#which like If Intentional and a joke about how cheap and fake a lot of affordable modern 'luxury' is

[vivalasthedas]

sims 4 released another overpriced kit consisting of content you can get better of for free, and it's called Modern Luxe. So it's meant to be like fancy and luxury.

The bed has an energy recovery rate of 5.

[saurongorthaur9]

ROP S2E7 Spoilers

So...the stupid kiss did indeed happen, and as promised yesterday, I need to vent and get it out of my system. It was every bit as stupid and unnecessary as I feared it would be; somehow, I was hoping if that was what happened, that somehow it wouldn't be as bad as it sounded? But yeah...it was. This is probably going to be a pretty long post, as I've been thinking a lot about what bothers me so much about it as a concept and I have a lot of Thoughts.

A disclaimer to begin with: yeah, part of me is disappointed that it wasn't the kiss I hoped it would be, but I knew from the start that a Sauron kiss would be very, very unlikely. If it had happened, it would have been less about a ship for me, and more about the validation for me of getting an onscreen Sauron kiss in a huge, professional production as I've written about in other posts. I would have loved a Sauron kiss, but that's not what is really bothering me on more than a surface level. So with that disclaimer aside...

I think I can break what bothers me down into two basic categories.

The first is more straightforward: it was SO unnecessary. Yes, there needed to be some way for Galadriel to get free, but there are so many ways it could have been set up without a weird, incredibly uncomfortable kiss that came out of absolute nowhere being necessary. He could have gently stroked her hair and slipped it behind her ear or into her hair itself (I used to have very long hair, and a pin like that would definitely get stuck if you tucked it in.) If they wanted to go the humorous, cliché route, they could have had him sneak it to her in a pie (that's a joke, I'm also glad they didn't do that, but my point is, they had options).

They could have set up the scene with a different tone and gone the Frodo-and-Sam-as-orcs route and had them fake a fight. I actually would have loved this. It could have been a culmination of the resentment and tension that's been building between the two of them all season to let off some steam at each other. It could have been one of those "we're fake fighting, but we're also real fighting at the same time" sort of scenes (which are delicious when pulled off right) where we could have gotten some real interesting character development and relationship development between the two of them before the orcs pulled them apart (but not before Elrond slipped the pin into her hand or tunic while pretending to push her or something).

The kiss however did nothing. Per my last two paragraphs, it being a kiss wasn't necessary for the plot. It didn't do anything to reveal anything about Elrond and Galadriel's relationship or develop it in any way. It didn't develop either Elrond or Galadriel's character in any way. It was purely and utterly for shock value.

And that's the first big thing: I really hate things used for shock value. It's a personal pet peeve of mine. And to make it clear, there's a different between using something for shock value and doing something shocking. Mirdania's death was pretty shocking, but it served the purposes of both showing how utterly ruthless Sauron is and solidified the elven soldiers' doubt in Celebrimbor's sanity. But using something for mere cheap shock value is so disappointing of the show. The writing had been SO good, everything had been so deliberate and intentional, that it made the sudden breach of that even more jarring and unpleasant.

And it makes me super worried for the future of the show. This show isn't Game of Thrones; it doesn't need shock value. But now they've set the precedent that adding pure shock value is okay for this show. It makes me afraid what else down the road will be thrown in the audience faces just to illicit an unpleasant reaction.

The second major thing that is bugging me about that scene is a little more insidious and subtle. I've seen people saying "it wasn't romantic", but the thing is, whether or not it was intended, romantic tension has now been introduced to Elrond and Galadriel's dynamic. Let me explain.

That scene was a pretty clear example of the Forced Proximity Trope. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, it's the trope of forcing two characters into a circumstance where they share space or physical intimacy that they wouldn't otherwise share. The most infamous version of it is the There Was Only One Bed trope. And the thing is, it's an incredibly romantic-coded trope. It's almost always used between two characters who have suppressed feelings for one another as a way to force them to confront said suppressed feelings. Even if it's used in a not explicitly romantic way, it still sends a subconscious message of romantic tension because that is what that trope is almost exclusively used for.

So yes, there is now romantic tension between Elrond and Galadriel, and I have a feeling they don't plan on doing anything about it.

At this point, I'd almost feel better if they went all the way and went ahead with the subconscious romantic tension. Like, putting Elrond and Galadriel in a romantic relationship wouldn't be my thing personally, but at least it would provide a sense that the writers had a purpose for the scene and for creating that tension. Dropping that and then not going anywhere else with it, and letting that tension fester for the rest of the series without acknowledging it or doing anything about it would be so disappointing and insulting to the audience.

But again, I'll be very surprised if they ever bring it up again.

And I'm sure the writers knew what they were doing. The only two options are that they were oblivious to the connotations of using that trope or that they knew full well, and used it anyway. And I suspect it's the latter. As good as the overall writing for this season has been, I just can't imagine the writers aren't aware of what they were doing in using that trope. I mean, they've deliberately used a number of romantic-coded tropes to build up the Galadriel/Sauron tension. They aren't oblivious, which means they used the Forced Proximity Trope deliberately and fully aware of it's implications.

It just really seriously damaged my faith in the writing of the show, just when I'd been building it up after some big disappointments from Season 1. Again, they've set a precedent, and I'm really worried this isn't the last time they'll pull something ridiculous like this.

Maybe somehow they'll turn it around. Maybe they'll have Galadriel and Elrond bring it up again and deal with the tension, maybe they do plan to have a romantic subplot between the two of them, or maybe they have something planned down the road that will put that moment in a light that shows it as something other than shock value. But I'm currently pretty pessimistic about that happening.

And it's extra disappointing, because the rest of that episode was absolutely amazing. That one bad moment stands out like a wine stain on a white dress because the rest of the episode was so good.

Anyway, that's my rant. I just had to vent and get my thoughts out of my head where they've been swirling. If anyone is feeling the same way and wants to vent with me, my inbox and messages are open.

[signalwatch]

Watch Party Watch: Birdemic III - Sea Eagle (2022)

Watched:  02/10/2023

Format:  Amazon Watch Party

Viewing:  First

Director:  James Nguyen

You can't really write about a Birdemic movie as a movie.  You could, I guess.  But what's the point?

A Birdemic film is an experience.  It's there to make you ask an infinite number of questions like: why?  So many "why's?".  So many "what's?".  And "how's?"

Jamie, Steanso and I attended what was one of the very earliest public screenings of the original Birdemic,  It was during a period where I wasn't blogging, so there isn't a record, I guess.  But I do have a record of seeing the sequel.  

That first screening was a profoundly weird experience.  We'll podcast it or something at some point.  But the point is:  Nguyen made the first film completely sincerely as one part sincere romance, one part Hitchcock homage, one part semi-Googled climate catastrophe film.  Nguyen rose to fame during Sundance when he drove to the film festival and drove up and down the main street blasting the sounds of sea gulls out of a mini-van with fake seagulls glued to the outside.  There was a screening in a local bar when curious gawkers finally asked what the hell he was doing.  I'd heard about it, so when the movie was coming to Austin, you bet your ass I went to see it.

It wound up becoming a hipster activity to go and see the movie with Nguyen there for Q&A's.  This went on for a couple of years.  Then, some party gave Nguyen some money to go make a sequel.  This time he indicated he was in on the joke, but I can tell you, from the Q&A - he kind of was not. 

It's been 10 years since that sequel, and I'll be honest - I wondered what James Nguyen was up to.  I have no idea.  But he was not studying up on how one makes a movie.

It's fine.  I watch a healthy number of films, and I'm pretty sure if you have me $30K and said "good luck" you'd get similar, no matter how sincere my efforts.  However, the budget to the sequel is listed at $300K.  

Nguyen did launch an Indiegogo to finance the three-quel, but apparently received about $570.  

This movie picks up some time after the first film, does not acknowledge the second, and lacks Nathalie, who was sort of the fizz in the Topo Chico bottle that was the first movie.  The jump in technology in the ensuing decade should have made shooting something on the cheap far easier, but instead, seems to have given Nguyen all new ways to now know what he's doing.  For the first time, I had to ask:  is this intentional?  But after three minutes of wildly unbalanced shots and I think Dug pointing out he was likely shooting multi-cam via multiple smart phones, the harsh reality of what we were about to see settled in.

You can't really prepare for these movies, because they will find new and exciting ways to confound the viewer while also retaining the insanity of the first two films, which your brain will refuse to hang onto in a meaningful way because dealing with madness is hard.  Both prior films spent a good 1/2 of the movie establishing a romance - no folding it into the A Plot for Nguyen.  But also, we'd receive some environmental awareness messaging to establish the "why?" of the second, thrilling portion of the movie where birds explode into balls of fire after kamikaze dives into hatchbacks.  This movie ups that portion to a full 2/3rds of the runtime, with endless opportunity for our characters (Evan and Kim) to learn all the ways that humans are giving whales and seals cancer.

Evan and Kim are played by two people who I am sure are lovely humans IRL, but may not have received the direction they needed with somewhat limited acting backgrounds.  My assumption is that Nguyen wanted a lot of angles and takes, and if he heard the dialog repeated back to him, good enough. The sun is only up so long, and that's his only lighting source.  Kubrick he is not.

We're still on the "say the dialog exactly as written" tip that gave so much flavor to the first movie, and left every character sounding somewhere between an AI chatbot and Nguyen himself.  If the actors ever knew how to act, walk, or act like normal humans and not NPC's in a 1997 videogame, there's no indication of that here.

Shots exist that are seemingly utterly unmotivated, and they just go on and on. And on.  Driving.  Walking.  Standing there in silence.  Dancing like no one is watching.  Protesting climate change on a weird loop while no one looks on.*

Former Birdemic lead, Rod (played by Alan Bagh) shows up with a new love interest 3/4ths of the way in literally out of nowhere, and he more or less saves the skin of the other actors and the movie.  At this point, he's like "Jesus, another bird attack.  Well, get the hangers."  

Notable is that when Nguyen has an opportunity to say how we could fix the climate crisis, he has an Elon Musk stand-in walk up to the couple (in front of a whale skeleton?) and explain how nanotechnology and space elevators will be what saves us.  which is to say:  (a) Nguyen's messiah is the guy who bought twitter solely to be dickish and spend his time trolling well-meaning dorks and (b) he, himself, has no concept of how to end climate change and did not Google it before writing his script.  

Now, 12 years after the first Birdemic, Nguyen seems to have little to no interest in his female characters.  And he seems perhaps jaded about romance.  But he does still seem to like a good motel room get-away romp.

I can't explain the movie.  I've now watched three of these, and in the world of Tommy Wiseau's, Neil Breens and now countless other auteurs, he still manages to produce a singular type of film.  This one may be smaller and way off balance in the romance/ ecological lecturing/ thriller portion, but that's just one more mystery of the man's oeuvre.  Long may he reign.

*there's no small allegory in that as our actual climate does change and who knows what happens in our seas, the only place you'll find someone passionately discussing this who isn't a small Swedish girl is a Birdemic film where they make it so annoying, you're good with Earth ending

https://ift.tt/CbiKlpH

from The Signal Watch https://ift.tt/uFWnerD

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How copyright filters lead to wage-theft

Last week, "Marina" - a piano teacher who publishes free lessons her Piano Keys Youtube channel - celebrated her fifth anniversary by announcing that she was quitting Youtube because her meager wages were being stolen by fraudsters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcyOxtkafMs

Marina posted a video with a snatch of her performance of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," published in 1801. The composition is firmly in the public domain, and the copyright in the performance is firmly Marina's, but it still triggered Youtube's automated copyright filter.

A corporate entity - identified only by an alphabet soup of initialisms and cryptic LLC names - had claimed Ole Ludwig Van's masterpiece as their own, identifying it as "Wicca Moonlight."

Content ID, the automated Youtube filter, flagged Marina's track as an unauthorized performance of this "Wicca Moonlight" track. Marina appealed the automated judgement, which triggered a message to this shadowy LLC asking if they agreed that no infringement had taken place.

But the LLC renewed its claim of infringement. Marina now faces several unpleasant choices:

She can allow the LLC to monetize her video, stealing the meager wages she receives from the ads that appear on it

She can take down her video

She can provide her full name and address to Youtube in order to escalate the claim, with the possibility that her attackers will get her contact details, and with the risk that if she loses her claim, she can lose her Youtube channel

The incident was a wake-up call for Marina, who is quitting Youtube altogether, noting that it has become a place that favors grifters over creators. She's not wrong, and it's worth looking at how that happened.

Content ID was created to mollify the entertainment industry after Google acquired Youtube. Google would spend $100m on filtering tech that would allow rightsholders to go beyond the simple "takedown" permitted by law, and instead share in revenues from creative uses.

But it's easy to see how this system could be abused. What if people falsely asserted copyright over works to which they had no claim? What if rightsholders rejected fair uses, especially criticism?

In a world where the ownership of creative works can take years to untangle in the courts and where judges' fair use rulings are impossible to predict in advance, how could Google hope to get it right, especially at the vast scale of Youtube?

The impossibility of automating copyright judgments didn't stop Google from trying to perfect its filter, adding layers of complexity until Content ID's appeal process turned into a cod-legal system whose flowchart looks like a bowl of spaghetti.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id

The resulting mess firmly favors attackers (wage stealers, fraudsters, censors, bullies) over defenders (creators, critics). Attackers don't need to waste their time making art, which leaves them with the surplus capacity to master the counterintuitive "legal" framework.

You can't fix a system broke by complexity by adding more complexity to it. Attempts to do so only makes the system more exploitable by bad actors, like blackmailers who use fake copyright claims to extract ransoms from working creators.

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-strikes-now-being-used-as-scammers-extortion-tool/

But it would be a mistake to think that filterfraud was primarily a problem of shadowy scammers. The most prolific filter scammers and wage-thieves are giant music companies, like Sony Music, who claim nearly *all* classical music:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#filternet

The Big Tech companies argue that they have an appeals process that can reverse these overclaims, but that process is a joke. Instagram takedowns take a few seconds to file, but *28 months* to appeal.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/cheap-truthers/#robot-sez-no

The entertainment industry are flagrant filternet abusers. Take Warner Chappell, whose subsidiary demonetizes videos that include the numbers "36" and "50":

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/annemunition-bizarre-copyright-strike-youtube-random-numbers-1317750/

Warner Chappell are prolific copyfraudsters. For decades, they fraudulently claimed ownership over "Happy Birthday" (!):

https://consumerist.com/2016/02/09/happy-birthday-song-settlement-to-pay-out-14-million-to-people-who-paid-to-use-song/

They're still at it - In 2020 they used a fraudulent claim to nuke a music theory video, and then a human being working on behalf of the company renewed the claim *after* being informed that they were mistaken about which song was quoted in the video:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

The fact that automated copyright claims can remove material from the internet leads to a lot of sheer fuckery. In 2019, anti-fascists toyed with blaring copyrighted music at far right rallies to prevent their enemies from posting them online.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

At the time, I warned that this would end badly. Just a month before, there had been a huge scandal because critics of extremist violence found that automated filters killed their videos because they featured clips of that violence:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/06/people-who-document-evidence-of-violent-extremism-are-being-shut-down-in-youtubes-crackdown-on-violent-extremism/

Since then, it's only gotten worse. The Chinese Communist Party uses copyfraud to remove critical videos from Youtube:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#communist-bandit

and so does the Beverley Hills Police Department:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

But despite all that, the momentum is for *more* filtering, to remove far fuzzier categories of content. The EU's Terror Regulation has just gone into effect, giving platforms just *one hour* to remove "terrorist" content:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/eu-online-terrorism-regulation-bad-deal

The platforms have pivoted from opposing filter rules to endorsing them. Marc Zuckerberg says that he's fine with removing legal protections for online platforms unless they have hundreds of millions of dollars to install filters.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

The advocates for a filternet insist that all these problems can be solved if geeks just *nerd harder* to automate good judgment, fair appeals, and accurate attributions. This is pure wishful thinking. As is so often the case in tech policy, "wanting it badly is not enough."

In 2019, the EU passed the Copyright Directive, whose Article1 7 is a "notice and staydown" rule requiring platforms to do instant takedowns on notice of infringement *and* to prevent content from being re-posted.

There's no way to do this without filters, but there's no way to make filters without violating the GDPR. The EU trying to figure out how to make it work, and the people who said this wouldn't require filters are now claiming that filters are fine.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#no-filternet

Automating subtle judgment calls is impossible, not just because copyright's limitations - fair use and others - are grounded in subjective factors like "artistic intent," but because automating a flawed process creates flaws at scale.

Remember when Jimmy Fallon broadcasted himself playing a video game? NBC automatically claimed the whole program as its copyrighted work, and thereafter, gamers who streamed themselves playing that game got automated takedowns from NBC.

https://old.reddit.com/r/beatsaber/comments/bi9cp5/beat_saber_stream_blocked_by_jimmy_fallon_show/

The relentless expansion of proprietary rights over our virtual and physical world raises the stakes for filter errors. The new Notre Dame spire will be a copyrighted work - will filters block videos of protests in front of the cathedral?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190425/09282042084/why-your-holiday-photos-videos-restored-notre-dame-cathedral-could-be-blocked-eus-upload-filters.shtml

And ever since the US's 1976 Copyright Act abolished a registration requirement, it's gotten harder to figure out who controls the rights to any work, so that even the "royalty free" music for Youtubers to safely use turned out to be copyrighted:

https://torrentfreak.com/royalty-free-music-supplied-by-youtube-results-in-mass-video-demonetization-191118/

We need a new deal for content removal, one that favors working creators over wage-thieves who have the time and energy to master the crufty, complex private legal systems each platform grows for itself.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/content-moderation-broken-let-us-count-ways

Back in 2019, Slate Future Tense commissioned me to write an sf story about how this stuff might work out in the coming years. The result, "Affordances," is sadly still relevant today:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html

Here's a podcast of the story as well:

https://ia803108.us.archive.org/3/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_314/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_314_-Affordances.mp3

Meanwhile, governments from Australia to the UK to Canada are adopting "Harmful Content" rules that are poised to vastly expand the filternet, insisting that it's better than the alternative.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-content-1.6007192

[tobiosmilktea]

nom de plume — bokuto koutarou

1.6k words | genre/s: barista!au, fluff | warning/s: — | pairing: bokuto x gn!reader

↪︎ in which bokuto gives you a fake name every time he comes to the cafe you work at. you’ve been dying to know the handsome stranger’s real name, but here you are scribbling “captain america” onto his stupid caramel macchiato

a/n: here’s something short and sweet to quench my need to write a fic after writing boring essays all week for school. not the most original content either but i needed something simple :p

there were four types of regulars you would see walk through those doors of the cafe you worked at. either to spend as little as five minutes to the entire day inside the shop just to breathe in the serenity of light jazz music humming in the background. you’ve been working at this establishment long enough to relish how different every single person’s life was as they stood in front of you and ordered their special pick-me-up for the day.

you could easily tell what a person was like based on what they order—like that middle-aged office worker with a receding hairline that always entered the cafe in the midst of an angry phone call with a client, disrupting in the calm mornings with bickering. he usually orders an iced americano, bitter and dark enough to match the dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles adorning his forehead. not entirely your favorite, but he tipped well.

then there was the occasional university student, overworked trying to finish three different essays while cramming for an exam. they usually come in small study groups that end up messing around half of the time or they trickle in as individuals, eyes all red and glued to their laptop screens as they try to chug the remaining contents of their cappuccinos with three shots of espresso.

then there were the soccer moms with their obnoxiously specific drinks, ranging from the different flavors of frappuccinos with extra, extra caramel drizzle.

and then there were guys like him—the one with alabaster hair and darkened roots who just walked inside the cafe—your favorite. the door swinging opening and causing the bell right above the threshold to ding. the tall, hot, and beefy regular with a smile so intoxicating that he catches you off guard each time he walks in exactly at two-thirty in the afternoon.

you didn’t know his name, but you recognized his face, all chiseled and annoyingly handsome. this time he was accompanied by his friend again, akaashi with dark frames resting on the bridge of his nose.

unlike his companion, you actually knew his name as he would actually give it to you, unlike the latter who preferred giving out a new nickname each time he comes around to visit. hell, you knew a lot more about akaashi despite seeing him far less often.

to say you were a bit peeved of this fact was beyond question.

the only thing you truly knew about the man you were inexplicably interested in was that he always ordered an iced caramel macchiato with almond milk. he was very particular about the non-dairy part of that order.

“what can i get you two?” you ask the two towering figures before you. though, it wasn’t much of a question when you already knew what they would order.

“a flat white for me,” says akaashi.

the usual, you think. he says he likes the foam art designs you make.

“and an iced caramel macchiato for me,” says the other, giving you that infamous toothy grin.

god, he was so cute. if only i knew your name, stranger.

you input their orders into your screen quickly, the total popping up on the smaller screen in front of akaashi and his friend as he takes out his card. he inserts the chip in for a few seconds, waiting for the beep to emit from the machine before taking it out in a swift flick.

once the payment goes through, your fingers pull the black sharpie clipped onto your apron off as you grab a cup.

akaashi didn’t bother mentioning his name as you were already scribbling it down in cursive—swift, yet satisfyingly neat. on the other hand, you waited for the white-haired boy to mention what new moniker that piqued his interest today. your eyes met his with patient intent.

“captain america,” he mutters with the corners of his lips tugging up into an amused smile. as if he was proud of himself for saying such, you couldn’t help melt into his contagious grin. like a ray of sunshine that would immediately melt away your troubles, you swore your heart skipped a beat.

the brunet flicks his eyes back and forth from you and his friend, temporary intrigue setting in as he holds back a smirk. “sorry about him,” akaashi pats his friend’s shoulder, “we’ve been rewatching the entirety of the mcu and just finished captain america before coming here.”

“oh, no worries, i’m used to it.” you wave it off, “it isn’t the first time he used marvel superheroes as nicknames. just two days ago he used vision after i reminded him that he had already used thor twice in the past week.”

“i’m surprised you remembered them in the first place,” akaashi’s friend confesses.

“how could i forget? i always look forward to whatever name you give me next.”

you thought you saw a hint of red blush dusting his cheeks when you flick a look over to him, but you weren’t too sure.

perhaps it was just your imagination.

noticing that you were only holding them up by making useless conversation, you clear your throat, muttering almost incoherently, “i’ll have your drinks ready in a few minutes.”

you dipped back towards the coffee machine before they could even thank you. their cups were gripped tightly in your hands as you placed them down next to the machine. the ground up coffee beans cascaded down the dispenser and into the portafilter. carefully, you compressed it tightly into the container before brewing the espresso into a small shot glass.

“is that the guy you were talking about?” your coworker, mitsuko, pops up from behind you and asks. you jolt a bit, almost spilling the piping hot, steamed milk in your hands when you give her a look, “you weren’t wrong when you said he was a complete hunk!”

playfully rolling your eyes, you continue making their coffees, careful not to spill anything that could possibly garner more attention towards you as you could see his towering figure over the barrier.

mitsuko’s eyes cast down towards one of the cups, grabbing at one of them to read the name. “captain america, huh?” she reads before glancing at him, “he fits the name well, at least. you think he’s an athlete?”

you shrug, “not sure, but i heard he’s a big marvel fan. he used quicksilver, vision, and thor in the past week.”

“aren’t you ever curious about his real name?” mitsuko asks as you smile contently at the foam art before snapping the cover atop akaashi’s flat white.

“of course i am,” you say, setting the ready-made drink to the side to start the other. “i suppose the guy likes his privacy. who knows, maybe he’s famous or something.”

you say that partly as a joke, but something inside of you thinks that perhaps that this was that one in a million chance. how would something of such a high caliber as him not be inherently well-known, even if it was just a little bit?

mitsuko snorts at your vehemence, slapping the meat of her thigh as if that was the funniest thing she has heard all day. “as if any famous person would ever come into a random cafe in a small city, (y/n).”

you didn’t answer for a few beats as you completed the white-haired boy’s drink, capping it properly. you weren’t ignoring your coworker’s statement, yet rather simmering in the thought of how ridiculous it actually sounded.

maybe this guy just wanted to have some cheap amusement. nothing more nothing less. it was just a name after all.

you let out a sigh, “as much as i would love to know his real name, it’s none of my business. speaking of which, has he ever given anyone else random nicknames when he comes by?”

mitsuko shrugs, “he only ever comes by when you work.”

“seriously?” you’re quite surprised.

“yup, this is the first time i’ve ever seen the infamous regular who only gives out fake names.” she mused, “maybe he does it to get your attention.”

you roll your eyes, scoffing at the thought. how ridiculous. you never wanted to wipe that smirk off of your coworker’s face as you wave her off, approaching the open end of the counter as you readied yourself to hand them their drinks.

they had been patiently waiting at the other end of the counter for a few minutes now, grateful they didn’t complain at your discrete chatter with mitsuko as some patrons would. instead, they smiled at your approaching figure with their coffees in your hands.

“here’s your flat white,” you hand the cup over to akaashi.

he flicks you a charming look of appreciation before making his way towards the cafe’s entrance. you couldn’t exactly pinpoint if he was in a hurry or not as he left you and his friend alone.

you didn’t entirely mind, though, as you shook it off.

you handed the man his drink, “and to the dude whose name that i shall never know.”

he mutters a brief thank you as he takes it from your hand, fingers brushing against each other and causing your heart to rush.

“aren’t you curious?” he asks suddenly.

your brows furrow, “about what?” you replied as you feign innocence.

“my name,” he clarifies.

“well, unless your name is actually captain america, why wouldn't i be curious?” a smirk was slowly appearing on your lips, “besides, with the dozens of people i see almost everyday, i have to say that you’ve caught my attention, stranger.”

he grins, hand fishing through his pocket, “well, since you’re dying to know,” he hands you a tiny slip of paper, making sure the tips of his fingers linger feather-like touches on the palm of your hand. “come and find out for yourself.”

he sends you a wink before walking out of the cafe, leaving you absolutely dumbfounded. your shaky fingers unfold the creases of the paper, eyes scanning the contents of his messy handwriting.

000-000-0000

the name’s bokuto — call me! :)

general taglist: @yongboxerrr @crybabbicus @rosepetalhaven @tvwhoresblog @tanakaslastbraincell @kellesvt @kitsunetea @milktyama

[samwinchestersgf]

obsession (part one)

prompt: “oh my god! he’s obsessed with you!”

warnings: horror, gore, obsessive weirdo, protective sam. nothing worse than what’s in the show, but still unsettling.

pairing: sam x reader

note: any message y/n sends is in ‘’. her other messages are not.

“excuse me?” i clear my throat.

a tall man with smoldering eyes turns around and looks down at me. “hm?”

“this is so random, but could you give me a ride? i’m supposed to be meeting my boyfriend, and i’m really late, and my phone is dead, and i just-“

“sure. but, are you sure you should be getting in the car with a stranger.” he raises an eyebrow, questioning my sanity.

“i noticed the uber sticker on the back of your car.” i point out with a smile.

“y’know, i’m off the clock...” his voice trails off.

i clear my throat, “that’s fine. um, i was just wondering. have a nice day!”

i turn around and awkwardly shuffle awah as the thunder roars even louder. soon, the small mist coming down from the sky will turn into a heavy pour. sam is probably worried sick about me, and i just can’t do anything. there’s no pay phones or anything, and i don’t have is number memorized anyways.

“no!” he calls out to me as i turn around. “i mean, it’s okay, really. i don’t mind.”

the first thick raindrop splashes onto my head. “thank you so much! i can pay you once we’re at his apartment. i just-“

“it’s fine. i’ve been looking for my random act of kindness for the day anyways.” he shrugs, opening the passengers door for me.

i duck in, clutching the knife in my pocket just in case. i might be making a stupid decision by getting in the car with this random man, but it’s my only choice. i may as well being insane in a safe manner.

“how far?” he asks, starting the car.

“only a few minutes. it’s 327 park way.” i respond.

he takes a left. “if you don’t mind me asking, what were you doing out there all alone? it’s, like, 11 pm.”

“he was supposed to meet me at this coffee shop. we, uh-“ i make up a lie on the spot. “we have a lot of college work to do. then, he called and said he wasn’t feeling well and that we should just cancel.”

“so, he left you stranded out there?” he asks.

i shake my head vigorously. “no, i decided to go over to take care of him, and i said i’d be there in a few minutes. well, my phone died so i couldn’t call an uber, so i kept walking. i still had a mile or two to walk, and then i saw you.”

“maybe next time don’t walk in the first place. uber straight where you’re supposed to go, especially at night.” he advises.

“noted.” i laugh.

“if i had a girlfriend, i wouldn’t let her go walking at night alone, even if it was just across the street. this city is full of creeps.” his tone gets a little more serious.

“he normally wouldn’t. he’s just been sick lately.” i assure him. “i’m glad you’re just a normal person though, not a creep.”

“i dunno, i pour my milk before my cereal.” he jokes.

i snort. “you are a creep! you’re a self-aware creep!”

“it’s just better that way.” he throws his hands up in defense, before returning them to the wheel.

“you think cereal is better soggy? god, get me out of the car.” i fake vomit.

“what other reason do people put milk in their cereal?!” he chuckles.

“it’s a flavor enhancer.” i roll my eyes.

“that’s why i add it first.” he points out.

“disgusting.” i huff in a joking manner as he parks the car.

“is this it?” he asks.

i nod. “yep.”

“this is phil’s motels.” he raises an eyebrow.

i rub the back of my neck. “uh, yeah.”

“you said you needed a ride to your boyfriend’s apartment.” he catches on to the lie.

look, i lied a lot. sam’s not my boyfriend, but i told him that he was so that he’d know i was going to see a man, so he wouldn’t try to follow me in. this isn’t his apartment, it’s a shabby motel because we’re on a hunt.

“ummm...” i hesitate.

he laughs. “did you make me drive you here for some shady hookup?”

“no! my boyfriend and i are just traveling.” i lie.

“why didn’t you just saw so?” he tilts his head.

“because of you’re reaction to the motel!” i laugh and smack his arm. “i didn’t want you to think i was a prostitute or something!”

he stares at me for a second. “i never caught your name.”

“it’s y/n. y/n l/n.” i cheesily shake his hand.

“i’m bryan. say, why don’t you let me give you my number so that you know who to call next time you need a ride.” he offers.

i show him my phone. “dead.”

“well, you give me your number, and i’ll next you so you can save my contact when your phone is charged.” he suggests.

“okay, sure.” i grab his phone and type my number in. i hand it back to him. “you know, it’s raining really hard. why don’t you come in and let me make you a coffee while the rain settles?”

“i dunno. maybe your boyfriend wouldn’t-“

i interrupt. “oh, he’s harmless. seriously, let me return the favor.”

“okay, okay.” he agrees, taking his key out of the ignition.

i walk him up to the door, and pull my key from my pocket. i wiggle it into the cheap motel lock and finally get it open. when we get in, i slip my wet shoes and coat on. he keeps his on.

“sam?” i call out.

he comes rushing over from the side room. “holy shit, y/n! i was worried about you.”

“i’m okay, i’m sorry. i’ll explain later.” i frown.

“who are you?” he asks, looking at bryan.

“babe,” i emphasize, hoping he’ll catch on and play along. “this is bryan. he gave me a ride over so i offered him inside for a coffee.”

“um, alright. thanks for getting my girlfriend home safely, bryan.” he shakes his hand.

i walk over to the coffee pot, which is conveniently still hot, and pour some into a mug. he clears his throat.

“actually, um, i think i’ll go.” he says awkwardly.

i turn around and catch sam giving him the death glare. i place the mug on the counter. “are you sure? i promise he doesn’t bite.”

i nudge sam in the shoulder, and he shrugs me off. then, he wraps his arm around my waist, playing into the role. he changes his tone, “the storm is awfully bad out there, bryan.”

“no, um, it’s okay. i have somewhere to be. take care.” he rushes out the door.

i turn to sam. “you’re such an ass.”

“what?” he asks innocently, drinking from the fresh mug of coffee.

“you scared him off!” i laugh.

“he’s a creep, y/n. he was looking at you, and...” his voice trails off.

“and what?” i roll my eyes.

“it was creepy!” he finishes.

“he didn’t have bad intentions, never did. he knew, well, er, thought from the start that you were my boyfriend and still wanted to help me.” i inform him.

sam scoffs. “really? did he give you his number?”

“he tried. my phone is dead, that’s part of the reason i needed a ride.” i answer, shrugging.

“so, there was no number exchanging?” he raises an eyebrow.

“well-“

“y/n! you gave him your number?!” he throws his hands up exasperatedly.

“look, he was nice, okay? he helped me, and i’m still alive!” i argue.

“guys don’t normally kill girls that they’re in love with.” he raises his voice.

“he is not in love with me. we were in the car for 10 minutes tops.” i groan.

he pinches his nose. “i’m telling you, it’s a guy thing. we can just tell.”

“you can’t be in love with someone you don’t know.” i cross my arms.

“tell him that.” he answers smugly.

“you are so weird! he probably won’t even text me.” i tell him.

“plug your phone in. there’s probably already a text.” he hypothesizes.

i do as he says, plugging my phone in. it makes a minute to reboot, and we both sit in silence watching it. once it turns on, i connect to my data, and sure enough, there’s a text.

hey, it’s bryan. i sure hope you didn’t give me a fake number lol

i roll my eyes, “that doesn’t mean anything.”

“it means everything.” he testifies.

i throw my hands up. “you know what, who cares?! maybe he does like me. is there a problem with that?”

“no problem.” he answers quickly. “just super weird.”

i ignore him and text bryan back.

‘haha, no. this is my real number.’

he replies almost instantly.

good, good.

is your boyfriend mad?

i laugh.

‘he’s fine.’

i sit down the phone. “he’s not that weird, sam.”

————————————————

i shiver in my coat. my fingers twirl around the loose strings in my pockets. i really need a new coat, especially if sam and i are gonna keep working cases in chicago in the middle of winter.

i order my coffee at the counter, thanking the barista as i grab it. my small hands are instantly warmed up, and i take a much needed deep breath. i notice how i shake as i do so. is it from the nerves or the cold? i guess i’ll never know.

my phone buzzes in my pocket. it’s sam texting me. unknowingly, i smile and take a seat while texting him back.

everything okay?

‘everything’s great. i got coffee.’

iced?

‘i’m not a maniac. it’s like, 4 degrees out here.’

i sit my phone on the table and take another sip of my coffee.

stay warm, and please don’t get into random guys’ cars.

i roll my eyes and reply. ‘okay, dad’

just looking out for, that’s all.

what coffee shop are you at? i have a minute. i can meet you.

i pick my phone up to reply, but i get distracted by a tap on my shoulder. i turn around, and give my eyes a second to adjust to the person right behind me.

“bryan?” i ask.

“haha, yep. is this seat taken?” he asks, gesturing to the seat in front of me.

“um, no.” i shake my head.

my phone buzzes again. hello? did you fall off the face of the earth?

“you look super cold.” he points out.

i smile meekly. “can you blame me? it’s like, 4 degrees outside.”

“it’s in the 30s, nowhere near as cold as it normally gets.” he chuckles. “you must be from somewhere warm.”

did you get into a stranger’s car again? :/

“i’m not really from anywhere,” i explain. i pick up my phone.

‘haha, super funny.’

“i’m sorry, am i bothering you?” he tilts his head.

i shake my head. “sorry, no. my boyfriend is just blowing up my phone.”

“is he meeting you?” bryan asks.

“no, he’s busy doing stuff.” i respond.

seriously, where are you?

i begin responding, ‘joe’s cof’ but i’m interrupted again before i can send the message.

“stuff?” he raises an eyebrow.

y/n please answer your phone

“yeah, he’s a busy guy.” i smile and nod.

“too busy to meet his girlfriend for coffee?” he takes a slight dig at sam.

you’re worrying me

can you just answer

y/n what the hell answer the phone

“he was going to try. but, yeah, too busy at the moment.” i laugh his insult off.

“you should come back to my place with me! i’ve got the heat on. it’s just down the road.” he suggests.

my phone vibrates on the table. i pick it up and give bryan a sorry look. “that’s him.”

“oh.” he blinks.

“maybe another time. bye, bryan.” i wave and pick up my coffee, and then answer my phone. “hey, baby.”

“can you seriously not answer a text? i was worried about you.” he sounds frantic, but not mad.

i walk out the door of the coffee shop. “i’m sorry. that bryan guy from yesterday was talking to me.”

“talking as in, like, he was actually there?” sam asks.

“yes, he was. don’t start.” i warn him.

“i won’t. can you come to the address i texted you? it’s just a simple ghost case and it’ll be really good to teach you.” he questions.

“yes, i’ll be there.” i agree.

“please don’t ride with bryan.” he emphasizes the word with extra venom.

i scoff, “i won’t.”

79 christopher road.

i show up at the house, and sam is standing outside waiting for me. he smiles, probably because bryan is no where in sight and briefs me about the case. apparently, these people buried their daughter in the backyard, and now she’s haunting them. they went out of town, so its a simple salt and burn.

“now, sometimes when you burn these things, they try to stop you.” he tells me. “so, while i’m doing this, your job is to look out and protect me, okay?”

“right, got it.” i nod as he gives me an iron bar.

it’s already dug up. he coats the body in salt. i don’t watch. then, he drops a match and the body bursts up in flames. it smells very bad.

“sam!” i exclaim as i see an apparition.

“hit it!” he shouts.

i swing the iron rod and it goes fully through the ghost, causing her to disappear. the adrenaline is coursing through my body. i can hear my heart beating so fast that it might jump out of my chest.

“she’ll come back.” he warns.

i swing the rod again, causing her to disappear once more. “she’s angry.”

“we’re killing her. of course she’s angry.” he laughs.

sam just watches as she appears again. he trusts me, and knows what i’m capable of. he knows when he needs to step in, and when i can handle it. right now, he knows i’m able to handle it.

she appears for the third time. i groan and get ready to swing, but she stops mid ‘step’ and bursts into flames. i jump back and watch as she burns and evaporates.

“and, that’s it.” he smiles, high-giving me. “you did really well.”

“this isn’t really a celebration moment, but, just know, i’m excited.” i point out.

he snorts. “right. grab a shovel.”

after reburying the body and leaving the premise as if nothing happened, sam and i take his car back to the motel. my phone buzzes in the car.

did you get where you’re going safely?

‘yeah. i’m good.’

“who are you texting?” sam asks.

“bryan.”

“bryan sure texts you a lot for someone who thinks you have a boyfriend.” he scoffs.

“he’s friendly.” i dismiss him.

that’s good. i’m glad you’re safe.

“what’s he saying?” sam asks.

“wow. in my business, much?” i roll my eyes.

“you’re gonna tell me either way.” he laughs.

i cross my arms. “he was just making sure i got to you safely.”

“oh god!” sam exclaims. “he’s so obsessed with you!”

“he is not!”

“if a guy is making sure you’re safe all the time, it’s because he loves you.” he explains.

“you’re reading too much into it.” i counter.

“i just think it’s weird that he loves you, when to him, you have a boyfriend.” he pushes further.

“last time i checked, you aren’t my actual boyfriend.” i sigh exasperatedly. “so, unless you are, you can’t tell me who i can and can’t text.”

okay, maybe i do wish sam were my actual boyfriend. he’s a sweet guy, and definitely not unattractive. i like him a lot. but, it’s obviously not reciprocated.

‘thank you.’

��——————————————

another case, same town, and the same coffee shop. it’s the same temperature, too, so i’m basically freezing down to my bones. i get the same coffee order and text sam.

‘do you think i’ll be able to help you today?’

‘or am i gonna have to be lonely again?’

sorry

this case is kinda extreme.

i’ll try to finish quickly so we can hang out.

‘yes please.’

“why, hey stranger.” someone calls out to me. i look up, and bryan is sitting in front of me.

“hey bryan.” i wave. “are you stalking me?”

he furrows his eyebrows. “this is a very common coffee shop.”

“i know, i-“

“i’m not some kind of weirdo, you know. i’m just a nice guy who offered you a ride and is trying to be friendly.” he defends himself. “i’m also a local here, so i’ve been getting coffee from here for a long time.”

“i’m sorry. i was joking.” i apologize awkwardly.

“oh.” he clears his throat.

“yea.” i nod.

“my bad. are you busy today?” he asks.

“uh, no, actually. my boyfriend’s busy all day so i’m kind of just.. alone.” i explain.

“come to my place!” he suggests.

i sigh, “ummm...”

“c’mon. i thought we already established i wasn’t some weirdo.” he jokes.

“fine, fine.” i laugh.

i hop into the familiar passenger seat. we listen to the radio on the way to his place. i sing along, which he finds funny. i catch him staring at me every now and then. he even missed a green light or two.

my hunter’s instincts go off. sam has trained me to be careful around these kinds of people. he’s obviously not a ghost. if he’s a werewolf, i’m not in any immediate danger because it’s not a full moon. so, maybe he’s a vampire and he’s luring me back to his house to kill me inconspicuously.

we walk into his house. it’s pretty nice. the hardwood floors are almost spotless, and the furniture shows no signs of any stains. i clutch the knife in my pocket.

“make yourself at home. we can watch a movie or something.” he suggests.

“um, yeah. of course.” i nod.

he looks puzzled. “are you nervous or something?”

“i-“

“y/n, we’ve already been over this. i’m not some psychopath that kills people.” he sighs.

“i know, i know.” i deflect. “i think i just had too much coffee.”

“jittery?” he asks.

“yeah.”

my heart beats way too fast. i feel like it’s going to burst out of my chest. it’s not the good type of adrenaline that i enjoy when i’m hunting. it’s not the helpful kind of adrenaline that has saved my life so many times. it’s adrenaline based off pure fear.

with my defeaning heartbeat echoing in my ears, i decide to bite the police. i slice my palm with the knife in my pocket and then bring it out. bryan turns around with a look of concern.

“i, uh, could i have a bandaid or something?” i ask.

“how did you cut your hand?” he asks, confused.

“i have a pocket knife in my pocket.” i half-lie. its not a pocket knife, but...

“you’re so clumsy. follow me.” he beckons.

i follow him into the bathroom. he opens the cabinet and hands me the biggest bandaid i’ve ever seen, with a slight smile on his face. i observe his smile. there’s no fangs in sight. he’s just a normal guy.

“thanks.” i smile back, bandaging myself up.

my phone rings and i pick up. “hello?”

“hey. my case is over. meet me back at the motel?” sam’s voice stings my ears. i miss him.

“of course! yea, i’ll be right there.” i smile.

“okay, bye. stay safe.” i can hear the smile in his voice.

i hang up the phone and turn toward bryan. “i’m sorry to cut this short, i-“

“ditching me to go hang out with your boyfriend again, huh?” he asks bitterly.

“uh, yea. sorry.” i offer him a faux smile.

“at least let me drive you back,” he offers. he grabs his keys off the counter and jingles them.

“actually, i think i’ll just get a cab. thanks for the offer.” i wave at him and grab my coat from the front door.

i feel uneasy. i walk down the street as fast as i can without looking suspicious. now, i realize the severity of the situation. he might not be a creep, but if he is, i am very much in danger.

he has my phone number; he knows where i’m sleeping; he knows i’m alone most of the day; he knows everything and i’ve known him for two days.

but, that’s not anything to worry about. bryan is just a normal guy, right?

right?

——————————————

if you enjoyed, feel free to reblog or comment or something! stay on the lookout for the final part. thanks for reading :)

[veliseraptor]

unpopular opinion: while there were other narrative options, loki’s death in infinity war is a better option than him faking his death, because that would clash with his character arc and his relationship growth with thor, and honestly just be a really cheap move as much as i would absolutely love to see him alive

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

I was never interested in a version of the narrative where Loki actually faked his own death to, like, escape from a bad situation. I would’ve accepted a version where he was very close to dead and got better (we have precedent for that in universe), but my hope was always for a resurrection instead. 

which, I understand why they didn’t do that, but they totally could’ve.

there are a lot of things I find frustrating about Loki’s death as a narrative choice, and how it was subsequently handled, but if the choice was between “he dies” and “he fakes his death, again” with no greater purpose than to escape, and then doesn’t tell Thor on purpose, then yeah, I’d prefer the former because the latter doesn’t make sense at this point in his character arc and would just feel like a regression.

unless - and this is a big unless! - it was the case that it was part of a longer term gambit that came around eventually. Loki faking his death to work the long game against Thanos without Thanos knowing he was there - that’s potentially a very interesting story! but also not one the MCU was ever going to go in for. 

I would also be okay, though, with a version where Thor ends up picked up by the Guardians, going on his mission to Muspelheim, and later finds out that Loki survived by the skin of his teeth and they’re reunited. but that’s, again, a slightly different version than ‘faked his death.’

...and I guess I did start writing one where Loki was faking his death but with the intent to sneak Thor out afterwards when Thanos wasn’t looking and just didn’t quite get there in time, but that one is 100% alternate universe that, again, wouldn’t see in canon.

the bottom line here is that the important thing in that scene to me, as far as characterization goes, is that some aspect of Loki’s move on Thanos is genuine and not just done as a trick to get out of dodge. 

lord, though, I was hoping for a longer Loki-Thanos collaboration and a double-cross later on. and it does frustrate me that like...off the top of my head I can think of so many alternative routes for that scene to go. 

though to nitpick: I do feel like the “Loki faked his death repeatedly” as a joke in fandom thing is actually not really a thing, tbh. at the end of Thor it was pretty clearly a suicide attempt that he survived, imo, and in The Dark World that scene only really makes sense as filmed if Loki genuinely believed he was dying and then didn’t. (yes, I know he doesn’t contradict Thor when Thor accuses him of faking his death in Ragnarok, but lbr, would he anyway? and he probably doesn’t see a huge difference between ‘not informing Thor of his unintended survival’ and ‘intentionally faking his death’ anyway.) 

[lochrannn]

Warnings: Sexual Content (M Rating)

Characters: Lila Pitts; Diego Hargreeves; Allison Hargreeves; Klaus Hargreeves; Ben Hargreeves

Relationship: Lila Pitts/Diego Hargreeves

Roommates AU; Fake Marriage; Slow Burn; Mutual Pining; Emotional H/C

Chapter 8/9

-

They’ve planned to head out early in the morning, because they will have to drive for a couple of hours to get to the more scenic part of the coast that Diego’s never actually been to himself. So the evening before he stops by Ben’s to borrow his camera. To his annoyance Klaus is also there.

Diego loves Klaus and he’s usually glad to see him and always relieved to see him in a safe and relatively normal place. He hasn’t forgotten the years of crawling along the city’s streets in his car in the dead of night, looking for Klaus because nobody had heard from him in days, or picking him up from shady ass bars, high as a kite.

But Klaus, despite the fact that he seems a little spaced out half the time, has always had an unfailing read on him and Diego really doesn’t want to get into it with Klaus what his plans are for tomorrow and why he needs Ben’s camera. Dealing with his brother’s shenanigans at the wedding was bad enough.

“So you’re taking your fake wife on a fake honeymoon beach trip to take some romantic pictures and you have absolutely no ulterior motive, you say?” Klaus asks, sipping on a large mug filled with a very fragrant and spicy smelling tea in Ben’s living room.

Diego’s leaning against the windowsill, arms crossed defensively, while Ben is over by the dining table unpacking his camera equipment and trying to pare down the amount of stuff he’s going to send Diego out with and very pointedly trying to look like he’s not listening. “First off, Lila’s my actual wife, you were literally the witness, Klaus, and second of all, yeah, I have an ulterior motive, I want to help her convince immigration officials that we didn’t just get married so she could get a visa!”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, stop deflecting!” Klaus says in that mild tone of his that always puts Diego on edge.

“Why, what other ulterior motive could I have other than scamming the government?” Diego asks in irritation and then instantly regrets opening that door for Klaus. The slow grin that spreads across his brother’s face makes Diego regret a lot of choices in his life.

“I think you’re in love with your wife, you weirdo!” Klaus says, batting his eyelashes at him and Diego tries not to react, but then thinks that may be exactly the wrong choice, so a little too late he grimaces and says, “Don’t be silly!”

“Oh please, it was written all over your face at the wedding. And so much sexual tension between the two of you, maybe you should fuck and see whether that resolves it,” Klaus offers with a shrug.

“Yeah, no… that didn’t really work…” Diego breathes out and then instantly realizes the horrible mistake he made when both his brothers almost shout, “What?!” at the same time.

“Urgh, you slept with your wife, you pervert?” Klaus squeals in delight, almost falling over on the couch laughing at his own joke.

“She wasn’t my wife then…” Diego shoots back and he just doesn’t know how this keeps happening. Why is he arguing about this with Klaus? He really, really doesn’t want to talk about it, but Klaus just always manages to push his buttons.

“Oh, intriguing! Do tell!” his brother rights himself on the couch and looks at him with big curious eyes.

“Absolutely fucking not!” Diego says grumpily and crosses his arms again, trying to physically make himself shut the fuck up.

“But then what are you even doing, Diego?” Ben pipes up from the other side of the room and that is almost worse, Diego thinks, because Ben’s going to end up making a good point, “You’re clearly in love with each other, you’re having sex, you live together, you’re married, but for some reason you say you’re not actually together?”

“We had sex once, and Lila’s not in love with me!” Diego grumbles just for the sake of disagreeing with Ben.

“But you’re in love with Lila?” Ben asks at the same time as Klaus says, “Oh please, Lila is definitely in love with you! I thought she obviously wanted to bang you, but now I know she already got there that puts all the longing looks she gave you in a completely different light!”

Diego’s not inclined to simply believe his hyperbolic brother and suddenly talking about the whole thing stings in a peculiar way, so he tries to not pout when he stabs a finger at one brother at a time and says, “I’m not talking to you two about this!” Then, directed at Ben he asks, “Are you done with the damn camera? I don’t want to be here all night, should have just gotten a disposable one at the drugstore!”

To Diego’s relief, Ben holds out a small bag and he grabs it, says his very swift goodbyes, and leaves in a hurry.

-

They leave, as planned, in the early morning and at first Lila is grumpy and Diego starts doubting himself for suggesting the trip. He’d hoped that beyond getting some nice photos, he could offer Lila a bit of a reprieve from the stress of the past weeks, but once they’ve stopped off to get some coffee and donuts, to his relief, her mood markedly improves.

It’s stupid, but after what Klaus and Ben said to him, Diego can’t help watching her intently to see whether they might actually be right. But all he achieves is to get distracted from watching the road when he keeps looking over to see Lila, feet up on the dashboard, donut in one hand and take-away coffee in the other, singing loudly and badly along to the radio.

Despite the good forecast for the weather, the sun hasn’t managed to come out through the clouds yet, but, Diego thinks maybe a little overly poetically, he’d hardly notice with the way Lila seems to brighten up the inside of the car with her huge toothy grin as she looks over at him while still chewing on her donut.

“What? D’you not like my singing?” Lila asks him with a challenging sparkle in her eyes and Diego turns back to look at the road because he’s starting to worry that he might just be openly mooning over her.

“Why wouldn’t I like your singing, seeing as you’re so good at it?” he responds sarcastically.

“Fuck off!” Lila says, laughing lightly and punching him playfully in the arm with her donut hand, transferring a little of the powdered sugar onto his shirt.

“You’re in a good mood,” Diego points out. He doesn’t mind that, of course, in fact he’s endlessly relieved, but it does come as a bit of a surprise after the last few weeks in which she seemed to be on quite the emotional rollercoaster.

“We’re going to the beach! You have to be in a good mood when you go to the beach, Diego, it’s the law!” Lila explains seriously and Diego makes the mistake of looking over at her again and his heart skips a beat at the way she’s looking at him.

Klaus’s words ring in his ear, but once more he can’t figure her out. It’s just as likely that she simply genuinely likes going to the beach and is excited about it.

When they get to the shore Diego gets so distracted by all the attractions and all the different activities they get up to that he almost starts to feel like they’re on an actual date.

They take a walk along the water, joking and chatting in a way they haven’t in weeks, Lila taking off her shoes and pulling up the skirt of her dress so she can wade in all the way to her knees. Diego’s impressed as he just puts his hand in the shallow waves once to gage the temperature and decides that he has absolutely no interest in getting any other part of his body wet.

They have about twenty pictures left on the film, so they make sure to get as many different photos as possible so they can claim their honeymoon was a couple of days long, rather than just a single day trip. They have lunch on the terrace of a small seafood restaurant and then head back to Diego’s car to change into a different set of clothes and wander along the fair on either side of the promenade.

One stall offers knife throwing for prizes and Lila gets Diego to take part. He’s surprisingly good at it and lets Lila choose a prize and instead of taking one of the huge stuffed toys she picks a cheap-looking bracelet made up of wooden beads on a string and Diego can’t help but think that it really does look pretty cute on her.

As the day turns into late afternoon he buys them ice cream to take along their walk down the pier and Diego doesn’t miss the way something flashes across Lila’s expression when he hands her her cone and then turns back to the vendor and asks for a receipt for their immigration file. He has no idea what to make of it, though.

“There’s a place near London called Brighton,” Lila begins telling him as they almost reach the end of the pier, “it has this huge, gaudy pier and when I was at school they took us there on a day trip. I really didn’t like it, but then they also took us by boat to this other pier that was derelict and damaged by storms and you couldn’t get to it without a boat anymore and I much preferred that one, even though there was nothing really there anymore, except for the ruins of a victorian building.” Lila leans over the ornate, wrought iron railing and looks out at the water. “And then, when I was in my teens there was this massive fire and a couple of friends and I we bunked off school and took a train down to Brighton to take a look. We could still see smoke coming off it even the day after and there was this sooty smell on the beach and I don’t know why but I actually teared up. And I can’t quite explain it, but it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen!”

Lila turns to look at him then, and her huge brown eyes are so full of emotion that Diego finds it hard to look at her and simultaneously can’t tear his eyes away.

Lila blinks rapidly and then turns back to look out at the sea and the slowly setting sun and says in a low voice, “Don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

On some instinct Diego pulls out the camera and takes a picture of her in profile. They’ve been purposely only taking pictures of the two of them together, on occasion asking strangers and then wrapping an arm around each other, or Lila would put her hand in the crook of his elbow, because a photo of them individually will offer nothing in the way of evidence for the visa process.

Having heard the shutter release go off, Lila looks at him again and asks, “What’d you take a picture of?”

Diego looks down at where he’s winding the little wheel to the next picture on the film with his thumb and says quietly, “One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

Lila doesn’t respond and when he does muster the nerve to raise his eyes up to meet hers, there’s suddenly a charge between them that feels like it might set the damp sea air on fire. He’s just about to say something, anything really, when a slightly nasal voice coming from somewhere off to the side chimes in with a midwestern twang, “Hey mister, would you like me to take a photo of you and the lovely missus?”

They both look around abruptly to see a small woman with a kind, round face look at them expectantly.

“Uh…” Diego begins, taking a moment to find himself back in the real world, “Yeah, thanks, that’d be nice!”

He hands the camera to the woman and she takes a few steps back to get them in frame and calls out, “Smile!” and he hears the camera click before he’s even managed to follow her instructions. He’s in the middle of wondering about just how dumb he probably looks in the photo when the woman looks over the top of the camera and asks, “One more?” to which Lila says “Yes!” with determination and then grips his shirt with both hands and Diego turns just in time for Lila to press her lips to his and that’s when all coherent thoughts get swept out of his mind like sand along a beach.

“Aw, how wonderful!” Diego hears the woman call out and only realizes that he’s closed his eyes and pulled Lila hard against himself when she puts a couple of inches between them, but doesn’t quite let go of him at the interruption, “Got the sunset in and everything! Here’s your camera.”

Diego lets go of Lila with one hand and she slides back onto her feet, a tiny selfish part of Diego’s brain notes that it almost seemed like she was a little reluctant, and he takes the offered camera.

He puts it back in the bag and then startles when Lila wraps her arms around his waist and presses her face into his chest, hugging him tightly.

A little uncertainly, Diego puts his arms around her and hugs her back, then leans his head down and whispers into her ear, “What’s that for?”

She mumbles against his chest, but he’s close enough to hear her, “Just don’t think I’ve really thanked you enough for what you’re doing for me!”

There are so many things he’d like to respond with but they all seem to either not say enough or far too much about how he feels in that moment, so instead, Diego tightens his grip on her and buries his face in her hair and just holds on until Lila starts pulling away.

-

The drive back to the city is a lot more sombre compared to the giddy energy that Lila had created in the car on their way to the beach. Diego looks over at her periodically, but for most of the time she’s just quietly staring out of the window at the scenery whizzing by in the half light of dusk. It’s a beautiful view, he can’t blame her, but he feels almost like she’s trying to avoid conversation with him. So not sure what he would even talk about, Diego leaves her to it and spends his time making up his mind that once she has her green card and is no longer reliant on their continued charade, he owes it to himself, but maybe even the two of them, to tell her how he feels.

-

There’s a definite shift in the way they live together after their beach trip. They never actually discuss it, but Diego makes an effort to not work until late in the evening, and it seems Lila hardly ever has any plans with friends at night, and so they spend the weeks leading up to their immigration interview cooking and having dinner together, often using the time to get to know each other as best they can and compare notes on all the relevant answers to the questions Rodriguez and his wife wrote down for them. Other times they’ll put on a movie and make popcorn and spend a quiet evening on the couch together.

It’s both perfect and absolute bliss and at the same time it nearly tears Diego apart. Because every time they sit together on the couch, separated only by the fucking bowl of popcorn that they both very strenuously take turns to put their hand in, he has to physically restrain himself from simply shoving the stupid bowl to the floor and launching himself at Lila.

It’s slowly driving him insane.

On the day of their interview they are both quite nervous and when the USCIS agent separates them and puts them in different offices, Diego can’t stop fidgeting even when the interviewer promptly comes back in to talk to him.

He needn’t have worried. They’d done a good job at preparing for the interview and between all of the photos and receipts (some of them legit others maybe slightly less so), there are no holes that anyone could poke in the story they’d created.

He is somewhat thrown, though, when the agent asks him whether he loves his wife, that wasn’t a question that Rodriguez had mentioned, but it strikes him that it’s the one question that he can answer most honestly, so he tells her that he loves Lila with all of his heart and at this point couldn’t imagine living without her, and the agent just makes a note on her notepad and then thanks him for his time.

He’s waiting in the foyer when Lila comes out looking a little flustered and Diego’s heart sinks in disappointment as he concludes she must not have gotten her green card.

“You ok?” he asks tentatively as she gets to him and Lila gives him a glassy eyed look and says slightly absentmindedly, “Yeah, course!”

Confused by her answer, Diego tries again and asks, “How’d it go?”

Lila seems just as confused when she answers, “Uh, yeah, fine!”

Feeling like there’s a misunderstanding somewhere in their conversation Diego asks head on, though he feels like he’s being insensitive, “So, d’you get the visa?”

“What?” Lila asks distractedly, then adds, looking more harassed than he’s ever seen her “Oh that, yeah, yeah, of course I did. Uhm, can we just go home?”

He’s absolutely thrown by that. He would have expected her to be significantly more excited, considering the amount of work she put in, but he thinks maybe it’s just the adrenaline wearing off, so he follows her wordlessly out of the building and back to the car.

When they get back to the apartment, Diego’s just in the middle of taking off his boots, when Lila twists around to look at him and then rushes out, almost as if she’s been holding the question in for hours, “Diego, are you in love with me?”

[itwillbeall-dwight]

hi king,,, i saw u take drabble requests and i humbly ask for some fluff ft. the grandpas (overconti) if that's something u feel like doing. there's not enough ace fluff out there ;w;

me staring at this ask since last night like surprised pikachu.. tumblr user dweetwise give me ur autograph-

you are absolutely right, and it’s a crime that I haven’t made any content yet. this was more hurt/comfort than fluff, but there’s some cute in there, just for you <3 i rlly hope u enjoy this, it was a lot of fun to write!

likes < reblogs, any comments in the tags are appreciated

ao3 mirror in the reblogs!

~

lovesick - ace visconti/bill overbeck; canon typical violence; tiny emeto tw; 2908 words

Preview: The two of them walked out of the basement side by side, Ace taking the lead to make sure the coast was clear before they left, taking the exit closest to them through the hole in the wall, heading towards a corner where a generator remained half-power, mechanisms slowly chugging from the inside. The soldier nodded to him, quickly taking over the lead and taking the long side over and leaving Ace to take one of the shorter sides, with the wires exposed. "Hey, Ace?" “Hm?” Ace looked up at the sound of his own name, odd coming from Bill, even now. “...Thanks.” “What for?” “Wh- what do you think?” “Oh, I know, I just wanted to hear you say it.” Bill scowled, though only momentarily, the shit-eating grin on the gambler’s face was enough to make him crack into a brief chuckle, even if it did make him a little (read: a lot) more punchable, before resuming work on the generator.

Ace was not the overtly romantic type.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had the charisma to back him up, a backlog of dirty euphemisms and sultry compliments for him to cruise off of when spoken in a low whisper at the poker table, but that was only enough to get him one night of fun, maybe two if he pushed his luck (which he did, quite often). He was plastic flowers and Las Vegas weddings - the fake kind of love that you could easily replace once it got broken. And for a while, he was fine with that. At the craps table, you couldn’t count on a forever, so going from lover to lover was a fate he’d more than settled with. Hell, even if his engagement only lasted a few months (the man had some sense, at least - the last Ace heard he’d gotten hitched with another man much richer and happier up in Illinois), it made for one hell of a lie to cover his bluff for a losing hand.

Romance hadn’t been something he’d thought about a lot, in the fog. There were more important things to think about, weren’t there - whether it was those cocky kids from the Legion wanting to go for a swipe or the bony form of the Hag slashing at his heels, his main focus was on escaping first, and testing his luck second. That didn’t change, for a while. Or at least, didn’t change enough for him to notice, until, like an unstable cliffside, everything caved in and he realised just how much shit he was in. It was a gradual process, not like how he’d rush things from the casino floor to the bedroom day in and day out for years at a time, knowing that it was likely to be his only chance before they moved onto someone new and better.

Ace didn’t know why it was him. Bill was a hardass, a stickler for the rules, a self-sacrificing hardass who could just say was way too high up on his horse and leave it at that. And normally, he would. But this time… he didn’t. He watched the old soldier with intrigue, with the way he commanded the room despite them being in the forest, his biting wit and genuine strategy enough to straighten the backs of even Nea and David, and that was a task worse than freezing hell over. He would listen to the words he used, insults peppered in like salt to a cheap takeaway meal, half drunk and lost in the belly of the Californian night, how his brow furrowed and how his eyes flickered with intent between survivors, and how his lips quirked and moved as he talked, or didn’t talk. All these little details finally came to a head when he’d began noticing how his words would bounce off of him like glue to rubber, unfazed mostly - though one time, he got a laugh out of him, while making a joke about David’s recklessness as the two offered their assistance in patching him up behind a rock (“takes an idiot to know one, Visconti”, he’d said). And that small chuckle was all it took for Ace to realise he was in deep, deep shit.

While luck had always been on his side, courage had not. Ace had let his feelings sit for a long time, trial after trial, not sure whether to be grateful that he was finally yearning for attachment or cursing the heavens that it had to happen here, of all places, enough to the point where avoiding Bill had become as natural as breathing air. Wasn’t anywhere to run eventually, though, as a terrible trial in the Autohaven Wreckers, where generators remained powered down and Micheal patrolled in his usual, methodical way, had left the two of them the only ones left alive. Hiding behind a wall, they had been silent for a while, before the old soldier had pressed him about his odd behaviour, calling him out to the very centre of it. And for the first time in a long time, Ace didn’t have a retort - there was no shitty movie quote, no stupid joke he could bounce off of - leaving him stumbling and hanging slack-jawed as his face grew hot and he rubbed the back of his neck, enough to make Bill growl and start to stand to his feet, ready to take the fall as he’d done so many times. But as if on instinct, Ace had grabbed his wrist and pulled himself to his feet, asking him to take a chance, just this once. Bill had chastised him as he normally did, pulling his arm away as he did so. And Ace had swallowed hard and looked him head-on, letting his eyes fall on every feature of his face, before grabbing the old fool by the collar of his shirt and pulling him in for a long-overdue kiss that seemed to last too long but not long enough, hoping that that was enough of a message to say that he’d trade his life for Bill’s in a heartbeat. He did, evidently, meeting his end at the hand of a knife in his lungs, but behind tinted glasses where he quickly lost vision, he’d seen Bill running for the hatch, glaring daggers at him as Ace could only smile, and die. Words were said at the campfire when he got back, but the message had been sent, loud and clear, earning him another kiss back when the two were, pinned against a tree with the glow of the campfire on his back, an answer to the silent question that he had posed for if it was really okay to do this. And it was. 

It had been a good while since that moment, though Ace played it in his head over and over as if it was some crazy dream that he was getting to live in. Things hadn’t really changed between them - he was still just as stupid, if not more so, trying to impress the man who made the mistake of liking him back, and Bill was still as much of a hardass - but there were moments now that made every injury, every lost chase and terrible mistake, and every death, so much more worth it. The soldier shared with him small smiles, laughs and jokes and tales of old friends, his doubts and his anguish, but most of all, showed him a side of himself that wasn’t as harsh, a side of himself that was vulnerable, and kind - a bleeding heart, as it were, and that was the side where their hands interlocked walking back from the campfire, where they’d joke and slow dance and laugh like normal lovers did, out on the edge of the campfire. They had each other’s back, and out here, that’s what they needed most. 

Another trial was underway now, as one always was, and the forest of the Macmillan Estate was cold as it always had been, especially around the old ironworks. The atmosphere in the old factory giving off ice cold vibes of unhappiness and solitude. Ace felt a shiver run its icy fingers up his spine from under his shirt, pulling his hands away from the generator for a moment as his head twitched a little from the moment, recovering quickly with a quiet sigh before he got back to work. The trial had been rather relaxed, as of now; one generator was already powered (he’d watched Dwight and Nea work on that together, which was like seeing snow in July, as far as he was concerned) and he’d only heard a few yells of pain after that as he was searching around the factory through chests for a key (no luck this time) before hoping down again. Over the sound of the mechanisms powering up like a beating heart, the fountain behind him flowed, the sound of pure water almost calming, if not for the sign that the Plague was roaming around.

Two wires he was holding sparked together, and that was enough to get the generator to flicker on. Perfect. Ace stood to his feet and took off his hat for a moment, scratching the top of his head before he put it back on again, as if it would help him figure out his next move. As if just going for a stroll (the poor priestess was making this trial seem like a cakewalk, after all), he slid his hands into his pockets, beginning to head out of the factory-

Running towards him made him step back inside, pinning his back against the wall near the door, his heart lurching into his mouth. From out of the corner of the doorway, he saw Bill sprinting past, the tall form of the Plague not too far behind. Ace smiled despite himself, though that soon faded as he heard the gagging coming from the woman, before she swallowed down her own vomit as the soldier turned a corner, and then subsequently hit her with a palette as she tried to follow after him. 

With the threat gone, though that wasn’t as reassuring as it ought to have been, knowing it wasn’t far behind the man he loved - Bill was capable enough, though, so there wasn’t much to worry about, was there? Right? - Ace moved away from the wall and sighed. Better to head in the opposite direction of the scary lady with the sacrificial censor and the terrible disease. But as he started to make his way towards the hole in the wall under the stairs, his eyes fell onto another set of stairs that were all too familiar. The whispers of the basement were calling for him. Ace swallowed, fiddling with the collar of his jacket. ...Bill had this, right? And if not, Nea and Dwight would have his back, surely. It was fine for him to dig around for another key, right? He looked around. No one was here to tell him not to, so the only other choice…

He descended the basement stairs carefully, a hand running along the rotting and misshapen planks of the old wooden wall the didn’t fit with the rest of the factory at all, as if it had been stolen and shifted from another building entirely. Those whispers of death were louder now, as he turned a corner and saw it, the chest at the back. Ace rubbed his hands together, hoping to channel some sort of magic to get this thing to open up. The gambler got down on one knee, picking at the lock of the chest while grumbling and talking to himself, praying for a key, or a flashlight to toss to the feisty young Swede if he saw her again. It didn’t take long to open, though nothing was waiting for him inside but a crusty old medkit. Ace stood up again with a frown, cursing Lady Luck for turning her back on him-

Heavy hands hitting the wall of the killer shack startled him, heart in his mouth. The Plague was probably already mad enough with how things had been going, he didn’t need to be spotted hiding out in the basement to make matters worse. Scrambling to his feet, the gambler lept for the locker just behind him, and clambered inside, hoping not to alert the tall, diseased woman that he was an easy target. But instead of sickly breaths and the sound of bare feet on concrete, the stumbling, heavy footsteps down the stairs and strained, pained breathing were enough to get him to poke his head out-

“Oh, shit- Bill!” 

The panicked whisper made the soldier look up, watching as Ace climbed out of the locker, leaving the doors to close on their own as he jogged over. Bill gritted his teeth, knuckles white as he clung to the edge of the wall beside the stairs with one hand, the other clutching his stomach. “Dammit, Visconti, what’re you doin’-”

“Don’t matter. C’mere.”

“No- get off me, dammit.” He tried to swat the gambler away, but lost his balance as he did and slipped from under his feet, yelling quietly as Ace rushed to grab him and help him stand, his hand grabbing hard at the side Bill was holding.

“Ah, shit- sorry, babe. Come on, there’s a medkit over here-”

“Oh, of course you were fuckin’ around in here-”

“You want the help or not?”

Bill paused, about to open his mouth again before catching the look on Ace’s face, an oddly solemn frown that seemed out of place, before sighing in resignation, if only to see the small smirk that overtook the other man as he led him over to the chest, letting him lean against the locker and slide down to sit.

“You’ll thank me later, trust me.”

“Just get it done.”

Ace nodded, taking the medkit out of the chest and opening it up, fishing through what little supplies were in there to try and help, hands shaking ever so slightly. For as long as the two of them had been here, you’d think he’d be used to this by now - but he was as cowardly at heart as always, it seemed.

He wasn’t an expert medic, but in the fog, you had to adapt fast, so Ace had picked up a few things from watching Claudette patch people up (and watch Nea complain about how wrong it was, but even he would doubt her judgement in that department), enough that he thought he was doing a pretty good job as he slowly wrapped the gauze around Bill’s torso, watching at the heavy bruising was slowly covered, and listening for a wince of pain every so often to tell him he was doing it a little too tight. Ace glanced up to him as his glasses fell down his face from looking down, just catching the soft expression he was giving before he grumbled and look away, making the gambler chuckle to himself as he finished tying off the gauze, moving his hand to gently hold his shoulder.

“She get you up there?”

Bill looked back again, an eyebrow raised.

“Vomit Queen up there. You caught anythin’?”

“Oh, hell no. Saw Karlsson instead, went after her ass. Considerin’ the run around she’s been givin’ her, ain’t surprised.” He paused, trying to push himself up now. “I gotta help her-”

“Aht, aht. Down, boy.” Ace put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down to sit. “C’mon, Bill, she’ll look at you funny and you’ll go down if you go up there again, ‘Sides, Nea ain’t a damsel. A few more minutes, yeah?”

“And Dwight?”

“He’s no idiot either. He’s our leader for a reason.”

He stared, before looking away again.

“We’ve talked about this, Bill. I know you gotta stick your neck out for everyone else, but you can only go so far.”

He didn’t say anything else, but from the way he tapped his fingers against the concrete floor, he wasn’t happy about it.

“There… no worries, you old coot, I got you.” Ace laughed as he got a punch to the chest, moving to hold a hand where the impact had been made, expression going soft as Bill laughed too, albeit it was quieter. He stood to his feet and wiped the dust and blood off of his knees where he’d been kneeling before offering the soldier a hand, which he took, helping him stand to his feet with only minor wobbling. "You good?"

"Yeah... yeah. Just... give me a second."

"Take all the time you need."

The soldier kept his grip tight in Ace's hand, sighing to himself before he went to move his hand away.

Though Ace kept his grip, if only to bring the hand up to his lips and gently kissed Bill’s knuckles, skin old and weathered on his lips, before pulling away and running his thumb across them. “Now come on. We've got a trial to finish."

The two of them walked out of the basement side by side, Ace taking the lead to make sure the coast was clear before they left, taking the exit closest to them through the hole in the wall, heading towards a corner where a generator remained half-power, mechanisms slowly chugging from the inside. The soldier nodded to him, quickly taking over the lead and taking the long side over and leaving Ace to take one of the shorter sides, with the wires exposed.

"Hey, Ace?"

“Hm?” Ace looked up at the sound of his own name, odd coming from Bill, even now.

“...Thanks.”

“What for?”

“Wh- what do you think?”

“Oh, I know, I just wanted to hear you say it.”

Bill scowled, though only momentarily, the shit-eating grin on the gambler’s face was enough to make him crack into a brief chuckle, even if it did make him a little (read: a lot) more punchable, before resuming work on the generator.

They got out of that game alive, thankfully, Bill saving Dwight from a last-minute hook and the two of them shielding him on their way out. As the two younger survivors rushed on ahead to give their friends the good news, Ace and Bill hung behind, strolling back hand in hand. It wasn’t an ideal world, but it was theirs, and having each other was a hell of a lot better than not.

[hailene]

𝚁𝚊𝚠  𝙻𝚒𝚗𝚎

𝚁𝚊𝚠 𝙻𝚒𝚗𝚎| 03

𝚂𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚏𝚊𝚗𝚏𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗

(𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘮– 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘺 𝘒𝘪𝘥𝘴, 𝘕𝘊𝘛, 𝘉𝘛𝘚, 𝘛𝘸𝘪𝘤𝘦, (𝘎)𝘐-𝘋𝘓𝘌, 𝘔𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘰, 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘬)

Genre: angst, racing!au, college!au, gang!au, underworld!au

Word count: 3.5K

ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ

00|  01|  02|  03|  04|  05|  06|  07|  08|  09|  10|  tba

Mafia.

My mouth goes dry as I take in Joshua's words. I couldn't breathe properly and my heart was beating faster. Why am I surprised? I should have expected something like this, I should have seen such news coming. However, I figure it's not surprise, it's fear.

Why am I even afraid?

Before I can realize what the actual answer is, I hear the boy next to me chuckling.

"You should've seen your face," he says and I frown.

"What?"

He looks at me with one of his warm smiles, which only annoys me more this time.

"Kidding," he says simply.

I cross my arms over my chest and turn away from him to look at the racetrack in front of us. There were six cars at the start, surrounded by a lot of loud supporters. I didn't really have any knowledge regarding sports cars, but I could tell those were some illegally expensive ones. So that's what they're into. But how can they afford all of this?

"The forth car is Jeonghan's," Joshua says, but I choose to ignore him, still a bit upset about his terrible joke.

The forth car was a metallic-black with a painted red line on the side. It looked much like something Jeonghan would drive, indeed. There were a lot of people around his car, but I figured he wasn't exactly interested in talking to them, at least not for now. He must have been in his driver's seat already.

"Racers, get ready!" A powerful manly voice is heard in the giant speakers on the sides of the racetrack.

The supporters back away from the start, leaving the six drivers to get ready for the race. I had to admit, the cars looked nice. One of them in particular was catching my eye every time I was looking at them though. A matte all-black car that roared like a beast was weirdly interesting. How was Jeonghan going to win against a car like that?

A girl dressed in a short black skirt and a red crop top steps towards the start, a colourful flag in her hand. Despite the fact that the flaggers we usually see in movies are mostly really-fake looking, most likely wearing too few pieces of clothing, the flagger girl in front of me looked really interesting. She looked almost weird in this context.

She looked normal.

I squint my eyes as if trying to find something off about her. But I couldn't find a thing.

This is something else.

She raises her orange flag and looks at the cars with a determination that made me shiver. If she weren't a flagger, I could swear she was a racer.

"Ready..." the manly voice in the speakers is heard again. "Set... GO!"

The girl lowers her flag and in a split second, the six cars fly past her, fluttering her long brown hair. She doesn't even flinch.

Who is she anyway? I wonder unconsciously.

"You might want to close your mouth, there is a lot of smoke in the air," Joshua speaks softly beside, reminding me of his presence.

I close my mouth shut, almost biting my tongue, and take a deep breath. There were so many things I would have wanted to ask Joshua, but I didn't really want to get over the fact that he made fun of me. I wasn't ready to step on my pride for him, even though he was slowly but surely making me willed to do so.

"Jeonghan might win this, if he wants to," he says, answering one of my questions.

"If he wants to?" I ask incredulously.

"Yeah," the boy nods "I don't think he does though."

I frown as Joshua turns his head to look at me as if wondering if I understood what he was talking about. But of course, his words didn't make any sense to me.

"If the leader of the pack gets hurt, a wise right-hand shall not get revenge right away," he explains, only confusing me more.

Seungcheol, he must be talking about Seungcheol.

I turn my head towards the racetrack again, but the cars were already out of sight, only their roaring engines being heard in the air.

"Is S.Coups the best racer?" I ask, wondering if that was the reason why his car was intentionally crashed.

Joshua hums thoughtfully for a while.

"Racers are pretty much like artists," he begins. "Each of them has something special, a technique they're best at... but Coups does have the biggest number of wins out of all the regular racers."

"That's why they wanted him out, right?" I ask impatiently.

"You could say so," he hums. "But that was just a first step."

Before I can ask him if he knew what was going to happen next, I spot Hoshi talking to some guys a few rows in front of us. I frown confused, but soon enough, I remember I shouldn't give away any sort of connection with anybody excluding Joshua. Why would Joshua be the most innocent one though?

"He's checking the rumors," Joshua explains, probably observing where my gaze was directed to.

"Is there anybody that I don't know from your... little non-mafiotic group here tonight?" I ask.

Joshua shrugs.

"Maybe."

I realize he is not going to tell me anything more than this so I decide to give up. However, I was curious.

I spot three cars approaching the finish line with a dangerous speed. Danger is what it's all about, isn't it? The thrill of driving on the thin line...

Jeonghan's car was the first one and in that moment, I felt some sort of admiration and pride, watching as he was getting closer to the finish line, ready to come in the first place-...

He then starts to lower his speed. For some unknown reason. It was like running low on sugar, like out of the sudden the world around you starts to swirl and you can't run anymore. So you slow down. It was like Jeonghan's car was running low on gasoline. But that couldn't be the case. The matte black car, which was right behind him, runs faster, getting in front of Jeonghan's car in a matter of seconds.

What the hell?

I suddenly recall Joshua's words, "He can win this if he wants to... but I don't think he does."

It was his intention to lose, he did that on purpose.

But why wouldn't he want to win?

What kind of plan do they have in mind?

The crowd erupts in cheers as the matte-black car crosses the finish line. Jeonghan's car follows shortly after, driving away from the place where the winner parked his. I let out a sigh and Joshua chuckles.

"Told you," he speaks, not making me feel any better.

A dark haired boy steps out of the winning car, a bright-but-full-of-pride smile visible on his face. Dark clothes were covering his well-built figure and they didn't look cheap at all. He did not look surprised that he won, nor overwhelmed by the cheers and the mass of people surrounding him. Confidence, he was giving off such a great confidence. However, he looked nothing like what I would have imagined such a good racer to appear as.

He looked... normal.

And then again, something was terribly weird about the normality of this place and some of  the people around here.

"Don't let yourself get tricked by the appearances," Joshua says. "That's Chris Bang, or Bang Chan if you like... the leader of those who have caused Coups' accident."

A sudden shiver takes over me and I look at the winner again, surprised by the newly received information. Don't let yourself get tricked by the appearances seemed like the best advice that I could be given tonight. Bang Chan's bright smile could have tricked anyone, including me, that he was a nice guy, having no ties with the underworld.

But eyes are deceiving.

Joshua fishes his phone out of the pocket of his jeans and holds my wrist gently, as if preventing me from being kidnapped. It wasn't that unlikely anymore, to be honest.

"We have to go," he says on a firm tone, making me look at him confused.

Indeed, the race was over, the people simply congratulating the winner, some of them comforting the other contestants as well. Some were already heading towards their parked cars, loud chatter taking over the place. Chaos, I tell myself. Anything could happen in this chaos and go completely unnoticed. That's probably why we have to leave now.

"But the others?" I question.

"Somebody else will pick them up," Joshua says hastily. "Now, let's go. There are some people you have to meet."

*

Joshua was not the best driver. Of course, he could drive... but not exactly the way I would have imagined somebody who is so close to Seungcheol doing.

Finally, something not so perfect about him.

"Did you like it?" He asks, breaking the silence of the car.

I was afraid that any kind of conversation might distract him from driving so I chose not to ask anything. And even after hearing him speaking, I was doubting his ability of focusing on two things at the same time while one of them was driving.

"The race?" I ask and he hums in response. "Yeah, it was... it was more than what I would have expected, I guess."

"And you have seen nothing yet..." he smiles.

There was something challenging about his words, about his behavior towards me. But rather than challenging me, I felt like Joshua was curious. Curious about who I was and what hid beyond the layers of a foreign girl who lives with her sister so far away from home.

I didn't really know any of that myself, so I wasn't sure that Joshua was going to figure it out any time soon.

The loud roar of an engine wakes me up from my thoughts and I turn my head to look outside the window. I don't know what I was expecting, but a motorbike wasn't that, for sure.

Are we being followed? is the first thing that pops up in my head, the memory of that night at Joshua's house appearing in my head. Fear started to crawl up on me, making me slightly shiver.

Joshua chuckles at the sight of the black-hooded biker and speeds up. So we're not in danger, I think. I hope. My eyes widen and not because I was afraid of speed, but because I wasn't really sure Joshua could handle it.

We were out of the highway and to my surprise, it didn't seem like we were heading towards Joshua's house. Before I can ask him where we are going, the roaring motorbike drives closer to us once again. Pretty persistent, aren't they?

That's a really high speed for an average biker.

Unless it is not an average biker.

Suddenly, the mysterious biker accelerates even more, flying past us as if we were driving on a turtle. Wow, I think to myself, whoever that is, they must be a little insane.

Joshua accelerates a bit more, not daring to press the pedal any further and I sigh in relief. If it was supposed to be a race between us and the biker, it was more than obvious who won.

In a matter of minutes, Joshua parks the car in front of a house on some side street. The road was barely lit so I could hardly observe the surroundings. However, right in front of us, the biker was leaning against his vehicle, arms crossed over his chest, looking at our car with a small smirk on his face. A boy, I think, I shouldn't be surprised. I couldn't really see his features because of the dim street lights, but that smile, I could see that smile really well.

There was some sort of wickedness in it, with a glint of wildness and joy. He, as I could guess, was crazy. But there was something rather catchy about it.

Joshua sighs and gets out of the car, so I follow suit, shutting the door closed after me. The car makes a click sound, signaling me that Joshua locked it. He steps closer to the biker and they do a frat-like handshake, making me look at them confused.

Of course Joshua knows the guy. He wouldn't have been so willed to compete against a biker in open street unless he knew them.

I step closer to them hesitantly.

You are going to meet new people, you will have to be willed to trust them.

The stranger turns his head towards me and inspects my face real quick, as if wanting to figure out who I am just by looking at me.

"What's your name?" He asks and his voice is unexpectedly soft.

"Emma," I say, having to think twice.

He nods as if recalling being told about me.

"I'm THE8," he speaks and my eyebrows jump in surprise.

So he's the one with the weird name.

I try to recall the first time I heard it and I remember it was a conversation about the car crash... about Seungcheol and about who was going to take his place... about first racers.

It clicks to me.

THE8 is the other "first racer", as I remember Jeonghan being called.

"Let's get inside," Joshua says, catching my wrist and leading me after him before either of us gets to say anything else.

The house smelled wonderful. Only after entering I realized that my stomach was desperate for anything edible. We take our shoes off and I hesitantly cling to Joshua, feeling really awkward. He chuckles but doesn't say anything, for which I'm thankful.

The house was much smaller than Joshua's, but it looked like a home. The lights were warm and the cream-coloured walls were filled with pictures. The furniture was definitely not as edgy as the one at Joshua's house, but something about its vintage-vibe reminded me of my parents. That was probably why I already liked the place so much.

We follow the sound of a kitchen-bustle and enter a large cooking area, filled with upbeat music and steaming pots.

"Are you seriously cooking while injured... at midnight?" Joshua asks on an amused tone, making the incredibly tall guy standing behind the counter with a spoon in his hand flinch in surprise.

He turns around and a smile spreads on his face as soon as his eyes meet the boy beside me. He steps towards us and I notice his bandaged arm and the stitches on his forehead. His smile was bright and his eyes were sparkling his joy. He looked much like a happy giant, as I couldn't get over the fact that he was almost two heads taller than me.

"You finally arrived!" He beams and I can't help but smile at his excitement. "I bet y'all are hungry!"

Joshua simply smiles and looks at me as if guessing that I am completely starved.

"Oh, you must be Emma!" The happy giant says turning towards me. "I am Mingyu! It's nice to meet you!"

He extends a hand in front of him and I shake it firmly, a wide smile plastered on my face.

"You, too, Mingyu!" I say.

It was the first time one of the boys actually knew my name, so I couldn't help but like Mingyu immediately, appreciating his bright personality and hospitality. I remember Joshua saying that he was the one who had been followed a few nights ago, causing the scene in front of Joshua's house. So that was why he was injured.

Despite the fact that he looked inoffensive in his sky-blue sweatpants and Kermit T-shirt, I could sense his body was no joke and that perhaps, when he was not in this attire, some would have to fear him.

"Eight!" He beams once again as he spots THE8 behind us.

I turn around to look at the boy and notice he was looking at the pictures on the wall with interest. His hood fell down, revealing his sleek black-ink hair, that was falling over his forehead, almost covering his eyes. I glance at his body and notice how skinny he was.

You would expect super-skinny people to have wobbly legs and insecure gestures. But THE8 was walking like he owned the place and everybody in this house.

"Hey!" He smiles and hugs Mingyu, patting his back.

I was afraid that Mingyu might crumble his body in the embrace without being aware of it, but fortunately, it didn't happen. They seemed more familiar with each other than they were with Joshua and I didn't know why. But I guess I was yet to find out.

"Wonwoo!" He shouts and I hear somebody shuffling from the other room.

A tall figure makes its way in the hallway, entering through the door on the left side of THE8 and everybody turns to look at them. The boy was almost the same height as Mingyu and he looked equally as casually dressed as him, except he, of course, didn't have a Kermit T-shirt. His round silver-rimmed glasses were resting on his nose, giving off a really smart-casual vibe, even though his attire made me think that he had just woken up.

He smiles and my heart almost flutters. He sure is good-looking.

"Ah, finally," he speaks and his voice is so deep that I can barely hear him.

Joshua introduces me to the new guy and I find out he has been taking care of Mingyu the past few days. He seemed nice and joyful, but it didn't really look genuine on him, as it looked on Mingyu.

Half an hour later, as we finish setting the table, the loud buzz of a phone makes me flinch. Joshua shots me an apologetic look and picks up his call with a concerned face.

Something isn't right.

He leaves the room, talking over the phone with somebody and I try not to panic at the thought that he left me alone in a room with three people I met like an hour ago.

"It must be Seungcheol," I hear Mingyu saying and for the first time ever since we arrived, he looks worried.

Before I get to ask anything, Joshua returns with the same concerned expression. I didn't know him well, I didn't know him at all, still I knew him best out of the twelve friends of Seungcheol. And I could tell, at least, that he was good at hiding his emotions. So now that even he looked worried, it felt like the reason behind it was serious.

"They asked for a rematch," he says and I frown confused. "In open street."

THE8 stands up from his seat and sighs. He walks towards the hallway like a man to his death and just when I believe he will leave without saying anything, he turns his head to look at us.

"Spare me a patty," he says before turning around and leaving the house.

Soon enough, the roaring of his motorbike rings outside as if waving us goodbye again.

I realize I'm the only one left surprised by THE8's sudden departure. What on earth is up with him? Is this really his usual way of being?

I look at Joshua who was staring blankly at the table filled with food. I was terribly hungry, but I was more worried than starved. And of course, it wasn't just worry. Worry for whom? My sister? She could take care of herself all too well. It was fear and the unsettling feeling of uncertainty, not knowing what is going to happen in the next minute, hour or day.

"You should eat," I hear Joshua saying silently and I swallow the lump in my throat.

Mingyu sighs, dropping himself on the big couch behind him. I didn't know what to do, I wasn't enough familiar with these boys to ask anything...

As if I knew what to ask in the first place.

A thing was for sure, nobody was coming back that soon, including Yuri. At least they called to let us know, so we could worry less... but are we worrying less? Am I worrying less?

Am I even worrying?

There is something else about this feeling, as if wanting to escape. But of course, there is no way I can do so. It's frightening, I guess, having to trust people that have done nothing to earn it. Being stuck in such situation with them is frightening. Depending on them is frightening.

I sit on a sofa across from Mingyu, feeling like I would faint if I stood up any longer. I feel Joshua's eyes on me, as if telling me to eat. My stomach seemed to agree with him, but the sudden dizziness that suddenly took over me just couldn't let me think about food. Not now.

I fall asleep on the sofa in Mingyu's living room, in the low chatter of Joshua and Wonwoo, hoping that when I wake up, things will have changed for the better. I didn't even know what I would have liked "better" to mean, but as I feel a blanket falling gently over me, I figure out it could mean simply being able to stay warm like that forever.

ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ

00|  01|  02|  03|  04|  05|  06|  07|  08|  09|  10|  tba

[threewaysdivided]

I appreciate the response. Yeah, among other adjustments, had the plot been handled a little differently, I feel like Sam’s relationship with her parents could have evolved into something like that of Danny and Jazz and their parents. And don’t get me wrong; I still like Sam, too.

(In reference to this post and follow-up ask.)

Good to hear from you again 😊

I think there were a lot of things across the board that could have been tweaked or edited to improve the integrity of the series.  If I had to boil down the problem with DP to a single point I’d probably say it’s that the most interesting parts of the show are the characters/world/implications but the writers (or some of them anyway - I suspect there might have been some conflict between Hartman, the lead writers and the execs’) wanted certain plots, aesops and gags, and chose to brute-force them in regardless of whether they actually worked with what was already there.  Basically, it lacks consistency and internal logic.

For Sam in particular I think there are a few things that could have been handled better:

First one’s more a general complaint at the show and might light a fire under my notes but heck lets go there anyway but the writing has kind of a sexist bent that really doesn’t fit the characters or need to be there. Considering how much Danny and Jack are shown to love and respect Maddie and Jazz there’s no way they’d call their involvement in Genius Magazine “the swimsuit edition”.  Paulina might be traditionally feminine but “She surrendered her individuality for a boy! I’m so proud of her!” is not a line that any human girl in the history of human girls would say unironically.  There’s also a few too many jokes that basically boil down to “male character is emasculated/ vulnerable/ likes feminine-coded things, hyuk hyuk hyuk”.

I’m bringing this up not just because they’re gross cheap gags but because for Sam specifically, this pervasive low-key contempt for women and femininity in the writing, especially the tendency to portray almost every non-sympathetic girl her age as one-note, brainless boy-crazy cliches that she can’t connect with, really does not help her character.  I would have loved to see more genuine interaction between Sam and the other girls, even if it most of it was Kim Possible-Bonnie Rockwaller style antagonistic rapport.  We could have seen her develop some kind of tenuous connection with one of the A-listers, or even just have a secondary-female-character to be cordial towards - kind of like Mikey is for Danny and Tucker.  Hold up, outside of Valerie, Star and Paulina are there any named secondary girls at Casper High?  Sam doesn’t seem to have a single female friend in the show and considering how vocally judgemental she is, it can almost read like she’s rejecting them outright for being girls, which really undercuts attempts to make her seem feminist. (I mentioned it in a past tag but this feels like an early-2000s-male-writer mistake of equating Female Empowerment™ with the ability to tear down other women and belittle traditional femininity - which isn’t so much Feminism as it is Internalised Misogyny.)  Even just mixing up the pairings to put her with Star instead of Kwan in Lucky in Love would have helped.

I’d have also liked to see more awareness of and consistency in the conflict between her activism and her wealth.  It kind of undercuts the significance of her activism when you realise that she’s wealthy enough to make these choices with little cost to herself; it’s much easier to go vegan or buy renewable/ recyclable /sustainable /fair-trade when price isn’t an issue, especially if you also have serving staff to offset the time cost.  Once you notice this it makes her activism feel more tokenistic, and also like she doesn’t really understand her own privilege when she tries to push her agendas onto the school/ her classmates without considering why they mightn’t be able to do so as easily.  It’s also weird because the source of her family’s wealth is a cellophane-toothpick-wrapper (i.e. something that basically produces litter) but she still seems very comfortable enjoying the material benefits despite her pro-eco anti-consumerism sentiments.  It’s bizarre that she’s more concerned with the social consequence of ‘fake friends’ than the ethics of capitalism.  It can come off a bit “do as I say, not as I do”. 

It would have been nice for the show to give more screen time to reinforcing that Sam is aware of that conflict and is making an active effort to hold to her principles even at the cost of personal comfort; maybe showing some unease at the source of her wealth, trying to live below her means and only spend up on ethical/ eco-friendly/ sustainable products, op-shopping or hand-making her goth accessories, going out of her way to re-use or re-purpose things even if buying a new one would be ‘better’, actually showing or referencing her doing substantial hands-on activities (e.g. going off-screen or taking the boys to do tree-planting, litter pickups, soup kitchens, animal-shelter work etc).  Just something to help make it clearer that she genuinely cares and isn’t just doing the low-mess lip-service activities because she enjoys indulging in the image of Wokeness™.

These things would have helped regardless of how her family was written but let’s hop back on topic and talk about them.  I don’t have any prescriptive preference but let’s spitball a few different options and how they could have played:

#1 Sam’s parents don’t respect her interests and want her to fit a mold

In this case I’d make it that they don’t really pay attention or show much caring for who Sam really is as a person; their image of and interactions with her are more of a fantasised version of the ‘perfect’ daughter they want, they make very little effort to encourage her actual interests and are perhaps restrictive about what they let her do in the few moments when they do bother paying close attention (you might compare to some versions of Tim Drake’s Parents from DC Comics).  Classist, overly image-conscious, snobby and superficial.  

This would be the most sympathetic portrayal of her character without changing it very far from how it is in DP canon - helping contextualise why Sam is so fiercely defensive of her autonomy, why she pushes so hard when trying to get her opinions across and why she’s so judgemental of rich people and disdainful towards classic femininity - even possibly explaining her more hypocritical/ manipulative/ entitled traits as learned behaviours.  It would also give her more legitimate reason to be less empathetic towards others - after all even if they have struggles and family troubles it’s still better than what she’s dealing with (Danny’s parents may not be attentive but hey, at least they love him for himself, right?)

For this version I’d probably put her arc around growing past the “suffering olympics” model of viewing other people’s pain, but also in her finding family in Danny/Tucker/her Grandmother’s circle of connections, learning how to have healthy power-balance and communication in her relationships with others (aka: getting over her hypocrisy and realising that assertiveness is about communicating that “I matter, and so do you”) and pulling away from her parents’ influence - maybe even living with Ida a lot of the time.

#2 Sam’s parents are well-intentioned but overbearing

For this one, Sam’s parents would genuinely want the best for her… only they have an overly old-fashioned and restrictive view of what “the best” is and are a bit set-in-their-ways.  They’d probably view “hippies” and “goth” stuff as “dangerously rebellious hooligan-activities” and likely to be somewhat patronising about Sam’s passion for it being “just a phase”.   They’d be worried about her hanging around “the Fenton Kid” and “the Foley Kid” both because Danny’s parents are kind of irresponsible screwballs about safety but also because they put a lot of value in image due to their belief in social connections being the way to get ahead.  Them pushing Sam towards classic femininity and specific activities would be less about disrespecting her identity and more about their overly narrow view of “success” and worrying that she’s going to end up losing valuable opportunities and “wasting her life” if she keeps on down her current path.

This would still give Sam more sympathetic context for her views on femininity and pushiness about self-expression. 

Personally I think the arc I’d like to see here is one themed around responsible/considerate assertiveness and valuing alternative perspectives.  Sam coming to realise her own hypocrisy - that she can’t push her views onto others while complaining about her parents doing the same - developing more sympathy for Danny as she realises that he’s in a similar position with Jack’s insistence that he’ll inherent Fentonworks and his parents’ narrow-mindedness about ghosts, interacting with other girls and seeing their perspective, learning how to assert her opinion while making allowances for others’ (maybe an alternative version where she connects with Star in Lucky in Love and, after Aragon’s defeat in Beauty Marked, Sam still says she personally thinks it’s dumb but then steps down and lets Star win because she understands that Star values it), and getting her Grandma’s help in convincing her parents to widen their perspective while still responding to their concerns.

(This one has the overall kindest message and I think I like it best).

#3 Sam’s parents are trying and Sam’s actually the problem 

This one is the one that’s the least sympathetic to Sam.  Her parents still don’t get the Goth/Activist thing and they have some concerns about safety but they understand that it makes her happy and they’re okay with it so long as she’s not getting into trouble or mixing up with anyone that could hurt her.  Them pushing her towards more feminine/optimistic things is less pushing and more trying to encourage some hobbies that offer a bit more common ground.  They might have reservations, and they might not always have time, but they would like to be part of their daughter’s life… except for the problem that Sam has wrapped herself up in a teen-drama persecution complex and got it into her head that they “won’t accept her” are “pushing her to be someone else” and “don’t understand” so there’s no point even trying to explain or connect.  In this one Ida isn’t taking sides on purpose but she ends up accidentally enabling Sam a little because Sam reminds her of her younger days and she likes spoiling her granddaughter (and doesn’t much care for her daughter-in-law).

In this case Sam’s flaws would be framed much more as flaws born of her making superficial snap judgements, thinking she knows better and being too proud to admit she’s wrong.  There would definitely be moments of her coming across as an entitled, privileged holier-than-thou brat who invents problems because she likes feeling sorry for herself, especially early in her arc.

This version of the story would go the hardest on Sam with the general lesson being “you need to respect that other people are people who have their own problems, feelings and needs that are as real and valid as yours”.  She’d still have good qualities and Danny and Tucker would still obviously like and value her but there’d also be times of strain where they don’t want to hurt her feelings but are clearly getting worn out with the nonsense.  At its worst, maybe a “you’re like mustard. Great in small quantities, but a lot of you is…a lot” type confrontation.

I’d also give the secondary cast the most fleshing out, agency and sympathetic-ness here, and have beats where Sam has to realise that they’re lot more complex than her 2D stereotyped view of them and are dealing with actual serious problems to which hers are largely non-issues by comparison.  I’d probably play Dash and Paulina similar to in the fic Alibi (go read it, it’s good) - Dash being gay and performing aggression because toxic masculinity, insecurity, and being terrified of anyone outside the A-listers finding out (still not okay that he’s a bully but at least more understandable), while Paulina is hiding high emotional perceptiveness behind her pretty face and deliberately bearding for him to keep bigoted parents/ teachers off his back.  I’d also probably have a subplot in an alternate Life Lessons where Sam follows Valerie around because jealous/possessive and, like Danny, ends up realising that she’s working two jobs to help her Dad with their financial problems.  Basically she’d be getting hit with the Reality Stick a lot.

There’d also be more instances of Sam getting directly called out by the other girls. Fleshing them out as people and showing that their dislike is less superficiality and more because she unfairly judges and antagonises them all the time.  Giving them more agency in Beauty Marked and have them be direct about “we know you’re just here to be smug about how much ‘Better’ you are but have you considered that we’re doing this for ourselves and actually enjoy it?”.  Having Paulina be less “tee hee I am indeed a Witch” in Parental Bonding and more “Ugh fine, fine, I don’t really like him that much but you were being so obviously Jealous and Judge-y and I figured if I played a little you might actually step up.  But fine, if you’re sure.  Here’s your necklace back, I’ll let your dorky ‘friend’ down tomorrow.  But pro-tip?  You like someone you gotta go for it - otherwise don’t complain when your boy-toy gets taken by someone who actually means it.”  (Still petty, but emotionally intelligent pettiness, which… not really much better, but at least more interesting.)  A lot more of Sam realising that she’s not a particularly good feminist and that she’s no more entitled to Danny’s affections than anyone else.

To be honest, while I could say the most about this version and there’s a lot of potential drama there it’s the one I like the least because it means canonising my least favourite proto-abusive bad-faith narcissistic reading of Sam, casting her as an almost-villain and essentially punishing her over and over until she character develops into a decent human being.  Sure it’s an important message about how you treat others but it’s not a very nice or kind story and while there might be the odd fic that makes it cathartic I can’t say I’m a huge fan.

Again, if I had to pick, I’d probably go with something like #2. 

But there we go.  Another thrilling instalment in the “overly long posts about Sam Manson” saga.  

Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for stopping by!

[krolock-in-the-snowlock]

Part 2 - Broadway’s Dance of the Vampires Commentary

Act 2

• And here we are again, after taking a week or two to recover from act 1

• I have no idea what’s going to happen but I’m gonna finish what I started, no matter what it takes

• Ok the video is ready, I don’t think I am but here we go

• Ok well the opening music was more like titanic than tanz

• Ooh ok we have lots of vague figures on stairs, probably vampires but it’s hard to tell with the 480p video quality

• Hmmm are we having a reprise of totale finsternis?

• That staircase is looking

• Glad to see the audience is cracking up again at the use of total eclipse of the heart

• Those couple guys are having a great time

• They’re like

• haHAAA

• Good for them

• Glad someone’s enjoying this

• I would be annoyed that this whole thing is seen as funny when the original scene is really cool but hey this whole thing is just one big old parody so what could I expect

• Distancing myself from it by calling it a parody is the only thing getting me through thiis

• I don’t think they’re using all the same lyrics as total eclipse so at least there’s that

• But the lyrics are too romancey and soppy ugh

• Michael your singing is actually quite nice aside from the hint of giovannui at the edges of your words

• ARE THEY NOT DOING THE HARMONIES

• NO

• The harmonies are the best part of the song noooo

• And I think his voice would probably harmonise quite well

• And he ISN’T SINGING TURN AROUND WITH THE BACKING SINGERS

• wHY

• there was no dramatic krolock walking down the staircase slowly

• but then again I don’t think giovanni could do that

• he’d probably trip on the second step, crash down the stairs and be like I’m a-fine! Hee hee!

• Oh

• Oh no

• I think they are doing harmonies but they’re just

• Wrong

• So wrong

• Or maybe good ol’ giovanni has just forgotten the key he’s supposed to be singing in

• Entirely possible

• I don’t think giovanni would particularly care about the rules of music

• Oh giovanni is literally just like come to the gates of hell with me and sarah seems chill with iy

• She’s singing along

• She’a having a good time

• NOOO they harmonised poorly during the verse where there should be no harmonies but they sTILL WON’T HARMONISE IN THE CHORUS

• I HATE IT

• -22/10 would not listen again

• But then that sums up the whole musical tbh

• The phrase ‘hold me tight’ should not be in this song

• Wrong vibes my friends

• This fails the vibe check

• Oh no they’re attempting a couple of the original harmonies

• 2 lines in and it’s not going well

• ???????

• Wait

• They’re both singing harmonies for sarah’s line but NOBODY IS SINGING SARAH’S LINE

• Sarah sing your own part

• What r u doing

• Sarah

• This is horrible pls stop

• Once again the staging is mostly just the two pigeons again

• Except the squawking is more evenly split between the two

• Back and forth

• Wait

• Hmm

• There appears to be either a cult or aa group of monks (is there a name for that? A flock of pigeons, a murder of crows, a prayer of monks?) gathering in the backgroubd

• Did nobody tell them yhis room was taken

• Or maybe sarah and giovanni didn’t book the room

• Maybe it’s just turned midnight and their hour is up

• Someone check the dramatic staircase room booking sheet pls

• Ok ok but there’s nothing you can do, a total eclipse of the heart??

• The whole point is that sarah is trying to choose to be free and make her own choices

• If there’s nothing she can do then that sort of defeats the purpose

• Oh wait yeah this sarah wasn’t locked up

• Never mind

• None of this makes sense anyway

• Really missing krolock’s cape rn

• Nothing looks as good without it

• If giovanni had a cape he might even make it from a -13/10 to nearly a 1/10

• Oh the cult is following giovanni

• Maybe he invited them..?

• Having that many candles on the stairs cab’t be practical

• And tbh is frankly quite dangerous if u ask me

• …and once again we end with some undeservinf applause

Round 4: the boys are back in town

• Ah here comes alfred with his self-narration

• Did he just lightly crack the fourth wall..?

• Oh god and the vampire hunting squad is joined by giovanni ‘buonasera’ von krolock

• Ew did he just say scrumptious? That word should be spoken by grannies and posh mothers alone

• I love how he’s just sat in a throne in the middle of nowhere

• Is this outside his castle? Inside? Somewhere else entirely? We may never know

• Oh sorry I stand corrected it appears I have been incorrectly naming giovanni this whole time

• His full name appears to be count giovanni coppolini travancoli von krolock (or something along those lines) of the sicilian side of the family

• Albus percival wulfric brian dumbledore anyone?

• I just.

• Why is he italian

• Krolock does not sound remotely italian

• Do vampires have a connection to italy?

• If so I am not aware

• Once again, I must ask: why is 75% of the staging of this musical just people stood at opposite ends of the stage facing each other

• Those bats look like family? I guess they would

• Oh my god why is alfred threatening giovanni

• I guess nobody’s gonna be pretending not to know what the others are

• Which gets straight to the point I suppose

• While not necessarily good at self-preservation, alfred sure is efficient

• But maybe too efficient because we still have an hour left to go

• This version of alfred is like a chihuahua with small dog sydrome yapping at a bigger dog, excpet giovanni is only slightly bigger than him and is probably a flea-infested chinese crested dog dressed in a halloween costume from wish.com

• …piccolo alfredo.

• This scene is really bringing out the offensively fake italian in giovanni

• WHY. IS. HE. OFFERING. ALFRED. A. SPONGE. SHAPED. LIKE. A. PENIS

• WHY IS HE MAKING IT GO FLACCID EWWWW NOOO

• I NEED EYE AND BRAIN BLEACH

• Are they saying… erbert..?

• Oh yay he’s french

• Quick tip, directors: the french would not pronounce the t either unless you added an e at the end (I think)

• Also e is more like air rather than er from what I remember

• So really it would be airbair??

• Which is stupid

• Tl;dr: do not make him french and still call him herbert

• Oh and herbert wearing bright blue? No thx I prefer his purple sparkles and black

• His hair and wig aren’t even done well *sigh* herbert would hate this

• See giovanni made a joke and the audience clearly liked it but I could not catch a word of what he said

• Oh god this herbert is wrong

• Herbert never actually speaks to krolock in tanz

• Which tbh is a shame but i prefer it over… whatever this is…

• Huh so it is set in transylvania, giovanni and airbear are just italian and french bc y not

• Neat

• Cool cool cool

• Wait so they were in the library the whole time???????

• I’m so confused rn

• Why does his library have a coffee bar..? you know what, never mind

• Ah ambronsius is clearly about to sing his book song

• …or maybe not? Giovanni is apparently trying to seduce him too..?

• The staging is a bit like vor dem schloss

• It’s the right time for it but who knows

• And one of the first decent harmonies of the musical is a line between giovanni and ambronsius singing about books bc apparently this is a book club now

• Oh no is koukol called boris

• If it isn’t boris johnson I’m gonna be disappointed (or relieved)

• Apparently the throne just glides backwards

• Like a magic carpet exceot it doesn’t leave the ground so i suppose actually more like a chair with wheels, which is much less exciting

• That didn’t deserve a clap

• I can’t figure out if they’re being open about their intentions or not because they seem to change their minds every 10 seconds

• There’s suddenly a bed?

• Oh god ok let’s see if they mess up carpe noctem

• Well the music is for an entirely different song so this will be interesting

• Hmm ok it is that completly different song

• Is that airbear..?

• Or alfred #2?

• Bc it should be krolock singing that song but idek

• At least we get a cape and mostly good singing

• Ah here we go

• Carpe noctem looking its usual weird self

• oH GOD NOT ITS USUAL SELF

• I do not remember winged demons dancing on the bed in the original

• But hey there’s more capes

• Something to be grateful for

• I’m really not sure what’s going on here

• Oh ok I can finally see the dream krolock

• He’s doing all those jumps in a suit rather than shirtless with leggings so he looks a little less cool sorry to him

• But yh i still have no idea who is singing the main vocals

• And it’s over

• Ha alfred lowkey looks like brian david gilbert in that one bit

• Sorry alfred your i’m scared but i’m gonna do this for sarah song isn’t quite as sweet when you’re super confident

• One thing i never understood was how ambronsius slept through alfred’s singing

• Ah it appears he did not

• He’s hugging ambronsius..?

• Does he do that in the original?

• Ha ha very funny professor sibilance and homovampiricus

• Oh and alfred happily just whacks chagal on the head nice nice totally in character

• The coffins are empty???

• Why is chagal in a nice coffin

• Where does giovanni sleep

• I guess in his floating mansion of a coffin

• If anything herbert would have that

• WHY IS MRS CHAGAL HERE

• WHY IS ALFRED EAGER TO KILL CHAGAL

• Oh he’s finally turning magda

• ..and his wife?

• Apparently

• Are they in a polyamorous relationship now

• They will not all fit in that one coffin I’m sorry

• And here’s herbert

• Ew herbert is so cheap

• Like he was flirty in the original but this is ridiculous

• Ugh too many cheap gay jokes

• airbear is sO much worse than I could have imagined

• Huh maybe alfred is confirmed a little bi here

• Ok yeah alfred is definitely having his bi awakening here

• And at least the whole thing is a little more consensual here

• Oh yeah alfred’s bi as hell, he’s singing harmonies with airbear

• But he’s still trying to escape?

• I guess he is a bit confused

• Wait so airbear ended that thinking alfred wanted him? Different but more accurate to the events

• 40 minutes to go

• Mrs krolock is apparently a disguise he uses around sarah too? Ok

• Well the vampires are about to wake so this is where things really should start getting good but I’m sure they won’t

• I don’t like that one of them laughed

• I don’t think they’re even harmonising

• Lazy

• Ah ok here we go harmonies

• These are nice actually

• The lower part is louder than usual, which actually works quite nicely

• The vampires aren’t as jolty and creepy though

• Ew the guitar is bad

• What was that horrible whining between notes

• Oooh this should be sie irren professor

• Oh no, I guess giovanni has decided to bypass the threatening and has gone straight to physical assault

• There’s a prophecy? Alright then. Bit abrupt

• Dammit so they’re going straight into die unstillbare gier without sie irren professor

• Maybe it’s for the best… giovanni was never going to sound that threatening anyway

• Half an hour to go

• I can do this

• Let’s see how he massacres one of the best songs in the musical

• Also he’s starting the song at the front of the stage not the top, and it’s just weird

• When giovanni has been so comedic and dumb the whole time this song just won’t work

• …and the firsg two lines don’t rhyme… great start

• He has a cape though

• Pls I just want 1 cape swish

• Oh but the cape is pathetic

• Oh

• This song could have been good

• But the lyrics aren’t as good in places and he’s still got hints of giovanni’s stupid accent

• What a tragedy

• Well they’re giving a little more detail about his previous victims which is interesting at the very least

• The lyrics don’t have enough syllables

• And ugh they’re not very good either

• There are a few nice ones but most of them…

• I use my body just like a bandage, I use my body just like a wound

• And the prize for worst lyric yet goes to…

• And what makes it worse is that those replaced ich will frei und freier werden und werde meine ketten nicht los

• One of my favourite parts of the song

• And I just want to add that he’s barely moving too

• He doesn’t climb to the top and run down to collapse on the floor

• He just. Stands there.

• Like a badly dressed rock.

• Oh but the stage tilts now to form a straight wall

• So it’s not even like they couldn’t have the stage rise as he runs down

• They just left it raised for him to do nothing on and then got rid of it completely

• They replaced doch die with buuuuuut which does NOT work at all

• You need two syllables to separate the two notes

• This is awful

• They changed the tune a tiny bit which is fine I guess, not as satisfying though

• I just

• *sigh*

• His voice is good. With good lyrics and the original character, he could have done it really well

• I hate that potential was wasted

• Which, again, goes for the whole trainwreck of a musical

• I can’t make out all of the lyrics and I’m not sure if that’s a mild annoyance or a blessing

• Like, i have no idea what he said in the last little bit

• But hey that’s that

Part 3 - The Ball and Beyond

[screensirenfic]

Black Leather - Chapter 8

I’d had to wait an additional twenty minutes at Steve’s house, because despite his near fanatical dedication to Farah Faucett; his hair had continued to fall flat.

Lucky for him, Nancy was there, otherwise I would’ve broken down the damn bathroom door and shaved the birds nest off myself.

Eventually; he’d managed to get his hair to a reasonable level of poofiness, and we’d gotten to Tina’s just an hour after the start time on the flyer; fashionably late without it being too busy to make an entrance.  

Sitting in the backseat of Steve’s thankfully spacious BMW gave me front row seats to the newfound awkwardness between Hawkins most beloved royal couple.

Despite Steve’s insistence that everything was fine between the pair and that Nancy was just still upset about Barb; I couldn’t help but feel there was a bigger void between them than that. One that was gradually getting bigger by the day, judging by the near complete lack of conversation for the entire car ride over.

He wouldn’t even let me talk to her for him; insisting he could handle it himself, but Steve really didn’t know girls like I did.

There was something big on Nancy’s mind; something that parties and corny jokes alone wasn’t gonna fix.

“That is a lot of carnage...” Steve remarked, drawing my eyes from the world’s slowest relationship train wreck, to the much more literal train wreck outside my window.

The word “carnage” was putting it lightly.

The party had already spilled out onto the street; bodies in varying stages on unconsciousness littering the front lawn like the vast amount of beer cans and bottles surrounding them. Those that were conscious were reveling in a variety of vices, from cigarettes to cheap booze to near all out sex on the AstroTurf. High school partying at its finest.

“Half the school must be here!” Remarked Nancy; eyes wide at the near renaissance painting of absolute debauchery outside.

“You got that right...” Agreed Steve as he slowed his car to park; and if Hawkins High’s keg king said that it was a rager, then she must be right.

Steve eventually found a space just outside Tina’s house; surprising considering the sheer amount of people present, however I guess most people considered a night in Hawkins PD’s cells too steep a price to pay for one night of drinking and dancing.

We got out of the car, and already the music hit our ears at full blast; someone’s parents were gonna get a lot of noise complaints in the morning.  

“We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off” was the song of choice, but clearly the song’s message fell on deaf ears, as most of the boys were down to shorts and skins, and the girls in even less.

Steve led the way through the highway to hell, ringing the doorbell to Tina’s, which chimed out in an almost comedic rendition of “Messiah” considering the situation.

Moments later, the door swung open to a smiling Tina, dressed in a skimpy leotard and fishnets, in what must’ve been a cat costume considering the black velvet ears in her perm.

“Steve! Nancy! Love the costumes!” She exclaimed with such enthusiasm; it must’ve been partially forced.

“Risky Business; right?” She asked, taking note on the pair’s cute matching black and white combo.

“And Lola! You’re..?” Her ever expanding smile faltered as she struggled to work out what exactly a tartan miniskirt and a Bon Jovi tank top had to do with Halloween.

“A vampire.” I replied with a fake smile, showing off the plastic fangs glued to my canines. She wasn’t the only one who could feign enthusiasm.

“Well; you all look so great...” She spieled; that plastic smile returning even quicker than it fell.

“Why don’t you come on in and get a drink...” She beckoned us in as she led us further into her temporary den of teenage rebellion.

Costume party could be used very loosely to describe what Tina’s Halloween party was.

People wore costumes alright; ones that made them look sexier, less restrained, more depraved. Anything from a pair of sunglasses, to an oversized bedsheet counted here; and trust me, someone had tried them all. My outfit honestly looked like a nun’s in comparison to some of the other girls.

Since when did lingerie count as a Halloween costume?

“Looks like a good party.” Steve remarked, though I wondered if it was only for our host’s sake.

“Yeah. If you like cheap liquor and herpes...” I muttered, earning myself a chuckle from him; so we were on the same page.

I glanced around the room, unable to believe people had managed to get this fucked up in an hour. There had to be some pregaming, or a high amount of class C drugs involved; definitely drugs, judging by the smoke in the air.

I was definitely gonna have to do the laundry before dad got home.

My eyes glanced over to the living room where some jock was spread out on the coffee table, whilst a line of cheerleaders did body shots off his chest.

I was definitely gonna need a drink to get through tonight.

“I’m gonna go grab a drink...” I told Steve, not waiting for a response as I slipped through the crowd towards the kitchen and what would hopefully be semi drinkable booze.

—————————————————

The liquor was shitty; the punch wasn’t much better, but still better to suffer the taste and be drunk, than suffer the company sober.

God knew there was nothing worse than being the only sober one in a crowd of drunks.

Steve had long abandoned me for his princess, in yet another attempt to drown an underlying uneasiness with cheap alcohol and fake happiness. Jonathan was a no show, but there was no surprises there, and I was kinda wishing I’d done the same, even if it’d cost me my left ear to Steve’s nagging.

The only consolation was that Billy Hargrove hadn’t spoken to me once. It was quite possible he hadn’t even noticed me; he was so sucked into the superficial cloud of party popularity that seemed to circle him like a storm.

Every girl in their fake leather biker boots and discount rack leather jackets was hanging off him, in a poor attempt to act as my replacement; as if being the resident basket case was as simple as smudging on a bit of eyeliner and smoking more Camels than usual.

I don’t think Billy was convinced; his mind so preoccupied with stealing Steve’s crown that he didn’t have time to think about getting laid.

No doubt when he came back down to earth; I’d be the first person he’d have in mind to help with that little problem.

But for now; my night looked relatively sleaze free. No one had tried to hit on me since Billy had taken an interest; probably valued their molars too much for that.

It’s strange to think that despite my total disdain for Billy and the clear message that I’d rather eat my own fingernails than date him; people still acted like he had some sort of “reservation” over me, as if I was unofficially “his girl”.

Right now, the man in question was challenging the royal reign of keg king; a position previously held by Steve, before Nancy had him saddled and bridled.

Even I had to admit; Billy Hargrove made quite the Lancelot to Steve’s Arthur. Billy had Steve in term of upper body strength; his keg stand lasting twice as long as Steve’s had, without any of the signature unsteadiness.

The keg court already loved him, counting down with unrivalled enthusiasm and chanting Billy’s name as if he’d just won a championship belt.

He’d even managed to steal Steve’s right hand man; Tommy H naturally taking his place behind the new alpha male, reminding me of a snappy hyena at his heels.

Billy’s keg stand finished on a impressive count of forty two; him touching ground soon after and spraying the crowd with lukewarm beer.

“That’s how you do it; Hawkins! That’s how you do it!” He yelled triumphantly, in that moment seeming more of a celebrity than the cocky asshole with a Camaro.

Even I had to admit that Billy seemed different tonight.

Maybe it was the punch talking, or the overall excitement of the crowd as they practically worshipped him like a god, but he just seemed larger than life.

He’d styled his hair different; his curls actually holding shape, rather than just falling into a dirty blonde mess. He also followed the crowd in terms of forgoing a shirt; just a leather jacket draped over his impressively built torso.

I could see why the other girls went crazy over him. Everything about him screamed dominance and raw testosterone.

Now Billy was walking my direction and I was running low on punch and confidence.

Yes; originally I’d planned to play the role of tease tonight, and drive Billy crazy with what he could see, but couldn’t touch. But he was forty two seconds of beer down and pumped up on the adoration of half the school, so I was having second thoughts.

Sober Billy was fun to tease, if not a little over persistent; drunk Billy was an unfamiliar entity that could turn out to be downright dangerous.

So I made my exit, slipping back into the crowd and relative anonymity.

—————————————

The kitchen looked like it had become the first fatality of what was sure to be a deadly night of binge drinking and bad decisions.

The tile floor now closely resembled a a swimming pool, complete with indeterminate objects that I had no intention of inspecting swimming on the surface.

The kitchen counters looked like the world’s largest game of beer pong, cups of various colours and fullness on every available inch of clear space. I didn’t even want to know what was in some of them; the smell of them strong enough to hit you from across the room.

I’d managed to find Steve and Nancy again earlier, though it was clear Nancy was well in her cups, and Steve was trying desperately to stop her from becoming any deeper.

I’d managed to convince her into trying something that didn’t have enough of an alcohol content to sedate a horse, but it seemed Tina had stockpiled just as many mixers as booze; though the former seemed vastly less popular.

I made my way back through the thick of the crowd, wanting to make sure I got Nancy something that’d actually stay down, rather than end up painted across the front of her sweater. I could already see the top of Steve’s hair, rising high above the crowd like a homing beacon; at least it wasn’t completely useless.

“Hey Nance; do you want soda or...” I began, threading through the crowd towards them, when I suddenly realised they weren’t alone.

I felt like I’d walked on set in the middle of one of those Wild West movies my dad liked to watch;  the sheriff facing off against the stranger in black.

Billy stood nearly chest to chest with Steve, looking as if he was moments away from flooring him, but at the sound of my voice his focus shifted; his demeanour no less predatory.

“Lola...” He purred, with a smirk that made me feel like he was undressing me with words alone. Up close I could see the evidence of his keg stand running down his tanned chest; slick trails threading between his taught abs.

Still; I kept stony, not trusting Billy in the slightest.

“Hargrove.” I spat; arms crossed over my chest in a way hoped said back off, but may have came across as nervous.

His smirk spread across his face; eyes falling to trail over my body, stopping at all the strategic points along the way.

”Like the costume...” He commented, wetting his lips as if I was desert on a platter. “Just like I imagined.”

I could already figure out exactly what he’d imagined, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t include clothes.

“Thanks.” I forced a smile faker than Tina’s attitude; dry and bitter just like half the booze on offer at this shithole of a party.

Still; Steve wasn’t gonna just stand around whilst Billy stared at me as if I was something from his private Playboy collection; the usurped king was instead experiencing a serious case of white knight syndrome.

“Hey; why don’t you back the hell off...” Steve warned, stepping forwards between me and Billy, so Billy could no longer blatantly leer at me.

It didn’t put his successor off in the slightest; Billy stepping past Steve as if he was an inanimate object to continue to proposition me.

“Why don’t you come and have a dance with me?” He asked with one of those smiles that made Tina turn into a shivering puddle of hormones.

“I’ll pass.” I replied with another dry smile, then turned to make a swift exit before he could come up with another bullshit reason to waste my time and my patience.

“Come on; sweetheart...” He purred, and I felt his hand lock around my wrist; not painfully so, but just firm enough to tell me that I’d leave when he let me, and not a moment sooner.

I gave him a dark look, because really? He was gonna try this with me?

But before I could give him the verbal lashing of a lifetime; Steve beat me to it, ripping Billy’s hand from my wrist with more force than I thought was possible for the doe eyed brunette.

“Dude; she said no!” Steve said, and despite his gentle chastisement; his face and tone told him that he wasn’t messing around.

But neither was Billy. He turned to Steve; his former aggression returning as quickly as it left.

“I’m sorry; I wasn’t aware you were her boyfriend...” Spat Billy; already ready to open an entire new can of worms and with it, let out a whole lot of alcohol infused testosterone.

Steve wasn’t gonna take it; though sometimes I really wish he would.

I really didn’t need saving; I’m goddamn Lola Hopper. Boys like Billy Hargrove should shit themselves when I approached.

But Steve; always the hero, came at him with all the verbal reasoning that Billy had no patience for.

“Just because she’s not my girlfriend; doesn’t mean I’m gonna let you drag her around like-“

But Billy truly didn’t have the patience or the mental capacity. He was half a keg in and looking for a fight.

Steve never got to finish his argument; Billy slamming him hard against the wall like some freshman, and not the previous reigning keg king.

“Excuse me?” Billy growled; his voice low and threatening, and really doing more for me than his sleazy flirting, but I had more important things to worry about than how Billy’s temper was a turn on!

My best friend was about to become an interestingly shaped stain on Tina’s parents’ wallpaper.

“Who the fuck do you think you are, Harrington?” Billy’s voice dropped another octave; his body inches away from Steve’s and although he didn’t touch him,

I knew he was seconds away from knocking the noble idiot unconscious.

Even then, Steve couldn’t take a hint. Always honourable; he was prepared to go down fighting, but I wasn’t ready to see him become a martyr.

“Billy; I’ve changed my mind...” I quickly thought on my feet, slipping between the two of them in the vain hope that the possibility of physical contact on the table was enough to shake Billy out of his rage.

“I think I want that dance...” I forced a pretty smile, grabbing his wrist softly in the hope he might unclench his fists in favour of touching me again.

It wasn’t working. Billy was far too worked up; it was if I was invisible. So I moved a bit closer; letting my body brush up against his as I slipped my hand down to grab his.

“Come on; Billy. He’s not worth it...” I whispered; my voice just husky enough to hold a little promise.

“But I might be...” I gave him an impish smile; all raw sexuality and desire, one that I’d of previously thrown up at the prospect of exchanging with Billy Hargrove.

To my great relief; he relaxed, his shoulders lowering and his jaw unclenching. His hand wrapped around my own, squeezing with just a little bit of pressure; a reluctant retreat on the condition that I upheld my end of the bargain.

I took him by the hand and pulled him away from Steve, heading towards the dance floor and hopefully putting as much distance between the two alphas as possible.

But even now; Steve wouldn’t relent, stepping forward ready to defend my honour.

“Lola; you don’t have to...” He petitioned, as if I wasn’t doing this to protect him.

“It’s fine, Steve.” I reassured him, making the words more forceful than necessary in case his dumb overprotective brain continued to reject self preservation.

But of course; my pushy prospective dance partner couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Yeah, Steve; it’s fine.” He mimicked; his smirk so full of venom, I’m surprised it didn’t melt his pretty face off.

At last, Steve relented, letting me lead my volatile pretty boy onto the dance floor without blood on his knuckles.

————————————

Surprisingly; Billy was actually a semi decent dance partner. He kept rhythm well enough and gave me enough room that I didn’t feel he was trying to hump me in front of the whole school.

We were two songs down; “Dancing With Myself” pumping through the overdriven sound system, and I hadn’t once accidentally-on-purpose tried to step on Billy’s toes.

If I was to be painfully honest, and believe me; admitting this was painful, I was actually enjoying dancing with Billy.

When he wasn’t so heavily focused on appearing the bad boy, he was actually pretty cool. He smiled more often; a genuine warm smile that was nothing like that sleazy grin he used on me all the time. He was actually cute.

“Are you feeling alright?” He asked after spinning me under his arm for the third time tonight; and I’m not sure if it was the dizziness or the alcohol, but I was actually beginning to feel giddy.

“Yeah; why?” I replied with a smile; my gaze getting lost in those bright baby blues that were staring at me with something other than lust.

“It’s just; it’s been half an hour and you haven’t threatened to shiv me with a beer bottle...” He joked; yeah, actually joked, with a wide smile on his face.

And God! His face just lit up when he was being genuinely funny and not an ass; and for a split second I was hit with the almost uncontrollable urge to kiss him.

Almost uncontrollable. I reigned it in at the last minute; not trusting my tipsy brain to have that much control, at least not when it came to Billy Hargrove.

I bit my lip instead; feeling an honest to God blush spread across my cheeks.

“Shut up once in a while and it might happen more often...” I retorted, lowering my voice just enough that he could tell his joke hit right.

He just smiled, and my pulse just skipped another beat as he swept me into another spin; happy just to keep his body close to mine for the remainder of the night.

[solecize]

.  .  .  𝑩𝑨𝑳𝑨𝑵𝑪𝑬 𝑶𝑭 𝑼𝑺  (INTERLUDE) |  

— — jung jaehyun is the beloved captain of your university’s basketball team. you’re a freshman in the school ballet company and somehow get roped into giving him dance lessons. the issue is that your brother is lee taeyong aka jaehyun’s on-court rival, who broke his little sister’s heart. that’s where you, revenge, and a little bet come into play.

SOMETIME IN MAY. 1:10 PM KST.

the thump of two bodies hitting the hard floor should have been painful and very awkward, but you and jaehyun couldn’t hold in the laughter. in the middle of the routine that you’d been teaching him, he lost his control over his balance and toppled over. of course, he grabbed you and dragged you down with him because that’s what men do.

“you’re such a dickhead,” you managed you get out in between your giggles, watching jaehyun rub the shoulder that he landed on. “wait, are you okay?” your lips parted, worried that he managed to injure himself while taking the fall.

for a moment, jaehyun considered feigning hurt because he thought it would be amusing. however, he saw the genuine look of worry in your eyes and knew that it would be best to keep the lame joke on the back burner. he raised a single eyebrow at her, grinning.

“it takes a lot more than a nasty fall to fuck up jung jaehyun.” the fake, arrogant smirk on his face was enough for you to roll your eyes and bring yourself back up to the ground.

the unease in your chest faded away slowly, but you were surprised at just how much concern you felt at that moment. of course, he was technically your student—a huge, annoying basketball playing student—and you were going to be held responsible if anything happened to him. for some reason, though, you felt like it wasn’t just that alone.

SOMETIME IN MAY. 1:10 AM KST.

jaehyun ignored sicheng’s cries of confusion when he ran out, random coat in his hand, with nothing on but his sleeping attire and a pair of nike slides. he’d seen the text and for whatever reason, felt compelled to leap off the couch where he was watching reruns of running man. sicheng, who was cramming for a class the next day, had never seen jaehyun leave so impulsively, especially at the middle of the night.

you casually mentioned that you probably weren’t going to get any sleep that night because the person who lived next to you brought over her boyfriend and that meant nothing but noise for the next couple ungodly hours. jaehyun joked that the two of you should go for a drive and you said that you would hypothetically love that.

obviously, you didn’t expect jaehyun’s text message announcing his arrival just fifteen minutes later.

it took some skill, but you managed to sneak out and you easily found jaehyun waiting in his car around the corner for you. you looked just about as ridiculous as he did: dressed in an old t-shirt that had lilo and stitch on it, sweatpants, and a pair of fuzzy slippers that were so obviously stolen from your grandmother. he waved and honked at you, even though you were looking right at him. the sight allowed for some hysterical laughter to bubble up at your throat, something so ridiculous about the situation made it amusing.

you hopped in the passenger's seat, giving him a death glare for honking in the middle of the night on a dead street. 

“you, mr. jung, are fucking crazy,” you shook your head, laughter continuing to escape from your lips.

he shrugged. “i guess neither one of us is going to sleep tonight.”

jaehyun started the engine, taking a glance at the time on the dashboard. 1:10 AM. despite the clearly awful time to be out and out, you never felt so energized. he pulled out his phone, about to open up his spotify when you suddenly slapped his hand.

“ow!” 

you kissed your teeth. “we’ve been over this, we are not going to play your shitty trap songs. this isn’t a workout, we’re going for a drive.” jaehyun shrugged and turned off his screen, allowing you to open up your own phone and connect your music to his speakers.

peppermint wind laced through your hair, into your lungs, and the giggles that entered the night. that night, the two of you spent hours driving down a road with no end, windows down, and long conversations. late night ice cream never tasted so sweet, as the two of you poured words that you didn’t know you were saying, words that only belonged in between sunset and sunrise.

SOMETIME IN MAY. 11:37 AM KST.

you didn’t mean to spent the night at jaehyun’s.

he invited you over after your usual dance rehearsal, where he, doyoung, sicheng, and johnny were hanging out. lucas was apparently there earlier, but left. nonetheless, you accepted the invitation because you’d enjoyed the boys’ presence the first time you hung out with them. they were all pretty nice and chill, plus you had nothing else to do on a friday night.

that was that. you came over, learned how to play 2k thank to doyoung, and proceeded to whoop sicheng’s ass. you and jaehyun made dinner for the boys. some alcohol was brought out. it was a fun night and slowly, but surely, the boys began to leave. johnny was first, followed by doyoung, and sicheng retired back to his own room. 

to be frank, you completely knocked out cold before doyoung even left. the three of them debated on waking you up and taking you back to your dorm, but jaehyun texted lucas for advice and they figured that it would be best to just leave you on the couch. jaehyun felt bad seeing you sleep on his and sicheng’s cheap couch, so he instead carried you over to his own bed and tucked you in, while he was the one who slept on the couch.

there was definite panic when you woke up in sheets smelling like teakwood and pear, where the mattress wasn’t stiff and sunlight streamed in from blinds instead of your wispy curtains. there was someone singing in mandarin in the other room. warily, you got up from the bed and realized where you are, as well as that you were wearing clothes from the night before. you woke up to sicheng burning eggs, who told you that jaehyun was out on his morning run.

“you guys did what during freshman year?” your jaw dropped, listening intently to the anecdote being relayed.

it didn’t take long for him to return and clutching take-out breakfast food. the three of you ate the meal on the balcony and nothing felt out of place anymore. you got to know sicheng on a better level and everything about talking with jaehyun felt so natural.

sicheng pouted. “do you have to go?”

you had plans with sooyoung and her mom later that day and there was no way you were going to cancel, especially when she was going to love the story you were going to tell her about your last 24 hours. unfortunately, time flew faster than you intended, and there was no way that you could just go back to your dorm building and get ready without being late. a pissed off sooyoung was not a fun one.

“just shower here, it’s no big deal if you don’t mind borrowing a sweatshirt or something,” jaehyun suggested, which wasn’t the worse idea at the moment.

there wasn’t much time to argue about it, so you quickly got in the shower and prayed that you would be able to get there in time. while you were doing so, you were simply minding your own business and about to finish when you thought you saw something move at the corner of your eye.

jaehyun and sicheng were still on the balcony, the two intently conversing about, well, you. sicheng was shooting questions left and right at the older male about you, which he barely managed to dodge. after that night, it was slowly become more and more obvious that something was off.

“wait, did you hear that? i think someone just screamed.” sicheng said, looking around and down to see if there was any hint or indication of trouble.

the other furrowed his brows, looking in the direction of the inside of their apartment. “that kind of sounded like y/n.” jaehyun thought he was hearing things. “i think i’m just imagining it.”

“THERE’S A SPIDER!”

that was something jaehyun definitely heard. he sighed and rolled up the magazine discarded on the floor, then covered his eyes with his hand. before he left, he turned to sicheng, eyes still covered with his hand, but jaehyun wished that he could see him rolling them.

“i never thought that i’d have to do this for anyone but you.”

tag list: @i-hate-these-people @glitterystanz @jkuwus @jenojae  @csillagosegnelkul @imtaehyungry @theloouiisee @ikonictaelien @knisterlicht @seungkwanismyaesthetic @jaemingold @xysabella @sua246 @ireallyjustneedcoffee @p-platonica @just-a-dream-400 @fuckthatfeeling  

[epizkage]

the first chapter of my good omens fic! its a uni au, the main ship is ineffable bureaucracy but there is also background ineffable husbands, hastur/ligur, and maybe future dagon/michael!  i’ll be uploading this to ao3 tomorrow, as well as uploading a page of sketches for each chapter both on here and on my art insta. thank you for reading, im grateful for any feedback at all!!  tagging as #ineffable neighbours on all platforms!! (here, ao3 and instagram!)

“Crowley, what the fuck?” Bee groaned, incredulous, as Crowley handed them another houseplant through the car window. They were sat in the passenger seat, knees near enough at their chest with how far forward the seat had been pushed, their lap and arms already full of plants which they may as well have been juggling in trying to make room for more. 

“I have to bring all of them, Bee, they’ll be lonely if I don’t.” Crowley answered sincerely, handing them another, which Bee shoved rather frustratedly into one of the cupholders by the gear stick. 

"Oh, don't worry about me-" Bee huffed sarcastically, taking the tray of mini cacti that Crowley handed them and sliding it onto the dashboard. "-I'll just be a fucking shelf, shall I? It's not like I wanted to say goodbye to our mothers or anything."

"Language, Bee!" Came their mum's joking voice, though from where Bee couldn't quite tell, their peripheral vision on both sides blocked by leaves and greenery.  

"Yeah, Bee, language." Crowley mimicked petulantly, having the gall to try and hand them one last plant through the window only to be stopped by a string of very colourful curse words. Bee managed, after a lot of growling and swearing and heightening claustrophobia, to transplant the innumerable pots into the vacant driver's seat, swinging the car door open with enough vigour to nearly hit Crowley as they made their escape.

The tiny battered car was stuffed to the brim, back seats folded down to make room for two lots of possessions, Crowley and Bee's lives packed up into boxes and stacked in the world's most audacious game of Tetris, scraping the roof and blocking the back window entirely; sure to make Crowley's already terrible driving even worse. 

"Arsehole." Bee scowled, stepping back from the car to join their parents on the pavement, all watching and doing nothing to help as Crowley attempted to strap a way-too-big suitcase to the roof.

"Don't call your brother an arsehole, dear." Their mama said jovially, nudging them in the side.

"He is a bit of one, though." Replied their mum - the other one - coming up to their other side. Bee smirked at the two of them, and busied themselves with rolling a cigarette. 

"Oi!" Crowley called, turning to throw them all a faux-offended pout, ignoring the suitcase for just long enough for it to start sliding off the roof. At the sight of him frantically trying to stop it from either hitting the ground or smashing one of the car windows, Bee choked on a laugh and dropped the filter they'd been holding between their lips, figuring it was karma for laughing as Mama rushed to Crowley's aid. 

"You could help, you know, dear sibling." Crowley yelled, way too loud for a quiet, late September morning, as he tightened the straps on the makeshift roof rack. The neighbours, inevitably, would talk amongst themselves - middle class businessmen asking "oh, aren't you glad that those bastard kids are finally going back to uni?" over a neat and orderly breakfast, wives responding "I never did understand them anyway, Karen mentioned Satanic witchcraft, but really I think they're just hippies." Maybe they'd even pop round with fake neighbourly intent, presenting the couple with a rehearsed spiel of "my Sophie left for uni again a few weeks ago, you don't appreciate the alone time until they come back!" and a horrid fake laugh when really all they were trying to do was nosey around and determine whether their neighbours were lesbians or just really good friends.

Really good friends, who shared a surname, raised children together, and held a garden party last year to renew their vows.

Bee ignored him and sparked up their cigarette. Both mothers shared a glance and rolled their eyes, and Crowley rounded the car to lean against it. 

"Is that everything?" 

Bee nodded through an exhale of smoke, and suddenly their parents had zoned in on them, Crowley being dragged into their huddle while Bee was made to extinguish their cigarette.

"Oh, we'll miss you, horrible children." Their mum laughed, pulling both Bee and Crowley into a tight hug and kissing them both, Bee on the crown of their head and Crowley on the cheek, before passing them off for Mama to do the same.

"We'll miss you both too." Crowley replied, his smile showing clearly all of the anxiety he was trying to keep hidden.

"Don't worry, kiddo-" Bee slapped him on the back as they spoke, a rare moment of genuine and open kindness flashing between them and making their mothers smile from ear to ear. "-Everyone's nice, you know that."

It was Crowley’s first year while Bee was going into their second, and Crowley was to move in with Bee and their friends that they’d met last year. Crowley had met them all before, too, even considering them friends of his own after spending a lot of time at Bee’s flat, though nothing could help keep the anxiety at bay. 

Truth be told, the poor kid looked like he might cry, and so with a sigh Bee decided to take control.

“Come on, we gotta go, I’ve got all the keys and I don’t want Hastur or Dagon tearing into me for making them wait.” 

Crowley looked understandably dejected, but nodded nonetheless, and with one last long family hug the two bundled into the car.

Bee got in first, bringing all of the plants back into their lap to make room for Crowley, who soon after slid into the driver’s seat, hands balled into fists on his thighs as he took a deep breath.

“It’ll be okay, kid.” Bee tried to be reassuring despite their voice sounding bored and their face being almost entirely blocked by plants, but Crowley smiled at them anyway.

“I know, it’ll just be weird to be so far away.”

Bee nodded with a hum, both of them waving goodbye to their mothers, before they set off for their new house-

-which was fifteen minutes away, in the city. ~

Crowley and Bee had managed to unpack the car and near enough move everything in before the first of their housemates even showed up, perfectly chaotic and exactly at the wrong time, as Crowley battled to fit the giant suitcase through the front door while Bee laid on the sofa and did nothing to help.

Her arrival was made known by three things: the sound of Britney Spears’ ‘Womanizer’ muffled through car windows and getting ominously closer until coming to a head as she pulled up, a crash as the aforementioned car hit the lamp post outside the house, and then a loud, blunt exclamation of “fuck.”

“Ah, Dagon’s here.” 

She ran out of the car, leaving the engine on, door open and music still blasting, and gave Crowley a hard clap on the shoulder as she pushed past him and threw herself into Bee’s lap, only to be promptly deposited onto the floor.

“Aren’t you guys buzzed?” She grinned, red hair messy and falling into her face, partially covered by a black baseball cap that said “women want me, fish fear me” on the front.

“I was until you got here.” Bee fired back playfully, snatching the hat from Dagon’s head and shoving it on their own. It was way too big and the peak fell down over their eyes every time they moved, and they readjusted the size, quite intent on wearing it for the rest of the night, as they got up to help Dagon unpack her car.

Dagon had brought with her far too much of what she didn’t need and far too little of what she did; half of her car being taken up by a giant fish tank (“I’m going back home tomorrow to get them, I hope they don’t miss me too much.”) while the tiny suitcase on her passenger seat apparently held all of her clothes for the year. The music, still Britney Spears, was only turned off once Dagon had unloaded the car completely (as Bee and Crowley had discovered, she had created a playlist of every single Britney Spears song on Spotify), by which point many of the neighbours had already given them some rather distasteful looks from behind their net curtains. 

With the playlist blaring again, now through a speaker upon Dagon’s insistence, the three of them had split up to investigate the house. The outside was irregular and dirty-white, made complete by a wooden door with chipped black paint and a half shiny, half rusted number six nailed to the wall. The inside was no better, old carpets and ragged papering complimenting holes in the plaster and rusty radiator pipes.

None of them had even bothered to look around the place before signing the contracts - an offer of cheap rent and ‘satisfactory’ facilities more than enough to sway them.

Bee had taken to the garden, itching for nicotine, and they extracted a cigarette from behind their ear, scattering loose tobacco through their mess of black hair and making no effort to even acknowledge it, let alone remove it.

The garden was small, narrow and void of greenery completely, except from a pitiful looking tree that looked more like a long twig that had been plunged into a patch of gravel than anything that had ever been remotely alive. The ground was plain concrete, mossy and damp and unappealing in every sense, resembling an alleyway more so than a garden. Bee thought it crunched nicely beneath their thick-soled boots as they walked, and that was enough for them.

They hopped up onto the shoddy brick wall that ran the length of the garden fence, almost barreling straight into the tree-that-once-was, and once they’d found their footing they paused to light their cigarette. 

Crowley would be sure to try and bring the thing back to life, of that they were certain. 

Eyeing the fence, Bee was sure that it would fall down before the year was up, what with the rot and knot-marks and holes between the panels; and they suppressed a laugh at the death-rattle it gave when they kicked it. They spared a glance over into their neighbour’s garden, and then their nosiness overcame them and they draped their arms over the fence entirely, wrinkling their nose a little at how nice next door seemed in comparison. 

It was a wide, open space and the tiles on the ground looked brand new and almost shone under the early afternoon sun. Bee didn’t feel in the least bit bad about dropping cigarette ash all over them. In the middle was a patch of neat green grass, in the far corner a russet-painted shed, and the entire back fence was painted with a sunset-inspired mural.

Inside the house Bee saw a lone girl, busy packing things away into the wall units in the kitchen. Bee found themselves very intrigued, her deep brown skin flawless and shining with a rich gold highlighter that caught the sun every time she moved, and she wore a loose, ruffled white shirt that flowed with her movements and made her look like an angel. 

For someone so seemingly put-together, she’d sure picked a rough neighbourhood to live in.

Bee stopped staring, then, and as they turned to duck down behind the fence to finish their cigarette they met eyes with Crowley, making his way out of the back door to join them.

“Dagon’s setting up her tank," He waved vaguely behind him as he spoke, up on his tiptoes to peer eagerly over the fence. 

"What's next door like?" 

"Nice." Bee replied genuinely with a nod, waiting for Crowley's hum of approval before continuing. "When's your boy moving in?" 

Crowley choked, and Bee snickered when his face flushed almost as red as his hair.

He had started dating a boy named Aziraphale, though Crowley would only ever call him Ezra, Zira, or Angel, over the summer, having met online and hit it off in a fresher's group chat for their university. 

"Weird name." Bee had commented, and then had immediately taken it back upon remembering that their legal name had very nearly been Beelzebub.

The two had met up a few times, and soon become an official item. Bee could still vividly remember the absolute joy on Crowley's face when he'd found out that, arguably through some sort of divine intervention, Zira would be living just next door when term time started.

Who else he was living with, however, Bee and Crowley hadn't the faintest. All Zira had said was that there were four of them, two second years and two first years, and all of them had met through family friends, university societies and extra curricular youth groups. Nerds.

"Uh, h-he-" Crowley cleared his throat, removing his sunglasses as if it'd help him think better, brown eyes so light they almost shone yellow darting this way and that but never meeting Bee's own. "-He should be here tomorrow, or the day after."

Bee smirked at him, quirking an eyebrow. 

"You'll have to introduce us.”

Crowley very quickly brushed it off with an awkward nod.

“What do you think the rest of ‘em will be like?”

Bee finished their cigarette and stubbed out the end on the wall, little ashy embers flying back at them as they flicked the filter in the general direction of the drain by the back door.

‘Get something to put your dock ends in-’ Bee reminded themselves as they followed Crowley back through to the living room. ‘-Asshole. Think of the planet.’

“Insufferable, probably.” Bee shrugged, leaning back against the sofa and crossing one leg over their knee, their foot beginning to twitch and shake out of habit. They decided not to mention the girl they’d seen in the kitchen, knowing full well that Crowley would mislay the information to Dagon, who in turn would mislay it to Hastur, over-exaggerated and not at all true stories of Bee and the mystery girl somehow being an item forming from nothing more than boredom and a need for drama.

“Yeah, probably.” Crowley’s reply was half-hearted, paying no real attention as he instead stared down at his phone.

“Zira likes them, though, so I’m sure they’re nice enough.”

Bee made no effort to reply, but if they had, it would’ve been cut off. First by a crash, followed immediately by the second customary exclamation of “fuck” of the day. 

It was beginning to feel like home already.

[imaginetonyandbucky]

Tony Stark’s Guide to Being a Functional Adult

Step 3: Get a Job (AO3)

The next morning Bucky came into the kitchen for breakfast and made a face at the funky smell.  He found Tony was sitting at the table, determinedly eating his way through what looked and smelled like burnt, rubbery eggs.

“Breakfast mishap?” Bucky said, smothering a smile as he went to the pantry for cereal.

“Yeah,” Tony sighed, poking at the eggs.

“If you would like someone to show you around the kitchen, I can,” Bucky said as grabbed a bowl from the cabinets. “I used to make breakfast for my sister all the time.”

Tony washed down the eggs with a large swallow of coffee.  “I used to sit with Jarvis in the kitchen while he cooked, so I thought I knew what I was doing.  Turns out it’s a lot harder than it looks.”

“Try doing it one handed,” Bucky joked without thinking, and winced.  He snuck a glance at Tony but Tony was just looking mournfully down at his plate.  He’d been waiting for Tony to say something about his missing arm, to at least ask, and waiting for the inevitable awkward questions was making him anxious. 

“I couldn’t even crack the eggs right, I know you should be at least able to do that one handed.”  Bucky looked in the trash can and sure enough, there were a handful of destroyed eggs along with a ridiculous amount of paper towels.

“You’ll get the hang of it.”  He sat down at the table with his bowl and smiled at Tony’s downturned mouth as he gazed covetously at Bucky’s breakfast.

With a sigh, Tony managed to force down the last bite of eggs and pushed his plate away.  “Speaking of fixing things,” he said, clearing his throat and fiddling with his fork. “I don’t suppose you need any help in your garage?”

“You got experience working on cars?” Bucky said in surprise.  Nothing about Tony screamed “blue collar” much less “grease monkey,” but he should know better than to judge people by their looks.

“Not professionally, but I’ve been working on my dad’s cars for years.”  Tony must have realized that he was fidgeting because he flattened his palms on the table and met Bucky’s eyes.  “I know we just met, but I was thinking if you just let me show you what I can do…you know what, I’m sorry,” he said, pushing back from the table and standing. “It was a dumb idea, you’ve already helped me enough-”

“No, stop,” Bucky said, grabbing Tony’s hand before he could turn away.  “It’s not a dumb idea.  There are jobs that I can’t take because of, you know, my arm, so I could probably use another pair of hands. One whole pair of hands.  You know what I mean.” He let go of Tony and ran his hand over the back of his neck.  “Just come down whenever, or I can just get you when I have something for you to do.”

“Great!” Tony brightened like Bucky just made his day, and for some stupid reason Bucky felt himself blush so he turned back to his cereal and hoped Tony didn’t notice.  “I’ll just grab my laptop and come downstairs in a little while.”

“Sure, sounds good,” Bucky said in what he hoped was an offhand manner and prayed that this wouldn’t turn out to be a really dumb idea.

(More after the break!)

Bucky’s business was not what you would call ‘booming’ these days; having to do everything one-handed made him slow and limited the types of repairs he could do, and most of the people in the neighborhood already knew that by now.  He had one guy come by to change out his battery, which he suspected was more of a charity thing than anything else, and a couple of people came in for inspections.  Bucky was about to apologize to Tony for wasting his day when a guy in a suit came striding up his driveway, shouting into his cell phone.

“Hold on a second,” he said to the person on the other line, and muted the call to speak to Bucky.  “You’re a mechanic, right?  My car started making this ticking sound on the highway and when I got off on the exit, it just shut off at the intersection.”

“What kind of car is it?” Bucky was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to help this guy because it sounded like a fuel pump problem, but it was worth a shot.

“It’s a 2016 Jaguar XJ,” the man said, and Bucky started to open his mouth and admit that he didn’t know anything about Jags when Tony jumped down off the work bench he’d been perched on.

“I might be able to help you,” he said.  “How far away is it?”

“Just down the street.”

Tony gestured for him to lead the way and out of sheer curiosity, Bucky quickly locked up the shop and followed.  The man returned to his phone call, apparently more than happy to ignore them both as Tony popped the hood and took a look.

“Do you have any idea what it might be?” Bucky said in a low voice as Tony leaned into the engine compartment.

“Yeah,” Tony answered absently.  “People haven’t been buying Jags as much these days because of the economy, so in order to keep from having to raise prices too much or, god forbid, reduce the salaries of the senior employees, they’ve been getting cheap on the parts.”  He reached down and started fiddling with something Bucky couldn’t see from his angle.  “Will you grab some stuff from the shop?” Bucky nodded and Tony gave him a handful of things to bring back. When he returned it only took Tony about thirty minutes of fiddling in the engine while Bucky handed him tools before he took a step back and was closing the hood.

“Give it a try,” he said to the driver, who got behind the wheel. It cranked up with no problem and Tony smiled in satisfaction.  “The fix will get you another couple hundred miles,” Tony said to the driver through the window, who seemed to be barely paying attention, still intent on his phone.  “But you should take it to your dealer, it should still be under warranty.”

“How much do I owe you?”  The man said, tossing the phone on the side seat as he reached for his wallet.

Tony looked to Bucky, who took a gamble and said, “Two hundred for an onsite service call, since we had to close the shop.”  Bucky halfway expected him to protest because Tony only worked on the car for about thirty minutes, but the man pulled out four fifty dollar bills without protesting, which kinda made Bucky wish he’d asked for more.

“Good work,” Bucky said in surprise as they watched the Jag drive away, purring like it just came off the lot.

“Thanks.  I used to tell my friends that I was good at three things: drinking, fucking, and fixing things,” Tony said, surprising a laugh out of Bucky.

“Drinking, fucking, and fixing things, huh?” Bucky said as he turned to go back to the garage. “Are you as good at fucking and drinking as you are at fixing things?”

“Better,” Tony said with a lewd wink as he flipped a wrench into the air. He tried to catch it and missed as it came down, wink turning into a wince as it clattered loudly on the sidewalk.

“Smooth,” Bucky said, smiling. He took one of the fifties that the man had given them for repairing his car and put the rest in the cash drawer.  “Let’s knock off early and go get a drink.”

He led them to a tiny, hole in the wall bar called, somewhat ironically, The Yacht Club, that was only four blocks away. “This is my favorite place drink,” Bucky said. “Well,” he amended as he pulled the door open for Tony, “It's kind of my only place to drink. I don't tend to wander very far from home these days.”  Going more than a mile from his house usually sparked a panic attack that only got worse the farther away he went, but he didn't want to sound like a nutcase so he kept that part to himself.

As they went to sit at a booth near the bar, Tony was acting like he never seen a place like this before, running a hand over the scarred wooden tables and picking at the cracking fake leather of the seats.  In honor of the bar’s name, the décor was beach themed with pirate accents;  Bucky looked around and saw it as Tony must be seeing it and realized that objectively speaking, it was probably a bit of a dump. But it was a dive bar, a locals bar, with great food and a beer tap that rotated just enough to say interesting without attracting too many of the hipsters that were invading the neighborhoods of New York.

“Bucky, you son of a bitch, I thought I told you never to come to this bar again.”  Bucky was pulled from his thoughts as a man came up and threw an arm around him with affection.

“You told me to never come to this bar again unless I was bringing somebody who could actually drink,” Bucky corrected.  Bucky was usually on a one or two drink limit because of his meds, and though Sam knew that he still liked to give him a hard time.  “So that's what I did,” he said, gesturing to Tony.

“Oh yeah?” Sam looked at Tony with interest and Bucky noticed curiously that Tony seemed to tense but smiled politely anyway under his scrutiny.  “I'm Sam, the main bartender here,” Sam said, holding out his hand.

Tony relaxed as he shook Sam’s hand. “I’m Tony.  

“Tony is my new roommate and co-worker,” Bucky explained. “Today was his first day on the job so I brought him here to celebrate. The food here is amazing, if you are hungry,” he said to Tony.

“Yeah our cook is a visionary,” Sam added. “Not good with people but a magician in the kitchen.”  Interest piqued, Tony reached for the menu.  At this point anything would be better than more frozen dinners; they'd run out of Jarvis's meals last week.  “I’ll give you a minute to decide,” Sam said, and gave Bucky one more clap on the back before he left.  “Nice to meet you, Tony.”

“So I keep hearing that you are planning to go to school in the fall,” Bucky commented as Tony looked over the menu. “What are you going to study?”

“Mechanical engineering, hopefully,” Tony said. “I would like to go into clean energy, I think.  Or robotics, I haven’t decided.”

“A Master’s?”

“Uh, well,” Tony cleared his throat. “A PhD, actually.”

“Oh, wow,” Bucky sat back with a smile. “Impressive.”

“It will be my second,” he admitted. “It’s why my dad kicked me out.”

“Really? For wanting another doctorate?”

“Yeah, he said I was just wasting time instead of helping with the family business.”   Tony ran a hand over the back of his neck.  “Which might be a little true, but not for the reason he thinks.  He thinks I’m, I don’t know, lazy or something, but the truth is that I just don’t think our company is in the right business.”

Bucky waited for him to continue, but Tony just shrugged and smiled apologetically, clearly unable or unwilling to say more. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that about your dad, but the PhD thing does explain a lot, though,” Bucky said, waving for Sam to come back.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like why you don’t know how to cook but you can fix a Jag with some duct tape and a clothes hanger.”  They placed their order, two loaded burgers with a couple of beers, and Sam wandered off again and came back after a moment with their drinks.

“Cheers to your first day of work,” Bucky said, tapping his glass against Tony’s.

“Cheers,” Tony repeated, taking a sip. "So, how about you? Have you thought about going back to school or are you happy with the mechanics shop?"

Bucky snorted.  "Nah, I got my bachelors in history while I was in the Army because I was going to try to become an officer one day."  He gestured wryly to his shoulder.  "But things didn't really work out.  Nowadays the thought of going back to school..." Bucky grimaced.  Even if he got into a program, which would be difficult enough, he could imagine being in class with a bunch of people who were ostentatiously trying not to stare at him, or having to constantly find workarounds for only having one arm, or having to commute so far outside his comfort zone.  Even the idea of dealing with papers and deadlines and presentations made him sweat just thinking about it.  "Just sounds exhausting,” he finished.

"I can see that," Tony said, which Bucky thought was rich coming from a guy going for his second doctorate. Bucky's skepticism must have showed on his face because Tony protested. "Hey, I hated writing papers," he said.  "All of the English and History prerequisites, even for a science degree, were horrible.  My roommate Rhodey is the only reason why I passed those classes."

"If you say so." Bucky took a sip of his beer.  “I liked writing essays. I wasn’t too shabby at math, but history was definitely one of my favorite subjects.”  Bucky told Tony about this one essay he wrote on the impact of snipers in World War 2, and Tony shared some of his dad’s anecdotes from working with the military, and when Same brought their food over, he got drawn into the discussion from his experience with the Air Force.  The bar was slow enough that Sam was able to sit down with them and talk, which was when Tony found out that Sam had a day job with the local Veteran’s Affairs center.

“But enough about me,” Sam said, leaning over the table to study Tony with a mischievous look in his eye. “Let’s talk about you.”

“Sam,” Bucky said warningly, apparently knowing what he was about to say, but Sam ignored him.  

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Uh,” Tony glanced at Bucky in confusion, but he was hiding his face in his hand and was therefore no help. “No?”

“No?” Sam echoed, sounding pleased.  “Hear that, Bucky? You know, Bucky here’s not seeing anyone either,” Sam said over Bucky’s embarrassed groan.

“Go away, Sam,” Bucky said, voice muffled by his hand.  “You’re not helping.”

Bucky couldn’t see the slow grin of unholy amusement that came over Sam’s face at that, but Tony knew that Bucky had just fucked up. “Helping, huh,” he said, and Sam’s tone made Bucky’s eyes fly up in alarm.

“Sam-” he warned again, but Sam just talked right over him.

“Helping implies that there’s something to help,” Sam said musingly, stroking his chin thoughtfully.  Then his eyes widened. “Oh my God, I’m crashing your date.  This is your first date, isn’t it?” As Bucky started to protest, Sam slid out from the booth.  “I’m so sorry, you guys get back to your awkward first date conversation.”

“This isn’t a date!” Bucky called out to his receding back.

“What was that?” Sam called back. “One slice of chocolate cake for the lovebirds? Ok, coming right up!”

Tony could see that Bucky’s face was getting red and knew he was blushing to match. “I’m so sorry,” Bucky said.  “Sam likes to think he's funny."

“It’s fine,” Tony said.  He wanted to say, I mean, it could be a date if you wanted it to be, but he didn’t know if that would make Bucky’s embarrassment worse, and anyway, they were living together and working together, so dating would be too much, right?  He sighed internally and plastered on a reassuring grin. “My friends are the same way.”  The silence between them was awkward for a minute then Tony said, “But we’re staying for the cake, right? That wasn’t just a joke?”

“Well, yeah we’re staying for the cake,” Bucky said as if that were obvious. “I mean, free cake.”