#which in their experience meant a lot less intensity from parents and stuff than say little league

[zipzin]

i'm really not a podcast listener, but occasionally will listen. and my favorite is when the host(s) start talking about something that you know more about than they do and they get stuff so wrong that you're like should i submit a review to correct you? like you aren't being factually incorrect because you're talking about your experience with something, it's just you clearly don't know enough about this tangential topic to realize the stuff you're saying is hilarious to people who know more

[malviral]

Canon divergence, the long post.

Alrighty !  Here  is  the  OFFICAL  Wesker  info  post.  This  will  probably  be  long  so  you’re  warned.  Much  of  this  will  be  going  on  Wesker’s  bio  page  when  I’m  ready  to  put  that  up.  So  ultimately,  having  gone  back  through  all  the  games  relevant  to  Wesker  I’ve  got  a  clearer  idea  of  stuff  now  hence  this  post.  I’ve  decided  I’m  MOSTLY  following  canon  with  the  most  major  alteration  being  Wesker’s  death  in  Re5.  

I  kinda  debated  if  I  wanted  to  use  anything   from  Re5  at  all  but  yeah,  ultimately  I’ve  decided  I’m  going  to  because  having  done  some  deep  thinking  about  it  I  do  think  everything  was  fine.   I’m  covering  the  whole  backstory  /  basically  everything  else  of  note  I  can  think  of.  I  wasn’t  able  to  completely  finish/cover  everything  due  to  computer  lag  from  length  lol,  so  I  might  make  a  part  2  if  I  don’t  just  put  everything  on  his  BIO  page  before  then. 

As  far  as  my  headcanon  goes  Wesker  was  raised  by  an  Upper-middle  class   mother  and  father  by  the  names  of  Nathan  and  Diana  Wesker.  These  are  the  people  Wesker  recognises  as  his  parents,  though  obviously  he  now  believes  they  were  not  his  biological  parents  and  were  instead  simply  contracted  by  Spencer  and  part  of  the  Wesker  child  experiment.  None  the  less  Nathan  and  Diana  were  thought  of  as  respectful  members  of  their  community  with  Nathan  working  as  an  oral  surgeon  with  his  own  clinic  where  Diana  also  worked,  thought  to  be  a  family  business.  

Again  Wesker  suspects  this  was  all  smoke  and  mirrors  and  that  whoever  they  really  were,  they  were  working  for  Umbrella/Spencer.  When  Wesker  was  about  13  he  had  already  excelled  through  all  traditional  education  and  had  frequented  two  high  class  boarding  schools.  He  spent  the  next  four  years  studying  for  a  decorate.  He  earned  this  when  he  was  16  and  was  personally  invited  to  participate  in  Umbrella’s  executive  training  programme,  which  would  have  entailed  spending  another  year  or  two  at  umbrella’s  private  training  facility  which  was  not  a  hard  transition  for  Wesker  since  this  was  literally  a  specialised  boarding  school. 

This  meant,  honestly,  in  comparison  to  other  children  Wesker  really  didn’t  spend  a  lot  of  time  with  his  “parents”.  By  the  time  he  was  school  aged  he  spent  most  of  his  time  away  from  them,  only  seeing  them  for  a  few  months  here   and  there.  He  kept  contact  with  them  largely  by  letters  that  he  would  write  them  every  few  days  and  they  would  write  him  back.  When  Wesker  was  about  14  he  received  news  that  the  two  of  them  had  perished  in  a  car  accident. 

He  found  himself  mostly  untroubled  by  this  aside  from  the  initial  surprise.  Again  at  this  time  Wesker  was  studying  for  his  doctorate  so  the  parents  he  already  had  a  somewhat  distant  relationship  with  were  the  least  of  his  concern.  He  doesn’t  remember  crying,  or  really  being  overly  upset.  He  didn’t  like  the  news  but  what  could  he  do ?  He  didn’t  attend  their  “funeral”  and  was  in  fact  encouraged  not  to  and  to  continue  studying  which  seemed  to  work  for  him  as  he  felt  his  “parents”  would  also  want  that.

 He  couldn’t  say  if  he  was  actually  saddened   and   the  work  helped  distract  him  or  if   he  just  never  really  cared  that  much.  He  doesn’t  know.  However,  he  was  probably  more  upset  about  this  than  he  realised  as  he  does  feel  a  sense  of  intense  anger/betrayal  toward  “them”  upon  finding  out  he  was  part  of  Project  W.  Its  not  something  he  entirely  recognises  of  himself  outward,  probably  because  he  would  rather  keep  up  the  illusion  that  he’s  fine  with  it.

He  doesn’t  really  have  any  negative  memories  of  them.  He  didn’t  have  a  bad  childhood  and  considers  it  to  have  been  good   and  normal  beside  the  higher  than  average  school  load  he  had,  but  this  was  something  he  liked  as  someone  with  such  a  high  intellect  so  he  didn’t  take  any  issue  with  it.  Aside  from  the  obvious  emotional  distance  he  felt  between  himself  and  them  he  was  provided  for  and  well  looked  after. 

At  the  Umbrella  training  school  Wesker  met  William  Birkin  who  instantly  captured  his  interest  and  attention.  Initially  of  course  it  was  William’s  smarts  that  put  him  on  Wesker’s  radar.  William  was  only  15  years  old  when  he  was  enrolled  in  the  training  school  and  Wesker  was  just   about  17.  William  being  the  youngest  attendee  made  him  a  bit  of  a  standout  and  at  this  time  William  was  the  record  holder  for  the  youngest  person  to  have  earned  a  doctorate  and  the  youngest  person  head  hunted  by  Umbrella.  Wesker  recalls  that  this  made  William  the  subject  of  much  envy  and  competition.  

He  took  notice  of  how  William  tended  to  be  somewhat  ostracized  and  of   William’s  somewhat  unremarkable  background.  Contrary  to  many  of  Umbrella’s  chosen  candidates  he  wasn’t  some  aristocrat  or  someone  from  a  particularly  wealthy  or  high  social  standing.  What  got  William  where  he  was  was  entirely  that  big  old  brain  of  his.  What's  more  was  William's  somewhat  disconnected  and  “humble”  demeanour.  He  was  plucky   and  confident  when  need  be,  but  with  no  real  conceit  or  arrogance  where  it  wasn’t  due,  that  gave  him  a  pretty  obvious  contrast  against  other  Umbrella  trainee  candidates.   William  stood  out  among  his  well-to-do  peers  who  had  majorly  lived  very  privileged  lives  and  tended  to  think  all  too  highly  of  themselves.  

Wesker  also  took  notice  of  how  largely  unbothered  William  seemed  in  a  way  that  almost  felt  naïve.  William  was  pretty  damn  happy  to  just  keep  his  head  down,  keep  quiet  and  study  and  thats  how  William  thrived.  All  of  this  was  so  extremely  fascinating  and  admirable  to  Wesker  who  pretty  much  fell  in  love  for  lack  of  a  better  way  to  explain.  They  were  quickly  placed  as  the  two  top  students  and  taken  under  the  wing  of  Doctor  Marcus.  However,  Wesker  soon  decided  William  was  not  the  guy  to  “beat”  but  rather  the  one  to  “keep”.  

The  nasty,  heated  rivalry  the  company  higherups  encouraged  between  the  top  students  quickly  became  something  Wesker  recognised  and  felt  was  unbeneficial  to  him.  While  Wesker  may  have  been  arguably  “better  bred”  and  infinitely  “more  mature”,  he  wasn’t  so  arrogant  to  think  he  could  beat  William  when  it  come  to  academics  and  sheer  brilliance  so  instead  he  quickly  became  Williams  friend   and   loyal  ally.   Something  very  easy  considering  how  alone  and  again  how  somewhat  naïve  William  seemed  without  him.  This  was  Wesker  deviating  from  the  norm  and  from  what  was  heavily  encouraged  of  the  students  at  the  Umbrella  training  facility.  Going  to  paste  a  snippet  from  the  last  info  drop  I  made: 

Wesker  was  never  suppose  to  become  friends  with  William  the  way  he  did.  The  two  became  pretty  “close”  and  generally  teamed  up  together  despite  the  fact  that  the  opposite  was  intended.  This  just  became  a  fact  of  the  training  facility  and  later  the  Arkley  research  facility  and  at  some  point  the  Umbrella  higher-ups  had  to  accept  that  Wesker  had  an  attachment  to  William  that  wasn’t  easily  broken.  We  do  know  its  canon  that  there  was  efforts  made  by  Umbrella  higher  ups  to  taint  their  friendship  /  turn  them  against  each  other  but  that  didn’t  work  and  apparently  just  had  the  opposite  effect.

Thinking  about  it  I  think  the  views  Umbrella   had  instilled  in  Wesker  were  kinda  a  factor  in  why  Wesker  entertained  a  friendship  with  William.  Wesker’s  initial  approach  to  William  was  both  a  matter  of  respect  for  his  intelligence  and  indeed  seeing  that  as  something  he  could  use  for  himself. Which  is  precisely  why  William’s  “academic”  superiority  over  Wesker  wasn’t  something  Wesker  thought  of  with  distain.  He  had  no  jealousy  or  contempt  for  William  and  no  drive  to  beat  or  destroy  him.  Instead  he  was  happy  to  befriend  William   and  foster  an  attachment  between  the  two  of  them  because  this  was  something  that  benefited  Wesker  greatly.  more  than  trying  to  rival  him  would/  It  was  easy  due  to  William’s  isolation   and  the  fact  that,  also  drawing  from  my  own  headcanons  about  William,  William  wasn't  built  like  Wesker.  He  was  a  mega  genius  but  he  wasn’t  as  heavily  conditioned  by  Umbrella  as  Wesker  had  been  and  again  he  didn’t  come  from  wealth.

 Though  Wesker  didn’t  know  it  Umbrella  had  been  influencing  and  conditioning  him  since  he  was  a  child.  The  boarding  schools  Wesker  attended  were  Umbrella  run  and   promoted  Umbrella’s  ethical  ideals. William  on  the  other  hand  was  chosen  to  participate  in  Umbrella  training  facility  not  because  of  some  grand  plan  to  produce  Spencer’s  perfect  “successor”,  or  rather,  the  first  in  a  line  of  “superior”  humans  who  would  accompany  Spencer  into  a  “new  world”,  but  because  William  was  just  genuinely  very  smart  and  of  course  Umbrella  execs  saw  potential.  His  intelligence  was  something  the  company  knew  it  could  make  use  of,  even  if  they  had  no  intention  of  him  being  anything  more  than  an  overworked  scientist. 

So  from  early  on,  in  a  way  kind  of  subconscious  to  Wesker,  he  had  been  trained  to  spot  things/people  he  could  use  to  further  himself.  So  though  Wesker  came  from  a  similar  place  of  privilege  as  many  of  his  other  fellow  students,  Wesker  was  not  so  self-absorbed  that  he  couldn’t  accept  his  better  and  instead  find  a  way  to  make  that  work  to  his  advantage.  Becoming  a  highly  trusted  friend  and  confident  of  William  achieved  this.  and  while  this  is  largely  my  own  speculation  I  think  it  works  well  because  it  intentionally  mirrors  the  early  relationship  between  Dr.  James  Marcus  and  Ozwell  Spencer. 

That  being  said  I  do  believe  a  very  genuine  sense  of  love  and  companionship  existed  between  Wesker  and  William. They  were  actually  friends.  Wesker  did  frequently  have  William’s  best  interests  in  mind  and  though  these  interests  usually  wound  up  benefitting  him,  William  was  someone  he  related  to,  enjoyed  the  company  of  and  could  easily  share  thoughts,  feelings  and  ideas  with.  This  along  with  the  fact  they  tended  to  team  together  against  everyone  else  gave  them  a  very  emotionally  intimate  and  sometimes  dependent  relationship.  Essentially  the  feels  /  friendship  was  genuine,  not  to  get  Wesker’s  very  manipulative  and  cunning  tactics  wrong  or  to  assume  he  never  actually  had  any  genuine  affection  for  William. 

Moreover,  another  snippet  from  the  last  post: 

I  kinda  believe  the  friendship  between  William  and  Wesker  is  what  got  them  both  through  the  training  facility.  I  think  had  a  rivalry  actually  ensued  between  them  one  of  them  might  not  have  made  it  through.  Why ? Because  William  had  the  raw  genius  but  Wesker  was  Spencer's  cunning  little  pet  project.  Teaming  up  with  William  ensured  Wesker  would  get  results  worthy  of  approval  while  Wesker’s  existence  as  an  experiment  that  was  essentially  going  as  planned  and  who  was  getting  all  the  marks  needed  to  progress  meant  William  was  assured  a  leg  up  while  they  were  functioning  well  together  as  partners.  It  was  a  very  mutually  beneficial  thing  they  had  going  on,  although  obviously  the  true  depth  and  scope  of  this  was  not  something  either  of  them  knew.  There  is  a  canon  suggestion  that  Wesker  and  William  stole  a  sample  of  Dr. Marcus’  T - Virus  in  order  to  ensure  their  graduation  from  the  training  facility  and  what  ultimately  granted  them  their  senior  status  at  the  Arkley  Research  facility  that  they  were  then  swiftly  moved  to  at  the  age  of  16  and  18  respectively.  This  explains  their  early  graduation  and  the  top  positions  they  were  thrown  into.  They  had  made  a  deal  with  Spencer's  executives  to  steal  a  sample  of  Marcus  work  and  hand  it  over  to  Spencer.  It  make  sense  that  the  two  of  them  would  do  this,  given  the  extremely  cut-throat  /  competitive  atmosphere  of  Umbrella,  even  present  within  their  training  school.  Another  factor  of  this  is  the  canon  fact  that  Dr. Marcus  was  experimenting  on  the  students  of  the  training  facility,  tricking  them  into  infecting  themselves  with  the  T  Virus  and  also  capturing  and  imprisoning  them  in  secret  rooms  where  they  were  being  tortured  extensively  and   killed  again  as  part  of  Marcus’  private  experiments  with  T. 

So  essentially  it  was  in  Wesker  and  William’s  best  interest  to  escape  asap. I  think  the  two  of  them  figured  this  out  and  decided  they  couldn’t  take  any  chances  with  Dr. Marcus  and  quickly  formulated  what  they  could  do  to  gtfo  for  their  lives.  I  believe  Wesker  was  the  one  who  was  contacted  initially  to  steal  work  and  he  basically  involved  William  in  the  scheme  because  of  their  friendship  and  William’s  worth  to  him  in  the  long  run.  Plus  everything  went  easier  with  two  people  working  against  Marcus,  one  to  do  the  distracting  and  the  other  to  snatch  a  sample.  If  anyone  ever  wondered  why  Wesker  and  William  were  so  personally  invested  in  Dr. Marcus’  downfall   and  assassination  this  is  why.  This  is  pretty  much  canon  via  files  found  throughout  Resident  Evil  0. 

Wesker  worked  at  the  Arkley  facility  with  William  for  a  number  of  years  after  this.  Things  were  however  turned  upside  down  when  Alexia  was  named  a  chief  researcher  for  Umbrella  at  age  10.  

This  was  when  things  started  to  slide  down  hill  as  Alexia’s  existence  turned  the  rest  of  the  staff  against  William  and  to  an  extent  Wesker,  who  they  felt  they  no  longer  had  to  see  as  their  superiors  in  a  nut  shell.  Wesker  was  able  to  largely  shrug  this  off  but  it  destroyed  William  and   threw  him  into  depression  and  paranoia.  Wesker  made  efforts  to  keep  William  afloat  but  they  were  now  struggling  and   their  research  was  becoming  stale  as  William  was  no  longer  functioning  the  way  he  used  to.  Wesker  had  to  recognise  things  were  bad  and   he  wasn’t  sure  if  he  could  “fix”  William  despite  his  efforts  and  aspirations  to  do  so. 

As  a   result  he  began  to  put  his  efforts  and  focus  else  where,  believing  that  the  Alexia  bullshit  would  eventually  cool   off  and  things  would  switch  back  to  normal.  Wesker  was   carrying  the  research  at  this  point  and  desperately  looking  into  other  resources  that  they  might  be  able  to  use  to  further  things. 

However,  it  was  during  this  time  during  Alexia’s  arrival  and  continuing  until  slightly  after  her  “death”,  Wesker  began  to  notice  other  things.  A  big  factor  in  Wesker  changing  his  direction  in  life  was  when  he  began  to  suspect  Spencer  was  up  to  something.  He  began  to  feel  as  if  a  lot  of  what  was  going  on  was  intentional  and  he  began  to  question  what  Umbrella’s  /  Spencer's   true  goals  really  were.  He  noted   research  into  T  was  starting  to  become  costly  and  despite  being  presented  as  a  B.O.W  a   lot  of  things  weren't  making  full  sense  as  such.  

A  major  point  in  this  was  when  Wesker  was  out  on  one  of  his  routine  hikes  through  the  Akrley  mountains  and  started  to  recount  on  the  research  they  were  doing  with  the  T  Virus.  Wesker  thought  about  how  viruses  like  T   have  a  high  infection  rate  and  that  they’re  not  limited  to  one  species  as  a  host.  He  noted  the  sheer  amount  of  biological  material  that  surrounded  the  Arkley  research  facility,  various  different  flora  and  fauna  and  then  the  fact  that  there  was  a  decent  sized  city  (Raccoon  City)  not   far  off.  He  came  to  realise  this  was  an  INCREDIBLY  dangerous  place  to  be  researching  a  virus  such  as  T. 

He  began  doing  some  of  his  own  personal  experiments  to  test  his  theory  and  was  quite  disturbed  to  find  that  yes,  T  is  able  to  infect  biological  matter  indiscriminately.  Birds,  insects  and  plants  were  easily  infected  and  weaponised  by  T  and  that  was  just  the  things  they  hadn’t  done  too  many  tests  on  previously  as  they  already  knew  T  could  infect  marine  life  and  reptiles  and  all  mammals  as  they  already  had  ample  data  to  prove  that.  So  here  was  a  virus  that  could  infect  pretty  much  all  living  organisms.  Being  worked  on  an  extremely  biologically  rich  environment.  If  it  ever  got  out  somehow  it  would  be  absolutely  catastrophic. 

 Couple  this  with  the  knowing  that  Spencer / Umbrella  executives  had  been  open  about  desiring  a  100%  infection  rate  from  T  (  which  was  already  a  little  unusual )  and  the  research  that  was  currently  being  done  was  being  done  to  remedy  the  fact  that  no  virus  could  ever  have  a  100%  infection  rate.  There  would  always  be  carriers  who  were  asymptomatic  and  those  who  were  naturally  resistant  to  the  Virus  (like  Jill  turned  out  to  be).  The  reason  for  working  on  B.O.Ws  like  Tyrant  and  Hunter  was  for  them  to  be  a  clean  up  crew  in  the  event  of  a  virus  outbreak,  and  take  care  of  anyone/thing  that  escaped  death/destruction  via  T. 

So  Wesker  was  suspicious  and  alarmed  and  had  an  idea  something  more  than  just  simple  B.O.W  research  and  production  was  going  on.  Wesker  details  all  of  this  better  in  Wesker’s  Report  2,  but  thats  the  summary.  Its  unclear  how  much  of  this  Wesker  was  able  to  share  with  William,  though  he  expresses  wanting  to,  he  finds  it  hard  given  William  was  still  in  his  very  depressed  state  in  coping  with  the  existence  of  Alexia  and  he  just  wasn't  sure  William  was  stable  enough  to  be  having  the  same  level  of  chats  they  used  to  have. 

Wesker  decides  at  this  point  he  needs  a  career  change  to  get  to  the  bottom  of  it  but  decides  to  do  this  very  very  slowly  so  as  not  to  arouse  suspicion.  For  the  meantime  he  goes  back  to  trying  to  help  William  and  progress  research.  He  found  out  about  the  NE-type  parasite  being  developed  within  Umbrella’s  European  branch  and  began  to  tell  William  about  it,  careful  as  he's  aware  William’s  mental  state  hasn't  been  top  notch  lately.  At  first  he  notes  William  wasn’t  really  interested  but  he  soon  managed  to  get  him  on  board.  This  is  also  occurring  just  after  Alexia  was  declared  dead  from  a  lab  accident.  

Wesker  notes  this  really  “helped”  William  as  suddenly  he  became  relevant  again  and  the  other  researcher  were  once  again  back  to  looking  at  him  and  Wesker  as  their  superiors,  as  they  should.  With  the  respect  and  balance  restored,  William  started  to  go  back  to  normal,  so  normal  in  fact  he  apparently  found  interest  in  a  another  fellow  researcher  called  Annette  and  struck  up  a  romantic  relationship  with  her.  Wesker  noted  a  faint  sense  of  contempt/bewilderment  for  this  but  basically  minded  his  business.  What  else  could  he  do ?  Besides,  William  seemed  happy  as  odd  as  it  were 

and  this  was  the  beginning  of  the  birth  of  the  G  virus.  The  tests  ran  on  Lisa  Trevor  using  the  NE  type  Parasite  lead  to  G’s  discovery.  During  the  four  year  period  between  G’s  discovery  and  approval,  Wesker  had  transferred  into  Umbrella’s  intelligence  unit.  Wesker  notes  his  reasoning  for  this  was  because  G  was  going  beyond  his  ability as  researcher  but  William  on  the  other  hand  was  thriving.  He  decided  it  was  the  perfect  time  to  transfer  as  both  his  interests  had  changed  and  everything  seemed  to  be  quite stable  and  normal,  William  seemed  to  have  things  under  control.  

So  while  Wesker  had  transferred  to  Umbrella’s  intelligence  bureau  William  and  Annette  were  transferred  to  the  NEST  which  was  constructed  specially  for  the  research  being  done  into  G.  Wesker  also  notes  that  this  was  a  huge  point  of  interest  for  him  as  he  found  it  odd  that  Spencer  took  such  personal  interest  in  and  approved  further  research  into  G  given  it  deviated  from  the  norm.  G  was  not  so  good  as  a  B.O.W  but  it’s  eugenics  potential  was  astronomical.  This  was  a  clue  of  sorts,  and  Wesker  took  close  notice  of  Spencer’s  behaviours  and  noted  that  he  seemed  to  be  readying  himself  for  something. 

I’m  kinda  happy  to  mince  some  of  the  lore  in  the  REmakes   and   the  stuff  that  was  canon  /  implied  in  the  original  games  so  from  here  on  this  is  majorly  my  own  headcanons  /  interpretation  of  events  based  on  the  games  /  what  makes  the  most  sense  to  me  as  sometimes  things  in  canon  are  a  bit  weird  /  hard  to  follow  /  some  things  do  contradict  with  others.  Some  things  will  be  added  to  /  slightly  rewritten  as  a  result. 

In 1998,  Wesker  and  William  are  directed  to  reopen  the  old  Umbrella  training  facility.  William  who  would  be  one  of  the  head  / leading  roles  of  the  newly  re-opened  facility,  basically  taking  Dr.Marcus  former  role  and  Wesker,  who  had  spent  the  last  five  years  dabbling  in  the  military   and   part  of   Umbrella’s  personal  security  force  was  set  to  oversee  this.  However,  as  preparations  were  being  made  to  reopen  the  facility,  something  unexpected  happened.  Dr. Marcus,  who  had  been  assassinated  about  ten  years  prior,  resurrected  from  the  dead  and  began  to  wreak  havoc  on  the  facility  and  surrounding  areas  with  T-infected  leaches  who  began  to  rapidly  spread  the  virus.  Birkin  and  Wesker  in  a  state  of  concern  and  confusion,   and   tasked  with  containing  this  bizarre  incident  sent  an  Umbrella  security  team  to  investigate.  They  are  however  quickly  overwhelmed  and   killed  by  the  T-infected  leaches. 

As the two (Billy and Rebecca) search the training school, they uncover disturbing evidence of what happened here both in the 1970s and recently. While built to oversee training of gifted teenagers recruited by Umbrella, evidence points towards Marcus deliberately using the children as test subjects in inhuman bioweapons research, turning them into Zombies, with two-level basement containing a torture chamber covered in dried blood. Zombies roam the halls of the school. Some of them are those children, left alone for twenty years. Others belong to Birkin's investigation team, consisting of USS and technicians sent recently to refurbish the school for re-opening.

Wesker  and  Birkin  quickly  start  to  figure  out  that  the  man/creature  behind  the  outbreak  is  actually  Dr. Marcus  himself,  despite  the  odds.  Wesker,  who  had  been  planning  on  leaving  Umbrella  for  some  time  now  decides  this  is  the  perfect  opportunity  to  jump  ship.  He  and  William  have  apparently  had  talks  about  this  together  previously  and  had  both  been  interested  in  diverging  from  Umbrella.  Wesker  because  he  no  longer  trusted  the  company /  suspected  Spencer  was  up  to  something  and  William  because  they  continued  to  deny  him  the  promotion  he  was  practically  owed  and   treated  oddly  as  they  did  not  want  for  William  to  get  any  power  over  the  company.

So  while  William  was  very  much  entertaining  ideas  to  leave  Umbrella  he  wasn’t  ready  to  depart  right   away  due  to  his  work  with  G   and  more  than  likely  fearing  for  the  safety  of  his  wife  and  child,  which  had been  a  major  concern  on  his  mind  ever  since  the  executives  started  making  it  clear  they  were  trying  to  keep  William  from  achieving  any  higher  rank.  So  considering  nothing  good  would  happen  to  his  research  or   and  his  family  if  he  just  up  and  disappeared  for  a  while  he  wasn’t  quite  ready  to  leave  immediately. 

Wesker  who  had  no  such  ties  though  decides,  despite  William’s  fears  he  can’t  be  deterred  from  executing  his  ‘escape’  plan  as  he  didn't  see  Umbrella  being  able  to  recover  from  this.  This  would  be  the  beginning  of  the  end  for  Umbrella.  William  attempts  to  oppose  this  but  Wesker  assures  him  there's  nothing  left  he  can  do.  They  come  to  an  agreement  that  William  will  stay  behind  long  enough  to  finalise  his  research  on  G,  While  Wesker  would  proceed  to  do  what  he  needed  to  do  in  order  to  collect  the  combat  data  that  he  could  log   and  trade  to  The  organisation  he  had  been  courting  as  a  big  step  out  of  Umbrella.  The  idea  being  William  stays  behind  and  lays  low  long  enough  to  finish  G,  then  Wesker  would  contact  him  when  he  was  ready  and  they  would  begin  the  process  of  getting  himself,  G  and  his  family  out  of  Umbrella  as  well.  

They  agreed  that  Wesker  would  lure  the  remaining  S.T.A.R.S  members  to  the  Spencer  mansion  as  he  had  already  been  instructed  to  do,  while  William  putting  up  a  good  front  for  Umbrella  would  set  off  the  self  destruct  in  order  to  eliminate  Marcus  and  his  leach  army,  hopefully  delaying  the  outbreak.  Seemingly  as  a  precaution,  William  then  gave  Wesker  a  sample  of  a  virus  he  created,  perhaps  to  sweeten  the  deal  between  the  two  of  them  and  the  rival  company. 

Meanwhile, Birkin and Wesker begin their own plans. Operating on the theory the mysterious man is somehow Marcus himself brought back to life, he poses a considerable threat and must be dealt with. Birkin plans to set off the facility's self-destruct device to blow up the training school and the man along with it.

This  is  where  the  canon  divergence  really  takes  effect  for  me  because,  during  the  early  RE  games,  the  Virus  William  gave  to  Wesker  seemed  to  be  the  G  virus.  Which  made  Wesker  a  functioning  G  human.  This  was  changed  in  RE5  when  we  found  out  this  was  suppose  to  be  the  “prototype”  virus.  I  wrote  a  post  here  explaining  why  I  diverge  from  this  and   why  thats  a  kinda  stupid  decision  IMO.  Those  posts  can  be  found  here  and  here.  Warning  they’re  also  quite  long.  

The  second  one  is  more  of  a  nutshell  version  of  the  first  +  the   conformation  that  what  I’m  about  to  say  was  actually  “canon”  prior  to  RE5.  So  feel  free  to  only  read  that  one  if  any  of  my  hyper fix  nonsense  interests  anyone  at  all  LMAO.  I  also  want  to  note  its  pretty  easy  for  me  to  take  it  back  and  follow  canon  so  if  the  G  human  Wesker  thing  doesn’t  work  for  some  folks  its  fine,  it  doesn’t  have  to  be  a  thing,  although  given  its  minor   and  doesn’t  really  change  anything  highly  important  and  only  makes  things  easier  to  understand  I  don’t  see  how  it  would  be  an  issue  for  anyone  tbqh. 

With  a  sample  of  the  G  virus  in  his  possession  and  William’s  research  findings  on  G’s  regenerative  capabilities  Wesker  attempts  to  exit  the  training  facility  through an  underground  tunnel.  Here  he’s  confronted  by  Colonel  Sergei  Vladimir  who  was  apparently  keeping  tabs  on  Wesker  and  felt  suspicious  of  him.  He  confronts  Wesker  and  berates  him  for  his  decision  to  set  off  the  self  destruct  device  in  the  training  school  as  this  had  not  been  ordered  by  Spencer.  Interestingly  enough  William  isn’t  mentioned,  which  suggests  Sergei,  due  to  his  pre-existing  suspicions  toward  Wesker  apparently  decided  this  was  Wesker’s  idea  and  doing  alone  and   took  a  big  issue  with  it  as  it  wasn’t  ordered  by  Spencer.

 With  Wesker  making  no  attempt  to  indcate  otherwise  Sergei  is   unhappy  with  the  insubordination  Wesker  was  showing  and  he  instructed  his  Ivans  to  teach  Wesker  a  lesson,  however  Wesker  managed  to  come  out  on  top  and  escape  and  without  much  time  left  before  the  self-destruct  device  would  detonate  Sergei  was  forced  to  leave. 

This  was  the  first  snag  Wesker’s  plan  had  hit  and  this  made  it  obvious  to  him  that  he  was  in  more  danger  than  he  realised.  Moreover  the  X  day  plan  was  already  extremely  risky  to  his  own  life.  It  may  have  been  obvious  at  this  point  that  William  might  have  been  in  more  danger  than  originally  thought  was  well  but  given  Sergei  never  mentioned  William  and  seemed  to  believe  it  was  Wesker’s  idea  and  Wesker  who  set  off  the  self  destruct  device  it  seemed  William  was  pretty  safe,  particularly  as  Wesker  makes  no  attempt  to  correct  Sergei’s  assumptions. 

Continuing  with  Umbrella’s  instructions  Wesker  lured  the  S.T.A.R.S  Alpha  team  the  to   mansion  and  from  here  the  plan  seemed  to  get  back  on  track,  however  two  things  remained  on  his  mind.  That  unpleasant  confrontation  with  Sergei  and  the  fact  that  Lisa  Trevor  had  survived  Umbrella’s  execution  attempt  no  worse  for  wear.  It  became  apparent  that  she  was  simply  put  into  a  death-like  state  for  a  few  days  and  regained  consciousness  later,  her  body  repaired,  which  essentially  further  proved  William  Birkin’s  opinions  about  the  G  virus  and  its  regenerative  capabilities  if  utilised  correctly.  

This  is  where  Wesker  began  to  realise  he  could  perhaps  use  the  virus  on  himself  with  no  adverse  effects  and  that  it  might  give  him  the  edge  he  needed  to  survive  the  mansion  as,  aside  from  his  previous  knowledge  of  the  mansion  from  working  in  the  underground  laboratory  there  was  NOTHING  guaranteeing  Wesker’s  survival  either.  From  here  he  concocted  a  plan  to  set  a Tyrant  on  the  remaining  S.T.A.R.S  members,  record  the  combative  data,  take  out  the  creature  and  pocket  the  specimen  sample  and  hop  over  to  the  Rival  Company  with  honours.  

Shortly  before  the  confrontation  in  the  mansion  basement,  Wesker  infected  himself  with  the  Virus  sample  William  had  given  him,  understanding  the  likelihood  of  his  own  death.  He  found  no  ill  effects  present,  in  fact  he  wasn’t  sure  anything  had  happened  at  all.  When  confronted  by  Jill  and  Chris  he  then  unleashed  the  Tyrant  but  unexpectedly  it  instantly  attacked  him,  impaling  him  through  the  abdomen,  killing  him.  Wesker  was  left  in  a  death-like  state  of  unconsciousness  for  a  short  amount  of  time  while  the  virus  that  had  bonded  with  his  system  activated   and  repaired  his  wounds.  When  Wesker  woke  up,  he  instantly  attempted  to  retrieve  the  Tyrants  combat  data,  only  to  discover  he  had  been  locked  out  of  the  computer  system  curtesy  of  the  Red  Queen  /  Sergei.  Something  that  seemed  to  have  been  pre-planned.  

 Moreover,  the  S.T.A.R.S  members  had  destroyed  the  Tyrant  leaving  him  completely  empty  handed.  Infuriated,  Wesker  began  his  hurried  escape  from  the  mansion  where  he  began  to  realise  he  hadn’t  just  been  saved  from  death,  he  was  now  stronger  and   faster  than  he  was  before. One  of  the  first  signs  that  something  inside  him  had  changed  beside  the  remarkable  regenerative  display  was  Wesker  realised  his  vision  was  near  perfect.  As  he  battled  his  way  out  of  the  mansion  he  realised  his  strength  and  speed  continued  to  increase. 

By  the  time  he  reached  safety  he  came  to  realise  that  he  no  longer  needed  Umbrella’s  data  or  specimens.  He  was  the  specimen.  Moreover,  he  could  use  his  “death”  to  his  advantage.  He  was  able  to  link  up  with  the  Rival  Organisation   and  seemingly  begin  his  take  over  of  it  with  little  resistance.  From  this  point  on  Wesker  continued  to  watch  Umbrella,  preparing  for  any  opportunity  he  could  to  steal  data  and   research  from  them. 

However,  3  months  later  in  September  things  began  to  go  sour  on  William’s  end.  Believing  Wesker  was  dead  and  feeling  the  heat  from  Umbrella,  he  attempted  to  enter  a  deal  with  the  US  government  for  asylum  for  himself  and  his  family  in  exchange  for   the  G  virus.  Wesker  attempted  to  intervene  here  and   retrieve  the  G  virus  and  William  however  to  his  dismay  he  found  Umbrella  was  ahead  of  him  and  got  to  William  before  his  operatives  could.  With  William  confirmed  “dead”,  he  had  to  instead  opt  to  collect  a  sample  of  the  virus. This  was  left  up  to  Ada  Wong. 

In  my  canon  this  is  pretty  much  Wesker’s  one  massive  regret.  He  had  every  intention  of  saving  William  but  Umbrella  was  too  fast  and  honestly  it  feels  to  him  like  all  stuff  he  really  should  have  known.  He  should  have  acted  sooner.  He  should  have  found  a  way  to  reach  out  to  William  right  away.  William’s  death  changed  altered  Wesker’s  plans  and  direction  as  William’s  G  virus  and  brilliance  was  intended  to  play  a  big  role  in  Wesker’s  new  organisation.  However  without  William,  Wesker  lost  interest.  Back  to  focusing  on  Spencer,  he  continued  to  steal  Umbrella’s  data  and  hammer  nails  into  its  coffin  while  amassing  wealth  and  power  along  the  way  for  his  own  means. 

This  all  very  much  follows  canon  from  this  point  on  and  I  don’t  have   any  other  divergences  to  note  up  until  RE5.  The  canon  divergences  here  are  that  Wesker  is  still  very  much  part  of  Spencer’s  Wesker  Project  but  I’ve  changed  this  a  little  because  frankly  I  thought  it  was   last  minute  addition  to  rewrite  an  otherwise  fine  bit  of  canon  info. When  Wesker  confronts  Spencer  he  finds  out  the  details  of  Project  W.  He  was  essentially  artificially  manufactured  as  part  of  this  personal  pet  project  Spencer  had  cooked  up  to  develop  an  advanced  race  of  human  beings  as:  “Spencer  believed  the  world  to  be  corrupted  by  human  decadency  and   longed  for  a  utopian  world  of  gifted  intellectuals.” 

 He  attempted  to  achieve  this  by  selectively  breeding  a  bunch  of  suitable  participants  in  the  project  who  had  high  intelligence  and  desirable  genes,  who's  children  were  then  raised  in  various  fashions.  Many  were  fostered  out  to  specially  selected  “families”,  others  spent  their  time  in  Umbrella  run  orphanages.  All  these  children  were  closely  monitored  by  Umbrella  +  those  involved  in  this  extremely  top  secret,  fucked  up  little  project.

 They  were  groomed  into  fostering  Spencer’s  ideals  in  various  ways,  whether  through  the  teachings  of  the  Umbrella  owned  orphanages  or  through  the  direction  of  the  specially  implanted  foster  families.  However,  of  the  hundreds  of  candidates,  only  13  of  them  showed  promise  for  Spencer’s  vision. Wesker  himself  was  one  of  the  13  other  Wesker’s  who  stayed  on  track  into  adulthood.  However, by  1998  Spencer  found  himself  with  only  two  Wesker  children  who  still  showed  promise,  essentially  resulting in  failure  of  the  experiment,  particularly  as  Spencer’s  health  was  failing  and   he  was  desperate  to  put  his focus  onto  something  that  would  save  his  life.

William’s  G  virus  was  very  strongly  considered  as  the  miracle  drug  that  could  achieve  this,  however  development  was  a  slow  process.   This  is  where  all  the  research  Umbrella  was  doing  begins  to  piece  together  to  create  an  disturbing  picture.  Ultimately  Spencer  intended  to  use the  T  virus  to  wipe  out  most  of  man  kind  and  the  G  virus  to  restore  his  own  life.  (in  the  meantime  working  on  other  projects  to  so),  they  would  then  rule  over  the  planet  as   below  only  Spencer  himself.  Needless  to  say  the  many  time  constrains  due  to  Spencer's  age  /  health  and  the  ultimate  collapse  of  Umbrella   meant   this  insane  dream  could  never  reach  fruition. 

Except  for  the  fact  that  Wesker  had   achieved  super-human  status  via  the  G  virus  sample  he  was  given   and  all  this  had  taken  a  toll  on  his  psyche.  Knowing  he  had  been  an  experiment  his  whole  life  both  repulsed  and  fascinated  him.  At  this  point  Wesker  was  someone  who’s  connection  to  humanity  had  already  disintegrated  and  in  a  twisted  way  learning  all  this  restored  Wesker’s  direction.  Enter  the  “Uroboros  Plan”

A  plan  that  failed  thanks  to  Chris  Redfield  and  Sheva  Alomar.  Wesker  was  weakened,  captured  and  taken  into  custody  as  opposed  to  being  killed.

[tryst-art-archive]

Context: 2013

Ngl, I had to go through the photos in my archives to figure out what even happened in 2013. SO, we'll cover the bits that stand out.

Thesis

Leading up to my graduation, I did a senior BFA thesis for my major. For this I decided to write the first chunk of Kriamiss's story in the Khra-nicles, which was an interesting experience both from seeing how someone besides me and Deer received that narrative and from approaching my genuine interests less as "dumb thing I do" and more as "thing I am doing seriously."

I completed the thesis successfully, but the experience sadly didn't lead to me writing the whole novel.

Graduation, Working Full-time, & Recovering from Art School

Prior to graduation, I needed to figure out what I was going to do about work. Because of the Boston lease cycle, I needed to know if I was staying in my then-current apartment with Deer, Coyote, and Tiger or not. Essentially, this choice boiled down to:

Move back in with my parents while I try to get a job in "my field"--whether that field is publishing or game dev.

Continue living with my current roommates in Boston and accept Any Job That Will Pay The Rent in order to be able to do that.

I chose the second because the real difference between 1 and 2 was whether or not I would have the space to be independent, have concrete privacy, and generally not feel observed in a judgmental fashion. (This is not to say my parents are overly harsh or anything, but it's the inherent nature of being with one's parents to regress to who you were as a kid.) This was completely the correct choice for me, and you can see it in photos following my graduation: my happiness and amount of life lived increases significantly.

To put it another way: Life Got Better as soon as I was free from a system that I hated and was able to self-determine.

That isn't to say I was magically no longer depressed--I was still massively depressed--but it is to say that the depression was existing within a bevy of relationships, experiences, and joy whereas before it had been the casing around a pile of obligations and resentments.

I graduated from my college, magna cum laude I think, in May of 2013, following the removal of my wisdom teeth, and accepted a full-time position with the company that ran my school's print & copy center and mailroom. They ran those services for many of the colleges in Boston, so my new gig with them was to look after the mailroom at another college.

This mailroom was in a basement, and I ran it almost entirely by myself. During some parts of the year, there would be a student worker with me, but usually it was just me and the spiders that liked to drop out of the ceiling. While that made working in the mailroom extraordinarily boring, it all-in-all worked for me; there weren't that many people stopping by, especially in the summer, and after spending four years dragging stories out of my soul, not being asked to do anything but exist and sort mail was a relief.

I spent a lot of my time in the mailroom decompressing from art school and slowly--a little tiny bit at a time, almost cautiously--returning to the things I'd liked about making stuff to begin with.

This seems to be an almost universal experience with art school, at least among the sample space of my friends. Pretty much every single one of us who went to some kind of arts university walked away with an intense amount of baggage about Making Things--typically centered around ideas of what is the right or wrong way to make things--that we had to dismantle before we could get back to making anything, much less stuff that aligned with what we wanted to make. For some of us that meant diving into other crafts/mediums than those we'd been educated in, and for others of us it meant simply not making at all and consuming voraciously instead.

For me personally, it tended to be small bursts of creativity that would then pitter out sadly, with a lot of photos--but decreasingly art-oriented photos--filling the time between.

One added peculiarity of the mailroom job was that I weirdly kept meeting people through the mailroom. One was someone I'd gone to high school with, who delivered some of the mail and greeted me with, "...I know you" to which I said, "You do?" and looked up to realize that he was one of the three Art Kids in my class--me, him, and another girl from my friend group. This encounter didn't kick off a friendship or anything, but it was a neat moment.

The other notable one--and I don't remember exactly when this happened--was a student at the school who made small talk when stopping by to pick things up. After a bit, he asked me on a date, and I agreed from a "Well, let's see what happens" place. We went on a few dates but lacked chemistry and decided to pursue that angle no further. However, Deer and I did succeed in adding him to our wider friend group. I also got a meaningful lesson and confidence boost out of being able to try seeing something without having to commit to them either exclusively or long-term. It made saying "No"--something I still struggled with--a little bit more feasible.

Gender?

I don't remember thinking about this in an intentional way, but it's clear to me from photos that I started stripping away elements of femininity in my personal presentation one little bit at a time. In particular, I was slowly shedding things that Required Effort to sustain.

A lot of the haircuts I see from this point forward are chin-length at longest or involve some kind of half-shave or undercut. I, in fact, specifically remember getting my first half-shave/undercut was a Big Moment in that I knew my family would hate it and felt I was doing something transgressive by prioritizing what I liked and wanted over what would make sure I was left alone.

I was, for a chunk of time, still doing makeup, but I slowly decreased the amount until I was only doing eyeliner and mascara, without anything else. While I was still wearing skirts and suchlike, a lot of the photos I have aren't of me dressed and looking nice but in the lounge clothes I wore around the house but feeling like I looked good in them.

I was also putting on weight, which for me is a sign of increasing happiness and reducing depression. Depression tends to make me not eat, so when I'm consistently losing weight, it's a sign that my mental health has tanked. (This isn't an intentional thing; I just stop having an appetite and lose the will to make food.)

Fun & Games

The social environment of my apartment was, frankly, rad, and while our unit was rundown in many ways, our location within the city was fantastic. We had a lot of excellent times, and we started some key traditions like the annual Krampus Party in December.

I had a habit of falling asleep in my squeaky pink armchair while playing Skyrim, and I'd wake up horizontal across the seat of the chair and its footstool with my horse on some building's roof.

Deer and Coyote and I would often get takeout while Tiger was out, and Tiger would come home to find the three of us passed out on top of each other on the couch with a spread of takeout containers spread over the coffee table. When we woke up, we'd get right back to eating.

There was a lot of eating in general, honestly. We made and shared good food and poured a lot of of our "disposable" income into the same, whether that was high-quality ingredients, special takeout, cakes from the nice bakery on the corner, or hitting up local restaurants. One of the parties in 2013 was, I think, a "Game of Thrones" themed party where we made lavish dishes.

In this way, we became something of a social hub for the wider friend group, and we were increasingly known for our warmth and welcome.

[magniloquent-raven]

soulmate au part 3!!!!

(read part 1 and part 2 here)

it takes three weeks for anything to happen.

they see each other at school, exchange glances in class, brush past each other in the hallways, fingers grazing as their shoulders bump, incidental touches that wouldn’t draw attention but still leave billy tingling and giddy and embarrassed at himself but…

he’s still getting used to having a soulmate. a real, tangible person he can reach out and touch.

and maybe he’d get used to it faster if he could touch him more, but life keeps conspiring against them. they can’t seem to get a second alone. when it isn’t steve’s kids are crawling all over him 24/7 it’s neil breathing down billy’s neck because he ran out on one fucking class.

well, and then had to lie to neil about why, which was probably what put neil on high alert, but still.

three goddamn weeks.

and neither of them have been patient about it. steve keeps writing billy notes. in the middle of class scrawling things like you have nice eyes and i wanna spend time with you and billy can fucking feel how smug steve gets about making him blush. it’s all he can do not to make a scene in front of half their peers. sometimes he’s not sure if he’d punch steve for being an asshole or kiss him for being sweet.

or both. he can do both.

but mostly he wants time, and somewhere to just...be. with steve.

and he gets that, three weeks after their conversation in the parking lot. steve’s parents will be out of town, and his kids have some stupid game night planned. max keeps asking to go but pretending she isn’t, badly feigning disinterest, and best of all, neil and susan are planning a weekend trip to visit susan’s bedridden aunt a few hours away.

billy is determined to take full advantage of those thirty-six hours. neither of them will acknowledge it directly, but he knows max will tell neil he was home all weekend if she has to. he has no reason to be nervous about being caught, or anything else. it’ll be fine.

it’ll be fine.

he tells himself that over and over but it doesn’t stop him from checking every corner of the house in case neil’s hiding behind a door somewhere before he can even think about getting ready to leave.

he checks again after he’s showered and dressed.

thankfully max is already gone, so she’s not there to see him pacing around like a neurotic rat in a maze.

it almost worse that he isn’t just anxious, he’s excited. and it’s making him twitchy.

there’s no plan. they aren’t going on a date or anything. he’s just...going to steve’s house. steve’s empty house. he’s going to be alone with his soulmate. the list of reasons why that scares him is endless.

and he’s not sure if he’s more terrified of the possibility that steve won’t ask about the makeup thing or the possibility that he will.

knocking on the harringtons’ front door is. an experience. it shouldn’t be. it’s just a fucking door. but billy’s palms are sweating and suddenly he has no idea what he’s even going to say, and he keeps glancing over his shoulder even though he doesn’t really know what he’s looking for, and it feels like he’s been standing on the porch for a fucking eternity but—

his worries don’t exactly melt away when steve opens the door but there is a warm flutter in his chest that’s...new. and distracting.

and steve smiles at him all sunshine and chocolate, and the second the door closes behind them he grabs billy’s hand, wide-eyed, questioning, watching billy’s reaction.

his palm is just as sweaty as billy’s and it’s gross, but also kind of comforting.

“hello to you too,” billy snickers, and steve visibly relaxes, lacing their fingers together properly.

“hi,” he breathes quietly, his gaze soft, but intense, focused. “waiting sucked, okay. i’ve been wanting to do that forever.” he shakes their joined hands for emphasis.

“...that all you were waiting to do?”

steve’s grin turns sly, and his gaze drops a little. “no.”

billy wants to kiss him. he wants to be kissed. he wants steve’s mouth on him, somewhere, anywhere, right now. it’s a nice mouth. he’s spent a lot of time looking at it, and thinking about it, about the way the steam from the showers turned his lips so, so red, wet and slick and both too close and too far away, wondering what he’d taste like—

but steve turns away, taking all the air in billy’s lungs with him. it’s so jarring a shift that billy actually sways a little before he gets ahold of himself and lets steve tug him by hand and lead him upstairs.

the wallpaper in steve’s room has to be some kind of hate crime, but billy doesn’t have time to dwell on it, because there’s a beige bag sitting conspicuously on top of steve’s neatly made bed. the clear plastic top is zipped shut, dusty with age and spilled powders, but billy can still make out tubes of lipstick and eyeliner pencils through the haze.

he stops in the doorway and stares at it, thoughts at a stand-still.

steve’s still clutching his hand, tighter now, and no longer pulling him along. “i—uh. the bag was my mom’s, i think. found it crumpled up under the sink, so, like. she probably doesn’t even remember it exists. and the stuff in it is...new.”

“...new,” billy echoes faintly.

“yeah. yeah, i—i bought it. had no idea what i was looking for though, so i hope i did alright.”

billy blinks at him.

“was—was that okay? i know maybe isn’t exactly a yes, but i kinda hoped it could be, y’know? it’s—it’s totally cool if it isn’t. if you’re—if you’re not up for it. or…” he trails off awkwardly and grimaces.

billy takes a breath. “i’m up for it,” he assures steve with more confidence than he feels.

and steve absolutely beams at him. “yeah?”

“yeah.”

turns out steve not knowing what he was looking for meant he bought...everything.

as billy pokes through the mess he tries not to feel too apprehensive. or at least tries not to let it show. too much. he chews his thumbnail, picking up an eyeliner pencil with the other hand. it’s good shit, all the products are, with fancy names for colours and designer labels. it’s all leagues better than the drugstore clearance shelf crap he lifted as a kid. which doesn’t make this any less nerve-wracking.

“it’s been a while since i did this, so. don’t expect it to be, fucking, art or anything.”

steve shuffles closer from his spot at the foot of the bed and touches billy’s knee. “the eyeliner earlier this year…?” he gestures vaguely at his own face, eyebrows raised.

“friend of mine did that,” billy mutters.

and then his whole goddamn life came crashing down around him because of it.

his anxiety spikes, and he drops the pencil back into the pile, shoving the bag away. “i can’t fucking do this,” he snaps, and he’s halfway standing already when steve reaches for him, alarmed.

“billy, wait—” the hand on his elbow is soft, gentle, but he still flinches away. steve withdraws, fingers curled, lips parted, shock and hurt at war on his face. “i’m sorry. i—shit, i’m sorry—”

“don’t.” billy shakes his head, pulling away further. his lungs hurt. there isn’t enough air in this room. “just—forget it. this was a mistake.”

he’s through the door and heading down the stairs before he can think about it, before steve can respond. he wouldn’t have heard him anyways, not over the echoes of his father’s voice that follow him no matter how fast he flees.

but he stops just short of leaving. stands on the ugly little mat by the front door and stares down at it, his forehead inches away from resting against the wooden doorjamb.

he doesn’t want to leave.

he doesn’t want to go anywhere but back upstairs.

and...he kind of hates it. he has no reason to want that. he barely fucking knows steve, and he certainly doesn’t owe him anything. not a look at his authentic self or even a fucking apology. nothing.

so why does he want to give him all of that and more.

why.

it’s fucking terrifying and ridiculous and confusing and…

“billy?” steve calls out tentatively, far enough away that billy doesn’t startle. he’s making his way down the stairs.

if he’s gonna run, it’s now or never.

now…

or…

he turns around, and leans back, his shoulder thudding heavily as he hits the wall. his eyes itch, and rubbing them doesn’t help.

“billy…” steve’s right in front of him now, hovering just shy of being close, worry etched into every line of his face. “i’m sorry. i shouldn’t have pushed, i’m sorry—”

“not your fault,” billy mumbles, muffled against his palm. “stop apologizing, harrington.”

steve sucks his bottom lip between his teeth. “i...uh.”

“you were gonna do it again weren’t you.”

“...no.”

billy snorts quietly, head falling against the cold wallpaper at his back. “fuck,” he exhales, hand dropping to his shoulder. “look, this is...threatening to be the best fucking thing that ever happened to me, and good things don’t just—it never lasts. it always blows up in my face, and you should know that before you get caught up in it too.”

there’s an awful, drawn-out pause while steve purses his lips and tilts his head and looks billy up and down, his gaze gentle despite the scrutiny.

“i want to touch you,” steve says quietly. he waits for billy’s hesitant nod before he wraps his arms around and tucks his face into the crook of billy’s neck. “i’ve been waiting for you my whole life, hargrove, you’re not scaring me off that easily.”

and...billy always wanted to believe in the romantic notions people wrote about in songs. soulmates being destined for each other. epic, unconditional love. he never had any reason to believe it was real, but he clung to it anyway. despite the part of him that was wary, afraid of putting too much stock in something that might break his heart later on.

so for steve to just outright say it like that…so matter of fact. the reality of the situation smacks him in the face a little.

he puts his hands on steve’s waist, slipping under his shirt to rest against soft bare skin. touching him feels...right. when he lets himself feel, lets himself be here, in the moment. the sweet scent of steve’s hair, the warmth of his breath, the soothing pressure of his fingertips smoothing the wrinkled fabric of billy’s shirt. it all adds up to a feelings that billy can only describe as home.

not home like the place, but home like the warmth of sunlight and sand between his toes, ocean spray on his lips. a feeling he’s always had to chase to capture, but somehow it’s...here. quiet and still, and nothing like he’s used to, but it’s here.

and his touch seems to put steve at ease as well, he practically melts into billy’s embrace, which does strange and addictive things to billy’s heart.

but he can’t just shut his fucking mouth and enjoy the moment.

“bet i could, though. scare you off. i might, some day.”

“billy,” steve sighs, and pulls back enough to look him in the eye. “trust me when i say, you’ll never even make the top ten scariest things i’ve seen.”

and he wants to scoff, or feel insulted, or push the issue, start a fight, but. there’s a hollow look in steve’s eye. it’s not the face of some sheltered rich boy who thinks he’s a big man, no, there’s truth there. billy believes him.

stopping the tide of questions is almost physically painful, but he knows there’s no going down that road today. he’s hiding enough of his own skeletons to be sure they aren’t ready for that yet.

he might just be ready for something else though.

“i wanna try again.”

steve blinks at him, confused for a beat, two, and. “oh!” his lips part around the exclamation, distracting billy for a moment. “the—the makeup? you don’t— you don’t have to.”

“i want to.” he hesitates, and then presses a brief kiss to the tip of steve’s nose, startling a smile out of him. billy grins back. “i want to.”

[boop-le-snoot]

PARTY FAVOURS | CHAPTER 2

Rating: Explicit. 18+

‼️TW: Reader is EIGHTEEN! Recreational drug use, smoking and alcohol consumption, deeply internalised self-loathing, very questionable moral standards. Daddy kink taken half-seriously. BDSM themes in later chapters - explicit content will come with it’s own TWs. FIRST PERSON POV.

Summary: You’re Peter’s classmate, a child of rich and famous but uncaring parents. Getting paired up for a lengthy project with the boy was an interesting turn of events and you don’t know whether to feel blessed or cursed when you develop, seemingly, a perfectly normal, harmless crush on Tony Stark. Fueled by feelings of inadequacy and boredom, your life spirals out of control - and you’re lucky your newfound friends are there to pick up the pieces even if you cannot find it in yourself to believe these amazing human (and not so human) beings voluntarily give you more than a fleeting glance and an offhanded thought. And they brought cake!

A/N: Bad girls are sad girls! Always wondered what goes through the mind of a spoiled, rich but intelligent and perceptive teenager? Have you found yourself craving that adrenaline rush, the danger of a forbidden fruit? Okay. That was cheesy as hell. Gross.

Let’s try again. Sarcasm? Check. Vine references? Hell yes! Crude humour? Check. Blunt honesty? Double check. We’re living in a Lana del Rey song, ladies.

The author doesn’t actually condone codependent relationships in real life. This is a filthy little fantasy. Enjoy, deviants.

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @vozit​ @another-stark-sub ​ @mostly-marvel-musings​

Beta read by the lovely and patient @miscmarvelwritings  ! She deserves all the love 💙

Peter woke me up at eight AM the next morning like the little shit that he was, demanding I make him pancakes. It wasn’t the first time I’ve had the joy to experience him in the morning and he knew exactly how to antagonise me enough to make him the special pancakes he liked so much. They had become kind of a ritual whenever he stayed over at my house, which was quite often - teachers liked me enough to pair me up with one of the most sensible kids for any projects that couldn’t be done alone by yours truly on her own.

I put on my yesterday’s dress, applied moisturizer and obediently trotted behind an excitedly mumbling Peter. The kitchen was large, beautiful and delightfully empty of any resident superheroes. I’ve indirectly crossed paths with all of the tower’s residents hanging around Tony, but I’ve yet had to speak more than polite niceties to any of them. 

Spying a bowl of boiled eggs and some sort of weird salad alongside half burned toast on the counter, I suddenly understood why Peter demanded his pancakes. I strictly instructed the disaster child to stay away from my cooking process and set to work with one ear listening to his ramblings and a headphone in the other. 

A set of thumping footsteps appeared behind me as I was pouring the batter for the first pancake. Their owner loudly sat down next to Peter, sighing, groaning, generally making “I’m not a morning person” sounds.

“Good morning, Mr. Barnes,” Peter’s tone was way, way too chipper.

“‘mrng,” The Sergeant grumbled. “Who’s this and why is she making pancakes?”

I turned around, spatula at the ready. “It’s me,” We’ve actually met before, but Barnes had left before I could even come over from my side of the work bench to say hello.

He nodded in acknowledgement after giving me a suspicious once-over. “One of Stark’s science children. I’m James but you can call me Bucky,” His voice sounded rough and gravely, and he clutched a coffee cup half the size of my head.

I snorted. “Science child, sure,” It wasn’t half-bad actually. I wisely choose to ignore the part of being Tony’s. No matter how hot the man was, I wasn’t anybody’s but my own, thank you very much. “Go get the bananas, Nutella and maple syrup, fellow science child.”

Peter scrambled to follow instructions as I plated the pancakes and cut the bananas into neat little rings to fill the sweet circles with. A tablespoon of Nutella, half a sliced banana, wrap, garnish with powdered sugar and pour maple syrup generously on top. I really didn’t see how this could be difficult but any and all attempts to teach Peter how to recreate my masterpiece always ended up in an absolute mess. I turned around to ask Bucky if he wanted any. The look of a man starved answered all my questions.

“You’re a goddess,” Peter moaned around his mouthful, nose smudged white with the powdered sugar.

“Gross, chew first then talk, you neanderthal,” I scoffed, prepping more batter for the second batch of pancakes. I wasn’t sure if everybody would show up but figured it would be rude to exclude them from the sheer magnificence that were my pancakes. I was just that good.

The music in my ear drowned most of Peter’s disgusting chewing noises, thankfully. My second batch vanished into thin air, inhaled by the two males like the garbage disposals that they were. Peter, in particular, ate an alarming quantity of food and I was surprised how he managed to stay so skinny. His daily eating schedule resembled the Hobbits.

More people appeared, this time acting less surprised regarding me standing at the stove. Hawkeye, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and her brother, all of them wandered in wearing sleep attire with various amusing prints. Thankfully, they mostly kept quiet or chatted with Peter - I would have definitely grumbled if someone tried to talk to me. As far as my body was concerned it was still the middle of the night.

“PANCAKES,” A booming voice announced and I shuddered at the sheer intensity and devotion contained in that one word. Thor.

“Please use your indoor voice,” I snapped reflectively. My brain caught up with what I just did so I hastily backtracked. “Sorry, I’m a bitch in the mornings.”

The blonde man chuckled, coming over to poke his nose into my flurry of pour-flip-fill sequence. Then, with all the grace and manners of a prince, he dipped one (1) large finger into the jar of Nutella and wandered off with it stuck in his mouth. With this turn of events the Nutella was bound to run out sooner than expected.

I turned around, annoyed confusion in plain sight. “The fuck?.. That’s gross, don’t do that,” Finding his brother (adopted!) sitting next to Thor, wearing a haughty smirk, finger still in his mouth. So Loki turned into his brother to steal Nutella from a jar. I sighed. Nobody even batted an eye. “Your alien germs are in there now, double ew.”

“Alien germs? Where?” Bruce entered the kitchen with a tablet under his arm, wearing Hulk themed pajamas, Captain America in tow. I was honestly on the verge of breaking down into hysterical laughter. Domestic Avengers wasn’t something I’d expected to see or experience, ever, much less be a part of. It took a moment for me to remind myself that they were people, too, and each of them was entitled to their own quirks. 

“America, egg-splain,” Peter muttered under his breath, giggling. “Loki stuck his hand in the Nutella jar,” He pointed at said jar. “She got grumpy,” Peter pointed at me. “Don’t make her grumpy, please, I want more pancakes,” And turned his pleading puppy eyes in my direction again.

“This is indentured servitude,” I pointed my spatula at the little shit. “You just had, like, ten.” But I made more batter nonetheless. I must admit it was kind of cool, seeing the earth’s mightiest defenders so relaxed. And Pete being happy, that was just… The best. I don’t know how to explain it. His eternal cheerfulness was highly contagious.

Chuckles filled up the room, the adults chatting and bickering amongst themselves while they patiently waited for their own breakfast. 

“Do you need some help?” Bruce approached me after stopping to fetch himself a cup of tea. It smelled strongly of tangy herbs and honey.

“I need more Nutella and bananas,” I admitted, surveying the sheer amount of people I had to feed. I didn’t doubt the Captain and two Asgardians had an appetite to match Peter’s which meant a literal extra set of condiments was required. Thankfully, Bruce fetched them for me, coming to a stop next to me. “Anything else?”

“You know, I tried making these with Peter and he just ended up with powdered sugar and chocolate all over himself,” I mused, noting the way Banner was carefully observing the assembly of a pancake. “You think Doctor seven-phds can manage to add a few toppings to a pancake without causing a disaster?“ 

Bruce rolled his eyes fondly, bumping me with his hip. "I’m no Clint Barton when it comes to cooking but at least I don’t burn my toast like Steve,” True to his word, his hands made swift motions of filling, wrapping and plating each individual pancake. They were almost as good as mine albeit more messy. I had lots of practice though. We finished off a batch in companionable silence, sounds of the team and my music playing in the background. 

I didn’t notice when I started swaying to the rhythm, catching a confused look from Bruce. I brushed back my hair, revealing a wireless headphone in my ear and he chuckled in understanding. “What are you listening to?”

“Right now? Kings of Leon,” I said, leaning towards him so he could hear the chorus “Use Somebody” currently occupying my right ear. 

“I like them, too,” He said, his cheek gently touching mine. His hands slowed on the pancake, a soft hum vaguely reminding me of the song’s melody emanating from his throat. “What else do you usually listen to?”

“Mostly heavier stuff, but I have a whole separate playlist dedicated to mid-2000s bops,” I answered. “I’ve heard I’m quite old school when it comes to music.”

“Well, I am an old man, so…” Bruce grinned mischievously. “But my guilty pleasure is Lady Gaga,” He admitted with a laugh.

I laughed, too. The image of his dancing in his lab to Born This Way was too much for my brain and I hung my head, fighting giggles. Bruce bumped me with his hip again, faking a pout. “Okay, okay, that was a fucking hilarious image, you go dude,” I finally powered through my struggle to contain laughter. “My own guilty pleasure would be… Umm… Lana Del Rey, I guess.”

Bruce made a vague noise of confusion. I took a brief break from mixing the batter to dig out my second headphone, presenting it to him and switching to a song. “This is what makes us girls”. Despite the fact I have never stolen a car or had a close female friend, the nostalgia was real. “Carmen” followed after the first song and I silently thanked whatever deity that “You can be the boss” was taken out of Spotify - I don’t think I was prepared to share that kind of information with a lab partner. An older, handsome lab partner. Wait… Where did that come from?

“I like it,” He said after the song ended and my more usual stuff began playing. “It suits you, I think.”

I groaned. “Really? I think it’s edgy,” Hiding away the embarrassment, I passed him a tray of freshly baked pancakes, occupying his immediate attention.

“You’re an old soul,” He gave me a lopsided smile. I saw a very faint blush tinting his cheeks, the kind of blush that had me wondering about the meaning behind his words. 

I gave an attempt at a smile in response, the left corner of my mouth barely tilting up. We talked some more about the rock music we shared in our earphones. I had a lot of 80s hair metal and 90s grunge in my playlist. Bruce was not a Curt Cobain man but enjoyed the works of his legacy, Marcy Playground. 

A tan hand wormed its way between me and Bruce, snatching a handful of banana slices and disappeared just as swiftly. “Tonyyy,” Bruce groaned, picking up another banana to replace the stolen pieces.

The spatula in my hand became a weapon as I blindly aimed at the target behind my back. A loud “ow” indicated I hit it. When I turned around, Tony was clutching the side of his face, a hurt look in his eyes and cheeks stuffed full of stolen goods. I stared him square in the face, absolutely refusing to acknowledge the fact that he was shirtless - the arc reactor glowed brightly in the middle of his toned chest. Fuck.

His chest was honestly what I was aiming for. I constantly kept forgetting how short he actually was. There was this one time when Tony had to put his arms around me to steady a piece of tech - he felt huge, hard and enormous around me. 

“What’s that for, Princess?” He finally chewed through his food and found his voice.

“For being a Tony,” I retorted. “Stay away from my workspace and wait for your breakfast like everybody else.”

“Hey! This is my kitchen,” He whined immediately, like the adult man that he was. I nearly cried from how adorable his face became, eyebrows scrunched up. “I don’t want to wait! And why does he,” Tony’s finger accusingly pointed at Bruce, “Get the bananas?!”

“Because he’s Brucie-bear,” I stuck my nose up in the air when Bruce’s arm wrapped around my waist. “He’s my science father,” I stuck my tongue out at Tony, seeing Bruce’s triumphant smile. Banner used every opportunity to get back at Tony’s incessant sass. 

The gleaming in Tony’s eyes should have alarmed me. “But he’s not your science daddy,” Tony’s flirting was accompanied by a salacious eyebrow wiggle and Peter’s screech of “OH MY GOD!" 

It took me every ounce of willpower to not flush. It was one of those rare times that I was at a complete loss of words. Thinking on the spot, I gave a very meaningful look to Bruce - thankfully, he got the gist and returned an equally filthy smirk back. Tony gaped.

"Is this how they are in the lab?” The Captain’s quiet voice leaked horrified amusement.

“All.The.Time.” Peter’s resonating groan was followed by Romanoff’s laughter.

We went up to the lab after breakfast. Thankfully Tony stopped his dramatic bitching when I served him my pancakes, scarfing them down much like everybody else. So me and Pete were accompanied by one (1) happy engineer, all three of us tinkering away on a robot that we were supposed to present in our science class in a month. The focus that was required to solder was immense and our usual banter was missing, replaced by an occasional request for a specific tool or a water bottle.

It took a few hours to get the dirty job done even with Tony’s help (technically he wasn’t supposed to but neither me nor Pete had the heart to forbid him from it when the man looked so content and happy soldering away). By the time I uncurled from my spot on the bench, my back was in knots and my dress had oil stains and holes all over it. I immediately went to the nearest water bottle, finishing half of it in seconds, picking up my phone to see if I had any important messages from my mother.

None.

Just a message from Bruce.

I tapped on my phone, idly scrolling through the Instagram app, liking some pictures of people I barely knew and keeping up a general appearance of being very busy. When the ringtone started playing, it took me a whole five seconds to understand it was, in fact, coming from my phone - I certainly wouldn’t put something so… Outrageous as my main tone.

Banner had discovered the power of the internet. You Can Be The Boss played loudly, and it played from my phone and Bruce was calling me. I picked it up, turning around, fighting the incoming laughter. “Yes, Brucie?" 

To say that Tony’s and Peter’s faces were scandalised was nothing. The boy’s face was such a deep shade of red, I started worrying about his blood pressure and Tony’s mouth hung open limply, like he was witnessing the second coming of Christ. 

"Is Tony sufficiently traumatized?” Judging by the breathless tone of his voice, Banner was resisting a mighty laughing fit of his own.

“Oh, absolutely,” I happily chirped.

“Good, keep it up. Come to my lab before you leave,” Banner snorted and then, realising what he’d done, promptly hung up, the tell-tale beginning of a giggle fit abruptly interrupted by a dial tone.

I put the phone in my bag, gathering the rest of my things with a look somewhere between innocence and indifference. At least, I hoped it was - my mind kept jumping between the engineer’s ridiculously scandalised face and the way his mouth went slack, lips moist and soft and plush. That’s a very dangerous trail.

A very dangerous trail I couldn’t resist exploring in the solitude and privacy of my own bedroom, at home.

[cl-01-kestis]

Shut Me Up - Jerome Valeska x Female Reader | Part 1

Summary: it’s been revealed that Jerome was the killer all along, you can’t process the information and try and convince yourself to visit Arkham Asylum to have a word with him.

Prologue <

Warnings: None

It was a few days since your encounter with the strange circus boy, Jerome. You had a hard time getting him off your mind, especially with loads of schoolwork and your job on the agenda.

Your father and Leslie didn’t update you about anything to do with the case about Lila Valeska, you were eager to know but whenever you asked Jim he’d push it to the side with a clenched jaw and tense figure. It didn’t make any sense to you as to why he was hiding stuff from you, you were one of the only, if not the only person to comfort Jerome when he was crumbling about his mother’s death. It’s understandable as to why you’d want to know who was behind this diabolical crime.

Thankfully, you remembered you had Harvey and visited him at the GCPD whilst your dad was away on some other mission. Leslie was in the morgue so you were in luck, Harvey could help you discover who was behind the murder.

For some reason, it took a hell of a lot more convincing than you expected, Harvey was stubborn and insisted it was best if you didn’t find out. He was acting strange, secretive. If there’s one thing you hated, it was being lied to.

Harvey tried telling you it was no use but you were desperate, Jerome had such an impact on you it was almost scary. You’d never acted this way towards someone before, especially to do with one of your fathers cases. Harvey eventually gave in due to your constant bickering and whining about him keeping secrets from you. He warned you multiple times about preparing yourself for what you were about to see as he guided you into one of the empty security rooms which was dark, tv screens and camera feeds airing through.

You sat yourself down on one of the seats, Harvey sitting in the one beside you and typing in something in one of the computer data bases of the GCPD. It took less than a minute for a security camera feed to pop up and cackle to life on the screen before you, revealing your Dad and the boy who was on your mind constantly.

“Again, please prepare yourself” Harvey whispered, turning up the volume of the feed so you could hear it better.

You watched intensely as the interrogarion filtered out between your dad and Jerome. He was crying, that poor boy. Your heart ached for him and you wish you were there as the interrogation went on. But, slowly you started realising something wasn’t right.

Jim started accusing Jerome of killing his own mother, the boy looked completely appalled at your dads accusation and you were too. How could he say that?

“Don’t be deceived” Harvey butted in once again, fast forwarding the camera feed and stopping it to point at Jerome’s face.

Something was wrong. A new man was sitting next to Jerome, a blind man with a walking stick and grey hair. Jerome was crying, his head ducked and eyes squeezed shut. But everything around you seemed to shut off when the ginger headed boy started laughing to himself, shoulders bobbing with each chuckle he made. You felt your heart drop when his emotional facade came to a close and his eyes held such evil and darkness. This wasn’t the Jerome you met at the circus.

“Why did you kill your mother, Jerome?” Your dad asked, hands pressed on the desk as he faced Jerome with a face full of thunder.

“Oh, you know how mothers are,” Jerome scoffed. “She just kept pushing... and I’m like, fine, mom. Be a whore, be a drunken whore, even. But don’t be a nagging, drunken whore” Jerome’s voice growled with venom as he finished his sentence, his words catching you completely off guard as you watched through tears and leaned back in your seat. Harvey watched with sympathy as you covered your mouth with one hand.

“I don’t believe it” You choked, leaning forward and pressing your elbows onto the desk as you hid your face in your hands. Harvey awkwardly patted your back, trying to comfort you as you sobbed quietly to yourself, to pity yourself that you’d been so oblivious.

“I gave him so much support, I told him about my past- oh fuck Harvey what am I going to do if he’s after me?” You panicked, gripping the sides of your hair as you lowered your head and sniffed back more tears. Harvey was quick to assure you.

“The lunatics been locked up in Arkham, you’ll be glad to know. He’s not getting anywhere near you anytime soon” The detective said, you looked up through your hands and breathed out a sigh of relief. You rubbed away the tears only to have more falling down as you tried to compose yourself.

“Jim didn’t want you knowing because he knew you’d react this way, he’s just looking out for you, kid” Harvey rubbed your shoulder before leaning over and switching off the camera feed, only for you to stop him halfway.

“I need a moment Harvey, I’m going to look over this stuff” You sighed, turning to face the computer once again and finding your way around the controls, reversing the feed so it went all the way back to the start. Harvey wanted to say something, he certainly didn’t want you to hear more of what was yet to come in the tape.

“I’ll leave you to it, but you got 10 minutes” He pointed his index finger at you in a warning manner before saying his farewells and leaving the room, closing the door behind him so you could bathe in the darkness and soil in your grief as you replayed the feed.

Whilst you were watching the interrogation, you felt sick to your stomach as Jerome laughed like a maniac and started talking to Jim about you. You felt scared, targeted by the most insane man you’d ever met, well, seen. You didn’t understand why he’d done this, why he’d drag you along with his little act and make you out to be a fool. It destroyed you more than it should’ve.

Jerome smiled and spoke about you in a somewhat positive manner, at least not threatening Jim by doing anything to you as he sat back in his chair cockily and continued giggling. You tried not letting the butterflies get to you when he said different sugar coated words that were bitter sweet.

“That girl back there was so sweet; ...yours, isn’t she, Gordon? Certainly gets my blood pumping, seeing that innocent face of hers... poor thing, thinking I was a good little boy” Jerome teased, grinning from ear to ear as he cackled. Your dad looked like he was about to kill Jerome, balling his fists and clenching his jaw as Jerome continued taunting him with crude words and snarky comments. You couldn’t take anymore of the torment and switched off the feed, standing up from your seat and leaving in a hurry whilst trying not to get caught by either Jim or Leslie.

Ever since then, you’ve been struggling with trusting anyone at all, even your own dad. You stopped opening up to people because of Jerome, you stopped being who you used to be. Of course, you were still friendly and kind, happy and bubbly, but you didn’t say anything to anyone about your family or personal life. You had over shared your life to a psychopath who slaughtered his own mother, it’s safe to say you have a reason for not opening up to anyone now a days.

It’s been around a week since Jerome was sent to Arkham and to say the least, it was taking a toll on you. With exams coming up and endless studying, you couldn’t seem to get your head down and concentrate because of the handsome red headed deranged teenager. Your dad occasionally checked in on you about Jerome and how you were feeling, usually you said you had to study which always ended with him giving up on trying to get you to open up to him and leave your room.

You and your dad didn’t always get along since the very beginning. He adopted you when you were 9 years old and at first you didn’t like him. You didn’t speak to him very much and spent little to no time trying to get on with him because of your traumatic past. You came from an orphanage with abusive caretakers and nuns, other girls like you were just the same when they were adopted by couples or single parents. However, as the years went by, you warmed up to Jim and started speaking to him like a daughter would with her father. He became the only person you ever trusted and it was still the same to this day. Jim fought hard to help you, he fought hard to keep you in his care and bring you up as his own considering he never had the chance to have his own kids. He adopted you in his mid 20’s with not much experience of being a parent so your relationship was strange to say the least.

When you started high school, that’s when you started changing and forming a new identity. The girl who was once vulnerable and terrified of human contact and so much as speaking to someone was finally blossoming into an outspoken omnivert who’s curiosity outshone everything around her. Jim was proud to say the absolute least, his girl was growing up and now, here you were at 17 years old, almost graduated high school and spending more time with him than you ever had in your life.

Jim knew how much caring about someone fragile meant to you. You thoughtlessly cared for people who were complete strangers but were suffering of some kind. That’s why when you comforted Jerome, he had a feeling it would turn in a different direction. And it did, it did alright. It was worse than anything he ever imagined which is why he never wanted you to find out about Jerome’s true character. Your heart was too fragile for this kind of stuff, your empathy and sympathy towards people was your downfall and for all Jim knew, Jerome could’ve killed you if he wanted to. The thought made him shiver alone.

When Jim was off to work and left you alone in the house, he had a horrible feeling something would happen to you and he wasn’t there to protect you. Even though Jerome was locked up in Arkham, he couldn’t help but worry. Of course he had to worry, his father instincts were hammering him and he hated leaving you alone, considering there were a few occasions when you got caught up in a couple of his cases and ended up being put in danger.

Jerome was different though, unlike the others Jim could see that you really cared, or used to care, for Jerome. You never formed any connections with any of your dads cases but Jim could see the look in your eyes when you bid the red head farewell. Your eyes were full of sadness and sympathy, Jim had never seen you look so upset before, so the fact Jerome turned out to be the complete opposite of what he seemed to be was the worst possible thing to happen. Jim kept the tapes and recordings of the interrogation away from you, covering up the truth with assuring lies that seemed to keep your curiosity and urgency at bay. But you were one step ahead of him and knew everything there was to know.

Jerome was a cold blooded killer, a killer with an innocent act you were so stupid to fall for. You weren’t worried about being killed, it wasn’t the first thing you thought about. It was the fact that Jerome was buried in your mind like a parasite. His crocodile tears and whimpers invested themselves in your memory and you could only see Jerome as a sweet, gentle teenager. You hated the way you felt whenever he crossed your mind, you certainly weren’t the type to get caught up with a boy but this was different.

Everything felt different.

-

You were finding it hard to keep your composure as you stood in front of the gates to Arkham Asylum. It was 3pm in the afternoon and it had been a while since you’d viewed Jerome’s interrogation tapes. You held your coat tight to your body and waited to be let in, leaning on your toes and rolling your balance back to your heels in an attempt to distract yourself from tie burning anxiety cackling in your stomach and chest.

You gave Arkham Asylum a call before you arrived, so you were expected and it saved you from explaining yourself as to why you were here.

“You must be (Y/N) Gordon, follow me please” A man dressed in a white shirt and a doctors coat unlocked the gate and let you inside, closing it with a loud clash behind you which made you jump suddenly. You didn’t like this, but you had to remind yourself that you’d be here for a short moment and then you’d never have to visit again. You were here for one thing only, and that was Jerome.

You reluctantly followed the man into the main entrance of Arkham, hearing yells and screams from the windows of cells around the building. You weren’t entirely terrified but you were wary enough to fear for your own health as you entered the building and took off your coat.

The man lead you down hallways and past many cells where insane inmates rattled the bars that replaced the small window in the door. You tried not to be intimidated by them but you’d never been in this sort of environment before.

Eventually, you were led into a room which was full of booths, the room separated in half by a long stripe of glass. There was stalls to sit at, boards at either side so there was a form of privacy within the person and whoever they were visiting.

“Mr Valeska will be happy to have a visitor, if anything happens please report it to me and I’ll have it taken care of” The man nodded to one of the stalls at the end, leading you to it and pointed out a small red button at the front of the table. It was an emergency button, in case of any emergency’s.

“Thank you” You mumbled, sitting down in the seat and exhaling out a shaky breath. The man left and closed the door, the noise of it slamming scared you briefly but you quickly composed yourself and cleared your throat.

You kept your feet flat against the ground, legs fairly spread as you sat comfortably in the chair and held your coat in your lap. You waited for a few minutes at most, tapping your fingers against the table which was split in half by the glass and hearing the sound echo around the visiting room. No one else was here, it was clear this wasn’t a popular day for visiting inmates, lucky for you.

A loud buzzer rung out in the room and you almost fell out of your seat as a result, placing a hand on your chest and feeling your heart speed up in your chest as the door on the other side opened.

Two guards walked in, holding a familiar ginger by each arm and leading him to the booth you were sitting at. Jerome’s face was empty until his eyes met yours, smiling the same creepy smile he had in the recording of his interrogation.

“You’ve got half an hour” One of the guards said in a stern voice before leaving the room and slamming the door shut. Silence was cut short when Jerome started giggling to himself, straining in his handcuffs as his hands rest on the table.

“Well look who came to visit me! I must say, it’s nice seeing your pretty face again” Jerome snarled with a grin on his face, his eyes narrowing slightly as they looked into yours.

“Why did you lie to me?” You cut to the chase, crossing your arms as a glare made its way onto your face. Jerome only laughed.

“Not even a hello? You’re boring” He repositioned his arms so his elbows rest on the table and his hands held his face. You didn’t lean back and instead moved closer, you weren’t scared of him.

“I don’t have time for games, Jerome, I trusted you!” You slammed your fist against the table, frowning as Jerome continued smiling as if you’d told a funny joke. This whole thing was a joke to him.

“Trusted me huh, that’s your mistake, doll” His voice lowered a tiny bit and the fact he was right made your blood boil. You clenched your fists, looking away from his face and down at your hands.

“What, are you sad because the person you had so much faith in turned out to be crazy? News flash! We’re in Gotham! Sorry I hurt your precious feelings, doll” Jerome started getting meaner with his statements, leaning closer so his head was inches from the glass. You didn’t move, you didn’t even feel like replying, but you were stuck in a room with him for the next half hour so it wasn’t like you could just leave.

“Stop calling me that” You hissed at the red head, feeling hopeless as he started cackling and leaned back in his chair, cuffed hands still on the table.

“Nope,” Jerome started, putting emphasis on popping the p.

“You are, you remind me of one; small and fragile, easy to break... easy to tear apart” His voice was low and had a seductive ring to it, but you weren’t going to let his words hurt you. He was terrifying as it was, but there was a wall of glass between you. You had nothing to fear.

“I’ll have you know I’m none of those things, you know nothing about me” You snapped back.

“Oh really? What about that time at the GCPD when we were outside the Interrogation room? From what I recall... you were an orphan, lost both of her parents, no siblings and no real family there for her. You’re favourite colour is red, you like cats, especially the ginger kind, that’s what you said right?” He smirked. You stared wide eyed at the psychotic teen sitting in front of you, horrified as you looked away once again and tried swallowing down the lump in your throat.

“You go to Gotham high school, you’re 17- oh! And your father’s Jim Gordon” Jerome continued, grinning from ear to ear as he watched your eyes begin to glisten with tears. You looked back up at him and Jerome swore he saw a fire in your eyes.

“You know, my mother never loved me. She never cared about what I did or where I went, she always spent her time fucking strangers and getting high, she neglected me most of my childhood... do you know what that’s like?” Jerome’s smile faded and he looked at you with a stone cold serious face, eyes boiling into your soul as he clasped his hands together and tilted his head to the side.

“I do” Was all you said in reply, gripping your upper arms as you fought back tears. Jerome smiled once again and winked at you in some form of congrats that you’d actually made common ground with him about something.

“Did your real mommy and daddy leave you?” Jerome pouted, putting on a baby voice as you sniffed and started slipping, tears falling at last and the lump in your throat taking over.

“Stop it” You whimpered.

“Oh but it’s true, they left you at that orphanage, didn’t they? Poor little baby, all alone... but I know,” Jerome lowered the volume of his voice so it was barely above a whisper. He looked at you as though you were the only thing that mattered, it made your stomach churn in a good and bad way. You tried denying his lingering, sincere gaze but your eyes betrayed you.

“How can you understand? Your mother may have not looked after you but at least she didn’t throw you away” You snapped, gritting your teeth together in anger as Jerome stated silent for a few seconds.

“I may not know what it’s like to be given away, but I know what it’s like to have no one there for me. You’ve been alone your whole life, all by yourself, but not anymore... you have me now” Jerome’s Cheshire-like grin returned to his face and you were so close to feelingc comfortable around him. Now you felt the same nauseating sensation buried in your stomach that was only there when he was around.

“You can go to hell if you think I’m coming back here, you’re lucky I even came here-“

“Yeah, your right, I am lucky” Jerome snapped, resting his chin on the palm of his hand and blinking up at you with eyes that didn’t exactly scream insanity. You had yourself on the edge of a sharp knife, you kept wobbling about whether to get the hell out of Arkham, or stay and take time to see Jerome, if he was really as insane as you thought he was.

“You amuse me, doll,” Jerome purred.

“You know, you’re the first person to ever treat me with compassion. Not even my mother held me in her arms like you did... it was a strange experience” The red head looked at your eyes and down to your lips, biting the inside of his cheek as his hands played with the cuffs. You tried looking away but his eyes held you in place.

“I didn’t ever get enough of it; affection, it’s my instinct to give what I never received” You said, not much emotion in your voice but Jerome seemed to be impressed with himself that he got a sincere reply.

“Shame really, if I hadn’t been caught, do you think you would’ve fallen in love with me?” Jerome smirked, licking his teeth teasingly as you tensed in your seat and let out a frustrated sigh. The tension in the visiting room was thick and the two of you looked at each other with narrow eyes. You no longer felt anger or disgust towards Jerome, he was still an insane inmate at an asylum so you couldn’t let your guard down too fast.

“It’s too late to ask that, Jerome” Was the last thing you said before the buzzer from earlier rung out in the room, signifying that your visit with Jerome had come to an end. The red heads eyes were wide with shock, he wanted to say something but the two guards from before came in and grabbed his arms.

“Goodbye, Jerome” You mumbled, standing up from your seat and waiting for him to leave before you did. The door on your side opened and out came the man who escorted you in.

“Well, that went pleasantly well” He smiled, watching as the door on the other side opened and closed. You nodded once, not saying anything as the man turned around and lead you out.

“Would you like me to send updates about Jerome’s behaviour?” The man turned his head to ask you.

“Oh no, I’m okay thank you” You cleared your throat, looking behind you as you walked out into the hallway outside the visiting room, feeling like Jerome’s eyes were still on you the whole time.

You had to get out of here.

[trulycertain]

fic writer interview

Tagged by @skogrr Thank you very much! It's a while since I've done one of these, and I've missed them.

Name: Tru/"Oi you" Fandoms (that I write for): Dragon Age, mostly. Still the fandom of my heart. Mass Effect, Deus Ex... uh, accidentally GreedFall? I don't know how or when that happened. Two-shot: Hmm... The actual last two-shot I wrote was Terms & Conditions, a very silly Dorian/Inquisitor modern AU where Gal is the guy Dorian hires to stop his late father's house falling apart. Recently? I suspect that's going to be Driftwood, which can stand on its own as a sort of weird post-canon first-meeting AU, but is trying to tempt me to continue it. (Vasco ends up going looking for Tír Fradí, which has disappeared - and finds it. He also finds De Sardet as a highly avoidant tree god of the island, post-Bad Ending, who transformed against her will. And he ends up falling in love with her anyway.) Weird tree gods! Pining by literal pine! An eventual happy ending! More grumpy commentary by Vasco!

Most popular multi-chapter: Either An Unquenchable Flame or Distraction, probably - both juggernaut pairings, the former close to the game's release and the latter with some fancy forbidden romance, so not so surprising. But surprisingly, Prague, 10:42 PM has done really well, considering it's for a small fandom (Deus Ex) and a rarepair age/rank-difference pairing that I thought would be a one-off experiment? I get it, guys. I like sad repressed stoics too.

Actual worst part of writing: Editing - which can be fun, but that "over and over" stage when you're about to post, especially in a longfic if you fear you've lost the spirit of the thing and the character voices and you can't see the wood for the trees. And when I have to remove a whole scene which Jenga-unbalances the fic, and then I have to redux from the top. Basically, most things to do with pacing. How you choose your titles: I like double-meanings and one word titles. If that fails: quote from a song. If that fails: quote from poetry, but very rarely. Do you outline: Only a little. A bulletpointed list of events or noted-down major lines of dialogue, that's usually it.

Ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: Uh... oh god. I blame so many people for some of these.

Post-Destroy ending where John is attempting to build a shed on Rannoch because that's the kind of thing retired people do, right? and Tali is far better at it than him, and it's just... disgusting fluff.

Actually, just reduxing the early John/Tali stuff with a bit more nuance and a stronger style.

Eva and Kaidan, and their mutually wary first meeting. ("Wow, that's a lot of pomade." "Wow, that's a lot of death-glare.")

AU where Gal and Dorian never met in DAI, and after everything went down, Gal tried to fade into the shadows and leave. He ended up working in Tevinter as an occasional informant/odd-jobs guy the way he was pre-Inquisition. He ends up being a gardener for a bitter, wry magister who seems to hate the entire Magisterium, has recently lost his father to political scheming and murder, and wants to take down the entirety of the remaining Venatori with one staff and maybe his teeth if he has to (hi, Dorian). But first, Dorian's going to drink his own body weight in whiskey and be a recluse for a while and start thinking about time magic again. Gal is trying to keep his head down and should definitely not be falling in love with said magister. Who's someday going to end up at one of the more southerly ports, come across a statue of the great Inquisitor, and go, Oh.

Stuff on Jensen's PT and rebuilding himself post-augs. More of Proprioception, basically.

Mer-AU where Marie De Sardet is still a diplomat attempting to make new connections, just not a human one, and it's a disaster. An awkward disaster. Highlights include her being framed as the beast trying to drown their best captain; her attempting to wobble about on brand-new legs and Vasco's coat while everyone assumes the dear captain has had a few too many; her asking Vasco if his "fascinating markings" glow; them getting into a duel, and her (fondly) getting punted off the side of the ship going "Woo-hoo." OK, I wrote a bit of that, but only a 1k doodle I'll probably never return to.

Non-Naut court AU where Marie gets promised to Bastien D'Arcy, because he's a bit of a layabout but he's also rich, popular at court, and amenable to bribe - [cough] suggestion, and the D'Arcys have prominent trading links with the Alliance. Instead she falls for his far less of a social butterfly, tired, worried-numbers-guy brother Léandre, who's pretty damn uncomfortable around Nauts because he's well aware he nearly got sold to them and he is not the favourite.

Straight-up role-reversal AU (another thing where I've put down 1k that I'll probably never return to), where Marie's Naut name is Paz, and she's a fed-up second-mate who's tired of noble idiots and feels a little strange and conflicted about her mark (and has context for it, because they make frequent crossings to Tír Fradí). Also a little more jaded, without the love of her mother, and not nearly as much of a tryhard as Vasco in canon; she ended up here because she had nowhere else to go and the Nauts were like "Ooh, free kid," and she's well aware. She gets stuck escorting the D'Arcy brothers to Tír Fradí for their new venture and is not looking forward to it. Except one of them is intensely bright and wry and keeps asking questions about the ship and noticing shit he is definitely not meant to notice, and they keep ending up in strange conversations, even if he seems really, really wary and uncomfortable about Nauts.

Some vague stuff about Vasco's thoughts on Jonas and that whole side quest, considering he's also a sea-given and implies sea-given take some shit in the Nauts, and also how damn difficult it must be watching a sea-given's parents endeavour to get their kid back when he knows full well his didn't do that for him.

Actually, just more Vasco POV in general, even though he's damn hard to nail down. I've written much pining for him from Marie's perspective, and I'd like to try things from the opposite. This guy's idea of wooing someone perfectly normally is to panic and then recite Baroque poetry. You know he's sappy as hell in the privacy of his own head, even if he's trying not to be.

Jean and Síora having the "I'm a sad healer who just lost my mother and I'm trying so hard not to crumble under the weight of assisting the leader" mutual talk way too late at night around the campfire and maybe him crying on her shoulder a little, with mutual kindness and the beginnings of attraction, and her finally getting past his jokey-smug facade to understand him.

More stuff about Jean's past in general, and how he wanted to be a doctor before he was dragged away from it by looking after Constantin and being nobility.

Síora and Eseld and the ways they changed over the years; something like an exploration of grief and growing her own will and the ways they very differently view the renaigse. Also maybe more about the en ol menawi magic, if I can worldbuild well enough?

I'd also love to do a GreedFall soulmark AU - it's generally not my kind of trope, I'm not into biological determinism type tropes - just because names and aliases and assumed identities are such a mess in GreedFall and it's a repeated plot point. That said, I feel like it's been done so beautifully in this fandom before that I wouldn't have much to add.

Callouts @ me: So. Many. Commas. So much over-explaining everything. If they get out of the car, your readers do not need a five-page manual of "and then he undid his seatbelt and leaned over to grasp the door handle, and then pulled it, and then stepped a foot out before he almost thought better of it - but no, he was going to get out of this car. The other foot joined the first, and he nearly banged his head on the doorframe."

Best writing traits: People say I have a head for finding small-but-important moments. I'm also told I write likeable protags. People have more than once said my writing makes them feel safe or makes them smile, and I really couldn't ask for more than that. I'll take those.

Spicy tangential opinion: I don't think I have any, really? Oh god, that makes me sound so very boring. Oh! Um. There should be more tree body horror in fandom. And body horror in general. *thumbsup*

No pressure tagging: @artemis-crimson, @eridanidreams,@rainypixel, @aphreal42.

[aster-aspera]

Another drabble I wrote for my superhero AU, though this one turned out a lot longer than I expected.

masterlist for my superhero AU

Relationships: platonic/romantic DLAMP

CW: chronic pain, flare ups, some internalized ableism, mentions of Janus’s mom’s less than stellar parenting.

A/N: While this chapter vaguely draws on my experiences with my back and knees, I don’t have arthritis. I tried to do as much research as possible and hope I have managed to portray it correctly. If my depiction is in any way offensive or incorrect, please don’t hesitate to inform me and I will correct my mistakes or even delete this writing. Hope you enjoy <3

Janus woke up with that familiar hurt curled around his bones. He sighed wearily as he looked out the large stained glass windows. Rain was beating against the panes with a violent intensity. 

Some days he wondered why he stayed here, wouldn’t it be better to just move to a nice sunny country where the sky didn’t seem to want to drown them? Who was he kidding, this city would never let him go, rain and his aching bones be damned.

He rolled over in bed a few times, hoping stubbornly the pain would allow him to sleep a little longer. It was way too early to even think about getting up, in his opinion. After a few more minutes of his body complaining and aching, he wearily dragged himself out of bed. 

He fumbled around for his cane and slowly made his way to the kitchen. He popped a heat pad into the microwave and switched on the kettle. Fortunately, it was still filled with water, meaning he didn’t have to struggle with taps right now. Picking up the heating pad had been hard enough with his hands feeling like they had been run over by a steamroller.

Why did it have to be today of all days? It wasn’t like he’d had that many plans but he had been meaning to at least get some work done. 

There was no way he’d be able to do much of anything today, merely the thought of typing made him cringe, let alone the thought of actually going outside. 

When his heat pad was warm, he curled up on the couch in the most comfortable position he could find and resigned himself to a day spent watching mindless television.

Somewhere around ten, a call came in and Janus fumbled to answer it with his stiff and aching fingers. 

“Damore,” He introduced curtly. If it was another bullshit telemarketer he was going to strangle someone. Once his body was halfway functioning again, of course.

“Hello Janus,” Logan’s voice filtered through the phone speakers, in the background he heard Roman yell something. “Yes, I’ll ask, now could you please be quiet,” Logan said, presumably to Roman.

Janus felt his lips quirk up into a smile despite himself.

“We were wondering if you would like to accompany us to Carntos forest, we were planning a hike.” The smile slipped off Janus's face. Of all days to have a flare up.

“As much as I would love to, I’m afraid I can’t come. Maybe some other day.” He tried not to sound too bitter. 

“Oh,” Logan sounded disappointed “why not?”

Janus hesitated. Usually, he would just grasp at the nearest convenient lie, he could easily tell them he was busy with work. But, he’d been learning not to do that, to let them in, not to bury himself in lies and mystery. 

“I’m not feeling too well today,” He eventually said, he didn’t feel like explaining his condition right now. His mother’s words still echoed in his head.

They wouldn’t think him weak, would they? They were good people. But after a lifetime of being told that he was faking it and to suck it up, he wasn’t exactly keen to share it with other people. He was supposed to be strong, a terrifying villain, not someone who could barely get out of bed some days.

He was shook out of his self deprecating thoughts by Logan. “Are you alright? Do we need to come over?” He asked, his voice filled with concern.

Janus felt emotion well up in his throat, not a lot of people held so much concern for him. He shook his head. Really? He was getting all teary eyed over some polite sympathy?

“No, I’m fine. I hope you enjoy your hike.” He pressed the end call button before Logan could say something else that would make him bawl like a baby.

He was just dozing off uncomfortably, when a knock on his door startled him. 

Who was even…?

He got up painfully and limped to the door, leaning heavily on his cane. He grabbed the gun from its hiding place before opening the door. It never hurt to be cautious. When he opened it, he was greeted by four smiling faces.

“Hi,” Patton greeted cheerfully, “We brought soup.” He held up a large container. 

In that eloquent way of his, Janus just stuttered out “What?”

Roman gently grabbed his shoulders and steered him back inside, putting the gun down on the table. The others followed, Virgil laden with a variety of food and Logan carrying some dvd’s. Patton made his way into the kitchen and started clattering around in the cabinets. 

“We’re here to take care of you,” Roman explained as he sat Janus down on the couch. Then he abruptly drew back “It’s not contagious is it?” 

“No, it’s not,” Janus said, distracted by Patton and Virgil doing god knows what in the kitchen and Logan heading towards his bedroom. They had all invaded his space with a swift efficiency.

“Great, so what’s wrong?” Roman asked, sitting down on the couch opposite him.

“It’s…” Janus’s mind was not cooperating right now. He tried to think of something.

“Dude, I’m literally a nurse, you can tell me.”

“I’d rather not.” Janus said, sounding a lot more defensive than he had meant. He was just slightly stressed out by these people barging into his house and Roman pestering him. He really wanted a nap and for today to be over.

Roman looked him over critically. “Fine, you don’t have to tell me, but we’re not leaving till you feel better.”

“Prepare to stay a while then,” Janus couldn’t help himself from laughing bitterly.

Roman’s eyebrows scrunched up adorably and then he smiled. “Well, that’s good, ‘cause Patton brought lots of food, so we can hang around for as long as needed.”

Janus curled his shoulders protectively. “You don’t have to.”

“But we want to.” Logan had appeared from the bedroom with an armful of blankets and was looking at Janus with such gentle and loving eyes and Janus had absolutely no idea how to deal with any of this. Why were they here? Why would they ditch their plans just to take care of him? Why did they even care?

Virgil and Patton came in too, carrying a tray laden with fresh buns, fruit, a bowl of soup and some tea. Janus’s stomach grumbled noisily. He’d only really eaten some crackers, as he didn’t have the energy to prepare anything more fancy than that.

“I don't know what you want to eat right now, so I’d thought I’d go with the classics for someone who’s sick but I have other stuff too, if you want.” Patton fretted.

“No, this is fine.” Janus replied. 

He made to eat the soup then stopped abruptly. There was no way he could manage that, his hands were aching all the way from the tips of his fingers to his elbows and they were so stiff he could barely curl them around the spoon, let alone coordinate them enough to eat.

He suddenly felt very vulnerable, with all of them staring at him. He cleared his throat. 

“I’m actually not really in the mood for soup.” He apologized and reached for the bread. That, at least he could eat without too much trouble.

“That’s fine, we just need to make sure you eat something. You’ll never get better if you starve yourself,” Patton replied cheerfully.

Janus cringed internally. They didn’t know, he couldn’t blame them for it, but god, did those words hurt. Always that same question: are you better yet?

“So, which movie do you want to watch?” Roman burst out, eager to get started on that.

“Maybe you should first ask him if he even wants to watch a movie, you idiot.” Virgil hissed.

“All right, no need to rain on the black parade, sunshine,” Roman defended.

Logan rolled his eyes.

“I’d love to watch a movie,” Janus said before the two could start a full blown argument.

The others settled into the couch and Janus barely suppressed a whimper when Logan jostled his legs. Wow, he was really pathetic today.

Despite his best efforts, Logan noticed his discomfort and looked at him, his eyebrows knitted in concern. 

“Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Janus immediately deflected, then when Logan’s eyebrows did not change their stance “It’s just… my knees hurt, so please be careful.”

“Oh, did you hurt them during patrol?” Patton asked. 

“Patrol?” 

“You fell off a roof?”

Oh, yeah, that had happened. His cheeks heated up in shame as Virgil tried to stifle a laugh. Jumping over rooftops was not his forte. The fall itself had probably looked a lot worse than it actually was, he had only vaguely scraped his elbows.

“Yeah, I remember. No it’s not that.”

“Really? It looked like a pretty bad fall, it would make sense that your knees hurt after something like that.”

Patton didn’t seem like he would let it go anytime soon. He was clearly worried about Janus. He sighed, it was going to come to light some day, better to bite the bullet now than to wait for when he would be forced to reveal it. He took a deep breath, oddly nervous. He shouldn’t be this worried, they cared for him, they were his friends, they had come all the way here to take care of him.

“I’m actually just having a bad flare up today.” 

A beat of silence followed his statement and Janus tried not to panic. But Roman just nodded understandingly.

“You mind if I ask what…?”

“Rheumatoid arthritis, symptoms started when I was about seventeen.”

“You could have just told us, honey,” Patton exclaimed.

“I don’t always feel comfortable sharing it”

“Well, I’m happy you felt comfortable sharing it with us,” Virgil said.

“Yes, I’m happy you trust us with this knowledge, Janus.” 

What was this annoying fuzzy feeling in his stomach? It was probably the tea, or maybe the buns, who knew what Patton put in those.

“Do you need anything?” Roman asked.

“Well, some more heat pads would be nice.”

“I'll get it.” Virgil got up.

“Does it jostle you too much when we sit on the couch?” Logan asked.

Janus hesitated, he was already bothering them so much, it really wasn’t polite to kick them off the couch too.

“Jan, sweety, please be honest with us, we don’t want to hurt you,” Patton pleaded.

“Yeah, it does.”

All of them happily moved to the floor, laying down some pillows and blankets so it was still comfortable. Virgil returned and passed him the heat pads.

“So, how long do these flare ups usually last?” Roman asked.

“Usually most of the day, sometimes longer.” 

“Well, as Roman promised, we’re staying here as long as it lasts.”

“Yay! Slumber party,” Patton exclaimed.

“As long as you don’t throw any pillows at me,” Logan sighed, before promptly getting hit in the face by a pillow from Virgil. He looked at him with a look of utter betrayal.

Eventually, everyone got settled and they turned the movie back on. Janus tried his best to focus on the plot but soon found himself drifting off.

[mst3kproject]

Magic Christmas Tree

I thought I’d try something different this year and find a bad Hannukah movie, but everybody I asked had the same recommendation: Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights.  I know for a fact that is a prohibitively awful film, because I know people who’ve watched parts of it (I have not to date met anyone who could sit through the whole thing), but it just doesn’t feel like an MST3K feature to me.  Anyway, I have standards.  My conclusion is that people need to make more Hannukah movies… and until that happens, I’m watching Magic Christmas Tree, which comes specially recommended by RiffTrax.

This is the only Christmas movie I’ve ever seen which starts with cheerful holiday music over footage of… Hallowe’en decorations. Obnoxious bully Mark and his two pushover friends decide to go investigate a supposedly-haunted house. Naturally the old lady who lives there is a witch, and in exchange for Mark rescuing her cat, she gives him a seed for a magical tree that will grant him three wishes.  Two months later, with the tree fully grown, his first wish is to have magical powers for one hour – he uses them to torment unfortunate people who were already having to work on Christmas Eve.  His second wish is to kidnap Santa Claus and extort unlimited presents from him, but that attracts the attention of the spirit of Greed, who intends to keep Mark as a slave forever!  Good thing he’s still got that third wish.

God, I hate this movie.  I’d say it’s the worst Christmas movie I’ve ever seen, but Elves exists, so instead I have to say it’s the worst Christmas movie that didn’t have any Nazis in it.  It reminds me more than anything else of Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, in that it’s an absolute mess that seems to have been put together by people who have no idea what they’re doing.  It spends most of its time on boring, annoying irrelevant bullshit, and then when it gets to the plot, that’s boring and annoying, too!

Magic Christmas Tree is only an hour long, but that’s twice as long as it needed to be.  A plot summary makes it sound like most of the film will be dealing with Mark’s three wishes and how he uses them, but it’s half-over before we even get to that point.  The time leading up to it is spent watching Mark follow the witch’s complicated instructions on how to grow and activate the tree, and his parents dealing with this unwanted thing appearing in the middle of their back yard.  All of this is presented in excruciating detail.  We watch Mark dig the entire hole to plant the seed in.  We see his Dad struggle with the lawnmower at unbelievable length, while the Mom yacks about nothing on the phone with her friend Betty.  The Dad tries to cut the tree down with no success.  Mark has to say a set of magic words over and over and over.

It goes on so long, it passes the are you fucking kidding me? point and wanders into territory where you wonder if there’s something wrong with the disk and you’re playing the scene over and over.  It actually starts to feel like it’s on purpose – especially when the slowness is repeatedly emphasized by shots of Mark’s pet tortoise, Ichabod, who seems to be eating his patch of clover far faster than anybody else is accomplishing anything.  You’ll swear the movie is making fun of you.

The sound that accompanies all this is sometimes very peculiar.  The old lady has exactly the voice you’d expect from a witch in a cheap kid’s movie, but Mark’s Mom sounds like she’s being dubbed by a twelve-year-old boy, possibly the same one who provided the voice for Mark himself.  The tree speaks (oh, yes, it does) in the voice of a smarmy stereotypical gay man.  Santa Claus sounds like he’s half-senile and wondering what’s for lunch.

The lawnmower makes some very strange noises indeed. I guess they’re meant to be cartoonish and funny.  They’re definitely the former but they’re never the latter, possibly because they never sound remotely like a lawnmower.  When Mark’s Dad is trying to get it started it sounds like the ghost of a consumptive horse, and three hours later when it actually gets going, it makes noises like a traffic jam in Whoville.

Besides sounding weird, the actors are just plain bad.  The guy playing Santa Claus is half-asleep.  We’re told that the tree’s magic means he’s trapped in the chair he’s sitting in, and I honestly do believe that actor could not have gotten up if he tried, no wishes necessary.  The woman playing Mark’s Mom looks like she’s high as a kite and only barely keeping her grip on reality.  Maybe that’s why they had to dub her.  Mark’s Dad recites his lines like a guy on a game show reading his own life story off a teleprompter, and does his yard chores in a way that’s probably supposed to be pantomimey but is the opposite of entertaining.  The Dad gets an inordinate amount of screen time, which I can only chalk up to the fact that he’s played by director Dick Parish.

The worst of the lot are, of course, the kids, who are predictably terrible 60’s child actors.  They yell all their lines, with the volume and exaggerated emphasis you expect from a school play.  It wears thin very, very quickly.  The kid playing Mark is the worst of the lot, although I might just think that because he’s the one we spend the most time with.  He’s a huge part of why this movie makes me so mad.

I think the best way to describe Mark as a character is to say that the first time I watched this movie I assumed his name was ‘Billy’, despite the fact that everybody kept calling him ‘Mark’. He just seems like the type of nasty little brat who’d be named ‘Billy’ in a bad 60’s Christmas movie.  We meet him having lunch with his two friends by the playground, and learn that he’s a greedy little shit when he drives a hard bargain in a sandwich trade.  Greedy-little-shit-itude continues to be his primary character trait and is, of course, the core of the movie’s lesson.  His attempt to monopolize Santa Claus makes him such a greedy little shit that Greed himself takes an interest in him.

Greed is a huge hairy man who takes delight in kidnapping little boys.  I think he’s supposed to look like a fairy tale giant.  Watching him manhandle a child is an intensely uncomfortable experience.

I guess ‘don’t be greedy’ is a standard message for a children’s movie, and it seems like a particularly appropriate one for Christmas, which presents children with a great opportunity for avarice. What seems a little odd is that Mark never actually suffers any consequences for his selfishness, only the vague threat of them. There was a perfect opportunity for some of this when Mark kidnaps Santa Claus.  Santa, after all, brings toys to good girls and boys… surely by this point, after his brief reign of terror with his magical powers, Mark has been naughty enough to deserve only coal.  Apparently that’s not how it works, though.  Mark just wanders off into the woods in search of small animals to shoot with his new rifle, runs into the giant, and immediately repents even though Greed is offering him all the toys and candy he wants.

What supposedly prompts Mark to become a better person is seeing how the world has responded to Santa Claus going missing.  Curiously, there is very little emphasis on the children who are sad because they didn’t get any presents.  Maybe somebody thought that would have made them seem greedy? Instead, the vision Greed presents to Mark is of the United States military mobilizing to locate Santa and bring him home, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians-style!  So… I guess Mark becomes a better person because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen if the army finds Santa trapped in a chair in his house?  I guess that is pretty terrifying.

Another thing that blunts the lesson is the fact that Mark is given his three wishes as a reward for a good deed.  He got the witch’s cat down from the tree, so she offers him the magical seed and doesn’t let him refuse.  What then was he supposed to use his three wishes for, if not to get stuff for himself? Was this intentionally a poisoned gift, because you shouldn’t accept things from witches?  The witch insists that there are good witches as well as wicked ones, but she’s not exactly an unbiased source.  The movie never tries to blame her, though.  The situation is presented as Mark’s fault, and Mark’s alone.

Finally, at the end Mark wakes up and finds that of course the whole thing was a dream – there was no witch, no magic tree, and no Santa Claus.  This is less annoying than it could have been because at least it’s not a surprise. Mark did hit his head when he fell out of the tree the cat was in, and the movie changed from black and white to colour.  We’ve seen this before in The Wizard of Oz and we can guess where it’s going. The audience might assume that Mark will wake up and immediately take the opportunity to be generous instead of greedy, perhaps by giving his friend something to make up for the lunch trade. Instead, the woman who owns the cat (who is not actually a witch, but looks even more like one in this part of the film than she does wearing the Hallowe’en witch costume in Mark’s dream) offers him milk and cookies, and he delightedly accepts.  This just gives the impression that he’s learned nothing.

Is there anything in this movie I didn’t hate?  Well… among Mark’s school friends is a token black kid, who is not differentiated in any way from his peers.  He talks like them, he dresses like them, and the writers did not use either his lunch or his Hallowe’en plans as a way to demarcate a class difference between him and the others.  So yeah, the movie sucks, but the writers tried really hard not to be racist.

Happy fucking holidays.  I want to say hooray for surviving 2020, but we’ve still got a week to go.  That’s plenty of time for oh, I don’t know, an alien invasion, or a giant meteor, or the Yellowstone supervolcano, or zombies, or whatever.  At this point, if most of us aren’t dead by this time next year, I’ll count that as a win.

[whetstonefires]

Your post about romance was so spot on and this is from someone who really likes reading romances some of the time. I just wish there were more books where friendships (which after all make up the majority of people's relationships!!) were given the same weight and importance as romance gets unthinkingly. Like, I want books or fic which show the development of two (or more) new friends *as the plot and main part of the book*, and the same thing for the progression of pre-established friendship.

Human relationships are varied and complex and interesting and limiting writing to mainly concerning romantic or dating ones is infuriating! I enjoy reading character driven stuff, which is why I like some romances but I really want to see similarly detailed deep studies of friendship. Friendships are so important, and romantic relationships do not supersede them.  Obviously there is gendered bias against romance as a genre but that is not the only reason to be uninterested in romance damnit!

Sorry for ranting in your inbox about romance and thanks for the post

Hah thank and welcome. Very true!

Yeah, the problem is not just how ubiquitous romance is but the inevitability of it. So many people are so much in the habit of hanging their emotional investment on ‘couples getting together’ that not putting one in is a risk, as a creator, and the faint suggestion of a possibility that a romance might eventuate between two characters constitutes a promise that the audience will be outraged to see not followed through.

So making a story focus at all on a relationship between two people who are considered valid potential romantic partners means having to go through incredible backflips and contortions as a writer to get away with not pairing them up, or there will be outrage. There will be outrage anyway, but hopefully on a contained scale that doesn’t have people throwing your book away.

(The easiest way, of course, is to give one or both of them an alternate partner, but then you either have to build up that relationship as the central focus instead, because you aren’t allowed to love anyone that much and not be romantically involved or be romantically involved For Real with anyone but whoever you love most, or accept that you’ve plastered on a beard of some kind in a way that at this point makes your main duo look even more romantic to people who are looking for that in the first place, even if it lets you write a plot that doesn’t acknowledge this.)

This has contributed enormously to the cultural truism ‘men and women can’t be friends.’ They aren’t allowed to be. And this weird intense romantic pressure is now increasingly extending to same-sex friendships, and it’s like...it’s good that gay visibility and acceptance are growing! That’s great!

But it means that all relationships are increasingly exposed to this honestly fucked up set of expectations. That every single love of any intensity is romantic and probably sexual. That that’s the only love that’s real, or that really matters. With occasional exemptions carved out for parents.

And that’s cultural, I want to say. The inclusion of and an interest in the romantic lives of characters in fiction is definitely natural and practically inevitable, but the outsize role it occupies in our current media culture is abnormal and totally non-compulsory. The central role of romance in so much of narrative is just...a pattern, a narrative schema that currently holds sway, born of an assortment of historical accidents and trends, and I don’t think it’s a good one.

I think it would be better for us as a culture and all our individual relationships for that particular social construct to be broken down.

Because this cultural obsession with The Romance in media mirrors and continually recreates the obsession with The Romance in real life. You know how many people are making themselves miserable by either being in a relationship predicated on the need to have one, any one, rather than actual mutual affection, or about not having a love interest currently at any given moment?

Like, quite separately from the actual frustrated romantic feelings themselves, people feeling like they are less or failures or just...unfinished somehow, because they don’t have a romantic partner. It’s so harmful and absurd! We all know this!

And there are of course a lot of sociological factors that have led to that point as well, but it’s linked particularly closely I think to the atomization of modern society.

You’re not likely to retain any particular community for long--we move around so much over the course of our lives, anything you have is designed to be taken apart. School friends are only rarely retained after school, work friends are only until you get a new job, family is quite often something to be avoided or something you have to leave behind, and not usually an extended network anymore anyway.

We are always moving into new contexts, or knowing we might be moved, and holding onto relationships from one context into another is generally regarded as an unusual feat betokening particular, though not lionized, devotion, and leaning on these relationships ‘too much’ or pursuing them with ‘too much’ energy is regarded with deep suspicion.

This, too, is not particularly normal in the human experience. We are not psychologically designed for this level of impermanence. And we have developed very few structures as a culture thus far to make up for it, which is why the modern adult is so famously, dangerously lonely.

But we have all these social protocols for acquiring a person and holding onto them. A person who’s just yours, all yours, who it is promised will fulfill all those gaping needs all by themselves, and if they don’t it’s because you or they are wrong, and need either a different partner or fixing.

The fact that this is insane and not how romance works over 90% of the time is irrelevant to the dream of it, and the dream overwhelms and controls the reality. I agree that codependency is really fucking romantic, and having a kind and supportive mutual one is a lovely fantasy! It’s just...

A lot of harm eventuates from pursuing this fantasy in reality with a media-based conviction that it is 1) a reasonable thing to expect and 2) a necessary precondition for wellbeing and worthiness.

But we have poured so much cultural freight and need into this one single relationship format. At this point having need in any other direction is regarded as disordered and suspect and probably a misdirected application of sexual desire.

The law, too, has put a lot of energy into supporting the focus on seeking the romance as life goal, because the nuclear family is built on the codependent marriage, and capitalism likes the nuclear family very much. The nuclear family is extremely vulnerable to market pressures and bad at collective action, and tends to produce new tiny humans whose main social outlet has been within the school system, which is specifically structured to condition you to accept abusive workplace conditions as a normal precondition of existence, and not to attempt too much intimacy.

Ahem. Spiraled there. But! It’s all connected! Many of the privileges piled onto the institution of marriage were put there specifically because the nuclear family was considered desirable for the expansion of the economy. That’s clearly documented historical fact.

So yeah, the modern cultural obsession with the romance is a symptom of collective emotional disorder, and it chugs along at the expense of the more complex emotional support infrastructures most of us need and deserve.

It’s not just about me wanting representation, wanting an image in the narratives of my culture where I can see myself with the potential for happiness. Everyone needs this. We learn so much about how to be, how to relate to others, from media at this point, since the school system and other weird age-hierarchy stuff keeps us largely segregated from human society for a majority of our growing years and limits our exposure to live examples.

So the paucity of in-depth explorations of friendship, of mutual support, of widespread narrative acceptance that you can have a good life without a romance as its central support pillar, is harmful to people in general.

-

It’s funny, I get frustrated about this periodically, when a piece of media lets me down, or even when I’m following along a funny piece of meta and then the punchline is ‘and the ace character is obviously in denial about how they’re already dating their favorite person’ or whatever.

(The meta is annoying on a surface level and distressing on a deeper level because it’s a threat; so many times a good platonic relationship will buckle under public pressure and it doesn’t matter how asexual, how uninterested in romance, how emphatically platonic the affection has been established as being, The Romance arrives in the next installment of the story because it’s what people expect. Which reinforces the general perception that any other love is illegitimate, lesser, and as soon as it’s meant to be taken seriously it has to be crammed into that one valid shape, and invalidates future insistences in the same mode.

Seriously people stop doing this, we long since reached the point where a character saying in words ‘I have no romantic interest in [person]’ is perceived as a glaring neon sign that they’re destined to get together and that does not do good things for fostering a culture of consent. Obviously people are in denial sometimes but it should not be understood to be the rule.)

But I don’t get upset about it until someone starts in with reasons I’m bad and wrong for not liking these norms.

Like, whatever, media does not cater to my needs, I’ll cope, but when people start trying to get in my head and make me not only responsible for my own discomfort that I’m managing thanks but dishonest and malevolent I...get upset. There’s history there, okay.

‘You don’t care about this ship because you’re homophobic’ ‘you don’t want a love interest in the sequel because you’re racist’ ‘you don’t like romance in stories because you’re a misogynist’ fucking stop.

And occasionally it’s like ‘i guess you have the right to feel that way but how dare you talk about it where other people might hear’ which...well, is particularly common and particularly ironic in the context of people hung up on gay representation.

If we as a society had a healthy relationship with romance, there wouldn’t be negative side effects to that crowd’s pursuit of their worthy goal of applying that schema in places it has been Forbidden, but as it is we don’t, and there are.

[lettersofwrittencollective]

The Pull (86/?)

Summary: The Ragnulf’s are one of the oldest lines of werewolves known. A gift from ancient times was gifted to them. Though not all of the line will experience it. There are some who will experience a Pull. This Pull leads them to their true mate, a soulmate. The problem is, just because the wolf finds their true mate does not mean that they are the same for that person.

Author: @lettersofwrittencollective​

Pairing: Stiles x Hale!Cousin OC (Reader)

Word count: 2538

Warnings: angst,  some fluff, Norse storyline development, threatening 

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The old god watched his daughter curled into her mate.

Taking deep breaths he tried to breathe through his anger. 

The Norns would not be swayed… this he knew. But hadn’t the fox been enough? 

They’d faced the fox and she’d brought back her mate… 

She had faced losing herself in the process.

He had almost been destroyed.

Natasha Rafnulf and Stiles Stilinski would be a force to be reckoned with when they fully came into themselves and their powers… if they stay with Scott McCall they’ll be damn near impossible to stop… 

But the Ragnulfs tend to return to their pack… the protection of their family always stronger than any other pack as they knew the bonds and they were aware of the implications. 

Stiles Stilinski, however, was intensely loyal… to Scott McCall. The question wasn’t if Stiles would accept Natasha, the way he held her currently 

Sighing, Odin recalled Hugin and Munin to his side. 

As his ravens returned, he thought back to what he had learned a moon cycle ago. 

Munin had accidentally stumbled across the remains of a group of assassins. They had not been trained very well from Munin cold tell. 

He’d come upon the scene as a woman taunted a man. She’d not been on her own. 

What had caught Munin’s attention was the creature with the woman. The one that seemed to be doing her bidding.

It looked like a man with an animal skull on his head. 

Munin hadn’t seen one of those in centuries… The magic to create them having become almost non-existent.. but there was something off about this one. 

Berserkers were not meant to be puppets. Like their counterparts,  Ulfhednar and Svinfylking’s they were meant to be the most ruthless men and women in battle.  They were originally meant to be the bodyguards of noble families but had become elite warriors in their own right as time had passed 

Berserkers entered their trances when they would need to go to war and while a man in a true rite may not be able to tell the difference between friend or foe, they rarely did someone else’s bidding. 

This one was following the huntress, Kate Argent.

Munin had stayed to watch as the woman asked about who the “Benefactor” was. Whatever this name was, it had been enough to cause her to go after his men. From what Munin heard, he figured that this “Benefactor” was paying for assassins.

Before Munin could figure out who the assassins were supposed to go after, he’d been distracted by the sound of the huntress groaning in pain. Munin had turned his attention to focus on the girl solely when he’d heard the clatter of a gun against the asphalt. 

Munin had watched as the blonde in front of him had doubled over in pain before her skin had transformed and he’d watched as a nagual formed in front of him, this one a were-jaguar. One of Xolotl’s then… 

Curious as to why Munin had followed the woman as she’d gotten the Berserkers to listen to her. It hadn’t taken them very long to disappear and the woman had then made her way north.

It was when Munin had told him the story of what he had seen, that Odin had thought to ignore the Norns, to step in and have the consequences be damned but the problem was the consequences wouldn’t be his to face. They’d be hers. 

So, he’d done the one thing he could do- he opened up the link her mate had with instincts just a little wider. 

He’d managed it just in time… 

Natasha had been foolish in taking off on her own but Stiles had made it in time and though it took his mind a little longer to catch up to his instincts, his instincts had immediately called for the blood of the one that would harm what was his. 

You hadn’t let go of Stiles since you’d launched yourself into his arms. 

You’d had to remind yourself that he was okay… that he was here and that the stupid bitch Violet wasn’t going to be able to get to him. 

Stiles had let you hold onto him. Had wrapped his fingers in yours and you’d leaned your head on his shoulder. Taking in deep breaths, you let yourself be grounded to the moment in front of you, to the man in front of you when the sound of a gasping, wheezing breath pulls your attention. 

Looking around, you’re struck by the memory of earlier, Violet had been taunting Brett… Wolfsbane. 

Running over to the boy, you’re met with the sight of him literally foaming at the mouth as he wheezes. 

“I need a lighter!” you call out but, unsurprisingly, no one has one.  

Trying to think of other ways you can get rid of wolfsbane poisoning, you realize that each one has its own specific set of rules. 

Thankfully Stiles has already pulled out his phone. As he dials out, Brett lets out a gasping breath before he starts choking and the foam at his mouth turns yellow. 

Calling out for Stiles, he’s at your side a moment later as he hangs up the phone and tells Scott to help him out. The three of you quickly make your way towards Stiles’ jeep and you get Brett situated in the backseat.

You’re just about to jump in the passenger seat when a hand grips your wrist. Turning, you see Scott giving you an apologetic look, “I told them you were the one attacked.”

“What?! Why?” you demand, knowing this means that you’re going to have to separate and not liking the idea at all. 

Scott grimaces but points out that you had been attacked and that he’d told the Sheriff as much before they had figured out Brett.  

You want to tell him to figure out something else, tell the Sheriff that he’d been attacked or something… You’re about to tell him as much when Stiles speaks up, sounding less than pleased, “Tasha… you need to give your statement.”

You want to argue but Brett’s pained grunt distracts you. 

Sighing, you step back from the car and make your way towards the school. As you walk oer, you can hear Scott promising to Stiles that he’ll keep you safe. 

Just as you make it inside the doors, Liam calls your name and a moment later he’s got you wrapped up in a hug, “Thank God you’re okay…”

He ushers you towards Coaches offices, through the locker room where you Violet’s been tied up, and as you do, you can hear the sound of sirens approaching the school. 

It isn’t long before the school is bustling with the sounds of people. Officers, students, parents… they’re all there and everyone is trying to demand answers. 

Parrish comes in and takes your statement, it’s just a rehashing of what you remembered. Though, you told him you’d come back to the locker rooms because you needed some girl stuff from your bag that you’d forgotten to take with you earlier and that you had no idea how you had gotten the necklace off of you.  Which was partially true. 

“Adrenaline rush?” he’d supplied for you and you’d merely shrugged your shoulders. It made more sense than whatever you could tell him at least.

Nodding his head Parrish took his notes and made his way out towards the locker room, no doubt to get Violet.

“Guys, back off. You can get your gear tomorrow. If anybody sees Garrett, you notify the police immediately,”  you hear Coach informing the rest of the team before grumbling, “Then tell him he's off the damn team.”

You’re not 100% sure how Coach knows Garretts involved but you can’t help but chuckle softly, somehow you doubt Garret’s going to care about getting kicked off the team. 

Making your way towards the girl’s locker room. You figure now’s a good a time as any to try and change— only to discover that they’ve locked down both locker rooms. 

You’re making your way through the people when you catch sight of Kira who’s sprinting down the halls and out of the school. Curious as to what that’s about, you’re about to go after her when you hear the pup calling your name. 

He catches up to you and immediately puts a jacket in your hand, looking down you see the large white numbers, an inversion of your own number 42 and can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the pup in front of you. 

Liam offers no remorse, he simply shrugs his shoulders and advises, “He texted me, said to make sure you had a jacket since you’re apparently always freezing and then he told me where it was.”

Smiling to yourself, you shrug on the hoodie. As you’re putting it on, you hear the Suit’s voice. You had known that Scott’s dad was around but you hadn’t seen him at the game - though to be fair you hadn’t been looking for him. He’s asked Parrish to hold up and is walking over while Scott makes his way up to you and Liam. 

Scott questions the absence of Kira.

“Not sure,” you tell him, “I saw her running through the halls earlier though.”

“She took off,” Liam elaborates. When you and Scott both turn to look at the pup he informs you that, “As soon as you guys took off, she called Lydia about that list and well-“ 

“Her moms on it…” Scott picked up, putting the pieces together.

“Everyone’s on it.”

“Wait a second,” you cut him off before dropping your voice and asking, “Are you on the list?”

“Not yet,” he mutters, “but there’s still another third, right?”

Before you can respond, Scott’s dad’s voice catches your attention, mostly be aide it’s accompanied by the scent of anger bursting as he says, “... that’s right. You don’t have any parents. That’s why they call you The Orphans.” 

You can hear the rattling of Chains and can only assume that Suit got the reaction he was looking for.

A moment later he’s telling someone, “We need to find the boyfriend, Garrett.” 

“Coach —I’m gonna need both their locker numbers,” you hear Sheriff point out before he comes into the hallway, “And someone find me a set of bolt cutters.”

Pulling into the parking lot at Deaton’s, Stiles finds both Deaton and Derek waiting for him. 

“Scott called,” he offered when Stiles raised an eyebrow, “where’s Little Wolf?” 

“Stayed behind,” Stiles growls out, not particularly excited at the prospect,

Working together, Derek helps him get the apparent werewolf out of Roscoe and into the clinic where Deaton’s grabbing some stuff. 

With Derek’s help, he manages to get the boy laid out on the metal table. As they’re getting him situated, Brett starts to seize again, this time thrashing about and choking on foam at his mouth. 

“What the hell is happening to this kid?!” Stiles asks as he tries to hold the boy down on the table. 

“He’s been poisoned by a rare wolfsbane,” Deaton answers as he comes to the boy’s other side. “I need to make an incision and you need to hold him as still as possible,” he says as he the boy thrashes forward. 

Stiles can feel his irritation at the older man but decides against it, pushing down on the boy again. Finding that they’re having a hard time holding the boy down, he snaps at the other werewolf, “Hey Derek, how about a little werewolf strength?” 

“Yeah, I'm not the only one with werewolf strength,” Derek snips out. 

“If you can’t hold him still, the incision might kill him,” Deaton points out and in his frustration, Stiles tugs the boy towards him.

A terrible idea really, because Brett seems to slide over to him quite easily. 

Stiles tries to push him back but Bretts covered in sweat and the yellow foam and as he thrashes about he can feel the boy slipping. 

Calling out to Derek, he tells the man that Bretts slipping and he doesn’t think he can hold Brett down. 

A moment later, Brett is taking a deep gasping breath as his eyes open.  Stiles looks over to see the boys terrified eyes just as the smell of something sour hits his nose.  

Brett growls menacingly and Stiles can feel himself getting thrown back into the cupboards. Grunting in pain, he looks up to see that Brett had managed to launch himself up and off the table he was just on. 

Growling, he starts to stalk towards Stiles when he seems to think better of it and turns to take off. He’s cut off, however, when a fist collides with his face and Stiles turns to see a blue-eyed Peter pulling his hand back, “I guess I still have a little werewolf strength myself.”

“Yeah,” Derek scoffs before looking from Brett back to Peter, “Maybe more than a little.” 

Stiles turns back to Brett who’s currently unconscious on the floor and he crouches down beside the boy’s body. He’s no longer choking on the rare wolfsbane but he doesn’t seem to be breathing either. 

“Hey Doc,” Stiles calls over his shoulder as he checks Brett’s pulse to make sure the boy’s not dead at least,  “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

From his peripheral, Stiles watches as Deaton drops down next to Brett, scalpel in hand. He takes one look at the boy before he’s taking the scalpel and dragging it down Brett’s chest, slicing open along his sternum, releasing a puff of putrid-smelling yellow smoke. 

Brett gives a gasping breath before his breathing seems to even out. Breathing out through his nose, Stiles tries to clear the putrid stench from his nostrils he asks Deaton, “Is he okay?”

“I think he’ll be fine. But he’ll probably be out for a while,” Deatom answers with a nod of his head as he moves to check the boy. 

Brett seems to be breathing easier overall but his lips are moving and Stiles can hear the boy murmuring softly. 

“Guys, can you hear that?” he asks the others, “I think he’s saying something.”

 Looking up he sees Deaton giving him a confused look and Derek’s face contorted like he’s trying to focus. 

Deaton’s already leaning over Brett so Stiles follows suit and as can make out the words the other boy is whispering, “The sun… the moon… the truth…the sun… the moon… the truth… “ 

He knows the words from somewhere… he knows he does… he just can’t remember where. Looking over to Deaton, he watches the older man lean back as understanding dawns on him and he says, “Three things cannot long be hidden — the sun, the moon, the truth.”

“It’s a Buddhist proverb,” Stiles realizes before his face furrows, “Why is he saying a Buddhist proverb?”

Deaton’s face doesn’t seem to indicate that he has any idea why so Stiles turns to Derek who’s staring at Peter. 

“Satomi,” Peter practically growls out. The two werewolves having a silent conversation with each other and Stiles figures that either Derek or Peter will be hunting down Satomi real soon. 

After a moment, Peter turns towards Stiles and asks, “Where is Little Wolf?”

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading!! Let me know what you thought! Comments, reblogs, asks… all of these things let me know how you’re feeling about the story and give me life!

Everything taglist: @stiles-o-dylan24​​ @nicole-lynne​​ @mummybear​​ @emichelle​​ @genius2050​​ @suhoey​ @fullangelimagines​ @xceafh​

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Posted 13 March 2020

[sprnklersplashes]

heart of stone (6/?)

AO3

Janis ditches the tights and jean shorts by Wednesday. There’s a slight look of ‘I told you so’ on her mother’s face, but she spares Janis the lecture out of politeness. Janis never thought she’d miss them, but here she is.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she scribbles another flower on the page, a twin for the one next to it. Not an exact twin, it’s thinner and its petals are more spiked and sharp than the one she drew before it. It’s less inviting, more dangerous. Angry, even. Like if she picked it up she’d cut her finger on it. She hadn’t intended for it to happen; in fact, she’d set out to doodle some pretty little flowers in an attempt to brighten up her sketchbook. But the pencil, as it often does, did what it wanted. She turns it on the side, trying to find a way to like it. It’s not bad work, not her best but certainly not her worst. Maybe she could like it if she had drawn it earlier, but she had really been hoping to get something nice into her book today.

With a sigh, she sets the book on her lap and swings her body around so that her feet dangle over the edge of her bed. Her next round of chemo isn’t due for a few hours, a long stretch of time to attempt to fill with activity. While she’s only been in the hospital for two full days, she’s decided that the worst part is the waiting around for the next thing to happen. Granted, much of that can be put on her as she’s spent more time in her room than she has anywhere else, distracting herself with TV and art and her parents and texting her friends every chance she can get. It all comes together and forms some kind of routine for her, one that’s built with as much familiarity and comfort as possible woven through it. The only downside to it is that the room’s been getting progressively smaller since two days ago and it wasn’t long before it started choking her.  

She left the door slightly open and peers into the hallway, the brightness of the walls striking against the cool tones of her room. She can hear the faint sounds of half-conversations that overlap with each other; nurses gossiping with each other while fiddling with IVs, the inhabitants of the longue talking and laughing about who knows what, doctors prescribing new rounds of medicine. The ward is much more alive than she had Janis ever thought it could be, a constant hum in the background of the day to day life keeps the place awake.

She taps her nails on the cover of her book, her swinging legs gaining momentum as she debates following the pull in her chest, compelling her to maybe leave her room for more than five minutes at a time and follow the sounds of conversation. Maybe talk to people who aren’t her medical team or her parents. Make some friends, because as everyone knows, cancer wards are prime social hotspots. She may not be here forever, but she’ll be here long enough to justify getting comfortable.

What’s the worst that can happen, logic had asked her that first night.

Literally so freaking much, she responded. Friends aren’t exactly her strong suit. Regina was a mistake, Damian was luck, and Cady was a gift. She could indulge her inner loser and tell herself it’s because she’s special and tailor made to a few specific people, but the thought of that makes her roll her eyes. So she faces up to the truth and all it entails; that she’s merely been unlucky in the friendship department, something that can be boiled down to one terrible experience and everything that came after it and lingers long after the smoke has cleared.

You’re being ridiculous she tells herself. If there’s a Regina George clone here, she’ll be thoroughly impressed. So she pulls her boots on and pushes herself off the bed, quickly explaining to her mom that she’s going to hang out in the longue for a bit.

“You need me to come with you?”

“I’m fine,” she says, a small smile on her face as she pulls on a cardigan. She nods at the intense competitive cooking show her mom has on the TV. “Tell me who wins. And don’t leave out any details.”

“Well we both know it’s not going to be Leticia judging by the look of that beef,” she says seriously. Janis clicks her tongue before turning and heading down, her steps smaller than normal and her sketchbook held against her chest like a shield. Her stomach twists uneasily, not from the chemo or anything like that, just from good old-fashioned anxiety. In an odd way, it’s a relief to feel ill in that way.

When she pushes herself past the open doors, all eyes turn to her and only look away to talk with other people. It’s far more populated than the last time she was here, people sitting in groups of two and three, most in pyjamas and some with hats. But all of them in groups, belonging with each other. Is this how Cady felt all those months ago, when she and Damian spotted her heading to the bathroom? Maybe her girlfriend had the right idea that day. A bathroom stall is a way better alternative to a room full of strangers.

Unfortunately, she knows better by now, and so she settles in an armchair as gracefully as she can, her legs tucked beneath her, and tries to shake off the discomfort she feels by opening her book and giving her hands something to do.

“You’re new,” a girl sitting on the floor states. She’s one of the few that actually has hair, dark brown and curly, and it makes Janis feel a little more at ease. Is that bad, she has to ask.

“Third day,” she explains, offering her a small wave. “I’m Janis.”

“Melissa,” she says. She leans back on her arms and exposes a little bandage inside her elbow. Janis pulls her own arm a little closer. Melissa doesn’t seem to notice, instead gesturing to her with her chin.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, this?” she asks, her cheeks growing warm. “Oh, just some drawings I do.”

“Cool,” she says. “So you do art?”

“Sometimes it’s like the art does me," she says dryly, earning a chuckle. “But you know how it is.”

“My best friend says that all the time,” Melissa sighs. “She says she wants to go to art college but I’ve watched her cry over trying to hand in assignments.”

“You sound like my mom,” Janis replies. “Literally every time I bring up doing art in college she tells me how stressful it is.” She shrugs lightly. “She’s not wrong, but it’s the only thing I want to do.”

“Is your mom here?”

“Yeah, she’s back in my room,” she explains. “I left her watching some cooking show on TV.”

“Wow, and you’ve only just here. I’ve been here for a month and I only just got my mom to let me out of her sight,” she sighs, a resigned smile on her face and her eyebrow raised in a silent ‘you know how it is’. “Want to play some Scrabble? We’ve started keeping a scoreboard so we can add you in. We have a whole tournament going.”

“Sounds fun,” Janis says, pushing herself off the chair. “Although I should give you warning, I’m dyslexic, so I kind of suck at it.”

Janis follows her across the longue, slipping her hand into her pocket when she thinks she sees the other girl reach out to her. There’s a pang of guilt in Janis’ chest even though Melissa doesn’t seem to care, and she does her best to work through it. She exchanges names and smiles with other kids, all introduced by Melissa. It’s an odd feeling; she’s not used to being the one who’s introduced. She’s either known people so long she doesn’t need to or she’s the one making the introduction, but today her mouth feels dry and her tongue tied so much that all she can do is say ‘hi’ and try to keep up with the rest of the little group. But despite this, and despite the fact that she does supremely suck at Scrabble, they aren’t half bad. They welcome her in with no problem at all, asking her about school and life and art as they set up tiles and she knows the right questions to ask them. She laughs at their jokes and nods along to the conversation, even adding in her own take now and again as it builds into a steady flow.

It’s not entirely perfect; she can’t help but feel slightly on the outside when they bring up a nurse or a patient she doesn’t know and she’s much more quiet than she’s used to being, unsure which, if any, topics are off-limits, where the lines are. But she’s enjoying herself enough to drown out her earlier worries even if it can’t make them fade entirely, and her mood only picks up when she hears someone behind her say (squeal) her name, followed a flash of pink and rainbow appearing in her vision. How times change when a pink sweater can make her smile instead of grimace.

“Maddie!” The younger girl leans into her side, eyes bright and sparkling, and Janis puts an arm around her shoulders. “Hey kid, where have you been?”

“Where have you been more like,” she replies. “I haven’t seen you since Monday.”

“Been busy,” she says. No one presses, likely because they all understand.  They’ve all been where she is before. “And now I’m busy losing at Scrabble. Badly.” Maddie chuckles and when her arms wrap around Janis and chin rests on her shoulder, she can’t say no to it. There’s nothing uncomfortable about such a gesture and it almost feels as natural as hugging Damian or when Karen rests her head on her shoulder, despite her only knowing the girl for two days.

“Oh hey, did they tell you about the photography thing yet?” she asks.

“That what now?”

“Oh it’s this thing the cancer centre started,” Melissa explains. “Basically they want us to take pictures of stuff that matters to us. Us doing hobbies, us with our friends, the whole shebang. It’s meant to be about our cancer not defining us or whatever.” She gives a casual shrug. “It’s fun anyway. You should do it. Especially since you have your art thing.”

“Sounds like fun,” she says before poking Maddie in the ribs. “Now come on, kid. Help me make a word out of these.”  

And maybe it’s Maddie’s presence or just time passing, but Janis suddenly finds herself a lot less anxious. She even gets to the point where she trades playful insults with another kid, a boy around her age, and form a team up of sorts against him with one of the other girls. They can’t replace her real friends and she wouldn’t try to, the bonds she’s formed with Damian and Cady are too important and were put through too much to be replicated, but she suspects that they could quickly become new friends.

What’s more, treatments and diagnosis come in and out of the conversation with unexpected ease, and when Janis talks about her own, it’s the same. She hadn’t realised how much of this she’d held back, even in her texts and calls with Damian and talks with her mom. And while she feels bad for it, it also feels so, so good to talk to people like this. People who aren’t her parents or her doctors. People who are, well… like her.

And as it turns out, her next round is scheduled the same time as Melissa’s, and so they head down the hallway together. While Melissa continues to make conversation, Janis’ responses dwindle the closer she gets to her room. It doesn’t take long for the good feeling from the longue to fade, and the image of the needle in her vein becomes sharper in her mind.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Janis asks suddenly.

“Sure.”

“Does it…” She swallows past the lump in her throat. She finds a loose thread on her cardigan and toys with it until the question comes out. “Does it ever get easier? All this?”

“Well…” Melissa stops in their tracks and Janis almost trips as she does the same, immediately regretting asking. The other girl bites her lip, searching for the right answer. It feels like hours before she says “I don’t really know. I can’t speak for you. We’re all different here.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “I mean… I guess you get used to it. So it starts getting less scary, I guess.”

Janis only nods and then Melissa reaches out and taps her arm.

“It doesn’t stop sucking,” she sighs. “You just get used to it sucking.”

“And then we all bond over it sucking?” she asks, smirking.

“You get it,” she replies with a laugh. “See you later, Janis.”

“Bye.”

After Melissa leaves, she lingers in the hallway for a minute, pressing her finger into the spot where her IV goes. The problem is exactly what Melissa said-you get used to it. And she really, really doesn’t want to get used to it. Getting used it to means that she’ll be here for a while, that something else replaces her old life. Especially now, after the year she had last year, she wants to get used to good stuff, not stuff that ‘sucks’. The idea of this, medicines and hospitals and doctors, becoming normal to her sends a shiver down her back.

But she learned a while ago how to live in reality, even when it’s not what she wants. And it’s with that attitude she walks into her room, where she finds not only her IV set up, but a text from Cady detailing something funny from her math class and how much she misses her.

Even if she gets used to everything else, she knows she’ll never, ever get used to missing Cady.

                                                                                               *****

Friday morning, she wakes later than she normally does. It’s a slow process at the start, sleep pulling her in and begging her to stay, the hospital-issue sheets softer than soft around her and forming a cosy cocoon that she’s so tempted to remain in.

That is, until she remembers what day it is, and then she’s jolted awake.

Friday. Or as she’s called it, Damian-and-Cady day.

It was an unspoken agreement that the two of them were visiting her in here. Just like her father, they were insistent on coming over every moment they could, with Damian jokingly suggesting he could hide under her bed and they could have a sleep over (which they had considered in seriousness and attempted to plan). But thanks to a little thing called school, and another thing called distance, today was the first day she could see them, which is why now she’s wide awake, bright eyed, bushy tailed, everything. Because she’s finally seeing them again and filling the hole in her soul being away from them had carved.

“Morning, kid,” her mom says cheerily, entering the room with a cup of coffee in one hand. “They’re still serving breakfast downstairs, or if you want it brought up to you-”

“Sounds great, Mom,” she replies, only half paying attention. She turns on her phone, her leg bouncing anxiously as she waits for it to load. Has it always been this slow at turning on? She swears it hasn’t been. It takes an eternity for her lockscreen to come up, the time written across it in thin white numbers.

“Ten thirty?” she reads out loud before her head snaps up. “Mom, why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Why would I?” she asks. “You need all the rest you can get, and you’ve still got time before you’re due a round.”

“I know,” she sighs, rubbing her eyes. “But Cady and I text good morning to each other and it was my turn this morning. I don’t want her to think I forgot.”

“Well, I’m sure Cady understands. You know, with all that’s going on, maybe she’s not expecting good mornings right now.”

“Course she is,” she replies quickly. In what universe would Cady not wait for a good morning from her? “It’s our thing. Didn’t you and Dad have a thing?” She types out the message and sends it quickly, although Cady probably won’t see it for at least another two hours.

“Oh, you think we did good morning e-mails back in those days?” she says, laughing a little. She sits on the bed next to her on the bed. “So are you getting some breakfast? Someone can bring it up if you don’t feel up to going down, I’ll just tell them what you want-”

“It’s fine, Mom.” She reaches under the bed and pulls on a sweater before slipping into her boots and raking a brush through her hair. “I might as well go down. Someone might take the last yogurt while I’m down there.”

Truthfully, she doesn’t really feel like eating. Not anything bad, she’s just not hungry, but it’ll put her mom’s mind at ease. Just as she thought, the tension fades from her mom’s shoulders, and when she pats her shoulder, there’s more relief in her smile than just breakfast warrants.

She eats in her room, with the TV on, like she does when she’s sick at home. She could eat in the dining room, but despite the new friends she’s made she prefers eating in private, especially away from the buzzing nurses. As she flips around the channels, her phone buzzes on the plastic table, the screen lighting up to show her a new text that makes her smile and roll her eyes at once.

‘Good morning, babe. Can’t wait to see you today. Also, ik I can’t really change it now, but what do we think of the outfit?’

Beneath the message is a picture of Cady in her bedroom mirror, clad in a black vest and blue flannel shirt with white skinny jeans, her hair held back in a high, loose ponytail, soft curls framing her round face, her eyes looking up at the mirror as she gives an open, toothy grin. And Janis can’t help it, she squeals. God damn it, her girlfriend is cute.

‘Love it, love it, love it. You’re the queen of cuteness. And apparently, texting during class. Stop doing that. If I get a text from you between now and lunch I will not cuddle you later.’

‘I’m not texting during class, it’s study hall.’ Wow, what on Earth has happened to the ever-studious, rule following Cady Heron? Not even Plastic Cady texted during study hall. ‘Besides, you have to cuddle with me. It’s legally required and I’m deprived of Janis cuddles.’

‘Only if you be good and don’t text during school hours.’ She fires back, chuckling under her breath. ‘And you remain that freaking adorable.’

“Well someone’s in a good mood.” She looks up and sees Doctor Wiley standing in the doorway, and her smile dips a little, the perfect bubble she was sitting in with Cady ruined. Not enough to ruin her mood, nothing could do that, but it shakes it.

“It’s her girlfriend,” her mom explains.

“How do you know that?”

“Your smile,” she says. “It’s your ‘Cady smile’.”

“I don’t…” Her voice trails off and her mom simply shrugs. Well look at that. She’s that girlfriend now.

“Well, that’s nice to hear,” Wiley says, striding towards her. Under the table, Janis crosses her fingers that this is a normal good morning visit. She’ll take bad news on any day that’s not Damian-and-Cady day. “So, Janis, a lot of us on your team have been talking and we’ve decided to ask if you might want to get a port inserted.”

“A what?” she asks.

“Think of it like a little reservoir put underneath your skin,” he explains. “Just to make receiving the chemo easier on you. A lot of patients have one put in.”

“Oh, wow.” Way to bring the mood down, Doc, she thinks. Sometimes she envies the younger patients who have their parents making all the hard decisions. Still, one word sticks out in all that. “It makes it easier?”

“Quite a bit easier,” he agrees. “For one thing, it’s a lot more comfortable than an IV.” There’s a plus. “And a lower risk of your medicine leaking out-”

“Sounds cool,” she interrupts quickly before he can bring up an image she doesn’t want. “Um, can I think about it? I mean, is it urgent?”

“No, of course not,” Wiley replies with a stiff smile. “I’ll let you and your mom discuss it.”

He leaves them after an uncomfortable silence, nodding to her and her mom and reminding her that he’s around if she has any questions.

“So what do you think?” her mom asks.

“I don’t think.” She picks her phone back up and jumps off the bed. “Where did you put my clothes?”

“I put everything in your bag, it’s under the bed,” she replies. Janis pulls out her bag, sorting through the mass of denim, cotton, plaid and leather, all while her mom hovers behind her with anxious eyes that drill into her back. "Janis, you should consider this.”

“And I will,” she sighs. She pulls out a shirt she’s always liked and throws it on the bed. “Just not right now.” She shakes her head, trying to clear some of the smoke in her brain. Still sitting on the ground, she looks up at her mom and sighs. “Mom, I just want to not think about cancer stuff right now. I just want to see my friends and think about that.” She toys with the shirt in her hands and bunches it into a tight ball, her arms tense and shaking and her grip tight. “Is that okay?”

Her voice sounds impossibly broken on that question. And while it wasn’t intentional, it works on her mom, who nods and comes over to pat her hair.

“Okay, sweetie,” she says, and that’s the temporary end of it.

The day passes even slower than it normally does in hospital-time. Hours stretch on and on with no end in sight and she can’t distract herself no matter what she tries to do. She can’t focus long enough to read or settle on one TV show and even games in the longue can only get her so far. She tries checking her social media when on her IV, but she’s hardly there a minute before her anxiety peaks again after seeing pictures of her friends. Besides, it’s mostly dry now, everyone else is in class.

Finally, finally, it comes to the afternoon and it’s close enough that she can justify beginning to get ready. She stretches, grateful for the little power nap she took earlier, and fishes her make-up out of her bag. It’s not everything, but it’ll have to work, as will the tiny mirror in her bathroom.

“What’s going on in here?” The voice makes Janis jump six feet, even though it’s the honey-toned voice of one of the older nurses. “Little makeover.”

“Just wanted to look nice today,” she explains as she unscrews the foundation. She’s a little bit surprised to see that she’s not out of practice since she’s been bare-faced for well over a week now. Bigger priorities and all that.

“Her girlfriend’s coming over today,” her mom says in a low voice.

“It’s not just that,” she says, even though it might be. “Damian will also be here.”

“Oh you kids and your relationships,” the nurse chuckles as she takes the empty bags out. In the mirror, Janis sees her point sternly in her direction as though she were her mother. “Just remember Janis, if she really cares about you, she won’t care how much muck you have on your face.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says as she applies a coat of eyeshadow, deep indigo and sparkling under the low lights. She adds a generous amount of purple lipstick next, a shade that’s always been a favourite of hers, and four coats of mascara. Some say that’s overkill, she disagrees. Bigger, bolder, better after all.

She takes a second before looking at herself properly, and when she does it makes her happier than it has any right to be. She looks like herself again. Not a girl with cancer. A girl who is perfectly healthy and happy, the dark circles around her eyes and the pale tint to her face deliberate. Not only that, she feels stronger, even though she hadn’t been aware of any weakness before. She can breathe easier now. She’s herself again. A little winded but it was worth it.

When she’s done, Cady and Damian should get out of school in about ten minutes. They worked it all out; they’ll get the first bus from school up to the hospital, which should take about twenty-five minutes. She offered to pay their bus tickets and her mom had offered to pick them up, but neither one of them would hear any of it. Damian in particular would die before accepting money from anyone.

So she has just over half an hour. Maybe closer to forty minutes when factoring in waiting for the bus and various stops…

She probably should have left the make-up to later just to give herself something to do.

No, it’s fine. The last thing she wants is them walking in on her doing her make-up. Besides, there’s plenty to do for half an hour. She’s waited this long after all. She checks her outfit again, first in the bathroom mirror, by bouncing repeatedly, and then by using the camera on her phone. This morning she was sure about this outfit. Now she’s not sure about this skirt. Maybe if her mom had woken her up earlier she’d have had more time to plan it. The shirt is fine, it’s something Cady loves, so she won’t trade it, but the skirt… it’s not working. She grabs more stuff from her bag and lays it out on the bed, debating each one carefully. There’s a pair of studded shorts that she doesn’t think looks right with the shirt, a pair of jeans that would be far too uncomfortable, and a dark grey skirt that she’s not worn that much and is a little short-

“Holy crap,” she sighs. She shakes her head at herself. She hasn’t obsessed this much over her looks since middle school. “You’re insane, Sarkisian. You’re fine.”

They’ve both seen her look worse, surely.

She forces herself to sit on the bed and just watch some freaking YouTube like a normal person. She gets a text from Damian telling her they’re on their way, and she takes a deep breath and sends a response. She then has one eye on the phone and one eye on the window, all the while counting the minutes until they should be here.

Twenty five minutes. One video later, it’s twenty one. Another video, eighteen. Another video, plus a sip of the coffee her mom got her, fourteen. Another video, plus re-checking her make-up, ten. Another video, six. Another video, three.

And now they should be here. They probably are; they’re probably walking through the lobby. Maybe the elevator’s a little slow, maybe they got lost. This is a big place and they don’t even know where they ward is. Do they? Did she tell them? She grabs her phone and checks their groupchat, scrolling through the week-

“Janis?” Her name is accompanied by a soft knock on the door, and when she looks up, Cady is standing in the doorway, looking even more beautiful than she did that morning with a breathless smile and dimples in her cheeks. And everything else she was feeling melts away.

Janis doesn’t care about dignity, she runs over and throws her arms around her. As Cady hugs her back just as fiercely, Janis fights the urge to pick her up off the floor.

“I missed you,” Cady whispers into her shoulder.

“I missed you more,” she replies, certain that she’s correct.

“Well I’ll just go then,” Damian jokes. “If you two need a moment alone.”

“Don’t even think about it,” she tells him seriously, jumping into his embrace. He runs his hand through her hair and even rocks her and everything about his embrace feels right.

“Got you these,” he says when they eventually pull apart. He presents her with a bunch of white flowers wrapped in silver paper. The scent is just like the gesture; so sweet it makes her well up.

“Oh you losers,” she says. “I love them.”

“Hi kids,” her mom greets from her chair in the corner. To be honest, Janis had actually forgotten her mom was there. So her mom has watched her run across the room and tackle-hug Cady. Nice. “How was school?”

“It’s fine,” Cady replies. “You know… senior year….”

“Oh I’m sure it is,” she says fondly. “I’ll give you kids some alone time.” She gives Janis’ shoulder a squeeze before heading out, and then Janis can hold Cady’s hand as tightly as she wants and pulls the two of them to the bed, utterly giddy at having them at her side again.

Even if it won’t last a voice in her head whispers.

“So come on, what have I missed?” she asks. “Other than you two, I mean. Tell me everything. Spill all the tea. I crave gossip!”

“It’s been a week, Jan,” Cady tells her, grinning and swinging her legs as her feet don’t touch the floor. “But, you do know that you’re talking to the newest captain of the North Shore Mathletes.”

“Come on then.” Janis digs her elbow in her girlfriend’s ribs. “Tell me everything.”

That’s all the incentive Cady needs.

She babbles on about her plans for the new year as Captain, how she’s already getting new recruits and she’s even allowed to invite freshmen and create Junior Mathletes, how she’s sure that membership is going to be double what it was last year (at which point Damian reminds her that there were only three people on the team last year), and about how they’re already starting to put together teams for a few contests, more than last year, and of course, how she’s ready to defend their state champion title. With each word, Janis’ heart grows warmer, the sense of security she’s craved all week settling and wrapping around her like her favourite blanket, and their hands lie intertwined on the bed a though they’d never been apart.

“So that’s my life…” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. She shakes her head and covers Janis’ hand with hers. “But what about you, what’s it like in here?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she scoffs. “I’m always fine.” Cady’s smile dips, not enough, but Janis notice and let out a sigh. “I mean it’s not the ideal situation. But I’m… coping?”

“I do not like that inflection,” Damian adds, leaning back on the bed and raising an eyebrow.

“You wouldn’t,” she says. “Like, it’s not too bad. You know… the food is actually pretty good, we have some cool stuff in the longue, they know how to keep us occupied. The doctors are all great. Including one hot med student I’m considering setting Damian up with.”

“Consider my attention grabbed,” he says. “How hot are we talking here?”

“Like… Okay I’m not into dudes, so I’m not that great at guessing, but he’s a solid 7.5,” she explains. “Would be a 9 but he stabbed me several times while trying to find a vein.”

“He did what?” Cady squeals, making the two of them jump. Her eyebrows shot up her forehead. “He stabbed you?”

“Woah, yeah.” She grasps Cady’s shoulder and silently bites her tongue. She rubs it in circles, bringing her back down. “And it hurt for a few seconds and I was slightly annoyed by it. And then we laughed about it.” She strokes Cady’s cheek carefully. “Nothing bad, Caddy.”

“Okay.” Cady lets out a breath and shakes out her hands. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, love.” She plays a kiss on her cheekbone, the tension fleeing Cady’s body as she does so. She tangles her fingers in her hair. She even missed her hair. “It’s cute that you worry so much.”

“I always worry about you.” At that moment, Damian turns his attention to the window, and Cady rests her head on Janis’ shoulder and Janis wraps her arms around her. This, the fearful looks and causing anxiety to her, this is what Janis wanted to avoid in the first place.

Damn Cady Heron and her unflinching loyalty.

“You’re feeling okay though?” she asks quietly. “Right?”

“Okay’s a bit of a relative term these days,” she says. “I’m feeling a bit bleh. But it’s fine.” Cady murmurs something she guesses is an agreement and nestles closer to her. Janis rubs her hand up and down her arm. “I’m fine.”

“Good.” She presses her cheek into her head and closes her eyes, only for a moment.

“Anyway, enough of that stuff,” she says, bouncing and turning to Damian, beckoning him back over. “There’s got to be more that I’ve missed. Come on, spill.”

“Well…” Damian begins, spinning around to face them with a grin stretched across his face. He’s been waiting to tell her this, she can tell. “They’ve announced that the musical this year will be… drum roll.”

She can Cady drum their hands on their legs, the sound bouncing off the walls and making the room tremble with anticipation as it gets higher and faster until-.

“Cabaret!”

“No way!” she gasps. Damian nods excitedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet and clapping his hands together. “Stars have aligned, mon amie. Stars have aligned.”

“Which means,” he goes on, throwing himself down on the bed with such gusto that it bounces. “I am going to be the greatest Emcee that North Shore High would ever wish to have.”

“Damn right!” The two high five, their glee double that of the slightly out of the loop Cady. “Emcee has been one of Damian’s dream roles ever since middle school.”

“Ever since I came out of the damn womb!” he exclaims. “I cannot tell you how much I screamed when the drama club announced it.”

“I can,” Cady adds. “It was loud and long and he got several death glares from everyone else.”

“That’s the only appropriate way to react,” Janis chuckles. “We watched the movie way back when and that’s when he decided he was going to play the Emcee or die trying.”

“It’s also when Janis became gay for Liza Minelli.”

“I’m gay for myself,” she corrects. “Liza was just the object of young Janis’ affections.” She rests her chin on Cady’s shoulder and smiles at him. “I’m helping you prep for this. I don’t care if I have to break out of here with an IV in my arm, I’m helping you.”

“I’d expect nothing less,” he replies. “Also the drama club is devastated you can’t do the set this year.”

“Who the heck says I can’t?” she says indignantly. “Those morons they have won’t last five minutes without my guidance. And I will not have your shining moment ruined by a subpar set.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “We all know who really runs that drama club.”

“Oh really, madame,” Damian scoffs, turning so his leg is folded beneath him. Janis keeps smiling, despite the feeling that its being tugged down and the weight settling in her stomach. Of all the times he had to do Cabaret, why did it have to be now?

“Everyone really missed you at school,” Cady tells her.

“Bet it’s not everyone,” she says, half joking. “Not one person in particular.”

“Hey!” Cady slaps her arm. “Be nice.”

“I promised to play nice to her face,” Janis reminds her. “Not behind her back.” Cady huffs out a laugh, her face slightly scrunched up. “But how’s the most important thing; LGBT+ society?”

“Well, we’re having our first welcome back meeting on Wednesday,” Damian says. “And Gretchen is taking over your stall at the fair. Sonja’s going to help her out though,” he adds. “And Sonja’s taking over your spot on the committee too.”

“Good choice,” she says. Lovely as Gretchen is most of the time, Janis isn’t sure she could handle the pressure of running her stall. And Sonja’s the perfect choice to take over her committee spot, smart as a whip, decisive and funny as hell.

So why does the idea make Janis so uneasy?

“Yeah, why don’t we turn this TV on?” she says, grabbing the remote. “It apparently has Netflix, although I’m not entirely sure how to operate it. There’s a load of DVDs in the longue as well.”

“A DVD. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” Damian says.

“I don’t think they have Cabaret though,” she sighs. “Which would be perfect for us right now.” She’s telling half-truths, because there’s a substantial collection of old movies, including musicals, but she doesn’t really want to brave the longue now, or to take them in there. The longue is probably her favourite place in the hospital, but it’s bound to be full right now. And for now, she wants to keep her cancer world and the real world separate.

So with some fussing, they manage to find Netflix and learn how to work it. Cady is insistent that Janis pick the movie, since it’s her room and she doesn’t know half of them and has already watched the other half. At the start of the summer, Janis had made Cady a list of every movie she needed to watch, and by the end of August they’d almost made it to the halfway mark. The best part wasn’t the movies themselves; it was the movie nights. Huddled under a comforter and surrounded by pillows, Cady’s body pressed against hers and the lights down low, buttery popcorn and sugar-covered candies keeping them going until one (usually Cady) fell asleep.

Now they make do with the thin hospital bed and the near-plastic sheets. At least they can adjust the height of it, and Janis positions Cady against her and Damian sits in the comfiest chair to watch The Parent Trap. It’s none of their favourites, but it’s familiar and good enough and while it wasn’t on the list, Cady hasn’t seen it yet. Besides, Damian can make any more fun.

And really, Janis can’t take any more of the back and forth debate.

The more the movie goes on, the more normal Janis feels. She runs her fingers up and down Cady’s bare arms, her girlfriend’s jacket discarded across a chair like she would in her house. The conversation is light and easy and full of giggles even at the stupidest, silliest thing, Damian quoting along with the movie and Cady hopelessly lost, especially at around halfway through when Janis decides to tell her that Annie and Hallie were played by the same person.

“No way!” she declares. “I’m not believing you until I see proof.”

“Google it,” she says. “Damian?”

“Way ahead of you.” He pulls up the page and shows her the cast list, with one little Lohan billed as the two twins. Cady’s mouth falls on the floor, her shoulders shaking in a silent, disbelieving laugh.

“Jesus Christ!” she says. “How did they do that all the way back then?”

“Movie magic,” Janis replies, wiggling her fingers for effect. “It’s okay, Caddy, we all felt betrayed when we first found out.”

“Didn’t she go off her rocker a bit?” she asks, pointing to the screen. “I know that much. Regina told me.”

“A little,” Janis agrees. “But I kind of feel bad for her, you know?”

“I guess.”

“Oh. Oh!” The camera pans up, revealing the striking and scary figure of Meredith Blake, and Janis squeezes Cady’s arms. “I hated this bitch.”

“I hated her more,” Damian adds, his tone not 100% light. “When I first watched this I had this soon-to-be stepmom, because my dad was back in the dating game, and she was…” He gags and points down his throat.

“Real mature, Damian,” Janis jokes. “I mean she absolutely was, but still. Mature.”

“Okay, missy,” he laughs. “Nah but I used to try to get inspiration from how to deal with her from this movie.”

“Shh!” she hisses sharply, covering Cady’s ears. “Spoilers!”

“I can still hear you,” Cady tells her. “And I could sort of guess. All the movies about step parents do that kind of thing, don’t they? Bratty kid gets wreaks havoc on the step parent?”

“Are you saying thirteen year old me was a brat?” Damian asks.

“Seventeen year old you is also a brat,” Janis teases. Damian gasps and grabs the cushion from the chair, aiming it at her head. Part of her is completely sure he wouldn’t, not in a hospital, part of her is completely sure he would because of course he would.

She doesn’t find out either way, because their gathering is interrupted by her medical team, and the weight in her stomach comes back with a vengeance.

“Not getting in the way are we?” Nurse Lucy asks.

“Not at all,” she says. Before she stops herself, she’s already pushing Cady off her. Heat rises in her cheeks. “That time again?”

“Unfortunately so,” she replies as Cady slides off the bed. “Is it okay if Jackson does it this time?”

“Yeah, sure.” As she rolls up her sleeve, her friends catch on to what’s happening, and Damian rushes to Cady’s side.

“I promise I’ll find the vein this time,” Jackson jokes.

“Oh this is the one you said-” Cady is cut off by Janis making a small ‘cut it out’ gesture with her hand. She then raises an eyebrow at Damian, whose small smirk tells her everything she needs to know.

She takes a look at her IV and her bare arm before turning back to them. She still hates this; shockingly, she hasn’t gotten used to it in under a week. Her stomach still drops a hundred feet when she looks at the needle and her chest tightens even if she’s only thinking about it.

“You guys don’t need to watch this,” she tells them. “It doesn’t hurt. But if you need to look away, it’s fine.”

“I’m fine,” Cady tells her. When Janis looks down though, she sees how tightly she’s holding Damian’s hand.

“Okay,” she says.

This time around it only takes Jackson three tries to find her vein before securing it with the bandage. Good for him. He’s learning.

“You know the drill by now?” Lucy asks.

“Two hours, stay hydrated.” She gives her a two-fingered salute.

“Two hours?” Cady echoes, and Janis has to chuckle at it. “This takes two hours?”

“That’s what she said the first time she found out,” Lucy says, gesturing to Janis. “I can see why you two like each other so much.”

“No but… two hours,” she says again as they leave. “What do you do for two hours?”

“I just… sit here I guess,” she answers, looking up at the medicine. “You know, there’s TV. I have books. I draw. Sometimes it knocks me out and I get a little surprise nap, so that’s fun.”

“Is that… should we go?” Cady asks. “If you’re going to-”

“Oh no.” She shakes her head firmly. “No, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Completely.” She’s such a liar it’s a wonder her tongue hasn’t turned black and crumbled. “Come on. Let’s finish the movie at least.”

Cady lays beside her rather than on her, and Damian stays on the other side of the bed, away from her IV. She catches him once or twice, watching the drip instead of the movie. His gaze is unreadable, and since she’s always been able to know his thoughts without him speaking, it unsettles her.

It’s not long before that familiar tiredness descends on her, clouding her mind and pulling her downwards. And she fights it; she keeps her eyes open despite how they itch and shifts her body when she finds herself too comfortable lest she start drifting off. It’s a challenge, not just because of the medicine’s effect on her, but because of Cady’s warmth next to her, promising security and comfort and being there when she wakes up.

And she must have given into it at one point, because she opens her eyes after a blink and the movie is over; Nick and Elizabeth are together again, Annie and Hallie stay with each other forever, happy endings all around.

“What time is it?” Janis asks.

“Nearly five,” Damian explains. Visiting hours don’t end for another two hours. “Are you okay?”

“Me?” she asks. “I’m fantastic.”

“You sure?” Cady’s hand is on hers, slowly linking their fingers together. Janis squeezes her hand, clarity coming into her mind by her own will.

“Of course I’m sure.”

They don’t have to be home for another hour. Home for dinner, that’s the rule. That doesn’t really change. Damian tells her that his mom is thinking about her every day and was beside herself when she heard the news.

“She’s started following more baking blogs,” he tells her. “So prep yourself for a lot of baked goods on your doorstep.”

“I can’t object to that,” she says. “Especially since Val always bakes with love.”

At some point during the hour, Janis pulls Cady into her lap again, or Cady crawls into it, or both. Her head is under her chin and her back against her chest, slotting into place perfectly. Like if she holds her this close, she won’t have to leave.

Wishful thinking, she knows, because when it gets close to six, Cady picks up her jacket and her backpack and there’s nothing but empty air against Janis’ body.

She wishes she could lead them to the door, but her IV catches on everything, so they say their goodbyes where they are.

“Don’t miss me too much,” she warns them teasingly.

“I hardly ever think about you,” Damian replies, his voice thick.

“And you,” she tells him. “Better run lines with me. When’s auditions?”

“Next Thursday,” he tells her. “So I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“Perfect,” she says. “I have treatments at 11, at 2… You know what? I’ll text you them.”

“Okay. And you were right by the way. That med student is a snack.” They laugh, and then there’s a moment of silence before he folds her in his arms, her face burying itself in the crook of his neck and his hand cupping the back of her head. “Take of yourself, okay?” His voice is so soft, so desperate, that it sounds like a plea.

“I will,” she says. “I always do.” Knowledgeable as always, he gives her and Cady space to say goodbye themselves. She rubs her hand on her shorts, nervousness gripping her body in a way she hasn’t felt in a while and she thoroughly dislikes.

“I’ll text you the second I get home,” Cady says. “And can I call you tomorrow?”

“Of course you can,” she says. “As long as you get some homework done tonight, kid.”

“I will,” she says. “I didn’t get the top grade in Norbury’s class for nothing.” Cady takes in a deep breath, her hand fidgeting around her backpack strap and her hair half-hiding her face. Janis reaches out and pushes it back and if she notices her shaking hand, she doesn’t say anything.

“Caddy-”

Janis actually wasn’t sure what she was going to say there, but it doesn’t matter, because Cady steps up and kisses her. It’s not perfect; it feels clumsy and awkward and they bump against each other, but it’s everything Janis needs. So much so that when they pull away, she doesn’t even attempt to hide the blush on her cheeks.

“Okay,” she whispers, grinning. “I’ll see you soon.” She steals another peck.

“See you later, Janis,” she whispers. They don’t stop holding hands for as long as they can and Janis is still looking at her until she’s out of view, walking back down the hall with Damian, maybe getting lost again. Down the hall, to the right, into the elevator and out the double doors. Bus stop down the street, next stop home. They ride together until Damian gets off and Cady stays on. All the while she stays here, IV in arm and her phone buzzing, talking to them until she falls asleep.

[rafandro]

Three of a Kind (1/3)

This is purely for fun, and not real in any way, shape, or form. Please do not post this anywhere else without my permission. If you want to post on your blog, please be cautious when tagging.

Summary: Ronen is polyamorous and in a relationship with his ex co-star Alberto. Then Ronen starts a relationship with his new co-star Rafael.

Rating: M (this part)

Warnings: polyamory, hand jobs, making out, falling in love, sex, threesomes

Note: I’ve been thinking of posting these stories on AO3. I can post anon and still get to see the comments and stuff from them, just my name won’t be attached to it. What do you all think? Keep it on tumblr only? Post on AO3 only? Post on both? Let me know!

Ronen’s always had a lot of love to give. When he was a kid he was hugging everyone; family, friends...strangers. Which is something his parents would frown upon and have to apologize to the person he hugged.

As he got older it turned into having multiple girlfriends. High school was a wild time and he was going from one girl to the next, or if he wasn’t careful he had two girlfriends at once, which never ended well.

When he got out of high school and really out in the world polyamory was thrown around and it kind of stuck. Ronen loved the idea of having multiple partners. He could have a girlfriend and a boyfriend or whatever and his partners were supportive for the most part. There were a couple that didn’t get it no matter how he explained it.

Which led him to dating his co-star, Alberto. They met on the set of Dead of Summer and clicked right away. They had fun on and off set Ronen had told Alberto about being polyamory, the man didn’t blink an eye and just said “Cool...me too.” The show was cancelled after one season they were sad but knew new shows and movies were being sent to them every day. Plus they had each other.

They had their relationship, but would go off into others. Ronen would go back to New York to visit his family and meet someone for the week or so he was there, but come home to Alberto. Alberto in turn had his flings and relationships but Ronen was his number one.

When Alberto started on Station 19 they drifted apart for a while. Ronen was wanting to spread his wings and trying to get a gig. He started dating some girl, who was great, but wasn’t what he wanted. Alberto was busy getting his new show off the ground. He was part of the Shrondaverse now so that meant he was a huge deal. He had ABC and Disney calling him all the time which made Ronen slightly jealous. He was happy for his boyfriend, but at the same time wanted to work as well.

Finally the call came that Ronen was cast in a new show. Ryan Murphy produced, no less. Ronen couldn’t believe he was going to be on a show playing Rob Lowe’s son. He and Alberto celebrated that night with a bottle of champagne. Alberto was so happy for him. 

The producers had him come in for chemistry reads to cast his love interest. There were a couple of guys that were good, but when the last guy walked in, Rafael something, his heart stopped. He was handsome, musicular, and his smile was bright.

They went through the two scenes together. And the police station scene was just...out of this world. Ronen felt something that he hadn’t felt with the others. There was something there. Rafael left after that and as soon as the door closed Ronen turned to the casting director and went, “That’s him.”

Thankfully the show agreed and they hired Rafael a week before shooting started. Ronen tells Alberto about Rafael while they’re having dinner that night. His whole face lights up when he talks about him.

“You really like him, huh?” Alberto asks.

“He’s great. New to acting but still. Oh my god, I wish you could’ve seen him,” Ronen replies.

Alberto smiles at his boyfriend, “He sounds wonderful.”

“I can’t wait for you to meet him,” Ronen replies, “Seriously he’s a great guy.”

“All that from a five minute chemistry read?” Alberto teases.

Ronen blushes, “It was really intense. Okay? I haven’t had something like that in a long time.”

“I’m only teasing, baby,” Alberto replies. He takes Ronen’s hand in his, “Also if he’s half as gorgeous as you say I can’t wait to see a photo.”

-----

Once filming starts Ronen doesn’t get to see Rafael for a week. They’re filming so many scenes out of order that it’s hard to get any time to see each other before it’s time to shoot the dance scene. They had a small rehearsal with everyone to learn to two step but Ronen was so caught up in trying to learn the dance they didn’t talk much. Plus Rafael was kind of quiet and stuck to himself while they rehearsed.

The whole cast is on set when Ronen finally gets to talk to Rafael. They’re setting up for the dance scene and the director has them go through the basics of what’s going to happen. Ronen mostly gets to watch before Rafael comes up to him asking to dance. 

“You ready?” Rafael asks.

Ronen looks over at him, “Yeah, hey man. Haven’t seen you since the chemistry read.”

Rafael smiles at him, “It’s been a wild experience. Can’t believe I’m filming with Liv Tyler! And Rob Lowe!” He makes a noise like his head is exploding which makes Ronen smile.

“I feel that,” Ronen replies, “How’s everything else?”

“Good, just taking it all in and learning a lot,” Rafael answers.

“Alright, everyone time to get rolling!” The AD says and everyone moves into their spots.

They film each individual part first first, Ronen and Rafael’s close ups are last. They have fun during the actual dancing part. Rafael gets Ronen to smile as they shimmy together. When the camera isn’t on them Ronen likes to make silly faces at Rafael to get him to laugh, which gets them dirty looks from the AD and tells them more than once to stop. Rafael gets red in the face and apologizes on their behalf.

“Dude,” Ronen whispers, “It’s okay. You don’t have to be all...whatever.”

“I don’t want to be fired before it even begins,” Rafael replies, “This is my first gig and I don’t want it to be my last.”

Ronen shakes his head, “You’re too pretty for it to be your only gig.”

Rafael blushes at the comment.

When they get through the scene and they’re allowed to leave for the night, Ronen throws his arm around Rafael’s shoulders as they walk back to their trailers.

“I can’t wait to film more with you,” Ronen says to the man.

Rafael nods, “I’m looking forward to it.”

“We should hang out sometime. Get to know each other better,’ Ronen says, testing the waters, “I mean we’re going to be on camera making out and stuff so might as well get used to each other.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Rafael agrees, “Um, do you want to hang out tonight? I don’t really have anywhere to be.”

Ronen’s about to answer when his phone rings. On the screen is a picture of Alberto, he almost lets it go to voicemail but if his boyfriend is calling him this late when he knows they’re both filming it must be something important.

“Uh, let me get back to you,” Ronen answers, “I need to take this call.”

“I’ll be at my trailer,” Rafael says but Ronen’s already turning his back and his phone is at his ear.

“Hey, baby,” Ronen greets, “How are you?”

“I...” Alberto trails off, “I don’t know. Are you almost done for the night?”

“Actually we wrapped up a few minutes ago. Are you okay? Shouldn’t you be filming?” Ronen asks back.

Alberto sniffs, “I...I’m being killed off. They just told me.”

“What? Baby, oh my god. Are you...do want me...” Ronen’s at a loss for words, “I’ll be home soon. Okay? Are you home? Do you need me to come get you at the studio?”

“I’m heading home now,” Alberto replies.

“Are you okay to drive?” Ronen asks.

Alberto sniffs again, “Y-yeah, I’ll be fine. I’ll see you at home.”

Ronen sighs, “I love you. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

“I love you too,” Alberto replies.

Ronen rushes through getting undressed from his costume and into the clothes he came in. He grabs his keys and is rushing out the door of his trailer when he sees Rafael standing at the bottom of the steps.

“Shit,” Ronen exclaims, “I mean I’m sorry. My, uh, my boyfriend called. Can we reschedule?”

“B-boyfriend? Uh yeah, yeah sure. Is everything okay?” Rafael asks.

Ronen shakes his head, “I can’t say much because he works on another show but he got some bad news. He’s really upset.”

“I’m sorry,” Rafael lamely replies, “Um, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

Ronen nods, “Yeah, I guess. I am sorry. If he hadn't called...”

“Relationships come first,” Rafael says, “Go, go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

------

At home Ronen finds Alberto with a glass of whiskey in his hand and his face wet from crying. He pulls the man into a hug and lets him cry about how it’s all ending. They both knew it was coming, the way the storylines had been written but it was still hard to see it happen. How he was being shot and killed off. Ronen lets him rant and cry until he falls into a restless sleep.

The next day, Alberto wakes and is melancholy but gets up to start his day. Ronen gives him a blow job in the shower to try to cheer him up, but it does little to help his mood. Ronen says he can call out, see if they can reschedule his scenes but Alberto shakes his head telling him to go to set. There’s no point in making a bad impression when you just started filming. Ronen kisses him with a promise to call later.

On set, Ronen puts on a smile for everyone. Rafael asks about what happened but Ronen shakes his head and just tells him his boyfriend will be alright.

They go through the scene a couple of times, making sure Rafael and Ronen are comfortable with what’s to come. It’s the first sex scene for their characters and it’s hot. A little savage and at the end has them rolling off the couch. Ronen and Rafael work through the roll more than once making sure neither of them gets hurt when they roll onto the mat. Ronen may get a little hard at how close they are.

When action is called the door of the set slams open and they’re making out. Rafael pushes him against the wall and woah, it’s a little harder than Ronen thought but damn if it isn’t hot. They push and pull at each other’s clothes before Ronen’s shirtless and pushed onto the couch. Rafael throws his shirt off and fuck if Ronen wasn’t hard already he would’ve been now. Rafael is a beautiful man and his chest is just so hard.

Rafael moves on top of Ronen and kisses him and just as they’re about to roll onto the floor the director yells, “Cut.”

Rafael pulls his lips off of Ronen’s and with a smile pushes himself off the other man. Ronen smiles back, “That was good.”

“Can’t say I have any complaints myself,” Rafael replies.

“We’re going to go from when Rafael pulls his shirt off,” the AD says, “Ronen stay where you’re at. Rafael shirt back on please.”

Rafael moves off the couch and grabs his shirt from the floor. The wardrobe people come to put it back on to make sure the buttons are still there and it looks the same as before. When everyone is happy with the shot they clear the set and call action again.

Rafael’s shirt comes off again and Ronen’s breath is taken away. Even though he knows it’s coming it’s still a sight to see. Rafael gently falls on top of him and his arm comes up like they rehearsed so they can fall onto the floor. Ronen’s arm goes around the man as they tilt and they fall onto the map.

Ronen laughs once “cut” is called. 

“Oh man that was more fun than the rehearsals,” Ronen says from his position on top of Rafael.

Rafael smiles back up at him, “Can’t say I’m complaining either.”

They have to redo the whole scene a couple of more times before they’re given the okay for lunch. They make their way to the food truck and eat lunch together, laughing and joking. Ronen learns about Rafael immigrating from Brazil when he was a kid and how hard it was. Ronen was younger when he came over to the US from Israel but still knows what it’s like.

They find they have a lot in common and it makes it easier when it’s time to go back to filming. They finish in the early afternoon and have the rest of the day off, so Ronen suggests they hang out for a while.

Rafael agrees and soon both are dressed back into their street clothes and walking out to their cars.

“Wanna come back to my place?” Rafael asks.

“Sure,” Ronen replies without thinking.

Rafael gives him the address of an apartment complex not too far from the studio and Ronen plugs it into Apple Maps, “I’ll meet you there.”

“There’s guest parking,” Rafael replies, “Just follow me and I’ll show you were to go.”

Ronen smiles, “Sounds great. Parking in LA is the worst!”

Rafael laughs, “New York isn’t much better.”

-----

They end up hanging out at Rafael’s and he makes them dinner. Ronen checks in with Alberto a few times to make sure he’s okay and Alberto replies with emojis varying from happy to sad. Ronen asks multiple times if he wants him to come home, but Alberto tells him to have fun. And to use protection which gets an eye roll emoji from Ronen.

As the night winds down and Ronen looks at his phone for the hundredth time Rafael comments on it.

Ronen sighs, “I feel bad having all this fun while Alberto is at home, wallowing.”

Rafael looks at the time on his phone, “It is getting late and I have an early call time tomorrow...”

“I should go,” Ronen says, “I didn’t know you had to go in early.”

Rafael shakes his head and pulls at his wrist stopping the man, “It’s fine. I’m used to late nights and little sleep. All the joys of college life.”

Ronen looks down at Rafael from where he’s standing. Rafael hadn’t let go of his wrist once Ronen had stopped moving. Ronen doesn’t think before he moves into Rafael’s lap and kisses him. Rafael is taken off guard but gets with it pretty quickly.

Rafael pulls back first and pushes at Ronen, “Wait, you have a boyfriend.”

Ronen shrugs, “And?”

“And we shouldn’t be making out on my couch,” Rafael says and pushes Ronen off of him so he’s sat next to him on the couch.

“He won’t mind,” Ronen says, “Honestly, he’s cool with it.”

Rafael looks at him, confused, “He’s fine with you making out with other guys?”

Ronen shrugs, “Something like that. Seriously, he’s cool.”

“I’m not a side piece,” Rafael says, “I don’t do that shit. Ruin relationships or whatever.”

“You’re not,” Ronen replies, “I...I’m poly.”

“Wh-what?” Rafael questions back.

Ronen sighs, “I’m polyamorous. Alberto and I both are. We have our relationship but have other relationships as well. As long as we’re both honest with each other and don’t bring any of it home unless discussed we’re allowed other partners outside of our relationship.”

“Oh,” Rafael replied, “I, uh, I see. And making out with your co-stars is...”

Ronen blushes, “Not something I normally do.”

“And what if said co-star was actually really, really into it,” Rafael teases. His hand coming up to land on Ronen’s thigh.

Ronen smiles at him, “I would say that I can get with the program.”

Rafael moves and presses his mouth to Ronen’s taking the groan that came from the man into his mouth. Ronen’s arms wind their way back around Rafael and pull him down so they’re laying across the couch. Rafael’s hand trails up his thigh and over his hardening cock before moving under his shirt. 

Ronen’s hand trails down Rafael’s back and lands on his ass pushing them together. Rafael’s erection brushes with Ronen’s through their clothes and both moan into each other. Rafael’s hands explore more and he gets his hand down Ronen’s pants to pull at his hard cock. 

Ronen whines into his mouth and pulls away to catch his breath, “Keep doing that...and I’ll come in my pants.”

Rafael laughs into his neck, “That’s the plan.”

Ronen whines when Rafael’s hand twists at the head of his cock. They connect again in a kiss, Rafael dominating it. Ronen’s cries get shorter and shorter the closer he gets to coming and he warns Rafael when he’s about to. Rafael slows his hand making Ronen whine, “P-please, I’m s-so close.”

Rafael pushes Ronen’s pants down so his cock is freed and his hand wraps back around it. He pumps Ronen’s cock and Ronen bites down on his shoulder as he cries out when he comes. Rafael strokes him through it making Ronen whine when it’s too much.

Rafael’s hand moves away and his lips go to peak at Ronen’s. Ronen sighs into the kiss.

“That was...” Ronen says but stops.

Rafael kisses his cheek, “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Give me a minute and I can return the favor,” Ronen says.

Rafael buries his face into Ronen’s neck and shakes his head, “Don’t.”

“What’s that?” Ronen asks.

“I said don’t,” Rafael replies.

“Oh...” Ronen trails off, “I, uh, I okay.”

Rafael kisses his cheek before whispering in his ear, “I already came.”

It takes Ronen a minute to get it, “Oh...OH, wow that’s, okay, wow.”

“I’m so embarrassed,” Rafael says.

Ronen’s hands come up to pull at Rafael’s head and he pulls the other man’s face to his, “It’s actually kind of hot.” And he pulls him down into another kiss.

-----

Ronen leaves Rafael’s with a kiss and a promise to go out again. On the way home, Ronen texts Alberto he’s on his way and Alberto responds with a smiley face and thumbs up emoji. Ronen feels guilty for making out and getting a hadnjob from Rafael when Alberto’s at home, still upset about being killed off. He can’t tell the man what happened without feeling like he failed in some way.

When he gets home he begs off saying he needs a shower before talking and Alberto let’s him go. He takes his time washing up and getting ready for bed before he can’t delay it any longer and he moves into the bedroom where Alberto is laying in their bed, the dogs laying at the foot.

Ronen crawls into his side of the bed and cuddles up to Alberto’s side, “How was your day?”

“Fine, how was work?” Alberto asks.

“We did the sex scene,” Ronen answers, “It was pretty hot.”

“Oh yeah, with your new hunky love interest,” Alberto teases, “What’s his name? Rafael?”

“Yeah, Rafael Silva,” Ronen replies, “He’s great. Moved from Brazil when he was like thirteen or something.”

“Oh, a Brazilian man,” Alberto teases, “Now that’s something I can get behind...or in front of.”

Ronen blushes, “I may have gotten under him.”

“No shit,” Alberto replies, “Bagging another one of your co-stars?”

“Shut up...it’s nothing like that,” Ronen says pushing playfully at the man, “He’s a great guy. So smart. Like it’s mind blowing.”

“Mind Blowing, huh?”

“Oh my God, I hate you!”

Alberto pulls Ronen closer and kisses his cheek, “I’m sorry, babe, but it was right there. I had to say something...seriously though. You know the rules.”

Ronen kisses Alberto’s lips, “You’re the best, you know that?”

[liskantope]

A personal look back on my summer 2020

My fall semester has already been going on for a little while, but in the past week the weather has suddenly switched from hot to autumny and now it feels like the summer was a period which is truly over and which I can look back upon as (unsurprisingly) one of the most singular summers of my life.

I consider myself to be excellent at autobiographical memory, probably in the 90th percentile or so, at least when it comes to being able to recall the year or month (or sometimes week) that particular events of my life occurred.  I attribute this to often being able to connect various things that were going on in different areas of my life at the same time (rather like separate arcs in a television episode) in ways that allow me to anchor any particular memory to the time it occurred.  Sometimes there are particular time periods where the "plot arcs" of my life somehow seem to fit together really well in a united larger story or a      single flavor, whereas looking back at other periods I can with some effort remember various arcs but it's hard to hunt them out and put them together, as though they were part of a poorly-written TV episode which doesn't have any particular unity.

Summers for me have always stood apart from the years they were in (with the slight exception of the summers I spent abroad doing my first postdoc which had so little structure that my general routine was the same all year round).  This summer I often looked back at the summer of 2010 (the last divisible-by-ten year), which was an example of the former: somehow all the separate arcs going on in my life at the time -- my studying and research (sadly, this was the most recent summer when I actually felt good about how studying/research was going!), stuff that was going on in my immediate family, progress in my social life, my first forays into doing local gigs as part of a band, the weather, my      apartment/roommate situation, shows I was watching, and personal internal struggles I was facing -- feel like they were all nuances of the same flavor.  (This was back in the days that I had cable and it so happened that Curb Your Enthusiasm was on the TV Guide Channel and I was introduced to it and watched it a lot just that summer; for years afterwards the theme tune immediately brought back the emotions that came with the flavor of summer 2010.  Semi-coincidentally I've been watching a lot of Curb clips on YouTube since I noticed them appearing early this past summer.)

The following summer, summer of 2011, is an example of the latter kind of time period in my memory: I'm able to remember a bunch of separate things that went on, including a visit to Switzerland, some of the research I was trying to do, my living situation (and anticipation of a move and the shift in my social life it would bring), my discovery of the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship and being a regular attendant there the entire summer, some particular online interests, and the unpleasant bike accident I had, but it takes some effort to recall that this was all happening in the same three months.  (One thing I do distinctly remember about my living situation is that my one roommate spent most of the summer out of town and that, in anticipation of my next roommate who I knew traveled less and would be much more social, I was telling myself, "Enjoy this level of privacy now because chances are you'll never have it again." I was absolutely right in my prediction that there would be much less solitude and privacy with the next roommate who I remained living with for several years, but I sort of assumed that after that I would have found some kind of a partner to be with all the time, and... oh the irony as I sit here, still continuously partner-free, after another day of the far more intense privacy and solitude of the past six months!)

This past summer, the summer of 2020, is very, very clearly bound to become a longer-term memory of the former kind: its extreme flavor is unmistakable.  As is probably the case for most of us, my experience of summer 2020 has been shaped almost entirely shaped by the pandemic we're still in the midst of.  For me this has meant constantly being home alone (although I settled pretty soon on into a pattern of going on daily bike rides and weekly supermarket trips plus a number of other types of errands.  Also, a caveat to the rest of this paragraph is that my parents visited one weekend and that provided an exception to some of the otherwise constant conditions below.)  I became uncharacteristically super introverted and very intent on making as much research progress as possible in the absence of teaching duties. None of this has been too unpleasant, but there has been a complete and utter lack of any form of fun, both in traveling (this may hold the record of the only summer where I stayed in the same 6-mile radius the entire time) and in social events.  The one positively pleasant thing in my life this summer was discovering the most beautiful area for cycling in any place I've lived, as well as a handful of late-evening warm-summer-night walks.  The extreme degree of loneliness and the necessity of self-discipline to keep my wheels turning has been smothering, and actually I think I dealt with it much better than I would ever have imagined I could if someone had told me this was coming a year ago.

I'd say my summer was a personal success in that way and in most other ways apart from the main concrete objective of completing a research preprint, which failed quite badly and is putting my career aspirations in a very precarious place (it would have been nice to get some heavier blogging done as well).  One could say that this was a less important goal than that of not letting my mental health spiral, though, and I did succeed quite well at the latter.  (In fact, I was doing much worse in January and February than I was when the pandemic hit.)  I'm upset that my goals seem to take me much longer than I feel they should but am glad that this doesn't seem to be due to an inability to sit down and focus on the work, as was the case with research during some summers of grad school.

Part of the flavor of summer 2020 that will live on in my memory has to do with my being home alone so much of the time, never having to get near other people, in an apartment that I kept hot, that, let's just say it took me a ridiculously long time to accumulate each laundry load and there were often T-shirts draped over my sofa to be reused for an hour or two at a time over multiple days.

While I'm continuing on this gratuitously self-absorbed vein, as I've noted that I love keeping track of personal "endurance" records, I've (again unsurprisingly, because of the situation) made a bunch of them which I'll finish by taking note of here:

Longest time without stepping out of the front door: I actually was careful to make sure I never stayed entirely inside for two days in a row, but it finally happened the weekend before last (after a late Friday night walk in my complex where I may or may not have gotten back inside by midnight).  I believe it was 61 hours, or very nearly 61 hours, without exiting my apartment. This may be a lifelong record; the only other event that compares was a 2-3-day period in March 2011 when I was very feverishly ill in the wake of a snowstorm, and I don't recall how far beyond 48 hours I stayed in.

Longest time without going into my office (or even onto my campus) in over a decade of having an office: from April 2nd to August 11th.  Hardly a unique one here, but I never thought I could have handled only having my home to work in for over four months.

Longest time not going near any public transportation whatsoever, since high school: Sunday March 8th (or just after midnight on March 9th, a bus ride as the final leg of the journey home from my last trip of any sort) to 26 Sundays later on September 6th because of having to leave my bike in the shop.

Longest stretch of time not withdrawing cash or paying for something in cash: since sometime in early March and counting.  The only times I've touched the cash in my wallet at all during all of this time was on two occasions when I gave a bill to someone in need.

Longest time since age 19 not touching a drop of alcohol: since April 11th (at a virtual birthday party of a friend) and continuing.  This smashes a record from last fall of something like 54 days.

Longest time with the thermostat completely off (no use of heat or AC): from one of the last days of March to, I think, June 4th. This was nothing to do with the pandemic (in fact, it makes the pandemic situation slightly more remarkable since I've had to be home for a lot more of the time); the spring where I am was just particularly pleasant.

Longest time not shaving my facial hair: 32 days in the late summer, breaking a record from earlier in the summer of exactly a month.

There are probably other even sillier ones, such as the fact that I’m pretty sure I didn’t put on shoes from sometime at the start of June to a few days ago. You’d also think I’d break an endurance record for not uttering a spoken word to anyone, but I haven’t kept track of that.

Let’s hope future intervals in my life are much less extreme and record-breaking; that’s the gist of what I wish for everyone right now.

[tact-and-impulse]

behind the scenes

I was so busy, but this blog is 5 years old! To commemorate, I’ll share notes and thoughts on some of the stuff I’ve written, like a behind the scenes look. Also, I’ll do anything to not think about my apartment right now.

Eating Together, Drinking Alone

Originally, Hiko was going to be responsible for some of the foreigner killings, but I thought this was too close to Kenshin’s past and it made more sense for his backstory that no one could personally be blamed. It’s easier to blame a specific person, something less abstract, and a different kind of personality would result from that trajectory. For Hiko, who removes himself from the world, the world itself had to be at fault. A natural disaster seemed to fit.

I expanded on Tae’s personality, since I think what we see in canon is her customer service face. It’s the nicest, most self-effacing version of oneself. She’s still pleasant of course, but she’s also brave and lively and that’s the side I wanted to showcase more. Not drastically different from her public face, but a different face regardless.

I never intended for Hiko and Tae to kiss. Sorry! Part of it was that a lot of period dramas don’t necessarily have kissing, and part of it was while I was writing it, I wasn’t really thinking of them together in a physical sense. I was more focused on their emotional connection and actually getting Tae to fall for him. Also, with how intensely private Hiko is, any intimate scenes would be fade-to-black.

I fully believe that kids aren’t a requisite for a happy ending, and I hint that Tae would probably have fertility struggles anyway because her sister and mom did. However! If they did have a kid together in an AU, I imagine it’d be a daughter who’s ambitious and confident and the epitome of “hi I’m here to ruin everything”.

The line “You’re not business, Sekihara” caught me by surprise when I was rereading earlier this year, because I don’t remember writing that? But it’s so swoon-worthy? Damn, good job, past me.

In the epilogue, when Keita mentions “Aoshi and the girls”, that was supposed to be a setup for a work about the kids. So, Aoshi and Misao have three daughters, who are rowdy and energetic and exactly what their dad deserves lmao. They’re a bit on the younger end, closer in age to Keita and Sumire. Their names were Narumi, Ruriko, and Sorano!

The Master and Her Pet

The master of the other dojo in the tournament, Ishii, makes a cameo in At Arm’s Length, in one of Koshijiro’s teenage flashbacks!

From what I recall, the alcohol that Sano sent them is sombai, which is a strong liquor with herbs. I’ve never had it, I just read descriptions of the taste. It seemed to be suitable because I imagine he’d be in the part of the world it comes from, and since it’s a rice based liquor, it would be palatable to them.

One of the reviews thought that Hitomi is pregnant but she’s not. Tbh she’s down to smash any time, but Kazumasa would never have sex before marriage. Also, it’s funny that while the guys are in the parlor, having a deep conversation about what it means to be a good husband, the girls are upstairs talking about the logistics of 69′ing.

With These Hands

Things may seem off in regards to Kaoru’s residency, but that’s because I used the Japanese version, which is different than here in America, and because I was younger then, so I didn’t know as much about the process. I’ll probably rewrite and fix things around when I have time!

I kinda threw Soujiro under the bus, but I wanted to use him as a stand-in for what someone told me. Over the years, I’ve also realized that while it may be true, I’ve been more receptive to the same advice when it comes from a woman, because it’s a matter of firsthand experience. Otherwise, it just sounds like the person is contributing to the problem, despite their intentions.

There’s an in-story reason why Kenshin is so forward towards Kaoru, and it’s not necessarily romantic (at first), but yeah, it’s on purpose!

At Arm’s Length

To be honest, I don’t put a lot of stock in Freudian psychology, but it’s not coincidental that some of Koshijiro’s personality is similar to Kenshin’s. They’re both introspective, protective, idealistic, peace-loving. It’s the kind of personality that would believe in Kamiya Kasshin and its success.

Hayashi rice was a thing around this time, and the wine in it would have been off-putting to Koshijiro.

I wanted to explore why Koshijiro would fight for an end to the shogunate’s oppression, and the logical conclusion was that his mom was a commoner. Also, it made sense for his name. Miyo had just turned 20 when she had Koshijiro, and Keiichiro was in his 30s. I do have an idea for an omake about how they met, once the main story is done.

I’ve dropped some hints but Kyoko has lupus. When I was first starting the story, I didn’t really have a good idea on what her affliction was, but as I learned more, it really fit what I wanted for her (chronic, fatiguing, possibly explaining why Kaoru’s an only child, and eventually fatal at a young age in historical times).

Kyoko fell for Koshijiro when he said he wouldn’t forget her name. She’s used to being shut away and isolated, so that little reassurance meant a great deal to her. It was a crush that deepened when he got the books for her, and she cried a lot when he had to leave.

Kyoko’s parents are supposed to be a contrast to Koshijiro’s. Her parents have fallen out of love and now hardly tolerate the other’s presence, but aren’t able to separate without harming Kyoko in some way (though their staying together makes her tense too). Meanwhile, Miyo and Keiichiro can’t physically be with each other, but they’re still immensely fond of and attracted to the other. Koshijiro is just awkward around them because he doesn’t know how to deal.

I’ve written the last line already, like in 2017? So, yeah, there’s no way I’m dropping this story.

Life’s Blood and Burning Sunsets

Akane’s cousin in the WWII AU was intended to be Kagari. RIP.

I was originally going to write a spinoff about Aya, as an Inspector investigating Akane’s sudden disappearance and finding out that Kougami was her dad, but it looks like canon is going in a different (less angsty for the OTP) direction and I’m on board! Aya’s name is written as “truth”, though I imagine it’s a popular name for her generation, except written as “color”. Also unintentional, but I didn’t realize until recently that her name has the A from Akane and the -ya from Shinya. Lol.

Storm Clouds of a Faraway Sky

In Chapter 3, the rice riots really were a thing! The chaotic atmosphere fit the riots from Season 1, so it made sense to set the story in that specific year.

I stayed up until 2 am to write the last prompt and man, I don’t regret it. I still reread it now and then.

Puzzle

Originally, my gut reaction to this scene was “They’re married! They’re married!” But logically, that’s probably not the case. This was to just reconcile the two lines of thought. Having Arata as our narrator made sense because he’s an outsider, he doesn’t really know either of them, so he’s working from the ground up. And of course, there’s room to speculate.

Stouthearted

I don’t know how many people will catch this, but the way I write Tomoyo for most of the story is that she’s essentially wearing a mask. More specifically, the mask of Satoru. In my mind, she’s internalized him so well and for so long, it’s difficult even for her to drop it. Her true personality is very straightforward and direct. It comes out in little moments like when she’s crying at night, or the scene when she says “I didn’t like it when Shinya started, and I still don’t.” I was going to reveal this via a flashback when she met with Professor Saiga at some point, and he notices this, which instigates her strong dislike of him. But I couldn’t find a way to naturally put it in. Maybe as a separate oneshot someday?

[theinterloper]

moreeeee stuff about Hearthians’ reproduction, early evolution and... ghost matter! very much not solid theories and just idea to expand the world for Hearthains

gonna try and get into multiple parts of Hearthians in order to pull it all together that makes some more sense. obviously theres a lotta fiction ideas here, playing on existing things we know about biology! i try to take some of that to compare or use as examples to any new ideas i bring in here.

also dont be confused if these conflict with the previous post, consider it “over writing” my previous post in ways, bc that post was for stuff i wrote over a week ago! initially and ultimately the asexual reproduction i wanted to describe doesnt exist in our standards of science and additionally the terms we have dont make sense for my ideas, so some things have been added and adjusted to maybe sound better lol.

Early Evolution and genetics

Hearthians when living in the water, reproduced asexually like many small aquatic creatures. we are talking waaay far back, probably up to or before the Nomai discovered them. this isnt exactly common (by our standards) for a species that evolved into mammals, but i will get more into that here. 

now, i cant describe what i want to say with terms like “vertical/horizontal gene transfer” because its a bit too strict and if anything its a whole new thing- but i imagine Hearthians, as asexual/sexual mammals, had a larger gene pool that allows them to put in and pull out genes from a previous generation that are left within their own dna. this isnt completely illogical (i think, but also its fiction so,) like, compare this in a sense to HGT where a bacteria could take in a gene from outside and pass it onto a clone of itself in order to have genetic variation..... this is just to a kind of different and larger scale.

Hearthians way back would mostly produce asexually in this way because it wouldnt require another creature and was faster. but they still had the option to mate with each other and would do so from time to time. hearthians produced a lot of offspring- but the present day Hearthians’ small numbers is due to the fact that many cross bred with other aquatic life or died off due to lack of food. sub species did not evolve into sapient life or they too went extinct over time. 

Hearthians apparently took around 281,042 years to evolve as this is the length of time that the sun station has been offline- so lets just round that up to 300k years of evolution... to be a little more clear about the games’ somewhat lenient science fiction, it look humans around 6 million years to evolve (science summarizes it takes around 1 million years for an animal to evolve to where most are today). i say this to add onto more theories/headcanons, because thats a short span of time... 

so, what if... hearthians mutated a lot more than normal? what if the ghost matter explosion caused mutations/its energy mutates the genes of Hearthians and additionally made them evolve faster? what if their genes are just fucked up a bit?? not to the extent of grotesque mutated monsters. minor things, like more gene variation or messing up their existing gene pool way more.

my ideas lean on Hearthians having been affected by the ghost matter in the middle of their evolution, when the comet exploded. this game has a lotta good timing/fate stuff with the Hearthians being left to discover the Nomai’s unfinished trail and this point gives another addition to the whole story. the Nomai were quite risky and almost too ambitious with their search and imo i feel they like wouldve failed if they truly attempted the ATP back then, so by fate they “had” to die by the Interloper/ghost matter or else You never wouldve been successful at finding the eye. in a sense and the ghost matter in some way had a hand in your species evolving in time for the end of the universe. 

Effects of Ghost Matter

its hard for me to again give real science on how the ghost matter would affect the Hearthians, bc it not real real science. but basically while Ghost Matter kills anything not in water, i imagine it killed everything due to some sort ‘radiation’ kind of energy. not nuclear radiation but, radiation of some kind that is effected by water. probably not a “real” thing in terms of stuff that exists in our world.

the initial explosion was so intense that while it didnt kill the Hearthians under water, it still effected them regardless. it ‘tainted’ the land, plants, water and their molecular structure with its radiation. and with their large gene pool, lets just say it permanently fucked up their genes a bit and that huge leap in change continues to affect them. it also supported their ability to evolve quickly. the ‘radiation’ dies down over time though, but left an effect on them.

plants. this is just an idea i formed on a whim after hearing Porphy mention that Hearthians evolved by eating “lots of bad things”. i imagine personally that plants “reacted” to the ghost matter- they did not “die” like living mammals died from the matter due to whatever energy it was, but evolved to its explosion as a “threat”. the explosion and ghost matter was detected by the plants as a threat to them/their life and they evolved into being dangerous/poisonous. so hearthians grew in a planet that had very dangerous plants but they too evolved to a hardened stomach and could withstand the many minor protective measures the plants formed.

Sex/reproduction stuff. i dont consider this “NSFW” its just sciencey talks! talking about genitals though! please dont proceed if under 16, preferably. also slightly reformed ideas on the previous headcanon post, as i have added much more to my ideas!

As hearthians evolved, they grew into land mammals and with their size, asexual reproduction was not as convenient. it wasnt about the genetics, as those were fine mostly, but the energy it takes to do so. in terms of evolution it was a poor device as they evolved into land mammals, because it barely happened and it drained the parent of their nutrients- they were not producing a lot of offspring and thi danger meant they could go extinct. at the point where hearthians were evolving to land, it was impractical for them to lay an egg more than once/twice in their life. 

asexual reproduction isnt completely gone, just that as they grew larger physically it was deemed less ideal by evolution standards to do it as much as they did when they were tiny little things in the water. mostly with their gene transferring abilities, their reproduction still has some level of variance that fluctuates in extremes depending on the gene pool the parent personally has or if other stored sperm exists. 

they were always equipped with organs for reproduction, but that were not used much within their early evolution. internally, Hearthians have “eggs” that are fertilized by “sperm” to create an embryo. Said “sperm” also is attached to an internal organ that does physically move in order to reach the egg. this organ can be seen from the entrance of the vagina during the period of self-fertilization. eventually said organ was used externally as it became more clear that hearthians needed a more reliable/less exhausting method of reproduction. 

self fertilization isnt always successful due to literal failures to fertilize physically (incorrect position, dead sperm, etc) which is why the two times in which an egg is created this way may not even create a live embryo, thus this method being ultimately unreliable for the Hearthians to thrive.

mentioned before- due to their old more common asexual ways, they experience a “cycle” for reproduction. it is typically once or twice in their life and occurs over the span of almost a year. within this period is the highest success rate for fertilization (usually mid way through). 

adding onto the gene transferring nonsense, a Hearthian’s past abilities to store old genes from their days of constant asexuality becomes relevant in their partner sexual reproduction as well. when mating with another Hearthian, the one being inserted into will store the other’s sperm/genes regardless of whether or the creation of an egg is intended, which is what their hgt/vgt-like gene transferring did many times in the past as they evolved. this does in fact allow them to store sperm of multiple donors, to mix together genes when fertilizing an egg. it is not the sperm they store, but the genes within a sample of sperm.