#Welcome to October 2017!
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Birthday boy | CL16
pairing: Charles Leclerc x bestfriend!girlfriend!reader.
summary: charles's childhood bestfriend y/n's birthday post for him throughout the years and them slowly falling in love as the year passes by.
genre: SMAU
warnings: grammar mistakes i guess , incorrect timeline to match the storyline, google translated french, mention of death of Jules and Hérve (I'm really sorry)
author's note; I had so much fun making this I hope you guys like it and happy birthday charlie ❤️
16th october 2016
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc , arthur_leclerc, pascal.leclerc355 and 48,947 others
yourinstagram happy 19th birthday to my least favourite leclerc 💙
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charles_leclerc least?? LEAST?? Who's your favourite then???
⤷arthur_leclerc me, duh.
⤷lorenzotl sorry guys it's clearly me.
⤷yourinstagram it's non of you, it's tante pascal ❤️ (aunty)
⤷pascal.leclerc355 merci beau ❤️ (thank you beautiful)
⤷lorenzotl fair enough.
charles_leclerc merci idiot!!
⤷yourinstagram you're welcome or whatever 🙄
username who else is here in 2023?
⤷username me! I came to check y/n birthday post for Charles as always and I think I scrolled a bit too far.
⤷username me too! their comments 😭 my favourite childhood bestfriend to lovers
username their bestfriend era 😭
⤷username just because she's his girlfriend now that doesn't mean they are not bestfriends anymore.
username here before y/n posts charles birthday post for 2023!
username my favourite couple.
username who would've thought they would be the cutest couple in 2023.
16th october 2017
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc , lorenzotl, arthur_leclerc and 56,793 others
yourinstagram happy 20th birthday to my bestest friend❤️!! and to the f2 world champion!!! 🏆🎖️.
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charles_leclerc thank you for being my unpaid therapist for 13 years!
⤷yourinstagram you can pay me back by giving me paddock passes when you get into f1 🥰.
⤷charles_leclerc let me get into f1 first.
⤷yourinstagram you will, i believe in you.
⤷charles_leclerc i know you do, I won't let you down.
⤷yourinstagram I know you won't.
⤷username i think this was where they both started liking eachother romanticly.
⤷username nah charles said and i quote "i fell in love with her the moment I saw her" - Charles Leclerc in dts 2022.
arthur_leclerc F2 WORLDCHAMPION 🏆🏆!!
⤷yourinstagram world champion 🏆🏆!!!
username literal childhood bestfriend to lovers.
⤷username "she has been by my side from the very beginning, karting, f3, f2 and F1, I knew from the moment I saw her that if there's anyone I wanna spend my future with, it's her." -charles leclerc dts 2022
⤷username that's so sweet 😭😭
16th october 2018
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc , arthur_leclerc, pierregasly and 56,940 others
yourinstagram happy birthday mr. formula 1 driver, it's just the beginning of your F1 career, you have achieved a lot of things this season and it's just the beginning there's many more to come 💪🏻!!! and just in case, I believed in you, i believe in you and I will forever belive in you and one day you'll drive that red car ❤️🏎️, enjoy your day idiot.
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charles_leclerc thank you so much sol, and thank you for believing in me ❤️❤️!!
⤷yourinstagram always stupid.
arthur_leclerc Joyeux anniversaire mr.f1 driver (happy birthday)
⤷charles_leclerc merci frère 💙 ( thank you brother)
username the hand replacement in first pic 😭
username little did they knew....
username she believed in him and he didn't let her down and right now he is driving that red car!
16th october 2019
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc , sebastianvettel , maxverstappen1 and 2,748,927 others
yourinstagram joyeux anniversaire charles ❤️, and this one is very important because not only you made me, tante pascal, arthur and lorenzo proud but you also made Jules and oncle Hérve proud, not only you drove for ferrari, you won a race with them, in their home, in Monza, I'm so so so proud of you that even these words can't explain and not matter what happens I'll forever be proud of you! joyeux anniversaire il-predestinado ❤️ forza ferrari sempre 🏎️
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16th october 2020
charles_leclerc grazie mille sole ❤️❤️!! this means a lot to me, you mean a lot to me, that win, mama, papa, arthur, lorenzo, jules and ferrari all of you mean a lot a lot a lot to me, that win was for all of you, thank you so much ❤️!! forza ferrari sempre ❤️🏎️
⤷yourinstagram ofcourse Charlie and I mean every single word from the bottom of my heart ❤️
⤷arthur_leclerc that is way too much red heart but it's okay, joyeux anniversaire charles and yes you made all of us proud!!💙
⤷charles_leclerc merci arth 💙
pascal.leclerc355 Je t'aime ❤️ (love you)
⤷yourinstagram Je t'aime aussi ❤️ (love you too)
username this post will never not make me cry
username Jules and Hérve part 😭
username they both were meant to be.
username I'm not crying, my eyes are cosplaying waterfall.
pierregasly happy birthday charles 🎂
⤷charles_leclerc merci pierre.
sebastianvettel tell Charles that we're proud of him too.
⤷yourinstagram done seb.
⤷charles_leclerc thank you seb ❤️.
username thisss 😭😭🤌🏻🤌🏻
username this is literally the sweetest thing ever.
16th october 2020
yourinstagram
liked by charles_lelcerc , arthur_leclerc , landonorris and 2,495,793 others
yourinstagram happy 23rd birthday banana man 🎂❤️ quarantine would've been horrendous without you! can't wait to celebrate it with you!! I love you ❤️
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charles_leclerc meri amour ❤️ and quarantine would've been horrible without you too thanks for being by side through everything, i love you too ❤️.
⤷yourinstagram ❤️❤️
landonorris there are kids on this app.
⤷charles_leclerc yeah, like you.
⤷username lmfaooo 😭😭
username we literally went from "least favourite leclerc" to "amour" 😭🤌🏻
maxverstappen1 happy birthday charles!
⤷charles_leclerc thank you max!
username the banana outfit 😭😭
danielricciardo I think we should make that banana costume a paddock fashion
⤷charles_lelcerc no.
username my favourites.
16th october 2021
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc , carlossainz55, pierregasly and 3,749,730 others
yourinstagram happy 24th love ❤️ i love you so much.
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charles_leclerc merci merci merciii ❤️❤️
⤷yourinstagram 🎂🎂
charles_leclerc i love you too ❤️
⤷yourinstagram I know 🙄
⤷charles_leclerc good.
username cutieeess 😭😭
carlossainz55 happy birthday mate!!
⤷charles_leclerc thank you mate!!
arthur_leclerc happy 24th bro ❤️🎂!
⤷charles_leclerc thank you arth 💙
username my favourite couple.
username they're literally the best.
16th october 2022
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc, carlossainz55, maxverstappen1 an 3,480,264 others
yourinstagram 25!!!! Joyeux anniversaire mon amour🎂🎂!! This year has brought you so much! There were many missed opportunities but it's okay because we make our own opportunities and I know there's many more coming for you, I'm so proud of you!! ❤️❤️
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charles_leclerc thank you so much love, for being there for me at my worst and my best i love you so much ❤️
⤷yourinstagram I love you too ❤️❤️
landonorris you both are so gross.
⤷yourinstagram shut up kid, go away.
⤷landonorris rude.
⤷username lmao 😭
username the team fucked him up multiple time this year but it's okay we'll always be there for him, happy birthday charles 🎂!
liked by yourinstagram
carlossainz55 feliz cumpleaños charles 🏎️! (happy birthday)
⤷charles_leclerc gracias carlos!
⤷username spanish 🤌🏻🤌🏻
alex_albon happy birthday charles 🎂🎉!
⤷charles_leclerc merci albono.
username the last slide 😭
username happy birthday charles!!
16th october 2023
yourinstagram
liked by charles_leclerc, carlossainz55, arthur_leclerc and 5,639,239 others
yourinstagram Happy birthday to my best friend, my lover, my partner, my beautiful boyfriend and the person I trust the most in the world! Happy 26th love, I can't believe now that you're closer to 30 than you're to 20, how time have passed so quickly 😭 I usually would be scared for us to get older, but as each year passes, I'm just happy we have more time on this Earth together! I love you so much and hope this year brings you so much happiness, I love you - your no.1 support mwah ❤️
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charles_leclerc thank you much love, thank you for being there for me from the very beginning, thank you for believing in me and just thank you for existing in my life, I'm forever grateful to have you and i love you so so so much even words can't explain, thank you ❤️
⤷yourinstagram merci amour ❤️
⤷arthur_leclerc ew...you guys are cute I guess... And happy birthday big brother 🫂
⤷charles_leclerc merci little brother 🫂
carlossainz55 happy birthday lord perceval!!
⤷charles_leclerc thank you carlitos!!!
pierre_gasly happy birthday mate!!
⤷charles_leclerc merci pierre!
maxverstappen1 happy birthday charles 🎂
⤷charles_leclerc thank you champ 🏆.
username they literally grew up together!! 😭😭
username look at them 😭
username the first picture ahhhh!!!
username i love them your honour.
username mother and father.
username they're the best
username happy birthday charles!
username he really mean it when he said "I fell in love with her, in the moment I saw her"
⤷username ikr look the way he's looking at her in first pic 😭🫶🏻
username they're the reason I believe in love.
username happy birthday charles, enjoy your day at fullest!
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PS: i think I kind of rushed the ending but anyways I hope you guys like it and happy birthday charles, us tifosi's love you so much and infact every F1 fan loves you so much, enjoy your day at fullest! And we're forever proud of you. Happy Birthday ❤️🫶🏻🎂
#formula 1#charles leclerc#happy birthday charles#charles leclerc smau#charles leclerc x you#charles leclerc x reader#f1 driver x reader#formula 1 x reader#formula 1 fic#charles leclerc fic
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she chose him; vince dunn
summary: blake ellington a famous person in the formula one world and the fiancé of vince dunn.
blake ellington x vince dunn
Blake Ellington a name well known in the Formula one world. Having joined the sport in 2018 with Red Bull and coming second in the Drivers Championship and having won multiple races as a rookie the world knew she was going to become big in the sport. Her second season in 2019 she became the first ever female World Driver Champion. She shocked everyone by announcing her move to Mercedes and she only signed a one year contract she easily won the championship that year and She shocked the world again and announced her move to Ferrari Formula one team, in 2021 She came second in the Drivers Championship and Max Verstappen won his first Championship. In 2022 she became the first Ferrari World Driver Champion since 2006. Before deciding to continue her career with Mclaren Formula one team in 2023, quickly leading the standings within the first few races.
Blake was born in Ontario, Canada growing up next to the Dunn family, being two years younger than Vince made him very protective of his best friend, for years the two danced around their feelings for each other. Blake not wanting to mess anything up with their friendship thinking he would never feel the same, and Vince being so in love with her he thought she only saw him like a big brother.
Vince in 2017 got really drunk after a game with his teammates and ended up leaving a long voicemail for Blake, confessing all of his feelings for his best friend, not even knowing he sent the voicemail.
Blake woke up the next morning with a voicemail from Vince, who was confessing his love, luckily for them he was coming home the next day in which he was welcomed by a smack on the head and a kiss from her and from them the two have been together.
October 21, 2023
Vince has always noticed over the last few years when he went to Blake’s races that Lando has always been around and Vince never saw any problem with that as Blake has been very helpful with Lando since he joined formula one and has been good friend to Lando, no the problem Vince had was Lando’s looks that he sent his fiancé and the touches Lando always tried to pass off as platonic, of course Blake always just thought of Lando as a friend to in love with Vince to even think Lando could be in love with her.
Vince and Blake’s schedules have always been very hectic and a lot of times there schedules are never free at the same time, Blake is usally around the world in a different time zone and Vince is around the states, but that doesn’t mean they don’t try to always see each other as much as possible.
Vince took a flight right after his game that night right to Austin Texas, having two days off before he next game and wanting to be there for Blake when she clinches her fourth World Championship, he was exhausted after he got off the plane but it would be worth when he saw his fiancé. He got an uber to the hotel and went to the front desk telling his name and they gave him the key card to their room.
It was already midnight when he got into Austin and he knew Blake would try and stay up to see him but would end up falling asleep, he dragged his suitcase to the hotel room and quietly opened the door, he saw Blake peacefully sleeping in the bed in his hoodie, he smiled softly as his fiancé as dropped his suitcase sliding off his shoes and set his phone on the nightstand before sliding into the bed next to his beautiful fiancée.
“Vinny?” Blake mumbled her eyes fluttering open and she naturally cuddled up closer to him.
“Hello my darling, go back to sleep i’ll be here when you wake.” Vince softly cooed wrapping his arms around and pressing a soft kiss to the crown on her head.
“Mmk love you.” Blake mumbled quickly falling back to sleep.
“I love you too.” Vince slowly dozed off content with his girl in his arms.
October 22, 2023
Blake woke up feeling arms wrapped around and happily hummed as waking up with Vince meat to her is her favorite way to wake up. She gently leaned her chin on his chest tracing her fingers against his face, feeling the light stubble on her fingers, she leaned up pressing a kiss to his nose, and then his cheek and then his lips, Vince’s hand came up to the back of her head holding her to him as he kissed hee back.
Vince pulled back cupping her face smiling at her, “I missed you.” Vince pressed a soft kiss to her head.
“I missed you too.” Blake kissed his cheek, “But soon we won’t be apart as much.”
Blake had decided she didn’t want to keep racing after this year feeling she accomplished everything and more that she wanted to in Formula one and besides she kinda wants to just live her life and be able to enjoy life without Formula one. And she wants to plan her dream wedding and she wants to be able to have kids with a Vince one day.
“You know you don’t have to retire.” Vince wanted her to know she didn’t have to retire just to see him more.
“I want to, i am honestly really kinda done with racing.” Blake loved racing she always has but the passion and fire it once gave her has faded over the years.
“Okay it’s your decision.” Vince nodded kissing her.
“Come one we’ve got to get ready.” Blake pulled Vince out of bed and towards the bathroom where they got ready.
Blake was wearing a pair of jean shorts, a white flowy tank top and white cowgirl boots, she slipped her engagement ring onto her necklace, before looking over at Vince seeing him on his phone in black jeans and grey t-shirt with grey vans.
They got in car to drive them to the track, Vince got out first holding a hand for Blake, they walked hand and hand pass all the camera ignoring them as they talked to each other.
Lando who was sitting outside the Mclaren moterhome waiting for Blake scowled when he saw who was with her this weekend. Lando who has been in love with Blake for years now.
Oscar who was the Mclaren Reserve driver this year shook his head at Lando, wondering when Lando would understand Blake has always been in love with Vince nothing is going to change that.
Vince stayed with Blake as she warmed up and did all her Pre race routine and before she knew it she was zipping up her race suit and Vince was holding her blue helmet, as blue has always been her favorite color and blue reminds her of Vince. Vince gently slid her helmet on buckling the straps before pressing a gentle kiss on the helmet where her forehead is, “Go drive my love.”
Vince stood in the garage watching her get on the track and getting ready to race.
Before Vince knew he was cheering with the whole garage as Blake finished first winning the Championship for the fourth time, He rushed out with everything towards Blake.
Vince proudly smiled as watching Blake stand on top of her car with her hands in the air, Blake took off her helmet setting it into her car and hopped off her car and running straight to Vince, she pulled him into a passionate kiss hearing the thousands of clicks coming from all the cameras but she didn’t care.
Vince breathlessly chuckled as they pulled away from each other, “I’m so proud of you.” Vince whispered to his fiancé getting a beaming grin in return, he let her go to let her celebrate with her team.
Vince watched her walk last and onto the top step, Vince proudly smiled the whole time at his beautiful girl. Blake happily grinned on the podium looking down towards Vince the whole time not even noticing Lando trying to get her attention.
Blake lifted her trophy in to the air hearing all the cheers, she was covered in champagne by the end of the podium.
Blake nodded at the interview letting them question her after her win, they asked is she had anything to say as most were wondering if she was staying with Mclaren next year or joining another team, “Ah, i would like to thank all the teams that have welcomed me into their families, coming next year i will no longer be racing in Formula one, here is my official statement of my retirement.” Blake smiled simply ignoring the loud disappointment coming from the crowd or the millions of questions from the press walking away.
Vince saw Lando’s face drop and he couldn’t help but smirk seeing Lando realize Blake wouldn’t be around much anymore. Vince has always been jealous with Lando around because Lando never respected the fact Blake didn’t feel that way with him and Vince hated that Lando never acknowledged Blake was in a relationship. Vince trusted Blake but he never trusted Lando.
Blake walked to Vince wrapping an arm around his waist, “Ready to go home?” Blake smiled at Vince, Vince looked down at Blake who was smiling at him and knew whatever jealousy he felt because of Lando faded away as she always chose him.
“Let’s go home.” Vince pressed a kiss to the top of her head as they walked out together.
#vince dunn x reader#vince dunn#lando norris x reader#lando norris#oscar piastri#mclaren f1#formula one x reader#formula one x you#formula 1#red bull racing#mercedes#ferrari f1#charles leclerc x reader#max verstappen#oscar piastri x reader#seattle kraken
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October 30th
Body Worship, Papa Emeritus II x Catholic!Reader
Masterlist
Words: 4.1k.
Warnings: Body Worship (okay, turned out less body worship and more just worship in general but fuck it, I wanted to write it this way lmao); fingering; vaginal fingering; cunnilingus; marking; piv; vaginal sex; unprotected sex; praise kink; y’all this is soft soft, and I love it; religious symbolism; corruption kink; hair pulling; multiple orgasms;
Taglist: @sodoswitchimage @enchantedbunny @bitchywitchygardener @thew0man @sodomiser @the-did-i-ask @copias-sewer-rat @gehrmansbignaturals @deetz-ghuleh @onlyhereforghost @zombiesnips-blog @saturnhas82moons
Author's Note: This is a continuation of October 3rd, so if you haven’t read that, please go and do so before you read this! Thanks!
Recommended listening: Chase Atlantic with their self-titled 2017 album.
🔞 MDNI 🔞
Under the cloak of night, he crept through the ancient cobblestone streets of Rome, heart pounding in his chest like a drumbeat of impending doom. The Vatican’s towering walls loomed before him, a fortress of faith and secrets. Driven by a love forbidden by both church and society, he had come to breach the sanctum’s impenetrable defenses.
His leather-soled shoes barely made a sound as he approached the towering stone wall that guarded the Vatican’s secrets. In the moon’s pale glow, he could make out the shadows of security guards patrolling the perimeter. He crouched low, his heart racing with each passing second, and carefully assessed their movements.
Timing was everything. With the precision of a cat, he found his moment when two guards turned their backs, engaged in hushed conversation. In one swift, heart-pounding motion, he scaled the wall, fingers gripping the rough stone edges, and muscles straining with urgency. His breath held, he cleared the top, dropping silently to the other side, where the hallowed ground of Vatican City stretched out before him. It was almost as if he could feel the soles of his feet burning as it touched the hallowed ground, and forced him to move forward quickly.
Silent as a whisper, he navigated the maze of corridors of the Vatican’s residential quarters. The opulence and history that surrounded him seemed at odds with the clandestine nature of his mission. Portraits of pontiffs from centuries past stared down at him from gilded frames, their judgmental eyes seemingly aware of his transgressions.
He moved with caution, avoiding the gaze of any servants or clergy members who might cross his path, clutching onto his Grucifix pendant in his thick hand in an attempt to shield his true identity. His knowledge of the Vatican’s layout was limited, but the urgency of his desire propelled him forward.
Finally, he found himself outside a front door, familiar to him only by the number he’d been given. He knew this was where you resided, his forbidden lover, a cardinal of the church with all the responsibilities but none of the titles or accolades. With trembling hands, he reached for the doorknob, his heart pounding louder than the sacred hymns echoing through the Vatican’s hallowed halls.
The room was bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, casting dancing shadows on the richly adorned tapestries that lined the walls. He had finally found your apartments, and with a mixture of apprehension and longing, he pushed the door open, revealing the inner sanctum of the Pope’s daughter.
Inside, you sat at a writing desk, the dim light revealing the weariness etched into your features. Your modest dress hung off your frame just as pristine as you liked it. You looked up from your work, your eyes widening in shock and disbelief as they met his.
Time seemed to stand still as your gazes locked. Words failed you both, as the weight of your forbidden rendezvous hung heavy in the air. You stood from your seat slowly eyes fixed on the now cocky Secondo whose arms were outstretched as though he wanted you to run to him and welcome him into your home. Run to him you did, but no words of welcome were exchanged.
Your palms reached his shoulders and with a force, you pushed him, anger now taking hold of your body. “What are you doing here!?” You hissed, clearly livid by his intrusion. This was not how he wanted things to go. “My father will be here any minute! What do you think he’d do if he found a Cardinal of the Satanic Church in his daughter’s room?”
Secondo grinned, his black upper lip stretching into a lacivious smile. “Hopefully he’d understand my intensions and close the door behind him.”
Your hand connected with his cheek, a red mark forming instantly. Just as you were about to lay into him, you heard a familiar voice sounding from the entryway. “___?” Your father had arrived.
Secondo’s eyes widened, now understanding the gravity of the situation. Though the Catholic church was supposed to be a pinnacle of moral upstanding, it wasn’t uncommon for Popes to take drastic measures to protect their Papacy, even if it meant defying their God’s wishes. Thou shalt not murder - unless of course they pose a threat to your power and need to be eradicated. Secondo knew that given he was a footsoldier of the Devil, a Satanic rat sent to plague the people with “immorality”, your father would have no problem crucifying him on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.
“Hide!” You shout-whispered, your panic even greater than Secondo’s.
Secondo wasted no more time, diving into your bedroom and throwing himself under your bed, thankful that you didn’t use it as storage. He did so at just the right time, because while he couldn’t see your father from his position, he could hear him and he was right where Secondo had stood just thirty seconds prior.
“What are you doing in here?” Your father asked, his tone certainly suspicious. “Why didn’t you come when I called?”
“Sorry, father, I was doing some work. Correspondances.”
Your father hummed in acknowledgement. “There’s a meeting tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. We’re gathering officials to discuss how we’re going to remove the vermin.”
Secondo didn’t need to visit the Vatican often to know that the vermin your father was referring to was the Satanic Church. He rolled his eyes and contorted his face to childishly mimic and mock your father - though he knew no one could see him, it was a knee-jerk reaction and he thought it was funny.
You hesitated before you spoke. “Yes, father.”
“Something you want to say?”
There were, in fact, several things you wanted to say to your father and none of them were kind. After spending as much time as you did with Secondo, you had grown to understand that they weren’t the monsters you used to fear and that the way your father and other members of your church talked about them was terrifying. You wanted to yell at your father for not treating you as you deserved, as well. How you were always promoted within the church, but could never retain the title as “women didn’t hold powerful positions”. But he had no problem using you to benefit his politics and Papacy. But all your thoughts would fall on deaf ears, and so you settled on a, “No, father.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“See you tomorrow.”
As the Pope finally left the room, you sank back against the door you had closed behind him, your emotions in turmoil. You closed your eyes and took a deep breath, trying to collect yourself. That was the moment Secondo had been waiting for. He emerged from his hiding spot, his presence a comfort and a promise in the midst of your forbidden… whatever this was. The silence between you was palpable, broken only by the flickering candles and the distant echoes of Vatican life outside your apartment. He watched as you composed yourself, trying to calm yourself of the anger your father had left you with only to feel it flare up when you saw the Satanic Cardinal standing in your bedroom doorway.
“Why did you come here?” You quietly shouted at him, anger ever present in your voice. “You know what would happen to you if someone saw you - what would happen to me, too!”
You stood there, lecturing him about his behaviour, hands flailing about the room in your frustration and a small amount of hatred dancing in your eyes. As you unleashed your fury, your words cutting through the air like a storm, he couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the raw beauty of your anger. Your eyes blazed with intensity, your voice resonated with passion, and your fierce determination only made you more captivating. In that moment, your rage seemed to enhance your allure, and he found himself irresistibly drawn to you. Never had he seen a woman before so beautiful than you in that moment.
He thought back to when he first met you, how your anger and hatred towards him had fuelled his lust, and how it forced him to act against his better judgement to take your virginity on a desk that didn’t belong to him in the bowls of the Ministry.
Caught between the tumultuous emotions swirling around them, he took a step closer, unable to resist the magnetic pull of your presence. Your anger had laid bare the depth of your relationship, and he knew that your illicit connection was a flame that refused to be extinguished. As you continued to vent your frustrations, he reached out, gently taking your face into his hands and pressing his lips against yours, silencing you, a fervent promise that he would stand with you against all odds, consequences be damned.
You pushed against him at first, not because you didn’t want to kiss him, but because he had the nerve to silence you when you were talking. But the more you melted into his arms, the less resistance you put up, and allowed yourself to be caught by him as you began to fall from grace. Though your descent from righteousness started when you gave yourself to him, it was that kiss that solidified your feelings, and made you realise that however much you loved your God, you were sure you loved Secondo more.
Passions grew when he pressed you against your door, trapping you between him and the wood. His hands moved from your face, down your arms, and tickled at the bare skin until he finally settled at your hips. Your hands gripped at his cassock, holding on tightly and pulling him as close as he could possibly be to you, but even then that wasn’t close enough. His kisses ignited a fire in you that shouldn’t have been lit in the first place, and had you submitting and bending to his wishes willingly. When his fingers tightened on your hips and began lifting your dress, you let him. When his tongue begged for entrance to your mouth, you let it. When his hand found the gusset of your panties, you spread your legs to allow him easy access. When he dipped below the waistband, and stroked a tentative finger over your clit, you moaned into his mouth to encourage him to do it again.
In this moment, he wasn’t a servant of Satan. He was yours. Your ardent and eager slave, a genie sent to grant all of your wishes even if you didn’t know that he had them. His lips travelled South from yours, roaming over vast expanses of your body in search of a single destination. He moved to your jaw, your neck, your clothed dress, your stomach, hips, thighs. He dropped to his knees in front of you, his glove-covered fingers pulling your panties down with him as he knelt before you. You watched him hesitate for a moment, before wide eyes stared up at you as if to plead with you to grant him permission. His eyes were mismatched and popped against his Cardinal paints, a gentle yet emblazoned fire in his eyes as he waited for you. You couldn’t say no; you simply didn’t want to. You needed him probably more than he needed you. You nodded.
He gently lifted your leg in his hands and kissed it from ankle to knee. The higher up his lips went, the more passionately he kissed, and once more he played using his tongue. But now, in addition to kissing, he started sucking, leaving a trail of numerous dark brown hickeys on your thigh. No one would be able to see them here, but every time you caught a glimpse of your naked body, you would be reminded of them. Of him. Of what he did to you and the shame that was supposed to come with it. Shame that you refused to feel because that would imply you regretted letting him have his way with you. But even when you were worshipping your Lord, when you were in the confessional booth, you couldn’t bring yourself to regret your actions.
He immediately dove in and started licking and sucking at your clit. He forgot to take it easy and instead allowed himself to just take from you what he wanted because he was so desperate and needy for your taste. He was encouraged to continue his movements by the faint and low whimpers that escaped from your partially opened mouth.
“Yes! Just like that!” Due to the strong suction he applied, you whispered, ending your sentence with a particularly breathy moan.
One of your hands flew to his head, gripping onto his hat and throwing it to the side allowing you to rest your hand there, pushing his face into your heat. Your hips bucked in pleasure, riding his tongue and taking what you needed from him. “Secondo!” The hand that wasn’t resting on his head flew up to your mouth, covering your exceptionally desperate moans as you came on his tongue, silencing yourself as much as you could so the Clergy wouldn’t hear your pleasure from the other side of the door.
When your orgasm had completely subsided, Secondo released you from his suctioned hold, his chin glistening with your juices and a small grin on his face. That grin altered your brain chemistry and instilled a confidence in you that you didn’t know you had. You pulled him by his cassock back to his feet and crashed your lips against his, kissing him much harder than before. You could taste yourself in his mouth, your own essence moving onto your tastebuds and heightening your arousal. Your hand gripped onto his and pulled off the first glove, still with your lips attached to his, and once it was off his hand, you threw it somewhere in the room. The second glove met the same fate.
You pushed him away from you and pulled at your zipper, undoing the dress and letting it pool around your feet. Your bra was the next to go, falling to the floor and exposing your breasts to him. You stood completely bare in front of him, looking at his face as his eyes ran over your body, drinking in every part of you he could see and committing it to memory. You then took his hand and walked him to the bedroom.
Before today, all your secret meetings had taken place after or during official meetings between your churches, sneaking off while representatives met to discuss peace or something redundant that both sides would ignore. Your meetings had been limited, but over the course of that week had been frequent. Yet for each of your encounters together, Secondo had taken charge. Despite how much he degraded you, how disrespectful his words were, you had grown to trust him entirely. He would never push you passed your limits, or do something to deliberately hurt you that you hadn’t already asked for or expressed your wish to try. Though he always used his experience to heighten yours, you were very much the pace-setter.
This was never more evident by his willingness for you to push him down onto the bed once his cassock and underwear was on your bedroom floor. How he happily lay on his back and watched you crawl up his body, tongue laving over his hairy stomach and chest and driving you further upwards. In your hubris, as your mouths connected in a passionate kiss, you took his length into your hands and lined him up with your sopping entrance, preparing both of you for the stretch you were about to experience. You felt Secondo’s hands move to your hips, supporting you as you sunk down onto him, taking him inside you in one fell swoop. This motion had you both breaking the kiss, mouths falling open in a perfect ‘o’ and your eyebrows raising while his furrowed, darkening his eyes.
You sat up, taking him even further down, and when you bounced for the first time, you ripped a growl from his throat. His back arched, his fingers tightened their grip on your hips. “Fuck!” He gasped when you did it again.
Your inexperience made it difficult for you to find a rhythm, your hands falling to his stomach to support you but failing to give you both the pleasure you needed. Secondo changed your motions for you, instead of helping you bounce, he used his hands to move you back and forth. “No, grind on me, little lamb.” He told you. You found a rhythm pretty quickly. “Just like that. Good girl.”
This position had your clit rubbing against his pubic mound and his cock moving inside you perfectly. The slight upwards curvature of him meant that each time you moved back, he hit that sweet spot inside you and caused you to cry out.
The more you moved, the more confident you became in your ability and allowed you to relax and just feel him - feeling the way he felt inside you, hitting your walls with each movement, his hands gripping onto you tight enough to leave more marks for you to admire later. While your eyes were closed in pleasure, his were wide open, drinking in every inch of your body and admiring you from below. He got to see you in your full glory, breasts bouncing with each thrust, thighs jiggling, mouth agape in ecstasy. The placement of your bed in the room in contrast with the overhead light created an ethereal glow, almost giving you a perfect halo around your head.
An angel.
You were an angel - you were his angel. The once good, Catholic girl who he loathed to look at, who made his life Hell in all the wrong ways. The righteous child who preached to those who didn’t want it, who was so sure in her decisions being the right one, now warmly accepting her mortal enemy into her body without much of a second thought. Now giving into temptation and pleasuring herself, against the will of her Lord, with the very man her book warned her about. The daughter of God using the son of Lucifer to commit sin after sin within the walls of the most hallowed building. It was almost as if he could feel your soul tainting with each thrust of your hips, your purity disintegrating along with his willpower each time a moan fell from your lips.
“Please,” you whimpered, “talk to me. Like you normally would.”
Degrade you? Now? He couldn’t possibly. He couldn’t find it within himself to tear you apart when you looked as you did: red-faced, sweating, panting and gasping for air as you felt him all the way up in your stomach. “I can’t.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Why?” He didn’t answer at first, hoping you’d drop this crusade. But you were determined to get what you wanted and so, you stopped moving. “Why?”
“Little lamb, move.”
“Why?”
He lifted your hips a little more and tried to thrust into you, but you fought against him. “For fuck sake!” He sat up, his nose mere centimetres from yours, his eyes burning with anger and lust, pupils blown so far out the colour had disappeared entirely. His hand moved to the back of your head and pulled at the roots of your hair, lips brushing against your neck as he spoke, “Because you are divine. Move, please.” When he lay back down you picked the pace back up exactly how you did before you stopped, working towards your orgasm. His eyes remained on you the whole time. “You want me to tell you how sinful you are, hm? How much of a bad girl you are for defying your Lord?”
“Yes!”
“I won’t. I won’t use the same words that they do. Fucking shit! I can’t use those words when Lilith herself blessed you with ethereal beauty. When she placed her most beautiful creation on this Earth to walk amongst the mortals; art amongst the rats. I will not degrade one who was made to conquer men.”
You were breathless, both from the exertion and his words. “I c-conquered you?”
“Body, mind, soul,” he gripped hold of your hand and pulled it to his rest on chest, “and heart.” Your eyes met his in surprise, and your body shook as though electricity was running through it. “Conquered and enslaved. I will forever be yours, and worship you like the goddess you are.”
His large hand that had completely covered yours moved up your arm and began to rub both of his around your body, gripping onto pieces and stroking gently.
“Secondo!”
By the way your walls were fluttering around him, he knew you were almost at your peak. “Cum for me, little lamb. Bless me with your holy water.”
This orgasm was much more intense than your first, your body shaking and your eyes glazing over. Your back arched as it washed over you, your fingers digging into his arms and leaving half-moon prints in his skin. “Fuck!” You screamed softly, like your body had just been plunged into cold water.
“That’s it. That’s right. Give it to me.”
“Secondo! Oh my God!”
He pushed you off his cock and put you on the bed beside him, turning you to lie flat on your stomach. Your hips were lifted just enough for a pillow to sit below you, then you felt him mount you from behind, draping his entire body over you. His lips found their way to your ear as his cock lined up with your hole once more. “Your God doesn’t deserve you.” He told you as he entered you again, pressing you against the mattress. His hand found yours and interlocked his fingers with yours as he began to thrust into you, moving at a similar pace to when he usually fucked you. Hard, fast, dirty. But this time there was something new, something tender in the way he touched you, the way his other hand rested atop your hip.
“I will forever get on my knees for you,” he told you between grunts, “and worship between these hallowed walls.” He kissed your shoulder blades. “I will thank you for all that you give me. I am yours.”
“I’m yours, Secondo.” You turned your head to capture his lips and give him a deep kiss, his tongue sliding into your mouth as his cock continued to slide in and out of your tight, wet heat.
He surrounded you, every inch of his body running against yours and trapping you between him and the mattress in a way you’d never felt before - making you feel safe. His words told you that you were loved, despite the violent speed they ran through your head as he occupied every inch of your mind. His scent, woody and musky, filled your nose. His grunts and growls swallowed by your mouth in your unbroken, needy kiss. He loved you. He’d risen to catch you as you’d fallen for him. In that moment, nothing else mattered. God and Satan be damned. They’d ruled your lives too much, you both deserved this.
“Cum for me.” You whispered into his lips. “Give it to me, give me everything.”
“Where can I cum?”
“Inside me. I wanna feel you inside me.”
“Fucking hell!”
His hips snapped faster and more erratically until eventually he pushed himself as far as he could inside you, painting your walls with his cum. His eyes were tightly shut and a growl escaped him. He could feel his heart in his throat. His fingers tightened around yours when he came, gripping onto you and never wanting to let go.
As he came down from his high, he peppered your skin with kisses, black Cardinal paints very much wiped away at this point and his body exhausted from the exertion. He stayed inside you, softening with each passing second but not wanting to leave the warmth of your body just yet. You didn’t want him to, either. But it had to happen eventually. He rolled off you, but kept his hand on your hip as he did and rolled you with him, wrapping you up in his capable arms and holding you close.
The later into the night it got, he knew he’d have to leave the Vatican and wait to see you for who knew how long, and that thought hurt him more than he could possibly. He did everything he could to commit you to memory; how you looked, felt, smelled. He needed something to see him through until the next time you managed to see him. And so, he held you close, doing his best to fight off sleep.
That was until your voice broke the silence. “How would the Ministry feel if I left with you tonight?”
Previous Day ⛧ Next Day
#mel writes#kinktober#kinktober 2023#ghost kinktober#ghostober#the band ghost#ghost bc#ghost#ghost band#ghost the band#band ghost#ghost band fanfic#ghost band fanfiction#ghost fandom#the band ghost fanfiction#papa emeritus II#papa emeritus ii x reader#papa emeritus ii x reader smut#papa emeritus ii smut#secondo#secondo x reader#secondo x reader smut#secondo smut#ghost fan fiction#ghost fanfiction
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COMPILATION OF EVERY ANIMAL JAM CLASSIC INTRO
(thank you to @toneinaflat for finding the first two videos!)
0. Beta Testing
i don't know what introduction (if any) was used during beta testing! (beta testing happened from ~march 2010 (closed beta) to september 8, 2010). i think it's probably the introduction shown in #1, but if you have any more info, please let me know!
1. Liza in Jamaa Township (original)
youtube
video posted october 1, 2011
started: either beta testing (march 2010-early september 2010) or the official release of the game on september 9, 2010
ended: some time between october 18, 2012 and december 14, 2012 (likely closer to december 14)
this is the original intro to animal jam! it shows liza around the mira statue in jamaa township, where she explains some background lore of jamaa (about mira especially), and some in game functions: moving, changing animal colors, getting achievements, and checking your gems. it's the earliest version of the lore, where "alphas" are called "shamans".
2. 3d Liza in Jamaa Township (update)
youtube
video posted december 14, 2012
started: some time between october 18, 2012 and december 14, 2012 (likely closer to december 14)
ended: february 6, 2014
this is an edited version of the original intro. it uses a new, jarringly 3d looking, model for liza, and has an updated introduction to the lore. liza's beginning explanation of mira is replaced with the "return of the alphas" cutscene also shown in the blue heron intro, and the "shamans" were renamed to "alphas". otherwise, this intro is identical to the previous
3. The Blue Heron
youtube
video posted february 6, 2014
started: february 6, 2014 (jamaa journal announcing it released on this date)
ended: january 23, 2015
this is the first major change in introduction! the player spawns in on a ship named the blue heron, that is modeled after mira. liza is piloting the ship, and gives you an introduction to jamaa. she introduces you to some in game functions: moving, changing color, checking your gems, and buying from shops. she also gives the option to "Learn about Jamaa's history", via watching the "return of the alphas" cutscene. at the end, the boat pulls in front of jamaa township.
fun fact: this was the only introduction that you could access without making a new account! when this introduction was released, they added an option in the settings to do this tutorial! (shown in the video, i actually couldn't find a video of this tutorial that started from the create an account screen). this option was removed an unknown amount of time later
4. Peck Intro
youtube
video posted january 23, 2015
started: january 23, 2015
ended: never 👍 (this is the current intro)
this intro changes the alpha greeting you from liza to peck. the player spawns into a long, forest-y room, and is greeted by peck. she takes you over a bridge to see a bunch of randomly generated animals that are spamming emotes and bubble chat phrases. she introduces you to some in game features: moving, changing color, using emotes, and checking your gems.
fun fact: from november 2016 to march 30, 2017, completing this tutorial would send you to the welcome party, an edited version of the jam session party that has other new jammers whose accounts were just created (if there were any online then....). this party had a singular clothing shop, the same "Clothing Shop" (literally its name) as the one on the blue heron. the end of peck's dialog in the main room is slightly changed to reference this party
BONUS: WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE TUTORIAL?:
after almost all of these intros, you spawn in jamaa township.
at first, completing the original intro would just spawn you in the middle of jamaa township and open up the jamaa journal and daily spin
but then, sometime before october 18, 2012*, the ending was somewhat changed. now it showed the avatar walking from the mira statue area to the middle of the town, and then the player was given this screen:
* why this date specifically? because this video of someone being mean to liza during the intro shows this new ending, and was posted on that date
however, i am almost certain that this was actually implemented on march 1, 2012; because that was the date that the loading screens were changed to their new (and current) format (date gotten from the animal jam wiki)
this end screen stayed for a while, but was minorly changed for the blue heron intro, and stayed that way for the first few years of the peck intro— "explore jamaa" was changed to "go on an adventure":
also, in the blue heron intro you're seen running up from the bottom of jamaa township (from the body of water where the boat dropped you off!). this is kept for the peck intro, although that direction doesn't make as much sense from that one.
when the welcome party existed from november 2016 to march 2017, the peck intro would lead to that party, but then the party had a path leading to jamaa township, in this same fashion. (video of this)
however, once the welcome party left on march 30, 2017, it seems this screen did too. because now, after the tutorial, the player automatically spawns in their den, where peck's den tutorial starts... guess our choice is made for us! (video of this). this date also marked the change in the items that a new jammer has from the get-go: originally new jammers got a sturdy table and a blue rug, but past 3/30/2017, new jammers get a rug, table, small window, chair, couch, lamp, and houseplant
speaking of den tutorials, a brief note:
ever since the peck intro, peck has always done the den tutorial. but i did read somewhere in my research that liza did the den tutorial beforehand— but i haven't found any pictures or videos on it, so you'll just have to take my word on that (if any of you have any pictures or videos of the liza den tutorial, or even a post talking about it, please send it to me!)
this has been information on every animal jam intro, thanks for reading 👍
#hi i let the adhd win 👍#hope this can serve as a good resource! lmk if you have any corrections or extra info#animal jam#jamblr#my posts#animal jam classic#ajc#introduction timeline#animal jam introductions#animal jam tutorials#intros#Youtube
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Grief still knows my number
Tags: Character study style writing, heavily implied Lestappen, Symbolism, Hurt/comfort, Happy Ending, Very focused on dealing with Grief, Charles Leclerc centered, Charles Leclerc Analysis throughout the years, All the radios and quotes that people use to describe Charles are accurate
Word Count: 2.8k
This is also on AO3 by roianamustang (me).
Hardships and life go hand in hand. Walk side by side. Fall into step with each other. Bleed together. Sigh deeply. Rinse and repeat.
Time and healing go hand in hand. Presumably anyways, according to everyone. While the years have allowed the blood to gradually crystalize, Charles Leclerc doesn't think the wound will ever stop dripping on his pristine wooden floor.
Success, achievements, wins. All these things fly with glory. Trigger adrenaline. The blood pumps, moves. Colors seem brighter, voices seem simultaneously louder and quieter, blending in with the murmur of the wind, of the cheers. The heart doesn't stop, doesn't take a break. It keeps on going and going and going. If any tiredness is supposed to be felt, it seems non-existent at that moment. The trophy is cool, blending with the heat of his hands. The light reflects on the champagne bottle. The crowd roars, so does he.
Man has never felt more godly than when he's soaked in red with the cape of history and legacy flowing down his back. Never felt more untouchable than when he's deemed irreplaceable. A hero from a legend coming straight to life.
The highs reach the moon.
So the lows reach the Earth's core. Bright, yet hot enough to incinerate, evaporate.
People die and the world doesn't bat an eye. Life keeps moving and time keeps flowing. But its core weeps molten metal, scalding. Dripping furiously, wondering, screaming. It seems so loud, yet no one notices. Why don’t they see it? Why don’t they understand?
Every June, his phone rings. Echoes in the walls of his expensive apartment. No matter how much he pays, it soaks itself in the crevices between the tiles. Makes sure it follows him. Hangs heavy in his pockets, in his rooms.
The heart has four chambers, each one of Charles’ overflowing.
Every July, Charles hangs his heart, lets it air out in the Monaco air, near the sea. It never fully dries. It drips and drips and drips.
In 2014, F3 welcomed him with open arms, the sun shined bright and his career seemed to be soaring. The future clear.
On October 4th 2014, the present halted. It stopped. His heart dropped, yet it deafened his ears. Hands shaking and eyes unmoving, he heard the gasp of his maman next to him. From the corner of his eye he could see his papa get up and call someone in a fervor. He felt hands on his face and the panicked, yet soft voice of his mother. Everything blurred.
Turned dark.
Blank.
He doesn’t remember much afterwards.
On July 17th 2015, Charles Leclerc’s phone rang at 4:03 AM. Jules Bianchi called him on a Wednesday’s waking hour for the last time. The sea was bursting in his room through every opening, every window.
Jules was finally resting.
Charles couldn't wake up from this nightmare.
His heart swelled. The rush of liquid in its chambers sudden. Wrong. The first thing to fill up were the ventricles, allowing them to hang heavy at the bottom. Slowly over the years, with every drip, every leak, the atriums expanded with the never ending grief.
2017 was his year of change. F2 had kicked off with a grand slam and he kept racking up the points. One after the other, after a long and difficult time, Charles’ future seemed set. His road to F1 perfected already.
He wanted more. He couldn't wait to have it. He'd jump, leep, crouch and slide to achieve what he wanted, what he deserved.
He'd honor Jules, he'd make Papa proud.
He’d bleed red. Get submerged in. Breathe till the bubbles escaped his lungs to reach for the sky.
The high of Monaco still lingered on his skin. In the month in between he'd been counting down the days. Training, sleeping, hoping.
20 days left.
10 days left.
9 days, then 8.
7, then 6.
5, then 4.
Halt.
Stop.
Just stop.
Not again. It's too much.
No.
Not again. Not now. Why now?
No.
The 21st of June’s sun peaked its rays on the cloudy sky, Hervé Leclerc’s eyes slipped shut and Charles Leclerc met his breaking point.
The quiet before the storm, then a boom was heard.
A sudden calm and then a supernova.
His phone rang on the 25th of June.
‘He’d lost his father earlier in the week. We’re talking literally 48 hours later, he was in the car. He then went out, fell to last place, fought his way through and won the race. This was a kid who’d just lost his father and he was a kid at the time, a teenager. To have that kind of mental strength, I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Charles Leclerc won the 2017 F2 Baku Grand Prix.
Charles and Hervé dreamed a lot together. He remembers the race nights, the Grand Prix, the atmosphere, the wins. The drivers and their celebrations, their fireproofs and livery. The success, the wins, the championships, the legacy, the weight.
They remembered the red.
They looked up to the red.
They dreamed of it.
Laid down their lives for a chance to look at it in the eye.
So he lied.
His father on his deathbed, sick and weak, still held that spark in his last words. That smile, that used to be his comfort, now lingered with a looming feeling of dread. Of knowing what's happening.
So he lied.
And take him back in that moment right now, he would still lie.
With his own reassuring smile, Charles Leclerc looked at his dying father and told him Scuderia Ferrari signed him into F1. The horse pranced and jumped and bled Charles Leclerc, as much as his own family had bled for it.
So he lied.
And his father died happy.
His heart filled to the brim. Charles could almost sympathize with the weight of the horse on his back.
Soon enough it'd be his.
Soon enough he would be the horse.
Fury seeped from every pore, screeched in his head, escaped his lungs.
Everything he wanted was taken too early.
Not this.
He wouldn't allow this.
‘It’s very unusual for Ferrari to choose a young driver. But after a decade with no championship success, perhaps trying something a little bit different is going to reap its rewards.’
A year into F1, it became reality.
The wind howled, his heart soared. It dumped its contents on the ground. Blood red leaking down, slowly spilling over each step, each stair. He should be jumping in joy, flying through the sky. Climbing.
So why?
Why was it heavy?
He looked up hoping to see the Sun, catching glimpses of it in between the clouds.
He plunged.
Eyes wide open. Hand holding onto a hoof. Hearing the echoes of its neigh.
His phone rang.
The sound made him pick up his head. Hazy, confused, he looked at the called ID.
Papa <3
Charles Leclerc was drowning in molten gold.
He didn’t swim.
He declined.
‘What Charles is doing is a continuation of Jules’ legacy. Charles has a mission. A mission to do what Jules should have done.’
It was never meant to be his seat.
At least not like this.
He doesn’t know, if on that fateful day in Suzuka, rain hadn't been falling, a crash hadn’t happened, a life wasn’t lost, would he still be here? In this seat?
Who was bleeding more red? Him, his father or Jules?
Can dead men bleed?
Are his achievements his own?
At the end of the day, the past has happened. Its consequences reaped.
Charles can’t revive the dead, but he can honor them.
In his second year in F1, Charles Leclerc became a Ferrari driver.
In his first year in Ferrari, Charles’ teammate was a 4 time world champion.
In his second year in F1 and first in Ferrari, Charles Leclerc won in Spa.
Anthoine Hubert lost his life a few hours before. A crash and a boom. A win and a trophy.
Death is imminent. It favors none and follows all.
And yet, Charles Leclerc at the age of 22, feels its shadow linger near. Never close enough to him, no.
It lingers right there, on the podium, in the trophy, in his anthem, in his legacy.
It gazes, but never touches.
Some days he wished it did.
After all, no one can truly best the perfection of the dead.
‘You can see the celebrations starting. He’s got one more corner, the famous Parabolica to go. Mercedes threw everything at him today. Charles Leclerc has coped brilliantly!
He won in Spa! He wins in Monza!
Charles Leclerc is the winner of the 2019 Italian Grand Prix!’
Monza is another type of beast. It’s godly. It paves the way for anyone, but it spreads the ocean for scarlet.
The confetti falls gently. Lewis Hamilton bathes him in champagne.
He points at the sky. He points at his suit. He looks above.
He sees the Sun.
He shakes his head, laughs in disbelief. Wipes his eyes.
Charles Leclerc wins.
‘On this Sunday afternoon, the Tifosis celebrate, what an epic race—’
Charles got so preoccupied with red he forgot about blue. Dark, mysterious, never ending blue.
Always there. Never far.
This cloud of rain that followed him around, dripping on the track.
Drip, drip, drip.
A puddle was created.
He pushed blue.
Disqualified the both of them.
He doesn’t regret anything. If he’s not winning, no one is.
Austria 2019 was a blur of purple. A blur of hate.
His blood was pumping. Pupils dilating. Eyebrows furrowed.
The PR training didn't matter in that moment.
Charles Leclerc doesn’t just lose.
He opened Instagram’s purple icon, went to his followings.
Typed in ‘Max Verstappen’.
Pressed the button, made it turn blue again.
2020 comes and goes. The quarantine unfamiliar. Unknown. More people gain shadows, and there’s an inkling at the back of his mind that his might finally touch him.
But there’s no time.
He can’t wait and waste his time with things like fear.
Every win, every overtake is not his alone.
So Charles holds his breath and anticipates.
The sky sees. The clouds look back. His phone charges.
He’ll admit, while he doesn’t think he will ever have a teammate which he wouldn't deem his rival, Sebastian Vettel would always be a special case. Would always hold a special place in his pool of a heart.
So it hurt.
It wasn’t Seb’s fault at all. For the first time in his life, Charles Leclerc felt something else towards the prancing horse.
Admiration and hopes were temporarily hidden behind confusion and hurt.
This time the shadow didn’t touch or tap or even come closer.
So why was he alone again?
Why was he leaving?
Please don’t leave!
Don’t leave.
A ring cut through the silence.
He declined.
Charles knows hurt and sadness, anxiety and fear. But that’s too many things to account for, he can't be writing them all in his notebook. Seb wouldn't.
So he writes a piece of paper with ink, doesn't let it dry, crumbles it and puts it in a little red box. A label lays on it.
Rage.
2021 happened, that’s for sure.
Shit car, shit luck, shit strategy, shit Charles.
Oh, and a new teammate.
A win stolen.
But it’s ok. It’s fine.
Patience is something he has learned the hard way, honed it to be his comrade.
Silenced, his phone’s screen flashed at 5:58 AM.
He ignored.
2022 is here and so is Charles.
Bahrain. A dream on the precipice of flowing over the rim of the glass.
He won.
He won!
The season had started off on a good note.
In a good car.
It was now on his shoulders to bear the expectations. Not just of others and his own, but also the expectations of the dead and their wishes.
Hope is a scary, scary thing.
It runs along with failure and when you least expect it, it catches its arm while it plummets in the abyss.
Drags it along, one drag at a time.
Saudi Arabia was a close call, but the clouds overtook him.
That’s ok.
He’s just starting.
He’s got what it takes. He knows he does.
So, for the hundredth time, why?
Goddamnit, why?
Every time. Every time he lets himself want.
This happens.
Charles Leclerc wins in Australia.
Charles Leclerc loses in Imola.
Loses in Miami.
Loses in Spain.
Loses in Monaco.
Loses and loses and loses.
But he’s always been special to Austria.
And Austria seems like it wants to be special to him.
He’s always got a knack for the raging bull. Specifically the blue one.
He crosses the finish line and Charles Leclerc smiles. Eyes squinting in the face of the screams. Cheeks pulling upwards. He runs to that podium.
Charles Leclerc grins at the cloud, at the sky.
The cloud pours and Charles Leclerc laughs.
Turns around, shakes his head and looks at it in the eye. His one constant. Grief can't touch the fastest after all.
There is hope.
It was blatantly obvious after a few more races, that Ferrari had no clear vision on how to improve its car.
So he lost.
He had the championship cup in his hands, and it slipped through its fingers. Rolling away on a slope.
So he lost.
He got second, but second was never what he aimed for.
This time, when his phone rang, Charles Leclerc anticipated it.
A thunk was heard. A crack was felt.
Whether it was his phone screen or his heart, Charles didn’t know.
He broke.
He doesn’t know if it will ever get better or heal. Everyone tells him scars heal with time, yet his is infected.
He can’t do this. Can’t hold this weight.
Why does he still call?
Why?
Grief still knows my number, and I don’t have the heart to block it.
2023 rolled around and there was nothing he could do about it.
There was nothing Ferrari could do about the absolute hindrance of a car that they had created.
A tractor would’ve at least given him more consistency.
It was out of his hands, but maybe he never had it in the first place.
His heart had been hanging out to dry for a while, yet the humidity kept it aching.
So for the first time in his career, summer break rolled around and Charles Leclerc breathed.
The shadow has retreated.
So with that in mind, you could see how it was a pleasant surprise.
Pole positions, podiums. No wins yet, but the Sun was shining, the Earth rotating and its core waking up from its slumber with slow, but assured movements.
Mattia Binotto out.
Fred Vasseur is in.
Finally for the first time in years, Charles felt the warm embrace of a calm figure in his life, who understood his struggles.
Finally for the first time in years, Charles Leclerc was first. Not in the championship standings, in his own.
The dead may be honored, but they are gone. They can be remembered.
The living are here. They can’t be put to wait in line, life doesn’t wait for people to catch up.
His blood is rushing, his lungs expanding, eyelids blinking, thoughts running.
He’s alive. He’s here. He’s important.
Charles Leclerc races in Las Vegas for himself. He fights for himself. He forgives for himself.
Max races after him to apologize but Charles has already moved on. He doesn’t hold grudges anymore.
He wraps his arm around the cloud and reassures. He smiles, eyes sparkling in the Vegas lights. Blue meets green.
He remembers and looks at the sky. His heart returned in his chest, no longer in the hands of mother nature’s fickle decisions.
Charles Leclerc makes his own decisions.
After Abu Dhabi, his phone rings again.
In the first time in 6 years, he answers.
It’s quiet for a while.
The number you are trying to contact is inactive. Please try again.
At least he tried.
A ping was heard. A message arrived.
Papa <3
impr0ud
He remembers the adrenaline, the confusion. He froze for a moment, but recovered quickly.
He replies.
Papa?
Are you there?
Unseen, unanswered.
And yet, he’s content.
He sleeps and dreams, and legacies don’t plague him.
He sleeps and he wakes up the next day, calls his maman.
“Hey maman. How’ve you been?”
Charles Leclerc is familiar with Grief’s number, as much as he’s familiar with his own.
2023 ends. But he’s just getting started.
The winter break came and went in the blink of an eye.
Contract extensions, announcement dates, livery showcasings and more.
Air enters his lungs and he lets himself feel.
5 wins this year, that’s the goal for now.
A small step backwards for a giant leap forwards.
Charles Leclerc is ready, has always been.
Rage in one hand and pride in the other, he steps forwards.
Blue on his side, as was meant to be. Blue meets green, understanding in between.
The crown on his head high and bright, and well deserved. His accomplishments and wins.
The cape down his back is theirs. He’ll let them have this.
After all, the championship will be his.
‘Charles Leclerc. Prince of Ferrari. King of Monza. Legacy of Monaco. What a star of the future! Celebrating wildly in the present!’
-End-
Please note that no matter how much I am writing here, it is all artistic speculation of what Charles himself has decided to show the world. Do not forget that these drivers are real people.
All of the italicized sentences that start and end with ' ' are actual words said for Charles, either by Netflix, Will Buxton, Crofty or other documentaries.
The phone ringing from a person that has already passed away, has happened to me and my mom. So it directly inspired me.
Time for some clarification of my analysis:
The wound is grief showing its head at the very start of this.
The cape is Ferrari obviously.
The Earth's core and its molten metal is always Charles himself.
Every correlation with a phone/phone call is Herve's, except the specific Jules one.
Every time the heart is mentioned it mostly means Jules grief.
The ventricles are the two lower chambers of the heart, which in this case filled up first, which is why it weighed him down.
The atriums are the two upper chambers, which are slowly overflowing.
Herve died exactly 4 days before his F2 Baku race, that is why the time stops at 4.
Red is Ferrari.
He holds onto the hoof and hear a neigh. This is Ferrari's prancing horse.
The Sun is hope, the unachievable.
The clouds and the color blue are always Max Verstappen, including the blue raging bull.
The sky are both Jules and Herve.
The shadow is always death in every mention.
Purple is the conflict and the brief pushing from Max on Austria. It shows an intriguing way of which even when they are fighting they are always in sync.
The notebook is the habit he picked up from Sebastian.
His one constant in life that will never leave is Max Verstappen. He calls him the fastest despite not knowing how the results of the 2023 season.
The message for anyone temporarily confused says: I'm proud. Its more of a sign that Charles has finally started racing for himself, has let go of some of the self-afflicted responsibility to hold the dead's wishes.
Every blue colored things is Max Verstappen.
Every red colored thing is the intense feeling that Ferrari gives him, every win makes him soar, but every loss digs him deep.
The title of this work is inspired by someone on social media showing their own experience of old phone numbers calling.
No one can best the perfection of the dead is a quote from Aya, in Bungou Stray Dogs season 5, which I thought was exactly what this fic needed.
Thank you so much for reading! It would mean a lot if I managed to get some reposts, comments or likes!
If you like this, I have written more stories that can be found on my Formula 1 masterlist. Including: Lestappen, Landoscar with more to come. If it manages to spark your interest, please go support those as well!
#lestappen#charles leclerc#max verstappen#formula 1#f1#sebastian vettel#charles leclerc x max verstappen#max verstappen x charles leclerc#dealing with grief#tw grief#symbolism#metaphors#charles leclerc x reader#charles leclerc x you#max verstappen x reader#max verstappen x you#ferrari#fuck ferrari#sf23 retired#2023 f1 season#2024 f1 season#jules bianchi#hervé leclerc#f1 analysis#f1 imagine#f1 fanfic#f1 x reader#f1 fic
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Have you heard the news?
Lupin III is diving into the world of live action once again, with Jigen Daisuke ‐ a spin-off film releasing “worldwide” on October 13th, 2023, exclusively on Amazon Prime Video!
Tetsuji Tamayama, who previously portrayed the character in the 2014 released feature film, will be returning to the role of Jigen.
Yoshimasa Akamatsu (BD ~Akechi Tantei Jimusho, Corpse Party: Book of Shadows) has produced the script for the film, and Hajime Hashimoto (The Detective Is in the Bar franchise, AIBOU: Tokyo Detective Duo, Shimauma, Signal) is directing.
In preparation for his reprising of the role, Tamayama states in an interview with Natalie that he has watched the Lupin the IIIRD spin-off film Jigen’s Gravestone, and hopes to bring this cooler, more mature version of the character to television screens come October.
Details on the plot are currently scarce - however, the Natalie article mentions that it involves Jigen searching Japan for the world’s greatest gunsmith, after his trusty combat magnum is in need of some TLC (and said gunsmith just happens to run a rather curious watch shop)…
More details on the film are to be revealed closer to its release date. For now, you can check out the films first trailer embedded below, and its announcement over at website Natalie.
youtube
After Lupin ZERO wrapping up at the end of last year, and VS. Cat’s Eye releasing in January, a live action Jigen spin-off is not where I expected TMS to go next with the Lupin franchise. It is, however, in my opinion, a welcome diversion from the norm.
I would be lying if I did not first meet the announcement with some scepticism, though, mostly due to the series’ less than stellar track record of live action adaptations (the amazing 2017 Inspector Zenigata spin-off drama aside). Taking a moment to think back, I quickly realised that while the live action film directed by Ryuhei Kitamura did not win the hearts of fans back in 2014, it did do one thing right - the casting.
Shun Oguri as Lupin III and Tadanobu Asano as Inspector Zenigata were big gets for the film, and both appeared to take their appearance throughout it seriously. Meisa Kuroki played a gorgeous, cunning Fujiko, with Go Ayano trying his best to bring the stoic samurai Goemon to life. It was Tetsuji Tamayama, however, that best looked the part. Fans on social media were swooning over his Jigen as soon as the character portraits were revealed, with some saying he was made for the role.
Despite issues with pacing and its overall narrative, all of the main cast members represented their anime / manga counterparts well, and if there is one positive to take away from that film, it would be their performances.
This gives me hope for Jigen Daisuke - with fresh writing staff and a keen new director to the franchise on board, with an actor we already know can do the character justice, both Amazon and TMS may be on to something special, here. Now slightly older and more experienced, I have full confidence Tamayama will exceed that of his already good performance as Jigen from 2014.
I’m looking forward to finding out how this comes together. Keep an eye out for a full review of the film come October, which I will aim to post up on lupincentral.com a few days after its release.
#lupin iii#lupin the 3rd#lupin the third#anime#lupin#manga#lupin the iii#lupin 3rd#lupin sansei#Youtube
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... and welcome back to them ♥️
October 2023, Los Angeles
April 2023, NYC
February 2019, London
February 2017, Berlin
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Another example for SheWon
By Jennifer Sieland December 4, 2023
Two trans-identified males dominated a women’s category at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships yesterday, leading many women’s rights advocates to condemn the tournament for allowing men to self-identify into the women’s divisions.
The Illinois State Cyclocross Championships was held at Montrose Beach on December 3, representing the final challenge in the eight-race Chicago CycloCross Cup. As with other events in the Cup, the event comprised of over one dozen different competitions for men, women, and junior athletes.
But two trans-identified males topped the podium in the Women’s Singlespeed category, taking home medals set aside for female racers. Tessa Johnson and Evelyn Williamson placed first and second, respectively, in the competition, leaving space for only one biological woman – Kristin Chalmers – on the podium.
Johnson also participated in the Women’s Category 1/2 race, placing third and winning $100 in prize money.
According to the Chicago CrossCup’s website, the competition prides itself on “first and foremost fostering a positive & supportive community built around competitive cyclocross racing,” continuing: “That means welcoming and challenging everyone who wants to contribute to the series and make it better in that regard.”
In its official FAQ on the topic of transgender cyclists, the Cup notes that “discrimination or harassment of any kind on the basis of race, color, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, or any other stupid idea someone comes up with to belittle another racer will not be tolerated at [our] events and may result in disqualification.”
On X (formerly Twitter), news of Johnson and Williamson’s victories was shared by user @i_heart_bikes, an anonymous female cyclist who frequently calls out males self-identifying as “women” in the sport. In response, many women’s rights advocates and sports enthusiasts condemned the competition for allowing the men to participate.
“Well done @usacycling you’ve proved you don’t care about women & you’re happy to put men in female categories. What a joke,” one user replied.
“Cycling has been my refuge since I was a little girl. This makes me sick to my stomach and full of rage,” another said in response to the news.
One woman’s rights advocate even went so far as to edit Johnson and Williamson out of the podium photo, placing female racer Kristin Chalmers onto the top spot.
This is not the first time that Johnson and Williamson dominated the podium at the Chicago CycloCross Cup. In October, the two also took gold and silver in the Women’s Singlespeed, similarly leaving the only female on the podium with bronze. Johnson also took first place in the Women’s Category 1/2 race, earning him $150 in prize money.
Both Johnson and Williamson have been racing in women’s cycling for years, with Williamson collecting 18 first place titles in races across the country since 2017.
In September, Reduxx reported that Johnson and Williamson competed as a team in two separate women’s races in Illinois, taking first place in both of them. During one of the competitions, Williamson and Johnson competed under the team name “TS-ESTRODOLLS,” a reference to cross-sex hormones.
Johnson and Williamson celebrated their initial first place win on August 27 after their victory at the xXx Racing-Athletic Relay Cross in Chicago. The two men surpassed nine pairs of women for first place.
Just days later on August 31, Johnson and Williamson beat out two teams of women at the Ed Rudolph Velodrome during the State Championship in Madison.
Williamson is reportedly in a polyamorous relationship with Austin Killips, another trans-identified male cyclist who has become notorious for his frequent participation in women’s competitions. Killips has similarly taken several first place wins in women’s categories and has forced at least one woman out of the sport after targeting her with physical aggression during a race.
#usa#Illinois#Women’s sports are for women#Illinois State Cyclocross Championships#These dudes could have competed in other categories#Congratulations to Kristin Chalmers
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Rose Gold
Book: The Royal Romance
Pairing: Hana Lee x Kiara Theron
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4, 304 words
Content Warning: Mention of Gun Violence, Character Injury.
Summary: Six months after King Liam and Queen Esther's wedding, Hana and Kiara take their next big step as a couple.
A/N: Set in the P&Tverse. Since P&T spans the timelines of Books 2 and 3 (the Engagement Tour and the Unity Tour + Liam & Esther's wedding), most of this fic takes place after the series is meant to end, and there are references to things that happen there that aren't canon.
The first half of the fic, however, takes place just before the group reunites with the MC and Drake at the safe house (TRR3, Ch 1).
I've borrowed a few elements from Hana's own engagement to the MC in the books: the rose gold ring, the coin throwing ritual at the foundation and the proposal at the lake.
Tagging @hanaleeappreciationweek for Day 5: Romance, @choicesficwriterscreations for FoTW and LGBTQ Archive, and @choicesmaychallenge24 for Hera: Marriage
October 14th, 2017. Half past Midnight.
Foolishness. Sheer foolishness.
The voice inwardly chiding her right now sounded suspiciously like her mother; for that reason alone she was desperate to ignore it.
But what else would one call an impulse to jump out of a car that could take her in complete secrecy to the city's best safe house, only to race to Argyros and Sons - Cordonia's premier jewellery store - for a gift she wasn't even sure would be accepted...a promise she wasn't even sure its intended recipient would want?
"Looking for something specific, Your Grace?"
Surprised, Hana looked up from the case displaying an assortment of glittering diamond rings. The eyes that met hers in a speculative survey were ocean-blue, marked by wizened crow's feet. It was at the tip of her tongue to correct him (Lady Hana, sir!) when she spotted the Twitter feed on the iPhone in his hand.
News sure does travel fast around the Capitol!
But no sooner had that thought left her head, than the riptide of memories began to flood her.
The Homecoming Ball. Hors d'oeuvres. Speeches. Fireworks. Announcements. Please welcome Esther DuPont, Duchess of Valtoria, and Hana Lee, Duchess of Krysanthe. Cheers. Expectant Gazes. And then...
Darkness. Gunshots. The acrid taste of fear.
Hana bit back a grimace. How long would memories of tonight haunt her? How long would it be before she heard people address her by her new title, without memories of the violence that followed?
She held her handbag with a sudden death-grip, forcing herself to breathe. To push forth happier, sweeter memories.
Unbidden, comes the one memory that had managed to keep her sane this night.
Her laughter.
Sharp. Raucous. Loud. Jarring against the tinkling sounds of cutlery and glassware, as far away as one could get from the soft, windchime quality of delicate laughter, that every female courtier was taught to emulate.
She thought she'd known love until that moment, fool that she was. Thought that no matter who she dated, no matter how distant she'd be from those memories of the social season - Esther would somehow remain her first and forever love.
Until she had taken that one fateful look at Kiara's wildly joyous face, heard her cackle - the kind one would never normally dare to do at court - and realized with piercing clarity that if she were to compare her feelings for these two women, they would be nowhere close.
Her love for Esther had all the subdued warmth of a crackling bonfire. But these newfound feelings for Kiara?? They made her feel like she was plunging herself headfirst into a raging volcano.
Something within Hana had trembled violently in that moment; some premonition that felt searing in its finality.
Kiara was the one. She was all Hana had ever wanted, without knowing it; all that Hana would ever want, from now till eternity. The one in whose arms she would want to stir awake, every day for the rest of her life.
Kiara Thorne, or no one. Kiara Thorne, or lifelong loneliness.
The phrase rang in her ears like a verdict: final, eternal, unchangeable.
When Hana opened her eyes, she found to her consternation that they were blurry from unshed tears. Quickly blinking them away, she noted dully how different the rings on the display now looked.
Certainly she must have moved to another part of the store without knowing. Where before she'd seen glittering, brilliant, ostentatious diamonds, set in white gold and platinum...now she saw stones nestled in the embrace of a warmer, almost blush-toned metal.
Rose gold.
The metal that was all the rage in her mother's birthplace Bethulia, for its delicate shimmer and soft pink hue. Mama had told her often enough in her childhood that their barony's love for it went far beyond just the colour...that her mother - Hana's Nanimaa - loved it for being such a perfect union of gold, silver and copper...
A whisper of a memory of Nanimaa, the one time she'd ever seen her. At a fountain, glowing from the glimmer of abandoned coins.
It took her less than a minute to find exactly what she didn't know she'd been looking for. Had you asked the jeweller about her, he would have told you that the newly appointed Duchess of Krysanthe had chosen her ring with the greatest confidence. The confidence of a woman who had probably wooed her beloved, confessed her love, basked in the joy of being loved back.
A confidence Hana didn't feel.
When she returned to the limo, she was greeted with the sight of a pensive Liam, rubbing the frown between his brows absently with his fingers. A telltale muscle jumped inside his jaw.
"Any news?" Hana whispered, almost dreading the answer.
"Yes," his voice was grainy from exhaustion and guilt. "Three people injured. Bastien, Esther's press secretary, and...."
"And?" Her voice had gone small and high, that a fearful child's.
"And Lady Kiara. She was..."
Hana blinked once, then blinked again. Liam's mouth was moving, yet no sound seemed to come out. All that she could hear was a low, keening noise, like a muffled siren...or like the moan of a woman in terrible pain.
Kiara. Kiara. Kiara.
--
May 12th, 2018. Afternoon.
"How far from the palace are you taking us?" Kiara asks, her voice alight with laughter.
"Not even outside its gates," Hana replies, grinning. Kiara looks down at their fingers laced together, palms almost touching.
They've been together for just six months, and still somehow, the lines on Hana's palm feel as familiar to her now as her own. Without even looking she can conjure up the memory of the heartline on Hana's left palm at a moment's notice - long and deep, starting from her index finger, suggesting she would be a wonderful lover with a very fruitful love experience - and her marriage line, stretching from one end of her palm all the way to her ring finger...suggesting friendly in-laws.
(The thought of luring Hana to marry her under the premise of palmistry is sounding more and more tempting by the minute)
Involuntarily - perhaps to stop herself from checking her trouser pockets once again for that tiny box she took from her vault today - Kiara's hand tightens around Hana's.
Can she dare to hope that fortunate beloved could be her?
She steals a glance in Hana's direction, noting with alarm that her fingers are trembling in Kiara's hand.
"We're here," she says, her voice suddenly small and quivering against the gurgle of water in the courtyard fountain. It's been a palace fixture for several decades now - ornate and imposing - a legacy from King Liam's formidable grandmother, the late Queen Mother Cassandra. According to Kiara's father, the woman had married into the family as a young princess from Monterisso, and for her foreignness alone was expected to be crushed by the strictures of the palace and the expectations of her people - yet in a decade's time she had somehow became the most imposing figure there! There was very little in the palace that didn't have her stamp of approval first.
As they come closer, Kiara sees the one thing Queen Mother Cassandra may not have predicted when this fountain was built - the glimmer of coins, all gleaming in the sunlight like they were minted just yesterday.
Her own smile begins to tremble on her lips, even as she notices Hana swallow a telltale nervous lump in her throat. For the first time since they have gotten here, Kiara notices that Hana's other hand is fisted around something. Something that could very likely be the same coins they just saw in the fountain.
She takes that hand gently in hers, knowing now how nervous Hana must feel; knowing that if they complete the ancient lover's ritual that she so hoped to do today, there will be no going back. She uncoils Hana's fisted hand, finger by quivering finger, watching her face as her breathing quickens. She smiles again - a smile more aimed at reassurance than amusement.
"Are we going to do what I think we're going to do today, ma moité?"
For several seconds, Hana doesn't respond. The three coins in her hand (Heavy. Ornate. Engraved with apples. Ancient) are proof enough. The answer, when it finally comes - almost like it is torn out of her throat for fear that Kiara's feelings may not match her own - is barely audible.
"Only if this is what you want too."
Gold. Silver. Copper. Tossed in one after the other in an ancient lover's ritual - one that Kiara knows only because she'd learned about it from her mother, who'd had friends in Bethulia where this ritual was most popular. Maman and Baba themselves had done it on a trip there when she was a teenager, still squirming over her parents' ability to still act like swoony romantics in their (and this would be said well out of their earshot) "fucking forties!".
Wiser now, Kiara feels the same anticipatory tingles that her parents must have felt back then.
This ritual wasn't for the faint of heart in ancient days. You did it only when you were certain. When you looked at your lover and knew that a life without them wasn't a life worth living.
Well, Kiara muses as she watches a hundred emotions flit in a second over Hana's face, I think I've known that long enough. I've known ever since I saw you fight your father in Shanghai, even when you knew it would cost you everything. Since that one moment, I've been yours.
Planting a tender kiss on the corner of Hana's mouth, she takes the coins. "Ready when you are," she whispers softly.
Hana swallows again, her eyes glistening and moist and relieved all at once. In a silk pouch that dangles from her wrist, she fishes for three coins identical to the ones on Kiara's palm. She breathes deep once, twice, three times.
Kiara links their free hands, grips them tight as they turn their backs to the fountain. Hana looks up, a question in her eyes.
"For friendship!" Kiara says, tossing the copper coin into the fountain. Faint memories of something that almost feels like another lifetime glimmer and fade in her memory. Applewood, sipping water, giggling over their favourite fruits and flowers. The Beaumont Bash. Watching from the sidelines as Hana did the verbel equivalent of ripping out Olivia Nevrakis' spine at the Coronation Ball.
Hana takes out the silver coin, and waits for Kiara to holds up hers'. "For love?"
Engagement tour. Fearing Hana would hate her in Fydelia, but never understanding why that should suddenly matter. Standing with her against a bridge in Paris, each mourning their lost loves.
Finally learning what love really was, when she opened her eyes and truly saw Hana for the very first time.
Kiara nods, touching her forehead to Hana's. "Par amour." Their coins splash in unison in the water.
Her girlfriend lets out a watery giggle as she takes out the final coin, glittering and golden on her palm. Her voice breaks a little as she tosses it behind her. "For...bel- belonging".
Kiara's own sigh releases in a shudder as she lets the final pledge sink in.
There were very few places in the world that truly felt like home to Hana. Not the place where she was born, not the barony that could have been her legacy. It took her months to even find comfort or security in her future in Cordonia - much less belonging.
Without a moment's thought, and without releasing the golden coin in her hand, she cups Hana's face and kisses her. Hana shudders and buries her hands in Kiara's hair, her lips trembling against the unspoken promises in her lover's.
"For belonging," Kiara says it like it is a vow. "And I don't care how long it takes - I give my word right now. I'll never let you feel like you have lost your home. Ever." Another kiss - this time on Hana's temple. "I hope you will always find one. In me."
Hana's smile is warm and dreamlike, her eyes closed as if to savour this moment, her fingers playing with Kiara's curls. She barely notices the sound of Kiara's gold coin landing in the fountain. "I love you, Kiki."
Kiara chuckles at her teasing use of the nickname, brushing Hana's nose with her own. "Together forever?"
Their hands, now free, close around each other. "Together forever."
It's quiet now, except for the sound of collard doves, the rustle of leaves and branches in a light breeze, and their breathing. The air smells of wildflowers, citrus and a subtle floral scent that Kiara knows to be the perfume Hana has been using for months. Orange Blossom. She grins as she remembers. It's a scent Hana has often loved to wear, just for her.
Hana's thumb feathers lightly over the ring finger on Kiara's left hand, almost as if to commit the bare space on it to her memory. Kiara doesn't miss that gaze - bright-eyed and soaked in longing - and how it mirrors a need she has felt ever since they landed at the Capitol last week.
Kiara swallows. She had wanted to take things slow, she really did. Woo her, bathe her in every luxury possible, make this trip even more unforgettable than Hana could ever imagine, and then spring this surprise on her - like a kirsch-soaked cherry topping on an already very tempting Black Forest Cake.
But...but that gaze of Hana's has always been Kiara's undoing.
Simply, she says, "come with me."
Puzzled, Hana looks up. "Where?"
"To Lake Sôse," Kiara whispers, wasting not one more moment and grabbing her hand. Hana lets out a nervous, slightly incredulous laugh as she allows herself to be pulled along.
Kiara isn't sure why she's suddenly rushing this. When she thinks of the elaborate plans she'd been constructing all week - chocolate-dipped strawberries and champagne at one of the Capital's premier restaurants, flowers everywhere, a proposal at the hedge maze with a picture together by the swing to commemorate the occasion - she wants to laugh. She isn't even sure why Lake Sôse was the first place she'd thought of just now.
She takes a deep breath, and grounds herself. Uncommonly impulsive though it may be, her decision has been made. There is even a part of her that seems to prefer it to happen this way!Kiara has never been one for last minute changes of plan...but ever since she fell in love with Hana, she's learned to expect - and enjoy - the unexpected.
It's only when she sees the shine in Hana's eyes that she realises why her mind took the turn it did.
Lake Sôse. The one place Hana Lee has always chosen for solace and comfort. The one place in the Capitol where she felt the most at home. It had been here, Hana told Kiara once, that King Liam had told her his plans to appoint her Duchess of Krysanthe. It was here, hours later, that she'd shared that momentous news with her best friend Esther; where Esther - herself aglow with love and a newfound purpose - hugged Hana and told her that the world would now be Hana's oyster.
She'd brought Kiara to this lake for the first time the day after King Liam and Queen Esther's wedding, following a night when the queen herself had been kidnapped, and Hana had joined the king's entourage to rescue her.
A night that Kiara - in constant fear of losing her forever - had recklessly kissed Hana. In public. In front of the entire court. Braving gazes of teasing approval from Kiara's parents, and near-murderous glares from Hana's. The night everyone outside of Hana's friend circle finally realized the two were a couple.
Kiara remembers the day after that like it was yesterday. Something must have changed fundamentally in Hana that night, because the fear seemed to have gone, and with it the compulsive need for hiding and subterfuge and constantly looking over her shoulder. It was as if Hana had faced what she'd thought was the worst thing that could happen to her, and realized she really was strong enough to face that fear.
You're my safe place among people, Hana told her that morning, her fingers lacing through Kiara's. The one I feel most at home with. I want to bring my safe space..to the place in Cordonia I've always felt safest in.
It is afternoon, and the yellow crocuses behind them exude a warm, buttery golden glow in the sunlight. Hana lets out a breathless, incredulous laugh. "You seem like a woman in a very huge rush today, Lady Thorne."
Kiara's own laughter in response is high-pitched and halting. She tries to hide the moistness of her palms as she makes a blind grab for the small velvet box in her purse. "Believe me, this wasn't the way I'd planned this to go at all."
Intrigued, Hana's eyes follow Kiara's hands, and her eyes widen as she recognises the familiar deep blue velvet, the embossed silver lettering on top. Argyros and Sons.
"Is that --"
"Yes," Kiara says, clearing her throat, "I'd been planning this. All week. It was going to be romantic, elaborate, I was going to sweep you off your feet. Just like I'd planned to ask you out seven months ago."
Hana lets out a watery giggle. We all know how that turned out, don't we, qīn'ài de? Kiara can almost hear her saying.
But the humour stops almost immediately when she looks at the box again, and suddenly Hana seems too still, too shocked...too far off from how Kiara hoped she would react.
Kiara lets out a deep breath, then lets the words gush out of her. She's too scared to stop, too terrified to think - the fear that she may be doing too much too soon is so overwhelming that she knows if she stops she won't be able to bring herself to do this for a long, long time to come. The humiliation would be too strong.
"I'm not one for impulse. I never have been. I've never felt comfortable with anything if I didn't have a plan for it first."
Kiara gives herself a moment to half-smile at the irony of it all. Approaching Hana Lee with a smile and a bottle of water, after that first eventful bite of a Cordonian Ruby was definitely an impulse. So were half the things she had done with Hana since. So will many, many, many of the things they may wind up doing together, if (if!) this leap of faith works in her favour.
She looks up at Hana to see if she's laughing at the memory too. She isn't. In fact, Kiara isn't even sure Hana's reacting yet to what she's saying. Perfectly still, her eyes never moving from the box, so wide that they would go bloodshot if they were widened any further. Kiara swallows, and finds that her throat feels suddenly, inexplicably sore.
"I could never tell what it was about you that changed all that. I still don't. All I know is that...around you, Hana, I feel so much more brave. To let go of the need to plan and organize. To not be too afraid of what will follow - whether it goes in my favour or not. I find myself not just willing, but eager, to trust my gut."
Kiara's eyes search every inch of Hana's face as she opens the box, revealing the ring inside. It's a gorgeous piece, all platinum and sparkling diamonds. The smaller stones form a cluster around a massive one, leading the viewer to believe they are seeing a glittering snowflake, fallen fresh from the heavens.
Kiara had known the minute she saw the ring that it was the one. That it would remind them of the first time they confessed their love. Of their very first date, of the first time they shared Hana's cup of homemade hot chocolate. Of why the two of them will always love winters.
Hana's fingers move, trembling, towards her mouth, her face suddenly flushed. She remembers it too.
"Hana Lee," A frisson of fear slithers down Kiara's spine. "Will you marry me?"
When Hana finally opens her mouth, several seconds later, Kiara has to strain to hear her voice.
"I - I -" her eyes dart away from Kiara as if she's just remembered something important - her beautiful bronzed skin suddenly a little drained of colour. The next few words, she says in a "I.... I'll be back. Give me five minutes? I...just remembered something."
She leaves without waiting for an answer.
Kiara sinks into the grass, covering her face in her hands.
What have I just done?
--
All the way back from her room in the palace to the lake, the pouch hanging from her wrist feeling only a slight bit heavier, Hana cannot stop mentally kicking herself.
"You fool! You imbecile! Bèn dàn!!" Hana curses herself as she speeds up her sprint into a run, "What happened to your tongue? What kind of reaction was that?? What will Kiara think?"
Her mind now sprints miles ahead of her feet, racing in panicked ferocity over the possibilities.
With any luck, Kiara could still be waiting - puzzled and perhaps a little worried. Or she could be actively panicking, the way she does (on very rare occasions) when a plan goes terribly wrong.
Or...or...
Hana holds the silk pouch from her wrist in a deathlike grip as she speeds up towards Lake Sôse. Or.
The thought of that lovely, open space completely devoid of Kiara, of that beguiling combination of rose and jasmine emanating from her favourite Dior J'adore perfume, makes Hana's stomach drop to her feet.
It isn't until she sees that that heartbreakingly familiar figure of Kiara's, hunched over the grass, that Hana allows herself to breathe.
Kiara is there. Shoulders bent, head buried in her hands, almost stumbling as she tries to get up when she sees Hana.
Morose. Defeated. But still there.
Without another thought, Hana rushes into Kiara's arms, almost knocking her off her feet.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Hana whispers against her hair. "I wasn't trying to run away. I really had to get something. For you."
Kiara pulls back to look into her eyes, and when she does Hana's heart twists at the sight of unshed tears. "I thought I'd scared you off."
Hana's own laughter quavers, pitched high in disbelief. "I've just pledged myself to you this afternoon, body and soul, at the palace fountain. This -" she lifts Kiara's left hand to her chest, her thumb caressing the empty space on her beloved's ring finger " - just makes it so much more real."
Kiara's arms wrap around her, pulling Hana flush to her. Hana can feel Kiara shake as she giggles in response. "...you mean to say that I'd have saved myself so much stress if I'd just remembered those coins."
"Yes, qīn'ài de, a thousand times yes." She cups Kiara's face, pressing their foreheads together. "Place that ring where it belongs, Kiki. I can't wait to see it on my finger."
Hana holds her tight until Kiara's breathing becomes slower, calmer. She raises her newly-adorned hand for Kiara to see - marvelling at how the ring really mimics the glow of a snow crystal in the winter sun.
When they part, shyly, reluctantly, Hana begins to fiddle with the silk pouch.
"Here's what I'd gone to bring."
Kiara's eyes brighten at the sight of the box in her hand; a wave of warmth floods through Hana in anticipation of her response. Kiara gasps the minute she opens the box, revealing a delicate, intricately carved rose gold ring, flanked by small diamonds on all four corners, cradling a bigger one at the center.
"Rose gold," Kiara murmurs in wonder.
"Yes," Hana brushes her fingers over Kiara's knuckles. She'd told her once, long ago, how revered that metal was in her home province Bethulia. How Bethulian jewellers and goldsmiths and young women swore by the rosy hue it exuded. How it was a perfect amalgamation of three precious metals - all highly valued in the province. How tied it was to their folktales and bridal rituals.
"Copper..silver...gold." Kiara's tears glitter like diamonds before she lets them fall. "For friendship. For love. For belonging."
Hana smiles, her hand still stroking Kiara's cheek. "You remembered."
Kiara rolls her still-moist eyes, trying hard not to sniff - it would take out all the humour in this situation. "It's hard to forget a ritual we'd performed just ten minutes ago, ma moité."
"I'd planned to give you this ring a week from now," Hana says, shaking her head at her own impulsiveness as the ring she'd chosen on a fanciful whim so long ago, now finds its home. "I've been holding onto it for far too long."
Kiara caresses the stone on her own finger lovingly, admiring the way the rose gold glows on her skin. When she speaks, her voice is breathless in anticipation. "How long?"
For several minutes, Hana's only response is to pull Kiara back in her arms again. Her hand slides slowly, almost with a tinge of regret, down the dip of Kiara's waist on her left side. The wound that had once served as a constant, searing reminder of so much (of her vulnerability, of her inability to run from pain, of what she'd once considered her failures), has healed in more ways than one - only a faded scar that Hana never fails to kiss, now remains.
"For seven months," Hana's voice shakes at the memory, "Since the night after Homecoming Ball."
With a choked sob, Kiara enfolds Hana into her arms, almost as if she'd want to absorb her into every cell of her body. Fervently, reverently, she presses her lips all over Hana's face - her eyelids, her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, all the little-known, barely-noticed parts of her. It takes her a while - perhaps too long, in Hana's opinion - for Kiara's lips to meet hers, but she welcomes the sweet torture of waiting.
"Mon cœur," Kiara says between kisses, "ma raison de vivre."
When they part, the two women keep each other's hands interlinked, one left hand over the other. Neither of them will remember how long they stay at the lake; only that they never want this joy, this warm afterglow of seeing their dreams come true...to end.
The empty spaces on their ring fingers, over which they'd each stolen such secret, hungry glances today, now bear the mark of their lovers. Now bear the most tangible signs of their love, their memories, their promises, their commitment.
Together forever.
--
Translation:
Ma moité - a romantic endearment in French, meaning "my other half"
Qīn'ài de - Mandarin Chinese for "my dear"/"darling"
Bèn dàn - Mandarin Chinese cuss word that means "stupid egg!"
Mon cœur - French endearment, meaning "my heart"
Ma raison de vivre - French for "my reason to live"
--
References for Hana and Kiara's engagement rings:
Kiara:
(Source: Maxine Jewellery)
Hana:
(Source: This article on engagement rings, but the actual pic itself came from Blue Rose Photography)
#hana lee#the royal romance#the royal heir#the royal finale#hanaleeappreciationweek#HLAW#HLAW 2024#HLAW Day 5#HLAW Day 5: Romance#series: petals and thornes#lizzybeth1986#content: fanfic
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chapter thirty-nine — saving a horse
➝ elisabeth and toto celebrate another title, in texan style.
➝ word count: 2,5k
➝ warnings: smut, alcohol consumption, elisabeth being hornier than horner
➝ author’s note: race week in texas deserves a flashback to the day elisabeth decided to save a horse. i hope they haven't given up on this madness here.
OCTOBER, 2017
Sitting in the jet seat, Elisabeth didn't have the courage to take off the sunglasses she had been wearing since she left the hotel suite on her way to the airport. Her head was throbbing as well as her body. Opening the bottle of water she had in her hand, she took a small sip, trying to ward off the queasiness that was plaguing her.
— Are you okay, Mauslein? — Niki asked, her blue eyes staring at her over the newspaper he was reading. Elisabeth just nodded.
— Was the party good yesterday? — he questioned.
She nodded again, which made Niki smirk.
— Have you had too much to drink?
— No — Elisabeth muttered.
— Are you sure?
She remained silent.
She had had too much to drink.
But was there any other way to celebrate an achievement like the one on Sunday?
As soon as Lewis crossed the finish line the previous afternoon, the team's garage exploded. Those were the points that were missing for the team to win another constructor's championship. The fourth title in a row. Another result of long days at the office, sleepless nights, and endless hours in the private jet. Elisabeth's excitement made her not hesitate to pull Toto, who was beside her, greeting Niki, into a completely passionate kiss. Feeling his hands wrap around her waist, she was sure his lips tasted different from usual.
A taste of mission accomplished.
After the podium ceremony, photos in front of the garage, and a quicker-than-usual debrief, Elisabeth and Toto returned to the hotel amidst jokes, laughter, and kisses that tasted like champagne, since both had been soaked by the mechanics during the celebration in front of the press.
Once in the suite, the two of them got into the shower together, with him insisting on washing her hair with a gentleness that could melt any determination she had not to go to bed with him in that exact second. However, Elisabeth bravely resisted her own desire. They would have all the time in the world later.
After getting dressed, the two went down to the hotel lobby, where the driver hired by them was already waiting to take them to the place chosen for the team celebration, in a themed bar that the team already knew from other celebrations, called Pete's Dueling Piano Bar. They got out of the car hand in hand, crossing the street quickly towards the establishment.
As soon as the two entered the bar, the atmosphere was filled with applause and whistles, a welcome worthy of four-time world champions. Looking at Toto, Elisabeth felt something warm rise inside her chest. The way the top of his nose crinkled, his dimples became more pronounced, and his eyes sparkled made her feel even more accomplished with the day's achievement.
As a witness to all the effort, dedication, and love he put into the team, she knew exactly what Toto gave up every week in pursuit of results. And she admired him deeply. So deeply that she felt she didn't express it often enough. So deeply that she couldn't resist the urge to squeeze his hand, drawing his attention.
— Any problem? — he asked, bringing his face close to hers.
— No. I just wanted to say that I'm proud of you.
Toto smiled widely.
— I'm proud of you too, Liesl — he replied — Very proud.
Elisabeth would have kissed him passionately if not for the arrival of Andy, who had approached them holding a beer and inviting them to his table. Being led by Toto through the apparent crowd inside the bar, they were stopped and greeted several times before arriving at a table crammed into the corner of the bar.
Around it, drinking beer and laughing, were James, Andrew and Aldo, as well as Bono and Tony. They seemed to discuss something related to what had happened during the celebration, still on the circuit. Spotting the two arriving with Andy, the men rose to give warm hugs and congratulations to the two.
— Would you like a beer, Toto?
— Oh, sure — he replied, with a smile — Would you like it too, baby?
— Yes, I do.
Elisabeth had always prided herself on being low-key when it came to alcohol. However, she didn't know if the cheerful environment, the excitement of having won another title, or even the veiled encouragement from her colleagues made her lose count of how much she had drunk after the third long neck, followed by the gin and tonic that Valtteri had convinced her to try.
However, what made Elisabeth realize she was a little more uninhibited than usual was that, after an upside-down shot of tequila next to Angela, she thought it would be a good idea to go on stage to sing 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman’ along with the physiotherapist, complete with a cowboy hat that had been handed over to her by one of the mechanics and some sensual hip movements, her eyes fixed on the only person she wanted to want her.
Toto was watching her from a distance, seeming to enjoy that uninhibited version of her. With the baby blue shirt he was wearing with one more button opened, his skin glistened slightly with sweat, the result of the crowded environment and the alcohol that warmed his body and flushed his cheeks.
He was a real temptation. And Elisabeth was willing to sin that night.
As she descended from the stage to applause, she walked up to the team principal with a determined look under her cowboy hat. Biting his bottom lip, Toto watched her with desire shining in his eyes. As she stopped in front of him, Elisabeth felt a large hand slide around her waist to her lower back, which made her skin heat even more.
— I enjoyed your show, cowgirl — he murmured, a mischievous grin on his face.
— Did you like it?
— A lot. You were incredibly hot up there — Toto said, before his hand slid to her ass, burying his face in Elisabeth's neck to place a kiss on her slightly sweaty skin. Feeling his lips brushing just below her earlobe made her feel almost feverish, as well as tingling below her navel. Something in the back of her mind told her she should have taken the chance in the shower and had sex with him, however much the logistics required them to get a little creative.
— I want you — Elisabeth whispered.
Toto looked up at her, their noses brushing.
— Now?
— Yeah.
— Elisabeth — he murmured, in a tone that mixed scolding and desire.
— Please — she begged, her hands sliding over his shoulders to Toto's face, her thumbs brushing against his skin, which was also warm — I want you so much, my love.
Seeming to have regained the ability to breathe, he took Elisabeth's hand and led her through the crowd toward the back of the bar. Testing a handle, he opened one door that was squeezed there and pulled her in with little delicacy, which made her giggle. Turning on the light, she realized they were in a small bathroom with a sink and toilet crammed in there.
After closing the door and turning the key in the lock, Toto turned to her and walked closer, wrapping his arms around her body. The mixture of alcohol and his musky scent was intoxicating, not to say addictive, to Elisabeth.
She needed that man like she needed air to breathe.
The two didn't exchange a word before they started kissing each other voraciously and a little awkwardly. There were traces of lemon in his mouth, which mixed with the taste of the drink and something that was uniquely his. Clinging to Toto's neck, Elisabeth let herself be carried away by his soft lips, completely inebriated.
Feeling her back hit the tiled bathroom wall, it took her a while to realize what he was doing. Releasing her waist, Toto's hands slipped down towards the hem of the dress she was wearing. Then, placing kisses along her neck and sternum, he knelt down in front of her, his fingers pulling the panties she was wearing awkwardly, almost hastily, until the garment was wrapped around her shins. He didn't have to say anything for Elisabeth to kick the fabric carelessly into a corner, while Toto lifted the dress and, with no ceremony, brought his face to the point between her legs.
— Fuck — he said through clenched teeth as his tongue explored her pussy delicately, almost as if he were tasting how turned on she was. And just that simple exploration could make her melt like ice cream under the Ibiza summer sun.
With one hand sliding over his head, Elisabeth gripped the strands of his hair tightly, moans escaping her lips and echoing through the cubicle. Her shyness was long gone, leaving only the extroverted and completely mischievous version of her behind. And if that version of her could bring that version of Toto out, she was willing to drink that way more often. Opening her eyes with difficulty, Elisabeth found his eyes fixed on hers; the pupils dilated as one of his hands gripped her hip tightly, the knuckles white.
— Toto — she gasped in response to the flick of his tongue around her clit, a kind of tease. However, just when Elisabeth thought he was finally going to touch her where she needed to be, he pulled his face away slightly, a mischievous smile on his lips.
— I could hear you moan my name all day, baby — Toto said as he draped one of her legs over his shoulder, exposing her pussy even more to him. Then, with a smile, he teased her with his tongue again, making Elisabeth throw her head back, her eyes squeezed shut.
From their first night together, she knew what Toto could do to take her to the height of pleasure. It was as if he had read her instruction manual and followed exactly what was there to please her. He knew how to lick, suck, nibble, and touch using just the right pressure and speed, always concerned with making her feel comfortable and, above all, loved. And with his face between her thighs, Elisabeth felt completely loved.
So loved that she was already speaking words with no sense.
— This… Like this, this… Please, please, fuck — she was saying as she moved her hips erratically, her mouth open, and her back arched — This, this… Fuck, Torger...
She felt a vibration come from his lips, as if he were laughing at what Elisabeth had just said. However, his reaction didn't make her angry or frustrated, but closer to the orgasm, which already clouded her mind and made her muscles tense even more. Then, with no warning, the wave of pleasure hit her, powerful and overwhelming, causing the leg that supported Elisabeth to give way. Had it not been for her leaning on the sink next to her, as well as Toto's hands holding her, she probably would have collapsed on top of him.
Panting and her body still shaking from the aftershocks, she felt her heart pounding, her heavy breathing the only sound inside the cubicle. Elisabeth's eyes were still lost on the ceiling when she felt her other leg being lowered, her foot touching the floor, and, at the same time, nothingness. It was like she was still floating.
— All good? — asked Toto, right below her.
Elisabeth didn't answer, her mind seeming to wrap around the feeling that was taking over the pit of her stomach. It was something she had never felt after an orgasm, but it wasn't all that strange. Suddenly, the environment inside the bathroom felt too hot, and she felt her body momentarily unbalanced. And then her mouth filled with saliva.
— Liesl? — he asked again.
She barely had time to push Toto back before she crouched down in front of the toilet before dumping everything she had drunk and eaten out violently, with no ceremony. After what seemed like an eternity, Elisabeth finally lifted her head, her arm resting on the tile.
— Are you fine, baby? — he asked, brushing her hair back from her face as Elisabeth sat down on the tiled floor.
— I guess — she mumbled before another wave of nausea hit her, causing her to throw up again. When Elisabeth felt that there was nothing left to leave her stomach, she looked up again to find Toto holding her hair, his eyes full of concern.
— Are you better now?
— Yeah — she replied, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.
Silence stretched between them for long seconds, while Elisabeth concentrated on her own breathing, trying to push away the discomfort.
— You've definitely crossed the line today, baby.
— You think? — she asked, her tone somewhere between irony and naivety.
— As the most ill-behaved man in Vienna, I'm sure — Toto replied with a smirk.
— Have you ever puked at a party?
— More times than I should.
She gave a shy, almost embarrassed smile as he tucked strands of hair behind her ear. There was something intimate about that moment, almost as if Elisabeth was revealing yet another layer of herself to him. The most inconsequential and probably doubtful layer of herself. And yet, Toto was looking at her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, and not some woman who had drunk more than her body could handle and let it all out. That thought made her remember something else.
Or rather, someone else.
— Toto?
— Yeah?
— Don't tell my dad I threw up.
— Liesl — he sighed, seeming to stifle a laugh.
— He won't let me drink anymore if you say I threw up.
— And you want to keep drinking?
— At least at celebrations — she said softly — No one has fun while drinking orange juice.
— Yes, that's true — Toto said, laughing, which made Elisabeth laugh. Silence returned to the bathroom after they stopped.
— Aren't you going to tell?
— No, my love, don't worry — he murmured before helping her to her feet and taking her to the front of the bar to take a taxi back to the hotel.
Upon arriving at the suite, they practically passed out on the bed, waking up only the next day. However, while Toto only looked like he'd had an awful night's sleep, Elisabeth felt like she'd been hit by a truck. And it was obvious that her father had noticed.
— I'm fine — she replied, before taking another sip of water. Niki wasn't convinced.
— Toto, did she drink yesterday?
Elisabeth looked to the side, praying that he would remember what she had said to him on that bathroom floor.
— Yes, Niki.
— More than she should?
— No. Just a few beers and a gin and tonic that Valtteri offered her.
Niki pressed his lips together, looking uncertain.
— Did she throw up?
Elisabeth's heart was pounding hard inside her chest.
— Of course not. She's a responsible woman, she would never do that to herself — Toto replied, before taking her hand, his thumb stroking her skin lightly.
— She must be — he muttered back, before returning his attention to the newspaper he was reading.
A few seconds later, Elisabeth squeezed his hand and mouthed a “thank you”, getting a mischievous smile back. In that moment, she was certain he would always have her back.
#toto wolff#wlffog#formula 1 fic#f1 fic#f1 fanfic#formula 1 fanfic#toto wolff x oc#formula one x oc#formula 1 x oc#f1 x oc#formula one fic#formula one fanfic#scwlff
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Dylan O’Brien Was in the Audience of ‘Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen’ — and Us Has Questions
By Yana Grebenyuk October 18, 2023
Dylan O’Brien has all of Us wondering what his favorite Bravo shows are after his surprise audience appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
Host Andy Cohen kicked off the show on Tuesday, October 17, by introducing guests Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Monica Garcia and comedian Heather McMahan. He then pointed out that O’Brien, 32, and producer Tommy Alter were both in the audience. Cameras switched to O’Brien who did a thumbs up for viewers while sipping a drink.
“I want to welcome our friends Dylan O’Brien and Tommy Alter to the Clubhouse. Great to see you! Dylan being a huge Vanderpump Rules fan, I found out tonight. I love it,” Cohen, 55, said as the audience cheered.
O’Brien was not mentioned again, but he did get fans talking about the unexpected cameo. “This feels random. Dylan O’Brien is in the #WWHL audience tonight!” a social media commentator wrote via X.
Meanwhile, another viewer poked fun at O’Brien enjoying himself in New York City, writing, “Just dylan o’brien in his natural state (sipping on his drink) in the audience of wwhl tonight.”
O’Brien was photographed hours prior showing his support for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike on the picket line. He wore a hoodie that referenced the actors’ union, which he paired with green sweatpants and a red baseball hat.
The actor rose to stardom after playing fan-favorite character Stiles Stilinski on MTV’s hit series Teen Wolf from 2011 to 2017. O’Brien went on to score the role of Thomas in the Maze Runner film franchise. He has since also appeared in movies including Deepwater Horizon, American Assassin, Bumblebee, Love and Monsters and Not Okay.
O’Brien’s collaborations with Taylor Swift, however, have been our favorite part of his filmography so far. In 2021, O’Brien starred opposite Sadie Sink in Swift’s short film All Too Well. He was also credited as a drummer on Swift’s song “Snow on the Beach,” which was featured on her 2022 album Midnights.
After All Too Well scored five nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards, O’Brien praised Swift, 33, as an artist.
“She sent us the news first thing in the morning,” he told Entertainment Tonight in July 2022. “She’s genuinely just someone who’s so involved and just proud of her work and is so grateful for any accomplishment or recognition for something that she just poured herself into. Talk about a special human.”
According to O’Brien, he has been in a “group chat” with Swift and Sink, 21, since working on the music video together. “[Taylor] would make a really, really good director. If it’s something that her heart’s in, Taylor can do whatever she wants,” he added. “She could easily direct a feature and it’d be something I’d sign up for, for sure.”
Source: usmagazine.com
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Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping"
On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it:
https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96
What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog).
The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that also written, and which was born in machine-readable form.
This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/
The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way are often unreachable (anonymous or pseudonymous) or impractical to reach (because there's millions of them). The linguists who study this speech will go through institutional review board approvals to make sure that as they produce aggregate accounts of speech, they don't compromise the privacy or integrity of their subjects.
Computational linguistics is an unalloyed good, and while the speakers whose words are scraped to produce the raw material that these scholars study, they probably wouldn't object, either.
But what about entities that explicitly object to being scraped? Sometimes, it's good to scrape them, too.
Since 1996, the Internet Archive has scraped every website it could find, storing snapshots of every page it found in a giant, searchable database called the Wayback Machine. Many of us have used the Wayback Machine to retrieve some long-deleted text, sound, image or video from the internet's memory hole.
For the most part, the Internet Archive limits its scraping to websites that permit it. The robots exclusion protocol (AKA robots.txt) makes it easy for webmasters to tell different kinds of crawlers whether or not they are welcome. If your site has a robots.txt file that tells the Archive's crawler to buzz off, it'll go elsewhere.
Mostly.
Since 2017, the Archive has started ignoring robots.txt files for news services; whether or not the news site wants to be crawled, the Archive crawls it and makes copies of the different versions of the articles the site publishes. That's because news sites – even the so-called "paper of record" – have a nasty habit of making sweeping edits to published material without noting it.
I'm not talking about fixing a typo or a formatting error: I'm talking about making a massive change to a piece, one that completely reverses its meaning, and pretending that it was that way all along:
https://medium.com/@brokenravioli/proof-that-the-new-york-times-isn-t-feeling-the-bern-c74e1109cdf6
This happens all the time, with major news sites from all around the world:
http://newsdiffs.org/examples/
By scraping these sites and retaining the different versions of their article, the Archive both detects and prevents journalistic malpractice. This is canonical fair use, the kind of copying that almost always involves overriding the objections of the site's proprietor. Not all adversarial scraping is good, but this sure is.
There's an argument that scraping the news-sites without permission might piss them off, but it doesn't bring them any real harm. But even when scraping harms the scrapee, it is sometimes legitimate – and necessary.
Austrian technologist Mario Zechner used the API from country's super-concentrated grocery giants to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. By assembling a longitudinal data-set, Zechner exposed the raft of dirty tricks the grocers used to rip off the people of Austria.
From shrinkflation to deceptive price-cycling that disguised price hikes as discounts:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071627182734180
Zechner feared publishing his results at first. The companies whose thefts he'd discovered have enormous power and whole kennelsful of vicious attack-lawyers they can sic on him. But he eventually got the Austrian competition bureaucracy interested in his work, and they published a report that validated his claims and praised his work:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071673594791946
Emboldened, Zechner open-sourced his monitoring tool, and attracted developers from other countries. Soon, they were documenting ripoffs in Germany and Slovenia, too:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071485142332765
Zechner's on a roll, but the grocery cartel could shut him down with a keystroke, simply by blocking his API access. If they do, Zechner could switch to scraping their sites – but only if he can be protected from legal liability for nonconsensually scraping commercially sensitive data in a way that undermines the profits of a powerful corporation.
Zechner's work comes at a crucial time, as grocers around the world turn the screws on both their suppliers and their customers, disguising their greedflation as inflation. In Canada, the grocery cartel – led by the guillotine-friendly hereditary grocery monopolilst Galen Weston – pulled the most Les Mis-ass caper imaginable when they illegally conspired to rig the price of bread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
We should scrape all of these looting bastards, even though it will harm their economic interests. We should scrape them because it will harm their economic interests. Scrape 'em and scrape 'em and scrape 'em.
Now, it's one thing to scrape text for scholarly purposes, or for journalistic accountability, or to uncover criminal corporate conspiracies. But what about scraping to train a Large Language Model?
Yes, there are socially beneficial – even vital – uses for LLMs.
Take HRDAG's work on truth and reconciliation in Colombia. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a tiny nonprofit that makes an outsized contribution to human rights, by using statistical methods to reveal the full scope of the human rights crimes that take place in the shadows, from East Timor to Serbia, South Africa to the USA:
https://hrdag.org/
HRDAG's latest project is its most ambitious yet. Working with partner org Dejusticia, they've just released the largest data-set in human rights history:
https://hrdag.org/jep-cev-colombia/
What's in that dataset? It's a merger and analysis of more than 100 databases of killings, child soldier recruitments and other crimes during the Colombian civil war. Using a LLM, HRDAG was able to produce an analysis of each killing in each database, estimating the probability that it appeared in more than one database, and the probability that it was carried out by a right-wing militia, by government forces, or by FARC guerrillas.
This work forms the core of ongoing Colombian Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, and has been instrumental in demonstrating that the majority of war crimes were carried out by right-wing militias who operated with the direction and knowledge of the richest, most powerful people in the country. It also showed that the majority of child soldier recruitment was carried out by these CIA-backed, US-funded militias.
This is important work, and it was carried out at a scale and with a precision that would have been impossible without an LLM. As with all of HRDAG's work, this report and the subsequent testimony draw on cutting-edge statistical techniques and skilled science communication to bring technical rigor to some of the most important justice questions in our world.
LLMs need large bodies of text to train them – text that, inevitably, is scraped. Scraping to produce LLMs isn't intrinsically harmful, and neither are LLMs. Admittedly, nonprofits using LLMs to build war crimes databases do not justify even 0.0001% of the valuations that AI hypesters ascribe to the field, but that's their problem.
Scraping is good, sometimes – even when it's done against the wishes of the scraped, even when it harms their interests, and even when it's used to train an LLM.
But.
Scraping to violate peoples' privacy is very bad. Take Clearview AI, the grifty, sleazy facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos in order to train a system that they sell to cops, corporations and authoritarian governments:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that
Likewise: scraping to alienate creative workers' labor is very bad. Creators' bosses are ferociously committed to firing us all and replacing us with "generative AI." Like all self-declared "job creators," they constantly fantasize about destroying all of our jobs. Like all capitalists, they hate capitalism, and dream of earning rents from owning things, not from doing things.
The work these AI tools sucks, but that doesn't mean our bosses won't try to fire us and replace us with them. After all, prompting an LLM may produce bad screenplays, but at least the LLM doesn't give you lip when you order to it give you "ET, but the hero is a dog, and there's a love story in the second act and a big shootout in the climax." Studio execs already talk to screenwriters like they're LLMs.
That's true of art directors, newspaper owners, and all the other job-destroyers who can't believe that creative workers want to have a say in the work they do – and worse, get paid for it.
So how do we resolve these conundra? After all, the people who scrape in disgusting, depraved ways insist that we have to take the good with the bad. If you want accountability for newspaper sites, you have to tolerate facial recognition, too.
When critics of these companies repeat these claims, they are doing the companies' work for them. It's not true. There's no reason we couldn't permit scraping for one purpose and ban it for another.
The problem comes when you try to use copyright to manage this nuance. Copyright is a terrible tool for sorting out these uses; the limitations and exceptions to copyright (like fair use) are broad and varied, but so "fact intensive" that it's nearly impossible to say whether a use is or isn't fair before you've gone to court to defend it.
But copyright has become the de facto regulatory default for the internet. When I found someone impersonating me on a dating site and luring people out to dates, the site advised me to make a copyright claim over the profile photo – that was their only tool for dealing with this potentially dangerous behavior.
The reasons that copyright has become our default tool for solving every internet problem are complex and historically contingent, but one important point here is that copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away. For that reason, corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power than the company to sign away their copyrights.
This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright (scope, duration, penalties), we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms.
As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
Many creative workers are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement for scraping their data and using it to train a model. If those cases go to trial, it's likely the creators will lose. The questions of whether making temporary copies or subjecting them to mathematical analysis infringe copyright are well-settled:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market
I'm pretty sure that the lawyers who organized these cases know this, and they're betting that the AI companies did so much sleazy shit while scraping that they'll settle rather than go to court and have it all come out. Which is fine – I relish the thought of hundreds of millions in investor capital being transferred from these giant AI companies to creative workers. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Because if we do end up changing copyright law – or the daily practice of the copyright sector – to create exclusive rights over scraping and training, it's not going to get creators paid. If we give individual creators new rights to bargain with, we're just giving them new rights to bargain away. That's already happening: voice actors who record for video games are now required to start their sessions by stating that they assign the rights to use their voice to train a deepfake model:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence
But that doesn't mean we have to let the hyperconcentrated entertainment sector alienate creative workers from their labor. As the WGA has shown us, creative workers aren't just LLCs with MFAs, bargaining business-to-business with corporations – they're workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/
Workers get a better deal with labor law, not copyright law. Copyright law can augment certain labor disputes, but just as often, it benefits corporations, not workers:
https://locusmag.com/2019/05/cory-doctorow-steering-with-the-windshield-wipers/
Likewise, the problem with Clearview AI isn't that it infringes on photographers' copyrights. If I took a thousand pictures of you and sold them to Clearview AI to train its model, no copyright infringement would take place – and you'd still be screwed. Clearview has a privacy problem, not a copyright problem.
Giving us pseudocopyrights over our faces won't stop Clearview and its competitors from destroying our lives. Creating and enforcing a federal privacy law with a private right action will. It will put Clearview and all of its competitors out of business, instantly and forever:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy
AI companies say, "You can't use copyright to fix the problems with AI without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right. But what they fail to mention is, "You can use labor law to ban certain uses of AI without creating that collateral damage."
Facial recognition companies say, "You can't use copyright to ban scraping without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right too – but what they don't say is, "On the other hand, a privacy law would put us out of business and leave all the good scraping intact."
Taking entertainment companies and AI vendors and facial recognition creeps at their word is helping them. It's letting them divide and conquer people who value the beneficial elements and those who can't tolerate the harms. We can have the benefits without the harms. We just have to stop thinking about labor and privacy issues as individual matters and treat them as the collective endeavors they really are:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/
Here's a link to the podcast:
https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/
And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450_-_How_To_Think_About_Scraping.mp3
And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers
Image:
syvwlch (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Print_Scraper_(5856642549).jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#cory doctorow#podcast#scraping#internet archive#wga strike#sag-aftra strike#wga#sag-aftra#labor#privacy#facial recognition#clearview ai#greedflation#price gouging#fr#austria#computational linguistics#linguistics#ai#ml#artificial intelligence#machine learning#llms#large language models#stochastic parrots#plausible sentence generators#hrdag#colombia#human rights
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⭐CRESSI WEEK 2K23⭐
LIGHTS, 🔦 CAMERA, 🎥 ACTION!!!! 🎬
Welcome to the Cressi Week 2K23! We are very excited to announce this year's event which, like previous years, will be held from October 1st to 7th and will be inspired entirely by movies of various genres, two options per day to delight our eyes and hearts ❤️
We have the scenery, scripts, staff, location and even the main actors to make the movie of the year, but we need a director, do you dare to be one? Let's hope so, because here are the movies that will be the inspiration to make your cristessi work come true ✨️
You can take elements from the story, completely use its universe and plot and even, why not, change the ending, there are no limits to your creation! (Only the main characters and/or couple, of course, will have to be Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi).
During the following days we will share a brief summary of the movies so that you will be encouraged to watch them, if you haven't already, and to create something about them.
🍿CRESSI CINEMATIC UNIVERSE🍿
🎟️ MONDAY 1 OCT - Romance
📽️ Pride & Prejudice (2005) / Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
🎟️ TUESDAY 2 OCT - Horror/Suspense
📽️ Carrie (1976/2013) / The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
🎟️ WEDNESDAY 3 OCT - LGBTIQ+ Community
📽️ Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) / Call Me by Your Name (2017)
🎟️ THURSDAY 4 OCT - Angst and Drama
📽️ Me Before You (2016) / Lala Land (2016).
🎟️ FRIDAY 5 OCT - Based on real events
📽️ The Vow (2012) / The Notebook (2004).
🎟️ SATURDAY 6 OCT - Erotica
📽️ Shame (2011) / Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
🎟️ SUNDAY, 7 OCT - Animated
📽️ Corpse Bride (2005) / Your name (2016)
Bonus: Days before the start of Cressi week, we will be sharing a surprise detail of this great event ✨️💫 So get comfortable and get to work ✒️
The fanart was made by @mrerwin__smith commissioned by Cadiie especially for this event ✨️
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DAYLIGHT ☆彡 INTRO
Welcome to Daylight! this is just an intro and the first chapter will mostly be the same dw you won’t have to reread it (unless you want to ✨)
i decided to take a more famous birthdays approach to it so i hope y’all enjoy :)
RIVER WILSON ☆彡
singer/stage-actress
Birthday: October 13, 1996
ABOUT
American singer and actress who took over the role of Regina George in the Broadway Production of Mean Girls in 2019. Before that she released her first single Ain't it Fun in 2014.
TRIVIA/FUN FACTS
She joined choir when she was in 7th grade, where she was an alto.
FAMILY LIFE
River likes to bring her mom, Alexandra Wilson, along to her shows on tour. She dated Corbyn Besson in 2017 – early 2023. She has recently been romantically linked to YouTuber, Sam Golbach.
btw i have nothing against Corbyn, he was literally my favorite member of wdw, i just didn’t know who else to use. I have a plan with him too (and his song that he released recently)
#instagram au#social media au#sam and colby#fanfics#x reader#sam golbach x reader#sam and colby x reader#x oc
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From October 8, 2018. Here's a pdf version if you can't access the article.
Showing vulnerability. Men are socialized to not ask for help or be vulnerable — and they can be penalized when they challenge this notion. An informative set of studies from 2015 finds that when male (but not female) leaders ask for help, they are viewed as less competent, capable, and confident. And when men make themselves vulnerable by disclosing a weakness at work, they are perceived to have lower status. This is problematic, as not seeking help when you need it or admitting areas for improvement inevitably leads to mistakes and less development.
Being nicer. Given that many of us want more nice guys at work, we might assume that men would be celebrated for being calm and unassuming. Wrong. Research has found that men who are more communal and agreeable (e.g., warm, caring, supportive, sympathetic) made significantly less money than more stereotypically masculine men. More agreeable men across multiple industries made an average of 18% less in income and were evaluated as less likely to have management potential as compared to less agreeable men. [...]
Displaying empathy. Empathy is an important part of leadership. However, women are more likely to receive “credit” for it than men. A recent study found that female leaders who displayed empathy (as reported by their employees) were less likely to be in danger of career derailment — e.g., problems with interpersonal relationships, difficulty building and leading teams, difficulty changing and adapting, failure in meeting business goals and objectives, and having too narrow a functional orientation. Men did not get this boost — there was no relationship between male leaders’ empathy and their bosses’ assessment of potential career derailment. These findings are consequential because displaying empathy is critical for leading effectively.
Expressing sadness. U.S. men are socialized to be stoic. What happens when they show emotions other than anger? Research demonstrates that men who show sadness at work are thought of as less deserving of that emotion as compared to sad women. A study from 2017 found that men who cry at work are perceived as more emotional and less competent than women who cry. And when men cry in response to performance feedback, the feedback provider rates them as a lower performer, less likely to get promoted, and less capable, as compared to women who cry. While we don’t want men or women regularly crying at work, an authentic work environment has to allow all employees to experience the same emotions without penalty.
Exhibiting modesty. What happens when men display modesty? Research demonstrates that men who were more humble in expressing their qualifications were evaluated as less likeable, less agentic, and weaker than modest women. Similarly, men in the hiring process who were more self-effacing were evaluated by potential employers as lower in competence and less desirable to hire, as compared to self-effacing women. With the increasing awareness of the detrimental effects of narcissism at work, we should encourage men’s modesty rather than penalize it.
Being a feminist or feminine. As noted previously, a sizeable percentage of American men self-identify as being a feminist. However, research shows that feminist men are more likely to be the victims of sexual harassment — from being told inappropriate jokes to being the recipient of unwanted sexual advances. In addition, research shows that men are more likely to be harassed when they work in male-dominated jobs and are perceived as too feminine. Research finds that men who ask for family leave, something that was historically in the purview of women, are viewed as poorer workers and are less recommended for rewards, compared to female counterparts. We should be welcoming feminist men, rather than derogating them for not being “man enough.”
This is why I'm so passionate about the fact that we all need to be aware of toxic masculinity and unlearn it, and not treat it as "something men need to figure out personally". Because toxic masculinity is a systemic issue, not an interpersonal one.
Failing to live up to toxic masculinity has clear effects. Men and people perceived as men are punished for it. This is not an issue that individual men can fix by going against the grain; not that they shouldn't, but misogyny can't be fixed by just encouraging women to be go-getters and not care about being sexually harassed and more than toxic masculinity can be fixed by telling men to cry in public and not care about being bullied and beat up.
There are real, serious consequences for men & people perceived as men who do not live up perfectly to toxic masculinity. This is a problem we should all be concerned about, not something we shrug off and decide that men can just personally get rid of an entire head of the patriarchial hydra on their own by going to therapy.
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The Snape Showcase is back, baby! Click the link for all the details and rules and how you can participate. It's a fest hosted by iulia_linnea over on LiveJournal.
Also, wondering about the previous fests? Here are the links to the previous years' masterlists: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The fest is in celebration of Severus Snape throughout his ages from birth to....well. We like to pretend around here he reached his golden years. Shhhh. That snake bite did nothing but leave a little scar and he's happily somewhere away from the adoring public (us), brewing his potions, and sending scathing letters to the editors.
"Gen, het, and slash fan works of any kind and of any rating are welcome."
We can't wait to see what our amazing community bring to the fest!
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