#...like it was so common for him to do that it was blasé and normal? that stuck out to me

[uncanny-tranny]

Transcript:

If you hate your body, do not achieve the body you want out of hate.

I know what you're thinking: starve yourself, run yourself into the ground, faster cardio, no carbs, no sugar.

You're reaching a perceived level of health at the expense of your actual health. If you expedite the process without doing the internal work, you're fucked. Now, I know there's some people who are finally happy and, uh, thinner body and I'm not talking to you, okay? Please, separate yourself from the equation and listen to what I'm saying.

It is so much more rewarding if you just improve your lifestyle. I just got my 10,000 steps on this beautiful day. I didn't do it to burn calories, I did it because I get to. I'm gonna go train legs now, I fucking love squatting and deadlifting! I love being strong! I have more time today, so I'm gonna take my time to cook a delicious, nutritious lunch. I'm not grinding, I'm not fasting, I'm not just having protein. I'm not doing burpees in-between my sets.

When you do this from an extreme standpoint, you're abandoning your quality of life. Therefore, you'll be more resentful. And because you're so resentful, you'll constantly be looking for validation, and it will never be good enough, and you'll be chasing a body that's impossible to reach 'cause your standards are too high. Just chase health! It's so much more rewarding, and you don't have to answer to fucking anybody!

#anti diet culture #disordered eating tw #disordered eating mention tw #eating disorder tw #eating disorder mention tw #long post #ough i needed this #this is the one 'gymbro' i follow because he's real #and as a man i love seeing him be vulnerable about his own body dysmorphia and his disordered eating... #...not that i love that he went through that #i was kind of heartbroken when he mentioned the burpee part. the casualness with which he talked about it... #...like it was so common for him to do that it was blasé and normal? that stuck out to me #honestly i want more men to talk about their experiences like he does or at least i wish we could normalize it #this took forever to transcribe because i would watch like 0.2 seconds in instagram then come back here 💀 #i've been saying this

[dballzposting]

The Gohan Goes To Highschool Saga is so unbelievably perfect and delectable and every time I see any bit of it I lose it

First of all I like the art style. The profiles are cute and I love how the clothes are drawn.

Gohan looks goofy as hell.

Gohan has been living Isolated Away from all of The World just Living in the sticks in the mountain in the woods just he and his mom and his brother

And Then he goes to SCHOOL and is thrust into a SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT for the first time and the FIRST thing that happens to him is that a GIRL, who happens to be MR SATAN'S DAUGHTER, DRILLS her EYES into him and STARES and STALKS and THINKS and she is going to see his guts god damnit.

And she herself runs the city. Mr Satan is King Lion Showpony Figurehead While Videl is actually out sniffing the streets. She knows her territory and she navigates it with clarity and confidence

And when new strange "Superheros" enter the environment she is going to get to the bottom of it.

Because some things about the world have never seemed right to her. The mysterious strangers during the Cell Games, the way that she has never seen her father do anything that impressive since- the Golden Warrior, The Great Saiyaman ... is there a common thread of one singularly strong warrior?

Gohan discovers the euphoria of a mask. He has always had to be the hero and it was a record of failure and stress to him. Now he gets to PLAY hero. It's fun, and juvenile, which would be healing, but- how far should we let this go? His silly Ginyu poses. The glory of being seen but unseen. He can control what people think of him. He's sensitive when people badmouth his alter ego, snapping into anger and then recovering with the blaséness of a child. What is this? I can't explain it but it seems like a slippery spiral.

Hes never had a mask before. Hes never been safe to have eyes land and melt on his body before.

And the FIRST THING that Happens to Him is that a Girl who is SUSPICIOUS and INTENSE and ADROIT sets her ICY Stare On Him and wont Relent. She is going to GET Under that Mask. Hes never had this sort of attention before, hes barely had peers before - hes never been studied like this, hes never been WANTED like this.

She stares and he sweats.

And it's clearly good for Gohan to be getting out but it's just that well there is CLEARLY Madness in the Woods and he is not out of those woods. Maybe hes the minotaur. He acts all goofy and happy and spontaneous and bright-eyed, but it's masking something I'm telling you. That's why the mask appealed to him so. Hes already wearing one without even realizing it

And again Videl is gonna be the one to cut him open and drag his guts out. And thatll be GOOD FOR HIM TOO becasue hes never HAD the privilege of CONVERSATION. There is so much that he just doesnt have context for. And he's never had the avenue to explore with others the events of the past that may still be living in him.

But until then it's just gonna brew and he thought he was out of the woods but now hes entering the fecund minefield of social revelations and hes learning and re-learning everything subtlety as he also experiences what it's like to see and be seen and he is finding access to a wealth of new feelings made for moving amongst his peers and theres a lot of internal shifting as he leaps out to claim a part of the world for himself and the shadows in his soul are finding thrill and fixation on playing the much-loved hero in a mask who gets to pull goofy poses.

Um Gohan sort of blew ass in the Buu Saga but his outfits were killer. And then he died. Badly. But I dont mind and I really think that it's important for him to get out of his mother's house and to lean into the insight of Videl ASAP. He needs to establish his own presence amongst a normal functioning society so bad.

I swear he only became a scholar becasue he began to associate it with peace and his mother's love, and it gave him something to escape into when he didnt want to experience being himself. But the self still necessarily expresses itself somehow and now he hyperfixates on bugs. So small and humble yet strong and brave. They make the world seem so small yet so big and switching between the two helps him to avoid finding himself in the middle. Also there was that whole Cell thing (he was sort of bug-like...)

#dballz posting #gohan & videl

[cantsomeoneelsedoit]

Ch 49: It's All Ours

Using this panel instead of the chapter cover bc I don't like how many Sean spoilers are on the cover but also because I can't get enough of this dynamic duo pose. Look at them! They just reunited and they're ready to take on the world!

The chapter opens with a post-mortem Sean infodump:

Not being able to see while using the power is a huge disadvantage! How was he doing murders and robberies without being able to see?

Sean using his ability for crime goes back to what Andy said in Ch 22:

He was recruited by a street gang, then by Under. Poor kid! If the Union had gotten to him first, he could've had a better ending.

The lines about, "Rip captured him and forced him to join Under" and "grafting a third eye to his forehead under Rip's orders" explain why he wanted to outshine Rip at Under. It also implies Under is in a hurry and rushing to get their team together.

His concern about seat rank is pretty moot though. Like, the world is going to end soon, so who cares? Does he even know about the Loops and Ark? I wonder what Under told him!

Rip: "He died, but he kinda sucked..."

Damn, Rip is cold as hell. I get that he and Sean weren't exactly friends, but still. Is this how they would've treated Chikara, too?

I think the Rip's callous reaction to Sean's death is what sets off Fuuko's nausea here. The realization that someone just died might not have been so sickening if Under wasn't so blasé about it.

But Fuuko's been through a lot lately! Beyond seeing Sean bisected and Anno Un dismembered, she witnessed all the losses in Andy's past and just saw a battle featuring two guys who use their bodies like blood jet skis, so she's actually held it together pretty well!

Andy's reasoning is, "better him than you," which really clashes with how Fuuko views the world. The story started with her wanting to die just so she wouldn't harm others. Her selflessness and compassion is one of her defining traits! She always tries to see the good in people. So for Andy to tell her to "get over it" seems a bit disingenuous. He knows she won't just get over it. The best she can do is to try to postpone her feelings for now and keep trying to make the world a better place.

Fuuko is suddenly confronted by a very normal child in a bunny suit who wants her gun.

Bunny/Backs snatches Fuuko's gun with her bunny ear, and Fuuko slaps some Unluck into her.

And the gun is absorbed into the bunny costume in a sort of Blob-like absorption or assimilation process?!

But Bunny/Backs falls into a crack in the floor caused by Fuuko's Unluck! They're still fighting in Anno Un's house, which has been halved by Dead-Line btw.

Rip's reaction to what happened to Bunny is similar to how he reacted when Sean died. Rip doesn't even check to see if Bunny is OK! Fuuko's expression is a mix of shock and disgust, but look how she handles it:

Instead of trying to kill Rip, she tries to understand him and bring him over to her side. She believes they share a common goal and can minimize the suffering if they work together. It's a lot like how she acted when she first joined the Union in Ch 9⬇️

And in both cases, Fuuko's attempts to make peace were met with harsh realities: Juiz telling her that they had already gotten 98 Rules added, and Rip telling her that his goal isn't to kill God. Both times, Fuuko was lacking information about the true goals of the organizations.

I don't mean that Fuuko is naive or a Pollyanna, but she IS an idealist. Naivete implies a sort of "ignorance is bliss" stagnation mentality, and she doesn't have that. She's always looking for the best solution to any situation in order to improve the world around her. That's why it's so difficult for her to stifle her feelings when she sees Rip acting unconcerned about others.

Finally, we have some more substantive goals than "Under is just mad at the world and wants to punish normies."

Rip explains Under's various goals and goes on to say that he would work with Fuuko if she gave him info about Ark, but otherwise he might as well kill her. Rip only seems to care about people he can use.

Oh snap. Not only does Anno Un know what he's trying to do, they're telling him that it won't work and that Latla will die! And why does Rip want to ride Ark? Time for a flashback.

They both blame themselves, and they're both Negators. Did their abilities awaken at the same time?

Rip wants to have another chance to save Leila from dying! And just like that, Rip switches from being a villain to an antivillain. He's got a sympathetic cause and wants to atone...It's just that his methods are a bit suspect.

Damn, Rip has already lost his legs and some life span for this goal?! That's both impressive and horrifying. He's so blinded by his love for her that he can't see the point of caring about others (or the larger issue of killing God so he doesn't have to live this way).

But Latla feels the same way! And she arrives on a motorcycle frame attached to an electric motor? We get a better look at it in the next chapter.

Autumn is heading their way because it's been attracted by Andy's thick, long, and satisfying BOOK. Can they all work together to capture Autumn, and will that still count for the Union quest?

We have six Negators taking on Autumn. Do they have the right combination of skills to take it down?

Masterpost

#undead unluck #overreading undead unluck

[whiskeyswifty]

what is the A&P effect?

A&P is a short story by John Updike that among many other things, highlights how wealthy people have an allure about them that is unavoidable for people of lower socioeconomic standing. It's a very common 9th grade english class assignment/discussion in america, one of those things so it's not exactly like a must read literary masterpiece or anything if you've never read it. if you haven't, the gist is that a young, working class grocery store clerk is mentally critiquing the corporate "sheep" around him with an air of feeling like he's better than them all. in walks in a group of teenage girls in bikinis and he's first annoyed and then enthralled by them, while also criticizing them, and that's where the A&P effect comes from. He remarks how they're plain looking, not particularly attractive in any way and yet they act like they're hot shit. he instantly clocks that they're rich, by the ease with which they move through the store, talking back to the scolding store owner, and buying expensive fish. by the time they check out at his register, he's fully in martyr mode for them. he's totally taken by them and just the simplest interaction with them. he's now furious with the store owner for scolding them, and quits in a big public show, doing what he thinks is standing up for them. but he turns around to see that the girls are gone, and even runs out into the parking lot or whatever to see if they're out there, waiting for him, their hero, grateful for their salvation. they've left completely and he's now jobless and feels like a fool.

again, other things are brought up and the story covers lots of important ideas about capitalism and consumerism and the male gaze, etc etc. but you asked about the A&P effect specifically so to just answer that, the details above are important. What john updike is trying to show you is that ultimately, the most attractive thing to other people is wealth and that wealth is not something you see, not exactly. it's not as simple as a fancy car or clothes, but it's the way a person has about them. the boy was able to clock their wealth right away because despite having no reason to be so confident, in his eyes as he said they're objectively unremarkably attractive, they walked around as if they owned the place. that kind of cool, unchallengeable confidence is only possible if you're raised with total and complete validation that you're the best and you deserve everything you want and it's further solidified by always getting everything you want. money at that level, generationally as well, creates that secure foundation upon which you can build that kind of blasé confidence. among themselves, wealthy people are petty and competitive sure, but when they deign to walk among the lower class, they are 100% certain, subconsciously at least, that they're better than every single person in the room, regardless of appearance or any other factor.

you can see this blind confidence exemplified in 2 ways. one, how they talk back to the store owner. his scolding means nothing to them. normally where he'd be more powerful because he's an adult and the owner of the store, it's negated by the far more important distinction between them which is that he's still working class and they're wealthy. to wealthy people like the teenage girls, a working class person of any status is beneath them and cannot exert power over them. two, how the aren't there when the boy clerk has his big showy moment of martyrdom for them. while the boy has a lot of things down correctly, their wealthy and it's not right for an adult man to leer and scold teenage girls for dressing scantily, he learned something new that day. he saw them as his equals because they were all teenagers, but he didn't yet understand that their dismissiveness of the store owner also extended to him. the whole story he goes on about how he's better and smarter than other employees and it's just a summer job for him and he's not gonna be some blue collar worker when he's older. that may be true, but the harsh lesson he learned is that while he may get a better paying job one day, he'll never be rich like the girls are. they know that, and so they see him as the same as the store owner and subsequently, don't see him at all. he doesn't exist to them because he's just another worker cog in their life, serving them, which is why they leave before he does his big speech, or if they caught the start of it, paid it no mind and left.

so the A&P effect is essentially this aura wealthy people have around them that attracts us to them as beautiful or cool or hot, despite them not actually being the most physically or personality-wise attractive person in the room. it's the most potent thing in the world, money which leads to power, even when it's just 3 teenage girls walking in a grocery store. and it's particularly important for John Updike to talk about because in america, we don't have class systems like in Europe. We don't have centuries old aristocrat families or landed gentry or things like that that separate people into classes by birth and land ownership. we separate people into classes by money alone. how long you've had it, where you got it, and how much of it you have. and often times, the wealthy people do not convey that wealth in easily identifiable and flashy ways. this story shines a light on how that wealthiness manifests, the root of it, and the psychological effect it can have on someone who's seduced and ultimately blinded by it. it's almost like being hypnotized. there's a way about wealthy people, a kind of cool confidence and easy way of moving through life unbothered that comes from having no high stakes stressers in their lives, no family members who were stressed, no concerns about the future. it makes sense it would be extremely attractive to the stressed out, worried, and uncertain working class, who ultimately are less attracted to the plain girl at the grocery store and more attracted to that relaxed life she's living and want a piece of that. the even more important irony of the effect, that is CRUCIAL for non wealthy people to remember, is that while the working class idolize these wealthy people or aspire to be them or what have you, it's a one way mirror. they don't see the working class at ALL. they don't exist to the wealthy, not as real people to interact with who have three dimensional lives and thoughts and feelings. and for working class people, it's extremely important to try and be aware of someone having an A&P effect on you. because you don't want to risk it all for someone who doesn't even notice you exist! the other thing is that i mentioned the A&P effect in the last post about impossible beauty standards set by wealthy people to say that also.... are they beautiful??? or are you just a victim of the A&P effect? in awe of the confidence of someone cushioned by their wealth? which, if you're at the same time trying to attain their beauty standard, is something you'll NEVER achieve cuz you'll almost certainly NEVER be rich like that and it makes the whole effort a fools errand.

#hope this helps! #another long answer! #also once again in case anyone tries to be a smart ass YES I KNOW THE STORY COVERS OTHER THINGS AS WELL #this is just one aspect of it #i'm not gonna get into the literary minutiae of a john updike story on tumblr dot com

[mxvladdy]

i have an angst request, i guess??

could you imagine the reaction when MC and a brother are cuddling, being real sweet and tender, rubbing sensitive bits of skin ect.

MC stares off for a bit and the brother thinks they’re being nostalgic but when they ask what they’re thinking about 😘 MC just says “oh? i’m just remembering that i’m a potential food source for you guys 🙃“

~My first request! Yay!~

I hope you like it. I just picked just 3 brothers that I thought would be fun. But if you want more lemme know!

Lucifer

Quality time with him is rare. He's a busy demon after all.

But after an unsightly incident a few years back he has been trying to take some time out of the day for himself. It is also the perfect excuse to have some quality time alone with you.

He likes to have you sitting on top of him while he lounges. Your weight and heartbeat were soothing. A living noisemaker.

It has become a routine now. You come and rest with him and enjoy each other's company.

This time you were a little distant. Your eyes constantly track the motions and actions of his mouth. You seem fixated on every little thing he does. From a sip of his drink to the way he scowls while reading the evening news. You’re mesmerized by something.

He takes it as you reliving the taste and feel of his lips on yours. He'd be happy to give you a reenactment. But, when he leans in for a kiss, he senses...fear?

No. Surely you had gotten over that little mortal hurdle. For all things unholy, he hasn't even threatened you in over a year.

He'll pry, demanding a reason for your sudden apprehension. If anything to mask his own fear with righteous indignation.

When you tell him it takes a lot of effort not to laugh. It wasn't a ridiculous notion. He had indulged once or twice in his younger years-not that he would tell you. The thought had crossed his mind not that he would tell you. But really you would have been dog food before he would put any effort into it.

He'll brush your concern off. He has no interest in your flesh in such a rudimentary form. Now that pretty little soul of yours was another matter...

“You seem- distracted.” Lucifer’s purrs against your temple kissing it tenderly. His deep rumble resonates down your spine. “What are you thinking about γλυκιά μου?”  He drags a razor-sharp canine down your neck teasingly. “Something good perhaps?”  

“No, sorry.” You burrow closer to his chest. “Just had a… thought.” Lucifer’s thumb stills, halting the teasing pattern he had been tracing into your thigh. He scowls brushing his nose across the crown of your head. If you were thinking of anything other than him, then he was doing this wrong.

That thought was… offending. He had carved out a spot for you in his already ridiculous schedule, and yet you seemed miles away. Normally these precious moments were spent with you snuggling close loving his undivided attention, and him loving yours in kind.

Tonight your demeanor was so demure. You clung to him as usual, soft lips trailing down his jaw to the little sliver of exposed skin from where he had loosened his tie hours ago. But, it just felt like you were just going through the motions. “Speak.” A request and order in one.

"If given the chance, would you eat me?"

"What?" Lucifer cups the back of your head and pulls you away to make eye contact. "What?" He balks, eyes wide. His expression was completely undignified. That certainly wasn't what he was expecting.

You explain to him about a conversation you had overheard in your early days of the exchange program. For some reason, it just hit you then at the feel of his mouth on you.

"I- hmmm. Personally, I would have fed you to Cerberus. I don't particularly enjoy the taste of human flesh." He settles back into his office chair unfazed. He thought he had something to worry about. "Besides, I have come to find I like you warm and breathing." He pinches your side teasingly ready to get the evening back on track.

"Wait! You thought about it!?" His blasé tone takes you aback.

Lucifer knocks his forehead into yours with a snicker. "Not too hard. Besides you'd probably give my pups indigestion with all the trouble you’ve turned out to be."

Beelzebub

He likes to spend time with you at his favorite cafe. The one with the little tea cakes and great sandwiches.

Normally you will spend a weeknight there studying and munching together. One hand scribbling away in your notebook and the other engulfed in his large hand. By the end of the night though, you always find your legs interwoven with his and his ginger head resting on top of yours.

He is full and happy. So happy in fact, he steals a kiss, and then another.

It’s a good thing he picked a booth in the back so the rest of the cafe can ignore the couple nestled closer and closer in the back. He sneaks a few more peaks in here and there, whispering softly. It was going great until- He hadn’t expected to feel you lock up. Was it something he said?

You’re embarrassed when he pulls away and tries to brush it off. You just got swept up in some thoughts, no biggie.

He won’t pry, he gets it, it happens to him too. But, when you untangle yourself from him he has to know what’s up.

When you tell him he is distraught. Because he 100% has and probably still will eat a person. He might have munched on a witch that had pissed him off just the other day…

What he hates most is he can’t really lie and deny that he hasn’t thought about it.  

“You taste amazing.” His words ghost over your lips as he savors the sweet mix of your coffee and natural flavor. You always taste like spiced oranges and honey when your lips brush. It’s intoxicating. Suddenly the flavor of you changes, a sour note hits his tongue. You go still and look out across the small cafe.“Are you ok?”

You pull away blinking rapidly. “Yeah-sorry.” You chuckle humorlessly. “Just...had a thought.” You try to move back into his arms but he stops you.    

"What's the matter?" He tilts your chin up with a callous finger. You turn your head away and answer. "What?" He could hear you just fine. Superhuman hearing and all, but he just couldn’t comprehend what he heard.

"Do you consider me as a food?" You repeat yourself. "I know demons eat people, and like you've mentioned it before. I guess, I don't know. Shouldn't I be scared?" You've never seen a demon wilt before. Beel recoils and tucks in on himself. His hand flops down to sit on his thigh.

Of Course, he did think about it. Hell’s he had considered it. Aside from being a demon, he was the avatar of gluttony. How many nights had he laid in bed, stomach growling, and your scent filling his nose when you first arrived. Mammon had a work out the first few weeks of school dragging him away from your immediate vicinity. It was fortunate for the both of you that you had bonded so quickly or else he could have ruined everything.

His silence was enough for you to know. "Crazy how things turn out right?" You try to lighten the mood. You stroke his hair gently trying to comfort him. "Sorry, I kinda ruined date night huh?"

"No, no this is good." He chuckles rubbing his neck awkwardly. "Or I mean. We should talk about this. Before Diavolo started working on the exchange program, human souls and flesh were pretty common delicacies." Beel collects his thoughts with a sigh. “The verdict didn’t go over well at first. I wasn’t too happy either if I’m being honest. But, I’m happy he did it in the long run.” He meets your gaze with a warm smile. “You’re the kinda treat I want to enjoy for eternity.”

Asmodeus

A deviant. An absolute terror when it comes to PDA. He doesn’t care if it’s class time. If he wants to be in your lap then that's where he'll be.

He'll nuzzle the crook of your neck whenever he finds his way on to your thighs. He always has a compliment ready for you. New perfume or cologne? Is that shirt the one he bought you? He'll dote on you for hours until you are a blushing mess.

He schedules out movie nights with you. Just the two of you, some good drinks, plenty of pillows, and no bothersome brothers.

The movie he picked tonight was an oldie from the Devildom. He was feeling a little sentimental and thought you would enjoy seeing some culture. You agree, but forget one little thing.

Old Devildom culture was...pretty graphic.

Asmo doesn’t notice how your mind drifted off during the opening act. He is busy creating a new trail of hickies along your shoulder and upper arm around his pact.

He does notice when he hits the sensitive spot of your neck that normally has you squirming but-nothing. Huh? Was he losing his touch? He is usually so aware of his partner's mood. He asks what’s wrong.

Your question comes out of left field. He panics, figuring the movie wasn’t the best for this conversation. He turns it off and gives you his full attention.

Has he eaten a human or two before. Yes, back when he was young and would get swept up in the heat of the moment. Crimson was a lovely color on him.

You try to console him. Really you get it, it was an errant thought. You know he won’t eat you.

Can he still call you a snack tho?

You watch the movie in dead silence. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you figure you should probably be disturbed by what you see on screen. Were you that desensitized? Probably. Should that worry you? Maybe? You try to weigh it out in your hand. The black and white feature flashing across your eyes. You have seen worse in crappy human B rated horror movies. But, those were special effects and pints of red-colored slime and food coloring. You had a nagging suspicion that the scene in front of you was real. You glance down at the slim demon trying to fuse his body into yours. His body flickering in and out of focus in the flickering lights of the movie. You try to focus on him, his warm body nestling closer to you under the blankets. It worked for a moment before another loud roar from the screen dragged your eyes back up.

The contrast between the violence on the projector and the soft innocents of Asmodeus’s lips on the corners of yours was wild. He wasn’t even paying attention to the film. Typical. This was his normal ploy to have you all to himself. It worked though, and you loved it. Oh- You watch with wrapped attention as the human on screen was consumed both body and soul by a horde of demons.

“Is the film more magnetic than me?” Asmodeus pulls away licking his lips. His rose-colored gloss was smeared across his cheek. You shudder blinking past the sudden thought of what that soft red color also looked like.  

"Nah," You huff wrapping your arms around him to press your chest to his. He purrs practically preening from your attention. "Just thinking."

"Oh~" You can feel his playful smile stretching along your hairline. "Care to share." He nips your earlobe.

"I just, humans really are just kinda food to you guys huh?”

You’ve never seen Asmodeus move so fast before in your life. One moment he is doing his best impression of an octopus and the next he is standing several feet away from you, hands raised in a mix of shock and defense. “Where would you-” He trails off hearing the sound of violence and death behind him. “Oh Hells.” He clicks off the projector in a panic. “I am so sorry honey! I did not think that through.”

You laugh awkwardly. “Would this be an inappropriate time to say I would go straight to your thighs?”

Asmodeus snorts in the dark. “Hips more like. You are nothing but sugar and fluff.” He flips the lights back on and he comes back to kneel next to you. He cups your face. “You know I would never do that right? I can’t say I haven’t done it before but I’ve never thought that about you.”

You hum kissing his warm palm. “Should I be offended or thankful?”

He hits you playfully. “That’s not funny!” You laugh taking his light swats, grateful that the mood in the room was already lightning.  

“It is and you know it.” You scoop him back into your lap and snatch the remote up from where he had tossed it. “Come on let’s finish movie night. I’m picking the show this time.”

#obey me #obey me lucifer #Obey me beelzebub #obey me asmodeus #fun prompt!

[gentlemancrow]

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

OK so I saw @hey-there-hunter ‘s JMart Wedding Challenge and I pretty much fan ficced immediately??  Like it was an instantaneous plot bunny that stabbed me in the brain and would not let me free until I made it exist.  SO HERE YOU GO!  Read it here or head on over to AO3 below!  And enjoy some unapologetically aggressive fluff with weddings!  Also subtitled someday Crow will stop abusing excessive astral imagery and symbolism for extended metaphors, but today is not that day.

Read on AO3 instead!

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

Jonathan Sims always thought of himself as a man with a deep appreciation for the great literature of the world.  A passionate turn of phrase, crystalline motes of clear imagery like snowflakes reflecting light in his mental scape, a devastating contemplation on the nature of good and evil in the hearts of all mankind, everything that could express the beauty and tragedy of the world in ways he never could.  Prose was a bright paintbrush on a ragged canvas of the universe he had known from an early age was swathed in shadow and pain and evil, and those words on those pages, for at least a moment, were another world he could hold in his hands, could cradle and protect, could mourn.  He liked the power of them as well, of the tinkling brightness of alliteration, the oaky sophistication of a well-aged metaphor, the evocativeness of the idiosyncrasy in a simple simile, laying bare truths in ways he never could have articulated for himself.

There was one thing he could not abide by in language, however, one cardinal sin liable to besmirch any piece of lush and sparkling verse or prose and taint it forever.  And that was idioms.

Jon loathed idioms and their dismally quirky cliches dressed in familiarity’s tacky clothing almost as much as he hated spiders.  Perhaps it was something about their reliance on common knowledge and repetition.  He couldn’t bear reading the same book twice, or even a book that felt too familiar, it only made sense that hearing a hackneyed phrase repeated in that awful singsong sardonic tone of someone who knows full well they’re saying something asinine that has been repeated ad nauseum for millennia would scrape at the back of his skull and down his spine.  They were too whimsical and blasé, crutch words for when one’s limited lexicon came up empty, or worse, for ill comedic effect.  They reinforced that staunchly English notion of skirting about the true depth and breadth of emotion for clipped niceties and unfeeling banalities.  Idioms to him were mere verbal window boxes, colorful and meaningless, dressings for untold disasters behind the shining windows they peacocked before.  

He hated them all with vaguely equal rancor, but there was one he could definitely single out as the one he hated the most, and that was the one about hanging the moon.  Such and such thinks you hung the moon, to me you hung the moon, and so on.  This particular rhetorical felony attracted his wrath only marginally because any moon symbolism never failed to feel outlandish and infantile, a mawkish image of love and care rampant in nursery rhymes and cheap commercialized slogans for t-shirts and wall art.  That was the least of it.  He hated the idea of hanging the moon mostly because once, another lifetime ago now it seemed, Tim Stoker had lobbed it in his face in a fit of smoldering rage and he had been completely, complacently, ignorant of its magnitude.  

Funny thing was, he couldn’t even remember what the actual fight had been about any longer.  Though he could remember exactly where he was standing, cornered next to the file cabinet for the year 1985, January through February, and the label had been peeling up on the upper left-hand corner.  He remembered he’d discovered a hole in the elbow of his jumper that morning and he had been obsessing over it all day, fussing with the dangling green thread and tugging at the knit as if it might magically close the wound.  He’d put his finger clean through it with his arms crossed haughtily over his chest without even realizing he’d been fiddling with it when something flippant about Martin came out of his mouth.  It hadn’t even been cruel, he couldn’t even remember how Martin had come up in the argument in the first place, he could only remember Tim’s mouth moving like he wanted to say something else, then him forcibly stopping himself before he snarled.

“Yeah well, god knows why, but he thinks you hung the moon, so you might try treating him at the very least like a human being once in a while.”

It was such a small thing.  Small words for a small feeling cloaked in a chintzy veneer of idiomatic dismissal.  A trembling little bird cupped in his scarred and battered hands and smothered.  Or so he thought.  Sometimes trembling little birds turn out to be phoenixes, and those who looked to someone else to hang the comfort of a wise, silvery moon in the sky already have the hammer and the picture wire at the ready.

As far as Jon was concerned, the moon only rose on their Somewhere Else because Martin deigned to pull the strings every night, not him.

It was Martin who brought him tea every morning, set it down on the breakfast table with that little flip of the tag and the deft, one-fingered turn of the handle toward him.  It was Martin who scolded him because whites are a separate load, Jon, were you raised in a barn?  Martin who talked him through every episode of the Doctor Who reruns that were the only thing their ancient aerial could pick up.  Martin who planted flowers in the garden and brought muffins from the sweet old lady at the grocers because they traded baking recipes.  Martin who still looked at him with diaphanous pools of ethereal moonlight in his eyes and his smile like he alone hung it in the sky over his head to wash him in its radiance.

Even after everything.

Even after it had been Martin who had to hold the knife buried in his chest as he lay gasping wetly for breath in an alleyway in Another Chelsea to keep the hemorrhaging at bay.  Martin who had cupped his face in his bloody hands with tears streaming down his and forced him to focus, furious love blazing in his sea mist eyes as they locked with his, screaming at him and him only, heedless of anything else.

“Look at me.  LOOK at me, Jon!  Stay with me!  Stay with me, DAMN YOU!”

Stay with me had not been a plea, it had been a command.  He had never once said please because it was never an option.  Shivering, breathing blood through his teeth, the streetlights a fading, star studded halo in Martin’s strawberry blond curls be damned, he was right.  Against every tangled thread of fate twisted deep into his flesh, or perhaps because they had been the only thing that held his torn innards together, he made it to the part where he awoke a few fractured times to nothingness, and then to fingers he knew every inch of inextricably bound up in his and a fierce whisper in his ear.

“I’m here, Jon.  I’m still here.  I’ve got you.  I’m going to fix this.  I’m going to get us out of here.  We’re going to be okay.”

It had been Martin who orchestrated their clandestine escape from the hospital the moment they both agreed he was well enough to survive under his rudimentary medical care and before the authorities got too invested in an urban ghost story of two men who didn’t exist.  Not to mention one of which should, by all medical and logical law, be dead.  It had been Martin who had stolen the necessary antibiotics, drugs, and wound care supplies, Martin who had picked enough pockets to buy passage on a midnight train to the only place they could think to go, and expressly told Jon not to ask where he learned how, even though he knew full well he would later.  Martin who had fought for everything and kept him hidden and safe while he lay in a dingy hotel room somewhere in Scotland, drifting in and out of consciousness between kisses, cold compresses, spoonfuls of whatever he could get him to swallow and keep down, and desperate ‘I love you’s.

Martin had been the one who hung the moon even on the nights Jon couldn’t see it, just so he knew it was there, that the light might finally guide him home.  Not him.  He could have never done something so selfless and simple and beautiful.  No not him.  Not The Archivist.  How could he have ever known that?  Stupid, myopic, pedantic, all-seeing and blind.  A blustering, sanctimonious Tiresias in a sweater vest and half-moon glasses.  And how important was the moon, anyway that he was expected to hang it too?  Would not night still come and the stars still shine?  The stupid, vapid saying should have been about the sun anyway.  Something that nourished and guided and warmed.  Not the moon.  Not the thing of night and hungry wolves and quiet loneliness.  Not a thing of the darkness they fought and still not won, not exactly, not in a way that mattered.  How could he have known the weight of such a thoughtless, frivolous, meaningless phrase and how far and how long Martin had borne it for him to protect he who hung his moon?  

He could see the weight of it so clearly now.  He could see it especially on the darkest days, which came, in grotesque mockery, the moment they found something like their safehouse and rest at last.  Jon had conned his way into a job at the village library with an ancient head librarian who didn’t care much for too many questions, or background or credit checks, and was more than happy to pay in cash.  With Martin’s help of course.  Martin himself had taken up stocking at the village grocers, and their life had teetered onto something so close to quaint and normal it suddenly laid bare the gravity of the depths of darkness they had escaped.

No longer did they have to run, no longer did they have to fight, they could finally lay down the chase and curl in upon each other to lick their wounds in quiet.  But without the driving, primal instinct to live, to survive, that ushered in the days where all the hurt came back to roost and brood and fester.  The days where he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, or the days Martin couldn’t bear the sound of his voice, or the days they shouted themselves hoarse, stormed apart for hours then came back, silent and broken, red-eyed and exhausted to hold each other and weep into the spaces between neck and shoulder where it still smelled like love and home.

He could see so painfully clearly the toll following him to the ends of the cosmos and back had etched its marks into his goodness, his body and soul, see how often he would walk down the road from their cabin, just a little ways, to stand on the heather spotted hills and gaze out into the frigid infinity of the gray sea.  Cold terror would grip him then, incite a desperate want to run after him, to throw his arms around him and bring him home, but also the fear it would only be to have him turn to mist and slip through his fingers forever.  He always had a cup of steaming tea waiting for him when he came back, just in case.

But again, and always.  It was Martin who would pick up Jon’s hands, kiss every slender, scarred finger through his tears and be the first one to utter ‘I’m sorry.’  Martin who told him with just a single scathing flash of stern blue eyes and not a single word uttered that he was certainly coming to bed and not banishing himself to the couch like an idiot.  Martin who wrapped him in his arms and warmth and boundless love and reminded him, “One way or another.  Together.  That was the deal, right?  You don’t get to back out now.  No returns, refunds, or exchanges, I’m afraid.”

And even through the deepest sobs he would find the laugh Jon didn’t think was in him.  Martin sifted through the mire and the muck and held fast to the tiny, shining things so easy to lose in the darkness.  Things Jon was certain were lost forever, only to be reignited and hung in the brightening sky of their story.  Even if they weren’t quite the moon yet.

It had also been Martin who, on a perfectly ordinary day, on a simple walk through the local farmers market, stopped to peruse one of the usual unremarkable stalls filled with crystals and oils and trinkets.  Jon had wandered off to procure the parsnips and the strawberries, unrelated recipes Martin swore, he had been tasked with finding.  When he returned he found him, a radiant monument tall among the faceless locals, rusty curls caressing his face in the salty breeze, carved of marble and rose quartz and gazing down at a pair of hematite rings on a velvet display box.  His eyes were distant, but not in the enthralled, disembodied way they were when he looked at the sea, or the broken way when they weren’t speaking, but in the contemplative, regarding of puzzle pieces way when he would look into the fire during their talks and turn his words in his mind over and over again like a rock tumbler until they were polished just right.

“Getting into crystals now, are we?” Jon had joked, “Surely I’m not so dull to be around that that’s becoming an attractive hobby.”

Martin snorted and shook his head.

“Supposed to mean healing, or grounding, or something.  Aligning your meridians, I think the lady said?  Whatever that means,” he elaborated, reaching out to touch.

They clinked weightily together, thick and glossy and the dark astral gray of a moonless night.  Martin turned over the card that went with them and read.

“’A grounding stone that belongs to the planet Mars.  It strengthens our connections to the earth and aids the warrior on their journey.  It is a stone of invincibility, but also fragility.  It balances yin and yang energies with its magnetic properties for the perfect reflection upon one’s own soul, astral, physical, and spiritual.’”

“Hematite, is it?” Jon asked, “Also more commonly called bloodstone.  You know if you scratch it, it leaves a red mark.  Like it’s bleeding.  Watch.”

He picked up one of the rings and firmly ran it down the corner of the card Martin had been reading from.  Sure enough, the black stone had left a faint, but starkly crimson mark on the yellowed paper.

“It BLEEDS?” Martin exclaimed in horror.

“It’s just a kind of iron oxide, so, rust, basically,” Jon explained with a chuckle, “Kind of weirdly romantic if you think about it?  This intimidating shiny black stone like armor, made of iron to boot, but with a bleeding heart at its core.”

“I just thought it was pretty, I didn’t know it bleeds,” Martin had laughed in that incredulous way he always did when Jon was telling him something he didn’t actually want to know, but appreciated anyway.

“I find that the strongest, prettiest things often do,” Jon had said in reply.  He remembered saying that particularly clearly, waxing poetic, feeling a swell of affection for the hugely beautiful man he leaned against and was adorably aghast at bleeding rocks.

“Yeah, I reckon they do,” Martin murmured back.

And then his cheeks had flushed bright red under his freckles and the stone steps of his shoulders crumbled a bit under the crushing ancientness and vastness of what he had originally been pondering.

“So, I mean, before you spoiled it with the blood thing.  I was thinking… Well, I was just having a browse and I saw these and I thought they were quite fetching, and then the lady told me they meant grounding and healing and a journey, like on the card.  A-And there were two of them, all by themselves, and everything else was so colorful and flashy these were just so… Um.  Maybe the blood and rusty iron thing makes it more poetic now, actually?  I don’t know.  Sorry I-  This sounded so much better in my head.”

It wasn’t his fault, Jon remembered thinking.  Martin couldn’t find the words because there weren’t any.  Not in this universe or any other.  Not for what they’d gone through, and especially not for what they meant to each other.

“I guess I was just thinking.  If… I bought one.  And wore it.  Sort of like.  Um.  You know.  Would… Would you-?” he had asked, his voice trembling.

Jon had never said yes, yes of course he would, faster or with more conviction in his life.  And there was that look again, rising from the ashes, that flooding of golden, unbound love and light, of eyes turned sky blue, of looking at the man who hung his moon in the sky come back to him.  He could still hang Martin’s moon all over again after so many nights of black clouds and darkness, even if it was only paper.  They’d paid for the rings in rumpled bills, exchanged them right then and there, and kissed each other as the crowd of oblivious people in a world they did not belong in flowed like a river around them.  Jon forgot the bag with the parsnips and strawberries.

But it didn’t matter.  It didn’t even matter that Martin’s fit nicely on his ring finger, but Jon had to wear his on his thumb, and even then sometimes on a chain around his neck for fear of losing it.  It didn’t matter that it was the closest thing they were ever going to get to a proposal and a wedding, consigned now forever to the shadows in a borrowed reality with only each other.  Because it was theirs, and they could begin to figure out how their broken pieces fit back together again.

But like most things that don’t matter, it didn’t until it did.

It began as simple things.  Seeing a wedding on some program they weren’t actually paying much attention to and Martin making a flippant, innocuous comment as he combed his fingers lovingly through Jon’s long and silvered chestnut hair in his lap about how he would have loved to have a cake that had a different flavor on every tier at their wedding.  Just so everyone could have something they liked.  And Jon woke up from his half catlike stupor and looked up at him with such aching regret as those words settled into the pit of his heart alongside ‘he thinks you hung the moon.’  

And soon they began to gather a collection of completely innocent remarks that ran the gamut from ‘would they have worn black or white?  Or one of each?  I don’t know… does it really matter?  And were these engagement rings or wedding rings?  I don’t know.  Neither?  both?  And do we say husband instead of boyfriend now?  Fiancé?  Whatever you want, Martin…’ To the heavier, cancerous weights that sank to the bottom of his gut, even below hanging the moon, like ‘I know Tim would have thrown the most amazing bachelor party for both of us, and his mum had always talked about him getting married someday like it was a farfetched pipe dream, but she would be happy for them, he thinks.’

He could never answer those questions.  There was too much at stake, too much finality and familiarity in them, a strange weightlessness in a world that weighed far too much.  The sun and moon continued their eternal dance of time, ignorant, unbothered, but Jon kept collecting those silent debts of normal life, secreting them away in a hidden singularity in his heart that only grew heavier and metastasized farther the more times Martin walked out at night, not him, beaming starlight from his eyes and his fingertips, to hang the moon again.  So soft, so full of wooly cows and pink heather and the smell of tea and sea salt and Martin’s shampoo on the pillow next to him did it become, that it was almost inevitable that one morning Jon awoke absolutely convinced none of it could be real.  

The moment he decided that, everything made so much more sense.  He could breathe again.  There was a reason he could never sit still, never just feel at ease or talk about the future like it was a real thing that could still happen.  He knew why the silence made his brain itch and why he still glanced around corners and glowered at anyone who dared let their gaze linger on his Martin too long.  Why Martin’s ring fit and his didn’t.  There was too much debt to the universe to be paid, too many broken promises, too many corpses in his wake, he had done nothing to deserve this idyllic life of love and peace and smallness and Martin.  It had to be Her doing, It’s doing, some carefully woven torture chamber that would lure them to the apex of their joy, the center of the web, where they would just be devoured over and over to empty husks and set up like chess pieces to fill with love and light just to knock down again.  He wasn’t free after all.

Jon had been halfway into his coat and halfway out the door to do, he didn’t know, something, anything, to go to the library to use their computer and research something he didn’t know he was looking for when Martin had seized his hand and whirled him around.

“Jon.  STOP.  It’s over.”

And he’d stopped.  He’d looked into those baleful blue eyes, fallen into their depths, landed on the precipice of madness, and broken.  It wasn’t over.  Not for him.  He finally understood.  It was still there.  The Eye.  It always had been.  Though not really, he understood slowly as he wept on his knees in their doorway into Martin’s chest, it had indeed closed forever on him, but it lingered as distant static, like a phantom limb, a metaphysical itch that could never be scratched.  Martin had cradled him close and listened, listened so patiently as he ripped the jagged black fear from the deepest, ugliest part of his heart, hauled it up bloody and messy from his throat and finally laid it bare for both of them to see.  And when it was done and he couldn’t cry anymore Martin had locked eyes with him in a way that made him forget any others could have ever existed outside of crystalline blue and filled with moonlight.

“Listen to me.  I know you think you have some cosmic burden to bear.  That you’re still wearing some… some fucked up crown and sitting on a throne of skulls and death and eyeballs or whatever image you want to put there, and that you have to sit and hurt and watch over everything so it doesn’t happen again, but...  Sorry, Jon, but that’s bullshit.  It’s just a scar now.  That’s all.  Just like the rest of them.  Ugly and beautiful and proof that you —Jonathan Sims— are still alive.  And you are not The Archivist anymore.  You’re just mine.  My Jon.”

He’d held his Jon’s stunned face in his hands and peppered kisses over the pock marks in his skin, over the slash on his throat, the burnt fingers that still couldn’t bend quite right, even the one on his chest, the one almost always hidden by fabric but the one he didn’t need to see to find.  His heart and fingers would always remember exactly where it was.  And he’d kept his lips there a moment, then turned his ear to his chest and wrapped his arms around his waist to listen to his heartbeat like a trembling little bird.

“If I can hear it and feel it.  So can you,” he whispered.

Unsteady fingers curled desperately into Martin’s silky locks, hematite loop cool against his scalp, “Thank you…”

Martin stayed for the kiss on top of his head he knew was coming and smiled.

“Okay, so it’s simple to fix if you think about it,” he murmured into Jon’s chest, “We just need that thing, you know?  The thing that makes you feel like you’re still doing the thing, but you’re not.  What was the word for it again?  A placeholder?  Like when you quit smoking and you hold a pencil or a straw or something that’s not actually a cigarette so you can wean yourself off the ritual?”

Jon blinked owlishly down at him as he dried his eyes.

“A… placebo?  Are you talking about a placebo?”

“Yeah!  That’s it!  We just need to find you a placebo for Knowing things!  That’s all.  Like… reality shows, or-or zoo cams or something!  We’ll figure it out together.  Alright, love?  I promise you.  It’ll be okay.”

Jon was skeptical, so very skeptical, but if Martin was determined to find a balm to soothe his jagged, ontological scars he would happily play the part of lab rat for him.  They’d tried a myriad things to replicate the feeling of Knowing and looking something deep within him still craved.  The zoo and animal livestreams were a bust, cute and entertaining as they were, but animals weren’t ever the purview of The Eye and the camera itself was barely a scrap.  Reality shows came closer, the more salacious the better, but even that temporary fix wore off when Jon’s disgust with the overall content and participants outweighed any benefit.  Martin was just happy to have finally converted him to Bake Off, at least.  They tried people watching in the square in the village, but it made Jon far too self-conscious and guilty.  He used the binoculars exactly once, and that was to look at the cows in the fields, and the choose-your-own-adventure books Martin had been certain would strike a sagacious chord wound up in the donation bin at the library.  But that was when he was struck with a bolt of genius.

Unbeknownst to Jon, which brought him no small measure of glee, Martin ordered, received, and then set up with a literal bow in their back garden the finest telescope he could afford on his meager savings.  He’d researched for days, asked on every amateur astronomer forum he could find, and had it delivered to the grocers so he could make it a proper surprise.  He’d even gone so far as to attack and blindfold a hapless Jon the moment he made it home from work on the day it was ready, and stood behind him giddily bouncing as he tore the tea towel away from his eyes.

“A… Telescope?” he’d blurted dumbly.

“Yes!  It’s perfect, right?  I asked around to find the one that had all the best features, and this one has the best overall magnification and the most lenses, but it doesn’t have the little satellite positioning thing?  I figured you wouldn’t want that anyway, you always like figuring things out and finding things on your own better.”

Martin had been positively radiant.  Jon had just stared at the gawping black tube and chewed the inside of his cheek as he processed what to say.

“I mean… thank you, Martin, really.  It was a sweet thought, but if the binoculars didn’t-“

“Screw the binoculars!  This is different!” Martin happily insisted, “You can look at so much more!  Stars and planets and galaxies and what have you, and it can maybe be sort of like you’re looking for other worlds?  Wormholes or whatever?  Or signs of The Fears and where they’ve gone?  Or even if the stars are the same here as they were back before?  Space literally has so many things to LOOK at we can’t even count them!  This has got to be it!”

Jon tried to smile and laugh and agree to try it out, at the very least, if only because Martin was beaming so sweetly with pride and hope.  Though that first night he didn’t, ushering them back in with promises of tomorrow, Martin, I promise tomorrow.  Tomorrow had been a lie.  As had been the next night.  In fact, it took Jon a full week to even remember they even had a telescope, and that was only after getting the smuggest, Cheshire grin out of Martin after casually mentioning there would be a visible, if partial, lunar eclipse that night.  He’d relented, only because he’d entrapped himself, and they’d both bundled up, looked in the manual for the best size lens to view the moon with, poured a few glasses of wine, and turned their eyes to the stars.

Martin had gone first, gripping the eyepiece and adjusting the focus all the while gasping in awe.  It was so beautiful he’d burst into poetry with a crooked grin.

“Art thou pale for weariness?  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth, and ever changing, like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy?  Sounds a little familiar, eh?” he joked, casting a wry look over his shoulder.

Jon rolled his eyes fondly.

“Gross.  Keats again?”

“Nope, Shelley this time, and even he thinks you ought to have a look at the moon.  I think you’ll find you have a lot in common.”

Jon had sighed obligingly and shuffled to the telescope, fully expecting to look at something bright and round with a bit of a shadow on it that was distinctly unremarkable, have another glass of wine, and then go back inside to snuggle by the fire.  What he saw in that tiny pinhole of light pierced straight through the hazel brown of his eye and plunged him into another world entirely.

The sands of the moon glowed the purest white in the refracted light of the distant sun with which it waltzed.  He could see in crisp, shadowy relief the innumerable scars she bore, the depth and breadth of Ptolemaeus, the boundless lonely flatness of the maria, named for the oceans they were once thought to be, an insult to the rock plains forged a millennia ago in birth by cataclysmic fire.  Every crater remained wrought in perfect, frozen detail with no erosion or foliage to slowly heal them over, and she beamed them proudly, ostentatiously in her heavenly light.  A hulking, ancient protectorate, hung by the hands of creation at the dawn of time for a fledgling planet, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and yet so crystal clear and unafraid as he perused her millions of years of cosmic sentinel through a lens.  It was dwarfing, humbling, viscerally awe inspiring in a way he dared not voice for fear of snuffing out the fragile glow of wonder and excitement welling in his chest he had been so certain was gone forever.

Astronomy had never been something that had particularly interested Jon, back when his entire reality from the moment his childish hands had touched a single book was spent peering into shadows and watching his own back.  There was no point in wondering what lay among the stars when danger and death lurked so close behind with slavering jaws ever poised at his throat on terra firma, but now.  Now, he had been living in an alternate world, dimension, reality, somewhere, he couldn’t even say for sure.  He’d been hurled potentially through the very stars that twinkled coquettishly above, flashed through their nebulous veils and curtains under their indifferent gaseous gazes, but seen nothing.  Here was a vast expanse of complete chaotic indefiniteness inviting him in to see what few had ever seen, to guess and hypothesize and gesture wildly at secrets only the stars could keep.  To Know.

Jon had jerked back so suddenly from the telescope to survey the entirety of the astral dome above them that Martin had choked on his wine.

“Jon?  Are you quite alright?”

“Yes, I…” he’d murmured, only even half hearing that Martin had said anything at all, stars reflected in his wondering dark eyes, “I’m fine, I just… How… How much more can this see?  How deep does it go?”

Jon hadn’t seen the victorious smirk on Martin’s face as he set down his wine glass and picked up the instruction manual and lens guide.  They’d watched the rest of the eclipse, of course, marveling through the lens at the inky trickle of shadow over craggy white, but then they’d changed the lens to the strongest one, according to the guide, and spent the rest of the evening triangulating their position beneath their slice of the universe and plotting out the various stars, planets, and constellations above.  Jon had even dashed inside to grab a mostly blank notebook and had filled several pages with notes and observations and things to research later, all while Martin held back tears watching him come so alive over a project he didn’t even know he needed.  Eventually though, sleepiness and cold claimed him, and he kissed his beloved goodnight and left him, more than gladly, to ride out the intellectual flare up until it burnt both him and itself out.  

Martin had no clue what time it was when he finally returned, and it didn’t even matter.  All that mattered was at some point, a practically frozen Jon had climbed into bed, snuggled up close behind and wrapped his arms around him to kiss the back of his neck so softly like the wings of a butterfly and whisper.

“Thank you.”

Another victorious smirk and a loving murmur.

“Told you so.”

Where there had been nothing but an Eye shaped hole in him, scarred around the edges and aching in its vacuum, Jon had filled it with the names of nebulas and quasars, of the myth of Andromeda, and Orion, and Castor and Pollux, or Hercules, and why they had all been hung in the stars for eternity.  The stories were much the same as he remembered, but he’d found slight eccentricities, tiny irregularities in the sky which fascinated him even more so.  Night after night he would look at a different astral body, chart it down in his notebook, then come bounding in with starlight beaming from his eyes and his fingertips with some cry of eureka.

“Martin!  Did you know here Polaris is in the south and Sirius is in the north?”

“Martin!  Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy is actually a little closer to the Milky Way here?”

“Martin, you have to come see this!  Oh, no it’s not weird this time, it’s just I finally got Saturn in the telescope and you can actually see the rings!”

His nightly herald would always be different, but Martin would always rise from the comfort of the couch, put his slippers on, and let Jon talk as long as he needed to about his latest discovery, watching him smile again while he, too, watched the matching smile it never failed to ignite illuminate Martin’s face and they lit each other up in the fused brilliance of a binary star.

Martin no longer hung the moon for Jon, he’d finally just up and quite literally given it to him, and there was no mortal way to repay him for that.  Or so he’d thought.  It came to him, as most flashes of brilliance do, on a night he hadn’t even been thinking about it at all.  All he had been doing was sitting in a lawn chair with his telescope long after Martin had gone to bed, chewing his pencil idly, vaguely missing a cigarette and pondering notes on Vega and Lyra between watching it through his lens.  He’d been stuck for days on Vega and its potentiality for another solar system and what that could imply for their new Earth and their new sun, as well as Lyra and the tragic tale of Orpheus and his doomed love.  Even in their new reality he still turned back at the end of the story, still could not contain the roiling, effusive adoration to his own downfall.

Bitterness had risen like bile in the back of Jon’s throat as he replayed the myth again in his head, unsure why it was vexing him and rewinding in his brain so torturously.  “Stupid, stupid man, if he’d only just…” he’d thought again and again, each time giving the star-crossed musician a different decision, a different choice, urging him down another path somewhere, anywhere along his journey, but in the end, he’d always looped back around to the original.  It was the point of the story, after all.  Not so much the love itself or even the loss of it, but the power of it over one man and the creation born from his mourning and eventual destruction.  Patently Greek.  But the chorus would always begin again in Jon’s head.  If he’d kept his Eurydice, if his songs had been happy, if he hadn’t spent the rest of his life mourning so intensely he was eventually destroyed for it, would he have become the paragon of healing he was, the oracle, the lynchpin of the fate of the world he had eventually become?  Which of them was the stupider man?

Jon was only mortal now, he was no longer all-seeing oracle and dark savior, he had no authority to say, but it was a trifle easier to ponder the hubris of Orpheus instead of his own.  He couldn’t help but think, achingly, sometimes the heroes just deserved to pull their beloved from the pit of Tartarus, promise to love them for eternity, and then simply get married, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after.  A story wasn’t a story if it didn’t write itself upon the very bones and sinews of its heroes, that was the law of the universe, but when the story was done and the cracks and fissures in their tissues had faded to myth and legend, what became of the heroes who did not die a tragic or heroic death and were not hung in the stars?  What happened to heroes left behind?  Twisting his bloodstone ring on his thumb idly as it caught the shivering fire of those stars in its dark mirrored surface, the musical arrow of the muses pierced his heart, wide-eyed in wonder.  He’d asked the universe, but he already knew the answer.  He’d always known.  He knew, and he knew it with such clarion joy as he had never known anything before.

He could no longer be the man who hung Martin’s moon, he hadn’t been for a long time.  That much was clear to him, but he could certainly do something else.  Perhaps they had grown past the need for moon hangings in the first place.  He knew how their story ended.

It took months of saving, secreting, preparation, and then finally just simply waiting for the perfect, clear night.  The moment it came, the moment he knew it was the night, Jon struck without hesitation.  Poor Martin wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the couch, into Jon, when he returned from a late shift at the grocers, but found himself instead stuffed right back into his coat with a picnic basket in hand and hauled out into the frigid night in a flurry of Jon with little time to protest.  He bounded up the hill behind their little cottage beneath a perfect blanket of stars flaming coldly overhead, trailing Martin’s hand in his behind with his breath coming in silvery puffs of clouds, and paying no heed to the whining.

“Jon, whatever it is, does it have to be NOW?” Martin panted, “I am absolutely knackered and it’s beyond freezing and wouldn’t it be nicer just to curl up with a cuppa and fall asleep in front of Star Wars or something?  Doesn’t that have enough stars and space in it?”

Dauntless, Jon only tugged harder.

“There’s tea in the basket, and I’ve seen Star Wars.  And yes, it has to be tonight, it’s really important, I promise.”

“Look.  I love you.  So much.  You know this, and please know it is with the utmost love and deepest affection in my heart that I point out that you say that every time, and you’ve still shown me Pluto like, a hundred separate times.  While I quite like it, and I still feel sorry for it being bumped out of the solar system and all, it’s just a dot?  How many times can you look at a dot?” Martin sighed.

His words finally threw a caltrop into Jon’s warpath, and he paused, turning over his shoulder woundedly.

“What?  No, it’s not Pluto, I swear just- Please, Martin?  I’ll never ask again if you don’t want to, but just for tonight, please?” he pleaded.

Martin winced, and immediately folded under the onslaught of doleful honeyed brown eyes under a nimbus of stars.

“Oh, lord there you go with the puppy dog eyes.  Okay, okay fine, but there better be a nip of whiskey in this,” he chided lovingly with a gesture at the thermos in the basket.

The smile flared back to life brightly on Jon’s face as he turned back up the craggy little footpath to the top of the hill.

“Of course, hot toddy with tea.”

“Ooh, lovely, you do know me.”

The rest of the way was trivially short to the small, flat hilltop surrounded by heather where Jon had already set up a blanket and the telescope over a pristine vista of the dark line where the stars sank into the sea.  He ushered Martin to sit down first, then perched on his hip beside him and poured him a generous helping of tea and whiskey from the thermos before pouring his own.

“Thanks, much.  Right then, what exactly are we up here to look at that we couldn’t see from our garden?” Martin asked, accepting his cup of potent hot toddy and sipping it gratefully around the lemony steam that billowed up.

Taken aback by the sudden logic lobbed into the center of his romantic posturing, Jon looked momentarily stunned, as if someone had slapped him upside the head.

“Oh!  Oh, um, well-!  Ahah, that is to say- Uh.  There is a reason for all this.  It’s not that we couldn’t see it from our garden, we very much could have.  B-But it’s so beautiful up here, and you can kind of hear the sea?  And it’s nice and peaceful, and the heather is still blooming a bit and um…” he trailed off, cheeks burning.

“Okay…?” Martin probed, frowning a little.

“Er, actually...  It’s less about the stars than it is- W-Well it is about the stars.  Let’s get that clear.  But to be completely honest I mostly just… I-I well.  There’s something I need to tell you?”

Jon was ill-prepared for the look of abject horror on Martin’s face as he went paler than the moon overhead.

“Shit, what is it?  Did you find something?  You saw something?  There’s been a sign of The Fears?  Oh god it’s not HER is it?” he asked frantically, nearly slopping hot toddy all over his lap.

“What?  No!  No, none of that!” Jon spluttered, aghast.

Martin regained a modicum of color in his face and breathed in measuredly.

“Okay, so then what is it?  Oh god, you’re not… Jon you’re not ill, or something, are you?  Please, you can just tell me if-“

“No, I am not ill either, damn it, Martin!  If you would just listen to me!  I-!” Jon moaned exasperatedly, “I just wanted to do something… nice.  Something nice for you.  And nicer than I normally would because I am apparently much worse at crafting romantic moments than I thought and-“

“Wait…” Martin cut in, eyes gleaming with realization, “Jonathan Sims… Are you grand gesturing?”

“Well I am certainly trying but you are making it exceedingly difficult!” he retorted, red in the face and breathless.

“Oh my god, you are!  I’m so sorry!” Martin laughed brightly, “Oh god Jon you poor thing I’m so sorry, I’m awful, I’m the absolute worst!  No please!  Don’t let me spoil it.  Please go on.”

Grinding the heel of his palm into his forehead, Jon tried to summon the words again, only for Martin’s strong, warm hands to take it from him and tip his chin up to gaze into his eyes.

“Hey.  Hey, Jon.  Look at me,” he breathed, looking into his eyes idolatrously, “I’m sorry.  I love you.  You can tell me.”

Taking the steadiness from those clear blue depths he needed, Jon focused on them, on the strawberry blond curls tossing in the icy breeze, of the kiss of chilled pink under his freckles, and that eternal, sunshine smile.

“Okay,” he finally answered, smiling softly.

With a deep, shuddering breath, and a long swig of whiskey laced tea for good measure, Jon drew himself up and fished deep in his soul for the words he had waited a millennium to say.

“Okay… So here it is.  Um… I’ve um, I’ve had a lot of time alone lately with my new hobby, as it were.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  A lot of it is overly complicated and ridiculous and doesn’t deserve to live outside of my head but… a lot of it has been about you, about us.  And I know we don’t need to-to put a label on us or put us into a… a box or anything like that.  But every time I look at this ring on my finger, I can’t help but remember we never actually talked about what they meant,” he began, holding out his left hand and fidgeting with the loose band around his thumb.

“Oh Jon, don’t worry about that.  It was just me being a big sappy, sentimental dork.  And if I recall correctly, we’d had a pretty awful row a night or two before, and I just wanted to feel close to you again, I guess?  We both know what they mean to us.  It doesn’t matter,” Martin assured him sweetly.

“Except that it does!” Jon insisted passionately, “That’s the point!  You are a big sappy, sentimental dork, Martin.  I bet you were the kid that had a dream wedding all planned in a notebook with pictures cut out of magazines and everything.  I adore that about you, but big sappy sentimental dorks should have big sappy, sentimental moments like huge, expensive seaside weddings with three-flavor cakes and all your friends and family and rose petals and dove releases and whatever else your heart could dream up.”

Martin snickered and shook his head, charmed at least by the mental image of kissing Jon on a seaside cliff at sunset while doves flew in glorious formation around them and everyone they had ever known and loved cheered.

“Pfft, I don’t need a grand wedding and all that, I just need-”

“Me.  I know,” Jon finished for him with a smirk, “I knew you’d say that.  Maybe not.  But you deserve one.  And I know I don’t use that word lightly, but it’s necessary in this case.  You deserve it.  All of it.  Me on one knee with a ring in a box, you deserve us picking out flowers and tuxedos and arguing over the font on the invitations.  You deserve Tim’s awful bachelor party and laughing at me at the altar because I had to read my vows off a card and they’re still so stiff and awkward and they pale in comparison to the beautiful poem you wrote about me.  You deserve smiling so hard your cheeks hurt and crying as we exchange rings.  All of it.”

Martin weighed his words carefully on his tongue with a sip of his boozy tea to chase away ghosts of things that never even were.

“I mean, sure, not going to say I never wanted that.  And I did have that stupid wedding notebook, by the way.  But all that became a pipe dream the minute we wound up here, right?  No use being upset about something that can never be.”

“That may be so, but the crux of it is… you also contented yourself with the idea of it never coming true not because we’re here, but because you didn’t think I wanted it,” Jon answered, his unspoken truth hanging heavy in the chill night air between them, “Every time you tried to tell me you wanted to be with me forever, I brushed it off and painted it gray and tucked it away and carried on the way we always were like nothing happened and it didn’t matter.  Because it was alright, really, you were just so happy to have what we have, that I didn’t die in your arms that night, that we were still together after everything.  That I at least kept that promise after I’d broken so many.  You were so grateful just for what you were gifted after we thought we would end with nothing you didn’t dare think to ask the universe for more and I am so, so sorry it took me so long to see that, Martin.  I’m so sorry.”

His voice broke.  The breath caught in Martin’s chest as he reached out to touch his wrist comfortingly.

“Jon, I-“

“No, please.  Please let me finish I… I can’t give you any of those things.  I can’t give you our friends back, I can’t give you cake and doves and the sunset and crying through vows in front of the vicar.  I can’t even give you an elopement at the register office because we still don’t legally exist.  And I guess for a long time I resented myself for that.  For all of it.  For stealing that from you, for dragging you through literal hell only to give you a shadow of a life stuck here with me because I betrayed you.  But- no stop, don’t say anything yet I’m not done.  B-But now I finally realize.  You’re right, Martin.  You were always right.  It doesn’t matter.  Those things are all just… things.  I said to you once, a long time ago, and I’m still not even sure if you really heard me, that I didn’t want to just survive.  It was true then, and maybe it wasn’t true for a while, but it’s certainly true again.  We did not fight tooth and nail to just survive.  We fought to live, and live together.  So what I’m saying is… I know now I don’t have to give you tuxedos and white roses as long as I give you something… Something to prove to you that you are my everything, my entire world, something to show you that I love you more than I have loved anything in my entire life.  That I want forever with you.  S-So I…” he trailed off, sucking in his breath to give his gesture of undying love the ardor and grandeur it deserved, “I bought us a star.”

The proclamation rang out like the toll of a bell, its gravity sonorous and quaking.  Martin blinked.

“You… I’m sorry?” he squeaked.

Jon set his empty thermos cup aside, flailed his hands in the air and shook his head frantically

“I-I know, I know it sounds mental just hear me out!” he protested, “Technically I didn’t buy the star, if we want to get picky about it.  I mean obviously no one can own a star.  Just the rights to name it?  It’s a thing you can do online.  I was a bit gobsmacked it was real to be honest.  I just had this silly idea when I was out looking at the stars.  I was looking at Lyra and thinking about you and Orpheus, and I… W-Well I just typed it in, ‘can you name a star?’ and it came right up.  Right then and there.  It um… comes with… hold on.”

Remembrance placed a gentle bookmark down on Jon’s fluttering thoughts, and he rummaged in the picnic basket for a moment before pulling out a navy-blue manila folder covered in stars and full of the paperwork and certificates that had come with registering theirs.  He handed it to Martin, who took it in place of his own empty cup, numb, muscles quivering under his jaw, and opened it to the glittering gold typeface that proclaimed ‘Congratulations!’.

“It comes with paperwork, too!  See?  So, it’s official, at least?  The Jon-Martin star.  Not a marriage license I know, but at least our names are together on something legal?  Our real names?  I figured even if we manage the fake identity thing we’d have to get married as not us.  Not really.  So…  I-It could be like our marriage certificate?” Jon explained, chewing his lower lip.

Martin said nothing as his hand turned the pages of the documentation, his eyes distant in a way Jon had never seen before.  Not disembodied and enthralled, not broken, not even regarding puzzle pieces.

“Oh!  Um, also I-I got us a binary star.  I forgot to mention that bit,” he went on, filling the sudden void, “It’s, ah- What a binary star is- It’s technically two?  But they’re caught up in each other’s gravity and they orbit each other so tightly they look like one star together, one that just shines a little brighter.  They’re bound together forever by the most powerful cosmic force in the universe.  Just like us.”

Only silence answered, punctuated by one last crisp whisper of paper, and then the folder closing with Martin’s spread fingers atop it, bloodstone gleaming in the vivid pale light of the night.  Jon’s heart pitched frantically in his chest, and desperate, stranded tears pricked at his eyes.

“I uh… I would have rather gotten us a whole constellation.  Heh, you know?  But they don’t do that, obviously,” he tried softly, his fingers barely brushing Martin’s knuckles, “They record heroes in constellations, after all.  Great deeds, doomed romances, lovers who can be together no other way… That would have been a better way to honor us, I think.  Our story.  A-And who knows?  Maybe back on our world there are a few new stars to remember what we did, to mark the place we left it, so that everyone we left behind can look up and remember us.  They don’t know how the story really ended, and they probably never will, but we do.  We do, and I want to end it right here, right now.  With our star shining above us ‘and they lived happily ever after.’”

Martin still said nothing, but his head bowed, casting a slice of shadow over his eyes, and his shoulders quivered as a thin, bright line of wet silver trickled down his cheek.  Jon felt the very sky shatter above and begin to crumble around him.

“Please… M-Make no mistake, Martin.  P-Perhaps the gesture is silly and meaningless, but it was all I could think to do to go with everything I’ve said tonight.  Martin… Martin, don’t you see?  These are my wedding vows to you.  This is me saying ‘I do’ and also ‘Martin K. Blackwood would you do me the honor of making me the happiest man in the universe?’  All at once.  This is me saying I swear to you I will be yours, through everything, until the end of time.  M-Maybe I wasn’t before.  Maybe I was still punishing myself, but I’m telling you, I’m ready now to have my happily ever after.  With you, Martin.  If you’ll have me.  If I haven’t-“

He would never finish.  In a dizzying blur of blue folder, flashing hematite, and a wreath of golden curls, Martin kissed the words off his lips.  He kissed him so hard and so fierce, through wracking sobs with his hands woven so raptly into his long, wavy locks he thought his lips would bruise and his fragile soul would finally shatter to pieces in Martin’s arms.  Undone, all Jon could do was surrender and kiss him back with equal passion, thumbing away the hot tears as they spilled freely down his cheeks and anointed them both with their cleansing, hoary heat.  Their lips parted and they panted softly against each other in the space between, each afraid to break the sacred, pulsing silence.

“You’re crying,” Jon whispered at length, “I’ve said something wrong. Martin, darling I’m so sorry.  I never meant to-”

Martin laughed, raspy with tears, but ethereal, sparkling, like stardust floating on the breeze.

“People are allowed to cry when they’re happy you stupid, silly man,” he murmured in between kissing him again, and again.

“Oh.  Oh.”

He kissed him one last time, that idiot man who always burnt the toast and always knew the facts but never knew what to say, who finally figured it out and bought him a star, and threw his arms around him, enveloping his slight, fragile form protectively in his embrace.

“I love you.  I love you so much.”

Jon sank into that warm, familiar comfort and buried his face in his shoulder.

“I love you, too, Martin.  I want to be yours for the rest of my life.  I want to be me, I want to be us.”

“I know.  I’ve always known.  Oh god, you do know that right?  I know that you love me, it’s written in everything you do and say.  I have never, ever once doubted you love me with everything you are.  Even in the moments I was afraid that… that maybe we just weren’t meant to be together, I still knew it wouldn’t be because you didn’t love me.  Never because you didn’t love me.  Just maybe that we didn’t fit together anymore,” Martin replied in a small voice through his tears as they spilled down his cheeks.

As much as he wanted to vehemently deny there was ever a chance they might have not fit back together again after they had both been so shattered, to kiss him and tell him not in a million years would there ever have been a future where they weren’t Jon and Martin against the world, Jon knew it to be inescapably true.

“I’m so sorry you ever had to be afraid of that,” he swore, digging his fingers into Martin’s back pointedly, “After everything.  After we fought so hard to escape fear itself.  That I almost let it truly win in the end.  That I couldn’t just let go… Because… Because this was never about The Eye, was it?”

A heave of breath and its shuddering exhale shook Martin’s body free of lifetimes of grief, and fear, of ugliness carried far beyond the borders of their souls.  His fingers curled tighter in unspoken reply.

“No Jon, no it wasn’t, but I’m so very glad you finally figured that out.”

“Me, too…” he whispered.

They held each other in the quiet wake of being a moment and let the astral plane wheel calmly overhead.  An impatient star twinkled.

“Wait… you never answered me,” Jon finally said as he pulled back, sliding his elegant fingers down Martin’s strong arms.

“Huh?” Martin blurted, scrubbing under his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.

“About marrying me tonight.  You never actually said yes, so…”

A twinkle in his eye and a slight mischief to his grin, Jon dove back into the picnic basket and emerged with a velvet ring box.  Martin’s hands flew to his mouth.

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did!  Nothing fancy, but I thought it was high time to retire the blood rings,” he explained rising from his former perch on his hip to kneel properly.

The box cracked neatly open, and inside lay a simple, white gold band with a tiny circle of milky moonstone embedded in it on a midnight-blue satin cushion, blindingly bright against the dark.  Martin sobbed joyfully all over again.

“So, uh… I suppose if it had just been us, if we’d just been together, without everything, and we’d arrived at this moment.  I would have done much the same.  I would have brought you somewhere beautiful, somewhere I could teach you some inane fact you didn’t actually care about, but liked because it came from me.  Emulsifiers in ice cream and rum raisin…” they both snickered, “And I would have tried my best to make it into some sort of romantic metaphor but completely bunged it up and you would be laughing as I got down on one knee, just like this.  And it would have just been simple.  To the point.  Just… Will you marry me?  So…”

Jon assumed the traditional position, on one knee, arms outstretched, his every slender point a star in a perfect constellation of love.

“Will you marry me?”

Their eyes met, across a thousand different realities, across a thousand different worlds, carried on celestial winds to fall hopelessly, inexorably, into each other’s orbit.

“Yes, yes I do believe I will.”

With one last farewell kiss upon it for what it had meant for them both, Jon slipped the bloodstone ring from Martin’s finger and replaced it with the delicate band made of starlight.  It took its place radiantly, and shone as Martin drew his hand back to admire it with an equally radiant grin before it dimmed with concern.

“But what about you?” he asked worriedly as he watched the old ring entombed lovingly in the box.

Jon only smirked and produced a second box from the basket, which he offered on his open palm out to Martin.

“Naturally, I got one for myself.  Couldn’t pass up a chance to get a wedding ring that actually fits, could I?  It’s just… Don’t you think you deserve to give it to me the way you would want?” he urged.

Martin took the box eagerly, biting his lower lip in thought.

“Not sure you want to give me that freedom.  I had about five different ways of asking you in my head and all of them you would have hated so, so much.  But I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t kind of the point,” he answered wryly.

Jon chortled.

“Sorry I, the unromantic one, sprung this on you, the romantic one.  But I did want to surprise you.  I-I mean you can still write me a vows poem later?  If you want to, of course.  I’d love to have it, even if I don’t actually get to hear it at our wedding.”

Martin’s face flushed immediate crimson and his eyes darted coyly away as he toyed with the wedding band box in his lap.

“Oh that?  A-Actually I… I have it memorized, i-if you really wanted to hear it.”

“You- WHAT?” gasped Jon, his cheeks flushing in tandem.

“Oh yeah, I wrote my vows poem for you ages ago and I’ve gone over it so many times I know it by heart.  It was comforting, okay?  I-I’d read it again when times were good and I thought maybe you’d actually- um… a-and when times were not so good, when you were gone, in your own head, when I was afraid we were broken for good, whenever I needed it.  I’ve read it over a thousand times and never changed a thing from the first time I penned it.  Never needed to.  I’m surprised I haven’t recited it in my sleep at this point,” Martin admitted sheepishly.

Jon’s entire body flushed with a solar heat that melted his joints and his heart into a swirling flare of adulation.

“I can think of no better way, then, to receive my ring,” he breathed, reaching out to cup Martin’s cheek in his hand, “I’ve had my turn, now it’s yours.”

In mirror ballets of love exchanges, Martin cradled Jon’s hand against his cheek as he spoke the first lines of the vows etched ever on his being softly into his palm.

“Let he who, shadow dwelling, must In paper, pen, and book be bound Shake off the chains of dark and rust And chart his own bright fate unfound.

Let he with lifelong burdens borne Cut paper wings with thread of gold And hand in hand, the sky forsworn Flit clouds and sun in laughter bold.

Let he whose blood and soldier’s ken The world did shield from dark and fear Heal fast those wounds, be whole again And sleep at last, held close and dear.

Bring him to me with spirit free With stars in eyes and music sung From lips a joyful promise be One soul conjoined, one fate’s thread strung.

Two hearts rejoice in love renowned. We lift our heads, alive, uncrowned.”

He waited until the last couplet to pull the ring from the box and slide it onto Jon’s finger where it too, fit perfectly, like it had always been there, and shone defiantly bright in the moonlight.  Jon wept.  He had been weeping since the first words of verse left his beloved’s lips, but seeing that ring like a piece of his missing soul returned to him undammed the tears effusively.

“God that was… Martin, I don’t have words.  I-It was… so beautiful.  You’re so beautiful.  Thank you,” he cried fervently, “I wish I could tell you properly how much that meant, but I just-“

“Hey… That’s alright.  I’m the words guy.  You’re the emulsifiers guy.  Making you cry is all I need to see to know how you feel,” Martin assured him warmly, reaching out to brush his tears away as he chuckled.

“Yeah… add this one to the running tally.”

“Oh, I have,” Martin snickered, “Speaking of!  Now we’ve done the crying through vows bit.  Shouldn’t we say the ‘I do’ bit, as well?”

Jon pursed his lips with a shrug as he reached out with his left hand to take Martin’s left as well, twining their fingers together

“Yes, I suppose we should.  I don’t see why not.  Well then, Martin, do you?”

“I do.  And Jon, do you?”

“I do.”

“You may now soundly snog the groom.”

“Martin…”

The emphatic drawl of his name the way Jon only called it when he was frustratingly enamored of him perished gently against Martin’s velvet lips as they caressed his.  They kissed slowly and reverently, sealing a pact ordained by the heavens long before either of them had seen the stars in the other’s eyes, lighting with white flame the torch to guide them for the first time, forward.  They broke it only to punctuate it with two more featherlight kisses and a breathless laugh, bowing their foreheads together in deference to the forces of fate and the universe.

“I know this isn’t the wedding either of us ever dreamed of, but as far as I’m concerned, it was perfect,” Jon murmured, nuzzling closer into his husband, swaddling the new, fledgling and beautiful word in his heart.

“Well, hey, what is a wedding really other than just a formal declaration that this is it?  This is us, we’re forever, no matter what.  We did it.  And you did it for me, in the STARS, Jon… Can we just remember that again?  You put us in the actual stars.  I am so writing a ballad for our constellation later, you do know this.”

“Oh lord.  Of course you are.  But really, it was the least I could do, after you’ve done so much for me, sacrificed everything for me.  Waited for me for so long.”

“And you came back to me,” Martin reminded him passionately, “And I don’t just mean back to life, here, in this world.  I mean you came back, Jon, MY Jon, the Jon I was in love with the moment I laid eyes on him.  The fidgety and obstinate Jon who can’t make a decent cup of tea to save his life, who puts on two different socks in the morning because his nose is already in the paper or a book, who teaches me about bleeding rocks and binary stars and still reacts to the simplest acts of kindness like a warm cranberry orange scone without asking for one like they’re divine miracles he is undeserving of, who looks at me like I hung the moon or something every time.  Even when I thought I was a complete and total waste of a human being, you, Jonathan Sims, the most beautiful, amazing, brilliant man to ever walk the Earth, looked at me like I hung the moon.  And that was… Still is… everything to me.”

The heavens shifted, the stars wheeled, the last piece clicked smartly, smugly into place.

“W-What did you say…?” Jon asked with such urgency, grabbing his hands so fiercely, Martin startled.

“Wh-I-I don’t-?  Which part?  The moon hanging part?” he stuttered, rolling his eyes fondly as he realized mid-sentence, “Oh, right.  Ugh, Jon are you seriously going to get after me about your weird vendetta against idioms at our wedding?  Because if you are that would be annoyingly adorable and so intensely you and kind of perfect, but also can you not on THIS particular occasion?”

The laugh that tore from Jon’s throat was half mad, half euphoric as the weight of the moon lifted from his shoulders and became naught but an indifferent sentinel disc in the sky once more.

“No no no, it’s just… It’s funny, I had more than a few things very, very wrong for a very, very long time.  That’s all.  Don’t worry about it,” he explained, leaning in and pressing a delicate kiss to Martin’s forehead, “If you’re the one who hung the moon after all, then I suppose ‘written in the stars’ will have to do for me.”

Martin lit up with literary glee.

“Oh ho!  Two space related idioms in one go?  What a rare treat!  Maybe this is your gateway drug into puns…” he teased impishly.

“Absolutely no chance in hell.”

They both laughed, laughed with the billowing icy breath that reached with victorious fingers up to the heavens.  They laughed, messily sniffing back the pesky drip of tears and cold.  They laughed with lightness of the encumbrance of hematite armor shed, its bloody protections no longer needed to cage wounded hearts and keep them safe and close.  They laughed in breath and also in the dancing points of light in their eyes as they fell into one another free from gravity.

“So uh… Do I get to see my star tonight, or don’t I?” Martin finally remembered, relishing the utterly horrified yelp from Jon.

“Oh god I completely-!  Y-Yes!  Yes of course, it’s already set up at the proper coordinates!” he had already sprung to his feet, “Oh, though, hang on, it took longer to get to the star viewing part than I anticipated, so I might need to adjust it a bit.  Oh!  And I have a little strawberries and champagne, if you like?”

“I do like, please and thank you!”

Jon set to readjusting the telescope to the proper ascension and declination while Martin poured them two glasses of crisply bubbling champagne.  They twined their arms to drink a toast from each other’s glass, ‘to us’ or ‘to happily ever afters’, or to several other messily rambled toast worthy sentiments.  They couldn’t decide and toasted to all of it.  They ate plump red strawberries and licked the juice from each other’s fingers as they looked at their star, which was, after everything, just a dot, just like Pluto, but Martin had to admit that he rather liked looking at dots after all.  And that one was their dot.  The warm intoxication of love and champagne begged for music, and someone fumbled in the cold for a wedding playlist on some app, somewhere, it didn’t matter, just as long as they could join hands, gaze into each other’s eyes and dance inelegantly, stepping on each other’s toes, under the umbrella of stars in a gentle rain of moonlight.

“I don’t see your problem with cliches, idioms and all that, really…” Martin mused at length, laying his head on Jon’s shoulder as they slowly spun to the rhythm of a longing ballad and the song of the sea, “Like this stupid, great song.  They’re familiar and cozy and everyone knows them.  They’re like… like old friends.  Always there to rely on when we can’t come up with the words ourselves, because sometimes we can’t.  And if something trite and silly sums up the way you feel, why not just let it be?  Sometimes things are said over and over again because some truths are universal, you know?  They’re just… human.”

Jon pressed a kiss into the mop of curls that tickled his nose and smelled faintly of toasted sugar and lavender and mused on all of the romantic cliches that had just passed through his mind unbidden.  Who was he to deny he was but one star in the sky, a single gear in the grand mortal mechanism of the universe.  If he had handed himself over to the humanity of it all instead of rusting, stopping, looking outside where there was never anything to see, perhaps he could have had this dance much sooner.  It didn’t matter though, until it did, because that night Martin took his breath away, made his world go round, he was head over heels for his match made in heaven, and better than heaven, they were written in the stars.

“You know what, Martin?” Jon laughed in reply, “Tonight, being what it is, I am willing to concede.  You are absolutely right.”

“I’m glad…” came the tender acceptance, followed by a distinctly puckish beat of silence, “Then does this mean I can I start saying love you to the moon and back?”

“Don’t push your luck...”

#The Magnus Archives #TMA #Magnuspod #JonMartin #JMart #jmartweddingchallenge #hey-there-hunter #Jonathan Sims #Martin Blackwood #Fan fiction

[natromanxoff]

Here is the interview that has been translated by Google, from the link ‘1′ on this post:

After Freddie Mercury visited Zagreb, it was clear why he was leading two big guys everywhere

By YugoPapir

TODAY, exactly 25 years ago , the great Freddie Mercury passed away , and on that occasion we remember his visit to Zagreb and the interview he gave on that occasion. It was back in 1979 ...

"In a situation of useless concert rock scene (such as at least Belgrade), an interview with one of the world's famous rock stars is a special event. However, although the man is not in a position to choose and has no experience with Jagger, Lennon or Dylan, these conversations are sometimes it comes down to the usual routine of exchanging questions and answers ... Kind me, kind respondent ... I smile, the respondent smiles I ask a question, I know the answer in advance.

Hand on heart, that was exactly what the conversation with the first man of the Queen group was like. Despite the millions of records sold, the sound clearly defined and the status of the stars, the guys from the group do not have a particularly interesting "story" behind them. The only way to do something extraordinary is to try to provoke the interlocutor, but one usually doesn't have the opportunity to do so in such "serially" organized meetings between stars and the press, where a bunch of idle idlers are dragged around without much smarter work in mind.

The press conference was held in "Intercontinental" full of boring luxury and, on this occasion, unusual teams. After a short wait (the stars are always late), the Queen appeared, dressed as employees of an English insurance company on vacation.

After a few moments of doubt, various guys of unknown faces and occupations attacked them. Of course the main victim was Mercury. Honestly, I didn’t expect so many people with tape recorders, notebooks and similar supplies. It is not only clear to me where they will be able to place all this, because I have not seen the results of that journalistic attack anywhere except in "Polet" from an interview done on another occasion.

Maybe it's better not to publish it anywhere because I heard so much nonsense and ignorance in a short time that I felt pity for poor Freddy. Now it is clear to me why he is taking with him two guys, as if removed from the mountain, who were strategically arranged around the front door during the whole press conference.

And finally when the crowd subsided I seized the opportunity to talk to Mercury.

Not particularly tall, black, in a leather jacket and jeans, he looked more like one of the tappers in front of Belgrade cinemas than the world-famous rock old man. Stoic accepted to give an interview for "Jukebox", although over time he approved and became somewhat more exhaustive. I probably bothered him less than the others.

As usual, I started from the beginning ...

"It's a long story. Brian, Roger and I knew each other since we were students. John came later. We had experiences with earlier bands where we played as high school students. When we created Queen we had a clear idea of ​​what we wanted to do and our work today is the evolution of these plans and dreams.We had a very clear guiding star.From the very beginning.

Is it still clear that guiding star after all these successes and millions of records sold?

Why not. The halls where we play are always full, the records are on the charts. Why not?

From the articles we read about you, it could not be said that the critics really like you. What does it look like to be in one of the world’s leading rock bands while at the same time reading how records are being ruthlessly denigrated?

This is the case only with the English press. It could not be said that we live in the best relationship with them. The English today have no choice but to be cynical, which is why the press is like that to us. That’s why you can rarely read our interview at NME or Melody Maker. There is no point in us being a training ground for them. We learned to live with it and, you know, I didn’t care too much about it. Our records sell well. In recent years, a big thing has happened with punk, and we are understood as the total opposite.

One of the main drawbacks is the dependence on technology. Your records are lavishly produced to perfection ...

You can't survive without technology today. Loudspeakers, light instruments and the most ordinary rock band look like an LP&P to a folk group or a symphony orchestra ... Even today they can't survive without technology. Electricity is all around us and you can't avoid it. The production on our records is rich, but I don’t think it’s an end in itself as many want to present. I play a plain piano, John a plain “Fender bass,” only Brian has special “pranks” that I make myself, but that’s not overdone either. The most important thing is that it is all in the service of the idea.

You are all college educated. Do you think that had an impact on this direction of the group. I have noticed that there are prejudices in English newspapers about such groups, in fact about groups that originated from such an environment, starting from “Genesis” onwards?

First of all, we don't have much to do with "Genesis", then such prejudices are the most common nonsense. I don't see any purpose for them. I don't even know that being in college automatically makes us intellectuals.

I have no doubt that you spend a lot of time in the studio preparing the album, that's obvious. You've created some kind of art since filming (interrupts me) ...

We record, than what. That's what everyone does! But we made a style out of it. We do everything in a special way and I think there is imagination. It's specificity, not covering up weaknesses or something like that ... We don't even try to reproduce the sound from our records ... It's hours and hours of work and there are hundreds and hundreds of recorded sections.

The record is one thing, and the concert is quite another. Although some people pass it on to us as a flaw, we are very happy with their gig. It would be a tedious and boring job to always play the same ... At one time we were thinking of introducing assistant musicians to our performances, but I don't think that would work. It is our music and we understand it best. Such a way would only bring us unnecessary problems and obligations.

Can any significant changes in your sound and direction be expected on the next panels. There is a lot of criticism that you got into a certain "gyre" ...

Again about the critics ... we care the least about them! We have created a certain sound, success, image and that is what we are. It is logical for the group to evolve slowly ... It would be stupid to try something radically different ... And that is what the "scribblers" expect to have something to fill the newspaper with. Drastic changes lead nowhere and make no sense. You can't become something else overnight ...

Normally we will change. Whoever has followed our work so far is clear in which direction. This is also evident from our latest albums. There is no longer as much luxury as at "Opera" or "Racing" ... I think that our next albums will develop in that direction.

The group "Queen" is considered to be a very stable formation. No sharper disagreements were heard, and only the drummer had solo outings. Should we expect new solo projects and do they pose a danger to the group?

Although Roger has a lot of experience with solo attempts, I don't see any danger in that for the group "Queen". I think the best we can provide, we provide together. Solo attempts are just a small change of climate and refreshment. There is no special need to try our luck outside the team. When we realize we have nowhere else to go, the group disbands - there are no illusions that it won’t come and we don’t even think about it.

Do you have any information about your audience in Yugoslavia, and does the sale of records in our small market mean anything to you financially?

Well, I've heard from people in our company that we sell a lot of records. Do you see these gold and silver plates we got here? Also, we care that our music is heard all over the world, that everyone listens to it, that's why we perform so much. One should not be blasé ... It is not only important for us to be popular in England, America and Japan ... People are the same everywhere and we like to play for them ... This is just rock'n'roll after all ... "

Interviewed by: Branko Vukojević, filmed by: Dražen Kalenić (Jukebox, 1979)

#queen #queen band #freddie mercury

[secret-engima]

alyss-spazz-penedo

If. If she's Iggy's MOM, does that mean him and Prompto are raised as siblings/cousins? Megara brings Iggy along when she has to Braincell "Uncle Verstael" bc she's not leaving a baby alone at home and unfortunately Science(TM) waits for nothing, least of all common sense. On Prompto's side, Glaucus was NOT prepared when Besithia whipped up a baby for him and has only a passing idea how to parent, so those first few months especially were full of panicked back-and-forth

alyss-spazz-penedo

with the only baby-worthy member or his Retinue, and chibi!Ignis was a great help in babysitting lil Prompto. Later, when Prompto comes to visit Science Dad, he and Ignis also get to hang out and stuff.

alyss-spazz-penedo

....wait, if she's the mom, who's the DAD? Bc for Ignis to take his mother's name, presumably the father isn't in the picture or they never got married. Or is also... named... Scientia? (If the dad is LITERALLY ANY MEMBER OF GLAUCUS' RETINUE, I might die of laughter. Or secondhand embarrassment.)

Me: .... well considering I really like the idea of her being Iggy’s mom let’s roll with this hypothesis. XDD.

... Yes, yes they WOULD. Actually Megara does not have bby Iggy when she is unceremoniously recruited, since Iggy is only two years older than Noct and she’s recruited at some point before Regis’s canonical road trip. But she DOES have bby Iggy eventually and two year old Iggy is thrilled to watch over tiny bby Prompto with his Mama while Glaucus has a Crisis in the corner. Glaucus is so, SO grateful for Megara’s presence in his life after Prompto happens because on one hand YAY PROMPTO LIVES on the other I HAVE A BABY WHAT DO I DO WITH IT. Megara, who has lived with these clowns for years by this point, doesn’t even bat an eye at the fact that Besithia MADE A BABY and that Glaucus has insta adopted him and is just like “this is your feeding schedule this is your optimal sleep schedule this is how you change a diaper thi-” While Ardyn coos in the background because he adores kids with every fiber of his blackened soul.

Also this means Ignis is also a tiny Mad Science bby, because Obviously Ignis, as a little prodigy that he is, is going to take an interest in anything that interests his bby cousin Prompto and science is a challenge to him. He’s not as much of a science nerd as Prompto, especially not after he’s introduced to bby Noctis and his brain kicks fully over into Mom Mode but he definitely knows enough to get by and chime in when Prompto goes on a tangent.

I have yet to decide who the dad is. If the dad is not a one-night stand, then the dad either takes his wife’s name (because mafia boss wife trumps patriarchy) or-

And hear me out.

Besithia is the dad.

NOT IN THE WAY YOU THINK.

But like- think of the glorious chaos, of Glaucus’s MELTDOWN if, while he’s off somewhere doing his saving the world business and it’s just Megara and Besithia and suddenly Besithia’s lab time is interrupted with Scientia coming in and going, “I want a baby.”

And Besithia very, very slowly sets down his lab tools and ....

Stares at her.

In a quiet befuddled sort of way that indicates he thinks he misheard her but cannot for the life of him come up with an alternate version of what she might have really said.

And she crosses her arms and repeats, “I want. A baby. Of my own.”

Besithia squints, because they’ve known each other for years at this point and he KNOWS she knows Glaucus’s rules on the Cloning Of Human Beings and that she is also not interested in any of the group sexually because they’re basically all her pet idiots, “...I’m fairly certain there are websites for that,” Besithia says slowly.

And the queen of the underworld rolls her eyes, “I do not want to spend the next two or three years dating a male who may or may not work out as a husband, not with the complications of my ‘job’. Nor do I feel like risking a one-night stand or fling, especially not with the people who know of my work.”

Besithia continues to squint, but there is an idea sparking in his eyes, a glimmer of understanding for what she wants, “I can’t clone babies. It’s against the Rules.”

“No, but I am a perfectly functional woman and there are known, legal medical procedures for this. I’m just coming to you rather than a hospital because I don’t want news to get out to the underworld. I’d rather they run themselves in circles trying to figure out who the father is. It will keep them busy.”

Besithia fully turns around in his swivel chair and props his chin on his hands, “If Glaucus finds out about this, you’re taking the blame.”

“Agreed.”

“And I’m going to need time to get the equipment and an adequate male sample.”

“Understood.”

Besithia nods slowly, an manic look blooming that would have disturbed her years ago but now is just normal to her mind, “Any preferences on the donor’s appearance?”

“I like green eyes.”

“Noted.”

And so she wanders off and Besithia gets equipment and bribes someone at a proper hospital for the things he needs and by the time Glaucus checks in from wherever he’s been, Megara is in like- her second trimester and the underworld is losing its mind trying to figure out who the dad is (because if the dad is Glaucus then they are all screwed and they know it). And Glaucus stiffens, mentally checks his calendar, then slowly relaxes because ah yes, Ignis. Then a moment later he’s confused, because who’s the father?

And Megara looks perfectly calm and blasé as she answers, “I don’t know, ask Besithia, he’s the one who picked out the sample. Though it was my idea so don’t be too upset with him.”

And far away in another part of the city Besithia gets a chill up his spine and swears he can already hear Glaucus screeching his name.

That doesn’t stop him from accidentally creating bby Prompto 2 years later but hey.

#Secret Engima Rambles #The Future's Blurry (the Past is Trap) verse #no besithia is not the donor #but he counts as the dad because the donor doesn't matter #in this particular case #Besithia was the one to do the procedure #and to help research everything for a successful pregnancy #and then happily coo over his 'co-creation' when iggy was born #glaucus meanwhile #is having a crisis #also besithia you better not have messed with the genes to make iggy even more of a genius #besithia: *guilty silence* #glaucus: *internal screaming*

[bereft-of-frogs]

strength and the star for the tarot ask if you're still doing em. (those are my birth cards!)

strength: what is your dream occupation?

oh man. That’s the question isn’t it? I don’t even know really at this point. XD I have some ideas but I’m sort of in limbo because of global pandemic and various personal circumstances so like, we’ll see what I think my dream occupation is once I figure it out. XD

the star: have you ever seen a psychic?

I have, once in a more like, normal context, and once in this sort of sketchy misadventure with some friends (always look up the psychic on yelp, don’t just wander in off the street because your more outgoing friend ‘things it would be funny’) XD

but this reminds me of this one story I’ve been thinking about recently, so I went to this one university for a year before I transferred to the school I’d graduate from and it was just like...a super poor fit. I was a nerdy kid from a fairly academically intense high school in New England and I wanted an adventure so I moved far away to a big state school and just. Did not fit in. But also barely cared because it was all just so absurd at that point? Like, I had been deeply affected by being bullied in middle school but had a good high school experience and by the time I was in college I was just like...really? We’re not more mature than this?

But anyway, I had this giant mug from the TV show Psych, that I’d gotten as a gift from someone who knew I was into the show, and on one side it said, ‘the psychic is in’ and on the other said the name of the show, network, etc. (I still have the mug, though the letters have worn off since then.) And everyone in my dorm hated me because I was kind of nerdy and weird and also we had to do a group project our first semester and err I was a bit of a taskmaster and was super frustrated by how blasé everyone else was and so by the end of that semester basically no one was talking to me.

So I’m studying in the common room, eating cereal from this giant mug. And this guy from my dorm sits across from me and after a second in this sort of mean voice goes, “So you think you’re psychic now?” And I just gave him a confused face and then after a second rotated the mug to the show name and was like ‘it’s from a TV show, bro’ and he just went, ‘oh’ and left.

And just. It’s so funny. Like 0/10, failed bullying attempt there, bro. XD Anyway, yeah by college I was pretty immune to bullying and transferred the next year to a much larger, much more academically rigorous university where I was by far the least of the weirdos. But I still think of that guy and his weird attempt to bully me over my favorite giant green mug. XD

[tarot asks]

#anyway #thanks for asking! #sorry i turned it into weird mug storytime #i just have been unpacking how being bullied in middle school has sort of continued to affect me #and then i go to use that mug and think of that guy and just have to laugh #epic fail at bullying bro #calico-fiction

[falseroar]

Is This Your Card? Part 5: Silver Bullets

((The hunter discusses the possibility of Mark being a werewolf with the others before the district attorney finds a strange note and the mayor issues a challenge.

Links to Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, and a link to the masterlist for the whole au.))

Abe swore under his breath while the chef did not feel the need to hold back as he began to rage that he wasn’t paid enough for this.

He tried not to look at the attorney as he straightened up, or at whatever expression the mayor had on his face right now, trying to focus instead on what this might mean.

“I assure you, Master Markiplier was not a werewolf,” Benjamin said, his calming hand outstretched toward the chef in particular, who just batted it away. “I am fairly sure one of the staff would have noticed that.”

“Except Mark was firing people left and right, wasn’t he?” Abe found his mouth moving on autopilot, just as it had when he first saw Mark’s body and turned on the attorney. The idea then had been the same as whenever he came across a witness—accuse anyone of murder, and they’ll start spouting off all they know if it means clearing themselves. Or that was the theory he generally went by, but instead the attorney had just seemed more closed and withdrawn than normal, their eyes so distant he wasn’t sure they even heard him then. Maybe, in retrospect, accusing someone of killing their best friend while they were still in shock might not have been the most tactful thing he had ever done.

Now he doubted he was helping much, even as he pushed forward with his current line of thought. “There’s barely anyone left on the staff now, isn’t that right?”

“Well, correct, we’re down to three at the moment, but Chef and I are still here most of the time. And even if Master Markiplier has been less…inclined to socializing lately—”

“You mean locked up in his bedroom half the day,” the chef interrupted with a scoff. “Man could be doing anything up there for all I care, so long as he paid me. Guess that’s out of the window now.”

“Mark was not a werewolf,” the mayor said, his voice straining with emotion. “We don’t even know who sent those cards or why! Why should we believe anything they say?”

An uncomfortable silence went around the room, and Abe thought of his own pair of cards tucked away deep within his jacket. The knowledge that he wasn’t the only one to receive a second card wasn’t as comforting as it could have been.

“Man, I’m just glad I didn’t get one of them death cards,” Chef muttered under his breath, only to immediately glance at the attorney when he realized what he had said aloud.

For their part, they didn’t acknowledge the remark. Instead, apparently still thinking of what Damien had said, they asked, “The box those cards were sent in, where is it?”

“It should still be in the dining room,” Benjamin said, a tinge of embarrassment in his voice as he added, “I’m afraid that I haven’t had the time to fully clean the house as I should, there have been so many…distractions this morning.”

“Yeah, I’d call finding out your boss has been murdered one hell of a distraction,” Abe muttered, unsure if anyone heard him over yet another round of thunder and lightning. “Now why don’t we have another look at that package?”

He led the way, pausing only once when he noticed the figure sitting alone in a darkened room, the shapes of plush chairs and hanging curtains suggesting a home theater of some kind, but Damien broke away from the group first with a murmur about having a word with the Colonel. Abe shrugged and continued on, glad he wasn’t the one who had to have that conversation.

In the dining room, Benjamin went to the side table and picked up the box, which he handed over to the attorney. Abe had to admit he had expected the butler to hand it to him, but he managed to hide his irritation if only because he probably would have handed it over to them in private, if for no other reason than to see what they could pick up.

Looking for it, he saw their nostrils flare as they looked over the outside of the box, pausing on the label that Mark showed the table last night, before frowning as they gave the box a slight shake.

“There’s something else in here.” They opened the box and turned one of the flaps out to reveal a piece of paper stuck to the underside, which fluttered with the movement but did not let go of the cardboard until they pulled it free. “Mark must have missed it when he opened the package last night.”

Their eyes skimmed over the short note before handing it over to Abe, allowing him to see that it was a series of lines typewritten much like the notes on the cards.

“Well, what’s it say?” Chef asked impatiently, and against Abe’s better judgment he began to read aloud.

“The cards have been dealt, the game has already begun. Whether you choose to play your hand or not, fate has already decided which chambers are loaded.” Abe turned the note over, but there was nothing else on the back to help explain. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Loaded chambers, sounds like Russian roulette to me.”

Abe spun around to see the Colonel standing at the door, the Mayor at his shoulder.

The Colonel shrugged at the expressions on the other faces in the room and said, “It was just the first thing that came to mind. What kind of game are we supposed to be playing then? I do hope it’s not Jumanji, took me ages to get out of that one.”

For someone who just found out his friend was dead, the Colonel seemed surprisingly blasé about this whole affair, Abe thought to himself. Then again, the man had seen enough death and undeath on the battlefield that maybe it took more than that to rattle him these days. Still…

“Clearly, the game of some sick and twisted individual,” Benjamin answered. “They must have planted the accusation in Master Mark’s envelope in the hopes that one or all of us might turn on him.”

“Well, whoever did it didn’t know what they were dealing with if that’s the case,” Abe said. When everyone stared at him, he felt the need to explain, “When I was examining the body, I found signs that Mark had been stabbed 37 times, poisoned, beaten, strangled, drowned, and then shot, in that order. Not exactly the way to go about it if you knew you were about to take on a werewolf.”

“Mark was a werewolf?!” the Colonel shouted. “Why, don’t be absurd! Where would you get a ridiculous idea like that?”

“Mark’s card,” Chef said, while Abe flashed the card in question. “We found it on him. But maybe the killer didn’t know, and that’s why they had to go through all that other stuff before the silver bullet finally put him down.”

“And they somehow had time to try all of that against a werewolf?” Benjamin asked. He raised his hands, gloved palms up, in a shrug. “Is it just me, or is this making less sense the more we learn about this situation?”

“Or mayhaps we are making this more complicated than it need be,” the Mayor said, his voice betraying an effort to keep his emotions in check. “Silver bullets are not exactly common.”

Suddenly, every eye in the room was on Abe, and not in the good way.

He felt the heat rise to his cheeks as he said, “Oh, sure, blame the monster hunter. Even if I had a motive, which I don’t—”

Chef cleared his throat and gestured towards the “Werewolf” card still in Abe’s hand.

“Please, like I would waste time with all of that other stuff if I wanted to kill a werewolf,” Abe scoffed. “Rule number one for dealing with werewolves: go straight for the silver.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the District Attorney wince and pinch the bridge of their nose with a sigh.

Right. Maybe that didn’t come out like he wanted it to.

“All the same, if everyone here who happens to possess a gun would be so kind to show their ammunition?” The mayor’s eyes were burning in to Abe now, but the hunter didn’t blink. He’d faced far deadlier stares than the glare of an elected official. Metaphorically and literally deadly, in the case of that one Gorgon who really didn’t handle rejection well.

“You know what? Fine. Colonel, anyone else here got a weapon?”

There were head shakes around the room, except for the chef who for some reason looked at the ladle he brought with him from the kitchen as though considering it for a moment.

“Never bothered with silver bullets myself,” the Colonel said as he pulled out his own gun, the same one he’d been waving around willy-nilly last night. “Homo necrosis, any kind of bullet will do, or a baseball bat if you’re feeling cheeky.”

“They’re expensive,” Abe agreed as he pulled his gun out of its holster. “That’s why I only use them when I have to, otherwise the ones I have on hand stay in a case I keep in my jacket.”

Both men unloaded their guns at the same time in front of everyone, revealing five bullets and one empty chamber each. In the palms of their hands, the ten silver bullets gleamed as they caught the light.

((End of Part 5. Thank you for reading!

Link to Part 6.

Tagging: @silver-owl413 @skyewardlight @withjust-a-bite @blackaquokat @catgirlwarrior @neverisadork @luna1350 @oh-so-creepy @weirdfoxalley @95fangirl @lilalovesinternet-l @thepoolofthedead @a-bit-dapper @randomartdudette @geekymushroom @cactipresident @hotcocoachia @purple-anxiety-blog @shyinspiredartist @avispate @missksketch ))

#markiplier #fanfiction #wkm au #werewolf au #monster hunter au #wkm detective #wkm district attorney #wkm mayor #wkm colonel #had to work that jumanji reference in somewhere #honestly though #the game is literally just the werewolf game + clue #with a missing card

[honeymoonjin]

heavy - hoseok x reader smut

A/N: a birthday gift for the wonderful vi @jeonau 

Mafia!AU Hoseok smut. Warnings for sexually explicit content: fingering, restraints, dom!Hoseok, praise kink, multiple orgasms, unprotected sex. 2.9k words.

Your Hobi was stressed again. You could tell by the tension in his shoulders when you ran your hand over his back, or the way the muscles in his cheek jumped as he clenched his jaw. Of course being the head of Seoul’s most infamous gun-running empire came with a certain level of stress, but Hoseok had always seemed to take it in his stride, navigating the black market underworld with an instinctual ease.

Now, though, with the police hot on his heels, he had become less blasé and self-assured, spending more and more hours holed up in the basement of your shared home to try and minimize the time he was out in public and vulnerable. Unfortunately, the lack of sunlight and proper exercise was beginning to make him stiff and tetchy. You smoothed your palm over his Egyptian cotton-clad back as he pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing at whatever the person on the other end of the phone line was saying to him.

“Reynolds doesn’t have access to the accounts, so, as suspicious as that fucker acts, I don’t think it’s him.” A slight pause as the muffled voice responded. “Well, maybe if you didn’t employ a goddamn narc in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation! Now, if you could please track down the man who’s put my ass on the line and deal with him, that would be great. Don’t call me again unless it’s good news. You’re wasting my fucking time.”

Without waiting for a response, Hoseok hangs up and chucks his phone lazily at his desk, sending it skidding across the thick layer of miscellaneous papers strewn over it.

You let both hands sweep over his shoulders, thumbs digging in to the knots in his back. Hoseok tips his head back with an exhausted groan. “You shouldn’t be down here,” he admonishes, though his tone is more tired than angry. “You know that the less you know, the better. I don’t want you in the line of fire, baby girl.”

You hum in response but make no effort to leave. “Perhaps I just want to make sure my husband isn’t facing the line of fire alone.”

“Mm, ‘at’s sweet of you,” he mumbles, eyebrows knitting together as you continue to work out the tension that’s deep-set in his muscles. “God, you’re the only person in this hellhole of a world I trust, you know that? Even my own team are betraying me, but you’ve stayed loyal all this time.”

“And I always will,” you promise earnestly, enjoying the way he becomes lax under your touch. “It’s you and me against the rest of the world, baby.”

Unprompted, Hoseok breaks out in a yawn, and rolls his shoulder blades back in two tight circles, breaking your hold. You let your hands hover uncertainly in the air, then drop. A sudden movement causes you to step back slightly as Hoseok spins in his leather desk chair to face you, eyes lidded. “Take a seat, baby girl.”

There’s no other chair in the basement; Hoseok is the only one who ever uses this room, but that wasn’t what he meant anyway. You wet your quickly drying lips and step forward again, stance widening around his knees until your wrists link around the back of his neck, and you’re lowering yourself daintily onto his lap. His eyes dart down to the spot between your legs as the skirt you’re wearing slips further and further up your thighs. You lean in, cheek resting on the firm plane of his chest. “I’ve missed you,” you confess into the dimly lit room, “you never come to bed anymore.”

A strong palm comes up to rest on the back of your head, cupping you against him. His chest reverberates as he speaks. “Is my baby feeling a little needy?”

You nod softly, enjoying the way the expensive cotton of his shirt slides smoothly over your skin. It was generally pretty common for the two of you to be having sex multiple times a day; normally when business was good, your husband was feeling a little more generous with his cock and his time. But you had been deprived of any action for going on two weeks now, and his simple proximity was enough to have a hot wave of need rolling around inside of you.

He chuckles out his nose at your lack of verbal response. “Do you know what? I’ve spent the past few days punishing my subordinates for their misdemeanors and disloyalty. I think it’s only fair that I reward good behavior too, don’t you think?” Again, you nod, this time more feverishly. “Mm, I thought so. And you’ve been such a good girl for me, haven’t you?”

“Of course, Hoseokie.”

“You didn’t get yourself off alone while I’ve been busy?” You shake your head. “Did you try to?” Your face burns with shame as you remain still. Truth be told, you had spent many a lonely night with your hand between your legs, unsatisfied with how big and empty your bed felt without him in it, but you could never get there on your own. He had really ruined you for any other lovers, including yourself. Hoseok simply gives another soft chuckle, the hand buried in your hair tugging softly at the roots. “That’s okay, I’m not mad at you. Your sweet cunt was waiting for me, even if your hands weren’t. Fuck, and I’ve missed it, too.”

You shift your head so that your chin props you up and you can look him in the eyes, which are twinkling with something a little darker than amusement, and a little deeper than lust. “Will you take care of me now?” you ask quietly, voice sounding small in the large empty space of the basement.

His grip tightens on your head slightly, turning from comforting to possessive. “Are you gonna be a good girl for me?” You nod as best you can under his hold, and he rewards you with a devilish smile. Suddenly, the back of your head feels cold as he removes his hand and begins loosening the knot in his tie, the dark, thick fabric snapping when he tugs it off his neck. “Wrists,” he commands firmly, and you hastily rush to present them to him, side-by-side. With a knitted brow as he focuses, he slips the length of the tie between and around your wrists until they’re solidly bound together, your fingers automatically linking in with one another, clasping your hands. Once they’re complete, he hooks his finger in between them to check they’re not too tight, and then uses that same hold to pull them up, ducking his head so that your hands fall behind his back. He lets go, and untucks his arms so that they’re over the level of yours, and your wrists rest snugly around his waist.

The realization of your own immobility never fails to send a rush of heat between your legs, and you bite your lip, watching as his eyes rake languidly over your body. Finally, his gaze lowers to the sliver of your panties visible underneath the edge of your skirt. It’s risen up practically to your pelvis, and you know that if you can see some of your underwear from your position, he was probably getting an eyeful.

Playfully, almost lazily, he takes a single finger and runs a featherlight stripe up the seam of your panties. You twitch in his grip, having felt how damp the fabric was when it was pressed slightly against your folds. “Please,” you whisper out reflexively, thighs straining to open your legs wider. He smiles at the sight, and swipes your clothed core again, smile widening when you let out a whimper.

“Look at you,” he croons, “all spread out in front of me, vulnerable and open.” Another pass, this one with more pressure, and your pelvis tilts up to chase it. “Completely at my mercy.”

“Hoseok,” you breathe. “I need you.”

“You’ve waited a couple weeks,” he says lightly, tone betraying the slightest edge of warning, “I would hate for you to lose your reward for being impatient now.” You swallow hard and shut your mouth, eyes pleading with him silently. The corners of his eyes crinkle in a smile. “Good.”

Hoseok sighs out deeply, running his hot palms up and down the sensitive skin of your inner thighs, fingertips coming dangerously close to the seams of your panties every time. Like he’s got all the time in the world, he starts fiddling with the lace edge between your legs, nail scratching the skin ever so lightly. You try to keep your breathing steady, but you can’t stop from whining low in your throat as he stays just an inch to the left of where you really want him.

“My girl definitely is feeling needy,” he mumbles, tapping at the wet patch right over your entrance. “You’re completely soaked for me, and I haven’t even touched you yet. It’s because this pussy is mine, isn’t it? You’re creaming yourself just for me.”

You can’t help yourself. “Please, Hoseokie, I need more.”

Wordlessly, he tucks his fingers underneath the sopping fabric and presses two fingers inside you, stopping at the first knuckle. You writhe on his lap, trying to shuffle forward to pierce yourself more on the fingers you know would feel so good seated fully inside you. “Use your words, baby. You get to pick a reward for being on your best behavior, hm?”

You give up on trying to get him to go deeper as he pulls his hand back every time you sneak forward. “I want your cock,” you confess simply, clenching around his fingertips.

He lets out a low curse, and lets his fingers sink inside you slowly, your mouth dropping open in pleasure as the knuckles of his other fingers rest snugly against your folds, preventing him from going any further. “So, you don’t want my fingers?” he asks with an air of innocent curiosity. “You don’t want me do to this?” A moan is ripped from you as he begins fingering you deeply, curling up against your g-spot with every stroke.

“Y-yes,” you gasp out, rocking your hips into the sensation.

“Oh, you do want my fingers? That’s strange, I swear just earlier you said you wanted my cock.”

“Both,” you moan, face falling onto his shoulder as your wrists tugged uselessly against his lower back, unable to draw them back around like you wanted to. “I want both, please, Hoseokie.”

He continues to finger you as you garble nonsensical moans, the sensation feeling so blissfully good after your extended lack of orgasms recently. “My sweet girl,” he coos into your ear, the soft words almost drowned out by the wet smacking resounding between your thighs, “I can never say no to you. You’ve been so good for me, so patient. Will you be a good girl for me now and cum? I want to feel you cum on my fingers before I make you cum again on my cock.”

Your thighs begin to shake as his thumb slides up to rub at your sensitive clit, and his other hand palming your ass to push you further onto him with each thrust of his fingers. “I w-will, I’m so close, Hoseokie,” you promise, burying your face into his neck and clasping at the back of his shirt with your bound hands. “Please, I need to cum.”

“Let go for me, baby. Let it all go, that’s it. That’s it,” he croons happily as you come apart on him, the pleasure only heightened by the fact that he keeps going full-speed, and you’re helpless to stop him or do anything but take it. Once your body shudders subside, your walls still periodically clamp down around him. You whine when he slips out of you, and you’re left clenching down on an unpleasant void.

“Please, can I have your cock now?” you moan into the crook of his neck, nibbling and lapping affectionately at the skin made slightly salty from exertion.

He groans at the sensation. “Does my girl want me to fuck her now?”

“Mhm.”

Hoseok hums in affirmation, one palm slipping under your skirt to cup your ass, the other deftly unbuttoning his slacks. “Can’t wait to feel your pretty pussy around my cock, baby girl, I’ve missed it.” His hand dips into his pants and pulls his cock out, Hoseok tipping his head back with a sigh as it’s finally released. He smears the precum lazily with his thumb, looking down at you with lidded eyes. “Do you see how much I’ve missed your sweet cunt?”

You bite your lip as you look down. It’s not a word you’d usually use to describe the appendage dangling between a man’s legs, but Hoseok’s dick is truly a beautiful specimen. Average in length, and only a little girthier than most, the beauty comes in the graceful curve that appears when he’s hard, an arc up to his stomach, so that the tip would graze the taut skin of his abdomen, just below his belly button. It was mostly smooth, and as bronzed as the rest of him, although it darkened as blood rushed to it, like now.

Getting impatient, you rock your hips towards his cock, the friction from the wet fabric of your panties causing him to groan your name. “Hoseokie. I need you now.”

“Come on then, baby,” he mutters sweetly into your ear, “open wide.” And with a single, strong arm, he’s lifting you up and using his other hand to line up his cock with your entrance, pushing the sopping fabric aside with his head, and letting you impale yourself on him.

Normally, the stretch is very bearable, especially after fingering you like he almost always did, but it had been too long that you had gone empty and feeling him inside you again had your toes curling, even as he let you stay still on his cock to adjust. “Hobi,” you whimper into his chest, unable to use your hands to prop yourself up. You feel the pressure of his chin on the crown of your head.

“You feel so fucking tight around me, baby girl. That pretty pink pussy of yours was made for me. God, it’s so perfect. You’re so perfect.”

You keen and clamp down on him at the praise, and he curses, the sound muffled in your hair. Unable to get any leverage to ride him with your hands bound behind his back, you wait for him to drop his hands to your hips, and slowly pull you off of him, the drag inside you pulling another moan from deep in your throat. He stops once only his head is snug inside you and holds you firm.

Instead of making you ride him, he plants his feet on the ground and begins thrusting up into you. With every stroke, his skin smacks against yours audibly and with the angle, his cock rubs slightly against the bottom of your clit every time he moves. “Oh, god, Hoseok, feels so good with you in me,” you pant.

“Yeah?” Hoseok questions through gritted teeth, voice stiff with exertion. “You’re taking me so well, baby. Fuck, I’m not gonna last long.”

“Me neither,” you assure, “just please don’t stop, Hoseokie. I need it harder.”

With a groan that comes out more like a growl, Hoseok begins slamming your hips back down every time he fucks up into you, burying himself deeper inside you than before. You can feel him strike your cervix wall on particularly strong thrusts, and the pressure feels so good that you can’t help but let your mouth fall open, drooling onto his shirt lightly as he forces your hips down onto his cock harder and harder, until you’re panting desperately, hanging off an orgasm by a thread. “Hobi, I’m close,” you confess.

“Fuck, I’m cu- ah! Yes, fuck, yes,” Hoseok chants, thrusting once, a second time, then holding you right to his pelvis as he cums. You squeeze down on him to help him through it, and the pressure it puts on your g-spot, combined with the feeling of him spilling inside you, has you falling over the edge into your second orgasm, shuddering violently on top of him as he slowly grinds his way through his orgasm.

When you both finish up, he makes no effort to pull out, simply putting your arms back over his head and untying you, massaging your wrists gently for you to make sure circulation returned.

“I love you so much, you know that?” he mumbles into your hair as you snuggle up to his chest. He’s starting to soften, but you don’t want to lose the connection, and he seems happy enough for you to stay on his lap as he’s buried inside you. “I’m sorry I haven’t been taking care of you enough. It’s just that work’s got me totally strung out, and I want to make sure-”

You shush him, reaching down a hand to interlink with his. “It’s okay,” you promise, “I’m with you now, let’s just enjoy this, okay?”

His fingers tighten around yours. “Okay.”

#btssmutclub #hoseok x reader #hoseok smut #jhope smut #bts fic #bts oneshot #bts smut #jhs

[hey-hamlet]

BNHA AU Ideas : Songbird

Also on AO3!

TL;DR: 

Izuku has a powerful quirk: he can give powers to the people around him based on the different songs he sings. Unfortunately, everyone else really wants that quirk and are willing to kidnap him to get it. 

Songbird is an au where Izuku has a quirk that gives a powerup/debuff to anyone that hears what he's singing! The effect depends on the song, or rather, what the song means to him.

He's been kidnapped a lot.

It came in when Izuku was like, 4? The normal time for a quirk to come in. Bakugo thought it was pretty cool, if not as cool as his.

Izuku's favourite powerup at the time was the Mario theme because it gives everyone a jump boost. So we have this little kid enthusiastically shouting the Mario theme as a small pile of kids jump around like maniacs.

Very stressful for all parents involved.

Anyway, the way his quirk works:

With some serious concentration, he can stop it working on specific people around him, but it always affects himself. Trying to limit it's spread for too long will make him pass out.

The shorter the song naturally is, the stronger the effect. His quirk works through speaker and coms but not through pre-recorded audio.

The effects can be really specific and strange, for example, 'Stronger Than You' gives a powerup to two people fighting together that care for each other. 'Radioactive', well, it literally irradiates the people around him and himself. 100% not a song he's allowed to sing.

Each song only works once per day, for the duration of the song. If accidentally, or intentionally, sings the song in a way that stops it from ending, the effect will slowly fade out.

the more a particular song has been used on you / the better you know the song, the better it works on you and the easier it is to control

Anyway, villains quickly get word of this kid running around with a powerful and versatile support quirk. Support quirks aren't super common, and one that works in so many different ways is super valuable. So, they start kidnapping the poor guy.

Obviously getting kidnapped is pretty traumatising for Izuku. It's not super great for Bakugo either, who watched his friend get stuffed into the back of a van by a small pile of villains. He gets saved by All Might. The two kids still have nightmares.

Eventually, he gets kidnapped so many random times each individual attempt is nothing to write home about. He and Bakugo become kind of blasé about the whole thing.

"Midoriya, why didn't you do your homework?"

"He got kidnapped, teach."

Izuku, bleeding sluggishly from a headwound. "Yeah, got kidnapped."

He and Bakugo are going to be heroes. They kind of end up the top dogs of the school, Izuku without meaning it, Bakugo 100% intending for that to happen. They train more than is probably healthy, because at this point it's not just good practise, it's in their best interest in an attempt to ward off more kidnappings.

Izuku has met All Might a depressing number of times, almost always getting saved from the kidnapping of the week. Bakugo is the only person Izuku lets see how all of these kidnappings are effecting him, everyone else just views it as kind of funny that this kid is so chill with getting taken so often.

He's really not, but heroes smile when they're scared, right?

Even if other villains fail, his quirk is just so useful its worth it to give it a go. He can turn a ragtag team of unfit losers into a force to rival pros with the right song choice. Plus, his involvement in all the kidnappings is suppressed for his own safety, so he's never on the news.

Oh yeah, the plan B for the USJ was take Izuku and run.

Aizawa knows about the kid that gets constantly kidnapped, but he doesn't know who it is. At the USJ, Shigiraki creepily calls out 'Hey Songbird!' and he has around 8 'oh shit' moments all at once. Izuku just wants to cry out of frustration.

The only reasons All for One hasn't stolen Izuku's quirk at this point is that All Might constantly rescuing the poor kid is both good entertainment and a good way to get him in one spot. Also he just finds this whole mess kind of funny.

His quirk only works when he's singing, but there is nothing stopping him from singing the tune to classical music! His quirk tends to work better with an instrumental or other people singing along. General power-ups are too risky to use with villains nearby, so it's mostly for disaster work.

None of his songs work on Nomu or people who can't hear (either by blocking their ears or being deaf)

Songbird Izuku kinda gives off a nice but chill air, a lot of people are afraid to talk to him because he's typically pretty popular. Inside he's just as, if not more, anxious than canon Izuku, he's just gotten pretty good at hiding it.

Regarding OFA, All Might considers giving it to him, but doesn't, mostly because he realised Izuku can't say no. It's not fair of him to ask something so big of someone who, because of the position he's been placed in, can't turn you down. He is pretty close with the Midoriya family though and comes over for dinner a lot.

The UA entrance exam is wild. Izuku kicks butt in the written, goes to thank Uraraka for helping him before but Iida stops him. Izukus externally like "Dude, you don't know me. Please calm down." internally he's like "I'M SORRY PLEASE DONT EVEN LOOK AT ME OR ILL DIE".

The announcement rings. He takes a deep breath and starts to sing, taking off after the other students.

First song up is 'Victorious'. It's both a confidence booster and a mild strength boost. He really just needs the confidence at this point. (In the distance, a purple-haired boy who was worried about the exam gets a pep in his step. He tries a little harder.)

Next up is 'Whatever it Takes', a strength and speed up based off the amount of adrenalin currently in your system. Izuku, who is constantly stressed, gets a big boost from this song. He ends up with around 28 villain points by the song, but punching robots with bare skin isn't good for your knuckles.

The 0 pointer appears and he's ready to just leave it behind until he sees the person trapped in its path. No matter how scared he is, no matter how badly he wants to go to UA, he can't leave her there.

He grits his teeth, and starts 'Get Back Up Again'. His quirk is honestly starting to run low, it's not meant to be used back to back to back like this. Still, 'Get Back Up Again' does it's job, temporarily powering up the quirks of those who can hear it. While he just wants it for Uraraka, so she can lift the rock off her legs, it works on him too.

The effects of the songs linger after they complete.

He helps Uraraka free herself from the rock and starts 'What's Up Danger'. Normally its not the strongest, but with the power up, the effects are impressive. The song itself grants luck and skill in equal measure. Normally it's hard to notice, but here it allows him to throw himself up the zero pointer until he reaches the fuse box, pulls out all of the important wires without getting zapped to high heaven, and somehow have stopped the robot in its tracks.

Unfortunately, songs end. His luck doesn't last long enough to give him a safe landing.

But Uraraka was watching him, and she can, stopping him just before he hits the ground. The buzzer goes off a second later and they collapse together, laughing hysterically and trying not to throw up everywhere. Everyone in the area looks a little shell shocked at what they just saw.

All Might looks on from with the other teachers and cheers for the boy he's seen grow from a scared kid to a determined young man. Aizawa is 100% confused and annoyed at this blatant favouritism.

He could write songs, but the catch is his quirk works with the emotions he has towards the song and his automatic reaction to it. There is a big chance that if he wrote them himself, each song would have the same effect as the other.

Please consider though, a classmate like Jirou writing him a song. That song would probably give a strong healing effect / widespread warm and fuzzy feelings.

A few fun ones:

Duel commandments from Hamilton should let you shoot air bullets

This is Halloween: i lowkey want it to be that people transform into their costumes, or something simple like it makes people glow like jack o lanterns

The Cha Cha Slide: its something he only does for fun, because it also forces him (and everyone else in the area) to do the cha cha slide

Thunder by imagine dragons electrifies everyone who hears it, so please consider a small swarm of zappy children

Upgrade from BMC gives your quirk an ‘upgrade’ or mutation. 

Hey Little Songbird from Hadestown causes earth to creep up the legs of anyone who hears it. It can’t be shaken off.

Deviltown by cavetown causes the temperature around to drop dramatically. Again, if you can’t hear the song, the temperature feels normal for you.

#bnha au #songbird au #midoriya izuku #Midoriya #bakugou katsuki #bakugo #All Might #aizawa shouta #yagi toshinori #uraraka ochako #uraraka #izuku #katsuki

[offrankies]

Breakfast at Graham's || Marley, Graham & Frankie

Timing: Sometime last week. Parties: @detectivedreameater, @grahamstoker & @offrankies Summary:  Meeting your roommate’s fuck buddy is an awkward experience. Especially when there’s screaming cicadas all over the apartment.

It was days like these when Frankie thanked God hadn’t given her supernatural senses, especially enhanced hearing, as Graham seemed to get more action than she had expected when she had first moved in. Like, fine, despite playing for the other team, Frankie could admit that the guy was handsome, but she had assumed that vampires couldn’t get laid for… their lack of blood and what it biologically implied. Maybe Edward getting Bella pregnant wasn’t too insane, after all. Still, nothing had prepared her to be sitting in the kitchen, cereal and milk on the bowl in front of her as she scrolled through instagram, when the faint but constant bug screams she had heard all night suddenly became louder when Graham’s door opened, a muffled groan leaving her lips. She wasn’t going to start to judge her roommate’s kinks and what did it for him (or his partner, for that matter) to get off, or maybe she would in a very silent way with lots of stares; but he could do whatever he wanted in his room, away from the common areas. “Why am I getting punished like this.” She mumbled to herself before a woman appeared on her line of sight, Frankie’s eyes immediately squinting at the bright colors around here. It took her a moment to decipher them: a soft purple that swirled together with blue, tinges of black and red dancing around her, fast jerks pulling it as if something was trying to break loose from it, and her eyes widened in slight panic. She’d never seen an aura move that way. Quickly, she looked down to her bowl, pretending to be very, very interested in the Choco Puffs swimming in there, trying her hardest to ignore the damn bugs and the colors that were visible from the corner of her eye. 

Marley had been hitting up Graham more and more lately, and though she didn’t mind, she also didn’t want to stop and think about why. Staying the night usually wasn’t her style, but he was a vampire, and his endurance definitely outlast hers. So here she was, waking up in a foreign bed, in a foreign house, next to a cold body. Anita was always cold, too, but Marley remembered how soft and warm she’d been when they’d woken up in her room together. Forcing the thought from her mind, Marley sat up and grabbed her shirt and a pair of random shorts, throwing them on before heading out into the living room for coffee. At least she could grab a cup here before heading home to change for work. But when she got into the kitchen, there was a girl sitting at the table. Blase as ever, Marley moved past her quickly and over to the coffee maker. “You’re uh-- the roommate, right?” she asked, pulling the mug out and filling it with water. Aside from pushing numbers on a microwave, making coffee was the only thing Marley knew how to do in a kitchen.

Frankie was stuffing her mouth with cereal in her lame attempt to ignore the woman that looked like she was wearing Graham’s clothes. Don’t judge them, she kept repeating in her mind, but the bugs screaming kept making her eyes move from the bowl to the hallway, and then back to the bowl, and then back to the hallway. To say she choked on the cereal when the other walked past her, the bugs suddenly screaming on her brain, was an understatement. Milk ran down her chin and she started coughing. It was moments like this when she wondered why God had punished and not made her a normal person with no anxiety and definitely with no abilities to read auras. “Uh-- Roommate, yeah, I am.” Are you the girlfriend? She wanted to ask, considering how often Graham had tried to kick her out because she was coming over. Wiping her face with the back of her hand, she tried to continue eating, trying her hardest to ignore the weird ass sound. “I’m, uh, Frankie.”

The girl was...weird, to say the least. Choking on her cereal, averting her eyes-- it was clear she had some form of major anxiety, but that wasn’t Marley’s problem. She had no shame in her sex life, and she certainly didn’t believe in the fabled “walk of shame”. Sticking the pot back into the maker, she poured the grounds in and pushed the on button. “Well, nice to meet you, then, Roommate Frankie,” she said, leaning back against the counter. The girl was staring at her with wide eyes, even as she tried to finish her cereal and pretend she wasn’t staring. But Marley was an expert on human behavior, and she noticed everything. “You can call me Marley,” she finally said, tilting her head as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t worry, once my coffee is done, I’ll let you eat your cereal in peace.”

The kitchen floor was definitely not swallowing Frankie fast enough. Her cheeks quickly heated and turned a bright red, her whole body radiating embarrassment. “Just, uhm, just Frankie.” She had to admit how badass the other woman looked though, moving through the kitchen like she was the actual person living there and not herself; and in other circumstances, specifically in one that didn’t involve kinky bugs, Frankie would’ve found herself showing more interest in her. Her head nodded slightly, leaving her spoon fall on the empty bowl. “Nice to, uh, meet you.” Marley was awfully confident, and she wondered if she hadn’t realized how loud the sounds were, and that she could still hear them. Her eyes opened even wider if that was possible, and she shook both her hands in front of her. “Oh, no no no no, please, take your, uh, time. Rushed breakfasts suck.”

Marley idled for a moment. While she hardly had shame or guilt, she didn’t exactly interact with people-- or roommates of her fuck buddies-- all that often. Ff ever. Anita lived alone and Jane was, well...Jane. Pausing, she shrugged. “I don’t really eat breakfast,” she said, shuffling around. Whoever this Frankie was, Marley wasn’t sure she liked the way her eyes kept widening when she looked at her. But, Marley could remember being 18 and on her own, struggling in a world that wanted to beat her down and silence her. Everything was always loud and new and scary, even when you could turn invisible. And she doubted Frankie could turn invisible. “Graham is good to you, right?” she asked. “Cause I told him I’d kick his ass if he wasn’t.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” A mechanical response, though Frankie didn’t really mean it and understood that the most important meal wasn’t for everyone. Her grandmother usually skipped breakfast too despite her best efforts to bring her trays with bacon and eggs, and her loyal cup of tea. The question about Graham made her mouth form a perfect ‘o’, before she erupted in laughter. Her mind wrapped around all the text messages  he sent her telling her to take care, to get home at a decent hour, and to not be a dumbass online. Though she sincerely doubted a normal person could take down a vampire, her words still warmed her up. “Oh, no, he’s great. I actually think he, uh, cares more than my actual dad. Thanks for the backup though.” Bugs or not, this Marley person seemed nice. She guessed you can’t judge a person by their kinks. “If he’s nasty to you I can help you kick his ass.”

“Eh, sounds fake to me,” Marley said in a blasé tone, shrugging. Then again, she didn’t 100% understand human diets, and she didn’t need to. It was their behavior she was concerned with, not their diets. Marley only needed to feed once or twice a week, it must’ve sucked to have to eat multiple times a day every day. Who had time for that? “Well, good,” she said, turning back towards the cabinets to rifle around for a mug. Didn’t quite know how to approach the dad comment, but it wasn’t her business, and she wasn’t going to pry. Mostly because she just didn’t care. “Oh, don’t worry about me, kiddo,” she said, finally finding the cabinet with the mugs in it and pulling one out. “I can handle shitty men. Though, for the record, Graham is on the less shitty end of shitty men,” she said in what she hoped was a teasing tone. Sometimes her voice made it sound serious. “I’m kidding, of course. He’s a good guy.” When he wasn’t accidentally biting you, she thought with a grin.

Both her elbows were resting on the table now, Frankie’s hands cupping her own face as she took a nice look at the woman’s aura when she wasn’t looking. It had been easy to grow accustomed to it; not thanks to the weird jumps that made her stiffen or shift on her seat in surprise, but because the colors weren’t nearly as bright as those of a normal person. The blue being the cause, definitely. Someone who keep things to themselves. Like the fact that she likes the sound of bugs to get off in bed. Her lips pressed together as she held in another laugh, though she wasn’t sure if it was because of her thought or what Marley had said, and looked away the second the other turned, her mind elsewhere, thinking about the screaming critters again. “Yeah he’s just has weird as fuck kin----- kicks.” Fuck. “H-His shoes are so weird, r-right??” Oh God. So much for not being judgemental.

Oddly, one of Marley’s biggest pet peeves had always been people who avoided eye contact. Now, of course, there was leeway for certain people, but when Marley looked back and Frankie quickly averted her eyes, Marley couldn’t help but feel a prick of annoyance. What was it about her that made her so jumpy? There was no way it she knew what she was or what she was capable of, just by catching her glance, unless Frankie could read minds. Maybe it was just because of the awkward implication this presented. Anyone who had a brain would know that the strange woman in your kitchen with your roommate’s pants on had probably fucked them last night. Marley was sure she’d feel awkward about that, too. And so, she decided to cut the poor girl some slack. “Weird shoes?” raised a brow. “Can’t say I’ve noticed that. He’s not usually wearing anyth-- shoes-- any shoes when I’m around. Cause, you know,” she shrugged, “we’re inside.”

If she had any cereal left, she would be choking on it for the second time in ten minutes. Once more, Frankie was wishing for the floor to swallow her whole. Or better yet, the ceiling suddenly crumbling and burying her forever. Her cheeks were red in embarrassment, and she sank on the chair, suddenly very interested in the pattern on the kitchen walls, the bugs continuing screaming almost as if they were mocking her in this whole scenario. “Right. No shoes. Cause uh, shoes are weird. Shoes are overrated anyways” It was then that the teen decided she would spend the night somewhere else every time Graham brought people over, definitely not ready to deal with random people, less alone do small talk with them. Grabbing the empty bowl, she awkwardly made her way to the kitchen sink to clean after herself, but as she got closer the screaming got as loud as when Marley had entered the room, and one eye twitching as she tried to ignore it. Except, she couldn’t anymore. “Hey so uhh can I ask you something?” She leaned against the sink, trying to keep a straight face but it was obvious how much she was struggling. “Do you, uhhh, like bugs?”

“Sup, ladies?” Graham’s voice arrived before he did and shortly after, the man casually strolled down the hall and into the living room, pausing on the other side of the island that separated the two rooms. He had the decency to put on his favorite pair of sleep pants but those were the only article of clothes that hung off his built frame. He was carrying three empty bottles that he set on the counter and glanced between the two of them, immediately picking up on the awkwardness in the room and he raised his eyebrows with entertainment. He hadn’t anticipated Marley being such a consistent partner in bed but he figured he was allowed to have his fun too. He didn’t… THINK they were that loud all the time. He had been really good about not biting too so he earned a nice night with someone who didn’t mind. “Talkin’ about me?” He asked mildly as he tried his damndest not to overhear their conversation as he lay on his back in his room previously.

“Sure, kid, what’s up?” Marley asked, grateful her coffee was finally done and that meant she could drink it fast and then get out of here. All this “stay the morning after” was beginning to make her itch. “Do I like--” she paused, raising a brow, but didn’t get to finish, as Graham’s voice chimed through the hallway and she was suddenly reminded about how vampire’s had super hearing. Frowning, she poured her cup and headed out of the kitchen. “Talk about you? Why would we? There’s so many more interesting things to talk about,” she said in a flat tone, but it was a tease, and the slight curve of her lips gave that away. “Like cereal. Right?”

Frankie’s head snapped when she heard Graham’s voice, and gave him a dead glare, eyes squinting and  lips pressed together in a way that could only be understood as I’m gonna kill you. Why could she still hear the bugs if they were both in there? Were they in kahoots just to bother her? Marley had looked nice, but she could totally see the vampire convincing her to play a prank on her. “Big ego much?” Eyes moved to the woman as she left the kitchen, her features softening with her words. “Yeah- right. Cereal is way more interesting than you.” And your dumbass kinks. Which led her to... “Okay- I had it. Stop that.” Still leaning against the sink, she crossed her arms. “Marley you’re badass. Graham, you suck. Can you stop the bugs now? I don’t- I really don’t care and I wish I didn’t know what you guys…” Her hand made a vague gesture, her cheeks bright red in embarrassment. “Do in bed and shit but-- Keep it in the room? Please?” “It IS in the room!” Graham exclaimed with an emphatic shrug before anything else had time to mull around in his mind. “It’s always been in the room!” He looked between the two women again, wondering what had happened that turned him into the bad guy. He wasn't mad, mind, but kind of confused and a little hurt. “And yes, I DO suck, you know that.” He made a joke at his own expense, knowing full well both of them would understand. “But I’ve never had sex in this apartment anywhere but in my room-- at least with Marley.” He added hastily. “I don’t know what bugs you’re talking about but that ain’t me, sister.” He went around them to the fridge and opened it roughly, rattling the glass bottles in the door before realising he didn’t want anything dead. If anything, it was more to give him something to do. “I have no idea what you guys were talking about, I have no idea why I’m being put on blast and I have no idea how to fix it but y’all trippin’ if you think getting all mad at me is gonna fix whatever’s happening.”

“Woah,” Marley said, sipping her coffee evenly with an unchanging expression, “someone’s spicy in the morning.” This was exactly why she never did stay. Plus, things had gone pretty sour last time she’d stayed the morning with someone, despite the immediate events being nice. It just proved more to Marley why her old method was tried and true. She leaned up against the counter, raising a brow. “Hey, look-- I’m into some admittedly kinky shit, but bugs aren’t it. So whatever you heard, or are hearing, isn’t us, kiddo,” she said, giving a shrug before picking up her mug and taking another hearty sip. As much as she wanted to leave, she was curious, now to see where this conversation would end up. And to see if Graham really was mad about a little light teasing in the morning. Men could be so sensitive sometimes. It was hard reading Graham’s sudden outburst -not that she wasn’t used to them, especially since Layla had crashed with them-, considering Frankie was used to know exactly (or, well, almost) what people’s intentions were just by glancing their auras; and though normally she appreciated the vampire lacking one, it was situations like these that made her infuriated. Pointing an inquisitive finger at him, she pressed her lips together as if she was about to let hell loose on him, but Marley’s words made her stop and look at her. Aura same as before, not even the slightest change of color (and, sadly, it kept moving like it wanted to eat her or something), and it made Frankie wince and drop her hand. “Then why the hell do I hear cicadas screaming specifically every time you’re over?!” Eyes back on Graham, she squinted for a few seconds, before letting out a sigh. “FINE. Whatever. Let’s pretend the teen doesn’t hear the kinky ass bugs.” 

"Bruuuuh," Graham closed the fridge with a lot more care. "I'm not doing a bit here. I have NO idea what you're talking about." His tone was mild, indicating that he also wasn't lying. "I don't hear bugs, I don't hear cicadas, I just hear a teenage girl getting all heated at two consenting adults for having-- a great time in his bedroom," The flare of emotion from earlier was gone; he was now speaking evenly. "Maybe it has to do with your, uh, synesthesia," That's what he had to call it around other people - it seemed close enough to how he perceived aura reading. "Maybe knowing that we're having sex sends your brain messages that psychosomatically associate the activity with sounds of cicadas," He explained, leaning against the counter casually as he absently chewed on the inside of his cheek. "In any case, don't be mad; just talk to me instead of assuming I'm fucking around with you," He chuckled. "If it's a problem then let's see how we can fix it or… At least mitigate it. Because I like having her over so that's not an option every time." It was Graham's turn to give Marley a look accompanied with a wink, almost as if to say 'sorry about my weird teenage roommate'. 

“Relax, kiddo, no one’s accusing you of anything, but I’m kinda with him on this one,” Marley pointed out, still leaning against the counter with her coffee. “It was good,” she corrected, “it was a good time.” Great was perhaps pushing it a little. Not that it wasn’t, but she couldn’t just outright admit that. Great was, well-- someone she didn’t want to think about yet. “Synesthesia? Really?” she raised a brow, wondering if that was their code for “supernatural”. It made sense. Graham was a vampire, after all. A strange one, at that. Only made sense it’d be easier for him to live with another supernatural roommate. Normal humans were probably too tempting. “So what is it, really?” she asked, pushing away from the counter finally and stopping just shy of Frankie. “I’ve never heard of anyone that can hear things from people. See and feel, but not hear.”

Another groan left Frankie as she buried her face on her hands, before slowly dragging her down her face. Sure, she had gotten herself into that conversation, but that didn’t mean she wanted to know more about their sex life than she already knew. Graham’s words made her stop her dramatic outburst, though - if she could potentially hear buzzing from Regan for some reason, could Marley be the source of another sound? It… made sense, in a very insane way. Despite the colors being radically different, they both shared the fact that their auras had weird and scary movements she’d never heard before. “Oh shit.” She whispered, her full attention to Marley, ignoring the fact that Graham had practically outed her. Carefully and almost painfully slowly, she started moving towards the woman. “I, uh, I don’t know, I’ve never heard stuff before? Don’t move--” And why bugs on top of everything? Crap. He had, in a way, been right. The closer she got to her, the louder the screaming got to the point Frankie had to stop and take a few steps back from her to stop the feeling of bugs chewing on her brain, an uncomfortable and confused look on her face. “Uhh- okay-- So not- Not kinky sex bugs--” She turned to Graham looking like she was about to throw up. “Ithinkheraurasoundslikebugs?” “...Well, at east they aren’t kinky sex bugs,” Graham replied mildly, all things considered. “That’s kind of a problem, though... Why d’you think she sounds like bugs?” He asked more in general as though it were a prompt for a class to ponder. He looked over at Marley again; she didn’t seem like she gave off a bug vibe to him but then again, he hallucinated when he drank her blood-- Ooooh could he turn that into a cocktail? THAT’D be fun. Sorry, distracted, back to the topic at hand. “Let’s see… how could we solve this non-kinky bug conundrum,” He hummed, feeling his brow furrow slightly as he legitimately thought about it.”Oh! Have you tried headphones?” He asked.

“Wait, hold on, back up,” Marley said, shaking her head and setting her coffee down, watching as Frankie turned a steady eye on her. Focusing as if she were waiting for something to happen. Marley raised a brow, glancing between the two. “Did she say aura?” She looked back at Frankie, who looked as if she were either about to faint or scream, then over to Graham. “Is she an aura reader?” Because that, well-- that might be a problem. Marley didn’t need some extrasensory teenager knowing that she was a killer. Not that she knew entirely how aura reading worked, but she’d been warned before that aura readers could see into a person’s soul, that they could know if you’d taken a life willingly. And boy had Marley done that. “Headphones, really? That’s your suggestion? Wait-- do you hear auras?”

“No!...?” Could she? No, if Frankie could hear auras her grandma would’ve told her. Unless she couldn’t? No, it was ridiculous, auras could be seen, not heard. But then again Regan… Shaking her head, the human moved her hands in front of her as if cutting the air; a “enough is enough” gesture before pointed at Graham with both her indexes. “Not cool outing me like that.” And then, she turned towards Marley and did the same. “Yes, and your aura is scary as heck and I’m so sorry you sound like bugs for some reason cause you’re super cool.” Now where was her backpack when she needed to run. Never mind her bright pink clothing - she could deal with the embarrassment of running town in her pajamas better than.. whatever was happening in the room. “I don’t think headphones will work so just--” She jerked the front door open. “-- Just tell me next time you come so I can yeet.” And without waiting for a reply, she walked out and almost closed the door, but she opened it slightly, screamed “nice to meet you Marley”, and ran down the stairs before Graham could drag her back inside.

Before the vampire knew what had happened, the teenager said her piece then zipped out the door without even bothering to close the thing behind her. Graham’s blue-eyed gaze followed her, then looked sideways to Marley, giving a small half-shrug. “Sorry ‘bout that,” He half-heartedly apologized, sounding more like he accidentally bought the wrong type of chips. “She’s, uh… a little manic sometimes.” He explained, rubbing the back of his neck. “For the record, I said synesthesia; she was the one that said ‘aura reading’.” He made sure to clarify. “She sure is sweet, though; we get along well because apparently vampires don’t have auras.” He added, going over to the fridge again and pulling out a bottle of water. “I, uh… get it if that kind of ruined the mood so I’ll do whatever you wanna do,” He said, taking a large swig of the bottle and looking to Marley for a lead.

Before Marley had much of a chance to say anything back, the young girl was bolting from the room, either out of embarrassment or anxiety. Your aura is scary as heck. For some reason, that statement ruffled her. Of course it was, it only made sense. Everything about Marley was scary. She was a monster, after all. But she didn’t like the idea that her aura was so transparent about it. About her. That someone could look at her and know and decide she was a monster without even understanding. She picked up her coffee and finished it off before glancing over at Graham. “She’s a teenager,” she replied evenly, “let her be manic sometimes. Life’s rough in this world as a teenager.” She looked down at the empty coffee cup, then to the open door, then to Graham. “You know,” she shrugged, coming over to him in the kitchen. Pretended to look at a watch that wasn’t on her wrist, “I think you’ll find my mood rather hard to ruin. I’ve got time for a quickie before work.” It was a good distraction, after all.

#p: graham #p: marley #breakfast at graham's #❪ ⋅ ⋆ —— ❛ para ❜ ❫ #wickedswriting #// these three are gonna kill me one day

[adamsvanrhijn]

Hello there! I have been happily working through your incredible wtmy,tbws fic like a duck enthusiastically eating a bowl of peas, and was wondering if I may request a director’s commentary on the "never cared to 'til a minute ago. Always been a delicate bloke." conversation OR whatever scene from that fic that you most enjoyed writing? Thank you!

thank you! i am loving that simile very much.................. a duck enthusiastically eating a bowl of peas. amazing.

under cut because the fic itself is Adult Content haha

& also because this is Absurdly long... doing this meme for other people is really hammering in for me how much i rely on single line dialogue & short paragraphs lol. i’d love to work on that, but, womp womp, it hasn’t really been happening.

there is ... a lot going on in this scene lol. i feel very galaxy brain while writing this fic and it’s very pretentious, but i’m just gonna poke at the relevant bits around that quote instead of quoting The Whole Thing. this is from chapter 5 of when to my soul, the body would say ! 

context -- they’ve had morning sex in front of a mirror, then they went for breakfast at the place they’re staying, where richard is using a persona for Safety Reasons, & now they’re just hanging out and richard has been checking thomas out for the last 5-15 minutes without him noticing... until he comments on thomas smoking, and then thomas...

...lets his eyes wander, himself. 

Richard, fully dressed save for his shoes, is turned from the bureau, arm slung over the top of the chair. He did his hair this morning, because Evelyn Price would not have gotten up to anything in the night that could possibly alter the work of a week's worth of Brilliantine, and Thomas sort of hates it.

Not how it looks.

What it means. Or represents, rather. That they've got people other than each other upon whom they need to make good impressions, be they in service or just in the world at large.

right, so, this is like, the Ground Work Thoughts for thomas here as far as this particular interaction is concerned, because this is Very Much about perception / Being Perceived, and before the conversation even happens he’s paying richard a lot of attention, almost to the point of scrutiny. and richard is put together in a way that is very much not for thomas’s sake, it’s for they-left-the-room’s sake, and so he’s noticing that and that’s his frame of mind as they move on.

side note! hair styling oil & pomades really were worn for multiple days in a row. amazing. i could never. there should really be more in this fic about richard’s hair being all floraly <3 <3 <3 but there isn’t. womp womp. that would have been a Factor in this bit huh lol.

"You ever try it?" asks Thomas. Meaning smoking.

"No," he says. He tilts his head thoughtfully. "Never cared to 'til a minute ago. Always been a delicate bloke."

Thomas coughs impolitely.

"I don't see the harm in saying it, Thomas."

The feeling he can't describe leaves him, and a different one forms, in his gut instead of his lungs, an uncomfortable and unwelcome weight. Knotted.

aaaaand boom. thomas Did Not Sign Up For This. 

richard’s being 100% honest, just speaking casually, but thomas’s reaction is enough to get him on the defensive & he’s not an idiot so he knows why, but this is also not something he has lately put a lot of thought into. he’s Accepted It About Himself (we’ll get into this). thomas meanwhile is not ready to approach the subject of Delicacy for anybody he cares about, because to him it’s not a good description, it’s not something he aspires to be or wants to come across as, but he has many times in his life come across as it anyway. he’s Not Like That. 

so the word alone sticks in the wheels of his rolly suitcase emotional baggage, even though it’s richard using it on himself.

"Well, you clearly haven't got a problem with playing at being normal," Thomas says pointedly. Tough not to be pointed when he feels like this, because he's no stranger to it, is he. "If I didn't know better I'd be asking after your wife and baby like the rest of this place."

Lucky those people were leaving after breakfast; Thomas wouldn't be able to take two full days of it.

He hasn't asked about the photographs in the wallet yet, either, and he's not sure if he will.

normal being heterosexual, in this instance, which is contemporary vocabulary.

and richard is very good at playing straight when he’s not fearing for thomas’s life, so. it’s true! it’s a legitimate opinion. but it’s also a pretty significant logical leap that richard is about to pick up on, because that makes him uncomfortable, given thomas is basically saying.... you seem straight, what are you talking about, which isn’t going to make him feel excellent about the sense of identity he’s settled into. 

the rest of this is an Achievement Thomas Is Yet To Unlock so i won’t say much other than that this is not a significant addition to richard as the reader might know him from ywntmha, but, a lot of the big emotional work & development in that fic happens in 1929, with this meeting as the impetus... so it is very significant for thomas, at this point. we’re still in january and they still have a ways to go both in the next 24 hours and in the rest of the year.

Richard raises his eyebrows. "And what's that got to do with it?"

He shrugs.

It should be obvious. It would be obvious, to anyone who bothered to think about it for more than half a second.

that’s not a good faith question; richard’s goading him into actually saying the underlying thought. on one level thomas knows that, which is why he doesn’t say that part out loud and only thinks it.

"It's pretending, is all it is," Richard continues, a little too gentle.

"Don't call yourself what they call you," Thomas returns, a little too sharp.

and since goading doesn’t work, new tactic on richard’s part here, and though thomas can tell it’s intentional it does work on him, so.

writing this was interesting for several reasons but one of the big ones is, and anybody who’s been following me since Before da will probably know this, i like... have very little patience for discussion about personal identity, especially when it comes to reclamation ? i am way more interested both on a personal and academic level (bc i can’t lie about that lmfao, hashtag english major) in community + external ideas imposed on people.  

and this might seem like a very 2010s conversation for them to be having, but... this period of time was really the Dawn of queer/lgbt identity Concepts: words were being coined, communities were coming together in new ways, in continental europe & the us especially there was a lot of rapid development and transition here owing to various roaring 20s factors, and i think richard given his situation would have been exposed to that, for one, but also just, it’s gonna be in both their environments because it was getting to be a thing from the victorian era w/ the medicalisation of homosexuality and things are only expanding. 

"delicate” is a euphemism, not a slur, but it has hella connotations & they are both fully aware of them.

"Rather it be me saying it than them."

Blasé like it doesn't mean a thing at all.

You should know better, he wants to say, you should know better than anyone.

"Don't see how you can feel that way when it's not true to begin with."

thomas’s Only Gay Friend Is My Boyfriend is showing here lol, this is shining light on a gap in what he knows about richard & what he Thinks he knows about richard, so there’s a dissonance. and he sees richard as Masculine on a conscious or subconscious level, and he’s in a These Are Antonyms place re “delicate”. some black & white thinking going on here.

& i feel like the other part is probably fairly explanatory but, richard gets a sense of control and self-assurance by using a word for himself that might not be kind coming out of other people’s mouths and Being Okay With That.

"Thomas…"

They lock eyes.

A tense moment passes.

It is Richard who breaks first. He turns back to the desk with a small sigh.

"This has very little to do with you," he says carefully.

richard, knowing thomas as he does, is able to tell that he’s taking this personally, because he Is, so that’s that there, but again this is something he’s already settled in himself and so there’s also an element of having to justify again this thing he’s already figured out, which he isn’t exactly fond of.

anyway i said i’d get into this -- there’s a lot of interesting like, Societal / Subcultural / Etc politics with regards to being a male servant in this day and age and Gender In General, and valets especially -- throughout the time period leading up to this but ESPECIALLY in the 1920s when there are fewer men in service than there ever have been and more and more kinds of, say, manufacturing jobs as the automobile industry picks up & labour saving devices start having more complicated parts, and probably yknow most of the boys he went to school with are in that or mining or railways, so he’d have thought about it earlier on in his life probably. or Has rather. ftr his brother was in the carriage works i don’t think that ever comes up but there’s a lot there lol. there’s some family stuff in but level in time that we’ll get to........... someday. ANYWAY. 

the point is.

valeting is an effeminate job.

like, point blank. i’m seeing that idea both in sources specifically about servants & just general of-the-era stuff about great houses. when you’re talking about gay men in service a lot of them are valets, and some of that lines up w stereotypes & common lifestyle habits of gay men in general -- looking after hair shoes and clothing, obvs, attention to detail in physical appearance (note that men who Get Valeted also care about details, but they are not the ones who actually have to think and decide about it; whereas their wives are probably giving their ladies’ maids more directions as to hair styles and dresses etc etc because they’re expected to care about that part of the process in a way that men weren’t), exposure to social mores in a variety of different contexts, being well-connected within both the communities that help him get work done: tailoring, hairdressing, shoemakers, drapers, etc and in General, having softer skills like sewing and whatnot. and you’re unmarried and looking after the presentation of another man so there’s some like, desexualisation stuff there.

and thomas and richard would both know this very, very well. they’d have encountered the idea both as men in service and as gay men and especially as gay men in service.  

this richard has been working at buckingham palace for more than twenty years at this point, minus his war backstory which....... is complex and i haven’t gotten into it very much anywhere but he was getting cosy with some higher ups and having To Do about presentation there too and like, was in the service corps which was non-combat supply lines ....... and apprenticing valeting / actually (non-principally) valeting the Literal King Of England for nine.

he has had a LOT of time to get over his shit.

he not only likes his job* but he’s also very good at his job, literal 2nd highest valet position in frankly The World, which is fucking wild, and that combined with his Childhood of like, being second best to his older brother who was like, a perfect human being so far as he could ever tell and that included being very traditionally like, athletic and Leaderly and having-a-sweetheart-in-your-youth-you-then-marry when he was more interested in, you know, story telling and Arts N Crafts (i’m being tongue in cheek) and just generally not ... especially into the Boys Will Be Boys stuff............................

he’s fine with it! he is Fine with being called delicate, it’s helped him get over a lot of his issues just to decide oh, this actually fits my personality and the trajectory my life has followed, so i’m going to just accept that and move on ! etc. 

but thomas is not anywhere near there for himeslf and therefore he isn’t for other people, too, because one of thomas’s Problems is that he hates seeing other people comfortable and happy when he isn’t... and that even applies to richard, because love does not make us perfect. 

*he wants to leave service and he’s tired of the constant scrutiny of working where he does for whom he does, but he does like his actual duties in a lot of ways.

well here’s a novel. i hope this satisfies you!!! <3 <3 <3

#lots of ..... gender in here... #downton abbey tag #fic talk tag

[aqvarius]

lol i gotta ask, why do you hate the romance md mc? i haven’t played the game (i hate love choice) she popped up in ayumu pov and err she seemed a litte eccentric ? lol ppl seem to love her from what ive seen so i would a different perspective on her character.

haha okay so i touched on this a bit in my reviews of takado and hosho but let me try to summarise:

basically, i love mcs i can relate to but also find inspiring? like i like mcs who i can see parts of myself in, enough that i look at them and think “if i try really hard to be a good person, i can be like them”. that’s why even with the masukisu mc, i like her well enough, but i like her the most when she fails and makes mistakes bc perfect characters are so boring. 

anyway with otoge, i know a lot of people are like waaa mcs are too emotional and weak and insecure about everything but (and maybe it’s just because i’m Peak Insecure) i love that? i like it when they’re emotionally vulnerable and feel things and get hurt cause it helps me (1) be able to relate based on my own relationship/love/hurt/failure at work experience and (2) feel more invested in their character and relationship and development bc it’s clear through their emotional responses that they’re falling in love (or overcoming a problem in their relationship or at work/school/etc.). and if you’re like me and read with a semi self-insert intention, then it’s easier for me to fall in love with not just the LI/MC as a couple but also the actual thought of being in mutual love with the love interest. 

so for me the problem with the rmd mc is that she is all surface sass with no emotional substance. i found it very incongruous that she’s supposed to be all meta and love this one (v generic) otome game character but have no interest in real men, because ALL OF RMD’S CHARACTERS ARE VERY CLEARLY OTOME GAME CHARACTER ARCHETYPES. her dialogue with them often reads as like they put 100 points in “snark” and 0 points in any other personality trait. she’s really full of herself (she’s literally in a university/training hospital and somehow thinks she knows better than these elite specialists just bc she’s read a lot of journals??). she’s eccentric in a way that i don’t find particularly cute bc it comes off more as arrogant than passionate to me (maybe bc the writing style for her dialogue is so clinical?)

with someone like hlitf mc, she is righteous to a fault and often will try to like butt in where she’s not needed and be like “noooo i can’t compromise my MoRaLs” but she also has respect for her instructors and is humble enough to know that she does need to listen to their advice, and we often see her fail when she just does it her way without taking their expertise into consideration. because of this, we get to see her self-doubt from the beginning develop into confidence and applicable skill as a working detective. we also get to see snippets where she has to compromise on those morals and overcome adversity to do her job. so we actually get to see her realise her own flaws and learn and grow from them.

however, with rmd mc, we basically never see her have to face any adversity and thus we don’t get to see her develop. she hardly has any inner weaknesses to develop or overcome because she has no personality substance beneath that sassy and nerdy exterior. that’s why she’s only ever interesting when she has the entire crew of doctors in that room off which to bounce dialogue but is so bland when it comes to actual relationship development. her inner monologue as she’s supposed to be falling in love is so insincere because she is written in a way that is very... unemotional? so she goes from “i don’t care about men i only care about READING” to like “what????? i love him????/”  and like if your own first person perspective character doesn’t know or believe she’s in love, then how am i as a reader supposed to suddenly believe it. that’s why i find rmd quite disappointing overall because the LIs actually have good backstories and it would be rewarding to see them gradually open up and fall in love but unfortunately that story is wasted on someone who in my opinion doesn’t allow us to see the full emotional potential of that development. 

for example, there are elements of hosho’s route and rei kamiki’s route (from irresistible mistakes) that i find very comparable, in that hosho and dr mc end up cuddling to sleep a lot and rei and the im mc end up basically sharing a bed to sleep together as well iirc? in both cases, we are confronted with having to deal with growing one-sided feelings in a relationship where there is physical closeness but it’s only platonic. and yet somehow, even tho hosho’s back story is way more traumatic than rei’s, the emotional ride of falling in love, having that conflict and then ending up together is so much more convincing and rewarding in rei’s route because of his mc (i.e. the perspective that we read in the MS). 

also tbh i think i just like softness? i think it’s really clear by my posts that my favourite moments are when LIs who are normally more stoic/mean are all soft and gooey for the person they love. but rmd mc has no softness under her prickliness lmao. anyway i said i would summarise but i ended up ranting again so my apologies if you like this mc but i personally think the only time she reads as interesting is if you literally only see like 5 slide screenshot posts on tumblr bc you can enjoy her being sassy without having to suffer through her lack of emotional substance 

EDIT: i do wanna disclaim that in some more recent hlitf stories/chapters (although can’t remember which ones gave me this impression off the top of my head), i have seen dialogue that sometimes gives me rmd mc vibes. i’m not sure if it’s the same translator/translation team or this is just a trend that voltage is heading towards, but i do remember getting that feeling a couple times and then getting a bit anxious lmao that one of my favourite genuine mcs might be getting corrupted. i haven’t yet been able to pinpoint what exactly it is, but i think it’s that the tone can sometimes come across as blasé or is expressed in a more meme-y turn of phrase where i feel it should be more genuine/sincere? but either way, the writing in hlitf is amazing and we’ve already been given so much wonderful development so i’m not overly worried 

EDIT 2: i also wanna add that i know a lot of people like her nerdiness and sassiness i respect that but let’s not pretend that she’s the first nerdy or sassy voltage mc ever lol. hlitf mc forces ayumu to watch freaking era of samurai code of love and nerds out over old school detective dramas (amongst many other things... mizuki fujisaki.....). im mc is a workaholic and a cat lady who could literally talk for 5 hours about tachibana’s ads. bmp mc is CONSTANTLY sassing all of them, esp prince keith lol. mlfk mc is such a dork. scm mc knows every single Greek myth about the stars. msb mc is a theatre nerd. eitm mc does not ever let miyabi or kyoga get away with their shit. however, they are all still VERY CUTE MCs.

anyway i could keep going on and on but all i’m saying is that in so many voltage games, the mc is CLEARLY the only one with a braincell out of the entire cohort of men and the fact that she is the only person with common sense (while also having her own hobbies and interests) while all these men around her are ridiculous is a great selling point so personally i don’t think voltage needed to overcompensate the way they did and delete her emotional capacity function. 

#romance md: always on call #rmdaoc #romance md #voltage mc #snow answers #meta #Anonymous

[shadowofthelamp]

Read Twix goes hunting and to space with her dads for fun, what does Kit do with them and his sister?

Kit doesn’t mind camping, he likes being out in nature, but he’ll leave the hunting part to them. He stays back at the camp and collects cool rocks and arranges the sticks into art, or writes poems. He’s got a killer instagram.

He also likes to play the violin, and I feel like Dib would have picked up the piano at some point so they could share that! Zim absolutely insists that he gets defensive training like Twix did, but when he doesn’t like the big holographic field he probably ends up in karate or something.

Twix is more of an aunt than a sister, although her kids probably end up friends with Kit, since they’re a year and four years older than him. (I still need to make them People, they’re just lumps with names atm.) She’ll tease him, but mostly she’s just kind of confused about how bizarrely normal he ended up. They bond over crystals though, even though she’s more into the magical protection aspect and he just likes geology. (It’s his favorite of the sciences!)

The weirdest thing about him is that the paranormal are just... a part of his life. He attracts them like honey attracts flies, and he’s blasé if he runs into weird stuff, so he’ll just turn and walk the other way if he sees a headless ghost or a zombie or w/e.

@terribluh just joked in the discord that while the rest of the family maxed out their intelligence and nothing else he’s the one who got the wisdom and charisma. He isn’t as genius as them but he’s got like... actual common sense. Something that family sorely needs. (Tulip is Twix’s Common Sense Braincell, for the record.)

#aip kit au #aip #iz #Anonymous #asks