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dreamblasterharuka · 3 years

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I Fear the Fall and Where We’ll Land

Title comes from Beautiful Crime by Tamer, which is my go-to Ciphixy song. I don’t really know what to call this, so I’m going to call it a character study. It started out as a vent/projection fic but then it kinda went off the rails. Enjoy!

Also on AO3!

He lost. Pixy lost. He’s floating, falling, drowning. He’s on fire, trailing smoke, unable to breathe. Desperately trying to stabilize enough to slow his rapid descent. He failed. Alarms are blaring, and he needs to eject. He can’t. (He won’t. Better to die with pride than live with the defeat.) It’s too late now, the sky is too far away.

Darkness has settled in when he finally comes back to. He’s still strapped into the cockpit of the Morgan. Maybe if he doesn’t open his eyes, he can pretend that it was all a bad dream, but the ache all down his right side says otherwise. It hurts, but it’s not an unfamiliar pain. He’s been in plenty of fist fights before, and while he usually won, he usually got his ass kicked in the process. All he needs to do is to keep moving and he’ll be fine. Just keep moving. (Sprained wrist, fractured leg, several bruised ribs, and a long gash on the side of his head that he never even noticed. The people that rescue him say that it’s nothing short of a miracle that he survived. A miracle better used on someone else.)

Snow covers the cracked window. None of the instruments are working, and he’s covered in broken glass from all the screens. All he can do is brush it off and start getting out. Everything is fuzzy, but he’s done this so many times it’s second nature. Panic floods his system when he can’t get the window open, but it just as quickly dissipates when a heavier shove is able to lift it up.

He drops onto the ground below, and another shock of pain runs up his body. It's cold, the kind of frigid that stings his skin and freezes the air in his lungs. Snow blankets everything in sight, reflecting just enough light to make his surroundings out. He crashed in a small clearing, surrounded by dense forest. A lone figure stands across from him, making neither a move nor sound, sending him fumbling for the gun he keeps on him in case he crashes behind enemy lines. (No one is coming to rescue him. Whoever finds him is going to drag him to prison, if not kill him outright.) The safety is flipped off and aimed by the time his head clears enough to recognize her.

Cipher doesn’t even blink at the sight of the gun, much less flinch at the idea of throwing her life away. (He’s jealous. Detachment is a necessity in this business, and she is practically the embodiment of snow.) Time slows to a crawl as they stare each other down. (Belkan. Pixy’s Belkan, not Ustian, like all his papers say. Life is easier without people knowing that fact.) His hands are shaking, from holding on too long, from the strain on his wrist, from the unwillingness to shoot. (She’s the only person on base who knows, and the complete lack of judgement lifts a long-settled weight in his chest.) Like always, she wins, and he lowers the gun and holsters it.

(Love and hate are supposed to be opposites, but they’re mixing and churning in his stomach. He can’t love her. She kills without hesitation or remorse, a soldier complicit in the slaughter of others. Just another cog in the machine, letting the cycle continue without end. He hates her, for all that, for being strong enough to do something about it, for not choosing to stop it. He wants - he needs to kill her. He’s the only one that can. But he can’t hate her either. She’s Cipher, his Buddy, who focused all her energy into making sure those flying with her were safe, who refused to fire on civilians, who was probably the first person he’s trusted in years. Just another victim of circumstance, trapped in a war she has no stakes in. They’re more similar than either of them ever admit. Different background, same story. Similarities that draw them together, and force vulnerability out of them.)

(Maybe he wanted to fall. Maybe he trusted her with the future. Maybe he’s just a fool who can’t even save himself.)

Cipher simply regards him, though he can never tell if she notices his inner turmoil. Another half a second passes, before she turns and walks straight into the woods. The choice in front of him is clear, either follow her or don’t. If he does, he’ll be chasing after someone who hates him and probably never wants to see him again. She probably has no idea where she’s going and he fully knows she has more pride than sense when she’s angry. If he doesn’t, he’ll also be blindly walking around the forest in the dark. Maybe he should just do the honorable thing and go back to sleep and let the snow consume him. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. He hasn’t made a good decision in a while; what’s one more?

Pixy breathes in, taking in as much of the frozen air as his messed up ribs will allow, and tries to clear his head. His choice is obvious, and he takes the plunge after her. She doesn’t even bother to acknowledge him.

Silence holds the entire forest in a stranglehold. Footsteps crunching through snow is the only reassurance that he hasn’t completely lost his sense of hearing. Cipher is walking steadily ahead of him, but she’s as silent as she ever is. (As silent as she was after Operation Choker One, just accepting that they were nothing but pawns.) All of his senses are on edge. Even in the dead of night, even with the snow, there should be some kind of sound, but there’s nothing. There hasn’t been any signs of life. Outside of the quiet figure he’s trudging after, he’s alone.

(He’s completely alone. He betrayed Lucan by goading Cipher into the fight. He betrayed Cipher over Waldriech. Cipher betrayed him over Hoffnung. There wasn’t anybody else he could trust anymore. Was there anyone he could trust in the first place?)

(Uncle Jonas wouldn’t be able to take him in. Said that they couldn’t afford another mouth to feed, especially one that wasn’t old enough to work. The senior officer makes no attempt to soften his words, even as the junior officer quietly reminds him that Larry is a child. Larry himself barely pays attention, still waiting for his parents to appear from the still smoking remains of the village. It’s not until the small memorial over the mass grave that he realizes that they won’t.)

He’s always hated silence. With nothing to focus on, his thoughts get too loud, until they drown everything else out. Instead he’s forced to think about the twinge in his chest with every breath he takes and the ache in his wrist and the shock of pain every time he takes a step and the numbness in his toes and oh, he’s going to die here, isn’t he? He’s going to die in the middle of nowhere and it’s all going to be for nothing. Borders will still divide people, wars will still rage on. How many more will die in the name of some land grab disguised as some beautiful ideal?

End it. Break the cycle. That’s what he wanted to do. Reset it all to zero, so there would be nothing to fight over. Many, many (too many) people would die, but infinitely more would be saved. (It wasn’t a heroic act, and the Solo Wing Pixy would forever be named a villain, but it was for the greater good, right? The catalyst would be horrific but permanent, better than allowing another Hoffnung or Vorfreude or however many cities had been caught in the middle, right?)

(Cipher disagrees with him. Said that conflict was part of human nature and that people would always fight. He thinks it’s a depressing worldview, but when she wakes up sobbing and terrified after being forced to relive her parents’ murder, he understands. They are so different from each other, yet they are so similar. A ring can stretch into the infinite, but it is still a ring. It will end where it starts.)

He needs to think about something else, so he thinks about that last battle.

Victory had simultaneously been within his grasp, and so far away he would never be able to reach it. He should have had the advantage, but he knew better. The Morgan was a beast of a plane, but Cipher was a beast of her own. She had faced impossible odds before. (They had faced impossible odds before. Maybe in another world they could still be together. Probably not.) It had been less of a battle than a dance, twisting and turning around each other, firing with near perfect timing and just missing enough to move onto the next steps. Beautiful and destructive and tragic, moving ever closer to one of their deaths. Fighting against her had been nothing and everything like alongside her.

(They tried to tango once, back before everything had fallen apart. Cipher knew from one of the many ‘flashy, useless’ classes she had to take, Pixy had learned while on a job in Sapin. Neither of them had done so in several years. It was clumsy and offbeat and they had to correct each other every other step, but it had been fun. Eventually, they both gave up and just swayed to the music, enjoying each other’s presence.)

She fought with the same cold, calculated, style she always had, but none of the caution. (None of her strict moral code, but perhaps she had deemed him unworthy of such mercy.) Eventually, she figured out his weakness and flipped to face him straight on in a move that was almost stupidly bold, even without the fate of the world hanging in the balance. An evenly matched duel between two knights, with fate determining the winner. That moment was probably the only moment he could have defeated her, except maybe the first blow, when he fired before he even had a clear visual, but her escort had taken the hit and went down.

(PJ, he realizes much later, trapped in bed with nothing but a broken leg and his thoughts. Of course PJ would be the one to follow Cipher straight into a suicide mission. Of course he would jump right in front of the blast like that. That was his ideal: to protect those he cared about, and Pixy damn well knew the kid thought of her like an older sister. He also knew that PJ’s ideals would get him killed.)

(He was right, but PJ had died and succeeded, while he failed and lived. So where did that leave him, aside from the twisted husk of a man who could only desperately cling to survival?)

The snowstorm is starting to die down, and his visibility is getting slightly better. The forest is getting less dense, so he can worry less about tripping on a root and just letting the snow consume him. Whether the thinning out was because he was actually nearing the end or just wishful thinking, he doesn’t know. Cipher continues ever forward, so he keeps following her, never quite able to catch up. Did she know where they were, or was she just moving because it was the only thing she could do?

(Both his mother and the matron of the orphanage warn him of the fae folk. His mother had warned him of beautiful people in the woods that would lead him away, never to be seen again. The matron does it out of spite, telling him that they would be back to collect the changeling they replaced the real Larry Foulke with. He retaliates by dropping her clothes in the well. Years pass before either of them even kind of respect each other, but she’s the first to express her pride when he graduates top of his class. He wonders how angry she would be if she saw him now.)

Suddenly the treeline breaks, and he can finally see. They’ve reached some kind of field, maybe a farm, but there isn’t any kind of civilization in sight. Only more trees across from him, and a sharply rising cliff face to his right. They must have crashed somewhere in the mountains. Towns were out here, but they were few and far between. It could be days before anyone would find them. (He’s not going to last that long. He’s not sure he’s going to make it past sunrise.) Cipher doesn’t seem bothered. She’s on his left, staring down a cliff, out into the storm. He can finally catch up, curious as to what caught her attention.

At first he can’t see anything but shadows, but as the storm slowly comes to an end, he realizes that’s not it at all. It’s ash. Rubble stretches on for thousands of feet in almost a perfect circle, before burned trees and ruined buildings finally begin to rise. He knows where he is now. The world changed here, turning everything on its head, and definitively ending the war. (It had been different when he had been flying freely above, safe from the immediate consequences.) This was one of the Seven Pillars.

There was a town there once. There were people there, once. Innocent people, who had only been involved because somebody behind a desk decided they should. He wondered if they even knew. Probably not. Nobody had predicted that the Belkan government would dare turn nuclear weapons against their own people. He had never heard of any evacuations, only that 12,000 lives had been wiped out in the blink of an eye. (Wasn’t the V2 going to be so much worse, though?)

He can’t move anymore. He’s just too tired (from the cold, from his injuries, from the fighting. He has been fighting with everything he had for almost his entire life, and now there is simply nothing more to give. If to survive was to fight, then surely to reach peace one had to die. That was the point, wasn’t it? To attain world peace through world annihilation?) All he can do is watch the storm continue to die down in complete silence, revealing more and more the depth of the destruction.

She stands in front of him now, in front of the crater, in front of the burned out prelude to what he was about to do. She stretches her arms out (as if to hold him, as she did when she tried to comfort him after Hoffnung, as she did when he brushed her off) and the sky bleeds from black to purple. Finally, the sun peaks over the horizon, bathing the world in the first light of a new year. It hits her, (her, Aurorette, the dawn) and her silhouette sets aglow, but it's too bright. If he looks at her, he’ll go blind. The sunrise catches her just right, and it turns her hair into a halo.

Ah, Pixy understands now.

This is not his Cipher. His Cipher is a demon, an instrument of war, an omen of death. (His Cipher is a monster. Just as he is.) This thing is nothing more than a spectre, a figment of his imagination. (Maybe an angel, taking on the form of his beloved to show him, to make him understand the weight of his sins before dragging him down to hell.)

The ghost reaches out to him, but unconsciousness reaches him first. The last thing he remembers is the cold, impassive look in her eyes before he collapses into the snow. (It’s fine. He did the right thing, right?)

(Right?)

#writing #Ace Combat #ace combat zero #solo wing pixy #cipher #pixy x cipher #ciphixy #PJ gets mentioned

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summonerscenarios · 3 years

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Can I ask for a scenario where MC finds and takes care of a stray cat and brings it around with him causing some of the other feline transients(tezcatlipoca, macan, nomad, and sitri) to become jealous because the cat is possessive of MC and is getting attention. On another note thank you for creating this blog, it really is nice for you to continue doing something like this for others to enjoy and i hope you are enjoying it as well. (P.S, agyo probably glares at the cat from behind the couch)

I WAS SO WORRIED THAT I’D LOST THIS BECAUSE I SWEAR I ALMOST COULDN’T FIND IT BUT HERE IT IS!!! Thank you so much for liking my blog I’m having so much fun with it!! And I hope other people are having as much with it as well~!

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Tezcatlipoca

Honestly, you’re starting to get pretty fed up with how many times Tez tries breaking into your dorm through the window when you’ve got a perfectly good door to use (especially because you gave him a key, dammit). It’s something about ‘stealth’ or ‘a surprise attack’ but it’s seriously starting to grate on your nerves; so when you decide to bring the stray who you’ve been feeding and taking care of for the past few months home with you, you decide that the jaguar can find out about the new arrival the next time he tries to make an ‘impromptu visit’ in the middle of the night.

And sure enough that’s exactly how he gets to meet your cat. Usually the loud declaration he makes as he bursts through your (thankfully open) window is what wakes you up from your slumber, but this time it’s the sound of your cat hissing up a storm as it leaps from your bed to confront the ‘intruder’ while he’s half-way through the window. It’s enough of a surprise to Tez that the therian slides right off of the frame and hits the floor loud enough that you feel bad for the person living on the first floor. However, he’s quick to recover, and by the time you’re out of bed you’re standing between the two trying to get Tez to at least lower his voice before he wakes the neighbors as he glares over your shoulder at the protective feline, the latter of which purrs and rubs against your legs vying for your attention.

That should have been your first sign that things were going to be tense between the two, but you didn’t actually think that Tezcatlipoca would get jealous of your new kitty just because it was a tiny bit attached to you. Little do you know from that point forward what ensues is a full out war between the therian and your cat. Perhaps its due to the fact you’re so doting, or just because you feed it and give it a place to sleep, but your cat is ridiculously attached to you, but Tezcatlipoca isn’t about to let a possessive stray take up the space at his brother’s side that Tez had waiting so long to reclaim - if it’s a battle for you that this little kit wants, then he is more than prepared to show it who your true favorite is. Tez gets increasingly more petty in his attempts to lure your attention away from the cat, and considering that he’s pretty adept with tactics you’d imagine this would be fairly easy but it isn’t.

Tez tries to get a moment alone with you by closing the door behind him before the cat can enter, and not two minutes later it’s pawing at the door and meowing so loud that you hurry over to the door to let it in and warn Tez to check next time. He also attempts to pawn the cat off onto his subordinates for a few hours under the guise of a play-date and to get the cat used to company; and yet that plan backfires spectacularly when you start getting pictures of its ‘playdate’. Group photos of the Luchadores all fawning over your cat and giving it treats alongside videos of them jumping around and letting it leap between them as they perform - it’s clear that the feline has successfully won them over just as it had with you, and you’re soon distracted cooing over the messages much to the therian’s growing frustration.

The lightbulb finally goes off when you catch Tez glaring at the cat when he thinks you’re not looking like he’s trying to convey the words he can’t say to the little feline due to your presence. You’re laying with your back on the floor as the kitty drapes across your chest, hands running through its fur and rubbing its ears as you coo and shower the cat in affection and praises. Your cat is absolutely loving the affection, purring hard enough that it’s practically rumbling as it stretches out and pads at your face with its paws; Tez on the other hand is staring the cat down like it’s going to claw your face off and he’s just waiting for the moment to jump in and intervene. When you tilt your head back to look at him you catch his expression before he notices you’ve spotted him; you ask him what’s got him so miffed, but in the split second it takes for him to look in the opposite direction and insist nothing’s amiss you look between him, the cat, then him, then the cat again.

Then it clicks.

“Tez, you’re not...jealous are you?”

His reaction is just too good - the lack of verbal response makes you lift the cat off of you so that you can safely roll over and look directly at him, taking in the lowered ears and ruffled feathers as he looks away from you. Assuming that he’s just feeling left out with the attention you shuffle over to where he’s sitting and apologize for not giving him some time too in a cooing hum that’s pretty similar to the tone you use when you’re coddling the cat. He goes to complain, but the moment you lean over to start scritching a spot right behind his ears he chokes on the words, expression tensing for the brief moment it takes him to realize what you’re doing to him.

Tezcatlipoca grumbles about underhanded tactics and how he won’t fall for them so easily even as he tilts his head up with a noise akin to a deep purr when you move your free hand to scratch just under his chin. At the forefront of your affection Tez almost has to laugh in triumph - of course you may lavish the little fluffy kit you’ve taken in with affection and praise, but you’ll always end up pouring your attention back onto him when it really counts. You’re pretty sure you catch his tail flickering languidly out of the corner of your eye as you pet him, but you don’t bring it up when it brushes up against your legs as you shuffle around to get a better angle to fuss him with. If the cat doesn’t try to make too much of a fuss and he keeps receiving your undivided attention like this, then Tez supposes that he can allow this kind of arrangement…

That is until the moment is interrupted when your cat promptly shoves itself between the two of you and turns it’s back to Tez so that you have to pull your hands away to look down at it. And just like that it’s back to square one, with Tez glaring daggers as the feline has the audacity to use his leg as height leverage to nuzzle its way into your arms, effectively regaining your attention as you turn back to fussing the cat - completely oblivious to the pointed stare-down the pair share when you’re not looking.

Macan

Taking in a stray for the first time you’d worried a lot about it wandering off or losing interest if it went outside, and the stories you had heard only heightened the worries you had about owning a cat. Turns out you didn’t have to worry at all, as the feline sticks to your side everywhere you go, even following you to school and sneaking its way into your classes even when you were sure you closed your dorm door - it was a running gag that where you went your new fluffy buddy was sure to follow, and it significantly eased your concerns as you gained a little more confident about taking it out with you. It even came with you when you went out to see friends, dropping by on the Berserker’s guild to catch up with your allies with your fuzzy companion in tow. Granted, it did in fact wander off from time to time, but rarely ever out of your direct line of sight. However, this time when you pull yourself away from a conversation with Andvari about merch revenue to check on your cat who’d been perched on the counter, only to find it missing from its spot and not in direct sight, you begin to panic. The main floor is thankfully empty of most of the visitors, with most people in the arena watching one of the fights and leaving the space mostly clear, but you still end up running circles around the room looking for the cat in question. Eventually, a familiar mewl catches your attention, followed by a sharp hiss and a growl that you recognize and you slide around the corner the moment you hear it.

Then you spot your cat, latched onto the Macan’s snout with both bearing their teeth and you nearly scream as you bolt over to pry the two felines away from each other. It takes a while to separate your cat and Macan, and you’re honestly flabbergasted that your kitty had such a wild reaction when up until this point you’d never had any of these problems before. Macan at least doesn’t seem entirely fussed about the sudden outburst - if anything he seems a bit entertained that your cat had the guts enough to try anything - but you still make a point to make sure his nose is okay, checking for any lasting claw marks as you apologize over and over.

From that point forward, it doesn’t take a genius to piece together that Macan and your kitty don’t entirely get along...well, that’s not exactly true. In the times where you’re doing your own thing and not focusing on the two of them, you notice that your cat has little qualms with sidling up to the bulky tiger therian and lounging all over him, and Macan doesn’t even shrug it off or push it away whenever the furball trots up to him looking for attention. It’s bizarre seeking the two of them actually getting along with each other, though you do have to laugh at how easily Macan’s able to pull your cat away when it starts getting too playful with his tail - it almost makes you wish you had a camera so that you could save these snippets.

However, those moments only last about as long as it takes for either of them to notice that you’re paying attention; then your cat’s racing me over to your side kicking up a fuss until you relent and give the feline some well deserved pets. You honestly don’t know who’s more attached to you - as when your cat comes to curl up on your lap, meowing and pawing for your attention, chances are Macan’s right there alongside it, leaning up against your back and resting his head atop yours nosing in on whatever you’re doing. It’s cute, but frustrating when this happens right as you’re in the middle of doing something important - and yet you don’t have the heart to get either of the cats to budge. (not that either of them actually would - you’ve now got two stubborn felines to deal with in your life, hope you’re ready.)

Nomad

Taking in a stray wasn’t your initial plan, but you definitely don’t regret it. You always came across the same cat on your way to and from school, and while you’d only stop for the occasional fuss and to give it some treats if you carried some with you, it didn’t take long before it started travelling with you as you made the walk. And then one day you got back to your home and the cat just...stuck around - and needless to say you just didn’t have the heart at that point to not take the cat in; how could you not? The fluffy feline needed a place to stay, and you were more than happy to have a new roommate in the form of the tiny cat. It takes a lot of trial and error to ease your new pet into its new life, taking your time to get it used to being around some of your friends so that it feels more comfortable coming over - and honestly, things go a lot better than you expected. Your cat warms up to just about everyone you’ve introduced easily, going in for pets or at least giving them a curious sniff before deciding whether it likes them or not; seeing how well it gets along with everybody you’ve introduced so far, you thought it was high time to introduce it to your favorite tiger detective - after all, you’re sure they’d get along just fine, right?

Your way of ‘introducing’ Nomad to your new kitty isn’t so much an introduction as it is you quite literally plopping the cat right into his lap the moment he sits down, looking up at him with an excitable smile and kneeling down beside him as you present the small cat to the exceptionally bigger cat. Your cat and him share a look, and you just about melt watching it purr and nuzzle up against Nomad’s jacket like you’ve seen it do with some of your other friends before - it looks like it’s taken a shine to him, which is honestly incredibly relieving after the initial worry that this introduction wasn't going to go as well as you’d hoped. What makes you even happier is that Nomad doesn’t seem to mind the cat either, leaning a hand down to give the kitty headpats as it preens and purrs under the action.

But then you turn away for a moment to check something on your phone, being pulled away by a message, and in that split second that you shift around to check your cat does a complete 180, just about hitting him square in the chest as it whips around and hops off of his lap to trot over to your side, meowing all the way until you turn around and focus your attention back onto him. What seals the deal is the warning noise that your cat makes as it turns back to face him, slinking into your lap with a pointedly sharp stare before it turns its attention back to you.

It’s not exactly jealousy, per se, because Nomad’s been around the block long enough to not get hung up over you doting over your cat and giving it a lot of your attention - though at the same time he gets pretty embarrassed realizing that what he does get hung up on is the fact that most of your attention is pulled away from him when you are together. When he realizes that’s what’s got him upset, the therian wants to just about kick himself for sounding like a damn kid about it, and he’s not about to go around admitting it out loud, so you’re gonna have to figure that out on your own.

What’s more, Nomad’s fully prepared to just cut his losses and accept that him and the cat just aren’t gonna get along, and he would if it wasn’t for the fact that this same cat was so damn affectionate when you weren’t around. Without fail, whenever you go out to run errands and he’s stuck with the cat it’ll come plodding up to him and flop down into his lap demanding pets and attention. And he falls for it every single time. You can practically see the frustration rolling off of him when you return, and the cat just about claws his head off trying to get to you as soon as possible, leaving Nomad nursing more than a few nicks thanks to the sheer protectiveness the little fluffball possesses when it comes to you.

Sitri

When you’d first brought the stray you’d adopted home it was a learning experience for you. Figuring out what toys to get and what kind of food and bedding to go and buy were just some of the things you needed to get and asap, and you’d been so focused on making sure the little guy was settling in okay and comfy that by the time everything was sorted out you’d pretty much neglected to let everybody know that you were a cat parent now. Once things have calmed down however, you’re eager to show off the fluffy feline to just about everyone and everyone, and who better to show that Sitri? You were planning to meet up with him after school anyways, and you figured if the kitty was going to warm up to anyone, he’d be a pretty good start, right?

Though perhaps you should have actually let him know that the cat was home when he’d stopped by your dorm room to see if you were ready to go, as while you’re mid-way through tossing a jacket on and grabbing your bag you hear a yelp and Sitri nearly barrels into your back. You’re about to ask him what’s wrong, but as you spin around you spot your cat dart across the room, and you have to catch the little fluff ball mid-pounce as it aims directly for the poor therian’s tail. Turns out, while you’d been getting ready, the cat had spotted Sitri at the door and had slipped past your feet to investigate the newcomer, only to latch onto Sitri’s tail the moment the flickering had peaked the feline’s interest. A slew of apologies wasn’t how you’d intended to introduce Sitri to your cat, but you really can’t stay mad at the kitty for long when it sticks you with the wide eyes and cuddles into your arms mid-apology, gently butting your jaw with its head.

You just about melt at the action, especially because this is still in the early stages of your cat settling into your home, and the apology quickly filters off into you cooing over the feline as you hold it up for Sitri to see. For a split second Sitri swears that the cat’s glaring at him as it wriggles free and drops back down to your side to curl around your legs, but surely he’s just imagining it, right? Wrong. That cat spends just about every second that he’s there curled protectively right beside you, sticking Sitri with a stare and swatted paw if his shoulder so much as touches yours. It even kicks up a fuss and follows the pair of you out of the door, which ends up with you asking if you can bring it along, which of course he’s not going to say no to. This quickly becomes a regular occurrence, where almost every time the two of you get to hang out your cat comes with you, and it must know it’s damn cute because every time it tags along you and just about everyone else comes over to pet it and give the cat attention.

Sitri absolutely refuses to admit that he’s even a tiny bit jealous of your cat - getting jealous over a cat is super dumb, and Sitri’s not the kind of cool cat who gets hung up watching you fuss and fawn over the cat every single time you’re together...okay, maybe he’s a tiny bit jealous, but it’s not like he’s going to tell you that he is. Instead, he stews with the thoughts for a while, and just kind of puts up with the presence of the cat in favor of hanging out with you, and he’s sure the cat knows because boy does it push the limits of what it can get away with. There was even one instance where Sitri had made the mistake of having his wings out around your cat, and the little ball of fluff just about ripped a few feathers free the moment it caught sight of those bright orange wings. That at least got your attention focused back on him as you’d worried over his wings and checked that he was okay, but Sitri really doesn’t wanna go through something like that just to keep your attention - he’s pretty sure he’d end up losing all of his feathers if he did that.

With that being said this is Sitri, and you’ve known him long enough that you can tell when something’s starting to bug him, and clearly something has been bothering him for a while. You don’t make the connection for a little while, after all while he does get a bit frustrated watching your cat nuzzle into your hands and curl up on your lap, so you’re blissfully unaware. However, after a while you start to realize just how little attention you pay to Sitri when you guys are together, having your attention pulled away by the cat, and you start to think that maybe he’s feeling miffed that you’ve been leaving him out as a result. You can’t say for sure though until you decide to bring the topic up with him, curious to figure out what’s got him so ruffled.

Once you put two and two together he gets notably embarrassed, and you don’t even have to voice your thoughts aloud before Sitri blurts out that he’s 'not jealous!’ automatically jumping in to deny it before you’ve said a word. Seconds later he realizes what he just said and his hands fly to his mouth as though hoping to stuff the words back in but it’s too late. Your jaw drops, but just as quickly you spin around and exclaim “You’re jealous!?”, watching as he flushes. Sitri tries to deny it again, but it’s significantly less convincing when even the tips of his ears are starting to turn pink; soon enough the moment dissolves into you repeating that he’s jealous, sounding more and more amused each time he tries to argue that he swears he’s not. After a while of this though you make sure to assure him that you’re not making fun of him, ruffling his hair as you assure him that as much as you coddle and fuss the fluffy feline you’ll always have time for him - after all you’d be a fool not to remind your friend he’s the number one cool cat, right~? At your words he goes from flustered to groaning at the cheesy remark, but you can tell he’s feeling a bit better about the whole thing, if not still a bit embarrassed over being seen through so easily.

#a-cat001 #housamo #tokyo afterschool summoners #housamo imagine #housamo headcanon #imagines #headcanons #tezcatlipoca #housamo tezcatlipoca #macan #housamo macan #nomad #housamo nomad #sitri #housamo sitri #request #ask

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clownao · 3 years

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I think about Okajima’s crush on Hayami a bit too much. Because you won’t expect him to like her, and it’s very interesting because so far, Okajima’s been established as a pervert. But this crush kinda proves that he’s not only a pervert?

(Keep in mind that my personal interpretation/ headcanon of Okajima is that he wants to be funny and accepted, that’s why he adopted the pervert persona (and it’s Matsui’s way of including perverted comic relief tbh). I don’t like how he’s consistently a pervert throughout the series (lack of character growth) but I kinda blame that on shonen tropes. If you don’t like him because he’s creepy, that’s okay.)

So Okajima likes big boobs. One would assume he would like Yada (I feel like he probably lusted after her at one point even as a gag) but no, it’s Hayami. Hayami, who isn’t even on the Kyoto girls ranking (I found out the “future beauty” is Hara, which is literally the only decent contribution I made during my early tumblr years). I don’t think I’ve seen Okajima call her pretty or anything despite being pretty vocal on his option of girls (he called her a tsundere though), so he might not be as shallow as he looks?

Hayami’s personality is also not what you expect Okajima’s crush to be. She’s serious, stoic, to-the-point unlike Okajima who ALWAYS gets distracted by his horniness. Like, you would expect the energetic and optimistic Okajima to like someone more outgoing (eg. Kurahashi), but maybe opposites do attract? Lmao.

And I’m pretty sure Hayami is... aloof towards him because he’s a pervert and he sits next to her. She disapproves of him and he has basically zero chances with her. Apparently “she shoots down all of Okajima's dirty jokes with a coolheaded gaze” and she really wants to talk to Kanzaki, but never did because Okajima sits between them (tfw you don’t even want to walk pass the class pervert).

BUT maybe that’s why?? Since Okajima apparently believes she’s a “tsundere” after her “don’t get the wrong idea” comment. So if Hayami is aloof towards him (and. basically a lot of people), he thinks she might like him?? But throughout the entire series it’s never been hinted, their only interaction I remember is the 7 years later scene when they fix the roof together (and that’s pretty irrelevant to a middle school crush unless you’re like Kayano and simply Can’t Get Over It).

But one interesting thing is that they’re in the same friend group:

A) They sit next to each other

B) Group 2 dynamics / same science group

C) Okajima is Chiba’s spotter, Hayami’s friends with Chiba

Thus the following:

So even if Hayami doesn’t like Okajima, they have a lot of opportunities to interact, which is probably why Okajima likes her in the first place?

... Chiba is sorta the middleman between the two, being friends with both of them. BUT it’s been made clear that Koro + some members of the class (eg. Maehara) ship the snipers, and Okajima is probably aware of the close bond (which may or may not be romantic) between the snipers

They were on the same side during Civil War, and Okajima + Chiba and Itona + Hayami worked in pairs (although Itona wasn’t much of a spotter, just a guard of sorts). This is expected because Okajima and Chiba are work buddies. But... imagine if Okajima survived the initial Kanzaki attack. Would Karma also order him to act as Hayami’s spotter because he’s familiar with the job? (Note: Hayami’s usual spotter is Fuwa) Or would Karma just go “Okajima with girls? Nope”?

Anyways I have a lot of thoughts about this, and I still don’t know why he likes her lol. Is the tsundere gag really that strong when she’s not even a tsundere? Is this just a gag, Matsui? But if it’s just a gag, why not make him like Yada since pretty much everyone expects it? Why Hayami? Why someone so indifferent to Okajima?

All the other crushes make kinda sense. Kayano, Nakamura and Kanzaki (kinda) have all interacted with Nagisa, and Kayano and Nakamura’s feelings are made obvious within the manga. Okano and Maehara have a whole ass arc. Kimura’s crush on Kurahashi makes sense despite it not being mentioned (they sit next to each other, Group 1 kids, also their personalities kinda mesh). Mimura and Yoshida, the quiet-ish kids, have crushes on the class idol Kanzaki. These all make sense. The people that are crushed on (Nagisa, Maehara, Kurahashi, Kanzaki) are all cute/good looking, friendly, sweet, etc.

But Hayami?

Hayami’s not known for all that. And especially NOT towards Okajima.

So either Okajima has a serious misinterpretation of Hayami’s “tsundereness” or he genuinely likes her for something else... hmm...

#assassination classroom #ansatsu kyoushitsu #hayami rinka #Okajima taiga #can I crack ship them? lol #okahaya uwu #or hayajima #fuck knowing me I’ll prob start shipping for real

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elves-n-angels · 4 years

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How Sebastian Stan Went From Winter Soldier to 'Winter Swoldier'

To keep up with the Chrises, Stan upgraded his diet, training, and worldview. And 2020 is shaping up to be his best year ever.

BY LAUREN LARSON

DEC 19, 2019

THE COFFEE-SHOP staff is having a silent meltdown. The peppermint tea I ordered was forgotten as soon as Sebastian Stan walked in. He orders a coffee, receives it instantly, and goes to put it down on a table. The lid isn’t fully on, and the coffee spills. It’s almost a “stars are just like us” moment, but then a barista suddenly materializes with a paper towel in his outstretched palm. “It’s wet,” he says eagerly.

Stan, 37, is wearing black shorts, a black T-shirt, midcalf black socks, and a gray hoodie missing its drawstring. He looks very off-duty SoHo, which he is: He’s back home in New York City on furlough from preparations for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, an extravagant collaboration between Marvel and newborn streaming service Disney+.

He’s also wearing a blue baseball cap, which sits slightly higher on his head than it might on the head of someone with less va-va-voom hair. That hair sent the Internet into a tizzy recently, when a poster for Falcon showed Stan with a short cut. In the past when Stan has played the Winter Soldier (né Bucky Barnes), he’s had shoulder-length hair. Next to his forehead, which is giant—the White Cliffs of Dover of foreheads—the longer style made him look very sinister.

Stan is somewhat less recognizable in street clothes, but women still side-eye him on their way to the bathroom. Maybe they recognize him; maybe he’s just a little too strapping not to be famous.

As Stan talks, he maintains an unsettling deadpan, verging on a glower. “People always ask me if I’m okay,” he says, still glowering. “They’ve said I have ‘serial-killer resting face.’ No matter what I do, I’ve always had dark circles under my eyes that never really go away. Lately there might be a little moisturizer happening here and there, just in case. Preserving a couple years, or whatever.”

The more reserved the actor, the more likely he is to become part of Hollywood mythology. Between Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), a rumor circulated that he had gotten too ripped for the arm he’d worn in the earlier film, a wraparound contraption meant to look like a machine prosthetic. Redditors called him “the Winter Swoldier” and “Bulky Barnes.”

Stan laughs when I bring it up and clarifies that he used a new-and-improved arm in each successive film. With the first iteration, he had to apply lube to slide his real arm into what was essentially two rigid metal tubes. “It was like having a massive hammer attached to me,” he says, “but it looked unbelievable in the movie, and it actually informed a lot of my body language.”

Subsequent arms were more mobile, and Stan doesn’t have to lube up to get in there anymore: There’s a sleeve inside the arm for his next appearance as the Winter Soldier. But, he concedes, he did get too big for the arm used in Civil War. “I was so insecure being around these massive fucking guys, so I started lifting really heavy and ate a lot. I remember I showed up, and I was a little bit bigger than I had been in The Winter Soldier. The arm was a bit tight,” he says. “I was losing circulation.”

Stan is not a new arrival in the Marvel universe: He made his superhero debut in 2011, with Captain America: The First Avenger. But recently he’s enjoyed a burgeoning late-term fandom as his roles (and arms) have ballooned. Beyond Marvel, he starred alongside Margot Robbie in 2017’s I, Tonya, as Tonya Harding’s jackass boyfriend. When we meet in October, he’s just returned from shooting the spy film 355 in London, with Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, and Diane Kruger. Another insecurity-inspiring roster.

With Stan’s constellation of anxieties—he says he’s “terribly self-aware, to the point of detriment”—he is uniquely suited to stardom in 2020. A decade ago, audiences wanted actors to be pillars of Hollywood hubris, strutting around in latex Marvel suits, muscly and impenetrable. We still want the muscles, but we also want stars to be genuine.

Marvel films can seem at odds with that national craving for authenticity. Steve Rogers, for example, becomes Captain America instantly, in the first ten minutes of The First Avenger: He goes into a machine and emerges fit, huge, and self-actualized. I ask Stan whether that narrative—man gets muscles and immediately earns the admiration and attraction of everyone in his midst—isn’t a dated, unrelatable picture of masculinity.

“When I was watching Steve Rogers,” Stan starts in, “I saw him question his identity, his alliances, the government. ‘Who am I? What is this? What made me come into this is very different than the role I am in now.’ I think it was very timely, in the sense that you could see that character evolve. Then he gives up his shield and is like, ‘I’m out. I’m going to do my own thing.’ He chooses his own life. It’s actually more relatable.”

There’s an obvious metaphor there: Stan is Captain America, and stardom—and the press tours, the scrutiny, and the training that come with it—is his government, always invading his carefully fortified sense of self. As a result, he can appear very reticent in public, offering only occasional glimpses of the unguarded Sebastian Stan. Audiences live for those moments.

Stan is the anti-celebrity in the year of the anti-celebrity.

And his ambient hostility toward questioning is offset by the behavior of his Falcon costar Anthony Mackie. When alone in interviews, Stan can seem deflective and bored, but he gets an enormous kick out of Mackie, who has jumped in to rescue many an interviewer left to writhe on the hook by Stan. He is the Sebastian Stan whisperer, midwife to a charm that can be difficult to coax out.

“When I’m trying hard to find the honest moment, he sort of unlocks me a little bit. We both laugh and we find a way to have a good time,” Stan says. When I tell him that I’m planning to mine Mackie for gossip, he laughs. “Here’s what he’s going to say: ‘He’s way too serious. It’s boring. He slows everything down. It’s always these questions and, like, the stare. Give this kid a Yoo-hoo! Somebody get him a chocolate milk. Good God, put a smile on his face!’ ”

Mackie is the enthusiastic extrovert to Stan’s pensive recluse. Even though I reach him on the phone at 9:00 p.m. after a long day of shooting in Savannah—“I’m already going to bed,” Mackie says in a N’awlins drawl that sounds sleepier than usual—he’s forthcoming about Stan. He describes his costar as a hermit, a chronic Irish-goodbye-er who doesn’t offer much of himself at first. “If the FBI ever needed to get anything out of him, they’d be in very big trouble,” Mackie says. “I don’t know what the male equivalent would be of ‘resting bitch face,’ but Sebastian has nailed that 100 percent.”

His first impression, which lingered for a long time, was that Stan was a very quiet, very reserved actor. They shook hands when they met, but it wasn’t a buddy-com bromance at first sight. It wasn’t until much later, when the two were on a press tour for The Winter Soldier, that they hit it off. Mackie hung out with Stan and a few of his closest friends, and they “unlocked” Stan for Mackie the same way Mackie now unlocks Stan on press tours.

Their chemistry also plays well on set. They share a dedication to their work, and they both come from classical acting backgrounds. (“He went to Juilliard,” Stan says of Mackie. “He can do anything.”) Beyond that, they’re opposites, reining in each other’s moods to a perfect, workable middle. “He calms me down when I’m ready to rage against the machine,” Mackie says. In turn, Mackie bullies Stan into having fun.

Case in point: When they were on a press tour in Beijing, they had one of those endless nights that make press tours seem glamorous. “It just went on and on and on,” Mackie recalls. “We had to do press the next morning, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to bed.’ I’m like, ‘Nope.’ I took his wallet and his cell phone so he couldn’t get into his hotel room. Then, by the time we got to the press, I was fine. He just looked like he’d gotten hit by a car.”

Hollywood has always relished actor partnerships—from Robert Redford and Paul Newman to Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson—but now more than ever, buddying up feels like an imperative. Pairs perform, especially on social media. In November, when Stan and Mackie took over Marvel Studios’ Instagram to announce that they’d begun filming Falcon, fans were as thirsty for their friendship as they were for the show. Their dynamic is the stuff of memes: “[I] want someone to look at me the way Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie look at each other,” one fan tweeted.

I know what that fan meant. When Stan does look at you without suspicion—when, perchance, he laughs at something you say—it’s like winning a battle.

WHEN IT COMES to fitness, Stan has also benefited from the influence of a charismatic spirit guide. He played soccer and basketball at his Rockland County, New York, high school, but he didn’t start running and going to the gym until he was in college at Rutgers University. And he didn’t get really into fitness until 2005, when he was cast in a film titled The Covenant, which Stan calls “really classic.”

Really classic, indeed: The Covenant also stars Chace Crawford, whom Stan would later join on Gossip Girl (another classic), and Taylor Kitsch. Stan plays one of five prep-school boys endowed with supernatural gifts and sick abs.

“I got a call,” Stan says. “And one of the producers said to me, ‘Look, you’re going to have to look like John Travolta in Staying Alive.’ He’s just glistening with muscles. It’s ridiculous. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I started to work out with a trainer, but it was my buddy

Taylor Kitsch who got me into it.” With the trainer and Kitsch as his gym shepherds, Stan began exercising in earnest.

Then, in 2013, ahead of The Winter Soldier, Stan teamed up with trainer Don Saladino, who’d also sculpted Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, and Liev Schreiber. That same year, Stan starred in a Broadway revival of William Inge’s Picnic, playing a character whose defining trait is his hotness.

“Inge was writing something very important about vanity and how people were perceived in terms of being quote-unquote good-looking, beautiful, or pretty,” Stan said in a Playbill interview in 2013. “In the play, there’s something shameful and dirty about it. Our obsession with beauty has not changed. When we see something that turns us on, we either appreciate it or judge it. It’s so primal. We still dismiss people if they’re pretty; we don’t care how they feel, because they should just be happy looking the way they do. That’s something we were trying to say with this production.” Stan is less philosophical about his Picnic bod these days. “I had to be basically shirtless every night, like eight shows a week,” he says. “I really zoned in on diet, and everything transformed.”

He prefers exercising on an empty stomach, so he generally starts his day with coffee—and a rice cake with some almond butter and honey if he’s feeling depleted. Today he was feeling very depleted, he says, so he had some scrambled eggs with Brussels sprouts and aioli. “I’m not going to tell you the place where I got that,” he adds, unprompted and wary, as though I might start dining there daily in a stalker vigil.

Stan is a proponent of “quality over quantity,” but that doesn’t mean he skimps on his workouts; he just knows that a 20-minute session that catapults his heart rate into the red zone is as effective as an hour of low-intensity bullshit. He runs (“I’m not going to tell you where”) when he’s feeling meditative.

In advance of the Falcon shoot, Stan started lifting weights every morning and knocking out stunt training for the fight scenes. He points out that filming an action movie is a workout in itself: You spend whole days running around and sweating in a heavy suit. “I mean, next to Evans and Hemsworth and all those guys, I feel like I’m 50 miles behind. I don’t think I can get to that size, to be honest,” he says. That aside, Stan feels, in his late 30s, better than ever. “My body right now is probably the best it’s ever been.”

THERE'S A PHOTO of Stan, age 15, on his Instagram. It’s a headshot from Stagedoor Manor, an acting camp that he attended while in high school. He’s recognizable from the brow up—he has the same broad forehead, the same voluminous hair. His arms look pale and soft, like overcooked linguine, and he’s staring down the camera with theater-kid intensity.

Stan lived in Romania until he was eight years old. Shortly after the Romanian revolution, he and his mother moved to Vienna and stayed there for four years before heading to New York in 1995. No, he says, he didn’t have a foreign exchange student’s social cachet in middle school. “Maybe if I was from France or something. But I am Eastern European. We left communism,” he says. “When I came here, I just wanted to be like everybody else.”

I ask Stan which of his mannerisms are typically Romanian. “You’re kind of putting me on the spot to define a whole nation—a guy who hasn’t been there for years,” he says. But he thinks for a second. “For me, based on my mother, the ‘Romanian temperament’ is perseverance—being able to handle more than you think you can. At 27, my mother was working two jobs in a foreign country where she barely spoke the language. There’s a sense of family and perseverance that’s deeply ingrained in the blood.”

Even for someone who has experienced a certain degree of stardom, Marvel fans can be a shock to one’s sense of family. Certain Marvel stars acquiesce to the attention on some level, greeting fans with a Chris Hemsworthian openness to scrutiny. Stan’s boundaries are reflexive and firm, as though his sense of self is always under attack. (Which, to be fair, it may well be: “He’s so reserved,” Mackie says, “but in this day and age that’s a very good quality.”)

Stan is more protective of his personal life than most actors. Celebrities often use social media to dispense calculated chunks of themselves in exchange for privacy. Stan occasionally opens up on Instagram: “Been working with this guy through years of self judgement and mental wars when it comes to fitness and LIFE,” he wrote of Saladino in a caption accompanying a gym selfie. But questions about the people in his orbit ping ineffectually against his poker face.

He attributes this to only-vaguely-alluded-to incidents in which his family and friends were subject to public attention. As a public figure, he has opted into that attention, he explains, but they haven’t. It upset him when they were the targets of scrutiny, particularly when that scrutiny came from his fans. Stan seems to be looking for earnestness in an industry that, on the whole, disdains earnestness. He “tries hard to find the honest moment,” as he himself puts it (much like how he saw a profound statement about “our obsession with beauty” in William Inge’s horny play).

In this, the Marvel universe is an improbably good fit for him. We speak the week after Martin Scorsese said Marvel films “are not cinema,” and Stan is as defensive of the films as he can be without disrespecting Scorsese, one of his heroes. “All I know is that all movies affect people,” he says. “I’ve certainly experienced firsthand many people who have been affected and helped by Marvel movies.”

Captain America fans lean earnest. People have told Stan that Bucky Barnes helped them cope with their PTSD. During Q&A sessions, he’s asked questions like “What would Bucky Barnes’s major be?” and “What happened to Bucky Barnes when he fell from the train?” Stan fields those questions without sarcasm or diversion.

“They think we are these people,” Stan says, again without condescension. He’s content to take questions about Bucky Barnes, especially if it distracts fans from asking questions about Sebastian Stan. “Now we’re much more obsessed with the personality rather than the actor. We take people and swallow them and digest them and chew them up, and then we spit them out the other side. Then we’re done,” he says. “We’ve done that with numerous celebrities—people. I’ve seen people have massive ups and downs and stuff. All I can do is just try to be as honest as I can. And do my job.”

Men's Health Magazine, December 19, 2019.

#sebastian stan #bucky barnes #winter soldier #mens health #long post

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lunetheaveragefan · 4 years

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one day...

Hi, y’all! Sorry there’s been such a delay for Chapter 2. I’ve been super busy with school and dance and other activities and all that. Also, I decided about halfway through my original Chapter 2 that I was going to alternate between Virgil and Roman’s perspectives so I had to start a new chapter from scratch. But that means that now-Chapter 3 has already been started, so hopefully I’ll have it done by Friday this week!

A Sander Sides high school AU

Pairing: Prinxiety and some background Logicality

Summary: Virgil is used to being alone. He only has one friend, Logan. But when Logan makes a new friend, things begin to change as two more join their group. Roman, a boisterous theater kid, seems determined to destroy Virgil’s lonely, average life. How much will Virgil’s life change?

Warnings: Some cursing and quick mentions of a possible fight/hospital. If you notice anything else, let me know!

Word Count: 1,919

anyway, here it is!

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CHAPTER TWO

Roman Princeford is absolutely, completely, terribly humiliated.

He can’t stop blushing in embarrassment, and it only makes it worse when the classes are boring and he can't stop his mind from drifting to that morning. Like now, for example.

Stupid, stupid Roman, he chastises himself. Why didn’t you notice him there, you oblivious dumbass?

He groans and buries his head in his hands.

“Is something wrong, Roman?” the math teacher asks. “Do you need help?” Yes, but not the help you can give me, Roman thinks. He takes a breath and fixes a dazzling smile on.

“No, Mrs. Perry, I’m doing fine! Thank you for your offer of assistance, however!” he exclaims in his usual lyrical way. Roman always makes an effort to seem like he’s reading off a script, especially one where there’s a heroic prince he can play. It always makes him feel better when he plays a part. Then, Roman can imagine that he is the character. The same qualities, traits, life, everything.

He can ignore how stupid he is and pretend he’s a brave, dashing prince. The princes in stories would never have the problems Roman’s been having.

Mrs. Perry walks off, rolling her eyes, not without fondness, and Roman turns back to his math. Shoving his mind out of fantasy, he tries to solve the problems. It seems like he’s gotten nowhere by the time the bell rings. Throwing his paper into his bag, he hurries out of the room.

“Heya, Roman!” Patton Hart, his best friend, calls through the throng of people. Roman slows down so Patton can catch up. “How ya doing?”

“Uhh, Patton, I am a disaster!” Roman proclaims. “You’ll never guess what happened this morning!”

“Oh no! What did you do this time?” Patton asks jokingly as they enter the classroom. History is one of the few classes they have together, so they always walk from fifth period there.

“I was telling a story, a great one, mind you, and knocked over a poor, innocent student!” Roman throws down his bag next to his seat and plops into the hard plastic chair. “I didn’t mean to, I swear. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was who I hit!” Pausing for dramatic effect, Roman finishes, “It was Virgil! I knocked over Virgil Tempest!”

Patton’s mouth forms a small ‘o’. He starts to laugh, but after seeing how embarrassed Roman is, he stops and places a hand on his shoulder. “What did he say?”

“Nothing much. Just some mumble-jumble. But now I can’t stop thinking about him! I didn’t get a single thing done in math! It’s terrible, Patton. My entire life is all going to go downhill from here! I’ll become ineligible for the play because I’m failing all my classes! I won’t be able to graduate, and then I’ll have to work.” He shudders. “That’s it! I’m done for. I’ll never accomplish anything!” He collapses back against the chair for dramatic effect. He knows he’s being very extra, but honestly, what else does anyone expect at this point? He’s Roman Princeford, after all.

If only I were the brave, loud, daring person the whole school thinks I am.

“Woah, woah, woah there buddy!” Patton comforts. “I’m sure you’ll do fine. You aren’t going to fail high school. You just gotta tell him how you feel! Then you won’t have to worry about it anymore!”

Roman looks at Patton in shock.

“Tell him how I feel?” Patton nods, encouraging. Roman sits back up. “And make a fool of myself yet again? No thank you! He hates me, you know that! I’d be better off flunking high school! How could I look into those beautiful brown eyes in that beautiful face and tell him I had a crush on him! Impossible, I say! Impossible!” He throws out his hands, but then remembers that the exact same movement started this whole thing. Quickly, his hands fall back to his sides.

Patton chuckles. “It’s not as hard as you think, Ro-ro! You’ll do great. And I’m sure he doesn’t hate you.” Roman sighs. “Hey, why don’t you—”

“Boys in the back,” the history teacher says, shooting a look at Roman and Patton, “it’s time for class. Pay attention please.” They both nod at turn away from each other and towards the board.

Roman doesn’t pay attention to a single word of the lecture. All he can think about is Virgil’s freckles and his eyes and his lips and his laugh, which Roman had only heard briefly while walking past him but loved nonetheless. How come I’ve never noticed that Virgil had freckles before? he wonders. Goddammit, is that boy just going to keep getting more and more amazing?

Roman chuckles to himself, thinking, Oh my god, I’m so gay. Deciding he should probably start listening to what the teacher is saying, he shoves any and all thoughts of Virgil from his mind and fills the gaps with information about the buildup to World War 1.

After class, Patton rushes up to him. He pulls Roman to the side of the hallway in a little nook where the row of lockers end.

“After school, you should come with me to this coffee shop,” Patton says, a little smile on his face. Roman knows that smile. He’s up to no good.

“Why?” His voice rises with suspicion at the end of the word.

“My lab partner, Logan Wise, you know him, said that we should meet up to work on our project after school.” A blush rises to Patton’s cheeks causing Roman to smirk as he figures it out.

“Someone’s got a cru-ush,” Roman teases, voice sing-songy and laughing.

“That’s not the point,” Patton says, blushing even harder.

“Fine.” Roman lowers his voice to a whisper. “But you can’t hide it from me. I’m the love whisperer, remember?” Throughout their years of high school, Roman had been responsible for setting up many couples. It’s gotten to a point where almost every day, he has someone walk up to him, asking him to help set them up with whoever their crush happens to be.

“Well, maybe I have a crush, but so do you. And you do know who Logan’s best friend is, right?” Patton responds, that same mischievous smile. Roman chuckles, looking around in a fond mix of exasperation and amusement.

“Virgil,” he finally says. Patton’s smile grows wider. “Look, I told you. I can’t talk to him. I’ll just make a fool of myself!”

“Fine,” Patton says. “Suit yourself.” He pats Roman on the shoulder and starts to walk away. Before he’s completely out of sight, he turns and yells, “Just think about it, okay?” Roman rolls his eyes at his friend’s shameless attempts to set him up and heads to choir.

------------------

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Roman shuts his locker with a bang. He joins the flood of people heading towards the front doors. He spills out of the school and heads towards his car. Once he’s only a few yards away, he unlocks the doors and dumps his things inside the passenger door. After waving to a few other kids on their way out that he knows, he gets into the driver’s side.

Alone, finally, Roman allows himself to drop the fake smile. Ugh, you goddamn idiot. How did you not notice him there? Now he hates you even more. Good going, Roman! Love whisperer, yeah right.

If only I could just talk to him…

Shoving his embarrassment and frustration aside, he starts the car and pulls out of the school, heading home. His route home winds its way through the downtown streets. Roman is so used to driving the same streets, he’s startled to notice something unordinary.

A few cars ahead of him is Patton’s silver car. What is he doing over here? Patton lives on the opposite side of downtown as Roman, and while the town is relatively small, it’s still strange. Roman is sure he’s never seen Patton drive this way home before.

Turning onto 4th Street, Roman watches Patton, now directly ahead of him, park in an open spot in front of one of the little shops lining the street. The sign above says “The Sanders Cafe” in swirly cursive lettering. A decal of a little cupcake sitting next to a cup of coffee accompanies it.

Oh, right, Roman remembers. Patton and Logan were meeting up to work on their chemistry thingy.

And Virgil is probably going to be there. No matter how much he tries to block the thought, it still shows up. Roman has tried to get Virgil out of his mind, but it never works. He always pops up when Roman least expects it. Frankly, Roman finds it quite frustrating.

Lost in thought, Roman turns one intersection too early. “I guess I’ll just go around the block,” he sighs. It had been a long day, and he was looking forward to crashing when he got home. The detour would only cost about 5 minutes but still. Annoying.

Roman’s phone buzzes in the center console while he’s waiting to turn back onto 4th Street, the one with the cafe on it. One quick glance down at it tells Roman it’s from Patton. Checking the road to make sure he has the time, he looks back to read what it says.

“Patton…” he groans.

“I think you should come to the cafe with me. I’m waiting outside. Just give it a chance, kiddo!” reads the text message. However much Roman would like to deny it, he does want to go with Patton. On impulse, he finds a parking spot and pulls in. Patton is parked a few spots down, still sitting in his car. He hasn’t noticed Roman yet, and Roman’s glad for that.

“Come on, Roman,” he says, trying to give himself a pep talk. “Think about what a prince would do. He’d charge in there without a second thought. It wouldn’t matter what would happen because it would be in the name of love. You got this. What’s the worst that could happen, besides Virgil hating the sight of you so much he instantly fights you the second he sees you and you lose and have to go to the hospital and become the laughing stock of the school because while under anesthesia you admit your feelings for Virgil and now everyone knows and—”

A knock on the driver’s side window cuts Roman’s worrying off. When Roman looks up, he sees Patton’s grinning face. The other boy waves enthusiastically and gives him a thumbs up.

You got this. Be a prince, Roman. It’s in your name, after all. Taking a deep breath and clenching his fists in determination, Roman grabs his phone off the console and double checks to make sure he has his wallet.

Patton practically assaults him the moment he steps outside the car, talking in a rapid stream of words, but Roman can’t hear anything over the ever-increasing beating of his heart. They walk up to the front door, Patton ahead of Roman, still rambling about something from foods class.

The moment they walk in, the little silver bell dinging above them, Roman forgets all his worries because there Virgil is, sitting in a booth with another boy, — Logan, probably — his hair falling in front of his face, teeth gnawing on his lip in concentration and Oh god, that boy is beautiful.

And then Virgil looks up at them, and Roman swears he can feel his heart drop all the way to the ground.

#virgil sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #patton sanders #thomas sanders #prinxiety #logicality #sanders sides #high school au #fanfiction #fanfic #one day...

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roccinan · 3 years

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1/? simply because you have the most galaxy brain thoughts ever,,, what do you think would've happened if they waited until s5 to reveal sergio and andrés were (half)brothers?

i do know that when my fam started watching lcdp at first i was so put off. like i watched ep 1 and the prof creeped me out. ""berlin"" creeped me out. e v e r y o n e creeped me out. and i was cringing so hard becz of the short lived romance angle with alison parker. i literally did not watch s1 at all xcept for like sneak peeks. highlights being the scene where berlin discovers monica is alive and does his dramatic door by door thing? that was so SUSPENSEFUL even tho i had no idea what was going on. DOMINGO DE RESURECCION remains forever iconic.

2/? And OF COURSE the group bella ciao dance when they hit earth (hahah i thought the banda were actually like a "found family where they all love each other LOL") i am a SUCKER for found family. but anyhoo when i properly got intrigued was s2 when tokyo was kicked out (the music from that scene is still my favourite) it's just so dramatic..!! why am i telling u all this again? right, i haven't slept a wink and it's nearly 7 am pls forgive me if these rambles make no sense. i have a point with this.. i'm going somewhere

RIGHT. so when the fam actually rewound the ep cz i wanted to know WHY berlin did that (didn't fully realise how batsht crazy he can be), the russian roulette scene played. and pedro's acting. MAN. and like just that ep they made a point of showing us these flashbacks where sergio and andrés hug....

Hi anon! Thanks for stopping by- sorry took me a while to get back to you, will do my best to answer this string of messages (got all 4 parts)! Glad you like my thoughts XD

Firstly, I believe Andres/Sergio would be the biggest LCDP ship if the writers were evil enough to wait until s5 to reveal that they’re brothers asdfasdf. They’re already the two most popular male characters anyway.

It’d be especially crazy because it’s not like they tell the actors these things beforehand either. So that means there’d probably be a Serdres vs Berlermo vs Serquel fight every 5 minutes. I mean, even if not everyone agrees on everything in the lcdp fandom, it’s the most “peaceful” one I’ve ever been in because no character really gets in the way of any other ship (like even with helermo and berlermo there’s no true conflict since Andres is dead). But with Serdres in the mix?? CATASTROPHE. Everyone out here writing essays about how much of a bastard/bitch/homewrecker/motherfucker that Andres or Sergio or Martin or Raquel is. Never a moment’s peace!! so basically, a regular fandom lmao.

Then when we find out they’re brothers, it goes from catastrophe to Apocalypse. Suddenly serquel and berlermo have the upper hand. Everyone would double down and harass the crew/cast into whatever’s going on. Plot-wise, everything is the same though, just without Andres calling Sergio “hermanito.” Fandom however, would be a minefield! And I’m glad that’s not the case because I’d probably be an unfortunate serdres shippers XD No joke, my mother and I thought they were a couple in S1. So bullet dodged!

Secondly: haha, everyone creeped me out in S1 too, especially Berlin, I hated him, but thinking back, I think I mostly hated the fact that I didn’t hate him as much as I should have. I’ve made peace with it now but oh boy, was he a controversial figure in my head. I actually like the professor on sight though! IDK why, maybe because I thought his plans were cool or because of Alvaro’s delivery. I was afraid of an Alison Parker romance thing too- like, I do feel like she had a storyline that got dropped, but that part was quite cringey and overall unnecessary to the plot. Same with Ariadna, which was even cringier and even Less necessary to the plot.

Domingo de resurrecion was iconic though yes! And even with all that said, I genuinely enjoyed parts 1 and 2 because it was so different from anything else I’d seen. Not content wise, but maybe tonally? IDK, they were just really bold with a lot of things, like being objectively unafraid of having the protagonists (plural because all of them did LMAO) do objectively shitty things. Really kept me in suspense from beginning to end!

I’m usually a big fan of found families too! The funny thing is, then banda never struck me as a “family” until season 3. In 1 and 2, I was wondering what felt different about this show; then it hit me that these people remained colleagues to the end. Like, they backstabbed each other (repeatedly) and everyone was quite selfish, and only the bonds that were already there stuck. They were the opposite of a found family LOL But I think by S3, they went down the found family route and I didn’t mind because it makes quite a lot of sense for them to feel that bond after the Mint heist and almost dying/living together (and having witnessed 3 deaths together on the team). But I still doubt Berlin and Palermo were ever really part of this found family, with good reason XD

LOL the scene where Tokyo got kicked out is also among my favorites!! It was so funny and dramatic, and it was like, wow we can go anywhere with this now! Don’t worry- your rambles and thoughts are always welcome :D

I’m rolling over how you watched the Tokyo expulsion scene before the Russian Roulette scene haha. Also yes, PEDRO. Berlin may have been “controversial” to me at first, but I became Pedro’s fan from day one! Also the Hug is probably what made me like Berlin (despite my determination to hate him rip) in the first place.

3/? ... and like now that i think about it... tokyo had real guts huh. like she KNEW berlin was close enough to el prof to know his name (fhshshs imagine if she'd heard andrés saying 'hermanito' it's unrealistic that she didn't TBH. i mean obviously they decided to make them brothers only towards the end but like in canon universe. how tf did andrés de 'i raised my bby brother since he was 12 and i'd actually die for him and his stupidly brilliant plans' fonollosa go 5 months without slipping up once and calling sergio hermanito. or like,,, i like to imagine sergio kinda gave him lots of leeway(?) sergio's a lil oblivious too but like i'm sure half of it is.. that's my dumbass older bro shut up i'm not being partial you all have city names .. andr-berlin, pass the salt. like OOF. + sergio also knew his big bro was dYiNG so like. i'm sure they were sneaking in some quality time (i hope they did 😭 gosh imagine if sergio really did not ever consider the possibility of andrés dying in the heist so he'd tell himself he needs to perfect the plan now & anyway he'll have enough time to spend w/ his brother post heist in philippines. and then ... that happened :/

Tokyo has guts in place of braincells you bet that she’d do something like this, consequences be damned XD I also think it’s unrealistic for Andres not to slip up, but I have a feeling nobody besides Tokyo really tried to spy on them in private. I headcanon that Andres instead slips up and does things like ruffle Sergio’s hair or adjust his tie when other people are around. I also think Tokyo was convinced that they were a gay couple when she saw them hug XD And if Sergio never went on to tell the banda that Berlin was his brother, everyone would be giving Palermo such awkward looks after Nairobi accused him of being in love with Berlin LMAO.

I agree! I also imagine Sergio giving Andres leeway because he’s just so used to interacting with his brother that way haha. So either he’d go out of his way to ignore Berlin in front of everyone else or IDK, borderline telepathically communicate with him. Not even “pass the salt” has to leave his mouth- Berlin just puts salt into his food and cuts it up for him, in front of everyone who’s just staring like O.O

I actually do think Sergio never considered the possibility of Andres dying in the heist because he was just that confident in his own plan. Plus, Andres was probably the one person he expected to survive. And a lot of it has to do with Sergio’s attachment to him + Andres’ own habit of downplaying any illness/injury over the years, which I think is safe to believe canon. He was really in no condition to be in the heist, let alone lead it. Just the fact that he needs to take those injections is a big sign that he shouldn’t be there, but Sergio didn’t catch it because he’s human and blinded by faith :’) So yeah, I think Sergio was planning to spend proper time with Andres in Palawan and at Toledo, they just settled for those little moments by the fireplace.

4/? what always also just GETS me in the feels is that el prof was shown to be this in control creepily calm dude who is miles ahead of everyone. + in the 1st Toledo class itself we see how detached,, like how impersonal he is, how professional - choosing frickin CITY NAMES?! no 'personal relationships' ? (after recruiting his older brother, a father son pair, and war cousins... oh sergio 😂 he's such a frickin nerd and i love him) but like the earlier seasons really emphasised how robotic and down right COLD he can be. it still sometimes bothers me that he put the button in the car. he lead the police to his own damn brother, his blood, who took care of him and adopted him and was terminally ill and like - UGH i try to rationalise that sergio is that cold and unbothered. or that he has strict morals. but it still bothers me becz that button really sort of tipped andres' already unstable sanity. like andrés tells denver someth like you've robbed my future and after that he just seems so much more suicidal and accepting that he can't get out of the mint alive - WHY SERGIO WHY. I KNOW THAT AT THAT POINT YOU BASICALLY DIDN'T KNOW ANDRÉS WAS GOING TO BE YOUR BROTHER YET BECZ IT WASN'T WRITTEN IN THE SCRIPT BUT WHYYYYY

That’s so funny to me too LMAO No personal relationships, then he recruits these guys. Sergio, hello?? Also can’t forget how he just recruited his own girfrleind in the second heist too. Buddy! Love this nerd.

I don’t think that cold aspect of Sergio went away in later seasons either; he just had more opportunity to show a more open side of himself + without Andres, he had to metaphorically leave his comfort zone without a safety net. But in earlier seasons, he really did seem heartless at times XD Then again, we can argue that the same goes for Andres.

To be fair, I didn’t feel sorry for Andres over the button thing lol, but once the brothers reveal happened and all of Alvaro/Pedro’s headcanons came out and we know everything Andres did for Sergio, it makes what Sergio did REALLY harsh. We really just have to explain it through Sergio’s strict morals and him believing this to be the best non-fatal punishment for Andres, who at that point had convinced him he killed a hostage. And because he knew the television interview was coming up, maybe Sergio assumed Andres would use it to “clear” his name anyway. And empathy isn’t one of Sergio’s strong suits either, so through that lens, I can rationalize it.

Also it was lowkey funny to me how Andres was there like DENVER MUST DIE until he found out Sergio put the button there, then he was like “oh hermanito, you and your practical jokes <3″

Still, like you said, Andres and Sergio weren’t brothers yet at this point. They were probably supposed to be lovers lmao and had a dysfunctional Hannibal Lecter x Will thing going on. But because they made #hermanos canon, that button moment just feels very out of place now, especially given how much the two genuinely love each other.

Guess we could also say that Sergio’s just generally kinda bratty with Andres XD Like, he knows no matter what, Andres would forgive him anything. That’s how I see it anyway!

#anonymous #thanks for stopping by!#royalpaperhouse is this you my friend? :D

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final-girl96 · 3 years

Text

Radioactive Spider Bite

Peter Parker x Reader

Warnings: language, vilonce, muture content? Maybe later on?, jealousy, death, idk its marvel... slow updates.

A/N: please don't be rude. Feed back is welcome but be kind. If there is any little details you would like to change to fit your style and personality please do so. This will also be on my WATTPAD along with all my other stories. This begins with Civil War when Peter comes home to find Tony Stark there. It will go to Homecoming, Infinity War, End Game, Far From Home, and then when No Way Home is out and I watch it the story will continue as long as there is a new movie with Spider-Man.

Word Count: 1238 words

Captin America: Civil War

Chapter Four

"Okay, I was wrong. This is fun, kick people's asses," I said to Peter and he laughed. We landed on the glass on the outside of the building while Bucky and Falcon ran through inside. We shot webs and swang around crashing through the glass. Peter taking out Falcon. Bucky went to punch him but Peter stopped his metal arm and Bucky looked at surprised. "You have a metal arm?" Peter asked. "Now that is cool!" I said walking over to stand beside Peter. "Thank you, but you know you have super strength too?" He said. "What? No. I meant the arm," I said and let put a small oh. "That is awesome, dude," Peter said.

Falcon came flying at us and picked Peter up and flew off with him. "Really?" I said and looked at Bucky. "That's not cool," I said and he went punch me but I moved out of the way. A saw Peter get away from Falcon and I shot a web-swinging up and came around kicking Bucky. "Your buddy is doing a terrible job," I said and swang off. Peter had Falcon against webbed to the glass wall and came to Stand in front of him. "That sucks," I said. "Those wings carbon fiber?" I heard Peter ask. "Is this stuff coming out of you?" Falcon asked.

"Umm... kinda?" I said. "That would explain the rigidity-flexibility ratio, which, gotta say, that's awesome, man," Peter said. "You're such a nerd," I said. "I'm not a nerd!" He whined. "Debatable," I said. "I don't know if you've been in a fight before... but is usually not this much talking," Falcon said. "Sorry, he talks a lot when he's excited," I said and smiled. "All right, sorry. My bad," Peter said. Peter swung towards him but Bucky came running into Falcon knocking them towards the ground making the glass wall break.

I swang up to beside Peter and webbed Bucky's metal arm. Peter had wrapped Falcon in a web. "Guy's, look, we'd love to keep this up, but we've got one job here today..." Peter said. "And he's gotta impress Mr. Stark, so, we're really sorry," I said and Peter went to shot them with more webs but he was caught by a drone and crashed through the large windows as he screamed. "What the hell?!" I yelled. "You couldn't have done that earlier?" Bucky asked Falcon. "I hate you," he said. "I hate you both," I said. They looked up at me and I waved. "Yeah, still here. Now, stay!" I said took off after Peter.

Once I found Peter we swang and landed beside Mr. Stark and the others we were fighting with standing in front of Cap and his side. Cap started walking towards us. "This is going to end well," Natalie said. "They don't know how to give up? I'm tired," I said and rolled my eyes. "Y/N," Peter whispered and looked at me. "Sorry. Let's kick-ass," I said. We started walking towards them and they started jogging. "They're not stopping," Peter said. "Neither are we," Mr. Stark told him. Then we all started running towards each other.

"Can't you all just give up?" I asked. Me and Peter went swinging but Cap threw his shield and it cut my web. Peter caught me before I had time and we landed on some kind of belt that they put the luggage in the planes. Peter looked at me "are you okay?" He asked and I nodded. "That thing does not obey the laws of physics at all," Peter said to Cap. " look, kid, a lot is going on here that you and you're little girlfriend doesn't understand," Cap said. "Girlfriend?" I said. "She's... she's... she's not my..." Peter stammered. "Not his girlfriend," I said. "Right. Mr. Stark said you'd say that. Wow," Peter said then we shot webs at him but he held his shield up.

I shot one at his ankle and pulled making him land on his back. "Nice!" Peter said. "Thanks. I think I'm getting the hang of this now," I said. Peter got his other ankle and we pulled him towards us. We let go and I shit him again. I pulled but this time went with the webs and kicked him in the face. I landed behind him "I'm so sorry for having to miss your pretty face up!" I said. Peter landed beside me "he also said to go for the legs," he said. Cap went for his shield but Peter stops them by grab and both of his hands with webs and pulling. "Cap pulled back and then twisted around making Peter go flying.

"Rude!" I said and did the same thing Peter did. He, in turn, did the same thing and when he did I shot a web and swang around. "Oh, sweet! You are getting the hang of it!" Peter said as Cap picked his shield up and Peter webbed It but Cap pulled the web and hit Peter in the face knocking him back. I went swinging at him he hit me too making me land beside Peter. "Ow! We're you never taught not to his girls?" I said as I and Peter got up and swang up to crouch down on top of the thing not connected to the plane and the building. "Stark tell you anything else?" Cap asked.

"That you're wrong. You think you're right," I said. "That makes you dangerous," Peter said and I swing down towards Cap but he ended kicking me and knocking him into the wheel of the thing we had been standing on. "Guess he had a point," Cap said. I was standing under and Peter had swang down to check on me but then Cap threw his shield and the walkway started to fall. Peter was there in an instant stopping it. I had closed my eyes but opened them to see him holding it up. " you got heart, kids. Where you from?" Cap asked. "Queens," Peter told him. "Brooklyn," Cap said before running off.

We were able to throw the thing off together and swang off. When we landed we saw Lang super size himself. "Holy shit!" We both said. Lang who had a hold of Rhodey threw him but Peter and I caught him. "Shit!" I yelled as we went with him since he was going so fast. "Truck!" Peter yelled and we braced our feet of the truck. Rhodey stopped and was able to fly back the way we came before he hit the plane. We hung on to his as he flew towards Lang and we shot webs wrapping them around his arm knocking him off balance as Rhodey, Peter, and I flew around him.

Peter and I were running on the plane avoiding Lang when Peter started talking. "Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?" Peter asked as he grabbed my waist and shot a web and swang up away from him. "Really, dude?" I asked. "Jesus, Tony, old are these two?" Rhodey asked. "I don't know, I didn't carbon-data them. They're on the young side" Mr. Stark replied. We were shooting webs and swing around Lang as Peter continued talking. " you know that part where they're on the snow planet.. with the walking thingies?" He asked as we swang around opposite of each other wrapping Lang in the webs.

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oflouises · 3 years

Text

{ cis man, he&him } ❝ it’s time to forget the mistakes of the past and start making the mistakes of the future ❞ huh, who’s HERMAN TOMMERAAS? no, you’re mistaken, that’s actually LOUIS WEASLEY. he is a 23 year old ⅛ VEELA wizard who is A PROFESSIONAL QUIDDITCH PLAYER. he is known for being RECKLESS, IMPULSIVE, ARROGANT, FLIRTATIOUS, and DECEITFUL but also AUDACIOUS, AMBITIOUS, CHARISMATIC, RESOURCEFUL, and INCISIVE, so that must be why he always reminds me of the song STARBOY BY THE WEEKND and THE SMELL OF A BRAND NEW BROOM, HAIR MESSED UP BY THE WIND, HAZEL EYES WITH A MISCHIEVOUS GLINT, A SMILE THAT ONLY MEANS TROUBLE, THRIVING IN THE SPOTLIGHT, IMPULSIVE DECISIONS & THE THRILL OF DANGER, SWEET LIES SLIPPING EFORTLESSLY FROM HIS LIPS. i hear he is aligned with NO ONE, so be sure to keep an eye on him. { dany, 23, gmt, she&her }

𝙀𝘼𝙍𝙇𝙔 𝙔𝙀𝘼𝙍𝙎

louis weasley is the youngest child & only son of bill weasley and fleur delacour. he’s got two older sisters, victoire and dominique. for the most past, he has always been pretty close to his family & cousins. louis tends to be protective of his sisters and would do anything for them, even if they tend to get on his nerves sometimes.

louis had inherited his father’s laid-backness & his mother’s charms and to some extent, vanity.

louis was a troublesome child, but one who could get away with literally anything. this would create troubles for him in the future, as louis didn’t really suffer any consequences for his actions & thought he could get away with anything.

the more he grew up, the more louis tended to clash with his father. it was nothing too serious, but bill was the family member louis tended to get along with the least.

perhaps the only problem louis had with being a weasley was having all those people’s legacy to live up to. he loved his parents, uncles & aunts, but at the end of the day louis was his own person & wanted to leave his own mark in the world.

𝙃𝙊𝙂𝙒𝘼𝙍𝙏𝙎

another weasley, the hat had mused. louis had always expected to be sorted into gryffindor; the hat even considered it for a moment but ultimately decided slytherin & at the end, louis was not disappointed.

louis ended up meeting different people from his usual social circle. some of those kids’ parents fought on the opposite side of louis’. he got to see their point of view; another perspective of the war stories his parents had told him. at first louis did recognize how harmful & wrong some of their opinions were, but it seemed like he got used to them at one point. he had inherited his dad’s loyalty & at the end, louis would do anything for the friends he made in slytherin. though being loyal to both his family & friends left him feeling conflicted at times.

louis joined the quidditch team as a chaser during his third year. he quickly discovered that quidditch was one of his biggest passions & seemed like a good outlet for all his outlet.

perhaps it was his veela charms, but louis didn’t seem to mind the attention he got from girls one bit. he liked dating around & struggled to commit most of the time - really, louis was set on having as much fun as he could, never intentionally meaning to hurt someone.

while louis was seemingly all about having fun & living his life to the fullest - pulling pranks with his mates, sneaking out late at night, throwing & attending parties, he still cared for his studies.. at least the classes that interested him. louis had always found it hard to focus if he thinks of something as boring. he’s never dealt with boredom well, due to his impulsive nature.

𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏

after graduating, louis decided he’d like to make quidditch his career. another part of him also wanted to travel, leave the country, experience something new - quidditch could offer all of those things.

it felt nice, doing his own thing. for the past few years, louis has had matches all across europe, though he did stay in france a bit longer. he liked getting to experience his mother’s homeland for himself. most of all, louis liked to meet new people, see new places, have new experiences. he was living his life to the fullest, while making sure to always write back to vic & dom and some of his cousins.

he’s back home now & means to stay. tensions are rising & louis feels like he’s at a crossroad - between family and friends.

𝙒𝘼𝙉𝙏𝙀𝘿 𝙋𝙇𝙊𝙏𝙎

best friends / squad. most likely other slytherins around his age. they would’ve met at hogwarts, but their friendship laster even after graduation.

dark influence. a friend of louis who’s a death eater or supports the death eaters. i’m also up for this being a romantic - but these two have a strong connection regardless. they seem to always bring out the worst out of each other & no matter how bad it gets, they can’t stay away.

the responsible friend. someone a bit more grounded than louis who looks out for him & calls him out on his bullshit

exes / past flings. louis doesn’t tend to commit easily or take relationships seriously. so they either didn’t really mean anything or if they did, they wouldn’t have ended up well.

friends with benefits. both of them have agreed that there’s no feelings involved.

partner in crime. if louis has a stupid idea, this person will make it even stupider. when these two get together, a disaster is always meant to happen - but at least they’re having tons of fun.

party buddy. maybe they threw parties together during their hogwarts years or meet up now when they’re up for a good time. regardless, if louis is up for a good party or a few drinks, this is the person he hits up.

quidditch buddy. maybe they’re teammates or simply have bonded over their love for quidditch / practice togetherer.

enemies / frenemies. these two can’t stand each other for some reason, or maybe louis enjoyes getting on their nerves. he doesn’t tend to take most things seriously, but a sure way to get louis to despise you is hurt his sisters.

#potterintro

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t-o-m-hollands · 4 years

Text

A/N: Cointens violence and mentions of injuries, war and blood. Also swearing and drinking. Smut in future parts, nothing in this.

“It seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in.”

― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

When Tom’s grandfather passes away, he inherits an office in the middle of a buzzling London. He has no idea what to do with it.

The year is 1947 and Tom is restless after the war. After a chance meeting with his old comrade Harrison and a drunken lunch at the local pub they decide to open up a detective agency. After finding you huddled up in a library while chasing an unwilling witness Tom decides to hire you as the agency’s secretary. You, reluctantly, take up the offer from the charming stranger.

Together the three of you face some of London’s most hard-boiled criminals and lethal femme fatales.

You have to navigate your way through adulthood, life after war and your growing feelings for your boss.

***

The pub was unusually crammed with people, workers meeting up with each other for a pint before heading home to their families. He could see them through the muted windows, cheering and laughing, pints of beer clutched in their hands. Now, it certainly wasn’t the nicest pub in London, a thick cover of mud covered the floor, the walls were so dirty that it was hard to tell what the original wallpaper had looked like. But then again, it was the Bugle, a pub well hidden in the Shafto Mews in London. It was not a pub you just happened to stroll in to, looking for a place to eat or a friendly place to catch up with a long-lost comrade in. It was a seedy and dirty place, where the beers came cheap and the brawls started easy.

The barman, a Mr. Eric Brew, was a brusque and quick-tempered elderly man with a beer belly so large it made it hard for him to steer his way through the many bottles and glasses behind the bar. Luckily for him it was unusual for anyone to ordered anything other than a pint or perhaps a glass of cheap and watered-down whiskey.

Tom loved this place, because no one ever bothered him here. This was not a place to talk to strangers in.

On this particular autumn afternoon the air outside was crisp and full of the smell of pavement after rain, it smelled of London. Currently though the sky was bluer than it had been all summer and the leaves on the trees had just started to change their colours. There was a distinct chill in the air. Tom shivered in his dress shirt, thinking to himself that this was sure to be the last time that year he’d get away with not wearing a jacket.

As he stepped inside, he exchanged the almost impossible fresh autumn air for a cigarette smoke fog. It was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon, and the sound of loud voices and clinking glasses filled the air. Tom gathered it must be payday. It was long ago that he stopped to bother about the days of the week or when pay was due. Not because of an abundance of money but for the lack of a steady job.

Walking up the bar he told Eric to pour the usual and handed him a coin. Eric grunted and started to pour into a glass that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months.

“Busy today, mate” Tom stated. Eric grunted again and handed him his drink.

As Tom sat down in the far, and well hidden, corner of the pub he thought to himself that his so-called conversation with the barman had been his longest conversation in days. After the war had ended, he’d stayed out in France, despite his mother’s letters begging him to come home he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t miss his family, on the contrary, being apart from them felt more torturous than anything he’d lived through during the war.

Still, he thought as he gulped down on his drink, he had been through war, and that does change a person. He wasn’t the same care-free boy who’d so gladly enlisted, desperate for some preconceived idea that the war would satisfy his deep-rooted need for adventure, to please his longing for glory. He’d happily waved his younger brothers and his parents goodbye on the platform, surrounded by sad looking boys saying farewells to their loved ones.

The war had not given him what he wanted. There had been no glory or sense of adventure. And even though the worst injury he’d suffer was a broken nose that had more to do with his own stupidity than actual fighting he had still seen the suffering of others. Walked through villages so bombed there was nothing, no human nor animal left. Nothing but ruin and corpses left to rot. He’d seen the torn apart remains of what had once been children on the street. He had had to breath trough the smell of decaying flesh as they walked by. He had lost friends and comrades.

The war had changed him, and he still wasn’t sure if it was for better or worse. All he knew was that he couldn’t face his father, or his mother. Not yet. He thought of his little brothers, how much five years must have changed them. He quietly wondered if he’d recognise them if he passed them on the streets today. He tried to convince himself that he would, and only after half a bottle of whiskey did he feel brave enough to admit it to himself that he probably wouldn’t. Too long had passed.

The only reason he had come back to England at all was for a surprise visit from a solicitor, who had tracked him down somewhere outside of Cannes, informing him of the passing of his grandfather. Tom had few memories of said grandfather What he could recall was a fearsome and stern figure, Victorian in his manner. Tom could remember looking up to the damn near giant as he looked down at Tom with disapproval written all over his face as Tom stood in front of a broken vase, he’d accidentally shattered while chasing the cat. It certainly had not been a man fond of children. Tom had always kept his distance from the man whenever they had visited, scared of the scolding the older man was more than capable of.

Therefore, it had been, to say the least, a great surprise when said grandfather had left his entire inheritance to his oldest grandson.

Sure, there hadn’t been a lot of actual money, not after all the death-duties and inheritance taxes had gone through, but he’d gotten his office and the apartment above it, placed bang on one of the busiest streets of London. What his grandfather had used the office for he had no idea, and the solicitors refused to tell him anything about is grandfathers’ dealings, but judging by the state of the place it must have been an awfully long time since anyone sat their foot in the place, probably not since before the war, the first one. The entire place was, like this very pub, filled with dirt and dust and long abandoned forgotten things. Most of which was nothing more than trash, a chair that surely would break as soon as anyone sat down on it, a desk with one broken leg and a filing cabinet full of mouldy documents.

The only distinctive feature was a rather well-made painting. Not only was the portrait of the young lady striking, but the gold frame surrounding it was solid gold. Something that had chocked Tom greatly. For he had never seen anything look quite so out of place than that gold framed picture of a young, beautiful women with seemingly shining eyes –

“Surely it can’t be – Tom Holland, OI! Tom!”

Tom instinctively looked up, only to meet the eyes of a dearly beloved friend.

“Mate! As I live and breathe!”

“Where have you been, buddy?” Harrison happily exclaimed, pulling out the chair opposite of Tom and before pretty much falling down on it, a pint of beer in hand and a massive grin on his face.

“I haven’t seen you since Monte Cassino– ” he silenced himself. Maybe because of the look in Tom’s eyes, maybe because of memories of his own.

(I haven’t seen you since the war, I haven’t seen you since we were crying in the bunkers, thinking we would die. Hoping that we would. Hoping that we wouldn’t.)

“Yeah” is all Tom can manage to get out, lungs suddenly feeling too tight.

They both take large gulps from their glasses, avoiding the others eye.

“So how you’ve been, mate?” Harrison asks, sounding more mellow now, less cheerful.

“It’s been good, bud” Tom says, trying to sound happy, trying to raise the mood a little. He can see the dark clouds of the war in Harrisons eyes, can see it clear as day even in this smoke-filled, god forsaken pub. It’s still haunting him. And he doesn’t quite know what else to say, doesn’t know how to voice the fact that he himself is hardly sleeping anymore, that he spent two years in France living as a wanderer and picking up odd jobs wherever he could find them, not even trying to pick up the pieces from the past. Not knowing where to begin

(At home, the part of him that’s braver than the rest seem to always whisper. Start at home and build from there.)

“Yeah?” There’s a note of hope in Harrison’s voice and as he looks at him the clouds in his eyes seem to clear, if only a little, and Tom’s heart breaks for his old friend. He knows that desperation, saw it all over France in the soldier's eyes. A desperate longing for proof that there was something good in the world, even after everything that had been done.

“Yes, mate! It’s been grand. I came into an inheritance and all!” And upon seeing the look of pure surprise in Harrisons now cloud-free face Tom bursts into genuine laughter, not caring to think about how long ago it had been since he had made a whole-hearted, genuine laughter.

“Alright, let’s order some food and then let’s catch up, yeah?”

And they did. The food at The Bugle was awful. Tom knew this, since coming back to London he’d drink away his consciousness in this pub and once or twice he had given in and ordered what The Bugle’s chef referred to as food. He knew this but did not care, for the company was excellent.

It turned out Harrison had come home immediately after the war. Had tried to pick up the pieces from before. He met up with his old friends (the ones that’d survived), he dated a different girl every week, unable to settle and now lived in his parent’s townhouse in Belgravia while they spent most of their time on the family estate out in Norfolk. He too was currently out of a job, however the difference was that Harrison had no need for work, the allowance his parents gave him and his own grandparents inheritance (which, although Tom never asked, but presumed) far exceeded his own.

Tom sensed that Harrison, just like himself, felt a deeply-rooted restlessness since coming home. It was in the way his left leg wouldn’t stop tapping, his regular glances around the room, in the way he just shovelled the food around his plate, not eating much.

Tom in return told him, although with far less detail than his friend had given, of staying out in France, of a surprise visit by the solicitors. He told him of the abandoned office and apartment he now was the owner of. He even told him of the portrait hanging above the broken desk.

They talked about old times, of old friends and past lovers, and every time the name of one of those comrades that didn’t make it to the end of the war was mentioned an awkward silence spread between them before the other one quickly started a new story.

(Harrison noticed that Tom never mentioned his parents, or his brothers. Not once. But he doesn’t say anything. He think they’ll get to that eventually.)

A loud crashing breaks their conversation and both Harrison and Tom are on their feet before either one of them has even registered where the sound came from.

“YOU FUCKING SWINE, I’LL GIVE YOU NOTHING!” The screeching, and surprisingly high-pitched voice, comes from Eric the barman, who’s standing arms raised above his head behind the bar. A young man, not even wearing anything to mask his face, is holding a revolver and pointing it right at Eric’s chest.

Before he’s even fully comprehended what he’s doing he’s halfway across the pub, people scattering out of his way, and out of the robbers aim. He can sense Harrison’s presence right behind him and then they’ve both tackled the young man to the ground. All Tom can think about is to get his hands on the man’s revolver, so that he can secure it. He sees how Harrison tries to get a hold of the young robbers’ arms as he’s waving them around, trying to fight them both at once. Unfortunately, he gets in a lucky swing that hits Tom right over his nose, a nose that’s already been broken once, and blood gushes out. The man looks surprised by this, partly because of the sudden stream of blood falling over him and partly because he actually just hit someone. Tom quickly uses this for his advantage and dives down for the revolver as Harrison secures the burglar’s arms behind his back.

They manage to hold him down until the police comes. They give them a quick rundown of what happened. Eric, furious and face alarmingly red, fills in when he manages to find words, shaking from fury. One of the policemen offer to drive Tom to the hospital to have his nose looked at but he refuses. Then they ask if he’d like to press charges. Tom takes one quick look at the young man now sitting in a police car and shakes his head. The boy, for on closer inspection he’s nothing more than a boy, looks terrified, and honestly, he’s already in enough trouble with the law. During the past few years crime in London has been on the rise. Young and restless men all coming home from the war, looking for jobs where there are none and haunted from memories from the battlefields. It’s no wonder there’s desperation in the air.

So, Tom and Haz walks away, leaving the two police cars and its officers, a furious pub owner with an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, and an entire pub of people with their noses pressed up against its foggy windows.

As they walk, without discussing where they’re going, Tom suddenly bursts out in laughter. He doesn’t know why, but the restlessness that’s done nothing short but haunted him for years now has suddenly vanished. There’s a pause and then Harrison joins in and Tom knows, knows that he feels the same. That this sudden rush of adrenalin was just what he needed too.

They practically double over with laughter, leaning on the other to keep upright and when they finally stop a comfortable silence fill the quiet as they walk on.

Before long, and before having reflected on where his feet are leading him, they’re standing outside of 15 Sloane street.

“Is this it?” Harrison asks, voice filled with curiosity as he looks up at the red-bricked building.

“Yeah” is all Tom manage to get out as an answer. Because suddenly he feels almost shy, like he’s showing Harrison some long kept secret. And for a moment they just stand and admire the building. “Can I look inside?” Haz asks, curiosity colouring his every word. So, Tom unlocks the door and they step inside.

Inside the air feels heavy, not like in the pub where it had been full of smoke, but instead it feels old, and if it hadn’t been so damn cold outside Tom would have opened up the windows.

The ground is as covered in mud and dust and dirt as the pubs floor. The walls look dull too. But the space is good, a large foyer to receive visitors, a guest bathroom, an office, a kitchen and a staff bathroom too.

“So” Harrison finally says, having taken in the place in silence. “What are you going to do with it?”

And Tom doesn’t know what to say because honestly – is that not just the question that’s frequently been on his mind since he first got here. “Dunno” ha answers lamely. “I suppose,” he starts but stops himself, feeling too embarrassed at his childish idea.

“What?” Haz encourages.

“Well” Tom begins, and then before he loses his gut he rambles out “It would be cool to be a detective though, wouldn’t it?” He doesn’t look at his old friend as he says this. He should though, because he misses out on the massive grin spreading across Harrison’s face.

“Oh totally!” He all but yells. “Like Sherlock Holmes, or Phillip Marlowe?”

“Phillip Marlowe, surely!” Tom responds, finally looking at his old comrade. He feels light as air, having finally put words on a wish that’s long been on his mind.

But now Haz looks awkwardly down, down on his well-polished, hand-made shoes and the muddy ground. “What?” Tom asks, worry threatening to blow his happy bubble.

“Look, you don’t have to, it’s just, like if you don’t want it or you find me lacking you could just sack me bu–“

“Of course, you’ll join me” Tom interrupts Harrisons awkward attempt at asking to work with him. “Really?” He asks, eyes gleaming with happiness. “You, ‘course mate, wouldn’t wanna do it without you”.

***

And so, it begins.

They start with trying to make the place habitable. After all, the office space needs to be a presentable enough environment for clients to feel comfortable to share their troubles with them and preferably the apartment above needs to be clean enough for Tom to live in without contracting a disease. It’s hard work, and Harrison loudly complains and gruntles and questions why they can’t hire someone to do it. Tom just laughs and tells him to shut his over-privileged mouth and keep mopping.

The truth is they could easily get someone in to do the cleaning for them, it’s just that Tom doesn’t want to, feels like they really ought to do this by hand, by themselves. To build the business from the ground up. And quite frankly, some real, good hard work is just what he needs. For the first time in ages he’s so physically exhausted by the time he goes to bed that he falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. He still has nightmares, but he gets in a couple more hours sleep every night and that makes it worth it.

Even though Harrison loudly grumbles about the rough labour he is a hard worker. Tom teases him a lot about it. Telling him he didn’t expect to end up doing this when he was sent to that posh public school as a child. Telling him that this is what good honest works feels like. Informing him that the pain he had in his knees from scrubbing the floors is what heavy labour feels like. It’s all jokes thought, for even they grew up worlds apart on the social scale they still fought on the same battlefield and as children they fought the same imaginary dragons.

In the end aid comes in the form of Lady Lauren Osterfield herself.

Tall and lean and dressed from top to toe in fine silk and fur in soft colours and with hair, the same shade as her son, in soft waves. She sways into the office one day, unannounced, as Tom’s trying to scrub the dirt from the walls and Harrison’s sprawled out on the floor, fighting a particularly stubborn piece of dirt. A hard a look of deepest disapproval is written all over her face as she takes in the scene.

“Darling” she drags out the word and make the endearment sound like a loving, but stern warning. “You simply cannot do this on your own”

“But mommy we-” Harrison begin but she stops him with a raised hand. “I will hear none of it, sweetie. If there is one thing I know it’s potential, and this place has got spades of it. However, I will not see my darling boys like this” she huffs, then adds “also, the rate you two are going at you’ll be in your 50’s before you even had your first client.”

She walks over to where Tom stands, now leaning against the broken desk, hands in pockets and covered in dust and sweat. “Sweetheart, it is wonderful to see you again” And she strokes his cheek with a satin gloved hand and Tom can’t help but to lean into the touch.

He had spent many a school holiday at the Osterfield house. Although, house wasn’t the right word. Technically it was a manor house – Osterfield manor was in fact its name. It had been built by Lord Ashley Osterfield in the early 1600th and had stood proudly on its green fields ever since. Tom had lived in the village, in a small cottage with his mother, father, three brothers and a half-blind cook/nanny named Cully. Harrison, since it was the family tradition, had been sent away to Eton whereas Tom had gone to the village school. But whenever summer holiday rolled around, they’d play on the grounds to the manor and in the forest surrounding it. They had played thief’s and robbers, Robin Hood and Peter Pan. Life had been blissful and full of light. He can still remember how the last month before summer break had seemed endless, how he’d counted down the days until his best friend would return, staring out of the window during class, not listening to whatever Ms Frank was going on about. They sent each other letters of course. About what was going on at home, what tricks each had played on their friends, or on their teachers, how awful school was or about the latest mystery novel they’d read.

His memories of the Osterfield family were many and fond. Lady Osterfield, with her loving but stern ways, never looking anything less than perfection, bringing them meringues and freshly made lemonade to the treehouse where they sat people-watching, spying on the garden parties going on below. Memories of Lord Osterfield, reading his newspaper outside in the warm summer sun, dressed in linen suits and with a great moustache covering his upper lip, teaching Tom tennis and playing croquet with them. And then little Charlotte Osterfield, Harrisons little sister. With her long, blonde hair neatly combed and braided, always carrying around a teddy bear, following them wherever they went. Harrison would get rather annoyed with her for that, but Tom had always said that she could join them if she wanted to.

He remembers Christmas eve at their house. A ginormous three in the hall, neatly decorated by Lady Osterfield herself. Countless of cousins and great-aunts and uncles coming over. The staff running around cleaning every corner. The chef, Mary her name had been, yelling orders and shouting herself blue in the face. The end result had been incredible though, and as snow covered the entire manor and its grounds there was a fire lit in every room, the smell of ham and turkey in the air, glitter and light and mistletoe and presents in overload. He remembers still, being sent home in the horse driven carriage on Christmas eve, belly full of delicious food and sweets, and presents from Lord and Lady Osterfield to every member of his family, including one to Cully, surrounding him as he watched the snow fall over the pretty little village outside the carriage window.

“Hello, Lady Osterfield, it’s been a while” he manages to get out. Because this is, has always been, his second mother. And it hurts even more to see her now, despite the fact that war doesn’t seem to have aged her a day. But seeing her reminds him so much of his own mommy, and his stomach seems to revolt.

“That” she says, and he thinks her eyes are wet with unshed tears “it certainly has been”. She doesn’t ask how his war had been, why he hadn’t return sooner, or sent them letters. Probably understands that he cannot give her those answers. Not yet at least. She lowers her hand and take a step back.

“So” she announces and there’s a level of authority to her voice that makes both Harrison and Tom stand up straighter. “I will send Georgina over, hopefully she can start tomorrow already, because this really is urgent”. She looks around her surrounding, the broken furniture, the floors and ceiling that refuse to give up the dirt they’ve been holding onto for years, despite Tom and Harrisons desperate scrubbing.

“Sorry? Mommy, who.... who on earth is Georgina?”

Tom smiles, for he can almost hear the curse word Harrison so nearly lets out.

“Oh darling, it’s Georgina Brewster, she is simply marvellous and really the only one who can save this place. I shall call on her immediately, she will work wonders, just you see”.

Georgina Brewster, as it turns out, would have put fear of the devil into any and every one of the generals Tom had met during the war. She practically comes in as a steamroller into the office the very next day and before either Tom or Harrison know what’s going on they’ve been thrown out of their office with strict orders to “keep out of the way, for gods sake, and don’t come back until next Friday at least!”

And because neither Tom nor Harrison dare to contradict her, even though Tom’s apartment is above the office and he now has nowhere to sleep, they listen and keep out of her way, spending their time at Harrisons, or rather Harrisons parents, place in Belgravia.

There they plan out and strategize, trying to agree on what exactly their business should be and how they should conduct it.

Their first hurdle is the name of the agency.

“So”

They’re at ‘The Bugle’ again and Tom is swirling the liquid in his glass back and forth, holding a lit cigarette in his other hand. Around them the air is filled with smoke and conversations. Tom had, rather cheekily, asked the barman if they shouldn’t get their drinks for free, seeing as they did save his ass just the other night. The barman had done his usual ritual of mumbles and grumbles before pouring them some watered down Irish whiskey.

“So?” he asks, implying that Harrison should continue his unfinished statement.

“What should we name it, mate?” Harrison is leaning back against the wall, his long legs sprawled out. He looks as exhausted as Tom feels.

“Name what?” Tom dumbly inquires, only half his mind on the conversation, the other on the gorgeous woman at the bar. She looks strangely out of place, wearing a respectably coat, dark hair neatly organised in curls and a soft smile on face as she’s conversation with the infamously grumpy barman, who – and Tom can hardly believe his eyes – is smiling back at her.

Harrison snorts and with a voice practically dripping in sarcasm he answers “Oh the golden retriever puppy we’re adopting! The fuck you think, mate? The detective agency of course!”

Tom gives his friend a kick on his sprawled-out legs.

“Holland Detective Services” he then states.

Harrison goes quiet for a second, rubbing the aching spot on his leg where Tom managed to get in a perfect hit, the bastard had always been good and noting soft spots. “Not Holland & Osterfield?” he asks, only half joking.

“Nah, too posh mate, we’ll sound like some solicitors’ firm, you know, like ‘Bundle & Alfredson & Alfredson & Bundle”, too ridiculous. Plus, no one trusts solicitors with their secrets, they’re too posh and proper. We need people to feel like they can come to us with things they can’t go to the police with.”

He looks over to the bar again, but the beatiful lady is nowhere to be seen.

And so, Harrison Detective Service is founded. The office (the apartment miss Brewster luckily left him handle himself) is revealed to them.

It’s perfect. There’s no other word for it. It’s looks professional but not over styled. The two large desks made from oak, the bar table with its whiskey decanter, the filing cabinets strategely placed in the little backroom, the lamps giving the office an almost golden and mysterious lightning, and on the wall hanging above his own desk, the painting of the woman that his grandfather left him. The only thing remaining from the original office.

It doesn’t take long until their first client arrives. He’s a perhaps not the ideal client, Tom notes. The man is in his late 50’s, wearing an ill fitted suit and smelling distinctly of B.O. He is however willing to pay.

Thus, this is how Tom ends up chasing a, to say the least, unwilling witness all down Euston Road. The man he’s chasing is fast, and Tom’s side is hurting and he feels out of form. He really should have had something other than whiskey for lunch. The man does a quick turn left, right over the road and Tom’s right at his heel.

A car horn blows and there’s a blinding light and for a moment Tom’s back on the battlefield in France, he throws up his arms, trying to shield himself for whatever is coming at him. His entire body tenses up and he waits for the inventible crash. But it doesn’t come, and there’s shouting but he can’t hear what they’re saying, the blood rushing through his head too loud for anything else to sound real. His lungs feel too tight and his breaths are shallow.

Slowly he regains control of himself, as he tries to take the world around him in.

The shouting is coming from a very angry driver, half hanging out of his window telling Tom to get out of the way, waving his arms in fuming gestures. People on the pavement have stopped what they’re doing, some mid conversation or mid walk, all just staring at him. He jumps into action again, desperately trying to push down the part of his brain that’s still in France. He can’t see his witness, but there’s only one place he really can have gone.

He runs up the marble stairs, ignoring the glaring stares around him.

The foyer is impressive to say the least. It’s a large circular room, marble from floor to ceiling. Right in front of him, but all across the room, is a reception and an elderly woman sitting behind it.

“Excuse me sir, we close in twenty minutes,” she calls after him, but it’s all she manages to get out before he’s gone, having made his way all across the hall and into the large oak doors with a sign simply stating ‘Main Library’.

The doors slam behind him and the sound eco in the silence. At first he’s taken aback, for this is nothing like the marble mausoleum he’s left behind, and if he thought the reception area had been large then this room is massive. It’s nothing short of a labyrinth of oak bookshelves, reaching from top to ceiling and filled with large volumes of books that look as if they must be older than queen Victoria.

He can only assume that this is where his witness is hiding, somewhere in this maze he has taken cover, wrongly assuming that Tom will just give up and leave. His witness is in no such luck. Tom does however remember noting the lineament of a revolver inside the other man’s jacket, and by now he’s had more than enough time to take it out, perhaps just waiting for Tom to be close enough not to miss.

The library looks empty and surely it must be this late. On slow but quiet feet he makes his way to the left side of the room, deciding to start there. Careful not to make a sound he removes his own revolver from its holster. Slowly he starts to make his way down the aisles, every time he turns a corner he knows it’s about whoever is the quickest with their trigger that will win.

By the time he’s made it down aisle three he can feel his heart beat so hard in his chest he finds himself wondering if it’s going to leave a bruise on his skin with its violent beating. Adrenaline has been running in his veins since the near contact with the automobile outside.

And then he hears it, a sound, what might be the noise of shuffling, and he starts to move with even higher awareness of the danger of the situation. Any second now he could stare down the barrel of a gun.

Before he can be a coward about it, he jumps around the corner of the shelf, gun in hand and pointing it straight at the witness.

Except it’s not him.

It most certainly is not him.

A pair of enormous and breathtakingly beautiful - but also terrified - eyes stare at him and for a second the whole world seems to stop, or crash, and Tom can’t help but feel like he’s a planet that completely unexpectedly has gotten knocked of its axis. He goes still, not just his body but his mind too. Everything just seems to stop, and Tom can not remember anytime that has ever happened to him before. All he sees is a pair of hauntingly beautiful, and vert familiar, eyes.

“I’m sorry sir, but weapons are not allowed inside the library.” Her voice is soft and even, but Tom can hear the slight tremble behind them, he can tell she’s playing braver than she feels. He knows that trick all too well. So, he lowers his revolver, but doesn’t unload it, still ready for his hostile witness to pop up, and if he does Tom will be ready for him.

“I beg your pardon, miss” he says and looks her up and down, trying to take in the rest of the woman in front of him. He’s pretty sure she is the same woman he saw at the Bugle the other night. She’s only a few centimetres shorter than he is, but then she’s wearing a pair of kitten heels. Her black pencil skirt and white blouse practically scream out respectability and woman. Around her neck hangs a thin, golden necklace with a little golden heart attached to it. A fleeting question of who has given her this pass his brain. And then there’s her hair, brown and styled in and fashionable curls.

“Sir” she says, and she sounds sterner now, a little wrinkle between her eyebrows “could you please pu-“ but before she can finish the sentence, before she can even finish her though Tom’s pushed her down on the ground, trying to cover her with his body as bullets fly around him. He swears under his breath, and he feels the librarians still body under him and he can practically feel her heartbeat. He tries very hard not to react to how close their bodies are to each other. His hyper focused mind hears her hitched breathing even above the sound of a firing gun and he sends a silence prayer to whatever god might be listening that she’ll get out of this unharmed.

The witness is far away from them, all across the hall and if it wasn’t for the fact that he didn’t want to leave this woman unprotected he would just hope for the best and rush against him, firing as many bullets as he had and if he survived this, and if Harrison found out he would just have to take his scolding later. Still trying to cover the women underneath him he raises his gun and fires. He knows the chances of him aiming right are damn near zero from here, but he wants to make it clear to the other man that he sure is not going to give in without a fight.

Still keeping his eyes on the bookshelf the witness has hidden behind he whispers to the librarian, “when I move off you, go hide behind the bookshelf, do not run for the main entrance whatever you do, but if there’s another way out, and you get a chance to leave, I suggest you fucking take it miss”. He hears a hiss of breath and then, a quiet “alright” and that is all he needs.

Springing to his feet he rushes seven meters ahead and then throws himself down behind another bookshelf. Daring to cast a look behind him he just about manages to see the secretary hide behind another bookshelf. Good, he thinks to himself, at least he doesn’t have to worry about her. And so he sprints out from the bookshelf and runs for all his might straight against the bookshelf the witness is hiding behind. It doesn’t fall, but he can hear countless of books falling, hopefully all over the man with the gun. He hears a shout of surprise and despite the situation he can’t help but smiling, the all too familiar rush of adrenalin runs through him and he jumps around the corner. However, before he can even raise his weapon something hard hits his temple and the world goes white for a moment as he stumbles over.

The other man is above him, throwing punches, hitting different places of Tom’s face with every hit. Tom tries kicking and luckily enough the stupid idiot above him has mounted him at chest level and haven’t taken his legs in consideration. One of Tom’s kicks hits the shelf and as he grabs the man's arms with his, stopping the flow of punches he sees a thick book (Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, he notices with glee) fall down and hit the man straight on the head. This time it’s his turn to stumble and Tom shake him off him with ease, but the other man quickly recovers, and lunches over him again, arms stretched out to grasp around his throat. Before he can even try to fight the bigger man off him, the loud sound of the shot of a gun echoes against the walls of the library and he stills. Then he feels it. A bright burning in his side and then, another shot.

He manages to turn around trying to make sense of the situation. On the floor lays the hostile witness, clutching his leg, where he’s clearly just been shot, and above him stands the librarian. Arms shaking as she’s clasping the gun in her hands.

For a moment Tom forgets about everything else. The mess they’ve made. The fact the police must be on their way. The bleeding man beside him. The fact that he’s bleeding too. All he sees is he terrified but impossibly brave woman in front of him.

Slowly, trying to ignore the pain in the side of his stomach, he gets up and walks over to her, arms stretched up in a gesture to show that he means her no harm, for she looks terrified to the point where she’s trembling all over. Her eyes are still fixed on the man on the ground, who’s shouting in agony.

“Look at me” he says, and his voice is firm and calm “Hey, miss, look at me”. She does, and something in his stomach churns. Once in the woods he and Harrison had all but stumbled over an injured deer, it had had the same look upon its face then as the woman had upon hers now. But he doesn’t flinch, don’t want her to lose focus but keep it on him and not the bleeding bastard on the floor.

When he finally reaches her, he takes the gun from her still clasped hands, unloads it, and put it in its folder by his chest.

“You’ll be alright, yeah? I promise you’ll be alright” he tries to reassure her but she keeps looking at him with that utterly terrified look on her face.

“Just hang on for a second, alright?” He doesn’t want take his eyes off of her, but he knows he has to, so he turns away from her and walks over to the injured man. Leaning down over him he whispers in his ear “mate, the police and probably the ambulance are on their way. They will be here any moment. Now, listen up, alright, ‘cause I’m only saying this once. You will be a fucking gentleman about this and when the police ask what happened here you’ll tell them it was some randy bugger trying to nick your stuff, yeah? You defended yourself, ‘cause you’re a lad and all that bullocks. They won’t believe you, but they can’t prove anything else.” His voice is low and threatening and he knows he has the witness full attention. “And in return” he continues “in return, I’ll stop hunting you over this Faulcon business, yeah? I’ll go after someone else, and when I finally have enough to turn that bastard over to the police, your name won’t be mentioned anywhere, yeah?” The man looks up at him with bloodshot eyes and nods.

Moving away from him he swiftly walks over to where the other mans’ revolver got lost in the fight and he takes it, places it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he walks over to the librarian, who, apart from her shaking hands has not moved a muscle. She’s staring at him, but not at his face this time, but eyes fixed on the wound at his right side. It’s pretty much only graced him. It still hurts though, and a bloodstain is growing ever larger and larger, staining his white button ups to the point where he doubts he’ll ever get the red out.

“Miss, look at me, yeah?” He tried to get eye-contact with her again, because even if she’s been incredible brave so far, she looks as if she’s about to pass out “Just focus on me, I’ve got to get us out of here thought, do you know any other way then the main entrance? Some back door?”

As he’s talking he buttons up the suit jacket, effectively hiding the wound. He sees her eyes flicker down for a brief second as he does so. Then, as if she suddenly wakes up she takes a breath so deep he can’t help but to wonder if her lungs had been empty. “Yes” she then says, and he feels the immense relief over the fact that her voice sounds clear and controlled again. “It leads straight out into a back alley and then out on Gordon Street.”

He stares at her, taking her in again. Her dark hair still in perfect curls framing her, perhaps somewhat paler, face. Her back is straight, her hands still somewhat shaking. He notices her red fingertips, and no gold ring to be seen. At least he doesn’t have to deal with some unknown husband, who probably wouldn’t be too happy with him if he’d heard what Tom dragged her into.

“What’s your name?” he asks, because he has to know.

“Laura” she breath out.

Just a first name then.

“Well Laura” he says “let’s leave”.

He takes one of her shaking hands in his, and she leads the way out of the chaotic scene, leaving behind them a massive hall and a labyrinth of bookshelves and in that labyrinth an injured man slowly losing consciousness.

***

A/N - Harrisons family is of course entirely fictionalised. As is everyone in this story.

Also, my sort of face claim for Laura in this story is Gene Tierney, but imagine it as whoever you like.

#tom holland #tom holland headcanon #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland x y/n #tom holland x oc #tom holland au #tom holland x you

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irithyllians · 3 years

Note

Present 5 Del!

WAR FLASHBACKS, Ella I typed this out in detail when you asked and then pressed delete instead of post bc I was excited! Press F to pay respects.

PRESENT (end of RoW)

5) What kind of people do they usually interact with? Who are their friends, the people they look up to/trust, and who are their “associates”?

She cares for a lot people (though considers very few her friends), so I’m going to limit it to a few of her prominent “anchors” (her boon/curse makes it very difficult to discern what feelings are her own, so Del’s anchors are people she knows for certain she has her own connection to, they “anchor” her to her humanity, and for reasons she doesn’t understand, their emotions impact her more strongly than others. There are also negative anchors, like some of the people she’ll kill in the course of her Fourth Ideal, but this ain’t about them).

Jasnah -- Del has worked for Jasnah ever since she was sent to kill her, about a year after Gavilar’s assassination. Whatever it was she sensed in Jasnah’s heart broke her brainwashing and convinced her there were greater causes to serve. It took Jasnah years to trust her, and Jasnah keeps even those dear to her at arms length, but they care about each other and are as close as two people like them can be. Del isn’t really capable of seeing anyone with rose tinted glasses, but she served Jasnah unquestioningly for years, and I live for her showing up at Jasnah’s door just before RoW (she returned to Rall Elorim after OB expecting to be executed and Nale ruined everyone’s day by conscripting her to the Order of Skybreakers) to tell Jasnah that she needed to prove that a Skybreaker swearing themselves to her would be a wise decision. Tbh, I’m pretty proud of their weird and complicated dynamic. Also if anyone ever guessed that Del once had feelings for Jasnah... you are correct, and I still kinda wish that ship could have worked.

Talion -- highspren are generally considered distant, compared to the spren of other Orders, but Del nevertheless draws a lot of comfort from Talion’s presence, when they bond near the end of RoW. As long as Del never breaks her oaths, she is no danger to Talion. I’m looking forward to writing their KoW scenes; the nature of nahel bonds and what Del is means that Talion (re)learns human understanding and pain faster than she ever has before (she’s OLD even by spren standards, and has bonded plenty of Skybreakers before). It’s gonna hurt and I’m looking forward to it [finger guns].

Kaladin -- their dynamic is my bicycle for exploring the similarities and differences between Windrunners and Skybreakers, and I’m really fond of it. Del understands him, not only because of her empathic nature, but also because many of her own issues mirror his. She could have an interesting discussion with Syl about the fact that sometimes complete understanding of another’s burdens freezes you up and makes you even less qualified to help them. By RoW, I’d say they’re friends, after two years of him squinting at her for being an assassin (valid), and she’s gonna spend KoW going “nice try, buddy, I’ll go to therapy when you do” while he tears his hair out in annoyance and I think that’s just very sexy of her.

Moash -- though Del doesn’t remember her older brother or anything of her life before joining those of no name, Moash calls to her mind the feeling of caring for someone so much that she would be willing to die for them, and she quickly grows attached to him in WoR. This feeling has remained all the way through to the present. She is incapable of seeing him as some irredeemable evil, despite acutely feeling the pain of people he has hurt, rather she understands that Moash actually represents a very common world view among humanity, and she quietly wants so badly for him to find his place of belonging. Kaladin and Talion are the only people she has confided in about this.

Oro -- her mentor while Del was among those of no name. They’ve known each other since Del was 12, holy shit. Oro at the time played the part of an antagonist, and had goaded Del into her first kill. I don’t think Del understood until her visit to the Nightwatcher that Oro encouraged wholesale devotion to the organisation, not because she loved it and was unflinchingly loyal, but because she was broken and couldn’t stand the thought of seeing any more children killed for disobeying orders. Even before this understanding led Del to love her like a mother, she respected her greatly. And Oro definitely taught her that it is worth being hated by people you care about, if it means you stand a better chance of keeping them safe.

Kazien -- her mentor among the Skybreakers. They disagree 67% of the time but they’re FAMILY and Del definitely breathed a sigh of relief when the battle of Emul was over and she knew he was still alive.

Nale -- I’m gonna leave this for another time because it’s LONG, but in short: he makes her very angry and very sorry for him all at once.

THIS IS GETTING LONG, SO: Masha (who belongs to @theropunk), a Dustbringer who is her opposite in a lot of ways. Ryz, a Lightweaver she has known since she was in those of no name and reconnects with years later bc spren are meddlesome. Jevanna, her handmaid, Del popped a champagne bottle in spirit when she found out Jev killed her abuser. Good for her! 🥰

#answered asks #bridgefourisgayrights #thank you for the ask!! 💕#oc: del #oc: oro #oc: kazien #oc stuff

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jq37 · 4 years

Text

The Royal Report– A Crown of Candy Ep 3

Keep Sharp

On the Road Again

Welcome back to Calorum you guys. We last left off witnessing an actual miracle as a group of cheese assassins masquerading as meatlanders (and Brennan by proxy) failed to kill a single Candian, Tartguard included.

Now, everyone is picking up the pieces. Amethar is still messed up from the fight so he’s being tended to. Liam and some of the NPCs are working on clearing the tree from the road. Ruby, still covered in blood, is in one of the carriages and when she uses Prestidigitation to clear the blood from a circus flyer she was carrying, Calroy walks in and grabs her hand to stop her as a reflex. He quickly drops her hand--very bold move to grab one of the princesses like that--and tries to impress on her that the rest of the world isn’t like Candia and she really really needs to stop with the casual magic when they’re on the road. Ruby is really naively taken aback and frustrated by this information but Calroy describes it like it’s business as usual. Her aunt, Lazuli, has the title of Archmage but the official position is that the title is an archaic holdover from less enlightened times and she was simply a really good alchemist--even though everyone knows that’s untrue. That’s politics bay-bee! Lapin joins the conversation (along with Theo shortly after) and says that if people knew where he got his powers from, he’d be dead (which seems a weird thing to say with Calroy in earshot).

Outside, Liam is chopping up the tree and finds these little peppermint acorn things called Heartseeds which are basically concentrated, ambient, magical energy that can grant small wishes. Preston eats them and gains a fly speed of 40 (but it’s like he’s a firework--he has to land after 40 feet). Jet finds Liam and asks for help with keeping an eye on Ruby. She’s pretty shook after seeing her almost die. Liam is down to do it for nothing (the kid just wants to be included) but Jet insists on being in his debt and--always on brand--he just asks for some cool seeds. She also finds a meat shield that’s made out of gross, burnt, stuck-to-the-pan meat bits that she names Burnt Ends.

They get going again and in the PC wagon you have all the PCs but Jet (who is outside with the guards and Grissini) along with Cruller and his wife--Lady Donetta. She chats with Grissini for a little bit while the adults try to get her to get in the carriage. She’s finally swayed by Ruby but when she comes in she says she wasn’t (just) flirting. She was trying to get intel on how in trouble Ruby was. Liam offers that he speaks Ceresian so he can spy if they need him to and also did anyone have any dreams last night? Theo--who is trying to keep everyone alive and was like so close to being impressed by Liam--along with Lapin and Cruller try to get everyone back on track but Ruby--defiantly--is all, “They’re not gonna kill me. I’m a princess!” Theo points out that someone almost killed her literally ten minutes ago and Cruller points out that death isn’t the only bad thing that can happen to a person. She could get forcibly put in a monastery for instance. Jet is not even having that in hypothetical-land and says that as the heir princess, she would lay the smackdown on anyone who tried to do that.

It looks like things are about to dissolve into overlapping gibberish but Amethar does the dad thing of putting his foot down and yelling at everyone to get along before taking a dad nap passing out from his injuries. Lady Donetta patches him up while Cruller once again talks about the importance of politics. It’s not just them that have to play this game. The Meatlanders are polytheistic generally but all Bulbian on paper. Jet thinks this whole song and dance is ridiculous and should be changed once she has more sway in politics, but she’s willing to shut up for now. She’s also willing to keep Lapin’s secret, but him bringing it up sparks Cruller’s interest. Lapin tries to gloss over it but Liam chimes in that he’s sorry about breaking his teacup. Lapin shuts him up (Liam on a low Insight check thinks he hates him) and rolls a 14 to get Cruller off his back.

Secrets and Lies

As they cross the border into Fructerra, Sir Theo invites Ruby and Jet out for some fresh air and they invite Liam which he goes along with even though it’s clear he wanted to talk to the sisters alone. As soon as they’re out of earshot of everyone Theo turns off the scold and says that regardless of everything they’re all saying, Ruby absolutely needs to keep studying magic. He says that he was a ward of Lazuli who taught him some magic (including animating Sprinkle) and he has a whole-ass lore dump for them that he was planning on subtly revealing over time but now’s the time for getting everybody up to speed ASAP not mentoring from the shadows:

He says that Lazuli--who, like Ruby and Jet, wanted magic to be acceptable and not relegated to the shadows of one kingdom--was doing arcane research into wild stuff like immortality that would have advanced the world a lot further than its current state. She died sacrificing herself in a battle where she was the only Candian casualty. Theo was there and, before she sent him away, she said that she needed to do it to, “save [their] people and save [their] world.” He didn’t get what she meant and why that would be literally the hill she--a princess and Archmage--would choose to die on but he knows she would sometimes have visions of the future and he thinks she might have known Ruby was coming and needed to ensure that timeline happened. Ruby--who is outraged that this is the first she’s hearing of all of this and shocked that Theo is suddenly cool (“I've always been cool! All of us are cool!”) still doesn’t want to do all this “book stuff” or embrace any kind of magical destiny and even Jet is like, “Come on girl.” Anyway, Sir Theo tells them they just need to be chill and lowkey and he’ll hook them up with magical training and banned books for Jet. He also promises to teach Ruby the Find Familiar spell.

Liam helps Lady Donetta with herbal remedies for Amethar and he comes back at full health. Amethar gets to talking about Liam’s dad who he says had Liam’s knack from nature stuff and taught him (Amethar) how to fight. Calroy chimes in that his dad and Amethar fought together in the Ravening War. He also says that Liam being a hostage (he outright calls him a hostage) is what lets his dad not join the Concord (the kind of ride or die, post Ravening War pact everyone else is in) and remain an independent rebel state. Apparently, he seceded because, King Jadin (Amethar’s Dad--the past king), would not uphold Candia’s alliances. Liam’s dad (Duke Joren Jawbreaker) turned traitor to go fight with their Dairy Island allies.

It takes another couple of days to get to Comida and, on the way there, Ruby learns and casts the Find Familiar spell--netting her a butterscotch falcon that she names Yak after the noise he makes. She hopes he’ll be friends with Sprinkle because Siobhan knows that the second real objective of every D&D campaign (after making friends) is acquiring pets and having them play with each other (which is in direct opposition to the DM goal of not letting any of your players have any pets).

Cruller checks in with Theo about the secret magic lessons and also says that he’s looked into it and the imperial soldiers who saw Ruby do magic are gossiping. Grissini is shutting some of it down so it’s not spreading like wildfire but it’s really just a matter of time. Cruller tries to get more specifics about what Jet and Lapin were talking about (his Sugarplum magic) and Theo dodges the question. Cruller says that he can be more helpful if he’s in the loop but doesn’t push further.

Faces and Names

We have made it to Comida and, after a quick House Rocks family heart to heart, it’s time for a parade of a BUNCH of new characters:

Manta Ray Jack: Man at Arms of House Cheddar and one of Amethar’s Ravening War buddies. A literal 2 foot tall cube of cheese. He also has a tattoo of a Manta Ray on his arm which isn’t important to the plot but is important to me that you know.

Sir Morris Brie: Knight of House Cheddar, Master of State to the Duchess (who we’ll get to next) and another Dairy Island buddy of Amethar.

Duchess Primsy Coldbottle: A literal bottle of milk, 16-year-old regent of House Cheddar (Duchess of Lacramor specifically) and ruler of the Dairy Islands. On a nat 20, Ruby knows that Prince Tarthur Cheddar was the prince during the Ravening Wars but died. She also knows about…

Captain Annabelle Cheddar: (Captain of the Colby) who is this cool, naval, battle-ready lady that Ruby sees hanging out with a bunch of solider women fighters and having a great time while Primsy is talking to her advisors. Apparently, Anabelle should be the rightful heir to the Dairy Islands but was stripped of her title because she refused to marry (hmm) which Ruby thinks is sick as hell. She goes to chat her up and finds out that she’ll be fighting in the Melee part of the tourney.

Senator Augustus Ciabatta: A full bread person who’s a senator from the very populous Ceresia and he’s throwing coins to the people from his palanquin. (I want it on the record that I feel an episode called Bread and Circuses coming.)

Prince Cabbage: The adult son of King Cabbage. His palanquin is the second largest. The largest belongs to...

Hierophant Rex Belizabeth Brassica: She is basically the Bulb Pope. She’s like a green woman with broccoli hair. She and Lapin have met before before she became pope. They quickly talk and she invites him to tag along as they pay their respects to the Emperor. He agrees to go. She’s followed around by Archbishop Onionpatch (another Primogen from Greenhold in Vegetania).

Theo is a little nervous about Amethar cozying up to all these dairy people considering the attack but Amethar insists he can handle himself. There’s a big feast set up and Amethar goes to talk to Primsy who is just super sweet and seems to know she has a lot of responsibility that she is trying her level best to uphold. She’s like the anti Jet and Ruby and Brennan...if something happens to her...I swear...

Anyway, Theo is scanning the room for trouble and he sees (1) That Anabelle is looking at Amethar forlornly from across the room (maybe like she wishes she could be in the room where it happens so to speak?) and (2) there is a young Dairy nobleman stealth flirting with Primsy. Amethar asks Sir Brie about the attack and he says they had nothing to do with it. They don’t have the resources after the war which was fought largely in the Dairy Isles. He seems to blame Anabelle at least partially for the diminished power of House Cheddar based on the dirty look he shoots her when he mentions the state of the state. Amethar reiterates that the alliance between Candia and the Dairy Isles is solid and Manta Ray Jack pops in to casually drop that Amethar had a war girlfriend (lover? idk what the proper terminology is here) in the Far East Isles back in the day so I’m sure that’s gonna become relevant at the worst possible moment.

Brennan also curses us by unleashing Thad (Jet’s avocado pen pal boyfriend) onto the story and as soon as Jet re-meets this poncy, French-y, horny, avocado she’s like “I made a huge mistake” and later gets him to “meet her outside” so she can ditch him.

Theo goes with Liam to check up on Primsy because he’s concerned with whatever is going on with her and that cheese boy who he learns is her traveling companion--Lord Stilton Curdeau. And it’s covered by cologne but his cheese stink is familiar. He wants to alert Amethar but Amethar is currently eyeing Basha Myaso (Warlord of the Beef Clans and ruler of all of the Meatlands) who is glaring at him. On Calroy’s advice, he squares up with Basha who implies that Candia is responsible for the false flag attack. Amethar tells him to “watch [his] fucking mouth.” Diplomacy!

Meanwhile, Lapin is with the Pontifex in the Great Food Pyramid (which is, of course, a thing). She introduces him to Sir Keradin Deeproot who is this super buff super intense carrot Paladin. We learn that Lapin isn’t an archbishop and his title of primogen comes from his status as a “miracle worker”. Apparently, Miracle working is very uncommon even though the Bulbian church is so massive. When asked, Onionpatch says that things in Vegetania are fine except that King Belvedere Cabbage is infirm. Another Priogem--this one of Cersia--joins them, the Archbishop Fettucina Alfredi who is this very classically beautiful looking, toga wearing woman with glowing eyes--she’s also a miracle worker. Lapin is like, “Oh fuck,” because if she’s magic too then she might be able to tell that he’s not actually on the level.

Lapin veers away from Alfredi and chats up the Pontifex who says Brightgarden is OK but they're currently dealing with a murder of an archbishop in the Meatlands (the Archbishop Raddica). Lord Basha is looking for who did it and the Pontifex wants them brought to justice ASAP. Alfredi brings up the attack on the road and wonders about the rumors she heard about strange magic. Lapin, sweating bullets, lies and says that he thinks it was the work of the Bulb. On a 14 Deception from Lapin, Alfredi thinks lavender fog would be a weird Bulbian intercession. It sounds more like something a false good she’s heard about from Candia would do. What’s her name? The Sugarplum Fairy? Lapin, with a 25 Persuasion check, is able to wave that off as primitive backwoods things that he’s working to stamp out in Candia. That’s enough to get the Pontifex on his side and they go up to see the Emperor.

Outside of his room is his daughter--Lady Plumbeline Uvano--who is lowkey very upset about something. She greets them and then takes the Pontifex in to talk to the Emperor while Lapin waits outside with Alfredi and Kerradin. When she’s done paying the respects of the church, the whole holy crew goes back to the party. Before Lapin splits off, the Pontifex does a little pull aside with him about Candia’s role in the war and how she thinks, with him at the helm, Candia is in good hands.

At Sir Theo's suggestion, Amethar has the Candy Crew stand with the Cheese Peeps during the announcement of the tourney which is a big deal because it’s a symbol that the alliance is still on even though they were attacked by cheese bandits. Primsy introduces herself to the princesses and gives them cool, milksilk handkerchiefs she embroidered herself with a candy cane crossed with a cheese cube on a stick with their house words: There is Strength in Sweetness. She doesn’t have one for Liam but gives him hers (it has her house words: Keep Sharp) on the condition he joins the archery competition and fights for her. With not a 15 between the 6 of them (even w/ multiple help actions) none of the PCs have presents for anyone else.

The tourney is announced. There are three events, each with a dope prize. Winner of the melee gets a boon from the emperor at the end of his rule. The winner of the archery contest gets a seat on the Cornucopian Council, the title of Master of Arrows, and is made advisor to the next emperor (which seems like a LOT to put on a person whose main skill is “can shoot arrows well” but OK sure). The winner of the joust gets to name a candidate for Emperor from any class or house they wish and their choice must be considered. Ruby and Liam join the archery contest. Theo signs up for the joust. Jet is hesitant but Amethar convinces her to join the melee with him. She also scratches “The Dairy Islands Rule!” into a piece of wood for Primsy and she’s charming enough that Primsy doesn’t think it’s a slipshod afterthought.

An imperial courier shows up and tells Theo the Emperor wants to talk to Amethar. He brings all the PCs and Calroy. Lady Plumbeline is still outside her dad’s room and she’s still pissed. On a 24 Insight check, Theo can tell that--as I suspected from episode 1--she is pretty ticked that she has all this institutional knowledge and competence and experience but, because of an arbitrary rule, she can’t take the throne. She tells Amethar (who she met when she was a teen) that they need to limit how many people go in as to not overwhelm him. He takes Lapin and Theo (who gives Sprinkle to Jet) and goes in to talk to Uvano.

Uvano, as we already know, was another Ravening War buddy of Amethar’s and another person he’s seen piss and shit--which we learn because that’s apparently how Amethar classifies who his best friends are. They talk the way old buddies do and Uvano asks what he would say about his life taking a surprising turn. Amethar says that if it was anyone else asking, he probably wouldn’t be on board but for Uvano? He’ll do it. That’s just what he wanted to hear.

And that’s where we end the episode without rolling initiative because the combat in the next episode is all fun and games and to quote Lou Wilson--who I suspect is about to become the wrongest person in D20 history--“It’s all sparring. Nobody is going to get killed.”

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

You Should Know

Country Accents seen to be as follows: Dairy (Scottish), Meat (Russian), Fruit (French), Grain (Italian), Candy (American/British)

In the long awaited sequel to “Kristen Has -3 Dex,” Liam has a -2 to Charisma.

Ruby speaks Lacra (Dairy-speak).

The Meatlander gods include The Great Cow, The Great Boar, and The Great Hen.

The head beef dude has a super jacked T-Bone steak wife who I assume we’ll get a name for during the melee next episode. Update, courtesy of @fjordgofurther--we did get a name this ep. Her name is Scravoya.

The Bulbian concept of hell/the devil involves the “Hungry Ones” which just serves to underline that Brennan really did think this crazy thing all the way through and still decided to not do it but to DO it.

Everyone levels up every episode I believe since D20 uses milestone leveling for the main seasons but Ruby and Jet leveled up twice to level 3 to help catch them up a little now that they have a story reason to be stronger.

Things I’m Concerned About

Uvano is only in his 60s. Like, people die in their 60s but that detail casually mentioned in a setting like this always brings up the possibility of poison or some other kind of sabotage.

The second Brennan mentioned the daughter of Uvano in passing ep 1, I clocked it and the situation is basically what I was anticipating it seems. Like, of course she’s pissed. I would be too. I wonder if either the boon or the chance to offer up a candidate could be used to override the Concord rules? Either way, gotta keep an eye on her. Also, I noticed the little flippant remark she had for the Pontifex (“This is Fructerra, I’m dressed for court.”) and I don’t know if that’s distaste for the church or something more personal but it seemed interesting enough to mention.

I know that the improvisational nature of D&D means that there’s not foreshadowing in the same way that you have in something fully set like a book or a movie but every time the Rocks family gets together for a sweet (ha) conversation (“We just want to protect you, Pop.”) I am just more and more sure we are being set up for a fall.

Lou Wilson’s defining trait as a D&D player is doing what his character would do and letting it play out to its logical conclusion, consequences be damned--consequences be welcomed even. And Amethar is--como se dice--no Calroy when it comes to politics. I can’t imagine these facts at up to any kind of happy sum.

Also, speaking of, I wanna trust Calroy, but I can’t. He’s too good at this. He’s too competent. He knows too much information and Amethar trusts him too much. Hope he proves me wrong but I will not be made a fool of by a slice of cake. Do you hear me Brennan? I REFUSE.

I've only had Primsy for a week, but if anything happened to her, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself. No but, seriously, if she is just as she appears to be (and this is GoT so I guess it’s not off the table that she’s secretly like bad and it would have taken a 30 Insight check to find out) then MAN I am so scared for her. Characters who are just trying their best to do a good job are my Kryptonite and she is as much in the wrong genre as the twins are. Moreso even.

I’m concerned Amethar has a cheesecake baby somewhere out there that’s gonna end up being a Problem. Oh my god what if one of the twins dies and their backup character is Amethar’s illegitimate kid?

The Bulbian Church has so much power but so little magic which seems...odd. Also, just curious, what is a Paladin without divine magic? Isn’t that just a fighter?

I very much vibe with the concept of Alfredi as a character but lol I was STRESSED for Lapin during that whole conversation and I feel like that’s gonna be my default state for him all season.

I’m concerned (or maybe just suspicious) that there’s more to the backstory with Theo and Lazuli than we heard. That little extra narration from Brennan about swearing he could feel her smile? Mmm, OK.

Five More Things

The character art for this season cracks me up because Brennan clearly gave the artist for this season two lists and one list was labeled “Hot” and one was labeled “Ridiculous” and that’s how we got characters like Primsy and Calroy in the same scene as Anabelle and Grissini and the funniest part is Brennan’s absolute refusal to play any of these characters like they’re any more or less ridiculous than any of the others. He’s like, “The hot pasta woman is valid and the talking cheese cube is EQUALLY VALID.”

“Not this season. Not season five.” Very bold of Brennan to be outraged about Emily trying to ride a living sprinkle dog like that's the ridiculous thing about a world with a living sprinkle dog.

The Sucorsi Road running into the Glucian Road for Sucrose and Glucose is the kind of worldbuilding detail that I love.

I was gonna be so mad at Brennan for the nonsense that is the name “Belizabeth” but he said on Adventuring Party that he was specifically dunking on GRRM with that so he gets a pass this time.

You know that famous Pixar meeting/lunch where they came up with Bugs Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E in one conversation? I bet Brennan had a similar brainstorming sesh where he came up with Garthy, Anabelle, and two other thirst traps that haven’t been introduced yet. Like come on. He described her hair as, “princely”? Brennan is trying to kill some of y’all.

#dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #a crown of candy #a crown of candy spoilers #the royal report

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halfwaythereroyalwrites · 4 years

Text

Electric (Poe Dameron x Reader) - Kilig

Pairing: Poe Dameron x Reader

Warning: This can be read alone or as part of the Kilig series. Cursing. No other warnings I can think of unless your secondhand embarrassment is really bad.

Word count: 1,940 words

A/N: Thank you for showing love for my fics. It makes me so happy that people like it. Check out my other Star Wars Kilig series for Cassian Andor and The Mandalorian! Feel free to message me if you have any comments, requests, or want to be added to a taglist!

Kilig is a Tagalog word to describe the feeling of excitement and exhilaration and possibly embarrassment from anything remotely romantic.

Part 1 + Part 2 + Part 4 + Masterlist

______________________________________

He knew.

Poe definitely knew what he was doing.

The infuriatingly hot idiot knew what he was doing to me. When we were sauntering over to the mess hall, he made a point to walk so close to me that our arms constantly brushed against each other. BB-8 enforced this closeness by rolling on my other side, effectively sandwiching me between it and the handsome pilot. While we were picking out our food, I could feel his close presence behind me, and if I didn’t think that we had magnetic attraction back then, we definitely had it now. Despite my best efforts to keep my distance from him, the nagging temptation of reaching out and touching him lingered in the back of my mind. The need to touch him felt almost like a twitch in my fingers, traveling all the way up my arms. The white-knuckled grip I held on my food tray was a desperate attempt to anchor down my hands to keep from reaching out to him.

After picking out our food, he and I walked side-by-side to a vacant table, making small talk about the happenings of our day, so far. BB-8 was rolling behind us, in a manner I could have sworn was much too self-satisfied. The small proud beeps coming from the BB unit added to my suspicion that BB-8 was a part of the plan. I placed my tray on the table and took a seat, fully expecting Poe to walk to the other side of the table. Instead, he placed his tray right next to mine and took his seat. My eyes followed his actions in disbelief, mouth slightly agape at the boldness of this man. We were seated so close to each other that I can feel his body heat radiating off of him and onto me, adding to the humidity of Ajan Kloss and the heat currently creeping its way up my neck.

“What are you doing?” I questioned, eyebrow raised and the tiniest of grins sneaking onto my lips at his actions.

“What? I can hear you better this way,” Poe smirked in response. BB-8 beeped in a questioning tone, head faced towards Poe who answered. “Yeah buddy. You can go back and charge now.” The BB unit beeped its farewell to the both of us before rolling away to his charging base.

“Did you put BB-8 up to this?” I asked, taking my first bite out of my meal.

“It was BB-8’s idea!” Poe refuted. “Besides, I’ve been trying to talk to you all this time, but you keep avoiding me.”

“I was not avoiding you.”

“Yeah tell that to the time you walked straight into a wall when we saw each other by the hangar last week.”

“…you saw that?”

“I don’t blame you,” Poe grinned. “This thing is electric, isn’t it.”

“Again,” I put up a finger to stop this train of thought. I waved my finger between the two of us. “ This is not a thing.”

“You say that, but you’re smiling.” He knowingly pointed at the upturned corners of my lips. A mischievous look on his carved face

“I am…” lying to myself at this point, I thought. “…just happy…that they had meilooruns here.” I turned my body forward and took a bite of the sweet fruit, hiding the beaming smile threatening to make its way onto my face. Poe was so persistent, and he was stating the obvious. His mere presence was electric. Merely sitting here having lunch with him was exhilarating, almost as if experiencing Poe was a great adventure in and of himself.

“I can practically hear your thoughts, babe.”

I hadn’t realized I was absentmindedly taking small bites of my food while Poe remained quiet, observing me. “Oh yeah? What am I thinking right now?”

“Probably thinking about how we’d make a cute couple. Maybe planning our first date. Don’t you worry about that,” Poe tapped his temple with his finger. “I got it all planned.” I whipped around to face him, my eyes wide and mouth agape at his incredulous words. Poe merely sat there, amused at my shocked reaction. He took a large bite of his meiloorun, and the sweet juices dribbled down his full lips. Before they could drip down to his chin, his brought his thumb to his lower lip to wipe away any excess. I realized I had been ogling his lips for a damning amount of time and peered up to lock onto his knowing eyes. Meanwhile, his thumb remained on his lip, emphasizing the full, pouty (and probably soft) nature of them. Poe caught my eyes sneaking a glance at his lips again and gave me an audacious wink. I quickly pressed my lips together to suppress a smile, but again, the corners of my mouth betrayed my mind and reflected the amusement I felt from his boldness.

Oh yeah. Poe definitely knew what he was doing to me.

Poe chuckled at my attempts to repress my smile and slowly leaned closer. He opened his mouth, no doubt to make some witty remark, when a familiar voice from the opposite side of the table cut in.

“Poe! Y/N! What’s up?!” Finn beamed, clanging his tray on to the table. He plopped down and dug in to his lunch, paying no mind to the fact Poe was leaning toward my face, and I was side-eyeing him in confusion and a hint of annoyance. Rose Tico was with him but remained standing. She politely smiled and greeted us.

“Hey guys! I hope you don’t mind,” Rose added, also glancing at Finn sideways for clearly interrupting our lunch.

“No, not at all!” I turned to face the two while Poe remained facing me. Rose sat down, and I felt Poe’s forehead lean against my shoulder. His soft groan of frustration elicited a slight giggle out of me. I shrugged his head off my shoulder and caught his eyes. Poe’s big, brown eyes clearly bore frustration at the intrusion. I raised my eyebrow in question to which Poe merely shook his head in response. He bit his lower lip before turning his body forward to face our new guests.

“Finn. Rose. Didn’t expect to see you guys here,” Poe remarked. His tone low and laced with the tiniest hints of irritation.

“What? In the mess hall? At the same time we usually eat lunch together?” Finn managed to garble out the questions while chewing a full mouth of food.

“Finn!” Rose bumped her shoulder against his, prompting him to look at her. “Close your mouth. That’s gross.”

“What? I’m starved, love. Leia’s got me training with Rey at the break of dawn every day. I haven’t eaten!” Finn swallowed his mouth of food and quickly took several more bites. Poe kept his eyes on the man in front of him, burning a hole at the top of Finn’s head. Finn, on the other hand, was oblivious to the world outside of him and his food. He kept his head, practically inhaling his meal.

“Y/N, I heard you’re going to be running point on missions now,” Rose chimed in, breaking the awkward silence that had settled between the four of us. I nodded in confirmation. “That’s great! Do you know when you’re starting?”

“I don’t know yet.” I responded. “Leia just said to stay ready, so I’m waiting on standby until she calls me in.” I felt an arm slide its way onto the back of my chair. I kept my gaze pointedly on Rose, who took note of Poe’s arm. She grinned and bumped her shoulder against Finn’s again. Finn looked up at Rose, his cheeks puffed out and filled with food. Rose “subtly” gestured to us by cocking her head in our direction. Finn whipped his head to observe Poe and me, analyzing the scene in front of him. I sat straight, my back purposely not leaning on the back of my chair to avoid making contact with Poe’s arm. My mind and body were in a battle to fight the tempting urge to lean into Poe’s side. Meanwhile, Poe’s arm casually rested on the back of my chair, his body leaning towards mine. Finn looked between the two of us before pausing…

“Ooohhhhh…” Finn swallowed his food down before asking. “Are you guys…?” He pointed his finger between the two of us.

“No.” “Yes.” We responded simultaneously. I smacked the back of my hand against his chest.

“Ow!” Poe dramatically grunted in response, and he quickly caught my offending hand against his chest. He held my hand and squeezed it in his grip, before letting go. The combined heat of Poe being next to me, Ajan Kloss, and the growing heat in my cheeks were starting to make me sweat, but I dared not hint at any flustered reaction while Poe was watching me.

“We could leave you guys alone if you want to sort it out,” Rose offered, a mischievous look on her face. Funny. I never took my sweet friend, Rose Tico, to be a traitor.

“No. There’s nothing to sort out,” I gritted. Rose feigned innocence by holding her hands up before finally taking a bite out of her meal. Poe’s hand made its way to my shoulder, his thumb rubbing circles into my skin. His other hand started to dig into his meal. What surprised me was how natural this all felt. How his touch felt as comforting as home. I gave in to the temptation and leaned into his side, reveling in the warmth and security he provided. Poe responded by bringing his arm in, bringing me closer, and his hand continuing to draw circles on to my back. Finn and Rose took notice of our change in position, turned their heads to each other, and grinned knowingly. These two didn’t even have the courtesy to hide their obvious amusement at the events unfolding. Poe paid them no mind, instead focusing on his meal while occasionally glancing at me. Our conversation flowed freely, switching from funny tales of past missions and base gossip.

“If BB-8 hadn’t told Poe, his ass would have left me on that damn planet!” We collectively laughed at Finn’s tale of the time Poe had been in such a hurry to leave that he almost left Finn behind.

“I was just checking the engines!” Poe exclaimed!

“Stop your lying, Dameron. The landing gear was gone by the time I saw the ship!” Rose and I continued laughing at Finn and Poe’s argument. Poe was about to delve into his side of the story when one of the intel officers came up to our table and interrupted.

“Finn. Commander Dameron. General Organa requests your presence at command center,” the officer announced.

“We’ll be right there,” Poe replied. The officer nodded and walked away. Finn and Poe looked at each other and nodded. I watched Poe wipe his mouth off with a tissue before looking at me.

“Lunch again tomorrow?” Poe asked.

“I’ll meet you here,” I smiled. Poe returned my smile and brought me closer to kiss my cheek before bidding goodbye to Rose. My cheeks immediately went up in flames at his actions. He got up from the table the same time as Finn. Finn slapped Poe’s back, grinning. They walked out of the mess hall together as Rose and I watched their retreating figures. When they had disappeared from view, Rose and I turned to look at each other.

“So…You and Poe are a thing now, right?”

“Shut up.”

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thesoundofnat · 4 years

Text

I should tell you

Finn/Poe, Rey

Summary: Finn tries to tell Rey that he and Poe are together, but they keep getting interrupted (sometimes by Finn’s own incapability of outright saying it).

A/N: Bitches hear one line in the new Star Wars movie and takes it out of context and bases a whole fic around it. It’s me, I’m bitches. No spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker. This takes place before it. Finn was so much fun to write, I hope you like this!

Words: 2 086

“Rey, I need to tell you something.”

Finn didn’t have time to say a single thing, though, as a blaster was suddenly pointed straight at them and nearly hitting Finn in the shoulder. He ducked, screaming as he did, and Rey pointed her own weapon at the Stormtroopers. Truly not the best time, but Finn had suddenly had a moment of revelation and wanted to bare his whole soul. He didn’t have time for it now.

“Can it wait?” Rey asked, shooting and shooting and oh god would they ever do anything else again but shoot various weapons and run for their lives?

“Sure,” he said, voice higher, hands shaking ever so slightly as he raised his own blaster. Yeah, it could wait. Maybe a lifetime, since Finn found his courage sinking as much as his heart as the Stormtroopers kept coming and coming.

Rey was suddenly running, and would you look at that, Finn was running behind her, both of them shouting as they kept shooting. Sand in his fucking shoe. So much sand on this godforsaken planet. Did anyone even need this much sand?

“Finn!” Rey screamed, and oh, he was kneeling, his leg suddenly in so much pain, and Rey had lost her blaster on the way and was using the force to boomerang the incoming ships into the mountains. Finn didn’t catch the rest, because Poe was there, lifting him up, almost carrying him away, and Finn tried to say his name, tried to say Rey’s name, but it really fucking hurt being shot in the leg and all he could managed was a strangled cry that he would deny later. Not that anyone would hold it against him, but still.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Poe was saying, rambling, almost going into panic mode, and usually Finn would try to calm him down but he was feeling quite panicked himself if he had to be honest.

They entered the ship, Rey behind them, screaming at Chewie to go go go, and they were up, or so Finn assumed because he sort of lost track of things after that.

Later, much later, he woke up feeling groggy but whole. A throbbing thigh but nothing worse. Whatever they had done, it had worked.

“Thank Rey,” Poe said, his fingers around Finn’s, but when Finn looked around Rey wasn’t there.

“What did she do?” he asked, his voice hoarse, throat screaming for water.

Poe shrugged. “She used the force.”

“I need to tell you something.”

This planet was greener and richer in every way, but Finn was a bit sick of slapping bugs from his arms. They were laying low, all of them fixing up ships and making plans and biding their time, but Finn could tell Rey was one second away from hopping into a ship herself and leaving. He found himself watching her, watching Poe, knowing they were probably watching him and each other. War made people reckless once they realized they’d lost enough, and Rey was like wildfire.

But she was also Finn’s friend, and sometimes he just wanted to have a regular conversation.

“The thing you tried to tell me before?” she asked, turning to smile at him, always smiling at him.

“Yes.” He sat down beside her on the fallen branch, his leg almost better than before. “Before we got so rudely interrupted.”

She laughed. “I can’t promise it won’t happen again.”

“Hopefully I won’t get shot this time. Thank you again, by the way.”

“Don’t mention it, really.” She bumped their shoulders together, and Finn could tell she was exhausted.

“When was the last time you slept?”

Visibly caught off guard, Rey fumbled. “Uh-”

“If it’s longer than 20 hours I’m sending you to bed right now.”

“Didn’t you have something to tell me?”

“It can wait.” Maybe he was still biding time.

She leaned forward, elbows resting on her thighs. “Is it bad?”

“No.” Quite the opposite.

“Then tell me so that I can go to bed happy.”

“It’s… well, it’s quite silly. I should’ve just told you ages ago, but now it feels weird since I’ve waited so long.”

Rey didn’t say anything, merely looked at him, face blank, neither pushing or assuming. Finn felt like throwing up anyway.

“Uh, well,” he started, looking away, as far away as he could without turning his back on her. “It’s… You know how I- Or maybe you don’t. Why should you?”

“Know what?” A gentle push now, to steer him in the right direction.

“Right. So. You know Poe?”

“I do know Poe, yes.” Her smile when he turned back to her made him start laughing almost hysterically, and he found he couldn’t stop.

“What?” She was whining now, begging, demanding, laughing, her hand grabbing Finn’s arm and pulling and shaking and slapping, but Finn couldn’t calm down enough to say another word.

“Geez, what did you give him?”

He recognized Poe’s voice, which didn’t make things better whatsoever.

“Nothing!” Rey said, audibly not minding him laughing but too curious to leave him be. “He was trying to tell me something and then started laughing.”

Finn had to stand, turning to face him and doubling over in the process. It wasn’t even fucking funny.

“I think it’s a nervous reaction,” Rey continued and Poe was nodding, grinning, but had Finn been calmer he would’ve seen something akin to understanding behind his eyes.

But Finn had to literally wander away from them before he could calm himself. So much for a normal conversation.

“I didn’t know you were a giggler when you were nervous,” Poe said that evening, and Finn laughed in response, though he had to admit he was all laughed out for a bit. “I mean, you giggle a lot around me, but I thought it was because I was so handsome.”

Finn rolled his eyes, but he let Poe lean his chin on his shoulder. “I didn’t know either, but to be fair I tried to talk about you.”

“You finally gonna tell her?”

“It’s been too long as it is.”

“She’ll just be happy for you, you know. For us.”

“I know but-” Finn cut himself off with a sigh. “I’ve built it up so much now, and each time I try to tell her something goes wrong.”

“You want me to tell her?”

“No. It should come from me.”

Poe hummed, his fingertips skimming the nape of Finn’s neck, making him shiver. “You should just say it. No prelude.”

“I want it to be a conversation.”

“I see.”

“Is that silly?”

“No.” Poe pressed his lips to his neck. “I think it’s endearing.”

“I need to-” Finn stopped in his tracks, remembering Poe’s advice about just saying it, but Rey was already looking at him. An eyebrow raised, so visibly amused.

“Tell me something?”

Finn deflated. “Yes.”

She laughed. “Sit.”

He did, the chair of the Falcon comfy and big and the perfect spot for a conversation. He shouldn’t have been nervous.

But he was. Oh, he was.

“The thing is,” he started. “I’m-”

“Incapable of making conversation?” she said when he didn’t continue, her smile soft. “Go on.”

“I don’t know why it’s so hard.”

“Give me a hint? Maybe I can guess.”

And then something exploded and the whole fight and flight thing resumed. Finn was so tired.

Finn didn’t understand how Rey hadn’t figured it out. He often found himself acting like a total fool around Poe, but he couldn’t stop.

“Don’t go,” he was begging now, holding Poe’s wrist and refusing to let him to get out of bed and leave him cold and alone.

“I have to,” he said, but he didn’t twist his hand out of Finn’s wrist or tickle him into letting go like he could - and oftentimes would - do. Instead he remained sitting, one foot dangling off the bed while the other was tucked beneath him. Half turned away from him, but Finn had his own face partly buried in a pillow so it didn’t matter. He was holding onto Poe’s hand for dear life.

Sort of.

He whined, knowing he’d done similar things in public when Poe had done something he hadn’t liked, mostly leave him, and Rey had to know, she had to know what this meant, but he couldn’t just assume.

Poe was laughing, turning to fully face him now, his free hand on Finn’s back, and Finn hummed contentedly, smiling despite himself when Poe leaned down to kiss him, and Rey had to fucking know if one ounce of attention from Poe made him melt despite their surroundings.

“Do I-” Not love. Too early to talk about love. “Do I enjoy you visibly?”

Poe’s turn to cackle like a maniac now. “What was that?”

“I mean,” Finn tried to explain, feeling himself flush. “Is my… affection for you visible?”

“It is to me.”

“How?”

“In the little ways.”

“Enough for others to see?”

“If they’re looking, though I think it’s clear we don’t hate each other or anything.”

Finn huffed out a laugh. “You’re too pretty to hate.”

“I knew you were just with me for my looks.”

“And because you fly me places.”

“At least I contain multitudes.”

“Oh, many.”

“Talk to her,” Poe said, changing the subject so suddenly that Finn forgot to complain when he slipped his hand out of his grip and stood. “You’re stressing yourself out for nothing.”

Well, he needed a hobby.

He sighed. “I’ll go find her.”

Poe was, unfortunately, getting dressed. “Try practicing your speech on others maybe.”

“You think that will work?”

“Yes.”

So Finn was suddenly on a mission to tell everyone else before he told Rey, because that was the logical solution to this tongue twisting trouble, right?

He’d truly die before telling her, he was calling it.

BB-8 lowkey knew, but Finn wanted to tell it anyway. Just to practice. Just to make sure.

Maybe to stall.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, feeling a twinge of nerves when the droid turned to look at him. “I need to tell you something.”

No prelude, he heard Poe say. Next time, honey, sorry, honey.

“I’m with Poe,” he blurted. “I mean, not right now. He’s not here. I mean.”

He could’ve sworn BB-8 tilted its head to the side.

“I like him. As a man. Wait, what?”

He heard Poe laughing hysterically behind him, having come up to them without Finn hearing. “I’m not sure BB-8 gets what you mean.”

Finn turned to pout at him. “This is hard.”

“It’s not. Just say we’re together.”

“Together.”

“Yes.”

“We’re together.”

“See?” Poe poked his ribs. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Finn shoved him lightly. “I can’t help it.”

Poe wrapped his arms around him, unusually affectionate while in public. Finn didn’t mind. Truly would never mind. Maybe they could stay like this until everyone knew, with Poe’s lips pressed to Finn’s jaw, eyelashes almost tangled.

BB-8 made a sound, and Poe laughed into Finn’s skin. “Yes, buddy. I do like him.”

Another beep.

“Of course you knew. I don’t think I’ve been good at keeping it a secret.”

“I didn’t know,” Finn mumbled. “Not at first.”

“I don’t think I fully knew at first either, to be fair.”

“Looks cozy.”

So used to being subtle, Finn nearly jumped out of Poe’s embrace as they turned to look at Rey, but Poe kept him in place.

“It is,” he said, one hand rubbing Finn’s back, soothing him. “Wanna join?”

“I’m good.” Her voice was normal, but her face softer than Finn had ever seen it. “I don’t like being a third wheel.”

Poe laughed. “That’s fair.”

And just like that, she knew. So simple. So easy and so free of judgement. Finn didn’t know why he’d been terrified.

“Is this what you’ve been trying to tell me?” she asked when Poe finally released him.

Finn deflated. “Yes. It’s been a living nightmare.”

“Why?”

“We kept getting interrupted! And I’m not the best with words, apparently.”

She reached out to squeeze his hand. “It’s okay. I like you anyway.”

“Good, because you’re not getting rid of me.”

“Or me,” Poe said from Rey’s other side, the two of them trapping her in their arms.

She was laughing. “I said I didn’t want to be a third wheel!”

“I’m clearly the third wheel here,” Poe said, and Finn reached across Rey to swat at him. “I don’t mind, though.”

BB-8 beeped, wanting in. Even if Finn had wanted to say no he didn’t have the heart to.

#finnpoe #stormpilot #finnpoe fic #stormpilot fic #star wars fic #mine #nat writes #I should tell you #star wars

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