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sentinelpri · 9 months

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Burnt Out

Working at Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital is brutal, to say the least. As the head of the cardiology department and a member of Gregory House’s diagnostic team, your job is not only hectic but also underappreciated. You spend most of your days cycling between helping your patients, helping your coworker’s patients, pouring over paperwork, being scolded by Cuddy, and being shat on by House, who insists that you stay on his team while constantly dismissing your ideas and implying that you’re an idiot like he does with damn-near everyone else he works with.

So, yeah. Life is great.

Currently, you’re sitting in the diagnostics conference room at the corner of the table. Chase, Cameron, Foreman, and Wilson are also sitting with you. Meanwhile, House is standing at the whiteboard, bouncing his tennis ball with one hand and using the other to write down your most recent patient’s symptoms.

“Eleven year old caucasian female, admitted two days ago after falling unconscious during her first ever track meet. Her family’s medical history is totally clean from what we can tell and she’s had no problems prior to this, though they seem to be way behind on taking her and themselves to the doctor for regular visits. However, since being admitted, she’s only displayed more symptoms and seems to be getting worse,” House explains, seemingly unenthused. You wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already figured it out. He likes to do that- to pretend that he has no idea what the patient’s affliction is and then rag on everyone else for not being able to figure it out. “So far, we’re dealing with high blood pressure, a one hundred one degree fever that refuses to break, hives, bloodshot eyes, and swelling across her entire body.”

“Rheumatoid arthritis?” Cameron suggests, eager to be the first one to get at the new case. “I know she’s young, but she could’ve developed it early and had it go undiagnosed.”

“Before we start discussing the possibility of chronic diseases, shouldn’t we test for strep and scarlet fever?” Chase questions. “If her parents are so bad about getting her medical care, it could have just been a minor illness that’s developed into this.”

“What about you two? (y/n), Foreman?” House pipes up, calling the two of you out since you’ve been totally silent since he started. You can’t help but notice that he doesn’t do the same to Wilson, who hasn’t said anything either. “Nothing to say?”

Foreman shrugs.

“This isn’t my ballpark. I’ll let you figure it out, House. I’m sure you’re just playing with us anyway. Compared to the last few cases, this seems like child’s play.”

Seemingly satisfied with that answer, House turns to you.

“And you?”

“Kawasaki disease? She has some of the symptoms,” You half-heartedly answer.

“Just because you’re a cardiologist doesn’t mean that every patient that comes through these doors has a heart disease, you know,” House scoffs with a roll of his icy blue eyes. “And she only has some of the symptoms for that. She doesn’t fit into the main demographic for it either. That’s the worst answer I’ve gotten out of you for a case all month. Are you even trying anymore?”

When House first hired you, you were excited- always trying your best and working after your already long hours to solve cases. As the years have gone by, though, you’ve lost your enthusiasm and frequently find yourself dreading the mornings where you and House’s paths have to collide. You know he’s only so cruel because he has problems of his own and because he has a motive (just like he has a motive for every other crazy thing he likes to do), but the fact that he picks on you so often when all you’re doing is trying your best gets under your skin.

A couple years ago, you might’ve tried to argue back with him. Now, all you can do is avert your eyes and stare at the table as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world. You’re praying for a hole to just appear underneath you and suck you into the vacuum of space- or at least for everyone to continue chatting until the embarrassing situation is long forgotten- but instead, Cameron pipes up to defend you.

“Dr. House, was that really unnecessary? They’re trying their best and you’re being needlessly cruel.”

“What, are you jealous that I’m paying more attention to them than I am to you?” House snarks back at her. You hold your head in your hands and sigh. “Because next time, I can include you, too. Now do any of you have any better ideas than the crap you’ve just given me or am I going to be handling this case by myself?”

With that, the meeting continues. House ends up deciding that he’s going to order labs to see if the patient has strep or scarlet fever before doing anything else, leaving you to finish out your work day.

You rush out of the office the moment he dismisses you all. Cameron tries to catch up to you to ask if you’re okay, but much to your relief, Chase stops her and tells her that you probably just need your space. You rush to your office, shut the door, sit down in your chair, and- for the first time in a long time- bawl your eyes out.

House being a dick to you is typical, but on top of everything else that you have to deal with at your job, it pushes you over the edge. With the ungrateful patients, admin, and coworkers, the long hours, the physically and mentally draining work, and all of the drama that happens in the hospital, it’s almost impossible to keep going. The only thing- or, person- that makes it somewhat worth the turmoil is your partner, James Wilson, who you’ve been dating for some months now.

He’s a great comfort to you, and he’s always kind, unlike a lot of the people you find yourself surrounded by at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Your relationship is surprisingly healthy despite the amount of problems between the two of you. You don’t want to miss out on more time with him than you already do, though, so you find it hard to quit or even ask to be moved off of the diagnostics team.

Conflicted and tired, you bury your head in your arms and cry even harder, glad that the walls are soundproof until you hear the sound of your doorknob turning.

And that’s when you realize that you forgot to lock the door.

You pop your head up, tears still covering your cheeks and welling up in your eyes. You probably look like shit and your partner has just walked in to see said display.

There, right in front of you, in the entryway of your office, stands James Wilson, looking at you like a deer caught in the headlights. The worst part is that you’re sure you’re looking at him the same way. The happy expression he walked in with has fallen completely.

“Did I come at a bad time?” He tentatively asks.

“No, sorry,” You answer and rush to wipe your tears away. You try to make yourself look presentable, probably to no avail considering the look of disbelief that James shoots your way. “What do you need?”

“Are you sure? I can leave if you want-” James starts and steps back towards the door.

“Don’t,” You interject, shaking your head. “Please. I know we’re at work right now, but…”

James sighs, then shuts and locks the door behind you. He quickly approaches your desk and sits on the edge of it, facing you.

“House really got to you today, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, I guess he did,” You shrug. “I don’t even know what to do about it anymore, James… I’m considering just quitting and going somewhere else. I feel so burnt out. It’s not even just House, it’s everything else, too. He’s the least of it.”

James nods.

“...I understand.”

“Do you really?”

“Well, maybe not in the exact same way. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice that House is a little less harsh on me than he is on the rest of you, but him and I have been friends for a long time. He knows what I’m capable of. The only reason he pushes your buttons so much is because he’s testing to see what your limits are. In a weird sort of way, he’s trying to get to know you,” James explains, though both of you know that isn’t much of a comfort to you. “I’m sure things have been difficult for you lately. You do a lot, and it goes unappreciated, but I promise you that you’re doing a good job and that there are people who appreciate what you do.”

At that, you smile. You don’t feel completely better, but the weight on your shoulders does feel a little lighter.

“Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“I love you,” James says.

“I love you too.”

Hours pass. You work on paperwork while James responds to patient emails for you. The two of you knock out most of what’s been piling up on your end, much to your relief. You try not to think about the fact that James has probably neglected a lot of his day’s duties to help you out with this.

“Should we head out?” You ask, looking at the clock.

“Probably… It is getting pretty late.”

Just then, the doorknob turns, only to go back since James had locked it just moments before. A second later, you hear obnoxiously loud knocking. Wilson goes to open it. Standing there is House, who’s holding a stack of papers.

“All the other tests came back negative. You were right,” House admits, looking straight at you. “It’s Kawasaki disease. Good job.”

Then, as fast as he came by your office, House leaves, just as elusive as ever- and all you and James can do is laugh.

#james wilson x reader #House #house md #House M.D.#House M.D #gregory house #reader insert #self insert #gender neutral reader #oneshot #oneshots #fluff #drabble #drabbles

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blackinquisitors · 1 year

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HCs and thoughts for Tilly and Lenny?

I wish they had more screentime so I had more to say about them.. I love them both

TILLY

based on the dialogue other characters have, I'd say she joined the gang at around 15. bc she was 12 when she was kidnapped by the foremans and bill says she ran w them "all them years" so ill say hes exaggerating from 3 years. so as much as I love all the art of her being like 10 hanging out w john and arthur its just not possible

dialogue hints that she has a crush on javier (Arthur antagonize line that says shes been giving him a lot of attention) and I think they have a little flirting situationship going on. nothing serious tho

defintely a massive shit talker but shes hypocritical and gets mad at people for shit talking

I also think shes straight

would love chloexhalle and sza

LENNY

bi but doesnt use labels

kendrick lamar fan

Ive seen this theory before but his gun is really old and worn compared to everyone else's so thats the gun he killed the men that killed his father with

him and jenny makes me go crazy... the fact that they never did anything despite everyone seeing that lenny was absolutely besotted with her.. I don't want to think it was unrequited. in my mind they were young and unexperienced and basically going "UGH idk if he/she likes me.." like thirteen year olds. and they waited too long and jenny died :(

modern au hes a twitch streamer. he just is hes got the personality for it. he does twitch streams all night and is getting his law degree during the day

I wish I had more but i dont know them that well 😔 I love them both tho

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sofipitch · 1 year

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Im really sad that besides the lack of implicit romance. The 1994 version got a lot of loustat and the family dynamic better. Like Lestat still tripping all over his family issues, but I see him trying with Claudia and Louis. And I can imagine, despite Pitt’s lackluster performance (that did sell at least Louis’s depression and detachment) that maybe with reflection there was once something softer there. I don’t know how the show could recover from this. The grey power and morality is so thrown

So I think you meant "explicit" and not "implicit"? That through me for a loop because I was like "you want to go back to queerbait...?"

No but I agree, the IDEAL IWTV in my head is Jacob Anderson as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat. TC's Lestat seems genuinely more nuanced in his cruelty and genuinely loves his family BOTH Louis and Claudia.

Brad Pitt as Louis fails not only because he gave like absolutely nothing in most scenes but bc a lot of the complexity surrounding Louis is taken away. Paul's death is more interesting than a rando dead wife and child. BP is a slave owner but that is just like never addressed as "hey this guy is not a good person". JA's Louis running the brothel you see more of that, not only in the confession scene but the fact that POST confession scene that guy keeps running his brothel despite KNOWING that it is wrong. Also in ep 3 when he is facing racist laws preventing his business, there is the idea that he could shut down the Azalea and make some other business. He even says he owns grocery stores and such. Yes it would be loss but maybe he could build a bar, a music club, or even a theater and potentially still employ all the same women. He has a chance to rebrand, yet he digs his heels in, on one hand because of the racism behind what is stopping him, but also the money, based on their convo when Louis makes the "colored only" sign. That is a good an complicated Louis, I can chew on the complexity of that guy for hours. And to me is more accurate to book Louis's grey morality by having him acknowledge his business yet coming up with false ways it's "not that bad" like how in the book Louis is very hands off with his plantation, so he doesn't treat his slaves poorly himself BUT these are ppl potentially being treated badly by the foreman.

JA's Louis also has more signs that is desire to "not kill humans" is false, it takes him years to come to this point and in ep 6 when Lestat asks him to Louis acquieses. In the book it's more complicated, he thinks he is doing it out of morality but modern interviewee Louis admits its simply because Louis wanted to savor working his way up the scala natura of blood. BP's Louis gives 0 reason for his reluctance OR his change from not drinking human blood to doing so. The only scene in the movie where BP's Louis is interesting in this regard is the prostitute scene, where it would have been kinder to kill her quickly than drag it out like Lestat was doing. But why he changed after making Claudia is unclear. In the book it at least gives the explanation that the night with the prostitue's death and Claudia convinced Louis to give up. But in the movie Louis just seems boring due to his pigeonholing of "the moral one" compared to Lestat. JA's Louis is clearly more complex than just "sympathetic good guy" (talking about eps 1-4 I think the mistake of eps 5-6 in regards to Louis is that by making him the victim he is now once again more 2D and anything "bad" he does later can still be scene as a result of his abuse) and there is of course how JA can actually act in comparison to BP. Brad Pitt sure is coasting on that white mediocrity when you compare him to Jacob Anderson.

So yeah best version: 1994 movie family dynamics, explicit queerness,Tom Cruise Lestat, Jacob Anderson Louis. I can't put Kirsten and Bailey (two bad bitches) against each other tho that's unfair

#vc #asks

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punkscowardschampions · 10 months

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Jali

Ali: [Private to Johnny, an appropriate amount of time after this drama which is probably nearing a week-ish because you’re young and you didn’t actually do it so you’re not giving him that much space lol]

Ali: Did you finish fixing the bike?

Johnny: More or less

Ali: You got the [a part he was going to have to go get after your fixing sesh]?

Johnny: Not as advertised, but I sourced another, like

Ali: So, is it possible for you to still take me?

Johnny: When is it you’re looking to go?

Ali: Whenever you’re free to, day wise

Ali: [tell him visiting hours because I am sure they exist]

Johnny: [tell her when works for you because idk what job you’ve got hun I’m not a gypsy boy] then

Ali: Perfect, thank you

Johnny: Be [tell her where to meet you cos obvs you aren’t gonna encourage her to come to the site or pick her up from her gaff where her fam could be cos they need to mind their business about this] in plenty good time, say [a time]

Ali: Sounds good 🙃

Ali: Are you like the foreman, you should be, you’re very efficient

Johnny: We’ve both somewhere to be and your brother’ll be waiting on you, so on me to get you there

Ali: You don’t have to be respectful, plenty aren’t

Johnny: Disrespecting your brother is same as disrespecting you, to my family, that’s how it works

Johnny: and neither you nor he have done nothing to earn it off me

Ali: It’s a good philosophy, similar to my own

Ali: just not used to it, especially when it comes to Joe lately

Johnny: I know, I’ve a good head on good shoulders

Ali: It feels like I’m being such a suck-up to agree but I have no current need to disagree so

Ali: do with that what you will

Johnny: Warm myself with it through this summer rain

Ali: but summer rain is the best, you can be out in it and enjoy it without risking the hypothermia

Johnny: You would say that, you’re out in it to enjoy the thing

Ali: Work ruins everything, I suppose

Ali: Do you like what you do?

Johnny: It’s steady enough, I like that about it

Johnny: work can be slow in coming, that’ll ruin more

Ali: all I have’s a paper round so it isn’t comparable

Ali: I thought perhaps you’d been busy recently

Johnny: You’re not to have that, compared to girls I know

Ali: Would make you an easy target for a serial killer type but any job with a route and set time of day does that, if you think about it

Ali: that is much more fun in the summer, rain or otherwise at least there’s light

Johnny: Am I to think of you?

Ali: If I get murdered?

Ali: It would be quite insulting if you didn’t spare me a single thought, yes

Johnny: Sure I’d want to crash 1 of your weddings than your funerals

Ali: 1 of, how many will I be having?

Johnny: Your lot, not your own, you know

Ali: Ohh, yeah that does make more sense

Ali: you don’t know about my whole resurrection skills yet, the funeral was also plural

Johnny: Do I want to know?

Ali: Sure your man Jesus did it, how can it be wrong? 😁

Johnny: You’re not my man Jesus nor his mammy even

Ali: 💔

Ali: Have you met anyone that’s getting hitched yet, or are we just crashing [a local venue that is the place people go to get married etc]?

Johnny: You tell me, if you’ve the sight or other blasphemous skills to be claiming for yourself, will we?

Ali: 🔮

Ali: Only if the crowd is spilling out onto the street, can’t be showing up to a quiet 50 person guestlist affair

Johnny: Yous have weddings where only 50 people come?

Ali: 😂 I know, can you believe it?

Johnny: Seriously, this a wind up or no?

Ali: Deadly, boy

Ali: Some just go to the registry office with themselves and 2 witnesses, no party, nothing

Johnny: I’ve nothing to say of that, I can’t work it out for why yous people are the way you are

Ali: Well I would never do that, not for any of my weddings

Ali: some people have shit luck, no family, no friends, just that person, I guess?

Johnny: You said you weren’t marrying last we said anything of it

Ali: but now you’ve given me the idea of having lots of elaborate ones

Ali: I’ll invite you, you won’t have to crash

Johnny: You are a girl, the bike only tried to have me thinking different, but there it is in you

Ali: You already knew I liked parties

Ali: and dressing up

Johnny: Yeah, true enough

Ali: I think you like me more when you don’t think of me as a girl

Johnny: I don’t think I like what you’re saying of me there, it’d have me disowned to prefer lads

Ali: That is not what I meant

Johnny: And it’s not true I’m one of them

Ali: I don’t think you’re gay

Johnny: You think you’re not girl enough for me, which is true

Ali: No, I think you can see being friends with me when you let yourself forget I am one, what that should mean

Johnny: Us being what we are isn’t something I should let happen at all

Ali: No one else cares

Ali: if anyone did, just point out how un-girl I am, if it wasn’t as obvious to them as it is you

Johnny: I care

Ali: Just tell me why

Johnny: It’s not right

Ali: You’re allowed to be friends with who you want, aren’t you

Ali: as long as I don’t disrespect you and your family and you don’t mine

Johnny: You’ve too many friends already and how you behave with ‘em don’t make you an un-girl, it just makes you a girl who’s a state

Ali: You wouldn’t have anything to care about or not let happen if you disliked me all that much

Johnny: I dislike how you act, in a way I can’t be putting aside to like you yourself

Ali: If I acted how you want a girl to act, you wouldn’t know me

Johnny: I shouldn’t know you, you shouldn’t be mixing with us how you are

Ali: Well I apologize but the others are happy to be my friend

Johnny: Too many is what I already said, yeah

Ali: It’s you who can’t envision a wedding with only 50 guests, there’s no such thing as too many friends

Johnny: Maybe we use the word different from each other

Ali: There’s levels to it

Ali: Not everyone is my closest confidant

Johnny: Don’t worry yourself on us needing to find common ground here

Ali: Heaven forbid

Johnny: You can be friendly as you like with the others, none are listening to my warnings on the matter, so

Ali: I know I can

Ali: you can keep trying to warn them likewise

Johnny: You’re girl enough you can’t tell me what to do

Ali: Unlike you, I wasn’t trying to

Ali: that’s not how I talk to people, friends or otherwise

Johnny: There’s your warning not to try to

Ali: Why would I want to control you?

Johnny: What you want don’t matter, other than seeing your brother, which we’re done with each other after it is

Ali: We could be done with each other now, you didn’t have to say yes

Ali: I don’t know why you would if you think I’m so awful

Johnny: I’ve said it, I’ll go on and follow through for doing it

Ali: Seriously, don’t trouble yourself

Johnny: It’s no trouble

Ali: That’s just not true so

Johnny: It’s true enough

Ali: I don’t need you to do a favour for me because you feel sorry for me

Johnny: I don’t feel sorry for you

Ali: What else would you call it?

Johnny: It isn’t about you no more, it’s about saying I’d do something and being good for the doing of it, that’s what a man does

Ali: I don’t owe you a chance to prove what a decent man you are, not if it comes at the expense of letting you insult me, which isn’t what a good person does, end of

Johnny: Be there when I said, Ali, there’s your chance to see your brother

Ali: I’ve got the time and place

Johnny: Yeah

Ali: I hope you only get rained on in the worst ways

Johnny: Sure you could use your powers to have it be rotten out, or lightning to strike, from what I’ve heard talk of

Ali: If you believed it, you’d be nicer

Johnny: I’m not scared of no girl, whatever it is she’s done

Ali: Proving how stupid prejudice always is…

Johnny: Watch what names you call me

Ali: I didn’t call you anything

Ali: but the idea of not being scared of someone who’s allegedly tried to kill someone, just because of what is or isn’t in their pants

Johnny: You called me stupid, but you wouldn’t be able to hurt me without getting hurt yourself, ‘cause you are a little girl, it don’t matter what else you’re trying to be

Ali: I don’t have any desire to hurt you, I didn’t say I did at any point

Ali: but if you’re going to be so Mr Darcy, you may as well get soaked

Johnny: You know what you said, and I know I’ve no reason to be scared of you

Ali: Am I a friend of the world or the big bad, I don’t see how or why I would try to be both

Johnny: You don’t know who you are, it’s how you’re the state you are

Ali: Well why don’t you stick around and keep telling me, isn’t that what a man would do, save the little girl?

Johnny: Gorja girls like you can’t be told or saved

Ali: Ah, there we go then

Johnny: Ah stop with thinking you can be everything to everyone

Ali: What else would I do?

Johnny: See, you can’t be told

Ali: You can’t tell me to stop and give me no alternative

Johnny: You can’t be more than the 1 girl but there you go giving it a lash still

Ali: And don’t you feel like you have to be something, someone, that isn’t always feasible?

Johnny: We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you

Ali: We could be talking about both of us

Johnny: There’s no us

Johnny: I’m not the same as you

Ali: No but you put pressure on yourself to be who the others need, who you think you’re meant to be, no?

Ali: Why can’t I

Johnny: You encourage the fuck ups, I don’t

Ali: Or you want someone to tell you you’re only one lad

Johnny: What have you said to Carly about Moses? What have you said to Ronan for following you ‘round?

Johnny: you don’t do nothing to help nothing ‘cause you want ‘em all to be your mate & like you

Ali: Wow, thanks for that devastating read of my failings as a person

Ali: but you telling Moses and Ronan to stop what they’re doing, hasn’t and isn’t going to get them to stop, so wouldn’t you be a lot happier if you realised you can only control your own actions?

Johnny: Grow yourself up

Ali: I’m a child, and so are you

Johnny: Yous get to be children ‘til you’ve had your own, and after, look at [Carly’s mum], you’re all messes

Ali: Sure must be fun being perfect

Johnny: I’m not that, I’m just not bothering myself if people don’t like me how you are, needing everyone to feel the sun shines out of you

Ali: You think you’re doing something right if everyone dislikes you, because no one but you wants to do the right thing

Johnny: Moses needed a smack and say you cared about Carly at all you’d give her a smack too before the stupid girl gets herself in proper trouble batting her eyelashes at the lads can’t get her out of

Ali: People get themselves into trouble, no matter how much you care, you can care ‘til it kills you too

Johnny: We’ve all our graves to go to, better caring puts you in than not bothering yourself and being eaten up for it

Ali: I care

Johnny: You care to make yourself look good, to be cared about, you’ll never do nothing that’d make you unpopular

Ali: Fuck you

Ali: I’m there when people like you have washed your hands

Johnny: You’re there for what, a party?

Ali: Whatever they need

Ali: do you think it’s going to be a party on the psych ward?

Johnny: Maybe, none of it’s real

Ali: What the fuck is ‘real’?

Johnny: You would say that, you don’t know life no more than your brother does, you’ve a paper round and your own dealers

Ali: Who knew drug dealers exploited child labour like the rest of the world, really think they’d have more morals

Ali: Some boys I go to school with hand out fun drugs for kids, it’s not like I’m giving the cartel their Sunday papers

Johnny: I’m saying you don’t take nothing serious, so there you’ve only backed me

Johnny: hippies and punks don’t exist now, you know

Ali: Why do you want to fit in so badly

Johnny: Why do you have to stand out? You need everyone’s attention so badly, it’s a disgrace, like

Ali: No one else is as bothered to have to give it to me as you

Johnny: Aren’t you shamed of yourself?

Ali: For being interesting, trying to be someone everyone can like

Johnny: For being as needy as you are for it

Ali: Shame for what you need just makes you suppress it until you can’t, then you really act out

Johnny: And you really acting out looks like what?

Ali: I don’t know, I get what I need

Johnny: Do you?

Ali: I’m not scared to ask for it, to openly want it

Johnny: You’ve everything you want then, is it?

Ali: Of course not

Johnny: No, you’ve not, for all your asking

Ali: So, why bother asking, right?

Ali: Don’t you, of all people, think that we should get to carve our own path, make our own way, not just take what we’re given and shut up about it

Johnny: I do make my own way, you don’t shut up but you’re standing still surrounded by all your friends, maybe it’s you can’t get past ‘em how many there are

Ali: You say family are important, tradition

Ali: Why should I want to be alone, isolated?

Johnny: She’s not your family, mine isn’t, go the fuck home, Ali

Ali: She hasn’t got one, as you’ve pointed out many a time

Johnny: She’s got her ma

Ali: and we can choose each other, to have more than what we were born into

Ali: It shouldn’t be any of your concern, if yours is so fucking solid

Johnny: They’d choose to pack up if you weren’t here all the time

Ali: Yeah, you want them to go the fuck home like it exists

Ali: the site politics aren’t my business, if they really have to go, then someone more senior than you can let them know, can’t they

Johnny: They can have a house, it’s not their traditions

Ali: Look, I actually get it

Ali: search me why the fuck [Carly’s mum] settled there but she’s not exactly reasonable

Ali: but why do you have to punish Carly for it, like she chose any of it?

Johnny: She has chose to make a holy show of herself

Ali: Like you said, they aren’t travellers, they shouldn’t live on a traveller site

Ali: she doesn’t have to comply with your way of living, but why can’t someone make [Carly’s mum] see she should go?

Johnny: She don’t listen to reason, you said it before I have, but when we get pushed past our reason, something bad will happen

Ali: Carly told me what you said

Johnny: I’ve not talked to her

Ali: About torching their caravan

Johnny: Sure, I’ve not talked to her

Ali: Oh

Ali: then someone else has threatened her, the morning after, she told me

Johnny: It’s good she’s been warned, whoever it were by

Ali: How can you say that’s good

Johnny: No warning and it’s done without, she’s dead when she could’ve been off

Ali: That’s a threat, not a warning

Johnny: Some people feel the need to make threats when their warnings go unheard and she’s had ‘em before now

Ali: That’s all I need to know

Johnny: There then, you know it all

Ali: I’ll get her to see, she can stay with me until her mum finds a place

Johnny: It’s best that way, nobody wants to see her hurt

Ali: You can’t really claim that when you condone burning her out

Johnny: As long as they don’t stay they won’t be

Ali: I can’t force them but I’ll try

Ali: now I know you’re serious

Johnny: It’s only words for now, no actions

Ali: You don’t get to try and soften it, it is what it is and that’s a threat

Ali: I’ll make sure she knows that, she thinks the rest of them care about her, for fuck’s sake

Johnny: She’s some dope that girl

Ali: She’s innocent

Johnny: No, she’s a whore

Ali: and all your cousins and brothers will use her until they decide her reputation is too bad and she has to go

Johnny: She made her bed by lying with Moses in his

Ali: She likes him!

Ali: If he doesn’t like her that makes him the one in the wrong, if we’re throwing those stones

Johnny: She made herself available to be used, that’s her fault

Ali: That doesn’t absolve them of any of their wrongdoings and you know that

Ali: blame a temptress all you want but you still get tempted

Johnny: I’m not tempted

Ali: It’s normal, people want to have sex

Johnny: You called it wrongdoings, I didn’t

Ali: You called her a whore, I was appealing to your piety

Ali: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her wanting them or them wanting her, you do

Johnny: It’s not the act, it’s the trouble it’ll lead to

Johnny: you know she’s not to be trusted not to cause it

Ali: Don’t all teenagers have relationship drama?

Ali: If it wasn’t so about the blame game, half of it would be resolved and it would just be feelings getting hurt, that’s life

Johnny: Their lives have a proper path and it’s not getting banged up by Carly

Ali: She won’t do that, she didn’t even tell me about the threat of being burned in her bed like it was serious, that isn’t her

Johnny: She’s a worst state than any gorja girl I’ve met before, I don’t know what she’ll do

Ali: She’s messed up, yeah

Ali: but she’s sweet and you shouldn’t be scared of her, she’s scared of you

Johnny: She should be scared of me, her carrying on

Ali: Find her inbox if you insist on this carry on

Ali: I’m not scared of you

Johnny: You don’t need to be scared of me

Ali: Why not, I’m just like her

Johnny: You’re not as bad as her

Ali: That’s so insulting

Johnny: Why?

Ali: Because I try SO hard to be unique and fascinating, obviously

Johnny: Only insulting if you want to be as bad as her

Ali: You may as well continue insulting me, it’s become expected

Johnny: You wouldn’t know what to do with the opposite

Ali: Says you

Johnny: You said you don’t expect it

Ali: Yeah, all you do is slag me off

Johnny: Isn’t all I do

Ali: To my face, anyway

Johnny: Come on, I let you help with the bike

Ali: Let me help… meaning I helped you, that’s me

Johnny: I didn’t tell you you couldn’t

Ali: Which is handy because I can

Johnny: Jesus, you helped, I admit it

Ali: Pulling 🦷🦷

Ali: I didn’t ask you to admit it in front of anyone, did I

Johnny: Not yet

Ali: Contrary to your perception of me, I don’t need everyone to know I can hold a 🔧 and not just look pretty doing it

Ali: Besides, I had metalwork with both of them so they already know

Johnny: You would take metalwork

Ali: And I have my own bike, not that you asked

Ali: well, we all share it but none of the others care about it anymore and the baby is too little

Johnny: Go on, you can’t tell me you’ve a bike and nothing about it

Ali: [tell him about this dirtbike you have like we did as children because your father is my father like that so you would probably have had a couple but literally who else is wanting it now so you just kept the one]

Johnny: [idk but nerd out asking her about it, like what the tea of it is and what needs fixing etc etc because you clearly are into this stuff too]

Ali: [god bless y’all nerds but me and my boo are not going to pretend to know what we’re talking about but you both do and can lol]

Johnny: [just here offering to swag it up for her with different parts and hacks in ways I know nothing about because he loves her]

Ali: When can I bring it over?

Johnny: When my bike’s done, there’s still some things I need to finish before [whenever he’s taking her to visit Joseph]

Ali: You can ask for help

Ali: won’t even make a thing out of it

Johnny: You’re to have her off site not yourself be on

Ali: I’m not just leaving my baby with you though, I want to help

Johnny: Every other girl is after a surprise but you

Ali: Sorry I called you predictable and now you’re after showing me you aren’t

Johnny: When did you call me predictable?

Ali: Your insults being expected, it’s sort of the same thing

Johnny: I’ll put it aside

Ali: Big of you

Johnny: We’d only be back to insulting each other, predictably

Ali: Isn’t it more fun when you don’t see them coming

Johnny: Is it now?

Johnny: Telling of you, would it not be more fun to not see the changes to your bike coming?

Ali: I’m not sure I trust you like that

Johnny: It’s no threat to cut your brakes

Ali: You would say that if you were trying to have me slam into a lamppost

Johnny: I don’t want it, you hurt

Ali: You don’t want to see anyone hurt, I know

Johnny: I’ll steal it to do what needs to be done, you know

Ali: 😲

Ali: You don’t even know where I live

Johnny: Ro knows so I know, I’ll get it out of him before you’ve yourself from bed in the night to see your bike stole

Ali: I’ll tell him to 🤐 or else

Johnny: I’ll be at him to tell me or else, how confident are you?

Ali: 🤔

Ali: nah, I’d say I’d feel safe putting a bet on it

Johnny: How will you feel him taking a smack for you?

Ali: Is that really the only way to achieve your goal? 🙄

Johnny: You can quit being a messer and say yeah to being surprised by the bike, it’s unstolen, he’s unsmacked

Ali: You liked fixing it with me

Johnny: You’ll like what I do to it

Ali: Maybe

Johnny: Maybe I know the whereabouts of a [really old/rare bike or car] we can work on together, but you have to say yeah to this, or sure, you’re never touching it

Ali: So you were holding out the big guns on me

Ali: 🔫 okay

Johnny: Say it for proper, on you go

Ali: Tell me when you’ve finished with yours and I’ll drop mine

Johnny: I’ll get it, you’ll strand yourself from leaving it here and no girl should be walking in the night

Ali: You make me laugh sometimes

Johnny: Laugh but it’s what’s to happen

Ali: like, I could come in the day, even if you’re not there, or you could give me a lift home, there are so many other options but sure, alright

Johnny: Options you thought up yourself ‘cause you don’t want me to have mine

Ali: No, you can come over

Ali: I could invite you in, wouldn’t that be fun

Johnny: Christ, I can think up for myself how that’d be

Ali: 😁😁😁

Ali: Don’t act like you don’t want to stay for tea

Johnny: You’ve a daddy unlike her, do you want me to get in trouble?

Ali: What could you get in trouble for, fixing [whatever is wrong with our bike]?

Johnny: Ah give over

Ali: Cute

Johnny: Don’t start none of your sugar with me, I’ve told you it don’t work

Ali: so I can tell my daddy that, can’t I

Johnny: Best you do

Ali: Can I say funny if I can’t say cute?

Johnny: Why are you after saying either?

Ali: Best you stop acting it if you can’t hack it

Johnny: Laying it on with a trowel now

Ali: Oh, please, that’s nothing

Johnny: To you it might not be, girl

Ali: Oh, please x2

Ali: You’ll have heard worse/better loads of times over

Johnny: Well maybe it’s something to me what you say

Ali: Is it?

Johnny: You’re not careful with what you do

Ali: so what I say must be the same

Johnny: Is it?

Ali: No

Ali: but I know that’s what you believe

Johnny: I don’t know, Ali

Ali: I talk too much, yeah, everyone agrees

Johnny: Maybe, but you’re a proper enough girl for that, all of ‘em talk and talk

Ali: How many sisters do you have?

Johnny: [He’s saying 4 but he’s doing it by naming them, if you know what I mean, which I won’t commit us to because soz gals none of you are relevant cos you’re either already married or not allowed to associate with cali anyway]

Ali: And are you the oldest or just the oldest boy?

Johnny: [again namedrop the sister/sisters that’s older because I vibe at least one of them is if not a couple of, why not, you’re only like 16-18 yourself sir so it’s feasible]

Ali: They’ve already had their weddings then

Johnny: They’re onto having children now

Ali: so you’re an uncle

Ali: I don’t know if any of my siblings will have children… 🤔

Johnny: [tell her about how many nieces or nephews you have at this point and what they are called and how old they are, a casual rundown how you do, but again I don’t need to commit us cos not relevant and I doubt there’s that many of them yet, you’ve your whole lives ladies, calm down, lol]

Ali: They must be the ones I’ve seen playing out, they’re cute

Johnny: Why are we talking about this?

Ali: I’m a tourist, aren’t I

Johnny: And the babies aren’t part of the travelling circus you’re here to see

Ali: It was a joke but okay, change the subject

Johnny: It’s a touchy subject, the next generation of us, nobody can say what the future’ll be like

Ali: If there’s one thing you have, it’s strong tradition

Johnny: But there’s less room for it, or for any of us

Ali: You’ve lasted thousands of years

Johnny: Things are changing, to houses, marrying gorjas, or not marrying at all and girls working

Ali: Evolving doesn’t necessarily mean destroying, forgetting

Johnny: ‘Cept when it does

Ali: That’s to be worked out

Ali: and you can still keep all the traditions you want personally

Johnny: It’s not personal choice, it’s who we are

Ali: If you can live within that, some people can’t stay in the family they were born into or the community

Johnny: For doing wrong, you can’t make it out like it’s the right thing

Ali: There are reasons that are valid

Johnny: You would say that, you’ve only your own rules

Ali: I have personal knowing that sometimes it’s the right thing to do

Johnny: You don’t have personal knowing of my community, or of being born into a family that weren’t already a mess though, do you?

Ali: It’d be a worse mess if my da hadn’t left his at 15

Ali: but no, I don’t claim to know your community beyond my outsider perspective

Johnny: We’re too different not to be outsiders to each other

Ali: We’re both sat here in a heavily Christian country that holds lots of the same family values you do

Ali: no, I don’t find your culture that wildly different, sorry, like

Johnny: You don’t hold them

Ali: Have you ever feckin’ asked?

Ali: You don’t know what I value, you assume based on seeing me at some parties, ah how much of the pub comes there right after Church on sunday?

Johnny: Not my fault your behaviour speaks for you, like

Ali: I’m not aiming for sainthood

Ali: and judge me all you like, your opinion of me has nothing to do with who I actually am

Johnny: Who you are isn’t what I need to worry myself about

Ali: As if I asked you to

Johnny: I’ve some hard graft I’m busy with

Ali: Alright, see you around then

Johnny: When you’re there at [wherever they are meeting for this Joseph visit, bold assumption she’s still gonna turn up when you’ve been this much of a dick but] I’ll see you

Ali: A lots been said since then

Johnny: Not you don’t want to go no more

Ali: Of course I do but this is about your words

Johnny: I won’t be saying nothing then, I’ll have my mind on the getting you there

Ali: And you have nothing to say to me anyway, right

Johnny: Nothing you’re really after hearing

Ali: S’funny you think you have the first clue but no

Ali: sure that’s right regardless

Johnny: We don’t have to be friends for me to take you

Ali: You’ve said

Ali: if you’re so hung up on keeping your word then fine, we’ll get it over with and I’ll make more permanent arrangements somehow

Johnny: We can have it as an arrangement between us

Ali: but what’s in that for you?

Johnny: Keeps the bike running, sometimes I’m too busy to go off and it’s sat about longer than’s good for it

Ali: Fuck it then, alright

Johnny: [the day of this visit] then, every or every other

Ali: Are you able to wait for me, because I don’t know how long he’ll even want me there

Johnny: I’ll wait, yeah

Ali: Thanks

Ali: don’t worry I won’t be crying or anything else awkward for you

Johnny: If crying’s what you need to do, don’t trouble yourself about me, I’ve seen it before

Ali: I heard, you have sisters

Ali: I’m not going to

Johnny: I know to look away before it’s awkward for you, so

Ali: Awkward for who?

Johnny: Neither of us, you’ll be on the back, I’ll not see you

Ali: Crying isn’t something that’s really done much in my house, just the baby

Johnny: You’re not in your house, and you’re supposed to be a free spirit or whatever, no?

Ali: I can think of more entertaining ways to go against the status quo

Johnny: Betting you can, but the psych ward’s probably not going to be fun and games

Ali: It’s not about me, it’s about how he’s finding it

Johnny: You’ll still find there’s a impact on you too

Ali: I’ve heard and seen it before, s’okay

Johnny: Go careful, will you?

Ali: How? I don’t have a choice, he’s still my brother

Johnny: I know, but you’re only a little girl

Johnny: and I don’t mean it in a putting the wind up you or an insulting way for this time

Ali: You’re not that much older than me

Johnny: I am

Ali: not old enough to call me that

Johnny: I could be a year older and call you that, it’s about more than birthdays had

Ali: and I’m not little, trust me

Johnny: Size of you is, compared to me, and sure to everyone else in that place

Ali: I wouldn’t ask you to come in, if you think I will

Johnny: I’m just asking you to think, keep yourself safe

Ali: I am, they’re just sick people, I’ll be safe

Ali: you’ll be right outside

Johnny: I don’t want it, you hurt, that’s true of on site or off

Ali: I believe you, for this time

Johnny: Yeah though, I’ll be outside

Ali: Maybe thinking about that does make me feel better

Johnny: You’re to keep it in mind then

Ali: I will

Ali: and I won’t rush to replace you, unfortunately for you

Johnny: It won’t be too bad for me

Ali: Get to keep the bike ticking over, yeah

Johnny: It’s important, you know

Ali: I know

Johnny: I’d come in, if you ever need to ask

Ali: I reckon that would be more awkward than you coming in for tea but

Ali: I’ll keep that in mind too

Johnny: Offer’s on the table, don’t matter if you never take me up on it or you do

Ali: I know how it matters, what does

Ali: I owe you, whether you like it or not

Johnny: There’ll be times I like it and times I don’t

Ali: I’ll work out how to make it actually pay back and not burden you

Ali: cash is off the table, leaves a lot I can try

Johnny: Don’t you be filling my mind with the likes of what you could get yourself up to

Ali: but please

Ali: My own head’s too full

Johnny: I’ve got work, should be where my head is

Ali: Isn’t work just what you’re occupying your hands with if you’re doing it right?

Ali: Not once am I thinking about my school work whilst I’m doing it, your head is your own

Johnny: Maybe I’m not old enough to let my hands do it all themselves how my da and uncle can

Ali: You’re an apprentice still, that makes sense

Johnny: No, what that word means to yous lot’s lads as messers isn’t what I am, but there’s things to be learning all the time ‘til you’re old as they are

Ali: You’re sharp, it’ll stick

Johnny: It has stuck when you’re not ‘round distracting us

Ali: I’ve come nowhere near in ages

Johnny: You’re here now, talking too much

Ali: I’m being restrained, have you know

Ali: but fine, lock me in your thoughts ‘til you get off the clock

Johnny: Rain’s stopped, was that to do with you?

Ali: Possibly

Johnny: You don’t want me piss wet through in all the worse ways no more?

Ali: I do but I’m thinking of you now and what you want so

Johnny: Are you now?

Ali: I told you, you’re going to like it or I’m not doing it right

Johnny: How do you reckon you know what I like?

Ali: I can feel it, when I’m getting hotter or colder

Johnny: What’s it feel like?

Ali: That’s a secret, for now

Johnny: You’re not playing very fair with that one

Ali: Neither are you, asking questions you know the answers to

Johnny: You think I’ve the answers

Ali: I think you know how this feels

Johnny: Maybe

Ali: maybe

Johnny: But for now we’re keeping secrets, yeah?

Ali: I can be honest, ask me again

Johnny: I’m not part of the games you play, told you before

Ali: I’m not playing

Johnny: You are

Ali: No

Johnny: I can’t do this with you

Ali: You could

Ali: just say you don’t want to

Johnny: Enough, Ali

Ali: It isn’t

Johnny: You take everything too far

Ali: Fine, go, I’m sorry

Johnny: [do go boy because we all know you’re losing your mind over this girl so you gotta]

Ali: [it’s very mutual and now you’re here DYING with nothing to do about it, god bless]

Johnny: [Winnie like invite Ronan over again and I say NO, stop it evil bear, but I do hope it’s not ages until they are going to see Joe cos they’ll both be DYING until then]

Ali: [the temptation but we cannot because we are just not that bitch to that extent, good luck functioning though because truly]

Johnny: [I also hope it’s not a really long bike ride because it’ll be so awks, god I’d die]

Ali: [god knows where Joe has been sent I have no clue but either way this girl is NOT okay]

Johnny: [soz you gotta lowkey hold onto him so you don’t fall off, that won’t be helping either of y’all with the tension]

Ali: [the forced intimacy]

Johnny: [hit me with your coming out post visit vibe and mood because he is gonna wait like he said however long she’s in there, how did it go?]

Ali: [me like hmm, how strange are we going to be today, Joseph? Lord lmao, he’s probably going to be kinda buzzing you’ve disobeyed mcvickers to come see him, so we can probably say it isn’t terrible but he’d definitely be as drugged up as he could be so that wouldn’t be nice to see so, a mixed bag but not like omg horrific, I feel?]

Johnny: [I definitely think that tracks for the first visit, not just saying that because 1. I’d feel awful if he kissed and left her when she’s already distraught and 2. Because if it was that awful she probably wouldn’t wanna go back and visit Joe again right away, it does feel real]

Ali: [mhmm, that’s my thinking, like you’re lowkey like hm does he need to be that zombified but that isn’t enough to have you coming out screaming crying and thus make that more of a betrayal than needs be]

Johnny: [this boy just looking at her as she comes out, trying to gauge the mood because clearly she isn’t crying but she said she wouldn’t so, it’s the way he hasn’t said a damn word for this entire bike ride and still isn’t for me, if I was Ali I’d be so !! frustrated not just in a sexy way]

Ali: [like I grant you we can’t have an easy chat whilst riding said bike because it’s loud and you’d need to shout but at this point hun, it’s a THING ™ so, looking at you with the ? like yes, what do you want to say because we are neither risking mentioning how things were left because we were in the ‘wrong’ nor jumping straight into telling you Joe’s business because that’s a lot and also makes this seem as transactional as we do not believe it nor want it to be]

Johnny: [when you try and look her over/up and down in a sort of casual so are you okay way like you do when peeps reappear after something but whatever she’s wearing for this visit and however awks the vibe she looks great because always and he can’t help LINGERING over LOOKING at her in full, cos we all know she just jumped straight on the bike to get there so this is the first moment and chance for that to be a thing]

Ali: [just nodding in a slightly petty way like if you’re not talking neither am I boy but we’re not holding out for dramatic effect because it’s serious and we don’t need to fake being on the edge here lol, but then he’s more than just looking at you and it’s LOOKING so then you’re also blushing which says as much without saying anything]

Johnny: [likewise running his hand through the long messy hair this boy has for every single role he’s ever played because he’s as on the edge as she is and lbr more so, going towards the bike wherever it has been left, closer to it than he was because he was deffo basically at the door of this psych ward before, as if that will encourage her to get on and they can just drive back again in silence, no no sir, no no]

Ali: [doing that kind of disbelieving laugh that is basically paired with the verbalisation of no no ‘I can’t do this’ taking a step forward but only to then stop with your arms out like no, again, we can’t ‘not if you aren’t going to say anything’]

Johnny: [stopping himself when she does, again running his hand through his hair so it’s essentially fallen out of the little ponytail it was in with the force of ‘We’ve talked enough’ you definitely have not and the absolute finality with which he’s saying that isn’t convincing either of you it’s true ‘too much’ with more of an !! exasperated and almost frantic edge to it because the boy is not okay, making a move to tie his hair immediately back up cos we can’t be still when we’re this tense]

Ali: [try not to watch this boy mess with his hair but it’s also distractingly mezmerising so we are, sorry, again we can look away embarrassed about it to show we too are trying here, folding your arms and hug them against you so you aren’t gesturing so exasperatedly still ‘I took it too far for you’ that for you because you wanted to say a whole lot more but do actually care about people’s boundaries thank you so we can admit that ‘I’m not going to…’ gesturing off because of the things you could say you aren’t going to do and how voicing that isn’t going to help rn]

Johnny: [‘leave it alone now’ in a way that sounds the same as when he told Moses to leave Carly alone and Ronan with Ali, because we need her to stop and shut up rn immediately but haven’t yet been pushed to the point of shutting her up by kissing her or anything ‘quit your acting up and get on the bike’ again, his tone making me uncomfortable because it’s too close to giving orders like before but also too close to how those other lads talk to Carly in a way I don’t appreciate, sir, thank you]

Ali: [‘because that’s working’ like hello, not addressing this is having us going ‘round in circles with this ‘you keep changing your mind’ in that frustrated tone but we’re still trying to talk and get you to see how confusing this for us, obviously, we are not getting on this bike]

Johnny: [‘god, girl, if you don’t get on this fucking bike’ he’s swearing at her, he’s threatening her, he’s almost shouting at her because !!, it’s all popping off ‘don’t you know I’m not meant to have you in mind at all?’ getting more in her grill about this because of the aforementioned !! and the fact he needs her to see how confusing this is for him like please understand]

Ali: [‘I’m not going anywhere with you like this’ matter of fact enough but our tone is very calm down without saying those words because never the move and we’d feel like a hypocrite for it when we’re also !! over this ‘but you do and you can’t have me on the back of you every week without thinking about me at all, don’t do it if that’s so’ ducking our head so we can make eye contact with you and we’re almost touching our forehead against yours but not fully making that physical contact]

Johnny: [running a hand through his hair again when she basically tells him to calm down as if that alone will do it, only to end up holding the sides of his head in his hands in a very literal sense because of how full of her his head is, just for a moment though so it’s back up by the time she ducks hers for the eye contact and almost forehead touch ‘I can’t have you and that’s the end of it’ almost eerily quiet in contrast to how loud he was before]

Ali: [just prising his hands away from his head really slowly by taking them in your own, using the manoeuvre to put only the tiniest amount more space between you after your almost forehead press, dropping his hands gently at his side even though for the briefest moment before you let go, you consider putting them on your waist, obviously you do not ‘that’s- okay’ a very definite pause meaning it isn’t the full sentence we intended it to be because it doesn’t feel okay even if we were being good and doing everything ‘right’ we’d tell you it was okay, instead we’re simply acknowledging you said it without actually commenting on it because we can’t come to the phone right now]

Johnny: [when it obvs doesn’t feel okay to him either so he’s back in her grill again before either of y’all are even fully aware of how close he is, which is to the point that his dramatic and frustrated af big long breath is basically at her and so near to being in her mouth that Winnie is screaming crying perfect storm ‘it isn’t’ an exact echo of what she said when he said enough before in their convo, unaware or aware af though he is or isn’t that he’s used her exact words here, like they are just so on the same page with their frustration that it could be accidental but it could also be targeted and deliberate like hey remember this hun, me too, the fuck]

Ali: [neither of you is complaining, almost trying not to acknowledge how close you are like that means he won’t notice either and thus move back when he does, closing your eyes and holding your own breath at this because you can’t trust yourself to do anything close to sane about it and you don’t know what he wants you to say or do because you’ve tried several approaches and you’re not used to being this wrong every time, seemingly ‘you aren’t part of the game’ as a promise because seriously]

Johnny: [‘What am I?’ genuinely because if not, what else do you think this can be, gal, you can’t be his gf or anything of the sort, it’s all a mess and he’s mad at the situation, her and himself]

Ali: [‘other’ like you’re putting him into a category because you can’t and there’s no better way to put that across ‘some shit is just different and that’s not ‘cos I want it to be’ because this is not ideal for us, if you were any of the others you would just hookup with/casually date us]

Johnny: [‘you weren’t supposed to be this different yourself’ cos rn he’d love nothing more than for her to be Carly so he can write her off/hate her or like the other non-traveller girls he clearly hasn’t been very interested in]

Ali: [opening your eyes again because you can’t keep them shut forever, doing a half shrug and the self-deprecating little laugh like heard that one before energy because what else can we say to that ‘I don’t want it to be you’ which sounds harsh but is said too softly to be so because we mean it, we’re not like the girl who thinks they’re so slay they need to get the one boy they can’t have, we didn’t mean to make this a thing when there is literally a much more sensible option in Ronan right there who isn’t so damn conflicted]

Johnny: [pushing her back barely at all in the scheme of things but it would feel like a giant gap suddenly and a harsh action despite how softly he’s doing it to match the vibe of what she said, as if it’s that simple to let her go and free you both from this ‘it isn’t going to be me’ me here like sure Jan because you’re literally looking at her and her mouth like you wanna kiss her rn as the words are being said because you do]

Ali: [not even purposefully doing the thing where you then rock forward from the pressure being exerted on pushing you back, so you’re truly back where you were, doing the tiniest smile as you catch his eye and take said step back yourself like okay, okay ‘if you’d just forgo your morals and hurt me, it could be’ like it’s a joke but it’s a little too real rn]

Johnny: [he’s gotta close his own eyes for a sec when she takes her step back because he’s fighting a war with himself not to immediately pull her back already but then she says what she says and his eyes open and flash with such anger at all this and it is the perfect kiss her hard before he goes moment because shut up that isn’t funny and I hate that you’d make a joke like this and I hate you and I hate myself that I’m doing this in response or ever etc etc, it can’t be overstated the way he’s actually launching himself at her for this and there is a violence to it because the desperation and the !! that’s there but he wishes was not, nbd not at all casually the most aggressive makeout any character has ever]

Ali: [me like try not to hit the deck guys because the way that will catch us completely off guard because feeling like you would never do anything at this point obviously, basically supporting yourself and keeping vaguely upright by holding onto the sides of his face like he did earlier because you’ll at least take him down with you, making some kind of unholy noise because of the absolute shock of it all but also because of something being done with this tension, however briefly it lasts]

Johnny: [I feel like at some point y’all have to fall against this bike and it has to hit the deck and end up with some kind of superficial damage that won’t stop him riding off when he needs to and he won’t fully notice til later because that’s poetic cinema, baby, y’all so carried away you don’t even care his precious bike you worked on together has fallen over]

Ali: [mhmm, it has to be done, also you’re outside of a psychward, there are probably many a mentally unstable teenager watching you guys in this car park, including your own brother Alison, the way a setting has never been less relevant in its life, we don’t even remember where we are or why we were here at this point, babe, just got to hold our own in this kiss fight]

Johnny: [me just having a big yikes moment thinking about how if Joe sees it he’ll be so into it, don’t think about that Junie, we’re not getting into his incest and inappropriateness rn, I’m just going to think about how this should be a quick kiss this boy regrets and snaps himself out of immediately but instead it’s going on SO long, we’re really going at it]

Ali: [Joseph, this isn’t about you, you’re being a menace and will continue to be but for now you are limited by being locked away lol, not having our moment ruined until it is by this boy leaving, because can’t pretend we’re not needing how aggressive it is either by now, like soz you have just given us everything to keep thinking about you, was not your intention but here we are, on the ground by this point I’m sure looking like you might be fully brawling]

Johnny: [Sadly all good things must come to an end and whether that’s because of some kind of way she touches him/he touches her or a sound either of you make or a move he ends up making to take something off her/touch her under it, something triggers that this amazingness has to stop and he simply will just get on this bike and drive away leaving her the most in shock anyone has ever been]

Ali: [can you imagine, the shock and awe, I can’t; also we’re on 30 pages so should probably post but just to say she would message you because we aren’t going to not but if you think he wouldn’t reply, I could try and do that on this page?]

Johnny: [I can’t imagine, I would simply pass away, I like to think he’d circle back later like wtf did I do to see if she was still there but he’d have obvs got so far away in his own shock before he did that and then had to turn back that she’s long gone by the time, because he does have morals and he wouldn’t actually wanna just leave her outside a psych ward, as for replying though, I don’t think he would, like lowkey he probably wouldn’t even let himself read it]

Ali: [Okay let me try, obviously waiting ‘til she is home so he should also be because not trying to get you to crash when it already feels vaguely possible]

Ali: I got home fine

Ali: Figured you’d want to know, still

Ali: and I hope you did but I won’t stop by and check

Ali: or ask, or say anything to anyone so

Ali: Why did you go?

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jojojoanie · 1 year

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When’s the last time anyone heard anything about JOANNE FOREMAN? Old friends remember them as SHARP & HUMOROUS but also DRAINED & ABRASIVE, no wonder they’re still known as THE MEDIA MACHINE around town. Today, in 2006, they are 38 and some people say they remind them of worry wrinkles far too deep for one’s age; an average of six cups of coffee a day; a cloud of smoke following your every step; an unquenchable thirst for peace of mind.

tw: death and injury

the artist formerly known as ‘joanie’, simply ‘jo’ or even ‘jojo’, now goes by her government name of joanne foreman. funny, how things change. had someone dared to call her joanne in 1988 rest assured she would’ve made them pay. but alas.

born and raised in hawkins, without ever having spent more than a few weeks away at christian summer camps and the like, joanie grew up with the firm belief that her parents had to have been the most boring people on earth. not that there isn’t some truth to it, it’s just that now she’s become equally boring, so what does it matter. she used to resent them for living that picture perfect life, with their little nuclear family in a big house on elm street, living the dream of their generation. the older she gets, the less despicable that idea seems.

joanie’s dreams used to be bigger than that, used to not fit anymore. no space in that big fucking house for her to let her imagination run wild. comparing her childhood home to that measly rat’s nest of an apartment she lives in in new york, well, she rather thinks she shouldn’t have taken it for granted.

growing up with a perfect older sister and a perfect younger brother, joanne’s the middle child so it was to be anticipated that she’d come out of that house a little fucked up, right? ‘who knows what went wrong with that one’ their neighbours used to wonder when she‘d storm out the house after another explosive argument with her parents. the way she dressed, her hair, the sort of music she listened to defied everything her parents deemed proper and good, everything they’d worked for, shattering their perfect image. not that jo was doing it actively rebel against their lifestyle - not that she wasn’t enjoying this unintended rebellion, either. it was the late 80s in the middle of buttfuck, indiana - well, what else was there to do except be a disruptor and nuisance to her parents? cause a little trouble?

despite being somewhat of an outcast she, amazingly, sailed through school with flying colours - the only reason her parents didn’t disown her, she suspects - and decides against college, scores a gig at the hawkins post. not that college is completely out of the picture, it’s just that she doesn’t know what to do with herself. like, at all. she’s been interning at the post since sophomore year - a classic case of her dad knowing someone who was friends with the wife of a guy who could put in a good word - so what’s the harm in gathering some work experience before she embarks on the long-awaited greyhound busride outta here?

it buys her some time, so wherever she decides to go, she won’t arrive as lost as she’s feeling right now. she even gets treated a little less shitty by her employers, so that’s a win. though she’s never been treated particularly bad, either. jo likes to think her more adrogynous nature and her ‘i won’t take any bullshit’ attitude contributes to that. maybe also the fact that she’s got pictures of tom holloway kissing his college aged girlfriend. a little blackmail never hurt anyone.

so there she is for a couple months, in charge of brewing coffee, sorting through the rough drafts of stories and news, discarding the many … batshit crazy clues people are calling in. those can go to the weekly watcher. she’s never bought the bullshit about the town being ‘cursed’ or whatever, it’s just a small town, there was nothing more to it. people were bored and inventing stories. it was getting ridiculous at this point.

especially in spring break of ‘86, the crazy seemed to reach a whole nother level of … well, crazy. first, the murders. jo had never talked to him much - yeah, she’d been a loner but, like, not a fucking nerd at least - but eddie munson had never seemed like the type of guy to brutally kill some cheerleader to get revenge on his bullies or whatever. but things weren’t looking good for him. even if you gave him the benefit of the doubt … well, there wasn’t much doubting. seemed pretty clear. munson murdered that cunnigham kid, for whatever reason. however, jo didn’t buy into that ‘he was leading a devil worshipping cult’ shit. it was dnd. just a nerdy dice game.

with things becoming more … well, for lack of a better word, interesting around town, jo was considering extending her break before college, maybe investigative journalism could be her thing. and so, to do some investigating - mainly to visit her neighbours’ elderly mother, whom they had asked jo to keep and eye on and who, living in forest hills trailer park, was increasingly worried about, well, everything - jo hopped into her more than busted car and drove down to the trailer park. stayed there until nightfall - she’d meant to leave by noon, had been talked into a second and third helping of cake - and wasn’t even gonna do any further snooping around when, on her way home, in the middle of the road, she came across fred benson. naturally, jo screamed at him to ‘get the fuck out of the way, moron! ‘ since he was blocking the way. soon, though, her protests died down when fred, unresponsive, began to lift into the fucking air, float there and then - there are shivers and cold sweat when she thinks about this now - proceeded to have his bones cracked by some … invisible force in one of the most gruesome scenes jo’s ever witnessed.

to this day, joanne just hopes her former neighbour’s sweet old mother laced that cake with something. hopes that she was simply going crazy, that this wasn’t real. deep in her bones, though, she knows it. feels that she actually saw what she saw.

that night she turned her car around as fast as possible, took a two hour ice cold shower and filled out a couple college applications. by the end of the following month, jo has packed up her shit and moved to new york.

denial is her method of choice of dealing with this, when it finally begins to sink in that all the clues she’s tossed out through the years might’ve actually had some truth to them. denial is good, she’s got no time to work through that stuff, anyway. so she just pretends it never happened. whatever the opposite of a crazy conspiracy nutjob is, that’s her.

the next few years are pretty uneventful, jo’s busy with her politcial science degree at hunter’s (she’s missed the application deadline for everything else), as well as busy with reinventing herself, finding her new york personality. also, finding the funds to fund her new york personality and general lifestyle. there’s a bunch of odd jobs, everything from waitressing to working coatcheck to being an usher on broadway, she dips her toes into every water available. it’s all about the experience, right?

it’s nothing but a stroke of pure, dumb luck that lands her the internship at snl. she’s never even considered working in tv before, thought she’d evetually just circle back round to working the front desk at some paper. she’s out with friends at a comedy club one night, drunk off her tits - she’d just failed an important exam, had fully embraced the fact that she was a failure and would probably be kicked off campus soon enough - when the owner had announced that it was ‘open mic night’. glorious, disastrous, everything in between. jo had swayed to the stage, tapped the mic and slurred ‘is this thing on?’ into it, and that’s all she remembers. the next morning there’s someone’s business card in her coat pocket.

the week after that she’s bringing coffee and sandwiches to the snl writer’s room. it’s funny how life works sometimes. her parents are less than thrilled that she’s dropped out of college but more than thrilled to hear that she’s met will ferrell.

when jo says she has little to no memory of the years that follow, it’s no exaggeration. it’s a blur of work, work, work, work and long nights spent in bars and seedy downtown clubs with the cast and crew of america’s favourite late night entertainment show. it’s when she’s finally managed to work her way into the writer’s room that jo changes, drastically. that rebellious, snarky young girl is gone, replaced by someone who always looks serious, who’s got deep dark circles under their eyes, who’s never taken a day off work and i mean, like, ever. she’s not so much fun to be around anymore, too professional for most of her fun loving friends. they sometimes joke that the infamous ‘debbie downer’ sketch is based off of her. jo’s not in on the joke.

the year is 2006 when things come crashing down. she never thought there’d be such a thing as working too much, after all this is her dream job (right?) or at least pretty good for someone who came to new york with no idea what they wanted to do with their life. she gets sloppier with the tasks she’s in charge of, her jokes rarely get used anymore, and it’s clear she needs a break - clear to anyone but her.

here’s a word of advice - if you want to make it to the top, work for it, maybe. don’t sleep with your married editor. which is, incidentally, what jo did. those news broke to everyone shortly before snl’s summer hiatus, and so, on the last day of work, joanne was called into her boss’s office and kindly advised to ‘take a break, ms foreman. i really advise you to take a long break, if you get what i mean.’ wait until the dust has settled and see if, once you’re in your right mind again, you’re still deserving of your job.

funny, how life works sometimes. you’re on top of the world in one moment, then completely crushed sitting alone in your shitty apartment in the next. summer in new york is shit if you’ve got noone to spend it with. and since that affair with her editor ended - their wife had threatened jo with a very, very explicit letter once she’d found out about the affair - jo was alone, truly. she hadn’t exactly spent the the last few years making meaningful connections in town, married to her work. sure, she had work friends. but now she had no work, thus no friends.

the letter arrived and jo, who had had virtually nothing to do with joyce byers, had initally wanted to stay home, but her parents had insisted she come back home. jo hadn’t told them about her little work fiasco, why bother? she finally felt like she wasn’t a disappointment to them anymore, like she could keep up with her perfect siblings, she wasn’t going to return to those judging stares, those disappointed shakes of the head.

so it was time to get back to hawkins, get back to living a lie.

#vr:intro

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sorry-im-late-again · 2 years

Text

Les Mis UK And Ireland Tour, Dublin 2.0

Okay so I saw Les Mis in Dublin on the 10th of February and as always when I see Les Mis I will be doing a review. For reference we were in the third row right in the middle.

I gotta see this is a STRONG cast. I actually couldn't fault any of the performances from the principal cast. There's usually always one that I'm not gone on but I genuinely believe this cast are stellar.

So to begin with, Dean Chisnall. I've heard such incredible things about Dean Chisnall and I have been so looking forward to seeing him. We've had these tickets since pre covid and I cam genuinely say it wad worth the wait. Quite honestly one of the best Valjeans I've ever witnessed. I can't even place what it is he brings to the character that makes his version so special but he's incredible. There's a softness to hid Valjean that sometimes I find lacking and it is just such a moving and nuanced performance.

So Enjolras is my favourite character and I've said it before that I have witnessed some incredibly underwhelming Enjolras and as a result I can be quite picky. Sam Wyn-Morris however, is quite honestly the best Enjolras I have ever seen. I am in love with his Enjolras. You can feel how much he cares for the cause in everything he does and those vocals. Honestly we are not worthy of his performances and I am so happy he got promoted from cover Enjolras in London to principal on tour because he is incredible.

Katie Hall. Katie Hall. Katie Hall. So I seen Katie as Fantine before back in Januarh 2019 and while I enjoyed her performance that time, it was nothing compared to this time. I don't know if it's becoming a mother or what it is, but her performance has completely changed and she blew me away. I sobbed through I dream a dream. There was so much raw emotion in everything she did and I just loved it.

Ian Hughes is a very enjoyable Thernardier. He is a great balance of funny and sinister and was very enjoyable to watch. Helen Walsh is good is Madame T., she's not my favourite role but I enjoyed her performance.

I had seen Nic Greenshields as Javert before and while I know he's not everyone's cup of tea, I enjoy him. He was perfectly stoic but unravelled at his death and vocally he was excellent on our night. I also found he acted more than he did previously when I'd seen him and thought he was a very good Javert.

Nathania Ong is a great Eponine. Her voice is stunning and I loved the rough and angry yet playful way she played Eponine. I felt like she did interstate the character which was lovely.

I really enjoyed Will Callan's Marius. Firstly, how is he only 18???? But secondly, he gave me very brick!Marius vibes he was just poor confused Pontmercy and I loved it and he also has stellar vocal chops.

I think it's generally agreed that Cosette can be quite a thankless role, but Paige Blankson was lovely. She actually acted!!!!! Which was great to see and has a beautiful voice.

The ensemble are very strong. Jordan Simon Pollard is excellently horrible as the Foreman. It is harrowing to see the Foreman as Fantine's first customer and his performance was fabulous. I really enjoyed Steven Hall as Grantaire in act 2, it was heartbreaking and he was wonderful. I could go through every member of the ensemble but I really don't have the time but it truly is an excellent company.

In terms of the production I was the first to complain about the original closing in London but after watching the New Production a few times in the last few years I can honestly say it is powerful. Some issues I would have, my friend I went with was a Les Mis newbie and sje said that the story was quite hard to follow at times as the scene changed no longer say the location and the year/ whether time has elapsed and I can imagine that would be hard to follow should you not know. Despite that I do think the production, sets and general staging etc are very good and while I do think it was a shame to get rid of the original completely, I do think this production is just as wonderful.

Something I noticed that was different to the other times I have seen both this production and the original is that Eponine no longer dies climbing over the barricade. The line "There's a boy climbing the barricade" no longer exists. Instead, Eponine is already at the barricade and a student (I didn't see who) calls "Incoming", this is followed by two gunshots and Eponine actually jumps infront of the gun in order to stop Marius getting hit (not unlike in the film). It was an interesting change because it is very small but I wonder what the decision was to change it.

Anyway, the tour company are very strong and I will urge anyone who can to get tickets because they're a cast you don't want to miss.

#les mis uk tour #dean chisnall #samuel wyn-morris #sam wyn morris #katie hall #nathania ong #paige blankson #ian hughes #helen walsh #nic Greenshields #steven hall #jordan simon polard #les miserables #les mis cast

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mldrgrl · 3 years

Text

Broken Things 17/24

by: mldrgrl Rating: varies by chapter, rated R overall See Chapter 1 for summary and notes

November approaches quickly. The surveyor is due to arrive in only a handful of weeks. The horses are coming along just fine with their training. Mulder’s relationship with Katherine feels like it’s moving forward at a pleasant pace. Just before the last weekend of the month, he asks her if he might accompany her into town that Friday.

“Of course,” she says. “But, you don’t need to ask.”

“You might have plans with your friends and I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

“I would like to call on Susannah and Monica and Doctor Black, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome to join me.”

“Then, I will accept your invitation.”

“My invitation? You invited yourself.”

“Did I?”

Probably the only thing he finds more delightful than when she raises her eyebrow at him is when she rolls her eyes at him.

He asks if she’d like to attempt to drive the wagon into town, but she declines. She feels that she’s only just mastered the carriage and has not had any wagon lessons yet. She’s more than happy to have him drive them.

Their first stop is the mercantile. Susannah rushes out to greet them and pulls Katherine inside by looping her arm through hers.

“We’ve got the prettiest new fabric in that will suit you so well,” she says. “I’ve been hoping you’d come by and held it just for you.”

“John,” Mulder greets, as he enters the store.

“Mulder, what timing. The denim trousers you ordered arrived just this week.”

“Thank you, I’ll take them now if you’ll wrap them.”

“Already done.”

“Katherine has our supply list, but it looks like your wife has absconded with her.”

“Yes, she’s been waiting for her to come in.”

“I’ll just take a look at the catalog in the meantime, I may have a few other things to order.”

“Certainly.” John slides the thick book of merchandise across the counter to Mulder. “We saw Melvin ride through town a few weeks ago and take Doctor Black back with him to the ranch. Heard you had taken a tumble from a wagon.”

“Just a little shoulder damage. That does remind me, if you have any liniment, I’ll take a couple tins off you.”

“We’ve got Sloan’s. The oil.”

“That’s fine, two bottles. No, make it three. I’ll bring one to the Doc.”

“He said Katherine patched you right up and did about as good of job with it as he would’ve done.”

“I guess if I had to compare the two, I much prefer the bedside manner of my wife.”

Mulder chuckles as John blushes and fumbles with the bottles of liniment. He’s saved from any further conversation of his shoulder when Katherine appears with Susannah and some bolts of cotton fabric with a blue paisley pattern.

“Kate, you have our list?” Mulder asks.

“Oh, yes.” She opens the little drawstring bag at her wrist and gives John the paper.

“Now that Katherine’s taken over from Melvin, you don’t have to translate his hieroglyphics any longer.”

“Yes, lovely handwriting.” John nods and then starts to collect items from the list, all business.

“I was just needling your wife about that Sunday dinner get-together we promised,” Susannah says. “You be sure not to keep her so busy she can’t do some proper visiting.”

“She is more than free to ride out at any time to come calling, but it has been a bit hectic lately.”

“Oh, we heard about your fall. Doctor Black said Katherine did all the doctoring for him and he didn’t lift a finger.”

“It was a mild concussion and a shoulder dislocation,” Katherine explains. “Just required a re-set of the shoulder and a good deal of rest.”

“John, put in for five of these undershirts here on page 67. Kate, is there anything you might want from Montgomery Ward?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a gander and put in for whatever you find with John. I’m going to head across the way to the lumber mill just for a few minutes.”

“Alright.”

Mulder leaves Katherine at the mercantile and goes across the road to the mill. It’s a noisy place with a lot of sawing and yelling and hammering. The smell of sawdust is everywhere. The air is thick with it and Mulder can swear he feels it clinging to him as soon as he gets within five feet of the place.

“Mr. Hartwell,” he shouts, waving his hat to get the foreman’s attention.

Mr. Hartwell leaves the saw he’s working with stuck in the lumber he’s cutting and takes his gloves off to shake hands. “Mr. Mulder, good to see you,” he says.

“I’m soon to be in need of some lumber.”

“Oh?”

“I took over Old Man Goodwin’s plot and I’ve got a surveyor coming out a little more than a week from now. He’s supposed to get me some plans for a bigger barn, new stables, and we’ll be doing a new bunkhouse and expanding the house eventually.”

“Is that right? When might you be needing your order?”

“I hope to break ground by winter. At least on the corral. I’ve been clearing trees on the property and we can recycle some of what we’ve already got. You still have a record on the build on my current plot?”

“I reckon so.”

“Let’s start with that same amount. I’m about to run down to the bank. I’ll tell Mr. Skinner you’ll be giving him an estimate and he can advance anything you need and I’ll take what I can get by let’s say, mid-December?”

“Well alright then.” Mr. Hartwell nods.

“I’ll also be in the market to hire labor, so if you have anyone in mind you can point my way, I’d be most grateful.”

“I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you.”

The two men shake hands again and Mulder heads back to the mercantile. John Jr. is loading up the wagon with their purchases. He gives Mulder a wave.

“How are things with your sweetheart?” Mulder asks, helping to load the last of the crates from the porch.

John Jr. sighs. “She broke off with me a couple weeks ago.”

“Well, now, that’s a shame.”

“She said I was boring and then the next day she was holding hands with Luke Doggett.”

“That the Sheriff’s boy?”

“Yes, Sir. I can’t even be mad over it because Luke’s a nice guy.”

“Be patient. You’re a hard worker and you’re not boring at all, you’re stable, like your father. You’ll find a great girl one day that’ll appreciate that.”

“Naw, I think I’m done with girls for awhile. I’m gonna save up and get a horse.”

“Well, horses are good too. When you’re ready to buy, you come see me. I’ll give you a good deal.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Mulder chuckles to himself as he walks away from John Jr. and goes back into the mercantile. Katherine gives him a smile that makes him want to wrap his arms around her. He puts his hand at the small of her back instead.

“Ready?” he asks.

Katherine and Susannah say their goodbyes. Mulder helps his wife up into the wagon seat and then they head to the bank. He leaves Katherine at the line to the teller’s window and waves to Skinner who motions him into the office.

“I wanted to let you know that we’re moving forward on the expansion,” Mulder tells him. “Mr. Hartwell should be coming by with an estimate for lumber. I told him to speak with you and you’d arrange to advance him anything he might need.”

“I can do that.”

“I also, uh…” Mulder turns his hat over in his hands for a few moments and then he glances out into the foyer of the bank before he shuts the door to Skinner’s office for a bit of privacy. “If you can get word to my lawyers through the branch in Fort Worth that I’d like to update my will, I would appreciate it.”

“Certainly, if that’s what you want.”

“I’m sure I’ll need an update of my account holdings, so whatever they need they can have time to put it together.”

“What brought this on, if I may ask?”

“Had a fall from a wagon a few weeks ago. Nothing drastic, mind you, it just got me thinking and I’d like to make sure that if...well, if anything should happen, there’s no question of what my wishes are.”

“Your wife would be protected, by law.”

“Not well enough. I want to make damn sure the ranch will stay with her, and I want to make sure Melvin will be taken care of as well.”

“I’ll get word and if anything comes back from your lawyers, I will let you know.”

“Thank you.”

“Does she even know? Who she really married? How much you’re worth?”

“No.”

“You might want to tell her sometime.”

“When the time is right.”

↭

Katherine feels more confident this time when she pays the mortgage. The teller is polite, calls her Mrs. Mulder, slides the card to her that she needs to sign with a fountain pen and she doesn’t hesitate this time to write Katherine Mulder next to the date.

She’s finished before Mulder is done speaking with Mr. Skinner, so she waits for him outside by the wagon. She’s never really gotten a good look at the town before. The row of businesses stretches long and wide. If the bank is the end point, the mercantile is the start. In between there’s a sawmill, a blacksmith, the saloon, an icehouse, a cafe, a flour mill, a bath house, a meeting house, the sheriff’s office, a barber, a boarding house, a livery, a laundry, and the house of ill repute, as Mulder referred to it.

She knows there’s a church somewhere and a school, but they must be hidden in the outskirts of the town. Doctor Black must have his practice somewhere off the main road as well. Monica had said she lives off the road that veers left from the bank and she wonders how many other homes are out there and where everyone lives. The Byers may make their home as part of their store, but presumably Mr. Skinner does not sleep in the bank. And she remembers that Susannah said he had a wife.

Mulder comes outside and stands next to her. “When I first got here about the only things that existed were the mercantile and the saloon,” he says. “Sometimes it seems like all this just sprang up overnight.”

“Susannah was telling me today that a Wells Fargo office is coming in next year.”

“Long overdue for that, if you ask me. Nearest place to send a telegram is either Abilene or Fort Worth, depending on where you’re at.”

“How many folks live here?”

“I can’t say I know for sure. If I were to wager a guess, maybe fifty or so in town. There’s a lot of ranches around these parts that do their business here, so if you consider them to be part of the town, there’s got to be at least another hundred.”

“It’s strange, but I grew up in a city of twenty thousand people and it always felt very small to me. But, standing here, on a street you can probably walk up and back in a quarter of an hour, it feels enormous.”

“Well, they say everything is bigger in Texas.”

“I have heard that.”

“Where to now, fair Kate?”

“Where does the Doctor live?”

“Up that way behind the boardinghouse.”

“I’d like to drop in on Monica first then, since the Doc is on the way back.”

Katherine takes Mulder’s hand to climb into the wagon and he drives them down the road, over a short bridge, and then past a grove of trees. A house appears as soon as they clear the trees, like an island in a sea of bluebonnets.

“Goodness,” Katherine says. “Monica said you can’t miss it.”

The rumble of the wagon must have alerted her friend. Monica comes out to the porch, wiping her hands on a dishrag. She waves and jumps down the steps to greet them as they come down the lane.

“I hope you don’t mind us dropping in,” Katherine says as she climbs down from the wagon. “We were in town so I wanted to say hello.”

“Are you kidding? I’m thrilled.” Monica hugs Katherine hard and keeps an arm around her shoulders as she waves to Mulder. “I’ve got cornbread in the oven that’ll be done soon. You’ll stay and have a cut before I bring dinner out to John, won’t you?”

“Well, that sounds too good to pass up,” Mulder answers.

“Come on in.”

The Doggett residence is similar to the ranch house. There’s a dogtrot that runs from the front to the back, but the left side of the house is all kitchen and dining area, presumably bedrooms are on the right. Monica offers them chairs at the table and then checks on the cornbread. Mulder holds a chair out for Katherine as she loosens her hat and removes her gloves, but he doesn’t sit down right away. He moves over to a breakfront along the wall and runs his hand over the smooth wood.

“This is a beauty,” he says.

“My boy built that,” Monica answers, proudly.

“The Sheriff did this?”

“No, our son Luke. I swear he was swinging a hammer before he could toddle.”

Mulder nods and continues to run his hand down the side and across the front. “How old might Luke be?”

“Fifteen. Just had a birthday on the 13th of October.”

“That’s funny, we have the same birthday.”

“Your birthday was the 13th?” Katherine asks. She’s mildly embarrassed that she had no idea her own husband’s birthday had passed.

“I didn’t even remember myself until just now.”

“What year were you born?” Monica asks.

“1861.”

Monica closes her eyes and tilts her head for a few moments. “You’re a three,” she says, with a brief nod.

“A three?”

“Yes, in numerology. Your life path number is a three. It means you like to inspire others and make them smile. But, if you feel you’ve been misinterpreted you can become sullen and withdrawn.”

“Is that right?” Mulder grins as he looks at Katherine and she raises her eyebrow. “But, I thought I was blue and red. Now I’m a number?”

“Oh, you told him about his aura?” Monica beams.

“I um…” Katherine can feel the heat rising to her cheeks as though she were caught gossipping. Mulder must sense her discomfort for he finally sits down beside her and takes her hand before hanging his hat on his bent knee.

“One day I’d like to hear all about it,” he says, squeezing Katherine’s hand. “I was just wondering though, Mrs. Doggett-”

“Oh, call me Monica, please.”

“Monica, that’s really high quality work your boy does. How would you feel about letting him come out this winter and work on an expansion out at my ranch? I’d pay him, of course.”

“I’d have to speak with my husband about it, but I’m sure Luke would be thrilled at the prospect. He’s been at us to quit school for the last few years.”

“Oh, but he can’t quit school,” Katherine says.

“Well, most of the kids around here quit by the age of twelve. They’re needed at their farms or ranches. Luke’s been the oldest in the schoolhouse for the last two years and he’s been pretty anxious to move on. John wouldn’t let him since we don’t have a farm and he’s certainly not going to allow his son to take on a job at the saloon, which is about the only place that’d hire a boy his age.”

“I’m going to be looking to hire quite a few men starting next month or so,” Mulder says. “There’s plenty of room in the bunkhouse for him and I’ll see to it he comes home for the week’s end. Your husband is welcome to ride out any time to check in.”

“I would keep my eye on him as well, if you’re at all concerned about that,” Katherine adds.

“Oh.” Monica puts her hand on Katherine’s arm and smiles. “I don’t doubt that. My, what a lovely ring!”

“Thank you.” Katherine runs her thumb along the side of her ring band with her thumb. “My husband got it for me.”

They spend the next half of an hour with Monica Doggett, sharing a slice of cornbread and chatting amicably. Mulder asks her more about this numerology thing and she happily shares with him more about his life path based on his birth date. When it’s time for them to take their leave, Mulder offers to drive Monica to the Sheriff’s office, but she says she would much rather walk. It’s just about her only time to herself and she enjoys it.

They ride back up into town and Mulder passes the bank to go down a smaller road behind the north side of the town. He points out a house up the ways with a sign hanging at the front that simply says ‘DOC’ etched in wood.

For some reason, Katherine feels nervous on the way up to the doctor’s porch. She knows she already made a good impression on the doctor, but still wonders if that was just politeness. The doctors she knew from nurse’s training were mercurial. Someone bearing a compliment one day could come bearing condescension the next, or worse.

Mulder opens the door to usher her inside. Doctor Black peeks out from behind a curtain and smiles broadly.

“Just my luck,” the doctor says. “I’ve just set a broken bone and could surely use your assistance while I mix a plaster.”

“Of course,” Katherine says. She immediately takes her gloves off and hands them to Mulder.

There’s a young boy perched at the edge of the exam table, no more than five or six, sniffling and sullen. Katherine moves to him and right away she can see that his left wrist is broken. She smiles at him and takes a gentle hold on his arm, cradling his wrist in her hands so the doctor can get to work on mixing a plaster.

“My name is Katherine,” she says to the boy. “Who might you be?”

“Joey Skinner.”

“Is Walter Skinner your father, son?” Mulder asks.

Joey nods and then wipes his nose with the back of his good hand.

“Has anyone gone to fetch Mr. Skinner?” Mulder asks Doctor Black. “I could run over to the bank right now.”

“Yes, why don’t you do that.” Doctor Black nods to Mulder and then hands Katherine a roll of gauze. “I trust you can wrap up that wrist.”

“Certainly.” She deftly holds Joey’s arm with one hand and uses her thumb to pin the edge of the gauze down and begins to wrap. “Joey, you tell me if this hurts, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So, how did this happen?”

“I was playing tag with Grace and Emma and Isaac and I was ‘It’ and I was running and I tripped on a rock and I felled down and my hand hurted real bad. Grace yelled for Miss Holly and Miss Holly bringed me to the doc.”

“Well, I think you’re a very brave boy and we’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

“Now,” Doctor Black says, rolling a small table over with a bowl of milky liquid and wrappings. “Joey, this might feel a little cold, but you do your best to hold still, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Excellent wrapping,” the doctor tells Katherine. “Would you like to do the plaster?”

Katherine nods and the doctor moves the table to her side so she can work. She runs the wrapping through the liquid and winds it around Joey’s small wrist and arm, moving methodically. She has experience with setting and wrapping broken bones, but never on a child. She’s cautious, but tries to be quick for Joey’s sake. Doctor Black provides her with a few short instructions as she goes.

“Beautiful work,” Doctor Black says when Katherine is wiping her hands dry. “Joey, is there any pain in your wrist now or in your arm.”

“It’s kinda itchy.”

“Yes, it might be, but you can’t scratch right now, I’m sorry. We’re going to let it dry and when it’s done it’ll be hard as a rock and keep your wrist in place so it can heal.”

Joey’s bottom lip begins to tremble. “Is it gonna be on my arm forever and ever?”

Katherine puts her arm around Joey and rubs his shoulder. “Not forever, sweetheart, just a few weeks is all. And the doctor will probably check on it a time or two to make sure it’s healing properly.”

“That’s right,” Doctor Black says.

“Joey!? Joey!?” Walter Skinner bursts through the door with Mulder behind him.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Joey.” Mr. Skinner rushes over and for a moment, Katherine is afraid he’s going to grab the boy up in a fit of panic before the cast sets.

“Everything’s alright,” Katherine says.

“What happened, son?”

“I was playing tag…”

As soon as Joey starts up with his story again, Katherine slips away from the exam table to go to Mulder. “He okay?” Mulder asks.

“It wasn’t a bad break.”

“Good.” He pulls Katherine’s gloves from his pocket and hands them to her.

Doctor Black comes up to the two of them and he and Mulder shake hands. Mulder gives him the extra bottle of liniment he bought at the mercantile and the doctor thanks him.

“Looks as though your shoulder’s healed nicely,” Doctor Black says.

“Yes, well, I happened to have a very strict nursemaid to see me through.” Mulder chuckles and Katherine demurs a little.

“If you think you could spare your wife for a few days a month, I’d be happy to have the help here.”

“Oh, I really couldn’t,” Katherine answers.

“Why couldn’t you?” Mulder asks.

“Well, there’s just so much to do. And the expansion is coming up, so…”

“I’m sure we can work something out.” Mulder nods to the doctor and at Katherine. “Good skills should never go to waste.”

Katherine is all but rendered speechless. She doesn’t know if she’s shocked or grateful or why she should even be so surprised. Mulder’s the only man she’s ever known that doesn’t seem to want to control her in some way, who seems to want her to have independence as much as she wants it. And she doesn’t just think he’s putting on airs of a generous husband in front of the doctor. She believes that he means what he says.

“We’ll talk it over,” she says.

“Joey.” Mulder produces a quarter and walks over and hands it to the boy. “Next time you’re in the Byers mercantile, you tell Mr. Byers you want a bag of his best penny candy.”

“Gee, thank you, Sir!”

After they leave the doctor’s place and get back into the wagon, Katherine sits close to Mulder and holds his arm as he drives. “Did you know Mr. Skinner had a boy?” she asks.

“Hell, until a few weeks ago, I didn’t even know he had a wife. He doesn’t talk much.”

“I think that minor panic may have caused him to lose what little hair he’s got left.”

Mulder roars with laughter.

#i wrote this #Broken Things #Chapter 17 #MSR #AU

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pastelgrungewrecker · 3 years

Text

Fumes And Funeral Arrangements

And it's go boys go They'll time your every breath And every day you're in this place You're two days nearer death But you go

It was only meant to be a few days- Just a quick refuel, a shallow cruise to restock and refresh but something wanted them to stay. The engines rumbled and hissed in disagreement and both scientists called for them to be powered down for fear of something shorting or worse-

They all remembered the bad jump all those years before.

When Megatron broke his methodical gait to slam his hand on the emergency closure switch on the exit hatch; optics wild and bellowing for facemasking and respirators they all stared in shock until Rodimus’s face twitched.

“RATCHET, DO WHAT HE SAYS!”

It was an old nerve agent, explained Megatron once every face was covered, every airlock sealed; it had been banned, but neither side would give up that easy- he compared it in hushed whispers to Gideon’s Glue, he watched Perceptor and Brainstorm shudder and bid them explain.

And in the kind of church-hum you spoke the Devil’s name in, they did. How it could so silently target your lines, how it cracked and shattered your cabling and rotted away your optics from connection to gauze cover and how it smelled so sweet until your life leaked from your face and you began to feel yourself shut down.

“It was supposed to be collected by drones.”, murmured Perceptor as Brainstorm looked to the side in barely covered disgust, “But when. When the MTO program was so successful they...”

“Used some of them as disposable workers, as you all know.”, finished the jet, drumming servos against his faceplate, “Drones are good, but they don’t have the power to bust into new veins, to cart back enough supply to meet demand.”

And Rodimus remained quiet, his face twisting and twisting until the flares of his helm became Lucifer’s own crown and his baby blue optics looked like dying dusklight.

“I’m taking a team in.”, he said quietly.

Cyclonus seemed amused, the edge of his lipplates quirking up slightly, “Will you be taking a team?”

“Yes. Megs, Ratchet, both scientists. Whirl, Magnus, Drift. You’re all with me. We’ll radio back what we find, and if we need more hands.”

“Why?”, asked Megatron, optics narrowed in something like pride.

“There’s no mass disposal.”, said Rodimus, “There’s no transport pads at that process plant. There’s nothing- but two barrack buildings and the shell of a medic block.”

Perceptor looked at him in shock, “....They’re trapped. It’s a company line- those mechs are...”

“Nyon was like that. I hated it then and I hate it more now.”, spat Rodimus, “And now I got some oomph to my demands, right?”

“Very well, Captain.”, said Cyclonus quietly, “I will guard your ship. Go right our wrongs.”

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

Their steps were heavy as they entered the wide maw marked ‘Entrance’. Ratchet surged forward towards the lines and belts ahead of them, calling for everyone to clear the area, to step back and let the mech vent.

An older model frame, servotips near melted away and the telltale stains at the edges of lipplates and corners of optics as they choked and coughed. Ratchet knelt quickly, panelling on his arms clicking away and open as he began to connect lines and set a scan before a hand covered his.

“Nah medic, nah, nah, nah...”, they gagged, “Lemme go, please lemme go.”

“I can help you-”

“Just make it stop hurtin’, medic- I’ve breathed the poison, there’s no saving me.”

The rest of the team caught up as the linelead stomped forth- a meeting of two stormcells on the burning room floor. They scoffed, bellowing for Ratchet to stand back and for the fallen mech to get back to work- Until Megatron’s bellow silenced every vocoder with a single sentence.

“SILENCE, LINELACKEY.”

The fear was suddenyl palpable as Ratchet then looked up with hate in his optics and reached into his supspace. With gentle words, quiet whispers he handed a thick painchip to the mech in their death throes and they looked at him with such gratitude it made his chest ache.

And then the dose was administered and their optics went dim and Ratchet watched their pulse slow and fade until there was nothing.

Rodimus walked forward, his stepping measured and controlled and leaned down- gently removing the protective gear he could see (oh, how little there was) and tucking it under his arm.

He stared at the linelead, let their stammer of “PRIME” fall on deaf audials before he nodded to Megatron. He looked to his team.

“Fall in, mechs. This place needs a little.... help.”

Brainstorm marched towards the vats and crushers, digging in a repurposed briefcase with Perceptor at his side and the pistol holsters deployed and ready. Ratchet nodded once, disconnecting and stood tall as he waved at the first line to put down their duties and follow him- a hand to his comm and calling for the medbay to report to the shell of a medical block.

The line leaders began pouring in from all corners, spitting their demands until they sputtered into nothing as they watched Megatron’s grand hand seal like a vise around the first fool’s neck and pry his authority from him like boiled crab shells.

Rodimus adjust his facemask, hooking the optic covers over his helm and wanting to commit cruelty at how well they fit.

“Foreman, what line should we run full first?”, he asked, looking to Megatron.

Surprised, and somehow proud, Megatron chuckled.

“Line four, power down and do a resync- breaktime!”, he barked, “I’ve got your replacements right here!”

He gestured at the lineleaders in front of him, and smiled with his fangs on display, “And they’re just happy to be here, right boys?!”

Rodimus stepped forward, shoving the too-clean bullies forth towards the line- threatening as they once did with kicks and snarls and threats he was all too willing to carry out until the hum and roar of machines was deafening.

Megatron doled out tasks, Rodimus calling measurements and backup as he did- watching as the one-time leaders still tried their tricks on mechs who had no qualms about killing. About righting wrongs by force.

Watching as someone stood too tall in their pedes, talking down to Brainstorm only to be forcefully turned and having Perceptor’s silent pistol under a chin- a lesson in the only language egomaniacs sometimes understand.

And Rodimus took a place as well- at the edge of the line, hands uncovered and sorting raw mineral chunks on the belt leading into a pulverizer. And as he got the rhythm, as the pattern came slowly back- he began to sing.

The old songs, the heavy melodies of mechs who new they’d die on the job- and he watched as the workers who’s lines were slowing at Megatron’s command joined in and reminded the bullies working Line Four that they were so very outnumbered.

“That- That’s a rebellion song!”, hissed a lineleader, optics darting to and from, “Don’t you give them any damned ideas, Sir Prime-”

“Do you know where I’m from?”, asked Rodimus as his tune was carried by a hundred other voices.

“...N. No sir.”

“Nyon.”, he said with an acidic smile, “I know your type, your kind of person. First, I’m gonna teach ‘em you aren’t as strong as you think you are. Then, I’m gonna teach ‘em the song. Pray I don’t teach ‘em you aren’t impervious to bullets.”

The silence and fear was palpable as he went back to singing- as there was a clatter and the rare sound of old Altihexian dockhands swearing the air black and blue like a bruise.

As lineleaders saw respirators and optic covers and heavy aprons passed around to workers- as a few were follish enough to complain that lower workers didn’t need protection- didn’t deserve to breathe easy or see clearly and then Megatron was behind them, snarling for them to get back to work-

“EYES DOWN, RATES UP BOYS- YOU AREN’T PAID TO COMPLAIN!”

Rodimus smiled as he watched the lineleaders stutter, stammer, trip and fail and face the same consequences they doled out.

Rodimus’s comm lit up with updates on the state of the workers around them- as Magnus loomed over a foreman’s door and heart the terrified rattling of armor behind it before a heavy-armored peded smashed it down with a single kick and he forced his way in amidst terrified howling.

And the intercom crackled to life, Magnus’s voice tight and cold and angry as he listed violations and broken codes- as he announced his communiques and blared the answers from owner’s voices; begging and pleading with him to do anything but expose them.

To the sound of Cybertronian voices calling for transports and bridging- and Rodimus led the worker songs with Megatron grinning at him and keeping the time with his pede.

The sound of ships in the air, of a marching squad and the shock on the faces of new forces as Rodimus wiped the grit from his face and pulled the cover off his optics.

“Welcome to The Apology Of Primus.”, he said, his smile not reaching his optics, “I hope you all are ready for an adventure- If anyone asks? It was an... anonymous tip, got it?”

The lineleaders froze, shaking as Megatron laughed and discarded his foreman’s gear in a pile.

“Shall we help with cleanup them, Captain?”, he asked cheekily.

“Of course, Megs.”, said Rodimus in sarcastic disdain, “You know I’m just a STICKLER for taking out TRASH!”

The humming of the regular working crew sounded around them as lineleaders voices rose in one begging, bargaining crescendo.

#pastelwrites #rodimus prime #megatron #listen i have a deep connection to this kind of thing cause of my adolescence #and well life in general #hosban is still mad i almost tried to work at a steel mill knowing my medical issues...

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sentinelpri · 1 year

Text

The Blind Date (Valentine’s Day Special)

10AM, Saturday February 11th

Allison Cameron is on a mission as she sits across from Robert Chase and Eric Foreman in the middle of a crowded, busy cafe. It’s a beautiful winter day- the sun is shining bright to melt the remnants of a dying snow outside, the breeze is crisp and cool, and the trees in New Jersey are dark with bare branches. She knows that Chase would rather be out bowling or sleeping in, while Foreman would rather be taking his dog on a morning walk or sitting inside enjoying a book with a cup of tea, and she would rather be tending to her garden or going to her Saturday taekwondo class. But, with enough convincing, she got them to come here.

“Why did you have us come get coffee with you on a Saturday? It’s out of character for you to want to spend your personal time with both of us outside of work, and you said it was important,” Foreman mentions and leans back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other and both of his arms crossed over his chest. “Spill.”

“Okay, okay,” Cameron relents with a nervous smile. She wonders if either of them will actually agree to her plan, but she figures it’s better to try and fail than to not do anything and watch the miserable game that House and Wilson play every single day; shooting each other longing looks, offering fleeting touches and nothing more, flirting when they think people aren’t looking but never doing anything about it. It’s better than watching House antagonize Wilson when compared to how he usually antagonizes others, just looks like a little kid lashing out in an attempt to get attention from their crush. “I have a plan to set House up on a blind date.”

“Wait,” Chase stops and looks between Foreman and Cameron with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips. “Why are you doing this? Weren’t you interested in House romantically? Why set him up with someone else?”

“Yes, I love House- I mean, I like him romantically, but I love him as a friend-”

“He’s not our friend, he’s our boss, and he’s a prick,” Chase argues. “Why should we take time out of our weekend to help him? And why do you need us for this?”

“Look, I’m doing this because of Wilson, okay?”

And it’s true. While she’s partially doing it for House, she’s mostly doing it for Wilson. She sees how the oncologist looks at House with lovestruck big brown eyes, and more than it is pathetic, it’s pitiable. Wilson, regardless of his tendency to cheat and regardless of the way he allows everyone to walk all over him, is a good person.

“Because of Wilson? What does Wilson have to do with this?” Foreman questions.

“He’s our friend, and he makes House happy… And House makes him happy, too,” Cameron explains, to which Foreman and Chase nod in understanding. She thinks about her date with House- how he told her that she was only interested because she wanted to fix him, and while she was definitely attracted to him for other reasons, he wasn’t necessarily wrong. But Wilson? Over the past few weeks, she’s noticed that Wilson is acting differently around House- that he’s head over heels, and House has always reciprocated that. It’s been obvious, and if she can’t be happy with House, she at least wants Wilson to be. “Don’t tell me you guys haven’t noticed.”

“What’s your point?” Foreman asks, then sips on his coffee- black, no sugar, the exact opposite of Chase’s, which is loaded with milk, sugar, whipped cream, and chocolate syrup. Cameron’s own drink is a caramel cold brew. “They’ve always been like that with each other. Maybe they’re just best friends and you’re overanalyzing like you always do.”

“I think it’s worth a shot,” Cameron says while trying to think of something that will pique Foreman’s interest. “And if House is happy and distracted with a new relationship, maybe he won’t be so hard on us.”

“Fair point,” Foreman adds while feigning a lack of interest like he always does. Cameron is intrigued by the childlike enthusiasm that he has for pranks and plots like this, even if he tries to hide it. Eric Foreman, much like Robert Chase, is intriguing. “Wilson has always been good at reining him in when he acts up.”

“I hate to ask this, but are they even gay? I’ve never seen either of them- you know , like that with a man,” Chase leans back, sips on his drink, and pushes back the long sandy locks of hair that frame his face.

Cameron pauses, looking between the two men. She isn’t sure if they like her very much, to be honest. She likes them- hell, they’re what makes working with House bearable when he’s at his worst… Maybe asking this of them is crossing the line? No, no, it needs to be done. The worst thing that could happen is them saying no and backing out. Pushing the trivial thoughts about her relationship with Foreman and Chase aside, the brunette quirks a brow and laughs.

“Are you really asking that? They’re clearly more than friends.”

“Okay, you’re right,” Chase laughs and throws his hands up in defeat before leaning in. Both his and Foreman’s interests are obviously piqued. “What’s the plan?”

5PM, Sunday February 12th

Robert Chase doesn’t know how he got dragged into this.

Or, he does, but he really would rather not be here with House of all people. Rather, he was hoping he would be the one stuck convincing the easy going, people pleasing James Wilson to go on a blind date. Foreman was given the much easier job instead, leaving the difficult and bitter Greg House to poor Chase.

The blond is in his boss’s apartment right now, sitting on his uncomfortable leather couch. There’s only a single cushion between them and Chase has to admit that it’s closer than he’s comfortable with. As amusing as Cameron’s scheme seemed in theory, he’s slowly coming to regret agreeing to the immunologist’s plan to set House and Wilson up on this blind date.

“Why all of a sudden are you so interested in setting me up on a date?” House asks.

The diagnostician is more focused on the soap opera on the television in front of him than he is on Chase. It’s a little insulting. Then again, he figures it’s a consequence for letting his crushes on Cameron and Foreman alter his decision making skills so much. He wouldn’t have said yes were it not in hopes to impress them and get on their good sides. It’s too late to back down now, so Chase knows what he has to do in order to make it happen; take drastic measures.

“Do it or I’ll quit,” Chase threatens.

“Are you really pulling a Cameron on me?” House says with a roll of his eyes. Chase’s threat seems to catch his attention more than anything else the intensivist has said through the duration of his visit, as House actually turns the television off and turns to look at him. Icy blue eyes burn into ocean and Chase is suddenly very, very nervous- so nervous that he pulls at the collar of his shirt and averts his gaze. “Because I don’t mind calling you on your bluff.”

“You wouldn’t,” Chase responds even if he isn’t entirely sure.

“I would,” House insists and starts to fidget with his cane. He picks the long object up with one hand and twirls it absentmindedly while he speaks with his eyes still trained on Chase’s face regardless of whether or not the younger man is actually looking back at him. “I don’t mind telling Cameron and Foreman about your little crushes either.”

Chase’s heart drops to his stomach. House knows? Well, of course House knows, House knows everything, but… God damn. Seriously? Chase mulls over his options, which are acknowledging the truth and begging House not to tell anyone (which will probably come at a price), or denying the truth and pretending it isn’t real (which House will most certainly not believe, so it’ll come at a price anyway).

“What,” Chase states plainly, going with his latter option.

All it earns him is a roll of House’s eyes and a dismissive wave of House’s right hand.

“Oh, c’mon, you’re all so obvious,” House laughs. Chase wants to ask about the ‘all’. He wonders if House knows something about Foreman and Cameron’s potential feelings towards him that he himself doesn’t. Right now, though, it’s about House and Wilson, not him, so he doesn’t say anything. He bites his tongue and crosses his arms over his chest. “At this point, it’s embarrassing to watch.”

Chase looks at the clock on the wall and sighs. May as well change the subject.

“You’re running late, this place is almost an hour from here and the date is in an hour. I know it’s my fault for waiting until tonight to spring this on you, but… Ugh,” Chase groans, runs a hand through his hair, and stands up. House’s eyes remain on him as he pulls out his wallet and counts out just shy of a hundred fifty dollars, which he holds out to House. “I still need to get a cab. Take this.”

“Is this a bribe to keep my mouth shut?” House smirks and takes the cash, standing up as well.

“No, it’s to pay for the date,” Chase answers. “With all the money you already steal-”

“Borrow-”

“Steal from Wilson, I’m not making him pay for this, too,” Chase realizes he’s slipped up. Part of the plan was to keep the identity of their date secret from both House and Wilson, but thankfully, House doesn’t seem to notice. Perhaps the diagnostician assumed that Chase meant he’d simply ‘borrow’ more money from Wilson later to make up for the date. “But… It would also be nice if you didn’t mention anything about this discussion to Cameron or Foreman.”

House shrugs, turns, and makes his way to the hallway that leads to his bedroom with a shout of-

“I’m not making any promises!”

Chase sighs for what must be the millionth time tonight, then leaves with nothing more than a shake of his head. It’ll be a miracle if this somehow works out…

6PM, Sunday February 12th

Foreman is unsurprised when he finds himself at the home of James Wilson. When Cameron initially proposed her plan to get Wilson and House to go on a date yesterday, Foreman knew he was going to end up doing a lot of the work, including making the reservation at the restaurant Cameron recommended, purchasing fancy attire for both men to attend the date in, and now, this. Just like at work, Foreman manages to carry the weight of the load on his broad shoulders.

Wilson has moved into a nice new house recently. The place is full of unpacked cardboard boxes, freshly waxed floors, and newly painted walls. Foreman is overwhelmed by the scent of paint and lemon cleaner as he fastens and fixes Wilson’s tie to make sure it looks just as perfect as he’d want it to were it him going on an important date.

“I still don’t understand your motive here, Foreman,” Wilson laughs nervously, his cheeks dusted bright red. Foreman isn’t sure he’s ever been this close to Wilson before, and honestly, he also isn’t sure why he was sent here to convince Wilson to go on this last minute date instead of Chase or Foreman, who are considerably more friendly with the oncologist. He supposes it boils down to the fact that House would question him into a corner that he’d literally give up on the plan to get out of. Clearing his head of the many doubts he has about this scheme that Cameron has concocted for him and Chase to execute, Foreman notes that the tie he’s putting on Wilson is soft and a dark shade of green, just like House would prefer. Wilson continues speaking after Foreman doesn’t respond. “This is unlike you.”

“I heard you hadn’t been on a date since you got divorced from your second wife back in ‘99, and this friend of mine is in a similar situation,” Foreman explains and looks away with a shrug. Admittedly, it’s not a complete lie, and it’s believable enough for Wilson to not immediately reject the idea of going on a date so last minute. Briefly, the neurologist wonders what the idiot Chase could have possibly come up with to get House of all people to go. He wonders if Chase has even succeeded or if the plan is going to fall through. He hasn’t heard a text on his cheap little cellphone from Chase nor Cameron yet. “I thought you two would get along really well.”

“Sure, but isn’t this short notice? Why are you in such a hurry? If I didn’t know better, I’d think this were some sort of weird plot… Either that or a bet that you need to win. Or maybe an emergency? I have no idea, but this strikes me as odd, especially for you. I’d expect it from the others, but you? Come on. We all know you don’t want to be involved with any of us outside of work, and I don’t blame you for that.”

Foreman winces at that. It’s not necessarily true, even. Cameron and Chase, he’d love to be involved with after work. He adores them, adores watching over them and helping them at work, even if he insists that he doesn’t want a personal relationship with them and that they’re nothing more than coworkers. House and Wilson, however, he usually wants nothing to do with; they’re both dumpster fire humans with problems that are too big for Foreman’s already buckled shoulders to carry.

“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” Foreman tries to lay everything out as truthfully as he can without ruining it entirely. The one condition he was given to make this successful was to make sure that Wilson doesn’t find out that his date is going to be House until he gets there. He understands why, too. If Wilson were to know that the date is going to be with House, he’d surely cancel. “It was Cameron’s idea and she didn’t let me or Chase know about this until yesterday, so we weren’t given that much notice either. I tried to call you yesterday-”

“I was busy yesterday,” Wilson says the words a little too fast, almost like he’s hiding something. Foreman almost asks exactly what it was that had Wilson so preoccupied at one on a Saturday afternoon that he couldn’t be fucked to answer the phone or at least fucked to listen to the voicemail Foreman left and call him back, but he thinks better of it and keeps his curiosity to himself. “My bad.”

“Right, well, I’m just saying… I tried to call you yesterday and you didn’t answer. I tried to call you this morning, too.”

To show him proof, Foreman steps back, takes his phone out of his pocket, and pulls up the receipts of the calls and texts that Wilson didn’t bother to answer yesterday afternoon or this morning.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Foreman, it’s honestly been a bit since I’ve checked my phone,” Wilson rushes to explain himself as he scratches the back of his neck. “It’s just been a hectic few days, you know? With that patient and everything…”

“Uh huh,” Foreman replies in an unconvinced tone. The last patient they had wasn’t worth being stressed over; some guy whose wife was poisoning him with gold that they figured out pretty easily. Wilson was even making jokes about the case. Out of all of the things that the oncologist has dealt with, something tells Foreman that this wasn’t the one to stress him out to the point of not answering his phone. “Yeah, okay, well… The reservations we set up for your date are scheduled for a little less than an hour from now, so I’m going to excuse myself. You should probably head there in the next half hour if you don’t want to be late. I’ll send you the address, alright?”

“Yeah, sure. Sounds good, but before you go,” Wilson starts with a smile. “I really appreciate you guys doing this for me. I still don’t quite understand it when the three of you clearly have your own unresolved romance issues that need to be worked on, but it’s a nice gesture.”

“Right,” Foreman clears his throat and steps away while sending Wilson the address to the restaurant he’s supposed to meet House at through text. It’s embarrassing that Wilson so clearly knows about his crush on Chase and Cameron, but he’s thankful that the oncologist has the decency to keep it to himself for the most part. Foreman wonders if House knows, too. “Well, good luck… I’ll see you on Monday.”

~~~

7:30PM, Sunday February 12th

James Wilson is nervous.

After being coerced by no other than Eric Foreman himself to go on a blind date, the oncologist finds himself sitting in a fancy, romantic restaurant. The lighting is dim and there’s a vase with roses in the middle of the table along with a lit, rose-scented candle. The tablecloth is bright white and silky, and the chair he’s sitting on is surprisingly plush.

The chair across from him, however, is empty. His supposed date was supposed to be here half an hour ago. Of course, some haphazard scheme concocted in the span of a couple days by the ducklings was bound to work out this way. Wilson isn’t even disappointed by the lack of company as much as he is anxious about being seen sitting alone in a restaurant by the other couples and the one waiter who has come by to try to take his order four separate times. It looks like he’s being stood up.

Why did he go along with this in the first place, you might ask? It’s a little more complicated than one would think. Following his second divorce, he and House formed a friends with benefits agreement. Unfortunately, Wilson fell for House somewhere along the way and has ended up here, silent about his feelings and fearful of anyone figuring it out. Desperate to avoid rousing any suspicion from Chase, Foreman, and Cameron, Wilson agreed to go on the date to get everyone at the hospital off his back about being single. Now, he’s starting to regret it.

Right as he thinks to text Foreman to inform him that his date hasn’t shown up, Wilson hears the door open and looks up to see a familiar face walking in and heading his way.

“Oh, this is rich,” House laughs, his smile not quite reaching his icy blue eyes.

Wilson’s heart skips a beat.

“I should’ve known it was you,” Wilson sighs like he’s disappointed, but deep down, relief is flooding him. House truly is the only person he’d feel comfortable going on a date with- and of course, the ducklings figured it out, just like he and House have figured them out. A large smile takes over Wilson’s face as House casually sits down in the empty chair and puts his elbows on the table. “Fashionably late as always.”

“Hey, it isn’t my fault that my taxi driver drove the speed of an eighty year old with cataracts,” House huffs and fidgets with the vase on the table until it’s perfectly aligned with the adjacent candle. Wilson watches him fondly and thinks about his feelings. He wants to say something so badly, it’s just that in moments like this, he fears he’ll scare House away and lose the little things like waking up to him or watching him across the table when they eat together. “So, which one of the ducklings conned you into this?”

“Foreman,” Wilson answers, and before he can explain everything that Foreman told him about the plan, House figures it out and says it out loud.

“This must’ve been Cameron’s idea, then because Chase was the one who conned me, and this is the same restaurant she and I went to on our date.”

“Should we just leave?” Wilson asks while twiddling with his thumbs.

“Nah, might as well enjoy it,” House answers, much to Wilson’s relief. They’ve never been on a romantic date before. It’s something that Wilson has always dreamed of. To his surprise, though, House whips out two hundred dollars from his wallet. He obnoxiously waves the bills in the air. Chase gave me money to pay for the date and everything. Guess you could say the ducklings got us a free meal.”

The waiter comes by once more and takes their orders.

Wilson, unsure of what to say or do in this awkward yet pleasant situation, looks around the restaurant for something to distract him from his internal conflict. He quickly spots Chase, Cameron, and Foreman in the back of the restaurant in a booth. Cameron is in a pantsuit with her hair hidden by a hat and sunglasses on her face, Chase is in an offensively casual outfit for a restaurant like this with a backwards baseball cap on his head, and Foreman is dressed like his usual self- probably because the other two couldn’t convince him to go with such a ridiculous plan. Foreman is staring into his lap, sitting between the other two in the booth. When Chase and Cameron catch Wilson looking their way, they avert their eyes and pretend as if they haven’t been staring at House and Wilson this whole time.

“Is that them over there?” Wilson speaks up. “Behind you, don’t look too fast though or it’ll be obvious that we spotted them.”

A few seconds pass. House casually glances over his shoulder, but it’s subtle enough that none of the ducklings react, even when he turns back around and laughs out loud.

“Jesus, I couldn’t have come up with this myself. Why’d you even go along with it anyway?”

“Honestly, I just didn’t want them to get suspicious of us,” Wilson whispers so no one else in the restaurant can hear him. “You?”

“I thought it’d be funny to go on a date with one of Chase’s friends and absolutely wreck their friendship to teach him a lesson about meddling in my personal life,” House chuckles and places his hand on top of the middle of the table. Wilson reaches across and places his hand over House’s, covering it entirely. Admittedly, it’s probably a stunt from House to mess with the ducklings, but Wilson is genuinely enjoying the contact. “But this works, too.”

“Are we really that obvious?” Wilson questions with light blush.

“Maybe… Either that or it’s some sort of joke on their end.”

“Let’s hope that’s the case.”

Things get silent after that. Their food arrives, and they eat, only offering the occasional small talk to each other. House appears as if he’s deep in thought, but Wilson doesn’t dare to ask what’s going on in that brain of his.

“Wanna stay over?” House offers once the waiter comes to take the money that House left on the table for the food. Wilson begins to clean up the table, stacking dishes and making sure it’s easy for the waiter or busser to clean up once they leave. “They’ll probably think it went well if we leave together, leave us alone for a bit.”

“Sure,” Wilson agrees, and with that, they’re up and leaving the restaurant.

It’s a beautiful winter evening. Wilson thinks it’s five, maybe six o’clock. Autumn has vanished, any traces of warm days and warm-hued leaves replaced by a heavy overcast and blowing wind. It’s cold outside with a heavy breeze, and the sky is the same monotonous, listless blanket of puffy grey that it has been for the past week or so. House is properly dressed if not overdressed for the weather as per usual, a long sleeve shirt underneath his sweater and warm pants and boots to match. A white scarf is wrapped around his neck, as he tends to be cold-blooded, unlike Wilson, who remains consistently warm in most climates.

House calls a cab for them. While they wait for it to show up, they walk around the front of the restaurant, silent.

House is in deep thought. He stops walking quite abruptly, his cane firmly clicking against the ground, and looks over at Wilson. Flashing blue eyes scan his body up and down before finally burning into chocolate brown. Wilson freezes, able to feel his heart beating fast, and in the midst of the oncoming rain and the cool breeze, in the midst of the rustling dead branches and the thoughts racing in the back of his mind, Wilson asks himself one thing and one thing only.

‘Why are we still doing this?’

Luckily, House seems to have the same thought- except he actually says it out loud.

“Why are we still doing this?”

And Wilson freezes. He’s both scared and confused by House’s question, unsure of exactly what House means. He knows it entails their complicated relationship at the very least, but Wilson can’t tell if House is trying to confess his feelings or if House is about to end their friends with benefits arrangement; if it’s gone too far.

“Let’s get back to your apartment before we have this talk, House,” Wilson argues, wanting to delay the inevitable confrontation for as long as possible, but House only shakes his head and places a hand on Wilson’s face.

“I can’t do this anymore,” House insists. “This must’ve happened for a reason, don’t you think?”

“What must’ve happened?”

“This- tonight, this date, us,” House clarifies with bright red cheeks. Even though his gloved hand is ice cold, even though they’re getting stares from the people who pass by, Wilson leans into it and listens to House’s words. “I’m in love with you, and I refuse to ignore it any longer.”

“I love you, too,” Wilson whispers back. If it weren’t so clearly real, he wouldn’t be able to believe it. “I am… Completely and utterly overwhelmed by you.”

“Wilson,” House leans forward and kisses him on the lips, gentle and void of the usual lust that drives them to do what they’ve been doing.

When they break apart, Wilson rests his forehead against House’s and smiles.

“House… You’ve manifested as this- this feeling in my chest that I can’t get rid of, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t want to get rid of it.”

“Wilson… I think the cab is here. Let’s go home,” House mutters. “We can continue this there, yeah?”

And Wilson grins, because the years that he’s spent waiting for this are finally proving to be worth it.

“Yeah.”

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astxlphe-fics · 4 years

Text

Odazai Week Day 3 // Soulmates AU

Dazai starts believing in soulmates when Odasaku dies

Word Counts: ~1 450

Content Warning: Major Character Death (hi Odasaku), Referenced Self Harm, Referenced Suicide Attempt, Referenced Sex, some blood.

Dazai doesn’t believe in soulmates.

The name on his skin was always there, clear as day but hidden under the layer of bandages. Mori is one of the two people who ever saw it, and when Dazai asked if it could be taken off, he simply shook his head.

“Soulmates,” he tells him, the tip of his finger tapping a spot on his own arm, “are for life. There is no return policy, unfortunately.”

Mori has one, too. He allows Dazai to see it once. Fair is fair. A weakness for a weakness.

Oda Sakunosuke, Dazai’s wrist reads.

He never has believed and, he thinks, never will. Soulmarks are nothing but random characters scribbled on skin forming into a random name, a lottery. There is no match made by some sort of higher power or magic.

He meets Oda Sakunosuke and doesn’t change his mind.

He doesn’t change his mind even when Odasaku is helping him change his bandages. Dazai’s are bloody, the red seeping through the fabric from the cuts on his skin, making his hands tremble uncontrollably, and Oda finds him.

He brings him to his apartment, the one without the children, and undoes the bandages with careful, soft gestures that Dazai can’t help but melt into. He has rarely been touched with such kindness.

His eyes flutter shut; his breathing goes shaky as Odasaku’s fingers skim over his skin, as he gently cleans the blood off it.

Then, under the red stains, appears Oda’s name. Odasaku stills for barely a second, eyes reading the words once, twice, and Dazai waits for a reaction, for something that tells him Odasaku will want to take this strange relationship they have somewhere else. He wonders how he’ll let him down, or if he should, if it’ll be what has him loose Odasaku.

It’s only natural. They’re soulmates. A scoff almost escapes him at the thought.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Odasaku asks evenly.

“About what?”

The man’s eyes flick to his face before setting back down on his arm, and he doesn’t answer, doesn’t say a word. As if those seconds of stillness haven’t happened, as if he hasn’t spoken at all, he picks another bandage roll out of the first aid kit and continue wrapping it around his forearm.

“Can you move your wrists properly?”

Dazai tries, twisting his hands. It stings a little, but the bandages aren’t too tight and the bleeding doesn’t start again. “It’s good.” He smiles, and Odasaku smiles back, and Dazai still doesn’t believe in soulmates.

They have sex.

It’s just something they do on occasion. They do not have sex with each other exclusively, but when it happens Odasaku takes Dazai home and fucks him like he’s valuable and deserving of the kindness he keeps giving him.

Then he wraps himself over Dazai, arms tight around him, and the next morning he makes him breakfast before they both leave for work.

It’s quiet and domestic. Something Dazai would definitely not mind doing every morning for the rest of his life.

And, at night, when Odasaku is fast asleep and holding him against his chest, Dazai traces his own name on the other man’s foreman. His soulmark says Dazai Osamu in a soft, baby blue color that seems so off compared to whom Dazai actually is.

He squirms a bit and turns around to bury his face into Odasaku’s collarbone, breathing in his sent and Odasaku moves in his sleep, tightening his grip on him. It’s the most comfortable place Dazai has ever been in his life, and he still doesn’t believe in soulmates.

Odasaku believes in soulmates.

There is something reassuring in knowing there is someone for him out there, someone who will be able to know Odasaku and everything he has done and still care about him.

The fact that his soulmate is a Mafia executive reputed for his ruthlessness does put things into perspective, of course.

They meet and Dazai doesn’t mention anything about soulmates. Still, he sees the name on Dazai’s wrist once, but he doesn’t want to talk about it, so Oda stays quiet.

Dazai is wonderful in ways Odasaku hasn’t anticipated and it doesn’t matter what he wants to do with this soulmate situation, Odasaku will be here.

Loving Dazai Osamu comes to him as easily as breathing. He wishes Dazai could see himself the way Odasaku sees him, much more amazing, much more precious, much more human than he is willing to believe himself to be.

He refuses to expect anything from Dazai, refuses to ask for a kind of relationship Dazai wouldn’t be comfortable with, refuses to let go once it becomes clear that they both have vastly different concept of what soulmates could be.

So, he holds Dazai close and loves him in every way he knows how to love someone. It’s enough for him to have Dazai at his side, to wake up to see him still asleep curled up against him, to walk next to him in the street, to have a drink with him and Ango at the Lupin.

Odasaku believes in soulmates, and he wouldn’t trade his for the world.

They share a kiss one night, in front of the Lupin, and it feels like everything Odasaku does to him. It feels kind and tender and Dazai is in love with him, with this man who keeps seeing him and knowing him and stands by his side in spite of everything.

But it’s a coincidence that he met Odasaku, that they became friends. Odasaku fills up his life in a way no one else does, it makes him feel like his heart beats and like the blood in his veins runs warm.

What they have is something they built together. It has nothing to do with soulmates and fated pairs and whatever that bullshit is.

It doesn’t really matter, he realizes.

The name on Dazai’s wrist thrums with a warmth that spreads all over his body, that relaxes him into a sense of security every time Odasaku holds his hand.

Soulmates. It means Odasaku existing for him, just like he would exist for Odasaku. It doesn’t sound as bad as it used to.

Maybe that could be a reason to live.

Maybe he wants to believe in soulmates, just a little.

Odasaku dies and Dazai runs from the Mafia.

It takes two full days the name to disappear from his wrist.

On the first day after his death, Dazai stays curled up on a shitty bed in a shitty hotel room far, far from Mafia territory. He imagines Odasaku’s arms and warmth around him to force himself to sleep, and he wakes up to a burning sensation focused on his wrist.

He sits up and undoes the bandages to find the skin and the name on it red and irritated. It’s not painful, but it’s uncomfortable and Dazai washes it under cold water in the hope of numbing it.

It doesn’t work.

Slumping back on the bed, he stares at it. It has been years since he last looked at his soulmark, and for the first time his heart stirs at the sight of it. It’s a reminder of Odasaku, the last physical proof of the bond he shared with him.

For the first time, he wants to cherish that mark, and he presses his lips on it like it’s Odasaku himself, as if Odasaku could feel it in spite of his death.

On the second day it gets worse. The burn turns into a searing pain, but Dazai doesn’t care anymore. This is nothing compared to losing Odasaku, and he gladly carries it knowing it’s the only thing that’s left of him.

But, when he checks the state of his wrist to see if it’s still irritated, he finds it inflamed and Odasaku’s name fading. Like spots of blood red ink staining his skin and covering the mark. Dazai rubs at it with more water, but nothing stops it.

On the third day after Odasaku dies, he wakes up early in the morning and the pain has receded. He blinks, slowly, and forces himself out of bed to meet with Chief Taneda.

He takes a shower, and as he replaces his bandages, he notices a blank, unscarred patch of skin on his wrist, where Odasaku’s name should be.

His thumb runs over it. The skin is smooth, like the irritation of the past two days was never there.

The thought shakes him to the core — and his chest tightens, his breath shortens. His hand shakes, his vision blurs.

It’s gone. His soulmark is gone.

“Soulmates are for life,” Mori once said, and he was wrong.

Dazai starts believing in soulmates when his dies.

#odazaiweek2020 #bsd #odazai #dazai osamu #oda sakunosuke #bsd odasaku #bsd dazai #writing #unsafe #character death #cw self harm #soulmates au

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tysonrunningfox · 4 years

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Toothless: Return to the Black Pony of Second Chances: Part 6

This is kind of a weird little limbo chapter leading to further shenanigans but whatever

Ao3

I don’t get involved in drama.

Really.

I don’t.

I don’t care who’s dating who, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t mention it whenever I see someone sneak home late at night. It’s just not something I care about, beyond the fact that the person in question will largely be lazy and useless the next day.

It doesn’t matter that Hiccup was having a video call with a pretty girl, because no matter how many times Ruff comments on how tall he is, I don’t care.

In fact, it matters even less because he’s largely been non-whiny the last few days, at least compared to the twins or Snotlout. Fishlegs is whiny in a different way, because the accommodations aren’t luxurious or intellectual enough for him, but again, I don’t argue because I don’t do drama.

I don’t do dramatic exits, abandoning things with a sweep of an imaginary cape as I stalk off for a fresh start.

Apparently, Hiccup does.

Or at least he abruptly leaves dinner with most of his plate uneaten, and I’m left chewing on perfectly cooked steak that’s suddenly gone dry in my mouth, his dad not staring at me so pointedly that he might as well be glaring.

Fishlegs scrapes his fork across his plate and it’s fingernails on a chalkboard.

Tuffnut picks his teeth.

And it’s Snotlout, fucking Snotlout, who breaks the tension.

“Is anyone going to eat that?” He points at Hiccup’s plate, avoiding my eyeline even though it’s clear he thinks he needs my permission, and my teeth grind together unconsciously.

I swallow and stab at a potato with my fork.

“Because if no one’s going to eat that—”

“Go for it,” I bark, making the decision that no one else will.

I don’t blame Mr. Haddock, and not just because I can’t blame him, but because he just promoted me, effectively, and this is my problem to deal with. And I don’t know how to act, because I’ve never been good with the interface between ‘boss’ and ‘family’ and exactly how my loyalty should be weighted within that matrix, but it has largely always centered on the horses.

And Mr. Haddock takes care of the horses.

“I mean…if no one else wants it,” Snotlout feigns hemming and hawing even as he pulls Hiccup’s plate towards him and I scowl.

“Speak now, or forever hold your peace.” It’s directed at everyone else, but Snotlout has to comment, because of course he does.

“If you’re proposing, is this where someone is supposed to object, or?” He laughs.

No one else does.

I take my last bite of food, teeth clicking against the fork before I stand up.

“I’m going to go check the fences.”

“Astrid,” Mr. Haddock tries to let me off of the hook I mounted myself and I pick up my plate.

“It’s a nice night, I’d like the ride.”

Once my plate is washed and on the drying rack, I risk the hallway I never walk through to get to the back door, because right now, walking past dusty family photos is better than dealing with Snotlout. The one closest to the door gives me pause, a gangly second grader between two smiling parents with that stereotypical posing smile, the uncomfortable one that I could never really replicate for school pictures.

A polite, get along to get along smile that he seems to have lost the ability or intention to use.

He was a scrawny kid, not that much has changed, and I think back to the brittle line of his shoulders as he hunched over his computer screen, trying to block it from me.

Hopefully, he’ll be cooled off by tomorrow, or at least keep his grudge to himself.

The wind whips at my hair on the short stint to the barn and I wish I’d grabbed my hat, but again, not worth dealing with Snotlout, so I jog the rest of the way, trying to remember if there’s a spare in the tack room. I think I left a hair tie with Stormfly’s saddle, and that’ll have to be good enough.

I don’t bother announcing my presence before opening the door and I’m shocked to hear someone swear, a horse snorting and pawing at the ground.

Not just someone.

Hiccup.

Who is standing in Toothless’s stall, hand on the black, stupidly-named horse’s shoulder, eyes already narrowing into a glare as I close the door behind me.

I glare back, like a habit, and he turns back to Toothless’s neck, brushing a fine bristled brush across his muddy neck, like that’ll do anything.

“If you’re trying to groom him, that won’t work,” I tell him, trying for casual as I walk past Toothless’s stall to Stormfly’s. She buries her nose in her dinner for one last bite before raising her head and nodding at me. Excited.

“I know you can’t help but give it,” his voice is curt, barely undercutting disrespectful, “but I don’t actually need to hear your opinion on everything.”

“It’s not an opinion,” I fasted Stormfly’s halter behind her ears and walk her towards the tack room, dropping the lead rope so that she’ll stand ground tied as I tack her up.

“Since I’m already beholden to you, can I please just tend to my horse without fending off your constant judgement too?” He snaps, and I should go.

I don’t get involved with drama.

“It’s not judgement,” I say because it’s not. That would imply that I care, which I don’t. He got his work done, the rest of it is none of my business.

“Right.” His eye roll is audible, the whisk of that useless brush across the mud in his horse’s fur like nails on a chalkboard. “Totally believable.”

I grit my teeth, grabbing Stormfly’s curry comb and raking it through the dried sweat behind her front leg. She looks at Hiccup curiously over my shoulder, ears twitching, and when I glance back at him, he’s staring at the brush in my hand.

He instantly looks away, ashamed to be caught again, and I want to bark that maybe he wouldn’t have to hide so much if he stopped doing things he doesn’t want anyone to find out about. Like talking to not-girlfriends in rooms with unlocked doors, right before dinner.

But that would be engaging, and I have to check the fences.

He brushes Toothless again, uselessly, saying something in a calm, under the breath tone that makes Stormfly perk her ears again. She must see something of Mr. Haddock in Hiccup that I don’t think anyone else does, because her jaw works quietly, expecting her usual treat.

I set my curry comb down and get my hoof pick, urging Stormfly to lift her front foot with a click and tug at her fetlock as I bend over. She lifts it easily, still watching Hiccup, and I start clearing the mud from this morning’s ride out of her hoof.

Hiccup’s eyes are bright like coals on the back of my neck and I wish I’d faced Stormfly the other direction, because I’m also too aware of my shirt riding up my back, the still, sticky barn air against my lower back. Not that it would be better to have to look at him when I stand up. Or maybe it would. I don’t know.

I’m not usually involved in the drama.

All the complicated teenage interactions that Ruff is always trying to clue me in on have always just annoyed me. The reasons Gustav is nice to me or the way that Snotlout and Fishlegs act around girls back from college for the summer are completely irrelevant to what I’m trying to do here, but now there’s the pressure of foreman on my shoulders and it makes me worry about group dynamics and the necessity of at least feigning getting along, that is if I want to stay on through the fall.

I set Stormfly’s foot down and stand up, yanking my shirt back down over the back of my jeans and glaring at Hiccup over my shoulder.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he answers automatically, eyes darting back to Toothless’s filthy fur.

“You’re staring at me.” I don’t need to ask, because it’s obvious, and he shrugs, not sufficiently deterred. “Why?”

“I’m…” He looks at the hoof pick in my hand and deflates slightly even as he sets his jaw, “I’m wondering what you’re doing.”

“I’m picking Stormfly’s feet,” I move to her back foot, ignoring how my shirt rides up my back again. Hiccup’s eyes are still on me, curious like he hasn’t been, like somehow this exact second isn’t drudgery and I’m once again plagued with the fact that I don’t actually want him to hate it here.

Purposefully making this awful for him would be…dramatic. Without question.

I want him to get his work done without complaint, and even I have to say that he’s largely done that the past few days. A little slow, sure, more than a little mouthy about how disgusting he finds things, but he’s been mostly willing. Mostly productive.

And he can put in a good word to his dad, if he has reason.

“Picking her feet?” He clarifies the term when I stand up again, patting her on the rump and walking around to her other side. “The ones she’s wearing now are ‘so last season’, I’m guessing.”

It’s a joke that I don’t get, but he still thinks it’s funny, laughing to himself in a way that feels like it’s at my expense and I bristle.

“Traditionally, jokes only count if everyone laughs.”

“Traditionally, the ability to laugh at jokes requires a sense of humor.” He snaps back, edge in his voice making his horse stomp and jostle him with a heavy swing of his head.

“Just because I’m not going to laugh at something that’s not funny to make you feel better doesn’t mean that I don’t have a sense of humor.”

“Could have fooled me,” he scoffs.

And he watches, craning his neck to see me lift Stormfly’s other front foot, and if I didn’t think he’d take it as a victory, I’d go check the fences on foot to get away from the unwelcome, confusing attention.

“What is so fascinating?” I stand up straight, forearm on Stormfly’s shoulder as I glare at him. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone groom a horse before?”

“No.” He sets his chin, the line of his jaw skinny-sharp, like he should have put his tantrum away long enough to finish his steak. “I haven’t. Or at least, not since I was about eight.”

I can tell that to everyone else, the ranch feels small. Restrictive. Usually, I can’t put together why, given the wide sloping fields and big blue sky, the endless nooks and crannies among the creeks and hills.

But it’s easier to conceptualize how much bigger the rest of the world is when Hiccup reminds me that he’s spent essentially his entire life, or the part that matters, the part where he formed his opinions and experiences, so far away from everything that I know.

I should ask him if he wants to learn. Or even tell him that he needs to learn, but I wonder what he’d want to tell me in return and fall back on something familiar. Bossy, even though I’d never admit it when it’s thrown back at me.

“He needs it,” I gesture at Toothless with my chin and he sighs.

“Yeah, I’m as ineffective as a horse owner as I am as a ranch hand. Who would have guessed?” He mimes flexing a skinny arm, making fun of himself like he anticipates me trying to and he thinks it’ll be better somehow if he gets there first.

Usually, it hurts the same no matter who drops the pitchfork on my foot, so I avoid doing it myself.

“That mud caked in his fur can irritate his skin, and it’s not helping his leg heal.”

“Yeah, I get it, but the general store’s car wash is nonexistent and the owner’s mad at me anyway.”

“You did steal.” I remind him and he bristles again, his heckles going up.

“And I didn’t even spin my pistol around my finger in the parking lot while limping in chaps. Not very regionally appropriate, I know.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, expression softening slightly when Toothless nudges at his wrist, “I was operating under the impression that most John Wayne movies were filmed in Arizona, or something. I thought the rules could be adjusted aesthetically, at least. My ass would get pretty cold in chaps here, with the wind.”

“Are you serious right now?” I don’t get involved with drama, but I’m used to Snotlout attempting to drag me back.

“Never.” He snorts, and something about it strikes me as truly miserable. Not pouting. Not trying to extract sympathy.

“Have you picked his feet?” I ask, and it comes out wrong, flat and irritated, because I’m flat and irritated, but he doesn’t puff up or argue.

“No, these came stock.”

“Picking a horse’s feet means cleaning out the mud and rocks from the bottom of the hoof.” I point at Stormfly’s last back foot, putting on my best reasonable foreman voice and trying to make my face match. “It’s important because a rock or other hoof obstruction can eventually make a horse come up lame.”

“They aren’t assigned lame in middle school like the rest of us?” He jokes and I grit my teeth together, struggling to stretch my ranch size world view to accommodate his non-attempt at communication.

“When a horse is lame, they have a limp, of some kind. Some issue moving. It’s a bigger deal for a thousand-pound animal.”

“Ah, the other kind of lame I was assigned. I get it.”

“Come here,” I order. Distinctly. Foreman voice wavering.

“Why?”

“Because I can’t get close to that horse and someone needs to pick his feet, so you can learn on Stormfly.”

He weighs that for a second and I’m surprised when he nods, carefully exiting the stall, fingers not quite clumsy on the latch but not comfortable either before he walks over to us, threatening to skirt way too close to Stormfly’s rear.

“Whoa there,” I hold my hand out to stop him and it works, except for his sudden, condescending smirk.

“Are you talking to me, or the horse?”

“You.”

“You just said ‘come here’, I know I’m not a master of deciphering mixed signals but—”

“Don’t walk right behind a horse you don’t know.” I must say it with some kind of authority, because he pauses, for once, before turning on his heel and walking around Stormfly’s front. He doesn’t touch her though, even as her eyes follow him and she huffs hot breath against his sleeve.

“She’s not tied up,” he comments on the lead rope against the ground and I shrug.

“She’s ground tied.”

“So, horses are susceptible to gravity. Noted.”

“She’s trained to not move when her rope is touching the ground.” I clarify, handing him the hoof pick and stepping to the side so that he can get at Stormfly’s back foot. “You need to bend over and pick up her back foot.”

“Thousand-pound animal,” he points at his chest, a little panicky, “I can’t actually deadlift two-hundred-fifty pounds like you can.”

“I wasn’t,” I pull back from the argument before it starts, “she’ll help.”

“If this breaks my back—”

“It won’t.”

He doesn’t seem to believe me, too cautiously setting his palm flat on Stormfly’s side as he adjusts his grip on the hoof pick. When he leans forward, his shirt rides up his back, revealing a pale, skinny spine and boxers peeking out of his stupid, pre-ripped jeans. I focus on Stormfly’s foot, patting her haunch when she easily lifts it for him, shifting only slightly when he fumbles with how to hold her hoof.

“Put your hand—” I try to explain and he cups the bottom of her hoof, impossibly awkward. “Here. Let me.” I bend down next to him, grabbing his hand and placing it properly around her hoof wall, tugging her foot up a few inches so that he can properly see the bottom of it.

“Oh.” He shifts his feet, turning the hoof pick in his hand and trying to get an angle on it. “That doesn’t hurt her or…”

“No.” I try to be patient. Really. “Now scrape around the frog—”

“Very funny,” he sets her foot down all at once and stands back up, wiping mud on pre-ripped jeans and taking a step back.

“What?”

“The ‘frog’?” He snorts, “really? While I’m bent over are you going to drop a house on me and call me the Wicked Warlock of the Big Evil City?”

“No,” I hold my hand out for the pick and he stares, guarded like he’s sure there’s a catch. “I’ll show you.”

“I’ve always wanted a tour of the secret horse frog,” he hands it over, and I swallow against the urge to tell him how wrong he is, ignoring how my shirt rides up again when I bend over and lift Stormfly’s foot.

“This,” I trace the triangle in the middle of her hoof with the pick, “is the frog. There’s a V shaped groove around it, and that’s largely what needs to be cleaned out.” I demonstrate, a few compressed flakes of mud falling onto the barn floor before I stand up and wipe my dirty hand on my jeans.

“Does everything having to do with horses have to have some weird word associated with it?” It’s rhetorical, but he expects an answer, and I think that summarizes most of our interactions. “Is Toothless even black or is there some other name for it? Is he Ebony? Charcoal pattern A-1?”

“He’s black.”

“Not Onyx 3A-4B?”

I’m used to being the butt of jokes. Or more accurately, the imaginary stick supposedly up my butt being the butt of jokes. Usually, I ignore it, because there’s no point in engaging. It gets me nowhere, it doesn’t matter.

But right now, looking at Hiccup’s smug face, spouting meaningless numbers and trying to act like he’s not mad that I walked in on a call I don’t care about, I remember something.

My first math packet is due digitally next week.

“He’s letting you close to him,” I say and Hiccup shrugs.

“Hasn’t showed me his frog yet, but I figure, at this rate, it’s just a matter of time.” His awkwardness doesn’t shut him down and I don’t understand how he’s so ok with projecting it.

Like it’s easier to be uncomfortable if everyone else is too.

It’s infuriating.

“Then you should really learn to groom him.” I pick up my curry comb and hold it out at him, “like if you’re trying to get the mud caked on his neck off of him, you need to use one of these.”

“This is…a torture device,” he pokes the tines on the comb and I sigh, pressing it into Stormfly’s neck and dragging it across her shoulder. She arches into it, lip curling when it scratches her favorite itch.

“It’s a scratch, for her.”

“She’s bigger than Toothless,” he comments, a little muted, and I shrug.

“Not by much.” I exhale through my nose, trying to remember how to cushion things. “About earlier—”

“When you told everyone that I had a girlfriend?” He doesn’t so much snap as he snaps back to some previously established protocol and I huff.

“I’m—You were being secretive in your room talking to a girl, what was I supposed to think?”

He weighs my rhetorical question like it’s real and shrugs one shoulder, hand idly petting Stormfly’s shoulder, “nothing.”

He’s right.

“I don’t involve myself with ranchhand drama—”

“Could have fooled me.”

It’s like he knows that I can’t fall back on my usual backup where people are scared of me. It’s not even intentional, usually, people just…don’t expect intensity and when they find it, they’d rather back off than question it. And his dad made me foreman.

And my math homework is due next week.

“I wanted to ask you about the internet.”

“Wanted?” He sees right through me, eyebrow raised, stepping away from Stormfly like she burned him.

“No.” I tuck my hair behind my ear, “I—your dad never turns it on.”

“What? Do you need to check Facebook to connect with the three people in the county who don’t live within a hundred yards of where we’re standing right now?” There it is again, the cruelty he tries on like a mask. A mask he wishes were permanent, and something about his determined brooding makes me think it will be soon enough, if he gets his way.

When he gets his way. Probably.

“I need to turn something in,” I stick to the truth, voice curt as I cross my arms, Stormfly’s ears flicking back towards me.

“To the single county cop who cares about a pack of gum?”

“To school.” I grit my teeth, and he is tall. Taller than me. And I hate it. Because how do I maintain anything of ‘foreman’ when I need his help?

“To school?” He repeats, frowning, and I sigh.

“Yes.” I tap my boot on the floor before turning on my heel and heading back to the tack room to grab Stormfly’s saddle. I don’t ask Hiccup to move before swinging it onto her back and he barely gets out of the way in time, stumbling backwards and elbowing the nearest stall, startling Hookfang, who snorts and stomps his foot.

“It is summer—”

“To summer school.” Admitting it doesn’t feel great. In fact, I wish I could take it back. I wish I could take the whole conversation back, that I could have just ignored him. I’d be half done with my round by now, wind in my hair, peace of mind incoming.

He’s silent for too long, watching me tighten my saddle, eyes cataloging my motions like he might be planning to steal from me next and my teeth grind together. Stormfly’s patient as I get her bridle, slipping the bit into her mouth and unclipping the lead rope like I’m not waiting for Hiccup to say something.

Because I’m not.

Because he’s not going to say anything helpful. He’s definitely not going to say anything charitable. He’s going to relish in having something to hold over me even though he doesn’t understand my world or its consequences, at all.

He’s a spoiled thief in pre-ripped jeans who has never had to work eight hours after school, trying to keep a horse farm running through disaster after disaster. He’s never fallen asleep in class because he’d already been up working horses for hours.

“So, the rumors are true.” He says, cryptic as I start to lead Stormfly to the barn door by her reins.

I stop short, thinking about Snotlout and the twins and even Fishlegs. About the swirling small-town rumor mill that he doesn’t understand. That he couldn’t understand.

“What rumors?”

“You did fail math.”

“Who told you?” I shake my head, “never mind, I don’t care.”

“Fishlegs.”

“Fishlegs,” I grit my teeth, shoving the door open and inhaling as Stormfly follows me through. I’ll put him on chicken coop duty for a month.

Two months.

“If I help you get internet, what’s in it for me?” He asks, and he could put in a good or bad word for me and I don’t know which his dad would believe more. I don’t know how I’m here, or why, or how nothing is clear anymore.

“I don’t know, Hiccup,” I swing onto Stormfly and settle into the saddle, glad for the height and the mode of transportation, the warm, steady sides between my knees. “What do you want?”

“Take me into town sometime.” He catches me off guard, “I’m going crazy. I think I forgot what buildings look like.”

“Usually at least four walls. A ceiling, typically.” I should be above his bad influence, but I’m not. Apparently.

“Good counting,” his grin is a little too performative to really be cruel and I want to ask about his phone call again, because I think I forgot how to care about petty drama until he showed up and made it too petty to ignore. “No promises, but I’ll tell my dad about the wonders of anti-virus again.”

“I’ve got to go check on the cows,” I cluck at Stormfly, pressing my leg against her side to indicate where we’re going. Finally. After all these interruptions. “I don’t know when I’ll have to go into town again but…if your chores are done, I’ll let you know.”

“And you’re the one who gets to decide when my chores are done,” he grins, clapping his hands on his thighs hard enough that Stormfly tenses. “Great.”

I could tell him that he hasn’t been doing the worst job, but I’m not willing to part with another bargaining chip right now. Not when I know I haven’t been avoiding the drama at all. I’ve just been blind to my own involvement.

#t:rttbposc #httyd fic #hiccstrid fic #modern au #horse girl hiccup #they're both so...fuckin dumb

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camillemontespan · 4 years

Text

can we talk about georgiana, the duchess of devonshire?

So, a few months ago, I asked my followers who would be interested in following a side blog about historical figures. I’m a huge history geek and I thought that if I started a blog about the people who interest me, I could add it to my CV and also just get back into my interests. Quite a few of you were down for it and I was so pleased!

I’m yet to make the side blog but I’m posting this as a test to see if you guys like it. If you do, I will make the side blog.

@jovialyouthmusic @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @moonlightgem7 @walkerswhiskeygirl @rainbowsinthestorm @saivilo @pug-bitch @katedrakeohd @gardeningourmet @mskaneko

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Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806)

I love history for its people. I am not interested in battles or treaties; I am drawn to the people behind these events. I like discovering what made them tick, that drove their decisions and what impact their lives have had on future generations. If you ask me to date a certain event, I can’t do it, but I can give you a spoken biography of historical figures that interest me.

When I moved to Devon two years ago, I was nervous but also excited for one reason: I believed I would be able to visit Chatsworth House, the home of the Duchess of Devonshire. Imagine my irritation when I realised that Chatsworth is actually based in Derbyshire, which is hours away from Devon itself. My ideas of weekend jaunts to Chatsworth as I admired the architecure and strolled around the gardens were ruined by this realisation.

You may have heard of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. A film of her life starring Keira Knightley was released in 2008 which first brought her to my attention. Now, I’m not a Knightley fan - ‘I’m Keira Knightley, look at my jawww,’- because I find her quite wooden, however I was pleasantly surprised when I watched her performance. She brought a human element to this historical figure who was known for her fashion sense, crippling debt and controversial marriage arrangement.

Georgiana is also the ancestor of Princess Diana. Many people compare their tragic stories and can see a mirror image. Married to man they didn’t really love, later forced to watch their husbands fall in love with another woman and say nothing, all the while maintaining dignity and poise on the world stage.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Georgiana.

If Georgiana was your friend, she would be the one who would come over with a bottle of wine, over which you would put the world to rights and drunkenly proclaim, ‘I love you sooooo much!’ to each other, before deciding to have a spontaneous night out where you dance on the bar and pound shots. She would visit you the next day – you would be horrifically hungover, she would be fresh as a daisy.

Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, was known for her charismatic and bubbly personality; her ability to make any outfit look beautiful (4 foot long peacock feather in her hair springs to mind) which made women everywhere try to emulate her - she literally set trends. She was also known for her passion for politics and her private life.

On the surface, she had it all. But in reality, she didn’t. Underneath this larger than life facade was a tragic figure.

For one thing, Georgiana was addicted to gambling and racked up an eye watering debt. She borrowed money from her friends but never repaid them. Her mother warned her to be careful but to no avail. Her mother also had a gambling problem and wasted money while playing faro. She didn’t want her daughter to continue her mistakes. Georgiana hid her debts from her husband for as long as she could, but eventually she had to tell the Duke, who paid off her debts and never mentioned it again.

She had been expecting to get a bollocking but he stayed silent. To be honest, this made it worse. It’s like being told by your mum that she’s ‘disappointed’ in you, when you’d prefer her to shout at you for a few minutes and then forgive you. She struggled with gambling for years.

Second, and most importantly, her marriage was an unspoken controversy. This is the thing that makes Georgiana an incredible character to study. I read her story and I just couldn’t work it out in my head - why would you put up with this? But then, you have to remember that divorce wasn’t an option for women in those days. Women were property. They were commodities. Leaving a marriage because your husband preferred another woman was not an option.

It was the worst kept secret in society. Everyone knew that her best friend, Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Foster, lived with them and that Bess was her husband’s mistress. Georgiana had asked for Bess to live with them after she discovered that Bess’ sons had been taken away from her and she was living in awful circumstances. Georgiana was too good, too kind – and Bess took advantage. Trust me, Bess is the villain in this story, no matter how often she tried to set her story straight. Diary accounts from Georgiana’s friends show that nobody trusted her. They could see her for what she was -a schemer, a leech. But Georgiana couldn’t.

Bess stayed at Chatsworth and conducted a secret affair with her husband, which soon became public knowledge. Did Georgiana say anything? No. She let it carry on under her roof, without saying a word. In the film, she stands up for herself which is how it should have played out. But according to Amanda Foreman, the historian and writer of the book, this didn’t happen. Georgiana kept silent.

Although I wish I could shake her and tell her she deserves so much better, in a way I feel she shows a huge strength of character to put up with that. She continued her daily routine with dignity and carried on being a queen.

Now, this is when things get interesting and draws in another historical figure who I feel isn’t really known? At least, I didn’t know him, all I knew was that there are tea bags named after him.

The rumour is that she later fell in love with Charles Grey, a Whig politician (later Prime Minister - I KNOW RIGHT? YOU GO GEORGIANA!) who had dreams of a bright, new world where all men had the vote. They were like minded and they could talk about these dreams together. I adore how political Georgiana was and that she spoke publicly about her political associations in a time when women were expected to stay at home and mind their business. She actually brought about the trend of canvassing, where you go out into the streets and campaign for a party. Having Georgiana on side meant the Whigs became popular quickly - if anything, she became their figurehead. Anyway, I digress, but let me just say that she has so much depth. She is genuinely interesting.

Right, Charles Grey.

They had an affair and she became pregnant with his child. In short, she asked the Duke if she could leave him and be with Grey. After all, he was fucking her best friend and not giving a shit about her feelings. But, of course, the Duke refused. Hypocrite, yes. But the time period was different and he couldn’t risk the humiliation of being deserted by his wife – nor could she. Women who left their families were ravaged by society. She gave birth to Grey’s daughter, Eliza, in secret and the baby was raised by his family as Grey’s niece. Again, that is a testament to her character. I’m sure many women would have felt broken after that. But she wasn’t – she visited Eliza frequently (who, when she grew up, named her daughter Georgiana after her mother. I think she knew by then) and she continued to partake in social engagements.

What I love about her, aside from her strength, is how she challenges the stereotype of women of that time. In fact, she was way beyond her time. She was the one who started the trend for getting outside in the streets and campaigning for the Whigs. She was a WOMAN who was out in the streets campaigning, despite not even having a vote or even thinking her gender would one day have one, and she was so much more than just fashion and money. She was an intelligent badass who cared about how the country was run. She didn’t let gender stereotypes and restrictions hold her back. I love how no matter how shit her home life was, she didn’t let that bring her down. If anything, politics was her escape. It was where she could feel valued. She made friends with the Whigs, such as Charles Fox, and they wanted to hear her opinion. They needed her on their side because her opinion mattered. She mattered.

She was ahead of her time. She had a hard home life but she carried on, trying to make a difference and prove her worth. Georgiana is my home girl and I will stand up for her because no one else did.

I know this wasn’t a coherent piece. It was all over the place, right? But that’s what history does to me. I get excited. If I’m talking to you about Georgina, my hands will be all over the place and my voice will be rising in volume because I get so passionate about the subject. I wrote essays at uni for my history degree and they were so proper, just the way university dictates you write. All I wanted to write was ‘read how amazing this person is! Give me an A for enthusiasm!’ I once got a lower mark for an essay because I made the mistake of being too enthusiastic, writing a really in-depth profile on the historical figure, but forgot to answer the question… My tutor said he could tell I really enjoyed writing it but I didn’t actually fulfill the point of the essay. It wasn’t a harsh criticism - he was happy I enjoyed writing it but obviously, couldn’t grade me a high mark.

But that’s how I approach history. I could sit here and try to write something proper but I think that is one reason why history is often a disliked subject. It CAN be boring if taught badly.

I remember my history teacher in high school, Mr Pia, who was the best teacher I’ve ever had. He scared all the young students because he was so serious and never smiled and I tell you, I was scared when I found out he would be teaching me when I was in my final year. But, when I joined his class, he surprised us in a lesson about Austria. He played Mozart and said, ‘I thought I would try to evoke the right atmosphere!’

I fell in love with his teaching then and there.

THAT is what makes history a good subject. You need someone passionate, who looks at it differently. That’s how I would like to approach it. It may not be for some people but it works for me.

If Georgiana has peaked your interest, you can read the biography by Amanda Foreman which is incredible. I couldn’t put it down. Even give the film a go - Ralph Fiennes plays the Duke and Dominic Cooper (babe) is Charles Grey. It’s on Netflix. Spend your Sunday watching it. It’s a great adaptation.

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marquiswrites · 4 years

Text

White Christmas

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)

Characters: James “Bucky” Barnes, Reader, Tony Stark [Guest Appearance]

Relationship: James “Bucky” Barnes/Reader,

Rating: Teen

Word Count: 1535

Warnings: FLUFF, small language

Author’s Notes: Written for @mypassionsarenysins for their #mypassionsarenysins1k challenge! My prompt was “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby. This was super fun to write and gave me a chance at some sweet sweet fluff to balance out my usual Angst and Mystery categories. I hope that you enjoy! [also, nothing against Las Vegas for the people who live there, but I too live in a desert, and no snow on xmas is a sucky tradition]

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One hundred and ninety four days.

That’s how long you and Bucky had been undercover in Las Vegas. Trying to catch out a Hydra base that was somewhere in this miserable desert. It was far too cold for the fact that there was absolutely not a single snowflake in sight.

You pouted once more, leaning over the balcony of the hotel suite that they had put the both of you in. Under the guise of foreman overseeing the construction of yet another Casino and hotel. It gave you both reason enough to be in the city for as long as you had been, and to chat up the other managers and foreman. But you had made little to no headway on figuring out whether the intel was good.

And now here you both were, on Christmas eve, in weather more suited to fall or even late summer. Clear and dry.

After so long on the east coast, or even the occasional trips to Europe, it was depressing. To put it plainly. And to make it all worse, you were with the one Avenger who couldn’t stand to be around you for more than a few minutes at a time if you weren’t actively working.

You and Bucky made a good team, Natasha’s training had helped you to come far in hand to hand combat since your first days with the team; and your enhanced ability made Bucky an absolute force of nature, strength and endurance expanded even past the capabilities of the super soldier serum, with absolutely no side effect due to the increased healing component. You worked well together, and your histories with Hydra helped you to understand each other on a level that none of the rest of the team shared.

But he also absolutely refused to acknowledge your existence half the time. Maybe it was because he was finally regaining memories, maybe because it was of the fact that you had grown up a Hydra Princess for the first half of your childhood, privileged compared to how he was tortured. Likely it was just because that was how he was. Reticent with most of the crew, except for Sam and Steve.

And you were so desperately in love with him that it hurt. Sending flutters through your chest every time your gazes met. Your mouth ran dry with his every smile, though it was usually saved for when you were actively on the job, a facade, no matter how real it looked.

Now you were stuck with each other on Christmas.

Happy holidays to you.

You tucked your hand against your cheek. Sighing to yourself once more as you watched the lights of the Strip. You were far enough away that the noise fell away across the desert, so much quieter than anything that you were used to.

Which made it worse that you didn’t realize Bucky had joined you on the deck until he was clearing his throat. “If you want, you can always go and do somethin’. I’m not about to make you miss christmas just cause Stevie’s got a stick up his ass about this case.”

Jumping out of your skin, you whipped around to find Bucky leaning against the open sliding glass door. Shirtless.

Which made you lose all ability to form words until it was almost too awkward to pick the conversation back up.

“You alright there, killer?” A raised brow suddenly brought you back to your senses.

“Uh yeah… just got caught up in my head.” Lifting a hand to rub at the back of your neck, shrugging slightly while you flicked your tongue against your lips. “But… what do you mean?”

Bucky chuckled softly, running a hand through his hair to push it back from his face. Possibly the most distracting habit that he had, well, the second most distracting at any case. “I mean if you got plans for the holiday. Go and catch a show. Get some drinks. Ice skate. Don’t have to be cooped up in here with me the whole time. Sad way to spend christmas, Doll.”

“I don’t mind. I mean… Everything is probably packed anyways, and there’s no snow or anything. Doesn’t really feel like Christmas, you know?” Shrugging once more as your gaze dropped. Missing the way that Bucky frowned at you.

“Yeah, guess that’s right. I’ll leave you to it then.” Bucky pushed himself off of the door jam, turning back inside. Leaving you with a growing pit in your chest. That niggling of anxiety that you tried to ignore most of the time. Resigning yourself to spending the rest of your evening out here, avoiding him in the hopes of keeping you from making a fool out of yourself.

It was quickly approaching midnight as you finally pushed off from the balcony, shuffling your way back inside the hotel room. Trying to keep quiet so you didn’t wake Bucky.

The only reason that you stayed out this long was to try outlasting the man’s seemingly incurable insomnia. Making it to the door of your room, pulling it open just to freeze as you caught sight of Bucky sitting on the edge of your bed. “You’re up late.”

You wet your lips and huff a laugh. “Says the man who never sleeps.”

“Did enough of that in Cryo. Come on, have something I want you to see.” Bucky stood, offering you your heaviest jacket and a pair of boots. Leaving you tilting your head up to him in confusion.

“Umm… I mean…”

“Doll, trust me.”

You wanted to tell him that you trusted him with your life, but those weren’t words that you said to people who couldn’t stand your company for more than five minutes. Instead just nodding dumbly. Slipping your feet into the boots, and the jacket over your arms. Watching as Bucky pulled out a blindfold, then swallowing tightly as he tied it around your eyes. “We’ll be there in just a few moments.”

It certainly felt like more than a few moments before you felt the car stopping. Listening for the opening of Bucky’s door, then the way it shut. Your own door opening, with a hand reaching gently from yours to lead you from it.

“I hope you know how very kidnappy this feels.”

“Don’t worry, Doll, if this is kidnapping, it’s the gentlest I’ve ever done.”

“Buck… That really, really doesn’t ease any of my concerns.” You manage to laugh as he guides you through what you are assuming in a parking lot. Ears straining as you caught the unlatching of a door, lifting a hand to feel the edge of it to confirm your thoughts.

“Smart, Doll, but stop cheating.” The warm laugh comes once more, bringing a heat to your cheeks. Warm in comparison to the sudden chill creeping along your skin. No wonder that he had wanted you to wear the coat. Your brow furrowing in confusion. Then wetting your lips as he moved to untie the knot at the back of your head, gently pulling the cloth from your eyes.

When you open your eyes, you can feel your breath catch in your throat. You heart skipping several beats as you stare out at the ice rink. Completely covered in snow from a machine blowing it in from one corner of the room. “But… how?”

“Made a call to Stark.” You can feel him shrug from where he stands just behind you, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body. Sending chills up your spine.

“But… why?”

“Because you deserve a White Christmas, Doll. And if I can do that for you, even if just for this one night, then I’m damn well gonna make it happen.”

In a sudden flurry of emotion, you twist on your toes, wrapping your arms around his neck. Your lips finding his in a desperate sort of gentleness, not caring how he might pull away at any second. Not caring that this might ruin any hope of him reciprocating those feelings. Just needing to express how much it meant that he would do this for you.

And then slowly melting in his arms as he met your kiss in return. A hand moving to cup the back of your head while his free arm slipped around your waist. Cradling you in place against him. Keeping you there, lips gently sliding across yours, for what felt like an eternity before he was pulling back to grin almost shyly.

“Well… if I had known it only took a bit of snow for you to notice me…”

You blink up at him before your forehead thuds against his shoulder. “We’re such idiots…”

“Yeah you both are, now get out there and enjoy the snow before they have to open this back up to the public. And turn off your coms next time old man.” Stark’s voice suddenly rings out across the loudspeaker system as a spotlight lands on you both. Leaving you and Bucky to both groan with embarrassment before bursting into a quiet sort of laughter. Bing Crosby’s classics gently filtering through the air as your gaze meets Bucky’s once more.

“Come on, Doll, let’s go enjoy our white christmas. Together.”

#mypassionsarenysins1k #Bucky x Reader #christmas fanfiction #James Buchanan Barnes #Tony Stark #avengers fanfiction #Reader insert

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vince-thrilligan · 5 years

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'Breaking Bad' Returns: Aaron Paul and Vince Gilligan Take a TV Classic for a Spin in 'El Camino'

The Hollywood Reporter | by Rebecca Keegan | September 18, 2019

In their first interview about the new movie, star and creator reveal why they risked messing with their defining show ("Is there another story to tell?") and how they shot the hot Netflix project in near-total secrecy.

One day late in 2018, the phone of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, man named Frank Sandoval started ringing off the hook. Sandoval runs a local outfit that operates Breaking Bad-themed tours in an RV identical to the battered Fleetwood Bounder that served as a mobile meth lab for Bryan Cranston's Walter White and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman on the Emmy-winning AMC show. Five years after Breaking Bad went off the air, the distinctive vehicle had — suddenly and mysteriously — reappeared in town outside a diner on a main road. "People were calling us and saying, 'Is that your RV up there?' " Sandoval says. "We'd heard rumors for years that they were shooting. But nobody we talked to ever knew anything." Sandoval asked around about the mystery RV and eventually came across a printed flyer explaining that a New Mexico tourism commercial was shooting in town. He figured that explained it.

Not quite.

In fact, Jesse and Walter's old RV was in Albuquerque that day, as were Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan and his cast and crew, engaged in a secret project. They were shooting El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which will premiere Oct. 11 on Netflix and in theaters in 68 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Albuquerque, before it airs on AMC early next year. Netflix only just announced the project in August, after Gilligan had wrapped postproduction. That's because despite the Virginia-born writer's gentle Southern manner and almost pathological humility, Gilligan, 52, is a showman at heart, and he wants to lift the curtain at the last possible second. "I don't want to open my Christmas presents a week and a half before Christmas," Gilligan says, explaining his insistence on a covert production. Gilligan's producers say they had nothing to do with the tourism flyer, but they did use other means to keep the project hush-hush, including waiting until the last possible minute to share the script with crew, obscuring locations with trucks and screens and relying on a private jet to shuttle a key castmember in and out of Albuquerque without notice.

The two-hour feature film, which Gilligan wrote and directed over the past 18 months, is premiering six years after Breaking Bad ended with Walter dying and Jesse driving an El Camino to freedom from his imprisonment on an Aryan Brotherhood compound. (A trailer set to debut during the Emmys on Sept. 22 will offer a detailed peek.) The Netflix partnership fulfills a long-standing wish of Gilligan's for a Breaking Bad theatrical experience and follows the formative role the streaming company had in the series' success — Breaking Bad was the first cable show to benefit from a so-called Netflix boost.

El Camino centers on what happens to Jesse after he drives out of that compound covered in physical and psychological scars, and it features more than 10 familiar characters from the show. In deference to Gilligan's spoiler aversion, THR will name only two: fan favorites Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) and Badger (Matt L. Jones), the Beavis and Butt-Head of the greater Albuquerque meth community.

Returning to the world of Breaking Bad comes with some risk for Gilligan — during the course of its five-year run, the crime drama about a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who transforms into a ruthless drug kingpin came to exemplify a new, golden era of TV, engrossing critics and audiences with its dense, character-driven storytelling, winning 16 Emmys and delivering one of the most satisfying mic drops in the history of television with a finale that more than 10 million people watched on AMC. In the rarefied club of early Peak TV auteurs, including Mad Men's Matthew Weiner, The Wire's David Simon and The Sopranos' David Chase, Gilligan is the first to take a leap and make a film from his signature show (Chase's Sopranos movie is due next year).

There also is the danger of dwelling indefinitely in the world — however rich — that Gilligan created. Breaking Bad diehards already have the show's spinoff prequel, Better Call Saul, which just finished shooting its fifth season. "I'm hoping when the movie comes out, people won't say, 'Oh, man, this guy should've left well enough alone,' " Gilligan says in his first interview about the film. "Why did George Foreman keep coming out of retirement, you know?"

***

Gilligan works in a nondescript glass office building in Burbank with a view of a dry cleaner and a parking lot. This is the "fancy" office he reluctantly moved to before his team started making Better Call Saul — superstitious, he didn't want to vacate the derelict space deeper in the San Fernando Valley where they had made Breaking Bad, a building they shared with a private investigator, a music charity and an hoc threading business operating out of the women's bathroom. Also, for reasons no one can recall, there was a guy in the building who always wore a kilt. Gilligan, who lives on L.A.'s Westside with his longtime girlfriend, Holly Rice, chose the location because it was convenient not for him, but for his show's editor. When it came time to select offices there, he picked for himself the room that didn't have a window and housed a giant humming server.

His newer, comparatively luxurious space is decorated with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul memorabilia — the special effects bust of Gus Fring's (Giancarlo Esposito) exploded head is next to Gilligan's desk, and bottles of Blue Ice Heisenberg vodka sit on a bookshelf. There also are model helicopters, tokens of Gilligan's other passion, aviation. At 50, he fulfilled a decades-long goal of obtaining his helicopter pilot's license. One of the locations in El Camino is a spot he used to glimpse while choppering with his flight instructor, 500 feet above the ground, en route from L.A. to Albuquerque. "When I'm flying a helicopter, I'm as happy as I ever get, which is not particularly happy, but still, as happy as I ever am," Gilligan says. "I'll never master it. It's one of those … Is that a Zen thing? When you have some sort of avocation that you're continually a beginner at. You're never going to perfect it. But in a weird way, that feels good, because you're never going to get tired of it either."

Gilligan first started ruminating on the story that would ultimately become El Camino before he finished making Breaking Bad. "I didn't really tell anybody about it, because I wasn't sure I would ever do anything with it," he says. "But I started thinking to myself, 'What happened to Jesse?' You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, 'What did that ending — let's just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?' " It was while planning events in 2018 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad that Gilligan first told his inner circle he had an idea to revisit Jesse, perhaps a five-minute short film, he mused to his longtime producer, Melissa Bernstein. "He just started letting his mind run over that," Bernstein says. "And he started to realize, 'I have a lot to say about this.' "

Gilligan, who wrote the feature films Wilder Napalm (1993) and Home Fries (1998) as well as some unproduced feature scripts, found his comfort zone as a writer in the collaborative, deadline-oriented environment of TV while on the staff of The X-Files. "I was the laziest writer in creation," Gilligan says. "I'd piddle around. It took me two years to write a first draft of a movie script in the early '90s, just because I had no one holding a gun to my head. I just didn't have that work ethic. Working in TV changed everything for me." But on El Camino, Gilligan returned to the solitary lifestyle of a feature writer. "I had been working with excellent writers now for well over a decade, and I'd forgotten what it was like to write something by myself, and it was daunting," Gilligan says. "Suddenly I'm trying to write this and thinking, 'God, I really could use a writers room about now.' " Gilligan outlined the story using note cards, his usual method, and then began on his first draft at his time-share in the Bahamas.

As a business philosophy, Gilligan is a believer in the idea that you "dance with the girl that brung ya," and at a time when many other top showrunners are managing multiple productions and seeking nine-figure deals at streamers, he has remained at Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul studio Sony Pictures Television, re-upping with the company last year in a three-year, mid-eight-figure overall pact that includes his work on El Camino. When Gilligan told executives there about his idea for a Breaking Bad movie, "We all just fell silent in the room," says SPT co-president Chris Parnell. "It was one of the moments when you think to yourself, 'Did I just hear that? Is that something he genuinely wants to do?' " Together with his agent, ICM Partners' Chris Silbermann, Gilligan quietly walked the script into just a handful of offices in Hollywood before deciding to partner with Netflix, as well as AMC. Both companies represented a crucial part in Breaking Bad's history, AMC for picking up the show after FX passed on it and Netflix for building it into the binge TV era's first true streaming/cable hybrid hit.

In 2010, Breaking Bad was at a crossroads: With the show averaging about 1.5 million viewers a season despite being a critics' darling, AMC informed Sony and Gilligan that the series could end with season three. When Sony began shopping Breaking Bad to competitors — quickly finding a taker for two more seasons at FX — AMC reversed course. Netflix, meanwhile, was aggressively licensing shows for its nascent streaming service, and content chief Ted Sarandos made a syndication deal with Sony for Breaking Bad. Originally, the arrangement was for the series to start streaming on Netflix after its fourth season finished on AMC, but, with the show's future uncertain, Sony accelerated the plan, and new fans began discovering and bingeing Breaking Bad on Netflix in time to catch some of the fourth season and all of the fifth and final season on AMC. When season five premiered in 2013, the audience had more than doubled from its previous outing. "We felt that it was a virtuous cycle, where we were introducing the show to new fans, who were then going and experiencing new episodes on AMC, and then when we would launch a new season, we would again see another wave of new folks coming," says Netflix vp original content Cindy Holland. Since news of the movie broke in August, Holland says, viewership of Breaking Bad on Netflix is up, some from rewatchers and some from newcomers to the series. "We were a natural home for the movie," Holland says. "It wasn't a really long conversation. It was a simple, 'Yes, please.' "

Netflix also brought the theatrical component, which was crucial to Gilligan. "Every time we'd put out a new season of Breaking Bad, we would have a premiere in a big movie theater," Gilligan says. "We would watch this quote-unquote television show. I mean, I guess quotations aren't needed. It is absolutely a television show. But we would have this wonderful, very limited, one-time opportunity to watch our television show on a big screen with giant stereo speakers thumping, the image filling 40 feet across. I always thought, 'This thing, it looks like a movie. It doesn't look like a show.' I really want to be able to share that with fans." As with its other theatrical releases, Netflix will exhibit the film in independent theaters for a very limited period.

The secrecy on the project extends to the budget, which all interviewed decline to disclose beyond saying that it is significantly higher than what Gilligan had ever worked with on the show, including the $6 million for an episode in the final season. Gilligan's producers Bernstein and Diane Mercer went to great lengths to keep the film under wraps during production, shrouding locations from onlookers' view, covertly ferrying key castmembers to the set and warning crewmembers to be discreet around town. "Don't be sitting on a barstool somewhere and talk about the project you're working on, because God only knows who's sitting next to you" was the mantra, Gilligan says.

The movie, which plays like a coda to the series, is thick with details that will tickle the superfan base, which is its true intended audience, Gilligan says. One that only the most devoted may pick up on is a key address at the corner of Holly and Arroz streets — a wink to Gilligan's girlfriend (arroz is rice in Spanish). "If, after 12 years, you haven't watched Breaking Bad, you're probably not going to start now," Gilligan says. "If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there's no doubt in my mind that you won't get as much enjoyment out of it. We don't slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, 'Maybe there's a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there's a way to explain things to the audience.' If there was a way to do that, it eluded me."

Breaking Bad was particularly cinematic television, with its wide-angle shots of the stark New Mexico landscape, expressive lighting and deliberate pacing. At one point during the series, Gilligan and his cinematographer, Michael Slovis, made an unsuccessful pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot Breaking Bad in the CinemaScope format that Sergio Leone had used to shoot Clint Eastwood's Dollars Trilogy. On El Camino, Gilligan got his wish — Better Caul Saul DP Marshall Adams shot the movie on the ARRI Alexa 65 camera used for The Revenant and in a 2.39 wide-screen format that seems designed to showcase a gunslinger's squint across the desert.

Gilligan is perfectionistic in a way that television schedules rarely have time to indulge. El Camino proceeded at an even more leisurely pace than his shows. Instead of shooting six to eight pages a day as Gilligan had on Breaking Bad, he shot one and a half to three. Most of the 50-day shoot happened in the same Albuquerque locations where Breaking Bad is set, but the larger budget meant he was able to take advantage of some picturesque out-of-state locations, too. "This is my first movie as a director, and I have to say, it made me want some more of that," says Gilligan, who has directed five episodes each of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and two of The X-Files. "You truly have time to get things right. It feels very decadent."

***

Returning to the character of Jesse Pinkman for El Camino was an unexpected career twist. While making Breaking Bad, Paul had grown as an actor under Cranston's tutelage and shed some fatiguing habits. "The first couple years were really torturous for me," Paul says. Often, after shooting had wrapped for the day, "I found myself in dark alleys in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at 3 in the morning, just to try to get more information, which was not a good thing. I just didn't want to mess it up, and so I stayed in that guy's skin, but I learned from Bryan it's OK to shake it off and wash up at the end of the night and just have time for yourself." When the finale aired, Paul says, "I really loved Jesse. I knew him better than anyone, but it was a big weight off of my shoulders to hang up the cleats and walk away. I thought it was goodbye, and I was OK with that."  In early 2018, while Paul was in New York shooting The Path, Gilligan called him and shared that he had written a movie about Jesse. "I'm like everybody else on the planet — I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that?" Paul recalls thinking. "But it's Vince we're talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That's how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to." (Gilligan inspires a fierce loyalty, and most of his colleagues have been with him for years, starting with Mark Johnson, who discovered Gilligan while judging a screenwriting competition in 1988 and has served as a producer on Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and El Camino.) Within months of answering Gilligan's call, Paul was back in Albuquerque's dark alleys, bearded and in scar makeup. "It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse's at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some, and so, honestly, it felt like a part of me had gone through that as well," Paul says. "All I had to do was just memorize these words and then play them out when they yelled 'action.' "

***

Gilligan, too, grew up, in a sense, on Breaking Bad, and he has a wistfulness about how it has shaped his life over the last 11 years. "I'm about 25 to 30 years older than I was when I started," he says. "Yeah, I'm just worn out. I mean, part of what excited me about doing this was it was a movie, a closed-ended story of about two hours. If I was starting now, I'm not sure I'd have the intestinal fortitude to fight all the fights and expend all the energy."

Gilligan is not ready for retirement — not at all — but when he looks ahead to life after Better Call Saul, he sees something outside the universe of characters that have become his trademark creation. He plans to make another show after Better Call Saul ends, but what exactly that will be and where it will air, he doesn't know. "Personally, I'd love to figure out something different, which at this point would be, God, not another antihero," Gilligan says. "Is there something else I can do? Is there another story I can tell? But I've got to tell you, it's harder to write a really engaging good guy than it is a really engaging bad guy."

#el camino #breaking bad #BrBa #vince gilligan #i love himmm #i cut out some of the aaron stuff (like the mezcal business w/ cranston...and there's also a cute q&a video at the source)#hollywood reporter #aaron paul #.....his office. (why do you like to suffer vince?) it's like jimmy leaving davis&main to go back to the shitty nail salon closet #oh and marshall adams is the dp for el camino :))) i was wondering #i can't believe the guy in the kilt never came up on the podcast #el camino: a breaking bad movie

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