#Figure Studies by Christophe Young

[try-set-me-on-fire]

Got tagged for several sentence Sunday by @bigfootsmom @eowon @rewritetheending @eddiebabygirldiaz @devirnis @thewolvesof1998 @lover-of-mine and @daffi-990, as well as a lot of people for a lot of tag games all week. I was out of town and didn’t get the chance to respond, but I did scribble out this little fic in hotel rooms across the state. Tagging @shitouttabuck @malewifediaz @homerforsure @jeeyuns @rogerzsteven @wildlife4life if you have seven, or several, or, uh, however many sentences this is you’d like to share!

This isn’t the first and only time Eddie has found himself watching Buck’s hands. It's the variety, maybe, in how many ways he’s good with them that’s so captivating. Work, obviously, was the first time he’d noticed. Buck — and Eddie smiles whenever he thinks about it, now — had made himself so loud and blustery when they’d met. Eddie hadn’t doubted Bobby’s assessment that the man was a good firefighter, but he figured he was a heavy rescue kind of a guy, here for his brawn, someone to point at danger to terminator his way through it. Then, he’d held a box out for a bomb so steadily it saved all their lives; then, his grip was strong and sure in a collapsing hotel; then, on every call, no matter what, he moved with absolute confidence whether he was tying a perfect hitch knot or offering a hand to help a frightened vic to their feet. He’s good, he’s good at his job, he’s good with his hands, and still even years later Eddie has to remind himself to pay attention to his own task when Buck is at his side with a kind smile and reassuring chatter as his hands work carefully away.

The second place he’d noticed was with Chris. Buck understands lego diagrams that look like rocket science to Eddie, Buck wasn’t overseas or parenting a young child and so has played video games newer than Grand Theft Auto on a hand me down 360 sometime before 2010. He’s right there with the kid, always ready to advise on a tricky part of the diagram or give pointers for a difficult level, always ready to catch and support and comfort and protect, but the thing Eddie realized pretty quickly is how often he doesn’t do these things. Buck, from the beginning, had complete confidence in Christopher being able to figure out anything he puts his mind to. He doesn’t coddle, he never gets impatient and does something for him to get it done quicker. He’s just there to hand him the next requested lego piece with the same sort of awed smile Eddie knows is reflected on his own face when he watches his son.

Then, probably the kitchen. Eddie’s a better cook than he used to be, but he’d still rather watch Buck prepare food, diligently studying his hand on a knife or how he flips a pancake. When Eddie was a child and his abuela still lived in Texas he would watch her cook, how she would pour all her love and care for all of them into the meal, and Buck is just the same. Seeing him try the same dish over and over to get it just right makes Eddie wonder how anyone could ever think of this man as reckless, thoughtless. Being handed a plate by Buck is to be cherished in a way Eddie thinks not many people get to know.

Eddie has watched Buck’s hand on the small of Ali’s back, Taylor’s, Natalia’s. He’s watched them hold their hands, lead them in dances, seen how big his palm looked where it gently rested against their faces, wondered very quietly in some deep and hidden corner of himself what that kind of touch from that specific hand might feel like. He’s good with his hands and he’s got good hands, long fingers, little scars and freckles all over, a little bigger than Eddie’s own. He’d wondered — how could he not — quietly, and then louder and louder, and then-

And then Buck’s touches started to last longer, started happening with more frequency. A hand on his back as he passes him in Eddie’s kitchen, a room so familiar to them that the gesture is entirely unnecessary. A hand on his knee in the engine as Buck laughs at his jokes, Buck’s fingers curled gracefully around his elbow as they talk in a quiet corner of the station, gentle probing touches on every tiny scrape and bump Eddie accumulates on the job. Lingering, is the word for it, Buck’s fingers more and more reluctant to pull away, Eddie always leaning into the touch.

And now - a holiday party, full of folks from dispatch, the entire 118, Eddie’s pretty sure he even saw Ransone around the dessert table earlier. Buck’s got himself trapped behind the bar after he mixed a cosmopolitan for Karen and her delighted sound upon tasting it drew a crowd and endless requests started pouring in. So here Eddie is, too, the pair of them never far apart. He’s been perched on a stool for the last hour at least, watching Buck’s deft hands pour and mix and even do some fancy tricks with the bottles, tossing them in the air or behind his back. It makes Eddie laugh every time, and Buck’s responding grin makes him feel warmer than the alcohol could.

“You’re good at this,” Eddie says, which feels too obvious, or at the very least a vast understatement, and definitely something someone with a terrible crush would say, but something about the party and the way Buck keeps leaning towards him and, probably, the very good blackberry brambles that appear in front of him at regular intervals are all making him over inclined to share.

Buck’s grin is a little crooked, like his tongue is pressed against his teeth, and he winks, the bastard. Eddie’s probably turned a dozen shades of pink. “Bars I worked in had shit wages. Had to rake in the tips.” He nods towards Eddie’s glass, even this movement seeming extraordinarily smooth. “How’s the drink?”

Eddie snorts and takes a sip, like he needs to think about it. “You know it’s good. How come we just drink beers all the time when you can make shit like this?”

Buck laughs, head tilted back as he shakes a mixer full of Chimney’s piña colada. “Seems kinda overkill for a Tuesday night.”

Eddie grins into his drink, because Buck is at his house on Tuesday nights, and Wednesdays, and most of the rest of the week too if they can swing it. “Oh, I’m not a special enough occasion?”

“You’re plenty special, Eds.” Buck’s response is immediate, and his eyes have got all terribly soft and hard to look directly at, but the party and the leaning and the drinking have made Eddie brave, so he doesn’t duck his head. “I’ll make you a nice drink anytime.”

“Or you could-“ Eddie’s words catch, he coughs, he takes another sip of the bramble. Chimney leans against his side for a moment to grab the glass Buck’s poured his drink into, and Eddie remembers they’re not alone, they’re in a crowded room full of people who know them, he should probably go find water or breathe some fresh air, but then Chimney flits away again and Buck is looking at him expectantly.

“I could?” He prompts, with a smile that Eddie wants to fall asleep and wake up to, wants to taste.

Brave. He can be brave. Eddie rests two fingers on the back of Buck’s hand where he’s set it on the counter, looks up at him like his sister’s cosmopolitan magazines said to do. “You could show me what else you can do with your hands.”

Buck searches his face, taking big marathon runner breaths. “Eddie-” whatever he’s looking for he seems to find, because he nods, glances at Eddie’s drink, downs whatever’s left of it, and tilts his head towards the back door. It’s California, it’s not cold, but it’s winter and uncomfortable enough the backyard will be empty of party guests. Neither of them should get in a car yet, but this- this’ll work. This’ll do, in a pinch. Buck turns his hand palm up. “You wanna get out of here?”

Eddie takes Buck’s hand in his own, and they fit together just as perfectly as he hoped they might. “Yeah,” he grins, wide and goofy, unable to try and look cool about this at all. “Yes, please.” Buck is grinning just as wide, so there. “Your patrons might be upset though. Pretty early for a bar to close.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Buck says, tugging Eddie’s hand to start moving across the room. “You gave me the best tip of the night. I-“ he trips a little over somebody's toe, apologizes while Eddie giggles into his shoulder blades. “I’m retiring. They can make their own drinks.”

“Retiring?” Eddie’s impressed Buck gets the door open on only the second try. “What are you thinking of doing next?”

Buck turns around, bright against the dark backdrop of the empty yard and cloudy night sky, big dumb smile on his face. “I thought I’d become a firefighter.”

Eddie cackles, and chases Buck through the door. He stumbles a little but Buck’s hands come up to rest steady on his waist, catching him, easy.

#tag games #several sentence sunday #buddie #eddie diaz #evan buckley #my writing

[leeknowsintrusivethots]

A Stray Concubine

| Part 1 | Pairings: Prince!Lee Know/You, Prince!Bangchan/You, RivalNoble!Hyunjin/You? We are all about possibility here. Summary: Entering into a harem choosing was something you have been groomed for since you were young. Your aim is to make Crown Prince Christopher fall at your heels in order to restore your ruined family name and fortune, but games of love are much harder than games of lies and deceit. Content: Angst (is it me if it's not?), slow burn, smut(warnings below the cut), fictional historical universe, dark themes, second person perspective, historical-typical gender roles, imperial harem-inspired concubine system, multi-pov WC: 5119 Minors do not interact. Do not repost my content to other websites. Notes: I'm back to writing again, keyboard slappin' again. Also, I am having trouble figuring out a way to format POV shifts on tumblr that is clean but not intrusive. I am open to suggestions.

Smut Warnings: very brief/very vanilla smut, sex with a stranger, no strings, mentions/illusions of oral, smut is not between leads of the story?(idk, I think some of you might be peeved by that. We do it for the plot.)

You

Powerful was a word that most would not place on a woman. 

Women were meant to be demure and delicate. They were meant to rear children and attend to household affairs as their husbands brought in income and fought in wars where there would be no true victors. It was not a woman's place to meddle in affairs of politics and governance outside of securing marriage alliances for unwanted daughters to bring extra wealth and prestige to the family name. That is simply how the world worked. 

You never questioned it in your childhood. You wore the pretty, colorful silks. You learned to speak eloquently but never out of turn. You played instruments and studied embroidery and other womanly arts. You were exactly what society dictated you be: a pretty face being prepared to be sold off for the honor of your family name. 

It was a single, fateful trip to the capital with your mother and father that had changed not only your perspective but the entire course of your life. Your family name was tarnished and your father was executed by the ruling Bang family for murder and treason. The only thing that had saved you and your mother was the grace of the sex you had been born with and her tears and pleas for mercy. Even as she cried and begged in front of His Majesty, the truths you had known crumbled to dust. 

Your father had been a puzzle piece in a generations long game of chess where the kings and queens played with the lives of others to gain power of their own. He had been a disposable pawn, easily lost to the ages as a traitor whom there would be no songs written about. Everyone knew it, and it didn't take long for you to realize it for yourself. You, even at a young age, looked beyond your mother's pretty tears and prettier words. 

You knew Princess Mai was set to wed the young lord Hwang.

The Hwangs were a powerful family - rivaling your own in terms of wealth and influence. Hwang Hyunjin was the sole heir to his family's fortunes. A marriage alliance with Princess Mai would tip the precarious balance of power to favor the Hwangs more greatly. It would have been a match that would have been detrimental to your own family's power. 

You knew all of this. You also knew the vial of dark purple liquid your mother had hidden under the flowing sleeve of her gown was not nail polish as she had told you. You had watched keenly as she had slipped the liquid into Princess Mai’s goblet as you all supped with the Queen without anyone else the wiser. Your mother's poison had killed the young princess before the physicians could even get through the door. As Queen Bang had cried and screamed for the loss of her child, your mother had secretly smiled. 

She had ruined the Hwang’s grab for more power and gotten rid of a Bang daughter in one fell swoop. She was the chess master, and she had outmaneuvered them all with a pretty face and a pretty smile. You don't know if she foresaw any of the consequences of her actions: the execution of her husband, the ruin of the family businesses, and the loss of your family's prestige.

Your mother had broken the mold. She had held your father under a spell with her looks alone. His station allowed him to take other wives if he chose, but he never did. He allowed her the freedom that many women would never get to taste in this lifetime, and she took it with greed and left him in a grave of her making. 

“Was the power worth it, Mother?” You asked the carriage window that tottered down the street.

Through the pristine glass, the lush landscape was ruined by the image of heavily armed men on horseback. They wore the colors and heraldry of the Bangs, and they patrolled the road to the palace with keen eyes and sharp blades. Their numbers were more than usual as they surveyed the throng of carriages and ladies on horseback that made the journey in an unlikely parade. 

The Selection was the only time that the Kingdom of Miroh would see such an odd assortment of women making their way to the Palace of Kings. It was a rare event, only happening when the Royal family required more women to act as concubines and maids. The needs of the Palace had nobles and commoners alike sending their daughters off for the possibilities of fame and fortune. 

Serving the royals as a maid was an honor that most of the peasantry could only dream of, but even nobles would be pleased if one of their younger daughters could secure a spot in the Royal household. It would ensure that they were at least in the line of sight of the many princes, and the maid staff were compensated fairly for their time along with accommodations and food provided for them. There were certainly worse places for a woman to find herself.

You, however, were not sent by your mother with such plebeian goals. 

It was not comfort you sought, nor was it the possibility of an affair with the princes. You were to aim higher. You were to become one of the women that history scorned for reaching beyond her station. 

Your aim was to ensure that you became Prince Bang's Most Favored. Your mother would accept no less. She wanted the favor, the prestige and wealth that would come along with your rise. It had always been her goal, and it had been fed to you for so long that you weren't even sure how much of it was your own desire over her influence. 

Did you want that level of power?

Did you even care to join the Royal family in such a fashion?

Would you ever even come to care for Prince Bang as more than a chess piece on your own board?

These were questions that you could not answer. You often thought of being a young girl again - ignorant to the world and the affairs of adults. You liked your pretty dresses. You loved running through your family's well maintained gardens with your favored hunting hound on your heels. You loved scrubbing paint off your arms and being scolded by your governess for ruining good gowns after a day of painting lessons. You were innocent then, but that was certainly no longer the case. 

The frivolities of childhood had to be left behind. You were an adult, and you knew more of the world than you cared to. You knew that as a gently bred woman, you would never be more than a broodmare for a rich and powerful man unless you took charge like your mother had so many times before. The consequences could be grave; you could lose your head if you weren't careful, but great queens had never become so by following the status quo. 

As you toiled with emotions far beyond your depth, the King's Gate shadowed your carriage eerily. It was an original part of the palace’s structure, built so solidly that the centuries had done minimal damage to its intricate design. It towered over the road, blocking out the sun with marbled walls inlaid with precious metals and jewels. It was meant to intimidate, and belittle. It was meant to make everyone passing in its shadows feel weak and small in comparison to the glory of the Royal Family. It opened seldomly, and only for whatever family sat the throne at the time. 

Its momentous shadow lasted for what felt like an eternity as the line of carriages trudged along the walls of the palace to a more appropriate entrance for those not of royal blood. You and the other women arriving for the selection were being directed to the same gate used for supply carriages and merchants. It was yet another mind game: being delivered like fine cattle to await the murderous whims of a king. It was a way to ensure all women of the selection knew their place - but you saw things through the lens of your mother. 

The Gate of Kings was the first thing all arrivals to the palace would see by design, but it would never open for them. Instead of intimidation, you saw a challenge to inflame and inspire your heart. You would enter through the Merchant's Gate, but you knew that the Gate of Kings would open for you one day. It was all a matter of what you had to do to make it happen - consequences be damned. 

Prince Minho

Head held high. Feet light and delicate. Body slim and lithe. Features sharp and regal despite station. Gown loose and flowing in bright, ostentatious colors. 

She could be a candidate, Lee Minho thought to himself as he watched the dancers practice. 

The brightly colored fabric of her gown rode up her ankles as she moved, offering the briefest flash of a pale and delicate ankle. It was inappropriate – bordering on scandalous. Had it been even a decade prior, she might have been imprisoned for her lewdness but times were changing. It was a fact of life as set in stone as the changing of seasons: people evolved and people learned. 

Minho liked that concept. He liked the ideas of society shifting and expanding. He liked the change of pace from the monotony, but what he liked even more was the prospect of those daring enough to enact that change. It took an uncommon spirit to go against the masses – to challenge the very knowledge that civilized society was built on. 

As if reading his thoughts, the dancer’s eyes found his and held them. Her's were not the wide eyes of an innocent maid. They were heavily lidded, seductive in their intent.

It was another act of impudence, a daring so strong she probably would be locked in a labor camp if his father witnessed the scene. A woman so open in her sexuality was a threat to the masculinity of the insecure men around her who grasped at whatever shred of power they thought was within their reach. She would be scorned – likely punished by her closest male relative had she acted so with any other man.

Lee Minho was certainly not just any man off the streets of Miroh. He was so much more, and arguably so much worse. A Prince of Miroh could easily have her pretty head taken off for such an insignificant slight against social norms. He hated himself for even thinking about it, but he did. He hated himself even as the dance practice came to a natural end and the dancer approached him carelessly. 

It was a silent exchange – not a single word passing her rouged lips as he took her slim hand in his and led her from the banquet hall. He knew what she wanted. It's what they all wanted. Motivations differed, but the methods never changed. A fun time with a Prince of one of the most powerful nations in the world. He was never one to reject the advances, never had been. 

Lee Minho was many things. He was a Second Prince of Miroh. He was the son of the most powerful man in the kingdom. He was the younger brother of the Crown Prince. He was an intellectual, a graceful fencer, and the official Spare of the Bang family. These were all monikers and titles the public used to describe him, but behind closed doors they sang a different tune. 

He was the shame of the Royal family. He favored arts over swordsmanship. He was an alcoholic who frequented ill reputed pubs and discussed philosophy over ale with criminal scholars. He was a rake who lived at brothels and slept with low class whores. They talked as if they knew him. They spoke as if he sat at their tables and discussed with him personally over hot tea – but they had no idea. 

They knew nothing of the self hatred that coursed through his veins. They knew nothing of the helplessness he felt due to his station. They would never understand the uncontrollable guilt that never failed to find him. 

He was a Prince. He held all the power in the world but that power was wrapped up and presented to him with strings attached ever since he came into the world. He could drink, he could talk and he could sleep his way through the entirety of Miroh but that was as far as his freedom extended. The second he even stepped over the invisible line of what was acceptable, everything could be taken away. 

The change he wanted was within his reach – a delicate treasure that would be so easy to share. Reaching up to break it free for the rest of the world would spell the end of everything he had, but he was not brave enough. He was a coward – a coward hiding behind fancy words and under the colorful skirts of women far more courageous than he. 

His frustrations often manifested in indulgence in the freedoms he was allowed. He would drink, he would dine, and he would fuck in a vain attempt to fill the deepest pits of his tarnished soul. He never wanted it. He had wanted to change it, but his own desires had twisted him. He became the very thing he feared: a powerful man taking advantage of the luxuries given to him without giving anything in return. 

The dancer’s back was pressed against a thin wooden door. Her lithe legs had wrapped around him of their own accord and her hands were threading into his hair and the fabric of his shirt – pulling him deeper into a brief moment where he was not a Prince. He was a normal man without a moral compass, enjoying the pleasures of a woman's body. 

There was no foreplay – no kissing or passionate words. He didn't even get her name before he was pushing her skirts up and sinking his sheathed cock into her cunt. It was not an act of love. It was the act of a desperate fool seeking to forget the world around him. 

And he took. He took the brief reprieve with abandon. The door shook dangerously behind her. Her nails raked him though his shirt hard enough to leave marks. Her moans and whines intermingled with his hushed pants to fill his ears with sensual distraction as her walls squeezed him. 

It was over too fast. The sounds, smells, and feelings of arousal tapering until all that was left was grim reality. Post orgasm clarity was never a good moment sober. Words failed him, and all the truths he ran from distracted him from the beautiful woman who had originally caught his eye. 

“Talia,” she spoke as she adjusted her skirts. 

“Excuse me?” He questioned dumbly. He had put space between them, giving himself a moment of reprieve and allowing her a moment to collect herself. 

“My name: Talia,” she repeated. 

“You're telling me now?” He asked in mild amusement. 

“Figured you might want to know who just made you cum,” she shrugged nonchalantly. 

“Is that any way for a lady to speak?” he asked at her audacity. It was brazen and crass, but he was far from mad about it. Her words had his cock twitching in his pants again.

“M’no Lady. You know as well as me that I'm not gentleborn.”

“Since we're being so frank, relieve me of my curiosity,” he said as he propped himself against an abandoned and dusty desk against the wall opposite of her. He regarded her levelly, but with the easy charisma that he was often praised for. 

“Anything for Second Prince Bang,” she mocked with a quirk of her brows. She never shied away from his stare, never let herself be subdued by the power his titles held. He liked that – a lot. 

“I figured you knew.” He was not surprised in the slightest. His portraits were few and far in between, but it was highly likely the palace staff had informed the dancers one of the princes was watching in on their practice. She made no comment of guilt, so he continued, “What did you want from this entanglement?”

“Other than being able to brag that I fucked a Prince?” She laughed. It was not a malicious laugh, but a genuine one. She also found their exchange amusing. 

“Are you going to join my fanclub?”

“I'll be the leader.”

At her remark, he laughed. It was an honest laugh, one that had him feeling light and free. It was an uncommon feeling for him, one only his brothers had managed to make him feel. He liked this girl, but that's all he ever could do was like her. He was under no illusions that this was just an exchange of banter. She was a passing moment in his life, not a permanent fixture. 

“Were you that pleased?” He asked with a spark in his gut. He made to move from the desk, but she put her hands up in surrender. 

“So pleased, I fear another round would have me fainting.” She let out a sigh as she fanned herself in exaggeration before letting out a snort of derision. “Isn't that what the gentleladies say when their ladybits can't take it anymore?”

“Even noblewomen like to dabble in the fine art of overstimulation,” he smirked back. 

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Are you avoiding my question?”

“I would never dare,” she hummed with a twinkle showing in her eyes. It was teasing – daring on its own. 

“Then answer.”

“Is that a command, Your Highness?”

“Would you obey if it were?”

His question had her approaching him, a smirk that mirrored his own pulling at her painted lips as the gauzy material of her dress flowed around her slim figure enticingly. When she was directly in front of him, close enough that he could feel her breath against his skin, she sank to her knees before him. Her hands deftly handled the ties of his trousers to pull them down enough to free him. 

“If the Prince commands, I will serve.” Her mouth, hot and wanting, was on him before he could even think of a witty response.

Prince Christopher

As heir apparent of a nation, Christopher Bang was not unaccustomed to worry. He worried about the coming winter and if the provinces had prepared their food stores accordingly. The winters in Miroh could be harsh– deadly even. If the cold didn’t kill the populace, hunger was a certain second contender. If he could help alleviate that in any way: he would. It was his birthright and his duty, and he was nothing if not a man of his station. 

Any indication of increasing hostilities in the Borderlands would have him holed up in his personal offices for weeks on end. He would analyze patterns. He would discern strategies. He would rethink choices in generals. He would make plans to advocate for peace treaties with the neighboring territories. WIthout fail, his efforts would be rebuked by the King and the conflicts would continue unchecked. He never stopped trying. 

The conflicts never turned to all out war. They were simply petty squabbles with centuries long history over dejure land rights. It was almost ingrained as tradition– sons carrying out the same trite battles as a matter of pride over any true cause. Ofcourse, it wasn’t the Kings or Princes that suffered. 

It was the common soldiers with wives and children waiting for their safe return. It was the fishermen who watched warily as flagships came to shore. It was the farmers who worked full days for a meager loaf of bread only to watch their livelihoods be put to the torch in a war they never asked for. It was average people who held no stake nor say in the matters of governance or state. It didn’t matter to them who held the territories they called home. Their lot would stay the same regardless of which Lords called themselves King, but the battles for that title hurt them more than anyone else. 

Christopher knew that. He wanted to change it. He wanted to right historical wrongs and be the King his people needed. Alas, he couldn't. All he could do was worry. 

It wasn't even just grand matters of state that occupied his mind. Smaller, more personal affairs piled on his already overloaded platter of responsibilities. He was the eldest of his family's sons – even in the circles of peasantry that came with its own responsibility. He had to look out for his younger siblings. He had to ensure they played their parts as royal children and kept the family name clean and as prestigious as ever. Some of his brothers made it harder than others. 

Changbin had taken his duties easily as had their younger brothers: Seungmin and Jeongin. They knew their stations and how to conform within the standards that befit them. Felix and Jisung tried, but they were more empathetic. They struggled with their places on the world stage– questioning the morality of their way of life and the responsibilities they held. It wasn't a negative thing, and Christopher could not fault them for it. It was a natural part of being human.

In his youth, it wasn't at all uncommon for his studies and training as heir to lead him down a spiral of questions. He was one of the most powerful men in the world thanks to nothing other than being born a son of the Bang Family. He could make people tremble in fear if he so much as looked at them with ill intent. He held the power of life and death in his hands. How could that possibly be fair? How could he live knowing that he had everything while others had nothing? He was as well aware of the moral quandaries as Jisung and Felix. He would not fault them for floundering – he could not.

The hardest thing – he had learned – was having all the power in the world and still trying to be a decent human. 

The duties and power of royalty were a loaded hand cannon given at whim by an unfair creator. Some men would tremble at the burden, and lay it down without problem. Some would take the power to head and heart, and become a terrible beast whose machinations could ruin entire realms with a single shot. Others –  a very rare few – had the sense and sensibility to know not only how to shoot, but how to aim. 

It was Christopher’s only hope that he ended up in the history books as one of the latter. He would be a good king when the time came. He would care for his people and not let the burden of rule turn him hard and corrupt. He would be the role model his brothers needed. 

But these were simply hopes and dreams. In reality, he was simply one Prince amongst many others. His father still held the crown of governance, and he answered to the King as well as anyone else. 

“You can not simply force him!” Beauty Lee cried out with as much emotion as Christopher had ever seen her express. She was usually so calm, and collected. She was a Beauty of the King’s Harem, but he had learned far too early that even his father could break the cool facade of the Palace women with little effort. 

“And what's to stop me, Woman?” King Bang grunted back with a bite. His voice was not to be forgotten. It was distinct in its unyielding harshness, and it suited his appearance just as well. 

He was a hardened man – a King but a true warrior at heart. He was graying and wrinkling in age, but he was still considered a handsome – even fearsome – man.  Under the wrinkles covering his face and hands were scars from battle. He had seen war, but his age and dress showed he also knew luxury in equal measure. 

“He is your son! You must have an ounce of compassion for your own blood!” Beauty Lee protested. 

“Compassion? Is compassion what he needs, now?” The words were not spoken, but spat in frustration. It was a testament to Beauty Lee’s determination that she did not shirk away from the words. “I'd rather a firm beating to undo all the years of coddling you've put the boy through.”

“Is a mother's love coddling? I shall not deny he is flawed. Heaven knows we all are, but he's grown into a good man with a good heart!” Her voice was calmer, but still burning with resolve. 

The feeling of dread that had been slowly rising in Christopher’s chest engulfed him until he felt bile rising in the back of throat. He knew he had not been summoned to the King’s receiving chambers to simply witness a lover’s quarrel. They were speaking of Second Prince Minho - Beauty Lee’s only son and the Second of the Bang Sons.

Minho wasn’t like his other brothers. He had always been incredibly brave even if outlandish. He broke tradition: galavanting across the world with intellectuals, keeping the company of whores and artists, and never accepting his duties as a Prince of the Royal Family. He had always done what he wanted, and Christopher admired him for it even if it stressed him out to his wits end. 

“A heart our enemies would tear out of his chest and eat for protein. He is soft. Sometimes I question whether he is even my son,” King Bang said viciously. It was a tone that could cut down enemies. I was not a tone to take with a gentlewoman, especially not regarding your own blood.

“You– you can't say such things! He is your true son! I swear it,” Beauty Lee prostrated. 

“Ah, bugger off woman! If I had any true suspicions you would be dead and he would be left to rot in a cell.”

“Please, Your Highness. Minho admires you so much, he just needs time.”

“Time? Had I known you and your welp would be so resource intensive, I would have left you both in the whore house you came from.” King Bang said it as if he were discussing the menu for the upcoming festivities. It was as casual a threat as could be delivered, but it was a threat. 

“Plea–”

“Save your whimpering. There will be no further discussion. Minho will cease his fruitless adventures and settle down here in the palace with a harem befitting his station – or he will be sent to the Borderlands indefinitely.”

“You would send your own son to die in such a way?” Beauty Lee cried. As if suddenly realizing he was present, her wild eyes fell on Christopher. Before he could even register what was happening, she was tugging the sleeve of his shirt in desperation. “My Prince! He is your brother! Minho will die in the Borderlands! You know it.”

“Unhand the Crown Prince, Woman! I have taken heads for less!” King Bang roared amongst her pleas for mercy.  

It was moments like this that Christopher liked to pretend. He was not simply Prince Christopher: he was King Christopher. He held the power. He would never let Beauty Lee be in such distress and he would be content to let Minho live as he saw fit, but those were still dreams. He was but a Prince, and Minho was too. If they wanted to survive for a future, they all had their parts to play. He could not pretend: he had to take action. 

“Father,” Christopher spoke up as Beauty Lee clung to him. “I will take responsibility.”

“For Minho?” King Bang questioned with narrowed eyes. He was always suspicious– always seeing a play even if there was none, and truly Christopher didn’t have one. 

“Yes. I will ensure he settles down into Court Life,” Christopher assured his dad and the bleary-eyed Beauty. She blinked up at him with hope, and even fondness. She always had been kind to him and his brothers. She would sneak them sweets when they were young and practiced at swords and the King forbade it. She was a kind woman – maybe too kind for the world she had been adopted into. “I will make sure he accepts it, and adjusts appropriately.”

“Sometimes, I fear I have raised no sons, but seven bleeding hearts instead,” King Bang sighed. He contemplated for a moment, his eyes flashing between his concubine and his heir with laser focus. If he were looking for something, he seemed to be content with what he found. “I will let you.”

“Oh, Your Majesty. I will be forever grateful. You are good, and just!” Beauty Lee cried as she dropped Christopher’s arm only to bow as low as possible at the foot of the King’s ornate desk chair he occupied. 

“Save your words,” he commanded her. Her words stopped at once at his admonishment. “If Christopher should fail to tame my most wayward son, it will be a statement of his right to rule.”

As he spoke, he stared right into the eyes of Chrisopher. 

The young prince was not surprised. He had spent his entire life jumping through hoops to earn not only his crown, but even a shred of affection from the larger than life figure that he shared blood with. His aptitude had never failed him, but he would never feel safe relying on his father’s love for anything in his life. 

“If I cannot trust my heir to command his own blood, how can I trust him to command the people of an entire kingdom?” the King added. He let the threat hang in the air before turning his attention back to the sniveling Beauty at his feet. “In other words, if he fails: you will ruin two of my sons.”

It was another threat meant for the woman who had borne him a child. 

She was one of his longest lasting concubines. It was rumored that Beauty Lee was the one woman of the harem that held any love from the King, and she had suffered for it. She had been scorned and bullied by the other women of the King’s harem. She had been attacked in countless games of court intrigue. She had outlasted all the attempts to have her ousted from the court and from his favor. 

Christopher could only wonder: how would she survive the biggest threat of them all? 

#stray kids smut #skz ff #skz smut #lee know fanfic #lee know ff #lee minho smut #lee minho fanfic #lee know smut #stray kids fanfic #bangchan smut #lee know x reader #bangchan x reader #bangchan ff #bangchan fanfic #stray kids ff #stray kids x reader #stray kids scenarios #skz scenarios #skz fanfic

[extasiswings]

Time to play the game of “in an episode full of deranged writing choices, what is making my brain go brrrrrr the most” and this week we have landed on: Christopher’s Mission Building Project.  

Now, for those of you who have never gone to school in California, this may require a bit of explanation.  Basically, anywhere from around 5th-8th grade or so, it used to be traditional to have a social studies/state history section on the California missions/Spanish colonialism which would involve picking one of the missions and building a model.  If you’re wondering at all if these lessons have historically involved very little critical reflection and a lot of glossing over of the treatment of indigenous peoples, you would be right, and that’s partly why at least from my understanding, that practice had fallen out of style a bit in more recent years (or at least in certain areas).

In sum: of all the school projects that they could have given Christopher to send Eddie to the hardware store, of any subjects, they chose to make it a history project, and one that is very traditional and at least arguably outdated at best.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Because again, what exactly is this project?  It’s building a model.  A replica.  Recreating a massive, towering, monumental piece of history in a way that, frankly, will never match or live up to the real thing (and could not be expected to).  Because it’s a fake.  A pale imitation.  How could it ever measure up?

That’s exactly what Eddie is doing in his love life though.  He says so.  He’s trying to recreate and recapture what he had with Shannon.  And Bobby even tells him that he can’t.  It’s impossible.  You have to build something new, you can’t go back, you can’t make something lasting and real if all you’re doing is trying to imitate what came before.  

And see, Eddie has learned a little bit.  He and Christopher aren’t using the premade models that you just buy and stick together.  He’s not going down the same “readymade family” path he did with Ana.  At least he’s trying to build something from scratch.  But it’s still a replica.  He’s still stuck in the past in his own way, still stuck in this narrow box of what’s traditional even if it’s outdated, even if he’s evolved as a person to a place where that’s no longer what he actually wants or needs.  

Eddie had a great love.  A real love, a young love, a complicated love, a love that died.  That love is part of his history, his past, and has shaped him as a person.  But the next great love, the love that’s meant to define his future, that’s not going to come from looking back at the past.  He can’t build a model, he has to build a whole new structure.  And the last little loud tweak of Christopher being an engineer...the implication that even in following his heart, not Christopher’s, Christopher is fundamental to helping him figure out what that new structure (for life, for family, for love) looks like?  Yeah...yeah...I’m OBSESSED.    

#chapel for ts #911 spoilers #eddie diaz

[kisskissbanggang]

Disavowed - pt. 2

[5.5k Words/20min. Read - Priest!Chris x Reader - NSFW/Smut - Church, Your Mind is Playing Tricks on You, Confrontations, Something Feels Off, Catholic Guilt, Priest Kink, Semi-Public Sex, Truck Sex, I Swear This is a Halloween Series]

[a/n: finally time to get halloween cranked up to speed 💕 ty to @magicficwriting and @therhythmafterthesummer for beta reading 💗]

[Part 1 | Come Say Hi!]

It felt forbidden to be in a room full of people and be the only one to know that Christopher, Father Bang, was a disgusting hypocrite. 

The day of your realization had been Sunday, obviously. It was now Thursday, after school, and you were all crowded into the modest boardroom next door to the faculty lounge of Pinewood Falls Prep. The walls were probably supposed to be white, if it weren’t for decades of wear and cigarette smoke. Even if the smell didn’t persist, the resulting hue of curdled cream lingered.

“So that settles it. It is generous of you to step up, dear… Dear?”

An elbow gently dug into your own at the conference table. You were so distracted. 

Your gaze swung to your side to identify who just nudged you, when you recalled that Jisung was the one who so politely saved you a seat. Reverend Han, you had learned, was the other young man that helped Father James serve mass alongside Chris.

That creep.

Chris, that is. Not Jisung… although you had to admit that you weren’t exactly in love with how polite the deacon was. 

“Dear…?”

You finally snapped out of your brooding then, finding Sister Judith rolling her eyes at the front of the room.

“Poor lamb must be sleeping with her eyes open,” Father James chuckled. To your chagrin, Chris laughed along. You wanted to shout it out at the whole room right then, just what a liar and a fraud the deceptively handsome priest was.

“I was saying,” Sister Judith reiterated, “that I know there’s a litany of work left in the wake of Jacqueline’s sudden departure, but that it’s generous of you to volunteer and step up to take it on, dear.”

“I did…?” you murmured out loud, stricken with disbelief. Jisung patiently nodded to confirm it for you.

To say that Sister Judith’s assistant left suddenly was an understatement. When you arrived at work early on Monday morning, her desk behind yours, in front of the Sister’s office, was empty. Every notepad, pen, and paperclip was gone, as if no one had ever occupied the space in the first place. Sister Judith wouldn’t tell you why Jacqueline left, but you supposed it was none of your business. At the beginning of today’s meeting, Father James had simply said it was a shame, but you were surprised that no one at all seemed to particularly care that the young woman had vanished so abruptly.

“You won’t take on everything, of course,” Sister Judith clarified. “You’ll be taking care of Jacqueline’s filing duties and backing up the receptionist when Roberta is unavailable. That’s all.”

“What about the lunchtime study group in the library?” Jisung suddenly asked. “Jacqueline was running it.”

“You can take that on if you have the time, Reverend,” suggested Sister Judith.

Jisung slouched back in his chair, as though he suddenly regretted saying anything in the first place. “Oh, uh,” he scrambled shyly, “that’s no problem, I guess. I just don’t know if the kids will take a liking to me–”

“Not like Christopher, you mean,” Father James laughed heartily, clapping a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “They practically flock to him.”

Chris humbly waved him off. “I hardly have anything worthwhile to teach; it’s just gym,” he denied. “I make myself available; that’s all. You have plenty to teach! Make yourself available, Jisung, and they’ll flock to you, too.”

The staff all but fawned over the platitude. Your pen’s barrel creaked in your hand, you were so close to snapping it in half. That pretty boy golden child had everyone wrapped around his little finger and it made you livid.

You left the staff meeting in a daze, trying to figure out why on Earth Chris refused to acknowledge you with any ounce of recognition. The whole ordeal felt like he was taunting you, and it was on the verge of working. There was no way it wasn’t him that you’d slept with. You remembered far too much of the whole night.

Maybe it was because your pride was admittedly hurt. You weren’t typically one for one-night stands like the one you were positive you engaged in, but the idea had intrigued you enough to want it. Now it just felt like you were being punished, some cosmic joke at your expense because you acted on your desires for once and now you couldn’t get it out of your head.

Indeed, even though you’d gone to your interview and mass with only an inkling of what exactly had transpired on Friday night, that fuzzy recollection had since turned high definition and was currently blasting at full volume in a maddening loop in your head. You had tried a divey little bar in Briar Bay, only a thirty minute drive away. There were no bars in Pinewood Falls from what you could tell, so the short trip seemed worth it. The bar had been a dank hole in the wall, a cozy hangout popular with the boat crews and mussel farmers that worked the bay. You’d noticed Chris before he ever saw you. He wasn’t wearing his clerical collar that night, obviously. Instead, you were drawn to this man sitting alone at a table in the corner, with the brim of his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. You had left him alone and minded your own business at the bar…

Until a beer appeared in front of you before you could even start a tab. The bartender pointed at the sender.

Right at Chris.

Here, now, today, you were feeling self-conscious and self-righteous all at once while you grabbed your bag from where you’d stowed it in your desk, back in the main office. It had been a long day of school, and the weekly staff meeting made this one feel even longer. Chris had shared one single flash of recognition with you at mass on Sunday, but never again in the days since. He had to be too ashamed, you were positive. Grouchy was an understatement for how you were feeling. You were on edge. All week, you strained to make pointed eye contact with this man, see if you could catch him replicating that explicitly guilty glint in his eye that he had during church, and he was staunchly refusing.

Even over dinner, you drifted, like a wraith, into the dining room of the boarding house and barely paid attention to your perfectly charming and sweet housemates. Seungmin and one of your fellow boarders, Felix, had worked so hard on making a gorgeous dinner, but you were so plainly pissed to the point that you couldn’t properly taste food. The worst part, honestly, was that you weren’t solely thinking of outing this disgusting man.

You were plagued by how much you couldn’t stop thinking of your night together. Not only were you burdened with this miserable secret, but you were the only one who knew what this man looked like under his clothes, the way he acted in bed. He was horrendously attractive. He was regretfully skilled. Those juvenile little hickeys he left all over you took days to vanish. In fact, most of them finally faded just the previous morning–something you’d never experienced before. The longest a love bite had ever stuck around on your skin was maybe three, four days, but five felt like a ridiculously long time. It was only adding to the way you couldn’t get the picture of Chris’ bare chest or carved hips out of your head, couldn’t shake the feeling of his soft lips or his rough stubble. 

One stupid hickey remained–angry and red and framed with teeth marks–right between your cleavage. More like a bite than anything.

This was going on far too long. 

It was Friday. Your housemates probably thought you were sick in the head. They’d been so cordial and polite, trying as much as they reasonably could to get you to open up and share a little, maybe unload some of the burden you were clearly carrying. The previous week, before you’d ever slept with Chris by accident, you were gladly chatting and helping with housework, staying up late to wash dishes with the boys and sip iced tea on the porch, wrapped up in sweaters when the breeze picked up.

You almost felt ill. More than the guilt, more than the shame, more than the way you were convinced everyone knew you were complicit in Father Chris’ sin, you hated that you wanted to be right. The way he ignored you was too practiced, too aloof. What hurt more than him not showing any guilt was him not even showing any hint of knowing you existed in any capacity outside of school. You tried like hell to keep your head down, get your work done, try to confront the pile of Jacqueline’s filing left unfinished.

It was the damned filing that did you in, ultimately. An approved stack of staff schedules now sat at the top of the pile, unearthed after you made some progress in your fastidious sorting and storing. Fr. Bang, Christopher was staring right at you, begging you to glance at the piece of paper. Planning: 2nd Period.

You wished you would move on and let it go, but you peeked at the clock on the wall. It was almost a quarter after 9 o’clock. There was plenty of time. 

You would do it.

No, you wouldn’t. You would work through the mountain of filing.

Yes, you would. You would confront this asshole once and for all and get him to admit that he recognized you, that he was disgusting and immoral.

The hallway was crushingly empty as you walked to the gym. Your shoes clicked loud on the aged linoleum floor. It was disarming, being this hyper-aware and critical of your own actions. Something resembling embarrassment clung to you like static.

Why were you so obsessed with doing this?

Walking into the gym, you almost chickened out when you found it empty, even though that was the entire point of catching him during his planning period in the first place. You scanned the basketball court and the stands extended from the wall, finding no sign of life and abashedly turning right back around to leave.

“Wait, I’m here!” rang out a voice behind you. “Can I help you with something?”

You warily turned back to face the voice, finding it to belong to no other than Father Chris. 

He smiled softly, kindly attempting to keep you from running off. “That’s right,” he nodded with recollection. Your gut twisted. “You’re the new office manager, right?”

That was it. This was your breaking point. “You’re kidding, right?” you scoffed. Chris’ eyes widened in bewilderment.

“I’m… what?” he asked. “Are you alright, dear?” He stepped closer, and flinched when you smacked away his outstretched hand.

“That’s rich!” you cackled. “How long are you going to keep lying? How long until you stop pretending you don't know me?”

Chris shook his head in confusion. “I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “What are you telling me? I’m afraid I don’t understand–”

“Seriously?!” you balked. “You’re going to act like we’ve never met?!”

“We met before?” the priest blinked at you, maybe even a little bashful. Flattered, even. “Maybe in a dream, but I don’t think so.”

You huffed so hard, so affronted by the response, that it could’ve been mistaken for smoke spilling out of you. “That is some nerve you have, asshole–”

“Hey,” Chris said sternly. “Calm down.”

And you did. God, you hated that you did. Worse yet, you weren’t even sure why you calmed down at all. The energy from your outburst was simply sapped out of you in its entirety.

“Do you want to talk?” Father Chris offered. “It seems you have a lot on your mind.”

Unsure what else to do, you indignantly folded your arms. “Fine. Yes. I’d like to talk.”

He nodded seriously. “Okay, I’ll be more than glad to. I have a meeting about a baptism here in ten minutes, but how about tonight? Somewhere we can have some privacy.”

“Oh? And where’s that?” you impatiently asked. If he suggested the Trawler, you’d scream right there and then.

“I live in Briar Bay for a couple more weeks,” he explained. As if you didn’t already know this. As if he didn’t tell you on Friday night. “How about Reflections? It’s a nice little cafe I like.”

You shifted your weight from one foot to the other, unsure. All the energy you originally had to pursue this issue was gone, vanished and leaving a vacuum in its wake that made it difficult to proceed. However, the idea of getting that confession was still too sweet.

“Fine,” you agreed, almost defiant, like you weren’t giving him exactly what he wanted. “Okay.”

╚⊶⊶⊶⊶⊶✞⊷⊷⊷⊷⊷╝

Not okay. 

The worst part of Briar Bay being a “short” 30-minute drive away meant that every five minutes, you were wondering what the hell you were hoping to achieve. What, Chris would admit what he did and you would be satisfied? You would simply leave? Were you going to turn him in and humiliate him, really punish him for being so terrible? What exactly did you want here?

And still you were thinking about how gorgeous he was in bed. This still weirded you out. You explicitly recalled hardly being able to remember anything during your interview with Sister Judith earlier that week, but days later and now you could perfectly recall the cute way he scrunched his eyes shut when he climaxed? That queasy feeling settled in your gut again. By the time you turned off the small highway into Briar Bay, you almost felt feverish. Nauseous and everything. You were nervous trying to pick out each business. The Trawler passed by on your left down the main road, but finally you caught it. Reflections was apparently a sweet little coffee shop at the end of the main street, the last business next to the main route down to the bay. And out front, sipping from a paper cup in a cardboard sleeve on the patio? 

Father Chris had the audacity to be the picture of serenity. His shitty powder blue truck was parked out front. He was dressed in a casual pair of jeans and a sweater. A ball cap was pushed low over his brow, just like the week before. 

Fucking creep.

You nervously pinched at the hem of your top. In a move of pure desperation to hold any power you had left, you put on the exact outfit you’d been wearing Friday night last week. A crop top of reasonable length, a belted pair of cute jeans, some casual sneakers, and a cardigan because it was getting a bit chilly out. You weren’t totally sure what you were looking to get here, but maybe this would be the element that finally got that look of recollection you were so hungry for.

As you should’ve predicted, he wasn’t even outwardly excited to see you when you approached. Just a glance and a soft smile before he motioned to the chair across from him. You stiffly took a seat, when Chris pointed out toward the cliffs looking over the bay, up the hill from the cafe. “So you’re new, right? You just moved to town?”

He waited patiently until you silently nodded before continuing. “That’s Barrett Bluffs. There used to be a church there until it burnt down a hundred years ago. I just noticed that there’s actually a square patch of dirt up there. Maybe it really did burn down, except the story is it spontaneously combusted. The local kids used to dare each other to look over the edge.”

“Why?” you asked, attempting to remain nonplussed. 

Chris laughed into his drink. “I guess there’s a cave on the cliff face or something. The local legend is that a vengeful spirit lives in it. I dunno. Kids are wild.”

“Yeah,” you nodded, distant while your gaze was still fixed on the square patch of earth at the top of the bluff. “They’re pretty imaginative.”

“What’d you want to talk about?” he suddenly asked. You snapped out of it.

“I just don’t understand why you’re pretending you don’t remember me,” you simply stated.

Chris shrugged helplessly. “Because I don’t? Would you like me to get you something? Their chai here is delicious.”

You felt like your face was about to crack into a thousand tiny pieces. Every single option ran through your mind at once, tripping over each other. Really, you could argue this some more, or just leave it alone… but you did neither of these things. Instead, you got out of your chair and simply walked back up the street. Chris hopped to his feet and jogged after you, finishing his drink in the process and tossing it in a garbage can.

“Where are you going?!” he frantically asked you.

He followed you all the way to the Trawler, where the bartender waved hello to you, driving you even more mad than you already were. You grabbed Chris by the elbow and practically threw him into the chair in the back corner. He watched, bewildered, as you pointed at the bar.

“I was there,” you heatedly explained, “you were here. You bought me a drink and I came over to sit down. You said you liked my perfume and I said I liked your cologne, and we had a great time, and you kissed me in the back parking lot out there in front of your truck before you offered to give me a ride back to your place!”

How you remembered all these finer, non-explicit details, you had no idea, but they were all clear as day all of a sudden. Chris, meanwhile, was beet red in the face. 

“Uh, er,” he floundered. 

And there it was.

That tiny, miniscule little flex of muscles in his face, his eyes widening a millimeter.

A fucking confession of guilt if you ever saw one, you were convinced.

Was this what it was like to go crazy?

Except he doubled down. Chris squared his shoulders and smiled that same humble smile. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I really have no clue what you’re talking about. But for what it’s worth, I’m having a nice time. You pretty much tricked me into a date. Smart play, too, since it’s the only way I can enjoy one.”

One final option lay in front of you, one you were finally angry enough to use it. You bluntly yanked the neckline of your blouse down, exposing that one last hickey, the one that looked more like you were attacked by some animal. Chris’ eyebrows raised in surprise, his focus darting to where the mark was and away. 

“Still insisting I’m crazy? You're a real piece of work, Father,” you scowled. “Hope you're pleased with what you got.”

You let go of your top, grabbed your bag, and stormed out of the bar through the back door, the nearest entrance and into the small parking lot there just so you could get some fresh air. An uncomfortable heat surged up your back and radiated through your chest like a fever. You were nearly on the verge of furious tears. Squeezing between two pickups, you were so distracted that the rearview mirror of one of the vehicles smacked your shoulder. Fuck Chris. You would turn him in, maybe even before mass on Sunday–

Rushed footfalls on the gravel of the parking lot startled you, and you turned with only enough time to gasp when you found Chris there, his hands already cupping your face and pulling you in for a heated kiss. You barely had time to register all of this between the priest panting hot, desperate in your mouth, his cologne and aftershave making your olfactory senses tingle. His lips were still so soft. And then you remembered that this was disgusting.

The force of your slap against Chris’ cheek was more of a shove, getting him the hell off of you. You found yourself leaning back against the bumper of the truck you’d squeezed past, still holding your hand out to keep him back. 

Chris massaged his cheek and jaw where you’d hit him. He was still panting. “I hate this,” he said with a firm shake of his head. He wasn’t even looking at you. “I hate this so fucking much.”

The cursing would’ve surprised you if you weren’t already plagued with memories of him cursing over and over again the previous week.

“What?” you rhetorically asked. “What do you hate, exactly? I thought you didn’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Would you knock it off?” Chris snapped at you. You leaned back against the bumper of the truck, as much as the metal surface would allow. “We both know I’m fucking lying, I’m lying through my goddamn teeth!” he brokenly ranted. “But what I want to know is how the hell do you remember so much?!”

“Am I not supposed to?” you asked, uneasy.

Father Chris shook his head again. “No, because I barely remember anything. All I know is… is–”

“What?” you prodded. You stood up straight and took a tentative step closer. “What is it?”

“I want you, and I fucking hate it,” he spat. “I shouldn’t be tested like this. I don’t deserve this! I’m stronger than this.”

These were more admissions than you were even hoping to achieve. Yes, Chris remembered sleeping together. Yes, Chris was disgusting and immoral, and wanted more.

You didn’t feel triumphant. You didn’t feel victorious.

You felt smug. A craving erupted inside you, swallowing you whole.

You wanted to punish him. You wanted him to live in that fraught feeling of deplorable desire.

“Are you?” you questioned him. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. “Are you stronger than that?”

Chris glared at you, brows furrowed as he digested the fact that you were blatantly mocking him now. It was difficult to assess his next move, but you didn’t have to wait long for another hint, because he simply took that option away and flatly answered you. Chris reached for you again, grabbing at your sleeve and pulling you close so he could kiss you again.

And this time, you let him.

When you weren’t almost gagging on his tongue in your throat, you adored how pissed he looked just kissing you. By now, you were dealing with his hands, too, desperately grabbing and squeezing you. He even began kissing your neck, his teeth grazing over your skin and nipping at you until you pushed him off again. You both caught your breath for a moment, but Chris nonetheless grabbed at your hips again.

“I’m not letting you mark me up again,” you scolded him.

He nodded obediently, despite already kissing your neck some more. “Sorry,” he panted against you, “I just, I need more– We’ll get in my truck, okay? And–”

“What,” you grinned, taking a chance to softly place intermittent kisses of your own on his throat. “You going to be a coward and hide me away at your place again?” From this vantage point, you could see he was wearing a small, golden crucifix just under his sweater. Cute. 

“Don’t want to?” he asked, fumbling in his pockets while he let you kiss him. “That’s fine, it’s dark enough, just in the truck is fine–”

You raised an eyebrow in questioning. “But you parked back at the–”

“What? No,” he interrupted. “It’s right here; come on.”

That made no sense. Chris’ wreck of a truck was back at Reflections–

But the metallic clatter of a keyring stopped your line of thinking in its tracks. Chris backed you up to the passenger side door and unlocked it before he scooped his hands under your ass, eagerly hoisting you up onto the bench seat. He was already working your belt until you grabbed the collar of his sweater and pulled him into the truck with you. You refused to let him lead here. If he was questioning his fortitude, you’d make it exponentially worse. 

Chris wrestled with you a bit to get comfortable in the cab of his truck, ending up sitting in the passenger seat with you straddling his lap. He was incredibly hard between your legs. When you worked your hips down against his, the friction drew the deepest, most regretful moans out of him that you’d ever heard. His strong hands clutched at your hips until you finally unbuckled your belt yourself. He leapt at the opportunity, still kissing your lips, your jaw, your neck, but now his starving touch drifted down from where it’d moved to your breast, down to slip under your panties and between your legs. You gasped and sighed in pleasure, his long fingers rubbing your sensitive clit before dipping into your wetness. 

“Fuck,” Chris gruffly cursed again, “you feel so good.”

“You still hate it?” you teased, almost laughing when he nodded pathetically.

“You’re so bad for me,” he whined. “I just want more.”

You almost felt bad for him.

Almost.

Chris watched in the dim of his truck, only illuminated by a couple security lights behind the old bar as you knelt up so you could shimmy your jeans down, and off one leg. You sat back down on his lap, your damp heat resting back against him but going no further. He looked up at you expectantly.

“Well?” you grinned. “Go on. Make your decision.”

A hesitance sank in between both of you while he considered this, his eyes glazed over and shining. You didn’t blame him. Truth be told, you were surprised with yourself, too. You weren’t typically one for such intensity, but there was something about holding this much control that you were getting satisfaction from in an unexpected way. You scolded yourself for a moment for coming on too strong.

Until Chris warily removed his hat and lifted his sweater off along with his undershirt, revealing his crucifix sitting on his bare collarbones. He set these on the driver seat beside you both, before his hands now wavered at his belt buckle. Father Chris quietly sucked in a breath, as if it were a long, drawn out gasp, astounded at his own actions when he unbuckled his belt and opened his jeans. You could feel the velvety, smooth head of his erection up against you. He paused again.

You pressed your lips to his temple, a tender little reprieve in the middle of this regrettable tryst. “Did you make your decision?”

Chris could be felt nodding before his hands pushed your hips down against his own. You both groaned then, his gorgeous cock slowly stretching you around him. He sucked a breath in between his teeth. “Fuck, baby,” he gritted out. “Feel how you’re opening up for me, it’s so goddamn good–”

You loved the way blasphemy sounded coming from him while you adjusted to him inside you, enough that you immediately took over and began riding him, never giving him a chance to suggest it or try taking the lead. Again, if he was going to decide to be immoral, you were going to really throw that into perspective. 

Chris cried out loud in pleasure when you dropped your hips down onto him and began working his erection into your depths, trying to search out that good angle while the priest was lost in the moment. He was so fucking hot like this, whimpering under you while his thrusts met yours, with no one to blame but himself by this point.

Right?

There was one second where you began to doubt yourself, maybe wondering if you were taking this too far, but Chris interrupted you. Even though you were hellbent on not letting him take control, you couldn’t bring yourself to resist when he grabbed onto your thighs and helped you grind into him instead of riding him, helping you climb that high you were chasing. Worse yet, he pulled down the neckline of your blouse like you’d brazenly done back at the bar, except he went further by pulling your breast to his mouth. His tongue lewdly ran over the bite mark you never managed to get rid of, but he kept his teeth off of you, opting instead to wrap his lips around your hardened nipple, overstimulating you just long enough to coax an orgasm out of you. It hit you hard and suddenly, a sharp gasp punctuating that blissful release as you shuddered around his erection still grinding into you. Chris’ actions got a bit more desperate now, goaded on by how you swept your fingers through his hair before clutching on, reeling his head back onto the back of the bench seat and riding him harder, your rhythm relentless and pushing him closer and closer over the edge.

“It’s good, right?” you sweetly asked. “You gonna cum for me, Chris?”

“Fuck, hold on,” he croaked, his eyes rolling back in ecstasy before you gently pulled his hair again. “Gimme a second, we can’t–” he pleaded, all pouty and doe-eyed, “goddamn, hold on, I can’t–”

╚⊶⊶⊶⊶⊶✞⊷⊷⊷⊷⊷╝

But he did.

At least, you thought he did.

Because, as if nothing had happened at all, the next thing you knew you were waking up in a bed that wasn’t yours. It was his again. The way you seemed to know this instantaneously didn’t ring as odd to you when it probably should have, but there was far too much to be confused by going on at once. How did you even get here?

You blearily sat up, the crust in your eyes making it even more difficult to see, along with how dark it was. The bed was empty but you knew it was his. You tried to make out the rest of the room, get further confirmation of this fact you already knew, until you found your bag on the floor. Your phone was on the brink of death when you fished it out, but it was still able to report that it was five in the morning. 

The weird thing, at least in your mind, was that you were clothed and alone. You did just fuck Chris in the parking lot behind the Trawler, didn’t you?

… Didn’t you?

It felt like you did. But, even now, fully clothed in this veritable stranger’s bed…

It felt like it’d been a vivid dream. 

You slipped out of the bed, not even covered in a blanket. Your shoes were still on your feet. The room was a bit cold, enough to wake you up a bit faster. Judging by the view out the window, Chris lived in an upper floor unit, likely a private walk-up like many of the old houses in the area seemed to be updated into. This house was old indeed, listening to the creak of the floorboards as you warily walked out of the bedroom and found yourself in a small kitchen. A frayed cord hung from the ceiling. Following it upward, it was attached to an old attic door.

“I wouldn’t pull that if I were you,” came a voice, bringing you back to the oddity at hand. There was Chris, sitting at his tiny kitchen table. He almost looked sick, his cheeks pale. You were certain if you felt his forehead, it’d be clammy. A mug with three tea bag strings hanging out of it was clutched in his hand, shaking the smallest bit for you to see. “The attic door is broken,” he explained, not looking at you. “The super is supposed to take care of it.”

You looked up at the door again. It didn’t appear broken, but you left it alone.

Chris grimaced into his mug. “Did you and I… Did we hook up again?”

You nodded, a gesture you weren’t sure Chris saw but he nodded back nonetheless. 

“I shouldn’t be wanting this,” he frowned. 

You were at a loss of what to say. Instead, you comfortingly ran your fingers through his hair. Truth be told, the fact that neither of you were freaking out over not concretely remembering this was probably the least weird aspect of it all. You both had your own, much bigger concerns.

Chris took a sip of his tea. His hand twitched, making him sloppy. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m better than this. I’m not supposed to want you.”

“I’m sorry,” you weakly attempted.

The young priest raised an eyebrow at you. His eyes were bagged and red, bloodshot like he hadn’t slept in days. “No, you’re not.”

It wasn’t a denial. It was a diagnosis. 

And he was right. 

Chris betraying his vows and giving into you was the most potent adrenaline rush you’d ever experienced. That was the case the first time, and it was the case now. 

And if he didn’t stop you, you’d make his life a living hell until he repented.

#neverendingdreams #straykidsland #bang chan smut #bang chan x reader #bang chan x you

[sweetracha]

Boxer! AU Storyboard

RACHA BOXING GYM: RESPECT, HONOR, DIGNITY

Thank you @kaciidubs for the idea!

Christopher "Bang Chan" Bahng came from a rough family from the wrong side of the tracks. He was a troubled kid who learned it was easier to pick fights rather than make amends. Always having to be on the defense can do a lot to a child and not having a safe place to go most nights meant Chris got into his fair share of trouble. When the owner of RACHA gym found a young Chris bloody and bruised sleeping behind his studio, he took him in. The man was the closest thing Christopher ever had to a father. He raised him in the studio and rewrote the whole world. Chris easily became the best fighter in the league. Every match he remembered the lessons his father figure had taught him; "Boys fight with anger, Men fight with dignity". This became the motto painted right above the door at what was now Chan's gym. He was heartbroken after the untimely death of his guidance, he took out all his anger on the punching bag that mocked him. Sadly, one missed swing landed Christopher's fist into the wall, shattering the bones in his hand. Unable to box Chan found another way to honor his father's legacy, he would run RACHA gym the way it was meant to be. Respect, Honor, and, Dignity.

Minho was an active child who tried every sport at least once, except one. He would beg his parents to let him box after seeing a movie his grandpa snuck in. Min would be told no over and over again. That didn't stop him, however, nor did it stop his grandpa. Every day after school when he would go to his grandfather's house, the two would watch old wrestling and boxing clips on black and white VHS. Minho loved it. He would go to bed and dream about his name in lights and fans cheering him on. Where his parents saw violence, he saw art. And where they saw brain-dead meatheads, Minho saw geniuses. He studied each play on a loop until he could accurately predict what came next. When other kids were out playing, he was calculating hitboxes and wingspan. He would tell you by one look if you were a swarmer, out-boxer, slugger, or box-puncher. At the age of 10, his grandfather enrolled him in private boxing lessons out of his garage and soon enough Minho was fighting in underground matches. Was it entirely legal? no. Was his grandpa and him making money off of his winning bets? hell yes. The original owner of RACHA Gym witnesses the illegal betting during a match between Minho and Chan. He agreed to not say anything under one condition, Lee Know would fight under the RACHA name. Years later, Lee Know has become one of the biggest names in boxing, fighting with his grandpa's name tattooed on his knuckles. He even has a student of his own, a popular boy named Hyunjin.

As soon as anyone saw him, they knew Changbin was a fighter. As soon as he was able to stand on his own two feet, he was in the ring. The Seo family was synonymous with the boxing world. With a legacy that large, disappointment was sure to follow. Binnie was a relatively scrawny child who hardly packed a punch. Thus Changbin was thrown out of the family light, favor was instead she'd on his brothers and cousins. He did everything in his power to gain the respect he could but he could see his light fading out. He put all his anger, frustration, and loneliness into boxing. When he wasn't at work he was at the RACHA gym, putting his life into the ring. Changbin and Chan grew up almost as brothers. They two protected each other and cared for one another. Where Chan showed Changbin's company, Binnie showed Christopher's strength. Before long Bin became the most feared fighter in the ring, known for swinging first and thinking second. However, the boys all know he is a softy at heart. He just doesn't hope the new kid, Seungmin, doesn't find out.

Hyunjin was as far as you could get from dirt and grime. He has never had to feel the grit rubbed into his wounds or a fist to an open jaw like so many others had. No, Jinnie was a pretty boy from a rich family. He only knew glitz and glamor. Where others built their paths, he was carried along his. That's what he disliked the most. He wasn't an individual, a personality, a body, or even a thought. Hyunjin was an image, a figurehead, a puppet to be played for the entertainment of other rich snobs. He wanted more out of his life, he was filled with rage and no outlet. His blow-up was a public affair. Hyunjin didn't mean to beat the living hell out of his brother-in-law but if you push one too many buttons, something is bound to happen. However, sometimes curses can become blessings, especially if the new owner of an award-winning boxing studio catches wind of your actions. Chan brought in the ball of fire much to the complaints of the other boys. They hated how he got to walk in and be a fighter. But then Hyunjin lost match, after match, after match. Soon enough that ego whittled down. Hyunjin learned this was an art rather than an impulse. Adrenalin only gets you so far. It usually winds you up in the medic chair being worked on by the sweet young nursing student. It also makes you look into the disappointed eyes of your master, Minho.

Han was not a name anyone knew in boxing. J-one was barely even remembered past amateur matches. He was decent, maybe even a little more than that. Han has the techniques, the skills, the body, and even the support. What he lacked was the motivation. There was no drive for Jisung to fight, he didn't see the point. Chan was his best friend, the two did everything together. Han followed Chan like his personal cheerleader and in return Chan kept him safe. Jisung was easily the butt of everyone's aggression. He was small and lacked a bite. Chan thought he knew what he was doing when he enrolled his best friend at the studio. How could Han say no when Christopher had done so much for him? When Han began to lose his matches, Chan was convinced it was because the boy needed to work harder, so he pushed. This put a tear in their relationship. Han loved and hated Christopher at the same time, he couldn't see that he was treating Han the same way everyone else did. After a pretty brutal match was lost, small sniffles could be heard from the supplies room. Minho was shocked to see the crying boy behind some old equipment. That's when it all hit, Han was losing these matches on purpose. Minho wasn't the best at comfort but he tried. Chan's heart broke when he learned the news, immediately pulling Han's name from the roster. Han still hangs around the studio every day, helping out in little ways. He wants to support his friends, not fight them.

Felix was a medical student looking for some work after graduation. The hospital was great work and gave good pay but something about it didn't click for Felix. He had always been someone who made close attachments, too close some may say. He was an empath to the description. Seeing patients come and go, never being able to care for them in the personal way they needed hurt Felix. Not knowing if they were recovering well kept him up at night. He wanted to take care of people, not treat them. Felix managed to get some odd jobs here and there but his favorite was working for an old boxing master. The man would tell stories of his glory days and how he was to leave his studio to his only son. Felix cared for the man every day and soon the two gained a special bond. When he passed away, Felix cried for hours. He worried about Chan and how he was handling the loss. Lix walked in right as Christopher's hand met the stone wall. Nothing mattered more than Chan at that moment, as Felix began to care for him right away. Lix knew it was bad, that Chan would probably never fight again. Chris said the only thing that made him feel okay in that moment was the sunshine smile Felix gave him. The two knew they were connected for life now, they may have lost someone close to them, but they gained someone who would become even closer. Felix enjoyed being the medic around the studio. The pay was awful and the boys always smelled like they needed a shower a week ago. But that didn't matter to him, Felix had his boys to take care of.

Seungmin was the newest fighter for RACHA, finally graduating from Chan's apprenticeship. Eager was an understatement. Minnie wanted a piece of the action, he could taste competition on his tongue. His fingers twitched and he could never stay still. He wanted to prove himself, he needed to prove himself. Not to his family or friends, not even to a puppy dog crush. Rather he needed to prove it to himself. He needed to know he could stand on his own and be the best. He trained for this, he studied for this, he lived for this. Seungmin was so sure he was going to become Minho's student. The two fought in similar styles. Seungmin remembered skipping classes to watch his idol fight. He kept a journal of every one of Lee Know's matches, connecting the dots just like Minho had said to do in interviews. So when he walked in to see Hyunjin with Minho, he was confused. Who would be his master if it wasn't the infamous Lee Know? Enter Seo Changbin. Bin knew he wasn't Seungmin's first choice but Chan knew what he was doing. The fireball needed someone to tame him and the enthusiast needed someone to bring him to reality. Minnie may never admit it, but he is glad he had Changbin.

Jeongin was a newborn baby in the world of boxing. Once Seungmin had been promoted upwards, Chan needed a new apprentice. When Innie walked in looking for a summer activity, Christopher's heart melted. He saw in Jeongin what his master saw in him. Chan knew he could be that guidance for Jeongin. His boxing name came rather fast after the boys struggled to remember his actual name. Finally when looking at Felix's medical notes he saw the name I.N. and it stuck. While Jeongin appreciated having a place that kept him out of bad crowds, there was a lot less fighting than he would have liked. Instead, he was stuck watching and learning, feeling like he was in school all over again. Minho would teach him lessons in predictions and stats. Changbin was tasked with correcting the kid's form and stance. Chan taught him the values of boxing. Even Hyunjin and Seungmin stepped in to give their insights. Though most days dragged on, Innie always found himself coming back. Something about it all was so addicting. Chan could see the spark behind his eyes when he landed a hit just right or dodged one of Han's swings. Chan had decided that Jeongin would become his one and only student.

The Sweetest Batch: @goblinracha, @xx3rachaslutxx, @j-onedrabbles, @lixiesweetbrownie, @marrivmel,@lyramundana, @lixiestarryhallows, @raaaaaaahhhh

#stray kids #skz #skz fluff #skz smut #stray kids smut #stray kids fluff #storyboard

[homomenhommes]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … April 11

1780 – William Smith and Theodosius Reed are pilloried in England for attempted sodomy. They are attacked by a crowd throwing objects, killing Smith. The London Morning Post endorsed the crowd's actions.

1901 – The Wisconsin author Glenway Wescott, was born on this date (d.1987). A major American novelist during the 1920-1940 period and a figure in the American expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s Wescott was the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

He produced a series of best-selling, highly regarded novels, notably The Grandmothers (1927), The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment In Athens (1945), although he didn't complete a novel after the age of forty-five. He was equally well known as an arts impressario and for the company he kept.

Wescott is a linking figure at the heart of the American literary scene in the middle of the 20th century. As a young writer in 1920s Paris, he associated with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On his return to the States he was a central figure in New York's artistic and gay communities - W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Jean Cocteau, Ford Madox Ford, Thornton Wilder, and many others were among his acquaintance.

Wescott by Lynes

Although only some of his work hints at his sexuality, he wrote a private journal from 1937 until the 1950s, focusing on his private life and relationships with fellow gay artists including lifelong partner Monroe Wheeler, photographer George Platt Lynes and Paul Cadmus – this was published in 1990 as Continual Lessons. His relationship with Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott's death.

There was a Paul Cadmus painting that hung in his house. In it, three men, clearly arranged in a triangle, are sitting on a picnic blanket. The men are George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Wescott himself. The picture below may be that painting:

1914 – Norman McLaren (d.1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including drawn on film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.

His awards included an Oscar for the Best Documentary in 1952 for Neighbours, a Silver Bear for best short documentary at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival Rythmetic and a 1969 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Pas de deux.

McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland and studied set design at the Glasgow School of Art. His early experiments with film and animation included actually scratching and painting the film stock itself, as he did not have ready access to a camera. His earliest extant film, Seven Till Five (1933), a "day in the life of an art school" was influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude.

McLaren's next film, Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), was a more elaborate take on the themes explored in Seven Till Five, inspired by his acquisition of a Ciné-Kodak camera, which enabled him to execute a number of 'trick' shots. McLaren used pixilation effects, superimpositions and animation not only to display the staging of an art school ball, but also to tap into the aesthetic sensations supposedly produced by this event.

His two early films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where fellow Scot and future NFB founder John Grierson was a judge. Grierson, who was at that time head of the British General Post Office film unit, saw another of his movies at an amateur film festival and took interest. He hired Mclaren for the GPO as soon as he completed his studies.

After making four films for the GPO in London, including Love on the Wing, McLaren moved to New York City in 1939, just as World War II was about to begin in Europe. He worked as a freelancer until 1941.

At the invitation of Grierson, he moved to Canada in 1941 to work for the National Film Board, to open an animation studio and to train Canadian animators. During his work for the NFB, McLaren created his most famous film, Neighbours (1952), which has won various awards around the world, including the Canadian Film Award and the Academy Award. Besides the brilliant combination of visuals and sound, the film has a very strong social message against violence and war. If you have never seen this brilliant 8 minute film, take the time to watch it below:

Not many Canadians realize that Neighbours garnered its Academy Award in the documentary category, or that McLaren's film was cut and expurgated in classrooms in many countries because of its resolute depiction of violence between two next-door families. The irony is that McLaren was the most gentle of figures, whose experiences filming the brutal fighting during the Spanish Civil War turned him into a lifelong pacifist.

In his early period in Canada, McLaren spent considerable time developing the animation department of the board. McLaren's presence at NFB inspired younger generations of animators, notably Oscar-winning producer, writer and director Derek Lamb, director Kaj Pindal and, perhaps most notably, the tragic, driven talent of Ryan Larkin. Also among his pupils are numbered James McKay of Toronto and George Dunning who designed the animation for the Beatles' film Yellow Submarine.

McLaren was gay, and his longtime companion was NFB director Guy Glover, whom he met at the ballet in London in 1937. The two were together until McLaren's death in 1987.

1932 – Joel Grey (born Joel David Katz) is an American actor, singer, dancer, and photographer. He is best known for portraying the Master of Ceremonies in both the stage and film versions of the Kander & Ebb musical Cabaret. He has won the Academy Award, Tony Award, and Golden Globe Award. He also originated the role of George M. Cohan in the musical George M! in 1973, and the Wizard of Oz in the musical Wicked. He also starred as Moonface Martin in the Broadway revivals of Anything Goes, and as Amos Hart in Chicago.

Grey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Goldie "Grace" (née Epstein) and Mickey Katz, a Jewish actor, comedian, and musician. He started his career in the Cleveland Play House's Curtain Pullers children's theatre program in the early 1940s, appearing in productions such as Grandmother Slyboots, Jack of Tarts and a lead role in the their mainstage production of On Borrowed Time.

Grey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in March 1973 for his performance as the Master of Ceremonies in the 1972 film version of Cabaret. His victory was part of a Cabaret near-sweep, which saw Liza Minnelli win Best Actress and Bob Fosse win Best Director.

In 1958, Grey married Jo Wilder; they divorced in 1982. Together, they had two children: actor Jennifer and chef James. He is also a photographer; his first book of photographs, Pictures I Had to Take, was published in 2003; its follow-up, Looking Hard at Unexpected Things, was published in 2006. His third book, 1.3 – Images from My Phone, a book of photographs taken with his camera phone, was published in 2009. An exhibit of his work was held in April 2011 at the Museum of the City of New York, titled "Joel Grey/A New York Life."

In January 2015, Grey opened up about his sexuality in an interview with People, stating: "I don't like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I'm a gay man."

1955 – The American singer songwriter Michael Callen was born on this date (d.1993). He was a architect of the response to the AIDS crisis in the United States.

First diagnosed with "Gay related immune deficiency" (GRID) in 1982, Callen quickly became a leader in the response to the epidemic. He was a founding member of the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement among other organizations, and he testified before the President's Commission on AIDS and both houses of the United States Congress. As a founding member of the New York Gay & Lesbian Community Center Board, and through his activities in other organizations around the country, he also became a leading voice in Gay and Lesbian politics.

In 1983, Callen co-authored the book How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which outlined the tenets of safe(r) sex. In 1990, he wrote Surviving AIDS, which received an Honorable Mention from the American Medical Writers Association.

He was a founding member of the Gay a cappella singing group The Flirtations, with whom he recorded two albums. He also had a solo album, Purple Heart (Significant Other Records, 1988), which a review in The Advocate called "the most remarkable Gay independent release of the past decade."

In partnership with Oscar winner Peter Allen and Marsha Melamet, he wrote his most enduring song, "Love Don't Need a Reason," which he sang frequently at Gay pride and AIDS-related events around the country. In 1993 he appeared in the films Philadelphia (as part of The Flirtations) and Zero Patience (appearing in drag as a singing virus, Miss HIV).

During the last year of his life, Michael worked furiously to record over 40 tunes; Twenty-nine of these compositions have been released posthumously as a double CD, titled Legacy, which garnered four Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards, including Album of the Year and Best Recording by a Male Artist. Legacy, recorded with the help of such prominent musicians as Holly Near, Cris Williamson, David Lasley, James Taylor, Greg Wells, k.d. lang, Fred Hersch, Arnold McCuller (Phil Collins) and Steve Sandberg (David Byrne, Ruben Blades) is a testament to Callen's commitment to the Gay and Lesbian community as well as his own passionate struggle for Gay identity and selfhood.

Callen died of AIDS-related complications in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 38.

1961 – Vincent Gallo is an American actor, director, musician and painter. Though he has had minor roles in mainstream films such as Goodfellas, Arizona Dream, The Funeral and Palookaville, he is most associated with independent movies, including Buffalo '66, which he wrote, directed, scored and starred in and The Brown Bunny, which he also wrote, directed, produced, starred in and photographed.

Gallo was born in Buffalo, New York. Both of his parents emigrated from Sicily. Gallo lived in New York City and from there traveled around most of Europe. In his adolescence, Gallo was frequently arrested for petty crimes and for indecent exposure, and has reminisced in print about his compulsive adolescent masturbatory habits. While living in New York, Gallo was a go-go dancer at various homosexual clubs and has also admitted to prostituting himself to homosexual clientele. "I did do sexual things for money. With men, I've never performed or had fellatio performed, but I did do jerk-off things. I would go in a peep booth and watch straight porn and get paid 5 or 10 dollars to have somebody watch me masturbate."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gallo was a painter in the New York City art scene showing with famed art dealer Annina Nosei, performed in a rap duo and was part of the first hip-hop television broadcast Graffiti Rock, and played in an industrial band called Bohack which released an album titled It Took Several Wives. In the early 2000s, he released several solo recordings on WARP records. Gallo is known for his outspoken views and generally sarcastic nature, once stating: "I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings; and I did it out of spite."

Gallo has modeled, most notably for Calvin Klein, and been photographed by Richard Avedon. He first began painting, then racing motorcycles, and finally became an actor.

Gallo acted in the film Arizona Dream, with Johnny Depp, in the cult comedy Palookaville, and in The Funeral, and had a lead role in the film Truth or Consequences, N.M.

In 1998, his debut film Buffalo '66 was nominated for, but did not win, an award for "Best First Feature" at the Independent Spirit Awards.

In 2003, Gallo starred in and directed the film The Brown Bunny. The film, which chronicles a motorcycle racer's cross country road trip, co-starred Chloë Sevigny. The film, which contained a scene of Sevigny performing unsimulated oral sex upon Gallo, received overwhelmingly negative critical response to its initial cut and became a media scandal, in part due to Gallo's use of a still image from a sex scene on a promotional billboard. According to Andrea LeVasseur of the Allmovie, The Brown Bunny "premiered to much derision at the Cannes Film Festival."

1969 – Leonard Miron is a Romanian television and radio presenter and journalist and works for Romanian National Television (Televiziunea Română).

He was born in Galaţi, Romania but was brought up in Piteşti and graduated from the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy before starting a career in media. He speaks fluent English and French as well as German and Spanish.

He has worked on a number of different television programmes, but is best known for presenting music shows and galas such as the national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Since September 2005 he has been living in London, where he has been studying for a Ph.D. in London and working at the same time as a flight attendant for a London-based airline. He returns to Romania weekly, where he presents a range of light entertainment shows.

Starting in 2014 Leonard has worked for Viking River Cruises, one of the biggest river cruise lines in the world. As a Program Director on Viking Embla and Viking Lif, Leonard rapidly gained both respect and popularity among both passengers and crew, and was mentioned in stories in magazines and newspapers in USA, Canada, Australia and Europe. His popularity increased season after season and in 2017 he was a constant presence in reviews published by the acclaimed website cruisecritic.com

He came out as gay in November 2012.

2013 – The French Senate in Paris approves the law for equal marriage and adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples.

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

The Untold History of Cabaret: Revived and Kicking

As Broadway welcomes the ever-evolving musical, its star, Eddie Redmayne—along with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, and Sam Mendes—assess its enduring power.

As director Rebecca Frecknall was rehearsing a new cast for her hit London revival of Cabaret, the actor playing Clifford Bradshaw, an American writer living in Berlin during the final days of the Weimar Republic, came onstage carrying that day’s newspaper as a prop. It happened to be Metro, the free London tabloid commuters read on their way to work. The date was February 25, 2022. When the actor said his line—“We’ve got to leave Berlin—as soon as possible. Tomorrow!”—Frecknall was caught short. She noticed the paper’s headline: “Russia Invades Ukraine.”

Cabaret, the groundbreaking 1966 Broadway musical that tackles fascism, antisemitism, abortion, World War II, and the events leading up to the Holocaust, had certainly captured the times once again.

Back in rehearsals four months later, Frecknall and the cast got word that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. Every time she checks up on Cabaret, “it feels like something else has happened in the world,” she told me over coffee in London in September.

A month later, as Frecknall was preparing her production of Cabaret for its Broadway premiere, something else did happen: On October 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.

The revival of Cabaret—starring Eddie Redmayne as the creepy yet seductive Emcee; Gayle Rankin as the gin-swilling nightclub singer Sally Bowles; and Bebe Neuwirth as Fraulein Schneider, a landlady struggling to scrape by—opens April 21 at Manhattan’s August Wilson Theatre. It will do so in the shadow of a pogrom not seen since the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the shadow of a war between Israel and Hamas that continues into its fifth month, with the killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Nearly 60 years after its debut, Cabaret still stings. That is its brilliance. And its tragedy.

Redmayne has been haunted by Cabaret ever since he played the Emcee in prep school. “I was staggered by the character,” he says. “The lack of definition of it, the enigma of it.” He played the part again during his first year at Cambridge at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where nearly 3,500 shoestring productions jostle for attention each summer. Cabaret, performed in a tiny venue that “stank,” Redmayne recalls, did well enough that the producers added an extra show. He was leering at the Kit Kat Club girls from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m. and then from 11 p.m. till two in the morning. “You’d wake up at midday. You barely see sunshine. I just became this gaunt, skeletal figure.” His parents came to see him and said, “You need vitamin D!”

In 2021, Redmayne, by then an Oscar winner for The Theory of Everything and a Tony winner for Red, was playing the Emcee again, this time in Frecknall’s West End production. His dressing room on opening night was full of flowers. There was one bouquet with a card he did not have a chance to open until intermission. It was from Joel Grey, who originated the role on Broadway and won an Oscar for his performance alongside Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie. He welcomed the young actor “to the family,” Redmayne says. “It was an extraordinary moment for me.”

Cabaret is based on Goodbye to Berlin, the British writer Christopher Isherwood’s collection of stories and character studies set in Weimar Germany as the Nazis are clawing their way to power. Isherwood, who went to Berlin for one reason—“boys,” he wrote in his memoir Christopher and His Kind—lived in a dingy boarding house amid an array of sleazy lodgers who inspired his characters. But aside from a fleeting mention of a host at a seedy nightclub, there is no emcee in his vignettes. Nor is there an emcee in I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s hit 1951 Broadway play adapted from Isherwood’s story “Sally Bowles” from Goodbye to Berlin.

The character, one of the most famous in Broadway history, was created by Harold Prince​​, who produced and directed the original Cabaret. “People write about Cabaret all the time,” says John Kander, who composed the show’s music and is, at 96, the last living member of that creative team. “They write about Liza. They write about Joel, and sometimes about us [Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb]. None of that really matters. It’s all Hal. Everything about this piece, even the variations that happen in different versions of it, is all because of Hal.”

In 1964, Prince produced his biggest hit: Fiddler on the Roof. In the final scene, Tevye and his family, having survived a pogrom, leave for America. There is sadness but also hope. And what of the Jews who did not leave? Cabaret would provide the tragic answer.

But Prince was after something else. Without hitting the audience over the head, he wanted to create a musical that echoed what was happening in America: young men being sent to their deaths in Vietnam; racists such as Alabama politician “Bull” Connor siccing attack dogs on civil rights marchers. In rehearsals, Prince put up Will Counts’s iconic photograph of a white student screaming at a Black student during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. “That’s our show,” he told the cast.

A bold idea he had early on was to juxtapose the lives of Isherwood’s lodgers with one of the tawdry nightclubs Isherwood had frequented. In 1951, while stationed as a soldier in Stuttgart, Germany, Prince himself had hung around such a place. Presiding over the third-rate acts was a master of ceremonies in white makeup and of indeterminate sexuality. He “unnerved me,” Prince once told me. “But I never forgot him.”

Kander had seen the same kind of character at the opening of a Marlene Dietrich concert in Europe. “An overpainted little man waddled out and said, ‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,’ ” Kander recalls.

The first song Kander and Ebb wrote for the show was called “Willkommen.” They wrote 60 more songs. “Some of them were outrageous,” Kander says. “We wrote some antisemitic songs”—of which there were many in Weimar cabarets—“ ‘Good neighbor Cohen, loaned you a loan.’ We didn’t get very far with that one.”

They did write one song about antisemitism: “If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song),” in which the Emcee dances with his lover, a gorilla in a pink tutu. At the end of the number, he turns to the audience and whispers: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewishhh at all.” It was, they thought, the most powerful song in the score.

The working title of their musical was Welcome to Berlin. But then a woman who sold blocks of tickets to theater parties told Prince that her Jewish clients would not buy a show with “Berlin” in the title. Strolling along the beach one day, Joe Masteroff, who was writing the musical’s book, thought of two recent hits, Carnival and Camelot. Both started with a C and had three syllables. Why not call the show Cabaret?

To play the Emcee, Prince tapped his friend Joel Grey. A nightclub headliner, Grey could not break into Broadway. “The theater was very high-minded,” he once said. When Prince called him, he was playing a pirate in a third-rate musical in New York’s Jones Beach. “Hal knew I was dying,” Grey recounts over lunch in the West Village, where he lives. “I wanted to quit the business.”

At first, he struggled to create the Emcee, who did not interact with the other characters. He had numbers but “no words, no lines, no role,” Grey wrote in his memoir, Master of Ceremonies. A polished performer, he had no trouble with the songs, the dances, the antics. “But something was missing,” he says. Then he remembered a cheap comedian he’d once seen in St. Louis. The comic had told lecherous jokes, gay jokes, sexist jokes—anything to get a laugh. One day in rehearsal, Grey did everything the comedian had done “to get the audience crazy. I was all over the girls, squeezing their breasts, touching their bottoms. They were furious. I was horrible. When it was over I thought, This is the end of my career.” He disappeared backstage and cried. “And then from out of the darkness came Mr. Prince,” Grey says. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Joely, that’s it.’ ”

Cabaret played its first performance at the Shubert Theatre in Boston in the fall of 1966. Grey stopped the show with the opening number, “Willkommen.” “The audience wouldn’t stop applauding,” Grey recalls. “I turned to the stage manager and said, ‘Should I get changed for the next scene?’ ”

The musical ran long—it was in three acts—but it got a prolonged standing ovation. As the curtain came down, Richard Seff, an agent who represented Kander and Ebb, ran into Ebb in the aisle. “It’s wonderful,” Seff said. “You’ll fix the obvious flaws.” In the middle of the night, Seff’s phone rang. It was Ebb. “You hated it!” the songwriter screamed. “You are of no help at all!”

Ebb was reeling because he’d learned Prince was going to cut the show down to two acts. Ebb collapsed in his hotel bed, Kander holding one hand, Grey the other. “You’re not dying, Fred,” Kander told him. “Hal has not wrecked our show.”

Cabaret came roaring into New York, fueled by tremendous word of mouth. But there was a problem. Some Jewish groups were furious about “If You Could See Her.” How could you equate a gorilla with a Jew? they wanted to know, missing the point entirely. They threatened to boycott the show. Prince, his eye on ticket sales, told Ebb to change the line “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all” to something less offensive: “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” using the Yiddish word for a homely person.

It is difficult to imagine the impact Cabaret had on audiences in 1966. World War II had ended only 21 years before. Many New York theatergoers had fled Europe or fought the Nazis. There were Holocaust survivors in the audience; there were people whose relatives had died in the gas chambers. Grey knew the show’s power. Some nights, dancing with the gorilla, he’d whisper “Jewish” instead of “meeskite.” The audience gasped.

Cabaret won eight Tony Awards in 1967, catapulted Grey to Broadway stardom, and ran for three years. Seff sold the movie rights for $1.5 million, a record at the time. Prince, about to begin rehearsals for Stephen Sondheim’s Company, was unavailable to direct the movie, scheduled for a 1972 release. So the producers hired the director and choreographer Bob Fosse, who needed the job because his previous movie, Sweet Charity, had been a bust.

Fosse, who saw Prince as a rival, stamped out much of what Prince had done, including Joel Grey. He wanted Ruth Gordon to play the Emcee. But Grey was a sensation, and the studio wanted him. “It’s either me or Joel,” Fosse said. When the studio opted for Grey, Fosse backed down. But he resented Grey, and relations between them were icy.

A 26-year-old Liza Minnelli, on the way to stardom herself, was cast as Sally Bowles. The handsome Michael York would play the Cliff character, whose name in the movie was changed to Brian Roberts. And supermodel Marisa Berenson (who at the time seemed to be on the cover of Vogue every other month) got the role of a Jewish department store heiress, a character Fosse took from Isherwood’s short story “The Landauers.”

Cabaret was shot on location in Munich and Berlin. “The atmosphere was extremely heavy,” Berenson recalls. “There was the whole Nazi period, and I felt very much the Berlin Wall, that darkness, that fear, all that repression.” She adored Fosse, but he kept her off balance (she was playing a young woman traumatized by what was happening around her) by whispering “obscene things in my ear. He was shaking me up.”

Minnelli, costumed by Halston for the film, found Fosse “brilliant” and “incredibly intense,” she tells Vanity Fair in a rare interview. “He used every part of me, including my scoliosis. One of my great lessons in working with Fosse was never to think that whatever he was asking couldn’t be done. If he said do it, you had to figure out how to do it. You didn’t think about how much it hurt. You just made it happen.”

Back in New York, Fosse arranged a private screening of Cabaret for Kander and Ebb. When it was over, they said nothing. “We really hated it,” Kander admits. Then they went to the opening at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The audience loved it. “We realized it was a masterpiece,” Kander says, laughing. “It just wasn’t our show.”

“PAPA WAS EVEN MORE EXCITED ABOUT THE OSCAR THAN I WAS,” SAYS LIZA MINNELLI. “AND, BABY, I WAS—NO, I AM STILL—EXCITED.”

The success of the movie—with its eight Academy Awards—soon overshadowed the musical. When people thought of Cabaret, they thought of finger snaps and bowler hats. They thought of Fosse and, of course, Minnelli, who would adopt the lyric “Life is a cabaret” as her signature. Her best-actress Oscar became part of a dynasty: Her mother, Judy Garland, and father, director Vincente Minnelli, each had one of their own. “Papa was even more excited about the Oscar than I was,” she says. “And, baby, I was—no, I am still—excited.”

By 1987—in part to burnish Cabaret’s theatrical legacy—Prince decided to recreate his original production on Broadway, with Grey once again serving as the Emcee. But it had the odor of mothballs. The New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote that it was not, as Sally Bowles sings, “perfectly marvelous,” but “it does approach the perfectly mediocre.” Much of the show, he added, was “old-fashioned and plodding.”

In the early 1990s, Sam Mendes, then a young director running a pocket-size theater in London called the Donmar Warehouse, heard the novelist Martin Amis give a talk. Amis was writing Time’s Arrow, about a German doctor who works in a concentration camp. “I’ve already written about the Nazis and people say to me, ‘Why are you doing it again?’ ” Amis said. “And I say, what else is there?”

At the end of the day,” Mendes tells me, “the biggest question of the 20th century is, ‘How could this have happened?’ ” Mendes decided to stage Cabaret at the Donmar in 1993. Another horror was unfolding at the time: Serb paramilitaries were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims, “ethnic cleansing” on an unimaginable scale.

Mendes hit on a terrific concept for his production: He transformed his theater into a nightclub. The audience sat at little tables with red lamps. And the performers were truly seedy. He told the actors playing the Kit Kat Club girls not to shave their armpits or their legs. “Unshaved armpits—it sent shock waves around the theater,” he recalls. Since there was no room—or money—for an orchestra, the actors played the instruments. Some of them could hit the right notes.

To play the Emcee, Mendes cast Alan Cumming, a young Scottish actor whose comedy act Mendes had enjoyed. “Can you sing?” Mendes asked him. “Yeah,” Cumming said. Mendes threw ideas at him and “he was open to everything.” Just before the first preview, Mendes suggested he come out during the intermission and chat up the audience, maybe dance with a woman. Mendes, frantic before the preview, never got around to giving Cumming any more direction than that. No matter. Cumming sauntered onstage as people were settling back at their tables, picked a man out of the crowd, and started dancing with him. “Watch your hands,” he said. “I lead.”

Cumming’s Emcee was impish, fun, gleefully licentious. The audience loved him. “I have never had less to do with a great performance in one of my shows than I had to do with Alan,” Mendes says.

When Joe Masteroff came to see the show in London, Mendes was nervous. He’d taken plenty of liberties with the script. Cliff, the narrator, was now openly gay. (One night, when Cliff kissed a male lover, a man in the audience shouted, “Rubbish!”) And he made the Emcee a victim of the Nazis. In the final scene, Cumming, in a concentration camp uniform affixed with a yellow Star of David and a pink triangle, is jolted, as if he’s thrown himself onto the electrified fence at Birkenau.

“I should be really pissed with you,” Masteroff told Mendes after the show. “But it works.” Kander liked it too, though he was not happy that the actors didn’t play his score all that well. Ebb hated it. “He wanted more professionalism,” Mendes says. “And he was not wrong. There was a dangerous edge of amateurishness about it.”

The Roundabout Theatre Company brought Cabaret to New York in 1998. Rob Marshall, who would go on to direct the movie Chicago, helped Mendes give the show some Broadway gloss while retaining its grittiness. The two young directors were “challenging each other, pushing each other,” Marshall remembers, “to create something unique.”

Cumming reprised his role as the Emcee. He was on fire. Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, played Sally Bowles. She was not on fire. She’d never been in a musical before, and when she sang, “There was absolutely no sound coming out,” Kander says.

“She beat herself up about her singing all the time,” Mendes adds. “There was a deep, self-critical aspect of Tash that was instilled by her dad, a brilliant man but extremely cutting.” He once said to her out of nowhere: “We’re going to have to do something about your chin, dear.” As Mendes saw it, she always felt that she could never measure up to her parents.

Kander went to work with her, and slowly a voice emerged. It was not a “polished sound,” Marshall says, but it was haunting, vulnerable. Still, Cumming was walking away with the show. At the first preview, when he took his bow, the audience roared. When Richardson took hers, they were polite. Mendes remembers going backstage and finding her “in tears.” But she persevered and through sheer force of will created a Sally Bowles that “will break your heart,” Masteroff told me the day before I saw that production in the spring of 1998. She did indeed. (Eleven years later, while learning how to ski on a bunny hill on Mont Tremblant, she fell down. She died of a head injury two days later.)

The revival of Cabaret won four Tony Awards, including one for Richardson as best actress in a musical. It ran nearly 2,400 performances at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 and was revived again in 2014. And the money, money, money, as the song goes, poured in. Once Masteroff, having already filed his taxes at the end of a lucrative Cabaret year, went to the mailbox and opened a royalty check for $60,000. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he snapped.

Rebecca Frecknall grew up on Mendes’s Donmar Warehouse production of Cabaret. The BBC filmed it, and when it aired, her father videotaped it. She watched it “religiously.” But when she came to direct her production, she had to put Mendes’s version out of her mind.

Mendes turned his little theater into a nightclub. Frecknall, working with the brilliant set and costume designer Tom Scutt, has upped the game. They have transformed the entire theater into a Weimar cabaret. You stand in line at the stage door, waiting, you hope, to be let in. Once inside, you’re served drinks while the Kit Kat Club girls dance and flirt with you. The show’s logo is a geometric eye. Scutt sprinkles the motif throughout his sets and costumes. “It’s all part of the voyeurism,” Scutt explains. “The sense of always being watched, always watching—responsibility, culpability, implication, blame.”

REDMAYNE’S EMCEE IS STILL SEXY AND SEDUCTIVE, BUT AS THE SHOW GOES ON HE BECOMES A PUPPET MASTER MANIPULATING THE OTHER CHARACTERS, SOMETIMES TO THEIR DOOM.

Mendes’s Cabaret, like Fosse’s, had a black-and-white aesthetic—black fishnet stockings, black leather coats, a white face for the Emcee. Frecknall and Scutt begin their show with bright colors, which slowly fade to gray as the walls close in on the characters. “Color and individuality—to grayness and homogeneity,” Frecknall says.

As the first woman to direct a major production of Cabaret, Frecknall has focused attention on the Kit Kat Club girls—Rosie, Fritzie, Frenchie, Lulu, and Texas. “Often what I’ve seen in other productions is this homogenized group of pretty, white, skinny girls in their underwear,” she insists. Her Kit Kat Club girls are multiethnic. Some are transgender. Through performances and costumes, they are no longer appendages of the Emcee but vivid characters in their own right.

Her boldest stroke has been to reinvent the Emcee. She and Redmayne have turned him into a force of malevolence. He is still sexy and seductive, but as the show goes on, he becomes a skeletal puppet master manipulating the other characters to, in many cases, their doom. If Cumming’s Emcee was, in the end, a Holocaust victim, Redmayne’s is, in Frecknall’s words, “a perpetrator.”

Unwrapping a grilled cheese sandwich in his enormous Upper West Side townhouse, Kander says that his husband had recently asked him a pointed question: “Did it ever occur to you that all of you guys who created Cabaret were Jewish?”

“Not really,” Kander replied. “We were just trying to put on a show.” Or, as Masteroff once said: “It was a job.”

It’s a “job” that has endured. The producers of the Broadway revival certainly have faith in the show’s staying power. They’ve spent $25 million on the production, a big chunk of it going to reconfigure the August Wilson Theatre into the Kit Kat Club. Audience members will enter through an alleyway, be given a glass of schnapps, and can then enjoy a preshow drink at a variety of lounges designed by Scutt: The Pineapple Room, Red Bar, Green Bar, and Vault Bar. The show will be performed in the round, tables and chairs ringing the stage. And they’ll be able to enjoy a bottle (or two) of top-flight Champagne throughout the performance.

This revival is certainly the most lavish Cabaret in a long time. But there have been hundreds of other, less heralded productions over the years, with more on the way. A few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Cabaret was running in Moscow. Last December, Concord Theatricals, which licenses the show, authorized a production at the Molodyy Theatre in Kyiv. And a request is in for a production in Israel, the first since the show was produced in Tel Aviv in 2014.

“The interesting thing about the piece is that it seems to change with the times,” Kander says. “Nothing about it seems to be written in stone except its narrative and its implications.”

And whenever someone tells him the show is more relevant than ever, Kander shakes his head and says, “I know. And isn’t that awful?”′

You can also listen the entire article here !!

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/cabaret-revival

I know it's a very long article , but very interesting!!

#eddie redmayne #cabaret #cabaret story #theatre #vanity fair #liza minelli #alan cumming #rebecca frecknall #director #gayle rankin #sally bowles #the emcee #nyc #august wilson #broadway #tom scutt #costume designer #scenic theatre #emma stone

[danothan]

dc dreams i’ve had in 2023

highlights:

- reconnected with an old friend who asked what i’ve been up to lately and i immediately started showing him my (non-existent) flash collection, including but not limited to: flash jacket, flash lunchbox, and a flash figure (i need all of these now.)

- superman/GL crossover comic where clark kept outshining hal and hal was getting mad abt it but then clark gave him a big ol hug and it wasn’t such a big deal anymore

- my therapist made me annotate a batman comic bc they thought i would have a lot in common with him 😭 edit: the dream that diagnosed me w ocd.

- went to an ice creamery with jason who was begrudgingly playing a video game with damian bc dami wouldn’t stop yelling at him to over messages, but by the end of the dream he was proudly showing me his scores

- wally and martian manhunter’s nephew m’hammed were friends and wally was helping m’hammed disguise himself as human and hide in society and it took ages for anyone to pick up that “muhammed” was actually a martian. also wally was a kid but barry was already dead in this version :(

and the rest of em are below cut:

- nightwing/GL crossover comic where dick and hal were cowboys that came with cowboy trading cards

- dc pride parade where multiple alt universe barries showed up, one of them had the nonbinary flag painted on their face

- babysitting damian (twice recurring)

- halbarry making plans in the gc 🙄

- found a comic where hal was an orange lantern

- wonder woman was nimona’s mentor

- yja artemis finally became a character in the comics and they made a figure of her to celebrate!

- halcarol wedding in an airport

- brought my hal and superman plushies with me to go somewhere but i got confused why barry wasn’t with me :(

- tried to buy a christopher reeves’ superman vinyl for my sibling’s bday gift

- barry puppy plushies. 5 of them. woke up to have NONE.

- some terrible stuff was happening idk, i was too busy infodumping abt barry to someone and making sure they wrote it down. archiving history as the world ends ig, that’s my contribution

- found an awful comic called darkseid warside (?? had nothing to do w darkseid) that was beautifully drawn and had sooo many fun characters details (ex: barry won the lottery and named his winning ticket betty, there was also a letter in his handwriting that was perfect for character studying, hal kept sneaking selfies to commemorate his time w carol, ollie and roy were simultaneously trying to figure out how to talk to each other again and it was sad + sweet, etc) but it was so horribly written. so so ooc, basically injustice again but so much more gory, thawne died in the first issue and it wasn’t even bc of the flash, it was superman ripping his body into two and there were intestines splayed out everywhere (in front of the young justice too). it was so awful, but the character details and panelling were so unique, everything i couldve asked for, so i lamented abt having to buy it. the clerk was like “you don’t have to” and i was like “but im gonna 😔”

#dc #danbles #2023 #dream diary #i dont rly dream often and i dont like remembering when i do (not even nightmares i just dont like dreaming) #but the dc ones just would not quit and tbh i don’t mind those ones as much #fun to have smth to keep track of while i’m asleep haha

[themosleyreview]

The Mosley Review: Poor Things

What if Dr. Frankenstein's creation was a success? What if the Bride of Frankenstein's monster became an actual person? A young woman with accelerated mental development and wanted to venture out into the world to experience life and womanhood. Well that's almost exactly what this original story was and I quite enjoyed the breath of fresh air it was. We've seen the coming of age, adulthood and life dramas and comedies, but this one was more on the level of delivering not only that type of story, but also a dark comedy that would either bore you or fascinate you. There was a great deal of fantasy elements that makes for a visual feast as we explore the odyssey in which the main character embarks on. There were some thought provoking and very witty dialogue between a number of characters and they all had unique perspectives on everyday life that apply today, even though this was a period film.

Emma Stone delivers an outstanding and evolutionary performance as Bella Baxter. To see her develop mentally from child to adult inside a grown woman’s body, was done so tastefully and almost effortlessly. She captures that ever curious wonder of the outside world and all that is to be learned. Her observational presence and wonderfully blunt delivery of sometimes hilarious dialogue was exceptional. Bella's exploration into the world's beauty and horror was the type of pure character growth that was captivating and sorely missed in modern films these days. I enjoyed experiencing her journey into becoming a woman and finding her freedom. Willem Defoe was excellent as her caretaker, creator and father figure, Dr. Godwin Baxter. He was a mad scientist that truly has a tragic backstory, but he doesn't let that stop him. I loved that he had a unique look on life and his studies into true human development was fascinating. The chemistry between Godwin and Baxter was heartwarming and not your typical relationship at all. It was a paternal relationship that developed intellectually. Ramy Youssef was great as Dr. Baxter's apprentice, Max McCandles. He was a young and enthusiatic student and I loved his genuine care for Bella. He was one of the purest and gentle souls of the film. Mark Ruffalo delivers a fantastic and manic performance as the very charming and petty womanizer Duncan Wedderburn. From moment he's on screen, you get the characters' intentions and how shallow of a human is. I loved that his confidence slowly gets chipped away by Bella's unwillingness to be controlled by his overbearing nature. It was a great affair that propelled the film along and their chemistry was excellent. Jerrod Carmichael was also excellent as the realist, Harry Astley. He drops some truth bombs on Bella on the world view of the rich and the poor and how society functions as a whole. His words may hold weight, but they were conflicting nonetheless. Christopher Abbott was ruthless and despicable as Alfie Blessington. I won't spoil his character too much, but I will say that he was absolutely the disgusting version of a man in that time period and he really shows his motives quickly. He acts as the final narrative payoff to a plotline that was almost an after thought thanks to the amazing performances all around.

The score by Jerskin Fendrix was fantastic, whimsical and unconventional as Bella Baxter herself. It truly brought out the comedic tone in a number of great scenes and underscores the experimental nature of the story. I loved the score the most during the moments Bella was at sea. Speaking of which, visually this film was stunning and almost dreamlike. I am a sucker for the usage of black and white to evoke the sense of time, but here its a character. The transition to vibrant colors as Bella explores gives the film a burst of life and also informs you of the characters feelings. Director Yorgos Lanthimos has undoubtedly made one of the best films of the year and the cast all around deliver outstanding performances. This is a must watch on the big screen and I highly recommend it in Dolby for the colors. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in comments below. Thanks for reading!

#poor things #emma stone #willem dafoe #ramy youssef #mark ruffalo #jerrod carmichael #christopher abbott

[alister312]

ok so i've put together all my thoughts about the gregstophe merman gregory/selkie christophe AU and it's a lot so i am gonna put it all below the cut 👀

(there are also more images below the cut 😏)

The concept of this AU starts with Christophe’s mom and dad. One of the old myths about specifically male selkies is that lonely fishermen's wives would cry seven tears into the sea and they would come to be with the wives instead (and maybe take them away). Christophe’s mom was a fisherman’s wife whose husband had been gone for a long time and she was lonely so she did this but after just one night with the selkie she felt guilty, changed her mind, and sent him away. Against her wishes, though, she wound up pregnant and her husband was still lost at sea (and presumed dead), so everyone knew she’d cheated in some way. 

Humiliated and upset, she moved to a new town so she could escape people judging her but she was still very bitter. She blamed the selkie for forcing her to have to uproot her life like that and when Christophe ended up being born as a selkie, she took his coat and hid it so she would never have to think about the whole affair ever again. She ended up projecting a lot of her bitterness and hatred for that selkie (as well as guilt) onto Christophe, making his life miserable. He learned early in life that he was a selkie but since his mom had his coat, he knew he couldn’t go anywhere and had to just put up with it. She ended up dying young, never having told Christophe where she put his coat so he’s stuck in the town forever.

I know there’s a lot of different versions of the myth about what happens when a selkie is separated from their coat, but currently I’m just going with the idea of the yearning for the sea and not being able to properly talk. So Christophe chose to become a fisherman because his mother used to talk about how good her past husband was and it’s a way he can be out in the sea constantly, kind of. Plus he doesn’t need to talk to be good at it, he just kind of grunts and gestures if he needs to communicate and everyone figures he’s just a very gruff, antisocial guy.

Gregory is a merman who’s gotten a bit cocky about having never been caught every time he goes to watch humans. He doesn’t want to join them exactly (he likes life in the sea very much) but he finds them fascinating to study. Anyway, Gregory gets caught one day by (of course) Christophe. Gregory is bit freaked out, worrying that Christophe might kill him or bring him back to the land as an attraction of some kind, but Christophe just wordlessly lets Gregory go.

This act makes him Gregory’s new fascination and, after a while of staring from a distance and learning that Christophe is an ultimately good (albeit quiet) man, he starts to interact with him more. Gregory is everything Christophe wishes he was (living in the ocean, free) so at first he gives him the cold shoulder out of jealousy but eventually warms up to him. Somehow Gregory learns that Christophe is actually a selkie who is missing his coat and he becomes determined to find it and give him the freedom he deserves.

I say somehow because I’m not quite sure but I’m partial to the concept of this AU also containing Stan and Kyle because…… i like them. Anyway, the thoughts I have about them in this AU is that basically Stan is also a fisherman who knows Christophe and doesn’t totally like him because Christophe’s gotten aggressive toward him before. Stan’s husband is Kyle who is also a selkie but, unlike Christophe, has his coat and can come and go from the ocean as he pleases. Kyle can sense what Christophe is and what’s wrong (and berrates Stan when Stan makes a rude comment because he doesn’t understand why Christophe is so difficult), but he doesn’t really know what he can do to help. He feels like he understands the best of anyone what Christophe is going through, and he technically does, but again he represents what Christophe wants but can’t have.

There's two potential endgames for this AU I've thought of but I'm open to hear other's thoughts if you've read this far! Anyway, both of the ones I've thought of I like, but they've got completely different vibes. In one, Christophe gets his coat (his mom had thrown it overboard a ship somewhere way out at sea) and joins Gregory in his life in the ocean. While he spends much of his time being a seal, he does come out of the water and shed his coat so he can give Gregory proper kisses. Maybe they live in a cave with an underwater entrance so they can have privacy and a safe place to keep Christophe's coat when he does take it off.

In the other end, it's less cute but imo still happy in a way. Basically Christophe finally accepts that he'll never find his coat and he tells Gregory that he doesn't want to string him along (haha like a fisherman) so he breaks off the relationship, believing Gregory would never want to give up the life in the sea. Gregory is offended Christophe thinks he doesn't love him that much so he goes and finds a way to start living on land with Christophe. He already liked watching people, why not live among them if it means he also gets to be with the love of his life? They are both trapped on land now, but they're trapped together so it's like a silver lining thing.

ANYWAY that whole thing is the AU concept!! I guess the one other important thing to mention is that selkies and merfolk are sort of myths in this world? Like they exist for real but most people think they're not real. Sorry to have gone on for so long but oh well! It's fun :)

#south park #gregstophe #gregory of yardale #christophe delorne #ze mole #sp gregory #sp christophe #this is a lot of writing and doodles which is why im bothering w all the extra tags #sp style #i promise you it's in there u just gotta look #gregstophe mer/selkie au #ali art

[luciehercndale]

Happiness Was Itself A Chemical Reaction - Gracetopher

Grace and Christopher are both 22 and they are attending their final year at university in the United States. I don't say what they study, but I figured they'd be interested in chemical engineering!✨ They are trying to complete this experiment they have to show to their class, but they are not in luck. Good for them, they can take a break and go to London through portal to have dinner with some known faces :) This fic is canon divergent so some of the events of Chain of Thorns didn't happen here, including [redacted]'s death. Read on A03 💜

“What do you think of wine, Grace?”

When Christopher asked Grace such a random question, she wasn’t the least bit surprised. It was late morning, the rays of the sun filtered through the high windows and bathed the table with chemicals and beakers in warm colors. Grace loved spending her time working in the lab and devouring science books until she was sick of it (she was never sick of this, if you asked her). 

She also developed an unexpected appreciation for the simple things, which were denied to her as she grew up. The things everyone took for granted. Spending more minutes in bed and going through her day at her pace, occasionally taking a morning off to think about what was not adding up to something new she was trying in the lab. Watering her favorite flowers, which she planted herself in the backyard of the Fairchild residence back in Grosvenor Square. 

She believed that keeping a little garden would keep her busy and teach her more about nature and science while she wasn’t studying. She thought they could also help with experiments, and she started to keep a diary to annotate their progress as they grew. Just like her. 

“Imagine if we could make hair dye or other cosmetics from the petals,” Grace suggested one day to Christopher. He was bent over the table, using the microscope. His glasses were close to falling off his nose, but he didn’t make any move to adjust them. 

He observed and took notes, but glanced at Grace when she spoke, her ideas sparked his interest and he needed to put off his work to listen to her. “Hair dye, you say? Cosmetics? Done by using the process followed by Phoenicians?”

She nodded with a sincere smile, and they started discussing whether that could be achieved. 

Most of Grace’s days would go on like that. After the invention of fire messages, Kit told her about other projects he had that could benefit the shadow world, but he needed to do some research before he could be sure that he was on the right path. Grace had beamed at the prospect of working on new things, but she had also been thrilled to work on new things together. 

Making new discoveries and enriching her science studies were her new life goals. Years prior, she had never thought she would say that, but here she was. She was enormously grateful for Christopher too, whom she thought to be the best person to accompany her in her journey. Grace saw Kit as a professor who knew too much but was too young. Someone who could teach her but who also seemed stimulated by their talks in the lab. But, of course, it wasn’t just that.

Grace enjoyed her time with Kit. It wasn’t just what they worked on in the laboratory that made her happy, it was his presence too. Nothing seemed to truly faze him and she was a little jealous of his positive attitude towards life. And his unpredictability made life with him peculiar to be with. She was always eager to hear what he had to say, and she realized he was too, with her. 

Things were evolving, albeit slowly, but she wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. She never thought she would get where she was and she was happy with the progress she made, but she knew she could do more. 

“I want to go to college,” she informed her brother one day. 

Jesse raised an eyebrow and grinned. “I’m not surprised. You would do great in college,” he said. “There is money to pay for tuition,” he added, to which Grace nodded. She knew that woman had enough funds that could build a castle, but she also knew that they couldn’t still obtain those yet. The will said Jesse had to be eighteen to access the money, which he would be soon. 

“I know. And I wanted to ask you because –” she bit her lip and sighed. “Those are Blackthorn money,” your money, she wanted to add, but recognition in her brother’s eyes told her he understood her concerns. “And you still can’t access them.”

“But I will in a few weeks,” he offered Grace a genuine smile. “Those money are mine as much as they are yours, Gracie,” he replied to her mental question. “You can do whatever you wish. If college is your dream, do not hesitate to take as much as you need.”

Grace’s smile was bright when she went on to tell Christopher about her decision. “You know, we could really use a bigger laboratory and the backing of an academic institution,” he told her, his eyes beaming at her. She could tell he was already starting to plan. “We could have funds and –”

“We have to graduate first,” Grace reminded him. “We’ll be just college students to them, until the end.”

“Yes, of course, but we will still have access to the lab and to ingredients and chemicals we can use for your research,” he winked. “It may even get academic recognition in the mundane world.”

“Kit,” Grace said, her voice low. “Does this mean you’ll be attending with me?”

“Of course,” he told her, his eyes wide and his smile even wider. “I’ve always loved this lab and studying by myself, don’t get me wrong. But getting full access to a variety of books I can borrow freely? And working with my favorite person? Amazing! A dream come true.”

Favorite person? Grace tried not to blush too much, but Kit was gazing at her and she smiled. A dream she never thought would come true. 

They had enrolled at a college in the United States, thinking that it would do them well to leave the stale and humid London air for a while. Going abroad scared Grace a little, since she had never traveled by herself. But then she remembered that Christopher would be with her, and she felt safe. She would be able to visit every few months thanks to the portals, and in the meantime, she could exchange fire messages and use the mundane telephone to keep in touch with her brother and her other immediate family.

Grace wasn’t surprised that they had accepted her request to join the university. America was more open to women joining college, and this was another reason why she thought it was better to move overseas to study. She was sure she could have a better experience there, and the experience proved right. She was glad she chose the United States.

That afternoon, she wondered what wine had to do with their experiments, but she was glad for the break. They were studying the distillation process of some chemicals, and they needed to show it to the class, in addition to creating a stable solution that would not explode. This would get them closer to graduation, and they needed for it to go well. Thinking about graduation brought her joy, but she was also frustrated because they still couldn’t achieve their goal. If they’d worked on it for fun, she wouldn’t have minded spending more time on it. But they had a deadline, and they needed to hurry. 

“I only tasted it once,” Grace confessed, remembering the moment with a slight shudder. She wondered if Kit caught that. “It had a bitter taste, and I do not wish to drink it again for the time being.”

Christopher raised his eyebrows, nodding. “I understand, that is a fine decision, by the way,” he managed a genuine smile. “I consumed wine on more than one occasion, even though I shouldn’t have, but,” he shrugged. “Fine, I guess, but not my favorite. I do not enjoy alcohol and I suggest people should mind how they consume it.”

“Then why did you taste it?” Grace wondered.

“Because I was curious about how it tasted,” he said, as if he was just talking about a dessert or some food. “And how wine is perfected to become the way it is. Do you know that you also need to do laboratory tests to check the status of the wine?”

“I suppose so,” she arranged her notes in her lap and shrugged. The grandfather clock chimed in to announce the time, and she didn’t continue. 

The sound of the wooden device made Grace gaze up at it. Lunch would be served soon, but they wouldn’t eat lunch. Not there, at least. She glanced back at Kit, and noticed him staring intently at her. 

“You stopped talking, Grace,” Christopher said quietly. “Perhaps you find the topic of heavy drinks uncomfortable? Because we can talk about something else. For example, do you prefer tea or coffee?”

She laughed softly, and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Old habits die hard. “Certainly, those two can still classify as drinks, don’t they?”

“Of course, they can. Their base is a liquid, and they do satisfy thirstiness,” Kit answered with glee. “But they are no less harmful than an alcoholic drink. Do you know that tea and coffee are stimulants and they can cause severe damage to your body if you have too much?”

“No, I did not. I did not know that,” she told him humbly. “I hope you didn’t try to prove this theory like you did with the wine.”

Christopher made a face. “I love tea and I love tea with lemon tarts, especially those mama makes,” he put his hand in front of his mouth and whispered: “don’t tell aunt Sophie that. She thinks I love hers more, but she doesn’t put enough lemon in them and I want them to taste like lemon, not some washed out version of it.”

Grace giggled, and glanced at the clock again. “Perhaps we should get ready to leave.”

“Oh,” he also gazed at the clock, and then at the window. “Yes, you are right, Grace. I lost track of time talking about wine, and I’m not even inebriated!”

They both laughed and started gathering their things. They had a dinner to attend, and they didn’t want to be late.

They were expected at Christopher’s house that morning. Or night. New York was five hours behind London, and it meant that when they crossed the portal that led to the London Institute, it would be evening in the old country. They would be five hours in the future, and this often fascinated Grace. Did it mean they traveled back in time once they returned? Of this, she wasn’t sure. 

“Feels good to be back for a short while,” Christopher said once they found themselves in the basement of the London Institute. He inhaled the air, which Grace found funny. “The air seems cleaner than New York. One time, we should measure both.”

“There’s too much pollution in the States,” Grace nodded. “Perhaps we can do something about it.”

“We will see about that,” he beamed at her, ever excited about the prospect of improving people’s lives. 

They climbed the narrow staircase that took them to the main hall. Grace’s heart hammered in her chest once she saw who was waiting for their arrival. Her brother Jesse turned upon hearing their steps on the ancient floors, and his pensive expression suddenly turned into a bright smile. 

“Grace,” he muttered affectionately, and Grace couldn’t help but quicken her pace and hurry to him. They hadn’t seen each other for two months because the last time Grace and Kit had visited, Jesse was in Idris for shadowhunter business. “Hello, Christopher,” he said to his cousin. “How have you been? Is New York treating you well? ”

“Good, really good,” she managed a grin. “New York is the same as usual, you should come again sometimes,” she suggested. 

“I believe Lucie would have fun with inspiration there. I have lost count on how many murders have happened recently,” Christopher chimed in, and Jesse frowned. “Do you remember, Grace? We helped the police, once, when that fellow student was found dead on the campus.”

Grace shook her head. “It’s not like I keep track,” she glanced at her brother, who was curious and astonished at the same time. “And it was just one time, and it was for a good cause. He died because of a demon attack, but they will never know.” 

“Murders on campus because of demons?” Jesse raised an eyebrow. “Sure, that’s probably a topic Lucie would love to hear more about,” he chuckled, and his eyes wandered on the staircase behind them.

“On that note,” Kit said, “where is Lucie? Is she not coming with us?”

“She is coming,” he answered. “She had a last minute urgency,” he offered a smile without disclosing much. “She’ll be here s– oh, there she is.”

They all turned in time to see Lucie coming down the stairs, her hair up and held by a glittering pin on the side of her face. When she saw Grace and Kit, her smile widened, but she still took her time descending the stairs, perhaps because of the emergency her brother had cited as the reason for her delay. Her face was flushed, maybe because she was in a hurry.

“We were about to leave without you,” Christopher said, and Grace didn’t know if he meant it as a joke or not. He seemed serious. She still smiled. “You are late,” he added, and Lucie subtly glanced at her brother and shrugged.

“Alas, it couldn’t be helped,” she replied enthusiastically. “I’m pleased to see you again after two months!” she added, changing the topic. “How are you faring? Is there something interesting happening in the Big Apple?”

“Do you like murder, Lucie?” Christopher wondered.

“Do you mean as a literary topic or literally?” Lucie inquired, and they started walking to the main door. “Tell me more about it.”

Grace and Jesse looked at each other and made a face, then followed after them to the carriage waiting outside.

It was a short ride to Bedford Square, where Christopher’s parents still lived with his younger brother Alexander. They also hadn’t seen their son and Grace for two months, and they were beyond themselves when they finally arrived.  It was nice to be back for a short while, and being around some of the people she cared about the most. That night it was just her, Christopher, his parents, her brother Jesse and Lucie, who was now his wife. 

“Are you eating well in New York? Because if not, I’m going to come to the college and argue with your principal and his poor meal services,” Cecily threatened. Grace knew that those weren’t empty threats. 

“Do not worry, mama. We are eating well. Right, Grace?”

Grace blinked, trying not to betray much emotion. “Yes, don’t worry,” she said politely, but Kit’s mom was still frowning. She probably didn’t buy it, she thought, eyeing her companion, who had moved to talk to his father. And for good reason.

“Tell me the truth, Grace,” Cecily leaned in and lowered her voice, as Christopher laughed at something Gabriel said to little Alexander Lightwood. “I don’t want to pry into your life as you are not children anymore, but you both look like you could use more sleep and better food. I’ve briefly been to the United States, but their food tastes awful.”

Grace smiled at the comment. “It isn’t awful. I would not define it as such, but it isn’t my favorite either. We are eating, if this is what you are worrying about,” she said. She didn’t specify that they mostly survived on dachshund sausages that they could buy from street vendors and other types of takeout food they could eat in the lab. 

Cecily didn’t seem convinced, but she let it go, and Grace exhaled a sigh of relief. She wasn’t great with small talk, and she didn’t know how to lie properly. She’d rather not lie, but she believed that white lies were okay. Christopher’s mom was highly inquisitive, and she could smell when someone wasn’t being honest with her. After they moved abroad, she used to come everyday through a portal to check on them because she worried about their wellbeing in New York City too much. At some point, she realized that they wanted their independence and that she needed to let them live their life and be independent, which Grace vastly appreciated.

It was pleasant to know that there was someone other than her brother who also cared about her like that. It had been three years since they moved, and they tried to arrange dinners every few weeks to keep in touch with their families. But that hadn’t been possible in the last two months, because of the workload from the lab that they still needed to complete. 

Grace sighed just thinking about it, but she trusted that they could make it in time.

“Do you like lemon tarts, Grace?” uncle Gabriel asked, his hand holding a small tray with Christopher’s favorite treat. She had probably sighed for real and hadn’t noticed it. 

“Yes, thanks,” she grabbed one. “Did Aunt Cecily make these?”

“She woke up at dawn to make them perfect,” he took one from the tray and tasted it, making an elated face when he did. “Delicious. My wife is an amazing baker,” she glanced at Cecily, who was deep in conversation with Jesse and Christopher on the sofa. Lucie was beside them but she was silent, every now and then grinning and commenting at something they had said. Little Alex was still there but he was falling asleep on Kit’s arm. 

“They are great, you are right,” Grace nodded. “Can we get some to take to New York with us?”

Gabriel’s smile widened. “Cecily prepared a box for you and Kit. It is meant to be a surprise, but it doesn’t matter,” he giggled. “Pretend you are surprised when she gives it to you, please,” he demanded, and it made Grace laugh. Sometimes, uncle Gabriel reminded her so much of Christopher, and it was funny to see where he probably inherited his inability to keep secrets. 

“I’ll pretend you never told me, uncle,” she lowered her voice and glanced at the group to see if they’d heard them. They probably didn’t. Someone made a joke and they were laughing out loud. 

Gabriel giggled at the sight and excused himself to the kitchen to get the drinks. Grace walked to the group right as Alex was protesting. 

“I was sleeping, mama!” He said with annoyance and rubbed his eyes. 

“There will be more laughing, my dear,” Cecily said gently to her youngest son. “Perhaps it is time you go to bed? You are tired.”

“No, I want to be with you,” he cried, and held Kit's arm even more tightly. “You will go and I will see you again in two months and I don’t like that!”

“Come, come, Alex,” Kit said. “We will come back soon, and we will play next time. Not tonight. There is not enough time tonight.”

“If you want,” intervened Grace, “we could take you to bed and wait until you fall asleep?”

Alex’s eyes lit up at the proposition. “Yes, please!” he said excitedly, taking Christopher’s hand and dragging him towards Grace. He also took her hand, then turned to the other three. “I’m sorry Lucie, I’m sorry Jesse. You can’t come,” he said fiercely. “And I hope you aren’t jealous. You’ll take me to bed next time, good?”

“No hard feelings, little man,” Jesse said with a grin. Everyone was smiling at Alex’s peculiar personality. 

“Yes, have fun with your brother and Grace,” Lucie added, and the kid smiled happily.

They turned towards the staircase and Alex held Grace and Kit’s hands in his. She heard her lab companion say: “Kiddo, do you like murders?” and she rolled her eyes with a grin. She couldn’t expect any less from a boy whose family loved to recount how their ancestor, and Christopher’s very own grandfather, had turned into a worm. 

Alexander fell asleep after Christopher started telling him about the last New York serial killer the police were trying to locate. He didn’t even have the time to tell him more, that Alex closed his eyes, his hands still holding theirs, and started snoring peacefully.

“I don’t think he likes murder stories that much,” Kit commented once they left the kid’s room.

“I believe he was just tired,” Grace said. “It is barely afternoon for us, while it is late at night for him.”

He snorted loudly, and stopped at the top of the stairs. “Which reminds me,” he sighed, “we must go back to the laboratory once we cross the portal. I mean, not at the same time, but you understand. We must complete our experiment before next week.”

“We do, and we will,” she said confidently. “But first, we should enjoy more time with our family. We haven’t seen them for weeks and I don’t know you, but I appreciate this break, albeit brief. And the food.”

“The food here is something else,” he confessed. “I trust your confidence, Grace,” he continued with a hopeful smile. “It is a delight working with you,” he added, which made her blush. Before she could reply, though, he went downstairs. Typical Kit behavior. 

She didn’t follow, though. Instead, she decided to take that time to use the bathroom. It was enough socializing for the night, and she needed to recollect and refresh herself. Cecily outdid herself with the dinner, and she didn’t think she could accept more cakes even though she wanted to. When she reached the bathroom, the door was shut, which meant someone was inside. 

It didn’t take long for the door to open, and a surprised Lucie appeared from the other side. “Grace,” she muttered, her mouth slightly open. “I’m sorry, I must have lounged in the bathroom for too long.”

“It’s okay, it wasn’t so urgent,” she said, eyeing her dress. Lucie often dressed in blue hues, but tonight, she wore a dark pink chiffon dress. There was a stain on the silk part on the bodice, and it stood out. Grace’s eyes lingered too much on it, and she blinked. 

Her gaze met Lucie’s, which managed a shy smile before glancing where her sister in law had just been. “By the Angel, I stained my dress,” she sighed, as if she was resigned and she expected for it to happen. She rushed to the sink, and she was about to dab her handkerchief on the stain when Grace took her hand by the wrist and gently stopped her.

“You will ruin it if you put water like that, and it will stain more,” Grace told her quietly. “Let me see if there is baking soda in the kitchen. Wait here,” she ordered, and returned as soon as she could with what she needed. 

Lucie was still there, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. Grace had already thought she seemed to glow with a new light, but now, in the small bathroom at the Lightwood’s, she could see it better. She brightened when she realized Grace was there. “Did you find it?” she pleaded, and turned to face her. 

Grace put a bit of white powder on the stain and used a wet handkerchief to cover it. “We should wait a few minutes and rinse it off,” she explained. “Baking soda works wonders with stains.”

“I didn’t know about that,” she said. “If it works, I’m taking you out for lunch next time you come here.”

“It will work,” Grace said confidently. “I would like to have lunch with you, but are you sure you will be okay? If you are in the first trimester, this may happen again.”

“I –” Lucie opened her mouth in disbelief. “I am, apparently,” she replied. “How did you know?” she asked, placing a hand on her stomach on instinct. “I’m barely showing.”

Grace looked at Lucie’s belly, which, like she said, didn’t seem any different than the last time they saw each other. “You are glowing,” she said. “You often radiate this energy, but tonight your cheeks almost match your dress,” she raised her eyebrows, tilting her head on the side. “You also declined a drink, which isn’t itself telling. I casually glanced at you while you ate, and you seemed distressed because you have nausea, am I right?”

“I’m quite predictable, aren’t I?” Lucie nodded. “Perhaps the others must’ve caught on too.”

Grace shrugged with a hint of a smile, but didn’t answer. “Let’s see if the stain disappeared,” she said instead, and used the same handkerchief to remove the baking soda. “It’s gone, but you’ll still have to get this dress cleaned as soon as possible or it will leave a halo on the texture.”

“You are a lifesaver, Grace,” Lucie took her hand in hers. “I’m beyond grateful for your assistance. Thank you. Thank you so much!” she said gleefully. “I shall go back to the living room before everyone thinks I fell into the toilet because a sewer monster got me,” she laughed, and Grace laughed with her. Their eyes locked, and Grace realized she wasn’t done. “Please, do not tell a soul. Only Jesse knows,” she spoke rapidly. “We’ve just found out about this and –” she bit her lip and sighed, and Grace noticed her cheeks turned even more pink. “I wanted to be sure that it was real and it wouldn’t be like what happened to mam,” she didn’t elaborate on that, and offered a tight smile. She supposed her mother had lost a child once, and was terrified it could happen to her. “You’re the first to unofficially know.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I’m glad you’re entrusting me with this news, Lucie. And I will keep your secret, don’t worry, ” she admitted. Funny how that was the second time that day that she was promising to keep a secret. Or maybe the third. She smiled to herself. “And –” she stopped, hearing steps coming from the living area. She relaxed when she saw it was her brother Jesse.

“There you are, girls,” he said. “I thought some demon kidnapped you. I was ready to get my gear and my sword.”

Grace made a face, and she exchanged a grin in acknowledgment with Lucie and chuckled. “Being with you is rubbing off on his creativity,” she told her. 

“What?” he wondered, but the girls just shrugged.

“Nothing of importance, my darling. I’m going back to the living room before aunt Cecily says I didn’t want to eat the other dessert she made,” Lucie winked at Grace and patted Jesse’s arm. He stared at her until she disappeared at the end of the corridor. 

“Lucie told me the good news,” Grace confessed, and Jesse frowned. “She told me no one knows, and I’m going to respect your privacy. Let me congratulate you, since you’re here.”

“Thank you, Grace,” he replied and his eyes lit up. She could tell he was happy and she was too. She only wished for Jesse to be happy and she knew he also wished the same to her. “And I’m glad the cat is out of the bag. I don’t know how long I could’ve kept it from you,” he laughed. “Maybe you figured it all out before she even told you. You are quite perceptive.”

“Maybe,” she shrugged with a knowing smile. 

“It feels like yesterday when you told me you wanted to attend college,” he told her after a beat. “And it didn’t surprise me at all. You’ve always been smart, Grace. I’m glad you found something that makes you happy.”

“I am happy,” she said proudly, her voice a little shy. She never thought she would say it out loud a few years ago, but here she was. “Studying in New York makes me happy,” she added, and her brother grinned. “And even though three years flew by, I think I’m just getting started.”

“I think mama’s cake upset Lucie’s stomach,” Kit told Grace after dinner. They ditched Lucie and Jesse’s offer to ride on the carriage back to the London Institute with them, and decided to take a breath of fresh air and walk to Fleet Street. 

“Do you believe so?” Grace played clueless. “I found your mother’s cooking agreeable, and so did the other guests.”

“Yes, it was quite okay, considering,” he glanced at her with a genuine smile. “Her face was green when she finished the first course, maybe she is p –”

“I thought you said there was a place you wanted to take me,” her eyes flickered with an idea to divert the conversation. She promised Lucie to keep her secret, after all, and she wanted to end the night in London by doing something else. “Is it still open at this dreadful hour?”

Christopher blinked. “Oh, yes. I completely forgot. I can take you there, but it’s not open.”

“Blimey,” Grace sighed, but at least she has diverted the conversation on to another topic. “Then we could go next time we come to London, if you want?”

“No, tonight will do,” he said confidently. “We can still break in with an open rune, Grace. If you want to. I want to show you this place because it could help us with our research which is due in a few days,” he reminded her.

She pursed her lips. “You are right. Unfortunately, though, we are not thieves. We can’t just break in a mundane place just to use a lab.”

“Of course, we can,” Kit’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s for the sake of science, right?”

“Why can’t we go during the visiting hours?”

“Because there aren’t visiting hours, Grace,” he answered. “We are going to a distillery. Or a winery, if you like.”

“Okay,” she nodded. “That’s why you asked me about wine today?”

“Okay? Just like that?” Christopher demanded. He was beyond excited. “What if I told you it was run by the mob?”

Grace frowned. “What of it?”

“You are so brave,” he grinned. “But no, I was kidding. It is a regular winery owned by regular people. I just wanted to see your reaction.”

“Well, you have seen it. How about you take me there now?”

And that, he did. “We are here,” he said after not much time. Grace realized they reached the Northern entrance to Regent’s Park, which had an eerie atmosphere at that hour of the night. 

“I only see the park,” she admitted, but then her eyes adjusted to the dim lights and she made out the outline of a small building, which was right behind the main entrance of the park. “Oh, I see it now.”

“We better prepare,” Christopher said, and Grace saw he drew a night vision rune on his forearm. “Give me your arm,” he demanded once he was done, and he did the same on her wrist. She appreciated the gesture. 

“You are talking as if we are going to have to fight, or something,” Grace said, trying to follow Kit as he neared the entrance of the factory. Mad Oak Distillery, that was the name. 

“Or something,” he replied with a chuckle. “Quite a riveting name, isn’t it? Unfortunately, I don’t know why they chose it,” he said. “Perhaps there was such a grandiose oak on this soil, and they had to cut down the tree to build their business. They believed they uprooted the whole tree, but the roots were still underground, and they got mad because they lost their body, so to speak.”

“Sounds fair,” Grace commented. “The oak had every right to be mad.”

“You can say it. But,” he continued, his hand pointing at the big text with the name of the factory. “Metropolitan legends say that the wine this factory produces is maddening. As that is displeasing. Insufferable. Vomit inducing –” he looked up and lost himself in his thoughts, “perhaps my parents served that at dinner? That’s probably why, my cousin –”

“Christopher,” Grace put a hand on his arm and managed a smile. “Shall we see it for ourselves?”

“You’re right, we shall,” he agreed with a grin. “Can you draw an open rune, Grace?”

“Right away,” she said. Once she finished, the main doors gave away, and they entered.

It was pitch dark, and they used a witchlight to see where they were going. There was a door in the furthest corner of the room which pointed to the laboratory. Grace knew they were going there without asking Christopher. After all, supposedly, they broke in to witness how a winery worked so they would get help with their project, but with Kit, she never knew what to expect. 

They found the laboratory where they tested the wine’s acidity and other stuff. “The taste of wine doesn’t just depend on the quality of the grapes,” Christopher told her as they wandered around and checked some papers the workers left there, “but also from other factors.”

“What do you think is missing from our research? Why won’t that liquid stabilize like wine ferments?” Grace huffed. She was tired, and she didn’t want to hide it. Doing this experiment was taking a toll on her already messed up sleeping schedule. She was frustrated. 

“Wine fermentation is one of the oldest chemical reactions used by people,” Christopher said, glancing at some notes on a desk. “This laboratory is such an amazing place, and I thought it would offer some input on how to proceed with our work, but alas, it didn’t.”

“We still have time to mull over it,” Grace considered. She put her hand over Kit’s, still holding some papers, and he looked up. 

“Yes, definitely,” he agreed. The moment seemed endless, as neither of them broke eye contact, at a loss for words. “Maybe –” he began, and all of a sudden, lights turned on in the room. 

“What is happening?” Grace asked with alarm. “Isn’t it shut down for the night?”

“I forgot,” Christopher shook his head as if he realized he had left the gas open in the kitchen but he didn’t care. “This factory is managed by a vampire named Oak, hence the name. And the wine is actually,” he gazed up at Grace, who frowned. “No, it’s not blood. But it is red as blood because of a peculiar kind of grape they grow in the countryside from where Oak was born centuries ago. I’m sorry but I don’t think we can go look at the barrels underground to tas –”

She didn’t let him finish. Grace grabbed his hand and took him in the adjacent room, and begged him to stay silent. Muffled voices came from the laboratory, and Kit’s mouth gaped open as if to speak, but he did not. Luckily for them, there was an exit door nearby, and they went through it in silence.

Grace exhaled a sigh of relief once outside. “That was close.”

“It was, but I wouldn’t have minded if they found us there.”

“You don’t? They could’ve reported us to the High Warlock of London for trespassing or something,” she said, but she wasn’t sure if that could be possible. She started working on the street that would take them to the London Institute, the Mad Oak several steps behind them.

Kit was laughing softly. “I’m sorry, Grace, I should’ve told you.”

“Told me what?”

“That I knew Oak, the owner. I made business with him at the Shadow Market when I still lived in London full time, and in exchange, he said I could visit his laboratory to get advice on the fermentation process.”

Grace snorted and shook her head, then she started laughing. “And here I thought I would go to vampire jail or that they would bite me out of spite for finding their secrets about winemaking.”

“Don’t worry, they can’t,” Kit said, and he offered her a grin. “And we had a deal, but our time is up, regrettably. He told me I could come here while there was nobody but it looks like the night shift just started.”

“We’ll just have to make do with what we have,” Grace sighed, worn out at this point. 

“Which, luckily for us, here I have some notes I got from the laboratory,” Kit showed her the bundle of papers that he had checked out while they were looking around. 

“Won’t Oak get… mad?”

“Nah, don’t sound too worried. He made a copy for us,” Christopher said nonchalantly, and Grace scoffed. 

It looked like she wasn’t the only one keeping secrets that night. 

They arrived at the London Institute in complete silence, and Grace found her brother waiting for them by the Portal downstairs with the boxes (plural) of lemon tarts Cecily baked for them. 

“Thanks Jesse, but you could have left them on the floor,” Christopher muttered and grabbed the boxes, nearing the Portal as Grace stopped beside her brother. “Oh, and, since you’re here, do you remember if we drank wine by Mad Oak Distillery by any chance?”

Jesse frowned and thought about it for a few seconds. “Uhm… no? Why is that? Do you want me to get it for you before you leave? I don’t think Will likes that one –”

Grace sighed and turned to Kit, ready to do damage control. He wasn’t letting it go, was he… 

“Nothing, nothing,” he quickly said. “Just curious. Well, Grace, I am going. I’ll wait for you on the other side,” he grinned. “And I will see you next time, Jesse. And congratulations! Too bad Lucie is not here…” he waved and crossed the portal, not waiting for an answer. 

Grace was baffled. She shot an apologetic look at her brother, but he shook his head. “Don’t worry, I know you kept the secret. He already cornered me after Lucie left the room to inquire about her condition, and I’m sure he understood. Sooner or later, everyone will know anyway,” he shrugged. 

She nodded. “We’ll see each other before the baby is born,” Grace promised, and she hoped she wasn’t lying to herself and to Jesse about that. “See you soon,” she managed a smile before disappearing through the portal as well, and returned to her imminent task.

They didn’t go back to the laboratory after coming from London, even though Grace had promised Christopher they would, and she was feeling a bit guilty for losing precious hours. But her body demanded sleep, so she excused herself to bed after crossing safely back to the United States. The following morning, she found Christopher right outside her room, and they went to the laboratory again. 

He took the Mad Oak notes with him, and they started dissecting the writing together, discussing options and trying, but failing. Grace's spirits fell and she felt even more exhausted than yesterday after their little adventure at the factory. 

“Perhaps we should get a dachshund sausage,” Christopher suggested after lunch hours had greatly passed, but Grace barely shook her head. He had already stopped reading the material, and was massaging his temples. He needed a break.

“Wait, wait, stop,” Grace announced after a while, rereading a piece of the notes and making a few calculations on a blank piece of paper. Kit was intent on watching her as she wrote, and then – “I think I found the problem!” she exclaimed, and showed it to him. “See, maybe it’s this. If we change this and put this other one in its stead –”

Kit nodded and started helping her until they were done processing. Seconds felt eternal as they waited for the concoction to explode… and it didn’t. They’d made it. 

“I think we did it, Grace,” he said enthusiastically. “It is stable! It didn’t explode! My glasses are safe,” he joked, and she laughed softly.

“Yes, we did,” she couldn’t believe herself. “We finally did it!”

“Well,” he continued. “Can I hug you, Grace? To celebrate?”

She answered by hugging him. She could feel his own heart racing and she knew hers was the same. 

Was that what true happiness feels like? 

She loved that sense of finally making it after long hours spent researching for the best outcome. The excitement of finding the missing piece. Grace didn’t know much about her future, but she was positive that she wanted to do this for a long time, with Christopher by her side. 

Happiness was itself a chemical reaction. Quite like how they made wine, the taste of happiness didn’t just depend on one element. Happiness could be a place, could be a food, could be a person. Or it could be all those things mixed together, many of those things. More than one place. More than one person. When we are with them, they affect how we feel and send signals throughout our bodies that we are happy. Our heart beats loudly in our chest. Our hands are sweaty. We smile uncontrollably, laugh, and feel giddy. 

Happiness was one of the oldest chemical reactions used by people, and it was free. Just like Grace.

Hey readers! Thank you so much for reading <3 Here's some things I wanted to point out:

America allowed women to get into university around 1880's.

I don't think Jesse needed to turn 18 to access Blackthorn money (I believe Tatiana left them A LOT of money) but I wanted to add this modern touch lol

Dachshunds sausages is the name for hot dogs in the XIX century :) they were exported to the US from Germany. I thought that Grace and Kit would be the types to eat street food while they work at the lab, because it's easy to manage.

I apologize if I said something wrong when I talked about what they were doing in the lab and about wine making. I'm not too good with explaining such stuff and I tried to do research, so I hope it wasn't bad.

#tsc #tsc fan fiction #tsc fan fic #tlh #gracetopher #grace blackthorn #christopher lightwood #lucie herondale #jesse blackthorn #blackdale #gabrily #gabriel lightwood #cecily lightwood #lightwood family #the last hours #chain of thorns #chain of gold #chain of iron #the shadowhunter chronicles #tweety.writes

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Wip asks….

Is p&p pride and prejudice… I’m intrigued

Anything you can share I’ll be here. Exciting to see your writing brain taking flight 😘

Spots!!!

My darling P&P is indeed pride and prejudice 😬😬😬

it’s gonna take me a while to get done but it has been percolating in my brain for over a year 😂

I’m sharing a few paragraphs of the secret fic that I’ve just written - because I am a tease and I’m intrigued to see if anyone can figure out what the fic is inspired by!!not that I think this sniper is giving anything away 😂

The road to London is an easy ride from the Diaz country house and it gives Buck plenty of time to think about Lieutenant Colonel Diaz and his son. Christopher had been adorable and everything a young boy of 7 should be. Buck was looking forward to teaching him, he got the feeling he would prove to be whip smart and a good pupil. His father Lieutenant Colonel Diaz, was a complete mystery to Buck though. He had come across as so aloof and unfriendly to start, but had seemed to warm up to Buck the longer they had spent in each other’s presence and then turned cold again once it was time for his departure. Buck could see the way he doted on his son, so he couldn’t be all bad, perhaps he just didn’t enjoy meeting strangers and inviting them into his home.

Bucks thoughts turn towards what he wants to teach Christopher and how he can make things interesting for him. He forgot to ask if he would have access to the Diaz library in the Lieutenant Colonels study, or if he would be able to purchase any supplies he might need. He wants to capture Christophers imagination and make learning fun, unlike his own experiences when he was Christophers age and was made to sit in a uninspiring school room and undertake a rigid and unimaginative education at the hands of a tutor who was the very definition of dull, in looks, teaching style and personality.

He supposes that what appealed to his parents, thankfully he had Maddie though and she made sure to spend hours with him in the library, with books spread all around them as they read through whatever they could find, Shakespeare, the history of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, astronomy, the kings and queens of Great Britain and of voyages of discovery undertaken by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Maddie had made everything far more fun and interesting and Buck had found it difficult when she had married and moved away. this new venture into teaching was his own attempt at escape from the oppression of his family, the family name and the expectations he could never live up to, no matter how hard he tried.

He makes good time back to Buckley house in London and quickly sets about packing his trunks with everything he needs to make his break for freedom. He fills one trunk with his clothes and a second with an assortment of books, papers and various items in his possession such as a telescope Maddie had given to him when he was 12. Everything stowed safely in his trunks he flops onto the bed and starts to plot how he can get them out of the house without it being noticed.

#kym answers things #secret wip #buddie fic #yes I am attempting to write a pride and prejudice 118/ buddie fic 😬😬😬

[daisylikesmedia]

Series 5 Episode 1: The Eleventh Hour

Well, we just watched the finale of both iconic doctor David Tennant, and the showrunner behind his success, Russell T Davies. In their places, we have Steven Moffat taking over the show with his new, young doctor, Matt Smith. Today we’re gonna be watching their first episode, let’s get into it.

So in my Girl in the Fireplace review, I mentioned how Moffat’s view of the Doctor as “fairytale” came through very strongly there. This vision comes back in this episode and in full force. The first act especially is just magic. The way he interacts with Amelia as a child as he’s trying to figure himself out is both funny and charming, and when he’s investigating the crack in time in Amy’s room he just instantly fits into Doctor mode. The only Doctor that took to the role as quickly (in new who at least) was Christopher Eccleston during Rose. And this isn’t just the first act, 11 is on fire the entire runtime. This episode, like I say about a lot of opening episodes, does a fantastic job at pacing. People can sometimes underestimate the challenge of introducing a new doctor, a new companion, the dynamic between the two, all whilst making an engaging Doctor Who story. It’s a *lot* to balance, but this episode excels at this balance.

The Prisoner Zero/Atraxi storyline is one that serves its purpose well. I don’t think they steal the show, or are as exciting as some opening episode villains (see: The Judoon/Plasmavore in Smith & Jones and I’d argue The Stenza from The Woman Who Fell To Earth), but saving Amy Pond from the evil alien who’s been living in her house for years fits very well into this Doctor’s introduction, and having an awesome villain isn’t necessary for a series opener. Also I was dogsitting when watching this episode and the dog barks from prisoner zero ended up waking up the dog I was looking after sglkj (it was ok tho I turned it down and he went back to sleep <3).

There is ONE nitpick I have about this episode though. This guy takes Jeff’s laptop, and through it is able to hack into a super secret conference call that should be like, *really* secure? It isn’t the worst instance of this kind of thing, but as someone who’s studied cyber security before omggg this is impossible even for The Doctor sflgn. It’s just not how computers work and when Who relies on expecting missile codes and secret meetings with world leaders to be hacked into from a home laptop in a matter of seconds it just makes me grumble. I know I should just suspend my disbelief but aaaa sdfgljk I find it so hard for this trope specifically.

TL:DR/Overview: The Eleventh Hour is, in my opinion, the best Doctor intro we’ve had in new who. Matt Smith instantly takes to the role, and Steven Moffat’s fairytale vision of The Doctor is at its best in this story. The pacing is tight and the villain serves the story well even if it’s not a particularly memorable one. There are some parts of this plot where you need to suspend disbelief, and I still think Smith & Jones is the best series opener we’ve had, but the highs are so high in this story that I’m giving it an S.

#daisy reviews media #doctor who #11th doctor #the eleventh hour

[capsensislagamoprh]

A few nights later, well past midnight, Christophe made his way into the main room, a long list of details scrolling in his head. The Swiss man considered the ceiling. It was tall enough, and did look like it could be used to brace his unique party trick, but he wanted to be sure. He had plans. Pausing, Christophe blinked as he was once again struck by an unusual sight. A particular dark clad figure sitting stock straight, head bent over books as he did what appeared suspiciously to be school work. The steel case tapped the table as Christophe moved to sit at the other end, his gaze curious. Otabek looked up sharply, his dark framed glasses causing his eyes to be illuminated by the single light he was working with. It gave the stoic man a studied air, reminding Christophe of a business mogul or some high end fashion ad for college students. It was an interesting look. He wondered if Yuri had ever seen it.

"Didn't know you wore glasses," Christophe offered as a way of greeting.

"Only for long bouts of reading," the younger man answered.

"Interesting." The case clicked open. The last time the portable pole had been used it had sustained some damage from a particularly exuberant dance routine. A few of the connection points were threadbare, and while he didn't want to admit it, he might have to retire this one soon. Ah, but there was a new model available, and wasn't that the silver lining!

They sat like that, companionable in silence, for some time. Christophe polishing and preening the pieces, making sure they worked correctly, Otabek carefully writing meticulous answers for something online. He had to admit he was curious. "What are you doing?" he asked casually.

"Homework."

No words minced. How very on brand for the young Kazakh. "For what?"

Otabek lifted his head, turning his gaze to Christophe. His blank expression revealed nothing. 

"School."

"Haven't you graduated already?"

"Higher education. For my degree."

Color Christophe intrigued. "Oh? That's forward thinking. What are you going for? I mean, what degree." Best not to give Otabek any way to short answer him. While he was unfailingly polite, he had been hanging out with Yuri, and you just could never tell how much of the Russian spitfire would rub off on him.

"Medical."

Christophe stopped his menstruations. Medicine? Well, now he was fascinated. "What type?"

"I am not sure. Right now I must pass the basics. Perhaps sports therapy, or an orthopedist."

It was so matter of fact. Such a done deal that no matter what path the young man chose, he knew Otabek would manage it with calm dignity. It made him want to shake the stoic demeanor, see what came loose.

"Are you coming to the bachelor party?"

"No."

No? NO?! Christophe looked bothered, confused and affronted. "Why not?!"

"I am tasked with keeping Yuri occupied so that the rest of the adults may have their fun without him becoming overly excited."

Without Yuri becoming overly aggressive, he meant, and Christophe knew it. It would be a shame to not have the young man there. He'd not been able to get him on that pole, tried several times the last time it came out, but Otabek had refused staunchly .

"Shame," he said casually. "It's going to be fun."

"I am assured both the events will receive glowing reviews from those who recall it."

Christophe felt himself hitch mid smile. Was... was that shade? Oh, sweet giddy Freya, that was shade! How intriguing! He had to find a way to get a reaction like that out of the Kazakh in a more public setting. He needed witnesses! Looking over his portable pole, he considered just how to accomplish this. So deep into elaborate plots was he that it caught him by surprise when Otabek stood. His books were closed, laptop tucked neatly away in a black leather satchel. He disappeared down the hall with nary a sound, returning without the school things. Instead he held a handful of washers, a few screws and a universal tool. "Here. These should help."

Christophe took the items, looking them over. Without a word, Otabek helped him fit the parts to the stripped connection points, stabilizing the pole. Then the young man stood, gave a polite goodnight, and disappeared into the room he shared with Yuri, the door closing silently behind him.

One way or another Christophe was going to get him on that pole. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Someday. It would be good for him. But for now, he had a stag party to finalize.

part 1

#yuri on ice #otayuri #yuri plisetsky #otabek altin #yoi #yuri katsuki #!!! #victor nikiforov #victor x yuuri #otabek x yurio #victuuri #yuuri katsuki #yuuri!!! on ice #excerpts from the onsen #stories #story #christophe giacometti #mila babicheva #georgi popovich #podium family #phichit chulanont

[cewritten23]

Gerard Richter:

-Gerhard Richter is a German painter who was born on the 9th of February, 1932 in Dresden.

-Some of Richter's family members were directly involved with Nazi movement, specifically his father, school teacher and uncle.

-At the age of 16 left his education and began an apprenticeship as a set painter within theatres.

-The second World War effected the young artist on a personal level as he lost family members. This lead Richter to pursue his art whilst being inspired by nature rather than political, religious or philosophical issues.

-In 1951, Richter began his studies at Kunstakademie in Dresden. During this time the artist spent is time creating murals and political banners that were supported and requested by state-owned businesses.

-Richter became aware of the artists Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, which in turn informed Richter's artistic practice as he began experimenting with splashes of colour with lots of energy and truth.

-In 1961, before events relating to the Berlin Wall, Richter moved to Dusseldorf and returned to the local Kunstakademie.

-Upon reflecting on his artistic practice, Richter decided he would produce and engage with work that was within the avant-garde style. Therefore, as a result the artist destroyed and discarded many of his earlier works from the 1950s and the 1960s.

-Richter would make use of photograph whilst projecting and tracing images onto his canvases and then paint. The final result was always a distorted and blurred version, therefore creating mystery of what the subject actually looks like.

-Richter's painting style evoked such questions involving components of paintings within the viewers; composition, colour scheme. This allowed the viewer to focus on the elements and literal marks left during the process of painting rather than specific and recognisable features of the subject matters.

-Richter began adopting techniques of blurring, sgraffito, impasto and creating multiple layers within his paintings. He would also used tools other than paint brushes, for example, a squeegee in order to engage with aggressive sweeping motions.

-The artist became a professor at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf.

-Richter unfortunately received a lot of criticism for many of his artistic process and actively disregarding the social and political issues that arose at the time due to the World War 2 Nazi regime.

-Later in Richter's artist career, he focused on creating figurative work that captured the imagery of victims that were involved with terrorist attacks.

-Richter continues to maintain his professorship at the Kunstakamedie in Dusseldorf.

-Richter was involved with capitalist realism, pop art and postmodernism.

-The artists paintings explore the idea of capturing images in ways that prove and change the view or overall perception of the object.

-Experiments with realism and abstract art within his paintings.

-the artist was also inspired by minimalism and conceptualism.

-Richter has explored the possibilities of painting and images and their not so good connections with photography.

-He believes that photographs do not convey objects in their entirety.

-His paintings are drawn from the imagery of newspapers or family albums.

-Richter believes that all forms of imagery work alongside one another and communicate.

-for many of his paintings Richter would capture the subject by blurring them convey the extent in which artists can paint something without revealing it truthfully.

-The artists displays his expressive strengths and shortcomings.

-His paintings have many layers, brushstrokes (in lots of directions), colours, with the use of sgraffito and strokes.

-Richter was influenced by artist and influenced artists: Christopher wool, Ellsworth Kelly, Max Beckham, Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Robert Raushenberg and Andy Warhol.

-Richter had personal connections with artist Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, Robert Storr, Joseph Beuys, George Baselitz and Konrad Fischer-Lueg.

-was influenced by conceptual art and minimalism.

-influenced Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus and Dada

How does this relate to my work?:

Within my practice I will be making use of similar techniques to convey the amount of energy I physically put into my work. I have made use of a squeegee in order to create a distorted and blurred look to many of my sinister subject matters. I have also made use of sgraffito and impasto much like Richter. The techniques he uses to create his works have inspired some of my works.

[remainseatedatalltimes]

2023: Bow Down To Barbenheimer

Oh 2023.  You came and went in a flicker.  And so will the memory of your cinema releases. 

Okay, okay.  It wasn’t that bad.  But in many ways, 2023 felt like a complete repeat of 2022 with the release of a series of decent, entertaining enough films to help moviegoers like myself enjoy a cinematic escape from the real world.  

Now don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  In fact, it’s precisely what my overactive brain yearns for.  And it’s a large reason why so many of the movies I review tend to sit squarely in the 3-to-4-star category.  I’m so grateful for that escape that I genuinely do like most movies.  But essentially, a movie needs to make me FEEL something that compels me to want to talk about it to get above or below that range.  To keep that escape going beyond the boundaries of the cineplex.  Good, bad or otherwise (we all love to share horror stories of the appalling film we had to endure…remember Cats?).  So whilst I thoroughly enjoyed my cinematic escapes in 2023, very few films kept me thinking and talking extensively about them beyond the boundaries of the cinema.  With a few exceptions…

But first, let’s talk about the three movies that DID make an impact in 2023 with most cinemagoers:  Barbie, Oppenheimer, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.  All 3 were big successes that certainly lit up the interweb.  And whilst Barbie certainly drew lots of well-deserved praise, unfortunately for me, most of the sequences with Will Ferrell and the Mattel leaders – who clearly had to be larger than life caricatures so to not offend the real-world company banking the film – just completely ruined the overall tone and impact.  Which is a shame, because if these characters had in fact represented the real-world business leaders, it would have elevated this already joyous and clever film to greater heights.

Meanwhile, The Super Mario Bros. Movie did great fan service with a fun and fast-paced film that finally gave the biggest names in gaming the cinematic star-status they deserve.  Even if Nintendo clearly didn’t read the Disney rulebook on merchandising by failing to release a new gaming title in line with the film…go figure.

But it was the final film in the 2023 trifecta that transcended the crowd to take the crown of my number 1 film of the year.  That film, Christopher Nolan’s dark, anxious and ambitious study of guilt, in the biopic, Oppenheimer.

To be honest, this movie probably does deserve a higher ranking than I’ve awarded it.  It is pretty close to cinema perfection.  A stellar cast, a stunning soundscape, a captivating story, and some of the best scene composition I’ve seen in years.  But I review from my heart, and I still left Oppenheimer stunned, but slightly hollow.  Which arguably is the entire point of the film.  I think we’d all have been very confused if this had been a musical retelling (don’t laugh, it’s actually a thing - Google Australian musical Atomic).  But when I look at other films I’ve awarded higher scores to, I stand by my score based on my personal taste.  I am quite thrilled it still managed to take out the no. 1 spot, however.  And hey, this is my list, so I can do what I want 😉

Interestingly, my second favourite film dealt with very similar themes – depression, grief, isolation – but in a VERY different way.  Quirky, brilliantly acted, and at times both heartbreaking and hilarious, The Banshees of Inisherin did find its way to my heart, and captivated me for 2 joyous hours of intrigue, laughs, tears, and WTF is happening musings.  Not to mention the haunting, yet stunning landscape sitting at the films core.  I lied.  I did mention it.

Rounding out my top 3 was another Barry Keoghan star vehicle, and one of 2023’s most controversial movies.  Whilst not quite as sublime as Emerald Fennell’s spectacular 2021 film, Promising Young Woman, her recent take on wealth, privilege, desire, and greed was impossible to look away from (even though I kind of wanted to in several instances).  But that is precisely the point of this film.  Reminiscent to me of one of my favourite films of all time, the underrated The Talented Mr. Ripley, this cynical, shocking, and brutal film was intentionally wicked and wonderful to behold.  Even if it may not be for everyone.

Similarly to 2022, I ended up awarding 12 films this year with 4-star ratings.  So there were plenty of other very good films released this year that you should catch up on if you haven’t already.  These ranged from the wonderfully optimistic and sentimental, Wonka – which, despite the director’s claims to the contrary, is the very definition of a MUSICAL; to the brilliant and most original film of the year, Poor Things – which very nearly pipped Saltburn for my 3rd place.  Emma Stone can literally do no wrong.  I also thoroughly enjoyed the animated gems ranging from the best superhero film of the year – Spiderman: Across the Universe; to Pixar’s romantic comedy, Elemental; to Disney’s latest animated musical, Wish – a charming, somewhat clever tribute to the 100th anniversary of the studio. I also clearly have a thing for seeing the upper echelons suffer, because the disturbing, yet brilliantly funny Triangle of Sadness also wet my whistle.  And rounding out the top 12 were three bigger blockbuster style films that shot well above their weight:  The best game adaptation of a movie to date (no, it’s not the one you’re thinking), Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves; the Nike origin story (is that a thing?), Air; and the hilarious, Joyride which accelerated nicely, but took out a few orange safety cones on the way to the finish line.

Thankfully this year was very firmly tipped in favour of the positives, with only 2 films falling below the 3-star level (although several such as the over-rated critical darling Tár, and the underwhelming slew of Marvel 2023 releases including The Marvels and Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3, did teeter precariously close to that edge.

Instead, it was another Marvel film, the over CGI’d and yet rather dull, Ant Man sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania that unfortunately became my first Marvel Cinematic Universe film to drop below the 3-star level.  Mostly because it felt pointless, hollow, and somewhat dull.  The sooner Marvel realises the solution to their box-office woes right now is less about super-hero fatigue, and more about the fact they’ve lost their human elements – and in doing so – their emotional core, the better.  The solution:  Ditch trying to go “bigger”, and bring the action back to Earth, in a setting we all find familiar, to make the action more personal.  In other words, bring in the moral quarry that the X-Men present.  There is no better time than now to tell the mutation story.  So they should hurry up and re-tell it the way only Marvel Studios can.

And finally, rounding out my list in last place was the incredibly oddly executed black comedy – Allelujah.  I say black comedy because that’s my best guess as to the genre this film was aiming for.  But unfortunately, not even the talented cast could save this film from delivering a storyline that has been done numerous times before (and better) on television, in a way that felt both shallow and frankly insulting, all at the same time. 

#movie review #film review #movie list #film #movie #2023 #best films #best films of 2023 #year in review #2023 year in review #2023 recap #2023 wrap up #movies of the year