleasure in the oblivion you can reach in the arduous routine of it - but he emphasises that it kills the soul by not giving you breathing time to sit and contemplate, discuss ideas, and make art. There’s a beautiful section where Gauny says

“Ah, Dante, you old devil, you never traveled to the real hell, the hell without poetry!”

This speaks to the ideas at the heart of Rancière’s entire project: that everyone aspires to critically engage in the arts, and that the extent to which do is not overdetermined by class position. His project in this book in particular is to demonstrate that there is no pure working class - there is frequent infighting within and between professions and genders, and their morality is often inspired by the bourgeoisie.

In fact, one of the most interesting parts is that many of the workers start seriously questioning the status quo only after they’re visited by bourgeois do-gooders, but rather than take on the ideas of these champagne socialists uncritically, they use them to inspire new ideas. Rather than expecting a new world to come from one place, we should recognise that novelty is always a result of the melding of difference. It actually makes me think of the fact that so many of the progressive ideas developed in Europe, from Rousseau to Marx, were inspired by Native American philosophies (David Graeber & David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, has a great section on the possible influence on Rousseau).

The aspirations of people like Gauny to write poetry, to come up with new ideas based on a variety of sources, was largely unrecognised or dismissed when Rancière wrote this in the ‘80s. He was frustrated that not only did capitalists view working people as beneath of that sort of thought, but Marxists saw it as counter-revolutionary and therefore unbecoming. Rancière was disillusioned with Althusser, who’s structuralist Marxism he saw as not leaving any space for people to resist their circumstances, instead being overdetermined by class. I don’t know Rancière’s stance on free will, but as a rather dogmatic determinist even I find that frustrating, as if we aren’t influenced by so much else which can give rise to disruptive convergences. Basically, people are more complicated than that! Any supposedly emancipatory philosophy with a single vision of what the working-class should be is doomed to failure, as Rancière well knew from witnessing the dismissal of the student protests of ‘68 be dismissed as “not real revolution”.

Rancière saw in Gauny a way out of this structuralist trap, where by taking on the high-minded ideas of the more romantic bourgeoisie and reinterpreting them with a personal need to act against the system, new ideas could be created and used to disrupt the distribution of the sensible, or the matrix of acceptable ideas - most important of which was the idea of who is capable of having such ideas. This concept is actually where my name comes from!

I wonder if we’re losing this time to contemplate even more today, with the spectacle invading so much of our lives - social media being the quintessential example. This is not such a danger if we’re using it to chat to people, but if we’re just scrolling… there’s not much thinking going on there. 😅 Guy Debord, in the ‘50s, was already talking about capital colonising our everyday life, and this stealing of attention, our time to think and talk and create and have ideas, seems to be the worst consequence of it.

[padfootastic]

Wolfstar stans always say that Remus was OOC IN Canon!!! I mean wtf?? delusional lol. Fanon Remus is a mary sue who suffers and pines after cruel hottie Sirius and then Sirius comes to his senses and runs after his moony, begging for scraps of his attention and ofc James is completely ignored by sirius or they fight over poor hurting remus lmao their Fanon is what is so OOC. I think they self insert into Remus so they can catch the popular Hot bad boy who they can "cure of his bad ways"

hello anon 💜 i see we have awoken to choose violence today (nice) so i’m putting this under a cut so remus fans can skip this one.

yeah i’ve seen that too and i always have to scroll past while making faces because,,,im not here to start shit lol but oh god it’s such an annoying position. like ok, i’ve called canonical behaviours ooc too (cough harry in CC cough) and it’s entirely possible i was wrong, but the remus thing is just. wilfully ignoring everything we know about him? (again: caveat here is if you don’t care about canon, then go for it w/o trying to do critical canon analyses. no harm, no foul)

but here’s the thing, right? remus as we know him in canon is a serial manipulator, liar, gaslighter, and coward. like, this has been shown multiple times. i’m not making it up. in my mind, his actions in dh were absolutely not ooc. they just followed the pattern that had already been established so far. and i feel like so much of his characterisation comes from not wanting to engage with that kind of darkness (because even acknowledging it means your dynamic is changed). i’ve read a few excellent fandom analysis posts on here, actually, about how characterisation of wolfstar has changed over the years (decades?) as the average readership/writer ship has gone from middle aged to younger. apparently, it used to be much more dysfunctional and grittier earlier, dealing with the darkness on both sides. it was interesting. but anyway, yeah, i see it happen with regulus/jegulus too sometimes (even if i can’t comment on it since i’ve barely interacted with that content) where you deliberately turn a blind eye to things because if remus is a coward or bad at relationships, then u can’t actually write that fluffy AU u want. which…isn’t fun. because fanfic is about writing all the fluffy AUs in the world ykno?

but what that’s ended up doing is completely transforming his character into someone barely recognisable to those who aren’t in that particular niche (although,,,it’s not exactly niche is it?) and just. idk. i’m rambling now lol but it just really frustrates me because i cannot escape it. and it always treats sirius so badly. remus is just the most sympathetically written character, even when he’s being an absolute asshole, and sirius can’t breathe without being whacked over the head with it. i hate how much he’s scapegoated, honestly. like, i think i’d be fine with the mary sue-fication of remus if sirius wasn’t so defanged in the process but alas, it isn’t to be.

also that’s such an interesting point because i’ve often thought the same about remus being a self insert tbh. i was talking to someone and they said something along the lines of ‘james & sirius as the hot, rich, privileged characters aren’t relatable as much as remus, who’s poor & tortured & misunderstood, so u have people flocking to the latter’ and that combined with the ‘i can fix him’ energy just,,,really shines through sometimes lol. not so much on tumblr (where i barely interact) but i’ve seen it so much in the mwpp fandom on twitter, and a bit on tiktok. it’s very projection-heavy imo (which like, not a judgement. i’m clearly a projection heavy writer too)

[dhaaruni]

 In Ugly Feelings, cultural theorist Sianne Ngai writes that envy is moralised as something shameful, which strips it of its potential as a way of recognising real forms of inequality. Most of us will have realised that envy can be a corrosive emotion in its own right, and that it’s not good to indulge in it too much. But it can also arise from real injustices, which is exactly why people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are so keen to portray it as grasping, mean-spirited and pathetic. This rhetoric also ignores the fact that it’s possible to care about inequalities you don’t directly experience, and effectively allows no legitimate way to be left-wing: if you’re privileged and support redistributive politics, then you’re a hypocrite; if you’re not, then you’re suffering from jealousy and need to get well soon.

[...]

A politics of envy needn’t be accompanied by a ‘politics of gratitude’, exactly, because simply expressing gladness that you don’t work in a factory in Bangladesh does nothing for the people who do – as well as being a bit smug, it also fosters a complacency which tells us to be happy with the way things are, simply because other people have it worse. But while ‘check your privilege’ has become a cliche, it’s important to have a sense of perspective about the position you occupy. If you’re going to complain about billionaires and Old Etonians (as well you should), you also have to recognise the ways that you benefit from how the world is organised. Because the alternative is a myopic fixation on your own advancement. That said, I’d like to make clear that I did go to state school, and that this does in fact make my stratospheric rise to the middle all the more impressive.

[whumpzone]

Linden & Colton - 14

(masterpost)

just a short one today. I meant for Linden to give out rules last chapter and then he didn't, lol

CW: dehumanisation, pet whump

-

Master had given Pet a dog toy. He must have done something good.

It forced Pet to use his hands a lot, which felt odd, but Master had told him very clearly that it was meant to be fun, not stressful. So he played with it, and truth be told, it was quite fun. It was painted lots of bright colours and clicked and shuffled about in his hands. It focused Pet’s mind so much he sometimes forgot where he was- almost. Never fully. That wasn’t allowed.

He was knelt as usual on the rug by Master’s feet, ready to be commanded or grabbed or kicked. He still shook, being so close to Master. It made it a little harder to grip his toy, sometimes, but he did his best.

Master finally broke the silence. “You need some rules, Col.”

Pet dropped the toy like a hot coal and turned to face him, giving his undivided attention. I exist for Master, I don’t need any distractions.

Normally, his heart would have faltered at such a reprimand, but here, with this Master… Pet did need rules. He wanted them, almost, if Pet were allowed to want things. “I think having some rules would help you here, yeah? I want you to know what you can and can’t do here, so you feel safer.”

Pet simply stayed still, focusing on his owner’s words. Master was making more sense today. Rules meant Pet was wanted. He could finally learn how to please him.

“Right. I want you to be in charge of feeding Jaffa every day. You already know where all her food is, and it’s a sure-fire way to her heart. You can handle that, can’t you?”

The question didn’t sound like a threat, but it always had been with Pet’s old owner. You can handle that, can’t you, because if not then I’ll make you handle it.

“And like Jaffa, you have to eat too. At least three times a day. Usually, I will be here to supervise this. When I’m away, I’ll make you meals that you can reheat in the microwave. I’ll show you how to use it later, alright?”

Pet’s eyes lit up. Food. Regular food. Even if Master chose to starve him, Pet would have a full stomach. It wouldn’t hurt so badly. Master noticed Pet’s obvious excitement and flashed a satisfied smile.

“Following on from that… you are forbidden from going near boiling water unless I say so. I’m not letting you get burnt again.”

Of course. Only Master had to privilege of deciding when Pet got hurt, and when he was spared.

“If you want me to touch you- rub your head, or sit with you, or anything- just come find me. I’ll do my best to figure it out.”

Pet nodded. He was starting to think that this Master just didn’t have such a way with words- perhaps not all humans found it easy to be direct? But this was clearly Master’s way of telling Pet what he wanted of him.

Maybe it was a compliment- Master trusted in Pet’s limited animal intelligence enough to let him figure it out.

“In fact. Right. Uh- to make it easier. You can have touch, sunlight, food, water, warmth, baths, uh… sleep, clothes. You can have all those whenever you want. Now, this is what’s not allowed. This is what you need to pay attention to, okay?”

Pet nodded, although his head was spinning with how many privileges Master had just granted him, like it was nothing. He couldn’t possibly pay for all of it. What would Master want? But he couldn’t dwell on that now. Master had ordered him to listen. He should’ve been listening anyway. But he had been, right? He- he- he had to stop thinking.

“No boiling water. No offering me weapons. If I want to punish you, that’s… well, that’s my choice alone. If you think I’m angry, but you’re not sure, come find me to ask first, before you panic. Similarly… no sex. If someone tries to use you like that, run away. Find me. Do not let them, okay?”

The knot in Pet’s stomach that he had almost stopped registering started to loosen a little. Whatever Master decided for him, however he hurt and moulded and used his property, at least Pet wouldn’t have to do that.

“No running away, either, but I don’t think you’d try that. Uh, be nice to Jaffa, it’s okay to sleep late, and if I’m out and people come to the door, it’s okay to ignore them.”

Seemingly finished, Master looked down at Pet. He had an expression that Pet didn’t think he’d ever seen, but he recognised it all the same. Embarrassment. “I hope those all makes sense. I’ve never had to give out rules before.”

Pet pointed to himself, then raised a slightly crooked finger. I’m your first Pet?

“Yep, you’re the first. I dare say it’s going pretty well so far, wouldn’t you?”

Pet positively beamed. Master hadn’t got mad when Pet tried to communicate like that. He must be allowed- wait, Master hadn’t specifically forbidden talking. Maybe there would come a day when he gave Pet permission, then? Maybe he could earn it after all?

Pet decided to take another small risk. He picked up his dog toy and looked to Master for permission. Asking for it. Not just waiting.

“Oh, yes, you crack on. Rubik’s cubes are a good brain teaser, aren’t they?”

-

tagging: @newbornwhumperfly @whumpadump1939 @firewheeesky @whump-me-all-night-long @captainseconds @grizzlie70 @unicornscotty @lave-whump @princessofonward @cupcakes-and-pain @bumbumbea @whumpfigure @yet-another-heathen @secretwhumplair @whumps-up @as-a-matter-of-whump @getyourwhumphere @itzagoodthing @whumpymirages @soapparentlyilikewhumpnow @zipadeedooda-drabbles @penny-for-your-whump @briars7 @legallylibra @whumpwillow @angel-stars @loyds-of-registry @tears-and-lilies @badluck990 @rosesareviolentlyread

@vickytokio @neuro-whump @thingsthatgo-whump-inthenight @whumpsy-daisies @control-whump @theydy-cringeworthy @starnight-whump @cursedandtired @jo-doe-seeking-inspo @justabitofwhump @glamrockgregory @rippedjeansandfadeddreams @genesissane @justbreakonme @addyez @httyd-chocolate

going to tag the rest in a reblog. let's see if it wooooooooorks :I

[footballxposts]

A Blue Forever - Mason Mount

Prompt: Mason proposes.

Warnings: Flufffyyyy af

Recommended listening: Fairytale of New York by Gavin James

A/N: I might do a p2 to this bc I have ideas that need to be released.

It was a dark and frosty Tuesday evening in December, exactly four days before Christmas. As you and Mason, your childhood best friend turned boyfriend, pulled into one of the staff-only bays of the car park situated next to the Millennium hotel, you sighed furiously. He refused to tell you the entirety of your journey where you’s had been headed, and now he was adamant on remaining silent, giving you no indication as to why you were now less than a five minute walk away from Stamford Bridge. Your head was rested against your fist, your elbow on the window ledge, holding your arm upright. Mason quickly took the keys out of his ignition, and flicked the overhead light in between you both on to illuminate your faces. Smiling across from you like a little kid, you turned your face to meet him, your expression still blank.

“Come on, don’t look at me like that.” He teased, taking your free hand into his own. “You’ll find out why we’re hear in a few minutes.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?” You whined and pouted at him, hoping your puppy dog eyes would win him over like they usually do. But it wasn’t working. Mason was terrible at keeping secrets, especially from you, but nothing was going to stop him this time.

“Because it’s supposed to be a surprise and if I tell you now it won’t will it?” he widened his eyes back at you, his little grin still in place.

“No, but you know I hate surprises, Mase. I always have done and always will. So pleeease can you just spare me the anxiety and possible embarrassment and just tell me now?!”

Ignoring your final plea, he rolled his eyes and mumbled a small ‘my god woman’ under his breath before looking down at the phone in his hands. An incoming call message was now plastered across the screen from a number you didn’t recognise, the vibrations and ringing causing the pit that had already formed in your stomach becoming even bigger.

“We’re all ready when you are, Mason.” a woman’s voice sounded, just audible enough for you to hear despite his phone not being on loudspeaker.

“Okay perfect thank you. See you in a minute!” Mason replied kindly. Ending the call, he hurriedly re-locked the device and turned the light above you both off. “Ready?” He asked nervously, his eyes twinkling ever so slightly.

“I mean I don’t know what for and no not really but okay, let’s go.” You replied with a huff, letting go of his hand and grabbing your handbag from down beside your feet. Mason stepped outside the car first, and you followed after as he closed his door, the crisp air hitting you both. As you closed your own, you met up with him around the back of the car and linked arms, making your way to the stadium entrance, blissfully unaware that the best moment of your entire life to date was patiently awaiting you inside.

Upon entering the building, you were greeted by a friendly-looking female, one who you could only assume was the lady Mason had been speaking with on the phone previous to your arrival. Mason engaged in conversation with her as you zoned out, eyes observing the empty grounds and racking your brain for an answer. Thought upon thought filled your mind, but you couldn’t pinpoint a solid explanation. Why on earth had he brought you to not only one of his main places of work but both your childhood club’s historic venue at 9pm in the evening when it wasn’t a match-day and it was so close to Christmas? Literally nothing made sense.

Before you could bite your cheeks or worry yourself sick anymore, Mason’s hand gently squeezed your own as he led the way to the Shed End. Stepping outside and making your way down the steps, you came to one of the middle rows and sat down beside him, not before looking down at him and giving him a stubborn ‘can you please tell me what is going on now?’ look.

“Mason Tony Mount, can you please enlighten me as to why we are sat here on a cold winters night when there’s no reason to be?” you looked at him, clutching at your scarp. “I’m scared now.” you informed him. His eyes looked at your own and he smiled, then diverted his attention back to the empty green pitch in front of you both.

“Do you remember when we were.. I don’t know maybe around ten years old? I think it was a few years after I had just started training properly for Chels at the academy. And we came here to watch the first team play together and after the match you told me you couldn’t wait to see me playing at this place someday, I think you referred to it as ‘with the ‘big boys’, but don’t quote me on it.” He smirked.

Placing your hands in your pockets and leaning back into the hard plastic seat, you took a deep breath before answering. “Yeah of course.. how could I forget? It seems like it was yesterday. And yes you’re right that’s exactly what I said though it pains me to admit it.” you responded, looking down at your lap with a small awkward smile. “What about it though?”

“Well, I told you I didn’t think I would ever be good enough, maybe for the first team back in Portsmouth but never for a club as big at Chelsea even though I was in the academy. But you had faith in me and reassured me even at that age. You said..”

“I said ‘You have to play here Mase. Chelsea’s not just our favourite team it’s our second home.’” Your smile widened at him as you took the words out of his mouth. “I told you.. I remember.” Mason smiled back as tears began forming in your eyes. “And now look at you.”

“And now look at me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you Y/N. I owe so so much of it to you.” He said, standing up from his position and holding out his hand again. “Which is why I need you to follow me again because I want to say thank you.” Taking his hand into your own, you followed him down to the end of the stand, and made your way onto the pitch.

You went to question him again multiple times but each time he cut you off, not giving away anything. As you came to the end of the tunnel and walked towards the centre of the field, the frosty green grass now with a trail of footprints on it.

“Mason what on earth is going on?” You asked him, terrified as to what was about to happen.

“I’ll tell you in two minutes I promise, but first watch this.” He said, pointing to one of the large screens as the floodlights had gone off. You jumped a little but the little moment of being slightly petrified was about to be so worth it. Now playing was a video compiled with memories of you and Mason growing up to now. You laughed and sobbed as you looked back on all your special moments with such fondness and gratitude. Each part of the video had a message appearing on the screen, with Mason telling you all the things he loved about you and how he couldn’t wait to create so many more memories with you like all the ones you had shared over the years. The final message to appear on the screen was a question. It read ‘you helped make one of my dreams come true. will you please help me make another come true by saying say yes?’

Confused and in shock, you gasped and put your hand up to your mouth, not realising Mason had moved behind you whilst you were reminiscing and distracted. Turning around as only some of the lights came back on, you saw Mason down on one knee and started bawling. He was crying himself, but also unable to contain his smile.

“Y/F/N, You have been my best friend and my girlfriend for the longest time ever now, and I absolutely adore you. I don’t think that’s ever going to change. I don’t want it to because loving you to ends of this earth in the greatest privilege I’ve ever been given. Please will you do me the honours of marrying me and being my wife?” He asked, popping the all important question.

“Oh my god, Mase.” You sniffled. “Yes, of course.” You said as he stood up again, kissing you as his body engulfed you in a hug. Just as you broke apart and he placed the most beautifully cut ring you had ever seen on your finger, it started snowing. The snowflakes dancing around you both, tickling your skin. Smiling as your foreheads rested against each other, music started playing and fireworks began shooting up from the roof of the stadium. He really had pulled out all of the stops.

“Ready for one last surprise?” He asked.

“More? Mase my heart, I don’t think I can take it.” You giggled at him.

“I promise you it’s just one more thing and it’s literally only something small.” He responded.

“Okay.” You said making your way down the tunnel after him. You stopped outside the home dressing room. Upon entering, you noticed all the other players shirts had been taken off their usual hanging spots, including Mason’s, which had been replaced by one in only his spot. On the back of a new home jersey was ‘Mrs. Mount 19’.

“Oh wow, nice touch.” You teased him, nudging his side with your elbow as you walked over towards it. Your old jerseys at home only ever had Mason’s surname on the back of them.

“What can I say? You’re not just any blue forever, you’re my blue forever.” He winked.

Best early Christmas present you had ever got from your best friend. Ever.

[magicman111]

A Moth to a Flame - Chapter One

Marcy watched the sun slowly set on Newtopia as she’d done many an evening before. The sharp squawks of the gulls rang through the orange sky. She looked quite the forlorn figure standing by the hotel entrance, the gentle evening breeze that ruffled her cloak underscoring her solitude.

Her eyes remained fixated in the same direction her friend had taken off, maybe in some fleeting fool’s hope she’d change her mind and come sprinting back right into her arms.

Not a chance, Marbles.

Anne was long gone by now. Hopefully, she’d caught up with the Plantars’ fwagon before they reached the city gate. Judging by how quickly she booked it, the odds were in her favor. That girl didn’t make varsity back home for nothing.

Marcy only hoped those sweet, simple frogs knew just how lucky they were to have someone like Anne in their lives.

Sighing, her head lowered, she licked her wounds slowly.

Really? That easy, huh?  

Could Anne have made it any more obvious that she wanted to get out of there faster than she did? After they’d been apart for so long, and for a family of farmer frogs whom she’d known for what? Months?

No, don’t do that, she pulled herself up. It wasn’t right for her to be mad at the Plantars. This wasn’t their fault. Sprig and Polly were a barrel of fun at the slumber party, providing you disregarded their life-threatening encounter with the jelly-fish ghosts. Hop Pop, meanwhile, reminded her so much of her own grandpa it was uncanny. They were sweet, decent folk who’d taken Anne in and kept her safe all this time. It was just...

Her lips twisted into a bitter frown. How else was she supposed to feel but a little rejected?

However, was she really allowed to complain when holding her tongue was so normalised for her by this point? Marcy was a people pleaser, she understood that much about herself. Anytime Anne and Sasha got into an argument, she was there to keep the peace and everyone happy. So if Anna-Banana wanted to spend more time with her bumpkin frog family than her literal best friend since preschool, who was she to say no?

The story with her folks wasn’t all that different either. When they pressured her to keep up her studies, up to and including PSAT prep despite it being years away, she did as she was told like a good girl to make them proud, and they were. She hoped they were.

Goodness knows what they must be thinking right now—

Nope nope nope! Don’t go there, don’t go there.

She’d already lost too much sleep at night ruminating over the unspeakable pain she’d most surely put them through, it was the last thing she needed right now. She tried to do the logical thing and focus on the positives instead. That usually worked.

Anne wouldn’t be away for too long. They’d be together again as soon as Hop Pop’s contacts returned the Box to Wartwood and then it was off to the first of the three temples to get those gems recharged. Once that side quest was done and dusted, it was a simple matter of finding Sasha and making their way home.

Looking down, she caught herself wringing her hands.

Home.

That sure was the plan.

I mean... what else are we supposed to do?

“Always sad to see someone go, isn’t it?”

Marcy quickly wiped her eyes and glanced over her shoulder to greet the towering form of King Andrias.

Almost instantly, her mood perked up a notch. He was the one person whom she trusted, more than anyone else in all of Amphibia. Ever since she first landed outside the city walls, he took her under his wings and ensured her smooth transition into this brave new world.

Andrias was without doubt one of the kindest and wisest people Marcy could have ever hoped to meet. He was a true listener, and there were very few you could say that about, her parents included. How often had he been there to lend both an understanding ear and sage advice over games of flipwart?

Games she won more often than not, she wasn’t humble enough not to brag.

It was also he who sent Marcy on the daring missions that would eventually make her the hero of Newtopian society she was today. All because he recognised the value of her talents beyond passing an exam or helping her friends with their homework. No other 13-year-old had their own solid gold statue adorning a city bridge.

She owed this king a debt she couldn’t possibly repay, but one he was far too altruistic in nature to demand.

Then, why did he look so... solemn?

“Come along, Marcy. We need to talk.”

Maybe it was his serious tone of voice or those specific choice of words, but they made the hair on the back of Marcy’s neck stand on end. In an almost pavlovian manner, she corrected her posture and she held her chin erect.

Shoving whatever remaining conflicted thoughts aside, she silently followed Andrias back to the castle like a pilot fish tailing its great white. She was so puny next to this tremendous salamander, he could crush her with a single blow of his fist if he so chose. Not that a gentle, goofy giant like Andrias would even dream of doing such a thing.

So when he was dead serious, Marcy knew better to zip it, listen, and do as instructed.

Their quiet journey took them all the way back to the castle and into the royal throne room, a place she was all too familiar with by now. To enter this hallowed hall was a privilege bestowed only to a select few. For Marcy, it was where she had her morning debriefs over bugachinos.

Instead of going straight up to the throne for their pow wow as she anticipated, Andrias guided her down a small passageway to their left.

When they made their way up to the statue of what Marcy recognised as one of his ancestors, one of the great rulers of Amphibia, they came to a stop. Andrias then gazed down at her with the most serious look she’d seen him give anyone.

“Marcy, before we go any further,” he spoke sternly, “I need to be absolutely crystal clear about something. Okay?”

“Y-Yes, Andrias?” Marcy asked, shivering a little. She did not like being pulled out of her comfort zone, not like this.

“You’re about to enter the most secret place in all of Newtopia,” he continued, now down on one knee and his hand hovering over her shoulder, as close as they could be to eye level. “What I’m going to show you... I need you to swear you won’t share with another living soul. Not to Anne, not to Lady Olivia, no one. Do you understand? I can’t emphasise this enough, Marcy.”

“Of course,” she answered earnestly, trying to sound more confident. “You know you can always trust me, Andrias.”

A ghost of that warm, fatherly smile returned to his big blue countenance.

“Trust is a hard thing to come by, kid, and you’ve gone above and beyond to earn mine. It’s just that I’m not exaggerating here when I say this is a big one.”

Marcy simply placed one hand over his huge index, the other over her heart.

She smiled back at him sweetly, genuinely, “I promise.”

“Very well.”

Nodding in approval, Adrias rose. He reached out, pushing a luminous coral torch upwards.

It didn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of ‘Creatures & Caverns’ for Marcy to predict that the statue was going to shift to the left next, revealing the spiralling staircase leading to Frog knows where. She probably should’ve been more surprised, but come on, it wasn’t exactly the first secret passage she’d come across in this castle lately. 

“Follow me,” was all Andrias said, before he pulled off the same coral torch, then proceeded down the stairs without another word. Marcy followed obediently, unable to ignore the unnerving chill that was now travelling up her spine.

Was it... always this cold around here?

Something about all this just felt so unsettling compared to last time. She couldn’t really explain why; she knew she was safe with Andrias and that he wouldn’t do anything to intentionally put her in harm’s way. It was a gut feeling and that sort of thing bugged a rational person like her to no end.

She tried to take her mind off it by hazarding her best guess as to precisely what he was going to show her. Either she did that or started getting all worked up dwelling on Anne again, which she’d rather not at the moment.

Another secret library, perhaps? Probably not, though she wouldn’t be at all disappointed if it was. Maybe there were forbidden texts about the dark arts hidden away down there. Magic users were incredibly rare in Amphibia these days—Marcy had already searched far and wide—so might this be her chance?

Oh, how the very idea of being able to cast actual magic excited her. Being Chief Ranger of the Knight Guard was a great honor and nothing to sneeze at, but to be a powerful sorceress, one who could communicate with spirits, raise the dead, shuffle the orifices on her enemy’s faces—

Okay, rein those snails in, Mar-Mar.

Her musings were interrupted by a strange noise emanating from below. At first she figured it was just her imagination, but the further they continued their descent, the clearer it became.

It sounded an awful lot like beeping. Yes, that was it. A progressively growing cacophony of bleeps, bloops and chirps, the kind she’d expect to hear from a high-tech supercomputer. Something absolutely alien in a world like Amphibia, she and her friends excluded.

Before Marcy could ask Andrias if he heard it too, she was distracted by the emergence of an orange glow chasing away the darkness below. It was a warm, almost heavenly light that conjured the mental image of a crackling fireplace on Christmas morning, protecting you from the snowstorm outside.

The chill in her spine had by now spread to the crown of her head and the tips of her toes. Her throat tightened up. Beads of cold sweat dripped down her forehead.

What the... Marcy could not say a word, only think.

There was something down there. Something greater than any library, however inconceivable that sounded. Whether it was good or bad was irrelevant to her at that moment.

It called her.

The duo finally reached the foot of the staircase and entered the sacred sanctum.

Marcy’s jaw dropped.

“Woah.”

There were no shelves of books. No ancient Amphibian artifacts. There weren’t even any walls that she could make out from where she stood. Just an apparently endless sea of darkness encompassing a large round platform from which both the enticing glow and the lowkey din of beeps originated.

Marcy resumed taking Andrias’ lead as they stepped out onto the platform, the clink-clank of their boots confirming her assumption it was made of metal. The whole thing appeared more at home on an alien spaceship than in the dungeons of a castle.

Upon arriving at its centre, Andrias knelt down on both knees and, much to Marcy’s curiosity, removed his crown and set it down on the floor. She took the hint by following suit.

Any lingering fears melted away the more she basked herself in the radiance. It was as if the beams were steadily pouring into her body, clearing up her headspace, reducing any tension in her body. She recalled a favored memory from when she was five-years-old, when she and Anne spent a whole summer afternoon by the beach. How the tides would come in and out without fail, washing away the ruins of their sandcastles, the seaweed, one of Anne’s sandles and the teeny tiny baby seahorse they rescued.

Like a nice blank canvas.

Was this a private place of worship? Not according to her expansive studies of Amphibian anthropology. Or maybe it was a place for Andrias to meditate away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the castle. Seemed a skosh excessive if that was the case.

“Truly captivating, I know.”

Andrais’ baritone brought Marcy back down to earth. She straightened up and tried to refocus herself. They were down here for an important reason, at least she believed they were.

“One can spend hours down here,” Andrias boomed ominously. “Adrift in their own thoughts and... dreams.” The light cast his face in a rather unnerving shadow as he stared ahead into the void. “But I’m sure you know I haven’t brought you here to show off my retreat from the world.” He took a long, deep breath, like he was mentally steeling himself for what he said next, “As much as it pains me to say it, I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely truthful with you, Marcy.”

He produced from his sleeve what appeared at first glance to be two giant pieces of parchment and unfolded them neatly on the metal surface. A closer inspection told Marcy they were in fact pages torn from an exceptionally large book. Judging not only by the size, but the font and format as well, she easily pieced together its origin.

“Are these...?”

“From the book we “found” in the wing?” Andrias chuckled mirthlessly. “Yes. Still kinda surprised you didn’t pick up there were pages missing, but that's not important right now. Please, read.”

The platform provided ideal reading light. Marcy’s ability to read at a 12th Grade level meant she cruised through the text and finished within minutes.

She read it once, then twice. A third and fourth time just to make sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her.

Her bottom began to tremble.

No... Nononono, this... this can’t be right. I-It’s impossible! How in the world can it...?!

No amount of curative rays could unfreeze the blood in her veins. The metaphorical pistons in her brain were firing on full cylinders in a vain attempt to digest this earth-shattering information. For a split second, she thought she was going to pass out.

Desperate, she turned to the stone-faced Andrias to plead for some kind of answer, but she found no words with which to speak. All the personal growth and development that made her Newtopia’s champion had been stripped of her and she was reduced to nothing more than a helpless lost toddler.

A comforting set of giant digits placed themselves under her chin, the same way a father would do for his daughter.

“All this time, I’ve been testing you,” Andrias told her, his voice full of pride. “The games of flipwart, the missions, the “secret library”, even the barbari-ant colony I had lured to the city. I was watching you, studying your every action. With each challenge I issued, you excelled my expectations. You’re an exceptionally talented human being, Marcy, truly worthy of the name ‘Wu’.”

Even if these words were meant to serve as comfort or encouragement, they had only the opposite effect for Marcy. Tears were leaking out the corners of her eyes.

She mustered only a pitiful whimper, “I-I don’t understand.”

“Don’t worry, kiddo,” he promised, “you will soon enough. He’s so excited to meet you.”

“... He?”

Lifting his mighty hand in the air, he thrusted it into the nothingness facing them. Marcy instinctively followed its direction.

“Marcy Wu,” Andrias’ thundering voice resonated throughout the sanctuary, “allow me to introduce you... to my master.”

No sooner had he finished, the whole world started to tremble at Marcy’s knees, throwing her off her balance. A rumbling, mechanical ROAR struck her ears so loud she had to cover them to protect the drums from rupture. Yet despite this sensory assault, she somehow forced her eyes to stay wide open. She needed to face whatever was coming.

Marcy gazed into the abyss.

And the abyss gazed back with all thirteen of its eyes.

Terror. Pure mounting terror overwhelmed every cell of her being. Her pupils shrunk to the size of pinpricks. If her mouth stretched any wider, her jaw risked snapping clean off its hinges.

Everything around her faded into black. Andrias, the platform and its glow, the beeping, all vanished into the ether. All now that existed were herself and those colossal demonic eyes plucked from the deepest recesses of her nightmares, their leer burrowing into her very soul.

Marcy wanted to scream until she coughed up her lungs. Moreso, she just wanted to wake up. This was all a dream, it had to be. A lucid dream that had gone on for far too long. She and her friends weren’t in another dimension inhabited by talking frogs, such a notion was a scientific absurdity. She sure as heck wasn’t a ranger in some anthropomorphic newt army.

Any moment now, her wizard kitty alarm would ring and she’d wake up in her soft, cozy bed. Dad would have left for work by now, planting a goodbye kiss on her sleeping forehead as he did every morning since she was little. Mom would be already making her her favorite congee rice and youtiao for breakfast. Then she would begin the process of packing up her room for the big move to Oregon like a good girl.

Yes, she would even happily do that. Anything to bring an end to this ordeal!

Shhhh

Her train of thought screeched to a sudden halt.

Marcy

It’s gonna be okay

And just like that, as if those were the five magic words required, everything was fine again. No more panic, no more existential terror. Her heart rate lowered to a steady, non-life threatening level.

The tide had risen up and washed Marcy’s mind clean.

Like a nice blank canvas.

What quickly followed was an epiphany of sorts.

There was nothing for her to fear. Once she accepted that fact, the warm sensation from before returned greater than ever, engulfing her in what could only be described as a spiritual hug. She could feel the pair of hands, tender as her own mother’s, caressing her face and flicking away her tears. They even ruffled her raven hair in the same playful manner.

Come to me, daughter of Wu

Let me get a good look at you

Marcy obeyed. Getting down on all fours, she crawled across the nonexistent ground—the laws of physics evidently had no place here—until her face and the eyes’ chief pupil were within inches of each other.

Fresh tears, now ones of ecstasy, trickled down her cheeks and evaporated in the pulsating heat.

“You’re beautiful.”

I know

We’ve gotta lot to talk about, Marcy

And I have a feeling...

You and I are gonna become the best of friends

[sserpente]

A/N: Random idea. Very fluffy. A little awkward… probably what would actually happen if you took Loki to a thermal bath spa when you are seriously crushing on him… enjoy! ;-)

Words: 4087 Warnings: a lot of fluff, sexual themes, implied smut

Birthdays were special—or at least, they should be. For the last decade, however, your own reflection in the mirror had been the only one wishing you a happy birthday. You had grown used to it. Loneliness was not so bad once you learned how to deal with the ache in your heart. But perhaps this year could be different, even though by now, you avoided telling the people in your life about your date of birth.

You had joined the Avengers a little over eight months now—and even though they were all nice and kind, there was only one other person you truly connected with. Loki. The man who had, only a few years ago, attempted to subjugate the entire planet. You shook your head quickly. It had not been his fault, not entirely. He had suffered under Thanos’ torments as much as you had been suffering under your loneliness. He was lonely too. Thor was his brother but he was no longer a friend, not really. The distance between them, albeit not physical, felt heart-breaking to even watch.

Surely, Loki would not be opposed to joining you in the thermal bath spa today. You intended to treat yourself, clandestinely and quietly, for your birthday. Having Loki with you—the man you could not only spend countless sleepless nights with talking about life, desires and fears but also caused your reoccurring and uncontrollable wet dreams. Seeing him shirtless for almost an entire day would put the cherry on top of your imaginary birthday cake.

Cautiously, you knocked on his door, your bag already packed. You would not need more than a book to relax with, some snacks (some of which were healthier than others), a towel and another bikini to change into, especially since the exclusive sauna was a no-clothing area anyway. Oh… if you got Loki to join you there…

“Yes…?” Loki’s disinterested face practically lit up when he realised it was you who had knocked. Smiling, you squeezed yourself through the gap.

“Hi.”

“Good morning.” He frowned, eyeing your bag. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I am, and I was wondering if you would like to join me. I’m heading to a local thermal bath spa to relax a little. You know… whirlpools, saunas, massages…”

Intrigued, he leaned forward. He remembered receiving positively amazing massages from Asgardian therapists in the palace when he was younger. They had worked wonders on his exhausted muscles after his training with Thor.

“Who else is coming?” He asked.

“No one. Just you and me.”

The God of Mischief smirked. “Very well.”

-

It had taken him time to warm up to you, and he had not just once questioned your intentions and sincerity. It warmed your heart, seeing him blithe, cheeky and curious now whenever the two of you were together. It almost felt like catching glimpses of his old, light-hearted self—before he had found out he was a Frost Giant; and that his whole life had been but a lie.

Loki had a good heart—he merely protected it well.

“Are you telling me we are going to share these pools with other people?!” He exclaimed in a downright horrified manner as you walked past the first swimming area to the reception.

“Oh… yes.” You giggled. “I’m afraid so, the spa is open for other customers too, after all. I’ve booked a booth all for myself… so we’ll have as much privacy as possible, alright? Hi!” You smiled at the receptionist who gave you a court nod.

“I’ve made a reservation, the name is (Y/L/N).”

“Oh yes, Ms (Y/L/N), you’re right on time. Please, let me escort you and your partner to your booth. Inside, you’ll find our welcome package, including champagne and the hot chocolate for your massage. If you need anything else, you can pay with your bracelets which will also give you access to our sauna world. Any purchases made will be added to your bill when you check out, other than that… we’re happy to help if you are experiencing any problems.” The words bubbled from her mouth like the gushing waterfall in the whirlpool area.

“Oh, uh, yes, thank you.” You stuttered. You blinked, blushing furiously. Loki spoke up as soon as she was gone and left you to change into your complementary bathrobes.

“Hot chocolate… for our massage?”

“Um… yeah… the package I booked to get this booth is intended for couples, usually.” You had almost forgotten about that when you decided to invite Loki this morning… Well, at least, the booth was nice. Opaque and dimly lit, it reminded you of an indoor-tipi. Inside, a giant round mattress took most of the space, along with a small table with, like the receptionist had promised, the hot chocolate and a bottle of champagne with two glasses.

“Ah. I see.”

Your heart skipped a beat, no, several at once, when Loki’s blue gaze met yours. If only he knew about your wet dreams… with a sigh, you undressed until all there was left was your bikini. You truly couldn’t wait to dive into the whirlpool first thing before your massage appointments, but what you were looking forward to even more was spending an entire day with Loki completely shirtless.

You gulped, quietly, when he followed your example. Quite hilariously, he had been rather unfamiliar with the concept of swimwear. On Asgard, nudity was rarely frowned upon when it came to bathing, whether it was a giant bathtub or a lake—still, Loki had always had the privilege of complete privacy as a prince, so he had told you.

He had refused to borrow one of Tony’s bathing trunks and instead opted for magic. Now, all he was left wearing were a pair of black swimming trunks with green and gold accents, complimenting his pale, yet well-defined and muscly chest.

“Do you like what you are seeing, my dear?” Blinking, you cleared your throat, quickly looking away. You blushed again, causing the God of Mischief to chuckle to himself. He truly was a tease. By now, you had learned this much—Loki was constantly torn between his smugness and confidence because of his physical superiority over you and his own shyness and insecurities whispering to him that as a Jötun, who would ever find him attractive compared to the mighty Thor?

You longed to prove him a lot more often he was indeed a lot more handsome than the Thunderer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You said finally, his cheeky grin growing even wider when you grabbed a towel and headed for the whirlpools. Loki followed you amused.

-

“Loki…?”

“Yes, my dear?”

You had been watching him, secretly of course, for the past twenty minutes now. How his muscles danced when he leaned back and closed his eyes, arms spread on the edge of the whirlpool and his Adam’s apple moving slightly when he swallowed… his wet body shimmering in the dim light of the spa… focus.

“Is there a reason nobody else is willing to join us in this particular whirlpool?” He really liked this one. For the past hour, you had been trying them all out. You could tell he preferred those with lower water temperatures. Oddly, however, other customers practically seemed to avoid the pool. Granted, some of them might have recognised him… but surely not all of them.

“I would never…” He teased, opening one eye and glaring at you mischievously. You grinned, shaking your head. For Heaven’s sake, you would only love to swim over to him and sit on his lap, find out what it would feel like to straddle him and to explore his muscles with your wet palms… but you would probably freak him out if you did. Loki had never indicated he had a romantic, let alone sexual interest in you. Your wet dreams would most likely remain just that—dreams. Wishful thinking. You sighed, taking a peek at the huge clock on the wall.

“We have one and half more hours until our massages. I’m gonna dry off and head to the sauna for a bit but you can stay here if you like.”

“No,” he replied quickly. “I will join you.”

You climbed out of the whirlpool with a smile, your body, instead of freezing, growing hot as soon as you heaved yourself out of the water. The cool air should have made you shiver, yet you felt your back burning. Loki was watching you, you were sure of it. Intently.

You returned to your private booth to put on your bathrobe, with Loki following you suit. It was nice and warm inside, perfect for a short break.

“Ugh, stupid hair…” Grumbling to yourself, you struggled to make your wet ponytail presentable again. The God of Mischief chuckled and raised an eyebrow, a cheeky smirk tugging at his lips.

“Come.” He said, reaching out for you. Blinking, and ignoring your rapid heartbeat, you obeyed. He made you turn around so you were sitting between his legs, holding onto his thigh for support. You had expected so much out of this spa visit with Loki… but not that you would become so aroused throughout the day. This man could be breathing peacefully and it would make you horny. For Heaven’s sake…

You almost purred when he suddenly ran his long fingers through your wet streaks to untangle it a little. He removed the hair tie easily and soon began to part your hair in three. Before you even realised what he was doing, he was already braiding it neatly.

“You… wow. Thank you. How do you know how to do that?” And how do I get you to do this more often? His fingers had felt wonderfully in your hair and on your scalp. You could only imagine him pampering other parts of your body…

“I used to do it for my mother as a child. I always came to hide with her in her dressing room. It somehow calmed me down whenever Thor and his friends… never mind.”

Turn around, a seductive voice in your head screamed. Turn around and kiss him, now! But you did no such thing. Instead, you darted away from him as if stung by an adder, much to his surprise.

“S-sauna.” You said quickly. “ Loki nodded, eyes, however, widening fast when you started taking off your bikini under the bathrobe.

“What are you doing now?”

“Uh, there are no clothes allowed in the sauna.” You mumbled in response, curious about how he would react.

Gosh, ever since your arrival, you were torn between seduce him and pounce on him and run away screaming. You just couldn’t decide… in fact… in fact you wished he would just pull you on his lap and kiss you senseless.

“You mean to run around naked? Among strange men?” He countered as he approached you slowly. He looked good in that white bathrobe, it complemented his wet raven hair… argh, focus! Loki sounded almost… possessive. A sign? Would he kiss you? Pretty please with a cherry on top? Perhaps you should just tell him it was your birthday and ask for a proper kiss as your birthday gift.

“I do it all the time, Loki. No one cares about the nudity in there. Besides, it’s rather dark in the cabins. I understand if you don’t want to do it though, you don’t have to come with me, I can—”

The God of Mischief snorted. “I am not letting you go there alone.”

You paused, mid-sentence, a smile tugging at your lips. Now you couldn’t just kiss him but at least, you could hug him. Loki always acted like he hated the physical affection you often showered him with but in that aspect, he was a bad liar. A sigh escaped his lips when he reciprocated your hug and wrapped his arms around your body. It was so tiny compared to his, the urge to protect growing within him like an ancient, primal need. Mine… he blinked.

Oh no, you were a mortal. He would not make the same mistake as his brother and fall for a woman who would die centuries before him.

“Let us go.” He had not told you yet but he was not overly fond of saunas. He was familiar with the concept, of course—steam baths and alike—but had usually avoided them back on Asgard. It wasn’t until he had found out he was a Frost Giant that he realised why he despised the heat so much and yet… he was willing to sweat with discomfort just so he could see your half-naked, no, all naked body all wet and warm and… Loki cleared his throat and let go of you like a piece of blistering firewood. Mutely, he followed you to the sauna world and used his bracelet to get inside.

He already longed to snap the necks of the men turning around to glare at you hungrily when you both entered, his left hand jerking slightly as he almost brought it to the small of your back to show them you were taken. They glanced away again quickly, realising Loki was not to be meddled with.

As soon as the two of you had disappeared into one of the cabins—an empty one, much to his relief—he flicked his wrist. A green, barely visible shimmer of light surrounded the opaque door. No one else would get to explore your naked body with their eyes now—only him.

Only then did he start to feel the gravity of the heat around him. It enveloped him, slowed him down… he took a deep, disgusted breath.

-

You shouldn’t be shy. Fuck it. Drop your towel. So you did, avoiding Loki’s heated gaze on you as you did and sat down. While part of you meant to lean back and present your breasts to him temptingly, another wanted you to cover yourself up again this instant. You looked up and…

Loki’s lips were parted. He didn’t even think about removing the towel around his hips. Instead, his greedy gaze wandered up and down your body, slowly and intimately. You gulped. It took him a moment to pick himself up.

Then, finally, he slowly removed his own towel, revealing the sight of his member. You swallowed thickly. He was big. Bigger than the average man, even in his soft state. Loki sat down next to you, another mischievous smirk playing on his lips. He knew. He bloody knew. He must have… right?

With any other Avengers, this situation would have been super awkward and strange but with Loki… it was peaceful. Neither of you felt ashamed to be naked around the other, no sounds disrupting the silence. The heat felt amazing, sweating all negative energy from your system even better. There was only the steam hissing in the background, the rapid beating of your own heart and Loki, panting frantically. Panting?

“Loki? Are you okay?”

“I feel fine.” He lied. You flinched when you looked over to him. Loki was blue, his eyes glowing red in the dimly lit sauna and his bare chest decorated with dozens of ridges you longed to trace with your fingertips.

“You’re blue!”

Taken aback, the God of Mischief gazed down at himself, jumping up as if stung by an adder as soon as he realised.

“A-are you okay?”

“Fine,” he choked out. You barely had a chance to reply before he stormed out of the sauna.

“Loki! Loki, wait!” Grabbing your towel before you could dart after him, you clumsily wrapped it around your body to cover yourself up. Loki had disappeared into the shower room.

He glared at you from the corner of his eye when he saw you approaching him slowly—ignoring the other naked man taking a shower as cool as you please. The pattering of the water onto the wet files echoing through the room pierced your ears the closer you came but you barely even registered it. Loki was leaning against the wall, palms pressed flatly against it. He looked normal again. Not blue.

“You were not supposed to see that.” He growled quietly. Hesitatingly, you put one of your hands on his shoulder blade. He had no idea how this could have even happened. His body reacted to the cold. To objects of Jötun origin, not to heat and hot air. It must have been a defence mechanism to cope with the sudden temperature change…

“It doesn’t matter, Loki. I knew about… well.”

“You knew I am a monster? A wolf in sheep’s clothing?” He snapped bitterly.

“I knew you were a Frost Giant. You’re not a monster. You haven’t eaten me yet, have you?” You joked, waiting for him to reply. When he said nothing, you took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Loki, I didn’t think the heat would do… this. Are you… are you sure you’re okay? I don’t want to spend the rest of my birthday in the hospital.” Even though you were fairly certain a regular hospital could barely help the God of Mischief. You should have considered his race when suggesting the sauna. Why, for Heaven’s sake, hadn’t he refused to come with you? To… protect you, maybe? From other, greedy men? Your pussy clenched at the mere thought of it.

“What did you just say?”

“W-what? Nothing.” Shit.

“Your birthday. You said it was your birthday.”

Defeated, you gave him a court nod and shrugged innocently. “It… it is. That’s why I wanted to come here today, relax a little… and spend time with you. Let’s just… go back to our booth and forget this happened, alright?”

She is not afraid of you. She does not hate you. She is not disgusted. The thoughts tumbled through Loki’s head like a house of twigs collapsing in on itself. She wants to spend her birthday with you.

He nodded mutely, for once at loss for words, and followed you. He had sworn to himself to not make the same mistake as his brother, besides, a mortal was no match for him… right? How soon, however, would he once again find someone who liked his company simply for the sake of it? Someone who would spend their most important day with him of all people? Someone who did not despise his true nature? Perhaps… perhaps, he should reconsider.

Hungry for a snack to stifle the shock, you reached into your bag to retrieve a package of marshmallows once you were back in your private booth. It was your birthday, after all. You could have some additional calories today if you weren’t going to get any cake. Apart from that, you needed something to munch on, even after admiring Loki’s backside… and his very impressive manhood. You wondered, briefly, if his cock was covered in ridges too when he was in his Jötun form… and how they would feel inside of you. You should have looked down when you had the chance. Licking your lips with a hum in a weak attempt to distract yourself from your naughty thoughts, you ripped open the package and fished one of the marshmallows out.

In the meantime, Loki opened the champagne bottle and poured you both a glass.

“And what is that supposed to be?” He said as he handed you one of them.

“Marshmallows? You’ve never had marshmallows before?”

“No…” He responded slowly, rather suspicious towards the white sugar clumps.

“They’re sweet and soft and… here.” Unceremoniously, you dipped it into the hot chocolate. It shouldn’t go to waste, now should it? “Eat.”

Loki obeyed, still in doubt but he soon hummed in approval when he let it disappear in his mouth. “Delicious… Tell me, what was that hot chocolate intended for, initially?” He asked curiously when he had swallowed, nodding at it before taking a sip of his champagne.

“Um… well…”

Impatiently, he raised an eyebrow.

“It’s for, uh, couple massages. You know… you’re supposed to use the chocolate for… as…”

“Massage oil?” He finished your sentence with a nod. His blue eyes locked with yours, making your heart pound in your chest. By the Norns, he should have read the signs earlier. The way you looked at him—both shyly and provocatively at the same time… the way your breath caught in your lungs whenever he touched you, even if it was in the most innocent and decent way possible. You made him laugh, too. It had been a while since he had laughed, from all his heart.

“Hmm, I see. Well, perhaps you were wrong, my dear.” He mused and put his glass away, making his decision there and then. “Perhaps I will eat you after all.”

He smirked—maliciously at that when your eyes widened and he crawled up to you on the huge mattress, right until he towered above you. Unceremoniously, he reached for the hot chocolate and inhaled deeply. The scent was infatuating—Loki’s hungry glare, however, even more so.

“L-Loki… what are you doing?”

His lips parted, one of his hands reaching up to caress your cheek. You shivered, desire and affection rippling through you. What was happening here?

You couldn’t help it. Your eyes wandered down to his lips. What would it feel like to press your lips against his? What would it feel like… oh. He was kissing you. A moan escaped your throat when his mouth came crashing down on yours, kissing you gently at first and then, devouring your lips like his last meal. Your languishing glance, so it seemed, was all the invitation he had needed. Loki’s hands set your body on fire, exploring every inch of your skin, stroking your neck, your arms, your chest…

You squealed when he undid the messy knot you had tied into your towel, leaving you completely exposed beneath him. Once more, his blue eyes appeared to ravish you whole. Then, suddenly, you both witnessed and felt him pouring the warm chocolate over your chest and breasts, your already hardening nipples reacting to the sweet liquid immediately. Oh my… God…

You couldn’t have imagined it to be like this in your wildest dreams. Goose bumps lingered wherever his fingertips ghosted over your body, the droplets of chocolate tickling where they trailed down your sides, threatening to stain the mattress. Your breath was trembling from desire by the time Loki lowered his head to your body and finally released your now swollen lips, instead tending to the warm and sweet mess he had created on your upper body. His tongue darted out as he hummed in joyful anticipation, patiently licking you clean.

Your back arched, hips bucking up towards him and grazing his crotch. It was him who moaned this time, his free hand, for he propped himself up with the other, fondling one of your breasts. You wanted more. Oh, you wanted so much more. But not here. This booth was private but at the end of the day you were still in public. At home, back at the compound… if that was what he wanted too. Don’t be a fool… of course he wants it too, the horny voice inside your head complained.

“Hmm… this tastes much better than those marshmallows…” He purred. You whimpered when he sucked one of your hard nipples into his mouth and tenderly nibbled on it. The attention made you clench your legs. Betraying arousal was pooling in your centre, drenching your bikini bottoms. If he didn’t stop now…

“W-we’re going to miss our m-massages, Loki…” You attempted weakly.

Loki chuckled darkly. “Something tells me you wouldn’t very much mind that, my sweet.” My sweet… if you hadn’t been lying down, your knees would have given in now at the very latest. Loki had a lot of explaining to do, and so did you. You had pounced on one another like wolves in heat, like sex-starved beasts… but not now. For the time being, you would simply enjoy having broken the thin layer of ice remaining between you. “You are right, of course.” He added then. “I want to be the only one to hear you screaming my name…” Another low chuckle rumbled through his voice chords, sending pleasant shivers up and down your spine. Reluctantly, he released you and let you catch your breath. Naked, you sat up, eyeing him with a shy smile which Loki reciprocated. This spa day escalated quickly, you thought, giggling to yourself. Not that you were to complain.

He winked. “Happy Birthday, (Y/N).”

-

A/N: Check out my blog to find more Imagines and take a glimpse at my  first (to be) published novel! If you enjoyed this story, I would  appreciate so much if you supported me on Kofi! ko-fi.com/sserpente ♥

[amphtaminedreams]

COVID-19, Negligent Manslaughter, and a Timeline of Tory Indifference

“I feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He is doing the best he can in the situation and I don’t think anybody else could have done a better job.”

[exhibit A: a gem somebody that I’m Facebook friends with reposted earlier]

It’s a sentiment that I cannot quite wrap my head around. I sit here hopeless and furious and trying to hold back tears because it’s been almost a year since England first went into lockdown and yet here we are, almost 100,000 dead, in an even worse position than we were before whilst other countries begin to slowly return to normality. It is clear to me who is to blame for this, however there are a large proportion of people who don’t want to “politicise” the actions of the PRIME MINISTER with regards to his approach towards handling a virus sweeping the country he GOVERNS. 

Typically, these kind of posts making the rounds on social media will be accompanied by some kind of photo of Boris Johnson looking somber as if to suggest that the way things have played out were beyond his control and that he is some kind of broken man beleaguered by the suffering he has, despite good intentions, inadvertently caused.

This one in particular of Johnson with his head in his hands is a staple. In reality, this is a photo taken back in 2018 whilst he was receiving flack from party members for comparing Theresa May to a suicide bomber (for her handling of Brexit, ironically) as well as from the papers due to his rumoured (now also proven, in a completely non-surprising turn of events, to be true) affair with his former aide, Carrie Symonds. 

So let’s shut this narrative-where we should feel for Boris because he’s doing his best, and apparently a better job than anybody else could’ve done in his situation- down right here. In a supposedly developed country with one of the world’s largest economies, if we’re talking by proportion, our COVID-19 death toll is up there with the worst of them. It seems that every other state figurehead (bar a small handful), and I mean almost every single one of them, is doing a better job. People love to throw figures out there about how densely populated we are to combat damning statistics as if we haven’t got just as many factors playing to our advantage, as if it’s unfair to compare our response to Germany’s or Japan’s or Singapore’s (both of which are far more densely populated) or New Zealand’s or Vietnam’s, but we are an ISLAND with world-leading technology and infrastructure and healthcare equipment and professionals and a relatively high standard of living. In what world is almost 70,000 dead in a country with abundant time and means to prepare a response reflective of said country’s leaders doing a good job?

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Johnson feels some sense of moral responsibility for this astronomical failure. A man who refuses to acknowledge the multiple children he has fathered outside of his marriages and who has had repeatedly engaged in affairs and one-night stands throughout said marriages. A man who continued to cheat whilst his most recent wife was receiving treatment for cervical cancer, for fuck’s sake. Yep, a real stand-up guy. 

So where does this idea that Johnson must feel remorseful for this catastrophe come from? We haven’t seen a second of remorse or a hint of accountability for the lives lost from him nor any members of his cabinet. That much is really no surprise; I have this hypothesis, and it’s not a stretch, that these people do not have an ounce of empathy in their bodies. These ridiculously privileged, privately-educated individuals who have had everything handed to them their entire lives simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of the average working person and that is the problem. Unable to recognise that what distinguishes them from most others is little more than the luck of being born into wealth and the abundance of recourses and connections that has entailed throughout their lives, they see us as beneath them-as less intelligent, less driven, and thus less deserving of the status and respect they enjoy. They see us as a bunch of whining, unmotivated idiots who do not recognise the chokehold they have over our media nor the fact that everything they do is a desperate grab to keep money and power within the hands of a select group of people, an exclusive members club from which most of us are barred (just take a simple Google search and watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opinion of the Grenfell victims or the buried Johnson speech where he talks about how inequality is essential). They know that we will squabble amongst ourselves about who is to blame rather than wising up to the truth which is that every decision they make is fuelled by cronyism and the inability to make and follow through with difficult choices, the pandemic being no exception. The supposedly self-made elite see the life of the average working class person as having far less value than their own, and their parties actions over the last 10 years have made that very clear. 

It was in December 2019 that the first case of COVID-19 was declared to the World Health Organisation and on March the 11th that they announced they considered it as a pandemic. In Wuhan, people were dying of pneumonia in their clusters. And what was Boris Johnson doing in this time? Well for starters, here in the UK we didn’t even have a pandemic committee-Johnson had scrapped it six months before. If years of benefits cuts and defunding of the NHS in favour of funding nuclear weapon programs, keeping British troops on other people’s lands, and tax breaks for the mega corporations that donate to their party didn’t convince you that the Conservatives have little regard for human life, them getting rid of this committee-whilst a pandemic has been declared year after year as the greatest threat to mankind-should have been the first sign of trouble. As if that wasn’t enough, he also skipped five of the COBRA (meetings are made up of a cross-departmental committee put together to respond to national emergencies and PMs routinely attend those pertaining to crises on the scale of COVID-19) meetings addressing the situation. Whilst other countries were closing their borders and stocking up on PPE, Johnson and his ministers were selling PPE abroad and simply telling people to wash their hands to the length of the tune of happy birthday. Their only policy was one of “herd immunity”, which was in fact not a policy but just an abandonment of their party’s public duty disguised as one, intentionally obfuscated with pseudoscientific jargon.

Even thinking the absolute worst of politicians you would hope that when it came to the point where the UK’s non-response to COVID-19 was becoming an international disgrace, Johnson and his ministers would take proper protective measures if only to save face. But when they eventually seemed to do so, it became clear that the priority was not the safety of the ordinary people affected by the virus. Outsourcing their test and traces system to companies such as Serco, Sitel, Deloitte and G4S rather than public health services, Conservative ministers could not resist attempting to line the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the process. According to the Guardian, instead of reaching out to the experts or using publicly funded services to handle COVID containment measures, the Conservative party has awarded a disgusting £1.5 BILLION WORTH of contracts to businesses with explicit connections to its MPs and donors, the majority of which lack any relative experience of the tasks they’ve been trusted to carry out. Unsurprisingly, the National Audit office found that when awarding contracts relating to the production of COVID-19 protection measures and treatment needs, there was a “high-priority lane” for suppliers referred by senior politicians and officials; companies with a political referral were 10 times more likely to end up winning a government contract than those without. On top of this, it is not hard to draw a link between the late initiation of lockdown measures and preemptive openings of pubs and restaurants against scientific advice to the interests of frequent donors such as Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin. Even if one chooses to ignore the blatantly obvious correlation between the owners of the businesses whose profits were prioritised over safety concerns and the number of those owners who donate to the Conservatives, party officials at the very least were reluctant to follow the lead of many other countries in financing furlough schemes themselves and instead avoided this responsibility by using loose lockdown measures to leave it down to the discretion of small business owners, who couldn’t themselves afford to furlough staff, whether or not to stay open. 

Time and time again, as the government flounder and fuck about, favouring personal desires to keep their powerful, high-paying jobs and to satisfy the corporate allies who make this possible, blame has been shifted from the public to care homes to NHS workers and back again whilst we, the public, make the biggest sacrifices of all under the illusion that we were being guided out of this pandemic rather than lied to and thrown under the bus. Whilst the elite continue to pick and choose what rules apply to them, it’s students and the elderly and the vulnerable paying the fines and scrabbling to afford basic living costs and hoping that they don’t lose someone dear to them.

Don’t get me wrong, a large proportion of the public have contributed to the spread too with their selfishness and entitlement and the arrogance it takes to develop a sudden refusal to acknowledge basic science from experts who have studied in the field their whole lives so that they can justify their need to go to the pub (speaking of, it’s absolutely HILARIOUS how many “mental health advocates” are suddenly coming out of the woodworks on football avi Twitter after they’ve spent years calling people on mental health Twitter attention seekers). And don't get me wrong, there were inevitably going to be casualties of this pandemic. But it didn't have to spread to this many people, and there didn’t have to be so many deaths due to a lack of preparation, and this wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inherent apathy of the Conservative party towards the lives of people of lesser status than them, the reluctance to put those lives before party interests. I wish I felt like there was an end in sight, I wish there was some positive takeaway from all of this, but even now, we continue to see corners being cut with the vaccine lauded as our saving grace and anti-maskers gathering outside hospitals to chant about how “oppressive” it is to be urged to wear a bit of cloth over their faces for the short periods of time in which they leave their houses and all I can think of is the selfishness that runs like poison through our country. It makes me sick and leaves me to question desperately where we go from here. I don’t like unanswered questions, I don’t like feeling politically directionless, and I don’t like the growing fear I have about the state of the world which seems to intensify every single day. In the UK at least, it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever change-we’re told we live in a democracy and yet mainstream media is owned by the people whose interest is to keep their Conservative friends in power. The stronghold they have over print media in particular allows them to continually get away with smearing and defaming every person who comes along and seems to want to actually help ordinary people, without being challenged, to the point where the only kind of “opposition” we’re left with promises nothing but a big boss approved tactical reshuffling of the status quo (which they call “electability”); it doesn’t feel like democracy when the majority of the country are being fed misleading information and convinced against voting in their best interests. 

This is the result of that. The state we find ourselves in is the inevitable result of being manipulated into helping the elite build their protective wall whilst the rest of us scrabble to get in and step on each others heads along the way, the people inside shouting over that it’s those even more vulnerable than ourselves that are taking our places. Outside the wall, the earth is falling from beneath our feet, and instead of throwing over the ropes to help us out, the people inside are stockpiling them so they can secure their firm place above ground and then later flog the rest. How many more people have to die before we reach some kind of widespread realisation of that? Where do we go from here and what do we do? Well for one, we can stop spreading those god-fucking-awful textposts on Facebook and get our heads out of our arses. Wear our masks over and wear them over our fucking noses. Have some fucking consideration for others. Don’t wait til an issue affects you personally to give a fuck about it. AND START HOLDING THE FUCKING PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MINISTERS AND HIS ENTIRE PARTY AS WELL AS THE OPPOSITION MPS THAT HAVE SAT BY THE SIDELINES AND ALLOWED THIS TO GO ON WITHOUT PROTEST ACCOUNTABLE. That would be a good start. 

I’m so tired. Things didn’t need to be this way, and yet because of the selfishness of the few, thousands upon thousands are dead. It’s not about “throwing around blame”, it’s not about “throwing around” anything, it’s about expecting a leader to do his best to protect lives. If that is “throwing blame”, let’s get things clear, I have no issue with hurtling it torpedo style at those who handed out a death sentence to so many in this country rather than do anything that might compromise their own privilege. Honestly, pass me the shovel after and I’ll happily bury the wreckage in the ground. Who wants to join?:-)

[wonderofasunrise]

About a Long Night

A/N: Naturally, I’ve been writing some ER fics on my own, and I managed to actually finish one yesterday. After a few tweaks here and there, I thought I’d post it here because...why not?

Inspired by @bwayfan25​, whose brilliant ER fics on AO3 made me real hot for Susan/Kerry and prompted me to start writing fanfiction again. Among other things, it’s a great exercise and wonderful way to relax.

Hope you enjoy, and fingers crossed I can share some more writing stuff here in the future. Reviews/ideas are welcome!

Disclaimer: These characters are, sadly, not mine. But a girl can dream, can’t she?

Featuring an excerpt from the song “Lost” by Dermot Kennedy, who I’ve been listening to a lot lately.

-----

For fear of moments stolen I don’t wanna say goodnight But I’ll still see you in the morning Still know your heart and still know both your eyes

***

“How long have you been awake?”

Kerry starts to rub her eyes, unable to contain her mild annoyance upon realising that the person whom she shares her bed with has been watching her sleep. Their room is dark with only a faint ray of light barely piercing through the window, but even without her glasses on she can easily recognise the pair of big green eyes staring at her, along with the smile that accompanies them.

“Long enough,” Susan smirks.

She is lying on her side, her head propped up on one of her hands—her favourite position every time she gets a chance to watch Kerry in slumber. Susan makes it no secret to Kerry that she finds the sight of her lover sleeping comforting, to which Kerry, in her typical defensive way, first responded by accusing Susan of wanting to see her at the most vulnerable.

Over time, however, Kerry has gotten used to it, to the point that there is nothing she looks forward to more than seeing Susan’s bright eyes and smile first thing in the morning—when their schedules allow them to spend the morning together, that is.

“You’re on at seven in the morning, Dr Lewis. Don’t push your luck,” Kerry tries (and fails) to emulate her Chief of Emergency Medicine voice, which comes as no surprise seeing that she has one of her eyes closed and her body relaxed against the comfort of her queen-size bed. Susan confirms it by sticking her tongue out in response.

“I’m not Dr Lewis,” she says in a mocking tone. “And neither are you Dr Weaver. We’re not in the ER, we’re home, and we’re just...us. Is my irresistible charm not enough to remind you?”

“Susan,” Kerry groans, her annoyance growing ever so slightly by the second. “You and I both know we need all the rest we can take. I had a long day, which I’m sure you’ve heard about, and chances are you’ll have one yourself in a few hours. Come on.”

But Susan is undeterred, and instead she gently pulls Kerry into an embrace and lets her head rest against her pillow, moving closer to ensure that their heads meet. Kerry can now feel Susan breathing against her skin, Susan’s hand wrapped around her body with only the fabric of her pajama top between their skins. Kerry half-expects Susan to kiss her neck and cause her to blush in the process, but instead Susan just rests her head against Kerry’s shoulder while inhaling the familiar scent of the latter before letting out a sigh.

“Do you know why I like watching you sleep very much?” Susan murmurs, her tone suddenly serious. “And it’s not because I like to prey on you when you’re vulnerable, although you gotta admit that would be pretty hot.”

“Because you get off on getting on my nerves,” Kerry states matter-of-factly. Both of her eyes are now closed, as if it somehow would convince Susan that they really should be sleeping instead of talking, but Kerry knows better and mentally prepares herself for a witty response.

“I’d rather get off on your other things, thank you very much. But seriously,” Susan retorts, “do you have any idea how different you look when you sleep? How...peaceful and relaxed you are? I swear sometimes I see you smirk in your sleep, and we both know that’s not something anyone would expect to see from you in public.”

“I’m not sure I have any idea as to how I look in my sleep, and I don’t think I’d want to know,” Kerry deadpans.

“You’re—you’re just you,” Susan happily ignores the remark. “You’re not an ER doctor, you’re not the Chief of Emergency Medicine, you’re just human—which I’m sure you’re aware that some people find debatable.”

Kerry is about to challenge that, but at this point she is just too tired and there is no way she can shut Susan up anyway, so she might as well let her be. All the while, Kerry lets her hand rest on top of Susan’s, her fingernails giving it a gentle scratch.

“I get worried sometimes, you know. That you don’t loosen up enough, that you’re content with people hating you and talking shit about you behind your back, because you deserve better than that. I think the world can do with knowing that you do have a heart, and not just in front of patients,” Susan muses, feeling Kerry squeezing her hand tighter now with each word.

“But then I feel lucky too, knowing your gentle side is reserved to those who deserve it. And you trust me enough to be one of those people. Heck, I’m the only person who gets to see you in pajamas and how cute you are when you’re cranky before having a cup of coffee in the morning.”

No longer feeling the urge to sleep, Kerry’s eyes are now wide open, staring at Susan’s as the latter shows no sign of ceasing her chatter. In turn, Susan, satisfied that she now has Kerry’s full attention, brings Kerry’s hand close to her face and places a soft kiss on it.

“When I—when we had our first date,” Susan continues, her smile growing even more at the word, “I remember you were getting tipsy after only one glass of wine, and you laughed so hard at something I said. I don’t even think it was that funny, but you laughed anyway and I just sat there, amazed. I never saw you laugh like that before. Granted, you had alcohol in your system, but the fact that you didn’t even try to conceal it said it all.”

Kerry chuckles as she recalls their first (proper) date, in which she inadvertently revealed to Susan that she was a lightweight, and she was surprised that she did not make any effort to conceal that. She was drinking and doing silly things as a result, but not once did she feel embarrassed. If anything, she was relieved that she could let herself loose up in front of someone she trusted completely, and she was beyond grateful that that someone was Susan.

There were no concerns about the possibility of being recognised by someone, nor were there misgivings about going public with their relationship—which Kerry normally has, ever since she started coming to terms with her sexuality. There were just the two of them, and the realisation that their feelings were manifesting into something more.

“It’s moments like that, and when you’re asleep that always remind me how lucky I am to see the real you. Sometimes I feel like keeping myself awake—even after pulling a double—simply because I don’t want to miss these moments when you’re just yourself. Because I want to always remember...how fortunate I am to be the one seeing you like this.” Susan can barely contain herself now, tears flowing down her face freely. She has to let it all out now, having expressed how privileged she feels to be with Kerry, to be the only one who witnesses her affectionate and loving side on a daily basis. To be the object of the said affection.

“Susan—baby, you’re crying,” Kerry raises her hand to wipe the tears away while sporting a concerned look. Susan, as if trying to tell Kerry to stop being concerned for nothing, laughs between her tears instead.

“I’m happy,” Susan takes a deep breath. “I—I never thought I’d say this, least of all when we first met, but I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time, and it’s all because of you.”

In many ways, as Kerry has learned, Susan is a fairly straightforward individual who only says what she means and means what she says, and coming from her those words feel like music to Kerry’s ears.

Unable to respond, having been rendered speechless at Susan’s sincerity and the way she expresses her feelings so candidly, Kerry simply kisses her on the lips, which Susan happily (and still tearfully) reciprocates.

“Me too,” Kerry says in a low tone that almost sounds like a whisper. “I’m the happiest I’ve been in years. With you.”

For a few minutes the two women stay silent—save for the soft sounds of Kerry’s breathing and Susan’s occasional sobs—as they lie still in bed, engulfed by the warmth of each other’s embrace. Time must have stopped for both of them, as for a time it feels like the stillness and warmth will never fade. As strange as this might sound, this is how Kerry always feels whenever she is with Susan: that the world around them stops as if conspiring to let the two be without anything in the way. There is no work, no hospital, nothing except Susan in front of her with her arms around her smaller body, and she knows Susan feels that way too.

“You know what will make me even happier?” Kerry smirks, and there is no mistaking the hint of mischief in her voice. “If you’ll get some rest, because God knows we really need it. And you know you don’t need to worry about missing any moment—I’m off tomorrow morning, and I’ll be right here when you wake up. First thing you see.”

Susan chuckles, pulling Kerry tighter into her embrace. She feels silly for admitting that she is worried about missing her favourite moments with Kerry, but she figures she can indulge herself in silliness once in a while. She is, after all, a woman in love.

“I love you,” Susan mumbles, her lips caressing Kerry’s shoulder blade. She has said this numerous times, and each time she knows that she always means it, and that it never gets lost on Kerry.

“I love you too,” Kerry kisses the top of Susan’s head and smiles at the sensation of Susan’s hair tickling her face. Similarly, each time she says the words she always ensures her sincerity comes across, which Susan never doubts.

Soon enough, the two fall asleep with their arms wrapped around each other, and again it feels almost as if everything around them stopped. There are just the two of them, sleeping peacefully without any care to anything or anyone else, and they know it is what they deserve.

All worries fading slowly, serenity begins to envelop Susan with the knowledge that she will see and hold Kerry first thing in the morning, all in a way that only Susan is privileged to witness, and that is enough for her to take on the world.

[fleursowl]

hey guys! some of you may not be able to acces the slytherin! remus fic on ao3 so here it is ♥︎

Remus

Remus Lupin was an unusual boy.

Well, no one bitten by a werewolf at a young age could really be considered ‘normal’ (not that there were a lot of werewolf children- they were usually quietly put down), but Remus’ parents, who were slightly more on the eccentric side, had rather helped contribute to this unusualness.

His father, an extremely academic and bright man, had always tried to squash his ambitions from a young age- Remus didn’t yet understand that he wouldn’t be able to achieve a lot of things others could. Positions in wizarding society were not exactly thrown at werewolves, whether they had excellent grades or not.

However, Remus, a young boy full of hope and wonder for the world despite his hardships, simply did not listen. In fact, this discouragement hardened his want, and he nursed a private longing to become Minister of Magic that no one knew about, except for his mother, of course. His exceptionally kind and caring main confidant, always privately disagreed with Remus’ father.

One day after Remus had run out of the room in tears when Lyall had told him he might not be able to go to Hogwarts, she slipped into his room and sat down next to him on his bed, slipping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him into her soft, warm body.

“Why campaign for change, when you can work to put yourself in the position that makes the changes, my little Moonshine? Don’t listen to your father- he’s just worried about you. He’ll see sense and come round soon enough.”

After all, Hope Lupin had high hopes for her son, so much that she decided to forgo sending him to primary and schooled him instead.

She taught him everything she knew, with extra help from Lyall on the wizardry side to help him get ahead on his Hogwarts studies. Hope spent many long nights reading any books around the house she could find, or that Lyall brought back for her on magic and its creatures, so she could teach Remus too.

All in all, Remus was extremely lucky. He had two parents who cared for him massively and would move heaven and high waters for him- which was rare even for normal boys, but add the fact that they had to deal with their only son transforming, against his will, into a werewolf every month and still loved him so much really added to their saintly status in Remus’ mind, especially his mother.

This all resulted in Remus stepping onto Platform 9 3/4 smarter than half of the rest of the first years put together, but without the ability to make friends and very, very sheltered against the outside world. He saw absolutely no shame in sobbing into his mother’s cotton shirt when it came time for him to leave, his father smoothing his hand over his hair soothingly. This resulted in a few sneers from older years, but Remus didn’t notice. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared- he was leaving behind his best and only friends.

However, Remus was strong- no one can go through excruciating pain once every month without having thick skin and a hardened heart. He was brimming with excitement at going to Hogwarts, meeting other people like him, and learning even more about this new and unfamiliar world he had just stepped into.

James

James Potter was a very sheltered and privileged boy. Growing up, he had never wanted for anything or had to work for it- it was just given to him. Regardless, Euphemia Potter had ensured that he was still polite, bright and extremely kind- if he was a bit of a prick, well, then he’d grow out of it eventually.

James swanned along the aisle of the train, practically trembling with excitement. His dad had told him countless stories about the amazing friends he’d made at Hogwarts, and James was extremely eager to follow in his footsteps. He spotted a fairly empty compartment with just a small, mousy haired boy sitting in it, and slipped inside, beaming at the boy and offering him his hand so enthusiastically he almost slapped him in the face.

“I’m James Potter, and I’m gunna be in Gryffindor? just like my dad.” he grinned, shaking the other boy’s hand heartily and practically ripping his arm from his socket.

The smaller boy squeaked, wide eyes looking at James in awe.

“I’m Peter- Peter Pettigrew. I… don’t know what house I’ll be in? Maybe, maybe Hufflepuff?” the boy stuttered, eyes widening even more when James scoffed, shaking his head.

“Nah mate, that’s a house for stoners and nancies.” he declared proudly, not knowing what either of these things were, but instead directly quoting his father teasing his mother over dinner. Peter let out a nervous laugh, nodding.

“Well, if you say so. So Gryffindor is the best house, then?” he asked, but before James could reply, another boy glided into the compartment.

“Hear, hear.” the boy drawled, a smirk tugging the corner of his lip. “Gryffindor for the win.”

Peter didn’t respond and had resorted to melting into his seat to get further away from the intimidating newcomer, but James turned to him with a brilliant grin.

“Finally, someone with sense. And you are?”

“Sirius… Sirius Black.” the boy said more shortly, and James felt his smile fall a little. Black. He recognised that name, and it seemed Peter did too, judging from his squeak of terror.

Sirius huffed, eyes darting between the two boys definitely, and he shook his head quickly. “I’m not like the rest of my family. I’m going to be in Gryffindor.” He said firmly, looking at the two other boys and daring them to disagree with him.

“Alright then, that’s good enough for me.” James said, his grin lighting his face up once again.

“James Potter. Soon-to-be Gryffindor. And this is Peter Pettigrew, he’s a bit shy.” James said, nodding at Peter in the corner. Sirius nodded, but before he could respond the boys were yet again disturbed by another. James looked at the newcomer curiously- he’d never seen anyone like him before. The boy was amber-eyed, with dozens of mysterious silver scars littering his exposed skin, a pink one running across the bridge of his nose.

Something about him just caught James’ eye, and as he sat down next to Sirius, James was struck with how similarly striking yet extremely different the boys looked next to each other.

“James?” Sirius prompted with a raised eyebrow, and James realised he had ignored Remus’ introduction while lost in his own thoughts.

“Oh, sorry mate, I’m James Potter.” he said, sticking his hand out. Remus’ hand felt oddly warm and calloused in his cool, soft one.

“What house do you think you’ll be in?” Peter squeaked out, but Sirius interrupted.

“Merlin, anything but Slytherin. I would rather die,” he said harshly, and James laughed.

“Agreed,” he said firmly, and Peter nodded along eagerly, but Remus stayed quiet.

“What’s wrong with Slytherin?” he asked, a frown on his face.

“Cause they’re all… the worst! My dad says every bad witch or wizard ever came from Slytherin.” James cried passionately. Sirius nodded gravely, a sardonic smile on his face.

“Can confirm that- my whole family has been in Slytherin. Patterns are reliable.”

“But- just because all the bad witches and wizards have been in Slytherin, doesn’t mean that every witch and wizard in Slytherin is going to be bad .” Remus reasoned wisely, though a little bewildered. “The house of Slytherin values being ambitious, which I think’s a good thing. I, for one, wanna become the Minister of Magic someday.” He declared proudly, his Welsh accent thick in his passionate speech.

The other boys sat and stared at him in shocked silence, their brains processing this new information. Luckily the trolley witch came knocking on their door before the silence could get awkward, and they spent the rest of the train journey trading stories about their first signs of magic and scoffing chocolate that James had insisted on buying for them all.

Remus

Hogwarts was better than anything Remus could’ve possibly hoped for.

It was better than the photos, the illustrations, the images he had conjured up in his imagination and dreamt about almost every night- it was the pure essence of magic, the very root of the word.

His breath was knocked from his lungs when the castle drew into sight, and he felt tears welling up in his eyes, overcome with emotion.

“Hey, you alright mate?” Peter asked, knocking him with his elbow. Remus wiped his eyes hurriedly with his cloak sleeve, nodding.

“Yeah. I’m fine, just got some wind in my eyes, is all.” Peter gave him a knowing look but said nothing more, which Remus greatly appreciated.

The sorting ceremony was nothing like any of them had ever seen. Remus had never seen so many people, and they were all confined into one glorious, magical place. His palms began to sweat slightly- he had never been a people person, and the thought of standing up in front of them all and taking the long walk to the stool made him want to throw up. He turned to the side and saw that Sirius was wearing a similar expression, and squeezed his hand slightly as his mother did to him to comfort him in public. Sirius jumped and turned to him in surprise, but before he could speak, his name was called by McGonagall, and he turned back to the front, swallowing nervously. Remus watched the pale boy walk shakily up to the stool, and held his breath along with the rest of the hall as he waited. And waited. Sirius’s face was screwed up in concentration as if he was having a conversation- or battle- with his conscience.

Eventually, the hat roared “Gryffindor!” and there was a moment of shocked silence, before James broke it by whooping loudly, clapping jovially, and the rest of the hall joined in. Remus watched Sirius’ expression as he glanced over to the Slytherin table on his way to the Gryffindors, and winced when he heard the jeers and hisses. Hopefully, his sorting wouldn’t be as dramatic.

After what seemed like an eternity, finally Remus’ name was called out. He walked up to the stool with trembling knees and clenched fists, sitting down on it heavily.

‘Oh, hello. It’s not every day I see one of you.’ A disembodied voice spoke, and Remus nearly fell off the chair.

‘Don’t worry, no one else can hear. Your secret is quite safe with me.’ The voice said again, which wasn’t exactly reassuring. Was Remus going mad?

‘Right then, let’s see. A very sharp mind, yes, full of wit and a keenness to learn. But also very kind, and loyal. And in addition to this, brave and daring! My my, you have a strong mind.’

‘Ummmm… thank you?’ Remus thought, a little bewildered.

‘But ah, what’s this? Minister of Magic, you say?’

Remus sat up a little straighter in excitement, nodding eagerly.

‘I’ll do anything to get there.’ he thought eagerly.

‘Well then, that settles it. Has to be…

“Slytherin!” the hat yelled, and Remus hopped off the stool. He wasn’t sure how long he had been on there, but it felt like ages. The Slytherin table eyed him speculatively, then burst into applause, accepting this scrawny, scared little boy into their midst. Remus hurried over gratefully, sitting down next to a girl he had seen on the train with a shy smile.

Eventually, James and Peter were both sorted into Gryffindor, which didn’t come as a surprise, but he was a little disappointed that the people he thought he’d be friends with had ended up in separate houses. Still, friendships could be formed in any circumstances, Remus thought firmly. He sat up a little straighter, craning over the crowd to try and spot them, and waved at James with a smile when he did.

James glanced at him and then looked back at his plate quickly, looking uncomfortable.

Sirius levelled him with a strong gaze, whispering something in James’ ear whilst still retaining eye contact with Remus, and the bespectacled boy snorted into his pumpkin juice, looking back over at Remus again.

Remus looked away with flushed cheeks, slouching in his seat and feeling humiliation and disappointment curdling in his stomach.

‘It doesn’t matter. You aren’t here to make friends, you’re here to learn, to gain knowledge, to gain power. To prove to everyone that you can achieve the impossible.’ Remus thought firmly, and pushed any thoughts of a brilliant friendship to the back of his mind.

It seemed Hogwarts would be a journey that he was going to have to take alone.

[shattersstar]

Do you know where I can find that email template to send to Lush?

Hi lovely so i found the template bc gia ford resposted on her instagram story but i cannot find the original post as it is no longer on her story either so! I am gonna copy and paste the email here with all the instructions on who to send to, photos and more BUT i would like to make it very, very clear that this is NOT my email, photos, idea, etc. I simply cannot find the original creator (and if someone does I would greatly appreciate being told so i can give them credit where its due) and still want the lush to be held accountable. It’s also quite long so I will undercut it.

Subject is: Black Lives Matter

The recipients are: wecare@lush.co.uk, lushpr@lush.co.uk, charitypot@lush.co.uk

The photos to attach (some of which are from the post as well) I will add at the bottom.

“ Dear Lush,

You have stated in a recent Instagram post that ‘Black Lives Matter’. As an customer I feel that this is an empty performative statement unless you commit to distributing your enormous wealth to supporting the Black Lives Matter campaign, and other Black-led organisations and funds. An example of a cosmetic company doing this is Glossier, who have committed to donating $500,000 to ‘organisations focused on combating racial injustice’. You have stated that you are donating through your charity pot scheme, but this is not enough in a desperate time of need. You have and will continue to profit off Black labour, both from material suppliers and your Black staff, who are in the minority. What are you doing to repay this labour and ensure that Black lives are not treated as disposable? Your statement does not go far enough to even begin rectifying the amount of strain that Black people have faced in our climate. You need to prioritise Black lives and welfare. In your UK statement, you said that ‘racism is woven unseen into the fabric of our society’. The metaphorical language used to discuss the very real consequences that race has on Black lives is not only trivialising but disrespectful. Slapping the message onto an image of fraying denim for emphasis only elevates the ignorance and superficiality of what you are putting across.

Lush CEO Mark Constantine has been posting on his Facebook about making lush donations to the police whilst we are witnessing extreme police brutality against Black people. He posted in support of the police one day after George Floyd was brutally murdered by police. This is not only happening in the US but in the UK too. The CEO of lush is actively supporting an institution which is directly harming Black people across the world. He has since continued to post on Facebook about the wonders of bird sounds, proving that he does not recognise the critical nature of the Black Lives Matter movement. Rather, it proves he is indifferent to Black oppression.

You have stated that you are going to release a charity product to raise funds for Black Lives Matter organisations, but why are you relying on customer funding to support this? I would like to see you match all profits made from the product as the minimum.

I would also like to know how you are committed to fighting racism and prioritising Black welfare throughout your company in the long term. Lush is a white-owned company and should be confronting white issues. A campaign should address and educate the public on white fragility and privilege so that Lush’s majority white consumers can acknowledge their societal positions and start taking accountability. You have stated that you are committed to listening to what you have done wrong regarding race and to correcting these mistakes. We need Black voices to be heard and prioritised, and feedback Lush receives must be taken seriously and acted upon. How will you ensure that Black people can speak out about experiences with racism amongst management/colleagues and customers without facing additional repercussions within Lush?

We know that Black people and people of colour are four times more likely to die from Covid-19. What is Lush doing to prioritise the safety of Black employees during the return to work period starting on the 15th of June? Mark Constantine also recently posted on his Facebook page that he has ‘decided that Covid 19 will disappear by August’ and that we should not ‘start on about all them negative second waves’. He is disregarding the fact that reopening shops would contribute to the possibility of a second wave. This would especially put his Black employees in danger. Meanwhile, he has mentioned in another post that he and co-founder Mo Constantine ‘are self isolating until the end of June’ because they are ‘average sixty something, diabetic etc’. This is white privilege. The furlough scheme is still available to protect employees, and they deserve to be prioritised just as much. We are also aware that Lush has expressed concerns about becoming financially bankrupt during the pandemic. With your focus being so heavily on financial worries, you put yourself at risk of moral bankruptcy by prioritising profit over people. Without Black labour, which is responsible for many staple ingredients for your products, Lush would become financially bankrupt anyway. You owe much of your financial profit and gain to Black lives.

If you believe that you truly are an ethical campaigning company, it is time to step up. You cannot support animal and environmental rights whilst not actively doing anything for the Black community. It took you an entire week to make the statement that you did. Silence is complicity, and it is unacceptable.

Signed,

[insert name] “

The photos to attach:

[secondfromtheright]

Fandom Racism

I’m not active on social media. But though I don’t use it, I do have this. I’m a terrible, unreliable tumblr user and I apologise for that (it took me way too many password tries to get back on here). I’d rather have been able to post something on my AO3 to any and all of my readers but my option is here instead.

I’m not a good person for this message – I am white, and I am not American. Seek black voices on this subject, please. I’m not tagging this because it’s really just aimed to anybody who already may still follow me on here. To use, but not overstep my lone social media platform. Because I can’t say nothing. I just can’t. You’ve all been so supportive and lovely to me in response to my fics and I’d like to think you’re all as decent in life to understand there are many things that we as white people do not and cannot understand regarding racism and that we need to do better.

So, this is aimed directly to my fandom readers – white fandom readers. From a white fandom writer. Some racism in fandom that I’m aware of, and I implore you all to become aware of too, if you aren’t already.

And again, please research black and brown voices on this matter. Voices that can speak to this so much more than mine, that can give better understanding, that can correct where I’m wrong, that can fill in what I’ve missed, that can communicate pain and hurt that I cannot know.

I get ‘ship and let ship’ and all, but there are major, glaring red flags that scream both personal and structural racism, conscious and unconscious, in fandom and ship conversation that should make you stop arguing, sit up and think about the shit you’re saying or reading.

This goes ten-fold for any fandom you are involved in that has a black love interest in canon that your ship and/or your fandom dismisses.

“They don’t have chemistry.”

Old ass racist trope that is about erasing romantic roles of people of colour. It perpetuates the idea that POC are not loveable, or desirable, especially to white people and especially in relationships (rather than just sex).

Anything that talks of black male characters as “evil” or “creepy” or “untrustworthy” or “weird” or “intimidating” or “aggressive” or “there’s just something I don’t like.”

It is continuing the 400+ year old bullshit premise that black men are dangerous – the ultimate justifying-white-fear-excuse to target and kill black man, then and now, because ‘they were a threat’.

When most of the ship verses ship debate is talk of tearing down a character of colour.

If someone is so confident in their white ship, why the need to tear down and hate another character? Keep it to your ship and only your ship. If the COC is a canonical love interest, especially one that existed before you started shipping your ship, question yourself and/or those shipping.

 Black female characters criticised as “irrational” or “angry” or “manly” or “slut.” Or, consistently praised only as “badass” or “fierce” or “strong” or “sassy.”

These are all major examples of misogynoir tropes that strip black women of their humanity, boxing them into one of numerous roles that do not allow them to be multifaceted, feeling people.

 ANY negative shit about black hair, especially natural, and especially of black female characters. 

Just fucking don’t. Don’t say it, don’t encourage it, seriously side-eye anyone doing it. Whites have no idea what that experience is, nor the effects of generations of products that only appeal to white consumerism and define whiteness as the definition of ‘beauty’. It a low, racist belittling of someone.

 When a character of colour has an insulting nickname within a fandom.

It dehumanises them. Actively and purposely. That simple. If you’ve never been involved or really aware of BLM protests or movement before, you must at least now recognise the chants of “Say their name.” Someone’s name matters, especially with history of slavery. Do not remove a black character’s name because you feel they threaten your ship. It reinforces white supremacy in even the most basic of society.

Any kind of discussion or mention that hopes for or encourages violence and hurt against black characters, including rooting for their death. Especially anything with a group, anything that involves dogs, anything that involves white people in power.

It’s the history of racism, it is about maintaining a white supremacist society and it retraumatises black audiences.

 If you or a fandom member have multiple ships but not a one of them includes someone of colour.

Question that shit. Seriously. If there’s a banner on a tumblr or a YouTube with loads of videos that has a bunch of only white characters, ask yourself why. What are you watching? What are you reading? Are there leading black and brown characters, black and brown voices, in what you’re consuming?

Don’t let yourself fall into thinking white people get to decide the definition of racism. Don’t let yourself think you know everything, even if you know the full dysfunctional and dramatic history of your fandom.

Understand that words and phrasing used has a whole history, and context. All of it. Microaggressions, tropes, coded language, connotations, dog whistles. Understand that just because you may not have known the history, it is no less relevant, or prevalent in the real lives of people of colour. More so, the fact that you can go about your life ignorant to it is evidence of your – our – privilege. And on this one I’ll add, especially if you’re not American. Learn real history – both American and your own country’s part in racism and slavery. Fandoms are global – recognise who you are interacting with.

Fandoms are tricky, often toxic as shit on a multiple fronts, I get it. Not everything within fandoms with characters of colour is simplistically only about race, but a lot of it is and none of us live in a vacuum. Don’t act like we do. Everything we say and do has a whole load of history and context behind it and we don’t get to cherry-pick.

If you say (or want to say) any response to the noted conversational points that sounds like

“So I can’t have an opinion now?” “I’m not racist but…” “I know black people and they said something else.” “I don’t care about/see skin colour.” “I didn’t say anything about race.” “Why are you bringing race into it?” “It’s just hating white people.” “That’s just how the character is written.”

Stop.

And seriously challenge yourself to be better, to listen more, to question and learn the origins and hurt behind such phrasing and what you may really be putting out, even if you didn’t realise it.

Because all that instinct that makes you want to push back, that has you wanting to dismiss the criticism and shut down a conversation that makes you uncomfortable and drives you to defend yourself – that is your privilege screaming because suddenly you are not the centre of everything. White discomfort. You have to recognise that instinct, and move past it. It takes continuous work. You don’t have to be perfect on racial understanding overnight – and please don’t get so terrified at such a prospect to the point of closing up and shutting down and doing nothing – but we do all need understand more and do more than we currently think we do and are.

I’m not trying to shame people, or even guilt people (not yet, anyway). But as a white person, you – we – need to start taking more responsibility for what we involve ourselves in, and what we don’t stand against.

I don’t care how good you believe you are (and maybe you are) or how many people of colour are in your life. If you are a white, you have a privilege – we - have a privilege. And whether you seek it or not, whether you’re conscious of it or not, you – we – benefit from that privilege because it is embedded in every part of society that we live day to day. And we do so at the expense of black lives.

I encourage everyone to be as involved in the movement as possible, but if you can’t attend protests, if there are COVID 19 concerns, if you don’t have the resources to donate or be in physical presence, and if you are not in a position to call out your friends and family, please, for the love of god please, at least do it in fandom. It’s a social circle that as we know, can take up a lot of our lives and our interactions. Challenge your friends in fandom – challenge yourself, if any of those phrases are in a space in which you inhabit.

Learn.

It is not the responsibility of people of colour to educate whites who suddenly realise the extent of racism, or worse, that there’s structural racism at all. But you can educate yourself, and you need to. Read black and brown experiences, listen to black and brown activists and academics. Hell, even read white antiracist voices as well if that helps you understand. If numbers are better communicators for you, look at data, whether on wealth disparity, environmental disparity, health disparity, educational disparity, justice disparity. Listen, absorb, push past your white privilege instinct that makes you uncomfortable, be driven by empathy and compassion and instead learn.

Learn history, learn data, learn what a black family has to talk about that you don’t. Learn about white fear and white grievance and white comfort and white discomfort and why they cannot be placated to. Learn to understand many forms of racism, systemic and institutional, overt and casual, personal and interpersonal. Learn to understand what privilege looks in real life, from a missed job opportunity to fear of a whole community every time they leave the house. Learn the extreme examples as well as the subtle, daily embedded. Learn to recognise the tropes and language. Learn about collective grief and trauma. Learn the psychology of looting from generationally oppressed view. Learn about the generations of violence against non-violent protest. Learn their names.

And act.

As a white person, you – we – can never really understand, but we can do a lot to try to. And we can be part of changing things. And frankly, we have to be. Racism is a white people problem; one that projects onto people of colour.

And especially to those who consider themselves any kind of liberal, those who think they can recognise misogyny or ageism or homophobia and problematic behaviour elsewhere – you have to step up on racism. And you can’t stop at the examples of obvious lack of humanity that are impossible to miss - go deeper.

And I’m asking you to not dismiss any racist language and behaviour within fandom on the basis of “It’s just a character, it’s not real.” Media and the depiction of black and brown lives is too often the only real relation to black and brown lives that a white someone has. It is a huge part of reinforcing white supremacy in society – it always has been.

If fans of colour in your fandom are telling you something is offensive, something is hurtful, something is racist, listen to them. Allow yourself to be challenged, uncomfortable and corrected. Because Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter.

[2dsheep]

“How old are you now, Erwin?”

They’re the first words out of either of them for the few hours they’ve been sat there, Levi on the office sofa and Erwin at his desk. The day has been long and it’s far from over, though it won’t be too long before they’ll have to light the candles. 

“I can’t remember,” Erwin mutters, his eyes not leaving the paper in front of him. “It’s hardly something I consider important.” He’ll have to redo this entire funding request. The presenting committee members were changed at the eleventh hour, and Erwin knows that at least three those now making the final decision will vehemently disapprove of the angle at which he’s requesting funding. It’s impossible to please every one, to tick all of their boxes, but he must make sure he’s thought of everything. 

“I’m turning 34 this year,” Levi says, to which Erwin gives a small hum. 

After a moment of consideration, he allows himself a small respite and indulges his Captain, and admittedly, his own curiosity. “I wouldn’t take you as the type to count off your years.” 

Erwin catches Levi give a thin smile before he turns his face away, seeming to ignore the paperwork laid out in front of him and choosing instead to stare into the fireplace. It’s still empty and will be for another two months at least, but Erwin has no doubt that Levi would have started lighting it weeks ago if he could. It’s not winter yet, but even in the height of summer this office will have that lingering touch of cold, the sun never quite reaching the windows on this side of the building. There have been times when Erwin has been tempted to allow Levi to light the fire before winter settles in, but he has to remind himself that the rules are there for a reason and it would be entirely unprofessional to make exceptions.

“In the underground, every birthday’s a milestone.” Levi says, face stiff as if he were trying all he could to remove any show of emotion. “Too many don’t even make it to double digits. I can’t help remember, count off how old I am.

“And my mum - ”

Levi pauses and the silence that had accompanied them for hours before feels uncomfortable all of a sudden. Erwin puts down his pen but he doesn’t say anything to break the quiet, aware that it isn’t necessary, he simply knows that his attention belongs wholly to Levi from then on.

“We’d eat pastries,” Levi says after a few long seconds, and after a few more he turns where he sits, looking at Erwin before he continues. “She’d make them. It wasn’t easy getting the ingredients, but she’d always manage it. And I swear, they were so good you could convince yourself they came from a bakery in Sina.”

Erwin recognises this for what it is; Levi is offering up a rare privilege, opening a window to his past. It’s only a small crack that Levi guides him to, but for most people that window is sealed up and barricaded, a few thick, dark curtains thrown over for good measure. Erwin can’t work out where this is coming from, but he knows that Levi doesn’t tell this sort of story in search of pity, it’s a reward of intimacy given in one of the few ways Levi knows how. 

Deciding his work can wait, Erwin stands and stretches, wincing as one or two joints crack as he does so, and sits in the armchair across from Levi. The change in position is pleasant enough in itself, he probably needed a break more than a few hours ago, but it’s when he looks over at Levi, their eyes just missing one another, Erwin realises just how much he longs for opportunities like this, as if it’s something he denies from himself until confronted with the fact. Despite them sharing the office more often than not these days, the two of them taking the time to talk with one another outside of the formalities of work isn’t such a regular occurrence.

Levi doesn’t look back at him until Erwin speaks. His grey eyes are sharp, yet his expression settles soft on his face, and Erwin can’t help but wonder who else knows that Levi can look like that. There’s a small, selfish part of him that hopes he alone is lucky enough to have seen it. 

“You know I’m awfully fond of pastries.” 

It’s true, and he knows that Levi knows. In fact, it’s a surprise for him that Levi eats pastries or ever did considering the scolding he gave to Erwin a few months ago when he returned to his office with a whole bag of pastries for himself. He would have offered to share but Levi simply tutted and grumbled something about his weight before walking out the door. 

Erwin hasn’t seen Levi eat anything other than the food prepared by the Scouting Legion cooks in the canteen or whatever rations they are supplied with on their missions, and he’s always assumed that food is nothing more than a necessity for Levi, mere fuel as a means of survival. 

“What kind would she make, sweet, savoury?” Erwin asks with genuine interest, all while silently pleading his stomach to not growl while his mind, and not his stomach, is filled with freshly baked good. 

Levi considers him for a moment before answering. 

“Always sweet.” He sits up slightly from where he’d been slouching against the back of the chair. “Sugar’s like gold down there. But my mum was always determined to make my birthday something special.” 

Try as he might, Erwin can’t think of a single occasion where Levi has spoken with such passion, such joy dancing around his words. The thought that he could listen to Levi talk for hours like this comes so sudden that Erwin doesn’t know what to do with it. He decides to swallow it down, and he pours himself a glass of water and takes a big gulp for good measure. 

“Fruit was even more difficult to get hold of than sugar,” Levi continues. “But one year, my mum managed to get some peaches and she made a tart with them.”

“How was it?”

“It was the best.” Levi states, so sure. Erwin is sure that Levi can still taste it to this day, the man appearing to be practically salivating just at the thought. Sure enough, Levi licks his lips, though only at the corner of his mouth as if he trying to be discreet about it. “I’ve never been able to find anything like it since.” 

“There’s nothing quite like handmade goods given by someone who loves you.” 

Erwin’s comment is met with silence. If it weren’t for Levi’s eyes widening ever so slightly, Erwin would think that time had stopped still, but it can’t have lasted more than a second before Levi looks away, possibly hoping that Erwin wouldn’t notice. But he does notice. Not that Erwin is able to get a read on him. In all his life, Erwin’s never had difficulty reading a person quite like he has with Levi. He’s like a picture book in which all the writing is in scribbles, granting nothing more than image before you. Getting Levi to translate those scribbles has been like drawing blood from a stone, and to this day Erwin struggles to make sense of any of it. Some days he finds himself wondering if Levi even considers him a friend. 

“It clearly wasn’t an effort made in vain,” Erwin says, attempting to guide the conversation back on track, thinking it would be such a shame to have it fall apart so quickly. “It’s a fond memory for you, even now.” 

Levi smiles, his gaze lost to reminiscence. “Yeah.” 

And before be can shake away the notion, Erwin becomes a little lost too, his attention entirely focused on just how charming Levi can be with such a look of content. If only they lead lives in which Levi could wear it more often. 

“So you really can’t remember how old you are?” Levi says, pulling Erwin from his thoughts, not a moment too soon. “You must be older than I thought.” 

Though it’s clear he’s trying to hide it, Erwin doesn’t fail to notice Levi’s lip twitch at the corner, amused at his own teasing, no doubt building up to something.

“It’s a shame that we’ll lose the commander to senility so soon.”

And there is it. Erwin smiles, almost laughs as he tries to give Levi a look of disapproval. Not that Levi would pay any notice even if they were both serious. It’s on that thought he can’t hold it in, and he chuckles under his breath. 

“Well, I was born in 809 so that would make me, oh 36 going on 37.” 

Erwin of course knew he was making his way into the late half of his thirties, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought of the actual number. He has his own memories of childhood birthdays, though the years have painted them foggy, feelings of warmth and comfort coming through stronger than any images he attempts to conjure. 

“Where do the years go?”

Levi picks up his tea cup, swirling what’s left inside. “It’s soon, isn’t it?” The tea must have long gone cold, but Levi brings the cup to his mouth and drinks it anyway, slowly, all while not making eye contact with Erwin. 

“My birthday?” 

Levi only hums in response, as if he couldn’t care less about the answer despite being the one to ask. He is certainly in a strange mood today. Just as he rarely gives anything of himself, he just as seldom asks as much of other people.

“That’s right,” Erwin says, unable to keep his sense of caution behind his lips. “On the 14th.” 

Levi hums again, and Erwin doesn’t think he’s noticed Levi do it so much before. It’s like a habit he’s picked up but hasn’t quite got the hang of yet. Before Erwin can make a comment though, Levi presses on. “You eat pastries every now and again, don’t you?”

“You know I do,” Erwin answers with a chuckle. “You’ve told me off for it more than once.”

“Well, yeah. Having a pastry is one thing, buying half the bakery and eating it in an afternoon is another. One day you won’t be able to fasten up your manoeuvre gear, and what’ll you do then, huh?”

Levi’s face remains serious, and Erwin is sure that Levi had said it in all seriousness too, but Erwin can’t help but laugh some more. 

“So what’s your favourite pastry?” Levi asks, glowering at Erwin from beneath scrunched eyebrows. 

“Why are you asking?”

Levi huffs, splutters before he can bark out a response. “Damnit Erwin, it’s just conversation.” 

Erwin thinks he spots a subtle blush bloom across Levi’s cheeks, but before he can spare even a second to look, Levi rises to his feet and takes strong strides towards the door. 

“It’s not something you gotta read into.” 

Erwin assumes Levi will storm out of the door on that note, shutting it not at all lightly behind him. It’s not an unusual routine, all sorts of things are able to bring about this sort of reaction from Levi, but he lingers a step away from the door, his hand resting on the handle. Erwin thinks Levi might say something, and it takes him an awkward few moments for him to realise that Levi is waiting for an answer; Erwin is so used to Levi making demands, not waiting with such hesitation for the answer to come to him.

 There really is something odd about Levi today, and Erwin wishes he’d made more effort to just listen. It’s an easy choice to at least give Levi this. 

“I think I’d have to say the good old apple tart is my favourite.”

Levi doesn’t look back, simply gives a quick nod of the head before he pulls the door open and walks through, closing it behind him - without slamming it. 

[myoddramblings]

the world, coronavirus and people

Well the world’s infrastructure is crumbling around us as we wait and watch from homes in self-isolation. This is the state of the world in the midst of the coronavirus. Depending on where you are in the world, it may not be the midst of it. Yet.

There are those in places such as China, which went through a peak in February and are coming out of the worst slowly, despite numbers of imported cases still remaining there is a sense that there is a lessening of domestic transmission creating a sense of fragile hope that there is a possibility for recovery. Then you look at places such as Italy which is currently the “scary” place. The one whose daily death numbers are quoted in conversation as a reminder by and to those who are scared but fortunate enough to not yet be there. These are places that are currently taking and have taken maximum (a relative term) precautions of quarantine and lockdown and where the full enormity of the crisis have been understood only due to the extent of spread and have been forced into these measures.

Then we have those who are yet to be affected on this scale, that are seeing initial numbers of cases growing and we observe their reactions to this. There are those across Europe closing borders, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA in Northern America to prevent cases being imported. In airports testing is undertaken and in some countries all incoming passengers are put into quarantine. There are extreme measures put into place to avoid spread and contagion on the levels that has been seen elsewhere. Places that have managed to contain it thus far but balance on this precipice of fragile stability until cases can no longer be contained. The “yet” is what is terrifying for these countries, witnessing the effect on other economies and being aware of what will come.

There are two wide categories of reaction to the virus which can be seen: those who want to continue as much as possible as normal (whether they are at-risk or not) and those who are changing their lifestyle around the virus (whether by choice or not). There is much criticism from those in the latter to those in the former, but the reality is that for all of us there will come a point where we all are part of the latter. The main reproach towards those continuing with their daily lives is the disregard that they have for those at risk and the impact that they have by potentially spreading the virus further, selfishly so. I disagree with this label. It implies malicious thought, but it is not malice that drives this. It is fear. All of us are aware of what is coming, whether it has happened, is happening or is yet to happen. We all know life has to change, the only difference is that some of us want to hold onto that sense of normality for a little longer. For the younger generations in particular, this may be the first time that the news around us directly affects us. The financial crisis was something that happened, but to me (not applicable to everyone) it was something I heard on the radio, that went on in the background whilst life went on. 2020 has been a year of horrifying news stories, the Australian bushfires, the rising political tensions between China and the US, but again whilst terrifying to hear about, they were other, things that were background noise to our ordinary lives. This is something else, something we cannot avoid or ignore. Those deemed selfish are aware of how life will change for them. They are just attempting to hold onto normality up until they have to accept reality.

Everywhere we have seen the money pouring in to support the crumbling economy to avoid a total collapse, with figures already quoting numbers worse than the 2008 financial crisis. The thing is, in this case it is not man-made, the panic of the financial crisis was (not purely) financial, the effects were on people’s livelihoods whereas now it is on people’s lives.

The current situation can be likened to any number of horror movies where the world erupts into panic but the reality is so much more gradual in the little changes in people’s actions. We see it in our shops where people’s stockpiling in preparation for shortage has only made it a more imminent reality and breeds further panic. We see it in the masks that have become commonplace and the hand sanitisers that are now out up everywhere to give a sense of control, that if we just wash our hands it will all be fine and it’ll just go away soon enough. The real fear comes from the reality that no one knows when this will truly be over. We hold arbitrary figures in our minds, fourteen days in self-isolation, six months until university opens again, hoping that normality will return soon enough for us all to return to everyday routine at some specific date. Aristotle’s words seem especially appropriate at this point in time as all we know is that we know nothing. From world leaders to the scientist working on a vaccine, no one truly knows anything about what will happen to the world.

The truth of the world is that it runs on people. People and their expectations and reactions and actions are what drives everything. The financial system, at its core, simply works on predicting expectations, of how people will react to key events and preparing for this. So how do we prepare for mass panic? The collapse of Northern Rock is often quoted as the beginning of the financial crisis in the UK which was due to a bank run, the cause of which is panic. Nowadays preventative measures are taken so that the financial system does not reach that point again but the reality is that fragility remains. The economy runs on people and how they behave.

But now it is not the economy that is failing (not that that isn’t also happening) it is the people. The pandemic brings fear for our lives and our loved ones that we cannot ignore. Every realisation of another person close to me in danger makes the situation more and more grave but also brings me to the realisation that we are all helpless. Our literal only option as people to stop the spread of the virus is self-isolation and social distancing. At the time where you want and need people around you is when we must stay apart for the sake of those same people. Isolation becomes separation as friends head home across closing borders with promises to keep in touch but with the knowledge that for some we don’t know when we will see each other again. There is no certainty when every day there a new announcement and last-minute flights are booked at extortionate prices to avoid being stuck for God knows how long away from home. A farewell is a privilege at this point. There are so many goodbyes that will have to do for however long it may be as we head into isolation. Can we really blame those “selfish” people for trying to stay normal for as long as possible in a world that is becoming more and more abnormal by the moment. That is not to say that they are justified in acting as they do but the condemnation towards them should not be so harsh without some understanding of why they are doing so.

Heading home myself for a presumable six months, there was a sense of normality I expected. Not even that, just an awareness of what it would hold for me, regardless of how the virus spreads I knew I could expect a solid period of inactivity on my behalf. In complete honesty, isolation at home for me holds very little difference to how I would spend my time regardless of the virus. What I did not think about, though I was aware of it, was the impact of the virus on my parents. As healthcare workers there is a certain tension there and likely in the whole system that further drives the fragility of the world, and the UK in particular, home. We as people consider the strain on them and the risk they put themselves at as individuals but they must consider the wider impacts. One (unexpected) positive patient does not just mean that those in contact are now at risk but also that they are out of commission, leaving even fewer behind in an industry that needs more. here are appeals for retired workers to come back to support the NHS but even at the current levels of infections in the UK there are cracks in the system. The lack of funding which was public knowledge to all before the crisis will slowly be the demise of the system as pressure increases on these workers who are personally taking precautions that the system cannot afford to provide them with. Doctors and nurses are having to pay out of pocket for proper protective equipment that is not provided. I cannot claim to be any type of authority of the working and reasoning of why the operations are running as such but I can only assume the funding is being held for the peak of infection but the reality is that peak is only being drawn closer and more extensive with the rate of infection likely not only being higher but also unknown amongst healthcare workers than suspected due to the way the situation is being handled as well as the fucking mess that the whole thing is. The world runs on people and as those who are most key at this point in time (and always) are being recognised, they are also most in danger themselves and unlike the rest of us, their isolation affects not themselves but those who need the most care. The strain on the healthcare system will only increase in the coming months before we come out the other side, whenever that may be.

These key workers are being recognised but also others who are often disregarded in society; the shop workers, delivery drivers and so many others who make up the fabric of society but are not viewed in the same way as the healthcare workers. The recognition of the work that these people do is coming out with the slow realisation that the economy runs on these “invisible workers” who cannot work from home, as so many of us are now doing, and still have our lives continue in the way that they are.

People. It has already been mentioned here but  people are what everything depends on. And that is one of the few good things that have come out of this. People are coming together, going where they are needed, set technicians from offering up their skills to build hospitals, companies reassigning production to those things most in demand, initiatives for students to assist the elderly and vulnerable in the community who cannot survive self-isolation by themselves. People are coming together for the important things. So many are in self-isolation, and even though physically apart there is the knowledge that we are all together in this situation, doing our best, whatever that may be.

The world runs on people. Remember that.  

21/03/20