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johnbrand · 4 days

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Loyal

With @mrrharper

I can not recall what started it really, there was just something off. Almost like a persistent tick within the back of my head, a missed alarm that somebody had forgotten to address from far away, and yet was still just barely registerable on my radar. It was like I was the only one that heard it, felt it, knew this tiny thing even existed. I was all alone.

When I had first come to college, I had no idea what to expect. The whole atmosphere had changed since the pandemic; competition was everywhere. I was no longer “smart enough” for the STEM kids, and yet I was not “passionate enough” to join any special interest groups. Everything had suddenly become a challenge to be the best, the greatest, but my background was not built for that type of drive. I began to assume college was only for my peers ready to commit everything to reaching the practically unattainable.

But Coach saw something different in me, he saw potential. He was the one who got me to stay. He was the only one who not only saw my tick when no one else had been able to, but explained it to me. He believed that the culture around education had become too individualistic, too single-minded. It was appropriate that I had suddenly felt inferior, unnoticed and left behind in the slaughter others had created. I needed to be a part of something greater, a team. His team.

At first, I had found Coach’s opinions beyond ludacris. Me? In sports? My body practically lacked everything necessary for a college athlete, unless it was in e-sports. I maintained my health fairly well, but I was toned and skinny, and practically too short for any serious competition. The only sport I could have seriously considered was swimming junior varsity–at a high school level. But soon I learned that Coach's opinion was law in his territory, from the locker room to the field.

Coach decided to tackle the standard issues right away, knowing that at the base of every great player is dedication. His questions opened up my formerly firm mindset and ideals, offering up new possibilities.

“Is it truly impossible for you to believe that I, an experienced professional, would not be able to help you discover a greater purpose as one of my players?”

“Wouldn’t you rather be a part of a team, a successful unit, rather than having to navigate the world on your own?”

“Do you really need to focus on other things outside of our work together? Are classes, friends, and family truly improving you like our time in the gym and on the field are?”

I did not realize it, but the more Coach questioned my morals, the more my mind began internalizing his. Coach believed that his players were all like the states in the mighty “US of A,” the greatest place on Earth. Separate, we had some power and identity, but nothing of significance. But together, as a part of a greater cause, we could become something much more impactful, more important, than our individual selves.

“If you become a part of my team, then wouldn’t it be more meaningful to be a player both in mind and body?”

“Perhaps your feelings of inadequacy aren’t stemmed from your lack of participation in college, but in general. Wouldn’t you feel more fulfilled if you followed a greater cause, like the traditional role of men in society?”

“Don’t you think what you are searching for is something to uphold? Maybe at large it is masculinity, but at a personal level supporting your teammates and likewise supporting me?”

Thanks to Coach’s help, I began to reprioritize my schedule, in turn reorganizing my life. With his approval, I was able to weed out some of the classes that were hindering my performance to become a better player, before I eventually stopped attending lectures all together. It was much easier to listen to Coach anyway, and he promised he would provide me with all the materials necessary in order to graduate.

With my time freed up, I was better able to absorb Coach’s teachings at a rapid rate. My body quickly started to expand, packing on muscle in the weeks following faster than I thought was possible. It was as if every week I had to purchase new clothes, before eventually Coach began supplying me with past players’ hand-me-downs. My biceps and triceps became too large for any sleeve, my thighs would practically rip through every pants seam. It was not long before I was practically forced to endless sleeveless tanks and tight shorts. I even managed to gain height although I was past the prime of puberty, reaching an appropriate 6’3 for any linebacker.

That was what Coach said I was to become. Not any linebacker, his linebacker. When he first told me his plans, I had been shocked, but soon I began to instinctually follow his orders. Eventually, he stopped calling me by my name altogether; I had been reduced to “Linebacker #1!” in all his references.

Strangely enough, it was like my body responded to this new name accordingly. My boyish features almost vanished over the course of a day, leaving behind a wide jawline to support a much broader skull. My general hygiene fell backwards in priority, allowing for hair to cover my beefier frame and a manly mustache to crawl out onto my upper lip.

I had even begun to emit a sweat-induced, locker room musk wherever I went, although after a while I lost any embarrassment in it. In fact, I took some pride in my larger figure. I soon weighed over 230 pounds of pure girth, muscle, and mass that helped me pummel my opponents on the field. There was something so invigorating about being large and in charge…while still being under Coach’s orders.

“What if your purpose all along was to play football for glory and to preserve tradition? And was I not the one who helped you discover that purpose?”

“Why would you possibly want or need anything else from outside of the field? Aren’t you at your best when you are a part of my team, a piece of a larger puzzle?”

“Wasn’t the only thing you ever wanted all along was to be Coach's loyal football jock? A place where you can be your biggest, most masculine, most aggressive self without ever having to worry about anything else?”

By the time preparations for the next season began to roll around, I had stopped questioning Coach. I had realized that he was right, that he had been right all along and would remain as such. I was no longer considering his viewpoints, now merely just thanking him for them. I had begun coming to Coach for advice on any topic. Should I be worried about my dropping grades? Is it ok to get physical with nerds who insisted that the team was “a bunch of stupid pawns”? How could I be a better player for the team, his team?

And now, I was strutting around the conference room filled with reporters and many other beefy, aggressive jocks just like myself. I was feeling proud, cocky, arrogant even. Since joining his team, I had gained strength, girth, and attitude, all of which had earned me the title as the up-and-coming star collegiate linebacker. I did not need anything besides my masculinity, I did not need an identity outside of Coach’s team. I was simply his loyal football jock, and when I heard him call out for “Linebacker #1!” I immediately turned around. That was my name after all; whatever I was called had been long forgotten.

#male tf #male transformation #dumbification #jock tf #unintended results

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komoboko · 8 months

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There's a new official art and this tweet changed the trajectory of my life so I NEED AN ARTIST MUI X READER

Maybe the reader would be admiring his way of drawign and nad nadua ndaud *explodes*

𝐒𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤

Artist!Muichiro x gn!reader

this character art changed my life cloudy i forever thank you for showing me this

Artist!Muichiro who first started having a crush on you after you complimented his art. It wasn’t something really big or important like slaying demons for example, just a passion he would do every now and then to pass the time.

While Muichiro was always aware that he's always had some skill when it came to art. He won't even realize how much people appreciated the craft until you complimented him one day.

"Muichiro you drew this yourself?" Your question snaps him out of the trans he was in previously. He stares at you a moment before nodding his head, noting the surprised but delighted expression that appears on your face. He never thought people actually admired his art, sure he's seen some lower ranks peer over to look at what he was drawing, but walking up to him? Complimenting him?? New territory for him.

He pulls his sketchbook in-between the two of you as he saw you take a seat next to him. He flips through the pages as he hears your comments and reactions to things he's drawn over the past couple months. "Who taught you how to draw?" You ask more eager to know where he learned his skills.

"I taught myself." He replies in a more relaxed manor with easily makes your jaw drop to the floor. Your reaction surprises him partially but he keeps his composure for good measures. "I could teach you if you wanted me to." He adds as your mouth continues to fall agape but your eyes shine with happiness. "Seriously? You wouldn't mind??" Muichiro nods his head as a goofy smile appears on your face. In response Muichiro can't help but let a small smile appears on his face.

He doesn't want to forget how beautiful you look when you smile, in-fact he doesn't really want to forget anything about this short conversation at all.

When the sun begins to set and you wave Muichiro goodbye, Muichiro immediately goes back to drawing. Instead of drawing the dragon like he showed you before or other animals he saw, he starts to sketch your face. He wants to make sure he remembers what you look like and who you are, and the next time he can see you for your first art lesson.

One sketch then turns into two, then two sketches turn into three. Then a sketch turns into a page, then two, then it turns into more pages then he can count. Different sketches of things you like or the food you told him you really hated. His favorite is the drawing of you two sitting next to each other while your sharing furofuki daikon, he was quite happy you remembered his favorite food for him.

"Love does crazy things to somebody, yes?" He hears Mr. Ubuyashiki states as Muichiro stares up at him, his face more confused than impressed. Kayaga only smiles before sitting next to the boy. "I'm surprised you haven't realized you've fallen in love yet." He. adds on as Muichiro can only look at him in surprise.

"Who have I fallen in love with..?" Muichiro asks the corps leader as he can only let out a laugh. He watches his finger glide until it lands on your face drawn delicately in his sketchbook. It only hits him then of what his master was saying.

So that's what he's been feeling when he's spending time with you. The warm feeling that bubbles in his chest. Love. You've struck him in the heart with your affection and now he can only wonder. Has he done the same to you?

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iliveforyouilongforyouvesuvia · 1 year

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We have a full hcs about a smoll MC, now how about a full hcs about a toll MC who's even more toller than Muriel? :0

The Arcana HCs: When MC is taller than Muriel

~ @zedibleandedible how do you always come up with the cutest ideas??? thank you for sending this in, friend! - brainrot ~

Julian

Very, very attracted to this and doing his best to hide it (he's failing)

So used to being one of the tallest people around that most of his flirtatious moves depend on the focus of his attraction being shorter than he is

Which means he's completely lost on how to approach you

He can't make a path for you through the crowd, he can't hide you behind him, he can't catch you against his chest - hang on a sec

This can go both ways

Now he's employing the reverse of all his tactics

Holding onto your elbow while you make your way through the crowd, tripping and falling constantly so you can catch him against your chest, asking you to grab something or spot someone for him

He could get used to this

He has a whole new perspective shift when your relationship progresses to things like cuddling and kissing, because he has to rethink all the mechanics of it (he's used to bending down for a kiss, not standing on his tiptoes) but he finds he quite likes it

Asra

Has loved you for years and is well-versed in interacting with someone your height (they knew Muriel long before they knew you, and they've known you for nine years now)

Though your height proved to be a challenge when he needed to teach you how to be human again

You had to lean on their shoulders, instead of their elbow, and they accidentally led you into so many door frames, signposts, and shop front awnings

There were also issues inside the shop. As it had been yours for quite some time, you had stored quite a few things on some very tall shelves that Asra couldn't reach without magic. (Or a ladder)

And magic lessons could quickly get out of hand when whatever you were doing ended up out of his reach

"Master, I can't control the fire spell!"

"Bring it down towards me! - wait, not near that shelf! Faust is sleeping in those papers!"

Faust doesn't mind your height at all. She loves hitching joyrides on your shoulders and looking down at all the teeny tiny humans below her

Nadia

When she first visited your shop, and mentioned that you were not the same as you were in her dream, this is what she meant

The truth is that you did appear at your regular height in her dream, but at that point everything seemed so out of wack for her that she assumed you just appeared larger than life

But here you are in real life, and you are in fact very large

Finds your frame impressive and, depending on your preferred aesthetic, is determined to find all the best ways to dress it (you have great potential in capes)

Secretly not that fond of having to look up to talk to you. She's used to being the tall one, or at least the same height

Starts wearing heels

Knows the whole time that it won't make a huge difference, but loves the shift in perspective

Never accepts your offers to grab something she can't reach, but she will ask you to spot someone in a crowd for her. Sometimes. Maybe

You are Chandra's new favorite perch

Muriel

A little surprised when he first met you

Hates to admit it, but he's rarely had to look up to talk to someone and he generally keeps his head down anyways. His neck was so sore the first few weeks he spent interacting with you

Genuinely delighted that he doesn't have to be the tallest person in the room anymore

Somebody needs something they can't reach? They go to you instead. Need to spot someone in a crowd? They ask you instead. People want to stare at somebody tall? They look at you instead

You love being in Muriel's hut as well, because it's one of the few buildings in Vesuvia besides the Palace and your shop that have door frames and ceilings that you don't have to stoop under

Once, Muriel had to ask you to put a baby bird back in its nest (the branch was just out of reach for him) and he nearly died on the spot from how surreal and attractive the whole thing was

Learns to like leaning his head on your shoulder when you sit side by side

Inanna has few thoughts about it. Unless you can teach Muriel to stop slouching

Portia

WOAH

She has so many uses for you, you are now required to follow her everywhere she goes (she's only half-joking)

Loves to rub it in her brother's face that she's with someone taller than he is. Not because Julian is insecure about his height, just because it's funny to watch him have to look up for once

Regularly requests to sit on your shoulders while you walk around. If you indulge her, she will only ask more often

Had to make a lot of adjustments to her cottage. Everything from the pots and pans hanging precariously close to your shoulders, to the mirrors hung at your chest height - the whole thing was a maze

She does have a personal goal to pick you up as effortlessly as possible. And, if you allow it, to demonstrate that skill at every party she attends with you

Regularly has you pay "tall tax" by grabbing things she can't reach, but really it's an excuse to grab your arm when you hand it to her and haul you down for a kiss

Pepi tries every day to climb your clothing like it's a cat tree

Lucio

He became so generally disoriented while he was a ghost and then while you were in the realms that he didn't realize how tall you truly were until he got his body back

There was a flash of insecurity there, he's not going to lie

However, he quickly realizes that having you as his lover and best friend means that he gets to brag about you instead of comparing himself to you

And brag he does. Constantly

(If he upped the height of his own heeled boots, no he didn't)

Secretly loves to watch people go slack-jawed when they meet you and they have to get used to looking up that much to make eye contact with you. Yeah, that's his beloved they're looking at

Shamelessly asks you to do height-related favors for him, even when it actually is in his reach or he can see perfectly fine himself

Regularly gets you involved in teasing playing with Mercedes and Melchior

Because you can hold the treats up so high! And they look so funny when they have to jump!

#ask arcana brainrot #the arcana #the arcana headcanons #the arcana hc #asra the arcana #julian the arcana #nadia the arcana #muriel the arcana #portia the arcana #lucio the arcana #the arcana game #the arcana fluff #the arcana shitpost #asra alnazar #julian devorak #nadia satrinava #muriel of the kokhuri #portia devorak #lucio morgasson

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blckbrrybasket · 6 months

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The New Moon

Rafe Cameron x Goth!Fem!Reader

ᴄᴡ: none

ᴡᴄ: 1k

ɴᴏᴛᴇ: this is part one of i dont know how many, but i’m seeing where it takes me! there aren’t any physical descriptions this chapter except for the color of clothes and the reader wearing makeup.

Rafe had known you since senior year high school. If he’d paid more attention he would have realized you’d worked at the country club long before he transferred to public school. The original plan was to have him attend one year outside of the academy in public school to teach him a lesson. Ward was tired of his antics, even if they hadn’t reached extreme points yet.

Rose, on the other hand, had whined and moaned against the decision. Imagine how it would look with Rafe being at public school, Ward couldn’t have cared less. He believed a punishment was needed and he made sure it was delivered. Rafe had reluctantly showed up to public school for a singular day, only to go home and beg his dad to not send him back. He promised to straighten and do whatever necessary. Anything was better than enduring a second day.

After long deliberation (and bribing), Ward had finally relented, warning Rafe to shape up or else he’d go back there. While Rafe hadn’t exactly fixed everything, he became adept at not getting caught. He’d learned from that one day of public school. Don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. To anyone else his reaction may have seemed overdramatic, and it was, but to Rafe public school was haunting.

He’d gone there expecting that people would recognize him and be intrigued, instead, he was another face in the crowd. The school was located towards the middle of the island, filled with all the students that couldn’t afford the academy. To them Rafe was a nobody. He had no power there. He especially had no power on how others judged him.

In the academy Rafe could freely snark at anyone he pleased. In public school, Rafe had been shoulder checked numerous times, snickered at from mouths behind hands, or completely disregarded. He despised it. He missed when people looked up to him, or were too scared to start something with him. Rafe had realized how isolating it felt when he entered the cafeteria to see groups of people already arranged at tables.

No one welcomed him. There was no fanfare. He was only met with suspicious glares. He deserved them no doubt, but suddenly being at the bottom of the social ladder was jarring. Rafe stood there to glare back at the room, as if it would help somebody invite him over, when someone abruptly slammed into his back.

“Fuck, sorry-“ A voice cursed behind him. Rafe turned around to spout out an insult when his eyes landed on you. Oh. was his first thought. There you stood decked out in all black attire. All the intricate layers and unique cuts fit together like you’d spent hours curating the perfect outfit. Even your makeup seemed expertly crafted to fit your vibe. Rafe could only imagine how long it took you to get dressed. He was accustomed to people spending long periods of time to get ready, but none of them looked like you.

Rafe wondered if anyone else dressed like you here. Was it more accepted in public school? Not that it mattered when you were right in front of him. He had never met a goth person, and had never realized how attractive he would think your style was. Usually his type were kook girls who liked him, but damn. “Are you just going to stare?” quickly snapped him out of his thoughts.

“What?” he responded cluelessly. You laughed—a genuine laugh! It wasn’t directed at him, but rather at the situation itself. Rafe watched as your hand covered your smile, already wanting to see it again. As you shook your head his blue eyes locked on yours. “Look, don't bother with the cafeteria, it's a shit show. Anyone who’s not boring sits in the courtyard.” He nodded slowly, “And are you one of those people?”

Rafe had expected bite in your response to his prompt but you merely shrugged. “Hmm, maybe.” He grinned dumbly as you walked away to join the line for lunch. “Will you be out there?” Rafe called out to your back. “You’ll see, Rafe Cameron.” He paused when he was met with his full name. You knew him and yet he didn’t know you. Rafe had wanted all day for someone to know who he was, but now he was silently cursing his family. He could only hope you didn’t know some of the shit he’s pulled.

Pushing away the thoughts, his feet hurried out to the courtyard to find a seat under a tree. Rafe waited and waited to see your figure step out of the doors. But as the bell rang you still hadn’t shown up. He really hadn’t wanted to dwell on the fact that the one positive thing about the day had slipped through his fingers.

As burdens continued to piled up onto his lap his day spiraled downhill. The teachers were just as relentless as the students, dumping an overwhelming chunk of makeup work on him. If the front doors weren’t locked Rafe may have made a desperate run for it. He had never realized the stress of public school, finding himself mentally praying for time to swiftly pass by. As the end of the day rolled around he sprinted to his car, which was boxed in by cars on either side, and sped home.

After the scare and being able to go back to private school things started to settle. After a few days, and a few dreams featuring you as the star of them, he went to the country club to golf on the weekend. Rafe needed the break and the opportunity to rant about public school to Topper and Kelce. It was senior year for fucks sake, why should he had to even go there in the first place!

The rounds flew by on the course, leaving him thirsty. Rafe unsuspectingly made his way towards the bar only to stop short at sight of the person serving an older man. Fuck, it was you. And what else could Rafe do except turn the other way and speed off, not catching your intrigued gaze.

You giggled under your breath seeing Rafe shove his hands in his pockets and dash the other way. Did you intimidate him that much? You truly couldn’t remember anything bad happening between the two of you. What a strange guy. The man you served, Bob, caught your eye, following your view to see what you were looking at. “Oh, that Cameron boy?”

You hummed and looked at the man. “Yeah…is he always like that?” “Weird and shifty?” Well, you wouldn’t have described him like that, “Sure.” Bob swirled his glass before sipping from it for dramatic effect making you suppress an eye roll. “Yeah mostly. Make sure to stay away from that boy. He isn’t known for kindness.” Huh. That was certainly not how he had acted towards you. If anything he seemed dumb in a sweet way.

Your eyes found their way back to where he was making an excuse of why he hadn’t gotten a drink to Topper and Kelce. Interesting.

#rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron x you #rafe cameron #soft rafe cameron #rafe cameron fanfiction #rafe cameron fluff #rafe obx #rafe outer banks #outerbanks rafe #rafe x reader #rafe fanfiction #rafe fic #outer banks #goth reader

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caltropspress · 7 months

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Earl Sweatshirt: A Geography of Grief and Growth

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic….I had soon to change my tune.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments.

—bell hooks, “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (1994)

Breakin’ ’em down to micro-fragments.

—Saafir, “Battle Drill” (1994)

What is asked of me is not to ascend but to descend.

—Robert Bly (1990)

Earl Sweatshirt’s arc, swerving and dervishy, isn’t difficult to see, as we’ve witnessed it with him—we’re either interlocutors or interlopers, both with questionable motives. So when Earl looks back on school daze, as he does on “OD,” we look back with him (though ours is often an imperial gaze [HOW COULD IT NOT BE?]). We tee-hee and titter as we hear that “somebody tooted in the student commons,” tooted being the most puerile word for gas he could have chosen. An array of scatological options were ignored. It’s a deliberate gesture toward juvenilia. He doesn’t want his expression to be too mature, ha. He wants to welcome you to the romper room, ha. Remaining a kid until the moment he expires, apparently. So he sets the adolescent scene: the student commons. “The bell rang,” and the accused student was spared the prolonged opprobrium. In about four seconds, the student will begin to post. He “went home and argued in the comments,” channeling his embarrassment elsewhere, talking shit (shit) on the internet behind the safety and quasi-anonymity of a screen—an odd facade. He can walk right up to your avi and diss you. That’s his philosophy. The public humiliation replaced with a private self-possession. The discomfort of the crowd exchanged for the solace of solitude.

2. DID AN ANGEL SPEAK?

The sonics of “tooted” and “student” are twee, giggle-inducing. We laugh along with the concatenation of m and n phonemes [somebody | student | commons | rang | went | home | then | in | comments]. The near-homophonous commons and comments scan hysterical. With “OD,” it’s easy to confuse adolescence with adulthood. That “somebody” committed this social transgression seems defensive. Maybe it was him—the subject, Earl, Thebe—seeing as how the rest of the song is delivered in the first-person. Embrace the Age of Immaturity. Channel the Fat Boys: Darren Robinson’s flatulent beatbox. Place it beside the disorderly lyrics that Bobbito spits: “I write my own shit from finish to start, / Diminish the heart, / I eat a knish and then I fart.” Like the Cenobites, Earl kicks a dope verse, and only that. “I keep my sentences short,” he says on “EAST.” Beauty is brevity, brevity beauty. A “brevity pack,” as Earl has referred to the Feet of Clay songs. He strives to be live ’cause he got no choice. He runs his own business like James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, a similar flatus incident unravels. At Clongowes Wood College (Stephen Dedalus’s Coral Reef Academy), a “stout student who stood below…on the steps” by the name of Goggins “farted briefly.” Sonically, the sentence shares much with Earl’s opening line. Dixon asks, in a “soft voice,” “Did an angel speak?” But the others react with bellicosity and name-calling (stinkpot; flamingest dirty devil). Goggins doesn’t retreat home; he simply asks, “It did no one any harm, did it?” You still bet that you can harm me, but you don’t alarm me, Goggins might say another way, reprising Del the Funky Homosapien, echoplexing Masta Ace.

Earl “watched the doppler move,” the wavelength shift—the siren song of the “toot,” something insidious—or maybe it’s just the tremors we’re feeling. Woop, woop: that’s the sound of the beast, KRS would say. The frequency shivers. The shift, the movéd doppler, means Earl is immediately older, he’s the child who “get[s] introduced to violence,” even if he acknowledges the line was inspired by his nephew on a playground in South Africa, experiencing apartheid reincarnate as a whiteboy cuts him in line for the slide. Cranly, bullying Goggins, “shove[s] him violently down the steps.” The doppler moves. It slides into violence—like the violence visited upon the MOVE compound located at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philly in 1985. Gradations of black/white. ELUCID mentions the “gray on [his] face showing age” on his Osage (2016) project. Isn’t it strange—how the youngins can turn cold, hoarfrosty, in an instant? The grayscale cover to ELUCID’s tape is graced by a photograph of Birdie Africa, the sole child survivor of the siege. The bone fragments of the MOVE children have since been used in anthropology courses at UPenn and Princeton—case studies. It’s a good trope. Fascinating stuff.

4. TRYIN’ TO TRANSFORM YOU BOYS TO MEN LIKE DAYCARE

When JuJu of the Beatnuts asked, You want pain?, he wasn’t referencing the dramatical-traumatical pain Earl negotiates—JuJu’s question posed a ruffneck and ruffian pain on “Watch Out Now.” Somewhere closer to Marcy, where Jay-Z’s streets was watching. Earl clocks minutes, anaphoric with what he watches (I watched the doppler… / I watched a child…), much like Dylan’s portentous hard rain in which he saw endless racialized visions: “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”; “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”; “I saw a white ladder all covered with water.” For Earl, the ladder is a slide. The saw is watched. Witnesses all.

In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting”: “I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” hooks says that she “came to theory young, when [she] was still a child,” citing Terry Eagleton who argues that “[c]hildren make the best theorists.” Children, Eagleton insists, possess “a wondering estrangement.” No wonder, then, that “since a jit” Earl has found no use in “giving up.” He rather make it make sense.

I beat you to the point. Having gained experience, there’s nothing you can tell Earl that he doesn’t already know, that he hasn’t already seen. He’s seen enough, had enough. He doesn’t await the mob’s pursuit; he places the noose on himself, he RE: DEFines it within his own lexicon. His noose, therefore, “is golden.” He’s a young youth, rockin’ the gold [noose], DEATHWORLD goose. He speaks with criminal slang, with a split tongue like ELUCID. Where ELUCID was “true and living, actual—no dull axes, owner of all heads,” Earl is “true and living, lonesome,” with no skulls to keep him company. He has to square up with the “pugilistic moments” on his own.

7. I AM OLDER THAN I ONCE WAS AND YOUNGER THAN I’LL BE

I’m thinking of “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991) by Thom Jones, whose epileptic protag describes a “grainy black-and-white photograph” of the bronze statue called The Pugilist at Rest. The pugilist, with a pocketful of mumbles, has “slanted, drooping brows that bespeak torn nerves” and a forehead “piled with scar tissue.” Torn nerves and scar tissue—sounds like the physical manifestations of grief. And, yes, Earl has grieved, and he continues to grieve—as listeners, we’re accustomed to his grief pedigree, as per Ka. In the past, Earl was “panicking a lot”—he just “want[ed] [his] time and [his] mind intact.” That’s a cold fact.

The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” readies himself for a cingulotomy—a psychosurgical procedure that will “cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in [his] brain.” In other words, he wants to keep his mind intact. The neurosurgeon promises the operation will lift “the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin,” which is what convinces the narrator to agree to it. Good grief, he thinks, he’s been reaping what he sowed. He “can’t go on like this,” barely living “with a deadening sense of languor,” a phrase which calls to mind Earl’s lethargic, slugabed flow. Feeling insane in the membrane, like he’s a Soul Assassinated, exploring the depths beneath his whooligan behaviors. 376 was a brothel. “Good and evil are only illusions,” Jones writes. In anticipation of the surgery, the protag considers the worst-case [so what, so what] scenario: “If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow.”

8. MOURNING & MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLIA

Grief carries its own antidote along with it.

—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

“Grief is the door to feeling,” Robert Bly says. But Earl, on “Grief,” told us he “ain’t been outside in a minute”—and that minute, whether we’re speaking with criminal slang like Nas on “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” or not, is an eternity. Earl hadn’t crossed that threshold, hadn’t kicked in that door. MIKE would realize it much later on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” how you “had to walk through the grief,” even if it “was the worst feeling.” In 2015, though, Earl found these passageways distorted. Like the undulating photograph on the cover of his first mixtape. Like the blur-obscured selfie on the cover of Some Rap Songs. Like the static-scrambled cover of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Earl’s dealt in fragmentary confuzzled noise for a full career. He’s been standing on the corner, red burnt, moving down alien lanes paved by GBV, greenthinking to himself. It ain’t hard to tell that Earl “don’t act hard” and yet is a “hard act to follow.” The density or opacity of his exterior notwithstanding, grief don’t come easy. “As men,” Bly says, “we’re taught not to feel pain and grief as children.” So Earl spits somnolent, numb-tongued and slack-jawed. Like he said on “Cold Summers”: muffle my pain and muzzle my brain up.

“I’ve been alone in my shit for the longest,” he spit on “Grief,” and in work as recent as “Vin Skully,” he’s still figuring out “how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit.” Bly says that “we receive something from our father by standing close to him—something moves over that can’t be described in material terms.” Bly speaks of being in a “conspiracy with his mother” from early on. Earl finds himself “thinking ’bout [his] grandmama” while he wallows and lies in a bottle. “Grief” catalogs all the things his mama taught him. Earl’s work, of late, is autodestructive. He peels away and pastes back haphazardly. He vibes with this Bly shit: “If you can deny something so fundamental as grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. And then how can you write poetry if you’re involved in that much denial?”

Bly goes on to quote Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who gave us The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979): “When you were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame—mourning. Mourning makes its way through moaning and mumbling—Earl’s current intonation. On “Grief,” he “cut the grass off the surface [and] pray[s] the lawnmower blade catch the back of a serpent.” Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower” (1979) leans more literal: “The mower stalled, twice; I found / A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed. It had been in the long grass.” Larkin’s speaker genuflects before the innocent critter, recalling how he “fed it, once.” Now, he mourns how he has “mauled its unobtrusive world, / Unmendably. Burial was no help.” Earl, of course, is less forgiving of the serpents in the grass. They’re threats, not friends. Still, a void opens up when the mower—(and let’s not forget the lawnmower is a modernized scythe)—does its mowing. Grief is the door to feeling, and on the other side:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

9. NOBODY KNOW WHO MADE THIS WELL, FOR IT WAS HERE WHEN I WAS BORN

“Come get to know me at my innermost…”

Riveting, Earl raps. Earl raps are riveting. We fix to the flow—riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s. We’re invited to know Earl, to become familiar, and his “innermost” is a constant vacillation between optimism and [afro]pessimism. The sudden switches—these switches on bitches like fixed with hydraulics—establish what Danny Schwartz, writing for Rolling Stone, called an “uneven terrain.”

Earl’s “family business [is] anguished,” and that’s recognizable. We’ve known Earl (on “Chum”) with the “pendulum swinging slow” and low. He holed up, hostage-like, in his “heart’s bottomless pit.” Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) brand of captivity. “I was sick,” that narrator says, “—sick unto death with that long agony.” Something tells me there should be an exclamation point there (SICK!). Earl Sweatshirt was down, down, down. “I was in the fucking pits for like 10 months post my pops dying,” he said in an interview. The Spanish Inquisition ain’t shit.

But for these countless downs, “OD” tracks the ups like naloxone in the nasal membrane. “Now I need atonement,” Earl notes—he makes a case for reparations. He “sets the goal[s]” like some motivational speaker. If “half [his] wings is broken,” he can “spread the other for [his] brodie OD.” Somewhat circumspect as he’s “tiptoeing,” yet the approach is laden with “too much love.” Even when his “sister showed in a rut,” he’s joining arms with her and “getting over, sending up.” That rut she walks—like Eudora Welty’s worn path (1941)—is a path through the pinewoods, and she’s suddenly Phoenix Jackson. “She was very old and small,” Welty writes, and she moves “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.” Even with her pentium processing and pendulum low, she swings back up—the rise of her namesake. She screams phoenix, her feathers and flames are one skin. “Living in the moment,” Earl raps, and his craft is bars. “You been corrupt”—and, sure, who hasn’t?—but you recover with “some ginabot.” Welty’s Old Phoenix surveys a spring “silently flowing through a hollow log.” She bends and drinks and says, “Sweet gum makes the water sweet.” It’s the equivalent to Earl putting “shilajit in his sippy cup,” which is “healing cuts revealingly.” And, yes, from a “sippy cup,” so we’re back to toddling around again (“Since a jit,” he says). “I can’t give enough,” Earl raps, his last winding-sheet made of nard and myrrh.

10.

We crouch and teeter, caterwauling along the ledges, for we’ve got these clumsy feet of clay. This is the intended effect[/defect]; this is the rubble of what Earl calls the “crumbling empire.” This is us feeling the violent vibes of the “death throes” he speaks of. Why would we expect anything to resemble traditional song or rhyme structure when the earth quakes, civilization trembles, and Earl’s dungeon shakes? His chains have fallen off. The tenor is tremors. He’s living the trife life—hell on earth—but still living. Earl’s done trying to not look down—he embraces an outer appearance which scans dour; he deliberately gazes into the pit, inviting the vertigo, for it “haunts the whole of existence,” as Fanon says. But Frank B. Wilderson III promises a “vengeance of vertigo.”

11.

Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip, and Earl’s lips. He’s “refilling the pump”—his heart, yeah—but with a sawed-off shotgun, hand-on-the-pump posture. There’s “no concealing it,” not even with a concealed carry permit. He brandishes right back at “the enemy up in arms bearing snubs.” The mood swings; been down so long it looks like up to him. The turns require tourniquets. This is some Battle of Dak To torture—somewhere between Retaliation and the Heavenly Divine. Emotional turmoil seems violent by design, and Earl’s “memory [is] really leaking blood.” Fear not, the blood is “congealing, stuck.” Like Havoc says, “The Mobb rollin’ thicker.” Prodigy cites it, too: “This ain’t rap—it’s bloodsport.” But Earl has known that all along—he’s been “mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did” since 2013.

12.

HipHopDX’s Kevin Cortez referred to listeners having to “sift through the muddle” in order to appreciate the bars, but where muddle suggests a disorderly conduct, a kaos network, Earl’s style, more appropriately, models. The woozy, wavy, and inner-conflict-war-torn vocals model an abstraction that anticipates the listener’s loyalty. This is what I’ve got, brief and cryptic as the gesture may be, the model says. Writing for NME, Dhruva Balram described Earl’s lyrics as “slurred,” but slurry is the form.

13.

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side…

—Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2005)

So if we’re giving ourselves over to the woozes and waves, we’ll just as well find ourselves lost. Let’s go—like those tourist books run by students—and let’s wander eastward. Follow our napkin-scrawled directions and disorientations to a somewhere elsewhere. Let’s go east for a second, for a spell, on a lark, in the dark (word to AKAI SOLO). Earl’s bloodwork contains “pieces of slums”—or more aptly, [sLUms]. He’s hand-to-hand with that Jungle Boy MIKE, but also the god Mike Davis. “[T]he cities of the future,” Davis wrote, would be “constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” Just the same as an Earl Sweatshirt verse is built—under the tutelage and overstanding-sharing, symbiotically, with MIKE. Davis says our cities aren’t “cities of light soaring toward heaven,” but a world that “squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” Smells like somebody tooted in the student commons. Smells like a slum village, something we’ve smelled before—possibly coming straight from the slums of Shaolin.

14. ACID EASTERNS

Earl trekked to the East and squinted into “one beacon in the dust weaving”—like Clint Eastwood arriving out of the hazy horizon ether of High Plains Drifter (1973). But Earl is heading to the East, blackwards. And though Brother J claimed you can’t define what’s direct from the East, Jeru told us on The Sun Rises in the East that you can’t stop the prophet either. So on “EAST,” Earl traverses a tricky terrain—it’s tricky, tricky, tricky because it’s an acid western landscape: an acid eastern.

The path isn’t direct or linear—it zigs and zags like rolling papers, and stimulates the same. “Double back when you got it made,” Earl says at the start of his journey “EAST.” The objective is to talk sense condensed into the form of a poem like Special Ed once did on “I Got It Made.” Instead, Earl’s poems—his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems—skew [non]sense, go form[less], and vaporize rather than condense. Lyn Hejinian in cinnamon Timbs: “constant change figures / the time we sense.” The narrative is hallucinogenic (note: “how the story careen against the bars”). Earl’s bindle contains “thirty racks and weed [with] no fat in the collard greens.” That’s how he gets funky on the mic like an old batch. That’s how he gets sincerity on the mic: “Off top it’s me—no cap, / I don’t bottle things.” That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, maybe. But Earl’s “canteen was full of the poison [he] need[s].” He gets where he’s going like El Topo, bereft. The “trip was long and steep”—that being an acid trip—so let me see you try to ride a horse into the chasms of the canyon.

“EAST” is a death meditation, a grand duel between Dantean and Donneian lyric voices [he damn-near well should’ve double-tracked the vocals]. In a 2015 interview with SPIN, Earl is asked about the worst thing he did that year, to which he replies: “Umm…acid?” He elaborates: “I took it at a time when I really didn’t need to be taking acid. I had like a fucking existential crisis at, like, four in the morning. But it was tight. We reeled it back.” Jodorowsky called El Topo (1970) an “eastern” in that it “incorporat[ed] ancient eastern wisdom in the materiality of American cowboys.” For Earl, it’s more a rhinestone cowboy—he holds the cold one like he holds an old gun (as evidenced in the “EAST” music video). DOOM was no stranger to grief, of course, and the rumors persist regarding the bad acid that precipitated Subroc’s early demise (“Bad Acid” also being the original title for “December 24”).

Estranged Earl, alienated—a high plains drifter (not Clint Eastwood, though) who rechristens a town “Hell” through a baptism of blood. Like the Beastie Boys’ version, Earl pulls out a pair of pliers and pulls a bullet out of his chest. He pulls through, true and living. “I’m long distance from my girl,” Mike D raps, so he’s “talking on the cellular,” but Earl is more alienated than that—beyond racking up roaming charges, immersed in dead zones. He “lost [his] phone and consequently all the feelings [he] caught for [his] GF.” Relationships can’t be sustained in these bleak and barren locations. All the blood has been drained from the ruddy faces—sanguine scenery. In his essay “On the Acid Western,” Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses how the subgenre “refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed.” Memory really leaking blood. Congealing. Stuck. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Earl’s acid eastern “formulat[es] a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify [his] hallucinated agenda—a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.” Earl’s “innocence was lost in the East,” and obsessives speculate whether this refers to Samoa or New York City—how far east we going? Countless spirit-questers pit-stopping at ashrams, searching for that Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal guide.

“I wait a beat,” Earl says. His canteen stays filled, auto-replenishes. His “cognitive dissonance shattered” and the “necessary venom restored.” Jodorowsky reportedly once taped snakes to his chest for an experimental theater performance. As if it matters if you think it matters anymore. Or, as ELUCID says, “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Acids and bases. Occident and Orient. Western and Eastern. Up is down.

15. NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS

Earl’s “EAST” accordion beat—or whatever Orkes Gambus Al Fata instrumentation is at work—is more madcap than madvillainous. In my head is Erick Sermon, though, speaking about how “the flow slow…like a jazz player, or someone on the accordion” on “Knick Knack Patty Wack.” But I’m less concerned with the flow of air through bellows—compressing and expanding—than I am with Earl’s rendering of wind. (Somebody tooted.)

“Let the dead be dead,” Carl Sandburg says at stanza’s end in “Four Preludes on the Playthings of the Wind” (1920). Later, he reports, “The only singers now are crows crying.” And so Earl, a lonesome crow, reminds us—and himself—that “the wind get the ashes in the end” on “December 24.” The whining, wheezing consonance of /-nd/ in “wind” and “end” manages to evoke both the wind itself and the circularity of life. The bar whooshes and whips until we’re at our end, the terminus. That circularity, that full circle: ashes to ashes. “We are the greatest city,” Sandburg repeats, “the greatest nation: / nothing like us ever was.”

Global winds be blowin’—[Of the Soul]—and so billy woods cites that same line on “Haarlem”: “Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv.” Check the configuration of the rhime:

The wind | gets | the ashes | in | the end {birth} {life} {death}

Even that get does work—whether it’s the violence of Death Grips’ “get got”; Too $hort threatening you to “get in where you fit in”; or the satirical sadism of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. The wind wins out—it gets what it wants. On “EAST,” the wind—infinitely personified—“whispered to [Earl], ‘Ain’t it hard?’” It ain’t hard to tell that it is. How about some hardcore? Yeah, we like it raw like M.O.P. But those burns yield ashes. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1989), she struggles with the words she uses, knowing “[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet [she] needs to talk to you.” I know it hurts to burn, she writes, but writing is no less ardent. “The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning.”

Let me bring it back to Robert Bly. “In the ancient times,” Bly says, “the movement for the men was downward—a descent into grief. It’s referred to in the fairytale as ‘the time of ashes.’” Ashes, he explains, is the “code word for the ‘out of it’ time.”

We know what it is like to take ashes in our hands. How light they are! The fingertips experience them as a kind of powder… Ashes, we note, find their way into the whorls of our fingertips, cling there, make the whorls more noticeable, more visible, more clear to us. We can take our own fingerprints with ashes.

Ashes, then, aren’t simply for the wind’s taking—ashes are for us, are necessary for us to transcend the grief the boys, the men, and the man-child experience. Bly points to the various cultures that have used ashes in initiation rites: “Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.” Ready to give up, so you seek the Old Earth. The elders cover your face—even your whole body—with ashes “to make [you] the color of dead people and to remind [you] of the inner death about to come.” Consider Earl’s ashen white face produced in the negative imagery of the “Grief” music video.” “The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death,” Bly says. “Ashes when put on the face whiten as death does.”

Earl Sweatshirt is a far cry from knocking blunt ashes into caskets.

16.

Feet of clay, hands of light…

—Moor Mother and billy woods, “Furies” (2020)

For Cheryl I. Harris, Earl’s mother, the feet of clay refer to a vulnerability we all possess no matter how formidable we may appear to become. Earl invokes the King of Babylon’s dream, a dream of an idol “meant to represent all the empires of the world,” echoing Sandburg’s imperious “greatest nation.” Earl believes “we at the feet of clay right now…We posted up live from burning Rome.” Imagine the ash pile. So Earl is here, ostensibly, to turn the disco into something dismal—how Mtume becomes “MTOMB” with its entombed sonics, as if he’s rapping from within a wall, the victim of some Poe immurement.

17.

“I remember woods,” Earl raps on “OD.” “I remember Endom when he wasn’t remembering much, / I remember love healing the ruptures.” I remember is also the refrain and title of Joe Brainard’s poem-memoir, a term which aptly describes much of Earl’s recent output. Brainard’s memories bum-rush into the present:

I remember a dream I used to have a lot of a beautiful red and yellow and black snake in bright green grass. I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall. I remember liver.

If Earl recalls love “healing the ruptures,” then he also likely recalls Fanon: It is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone. But Fanon also speaks of young Black men “maintain[ing] their alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.” Earl, “feeling rushed, grew up quick.” He echoes Biggie, who “grew up a fucking screw-up,” and Raekwon, who “grew up on the crime side” (though Earl’s mama taught him, as we know from “Grief,” how to avoid the pigs, persecution, and prosecution). Eyes on the clock, Earl acknowledges this “trip around the sun” is his “25th,” so “give it up”—his survival alone deserving of a standing [on the corner] ovation. He celebrates life with “gin and rum.” Again, notably not gin and juice—murder was never the case. The only death is the inner death, the death of the ego-bound boy, that Bly describes. Earl’s gin is the drink of be[gin]ning, of genesis (“Light them Phillies up then…”), of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead-broke, man… “We wasn’t supposed to be alive,” Earl says, yet here he stands.

18. RUMINANT

Stare at the Feet of Clay album cover—an evocation of folkloric imagery: a Grimm forest with gnarled tree branches—and the enchanted, diabolic goat lying in wait. Earl’s parasocial following speculate G.O.A.T., of course, but I’m more inclined to mythopoeic possibilities. The Feet of Clay goat glares like Baphomet but frolics like a faun over fractured beats. “OD,” Earl has stated, “brought [him] up out of [his] little wreck”—a wreck of wracked nerves. Adrienne Rich encourages “diving into the wreck” (1973).

I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power.

Earl’s right there with her, submerged and blacking out, but still surviving: Really leaking blood, but refilling the pump.

In her essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks invokes Rich’s struggle to navigate the “oppressor’s language.” For hooks, as a Black writer, managing that is even more difficult and historical. “I think now of the grief of displaced ‘homeless’ Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed ‘the oppressor’s language.’” hooks explains how Black folks have “remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination.”

Earl Sweatshirt, especially in his later work, has “altered [and] transformed” English, just as “enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language.” The emotional wreckage is also a linguistic heap of fragments—micro-fragments, if we’ve learned anything from Saafir. Earl, in the tradition of his ancestors, “put[s] together [his] words in such a way that the colonizer ha[s] to rethink the meaning of the English language.” “The grammatical construction of sentences in these songs” by Earl, just as by the spirituals of hundreds of years prior, “reflect[s] the broken, ruptured world of the slave.” That crumbling empire Earl mentions was faulted by feet of clay.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2019, sharing a dais with his mother, Cherly I. Harris, Earl spoke to this lineage directly: “Rap music is slave music—the modern-day iteration of it. Slave communication had to be encrypted. You got a code.” He shifted: “If I know what I’m saying…I can teach it to you.” On Feet of Clay, Earl is teaching to transgress. “I’m cracking my own code,” he says to an audience member during the Q&A, “how it comes out garbled…,” and then he trails off, as if making a deliberate effort to keep his answer cryptic.

hooks always saw language as “a site of resistance.” This included the incorrect usage and placement of words—she called such practices a “rebellion.” Weaponizing syntax. hooks recognized rap music as a continuation of this fight—the latest [sound]clash, hip-hop artists as rebels without a pause—while still acknowledging the collateral damage it might cause.

Rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined.

Or, as Earl once said on “Chum,” “Too Black for the white kids and too white for the Blacks,” an axiom he’s come to loathe. Perhaps Fanon had the better bar on this subject: “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret.”

Despite the pitfalls (and, yeah, the pit is bottomless), Earl’s words play [wordplay] a part in retraining minds, all while exorcizing his own demons through a steady diet of ashes and fractures. hooks promises us that “in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately.” Through his embrace of a language that indulges in passion and cerebral coding, Earl “heal[s] the splitting of mind and body” so common within Western metaphysical thought. Earl Sweatshirt speaks “words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality”; he builds blips into a reality that is worth the rewind.

Images: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot) | Teen at 1990s computer photograph, Unknown (c. 1996) | James Joyce, Age 2, Unknown | ELUCID, Osage album cover (2016), photo by Michael Mally, Philadelphia Inquirer | The Boxer at Rest, bronze statue, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy (330-50 BC) | Alphonse Legros, The Pit and the Pendulum, second Plate (1861) | High Plains Drifter, dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973 (screenshot) | Subroc on an Apple IIc, Unknown (c. 1987) | Earl Sweatshirt, “Grief” music video, 2015 (screenshot) | Arthur Rackham, The Water of Life, Grimms Fairy Tales (1916) | Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot)

#earl sweatshirt #underground hip hop #rap #backwoodz studioz #elucid #billy woods #moor mother

132 notes · View notes

knyontop · 5 months

Note

I already requested something similar to somebody else but whatever- Could i have some creeps (maybe include Ben, Sally, Toby and Ej) with a new preteen proxy?? And the kid is obviously always tired/sleepy and somewhat depressed. Reader is also just really shy and nervous around people (ESPECIALLY PEOPLE OLDER THAN HER BECAUSE SHE OVERTHINKS AND DOESNT WANT TO MAKE A BAD IMPRESSION). And because of all this theyre really timid dont have any friends and just observes instead? (Whenever theyre alone they talk to themselves but nobody hopefully knows that <3) Theyre really intrested in others but theyre just scared and a loser. (also likes to keep things to themselves so hardly ever opens up) They only talk when being asked a question but when reader didnt understand them clearly they dont ask the other to repeat themselves but just stand like stupid literally the definition of awkward. Very isolant, overfriendly, nervous, silent and obedient. Will listen to you because they want to do a good impression. Oh youre hungry and want food? The kid will bring some snacks if you ask. (Theyre just a lonely scared kid who is trying to do their job correctly and fit in) sorry for yapping :c

₊˚ ‿︵‿୨୧ · · ♡ · · ୨୧‿︵‿ ˚₊

AWH DW ITS OKAY YOU CAN SAY WHATEVER YOU WANT AND MAKE IT PARAGRAPHS!!

Creepypasta x Child!reader

Ft: Ben drowned, Jeff the killer, sally willaims, eyeless jack, ticci toby, and our amazing, beautiful, handsome, reader.

Ben:

・as soon as he meets you he knows your an easy target for shit.

・he likes to fuck with your mind a lot.

・he sometimes feels bad about it because of how vulnerable you are, he has sadistic instincts and protective instincts about you.

・The more Ben hangs around you he starts to town down his mind games.

・he is practically your shadow.

・Ben also likes to teach you how to play games!

・Hes also starting to feel bad when he says thing like “What makes you think I care about you? Your so silly.” Because he sees how upset you get he then apologizes with a “Kid I didn’t mean it you dummy.” (Dw he means dummmy lovingly)

・he likes to think of you as his side kick.

・”Y/N, dont worry ‘bout jeff he dont mean it.”

EJ:

・when he first saw you, he knew you would be a tough case.

・sometimes he likes to spook you just a little bit.

・hes very curious about you even though your like an open book, he wants to know more about you.

・he feels bad for you because your a child, but he wont ever admit it.

・Jack sometimes lets you help him with small tasks.

・he has fatherly instincts towards you.. but also has thoughts about eating you because your like a helpless little lamb and hes the wolf. He likes his victims vulnerable.

・He does not understand his feelings about you see he pushes them to the back of his mind.

・”You want to help me? But your a child..”

・he looks down of you because hes older then you. It’s immature but he can’t control it.

toby:

・he sees himself in you and he doesn’t like thinking about the past so he tries to stay away from you.

・but it also makes him protective over you like everyone else.

・so he doesn’t hang around you, but, he protects you like his life.

・when he actually has moments where he hangs around you he starts to like you.

・like your the only person besides sally who treats him like a human.

・but that doesn’t mean he wont bully you a bit!

・Its more like teasing but like sometimes he takes it to far sometimes.

・his dark humor scares you.

・very clingy when he gets to know you.

・he asks to have sleepovers with you! (He watches you sleep)

・he takes up every opportunity to go on a mission with you.

・hes like obsessed with you at this point. (Platonically)

・he sees you as “his” Defenseless little sibling!

・”H-Hey there Y-Y-Y/N! Want to- to- go on a mission with m-me?” (He will force you if you say no)

Sally:

・Sally loves you so much!

・theres someone here age, and another girl!

・theres barely any girls!! ☹️

・loves hanging out with you and having tea partys and just everything!

・shes a sweetie<33

・she understands your anxiety around people who are older.

・she has that to.

・Sally even lets you babysit Mr. Charlie! (She will be mad at you for a bit if you hurt/lose him)

・just call her and shes there!!

・”Hey N/N!! Want to babysit Mr. Charlie?”

₊˚ ‿︵‿୨୧ · · ♡ · · ୨୧‿︵‿ ˚₊

NERVOUS ABOUT THIS AT FIRST BUT I LOVE IT!!

#ben drowned #platonic #platonic creepypasta #creepypasta x reader #creepypasta x you #ticci toby #toby x reader #eyeless jack #sally williams #sally willaims x reader #eyeless jack x reader #toby x reader creepypasta #creepypasta platonic #creepypastaaaaaa #x reader #platonic x reader

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calliesmemes · 7 months

Text

JAMES CAMERON’S TITANIC (1997)

ROLEPLAY SENTENCE STARTERS PULLED FROM THE SCRIPT FOR THE ICONIC FILM TITANIC (1997). DELETED SCENES INCLUDED.

CHANGE gendered words and in-universe phrases as needed.

SPECIFY muse for multimuses.

“ You’re a treasure hunter. So what is the treasure you’re hunting? ”

“ She’s a goddamned liar! A nutcase! ”

“ ls there anything you'd like? ”

“ Well, here it is, the moment of truth. ”

“ I know how hard it is for people who care greatly for money to give some away. ”

“ This was mine. How extraordinary! It looks the same as the last time I saw it. ”

“ Just tell us what you can-- ”

“ I don't see what all the fuss is about. ”

“ Your daughter is much too hard to impress. ”

“ You act as if you're going to your execution. ”

“ Outwardly I was everything a well brought up girl should be. Inside, I was screaming. ”

“ You lost our money. I'm just trying to get it back. ”

“ Somebody's life's about to change. ”

“ We are the luckiest sons of bitches in the world! ”

“ Just another example of the men settin' the rules their way. ”

“ Do you know of Dr. Freud? His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you. ”

“ She’s a pistol. I hope you can handle her. ”

“ Stay back! Don't come any closer! ”

“ Don't presume to tell me what I will and will not do. ”

“ You're distracting me. Go away. ”

“ Don't be absurd. You'll be killed. ”

“ Come on. You don't want to do this. Give me your hand. ”

“ I've got you. I won't let go. ”

“ Women and machinery do not mix. ”

“ Good for you son, well done! ”

“ Perhaps you could join us for dinner tomorrow, to regale our group with your heroic tale? ”

“ I know you've been melancholy, and I don't pretend to know why. ”

“ It's for royalty. And we are royalty. ”

“ Open your heart to me. ”

“ I’m afraid I'm feeling a little tired. ”

“ Look, I'm running out of time. I need your help. ”

“ Maybe she wants to make peace with the past. ”

“ Could I speak to you in private? ”

“ So, you got a name by the way? ”

“ That's quite a moniker. I may have to get you to write that down. ”

“ I feel like such an idiot. It took me all morning to get up the nerve to face you. ”

“ Look, I know what you must be thinking! Poor little rich girl. What does she know about misery? ”

“ I was trapped in it, like an insect in amber. ”

“ Oh God, I am such an utter fool. ”

“ Please don't judge me until you've seen my world. ”

“ You have a gift — you see people. ”

“ I was hoping I'd catch you at tea. ”

“ Why can’t I be like you? ”

“ They didn't teach you that in finishing school? ”

“ Do you have the slightest comprehension of what you're doing? ”

“ You're about to go into the snakepit. I hope you're ready. ”

“ What are you planning to wear? ”

“ My, my, my... you shine up like a new penny. ”

“ I didn't recognize you. ”

“ Amazing! You could almost pass for a gentleman! ”

“ Remember, the only thing they respect is money, so just act like you've got a lot of it and you're in the club. ”

“ It’s a pity we’re both spoken for, isn’t it? ”

“ Where exactly do you live? ”

“ You find that sort of rootless existence appealing, do you? ”

“ It’s a big world, and I want to see it all before I go ”

“ Something like that teaches you to take life as it comes at you. To make each day count. ”

“ All life is a game of luck. ”

“ A real man makes his own luck. ”

“ What are you doing? I see you everywhere writing in this little book. ”

“ It'll be all business and politics, that sort of thing. ”

“ So you want to go to a real party? ”

“ You're not one of them. There's been a mistake. ”

“ Look! A shooting star. ”

“ My father used to say that whenever you saw a shooting star, it was a soul going to heaven. ”

“ What would you wish for? ”

“ I had hoped you would come to me last night. ”

“ You will never behave like that again! Do you understand? ”

“ I will not be made out to be a fool! Is this in any way unclear? ”

“ You are not to see that boy again, do you understand me? ”

“ Oh, stop it. You'll give yourself a nosebleed. ”

“ This is not a game! Our situation is precarious! ”

“ How can you put this on my shoulders? ”

“ How can you be so selfish? ”

“ We're women. Our choices are never easy. ”

“ Look, you're not supposed to be in here. ”

“ She's a goddess amongst mortal men. ”

“ You're a spoiled little brat! ”

“ You're the most amazingly astounding girl I've ever known. ”

“ You're amazing... and I know I have nothing to offer you. ”

“ I can’t turn away without knowing that you’ll be safe. ”

“ They've got you in a glass jar like some butterfly, and you're going to die if you don't break out. ”

“ Sooner or later the fire in you is going to go out. ”

“ It's not up to you to save me ”

“ I changed my mind. ”

“ I want you to draw me like one of your French girls. ”

“ I expect to get what I want. ”

“ I want to always remember this night. ”

“ You’re trembling. ”

“ I can feel your heart beating. ”

“ It doesn't make any sense. That's why I trust it. ”

“ There’s no cause for alarm. ”

“ Say, did I miss the fun? ”

“ Something serious has happened. ”

“ You can't be serious! We're in the middle of an emergency! ”

“ Don't listen to them... I didn't do this! You know I didn't! You know it! ”

“ I believe you may get your headlines. ”

“ Please dress warmly; it's quite cold tonight. ”

“ Please tell me the truth. ”

“ Tell only who you must. I don't want to be responsible for a panic. ”

“ Do you know who I am? ”

“ I'd rather be his whore than your wife. ”

“ That man tried to take advantage of me! ”

“ Help!! Somebody!! Can anybody hear me?! ”

“ I'll do this with or without your help. But without will take longer. ”

“ I'm through with being polite, goddamnit! I may never be polite the rest of my life! ”

“ So... how did you find out I didn't do it? ”

“ Where you go, I go. ”

“ Don’t argue with me; you know it does no good. ”

“ I will never forget you. ”

“ It seems we've been dealt a bad hand this time. ”

“ You're a good liar. ”

“ I always win. One way or another. ”

“ You're so stupid, you're such an idiot— ”

“ You jump, I jump, right? ”

“ What could possibly be funny? ”

“ Won't you even make a try for it? ”

“ We can't expect God to do all the work for us. ”

“ Shhh. Don't cry. It'll be over soon. It'll all be over soon. ”

“ No... don't say your good-byes. Don't you give up. Don't do it. ”

“ You're going to die an old lady, warm in your bed. Not here. Not this night. Do you understand me? ”

“ You must do me this honor... promise me you will survive... that you will never give up... no matter what happens... no matter how hopeless... promise me now, and never let go of that promise. ”

#askbox meme #askbox prompt #rp ask meme #ask box #roleplay sentence meme #sentence starters #roleplay prompts #roleplay sentence starters #* sentence meme #rpc help #historical rp #bridgerton rp #indie disney rp #disney rp #disney rpc #titanic rp

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piizunn · 5 months

Text

ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ ᐊᐢᑯᑖᐢᑯᐱᓱᐣ nohtawiy askotâskopison, My Father’s Cradleboard by Morgan Possberg Denne

The New Gallery, November 18 - December 22, 2023

“Cradleboards have been used for thousands of years by our ancestors to carry and love for our future generations. They have protected us, acted as an external womb, and given us a place as children to watch our parents' culture and learn from a safe distance. I’ve always wondered if the fact that neither my father, his father, or myself was ever put in a cradleboard may have had a long term impact on our development, personhood, and our coping mechanisms to the ways that colonialism, residential schools and the foster care system has affected my family.

Now as an adult I deeply wish I could rewind the clock and put myself, and my father before me, and his father before him in a cradleboard as a child. To softly sing songs to us, give us safety, and to give us a connection to our culture in a safe environment. Maybe this would fix things. As kids when we were supposed to be kept safe and playing in the woods we were instead being prepped for the meat factory - the eternal meat grinder of colonialism.

The western world teaches us to push aside this childhood imagining and innocence - “These things can’t be undone!”, but what if they could? In another world somebody took better care of us, in another time we learned to drum and sing and dance, in another place we were listened to by adults who had the capacity to love and care for us.

These hot chest and aching throat feelings, the times of biting back angry tears and saying “It’s fine” have to count for something….right?”

“Morgan Possberg Denne is Two-Spirit millennial scoop and foster care survivor; with settler, Cree, Metis, and Chippewa blood connections. They have grown up in treaty 7 territory, and have relatives in southern and northern Ontario. Morgan creates imaginative, illustrative objects which could be seen as pieces of possible narratives, different ways to connect with the past and potential futures through layers of abstraction with no right or wrong answer. What matters to them is not accurately recreating the past or to predict the future, but rather to capture an inner truth and a possible alternative reality of colonial experiences. In a sense, creating new culture from a series of “what-ifs” and new stories / lore. Their work has been recently shown at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and Gallery Gachet.”

(Photos belong to me and the description and artist bio are courtesy of The New Gallery’s website)

[IDs:

1. a large wall hanging made from fish leather,

2. a close up of the same piece. the artwork has faint text cut out of the green tea tanned fish that reads “hey it’s not your fault, you know that right?”

3. a photo of the space showing a video projected onto several fish skins, a table with a vest and a hat made of fish leather, and on the table are cartons made from rawhide.

4. a coatrack on which are a rawhide hunting ruffle and rawhide fishing net resembling a badminton racket

5. a shelf seen in the background of image 3 containing a astro-turf shirt, a hand gun and pocket knife made from rawhide and a fish leather circular clip with a piece of dark hair hanging off the shelf.]

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arcane-apathy · 9 months

Text

Chapter 10

Prologue | Previous | Next

AN: No you are not dreaming, I'm actually posting another chapter. Thank you all for being so patient with me this past year. I hope this chapter was worth the wait. 🌻

Warning(s): Brief talk of self-mutilation

It only took a week for Talnir to lay down the first layer of snow. The tan of the dying grass was sprinkled with snow and frost. Only to be turned into mud beneath people’s feet that same day. Despite being from a considerably warmer climate, the horde was not deterred. They donned extra layers without being told and helped the rest of the camp as they prepared for winter. The beginning of the winter rush was nothing new to you. And like most years you busied yourself with making tinctures, salves, and medicines. Making sure to use all ingredients you know would spoil if not used soon.

While you were busy preparing for a winter full of illness, Kurakh started a project of his own. He would leave once his food was devoured every morning and wouldn't return to your shared quarters until the last meal. You barely saw him around camp, nor did either of you speak unless necessary. It took five days for you to lose your mind because of the silence. Opting to work in the main hall with other camp members who wanted to hide away from the harsh wind.

The main hall always brought a small smile to your face. The rebel's and the horde's children play together in the middle of the room. An Orcish woman helping braid the tail of an older Centaur. The Dwarves assess broken blades of all kinds. An Elven man was teaching a group of teenagers how to build arrows. Everyone sat in groups, no matter their race. Across the hall, you could see Schelura doing the hair of a younger Orc woman. The intricate style was already full of beads by the time you made your way over.

“Oh hello,” Schelura smiles and motions to an empty spot on the table, “have a seat.” You set your tools on the table and sit down, openly staring at Schelura’s handiwork. “Do you want to be next?”

“It’s tempting, although that’s a lot of beads…”

“She’s trying to catch a young warrior’s eye… Maybe you need this style too,” she teases.

“You’re ridiculous,” you roll your eyes.

“And you’re blind,” Schelura scoffs. “This is a more traditional plait since his parents are more set in the old ways. I’d give you something different… What do normal Vorren women do with their hair?”

"We usually just weave ribbon into our braids. Our hair is usually covered because you're clergy, or due to the cold."

"Such practical people." You roll your eyes at her comment and begin measuring out your ingredients. Schelura and the girl start to gossip while you ignore them to focus on the task at hand. "And Kurakh is away checking and setting up traps all day. I wonder what he's trying to catch, he comes back nearly every night looking frustrated."

"Wait that's why he's gone all day," you look up from your herbs.

The younger girl turns her head as much as Schelura would allow, "you didn't know?"

Schelura laughs, "somebody might be getting a gift soon"

"A courting gift, now that's romantic," the younger orc swoons.

"Oh I don-"

"He hasn't told you about it, he's gone all day, and he's constantly frustrated things aren't going as planned. If it isn't a courting gift, I permit you to cut off my hand," Schelura deadpans.

"You know I wouldn't do that unless it was at serious risk of infection or severely mangled ."

"Maid, that is not the point I am trying to make," she scoffs at your logic. You didn't even get to properly glare before she scolded you, "don't even look at me like that! Kurakh is one of the easiest men to read, like a warg pup."

"I don't even know what a warg pup looks like Schelura," an exasperated sigh leaves your lips.

"Cuter than you'd expect," the younger girl smiles while Schelura repositions her head. "I also heard he threatened a Tiefling in the courtyard yesterday for disrespecting you."

"That sounds likely,” Schelura smirks.

"You've made your point very clear Schelura," you roll your eyes and refocus on your craft.

"Then you should make sure Kurakh is aware that you know. He needs to know if you reciprocate or not. Not knowing is currently driving him crazy. And if you don’t want his advances he should know before he goes too far.”

“And how do I do that?”

Schelura smirks, “you can start by letting me do your hair.”

"I'd rather not think of my hair, it has been so long since I washed it last. "

"You haven't gone to the hot springs yet?"

"And have strangers see me bare," you flush at the thought.

"The girls and I could go with you, and if we go in the evening there shouldn’t be that many people."

"I would appreciate the company," a rare smile graces your lips.

"We'll go tonight, I've been dying to wash off with something other than cold water." That evening you dropped Mazna off with Roldza, luckily without much fuss. And you left a note for Kurakh since he had yet to return. With your only clean change of clothes and bath oil in hand, you meet the girls in the hall. Maaga and Galta were both equally excited to relax in the warm waters that lie further within the former mine. Like Schelura said there was hardly a soul in the springs. Only a few elven girls sat in one of the smaller pools, applying oils to their hair.

With the safety of only being surrounded by women making you more confident you begin to undress. Schelura was the first one in, with a massive smile on her face, "definitely better than cold water and a bucket." You slowly follow in behind her, minding your steps on the slippery rocks beneath you. The water was certainly warmer than any water you bathed with before. After waiting a few minutes, thankfully there was nothing within the water that would irritate your wound. You take the chance to properly inspect it, not having to hide in the shadows from Kurakh.

"Is it still bothering you," Maaga asks concerned.

"Not as much as it used to, it'll be an awful scar."

"There is no such thing as awful scars in our culture," Galta chuckles. "I mean just look at Kurakh. Blind in one eye from one and littered with dozens smaller than that. And Orkisch women swoon over him every day... Well, the ones who don't know him like we do."

"Men can be scarred all they want in my culture, but for women it's unsightly."

"The more I learn about your culture the more it pisses me off," Maaga groans.

"How do you think I feel," you scoff and sit on a rock in the water. The warm, mineral-rich water goes up to your shoulders. Galta dunks herself beneath the water with a smile. The whispers of the Elven girls were welcomed in comparison to the noise of the main hall, or Mazna throwing a fit. You slowly sink below the surface after getting more accustomed to the water temperature. The voices above you became louder, and you could practically feel the grime melt away.

The light burn in your lungs prompted you to stand again. The water trickled down your back as you wiped your face. The cold air of the cavern causes goosebumps to bud across your skin. Once the water was out of your eyes you refocused on the rocks ahead. Trying not to stare at anyone in particular. Schelura scoffs and moves beside you, trying to run her fingers through your soaked hair. "This won't do... Don't worry I brought tools for this." She reaches for her comb and motions for you to sit on the rocks again.

"I can brush my hair."

"I'm aware, but I need to prep it for braiding tomorrow."

"Fine," you sigh and try to relax as she works the comb through the ends of your hair. Luckily it felt much better than Mazna playing with your hair at night. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch Schelura reach for the pool edge again, followed by a light herbal smell. "What's that?"

"A hair oil," she hums as her hands gently massage your scalp. "Your hair is damaged from the fabric of your headcover. It is too rough... I might need to make you something stronger. You also need a trim; your ends are a mess."

"I get it, my hair is awful."

"It just needs more than a hairbrush," Schelura chuckles. "Don't worry, you're in good hands," she emphasizes by massaging the back of your neck. You couldn't help but hum in relief, fighting not to melt into her touch. "your muscles are just as stiff as the warriors. You know, for a healer you are terrible at taking care of yourself."

An ache settled in your stomach. Schelura was one of many people to point it out to you. Usually, you'd be able to blame it on your duty. The life of a Maid of Eia was busy, even before the King declared war. Maaga seemed to sense this ache, moving closer to the two of you, "so how long until we have snow up to our knees?"

You smile softly as you welcome the distraction, "I'd say another month. It's supposed to be a late winter this year. Or as we say in the clergy, Talnir is lazy this year."

"Talnir?"

"The Spirit of Winter, son of Sokastr and Sala."

Galta laughs, "because that explains so much."

"The number of deities your people have is ridiculous," Maaga chuckles before dipping her head below water.

"It's a lot to remember," you sigh as Schelura's hands leave your scalp. "Honestly I forget most of it now. Just the stories we were told as kids. And the weird stuff you can't forget how much you try."

"How weird," Maaga looked apprehensive to ask.

"Eia's parents are aunt and nephew."

"That's not too bad," Galta relaxes against the pool's edge with her eyes closed.

"When creating their children, the elder gods forgot about procreation. So, the new gods had to create their genitalia. Eia took it upon herself to create the females by cutting herself open. Using her muscles to create a womb, and cutting between her legs. Hence the monthly cycle and the pain of childbirth." Galta and Maaga wince, and Schelura groans. "Want to know how Lantes created male gen-"

"Absolutely not."

"Don't even dare."

"I'm close enough to push you underwater." Despite the threats you all laugh. A rare deep belly laugh escapes you. It has been so long since you've laughed like that it almost scared you. The good mood carried through as the four of you finished bathing. You felt the most relaxed and clean you've been in ages. The clean change of clothes felt heavenly against your skin. Per Schelura's orders, your damp hair flowed down your back as it air-dried. The only bad thing was that you now needed to launder your only other set of clothes.

You returned to your quarters with your things in your arms, greeted by the smell of food cooking. Kurakh looks up from the pot but doesn't say anything. His good eye was looking you up and down. His silence was killing you, “is something wrong?”

“The scouts spotted a battalion just north of us. We'll ride out before dawn to intercept them."

"I should probably pack my supplies-"

"You're staying here."

"Kurakh, I can be careful."

"You are what they want. It would be surrender if you came with." You knew this tone well, Kurakh's words were final. And you didn't want to ruin your evening by wasting your breath. "That was easier than I expected," he smirks.

"I don't feel like ruining my good mood," you set the dirty clothes in the corner. Hopefully, you won't forget them come morning. Kurakh doesn't say anything, choosing to stare at your hair instead. "Will you at least wake me up before you leave?"

"Of course, Odmili," he motions for you to sit. "The stew is almost ready."

"Rabbit?"

"They are plentiful here."

"I fear you will run out of recipes before you run out of rabbits," you sit cross-legged beside him on the bedroll. He breathes out a laugh while handing you a bowl. A plate of Freronbrod on the ground beside the two of you.

"Your kingdom will run out of rabbits before the horde is full."

"Your fault for coming in the winter," you snicker as you dip your bread in the stew. Kurakh elbows you in the rib playfully, his worried expression having finally worn away. You smack him in the chest as retaliation, a challenging look in your eyes. For once you didn't recognize the expression on his face. He looked conflicted like something was holding him back. His eye goes back to your hair, nose twitching. "What?"

"It's nothing."

"Considering the face you're making; I highly doubt that. Is it my hair?"

"Not necessarily... What oil did they put in your hair?"

"I don’t know. Schelura only scolded me for how unhealthy my hair is."

"That makes sense. I think Schelura is trying to make a fool of you."

"What do you mean?"

Kurakh sighs, "Orcs have a stronger sense of smell. Because of that, hair and body oils tend to have different meanings. And the one Schelura used on you… Well, it’s supposed to be seductive."

Immediately blood rushes to your cheeks, “you can’t be serious.”

“I wish I weren’t,” his lips parted as he tried breathing more through his mouth.

“I can go sleep with the girls tonight, considering they’re the ones who got me into this mess.”

“No,” Kurakh said rather quickly, “I can handle it.” He smiles sheepishly and continues to eat his soup. You decided not to press any further and do the same. Once the two of you finished eating you took it upon yourself to clear up the dishes.

“Do you have anything that needs to be laundered? I’ll be cleaning my spare clothes tomorrow.”

“I’ll leave a few things on the pile you’ve made. I know Mazna has a few tunics as well.” There was a quiet hiss of a blade leaving its sheath from behind you, soon followed by it scrapping the whetstone. “Do you not have any more clothes?”

You glance over your shoulder, hands still in the tub of cold soapy water used for cleaning, “I do not.” Stew was easy to clean off the wooden bowls, you hardly needed to look at what you were doing. “Clergy life is not as luxurious as people think. I had my own room, but it was tiny and drafty. The library barely had anything other than medical tomes. Three flavorless meals a day. We had no days off because ailments and childbirth don’t care for the calendar. And I would be lucky to get a new apron for my birthday.”

“Just enough to keep you from complaining about working for no pay I presume?”

“A twenty-pence on high holidays, which there are five of in a year,” anger made itself known in your gut. Stomach turning as you tried to ignore it, “it would take me three years to make enough for taxes. Luckily I don’t have to pay taxes. But I do have to catch a deadly disease, get robbed while traveling from town to town, never see my family again, or get captured by the enemy in a pointless war!” The scraping of the blade stops and so do you, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.”

Kurakh motions for you to return to the bed roll. Patiently waiting as you dump the dirty water into the floor drain. “I wish you would stop apologizing for being your true self.” You pause and open your mouth to rebut, yet nothing comes out. “It is as if you are playing a character,” he gently takes your hand to pull you closer. “When I see that fire in your eyes, I’m reassured that there is a real person hidden within. You need to break free.”

“Kurakh, I hardly know how,” the words barely above a whisper.

“We can teach you. Remember you are one with the horde now, and we take care of our own.”

#male orc x female reader #tpow series #my writing #m orc x f reader #orc x reader #exophilia #fantasy #tpow #orcs

142 notes · View notes

diefxrguns · 2 years

Text

𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑'𝐒 𝐏𝐄𝐓

✯pairings- erwin smith x afab!reader

✯a/n- might be some mistakes, apologies. Do not share on tiktok without my permission. not glamourising pedophilia, Y/N is 18

✯synopsis- your teacher develops strong feelings for a specific girl in his classroom

✯ c/w- smut, teacher x student relationship. choking, spanking, and more- not comfortable? dont read.

"teacher's pet, if I'm so "special. Why am I a secret?" ✧

Your eyes couldn't concentrate on the board infront of you, never in your life have you felt this way for somebody.

Despite all the love letters from boys in your class and offers to go out on dates, boys your age-just didn't do it for you. Ya know.

There was always something about older fellows, but not to old. Maybe 25-35 since you were 18. It was appropriate after all- well for some people atleast.

Your mother would die if she saw the things that kept you up at night, on your laptop a stash of porn videos. All in the same category of porn. You had a thing for manthers, not the creepy pedophilic one's. The men who are like 30 with 20 year old girlfriends. Sounds normal right.

So when your new teacher entered the classroom, you almost fell out of your seat. His arms, his hair, everything about this man was just so fucking sexy.

He wore a blue button up shirt, that was long sleeved, but the sleeves were rolled up a bit- revealing his toned forearms. His pants were black and his blonde hair was combed back.

He had to be in his early 30's, but my God did he look so delicious.

He's an English, History and Biology teacher so he would be teaching you English and History, since those are the classes you had.

He started off by introducing himself, and went straight to work. Instructing the class to open their books on page 116. He got down to business, you could tell he was one- track minded.

His voice was so deep and demanding, but somewhat calm and smooth. He explained the work diligently. Making sure everyone understood the English lesson- before dismissing the class and closing the whiteboard marker.

As the days passed you did nothing but gawk at him, in classes you barley even payed attention. And oh- he knew you weren't listening. How your pretty eyes just stared into space, he knew exactly what you were looking at. He's way smarter then he looks.

There was one particular day, after class. You were looking at him the whole time, and he knew- but it bugged him because exams were coming up and you never took notes once. He knew your grades were sky high, and he didn't want you to fail your examinations. So he called you after class.

" Miss Y/N, please stay behind and take a seat" he said, as you were on your way out the classroom.

" Yes" you said in timid voice because of how shy and slightly intimidated you were

The older man sat on a chair opposite you, his back hunched and his elbows on his knees, he removed his glasses and looked you directly in the eye

" You're not paying attention, you think I don't know, you think I don't see how much you're looking into space during my lessons"

" Mr Smith, I'm really sorry " you said with fake sympathy, in all honesty you didn't give a fuck about his lessons. He's eye candy- who wouldn't look at him.

"Your results went from 93 to 50, your practice test results where lower then I expected. A five star student, became mediocre over night. I advise you tell me what's on your mind Y/N" he said straightening his posture and leaning back, never breaking eye contact with you

" Mr Smith, I've just been distracted lately, ya know, Like something is really troubling me". What you just said was true, something was bugging you. Everytime this fine ass man opens his mouth, breathes or even looks your way you cream your pants, leaving a stain on your lacey panties. That's the real problem.

" Ah, I see. Well, as your teacher I suppose you need to trust me with whatever it is you're going through. You need to get it out of your system so we can work through this" he said

" Well, I...um, i- I got dumped by my ex boyfriend and.. well he, he really hurt me. Its bothered me alot" you lied through your teeth, you never had a boyfriend. You just said that so that Erwin could feel sorry for you.

Immediately Erwin stood up and knelt down to your level, holding your hand gently. In this moment your heart was racing, you didn't know how to react.

What the fuck was actually going on here? Your teacher( crush) was kneeling down holding your hand, this was to much to handle.

" Y/N, I need you to not focus on other boys ok- they're a waste of time, I need you to think about bigger things. Like college and a husband maybe? You need a man that's going to take care of you, love you..."

Your chest was rising up and down as you took intense breathes, he was so close to you. His warmth was radiating off his big body onto your smaller one.

" After school I'll take you to my place, so that I can prepare you for upcoming examinations... Sound ok?" He asked as he stood up fixing his tie and getting his things

" ye-yes, it sounds awesome" you said standing up in a hurry and giving your teacher a big smile.

Everyday afterschool Erwin took you to his home.

He lived in a very spacious house, it was small but modern and fancy. A two story home with two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

He had two cats aswell, a grey one and a white one. Grey one named Oscar and the white one named Bunny.

His home smelled like vanilla and sandalwood, it was clean with grey and white accents. He obviously lived alone, but damn how can such a handsome and astound man be single.

He sat you at the dining room table with your books and tutored you, and helped you make notes for your exams.

He spent three hours after school tutoring you.

You were beyond grateful for this opportunity, because it made you and Erwin closer.

Even though you never really spoke about personal things, subconsciously your souls were somewhat aligned. Almost like you had a connection that you couldn't explain or describe, you just felt comfortable around each other.

A little to comfortable

After examinations, you stopped going to Erwin's home. There was no need afterall, I mean he stopped tutoring you because exams were over.

In all honesty you missed it, you missed him. So one afternoon you went to his house to give him some treats, just to say thank you.

You knocked on his door, patiently waiting for him to open it

And in that very moment your heart shattered, the pain you felt when the door opened, only to be greeted by an older women, her late 20's to be precise. Her ginger/ strawberry blonde hair was wavy and shiny. And her body was curvaceous and slim

Her nails painted red, she wore a tight black dress and heels, with pearls around her neck- and the cherry on top of the cake, was the 24K diamond ring she wore on her ring finger, indicating she is married.

Your face went red, not with anger. But with sadness, you felt like a fucking idiot. Falling for you teacher.

" Oh hello dear, you must be Erwin's student, please come inside. He must be thrilled to see you" she said, in a nice tone of voice as she let you inside

" Erwin! Honey, your student is here to see you" she yelled for her " husband" as she told you to sit and offered you a cup of tea

" Oh my, Y/N. This is rather unexpected. Why have you come?" Erwin asked as he dried his hair, obviously he just came out the shower.

You tried to swallow the lump in your throat, your eyes were visibly watery indicating you were about to burst into tears.

But you had to suck it up, and pretend like nothing was wrong

" I..I um- I brought you some gifts, just to say thank you for helping me with studying" you said handing him the gift bag

A smile appeared on Erwin's face as he opened the bag filled with chocolates, and sweets . But at the bottom of the gift bag was a letter, expressing your feelings to Erwin- and how you really felt about him.

He opened the letter silently, and reading it rather quickly before clenching his jaw, his smile faded into a puzzling expression. And he looked at you for a mere second before sitting on the barstool next to you.

His wife still making tea for the both of you including herself.

" So Y/N isn't it? How is school treating you?" She asked sitting across from you and Erwin.

" Well... Its, it's, it's great actually. Thanks to Mr Smith, your husband." You said, in a fake- nice tone of voice.

She didn't catch on to your obvious sarcasm but Erwin knew exactly how you felt about her, as said before he's smarter then he looks.

" Oh well, Erwin here isn't my husband, not yet. He's actually my fiance, we're getting married...soon I suppose" she said giving you a smile and sipping on her tea.

" That's wonderful news" you said sipping the tea.

Erwin sat in silence, drinking his tea and staring elsewhere, not daring to make eye contact with you or his fiance.

" Oh my, I haven't even introduced myself. I'm Mari Dawk" she said flashing you another smile.

" You see Smith and I met in our military days, he just caught my eye, he was one with the ladies too. She said waffling on about how her and Erwin met and how they got together. But in all honesty you weren't listening, frankly you didn't care, you were to hurt to listen to these stories.

She talked to much, but she was extremely friendly. You could see why Erwin was engaged to her, Mari would make a wonderful mother.

A few minutes passed and it was time for you to leave. You couldn't spend more time in this house, with Erwin and this woman.

So you said your goodbyes and offered to clean up.

"Can I help with anything, washing my mug?" You asked Mari

" No that won't be necessary Y/N, go home and get some rest it's late " said Erwin in a monotone voice.

You shut the door behind you and made your way home...

A few days passed and your behaviour changed drastically, you barely ate and you no longer enjoyed your usual habits.

You were on a break so you never saw Erwin.

When school was back on, you payed attention in class and actually wrote notes. He noticed your change in attitude towards him.

You no longer smiled at him when you entered to classroom, you no longer greeted him or said goodbye.

It was like you changed...

When the history lesson was over, you were the last student to pack your bag. Getting ready to leave, when Erwin closed the classroom door, locking it

" Why did you lock the door? I need to go home it's afterschool" you said in a cold tone of voice, not looking at him once, packing your textbooks into your backpack.

" Y/N, please stop this little act you're doing. You think I don't what you're up to? " Erwin said standing with his hands in his pockets, a few steps away from you.

" I don't care, if you don't mind I'd like to leave Mr Smith. I don't have time for this. If it isn't about schoolwork I'm not interested" you said

" The letter you wrote to me, well... It made me emotional Y/N" he said stepping closer and closer to you, only inches away

At this point you felt so broken and drained, it wasn't exactly his fault. How was he supposed to know you liked him and besides it's his life, he can't just dump his fiance for you.

" Mr Smith, I appreciate everything you've done. I'm sorry for that letter, I wasn't in the right head space. I just had a small crush, it was nothing serious. Please go back home to your wife and forget everything. " You said tears threatening to spill from your eyes as those words were so hard to say.

You couldn't lie anymore, you loved Erwin Smith. His smile, the way he comforted you and motivated you. His kindness, his leadership, his empathy. Everything about him lured you in. You still had feelings for him, you tried ignoring them and ignoring him. But truthfully you were hooked like a worm on a fishing rod.

As you were about to walk past him, he grabbed your arm. Forcing you back to him, his arm was strong. At this point you couldn't break free from his hold, even if you tried.

He held your waist, and placed a hand on your back rubbing it gently.

Things were getting out of hand, luckily there were no surveillance in his classroom.

" Y/N, I know I hurt you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry for leading you on. Truthfully I knew you liked me, I knew from day one. And I liked you too. Not in a daughter way, I like you romantically, I don't have feelings for Mari anymore. She cheated on me with one of my friends, and she came back. The only reason I let her back into my life was because my morals were telling me, that loving you is wrong. " The blonde man said with pain in his voice, he was being serious, he was genuine.

A passionate kiss was placed upon your pink lips as Erwin held you tightly in his arms.

Your hands made their way to his neck, rubbing the back of his neck slowly. Enjoying the kiss.

Erwin began to move his hands from your waist to your ass, lifting up your skirt as he squeezed your cheeks.

He broke away from the kiss

" Do I have your consent Y/N?" He asked as he looked you dead in the eye waiting for you to respond

" Yes, yes you have my consent" you said.

He kissed you even more, before bending you over his desk. Only to pull your panties down

" hmm, won't you look at that hey. All wet for me already, I haven't even touched this pussy yet"

He began rubbing your folds gently, making you whimper from every touch.

Erwin flipped you over, you sat on his large desk with you legs spread for him to see.

He unbuttoned your school shirt and threw it elsewhere.

And unclipped your bra, letting your pretty breasts drop.

He couldn't believe it, the sight of your pretty body, made him so fucking hard.

He gave you a kiss before flipping you back over again and kneeling down to your pussy. His tongue flicked across your already- wet folds, earning moans from you everytime.

He eventually inserted his cock into your pussy, fucking you slowly at first. Gradually he fucked you even faster, causing you to moan loudly.

Echo's could be heard throughout the empty classroom, as well as moans and pants.

The both of you came a few times, before deciding it'll be best to leave the school, before you both got caught doing your lewd activities.

And after cleaning up the classroom and getting dressed, Erwin grabbed you and kissed you once again

The words " I love you" falling from his lips

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a-local-idiots-shitpost · 9 months

Text

Mc fakes their Death

Lucifer:

he was insulted that you thought this would work and if he didn´t know you would cheer when he would do the same thing he would have traumatized you for live

actually he doesn´t even think he could traumatize you for live even if he wanted to, you are immune to all types of bullshit from him and his Brothers

but you are going to hang for this, not because you tried to trick him… well maybe a bit because of that but mainly that the carpet is now ruined and they have to get a new one

and you are the one who has to help him with everything, he would have made you do everything but he doesn´t want to imagine how the House of Lamentation will look after this

he knows if he allows you to do one thing it will just spiral onwards from there

Mammon:

he fainted because he thought you died

and when he saw you he assumed your Ghost was there to hunt him and uh… he did the dumb thing and confessed to all the things he took from you

but in his defense he took your favorite shirt when he missed you and gave it back when he got you back!

aaaand now he´s embarrassed because you are still alive, now excuse him he has somebody else to rob and he doesn´t just say this because he can´t face you for all of eternity now

don´t tell them if you think this was cute, everything will just get worse and he can never look at you

Leviathan:

how could you do this to him!? he nearly thought you died for real and decided to spend the rest of eternity hunting him!

he has to give you credit for a well done fake body, it´s detailed to a concerning degree, you even got fake blood… at least he hopes it´s fake blood and not that you bleed somebody out for this

it sounds like something you would do though

but do you even know what you did!? if you really died he would have died of a heart attack and who would have looked after Henry then! He doesn´t trust any of his Brothers to do it which means you would have also killed Henry!

Weirdly enough he was more pissed about what could have happened than the fact you tried to fake your Death, he did offer to help you make an even better one though

maybe to scare Mammon to pay his debts...

Satan:

he was insulted that you think that shitty thing could fool him but he would gladly teach you how to make a convincing one

he has practice because he uses them to prank Lucifer or to get out of punishments

and just so he can get out of chores when he sees his feline friends that rarely works though

Lucifer tends to catch on pretty quickly and gives him more chores as punishment but it´s always worth it to him

but he needs your help first before he teaches you how to make a good dummy to fake your Death with

Lucifer took one of his book with the ridiculous claim that it´s “illegal” and “highly dangerous in the wrong hands”

actually now that he thinks about it he could combine the two and maybe he´ll give Lucifer a Heart attack that´ll finish him for good

Asmodeus:

he was insulted by the fact you gave the thing your own clothes

he can get past you trying to fake your Death because who hasn´t tried that during their life but he draws the line at you ruining your clothes

more importantly the clothes he got you! You could have chosen literally anything in your closet and choose the nice clothes he got you

you could have ruined the clothes Mammon got you instead, at least he has an excuse to go shopping with you again

you did always complain your closet was to full but to Asmo it´s completely empty

to be fair even with a filled to the brim walk in closet he would still say you don´t have enough clothes

Beelzebub:

you didn´t even get actual Human blood for this? your really bad at faking your Death

but he has to admit the fake body was pretty well made even if mixing syrup and red food dye was a bad thing to do for the Devil who can recognize Devils and Angels by their smell alone

but he wasn´t to angry at you trying to fake your Death, he was even a bit amused but only because he never actually thought you were Dead

if did at any point you actually died he would have been pretty angry with you

but he wasn´t so he invited you out for Ice Cream

a weird thing to reward you for but you´ll take it, the only thing that you have to do is support Beel when he wants more food

and maybe take some extra money with you in case he miscalculates his hunger

Belphegor:

he would have expected more from you, you didn´t even clone yourself! you just made a dummy and pushed it off a cliff

like that could have fooled him, he might not be Beel but even he picked up on the fact that wasn´t even real blood and just some fake one

and you didn´t even do a good job with it even from afar it barely looked like you even worse when he looked at it

as payback he´ll once again take over your room and teach you how to make a clone to better fake your Death with

it just showed him that you need more practice when you want to fake your Death

also it sounds like it would be a fun thing to prank Lucifer with

#obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me imagines #obey me headcanons #lucifer avatar of pride #obey me lucifer #mammon avatar of greed #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #leviathan avatar of envy #satan avatar of wrath #obey me satan #asmodeus avatar of lust #obey me asmodeus #beelzebub avatar of gluttony #obey me beelzebub #belphegor avatar of sloth #obey me belphegor

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specialagentlokitty · 10 months

Text

Carol Danvers x teen!reader - we all need time

Prompt 39 carol Danvers with teen fan reader please? - @witchreporter 💜

39: “I didn’t know you could ice skate.”

Standing in line, you held the photo in your hands tightly.

You were so close, just a few more people and you would be able to meet one the heroes you admired so much.

The line moved forward, and you looked at the woman in front of you who was chatting to the superhero.

Captain Marvel’s phone began to ring and she signed what was placed in front of her before excusing herself so she was able to answer the call.

“I’m sorry you guys, I need to go but we’ll rearrange this!” She called.

With that she ran away and while everybody clapped and cheered for her you just sighed softly, turning around to leave.

You didn’t have much longer in the city so you did a bit of sight seeing then you went back home.

A few weeks after returning, a blizzard had hit, causing everything to freeze, the roads, the trees, even the lakes and rivers in the nearby area.

Running downstairs, you grabbed your shoes and your skates by the door, making your way over to the couch.

“Don’t be out you long, it’s cold.”

You flicked your eyes up to the doorway, looking at your foster parent.

“I’ll be fine, I’m going to practice some routines then I’ll be back.”

You put your skates into your bag and swung it over your back, making your way to the door so you could head to the nearest frozen lake.

You stopped nearby, changing from your shoes into your skates and you stepped out on the ice.

You weren’t the only one out there, there were others from the town, skating, playing games, practicing hockey.

But there was a large part that was still left empty, and that’s where you went to.

Standing in the edge, you stretched a little, making sure your headphones were on securely before you began to skate.

You loved it, the cold air, the way you loved so freely, almost like water, and everything was so much more simple when you were skating.

It only took a few minutes for you to notice that somebody was skating with you, trying to keep in line with you.

You pulled your headphones around your shoulders, catching a glimpse at who was skating with you, and you smiled a little.

“Shouldn’t you be off saving the world?”

“Finishing a signing that I was doing.” Carol replied.

You hummed, nodding your head, skating backwards with her next to you.

“You’re really good, do you skate often?” Carol asked.

You spun around, skating in a straight line.

“Yeah, I can’t do any of those fancy tricks.”

You smiled and you stopped, turning back around to look at her.

“It’s just a little jump, it’s called an axel. It’s pretty simple when you get the hang of it, surely a big superhero could do it.”

She laughed a little, skating over to you.

“Is that how you speak to your hero?”

You grinned a little bit and she held out her arms.

Skating forward, you hugged her tightly and she laughed, hugging you back.

“How come you’re all the way in this little town?” You asked.

Carol smiled at you, and she held out the photo you had wanted to get signed, and you carefully took it, looking at her signature.

“You seemed really disappointed I couldn’t sign it, and I couldn’t accept knowing that I let you go home so disappointed.”

You smiled softly at her.

“Thank you…”

Carol stood next to you, gesturing to the woman in the photo.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s my big sister, she used to look after me, and r were huge fans of yours.”

Carol placed a hand on your shoulder.

“I’ve got some time, how about you show me how to do an axel, maybe I can teach you something new as well.”

“I didn’t know you could ice skate.” You said.

Carol laughed a little, grinning at you.

“I haven’t skated for a long while. I used to love it when I was the same age as you, I spent all my time ice skating, and playing hockey.”

Laughing, you made your way back to your bag and set the picture down, looking at the face of your grinning sister.

Carol knelt next to you.

“Show me those jumps you like so much.”

You pushed yourself up, and you held out your hands.

“Throw me as far as you can in the ice.”

“Whatever you say kiddo.”

Carol didn’t often spend time with her fans, but she needed this time, and so did you

#marvel #marvel x reader #marvel x you #marvel x y/n #marvel imagine #captain marvel #captain marvel x reader #captain marvel x you #captain marvel imagine #Carol Danvers #Carol Danvers x reader #Carol Danvers x you #Carol Danvers imagine

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letshavedeernnertogether · 7 months

Text

Let us make this dance properly

Charlie gathered everybody in the main living-room. It was the usual place to discuss the princess's plans about rehabilitation of sinners. This time she wanted to make a new exercise with the purpose to know each other better and to have fun.

Not everyone was excited with this idea; to be honest, all the residents, excpect Vaggie, didn't find any of Charlie's idea good or useful. But they still did everything she asked. And this time wasn't exclusion.

She looked around everyone with a shining gaze, and asked the residents to tell everybody about their favorite activities.

Angel started, "I love to fu-!"

"I swear, if you say it, I will fucking kill you!" Husk exclaimed.

You chukled. Angel always said something lewd, and it made you laugh. But you laughed even more, when Husk tried to shut him up. They were just adorable.

"What? Charlie asked and I answered!" he threw up his hands.

Husk only sighted heavily with a growl.

"And what do you like to do, huh?" asked Angel. "I bet you'll say "to get drunk", right?"

Husk nodded.

Charlie forced a smile and said, "Well, maybe somebody else wants to express their opinion?"

You didn't like to share you mind, but you didn't want to make Charlie upset either.

"Well, I'm not really into any activities, but I do like dancing" you said.

Vaggie looked at you with gratitude. There was at least one person who didn't make jokes about Charlie's offers.

"That's great!" said the princess with a big smile, so you could see her white snow fangs. "Everybody loves dancing!"

You knew that dancing is the thing that almost every resident liked: Charlie, Angel, you, and maybe Husk too. And of course Alastor. It was his favorite thing to do after murdering and cooking somebody. He was a great dancer as you heard, and you dreamt about having a dance with him one day. It wouldn't be impossible as you were pretty old-fashioned and liked the same dance styles, that were popular at his time. You blushed every time thinking about dancing at least shag with him.

You cautiously looked at Alsor, who stood near the sofa, where you were sitting. He was looking at you slightly covered eyelids and smiling.

Yeah, you dreamt of dancing with him, but there was no right time.

But maybe tonight?

Then Charlie clapped and exclaimed, "I have an idea! Let's teach each other our favorite dance! I'm sure it'll be interesting!"

Everybody considered for a moment and nodded.

Everybody went to the ball room. It was the biggest room in the hotel. Pale pink wallpaper, golden colomns and chandeliers.

Sir Pentious started. He asked you all to stand in two ranks. Charlie and Vaggie were inseparable, so they stood next to each other. Angel stood opposite Charlie, and Husk opposite Vaggie. You stood near Husk, and opposite you stood Alastor. Niftty stood beside you.

"We're going to dancccccce Mr. Beveridge's Maggot! " exclaimed Sir Pentious.

"What?!" you thought. Didn't you mishear? A Jane fucking Austen's dance?!

And what is even more important, was Alastor your partner?

Sir Pentious asked to turn on the music, and Alastor made his radio play load some classical music.

Sir Pentious explained the main thing about this dance and how to move. He stood opposite Niffty, and you began to dance.

Not everything worked out the first time. You missed your partners, your backs collided, somebody took an extra step because of which everyone was confused. But Sir Pentious had enough patience to be a good teacher, and after a while you danced a pretty good Mr. Beveridge's Maggot dance.

After you'd finished the dance Sir Pentious said with the tears in his eyes, "so sssssweet!"

While dancing you understood how really good was Alastor at it. He understood all Pentious's instructions the first time. And you noticed that it was comfortable for you to dance with him. Of course, you said you liked dancing, but, to say the truth, you were terribly shy. You never danced on public, prefering to dance just by yourself. You even waltz in your room all alone sometimes. But you thought it would be nice to find somebody one day whom you won't be afraid to dance.

"It was a pleasure to dance with you, dear" said Alastor, making you blush.

"Um, thank you. I liked dancing with you too!" you said and smiled.

He was looking at you with a softer smile that you'd ever seen on him.

The next dancing lesson wanted to make Angel. Of course, he wanted to teach you all how to make the most seductive movements, but Alastor just couldn't find appropriate music on the radio (or he just didn't want to find it), and Angel decided to sing a melody and show you the movements. (Thanks goddess it wasn't something too obscene, just slow swing of your hips and beautiful movements with your hands.)

Alastor was pretty confused with such a kind of dancing, but you couldn't help but notice that he was actually good at this one too. And the way his hips were moving side to side...

Well, you better to turn away before your turned out as red as his suit.

Now was your turn.

"Well, find a partner at first."

Vaggie and Charlie looked at each other, and Vaggie asked you, if it wouldn't be like the first dance?

The girls still were a little bit upset that they weren't actual partneres in the first dance.

"It will be similar to a waltz, so don't worry", you responded.

Charlie happily took Vaggie's hand, making her smile soft.

Angel came closer to Husk and smiled. The cat-demon rolled his eyes but didn't go away.

Niffty looked at Alastor, but he shook his head, so she was Sir Pentious's partner again.

"Well, Alastor is enough with modern dancing," you thought.

"The name of the dance is foxtrot." you noticed how Alastor pricked up his ears and tilted his head. Yes, he was actually interested in.

You continued, "There are two type of it: quickstep and slowfox. We're going to dance slowfox."

"As I mentioned before, it is similar to waltz but much smoother. Also the rhythm is different."

You stood your back to others and stretched your arms out in front of you, bending them at the elbows.

"Well, I'll be on the place of the one who's being led in dance. You need to make a step with your right foot back. Then a step back with your left foot. Step right and slightly back with your right foot. And then place your left foot next to your right one and take a full step to the right."

Everybody repeated your movements slowly, and you were glad, everyone succeeded in it.

"Ha-ha my dear!" you heard Alaslor laughing and frozen.

Suddenly he appeared before you and came closer.

"You're so funny, trying to waltz without a partner ha-ha-ha!"

You felt that your cheeks became red of shame and anger.

Alasor leaned over to you, "Don't frown, my dear," he placed your hands on his shoulders. "Let us make this dance properly."

He snaped his fingers, and the room was filled with slow jazz; several candels dipped.

He made a step onward, you made a step back and throw your head back. His hand barely touched your shoulder-blade, just enough you could place your hand on his shoulder. Moving your feet at the beat of music, your hips touched. He was gentler than you expected. He tenderly made you follow his steps hardly touching you. It felt like being a cloud driven by wind.

You whirled in dancing; two circles before you bend back; then he swayed you side to side; then again steps when your hips touched, that made you breathe deeper.

And you stopped.

He pulled you closer to him. Your breath became faster because of dancing, but his stamina was better then yours, and his breath almost hadn't changed.

"My, my, what a nice dancer you are," he said to you. "But a little bit shy, don't you think so?" he leaned to you and smiled wider.

He removed his hand from you back, but your palm was still in his one.

"I don't dance very often, and I usually don't have a partner, so... I'm just not sure about the movements I make," you mumbled.

"I know what can help you," he leaned even closer, "Maxixe," he whispered.

Now you were sure you'd become as red as his suit!

All the candles were lighted up again.

He drew himself up to his full height and exclaimed to everybody, "Now everyone! I'm going to teach you the most popular among the most scandalous dance of the 1920's!" he adjusted his monocle, "One man said, it is the easiest dance of all to do, and yet the hardest of all to do well!"

Everybody were intrigued, and you were the only one who was afraid.

To dance maxixe with him?! One of the hottest dances of his time? And he offered it himself? Just unbelievable! It must have been a dream!

Alastor tuned up the radio and found fast piano melody. All the pairs were the same. Only Sir Pentious got tired and was sitting on a coach, so did Niftty.

You've never allowed yourself to even dream of dancing something like this with Alastor. But now you stand together. Your hands in his; you back is lead against his chest; he makes steps forward slightly touching your knees; his breath is in your hair, and you feel how his heart beats.

It was better then any dream you could imagine. In your dreams you couldn't feel the touches, the breath, the fabric. But now you felt all of this.

You were swaying like in waltz, leaning together in direction of your moving, making funny steps forward on your heels. Then he turned you your back to him, placed his hand on your stomach and leaned against you. Swaying again.

You couldn't find a place for yourself at first and was blushing all the time. But very soon you understood how good it felt to dance with him. So you relaxed and let your body move to the rhythm of the piano.

Alastor turned you to face him and raised your hand high. You put your hand on his waist.

You both were dancing and smiling without noticing the others. They'd ended with maxixe and were dancing what they liked. Husk was leading Angel and sharply turning him round. Charlie and Vaggie were dancing a simple waltz. Sir Pentious, having already rested, joined a dance with Niftty.

Was it the most delightful evening in the hotel since you'd been here? Exactly.

But nothing can last forever.

When the music stopped Alastor stood beside you. Charlie thanked everyone for participation.

Now it was very late, and you all had to go to your badrooms.

On the way to your room you heard some static noise in the air and stopped. You felt like somebody was staring at you. You turned back and saw Alastor. He smiled at you soft.

"I didn't mean to frighten you, my dear, but I couldn't let you go without saying how much pleasure you showed me tonight."

He came closer.

"I hope that one day you'll do me the honour of dancing with you again, my dear."

Astonishment, shock, unbelief, fear and at last happiness. You felt all of this just in one second.

"Sure!" you answered, slightly jumping up and pressing your hands to the chest. You didn't say anything else because you believed that Alastor would understand everything by your smile and eyes. And he did.

He had never seen before your smile so wide and your eyes so bright. He understood what did you feel.

Both of you were standing in silence for a while, looking at each other and smiling.

"Goodnight, then?" you said.

"Goodnight, ma chère" answered Alasor and headed for his room.

Definitely, it was your best day at the hotel.

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