#yeah I don’t have any in depth commentary here I just wanted to make something cute and silly.

[mariasont]

wow, ok, ok, ok, I did keep my promise and read this plastered straight from the bars (not a good decision bc i ended up sobbing through the entirety of it) … but i wanted to wait until the morning to give this the commentary it deserves bc ..... omfg. sam this is insanity (compliment ... maybe). i feel like im on tumblr premium i should not be reading this for free.

Spencer is looking at you like he loves you. He doesn’t know how to look at you any other way.

died dead

Flickering blue and white light… a buzzy drone in iambic pentameter. The sluggish pound and gush, pound and gush, of a failing heart.

shakespeare wishes he could write something like this #get fucked

If they did, they’d notice all the structural flaws. The deep cracks and the sagging floorboards and the mold you’ve been covering in paint.

get out of my phone. begging u to quit ur NRA career and pursue something else pls i cannot be looking in a mirror like this

You’re like… a lens I see the entire world through. I can’t do anything, or make any choice, without thinking about you. I’m always thinking about you. When we’re not together, it feels like I’m waiting for my life to start again. Nothing really counts unless you’re there to experience it with me, you know? I think of you as… I don’t know. Everything. You’re why I know it’s all real.

this is, bar none, my favorite line (call me a romantic .... idk)

You’re little more than a pulsing, glowing star, lightheaded at the depth and the pressure and the way that band of resistance he’d pushed past aches around him in time with the pound of your heart.

the way u write sex scenes is just .... yeah. not bc they're spicy (they are) but because they're narratively necessary. it's all ab power and need and who's taking and who's giving and it's so excruciating !!!! no one has ever written someone needing to be loved this badly and then ruining it in real time with such poetic accuracy.

and ALSO like u have a way of writing heartbreak that feels sooooo precise it doesn't even feel mean at first?? it just feels beautiful. and i would argue this is soooo much worse bc suddenly im like wow that's such a gorgeous line

EXHIBIT A:

That gleam is, of course, an illusion. It will shine so brightly you can taste it. It will convince you to reach just a little further. And it will wink at you from the impossible end of a bottomless pit. You don’t care. You tip over the edge and let the darkness swallow you whole. Nothing but stardust, now. You blow across the silent black ether.

and then seven paragraphs later i realize i've been BAMBOOZLED and BLINDSIDED into feeling every ounce of shame, longing, desperation ur narrator is radiating.

EXHIBIT B:

Your entire body waits in suspense, taut like a steel guitar string, for shattering glass, or splintering drywall, or a slamming door, or something. It doesn’t come. He’s still here. You know he hasn’t left. But he’s going to. This is it. The unforgivable thing.

like god im gonna walk into traffic and u 🫵🏼🫵🏼will be charged for non-negligent manslaughter

I LOVE IMPERFECT CHARACTERS !!!!!! I LOVE COMPLEX HUMANS WITH FAULTS AND IMPERFECTIONS AND I LOVE WHEN THEY LOVE AND ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY BAD AT LOVE RAHHHH

i hope ur proud of urself tumblr user nereidprinc3ss, u sick, brilliant woman. u wrote one of the most stunning, psychologically rich, soul-ripping (emphasis on this) pieces I've ever read, and I'm going to be thinking about it for the rest of my natural-born life. possibly longer. might be a ghost one day muttering "you're why I know it's all real..." in an abandoned house idk man can't predict the future

spring into summer

the highest highs and the lowest lows of your on-again off-again relationship with spencer reid, tracked through the seasons of a year.

18+ (smut, angst, fluff) warnings/tags: (spoiler tags at the bottom of post) reader gets drunk a few times, questionable consent (not between Spencer and reader), much codependence, softdom Spencer/sub reader, oral m receiving, finger sucking lol, deep pen piv/intense sex, mention of marks being left, praise tho dw he is soso nice and loves her, fighting/yelling/sex as reconciliation, general toxicity and lots of it DDDNE!! avoidant!reader, panic attacks, joke abt r being high off cough syrup when she’s sick and Spencer is taking care of her, implied trauma, IM MAKING IT SOUND CRAZY BUT THERE IS A LOT OF STRAIGHT UP FLUFF IN HERE GUYS PLS THEY ARE SO CUTE A BUNCH OF TIMES. wc 23k (!) longest nereid fic ever!also had to squish 167 lines together so the first half is a bit compact I apologize!! a/n: yeaaaah…. Thanks for being patient w me guys :”)) I miss posting sosososo much and I out genuinely probably days into this fic like once I was writing for 15 hrs straight. So. Yeah. I so so hope u enjoy and I love u miss u MWAH

February 17th

You don’t know when you last blinked. 

Flickering blue and white light washes deep into the backs of your eyes as you stare at some old film without watching it. A knight atop his steed warps and stretches gruesomely under your apathetic observation, and whatever noble speech he’s giving turns to monotone slurry before it hits your ears—old-fashioned English smeared in 1960’s transatlantia. A buzzy drone in iambic pentameter. The sluggish pound and gush, pound and gush, of a failing heart. 

Spencer said you’d love this movie.

“You okay?”

The question draws you from your fugue state, and you turn, eyes so dry they sting when you finally blink. He’s comfortable. You’ve been here for hours—enough time for his hair to tousle, enough time he decided to trade his contacts for glasses. When you look at him, there is only static. 

You must be having one of those nights again. Something in your body refuses to succumb to the comfort his presence should offer, regardless of how many hours you’ve spent together. Or days, or months. 

It’s awful because you fought to be here, sitting on his couch, sharing a blanket. You fought every instinct in your body for so long just to get to this point because you wanted it so badly, and now that you have it—now that you’ve had it, this weekend, and last weekend, and every weekend you haven’t been out of town on a case for months—you struggle to let it feel good. 

Spencer is looking at you like he loves you. He doesn’t know how to look at you any other way. 

Sometimes you don’t feel like this. Sometimes it’s easy.

That doesn’t make the guilt in the pit of your stomach any smaller when it’s not. 

The only thing you know is that you’ll want it again. This is what you’ll want tomorrow morning, or in an hour, or the second he’s gone. You’ll want it so badly you’d humiliate yourself for it. And humiliation in front of him is a fate worse than death. So you find ways to want him in the present. 

This is the right thing. 

���I’m fine,” you promise. His brow flickers. The knight’s shining armor makes a glare off the lenses of Spencer’s glasses. 

Before he can say anything, you lean into his side, dropping your head to his shoulder and settling your weight against him. Immediately he’s wrapping an arm around you like you knew he would, because he doesn’t have a choice. Not when it comes to you. You don’t give yourself time to feel bad about that. Instead, you press your lips to the bit of collarbone visible over the neckline of his shirt. A series of kisses litter the warmth of his throat. You take and take like an invasive species. A hand pushes into his hair. 

There’s hesitance in the way he kisses you back as you sling a leg over his lap. So you take more. You kiss him harder. You need his hands on you, you need him to hold you by your thighs or your hips or your waist like he’s not afraid. At least one of you mustn’t be so scared. 

Spencer only requires a few more moments before his will melts, and he grabs you how you knew he would. Like he’s going to make something of you. He’s going to make you his. He’s going to break you and put you back together stronger, and he’s going to tell you what you are. That’s all you need—you just need him to keep trying. This is a promise you need him to keep making. 

“Pause the movie,” you breathe into his waiting mouth. 

He’s warm. He keeps you safe. 

March 9th

The heat in your apartment kicks on with a rumble that seems to shake the whole place. It’s the first noise in minutes. 

Spencer is at your little wooden dining table, hair mussed, pajama pants rumpled, staring into a chipped mug half-full of black coffee. You stand in the kitchen, countertop digging into your hip as you watch him. Outside, the sky is still spilled winter ink. The only light comes from a lamp you’d bought with him months ago at an antique shop. The stove clock flicks from 1:31 to 1:32. 

The ringing silence is killing you. 

“Spencer—”

“I—” he stops and you watch his throat bob. “I don’t understand—”

“I explained it to you—”

“You explained what? That you—you don’t care about me as much as I care about you, and you want to be together, but you don’t want me to think of it as a real relationship, and you’re letting me know out of courtesy? What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Don’t twist my words. I do care about you. A lot. I just—when we started this a few months ago you knew where I was at with commitment, and we agreed we’d be honest and communicate about what we were feeling—and what I’m feeling is that I’m not ready for this to be more than what it is! You knew that was a possibility, I knew that was a possibility. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. It just means I’m not ready for… for labels, or telling the team, or—or putting pressure on ourselves to try and be something we don’t have the time to be right now.”

Spencer looks at you with something close to disdain. It’s sort of like a bullet to a flack-jacket—it won’t kill you, because you’ve made sure to protect yourself. But it hurts. 

“I make the time. That’s what you do when you care about someone. I mean—where am I, when we’re not on a case? I’m here. I coordinate my entire life so that I can be here when you want me to be. Do you think I do that because it’s convenient for me? We have the same 24 hours. We have the same job. It’s not about time. Don’t insult me by saying that’s what this is.”

“I’m not trying to insult you.” The words come out an unsure waver—but it’s not because you don’t believe what you’re saying. 

I coordinate my entire life so that I can be here when you want me to be. 

Why? Why would he do that?

Spencer is not gracious in the face of your silence. Maybe he interprets your inability to put words together—the way you froze as soon as he casually admitted something that feels so oppressive and suffocating—I coordinate my entire life so that I can be here when you want me to be—as your silent way of admitting he’s right, and you don’t care about him. 

But he’s not right. You just can’t breathe. Why does he care about you so much?

Someone would have to be looking very closely at you in order to care that much. To think you’re worth the trouble. But you’ve taken steps, your whole life, to ensure that nobody will ever be able to see you close enough. If they did, they’d notice all the structural flaws. The deep cracks and the sagging floorboards and the mold you’ve been covering in paint. 

You feel your throat closing as he stands. 

Yes. Leave. Get out. Don’t look at me. 

March 13th

“Spencer.”

The name drips from your lips like melted sugar. Like a term of endearment. Just saying it makes you warmer. It’s maple syrup in your veins. You try to tug your dress down your thighs and stumble in place. The bartender holding your phone twists his wrist to speak into the microphone. 

“Hey, man. Your girlfriend is wasted. Cabs aren’t running and you need to come pick her up before she throws up all over my bar or wanders into traffic or some shit.”

“I’m not—I’m not wasted,” you mutter, pushing hair out of your face. Neither of them are listening as the bartender relays your location and assures Spencer that an eye will be kept on you until his arrival. As soon as they’re done, you’re leaning forward over the bar. “Gimme him,” you whisper-shout, making a grabby-hand. 

The bartender passes you your phone with raised eyebrows. “He’ll be here soon.”

“But he’s—he’s not on the phone?” You realize, closing your eyes and frowning as the heartbreak processes. 

“Nah. Drink this and sit tight. And don’t fuckin’ throw up. Please.”

You sigh and sip on a lemon water, smearing lipgloss all over the rim of the glass and wiping a dribble off your chin after you swallow. “Spencer’s my boyfriend,” you tell the man, dreamily. 

“So you’ve told me.” 

“He’s so handsome… and smart… and we’re in the—the FBI. Can you believe that?” You cackle and slap the bar top. Mr. Bartender only hums an uh-huh as he focuses on making someone else a drink. 

When Spencer does finally arrive, you’re elated. Glitter courses through your veins. More than that, you’re relieved—you catch his eye and light up, and when he makes his way through the throng to you, you’re ready to melt all over him. You haven’t spoken to him in days. 

“You’re here!” You sing, hooking an arm around his back and resting your head on his bicep, looking up at him with big, bleary eyes. Spencer supports you with an arm and doesn’t let go even as he’s fishing out his wallet to settle the bill you racked up. “Wait, Spence—we should have one more drink.”

He’s not looking at you as he speaks. “Absolutely not.” And then, to the bartender, “Thanks, man.”

“Spencer,” you begin again, savoring his name on your tongue and admiring his profile as he walks you out of the bar. “I told everyone I met tonight that you’re my boyfriend.”

“I heard,” he says simply, scanning the street before you cross. Presumably the wind is whipping at your bare legs, but you don’t feel it. “Why’d you do that?”

“Because…” you hum thoughtfully. “Because I like you so much. And I liked thinking about you being my boyfriend.”

He doesn’t respond. Even now, even drunk as you are—a very small part of you knows this is cruel. Just last weekend you’d let him walk out of your apartment precisely because you weren’t willing to label things. 

In the morning, that will still be true. But this is just play-pretend. 

“Also, because—isn’t it—isn’t it crazy, that you’re the nicest, prettiest, smartest, best guy ever, and they believed me? I showed them pictures and told them about your degrees and everything and they still believed me. They believed—they believed when I said you’re my boyfriend. They didn’t even question it at all. Like, what? They thought I was good enough to deserve you.”

The sidelong glance he casts you then is like a grappling hook, and you stumble into his side. His brows are knit over eyes that have gone glassy black in the dark, illuminated only by the shifting reflection of each haloed street lamp you pass. It’s hypnotizing. “You think you’re not good enough for me?” He asks. 

You hiccup and clap a hand to your mouth, stickying your palm with remnant gloss. “Oops. No. I mean, yes.”

He’s on the verge of replying when the smell of something fried and sweet has you perking up like a bloodhound. A blinking neon sign behind him catches your eye. “Oh my god,” you interrupt. “They’re—holy fuck, Spencer. That donut shop across the street—oh my god. We have to go. Please? Pleasepleasepleaseplease?”

One thing about Spencer you know to be true—and, perhaps the characteristic of his that defines your entire relationship: he has a profoundly difficult time telling you no. 

Which is how you end up eating donuts in his bed. The ones you couldn’t finish end up in a paper bag on his bedside table—tomorrow’s hangover remedy—and you end up safely tucked under his comforter, in his shirt, smelling of his bodywash. His touch still burns everywhere, like the paths of his fingertips had etched glowing tributaries into your skin. 

All of this to say, you couldn’t possibly be happier with the way the night unfolded.  

It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the complete black of the room after he flips the bathroom light off on his way out, but you manage to track him nonetheless. You relish in the familiar dip of the mattress under his weight, the careful tug of the blanket as he gets in bed with you. As he pulls you into him, without hesitation, it’s like ecstasy. Everything is okay again.

It doesn’t take long for you to get close to sleep—it’s been days since you’ve been able to. Just before you go under, Spencer secures you to him. He presses his lips to your temple. 

“I love you,” you mumble. You want to say it before you can’t. 

He strokes your hip. And then you’re gone. 

March 26th

“Did you mean it?”

You look up from the transcripts you’d been studying—the latest victims both had behavioral issues at school. Spencer is across from you, on the other end of the big glass conference table at the Memphis field office. Binders and notebooks and thick Manila folders form a sort of abstract frame around him as he leans back in his chair, gripping the plastic arms. His eyes are laser-focused on you. How long has he been staring at you, thinking about this?

“Did I mean what?”

“When you said you loved me.”

The door is closed and the blinds are shut. You almost wish this were more public so you could reasonably (and urgently) change the subject. Instead, you laugh awkwardly and cast your gaze sideways as if something in your peripheral vision could save you. “When did I say that?” 

It is very clearly the wrong question to have asked. Spencer blinks and looks down through the table at nothing, brows knitting slightly like he’s accounting for new information and adjusting his frameworks accordingly. You swallow. The trouble is, you remember saying it with perfect clarity. You’d just been hoping he would let you off the hook for it. 

“Okay,” he says, after a few eternal moments with only someone’s ringing landline in the office beyond to bridge the gap of silence. 

“… Okay what?”

He picks up his pencil without making eye contact. Twirls it between nimble fingers. Pulls his chair close to the table like he’s going to settle back into his work. There are times where he is capable of immersing himself in whatever he’s reading completely and immediately, but you know this is not one of those times. The petulant flash of his eyebrows, the chin balanced on his fist to hide his mouth. And that perpetually tapping pencil. For all his genius and every one of his quirks, you know he can’t focus on reading and fiddle at the same time. You’re not a profiler for nothing. 

“Spencer.”

“What?”

The immediacy of it is almost enough to have you wincing. 

“I… I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I asked you a question and you didn’t know what I was talking about, so it’s fine.”

“But you’re obviously upset.”

“I’m not obviously anything. You’re reading into it.”

You can’t help but roll your eyes. “Oh my god. Says you.”

The pencil hits the table—as does the other hand. Spencer sits up straight and looks you right in the eye. Uh oh. 

“You responded to my question with another question to avoid giving me a real answer because you think I won’t like what you have to say. Am I wrong?”

Your face goes hot as your mouth opens and closes uselessly a few times. A moment passes and you hate watching that vindication, that hurt, freezing him over, more solid with each second you don’t speak. Mostly you hate that feeling in your throat—it’s either bile or the truth. You’re not sure which one will come out when you open your mouth. But you have to try. He’s backed you into a corner. You swallow. 

“Yeah. Yeah, actually, you are.”

Spencer blinks. “Oh.”

“Oh,” you huff mockingly, averting your eyes to the paper in front of you and strangling your pen as your cheeks positively burn. 

More buzzing silence. 

“Sorry,” Spencer tries, having softened considerably and now obviously remorseful. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I’m sorry. You don’t have to… say anything before you’re ready. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

Still avoiding his gaze, you hum. It’s a manic, anxious sort of sound. The nail of your thumb wears away between your teeth before you switch to picking at the dead skin on your lip. Your foot bounces as you read the name of the victim over and over again, just to have something to do. Kelly Shelton. Kelly Shelton. 

You don’t realize he’s rolled his chair over to you until there’s a gentle hand around your wrist. 

“Stop,” he murmurs, not letting go even when you look at him indignantly. He produces chapstick from his pocket, because of course he does, and presses it into your palm. His eyes are so big and so brown and so warm, almost calf-like, that it’s very difficult to stay mad. “I’m sorry. That was unfair of me.”

“Yeah. It was.” You drop your eyes to where you’re fiddling with the lip balm. His hand still rests over your wrist. If he won’t let you pick at your lips, you’re at least going to chew on them—especially with the concession you’re about to make. “But… I mean… you held out for a while. I guess I’d probably be curious too.”

“So you do remember saying it.”

You look up at him with eyes that you hope effectively say don’t push your luck. At this, he has the audacity to smile—something smitten and stupid and cute. God, he really is easy on the eyes.

“If you tell anyone, you’re dead,” you warn, but it comes out all wrong when you’re fighting back a twisty grin of your own. “And they’ll never know it was me.”

“Noted.”

“Because I could really get away with it. Like, really. I know exactly how to throw off an investigation.”

“Easy, tiger. Put that on. I’m going to get you some water so maybe you’ll stop dessicating your lips.”

“Why are you so worried about my lips?” You ask his retreating back. 

Spencer barely looks over his shoulder as he clicks his tongue, like you should already know. “Vested interest.”

You slink low into your seat and try not to be flustered. 

April 15th

“That tastes like lawn clippings.”

You laugh at the face Spencer is pulling as he lets your gelato melt on his tongue. “No it does not! It’s so good! You seriously don’t like matcha?”

“Matcha is fine.” He points at your cup with his dinky wooden spoon. “That is grass.”

It’s the first warm night of spring, and you and Spencer weren’t the only ones who had an itch to get out of the house. Bars and restaurants have set up their sidewalk seating. Food trucks seem to dot every corner, and on this street alone there have got to be nearing a hundred people, milling about or seated, all talking and laughing. The two of you are ambling back toward his apartment. Efficiency has not been a priority of the journey. 

“The lady said it’s one of their most popular ice cream flavors. It wouldn’t sell if it actually tasted like grass. You’re just delusional.”

“Not ice cream.”

You frown and suck on the wooden end of your spoon, looking up at him through narrow eyes. His hair is getting long. “What?”

“It’s not ice cream. Gelato and ice cream are fundamentally different.”

“How?” 

“Gelato uses more milk, less cream, and usually doesn’t contain eggs. It’s also meant to be served at a warmer temperature. And they have entirely different regional origins. Thus, not ice cream. If your opinion is going to be wrong, you should at least try to get the facts right.”

Spencer is smiling at his cup when you shove against him. “If mine is so bad, let me try yours.”

“No,” he laughs, eating another pitifully small spoonful. “Because I know if you try mine, you’re going to realize it’s better, and then we’ll have to go back.”

“That is not going to happen. Just let me try! Please? I let you try mine!”

“Forced me to,” he mutters, smile still pulling at the corners of his mouth as he slows to a stop in front of a mostly-budded spindly tree. You stand toe to toe on the sidewalk as he scoops a bite for you and holds out the spoon. As soon as you lean forward to taste it, you realize he was completely right. His is infinitely better than yours. Spencer’s lips twist and his eyes sparkle at this recognition, and you’re pissed it’s so visible on your face. 

“You’re making me go back, aren’t you?”

“… No. Yours isn’t even good.”

“Oh my god,” he laughs. “Come on.”

“Mm… okay.”

You turn around, and immediately freeze. There, at the edge of the crowd of food-truck goers, you see a distinctly colorful and familiar silhouette. Penelope Garcia is facing away from you, but even from the back you’d never mistake her for someone else. Those metallic green platform heels had very nearly crushed your toes in the elevator just this afternoon. 

“We need to go.”

Spencer frowns when you turn right back around and he has to take a few quick steps to catch up when you feel no qualms about leaving him in the dust. “What? What happened?” He asks, craning his head to scan the crowd shrinking behind you. “Is that Penelope?”

“And Kevin,” you agree. 

“Oh. You don’t want to say hi?”

At first you think he’s joking. But when you feel his eyes on the side of your face for a moment too long, you meet his questioning gaze. “No, I don’t wanna say hi.”

A familiar pause. The one that always comes right before he starts a fight with you. “You don’t want them to see us together?”

You sigh. “I—no. You know I don’t want the team to know yet. And if Garcia finds out, it’s gonna be the whole team. They’ll just… they’ll make it weird.”

“I think you’re making it weird right now. We’re allowed to spend time together outside of work. I sincerely doubt that if they had seen us back there Penelope’s first assumption would be that we’re together.”

We’re not, you want to say—but you bite it back. Because, even if not by name, in effect you are. The only reason to remind him of that at this point would be to hurt his feelings. And you’re not cruel. Or at least—you don’t try to be. 

“I just—I’m not ready for that.”

“We wouldn’t have to tell anyone.”

“Can we please just drop it?” 

You didn’t mean to snap. Luckily your brisk pace has taken you far enough away that the ambient sounds of the city will surely muffle your voices before they reach your coworkers. 

Spencer is silent. Your gelato hits the bottom of a nearby trash can. 

Back at his apartment, things remain slightly tense. You don’t like it—his reticence, the physical distance he maintains. 

Spencer’s getting water in the kitchen when you wordlessly excuse yourself to his bedroom. A few minutes later, you emerge, padding quietly across the antique tile, and he turns around—eyes shamelessly scanning you up and down as he notes your lack of shoes. And pants, probably. 

“I thought you were planning on going home for the night.” He sets the glass down on the counter when you don’t stop coming. 

“Don’t feel like driving.” You wrap your arms around his middle and rest your cheek against his chest. “Can I stay?”

He’s quiet a moment. You don’t always reward him with overt, unapologetic affection like this. Especially not after the recurring what are we argument. “You know you can.”

“Thanks.”

After one more moment of hesitation, or reluctance, or something—his arms snake around you. You relax further into him, eyes fluttering shut. “I’m sorry about earlier. With Penelope.”

The thrum of his heart could lull you to sleep. 

“Me, too,” he murmurs—and there is something like grief laced into the words. You pretend not to notice. 

April 29th

“Sorry I’m late. Crash on the beltway,” you breathe as you blow into the roundtable room one morning, tossing your bag on the table and falling into a seat. 

JJ nods, leaning back in her chair. “Oh, yeah. Spence got delayed, too. Maybe it was the same one.”

You clear your throat and focus on flipping open a file. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Spencer is holding back a grin so bright that you can practically hear the crystalline twinkling as it fights to be freed. 

Later, you corner him by the coffee machine. 

“You have to stop doing that,” you mumble. 

He’s leaning against the counter, one hand in his suit pocket—your favorite suit of his—as he watches you smugly from behind his cup. “Doing what?”

The look you give him then could boil water. He maintains his innocence. 

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“Yeah, asshat. Making us late,” you hiss, only after a proprietary scan to make sure nobody’s standing close enough to hear. 

“Friday is statistically the most dangerous day of the week on the beltway in terms of vehicular collisions. But there’s nothing I can do about that. You look nice today, by the way. Had a good morning?”

The audacity on him. Your face burns as you try to think of a retort, but all the signals have been intercepted—playing clips from your rather leisurely morning in a hazy highlight reel that is most certainly not appropriate for the work place. But he doesn’t let you flounder for long. Instead, he’s pushing off the counter and standing too close, just barely resting a hand on the small of your back as he reaches up to grab your mug from a shelf and you try not get dizzy from the proximity. 

“I’ll bring the coffee to you, sweetheart. Go sit down.”

The words, the gesture, are all too subtle for anyone else to notice. They turn you into a puddle of idiot. He’s never called you sweetheart. He’s never condescended to you like that before. You’re pretty sure you’re not supposed to like it so much. 

A few minutes later, the mug hits your desk. With ten words, he’d reduced you down to something shy and nervous, and you look up at him as he slides the coffee toward you like he might do something else crazy and unreasonably attractive. “Thanks,” you murmur, accepting the drink and exerting excessive willpower in order to turn your attention back to the computer screen. 

Rossi calls from the catwalk. “You do deliveries now? Fantastic. I’ll take a cappuccino.”

“Yeah. I’ll get right on that,” Spencer mumbles, and makes a beeline for his desk. You hope his face is red. Serves him right. 

The rest of the day, you’re almost… clingy. At lunch, you silently slide your chair over to his and begin eating without a word. It’s not like you have anything to say, really. You just crave the comfort of his knee against yours. When he fleetingly rests his hand on your thigh under the desk, for the briefest of moments, you’re far too pleased. 

Soon, JJ joins you, and then Penelope. But you don’t mind. Sometimes the nature of your relationship with Spencer and the secrecy of it all is a major source of stress for you—but today, it feels more like an alliance. Something special between the two of you that nobody else gets to share in. 

You keep casting glances at him, just for the pleasure of the view. Hoping he’ll be looking back. The third time you make eye contact, he shakes his head subtly and smiles down at his salad. You bite back a grin of your own, and try to focus on the story Penelope is telling. Sometimes, keeping secrets is fun. 

May 3rd

When Garcia said the case was local, you didn’t think you’d know the final victim. You didn’t think you’d have to watch her die. 

After the EMTs clear you, Spencer takes you to your apartment. You don’t speak a word the entire drive. Not in the parking lot, not in the lobby or the elevator or the hallway. You don’t speak in the bathroom when he quietly asks if you want help getting out of your bloodied clothes. Gently, tactfully, he coaxes a nod from you, and then he’s unbuttoning your shirt. It’s not your blood. 

The shower is started. Do you want me to come with you?

Another shake of your head. He respects your wish for privacy, but leaves the bathroom door cracked. You’d never tell him how much you appreciate that. 

After the shower, after you’re dressed, Spencer brings you tea and sits on the bed with you. At some point he changed from work clothes into pajamas he’d left here, even though he didn’t ask if he could sleep over. You’re grateful. Maybe he noticed that you’d left all the lights off, and he doesn’t try to turn them on. You’re grateful for that, too. 

“We don’t have to talk about it right now. But we can, okay? We can talk about it whenever you’re ready.”

Another morose nod. You stare into the amber depths of your tea. Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. 

“I just wanna go to bed,” you whisper. All the screaming has shredded your throat. The words come out like rice paper. 

Spencer holds you until the room fills with milky grey dawn light. And though neither of you are speaking, he doesn’t fall asleep. You can tell from his breathing that he’s staying awake for you. 

-

You’re supposed to take a week off, at the least. This is not something you want. Being alone for eight hours a day sounds like it’ll be the opposite of helpful—but so what. You can handle it. When Spencer calls to tell you there’s a case—that’s when the panic starts to well. 

You pick at your lip, and then when you remember how he’d scold you for it, switch to pulling a loose thread on your sock, phone poised in your free hand. “I’ll come in.”

“You can’t,” he says, voice tinny through the speaker. “You cannot be in the field right now. You know that.”

You sit up a little straighter, nails biting into the skin of your ankle. “What am I supposed to do—just—just rot here for however fucking long you’re—you guys are gone?”

Spencer sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t want you to be alone. I’m… I’m considering sitting this one out, too.”

Your blood goes cold. “Spencer.”

A beat. “What?”

“You’re not staying behind for me.”

“I’m—”

“No. That’s not—that’s not what this is. That’s not what we do. You’re going to go do your job, and I’m going to stay here.”

“You just said—”

“I don’t care what I said! You’re not putting me ahead of the job! You’re not staying behind to check up on me. I’m an adult.”

“You don’t need to lash out. I’m just worried about you.”

“Worry about doing your fucking job. And don’t call while you’re gone.”

You hang up and throw your phone at the end of the couch. 

-

Spencer gets home at the end of the week to find his apartment broken into. The first clue was that the culprit forgot to lock the door after they used their key. The second and third clues were haphazardly untied and dropped in the middle of the living room. 

He finds you in the dark, curled up on his side of the bed under the blanket. Spencer drops his bag and rounds the bed to you, sitting on the edge and carefully taking your head into his lap, where, as if on cue, you begin to cry. For a long while, he doesn’t say anything—only pushes your hair out of your face with a gentle hand and fruitlessly wipes away tears. You’re not sure you’ve ever cried like this in front of him. 

Eventually, you try to breathe, pushing the heel of your palm into your eye as if you could forcibly hold the tears in. “I c-can’t believe that she’s gone,” you gasp. 

“I know, honey,” Spencer murmurs. “I’m so sorry.”

You sob harder. “It sounds so s-stupid, but I can’t—I don’t underst-stand how she’s dead! I saw her last week!”

“It’s not stupid. Human brains struggle with loss because we constantly function under the assumption that people are still there even when we can’t see them. Your brain is trying to contend with two incompatible realities, and it’s exhausting, and it hurts a lot. I know it does, angel.”

“I just—I saw it happen—I haven’t slept, because—” A cleaving cry pushes through your sentence, cutting you off. The air in the room is vacuous around your grief. 

“I know,” Spencer whispers again. His voice is so tender it bruises more than it breaks. “I know. I wish you hadn’t. I’m sorry.”

The fact that you went days without talking or even exchanging a text goes unmentioned. Your outburst goes unmentioned. Still, Spencer wishes you had told him what was going on sooner. He would’ve come back in a heartbeat. You wish that, too. 

May 20th

Spencer is sick. Over the phone he insists that you don’t come over. So you show up at his door and use your key. What is he going to do? Get up from the sofa and physically remove you? Not likely, in his state. 

As soon as you enter the apartment, you see his head poke up from the couch. Then he groans, hoarse and congested, and drops back down. “I told you to stay away. I’m still contagious.”

“I brought you three kinds of soup,” you say, completely ignoring his bid to send you away as you breeze into the living room and sit on the coffee table across from him, paper bag in tow. “But I think you should start with this one. It’s chicken noodle with garlic, ginger, and turmeric.”

“Anti-inflammatories.”

You give him a dazzling smile. “Exactly. So you’ll get better quicker. I looked it up.” Spencer smiles at this too. Despite the sallow skin and the darker-dark circles, the brilliance of it still has the ability to fluster you—so you move right along. “Um—I also got—I brought honey-herb cough drops, like the ones you keep in your desk. Oh! And this immune-boosting tea. I don’t know if it works, but it sounded good. And… I brought you orange juice for vitamin C—and, okay—you don’t have to try this, but it’s one of those, like, immune-boosting shots? It’s just a tiny little bottle of ginger and turmeric juice, I think. It’ll probably taste bad. But I got one for me, too, so we can take them in solidarity. And maybe then I won’t get sick.”

Spencer just watches you for a moment. You smile awkwardly and pick at a thread on your jeans. “Sorry, I know this is a lot. Sorry if I overdid it. I can go, if you want—I just wanted to make sure you had—”

“Stop. This is amazing. You’re genuinely like an angel. Thank you.” Spencer reaches out and sets a hand on your thigh. The idea that he wants to show you affection but doesn’t want to risk your health is so endearing that you can’t help yourself—you slide to your knees in front of the couch and wrap your arms around him best you can. He chuckles and hooks an arm around your back, rubbing a few short lines over your shirt. 

After a moment you pull back, and press a fleeting kiss to his warm forehead—but you stay kneeling in front of him for a bit longer. Unwisely close, most likely. His eyes are bleary, glazed with illness and watercolor soft on you. 

“What are you gonna tell the team if you get sick?” he murmurs, gaze tracing your face in gentle lines. 

You hum, wrapping your hand around his forearm. “We were doing mouth to mouth resuscitation?”

-

Turns out the immunity shots were a gimmick, because the next week, you’re sick as a dog. The team doesn’t ask any questions—it’s completely reasonable that Spencer could’ve infected you without getting his spit in your mouth. 

“Guess what?” You ask from his couch as soon as he opens the front door, making a beeline for the kitchen to set down his groceries. 

“What?”

“Penelope called me today asking why I wasn’t home. Apparently after work she stopped by to bring me soup. I told her I was at the doctor’s, and she was like, at six PM? And I was like, yeah, she’s a weird naturopathic doctor, and then she started naming all the naturopathic doctors she knows.”

“Technically you are at the doctor’s,” Spencer reminds you as he comes to sit on the coffee table, much like you’d done last week. “You still sound congested. Are you feeling any better?”

You lean into his touch when he checks your temperature with a cool hand to your forehead. “A little, maybe.”

Spencer frowns as he brushes his thumb across your febrile cheek, sporting that little worried line between his brows that you find so cute. “You’re not coughing. Have you been taking that cold medicine?”

“Plenty.”

A slow smile blooms on his face in spite of the concern. “Oh. So you’re high.”

“No!” You giggle, though you’re definitely a little loopy. “And hey—even if I was, that’s medical malpractice on your part. One, you should never share prescriptions, and two, you should never let the patient administer her own doses when she’s really sleepy and out of it.”

Spencer lets you grab his hand, running his thumb over your knuckles. “Can’t leave you alone for even a day,” he scolds through a grin that oozes affection. 

“You know what would make me feel better, Dr. Reid?”

“What?”

“A kiss.”

“Can’t risk it. The virus could have mutated. It might reinfect me.”

“It wouldn’t do that to me,” you promise. Spencer smiles even wider, squeezes your hand tighter. 

“Yeah? Why not?”

“Because we go way back. Like to last week when you got sick.”

“Right. You’re getting cut off the cough syrup, Typhoid Mary.” At that he tries to get up, presumably to go make you dinner—but you refuse to let go of his hand. 

“Hey, wait.”

Spencer, now standing and still holding your hand, looks down at you expectantly. Your head lolls on the pillow as you blink up at him. “Love you.”

He smiles, softer now, and kisses your wrist, right where the feverish blood flows closest to the surface. “I love you.”

After that, it’s hard to feel too bad. 

June 6th

“Can you slow down?” Spencer follows you into the bedroom where you immediately begin yanking open drawers and shoving clothes into your duffel bag. 

“No, because you’re going to try and fix it, and I already told you I don’t want—”

“Jesus Christ—I’m asking you to stop for one fucking second so we can talk about this.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I do. There are two of us in this relationship, and I want to talk about it.”

“And I just said I don’t.” Half the clothes you’ve accrued here are on his floor because they wouldn’t fit into the bag. Both of you stomp carelessly over them toward the bathroom. You’re grabbing products at blind from the medicine cabinet. 

“You are unbelievable. How many more times are you going to do this? How many times are we going to break up because you—”

You whip around, brandishing a toothbrush. “We’re not breaking up. We’ve never broken up because we have never been together. That’s the fucking problem—you always think everything means more than it does. You’re obsessive and clingy and smothering and so fucking exhausting to be around. If you want to talk about it, there. That’s why this is happening.” You shove past him and he tails you down the hall. 

“You’re pathetic,” he calls. “Truly. This is pathetic.”

“Stop talking to me.”

“You know what your problem is? You know why we keep doing this? You’re a coward.”

“Oh my god. Great, yeah, this again. Let’s have this conversation again, please.”

“If you don’t like it maybe you should fucking listen to me this time!” 

The yell rings. It might be hard for the average person to get him this angry. To you, it comes naturally. It comes like switching the shower water from hot to room temperature, washing cool down your neck and shoulders. 

“Goodbye.” You’re making for the door, and you get so far as to open it—but then, Spencer has his hand in a vice grip around your wrist, and he’s slamming the door shut. You startle, almost jumping back into him and then whirling around. He’s so close you can see the freckle in his iris. “What the fuck is your problem?” you shout—when he goes low, you go lower. “Let go.”

“I am not going to keep doing this with you,” he breathes, and his eyes are so dark, so full of gravity and swirling with anger—that for the first time, you actually sort of believe him. “I will say this one last time.” Your heart is pounding as his tongue darts over his lips. You’re frozen. Battered silence hangs all around, waiting to be broken and put back together for the umpteenth time this week. But he keeps his voice low. “I have been patient with you. You were taught that the people closest to you are going to let you down and hurt you. It is not your fault that those lessons are biologically ingrained into your nervous system. I understand that sometimes it doesn’t feel safe to let someone in, and you’re just doing what you think you have to do. But you are an adult. I’m done letting you use me as a scapegoat for your own attachment issues. I love you, and I care about you, and I’m never going to punish you for caring about me. I’m not going to hurt you for it, ever. But I am not your doormat. So I need you to understand that the smokescreens and the manipulation tactics are not going to work anymore. If you leave, it’s going to be because you are afraid. Not because I’m clingy or obsessive or exhausting to be around. You’re going to take accountability for what this is.”

Your wrist flexes in his hold. The words are like searing fire in your veins, in your whole body—burning you clean from the inside out. This is the worst thing he could have said to you. The worst thing he could’ve done while he made you look into his eyes like this. You’d rather be stabbed. If you could, you’d play dead. But you have a terrible feeling that he’s ready to stand here, watching you, for hours. For as long as it takes you to move again. 

“You need to let go of me,” you whisper. 

And he does. For a moment, you stand there, afraid to move, watching him wearily like he’s going to grab you and drag you deeper into some cave—somewhere he can wrap you in a web and keep you there to poke at forever. But he doesn’t. Not when your fingers twitch at the doorknob. Not when you twist it open. Nobody chases you down the hallway. 

He simply lets you go. 

June 11th

The team doesn’t know about your most recent split with Spencer. They never do. No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many brutal arguments you get into, no matter how many disgusting things are said, no matter how many of his dishes you shatter—always, without fail, the two of you will go to work the next morning, stand peaceably next to each other in the elevator, and your coworkers will remain none the wiser. How could they possibly suspect a breakup when they never knew you were together?

It makes you feel insane. It’s like the relationship is a shared hallucination, and the only person who’d assure you that you you’re not going crazy is the one person you don’t want to talk to. And, of course, it puts you into situations like this. You and Spencer have been tasked with going to the medical examiner. Just the two of you. Aside from the hum of the wheels spinning against the wide road and the purr of the engine, the SUV is silent. 

“Take a left up here,” Spencer eventually says. 

You shoot him an irritated glance from the driver’s seat that he does not reciprocate. “The GPS is on, Reid.”

“Yeah, but you have it on silent. You keep missing turns. It’s rerouted three times.”

You grimace, glancing between the road and the mapping system several times. “Wh—and you didn’t think to tell me?”

Spencer doesn’t respond. It’s probably for the best. 

Fifteen minutes later, car doors are slamming in almost-unison. LA is hot today—white sunlight bleaches the sidewalk and beams off the shiny car in death rays. You flip your sunglasses down over your eyes and breathe in the wind coming off the ocean, ruffling the towering palm trees and your shirt. You don’t wait for Spencer. All you can think about when you look at him is what he’d said to you against his door—how he’d laid out the truth bare and in turn made you feel stripped and humiliated. Little more than a specimen, belly up, for him to sink his scalpel into. 

“Hold on,” he calls from behind. For decency’s sake, you do. After all, he is your co-worker. You don’t take your hand off the knob as you watch him coming up behind you in the door’s paned reflection against a wide, aggressively cerulean sky. He’s got sunglasses on, too—too many layers of glass between your eyes and his. You wait for him to speak. He takes his sweet time. “We need to be functional.”

“We are.”

“We need to be more functional. No more avoiding talking on the job.”

You open the door, baptizing yourself in the freezing rush of lobby AC. “That was a you problem. I would have vastly preferred if you hadn’t spent the first five minutes of the drive not telling me that I was going the wrong way.”

“I know,” Spencer agrees, holding the door open above your head. “Sorry. You’re just… kind of scary, sometimes.”

A probable understatement. The corner of your mouth twitches as you flash your badge to the receptionist, and she picks up the phone to alert the examiner of your arrival. 

June 30th

The elevator door was sliding shut as you and JJ chatted about where the two of you were going for dinner—perhaps that new Mediterranean spot with the nice outdoor seating—and then, there was a hand. The door stopped and slid back open. Spencer clearly wasn’t anticipating that it’d be you and JJ, but only the briefest flash of hesitation is visible before he’s plastering on an awkward smile and stepping in. 

“Oh, Spence! We were just talking about going out to dinner—do you have plans?”

You bite your tongue at JJ’s invitation and stare at the glowing panel of buttons. Spencer falters—you can feel his eyes on you. 

“Uh—tonight’s not a great night for me, actually.”

“Are you sure? You cancelled on me last month. And the three of us haven’t gone out in a long time.”

That’s how you end up at a smooth wooden table in a stucco courtyard under a big blue umbrella, serenaded by the burbling of a central tiled fountain and some bouncy stringed instrument coming through a wall mounted speaker with JJ and Spencer. And then, because of course, JJ gets a call from Will—something about the kids throwing up—apologizes profusely, and then leaves. Leaves the two of you alone. Together. At a restaurant. 

Silence hangs from the umbrella. You get impatient under the pressure of it. “Wow. We’re already having so much fun.”

The sarcasm does not go over Spencer’s head. “In my defense, I tried not to come.”

You sigh, cheek squished against fist and studying the way sunlight bounces off the splashing water as you slurp forlornly from a straw. “Not your fault.”

“Should we go?”

You turn your attention back to him, squinting and nibbling at the end of your straw. “I don’t know. We already ordered.”

“So… you wanna wait?”

A shrug. “It probably won’t be that long.”

And with that, a silent treaty is signed. 

“You know,” you begin, fishing a strawberry from your glass, “JJ was right. I can’t remember the last time the three of us hung out.”

“September 24th.”

You nod. “Wow. So, like… eight months. We kind of suck.”

The reason you’d stopped going out as a group was as much the changing of seasons as it was the shifting in your dynamic with Spencer. Around that time you’d started to see him one on one a lot more. This truth goes clearly acknowledged, but unspoken, as he tracks a drip of condensation down your glass and then regards you with a cool sort of curiosity. 

“Eight months is quite a while, huh?”

You eye him right back and lean down to your straw. “Basically forever.”

Later, easy chit-chat dots the short walk to your vehicle—it’s been hours, and you haven’t run out of things to say. You could keep going, you realize once you’re standing next to your car. A month without his company, and you’re brimming over with stories and anecdotes you’d been saving for him. He’s the first person you think about when you hear a funny joke or learn something new. That doesn’t just go away when if you’re not on good terms. It simmers. Waits for inevitable release. 

The sky is a gorgeous cocktail of pink and purple and yellow. You tilt your head back and close your eyes, just briefly, breathing in, letting the setting sun soak through your skin. 

“Beautiful,” you observe once your eyes flutter open again, tracing the wispy edges of rose-colored clouds. 

“Very.”

You sigh, taking in just a bit more vitamin D—and then you’re looking back at Spencer. He’s already looking at you, gilded in the heavy aureate light. Studying, in that way of his.

“Are we good?” He asks, after a moment. 

You blink. And then you offer him a small smile. “We’re good.”

July 13th

The trouble of being friends with Spencer is this: once you allow yourself a taste, no matter how small, no matter how innocent—you’re overcome with the desire to bite down. You want him between your teeth and on the back of your tongue. Messy, starving, gnashing, you don’t care. You want and want and want. 

Victim number one of your relapse: the coat tree. It clatters to the ground and spills everything everywhere when Spencer stumbles against it, trying to walk backwards into the apartment after you blindly lock the door. Of course, he couldn’t see where he was going—he was too busy tracing the seam of your bottom lip with his tongue. 

“Shit,” he breathes, nearly tripping again as winter coats and scarves, dormant for summer, wrap around his ankles and threaten to pull him down. You giggle breathlessly, slipping off your own shoes as he kicks at the heavy fabrics like they’re going to bite. Then he’s pulling you back into him, deeper into the apartment, tongues clashing. It’s been a long time, and he’s demanding. Not that you mind—not at all. Though, when he pulls you the opposite direction of his bedroom—toward his desk, in fact—you’re certainly confused.

“Bed?” You whisper against his mouth. 

“Can’t. Rebinding books, they’re laid out on the bed while the glue dries.”

Okay. “Couch?”

Reluctantly, Spencer pulls away. You yelp in surprise when he grabs your hair and uses it as a handle to direct your attention toward the sofa. Also covered in books. It’s amazing, actually, the sheer volume of them when they’re not neatly tucked into the shelf. And he’s got them all memorized. You look back at him, a wave of renewed awe washing through your veins. He’s so fucking strange. You missed him awfully. 

Pressing close enough is impossible, then, as you kiss him hard. There is a blatant, unapologetic hunger in his touch which completely ignores the border that the hem of your short dress presents, grabbing the back of your thigh in a bruising grip. Your breath catches against his mouth at the way his fingers dig into you like you’re wet clay and he knows best, he knows how to make you into something better, as the slow ache crawls up the back of your neck and furrows your brow. Spencer’s not afraid to touch you. He knows exactly how to make sure he’s got all your attention.

Nobody else has ever been able to do that. From other hands, when you’re forced to go begging for the cheap version of what you really want, it’s little more than untrained violence. Spencer knows how to make it feel righteous. Nobody is ever him. That hand comes to slide up the front of your thigh, thumb skimming the hem of your underwear while he dives back into your mouth and you let yourself be completely washed out in the riptide of his desperate affections. All that you’d been missing for months—you want it now. You want to show him how much you missed him. 

“Spencer—” you gasp between kisses. He hums against your mouth, and you let your hand slide down his stomach to hook in his belt. “Spence, can I—please, baby—”

“You don’t have to beg me, honey. I’m gonna give you whatever you want.” Lips against your warm cheek, your forehead, as he lilts sweetly, breathily. “Anything.”

So you’re nodding, dizzy in your anticipation and your desire, wordlessly pleading for more of his mouth on yours while you take off a belt you’re intimately familiar with. The clinking metal wakes up a part of you that’s been asleep since the last time you’d had him like this. When you drop to your knees, he seems vaguely surprised, eyes soft and all love on you. 

“Really?” he croons, hand already at your temple, already smoothing baby hairs. Already being the person you want him to be, because he’s been waiting, because it’s natural. Your nod, your eyes, the way your hands find his legs—it’s all enough for him. You get what you want. 

The hardwood presses against your knees, shifting and squeaking beneath you. Spencer takes his time pushing your hair out of your face, gathering it between his fingers and holding it to the crown of your head with an impossible kind of tenderness as you move. He strokes your cheek, brushes his thumb feather-light over the soft line of your lashes, once, twice. The fabric of his trousers bunches in your hands where they rest on his legs—he’s so kind to you that it hurts, it makes you want to cry, it makes you want to stay here forever just so he’ll keep looking at you like that, so you never forget how his pinky feels against the nape of your neck or the heel of his palm feels against your temple as he plays and plays with your hair, as even when you’re the one on your knees, he worships you. Christens you his own little angel, angel, angel—whispered like he really believes it, like you’re a miracle. Spencer loves in a way that feels like soothing, that feels like an apology for all the bad things that have ever happened to you and a nullifying of all the bad things you have ever done. 

Afterward you press your forehead against his thigh, mostly to hide the welling of your eyes when there’s no longer any good excuse—partially as a kind of supplication. Never let me go again. Please. No matter what I say. I’m sorry. 

Spencer fixes himself, crouches to your level, drops your hair just to push it out of your face and make you look at him. Your chest rises and falls rapidly as your glossy eyes dart between his. But you don’t look away. You don’t want to. When a tear rolls down your cheek, he sees it, and there’s nothing you can do. And you realize you’re not sure you’d want to hide it after all. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” he murmurs. “We’re okay. What do you need? What can I give you, sweetheart? Do you want to be done? Want me to move the books so we can sit down?”

“No, no—I don’t wanna be done. I just missed you so much. I was dumb before. I’m sorry.”

He softens impossibly at this, to the point where he’s hazy around the edges, melting into the warm ambient light. “You weren’t. You weren’t dumb. Come here, stand up. You’re never dumb—here, is this okay?” He’s sat you on his desk, shoving things aside to make room—casualties for a later consideration—and he’s already littering kisses over your neck. “I missed you too. I think about you all the time, angel, you don’t need to apologize, just… god, I missed you. Please let me touch you. Please.”

It’s hard to say no to that—what with the begging, and the pull of your lip between his teeth, and the heat of his breath fogging your brain. There’s not a lot of room to work with, but you manage to lean enough of your weight back that he can tug your underwear down your thighs. They end up on the floor, and you feel his hand sliding beneath your dress again, where you’re bare for him, and he doesn’t make you wait. 

“Oh my god, you’re perfect,” he mutters upon discovering just how ready for him you are. You hiss as he slips past the initial resistance. Spencer responds with his lips pressed to your head, but he shows no mercy with the slow rock of his hand, the drag against where you’re softest and where you need him the most, the exact right place to touch you. Your arching, squirming, whimpering, doesn’t deter him in the slightest. When your thighs clamp shut and you shift back, he follows you. When you look up at him, brow furrowed, lips parted—in disbelief but without the words to say it—he’s already looking at you. “I know,” he assures you. “That’s it, huh? Right here?”

Rapidly you nod. His exhale is almost one of relief. “Yeah,” he sighs, knowingly. Melting closer to kiss you again. 

It doesn’t bother him when your nails dig into his flexing forearm as you cum. Judging by the groan, you think he might like it. 

You’re barely recovered by the time he’s lining himself up to you, but you find your bearings quickly. It’s a slow, bated burn, when he finally does it. You’re both silent, tense, hardly breathing in anticipation. What has at times been a slip feels now more like an endless push—it is its own kind of back-arching, toe curling, deep-in-your-spine ecstasy, as he breaks you open slow. Your legs part wider for him, and your hips yearn to push against his.

His words burst forth with the same expelling of pressure, at the same time, as your first sudden cry. “Fuck, angel. Jesus.”

There’s a stinging point of light inside you that he’s pushing against. You close your eyes and watch it flash and spark. “Feels so good,” you promise, nothing more than a whisper. Whatever this is, this pain and pleasure, it’s landed you in some divine plane. You never want it to end. 

“Relax for me, honey. Let go a little.”

“I am, I am,” you defend on a quick exhale, looking down when he stops fighting to get in. “Please—why’d you stop? Please—”

“You’re not ready.”

“Yes, I am, fuck, please, Spencer!”

Something in you is desperate and starving and you need it now—you’ve needed it for a long time—but he doesn’t capitulate. Instead, he kisses you. Softly. Slow and sweet, like you have all the time in the world. You have no choice but to drown in it. It’s a short-circuit in your body when after a minute of this, after he senses the way you’ve dissolved, suddenly his hips are flush with yours. You gasp and a pencil cup clatters to the ground in your search for purchase. You’re little more than a pulsing, glowing star, lightheaded at the depth and the pressure and the way that band of resistance he’d pushed past aches around him in time with the pound of your heart. Spencer is leaning against you, gripping the edge of the desk behind you hard and breathing heavily against your neck. 

Words have every opportunity to pass from your dropped jaw, but you’re actually speechless. Your heartbeat is a white flashing in your eyes. The only verbal expression at your disposal: “Spencer.”

For a moment time suspends like that, and you wonder how the fuck you could ever have made any decision that would take you away from him, away from this. This is so obviously the only right answer. 

Slowly, he draws out, and you stop breathing. Come back. Come back. Your legs spell it out as they wrap around his hips. It’s just as slow on the uptake, and you loose a shuddering, rattling breath. Your body tenses and shifts, trying to pull you up and away from the feeling—but not because it hurts. It’s just so mind-numbingly fucking deep. Everywhere. The base of your spine, the tips of your fingers. Out. While you have a fleeting moment of sentience, you whisper his name a few times in quick succession. This successfully draws his attention and he lifts his head from your shoulder, pupils blown to hell as he’s already dragging back in. A too-honest, too-raw cry pulls from your soul, turns half disbelieving laugh as he presses against your deepest part and black spots dance in your vision. 

His eye darts to the way your knee pulls up, clearly beyond your control—the way your body tries to make sense of him, tries to respond to what he’s doing to you. You watch as it happens—that flash in his eyes. That shift into a kind of determination that always ends with you dead asleep on his pillow, face streaked with dried tears borne of sheer overwhelm. Spencer fits his arm around you and pulls you flush to him, the other hooking under your knee and holding you open. He sets a new pace, and it doesn’t take long to get you gripping at the back of his shirt and tearing up on his shoulder, making due with gasping sips of air and having completely given up on holding in the keens and the pleases and the occasional sob that to the trained ear sounds much like his name. 

You feel it coming—the searing heat, the pound of your heart, the drop of your stomach. It hits as hard as you knew it would. 

Usually he’s a little more talkative—but that comes later. With you pushed over his desk, and his arm around your chest, and his lips pressed to your ear. Blindly you reach back for him—you need him, you need something—and without question he catches your hand, pressing it hard into the dark surface of the wood. His thumb strokes at your hand, his fingers curl with yours, and Spencer continues with those murmurings, like spells—things nobody who knew him would ever imagine him saying. Things that have you making promises, breathing uh-huh’s, telling him you love him. Things that have your vision going black and your throat tightening around choked moans. He’s never had you this vulnerable before. You’re dizzy, drunk on it. This time when the end comes, it’s a heavy crash. It pulls you under. It does whatever the fuck it wants with you and tumbles you in its current forever because he’s not stopping, still slowly closing in on his own peak. There are moments where it goes beyond good. It’s just complete and utter sensation, on all fronts—thoughts come as colors and textures instead of words. You don’t even feel tethered to your body anymore, your grip on reality tenuous at best. 

Eventually all the crashing does end, and you whine brokenly, and he shushes you softly, and finally, finally, stills inside of you. 

Slowly, you come back to yourself. It’s dark outside, now. You can hear weekend traffic on the streets below. His apartment is clean (aside from the shit that got knocked over and the books on the couch) and it’s sticky summer warm, and it smells like home. It’s safe. And everything is okay. You don’t know if you’ve ever felt so okay in your life. 

Spencer adjusts his hold on you when your weight signals that you want to lie flat on the desk, face pressed against your forearm, catching your breath in the wood-lacquer darkness. He follows you down, arms braced on either side of your head. His weight on your back is a comfort, as are his lips at the nape of your neck. 

“Okay?” he murmurs. Two gentle syllables, marked with exertion. You nod against your arm. “Not ready to talk?” Another nod. Another okay. 

For a stretch of time, he’s pressed his face against the back of your shoulder. You’re still seeing dancing colors behind your lids. 

The twinkly laughter comes as a surprise. “I don’t know where to put you, baby. All the places for lying down are covered in antique books.”

There’s not much air in your lungs. You spend it on laughter.

August 3rd

Spencer corners you outside the bathroom. 

“Who was that?” He demands, eyes worrisomely clear on you, voice alarmingly steady. You glance around to see if any of your coworkers can see the way he’s practically got you up against the wall down the dark passageway. The way he’s looking at you. Like he owns you. 

“Who was who?”

“I’m not willing to play stupid with you right now. Answer me.”

It’s easier to hurt your feelings these days. They’re closer to the surface. Sometimes it makes things feel really, really good. Sometimes your eyes sting at the smallest of provocations—things you would’ve brushed off without a second thought a year ago. You meet his eyes and swallow. “You’re being a fucking dick.”

Spencer is unfazed. His response is whip-fast and too loud, even among the chatter and laughter and music and clinking glasses. “Did you sleep with him?”

“What? What is your problem?” you hiss, pushing Spencer just hard enough to get some breathing room. 

“Why won’t you answer the question?”

“God, are you—you know what? No. You are so fucking out of line right now. Fuck off.”

You leave Spencer in the hallway and emerge into the bar. It’s bustling tonight. The whole BAU is here, scattered around, but suddenly, you feel aimless. Your nervous system is rattled after being accosted as soon as you left the bathroom, on what had previously been a good night. So you stand there, looking around and fiddling with your bracelet. 

It’s one Spencer recently gifted to you. A simple, delicate chain, but clearly well-crafted. The clasp is the only real ornamentation—two interlocking circles of equivalent circumference. There is no tail of wider chain loops to create an adjustable size—it is exactly what it is, and it fits you perfectly. To some, it’d be an underwhelming gift. No lavish stones, no poetic engraving, no garish costume-jewelry gold. But it means more to you than you could ever explain to somebody else. More than you’d ever feel comfortable explaining to somebody else. Spencer knows that. Two interlocking circles. 

When he gave it to you, you had a panic attack. Jewelry felt like a big step. But you didn’t do your usual thing where you start a huge fight and then dump him, and he didn’t take offense to your overwhelm. He only comforted you, and when all was said and done, you held out your wrist, and he put the bracelet on for you, and kissed the back of your hand. You haven’t taken it off since. It’s quickly become something of a talisman—you worry at it when you don’t know what to do with your hands. Even now. When you feel like punching him in the face. 

Did you sleep with him? What an asshole. What a fucking asshole. Spencer grovels and simpers and promises he’ll never hurt you, and then he goes and does something like that. The him in question—the one who recognized you when you were ordering a drink, and who held you up for maybe five minutes—is nowhere to be seen. That’s for the best. The recognition was not reciprocal. But rather than humiliate yourself in front of this man who knew your name by admitting you couldn’t place his face, you’d played along. Laughed awkwardly at his jokes like you knew who he was.

You don’t get why Spencer is so angry. He’s not the type to get jealous just because you spoke to another man. Sure, the man was perhaps a little over-familiar with you. He was flirty.

But Spencer is so overreacting. 

Before you can stop yourself, you’re looking back in his direction. 

He’s still in the dimly lit hallway. He’s watching you, hands in suit packets, and for all that you’ve seen his face, all the times you’d swore to commit every bit of it to memory—you can’t read his expression. 

That only pisses you off worse. 

You pointedly turn away, carving a path through the Friday night patrons toward the jukebox. 

The machine takes your quarter, but there’s something of a queue, and you realize you’re in too much of a bad mood to stand around getting jostled by drunk people who are having way more fun than you are. 

That’s how you end up out front, letting the rough stone wall bite into your bare arm and watching the cars go by, surrounded by patrons who’d stepped out for a smoke. 

Maybe you shouldn’t let Spencer ruin your entire night because of some stupid outburst. But you can’t shake it. 

Is that what he thinks of you? That you sleep around? That you cheat? Sure, the two of you haven’t explicitly had the commitment talk. But you thought it was pretty fucking implied. 

The moon is a bright white spotlight overhead. Despite the season, a breeze nips at all your exposed skin, and you cross your arms against the chill. Earlier, in your classy-enough white minidress and blue pumps, you’d felt beautiful. Now you just feel gross. 

Spencer comes out a few minutes later. 

“They’re playing your song.”

You can tell by the way he stops a few feet away that his tail is between his legs. Your head rolls toward him. 

“I can hear.”

It’s true—the buzzy, bouncy twang is distinctive even through a wall, and every drum beat is clear as day. So is the cheer that goes around as a bunch of drunk Generation X-ers and millennials recognize the synth riff. 

Spencer narrows his eyes and searches for the words. “I can’t help but feeling it’s slightly… pointed.”

What? Playing a song called Love Will Tear Us Apart? 

Pointed? 

Surely not. 

You don’t bother using your words—the exaggerated faux-bafflement on your face gets the message across. 

Spencer nods, looking appropriately contrite as he steps closer. You let him. 

“You were right,” he murmurs, speaking just for you now. “I was out of line.”

“Oh, really? Thanks for telling me. I hadn’t noticed.”

He says your name gently. You shut up and cast your glare sideways, watching a crumpled plastic cup make its way down the sidewalk. 

“I’m sorry. I just—I know you’re beautiful. I know people notice you. But we’re not usually in environments where I have to watch it happen. Or… or maybe it just goes over my head. That’s entirely possible. Either way, I’m not used to seeing you get hit on, and I couldn’t tell if you knew the guy, or if… maybe you were just hitting it off, and—I—I panicked, because we’ve never really had that talk before. I know what you are to me. But I’ve never clarified what I am to you. I’m not going to push you on the labels thing. You know I’m not. We should be on the same page about this, though.”

You sigh. Fiddle with your bracelet and watch it glint. “Spencer, I swear that guy—”

“I don’t care about that guy. It wasn’t about him. I’m sorry. I just want you to know that regardless of what we call it, it matters to me that we’re not doing this with anyone else.” His voice takes on that intimate tone—just barely more than a whisper. You look down as he grabs your hand, and drags it back up to his heart. Your breath catches. “You are my person, and I need that to be clear. Is that okay with you?”

His sincerity has stunned you speechless, and the proximity isn’t helping either, so you can only let your fingers catch on his lapel and nod—quick, eager little dips of your head. Yes, yes, you think. I can’t say it like you can. But yes. Please. That’s what I want. 

“Yeah?” he asks quietly, mirroring your nod and fondness twitching at the corners of his mouth. 

What you want to say is, oh, god, I love you. I love you so much it hurts. It burns inside of me, all the time, and I don’t know what to do with it all. I love you I love you I love you. 

Instead, you say, in your smallest voice, “Yeah. Yes.”

The way he slips his hand behind your neck and kisses you against that wall, under the full August moon and between clouds of cigarette smoke, cools your blood. It’s the only thing that works. 

Later in bed, you watch him sleep, that same moonlight casting silver through his hair as you comb your fingers through it, again and again. 

Before he’d fallen asleep, you’d asked him a question that had been on your mind since the bar. 

Spencer?

Hm?

What am I to you?

It’d caught him off guard. He held your hand, pressed the circles of your bracelet just to your racing pulse on the underside of your wrist, and mapped your face with darting eyes, with an intellect that can’t read minds no matter how much he wishes it could. 

Do you actually want me to answer that question?

You’d nodded. 

Is the answer going to freak you out?

At this you’d shaken your head no—which was an assurance made in haste. But you were too curious. You needed to know. 

Spencer weighed something internally for a long moment. 

You’re like… a lens I see the entire world through. I can’t do anything, or make any choice, without thinking about you. I’m always thinking about you. When we’re not together, it feels like I’m waiting for my life to start again. Nothing really counts unless you’re there to experience it with me, you know? I think of you as… I don’t know. Everything. You’re why I know it’s all real. Why it matters. 

It was so much, you had to hide in the curve of his neck. It made you nervous. The bigger it is, the harder it falls. 

But, because it mattered so much to you—because he matters so much—you found the courage to whisper against his neck: Me, too.

It was a really scary thing to admit. Scarier than when you tell him you love him. He kissed you for your bravery. 

Now, he’s asleep. 

You trace the moon-glow line of his cheek. 

Spencer lies sleeping next to you like a Renaissance angel as hot tears burn a scar down the bridge of your nose, and you bargain with god. Let me be good enough for him. Let me be someone else. Anything. I’ll do anything, just—please. Take this feeling away. Make me into a girl who deserves this kind of love. 

God does not answer. 

August 19th

Something is off. 

It started when you and Spencer didn’t take the same car to the airfield. 

Of course, that’s not unheard of—but it is uncommon. If it’s at all possible, he’ll slide in next to you. Today he didn’t even wait—got engrossed in a debate with Emily and followed her right into an almost-full SUV. 

So you stood there, blinked, and climbed into the other car next to Rossi. You didn’t say a word for the whole fifteen minute drive, watching the muddy fields and warehouses roll by beyond the window. 

Spencer isn’t doing anything wrong. 

It’s just that it’s been nearly a week since you’ve spent a night with him. And it’s starting to make you feel restless. There have been crack of dawn doctor’s appointments, and nights where one or both of you are too tired to drive to the other’s place, and preexisting plans with other people. All valid reasons to raincheck. 

But you’re not used to sleeping alone anymore. It’s not what you do. It feels like a really big deal to you that you haven’t had a sleepover for so long, and he hasn’t mentioned it, or given any hint that it’s bothering him the way it’s bothering you. 

God, when was the last time you spent more than two or three nights apart?

The last time you broke up, you realize. 

That is a sobering thought. 

On the jet, it’s not much better. Again, Spencer doesn’t wait for you before boarding. You’re slamming the car door, and he’s already walking up the steps in animated conversation with JJ. 

There is an old, familiar pang in your chest. 

No. No, please—I’m past this. I’m too grown-up for this. 

He loves me. 

But there’s that old paradox, again. If nobody except Spencer knows that you’re dating Spencer—and he’s not acknowledging it—are you really even together?

By the time you get on, he’s at the table. The three seats around him have been filled. You eye each of your coworkers and try not to feel burning rage, because they didn’t do anything wrong. 

Instead, you sit on the far end of the couch, and you pick your nails. 

The whole first day at the precinct is pretty much the same story, though you’re able to engross yourself deeply enough into the job that it doesn’t bother you so much. 

It’s only when the day is over, and you’re showered, and you’re sitting on your perfectly made hotel queen bed, that loneliness turns into gnawing, tearing panic. 

You catch your breath as it hits you—as the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and dread washes out the shell of your body. It’s bad. Worse than you would’ve imagined. 

What is wrong with you?

Why can’t you ever just be alright?

You don’t know if the solution here is to go to Spencer or to remain locked in your room like a psych-patient in a padded cell. 

Panic makes you unreasonable, you think. Pushing off the bed to pace. Moving helps. Moving tells your body that you’re evading the threat, and the panic attack ends sooner. 

Something you’d learned from Spencer, of course. 

Spencer. 

Unreasonable, right. You’re not entirely dependent on him for your mental stability. You have developed implicit expectations, sure—you’re used to being alone with him every night, so you can talk about your days and drink tea and be close. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a routine you’ve developed, and one you’ve come to rely on. Surely it’d be disregulating for anyone if it suddenly changed without warning. It’s not because you’re obsessive, or sick, or overly-needy. And it’s normal for couples to take a few days apart. 

Not obsessive, not sick, not needy. It’s normal. This is normal. 

This becomes your mantra as you pace the patterned carpet, eyes closed, lips moving, like if you stop the panic is going to catch you and swallow you whole. 

For a few minutes, it works. 

Then, for no apparent reason—it stops working. 

And it’s like watching a dam explode from the valley below. 

For a second you don’t know if you should run to the bathroom and throw up or go to Spencer’s door, and then you’re questioning if it’s late enough to go to his room, if maybe someone on the team might be out in the hallway—but your brain is screaming, if you do not go see Spencer, you are going to die. Who gives a fuck about your fucking coworkers. 

You tap lightly at his door. 

He doesn’t answer right away, and the brightly lit hallway seems to stretch on forever. You’re so profoundly anxious that there is a moment of hysterical, perverse humor. Look at you. About to die in a hotel hallway, barefoot and in pajama shorts, if he doesn’t open this fucking door. And of course. Of course he’s not going to open it. This is great stuff. Really, awesome material. Perfect. 

Just as you’re gripping the door frame to stop the building from spinning, just as you’re really, seriously about to pass out—the lock clicks. The door opens. 

Glasses. Sweatshirt. Spencer. 

“Hey! I was just about to—” he stops. Perhaps notices your slumped posture, how you’re white-knuckling the door. Maybe the sheen of sweat on your face. “Hey, okay—come here.”

Spencer wraps an arm around you and helps you in, closing the door and then leading you to his bed. 

“You look like you’re gonna pass out,” he mutters, laying you down carefully—ideally to get the blood flow back to your head. You blink. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you okay? Did something happen?”

“I’m fine.”

You say it because you’re embarrassed. Spencer says your name with an edge that wants the truth. 

“It was just a panic attack.”

This doesn’t satisfy him. 

“Do you often pass out from panic attacks?”

“Um… not never.”

Your vision clears. Your ears stop ringing, and you push yourself up to sit against the headboard. Spencer has a bottle of water locked and loaded, holding it out for you as soon as you’re settled. 

The way he’s watching you as you drink, with so much unabashed and scrutinizing concern in that knit brow, is almost too much. You look away and screw the lid back on. 

“What triggered it?” He asks. 

“I don’t know, I was just sitting there—I was literally just sitting there, and suddenly my brain was like, by the way, you have five minutes to live, and—and I don’t know. I tried walking it off and breathing and stuff. I’m sorry I came here. It’s not your problem.”

“You’re not a problem. This isn’t a problem. You should’ve come before it got this bad.”

When he sets his hand on your knee, you close your eyes and try not to let it feel like medicine. 

It’s not his job to fix you. That’s not what he’s for. 

“Yeah,” is all you say. 

A pause. 

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

It’s clear he’s putting the pieces together. You sigh and fiddle with the bottle cap. Untwist. Twist. Untwist. 

“I… don’t know. I was overthinking.”

“Overthinking what?”

You flash him a look, because he knows he’s pushing you—but he’s unrelenting. 

Spencer’s hair is a corona of unruly curls. He hasn’t shaved in a few days. You don’t want to have this conversation—you want to put your head in his lap and fall asleep to the hotel TV. 

“It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense. I just—I don’t know, we didn’t talk all day, and—”

You take a quick, shuddering inhale, and close your mouth. Because you realize you’re about to cry. And now you can’t even soften the blow of your insanity—you can’t tell him, I know I’m being crazy, I know nothing is wrong, I know it’s okay for us to not talk for a day or to spend a few nights apart and it doesn’t mean you hate me. 

But you can’t say any of that. It wouldn’t be true, anyways. You don’t know any of those things. 

Spencer is observing you and you can’t tell what he’s thinking. You look down at your folded legs to hide your wobbling chin. 

There’s no hiding the plunk of a fat tear as it hits the mattress, or the subsequent bloom of saltwater grey turning the sheet into a ghostly, sad little garden. You wipe your face with a furious, punishing hand, and speak hoarsely. “Sorry.”

Spencer catches your wrist before you can take out your own eye. “Stop.”

“I’m fine,” you insist, snatching your hand away though you desperately crave the contact. “I don’t even know why I’m crying. I don’t know—I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Everything is fine.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t—you need to stop doing that. Minimizing everything all the time. If everything was fine, you wouldn’t have had a panic attack and you wouldn’t be crying now.”

“Everything is fine,” you assert. Anger—not at him—begins seeping through your tone, burning you at the edges. “Everything is fine, but I’m obviously not, and I’m sick of getting so fucking upset about nothing all the time.”

“Tell me why you’re upset.”

“Because I’m crazy! Because we haven’t been together all week, and you didn’t sit next to me in the car today, or on the jet, and—and ever since I actually stopped holding you at arm’s length, I’m so fucking involved, and I care so much, and I knew this would happen. Before, it wouldn’t have mattered if we didn’t spend the night together for a week, because I wasn’t all in, and I knew if I was always giving you just a little less than you were giving me that the dynamic would be in my favor, and I would never have to feel like I was the unwanted one. But I can’t do that anymore, because—’cause I let myself care all the way, and I was so afraid of this happening, and it’s happening. I don’t have any fucking control over myself anymore. I’m so worried, all the time—it’s like, I have a doomsday clock inside of me, but instead of the end of the world it’s measuring how close you are to breaking up with me at any moment. Which is fucked, I know it’s fucked. I know I can’t read your mind, but I don’t have any perspective anymore. And the worst part is that it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know the more insane and hyper-vigilant and codependent I get, the likelier you are to actually break up with me. It was never a problem before. It was never this scary because if I was the one who kept breaking up with you it meant I was in control, but I don’t wanna break up with you at all. I’m terrified of it. But it—it’s like my karma, I—”

“Okay. Slow down.” Your head snaps up—wide, teary eyes on Spencer. You almost forgot he was there. “Breathe. Just—take a deep breath.”

Fuck. You drag your hands to your face, fully prepared to curl in on yourself and die rather than face your own humiliation. 

“No, no—look at me. Come on.”

“I’m going insane,” you sniffle as he peels your hands away and forces you to look at him. “I c-can’t say anything that will make me sound less crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. Your nervous system is just shot, and you’re probably exhausted. Did you eat? I didn’t see you have dinner.”

Guilty, you shake your head. You didn’t realize he was paying attention. 

“I’ll call room service,” he decides. 

“I’m really not hungry.”

Spencer ignores this and picks up the phone anyway. You sit back against the headboard and hug your knees to your chest, staring at nothing as he orders something you’ll like. Waiting for the click of the phone back in its cradle. 

When the call is over, there is tremulous silence. A tension you’re not sure how to go about breaking. 

Spencer does it for you—finding your ankle and carefully pulling your leg straight, so he can run the length of it back and forth with his hand. You watch it go, like waves rolling in and falling back on sand. 

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend enough time together this week. I missed you, too. I absolutely do not want to break up. Not one part of me wants that.”

“I should be able to know that without you telling me.”

“But you aren’t, yet. You’re going to learn.”

“But—until I do—you’re gonna have to—to reassure me constantly. I’m going to be exhausting and irritating and you’re going to get sick of me.”

He regards you. 

“It makes me really sad that you feel that way. I think you severely underestimate how much I like you.”

“Why, though?” Immediately you’re rolling your eyes and throwing your hands up. “See? Fucking right there. Already. I’m already doing it.”

Spencer is holding back a smile when you look at him. You shrink. 

“No, no—” he laughs, leaning in. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you.”

You end up nearly lying down, with him over you. Breathing in his mint and eucalyptus bedtime smell. The smile fades slowly, as he thumbs over your cheek, your lips. Your lids flutter at the relief of it all. 

“I’m hoping… we’ll never have to do a week like that again. I didn’t like it very much, either.”

You lean into his palm, and don’t speak for a long while. 

“Spencer?”

“Hm?”

“Can—” you swallow involuntarily. You’re scared to ask. But you know what the answer will be. “Can we… I know I’ve messed up a bunch of times, but—can I be your girlfriend? We don’t have to tell anyone, I just… I want to be your real girlfriend.”

The slow blossom of his smile is like a swell in your favorite song as he grins down at you. 

“You’ve been my real girlfriend for a while.”

“I know, but… I want you to tell me that’s what I am. I want to know that when you think of me, you’re thinking about your real-life serious girlfriend.”

He hums. 

“And am I allowed to tell other people that you’re my real-life serious girlfriend?”

You chew your lip. “Some of them.”

“Which ones?”

He’s angling for something, and you know what, but you’re not sure you’re ready for that particular step. 

“I don’t know. We’ll find some.”

“I have a few in mind.”

“We can’t,” you murmur, hugging his arm to your chest. “Not yet. They’ll—it’ll change things. But… but maybe we don’t have to hide it quite as much.”

“Like… no running away when we see someone we know in public?”

You nod. “And I have a rule.”

He strokes your hair. 

“What’s that?”

“You have to always save a seat for me in the cars and on the jet. Always. Capiche?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

You tilt your chin up. He kisses you. 

Now that you’ve got him, you’re not going to let go. 

September 1st

“You’re delusional. Truly, you’re acting insane.”

“For wondering why you had to stay three hours late at work to review one interview transcript you could’ve done during lunch?”

Spencer drops his bag onto a chair and rounds the counter, pushing a hand through his hair. You remain leaning against the back of the couch, arms crossed.

“It is not that simple.” He insists. “You’re being paranoid and unreasonable. Again.”

“Or you’re being defensive.”

Spencer’s eyes narrow, like he’s just now seeing you for the first time since he got home. That is to say—his home. 

“Am I being accused of something?”

Words catch in your throat. Normally you’d hurl a ridiculous indictment as a matter of anything being possible—but not this time. It would be abjectly absurd to accuse him of cheating at anything other than cards. 

“No,” you huff after a weighty moment. 

“So what? What’s the point of this? I come home after staying at work three hours late listening to a man recounting in excruciating detail how he killed and ate an entire family because nobody else wanted to do it, and as soon as I walk through my own front door you start a fucking fight with me? Over nothing?”

The sudden slope in volume is startling as it rings off the walls like a gunshot. Rarely does he raise his voice before you have the chance to. 

For the few moments you’re stunned into silence, you take note of a few things you hadn’t before. The pound of his heart in his throat and just beneath his eye. Exhaustion evident in the strain of his voice and the mess of his hair, hanging over his face limp in some places and frazzled in others. The fragile glaze over his eyes, even as they widen and crackle with heat. It takes a lot out of a person to sit and listen to what he listened to for as long as he did. Even Spencer—even a man who can intellectualize and pathologize any human atrocity into microscopic pulses of electricity coursing through grey matter. 

It gets to him like it gets to everyone. You know that. 

Fuck. 

The most embarrassing part is that you started this fight because you missed him, and you still haven’t quite figured out how to not be afraid of that feeling. Sometimes when you miss him it feels like a threat to your autonomy, and by extension, your safety. You sure as hell don’t know how to just admit this to him. 

So instead you pick fights. Not as much, anymore, but sometimes when you’re in need of comfort and just can’t ask for it, you’ll start pushing your luck with inflammatory comments. You’ll trigger a meaningless argument. Spencer will eventually whittle your fighting words down to a simple, familiar truth. He will realize that this is your way of telling him you need something, and then you get the sweet after: where he rewards you for nothing, where he tries to apologize for a conflict you’d created with gentle touches and murmured words of comfort. Sun after a storm. It’s easy to accept affection and tenderness if you’ve intentionally scratched open all your old wounds—if you’ve earned it through trial by blood. 

Tonight, he’s not having it. You sense no reality where this ends with a sweet kiss and whispers so soft you can hardly hear them. 

Which means you need to backtrack. 

So you swallow your pride and your shame and your fear. Choke on it, really. But the words come out all the same. 

“I’m sorry.”

Spencer’s chest is still rising and falling quickly. The purple paisley silk of his tie catches your eye. It’s all astray. You want to fix it. He could breathe better if you took it off. And there’s no way he’s not bothered by his hair falling over his face. 

How can you make this go away?

Could it go in the other direction these quarrels sometimes do? Maybe it could end with you achey and tired in his arms, after he kisses the marks around your wrists, the little purple splotches on your hips and the starburst clusters of broken blood vessels on your thighs. Here, too, he’ll end up being sanguine—there’ll just be more steps in between. 

Just as you’re running scenarios in your mind, calculating outcomes and trying to chart the best plan of action, his tongue darts over his lips. It’s enough to stop you in your tracks. 

Why hasn’t his brow relaxed? Those eyes, still darting over your face with a kind of urgency—is that hunger or dissatisfaction with what he sees?

“You should go.”

A beat. 

This does not process instantaneously. You blink and shake your head as if you could clear it that way. 

“What?”

Spencer’s eyes are a forge on you, but he diverts them to the wall. Sparing you from the edge of a glowing sword. You don’t know how you’d prefer it—cool to the touch and sharp enough to cut, or soft and burning and prolonged. He’s probably decided he’s being civil. Doesn’t realize it lasts so much longer this way. 

“I think you should go home for the weekend.”

“Why?” It bursts from you, trembling and affronted. 

“Because I can’t—” he stops himself. Shutters his eyes and takes a deep breath that doesn’t seem to do much of anything. “I am not in the right headspace for this. I need you out of here.”

“What do you mean, this?”

“You. This thing you always do. I do not have it in me to make you feel better about yourself right now.”

It would’ve been quicker to just kick you in the stomach. 

For a moment you’re too stunned to speak as he blurs through a thick cloud of tears. 

“You are such a fucking asshole.”

The words come out too hurt, too quiet.

Spencer is unfazed—leans in closer as if to make sure you understand. Lowers his voice, and the tremor there is not the kind that comes from hurt feelings. You don’t know what it is. 

“Go. Home.”

It’s the kind of quiet that you’re afraid will culminate in a burst eardrum or something worse. He’s not like that, you know he’s not. Even at his worst. Even when you push him to his absolute wit’s end. But you can already hear it. Feel it. Ghost echos that have been rattling around in your head for years. 

A part of you—a rather large part—wants to cover her ears hard and sink to the ground, or otherwise apologize and beg him to love you again. 

But you are an adult. He’s asked you to leave. 

So you do. With an awful pulling in your gut and a hollowing in your chest like a sinkhole falling into itself. 

The static starts outside his door. The raking breaths. That awful warmth on the back of your neck and the greying of your vision. 

You stumble to the stairs and cover your face, letting the waves of panic wash over your shoulders. 

Was that a breakup? Does he still love you? Did he ever? If love can be so quickly taken away, was it ever really there? See, this is why—this is exactly why you’ve done what you’ve done, why you’ve been the way you have and treated him the way you did for so long. Because of this inevitability. Because of your nature, and what happens when a child tells himself he can enjoy a broken toy just the same as a regular one, until he keeps playing with it, and it keeps breaking worse and worse until it’s completely unusable. 

Something snaps inside of you. Gears grind and groan. The static doesn’t go away, it only gets louder, and it sounds a whole lot like his name over and over again—so you’ll just have to drown it out. 

-

It’s hot in this place, and it’s loud—so loud you can feel the throbbing techno beat in your teeth. The flashing lights wash over you like a tide of blood, rising and falling, filling your lungs. 

Whatever is coursing through your veins is not enough to dull the ache. In the middle of the dance floor, and you’re still thinking of Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. With every beat of your heart. Not enough alcohol. Not enough anything. 

It’s so hot in here—sweat drips down your spine and the room is spinning, but all the writhing, shadowed bodies prop you up as you stumble toward the bar. No chance in hell the bartender would keep serving you in the state you’re in, so you find someone to buy the drinks for you. 

And you fall, fall, fall—chasing some wicked, Cheshire gleam at the bottom of that glass, and the next, and the next. 

That gleam is, of course, an illusion. It will shine so brightly you can taste it. It will convince you to reach just a little further. And it will wink at you from the impossible end of a bottomless pit. 

You don’t care. You tip over the edge and let the darkness swallow you whole.

Nothing but stardust, now. 

You blow across the silent black ether. 

September 5th

You’re practically dripping from Spencer as he locks your door.

“Help me out, a little?” he grunts as you make no effort to support your own body weight. 

“Sorry sorry sorry. I’m up.”

He breathes a laugh and walks you deeper into the apartment. It’s a slow process. 

“If I set you down on the couch… are you going to be able to get back up?”

“I don’t know,” you sing-song, stumbling, giggling, and grabbing onto him tighter. “Let’s find out.”

Your ankles threaten to buckle all the way across the room, but he holds you fast. 

“Easy,” he murmurs as you slip your arms from around his neck and drop heavily to the cushions. You blink at him, exhausted, admiring the view. At some point, you’d managed to pull off his tie and undo the first few buttons on his shirt before he’d caught your hands and given you a warning look. Looking at him now, you have absolutely no regrets.

Spencer kneels in front of you, undoing the delicate ankle strap on your shoe. Your blood is pleasantly warmed as you let your head loll to your shoulder—warmer with every sweet way he handles you. Carefully. Like it’s an honor. 

After he slips the heels off, he presses a kiss to the top of each knee. You lace a hand through his hair. “Excellent view.”

There’s a lazy sort of smirk on his face when he tilts his head back up toward you. 

“I’m sure. Don’t get any ideas.”

You grin. 

“Too late.”

Spencer slides a gratuitous hand up your leg, fingertips just brushing the short hem of your dress, and raises his other. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Easy. Six.”

He snorts, pressing his face against your thigh, and you melt into a puddle of giggles. 

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! It was three. See—hey, you can make me say my ABC’s backwards, and I’ll walk in a straight line—”

“I’m not sleeping with you.”

Even that sweet, placating kiss to your thigh isn’t enough to temper the immediate and profound disappointment you feel at his proclamation. “What? Why?”

“Oh—why am I not going to sleep with a woman who couldn’t get up the stairs on her own?”

“Nonono, I’m dead sober. Please?”

He pushes off the ground, towering above you once more, and leans down to press a kiss to your lips. “Sorry. You’ll have to go find someone just as drunk as you.”

You linger there, your head tilted up, so he hangs in your silence, suspended less than an inch above you. 

“What?”

It comes out thin, with the crane of your neck. Quiet because your blood is frozen in your veins. 

Spencer pauses only briefly and then drops one more kiss to your mouth. At the contact your eyes flutter, in spite of yourself. 

“Nothing, baby. It was a joke.”

Then he’s up again, moving toward the kitchen. 

“Why would you joke about that?”

Spencer stops at the end of the couch and gives you an odd look. “Did it bother you?”

“Yes. Don’t—you can’t say stuff like that.”

Why are you breathing so quickly?

Now you’ve really got his attention. He turns fully back toward you, slipping his hands into his pockets.

Spencer doesn’t say a word. His eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. 

There’s a long stretch of silence. You can hear a faucet dripping and try to match your inhales to each plunk of water. 

“What’s wrong?”

One blink of hesitation and you realize your name is halfway signed on your own death sentence. 

“Nothing.”

“Don’t say nothing, you clearly—”

“Oh my god, I said it’s nothing. Just let it go. Jesus.”

And that final utterance, that subtle roll of your eyes, was practically a flourish of the pen. 

You haven’t gone the offense-as-defense route in a while. 

Immediately, something about Spencer’s demeanor goes cold. 

“Did something happen?”

The question is quiet enough to chill your bones and dry your throat. 

“Nothing. What? Nothing happened. I just don’t think it’s funny to joke about stuff like that.”

Fuck. Fuck. There may as well be a giant blinking sign over your head that says I’m lying. 

You watch it wash over him. 

The worst part is that he doesn’t say anything. He stands there for a moment—and then he turns, walking toward the kitchen again. For a moment, you’re frozen. Then you panic. 

“Spencer,” you call, and it breaks down the middle as you try to get up and sit right back down. He will not want to be followed. You take in a deep, grating breath, digging your nails hard into the sides of your legs and staring at the ground, willing the room to stop spinning. Willing your lungs to fill with air. 

Your entire body waits in suspense, taut like a steel guitar string, for shattering glass, or splintering drywall, or a slamming door, or something. It doesn’t come. He’s still here. You know he hasn’t left. 

But he’s going to. 

This is it. 

The unforgivable thing. 

Maybe five minutes later, you hear movement. When he reenters the living room, you keep your head down, tracking him only with your eyes. A yawning chasm seems to open up between your spot on the couch and where he stands, across the room. 

For a moment, neither of you speak—and then both of you try at once. More silence follows. You cover your face with your hands.

“We weren’t together,” you mumble into the cup of them. 

“What did you say?” 

His tone bites. 

“We weren’t together.”

“In your mind we were never together, so I don’t really know what you mean by that.”

“No, we—we got in a really big fight—”

“When?”

You swallow. Because you work together, you should be familiar with this part of him—this relentless part, this I-will-run-you-into-the-ground part. But you’re not. 

“Spencer…”

Spencer recognizes this type of quiet. This quiet which means things can only be worse than they seem. The punishing anger is quickly slashed and bled until you feel it swirling around at your feet like water waiting to be swallowed down the drain. Displaced by massive grief, so heavy that you hear the break. The word is small. Too small to be a real question—it is a plea for mercy on a dying breath. 

“When?” 

You try to inhale and choke on it. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t think we were together—”

He snaps. “We are always together. You know exactly what we are. Take some fucking responsibility.”

“I didn’t mean to,” you whisper, desolate. “I didn’t.”

A tremulous pause. Your skin is crawling and you can’t get out of it. 

“What does that mean? What do you mean, you didn’t mean to?”

Snippets come from a reel you’ve been working hard to bury. The blisters on your palms burn. There is blood and dirt caked into the half-moons of your nails, too heavy and too fresh. 

A phantom ache has taken up residence in your bones. It throbs. 

You only shake your head.  

Spencer comes to you again. Gets on his knees for the second time this evening, sets his hands over your legs again in some backwards sort of supplication. Some bastardized retelling of a sweeter story from a few minutes ago. Like he’s pleading with you to recant, rewrite—to fix it so he doesn’t have to leave. 

“What do you mean? Just tell me what happened,” he begs. 

“I can’t,” you whisper.

“Why?”

The pain in his voice pounds at the base of your skull. 

Words dance on the tip of your tongue. Because there is too much I don’t remember. 

But something deeper in your gut keeps them tethered. Pulls hard. Shame, perhaps. There is no excuse for what you did. There is no explaining it away. No circumstance in which you are innocent. A girl goes dancing. Looking for something. She gets drunk. She chases the thing she’s looking for into dark corners and down alleyways. She needs to know what it is she’s chasing—she needs to hold it by the throat and squeeze, thumb against hammering pulse, until it doesn’t have so much power over her.  

She wakes up in a stranger’s bed. That’s the part of the story that matters. 

“I just can’t.”

The words are too quiet, but he hears. Your lungs burn in the pulsing silence that follows. 

No solution. 

He gives you a few minutes in the dark living room to change your mind, to say the right thing. It doesn’t come. 

So he gets up. 

“Wait, wait wait—” your heart is pounding as you stumble off the couch and follow him, barely avoiding tripping over your own feet. He’s at the door. How did he get there so quickly? You catch the wall just behind him. “Spencer, wait.”

The tear in your voice is desperate enough you flinch. 

But it gets him to turn around. 

He looks exhausted. 

The pallor of his skin—the shadows exaggerating where his cheeks sink in and where the troughs beneath each eye get darker in purple half moons.

You fucked up so badly. 

How much more of you can he handle?

Is this the one thing to push him over the edge, for good? 

“I’m sorry,” you breathe. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t—I can’t explain it, but it wasn’t right—I didn’t—” heat wells behind your eyes as you flounder and dig your grave helplessly, flexing and clenching your hands. “I’m never, ever gonna do that again. Something was—I wasn’t myself that night, and it’s not going to happen again, I don’t know why I did it. I was stupid, and I love you so much, and—please. Please, don’t go. I really need you not to go.”

Spencer regards you, gaze flickering up and down, swallowing. His eyes are all foggy and waterlogged. It makes you feel sicker.

“I know you’re sorry.”

Your chin wobbles. 

There’s nothing to fight with in his words. There’s nothing to scratch or kick or bite or cling to. 

“You’re gonna leave?”

A beat. 

“Yeah.”

“Are you gonna come back?”

It hangs in the air between you for a very long time. 

September 12th

When you see him at your door a week later, you’re not sure what to say. Spencer has hardly spoken to you at work. It’s not that he’s been cruel, he just… he’s been distant. Understandably so. 

This lack of words, you realize very quickly, is not going to be much of a problem. 

What he wants to do with you does not require a lot of speaking. 

In fact, you start to suspect he doesn’t want to hear you talk at all. It would be hard to form words when he’s kissing you like this.

But you have to try, don’t you?

“Spencer—”

He pulls away, leaves you reeling and head sparkling with fresh oxygen. Disoriented. Desperate to have him in any way you can. A thumb presses against the seam of your lips and you open for him without hesitance. 

He has you against the back of your door, locking it with one hand and pushing down on your tongue with the other thumb. You wish you could do more than let it happen. Do anything but suckle like a lamb. Make him talk to you. Fix it while you can. 

But for the first time in a week he’s close and he’s looking at you like he wants you and you could cry. 

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he whispers, eyes darting rapidly over your face like he’s hungry for the sight of you. “You are going to listen to me. If I ask you a question, you can say yes, or you can say no. If we need to stop, or if something doesn’t feel right, you tell me. Otherwise, you don’t talk. Do you understand me?”

Your delirious nod is not enough for him as he slips his thumb from your mouth and grips your jaw, angling you carefully upward so as to look right at him through shuttered eyes. 

“Do you understand me?” He repeats lowly, and your breath catches. 

“Yes.”

Those eyes slow, taking you in, that gaze dripping from you like honey. Just barely, he strokes the line of your jaw. He ducks to kiss you again and this time it is not so urgent. 

“Do you want this?” Spencer asks just shy of your own mouth, soft without warning. 

The fabric of his coat bunches in your fist. 

Only if you still love me, you want to say. But you know why he doesn’t want you to talk. So you can’t say things like that. So he doesn’t have to tell you of course I do. Please spare me the humiliation of admitting it. 

“Please,” you whisper. A trembling breath. More than a plead for sex. You are asking that he be kind. Perhaps it’s more than you deserve, but you can’t do this if he doesn’t touch you like he loves you. Not with him. 

You are asking for him to fix something big, something thus far unspoken and which you don’t totally understand yourself. It’s too complicated. He shouldn’t have to do this for you. He doesn’t owe you anything. 

Erase it, you want to say. Make this feeling I can’t talk about go away. I know you love me enough to do it. 

All this, with one please. 

Spencer exhales. And he kisses you again. 

Of course, Spencer’s not good with enforcing rules. Not when you’re opening up to him in this way. Even now he looks at you like you’re a marvel. Touches you like you’re a miracle. As soft and as careful as you could’ve asked for if you’d used the words—he may as well be tracing love letters into your skin. 

All you can do is try and respect his wishes. You hurt him, badly, you know you did. Don’t add salt to those wounds. He needs you to be predictable right now. No sudden movements. No derailments. To the best of your ability, you are quiet and good and gracious and docile. 

But you are only human. Those times you gasp his name under your breath, he just holds your hand tighter. A plead or two are lost against his skin or into the sheets. He takes pity on you—murmurs gentle questions just to give you an outlet. Kisses your teary cheeks as you give your shaky answers. 

He loves me, you think, in absence of the words, over and over, until you feel it, until your whole body is buzzing with it. Until you’re buoyant and nothing is hard anymore. 

Afterwards, his stillness is what draws you back. His heart pounds against yours, he’s exactly the weight and the pressure you need. But he’s still. The momentum of the passion is wearing off, and you can sense it. 

So you allow yourself one quiet, distressed little chirp. One nervous bid for reassurance. Spencer comes to his senses and quells you with a chaste kiss. 

And then he’s out of bed. The weight of all the air in the room, the heavy cold, comes crashing down—pressing into your skin, your stomach, all at once.  

Suddenly you’re paralyzed, unable to look away from the ceiling as he dresses, grabs the glass from your nightstand and disappears into the bathroom. A few moments later he returns bearing a cloth and a full cup. The cup hits the nightstand. The edge of the bed dips. He slides one hand up your calf like always, and you acquiesce, letting the weight of your leg fall against him. A warm washcloth finds your inner thigh. 

Your mind is screaming, deafening static. 

“You okay?” Spencer asks gingerly after a few beats of silence. There is a hesitance, there. A feigned lightness, like he’s afraid of asking. Afraid of opening up this line of conversation and too good not to. 

Your tongue is heavy in your mouth as he cleans up any evidence of his having been here. 

“You got up pretty quick.”

More static. Something fights its way up your throat and you swallow it down. 

“Yeah. An old professor of mine is town. We have dinner plans.”

You don’t know what to say to that as he retrieves a few things from your dresser and returns. Normally he’d slide underwear up your thighs for you and pull a shirt over your head, but today you’re grabbing the garments from him before he has a chance. 

“I can do it,” you mutter, hurrying to yank the clothes on under his measuring gaze. Under other circumstances he might take offense to this. Might at least ask you about it. Now he only stands to give you space and pockets his hands. 

Because he knows. He knew the whole time. 

He’s not sticking around. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally says. Dust particles swirl through thick beams of molasses light, pouring in from the windows and warming rumpled sheets. How long was he here?

You hug your bare legs to your chest and settle your chin over folded arms, mapping dust like stars in a galaxy. “Why’d you even come?” you murmur.  

The world quiets down. Waits with you, holding its breath for his answer. 

“I don’t know.”

Light glares off the floor in a blinding white pool. Sends shooting pains into the back of your eyes as you fiddle with your own shirtsleeve. 

“Were you trying to… hurt me back, or something?”

“No.” The answer is firm and immediate. “No, I am not trying to hurt you.”

You say nothing. Wood creaks under shifting weight, but you’re not looking at him as he sighs. 

“You have to give me some time.” Your name on his tongue is reprimand, a thing he shouldn’t have to tell you. “It’s been a week. I don’t have any of this figured out. I’m not thinking straight.”

“You were thinking straight enough to drive over here and tell me not to talk while you fucked me.”

“I—” he sighs. At a perpetual loss with you. “I told you it wasn’t well thought out. I’ve been spiraling. All week. I’m not sleeping, I’m not making good choices. I mean—you—you fucked me over!” The words burst out, the way they do when he curses. “I haven’t had anybody to talk to about this. You are the only person. Do you see why that would be difficult? You hurt me so much and I miss you and I’m furious and you’re the only one I can talk to about any of it. That’s insane, right? I think you owe me some grace.”

“Did I owe you that, too?”

You gesture toward the unmade sheets and then bury your face against your arms once more. 

Humiliated. Like usual. 

Spencer is stunned into silence for a moment. 

“No. No, you didn’t. Did I—did I make you feel that way? If that didn’t feel right—”

“No,” you assuage tearfully. “I just wish you t-told me you weren’t going to stay, ’cause I wouldn’t have—I just can’t do that with you.”

“Can’t do what?” he asks, sitting on the bedside once more, hand twitching but ultimately leaving you be. 

“I can’t have sex with you if you’re gonna leave after. I’m sorry, I know you didn’t know that. But, like—you are the one person who can’t—I just really really can’t do that with you, because—” you stop yourself and change course with a shuddering breath, pressing your palms to weeping eyes. “I’m sorry. I know this is literally all my fault. I don’t get to ask for things. I know that.”

Fireworks dance against the back of your lids. Spencer is quiet. 

Then there are hands around your wrists. A thumb smoothing the delicate skin under your palm. You hiccup a gasping cry and melt toward him. It might be the most you get from Spencer, so you focus on the small touch until it burns. His voice is soft—a balm you don’t deserve. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” you sniffle, hands falling an inch, then two, as you go lax under his touch. “You don’t owe me an apology. Just—I can’t do that with you again until… until we have things figured out.”

The stroking thumb stops, and then restarts. 

“Okay.”

Finally, you open your eyes. Can’t make sense of the neutrality on his face.

“What?”

He only shakes his head. Nothing. 

Too tired to push him, you let your hands fall to your lap, and he keeps hold on your wrists. Sweeping. The lines he makes entrance you. 

“I’m sorry I put you in this position,” you whisper. 

No response. Back and forth. 

“I know you’re mad at me. You really, really have the right to be mad at me. I’m sorry for making you be nice to me. That’s so stupid, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for—”

“Angel.”

You bite your tongue and sink your gaze. What a ridiculous petname it is, now. How terrible of him to keep using it. 

“Sorry.”

Afraid to tell him he can leave, and too ashamed to let yourself enjoy his presence while it lasts, you remain in limbo. His silence does not tell you exactly how much he hates being here, but you think if the tables were turned, you wouldn’t be able to stomach it. Is it really better, his lingering, if it’s not because he loves you? With each pass of his thumb, you imagine him hating you more. He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. 

“I’m not going to do this again,” he murmurs, jarring you from your obsessive contemplation. 

Now, when you look up, he’s focused on your wrist. 

“… I know.”

“No, honey. I mean… it needs to end.”

This sinks in slowly, with a heat in your face and the back of your neck and a sick tide rising in your stomach. 

The first thing you feel is panic. Drops of adrenaline in your bloodstream like you’ve just realized you’ll need to run for your life. 

“Why? Because—if this is because I said I can’t sleep with you until—”

“That was completely appropriate. You were right. It’s not good for either of us.”

“So why does that mean we can’t try again? I mean—I know you need time. You can have it. You can. We always do this, and then we get back together and it’s better. I already did the worst thing I could do—we’ll get better.”

The breath he takes is quiet, uneven and pronounced. The kind of breath you take when something hurts more than you thought it would. 

“You’re asking me to get over something I haven’t even fully wrapped my mind around.”

You falter. 

“No, I’m—I’m just telling you I’m going to wait, and you can have as long as you need—”

“Stop,” he says, more sad than angry. “You need to stop.”

“I can’t stop,” you whisper, closer to forlorn every second as you tear up and spill all over again. “I have to try.”

Spencer’s voice shakes as he speaks. “Do not do this to yourself. There is nothing you can say, alright? This needs to be over, so it’s going to be over. It’s not good for us.”

“But—but… you can’t just say it’s over, Spencer, we put so much—I’ve been trying so hard. I know I keep messing up, I’m sorry, I’m trying so hard. I don’t know what happened, I’m—I can do more, I know I can.”

“You can’t—this isn’t going to work. You can’t fix it.”

“But I love you. I want to be with you. I did it all for you, all the hard stuff, not for me, I just—I love you. I want you.”

You don’t realize you’re sobbing until he’s wrenching your hands from your face once more and pulling you into him. 

“I know you love me. I wish we were better for each other, angel, I do. But it’s not supposed to feel like this.”

It’s not supposed to feel like this. 

You shudder a cry. 

“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to hurt you, really. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want that. You d-didn’t deserve it. I’m so, so sorry, Spencer, I ruined everything, I—”

“Shh. Just… I’ll stay for a little bit longer, okay? Just a while.”

And he does. Until the room goes dark, and the stars watch silently from above.

October 29th

It’s not going to be warm enough to enjoy the outdoors for much longer—but today, the beams of sun are still thick through the turning leaves, still gold when you close your eyes, and the sweet smell of autumn is enough to keep you out criss-cross on Rossi’s swing. 

The seal on the glass door suctions open and then slides shut again, and Penelope is joining you. You accept the mug of apple cider, holding it carefully in your lap. 

“What a gorgeous day,” she sighs, and you hum in agreement. “Probably one of the last good ones. I saw rain on the forecast later this week.”

“It begins,” you mutter. 

“Yeah. And I haven’t even found a suitable mate to hibernate with yet.”

Your brow knits. “You’re not with—”

She pauses mid-sip as you turn to look at her. Right—you weren’t supposed to have seen her with Kevin last spring. Your face warms and you try to play it off. “Oh, right. You guys broke up forever ago.”

To her credit, she doesn’t actually confirm or deny. Instead, a quiet settles. Or—a sort of quiet. Down the yard, in grass that is still lush and green, JJ and Spencer are playing some sort of game with Henry and Michael. One that seems to invoke a lot of delighted screeches from the young boys as they run around and fall over and get back up. 

“What about you?” Penelope asks. 

Apple and clove melt on your tongue and warm your throat. 

“What about me?”

“Are you hunkering down with anybody?”

“No,” you admit without fanfare. Garcia doesn’t respond—probably hoping to get more information out of you. You hesitate, and then go on. “I mean—I was seeing a guy. But it ended a little while ago.”

She speaks her pity gently, in a tone like the velveteen undersides of flower petals. 

“You didn’t tell me.”

You shrug. 

“It wasn’t… official.”

“How long were you seeing him for?”

“It would’ve been a year next month.”

This time, she’s silent for too long. 

When you finally glance over at her, she’s not looking at you, as you would’ve expected. 

She’s… looking at your feet. 

You glance down, ready to be very confused—and then you see the problem. 

Your jeans have ridden up. One sock is striped purple and green. The other, brown, dotted with horseshoes and cacti. They’re visibly too big for you. 

Quickly you try to tuck them further under yourself. But you’re sure it’s too late. 

You could explain this. You could say you forgot to bring socks on a case, and Spencer let you borrow a pair. 

Before you can, she speaks. 

“I worried that maybe you guys had split up.”

You flash her an alarmed look. “What?”

Penelope glances toward the house to make sure nobody’s about to come outside. 

“I mean… honey, you guys weren’t very subtle. I don’t think anyone who lacks my perceptive genius and emotional intelligence would have noticed, but I noticed. Like, I really noticed.”

You swallow, opening your mouth before you’ve decided your plan of action. Deny? 

“When?”

“Well, everyone always knew that you liked each other. But there was this one time—and this was a total invasion of privacy, and I will never do it again unless I have to—where, you know, you… weren’t answering your phone about a case, and I got worried, because no offense, but this team kind of has a track record when it comes to going missing, and so… I checked your location… and it pinged at Spencer’s apartment… who had just told me he didn’t know where you were. And then you both showed up. I’m so sorry, but in my defense, I was not trying to snoop—”

“Penelope, it’s fine.”

“Well—okay—and there’s this other thing that I haven’t told you about because it would’ve been mutually assured destruction, so I kind of don’t ask don’t telled it, which was… me and Kevin saw you guys on a date last spring. And me and Kevin were not supposed to be on a date. And you were not supposed to be sharing spoons—spooning, if you will—with Spencer. But I did see it. And I didn’t tell you and I felt really squicky about it for a long time and I’m sorry.”

You blink. Try to process. 

“You didn’t tell anyone else?”

“No! God, no! I like to gossip, I don’t like to ruin people’s relationships.”

“Who’s ruining whose relationships?” JJ asks breathlessly, carrying a tuckered out Michael on her hip and holding Henry’s hand as she approaches. Your head snaps up. Spencer is trailing a few feet behind her, eyeing you. 

Heat blooms in your cheeks. 

“Theoretical conversation,” Penelope supplies quickly. “Are we finally ready to harass Rossi about dinner?”

JJ looks anything but convinced—and in typical fashion, lets it go. 

“I think we are. What do you think Michael—pizza?”

“Pizza!”

Everyone cheers at that—aside from you and Spencer. Penelope hurries inside after JJ and the boys. Spencer lingers. You quickly try to get your shoes back on before he can tell that you’re wearing his—

“Nice socks.”

You sigh, pausing just a moment before you finish pulling your boot on. 

“Sorry. I need to do laundry.”

You stand, and Spencer opens the door for you. “What socks you choose to wear are none of my business.”

Halfway inside, you pause, glancing up at him. “Do you want them back?”

He narrows his eyes thoughtfully. 

“That’s okay. I have a pair just like them at home.”

This is the first time you’ve exchanged more than a few work-related sentences since he ended things for good. 

It’s sort of ridiculous, after all the melodrama. 

It’s sort of a relief. 

January 1st

Garcia’s New Year’s party was a success. There’d been the most FBI agents you’ve ever seen crammed into her apartment at once. There was a chocolate fountain, three kinds of champagne, and an elaborate charcuterie setup spanning nearly the entire counter. At midnight, you’d popped a confetti gun and blew into a noise maker and cheered and jumped around and hugged your friends. 

An hour and a half later, you’ve taken over as impromptu host—Penelope is decidedly out of commission, snoring atop her bed, still in heels and sequins. 

“Bye, guys! Happy new year!”

You wave as the last stragglers head out the door.

When you close it, and turn around: “Holy shit.”You wade through confetti and streamers and napkins, kicking a few balloons out of your way. Any flat surface is covered in sparkly plastic cups and champagne flutes. “We trashed the place.”

From the kitchen, Spencer chuckles. “It’s pretty bad.”

You frown when you notice him stacking plates. “Hey, you don’t have to do that. I told Garcia I’d handle clean up.”

He checks his watch. 

“The odds of being involved in a fatal car accident are up 208% percent right now, and they won’t be going down for a few hours. Plus, my own blood alcohol content is probably hovering around point zero four, which is well under the legal limit to drive, but I’d prefer for it to be zero flat.”

You shrug and make your way over to the record player, which had finished up A Night At The Opera a while ago. “If you want to ring in the new year by helping me clean, I won’t stop you. Blue or Abbey Road?”

“Neither?”

“Boring,” you accuse, and put on Coltrane. The jazz comes slow and crackly and warm through the speakers. 

Spencer steps aside as you enter the kitchen and hunt for trash bags under the sink—compostable, because it’s Garcia. 

When you stand back up, you’re unprepared for how close he’s going to be—barely an inch separates you and you stumble on your quest to pop backward. “Whoop—” instinctively, he reaches out and steadies you. You grasp onto his arms, eyes flickering up to his and laughing nervously. “Hey.”

Spencer’s gaze is warm and easy on you as he pulls a little smile of his own. “Hi.”

A stuttering inhale. 

A moment that is just too long. 

His fingers seem to relax against your arms, just fractionally, for just a split second. Like he could hold you. Like you could stay this way. 

“Sorry,” you breathe, releasing your grip on him and stepping back. 

“You’re okay.”

A lazy sax solo traces its golden fingers around your thrumming heart until your skin is buzzing. His eyes are the same color as the music. Just as soft. Just as leisurely as they vamp the distance between your own. 

Bio-derived plastic dampens under your fingers as you flee to the living room. 

The next fifteen minutes are spent kneeling in front of the coffee table, cleaning drips of chocolate and splashes of champagne, and trying not to think about the way his eyes caught on your lips. 

Spencer doesn’t miss you. Not like you miss him. Apparently he even went on a date a few weeks ago. 

And with the way things ended, you’re lucky that he doesn’t despise you. Being on decent terms should be enough. Letting your perpetually smoldering want trail its smoke under his nose isn’t fair. Not to you, not to him, and certainly not to his mystery girl. He’s trying to move on, and you don’t have the right to drag him down.  

But, just—that one little moment. One touch, and you’re totally thrown off your game. Now, you’re reading into the silence. You’re wondering what he’s thinking about you. If he’s thinking about you. 

Later—much later—the living room has been mostly cleaned. You’re taking the final trash bag to the kitchen when you notice something on the ceiling fan and pause, frowning up at it. 

“Spencer?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you come here?”

He appears. “What’s up?”

You point at the fan. 

“I think somebody put a cup up there.”

Spencer makes a face and reaches up to grab it. He reads the name Sharpie’d on the side and snorts, before showing it to you. 

Kevin, scrawled next to the worst smiley face you’ve ever seen. 

“How do you mess up a smiley face?” you laugh. 

“I’m sure he’d be able to tell you.”

You suck your teeth. “God—do you think they’re together again?”

“Kevin and Penelope?”

The trash bag drops to the ground as you flop onto the couch, exhausted. Spencer crushes the cup and tosses it in, standing just in front of you, studying you as he thinks. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t entirely surprise me. They’re pretty good at remaining inconspicuous.”

You hum, slinking lower in the faux-leather. Maybe some friendly chit-chat is in order. Friends ask each other questions, don’t they? “Speaking of inconspicuous relationships… I heard you went on a date.”

He slides his hands into his pockets and picks his words in silence for a moment—you hate that. You hate feeling excluded from whatever internal conversation he’s having. Knowing that he’s measuring how much truth he’ll dole out to you. 

“Who’d you hear that from?”

You track him with your eyes as he takes a seat next to you. 

“Did you?” you ask, ignoring the question—more focused on the stubbled line of his jaw. 

Spencer considers his answer for a moment, head reclined on the back of the couch, charting the glittery paper stars suspended from the ceiling. 

“I did. Two, actually.”

Two dates? With the same person?

“How’s that going?”

He approximates a smile. 

“You’re not being very subtle.”

“I’m just curious. You don’t have to answer.”

Spencer meets your eyes. Studies them in turns, like there’s a secret language etched into the fractals of pigment.  

“I like her,” he decides. And your stomach sours. 

“But you didn’t bring her tonight?”

Spencer rolls his head back toward the ceiling—and very nearly his eyes, as he dryly reminds you, “We’ve been on two dates.”

“If you like her, you should’ve brought here. You could’ve kissed her at midnight and sealed the deal.”

A ditch in the conversation. The perfect depth and width for hiding a body, as something in the air changes. Drops a degree or two. Thickens. 

“What are you doing?” he murmurs, looking back at you and finally putting an end to your game. Your face gets warm. Oops. Too far, maybe. 

“I’m being supportive.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. Is that allowed?”

“You’re sure it’s not surveillance?”

“Yes!”

Even to you, you sound overly defensive. 

“Fine.” A moment passes. He’s staring at you, in this lazy sort of way. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You didn’t bring anyone either.”

“Well… I’m not seeing anyone.”

It’s embarrassing to admit. You pinch at the fabric of your skirt, worrying the glitter sewn into black like drops of silver. Stars, or beads of rainwater. 

“Why not?”

“Do I need an excuse to be single?”

“Just curious. Is that allowed?”

Evidently the look you cast him then is not as withering as you’d it to be. Not if he’s so unfazed. Still reading you like a familiar book. 

“God, this is frustrating,” he mutters, as if to himself, tongue darting over his lips and frowning like you’re a question he doesn’t have the answer to. Your own brow pinches, ready to be offended. 

“What is?”

“I just… I thought I’d stop wanting to kiss you by now.”

Behind the safety of a bone cage, tucked where he can’t see, your heart does a somersault. It probably shows in the way your spine straightens, the catch of your breath. 

“Oh. I’m… I’m… sorry.”

Spencer cracks a dry smile. 

“You’re sorry? Why are you sorry?”

“Well—I don’t know. Because… I don’t know. it just seems like… the wrong thing to want. You have a girlfriend.”

The softening of his eyes, the tilt of his head, all spell pity. Like you’re naive. 

“That’s not what she is, honey.”

Honey. You try to remember to breathe. To think.

“Then what is she?”

He hums. 

“Not you. As much as I tried to tell myself that was for the best.”

Scratch somersault. Back handspring. Or maybe a round-off. You swallow. Pick at your nails. 

Did you think this into existence? Was all your desire really so loud?

“Spencer…”

“What?”

“That’s… that’s not fair.”

His eyes are melting glass on yours, voice lowered in a way you’ve sorely missed. “How so?”

It takes you a moment to remember yourself. “Because I’m—I’m trying to be better. I’m really trying. I don’t want anyone to get hurt ’cause of me. So if this girl likes you—”

“Angel. Nobody’s getting hurt. She knew I had someone else on my mind.”

“You can’t call me that,” you whisper brokenly. But he’s close enough you can feel his breath. You don’t know how he got close like this—when you gravitated toward him, charmed as a snake by a flute. When the inevitable outcome limited itself to brilliant, disastrous collision. “We can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because… because we’re not together.”

“When has that ever stopped us?”

All your air comes out at once. “This is so stupid.”

“You’re so pretty.” Delicately he cups your jaw. Strokes the tips of his fingers along the hollow of your cheek. “I was thinking about it all night. Noticed the glitter as soon as I saw you. Did Penelope do it?”

“Spencer, please.” Breathless. Pathetic. Desperate for him to put you out of your misery, one way or another. 

His throat bobs. “Come here.”

So you do. You lean in, one hand balanced on his knee, the other on his shoulder, and your lips brush so softly it can’t even be called a kiss. Still it sends a high-voltage shock through your whole body. He tastes like champagne as you kiss him deeper, as his hand wanders to the back of your thigh and hoists you across his lap. The other roots in your hair and your head spins. 

“Missed you so much,” he breathes into your mouth, not even bothering to pull away, or even to stop kissing you really. Mellow ivory and brass do a good job of concealing your soft breaths. Less so the undignified noise you make when Spencer shifts you roughly on his lap to pull you closer. 

“This isn’t a nice thing to be doing on ’Nelope’s couch,” you gasp between kisses, gripping at the front of his shirt like someone’s going to try taking him away from you. He alters his course from your mouth to trail down your neck. Lets fingers dip just beneath the hemline of your skirt until you shudder. 

“Then we’ll stop.”

Your jaw drops in a silent squeak as he nips at a delicate spot on your throat. 

The problem is that with the two of you, there is never any stopping. Not definitively. Never permanently. You can say it as emphatically as you’d like. You can even sort of mean it. But the cosmos has other plans. 

Outside, silent snow falls from a blue-black sky. There is nothing but the headlight glare from the occasional passing car. The popping and crackling of distant fireworks set off by the over-imbibed, ringing twelve o’clock in hours after the bloom of the new year. It must be midnight somewhere, you suppose. 

It’s just like you and Spencer, to be in the wrong place at the right time. It’s like you to slip through time-space cracks until you find each other in the accordion folds of the universe. 

It’s basically tradition.

spoilers: reader kinda cheats on Spencer but the consent there is questionable seeing as she was incredibly intoxicated

if u read this far WOW ily I hope u liked it :D I put blood sweat and tears into this bad boy. also shout-out @aliteralsemicolon for helping me so much with this fic she is a very helpful and willing consultant I think this never would've seen the light of day without her!!!

[tainebot01]

Guys, I have a theory:

Bright blue and red colour scheme, with gold accents

Always wearing white gloves

An overconfident yet oddly endearing competitive spirit

Fast runner

Short attention span, but not an idiot!

Encounters a thieving bird person on occasion

Contrast to a more level-headed, intelligent character named Miles

Defeats an egotistical, baldheaded, goggles-wearing villain

Conclusion: Stacey The Winner is aai2's Sonic The Hedgehog.

[presidenthades]

At long last: behind-the-scenes commentary for Lavender’s Blue Chapter 1.

Usual disclaimer that these thoughts aren’t necessarily canonical to the fic verse until/unless I write them into the actual story.

Lavender is a recursive fanfic for my own AU fanfic, so I truly, honestly didn’t think it would be as popular as it is. Two years ago, I would’ve said that an Aemond fic (like Compromise) would’ve been way more popular than any Aegon fic, but life is full of surprises. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Chapter titles are quotes from Westerosi wedding ceremonies performed under the Faith of the Seven (both book and show verse).

The fic was originally supposed to be a short threeshot. As you can see, it’s a full-ass story at 8 chapters and 80k words. 🤡 When I wrote the first chapter, I wasn’t planning on the moon tea scheme, Dorne arc, or prophecy-mad Vizzy T storyline. The fic was just supposed to be Jace and Aegon figuring out an arranged marriage when they don’t know each other. But then I started writing Chapter 2 and I decided I needed plot. 😂

We start the fic with Aegon in his pre-Jace state: a medieval frat bro who just wants to chug beer and sleep around. At first sight, he embodies the “useless heir who’ll probably run his inheritance into the ground” trope. But I try to make it evident fairly quickly that Aegon has a profound depth of emotions, and he shouldn’t be written off just yet.

Back when the fic was supposed to be a threeshot all in Aegon’s POV, Myranda had a different role. Aegon would be teased for falling in love with Jace, and he would try to prove them wrong by going back to Myranda at the brothel. But at the last minute he realizes he can’t go through with it, Myranda gets catty about Jace, he says something like “yeah you’re pretty but not as pretty as my wife,” and Myranda throws him out. The final draft turned out very different, but this alternate story would’ve been kinda funny.

When I imagine pregnant Rhaenyra and pregnant Alicent having a huge fight, I also imagine fetus!Jace and fetus!Aemond being very confused about all the clamor they can hear in the womb.

Aegon acts like he hates the idea of the betrothal, but he definitely keeps that portrait of Jace in his room and looks at it every so often. Now I’m thinking of another AU where Aegon goes to Driftmark to see if Jace is as pretty as everyone says, and maximum chaos ensues because he decides marriage isn’t so bad actually, so they should just marry ASAP.

The Velargirls get the title “princess” solely because Viserys is desperately trying to win back Rhaenyra’s favor. (It doesn’t work, of course.)

Alicent is projecting a lot onto Jace, which is one of the reasons she tries so hard to be nice to Jace. Young Alicent in S1 felt very isolated in her early days as queen, so now she frets that Jace will feel the same. This universe’s Alicent never had her green dress moment, and she doesn’t defy Viserys like she does in S1E6. Here, she tries to exert her influence over Aegon to ensure that at least one other girl (Jace) might be spared some kindness from her husband. This conversation, plus Aegon’s core memory of the aftermath of Alicent’s marital rape, have a big impact on the way he treats Jace.

Otto is keenly aware of the Velaryons’ many dragons, ships, and wealth. In this universe, he prioritizes making the Velaryons happy, because he really doesn’t want the dragons on Driftmark turning against the Crown.

If Jace weren’t betrothed to Aegon from the moment she was born, she would’ve been raised as the heir to Driftmark rather than as a future queen. She can’t be both because, like I mentioned in Compromise, Corlys wants the ruler of Driftmark to always make their seat a priority. Yet another interesting AU idea: Jace is raised as heir to Driftmark, but she can’t keep her status as heir if she marries Aegon. 🤔

In F&B, Viserys is the one who betroths Aegon and Helaena so they can’t marry other houses and gather support against Rhaenyra. Viserys almost does that in this AU before Otto talks him out of it.

Helaena’s quip about Aegon smiling is because she knows he’s about to smile so hard that his face hurts. ☀️

The Green kids get a more functional relationship with their mother in this universe. Alicent isn’t worried about securing Aegon as heir or protecting them from Rhaenyra/Daemon. As a result, she’s much more present in her kids’ lives.

Baela and Rhaena have been absorbed into the Velaryon clan because Daemon ditched them. 💀 He originally planned to take them back to Penrose (like he mentions in S1E7), but he saw how much they were thriving with their extended family. So he allowed the twins to stay on Driftmark—but he left because he didn’t see a place for himself in the Seven Kingdoms anymore. 😔

There is NO WAY Jace is making her debut at court in riding leathers, with messy hair and the stench of dragon. Just picture her and the other girls in the wheelhouse on the way to the Red Keep, frantically changing clothes and brushing hair and spraying perfume. 😂

Aegon: “everyone lies at court.” Aegon 5 seconds later: “nice to see you again, Rhaenyra!”

It would be fun to see 12yo Aemond’s adventure sneaking out of the castle, hitchhiking to Crackclaw Point, and claiming Vhagar. Damn, I need to stop giving myself ideas.

Aegon and Daemon have similar reactions to Joff’s name. Truly, they would get along so well in another life.

Aemond fell into horny at first sight. 😌 Also I love his and Aegon’s brotherly telepathy.

Jace isn’t a military person, but she knows how to go on a strategic offensive. Her goal is to make Aegon like her, so she starts off on the right foot by dressing in Sunfyre’s colors.

Aegon was told to stop doing frivolous things, like draw and play the lute, because those aren’t useful talents for a king. 😞

“I don’t believe you’ve met.” Viserys actually cannot remember if Aegon has met Jace. 💀

Jace is honestly happy to meet Aegon. Alicent made sure he cleaned up well, so he’s looking very dapper.

Jace did her homework for the tourney. She memorized sigils, names, and family trees so she could make a good first impression on all the lords and ladies. Aegon could never. (Good thing he’s marrying her.)

Because Jace has heard rumors about Aegon’s profligacy, she tries to prevent him from drinking too much and potentially causing a scene. The questions she distracts him with are carefully chosen to a) be questions he can answer intelligently and b) help her get to know her husband a bit. She can multitask! And in the end, Aegon is so intrigued by his wife-to-be that he loses interest in drinking. Wins all around.

Aegon notices that he can never catch Jace alone. We learn from her POV this is intentional because she’s worried he might try to seduce her before the wedding ceremony.

Aegon and Aemond have sexual experience, but not romantic experience, so women are a mystery to them. 🙃 Daeron, meanwhile, is like “why don’t you just treat girls like people, they’re not a different species.”

Velargirls are sneakily interrogating Helaena for info about the Targbros. Helaena knows it, and she lets them do it. Her brothers will thank her for it one day.

Otto’s daily cup of prune juice is one of my favorite running jokes in this series.

The bit about Aegon’s “accessories” lying around his bed is a reference to the infamous screenshot in S1E8 of Aegon’s medieval sex toy collection. 😳

The handkerchief that Aegon notices in Jace’s room is the handkerchief she gives him later. It’s also the same handkerchief he waves as a white flag to Laenor and Rhaenys in Chapter 6. Luce knitted the shawl for Jace, of course.

Septa Lucinda is another of my favorite running jokes. Modern!Jace definitely secretly reads smutty romance novels.

Rhaenyra’s diagrams about sex were also mentioned in The Golds. 🤭

Jace wakes up early enough before Aegon that she has time to primp and dress herself to her usual level of being presentable. But she already feels comfortable enough around Aegon to leave off some of her public-facing layers. She even switches to her usual robe, the kind she wears for lounging alone in her room, rather than the skimpy one that’s designed to make Aegon like her.

Viserys intentionally sent the messenger late enough that Aegon would be late to the meeting. 🙄 Luckily for Aegon, his wife is an expert at making people look presentable in very little time.

Even though Larys isn’t able to worm his way into Alicent’s confidence in this AU, he still offs his father and brother. Larys has ambition, and he has better odds of sneakily climbing up the ladder if he’s the lord of Harrenhal rather than a spare.

Aegon is very ADHD-coded in this verse. He also just isn’t meant for administrative work.

Toward the end of this chapter, Aegon has the realization that he’s been using sex as a band-aid. He wants to feel accepted and wanted for himself. As Helaena says later, he wants to be seen. And he already feels like Jace can give him that. Them giving each other permission to call each other by their first name is another milestone in both of them shedding their masks.

Jace’s job in this universe is being Aegon’s wife (at first), and she performs her job like her life depends on it (which it kinda does…?). She already figured out that Aegon gets hangry. Or maybe hupset would be more accurate.

All the urban planning and governance topics that Jace studies isn’t part of a typical lady’s education. But she grew up super close to Rhaenys, who was given an heir’s education. And Corlys and Laenor definitely indulge the Velargirls in their interests.

Aegon does indeed fulfill his promise to build a more beautiful and comfortable throne for Jace next to his. 🥰

See Chapter 2 commentary here.

[waitmyturtles]

Hi,

I am writing in context of my comment to your recent KP rewatch post. I have only just started to look at your older posts, and I must thank you very much for actually being the first place where I find proper in depth-criticism of Only Friends. As I mentioned, the show is very dear to me, and when it aired I only saw a lot of ranting and 'Boston is being punished for being poly' commentary, which being poly myself, I just couldn't see at all, as I never perceived Boston as poly rep. Also thank you for bringing Jojo's comments on Boston onto your blog, because I was not aware of those, and they recontextualize the anger of many people a lot for me. But maybe a main reason why I didn't even think about something like that is because I perceived the show absolutely not as a morality piece but as a depiction of a questionable queer friends group and their antics. I always saw the title as ironic, as the cast never gave found family vibes style friends group to me, but instead always showed how deeply problematic they all are.

There is much more I want to say here, and maybe I should make a proper meta post of my own once I have read more of your (partially also reblogged) posts on the matter.

For now I just want to add that I don't see any of the main cast as without major flaws, and I am hoping for a second season that is as messy as the first (messy not as in bad, but continuing to play to the characters' flaws and work with that), as the current stable situation doesn't seem to me like something that will remain. And all that I say as someone who usually doesn't like messy.

To end my rambling, thank you very much again for making your blog such a goldmine of excellent discussion, and insightful meta. I love it.

Thanks so much for the compliments, I appreciate it, @the-iron-queen!

Very interesting to hear that folks were interpreting Boston as poly. Yeah, no. I did not ever go there in my interpretations of him. The polyamory that I’ve seen in Thai shows is limited to the second season of Gay OK Bangkok (Aof’s and Nong Big’s triad) and 3 Will Be Free.

I saw Boston instead as simply having casual sex, and being judged for it. I’d posit that he was judged both by the characters within the show, and — and I say this with a fair amount of seething bias — by the creative team of the show itself. To the point you made about Jojo’s own quotes of calling Boston a slut, I think the character of Boston was likely written with judgement of casual sex in mind. (Which, wtf.)

My review of Theory of Love covers my strong distaste for judgements against casual sex, in part because I subjectively and personally think that judgements against casual sex offer judgy individuals false states of moral superiority that ultimately ring as hypocritical and disingenuous to me — especially if and when those judgy individuals jump at the opportunity to have casual sex themselves. In regards to Only Friends, what I felt was truly disingenuous about the whole show was its original marketing on being a progressive show about casual sex, depicted by actors who seemed to be ready to leave the confines of their branded ships. We got QUITE the opposite instead — the ships shipped together in a seeming condemnation of casual sex outside of monogamous relationships. The way Boston was condemned and left behind by his friends and Nick just seemed kinda unnecessarily brutal.

But this is me taking into account not just what the show internally is saying, but how I also think the show was conceived of and created externally. Den Panuwat, OF’s screenwriter, also had monogamous relationships as end goals in his more recent show of Playboyy, and I’m watching his first screenwriting work now in War of Y, and I’m not terribly impressed by his art. I do agree the “friends” of Only Friends end up in a non-committal and arguably “messy” place, but other than being judgmental dicks, I don’t know what their motivation was to be disloyal assholes in the first place — the show never told me that. It was all just kinda meh in the end.

@the-iron-queen: I’d recommend watching both seasons of Gay OK Bangkok, 3 Will Be Free, and Theory of Love for much more sophisticated conversations about sex from Thailand. I don’t know why more recent Thai BLs are just putzing out on this topic lately, but there’s a short history of really good shows that delve into this, and if I’m not mistaken, I think a few Japanese BLs are also treading well in this territory right now that I need to catch up on. I hope my back catalogue of Old GMMTV Challenge posts keeps you entertained, good luck!

[trainsinanime]

for the dvd commentary ask game: Willing to Help

i can submit a whole fic if it’s less than 500 words, right?

Sure, thank you for asking! For context, the story is Willing to Help, and this is the ask game.

Willing to Help is part of a small set of stories, scenes and incorrect quotes that I originally published right here on Tumblr, originally without a title. Over the years I’ve added them (I think all of them) to Ao3 so I and others can easily find them again long after they’ve been lost to the depths of the dashboard. The original is here; as you can see I added a bit more description.

As such, the story is deliberate simple, really just one basic thought and punchline, both part of the list of ML ideas I always find funny:

Adrien is so in love with Marinette even though he doesn’t fully realize it. He might not say he’s in love with her, but given half an excuse he’d marry her instantly. So let’s give him an excuse!

The reason why Marinette has to get married is a list of over the top silly and familiar tropes that don’t make any sense and don’t belong together, because that makes me laugh. It doesn’t actually matter, so this is a great opportunity to get silly with it. I’m always a big fan of implying parts of the story and letting the readers fill in their own imagination, especially for such short stories.

And of course it doesn’t matter at all, Adrien didn’t need any of the excuse, just hearing that she wanted to marry was enough to set him off. Because our sweet fool knows not that he’s in love with her, but he understands that he loves her.

The punchline is again from my bag of favorite tropes: Kagami also loves Marinette. I know not everybody likes that, I have received negative comments (well, one, to be precise) about how often I make either outright Marigami (or Adrigaminette) stories or tease them… but yeah, I’m not gonna stop, I have way too much fun with that.

What else? Alya is really just a sounding board to get the plot rolling. Sorry, I love her, she deserves better, but having Adrien overhear a discussion between Marinette and Alya is a really efficient way to get a Marinette-centric Adrinette plot to happen. They’re literally right behind him in the classroom, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

The Ao3 version also makes an “Adrien comes out of nowhere” joke that the show loved to do.

My main issue with the story is the title. The Tumblr post didn’t have or need a title, and I don’t like the one I chose, because it’s too generic. I am having real trouble telling “Willing to help” and “How do you help a good friend?” apart (and the letter from “Let’s talk about that”), and I wrote the damn things! So that’s something I hope I can improve on for future stories. Attack of the Crystal Zombies may not be the best title ever or the best story ever, but at least I can remember which one it is.

Thank you for asking, writing this was fun!

[madraleen]

Genshin Impact - To the Stars Shining in the Depths Act III and Act IV Commentary (full spoilers)

-Finding a quiet place to read a book?! Not me relating to Paimon?!

-I love the Furina-Neuvillette interactions.

-FATHER IS HERE! FATHER ARLECCHINO IS HERE, THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

-Oh, the House of Hearth is in Fontaine? I wasn’t sure.

-”A personal relationship with the administrator” - NEUVILLETTE, WHAT! Hoyo, why you feeding us the good Wrio/Neuvi content like that

-No, I don’t want that cake, the Knave brought that cake, what are you up to, Monsieur Neuvillette?

-I also think spoilers are despicable, thank you Charlotte (*and I’m just realizing post-quests that in the end we never catch up with Charlotte??)

-I see. We are guilty of eating the cake. Neuvi, you little snek.

-Did Childe get teleported in the Abyss or something

-Wriothesleyyyy! Is he cat-oriented? Dog-oriented?

-Why is our baby Lyney in prison! Oh, he should be Arlecchino’s spy, yeah? We’re disrupting Wriothesley’s business so bad

-What Neuvillette and Wriothesley have to discuss is not for your ears, Paimon. Let them be.

-The rizz of Lyney to leave us a card, jeez.

-The two spies from the two sides, we really are star-crossed lovers, aren’t we, Lyney

-Oh, Lyney actually goes out of his way to tell us everything, good boy. Or he might be manipulating us, but you know what, eff it, I choose to trust Lyney and take him at face value.

-Lyney, your crush is showing.

-Sigewinne’s lil shoes tho.

-Childe, I love you, but investigating you is taking too long and I’m not interacting with any main characters and I’m starting to grumble

-Is Alexis’ VA Diluc’s VA…? They sound so similar (JP dub).

-How long has Childe been in prison???

-Lyney really said “We will not take advantage of my crush. Lynette! To the infirmary!”

-We are the Romeo and Juliet of Genshin, Lyney. Deny thy Father, Lyney.

-Traumatic flashbacks Lyney?? “This is not like what happened last time, the situation is different now”??? He is SUFFERING, omg LYNEY

-”A parents’ evening” hahaha

-Us to Siggie: “If you’re close with Neuvillette, why not learn a thing or two about virtue from him?” Wow, we’re going all out on protecting and standing up for the Lyney siblings, huh. Look at us go.

-FREMINET CONSUMED PRIMORDIAL SEAWATER??? HELP!

-Ah yes, patch 4.1, the “Lyney Has a Breakdown” patch.

-Wriothesley and Sigewinne are so unpredictable.

-”Lyney has finally begun to stop tensing the muscles on his face” ??? JUST HOW CLOSE ARE YOU WATCHING HIM, AETHER

-I love the siblings’ interactions, they’re so soft, and I love that we finally see more of them with Freminet. They are adorable.

-Why is Aether smiling when admitting we’ll tell our little Fatui friends everything, lmao.

-Wriothesley about to become his technical consultants’ best man.

-The siblings see us as familyyyy waaaaaahhhh :’))))

-I was like, what is Wriothesley gonna do, PUNCH the water? But yes, ofc, he’s cryo, he’s legit gonna punch the water.

-The Neuvillete-Wriothesley-Clorinde interactions are so interesting, they’re such a power group of people. Also they’re Levi, Erwin and Mikasa, THESE ARE MY PEOPLE! Also, I’m very happy we see more of Clorinde, and for some reason extra happy that she works with Wriothesley because it just makes sense, somehow. They seem to match so well.

-Furina Marie-Antoinette-coded huh

-Arclecchino is pyro? I mean, she’s not wrong with her questions at Furina. But see, this just makes me think even more that Furina DOES have a plan… but not this Furina. That she split parts of herself… for reasons. And they’re somewhere. Including in the Oratrice. And she’ll become Furina-Furina again in the next Archon Quest. Maybe she even used part of her to make Neuvillette into who he is, idk.

-Are we seriously reassuring the Knave that Lyney et al are good little Fatui? We’re so fond of them.

-Oh? Father(-in-law) knows I’m close to her son?

-Dude, it’s so cool speaking so civilly and openly with Arlecchino, especially after dealing with Dottore and Scaramouche.

-I would also be happy to cooperate with you, Arlecchino, I really would! Even Aether’s not reacting negatively, he’s not outright rejecting it.

-It wouldn’t be a Neuvillette patch without some Water Dragon tears.

-We are actually asking if he’s the Dragon!!

-And he just outright said yes?!?! WHAT! Refreshing.

-Ooooh, such interesting lore! Dragons are weaker now because part of their power is the basis of the Archons’ Authorities!

-Freminet hang-out when

-Lyney’s like, “YAAAAY, Father approves of my crush! My crush didn’t immediately clash with Father! YAAAY!”

-I love the way our relationship with the siblings is evolving

-90% of the people we’ve met in Fontaine: “This is normal human behavior, right? I’m doing it right, right?”

-Wriothesley and Neuvillette trying to flirt will be like, “Wanna bring the water… And I’ll bring the tea… And have a tea-making session…”

-AAAHH, I can’t wait for Act V, it’ll be probably be the finale, right?

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: He-She

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS)

The public domain is filled to the brim with some of the best and most fascinating characters that you, dear reader, can use without issue in your very own stories! Nothing can stop you from slapping Dracula, the Martians from War of the Worlds, Gilgamesh, Cthulhu, and Sherlock Holmes into some big stupid crossover story! And if you plumb the depths of the public domain you’ll find even cooler and wackier characters who had their licenses expire ages ago. Why not put Six-Gun Gorilla or Stardust the Super Wizard into your works? You’ll get a lot more points for originality there.

But sometimes when you go deep into the depths of free-to-use characters, you find… Well, you find stuff like He-She.

In 1943’s Boy Comics #9, the world was given an answer to Two-Face that nobody had asked for, mainly because he’d only existed for about a year. But did Two-Face have the greatest fucking tagline ever?

I don’t think so! Still, the name alone might make you raise an eyebrow, and the mere concept sure does seem a bit… iffy in this day and age. I imagine there’s a reason I discovered this character through lists of old comic villains who are incredibly offensive (for some reason, Snowflame kept appearing on those lists too, even though there is nothing offensive about him except how much cooler he is than every other villain ever), although… is that really fair?

Motivation/Goals: All they want is money, money, money. Ain’t it funny? I mean, honestly, what do you expect from the villain in a Golden Age comic book? All the villains back then either wanted boatloads of cash or to destroy the city, with no in between. We wouldn’t get cool motives like “turn the population of New York into dinosaurs” or “Go on a gorilla rampage” until later. Most villains, however cool they appeared, were fueled by simple greed back in the day.

Final Fate: So, uh… They get executed for their crimes.

Like, what, they committed a murder and stole some money? Does that really warrant the death penalty? I’m thinking there was some other reason He-She got put to death...

Best Scene: Over the span of two pages, He-She uses their better half to seduce Crimebuster and then some random guy into doing their bidding. There’s just something genuinely hilarious about a villain using the exact same ploy twice in a row and having it be effective both times, especially since it’s one of the most transparent and silly ones ever used.

Best Quote:

Final Thoughts & Score: There is just so much to unpack here, and yet at the same time so little.

Let’s start with the obvious question: Is He-She offensive? Well, they refer to them as an “it” right off the bat, which isn’t particularly great, and we have our police character acknowledge there are people like them… in circus freak shows. Crimebuster is a little nicer in the end, saying they’ll pay for “his or her crimes,” but yeah, it’s not exactly tasteful by modern standards.

Of course, considering when this was made, it genuinely could have been a lot worse. Golden Age comics were rife with problematic characters, and by those standards He-She could have been some walking transphobic stereotype. But being trans wasn’t really the big topic it is today; I don’t really see He-She as being any sort of commentary on gender identity or trans people beyond having a name that is incredibly unfortunate with the benefit of hindsight because I really don’t think it was an issue mainstream enough to mock. I’m not going to pretend like this is tasteful or well done—it’s definitely not—but if they were genuinely trying to be transphobic it doesn’t really come off that way. He-She is just a generic criminal with a very weird gimmick that has aged a bit awkwardly.

And that’s really the long and short of it right there: He-She is, ultimately, a generic criminal. If not for their absolutely bizarre premise and design, I think they would be completely unremarkable. And even the gimmick falls a bit flat because it is truly poorly implemented into the story. He-She marries a landlady within the first page of the comic, but it’s only after their marriage during a big fight that their wife finds out that they’re He-She. Did she just never once see the other side of their face? Did they not kiss them at the wedding? Is the trench coat and hat really that great of a disguise? The entire plot would collapse if anyone bothered to look at He-She from the other side. Do they have some superhuman ability to make people never question why they always stand so you can only see their profile?

There are a few humorous moments like the aforementioned seduction trick, but the gimmick isn’t utilized well beyond that. What we’re stuck with is a historical curiosity that’s too bland to be offensive, too tasteless to garner a fanbase, and just a baffling creation in its own right. 4/10 seems about right. But that’s where you, dear reader, come in!

You see, as He-She is in the public domain, you can take them and put them in your own stories, free of charge! Give them complex motives and deeper characterization! Give them a more appealing design, or at least have their odd physical condition make a bit more sense! And most importantly, change their fucking name and write them with respect! Literally nothing is stopping you from rehabilitating this bizarre piece of comic history!

Except for the fact that, you know, He-She sucks. But that's why you gotta make them better.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

LMAO REAL I can imagine him rolling off his futon and like steamrolling the rest of Team V at night

IM SO READY SHDHSHS your writing gives me life fr

Omg Yukimiya fic….thats true gotta balance out the tabieitaken distribution LOLL I feel like there’s many interesting routes you could go with…if you wanna brainstorm I’ll gladly dump my thoughts out HAHAHA

Oh my the poison dragon how could I forget (I’m NGL the multiple different outcomes of two element combos irked me like wdym I can get flower/poison or blue flame/cold fire???)

LMAOO I love the randomness of smash its so fun I lowk miss playing

Ok im just gonna smack my response to your response on the commentary here so you don’t have to go read separate asks LMAO

SHDHSHSH BRO THE MEET CUTE IM CRYING ok but when I read all the quotes from y/n with the emojis I’m imagine that like bang/boom sound from the vine soundboard LMAOOOOOO the “you have a stupid name” one is especially funny HAHAHAH

Bro the “I want you to belong to me” SOLD ME LIKE >>>>> I love it sm I love the flavor it brings *chefs kiss*

OOOOOOOOH I’m buckled in guys I’m so ready for ~10 chapters of gold (also LMAOAOA it’s funny imagine you ballpark 40k words and it ends up doubling like how fwtkac also doubled in length and ended with a 16k final I love it)

Also unrelated but I went back to read hollyhock 1 and then 2 again and in the process passed by your masterlist and decided to read seabird too and WOW (as we’ve discussed) I’m not really a Sae fan but the way you write him makes me wanna be one SHDVSHDH maybe you just sprinkle some sort of magic spice into all of your characterizations that’s by far one of the best versions of Sae I’ve seen written out there the constant “I beat you to paying” was so funny too!!! But yeah honestly I was like ykw it’s 11k words Mira must’ve cooked something again idc if I don’t like Sae we go and lo and behold you indeed cooked LMAOAOA

-Karasu anon

LMAOOO zantetsu and reo get absolutely flattened on the daily 😭 maybe that’s why reo was so insistent on scoring enough goals to get fancy beds 😩

I WILL TAKE YUKI THOUGHTS AT ANY MOMENT!! your requests have lead to greatness in the past so if you have any ideas for him i would not be opposed hehe…i agree there’s def a lot of diff ways to go with him!! truly a very versatile guy

i had to sell so many random dragons in the pursuit of getting like the really rare ones omg 😭 but yeah what they did to the poison dragon is a travesty it is SUCH a cute baby and such an ugly adult??

smash is so fun precisely because it’s so random…like what other game has bowser beating up steve from minecraft yk?? i miss playing as well all of my friends rn are mario kart players which don’t get me wrong mario kart is a blast but sometimes you just want to beat people’s little video game avatars up 😰

PLEASE OMG IT LITERALLY IS LIKE THAT like y/n saying everything completely straight faced like 😐 meanwhile karasu is like 😨😱😓 the whole time…she did not give bro a second to breathe 😫 POOR GUY SHE EVEN MADE FUN OF HIS NAME AS IF HE CHOSE THAT??? he’s lucky she didn’t say anything abt his hair fr

oh i was giggling writing that LMAOAOA…i feel too like it’s also a role reversal almost?? idk the power dynamics between them are so odd because they’re so nuanced based on their societal roles and whatnot and just when you think you have them figured out they throw another wrench in things 😩 but it adds sm more fun and flavor than just “big strong talented protective man and shy weak gentle helpless woman” imo!!

honestly i would not at all be surprised if this ends up being longer 😟 i think it just depends on how in depth i decide to go with the military stuff but honestly the plot i have planned spans several YEARS soooo expect to be in for a ride

OMG SEABIRD AHAHA that was like the first or second request i got for my event (and also ever) so i was really excited to write it even though lowkey i was like “sae 🙁⁉️” i got sooo carried away w it too (as you can tell by the 11k< word count KFJDJD) and it ended up being sm fun!! reader and sae’s relationship (as well as her little brother’s random cameos) was so silly summer cutesy so it rlly fit the vibe considering i wrote it in the end of may/beginning of june. ofc yk how i feel abt sae and the itoshi bros in general but i always try to set aside my biases when writing!! it’s my goal to write stories that you can enjoy regardless of the characters they’re for. and yes i really tried hard to characterize seabird sae as close to how i actually see his manga self!! i think his dry emotionless soccer-brained personality meshed really well w the reader’s which is probably a part of the charm he has in that story!! i’m glad you gave it a chance and ended up liking it though 💖

[platoniclokiimagines]

Alternately imagine Loki messing up and turning the reader into a kid and being so conflicted bc ew kids but aw ur so nice and sweet

Hello, I’m not dead, and the Loki trailer has breathed new life into me, and I’m taking Advantage of that by trying to write more this year! Go easy on me, I’m rusty. I hope you enjoy this little prompt!

Rating: G

W/C: 1561

TW: none

A/N: Watch Wandavision if you haven’t already!

When Loki had asked you to help them work on some spells,you’d expected you’d be mostly providing commentary. Deciding if the outcomewas what Loki had intended, suggesting what to do to make the spells moreeffective, that sort of thing.

And to be fair, it hadstarted out that way.

And then Loki had misread a spell, and the next thing youknew, Loki was towering over you, and you were all but two, a little dazed andvery confused.

Naturally, you did the only thing your newly re-toddleredbrain could do.

You started to cry.

Loki, it seemed, did notappreciate this new turn of events, and the longer they stared at you inblatant disbelief and uncertainty, the more upset it made you, and the nextthing either of you knew, you were absolutely wailing.

The sound alone was enough to have everyone who wascurrently home run into the training room.

“….is that Y/N?” Steve asked, after a long moment of silenceas everyone tried to piece together what happened.

“…yes,” Loki admitted, defeat evident in their voice.

“…Y/N’s a baby?” Nat sounded just as bewildered as Stevelooked, and Loki could only pinch the bridge of their nose.

“Yes, very well spotted, Romanoff. We were practicingspells. I was practicing spells, andI must have said something the wrong way. Asgardian spells are very particular.”

“Make Y/N stop crying!”

“Me?!”

“You did it!”

“Not on purpose!”

While Nat and Loki bickered, it made you only the morefussy, and you continued to wail, as you no longer had the skill set, or thevocabulary, to try and help or figure out what happened and how to help.

Steve picked up on this easily, and was quick to shut theboth of them down. “Arguing isn’t going to help matters, and you’re making Y/Nmore upset. Loki, do you have a way to fix this?”

“If I did, don’t you’d think I’d have done it already?”

Steve opted not to take the bait, and instead heaved a sigh.“Will it wear off?”

“…theoretically. But I don’t know how long until it will.”

“Alright. So in the meantime, Y/N’s a baby. Babies don’ttake care of themselves, so… someone else has to.”

“Not it,” Natasha was quick to respond, already headed forthe door, leaving only Steve, Bruce, and Wanda to stare at you.

“…I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to look after Y/N, given…” Bruce waved his hands in a vaguegesture, but it got the point across.

“Well, I think Loki should do it. Loki caused it, after all.”

Steve looked at Loki, who only glowered in response. “…Notto take sides, but Wanda does have apoint.”

“…fine. But you should know that children and I do not mix, and if anything else happens toY/N, it’s on you.”

“Sure, but if anything happens to Y/N, it’ll be when the skyturns purple, because everyone in this compound knows you’d never do a thing tohurt Y/N.”

You and Loki both knew Steve had a point, and as everyoneleft the room again, so that it was just the two of you, and by now, you’dcalmed down enough that you were no longer wailing, but instead having a nice,pouty little sniffle.

Loki didn’t look any happier at this improvement, andhesitantly approached you, lowering themself to sit down in front of you asthey watched you.

“…I mean it. I’m not good with kids.”

You only pouted more, crossing your arms over your chest asyou kept watching Loki.

“…stop that.”

“Top dat,” you shot back, unable to stop yourself frommocking them.

“Y/N, really.”

“Y/N, weawy.”

“…if you’re trying to make me think you’re cute, it isn’tgoing to work.” All the same, you could see the slightest little smile on theirface.

“I am coot.”

“….you aren’t going to make this any easier for me, are you.”

“Mmmmmmmno.” And you grinned, a cheeky little grin that,despite the change in age, was enough like the old you to make Loki laugh abit.

“Let’s get one thing straight, though, I don’t change ragsor whatever it is human babies wear here, so you’ll be doing all of that onyour own.”

“I’m two!”

“….then we’ll have Steve do it.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

The both of you settled into a long, somewhere comfortablesilence, broken only when you spoke up in your tiny little toddler voice. “How wongam I gonna be wike this?”

Loki’s face fell a bit, making it obvious that they weretruly a little out of their depth this time. “…I don’t know. It could be hours,or days, or even weeks.”

“Weeks?!” Youshrieked, which sounded much funnier in a two-year-old voice than you hadintended it to.

“…It won’t take weeks. If it’s not worn off by tomorrowmorning, I’ll start looking through my texts and seeing if I can’t findsomething to reverse it.”

“………..otay.”

You fell into another long silence, and you took theopportunity to push yourself up onto your feet, trying to gain your bearingsand figure out how to maneuver yourself now. Eventually, you got the hang ofit, and you took to walking circles around Loki, just trying to pass the time,as though it might help the spell fix itself if you were being more active.

“What are you doing, Y/N?” Loki asked, watching you withjust your eyes every time you came into their line of vision.

“Passing da time.”

“…right.” Loki fell silent again, and pulled their phone outof their pocket, fiddling around with it for a bit, and you saw anotheropportunity to be annoying, and took it without a second thought.

“Yoo got games on yoow phone?”

As you erupted into laughter, Loki, unappreciative of thehumor, only looked at you as they deadpanned. “You know I don’t.”

“Ya, cebause yoow bowing.”

“I’m not boring, Ijust don’t see the point.”

“It’s fun.”

“You can have fun without playing games on your phone.”

“Yeah, so?”

Loki, clearly wanting to change the subject so they would nolonger be grilled by a two-year-old, put their phone away and stood. “How aboutlunch? Are you hungry?”

That gave you pause, and you stopped, thinking for a moment.“…I could eat.”

“Perfect. Let’s go.” Without thinking about it, Loki startedto walk off, and you stared after them, offended that they didn’t remember youwere now much smaller and therefore walked much more unsteadily.

“Hey!”

Loki turned around to look at you. “What now, Y/N?” You could tell Loki wasn’treally as annoyed as they were trying to act like they were, given the slightedge of concern in their voice.

“Tha’s a long wawk!”

“…and?”

“I’m two!” Youwere starting to wonder how many times you’d have to remind Loki of this.

“…what, do you want me to carry you?”

“Ya!”

Loki narrowed their eyes as they considered you, and youlooked back, smiling innocently as you held your arms out. There was no way you were going to make any bit ofthis easy for Loki; a small bit of payback for being turned into a toddler.

Loki heaved a sigh that was dramatic, even for them, andwent back to you, picking you up and settling you on their hip rather easily,for someone who claimed not to be fond of children. “Not a word of this to the others, are we understood?”

“Mm…. Maybe,” was your only response, and Loki was smartenough to realize that that was the best they were going to get.

Twenty minutes later, and you were happily munching your waythrough your favorite sandwich, feet kicking in the space between the chair andthe ground, as your feet no longer reached.

“Are you happier now?” Loki asked, once you’d finished yoursandwich, and loudly finished the last of the juice box Loki had found for youin the fridge.

“Yah! Tank oo.”

“…you’re welcome.” Loki kept watching you as you set theempty juice box down, and rubbed at your eyes, yawning a bit. “….naptime?”

“….fow someone who doesn’t wike kids, yoo seem to know whatyoow doin’…”

“Yes, well. I do read a lot.”

You allowed Loki to pick you up and carry you over to thecouch, but when they tried to set you down, you whined.

“Nooooooo!”

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“Noooooo!” youinsisted, and Loki heaved what had to have been the hundredth sigh since you’dbeen toddlerized.

“Y/N, you know I don’t do cuddling, even when we’re bothnormal.”

You gave your absolute, very best puppy dog eyes, hoping youwould be able to sway Loki, and much to your amusement, it seemed to work, asthey gave their hundred-and-first sigh.

“…you’re spoiled,”Loki grumped, with very little actual grumpiness in their voice, and they letyou settled comfortably against their shoulder, watching as you relaxed. “Not aword to the others.”

“Ya, ya, I know…”you mumbled, already halfway to sleep.

Loki said nothing else, only patted your back gently as youdrifted off to sleep.

And a half hour later, when the rest of the team came in tofind the both of you nodded off together, they didn’t have the heart to wakeeither of you.

[leverage-commentary]

Leverage Season 2, Episode 13, The Future Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

Marc: Hello, Marc Roskin, producer and director of this episode.

Amy: Hi, Amy Berg, supervising producer and co-writer of this episode.

John: John Rogers, executive producer.

Chris: Chris Downy, executive producer, and co-writer of the Future Job.

John: Uh, this, did this start out of the haunting episode? Is this how the psychic came about?

Amy: The origin of this? No, the um, no I don't think so. Psychic Job was—

John: Was that Dean's?

Amy: No, it was literally a card that was on my board at the beginning of the season, along with Three Days of the Hunter, and Two Live Crew Job, so this was essentially plucked from the well.

John: This was one of the ones that sat there, that sat there for a long time, she was great, what, uh...

Marc: Jen Taylor, local Seattle actress. She was wonderful.

John: But it was Dean who really dug in on this one, because he really liked the bad guy. He really said, you know, ‘I really wanna hammer the fake psychics.’

Amy: Yeah, and he was the one who, sort of, had the vision of, sort of, making this a Parker episode and, sort of, getting to delve deeper into her backstory a little bit.

Chris: And there's Luke Perry.

John: Luke Perry was fantastic.

Amy: He was great.

John: How did we wind up casting Luke Perry?

Chris: I think it was suggested by our casting folks, and I think it was the first one on his list, and he said, Luke Perry would be fantastic for this role. And we all, we were kind of like wow. You know, you didn't really think of him as- as an evil psychic.

Marc: I would leave my wife for Luke Perry. 

[All Laugh]

John: Luke Perry—uh, as a director, why don't you talk about working with Luke Perry, Marc?

Marc: He was wonderful. I mean, you can just really, when someone has that much experience working in television, I mean, it's amazing. He was on time, he never left set, he was always talking about character and would take any suggestions, you know, from me as a director, if you wanted to go another way, just let me know; he was just a dream to work with.

John: Now, what was the idea on this particular setting for the psychic, instead of like a formal office, or like, what was the set dec idea on this?

Marc: Well we wanted to have him working out of, like, a home type office, and actually we had to find something that we could build on the stage to work on.

John: Oh so that wasn't a location, that was-

Marc: No, that was just our basic, uh, hospital and Gina apartment set.

John: [Laughs] The Frankenset.

Marc: Shot on the same day as this day, on the stage, in our bar.

John: Okay, cool. Nice shot through the glass, by the way. I didn't know those taps worked. If I'd known those taps worked I would have been up north a lot more often.

Marc: They work. As soon as you request it, Eric Bates we'll start pumping a keg through them.

John: And this actor playing the brother—

Marc: Uh, Eric Riedman, he was great, too. I mean, he really, really clicked with Tim in this scene. They really worked well together.

John: And it was interesting. We were trying to figure out—we had a great victim, but ordinarily our victim has already had the thing done to them, but in the design of this, you needed the victim to sort of be in suspension.

Amy: Yeah, we needed a proxy. And uh, the brother was sort of a great emotional investment tool for us.

John: Yeah. And Portland actor, just a really, really great job. That was a good, 'I hate that guy moment', when we made her pregnant. And uh—

Chris: And taking her house.

John: Take her house, don't leave money on the table.

Amy: I guess we should point out that, uh, I named a lot of these characters - with the exception of Dalton Rand, Luke Perry's character - after the assistants on our show.

John: Oh, this one is the one where we used all the—

Amy: Yeah, it's Wilson, it's Nicholas, and Ryan, and—

Chris: I love that logo there, by the way, that went by.

John: Oh yeah, who designed that? The great Dalton Rand logo?

Chris: Oh they did a great job.

John: It was actually designed by Derek, right? Our computer graphics guy?

Marc: Yeah, Derek Frederickson in Chicago.

John: He banged it up for us. And it is amazing, this is another one where you could assume we are doing one or the other of any of the very sundry famous psychics, but really they all use the same cons.

Amy: Yeah, they really do.

John: And I’ll also say, Derren Brown was a big influence on this episode.

Amy: Yeah, I think you and I are maybe a little too obsessed with Derren Brown, and uh—

John: He is dreamy.

Amy: He's dreamy and he's sort of an—

John: And a powerful, commanding presence.

Amy: And he's an expert in NLP, which a lot of the stuff we talk about in this episode is, and he debunks a lot of psychics and mediums and things of that sort.

John: That's a really interesting way, too, by doing shows that make it look like he has those abilities.

Amy: And Apollo Robbins, our consultant, was helpful in, sort of, submitting some great terminology for us to use throughout.

John: Oh yeah, that's right, the cold reading terminology, yeah. Um, now this, where was this set?

Marc: This was an actual cable access station that they, again, just opened the doors for us. We didn't have to change any of the logos or the numbers, the people working the camera are the actual camera crew—

Chris: Wow, that's great.

Marc: —of this station, they were wonderful.

Amy: They absorbed us into their own productions.

Chris: Just like Three Days of the Hunter, this is another example of Portland opening its doors to us.

Marc: So all those monitors, they had up and running and feeding through our system as well, it was great.

John: Now did you take a look at any of the extant shows, in order to, sort of, see how this works?

Marc: Uh, I did, and a lot of it at first was just to see the set. And everybody—once you start looking at their sets—were like 'oh, maybe ours is a little too pretty.' [All Laugh] Some of them were just like two chairs and an easel, with something leaning against it.

John: 'I'm gonna sketch what your dead mother is saying.'

Marc: And then our construction crew, you know, built the risers, so we can have some depth with the audience. This was a fun scene. It wasn't supposed to be a physical scene, but Eliot and Lathrop turned it into one, so it was kinda fun.

Chris: I love when he gets mad here.

Amy: This was supposed to be a con, and then it turned into something altogether different.

John: He's just really annoyed at that dude up in his face. And you know what's interesting is we- it was a little weird developing this, because all the tricks that a lot of fake psychics use—not the real psychics, of course, with giant lawyers behind them, but the fake psychics use—are actually techniques we use in the cons, and so it was kind of this weirdly recursive thing. It's like, we're kind of exposing to the audience how they do this, but we do it every week.

Amy: Yeah, we're exposing ourselves as much as we're exposing Dalton Rand here.

John: And this is where he goes into cold reading. What was the—and it's interesting, cold reading is a fascinating subject, there's actually a couple great books that Apollo Robbins hunted up, and the idea that just by playing the numbers, just by playing the odds, any one of these guys can hit at about 80 to 85 percent success rate.

Amy: Yeah, it's act- it's basically asking a series of questions, and, sort of, gauging reactions to people without knowing anything about them in advance. Whereas hot reads or warm reads, as they’re sometimes called, are basically doing your homework beforehand, and getting research on the people you're about to meet with and, sort of, using that knowledge to, sort of, manipulate them.

Chris: The hot read is really more what our guy's doing, which is kinda how this thing broke down in the episode, was when we hijack and sort of take it over and hot read.

Amy: Yeah. Well we, the team basically underestimates Dalton here, and he surprises them.

John: They think that once they throw him, they'll get him, and he's able to cold read Parker. Which is also a big thing, not just in anchoring Parker's story into the episode, but the show always works when the nemesis is a bit more formidable.

Amy: Absolutely.

John: And it was kind of important, especially since Luke's kind of a really nice, he's got a nice guy vibe, it was kinda really important to start to hammer in on the fact that this guy is as good as they are. If he knew they were coming, this would be a very different game.

Amy: And I think Tim is great in this scene, because he's playing the audience, he's like, ‘Wait a minute, like, we were supposed to come in and sort of take over this guy, and he's sort of manipulating Parker, and surprising me in turn.’

John: Wow, look at Beth there. She is working.

Chris: Now, how'd you work with her on this when you went into this scene?

Marc: Um, it was interesting, because the scenes we shot first are the scenes later where it was really emotional in the Leverage apartment, where she really broke down, so she was already at that place once, and she just brought it right back, and I think Luke worked really well with her.

John: I also like that beat in the van where Jeri sort of chose, it was a very nice choice, where Aldis has got Hardison really pissed off, and Jeri's just admiring the craft. She's not as emotionally invested in the team, so she can kind of step back and admire this guy's chops.

Marc: And this scene was just such a great scene where all of our actors work so well together in, not only just rehearsing it, but getting Beth to a certain place, you know, where she should be, they were all really emotionally involved in this, and took a lot of time to rehearse—

John: Probably took twice as long as we usually do to shoot this stuff.

Amy: Well yeah, it was the characters being really protective of Parker, and the actors being really protective of Beth, it was really great.

Chris: Well I think it was actually, when it was written, more angry. You know what I mean? And I think seeing the dailies, it was, like, she took it to this incredibly vulnerable place that I don't think it really was on the page.

John: Also big credit to Dean Devlin, because he also had pushed that.

Marc: He did, he did. And this was a great scene, we have all the emotional arc with Beth, but as you guys were just explaining, in the script we explain the hot read and the cold read and we break it all down.

John: Yeah, and this is—again, we are always agonizing over how to explain this stuff, and having someone with a specific emotional response or attitude in the scenes makes a giant difference. And having it be Parker, who the audience is very very fond of, really helps, you know. We're now dumping an enormous amount of exposition on your plate, and you don't care.

Chris: Right, because it's—you know, we're seeing her in this really, just devastated place.

Marc: And we just found out a lot about her past that we didn't know about.

John: And he—I love that look up, just like, ‘Help me out here, I got nothing.’

Chris: Well the thing about it, and we'll talk about it when we get there, but the way she plays the scene at the end, with the brother, really was informed by all this, which was not at all on the page at all.

Marc: Right.

Chris: Like, when she hugs the victim's brother, and we'll get there, it's as if she's hugging her own brother.

John: And also it's interesting, because—oddly, it certainly wasn't intended, but it's just the way TV shows evolve—it helps, sort of, explain her relationship with Eliot and Hardison, you know. That's sort of how she fell into that rhythm, and that sort of proxy family—

Chris: It was not intended.

John: I would like to say, I'd like to say it was a sort of subconscious Alan Moore idea space.

Amy: Speak for yourself Chris, I totally did that on purpose.

John: Like two years ahead, like two years in advance?

Chris: Oh sure. That's what you're supposed to do on these commentaries—

Amy: Yes, many many years.

Chris: —you're supposed to go 'well, you see, I laid these—'

John: 'So this moment, two years earlier—'

Amy: Reason we're awesome, number 427.

John: But here's what's amazing is, we really, we're always like, in the show, could we possibly fool people with this? And then when you do this, this explanation scene, could you possibly fool anyone? They do! This is how they do it! We're not making any of this up.

Amy: No.

John: If anything, we're giving them better tech.

Amy: We're giving them ideas on how to be better at it.

Chris: And by the way, from a technical standpoint, these scenes were very difficult to shoot because we're going from monitors to action—

Amy: To flashbacks.

Chris: —to flashbacks, very hard.

Marc: And they're all green screens on the day we're shooting them.

John: Oh that's right, we didn't have the footage.

Amy: Nothing was on these monitors.

Marc: Nothing is on the monitors.

Amy: All we had was a nice bulletin board.

Marc: Yeah, we had a little bulletin board to show that they had the seating chart. And here, one of my favorite lines is coming up, it's just a great release valve, with all this tension, and, and her emotions—crying.

John: Yeah, you can see her turning, too. There's the sort of old Parker coming back, and the anger kind of building up in her face.

Amy: Yeah it's like, wait a minute...

Marc: And then this line from Eliot. 'Can we kill him?' 

[All Laugh]

Chris: I think that was you.

John: Yeah that was, I think that was me. Quite sure. ‘Yeah, alright [Laughs] absolutely.’ I like, and Chris played it just right too, like...

Chris: Just a shrug.

John: And it's interesting, 'cause, that actually was intentional in the back half of the season this year. We really want to remind people, Eliot Spencer used to kill people. I mean, because it's really easy, because Chris is very charming, and he's very funny... yeah he was not a pleasant human being by any stretch of the imagination. And every now and then, you lose it a little, you know what I mean? You lose track of it, because he's such a nice guy. And who's that?

Marc: That is Lana Veenker, our casting associate there in good old Portland.

Amy: How did that come about? [Laughs]

Marc: You know what? We were just reading people and all of a sudden I'm like, ‘Why don't you read?’ 'No no no, I won't. Okay, gimme thirty seconds.' All of a sudden she read and we were like, 'Done.'

John: Done. We're out.

Chris: Didn't we write some pages where they have a long passionate kiss here? 

[All Laugh]

John: Yes, we did. We did—actually we didn't write them, you know, they were faxed in, and I don't know where they came from.

Chris: Handwritten.

Amy: Yeah I think it was a Portland IP address, somehow.

John: Yeah, it was a little creepy, to tell you the truth. [Amy Laughs] Ah, no. And this, uh—you know, we need a new name for the assistant who's not a Busey.

Chris: Uh... Well, I mean...

John: Because we've had a couple.

Chris: Lackey? It’s kind of a lackey.

Amy: Do people know—have we explained—

John: We've explained the Busey's on both seasons.

Amy: Okay good.

John: Uh, yeah, he's not quite a lackey, he's more of a henchman.

Chris: Henchman, yeah.

John: For those of you building the characters in Savage Worlds, he would have one wild die. [Laughs]

Amy: Lackies don't have lines, henchmen do.

John: Ah, there you go, good point.

Marc: And this scene as well, the opening scene in this office was shot at like, one in the morning, twelve o'clock at night, Luke's first day—

John: [Laughs] Welcome to Leverage, Luke.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. And he just rocked it out.

Amy: Yeah, he's great.

John: He landed unctuous. It was a pity because it was one of those performances where in the middle you're like, ‘Oh man, I love when we find an actor and we want to bring them back— oh wait, he's a villain.’ This almost never happens with villains.

Marc: Yeah.

John: Drew was the exception, but he was a good guy villain.

Chris: I think he mentioned that he was a—he is a con man here, and that he could always have a twin brother.

[All Laugh]

Amy: Without the beard and mustache.

John: This is, uh, I actually showed up on set, I think this day, or the—I flew in...

Amy: This was my first day too.

John: Yeah, and we arrived and Marc was in the middle of planning the most insane thing ever.

Amy: Well, the thing is, I put this camera move in the script thinking and hoping maybe just to freak Marc out—with no expectation that he could possibly pull it off—as a joke!

John: Oh like the giant blue whale structure.

Amy: Yeah, yeah, as a friggin joke, and then like, he shows me this move, and, like, I nearly died.

Marc: I thought about it, and I was like, ‘Well, can we do it?’ And our First AD David Wechsler and New York AD goes, 'Do you want it?' I'm like, 'Yeah.' He goes, 'Then we could do it.'

John: Yeah, Wex stops traffic in New York; stopping traffic in Portland wasn't—'cause that's what happened, I showed up and I'm like, 'I'm going to the set' and they're like, 'I'm sorry sir, you can't go. They stopped traffic.' 'Well I know, but I'm a writer' 'No no, they're doing some sort of s—' I'm four blocks away! What the hell?’

Chris: By the way, Jeri Ryan here, fantastic look from Nadine—

Amy: Yeah.

John: And she's also got a great character going here—

Marc: She looks fantastic.

Chris: Got a great character.

John: This is a softer character than Jeri usually gets to play, even in the cons.

Marc: A little hippie-ish, yeah.

Chris: The hair was great. I mean really, they nailed this.

Amy: Well Luke even comments on it, “It’s a little on the nose, but [laughs] it works for you.”

John: But that’s the idea, to just kind of you know, not try to overthink it.

Amy: Yeah, it’s great.

John: And it was interesting, again, the—Jeri was great for us and she was really fantastic all year, but you know one thing she mentioned is, she got to play roles that nobody usually lets her play, even within the cons.

Amy: Yup.

John: And there’s another clue for you, where she spent the last—the time before her con career.

Marc: And here comes the shot.

Amy: I’m excited just thinking about it.

John: I’m a little giddy. Yeah, there you go.

Chris: Oh, around the corner!

John: Now that’s all done in camera, so what happens is you have to have everyone within view of that camera freeze. And then the camera man basically runs, we put a steadicam through and then we digitally speed it up.

Marc: Poor Gary Camp.

Amy: Gary Camp!

John: Poor Gary Camp.

Chris: Now that I thought about it, I bet you in the finale that’s what prompted Dean to do that shot with Sterling. 

John: Right.

Chris: I bet Dean was like, he saw this and he was like ‘Oh you wanna try and top me with that? Well come and watch this!’

[All Laugh]

John: ‘I start and stop it four times!’

Chris: ‘I gave you your chance!’

Marc: But I don’t know, if you play it back you can see we also put some digital birds that are stopped—

John: Seriously? Like, if you slow-mo it you can see?

Marc: Yes. If you slow-mo it you’ll see two pigeons in the middle and we pass right past them.

Amy: That’s awesome.

John: I like the fact that, again, they’ve electrified the table, and that Nate is on board with Parker. ‘Cause again, that’s one of those little hints that Nate’s… sadism, for lack of a better word? is really starting to overtake his good judgment.

Amy: Yes. He’s—yeah it’s, little by little he’s starting to sort of fall to pieces here and sort of turn to the dark side.

John: Well, what’s nice is we started with the arc with the hospital one with- with the sadism, and then, you know, we had to sort of lean back on it for Gina’s arc. And then when we came back it was nice, that was basically the thrust of the back episodes. This was a lot of fun coming up with what the possible fucking visions could be. Oh that’s… I’m sorry, I’m drinking. [Amy Laughs] They’re used to me swearing on these by now! This really is like making, building a puzzle backwards.

Marc: This was really clever writing, and then to have the ability to shoot it was so much fun.

Amy: Aw. Thank you Rosky.

John: Yeah. We try to keep you entertained up there, after all your—this was only your fourth?

Marc: Yes.

Amy: Fourth episode?

John: Fourth episode, with no notice.

Marc: Yeah.

Amy: How was this episode different from the other three you’ve done?

Marc: It was fun to be in different places, you know, just to new places in Portland. It was fun to have a guest star like Luke to work with. And I loved having the emotional hook with Parker, ‘cause my first episode I did in the first season was a Parker episode, it was the Stork Job.

Amy: Oh! This is like your Parker bookend basically. That’s great.

John: Also it was interesting, watching with the sound off, I didn’t realize that’s one of the longest villain character scenes we’ve ever had. Like just when he’s parked there at the chair and she runs the con on him. Luke was really, really great.

Amy: He’s not bad to look at. [John Laughs] That’s kinda my job since you’re all dudes. [Laugh]

John: Well you know, I can appreciate a nice piece of man flesh as much as the next person. What is in this?

[All Laugh]

Marc: And the coffee finally spills.

John: And did we do the driving stunt there? No the driving—yes, the driving stunt’s after this.

Chris: It’s after this, yeah.

Amy: Yeah, yeah it was, the first part of it yeah.

John: But we shot it that day.

Amy: With the amazing, highly maneuverable Hyundai Genesis.

John: Hyundai Genesis was great. If you’re gonna murder someone with a car, the Hyundai Genesis is the way to go.

Marc: This was another local actor, I mean he just has… what a great face for television.

John: You know what, he looks a little like the British actor Peter Mullan actually, the guy who was on The Fixer?

Amy: He does! Yeah he does.

John: It’s really, I’ll tell you what Portland gave us - good cops.

Marc: Yes.

Amy: Oh yeah.

John: Our cops up there, ‘cause we just look at the Bottle show, and the three guys who played the Boston cops in the background, they’re just grounded.

Amy: This guy smells cop. [Laughs]

Chris: If you’re a cop-looking guy living in LA and you wanna get some work...

Everyone: Move to Portland.

Amy: We’ll employ you!

Chris: Just go! You listen to this right now? Load up the car, get up there! There’s work for you, my friend.

John: After these commentaries come out, people are gonna be on buses. There’s gonna be, like, bus tours for actors. And this was a lot of fun, was coming up—this was actually, I think we’d had the fortune cookie con in something. What was the story? Remember? We’d had it on the board for a while. The fortune cookies, the substituting.

Amy: Oh dude, so long ago; I wish I had the answer to that.

John: A lot of the, I mean that’s the thing is, there’s actually in the writer’s room a board of stuff.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And some of the stuff has been around long enough that it’s like, I know there was a provenance.

Amy: I think there was a fortune cookie con card.

Chris: Mm, I don’t know if a whole… might have been a story beat; it wasn’t a whole con.

John: Not a whole con, it was a story beat, yeah. But the idea of substituting—

Chris: This is a great- Here we go; here it is. [Laughs]

Amy: Look at it shining in the sun, beautiful.

John: And that’s a great—what was the choice on the, like in the moment, in the script it just says, ‘He realizes.’ How did you decide to go to the slow-mo and..?

Marc: I wanted to do a slow-mo in the 360; the world’s kinda spinning on him and just the— 

Amy: The camera’s a great touch, too. I like it.

Marc: Yeah, well I wanted the can to just show the proximity of how close he was, how much he’s tempted fate.

John: This was also one of the sequences that—who cut this?

Marc: This was Sonny.

John: This was one of the sequences where Sonny Baskin really, really, really slammed it together because this is always tricky, figuring out how the flashbacks work. In what order, in what pace, at what exact moment in the scene. And I think in the script we played around with showing some of it upfront, and then—

Chris: How much of the dialogue to replay was kind of the trick.

John: Exactly, how much we make sure the audience is following.

Marc: And I don’t think some people were understanding, like, why I took so long to shoot that car sequence when he stepped out. That it does play later, and it does have to have different feels and looks to it.

Amy: There’s two parts to it, yeah.

John: And again, this is another one where you have to anticipate, this guy checks credit reports, we know he checked the victim’s credit report earlier, you know.

Chris: And another thing is, one of the hallmarks of our show is that when we create a character, we don’t always create powerful con characters. We create characters that have vulnerabilities that our bad guys can exploit. So here, we created a fake story of her having bad credit and being in debt for hospital bills.

John: Yeah it’s like Chris in the MMA one, Kane, he plays in a very power-negative position in that. Pretty much every variant of a con character you can possibly find.

Amy: José! The name on the cup.

John: And Chris is ridiculously delighted to be doing this at this point actually. [All Laugh]

Amy: How can you tell?!

John: I think he’s just enjoying stealing—driving a truck to tell the truth. And I love the idea that Hardison would do this and this is just what he does. He spends his weekends filling fortune cookies with fake messages. He does all the grunt work.

Marc: That’s a good shot.

John: That is a great shot. And we’re locked in. And this was also tricky, too, because again, because the victim had not been burned yet, essentially, and it was a preventative con. It’s not something we usually do, and trying to figure out how to accelerate this con, and what exactly Con A was, was really—it kicked our asses to tell you the truth.

Chris: The danger was really the tricky part, when to introduce the danger.

John: And now we knew we wanted to do the maestro Hardison beat in this script. Marc, you had a very specific reference for this whole bit, which was the radio announcer in Warriors right?

Marc: Yes. 

John: Though Hardison is basically being a geek hacker—what year was that, 1980… Walter Hill, The Warriors…

Marc: Late 70s.

Amy: ‘79, or something. Around there.

John: Basically Marc reached back, like 35 years, and found himself a really great filmic reference for her side.

Chris: Well the key here is, the writing of it was making sure to go quickly from one, to the next, to the next.

John: Boom, boom, boom.

Chris: Each piece of information feeds to her, and she synthesizes it and comes to a conclusion.

John: It also helps explain how good Tara is.

Chris: Yeah.

John: She’s gonna run this con character as she’s getting all this crap dumped into her ear.

Amy: She’s playing vulnerable to him, but sort of expert to us.

John: I also love that he’s just given up at this point. We had not told the set people to put the orange soda in the fridge, but they just filled it and it just stayed that way for the year. I love that Nate’s just given up.

Chris: Yeah, this is Hardison’s war zone. He’s gonna need to be armed.

Amy: Gummy frogs, always important.

John: Gummy frogs, a call back from the magician episode. And Aldis really dug in there, really great job. Oh that’s Ire!

Amy: That’s Ire!

John: Was our…

Chris: Camera intern?

John: Camera intern, yeah. And she does some acting, and she was fantastic. 

Amy: Her audition was fantastic, yeah.

John: Yeah, that was one of the ones where it was like, ‘Okay we’ll audition you.’ At the end of the audition, ‘Wow…you have a career in this.’ [Laughs] But she’s going into camera work. She’s gonna, believe back this year as one of our camera people...

Chris: Oh she’s gonna come back? Oh that’s great.

John: And why the choices on the lights in the- the blue? Just liked it? Just like the set of one color tone?

Marc: Yeah, just liked it. Dave had an idea about it, and it just worked real well.

John: And it stayed consistent through this setting. It’s a very nice contrast with the sort of warm orange and wood tones of like, Nate’s apartment. It helps track locations a lot easier.

Marc: And Beth freaked out a lot of people when she walked on set with that wig.

Amy: Many many people did not recognize her.

John: I know, that’s really odd, right?

Amy: It was fun.

John: It’s a great wig.

Amy: Yeah it is.

John: Hair and makeup did a great job with that, ‘cause you guys sent me the photos and I was like, ‘I have to shoot the season finale. Did they cut her freaking hair?’ No, great wig. And this is hot read, this is our crew doing hot reads on the fly, and it’s a lot like the Bottle show, where it’s like, you can’t do the wire in two hours. In theory, you can’t hot read someone simultaneously as you’re conning them. Well, you know.

Amy: Maybe you can if you’re Leverage!

John: You’ve got the little camera movements here, is that, you tried to track those or do you just assume that Camp and—?

Chris: Yeah, you’re making sure as you move in one direction on one, you move in the other direction on the other?

Marc: Uh, a little bit. We always wanna keep the sliders going, just pushing in at the appropriate moments especially when Ire- I mean she just did such a great performance, and did it in one take.

Amy: One take; it was one take.

Chris: And didn’t you say to her, ‘Save a little bit ‘cause you may need to do this again’?

Marc: Yeah. I said, I said, ‘Don’t let it all out so fast.’ And Luke was so great with her. Knowing that... He’s seen her pulling cable, and all of a sudden she’s in front and having to break down.

John: He was great with her. Now here’s the thing, most people don’t know what sliders are, why don’t you explain what sliders are? Most people know cameras move left and right but they, you know-

Marc: Sliders are what we have on our dollies and tripods that allow the camera head to move, I guess laterally, left and right, in a fluid movement. Just drifting, so always- the background’s moving just ever so slightly, so it never looks too stale or stagnant. There’s my Warrior shot!

John: And I notice you punched in, like closer, closer, til you land on it. It’s very nice. Also, I like the fact that the name of the National Transportation Safety Board—is that, that’s the name of Parker’s friend from… Peggy Milbank, is like the name that’s coming up, that’s Parker’s friend from the first season.

Amy: Yeah, it’s sort of like a little inside joke.

John: And Hardison, ‘Get the hell out of my way.’ It’s interesting, this is a big, kind of, Nate as guardian episode, and he’s not driving it. It’s one of the great episode examples of where Tim Hutton and Nate kind of just ground it, is kind of the center of it. There’s Wade.

Amy: Wade Williams, awesome actor. Perfect for this role.

John: I was wondering how he would play this reaction, because she’s, you know, he’s giving her a line of bullshit, and he’s gotta, he’s in front of everyone.

Amy: Yeah, he knows he’s on camera.

John: That reminds me of that guy who proposed to his girlfriend at the basketball game and she turned him down.

Everyone: Oh yeah!

Marc: Then the mascot walks him off.

John: Just put a- just end it. No, Wade was fantastic, he’d just come off Prison Break? Wasn’t he a guard on that?

Chris: And we had a long search for that part, too.

John: Yeah, we read a lot of guys. Well, because the original dialogue was somewhat baroque. [Laugh]

Amy: It was! It wasn’t exactly an easy thing to pull off, which is why we ended up casting it out of LA. It was just a really meaty part.

John: Nice fight coming up here, by the way. They actually banged the hell out of that van. You had to hammer a dent out, didn’t you?

Marc: Oh yeah. Yes we did. 

John: Just every now and then you bounce a stuntie off a van. Jeri mixing it up. Jeri was in there, yeah. Good hit! 

Marc: Our local stunt actors and Kevin Jackson choreographed this. 

Amy: The moment where he, sort of, notes the tattoo on the guy’s hand.

John: It’s a nice beat. It’s interesting, the Portland stunt guys really dug in. Because we did a lot more stunts and a lot more fights than four or five movies that have shot up there combined, and they really rallied. They were fantastic. And this was the—

Chris: But here’s where he has to synthesize everything. I mean, now, you know, is where he really steps forward.

John: Well this is really where he digs in on the mastermind thing. This is a good, ‘Let me get this straight’ scene. This is a nice- the ‘let me get this straight’ scene is where you just reset for the audience, you know, just reset the stakes, reset the plot.

Amy: Also known as ‘So you’re telling me.’

Chris: It’s a general rule of writing to show, not tell, and the exception to that rule is when the situation is either so absurd or entertaining that you get a second laugh on the retelling of it.

Amy: Just commenting on it.

John: ‘I wanna get this straight,’ yeah. And you can also hide it in planning, or when the characters don’t have enough information. But no, because the episode at this point—

Chris: There it is, I think she just said ‘so let me get this straight.’ 

[All Laugh]

John: ‘Cause this is the point where the episode becomes an entirely different episode, because the first con worked. Again, because that’s always the trick on these, like, in theory you don’t want something to just fall out of the sky and be wrong.

Amy: Well they basically had Dalton Rand in the bag, and then, a totally unexpected-

Everyone: It worked too well.

John: This was a lovely shot. Marc?

Chris: Oh, I love this.

Marc: This was, I wanted to try and get this in one steadicam shot and just show the energy and movement throughout. I mean we spent so much time in this apartment that it’s fun to try and mix it up again.

Chris: Oh here we go, and up the stairs!

John: Nice, how many takes was that?

Marc: I think we did it in about three or four takes.

Amy: That’s crazy.

Chris: That was it? Now that was planned as a one- or, or was that just the end of the day, we gotta get this shot?

Marc: No, that was planned. That was one shot I wanted to try and do that had a little more energy and fun to it. 

John: Marc’s lived at that set for a lot of shots, he wants to vary it up a little.

Amy: Time to mix it up. 

Marc: And this, this was an idea that Connell had. When he saw the location and the time we’re shooting at, he said, ‘Let’s establish their faces,’ and then just, she’s walking into darkness.

John: Just bump into silhouette.

Chris: And she’s in boots, so let’s pan out from them, so, let’s be honest.

Amy: That’s what boots are for.

Marc: This happened to be in the paper factory.

John: Is this the The Bottle Job paper factory?

Marc: Yes, it’s just the area that didn’t have paper. 

[All Laugh]

John: Now, yes, now we’re basically—yeah, there you go. He’s really digging in on this. ‘Come, come join me!’

Marc: And that was his idea, he said, ‘Get the lady a chair!’

John: This entire speech, I think I did drunk. 

Amy: This was me taking notes on a notepad when you were drunk in the writer’s room, reeling off this speech. 

Chris: It was a big debate about the- about what we- this guy, what was called in the writer’s room the evil scary guy.

John: Evil scary guy.

Chris: The appearance of evil scary guy. We typically don’t have dangerous villains appear late in episodes. Usually we’ve established them and so this was the idea that we were gonna have evil scary guy come at this point in the episode and you know, put everyone in mortal danger. And you went off in a very oddly baroque manner.

John: Yeah. I really—‘cause what I was doing was actually making fun of the idea. Because I was like, ‘Seriously guys, we’re gonna do this? Some guy’s gonna show up and go ‘Gentlemen, I have a problem!’’ And I basically did this speech with, like, a fistful of scotch, and Berg and Chris sat on the same side of the table and they both looked at me and went, ‘Yeah.’

Chris: ‘Yeah, yeah if you like that. That’s great.’

John: ‘Pretty much. Exactly like that. Thanks gentlemen. Debate’s over.’

Chris: ‘Debate’s done.’

John: ‘Debate’s done. That was entertaining, we all enjoyed it, therefore it is in the episode.’

Marc: This was fun to shoot; we had a circle track with, you know, two cameras and two separate dollies.

John: Wait, at the same time?

Marc: Yes.

Chris: Wow.

John: Oh, Jesus Murphy. So where is the circle track laid down, it’s on the outside of this beam?

Marc: On the outside of the beam, and yeah, just around everybody. 

John: Two sizes.

Marc: Yeah, two sizes. And then at one point towards the end we, you know, change direction, just to mix it up a bit. But it was fun to have this type of villain. In the beginning we’re dealing with someone who’s smart, looking at bank statements, and now we’re dealing with a guy with a gun and thugs, who spent time in upstate New York.

John: Yeah, and he really sold it. And also it- the rule is: the villain has to suffer. And interestingly enough, we started Darlton Rand’s suffering really early in this episode. His loss of power here is really, he has just a bad back two acts. And Luke played it very nicely. Like right here, where he’s trying to keep control.

Marc: Yeah, when he’s trying to keep control, and he’s still trying to sell the idea that he’s the psychic. 

John: Wade is terrifying. That was nice, picking up around here as she was dropping into it; that was very nicely done.

Marc: Yes, Gary Camp and Dave Connell.

Chris: Now how long did this take? Do you remember how many takes you did with this, with the circle track?

Marc: I think this scene, we… I believe we did it in just over an hour. Yeah, but it’s a lot of dialogue, and Wade did such a great job because, you know, he had to do it so many different times.

John: And there’s a lot of looks in this. There’s a lot of angles in this.

Amy: He just cracks me up.

John: Yeah, he does. He’s so happy. Yeah, you gotta bang them up from both sides, you’ve gotta pick him up talking to them. There’s no good way except a circle track to shoot that.

Marc: Yeah. I think that Jeri sells this really well in this scene.

John: She does. A little distressed, a little—

Marc: Yeah he’s walking in one direction, no, it’s not, this way. And it’s nice seeing, shooting over, oops, too early.

John: It’s always a little too early. A little too early.  Timing is a big part of the show. And yeah, fainting damsel never, never fails. 

Amy: Best stall ever.

John: Where was this? Was this, like, the storage unit place? Or this was on the road outside?

Marc: Uh, this wasn’t far from our sound stage.

John: Really? Really, we shot near the sound stage?

Chris: We got a lot of mileage within a couple hundred yards of our sound stage.

Amy: Clackamas.

John: Beautiful scenic Clackamas. And this actually, the fake registration idea came from Darwyn Cooke’s comic book adaptation of Parker. The Donald Westlake novel. In the opening of it, remember, he has the thing with Parker and—it’s one of my favorite starts to a novel, Parker’s walking into New York on the Brooklyn Bridge, like, but on the street? And people are—So what happens is, in the 1960s, he goes and gets his replacement driver’s license, and then he ages it. Because… and we spent a little time in the room like, what doesn’t have your picture on it? What can we age believably that, and, yeah that was where the idea came from. And then constructing this backwards to get the series of clues was- was a long afternoon.

Amy: Yeah, that was a tough—but then we broke this episode in one day, so it wasn’t that tough.

Marc: But I wasn’t allowed to break the window.

Amy: Oh that’s right, I remember that. Yeah, we had to, she had to jimmy it open.

Chris: ‘Cause that glass is expensive.

John: Breakaway glass is not cheap. Uh, there’s something creepily sexual about this exchange.

Chris: ‘Can I have your overalls?’

Amy: Yeah, and the look on Tim’s face, too.

John: Yeah, well I think that might not be the matching dialogue with that take, ‘cause I think it got a little dirty in that shot. Now this is a great location. I think we actually broke into a couple of storage units for this. People don’t mind, it’s Portland, they’re totally cool with us doing that. Good stall, and then we finally get Nate into a costume for the stall. Storage units, the anonymity of modern life is the key to Leverage. Storage units, cell phones, instant messaging, email, you know, I don’t think you could do this show in the 50s. And there you go, yeah.

Chris: Here he is.

Marc: Uh-oh. Gun, danger.

John: And, is that Dashiel Hammett or Raymond Chandler’s rule?

Amy: Yeah, Dashiel Hammett’s.

John: Dashiel Hammett. When in doubt, have a guy enter with a gun. And we actually have on the board in the writers room, ‘Man entering with gun > man exiting with gun.’ You have to understand, dude coming in… And Tim has an enormous amount of fun.

Chris: And this is his fumfering bureaucrat.

Marc: This was a fun shot to do. Craning up just to see, and then that’s the CG building that we added in the background.

Chris: That’s right, to set up the ending.

John: Yeah, in the original ending it was all done through remote camera, and then Dean suggested that we actually put it, attached it to it, and since cable access shows are shot in the middle of fricking nowhere, it actually worked out fine. And whenever- Oh, there you go.

Amy: Well I think Dean’s idea of that was just, sort of, to give our villain a bigger comeuppance, if he had to, sort of, face his victims...

John: Face-to-face. And that’s interesting ‘cause we always go like, you need the gloat, but you also need the suffering. And in the non-him-showing-up version, we had—

Amy: It was basically just the gloat, yeah. I mean he still ends in jail, but.

John: We have the people upset, but you know, you don’t get him looking them right in the eye.

Marc: Small spaces to work in. 

[All Laugh]

Chris: How was it like, shooting the storage locker?

Marc: It was a little tough.

Amy: I remember this day.

Marc: You know, it was a double, but we just made it look like one, so we had room to always just have the camera on one side.

Amy: Yeah, there was actually another storage locker that opened up right next to this, to the left, so we could have somewhere to switch the cameras.

John: So did you throw up like a half-wall over on that side, or is it just, stack some boxes to feel like-

Marc: We just stack some boxes and just move the camera, but you’ll notice the camera’s usually on that side, looking that direction.

Chris: And here’s where he’s really starting to lose it, ‘cause he does have an arc, from inexplicably baroque, to just completely losing it.

John: No, he totally sold this. There’s no doubt about it whatsoever. And you guys took what was a joke pitch and turned it into a real character. That was just me on a long drunken rant. I’m inexplicably baroque, in the room, often! 

Amy: This is, by the way, true. 

John: Yeah. And Luke, losing it. Really the whole confession, the whole begging; he really sold it.

Marc: And of course, you know, time constraints. His stuff was shot all at night, hers was all in the daytime.

Amy: Of course. That’s how it works.

John: Really? So looking at Luke, you were looking, you had night behind you looking out?

Marc: It was night.

Chris: Here we go.

John and Chris: Det cord. 

[All Laugh]

Amy: Det cord is great. 

Marc: Our friend for the back half of season uh—

Amy: Thank you MythBusters for det cord.

John: Thank you MythBusters for showing us how det cord worked and how effectively—

Amy: I think I pulled that from a YouTube video.

John: Yeah, well we started with Thermite, remember? ‘Cause I remember how it melted through the car and you were like, ‘No, that’s too huge’, and you found us some det cord.

Marc: Here I just wanted to have a shot of Eliot’s arms.

John: So here’s a little something for the ladies, as my wife says. And now, this is very flashback heavy, but it’s all in continuity. You did a nice job of making sure we’ve seen just enough of these that we never floated. ‘Cause sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh god, do we know exactly where we are in this flashback?’

Chris: I think we compressed a little of it in editing too. I think there was a little bit more and we kind of just moved it all.

Amy: Yeah, there’s a lot more here than…

John: Ah, the network is unhappy; they’re gonna go get one of these real psychics now, not a fake psychic like this.

Chris: And then we get to see our victim again, and our other victim.

John: The proxy victim. 

Amy: And the camera lady’s like, ‘I don’t wanna be part of this,’ backing out of the scene.

John: And the begging and the pleading. There you go. And there’s all the people who’ve been hurt. 

Chris: The man from Michigan. 

John: Did he stay in a hotel? Why is he still there? He got his reading yesterday. I don’t remember why he…

Chris: He wanted to come back; he had more to find out.

John: I guess so, I guess so.

Marc: This is always fun when you shoot things on two different days, that end, and that end.

Chris: Is Tim looking at a tennis ball, what do you do?

John: Is that like Jurassic Park? Or it’s like this tennis ball on a hockey stick is Chris’ hair. ‘Just track this.’

Chris: You just make sure your script supervisor takes good notes of uh...

John: Look at that, you’re shooting past the car! He’s in the car. 

Chris: Nice, I never would have known that.

John: Nicely done. And this is actually, you know what? The president of the network the other day mentioned how much he loves the scenes where they’re all there. Where the guy actually, like, sees the whole- the whole con.

Amy: The family gloat, as opposed to just the singular gloat.

Marc: That’s the way we pull off this show in seven days - cheating.

Amy: Cheating very cinematically.

John: I prefer to call it cable awareness.

Amy: Cable awareness? Nice.

Marc: Now I think this next scene in the bar is, I think, one of my favorite wrap-up scenes that I’ve got to direct.

Amy: It’s one of my favorite, too.

Marc: It was one of these days where it was- there were so many tears on set.

John: We were coming to the end, too; we were getting there. Everyone was kind of rung up and spun up.

Marc: But everyone just, you know, Tim and Jeri and Beth and everybody, our guest actors, everybody just came in so strong and it was great.

John: This speech, by the way, you can really tell Tim’s a dad. That’s really how he lands this speech, it’s like, yeah.

Chris: Well the story, it’s an interesting story because the little peanut butter bit, a very good friend, a writer friend, Steve O’Donnell, who is a long time Letterman writer, and he has a twin brother Mark O’Donnell—also a writer, wrote the book to Hairspray. And I remember talking to him one time about the closeness of the two of them, and he said that they’re so close, that if you laid out peanut butter, that somebody spread on different pieces of bread, he could pick out his brother’s peanut butter. And it always stuck with me that that is something that, when I was writing this scene, that there’s just things that you see in your child that you just recognize from yourself or your father, and it has nothing to do with what you did, it’s all biological. And that was really, it did a beautiful job with it.

John: Nice landing on that. And Jeri there, by the way, she’s got a little glisten going there; she got a little moist.

Chris: And here’s this moment that was not scripted at all. Well, not intended in the script, but just through the acting.

John: But that was nice. Jeri landed the arc. She kind of completed Tara’s arc through there. 

Chris: Yeah, she got it.

John: She had gone through all six episodes and she, you know, a lot of actors would come in and take up the space and say thanks for the job, but she really put in the work from [unintelligible].

Chris: There it is. I mean, that’s like...

John: I mean, she’s breaking your heart there.

Chris: She’s hugging her brother.

Marc: And I just gotta make sure that she makes that eye contact with Nate.

Chris: And it was all because that part about her brother was added after that scene was written, but she brought it together in this moment.

John: It’s a lovely beat. We have very, very good actors.

Marc: Then we release the valve and let you chuckle here.

Chris: Yes. We call it, in the comedy business, a treacle cutter.

John: A treacle cutter, yeah. And also Kane really lands these beats. He really- it goes from a smile, all the way to annoyed. He hits both of the crucial Eliot beats here. It’s the grin, and then, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass.’ He really hits all the bases on that one.

Chris: And we kind of end on her surrogate brother here.

John: Yeah. Who she may sleep with. Still haven’t decided that.

Amy: It’s a little incestual.

John: Yeah, you know, all television’s a little incestual. 

Chris: Oh they’re all...

John: What, they’re all sleeping together, is that what you meant? What’s going on up there?

Chris: No, that’s—Come on. It’s like Star Wars.

John: Oh there you go, that’s perfectly legit. Anything you want to say to the nice folks?

Amy: Thanks everybody.

Marc: Thank you. It was a great episode to work on. 

Chris: Thank you guys.

John: And actually thanks for David Wechsler, ‘cause he came in late and really helped us out on that. Really good job. And hopefully Luke Perry will be back. Less evil.

Chris: As his twin brother.

John: There you go.

Chris: Why not?

[em0avacado]

Pen Pals - Ezekiel Reyes

trigger warning : none other than brief mention of removing someone’s pelvis, wearing maybe.

word count : 2068

Dear Ezekiel,

Her first letter started simple, she wasn’t sure whether to address the inmate more formerly, or of this was fine, but with lack of better knowledge on this, she settled on that. It all started when curiosity got the best of her. She had a friend who would constantly talk about her very own pen pal, she’d talk about the stories theyd tell her, how they were interesting and that they had, in reality, not much better to do with their time in lockup. At first, the young woman was rather skeptical, but after reading some of her friends letters herself, the curiosity started eating her alive from the inside out. Maybe she’d give it a try, what’s the worst that could happen? So, after a few hours of extensive reasearch, she’d picked an inmate and began writing, although, after the first two words of the letter, she was stuck. It wasn’t long until she realized how much time had passed since she’d actually written a letter to someone who wasn’t her grandmother.

With a pen gripped tightly in her hand, the black ink began to spill onto the page as her mind finally came up with things to scribble onto the soft blue lines. The nails of her right hand tapping against the finished wood of her desk, it wasn’t long until she ripped the paper out of the coiled notebook and started over again.

Dear Ezekiel,

My name’s Ophelia, I’m about twenty six years old, and my favourite colour is orange, because it reminds me of orange creamsicles on a hot summers day. Seems childish, I’m aware, but alas, my curiosity only carried me so far. It’s been years since I’ve actually written a letter, let alone made a friend. You see, I’m a very reserved person but i supposed that the only way of really making friends with a pen pal is to start off by introducing myself into a bit more depth than small talk. The friends I do have, they call me Oph, no one really calls me by my first name.

God, she sounded so utterly stupid, she thought, but what else was there to write? Who even knew if this man would write back? No one, no one did. But, can’t be for sure unless she tries, right? right.

However, she went on, writing down anything she could possibly think of that could stark some sort of interest from the man behind bars. She went from how the green on the trees in the spring brought her a specific joy in her heart because when she was younger her father would point out that the green in forests meant that the wild life was happy, healthy, to explaining what the saw was initially invented for. Once her hand began to cramp, she called it a day. Folding the papers together neatly, she shoved them in an envelope and sent it off to the right address before her hesitation stopped her. Now; it was time to wait. And she hated waiting.

Without a real timeline in her head on when she’d hear back from Ezekiel, she waited days, then weeks, at some point, the thought seemed to slip her mind. Heading to work each day, only to head home, check her mail box, head inside, prepare herself for the night and get at least a few hours of sleep before doing it all again the next day. An impossibly boring routine that was disturbed when she found an envelope, with blue in scratched into the front. Reading the name ‘Ezekiel’ within the first few lines of the actual letter, thrilled her. Quickly, she tossed her bag and keys to the side, kicking the door shut behind her, she tore into the envelope and began to read.

Dearest Ophelia

You can tell me absolutely anything you wish to, just from your first letter i can tell that your mind is a place of wonder. If you think anything like you write, I’d love to pick your brain some day, those run on sentences really get a man thinking.

A wide grin spread across her lips, her eyes flit across the pages as she read ever word scribbled onto the lines in blue ink. He told her anything that reflected topics she covered, answering all the questions that she asked, even adding in commentary here and there. He matched the amount she wrote, rambling on just as much as she did.

P.s. were chainsaws really invented to cut open and take out the pelvis of a woman who took too long giving birth?

A cackle rolled passed her lips when she read that very last sentence, and she dove into explaining the history of it once more. Every letter she wrote, would end in a fact so buzzard it was hard to believe. The two went back and forth as fast as time would allow, matching the length of letters, each and every time. Quickly, that ugly blue ink from Ezekiels pen became her favourite colour, replacing the orange colours that she once preferred over all else.

But, all good things do eventually come to an end, for years, they’d go back and forth, writing letters and knowing everything about one another. Occasionally letters were sent with tear stains wrinkling papers from when she poured her heart onto the page, she’d sent a picture of herself once too, one she never got back. Dozens of paper cuts, empty pens and notepads empty, pages torn out and sent. Then, one day, it all just stopped, her last letter never got a response, she waited weeks, but weeks turned to months quickly and she assumed he’d gotten out, it wasn’t worth contacting her anymore now that he was set free into the world once again. It hurt, it shouldn’t have, he was just a pen pal, a friend who wasn’t permanent in the slightest, she knew that, she did, but that bond she thought they developed was broken. Perhaps she got attached, but, for lack of better wording, it sucked.

It was now the middle of December, and Ophelia had planned what she usually did during the holiday season. Nothing. She didn’t have family left, her friends had their own families to attend to, besides, she had just up and moved to a town she was dangerously unfamiliar with. Although, none of that really phased her. On her way home from work, she stopped by the store, a hardcore case of the munchies leading her down chips isle. Humming to herself softly, her eyes scanned the shelves, tossing a bag or two in her basket before strolling down the isle.

A small, white sheet of something, perhaps paper? Swayed to the ground slowly, landing rignt at her feet, with a quirked brow, she leant down and picked it up. The man who dropped it, standing not too far in front of her, didn’t seem to notice that he’s lost it. A man, with a buff figure, broad shoulders, he walked like he’d been constipated for a week now, his phone in hand, which his focused had zeroed in on. She trapped the small paper, which turned out to be a photograph. Ophelia didn’t want to look at it, to respect the mans privacy, but curiosity killed the cat, right?

The photo, she immediately recognized the bright red hair, the pearly white smile, the mess on the pale skin and the beaming green eyes. That was her, the photo? it was the one she sent to Ezekiel all those years ago, when they first started talking. But why did this man have it? With confusion, she rushed forward, tapping the man on his shoulder “excuse me -“ she started, but her words caught in her throat when he turned around, it was him. he looked like he did in the pictures on the sight, the one he sent her, just slightly older, his hair had a tight trim, he had a few more stress lines than the picture did.

The basket tucked under her arm just moments ago, hit the ground with a crash. Her eyes went wide, her skin paled. Ophelia looked like she’d just seen a ghost, Ez mimicking the shock on his own features. “you- i-“ she managed to get out, forcing her mouth shut.

A nervous chuckle came from Ez, paired with a weak “O- hey.” he said sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck.

She raised her fist and punched him in the bicep “what the fuck?!” she asked, her shock replaced by anger as she waved the photo in front of him. “really?! I thought we were cool, friends? even? you said I was one of the best friends you’d ever made and I don’t even get as much as a ‘oh hey Ophelia I’m getting out talk to you never!’ ?! and you just carry my picture around like a creep?” she asked, pushing it against his chest and crossing her arms over her own. “well?”

“Listen, I’m sorry.” he said, looking for ways to explain himself, why he hadn’t kept in touch, any sort of excuse but there was nothing, truth was, he had wanted to stay in contact but everything with the club, and the deal, and pops got in the way, so it kept getting pushed back. “it was a dick move and I’m sorry.” he said, looking down at her.

“yeah no fucking shit.” she spoke, her arms still crossed over her chest, her glare burrowing holes into his head. She opened her mouth, ready to add more onto what was already said to him, but in that moment someone in a kutte that nearly matched his own, rounded the corner, ready to speak to Ez until her glare shifted from him to the slightly taller man, his green flannel buttoned up, chains clanging together.

“Hey boy sco-“ he stopped mid sentence, not taking another step, he narrowed his eyes at her, looking between her, and his brother, a smile came to his lips in realization “oh shit.” he laughed “you can deal with angry fire crotch on your own, I’ll wait outside.” he laughed, heading out and leaving the two alone again.

“Angel?” she asked, he looked exactly like Ez would explain in his letters, nodding his head, she furrowed her brows slightly and leaned down, picking her basket up again, hanging it in the crease of her elbow. “Look I get it, you got out, had better things to do, I shouldn’t have let my anger get the best of me but come on? We spoke for years, we bonded, or so I thought? Feels ridiculous now, but, hey, I hope that your life treats you better than it has, I’ll see you around.” she said, nodding her head at him, turning to head to the till when she felt his hand on her arm, spinning her around.

“I looked for you.” he started “not nearly hard enough but they never gave away your address, nothing, which was smart but I did look for you, where I could.” he confessed “not once did I forget about you, Ophelia, I couldn’t.” he dropped his arm when she stood, looking up at him.

“I know. Duh. Your memory is like- permanent.” she said, and he nearly rolled his eyes.

“okay smart ass that’s not what I meant.” he groaned. “you’re unforgettable, even if I could forget, I couldn’t.”

“you’re much smoother on paper” she added another little side note.

“Ophelia.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyways, that picture was the only that allowed me to feel a sense of home as of lately, and would be the only thing that did until i found you. That’s why I kept it.” he told her, her gaze softening. “Now that i have, found you, i won’t let you get away again.”

“sounds kidnap - y.” she muttered, interrupting him. He dropped his hands, slapping against his thighs with a soft sight, he shot her a glare.

“Ophelia I swear to god i’m trying to confess my feelings right now could you put a pause on that for a moment?” he asked her, raising a brow.

“no.” she said simply, scratching her nose. “don’t confess your undying love for me in the middle of a grocery store, please. That old lady has been listening and eyeing you this whole time.”

[comfy-whumpee]

Kieran

TW: discussion of abuse (partner and child), slavery, inferred noncon.

Sequel to Ash’s post Queen of Underland, here. Savvie and Izzy are her characters. No extended Silver Chair metaphor in this one, sorry!

Dad Jax Taglist: @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @wildfaewhump, @ishouldblogmore, @lektricwhump, @that-one-thespian, @raigash, @burtlederp, @rosesareviolentlyread, @whumptywhumpdump, @eatyourdamnpears thank you all for the amazing commentary.

He’s not been around long, and Jax shouldn’t really, but fuck it. He needs someone. He needs to talk about this. And clearly… It’s going to be a thing, with him, going forwards. He needs to explain.

So he makes arrangements, and after the kids are in bed, he steps outside in his jacket and sees the simple silver car. After one glance up and down the street, and a check of both the number plate and driver, he gets in. He leans across the handbrake and drops a kiss on the waiting cheek of the man inside.

Kieran O’Leary-Ahmed is a gorgeous man. Jax loves the light tickle of his shaggy hair, the gentle softness to his smile and the light that sits in his eyes like a shaft of sunlight on a deep ocean floor. He always wears simple, loose clothing, like today: black hoodie, black T-shirt, back jeans; the only accessories are his watch and his septum ring. He’s perfect. Jax is nowhere near good enough for him.

But Kieran likes him anyway.

“Hey, love,” he greets Jax with a soft, slightly high voice, tinged with a Dublin childhood. “How’s things?”

Jax settles back into the car seat as Kieran pulls away, heading for one of his countless green spots around the edges of Manchester city. Jax doesn’t know where they’re going, and for once, doesn’t feel the need to find out in advance. He’s safe with this man.

“Some trouble at school today,” he says after a long moment. “Izzy apparently shouted her head off in class.”

Kieran’s eyebrows rise. “Izzy?”

“Right?” Jax agrees with his disbelief, chuckling weakly. “I don’t know what happened. Apparently one minute she was working as normal, teacher steps out, and when she comes back Izzy is swearing at this kid.”

Kieran doesn’t ask why his nine-year-old daughter knows how to swear. It’s obvious enough. “And…are we proud of her?”

Jax blinks, looking again to his boyfriend. It’s a good question. “Yeah, we are.”

“Good,” Kieran smiles. He knows, of course, how Izzy struggles with letting things out. Jax has talked about it before. He’s even met the little girl a few times.

But he doesn’t know the story.

“So, what happened? How did she get to that point?”

Jax sighs slowly, rubbing at one of the scars on the side of his thumb. Kieran pulls up at the edge of a car park, a tiny gravel affair with no marker lines, abandoned at this time of night. All around them are trees.

Quiet falls as the overhead light slowly dims itself to black. Leaves rustle softly outside, and there’s nothing else to disturb them.

He breaks the silence like a man stepping off a ledge. “You know their mother?”

“Of course.”

“And she was… She was abusive.”

“Mhmm.”

“I didn’t tell you much, I know, but… Well, she was – she wasn’t great to Izzy either. A lot of what she’s like…comes from being raised that way.”

Kieran turns to him in the evening light, resting his temple on the headrest. “That makes sense.”

“Yeah…” But that’s not the story. Jax looks down at his hands and rubs his thumb along his bare ring finger, remembering what sat there. Never again.

Kieran didn’t look him up. He said he wouldn’t, when Jax mentioned people had. He said he didn’t care about anything that didn’t come from Jax himself. Jax almost wishes now that he had.

Five years, and it didn’t get easier.

“When I was, uh… Twenty-one. I got abducted into modern slavery.”

Kieran doesn’t reply. Jax waits for the reaction, and all he gets is a slow nod.

“The guy who…sold me. Uh, I was – auctioned. My ex, she – her uncle bought me for her.”

There is, maybe, a soft inhale, hissing through Kieran’s teeth. He’s smart, smarter than Jax. The pieces come together quickly for him.

The words feel so small for how big it all was. They’re all he has. “For the first – the first time, I mostly cleaned, and… She treated me like a captive best friend. I got out, I – escaped, got a message to my dad… That’s when she went to prison. But after she got out, not long after, she – her family, they work as, as slave catchers. She had them take me back. And that time, she decided I-I was her – her t-true love.”

He can almost feel how much Kieran wants to touch him. He can imagine the hands moving towards him in the dark to rub circles on his back or take his hand. What Kieran actually does, though, is turn and look out of the windscreen at the shifting shapes of trees in the dark.

Jax glances to his side. The doors are locked. Safe.

“She kept me there for…years. With the, you’ve seen the…” he gestures at his neck. His hand is shaking. “…It was a shock collar. I couldn’t, if – if I left, she said she’d kill my dad, and I was still trying, but…”

It’s the most he’s talked about it since court. His heart is beating too fast for sitting in a car. The way the shadows move make his teeth itch and his mind spin shapes.

“Sh-she… She got pregnant,” he forces out, voice cracked.

Kieran breathes out, slowly, as if the breath he took had been trapped in his lungs.

“I couldn’t, after that, I couldn’t – I couldn’t. Maybe she would have – if I’d escaped, maybe she wouldn’t h-have kept it, but, but there was a – a chance she wouldn’t sh-she’d keep it as a-a punish-ment or t-to get m-me back—” He tries to inhale, and the air clogs in his throat. He jerks slightly, and it’s not quite a sob. It’s something mistakable for the shudder of an aftershock. They all are.

He covers his face with his hands, and Kieran doesn’t look. Not looking helps.

“When I… I saw how sh-she treated Izzy, I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave. And then Jamie… F-Four years, till I managed to get us out. And Izzy, she – I-I couldn’t keep her safe. She doesn’t kn-know how to be safe, really, even now, so…”

A really bad aftershock. Consistent tremors through him, twisting up his breaths. Kieran must be able to hear, but he just listens, nods occasionally, and lets Jax speak.

“Today,” Jax says, finding the point amongst all the chaos in his head, “t-today, she heard these boys talking about kissing a girl when – when she didn’t want to. And she’s s-seen that happen, to, t-to me."

The light that glimmers in Kieran’s eyes disappears as he closes them. He understands.

“And then they talked about me, and her, and her in prison and all of that and Iz yelled at them, and, so, I’m – I’m so fucking p-proud of her, b-but, she – she shouldn’t, sh-she shouldn’t have to do that, do a-any of it.”

He swallows. He needs a moment, needs a moment to breathe, he can feel it in the rising panic in his head and the tightness of his chest, even though nothing more is happening than words and glimpses of Savvie standing outside the car, pale skin and dark hair in moonlight, telling him that he’ll always be hers.

When the silence has stretched for minutes or more, Kieran opens his eyes and brushes a hand over his cheek. He turns his head back to Jax. His voice is the same steady, soft tone as before. “It’s not your fault.”

The words pierce straight to his heart, and finally, a sob breaks clear of his self-control. He buries his face back into his hands, and Kieran’s hand settles, finally, between his shoulder blades, and stays there, his anchor in the depths.

[praphit]

A message from Reverend Candyman

Before I even entered the theater, I was mad. I was mad due to certain people on social media stating that this film is "too woke", "super-woke", "BLM propaganda", etc, etc.

I'm not saying that they're right or wrong, at this point, but how did those people not know what they were getting into? Did they not watch any "Candyman" films before this? Do they not know of Jordan Peele's previous film productions? Have they never seen any of Key & Peele? It's mostly race stuff!

Some of them were probably only hate-watching. There a re a handful of pundits I like to hate-watch. Sometimes, getting heated by their takes fuels my work days. But, I know what I’m doing to myself... *smh* but these people.

I didn't stay mad for long though, because Nia DaCosta, the director of "Candyman", is on point! This whole movie, strictly from a cinematic view, is very cool. How bout that?? "The Rambling Praphit says Candyman is VERY COOL." :) She'll be working on the next Capt Marvel movie. 

Most people did not like that movie (I'm excluded from that crowd). Marvel is so scared of the public's dislike of that movie, that they're not even calling it "Capt Marvel 2". It's just called "The Marvels"; leaving the first movie's "captain" as far away from the title as they could. I bring this up, cuz after watching "Candyman", I have high hopes for "The Marvels".

In the trailer we see some shadow puppet type action going on to tell Candyman's story.

So, if you haven't seen the 1992 film, you can get mostly caught up. A creative way to knock out exposition.

They still didn't get into why Candyman rocks a pimpish coat. Or why he's called "Candyman". I mean... they address the name, kinda... (Razor blades in candy - also seen in the trailer) but there's a bit of a hole in the timeline of that story. Plus, how would Candyman (a vengeful spirit) even have the time or patience required to put razor blades in hard candy? If he were an actual pimp named "Candyman", it would make more sense... but anyway...

The main character (Anthony, played by Yahya Adbul Mateen II) 

needed more of Candyman's story , so he went into the depths to find more horror, and he found it. Now, there's a white woman, who's the main character in the 1992 version, who does the same thing, and... let's just say things end poorly for her, and Anthony is foolishly following in her footsteps.

He's a broke visual artist, but thankfully he's got himself a suga mama (played by Teyonah Parris) , 

a not-so-broke art gallery director named Brianna. Lesson number one, you broke artists - gym membership. 

Follow the path of Yahya. He’s the only hard candy mama needs! Keep that suga mama money coming to fuel your art.

I appreciate this couple though - a lot of times (in movies) we see black couples where the woman is struggling to feed the kids with like 3 or 4 jobs, while the man juggles cheating on her, being involved with drugs, and dreaming of one day being the greatest rapper there ever was. We've been there and done that with black movie couples enough.

But, Candyman can't allow this couple to be too happy, so the killing begins!

Say his name 5 times! He dares you! After the fifth time, he appears to brutally kill you. What kind of game is that? I could see if it was a 50/50 chance - win some money or die, but straight up 100% death? Who would play such a game?? 

"Let's go to the top of a snowy, slippery mountain. Let's slide down it with crazy speed and immovable objects in our way." Who’s game?

(white people)

"Let's take a detour through the woods, at night, right pass the area where those teenagers were murdered, LAST NIGHT... I don't think they ever caught the perp. Oh, well... let's go!" Who’s going?

(white people)

So, who will play the candyman name game? - white people, of course :)

I heard someone say that Candyman is only killing white people. That’s not true #1, but #2 - they’re the ones mostly playing this game.

No, this isn't just some movie about a black, pimpish, man with a hook, killing white people. We've got story as well.

Three parts to this story, actually:

The look -

Which I mentioned is great! The gruesome horror elements and the killings are well done. In fact, the kill scenes are so good that I wanted to see more of it. A lot of the kills effectiveness come from NOT showing you the gore. There's plenty gore as well, but the balance of times when you have to imagine what's happening as people scream is also dope.

The horror part to the film is kinda slowed down though by the social commentary. part to the film: The 1992 film has this as well, but it's more subtle, and flows with the story better. This... well, I can see why some hyper-sensitive conservatives might cry "wokeism!" I disagree with their sentiment, but I get it. If this movie had come out before 2020, perhaps the feeling would be different. There's a scene that's directly addressing gentrification. It's a group of four people (three black people and a white dude) talking. The movie shows how the seemingly enlightened and likable white dude was involved in the convo, but still didn't really get it. Perhaps that's how they see a lot of their audience with this, cuz there's no subtlety going on here at all. It's more of an "F U" at times. It's effective hate-watching though.

Lastly there's the psychological part to the movie. Something has clearly gone wrong inside of Anthony, and no one seems to be taking it all that seriously.

Something is also wrong outside of Anthony as well.... as seen in the trailer, he gets stung by a bee. One of those Candyman Bees! (Not a thing, but it should be) It's... maybe... infected (they never really explain), and gets worse and worse. Why doesn't anyone demand that he go to the doctor?! Not even his suga mama says anything! You know damn well, that no matter how sexy one may be, if you've got some sort of creepy Candyman infection, that's gonna mess up that sexy-suga-money flow, y'all feel me?? And if there is some sort of ghostly infection, shouldn't we be more scared of the bees than even Candyman? He only appears when you say his name! The bees on the other hand...

I guess it's kinda real though - I could certainly see people these days getting "the candyman infection" I speak of, and saying proudly "It's not real! And I will NOT be treated!" while waving a flag, with their clearly infected hand.

These three parts collide, sloppily. It's funny, cuz the film, as I said, is heavy-handed with hot topics, but the story (particular in the third act) will confuse you. I mean, I get it, cuz I saw the original film, but had I not... ??? There's a scene when Candyman is summoned and he proceeds to kill a bunch of cops. THEY didn't even summon him! They said “Defund the Police” not kill’em!  Idk if Candyman had been listening to nothing but Louis Farrakhan and Marvel’s Kilmonger nonstop during 2020, and it's all spilling over or what?? Some people are overachievers. Then he says "Spread my message" What message is that?!

Imagine if you say my name 5 times, and I appear in your kitchen, drink all of your beer, walking into your living room, and pee in the corner... then I say to you, before disappearing "Spread my Message".

You'd be like "What the hell?"

Despite this movies' flaws, I still enjoyed it. The social commentary really is important to the times we're living in, and should still be discussed, and not just discussed, by acted on. Plus, I truly am impressed by director Nia DaCosta. I do recommend that you see it, but you should probably watch the 1992 one first. Or who knows what message you'll leave with :)

Grade: generous B-

I doubt that there'll be a sequel, but if there is one, i really do hope that we can finally get to the bottom of this name thing. With Candyman, I'm still thinking drug dealer. It's not that scary of a name. Maybe CandyHOOK! Hooks wielded by maniacs are always scary.

No? Yeah, it does make me think his hook is made out of candy.

With the bees involved, perhaps "Bee Guy", or "Bee King", but... they're not really his thing. Plus, that's lame, and kinda sounds like he's buddies with Ant-Man. That could hurt his street cred. The 1992 film gets into a honey type of scenario as to the etymology. But, then, it should be "Honey Man", right? - that sounds kinda like a gigolo though. But, perhaps this is a good thing! That gives me an idea that could add some surprise to this whole name game thang! Call his name 5 times and either receive drugs, murder, a confusing sermon, or sweet, sweet lovin. Now, that's a game!

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

Back at it again with my self-indulgent comic posts. This time! It’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #3, perhaps the most tonally-distinct entry yet, with shades of The Twilight Zone. 

Spoilers!

So, as mentioned, this issue is the most deliberate in terms of both its pacing and its tone, IMO.

What is that tone, you ask?

To quote Alex Danvers, from “Midvale”: Hello, darkness.

THE STORY:

Kara and Ruthye are still looking for Krem Clues in the alien town of Maypole.

(Which is actually just Small Town, USA, complete with vintage 50s aesthetics.)

But the locals are clearly hiding something! So Kara and Ruthye continue to investigate, and they eventually discover what it was that the residents of Maypole were so keen to keep hidden. 

Genocide, basically. 

As I said, this issue struck me as very Twilight Zone; a genre story involving the build-up to a dark twist, all set against the backdrop of an idyllic small town. (Think, like, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” but instead of focusing on the Red Scare, it’s classism and racism.)

The wealthier blue aliens kicked all of the purple aliens out of town, and when space pirates showed up to pillage and plunder, the blue aliens made a deal with them: the lives of the purple aliens in exchange for their safety.  

Which is where the episodic story connects to the larger mission; it was Krem who suggested the trade, and then joined up with the Brigands (space pirates) when he was freed by the blue aliens.

The issue ends with no tidy resolution to the terrible things Kara and Ruthye discovered, but they do have a lead on where to find Krem, now, as well as Barbond’s Brigands.

KARA-CTERIZATION:

Ironically, it’s here, in the darkest chapter yet, that we get the closest to what might be considered ‘classic’ Kara. 

Which I think comes down to that aforementioned deliberate pace--this issue is a little slower, a little quieter. It gives the characters some room to breathe.

That’s not to say Crusty Kara is gone. Oh no. She is still very much Crusty. XD 

But anyways. A list! Of Kara moments I loved!

I mentioned a few of these in a prior post when the preview pages came out: I like the moment where Kara blows down the guy’s house of cards, and I like that the action is echoed later in the issue when she grabs the mayor’s desk and tosses it aside. A nice visual representation of the escalation of Kara being, like. Done with these creeps. (Creeps is an understatement but you get the idea.)

Another one from the preview pages: Kara explains to Ruthye that her super hearing won’t necessarily help her detect a lie, especially if she’s dealing with an alien species she’s not familiar with.

It not only reveals her level of competence and understanding of her super powers, it also shows that, you know. She’s a thinker. She’s smart. 

Amazing! Showing, rather than telling us, that Kara is smart! Without mentioning the science guild at all wow hey wow.

(Sorry, pointed criticism of the SG show fandom.)

Anyways.

I dig the PJs! 

And Kara catching the bullet! Not only are the poses and character acting great, it’s also a neat bit of panel composition:

We start with Ruthye’s POV, and then move to the wide shot of the room. The panel where Kara actually catches the bullet is down and to the side of the wide shot panel--we move our eyes the way her body/arm would have to move to intercept the bullet. Physicality in static, 2D images!

Also, like. It’s a very tense moment, life-or-death, but. Ruthye’s wide-eyed surprise at the bullet in Kara’s hand? Kind of adorable. 

I was pretty much prepared for the page of Kara shielding Ruthye from the gunfire to be the highlight--it was one of the first pages King shared and I was like, ‘yeah, YEAH.’ But, shockingly? The TRUE highlight of the issue?

Where do I BEGIN?!?!

EVERYTHING. About this moment. Is lovely.

From Kara holding Ruthye above the bench to explaining the concept of a piggyback ride, to telling her:

“I’m going to hold my hands here, and these hands can turn coal into diamonds, so they’re not going to let go. I’m going to keep you safe.”

HNNNNNNNNNNNG.

Ruthye’s narration--about how Kara had avoided flying as she was concerned it would freak Ruthye out--just adds a whole additional layer of YES, GOOD, YES, and her line on that splash page is great: “You see, all that time, she was worried about me.”

HNNNNNNNNNNNG. AGAIN.

To say nothing of the STELLAR ARTWORK.

And SPEAKING of that stellar artwork, Evely and Lopes continue to knock it out of the park. Each issue is distinct and beautifully crafted, a true joy to look at.

Before I jump into more of the art, a few final notes of character stuff in general.

Ruthye is the one most affected by the experience in Maypole, as she can’t comprehend how a society of people that look so nice and gentle and peaceful could have been party to such a horrible act.

One of the big criticisms of the book thus far is that Supergirl is not the main character, and I guess I can agree with that observation. Typically, in Western media, the main character is the one who goes through the most change in the story. 

And, yeah. That’s Ruthye.

As I was reading the end, where Ruthye sits on the curb and Kara hugs her, I was imagining how the scene would’ve played, had King stuck with the original idea for the series: Kara as the one learning to be tough/experiencing all of this for the first time, and while I think that could certainly work...

I continue to appreciate that King literally flipped the script; that Kara, especially in this issue, is like, ‘I’ve seen this, I know this,’ as opposed to being the one going through a loss of innocence.

*Marge Simpson voice* I just think it’s neat!

Because Kara’s been a teen in DC comics for so long--ever since she was reintroduced to the main DCU continuity, actually--so this is all brand new territory, here. Having an older Kara who’s SEEN SOME STUFF.

(Alsoooooo, since Bendis made the destruction of Krypton not just inaction and climate disaster, but rather, genocide, and the subtext of a Kryptonian diaspora text, the waitress’ derogatory comment regarding the the destruction of Kryton, as well as Kara picking up the bad vibes the entire time, suggests not just a broad commentary on discrimination in all its forms, but specifically allegorical anti-Semitism. The purple aliens being forced out of their homes and into substandard living conditions, then the blue aliens--their neighbors and once-fellow residents--essentially allowing the space pirates to kill them, making them literal scapegoats, Kara discovering the remains of the purple aliens, and Ruthye’s horror at the ‘banality of evil’...yes. A case could be made, I think.) 

(Which would probably require a post unto itself and a lot more in-depth discussion, nuance, and cited sources.)

(Should mention that King has brought up that both he and Orlando--the other Supergirl writer he talked to--are Jewish, and for him personally, that shaped his views on Kara’s origin story.)

I guess my point is that this issue is perhaps not as out-of-left-field as some might think, and just because there isn’t as obvious an arc for Kara, doesn’t mean there isn’t some sharp character work at play. 

(I could be WAY OFF, of course, and I’m not suggesting it’s a clear 1:1 comparison. I’d actually really love to hear King talk about this issue in particular.)

Anyways.

Here’s the final page, which I think works, because as I mentioned before, there is no easy answer/quick wrap-up to the story of Maypole:

THE ART:

I mean. How many times can I just shout ‘ART! AAAARRRRRRRRRRRTTTT!’ before it gets old?

I dunno, but I guess we’re gonna FIND OUT.

There are some panels in this issue that I just. Like ‘em! From a purely artistic standpoint! Because they’re so good!

Like, I just really love the way Kara is drawn in that top panel. Her troubled, confused expression, the colors of the fading light, the HAIR. 

Evely draws the best hair. I know I’ve said this before. I don’t care. I will continue to say it, because it continues to be true.

The issue I find myself running up against when I make these posts is that I really don’t want to post whole pages, as that’s generally frowned upon (re: pirating etc.) but with something like this, you just can’t appreciate it in panel-by-panel snippets.

(Guided View on digital reading platforms is a BANE and a POX I say!)

Anyways.

LOVE the implied movement of the cape settling as Kara speeds in and stops. 

And, obviously, Kara flicking the bullet away is just. A+. 

And the EYES, man. LOPES’ COLORS ON THE EYES???!?! BEAUTIFUL.

Also, should note the lettering! The more rounded letters for the ‘WOOSH’ of Kara’s speed (and, earlier, the super breath) work nicely, and contrast with the angular, violent BLAMS of the gunshots. 

And, I gotta say, the editor is doing a really great job of not cluttering up the artwork with all the caption boxes. Which is no small task.

(I assume the editor is placing them, as editors usually handle word balloon/caption box placement, but I suppose it could be Evely? Sometimes the artist handles it. Either way, whoever’s taking care of all the text, EXCELLENT WORK! BRAVO!)

Okay I think that’s everything.

Ah, nope, wait.

MISC.

Just a funny observation, more than anything else: Superman: Red and Blue dropped this week, and King had a story in there, “The Special” (which was very good, btw.) Both Lois and the waitress swear a lot so I’m beginning to think that this is just how King writes dialogue for any adult character who isn’t Clark. XD

This is absolutely a personal preference but when Kara was like, “And my name IS Supergirl,” I was like nooooo. I know King is trying to simplify all of the conflicting origin stories and lore but I LIKE KARA DANVERS, SIR. XD

It’s almost assuredly a cash-grab/an attempt for DC to get all the money it can out of a book they don’t have much confidence in, but I like the cardstock covers! Very classy, much Strange Adventures.

(OH my gosh, can you imagine that issue 1 cover with spot gloss???? Basically the only way you could possibly improve on it.) 

Okay NOW I’m done. For real. XD NEXT TIME: Kara and Ruthye go after Krem and the Brigands!

[hunnybby]

Chances

Pairing: Kunimi Akira x fem reader

genre: general/fluff

Confessing is harder than it seems. You try a few different ways, but it never seems right.

wc: 2.6k

a/n: Happy Holidays to everyone and and especially to @mimi-cee-hq! Surprise! I’m your Secret Santa for the @haikyuucreations SS event! :) I had a GREAT time being your anon, and I was super excited to write for you! May you have a blessed day, and may it be merry and bright! 

-

Verbal

"Kunimi!"

The boy halts mid-step, already half way to the gym with his gym bag slung over his shoulder. He turns around, face expressionless (as usual) with no hint of annoyance (surprisingly). Adjusting his gym bag, he makes eye contact with you. "What's up, Y/N?"

"There's something I need to tell you," you say, forcing your voice to level out instead of shake. Your hands are stuffed inside of your jacket pocket and balled into fists to keep yourself steady. "It's important."

Kunimi lets his body turn towards you, facing you fully with his head tilted to the side and a hint curiosity in his usually disinterested eyes. "Shoot," he urges, bringing a hand up to signal you to continue.

You heave out a breath. "Okay," you start, opening and closing your fists still in your pocket as a ways to get ready, "I really like-"

"Oi, Kunimi! You coming or what?" You recognize Kindaichi's voice from afar, and immediately freeze up. Wasn't everyone supposed to be already in the gym? Shouldn't Kunimi be the only straggler today because you asked your friend to stall him from practice?

The call from his fellow team mate has him slightly turning his head to where the gym is located. But he turns back to face you. "Hm?"

You hear light jogging now. No doubt Kindaichi on his way to retrieve Kunimi for warm ups. How dedicated, you think in passing.

You start to feel your heart race. If you don't say it now, you might never find the courage to say it again. But Kindaichi might also hear you. What if Kindaichi hears you, Kunimi reacts in a non-favorable way, and you can't show your face again? Would you need to change schools? Change your name? Perhaps live a new life somewhere else-

"Y/N?"

You snap out of your thoughts, looking from the ground to meet his eyes once more. Kindaichi is already directly behind him. You've spent too long thinking, and you curse to yourself. What now?

"I really like...," it feels like your brain is grasping for straws, or anything to say. An excuse? You look behind Kunimi to find Kindaichi also looking at you expectantly. And you decide you can't do it when there are spectators around. So you need to make a statement now.

"I really like... your... middle part," you finally say, gesturing to your own head so that he knows you were clearly referring to his hair.

Saying this outloud would be too difficult.

-

Interlude I

“... and then I tell him how much I like his middle part,” you whine, handing over a full water bottle to the current captain of Aoba Johsei.

It’s uncommon for you to confide in someone, or anyone really, for something so personal and embarrassing. It’s especially uncommon for that person to be Oikawa Tooru. But when it came to it, you needed to tell someone sometime before the truth explodes out of you.

Oikawa makes a face. “Ugh, that is embarrassing. Everyone knows Kunimi’s redeeming quality is his nonchalance, not his middle part,” he states. You think you see him over-exaggerate a shudder and shake your head in disagreement. You don’t think his middle part is bad!

You practically yank the water bottle from his hand once he’s done chugging. “That’s not the point,” you almost hiss, keeping your voice a low whisper.

He bends himself down to your level, using the wall to support his weight as he rests before the break is over. “Oh?” There’s a curious smile that graces his features. “So were you trying to call him over to tell him how madly in love you are with him?”

You purse your lips together, both in thought and annoyance. Why is it that he could read you like a book? You suck in your teeth slightly, getting ready to retort back when Oikawa begins to speak again.

“Well, now’s your chance,” Oikawa snickers, positioning himself upright as he pushes himself from the gym wall and saunters off coolly.

“No, please don’t go-,” you say to the captain’s retreating form, arms rising to clutch at air before hanging your head down in defeat. A free hand comes up to your forehead to slap yourself softly. Preparation. That's what you're doing right now.

“Here you go. Thanks,” you hear Kunimi say from behind you.

You turn around to see him extending out an empty water bottle to you. Your eyebrows wrinkle together slightly at this, and you think yourself that he could have left it on a chair or a bench so that you could pick it up later. This is the first time he’s done this.

You take the bottle from his hands, taking care to avoid any physical contact. “No problem,” you say, and you can’t help but fill the will-be-awkward silence with your unnecessary commentary. “It’s good to stay hydrated with water- you know our brains are like 70% of water,” no you aren’t going to fact check this later, “so make sure you drink enough water to keep your brain big!” you finish off with a nervous laugh, your free hand going to rub your elbow.

He gives you a curious look. “Sure,” he responds to you. “Good to know,” he finishes off, not laughing. But he smiles a bit at you before running off.

You inhale and exhale quickly, not realizing you were holding your breath while waiting for a reply.

You start to think that maybe you need to go a different route- what’s easier than talking to someone you like face to face?

-

Written

“It’s cold,” Kindaichi says, taking one hand out of his pocket as if to test the air. “Very cold.”

“So?” you question, stuffing your own hands further into your pocket and digging yourself deeper into the depths of your oversized scarf. “It’s always cold in December. In the morning. On a Saturday. When you guys practice. In December. Why do you all practice Saturdays again?”

He snickers first before responding. “You know who gets cold easily? Kunimi,” he nods his head in said-friend’s direction. “You should share that monster of a scarf with him. It’s big enough to shelter the whole team from the winter.”

“Ha-ha,” you say dryly, puffing out air and watching the cloud disperse in front of you.

Kindaichi doesn’t respond to you, his attention now focused ahead. He lightly jogs forward, leaving you slightly behind to shuffle your way towards the gates of the school.

It feels like the closer you get to your destination, the heavier your steps become- almost as if your whole body is rejecting the plan you so thoughtfully concocted in your head the night prior.

In your pockets you keep yourself from balling your fist. You can’t risk crinkling the small stationery you had carefully picked out- the contents of the pretty envelope holding one sheet of pretty paper with valuable information meant only for the eyes of one person in particular.

Kunimi.

3 easy steps for success.

Step 1: find Kunimi.

And you find him almost instantly! It only helps you further that he's in the same spot he always is right before the start of the school day- leaning on his favorite pillar outside in solitude. No one in sight. Perfect.

You just need to make your way to him. The heavy steps coming to haunt you once again. Left. Right. Left. Right. Stop.

Step 2: Strike up a conversation

"Good morning!" you say in a rush, immediately regretting your volume and tone of voice. It's not /that/ good a morning, and you have to clear your throat. Two pitches, too high! Also too much.

Kunimi looks up from his phone and sets it in his pocket. "Hey. Morning," he responds to you, waiting expectantly.

"It's cold, huh?"

He raises an eyebrow and the corner of his lip upturns into a smirk. "How cold is it?"

"It's sooo cold, that the water in my bottle is frozen! A mini-you could probably ice skate in it," you joke, taking his intentional set-up for it as a go-ahead.

"I'm terrible at ice skating. I'd much prefer sitting and watching."

"Oh, yeah! Me too," you lie- but it's not a total lie. You recall in the back of your head that you can ice-skate for at least 5 minutes without falling over and eating ice.

He smirks. "Liar. I've actually seen you in roller blades before- I don't think that's any different."

A little heh escapes your lips. "You caught me!" You want to comment that there is a difference, but that isn't something you want to get into right now. What you should be getting into is your pocket. And in your pocket is where your hand starts to shake.

Step 3: Hand over the letter

You feel around, gently bending the edges of your letter. "I have... something... for you," you struggle to say. Your index finger and thumb smooth over the envelope.

He looks at you with full attention, waiting for your next move.

As you find the will to take out your letter, your eyes move up to his middle part again. You think for a second that you really do like his middle part, and that he makes it work for him. How effortless. So effortless you almost feel annoyed about it. You spend so long on your own hair, he probably spends 20 seconds on his every morning.

"Is it something you can eat?" he asks you teasingly.

Another small, nervous laugh leaves you. If you can eat my feelings, then yes!

But now you feel something else in your pocket. A smaller rectangle. Wrapped in foil. Gum. You let out a quick, shaky breath. The thought of having gum in your pocket is now making you regret this plan. This gum is a sign that you shouldn't be doing it like this! (What an excuse!)

When your hand finally leaves your pocket, hand it to him.

You hand him the gum that was in your pocket, but the thought of handing him a love letter makes you gulp anyway.

Kunimi looks at his outstretched palm, staring at the covered piece of unchewed gum, and then closes his hand around it and places it in his gym bag. "Thanks," he says, a confused smile on his face paired with his signature tone of unconcern and collection. "I don't think I can have this right now, but definitely later."

"Oh, yeah," you say, feeling the awkwardness of yourself leave your body through your mouth. "Later. When your breath kinda stinks. Wouldn't wanna talk to someone and then have them say something like why do you smell like onions, Kunimi!" you word-vomit, voice imitating what would sound like your best Kindaichi expression yet.

-

Interlude II

"I gave him my last piece of gum!" You whine in the equipment closet. "My last piece!"

Kyotani, the victim who has unfortunately found himself in the gravity of your unrelaxed aura, only grunts in response. He drops the net that you had asked him to carry to its place of rest and dusts his hands off o his gym shorts.

"I ended up ripping the letter in pieces and drowning it in water to dissolve the evidence," you admit, recalling the moment right before morning practice where you ran to the nearest water fountain to soak your feelings.

As much as Kyotani scares you, you find it easy to talk to him under circumstances where you feel like summoning a black hole to swallow your entire self whole. Doesn't say much, but he listens. At least you think he does. He's never given much facial expression that indicates his interest in anything. You're so used to a scowl.

He doesn't move from his spot in the closet, so you take this as the time to continue. "What do I do now? The letter was fool-proof. Do I write it again and give it to him later? What if I chicken out again? Do I throw it in the trash, then? Eat it this time so no one ever finds it?"

You turn to look at Kyotani, and notice that he's staring hard at the net he so neatly placed. "Do whatever," he comments.

You think you feel your ears perk up. Do whatever? Do whatever.

You let out a tiny gasp, "Oh my stars, Kyotani," you start, walking towards the closet exit and then walking back towards him. "You're right."

Kyotani raises a brow, visibly confused.

"I have to do whatever," you emphasis. "As in whatever it takes."

He nods slowly, still lost.

You make your way back to the door, ignoring Kyotani and deep in thought. You need to think about your next move.

-

Actions

"Kunimi, hey!" you greet, marching head first towards him and his favorite pillar yet again. Perfect is the first word that comes to mind. Because the pillar is the perfect spot to do this. It's only the only spot you had in mind for this to work. Also- you aren't tall enough to reach any door frames anyway.

"Y/N, what's up?" he responds, small smile appearing to brighten up your morning. The word perfect comes up again. And it snaps you back to your plan.

"Nothing much," you say, releasing one of your backpack straps from your shoulders to sling it over your front. "Got something for ya, though." Your fingers reach to unzip your bag. "But you need to close your eyes."

"It's not Christmas yet," he argues, but shrugs and closes his eyes anyway.

"Think of it as an early gift then?" you suggest playfully, the sound of tape ripping from its roll and paper slapping on cement pillar. "It's home made," you add, voice slightly shaking towards the end as your confidence falls from you. But you've already taped what you needed to on the pillar. You can't just rip it up now.

You position yourself next to him, leaning on the pillar now. "Okay- open your eyes and look up!" you say nervously, the speed of your words rushing towards the end.

But you didn't rush it fast enough. He has heard your request, and looks up. You study his face closely. He looks confused at first, squinting his eyes to view the picture better, but they widen out when he realizes that you've drawn a picture of mistletoe on a blank sheet of printer paper. With the little red berries and all. Very festive. "Very creative," he blinks a few more times, before looking back down to you and smirking. "Looks like holly more than mistletoe."

Your brows knit together and your lips purse in fake annoyance. "Aren't they the same thing?"

He shrugs at you again, taking his hands out of his pockets and begins dusting at your shoulders. "I don't think so," he replies, still looking smug. "So?"

You feel yourself rocking back and forth, spending extra time on your tiptoes. "So..."

His reaction gives you a boost of confidence, and you feel yourself getting warm and giddy. "Ready for the next part of your surprise?"

-

Interlude III

"She finally did it, huh?" Kindaichi asks, tossing a few volleyballs into the basket after practice.

From behind him, Kunimi comes up with a mop. There's an odd skip in his step, and he looks less tired than usual- almost lively. "I guess so," he tries to say as coolly as possible. He keeps his eyes focused on mopping, afraid that if he makes eye contact with his teammate he'll read him like a book.

Kindaichi knows this, and respectfully keeps his eyes on his own task. But that doesn't mean he'll end the conversation there. "So what's the next move?"

He sags a bit, thinking. He remembers the last confession he received in middle school. How awkward and embarrassing it was to stand on the roof of the school with someone who he only knew in passing.

He remembers your confession. How awkward it was but how genuinely nice it made him feel. So he says, "I surprise her next time. That's the move."

[lifeexperience]

Maribat March 2021 - Half time

In my AO3 account I am also updating the 'A playboy billionaire, an ambassador and the secret love-child' title, and sometimes I add(ed) commentary why I write something the way I do.

Masterlist

From the last fifty days here is all the plus note:

First day

In Red Robin (2009-2011) comics Vicki Vale was a little bit too noisy for her own good, that's why I used her personal annoyance against Bruce Wayne in this story.

Third day

Vanessa Rios was an assistant district attorney in Gotham in the Robin (1993-2009) run. Here I am using her as the Wayne's legal team head. Tamara Fox, Lucius Fox's daughter, is friends with Tim Drake in Red Robin (2009-2011) comics and here too. Also she is an intern with the HR department who knows about the BatFam alteregos.

Fifth day

In the comics, Alfred always followed Bruce to his 'trips' (in 'Batman and Son' to London, 'Batman & Robin Annual' to an scavenger hunt, in 'Batman Inc.' to every country where they found representatives...) However because of Damian's unpredictable behaviour he stayed at the manor with the children in this story.

Sixth day

So Young Justice thing is a little complicated to me if I dare to say something about it. There was the 'Young Justice: The Secret' and its sequels. Then there were 'The New52' and 'DC Rebirth' era, plus the animation show. And they all are kind of okay..ish, furthermore I wanted to keep the principles like the main members (Tim Drake, Connor Kent, Bart Allen and Cassie Sandsmark), however I never liked their too childish behavior in some of the works (and the mixing with 'The Titans). So in this story, here, they are more adult..ish, but more relaxed and cheerful than 'The Titans' ever was (like in comics, not in the shows).

Eighth day

In the 'Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir' show they showed Lila as a manipulator without any remorse, which got me to think she has antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). I am not a doctor but I had some basic lesson in psychology, and I have a natural curiosity about things so I always research everything. With diagnosed ASPD the person has to be older then 18, however I read its symptoms can show up in childhood, and it can lead to an earlier diagnosis like 14-15 years old early.

In the case of Lila she deceives people and uses them (✓). Don't makes long term plans or thinking through about her behavior (✓), however has a set on some goal she wants to achieve (✓). She has a sense of superiority above of her classmates and adults in her environment (✓), nevertheless does't have any remorse or guilt to mistreat them (✓). Uses charisma and her fake charming persona to get something or someone (✓), however didn't value them more than tools or prizes (✓).

I didn't see any real aggressive behavior from Lila beside akumatizations (✓), but on its own I think it's enough evidence, that she has this disorder (and not the many that she claimed). In normal aggressive way Lila didn't show herself (like physical violence, loud angry outbursts, big fits in front of everyone) yet, rather she uses Akumatization to hide that kind of behavior (when Adrien tried to stand up she became willingly Chameleon, or the Heroe's Day, or Oni-Chan). So her Akumatised forms and helping to Hawkmoth are the evidences that she has aggressive behavior, however they are not the classic forms (but we also can remember the threatening in the bathroom, but I think that was more intimidation and showing her superiority then pure aggressiveness).

And I wanted that recreate and strengthen this 'fact' a little bit so it would be more obvious than in the show.

Ninth day

In the comics there are so many take on Bruce Wayne it's kind of hard to count it. We could list the Batman persona, when he kind of let his children do what they want within his no-kill-rule (like living alone at fourteen with bunch of other teenager - 'Teen Titans' or 'Young Justice' or as it looks like to go rough - Robin, Red Hood). And there is the obvious martyr-parent take, when he has to know everything about his children, but he is always silent about the important things ('Death of the family' - 'Batman and Robin: Born to kill' - 'The Hunt for Robin'). And one of my favorites the worried-tired father take, when he is kind of showing his emotions and trying to love his kids ('Super Sons' - 'Robin Rises' - 'Prelude to the Wedding: Nightwing vs. Hush' ...).

And I decided to use the last with a more active take from the first (like he lets everyone do their thing but he is monitoring them within reasons). In the comics there are many accusations about being someones father (with Julie Madison or Mariah Shelley), and here in my take he is trying to be responsible (for the sake of his children, mainly for Damian and Jason) and checks every claim out personally (so they also can do DNS test).

Tenth day

Alya Césaire is a complicated someone in the show. At first she is portrayed as a fierce helper for the protagonist, Marinette. She is stubborn and reckless, but royal to her best friends.

Then came Lila and the makers sharpened her stubborn tunnel vision. This I saw it first at the 'Lady Wifi' episode, when she clearly didn't remember about the first day, when Ladybug saved Chloé (or ignored it). After that she always fixated on 'Adrienette' (or everything else if it's interesting - Dark Cupid) when the girl, herself had other things to do (Princess Fragrance, Puppeteer 2, Reflektdoll 2, Timebreaker). So it was not that big surprise when her tunnel vision turned to Lila, and she (and everybody in her class) forgot about that they all met Jagged Stone and with his crocodile already.

Yeah, it's all true, however unlike Lila, Alya didn't show any other big social flaw. And she is 14 years old and middle child, which is kind of important in someone personality. She has to be a mature figure and a little child at the same time in her sibling's eyes. She has to compete attention in their parents eyes and be smart about it.

Moreover if we look at the Collège Françoise Dupont's students, they are all spoiled, not just Chloé or Lila or Adrien. Yes, they are not that bad like the three, but they are all sheltered to a certain degree. Their family don't have financial problems (famous chef, designers, mayor, famous bakery, curator in the most famous museum, police officer, famous pantomime, ...), plus they are all in a prestigious school where they can't meet people with everyday problems (and rich spoiled kid is not an everyday occurrence in my country). And beside some vision problems (Max, Sabrina) they are all healthy and the first time to meet a disability is when Lila arrived. So it's natural if they don't really know how to interact right with her (putting aside that whole lie thing).

And I think they, especial Alya, need first a little life experience, before they could be called responsible about their acts. And here I am trying to write it this kind of way, where they are all flawed, but they can learn from it.

Human being can be shallow and not perfect. These children only heard one perspective from Lila, and another from Marinette. In the show the makers not exactly specified about how well the classmates know Marinette and how depth Marinette and Alya friendship is, so there is already some trust issue.

Like yeah all of they are going to concerts, cinema, each others, however they didn't show so far any serious conservation between them (maybe the only exception is Adrien-Marinette combo). Until this year when Adrien and Alya got transferred in the class, the classmates don't even help Marinette with Chloé bullying. And one year friendship - how beautiful is it tho - is not that depth and stable, especially with that many secrets they have. And Lila 'charming' personality came into this still fragile relationship at the right time to prove this.

I am not saying that the makers is doing good to simplifies the relationships. Because rather they missed so many ziccers for the sake of promote new hero designs and the overwritten romantic scene, it's physical hurting me. But they are right that we are talking sheltered-traumatized-too naive kids, who sometimes had unearned magic powers (looking at Chloé, Alya, Kim).

And I didn't ever going the length of mentioning the adult characters. It's an other kind of wormhole.

Marinette was the only one who openly disobeyed Lila's wants. She stands up against her lies in the public so she is a real obstacle for Lila. While Adrien is only trying in the background without any witness (I don't say it's bad, because with some case it's better, but not here), and the boy is too valuable to Lila.

Lila already showed in the series she didn't stop with the lies and she is brave enough to ruin someone carrier with them (Marinette - 'Ladybug', Nathalie and Gorilla - 'Oni-Chan', Alya - 'Volpina'). And Adrien watched all of it in the front seat, and he kind of knows that Lila's main target here to discredit and broke Marinette/Ladybug (and Adrien, himself also, but it's his perspective and he is very sheltered and naive about it).

And this story she got another one to ruin. Bruce Wayne, himself. And as her fake charming side melts away in her anger as she is focusing more and more on her targets.

Eleventh day

Speed Force is one of the Seven Forces of the Universe. It grants the power of the speedsters. And some of them merged with it (for example Barry Allen). Speed Force has a direct connection to the time flow and with the Multiverse (or now Omniverse). The biggest event of it is the Flashpoint (2011) which started the New52 era. And Batman doesn't want to mix this kind of force with a really mysterious ancient magic.

Nightrunner's first appearance was in 2011 in Detective Comics Annual #12. Within the Batman Incorporated line Bruce recruited Bilal Asselah, French-Algerian citizen to represent Batman in Paris. Here he is a mentor/background assistant to the Team Miraculous and a representative of Batman Inc.

Fourteenth day

Wang Fu is not the most mature character in the show and I think it says it all. Being an 186 years old is the Great Guardian after he accidentally destroyed the temple, he is kind of shameful and amateur. And if we contrasted him with Batman... yeah. Batman is NOT happy and takes the control from the old master.

Fifteenth day

I know Cyborg, alias Victor Stone is currently shown as a founding member of the Justice League (since 2011), however I am prefer him more in the Titans. And it's not just because of the animation show form 2003, but also in the comics he is more himself with the first Titans then with the -all mighty- Justice League. And I also wanted him to have a little cameo in this story because in the Super Sons (2017-) he was kind of like a babysitter for the boys. And to me it's kind of funny how many times the bats short circuited him (Robin Rises, Super Sons: Parent Trap, ...).

Sixteenth day

Damian Wayne is a complicated character. For ten years he was teached to kill. He only learnt about his mother at eight. He only learnt about his father at ten. Thalia used him for anything from power play to plotting someone death. Bruce loves him, but he is so moronic about his own emotions it's kind of painful to read sometimes. And there is the thing where Damian is never enough, his mother cloned him (Heretic), his father has other wards (mainly Red Robin). Dick Grayson went incognito spying when the boy had finally a healthier relationship (Grayson: The Superspy). His best friend, Jon Kent was suddenly older then him (2018 Superman #16). Alfred was killed in front of him (2016 Batman #77). Yeah, Damian is a jerk, but he has every right to be a jerk in my opinion. And I wanted that recreate here as Lila is a liar and threatening his 'only' position as a blood son. His only weapon to prevent it to have a fit and doing what was teached to him.

Fulltime