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lokiondisneyplus · 3 years

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SPOILER WARNING: Do not read if you haven’t seen Season 1, Episode 5 of “Loki,” now streaming on Disney Plus.

I think it’s when Alligator Loki ate President Loki’s hand that I realized I was in love.

To be sure, I was always into “Loki,” Marvel Studios’ third Disney Plus series and the first devoted to exploring a single character: the god of mischief as played by Tom Hiddleston. From the first episode, I dug the absurdist deadpan humor imbued by head writer Michael Waldron, and I was immediately smitten with how director Kate Herron employed ’70s sci-fi brutalism and a particularly British affinity for bureaucracy to build out the world of the Time Variance Authority.

“Loki” looked unlike anything I’d ever seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an increasingly difficult prospect given there are now 26 discrete iterations of the MCU — soon to be 27 with the impending debut of “Black Widow.” As the show has progressed, that feeling has only grown more acute as “Loki,” in its exploration of its title character’s identity, managed to carve out its own unique personality not just in the MCU, but also in the grander landscape of sci-fi storytelling.

To put it as simply as I can, “Loki” is a cosmic-yet-intimate time-traveling romantic action comedy about how Hiddleston’s sexually fluid narcissist finally learns how to fall in love with himself — or, rather, the female version of himself who has lived a whole lifetime of harrowing experiences apart from his own. In doing so, the show has proven that not only can the MCU work on television, it can thrive on it.

Marvel Studios’ first Disney Plus series, “WandaVision,” was a fabulous first step onto TV, proving that the MCU, itself an experiment in creating an episodic series of blockbuster feature films, could shrink itself down to the scope of an American sitcom. Its exploration of grief and the restorative power of comfort TV could not have been more relevant to an audience enduring a devastating pandemic. But as it unfolded, the escalating mystery of what was actually happening on “WandaVision” — Evan Peters showing up as Pietro-but-not-actually-Pietro, Kathryn Hahn hiding in plain sight as Agatha, Elizabeth Olsen unwittingly responsible for almost everything on the show as Wanda — began to overwhelm it. Fans and major entertainment news outlets alike began wildly theorizing each week — it’s Mephisto! it’s Magneto! — and the pressure to achieve a Marvel-sized scale, service a wide ensemble of MCU characters, and resolve all its narrative strands made the final episodes of “WandaVision” feel, to some, misshapen.

Marvel’s follow-up series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” meanwhile, was at once more conventional and more ungainly, with five separate antagonists (John Walker, Karli Morgenthau, Helmut Zemo, Sharon Carter and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) operating at cross-purposes and overshadowing the two title characters meant to be at the heart of the show and the exploration of being a Black man in America meant to drive it.

“Loki” avoids all of that, because it’s the first MCU show that understands to its bones that the best television is about its characters first, and its story second. The lasting pleasure of longform storytelling is allowing the audience a far deeper understanding of who is on screen than a two-hour movie can allow. That sensibility is already woven into the MCU: Watching Tony Stark, Thor, and Steve Rogers grow and changed over multiple features has been central to the franchise’s unprecedented success. But while Marvel’s conviction to make their shows the same way they’ve made their movies makes sense, it’s also had the paradoxical effect of making “WandaVision” and “FAWS” feel too overloaded with their characters doing stuff than just letting them be.

Each episode of “Loki” does just that. In Episode 1, Loki and Mobius (Owen Wilson, never better?) sit and talk about why Loki does what he does; in Episode 2, they ruminate on the nature of accepted reality while trying to solve the mystery of the variant Loki’s whereabouts. In Episode 3, Loki and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino, an instant star) spend the entire hour walking through a doomed planet getting to know each other, and casually coming out in the process. Episode 4 is when the story shifts into a higher gear, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer emerging as its true antagonist, but even that episode allowed for several extended scenes of human connection, between Ravonna and Mobius, Loki and Mobius, and Sylvie and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku, richer with each episode).

This week’s penultimate episode, “Journey Into Mystery,” introduces several new Loki variants, a critical new location in the Void (the purgatory at the end of time into which all pruned entities are dumped) and a blockbuster movie sized enemy in the monstrous, timeline devouring Alioth (re-imagined somewhat from the comic books). And yet, there’s still time for Loki and Sylvie to sit on a hill, share a conjured blanket and quietly express how much they mean to each other, and there’s also time for Classic Loki (the great Richard E. Grant) to get a deeply satisfying character arc. After explaining how his own existential despair at his lot in life allowed him to live well past his encounter with Thanos, Classic Loki’s encounter with Loki and Sylvie reinvigorates his sense of glorious purpose — and helps Loki to understand he’s more powerful than he’s ever allowed himself to be. It’s a full meal in miniature, and Grant makes the most of it.

All the while, Herron and writer Tom Kauffman work in all manner of delightful alternate reality Easter eggs, from the USS Eldridge (purported to have been part of an experimental cloaking and teleportation device in 1943) to the Polybius video game (purported to be a government psy-ops scheme). More notably, there are also some MCU Easter eggs, including the Thanos helicopter and the Living Tribunal that flit by quickly and appear designed to tickle Marvel die-hards and pleasantly mystify everyone else. And then there’s Alligator Loki, a flawless creature who should be protected at all costs.

There is one blink-and-you-missed-it moment, though, that could be something more, when the Qeng Enterprises logo shows up on the Avengers tower. In the comics, Tony Stark sells that tower to Qeng, which is secretly connected to the same Marvel boogeyman that’s haunted “Loki” from its premiere: Kang the Conqueror. The decrepit house Loki and Sylvie are stepping towards at the end of the episode also looks like it could — could — be Chronopolis, Kang’s HQ in the comics, although the TVA itself could be that as well. In any event, it’s been well documented, here and elsewhere, that Kang could be the entity who is really behind the TVA, especially since “Lovecraft Country” star Jonathan Majors has already been cast in the role and will appear in 2023’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

If “Loki” does introduce Kang in its finale, however, then the show is stepping onto its highest, thinnest tightrope yet. This is supposed to be a show about Loki, not about a villain that, within the world of the MCU, remains a total unknown. It’s a massive risk for any series to bring in a brand new character — let alone the Big Bad! — in the final episode, so this could be another example of an MCU series serving the larger franchise at the expense of its own story. That would be a shame. Sticking the landing, after all, has always been troublesome for TV because TV is so much more about the shared journey than the ultimate destination. And yet, if anyone in the MCU knows how to alight onto safe ground despite impossible odds, it is the god of outcasts, who lives to survive.

“Loki” streams new episodes Wednesdays on Disney Plus.

#Loki #episode 5 review #spoilers

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writefinch · 4 years

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Family-Owned Small Business

(CN: incest, sex work, mentions of sexual assault & suicidal ideation)

The worst part of my job is administration. Last-minute rescheduling when a client flakes on us. Chasing up payments. Booking accommodation at short notice. Answering messages! Jesus, every time in the last year when I've slumped, sighed, and thought to myself "fuck working, I need a break from all this" it's been when I've opened my messages and seen thirty different texts that need a reply. Some people are fine with it I guess, but for me it's boring, time consuming, and stressful.

Big deal though, right, I mean nobody loves doing admin, why even bring it up? Well, if I tell someone that for work last night I ate a client's cum out of my mom's pussy, I'd expect that they'd get fixated on the sex work and the incest. I'd expect them to freak out and not pay attention to the specifics of what I'm saying. So, first, I'd like that person to know that the thing I hate about my job is probably the same thing that *they* hate about *their* job. I would rather lick my mom's asshole for five minutes than answer emails for five minutes, and I answer a lot of emails.

Do we have to worry about violence, danger, cops, and legal trouble? Yeah, we do. Am I scared of these things? Yeah, sometimes, but I had to worry about all of those things before I started doing sex work. At least now we've got the money to buy our way out of the worst of it.

I'm not saying that what I do with mom is an objectively healthy relationship, let alone a perfect one. If you took me back in time and told me I could pick a completely different life for me and my mom, I'm sure there's a bunch of choices I'd pick over this one. But I never had that choice. I got hurt a lot growing up. I feel like I've finally escaped the things that hurt me, but I know that I've barely started to recover from them.

That's why I'm writing this. We've saved enough money to afford some therapy and my first session is next week. I want help with the fear, the nightmares, the mood swings and insomnia, I want to stop the rush of rage and terror that flows through me every time I see the word 'dad,' I want help untangling the stuff that came out of being told I was a pansy when I was growing up, then figuring out I'm gay, then figuring out I'm a girl, then figuring out I'm all three of those things while I was living in a place that kept trying to kill me for it. What I don't want is for the psych to pin it all on the two least harmful and least fucked-up things about my life, and worse, I don't want them to make me believe it. This journal is a prophylactic, an assessment of my job, my relationships and my life that I can refer back to if and when someone sticks their fingers in my brain and swirls them around.

I'll start with a problem statement: my dad. The memories that hurt the most are the ones where he almost appeared human, the flickers of joy, curiosity and humor that stood out from the bland cruelty that made up the rest of his personality. I'll remember him buying me ice cream or talking about a book or a movie with me, I'll doubt myself and wonder if I just went crazy and cut him out of my life for no reason, and then my brain will hook onto a random act of sadism he inflicted on me.

The physical abuse was bad all on its own, real psycho shit like driving me out into the woods and making me pick through the brush for a switch he could hit me with and a whole lot more I won't go into, but the emotional abuse was worse. When I was eleven, I forgot to feed my cat one day. He gave her away to my uncle, but told me that she'd developed malnutrition and had to be put down. I didn't find out the truth for another two years, when he just let it slip at Easter. He bragged about it, even, like he'd invented a really smart child-rearing technique. I don't want to write too much down here because I don't need to, if anything I want therapy to *stop* everything he did from running through my head. He's a punishment-obsessed sadist, a Baptist, and he works as a judge. Did he ever sexually abuse me? No. Parent of the year, right? He kicked me out for being a fag the day I turned eighteen, so it's ironic that my biggest fear is that he comes looking for me. He doesn't even know I'm a girl.

On the other hand, my mom has had an interesting life. She's kind of a fuck up. When I was one year old, mom and dad split and dad got full custody--being a judge helped with that--while mom left the state. She spent a decade trying to kick a heroin habit and a year and a half in prison for related stuff, got banned from even entering the state I lived in on account of her parole--again, dad being a judge helped with that--illegally emigrated to Canada for a while, and went to Oregon by mistake, doing a mixture of bartending, delivery driving, MDMA dealing and whoring to stay afloat.

The only reason we met again is that I was in the same city staying with friends, also whoring. I don't remember the first time I saw her, but the first time we talked was in a mutual friend's tiny studio apartment with a few other hooker friends. We ended up comparing our Pest Lists, shared a few drinks, and swapped numbers. A week later we fucked, and a month after *that* we realized that we'd Oedipus'd ourselves. It seems funnier now than it did at the time.

That was an emotional time. We cried with joy that we'd found each other, we started tip-toeing around the ideas of rebuilding our lives together, and we agreed to pretend that the sex had never happened. Of course, we got drunk together a week later and fucked again. She's hot! I have a thing for older women, I have a thing for breaking taboos, and I have a thing for being mommied in bed. Blame dad for raising me like this, I dunno.

We started doing sex work as a team after she got a dental abscess. The bill for the hospital stay and the tooth removal was insane, and the dentist straight-up told her that she'd end up with another in a different tooth within a year if she didn't get two root canals. Even when she was recovering, we could only afford fish antibiotics off of Amazon. We crunched some numbers and made some inquiries, and figured out that we could pull in two week's worth of our combined income with one night of mother-daughter stuff.

Our first joint session was with a real estate pervert I'll call Stan, a chubby balding powerlifter in his fifties who we'd both had as a client before. Mom took me over her knees and switched between spanking me and fingering me while he watched. I sucked him off while mom made out with him, made out with my mom with his cock between our lips, licked his balls as mom licked my ass, then let him fuck my ass while mom sat on my face. That was the first half hour. He came six more times before we passed out in the early hours of the morning, and I drifted off nursing his finally-limp cock in my mouth. He paid us the price of a used Volkswagen for our trouble, and I blew him one last time before we left as a thank-you.

Six months later, mom's teeth were fixed, I was on spiro, and we had just under a dozen clients for our "doubles sessions." Only a few of our appointments are ones with me and mom together, three or four a month, we mostly work alone. That's not out of a deliberate choice, it's just that we've got a strict criteria for who we'll double up on.

Trust is one thing: depending on the lawyers we can afford, what we're doing is either kinda illegal or extremely illegal. Since my dad is presumably still a judge, I don't want him to ever find out about this. He'd put us in a prison or a mental institution. We won't do a double session with a client unless we've both had individual sessions with them.

Money is the other thing. Getting your dick sucked by a hot mom while her daughter sucks your balls costs a week's wages for the average person. Hiring us for the night is more like a month's wages. Even in a city like this, there's only a few thousand people that can drop that kind of money on hookers. Then, they've got to *want* to fuck a trans girl and her mom together. Don't get me wrong, more people are into mother-daughter incest than you'd expect, but it's not a universal thing.

Clients are, on average, annoying. It's a fact of life. The thing that all clients have in common is a ton of disposable income and a fondness for fucking hookers. They're not necessarily bad people, but there’s a heavy ‘What can a banana cost, ten dollars?’ vibe to them. It’s not that they’re adrenochrome-drinkers who don’t see regular people as human, it’s more that they don’t have an intuitive awareness that other people don’t have savings accounts, health insurance, an investment property, and four figures of walking-around money at any given time. I guess I'd feel differently if I was like, a concierge or a PA, but there's a lot more pillow talk in my job.

I've had bad and dangerous clients before, there's been at least two occasions where I was pretty sure I was going to die--one where the hospital afterwards stay wiped out four months of income, not counting the month where I couldn’t work--but they were all before I met mom, when I couldn't be so careful about screening prospective clients and dropping them if they threw up red flags. I'm sure we'll get bad clients in the future, but we're in a better place to deal with them safely.

I also wanna write down what a "normal day" is like. Friday was a good example. I woke up early at 9am and cooked breakfast for mom. She was up already doing the laundry. We entertain some clients in our apartment, so we go through a lot of clothes and a lot of sheets. You can't fuck a guy on top of another guy's cum stains, that's rude. Some of the job is Housework But More. We don't really use the main bedroom or the sitting room because we treat them like bed and breakfast guest rooms. It's annoying but every time we have a session without getting an actual hotel or motel room we save like $50 minimum.

After breakfast I epilated, showered, and went for a run. Personal grooming isn't that big a deal in terms of time, I'm not saying I don't spend a lot of time on it, I do, but I'd be spending that time even if I worked in a bar or an office or something. Look: I'm hot. I might have been a weird-looking spotty nerd when I thought I was a boy, but as a girl I'm a fucking dime. I could get like, 25% uglier before it had any impact on my earnings. The only part of personal grooming that's necessary for sex work and I wouldn't do all the time anyway is power-washing my guts an hour before every session.

After lunch, mom went to see some friends and I played Magic for a few hours. At two pm, the actual work started. I picked up the work phone for the first time that day and began answering texts. An hour later I'd cancelled the 6pm appointment, blocked out all of Sunday evening, checked in with a few regulars, and provisionally moved three guys to the 'Time Wasters' list.

I spent a while sexting with a good prospect. He was a good prospect because he paid up-front for the sexting instead of treating it like a free samples platter at Costco. We scheduled a tentative appointment for next Tuesday, when his wife would be out of town on a business trip. Most of the guys I fuck have kinks, and I swear that 'cheating on your wife with a sex worker' is the most common one there is. Do I feel bad about it? At my hourly rate, absolutely not.

Mom got back at half four, so I took a break. We made tacos for lunch together and ate while watching Billions. She nudged me and told me that I need to do my injection, and, well, we have a little ritual for that. I'm scatterbrained and I'm not great with needles, but mom has been incredibly supportive with my HRT, and when I told her I was having problems taking them on time, she came up with a way to make me as comfortable as possible. As soon as the needle is ready, I laid down in her lap and she cradled my head in her arms, pressing her bare chest against my face. I took a nipple into my mouth and nursed it softly while she stroked my hair. She called me a good girl, telling me how proud she is of her daughter, how much she loves me, and asked if I was going to take my medicine like a big girl. On good days I inject myself while she pets me and coos over me, and on bad days she takes the needle and does it for me. As soon as I dropped the needle in the sharps container, mom pressed a Hitachi against my cock and took one of my nipples into her mouth, called me her big brave girl, and asked if I was gonna cum for mommy.

As usual, the answer was yes.

Late afternoon and early evening is when the messages start flowing in, especially on Fridays, when the kinds of people with hooker money have either left work early and thinking about getting laid, or are still held up at work and are desperately thinking about getting laid. This kind of messaging gets trickier, because it comes down to what I'm providing. Like, setting up a session is the kind of normal administrative stuff that's baked into the price of a session. It's also partly a sales job, so I'm naturally flirty and solicitous, and because I do sex work I talk openly about sex.

However, *sexting* is not normal administrative stuff. If I'm sending you messages for jerking-off purposes, I can charge by the hour or by the text but I will insist on charging for it. Also, it's not just sex that me and mom provide. There's a reason that 'companionship' is an old euphemism for whoring, it's because whores are good company. I'm a good listener and I don't judge, which means I'm like the fun parts of a therapist but without all the homework and self-improvement. I'm (unsurprisingly) friendly with all of my clients, and I have more than a few clients and former clients who I'd consider good friends and vice versa. I talk to a bunch of them outside of a business context, especially the ones I met outside of my job, and that's a normal part of maintaining a pool of clients for any sales job, but on the other hand... it's a demand on my time and it's a part of my services. I can and have bluntly told guys that they're wasting my time when it comes to uncompensated sexting, but the platonic stuff requires a lighter touch.

One of my regulars, Fintech Pete, sent me a message. Two messages later, he sent me $100, and we're off. Describing in gratuitous detail exactly how I'm going to suck his cock, begging him to fuck me until my clit is drooling all over the sheets, sending him feet pics, things of that nature. Pete is great for sexting because he barely jerks off while he's doing it, he saves all the messages and pictures and jerks off to them later, because he's got some biohacking routine where he only cums once a week. He said once that part of the reason he hires sex workers is that he takes each nut a lot more seriously if he's paying three digits minimum for the privilege. He does this teleconferencing report with the board of directors at his company four times a year, and every time he hires me to kneel under the desk in his home office and suck him off while he makes his presentation.

Anyway, while we were going back and forth like that, he mentioned that I'd made a joke one time about doing a joint session with my mom. I told him it wasn't a joke, and to cut a long story short, half an hour later I was asking mom if she was up for an overnight session starting at 9pm. She agreed, Pete confirmed, so we both got ready--think getting dolled up for a night out but with a more thorough enema--and drove to his place. He lived outside of town in a two-bedroom suburban home, alone with his two dogs.

As soon as we were parked in his garage I did the safety call in front of him: I rang a friend of mine, told her we were visiting a friend, told her it was at the address I sent her earlier, and told her we'd call her again tomorrow morning. Was it really necessary to do that with someone like Fintech Pete? No, but practice makes permanent. If you let these things slip when there's no danger, eventually they'll slip when there is danger.

Now, I don't want to imply that I'm in a lot of danger! There's a reason that most of the faces you'll see on the Trans Day of Remembrance are of poor black and brown women, because real danger comes when you can't turn skeevy jobs, when you can't afford to take precautions, when you have to make the choice over and over between maybe starving and maybe getting murdered. I'm white, I've got a good support network, and I've been relatively lucky in that I can do all these things to minimize my risks. I've still got to do them, though! Things like safety calls are a good habit to get into and it helps all sex workers if there's an expectation that they've all got someone looking out for them.

...I get that there is some bravado creeping into this journal. I start off saying that admin is the worst part of the job and a page later I flippantly mention that the job has put me in the hospital. On a day to day basis yeah, the admin is the bit that sucks the most, but if you offered me a deal where the admin is twice as bad but I never took that session, I’d take it in a heartbeat. This job has left me with some scars. Any time something cold touches my wrist I get a vivid flash of the first time I had my hands zip-tied behind my back in a cop car. I've had nightmares all my life, and more than a few of my nightmares are about stuff that's happened since I got into sex work.

If it seems like I’m downplaying it, it’s because the harrowing stuff is where the job has gone wrong, it’s not baked into the everyday stuff, and most importantly it has nothing to do with my mom. The work I've done with her is some of the least stressful and dangerous I've had since I started this job, and whatever wounds I have, she's not the one who caused them.

On a more positive note, a cool thing about doing sessions with my mom is that we can dress pretty conservatively and still have it come off as insanely lewd. Mom wore a black cocktail dress with an imitation pearl necklace and her hair up in a bun, I was in a white blouse under a lambswool sweater, a pleated short skirt, cheap dark tights--Pete has a thing for tearing them--and patent leather shoes. When you're going to suck a guy's world entirely off alongside your mom, the more modestly you're dressed, the more perverted it looks. Out in the suburbs it also means you get to avoid the microskirts and fishnets look which screams to the neighbors 'I've just hired a pair of hookers' or the mid-range raincoat over microskirts and fishnets look which screams 'I've just hired a pair of pricey hookers."

Pete's living room looks like the back room of a Radio Shack, computer guts everywhere, every surface turned into a makeshift workbench. It's not a suitable place for lovemaking; I don't want to have to pull shards of a soundcard out of my perineum. His bedroom is a lot neater, with a king-sized bed to sit on, a ton of pillows to lounge up against, and a TV mounted on the wall. Mom poured out some wine, a mid-range red zinfandel that we'd picked up on the way, Pete brought out some imported dark chocolate that costs like $40/kg, and I swung my legs over his lap and turned on the Food Network. I took a bite of chocolate, mom took a sip of wine, and before either of us swallowed she pulled me into a deep kiss, mixing the wine and the chocolate. It's a good combination, and Pete enjoyed the show.

The night started off with chatting. None of us were in any rush, not with an overnight session, and since Pete has been a client for each of us for a while it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Pete's fingers danced over my thighs, absent-mindedly plucking ladders into the fabric as we talked baseball, business, sex work, the difference between the gentrified fag bar downtown and the really gentrified fag bar downtown, programming and other nerd shit, local politics, the contestants on Cutthroat Kitchen, just normal stuff. Mom and Pete started talking about fancy cooking stuff so I started annoying them both by claiming that sardines are just fully-grown anchovies, that DOP labels are all fake, and that instant grits are better than the regular ones until mom jabbed me with a finger and told me that my mouth should be put to better use elsewhere.

You know how some people say "Cilantro tastes like soap, that's why it's good?" Same thing for how weird it feels to go down on my mom. The first time I ever jerked off, watching a 144p clip of Rocco Sifreddi fucking a girl in the ass while flushing her head down a toilet bowl, knowing that this meant I was going to go to Hell unless I begged God for forgiveness and never did it again, I came so hard I passed out. It feels good, it feels wrong that it feels so good, and it feels even better because it feels so wrong.

She was already wet when I got between her legs. I kissed her clit and started licking, her bush tickling my nose and her thighs squeezing my ears. Fabric rasped over my head as she hiked her dress up to run her hand through my hair. Everything was muffled but I could hear kissing and clinking, and I knew that mom was undoing Pete's belt and jeans to give him a Catholic-quality handjob.

I got mom worked up, bucking her hips and getting all breathy, until she asked me to get up here and give her some help. I crawled up to his groin and winked up at him. He blushed and grinned back. Pete's not a bad-looking guy. I mean, I don't care about looks in general, I guess I can look at someone and say that objectively they're ugly, and if someone is beautiful it adds something to the experience, but like... it doesn't really figure into it. Obviously most johns don't look like supermodels but they're not uniformly ugly, as I said before the thing that johns have in common is being horny guys with a lot of disposable income. Still, Pete is towards the better-looking side of that scale.

...Okay there is one thing about him that's weirdly common for my clients, I call it 'John Balding:' where a guy is losing his hair but in a slow, uneven, and kinda weird pattern, so that even when they cross into being more bald than not, they never bite the bullet and shave it all off. Pete is only like 30% of the way through that process so it doesn't look terrible yet, but he's on that track.

Anyway, back to the sex. A fun thing about double blowjobs is that you can take them a whole lot slower than solo blowjobs. Me and mom have had a lot of practice so we go at about 1/4th speed and it feels twice as good. She started off by wrapping her hand around the shaft, slowly stroking it while she softly kissed the tip, and I licked his balls, gently lapping at one, then the other, cleaning away the day's sweat and musk, carefully taking both of them into my mouth at once. Mom swallowed half his length, and I started kissing my way up his shaft as she pulled back up, my lips touching the head as hers reached the very tip. She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into a deep French kiss with his cock in the middle, precum mixing with spit, moaning as we felt him twitch and grunt, mom's hand on his balls and my hand on his shaft. We broke the kiss and repeated it in reverse, taking his cock in my throat as mom kissed her way down to his balls. He came after five minutes of gentle little schoolgirl kisses on each side of his cock from the pair of us. The first rope caught mom on her cheek, the second hit her hair, but I wrapped my lips tight around the head and sucked him dry before he could spill another drop.

You can't give a client a mother-daughter blowjob and not snowball the cum back and forth in front of him. We've done it enough times to get the timing down: wait until he sits up straight, because if you don't he'll be too dazed from nutting in your mouth to really appreciate it. Make sure he's looking at you, move your hair out of the way so it doesn't obstruct his view, open your lips so that a trickle of jizz almost sloshes out, move in close to your mom so that your noses are touching and it's clear that you're about to kiss, sink a palm into her tits as she grabs your ass, and then you gotta really go for it: wide-mouthed, feral, energetic, like you're trying to reach each other's sinuses. If a little bit of cum spills out because you're being so sloppy, that's a sign that you're doing it right. You're going to lick it up afterwards anyway.

We broke the kiss, I licked mom's face clean, and we took a break. We drank some more wine, he offered us cigarettes--the coolest clients are the ones that let you smoke indoors--and we cuddled and relaxed for a while with Guy's Grocery Games playing on the TV. Pete went to get some water, and returned with three bottles and a strip of Cialis. He downed two pills, we both stripped off--it was sweltering by that point--and got ready for the next round.

Mom played with his nipples and I got between his legs again, this time going lower than his balls to eat his ass out. Rimming is a trusted client privilege like the mom-daughter stuff is, except it's less about trusting them in the legal sense and more about trusting that it won't be grainy down there. I like it when a client is clean enough to rim, because I'm extremely good at it. Mom says she's better, she claims she once made a guy no-touch cum with a rimjob, but I don't fucking believe her.

He got hard after a minute of digging my tongue into his ass, but his cock was still super-sensitive so we figured we'd tease him for a while longer. We swapped places, mom ate his ass while he made out with me, squeezing my tits and playing with my cock. I like it when guys touch my tits, my cock is... fine, I guess? I don't viscerally dislike people touching it but it doesn't do much for me. After a minute of that he reaches around and works a finger into my asshole, which is much more my speed.

By the time he was two knuckles deep I looked down and saw his cock twitching, leaking precum onto his stomach. He seemed pretty worked up. I kissed his neck, nipped at his ear, and whispered, "Do you wanna breed me, Mister?"

He sure did.

I use condoms unless I've got an extremely compelling reason not to, and mom has a cool trick for getting them on. She grasped Pete's cock around the base, placed her lips around the tip, deepthroated the entire thing in a single stroke, and as she slowly lifted her head back up, his cock was neatly fitted with a condom.

As soon as I lubed up he put me on my back, pushed my ankles up to my ears, pressed his cock against my hole and sunk into me inch by inch. He muffled my moans with a kiss and rutted me into the bed. I gotta give it to him, all that biohacking and cardio is doing something right because he railed me at a fast, steady pace until my dick was leaking all over my tummy and I couldn't form sentences in my head any more. Mom made out with him as he finished, and at that point I was just babbling nonsense. He was gentle and cautious as he pulled out of me, stroking my hair as I reached down to take off his condom. I poured the contents out over my tits, slumping back against the headboard as mom licked them clean.

It wasn't yet midnight by then, and we went on like that through the night. Licking his feet, mom-daughter 69, him sucking my cock while mom rode his dick like a Sorority cowgirl champion, more wine, more double-blowjobs, tacking an extra $200 onto the fee for the privilege of pissing in my mouth instead of having to get up to go to the bathroom, a whole buffet of fun whore stuff.

We woke up at around ten in the morning, stayed for breakfast, then said our goodbyes. Me and mom thanked him for his custom, and he thanked us for a good time. By midday we were at home, we both showered, checked our calendars, messaged our evening clients to confirm that they were still on, and then... well, the rest of the day kinda evaporated. I played Demons' Souls until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, passed out in bed, and woke up when my alarm went off in the evening.

That's one of the things I don't like about overnight sessions: you're technically only spending like, ten to twelve hours with a client, and for some of that time you're either not fucking or actively asleep, but it kinda feels like it destroys two days. By the time it's scheduled, everything in the rest of the day is either preparing for it or doing it, and when you get back it takes the rest of the day just to recover. I don't like that part of my job, and if I sit down I can probably go through a whole bunch of things I don't like about my job. I still know that my job isn't a *bad* job, because the last time I had a bad job it was at a chicken processing plant. Know how I know that the chicken job was bad? Because I excused myself for a bathroom break four hours into the shift, walked off site, and never came back.

You know what, there's another reason I know that this isn't a bad job and that mom isn't a bad mom, and I guess it's part of the reason I've written all this down in the first place. I was seven years old when I first wanted to die. By the time I got to high school, suicidal thoughts were just the radio static in my brain. I can't remember any point after like, grade school where I didn't daydream about suicide every single day.

Now? I sometimes go for weeks without thinking about killing myself. It hasn't gone away completely, it still pops up when I'm upset or stressed out or tired or really hungry, but what I do is I talk to mom about it, and she talks me out of it. I feel guilty sometimes about putting that pressure on her, and taking that pressure off is part of the reason I'm going to therapy I guess.

I hope it works out.

I really think it will.

#story #stories

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kodzukuroken · 4 years

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Seasons change, but people... Do too I guess.|Chapter. 3, Change

Genre: Angst, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers

Summary: You and Tsukishima had been friends for years but upon the arrival of a very special invitation, your relationship takes a sudden change. Will your long-harbored crush for your best friend finally come into the light? Or will your relationship be altered for good?

Aka, Reader is an artist who is in love with Tsukki, there's angst, there are laughs, there are three established captain relationships! What could a person want?

Pairings: Tsukishima Kei x Reader (Kuroo Tetsuro x Kenma Kozume, Bokuto Koutarou x Akaashi Keiji, Daichi Sawamura x Sugawara Koshi)

Warnings: Drinking, Swearing, Smut

Read on Ao3 | This will update before Tumblr

This is the 4th chapter (including the prologue). I really love writing this story, there are currently 6 chapters out on AO3, so if you’d like to read past this chapter that’s where you can do it! Enjoy!

It took you about a year to fully get back to some kind of normal after everything that had happened. It was slow at first, after that night at Kenma and Kuroo’s they’d given you a ride back to your place but within minutes of being there, you couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore. You’d never realised it before, but Kei was all over that place. His old volleyball sweaters in your closet, photos of the two of you on the fridge and a small plush dinosaur that he’d won you at a carnival in college. Your apartment suddenly felt too big, too empty and after putting all of the things that reminded you of him into boxes, you found yourself not stopping until everything was boxed up. You’d called Kuroo the next day and he’d helped you move everything out, and into your art studio. He seemed concerned at first, the idea of you living in the same place that you worked but the gallery owner and boss didn’t seem to mind as long as you kept it to yourself.

“Otherwise I’ll have all of you starving artists living up there in some kind of commune” he’d said in an annoyed tone that reminded you of Kei.

For the first few months, you were basically a hermit. You spent your time painting and working in the gallery and basically nothing else. If you did have to go out, for groceries or something else you did that as late as possible. You didn’t want to run any risk of accidentally running into Kei again like that night in the summer, or worse run into him and his new girlfriend and she fawned all over him. Luckily, the universe had seemingly given up pushing the two of you together and you managed to get time to heal. Around Christmas time was when inspiration first really struck you again. After everything that had happened and Kei’s discouraging words about your art, you’d found it exceedingly difficult to come up with anything original. You kept up with your commission work and a few other landscape paintings that you knew would sell in the gallery but you could never really seemed to paint anything that meant anything to you. This was until one day in the winter when a friend of yours from the gallery had come to raid your studio for supplies and had found the torn-up canvas with the destroyed painting of you and Kei on it. She’d asked if she could have it, to repair and paint over, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to let it go. You couldn’t understand why at first, you’d managed to put everything else that reminded you of him away why not this too? But as the cogs in your brain began to turn, you realised what you had to do with it.

From then, you found yourself diving into probably the largest project of your life. Several large scale paintings, all some of your best work and all that your boss had deemed “exhibition worthy”. You couldn’t believe it when he’d first said it, you’d always had your work displayed in the gallery, something your boss had been nice enough to do for all the up and coming artists who worked there. However, nobody who worked there had ever even been offered the prospect of an exhibition, those went to more well-known artists the ones who were all the rage on social media or whose work had made it into the best magazines. You didn’t hesitate to agree of course, and before you knew it, almost a year after all the awfulness with Kei you finally felt like you were on a road to a new normal.

“It’s called Change,” you told Kuroo and Kenma one night at dinner. “You guys will be there right? It starts in two weeks.” Kenma nodded furiously, but Kuroo was off somewhere else. It wasn’t until Kenma nudged his husband in the ribs that he even realised you’d been talking to him.

“Huh?” he looked at Kenma who gestured to you.

“(y/n) is asking you to attend the biggest event of her career babe, be present” you giggled lightly.

“Oh sorry (y/n) I guess I was just distracted. We’ll be there, of course, we will, when is it?”

“Two weeks” you repeated “Tetsurõ, are you okay? You’ve been off all night” he laughed, about to undoubtedly come up with some kind of excuse but Kenma nudged his side again, a little harder this time.

“Ow!”

“Just tell her” Kenma shot back.

“Tell me what?” Kuroo was silent for a minute and then decided his husband was right.

“Okay, but promise you won’t be mad?” you rolled your eyes and he continued “I saw Tsukki yesterday.”

“Oh” the sound left your mouth before you could stop it, you hadn’t heard that name in a while.

“I promise (y/n), it’s the first time since everything happened with you guys. I was so mad for what he did to you, but then…”

“Then?” you questioned you hated that you were so intrigued by any of this.

“Well, Bokuto suggested we meet up, just some of the guys from training camp days. I didn’t even think about it at the time but when Bo said it would be at Tsukki’s place I-”

“You were at his place?” god why were you asking? You could already feel the pit forming in your stomach. Kuroo nodded and looked at you with guilty eyes.

“I met her (y/n)” now you were lost for words. Suddenly it felt as though everything you’d done this past year had been for nothing, you still weren’t over it.

“She’s not you,” Kuroo chimed back in “he’s not the same with her as he ever was with you, I can see it. He doesn’t look at her like he did with you, he doesn’t joke with her.” Kuroo paused for a minute and looked around as if he was about to tell some kind of shocking secret.

“(y/n) she’s nice to him, like actually nice. She doesn’t challenge him like you did… he’s bored.”

You shut your eyes tightly trying to push down the bubbling hope in your stomach.

“No,” you said squeezing tighter so that you could see patterns behind your eyelids.

“It’s true!” Kuroo began again but you shook your head.

“Tetsurõ please, don’t do this, I can’t. Not again.”

“Okay, okay,” he said “I’ll drop it” you opened your eyes to see a solemn look on both his and Kenmas faces. Kuroo extended his hand and placed it on yours.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, eyes doe-esque and wide.

“No, of course not. He was your friend too. I just, I can’t do that again. I was in so much pain after that night.” The two nodded and with that, the subject was dropped. Kuroo went on to ask more questions about your exhibit, evidently trying to distract you from what had just happened. But it was too late, the door that you’d taken so long to force closed in your mind was open again and you were thinking about him.

Two weeks later when your exhibition began you could not have felt more loved. Kuroo and Kenma came the first night, with a huge bouquet of wildflowers and a bottle of champagne. You’d showed them around and felt giddy at the genuine look of pride on their faces. A few nights later Bokuto and Akaashi stopped by, Bokuto was confused by most of your paintings but no less enthusiastic because of it. He even said that he wanted to buy one particular painting because it “looked like the back of Akaashi’s head”. But you told him that you didn’t plan on parting with them any time soon. Your exhibition got more reception than just your friends though, some of the attendees were really big deals in the art world, you’d even ended being interviewed by a local news station. Overall, the exhibition had gone off without a hitch, attendance was consistent and there were no huge disasters. That was until the last night of your show.

There was only about an hour left until the gallery closed, most people had come and gone for the day. The only people who were left besides yourself were your boss and a few of your coworkers. They’d brought out a bottle of champagne and a few glasses and were toasting in your honour.

“To (y/n)!” your boss said brightly and blush rose in your cheeks as they all cheered. You were half-way through thanking them all for their help when you’d noticed you were no longer alone. You caught a glance of his figure out of the corner your eye first and it wasn’t until you’d turned that your drink caught in your throat and you realized who it was. Standing there, in the middle of the gallery staring up at your paintings was Kei. The pit from two weeks ago began to reappear in your stomach and you began to feel your heart pounding in your ears. It wasn’t until your co-worker saw who you were looking at that you managed to snap out of it.

“Who’s the tall glass of water in the jacket?” he’d asked, sipping his drink. You hadn’t noticed at first, but Kei was wearing a stylish dark blue jacket with a colour coordinated turtleneck underneath, his glasses were new too. Your stomach churned as you scanned his new look, it wasn’t that he looked bad, god no, quite the opposite. It was that he looked incredible, the clothes fit him perfectly but you’d known that they weren’t ones he’d chosen for himself. All things considered, Kei had always had a pretty good sense of style for someone who didn’t care about fashion, but he’d never tried at it, it was just what he wore. This had thought put into it, this was her handy work.

“Uh, he’s an old friend” you finally replied after what felt like minutes. You held out your glass and he took it from you smiling and turned back to the group.

Your legs were weak as you walked and it wasn’t because of the heeled boots you were wearing. However, their clack on the hardwood floor had alerted Kei of your presence and now he was staring right at you.

“Hey,” you said, surprised at how natural your voice managed to sound given the circumstances. He looked back up at your work,

“Hi.” you were both quiet before he spoke again “I saw a flyer for the show, and before I knew it” he trailed off, the pit in your stomach began to bubble with hope again. You both stood in silence for a while staring at your feet and he at your painting before you couldn’t stand it any more.

“There’s an order yano” you gestured around the room “to all of this.” He met your eyes for the first time that night, god you’d missed his eyes. “Want me to show you?” and in his very Kei way, he answered with silence.

You led him to the painting closest to the door, it was one of the smaller ones in the collection, but still above your average size of painting. It was an abstract painting of a pair of broken glasses, painted perfectly from memory of one of your first times hanging out with Kei. You stood there for a moment, letting him stare and the work, he cocked his head to the side and a little and then looked at you expectantly. You led him to the next one.

The second painting was the view out of a window, looking out onto your old college campus in the fall. The painting was filled with oranges and reds, you liked this one a lot, it almost looked like flames. It was the view from Kei’s dorm room window, the same one you’d sat at years ago.

You led him around a few more paintings, all different scenes from your lives together. One depicted the carnival you’d attended together in your first year of college, another the sunset you’d watched together on the day you’d both graduated. They were all painted from memory, every one of them had sat like postcards in your brain, you’d had to get them out.

Finally, you led him to the end of the room, where the final two paintings stood side by side. The penultimate painting was the one he’d been staring at when you’d noticed his presence. It was a self-portrait. Your abstract figure sat, hunched over on an ornate spiral staircase. Your face was hidden, but the dress was the exact same colour as the one you wore on the night you’d kissed Kei.

The final painting was by far the largest in the set, it was one that had become so familiar to you that it had seemed the show was incomplete without it. There, towering above the two of you, was the painting you’d shown Kei on the night you’d fought. The red paint was still there, splattered over the pair of your faces, but the once shredded canvas had been repaired. You’d spent hours in your studio sewing the canvas back together, and the thick black thread that you’d used to do so stuck out against the bright paint.

You were both silent for a while longer, and when you were sure that he’d had enough to process you spoke again.

“I know this kind of stuff isn’t usually your thing.”

“No, but I think I got it.” There was something so familiar about the way he’d said it, that honesty mixed with smug that you hadn’t heard in so long. You’d really missed it.

“Kei I-” you began, but you were cut off by your boss's hand on your shoulder.

“I’m sorry to interrupt (y/n) but we should really close up.” Fuck.

“I guess I should go,” he said, but you couldn’t reply. You wanted so badly to protest but you just couldn’t get the words out. He turned to you once more before leaving.

“Goodbye (y/n)” and with that, he disappeared out into the night.

When Kei got back to his apartment late that night his head was reeling. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. He’d been standing in the grocery store what felt like forever ago now and had seen the flyer for your show in the window. Without even thinking, he’d dropped his groceries and had walked the few short blocks over to your gallery. He wasn’t shocked to see you there, he’d kind of expected it really but what he didn’t expect was how fucking good you’d look. The last time he’d seen you you’d looked so... broken. Your hair had been a mess and you’d looked completely exhausted, he had still found you endlessly attractive but it was more the kind in which all he wanted to do was take care of you but he’d done the exact opposite of that. But tonight you looked so good that he could barely keep himself breathing. The way your tight black clothes had hugged you so perfectly and the small lift that your shoes had given you just enough height to bring you to eye level with him, you were literally breathtaking. And the way you’d spoken with such ease when you’d seen him as if nothing he had done had ever affected you, as if you were completely over everything he’d done to you just over a year ago.

Your work had been incredible too, it was all so beautiful he could see your thought process in every single brush stroke on the canvas. It made his heart swell in a way art never had. He was even more impressed in the way you’d managed to remember so many aspects of your relationship. The exact shade of black metal of his glasses from all those years ago and that small crack in the window of his dorm room from college. You’d remembered it all so well and it was right there on the canvas. He’d felt as though he was being transported back to all the best moments of his life, all the moments with you. And when you finally led him over to the final painting in your exhibit, his heart had shattered all over again. It was the painting you’d shown him that night, even with all the red paint and damage he could have recognised it anywhere. He thought back to the first time he’d seen it, it was so beautiful, so full of colour and true emotion but he couldn’t enjoy it. He’d felt guilty, guilty for the way he’d treated you that night at the wedding, guilty for finding someone else when he’d been trying all the time to tell you how he really felt. But rather than apologize rather than try to fix things he’d ran, your words that night had hurt him so badly but it wasn’t because they were inaccurate. You’d been right, he’d known that even then, he was running from you, from something he’d wanted for so long but fear had set in and got the better of him. Fear of hurting you, the fear of things not working and ruining seven years of friendship. So instead he decided to do exactly what he’d feared doing in the first place. God, he was a fucking idiot.

It wasn’t until the light in the hallway flipped on that Kei noticed how long he’d been standing in the darkness of his apartment.

“Tsukki?” he looked towards the source. It was his girlfriend standing there, arms crossed and a little blurry-eyed, he’d obviously woken her.

“Where did you go? You’ve been out for hours” she asked, she was in her pyjamas. They were matching, pink and silky. You had never worn matching pyjamas, you’d usually just worn whatever old Karasuno sweatshirt you’d stolen from him and shorts. His chest tightened at the memory.

“ Kei? ” she asked again, a little more annoyed this time.

“Somethingcameupatwork” he muttered quickly and tried to push past her into the bedroom but she put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“Work? You’ve used that excuse three times this week Tsukki!” he didn’t answer her, just stood there staring into her eyes. Your eyes were so bright compared to hers, she always seemed to look annoyed even when she was completely content, Kei missed your eyes.

“You’re seriously not going to tell me where you’ve been?” she asked but he just shrugged. He knew he should be better to her, she was a very nice girl but after seeing you tonight it didn’t feel worth it to pretend anymore.

“Fine.” she spat. “I’m done Tsukki, done.” He didn’t try to protest, he just leant against the wall in the hallway until she had changed out of her pyjamas back into whatever clothes she’d arrived in. Then once she’d gathered her things, he watched her walk out the door without another word. He knew what he’d done was shitty, but he couldn’t really care about that right now. He would apologise tomorrow.

He sat down on the couch and pulled out his phone, he was half-praying that you might have texted him, but then again who knew if you even still had his number in your phone? He pulled up Instagram and typed in your username, he wasn’t much for social media so he hadn’t really checked your profile since the two of you stopped talking. There was only one post he recognised to be something he hadn’t seen, he guessed you might have secluded yourself from social media in order to produce the kind of work he’d seen tonight. There was no way you’d had any distractions. He clicked on the new post, it was a video of you being interviewed by a local news channel and it was captioned “Hey look! I was the news!” with a bunch of those stupid emoticons you loved. He turned up the sound on his phone and listened to you speak.

“Someone once asked me what I did, I was so young at the time, but even then I’d known what to say.” you paused for a minute and he noticed your eyes wander down to your feet just like they had since you were young. “I’d told them I was an artist, that I liked to make things. And that’s what I do, any time that my soul is at odds with reality I take that and make something from it. And that's what this project is, it’s the process of grieving… and moving on.” Kei swore he could have seen the smallest amount of tears raise in your eyes, but the camera wasn’t close enough to see. He listened to the video a few more times, you were talking about him. He was the one who has asked you that all those years ago in the kitchen of that party. He couldn’t believe you still thought about that day when the two of you had first met. Of course, he did too from time to time, but he’d never thought that that conversation had ever had any kind of effect on you. He was so glad that he was wrong.

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queenofthemindynasty · 5 years

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Even If You Say ‘No’ - pt 1

Pairing: Hoseok x Fem!Reader

Summary: {Y/n}, a brilliant, young producer at BigHit Entertainment, tends to be overly self-critical of her work and scarcely gives herself credit when it’s due. Hoseok, A.K.A. J-Hope of BTS, puts so much effort into keeping up the spirits of the other members, he hardly has time to worry about his own well being. What will happen when the two cross paths?

Genre: Angst, Fluff, Idol Universe

Word Count: 2599

It was late August, and the leaves were just starting to change colour. Love Yourself 承 Her would be coming out in a little less than a month. {Y/n} turned up the master volume on her desktop as she listened to the same eight-measure section again for the nth time in the last hour. She could have sworn she was going deaf. She seemed to be turning up the volume more and more as she sat in her studio, waiting for the song to suddenly sound the way it should have. A strangled sigh left her throat. The track she was working on was still missing something important. Something she couldn’t seem to grasp. She’d already asked the other producers what they thought. Each one of them had said it sounded good, though. Just ‘good’. Now she had to submit it in twenty minutes. And going on her rate of progress over the last several hours, it wasn’t going to change by then. She expelled another sigh, clicking “Export as .wav” and emailing it to her boss. Her forehead made a dull thud as it made contact with the edge of the desk. She didn’t even try to stop her hand from pulling her phone out of her back pocket and opening Twitter. Her mind wandered as her thumb scrolled through posts on autopilot.

It always ended up like this. The song she would be submitting for an album was always just too raw or was missing some important detail that she didn’t seem to be capable of creating. It wouldn’t have mattered if everyone in the world validated her work. It still wouldn’t have made the music sound any less like the work of an amateur, which it was. Even though everyone told her that her songs were ‘good’, it wasn’t enough. They needed to be perfect. Otherwise they’d bring down the quality of the whole album. She was producing for the most famous rising male music group of the world. She had the eyes, and more importantly the ears, of hundreds of millions of listeners trained on her. Even the smallest effect in her music made an unimaginable difference. She could have been held responsible if the band lost fans after this next release, especially since three songs in the album were mainly her work.

{Y/n} had started working for BigHit without any foresight of the expectations people would’ve eventually had for her. Now it had been just a few months since she’d started working for them, and her life had started over completely. She’d moved to Seoul from quite a distance away just a year or so after graduating from high school, and up until then, she’d lived with her less-than-happy family in the house that she’d grown up in. All she’d wanted had been to run away and make music for a living. She’d been so excited at the prospect of getting her own unique artist’s name, and having her own studio, and giving it a name, and so on. (She’d picked the name Sea Beats for herself because she’d grown up in a city near the ocean, and the water’s welcoming, non-judgemental nature had always provided a sort of safe haven for her, apart from everything and everyone.) Being the naïve young adult she’d been and still was, however, she hadn’t thought through any of the struggles that all of it—running away from her household where she’d always existed as a mere mistake, cutting herself off from the people whose lives she’d only made worse, and blindly going off into the unknown to pursue the dream she’d kept secret all her life—would bring along.

She shook her head. How could she let herself think so selfishly? She was just sitting here, pitying herself. She wasn’t giving any credit to the real artists who had a million times more pressure to succeed than she did. They were dealing with all the difficulties she was, but amplified, and topped off with another mountain of hardships that she’d never have to experience. They were the ones who had to have personal guards with them whenever they went out in public so they didn’t get attacked by some crazed, out-of-their-mind fan. They were the ones who received disgusting comments like, “He never should have become an idol if he can’t handle being on stage,” and, “He’s so ugly. Why is he even a part of the group?” It was impossible to even imagine how hard they struggled in their daily lives to just be. Whereas she was fortunate enough to have the option to hide away in her cozy, little studio, never having to show her face to the world.

She yawned, and noticed she’d been yawning for a while; it felt like her jaw was going to pop off on her next one. Looking at the clock on her phone, it read “12:42 p.m.” A sudden weight of exhaustion hit her, and her eyelids were sinking beyond prevention. It had been weeks since she’d gotten a good eight hours. As was the norm, she couldn’t be sure if she’d be able to drive home in this state, so she’d just have to sleep in the studio. At times like this, Atlantis was her best friend. It was always ready to accommodate her if the need arose. There was a stow-away bed in the couch, and there was an outlet right next to that for her to charge her phone overnight. She could always brush her teeth and wash her face in the bathroom down the hall. The only things it didn’t provide were pyjamas, but she could make do without them for the night. Anyway, she usually wore comfy clothes to work that were comfortable enough to sleep in, and she always had a spare set of clothes to change into the next day. She fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

A day had passed, and {Y/n}’s track had gotten accepted by PD Bang. It was so illogical how this always happened. She was the youngest one of the producers of BigHit, and most of them had been producing for much, much longer than she had. She’d gotten hired just a couple of months before the You Never Walk Alone album had been released. She was anything but exceptional at what she did. But her boss seemed to see things differently, saying she had a unique style and that it gave some variety to the albums. She wasn’t going to argue with him despite how much she wanted to tell him that her so-called ‘minimalist style’ wasn’t intentionally so. She was just glad that it earned her enough to make a living.

She’d woken up—once again in her studio after staying up late mixing vocals—to loud thumps coming from the floor above her. Still half-asleep, she turned on the screen of her phone, and the clock told her it was hours too early to be waking up. Turning her phone screen off, she went back to sleep.

At least, she made a worthy attempt.

Her eyes shot open just a few short moments later at an ear-shredding screech. It had a striking resemblance to rubber soles on a hard floor. Surely not. Surely the boys weren’t up at—she turned her phone on again—quarter till seven for dance practice. And yet, the stomping and screeching didn’t let up. She sandwiched her head between the mattress and the too-thin pillow, groaning as it failed to block out the awful noise from upstairs. She commended the boys for their undeniable dedication to their work, but they at least could have had the consideration to keep their practicing to a lower volume.

Seeing going back to sleep was a lost cause, she got up, getting ready for the day. Once she was dressed and ready for another day of head-pounding stress, she was headed for the staff lounge on the fourth floor, just above the one where her studio and the other producers’ were. There was coffee up there, and it was calling her name. The lounge was past the main dance studio too, so if she wanted to, she could poke her head in and see what the idols were up to. Maybe it wasn’t even any of them. It could well have been one or two of the staff’s choreographers or backup dancers. She’d have to go see for herself. But it would have to be after she got her daily dose of stimulance.

Once she had her drink in hand, she visited the practice room. She managed to open the door with an almost inaudible click. The place reeked of sweat. When she peeked her head through, she turned around and found two of the members practicing: Jungkook and J-Hope. The two were so focused on rehearsing, it was hard to tell if they’d even noticed her come in. The new choreography for the new title track looked harder than anything they’d done until now. It was tiring just watching it. They were jumping, shuffling their feet, shooting their hands up in the air. One move stuck out to her in which Jungkook tapped his forearm with two fingers on the last beat of a chorus.

Out of the two, she couldn’t take her eyes off the elder. The way he moved his body with flawless control and precision was beyond comprehension. It was funny. {Y/n} had never particularly been a raving fan of male dancers. She didn’t mind them, just didn’t drool over them. She simply wasn’t as affected by toned muscles rippling with the artist’s movement as all her classmates in high school who used to gush over such things had been. But Hoseok was the exception to that. He was the only person she’d ever seen who moved the way he did. He was ridiculously talented, and not just in dance. It was like the universe had taken oceans of every skill in performing arts and music one could think of and poured them all into one being. He was so dedicated and so talented, he could probably learn to do anything he wanted. He could produce an album entirely on his own if he worked hard enough. There was no doubt that he would. His dedication and hardworking attitude were proven when he’d learned how to rap like a god in just a few years with no prior experience. {Y/n} wanted so badly for him to know how admired and appreciated he was. That was the reason she needed to keep trying hard to become a better artist so that he and the rest of the members kept getting the support they deserved.

“‘Morning, Sea Ssi.”

She’d been pulled out of her thoughts by the voice of the maknae addressing her. “‘Morning.” She chortled under her breath at the endearing title he’d given her.

“Sorry we were too busy to say hello when you walked in. What are you doing down here this early?” the brunette asked.

“Oh, just getting some coffee after I got woken up by some loud noises coming from the floor above my studio. I came to see what was making all the racket.” His face turned sheepish, his hand dropping from his waist and his eyes going wide. J-Hope just grinned and chuckled at his sudden change in demeanor, and {Y/n} couldn’t help but do the same. “I could ask the same of you two.”

“Sorry,” started the main dancer, laughing nervously. “We were just practicing some new choreo that the director gave us.” She nodded. “Sorry for waking you up. If we’d known you were spending the night in your studio, we would have tried to be a little quieter.”

“No, it’s okay,” she answered quickly. He was too polite and too sweet for her to even think of rejecting an apology from him. “Where are the other members?”

“Who knows? Most of them are probably still at the dorm. Just like you, I got woken up by J.K. who was up before the sun attempting to practice in his room by himself.” Hoseok chuckled, his lips forming a heart shape. “When I came to ask him why he was up so early, he told me, ‘Well, I couldn’t sleep ‘cause I felt like practicing.’” He shook his head. “Seriously, this kid… Anyway, he said he was just about to head over here since it was too cramped in his room and asked me if I wanted to come with. Since I was already up anyway, I thought, ‘Why not?’ So,” he threw his arm up, “here we are.”

“Hey, I noticed you couldn’t stop looking at Hyung while we were practicing,” jeered Jungkook. “Are you a fan of his?” He was poking fun at her even when she was a year older than him. How shamefully obvious could one get?

She risked a glance at Hoseok, whose eyes trained on her said he was expecting an answer. “I…uh…” She stared down at the stained mug in her hands. It was one thing to be a fan, but a fan in her position, where one had the chance to see them all in person almost every day, was a different matter. She didn’t deserve this.

“Stop it, Kook, you’re making her get all flustered,” scolded the angel, only making {Y/n} implode in on herself even more, shoulders tense and attention averted.

“Look, so are you!” Jungkook shot back. She saw him gesturing at her as he emphasised his point.

“No, I’m not!” He almost sounded offended. “Right?”

She sighed. “Honestly, it’s no big deal. No need to point fingers, at me or each other,” she muttered, her gaze now directed toward the wall off to the side.

“Let’s just forget that happened, okay?” Jungkook fretted. “I’m gonna go get some water. Be right back!”

She watched the heavy door close long after his lively footsteps had begun to fade.

“So!”

She whipped around to face J-Hope.

“How’s your producing going?”

She sighed. “Not that well, to be honest. I’ve gotten pretty behind.”

He pouted. “That sucks.”

“No matter what I do, it always feels like there’s something missing. It’s always like this. And every time, I feel bad turning in something so mediocre. I hate feeling like I’m disappointing everyone.” She abruptly realised she’d been rambling and shut her mouth, staring down at her feet.

“Here’s some advice.” She looked up at him. “Just remember why you became a producer. You didn’t do it to please anyone else, did you? You did it for yourself.” He smiled at her with nonchalance, catching her off guard. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? You got this.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder. His eyes were so warm, like the moon—shining on her in even the darkest of times.

An awkward silence filled the practice room, and she suddenly noticed how close he was standing next to her. What else was she supposed to say? She’d just come to see what was going on down here. Even though she worked in the same building as the members, she still didn’t talk to them all that often. Why should she?

“Umm…thanks, I guess. I should, uhh…probably get back to work.” She knew she was chickening out. She couldn’t help it. “Keep up the good work!” she praised with an unnatural smile.

“Yeah, you, too. See you around!”

Thankfully he hadn’t seemed to detect the heat on her cheeks as she made her exit.

#my writing #fanfic #bts #bts fanfic #bts x reader #jhope x reader #hoseok x reader #angst #fluff #idol universe #first fic on this account!

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janiedean · 7 years

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Prompt where Lyanna and Elia raise their three children together because Rhaegar has disappeared and he shows up again during a Stark/Martell family reunion to find both his ex-lovers are together?

(hi anon for the part where I’m filling old prompts that y’all thought I forgot: have fun)

–

It’s probably very cliché that it starts when they literally crash into each other at the supermarket.

Or better: Elia’s cart crashes against Lyanna’s while she’s distracted because her eldest daughter is running off towards the sweets counter, and Lyanna is just glad she had her own kid on her back and not in the front.

“Sorry,” Elia tells her, “you know how it is with -” she says, and then she never finishes the sentence.

Lyanna imagines why - finding yourself in front of the woman your ex-husband had a fling with, who caused your split and who also has a kid from that same ex who has also conveniently vanished into thin air before he was born is probably not what Elia had in mind for today.

“Er,” Lyanna says, “no problem. I know.”

Elia looks at her, taking in the situation - Lyanna has a feeling she didn’t even know Rhaegar had disappeared also when she is concerned. She’s wearing some of Ned’s old clothes that he gave her when she said she needed something that no one would miss when her kid started teething, she hasn’t had a shower in two days and the only blessing is that Jon isn’t awake for this. Elia, on her side, looks tired but at least - well, put together. Sort of.

“Shouldn’t he be around?” Elia asks, and Lyanna doesn’t know if she’s glad that she didn’t beat around the bush or if she wants to disappear into the ground.

“Er, he hasn’t been since the seventh month. Family matters. You know.”

Elia sends her a fairly understanding look, which Lyanna had not expected.

“I think I do,” Elia sighs. Her second kid, the one in the cart, makes some kind of displeased noise and the other one calls for her mother from where she’s standing at the sweets aisle. “Listen,” Elia says, “guess we haven’t got time now, but maybe - if you ever want to get coffee sometime and trash talk our common ex, your brother has Arthur Dayne’s number and he has my brother’s.”

Then she runs after her daughter and Lyanna is left standing grabbing at her cart and wondering if she’s ended up in some kind of alternate universe.

–

They see each other for coffee.

Turns out that when Elia finds out how things actually went, she shakes her head and says, see what happens when you don’t even try to see the other side.

“Sorry that he dumped you like that,” she says.

“I get by. I mean, my brothers do help out.”

“I know, but - it’s still not okay. Well, if you ever want to make the kids hang out, I won’t say no.”

It’s obvious that she means it. Lyanna wants to cry in relief - damn it, she hadn’t even known Rhaegar was married when they met each other.

She calls Elia another time.

And then again.

–

Once, they bring the kids to the park all at once even if they don’t tell them how exactly they’re all related.

“Well,” Lyanna says after half an hour, “given that the only kid in existence who’s ever managed to not make mine cry is his cousin, maybe we should tell them at some point.”

Elia sips from her frappuccino and takes a deep breath - her bright orange scarf stands out against her black coat and the snow surrounding them. Their kids are making a snowman together, more or less. Or better, Rhaenys is doing most of the work, but never mind that.

“Really?” She asks.

Lyanna shrugs. “The daycare girls keep on saying that he’s terribly sweet on his own and they’re glad he basically never cries but that whenever he’s dealing with other children it’s a disaster. Robb’s basically the only one he likes. Until now.”

“Well,” Elia replies, “I don’t see why not. I mean, fuck’s sake, it’s not as if we have to make their life miserable because Rhaegar was a complete idiot.”

Lyanna has nothing to add to that.

They tell them (well, Aegon and Rhaenys - Jon is one, it’s not as if he’s going to remember that conversation). It goes definitely better than they had imagined. They end up making sure they hang out more often.

After all, it’s really not worth it to poison their lives over their father being a complete idiot.

“My landlord so wants me gone,” Lyanna tells Elia a year later while they’re having tea at her studio apartment. The kids are out with Ned, bless him and Cat for volunteering to take all of them for the day.

“Really?”

“I can only take so many hints that he doesn’t want single mothers in his establishment. As if I don’t pay rent on time.”

Elia’s dark eyes turn on hers, and she seems to be thinking it through. Then she glances at the three pictures attached to the fridge. One is Jon and Robb, another was taken at the park when Jon and his half-siblings were sortofbuilding that snowman, the other is some artsy black and white picture Cat took of her and Jon the week when she brought him home. No one should be allowed to look artsy when they’re basically passed out with their kid sleeping on them on Ned’s horrible old yellow sofa, but somehow it came out good and she put it there for - she doesn’t know why. Maybe to remind herself that, from the outside, the result of falling for a guy who doesn’t tell you he’s married, then leaves his wife to be with you when you end up pregnant and then disappears off the face of the earth because his family doesn’t approve can... well, look somehow better than it feels sometimes. Not that she’d change things now, but - sometimes she just wishes she had been smarter about it. As if it’s of any use crying over that now.

“I have an entire floor I don’t use,” Elia says then.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve seen the family house. I have two floors, Oberyn has the other two. Half of my half is empty and I don’t even know what to do with it, and I don’t need money on top of what I earn already. Just move in, I could use the company sometimes.”

“What? Are you sure?”

Elia gives her a half-smile that’s somehow both encouraging and somehow melancholic and shrugs slightly. “Why not? Sometimes it’s just - it’d be nice to have another adult around. Oberyn’s not in town most of the time anyway and I love my children, I do, but being alone with two of them just makes you long for any grown up to be around the place regularly. Really, I don’t mind.”

Lyanna wants to refuse, then she remembers how much she’d save from the rent money. Here she’s sharing one room with Jon and at some point it’s not going to work anymore - maybe until he’s five she can push it, but if she wants to raise a kid with some sense of independence and privacy she’d rather change the situation before then. And she likes Elia, to be truthful, she likes her a lot, and if Jon’s less than stellar social skills keep on developing this way then it’d be better if he’s around his siblings.

Well then.

“Fine, but I’m - okay, I’m a shit cook. I can do the laundry or whatever else.”

“Deal. I hate doing laundry,” Elia agrees, and holds out a hand. Lyanna shakes it.

Thing is: Lyanna’s never actually considered dating a woman - mostly because Rhaegar was the first man she really dated and it ended the way it did, and when you’re having a kid at nineteen it’s not like you have time for dating. And in high school all her flings were men. But she’s always sort of known she wouldn’t have problems with the prospect of dating a woman. In theory.

Living with one who has some ten years on her and is fucking scorching hot as pretty much the rest of her family hasn’t made it easy for exactly that same reason. On one side she’s happy the Martells were not the kind of stuck up rich people the Targaryens are and they had no issues with her coming to live with Elia.

(Hell, after Oberyn once clapped her on the back so hard she spit her wine because she didn’t even try to look for Rhaegar so he could at least acknowledge the baby as his own and said that she did the right thing not even worrying a bit about that asshole of a Targaryen, she stopped worrying about whether they hated her or not.)

That said, Lyanna had been sure she had kept it under control - sometimes she’ll stare and fine, she likes Elia and Elia’s not just hot, she’s beautiful with that dark skin, long raven hair and eyes of that same shade, and sometimes Lyanna envies those long eyelashes of hers and then decides that no, they look great on her, no point in envy when Lyanna’s hardly ever given a fuck about her own looks.

Anyway, she doesn’t know if maybe she wasn’t as good as she thought or what, but when one day when the kids are at Doran Martell’s and she comes back from tidying up Jon’s room and finds Elia reading in the living room and Elia tells her that they need to talk, Lyanna can’t help thinking, crap, did she figure me out?

Turns out, Elia had.

Turns out, talking meant actually making out in the middle of the living room with the two of them crashing on the ground when Elia put her foot over some Lego toy of Aegon’s and put her off balance. Then it turns into making out on the couch, which is blissfully free of Legos of any kind, and Lyanna decides that maybe this situation turned out better like this than if Rhaegar hadn’t fucked off wherever he did.

His loss, really.

The last thing Rhaegar expected from Elia was an invitation to the annual Stark-Martell post-Christmas family reunion. Not that he had expected anything from her after he came back to London four years after leaving abruptly, and he wouldn’t even have known how to apologize, but she sent him a message on Facebook after finding out from common friends and - well, he had gone. If anything, to apologize.

But when he gets there, he realizes that maybe there’s something else he had expected even less. Walking in on Elia and Lyanna sharing the same plate of appetizer while sitting on the sofa in a way that's certainly not friendly was jarring enough, but seeing the two of them kiss a moment later like two people who’ve been in a relationship for at least a few years -

Yeah. Wasn’t in the plans. He doesn’t come forward as he sees them part and hold hands as they go back to their appetizers, and at that point he can’t even be angry because he was the one listening to his damned father and leaving the country out of some ridiculous concept of keeping the family integrity - shit, he should have just cut ties with the old mad bastard long before then. It’s probably not surprising they moved on with their life, and they would have ended up meeting, given that they gave birth to three children one of which he hasn’t ever met, who as far as he knows are in the room which Doran reserved for them and the relatives who volunteered to be on watching-children-duty. He should go there, at some point, when he finds some way to put into words how much of an idiot he was.

(Especially with Lyanna’s child - how is he even going to not sound like an asshole when the point of the matter is ‘I had a fling with your mother because I fell for her and I left your siblings’ mother for her but then I left her too because I was a complete fucking bastard’?)

There’s one thing, he knows for sure now, though.

That when it comes to Elia and Lyanna and anything else related to the two of them, whatever it is that’s going on between them or his part in their lives, he’s most probably too late for anything that’s not making amends, and he hopes they’ll let him do that, at least. They deserve some, and they probably deserve each other more than he deserved them in the first place.

#lyanna stark #elia martell #elia x lyanna #uh there's even a ship tag?#okay wow #k guys first time i write this ship and probably last bc it's not my usual sandbox but this was fun #:)#sorry for the lateness anon #my fic #anonymous #ask post #ch: lyanna stark #ch: elia martell #ch: rhaegar targaryen #cowt settimana 4: troppo tardi

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