#forcing myself to replace fluids

[baejax-the-great]

cannot even explain the frustration of being 90% of the way through editing a chapter and having a fucking fever??? come out of nowhere?? and sap my brain of the ability to do *anything*

#how is it that people on tv are always shown working through fevers #is that a thing real people can do #or just tv drama #because girl like i almost fell down the stairs last night #and my fever isn't even very high #just a fragile and weak creature #forcing myself to replace fluids #I hates it

[lokisgoodgirl]

Teenage Dream [Loki x Reader]

A link to my Masterlist is HERE Summary: A trip to Asgard means a visit to Loki's childhood bedroom - and his teenage fantasy. (w/c 1.9k) Warnings: 18+ only. Loki x Female Reader. Established relationship. Smut. Body fluids etc etc. Language.

“This is your childhood bedroom?!” Loki’s arms spread wider, turning in a lazy circle as you gape at the high ceilings and golden cornicing. Open archways lead to a balcony which runs along the full side of one wall, Asgard sprawling below in afternoon sunlight. It’s huge.

“What did you expect?” Loki shoots a lovingly indignant look over his shoulder. “Some kind of hovel-sized quarter the kind of which Stark has bestowed on Lang?”

His boots thud in quick succession on polished marble before he jumps through the air and lands on the modest queen-size with a bounce – a hand balled at his temple. The sheets have clearly been replaced since he last laid in it, but old habits die hard. The green and gold of his colours is in full effect in this room from the curtains to the tapestries and the quilt draped across the mattress. “Lie with me,” he says, looking up through his lashes. “Please?”

Something about seeing Loki dressed in his, what he still calls, ‘Midgard garms’ suddenly seems ridiculous in one of Asgard’s royal bedchambers. A pair of tight black jeans cling to his muscles, denim shifting as he draws one knee over the other to rest on the bed. His forest green t-shirt has ridden up at his lower stomach, a victim of the obscene measurements of his stretching body. He chuckles lightly, making a thick line of his obliques tighten as he slips his fingers further into mussed hair. "I told you I was a prince," he says sheepishly.

You make your way to the bed and he flips to his back, releasing a happy groan as you straddle him. His eyelids droop, a flash of his upper teeth as he bites his bottom lip. "Frigga will be expecting us," you say as you roll your hips against his crotch. "Uhhh...gods-" he grunts, large palms rubbing up your thighs tight on either side of his chest. ‘Frigga can wait. I said I would give you a tour, and give you a tour...I shall.’ "Not from down there you won’t."

You yelp as Loki sits up and his lips fasten to yours, hand cradling the back of your head and forcing you in a violent kiss. He bites your bottom lip, sucking out gently. You moan softly as his hands begin to rub your thighs again. He’s needy. The sentimentality of bringing you Asgard for the first time is doing a real number on him. Your fingers run down his neck, down the hard dips and ridges of his abdomen through the t-shirt.

“I used to pleasure myself in this bed, dreaming of a woman like you-” he says huskily, beginning to thrust upwards. The painfully tight erection bursting against denim rubs against your gusset, toying back and forth. You feel a swell of arousal web between your folds as your eyes dart towards the open door. Just a crack, but it’s enough. The guards are never far in the palace it seems, even for a Prince who’s all grown up.

“Say more,” you tease. It’s a whisper, but it seems to echo. Loki chuckles quietly into the curve of your neck before he tips you easily to the side. You meet the mattress with a bounce, your head disappearing between the crevice of two plush pillows. Loki’s long form rises above you, impossibly rectangular, spread on his knees, the denim screaming around his crotch.

“It may come as a surprise to you that I was an awkward young man,” he starts, riding up the hem of his t-shirt. His leather belt sits maddeningly at the dent of his hips, perfect alabaster skin of his stomach flashing into view. “No!? I would never have guessed...” you joke, surprised at your ability to think straight as Loki’s shirt pops over his head. He throws it away, skittering gently across the marble floor. His eyes flash mischievously.

“But I had urges, of course; fucked myself night after night like a demon; elaborate fantasies formed in my head with excruciating detail.” He falls forward against the pillows, the bulge of his shoulders tensing as he cages you.

“I wouldn’t let myself cum until every detail in my head was perfect,” he breathes, letting long tendrils of hair drag against your throat in time with the filth of his dulcet syllables. “Again and again. It was enough to drive a young man to madness.”

“Did you ever have-?” you start, cut off by a pathetic moan as Loki drags his bound cock against your clit. “Never," he whispers. "This bed is as virginal as myself when I left it.”

The warm glow of his magic pulses from his skin. Loki’s jeans are gone, replaced by a green silk robe open at the waist. It's Asgardian craftsmanship, that much is obvious. Gold weaving edges the hem, its age betrayed only by the sleeves which are a little too short. The sage shimmer melts into the wave of his hair, and for a second you can’t bring yourself to believe there wasn’t a line forming outside his bedroom every night after he came of age.

He rests back on his haunches between your legs, flipping out the robe at the nip of his taut waist. Loki’s eyes smoulder, waiting for you to ask.

“Which one do you want?” you say. It times perfectly with a twitch of his proud cock as he draws a finger back and forth along its length. His chin dips and a small smile creeps at the corner of his lips.

Loki raises a hand, a theatrical snap of his fingers making the ceiling height door to the chamber swing closed with an almighty clang. Even under normal circumstances, doors don’t close quietly in the palace; it is by design.

“My goddess riding me,” he says, raising his gaze to yours. “Then once I’ve filled her, she crawls to my face; smothers me with her perfect, dripping sex; calls my name so loudly in ecstasy that my brother hears it all the way in the taverns.”

Your brows raise. “That’s quite specific.”

Loki shrugs. “I told you. It needed to be perfect. I spent a lot of time thinking about it.” You shuffle up on the pillows, curling one side of his silk robe in a fist and pulling his mouth to yours. He manoeuvres around, lying back against the pillows with bright eyes while you crawl on top of him once more.

“Are you my sweet virginal Prince?” you ask, batting your lashes. Loki snickers. "If you like." “I do.” “Aright then,” he sniffs. “Although I should warn you, for a virgin – I am rather an expert.” “Shhh-” You press a finger to his lips. "I read a lot of books," he explains with overly-earnest eyes, muffled against your finger. “Let’s get you some practice, then..” you whisper, rolling your hips up the length of his cock. Loki whimpers, brows slanting. You can't tell if that part is for show. With a slip of his hand against your ass you feel your dress dissolve, the nip of a breeze through the open arches making your nipples stiffen. Loki’s head leaves the pillow and catches one in his mouth as your hand guides his cock between your legs. You rub the tip against your slit, slipping back and forth as guttural groans roll in his throat.

"My virgin Prince," you coo.

Loki’s head falls back to the pillow, a warning brow rising. But his eyes sparkle. Slowly, you sink down onto his cock; each hard inch of muscle tugging against your walls as you settle to the hilt.

“Every time you do that,” Loki rasps, “it’s everything I ever dreamt of in this bed, I swear.” You flatten a curl of hair back from his forehead, rocking your hips back and forth. His hands slide up your waist, cupping your breasts as he pants beneath you. A vein in his neck throbs as he grits his teeth to the ceiling. He won’t last, not today. And that’s just fine.

You press his shoulders down, limiting his thrusts. If he wanted to, he could overthrow the touch in an instant. But he wont, not today; not in this bed. Every time you reach the tip of his cock you squeeze and his lips part; every time you sink him deep into your cunt they press together, like he doesn’t trust himself not to howl. The squelching is louder now. The moaning, too. You and Loki have fucked many times, in many places – in every conceivable position, each time you think you could never be more aroused, he proves you wrong. But something’s different about him here. When his beautiful eyes open, the dark fan of his lashes seem to pop against the vibrant blue ringing blown pupils.

Loki’s fingers sink deep into the plump of your ass. He pulls in time with your rhythm, drawing the flat of his feet up. In seconds, he sits up to meet your mouth; his tongue lapping against yours with quiet desperation. Your fingers run down his abdomen and you feel his stomach clench.

“Fill me, baby-” you whine into his open mouth, “show me what Asgard’s finest cock can give me.” Loki grunts in pleasured anguish, thrusting in erratic shudders as he erupts inside your heat. The angle is tight. Fresh seed creams at the seal of your slit and wells around the rim of his half-sheathed cock as he comes undone with a ragged exhale of your name. He captures you in a messy kiss, falling away from your mouth to your chest before collapsing back to the pillows. He squints with one eye, a lazy hand beckoning. “You sure?” There’s an unusual shyness in your voice. Loki nods with a wolfish, lopsided grin; drunk on sex. You shuffle up his abdomen, feeling a thick roll of hot cum settling against your inner thigh. Your fingers curl around the wooden headboard, Loki’s large palms settling on your ass and keeping you high. His head tilts, warm tongue tracing your inner thigh and sucking his seed from your skin. A violent shiver of desire rolls down your spine, making you thrust towards his face.

“I’ll try my best-” he purrs in character from between your legs.

His eyes are all you can see as his tongue outstretches. They disappear as he dips further back, running his warmth between your folds. He tilts his chin up, a white pool collected on his tongue. Loki of Asgard looks up from bottomless eyes, the planes of his cheekbones sharpened. You shoot down and jam your tongue into his open mouth. His cum swirls within the kiss, mingling with the earthy taste of your own pussy – swallows and moans and filth sliding down your throats. Loki gasps loudly as your kiss breaks with a slurp. “Was that in your fantasy?” you ask innocently, resuming your position above his head. “I regret now, that even in the depths of my teenage depravity, it was not,” Loki growled, squeezing your ass-cheeks. He nudges you closer. “Now, finish me,” he orders as he pushes you down against his face. The flat of Loki’s tongue meets your plump clit. Each flush and fat stripe of the muscle has no pretence – he intends to make you climax; and climax hard. Your nails dig into the headboard, scratching down pristine oak lined with gold. Images of Loki as a virginal youth rear in your mind, thrashing in these sheets, under this very ceiling, twisting and unravelling beneath the beat of his fist. Your thighs begin to tremble, held steady by his fingertips sinking deep into the curve of your ass. Loki’s tongue is relentless; it swirls and captures every flush of sparking orgasm and tends it with the next lap of his attentions. Before long, your legs tense – and somehow, one of your hands has tangled in his hairline, pushing him deeper, his nose slotted perfectly at the lip of your mound. The sight is all it takes. “Loki-” you choke, punctuated by a final devastatingly soft lick of his flat tongue over your sex. “Mmrph…” he grunts, brow furrowing. You hold your breath as climax shatters you, the exhale a strangled sob of his name that sings around the ceilings and tumbles out the archways.

You collapse on his chest, the two of you panting heavily. A thin sheen of fresh sweat clings to his skin. You trace the angle of his jaw, smiling as a dream-like peace descends on his features. “Do you think Thor heard?” “From Midgard? I doubt it,” Loki sighs, letting one of his legs fall open to the side. He’s hard again. “But I can let that part of the fantasy slide. Everything else was...perfection, my love.” You prop a fist beneath your chin. “Maybe we just need to try harder.”

“Fuck harder, you mean?” Loki says, a smirk curling the corners of his lips. “You did promise me a palace tour…” you say, drawing your knuckles up the velvet skin of his cock stretching against his stomach. Loki’s smirk grows wider.

Tags (continued in comments)

@meowmeow-motherfucker @gigglingtiggerv2 @imalovernotahater @avengersalways @littledark11 @lokikissesmyforehead @simplyholl @fictive-sl0th @thedistractedagglomeration @loopsisloops @glitchquake @jaidenhawke @silverfire475 @fandxmslxt69 @morriggannlostinfandoms @marygoddessofmischief @thevillainswhore @xorpsbane @peacefulpianist @yelkmelk @wheredafandomat @mistress-ofmagic @acidcasualties @ozymdias @your-taste-on-my-lips @lokidokieokie @kikster606 @peachyjinx @tbhiddlestan83 @skymoonandstardust @justjoanne242 @thenotoriouserg @ladyofthestayingpower @wolfmoonmusic @brittbax @smolvenger @liminalpebble @joyful-enchantress @kaleenjackson @fictional-hooman @kellatron55 @icytrickster17 @buttercupcookies-blog

#loki x reader #loki smut #loki laufeyson #loki fanfiction #loki x reader smut #loki x female reader #loki marvel #loki x you #loki odinson #loki odison x reader #lokismut #loki x you smut #loki imagine

[dolldefiler]

[Inspired by a post I saw floating around]

It’d be utterly cruel to strip away a woman’s identity until she’s just a sex toy, wouldn’t it? I’d replace her clothes with sluttier and sluttier lingerie, objectifying her fuckdoll body in any way possible. As she’d drink her coffee in the morning, I’d stand in front of her, stroking my pulsing cock. I’d pour my thick, creamy load into her coffee, before kissing her forehead and making my own cup. I’d walk over her boundaries, groping her, slapping her ass, pinching her nipples, everytime I pass by her. I’d harass her endlessly until she simply accepts it as a standard part of life.

I’d set her plate on the floor and snap a collar around her neck, telling my little bitch to eat up. If she’s slow or is indignant, I’d kneel down and spray another load of white sauce onto her plate. I’d force her head down and have her eat it off her plate, like the sub-human animal she is. I’d throw things at her and around her before telling her to clean after herself. Her mess is her mess. My mess is her mess. 

She might snap at some point. She’d raise her voice, and I’d simply molest her lewd tits, stripping off her clothes. She’d ask me to stop. I’d spit in her face. She’d demand I stop. I’d lower her to her knees and shut the inferior fuckmutt up by pounding her stupid little face with my dick. She can argue all she wants while my hairy balls slap against her chin and my dick chokes her out.

And at night, when she finally thinks she has a break from her torment, she’d wake up to the feeling of a cock in her asshole. She’d feel warm fluids leaking around her and my arm wrapped around her neck. Not viscous enough to be cum. Piss. I’d piss in her asshole as she sleeps. Why would I bother going to the bathroom when there’s a urinal sleeping next to me? I’d jack off in her asshole and slide myself into her cunt only to breed the sex toy with my icky, misogynistic jizz.

#misogyny kink #patriarchy kink #degrading k1nk #degradation k1nk #degredation kink #humiliation kink

[soulofapatrick]

Scarlet Temptations - Shanks x Reader

Summary: You find your way onto the Red Force to find Shanks' crew mid party which leads to some confessions from Shanks

Words: 1.7k

Warnings: None

Y/N’s POV

As I set foot on the deck of the legendary Red Force, the scene unfolds before me like a vivid painting brought to life. The air thrums with the harmonious medley of lively music and carefree laughter. Lanterns, adorned with intricate patterns, sway gently in the breeze, casting a warm, ethereal glow that dances across the deck. The vibrant attire of the pirates is a sight to behold—each outfit a kaleidoscope of colours that whirl and twirl with every movement. They move with a contagious energy, embracing the night with a fervour that seems to defy the boundaries of the open sea.

And there he is, amidst the jubilant chaos, Shanks stands tall and commanding, yet there’s a different air about him tonight. His usually serious countenance is softened by a smile, his laughter blending seamlessly with he joyful tunes echoing through the air. As I stand there, enraptured by the spectacle of Shanks and his crew revealing in the festivities, I can’t help but admire the way he seamlessly merges with the joyous atmosphere. He moves with a grace that belies his stature, effortlessly engaging in the lively dance that envelops the deck. 

His laughter, infectious and genuine, resonates across the ship, drawing others into the whirl of merriment. I watch as he twirls a crewmate around, sharing a joke that elicits hearty laughs from those around them. There’s an undeniable warmth in the way he interacts with everyone, a genuine camaraderie that speaks volumes about the respect he commands. 

Caught in the rhythm of movement, shanks suddenly stumbles mid-step, his gaze shifting through the crowd until his eyes lock onto mine. A glint of recognition sparks within those deep, espresso eyes, and without hesitation, he gracefully navigates his way through the dances until he stands before me. 

“Ah, there you are!” His voice, carrying a blend of amusement and genuine delights, cuts through the music. With a playful grin, he extends a hand, inviting me to join in the dance, “Care to join me for a dance?” 

Caught off guard by Shanks’ unexpected invitation, I feel a surge of both excitement and hesitation. His hand extended, the music pulsating around us, I can’t help but hesitate, a shy smile tugging at my lips. 

“Ahh, I don’t know Shanks,” I stammer, glancing around at the lively dancers, feeling a mixture of nerves and exhilaration 

But Shanks, ever persistent and full of infectious enthusiasm, doesn’t take no for an answer. With a gentle yet firm tug, he insists, “Come onnn, it’s all in good fun! Trust me, you’ll enjoy it!” 

Before I can protest further, he pulls me gently but decisively into the heart of the dance floor, his infectious laughter mingling with the music. At first, I feel self-conscious, my movements hesitant and unsure amidst the whirl of experienced dancers. Yet, Shanks’ encouraging grin and the vibrant atmosphere begin to work their magic. His easy confidence is contagious, and soon, I find myself swaying to the rhythm, the initial hesitation giving way to a growing sense of enjoyment. 

As we move, Shanks’ guiding hand offers reassurance, guiding me through the steps with  a patience that surprises me. His presence is both reassuring and exhilarating, a mix of warmth and strength that envelopes me in a cocoon of comfort. With every twist and step, the music seems to weave a connection between us, breaking down barriers in its infectious melody. And as the dance reaches its peak, any lingering reservations melt away, replaced by a sense of pure exhilaration and joy. 

The dance crescendos and the music wraps around us like a vibrant embrace. Shanks’ movements become fluid, guiding me effortlessly through the steps as if we’re engaged in an intricate duet. His touch, gentle yet firm, sends a shiver down my spine, awakening a sensation I hadn’t expected. 

In a graceful swirl, he draws me closer, our bodies aligning in perfect rhythm. His chest presses against mine, his warmth seeping through the thin barrier of our clothes. The closeness makes my heart quicken, a nervous fluter rising within me. 

Shanks, ever the playful charmer, leans in, his breath teasingly close to my ear, “You’re a natural on the dance floor,” he murmurs, his voice a husky whisper that sends a jolt of heat through me. His lips graze against the shell of my ear, sending a thrill down my spine, “Or maybe it’s just the company.” 

A blush blooms across my cheeks as his playful flirtation catches me off guard. His proximity is electrifying, and I find myself pressing my hands flat against his firm chest, a futile attempt to steady myself amidst the whirlwind of sensations. His laughter rumbles against me, the sound infectious and carefree, “You’re blushing.” He observes with a hint of amusement, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he leans back slightly, his gaze locking with mine. 

Caught in his gaze, I can’t help but feel both flustered and captivated. There’s a magnetic pull in the air, a tension that crackles between us, undeniable and exhilarating. The lively music fading into a softer melody, Shanks drawing me closer again, a playful glint in his eyes, “Another dance, perhaps?” 

Unable to resist the pull of his charisma, I nod in agreement, allowing him to draw me into the gentle sway of the slower rhythm,. The atmosphere changes, the energy now replaced with a more intimate ambiance that envelops us like a warm embrace. Our movements synchronise effortlessly, a silent understanding guiding us through the graceful steps. As the dance progresses, a newfound ease settles between us, the tension from earlier transforming into a subtle connection that seems to deepen with every passing moment.

Caught in the intimacy of the dance, I find myself drawn to the enigmatic scars that adorn Shanks' left eye. With a hesitant yet curious touch, my fingers trace the three distinct marks, the texture rough against my fingertips. It's a silent acknowledgment of the battles fought and the stories untold, a gesture of both reverence and curiosity. Shanks' gaze lingers on me, a mixture of surprise and a subtle vulnerability flickering in his eyes at the unexpected touch. Yet, he doesn't pull away, allowing the moment to unfold between us.

In that tender exchange, our closeness feels like a delicate dance of understanding and unspoken words. His surprise at my touch gives way to a soft vulnerability, a fleeting glimpse behind the veil of the enigmatic pirate captain. As my fingertips trace the rugged path of his scars, the world around us seems to fade into a hushed sanctuary, leaving just the quiet rhythm of our breathing. Shanks' gaze, intense and searching, holds mine captive, as if inviting me to explore the depths of his untold tales.

Unexpectedly, Shanks leans in closer, our noses brushing lightly, causing a rush of laughter to escape both us the shared moment washing away any hint of unease. It’s a lighthearted exchange, a dance of proximity that sparks a carefree joy between us. 

Amidst the laughter, Shanks’ voice, a gentle murmur, breaks the fleeting silence, “You’re… you’re ethereal,” he breathes out, the sincerity in his tone wrapping around us like a gentle breeze. His words carry a weight of admiration, tinged with a hint of wonder, leaving me speechless. 

Before I can even gather my thoughts, Shanks closes the remaining distance between us, his lips meeting mine in a tender and fleeting kiss. It’s a moment suspended in time, the touch of is lips against mine, a blend of warmth and promise. There’s a raw authenticity to the connection, an unspoken understanding that transcends words, leaving only the soft brush of our lips and the shared heartbeat between us. It's a brief yet poignant exchange, carrying with it the unspoken promise of a story yet to unfold.

In that suspended moment, the air crackles with an electric charge, and as our lips part, a gentle smile plays on Shanks' features, his eyes reflecting a myriad of unspoken emotions. His vulnerability echoes through the faintest quiver of his lips, resonating with an unspoken invitation. Drawn inexplicably closer, my fingers instinctively thread through the soft strands of his crimson hair. With a gentle yet firm tug, I guide Shanks' face back towards mine, the unexpected pull drawing a deep, guttural sound from him—a mixture of surprise and a raw, primal response to the sensation of his hair being tugged. 

The kiss that follows is fervent and impassioned, a collision of longing and restraint that sets my heart ablaze. His lips are soft yet possess an underlying intensity that ignites a fire within me. There's a dance of fervour and tenderness in the way his lips mold against mine, each kiss a whispered promise of uncharted territories. 

As our embrace deepens, I feel the gentle touch of his hand on the small of my back, his touch warm and reassuring. His right hand, the only one he has, finds a natural resting place, cradling the curve of my waist with a tender yet possessive hold. The sensation of his kisses is an intoxicating blend—a symphony of desire and reverence. Each touch of his lips against mine sends a cascade of sensations through me, evoking a sense of longing and connection that feels both exhilarating and comforting.

Amidst the fervent exchange, a wave of emotions surges through me, a whirlwind of desire and an unspoken understanding. Shanks' kisses feel like an exploration of uncharted territory, each touch leaving an indelible mark on my soul, a testament to the depth of our connection.

In that stolen moment, with the world fading away and the only reality being the touch of our lips and the intertwining of our souls, I find myself lost in the enchanting dance of passion and intimacy, completely ensnared by the enigmatic allure of the man known as Shanks.

“Come on,” His voice is husky as he parts enough to whisper, “I want you in my cabin now.” 

“Yes sir.” 

“You’re gonna be the death of me.” 

One Piece Masterlist TAG LIST - updated 21st Dec 2023

#shanks #shanks x you #shanks x reader #red haired shanks #red hair shanks #shanks smut #shanks fluff #shanks x y/n #shanks angst #shanks one piece #one piece fluff #one piece smut #one piece #one piece shanks #one piece x reader #peter gadiot #opla!shanks x reader #opla!shanks

[tensecretsandakiss]

We're out with some friends for drinks and I've been teasing you all night. Locking eyes with you while I lick the salt from the rim of my glass, leaning over you to steal your own drink, wrapping my lips around the neck of the bottle slowly and drinking deeply. Letting my skirt edge further and further up my thighs until almost nothing is left to the imagination. I can see you getting riled up, the way your eyes rake over me, the frustration in them, the lust. I know that when we get home I'll suffer the consequences for my behaviour. And I know that those consequences will be bliss.

Your hand grips my thigh in the taxi home. Once inside, I climb the stairs to our apartment slowly with you behind me - I can practically feel your gaze on the curve of my ass.

You're silent as we enter, locking the door behind you with a definite click before turning to me. You look me up and down, my flushed skin, my sly smile.

You shake your head, tongue darting out to wet your lips. The sight of it sends a rush of heat to my core.

"You know what you were doing tonight." I shrug, feigning ignorance.

"I don't know what you mean." Your hands grab my arms and you push me against the wall, strong but gentle.

"Oh, I think you do." Your lips attack my neck, sucking and biting, marking me as yours. I moan, a hand weaving through your hair. My neck quickly bruising, you lift your head to kiss me deeply. We're all tongues, grabbing and pulling, clinging to each other so tightly I can't tell where I end and you begin. You pull at the straps of my top and bra in a fluid motion, forcing them off my shoulders to expose my tits to your approving eyes. You focus your attention on them, sucking on my nipple while your hand squeezes the other. I'm overwhelmed, gasps and moans spilling from my lips like a prayer, legs shaking, hands pressed against the wall to stop me falling to the floor. You move further down, fingers gripping the soft flesh of my thighs and your lips following. I pull my skirt up, allowing you access, and you grin up at me from your knees.

"So desperate for me to taste you." I can only nod. You tighten your grip, forcing me to spread my legs so you can admire the damp spot on my underwear. Your tongue drags over it, teasing my pussy, barely providing enough sensation. I grind down, hungry for more, worried that the teasing will last longer.

But you're feeling generous. You tug at the waistband so they fall to my feet, and wrap your lips around my clit. The sound that escapes me is more than a whine - it's primal, demanding, hungry. You bury your face in my wetness, sucking and licking, your tongue dipping inside me.

"Fuck," you groan. "You taste so fucking good. And you're all mine."

"Yes." The word comes out as a gasp. "I'm yours. Only yours. Please. Please."

Two fingers slide inside me easily, your mouth focusing on my clit. The fingers curl against my g-spot and my legs almost give out. I can feel the tension building inside of me as you thrust in and out, as your tongue works magic.

"Come on, baby. Cum for me."

A few more thrusts and I come undone. My body shakes as the orgasm rips through me, your tongue unrelenting, lapping up my cum like it's your last meal on earth.

I collapse against the wall, chest heaving, barely standing as you rise to my level. You take hold of my jaw and pull me into a kiss, letting me taste myself on your lips. All words have escaped my mind, replaced only with want and need.

"Bedroom." You rasp. "Now."

~~~

*this is about queer sapphic sex. men and minorsw DNI*

#writing #sapphic ns/fw #sapphic nsft #queer nsft #queer ns/fw #lesbian ns/fw #lesbian nsft #wlw ns/fw #wlw nsft

[regenderate-fic]

Let Me Spin and Excite You

Fandom: Doctor Who Ships: Fifteenth Doctor/Rose Tyler Characters: Fifteenth Doctor, Rose Tyler Rating: General Word Count: 1,932 Other Tags: Reunions, Immortal Rose, Bad Wolf as Disability

Read on AO3

Summary: After years of looking for the Doctor, Rose meets a strange-but-familiar man at the club.

NOTES: i happened to finish this on esther's birthday so it's for him now. everyone say happy birthday @nounpolycule

anyway i have a ton of long wips that are going super slowly because of how grad school owns my entire soul now so this is my attempt to remind myself that i can write things that are short sometimes.

title from may i have this dance by francis and the lights. which has some of my favorite lyrics of any song and i'm forever mad at spotify for not telling me the version of it i first discovered is a cover (by meadowlark)

Rose leaned against the bar, drink in hand. 

The glass was full. Half an hour, and she hadn't even taken a sip. She'd meant to try and relax a bit, let loose, but it just wasn't happening. Her head hurt, her bones ached, and she felt the ever-present exhaustion hovering over her, threatening to take her out at the knees. 

Not to mention—ten years.

She'd been back in this universe for ten years. And she still hadn’t found the Doctor. 

She'd tried, of course. She'd looked for unusual happenings, bumps in the timeline, anything that might indicate the presence of a haphazardly landed time ship and its ridiculous occupant. She'd chased a million leads, ironed out as many of time’s odd little wrinkles as she could manage, followed timelines across millennia—running into the Doctor should've been inevitable, after all that. And yet she still hadn’t seen them. 

And now here she was, slumped against the wall, trying to convince herself that this was still the sort of thing she enjoyed. 

She sighed. Maybe it was time to go. She tipped what was left of her drink into her mouth and turned to leave. 

But just as she started for the door, a flurry of motion caught her eye. 

She disregarded it at first. It was coming from the dance floor, for goodness sake. Surely there was enough movement there to turn anyone’s head. But—no, this was an unexpected movement. Something out of time. 

Rose turned to look. 

Immediately, she was transfixed. 

The densely-packed crowd of dancers all but faded away around the dancer who'd caught her eye. 

Beautiful was the only word for him. He practically gleamed in the club lights—the sheen of sweat on his skin somehow made him more entrancing. He moved with a fluid ease, even as the moves themselves were unlike anything anyone else was doing. And there was something about him… Rose couldn't tear her eyes away. He just looked so joyful. 

Tears startled her at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand. She missed that sort of joy—that carefree movement, lost in a sea of people. 

To hell with it. One dance wouldn't kill her. Rose took a step towards the dance floor. 

Never mind. Maybe it would kill her, figuratively speaking. The bright lights and loud noises were doing nothing for her headache. Why had she come here again? She'd enjoyed nightclubs, once, but since then every cell in her body had surely changed, fallen away only to be wholly replaced. She could hardly expect to be the same person she was.

Still. It was nice to indulge the fantasy. 

The dancing man had his hands above his head, skirt fanning out as he twirled. As Rose watched, he came to a stop, and then—

Was he looking at her? 

Rose fiddled with the hem of her jacket. She probably looked out of place, in long pants and a full-on leather jacket, with barely any makeup. She hadn't minded, but now she'd been caught out, staring unabashedly at this man, and her usual armor wasn't quite right for the scenario.

The man stepped off the dance floor. He walked like he was still dancing, with graceful, deliberate steps. Rose forced her eyes to stay trained on the dance floor as he walked past her, presumably to the bar. 

She'd been standing for too long. If she wasn't going to leave the club, she needed to find a place to sit. She looked around. Most of the tables were completely full—but then she noticed a group of people getting up, and Rose hurried over to take their table before anyone else could claim it. She kept an idle eye on the dance floor. She wasn’t up for it now—but a hundred years ago, she would've been there, carefree and having the time of her life. 

There was movement in her periphery. She looked towards it only to see the man from earlier, now lowering himself into the chair next to her. He was holding two glasses. 

“This your drink?” he asked, offering one to her. 

Rose eyed him. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.” He settled into the chair. “D’you come here a lot, then?”

Rose burst out laughing. “You're really opening with the oldest line in the book?”

“I didn't mean it like that.” He flashed a smile. “I'm not from around here. Don't know the scene.”

Rose hesitated. “It's not my usual haunt, no.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Where are you from, then?”

He waved a hand. “Here and there.”

“How specific.” Rose felt herself start to smile. “And, I have to ask. Why are you here?”

“What?”

Rose nodded at the dance floor. “You've got a whole club to talk to. What are you doing here?”

He pointed at her. “You were looking at me.”

“Can't imagine I'm the only one,” Rose said, and then she blushed. She hadn't meant to be flirting—but, well, why shouldn't she? It would be ludicrous to pretend she wasn't attracted. “Why me?”

“Why not you?” He raised his eyebrows. “Got a big old skeleton in your closet, have you?”

“I've barely got a closet,” Rose said, truthfully. She kept a small flat, but it wasn't really home to her. No need for closet space, not when she hadn't bought new clothes in four years. “No room for skeletons.”

“That's a shame.” The man grinned. “There's always under the bed, I suppose.”

The space under Rose’s bed was full of random bits of alien tech she hadn't gotten around to investigating. “Not my bed,” she said. “No room, what with all the doodads I've got.”

“That's a technical term, is it?” He was smiling. 

Rose smiled back. “Oh, yeah, definitely. I'm great with doodads.”

“How about thingamajigs?”

“Absolutely. One hundred percent. I'm there.” 

He and Rose grinned at each other, and suddenly Rose was sitting in a chippy just off the Powell Estate, her feet knocking against the Doctor’s as they laughed. 

She blinked. 

That feeling—the fizzy joy of an easy back-and-forth—it had been at least ten years since she’d felt that way. It was nearly alien to her now.

But… it was nice. And there was no harm in it, was there? If this frankly gorgeous man wanted to buy her a drink and have a bit of flirty banter—well, she wasn't exactly going to say no. 

The man gestured towards the dance floor with a flourish. “Would you like to dance?” 

Rose weighed her options. There was a reason she’d held back, before. But… this was different. Unwise as dancing may be, this man was very quickly beginning to seem worth the sacrifice.

“Yeah, all right,” she said. She smiled. “Show me your moves.”

The man’s face lit up. He held out a hand to Rose, and she took it, allowing him to lead her to the dance floor. Before, when she was watching him, she’d felt like he reflected light outward, shining on the whole club, and now she shared in his glow, moving without care, lost in the light and sound, anchored entirely by this strange man’s hands at her waist. 

It was the most she’d been touched in years. She felt a bit intoxicated—or maybe that was the alcohol—a bit light-headed—or maybe she’d just been upright too long—a bit exhilarated—and there was no way to explain that away. 

The dance felt like it lasted forever, but both common sense and time sense told Rose it could've only been a few minutes before she started to feel out of breath. 

“You all right?” He had to yell in her ear to be heard. 

“Yeah, fine!” Rose hesitated. “D’you want to get out of here?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” His hand fit wonderfully around hers, and they stepped out onto the street together. The cool evening air was a welcome respite from the warm fervor of the club. Rose laughed to feel it on her face. 

“Where are we going?” she asked. 

The man gestured. “My place is just around the corner, if that's all right with you.”

Rose glanced at him. He was still grinning, still gorgeous, his face illuminated by the bright neon of the club’s sign. This night had been strange in the best way—she hardly objected to continuing it. “Lead the way, then.”

His grin grew, as if that was even possible, as if he had infinite capacity for joy. Together, they walked to the street corner—turned—

Rose felt it before she saw it. A rushing familiarity, a glorious sense of home, a giant weight lifted from her bones. She blinked. There it was: a wooden blue police box, innocently positioned in the center of a streetlight’s beam. 

The TARDIS. 

Her brain was short-circuiting. She'd stopped walking. She was staring. The TARDIS was here. The TARDIS was here, which meant the Doctor was here. The Doctor was—

She looked back at the man she was walking with. He was still grinning, his gaze fixed entirely, expectantly, on Rose. 

Rose gasped. Her body felt like it was on fire. She looked from him to the TARDIS—back to him—her lips parted—she breathed out—and on her breath there was a name. 

“Doctor?” 

The look in his eyes was so achingly tender she wanted to cry. When he said her name, it sounded the same as it always had—low, soft, with an echo of reverence. “Rose Tyler.”

She fell into him. Immediately, instinctively, his arms wrapped around her waist, and she closed her eyes. 

“Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”

She felt the vibrations in his chest when he laughed. 

“Thought it would be more fun if you figured it out for yourself. And I was right, if you were wondering.” 

He pulled back. His eyes met hers, and she stared, trying her hardest to take in the collection of features that made up this Doctor’s face. 

“Oh, I missed you,” he breathed. 

The words sank into Rose, settled into her bones.

“Not even going to ask how you got here,” he added. “Or how long it's been.”

“Dimension cannon,” Rose said. “And—hundred years?” 

“Oh! Because—”

“Bad wolf, yeah.” Rose grimaced. “Turns out looking into all of time has some side effects.”

“Oh, Rose, I'm so sorry. I should've known.”

Rose shook her head. “Water under the bridge. Don’t apologize for that.” She raised her eyebrows. “Apologize for being so bloody hard to find. Been looking for years, I have, and best I can manage is a chance encounter?”

“Ah, the TARDIS knew what she was doing, landing here.” 

“Typical. Blaming the TARDIS.” Rose scoffed. “Still haven’t forgotten about twelve months.”

“That was one time!” 

“Scotland? Queen Victoria? Where were we trying to go then?”

“Oi, I made it to Sheffield eventually—”

“Not with me you didn’t!”

Their eyes met, and suddenly they were both laughing, falling into each other, and the Doctor’s arm curled around Rose’s waist as he asked, “What do you say, then? Fancy a trip?”

Rose let her head fall against his side. “Fancy a good night’s sleep first.”

“Hey, I've got beds.”

Rose smiled. “I've missed that time machine of yours.”

“Just between you and me? I think she's missed you too.” The Doctor dropped his arm from Rose’s waist in favor of taking her hand, and as he entwined his fingers with hers, they stepped together in the direction of the TARDIS. 

#doctor who #fanfiction #my fic #fifteenrose #fifteen x rose #fifteenth doctor #rose tyler #short #doctorrose #doctor x rose

[cryoculus]

— reparations 02 ⟢

what resumé? i'm hiring myself as your number one helper!

★ FEATURING; arataki itto x gn!reader

★ WORD COUNT; 5.3k words

★ TAGS; modern au, flower shop au, slow burn, idiots to lovers, tooth-rotting fluff, mutual pining, no smut, sfw

★ NOTABLE CHARACTERS; arataki itto, kuki shinobu, thoma

★ NOTES; this is the fic that i started before we even got itto as a playable character, and the same one i have Yet to finish two years since his release lmfao i hope you enjoy what i have so far!

★ MASTERLIST . AO3 ★

You slide the door behind you when you arrive at your parents’ house—breathing in the familiar scent of leftover incense with a sigh. 

“I’m home,” you call out, and you vaguely hear your mother respond with a distant, Welcome back! from the kitchen. You’re quick to slip off your shoes by the entrance before padding further inside.

“Just in time for lunch,” your mother says with a smile, ladle in hand as she stirs a pot of savory curry on the stove. “I was a bit worried about the text you sent. Is your friend alright? You said he had a concussion.”

The way she addressed Arataki as your ‘friend’ makes a chill run across the length of your spine. Last night isn’t the first time you’ve had to watch over someone at the hospital (your father is quite the regular patient himself). But having to do so for a certain gang boss with the social adeptness of a bake-danuki pushed your saintlike patience to the limits. It’s a good thing Shinobu arrived before you could strangle him to death.

“Yeah,” you tell her dryly. “His, uh, sister’s looking after him now.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” She grins. “Can you set the table and call your father, dear? He’s fixing a leak in the roof even if I told him you’re coming over. You know how he is.”

You let out a quiet laugh. “Sure do.”

Being back home, despite your prior insistence to move out, slightly abates the negative energy you’ve accumulated earlier today. But no matter how nice the curry smells, and how sweetly your mother smiles at you, they aren’t exactly enough to make you forget the proposition offered to you this morning.

It’s ten minutes to seven when Arataki nudges you awake for the fifth time. You glare at him from your seat, noticing that you’ve developed a stiff neck overnight. “What do you want now?”

“Nothing,” he says, yet the intensity of his gaze tells otherwise. And despite having little to no sleep for the past few hours, Arataki looks irritatingly chipper. “I just realized that you’ve been listening to me blab about Onikabuto Royale championships for hours but I don’t even know your name yet. Shinobu asked you to stay here, right, nee-chan?”

You huff, getting back to your feet to ease the cricks in both your neck and joints. It takes you a while to dig for your phone in your pocket, but when you do, you read through a message Shinobu sent about half an hour ago. 

Shinobu [06:25]: I’m on my way, I hope he didn’t bother you too much

“You don’t even know the person who rents out your gang’s commercial space?” you question Arataki as you type a quick OK to Shinobu. “And, to clarify, she didn’t ask me to do this, I offered.” 

Arataki sits in silence for a few moments—looking especially skeptical of your answer. Though you don’t really have the time to chide him for it because you notice that the bag of IV fluid hanging next to his bed is about to run out. You’re planning to walk over to the nearby nurse’s station, but then you feel a large hand enclosing your wrist—tugging you back with enough force to rid you of whatever sleepiness lingered in your mind.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” you hiss, attempting to yank your arm back, but Arataki’s grip remains iron-tight. “I’m going to tell the nurses to replace your IV. You don’t want air getting into your veins, right?”

“I’ve been told I have lots of that in my head,” Arataki mumbles, and you wonder if he’s aware that he just insulted himself. “But, whatever. What happened last night… It’s all on me. Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Yeah, thanks, Captain Obvious.” You roll your eyes. “You’ve been bothering me all night, yet you never told me what happened before that stunt you pulled in my shop. So are you going to spill, or am I just going to list you off as a big nuisance again?”

You probably shouldn’t be talking to your landlord in such a demeaning way. But any normal person would plead insanity after being subject to Arataki’s tendency to be a blabbermouth. All in a span of one night, you were lectured about trivial things you’d otherwise never give the time of day. From the different onikabuto breeds to the best instant yakisoba you can find in a convenience store—his reservoir of useless knowledge knows no bounds. 

It’s no wonder Shinobu looks older than she actually is. Listening to this guy drone on for hours on end probably took five years off your own lifespan, too.

“...You’re Ranpo-dono’s kid, right?”

The moment you feel Arataki’s hold loosen, you’re quick to detach yourself from him—lightly rubbing the spot where his fingers dug into your skin. Excessive force aside, you flash him a perplexed look.

How does Arataki know your dad?

“I don’t see why you need to know that,” you grumble. “Anyways, if you don’t have anything important to say—”

“Sorry I’m late!”

Right on cue, Shinobu ducks behind the partition curtains—still wearing last night’s clothes. Her backpack is nowhere in sight, so you assumed she might’ve dropped it off at home first before going here. Wordlessly, she marches right up to Arataki’s bed and glowers at him. You’ve been giving the guy the same look every time he tried to wake you up, though, which makes you think Shinobu’s intimidation might not be that effective. 

But, as if you haven’t been surprised enough for the last twenty-four hours, Arataki shakily pulls the covers up to his face.  

“Itto,” Shinobu begins, a vein popping on her head. “What mess did you get yourself into this time?” 

He coughs up a nervous laugh. “What do you mean? I was, uh, driving under the influence is all! Don’t be furious, Shinobu. It’s not like I killed anyone.”

“That’s not what the doctor told me.” She narrows her eyes. “And you dealt enough damage to that flower shop that the charges might be on-par with manslaughter if they decide to press any.” Shinobu thrusts a finger in your direction, making you gulp nervously. This is the first time you’ve seen her so expressive. “So you better have a good excuse for this, or I’m going to tie you to your office chair for the rest of your life.”

“Now, now. Don’t be like that!” Arataki pouts, giving you the horrifying image of a big-hulking man trying to look adorable. “How about this? I’ll tell you and the boys everything once I get out of this joint, and you can talk my ear off all you want after.”

Shinobu shakes her head, folding her arms over her chest. “Not enough, Itto. You’re starting to act reckless again. How am I so sure you’re not going to do the same thing behind my back?”

“Um…”

“That’s what I thought.”

Just listening to their conversation, you’re starting to feel a bit sorry for Shinobu now. On top of dealing with her final requirements until graduation, she’s stuck dealing with an insufferable boss. Imagining how she must’ve been holding up all this time gives you the jitters. You barely even managed one night looking after the guy!

“...and that’s why I want to strike a deal with you.”

It takes you a moment to realize that Shinobu is talking to you, and not her sorry excuse of a superior. She’s wearing the same, firm smile she always flashes every time she buys flowers from your shop. But despite Shinobu’s inviting demeanor, something tells you you’re not going to like what she’s about to say. 

With that, Shinobu clears her throat. “In line with our boss, Arataki Itto’s, unbecoming behavior—”

“Hey!”

“—I’d like you to consider letting the Arataki Gang offer you compensation. We’ll try our best to, ah, replace and repair everything that got destroyed. We’re also going to assign one of ours to help you out in your shop until you can manage on your own.” 

“...One of yours?” you ask. “Sorry, but who might that be?”

The deputy of the Arataki Gang takes your question in stride—lips twitching into an uncharacteristic smirk. You should’ve walked out right then and there.

“What better helper to have aside from the same man who caused you all this trouble in the first place?” Shinobu chuckles. “In other words, we’re going to offer you our boss as your personal slave.”

“Hey, what the fuck?” Arataki shouts. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

“You revoked your own rights when you went against Section Three, Article One of the Arataki Gang’s Code of Honor,” Shinobu says, uncaring about the way her boss suddenly grabbed her by the front of her shirt. “Always inform fellow members about plans and actions that may implicate the Arataki Gang. Failure to do so is subject to disciplinary action. And Itto, inside voices please. We’re still at the hospital.”

“Like hell I care about that,” he hisses but lets go of Shinobu’s shirt. “I’ve got more important things to do than tend to some dumb plants, Shinobu. You know that.”

“Boss, you brought this upon yourself,” she groans. “Now man up and deal with the consequences of your—”

“...Shinobu, it’s okay.”

The two of them whirl their heads around to glance at you with lingering surprise. You’ve gotten up from the flimsy chair next to Arataki’s bed, already patting the non-existent dust off your clothes. If they notice the way your voice strains a little, they don’t comment on it.

“I appreciate the assistance for the repairs and replacements,” you say, awkwardly avoiding both their gazes. “But you don’t have to make him do something he doesn’t want to. Not everyone is cut out to be a florist anyways. Um, I’ll be going now. Just contact me if you need anything.”

“A-Are you sure?” Shinobu asks, clearly concerned. “It’s the least we could do for—”

“You’ve offered me plenty of help already,” you insist with a slightly forced smile. “If you still feel bad, just keep on buying flowers from my shop and we’ll call it quits.”

Arataki hasn’t spoken a word since his earlier outburst, but you can’t really look at him right now. You’re afraid you might say something you won’t be able to take back. But it’s not like it mattered, right? His gang’s going to pay for the damages in the end anyways. You don’t really need any form of support aside from that. 

“Some of our men are still guarding the shop as we speak. I told them not to leave until you arrived,” Shinobu informs, realizing there’s no changing your mind. “Take care on your way back. I’ll drop by tomorrow to assess the situation.”

“Yeah,” you tell her shakily. “See you there.”

And that’s how you left Inazuma General Hospital this morning—tearing up like a school girl all because of the shit some ingrate said about your line of work.

“Arataki?” your father repeats, setting his bowl of rice on the table. “You mean that gang leader from Hanamizaka? Has he been bothering you?”

“Uh, not exactly.” You take a sip from a glass of water, letting the cool sensation wash out your budding frustration. “I’m just curious because it seems like he knows you.”

Across the dining table, he strokes his chin, as if trying to recall something he’d long forgotten already. But when your father turns up with a clueless smile, you know you’ve just hit a dead end.

“Sorry, kiddo. I only know him because of his reputation,” he chuckles. “But if he ever tries to lay a hand on my little rascal—”

“Dad, I’m twenty-four years old.”

“—he’s going to have to answer to me, Takahashi Ranpo!”

Fortunately, your mother emerges from the kitchen with a plateful of mochi in hand—effectively silencing your father’s outlandish proclamations. You decide not to bring up Arataki nor the reason behind your trip to the hospital after that. Instead, you spend the rest of the time catching up with your parents as you happily chew on your favorite childhood treat.

“Oh, Andou-san from next door has a nephew who’s getting married in a few months,” your mother says. “She told me he wants you to oversee the flower arrangements both for the bridal bouquet and the venue. What do you say, sweetie?”

The news takes you slightly by surprise. Your shop is just as green as a germinating sweet flower seed, so you didn’t really expect to receive major bookings like this so soon. Plus, you still have to deal with the mess you’ve left at the shop. 

Despite having told Shinobu you’re going back to the scene, you decided to make a quick detour to your childhood home to get Arataki’s foul words out of your head. You’ve never been overly sensitive about what people said about your job. In fact, you’ve already gotten used to dismissive statements like that in college. A bachelor’s degree in Biology often implies that you’re pursuing medicine, so when you awkwardly stutter that no, you major in plant biology, most people will just brush it off with a laugh.

Which, of course, sucks like hell. But life doesn’t always turn up daisies, now does it?

“Sure. I’ll keep that in mind.”

When you finish washing the dishes, you bid farewell to your parents somewhat reluctantly. Lunch was great, and you kind of don’t want to go back to living alone just yet. But you remember that Mikan and your partially destroyed shop are waiting for you back at Hanamizaka. 

“Come back whenever you feel like it,” your father says, ruffling your hair like he always did since you were a kid. “I told you living alone can be a bit stifling sometimes.”

“I will,” you promise, lacing your shoes up by the entrance. “I’ll bring Mikan along next time. I think she misses mom’s tuna.”

“And I have more than enough for her when you both drop by again,” says your mother, reaching up to kiss your cheek. “Take care.”

Once you make it out of the house, your parents don’t move from the doorway until they’ve heard the telltale sound of the gate clicking shut. Your mother sighs.

“You know you’re going to have to tell them soon, right?”

Your father brings a palm across his face, breathing in somewhat sharply. When he closes his eyes, he quietly replies:

“I know.”

You didn’t really know what to expect when you got back.

When Shinobu told you that a bunch of gang members were hanging around the block to guard your shop, you expected them to be scattered across the area—intimidating everyone that dared to pass by your street. But what you come to discover, instead, are a bunch of men hard at work as they reinstall a new sheet of glass to replace your broken display window. Further inside the shop, you can see one group picking shards of the broken clay pots off the floor, while another is busy sweeping up the rest of the carnage. 

Have gangsters always been this...tidy?

 “Oi.”

You jolt at the sound of a deep, rugged voice coming from behind. It takes you a moment to meet the gaze of the guy that suddenly appeared behind you. But your initial dread is slightly quelled by the knowledge that he looks no older than sixteen.

“You the one who owns this place?” he asks, turning his head to spit on the pavement. Ugh. Gross. “If you ain’t the right person, you better skedaddle.” 

…Skedaddle? Did he just tell you to skedaddle?

“Um, no. I’m the actual owner,” you tell him, showing the ID in your wallet for some added proof. “You can consult with Shinobu if you don’t believe me.”

The teenage gangster sizes you up for a bit longer, and he looks like he’s about to voice out his skepticism until someone smacks him at the back of his head.

“Ow! Haru-nii, that frigging hurts!” he cries out, glancing at the newcomer spitefully.

‘Haru-nii’ is someone who looks considerably older—probably around your age. He slings a muscular arm around the poor boy’s shoulders before acknowledging you with a nod. “Hope you can forgive this little brat for acting so crass. Tora here doesn’t know how to distinguish friend from foe.” 

Sighing, you cast a sidelong glance at the state of your shop. The inside was relatively cleaner compared to the state you left it last night, and the gangsters managed to clean up most of the mess while you were away. By the time you’ve gotten your bearings straight, they were already finished installing your new window. You’d probably treat these guys to lunch if their boss wasn’t the one behind the casualties in the first place.

“Thanks for, uh, helping out,” you say, definitely not feeling all sorts of awkward right now. “Do you guys want snacks or anything?”

“Nah, we’re good,” Haru reassures before cupping his hands over his mouth. “Alright, boys, the owner of the property’s here. Let’s head out and visit the boss at the hospital.”

Tora perks up at the news. “Even the minors can go see the boss?”

“No, Tora. Minors aren’t allowed inside the emergency room. You guys are heading straight back to base.”

“God damn it!”

“Oi, what did Itto say about language before you’re eighteen?”

“...Gosh darn it.”

As the last of the Arataki Gang disperses from the area, you take the time to marvel at their quick repairs. It hasn’t even been a day since their boss hurled his motorcycle into your shop, but they made it seem like the incident never happened at all. Who knew gangsters had a knack for fixing things? 

The moment you remembered Arataki’s ridiculous motorcycle, though, you’re made aware of two things. The first is that the bike is no longer in your shop. His men probably wheeled it off to the nearest repair shop or something. The second is that the crocheted tanuki plush attached to the key to that same motorcycle is still in the back pocket of your jeans.

Now you have to involuntarily see that asshole again just to return it.

“Or I could just hand it to Shinobu tomorrow,” you realize half a second later, tossing Arataki’s keys in between your hands as you chuckle conspiratorially. “Yeah! That way, I don’t have to see that plant-hater ever again. Someone who likes bugs that much shouldn’t be trusted anyway.”

Mikan, thankfully, didn’t seem to give your neighbor a hard time. Ever since you moved here, Yoimiya has always been that one neighbor who’s always happy to help out. You kind of feel bad for assuming she might take the goods out of your cash register while you were gone.

“She was a nice little kitty!” Yoimiya gushes as she hands over your cat. “I took a day-off today, and she was such good company. Did you train her or something?”

You laugh softly as Mikan purrs in your arms. “She’s just more aware than most cats, I think.”

Deciding to follow in Yoimiya’s footsteps, you decide not to open up shop for today. Most of your regulars came in the morning anyways, and they were probably going to be too spooked by the influx of gang members to drop by. You’ll have to clear up the air soon, but for now that’ll have to wait. 

Once you fill Mikan’s food bowl with some canned tuna, your first order of business is to hop in the shower for a nice, hot bath. Scrubbing away the grime that accumulated from yesterday’s altercation has never felt more satisfying. But as you let the suds of shampoo soak in your hair, you’re abruptly visited by a memory that you’d rather keep locked up in a box, never to be recalled again.

The scent of engine exhaust was heavy in the air at the time. You still remember how loudly your heart pounded in your ears as Arataki reached out to touch your face. How those deep red eyes seemed glazed over with raw fascination. 

You’re so pretty.

A soft thud echoes in the tiled walls of your bathroom, accompanied by the pitter-patter of the shower against the floor. Your face feels a lot warmer than before, and you’re sure it isn’t from the hot water.

“Whywhywhywhy…”

Steam billows out of the door when you finally get your rushed shower over with. Like hell you’re going to spend another second thinking about that douchebag. But as you put on some more comfortable clothes to lounge in, you realize it’s only two hours past noon. You haven’t had a day-off in a while, so you aren’t sure what you’re supposed to make of all the free time. 

However, the moment you sit down on the couch, the day’s fatigue immediately comes crashing down on you once again. 

“Fuuuuck,” you mumble, lying on your side as you fish your phone on the coffee table. You placed it right next to Arataki’s stupid keys, and just looking at the stupidly adorable tanuki crochet is pissing you off. Why does a dick like him have something as cute as that?!

Me [14:15]: I’m bored and sleepy. 

Me [14:15]: What should I do?

It doesn’t even take two minutes for you to receive a reply.

Thoma [14:16]: Sleep definitely (－ω－) zzZ

Thoma [14:16]: Btw, Ayaka tried calling ur landline last night. She wanted to thank u for the flowers but u weren’t answering. 

Thoma [14:17]: U okay? Σ(°△°|||)︴

You end up staring at the blinking cursor on your screen. Shit. Should you tell them about what happened last night? But that might just cause unnecessary fussing, more on Thoma’s behalf than anything else. The evidence has been duly cleaned up by Arataki’s men anyways. Maybe you should just sweep all of this under the rug for the meantime. Your friends already worry about you a lot as is.

Me [14:23]: Yeah. Just rly tired. 

Thoma [14:24]:  ρ(- ω -、)ヾ(￣ω￣; )

Thoma [14:24]: We all have days like that.

Me [14:30]: …why are you using kaomojis

Thoma [14:31]: Ayaka said they were cute  ♡ ～('▽^人)

Not wanting to frustrate yourself about Thoma’s obvious yet inadmissible infatuation, you toss your phone somewhere in the mountain of throw pillows at your feet. You grab the remote to your TV with the intent of watching some noon-time soap opera, and Mikan seems to like that idea. She chooses that same instance to soundlessly prance over to the space in front of your stomach—making herself comfortable with a wide yawn. 

“It’s been a while since we hung out like this, huh?” you chuckle, scratching her ears affectionately. “Alright, marathon time.”

Five minutes into said marathon, however, you fall fast asleep. 

Is it normal to sleep for almost seventeen hours straight?

This is the first thought that occurs to you when you groggily paw around for your phone on the sofa. Your mouth is dry, and your stomach feels emptier than a used can of Mikan’s precious tuna. God, now you want tuna for breakfast-slash-late-dinner, too. 

The numbers on your lockscreen stare back almost mockingly. 05:57. Great! You slept through dinner all because you didn’t get any decent sleep the night prior. Although, it’s a miracle your dreams weren’t plagued by onikabuto battles and instant noodles. That just means your brain isn’t subconsciously making you think about Arataki Itto after all. 

There’s also a notification from an unknown number displayed, but you decide to check that for later. It’s probably an inquiring customer, and business hours don’t start until eight.  

You rise back to your feet, stretching out your limbs as you stifle a yawn. When you look around, Mikan is nowhere in sight, but you’ve gotten used to her morning strolls around the neighborhood. She might be a housecat for the most part, but that tabby does have a knack for adventure every now and again.

But you also realize that Arataki’s keys are no longer on the coffee table either.

Running your fingers through your bedhead, you make a quick search around your apartment—checking all the nooks and crannies where Mikan liked to leave dead lizards and mice for you to clean later. She must’ve mistaken the tanuki crochet as another candidate for her corpse collection. But twenty minutes in, you’re getting no leads.

“Don’t make me have to pay for it, damn cat,” you grumble, hastily putting on your slippers as you skip down the stairwell leading to the shop. 

The fluorescent lights are a bit much for someone who’s been dead to the world for nearly a quarter of a day. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust, but when they do, you realize that someone is squatting outside the shop. You pulled down the shutters yesterday, so you can only make out a slight silhouette. But still. The sun’s barely peaked over the horizon, yet you already have pending customers? 

You have a last-minute debate about whether you should entertain them or make them wait an hour more. But the kindness of your heart eventually wins that argument, and you end up undoing all the locks on the front door before you can change your mind. When you finally see who’s crazy enough to drop by a flower shop so early in the goddamn morning, though… 

“What exactly are you doing here?” 

Arataki looks up from where he’s crouched on the sidewalk—still sporting the bandage he had yesterday. There’s an unlit cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth, but he’s quick to put it back inside a box he retrieves from his pocket. Interestingly enough, right in front of him is Mikan, who’s lying on her back as Arataki uses the familiar tanuki keychain to play with her. 

“I sent you a couple texts, didn’t I?” Arataki tells you nonchalantly. “Said I was gonna come over first thing today for my training.”

You blink. “Excuse me, your what? And I received no such texts, sir.”

The gang boss sighs, before rising back to his feet. There’s a bit of a lag in your thought process when you take in his appearance. His style seems a bit more traditional compared to most men in their twenties. He’s wearing a deep purple yukata that’s hanging half-open to reveal that ridiculously built chest (is that his trademark look or something?). Said scandalizing article of clothing is tucked inside a pair of gray pants, and you notice that he’s even wearing wooden geta sandals. In this day and age!

“Here,” Arataki sighs, showing you the screen of his phone and—oh.

Me [20:45]: yo this is arataki shinobu told me to work for you as an apology so im heading over tomorrow morning

Me [20:50]: she told me not to tell you she told me but thats kinda too late for now

Me [20:51]: shinobu is reading all this shit over my shoulder do you think i suck at texting too

Me [20:56]: anyway im expecting gruelling training tomorrow see ya there master

Your mouth hangs slightly agape as you read each text. The digits displayed on top of the screen are enough to prove that this number is, indeed, yours. How he got it in the first place, you hadn’t the slightest clue.

You’re not even sure whether you’re supposed to be stressed about his lack of proper punctuation marks or the fact that he just showed up because Shinobu told him to. Now he knows you kept his keys all this time, too! 

“So there’s that,” Arataki breathes. “And you never replied so I took that as a go signal.”

“Usually when you don’t receive a response, you shouldn’t act on your own,” you tell him. 

He only shrugs. “Silence means yes, right?” 

“...It’s way too early for this,” you groan, scratching your head irritably. 

To your annoyance, Mikan meows from her comfortable place on the sidewalk, almost like she’s begging for Arataki’s attention. Seriously, this cat is clingy to everyone but her owner!

“Come on, how bad can I be?” he asks, almost pouting as he leans against your newly installed glass window. “Taking care of plants is just like taking care of your pets, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s so much more complicated than that! And I didn’t even know you’re going to be discharged this soon,” you argue. “I kind of resent you for what you did to my place, but it’s all good now, okay? Your men already took care of the dirty work, see?” You then make an exaggerated showcase of the spotless display window. 

Arataki sighs, red eyes staring into the distance.

“I haven’t made up for being such an asshole to you yesterday, though.”

The silence of the early dawn rings in your ears as his words settle around the both of you. You’re acutely aware of how the morning dew chills your skin slightly, but for some reason, those few words are enough to warm you up—even just a little.

“Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat before holding out his hand. “The name’s Arataki Itto. For the most part, I run an organization called the Arataki Gang. But for now, I’m a trainee and probationary employee at the Hanamizaka Flower Studio… Did I say that right? Eh, whatever. Pleased to meet ya, master.”

You think it’s a bit rude for you to wonder how much time he spent practicing that speech in front of a mirror. But Arataki seems like someone who's used to crowds and being the center of attention. You’ll have to applaud him for actually knowing the name of your flower shop, too. It’s only been less than a month since you’ve moved into the area, so most people only know your store as “the new flower shop at Sakura Street”. 

You’ve always considered hiring a helper around the shop—just one extra pair of hands would suffice, really. But you never expected that help to come in the form of a six-foot-something gangster who actually has a modicum of self-awareness. You feel a bit bad for talking shit about him in your head now. 

“W-What happened to ‘nee-chan’?” you grumble, not wanting to dwell on your false assumptions.

Arataki tilts his head slightly before snapping his fingers. “Oh, that. I realized that I’m older than you, so.” 

You scowl. “And how in the world did you realize that without asking me?”

“Shinobu has a copy of your national registry, remember? The one you’re s’posed to submit before signing the lease?” He chuckles as he leans back down to take Mikan into his massive arms. “Let’s just say I did my research, master.”

“Please stop calling me that,” you plead. “That’s too freaky, even for you.”

“Does this little thing approach people you call creepy?” he taunts, rubbing the tip of Mikan’s nose. “How about you start showing me the ropes now? We’re burning daylight, y’know?” 

There’s no way out of this—you realize bitterly. Arataki Itto is exactly the type of person to push your buttons until you ultimately surrender to his whims, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Fine, fine!” you groan, stomping over to the front door as you swing it a bit too enthusiastically. “After you, my prized trainee.” 

Arataki raises an eyebrow but the look melts into a peal of laughter that makes something flutter in your chest. Damn it!

“Thank you, master~” he sing-songs, brushing past you with Mikan still snuggled comfortably in his arms. The moment he crosses your space, though, your senses are filled with the faint scent of cigarettes and something minty, just a tad bit sweet. You sigh.

This is going to be a long probationary period. 

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★ UPDATE SCHED; every thurs & sat (12 nn gmt+8)

© cryoculus | kaientai ✧ all rights reserved. do not repost or translate my work on other platforms without permission.

#genshin impact #genshin #arataki itto #arataki itto x reader #arataki itto fluff #genshin x reader #genshin scenarios #genshin headcanons #genshin imagines #cryoculus #reparations

[lady-grace-pens]

Follies Excerpt [11]

100k. Homegirl breaks a mirror + another bit from the Heads Up Seven Up snippet from this morning ;) I’m obsessed with these scenes

Taglist: @wordwizards @serafyyn @isabellebissonrouthier @flowerprose

•••

The devil fashions himself the epitome of casual. A lax European model with his hands stowed away in his pockets and his brows raised in layman’s sympathy, all but shrugging with a metaphorical cigar on his lips.

Much as I burn to cause a scene that would honor Cleopatra and the great actresses of long past… I flex my fists. Nothing more.

“So that’s it then?”

He goes to speak. I strike him twice, once per cheek. In the time it takes him to process my movements, I snatch the maroon blanket on his couch. Wrapping it around my body, I storm out the front door, not bothering to slam it behind me.

The street is nothing but a spotlight. A void of sun and the whites of eyes, with the concrete gradually baking my bare feet. Whispers fill my ears, the greatest proof that I’m making an utter spectacle of myself.

I sprint across the street and throw myself against the red door of home.

It doesn’t budge.

Fumbling with the knob yields me the same result, but it’s all I can think to do. Possessed by instincts, I drive myself into the damn thing again. And again. And again.

By a miracle, it opens. I stumble inside. It shuts behind me. I glance around but the place is soulless.

Cal. Where is she? My baby, she… Oh God. What of Pierre?

I whirl around. Ilya replaces my view of the door. Before he has room to interrogate me, I demand the whereabouts of my sister.

“She’s still with Pierre. Hospital decided to keep him and Matt a bit longer but they should be home soon.”

“She’s isn’t here? What do you mean she isn’t here? Where’s my sister? I—I need my… I need my…”

Ilya’s voice is a murmur to the titans groaning in my ears. The memory of Arthur pairs with insects skittering across my skin. I dash upstairs, to my room, and lock the door behind me. Fingers draw blood from my scalp as I slave over the empty stretch of floorboards.

In an onslaught of mania, I sweep the ornaments off my dresser. I tear down the lights and rip the tapestry from its hooks. The force of my screams sends me to my knees in the center of my room.

Dammit! Don’t I deserve more than this? Acting as if it never happened. Posing as if it’s anything lesser than what it is. Childish first love, the thrill of a summer fling, or the cool breeze.

Infatuation, at best.

I catch her snake eyes in the mirror above my dresser. For a moment I can’t register her as a fraction of myself. This rage can’t be my own. It can’t be human. It can only be a beast whose features are the envy of a snarling old olive tree.

My fingers coil around a candelabra laying at my hip. Heart raging, breath abandoned, I launch it at her with one fluid strike. Time crawls as glass rains down upon me. Laughter foams on my tongue, tickled by the crystalline shards glittering through the air. For something so dangerous, they carry themselves with the beauty and serenity of falling snow. My eyes flutter closed. I lift my head, even open my mouth for a taste.

Ilya’s feet thunder upstairs. Screaming my name, he sprints for my door and rams himself against it. The locks are old things, so they give way without much force, but for my life I can’t understand what possessed him. At the sight of me, his eyes bulge and his grip tightens around the doorframe, exclaiming, “Jesus! Fuck.”

Fractals of glass are splayed all around me. Each one is bonded to the other via streams of blood gushing from an unknown source. Perhaps multiple, considering the volume. They retain their function as a mirror, displaying my lazy smile and half-mooned eyes—though both are muddied by streaks of rust.

Turning over my limbs, I can’t resist a laugh. Crystals and crimson dress my body. Ilya gawks as if I were a circus freak, but I’ve never felt more divine. I could make an army of men worship me with my tongue of diamonds.

What good would that do when the one I love scorns me? What then? What now?

My coat of ecstasy slips. The head bows and the eyes grow fuzz, staring at nothing yet musing over everything. Silence rots my will to speak. Ideas stall and my joints lock.

Ilya scoops me into his arms. Caution bleeds through the cracks in his voice. Too many. Too obvious.

“Come on. Let’s go visit Pierre.”

•••

“Em.”

“What do you want from me?” I spring to my feet.

Arthur gapes through jaded lashes. Times skates on before he settles on the word, “Truth.”

I shake my head. My voice teeters off the edge of a rocky summit. My stomach has already taken the fall.

“I can’t be like you. I can’t.”

“But you can! You can.”

He floats to his feet, sweeping my hips into his palms before I have the mind to object. His face is centimeters from my own—acetone to our surroundings. The steam from our breath piles in the faint cracks of our smile lines. I part my lips. My hand finds it’s way to his stomach where I latch onto his belt. Our torsos collide, coaxing a moan from my lips. His grip tightens. Our foreheads touch.

I lick my lips, grazing his own. His mouth bursts with plums. Saccharine and tart create the exact impression I’d expect from our second first kiss.

“Last night melted your tongue so sweetly,” he utters, praise only fueling my acrid desire to suckle him dry. “You remembered our dream—”

Memory extracts the wool from my eyes. In a bout of agony, Arthur becomes my pillow and my punching bag. Think fraught caresses and impassioned pounding, lonely pleas versus touch-starved mangling. Each jerk of my head rubs my nose in my snot, spit, and tears as I wail into his chest.

“Please don’t make me say it. Not like this.”

He stopped holding me ages ago. I realize that only as my arms fall to my sides and my sobs begin dragging their tails. He scorns me with his arid pause, unchanging. My hope sticks to the morning grime costing my teeth.

His hand is a gavel clamping down on my shoulder. My sentence is proclaimed without having mentioned a word.

I wipe my nose with my sleeve. Upon the gathering of my wits, I straighten and look up to face the grave I’ve dug for myself.

#wip: foad #wip: follies #writing #my writing #writeblr #creative writing

[greatwyrmgold]

A few existential YouTube videos lead me down a rabbit hole of introspection.

I've always been interested in science, particularly stuff like astronomy and biology, particularly the bits about the history of life on Earth and how people work. You might note that the crushingly hollow void of space, the inconceivable depth of time, and the mechanics which make the human mind tick are arguably the three parts of science most prone to causing existential crises. And the way I internalized that stuff has definitely influenced how I interpret others' existential crises.

Let's back up. When I was a kid, I read a magazine article reporting on an experiment which indicated that the brain signals for deciding to do a thing came after the brain signals for making the body do it. It made the argument that what the brain is actually doing is rationalizing what it did, rather than thinking about what to do. This was framed as both something scientifically interesting and a challenge to free will.

To put the response I settled on into words: "Okay. But there is still something that triggered the neurons which caused the body-controlling brain signals. Free will and the self must reside in that something."

When confronted with existential crises, I learned to unconsciously work backwards from the conclusion I needed. Free will exists, the self exists, humanity matters, I matter. I just need to find the definitions that would allow those things to be true, and the existential crisis vanishes in a puff of logic.

All of this is second nature to me, but most people don't read old science books from their great-grandma's bookstore when they're in grade school. Most people have a firm sense of the world before they're faced with existential crises. Or at least, I assume that's what happens to most people, because most of the existential crises I see seem really weaksauce.

Like, take "the trouble with transporters," summarized in this CGP Grey video of the same name. A transporter doesn't move you, it destroys you and makes a copy of you somewhere else! Oh no! There are many variations on this theme, ranging all the way down to "Sleep is an interruption of consciousness, therefore you're arguably a new person every day". And my reaction to all of them is the same: "If the thing at the other end looks like you, acts like you, thinks like you, and thinks it is you...how the hell is is something else?"

To me, this is natural. Work backwards. There must be some continuity of identity, both through sleep and through the process of basically every cell and atom in your body being replaced. Ergo, identity must be something more fluid, found in abstract patterns rather than anything material. The same logic applies to transporters and teleporters, ergo there must not be an existential crisis there. If there was, then ordinary existence would induce existential crises, and that's an invalid result.

If challenged, I think I could defend this approach to philosophy. But that's not really my purpose here. I'm just trying to think about the way I think about stuff, force myself to clarify those thoughts, and then post them to justify that forcing. But hopefully you still find it interesting.

#existential crisis #or lack thereof #philosophy #introspection #not sure how any of this has affected me #probably smoothed my slide into atheism (which is NOT a can of worms I'm opening today) #part of the problem is I have no idea how the rest of you think #I just kinda have to guess from what you say and do #like trying to figure out what's inside a black hole from the movement of stars around it

[tub-thump3r]

SEVERAL... WHATEVERS, AGO

Foolishman Epilogue

“Are you sure we have to start working on this tonight? Can’t we just, I dunno, wait to get into your files after we go home and get some rest?”

“Ichiro, even if we were going to delay our MASTER PLOT, I still sleep here, and now, you do as well.”

“We could go back to my apartment!”

“You have an apartment? …we’re already here! It’ll take two seconds to get in! Come on, buddy, calm down a little,” Orlando reassured Ichiro, who was pacing back and forth incessantly next to him.

“This is my first time breaking into a real building!”

“You wanted to be a vigilante, right? You were gonna have to do it eventually. Besides, it’s not technically ‘breaking in’ because I’m the principal. It’s just a slightly larger-scale version of locking myself out of my house. Now could you give me a minute? Raking’s not working - Bones must’ve upgraded the locks again. I swear, I dunno if that guy is legitimately trying to improve security or if they hate me and are doing this to be petty. Let me get out my other picks-”

As Orlando was talking somewhat enthusiastically and somewhat exasperatedly about his various lockpicking tools, Ichiro turned around and felt his eyes pass over something he hadn’t seen a few seconds ago. Some shadows in the darkness of night seemed to be moving closer, and as Ichiro squinted his eyes, he started to realize they were the shapes of people. 

“Orlando! Orlando, there’s someone-”

One of the figures darted forward, and before Ichiro could do anything more than bring out his Stand, summoned a Stand of its own. A muscular purple figure with strips of fabric hanging off of it, both from its arms and from a sort of belt it was wearing that looked similar to a professional wrestling championship belt. Its most notable feature, however, was a massive disco ball that replaced its head, each individual mirrored tile seeming to shift back and forth, catching a nonexistent light. 

The Stand lunged forward, grabbed Orlando by the back of the head, reeled its arm back, and threw him through the metal door with force enough to tear it off its hinges and send Orlando sliding into the school a good distance, his body riding on top of the detached door like a sled.

“Orlando!” Ichiro shouted, and dashed after him, but as he approached his friend, a second figure summoned a Stand of its own - a motorcycle, covered in green and yellow decals and with some sort of neon pink fluid running through transparent pieces of its frame. The three colors blurred together from a distance, but came into more focus once the rider shot forward, delivering a decisive kick to Ichiro’s stomach and bringing them both down the hall and into a different room.

Meanwhile, the first figure and its Stand entered the building, reaching around the door to find a light switch and flicking it on, revealing a boy around the same age as Orlando, but nowhere near as tidy-looking, even after Orlando’s little adventure earlier that day. Instead, he was scruffy, with the clearly teenaged beginnings of a beard and a shortish haircut that stuck up like spikes. He wore a thick blue jacket with lots of pockets and a lame sort of scowl you might see on someone loitering outside a mini-mall blasting My Chemical Romance.

Orlando’s body lay there on top of the metal door, completely unmoving.

“He’s not dead, is he?” said a low, soft voice from within the disco ball.

“Nah, of course not,” the boy responded. “He shouldn’t be. We didn’t hit him that hard, did we?”

“You know how hard it is to control this level of strength,” said the Stand, shrugging. The boy rolled his eyes and began to approach Orlando’s body.

Just as he was getting ready to crouch down, Orlando pushed up and swung an arm around to aim at the boy, Chumbawamba wrapped around it. A blast of bubbling purple liquid made contact with the boy’s skin, causing it to break out in a strange pink rash. He frantically shook off the liquid that wasn’t absorbed into his skin, his expression switching quickly from disgust to rage.

“AH-HA! GOTCHA!” Orlando shouted, finally getting a leg up and standing up again. He stumbled a little, but turned to face the boy, brandishing his hammer. “Whoever you are, I hope you didn’t think it would be that easy!”

“Gh! What now, YMCA?” said the boy, turning to the Stand, but there was no immediate response. The purple spirit held its oversized head in its hands, the mirrored tiles rotating faster and faster. “YMCA?” he asked again.

“YOUR DEVICE HAS DOWNLOADED A NEW UPDATE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO INSTALL IT?” the low voice said, this time much louder.

“What the hell?” the boy cried. Orlando released a much-needed evil laugh.

“CHUMBAWAMBA!” he exclaimed. “Your Stand has been freed from your influence! Let’s see if you can “Stand” on your own! Ha ha ha!”

“You bastard!” the boy shouted, but didn’t make any immediate approach to attack. Instead, he took a short moment to shadowbox, and seemed relieved when his Stand mimicked it, although it let out another cry of “ADWARE SPYWARE HAS BEEN DETECTED ON YOUR DEVICE. PLEASE CONTACT SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY.”

“Okay, at least that still works. Now, c’mere,” the boy growled, lunging at Orlando while he and his Stand threw another punch. Orlando ducked and watched the fist make a hole in a brick wall, then gunned it down the hall. He looked back after not hearing immediate footsteps, and saw the purple Stand - YMCA, apparently - tear a set of lockers directly off the wall with one hand, and immediately fling it at him. Orlando leapt into the air and watched the huge metal bulk slide across the floor underneath him. At the end of the hallway, an older person with black-and-white hair slammed a door open.

“Bones, look out!” Orlando shouted unhelpfully.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING O- AUGH!” Bones shouted, as the lockers completely tripped them, smashing into the wall behind them and leaving a huge crack in it. Bones was immediately knocked off their feet and slammed their head directly into the floor, leaving them passed out in a quickly-growing pool of blood.

Orlando grit his teeth knowing there was nothing he could do at the moment and ducked into a side room, which he soon realized was the computer lab he’d added not too long ago. He searched for a place to hide, but as he opened up a wide metal locker, he found it was already occupied.

“Kyou?” Orlando said, but whipped his head around as he heard stomping footsteps coming down the hall, and just as he did so, saw the door ripped off its hinges and thrown at him with two hands like a wide javelin. He ducked, heard it fly through the window, and tried to make as much distance as he could between him and his assailant. Kyou simply stood as still as possible within the locker, and if he could’ve gotten any stiller, he would’ve upon seeing the attacker glare straight at him before hurling a metal chair at Orlando.

Orlando managed to dodge yet again, and turned to the errand boy. “Kyou, what are you doing? Help me!”

The other boy moved his foot out of his hiding spot for just a second before a huge purple finger and a smaller, regular finger pointed at him, a voice shouting “Don’t you fuckin’ move, dweeb!” sending him right back in the locker.

“Goddamn it, Kyou!” Orlando shouted, zigzagging around a number of destructive attacks - for all the collateral damage this guy was racking up, he was a lot slower than Orlando on the defensive. “I know you’re like, Cthulhu’s great-nephew or whatever! Help me!”

“I’m not that strong,” the boy replied meekly and quickly. “You seem to be dodging pretty well.”

“I CAN’T DODGE FOREVER!! THIS GUY’S GONNA KILL ME IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING!”

“I’ll kill BOTH of you if you try anything, goth boy!”

Despite Orlando’s interference, the purple Stand still seemed to be under mostly complete control of its user, and its relentless attacks mostly kept it from having an opportunity to say anything. Orlando dodged and weaved as its fists tore through computers, it picked up chairs and chopped through tables and its kicks destroyed anything that remained. Although Orlando didn’t have much issue dodging at first, without an open space to bounce around in, he was starting to lose the momentum that kept him ahead of his attacker. Eventually they demolished their way all around the room, Orlando having dashed to the side opposite of Kyou before being attacked. The path of destruction was slowly approaching him, smashing through the central and side tables and every bit of the expensive electronics.

Orlando rolled out of the way of another punch and landed on his feet, immediately pulling Kyou out of the locker and grabbing both his shoulders. “HELP ME!” he shouted.

He turned around again just in time to see YMCA throw another punch, the boy mirroring it, and Orlando dropped to the floor, leaving Kyou in the direct line of fire. The student council’s errand boy’s face sparked in fear, and he raised a hand covered in inky black darkness. As the fist collided with it, the purple glow of Stand aura and sheer darkness of Kyou’s powers fought against each other, eventually mixed, and exploded outward in a supernova Orlando was pinned directly underneath.

Meanwhile in the room further down the hall, Ichiro flew across the floor from the kick, and saw the second figure come into focus - a woman, seemingly a bit older than Orlando, wearing sunglasses, some garment somewhere in between a trench coat and a pilot jacket, and a cowboy hat. She sat atop her colorful bike, revving some engine that surely did not make any sense to any qualified engineer, and Ichiro noticed it had the skull of a horse mounted on its handlebars.

The engine’s hum suddenly silenced, although the vehicle still maintained its otherworldly glow, pink and green reflecting off of her shades, which Ichiro now realized she had kept on even in the middle of the night. There was a pause for Ichiro to get to his feet and catch a few breaths - the kick had really knocked the wind out of him.

“Ichiro Kenshi,” she breathed. Her voice didn’t sound very cowboyish - only the smallest hint of a southern drawl hidden within it. It sounded more midwestern, for the most part - soft, but confident. The kind of voice someone uses to make a major decision about their future.

“How do you know my name?” Ichiro responded, holding his sword in a way that could maybe be seen as menacing if you turned your head and squinted a little. It was still clear to everyone with any sense of swordplay that he had no idea what he was doing with the thing.

“I have my sources. I’ve been getting connected with all kinds of Stand users, Ichiro, and your friend… well, she’s not exactly subtle, is she?”

“What about her?” Ichiro responded, gritting his teeth.

“Nothing about her. She’s gone, right? All that’s left of her is… well, you, pretty much.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I want to help you, Ichiro. You’ve been through something terrible. I’ve been told… she still has some influence over you. You don’t deserve to be tied to her for the rest of your life. You want to be a hero, right?”

Ichiro didn’t respond, so the cowgirl kept talking. “That’s what me and my friend are here to do. We’re heroes. Orlando? He’s a bad guy. You’re really good at getting suckered in by them, aren’t you? We just want to help you, and maybe, in return, you can help us save our friends from some even worse guys. The guys he works with. Do you understand what I mean?”

Ichiro let that hang in the air for a second. He already knew what his response was going to be, but he wanted to let it simmer for a few moments more. “I understand plenty. I understand you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Listen up - Mitsuko never had any influence over me after the fact. I did all that stuff because I wanted to - not because she made me.”

The cowgirl crossed her arms, leaning on the handlebars. Ichiro gripped his sword tighter and continued. “I don’t care what you have to say. If you wanted me to join up with you, maybe you should’ve thought about that before you attacked my friend. Let’s do this.”

Ichiro, Supermassive Black Hole behind him, charged at the cowgirl, who quickly started up her own Stand and quickly backed away. Ichiro slowed down a little, but then watched as the motorcycle revved up and came back around for another kick.

However, as the attack was incoming, Supermassive Black Hole’s green flame flared up. Its slime quickly flew out through the grate on its boiler, sticking all over the front of Ichiro’s body, locking him in place. The cowgirl had no time to slow down as she planted a foot in the slime that Ichiro had layered thick enough to cushion him from the blow’s impact.

Just as her attack connected, the slime seemed to explode off of Ichiro and cling all over her body, leaving her completely unconscious. The motorcycle instantly dissipated, and Ichiro sprinted down the hall to where he’d heard Orlando dashing off to, taking a moment to express some brief concern at the unfortunate mad scientist still bleeding out on the floor.

Ichiro turned to open a door that was no longer there and looked in the room to see what appeared to be the supernatural equivalent of a star collapsing in on itself. The purple Stand’s arm was still being sucked into the inky blackness produced by Kyou’s own ability, and both Kyou and the other boy seemed to be having a very not fun time of whatever was going on, both seeming to be sucked towards each other but trying desperately to pull away as if they were being pulled into a black hole.

“NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME!” shouted the scruffy boy. “I AM YOUR PRINCE OF DARKNESS! I COMMAND YOU, FORCES OF EVIL! YOU WILL BOW TO ME!”

The other boy seemed to be crying incessantly. “FUCK! FUCK SHIT FUCK! NO! I don’t wanna! Don’t make me! I still have things I want to do! I haven’t gotten to make something of myself yet!”

In that point of contact, the purple light and the darkness were mixing together into a more light-bluish light that shined out with an otherworldly brightness that Ichiro had to shield his eyes from. Bolts of some sort of neon-pink energy seemed to burst out of the contact point, energy crackling all around it. Orlando was lying just underneath it, seemingly completely immobilized.

“ORLANDO! ARE YOU OKAY?” Ichiro shouted. It was hard to tell what could be heard over the sounds of the two boys screaming and the lightning-esque discharges from their powers being sucked into each other.

“Ichiro!” Orlando shouted in return, a bit weakly. “Get out of here! I don’t know what’s going to happen if we stick around here, and… I think I’m stuck! There’s… a lot of energy being discharged, and it’s mostly hitting me!”

To punctuate his point, one of the bolts of energy struck Orlando, causing him to cry out in pain. Ichiro took a deep breath, grit his teeth, and started to run towards his friend as best he could. 

“Ichiro, what are you DOING!” Orlando shouted with what energy he could.

“I’m not losing another friend! I’m getting you out of here!”

Despite those two being sucked into each other, from Ichiro’s position it felt more like he was getting pushed away. A bolt whizzed past him and left a scorch mark on the wall, but he pushed forward through the strange force field. He tried to push his Stand forward as well, but found it was even more difficult to move through the strange energy field being created.

Ichiro was hit by a few bolts as he moved closer to the center of the energy, but kept his footing for the most part. He tried to cover his eyes as best he could to keep himself from being blinded, and finally managed to reach a hand out to Orlando, who found the strength to lift his hand. They made contact, grabbed onto one another, and Ichiro began to pull away.

“I…” said the scruffy boy.

“I…” said the goth boy.

“WE…” they said together, “GOT IT!”

In a smooth, parallel motion, both boys set their feet in a steady position and tried, with all their might, to move their bodies away from each other. The bright ball of energy pushing Ichiro away began to dissipate… and instead, the point of contact grew dark, pitch black, even. As the two boys managed to start actually pulling away from each other, Ichiro could swear he heard a crackle in the air as he felt himself being pulled towards the center now, not pushed away.

The darkness at the center of this completely insane situation started to grow further, bigger and bigger, filling the space between Kyou and the mysterious attacker as they managed to untangle their strange powers. Ichiro looked on in horror as Orlando’s body began to be consumed by the darkness.

“ICHIRO!” he shouted, trying to free his hand. “LET GO!”

Ichiro just grabbed on with his other hand. “NO! NEVER!”

Ichiro had been managing to maintain his position for a while, but at the point where the ball of darkness seemed to be the biggest, he began being pulled into it, watching Orlando’s face sucked in and feeling his entire body go cold as he was sucked in just after.

Orlando and Ichiro could barely see anything besides each other now, both of them seemingly suspended within the darkness bubble as if they were skydiving with no parachutes. The darkness around them seemed to whirl and whip as if they were trapped in the middle of a tornado. Ichiro had maintained his grip, and so used it to pull himself closer to Orlando. 

The maybe-wind around them was almost deafening, but it felt as though they weren’t really going anywhere - not falling, but not hitting any kind of ground, either.

“ORLANDO!” Ichiro shouted, trying to make himself heard above the wind-esque sounds. Even with the cacophony surrounding them, Orlando could tell he was crying a little. “YOU’RE THE BEST FRIEND I EVER HAD!”

Orlando pulled Ichiro in for a hug and shouted back, “I TRIED TO BE! I REALLY TRIED!”

The two of them screamed as the darkness consumed them, granting them some unknown fate.

Outside of the bubble, Ichiro’s slime dissipated. The cowgirl was coming to. She heard the noise outside the room she was in and quickly got up, dashing down the hall to see what was happening.

The ball of darkness was immense at this stage, barely peeking out of the door of the computer lab. The unconscious person was beginning to be pulled into it, and the cowgirl, knowing that Darkness = Bad, summoned her bike and attempted to grab them before anything terrible could happen. 

She kept her bike’s speed up for only a few more moments before it went flying off down the hall again, and she was only barely able to stop it before hitting another wall. A bit awkwardly, she turned the bike around and drove slowly back, dropping her passenger off in a position that was a bit less precarious.

She looked into the computer lab and fumbled for a light switch, finally turning it on to see her partner and some kid she’d never seen before lying face-down, unconscious, white smoke seeming to come off her partner’s body and black smoke coming off the other. The room itself was practically empty of anything else.

“Holy shit,” was all there really was to say.

After a pregnant pause where she tried to figure out how to resolve this situation and all the collateral damage they’d just caused, her partner’s Stand emerged again from his unconscious body, turning its head as if it were looking around, but not having eyes to do so with. It lifted its user off the ground, carrying him like an eight-year-old might carry a baby.

Without thinking, the cowgirl reached into her pocket for a phone, and took a picture.

“Vi, why would you do that,” the Stand said flatly.

“Blackmail material? Joey would never be caught dead looking this… hm. Vulnerable. He looks like a little baby when you’re holding him.”

“...huh.” It didn’t really comment further on any of that.

They sort of looked at each other.

“What now, miss leader?” YMCA said.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot happening. I think I just need a second.”

Luckily for her, her soon-to-be break was interrupted by the sound of coughing. She turned around to see the other boy taking deep breaths, suddenly conscious again. She quickly adjusted her glasses.

“Well, hey there,” she started.

“Auuuuuuuugh,” Kyou moaned. Vi lowered her eyebrows and tried to flip him over, but slowly lowered him back down when he responded by chittering “Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow…”

“What happened here?” Vi asked, getting straight to the point.

“I- I dunno…” Kyou coughed. Vi gave him a few moments, hoping for him to continue, but instead he asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m going to be asking the questions here, unless you want my partner to… do whatever he just did to cause this again.”

“Please… no…” Kyou begged. “The pain… I… I felt my existence merging with his. Our powers are too similar - when we pushed them together, they started to try and fuse - and our minds fused as well, and got mixed up…”

Vi looked between the two of them and saw smoke was still coming off of them, though it was tapering out at this point. “What happened to the other two?”

“We were untangling ourselves from each other, and it created… something. In the middle. They got… sucked into it.” Kyou paused for a moment, completely silent, but then tears started to well up in his eyes. “Principal Kincaid… I’m sorry…!”

Vi pondered this for a few moments while she let Kyou cry it out a little. Her partner, Joey, coughed a little, but whatever little bit of consciousness he had regained, he almost instantly lost, going back to sleep in his Stand’s arms.

Eventually, Vi crouched down again next to Kyou, half-whispering. “Listen to me, buddy. I came here to do what I came here to do, and I need to get out of here without raising much of a fuss, understand?”

Kyou, silent for a moment to recover, eventually said “What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, how good are you at cleaning up messes?”

“Relatively speaking, I’m… okay, I guess…”

“‘Okay, I guess’ will have to cut it. I’m getting out of here with my crew. You fix this whole mess. No one knows we were here, or else I’m gonna force you to mindmeld with my friend here again, get me? You take care of this for me, you never see me again.”

“Ugh…!” Kyou seemed to have more Feelings™ about this topic than he could probably admit at this current moment, but seemed to be mostly fixated on the sheer amount of pain he was still in. “Just… just go. I’ll… take care of it.”

“Good,” Vi stated, and then began to walk out the way she came.

YMCA floated after her, user in tow, and said, “So… that’s it?”

“We technically accomplished what we came here for. Kincaid’s gone, and so is Kenshi… so there’s nothing really left to do about either. We’re out of here.”

Vi summoned her bike Stand, waited for YMCA to mount it as best it could for being vaguely intangible, and then sped away.

Several hours later, the school day began anew. Kyou Kagemori had dressed Bones’ wound and set them down somewhere nice to sleep it off. He and his eldritch companions had spent the night and what resources they had slowly rebuilding everything that had been destroyed using whatever means they had, getting a little desperate as they cut it pretty close near the end.

As people began to enter the school, surely not looking enthusiastic about whatever nonsense was going to occur with the principal’s position going forward, Kyou just decided to find out where Orlando’s stupid little hideout was and take a goddamn nap.

#FOOLISHMAN #this is technically the only other plot relevant part of this arc but #/shrug #this may be. nonsense. whatever. it is done

[a-complex-joke]

The Toymaker Chapter 4

MASTERLIST

A day after the somewhat weird visit from Thee Rumpelstiltskin, another surprising visit Arrived at the Toy shop.

"Welcome, Si-" The girl was stunned, and in her shop stood the king.

"Your Majesty, to what do I owe the pleasure of you being in my shop? '' she said, bowing to the monarch.

"I've come to inform you, you're out. You have but a fortnight to vacate the premises" The King said, already turning to leave.

"What? But why? Im-" she started to protest.

Hush, it has already been decided. This town has no use for a loly Toy Maker such as yourself"

"But your Majesty, I have nothing else, no family, no place to go off to, I'd be forced into prostitution to feed myself, " He said pleading for some kind of pity.

"I care not of what happens to you, your shop will be replaced with something that will actually help the town" the King stormed off with his court in tow.

The Toymaker fell to her knees, tears starting to form.

"Don't worry you'll figure it out" A cloth doll said, patting the girl's back.

"Just seduce a prince then you'll never need to worry again." a jester doll said snickering.

"Wasn't the king throwing a ball so his son could find a wife?" the cloth doll said, jumping and clapping her hands together.

"But I don't even know him" the Toymaker argued.

"So what," the dolls said towering over the girl in her variable position.

Later that night, the ball was held. Everyone wore their finest clothes, Including the Toymaker, A beautiful dress, yet still modest that cost way too much but it would be worth it, she thought.

The people danced, talked, and drank, but if there was another common theme it was young women crowding around the prince.

"Your highness" She Curtseyed towards the prince, though he seemed distracted by a different young lady.

"Uh Pardon me," He said walking away from the Toymaker.

Almost instantly the plan to course the prince had failed.

Though he wasn't the only man here with money, surely another man would ask for her next dance.

Song after song the girl waited to be approached by someone, other than the Servants carrying drinks on their trays.

All while the Prince danced with some blonde the whole time.

"You seem rather appalled by being here," a voice said startling her.

"Ah, Mr.Stiltskin you started me. What are you doing here?" She asked, starting with his sudden appearance.

"While I'm in town I might as well show up to a ball, not every day those are thrown. Why are you standing here"

"Asking myself the same thing. I thought at least one person would ask me to dance. I'm just gonna head back to the shop at this point" she began to walk away but was pulled back.

"The night is still young, one dance won't kill you," Rumpelstiltskin said, leading her to the other dancing people.

At first, the dance was off wrong timing and clumsy but as the song progressed and the Toymaker relaxed the movements were more fluid.

With a final kiss on the hand, the two split their ways until the following day.

The Toymaker had gotten no sleep, due to worry about what she would do, she tried making things to ease her mind but in the end, it was pointless.

"Hello welcome to my shop how may I help you" she muttered

"Down in the dumps, I see" It was Rumpelstiltskin

"Oh, hello Mr.Stiltskin, she's all finished up I'll go grab her" she Sighed heading to the back before emerging once again, with a gorgeous doll.

"Are you moving shop ?" he asked looking around the now depressing shop.

"Not by my own choice, The king I kicking me out. It's just terrible I have nothing, I'll have to sell myself on the street, and he could care less" She hissed out.

"Sorry I have a lot on my mind" her glare softened as she handed him the doll.

"Here she is, funny how my prettiest doll will be my last"

"You're just giving up ?" he sounded disappointed.

"Well I did attempt to seduce the prince last night, but As you can see I'm no doll" she gestured to herself.

"I think ill head off to the next kingdom over," she said unsure of her answer.

"Work you me" he blurted out

A silence formed between the two.

"Ok, yeah I work for you. Oh and you can call me Emily, Emily O,hare.

#fanfic #ouat #rumplestiltskin

[memory-laine]

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu | Can't Help Myself, 2016

Can't Help Myself is programmed to sweep a blood-like substance perfectly in a circle only for it to stop working every time it approaches a perfect circle and mimic dance movements. This results in the blood to flow black again and splatter around, forcing the robot to repeat the action for eternity.

The contemporary artwork is by two of China's most controversial artists, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It's titled “Can’t Help Myself.”

One of the interpretations of this artwork I like says, (paraphrased)

“The blood is how we kill ourselves both mentally and physically for money just in an attempt to sustain life. How we replace our happiness, passion and inner peace with paychecks and promotions. How the system is set up for us to fail on purpose— to enslave us, to steal the best years of our lives, to play the game that the richest people of the world have designed.”

Another one describes the artwork as a robot who is designed to leak its hydraulic fluid and try to scoop it back in, to keep going. The closer the ending comes, its dance moves become more depressed and erratic. Eventually it stopped operating in 2019.

Especially given how death is inevitable, yet the robot's fragile attempt to create an “art.”

The latter is patently untrue, but a more bleak version.

In both cases, it's quite sad.

[watery-pancake]

The Mirror

A reflection of the form you've been selected, unbeknownst to you. Forced upon your soul, this body is what you will now be seen as. It is within seeing your double, that no one sees underneath. In the flesh, the bones, the blood and the various fluids you produce. When the image in the reflection stops moving, it is all that will be left behind. Photographs and voice notes, videos and memories. Nothing can recreate the soul, as much as the soul can pretend to be real. To see consciousness as a form of intelligence, however the fool is as real as the scholar.

It is you. Customization comes at a price, suffering in hunger, thousands to make you beautiful as you see in your mind's eye. The soul varies with its container. The soul softens with a beautiful shell, melting within these folds. The soul disconnects with an ugly one, blaming the creator of such form, blaming the others who use their lenses to judge, and finally blaming the self for allowing the birth and creation of such a mistake on Earth.

It is within the silence of the night, and the loneliness of the day, that the soul thrives in its shell. It moves around, inspecting the fingerprints intricately carved, the signs of life in the healed scars, and in the lack of shine in the eyes. The mind hears the mind, to no one else. The three faces are seen to the self, but only one allowed for every external one. Sometimes the faces will shift, from a foe to friend, friend to the raw soul. The rarity of all three being exchanged between these two souls, it makes the fear of mistake more real.

Love was gifted to animals and eventually reached its way to the humans that roam today. To look in the reflection of the mirror, to look at another human on the side of the road, the flesh is all that is seen. Within love the soul can flourish, the human gains something unalike the diamonds on their fingers or the replications of animals upon the place of which they slumber.

In your temporary existence, you have the chance to show it that you were here. You are real, not in your skin tone, tone of voice, voices you hear to yourself, yourself that others see. The droplet of life has graced this flesh, and you choose to let it waste away. Or rather, the curse of love has once again afflicted the mind. The love for connection is stripped away, leaving you crawling and screaming and craving, begging for more. But no matter how you scrape your fingers against the concrete, leaving the sweet sight of liquid life upon the hard dark surface, your voice was for nothing.

There was nothing you could have ever done. No matter the people you learn, the connections you string together carefully, the attention to others you wish to portray, it was for nothing.

I was cursed from birth, of a form rotting faster than I can live it, of a connection to blood that wishes to let it spoil than heal it. I was born of the man who needed to be loved, and the woman who steals love from every chance she can get, and raised alongside a man who hates those who give him love, then begs for it back. I have become the soul who begs, scarring my fingertips with the ground, but no matter how loud I scream, I was placed in a deaf world, blind to my cries.

I see this pathetic form, in the mirror hidden by my open door, exposed to the closed. I see my folds, my scars of which will never fade. I see the hollow eyes once filled with hope of the future I wish, instead scooped out and replaced with the truth of my purpose. I found love, and lost it. I found it again, and lost it. I find it again, and I can no longer trust its validity. The forgetting of little things, it's what slowly empties the soul. But not even my big things can be pitifully remembered.

I sit in this bed, the mattress gifted from my late father. The stuffed animals from my best friend, myself, and my lover. I sleep with a piece of their existence every night, and awaken to the memories we've formed. I share my soul with the universe, but the universe is a mirror. It just reflects back into me, refusing to accept it with love. My soul remains in this flesh, until this flesh fails. And finally, then, the universe will accept my soul, in disgust of my failure. The mirror will accept the soul, and leave behind the warm flesh of which many have held and touched. The body will accept this body, and my soul will be gone. And I will be happy, to be gone. When I am gone, I can't beg for love my damaged brain will never deem enough. When I am gone, I will be good. And that is good.

[breadvidence]

DAMMIT: I.II

On AO3

SUMMARY: Two suicidal old men with moral scrupulosity in a three-legged potato sack race towards domesticity. Dallas 2014/Brick crossover, all adaptation decisions arbitrary.

Note: When Valjean says "What has come into his hands he cannot put down" the 'what' is like someone else's trash and there isn't a garbage can as close as he thought there would be. Warning for suicidal ideation and medical content.

⁂

He who takes notes while he leans upon the steps of the sepulcher does not set aside his habits merely because he chooses to stand, put his feet upon them, and betake himself through the door. Which is to say: Javert can remember the attempt with damnable clarity, and the hospitalization so far well enough. Pain and drugs muddle, but do not erase. He knows the cut on his knuckles is from the teeth of the first responder who dragged him from the Trinity, and that rests uneasily in his gut. The nurse who leaned close as they sheared off his clothes and repeated your legs are broken, sir—your legs are broken—stop trying to stand—your legs are broken—she doesn’t work on his ward, but he hears her voice sometimes out in the halls, and he would recognize her face. He could repeat the words, shouted in a drowned-hoarse voice, he felt were necessary commentary when he woke from his first bout of unconsciousness to find himself catheterized, fixated on the sight of the bag full of red fluid which hung from the side of the hospital bed. Kidneys, of all fucking organs to take the fall hard.

It was on the morning of Valjean’s first visit when he, as coherent as might be expected through the dilaudid and haloperidol, received the disagreeable news of his ineffectiveness. No, he certainly wouldn’t die.

The surgeon praised his own work as he numbered the pedicle screws and rods which fix together Javert’s pelvis and lumbar spine, unironic when he called him a lucky man. “If your legs weren’t in pieces,” he said, “we’d have you up on your feet already.” Tricks of force and chance of angles, the fall spared his skull entirely and chest and abdomen more or less, a few ribs fractured on the right where he skewed to the side after his feet entered the water, internal damage limited to contusions where there might have been organs lacerated and vessels torn. The surgeon added, “Oh, you’ll need knee replacement before seventy. Not because of the jump—they’re just terrible. Wearing out. You a runner?”

Sometimes he thinks, If I were noncompliant with the physiotherapist, I could throw a DVT and die that way. He cannot bring himself to be noncompliant. He thinks: I should have shot myself. But he has been present at a failed suicide of that kind and can’t shake those memories now any better than when he took his sidearm out of its holster and decided to lay it on the parapet rather than put the muzzle in his mouth. At least he still has a goddamn face. He expresses this to the psychiatrist, who is the one doctor he doesn’t please, and gets no response except for an increase in dosage; he tries it with the therapist, too, though he is suspicious of her authority, and less inclined to make an effort. He has the uneasy sense, a thought that is like an object touched in muddy waters, that what she asks him to do —reflect on his reasons—is precisely the opposite of what will accomplish what she wants—his avoiding future high velocity impacts with water.

At the end of the first week, he conducts a tense conversation by phone with Gisquet about whether the email he sent on the sixth in fact qualifies as a resignation and learns that his confidence in his prompt severance is unfounded; it’s a union job; there’s disability law; of course he will not be a member of law enforcement, but at present— he holds the phone away from his face and hyperventilates about an officer’s obligations vis-a-vis known criminals in their hospital rooms. Gisquet continues to speak, and his sense of duty to the man throttles down panic enough for him to participate in the next unpleasant turn of the conversation, namely Gisquet’s apology for his response to the email, written and sent prior to his awareness of the situation— Javert has not read it yet, in any case. Gisquet expresses his regrets. Precisely what he regrets is unclear. He praises Javert’s career in funereal terms. Given Javert’s clear knowledge of his debasement in matters of justice, the implication of this praise unsettles him.

Valjean’s visit the next morning goes poorly.

Yes—a hell experienced not quite daily—here, a man. They do not say anything of significance to each other because Valjean does not ask and Javert does not know how to offer. Regardless, while he watches the hospital walls breathe in long nights disrupted by too much light and frequent nurse checks, he paws through their words and seeks— fuck! God knows what. 

He finds, in memory, that he calls the man sir, though he never notices at the time. 

He finds Valjean’s kindness. So many offers of little comforts, of practical help. Would you like a cup of coffee. There’s a sandwich shop downstairs if you want something other than hospital food. I brought a long cord for the tablet. Do you have houseplants that need to be watered. I can get your mail for you.

Today, “The nurses said you could have some of your own clothes, so I brought back sweatpants.”

“You went through my dresser?” It’s so intrusive, he fumbles between his unease and his gratitude, and the words that fall from his mouth are, “Guess I’ll check when I’m home that my watch is still there.” He horrifies himself.

Valjean laughs. “Your expression is—something,” he excuses himself. “That was unkind, Javert, but you’re forgiven. Calm down.”

The laugh, the scold, the forgiveness. Hunger—for which one—he does not know; something in him parts its jaws and slavers. Javert thinks this man might kill him where the river failed. He is comforted to know he keeps this from his eyes. Valjean would not make these visits, surely, if he could see—it; whatever it is. 

⁂

Javert watches him with the eyes of a starved and beaten animal. Jean Valjean does not know if he is the meat, the cudgel, or the caressing hand, and derives little comfort from the awareness he is not alone in this uncertainty. He would leave the man to his suffering and call it kindness, but it has been two weeks and he is entangled. There have been no other visitors. One card, Get Well Soon!, in the trashcan. 

Javert’s apartment is of a piece with this: a desk and no dining room table, one pillow on the bed, no photos on the walls. The cleanliness is noticeable, bleached grout, empty countertops, books in perfect alignment on the shelf next to a modest television set. When he turns on the latter, he expects Fox News and finds C-SPAN. In addition to condiments, there are two pre-made salads, a single raw chicken breast marinading in a ziplock, and a head of broccoli in the fridge, which he throws away. He scolds himself for being surprised that Javert would use spices other than pepper and salt.

“I cleared out your fridge,” he tells him.

Javert squints at him with much the same expression with which he greeted the sweatpants. “Did you. Well, make yourself at home, why don’t you.”

Jean Valjean thinks, You never seem to have, but certainly wouldn’t say anything. Maybe the suicide was planned for some time, and the apartment reflects a dying man’s conscientiousness to those who would have to clear out his things. 

“Thank you,” Javert adds, after too long a pause. 

“It’s nothing,” he says, before Javert can call him sir. “Do you have an update on your discharge date?” 

He listens as Javert balances his desire to complain against his compliance with his medical team. It is ineffable. Jean Valjean has had a single hospital stay and he checked himself out against medical advice. He makes sympathetic noises. He pretends the nurses do not gossip to him. This man provides a—not quite welcome—distraction from the process that is legitimizing the money Jean Valjean intends to pass on to Cosette. The riot has been a sharp reminder that each day he lives is another step closer to God, and while he hardly intends to put himself in the line of gunfire again, well. Other hazards aside, that depends upon the damn boy of hers. With all due respect to her choices. 

The liquid funds are a simple matter; he invokes old Fauchelevent’s name as if the man died with a penny in his pocket unspent. In the nineties and early aughts he falsified documents that are now long past discrediting, and those are of the essence in recovering the funds and property escheated to the state, which he has for over a decade allowed Texas to manage on his behalf.  It frets at him, to bring Jean Valjean’s and Fantine’s names into the light, and it is no small task to leave Ultime Fauchelevent’s entirely out of the matter. Little use in the process if he allows his fraudulent identity to become entangled. He rehearses his speech to Cosette: no, I am not your father, but your mother left an estate to you, and— 

Perhaps he will be able to sidestep entirely the provenance of the estate itself.

He considers the numbers involved. It might be a slightly excessive graduation present. Maybe he will not call it that after all. He thinks: he ought to sell the house in Southlake; he can find a property that costs much less to maintain, and so keep less of the money for himself. Cosette will not be so sad to lose her childhood home, surely, when she has left the city for medical school. It matters little that the idea hurts him. Such thoughts as these are what he escapes, coming to Baylor.

Abby greets him at the ward door with, “He’s on a tear,” so Jean Valjean turns back to the nurse station and cajoles coffee orders out of them, and goes with Jessica—who was almost on break, anyway—to fetch the cups up, as an apology that he hopes Javert will never learn about, for all it is on his behalf. 

He is in the wheelchair rather than the bed, tapping at the handrims, though he has nowhere to go. Instead of a greeting, he says, “I’ve got excellent news from my insurance company.” He’s furious, irony held dead between his bared teeth. “I’m ready to be discharged into the conveniently available hands of my loving family. Yes, I’ll be rolling through the front door of my own accessible single-level home by five o’ clock.”

Jean Valjean waits a moment for this to continue, but Javert has worked himself past snapping into a shivery silence. “I don’t recall your having a—” He forebears from the loving. “—family.”

“What do you mean? I’ve had Mrs. Javert in my pocket this whole time.”

Jean Valjean props himself against the edge the bed and waits.

“I don’t need to be—” He waves his hand at the hospital room. “— here . The doctors want me discharged to a—” His expression takes on the fixed solemnity it tends towards when his pride is hurt. “—skilled nursing facility. The insurance says, No, there’s not high enough medical care needed. Well! I’m so terribly glad to hear my ability to shuffle my ass from a bed to a commode means I can walk up two flights of stairs. Yes, here I am without an IV, so there’s not a bit of medication management needed. In fact—” 

Abby comes through the door with an expression of fixed good humor, as if Javert hasn’t broken off to stare at her with ill humor. “We need to move you back into bed, Mr. Javert. It’s been an hour.”

“It’s not a definite rule,” he snaps. “I’m fine. The pain’s not bad. You can go.”

Abby flushes and does so, but not without a despairing glance Jean Valjean’s way. 

“Javert,” says Jean Valjean with great mildness. “Have you considered that the nurses have your best interest in mind? You might be more polite.” 

“I hadn’t considered,” the man replies, in a stifled tone. “You’re right.”

Jean Valjean feels the hair prickle on the back of his neck. Javert was not like this in Montreuil; aside from the conflict over Fantine’s arrest he had the irritating habit of not arguing even where he clearly disagreed, but he avoided at the same time agreeing. I hear what you’re saying, Mr. Madeleine and I understand the point you’re making, Mr. Madeleine. Though obscured at first beneath the man’s—Jean Valjean does not know what to call it other than bullshit —there’s something here he does not want to name, which he suspects answers to submission, and which scares him. He has not been here long enough to flee. He clears his throat and says, “Well, then. I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. I can only imagine it’s very frustrating to be stuck in a hospital room.”

“Ah—yes.” He blinks. “I should be out by the end of the week, though. There’s an appeal process.” 

Jean Valjean gives his hand an encouraging pat, only to feel bad when the fingers under his touch clutch around the handrims.

⁂

They allow the patients to wear their own clothing, which eases Jean Valjean—some; there is no other aspect of the SNF that is not wretched. He knows the odor of an institution. The transfer process has taxed Javert past what he wishes to admit, and Jean Valjean, perceiving this, begs his own weariness and departs early. He spends some confused length of time leaned against the door of his car, metal hot through his jeans, listening to a flock of grackles file their complaints. Through an open window he can hear one of the staff raising their voice in frustration.

In the evening he worries himself, he avoids his bed, when he dozes in the armchair it is into nightmare. As ever, the right path is the first one before him, and in his weakness he dithers to put his feet on it. How awful to their dignity, he thinks: that without any loved ones, Javert has this only, an old con, who pities him too greatly to see him imprisoned. And what will Jean Valjean say to Cosette? Yes, I’ve taken in a man —well, not altogether his strangest moment— and you must never speak with him . Less explicable. She will be hurt. Can he say instead he’s gone on a trip? No, she might stop by the house for something from her room. He could say that the house needs sudden repairs, perhaps? She might believe that.

In the morning, as he searches the Double Oaks website for their visitor policy—as if a man should need policy to say when he can be visited!—he reflects irritably on himself. To be vexed to nightmare—that’s reasonable enough when the hound’s teeth are seeking your flesh, but not if the dog is all gums. Yet—the dreams were not of pursuit, but of what comes after. It’s the kennel that troubles him, not its creature.

Well. The creature fails to delight as well, but he will weather him.

He does not expect, when he texts with an excuse for making a visit two days in a row, that Javert will rebuff him. It is well enough; he takes three days to lay groundwork for keeping Cosette away from the Southlake home, which is not so difficult with her continued distraction by Marius, and orders a simple cot to put in the office for himself. On the fourth, in the middle of the night, he receives a garbled but unusually friendly text from Javert that he takes to mean the SNF has adjusted his medication. In the morning there is a follow-up, Disregard . 

Sure, Jean Valjean texts back. I can bring your mail over today.

OK. Fifteen minutes later, this is joined by, Thank you.

Maybe he should make his offer over text? His charitable behavior thus far has been accepted with fair grace, or in any case with a kind of bewildered compliance flavored by the occasional profanity, but he does not anticipate this will be a pleasant conversation. On the other hand, he can exert pressure in person more effectively, and he does not want Javert to make a choice contrary to his own best interest. Yes—best to ask in person. On the drive to the SNF he finds himself tense, but not unhappy. 

The dayroom, with its large windows decorated by flower boxes, should seem kinder than a hospital. Jean Valjean crosses it with a prickling sense of barred doors and cameras, though neither are in evidence.

“Hey,” Javert greets him, and there must be something evident on his face, because he lapses into alert silence rather than launching into whatever complaints he has.

They are never quite reciprocated, but he can’t divest himself of the habit of pleasantries, the verbal dallying that has made him unremarkable over the years. Finally, he says, “I haven’t figured out all the logistics—” That is, he has not resigned himself to the logistics. “—and of course it depends on what you want, but I’m sure we can get you out of here before the end of the week.” 

“What, planning to heal me with a little laying on of hands?” He bares his teeth, taken by some private humor. “I didn’t take you for that kind of saint.” 

“No, I mean—this place. This institution. You ought not have to be here.” 

Javert looks at him with the perpetual perplexity closer to the fore than his equally ever-present exasperation. “What are you talking about? It’s fine.”

“Don’t you find—” Have his senses deceived him, then, that he sees a prison where there is none? No; the scales are on the eyes that stare watchfully into his. “—that a place like this makes a person…” less , he means. Inhuman. He can understand the necessity of the facility without respecting it, can know the nurses and aids are not guards without allowing them to repudiate the function. Javert, to his regret on this particular day, has an interrogator’s sense for when the subject will break on his own, and waits on. He asks frankly, “Doesn’t it remind you of Memorial?”

Javert moves his shoulders in a restless, meaningless gesture; either it doesn’t, or he denies it to himself—how can it not , truly?—and either way he is uncomfortable arguing the point with Jean Valjean. He offers, in what is not a joke only because the fact of it is so terrible, “It has air conditioning?” Then he clears his throat, looks into his face, and says simply, “You don’t have an obligation to visit me.” 

What has come into his hands he cannot put down. “Whatever the case may be, I have a single-level accessible home, and it would be no trouble—” Even he blushes at the extent of this lie. “—for you to recover a while with me. It is not unreasonable.”

Javert raises his eyebrows.

“There’s—” 

“Fauchelevent—”

“—home health—”

“—Valjean.” The room is empty, but for him to say the name still feels like betrayal. “Can I speak?”

It takes a moment for him to understand this is a sincere question. “Yes. Of course.”

“I’ve seen your attempt to ruin yourself,” he says, in a tone that speaks anger while his eyes beg understanding. “You know what response I gave to that. You’ve insisted on—I don’t even know the word—clemency. You’re fucking helpful. Fine. Now you’d like to suffer for me, is that it? Well, you cannot take something that I do not have. I don’t mean to argue, but you’re only making it for yourself. You see structure and it’s a prison, is that it?” He averts his gaze at last. “I don’t. I’m fine. Ah, so—” His voice softens. “You kneel on the heights—that’s what I expect of you—” He sighs, presses a hand over his eyes, and says, “Fucking hell, I’m pretty sure you could’ve brought this to me when I was more sober. Pills are at seven o’ clock. Give me until the afternoon next time.” 

He is warm—he’s blushing again. “Ah.” This is not the protest he expected, and he wants to quit any conversation that includes praise of his person. 

“Ah?” Javert repeats, roughly. 

“How long do you have here?” Jean Valjean asks.

“Four weeks or so,” he replies, and narrows his eyes. “You aren’t going to argue more?”

Jean Valjean examines himself and finds he is piqued; his charity does not get declined; Javert does not win arguments against him, certainly not so quickly. “I don’t know. Can we conduct this argument without comment on my character?”

“Probably not.” 

“I thought you would say I’d be terrible to live with. That your dignity was at stake. That sort of thing.” 

“I can also say those things, if you want,” Javert says. “You’re probably right. And God alone knows what kind of roommate I am. Nobody’s had that misfortune in thirty-five years.” He reaches out and, condescendingly, pats Jean Valjean’s knee. His hand is very large, the pinky knobbed by an old injury. “You’ll be fine. I’m sure you’ll find some other sacrifice to make soon.”

#DAMMIT #fanfic (mine)

[leam1983]

Types

I used to think that being poly meant an end to most fantasies. I thought it would mean those three or four OCs I spent using strictly as a medium to yank on my crank would be pushed in some musty corner of my subconscious, but a check-in with Walter was all I'd need to realize that fantasies are like cockroaches. You can't kill them, but they also have a role to play in your relationship's ecosystem.

We just settled into bed and I mention this to Walt, who seems nonplussed. "George Grimm isn't real and he couldn't be real, hon. Am I supposed to be jealous of a made-up guy you've pulled up AI art renders of? He's never actually touched you, never actually kissed you - and you know what I noticed?"

Walt smirks. "You're feeling guilty about it. That means you probably went at it last week, during one of the two evenings I spent at the office, and now you've got irrational guilt pangs about having cheated on me with a JPEG of a guy that could be me if I got everything tailored on Saville Row and had absolutely zero backdoor shyness in regards to your kinks."

His smirk turns into a chiding gesture. "You're being silly, you silly goose. We've sploshed - you know we're open concerning our kinks. Come on, tell me about him. Tell me about George Graham Grimm the Food Vampire."

I figure I'll do it like this, instead.

George was a solid coping mechanism in my late teens, someone who's cropped up in my dreams during a phase of my life that saw me define myself as unloveable by default. I don't remember the specifics of that particular dream, but I do remember the broad strokes.

I dreamt I was dragged to some sort of symposium by my Ph. D. of an aunt and was forced to spend four hours dipping my lips in cheap champagne while pretending like I didn't have a piteous inferiority complex. Dreams go as they're wont to do, elastic and fluid in their arrangement of Time, and I find a secluded dining room on the floor being used by the reception. Its décor is ornate, and its four massive tables are arranged in a square. In the middle of one of the sides is seated a mountain of a man, about four hundred pounds and change, and he's dressed in custom-tailored clothing that's probably cost a fortune. As obese as he is, he's the most smartly-dressed of the assembly, with a bowtie and vest combo that's so perfect you'd swear he was born with them. His thick fingers are impossibly agile, swiping things from the piles and piles of food waiting on the table and wolfing them down with a mixture of sheer abandon and meticulous precision - extended pinky finger included. He somehow never stains himself and his thick and flowing beard remains immaculate no matter how fast he goes. His utensils are barely touched, and he instead keeps going back to sucking on his fingers. He's a very vocal eater, groaning in appreciation or drowning a satisfied chuckle in an umpteenth bite. He does it all with his eyes closed and a light frown, almost as though he's got a mental map of the table's furnishings he keeps perfectly up-to-date.

Considering the amount of food that's involved, my first thought is that this is actually a buffet and this dude here's just decided he'd click on that I Will Attend link for the RSVP for the exact purpose of stuffing his face with free food. I don't remember the exact dialog in the dream, so I'll sub what was probably said with what actually makes sense in-context. Guy sounds like Tony Jay and Sydney Greenstreet made love and had a posh, congested and vaguely eerie descendant - and he stops between two bites, eyes opening to reveal two gray slivers behind his bifocals and his thick and well-groomed snowy-white eyebrows.

"Pardon the intrusion, but I don't recall the help replacing the buffet sign on this table..."

Just that is enough to prime my hind brain. This man's voice is the stuff my insecure adolescent self's dreams are made of. The snootiest Received English Pronounciation imaginable, rendered in a low and rough timbre by a guy who looks more fit to mumble than ti articulate - except everything is crisp. My flustered teenage brain thinks he's being contemptuous so I nervously blurt out a response - and he laughs.

I woke up, the first time my subconscious made George Grimm laugh. Again, it's Tony Jay and Greenstreet melded together, as if normal people had Plosive Laughing Prefixes without veering into outright guffaws, or as if your classic swell of Evil Laughter could've actually sounded congenial.

"Never you mind, dear boy - I was merely... indulging."

Over time, I'd realize George refuses to call eating what it is. He seeks repaste or regales his tastebuds, or maybe he prays to the God of Luxury, which I've always taken as being my subconscious regurgitating my brief obsession with Roman mythology. Grimm does fit the bill for some sort of modernized and expanded take on Dionysius and he did first come into being during my High School History classes on the Roman civilization.

"Go on, fix yourself a plate," he then says. "I'll hardly miss these bites you'll take."

I realize that he's serious, at that moment. He was rearing to polish off all four of these tables on his own. Something makes me want to keep my distance and to settle with clearing off a bit of table surface for my plate - and what I put in it never quite gels into something. It's like AI Art's idea of a plate of food, with chunks of unidentified meat, mounds of recursive and self-cannibalizing stringy pasta, black masses that might be meatballs or olives, it's hard to tell - and Dream Logic being what it is, I'm not fazed by this at all. My plate seems endless, but I work through it at a pace that I assume matches with my usual pace for a normal-sized meal. In the meantime, the big man's gaining speed at an impossible rate. He's slurping, gnashing, worrying, moaning and grunting his way towards my location, and I get the sense that he'll just keep getting faster if I try and slip away. So, half-convinced this just flipped into Nightmare Country, I feel the dream turn lucid as the overly-dressed organic Shop-Vac I'm seated with works his way through enough food for twelve people in a few seconds. He stops right next to me, daintily raised a tiny piece of cheese to his mouth and politely covers his mouth. If he's burped, no sound's been made.

He turns to face me and outstretches a hand that certainly has the mitt-like qualities of the appendages of particularly fatter people, but with an almost feline level of grace.

"George Graham Grimm - monster, scholar, gentleman, professor amongst others - at your service."

I take his hand. There's an instant of tension, the sense that Grimm's hunger's just shifted - and he's warm, warm like I've never felt anyone's hands being, before.

What I remember is that this was enough for my dream self to practically climb over his immense paunch and perch myself on it. His amusement and surprise immediately turns to relish, and George's kisses would be my measurement for Decent Snoggings for years, up until I met Prof - and eventually Walt. The specifics leave me, but I do know I dump everything on this posh quasi-ogre. Time dilation being what it is, George ends up being the perfect listener, as you'd assume, and he knows his voice is basically single-malt whiskey down my ears - again with weird plosive inclusions that make it so he hungrily moans or grunts at the beginning of every other sentence.

Obviously, my subconscious and my loins don't care about logical progression - we're Together, and that's it. George would crop up every now and again, typically when arousal was mixed with loneliness, and he'd call me his "dear boy" by repeating the word dear a good ten times or so.

Unsurprisingly, Younger Grem had Sugar Daddy fantasies and dreamed of a man large enough to be heavier than a loaded semi who'd take him out to walks and daintily request stops for "snacks" that would involve lifting hot dog carts à la Obelix the Gaul and tipping them into his open gullet. I understand that I spoke, in those dreams, but I don't remember anything I ever said. Even George's actual words faded, but I was left with a sense of either glowing praise or the sort of public expression of physical attraction that would normally make people ill-at-ease. Dude was horny on main the same way I was, adolescence oblige, and bowties-plus-silk-scarves affairs turned into spy thrillers as we both tried to find a sufficiently quiet and secluded space that would let us screw each other wild instead of catering to a gaggle of strangers in galas and receptions neither of us knew what to do with.

Then came Prof, and now Walt and Sarah. I started to feel guilty about an overdressed fatty that would've never left the confines of my mind - especially in regards to Walt.

The coincidence didn't escaspe me, back then. George Graham Grimm. Walter C. George. Walter's actually Grimm with the brakes on, the much more realistic idea of what it means to have a plus-sized boyfriend. The closeness isn't always welcomed on my end of things, seeing as I want to enjoy the Actual Man's emotional and intellectual availability, but my hind brain wants the Fake Man's relentless libido or his appetite. It's not that much of a problem, but it makes those occasional times that see me superimpose red paisley-patterned silk over Walter's gray gabardine feel like a dereliction I'm the only one to perceive.

I guess I needed George Grimm, back in the day. I needed a belly platform so big I could sleep over his chest without my feet touching the mattress, or the eventual internal running commentary on the various happenings in my life. I needed a guy with so much self-confidence and zest for life that he could turn morbid obesity around on a dime and make it look sexy. I do channel him on occasion, when I have to be snippier or more authoritative than I usually am. I probably needed the embryonic forms of the Loudest Fake Lover in Existence to make some inroads about my sexuality. I probably needed the imagined bedroom theatrics, Grimm gnashing his perfect teeth at me over climax, heatedly declaring that "our exquisite flesh" would "endure for aeons".

I think everyone needs or wants a concept of a certain "Forever Love", past a certain age, and it's probably natural to start out with an idea, a dream, a fantasy that's gone a little haywire in my case, that still sometimes looms over me while I'm working on our server stack, smelling of expensive cologne and of the cooked juices of something that's been expensively prepared. I don't need running commentary from Walt; he's always right around the corner!

George Graham Grimm, however - monster, scholar, gentleman, professor amongst others - hasn't really left my side for a good twenty-three years.

#life post #OC discourse #old faithfuls that never existed #on being nostalgic for something that's never left; never died #vague pangs of guilt #AI Art #Midjourney renders

[kammartinez]

Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a great tendency towards exuberance, and a natural bent for the strange and the marvelous. There’s a constant play between veiling and unveiling (even in our newscasts, one senses indirect meaning in everything), as well as a fluidity of form, in which excess triumphs, every time, over restraint.

Three hundred years of colonial rule produced an intense syncretism of indigenous and European cultures, a bold new aesthetic accompanied by many new paradoxes, and these can be glimpsed today in both lighter and darker manifestations, some playful and others barbaric.

Mexican Baroque emerged from the conquest of the New World, from the long, fraught process of negotiation and subjugation that began to unfold once the Spaniards established their rule in 1521. The European monarchs wanted as much gold as their conquistadores could plunder, while their missionaries sought to convert the pagan savages to Catholicism. The Aztecs of course had their own gods, a monumental pantheon that included the fierce and formidable Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, yet these ancient powers proved no match for colonial rapacity.

There was one pivotal overlap between the two religions, however, a fortuitous convergence which helped ease the transition from the Aztec cosmology to the Catholic faith. And this was the “theater of death” present in both religions. Accustomed to their own culture of human sacrifice, the Indians identified with the Crucifixion and with other violent chapters in the new theology, and were thus gradually lured by its passions and taste for the macabre. In artistic portrayals of certain scenes from the New Testament, the blood and the drama were laid on thick.

The Churrigueresque style brought over from Spain, a highly florid and heavily laden version of Rococo, found its most triumphant expression, one could argue, in Mexico. The church architects were Spanish, yet the artisans and laborers were Indigenous and mestizo, and they asserted their autonomy from the metropolis by adding local materials such as tezontle, a porous red volcanic stone, and local motifs, with quetzals and hummingbirds and faces with native features finding their way into the chiseled landscapes. In all their magnificence, the gilt altars and church facades also betrayed a horror of silence and empty space, every inch of wood, stucco, and stone teeming with detail, as if replicating the delirious splendor of the natural world beyond.

Despite the number of masterly creations that resulted, Mexican Baroque mostly emerged from a clash of cultures, from antagonism rather than harmony, and this is largely what grants it its dynamic force. Its art rejected straight lines and predictable paths, reveling in a liberated geometry that mirrored the new unstable and multicaste society that had risen from the embers. The monolithic sculptures of the Aztecs and earlier pre-Hispanic civilizations—signs of a certain stability—were replaced by a more fluid and volatile art, one which favored movement over form, agility over monumentality.

Like most art of the Baroque, it too thrived off a play of contrasts and opposites, and this was most poignantly articulated in the historical counterpoint between the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, the dialectic between victor and vanquished spilling over into one between old gods and new, the awe of the conquistadores upon discovering this marvel of a land versus the increasing disenchantment of its natives, their gods toppled, their beliefs exploited. To a large extent, the soul of modern Mexico was born from this collision.

***

One arena in present-day Mexico in which a conflict of archetypes can be witnessed literally is in the spectacle of lucha libre, or freestyle wrestling, another European import to which was added local color and verve. Different theories exist regarding its origins: some say an early variant was brought over in 1863 during the French intervention, or in 1910 by a Spanish boxing promoter; a more accepted notion is that the sport came to Mexico in the early twenties courtesy of two dueling Italian theatre troupes.

Everything about the performance favors emotion over form. The movements are exaggerated, as are the wrestlers themselves, massive hulks of men in tights who wear capes like those of superheroes and shiny carnivalesque masks that hide their faces. There’s a certain splendor to them, but once the match begins, that splendor is undercut by an atmosphere of buffoonery. At rest, the wrestlers appear regal and imposing. In motion, the elegance is quickly undermined by their comical leaps and bounds. It is as if they start off by embodying the first period of Baroque in Mexico, in the late seventeenth century, characterized by solemn church facades, rich and refined, and then they go on to embody its second period, from the mid-eighteenth century, which was more opulent and chaotic, an architecture of Solomonic columns that twist, spiral, and writhe.

The wrestlers’ masks often evoke their powers and persona: El Santo, Blue Demon, Fray Tormenta, Huracán Ramírez, Rey Mysterio. They are costumed heroes and villains engaged in a jocular battle between good and evil. The Baroque fondness for extremes is felt in every match, which is fought between a técnico—one who follows the rules and plays cleanly and gracefully—and a rudo: one who transgresses, breaking codes with relish. In this play of adversaries, there is no guarantee that good will win. In fact, the rudos are often expected to triumph, hinting at a cultural acceptance that righteousness, in Mexico at least, isn’t necessarily rewarded.

In a sense, the showdown between Moctezuma and Cortés could similarly be envisioned as a battle between a técnico and a rudo; the Aztec emperor, honest and honorable and deferential to his guests, played by the rules, while the conquistador lied and cheated and, thanks in part to his deviousness, succeeded in bringing down an entire civilization.

***

The wild gestures that fuel the lucha libre spectacle elicit a frantic emotional intensity. Audiences work themselves into a lather, subjecting the wrestlers to a loud repertoire of insults, mostly bawdy and vulgar, as if they were taking sides in some kind of moral contest rather than a sporting tournament.

In Baroque art movement tends to be centrifugal, a restlessness away from the center, as opposed to the classical impulse of restraint. Although the wrestlers lunge at one another, they are constantly being cast outward, either by their opponent’s thrust or by the elastic ring, their main instrument for propulsion. Performers often take flying leaps outside the ring and land in the audience. Similar to what Caravaggio did in his paintings, these “suicides,” as the moves are called, break down the boundary, and remove the safety barrier, between viewer and spectacle; one can smell the sweat, feel the flesh, hear the grunts, almost grasp the energy, of the wrestler as he comes crashing into us.

Even the geometry of the ring is defied, its quadrangle stretched and deformed again and again. The rapid shifting of planes—between floor and air, the ring and beyond—is forged by grand aerial maneuvers and gestures of torsion and contortion. Every effort is answered with a countereffort, every movement turned into its opposite, a great elasticity between up and down as each man tries to bring his opponent to the ground. In this endless curling and coiling, transcendence is, at least corporeally, denied. Something deeply Dionysian haunts the spectacle, chaotic and unpolished. And yet it is often marked by pathos—sometimes in the mere sight of a massive lump of a man unable to haul himself up or even more so when a wrestler is defeated and his mask removed. The moment his identity is revealed, his strength and his aura dissolve.

 ***

A more recent and dismaying phenomenon of Baroque excess and hyperbole, wherein the human body again becomes the site of transformation and yet the spectacle of bloodshed is real, not staged, is within the violence wrought by the warring drug cartels.

Since 2006, Mexico has been in the grip of a disastrous war on drugs, initiated by our then president Felipe Calderón. Over sixty thousand individuals have lost their lives as the cartels battle among themselves for territory while a weakened military and often corrupt police force try desperately to control them. Nearly every day the news offers reports of beheadings and dismemberment, of a violence and brutality so extreme that even the depiction of severed body parts in Goya’s Disasters of War seems restrained. It goes without saying that narco-violence is not an art, yet the graphic mise-en-scènes could similarly be read as allegories of great sociopolitical disintegration, and the headless bodies as metaphors for a country without any real leadership.

Mexicans are accustomed to severed body parts; they have been an element in our landscape since pre-Hispanic times. Skulls, in particular, feature prominently in every one of our civilizations, the hollow eye sockets and bared teeth a presence from ancient eras through to the modern. Yet they have become so detached from their cadavers that they seem to exist entirely on their own, devoid of humanity. And it is one thing to see images in stone at the Museum of Anthropology and quite another to witness heads with their hair and flesh still on them, faces one could have glimpsed on the metro yesterday. The ancient skulls formed part of a metaphysics, whereas the decapitated heads of today signal chaos and collapse.

In Uruapán, a city in my father’s northwestern state of Michoacán, masked men once stormed into a discotheque called Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) and tossed five severed heads onto the dance floor. This incident, which took place over ten years ago, was one of the first outings of La Familia, a drug cartel composed of right-wing vigilantes who quickly established their bloody reign over the region. The photographic image of these decapitated heads, each with its trail of blood where it has rolled out from the black plastic bag, is hard to erase from memory. Their eyes are closed, their faces a shiny olive color; the gangrene of death has yet to set in. In their midst is a large scroll emblazoned with a warning for rival cartels, a handwritten message that ends with the words “Divine Justice.”

Other cartels, like Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, and the Sinaloa Cartel, are similarly fond of leaving behind gruesome memento mori. Bodies, often headless, are dangled from bridges or left in segments by the side of the road. Here Baroque is taken to an extreme, deformed into excess and true monstrosity. The tremendous striving for effect, a desire to make the most startling impact on the senses, has mutated into an unabashed theatricality of the utmost violence.

There are, these days, few signs of redemption. In a regrettable twist of the Baroque, its original vitality has been contorted, redirected towards death rather than life. One finds similar aesthetic criteria, a similar dynamism and instinct for theatricality, yet the early religious impulses have morphed into their opposite. And for some the only religion left, it seems, is death itself.

Perhaps the most literal manifestation of contemporary Baroque—a true syncretism of Spanish Catholicism and pre-Hispanic beliefs—is to be found in the cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, the patron saint of the Mexican underworld, who is a sanctified personification of death herself. Though her cult incorporates dozens of Catholic rituals, she remains vehemently unrecognized by the church.

The millions who worship La Santa Muerte tend to belong to the more marginal or endangered strata of society: criminals, transvestites, drug dealers, prostitutes, taxi drivers, police officers. They are individuals who live by violence or are threatened by it, those who exist in a perpetual twilight and, professionally, mostly by night. And they come to her for protection.

I first encountered La Santa Muerte at her main altar in Tepito, Mexico City’s shadowy sanctum of drugs and contraband. There she stood behind a glass pane, a tall skeleton in a long black wig, a jeweled crown, a sparkling gold dress, and a diaphanous cape. She was heavily adorned, an embodiment of Baroque’s dual pull towards death and sensuality, and I couldn’t help feeling like I was seeing a pre-Hispanic skull in Spanish robes. In one hand she held a globe of the world, in the other the scales of justice. Spread out at her feet was a semicircle of figurines, smaller versions of herself, and a flickering landscape of ephemeral offerings: candles, apples, flowers, incense, beer, bottles of tequila, lit cigarettes. I watched as the devotees queued up to press their hands against the pane and murmur their prayers, then quietly deposit a gift.

 ***

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, Moctezuma, believing they were gods, had his emissaries bring Cortés tortillas smeared with human blood as an offering. The emperor himself was a sybaritic gourmet, presented with around three hundred dishes a day made from ingredients brought in from all over the country. Human sacrifice also formed part of the cuisine, and his priests would cook up the remains of sacrificial victims in squash flower soup. The most Baroque dish to emerge from the Conquest is mole poblano, a thick sauce like dark blood concocted from chocolate, almonds, spices, and three types of chili, originally put together by nuns in a convent in Puebla. In Mexico there’s a saying that the spicier a food—and the more it makes you cry—the tastier it is. True culinary enjoyment should be accompanied by a bit of agony, and so it is that to this day mole remains our most beloved dish, a reminder of the turbulent forces from which modern Mexico was born.

#art