#i need to do a re read and cap more of it

[elyvorg]

Kieran Part 2: It’s All About YOU

Well, looks like The Indigo Disk didn’t remotely drop the ball – it caught it in incredible style! Pokémon’s best character-writing job yet has been followed up and capped off with, if anything, something even better. Kieran is far and away the most complex and well-written character that mainline Pokémon has ever achieved, and I am here to talk about the second half of why this is, in very great detail. Consider me just, blown away. I have So Many Feelings about this boy.

This is of course a follow-up to my earlier analysis post about Kieran’s character and arc during The Teal Mask, which you can find here. Reading that before this is recommended!

(This will contain a couple of brief references to some post-epilogue lines, so if you haven’t got to that stuff yet and you really care about seeing it completely fresh, you might want to hold off on reading this for now. But there’s no actual spoilers for the epilogue itself in here, because, whoops, I think I’m gonna have to cover all of that in yet another post of its own.)

(Like last time, I will be largely referring to the player character as “you” for convenience, although I may shift into third person occasionally when I’m talking about the vague implications of a personality that they are given, since that’s a little more relevant this time.)

The gaping pit of inferiority

First, though, before getting into The Indigo Disk, I want to re-establish where Kieran’s character ended up at the end of Teal Mask, now that I have a clearer idea of exactly how that relates to where things are headed.

Kieran was always gripped by an aching inferiority complex, one too huge and unbearable for him to ever face directly. Prior to Teal Mask, he’d coped with that by clinging to the figure of the ogre as an ideal of strength. He imagined that maybe one day if he managed to grow strong enough to be just like it, the ogre would acknowledge him and be his friend – and that would finally mean that he mattered and he really was strong after all. He finally wouldn’t have to deal with the crushing pain of his inferiority complex any more.

But then, of course, you swept in with your amazingly perfect protagonist strength, ripping away Kieran’s chance of ever befriending Ogerpon and doing so in the most tragically agonising way possible that only seemed to validate and hammer home to him just how hopelessly weak he really is. Left with nothing but an even bigger gaping pit of inferiority inside him, and no longer able to cling to the idea of Ogerpon as a way for him to one day escape it, the only thing Kieran could do in order to cope was find something else to latch onto: you.

You became a greater ideal of strength to Kieran than even Ogerpon ever was during the events of Teal Mask, so now he’s hung everything on the thought of making himself strong enough to prove he’s just as good as you. If he can become strong enough to beat you, surely that of all things will be enough to prove that he matters and isn’t weak at all. It’s the only thing he can conceive of that might just free him from the grip of his terrifyingly massive inferiority complex, and he’s clinging onto it for dear life, striving for it to the point of obsession.

I saw a lot of people talk in the lead-up to this DLC like it was going to be about Kieran wanting revenge on you, but that’s not remotely it. He isn’t even able to comprehend the idea that anything you did to him could be considered wrong in the first place; that’s just how things were meant to go when you’re strong and he’s weak, right? Even though it was you who took everything away from him and made him feel so crushingly inferior, that pales in his mind next to how incredibly strong you are and how badly he needs to be like that himself. This isn’t even about him getting another shot at winning over Ogerpon, either – as much as you having become her trainer is a huge source of pain and jealousy for him, he seems to have pretty much accepted that there’s no changing that now.

What Kieran actually, consciously wants out of all this is…  well, it’s extremely vague and nebulous, but that’s precisely the point, because there is no rationality involved in any of it. What is he really hoping to gain from it, when (if) he beats you? For you to decide to be his friend after all? For him to instantly become happy and finally feel strong? For him to magically turn into you and have all the good things you have that he envies about you? Obviously none of those things would necessarily happen, but Kieran is not consciously thinking any of this through to its logical endpoint. He’s not actually hoping to get a specific Thing out of beating you – he just desperately, indescribably feels like he needs to beat you, more than anything else in the world.

What Kieran really needs out of this deep down is for you, this person he’s warped himself into idolising as the Strongest Most Perfect Person Ever, to acknowledge him and his strength. It’s just like he wanted Ogerpon to acknowledge him before, shifted onto a new target of idolisation and grown far more desperately obsessive. If you of all people acknowledged him, then just maybe it might actually be true that he really is strong and worth something after all. At its most fundamental level, Kieran has always just deeply needed to gain a sense of self-worth, and yet his self-esteem is so horribly low that he’s basically incapable of doing so on his own without outside validation. But I really don’t think he’s aware on a conscious level that this is what he needs and what he’s striving to get out of all this.

(And of course there’s no way you’d ever acknowledge him and his worth as a person anyway, right? He thought you’d maybe done that when you called him a friend back in Kitakami, but any fleeting hope of gaining self-worth that way evaporated when you went and lied to him, validating his fears that obviously you’d couldn’t possibly have meant it. After all, why would someone as strong as you ever want to be friends with someone weak like him? The only way you’d ever possibly acknowledge his worth is if he conclusively proved that he’s even stronger than you, by defeating you in battle.)

Blueberry Academy

The other thing I want to do before getting into the events of The Indigo Disk itself is to re-evaluate a few assumptions I made about Blueberry Academy in the previous post, now that we’ve actually seen it for ourselves.

I was assuming that a significant part of the reason for Kieran’s inferiority complex was due to him being bullied at Blueberry, but… there’s absolutely zero indication from any of the NPC dialogue that any such thing happened. If the writers wanted this to be a fact that was relevant to Kieran’s character, they absolutely would have put something in. However, in hindsight, I realise that maybe I was primed to assume a bullying problem at Blueberry due to the Team Star storyline, when actually, Kieran being bullied there doesn’t necessarily fit. His issues about being shunned and his paranoia that people are laughing at him behind his back are so ingrained that they have to have originated from quite a while ago in his childhood – and he’s only a first-year at Blueberry.

So, scratch that part of the previous post: Kieran was not bullied at Blueberry Academy, but he was almost certainly bullied earlier on in his childhood, at whatever school(s) he attended beforehand. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to be a really overt, physical kind of bullying either – that’s the sort of thing that Carmine would certainly have noticed and protected him from. But even something more low-key like being constantly left out of things and looked down on by others would have left a huge psychological mark on him, and would have probably been too subtle for his socially oblivious sister to do much about. (Or, in some ways, she might just have made such things worse by being so fiercely overprotective of him. Most people wouldn’t want to go near the kid with the Scary Big Sister who’ll bite their head off if they so much as look at him wrong.)

Bullying aside, I was looking for any kind of clues at all from the NPCs as to what Kieran was like at Blueberry Academy before his big change… and there’s almost nothing. Plenty of people comment on Kieran now, because everyone knows who he is as the Champion, but nobody shows surprise that it was this timid kid who rose up and beat Drayton. It seems that as far as most of the students are concerned, he just came out of nowhere. But maybe that’s the point; maybe almost nobody ever even noticed him or thought anything of him at all until he grew stronger. By the time he joined Blueberry Academy, Kieran’s default coping mechanism must have been to make himself as small and invisible as possible, so that basically nobody even really thought twice about him.

Only two whole NPCs actually make any kind of reference to what Kieran was like before he became Champion. (Well, other than Carmine, of course, and also discounting Amarys because she’d have only known Kieran through her friendship with his sister.) One of them is Drayton, who’d noticed him as the incredibly shy kid who nonetheless lit up with joy more than anyone else when watching battles. And then there is one random NPC you can find in the Central Plaza who comments on how Kieran has turned into a completely different person. That’s it. Only two people happened to have noticed this timid kid enough to realise he’s the same guy who suddenly became Champion. (And, while they both seem at least a little concerned, neither of them appear to have outright considered Kieran a friend, because of course not. You really were the first friend he’d ever managed to make, until everything went horribly wrong.)

One thing I was expecting to get from the vibe at Blueberry that it absolutely did deliver, mind you, was the culture around battling. There’s all sorts of talk about battling and getting stronger, double battles as standard to make things more strategic, and even the random NPC trainers can actually be kind of challenging. So I was definitely right that this culture must have contributed to Kieran fixating on getting stronger and proving himself to you through gaining more battling strength in particular. One NPC near the entrance also remarks that “you don’t look strong”, as if people here assume battling strength to be correlated with physical appearance, which… yeah, that explains a bit about why Kieran felt he needed to look different alongside becoming stronger in battle, doesn’t it.

Changing himself

Of course, Kieran’s reasons for changing up his appearance go much deeper than just wanting to superficially “look stronger”. In order to achieve the nigh-impossible feat of managing to match you in strength, he felt like he had to become nothing short of a completely different person. He can’t be anything like that timid, weak, pathetic kid from Kitakami who got walked all over, because there’s no way that kid would ever, ever be able to beat you.

Which means that absolutely everything about who he used to be needed to get thrown away. That hairstyle that practically covered his face and let him hide himself behind it? Gone. His country accent and way of talking due to being raised in Kitakami? That always made him feel different and outcast among the students at Blueberry already, but more than that, it’s a distinctive feature of that kid he used to be and cannot be any more, so he had to cast it away and learn to mask it. Even the unambiguously good parts of him – the way he’d always get so excited and passionate over things he finds cool! – they’re a part of his old self, so they had to go, no exceptions. Far be it from him to ever say “wowzers” any more, for more than one reason. His old hairstyle may have been the one that visually resembled a mask, but now he’s putting on much more of a metaphorical mask than he ever was before. (Putting on a mask to become stronger and hide his reasons to be cast out and shunned – a bit like a certain ogre.)

(And since Kieran’s just on the cusp of puberty, I find it fun to imagine that maybe his voice happened to start breaking in the interim between the two DLCs, so that he doesn’t just talk differently and mask his accent, his voice literally sounds different now compared to how it did before.)

Unfortunately for Kieran, no amount of fervently doing everything in his power to change and grow stronger can make his growth spurt come any sooner. It seems it hasn’t happened quite yet, leaving him awkwardly still the smallest person in the room even as he is trying to project an air of being Strong and Tough now. He gets around this as best he can by adopting a mannerism of taking a step back from people, to give him less of an angle to look up at, and tilting his head far enough back that he can kinda sorta still be looking down on them, in a sense. He is so desperate to not feel small any more.

(Fittingly – or ironically, perhaps – you are the one relevant person who is the same height as Kieran and can face him eye-to-eye. That’s bound to be feeding into his complex about you: all the other people he looked up to and saw as stronger than him were older than him and so they had a good reason to be that strong – but you and he are the same age. You should be his equal, and yet you can already do and have all these things that he could only dream of.)

And his timid demeanour isn’t the only thing from before that Kieran cast away – he also got rid of almost his entire team of Pokémon from those battles back in Kitakami. Nearly all of them went the same way as poor Furret and Cramorant before them, because they weren’t strong enough to win him that vital battle that would definitely have decided who got to become Ogerpon’s partner (right?), so there’s no way they’d ever be able to help him beat you now. The only exception to this is Dipplin, perhaps precisely because Kieran knew it was capable of evolving again and so still had more strength it had yet to show him. The rest of his team got completely overhauled, no doubt informed by his fervent studies in battling strategies to let him put together the strongest and most optimal team he could come up with.

I nearly had a whole spiel here about how excruciating it is that his new team has a Politoed, in that he could almost have kept another of his old partners from his Kitakami team if he hadn’t hastily evolved Poliwhirl into the less strategically-optimal evolution as part of his efforts to prove himself to you during Teal Mask. Except, actually, a postgame line implies that Kieran’s Politoed is also a longtime partner of his, along with his Poliwrath, like they’re a pair. So it’s not that he went and caught a “replacement” Poliwag that he was less attached to – apparently he always had two Poliwag friends from the start and just only ever trained up one of them to use against you in Teal Mask. Then, when that one had failed to be good enough for him, it was the other one’s turn to prove how strong it could really be.

As for his other new team members: Porygon-Z and Incineroar are both available in the Terarium, but Grimmsnarl is only available, to Kieran at least, in Kitakami. So that must be another one he’d caught during the school trip, maybe a candidate he’d considered training up back then but never quite had the time to alongside the rest of his team. And then there’s Dragonite, which is an interesting one, because the Dratini line is nowhere in either Kitakami or the Terarium – meaning, Kieran must have gone out of his way to trade for it in order to get one. Perhaps he was really impressed by the strength of Drayton’s Dragonite and wanted one of his own to match that? (but his has a very different build to Drayton’s, so it’s fine, he’s definitely not just copying Drayton in order to win, okay.) I like to think that maybe he got it from Carmine, who’d apparently been visiting loads of other regions with Briar during Kieran’s obsessive training arc and therefore could have been in a position to catch a Dratini.

More importantly than just catching these new Pokémon, though, would have been training them, which Kieran threw himself into so obsessively that it and studying battling strategies now consume every single moment he has, to a concerningly unhealthy degree. He’s cutting back on sleep, barely eating proper meals, because spending any more time than necessary on even things like basic physical needs is not acceptable to him. You are so overwhelmingly, impossibly strong in his mind that, in order to match your strength, Kieran feels like he has to give everything, no matter the cost to himself.

Being Champion

And, well, his fervent desperate self-destructive training did indeed make him strong enough to become Champion of the BB League. It’s only a stepping stone, a means to an end for his ultimate goal of being strong enough to beat you – but it’s something. As Champion, Kieran’s known to everyone in the school, getting awed murmurs wherever he shows up. People respect him now, because he’s proven that he's strong. (The very converse of how everyone ignored and shunned him back when he was weak. That’s how it goes, right?) And on top of that, he’s earned himself a position of authority over everyone in the League Club.

…Frankly, it’s a very stupid rule the club has to make the Champion be automatically in charge of the whole thing, precisely because of situations like this, in which the trainer who happens to be strongest also happens to be someone nobody else wants bossing them around. But thanks to that stupid rule existing, Kieran’s in charge now, and everyone else has to do what he says whether they like it or not, because he’s the strongest of all of them. Way to validate and perpetuate Kieran’s toxic worldview that having strength (battling strength) means you get to call the shots and walk all over anybody who’s weaker than you, and that’s just how things work.

Our first glimpse of how drastically Kieran’s changed, the interaction we see him having with that one poor club member, is bound to be the epitome of how he’s been treating everyone in the club these days. And he is not simply being a dick for the hell of it just because he can now and he’s turned Edgy or whatever – everything about his behaviour here is agonisingly rooted in his own deeply ingrained worldview about strength and weakness.

It's so tragically telling how he phrases his scathing disapproval of the poor guy as, “So that means you’re just OK being this weak forever? That what I’m hearing?” That’s not at all what the guy was saying, but Kieran hears it that way because he can’t help but see his own former, weaker self everywhere he looks. At the end of Teal Mask, he was trapped in that horrible pit of feeling like there was nothing he could do except be this weak forever, unless he devoted himself obsessively to becoming stronger and stronger and stronger with everything he had. Any tiny sign of weakness in anybody else reminds him of that place, reminds him that the only reason he’s not trapped there himself right now is because he’s spending every waking moment trying to claw his way out.

The guy’s reason for not completing Kieran’s training assignment wasn’t even that he didn’t want to do it. He said he’d had hectic stuff going on at home that meant he didn’t have time, which ought to be a perfectly reasonable excuse! But… not to Kieran, it isn’t. Kieran has sacrificed everything to become as strong as he is, even basic physical self-care; he would have chosen training over busy home-life stuff in a heartbeat. Anyone who isn’t willing to do the same, anyone to whom growing stronger isn’t the most important thing in the world – they’re not good enough. They must obviously just want to stay weak forever, like Kieran himself absolutely could not bear to be. So he kicks the poor guy out of the club, thus dooming him, in Kieran’s view, to really being stuck this weak forever with no chance to improve.

It's bound to be just like this for everyone else in the club, too, based on plenty of comments we hear about how Kieran becoming Champion has taken the fun out of everything, and the ridiculously strict rules he’s apparently put in place. He’s projecting his own unhealthily high standards of strength onto everyone else, then shunning them if they don’t manage to live up to that, because that’s just what happens to people who are weak, right? It is agonising to watch Kieran perpetuating the exact same toxicity that he used to always feel like he was on the receiving end of, especially as that isn’t even really why he was ever treated that way.

None of this is the behaviour of someone who is even remotely secure and confident in their strength. Despite being Champion and having the respect of the entire school, Kieran is still constantly terrified that even the slightest thing, even so much as allowing a tiny instance of “weakness” in anyone associated with him, will cause all of the strength he’s worked so hard to build to come crashing down in an instant. (One detail I really love about the scene where he’s telling that one guy off is the way Kieran’s tapping his foot at the beginning. He probably means it as a way to express impatience, but really it comes across as incredibly anxious and insecure. The animators did some excellent stuff with Kieran in this DLC.)

And what’s extra heartbreaking is that Kieran doesn’t need to be doing any of this. He’s the Champion now; he is undeniably strong; he’s able to talk to others; people notice and respect him. He is already in a position to reach out and grasp everything he’s ever wanted: acknowledgement, friendship, fun. He used to love battling – he’s supposed to love battling – so he could be having a great time with all this! If he just dropped this toxic mindset and stopped letting it turn him into a massive jerk, he could make friends with the Elite Four and others in the League Club and not be alone any more!

But he’s not able to see any of that. None of the things he’s already genuinely gained for himself truly feel like they matter, not when they’re all just a means to an end for the one thing that does – proving he can beat you. By desperately hanging his entire self-worth on the idea of becoming strong enough to measure up to you and nobody else, Kieran has blinded himself to the fact that he’s already found a good amount of what he’d always truly wanted in the first place. And it also means that, if he can’t beat you when that day comes, everything he’s done will be for nothing.

Drayton and Carmine

But although nobody is happy with the way things are now (least of all Kieran himself), it seems only a couple of people have been willing to question Kieran’s “authority” enough to try and talk him out of this.

One of them is Drayton, who’s doing this not just out of wanting his club to go back to normal, but also because he’s the almost-only person to have noticed the timid yet battle-loving kid Kieran used to be, and he genuinely wants to help Kieran remember how to have fun like that again. Unfortunately, it seems that any of Drayton’s attempts to tell him this bounced right off Kieran, because fun and excitement were a part of that weak kid he used to be and absolutely cannot be any more.

Plus, with his newfound authority and validation of his toxic worldview, Kieran would easily be able to brush off anything Drayton said to him with the excuse that he doesn’t have to listen to someone who can’t beat him. He actually mentions at one point that Drayton “always loses” to him, implying they’ve battled more than once. Apparently, in an attempt to get Kieran to listen, Drayton actually went and challenged him to a rematch at some point, or maybe even several – a remarkable amount of effort, coming from Drayton – but he still couldn’t win.

(Kieran is bound to be super jealous of the way Drayton appears so effortless in his strength, when Kieran himself had to train and strive so hard to reach this level. But on the flip side, now that Kieran is the stronger one, he can use Drayton’s laziness as another way to paint himself as superior. Obviously the reason Drayton keeps losing to him is because he doesn’t train nearly as hard as Kieran does.)

It also doesn’t help that Drayton’s attitude towards Kieran when he’s not specifically trying to encourage him to have fun again is very sarcastic and condescending, drawing from his deep frustration at Kieran’s attitude. It must be very easy for Kieran to completely overlook the part where Drayton is actually doing this because he cares – he probably feels that Drayton just hates him and wants him gone. (Just like everyone who’d always shun him and treat him like an outcast before, right.)

Then there’s Carmine, who’s been incredibly worried about the change in her brother and is bound to have done her fair share of trying to talk him out of this too, evidently also to no effect. It’s certainly easy for Kieran to remain oblivious to the fact that she’s doing this because she cares about him and isn’t just trying to bring him down, since she has, uh, historically not been very good at showing that.

It seems that Kieran has largely been avoiding Carmine since he overhauled everything about himself. No doubt a lot of that is because, what with her being part of the reason for his inferiority complex in the first place, she’s capable of triggering his insecurities more intensely than anybody else can. But maybe it’s also partly because on some level, he’s aware that she’s got a point now with the things she’s trying to say to him, and that makes him feel bad, and have doubts that he can’t afford to be having. Carmine’s certainly right to be concerned that his behaviour now would be driving any friends of his away – although she is almost definitely wildly wrong to be assuming Kieran even had any friends other than you before all of this.

(For that matter, she’s very wrong to assume that you are still his friend right now in a totally normal way; ha ha ha. But then, based on your options of “yes” and “yes” when Drayton asks you if you're Kieran's friend, it seems that you – the player character – are also somehow completely oblivious to the fact that Kieran just maybe might not consider you a friend any more on his end. Which just makes this whole thing even more excruciating.)

The dynamic between the siblings during the one brief time we see them interact here has notably changed, in that Kieran is finally able to stand up for himself more, telling Carmine to shut up when she tells him off. And yet, he doesn’t do so very forcefully, averting his gaze in a way that suggests he just sort of mumbles it. He probably realises she has a point about what she was saying – that he shouldn’t act so condescending towards you. Which on Carmine’s end, she said because she doesn’t want him to drive away the one friend he still (supposedly) has, but that’s not how it’d read on Kieran’s end, because he doesn’t believe you ever were his friend at all. He must have felt like his sister has a point only because he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you, not when he still hasn’t proven himself to you yet (and maybe never will).

Unexpected reunion

See, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the surface of Kieran’s reaction to suddenly meeting you here. Literally everything he’s been doing this entire time has been for the sole purpose of defeating you when he sees you again. Which means that you showing up and challenging the BB League should be exactly what he wants and has always been waiting for. And yet.

The first notable thing is that he had nothing to do with inviting you here – the person responsible for that was Carmine. She probably figured that you’d be able to help her brother out, so she recommended you to the director when she heard he was looking for an exchange student to invite from Paldea. As Champion of the school, Kieran should also have had enough influence to make such a recommendation – but he didn’t.

Then, when Kieran comes to the cafeteria, he has plenty of condescending things to say to Drayton (about how taking a lunch break is a waste of time, because who needs to bother with basic physical needs like eating when they could be training instead, right). But the moment he sees you, he’s just shocked at you even being here… and then he’s very quiet for the entire rest of the conversation.

Drayton puts things to a vote among the Elites plus Kieran as to whether you should be allowed to join the BB League, and – despite that this should be exactly what he wants – Kieran is the last to vote. He only does so when he’s forced to break the tie.

(Although, it’s revealing in a different way that the Elite Four all ask each other for their opinions first, with none of them naturally thinking to consult Kieran. Despite his newfound strength and authority, he is still socially excluded – but this time he really has nobody but himself to blame.)

Kieran’s wording of how he casts his vote is so very telling. Just: “It doesn’t matter who I’m facing… I don’t lose.” – and he says nothing else before leaving in a huff. He words this in a generalised way, as if this an overarching principle of his that has nothing to do with you in particular, even though it’s always been about you. Because if he let himself think about how you in particular will be his opponent, then suddenly the statement that he doesn’t lose doesn’t feel so certain. But, put on the spot like this, he cannot show any sign that he’s afraid he might lose to you – that would be like giving up and accepting that all the effort he’s put in for all this time has been for nothing. So he has no choice but to let you join.

(Drayton totally knew he would refuse to lose face like this if put on the spot, of course, and that the Elites would vote 2-2 between them and leave Kieran with the deciding vote, which is precisely why he set things up this way. Kieran’s not unaware of this, either.)

There’s a brief interim here as you head to the front desk to officially sign up for the League. This gives Kieran a moment alone to process the fact that, welp, this really is happening, you’re really here, and, isn’t this supposed to be exactly what he always wanted? Hasn’t everything always been so that he can beat you this time? He manages to twist things around in his head, convince himself that yes, this is it, the chance he’s been waiting for, and he will win when it comes down to it, he will, because that’s what it’s all been for.

As such, when he shows up at the front desk to confirm that he’s allowing you to join, Kieran is able to be a lot more direct about you challenging him than he was in his one whole sentence on the topic in the cafeteria. Even then, he makes a comment to Drayton about how he feels like he was manipulated into this… then immediately insists that he’s fine with it because this is what he wanted anyway. If it was truly 100% what he wanted, he wouldn’t have felt manipulated!

To sum all of this up: it is abundantly, delightfully clear beneath the surface that Kieran does not actually feel ready to face you. He would never have felt ready for this, no matter how long he’d spent training and pushing himself, because your impossible unreachable strength and his own inherent worthlessness are both so deeply ingrained in his mind that he is incapable of truly believing he can match you.

But, well, here you are, and now Drayton’s trapped Kieran in this situation where he has no choice but to keep up the mask of strength and confidence he’s been putting on all this time. So he’s got to act like he’s fine with you challenging him, whether he truly feels ready or not.

Your Elite Four challenge

As you work your way through the Elite Four’s ranks to earn the right to challenge him, Kieran is very insistent that you’d better not dare lose to anybody else before facing him, or to have gotten weaker in any way since he last met you.

You might think that Kieran would be glad if you actually did lose to one of the Elite Four and never manage to make it to him, because, hey, that means he’s already stronger than you! He doesn’t even have to worry about whether he can win his battle against you! But… no, that wouldn’t be how it’s supposed to go. The way Kieran’s been building things up in his head the entire time, his whole life is supposed to magically somehow get better when he beats you. He needs to prove himself and his new strength to you, specifically. It wouldn’t mean anything if someone else beat you first, or if you’re somehow not actually still the impossibly strong person he’s idolised and fixated so hard on becoming equal to. That’d just be the most crushing anticlimax for him, in which he never gets to achieve what he’s been striving so hard for, and in which he’d have to somehow come to terms with the fact that… he’s already stronger than you, and yet he still doesn’t feel better or any less agonisingly inferior than he always did? If that happened, he’d be at a complete loss as to any other way to escape how he feels about himself.

But, fortunately for him (for some value of “fortunate”), you of course still are just as strong as you always were. On hearing you assure him of this, and also on seeing it for himself as he watches one of your Elite Four battles, Kieran gives this awful twisted grin that does not even slightly reach his eyes (because he has completely forgotten how to genuinely smile and no doubt hasn’t ever done so this entire time). Yes, he will still get to have his long-anticipated showdown with you, and winning that will still somehow magically definitely fix everything that was ever wrong in his life. Definitely.

There’s also the part where, because you come with such glowing recommendations, you get to skip working your way up the BB League from the very bottom and can start right at challenging the Elite Four. Kieran has to feel all kinds of ways about this – on the one hand, he’d tell himself he’s glad because this means he has less time to wait until the battle that he’s definitely totally ready for, and he knows full well that you wouldn’t need to waste your time on small fry at the bottom. But on the other hand… he had to painstakingly work his way all the way up from zero in order to get where he is, so it sure is something that you’re so special that you just get to skip doing that. (And if you did have to start at the bottom, then it’d give him more time to train himself, just to make absolutely sure that he really is ready to face you…)

When you’ve beaten the final Elite, Kieran shows up again and scoffs that this was kind of slow for you, wasn’t it? I believe this isn’t just posturing and was his genuine reaction – you’re so impossibly perfect in his mind that he can’t even comprehend the idea that you wouldn’t breeze through this effortlessly without a single hitch. But still, at least he can turn the fact that you fell short of his impossible expectations into condescension that helps him feel above you and definitely capable of beating you. (How long did it take him to beat the Elite Four, I wonder? Probably longer than you – but of course he’s not gonna bring that up.)

Drayton, meanwhile, has now picked up on the fact that Kieran isn’t just obsessed with winning like he’d initially thought – he’s obsessed with you. Maybe he’d have approached things a little differently if he’d been aware in the beginning that you were a lot more to Kieran than just an old friend. But, welp, bit too late to back out of what he’s set up now, whoops.

And on Kieran’s end, he hasn’t let go of the feeling of being manipulated into this, and now feels like you and Drayton are plotting against him. This poor kid’s paranoia and tendency to assume people are laughing at him behind his back has still not gone away, even if it’s taken on a slightly different form now. It’s probably a good thing he doesn’t ever learn that Carmine was the one who called you here, or he’d think she was in on this supposed conspiracy too.

(But, hey, while Kieran could never do anything about it before whenever he was ganged up on and shunned by others, at least now he’s finally strong enough to fight back and hold his own, despite being outnumbered, right? Just like the ogre did.)

THE BATTLE

So now, it’s finally time: the battle that Kieran has absolutely everything riding on. Of course I’ve already made it abundantly clear here that every single thing he’s done has been for the sole goal of beating you right here and now – but it says a lot that he spends his pre-battle speech making sure you know this. He probably feels like you’re such an amazing superstar trainer that challenging someone for their Champion title is basically just another Tuesday for you, like this is nothing on your end – but this battle is everything for him, everything that he’s been spending every single moment of every single day building up towards for all this time, and he needs you to acknowledge this.

And as if that wasn’t enough, as the battle opens, Kieran screams into the sky with the sheer uncontainable emotion of how much this means to him. Everything he’s been feeling, bottling up, clinging to for so long is spilling out of him now that he’s finally here in this one pivotal moment he’s always been waiting for.

It comes spilling out in a lot more than just that scream, too; he has so many things to say throughout the battle as it all reaches fever pitch inside him. While some of his in-battle dialogue during his Teal Mask fights had fun hints at his issues in there, this one battle here absolutely takes the cake. This is quite possibly the most dialogue in any battle in any Pokémon game, and all of it has something interesting and nuanced going on that’s rooted in Kieran’s massive issues. I cannot resist taking this opportunity to talk about every single bit of it.

His first line as the battle begins is, “I know I’m making the right choice… You’ll understand that soon enough!”, which seems kind of odd on the surface. What “choice” is he even talking about that he feels the need to justify? Accepting a challenge to his Champion position is just what Champions are meant to do. But that’s not what Kieran’s thinking about here – he’s thinking about all of those times that Drayton and Carmine tried to talk him down from the entire way he was acting and pushing himself too hard. Every time they did, he insisted to himself that no, training this insanely hard is the right choice, he needs to do this, and it’ll all be worth it when he beats you. …Somehow. Definitely. You’ll see, you will, you have to…!

On the very first hit he lands on you – it doesn’t even need to be super-effective, any damaging hit will trigger it – he says, “How do you like that? See how hard I’ve trained? Not like that kid you battled in Kitakami, huh?!” In reality, the hit he lands here isn’t necessarily any bigger than the kinds of hits he dealt to you back in Kitakami – but it feels bigger to Kieran. He’s trained so hard that he feels so much stronger and so different from the kid he was back then, and he needs you to see and acknowledge this too.

Meanwhile, your first super-effective attack you land on him manages to pierce through his mask for a moment and get a “wowzers” out of him. It’s not actually any more impressive than any other super-effective hit he might receive from any other trainer – but because it’s coming from you, it feels so much more incredible, triggering his instinctive irrational idolisation of you just for a moment before he collects himself and puts his mask back up.

Then he insists that he’ll still win anyway, even if “the type matchups work out for you”. Which… isn’t how type matchups in battles work? Sure, you landed one super-effective hit, either because one of your Pokémon happened to have a good matchup, or you just had a good coverage move. That doesn’t mean that all of the type matchups in the battle are inherently in your favour. But Kieran apparently feels like they are – because, when it comes to him versus you, he always feels like everything in the world is on your side and he has to claw and grasp to regain the tiniest bit of ground against his inherent overwhelming disadvantage.

Speaking of everything being on your side, when you land your first critical hit on him (and I say “when” here because this battle is long enough that statistically you’re extremely unlikely not to at some point!), his response is delightful, raging that “even luck’s chosen you over me!” and that it’s “not fair!!!” All of his bitterness and jealousy about Ogerpon choosing you over him is still raw, evidently, so even something like you getting a statistically near-inevitable critical hit feels to him like luck itself taking your side against him, because everything always does. And on some level, he may have realised that you befriending Ogerpon was partly due to the sheer luck of you happening to meet her while he wasn’t around, so of course he’s bitter about luck because of that, too. It’s not fair, how you always get everything, so effortlessly, while he has nothing.

(He doesn’t comment at all if and when he lands a critical hit, because of course not. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug.)

And of course, you bringing out Ogerpon herself gets an extremely strong reaction from Kieran. “You’ve got some nerve,” he snarls among broken mirthless laughter, to bring her out “NOW of all times?!” This, right here and now, was supposed to be his moment, his time to finally shine and show you how strong he is and take the victory. And yet you’re choosing this moment to parade Ogerpon in front of him, a reminder of the painful losses and inferiority he suffered back in Kitakami that he’s tried so hard to forget and overcome by making himself stronger, just rubbing it in his face that you got to have her because you’re so strong and lucky and perfect.

His expression during this line is one hell of a thing as well: shocked and wide-eyed and practically terrified, in stark contrast to all of his other expressions in this fight. He’s not only reeling from the pain of having his inferiority from back then shoved in his face, but also, he’s always believed that Ogerpon is so incredibly strong. If you’re using her against him in this battle, you and her working together… how is he ever going to be able to defeat that combination of impossible strength…?

(Apparently, Kieran’s trainer AI actually has a modification in this fight that makes him prioritise attacking Ogerpon more than an AI trainer otherwise would, which is delightful, I love that that’s a thing devs programmed in there. Of course he’d desperately want to get Ogerpon off the field as fast as he could before she utterly destroys him.)

As his back’s against the wall and he’s sending out his final Pokémon, Kieran’s still raging, with increasing desperation: “Just go down already! How are you still standing after I’ve thrown everything I have at you?!” This battle is not at all going how he’d insistently imagined it would in his head, in which he’d prove himself and win, not even though he’s giving it absolutely everything he has. (And the thought that you still won’t go down even then is terrifying to him. He really has given everything to this, he couldn’t possibly have done more – and yet, what if that still isn’t enough to beat you? That’d mean it’s just impossible for him, no matter what he does, and he’d have absolutely no idea how to cope with that.)

Just before he Terastallises his Hydrapple, he insists that he “doesn’t need the old me”, that he’s changed – here’s the way he felt he had no choice but to throw away everything about his former weaker self in order to get stronger, even the positive parts. But then he adds, “and I’ll show you I can change again!” He’s not just literally referring to the Terastallisation he’s about to do (although it’s thematically fitting that he brings up this topic as he’s doing this – and his Hydrapple’s Fighting Tera-type is a neat link to him having changed himself into being obsessed with strength) – rather, he’s referring to what he’s convinced himself will happen when (if) he wins this fight. That’ll change everything for him, right? That’ll make everything good, finally; he’s going to change for the better once he wins this, he has to…!

And then… Kieran’s animation while he’s Terastallising is an odd one. He’s remarkably expressionless about it, compared to the intensity of his expressions in the entire rest of the fight. But I think the reason for this must be: most trainers wince with the force of it as they begin charging their Tera Orb – and apparently, Kieran doesn’t want to be seen doing that, because that’d make him seem weak. So he’s trained himself to put on an expressionless mask, not even looking at the orb directly, to avoid that. (And one of the few trainers who doesn’t wince, who’s able to stare directly at the dazzling power coming from their Tera Orb without flinching, holding it up for all to see… it’s you, of course. Kieran almost certainly saw this from you a few times back in Kitakami.)

His last possible line in the fight, as he orders an attack from his Hydrapple, at which point he is guaranteed to have only one or two Pokémon left and be desperately fighting to hold on with his back against the wall, includes him saying, “I’m capable of winning too, you know!” Because that is definitely a very normal thing for a reigning Champion to need to say to their challenger. Even with all the victories he’s had on his way here, Kieran still has to fight to convince himself that he is capable of winning, because being up against you and teetering on the brink of defeat like this just reminds him of all his previous agonising losses at your hands, his inferiority complex rising up to overwhelm him with the feeling that he’ll never be able to be strong or win anything at all.

(And, hey… what if he had actually managed to win? Tragically, the game does not let you see any of his reaction if you do happen to lose to him; it just rewinds time like it never happened. But there’s no way that Kieran beating you here would truly have helped or fixed anything about that massive inferiority complex of his. He’d ride the high for a bit, but then he’d go back to the same condescending façade he’d had before and gradually realise that… he doesn’t actually feel any better about himself beneath it like he was supposed to once this happened. Funnily enough, beating you in a Pokémon battle would not have magically turned him into you.)

Everything falls apart

But, of course, because the game refuses to let you not be the Perfect Protagonist (or, perhaps, because the narrative needs to go this way in order for him to actually get better in the long run), Kieran loses. The last time he lost a pivotal battle against you that he’d told himself everything depended on, back in Kitakami, he crumpled immediately in defeat – but this time, his reaction’s a lot more drawn out. Back then, the conviction that he could never ever beat you was right there at the surface to the point that he was basically expecting to lose despite his determination. But here, he’s spent so long insisting to himself over and over that he will win this time, he will, convincing himself that things just have to go that way… that it takes him a moment to even process the fact that they haven’t. He’s just shocked, lost, dumbfounded, not knowing how to react, because this wasn’t supposed to happen…!

But then the spectators around him mutter and begin to leave, apparently because he lost, because he’s no good after all and so there’s no point staying to watch him, and this seems to be what agonisingly drives home the reality to Kieran. All the respect and esteem he’d managed to grasp for himself – in this one awful moment it feels like all of it is crumbling away before his eyes. All of his effort to get here (so much effort) was worthless, all because he couldn’t beat you. He’s gone right back down to being nothing. I adore the blurry effects in the cutscene as Kieran sways and staggers and collapses, giving a visceral sense that the shock of this is hitting him so deep that it's rendered him physically light-headed and dizzy. Guh, this poor kid.

And then Drayton has to come along and rub it in. Kieran winces in agony as he gets smugly called “ex-Champion” – though he was never doing any of this for the Champion title itself, having it meant something and made him matter, and now that’s gone like it was never there at all. It’s bound to sting especially hard coming from Drayton, whom Kieran believed was plotting with you to take him down, take away everything he had, and now that’s exactly what’s happened, because he wasn’t strong enough to stand up for himself after all.

…The fact that Drayton felt the need to be a smug bitch about this first and foremost does not remotely help Kieran actually listen to and internalise the genuinely good advice Drayton gives just a few moments later. He really was doing this because he cares, and because Kieran ought to go back to having fun with things! But of course Kieran isn’t in any state to listen to that, not after all his paranoia about Drayton manipulating him, and then Drayton rubbing his loss in on top of that; he still has no idea that the guy genuinely wants to help him. (Unfortunately, while Drayton cares about the person Kieran should be, he has been deeply frustrated by the person Kieran is being, and that comes out in sarcasm and smuggery first, hence why this completely bombs.)

So instead of taking on board Drayton’s advice, which he probably wasn’t even listening to, Kieran just starts desperately, incoherently mumbling about how he’ll win next time. It’s the only thing he can cling to – the same thing he always has, to escape the all-consuming, unbearable thought of just being achingly inferior forever and ever with no way out. He still can’t see any other way out that isn’t beating you. (But… how is he ever going to win next time, when he’s already given it absolutely everything he had and still couldn’t manage it…?)

Seeing him being so clearly Not Okay, you approach him and (probably) attempt to say something to him, but it seems like even if you try, you barely get any words out before Kieran just shuts down even more. He reacts with slumping, and with an “Aw, man…” – the same words and body language he’d often have back in Teal Mask whenever something (usually his sister) would push back at him and make him feel small. Now that he can no longer cling to his façade that he totally is stronger than you and just hasn’t proven it yet, he’s reverted right back to the state of mind he was always in back then. And it’s you in particular that triggers his inferiority complex harder than anything else right now, even if you just silently approach him, or say a few words that certainly wouldn’t have been anything cruel.

It's a bit of a shame that the game doesn’t actually let us see what you try to say to him, assuming you do. But it most certainly couldn’t have been anything along the lines of “You put up a really tough fight!”, because that kind of thing – acknowledging Kieran’s strength, even though he lost – is exactly what he’d need to hear right now, and he’s clearly not hearing it. Whatever it was you did say, he probably barely even heard it beneath his crushing sense of inferiority at being near you, and you probably trailed off pretty quickly upon seeing his reaction.

(In fact, it might say a lot that your dialogue options here are so non-specific that they’re literally just “Say something/nothing”. This suggests that the player character has no idea what to say to Kieran at seeing him in this absolute state, and they can only choose to either accept that and remain silent, or to fumble for something to try and say anyway. I believe it’s pretty important to “your” role in Kieran’s arc that the player character is extremely socially awkward and just finds themselves utterly lost as to how to deal with him breaking down like this because of them. Someone with better social intelligence would be able to say the right thing here to help him at least begin to feel better! But that someone is emphatically not you, it seems. This apparent social obliviousness also tracks with the fact that you – the player character – agreed with Carmine’s very short-sighted decision to lie to Kieran back in Kitakami, thus unwittingly setting off this whole domino effect of his issues in the first place.)

Sudden legendary hunt

If Kieran had had longer to process his defeat, maybe he’d have realised that there really is no way he can “win next time” when he already gave it his absolute all this time, and he might have begun to approach the fact that there’s nothing he can do but let things go. However, while he’s still reeling, he almost immediately gets dragged into the meeting with Briar about her expedition to Area Zero.

Kieran looks like he’s barely even listening to the conversation at first, just staring miserably into space in front of him, no doubt stuck endlessly thinking how can I ever be stronger than you when everything I had still wasn’t enough??? But then Briar mentions that they’ll get the opportunity to find a legendary Pokémon on this quest – and whoops, now Kieran’s paying attention. Because here’s the answer to his impossible conundrum of how he can beat you next time.

Make no mistake: this is nothing like Ogerpon was to him. He’d been fixated on her and cared about her ever since he was little for deeply personal reasons based on him relating to her situation and projecting onto her. Her strength was part of it, but it wasn’t that he wanted to obtain that strength by catching her; he just admired her strength and wanted to be like her, and if he could, then maybe one day she’d acknowledge that by being his friend (and therefore also incidentally his Pokémon partner). But Terapagos is nothing to Kieran here other than a source of potential strength for him to acquire for himself by capturing it, a tool that will finally let him beat you.

Nonetheless, because this is another legendary Pokémon, Kieran can’t help but draw the surface comparison to Ogerpon anyway and remember the way she chose you over him. He’s probably already imagining that Terapagos might just do the same thing, because you’re so strong and special while he’s nothing – so he tells himself, fervently, that no, he won’t let that happen again, he won’t let this chance go.

He doesn’t ever say as much, but he’s bound to be already having doubts as to if he really could ever capture such an amazing Pokémon. Legendary Pokémon – or really, any Pokémon in general – are supposed to join trainers once they acknowledge their strength; that’s what battles to weaken and capture a wild Pokémon are all about. How is Kieran ever going to get Terapagos to do that for him when he’s so weak? But even so, even if it seems too good to be true, he has to cling to this possibility. It’s the only chance he has left to still just maybe be able to beat you, to continue running away from that gaping pit of inferiority inside him that he doesn’t know how to face.

(A minor nitpick I have with the game’s writing: it’d have been fun here if things had been subtler and Kieran hadn’t outright said that he wants to catch Terapagos at all. His intent would have been very clear regardless for anyone who could read between the lines – I realised what was up the moment he reacted to hearing about a legendary, because Oh No. But nonetheless, it seems like you the player character and also Carmine are both socially oblivious enough to fail to follow Kieran’s stated intent to catch Terapagos through to its obvious conclusion of “he’s still fixated on beating you”. I guess the two of you just assume, oh, hey, he’s found another legendary Pokémon to get excited about, that’s good, that means he must be getting over Ogerpon, right…? Ha. Ha ha ha. If only.)

Journey through Area Zero

As you make your way into and through the depths of Area Zero, Kieran seems to have largely lost hold of the condescendingly superior façade he’d been putting up all this time (after all, he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you when he’s still weaker than you). This allows a few little hints of his true self to begin to rise to the surface and shine through again, at least a little bit.

He lets slip a “wowzers” on seeing the sheer alien beauty of the place for the first time, and later at the lab he’s so excited at the technology reminding him of a spy movie that he even forgets to mask his accent for a whole sentence. But both times, he’s quick to catch himself and brush it off and act aloof. That excitableness was part of who he used to be, that kid who was weak, and he's still convinced that he can’t afford to be that person any more. But, hey, getting these little reminders that he actually enjoys being his true self and has missed it, at least certain parts of it, has to help! Plus, Carmine seems happy at these moments of him being the little brother she knows and loves again; they have a bit of regular healthy sibling banter; she notices him being considerate about Briar reading someone’s private diary…

These are all good signs that Kieran’s starting to get back to normal, maybe just a little… but, not completely. The spark still isn’t there in his eyes, even when he’s smiling about the cool spy vibe of the lab. Despite the distractions, he’s largely very intent on just getting to the legendary Pokémon and nothing else. And perhaps most relevant of all, he barely says anything of substance to you, even if you try and talk to him.

He does have a notable reaction near the beginning when you mention that you came here last time with some friends of yours. Kieran had probably never quite considered the idea of you having other friends before – Ogerpon did not exactly prime him to imagine that about his idols, after all – but, now that he’s hearing it… of course you’ve got friends. Why wouldn’t you? You have everything, everything he’s always wanted so badly for himself but could never, ever have.

Then, of course, you’re the one who does all the hard work in the Underdepths to deal with the sparkling Pokémon that are blocking the way forwards. For the first one, Carmine almost asks Kieran to take care of it before changing her mind and asking you, which, ouch, that’s got to have stung. (I don’t think she did that to deliberately be unkind, though; it’s probably that she still feels a little weird and uncomfortable about her brother battling, because of the way he’s been, so she’d rather just watch you battle it instead.)

Because of all this, later on Kieran bitterly comments that he feels like everyone’s relying on you too much. Really, the only reason this is the case is because you just happen to be the one who has the lizardbike buddy that can navigate you to the Pokémon you need to defeat… but then, that in itself is another sign of how special and favoured by legendaries you are, isn’t it.

And actually, you’re not necessarily the only one who can reach the sparkling Pokémon! Kieran has a Dragonite, which must have been what he rode on for the flying Elite Four trial, so, in theory, he could go and deal with those sparkling Pokémon himself. But he doesn’t, because you’re already doing it anyway, and he doesn’t feel worthy of taking the spotlight from you. (Or, he could ask to join you on your lizard buddy as you head over there, but ha, even less chance he’s about to do that.)

One bit of optional dialogue Kieran has during this part is insisting that he could totally make quick work of those sparkling Pokémon if only they weren’t so far away. This is very true… but the fact that he never tries to do so despite actually having the ability to reach them himself tells us that his words are just desperate posturing that he doesn’t truly believe. He can’t even register the part where he genuinely has a really strong team of Pokémon that he worked hard to train, because he did all of that for the sole purpose of beating you, and since he couldn’t manage that, that means that none of it matters and he’s just useless.

Then there’s the moment near the end where Carmine tells Kieran it’s his turn to call out to you to let you know the path opened up, but Kieran miserably assumes you’d prefer to hear it from her instead. (As if who tells you that even makes any difference!) Carmine did this to try and begin bridging the gap between you, and she forces him to do it anyway despite his protest, but then when she asks if he’s got anything more to say to you, he just says no. He still doesn’t feel like he’s worthy of even interacting with you in any way at all, still convinced he must be nothing to you.

There’s a heartbreaking hypocrisy to this, too, since he knows you’re perfectly okay interacting with Carmine, and it’s not like she’s ever been able to beat you in battle either. But… but that’s different, right, because she’s already someone who’s strong and cool and worthy of your friendship. In Kieran’s head, he is the single person in the world who is so automatically, inherently worthless that he needs to prove his strength before he is allowed to Matter to you or to anybody.

Outburst at the crystal

As the group reaches the final chamber, Kieran rushes ahead into it and begins pulling at the crystal the moment he figures it even might be Terapagos, because he is so desperate not to lose this chance to anybody else (meaning you). In his urgency, completely oblivious to how messed-up this sentiment is, he blurts out that this’ll mean he can finally beat you, at which Carmine, who failed to realise this was still the reason he was doing all this until now, tries to call him out on it—

—And Kieran can’t stand that; he can’t let her try and take this away from him too on top of everything else, because this feels like the one remaining chance he’ll ever get to still have something and matter next to you. So in a kneejerk attempt to defend why he needs this, everything comes tumbling out. All of those feelings about how you have everything he’s ever wanted, and he has nothing, how he trained so so hard but even that ended up worthless because he still lost to you in the end, so this is all he has left.

(Well, it’s not quite everything that comes spilling out of Kieran here. He doesn’t say anything about why he feels he needs to beat you, and how that’ll totally magically solve everything for him – because there is no actual logic behind that part. There’s nothing he can say to make that make sense, and on some level he must be aware of that, must know it doesn’t, really. But if he admits that, admits that there really isn’t any way at all to escape from his crushing inferiority, then he’ll have nothing left whatsoever, which he cannot bear.)

Hearing Kieran’s outburst about how worthless he feels, Carmine tries to put in a good word for him about how he’s tried his best too – which is good! That’s exactly the kind of thing he needs to hear; she’s finally getting it! But unfortunately, because she herself is one of Kieran’s sore points, in regards to how you magically went and befriended her, he doesn’t properly register what she’s saying. Hearing her speak at all just triggers that thought and spurs him into venting about that, too.

His hang-ups with you befriending Carmine are interestingly reversed from how they appeared to be in Teal Mask. Back then, he seemed more low-key jealous that she might have been trying to take you, his first ever friend, away from him. But now (now that he’s convinced that you were never really his friend in the first place), it’s all twisted around into yet another sign of how perfect you are, because you managed to win over even someone as prickly and abrasive as his sister so remarkably fast. (Which, of course, has less to do with you than it has to do with the fact that Carmine’s actually a lot softer at heart than Kieran realises.)

He’s also maybe thinking about Drayton here, about the one time Drayton claimed in the cafeteria that you and he were “already tight”. That was a massive exaggeration, but no doubt Kieran filed that away as another person – someone else he finds infuriating and impossible to get along with – that you instantly won over with your magical friendship powers because of course you did. And on top of that, he’s bound to be thinking about his recent realisation that you came to Area Zero last time with your friends, plural, because of course you’d already got a bunch of friends, you’re perfect, you can do anything you want, you can be friends with anyone!

And yet – even as Kieran says this, it is objectively not true. Because you’re not friends with him right now! No amount of your amazing protagonist powers has been able to cut through his pile of issues and properly befriend him, even though you want to, because you are in fact not perfect in the slightest and have no idea what to say to get through to him and help him! But of course Kieran doesn’t realise this contradiction in what he’s saying – he's worthless, so the fact that you’re not friends with him is obviously just because you never wanted to be.

Speaking of you not being perfect, this moment here in which Kieran outright voices his jealousy and sense of inferiority compared to you is bound to be the first moment in which you, the player character, actually begin to realise that this has been his problem this whole time. (And, to be fair to your poor socially-oblivious avatar, it really wasn’t very apparent from their perspective until now! The only time Kieran ever gave any real explicit indication of his issues around you before was in Teal Mask, after the third battle when he lamented that “it’s because I’m weak” – but at the time, the player character wasn’t aware (like we the players were) that he knew they’d lied to him, so they couldn’t have known he was thinking about that. They probably just chalked his reaction down to him taking the lost battle particularly hard. The lie reveal was messy but seemed to work itself out; he was obviously upset when you caught Ogerpon but appeared to accept it well enough in the moment – then all of a sudden he showed up later being really determined to beat you for some reason??? Why.)

Another thing I love about this moment is the animation of Kieran desperately pulling at Terapagos’s crystal, the way he has to pause to catch his breath in between each huge tug, which really gets across that he is giving this every ounce of his strength. And that still isn’t enough, because it never is – he’s always too weak to be able to grasp even one thing for himself, but he is never ever going to stop trying no matter how impossible it seems.

(And I wonder if it’s going through his mind as he does this that surely this wouldn’t be nearly so hard for you. Like this is a sword-in-the-stone kind of thing, in which Terapagos would slide out smoothly like butter for someone who’s truly worthy of it, while a weakling like him is stuck hopelessly yanking on it with everything he has and just making himself look pathetic, because of course he doesn’t deserve this.)

Catching Terapagos

Except it turns out Kieran can manage to pull out the crystal after all, doing so with such force that he accidentally flings it halfway across the cavern to land between you and him. He rushes to pick it up before anyone else can, because this is his and he can’t let anyone take it from him, he can’t—

But then Terapagos wakes up, pops out of the crystal that serves as its shell… and it’s facing you. It doesn’t even see or acknowledge Kieran at all. It looks up at you adorably, like a baby imprinting on the first thing it sees, taking a few steps towards its new friend…?

(this has to be such an aching reminder of the way Ogerpon so quickly came to adore you and didn’t care about him, all compressed into one single agonising moment, ouch)

…This was not Terapagos choosing you over Kieran in any meaningful way. Kieran was behind it, such that it literally couldn’t see him and didn’t even know he existed. All it was doing was latching onto the first person it saw, which was you, because – completely by chance – it happened to wake up facing you and not him. If it’d woken up facing Kieran, it’d have seen and approached him in exactly the same way. Terapagos’s dormant crystal form is symmetrical; Kieran had no way to know which end was the head and which was the tail until it popped out.

This was, almost literally, a fucking coin flip. Only the coin was a magical crystal turtle and the winner was whoever “heads” landed facing towards.

(But then, luck has always chosen you over Kieran, too, hasn’t it?)

And so, seeing this happen to him yet again, seeing his one last chance of maybe finally having something and mattering about to be casually snatched away by you, like always, because the universe always gives you everything he wants… Kieran makes an awful, desperate split-second decision and throws the Master Ball. Because of course he does. It’s not right; it’s not fair on Terapagos – but it is so achingly understandable why Kieran would be driven to do this in this moment. The whole thing was so cruelly, rudely unfortunate. This poor kid just wants so badly to have something, to have anything at all where he’s not immediately overshadowed and upstaged by you.

(Also, shout-outs to the narrative cleverness of quietly establishing that BB Champions get given Master Balls, by the game giving you one when you beat Kieran, such that you think nothing of it at the time but can realise right away in this moment where Kieran got his from.)

Still, it’s notable how quickly Kieran was able to pull out the Master Ball, which suggests he’d had it ready near the top of his bag. It must have crossed his mind on the way here that surely, you’re going to somehow magically sway Terapagos to join you – or that it’ll just shun him, because earning a legendary’s respect involves proving one’s strength, and he’s still so weak – such that he felt he might need a way to guarantee it would become his, no matter what.

But even then, I do want to believe that Kieran wouldn’t necessarily have used the Master Ball if he hadn’t felt like he had no other option, and that he wanted to at least try to get Terapagos to join him willingly, like trainers are supposed to do. If he’d won the turtle-coin flip and it had woken up facing him, maybe he’d have been able to do so! But of course he didn’t get to have that.

(It’s kind of a shame that the characters never discuss the dodginess of catching a Pokémon from behind in a Master Ball, how that gave poor Terapagos no choice in the matter like Pokémon are supposed to have when they join a trainer. But then, pointing out that Master Balls are inherently ethically dubious gets awkward considering that the player can freely use them on anything they like, so the game was probably never going to go there. You are too silent-protagonist and Briar is too irresponsible-adult to comment on it, but maybe Carmine could at least have had a brief line questioning this? But, well, at least she does express apprehension about going in to battle with a legendary Pokémon they know almost nothing about, which is also a very valid concern, considering what ends up happening.)

Trying to beat you with Terapagos

So of course, the very next thing Kieran does is challenge you to battle him with Terapagos, so that he can finally beat you. Only… he doesn’t show anywhere near as much of that furious, fervent determination that he had for the Champion match. All that fire of his got snuffed out the moment he lost back then, and it never really came back. This isn’t the battle he’s been psyching himself up for and dedicating everything towards for months; it’s nothing but a desperate grasp at not falling apart completely. He’s kind of just… going through the motions, trying to beat you simply because it’s what he’s been clinging to all this time, and he still doesn’t know what else to do with himself if not this.

And more than anything, Kieran has to know deep down that he doesn’t truly deserve this, not after the way in which he caught Terapagos. After all, trainers are supposed to earn having strong Pokémon in their team, either by training them up from a low level themselves, or by proving their strength to a high-level Pokémon by weakening and catching it in battle. (This is why high-levelled traded Pokémon will disobey you if you don’t have enough badges – you haven’t given them a reason to respect you!) Catching a legendary from behind with a Master Ball is none of those things. Kieran has to be perfectly aware that he has not earned Terapagos’s strength in any way (just like he knew all along he’d never really be able to).

A very revealing line on this matter is that if you say you’re not ready to battle him yet, Kieran tells you, “You’d better not run away from this”. He never once implied you might run away from the Champion battle – that’d be like admitting you couldn’t win, and you’d never do that. But here, it's different, because Terapagos isn’t his strength, so even if he could beat you with it, it wouldn’t really prove anything about him. You’d be well within your rights to just refuse to indulge Kieran in this at all, and on some level, he knows that.

(…With all that said, Terapagos does obey his commands in the battle anyway. It’s sadly difficult to attribute any definitive emotions to it because it’s pretty unexpressive, but perhaps we can imagine that Terapagos is kind of just lost and confused, going along with the orders of the one who threw its ball because it’s not really sure what’s happening and battling is kind of instinctual for all Pokémon. Maybe it’s even more instinctual for Terapagos, thanks to its ability that automatically shifts it into a battle form when there’s an opponent in front of it. It doesn’t really help matters that you just sent something out to battle it without questioning things, either.)

If you manage to hit Terapagos super-effectively during the battle, Kieran scoffs that “it has a weakness? I thought this was the hidden treasure of Area Zero?!” What do you mean his super-special legendary that would let him finally definitely win this time isn’t invincible, that it’s still functionally just a regular Pokémon and it’s still possible – and not even that hard, really – for you to beat him even now.

And if you land a critical hit, oh boy: “How can you get critical hits, even at a time like this… What are you, the hero of this story?” Kieran is clearly raw with bitterness about the turtle-coin flip, about luck choosing you because you’re just so heroic, even when this was finally supposed to be his moment really seriously for real this time. It’s reminiscent of another time he compared you to a hero when you critted him, in his fourth Teal Mask battle – but back then, he said you were like the hero in “a story”, whereas here, you’re the hero of “this story”. Kieran’s realising on some level that if this were a story, you would be the hero of it, you’d deserve to win, and… wouldn’t he be the villain? Because heroes certainly do not go around throwing Master Balls at legendaries from behind.

(For the record, though? Kieran is not a villain. Stop calling him a villain, people. Not a single thing he does is outright villainous; catching Terapagos in this way is wrong, yes, but it’s an act of desperation for which his entire end goal is literally just to win a dang Pokémon battle against you. He’s barely even that much of an antagonist, if we get into that – this isn’t really a you-versus-him conflict so much as a him-versus-himself conflict that you happen to be inextricably wrapped up in.)

Kieran isn’t even that crushed when he loses this battle, just… lost and confused. He insists that “I thought if I had Terapagos, it would make me stronger,” as if catching it in a Master Ball would change anything about his strength – but really, he has to have known that wouldn’t truly be the case. And when Briar remarks that Terapagos isn’t as strong as it should be, Kieran just miserably assumes, “so it isn’t the hidden treasure?” Like, of course this was too good to be true, of course whatever Pokémon he actually managed to get his hands on was just some dud and not the real deal, because he’s never deserved to have anything worthwhile. His expression’s upset, and pleading, as says this was meant to let him beat you, still like that’d somehow fix everything, but his desperation’s become something pitiful compared to how furious it was before. He just doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know how else to cope with his crushing sense of inferiority if he can’t hold onto this.

Terapagos goes berserk

The only reason Kieran even Terastallises Terapagos is pretty much because Briar tells him to, and he’s at a loss for what else to do. It’s very possible that if an actual responsible adult had been here to talk him down – or, heck, even just let Carmine talk to him, since she was trying to do so again – then he’d have finally been in a state to listen and none of the ensuing disaster would have needed to happen. But Briar’s gotta see her giant sparkle turtle, because it turns out that basically her entire character exists to facilitate Kieran’s character arc having the most dramatic climax possible, and I for one am 1000% okay with that.

Kieran looks apprehensive and afraid even as he’s just beginning to Terastallise it (no emotionless mask to cover the wince this time), perhaps because he can feel that the power from his Tera Orb is way more than it usually is and isn’t sure this is a good idea. But what else can he do? He has nothing else left – so he throws the orb anyway.

Again, Terapagos is frustratingly unexpressive, such that it’s difficult to get a sense of whether it attacking Kieran once it Terastallises is an instinctive, unconscious defence mechanism, or something more deliberate. But it’s certainly more fun to imagine it’s deliberate – that this is Terapagos lashing out from anger and fear now that it’s been given a terrifying amount of power it can’t fully handle and begins to realise, wait, no, it didn’t want this. That makes this problem distinctly more Kieran’s fault, which is a good thing for his arc. (If Terapagos’s rampage wasn’t based in its emotions in any way, then this kind of wouldn’t be Kieran’s fault at all, not really! It was significantly more on Briar that he Terastallised it, after all. Kieran’s real mistake was catching it without its consent – so it’s more narratively satisfying for this to be, in part, him facing the consequences for that.)

Either way, the important part is that Kieran is bound to feel like this is Terapagos lashing out at him because he shouldn’t have caught it. He always knew deep down that that was wrong, and now here’s the proof, because of course a strong and special legendary like that would never truly acknowledge him. And now it’s so mad at him for trying to act otherwise that it tries to kill him. (This poor kid is already clearly very sensitive to rejection in general, but, ouch, that has to have been like a stab in the gut.) This is all his fault for daring to think he deserved to have any kind of strength at all.

But then you save his life, by sending out your lizardbike friend to shield him! Which on the one hand just makes you even more of a perfect hero – but this time, your heroism is a good thing for Kieran. And, more than that… you wanted to save him. You saw him as someone worth protecting? You, actually, care about him??? (Kieran has been convinced that he’s nothing to you pretty much ever since you lied to him back in Teal Mask, but, oh, hey, maybe not…?)

Not that he has much time to process that in the heat of the moment; he’s too busy freaking out over everything such that Carmine has to be the one to tell him he should recall Terapagos. Maybe on some level he just feels like Terapagos would never listen to him if he tried, because it literally just attempted to kill him – and indeed, it fights back and breaks the Master Ball rather than go back to being his Pokémon (there’s another painful sting of rejection). Of course Kieran should never have caught it or called himself its trainer. He reflexively asks “why?” it wouldn’t come back, but he knows why. It’s because he’s worthless and deserves nothing, and he should never have tried to pretend otherwise.

Facing the gaping pit

At the start of the final battle, Kieran’s just frozen in terror at what he’s accidentally unleashed, not to mention the recent shock of nearly being killed and the knowledge that this is all his fault. (Even though, it isn’t all his fault! Briar deserves at least half the blame for this! But that doesn’t remotely occur to Kieran in the moment, because he is intrinsically the most worthless person ever, so of course all the blame should be on him.) But after a little while, the immediate terror fades, and Kieran’s left with nothing but the overwhelming feeling that he’s useless, that he can’t help anyone. It’s that vast aching pit of inferiority that’s always been there inside him, finally right at the surface.

There’s nothing he can do to run away from it any more. Ogerpon didn’t want him and chose you instead. All of his efforts to make himself stronger meant nothing in the end because he still lost to you. He never should have tried to catch Terapagos, because it never wanted him either and all he’s done is put himself and everyone else in danger. There’s just no way out.

Which means that, for the first time ever, Kieran has no choice but to finally, actually face up to and confront his terrifyingly huge inferiority complex, and begin to fight against it in a genuinely healthy way.

Maybe he wouldn’t have even tried at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that he needed to help with this battle! Shout-outs to the narrative for creating a situation in which Kieran has to help after Carmine’s one remaining Pokémon goes down, because he might otherwise never have done so.

(I love that one of the things the battle camera can do while you’re idling here is cut to Kieran and linger a moment with him, with the look of either frozen terror or miserable inferiority on his face. Even though he’s technically just a background character right now for the mechanical purposes of the battle, this moment is about him, and the devs knew it.)

And of course it takes Kieran a really long time, most of the battle, to actually find the courage to fight back! His inferiority complex is so massive, so all-encompassing, the root cause of all of the desperate, self-destructive, obsessive things he’s done to try and escape it, that of course it’s so, so terrifyingly difficult for him to actually face up to it and find the strength to try and believe that… maybe it’s just wrong.

Crucially, the single thing that does the most to trigger Kieran’s shift into courage is you – you, calling out to him, asking for his help. Hearing that you actually value his strength and need his help is exactly the kind of acknowledgement that Kieran has always desperately craved from you all along. It’s just what he needs to help him believe that, just maybe, he might actually be kinda strong and worth something after all.

But even then! Even with that, his inferiority complex does not magically vanish, because of course it doesn’t work that way! All your words do is give Kieran the courage to fight it, by holding onto the fact that you believe in him and he’s not alone. His animations here are so good; there’s tears in his eyes even as he manages to snap himself into determination, because he is still so scared and just finally being really, really brave about it!

One really lovely subtlety is that the highlight in his eyes, that little visual detail that makes a character really look alive, which was completely not there in Kieran for the entirety of Indigo Disk up until now, finally comes back in the exact moment when he finds the courage to fight. And it's neat how the game manages to re-use the same screaming animation Kieran had for the beginning of the Champion fight, with the only minor differences being the tears and that highlight in his eyes, but in this new context it communicates an entirely different kind of emotion. It’s like he’s fervently psyching himself up into believing that he is capable of doing this.

And hey, Kieran’s contribution to the battle really is pretty helpful! It’s a genuinely tough fight to the point that, no matter your level, there’s a good chance you were struggling on your own for a while, so you’re probably glad he’s here to help even just in a mechanical sense. His Hydrapple’s Supersweet Syrup ability can be useful to you as well as him, and then if it goes down, he switches to Dragonite and – because of the evasiveness drop – begins spamming near-accurate Thunders on a Terapagos who is Water-type for this final phase. Look at him go! (And another thing Hydrapple can do to support you is use Dragon Cheer, which delights me, because it’s Kieran deciding that actually he’s okay with you getting all the critical hits after all. Aww.)

Once Terapagos is defeated, if you try to not catch it, Kieran will tell you that you need to do it, that “it has to be you, not me!” It’s so lovely that there’s not a hint of bitterness to him here as he says this, just perfectly comfortably accepting it, because he never really wanted Terapagos anyway and he knows it’ll be happier with you, and that’s all that matters. Even if you don’t get that line, his encouragement of you as you go for a Pokéball is more than enough to communicate the fact that he’s okay with you doing this. And Kieran’s smiling again, cheering you on with that same animation of his from back in Teal Mask when he was super excited to watch you battle his sister! This is the excitable, battle-loving kid he always was and finally is once more! His smile is even more adorable now without his hair obscuring half of it, too.

Letting it go

In the end, Kieran’s finally able to let things go thanks to multiple factors brought about by what happened in Area Zero. There’s the part where he spent the adventure being just a little bit closer to his normal self, letting him realise that he misses being like that and that maybe there was nothing inherently bad or weak about those parts of him at all. There’s the way that Terapagos going berserk served as a very stark representation of how his obsession with strength only ends up hurting himself and everyone around him, which must have helped him see that his behaviour leading up to this was doing the same kind of thing and he can’t go back to that.

And, perhaps most importantly, you acknowledged his strength by calling out for him to help you against Terapagos, which is what Kieran really needed the most all along. By joining you in the battle, he’s finally begun to face his inferiority complex, to shoot down the conviction in his mind that he’s useless and weak and can’t do anything, and prove to himself that he’s capable of confronting scary things after all, even including his own mistakes.

I do have another small writing nitpick about his dialogue in the post-battle scene, in that I don’t quite agree with his progression from “I just don’t have it in me to be like you” straight to “finally I can let it go”. Kieran was always aware of the former, deep down, but knowing that never did anything but make him latch desperately onto trying to prove that wrong no matter how impossible it felt. Meanwhile, the latter implies that he’s always consciously wanted to let it go and just somehow couldn’t despite that, which isn’t quite it either.

Instead, I think it’d work if he first went from how he can’t ever be like you into “I guess I have to just let it go”, and then from there into “Yeah… finally I can let it go”. Feeling like he simply has no choice but to let go at first, and only from there would he reflect and realise that actually, he can now, and maybe a part of him had always kind of wanted to after all.

Delightfully, as Kieran begrudgingly accepts that he can’t ever be like you, you finally get a dialogue option that lets you tell him that he’s strong and cool and worth something as he is!!! It seems like it really did take you hearing his inferiority complex directly from him in order for you to realise that this was something he needed to hear. He reflexively tries to downplay your compliment, like he didn’t really do anything impressive at all just now, because he still instinctively feels that way about himself – again, his inferiority complex has not just magically vanished, because it doesn’t work like that! – but hearing otherwise from you of all people has to be an immense help for him in fighting against it.

And it’s this that sets Kieran off crying, from that overwhelmingly positive emotion that you think he’s really cool, aww. This seems to break something of an emotional dam for him, letting him just have a good long cry about all of it, which, yes, he has so many emotions he’s needed to let out for so long now and it is good and healthy that he’s finally able to do so! (I wish this part was better animated, alas – but believe me, I am imagining him having such a big long cathartic cry even if the game isn’t managing to adequately show it.)

Then there’s the final scene! It’s so brave of Kieran to have resolved to apologise and make amends for everything he did wrong. That is scary as hell and comes with a huge risk of massive painful criticism and rejection, but he’s doing it anyway because he wants to do the right thing. He is such a good kid at heart despite his massive issues having driven him into several big mistakes.

Now that Kieran’s returned to something resembling his old self, his anxious body language from before is back – he’s barely making eye contact with you as he speaks, his head low, instinctively trying to hide his face behind the one bit of hair he still has hanging down. But nonetheless, you can tell that he’s making an effort to fight that and push himself to be just a little bit more assertive than he was able to be before all this. As he asks if you two can be friends again, he’s grimacing, already braced for rejection, hesitating then blurting out all of it in one big go before he changes his mind – there’s still a very significant part of him convinced that you’d just never want that and he doesn’t even have the right to ask. But at least he’s now able to realise that said part is probably wrong and find the courage to ask anyway! Because he wants this, and he deserves to at least try and grasp good things for himself!

And of course you still want to be his friend, because you basically always were anyway from your perspective, and Kieran is so adorably happy to have this second chance, and I am so delighted that the two of you are able to be friends again like you always should have been all along, aaaa. I could not be more proud of my boy.

(Well, I could go into a lot more detail about just how proud of and happy I am for Kieran thanks to all of his scenes in the epilogue and postgame. But that’s enough of its own separate Thing that it ought to get its own post! So hold on for that; I’m not quite done having So Many Feelings about this boy just yet. Aaand here it is!)

#pokemon #pokemon sv #pokemon scarlet and violet #the indigo disk #the hidden treasure of area zero #pokemon kieran #kieran pokemon #trainer kieran #rival kieran #champion kieran #character analysis #ramble #my buttons #friends

[ddejavvu]

stepdad!aaron request perhaps

it’s summer and reader is in and out of the pool in the backyard and steps inside to get a drink after a while still dripping wet with a clinging bathing suit and aaron tries to act innocent like he wasn’t staring at r through the window but he can’t help it i mean he’s only a man and how easy would it be to just slide the bikini bottoms out of the way and then r catches him staring (fantasizing) and calls him out and smut follows

today is multiverse monday, send me any au you can think of! :)

this post is 18+ (and so are its characters) and dark, minors dni. (cw: stepcest; don't like, don't read).

the plotline that you described was too long for a blurb so i just took the idea of him seeing her in her bathing suit and did what I could!

Aaron isn't paying much attention to the pool party outside, because there's work to do in the form of numerous reports on his desk. Witness reports that he needs to pair with their crimes, ME reports he needs to sign off on and tuck away into files, budget reports that he needs to stuff with receipts so that the higher-ups know that yes, they did need to stop for gas four times in Florida, the numbers aren't a mistake. His world feels like a never-ending mountain of paperwork until he hears the sliding glass door open, and he glances to his left where he sits in his office to find you sliding your wet flip-flops off onto the pavement before stepping inside.

You're dripping wet, but there's a towel over your shoulders that catches the runoff from your bathing suit. You grin sheepishly at him, muttering a quick, "Hey," as you reach for a packet of chips from the bowl on the counter.

"How's it going out there?" He asks, head suddenly grounded on his shoulders and no longer buried beneath paperwork. He leans back in his chair, all too content to see you take a seat at the barstool to munch on your snack before returning outside. You turn to face him in your chair and the cut of your bathing suit is on full display, wrapped tightly around your thighs and showcasing the droplets of water you'd missed with your towel that rest on the supple skin there.

"Jack and his friends are a handful," You glance back outside, "I wasn't even that hungry, I just needed a break from their splashing."

"I don't blame you," He chuckles, setting his pen down, work long forgotten, "Once you're an adult, splashing isn't as fun as it is irritating."

You grin at his comment, "Are you gonna get out there too, Aaron? I don't think I've ever seen you in swim trunks."

Briefly, Aaron wonders if you want to. Though he's not sure he'd look as good in trunks as you do in a bikini, so he might elect to just watch you from the sidelines.

"I don't even think I have swim trunks," He chuckles, "But I might sit out there for a while and get some sun. Garcia says I'm inside too much, and that I need a tan before I turn invisible."

"She's a smart woman," You laugh at the imagery, "Come on, Aaron, take a break and come sit in the sun with me for a bit." You stand, chips held in one hand and towel clasped in the other, "I need someone to help me reapply sunscreen, anyways, I'm not trying to get skin cancer."

He can't say no to rubbing lotion into your back.

"Alright," He stands, abandoning his paperwork and opening the sliding door for you, a hand on your back as he leads you back outside, "This bathing suit's pretty on you, honey."

You turn back to him and grin from where you're already popping the cap off of the sunscreen, chips set on the table beside the deck chairs, "I knew you'd like it. That's why I bought it, you always like me in red."

You barely give him any time to process your admission before you're turning to put your back towards him once more, holding one hand over your chest while the other tugs at your bathing suit strap to pull it out of its neat bow, "Can you re-tie it after you're done, Aaron? I can't reach."

He takes the sunscreen from you, glad you aren't facing him to watch him both blush and chub up beneath his thick jeans as he smears the sunscreen over your back and begins rubbing the substance smoothly into your skin, "Yeah, sweetheart, I'll tie it."

#dark mei #aaron hotchner x reader #aaron hotchner imagine #aaron hotchner scenario #aaron hotchner oneshot #aaron hotchner one-shot #aaron hotchner one shot #aaron hotchner headcanon #aaron hotchner headcanons #aaron hotchner hc #aaron hotchner hcs #aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotchner fanfic #aaron hotchner fic #aaron hotchner blurb #aaron hotchner drabble #aaron hotchner dialogue #aaron hotchner fluff #aaron hotchner x reader fanfiction #aaron hotchner au #stepdad!hotch #ddejavvu’s multiverse mondays #multiverse mondays

[f10werfae]

The Summer I Met You

pairing: Chris Evans x Shy!Reader

Summary:Chris meets Shy Reader. The reader is traveling with girlfriends and is mostly ignored and turned on. Such as eating less or talking more. Chris can't look at it more and goes there and says that the reader is beautiful (Req by Anon)

Requests are open/ Likes, Comments and Re-blogs are appreciated♥️

Chris Evans Masterlist Full Masterlist Taglist Form

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

It was the summer of 2018, a time where Y/n found herself on holiday with some of her friends from high school, granted they weren’t as close before but Y/n couldn’t find it in her heart to say no. Thing is though, a group of guys were coming with them. Stephanie's older brother and his friends, which only made Y/n's social battery already start to sputter.

Arriving at their beach resort on Hawaii, the group of girls and guys got all their luggage, hotel room keys and headed to get settled in. Y/n carried in her small suitcase for the 7 day vacation, the smell of the salt water nearby already heightening her sense in a good way, she always loved being close to nature.

“Ya need any help?” She heard a deep Bostonian accent ask, looking up to see one of the guys on the trip with them, Chris Evans.

Before Y/n could even reply Grace had already spoken for her, “Nah don’t bother with her Chris, she won’t speak to you, that girl’s basically mute”

‘Here it all starts’ Y/n thought to herself, deciding to ignore them all and head on up to her room, if we was going to be on holiday then she was going to enjoy herself.

Her room was beautifully decorated, flower petals all over the place, courtesy of the hotel staff. Y/n has begun unpacking her phone buzzed,

Vacray GC 2022!!

Stephanie: Ok yall meet at 7pm for the dinner downstairs? Until then do what your heart desires :)

Everyone had replied with ‘okays’ so throwing her phone, Y/n got out the tiny notebook she brought with her, there she had written down all the things she wanted to do in Hawaii. Things the others didn’t want to do.

1. Snorkelling

With her bathing suit already on under her tshirt and shorts, all she had to do was gather her valuables and off Y/n went.

(Y/n’s P.O.V)

Closing my hotel room behind me, I bumped into one solid mass, only to hear it grunt right back at me.

“Y/n right?” Rubbing my forehead I looked up to see Chris from earlier, a charming smile on his face, a backwards cap pulling his hair back.

“U-uh yeah, you’re Chris?” I said avoiding eye contact, seemingly finding the floor more interesting than his intimidating dark blue eyes.

“Are you joinin us with the spa massages Stephanie booked?” He asked crossing his arms over his chest, see somehow only us two were put onto this floor, making it that more awkward knowing no one could interrupt this.

“Spa massages?”

“Yeah the one she sent us? She sent the invites separately”

I knew this was going to happen. I was only brought along to be the butt of their jokes, something I expected but was used to. I was not going to waste this vacation

“Uh no. No i’m not. I have my own list” I smiled holding up the tiny blue notepad in my hand, letting him read it when he reached up for it, his eyes concentrating on every single word.

“So you’re going snorkelling then first yeah?”

“Mhm I wanna see turtles” I smiled remembering the documentary I watched a while back about how they are endangered and how amazing it is to see them out in the wild where they belong.

“Can I join?” Chris asked cocking his head to the side, his thumbs now tucked into the front pockets of his swim shorts, a small smile on his face.

“I-I mean yeah of course, don’t you wanna go to the spa though?”

“I mean sure but i’d rather see some adventure, plus I dont want ya to be alone” He explains starting to walk down the hallway, causing me to run up a little to catch up to his massive steps.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

(Chris’ P.O.V)

Y/n and I got into the boat we were using for the snorkelling trip we were doing, my phone was switched off because of all the spammed texts I was receiving from the others. Straight from the get go I could already see they were trying to alienate Y/n, for no other reason than them thinking she was too shy to actually be fun.

“Look Chris! It’s a baby turtle!” Y/n shouted once she got into the water, pointing towards a spot where a tiny guy was floating towards the boat, even deciding to boop Y/n's finger with its head before swimming away rapidly.

“Alright alright m'comin sugar” I laughed getting into the water beside her, both our hands interlocked as we floated over the water, both our heads submerged looking at the wildlife underneath. I had even decided to buy an underwater camera at the lobby of the place, Y/n and I deciding it’d be a good idea to have ways to remember it.

Looking over at her under the water, her face was lit up by her gorgeous smile, her hair flowing freely in the water almost as if she was some siren.

(Time Skip)

“Omg that was amazing! I’m so glad we got to do that” She squealed jumping up and down once we got changed back into our clothes and showered off, both of us choosing to have a sneak peek around the gift shop.

When something small and blue caught my eye, a turtle stuffie on a keyring, perfect for her.

So while she was busy looking at some other things, I bought ut and stuffed it into my back pocket, waiting on her by the front door. The taxi waiting to bring us back to the hotel for dinner, I could tell both of us were sleepy from the activities with the way our eye lids lidded.

Y/n's shoulder had landed onto my head,

“Hey Y/n? Thanks for today, I had a lot of fun” I whispered pushing back some of her wet hair away from her face

“No problem, I had a ton of fun too! Maybe you can join me for mountain tubing tomorrow? I understand if the others-“

“I’d love to go mountain tubing with you, and between you and me, the others’ plans seem boring. All just therapeutic bullshit, which don’t get me wrong I totally get, but for the whole week? Really?” I scoffed feeling her giggle onto my bicep, my chest feeling that bit tighter, and my cheeks feeling that bit more redder.

“Also I-uh got you this earlier, reminded me of ya” I said fishing for the turtle keychain in my pocket, her fingers immediately reaching for it and squishing it like crazy. Without seeing her face, I could already tell that her eyes were probably wide and doe.

“T-thank you so much Chris, it’s so cute. I may just name it after you” She smiled looking up at me, then putting it straight onto the bag she carried around with her

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

(Y/n's P.O.V)

“Ah so there you guys are” I heard Chloe groan, the rest of the groups already sat down for dinner, stephanie at the head of the table looking grumpy.

“Didn’t we say 7 for dinner?” Grace grumbled throwing me a shady look, the other guys choosing to just remain silent and engage in their own conversations.

“Yeah sorry our boat took a bit to get back, there was just so much to see with the turtles-“ Chris explained before he was interrupted

“Y’all went snorkelling without us? Was it Y/n’s idea? God Y/n you’re so fucking rude, where was our invite?”

“W-well I thought you guys had massages, so I went to do my own thing and Chris wanted to come along” I explained, feeling my cheeks heat up at all of their glares, my fingers starting to fidget under the table when I felt Chris' hand grip onto mine under the table

“Uh she wasn’t rude, I know you guys purposefully didn’t send her an invite today. Frankly I’d prefer to spend my vacation with her than a bunch of assholes. Oh and Grace? She isn’t fucking mute, maybe if you took the time to talk to her like a person you’d understand that she does have a mind of her own and can speak for herself”

By the end I could see a vein throbbing at the base of Chris' neck, his face flushed because of his rant, the girls’ face red with embarrassment for being told off.

“Come on Y/n, I read up about a good restaurant a few minutes away”

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

(Chris’ P.O.V)

“Thank you so much for treating me to dinner, standing up for me and just being there” Y/n said as we walked towards our respective hotel rooms, our pinkies linked, which somehow happened on our way home. I definitely wasn’t against it.

“It’s no problem, honestly. Thank you for making my first day here absolutely amazing, and I know I might sound stupid straight off the bat, but I think I like you? Of course I know you said during dinner you prefer to take things slow so-“

I could barely even finish my statement when U felt her lips kiss my cheek, a small squeak leaving her as she rushed to close her bedroom door and rush inside; not even letting me process what the fuck just happened.

“You dropped Chris out here by the way” I laughed seeing the poor tiny turtle stuffie had been cut off the rashness of the door. I heard her door unlock slowly before her hand slowly reached out with the palm open, a cute gesture.

“Alright here’s Chris, and my spare room key. I-I saw that it’s due to thunder tonight and I remember you saying earlier you were scared of storms so..”

Closing her hand around both items her hand retreated into her room again, a few seconds I just stood there standing for some reason, when I saw her hand hold out something to me. Her notebook.

“I-incase you wanna add anything else you wanna do, l-like for future trips I dunno” She whispered now shutting the door for definite, a bashful smile on my face as my heart started to race a tiny bit.

“See ya tomorrow bright n' early for mountain tubing then!” I shouted to her door before walking off to my room. Lowkey awaiting her presence at some point during the night, hopefully.

———

Taglist Tags (Form is up there^^): @cevansgurl @imboredat2am @adoreyouusugar @fdl305 @stormcloudss @patzammit @pandaxnienke @thereisa8ella @chrisevansangel @evanstanwhore @seren-a-ity @chrisevansdaughter @bxdbxtxh15 @madebylilly @vrittivsanghavi @uwiuwi @jackslover12 @marvelgurl @caps-shield1918 @xoxokiaraaxoxo @mirikusashes @taramaria @mysticfalls01 @royalwriteroftheuniverse @inlovewiththefictionalcharacters @sairsei @dumb-fawkin-bitch @kimhtoo17 @itsaylayay1213 @mrspeacem1nusone

#romance #chris evans imagine #chris evans x reader #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans #chris evans one shot

[lamentationsofalonelypotato]

You Call It Madness But I Call It Love

Chapter 6: Batter Up

Pairing: Soldier Boy x f!reader, Reader POV

Summary: When the reader left Payback 40 years ago after a falling out with her childhood best friend she never looked back, but when two men show up to her apartment and start asking her questions about the past, the reader begins to think those things can’t stay hidden and starts to question what’s real and what’s fantasy.  This is a re-telling of The Boys Season 3, where the reader is a supe who's known Soldier Boy since 1927. The chapters will fluctuate between past and present. This is chapter six of my "You Call It Madness But I Call It Love" series. (I'm so bad at summaries please forgive me!)

Word Count: 3.1K

Warnings: References to Sex, Sexual Innuendo, Cursing (a few times), Drinking, Soldier Boy might be, is, really, absolutely, a little OOC,

Note: This is told from Reader's perspective. Any references to the reader is made using you or your. There is minimal use of y/n. I tried my best to proofread, but nobody's perfect. Reader is described as "curvy" occasionally. If you don’t like, don’t read, but if you do like, you’re my favorite!

Internal Monologue is in first person and is in italics

Series Masterlist

Masterlist

****************************

Philadelphia 1935

"Only you would bring a sketchpad to a baseball game." Ben shouts over the screaming fans in Shibe Park Stadium. The sun catches his hair turning it into a honeyed brown that drips down into his gorgeous green eyes that shine with charm. 

"I want to capture the devastation on your face when the Phillies lose." You snark back, tracing the curve of his mouth as it pulls down in a frown with the tip of your pencil on your sketchpad, and wishing that you could do the same with your fingertip. It was not the first time that you'd drawn him and by now you didn't need to look up at him to capture the angular structure of his face, but you couldn't help it.

"Funny." Ben taps the ridiculous white and red pinstriped baseball cap on your head that he bought you before the game.

It was a few days after your party, one day before Ben had to go to boarding school number seven, and Ben, being the person he was, decided to drown his sorrows in cheap beer and the electric atmosphere of a baseball game. Before his mother died Ben's father had taken him to a single baseball game, but Ben never forgot. He didn't have to tell you for you to know that it was one of the only happy memories from his childhood, despite his father getting so drunk that he forgot Ben was with him. You figured that Ben liked going because it reminded him of one day that his father didn’t tell him what a disappointment he was. Your heart ached at the thought. Ben didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve the constant disapproval of his father. Yes he got kicked out of numerous boarding schools, he swore like a sailor,  ran after whatever caught his eye, and he drank so much alcohol you wondered how he wasn't flammable. But Ben deserved more. And you wished that he would let you give it to him all the time, not just on the days you were out together or the times he snuck into your room.

Your thoughts drift back to the numerous boarding schools. Although you wanted to defend him, you couldn't come up with an excuse for that, especially since Ben didn’t just flunk out, he made an effort to get kicked out. Ben had a different story that resulted in his expulsion for each that never ceased to amuse you. Boarding school number one was vacated when Ben was only thirteen years old because he glued the history instructor to his chair. Boarding school number two was evacuated due to an “accidental fire” in the science lab, which Ben insisted he didn’t start. And then complained that he didn’t think that his lab partner's coat would catch fire quite that fast. Boarding schools three and four were within months of each other and both due to the fact that Ben got caught with a girl in the dorm. Something you wished he hadn’t told you. Boarding school number five you were the most proud of. Only because Ben used some of the minimal art skills you showed him to draw a naughty doodle of the English teacher on the chalkboard before class. Ben replicated the doodle in one of the sketchpads that you hid under you bed just in case someone were to find it. Finally, Ben left boarding school number six because he drove the dean's car into the swimming pool. When you asked him why, he said that he thought it "needed a wash."

"So is it everything you ever dreamed of?" Ben asks with a smirk.

"What?" You look up from the sketchpad at him in confusion.

"Your first baseball game." He emphasizes the word suggestively.

"It's certainly loud-" You begin to say, leaning towards him so he can hear you over the roar of the crowd.

"Yes, well lots of screaming is expected your first time." Ben wiggles his eyebrows. "Though I'd say that there should be screaming all the time-"

"Ben."

"But I told you that I'd be gentle-" He taunts.

"BEN."

"What? I like that I'm your first." His smirk widens and your cheeks flare bright red, prompting you to punch him in the shoulder.

"Shut up." Your mind can't help, but drift back to the other day when he trailed his fingers down the back of your corset and loosened the ties, which makes you flush a brighter red as a shiver goes down your spine.

The boos around Ben and you get louder as the bottom of the eighth inning begins and as one of the New York Giants' infielders steps up to the plate. Despite Ben's teasing it was your first official baseball game. He was outraged when you told him that you'd never been to one a few days before your birthday and he believed that it was his responsibility to take you to one before he went back to boarding school.

And as much as you pretended to hate it, you were having a lot of fun.

The roar of the crowd is electric and surges up over the trumpet blasts that fill the loud speakers, broken up by the sound of the vendors selling cracker jacks and other food items where they wander up and down the concrete steps of the stadium. The smell of beer, hotdogs, sweat, and peanuts swells over the crowd, while the golden glow of the noon day sun flashes against the metal overhang that shields the crowds from its rays.

"Are you hungry?" Ben asks, nudging your shoulder to grab your attention again.

"A little."

Ben waves down one of the vendors and buys you both hotdogs and a beer to share. And as you sit there and begin to eat, you realize that something about today feels different.

You can't put your finger on it, but him buying you a  baseball hat and food kinda feels like a… date. Ben had bought you things before from street vendors as you walked through Philadelphia, ice cream, pretzels, but being here, sitting so close that your shoulders brushed every few minutes was different. You briefly circle back again  to the other night when he helped you out of your dress. Neither of you had brought up what happened, but you wanted to. You wanted to know if he did that to help you or if he did that because he wanted to go further.

But at the same time you wondered if it happened because Ben was drunk. When he got drunk Ben tended to be a bit more clingy, well at least around you he was more clingy, but he’d never admit that. 

The crack of a baseball against a bat pulls you from your memory of the other night and Ben groans as the ball soars over the wall at the back of the stadium.

“That’s another 5 bucks.” He mutters.

“Told you not to make that bet with Adam.” You sing-song.

“You made a bet too.”

“A winning bet I might add.” You poke his muscular bicep with your pencil.

Adam Winthrop was one of Ben's drinking buddies and someone you had run into at the ticket booth before the game. Ben bet him that by the eighth inning the Phillies would pull ahead, whereas you bet Adam that the Phillies would be down exactly four points. Adam laughed at you, but agreed, while Ben stated that the Phillies were better than the New York Giants and you would lose.

You were eager to make him eat his words. And one look at the scoreboard meant that Ben was suffering through a four course meal.

"I have no idea how you did that. You don't even know what baseball is! How could you know that the Phillies would be down four points in the bottom of the eighth?"

"I've meant to tell you, I'm secretly psychic."

"Oh really?" Ben smirks, eyes darkening as they lock with yours. "What am I thinking right now?"

"That you're happy you didn't bring Missy Callahan." You smirk back at him to stop the butterflies that have erupted in the pit of your stomach.

"I am." He cocks his head to the side in a way that makes his dark hair fall into his eyes.

"Good." You turn back to watch the game so you won't focus too much on how good he looks and to resist the urge to run your fingers through his hair. "And I am getting it a little. My teacher is very good at explaining things."

"I'm good at explaining lots of things doll." You don't need to look at Ben to hear the smirk in his voice.

Damn it. The blush that creeps into your cheeks with his words feels like fire.

"Trollop." You snort, taking the beer from his hand so you can have a sip.

“You should be nicer to me, I got you food.”

“And a ridiculous hat-“

“You look cute.” Ben rolls his eyes and turns away, but his words stick to your chest like fly paper.

He thinks I look cute?

“I don’t think you look too bad yourself.” You respond, turning your eyes back on the field, but watching him in your peripheral vision.

“I know.” He grins.

“Keep being all cocky and I won’t buy you cotton candy with all the cash I’m about to make on this game.”

“What happened to gambling being unladylike?”

“We both know I’m far from a lady, darling.”

“Well the Dawson School for Girls will clear you right up.” Ben sighs, but you can hear the disappointment in his tone.

Oh yes, the wonderful news my mother dropped in my lap, how exciting!

When your mother had come into your room the other night she told you she had a big birthday surprise, which was that she was sending you to the Dawson School for Girls in Boston. You don’t know what prompted her to send you to a boarding school, only that she said it would be good for you.

Which probably meant she was doing it to keep you far away from Ben.

Maybe it won't be so bad. New city, new exciting people-

But no matter how hard you thought about it, you weren't excited and it was because of Ben. Not only would you miss him, you really didn't know what he would do without you. You weren't sure how long that Ben would be at his boarding school in New Jersey, and you didn't know where he would go when he got back.

If I was gone, who would be there for him when he got back? Who would he go to when he didn't want to go home? Would he end up at Missy's?

The thought that he would sleep over at her house makes an ice pick of jealousy stab you in the chest. You still weren't over what happened the other night at your birthday party, but you were getting through the best you could. Being here with Ben was helping you forget how mad you were.

"Y/n?"

"Hmm?" You look up at him.

"Don't focus too much on what they teach you there." Ben says, his eyes are still on the game tracing the pathway of the ball as it soars into right field.

"Why?"

"Because you don't need to change." He glances over at you with a frown as if the thought hurts. "And all those boarding schools are the same, they try to make you like everyone else. Strip you of everything that makes you different.”

"Is that such a bad thing? I've been the odd one out for a while-"

You think about all the other girls that you'd met over the years and of course Missy pops up. She was popular, pretty, and she'd caught Ben's attention. You'd never been that popular, Ben was the only close friend you had. Plus most of the people you interacted with were Ben's friends/drinking buddies who seemed to like you as much as he did. That always made you feel better, that Ben's friends liked you enough to let you come out with them sometimes, even if it was to the bar on the corner and even if it was completely unladylike when you staggered home drunk. It was usually Adam's fault when he bet you that he could drink you under the table and you weren't one to walk away from a challenge. Ben was always there to help you down the street and make sure that you got home okay, laughing when you tried to go into the wrong house or sang off-key. Of course when you arrived home those nights your mother practically locked you in your room, making you feel like Rapunzel, but never dissuaded Ben from coming in through the window.

"For you it is."

"Why?"

"Because you're different."

"I can't tell if that's a compliment or not." Your brow wrinkles and Ben presses a fingertip to the scrunch between your eyebrows under your hat, surprising you.

"I like that you're different." Ben shrugs.

Your cheeks flush bright red with his confession. It's the first time that Ben's ever said anything remotely like that before.

He turns back to the game as if he hasn't said anything.

“I like that you’re different too.” You whisper, barely audible over the crowd.

“Good.” Ben shoots you a sideways grin that makes you warm from head to toe. 

“So is that why you don’t stay?" You look back at your sketchpad, shading along the bottom of Ben’s strong jawline, reveling in the familiar scratch of the pencil against the paper.

“Huh?”

“At the boarding schools? Because you don’t want to change?”

Ben frowns for a minute before reaching for the beer between you. “I don’t like being there.”

“Because?”

Ben shrugs. “It’s not home.”

You didn’t understand that. Ben hated being at his own house with his father. Well, hated being anywhere with his father. The only place that he spent enough time sleeping was in your bedroom and you doubted that’s what he meant.

You wait for him to clarify, but he doesn’t. “Well I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate being in Boston because I'm just going to worry about you the whole time." It slipped out before you could stop it.

"You worry about me?" The corner of his lip twitches.

"Of course I do. You're my friend."

"And what do you worry about happening to me?"

"The usual: barroom brawls, alcohol poisoning..." You smile. "That or sleeping with someone's girl and having the guy come after you."

"I hope you know that you're my alibi if anyone tries to catch me."

"After all these years I'd expect it. And everyone believes me, because I'm trustworthy-"

"I'm not so sure about trustworthy, when we first met you lied for me." Ben's fingertips trace against the back of your hand where it is on the armrest between you.

"Yes I did." You swallow the lump in your throat, trying not to focus on how electricity seems to follow his touch, mildly surprised at the boldness of Ben's touch.

You remembered that night. When you ran into your father's study to hide from your mother and Ben was behind the couch hiding from his father. He had looked so cute with a scowl on his face, when he peered at you from over the back of the couch when you came through the door. You remember asking him what he was doing, but he hadn't said anything, just stared back at you. His father had been enough of an answer when he practically crashed through the door of the study, stumbling around the room and slurring his words together as he demanded you tell him where his son was. You had held his gaze and insisted that you hadn't seen Ben, and his father had left cursing under his breath. It was hard not be friends after that.

"Why?" Ben asks.

You pause considering. Ben's face is impassive, but you see a glint of curiosity in his eyes. His fingers are still resting on the back of your hand.  “Do you really want me to tell you? Or do you want me to lie?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me before.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know your tell.” He replies smugly.

“I don’t have a tell.”

“You do.”

“What is it?”

“It’s no fun if I tell you.” Ben smirks, tapping the brim of your hat. “But why?”

You didn't want to admit it to him, because you thought that he would mock you. The truth was you'd helped him for two reasons, one because he'd looked scared. Ben wasn't afraid of anything and you hadn't seen the look in his eyes since the day you met, but you know that you did not imagine it when you locked eyes in the study. The other reason was because you thought that your problems with your mother and his problems with his father made you two the same or at least connected in some way. You were happy to meet someone that understood you. None of the other people you met understood what it was like to have a parent that never thought you were enough for them. And as you grew up together, Ben was someone that you could depend on no matter what, just as he depended on you. Even if he couldn't admit it to you or to himself.

“It might have also been because I was also in the study hiding from my mother and it kinda felt like we were sharing a secret.” You press your lips together. “I know that sounds stupid.”

“It’s not.” Ben breathes, holding your gaze with a sincerity that makes your heart warm. “I never said thank you.”

"You’re right. And I’ll hold that against you for as long as we live.” You smile up into his handsome face again admiring how the sun reflects off the perfect angles and rests in his green eyes.

“I wouldn’t have expected anything less sweetheart.” He holds your gaze for another few seconds before turning back to watch the final inning, his forearm pressed firmly against yours where your arms rest between you. And instead of moving back you allow yourself to lean into him, so close that your shoulders are touching, continuing to sketch through the final parts of the game and ignoring the urge to look up at him.

It really was a wonderful day, but that's the thing about wonderful days, they always have to end.

**************************

Thank you so much for reading! If you'd like to be added to the taglist for this series, let me know :)

Taglist: @roseblue373 @anundyingfidelity @cheynovak @cassiecasluciluce @muhahaha303 @deans-spinster-witch @kayleighmeister @demodemo909 @fruitfacess @bobbobbobinogs

#soldier boy x reader #soldier boy x you #jensen ackles soldier boy #soldier boy #soldier boy x female reader #soldier boy x y/n #soldier boy/ben #the boys amazon #the boys fanfic #jensen ackles #soldier boy fanfiction #the boys series #the boys tv #soldier boy fic #the boys season 3

[emeraldenha]

SAY MY NAME.

pairing: han yujin x gn!reader | genre: high school au, opposites attract trope, fluff | w/c: +3.9k words | warnings: nothing but fluff <3

for years han yujin has been harboring a crush on his childhood friend

from the day he first met them as seat mates in middle school to the day they moved away to now, those gradually blossoming feelings have never wilted out like the dying flowers he thought they’d become

transitioning to high school was tough without them, but when he finally learnt to open up to others, he thrived

he made new friends, became more popular among his classmates, all while still being the cute and shy boy he’d always been

though in the back of his mind, he’d be up at night wondering if he’d ever run into his childhood friend again

maybe it was wishful thinking, but he missed having someone in his life who he saw so much of himself in

someone with similar interests, quirks, and heart

a person that’s… the complete opposite of you

ever since he first saw you walk into the classroom with your nose held high in your textbooks, the cold and studious first impression has yet to wash away

you didn’t answer to anyone unless it was school related, not a care in the world about what people thought of you

yujin could never relate to that

your only goal was to be the top student, and secondary to that was anything else that’d make a pretty addition to your résumé

the day your two paths crossed was on your first day as second years

that morning, yujin was talking to his best friend, park gunwook, in the hallway

“yujin, did you hear we’re getting a new transfer student?”

the boy shakes his head

“hopefully they’re nice. I’ll probably have to show them around, help them adjust, all that stuff,” gunwook continues, which spirals into a ramble of all the responsibilities he’ll have when he’s inevitably re-elected as class president

yujin just hums in agreement, twisting the cap off his plastic water bottle and taking a sip

the two eventually reach their classroom

and sitting in one of the seats is a face he’d recognize anywhere

it’s none other than his childhood friend… they’re back

he chokes on his water and bursts into a fit of coughs that draws everyone’s attention, including their’s

the new transfer student is his childhood friend… how is he supposed to approach them, speak to them, act around them…

he gets so flustered that he turns around to leave and run out of the room

not noticing you were already walking in through the propped open door with your eyes down in the midst of reading a book

one thing leads to another, and before yujin can prevent himself from the mess he’s about to cause, his hand is already squeezing around the open water bottle out of shock and water splashes onto your uniform and the fresh pages of your book

you’re scarily still for the first few seconds, so much that yujin feels a chill run down his spine

it’s like his life just flashed before his eyes

“are you serious?” you say through gritted teeth, your glare burning into his skull like flames

yujin doesn’t have the guts to say anything, which only makes you more aggravated

you take a step forward and open your mouth to chew him out but gunwook wedges himself between the two of you

“come on, y/n, don’t be too harsh on him. he didn’t mean for this to happen,” gunwook says, trying to remedy the situation

you’re not pleased by that in the slightest

gunwook quickly takes off his blazer and hands it out to you as a peace offering

but you only scoff at it and shake your head. “I don’t need your help, park.”

you push him out of the way and stand face to face with yujin

“don’t you owe me an apology?”

he hesitates for a moment, still in panic mode, but you shut him down before he can even get a word in

“forget it. you’re not worth my time.”

tossing the damp book into the trash can, you storm out of the classroom and not once do you look back

and yujin thinks to himself, from that day on, he’ll avoid you at all costs

in the months following the incident, yujin does just that

if he sees you, he’ll walk in the opposite direction

if you so much as turn your head his way, he’ll steer clear of all eye contact

instead, he concentrates on mustering up the courage to confess to his long term crush, his reunited friend from his middle school years

though in all honesty, a lot has changed even in the short time they’ve been gone

they haven’t exactly reconnected like he anticipated, but it’s not like they’re total strangers either

he understands that they’re no longer in the same social circles, no longer attached to the hip, no longer conversing over the same talking points like they used to

but he still wants to give himself a chance to confess before it’s too late

with both the help and motivation from gunwook, yujin comes up with the perfect plan

he retrieves a carton of chocolate milk—their favorite—from the cafeteria and writes a note in the pink origami heart he learned how to make the night prior

meet me by the field after school! -h.yj

time feels painfully longer when having to wait for it to pass

yujin rocks his heels back and forth on the ground, checking the notifications on his phone that he’s already been scrolling through for the past five minutes

he wanted to be the one to arrive at the field first, but his nerves were only amplifying in an echo chamber of anxiety

“what do you want?”

he jumps from the abruptness of your voice but gets even more surprised when he realizes it’s you

he lets out an awkward cough and quietly says, “oh, sorry, I’m waiting for someone.”

you pull out the unfolded origami heart from your pocket

“so this wasn’t you?”

yujin does a double take, eyes widening as his mistake was staring at him straight in the face

he had somehow set the chocolate milk and the note on the wrong desk

“no, it was me. you’re the one I was waiting for,” he lies, attempting to make it seem as if he was joking earlier

he has to hold himself back from grimacing

why was it always so hard for him to own up to his feelings? shout out to the world that he has a crush and is currently messing that up?

you quirk an eyebrow. “what is it then?”

yujin falls silent and he can already tell your patience is running thin

he doesn’t know how to respond, other than with the truth, and blurts out the first excuse that comes to mind as you say

“look, I’m not interested—”

“can you tutor me?”

“you want me to tutor you?” you repeat

“yes, of course, you’re the smartest one in our class.”

“what subject?”

“umm… everything?”

“are you seriously failing all your classes?”

“yes…?”

“why do you sound so unsure of yourself?”

yujin gulps. “it’s just a little embarrassing to admit, I guess.”

“well, I was planning to take a break from tutoring this year, but if you’re really in need of help, I can make an exception.” you pull out a business card from the front pocket of your bag. “this has all my contact information and tutoring rates. we can figure out whatever meeting times are convenient for the both of us later. sound good?”

he gives you a wordless nod of affirmation, and with that, his fate is sealed

you turn around to leave

however, unlike the last encounter, you look back

“hey, what’s your name again?”

“yujin, han yujin,” he nearly stutters out his own name

you curtly nod, walking away while quietly mumbling his name as a reminder to remember it

yujin closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, wonder what he just got himself into

the first meet is on a monday at the library after school

to put it shortly, it’s a disaster

“weren’t you the one that asked me to tutor you? I wouldn’t have agreed if I knew you’d get this distracted.”

yujin couldn’t focus in the slightest

he didn’t want to be there, which was unfortunate since he could’ve used this as an actual opportunity to boost up his class rank

yet he wanted to be living his life, putting off his studies until the last minute like he normally does

he tells himself to put up with all your complaints and scoldings just to appease you, but it only leads to him reaching his breaking point about a whopping three meetings later

“I lied.”

“great, now finish your practice questions.”

yujin grunts in a fit of frustration. “aren’t you curious as to what I lied about?”

“not really. you can tell me after you finish your practice questions.”

you won’t hear him out otherwise, so he does as told

you check the worksheet, marking all the incorrect answers before setting down your red pen and resting your chin in the palm of your hand with boredom

“I’m listening.”

“the note I gave you to meet me at the field that day… it was actually meant for someone else.”

“so you were planning to confess to someone.”

“yes,” yujin confirms before a wave of confusion hits his face. “wait, what? you knew?”

you shrug. “it was more of a heavy suspicion with the heart and the chocolate milk. but you were the one that asked for tutoring so I couldn’t say no to a client.”

“but you practically knew I was lying! I thought you hated people wasting your time.”

“I do. it’s what I hate more than anything. I only accepted because I need the money.” you stand up and begin to pack your belongings. “now that everything’s all cleared up, we can go our separate ways, right?”

“no!” yujin shouts, garnering weird looks from everyone in the library

feeling embarrassed with all the eyes drawn to you, you decide to leave anyways

and yujin finds himself chasing after you

at first, there’s not much rhyme or reason as to why, just a lingering ambiguity of regret and general instinct

though as he catches up to you towards the front of the school, he starts to piece together what it is that he’s feeling

the thing about yujin is that he never goes out of his way to make things right

if he makes a mistake, then he’ll ignore the entire situation all together until the remorse and responsibility fade away

that’s what he’s always been doing with you, cowardly entering and exiting your personal space without permission and then having nothing to make up for it

he yells for you to wait up, but you don’t stop in your tracks until he runs faster and blocks your path

you roll your eyes. “what?”

yujin catches his breath. “look, I’m sorry for being a nuisance. I want to apologize by working harder. I’ll pay more attention this time and get my grades up.”

“you don’t have to pity me. I’ll still survive with or without the tutoring money.”

“I’m not pitying you! I know I didn’t come into this with the best intentions, but I’ll make your time worth it, I promise.”

to you, his words may not bear much weight, but you decide to give him one last chance. if things started going south, then hopefully he’d get the hint and you could drop him for good

“we start again the day after tomorrow. don’t be late.”

while your doubt initially overtook any faith you had in the boy, yujin turns out to be better than you thought he was

you figure out he’s not failing all his classes like he had exaggeratedly claimed before

he’s more of a decent student that could use a good push, and once you help him tap into his potential, yujin actually begins to see an improvement in his grades

little by little, you even find other aspects of your life seeping into his too

such as eating lunch together

it wasn’t a daily must, but yujin felt bad constantly seeing you eat lunch by yourself, despite your protests of enjoying the solitude

it started with him calling you over to ask questions on the class material, and then slowly evolved into him inviting you over with no particular reason at all

as his best friend, gunwook would be there as well

“park.”

“hello to you too, l/n.”

yujin can’t help but snort, eating his lunch in amusement. “you guys are still so formal with each other.”

“competition is competition. I’m going to outrank you someday, l/n,” gunwook declares with a playful smirk

you only rest your head on the desk, using your arms as a cushion

“try me, park. try me.”

“you’re not going to eat?” yujin points out

“forgot to bring anything. was too tired from work last night.”

yujin takes a snack from his lunch bag and taps your arm with it before placing it on the desk

reluctantly, you accept the offering

“how do you do it?” gunwook queries. “my parents don’t allow me to have a part-time job, because they want my main priority to be school and the debate team.”

you sigh. “I work hard because if I don’t, then what else do I have? making friends and going out doing nonsense is for the people who have the time and money to afford it.”

albeit a bit hurt, yujin appears more puzzled than disappointed by your answer

“doing nonsense? you mean having fun?”

you continue on explaining, ignoring his comment, “I used to do my regular tutoring schedule and my part-time job last year, but it became too exhausting. some students are just a piece of work.”

“except me, right?”

you give him a small nod, lips curling upward just a fraction, but even that makes yujin’s heart skip a beat. “thankfully, you’re one of the better ones.”

for the majority of the lunch period, gunwook’s the one to actually keep you entertained, the two of you casually engaging in an academic conversation that has yujin lost in his own thoughts

“but seriously, y/n, you need to relax sometimes. you’ll get burnt out if you keep going like this,” gunwook says, tapping below his eye to refer to your dark circles

yujin begins to notice just how tired you are, the layers of fatigue sewn into your skin

and it’s in that moment a lightbulb goes off in his head

“oh, I have a good idea! y/n, can we cancel our tutoring session later today?”

“no,” you instantly shut him down, resulting in him childishly sulking

“can we do something after then? it’ll be a surprise!”

‘I hate surprises’ is what you want to say, but his pleading eyes oddly have an effect on you

and that’s how he lures you into a rare afternoon detour

“an arcade?”

“yeah!” he cheers, then studies your wary reaction. “you’ve never been?”

you give him a pointed look. “what do you think the answer to that question is?”

yujin pouts, rambling on and on about how he knew this wasn’t exactly your scene but was still baffled to the fact you’ve never stepped foot into an arcade in your life

he brings this up when you majorly lose to him in air hockey, dance dance revolution, and every game under the sun

your reflexes are some of the worse he’s ever seen

however, you still let him explain the rules each time and don’t get upset when you crash and burn, so he appreciates your efforts to try and understand the experience

then lastly, he guides you towards the line of claw machines, peering at the prizes inside each one

he asks if there’s anything you’re interested in, but you just let him choose

he goes with one filled with pastel colored stuff animals, aiming for a baby blue bunny that he ends up completely missing

“do you want to give it a try?” he asks but inserts the cash and ushers you forward before you’ve even decided yet

toying with the buttons experimentally, you give it your best shot

“ah, that was so close!” yujin’s hands shoot up to weave through his hair as you almost had it

“stupid machine,” you mutter, kicking the bottom of it with your sneaker. “aren’t these things just money suckers? what’s so fun about them?”

“you’re just saying that because you didn’t win.”

“oh, I’ll win,” you say with determination, your competitive side finally taking over

yujin goes around analyzing the side angles and directing you where to move the claw, and while you don’t verbal respond, he can see by the claw movements that you’re listening to him

once it’s aligned to your liking, you watch as it drops and barely latches onto the bunny’s ear, miraculously holding on enough to release it right into the prize box in the corner

yujin audibly celebrates the success more than you do, but there’s prominent sense of accomplishment you throughly enjoy

you retrieve the stuffed bunny and shove it in his hand. “here.”

he tries to give it back but you stubbornly refuse to take it from him

“don’t you want to keep it? you won it, after all,” he says

“I don’t really care for stuffed animals. it kind of looks like you though, so consider it yours. think of it as a gift for improving your test scores.”

he innocently holds the stuffed bunny up to his face. “it looks like me?”

you laugh, and yujin thinks it’s the most beautiful laugh he’s ever heard

you teasingly tilt your head and put a finger on your chin, an action so out of character that he’s almost memorized by it

“hmm… maybe the bunny’s a little cuter.”

a chuckle escapes from yujin’s lips and his eyes refuse to leave the ground

but when he looks back up again, he’s met by your warm and comforting expression, a side he’s never seen of you before

and while the moment passes and the day comes to an end, you’re the last thing on his mind that night and the first thing the next morning

then in the following weeks, thinking of you becomes routine

it makes him reflect on why he held onto his previous crush for so long, because you’re nothing like them yet the way he feels about you is stronger than anything he’s ever felt before

his entire life, yujin’s always been stuck in his comfort zone

and he thought that to like someone, the more things they have in common, the better

yujin thinks about how you both have opposite upbringings, opposite hobbies, opposite personalities, and how none of that really matters to him

in fact, it’s one of the main reasons he’s grown to like you so much

he likes letting you into his world, and his heart flutters when you let him into yours

whether it’s you telling him about your favorite books or the kind of music you listen to when you study, he wants to know it all

one day, he searches his room for the book he had bought all those months ago

it ignites a sense of nostalgia in him when he finds it, the memory now feeling so distant considering how far your relationship has developed since

though when he gifts it to you, he doesn’t quite get the reaction he’s expecting

“oh, thanks. how did you know I needed a new copy?”

yujin’s almost dumbfounded by the question

“because… I was the one that ruined the original… I got water all over it, remember? I actually bought the new one not too long after everything happened, but I was too scared to give it to you.”

“oh, that was you?” there’s a small glimpse of guilt in your eyes for not remembering. “sorry, I’ve never been good with names and faces.”

“but you remembered gunwook’s name back then. you called him park.”

“because he’s class president and a high ranking student. you know what they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” you say half-jokingly

“are you only interested in people like gunwook?”

“well, I wouldn’t say that. I like you, don’t I?”

yujin’s face can’t help but glow a bright red

he knows you don’t mean it as a confession, though a part of him wishes he could’ve poured his heart out right then and there nonetheless

and that’s not the only instance where he gets that inclination

it’s the very thing that eats away at him until he finally plans to act on it

he waits until the end of the semester for final exams to be over so he doesn’t accidentally overwhelm or burden you while you’re already stressed out

“is it just me or am I getting déjà vu?” is the first thing you say when you meet him in the familiar location by the field

his stance is awkward, smile crooked, and his hands are stiffly hidden behind his back

there’s a brief pause in the air as he mentally prepares himself again and again with what he had practiced beforehand

firstly, an icebreaker

“so, what are you doing over break?”

you rack your brain for a second. “probably just picking up more shifts at work. nothing interesting.”

“I’ll be able to visit you though, right?”

“sure,” you say with an airy laugh at his eager tone, “I mean, we can just hang out whenever too, but I’m guessing that’s not what you brought me here to talk about.”

you’re about to confront him on his weird posture, but he abruptly beats you to the punch

“close your eyes and hold your hand out,” he instructs

“why?”

“just do it.”

yujin nervously places a small item in the center of your palm and covers it up by folding your fingers to form a fist around it

when he tells you to open your eyes again, you curiously unravel your fingers and look at it with a blank expression

“why are you giving me your name tag?”

“you really don’t know what it means?” yujin slowly asks, scratching the nape of his neck. “then it means nothing, sorry for bothering you!”

he tries to to end the conversation at that, but you hook a hand around his wrist to prevent him from walking away

“yujin,” you call out his name softly, “just be honest with me.”

he freezes, and it feels like an eternity has passed until—with a sudden splurge of confidence—he holds your hand that was originally on his wrist and takes a step closer to you

“when someone gives a person their name tag, it means that they like them.”

it’s right there he realizes he’ll remember this moment forever, because it’s the first time he’s ever made you speechless

he uses the hand not intertwined with yours to point at your cheeks

“y/n, are you blushing?”

you immediately swat his hand away. “no, I’m not.”

he stares at you patiently for a proper response to his confession, an annoying grin plastered on his face like he’s taunting the answer out of you

silently, you remove the name tag from your blazer and place it in his palm

“can I hear your answer aloud?”

that makes you snap your head up and gently push him by the shoulder. “hey, you technically didn’t say it outright either!”

yujin bursts out into laughter, but once the atmosphere becomes quiet again, it’s his turn to blush

“I like you, y/n. I really, really like you.”

you give his hand a light squeeze. “and I really, really like you too, han yujin.”

main masterlist

permanent taglist: @shiningstar-byulxx @yeolsbestie

#zb1 #zerobaseone #zb1 au #zb1 imagines #zb1 scenarios #zb1 x reader #zb1 yujin #han yujin #han yujin x reader #yujin x reader #yujin au #yujin imagines #yujin scenarios #zb1 gunwook #park gunwook

[dnickels]

RE: 5x05. I have no idea how much I'm supposed to read into this, but that has never stopped me before:

It's VE Day. Havers is back in England. The post office, telephone system, communication infrastructure etc all still work. So where is Cap's sense of urgency coming from? He knows the full name and regiment of a serving officer, a letter will get where it needs to go, they're very good about that over there. Yes, Cap's been waiting, but its been six years, he can wait a little longer-- hang out in the bushes until he sees Haver's car drive away and bang on the window, if he insists on being an insane person (<3). Figure out where he's billeted. Japan hasn't surrendered yet, so I suppose there's a chance Havers could get shipped to Burma or something and potentially die there, but he's not going to go straight from the cocktail reception to the troop ship, especially if everyone there is about to get "Hitler defeated"-levels of drunk. ("They're all red tabs, surely decency and decorum--" they are going to roll those old soaks out of there in wheelbarrows)

The urgency isn't because Havers might die. I think Cap knew his time was short.

He's a middle aged man in tolerably good shape, all that ration food aside. He make good time on his morning jogs, and his biggest ailment is 'creaky knees'. "Widowmaker heart attack out of nowhere" isn't an unheard of COD for someone who seems otherwise fine, especially someone who has been under a fair amount of stress (six years of wartime, including the fucking Blitz would do a number on my heart) but his sudden relocation makes me pause. It's only been about a year since he got relocated away from Button House, right? What was all that about? It's presumably still requisitioned, given that they're throwing a swanky victory party there and Heather Button is nowhere to be seen, but has the weapons program been disbanded? Or was there some reason to pull the CO out of a high-stress position and send him to the beach to take potshots at seagulls? (I am being glib here-- the coast was NOT a stress-free place when you can see your enemy just across the Channel). I genuinely forget what he said he was doing in season three-- was he even still in the army at all, or did they send his ass to the Home Guard? Even they got a campaign ribbon.

I think Cap made one last push to get to the front, and while its very clear that this dingus should under no circumstances be on the front line (<3) they humored him with a medical-- and found something really troubling. Or maybe he went in of his own accord, the old flutter, or maybe it was just a routine checkup. Either way he got some very serious news, so sorry old boy, just one of those things, could be any day now-- best make sure your affairs are all in order.

Hence the single-minded desire to meet, once last time. Everyone else clearly drove-- did he walk all the way from the train station, down the country lanes? Did he feel a little short of breath scaling all those walls? Did every set-back and stressor make him more determined-- just give me a little more time, just a little more time...

It could also be that he just got yelled at so hard he died of it, which is almost certainly how I will go, but that was my immediate impression and it has not left me, nor have I known peace. I know there's a few holes in my theory but I haven't talked myself out of it yet. For me the kicker is that he experiences at least ten devastating emotions in the last moments of his life, but "surprise at entering cardiac arrest" does not appear to be one of them. It looks more like grim acceptance. Stoic in the face of death-- a soldier to the end.

#bbc ghosts #ghosts spoilers #the captain #I will be so embarrassed if I wasnt watching closely enough #and this is all explicitly text no one thought to comment on because duh #but I didn't see it in the tags and I think I might explode just thinking about it #I have mooooooooore thoughts and you will hear them! #ghosts season 5

[thisweekinfandomhistory]

Re: Endgame. Oh, boy do I loathe Steve’s “resolution.” I read a quote where one of the Russos said that the hyper-patriotism of Captain America “belonged in the past,” so that was part of their thinking there.

And I just…that’s when it was confirmed for me that they never understood Captain America. Since his creation, Cap has been what the United States SHOULD BE, not what it is. And what could our country need more now than a guy who socks Nazis in the face?! He could not possibly be more timely.

Of all the things that the Russos have said about Steve (and yes, this includes all that whining they did about how COOL it would have been to have Thanos bowl 2014 Steve's head into the feet of his 2023 self and how LAME it was that the studio was rightfully horrified by that version of the script) that bit about him being the kind of "White, Patriotic American Male" that doesn't have a place in the present anymore...

That is the one that perpetually fills me (Emily) with rage.

Because HOW could you possibly look at Steve "I don't like bullies, I don't care where they're from/SHIELD, Hydra, it all goes/If I see a situation pointed south I can't just ignore it" Rogers and equate him with the red hat-wearing 'Merica Fuck Yeahs marching around saying "We're Number One!"

How could you do it? Just be honest. Just say "We're uncreative schmucks who couldn't figure out how to sunset Evans out of the franchise after his contract was up." Just say that! Don't burn his whole character to the ground and salt the earth with the WORST ENDING EVER.

#anti endgame #anti endgame steve rogers #avengers endgame

[saw-x]

Hi so I’ve had a couple of anons asking me how I make my gifs (some specifically hsmtmts gifs lol) so I’ve decided to write up a tutorial of the basics of how I make my gifs. I’m going to try and make it as detailed and clear as possible - but I have been pretty busy with uni and stuff so if I miss anything or anything isn’t clear just lmk and I will do my best to clarify. I’m going to try and include any resources or other tutorials which may be useful as I go along. This is going to be quite long and detailed so tutorial follows under the cut. For some basic steps I know of good tutorials for - I will link tutorials rather than re-explaining :)

Before we begin with the tutorial part bear with me there are a couple of screencaps which I took out of sequence because I forgot to take them at the step I did it - and the final gif colouring result looks kind of different from the rest of the screencaps because when I was adding the gif to the gifset I was making it for I decided it needed to be brighter because the s3 scene was much brighter than the s2 gif I made for this tutorial (none of this really matters, just explaining the slight discrepancy in some of the caps).

1. SOFTWARE

To make all of my gifs I use Photoshop CS5 (this is the version I use). Any version of Photoshop should work with the methods in this tutorial and you can find a masterlist of cracked photoshops here

2. FINDING HQ VIDEO

When making gifs I always use 1080p video - but not all 1080p is created equally. Generally remux files and larger file sizes will produce better quality screencaps so this is what I search for when giffing. I know a lot of gifmakers who swear by using 4k, but personally I find 4k is more trouble than its worth in my opinion (screencaps always come out weird on my computer - like with a full on green tint, and they take forever to download). For HSMTMS in particular I like to use the release labelled 1080p SALT.

In terms of finding videos, this is a good guide on downloading.

3. SCREENCAPPING

I use mpv player to take screencaps for my gifs. This is a tutorial on how to use and install mpv. When taking your screencaps make sure you have continuous screencaps and no frames are skipped or duplicated. These missing/extra frames will make your gif look choppy and the animation won’t be smooth.

After finishing my screencaps I put them all in folders and move the folders to my desktop (but it can be anywhere you easily can access the folder) to import into Photoshop.

4. IMPORTING SCREENCAPS TO PHOTOSHOP

Open Photoshop. Open the Menu path "File > Scripts > Load Multiple DICOM files” and select the folder where the screencaps for your gif are. 

5. CROPPING AND RESIZING GIFS

Click the ‘Crop’ button on Photoshop (the little button shown in the screenshot below). Typically I like to use a preset so that all the gifs in the set I make are the same size. For this set I used the 4x5 crop preset because that is what I typically use.

Position the crop where you want the gif (typically I like the character in the center).

Then push enter (or the tick next to the crop buttons) to confirm your crop.

Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + I to resize your image. This will bring up a little pop up like this:

Resize your gif accordingly based on the width. It is important to use the correct dimensions for the size of the gif you wish to make. These are summarized in the below image.

When you change the width to the correct size (e.g. in this case 540px) the height will automatically change as well.

Click Ok to resize.

6. ANIMATING YOUR GIF + SHARPENING

There are quite a lot of steps to turning your frames into a timeline animation. They are covered in detail in this amazing gif tutorial (which is the main one which helped me learn to gif).

It would be useful to have a read of how the process works, but to speed things up for myself I use a Photoshop action (shared here) I made that does all these steps for me plus my sharpening😊 (Here is a tutorial explaining how to create & install Photoshop actions)

I just highlight the word animate click the play sign and it does all the tedious steps in a couple of seconds. Note it is important to keep the reverse frames one unticked as shown in the screencap otherwise your gifs will move backwards

After that runs through we have our gif in timeline mode sharpened and ready to colour :)

7. BASIC COLOURING TECHNIQUE

My basic colouring process is very simple and honestly it may shock some people but I primarily colour my basic scene gifs using only the curves and vibrance adjustment layers. There a few reasons for this – 1) The curves tool is a powerful tool and you can do a lot with it 2) Less adjustment layers = better quality gifs 3) This works for me and it is what I find easy. Essentially, I like to keep things simple where ever possible.

First I add a curves layer by clicking on the highlighted adjustment layer

This gives you a menu that looks like this:

The great thing about Curves is that Photoshop will do a lot of the work for us if we use the eyedropper tools.

First I click the white eye dropper – then I pick a white point on the gif and see how it goes. This can take a few times to get right and often I will try a few times to see which I like best.

For this gif I selected the white light in the background but it looks a little green to me

After I have selected my white point I will usually do the same thing except with picking a black point of the gifs. I don’t always pick a dark point it kind of depends on how much I like what Curves has done with the white point and if I think the gif needs more contrast.

For this gif I picked a black point of the area behind Ricky. This is what the gif looks like now with the dark point chosen:

This looks a little better to me than just the white point – but the screencap still looks kind of yellowy and dark to me. So what I do now is I go into each colour channel for the curve and manually adjust it to my liking.

Since this gif is yellow I start in the blue channel and add more blue. I do this by changing the drop down menu on the curves screen from RGB to blue. This gives me something like this to work with:

Essentially I adjust the amount of blue in the gif by sliding the white arrow down the bottom up or down to add more or less blue to the gif. For this gif I am going to slide white arrow at the bottom to the left to make the gif more blue (i.e. neutralise yellow). If I think I have added too much blue I slide it back to the right to add yellow back in.

This is what I adjusted it to and it already looks a lot better

I am actually pretty happy with the overall colouring of this for the moment and I don’t think I need to go into the red and green curves. But I will briefly explain what they do/how they work by showing what some adjustments to these curves looks like.

Red curve – here is our starting point

Dragging the curve to the left will introduce more red into the image

Dragging it back to the right will take out red (the gif will become more cyan)

Green curves: this is our starting point

Dragging the green curve to the left will add more green to the image

Dragging it to the right will take green out (adding pink/magenta)

So after I am happy I have coloured the image in curves If I want the gif to be a little brighter I go back to the main RBG Curves screen and drag the white arrow a little up to the left to add some additional brightness

After colouring with Curves I add in a Vibrance layer (highlighted adjustment layer)

Typically I set the vibrance somewhere between 50 and 60.

This is what the gif looks like now:

At this point I also have another quick look at the gif and see if I think I need to go back into curves and tweak the colouring a bit and add a bit of extra brightness. When I add in the Vibrance I find it easier to see if there is any underylying colours I want to go back and neutralise/adjust in my curves layer again.

This is what I end up with after making my adjustments post vibrance layer:

Another step I do sometimes is grabbing the black slider on curves and dragging it just a little bit to the right to add some depth and contrast to the gif. As s2 of hsmtmts is really dark I didn’t do it for this gif because I don’t think it needs it. But I will show an example of what this might look like:

This is basically it for my basic colouring. Of course there are a lot of different steps to making my colourful gifsets, but this is just a basic tutorial for the way I gif standard scenes so I will move on to subtitling gifs.

8. CAPTIONS

My go to subtitle font is Arial Rounded MT Bold. I have Faux Italic and Faux Bold Selected for this. I like bigger font sizes because I have bad eyesight so usually I will opt between 20 – 24 pt font size

I click the T button to add text then I type out my caption.

Obviously we don’t want our text here so I align it to the bottom and centre of the gif I do this by first selecting the move tool then going ctrl + a (this selects our gif as the boundary for our alignment). You will know this is done based on the border that comes around the gif (also please ignore that drop shadow and outline settings have already been applied here lol – I added this in because I forgot to screen cap/ explain this part initially)

Then I align my text using the following menu buttons:

Next I Ctrl +D to remove the selection (you need to do this to be able to nudge your text up for the next step). This is the result of the alignment:

Now I nudge the caption up by selecting the text layer and pushing ctrl + shift + up

This is the result:

This looks ok, but I always add an outline and dropshadow to make the text more readable. To do this I go into the blending options for the text layer. You can do this by right clicking the layer and selecting blending options or by double clicking the layer (but not on the text).

First I add Stroke with these settings

Then I add Drop Shadow with these settings:

9. SAVING GIFS

To save your file use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S to open the save for web settings. You will get a screen like this. The settings shown in this screen are my typical save settings (except it should say ‘Forever’ on looping options)

However, Tumblr’s gif limit is 10mb so the size of this gif is too big to upload (it is nearly 12 mb) so we have to go back in the timeline to shorten the gif a bit so we can upload it to tumblr.

I do this by dragging the red preview thingy (idk what else to call it) around till I find a point where I feel the gif has a natural end. Then I grab the timeline bar thingy (idk what it’s called but the silver gray bar at the end of the gif) to the red bar to shorten the gif.

Now press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S again to save your gif and make sure you set the Looping Option to ‘Forever’. Sometimes I have to shorten the gif a few times to get it under 10mb - but luckily I got it first go this time :)

Now your gif is saved but there is still one step left to do. Photoshop has a glitch where it automatically sets gif speed to 0.7 after saving from the timeline function – we don’t want that! The gifs look very slow and are not very smooth.

So what we do is we open the gif that we just saved and this will open in the frame format. All we have to do is select all frames and set the gif speed to 0.5 – I also have this in my action so I go back to the actions and highlight the line that says ‘set frame speed’ and play the action through

Then we just save the gif again as we just did 😊

This is the end result:

and what the gif looks like without any colouring or text:

One other helpful tip:

If you are giffing from the same scene you can do your colouring and text manually as per the tutorial on the first gif for the set and then drag what you did across to the second (after cropping, resizing and animating it). All you need to do is drag the colouring outside to a different window then highlight your adjustment layers + text and drag them to the new canvas off of the gif (If you drag it on top of the gif it will place it where you put it. Make sure to go off the canvas to so it will keep you positioning/alignment of the text you made 😊)

Basically - you drag the text, curves, vibrance (and any other layers you need) to the gray area of your photoshop document and your colouring will be applied and your text will be placed in the same position as your source doc.

Ok so that is my super basic gif tutorial - if anyone has any questions feel free to ask!

#hsmtmtsedit #*mine #request #gif tutorial #resources #ps help #photoshop tutorial #usergif #allresources #yeahps #completeresources #resourcemarket #dailyresources #userelsbeth #usersavana #useraurore #userrobin #usersole #uservalentina #tuserheidi #okkk so this is kind of a weird choice of gif for the tutorial but I just followed my process as I made a gif request this morning #plus I do feel like its a really ugly screenshot so shows the results of the colouring quite well #but anyway i hope this helps someone

[transmutationisms]

pleaaase share any and all thoughts you might have on as i lay dying by william faulkner if you're willing, i'd appreciate your analysis on any topic dealing with it. I recently had to read it for class and kept thinking "tumblr user transmutationisms would probably find this very interesting" and when I search your blog i see its one of your fav novels! personally am interested with the treatment of darl and what is considered "sane" vs. "insane" as well as addie and how her death is handled.

yeah this book made me so insane when i first encountered it lmao. i was always surprised by people who read it and thought that darl had genuinely or intrinsically 'gone insane' or even that he was in some kind of decline throughout the book. i thought what faulkner was doing with him was very different.

i'd posit there are basically 2 main mechanisms by which darl comes to be regarded as insane. one is the construal of criminal action as prima facie pathological. in darl's case it's specifically criminal action against his mother's body (so, the violation of a blood tie that is so important it has guided the entire novel) and ofc the barn burning has a more general sort of antisocial effect as well. so, the designation of insanity follows not because darl's action shows some kind of intrinsic breakdown or loss of lucidity, but because it puts him outside the bounds of accepted familial and social behaviours. so, in that sense there's a very straightforward connection between the social mores, the criminal code based on them, and the invocation of insanity to preserve the dichotomy between 'sane' and 'criminal', ofc with the asylum then appearing as another arm of the carceral / criminal apparatus.

in addition, though, faulkner's work is generally marked by an interest in the sort of social breakdown and decline that articulates along family lines. which is to say: although i wouldn't attribute to him the same degree of evolutionary-hereditarian degeneracy theory as, like, zola, there is certainly a repeated interest throughout faulkner's work in the family as a site of inherited social and economic decline. i don't think the point here is to write anse as insane, per se, or as passing on a discrete malady to darl, but parentage matters (cf. jewel's illegitimacy) and in the same way that anse is antisocial, illogical, and frequently illegible to the surrounding characters, darl by the end of the book has come to occupy a similar socially marginal position. darl is ofc punished more violently for his transgression; anse's chapters convey pretty clearly his outsider position and complete inability to make sense of the world on linguistic-logical terms, but darl escalates this when he burns the barn because he's breaking a rule that has more external social ramifications than, say, anse's biblical exegesis about snakes and trees and whatever.

broadly and kind of annoyingly you could say the novel is investigating the relationship between consciousness and language, or at least feeling and language. the words are "a shape to fill a lack", vardaman's fish chapter sort of sums up the failings therein, &c. so, anse and darl are interesting to counterpose in this respect because the disconnect between their inner worlds and linguistic abilities are very different. darl is the most linguistically adept narrator in the book, yet by the end he's committed an act so illegible to the state and to his community that he's declared insane for it. anse, on the other hand, is motivated by what is in certain ways a very clear and simple moral code (he is driven primarily throughout the novel by the desire to bury addie and then take care of his own material needs re: teeth and a new wife), but he's not really able to communicate this directly in narration, which makes his chapters some of my favs to re-read. with anse the stream-of-consciousness is continually hinting at and around what he's trying to convey; with darl there are certainly things he's capable of expressing clearly and directly in language, and so the effect (for me) is to surprise you when it's revealed that darl, too, is on a kind of margin of social logic.

#as i lay dying

[universitypenguin]

Hey Alice :) I know you did something already for Valentine’s Day where Lloyd spoiled princess but I was wondering what if the roles were reversed? Would princess 👑 do anything sweet for Lloyd? As always thank you so much for writing this amazing story 🥹

Thank you so much for this ask! 🥰

I had a lot of fun thinking about what Princess would do for Lloyd on Valentine’s Day if she were the one planning their celebration. I know for a lot of men it feels like a one sided bargain which is something a guy like Lloyd would find incredibly annoying. Of course he loves Princess, so his perspective on the holiday has shifted, but I feel like Princess would want to do something special for him, too.

When I was pondering the dynamics between the characters, I did a lot of thinking about that piece I wrote about Lloyd’s approach to Valentine’s Day. It’s clear that his plan for the day was mainly driven by his need for social validation. Yes, his overall goal was to please Princess, but his actions in the story centered around impressing her social circle and gaining attention. This is quintessential Lloyd Hansen behavior. He’s motivated by a very superficial type of recognition, because that’s all he’s ever known before.

Princess is very aware of this because she understands Lloyd and knows how to read him. That said, by the end of the day she was getting sick of the extravagance and the theatrical, exhibitionistic display it had become. She did appreciate his efforts, but what she really wanted was a personal connection that memorialized their relationship, not ones driven by external validation.

Side bar: The fact that Jenn was the one who realized the disconnect between Lloyd and Princess was so funny to me. Like, if you’ve read the backstory pieces you know Jenn and Lloyd absolutely despise each other. She really proved her devotion to Princess by going to Lloyd in private and re-orientating him in the right direction. It was kind of like watching the Grinch save Christmas. 😂

So, after all this reflection on what Lloyd’s take on Valentine’s Day represented to the characters, I came up with a plan for how Princess would choose to spend the holiday if planning it were up to her.

First, she wouldn’t try to steal Lloyd’s thunder by planning something for the actual date of Valentine’s Day on her own. Knowing how important it is to him to have center stage and step up to prove his worth as a boyfriend to her (and all of their friends and coworkers) she’d sit back and graciously indulge his extravagant public display of affection. Princess would wholeheartedly mask her desire for more intimate gestures in an effort to honor his intentions.

Which is why she would plan her own Valentine’s Day celebration… but in deference to Lloyd, she’d arrange it for the weekend after V-Day.

Her take on the holiday would prioritize their shared interests and revolve around activities they both enjoy, starting with a relaxing morning at the spa and a leisurely brunch. For the afternoon Princess would reserve a cozy spot at one of Lloyd's favorite restaurants for a late lunch, ensuring a quiet, private ambiance for uninterrupted conversation.

As for his gift, Princess would cater to Lloyd's interests, by arranging a golf trip to Myrtle Beach for him and his friends. The rest of their afternoon would be spent wandering through the D.C. botanical gardens, a favorite pastime of Princess’ that Lloyd has also come to appreciate. In the evening they’d go on a romantic sunset catamaran ride down the Potomac River to cap off the day.

The rest of their night unfolds at home. Having spent the day out on the town, Princess would opt for reheating leftovers at home over going out for a fancy dinner. After all, Lloyd’s homemade Coq au Vin from their Valentine’s Day meal is even better the second time around. Then they would cuddle up on the couch with their dinner as Lloyd picks out a movie for them to watch. When he suggests turning the weekend after Valentine’s Day into their own personal holiday, a warmth spreads through Princess’ chest.

For some, it would be devastating if their partners’ approach to celebrating a romantic holiday like Valentine's Day was very different from their own. However, at that moment Princess realizes that she’d never want to spend Valentine’s Day with anyone else. Despite the fact that they have incredibly different perspectives and values - something which could easily drive a wedge between even the strongest of couples - she and Lloyd somehow always come to a unique, peculiar state of equilibrium. They balance each other out, and in the end, that’s the best gift he could ever give her.

#lloyd hansen imagine #lloyd hansen blurb #lloyd hansen ask #lloyd hansen one shot #lloyd x princess #lloyd hansen au #lloyd hansen x you #lloyd hansen x y/n #lloyd hansen x reader #lloyd hansen fanfiction #lloyd hansen x female reader #lloyd hansen x fem!reader #the princess and the lawyer #series: the princess and the lawyer #the princess & the lawyer: ask #the princess & the lawyer #chris evans charaters

[f10werfae]

A Halloween For Three

pairing: Husb!Dad!Chris x Short!Wife!Mom!reader

Summary: Can you do a short on Chris and short reader and the triplets Halloween like taking them trick or treating and their costumes please! (request by anon)

requests are open/likes, comments and re-blogs are appreciated♥️

Chris Evans Masterlist, Full Masterlist, Taglist Form

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

- For Halloween the Evans family decided to dress up like Toy Story. The three triplets being the three aliens, Y/n was little Bo Peep and Chris was Woody

- With it being the first time the triplets are going trick or treating, each of them had their own customised baskets for their candy. Isabella chose a sparkly pink pumpkin basket, with the boys choosing green and blue.

- At one of the houses they got to, unfortunately there wasn’t enough candy left for little Isabella, the younger of the three. Noah and Jacob took it upon themselves to actually take some of their own candy and put it in her basket; a wide toothy grin plastered onto her tiny cute face

- Chris on the other hand along with protectively watching over his three buggers, also kept an eye on his wife, who was now heavily pregnant with their fourth baby. Despite Chris' pleas, Y/n was adamant on walking around their suburban neighbourhood to support their kids on their first proper venture of the outside world.

- With one hand wrapped around her waist at all times, Chris found himself smiling to himself at the sight of his family at one of his favourite holiday seasons. After carving pumpkins the night before, Chris couldn’t help but feel a sense of fulfilment at the sight of his three kids jumping up and down each time they got a piece of candy.

- “Dada look, got jellybeans” Noah smiled holding up the packet of colourful sweets to his dad, he knew Chris' favourite candy, something that always warmed Chris’ heart.

- “Dada Uppies” Jacob whimpered holding his arms up for his father, “alright c’mere my little green alien” Chris cooed. Jacob nuzzling himself into his father’s arms, Noah and Isabella holding hands as they skipped down the sidewalk, Y/n and Chris following closely behind them.

- “Alright kids, let’s get home. Your momma needs some rest, and I know you little stinkers need bathed” Chris called after Noah and Isabella, watching his exact doubles turn and run back towards them laughing loudly at their father’s name for them

- Once arriving back home, Y/n relaxed onto their comfortable velvet sofa after having showered and removed het costume. Chris took it upon himself to take on bath duty that night, watching his three babies play with their toys in the tub, with them only being three he still couldn’t help but feel they were growing up too fast

- Heck the three pumpkins they each had tried to carve was placed on their front porch, stickers even being placed all over them

- Once the kids had each been read their own respective bed time stories, Chris slipped into bed beside his wife who was readily waiting for her nightly cuddles. During this pregnancy, Y/n found herself wanting more and more affection, both with her babies and her husband. An overload of family love overall

———

Taglist Tags (Form is up there^^): @s-void @oliviah-25 @mischiefsemimanaged @nikkitc0703 @chrisevansangel @chrisevansdaughter @cevansgurl @marvelgurl @evanstanwhore @taramaria @mirikusashes @evanstanwhore @patzammit @pandaxnienke @bxdbxtxh15 @dumb-fawkin-bitch @seren-a-ity @thereisa8ella @sairsei @jackslover12 @hallecarey1 @misshale21 @meetmeatyourworst @imboredat2am @adoreyouusugar @fdl305 @stormcloudss @vrittivsanghavi @uwiuwi @caps-shield1918 @xoxokiaraaxoxo @mysticfalls01 @royalwriteroftheuniverse @inlovewiththefictionalcharacters @madebylilly @kimhtoo17 @itsaylayay1213 @mrspeacem1nusone

#romance #chris evans imagine #chris evans x reader #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans #chris evans one shot

[runnning-outof-time]

Research | Tommy Shelby x Reader

Request: no - for @zablife ‘s 600 followers celebration

Pairing: Tommy Shelby x reader

Summary: Tommy enlists a librarian named (Y/N) to help him with research on his latest opponents.

Warnings: language, smoking, mentions of drinking

Word Count: 3109

A/N: this was a very self-indulgent fic to write because I thoroughly enjoy research and would love to be a librarian. Congrats on 600 followers again, Lee! Enjoy! :)

I’D LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK! - YOUR COMMENTS & REBLOGS HELP ME WRITE!

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged in future stories similar to this one!

(Y/N) was so busy working on re-cataloguing the returned books that she hadn't even noticed someone had approached the library's front desk. It wasn't until that person cleared their throat that she looked up. "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. How can I help you?" she apologetically asked the man standing across from her. He was dressed in a suit with an overcoat on top of it and was wearing a peaked cap.

"Can you help me find a book?" he asked her as he set his hands on the desk and leaned against them.

"Do you have a title?" (Y/N) asked, a polite smile on her face now.

"No. My sister said it was about the bastards that ran away," he gave her the little information that he did have. (Y/N) couldn't help but laugh slightly at his words.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that that's not its title," she pointed out the obvious before continuing, "you said sister...does she work here?"

The man nodded his head. "She does. Her name's Ada."

Realization flashed in (Y/N)'s eyes. "Shelby," she filled in the last name, "which means you're either Arthur, John, Thomas, or Finn," she then rattled off names before blushing slightly, "Ada talks about your family regularly."

"I'm Thomas," he told her, a slight smile playing on his lips, "but Tommy works too."

"Well it's nice to meet you, Thomas. My name's (Y/N)," she formally introduced herself then. "Now can you tell me what the topic of the book you're looking for is? Maybe that'll help narrow it down."

"The Russian Revolution," he gave her the information she was looking for and she nodded her head before she came around the desk and waved her hand for him to follow her.

"You're interested in history?" she asked him, her voice lowered now that they were walking amongst the shelves of books as well as the other patrons who were busy reading.

"Not necessarily..." he trailed off, his loud voice earning shushes in response, "just wanted to broaden me mind," he continued talking at the same volume level as before, unbothered by the disgruntled people.

(Y/N) only nodded her head as she brought him further into the library. She then stopped upon a shelf that she thought would have the book she was looking for. She looked at all of the options before grabbing the ladder and sliding it over to where the book she needed was. Then she climbed the rungs, grabbed it, and brought it back down for the man standing next to her. "Is this your book?" she asked, holding the small, red-covered book out in front of her.

"It is. Thank you," Tommy nodded his head before he took the book from her hand.

"You're welcome, Tommy," she smiled at him, happy to have helped him find the book he needed, "I'll be back at the desk...if you need help with anything," she then told him, jerking her thumb in the direction they'd come from.

"I'll come to you if I do," he nodded once more, a smile pulling at the corner of his lips as she then turned and walked away. He watched her go for a few moments before he found an empty table and sat at it. Then he opened the book and began reading.

"Good afternoon, (Y/N)...I was wondering if you'd be able to help me find some more books." The sudden voice came out of nowhere and it made (Y/N) jump; the pen in her hand went flying and the papers she had neatly stacked next to her book got disheveled as she set her hands on the desk to steady herself.

"You scared me, Tommy!" she exclaimed, knowing who the voice belonged without even having to look up. She had his voice stuck in her head since he first came to the library a week ago.

"Sorry," he apologized, although there was still a smirk on his lips. (Y/N) shook her head at his amused expression, unable to keep the smile from her features. "I need you to help me find some more books," he then repeated the second half of his original sentence.

"Ok," (Y/N) nodded before she went to the project that she was in the process of working on, "let me clean up what I was working on and we'll go see what we can find," she said as she made sure that her materials were in a neatly stacked pile before she came around the desk. "Follow me," she told him, waving him along as she walked through the shelves.

Soon enough, they were at a table with a few books stacked atop each other. Tommy had the same red-covered book in front of him again, and he was flipping through the pages as (Y/N) watched him intently. "You seem to like that book," she commented after a few quiet moments.

"It has the information that I need," Tommy answered her without looking up.

"But you've asked me to find you more books..." (Y/N) pointed out, trailing off as if the statement was a thought.

"I wanted to see if I could find more information," he responded, finally looking up at her. She lost her train of thought the second his blue eyes locked onto hers, and it took a moment to snap out of the trance that they'd brought on.

"I can help you find some," she told him after she finally managed to rip her focus away from his stare.

"Yeah?" he asked, his eyebrows raising slightly. She nodded and then picked her chair up so that she could bring it right next to his. Tommy glanced down at its placement, they were sitting rather close together now, but he didn't comment on it.

"Yes," (Y/N) affirmed with another slight nod before she motioned to the book. Tommy understood what she was getting at and let her take it from him. She then flipped to the back of the book and began scouring through the source notes that were present there. "Is there anything specific that you're looking for?" she asked him after she'd been flipping through the pages for a few moments.

"A man; named Leon Petrovich Romanov," Tommy answered her and she began flipping through the pages once more, "I'm interested in his dealings in Russia...wanted to find out more than just who he is," he continued as she then reached over for another book and started flipping through it.

"Any specific reason?" she asked out of curiosity as she then started searching through the book's index.

Tommy sucked in a breath and let it out, taking a moment to decide if he wanted to disclose any information to her before he responded, "I've been asked to work with him...I wanted to know more about what I'm getting myself into," he gave her a broad response.

She took it without further question and pulled a third book in front of her. Several moments passed before she finally stopped flipping through the pages and looking in his direction. "I've found some stuff that may be useful to you," she informed him. Tommy raised his eyebrows at her statement, his nonverbal way of asking her to continue. "There's information in this book about his family, his role in the Russian Revolution, and the people that he's been linked to," she then listed off the topics of information that she found. Tommy nodded along as she spoke. "The trick to finding more information and sources is looking at the notes included at the back of the book. Everyone skips over them really, but they help a great deal when you need to corroborate your evidence."

Tommy was impressed by her words. "You seem like you know what you're talking about," he commented.

"I'd hope so...I'm studying literature at university at the moment and my professors would have my head if I didn't know how to use an entire book properly," she told him, laughing slightly as she remembered all of her professors' lectures on the parts a book had.

"Literature?" Tommy questioned, intrigue in his voice.

(Y/N) nodded. "Yes, literature. American literature to be exact."

"And why American?"

"Because I read Henry David Thoreau's Walden and was instantly hooked," she answered his question, "now I've decided to devote my scholarly work to him."

"Is that what you were working on when I scared you?" he asked her, grinning slightly as he thought back to the reaction he caused.

(Y/N) rolled her eyes at the mention of what happened earlier, a smile forming on her face as she nodded her head slightly. "Yes. I was doing a deeper reading of Walden. My prospectus is focused on the question of whether or not Thoreau truly could have felt complete solitude amongst the woods when he was only living a mile away from civilization during the time of writing Walden, and I'm sorry...I'm probably boring you now," she ended by looking down at the table once more, feeling slightly embarrassed that she had just delved into what most people would find boring.

But Tommy didn't seem to mind. "You're not a bore," he assured her, "actually I wanted to know if you'd like to get a drink and explain to me more about your project," he then smoothly asked her. She was able to tell that there was a grin on his face without even looking at him.

She confirmed what she already knew when she turned her head to look at him. He still had his eyes on her and a half-smirk adorned his lips. She once again got sucked in by his eyes and had to fight hard not to just fall at his feet right there. "I've done my research on you, Tommy," she finally spoke, her voice now lower because they were rather close together.

"Oh yeah?" he started, his eyebrows raising, "what have you found?" he asked as his eyes widened slightly, the intrigue in them evident.

"Nothing good," she held his gaze, shaking her head slightly as an added measure.

Tommy laughed softly and nodded his head to the side, "sounds about right," he agreed with her, his smirk still present.

"I would be interested though," (Y/N) said almost as soon as he was done speaking. She mentally kicked herself for saying her words in a way that seemed desperate...like if she waited a second after he finished his statement, his mind would have been changed.

"Yeah?" his eyes were on hers again. He couldn't deny that he was surprised by her statement. He thought his chances had flown out the window when she hit him with the 'nothing good' line.

"Yes, but I'll have you know that it's because I'd like to tell you more about my work on Thoreau," she said, the second part of her statement making Tommy chuckle.

"Either way, I'll take it," he shrugged his shoulders.

The two first spent some time searching through the books placed on the table. Once they were finished, (Y/N) told her boss that she was leaving and they set out for one of the taverns that were close to the library. They were immediately given one of the finer tables in the establishment and a waiter came over so fast to take their order that (Y/N) couldn't even comment on the amazing service they were getting. Surely it had something to do with Tommy's standing within the city.

With their drinks in front of them, Tommy allowed (Y/N) to tell him more about the project she was working on and what she hoped to get out of it. Then Tommy, while staying mum on most of the finer details of what he was working on, gave (Y/N) some background on why he'd been wanting to do research on the Russian Revolution and the Archduke that he mentioned earlier.

After those topics were out of the way, they talked a bit more about themselves. Their conversation lasted for a long while without them even noticing until one of the managers of the establishment kindly asked for them to leave. They heeded to the request and Tommy graciously offered to walk (Y/N) home, which she accepted with butterflies in her stomach.

At the door to her apartment, she thanked Tommy for a wonderful evening and then pressed a kiss to his cheek. She immediately became embarrassed by her actions and felt that she went too far, but the grin that Tommy was wearing once she pulled away helped to quell her nerves. They bid each other goodnight and Tommy began walking down the hallway, away from her apartment. (Y/N) watched him until she couldn't anymore before turning the key and entering her dwelling with a smile on her face.

"Thomas Shelby, you can't be smoking in here!" (Y/N) hissed as she approached the table he was sitting at. He was focused on the book that lay open on the table, but (Y/N) was focused on the cigarette that was dangling from his lips.

Her voice made him look up. "Hi, love," he greeted her, the nickname he called her by making her insides heat up and a blush travel to her cheeks, but she had to remain calm. There had been more nights filled with drinks and conversation after the first, and now (Y/N) couldn't hide the fact that she may have developed an interest in this man.

"You need to put that cigarette out," she told him, her eyes still trained on it, “and you can’t be smoking here.”

"Didn't know," he mused as he removed it from his lips, exhaling a cloud of smoke as he dropped it to the floor and stamped it out with his shoe. (Y/N) gasped and looked down quickly, relief filling her once she saw that it had been extinguished on the wooden floor rather than carpet.

"Yes you did...I've told you a handful of times before," she told him, unable to stop the smile from forming on her face as he looked at her with a lazy grin. "What are you reading?" she asked him then.

"The same old shit," he replied, motioning to the book on the table before he sighed, "are there any more books on this royal family's involvement in the conflict?" he asked her then. She came around to where he was sitting and peered over his shoulder to get a good look at the book he had all while trying to ignore the sensation of her body brushing against his.

"There might be," she told him, glancing in his direction briefly before she took a step back and straightened out her skirt. "Follow me, I'll help you find some," she said, waiting for him to stand before she started walking through the rows of shelves.

"Should I be worried that you're taking me to the other side of the library?" Tommy commented after they'd been walking for a few moments.

"Shut it, Tommy," (Y/N) hissed, turning to shoot him a glare that she wasn't able to keep up for long due to the stupid grin on his face. Soon enough, she slowed down at a shelf of books. "There should be some amongst these books," she told him, her eyes carefully looking at the books' spines in hopes she'd find what she was looking for. Tommy, on the other hand, was too busy looking at her as he leaned up against the shelf. "Ok, so this one..." she trailed off as she pointed to a book on the shelf, "might have something in it about the family itself, but you said you're looking for something more on their involvement in the revolution, correct?"

"Hmm," was all she received, which made her look at him with raised eyebrows. Her eyes locked with his, engaging her in yet another fight to try and keep her right mind.

"You didn't hear a word I said, did you?" she asked, the startings of a grin playing on her lips.

"No," Tommy shook his head, not even seeing the point in lying. He continued before (Y/N) could say anything, "you looked fuckin' beautiful saying it though," he told her, a grin forming on his lips as he took in her shocked reaction.

"Tommy!" she hissed, her eyes wide as she tried to stop her cheeks from heating up.

"Sorry," he shrugged slightly before he pushed himself off of the shelf. In a swift movement, he managed to take hold of her hips so that he could pull her closer to him; close enough that their noses bumped before (Y/N) managed to steady herself by grabbing onto the lapels of his suit jacket. “Forgive me, eh?” he asked in a whisper, his breath fanning off of her lips as he looked at her through his eyelashes.

(Y/N) looked up at him with wide eyes, her heart practically beating out of her chest. His proximity was making her forget how she even got into this position, but she wasn’t about to waste the chance she’d just been given. Taking a deep breath and hoping for the best, she leaned in and pressed her lips to his. The kiss was soft at first, but then Tommy responded, kissing her with vigor as his grip on her hips tightened. Their lips stayed melded together until (Y/N) pulled back, her lungs screaming for air. She searched his eyes for a moment before exhaling a breath of a laugh and looking at the bookshelf.

“Maybe my research was wrong...” she finally said after a few beats of silence. Tommy’s brows furrowed at her statement, his silent way of asking her to elaborate. “I thought that you spent a lot of time here because you wanted to learn more about the Russian Revolution...when really you were interested in me.”

Her words made Tommy chuckle and shake his head slightly. “You thought I was coming here to read books, eh?” he asked her, quirking an eyebrow as a grin formed on his face.

“Maybe...” she trailed off, her cheeks heating up.

“Love, there ain’t anything I’ll ever be that interested in,” he told her. (Y/N) laughed at his statement before her mouth went dry at the look he was giving her. “Except for you...I’m very interested in you,” he added at the end before he leaned in and kissed her again.

Tagged: @alreadybroken-ts @magicalxdaydream @the-anxious-youth @cloudofdisney @look-at-the-soul @golden-hoax @elenavampire21 @peaky-cillian @mrsalwayswrite @julkaamazing @evita-shelby @lilyrachelcassidy @notyour-valentine @easilyobessedbutflighty @shelbydelrey @december16-1991 @onlydeadcells @peakyswritings @just-a-blackhole @watercolorskyy @strayrockette @peakyduchesss

MASTERLIST

#tommy shelby #tommy shelby x reader #tommy shelby x y/n #tommy shelby imagine #peaky blinders #peaky blinders x reader #peaky blinders x y/n #peaky blinders imagine #peaky blinders fanfiction #peaky blinders fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic

[robintherobiner]

Types of fics i need more of:

de-age fics. Baby Bruce? Teen Bruce? Baby Dick? Teen Dick? Baby Jason? Teen Jason. The list goes on and on. deage them all. is it sad? is it funny? is it cute? is it traumatic? i dont care, make them all little.

ghost fics. i want Jason to haunt the shit out of his family. he sees them all grieving, comes back to life, and instead of killing people he just leaves ominous notes like "i saw you trip on your cape." or "leave fifty bucks at *address* or i'll tell everyone about your superman body pillow."

Tim being an utter loser. I love him, but he should be incredibly put together in public and then he gets home and just... is a mess. never felt the touch of anyone, woman or man. can do complex mathematical equations but needs a calculator to solve 4 x 3. think Sherlock Holmes, who can tell everything about you from one look but doesnt know the earth revolves around the sun.

Alfred being called out for being an enabler! fuck that old man, i hate him. however if he made me a cup of tea, i would die for him. Im a very complex person.

Dick being Damians dad. so cute, i love it. Damian deserves to have his own taste of found family. fuck blood of the womb, lets go with blood of the covenent or whatever the quote says.

Jason being childish!!! i think his mental age should younger than his physical one cuz, trauma, being dead, being catatonic in some cases, also just being pretty young anywas? gimme a fic where he comes home covered in blood cuz he just killed four guys and then goes to have a shower so he can play with his rubber duckies.

kiddie crushes!!! gimme more Jason loving Wonder Woman and being an utter fanboy when he encounters her. "Oh em gee you're here to apprehend me? Wonder Woman, this is such an honor, can i have your autograph-" Young Dick meeting Superman for the first time and hiding under Bruce's cap because "He's so pretty Bruce, he's gonna hear my heart go fast!" Tim meeting Constantine and, to everyones despair, somehow adoring him. "So you do magic? Thats like, so cool! Tell me all about it. My parents were archeologists, we probably have loads of of magical objects, do you wanna check them? Do you like coffee? Did you really sell your soul to multiple people? Thats so hot- I MEAN COOL SHIT FUCK-"

Literally anything about Dicks time in the circus. I think i've only read like two fics about it? Compared to the hundreds going indepth on Tim and Jason's childhoods?

Similar to the last one, but gosh the culture shocks they all probably had! Dick was used to constantly moving from city to city. Jason going from being on the street to a mansion. Tim going from boarding school, a place full of kids his own age, to being alone in his house so that he could be Robin. Damian was used to being respected and honored, he was a prince after all, only to suddenly be told that everything he knew was wrong.

Babs and Tim. I think they would get along, i wanna see them bonding!

Joker Junior. i know its not canon and it was only in like one cartoon but oh my GOD i love it.

Trauma reveals!! i love them. Dick's time in spyral, his apprenticeship with Deathstroke, the multiple fucked up relationships he's been in. Everything Tim did during 'Brucequest', Jasons time with the LOA, literally anything from Damians childhood.

Jon being aged up and his relationship with Damian! i dont even need to add anything, you get the point.

Dana, Jack, and Janet. I want it so bad!!! Dana is implied but never confirmed to be dead so bring her back and let her and Tim mourn!! let Tim find out his parents both slept with Bruce and have Bruce be like "oops i forgot about that, soz sweetie-" let tim hate christmas eve because thats when his mother was buried!

if anyone has recs for any of these sort of fics, PLEASE GIVE THEM TO ME. i've probably read most of them already, but i have a terrible memory so i love re-reading fics. just, gimme gimme gimme

#i love my babygirls #dc comics #dc universe #batman comics #batfamily #bruce wayne #dick grayson #jason todd #tim drake #damian wayne #fic rec #fanfiction #batman fanfiction #batfam

[bcacstuff]

My Dearest Gentle Reader....

Sometimes stories are too good to be true, and sometimes they're too good to not be shared. Even though I promised not to waste anymore ink or feathers on what is going on in a particular corner of the Tum where a certain Cinderella is the highlight and the talk of the Tum these last weeks.

You know the best show not on tv, though much to our surprise Cinderella was rudely written out of the books, instead last years summer fling's likings on posts became interesting again.

Then suddenly around midnight (CEST, = abt 6pm ET and 3pm PT) she who always wakes up to DMs or just got a minute rushing in between meetings posted an Anon telling her most eligible bachelor was in the South of France and pictures will be out tomorrow. I had to shake my head as I knew how that message came about.

Half an hour before, I posted a little cryptic message to an Anon that sent me a message earlier that evening (21.50 CEST) about the whereabouts of this supposed vigilante. I did a little research and the message, naming an event, had some merit in it. I tried to find pics or videos, looked at many, but none to be found that could identify him clearly. Yes, several lookalikes with a cap and a shirt far in the distance. But not good enough for me. So I decided to post this cryptic message hoping Anon would come back and perhaps had some more proof than the 'listing' I found and mentioned in my cryptic post.

About 15 minutes later I got this Anon:

I had to laugh as it was far off... and no Idea why H... R....... and him being 'listed' as I wrote could have anything to do with the South of France in the slightest way.... Confirmation bias looking in wrong directions to say the least

You can imagine how I had to laugh even more when I saw the same Anon on the blog of the one that now seemed to have all the time in the world spinning a fantastic story around it. The Anon seemed fairly sure now, not a question mark in it but even claiming there would be pics tomorrow! I had no doubts where this Anon had been reading first and as I didn't posted her message she must have thought she was right and run straight off to Lalaland to please her fairytale writer.

Time for popcorn 🍿 I thought and popped some in the microwave... and boy, I needed a full box of it, cause what happened after that post I can hardly describe. The story that was spun around this 'South of France' you can not make this up. Literally in a matter of minutes, each time I refreshed the page there was another chapter. More 'proof' and 'evidence' on every reblog of herself.

Look Melissa is in Cannes... [right, she was already there for a couple of days... and believe me S isn't the only one she grooms]. And of course it all made sense since, blimey, all of the sudden Cinderella was back on top of the list and magically popped up in the South of France as well! Only days before, she posted about Brigitte Bardot and changed her profile pic to an old one from the time she once must have been on an RC in Cannes and you know she's 'a socialite and a film maker who has lived in France for years' and must be well known in those circles... No, this can't all be a coincidence, now can it? 😂😂😂

More popcorn please... 🍿 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

Lists of parties in Cannes were shared and oh bloody hell how could we have missed his latest following of Alessandra, she's there as well... Maybe she was even better than Cinderella (how rude!)

[Did she not notice how he followed her already long time ago, but seemed to have unfollowed her and now re-followed again, as well as the other ones he followed recently, the everydayman and Neil Marshall. Now don't ask me why he does this, but he does]

My head started to hurt from laughing.... but also from keeping up with all the women the Queen of Lalaland had brought up in less than a day. And remind you, she was busy for more that 8 hours straight to finally come up with an Anon who gave her and her readers the wake up call realizing what H.... R.... stood for.

About 8 hours after my cryptic post and 2 more hours after I received my Anon

Yes, of course Hyrox Rotterdam. Not a woman, but a sports event. I found the listing on the website. (why did nobody else took a look there???) And I have to be honest, I did remove some comments working it out and received Anons before it even occurred to the other side what it was all about.

But last night it showed no results and today it is still empty. I was hoping more results would be added today but it doesn't look like it. As said no clear identifiable pics or videos have been found. So it remains unclear if he participated at all. All I can confirm is that at least he planned to stay on this side of the Canal and fill his days with sports.

But do not despair my dearest gentle readers, as I have it on good authority that he's busy preparing for a full week of shooting TCND in which he even might get arrested at the end of the week...

Signed: Yours Truly

[soapdish290]

The Tower.

Okay. So we have this:

https://twitter.com/SpankMeSilly/status/1570020419150950401?s=20&t=tbQfUWRqmqXO9IXbcWPwBg

We have Ianthe and ‘Kiriona’, described by Ianthe as ‘The Tower Princes’ (Nona, pg 210). I don’t know the significance of this, but we haven’t had John describe things as ‘Tower’ anything before, so it’s definitely SOMETHING. More easily parsable, we have whatever Judith / the 7th RB is talking about on page 393:

“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know … they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”

Harrow also sees this at the end of John 5:4, when she decides she’s heard enough, turns from John (turns from god, both literally and metaphorically), and heads out into the river (there’s more on this tying in to how we leave her after her ‘death’ in Harrow, but that would be it’s own thing and should be rather obvious if you look at all the pieces now):

Before her, the waters parted, speared-through and mute, for the enormous lance of a tower—a tower that had never been there before; a tower that soared, impossible and deadly grey, out of the waters—a tower of grey bricks, lurching out of the River as though gasping for air. An impossible, cone-capped tower—a belled tower; she could see the steeple, but the bell cot was too far from shore to see the bell. “I’ll start there,” she said.

Nona et al also see it, again in the river, and it scares Nona shitless on page 440. This is a long one, I’m sorry:

The tower was so big—as the megatruck approached she began to realise how big, as big and as broad and as tall as any crane or building in the city—stretching higher than their Building at home, even. There was a clear mark where the water reached up it, where the stone was wet black rather than the dry-stone grey above. From inside the megatruck, she could not see how high up it went. For some reason this tower scared Nona’s top and bottom thoughts so terribly that her heart went ker-CHUNK in her chest—there was a terrible pain in her side and all the way down her arm. The pain was good, because she couldn’t think about anything but the pain. The more she thought, the more problems she had. “The hole,” said the Captain, “the hole in the road, the hole, the hole, the hole.”

I don’t know what this tower is. I’m not particularly well read and my memory isn’t worth shit, I’m not catholic, I’ve nothing I can pull from to reference with to try and understand this. If it’s eluded to in previous books, it isn’t done so by name.

I CAN say with some confidence that it’s known to the souls of the planets. The 7th RB is familiar with it, and Nona’s entire body nearly stops working - she has what is described as a fucking cardiac event when she sees it. And, because she’s Nona and she can’t be a useful narrator even once, she refuses to think about it loudly enough to actually answer our questions.

It’s tall. It protrudes far out of the river. (was it once IN the river? Related to the Stoma in some way? I’m going to need to re-read Harrow) And, whatever the fuck it is, it’s REACTIVATED.

Edit: FUCK! I just found something else!

When Nona et al find the tower, Judith says something (pg 440):

“He left them too long—you left them too long, my salt thing.”

And Nona DEFINITELY knows, but won’t let herself think:

There was a thought above and below that knew what it was, but the moment she looked at either thought she’d lose the game.

and whatever it is “scared [her] ...  terribly”.

I think this might be related to the souls that weren’t resurrected. Something has happened - possibly related to the shitshow at the end of Harrow - which has put things into motion. I imagine the Stoma is similar. The ‘otherside of the river’ might be similar. fuck, the entire river might be these souls - we don’t really KNOW enough yet. But I think these are what’ve been left too long. And I don’t think they’re overly sympathetic.

Alecto herself also says something that implies that the river is made of the souls of those John didn’t see fit to resurrect - on page 477 it mentions it !was grieved to find [the river] yet dead.

This also makes me think about something I just made another post about - Nona draws something called a ‘Cradle Creature’ - saying “When first it was born it used to live in a river, but then it got cold so it had to get large.” (pg 251) and the Tower just seems reminiscent of that? This last is a SUPER reach, but ‘he left them too long’ is definitely a sentence that has teeth. Pardon the pun.

#Nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #tlt

[gurugirl]

priestrry's coming this week??? i just saw the schedule and you have it listed! EEELKjdka;dka;jkfdj;akldj;aflkdj;k

i'm so excited! what day do you think? can you give us a hint of what's to come? i'm so fucking excited! forgive me father is my favorite!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

😂 yes it is, babe! I'm so glad you're excited!

I'll post the check-in tomorrow because I'm pretty much done with it. I just need to re read. I'll give you a tiny teaser below... 👀

*NOT PROOFREAD*

teaser for tomorrow's update for Forgive Me, Father

“Is that all you want? You’re going to be in the cage for another few hours so if you get thirsty that’s going to be on you.” Harry always made sure she stayed hydrated even when she wasn’t going to be locked in her cage. He always took care of her the best he could.

She nodded silently and looked downward again.

Harry nudged her toward the bedroom and made her turn to face the cage. She half expected him to spank her or something but instead, as he walked away and then returned put the leather gag belt over her face, “Open,” he said plainly.

She opened her mouth and the silicon ball fit between her lips and silenced any noises she might have made. He secured the belt in place behind her head and removed his hands from her completely. Which she hated. She wanted him to spank her or manhandle her or something. But he was rather cold and his touch was missing completely.

“We’re going to put these in,” Harry put his hand out showing her the weighted Ben Wa balls, “take them.”

Y/n took the balls in her hand as her priest pushed at her low back, causing her to bed forward the slightest. She heard the snap of a cap and then felt his fingers on her entrance as he smeared lubricant over her.

The set of balls were connected with a thin rubber-like string. The first one was larger and the lightest, which aided in keeping them in place inside of her, while the other two were smaller and heavier. The cord would stick out and make pulling them out easier.

Harry took the balls from her hand and pushed her thighs further apart, “Relax.”

She felt him push the first, larger ball inside, his finger plunging into her deeply to secure it before inserting the next two one by one. It was a pretty sight. He loved stuffing them inside of her. Plus it was good for her pelvic floor muscle so he felt like he was doing her a favor really.

“Get in,” he gestured toward the door of the cage.

She climbed in, clenching to keep the balls in place, and got to her knees as she looked up at Harry with big, pleading eyes. He knew that if she weren’t gagged she’d have somehow found her voice in that moment and begged him to spank her or stay with her. But he didn’t have time to argue with her or listen to her soft voice and whimpers as he left. The gag was for that purpose. More for himself than to punish her.

Harry locked the cage and shook his head, “Had plans to love on you but instead, this is what you deserve. Had a hard day today, pet, and I still have to go back and endure more hours away from you yet you chose to act like a bratty child so I didn’t get to come back home to my pet and hold her and kiss her like I wanted. I needed you. Maybe when I return later on you’ll be better behaved.”

Harry sat the glass of water down next to the cage for her so she could reach out and grab it if she needed it. Her heart swelled at his kind gesture and his words. Now she truly felt awful. Felt so bad for being so mean to him when all he wanted was her love. Now she’d really gone and done it.

#harry styles #priest!harry #priestrry #harry styles smut #ask #firstpost #harry styles one shot #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fan fiction #harry x reader #priest!harry x reader #pet!reader #dom!harry x sub!reader #softdom!harry #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles writing #harry styles fic