#wish I could have seen it today but the only showing was at 11 and I worked at 12

[camscendants]

I ushered the final Taylor Swift showing :(

[words-4u]

as you wish - j.l

wc: 1.5k

a/n: down horrendous for jordan i’m going through it

warning: 18+ smut, swearing

you were jordan’s favourite thing in the world and they would do anything for you. so when you first got together and you wanted to take things slow, it wasn’t an issue.

but then four months passed, five months, six months and the most the two of you have done was dry hump. jordan would never rush you or push you into having sex but they wanted you, all of you, so bad and they were losing their mind with lust.

what jordan didn’t know was that you were just as horny as them. you constantly thought about how good it would feel to have their head in between your thighs but you were nervous, that’s what it all boiled down to.

jordan had mentioned previous partners, a couple fuckbuddies and one serious relationship, which you didn’t mind because of course people wanted them, how could they not?

you, on the other hand, have had zero sexual experience, the kind that actually matters when you enter university and kissing a classmate behind a bush when you were 11 doesn’t count in your books.

so month after month you held off on having sex with jordan because you were unsure of what to do but your desire for jordan has now outgrown your silly little fear.

you sat alone in jordan’s room as they finished their last class of the day. you had plans later that evening with some friends to catch a movie but until then you decided to kill some time by reading in jordan’s room since it has the best natural lighting.

you were so immersed in your book, you didn’t notice jordan come in until the bed dipped and they were kissing your neck.

“oh hello,” you said bringing a hand into their hair as they smushed their face into your neck.

“sorry, you just look so good on my bed reading… the secret diary of anne boleyn?” they asked peering into your lap where the book laid faced down.

“leave me alone, you know how much love history!” you chuckled as jordan sat against thier headboard and pulled you into their lap.

now straddling them, you toyed with the back of their necklace as they peered into your eyes.

“what?” you said in a hushed tone.

“nothing, you just have really pretty eyes,” jordan continued to stare into you with their intoxicating eyes. you started to get shy under their gaze so you broke it by leaning in for a soft kiss.

there couldn’t be a more perfect moment than this one. it felt like the two of you were the only ones in the world. you often felt that way with them but today was different.

“jordan, i-i think I’m ready,”

it took a second for what you said to register with jordan but once it did, their eyes widen a little.

“are you sure?”

you nod in confirmation. “i want to have sex.”

that statement went straight to their dick making it twitch in their pants.

“say that again,” they said as they moved you off their lap and onto the bed hovering over you.

“please fuck me,” you said grabbing their neck and kissing them with a certain passion. jordan had found a comfortable spot between your legs.

“as you wish,” they whispered as they bucked their hip into yours.

you lifted their sweater a little, hands roaming their flat and hardened chest, before jordan took it off completely. you held yourself of using your forearms and enjoyed the view. you’ve seen jordan shirtless plenty of times but knowing they were going to fuck you in a few minutes made the view so much better.

“i think you’re wearing too many layers,” they smirked which prompted you to take off your shirt and bra with no hesitation.

“you’re so fucking gorgeous,” they muttered before encapsulating a nipple into their mouth. a sinful noise left you as their tongue expertly swirled around your breast. their hand showed the other the same amount of attention, rolling the nipple between the pads of their fingers.

impatience got the better of you and before you knew it, you took jordan’s hand brought it down to your core making them cup you. jordan lifts their eyes up at you and you nod. you moved your hands down your body slipping of your jeans and panties along with with it. jordan’s fingers ran through the wetness that had built up, a moan echoed around the room as they circled your clit slowly.

“i’m going to take such good care of you babe, just relax,” jordan whispered in between kisses.

you listened to them, focusing on the feeling of their fingers now teasing your entrance.

“please, please just fuck me,” you begged, making them slip a finger into you, your hands moved to hold onto their back as they gradually increased their pace of thrusting their finger into you, making you moan their name.

“fuck,” you groaned, throwing your head back as they curled both inside you before kissing your lips one last time and making their way down your body once again.

you watched with lust-filled eyes as they kissed down your stomach and hovered over your core, hot breath fanning over your dripping centre.

“is this ok?” they asked kissing your inner thighs, you hastily replied with a breathy ‘yes’ to make them continue. their mouth soon sucked on your clit, back arching and an even louder moan erupting from the back of your throat while they ate you.

with the feeling of them pumping their fingers inside you, combined with their tongue swirling around your clit and them moaning against your core at the taste, it didn't take long for you to reach your orgasm.

“uuuh, jordan!” you yelled out, a rush of euphoria washing over you. you shook as you came down and jordan came back up you body. their face covered in your juices and you felt almost embarrassed.

“look at you,” you laughed hiding your face behind your hands.

jordan shook their heads, “don’t be embarrassed. that was the hottest shit i’ve ever seen.”

they slowly removed your hands from you face and kissed you sloppily. you definitely tasted yourself on their face.

“see? you taste so good,” they smiled smugly.

with a quiet laugh, you pulled them down for a full kiss, tongue immediately pushing into their mouth as they echo your laughter.

it quickly turns into a moan, as does yours when they grind their hips into you before they reluctantly tear themselves away, a small smirk appearing on their face. 

jordan unbuckled his belt getting rid of his jeans and reached over you to grab a condom from their nightstand drawer.

“so just have those in there?” you asked eyeing the the small plastic squares.

“bought them a month ago. i was feeling hopeful,” they responded sheepishly which made you laugh a little.

“presumptuous… but safe. i’ll let it go for now.” you watched as they sit back on to their heels to slide it on.

they are sweet with the way they checked in with you again, hand returning to your cheek. they smile when their fingers run over your lips. you nod, quietly giving your consent once more, and they help you to spread your legs wider so that they could fully lay between them.

they dragged their cock through your folds, catching your earlier orgasm on the tip to slick the way, and with a deep breath, they pushed in.

touching jordan this way, feeling them this way, is something you've been thinking about since the first time they kissed you.

they were sweet in the way that they went slow as they patiently waited for you to adjust and feel comfortable, and it's not long before they’re completely inside you.

they leaned down to kiss you, lips caressed yours softly at first before it shifted into something a little more heated, more passionate.

"you're doing so well for me, babe," they said against your mouth, and the words make you sigh in response, hips once again rocking into you. "you feel so good. does it feel good for you too?"

“so good,” you told them truthfully, hand running down their back. “you fit so well.”

you felt their mouth split into a grin against yours, and you couldn’t help but let out another groan when they pulled out slightly before pushing back in.

jordan looked so beautiful pressed against you, damp hair resting on his forehead. you reached up and pushed the hair out of their eyes and trailed your fingers down their cheek as they continued to slide in and out of you.

you pulled them close and whispered some encouragement as their thrusts became erratic and they let out a deep breath. they felt even more amazing inside of you as their cock filled you with their release, coating both of you with slick warmth as they continued to move.

they gradually slowed their movements, panting in utter relief and pleasure as they came to a halt, resting inside of you with a few lingering twitches. you wrapped your legs around theirs, holding them close for a moment as you soaked in euphoric thrill.

“how was that?” you sighed making yourself comfortable in the bed. jordan joined you, putting an arm around your shoulder pulling you into them.

“are you sure you’ve never had sex?” they joked prompting you to playfully smack their chest.

“i’m so happy we did… finally. i love you, j.”

“love you more, y/n/n”

[landwriter]

Desperate Measures | Dream/Hob | 1.2K | G v silly and fluffy, literally 90% air, dream attempts a romantic gesture, hob is a sap and forgetful, human au, part text fic

for @domaystic drabbles, Day 6: Under the Same Umbrella

---

Dream woke up to 26 texts from Hob. He put on his glasses and began his morning read. It’d replaced Times for him. The editorial quality, he thought, was far superior.

Hob (7:19 am) heading out, gave you a wee forehead kiss and you didn’t even stir. sleeping bloody beauty. love you disgustingly much x

Hob (7:26 am) couldn’t find my umbrella anywhere can you take a look if it’s not too much of a bother? feel like i’ve gone mad

Hob (7:30 am) christ it’s bucketing down!! standing under the eaves just to tell you how much it’s bucketing down

plants will be happy at least so will my goth boyfriend ;) hope your writing goes well today love. extra atmosphere!!

Hob (8:42 am) nevermind don’t look for it remembered that i left it in my office told johanna she can use it since i’m at the archives all day anyway glad i’m not the only one who’d forget their own head if it wasn’t screwed on :) :) :)

Hob (10:11 am) you should’ve seen the look lisa gave me when i showed up had to dry myself off in the men’s w half a forest of paper towels there goes my carbon offset from walking i said christ you’re probably still in bed asleep warm dry!! lucky bastard

wish i could come back already and drip puddles all over you

Hob (10:37 am) if this keeps up i’m going to look like mr darcy in the rain on your doorstep tonight don’t worry i promise not to propose marriage while insulting you xx although i do love you most ardently

...elizabeth

Dream smiled, read them all again, contemplated, and then sent his reply.

Dream (11:01 am) Sir, I appreciate the struggle you have been through

Hob replied moments later.

?? you sound like a customer service agent wait you’re quoting the film you can’t reject me if i’ve not proposed to you!! yet!!!

Dream snorted. 'and I am very sorry I have caused you pain' went the line. They’d watched it last weekend. Hob had cried, and Dream had privately decided that if Hob proposed, he’d say yes. Even if it was poorly done. It wouldn’t be, though. Not if Hob was doing it. He sent a second text.

...and I am very sorry you were drenched by rain.

Then he got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen. His phone buzzed anew as he made tea and toast. He smiled at the sound. On their first date, Hob had warned Dream that he had a bad habit of annoying boyfriends over text. Dream, on his first date in six years, had wondered what it might be like to be so effusively charming that you could have enough boyfriends to form habits around them at all. He hadn’t known what to say, and Hob had ducked his head, grimacing a little, and said, “Just tell me to piss off, please, if I do? I know I can be a bit much.”

Dream believed it, because the man was telling him about his habits with boyfriends after one date. Not that he minded. And three months in, Dream had yet to tell him to piss off.

Turns out, a bit much was exactly what he’d wanted. Needed, in truth. Someone to tether him to the real world. His phone had become a modern-day lodestone in his pocket, a comforting pull of Hob-ness that would always point him back to life whenever he’d emerge, blinking and disoriented, out of the mire of his work. Work that he loved - creating worlds out of nothing, writing stories that would change people - but, coming on the age of thirty with nothing to show for it but recurring wrist strain and an upmarket flat that never had any guests, work that had also made him spend so much time apart from the rest of humanity that he was sometimes unsure how to rejoin it.

The tipping point had been when his eldest sister had found out that he hadn’t spoken to anyone else in between two of their regular dinners. Which were monthly. It had been mortifying. She’d smiled sadly, which was excruciating enough, and then gotten the gleam of a plan in her eyes, which had been far worse. “I’m setting you up,” she’d said. “I know just the guy. We go way back. I think you’ll like him.”

He had. Now, when his phone buzzed, he found himself frowning if it wasn’t Hob. (An exceedingly rare occasion.) But this time it was, of course. Four short messages sent one after the other:

hahahaha ok fine that was v good enjoy your day x

Five hours later, not even the curtain of rain awaiting him outside could douse the anticipation in his belly. An idea, he knew, was a powerful thing. Dream didn’t have an umbrella - Hob always shared with him, and would’ve apologetically nicked his if he had - so he would make the first leg of the journey as Hob did. He intended to go and get something nice, but once in the cold downpour, his resolve failed him almost at once, and he ducked into the first shop that had umbrellas in the window.

“Hiya,” said the girl at the counter without looking up from her phone.

Dream ignored her, blinking the rain out of his eyes, belatedly registering all the merchandise had a unifying theme and that he’d made a terrible mistake, borne of sheer desperation.

“Would you happen to have any other umbrellas? In black?” he asked. Hidden behind the counter, perhaps. If only you knew to ask.

The girl looked at him with an air of disbelieving reproval only accessible to teenagers and the very elderly. “You could try Boots, you know. It’s just down the street.”

Dream looked out the window. Rain torrented down. Commuters hurried past with their sensibly coloured umbrellas. From places exactly like Boots.

“Or we’ve got rain ponchos,” she added. It sounded like a threat.

“Nevermind,” said Dream quickly. “I’ll take it.”

“Enjoy your visit in London, sir,” she called out as he left.

He stepped outside and flicked open the umbrella with slightly more force than necessary.

Dream waited a few paces outside the archives, wanting to surprise Hob properly. Two separate pairs of tourists had thought he was their London Ghost Tours guide, and he was beginning to regret not holding out for longer, drenching be damned. Then Hob emerged, striding out and immediately stopping to pull out his phone. He was smiling at it. Dream smiled too, in anticipation.

A moment later his own phone buzzed loudly in his coat pocket, and Hob looked up in surprise.

“Oh my god,” he said. Then he said it again.

“I heard you needed an umbrella,” said Dream. He’d had the line already, since he got the idea. It had been very dashing and romantic in his head. It was somewhat undermined by the dreadful costuming choice that had been forced upon him.

Hob looked between Dream and the umbrella, bafflement melting into a happy laugh. He ducked underneath, pecking Dream on the lips. “I’m not sure I needed one quite this badly. Did you rob some poor tourist?”

“Unhappily, I paid for this.”

“Oh no,” said Hob, pulling away and pretending to inspect him for injury. “My poor darling. Your dignity.”

Dream sniffed. “I will recover.”

“Here,” said Hob. “I’ll carry it for you. You’ll only be guilty by association, then.”

They began walking, a bobbing Union Jack in a sea of blacks and greys. After the chief sin of ugliness, it was also a little small for two grown men, but Dream found he didn’t resent that at all, as Hob tucked him tightly into his side to keep them both dry. People gave them a wide berth. Tourists could never be trusted with umbrellas.

“You’ve rescued me, you know,” said Hob, nuzzling into his cheek.

“It wouldn’t do to have you dripping puddles all over the floors,” said Dream.

“Even if I looked terribly handsome, all wet and ardent?”

Dream bit his lip and smiled a little. “Perhaps you can be wet and ardent in the shower. Instead.”

Hob laughed again. It was Dream’s favourite sound. “Much warmer than the rain anyway. Deal.” Rain drummed down on their private nylon ceiling. “I was thinking chicken tikka masala for dinner?”

And so they made their way home, and although the rain never let up, Dream was so content and warm that he might’ve sworn they were walking in the sun.

[lokisprettygirl]

Under his influence (Post Avengers! Loki x female reader)

Read chapter 11 here // Series Masterlist

Chapter 12

Summary : Your relationship with Loki is growing, your mom tries to play a matchmaker again.

Warning: 18+, Soft Smut, mention of psychological torture, angst, insecurities, self deprecating behaviour, anxiety and overwhelming emotions

"Captain? " Loki called out for Steve as he was about to step out of the training room so he turned around and looked at Loki "May I have a word with you?"

"What is it?" Steve crossed his arms as he questioned.

"I wanted to discuss that statement you gave about me, that I was pretending to be you to steal the scepter" Steve chuckled as loki said that,

"Loki loki, everything is out in the open now, you can drop the act and your lies..it was probably something you did before you disappeared" Steve turned around to leave again

"But what if I'm not lying? What if I wasn't there? What if it wasn't me? Steve halted in his steps as he thought about it "Give it a thought"

Loki walked out , leaving Rogers to contemplate over his words. How could it be possible? He saw the exact doppelganger of him and only loki had the ability to do that. The doppleganger did seem a little different though.

Loki was supposed to be at some gala with other Avengers in the evening and the thought saddened you, mainly because you knew you probably won't see him tonight and you had seen him just twice in the last week, and he was also taking Melisaa to the gala so there were plenty of reasons to keep you anxious throughout the day. You knew he wasn't interested in her but there will be other women there, it was a fancy Gala and all famous rich people were invited, what if he meets someone interesting and they hit it off? What if he realizes that you weren't the best thing he could do in midgard.

Was it too soon to show him your crazy side yet? It's been almost five months since you had met him but it already felt like a lifetime, you have never had a man who made you feel so fulfilled and you didn't even have sex yet. He had so much more to offer to you than just sex, he understood you and your neediness but that could get tiring with time. That's what drove so many guys away from you because you showed them your crazy side too early.

You sat down on the sofa after work and turned the tv on, there was a red carpet and everything. You watched these people and you couldn't relate, you could never imagine yourself to ever be a part of such a circle. However Loki fit in just fine, he was a prince and it showed, his upbringing made it easier for him to blend with those pretentious people, watching him with Melissa hanging around in his arm only made you feel worse. He had a black suit on and he looked handsomer beyond this realm.

"Loki, a quick question..who are you wearing?" The girl interviewing all the celebs asked him and he seemed perplexed.

"Uhhh who am I wearing?" He looked at her confused so Melissa answered on his behalf, the furrowed brows and pursed lips made you want to hug him instantly.

"God you're cute" you whined to yourself, you felt extremely hormonal today, maybe you were pmsing again.

'You're such an embarassement" Melissa whispered in his ear so he glared at her, why would they even ask such a stupid question? What was he supposed to say?

He wished you were here with him, you probably would have found him cute even when he was fumbling like a fool. As soon as they got inside the venue he let go of her hand to get away from her.

"So that's the girl he was staying with for months before you guys captured him again?" Pepper asked Tony so he looked at her for a few seconds before he spoke,

"Yeahh whhy? Isn't she perfect for him?"

"Is she? I mean they're not even talking to each other, look at him" Pepper said to him so he looked at Loki "He'd rather spend his time at the bar then be with her, they look so in love in interviews and stuff" Tony squeezed his eyes as she said that.

"Yeah may be the relationship has run its course"

She looked at him confused and then she shrugged. Her curiosity has been peaked though.

"Brother, when all these people are inebriated I can drop you off to see lady y/n' Loki gave him a side eye as Thor approached him with the proposal.

"Alright, what am I missing here? What is the catch?"

"Catch?"

"Motive, you must have a motive, you are not helping me because of the goodness of your heart are you? Where do you go?" Thor was taken aback by the sudden scrutiny.

"I'm appalled brother, is this what I get for reuniting you with the love of your life? Must it be this difficult for you to believe that I want your happiness?" Thor retorted.

"Hahaha, I laughed, now tell me the truth, who are you seeing? Oh is it the mortal you were besotted with?" Loki asked him again.

"I am not seeing Jane.. absolutely not"

"That is fabulous, Asgard's first man in the line of throne is courting a mortal, what is mother's opinion about that?" Thor sighed, there was no denying it any longer.

"She doesn't know yet and she can not know and for the love of norns lower your voice"

"Oh I'm just overjoyed brother, mother might be unaware of your insolent behaviour but do you really think the loyal snitch would stay quiet for long?"

"Yes he will, Heimdall gave me his word" Loki rolled his eyes as he heard that.

"Oh I forgot he was the royal snitch of Odin, Frigga and Thor"

"Well perhaps he might have been fond of you if you hadn't played those countless tricks on him as a child" Loki scoffed at the insult.

"Yes, a child, I was a child"

"You froze him merely a few years ago"

"He commited treason "

Thor rolled his eyes at the comment but what Loki said next pleased him "Whatever your hidden motive might be, I'm still grateful so–"

"Are you trying to tell me you appreciate my help?"

"Yes"

"Well I appreciate your appreciation "

Loki shook his head before he smiled.

Your phone was ringing so you picked it up hoping that it was Loki, unfortunately it wasn't him but your mother instead..

"Hey mom"

"Hi, listen, remember David's best man Eugene?"

"Gee mom I'm good, how are you?" She groaned at the response before she asked you the same question again.

"Can't say that I do"

"Okay whatever" She sighed deeply before she spoke again "His son is going to be in Minnesota for two days, I'm going to send you his phone number, talk to him" the anxiety rose as she mentioned one more guy she wanted to set you up with.

"What? Isn't he like 40??" You screamed as if you weren't canoodling a guy who was forty plus an extra thousand years.

"He's 35 y/n, he's a doctor and well reputed, you're not some 20 year old yourself, just do me a favor and meet him once"

"Mom I'm not going to do that, I'm seeing someone" you said to her, hoping she'd respect that and would realise that you were fucking 30.

"Yeah who is it? Who are you seeing?"

"God"

You could feel your mother's eyes rolling at the quip, but you weren't lying to her.

"Just show him around, if nothing..you can atleast be friends with him, are you against that as well now?"

You groaned as she continued to be insufferable about it so you agreed to see this man, after all he'd only be there for two days.

"Fine I'll show him around"

You hung up the phone and sighed, this wasn't what you needed, it was like a cherry on the top of a perfect day. You opened YouTube and saw several videos about the stupid gala, you just wanted to see what people were saying about the new IT couple Meloki as they liked to call them affectionately. You stumbled upon a video that showed their relationship timeline from the moment they met. Wow some people really had way too much time on their hands to be so invested like this. You read the comments and some of them made you laugh while others made you feel even worse,

You put the phone down in order to not hurt yourself any more.

You felt horrible at the moment and every time such feelings occurred you felt overwhelmed by the whirlpool of emotions. You were in love with him and he had become the best friend you had always wanted in your life, someone who wouldn't use you and deceive you for selfish purposes, there was a genuine affection from his side that you always felt whenever he was around you but then you have had such friends before, you had those people who cared at first but now they didn't even know whether you were alive or dead.

Sometimes it was who had to cut them off because they couldn't stop hurting you but that didn't mean that you came out unscathed, it still hurt, the memories hurt, the promises hurt, the loss of friendship hurt.

You laid down on the bed and cried your heart out, you spent a month where you couldn't get in touch with Loki and those days were damaging, you didn't think you'd be able to go through that pain again. It was easier to move on when the people you considered your friends had hurt you but losing Loki? You didn't think you'd ever survive losing the way he cared about you, you couldn't imagine seeing a day where you two would be nothing but strangers to each other.

It was starting to get harder to breathe, your own overthinking was driving you into panic, you stuffed your face between the pillow as you cried and cried. In that moment you just wanted to talk to him and have him tell you that he won't hurt you or leave you like others did.

When you heard the knocks on the window just a few seconds later for a second you thought you had imagined it but then you looked at the window and there he was smiling so innocently so you got up, wiped your face as best as you could and walked towards the window to open it so he could get in, he had a dark green shirt on and a black trouser, you could see his long hair waving because of the wind,

"Hiiii" you mumbled as you opened the window but before he could climb in he grabbed your chin and pulled you in to kiss you softly before he let go "Ummm i thought you were not coming tonight"

"I was missing you darling" you nodded and stepped back so he could get in, he noticed you had his shirt on that he had left there or in other words the shirt you had stolen from him.

"Are you okay..you seem..were you crying?" You shook your head as you turned around, you didn't want to snap in front of him.

Before you could get away he grabbed your arm around turned you towards him, he hugged you briefly before he pulled away and grabbed your chin to make you look at him

"Now tell me what's wrong and this time I don't want you to lie to me" he asked, his voice was tender and sweet.

"Nothing..it's nothing…I was just missing you" you pursed your lips to control your sobs but they came out anyways,

"I was missing you"

"You were?" You sobbed even harder and his eyes teared up too.

"How could I not sweetheart hmm?" He cupped your cheeks, leaned down to kiss you and his thumbs proceeded to wipe your tears simultaneously,

"That's just not it, is it? Something else is eating you up..tell me, share with me" he questioned you but you could only hiccup between your cries. Why were you like this?

"It's ..I don't want to annoy you"

"Annoy me? Did I annoy you that day when I wept like a baby in your arms?"

He questioned you softly so you shook your head, you looked like a child at the moment and it made him smile. He just wanted to take away whatever was bothering you and make you feel better

"I just don't want you to leave because people leave when I'm like this, they don't like me like this" the broken voice and the fear your words held made his heart sink, to learn that people had hurt you so badly in the past that you felt afraid sharing your feelings with him was heartbreaking for him.

"Like what princess? You feel hurt and you just want to be held and comforted, there's nothing wrong with that" the back of his fingers brushed against your cheek as he cooed.

"No???"

"Why would this ever drive me away?"

"I just don't want you to leave " you sobbed even harder so he hugged you and gave you the time to let it all out, he could feel your heart thumping in your chest and he knew this thing has been building up from quite some time now. You both had your insecurities and he wanted to be there for you the way you have been there for him.

"Princess I just need you to know and understand that I'm not going to leave, I'd always need you more than you could ever need me" you pulled away to look at him as he said that. You didn't know why would a god like him would ever need you but you liked the sound of that, mainly because of the look on his face.

"Come here sweet thing" he cupped your cheeks again to kiss your forehead and then he took you to the bed, perhaps cuddles would make you feel better. For once he was the one being the bigger spoon here, he made you lay down on his chest and you held onto him as tightly as you could.

"I was just watching you and Melissa on the tv or should I say Meloki and it just bothered me alot" you mumbled so he laid you down on the bed and turned towards you so he could look at you while talking, he laid sideways on his arm and used those fingers of his to caress your scalp while the other hand wrapped around waist and you felt them running up and down on your back

"Meloki? What is that? An ailment of some sort?" you chuckled as he said that

"It's just not her.. I kept thinking about all those gorgeous people at the gala and I just wanted to be there with you..but at the same time I know I'd never fit in"

"Not fit in? My sweetheart you'd not only fit in but stand out between those shallow dimwits, they are just a bunch of buffoons anyways" you giggled as he said that.

"You're so cute" you scooted closer to him and placed your head between the crook of his neck, your arm curled around his slender waist,

"Someday we will tell this whole planet of our truth and it would be glorious"

"It will be glorious" you said excitedly

"Are you feeling better?"

"Mmmhmmm now that you're here I'm Okay..are you gonna stay?"

"Absolutely, besides Thor is out galavanting with his own mortal"

You pulled away to look at him as he said that.

"Is she the same girl he fell for when he came here?"

"That would be her"

"Ahhhh that's nice..ohhhh your parents are going to kill you both"

"Not me, I'm no Asgardian any longer" he chuckled so you kissed him again. He was so adorable.

"Ummmm I have to tell you something..my mother is trying to set me up with this doctor guy, he's the son of my stepfather's friend " he pulled away slightly to look at you.

"I don't like the sound of that"

"Trust me, me neither, but he's going to be here for two days so I'm just gonna meet him and show him around the city"

"What happened to the don't see other people pact?" He pouted so you pecked on his lips again.

"I'm not going to see him, I'm just going to be a fancy tour guide"

"Uhhuhh but what if he sweeps you off your feet?"

"He can compete but he's never winning against thisssss right here" you pointed towards his heart so he smiled "Mr Loki there are no men like you"

He chuckled before he got on top of you and kissed you, he hated the idea of you going out with this guy he knew nothing about but he couldn't have stopped you either, your mother wanted you to see him and you couldn't have denied, besides from what he had heard your mother hated him so it wasn't really wise to tell her about you two just yet.

"Lokiiiii" you moaned into his mouth so he hummed.

"I have your shirt on"

"You think I didn't notice?"

"Mmhmmm did you notice that I am not wearing much underneath it?" He stopped kissing you and looked at you intently, of course he noticed, you just had your underwear on but he didn't want to say anything that would make you feel uncomfortable.

"I did"

He leaned into you and kissed you again while you pulled his shirt out of the confinement of his pants before you unbuttoned it slowly, he moaned into your mouth as your fingernails caressed his bare skin,

"It amazes me how you are so unaware of your good looks" you whispered in his ear and he let out a nervous laughter, kissing down from your jawline his lips trailed over your collarbone slowly, every inch of your skin felt tingling with anticipation of what was about to happen or how far you both were going to take this.

He shifted on top of you, situating his knees on either side of your waist to support his weight.

"If you're ever burdened by those tormenting misconceptions regarding yourself again just remember that no matter where I am, your thoughts are all I carry in my head" your eyes teared up as he said that.

"Mmmmhmmm really?"

"I couldn't stop thinking about you little one, i just wanted to come back here and love you like this" you gulped as he said that, your fingers curled around his neck and you pulled him closer to you to kiss him passionately,

He wanted to stay patient but how could he when you touched him and kissed him so desperately, he could feel the heat radiating off your body, he never knew that he'd ever come to crave the feeling of a woman's warm body underneath him, he wanted to get burned by the heat you were radiating, the energy that felt torturous in other situations only gave him pleasure at the moment.

His hands sneaked under the shirt you were wearing and you let out a loud moan as his fingers trailed over your erect nipples,

"Looo..gosh babyyyy" you whined and bit on your lips as he gave them a little squeeze,

"I have thought about this a countless times since we have met" he mumbled softly.

"You did?"

"Mmmhmm especially when we were separated, your thoughts were the only thing keeping me sane at nights, in every possible way" he whispered in your ear before he sucked on your neck, you wrapped your legs around his waist , the feeling of his cock rubbing against your core was almost too much to take, your body felt shaky, you have never been the subject of such eroticism before, you only read about it and saw the sweltering passion in movies but now you knew how it felt to be touched so sensually by man you were actually in love with.

"Gossshhh Loki…oh goddd"

You cried out his name as he gyrated his hips into your core, your hand gripped his bicep to feel a sense of security because even though you were on the bed you felt as if you'd fall down even lower and deeper into the grounds, it felt like a trance that you were afraid to break out of.

He grabbed the collar of your shirt between his fists and ripped them apart in one quick motion, breaking all the buttons at once, the subtle flaunt of the inhumane strength only added to your arousal, the things he could do to you and with you and the things you'd allow him to do to you were infinite in number. You'd do anything for him as long as he'd continue to rub against you like this .

He allowed the shredded fabric to stay on your body but your breasts were visible to him now, his cock had gotten so hard that he feared he'd come almost instantly.

"Norns you're beautiful, so beautiful, it's taking everything in me to not claim you as my own" he whispered so you cupped his cheeks,

"I'm all yours i promise..i promise" he kissed you feverishly before he grabbed your hips and aided them to match his own movements,

"You are mine darling and I'll never let you go, never"

"Yessss godd yess stay with me, be with me, all of you..with me, I need it lo, I need it"

Your voice trembled as you spoke, words barely audible but he heard them when you whispered everything in his ears, the day he had met you he felt so strangely connected to you and with time he had only fallen in love with every little thing about you that made you so completely you.

"Lokiii I'm gonna…oh wowww" you moaned his name and he couldn't take his eyes off your face, the dimly lit room made the moment even more perfect. He could see you, touch you, you were half naked underneath him but there was still a sense of mystery.

"I know, i know love, let go, cum with me"

You didn't need anything else, it worked like a charm, a trigger, him asking you to cum in that deep husky breathy voice of his was the only push you needed, the hold of your legs around him tightened and your body convulsed underneath him, if he wasn't holding onto you so fiercely your body would have thrashed uncontrollably, maybe someday he could watch you do just that..

You lifted your hips up and gyrated against him in the wake of your high, that made him combust too and it was glorious in every way, he had sex a million times before but he had never been so pleased like this, it wasn't the orgasm itself but the woman who was pleasing him beyond belief.

He placed his head down on your breasts to calm down, your fingers scratched his scalp gently, both of your bodies felt utterly spent.

After a few minutes he laid down next to you so he wasn't crushing you underneath his weight. You turned towards him and gave him a smile which he returned immediately.

"So now we are friends who kiss sometimes, don't see other people and do Thattttt" he chuckled as you said that

"Princess at this point it's safe to say that we are friends who are also lovers"

"I love being your lover"

"So do I"

You kissed him lovingly before you got off the bed to clean yourself up but he was too relaxed to even move a muscle so he used a charm to take care of the mess he had caused in his pants, when you came back from the bathroom he was in a fresh pair of pants.

You didn't remember much after that because as soon as you got back to the bed, he spooned into you like a baby and it merely took a minute for you two to fall asleep.

He woke you up around five in the morning because he knew Thor would be there to take him back to the tower and he wanted to spend some time with you before he would leave.

You kissed him again and you kissed him in a manner that would keep him obsessing over it for the rest of the day

"Don't fall in love with this healer"

"And if I do?" You mumbled teasingly

"I would just have to murder him I'm afraid"

You giggled at the response. He did enjoy stabbing bad people. You fixed the collar of his shirt and his hair seemed all poofy so you made him sit down at the edge of the bed while you brushed them with a comb.

"You have the softest hair lo..such a pretty baby you are" he giggled at the comment. God you loved him.

You missed him as soon as he was gone and now you had to worry about meeting this guy after work, your mother had given you his phone number so you called him, you didn't understand why he wasn't the one to call you since he was visiting. Just the phone call was enough of an indication that you weren't going to get along with this man. He sounded arrogant

"I'm sorry I'm late" you apologized as you spotted him at the restaurant, your mom had mailed a picture of him to you so it was easier to recognise.

"It's fine I guess, I'm used to such tardiness" he smiled but you could tell he was annoyed, you didn't miss the sarcasm in his tone.

"Ummm okay actually I don't think I got your name yet, my mom told me everything except your name, I'm y/n by the way" you raised your hand forward so he looked at it for a few seconds before he shook it.

"Hello y/n, my name is Doctor Stephen Strange"

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

Tag list (if you want to be tagged or removed let me know.. also I’m not able to tag some of you, please check your settings)

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[intoanotherworld23]

Pick Your Battles XII

Pairing: Reader x Bradley Bradshaw

Warnings: None

Summary: Bradley broke your heart when he accused you of betraying him, and you haven’t seen or spoken to him since. Until you are both called back to Top Gun to help with a dangerous mission that nobody’s ever attempted before

I do not own any rights to the characters or movie this is just purely for reading entertainment. Hearts, reblogs, and comments are encouraged and appreciated! If you wish to be added to the tag list please let me know! Thank you so much guys and enjoy! XOXO

Part 11

Check out my other works on my Hall Of Hunks

The next day literally dragged on for what felt like days. Both Jake and Bradley constantly looking over at you, but neither one of them saying a word. Of course you didn’t give neither of them so much as a smile.

It wasn’t a good day of training either. Nobody was communicating with each other, and they weren’t acting like a team. Maverick and Admiral Simpson were both disappointed and frustrated. The mission was only a couple weeks away, and everyone still wasn’t learning.

Admiral Simpson was also getting on you about choosing a team leader for this mission. He suggested Jake, but you argued that he would get his entire team killed if he led the mission. It was like you were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Today though you were completely distracted, and your head was in the clouds. Right now you couldn’t think or make any type of decision. You felt like you needed to escape from here.

Ever since that night going on your somewhat date with Jake, and running into Bradley. Only to hear the truth, and both men wanting you to choose them. It was hard and that’s why you decided to go home alone. Bradley being kind enough to drive you home.

You didn’t kiss you didn’t hug. You just said your goodbyes, and laid in bed until it was time to get up. Mind going crazy over everything that’s been happening, and wondering what you should do.

Standing next to Maverick as you watched the pilots strolling in to take their seats. Pete asking you if you were okay, and of course you lied not wanting to burn his ears off with everything that’s been going on.

Admiral Simpson and Solomon walked in with Simpson taking a seat in the back, and Solomon walking up to the podium with a stoic look on his face.

“Good morning pilots.” Warlock greeted everyone. “The mission will be operational earlier than expected. The new shipment will be delivered within about ten days time. As a result your mission has been moved up one week.”

Everyone including Maverick looked nervous hearing this news. It was unexpected and quite honestly terrified the pilots.

“But sir nobody has successfully flown a low level course.” Coyote spoke.

“You’ve been ordered to move on.” He responded complete silence filling the room.

Looking across the room you saw that Bradley was already staring at you. You could tell by the look on his face that he was worried. Instinctively you cracked a smile for him in reassurance. He mimicked you as you turned away to look back at Warlock.

“Captain.” He signaled to Maverick who now stood in his place placing his hands on the podium.

“We have one week left to focus on the most dangerous part of the mission. It’s a pop up strike with a steep dive requiring nothing less than two miracles.” A heavy sigh leaving your lips. “We need to focus on this mission, and you need to listen to every instruction that is given to you.”

Maverick looked to you to speak now making you step forward clearing your throat. Your mouth so dry it was like the Sahara desert.

“Two pairs of F-18s will fly in a welded wing formation.” All eyes now focused on you. “Team work. Precise coordination of these aircraft are essential to this missions success and your survival.”

“As you have read this plant rests between two mountains.” Pointing to the screen behind you showing a simulation of what it’s going to look like. “On the final approach you’ll invert directly into a steep dive. This allows you to maintain the lowest possible altitude, and the only possible attack angle.”

Looking at the pilots expression you could see them all twitching and fidgeting in their seats. They tried to put on brave faces, but you saw the fear behind their eyes.

“Your target is an impact point less than three meters wide. The two seat aircraft will paint the target with a laser bulls eyes. The first pair will breach the reactor by dropping a laser guided bomb on an exposed ventilation hatch. This will create an opening for the second pair.”

“That’s miracle number one.” Maverick interrupted before you could say anything more.

Some shook their heads in disbelief, and others looked around at the other pilots making sure they heard all this correctly. It sounded easier than it was going to be.

“The second team will deliver a kill shot and destroy the target.” You finished as Bradley gave you a encouraging smile.

“That’s miracle number two.” Maverick raised two fingers this time. “If either team misses the target.”

Looking over at Maverick who had a very serious expression.

“The mission is a failure.” Bowing your head down to the thought of them failing or losing their lives because of this mission.

“The mountain is a very steep high- G climb out to avoid hitting this mountain.”

“A steep climb at that speed your pulling at least 8 G’s.” Jake spoke up saying what everyone else was thinking.

“9 minimum.” Maverick responded.

“Has anyone actually ever achieved that?” Jake sounded skeptical.

“I did.” Maverick sounded proud of his achievement.

You remember that day very clearly too. Maverick pushed 10 G’s, and pissed off almost every Admiral that was watching. Laughing to yourself as the cursed mutters in the room, while some of them were chuckling at Mavericks bold action.

“To survive this mission you will pull beyond that. Even if it means bending your air frame.”

Looking over to see Admiral Simpson closing his eyes, and shaking his head at Mavericks words. You knew Simpson wanted this mission to be as clean as possible, but with Mavericks reputation you knew he’d tell them to push their limits.

“You’ll be pulling so hard you’ll weigh close to two thousand pounds. Your skull crushing your spine. Your lungs imploding like an elephant is sitting on your chest. Fighting with everything you have just to keep from blacking out.”

You could feel a lump forming in your throat at the thought of Bradley struggling in the jet. Imaging the worst case scenario. The last thing you would want is for that to happen to him, and Bradley loses control and crashes.

“And this is where you’ll be at your most vulnerable. This is what we’re calling coffin corner.” Bob looked like he was either going to throw up or pass out.

“Assuming you avoid crashing into this mountain you’ll climb straight up into enemy radar while losing all of your air speed.” Everyone now focused on the screen as they showed another video demonstration.

“Within seconds you will be fired upon by enemy SAM’s.” Those were powerful missiles and everyone else knew that too.

This was a mission that couldn’t go wrong. They don’t want to fail, but they also didn’t want to lose any pilots. That’s why they wanted the best of the best. Pilots that they felt could achieve this and survive.

“This is gonna take you and your aircraft to its breaking point.” Mavericks tone was almost like a warning.

“Sir is this even possible?” Natasha spoke up this time.

“The answer to that will be up to the pilot in the box.”

Maverick was speaking to everyone, but his words were meant more for Bradley. The pair stared at each other for a few seconds like they were having some sort of silent conversation. Maverick didn’t want to lose Bradley either, and wanted him to know how serious this was.

“We have created a flight path just like the one for the mission. You will learn this path, you will think about this path even in your sleep.” You said as confidently as you could. “First pair will be Coyote as lead pilot, and Phoenix and Bob second.”

The three pilots nodded as they were dismissed by Maverick. Watching as they were escorted to where they needed to go.

Everyone else left the room to listen in on what was going on. Jake tried to remain in the room as long as he could, but when he saw that Bradley wasn’t moving he gave up, and headed towards the door. Bradley remained in his seat as you stood there, and waited until the room was empty.

Nothing was said between the two of you. Picking at the skin around your nails out of habit. While Bradley just watched you curiously like he wanted you to speak first. Both of you had so much to say, but didn’t know where to start.

“How are you?” Bradley asked as he stood up.

“As good as one can be.” Giving him a pathetic smile. “You?”

Not realizing that the two of you were each stepping towards the other closer and closer. Like some type of magnetic force was pulling you to him.

“As good as one can be.” Repeating your words making you smile.

“How you feeling after that little speech?” Crossing your arms across your chest as you two now stood practically in front of the other.

“Nervous as hell.” Answering honestly as he wiped the palms of his hands against his pants. “Do you think we can honestly pull this off?”

“Yeah I think with the right pilots we can.” Bradley actually valued your opinion on certain things.

“Who do you think should be leading this mission?” It was a question you were hoping to avoid with him.

“Bradley come on.” Scoffing as you turned away from him.

“No seriously I want to hear who you think should be leading this mission.” Softly grabbing your hand so you looked back at him.

“Honestly.” Taking a deep breath before you answered. “None of you.”

That answer seemed to shock Bradley as he didn’t say anything and just looked at your face. It was the honest truth, and quite frankly you didn’t want him leading the mission anyway. He meant too much for you to lose.

“None of you are really ready for this mission, and they need someone who can lead it successfully.” Shrugging your shoulders at him as you further explained.

“You’re right.” Finally speaking. “You’re totally right.”

“It’s not that I don’t think you can’t do it.”

“I know what you mean. It’s what you and Maverick have been telling me from the start.” Hearing him mention Mavericks name surprised given how he felt about him. “I can’t play it safe.”

“You’re a good pilot Bradley.” Placing a hand on his shoulder as he weakly smiled.

“So are you.” Taking your hand from his shoulder and holding it in his hand his thumb tenderly rubbing the skin back and forth.

Bradley’s gaze lingering on your face as you both smiled at each other with adoration. Neither one of you doing or saying anything, but just enjoying each others presence. It was like a roller coaster with you two. Constant ups and downs, and you didn’t know when it was going to end.

“We should probably be there with everyone else.” You spoke up as you dropped your hand from his.

“Yeah right.” He stuttered as you walked in front of him Bradley placing a soft touch on your back as he followed right behind you.

Once you got into the room everyone looked stressed and terrified. Some of them had their head in their hands, and others mouths open wide. You and Bradley looked at each other confused to what was going on. Whatever happened it wasn’t good.

“Where the hell have you guys been?” Payback exclaimed everyone turning towards you both. “You guys just missed it.”

“What happened?” Asking as you walked away from Bradley.

“Coyote went into G lock and Phoenix and Bob crashed.” It was like the air left your lungs and all you heard was crash.

“What?” Bradley shouted in disbelief.

You could hear muffled voices but you had no idea what they were saying. There was a ringing in your ear as you stood there like a deer caught in the headlights.

Staring at him wide eyed saying nothing your legs moved before your mouth could say anything. Running out of the room as quickly as you could before you burst into tears. Those same feelings and fear were coming back, and you couldn’t handle something like this happening to you again.

Running into an empty room as you sat down trying to catch your breath. Your breathing was shallow and erratic, and you felt that same anxiety before you had a panic attack. The room was getting smaller, and it was getting much harder to breathe. Like at any moment you could burst into tears.

Bradley quickly followed behind you hearing you as he ran down the hall, and quickly came into the room. The sight before him nearly broke his heart.

He took one look at you, and sat right next to you. An arm wrapped around you while he held your hands. Leaning your head against his shoulder as he tried to help control you. Whispering comforting things in your ear.

“It’s okay just breathe in through your nose, and out of your mouth.” His chin resting on top of your head. “Breathe with me baby.”

Trying to get you to follow his breathing patterns in a slow and easy pace. Hoping that his calm presence would help, and would make you feel better. He hated to see you like this, and wishes he could take all this pain you felt away from you.

“That’s it. Just breathe like that for me.” He whispered once he felt your breathing slowing down. “That’s a good girl.”

Closing your eyes as you suddenly felt exhausted. Pressing yourself deeper into Bradley’s body loving how warm and safe he felt. Bradley wasn’t going to let you go either. He wanted to hold you in his arms for as long as he could.

“Better?” He asked looking at your face.

“Yeah. Thank you.” Weakly smiling at him as you pressed your face into his shoulder. “It’s been so long since that’s happened.”

“I understand.”

The doors came bursting open as a worried Maverick came into the room. Looking at the way Bradley was holding you and seeing the expression you had on your face he knew what happened.

“Are they okay?” Bradley asked.

“There gonna keep them both in the hospital over night for observation. But there gonna be okay.” A sigh of relief left your lips hearing that news.

“That’s good.” He responded not moving an inch.

“It was a close one.” Mavericks voice cracking at the thought of how much worse it could’ve been.

“I’ve never lost a wingman.”

“You’re lucky. Fly long enough and it’ll happen. There will be others.”

“Easy for you to say.” Bradley letting go of you to stand up now. “No wife. No kids. Nobody to mourn you when you burn in.”

“Bradley.” Whispering for him to stop knowing this wasn’t the time or place.

“Go home.” Maverick responded not really in the mood to have this discussion. “Just get some sleep.”

“Why did you pull my papers at the academy?” Bradley asked Maverick before he could walk out the door. “Why did you stand in my way?”

“You weren’t ready.” Maverick kept his voice low and soft.

“Ready for what? To fly like you.” Bradley was raising his voice as he stood face to face with Maverick now.

“No ready to forget the books and trust your instincts. Don’t think just do. You think up there your dead. Believe me.”

“Well my dad believed in you.” Bradley said with such malice it even shocked you. “I’m not gonna make the same mistake.”

As the two of them stared at each other you could tell Maverick was affected by his words. Standing up this time as you wanted to say something, but it was between the two of them. They needed to be work this out themselves.

Before anything else could be spoke the door opened, and Admiral Solomon and Simpson were standing there with weird looks on their faces. Thinking they were there to lecture Maverick, but there focus was on you.

“Y/N.” Warlock waving you over both Maverick and Bradley watching you.

“What is it?” Asking when they shut the door behind you.

“Your fathers gone.”

[mollywog]

A list of people Katniss Prim’s-the-only-person-in-the-world-I'm-certain-I-love Everdeen loves (in the order mentioned in the text)

Prim

How could I leave Prim, who is the only person in the world I'm certain I love?

Rue

Sing. My throat is tight with tears, hoarse from smoke and fatigue. But if this is Prim's, I mean, Rue's last request, I have to at least try. The song that comes to me is a simple lullaby, one we sing fretful, hungry babies to sleep with. It's old, very old I think. Made up long ago in our hills. What my music teacher calls a mountain air. But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece of time we call today.

[proceeds to sing a song]

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.

Peeta

It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the time to run away to the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin.

But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch?

And now I know. It's because you have no choice.

* There are other instances- just sighting the first

Haymitch

I turn and see them all waiting in a big chamber at the end of the hall - Effie, Haymitch, and Cinna. My feet take off without hesitation. Maybe a victor should show more restraint, more superiority, especially when she knows this will be on tape, but I don't care. I run for them and surprise even myself when I launch into Haymitch's arms first. When he whispers in my ear, "Nice job, sweetheart," it doesn't sound sarcastic.

Additional Notes:

Katniss doesn’t talk about feeling a sense of debt to Haymitch, even though he continually helps keep her alive. This feels significant, and I choose to believe it’s because she considers him family

Haymitch is included in the running away from D12 scheme because she can’t leave him

After the bombing in D13 and failed propo she only wants to be comforted by Haymitch “because he loves Peeta, too.”

Gale

"I've heard worse," she says. "You've seen how people are, when someone they love is in pain."

Someone they love. The words numb my tongue as if it's been packed in snow coat.

Of course, I love Gale. But what kind of love does she mean? What do I mean when I say Ilove Gale? I don't know. I did kiss him last night, in a moment when my emotions were running so high. But I'm sure he doesn't remember it. Does he? I hope not. If he does, everything will just get more complicated and I really can't think about kissing when I've got a rebellion to incite. I give my head a little shake to clear it.

Madge

I nod and go straight to my room. I sit on the bed, knowing I will never write those letters. They will be like the speech I tried to write to honor Rue and Thresh in District 11. Things seemed clear in my head and even when I talked before the crowd, but the words never came out of the pen right. Besides, they were meant to go with embraces and kisses and a stroke of Prim's hair, a caress of Gale's face, a squeeze of Madge's hand. They cannot be delivered with a wooden box containing my cold, stiff body.

Too heartsick to cry, all I want is to curl up on the bed and sleep until we arrive in the Capitol tomorrow morning. But I have a mission. No, it's more than a mission. It's my dying wish. Keep Peeta alive. And as unlikely as it seems that I can achieve it in the face of the Capitol's anger, it's important that I be at the top of my game. This won't happen if I'm mourning for everyone I love back home. Let them go, I tell myself. Say good-bye and forget them. I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return.

Honorable Mention

(She at minimum cares about and feels responsible for these people - love could be implied.)

Mrs. Everdeen - Katniss loves Prim, Prim loves their mother, Katniss at minimum feels responsible for her mother if only for her sisters sake

The Hawthornes - She provided for their family from the woods after Gale starts work in the mines. They are included as part of her escape plan in CF. She gets Hazelle the job working for Haymitch when times are lean.

Finnick and Johanna - Come on! She doesn’t say as much, but she loves them, right?

District 12 - she altered the Lady the Goat story to protect people back home. Also Greasy Sae.

Cinna

Effie

Please add your thoughts!

* Inspired by this question

[black-arcana]

LACUNA COIL Announces 'Sleepless Empire' Album, Shares New Single 'Oxygen'

Italian metal titans LACUNA COIL will release their tenth studio album, "Sleepless Empire" — their first collection of new songs since 2019's "Black Anima" — on February 14th, 2025 via Century Media Records. The official music video for the LP's latest single, "Oxygen", filmed in Latina and directed by Daniele Tofani, that shows singer Cristina Scabbia in the lead role, will make its online debut today at 9 a.m. PDT / 12 p.m. (noon) EDT.

Scabbia commented on the track and her experience filming the video: "'Oxygen' is a powerful exploration of emotional struggle and inner conflict. The lyrics convey a sense of drowning in a toxic environment, both literally (in the video) and metaphorically, where attempts at salvation, represented by 'oxygen' are somehow futile. This song encapsulates the feeling of struggling to break free from what holds us down, when the journey is filled with difficulty. It's a raw anthem of vulnerability, resilience, and the courage to face what seems insurmountable. Having to stay in the water for so many hours during the video shoot was cathartic for me, the realization that the pleasant sensation of floating could in an instant become dangerous and deadly if I wasn't careful was very fitting with the song's theme."

Inspiration to create "Sleepless Empire" came during the sessions for "Comalies XX" (2022),the acclaimed remake of LACUNA COIL's breakthrough third record "Comalies". Writing and recording took place in northern Italy between Milano (the band's hometown) and Como, where SPVN Studios are located. As with their previous albums, production was done in house with Marco "Maki" Coti Zelati at the helm, and artwork was hand curated by the talented Italian artist Roberto Toderico. Two other very special talents enrich the album, namely the guest vocalists: LAMB OF GOD's Randy Blythe on the song "Hosting The Shadow" and NEW YEARS DAY's Ash Costello on "In The Mean Time".

As a token of the band's love for the gaming world (which we've seen in past endeavors such as their card game "Horns Up" and their collaboration with Zombicide for which they wrote the track "Never Dawn"),the band have created an oracle "game" to be played with custom made dice available only in the box set version of "Sleepless Empire".

The new album is comprised of 11 tracks; each one is a richly textured soundtrack to a specific time and place. With "Sleepless Empire", that place is dark, cinematic, and unmistakably true to the unique characteristics that have given LACUNA COIL such a celebrated entry in the annals of heavy music.

The band shares: "'Sleepless Empire' captures, through our eyes, the chaos of a generation trapped in a digital world that never stops, where social media consumes identity and every day pushes us one step closer to becoming soulless zombies. We find ourselves in between, having witnessed a full analogic world and the modern one, confronting the evolution and searching for a true meaning of it all. Throughout every song, the journey is an undercurrent of rebellion, a desperate cry to reclaim oneself in an era that seems to have lost its sense of time and reality."

"Sleepless Empire" track listing. 01. The Siege. 02. Oxygen. 03. Scarecrow. 04. Gravity. 05. I Wish You Were Dead. 06. Hosting The Shadow (feat. Randy Blythe). 07. In Nomine Patris. 08. Sleepless Empire. 09. Sleep Paralysis. 10. In The Mean Time (feat. Ash Costello). 11. Never Dawn

Later this month, LACUNA COIL will embark on a tour of U.K. and Ireland with Finland's BLIND CHANNEL. Tickets are available here.

LACUNA COIL played its first concert with the band's new touring guitarist — whose name has not yet been disclosed — on August 4 at the Rockstadt Extreme Fest in Râșnov, Romania.

This past June, LACUNA COIL announced the departure of guitarist Diego Cavallotti.

Cavallotti, who joined LACUNA COIL in 2016, initially as a fill-in guitarist following the exit of Marco "Maus" Biazzi, later said in a social media post that "this decision is not the result of my dissatisfaction or desire to explore new opportunities."

When LACUNA COIL announced Cavallotti's departure on June 17, the band wrote in a statement: "As we step into a new cycle, writing and recording our next album, we are parting ways with Diego 'DD' Cavallotti. We thank him for the many unforgettable moments shared over the years and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours."

All future live plans remain unchanged and the new songs are taking form, we can't wait to share them with our fans."

LACUNA COIL recently completed the "Ignite The Fire" U.S. tour with support from NEW YEARS DAY and OCEANS OF SLUMBER.

"Comalies XX" was made available on October 14, 2022 via Century Media Records.

LACUNA COIL celebrated the 20th anniversary of "Comalies", by performing it in its entirety at a one-night-only concert on October 15, 2022 at Fabrique in Milano.

"Comalies" was originally released on October 29, 2002 through Century Media Records. The LP, which featured the band's breakthrough single "Heaven's A Lie", has reportedly gone on to sell over 300,000 copies in the United States alone.

Photo credit: Cunene

[lovelyladyabsinthewrites]

Love Song for a Vampire Pt. 32

Pairing(s): Edward Cullen x Wolf!Reader, Jacob Black x OC!Witch

Warnings:none

Words:2144

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Part 6  Part 7  Part 8  Part 9  Part 10  Part 11  Part 12  Part 13  Part 14  Part 15  Part 16  Part 17  Part 18  Part 19  Part 20  Part 21  Part 22  Part 23  Part 24  Part 25  Part 26  Part 27  Part 28  Part 29  Part 30  Part 31  Part 33  Part 34  Part 35  Part 36  Part 37  Part 38  Part 39  Part 40(series finale) 

Bright and early, you leave your house to check on Evita. Sam had told you making just one of those wards had drained her of all energy. Just one. And there was so many more she needed to make in order to protect the borders of La Push and Forks.

Evita sat out on Sam’s front porch, a mug in her hands that had ribbons of rising steam trailing from it. Her face was pale, too pale opposed to her usual tan complexion. But her eyes when they flick to you are still alive and observant. A hair band pushed away her tightly wound curls to show off the pale pink scars on her face. “Good morning (y/n).”

“Good morning. How are you feeling?” You ask and sit on the front steps, angling your body toward her since there was only one chair on the porch.

She sighs and leans back, her shoulders sagging. “It’s taking a lot longer to recover my energy. I was hoping I’d be able to make another ward today, but I don’t think I’ll be up for it.”

“Sam said you had a friend coming.”

With a hum, she nods. “Yes. But I don’t know when he’ll be here. He’s constantly on the move. Most of the time he doesn’t have cellular service.” Her fingers tap against her mug. “I didn’t know it would take that much out of me. I’m not the strongest witch out there, but I’m fairly competent. I’ve seen my mother make wards before but mainly for our home. Nothing for a large reach of land. Times like these I wish she was here or even Leti. Leti was the most talented of our whole family. That’s why Xiomara saw her as a threat.”

She really hadn’t had time to mourn her sister. Now she was far away from any kind of family and help. You admire her tenacity. How strong she was even though Evita couldn’t have been much older than you. You think of your parents and how relieved they were when they saw you last night. Constantly making them worry about your wellbeing. Not even being with Edward had soothed them. Was Evita’s mom equally worried about her young daughter all alone?

”By the way,” Evita takes a sip from her mug before she proceeds “who was that girl yesterday? I don’t think I was introduced to her before.”

You knew who she meant. “That was Bella Swan.”

One thick eyebrow arches in intrigue. “TheBella Swan?”

“The one and only.”

You catch the space of skin between her brows crease. “Interesting. In a room crowded with wolves, I sensed her above them all.”

“What do you mean?”

Evita pauses for a few breaths to mull her words over in her head. “Hmmm, I should I put this. . . People, whether they be human or something else all have an aura. In the state that overcomes me when I’m performing my craft, my ability to see them intensifies. And you said Edward had never been able to read her thoughts?”

Affirmatively you nod wondering what this was leading to.

“That kind of aura,well, many magic welders have one just like her’s.”

“You’re saying Bella is a witch?”

“She’d have to practice at it, but yes she does have the capability of being a witch.” Her drink depleted, Evita sets it down next to one of the legs of the deck chair. Fixedly she looks at you, shooting you unspoken words that you read loud and clear.

Pursing your lips, you lean back against the stair rail. “Can she learn fast?”

“Normally I would say no.” Admits Evita. “But it’s not that often a human is naturally immune to a vampire’s power.” Her fingers tighten around a small jar that hung off her neck, caged in silver wire and strung with rope. You remember her making it. It protected her thoughts from Edward and other prying minds. She'd made it when she found out Edward could read everyone's thoughts except for Bella's and now your own.

Letting out a small sigh, Evita picks her mug back up and stands. You follow suit. "I need to get my strength back as soon as possible." She taps the mug. "This tea helps. I've already had three cups of it."

"Is there anything the pack can do in the meantime?" You ask her.

Evita's face glows and with her free hand, she holds your hand for a moment. "Spend time with your vampire now that you have him. Take this opportunity to bond before chaos ensues."

While she had spoken lightly as it was meant to cheer you, you couldn't help the shadow of worry cast over you at her last words. Foreboding of times to come.

Evita was to wait for her friend to arrive before she even entertained the idea of training Bella. She was no teacher and wouldn't even know where to begin with such a daunting task. She said his name was Dieufel and he was older than Letizia by three years. Still relatively young, but Dieufel was extremely talented and had traveled around the world to gain knowledge of all the known magicks out there. Dieufel called Haiti his home and had been there the last time Evita heard from him. That was a while ago.

While Dieufel wasn't the only magic wielder Evita knew, she was much more familiar with him since Letizia had gone on a few trips with him through the years of their acquaintanceship. "After yesterday though, I realize we'll need more people on deck to make the other wards."

“We’ll get them. Carlisle and Jasper are already on the road to get more vampires on our side.” You assure her. “And Edward texted me this morning that Alice also left last night too.”

“I hope they find success.” Evita smiles.

You left so Evita could get more rest and head back down the road. When you got home, you planned on suggesting a day for your date. Even thinking about it made you smile like a fool. While you wished you could go out on your first date right then and there, you couldn’t. You had to finish your summer school work before you academically fail even more. Not even werewolves could escape school.

Passing by the Black house, you notice Bella’s car pulling into the gravel driveway. This was the most you’d ever seen of Bella. Even when the vampires and wolves had been training together.

She hops out of the driver’s side and waves to you.

You wave back and anxiously eye Jacob’s garage where he always was when wolf duties didn’t pull him away.

Did Jacob tell her about imprinting on Evita? You wish you’d gone to check on him first before Evita. Internally you curse yourself for being a bad friend.

“You and Jake hanging out today?” You ask her, doing your best to be polite.

“Actually I wanted to see how Evita was doing.” She rubs anxiously at her arm despite the weather not being chilly at all. “Yesterday was really intense.”

“I think Evita would appreciate it.” You smile. Would Bella be happy about potentially being a witch? It could be a burden for her, something else to remind her of how her life has been tossed around by the world Edward and you live in. She would never have been privy to it prior to her life in Forks. There had been no fear of actual vampires walking on the same streets she walked. “I just came back from there. I think she wanted to talk to you too.”

Relief smoothed out the nervous lines on her face and she really smiles.

It was unwise though for Jacob to be anywhere near Evita right now. Evita didn’t need another situation on her plate.

You open your mouth, prepared to offer to take her to Sam’s yourself, when Jacob pops out of the garage with his house keys in his hands. He froze when he finds you there standing right next to Bella. Being friends for over a decade, you knew each of Jacob’s facial expressions and what they meant. His was one of guilt. You didn’t want to admonish him in front of Bella in case he hadn’t told her yet. But you definitely didn’t want him to go to Sam’s, especially if the alpha wasn’t their to monitor him and Evita.

“You guys might have to postpone your visit though. Evita’s still pretty tired and was going back to sleep when I left.” You smoothly explain, regretting the lie when you saw Bella’s look of disappointment.

“Oh, okay. Guess we’ll do a rain check.” Bella nonetheless smiles at you and is about to go back to her car when Jacob cut in.

“It’ll only be for a few minutes.”

Uh oh. You were wondering when his adolescent wolf brain would kick in. “She was pretty exhausted Jake. Plus Sam’s not there right now.”

You were getting in the way of him and his mate and his stupid testosterone was making him act irrationally.

Jacob’s jaw ticked.

Overly aware of Bella being so close to him, you slowly side step closer to her in case he did explode. She didn’t know what was going on; why Jacob had suddenly turned feral.

“She’s okay Jake.” You don’t pull your eyes away from his. “Everything’s fine. Let her sleep. It’s no use going if she’s sleeping.”

You nudge Bella’s arm, indicating for her to shift behind you and start to slowly move to her car.

Don’t do anything stupid you idiot. You think to yourself, unable to shout it at him through pack telepathy.

“(y/n). . .” Bella whispers at your back. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him.” Well, if he wasn’t going to tell her now then you’d have to. “He’s just imprinted on Evita is all and is acting like a stupid male wolf.”

You saying it out loud snapped him of whatever stupor he had so quickly plummeted in.

“On Evita?” Bella breathes out shakily.

“Yes. And he’s acting irrationally because he doesn’t know how to deal with it.” You were tired of keeping the poor human in the dark. “Because he always wanted to imprint on you, Bella. But we don’t get the choice in that and we have to live with it and accommodate.”

Bella addresses Jacob “Is that why you didn’t tell me sooner? How long have you known?”

He glares at you for revealing everything to Bella when he wasn't ready. "Since the first day she got here."

"She doesn't know yet. It's best for her right now to focus on getting the wards up for protection. She doesn't need this imprinting mess impeding on her work." You remind him. "If you act like this in front of her, she'll definitely know something's up. So it's best if Jacob just stays away for the time being."

Now Bella knew Jacob had used her just to see Evita.

Chancing turning away from Jacob, you say to Bella in a softer tone "Evita really does want to meet you though. She said. . . She said you might be helpful to her."

The hurt on her face stalled for a moment. "Really?"

You nod. "If you feel like you need a wolf chaperone to go to Sam's, then I'd be happy to accompany you next time." While Bella hadn't shown any romantic attachment to Jacob (that you'd seen at least), you knew it might hurt losing another close person to imprinting.

You'd give her credit though as she took a deep breath and nods. "Thanks (y/n). I think I'll just go home for now. But can you call me tomorrow if Evita is ready?"

"Of course."

You and Jacob watch as she hastily drove off. Immediately Jacob verbally tore into you. Condemning you for telling her something that wasn't for you to tell. The news of his imprinting was something he should have announced when he was ready. But it was clear keeping this from Bella was the wrong choice. And you used that fact to snap back. He'd been the one who was inconsiderate to Bella's feelings. Of course this would be tough to tell her regardless.

By the end of it, both of you were trembling, your wolf threatening to come to the surface and snap actual deadly teeth against someone who had been one of your closest friends. For fear of an actual fight breaking out, you storm off to your house even though you wanted to go back and tussle with Jacob. You remind yourself how you were when you first imprinted on Edward. Such a confusing time but you'd found isolation the best way to come to terms with your new reality. Perhaps that was what Jacob needed too.

TAGLIST: @saltedcoffeescotch , @dangerouslittlefairy , @burn-crash-rqmance , @casedoina , @avadakadabra93 , @daryldixonstorm , @blue-aconite , @xanniestired666 , @esposadomd, @godinho11 , @arin-swear-rose , @alexizodd , @melaninsugarbaby , @lyeatoalinatoheaven , @ronwownsme , @itsmytimetoodream , @afro-hispwriter , @mutandis-extremis993 , @hxgemxscles , @nightly-polaris , @corrodedcoffins-slut , @ellesalazar , @itgetzweird08 , @crybabyatthediscooffandoms , @sassyandclassyx , @scarlet2007 , @theroyalbrownbarbie , @jennyamanda8 , @stevenandmarcslove , @biancaindaeyo , @loversjoy , @turningtoclown , @vixorell , @xxthackerybinxxx , @daredevilonmyheels , @dumbbitch-juice , @southern-bell-give-hell , @nat-the-gemini , @imdoingathingmom , @emmettcullenswife , @yoong1c0re , @daddykylokenobi , @minjix , @magical-spit , @krismdavis​ 

[freyjawriter24]

AO3 is down, so I'll have to post this there later and backdate it, but...

Today's 10th July, which means there's only 18 days left until Season 2 of Good Omens!

To commemorate this momentus point in the @gomenseveryday countdown, please enjoy the little fic below the cut...

August 2008: 11 years until Armageddon

Aziraphale was trying desperately not to think about it too much. He was failing, of course. But really, how could he be expected to just forget? This was, quite literally, the end of the world. And even if it was still eleven years away, well, that really wasn't long at all, if you thought about it. Which, despite his best efforts, Aziraphale certainly was.

He'd tried putting on some music to distract himself, but that had failed dismally, too. What a Wonderful World, Louis sang, and the angel couldn't help but picture it as a mourning song, covering everything Aziraphale would be heartbroken to lose when the war destroyed it all.

He'd quickly changed the record, but for some reason the next, usually upbeat track suddenly sounded sinister.

Everyday it's a-gettin' closer,

Goin' faster than a roller coaster...

Oh dear. Eleven years really wasn't much at all, was it? He wished Crowley were here. Why had he only agreed to meet with him the following morning? That was hours away. And in the meantime, he had to sit with memories of destruction and the echo of Buddy's words circling around in his head.

Everyday it's a-gettin' closer...

August 2009: 10 years until the Apocalypse

A decade left, now. Only a decade. Crowley had slept through more than one of those by accident, and now it was all the time they had remaining until either the Earth was annihilated or they, impossibly, miraculously, succeeded. Ten years.

You wouldn't think it, looking at him. Warlock Dowling, the Antichrist. It didn't feel real, watching the rise and fall of his chest as he slept. He was still so small. One year old, and so much potential held within him. He looked like any other human child.

Still, ten years. Just a drop in the ocean in Crowley's lifetime, but for a human – a human child in particular – that was aeons. They had time. Time to guide him, time to encourage him, time to carefully balance the good and bad impulses in him so that Hell would fail and Heaven would be denied their war. They could do this. They still had time.

August 2010: 9 years until the End of the World

"It's admirable, really," Michael mused, only half sincere.

"Naïve, is what it is," Gabriel grumbled. "And now we're getting yearly check-ins, as if anything at all is going to change."

Michael nodded sympathetically, and shuffled some paperwork on her desk. She wouldn't have minded Aziraphale's visits really – it often made for an entertaining change of pace, watching him attempt to make his busywork sound important – except that they always seemed to leave Gabriel in a bad mood.

"Well, at least you've got less than a decade left of that to go."

"Yes!" Gabriel said, brightening. "Only nine years left, and then war. What a delightful thought."

Michael smiled. "Glorious indeed."

August 2011: 8 years until the End Times

"I don't get it," Beelzebub muttered.

"He always did like going above and beyond," Dagon reasoned.

"Yeah, but yearly check-ins? It's just pointless. We know the child is going to be evil, he's the Antichrist, for Satan's sake. We don't need constant updates just to state the obvious. Certainly not every year."

Dagon shrugged. "I think he just likes showing off. Fair enough, really. He's been doing some outstanding work up there. It's only demonic that he come and gloat." The Lord of the Files rifled through a damp-looking cabinet, and pulled out a mouldy-looking folder. "Have you seen what he did with the global economy the other year? I'm thinking of sending him another commendation for that."

Beelzebub hadn't, but didn't want to let on in case Dagon launched into an explanation. "Why doesn't he come and give us presentations on that, then, rather than some snivelling child?"

Dagon raised an eyebrow. "Because you'd hate that too, and understand it even less. He's not stupid. Don't you remember the M25?"

Beelzebub groaned. "Okay, yeah, fair enough." There was silence for a moment, broken only by the steady drip of yet another broken pipe. Then: "Do you trust him, though?"

Dagon snorted. "No. Of course not."

"Good. Just checking."

"Like I said, he's doing it for his own benefit, not ours. Self-obsessed little prick, prancing his pet project in front of us every year. But at least it's only for another handful."

"Mmm. Suppose so."

Beelzebub looked gloomily into a corner, lost in thought.

Dagon sighed and slammed the filing cabinet shut. "Want to go torture someone for a bit?"

"Fuck yes. I thought you'd never ask."

August 2012: 7 years until the Destruction of Earth.

Everyone was so happy this year. London was buzzing with the energy of it all, the weather seemed determined to echo the mood, and Warlock was picking up on the collective indulgence in the simple joy of living.

You wouldn't think there was only seven years left of all this.

They took him to the Olympic Stadium, and the O2, and the Velodrome, even though he was probably still too young to understand all the rules and nuances of the sports they were watching. He loved clapping and cheering, though, and would do so regardless of who won, calling out with pride when Kenya got gold, when France did, when China did.

Thaddeus was getting more and more red in the face with each passing win for another country, but Nanny Ashtoreth's sharp gaze stopped him from doing anything about it. She'd had the forethought to warn him in advance that there would be no stifling of Warlock's joy this summer, as he was far too young to be trying to understand the nuances of the geopolitical landscape his father occupied.

Harriet sat fairly quietly the whole time, trying not to look bored, and clapping politely whenever either the USA or UK did well.

When it came to his birthday towards the end of the month, Warlock's parents got him a bike. A simple gesture, but one surprisingly aware of their son's interests.

Nanny carefully fitted a pair of stabilisers to it, and Brother Francis gifted Warlock a set of knee pads and elbow pads, alongside a helmet printed with an illustration of grass and ladybirds.

Warlock learned quickly, and took great joy in shouting out garbled imitations of Olympic commentary as he cycled around the garden.

"And Warlock Dowling cwruches his enemies under his heel, shooting stwaight into first place and winning five hundred gold medals for Team GB. And, uh, America."

Nanny watched with pride, and ignored the flutter of nerves that whispered that she might be doing a better job at influencing the child than her counterpart, and all that would mean.

August 2013: 6 years until the start of the Second Angelic War

Brother Francis tried not to think too hard about it all while he neatened up the flowerbeds for the garden party that afternoon. Warlock was turning five, and miraculously the weather had speckled the garden with enough rain overnight to keep everything looking green and vibrant without threatening any ruination to the outdoor celebration that was to come.

Five years old. Six years left.

He tried not to think about flaming swords and burning wings. Tried not to consider what might become of this garden in a few short years if they failed. Tried not to imagine what would happen to the Antichrist himself if he accepted all his inborn power.

"Brovver Francis!" came a high-pitched call, and the gardener turned to see Warlock – still tiny, really, barely more than a toddler – running across the grass towards him, Nanny following protectively just behind.

"Hello young Master Warlock. And happiest of birthdays to you! How old are you now?"

"Four," Warlock said, a little uncertainly.

"Ah, you were four, weren't you my little Prince of Darkness," Nanny said, crouching down. "But today is your birthday, and that means you get to add one year to your age! So how old are you now?"

"Five!" Warlock said brightly.

"Yes, you clever little cherub!" Brother Francis beamed.

Cherub? Nanny mouthed over Warlock's head.

Francis raised his eyebrows and shrugged slightly. Ashtoreth rolled her eyes.

"Almost halfway to conquering the world, aren't you, my little charcoal dove?"

The gardener gave Nanny a look then, too, but she just smiled, a touch wickedly.

"Come on then, Warlock, let's let Brother Francis finish his work so everything's ready for your party."

"Okay Nanny! Bye Brovver Francis!"

"Goodbye, Warlock!"

Only six years left.

August 2014: 5 years until the End of Humanity

Warlock was turning six this year. He was very excited.

Six was bigger than five, and four, and three, and two, and one. It was much bigger than zero. Not quite as big as seven, true, but six was a very good number. It did lots of clever things with factors and division, which Warlock liked, and it had a special sort of meaning when three of them were next to each other, which Nanny liked. And three was half of six, too, so even better. Warlock liked maths a lot.

Six was also over halfway to eleven, which Nanny said was going to be important. That was when he'd come into his powers and rule the world. Mummy said it was when he'd go to big school, too, so maybe that was what Nanny meant. But either way, he was over halfway there now. Six was a very good number.

August 2015: 4 years until the Events of Revelations Come to Pass

Warlock had been looking forward to his birthday, as usual, until he'd learnt from his father that seven-year-olds don't have nannies, they have tutors, and that meant Ashtoreth would be leaving him soon. The child was heartbroken, and even Nanny couldn't console him for several days.

He seemed to cheer up a bit, though, when he met the first of his two new tutors – Mr Harrison, it appeared to Thaddeus and Harriet, was exactly the sort of no-nonsense teacher that little Warlock needed to get over his childish attachment to his Nanny. Warlock looked up at his new tutor in awe, and chose not to suggest otherwise to his parents.

The changeover day was to be his birthday, when neither Nanny nor tutors would be required, and it thus marked a turning point in young Warlock's life. But he knew he would be safe. Growing up wasn't all that scary when you had trusted people there to protect you. And, as it turned out, Mr Cortese looked rather familiar too. Maybe the future was going to be okay after all.

August 2016: 3 years until the End of Days

"Maths! Why did it have to be maths?"

"I don't know. I can't imagine where he gets it from."

"Makes no sense at all."

Warlock was thriving in his lessons, but that was the one thing Mr Harrison really couldn't get over. Maths.

"I mean, if it had been anything else..."

"Well, perhaps it's our fault. We really should have learnt enough by now to keep up with him on it."

"Yes, but..." Mr Harrison spluttered for a moment, unable to articulate his thoughts. "It's maths."

"Point taken."

The only maths Mr Harrison was capable of doing at the moment was subtraction. Specifically, counting down from eleven. And he was getting shockingly close to zero now...

August 2017: 2 years until the Day of Reckoning

Mr Cortese was getting rather into this teaching lark. He hadn't done much of it for centuries, but the knack hadn't left him, and he was rather enjoying things. Pity about the maths, but he was less distraught about that than his counterpart.

He just had to remember that this wasn't forever. It was a temporary measure, designed to prevent the end of the human race and all life on earth.

He didn't like reminding himself of that. But needs must. He shouldn't lose sight of the goal.

Not that Buddy was letting him forget any time soon.

August 2018: 1 year until Judgement Day

The tutors both got Warlock's birthday off, and so Crowley and Aziraphale were holed up in the bookshop, celebrating dismally the one-year-left anniversary.

"It will be fine, won't it?"

"We've done all we can."

"Not quite yet. Still a year left."

"Yes. A year."

They sat in silence for a long while. Well, the outside world was silent – Aziraphale could still hear the echoes of an earworm he'd had for the last decade, insistent and unrelenting. He began to tap his foot absentmindedly.

"What's that you've got there, angel?" Crowley asked after a few moments.

"Hmm?"

"What's in your head? You're tapping."

"Oh. Yes." He sighed. "Buddy Holly."

"...Buddy Holly?"

The angel sighed again, then got up and put the offending record on. The upbeat music filled the bookshop, and the demon winced.

"Ah. Buddy Holly."

Everyday it's a-gettin' closer...

August 2019: Adam Young's 11th Birthday

Adam opened his eyes. Yes. Today was the day. Eleven years old. He he grinned up at the ceiling, then scrambled out of bed, still grinning, and headed downstairs.

Today was going to be a brilliant day.

[ananiel]

His cruel angel

Moriarty the patriot x reader

Tw :hurt/comfort, death, slight Gore a little bit of toxic relationship but happy end

William james moriarty x reader

Sorry for bad english.

The manor was quiet. Moran and Bond weren't arguring, Louis was doing his chores. Everyone seemed busy.

William being the busies. He looked at the clock a few Times and noted that his wife, Reader, hadn't visited him in a few hours. If he remembers so corectly, he hadn't seen her since he woke up. William usually, if he sleep that is, wakes up before reader does.

He knew that her mother, who was traveling the world as a circus ring master with only her little brother, since reader remained in London with William, should've sent a letter today.

Reader was surely waiting for it to appear.

Yes, that was it.

She will come at any moment now.

She was just waiting for a letter, after all, he loved her and she loved him, neither one of them could leave the other behind!

An hour passes and Reader enters quietly in the manor, holding a letter close to her chest. "Ah, my love, You are finally here!" William exclaims and goes to reader. He can sense something is wrong but doesn't want to be direct about it.

"William please sit down." Reader says firmly. Her voice was shallow. Clearly something happend. William does as told, waiting impatiently for her to speak again.

"My mother died" she says quietly. Her eyes Red while looking at him. Before William could say anything she ads :

"i was sent a letter from her manager and i would like to take her place as ring master at the circus-"

"no." William cuts her off.

Reader looks surprised.

"but-"

"no. I won't let You leave me. Your mother's circus was a moving one. If You take over it You will have to move from place to place. I don't want You to leave me."

"But William-"

Louis and Moran enter, looking at the both of them. William pulls her close and whispers into her ear.

"You are not an acrobat, or ring master or what not. You are lady Moriarty. My wife. We will go to complete the mission planed today and forget this conversation ever happend. Clear?"

Reader frowns slightly but nods her head and follows the others to the mansion where they would kill a noble family that does ilegal traficking of children and women.

Yet, reader was clearly not paying attention. She was clearly still thinking about her mother. William should've known better than to bring her in such a place.

She got shot.

William didn't see where. The building was on fire and the nobleman was aiming for him, but instead, the bullet hit reader. She fell to the ground. William rushed to get to her but Moran grabed and draged him outside. The building colapsed and William fell to his knees, screaming and crying. Louis knelt down to comfort his brother but William was simply unconsolable. He was holding his ring. The one that should've shown others that he had his love. That he found the missing piece of his life. Now he lost it all.

It's been 11 months since the incident. William wasn't the same. They couldn't find her body. Didn't have enough time to look for it as the police showed up. Reader had a gravestone put on her name, but no corpse there. William often visited her grave. Sometimes he brings flowers, other times deserts that she used to love. He would sit hours at a time. Whising that she was there, or that at least, God would have mercy on his soul and kill him too. He was already dead inside, was his reasoning for the sinful wish of death. Without his love. Without his angel. The world returned to it's dark place that doesn't let him have a happy ending.

He read all the letters that she ever gotten and the ones she never sent. He didn't eat, didn't sleep. He was a broken man. One that had no motivation left. His brothers were worried but what could they do? The last Time Louis tried to talk to William, he started sobbing.

The last Time William and Reader ever talked was an argument. She died not knowing how much he truly loved her. She died because of him. He was truly a monster. One that killed the only light in his life that could change that fact.

He read the letter from Reader's mother hundreds of Times, and out of spite looked for The circus that her mother had. The reason why they had an argument, why she was so distracted in the mision... The reason why she...

William couldn't finish that line, even in his head. Even thinking about it, twist his insides and yet she is all that he can think about.

To his surprise, the circus was still going. Making even more money then it ever did. Maybe her little brother was running it now. He took the train to where the circus was located at the moment. Her brother had the right to know that she wasn't alive anymore.

When he got to the gate he felt a chill run down his spine. This is where he met reader the first Time. She was an acrobat for her mother's circus. When they made eye contact for the first time he knew that she was the one.

"My ladies and my gentelmans!"

Wait.

Wait.

He knew that voice. He knew that voice so well.

The voice he hadn't heard in 11 months.

His angel. That was his angel. He knew it for sure.

He ran inside while the others were leaving. Clearly the performance was over and many nobles gave him weird looks for entering now, but did he care? Not at all.

His breath hitched and his heart started beating again after 11 sorowfull months. There was his beautiful wife in the middle.

Wearing a Red costume and a magician hat. She was the ring master of the show.

She turned to face him and let out a gasp when seeing him but regained her compusture fast.

William slowly made her way to her.

"yes, i know what You will say" Reader started talking.

"how could i do something like this"

Reader took a few steps back and William took a few foward. William was silently the hole time

"how could i leave everything behind, how could i leave You behind."

Redear was almost backed down into a wall

"why do You have to be so stoick, William!"

Reader was completly backed down against the wall.

"shout, scream, say something!" she screams.

William takes her cheeck in his hand and caresses it softly. Tears start falling from her eyes.

"You're as beautiful as the day i lost You" William finally whispers and Kisses reader.

It was the best kiss they have ever shared togheter.

William finally felt alive after all this time. His angel. How could his angel leave him to mourn like this? She truly was a cruel woman.

And he was a monster.

He was a monster, and her, his cruel angel

[stargatebarbie]

Getting to Know You Meme

Tagged by @spurious 😊

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship? Yes! 7 years this November

02) What was your dream growing up? I wanted to be a psychologist for a long time but tbh glad I didn't end up doing that I am not suited to it

03) What talent do you wish you had? It'd be cool to have an idetic memory. Or even just like, a good one. My memory is shot lol

04) If someone bought you a drink what would it be? I could really use a proper coffee rn

05) Favorite vegetable? like good cherry tomatoes. the home grown kind. Or maybe potatoes

06) What was the last book you read? I'm currently reading Dungeon Meshi! I'm really enjoying the anime and decided to pick up the manga, just finished the first volume

07) What zodiac sign are you? Cancer 🦀

08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Yeah ears stretched a little, I think they're only 1cm & septum piercing. I haven't gotten around to getting any tattoos atp, shit's expensive, but I absolutely want them

09) Worst Habit? stealing all the cups and forks in the house

10) What is your favorite sport? not to be a stereotype but I don't really do sport. ig hockey?

11) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude? naturally pessimistic but i really try to like. practice optimism

12) Tell me one weird fact about you. one time I was locked in a bathroom with a goat

13) Do you have any pets? Yes! A cat named Moon :)

14) Do you think clowns are cute or scary? Scary for sure. I blame my mum she hung a clown puppet in my room as a baby

15) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be? boy howdy would I love a breast reduction

16) What color eyes do you have? grey/blue

17) Ever been arrested? No but I have been detained for like. safety reasons oop

18) Bottle or can soda? Bottle i suppose? I don't really drink a lot of soft drink though

19) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it? probably fund my move out of state

20) What's your favorite place to hang out at? home tbh. or the beach when it's not too crowded or cold

21) Do you believe in ghosts? No, to almost a cartoonish degree. I saw a ghost as a child & I still don't believe in them

22) Favorite thing to do in your spare time? any of my 8 million art/crafts/creative hobbies (currently mostly crochet, tatting, & drawing) & binge watching tv

23) Do you swear a lot? Ohhhh yeah. not only am I Australian, I'm from mining country

24) Biggest pet peeve? People being willfully inconsiderate of others in public spaces. trolley parked across the isle, tiktoks with no headphones on the bus, talking on the phone at the cash register, that sort of garbage

25) In one word, how would you describe yourself? um. weird?

26) Do you believe/appreciate romance? Yeah but like. I suck at it lol

27) Favourite and least favourite food? fave: potato bake & least: sausages

28) Do you believe in God? Nope lifelong athiest

29) What makes you happy: hanging out with my cat, rotating the blorbos in the brain microwave, finishing a project (in theory), and uhhh I'm replaying totk with my gf right now that's pretty great

30) Currently listening/the last thing you listened to: listening to a country & folk playlist, folsom prison blues just came on shuffle

31) Favourite place to spend time: uh yeah home

32) Favourite lyric: truly i hate to choose favourites there are so many um. okay

I'll be the jester as long as you are my queen Make a fool out of me I wanna be the source of your laughter

33) Recommend a film: I almost never watch movies uhhh. I recently forced my gf to watch the Birdcage with me bc she'd never seen it, it's so good

34) Recommend a book: Peter Darling by Austin Chant my beloved. Also I'm reading Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke rn and I'm really enjoying it if you work in an office and have slack or similar then I highly recommend especially

35) Recommend a band, a song, or album: Stick Season by Noah Kahan is just SUCH a good album

36) Recommend a TV show: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - great for lovers of musical theatre and/or the mentally ill 😌

37) Where are you from, and do you still live there? Where have you lived? I'm from Queensland and currently live in Tasmania. I've moved back and forth between QLD and TAS a few times, and plan on moving to Melbourne eventually

38) Do you have any pets or animals in your life? How did you find/get them? The aforementioned cat, I got him from a shelter & they got him from a dumpster <333

39) What's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? during a drinking game I once took a shot that included; soy sauce, fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, vodka, a warhead (sour lolly), fanta, and probably some other stuff I'm not sure I was very drunk and 18 year olds should not be unsupervised with that much alcohol bc they'll invent the world's worst drinking games

40) How did you 'find' fandom? A friend of mine sat me down in front of her family computer in their bible library (not a joke, whole library of bibles & Christian religious texts) & said hey. have you heard there are people on the internet who write stories about these two guys from this one series kissing? and I was immediately hooked lol

41) Make a list of 5 things that you see without getting up. work laptop (bc I am on the clock oops), personal PC, crochet project, calcifer plush, & my cat glaring at me from my computer tower bc I wouldn't let him sit on my keyboard

42) How do you style your hair? Well it was a mullet but it's super grown out now so it's more of a shag & I mostly just chuck it in a bun or something. I desperately want to shave it but it's so cold, idk maybe I'll just make a few beanies & buzz it anyway

If you want to join in please consider yourself tagged! 💖

[the-rewatch-rewind]

I love Poe Party too much to feel like any words will do it justice, but I keep trying.

Script below the break.

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most frequently rewatched movies of the last 20 years. And today I will be discussing number 13 on my list: Shipwrecked Comedy and American Black Market’s 2016 mystery comedy Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, directed by William J Stribling, written by Sean Persaud and Sinéad Persaud, starring Sean Persaud, Sinéad Persaud, Mary Kate Wiles, Sarah Grace Hart, Joey Richter, Lauren Lopez, Ashley Clements, Tom de Trinis, Blake Silver, and a whole bunch of other incredibly talented and underrated actors.

Edgar Allan Poe (Sean Persaud) wishes to impress the beautiful Annabel Lee (Mary Kate Wiles), so he enlists the help of his ghost roommate Lenore (Sinéad Persaud) to throw a murder mystery party for Annabel and a group of famous authors. But then guests start actually being murdered.

So, first of all, I realize that this isn’t technically a movie; it’s an 11-episode webseries available to watch for free on YouTube, which you should absolutely pause this podcast to do if you haven’t seen it yet (link in the show notes). But there is a feature cut that’s about an hour and 45 minutes long, and that’s what I counted as a movie. If I’d kept track of the number of times I watched each episode, I’m sure that even my least-watched episode would easily beat number one on this list. But as for the feature cut, I watched it 12 times in 2017, three times in 2018, four times in 2019, twice in 2020, and three times in 2021. To a certain extent, every movie on the Rewatch Rewind has changed my life in some way, but this one has changed my life to a degree that I would never have believed possible. Every single day of the last seven plus years of my life would have looked different if not for Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party. All of the guests I have had on this podcast who are not my siblings, I met either directly or indirectly because of this show. So fasten your seatbelts: this episode is going to be a ride.

My journey to Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, or Poe Party for short, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Invite-Only Casual Dinner Party/Gala for Friends Potluck for long, began years before the project itself was even written. In the late 2000s-early 2010s, my sister was relatively plugged into the YouTube scene, at least compared to me, and she first introduced me to a group called Team Starkid around 2009-2010-ish. At the time, they were a bunch of college theater kids who had put together a Harry Potter parody musical and on a whim posted it to YouTube, where it went viral, so they started making and posting other musicals – which they are still doing. I feel like I might still have discovered Poe Party if I hadn’t been a Starkid fan, but that definitely helped. A more crucial step on my road to Poe Party started on April 9, 2012, when my sister posted a link to a new YouTube video on my Facebook wall, with the message, “Fictional vlogs by Lizzie Bennet. (actually Hank Green.) There’s only one so far, but I’m kind of crazily excited for this!” Hank Green, of course, along with his brother John, is basically one of the fathers of YouTube. I don’t think I’d seen a ton of their videos at that point, but I was familiar with and liked them. And of course, I knew Lizzie Bennet was the main character in Pride and Prejudice, a story that I loved very much – more on that in a future episode. So I was also very excited for this new show, called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, but I could not have imagined the intense emotional journey it would take me on, through two short episodes a week (plus spinoffs) for almost a year. There had never been a TV show that I was more invested in than LBD. I was double majoring in college and working part time, but the main thing I cared about was these modern Pride and Prejudice characters. The show was clearly very low-budget, but I was blown away by the writing and acting. I was particularly impressed by the person playing Lizzie, Ashley Clements, and the person playing Lydia, Mary Kate Wiles. And, like, it wasn’t just me – LBD had a huge following for what it was. Not, like, millions of fans, but hundreds of thousands by the end. As the finale approached, the producers launched a Kickstarter to release the show on DVD and – ostensibly – pay significantly more to the cast and crew who had been incredibly underpaid. If you’re at all interested in hearing more about that, I highly recommend checking out The Look Back Diaries on Ashley Clements’s YouTube channel; she just did a whole deep dive into the show and its aftermath in honor of its 10th anniversary that I found fascinating. But anyway, coincidentally, right around that same time, Starkid also launched their first Kickstarter, since most of them had graduated from college and no longer had access to the same resources but wanted to keep making more musicals. So they were raising money for Twisted, a Wicked-style villain redemption retelling of Aladdin, which sounded interesting. I had never pledged to a Kickstarter before, but I backed both the LBD DVDs and Twisted on the same day: March 25, 2013, according to my emails.

After that, I kept following Starkid and some of the cast members of LBD, but not particularly closely. In early 2014, Mary Kate Wiles was in a webseries called Kissing in the Rain that I think I watched part of at the time, and I thought it was fine, but I wasn’t particularly into it (imagine, me, an aromantic, not particularly into a show about kissing!) and there was a lot of other stuff going on in my life so I honestly can’t remember if I saw all of it when it was first coming out. I definitely couldn’t have told you that it was on a channel called Shipwrecked, or even the name of the actor she was kissing. But in May of 2014, a new Kickstarter launched for a series called Muzzled the Musical, which was going to feature several cast members from LBD as well as Joey Richter from Team Starkid (Lauren Lopez also ended up being in it but I don’t think that was known during the Kickstarter). And I thought, whoa, cool, worlds colliding, and backed it. And promptly all but forgot about it.

A lot of strange, confusing, and rather upsetting things happened in 2015 that I don’t really want to get too deep into here, but I will say that in hindsight most of them had to do with a combination of amatonormativity and heteronormativity, and I started feeling pretty bad about myself. Before then I had managed to convince myself that I was too young to seriously fall in love anyway, but suddenly I was 25 years old and had never had any interest in dating anyone, and I felt like there was definitely something wrong with me. I didn’t exactly want to change, since I liked not dating, but I had always thought that that would just automatically change when I got older, and facing the fact that it wasn’t changing meant facing the fact that I didn’t know what the point of my life was. I liked my job but I didn’t want it to be my sole purpose. I loved movies, but that didn’t feel like it mattered. All my life I had taken in the message that finding a spouse and creating a family was what made the struggle of life worth it, and I felt lazy for not even trying to pursue that. I remember hearing at some point in my late teens that if you didn’t find your significant other in college, you needed to look online, but I didn’t even know what I would be looking for. And I truly don’t know where this line of thinking would have ended up if it had gone on much longer uninterrupted – I may have discovered my identity a bit sooner, or I may have ended up hurting someone by trying to pursue a relationship I ultimately didn’t want, or I may have just continued to spiral – but what actually happened was I got an email in late October that that random fantasy musical series I had backed on Kickstarter a year and a half earlier was being released on YouTube.

So I watched Muzzled, and it was very fun and silly, but the main thing I got out of it was, man I miss the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. So I finally opened that DVD set I’d gotten from the Kickstarter, and I binge-watched the whole show (I didn’t count it as a movie because there’s no feature cut, and also it is very long). And then I re-watched the whole thing with the DVD-exclusive commentary. And then I thought, I wonder what this cast has been up to lately, so I started searching for them on YouTube. And that’s when I learned that Mary Kate Wiles had been posting two videos per week on her channel for years, and I had been missing it. As I got caught up on her videos, I learned that I had just missed a Kickstarter for a musical she was going to be in called Spies are Forever, made by the Tin Can Brothers, which were a group of people who were also involved with Starkid, and that she seemed to be getting ready for a new Kickstarter with a group called Shipwrecked Comedy, the same people who had made that kissing show. They had also made a show called A Tell Tale Vlog about Edgar Allan Poe and the valley girl ghost Lenore who was haunting him, in which Poe had been played by Sean Persaud (the guy from Kissing in the Rain, who was apparently dating Mary Kate in real life) and his sister Sinéad (who was in the second half of Kissing in the Rain, which I definitely hadn’t watched before). Mary Kate had made a brief appearance in A Tell Tale Vlog as Annabel Lee, and this new show was going to be related to that, but bigger. I was so intrigued by this new project that I started supporting Mary Kate on Patreon to ensure that I didn’t miss any updates about it.

The Poe Party Kickstarter launched on February 2, 2016. By then, I had watched and enjoyed everything on Shipwrecked’s YouTube channel, but that Kickstarter video was my favorite thing they had made. I initially pledged the same amount that I had given to the Lizzie Bennet DVDs, thinking that would be my final pledge, but I ended up giving almost six times that much by the end of the campaign. Every $5,000 they raised, they revealed a new character and cast member with a poster, and each reveal made me more excited. Joey Richter was playing Ernest Hemingway?! Ashley Clements was playing Charlotte Brontë?! Lauren Lopez, who frequently played male characters, was playing George Eliot, a woman with a male pen name?! They got Jim O’Heir from Parks & Rec?! And then, as if the reveals weren’t enough, they had weekly 4-hour livestreams that I found incredibly entertaining. It had become clear that Shipwrecked Comedy now consisted of four people: Sean, Sinéad, Mary Kate, and Sarah Grace Hart, who had played Emily Dickinson in a stand-alone video and would be reprising that role in Poe Party. Various other cast members showed up in the streams with the Core Four, and I distinctly remember thinking, if these people are this entertaining to watch when they’re just hanging out, this show is going to be so amazing! In the second livestream of the campaign, they started writing people’s names on papers to stick on the wall if they pledged or raised their pledge during the streams, which was an excellent incentive, but I would have kept raising mine anyway, because I was desperate for this show to get made. Apart from a few weird troll messages, the stream chat was full of lovely conversations between people who seemed like my kindred spirits. I had never felt more at home in a community. And I had never been more excited than when the Kickstarter exceeded its goal.

And I’m telling you all of this because I need you to understand how astronomically high my hopes and expectations for Poe Party were. Some of the movies I’ve talked about so far ended up in my top 40 partly because I had fairly low expectations going into them and was pleasantly surprised, but that was absolutely not the case here. I had seen excellent work from several of the people involved before, and they seemed particularly dedicated to this project, and I knew they were going to make something incredible. I also desperately needed something in my life to go really well, and this seemed like it might be it, although I knew it wasn’t fair to put that kind of pressure on these independent filmmakers. I tried to temper my expectations, reminding myself that they had only raised a little over $72,000, and Kickstarter was going to take a chunk of that, and some of it had to go to perk fulfillment, so they weren’t going to have nearly enough to make anything super fancy. They released some prologue videos that were very fun but also very small, and I tried to tell myself that the actual show was also going to be small. And I kept reminding myself how long Muzzled had taken to come out, and that I was probably going to have to wait a while for Poe Party too, so I needed to chill. But then in late July – only four and a half months after the Kickstarter had ended – Shipwrecked released a trailer for Poe Party, which said it was starting in less than a month, and there was no tempering my expectations after that. The trailer looked fabulous. It was witty and clever and dramatic and intriguing, the music was perfection, and, shockingly, it looked like an actual studio movie. Not like a super high-budget one, but like they had at least a million dollars. Certainly way more than $60k. My already-ridiculously-high expectations soared to new heights. Part of me was sure I was setting myself up for disappointment, but I couldn’t help it.

And then it was August 22 and the first episode (Chapter 1: The Bells) dropped and it was so much better than I was hoping for. First of all, the look set the tone perfectly. The lighting was exquisite, and the location – incidentally the same house where Muzzled was filmed – was perfect. And then there was the writing. One thing the Persauds had mentioned during the Kickstarter was that they were inspired by the movie Clue, which will be featured in a future episode of this podcast, so I was expecting similar vibes to that, but I was not expecting there to be so many direct references to Clue. All of them made me extremely happy. It felt like the show was made specifically for me. It was like Clue, but even better. I already loved every single character and knew I would be sad to see some of them get murdered. It was also very clear from even just that first episode that this was going to fall into the “everybody was having way too much fun” category of film that I love. But while most movies like that tend to have pretty weak stories and just overall mediocre scripts, and the cast having fun makes up for that, Poe Party was different. The writing was fantastic, AND the acting was perfect, AND it looked gorgeous, AND everybody was having fun. Again, I tried not to have unrealistic expectations, I tried to tell myself that not every episode could be quite the banger that the first one was, but I was still incredibly excited for the rest of the show. And I was not at all disappointed. Somehow it just kept getting better. The running joke about everyone forgetting Emily Dickinson was there or who she was just kept getting funnier. Ditto the joke about George Eliot thinking she needed to convince everyone she was a man when everyone was clearly fine with her being a woman. I remember at one point, when around three or four chapters were out, Mary Kate tweeted that they were working on editing her favorite part of the show, and I thought, surely it doesn’t get better than what I’ve seen already. But it turned out she was talking about chapter 8, and yes, it absolutely was better. The constables, Jim and Jimmy – played by Jim O’Heir and Jimmy Wong – and everyone else trying to fool them, are so delightful to watch. Even though chapter 8 features probably the second saddest death in the series, it’s overall the funniest episode. This show touches an incredibly wide range of emotions and moods, especially considering it takes place in one house over one night.

I want to make it clear that I would still love Poe Party even if I’d stumbled upon it years after it came out, and even if I didn’t recognize any of the actors. The show is excellent enough to stand on its own. But being part of it from the Kickstarter, being familiar with some of the actors, and being online as it was coming out, certainly enhanced my enjoyment of it. Shipwrecked had a weekly “competition” of sorts where they would give a vague prompt and people would make fan art or write fan fiction and post it on social media (#PoePartyFTW), and each of the four members of Shipwrecked would pick their favorite to re-post. I wrote a fic after each of the episodes, and several of them got chosen by Shipwrecked, and I hadn’t felt that good about myself in years. I loved the show so much that I couldn’t confine it just into weekly fics; I was shouting about it on every social media platform. I also started weekly speculation Tumblr posts, using Clue references as my guide, many of which led me astray – I was convinced there must be a secret passage between the kitchen and the study that didn’t turn out to exist – but I did figure out part of the solution relatively early on. While the mystery aspect of Clue is ultimately nonsense if you think about it too hard, Poe Party actually tracks. And if you’ve listened this far and you still haven’t seen Poe Party, please go watch it now, because I’m going to start getting into story specifics and spoilers, and I think everybody should get to see it once without knowing what’s coming. (I’m also going to spoil some of Clue, so you could go watch that too if you want, although I don’t feel like Clue spoilers matter that much.)

In her episode of A Tell Tale Vlog, Annabel mentioned that she had started seeing a banker named Eddie, and then in the Poe Party Kickstarter video, she asked Edgar if she could bring Eddie as her plus one to his party. So Eddie (played by Ryan W. Garcia) shows up late to the party with Annabel, and then becomes the first murder victim. EXCEPT, spoiler alert: he’s actually NOT DEAD, and is, in fact, one of the murderers. And from the very first episode, I recognized Eddie’s similarities to Mr. Boddy in Clue, who is also not dead when you first think he is, and I was therefore suspicious of him from the get-go. But I was still very much open to any possibility (or so I thought) because the Persauds had done an excellent job of making everyone at least somewhat fishy. But there was one thing I was not prepared for, and that was the end of chapter 9. Because it absolutely never occurred to me that Poe’s beautiful Annabel Lee would die, and I’m honestly still kind of devastated about it, even understanding why it had to happen, and at the time I was almost inconsolable. Mary Kate Wiles had led me to this brilliant show, in which she played the kindest, most likable character, only to be brutally murdered? Some fans at the time had thought Annabel might be the killer, which I never did, and honestly I would have been kind of angry if she had been because we need to have more genuinely nice characters in things. I was upset that she died, but I would have been more so if she’d turned evil. (Not that I have anything against MK playing villains – I’m all for it, under the right circumstances. And thankfully the Persauds know when the right circumstances are.) And like, okay, I know I complain about too much romance in stories, but Annabel’s “It was always you” as she died in Edgar’s arms – that got me. Annabel had been planning to marry Eddie because he was more respectable than the unhinged poet she actually loved, and I think that that whole trying to fake the life you think you’re supposed to have thing spoke to me. I had been so tempted to try that, and this was almost as clear of a message as the constables’ “Don’t Do Murder”: Don’t Fake Romance.

At that point, I was pretty much convinced that Eddie must have had something to do with this; why would anyone else kill Annabel? Also, chapter 9 reveals that Annabel wrote the invite list, and I thought it made sense that Eddie, her boyfriend, could have told her whom to include, especially since it had already been established that most of the guests had some connection to Eddie. The prompt for that week’s Poe Party FTW competition was “Confession,” so I decided to try something different from the short stories I’d been submitting, and I re-wrote the poem “Annabel Lee” from Eddie’s perspective as if he was the murderer. And I know this episode is already longer than most of my solo episodes and I have a lot more to say, but I’m still proud of this poem (even though it’s not completely accurate, since it turned out that Eddie didn’t kill everybody), so I need to share it with you:

It was many and many a month ago,

           In her cottage by the sea,

That I first read the words that Edgar wrote

           For my girlfriend Annabel Lee;

And he said that she lived with no other thought

           Than to love and be loved by he.

“He’s just my friend and I’m just his friend,”

           She quickly explained to me;

But we loved with a love which was worse than love –

           I and my Annabel Lee –

With a love that was founded on secrets and lies,

           Fueled by jealousy.

And this was the reason that, later on,

           Faced with opportunity,

I took advantage of an offer made

           To innocent Annabel Lee;

For when Lenore asked whom to invite

           To that cad’s dinner party,

Annabel deferred to my input

           Which I gave most willingly.

All authors, not half so worthy as bankers,

           Who had e’er quarreled with me –

Yes! – they were the ones (no one would know;

           I’d met them all secretly)

That Edgar would invite to his house that night,

           At the behest of “his” Annabel Lee.

For our love it was weaker by far than the love

           Of vengeance I carried in me –

           Of justice toward those who’d wronged me –

And neither the psychics who bring back the dead,

           Nor the cops fresh from Academy,

Can hinder my murderous plan; no one can!

           No, not even my Annabel Lee.

As I watch them point fingers I find my gaze lingers

           On the beautiful Annabel Lee;

When they mention invites, she suspects, knows she’s right,

           Out the door runs my Annabel Lee;

Can’t let her get away: who knows what she might say?

So I kill her – I kill her – my eleventh kill today.

           Instead of revealing me,

           Her last breath says it was always he.

So yeah. I was deep into this. But then nobody in Shipwrecked chose it that week, and I thought, okay, maybe it wasn’t that good, or, maybe my theory is laughably far off the mark. Maybe Eddie’s too obvious. Maybe he really is dead. Then in chapter 10, Charlotte Brontë confessed, and revealed that her sister Anne had been there the whole time helping, and at that point I was pretty sure Eddie was also involved again. We clearly saw that Annabel’s killer was wearing pants, unlike either Brontë sister. And then it was Halloween and the finale finally arrived, and I was right about Eddie, but I was still completely unprepared for how awesome that final chapter would be. I think there was still a small part of me that didn’t believe it was possible for the end to live up to the buildup of the first ten incredible chapters. But it absolutely did. The finale was everything – everything, I say – that I wanted it to be and much more. The evil slow clap. The revolving villain trio of creepy neck touching. The flashbacks. The fights. The pet rock’s revenge. The literary references. And of course, the surprise reveal of Jane Austen, played by Laura Spencer, who had also played Jane Bennet in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The episodes were posted at 9 am on Mondays, when I was at work, so I couldn’t watch them right when they dropped, but after the first one I couldn’t wait until I got home either. My work’s wifi blocked YouTube, and I had an extremely limited data plan at the time, so on my lunch break I would walk to the McDonald’s down the street and watch the new episode using their wifi. And when the camera panned to Jane Austen, it was all I could do not to yell “OH MY GOSH IT’S LAURA SPENCER!” in that McDonald’s. I definitely audibly gasped, but I don’t think anyone noticed. The thing is, I would have still been blown away by the finale without that extra surprise. But that’s what Shipwrecked does. They make things that can appeal to a wide audience, and then they sprinkle in some extra treats for people who have been following them for a while. Of course, LBD was not a Shipwrecked project, but finding Shipwrecked through LBD is a fairly common path. And I’m still so impressed with how well they kept Laura as Jane Austen a secret. As a Kickstarter perk, I’d had a video chat with the Core Four that summer, and I’d mentioned that Jane Austen was my favorite author, and I was disappointed that she wasn’t going to be in Poe Party, and they were just like, “Yeah, we thought about including her, but we figured she would be too similar to Charlotte Brontë,” and betrayed not a SINGLE HINT that she was, in fact, in the show. Which is another thing Shipwrecked does: make a very specific, deliberate plan about what to reveal when, and stick to it.

As another example of that, the Poe Party Kickstarter had reached a stretch goal to produce an epilogue. I had completely forgotten about that, but other backers remembered and started asking about it after the finale. Shipwrecked was pretty cagey with their answers, but then directed us to a mysterious Twitter account that was dropping strange clues. I watched as the Shipwrecked fan Facebook group decoded them and ultimately unlocked the epilogue a day before it was released publicly. The epilogue is not included in the feature cut, and now I don’t really think of it as part of the show. Chapter 11 ends so perfectly – Poe stares at the floor as the heartbeat grows louder, a floorboard creaks, fade to black: chef’s kiss. But at the time I was feeling so many overwhelming feels about this show that I desperately needed that epilogue. I was so utterly relieved to see Annabel and HG thriving as ghosts. And I was so thrilled to be surrounded by such a great fandom, who all worked together and helped each other to solve the puzzles – it was a beautiful weekend. And it was also the last weekend before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and I had to face the fact that the country was more broken and divided than I’d wanted to believe, which definitely adds to my nostalgia for that epilogue adventure.

The show may have ended, and the world may have been falling apart faster than usual, but I could not have gotten Poe Party out of my head even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. For over a decade I’d been searching for something that felt like a classic movie, but with some modern sensibilities, and these independent filmmakers had made exactly what I was looking for, zillions of times better than I’d imagined it. That clever, witty dialogue, perfectly delivered by quirky characters, almost felt like it came from a 1930s screwball comedy. But it also felt fresh and new and different from anything I’d seen before. It had so many similarities to Clue – in fact, I taught myself how to make gifs, or [other pronunciation] gifs, in order to highlight specific parallels between Poe Party and Clue – and yet remained unique. Where Clue was mostly just comedy, Poe Party was comedy, tragedy, romance, and intrigue, and absolutely nailed all of those. (Sadly no ravens, though, they didn’t have the budget for that.) Anyway, the series held up shockingly well upon rewatch, and I could not get enough of it. And despite the socially anxious part of my brain that remains convinced that everyone always is annoyed with me, that I have nothing worthwhile to say, that I should just shut up and stop bothering others with my existence – people seemed to like what I was posting about Poe Party. Other fans would engage me in conversation, and I started making internet friends for the first time. And, shockingly, the members of Shipwrecked seemed to genuinely appreciate what I was saying as well. After the finale had aired, Mary Kate reblogged my Annabel Lee poem on Tumblr and said, “I legitimately thought this was brilliant, and only didn’t choose it that week because of spoilers. Every single fic Jane wrote for this ftw has been wonderful, and I have so enjoyed them all, but this was above and beyond.” And maybe it sounds like I’m just boasting at this point, but the reason I’m sharing this is because a year earlier I had felt like a failure of a human who had no place in the world, and now this incredible actress/producer I greatly admired, who had just made my new favorite show, was saying that I had enhanced her experience of releasing it. People were liking and appreciating me, just for being myself and enthusiastically enjoying a movie. And I no longer felt like I was supposed to change who I was.

In early 2017, I got the rest of my Kickstarter perks, including behind-the-scenes goodies that featured not one but two fabulous commentaries. I love them both, but the second one is particularly chaotic in the best way. Ashley Clements and Ryan W Garcia, true to the villainous characters they played in the show, keep derailing the conversation and it’s incredibly amusing. The commentaries are over the feature cut, so many if not most of the views that I counted were with one of the commentaries. And I also bought the feature cut without commentary so I could show it to other people and still count it on my list. Now I tend to watch it episodically because I want the Shipwrecked YouTube channel to get more views for the algorithm, although I’m not sure that actually helps. But anyway, the feature cut and commentaries and other bonus features are still available to rent or buy on shipwrecked.vhx.tv, which I will also link in the show notes, if you’re interested.

Also in 2017, the first episode of Poe Party was shown at a festival near me, so I got to meet the Core Four members of Shipwrecked and some fans in person. That was very exciting, but I was also extremely nervous, although I didn’t need to be. The Shipwrecked people were so lovely and actually wanted to talk to me and the other fans who were there. And then I got to see Poe Party win some awards, which was awesome. And then a few months later, Shipwrecked launched another Kickstarter, and I pledged even more to it than I had to Poe Party even though the goal was lower, and then they kept making more stuff and I kept supporting it, and also continued to love everything they made (yes, even the Fart Feud with the Tin Can Brothers). I continued to support Mary Kate on Patreon, and I also started supporting other cast members on Patreon, like Whitney Avalon who had played Mary Shelley and does a lot of her own stuff on YouTube, and of course Ashley Clements, as I’ve mentioned previously, and as soon as Shipwrecked finally got their own Patreon, I was all in at the top tier. And, like, I don’t want to go on about this too much, because I do truly believe that I would love their work even if I’d never interacted with them, but I don’t know that I’d be quite the die-hard, take-all-my-money-to-make-more-things Shipwrecked fan that I am, if I hadn’t had so many wonderful interactions with the members of Shipwrecked over the years. I didn’t set out to become friends with them, but I kind of have – although I still feel a little weird and presumptuous to claim that. I feel like this will sound to some people like an out-of-control parasocial relationship, but like, it’s not that, because they do know me. Other people in my life have referred to Shipwrecked as “the people you pay to be your friends,” but it’s not that either: I give them money so they can keep making things, and we also happened to hit it off as friends – which again feels like a presumptuous label, but I can’t come up with a more accurate word. They make what they love and I love what they make, so it’s not that surprising that we’d get along. And for similar reasons, it’s not surprising that I’ve made so many very close friendships with other Shipwrecked fans. Our love for these projects brought us together, and then turned out to be far from the only thing we have in common.

I feel like I’m talking way too much about my own personal experiences, I’m so sorry if this is boring. Back to Poe Party itself. I’ve hinted at it already, but I need to emphasize again both how incredible the script is, and how amazingly the cast brought it to life. The story was so well thought out: every scene, every character, every moment was there for a reason. Like, I thought George Eliot disguising herself as a man was just a nod to female authors having to use male pen names, but then that turned into an important clue that led to the Brontës. Yes, you can poke plenty of holes in Poe Party if you want to – not all of the characters based on real people were actually alive at the same time, some of the technology is anachronistic, etc – but none of that stuff really matters. It’s clearly meant to be silly and fun, so you don’t really need to know what year it is. But the fact that they managed to write something silly and fun that didn’t completely devolve into absolute nonsense is so incredibly impressive. Sean and Sinéad wrote an absolutely brilliant script, and then they assembled the perfect cast for it. Every actor is on the exact same page about what this project is, and they each know exactly how their character fits in. Even when they’re in the background, everyone is giving 100%. I want to especially shout out Joey Richter, since Ernest Hemingway is drinking all night, and Joey did a tremendous job of tracking how drunk he was supposed to be. By the finale he’s having to slap himself to stay awake in the background, and it’s hilarious. Everyone else is also a delight to watch, and I feel like I’m still noticing little background moments I hadn’t clocked before. There aren’t very many close-ups, which I think was mainly because they didn’t have the budget for the time it would take to shoot them, but it works perfectly because a lot of the funny moments become even funnier when you can see multiple characters’ reactions at once. If you’re watching the background acting closely enough, you may notice a few instances of people almost breaking, but personally I just choose to interpret that as the characters finding it difficult to keep it together when other characters around them are being silly, and who can blame them? I appreciate that the writers and director trusted the cast enough to let them play around and improvise, because some great ad-libbed lines ended up in the final cut, and many more went into the best blooper reel ever, which is 24 minutes long and I love every second of it. There are some moments from the bloopers that I find myself saying sometimes when I’m watching the actual show – Ashley’s “Don’t be mean to me!” is probably the one I quote the most.

There is definitely romance in Poe Party – the whole reason for the party is because Edgar is in love with Annabel. Lenore and HG Wells develop feelings for each other over the course of the evening…until he dies. And several other characters flirt with each other. But none of the romances end well, and throughout the story, there is a lot of emphasis on friendship, and acquaintanceship, and other types of relationship. And that’s a running theme in most of Shipwrecked’s projects. There hasn’t been a kiss in any of them since Kissing in the Rain. Of course, much of the Poe Party fandom was, and is, into shipping characters with each other – for any listeners who may not be terminally online, shipping characters means that you want them to be in a romantic relationship with each other. I joined in somewhat, mostly because I felt like I was supposed to, but I couldn’t have articulated that at the time. And, as I mentioned earlier, I was particularly fascinated by the Eddie/Annabel dynamic, but I was only able to fully comprehend how much I needed the “don’t fake romance” message in hindsight. This show and its fandom made me feel less alone and adrift, but I still didn’t figure out I was aroace for a few more years. Although it was friends I made in the Shipwrecked fan community who first really helped me understand and accept that part of my identity, so I can still say that Poe Party was an important step on that journey.

I want to say so much more about this utterly brilliant show – I don’t feel like I’ve even come close to doing it justice here – but there truly are no words to adequately express my love for it. It still holds up nearly 7 years later, but Shipwrecked has come a long way since then. When their most recent webseries, Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, was about to come out, they said it made Poe Party look like it had been done by a bunch of kindergarteners, and I was upset at the Poe Party slander, but once I watched that series, I understood what they meant. Headless is so far above and beyond, but unfortunately it came out too recently to make it into my top 40. Currently they’re releasing an audio narrative called The Case of the Greater Gatsby, which should be on the same platform you’re listening to this on. That is a sequel to their short film The Case of the Gilded Lily, which I will be discussing in a future episode. I really hope that someday Shipwrecked gets the level of recognition they deserve – their fandom is still relatively small, although we are mighty and devoted. At the very least, I hope that the current strikes will help enable them to make a living from writing and acting.

Thank you for listening to me discuss another of my most frequently rewatched movies, or at least attempt to. Following this will be a two-way tie of movies I watched 25 times, both of which feature Cary Grant, my favorite leading man apart from Sean Persaud. As always, I will leave you with a quote from the next movie: “Hi! Mellow greetings, ukie-dukie!”

[thekatebridgerton]

Today on another episode of... oh you know the drill, I'm sleep deprived, I write aus at 3am, fall asleep without energy enough to keep writing, only to do it all over again next weekend. So for this week's episode:

Benophie meet the Robinsons au

So this kid Charlie suddenly lands in 12 year old orphaned Sophie's backyard, right around the time her father married Araminta, and for some reason Charlie claims that she is the only person who can help him fix the time machine that brought him there in the first place else his parents are going to kill him. And some evil villain is out to get him. So of course science kiddo Sophie agrees to help.

Except that while she tries fixing it, the time machine malfunctions again and sends 12 year old Sophie and 11 yo Charlie into the future.

The thing is that Charlie Bridgerton's entire family is currently all in his grandmother's estate for their annual game of pall mall.

And his family is... a lot to take in

Sophie's new friend has 7 eccentric aunts and uncles, plus their spouses, around 20 cousins ( Sophie really keeps loosing count of how many cousins Charlie has), then there's the unexpected visits from the sisters of his uncle's wives, with their respective husbands. Sophie counted one two, five Grandmothers having tea in the solar. And of course, Charlie's father, the artist Benedict Bridgerton, (who has got to be the most handsome man little Sophie has ever seen and Charlie's three younger siblings. )

They all think Sophie is some kind of school mate that Charlie has brought home and treat her so well that cute orphan Sophie starts wishing she could have a family like the Bridgertons, no matter how much Charlie says that's a bad idea because his mom definitely wouldn't like it, but once the Bridgertons find out that Charlie's friend is an orphan, of course they want to take her in.

Until Charlie's mom comes back home ready to scold her son for damaging her time machine and... little Sophie Beckett finds herself face to face with genius British scientist Sophie Bridgerton. Cue the chaos from the family realizing that Charlie brought his little mom to the future.

In the end when the evil corporation is defeated and the future time continuum is saved Sophie goes back to the past, ready to endure under Araminta until she can get an early emancipation and a scholarship to put all her effort into science and create a time Machine... and then she bumps into some slacker teenager painting the walls with graffiti and calling it art. Young Benedict is far from the wonderful man Sophie met in the future, but... she wants to stick to him and figure out how they ended up married in the future, worse, as her life keeps progressing and her friendship/ on and off art trade offs, with Ben keeps getting stronger trough the years, how can she hide the knowledge of who exactly is her in-laws future spouse.

Take for example Penelope from the journalism club, when Colin Bridgerton said he'd never date her, Sophie wanted to punch him and tell him he'd regret those words soon enough. She literally saw his adult version missing his wife just because Penelope went outside for air. And let's not mention Benedict's pompous older brother who always thinks he knows best, making plans to date Kate's sister right Infront of Sophie and Benedict. At that point Sophie was just opening a betting pool with grandma Danbury and calling it a day. Simon showing up one day and pretending to date Daphne was honestly the least weird part of Sophie's college years. When they got married, she was the least surprised, she knew!!

Francesca getting married to Michael's cousin? Since when? Sophie was convinced Michael was Fran's husband in the future, she didn't know about any John...wait ..wait oh no

And let's not get started with super feminist ' I don't need a man I'll never get married afraid of children ' Eloise, little Sophie was almost adopted into the Bridgerton family because adult Eloise was an avid children's rights advocate with a husband who believed in adopting orphans left and right. To find out that Eloise, the star step mom who was all about healing Sophie's trauma, used to be some surly angry highschool rebel, really had Sophie wondering if Eloise had a nicer secret twin.

And all the while in which Sophie is going with the flow keeping up with the Bridgertons and helping them out into becoming the happily weird and chaotic family she knows they can be. She ends up not noticing that ex graffiti artist, turned gallery owner Benedict is really into her. Mostly because Sophie knows herself as his wife or rather his future wife. And he keeps asking her to be his friend with benefits so she automatically thinks he's joking and doesn't pay him attention whenever he DMs her a horny come hither.

Benedict's family on the other hand who already love Sophie, keep telling him that a genius inventor like Sophie will never take him seriously unless he's ready to give her something solid to rely on. Instead of being a shameless tease, he should be a man and ask her out for real. But Benedict hesitates because Sophie already looks like she's been inlove with someone since forever. What he doesn't know is that he's actually jealous of himself, or rather, jealous of the man he'll be in the future, who Sophie met when she was 12.

What a complicated mess.

[linesonscreens]

Let's Read Peanuts (Yes, all of it) – March 1953

There are lots of great strips I just don't have room to comment on. I strongly encourage everybody to read the full month at the official GoComics page. Today's month starts HERE.

Mar 1, 1953

Torn between being irrationally angry at this boomer-ass “kids these days” take and loving that room's aesthetic.

Also I'm pretty sure that this is the song in question for those who are curious.

Mar 3, 1953

I haven't been showing them because the joke is bad and I hate it but there's a whole bunch of strips about Lucy's bread and butter sandwiches and her insistence that they be folded over and not cut. I'm guessing it's a thing Schulz's daughter was doing at the time.

Mar 7, 1953

A mildly antagonistic relationship is forming.

Mar 8, 1953

Living with Lucy must be a special kind of personal hell.

Mar 13, 1953

Careful, that girl will crush your abnormally large head like a grape. I've seen her do it.

Mar 15, 1953

Nice to see Schulz finally figured out how to draw thought bubbles.

Mar 26, 1953

Solid punchline, but the best part is actually the casual dig Schroeder drops in the second panel.

Thoughts:

Watched A Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time in decades over the holiday and it's... fine? I think it's something I respect more than enjoy. There are specific moments that I like and certain artistic decisions that I think work phenomenally (the jazz soundtrack, for example). I even like the message despite not being in any way religious.

But man, it's kind of a mess. I was constantly distracted by awkward cuts, animation errors, weird line readings, and all kinds of other issues. Plus the whole “we need to get this Christmas play ready” plotine just kind of gets dropped at the end and that really bugged the hell out of me. I don't think that this is the animation team's fault, apparently they only had 6 months to write and animate the entire thing, but the lack of polish really shows and I wish they had just a bit more time to tighten things up. Then again, that same jankyness gives the special a certain human touch and charm which I suspect is a large part of why a lot of people still like it even today. So who knows if changing things would make it more enjoyable.

Overall I think this special still ~mostly~ holds up, even if it's not my favorite piece of animated Peanuts media. It's over before you have time to get mad at the parts that don't work and at the end of the day when the kids decorate the tree and start singing I felt the feelings it wanted me to feel. And really, that's all it needed to do.

Soooo... I guess keep this one in mind for when you're looking for something to get you in the Christmas mood in like... 11 months? (Yeah, I really should have watched this thing earlier so I could post this before New Years. Oh well.)

[imheretoreadandpostart]

Missing

An Invader Zim grimdark fic.

WARNINGS: Missing cases of both children and adults, death of background characters i made up on the spot, gore, emetophobia, i'm basing Dib's area code somewhere in Montana (I know that's not a warning but i feel it's necessary info.), kinda short, BAD ENDING!!!!

A strong wind blows through the area as storm clouds can be seen approaching in the distant sky. It's not too often they get storms, for the surrounding trees and mountains are usually more than enough to keep them safe. That doesn't matter now, though, for Professor Membrane has yet to figure out how to control the weather, maybe someday, but not today.

Dib flinches as he's hit in the face with a missing poster as Gaz looks on wordlessly, there seems to be a concerning influx of them lately. He struggles to get it off when the wind has it so firmly pressed against his features, he does eventually free himself from the clutches of the sheet. The image of a little girl and pigtails sends a surge of... a feeling hard to describe. not strong enough to be sorrow, but a sense of sympathy with undertones of paranoia and grief. He lets out a sigh.

No amount of looking at the sidewalk beneath him on his way to the bus stop will help these feelings. The feeling of a lingering guilt. He couldn't help but notice how unusually quiet Zim has been lately... he's been more... collected, as of late. Every time Dib has confronted him about it, he was either given some lousy excuse, an outright lie or a fake plan to throw him off. He stopped falling for it after the first three times or so. He almost jumps at the sound of his sister's almost monotonous voice, laced only by the venomous dislike she holds for everyone around.

"You're plotting against Zim, aren't you."

"You don't think it's weird that Zim hasn't come out with some evil plan or scheme?? And the amount of people going missing!"

"It's probably just a serial killer or something."

"That's no better!"

"Anything's better than your paranormal claptrap. Now quiet, your voice is giving me a headache."

He lets out a defeated sigh as he steps onto the bus to be driven to another slow, soul draining school day of nihilistic lectures from the almost snake-like teacher known as Ms. Bitters. It would be unbearable if he didn't have his notebook to sketch in during said rambles of imminent death... or a nemesis to watch over.

Dib isn't exactly surprised when everyone on the bus moves as to not sit near him, nor does he make any effort to move closer to anyone. Gaz, thankfully, is kind enough to sit next to him. her focus is more on her videogame than anything else, Dib wishes he could at least read without the threat of carsickness over his shoulder, so he has no choice but to stare outside at the passing buildings and occasional tree.

Throughout the day, Dib has done nothing but watch Zim's every move. Every blink, every shift of his mauve eyes, and every student he even glanced at. This wouldn't be completely necessary if the cameras he's hidden in Zim's house weren't broken, no matter which camera Dib switched to, all the screen would ever show was static. Of course though, Dib didn't rely on cameras alone, he's been following Zim nonstop for the past two weeks. To his dismay, there was nothing too out of the ordinary.

Tonight though.. is different. He's noticed a pattern in Zim's strange schedule. Every Thursday without fail, he goes out for a while and comes back dragging grocery bags full of snacks from the nearby convenience store, probably to keep Gir's screaming at bay. The insane little robot never fails to keep both of them guessing. So after weeks of stalking and the feeling of monomania clinging to the back of his mind, Dib is finally going to take advantage of this small window of weakness.

Under the blanket of night.. and a bush outside of Zim's house. he lies in wait for Zim to leave. it's almost 11:00 at this point, he's been waiting for almost an hour, but he eventually spots Zim poking his ugly mug outside to look around. He runs off off down the road and out of sight. Dib wastes no time running to the side of the house before picking the lock to one of the windows, he jumps onto the ledge and falls on the other side, cracking one of the lenses in his glasses. At least he's in.

Nothing seems to have changed at first glance, the interior looks exactly the same, the strange decor, the monkey picture above the couch staring forward with soulless eyes. He turns to leave.. but notices something out the corner of his eye... a bloodstain near the trash can, it looks like human blood. He freezes as a chill runs through him... rather than the rush of excitement he would usually get at being right, at having evidence, he feels... horrified. Yes Zim has hurt people before... but... if he really was responsible for all those missing people.. oh odds.

Dib cautiously creeps closer to the trash can to investigate, hesitantly opening it and flinching in anticipation of the sight of human flesh.. only to find nothing, a panel of buttons with Irken words on them on the inside, two of which having arrows, one pointing up, one pointing down. It doesn't take a genius to guess what it is. He looks around before stepping into it and pressing the down button. It starts to descent rather quickly through a cylindrical shaft, surrounding him is darkness, lots of darkness and a tangled mess of wires, tubes, and cords only illuminated by the lights on the almost claustrophobic elevator.

The further down he descends, the more his heart sinks in fear. He soon reaches his destination... wherever it is. The constant whirring and beeping of the surrounding machinery does nothing to calm his wild thoughts and active imagination. He wanders around, looking everywhere he can for something out of place... though he didn't have to wander for long. He comes across some kind of work room? research facility? It certainly looks the part. This raises so many questions... but he stops in his tracks when he comes face to face... with one of the missing persons. A girl presumably somewhere in her teens... lying on a table with an open ribcage and her organs placed around her. Dib lets out a small squeak of horror at the sight of the poor girl, unable to say anything.

Blood drips on the metal floor, the sickly scent of rot hitting his sinuses. The dissected victim laying lifeless in the early stages of rot. Looking around, he finds multiple others of the missing people, including the little girl with pigtails. All torn apart with methodical precision, some kept in massive containers of formaldehyde, others left out for observation. Dib feels a wave of nausea as his breathing speeds up, he backs away before the burning sensation of stomach acid stings his throat, he spills his stomach on the floor, coughing and gasping only to be met with the stench of death yet again.

He gathers whatever strength he can get get up and run... only to be met with the sight of Zim standing in the doorway behind him. Dib lets out a scared gasp and backs away from the small Irken.

"Zim?...."

Zim doesn't respond.. only staring at him.

"What have you... why... why would you do this... even for you this is..."

Dib can't think of how to describe it... it's out of character, even for Zim. Five metal limbs extend from his PAK, four lift him off the ground, one holds a syringe. Though Dib has seen the robotic legs a multitude of times.. for the first time, this act intimidates him, causing him to back away further. Without warning, Zim lunges at Dib. Everything goes black.

He lets out a gasp as he snaps awake, though Dib can't move his arms, can't move his legs, his shirt and trenchcoat are missing and there's a red dotted line running down from the bottom of his sternum, to the top of his pelvis. He struggles and thrashes in his restraints, though he stops at the voice of a familiar Irken.

"Are you trying to dislocate your human-paws?"

"Listen, i-i'm sorry, i won't say a word, let me go, Zim!"

Zim only laughs, it starts out quiet but evolves into his signature villainous fits of hysterics.

"This isn't about witnesses, Dib-worm.. it's about figuring out what makes the human body... tick."

At the last word of that sentence, Zim digs a bare claw into Dib's sternum, puncturing the skin and drawing blood. He lets out a yelp in response.

"What're you... on about??"

"You and I both know that I will take over eventually.. i figured in order to be a truly good ruler, i would have to know the inner mechanics of you DISGUSTING pigbeasts. While i did accomplish that, yes, i figured one last victim would do me good. Especially since this time it's more personal than before."

Dib is speechless, he feels nothing but horror and desperation as Zim approaches him with a scalpel.

"NO! ZIM PLEASE!"

He's cut off when the scalpel pierces his skin and glides down his stomach, letting out an agonized scream as it does so. Zim pulls apart the edges of the incision and gently delves his hands into the slimy, warm, writhing mass of organs in his interior. He takes a moment to feel the movement of each organ in his three fingered hand before setting each one aside. It's not long until Dib passes out from the pain.

He never wakes up, kept in suspended animation with his chest cavity still open for Zim to look at, a reminder of victory. Though it's not long before Dib's image ends up on a missing poster like the rest of Zim's victims.. and just like the rest of them, he was never found.

[coquettedragoon]

so earlier today, i showed a friend of mine anime munters bc he said he'd never seen it, which is still such a flash player marvel that i have a major soft spot in my heart for :'-) jokingly wondering "where are they now!", i checked your dA and saw your patreon-- only to find out that i've already followed you on twt for at least a year, bought your game, and was subbed to your patreon til i lost my dang job ;u; which was such a lovely surprise!!!

i adore your new stuff as well as the old, and it's so so cool to see how far you've come. i just wish i could tell 11 year old me, shouting scissor sisters with my dorky misfit pals, that your work would still be such a source of joy for me, even now!

thank you for coquette and helping me feel less strange about my kinky habits and my own personal trauma and struggles. i just wanted to thank you so so much for all that you do :D

very flattered sdfds but that was not me... i was curious how the connection was made and saw the patreon link from devil-dantes just links to 'user' and takes you to your own homepage, so if you were already following me it was showing you me in your feed.