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ceilidho · 4 days

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sirius c

prompt: forced throuple au; Ghost decides that you and Johnny are his (part 7; ghoap x reader) [tags: noncon, implied cheating (in the context of Ghost's refusal to be a negotiation king lol), very nsfw] first part >> last part

No one tells you what to do when you finally notice the larger animal watching you from the thicket.

It's been awhile now, you suspect. So long that it's managed to follow you all the way home.

Now they insist on helping you around the shop while you try to work. Try being the operative word. It’s hard to get much done with Simon scaring off all the customers and Johnny dogging at your heels, practically glued to your hip. You briefly consider stabbing him with the snips but then think the better of it. Simon’s stare follows you too closely for you to think you’d get away with it.

Plus, after this morning—you cut that thought off at the root lest embarrassment make your eyeballs burn right out of your head. Despite the fact that he never brings it up, you can’t shake the thought that Simon knows. His face is just as expressionless with the mask off, which rests like a heavy weight on the kitchen table, imbued with a meaning too potent, too loaded, for you to fully digest or, really, understand in any concrete way.

But the glint in his flinty eyes flirts with amusement. Brushes close to it.

“What?” you snap, eggs dangling precariously from your fork.

His stare hasn’t wavered once since sitting you across from him. He doesn’t smirk nor snicker, but you can feel the laugh like a phantom limb that aches until you try to scratch it. He has a face carved from marble or granite, subject to some horrific fate. A statue pulled down from its pedestal and hauled into the river, now dragged out waterlogged and barnacle-crusted. Something terrible happened here and now something else wears its face.

His knees knock against yours under the table again, forcing one leg to spread to accommodate him. You stare at the elbow resting on your table as he chews off the end of a strip of bacon.

He doesn’t say anything, but you know he must have heard you and Johnny in the washroom earlier in the morning. Simon hadn’t even attempted to feign sleep when you’d come out flustered and turned around, stomach in knots.

You can’t even look at Johnny for help because he stands behind the two of you at the counter, no space for him at your small kitchen table. Your life isn’t built to accommodate two men of their size; it’s hardly able to hold space for just the one.

Nevertheless, they stretch it to fit their needs.

Begrudgingly, you have to admit that Simon does help you out around the flower shop. He fixes the door to the supply closet that always jams, hoses down the sidewalk in front of the store where someone vomited near the entryway the night before, and even gives you a couple hours alone to yourself when he drags Johnny with him to do the bouquet deliveries.

They come back with coffee in takeaway cups and pastries in a waxy bag and you nearly moan when you notice the label on the cup. Coffee from the good coffee shop across town. You actually moan when you sink your teeth into an almond croissant and then blink your eyes open wide when you hear Johnny groan in response.

You steel yourself to keep your knees from knocking together.

It’s been a week since you saw him last. Hard to believe. You’ve been distant, rightfully so, contemplating the state of your relationship and coaxing yourself to the brink of texting him that it’s over, only to give up at the last possible minute. The tides receding again.

You don’t think about how much you missed him.

Since this morning, you’ve been on edge. Half tempted to corral Johnny into your apartment upstairs for some alone time. You don’t think Simon would allow that though, whether out of some sadistic glee in seeing you squirm or out of jealousy. It doesn’t seem unlikely. He acts like Johnny is his to do with what he pleases, and Johnny beams up at him like the sun and lets him.

You hadn’t realized there had been a third person in your relationship. Now it feels like his presence has always been felt. You can’t imagine Johnny without the half-shadow cast over his face.

All day, you wait for Johnny to break. Part of you hopes that it’ll be sooner rather than later. Unless he’s been entertaining someone on the side—and, for reasons unbeknownst to you, you discount that thought the second it comes to you, sure that you’d know if there was another woman—it’s likely that he hasn’t fucked in a week. He acts like it too, hovering close enough that you can feel the heat radiating off his body. Every accidental step back comes with a chance of landing straight into his arms.

When you touch his arm gently to ask him to help you move a heavy flower pot, he looks down at you with irises gone black, ready to fuck on a dime. It’s not the right place or time, and you’re still tremendously pissed at him for letting his superior grope you in front of their whole platoon or whatever, but you’ve also gone a week without his dick, and you’re starting to think that your pride shouldn’t get in the way of good dick.

But then he looks over at the hulking figure haunting the doorway and draws back. The shadow on your relationship again. The tension breaks. Even though he postures and flexes when he helps you move the flower pot, it doesn’t come with an invitation to sneak away to your apartment upstairs. Johnny grits his teeth and holds himself back because Simon tells him to; because, in Simon’s own words, he’s a good lad.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask Simon when Johnny goes to take a leak, but he just stares at you with eyes still darkened by poorly wiped off eye black.

The oxygen is sucked out of the room when it’s just the two of you. He’s imposing from afar, accentuated by the innate knowledge—gleaned just from looking at him, nothing more than that, just the size of him in his line of work—that he’s the most dangerous thing around, but with no one else to hide behind, you can’t help but feel like a trapped animal.

“Means he knows who’s in charge,” he says.

Like that’s supposed to tell you anything.

The air still crackles with tension when Johnny comes back. He glances around almost nervously, pupils dilating.

“The two of ye finally gettin’ on?” he asks.

There’s a moment where you consider ripping the veil down and saying, no, we aren’t, Johnny. You quisling. You can see exactly how uncomfortable I am. It’s more than visible; it’s oozing from my pores. You’ve let a wild animal into my house and now it won’t leave. In fact, it’s pissing on my sheets to mark its territory. You let it in knowingly, and even though you know something’s wrong, you’re letting it get worse.

Simon’s smile is severe and whetted when he cuts off your train of thought. “Reckon we're getting on like a house on fire, eh?”

You can’t muster more than a weak smile and nod in response to that.

Around mid afternoon, a regular client calls in with a large, last minute order. You accept it because it’s nothing you don’t already have in stock, but it means you have to close the shop early to work on her order and then load up the van to drive to her place to drop the flowers off.

“I’ll come with you,” Simon grunts when you flip the sign and tell the two of them about your plans.

You freeze, a shudder rippling down your spine. “That’s not necessary—I can do it myself.”

“Don’t care.”

“I do it all the time when you’re not here!”

“It’s not up for debate,” he says, eyes going hard. Daring you to argue.

You’ve been getting the sense all day that he’s been trying to corner you, trying to get you on your own. You evade his efforts like a prey animal, but all that does is make him work harder for it.

You look to Johnny for any kind of reassurance, someone to back you up and agree that you’re more than capable since you do this all the time, but he just grins from behind the counter where he helps cut lengths of cellophane and ribbon for the bouquets. “Aye, hen, let him help. Ye cannae carry all of that yourself.”

Your brain clicks back on when you’re barrelling towards your client’s place at breakneck speed, far too fast for a residential road. It’s not you driving though. Simon has himself parked in the driver’s seat, one hand on the wheel and the other dangling loosely out the window. His driving makes your stomach churn, nausea brewing. You bone-knuckle the grab handle reflexively.

“Could you slow down?” you hiss out through clenched teeth.

Simon ignores you until you start to scroll through your phone to distract yourself. He transfers the hand on the wheel to jostle your knee with his free hand. “Eyes on the road.”

“I’m not even driving you,” you squawk, heart thudding in your chest when his hand doesn’t lift off your knee.

“Tell me when to turn, doll.” The pet name makes your stomach jump. When he says it, his hand tightens over your knee, thick fingers with scraped up knuckles curling around, the width of his palm wider than your kneecap and you stare down dumbly, rabbit heart careening at the same speed as the van.

You’re so dumbfounded that you nearly miss the street. He takes the turn suddenly when you mention it instead of making the sensible call to go up the next street and then come back down, and you swear and yell when he nearly takes the van onto the right two wheels.

The sweat is still dripping down the nape of your neck when he parks in front of the client’s venue.

Simon ignores any attempt of yours to help unload the van. All you can do is watch helplessly as he carries multiple arrangements into the venue at once, leaving you to handle the contract and payment collection. The situation is spiraling rapidly out of your control.

Your client, a housewife about a decade or so older than you, eyes him as he passes with two flower pots tucked under his arms.

“I didn’t know you changed staff,” she murmurs, eyes following him into the next room and lingering on the backs of his thighs when he bends down to deposit the flower pots, making the material of his pants strain tight around his glutes and hamstrings.

“I didn’t,” you protest, shaking your head. “That’s—he’s my boyfriend’s coworker. Um, his boss, I mean. I think. He’s just helping out for the day.”

“Well, I know how I’d like him to help out,” someone else giggles. One of the venue staff, judging by her uniform. Even your client titters at that.

Simon’s more approachable with the mask off, it seems. Still verging on the preternatural, but at least without the mask he seems more human. All six-foot-five-inches of him, arms and legs packed with a generous helping of muscle and fat; a square jaw must be appealing to any sex-parched person within range. It makes your jaw clench.

“Here’s your receipt,” you grit out before ripping it off the payment terminal and handing it to her. She blinks at your dour mood, unused to a less than professional version of you, but that’s what Simon’s presence does to you. Sours you right up. A lemon squeezed right into the mouth.

He’s posted by the van when you come out still scowling and itching for a row. He frowns at the look on your face. “Fix your attitude. You’ve already upset Johnny enough.”

You halt in your tracks, dumbstruck. “I’ve upset Johnny?”

“Yeah. So fix it before we get back.”

You’ve officially reached your limit. All day, you’ve been waiting to go nuclear, bad mood settling deeper and deeper into you because you’ve never been good at managing your anger. The audacity to blame you for this whole situation nearly makes you lose your head.

Simon looks almost bored when you stomp up to him and stab a finger into his chest. You pointedly do not let yourself focus on how little his chest gives beneath your finger. “All of this was your fault for sexually harassing me in the first place. I don’t even think you were ever sorry for that—this all just feels like some fucked up attempt to break me and Johnny up.”

He stares down at you. “You think I want Johnny for myself?”

Heat flares under your collar, but you push on. “I do. And you know what? You can have him. I don’t need this. Johnny clearly values your approval more than mine anyway or none of this ever would have happened once he caught you groping me in broad daylight. If you want him so bad, nothing I do is going to work, so why even bother? He’s yours. The both of you can fuck off when we get back—I’m sick of having you in my space.”

The tirade leaves you panting by the end of it, and then you look into his eyes.

You wonder if it’s a universal phenomenon to sense the moment when you’ve made a grave miscalculation. It must be. The feeling is overwhelming; for you, it throbs in your very bones.

Simon’s expression never changes, but the light behind his eyes starts to flicker in a different way, and you are suddenly conscious of him not just as a man but as a man paid to kill. A professional at that. At least a dozen bodies under his belt and likely more, and yet you stand chest to chest with him like you’re somehow tougher than that; like all those bodies mean nothing, like his knife hasn’t quenched its bloodthirst ad infinitum, like his arms haven’t felt a neck crack until it’s become a habit, an easy kill, a morning fix.

You’ve never felt more like meat than under his gaze.

“Get your ass in the van,” he commands, and you listen because your mouth has gone dry and you understand now, somewhere deep in your reptile brain, a little creature hissing at you to turn and run, that he doesn’t warn. He just does.

Humiliation festers under your skin when he buckles you in. Your mouth opens on a smart remark until you catch a glimpse of him from the corner of your eye and it’s all anger leaking tar, mafic lava dark and flowing, smooth and lobed and striated with hellfire.

You think at first that he’s just going to drive you home. Your words might have offended him, but the lack of refutation makes you think that at his core, he must agree. Simon is just another man with an unholy allegiance to ego, an ugly incarnation of desire and pride that you might have briefly mistook as a person as complex as yourself until he snuffed that inkling right out with a hand on your ass.

Then, lost in your thoughts, you miss when he pulls over and puts the van in park.

You hear the click of your seatbelt, but your head doesn’t have time to turn before Simon hauls you over the center console and into his lap, a hand already clamping over your mouth to muffle your scream.

“I’ve had enough of the fuckin’ attitude, girl,” Simon snarls into your ear, shoving his hand down the front of your pants without any preamble, the stretchy jogger fabric not putting up any resistance. “I haven’t got the patience for it. We’ll sort you out and knock these stupid notions from your skull.”

You must shriek under his palm because his fingers tighten, digits pressed into your jaw to the point of aching. It’s hard to tell under the white hot fear that washes over you, nearly blinding you.

If it bothers him to find you dry under your panties, he doesn’t say anything. Calloused fingers spread your labia wide and trace over your clit lazily, trying to coax the slick out of you. You squirm in his hold, desperate to somehow wriggle out, but Simon chooses now to give you a glimpse of his strength, holding you tight to his chest. No matter how much you squirm, there’s no way out of his hold. Shouting behind his palm doesn’t help either; Simon just curls his hand tighter over your mouth.

Horror blooms in your chest when your core starts to warm up at his touch. The first traitorous bead of wetness nearly has you apoplectic with rage. His fingers saw up and down over your slit until he thinks you’re wet enough to handle two fingers shoved knuckle deep.

“Enough of that,” Simon grunts when you yelp and knee the underside of the steering wheel in your haste to get away. “It’s just two. You’ve been fucked before; you can take it.”

Your knee aches from slamming into the steering wheel, but it’s nothing compared to the ache of his fingers stretching you open, the skin around his knuckles delicate and febrile. For all his flaws, Johnny loves getting his mouth on your pussy before trying to cram his cock in, addicted to the taste of you on his tongue when he’s got you folded in half and taking his dick like a champ. Simon seems like he wouldn’t mind railing you in the back of the van without any prep whatsoever.

“Can’t wait to break you on my cock,” he growls, his breath hot over your neck, and lust stinking up the van so bad that the air is nearly rancid with it. Sulfuric. “You think you’ve had it rough with Johnny? You don’t have a fuckin’ clue what you’re in for with me.”

His hunger is a noxious, billowing cloud. Miasma like. It threatens to smother you. His shaft is hard under your ass, evident when he thrusts his hips up. Your ensuing yip makes him grunt, gratified, like his pleasure comes part from your shock.

“I’m not explaining this shit anymore. This is the way it’s gonna be from now on—no discussion, no arguing, no nothing. It’s not up for negotiation.”

Simon’s fingers piston into you without remorse, brutal hunger foisted off on your body. You again try desperately to push away from him, almost levitating out of his arms until he forces you back down and bites down hard over your clothed shoulder. The horn stays silent when you try to honk it, mocking you somehow. You wonder if anyone would hear your muffled cries from beneath Simon’s hand if they happened to pass by, or if they’d chance a glance into the van and see the devil himself playing with your pussy in his lap and keep on walking.

Your body plays you for a fool though, sweltering under his touch. When he growls in your ear, your pussy clenches up nice and tight, and slick drips down your inner thighs.

A third finger nearly makes you choke on your gasp. You go quiet after that save for the occasional whimper, all of your energy concentrated on accommodating his fingers, each as wide as almost two of yours. A fourth almost doesn’t feel fathomable, but then he sinks it into you and every thought leaks out of your head.

“Christ, you’re a dream when you shut your mouth, aren’t you, doll?” Simon breathes, nosing the corner of your jaw. “Johnny picked a nice little cunt for himself.”

He doesn’t pick up on the irony somehow. Even shaking in his lap, your brows furrow at his words, a barb on the tip of your tongue until a glob of slick leaks from you and wrenches you back out of your head.

He clicks his tongue against his teeth all condescendingly when your breathing goes hitched and panicked, so close to coming that you feel a hairsbreadth from it. When you jump at the sound of his tongue snapping in your ear, he chuckles, the broad chest at your back shaking with his laughter.

“There we go,” Simon murmurs, rubbing a soothing hand over your belly. “Tired, eh? Just need to come and have a nap. I know Johnny left you hanging this morning. Poor girl.”

You hadn’t even noticed that he’d dropped his hand from your mouth to your stomach, but there’s nothing to do about it now. All you can do is lean back against him and stare at the fine, blond hair on his knuckles as he drags it over your belly button in slow, languid strokes.

“Oh god—” you groan when he thumbs your pearled clit and sinks his fingers in as deep as they’ll go, your hole stretched too tight.

Sweat beads on your hairline. It feels like tears might be leaking down your cheeks, but it’s hard to say. The only thing you can do is focus on not coming apart at the seams.

The air in the van is moistened by your breath, the windows almost completely fogged up. Your lower back aches from arching into his hand. When it comes out in a sob, he tells you he’ll have Johnny massage it when the two of you get home.

“It’s always gonna hurt a little with me,” Simon says, and you almost mistake it for apologetic until he pulls you into an open-mouthed kiss that makes you twist your neck and ignores the way you whimper into his mouth.

You nearly black out when he finally makes you come, your head tipping back and resting on his shoulder. You tense in his grasp and open your mouth on a soundless moan when your walls spasm around his fingers. Nothing you can do but let it happen. Like splintering down the middle. It hits you so hard that your belly cramps.

Shame hits you so much harder. A half second after, like the sky splitting open and a voice thundering down, you know what you did.

Your leg gives a feeble twitch when he pulls his fingers out, his palm soaked with your juices. You’re a limp mess of sour sweat and come in his lap, reeking of sex musk and a warm, spicy scent.

You squeal and jolt back to awareness when he pushes a finger back in, sensitive to the point of pain. “Simon, I can’t—”

“Hold still; m’not done yet,” he cuts you off, irritation layered in his voice again.

You don’t have to endure it for as long this time at least; he paws at your overworked sex and pants in your ear like a bear. Luxuriating in the soft, wet folds of your pussy. His touch isn’t clumsy, but it feels like he’s making up for lost time. It almost makes you wonder how long he’s wanting to get between your legs, but that thought evaporates when he reaches further down to press his fingers against the rim of your other hole, chuckling into your hair when you clench up.

Then, after a few minutes, he pulls his hand out of your joggers and pats your belly with his wet fingers, leaving dewy strands of your juices on your skin before helping you back into the passenger seat. You don’t even have it in you to protest when he buckles you in again. You even accept it when he leans over to plant another wet kiss on your mouth, one with too much tongue and too much teeth, come drunk and aching for any kind of affection.

“Sweet as pie, eh?” Simon rasps, eyes half-lidded and heady. Almost lovesick. “Couldn’t have asked for better.”

You stare at the side of his head as he drives the two of you back to the shop, eyes glued to his cauliflower ear. Rough son of a bitch. Brute strength hewn into his bones, covetous need in his veins.

And this is what your boyfriend thought was appropriate to bring home.

He stops one more time to feed his cock down your throat before you make it home. Your tongue curls around the mushroomed head of dick when he drags your head down, the wiry hair at his crotch tickling your nose. The scent of him here is pungent, musky. Old lichenous rocks and rust like blood on your tongue. You’re so pliable that you hardly even gag when it touches the back of your throat.

His come is still hot and tacky on your tongue when he pulls you into his lap to let you cry it out, wiping up your tears with a rough thumb. It’s a while before you manage to settle down again.

Johnny’s still beaming behind the counter when you come in, Simon at your rear to keep you from running, his hand planted firmly at the small of your back. You can barely look your boyfriend in the eye. You’re afraid he’ll see it plain as day on your face, hair mused and lips swollen from sucking his lieutenant off in the van on the drive home.

“The two of ye have a good time all by yourselves?” he asks, either deliberately ignoring the obvious or naively trusting. You don’t know which would be worse.

You can hear the dry grin in Simon’s voice. “We had a nice chat, didn’t we, doll?”

All you can muster is a weak smile and croak, “Yep. We did.”

You hold off a flinch when Simon’s hand slips down and grabs a handful of your ass.

#ceil writing #cod mw2 #cod x reader #ghost/soap/reader #ghoap x reader #ghost/reader #ghost x reader

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punemy-spotted · 1 year

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A Worthy Grave - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - The Dead Become the Emperors of Memory

Pairing: Federal Agent!Ari Levinson x Witch!Reader

Masterlist; Chapter 1; Chapter 2

Pairing: Federal Agent!Ari Levinson x Witch!Reader

Warnings: THIS IS STILL A HORROR FIC; A Whole Lot of Body Horror; Blood and Gore; Harm to an Animal; Gruesome Murder; Religious Iconography; Straight up Heresy; Christ Imagery; Gruesome Descriptions of Organs; Ghosts; Ghouls; Violence Against Women; Discussion of Grief; Witchcraft; Blood; I Cannot Articulate Enough That This is a HORROR Fic; Dead Dove: Do Not Eat; Seriously so so dead, HEED THE WARNINGS

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT YOUR CONSUMPTION OF MEDIA IS YOUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY AND IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE CONTENT THAT IS BEING PRESENTED, PLEASE DO NOT READ

Chapter Summary: Death was not supposed to visit you in the one place you spent your day speakin’ for it, carvin’ answers out of flesh and bone.

Notes: So yes it took me 84 years to update and I'm SORRY. Please take this update as an apology. (also yes this was on Ao3 ages ago… depression’s a bitch, y’all.)

I cannot emphasize enough that this is a horror fic so things are going to get gory going forward. PLEASE read at your own discretion, I'm begging you.

As always, I crave feedback so please let me know your thoughts! Have questions about the lore? Let me know about those too! As a reminder, reblogging fics supports authors so please let me know you want more by liking AND reblogging!

All of my work is 18+ Only, Minors DO NOT INTERACT. I do not consent to my work being posted anywhere besides Tumblr or Ao3 and I post my work there myself. Do not copy, translate, or repost any of my content.

The next morning comes with lab results and Ari Levinson bringing you coffee, bright and early.

Good coffee, too, which you note with amusement the moment you take a sip, You convince Janice to upgrade the beans?

Pretty sure she’d tell me asking wasn’t even on the budget. I went to Jed’s.

You go to his restaurant or his house?

You’re teasing him — which you’ll admit is new for you, especially with Ari fuckin’ Levinson standin’ in front of you, sipping coffee and enjoying one of Jed’s famous breakfast sandwhiches — but considerin’ your couch an’ the fact that he slept on it night before last, it’s not like you’re unjustified, is it? A fact which he, to his credit, takes in stride, taking a smug sip of coffee — if such a thing were possible, it would be Levinson to pull it off — and shrugging, Showin’ up unannounced at the ass-crack of dawn’s a privilege I reserve for you, Doc.

You roll your eyes, hide your smile behind the lip of your coffee cup, Just cuz you spent the night on my couch don’t mean I’m gonna be any nicer to you, Levinson.

Shit, Doc, you start bein’ nice to me and I might swoon here and now.

You’d refuse to admit it if he or anyone else asked you to, but that makes you laugh, hidden behind a huff that could be annoyance or amusement, Hope you ain’t expectin’ me to catch you, Levinson.

I learned my lesson last time the Chief tried makin’ us do trust exercises.

Not my fault you didn’t warn me.

He shrugs, you roll your eyes, turning back to the computer as it dings with a message for you to review, You better have ordered me a sandwich too, or I’m bannin’ you from my biscuits for the foreseeable future.

That’s for you to find out in the lunchroom, Doc.

Where the hell’s your apple butter?

In a twist of fate you will not be thankin’ anyone for — least of all Ari Levinson — there is a sandwich waiting for you in the breakroom fridge, labeled and everythin’. You pop it into the toaster oven like you always do with Jed’s takeaway, pouring yourself a glass of sweet tea and taking the time you deserve for yourself an’ your lunch break, having taken great care to make sure there’s not an ounce of paperwork or results to review while you sip tea an’ enjoy a meal to the sound of blessed silence.

Most of the office would be done with their lunches by now, or eatin’ at their desks to avoid traffic in the break room. ‘Course, with your lab, the idea of eatin’ a meal with a frozen corpse in the next room waitin’ for you to finish rummagin’ around in its guts did not whet the appetite.

Least the break room don’t smell like formaldehyde all the time.

So you take your vigil here, disappearing into your thoughts and the quiet joy of pastrami on rye.

Until Ari Levinson, like a bloodhound sensin’ the exact moment you find silence in your life and choosin’ to hunt it down, comes strollin’ in, See you found the sandwich, Doc.

You might’ve been grateful you’d already finished your meal, just sippin’ tea by the time he came by, but you’re already missin’ silence and there’s a good fifteen minutes left before you need to clock back in an’ pretend you’re comfortable ‘round grieving parents, so you’d thank him to forgive you for lookin’ like he made you swallow a lemon. Whole. You bribin’ me with a sandwich to keep talkin’ to you, Levinson?

Is it working?

You open your mouth, poised to continue the time-honored tradition of tradin’ barbs with him, sarcastic quip ready to fly from your tongue, when you see her. Standin’ there in all her spectral glory, mouth open wide in a static scream of horror an’ fury, a livid necklace of purple bruises blooming around her throat, hollow eyes trained on you.

And Ari Levinson, goddamn him and his goddamn training, notices. Notices. Watches you. Makes silent note of how your mouth snaps shut, how your lips fold into a grim line and follows the trajectory of your gaze with a turn of his head, watchin’ the hallway behind him.

Hey Doc, he calls back to you, voice as level as he can probably manage it.

Yeah? You make a valiant effort at doing the same, refusin’ to take your eyes off the specter once known as Jane Doe #117.

I’m assuming you see her?

Sure do, Levinson.

There’s a pause, a moment, Ari’s hands slowly reaching for the gun at his holster and you slowly reaching a hand out to stop him, ears ringing as you try to make sense of the radio static pouring from that endless scream, your daddy’s lessons servin’ you well. Run.

A beat.

Then—Levinson, I need you to get security over to the lab.

The look he fires back at you is pure confusion, hand still poised over his gun and you know in your bones the only reason Jane Doe #117 hasn’t moved is cuz you’ve got eyes on her right now.

Bad deaths. The humanity is rotting out of her by the second, an’ no amount of cornbread offerings an’ promises to do our best are gonna keep her from lashin’ out at the humanity she’s lost, not ‘til the person who took it from her is found and named. Named for her to haunt until they too, turn to rot.

But you don’t got time to think about that right now, not when Ari’s already arguing with you ‘bout leavin’ you alone with an eyeless, bloodless, ghost. Or haint, you ain’t sure what he’ll call it—Doc, I know—

I know I didn’t stutter, Levinson. Security. Lab. Now.

It’s already too late.

Jon Doe #43 is less pleasant lookin’ than the girl whose ID he had hidden inside his flayed jaw — the girl whose radio static warning is still ringing in your ears as you take in the sight of him now, lookin’ leagues worse than he did the first time he showed up on your doorstep… two nights ago.

How quickly things move.

Ari swears low under his breath behind you, both of you frozen in place and trying to make sense of the tableau before you, the sight of a dead man strung up against the wall, arms outstretched and a crown of broken scalpels forced into the exposed bone of his scalp, head hanging low as if looking down at the figure kneeling at his bloody, skinless feet.

Is that…?

It is.

Something sick rises in your gut as you take a look at the blood-bathed figure kneelin’ before the corpse you know she’d been busy trynna put back together into somethin’ buryable, her gloved hands bound into some bastardization of penitent prayer by a line of what you’re pretty sure is John Doe #47’s own large intestine, havin’ been cleaned out after another one of your techs “recovered” it from the tupperware container it’d been found in when the whole mess’d been discovered.

You can’t see her face — part cuz she’s turned away from you, lookin’ up at that flayed Christ, an’ part cuz of the horned thing resting on her shoulders, a shape you wish you didn’t recognize as you take in the sight of cream-white fur stained with drippin’ viscera — but you suspect you know exactly what kinda expression she’s wearin’ underneath that “mask” forced over her.

Blood for blood.

You made a life of it, death. Cornbread offerin’s like your momma taught you the first time you met one of the wailin’ spirits of the woods ‘round your home, let ‘em gorge themselves on the vitality of food the same way a livin’ bein’ might fuel themselves with the actual thing. Tried to make sense of the static the way your daddy would when he stepped off the pulpit and into the graveyard behind your family home, always hissing warnings to the bein’s beyond to keep away from his family.

You made a life of it.

But just like the mountains, the ones meant to keep you safe if you kept ‘em safe, death was supposed to stay way the hell away from you, was supposed to keep its scythe off you an’ yours until they were good an’ ready to travel through that big black door. That was the promise written all over that big ol’ family Bible you spent your childhood copyin’ so you’d be ready for the world outside your homemade Eden, the one you wielded like shield an’ sword against any manner of haint unwillin’ to recognize the darkness in your own blood.

Death was not supposed to visit you in the one place you spent your day speakin’ for it, carvin’ answers out of flesh and bone, woe to you who rend the flesh.

Your lab is now an active crime scene, casting you out to make your calls to next of kin — you know them, you’ve met her husband ‘bout a half-dozen times this past month alone, bringin’ her lunch when her scatterbrain forgot it, got used to seein’ him lingerin’ sheepishly in the doorway and then hollerin’ for her to come out front an’ give her beau a kiss — and try to get used to sayin’ her name in conjunction with, There’s been… an incident.

You’re no grief counselor.

There’s no training for this, but it ain’t right. It ain’t right for someone who ain’t family to call hers, someone who don’t remember laughin’ at her gettin’ giddy over stomach contents. Someone who don’t understand what it’s like to miss the sound of her hummin’ some pop song you ain’t even heard of—

You holdin’ up alright, Doc?

Ari Levinson makes you jump for the second time in as many days, office phone clatterin’ from your hand as you spin ‘round and try not to let your heart beat out your chest, still too busy overthinkin’ to manage a glare, I’ll be fine. You get the security footage from the lab?

Yeah. Got a couple computer guys on it now, trying to figure out what happened.

Well, you sigh, rubbin’ the bridge of your nose as you lean against a metal countertop, We better hope we find out soon enough, cuz I’m ‘bout three seconds from shakin’ this whole goddamn buildin’ apart lookin’ for someone to pin this shit on.

Ari nods, mouth pressed into a thin line as the silence ‘tween you stretches out, eyes wanderin’ over to the closed-off lab, sanctuary swarmin’ with corpse beetles mournin’ the loss of one of their own as they try an’ find out whodunnit.

You know they won’t, ‘course, but it’s enough to let ‘em try.

You’d never admit it, of course — an’ maybe you’d almost forgotten it by now, those childhood truths givin’ way to the kinda truths you needed to keep your callin’ here in these mountains — but it used to terrify you. An’ why wouldn’t it, all ‘em screamin’ mouths an’ radio-static pleas beggin’ you to make sense of the injustices of the world they’d been cut right out of?

Too much, too much pain, too much horror, too much for a girl of tender years to tolerate hearin’, much less repeatin’ to those still grieving.

Problem with the dead is, well, they’re selfish. Don’t care if you’re barely old enough to understand the meaning of death, still meant to be shielded from those things that should long have left this plane of existence an’ passed through that big black door.

Ari Levinson don’t know none of that terror though, don’t know much more’n what you jammed into his head after blowin’ away another one of your ghosts, but he means well. Stands a little to close behind you like he could just peer ‘round an’ see the way your lips twitch as you swallow down blood an’ bile, holdin’ back the shadows of your daddy’s own temper.

You gonna be alright, Doc?

Ah shit.

You’d rather chew glass than tell him you prolly won’t be, tell him you just lost a girl you loved like your own blood, tell him you got cocky and now the very community you called your home was in danger cuz of it.

But there he is, standing in front of you like a fuckin’ sentinel while he waits for you to give him something back. Assurance, more likely, but as much as you’re used to tellin’ lies an’ keepin’ secrets, there are some falsehoods even yoou can’t keep.

Sure, you finally answer, trying to sound convincing and feeling the hollowness bitter itself on your tongue, I’ll live. Gimme a few hours an’ I’ll have somethin’ to say for her.

#ari levinson x reader #ari levinson #chris evans #ari levinson imagine #chris evans imagine #chris evans character #a worthy grave

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itsclydebitches · 1 year

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RWBY Recaps: "Altercation at the Auspicious Auction"

Happy, uh... Tuesday, everyone! I'm a little bit behind 😬

Man oh man, but do I have mixed feelings about this episode. While drafting today's recap I kept trying to come up with a summary to start with; an abbreviated takeaway of my overall thoughts - especially for any readers who don't feel like wading through the whole post. Unfortunately, anything that simplistic kinda misses the point, so you all are just gonna have to settle for a, "I'm a glass case of mixed emotions!" while we unpack this episode.

First, a note about our title. Last week I bypassed commenting on "A Place of Particular Concern" for the simple reason that I wasn't sure what to do with it yet. Now, I think I understand the general vibe that RWBY is going for, though it does surprise me a little. The alliteration of "Altercation at the Auspicious Auction" is definitely catchy, but it doesn't have much of a Wonderland feel to it. Carroll's chapter titles were, by and large, descriptively straightforward:

Down the Rabbit-Hole

The Pool of Tears

Advice from a Caterpillar

Who Stole the Tarts?

You get the idea. They're very accessible for a child because although the combination might be new - how does one get advice from a caterpillar? - every element is familiar. They know what a rabbit-hole is, a tart, a pool, tears, etc. just not how those elements are fitting together in new ways. RWBY's titles, meanwhile, are a little more complex. Which isn't a bad thing, they're just not titles that would have fit well into Carroll's original or, arguably, fit the whimsical, fairy tale, 'This is kinda for kids' vibe of the Volume thus far. If anything, what we've gotten reminds me of Lemony Snicket's work. An auspicious auction sounds like it belongs smack dab in the austere academy.

Anyway, let's get into the actual story. Last we left off, Volume 9 was struggling significantly with its tone and I'm sorry to say that things haven't improved in that regard. If anything, the introduction of better written, more emotionally driven scenes means that they're suffering from the endless gags surrounding them and those gags, in turn, feel all the more out of place. We open on the girls all looking out on the world that Blake has revealed to them, though none of the emotion from last week has transferred over. Ruby and Yang are just kinda blank as they stare ahead, whereas Blake and Weiss appear intrigued by what's before them. Blake I can understand - the episode goes out of its way to frame her as the book nerd who's prepared to navigate this world and though I mentioned in a recent ask that Ruby feels more like the fairy tale lover to me, I do really like that Blake is given agency as the bibliophile again - but Weiss spends the entire episode having an absolute crisis over navigating a fairy tale, so why she's animated looking smugly pleased at this development is beyond me.

This is a common problem though, especially is modern RWBY. Unless the story is going out of its way to highlight a particular emotion (such as Ruby's depression at certain points) then everyone is given randomly generic expressions to fill a shot. Rarely do I feel like the smaller moments accurately reflect the overall mood. If a character is angry, they're just as likely to be smiling while someone else talks; if a character is frustrated, they're just as likely to appear content when the focus is no longer on them. In some ways this highlights the difficulties inherent in animation - you can't just let an actor do their job in the background, you have to actively conceive of and construct a characters' every micro-expression - but, the issue of crunch aside, it's still something the show could improve on. If your character is on screen, make sure their expressions actually matches what's been going on.

So we're off to a slightly rocky start and then, of course, we really kick things off with a joke. Yang wants to know if they're just going to stand around thinking about this in silence, or...?

Yeah, we definitely needed the meta acknowledgement that there was a break between episodes and we don't technically know how long the girls were staring at the view in-world. That's absolutely the best way to follow up on Ruby collapsing over the death of a friend🤦‍♀️

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the episode that this will be a common complaint from me today. Consistently the writing portions out moments for Ruby to be sad about what's happened, neatly separated from the rest of the story, and everything surrounding those moments works very hard to undermine that emotion. For example, in this moment I couldn't help but re-frame what we've been given through Yang's perspective: she saved her little sister and in the process fell into a terrifying void, waking with the thought that she's probably dead. Her arm was stolen from her and she somehow encountered a (meant to be) terrifying beast she wasn't able to fully defend herself against. This led to her reuniting with her team and the realization that them being here meant that they failed spectacularly to defend the world above. Weiss confirms this by tearfully admitting that one of their friends has died and Ruby is so shocked that she passes out.

So how does Yang react to all that? With incredibly bland questions about whether Ruby is okay. No physical comfort. Lots of jokes about their situation and, as we'll see later, an endless desire to punch someone's lights out - but even that is presented as a cute character quirk, not a symptom of her trauma. Yang - and everyone else - is only reacting to the horrors of Volume 8 when the story wants them to react, the Bad Emotions flipping on and off depending on whether the writers want another gag or not.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. The point is that we begin with this sarcastically cheery tone and segue right into more animation humor. Ruby says that it's impossible that they're in a fairy tale, but Blake points out Little as evidence. (Side-note: how is that irrefutable evidence when the woman giving it is part CAT?) A highlighted mouse and Ruby's sweat-drop convey that yes, this is really happening! Because we can't convince the characters without those humorous details.

Oddly though, Little agrees with Ruby? We see them nodding along when Ruby says they can't possibly be in a fairy tale and right now I'm not sure if that's because they agree with the idea that their obviously real home can't be equated with a made-up story - something Little will outright say in a moment - or if they're just agreeing because, frankly, Little seems confused 99% of the time, but possesses enough emotional intelligence to want to make Ruby happy.

Regardless, with Little acting as (shaky) proof, Weiss revises Ruby's statement to say that it's "improbable" that they're in a fairy tale and we get the trailer line, "Let's look at this more logically, shall we?" You know, I think this line comes across much better here than it does in isolation. It's still not going to be winning any voice acting awards, but the flow of the conversation helps it out quite a bit.

However, I think Weiss', “Okay. I see your point of view. I’m going to go over here now" sounds so much worse.

Before that though she runs through all the plot we've already seen or, in Yang's case, was mentioned off screen while Ruby was unconscious. (And yes, the fact that Yang told everyone about her harrowing journey when the most important person in the world to her couldn't listen in still bugs me.) They all fell from the sky, Ruby met a talking mouse, Weiss and Blake encountered killer vines, and Yang had her arm stolen by a purple racoon. As if the deadpan nonsense of that wasn't enough, the scene needs to inject even more humor by having Little interrupt with a shouted "FRIENDS! :D"

Please note that nothing in this scene emphasizes - or even hints at - Ruby's current emotional state. From the flat expressions as she listens in, to the tiny smile when Little celebrates their friendship, this Ruby is indistinguishable form the girl we've seen for the last four-ish Volumes. As I mentioned above, it's an ongoing problem for me that the Volume is consistently separating Ruby's depression from, well, everything else. I'm not saying she has to be sobbing every second of the episode, but if you can snag a random scene - especially one so soon after her faint - give it to an ignorant RWBY fan, and expect that they'd have no idea based on this animation that she was dealing with the traumatic death of a friend... you need to go back and re-write that scene.

The absurdity of Yang's experience results in Weiss giving up on her logical approach. She gives that line about going over there now, bye-bye, and then we see... uh...

What is this? I have nothing against Weiss struggling with them being here - that actually makes a lot of sense for her character - but do we really need to convey her struggle like this? I literally cannot take the emotional beats seriously when they're surrounded by this Chibi-like silliness. Worse, later in the episode Weiss' comedic grumbling will return and actively interrupt Ruby's grieving.

But we'll get to that.

“As crazy as it sounds, something about this is familiar," Ruby says and then the girls realize that what they've experienced sounds an awful lot like "The Girl Who Fell Through the World." And by "an awful lot" I mean it's nearly an exact, one-for-one recreation. Cool concept! Too bad the viewer barely knew this story existed before the girls landed here. If you'll recall, the fairy tale was mentioned back in Volume 8 when Oscar was captured by Salem, which tells us that the writers realized what they wanted for the upcoming Volume and hastily tried to shove a reference in so this didn't come entirely out of left field. However, this wasn't a successful attempt imo. All we learn from Oscar's conversation with Ozpin is that a) a girl fell through Remnant, b) she wound up in a new world, and c) she returned to Remnant sad because she'd been so changed by her journey. Nothing in that tiny summary tells us what the world was like, or what Alyx experienced there, the two things that would help sell the idea that our characters recognize this environment and the things they've been through. Hell, we don't even learn the girl's name prior to Blake info-dumping the plot. "Alyx" exists only in Roman Holiday, a book I read and 100% did not remember learning the name. How's the average fan not obsessively plugged into every RWBY side-project supposed to emotionally invest in this?

Here then, we see another case where RWBY needs long-term revision. Given that they'd be basing an entire Volume around this fairy tale and putting an emphasis on the girls' knowledge of this story, we needed to spend time actually showing that the girls possess this knowledge; that it's of cultural significance to them. Give us a flashback of Summer reading the fairy tale to a young Ruby. Have the girls reference it during their Beacon days - Weiss makes fun of Ruby for still reading fairy tales when they're unpacking their room, Blake admits that it's one of the few tales she likes because of what Alyx needs to do to survive, Yang reminisces about sharing the story with her little sis. Give us Pyrrha bringing it up when she's asked what her favorite tale is. Ozpin hints during their travels that everything they grew up with is more than it seems, hiding grains of truth. Jaune reads bits of the story to his nephew, they overhear a version while the people of Mantle are trying to find comfort while they wait, there are posters up in Atlas for a movie adaptation coming out next Spring... Obviously some of these aren't possible - I never expected RT to invent a time machine and actually revise the earlier Volumes lol - but if you're going to pull this, "The characters knew this story all along and it was a super memorable part of their childhood" card then there needs to be something to set that up. And if you can't backtrack due to the medium you're writing in, you put off the Ever After Volume until you've done at least some of the work to properly prepare for it. At the very least you do more than have Oscar randomly mention it post-torture session, complete with no identifying information for the viewers to recognize once the Volume 9 trailer drops.

Or, they might have conceived of this as a tale that isn't well known and the girls are damn lucky that Blake is well-read enough to have come across it. But as it stands, Ruby suddenly recognizes where they are, Yang agrees, Weiss casually tosses out that oh yeah, of course they've all read this as kids. Obviously. You just never heard about it until now. Funny that! I found this particularly annoying when Blake suddenly reveals that the entirety of the premiere makes up the plot of this tale: Alyx falls a long distance, meets a bunch of mice, has to deal with killer vines, meets a Jabberwocker (why bother changing the name to little?), and had her knife stolen by a racoon. This is only impactful if the viewer can see the similarities as they're happening and come to the early conclusion that, oh wow, they're reenacting a Remanent fairy tale! What RWBY actually does though is present a bunch of seemingly random events, leaves the viewer for a week, and then comes back to say, "Actually you know what? That was all important!" But, I'd like to emphasize, not in a way akin to foreshadowing. This wasn't deftly planned; a trail of subtle breadcrumbs that the viewer can look back on and go, "Oh my god I should have realized!" We haven't the slightest idea that they're reenacting the plot of a fairy tale until Blake announces that... after its all occurred.

As the girls realize they're living out Alyx's story, there's understandably a bit of push-back. How can that be? It's fiction! (Even though, you know, by now they're well aware that their headmaster lived through a lot of 'fiction' too.) Little pipes up that this place isn't make believe, it's where they live... but doesn't actually provide any useful information beyond that.

Blake then proceeds to lay out the rest of the fairy tale's plot and also, presumably, the basic outline for our season: Alyx beat the Red King at his own board game, met the curious cat, encountered the rested knight (interesting description. I assume that'll be Jaune?), and finally escaped back home through the tree. Of course, if the girl we saw in our opening is really Alyx, then she didn't get back to Remnant (or wherever else she might be from. At this point I'm not putting it past RWBY to introduce a MCU-style multiverse. Especially with the Justice League crossover coming out). Right now, I'm not sure how to reconcile this idea. If Alyx never escaped then how did her story - and all its personal details - make it back to Remnant? Did someone else escape to tell her story? Does Ozpin have some world-traveling powers that we don’t know about yet? Does Alyx?

Maybe that’s not Alyx and this question is pointless.

Ooor maybe this question will simply go unanswered, leaving us with the plot-hole of how her story became a fairy tale so common that everyone from farmers out in Patch to corporate princesses in Atlas grow up on it.

(RWBY has a lot of world building diversity, don’t worry about it.)

Anyway, I do appreciate that this gives the girls a solid reason to seek out the tree. Last week I honestly thought they might be heading there under the ‘logic’ of “Why not? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” Yes, the tree is massive and at the center of the land, but that kind of marker is only useful if you already know where you’re going - it doesn’t necessarily imply an exit. If anything, my first attempt to get out would have been via the ocean, given that some, like Ruby, appear to have come in with the tide post-fall. Plus it’s the only boundary we’ve seen. But what RT wrote holds together, even if the delivery had problems: Ruby was seeking higher ground and then realized she’s re-living a story where the tree is the protagonist’s way out. Well done, that tracks.

From there though things continue to struggle. Weiss reminds Ruby that she hasn't even found Crescent Rose yet and I thought, foolishly, that this would result in some kind of acknowledgment? Meaning, it's really easy to view this as a symptom of Ruby's declining mental health. As her encounter with Jinxy will demonstrate, she's so hopeless right now that she can't take joy in the things she once loved - or even care about their existence. Weiss is clearly concerned that Ruby hasn't found Crescent Rose, but no one else is concerned that Ruby isn't concerned. There's no mildly shocked, "Oh" from Ruby as she realizes, oh yeah, she's without her beloved, hand-made weapon modeled after her Uncle, perhaps also in connection with her mother, the thing she once turned to for comfort when she didn't know how to make any friends. Ruby: 'I should probably care that I've lost that, huh?' But we get zip in regards to her realizing that this emotionally significant object is still lost in the Ever After somewhere. Worse, no one else reacts to Ruby's lack of reaction. Alarm bells should be going off in Yang's head at the moment, but the episode is too focused on comedy and flirting to let her really check in with her little sister. Yang has come to the realization that Ruby horrifically lost that fight, watched her faint in response to the death of a friend, and now she doesn't even blink at the idea that her prized weapon might be gone for good. By all means, give us bumblebee, I WANT more canonical content (more on that below), but there's a time and a place. Ruby still not having Crescent Rose should be a huge deal for her and when it's not that should be a huge deal for Yang.

Also, I'd like to point that this loss makes Ruby incredibly vulnerable here (as the brief Jabberwock encounter demonstrates), potentially highlighting her less than passionate desire to keep herself safe. So is Yang - or even her other teammates - at all concerned about Ruby's mental health? Her own sense of safety?

Barely. They're not showing much.

I give Weiss props for trying to reach Ruby in a few moments, but Blake and Yang are too busy being wrapped up in each other to bother. (Which could be an interesting conflict/character flaw if the show acknowledged it.) This is the same problem we had in Volume 8: why is Yang worried about Blake when she had a huge fight with Ruby? Because RT can't figure out where to put their bumblebee moments so they don't actively draw away from the other relationships.

Before that though we need to have another gag moment, this time through flashback images of Yang having her arm stolen.

Look at this.

Who decided this was a good tone for the Volume? The contrast between past and present says it all. Yang is looking quite serious as she recalls presumably falling to her death, but we can't take her seriously because the trauma of that is undermined by a circle of cartoon stars over her head. Having her assistive device stolen while she was vulnerable makes Yang furious? Well, it doesn't make the viewer furious because they're too busy laughing at her dramatic reach, Jinxy's equally dramatic, evil design, and the cartoon-y white eyes/exaggeratedly open mouth. Notably, Blake is laughing too, rather uproariously, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen any non-RWDE grumbling from the fandom. After all, weren't people upset when Tai made a joke about Yang's arm, insisting that it was the height of insensitivity? How dare he say such a thing! ... never mind how Yang reacted to it. For me, a father knowing his daughter well enough to help jolt her out of an angry spiral, weeks after the event occurred, is better than a school friend laughing at the traumatic event mere hours after it happened... but that's just me. Apparently, shipping trumps all because it's presented as cute and wholesome for Blake to laugh over Yang having her assistive device stolen after the worst night of their lives. Disarmed, am I right?

Nothing in this scene tells the viewer to take the theft seriously, so... I don't. Yang went through something incredibly difficult after an already horrific night? No she didn't. She experienced an average annoyance, something to laugh at - as Blake demonstrates.

Deciding that they need to track this Jinxy down (I'm not challenging the need for that, especially when it's Yang's arm, but is no one planning to find Crescent Rose too?), the girls head to the nearest town. Cue the already overused joke that Little will lead the way! And then they don't.

We get more info-dumping about this story, including that Alyx accidentally started a war in the town because she went blundering in without understanding their customs. Blake is worried that fictional history might repeat itself which I like because yes, you should be worried about that! Not just because it's basic human decency not to sow chaos in the town you're visiting, not even because they've already seen themselves repeating Alyx's story (fall, mice, vines, theft) and thus have an excellent reason to think that they might repeat her mistakes as well, but because what has this group been doing since Volume 6 except blunder into places and sow chaos? Not intentionally. I am always fully aware that our cast is written to be well-meaning heroes consistently doing the best they possibly can for the people, but even if we believed that they truly had done everything within their power to help (which I often don't), their "best" has still caused irrevocable damage. Intentions aside, the group has tampered with one of the world's few remaining sources of communication, drew a terrifying grimm toan unsuspecting populace, tested the already shaky relations between Kingdoms, lied to their one remaining ally in a way that did nothing to help his declining mental health, risked a major operation on literal, blind trust (which wouldn't be so bad if the story hadn't gone out of its way to paint that as stupid, but only when a non-Team RWBY memeber does it), sat around drinking tea while an actual apocalypse was happening outside, lost two of the magical relics that may well doom the world (a failure that I personally wouldn't blame them for if they hadn't been so stupidly brazen in their "protection": not putting it in the vault, carrying it on their belt, not sending someone through to Vacuo with the Staff, etc.), and to top it all off, made the conscious decision to obliterate two cities, evicting a fourth of the world's population, without even TRYING to find a way to work around that nearly unimaginable consequence. Without even acknowledging it.

Yeah, they should absolutely be concerned about bringing chaos down on these people. The fact that for once they don't when narrative logic says they should is so painfully, hilariously ironic.

What really grinds my gears though is that none of the others care about this possibility when, as outlined above, they should. MAJOR kudos to Blake for being the voice of reason here, but Yang is all, "Yeah, but [Alyx] was kinda a mean person, right? She lied and cheated her way through most of the book."

OH BOY, YANG. HAVE I GOT NEWS ABOUT YOU AND YOUR TEAMMATES.

We don't need a rehashing of all the times they - Yang in particular - have lied, cheated, or been needlessly mean to others, so I suppose all I have left to say is that she's at least consistent? I mean, Yang is by far my least favorite of the group nowadays, especially the version of her that would sneer at Ren for daring to point out that they've made horrific mistakes, but for what it's worth this is the attitude we've come to expect from her. Us? Fuck things up? Never! We're perfect! We're not like mean old Alyx who would do something as awful as lie to people.

Weiss tries to defend Alyx's actions by saying that "she was trying to survive" and grousing that the morals are too simplistic. That's a position I can respect, though I wish it weren't coming from a show that, at the end of the day, pushes such a simplistic perspective. As we've seen plenty of times in the past, RWBY continually claims that it has complex morals while not actually engaging with complex morals.

Just to hammer the point home, I'd like to point out that this conversation about harmful actions and gray morality is broken up by Ruby poking a sleeping Little, trying unsuccessfully to wake them up. After all, nothing highlights the complexity of your story like continuing mouse gags.

Let's put all that aside for a moment though. I've been jumping around just a bit, discussing some conversation pieces out of order because it works better with the flow of the recap. Now, we come to a crucial moment I previously skipped over:

The bees.

Being over a week late with this recap, pretty much everything that needs to be said has been said, to the point where even some non-RWDE folks are tentatively going, "So is that it then? Is it confirmed? Can I say with complete confidence that it's canonical?"

Well... no.

But it's the closest we've ever gotten.

It's also a setback.

Let me explain.

While Blake is laughing it up over Yang having her arm stolen, she gets very flirty. In fact, I think we can make a case that her laughter is exaggerated in an effort to catch Yang's attention, though that doesn't detract from the problem of what she's laughing at in the first place. Regardless, Blake is clearly enamored with Yang in this moment, grinning, leaning real close, teasingly touching their fingers together. They don't hold hands, but the desire is obviously there, and Weiss responds to the flirting with a, "It's about time."

Now, the reason why this is the closest we've gotten to a canonical confirmation is 100% because of Weiss. I wouldn't argue for a moment that this scene wasn't deliberately flirty, but it still holds a certain level of plausible deniability, which is the exact problem all the other Yang/Blake scenes have. Yes, forehead touches, hand-holding, and blushes are all coded as romantic, but until you actually confirm a relationship or interest, homophobes can come back with, "I blush at compliments/hold my friends' hands/they were just overwhelmed after nearly dying! Why do you hate platonic intimacy so much??" (To be clear, I do mean homophobes in this example, not the ace/aro community who might want to see the same things, but for very different reasons.) In fact, I recently came across a tumblr post tagged for arospecs upholding forehead touches over kisses:

Now, I certainly get what OP is saying (and it's worth pointing out the obvious: they don't know anything about my recaps, aren't responding to RWBY, etc. The post just came across my dash). There's an intimacy here that rings as more heartfelt than what we often get with a kiss. After all, kisses are a dime-a-dozen in television, just not for queer people, and largely in response to those restrictions, queer characters have historically been coded through other, intimate touches. So yeah, for some - even those who aren't aro/ace - a forehead touch might mean so much more in a pairing than an outright kiss. But note that the texpost starts with, "sure, fine, your characters kissed, whatever." OP is imaging a scenario in which that confirmation is a given. They kissed. So what? We want more meaningful interactions than just that!

"Just that" being the key phrase. Blake and Yang don't have "just that." They have not kissed. They have not been confirmed, so to argue for forehead-touch supremacy here is insufficient. It's like going, "Who cares about the core outfit. The best part is accessorizing!" Sure, that's a legit opinion, but for anyone who doesn't have any clothes yet, a pair of earrings and a scarf isn't going to cut it.

Despite all this, the line "It's about time" isn't attributed to anything other than romance. If a character looks at two others and says that, they're not talking about anything other than a decidedly non-platonic interest. So this, on its own, is definitely something to celebrate and is by far the most solid piece of evidence that the bees will be 100% confirmed by the end of the Volume.

Nevertheless, I have to ask: why are we still in the flirting stage?

Yes, Weiss makes a 'They like each other' comment that really can't be interpreted as anything else, but the comment itself translates to, 'It's about time they admitted they liked each other.' Now, if Blake had kissed Yang - or asked her out on a date, said "I love you," whatever confirmation we're each personally leaning towards - then we'd be golden. It's about time they did that? Yeah, it sure is! But the actions Weiss responds to are that flirty dialogue and a minuscule hand-brush, both of which we've seen before. A fair bit, actually.

This is what I mean when I say the moment is regressive. Weiss is acting like Blake and Yang have taken this huge step forward in their relationship, but the reality is that they've gone backwards, from full-on hand-holding to tentative brushes. The hand-holding already wasn't enough, as established, but now we're meant to cheer for an aborted hand-holding instead? I suppose it's possible to read this purely from Weiss' perspective. Meaning, she wasn't out in the shed when Blake took Yang's artificial hand. She wasn't at the Adam fight (even though she should have been...) to see their actual step forward, clasping hands as one and promising to defend each other. And though she was there, I doubt Weiss was paying them any mind when they had their moment of comfort on the airship, or even when Yang complimented Blake's new haircut. So yes, from Weiss' limited perspective this might actually be a significant change. Most of the girls' development has occurred in private and they haven't shared these changes with the group, so of course Weiss is going to go, 'Oh wow, Blake is leaning in close and teasing Yang with intimate finger brushes - they've never done that before! It's about time! :D'

But - and this is a crucial 'but' - neither the story nor RWBY's marketing present this as something solely from Weiss' perspective. Despite making this "It's about time" statement to Ruby, she doesn't come back with any additional knowledge to catch Weiss up to speed. There's no moment when Blake and Yang turn around to reveal that, oh yeah, we've actually been flirting like this for a while - culminating in an on screen admission of their feelings. And the official RWBY twitter puts out stuff like this:

The audience isn't supposed to work through who knows what like I've done above, they're just meant to celebrate that omg, the girls touched fingers!! Never-mind that they've gone past that before and, as said multiple times, that's not enough.

Do I think the bees will be confirmed this Volume given that this is the most overtly anyone has acknowledged the relationship? Yes. Do I think it's a problem that after nine years we're still in the barely flirting stage when other, straight relationships - even slowburns like renora - have already been explicitly confirmed? Also yes.

RWBY is writing this badly and I again question where most Yang/Blake fans are coming from. Either you're old enough to recognize queerbaiting and are likely wary as fuck that we'll get a repeat here, or you're young enough that you've grown up with queer ships that are unambiguously canonical within the first few seasons - if you even had to wait that long - in which case this 'Are they or aren't they?' dance should seem ridiculous. All I can imagine is that the RWBY fandom's tendency to rewrite canon has led to a legitimately inaccurate reading of the text. The same way that people will claim that their headcanons 100% happened on screen and will not be dissuaded even when you stick screenshots under their nose and go, "Look! That's literally not happening here!" I wonder how many fans imagined up a romance and just... honest to god think we've already gotten it. Not that anyone is literally hallucinating or anything, just that there's this pervasive trend of imprinting what one imagines onto the text. What do you mean Ironwood wasn't a dictator the whole time? What do you mean Ruby is repeating the actions she's criticized others for? What do you mean Blake and Yang aren't dating? We've spent so long rewriting the canon online that it's now hard as hell to differentiate between those creative hopes and what has actually happened on screen.

So yeah. I want to praise this moment. I am praising it just because this is the most we've ever gotten out of RWBY in terms of non-background character queer rep, but damn is it still falling short of what it could be.

It's worth pointing out that Ruby has no reaction to her sister almost-dating her teammate, but I give this a pass because Ruby is so obviously lost in her own, dark thoughts. In fact, she doesn't even seem to follow what Weiss is commenting on. As we'd expect, their semi-private conversation turns dark and Weiss stops walking. “It’s all gone. There’s nothing left for me to go back to," she says.

I'm really glad they're acknowledging that Weiss didn't just broadly mess up along with the rest of the group, but that she, specifically, has lost her home too. I honestly thought the acknowledgements would end there, but when Ruby tries to comfort with a, “You did the best you could for Atlas, Weiss” she shoots back with, “We hatched a crazy plan that put a whole kingdom at risk!”

Yeah you did! Thank you for finally saying that!! If we can't have heroes weighing the repercussions of their actions prior to engaging with them, at least give me heroes who will grapple with their mistakes after the fact. I mean, like with Yang I have a very hard time taking Weiss' grief and self-recrimination seriously when the majority of her struggle has been depicted through absurd gags... but beggars can't be choosers. This, coupled with Ruby's closing line of the episode, gives me more hope for the girls' development than I've had in years, certainly more than we got from Ren's argument with Yang.

As a sidenote though, I wish they hadn't hidden Weiss' face for the majority of this scene. I liked it when this cinematography was used to emphasize how she was hiding from her teammates - AKA when she was keeping Penny's death a secret - but now? Everyone knows everything (for the most part, anyway) and it would add a hell of a lot for the viewer to be able to see the struggle taking place on Weiss' face. Of course, the animating of emotions this Volume has been iffy, as acknowledged earlier, so maybe it is for the best that they didn't try and then fail to depict that kind of sorrow. Not when vaguely wet eyes and mostly blank expressions have been our norm. Still, when we have this important a character moment I don't want to be staring at Weiss' back, or her ridiculously complicated belt. Let me see her.

(I just realized that combining those screenshots makes it look like Weiss has messed up shoulders and a head turned round backwards whoops lololol.)

Another weird detail is that Weiss seems to be under the impression that Jaune may have saved the Relics. Sorry, but what? I'd buy this as a holding out hope situation if the whole group didn't know that Cinder had the Lamp and if Weiss, as the last to fall, wasn't at least vaguely aware that Cinder had snagged the Staff too. I mean, I'd have to re-watch the finale to get the exact timing, but I don't think it was that long between Weiss falling and Cinder flying off to make a new wish. Besides, what's the healer of the group going to do against a fully powered Maiden, especially without the rest of his team? It's not a literal mistake/retcon, just a really weird thing to have your character believe. I'm kinda getting the vibe that the writers didn't want to list all the ways the group fucked up - because yeah, that's overwhelming. That's what we've been saying! - so some mistakes are just kinda... glossed over. 'Well sure, we destroyed a Kingdom, Penny died, and we're now lost in this world, but maybe the Relics are still safe!' Mmm no, sorry. The only 'Well maybe' I'll accept is in reference to the people of Atlas being safe because yeah, there's no reason for Weiss or the others to know that they wound up in a grimm-infested sandstorm. I definitely give Weiss a pass for not realizing how her wish screwed them over - "One way ticked to Vacuo" - because it literally took Oscar summoning up a memory he didn't have to figure that out. I mean, I'm in full agreement with what others have said: it would be great if Weiss did realize/learn that at some point and was forced to grapple with the fact that the lack of help she's so angry over was, in fact, her fault... but I don't expect her to realize that on the fly, especially not when she's dealing with so much else in the Ever After.

I mean hell, I can barely remember the last sentence I wrote here. If you wanted me to backtrack through a conversation I had hours ago to find a linguistic mistake I made - when I don't even know there is a mistake I'm looking for - I'd be screwed lol.

As the conversation continues Weiss also acknowledges that learning about Penny's death must have been "a lot to hear" and - pushing back against my earlier frustration with the characters' expressions - Ruby actually looks affected by this. By and large I think this is the best interaction we've gotten in a while, right up through Ruby just walking away, unable to even respond to that statement yet. Unlike hiding Weiss' face, or Ruby fainting instead of otherwise reacting to the tragedy, this doesn't feel like a cop-out, but rather a legitimate, believable response. She's not capable of processing this yet, let alone chatting it out with Weiss.

Unfortunately, this engaging emotion doesn't last for long. As expected, I've seen posts in the larger RWBY fandom criticizing our criticisms, claiming that all RWDE folk want are "doom and gloom" for the girls; something "edgy." To which I can only respond with a "Nah." I like horror and tragedy and morally gray storytelling, but if we're defining "doom and gloom" as a work that has nothing but hopeless pessimism to impart, I'm not here for it. All I want is a Volume that appropriately engages with the darker tone introduced in Volume 3 and ramped up like WHOA in Volume 8, without cracking its foundation with constant, contradictory jokes.

In short, we have really done without another, humorous' moment where Little proves themselves useless - they have no idea what lies beyond the bridge, despite offering to guide Team RWBY on this journey - as well as a long sequence (long for a 15-20 minute episode, anyway) wherein Little tries to build themselves a home because...? I mean, I get that they don't know their way back to the village, but what made them think they weren't continuing on with the girls in the first place? I think the logic is loosey-goosey because the writers just wanted an excuse to have Little build a rickety home to fall apart. While singing. While the group has over-the-top reactions to that. Gags upon gags upon gags.

Continuing on, they arrive at the town and I've gotta say, I really like the design here. The red of the architecture pairs nicely with the deep green sky. As a fantasy aesthetic, I mean. I do wish this had carried over onto the actual streets though. We loose that cohesion among the townspeople and, frankly, they look bad in comparison.

We get a little discomfort from the girls as they navigate among sentient game pieces and we're shown a closeup of a flyer advertising the birthday of "His Most Royal." I'm writing this paragraph having seen Episode 3, so kudos to RT for keeping that title vague. As the groups awkwardly move through the crowd we get what is, hands down, the best line of the Volume so far:

Blake: "Just act like you belong."

Little: "I've always wanted to be long, but I'm still just small."

Hilarious. Witty. 10 out of 10. That's the kind of Caroll-esque humor that could permeate the Volume without undermining the darker tone. Too bad this is currently a one-off moment.

They spot Jinxy's caravan. “So what’s the strategy?" Yang asks, eagerly looking back at her teammates. "Just start roughing 'em up, or what?” Ah yes, Yang. Start an attack with innocent, defenseless civilians all around you. I honestly hate how her solution to everything is still 'Get angry and punch things.' Not because that's a bad trait in a character, but because Yang specifically went through an arc to get better at that. Yet instead of improving, or have a story that engages with her failure, she's just as impulsively violent as she's always been, but now it's treated as a justified response at best, a cute quirk at worst. Here we've got Option #2 with Yang smiling, acting like beating up Jinxy is a fun outing for her and her friends.

And you know what? No, I don't really care that this is all to get her arm back because as the girls should have learned by now, the Ever After doesn't follow their rules. We know, post-scene, that Jinxy is legitimately a conman who knowingly stole Yang's arm, but crucially none of the characters know that. Not for sure. This is a world where mice talk, vines move on their own, people are made out of wood, and most don't even know what a human is. The group should at least be questioning Jinxy's motivations in a world where everything is (supposedly) so topsey-turvey and, in turn, questioning whether it's right to go in gun's blazing. Hell, I actually would have liked that better. Give me a Jinxy who honestly didn't realize he was doing something wrong. You were just lying there, possibly dead, that metal thing is clearly not a part of your squishy body - it detaches! - and as your mouse friend will clearly tell you, it's not stealing if no one sees you do it. What are you so upset for? Give me a scene where Yang has to acknowledge her, 'Attack first, ask questions later' response to every. single. problem. Give me a RWBY where Yang is allowed to be wrong again.

Blake at least tries a peaceful approach. She looks as uncomfortable with Yang's attitude as I am (is that ever going to come up in their budding relationship?) and reminds her that Alyx bartered for her knife back. Yang's response?

"Yeah, I think I'd rather hit him :D"

We get our first real look at Jinxy when he comes out to start his auction. I'll admit this never even crossed my mind while first watching, but uh... yeah. I see what people mean about the Romani stereotyping. The brightly colored, free-flowing clothing. The caravan. The travel (the fact that Jinxy can trick these townspeople implies that he's never been here before; never staying in one place for very long). The characterization as a dangerous charlatan scamming unsuspecting innocents. It's not a one-to-one comparison - stereotypes very rarely are - but there's enough there to catch a glimpse of the writers' bias. It's unfortunately a rather common bias and, as said, one that those like myself won't always immediately spot, but that's why it's important to point it out. There are so many ways of depicting a conman. Why did you choose the version that looks distinctly like a marginalized ethnic group?

The answer is likely just ignorance but again, that's why we discuss such things. We need to help others - and ourselves - do better in the future.

Obviously unaware of the uncomfortable implications, Weiss exclaims that Jinxy is oh so cute and Blake comments that he looks older than he appeared in the book, perhaps providing evidence that a significant amount of time has passed since Alyx fell. We learn that Jinxy screws over people by selling trash disguised as treasure, so Yang will have to let her heart tell her which is her arm.

Spoiler: Yang doesn't use her heart to find her arm. Oh, she correctly identifies her arm, but only because it's the most arm-shaped, yellow colored thing on the stage. I honestly expected that not to be her arm because that's how situations like these go in stories, right? It's never the most obvious choice... but in this case apparently it is! I want to emphasize though that Yang does not choose this because she has an emotional connection to the object. We are explicitly shown what that connection looks like via Ruby and Yang, in comparison, basically points and chooses at random.

So that's an awful way to depict her relationship with an assistive device, but it is consistent. We see Yang first emerge with her arm with very little fanfare - the audience doesn't watch her decide to put it on for the first time, nor do we see her actually experiencing those first moments. From there her arm is used largely for jokes - scaring Nora, new puns - or is left behind to get an advantage in a fight. (Which, I'd like to clarify, I don't dislike on its own, but it is relevant in the grand scheme of how Yang approaches her prosthetic.) Last Volume she's given a line about how it is not an important part of her identity, it continues to be used for humor purposes now, and when a fantasy mouse says, 'What does your heart tell you? Which is your arm?' Yang's response is a straightforward, 'I don't know.' For me, this moment perfectly encapsulates how hollow Yang's disability journey has been, all the way back to her simply not caring that another disabled ally procured her a state-of-the-art device. Though it makes for a lackluster scene, to put it mildly, I admittedly would have scoffed if Yang had felt some call to her arm because when has RWBY ever established that? It hasn't, so yay keeping things consistent I guess?

Also, just the fact that all of Jinxy's wares are bits of trash disguised as treasures says a lot. Unlike my little rewrite above, we don't get any exploration of Ever After's culture that reveals that Jinxy has no idea what this arm is, why it might be important, etc. So literally the narrative is just saying, 'Others think Yang's assistive device is trash' and we leave it at that. Fantastic.

As said though, Ruby does feel a pull towards the little doll on the stage, though she can't say why. As she stares, Jinxy sells his first 'treasure' for... a hug.

...

.....

..........

"And what happened, then? Well, on Tumblr they say that Clyde's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then – the true meaning of RWBY came through, and Clyde found the strength of ten turtles, plus two!”

I'm not gonna lie, I thought that detail was super fucking cute. Hugs acknowledged as incredibly valuable? Hell yeah! I like that the townspeople are paying in ways beyond handing over [insert fantasy money name here]. That's a nice world-building detail and when Jinxy has to give the hug back when his con is exposed? Fantastic. This scene might be struggling like whoa with the larger concepts, but many of the details are really nice.

When it's time to sell the arm both Yang and a nearby royal guard raise their hands. However, Jinxy asks for "knowing what it is to feel love" and, with a glance at Blake, Yang gives up the bid. If they were going to tease the ship some more, maybe specify romantic love? As it stands, Yang should be backing down regardless of whether there's a relationship in the works because love as a broad concept would have her losing everything: love for her sister, her teammates, her family, her home, for adventure. That's not a Blake specific thing, that's a, 'Holy shit he's asking her not to be human anymore' thing.

So it makes sense then that a wooden puppet, nameless and identical to every other guard, existing only to serve "His Most Royal" would be able to pay that price.

Of course, losing what she assumes is her arm (because remember, she doesn't actually know that yet) makes Yang angry. Check out Blake's totally chill, not at all worried, definitely not uncomfortable look.

Finally we come to the doll, which Ruby immediately bids on. However, like Yang's, Jinxy asks too high a price: fill this jar with hope. It's a bit on the nose, but I like the idea, as well as the shot of the doll sitting dejectedly through the jar's reflection.

However, I think this moment would have had far more of an impact if Ruby had tried to fill it. Sure, she's clearly struggling right now, but why doesn't Ruby at least make an attempt? Especially given that one of her most defining traits lately is to sink deeper into denial: I'm fine, everything's fine, we're going to get home, we're going to fix things, why would anyone be doubting that? Of course I can fill the stupid jar! Let her angrily charge up to the stage, snatch the jar, glare in annoyance because duh it's going to fill... but then it doesn't and her expression falls. That's when Jinxy can say, "You can't, can you?" Simply announcing that to the audience is probably the least compelling way to go about this. Oh, our story is telling us things again rather than showing them? Groundbreaking.

While all this is going on Little has scampered up on stage to fucking steal the doll and you know what? Good on Little. That's the first thing they've done that hasn't felt like a waste of time. I especially like that this calls back to the Ever After rule that it's not stealing if no one sees you do it. "Fairs fair," they say.

Given that Little took the 'treasure' before Jinxy received his payment, his spell is broken and all the objects are revealed as the 'trash' they always were. The random citizen finds a mouse in his hands, the guard screams as he sees Yang's arm in his hands, and the doll turns into...

Penny's sword.

(Get it? The green doll was a green sword belonging to a not-real girl? Everyone got it, right?)

Say, did anyone else expect it to be Crescent Rose? Ruby feeling an emotional connection to an object while her beloved weapon is still missing, lost in a world where a Racoon picks up any random objects to sell? That would make a LOT more sense than Penny's sword winding up in the Ever After. As I explained in an ask, Penny made those swords out of her Maiden powers and they disappeared as soon as Cinder struck her in the chest. Of course they did, she likely lost control of her aura/magic as soon as she took a killing blow. But apparently the swords actually hung around despite Penny passing her powers to Winter, despite being dead, and were... blasted? All the way to the edge of the bridge?? From a blow that didn't have any force behind it??? Yeah sure, totally believable.

So instead of resurrecting Ruby's love for the weapon she designed and re-arming her before the team faces any real danger - because there are no battles these first two episodes - we get another emotional moment without a real foundation underneath it. The writers were so eager to continue Ruby's grief arc specifically through Penny (even though SO MUCH has happened that she could be triggered in any number of ways) that they just kinda... forgot to set that up...

I do like the moment itself though. I think Ruby's frantic run to the sword, her gasp, her clutching the sword to her chest and crying over it - all that is well done. Certainly better than much of what we saw in episode one. I just wish this wasn't so freaking contrived.

In the realm of not setting things up, we get another severely awkward moment as the group "escapes." I put that in quotation marks because, well, the problem is that they're not escaping from anything. Jinxy isn't trying to attack them for revealing his con, the townspeople don't mistakenly blame them for things, and though the guards will show up in a bit, they're notably not seen chasing them yet. So we've got Yang and Blake booking it out of there, Weiss walking leisurely away, Ruby barely paying attention, all of it with nothing seemingly happening in the background.

Then they wind up back in the forest with:

Yang [out of breath]: "Those people... take auctions... VERY seriously”

No they don't? This implies that the people were turning on the girls for ruining their auction, but none of the civilians were paying them any mind. The most we see is the guy who bought the bunny getting his hug back which, you know, is kinda the opposite of a mad crowd threatening violence for this deception. Yang functions more as a threat at the start of all this than the group they're supposedly running from. Blake literally starts freaking out about how they're "ruining everything!" and I'm like you didn't? Nothing happened?? I mean, yay Blake continuing to take responsibility for their actions, but in this case the girls legitimately didn't cause any problems. In the story Alyx started a war because she didn't know how to properly deal with the townspeople, so I expected the team's visit to go equally as bad; something to explain Blake having a crisis once they'd left. All they did was reveal a conman though, a conman everyone is only passively angry at. Please give me my hug back, sir, and shame on you for tricking us. We will all calmly disperse now.

I know it's years too late, but RWBY really needs to learn how to show what they want depicted on screen.

We learn that the theories were right about the weather being influenced by others' emotions - or at least Ruby's emotions in particular. As she sits down with Penny's sword a localized storm starts and, in a few moments, we'll hear a guard shout that someone's sad over there. So this is a useful tool for showing (good job!) that Ruby is really struggling right now, even if she appears calm on the outside, and I'd have so much more to praise about the scene if it hadn't been ruined by freaking Weiss.

Seriously, forget Little. Weiss is by far the most annoying character this Volume.

So after Ruby fainted at the news that her dear friend had died, unexpectedly discovered her sword, and now sits with a grief so heavy it magics up a storm to drench them all, her teammates do... nothing. Honest to god they do nothing. Yang has a single, "Ruby?" before the scene is stolen by Weiss having a temper tantrum. She doesn't like Blake's idea that they're following in Alyx's footsteps - even though everything they've done has followed in her footsteps - and starts ranting about how "We are not in a book!" and even if they were, they know the ending takes place at the castle, so let's go. Does Weiss care that Ruby is sitting there in shock, even after she tried to connect with her earlier? No. Does Yang care that her sister is loosing it two feet away? No. Does Blake? Nope. Does the narrative? Absolutely not. Ruby sits in background while Weiss has more stupid comedy moments, getting trapped in a loop and hitting herself in the head with a rock.

I keep seeing celebratory posts about how the show is tackling Ruby's grief, but it's not? It's introducing her grief and then immediately ignoring it. Ruby cries and then finds a cute mouse to distract her. Ruby faints and just brushes past that - she's fine. Ruby finds her dead friend's weapon, but why would we focus on that when we can watch Weiss hilariously knock herself out? I feel like the stock answer to these complaints is always something along the lines of, "They're working up to Ruby's breakdown," but frankly I don't care if they are. The execution is atrocious now and a sudden swerve into respectful storytelling isn't going to change that.

Plus, as I've mentioned previously, these moments don't help convince me that the girls care for each other outside of the dramatic, self-sacrificing actions added to finales. Bad enough that everyone ignored Ruby's faint and extended no care towards her, but now they're literally just standing there as she suffers. This is by no means a new problem, but the heroes have become so passive the last few Volumes. What happened to Black who marched right up to Weiss and let her how important the faunus are to her? The Yang who squared off against her mother just to reach her little sister? Weiss delivering a cup of coffee and checking in with her newly acknowledged leader? Say what we will about Volume 8 - and we've all said a lot - but at least there Yang puts her arm around Ruby and tries to comfort her on the steps, no matter how much denial that comfort required. Now? Now Yang just stands there because again, why comfort her little sister when Weiss is making a fool of herself?

At least this has some basic care and human decency behind it.

"This way!" the royal guards yell. "Someone's sad!" Yeah and her teammates don't care. Sure, we know in the way someone knows who reads the script, or who knows the writers' intentions, that of course Team RWBY all love each other so, so much... but man, would it kill them to show it more?

As the guards show up we get an interesting shot of Ruby that mirrors the one with Jaune's blade--

--and then she pulls herself together enough to face them, deciding that if Alyx went to see the Red King then they will too.

Ruby offers to give the guards “the weapon of a powerful warrior," AKA Penny's sword, and what follows is a legitimately emotional speech:

"[She was] the most powerful [warrior] to ever live. She was touched by magic and she gave her life for thousands. She took a message of hope to the stars and she saw the world through better eyes."

At least, it would be legitimately emotional if it hadn't been undercut, again, by all the comedy. We just had Weiss loosing it. The guards all "OOOOOO" loudly over the sword. Then they burst into exaggerated tears at Ruby's words, complete with their toy horses crying too. I've said it a million times now and I'll say it again: you can't expect me to take these moments seriously if the story can't take them seriously.

Also, I have to ask... why is Ruby giving the sword up? The logic is that they're trying to get to the Red King, but they were already heading to the Red King. That is, the guards were after them, trying to take them into custody for ruining the birthday present. So why bother with this bribe? It's simply not necessary, especially since they're still basically escorted as prisoners, guards on all sides. It's not like these guards are presented as terribly intelligent. All Ruby needed to do was go, "Oh, we're so sorry for ruining His Majesty's special day. Yes, please take us to him so that we can apologize in person. Your Majesty, can we please make it up to you by playing some games? Etc. etc."

The sword is a needless addition and that wouldn't be a problem if it didn't (supposedly) have such emotional impact. Ruby just found this piece of Penny. This is, likely, the last bit of her she'll ever encounter... and she's going to just give that up? Literal minutes after she found it? To a bunch of identical goons who snatch it up and run off in another, stupid gag? Once again, this is not convincing me that Ruby is having an authentic grief arc. She might be sad for the whole Volume, but each individual moment is ignored or "solved" almost instantaneously. To say nothing of the fact that Ruby is without her weapon. She has the PERFECT, practical excuse to hang onto Penny's sword with everyone, characters, and audience alike realizing that her logic is hiding a harder truth: she can't give it up. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But then sure, give me a moment at the end of the Volume when Ruby must part with the sword for some reason, to save another, or further their cause. Giving it up now, especially when it's not necessary, makes the supposed attachment she feels to it ring hollow.

This is just so... meh. I honestly thought we'd be getting an updated version of this for a second.

As they follow the guards to the castle Ruby bitterly tells the girls that they need to "stop pretending we know what we’re doing." Hell yeah, Rubes, that's the first time we've agreed in a while. Whether or not anything comes of this line is still to be seen, but I'm happy that their failure - stemming from arrogant complacency - was at least acknowledged. It's definitely a hard-hitting line to end an otherwise goofy episode on.

Now! I'm off to try and write up "Rude, Red, and Royal" in... three days🙃

Thanks for reading! <3

#rwde #rwby #mymetas #RWBY Recaps

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soliloquyepistolary · 1 year

Text

What’s the next step to take us closer to the recall?

In the dream, there were some rats in the deep freezer that we have in the garage that were in suspended animation, a couple of them. And I think my dad was keeping them there for some reason and I wanted to set them free even though I found them absolutely disgusting. They were in plastic takeaway food containers and I drove some kms away like to some sort of sports stadium, where there was a lot of people around about to attend some kind of event like a game or something or maybe it was near commission housing somewhere in the city and I set it loose and it scurried away immediately, lightning fast. That one was the biggest one and then the other tub had a few smaller ones that I set free too. I felt a lot of disgust but I just knew I had to do the right thing and I didn’t want to set them free near the house in case they just came back resettle where they were and wrecked havoc too close to home I knew I had to release them a little while away.

This next dream I originally forgot but it was replayed again to me There were three doors, just three on doors that seemed to float in empty white space. The first felt like it was the most 'protective' with the security door locked as well the main door itself. There was no one there but I stood at the door pondering something. The other two doors felt more transparent or something the next one in the row didn’t have a security door and I’m not sure about the last one, I just now that progressive as you go along the next door felt 'lighter'.

What am I going over to his house for?

In the dream, I was sitting next to AL on white chairs and I just knew she was not okay like she was sad about something but at the same time she was trying to hide it so I touched her arm affectionately, stroking it tenderly as if to soothe her and she started crying and I really felt for her. It’s as if she just needed someone to feel that she was not okay and give her space to feel her emotions. I let her cry without saying a word, I was just there for her. It was unspoken communication.

I was looking out the window and I saw that there was an island that was hovering in the sky off in the landscape in what looked like a idealistic rendition of nature. The island looked like it was like a huge piece of earth that had been ripped out of it and was now floating in the sky. There was lush green growth upon it. It didn’t feel like earth, it honestly felt like a scene from a video game in the way that it was too perfect. It looked slightly out of focus or something. I was looking out of a window from a regular room too, probably my room but I was looking out into a scene that didn’t feel real. It was definitely beautiful, the sky was blue and bright but I felt no energy, it was devoid of any feeling. There was nothing coming from this reality, it's as if I was looking out into a painting or still image. When I realised this, I knew that I must be dreaming because the scene I was looking at was just too fake.

There was a washing machine in my room under the desk but it wasn’t connected. I knew that it used to work and I used to use it regularly but not anymore. I was looking at the back of the machine, trying to make sense of all the tangle of cords back there, trying to plug it back in. But I also kept thinking about how much water would drop on the floor from transporting the laundry from the machine to hang it outside and I realised I didn't really want to use it anyway. I'll just used the other one I've been using in the laundry room.

7/5 Yesterday I asked what the next step toward the recall was and I received that rat dream but what does it mean? Please make it very clear

A football game, choosing your team and sticking with it

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survey--s · 2 years

Text

321.

what is your favorite kind of ice cream? Our local ice-cream parlour does some great flavours - tiramisu, blueberry and panacotta, Jaffa Cakes and peanut butter. if people could read your mind, what would they usually find? A load of jumbled nonsense. who do you talk to on the phone most often? I only really talk to my mum on the phone. what's a song that makes you feel happy? Summertime by Bon Jovi. what celebrity would you like to meet? Johnny Depp.

what's the best concert you've ever been to? Plain White T’s were really good live. They had good support groups too. what is your favorite clothing store? Fat Face. how did you meet your best friend? We met via online dating. do you need money to be happy? I mean, money doesn’t equal happiness, but I’d much rather have food and shelter than not. what is something you do well? Tidy and organise things. what's a good idea you've had recently? To take Fridays off over the summer. It’s been lovely to have some three-day weekends for a change. what is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? Pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, smashed avocado on sourdough toast, a proper Full English or fresh croissants. how far in advance do you prefer to plan? With work, I like knowing my week by Sunday night, but for personal stuff I generally plan quite last minute as I never know how I’ll feel in advance. do you like to wear high heels? Nope. how many slices of pizza do you usually eat? I happily eat an entire pizza, lol. But pizzas here aren’t served as slices - you just order a whole one and the expectation is you eat the lot. Can you remember life without technology? what was it like? I mean, there’s always been technology, but it was pretty basic when I was young. I didn’t know any different so it was fine, but I’m glad it exists now.

what gift would you like to receive? Money is always good. what's the last thing you paid for? Toiletries. what's the last movie you watched? Gosford Park. do you remember your dreams? When I first wake up, but not really later on in the day. do you play any instruments? Not anymore. I can play some, though. do you always smile for pictures? No. what are you most excited about right now? Having a long weekend and then having two weeks off at the end of August. if you had $5 in your pocket what yould you spend it on? I have no idea, I have nothing I need to buy right now. how often do you buy things via the internet? Maybe 2-3 times a week. would you like to live in a different country? if so which one? Yeah, Canada or Australia. what animal would you see first if you went to the zoo? Penguins or tigers. if you could switch places with someone for a day, who would it be? Someone with a beach house and a swimming pool, please. do you prefer the aisle, middle, or window seat on a plane? Window or aisle. what's your favorite song from a movie? I have no idea, there are loads of amazing soundtracks out there. Lately, We are Not Alone by Karla DeVito. where would you like to volunteer? I don’t really like the idea of volunteering as I think people should be paid for the work they do, but maybe an animal sanctuary or something. would you rather go out for dinner or cook at home? Have a takeaway or go out. who sent the last text message you received? Jane, a client of mine re-arranging a visit as her cat needed to go to the vets. what's your favorite flower? Lilys. what's the last song you listened to? I don’t remember, whatever was playing in the car on my way home from work. do you like being alone? Yep, I need my alone time to function lol. what was the last thing you ate? Bacon flavoured crisps. how do you find new music? Spotify and YouTube, also the radio occasionally. what is your dream travel destination? Iceland, New Zealand, Japan. if you could play any instrument what would it be? I have no idea. what's the last youtube video you watched? An episode of some policing programme. where are you going on your next trip? We’re going to Broughton for a dog walk and lunch on Friday, if that counts? what are you currently addicted to? Without a Trace.

#survey #surveys

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queenshelby · 3 years

Text

Time for Change – Part Five

Pairing: Cillian Murphy x Reader

Warning: Smut

Words: 3,388

Notes: Not based on Cillian’s life. This is fiction guys!

The week following your night at the Westin with Cillian, you and Cillian caught up again, this time at a different hotel and without spending the entirety of the night together so that you wouldn’t raise any suspicions.

Then, the weekend after that, it was his birthday party and you and James were invited over to his and Danielle’s house to celebrate.

Chloe stayed with her grandmother and you were keen to see Cillian again. At the same time, you were nervous. It was the first time you were going to be around Danielle after you slept with Cillian and it certainly didn’t help that, despite your sense of clarity around everything, you were developing feelings for your brother-in-law.

The text messages between you and Cillian had become constant and not just sexual in nature. He called you daily when he could and you even met up on occasion, sometimes at the park when you both went for a run or sometimes at the local bookstore.

He was different to James. He had always been kind and you were interested in the same things. Occasionally, you would still teach the piano to his kids and he made sure that, every time you came over, Danielle wasn’t home.

When there was a chance, you kissed and held hands. You got to know him, even to the point where, when James bought Cillian a birthday present, you rolled your eyes, thinking that it was unsuitable.

‘He does not drink spirits James. Just shelf it and I will go to the bookstore and get something else for him, yeah?’ you chuckled and James looked at you somewhat confused.

‘You seem to know him well, your brother-in-law. I could almost be led to believe that you have a little crush on him’ James said, raising an eyebrow.

‘I ran into him a few times at the book store so I have an idea what he likes James. That’s all’ you explained, cheeks flushing.

‘Relax Y/N, I was just joking. I was thinking though, you know how Cillian had spoken about his holiday house down south the other time?’ James asked.

‘Yes, what about it?’ you asked.

‘Well, perhaps we can ask him for the key and get away for a weekend, just you and me. This might get you in the mood for some sexy time for a change’ James said, causing you to sigh.

‘James, we talked about this. I am just going through a few things’ you explained, not wanting to be with James in any intimate way knowing the big secret he was keeping from you.

‘It’s still about my affairs, isn’t it? You know, if you would have been more attentive as a wife and less occupied with Chloe’s needs and your job, I wouldn’t have had to cheat on you’ James said angrily, making it out to be your fault.

‘So, it’s my fault you fucked your secretary and knocked her up?’ you asked angrily.

‘How did you know?’ James wondered.

‘I just do James. It’s for another time to discuss. Not today. Today, I will pretend to be a happy wife and we will go to my step sister’s house for the party. Then tomorrow, we will talk about what we are going to do moving forward’ you suggested.

‘You know, this is all your fault Y/N. At least Laura gave me a child which is something you were incapable of doing. You didn’t want to fucking try going through IVF’ James then shouted angrily.

‘Because we didn’t have the money, James! And money is what keeps you here now, by my side, isn’t it? You don’t want to pay support for Chloe and me and you don’t want to miss out on my inheritance. Is that it? Because if you leave me, you don’t get anything’ you yelled at him as, suddenly, you had to reach for the corner of the kitchen bench as a wave of nausea washed through your body.

‘Chloe isn’t my daughter, nor is she yours. I have a daughter now and you can’t have children, which is probably for the better because, obviously, you are delusional and self-centred, blaming me for what happened instead of yourself’ James yelled, holding onto your shirt tightly and angrily.

‘Oh, I am self-centred?’ you barely managed to say before pushing his hand away and making your way to the downstairs bathroom rather quickly.

As soon as you walked through the door, you dropped to the floor and leaned over the toilet.

‘Jesus Christ’ you huffed as another bound of nausea overcame you and you emptied your breakfast into the toilet.

Just as you were in the bathroom, you heard the front door of the house close shut and you realised that James had left, which was probably for the better.

‘This fucking sushi place’ you growled to yourself, regretting your takeaway choice for the previous night before quickly brushing your teeth and making your way to the bookstore.

***

At around 7 o’clock that night, you arrived at Cillian’s and Danielle’s house without James by your side.

When Danielle enquired about James’s whereabout, you informed her that he would arrive a little later and so he did.

She could sense that you had been fighting and was quick to offer you a drink, which you gladly accepted.

After wishing Cillian a happy birthday and giving him his present, you socialised with Danielle and her friends and, every time you spoke to her, you felt guilty about what you were doing.

Yet, you couldn’t help but glance over towards Cillian on numerous occasions. He looked incredible and you loved seeing him smile.

Danielle, however, seemed unhappy and a mutual friend by the name Natalie eventually asked her what was wrong.

‘I think Cillian is seeing someone’ Danielle said quietly.

‘Oh god Jesus Danielle, not again, please’ Natalie said, being well aware of the constant allegations and fights they were having. ‘Just because you cheated doesn’t mean he did’ she then said, causing you to almost choke on your wine.

‘You did what?’ you asked surprised. This was the first you heard of it.

‘It was many years ago Y/N. Cillian knows and he forgave me. He was always away and I struggled with the kids and…’ Danielle went on to explain and you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing.

‘What is so funny? We all make mistakes’ she said and you couldn’t help but shake your head in disbelieve.

‘Well, apparently so’ you chuckled. ‘Now, what makes you think that he is cheating on you Danielle?’ you then asked, curious as to whether her suspicions were actually warranted and whether she knew something.

‘I looked at his bank account statement and there were two hotel charges in Dublin in the past two weeks, one for the Westin and one for the Hilton’ she explained.

‘He could have just eaten there with friends Danielle, both of these Hotels have restaurants attached to them and are conveniently located near Temple Bar’ Natalie then laughed, causing Danielle to nod.

‘Yeah, probably. But, he has been acting funny lately and isn’t interested in intimacy. He doesn’t even kiss me anymore’ Danielle said.

‘You walked out on him twice in two months Danielle. Does this seriously surprise you?’ you asked, causing Danielle to shake her head just as Cillian came walking over towards you.

‘Miss Music Teacher, do you mind helping me with this?’ Cillian asked you as he handed you a guitar with two broken strings.

‘What animal did this?’ you chuckled and Cillian looked over towards one of his friends, rolling his eyes as he did.

‘Right, show me where the string is and I will fix it’ you said and Cillian asked you to follow him downstairs which is where he kept all of the music instruments and accessories.

***

After you followed Cillian into the basement and he gave you quick kiss now that you had some privacy, you quickly locked the door behind you.

‘What are you doing?’ Cillian asked surprised and, without loosing any time, you moved towards him and pressed your lips onto his again for a more passionate kiss.

Your lips parted his, allowing your tongue to enter for a short moment and explore, before you broke off the kiss and moved back. You then brushed your finger over his lips in a silent hush as you started fumbling with his zipper.

‘I am giving you another birthday present’ you smirked and, whilst Cillian knew that this was wrong, especially with Danielle and James both upstairs, all he managed to do was exhale and watch as you pulled at his jeans and briefs and released him.

You gasped as his cock sprung straight up, precum already glistening on the tip.

‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to be hard already?’ you said with some excitement.

‘What can I say, I have been fantasising about you all evening, seeing you in these tight jeans’ Cillian whispered as your fingers wrapped around the shaft while your other hand cupped his balls and squeezed.

‘Have you now?’ you purred without looking away from his cock.

‘You are such a tease Y/N’ Cillian moaned as you started to stroke. Timidly at first but you quickly picked up the pace. You could tell Cillian was getting himself worked up and you knew you didn’t have much time as everyone was waiting upstairs.

Without warning, you leaned forward and took his shaft into the back of your throat, making him gasp.

‘Fuck’ Cillian groaned, no longer caring if anyone heard him. Your mouth around his cock just felt too good.

You moaned and hummed as you bobbed your head and the sound coming from your throat tickled his cock. He wasn't going to last long at this rate and he was holding back another groan as your tongue slid up and down the underside of his shaft rather seductively. Then, your lips were puckering on the tip of his cock, sucking like a vacuum before releasing him with an audible 'pop'.

‘You like that?’ you whispered, kissing the tip and looking up at Cillian with eyes full of lust but, his only reply was a nod as he ran his fingers through your hair.

The truth was that, he couldn’t remember the last time Danielle and him had sex, let alone her pleasuring him with her mouth. It wasn’t her thing and you certainly wouldn’t have pleasured James like this in recent years either. But, you couldn’t get enough of Cillian’s cock. He was just perfect and you enjoyed giving him the pleasure that he deserved.

‘You can fuck his face, I won't gag, remember?’ you eventually said with a wink, lowering your head again.

Cillian was somewhat surprised by your rather dirty request but found some reassurance when your hand came off his balls and found his hand in your hair, pushing downward, encouraging him to stop holding back.

Taking the hint, Cillian bunched your hair up in his fist and slammed his hips upward, bottoming out in your throat with a wet gurgle. You held there for a moment before pulling back with a gasp.

‘Again’ you moaned, excited by how he had his way with you and, just as you requested more, he forced your head back down on his cock.

‘Fuck Y/N, that’s it’ Cillian groaned, plunging his cock in and out of your plump lips over and over again now while your hand was back to squeezing his balls.

‘So fucking good’ Cillian groaned as he took from you what he needed and he couldn't hold on any longer. With one last violent thrust he held your head down and exploded, coating your throat with his seed.

Cillian could feel you swallowing as you moaned and squeezed his balls some more, milking him of every last drop before letting go off his cock and wiping your mouth.

‘Now give me the string for the guitar before anyone files a missing person’s report’ you winked as you stood up and Cillian zipped up his jeans.

***

When you came walking back upstairs, you noticed how drunk James was which didn’t surprise you after the fight you had earlier that day.

Tipsy and in a good mood, he walked over towards you and, just as you took a sip from your wine to flush down the remnants of what you had just done to Cillian in the basement, he took the glass out of your hand and gave you a kiss.

Cillian looked over to you, his eyes widening and chin dropping. He couldn’t help but laugh.

‘James, you are drunk’ you pointed out, pushing him off you quickly with some embarrassment.

‘I just wanted to kiss my wife, can’t I do that?’ James then said and Danielle quickly came over and handed James a glass of water.

‘You guys should stay the night, I think you can’t take him home in this condition’ Danielle suggested and, before you could decline, James agreed and accepted her offer.

‘Good, you can stay in the basement. It’s nice and warm and there is a comfy pull-out lounge and bathroom in case he gets sick’ she said and you thanked her for the offer.

Thankfully, the party didn’t last too much longer and, at around midnight, everyone had left and you made your way downstairs to see how James was coping.

Just as you walked down the last step, your phone buzzed and you received a text message from Cillian.

‘Meet me in the upstairs bathroom at 1am’ it said and you couldn’t help but giggle.

‘Okay xx’ you responded.

----------

The clock on the nightstand hit 1o’clock as you were laying on the pull-out lounge in Cillian’s basement studio with James snoring softly next to you. He had gone to sleep about half an hour ago after throwing up numerous times and you quietly made your way upstairs.

You opened the bathroom door where Cillian was already waiting for you and, without a word you met in an embrace, lips locking and tongues fighting one another in a sloppy kiss.

His chest was against yours as you backed your ass up against the vanity. His hands slid under your butt and you giggled as he lifted you off the ground, wrapping your legs around his waist and grinding your pelvis against his growing erection.

‘Are you going to fuck me?’ you whispered into his ear, your tongue tracing his ear lobe.

He answered with a nod and a groan against your neck, kissing a trail back up to your lips before pulling off your panties, which was the only thing other than a t-shirt which you were wearing.

Cillian then sat you on top of the vanity, facing him before pushing down his boxers.

Your lips never broke contact and, once he freed his cock, it sprang upward and slapped against the soaked mound between your legs.

‘Give it to me Cillian…I want you so fucking badly’ you moaned into his mouth as his hands slid up your t-shirt and cupped your breasts.

‘I've been thinking about having your cock inside of me all night’ you gasped between kisses, causing Cillian to groan.

‘Have you been thinking about fucking me too?’ you continued, your hips grinding against him, your pussy lips sliding along the length of his cock.

‘I have been. Every night, I have to go to the bathroom and make myself cum just thinking about you and how good you feel’ Cillian groaned as your hand snaked between you both and took hold of his girth, aiming it towards your dripping love hole.

‘Hmm, oh god Cillian’ you cried out as he took your cue and pushed himself into you slowly. Your body shook as you took him inch by inch.

‘Cillian, fuck’ you moaned again and almost screamed as your body convulsed against him and your back arched, fingernails digging into his chest through his t-shirt.

‘That was quick’ Cillian whispered and his hand immediately came down on your mouth, covering it as an orgasm swept through you within seconds of him entering you. This is how much you had craved him. You wanted to simply have him inside of you and were aching for him.

‘Holy shit’ you panted, pulling Cillian in for another deep kiss. While you were clawing at his chest again, he began to thrust in and out of you with short strokes and you began taking a little more each time until he hit your cervix.

Cillian could feel your pussy juices leaking onto his balls as he thrusted his hips and you moaned and shuttered as a second orgasm rolled through you after several minutes.

Cillian didn't slow this time and instead quickened his pace, thrusting into you relentlessly. Your hips were gyrating every time your bodies connected, making his cock do circles inside your pussy. It felt fucking magical and Cillian could feel his balls tightening as an orgasm approached, but he wasn't ready to finish.

‘Fuck, hold on, not yet’ he grunted, grabbing your hips and lifting you off the vanity before spinning you around.

You grinned eagerly at this and leaned forward across the vanity, wiggling your apple shaped butt in anticipation as Cillian took position behind you. As Cillian rubbed his cock against your slit you arched your back and raised your ass to give him better access and he teased you with the tip, pushing in a couple of inches before pulling out completely

‘Please Cillian, I need you to fuck me’ you begged and, just as you did, Cillian held your hips and slammed his cock all the way into you. Your bodies collided with a wet slap and you had to reach forward to brace yourself against the vanity.

‘Oh god yes fuck me Cillian’ you groaned, throwing your ass backwards to meet his thrusts while Cillian reached out and took a handful of your pony tail, pulling your head back as he pounded away. The way you would grind into the mirror in front of you every time Cillian bottomed out inside your drove him crazy and quickly brought back his orgasm.

‘Fuck Y/N, I'm gonna cum!’ he groaned.

‘Cum inside me’ you gasped, twisting to look back at him with lust filled eyes. ‘Fill my pussy and let me feel it’ you moaned.

‘Oh god, fuck Y/N’ Cillian groaned, grabbing your ass with two hands as he pulled you into him as his cock erupted inside you. He filled you with spurt after spurt of hot cum as you watched him in the mirror and wiggled your ass against him.

After he came down from his high, Cillian pulled out of you and spinned you around and once again sat you on top of the vanity before inspecting your cum dripping mound.

He stepped closer towards you and made you spread your legs wide before, without any warning, he slid two of his fingers inside you.

‘Oh shit Cillian right there! Oh fuck!’ you screamed as he pinched your g-spot. Within a minute or two of him stimulating your g-spot this way, your body quaked as one last orgasm passed through you.

Cillian held you in this position until you calmed down before pulling his fingers out with a wet slurp and brining them to your mouth.

You grinned and cleaned them up eagerly with your tongue and lips before kissing Cillian passionately, letting him taste the both of you.

‘That was...fucking amazing’ you said in between kisses and, just after your lips drifted apart, Cillian made an admission to you after a rather long and awkward pause.

‘I think that I am in love with you Y/N and I don’t know what to fucking do about it. This…all of it…it’s wrong. Yet, it’s like I can’t resist it. I need to be with you’ Cillian then said after he pulled up his boxers and let his head lean forward against your chest.

‘I feel exactly the same’ you said, causing Cillian to lift up his head and ask again.

‘So, what are we going to do about it, Y/N? We can’t go on like this’ he said and, just as he did, the bathroom door opened suddenly….

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hellzabeth · 3 years

Text

i have opinions about The Prince of Egypt musical adaption and you’re going to listen to them: An Essay

So, quick disclaimer: The Prince of Egypt is one of my favourite movies of all time. The casting, the music, the animation, I think it’s one of the top-tier movies that have ever been made. I went into seeing the London West End production of PoE with a full expectation that nothing I saw on stage would ever live up to how much I love the movie. I was fully aware there are plenty of limitations to what can be shown live on a stage with human actors and props.

That being said, I was enormously disappointed with how the whole thing was handled.

The Good

Now before I launch into a whole tirade of what I didn’t like about the production, it does behoove me to say what I think they did do well.  

The casting of the role of Moses was done fantastically, as was Miriam, Tzipporah, and Yocheved. The swings and the ensemble were really engaged and well placed, going through lots of quick changes to go from Hebrews to Egyptians to Midianites and back. 

The two Egyptian queens, wifes of Seti and Ramses, are actually given names, lines, and character beyond being simply tacked onto their respective kings. We get to see how they feel about the events happening around them, and there’s even a scene where Ramses meets his wife and courts her, whereas in the movie, she stands in the background and says nothing. This is one of the areas I was hoping the musical, which would naturally have a longer run-time, would expand on, and I was pleased to see the opportunity was taken.

Light projections on enormous curtains were used to very good effect, taking us instantly inside the walls of the palace and then out to the desert.  

Over all, the work was really put in to be engaging and emotional, and the orchestra really worked to deliver the right musical beats. 

One of two stand out scenes as being done very well was the opening “Deliver Us”, which included a bone-chilling moment of Egyptians separating a mother and her baby, with her screams as she’s dragged off-stage, and the blood on the guard’s sword. It really brings home the fear as Yocheved tries to lead Aaron and Miriam to the river with her, not to mention Yocheved’s actress nailed the lullaby.  

The second was at the other end of the show, “When You Believe” was beautifully performed by the whole cast, though it was somewhat stunted by what came before...

The Bad

Oh boy.

So the main problem with this show is not the music, not the staging, not even that sometimes the ensemble was a little off-beat (the lai-lai-lai section in Though Heaven’s Eyes comes to mind). Any mistakes there can all be forgiven, since sometimes things just happen in live performance, someone’s a bit off or something’s just not possible to do on the budget allotted.  

The problem is in the script.

The Prince of Egypt movie is a story that stands not only on the shoulders of its fantastic music and visuals, but also on its emotive retelling and portrayal of the characters within - mainly Moses and Ramses. And while the stage musical does spend a lot of time with the two mains, it neglects two other, incredibly important characters.

Pharaoh Seti, and God.  

In the movie, Seti strikes an intimidating figure. He is old, hardened, and wise in the ways of ruling his kingdom - and is voiced by Patrick Stewart, who brings his A-game to the role. Both Moses and Ramses admire him and look up to him immensely as young men, and the relationship he has with both of them deeply informs their characters as the story progresses. It’s from Seti that Moses learns that taking responsibility for your actions is the respectable thing to do (and later, the true horror of having your idol turn out to be not what you think), and it’s from Seti that Ramses takes a huge inferiority complex.

There are two lines that Seti gets in the movie, one spoken to Moses, and one to Ramses. These two lines define Moses and Ramses’ actions later on in the story:

To Ramses - “One weak link can break the chain of a mighty dynasty!” To Moses - “Oh my son... they were only slaves.”

Guess which two lines are absent from the musical?

One Weak Link is turned into an upbeat song, rather than shouted at a terrified and cowed young Ramses. Instead of being openly a traumatic, internalised moment of negative character development for Ramses, it’s treated as a general philosophy that Seti passes down to his son. Instead of a judgement that is hung over Ramses’ head like a sword of Damocles, lingering in his mind through the whole story and coming up in a shouted argument with Moses later, it’s said and then moved on from.  

The “they were only slaves” comment, on the other hand, is absent entirely. This changes Moses’ relationship with Seti enormously, as well as his relationship with the Hebrew people. Upon finding the mural depicting the killing of the slave children, Moses is appropriately horrified, and Seti shows up to comfort him and defend his terrible actions. Moses leaves this interaction... and then sings about how this is indeed all he ever wanted! He has no moment of horrific realisation that his father thinks of the slaves as lesser, as lives that can be thrown away. This means that the scene where he kills the guard doesn’t lead into a discussion of morality with Ramses as he runs away, but rather Moses breaking down about his heritage as though it’s a negative, instead of something he’s realised is just as valuable as his life as an Egyptian. Instead of Moses being shown as having a strong moral core that protests against the idea of any life being lesser, he bemoans his Hebrew blood loudly, and makes little mention of the man he killed. His issue that causes him to run away is being adopted, rather than his guilt that he’s a murderer, and nothing Ramses can say will change it.

Later on, we don’t see Ramses express this opinion either (in the movie - M:”Seti’s hands bore the blood of thousands of children!” R:“Hah, slaves!” M:“My people!”) so it seems the core reasoning for the necessity of the extremes God had to go to in order to convince Ramses to let the Hebrews go is completely gone.

Which leads us into God Himself, as a character.  

God is a tricky topic in general. He is hard to talk about as a concept and as a character, and even harder to depict in a way that won’t offend someone. The Prince of Egypt movie always struck me as a very good depiction of the Old Testament God - vengeful and strong-willed, commanding and yet nurturing, capable of great mercy and great cruelty in one fell swoop. God is incredibly present in the story, a character in and of Himself, speaking with Moses rather than simply commanding him. The conversation at the Burning Bush is bone-chillingly beautiful. Moses is allowed to question, he’s allowed to enquire, he’s allowed to express how he feels about God’s choice, and God is given the chance to respond (and reprimand, and comfort).

In the musical, the Burning Bush scene lasts all of two minutes, during which God (the ensemble cast, acting as one moving flame, speaking in unison) monologues to Moses, and Moses is not given room to question, talk to, or build a relationship with God. Later on, once some of the plagues have gotten underway, Moses rails against God, flinches in his resolve, and tries to back out... and God says nothing. It’s Miriam and the spirit of Yocheved that convince Moses to keep going. As a character, God is nearly absent. Even when it comes to calling upon the Plagues, or parting the Red Sea, God’s voice is absent. Moses does not pray. He does not even use the staff that God encouraged him to pick up as a symbol of his becoming a shepherd of the Hebrews out of Egypt.  

It’s these little changes, these little absences of such vital lines and presences, that ends up changing the whole vibe of the show. Seti is more like a dad than an emotionally distant authority figure, and God is more like an emotionally distant authority figure than a character at all. Ultimately, the whole feeling that one is left with at the end…

The Ugly

… is that the script doesn’t like God, or religion in general.

A bold statement to make, considering the source material is one of the central biblical stories in EVERY Abrahamic religion. Moses as a figure is considered so important and close to god, that The Prince of Egypt, even with its sensitive portrayal, cannot be aired in a number of Islamic states, because it’s considered disrespectful to depict any of the prophets, especially an important one like Moses. Moses is arguably the MOST important prophet in the Jewish canon.

However, I haven’t highlighted one of the most noticeable script changes - the elevation of Hotep, the high priest, to main antagonist.

In the original movie, Hotep is a secondary villain, a crony to the Pharaohs, bumbling and snide and two-faced. He and his fellow priest Hoy are there primarily to juxtapose how charlatans can control power through flattery and slight of hand, reassuring Ramses that Moses’ miracles are merely magic the same as what they can do. They even get a whole villain song, “Playing With The Big Boys” which is a lovely deconstruction of lyrics vs visuals, where while the priests boast that their gods and magic are much more powerful, in the background the staff, transformed into a snake by god, devours and defeats the priests’ snake handily. The takeaway from the song is that God’s power is true, and doesn’t need theatrics.

It’s a good little nugget of wordless world building. And it is completely absent from the stage musical, with only a vague reference to the chant of all the gods names.

Hoy is gone, and Hotep is the only priest. He actively speaks out against the Pharaoh, boasts about having all the power, and is played as bombastic and proud. He’s a wildly different character, even threatening Ramses at one point. In the end, it’s shown that Ramses won’t let the Hebrews go not because he has inherited his father Seti’s cruel attitude towards the lives he considers beneath him, but because he is being actively bullied by the priest, and will lose his power and credibility if he doesn’t do as he’s told. Ramses is even given a whole song about how little power he really has. The script desperately wants us to feel sorry for Ramses’ position and hate the unrepentantly, cartoonishly evil priest.

That’s another matter as well - a LOT of time is dedicated to making the Egyptians more human and sympathetic, portraying them as largely ignorant of the suffering beneath them, rather than actively participating in slavery. Characters speak out of turn without regard for formality and class, even to the royal family. They are casual, chummy even. And this would be fine - in fact, it’s good to have that sort of third dimension to characters, even ones who are doing reprehensible things, to show the total normalcy and banality of evil - if it were not for the fact they still include a completely open-and-shut case of evil right next to them.

Hotep has no redeeming features. And on the other side, God is barely present, certainly not in a relatable context. Moses has several lines about how cruel and unnecessary God’s plagues are - and you know what, in this version, they are unnecessary! Ramses is not the stone-hearted ruler that his movie counterpart is, he has no baggage over being a potential failure, because it was never really given to him in the same way! By taking away Ramses’ threatening nature, numbers like the Plagues lose half their appeal, as the back-and-forth ‘you who I called brother’ lines between Moses and Ramses are completely absent. Moses is faithless, and is less torn between the horror of what he’s doing and the necessity of it for the freedom of his people, and more left scrabbling for meaning that he doesn’t find. And the only thing hanging over Ramses is Hotep nit-picking everything he does and threatening him, which is considerably less compelling than the script seems to think it is.

This is best exemplified at the end, when all the issues come to a head. The angel of Death comes and takes the Egyptian first borns (which was actually a well done scene), and the Hebrews leave to a rousing rendition of When You Believe. But then we cut to Ramses and Hotep, with Hotep openly threatening to revolt against the Pharaoh - whom was believed, especially by the priesthood, to be a living god! Hotep is so devoid of redeeming features he cannot even be trusted to stand by his beliefs! - unless Ramses agrees to chase after the Hebrews. Reluctantly, Ramses is badgered into the attempt.

Back with the Hebrews, Moses parts the Red Sea… not with his faith, not by praying to God for another miracle, not even by using his staff as in the most famous scene of the movie… but by holding out his hand and demanding the ‘magic’ work. Setting aside the disrespect of Abrahamic religions to call one of the most famous miracles “magic” (and my oh my, if there was a fundamentalist of any religion in the audience they might have gasped to hear it), it again belittles the work of God, and puts all the onus on Moses, not as a conduit for God’s work, but as the worker himself. Then, the Egyptians arrive in pursuit, lead by Hotep, not Ramses. Moses sends the Hebrews through first, lead by Miriam, and stays behind with Tzipporah… to offer his life in penance to Ramses! The script has completely stripped both Ramses and Moses of their convictions towards their causes, and Moses cannot even stand by his decision to lead his people.

Then, in a moment of jarring melodrama, Moses has a sudden vision that Ramses, his brother, will one day be called Ramses the Great (an actual historical Pharaoh who reigned 1279-1213 BCE). There is no historical evidence that this was the Ramses that ruled over the Hebrews (there are 11 Pharaohs called Ramses through the history of Ancient Egypt), and maybe if the scene was acted a little better, it wouldn’t have been so sudden or jarring. Even more jarring, is that then Hotep arrives with the rest of the army, and Ramses refuses to lead the charge into the parted sea. Hotep does so himself, and is the one to have the final dramatic moment, being crushed under the water.

The Takeaway

After watching the show, I’m afraid I could never recommend it as either a play, an adaption, or even as a faithful retelling of a bible story. Its character drama isn’t compelling enough to be good as a standalone play, with it two main characters declawed and their core motivations reduced to a squabble between brothers rather than a grand interplay between two cultures and ideas and trauma handed down from their father. As an adaption of the movie it’s upsettingly bad, with grand numbers like the Plagues rendered piecemeal and fan favourites like Playing With The Big Boys missing entirely. As a retelling of the bible story, it’s insulting, completely cutting God out of the equation, taking no opportunity to reintroduce Aaron as an important character (which he was, in the bible, as Moses was a notoriously bad public speaker, with a stutter, and Aaron often interpreted for him) and more importantly, completely erasing God’s influence from the narrative.

I don’t know who this show was… for, in that case. If it wasn’t for drama lovers, movie fans, or people of the faith, then who the hell was it for? Why change such a critically acclaimed and well-beloved story? Why take away all these defining moments? If you wanted to tell a story about how religion is the true evil, how God can command people to do terrible things, and how those who uphold organised religion like Hotep are unrepentant, one-dimensional monsters… why would you tell that through the Prince of Egypt?

Underwhelming at best, infuriating at worst… just watch the movie. Or read Exodus. At least the Bible’s free.

#the prince of egypt #the prince of egypt musical #PoE #review #essay

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ot3 · 3 years

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i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey.

anyway. here you have it.

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith. I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it.

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene.

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land.

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass.

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area. In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.

#long post #really long post guys. look out !#rvb

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scottfuckingreed · 4 years

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It’s a Pogue Thing - Part Two

This is a JJ Maybank story :)

Requested

Warnings!: swearing and it gets sexual (SMUT)

“That’s disgusting,” Ki grunts as we watch JJ spit into an impressively far distance. Today we sailed to a small piece of island in the middle of the ocean. Between the blue sky, and the slightly green water it’s quite beautiful. Not a cloud in sight either, which is a somewhat odd thing for the Outer Banks. Some would call it peaceful, except we seem to hang around with complete animals. The JJ smirk spreads across his face. “You know you love it,” he winks. With a laugh, I sigh. “That’s even worse.”

You’d think it was awkward. I mean, how can you go from being friends, to sleeping together, back to normal again? I don’t know. Over the past week it’s been indifferent. Sure, it was a bit weird the first day. Maybe even the second. I’m still in shock that it happened. Once we cleaned up my house after the party, the ice was pretty much broken. We know where we stand with each other.

“Are you seeing Sarah today?” I ask John B. I notice Kiara roll her eyes so I flash her an ‘I’m sorry for bringing it up’ look. He clears his throat. “No... why would I be seeing Sarah today?” His tone comes off slightly defensive. I imagine it’s because Ki’s here, and he once had a thing for her? Maybe he still does. “I don’t know. Was she any help at the party?” We haven’t spoken much about the party; any of us. I, for one, am a bit relieved. “A little, but Topper started following us around,” of course. I’m not sure if she has him on a leash, or the other way around. “Still a good party though,” he nudged. If he thinks that’ll get me to throw another one, he can think again. “Thank JJ, I didn’t even wanna be there,” I laugh jokingly. “You can definitely thank me, you seemed like you had a good time in the end,” his words send shivers down my spine. I’m thankful for the concealer on my face as I feel my cheeks redden at his husky voice. “I don’t know, maybe it was the alcohol,” my head turns to his. “Maybe.”

We sail straight back to John B’s house. “You guy’s can crash here if you’d like,” he shrugs. With his dad gone, it’s a pretty empty house. I know we all fantasise about a parent-free life sometimes, but I can’t actually imagine the feeling of someone never coming home. “I’ve actually gotta go. My mum’s cooking dinner tonight... you guys hungry?” I ask. John B sends a warm smile my way. “Thanks, but I got left over pizza inside.” “Nice,” I laugh. I shift my eyes over to Kiara. “I think I’ll stay and help John B tidy up a bit.” If you visualise a teenage boy’s room, his entire house looks like that 24/7. Beer bottles, left over takeaway boxes, smelly ass clothing thrown around. “Suit yourselves.” I lock eyes with Pope, and I already know the answer. “You know my dad’ll kill me if I don’t get my ass home and check in.” A smile spreads across JJ’s face. “I’m not stupid enough to turn down mama Y/L/N’s cooking,” he chuckles.

As soon as we walk through my front door, my mum is all over JJ. She loves him. Usually the parents despise the boys like him. He’s the bad boy! But no. She still sees him as this cute, cheeky boy. “Mama Y/L/N! Long time no see,” JJ exclaims with a cute smile on his face, bringing my mum in for a hug. She squeezes him back in a tight embrace. “It’s been too long, how are you?!”

The conversation flows smoothly throughout dinner. It’s actually nice, not that I’d ever tell my mum that. She needs to think I’m embarrassed, when in reality I love that it’s so chill. “Did you guys enjoy the party the other night?” My mum asks as if it hasn’t been playing on her mind throughout the entirety of dinner. She’s asked me, but I won’t tell her anything. So, of course she asks JJ; he will answer. “Oh it was great! Y/N and I had a great time!” He smiles greatly. In a quick moment that my mum isn’t looking his way, he winks subtly at me. “Really? She hasn’t said much about it.” This is one of those moments where you wish you could send a telepathic message to someone. It would scream ‘stop before it’s too late’! “It’s probably because Rafe turned up.” There it is. I immediately just want to shrivel up and crawl away. My mum’s eyes widen. “Shit, I hate that guy.” JJ sends an agreeing nod. At least we’re all on the same page here. Like with other things, I’ve kept Rafe as much to myself as I possibly can from my mum. She knows he was nasty, but not in much detail. She knows he hurt me, but not in any specific way. In a very vague way, she knows everything she needs to. Just to hate him. “He’s a dick.” “This is why I like you JJ,” my mum pauses. Her face as she processes her possible next words. I raise my eyes brows in a warning manner.

After dinner, JJ offered to help my mum clean up. You may think it’s cute, but I know this boy’s games. He can’t fool me. “Are you staying to watch a movie JJ?” She asks, passing the boy a plate to dry. Before he can answer, I interrupt. “Can you give us a second actually, please?” I smile innocently towards her. Her eyes widen and she wiggles her eyebrows at me. “Sure.”

“What are you playing at?” I giggle. Recently, although I hate to admit it, JJ’s company has honestly been what I’m craving. Somehow a he’s so predictable, yet he surprises me every time. “I’m not doing anything Y/N, you’re reading into things.” He dries his last plate and puts the pile into a cupboard. Of course he knows exactly where they go. “You’re not staying for the movie,” I warn him. Even with my mum there, I don’t trust him. I don’t even trust myself. “What are you watching?” He asks. “I don’t know. I think my mum was on about watching ‘Now You See Me’ or something.” His face lights up. “Come on Y/N! I love that one.” I shake my head. I don’t want to want him here. “Please,” he sticks his bottom lip out. Because of my lack of reaction, he brings his head closer. He was so close that I could feel his breath on my face. A feeling that took me straight back to the party. A moment that I am trying so hard to not think about.

Unfortunately JJ has something about him. He’s painfully hard to say no to a lot of the time. So, here he is, helping bring down some blankets from upstairs. Despite the fact that our friendship should be ruined at this point. I’m starting to think that this may just be an exception. Why should it ruin everything? It was nothing. Before going back downstairs, I change into an oversized hoodie and some shorts.

My mum makes popcorn whilst we get things set up. Some soft blankets and even comfier pillows are arranged on the couch. I sit myself in the middle, with JJ on my right and my mum on my left. A part of me wanted to have my mum split us up, but that would’ve just looked strange. My eyes light up when I catch a glimpse of the popcorn bowl. “Let’s get started then.”

As the movie starts, I begin to get more excited. “I’m excited,” I smile massively. The more I think about it, the more hyped up I get. “I didn’t know this was your sort of thing,” JJ mutters with a smirk. Of course it’s a great movie, but that’s not what it is. “I watch it for the plot,” I smirk back. The plot being Dave Franco and Jesse Eisenberg. I express my love for the two beauties, only for JJ to simply state “I am so much better looking than them.” I snort at his words. “Whatever.”

20 or so minutes go by. My mum has already started nodding off, and I am beginning to get myself comfy. Without thinking, I nudge myself a bit closer to JJ. I didn’t even have to look at him to notice the growing smirk. The best thing, I thought, was to pretend I didn’t notice what I was doing. I bring my feet up, and lean them against his leg. A small noise exits JJ’s mouth, which sounded like a small chuckle. “Sorry I-” I start. My words pause at the touch of JJ’s fingertips. Even before they touched my bare thigh, I could feel their presence. “JJ,” instead of being a warning, my voice let’s put a wobbled whisper. “It’s fine,” he presses his lips together in a smile. I couldn’t tell his to move his hand away. I didn’t want him to. So I let him sandwich his hand between my thighs.

His hand, large and warm, sat nicely. It felt like an average thing. Every now and then he gently squeezed against my bare skin. Whirlpools. That’s the only way I can describe the way my stomach flipped. I thought, stupidly, that with my mum inches away it would turn everything off. Of course, that is not the case. JJ tries to be slick as he moves his hand further up my thigh. The first time, I do nothing. I’m not sure what to do. But the second, I cup my hand over his. Just as I’m about to tell him off in a whisper, my mum yawns. My heart jumps. “Shit guys, I should probably go to bed,” she stands and stretches. I try and make it look like JJ and I aren’t sitting so close. “You can stay over though JJ, finish the movie.”

My mum wanders out the room. We’re silent as we hear her footsteps all the way upstairs. Until her bedroom door shuts. “You’re not sleeping over,” I try not to smile as I say those words. The truth is, these little flirting games, send rushes through my body. Just like shockwaves. Now we’ve acted on it and I’m not sure how to resist my current urges. “Sure,” and he slides his hand up a bit higher. I grunt, accidentally making it sound slightly like a moan. Oops. That’s embarrassing. “I- uh- we-,” There’s no getting out of this one. I have no choice but to stop myself from uttering another word. I cannot even find the words to sort into a fully functioning sentence. The tension in the air was thick. So thick you would struggle to cut it with any knife; it would simply be too blunt. There were seconds of silence that just dragged on too long. As the tips of his fingers on his right hand trace along my jaw, guiding my head to turn to face him, I find myself lusting for him. “Give in to me Y/N.” Some things are just too hard to resist. Especially when it’s purely sexual. It’s as if my silence screamed for him to continue. Maybe it was radiating through my body. Even if I did speak, I couldn’t hear myself. The only noise was the dangerously loud thumping of my heart as his fingers continued on the trail. My heat was throbbing. He isn’t even doing anything. At this point, probably doesn’t need to. Am I wrong if I just let him? It feels that if I give in, I’m not only betraying the other Pogues, but maybe even myself. This was the deal. Then again, a promise that I made years ago. I was younger then. I’ve changed since then. I don’t care about that shit anymore.

That’s it. I start leaning in. To feel my lips against his, and finally give in to him. Then...

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He grunts, rolling his eyes back into his head as his phone goes off. Facetime. My body leans back in a mix of defeat and relief. I rub my eyes and my face, and hear the sound of JJ answering. “What’s up?” I pretend to shuffle up to JJ, although our legs were still touching anyway. “You’re interrupting-” “The movie,” I rush, feeling the need to cut JJ’s sentence off. “So you don’t wanna come over?” Ki erupts from the background. With a piece of pizza in each of their hands, I realize I do. Being with them, and their cock-blocking asses sounds perfect. A glace comes from the boy next to me. His eyes screamed no. Every part of my body agreed with him. My brain, however, disagreed. “Sure.” His eyes widen. Another eye roll. “We’ll be there in 30.” And he hangs up.

“Why do we need 30 minutes?” I laugh, standing up and gently folding the blanket poorly. I turn down the tv before turning it off. Like a child, I notice JJ with a rather grumpy look on his face. “Come on, you’re not that upset are you?” I ask, trying to hold in my laughter. “I’m pretty pissed Y/N I’m not gonna lie,” he says with a half smile creeping. “We still have time... 30 minutes to be exact...” His hand reaches over to my arm. His soft fingertips slide from my elbow, down to my hand. With that comes a pull. I land perfectly on his lap. A leg either side of his. I try and contain my thoughts. I cannot control my hands as they sit on his face. It’s hard to keep my head straight when JJ’s hands run up and down my thighs. All I can think about is the thin clothing between our crotches. So little, yet way too much. I close my eyes for a second. Just to absorb the sensation. Then it’s time for reality. “Not now.” I whisper. A heavy breath leaves him. “Fine, but you owe me.” As much as I’d love to deny it, it’s promise I’m more than willing to keep. I pull my head away from his, presenting my pinky finger to him. A smile, isn’t cute to me at all, gleams; it radiates. So much so that its contagious. Our pinky’s lock. “Yeah?” The blend of his smile and tone screams extreme excitement. “Cross my heart Maybank.”

John B’s house was now clean. I don’t think I’ve seen for the floor for months. Although I don’t blame him for the way he’s lived for the past few months, It was beginning to get a bit much. He very persistent. I know he’s still waiting for his father to come home. That being said, Kiara clearly was the one who cleaned. “Wow, the shitty smell has faded,” I hit JJ as those words fall from his mouth. That boy has zero filter. “It looks great, I’d love to know how much you helped though Johnny,” I assure him with a smirk, nudging John B on the shoulder.

“So, what are we doing?” I ask. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realised that I probably didn’t want to know. John B says nothing, just simply forced a smile. Jesus Christ. Instead I look at Kiara. “He said Sarah’s information gave a lead. He wants us to follow it.” I look down at my outfit. I still have my fucking nightwear on. I should’ve known. I’m the stupid one here. Damn. I actually thought we would maybe just sleep for once.

With John B in the drivers seat and Kiara in the passenger, it left Pope, JJ and I in the back. I found myself staring at the stars flying past as we drove. The Outer Banks is a totally different place at night. It’s beautiful. It’s also scarier and creepier, but we cross those bridges when we get to them. “Hey,” JJ nudges me gently with a whisper. “You alright?” I nod slowly. I wouldn’t say this to John B, but honestly it’s worrying. This whole thing has become an obsession. I know it’s his dad, and I know he misses him like crazy, but is there really a chance he’s alive? And why has this whole thing been so mysterious and chaotic? “What’s up with you two?” It’s only when I hear Pope’s voice that I remember that we’re back as a group right now. “Are you feeling left out?” Is JJ’s response. I try and keep my smile contained. He just has this tone, and facial expression, where you can’t take him seriously. “I didn’t know you felt that wa-”

“What the fuck John B?” Kiara snaps in an angry mumble. Before the van even stops Ki opens the door and hops out. We haven’t been driving for long, so we can’t be far. Kiara, with an extremely miserable face, hops into the back with the rest of us. I go to ask, but I see Sarah Cameron climb into the front passenger seat. What is this boy playing at? “Oh shit,” I whisper in JJ’s direction. A slight chuckle comes out, purely amazed at the balls on this boy. “Hi guy’s!” Sarah smiles enthusiastically. I feel somewhat obligated to respond. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve never had a massive problem with her. “Hey Sarah.” I feel bad for both sides. John B shouldn’t put Kiara into these situations as he knows she doesn’t like her. Then again, I think Ki needs to not be so rude sometimes. Right now, that’s not going to happen. Might as well just enjoy the awkward car journey.

Sarah and John B giggle away in the front as if they have been life long friends. The rest of us, not including Kiara, sent awkward eyes each other’s ways. Ki sulked silently. So I go back to staring outside. It’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to be free. The Outer Banks area is all I know. My family may ‘have money’, but our trips have always been within an hour’s drive. There’s a world beyond this. There is so much more to see and explore. Maybe that’s why we’re all so hung up on these mini impossible adventures. We’re craving something more.

John B’s plan, he said, was simple. A clue has led us to an area of green. “There has to be something here. We’re close. I can feel it,” his words sound hopeful, despite the wobbly tone to his voice. “Can’t we do this in the morning? We’re not going to find anything in the pitch black,” Pope was right. But John’s desperate. I would be too. “We’ll just have a quick look around,” he promises. He wanders to the back of the van, and takes out some torches. “I think we should split up into three pairs,” when Sarah speaks, I can automatically feel the rage coming off of Kiara. With an excessive eye roll, she might as well have just said something. Everyone else must’ve seen it, but it get’s ignored. Probably best not to fight in the darkness, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees. I send a quick smile Sarah’s way. “Okay. So... I’ll go with Sarah. You and JJ, and Kiara and Pope.”

“Don’t look so smug,” I warn the smirking JJ as we separate from the others in our direction. It’s pretty typical for us to be paired, but we also do make the best team. With a torch, I look around as if I know what I’m looking for. “This is going to be impossible,” I grunt already in defeat. I really want to help John B, but I don’t even think he’s helping himself at this point. How long is this going to go on for? “Do you think he’s alive?” JJ asks in a whisper. It’s a question, I think, we’ve all been too afraid to ask. John’s answer is simple. We wouldn’t be searching for clues in the middle of the night if he didn’t. I hesitate. As I shake my head, my heart breaks a little. I wish I did. It would make things a little easier. “Me neither.”

Although being surrounded by trees at night is usually the scene of a horror movie, it’s rather beautiful. Scary, but beautiful. Around 15 minutes has passed since we split from the others and no one has found anything; I assume anyway. There is zero service on our phones, so really we have no idea, but my gut is telling me that there’s nothing to find. “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with G,” I smile. For about 5 minutes, we’ve been playing I-Spy. Perhaps at the hope of us ‘spying’ something we usually wouldn’t spot. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. I’ve been the one annoyingly asking, and he’s just been playing along to humor me. “I swear to god Y/N if it’s grass...” He warns. Like I said, we’ve seen nothing but the wilderness. “My turn.”

As someone who pretty much refused to play, I was interested to see what better he could do. There’s nothing to see. “I spy something beginning Y.” Okay. I immediately start looking around, into the darkness. This is only I-Spy, but I need to win. JJ is one cocky mother fucker. I turn to him and frown. “Y? You know you have to actually be able to see this thing right?” I finish my sentence. Two hands go to my waist, guiding me backwards. “It was “You up against a tree, naked.” And I was. Well, I was pressed against the tree. My heartbeat went from a normal pace, to almost having a sudden heart attack in seconds. I open my mouth to speak, but no words seem to come. What is wrong with me? “I make you speechless,” he leans down to my ear and whispers. I still say nothing. As I finally feel words ready to be released, I get interrupted. And no, not by JJ.

We walk back to the van in silence. Trying to hold everything in, I restrain my need to smile and let out a giggle. I’m thankful to see the others. “How did the searching go?” John B asks as we finally become a group again. “We didn’t find anything,” A big part of me wished we would’ve found something. Not that me and JJ were properly looking, but it would’ve been nice to come back with some hope. “I’m sorry guys. We should’ve waited until the morning to look around,” Unsure if anyone else saw what I did, I glance around. Sarah - only for a second - nudged her hand against him. I can’t help but find it cute.

Once we dropped Sarah and Pope home, we all went back to John B’s as planned. “You two can take the bed,” he, the gentleman he is, gestures towards the bedroom. John B’s dad’s room is locked. “I don’t mind sleeping-” “Just take the bed,” his voice, which was quite assertive, was joined by a smile. Without even thinking, I wrap my arms around John. “We will find something,” I assure him. He need to believe it, whether I do or not. I kiss him on the cheek. “I love you John.” In true JJ fashion, he joins in on the hug. “Wow I love you guy’s too.” “Hey! I wanna join,” I chuckle as Kiara swerves herself into the huddle. “Okay, that’s enough!”

So I lay there; just staring at the ceiling. Kiara is already asleep. I’m jealous. I’ve tried. It’s hard to sleep with all these thoughts going through my head. There’s too much going on.

‘Are you awake?’ I text JJ. Within seconds I get a reply.

‘Do you need some company ;)’ I roll my eyes, more at the fact that he knows I do.

‘You gotta get your mind out the gutter ;)’

My stomach turns at the response. I read it over and over, just to get it to stick. The picture those words paint in my head should be illegal. Words like that should be a crime. I’ll just read it once more.

‘I’d rather have my head between your legs’.

How does he expect me to sleep after that? I try and keep my eyes closed, but the only way they do is if I squeeze them shut. I hear quiet footsteps. When I let my eyes go, I see JJ tip-toeing into the bedroom. My body sits itself up. “What are you doing?” I ask with haste. His face becomes clearer as he gets closer. “Didn’t you get my text?” He smirks, making my stomach flip just like a gymnast on a trampoline. I refuse stay speechless like earlier. He does not have this affect on me or my body. “Yeah but-” “It’ll help you sleep,” He shrugs, lifting the blanket slightly. “JJ.” I whisper, stopping as soon as an index finger starts trailing up my leg. I want to resist. I’m sure I can. It would be so much easier if I actually wanted to. He gets closer to the top of my thigh. I start asking myself, what if I just let it happen? Just one more time? It can’t hurt. “Y/N.” I was so caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t notice how close JJ’s head was to mine. When our eyes locked, I knew; I knew there was only one way this was going to go.

I pull his lips down onto mine. I hate admit it, but the main thing that came to mind was ‘finally’. JJ doesn’t hesitate to start lining kisses from my lips down to my neck. Forgetting where I am, more importantly forgetting the fact that Kiara was inches away, I let out a slight moan. I immediately cover my lips. He lets out a deep but quiet laugh. “Shit,” I feel my cheeks begin to redden, and I’m instantly thankful for it being dark. “I have that affect on people,” shaking my head, I push him gently. “Yeah yeah.”

I hardly realized at first, but I was pushing his head lower. If I’m being honest, I was getting desperate now. I need him. Now. The tips of his fingers hook around the outsides of my shorts, smoothly down my thighs in the process. He didn’t hesitate removing my underwear quickly after, placing it next to the bed on the floor.

A soft kiss gets placed on the inside of my thigh. I was already wet. Possibly the worst thing would be for him to know that he now has this hold over my body. A temporary hold. It won’t last. Another kiss, closer to my heat now. I wished to shout at him. He’s a teasing asshole. One more, the last one, gently exactly where I desired him. “Fuck,” he whispers, so attractively. His hand grips both of my thighs, pulling me closer to him. He attaches his lips to my throbbing heat. A deep breath exits my mouth. My hand goes straight to his hair, scrunching my fingers and pulling. Every fiber of my being wanted to moan. The pleasure shooting through my body was immense. As his tongue swirls with skill, he sends my body into a growing frenzy. Perhaps it’s the build up. Whatever it is, it feels amazing. His tongue starts concentrating mainly on my clit. Between every suck, every nibble, my stomach started building a tight knot already. My thighs clamp around his head, which he opens back up without interrupting his work. If I’d have known how good he was at this, maybe I would’ve given in a little sooner. “Oh my,” I whisper as quietly as I can. My breaths were loud enough. His arms hook a tighter hold on my thighs to keep my in place, as my body moving uncontrollably. I was so close. I knew he could feel it too. The knot begins to tighten, excitement growing more and more. And I let go, bringing a release that - although was only growing for a day - was much needed. I press my mouth against my arm to contain the majority of my moan. He gracefully lets me ride out my high, until I’m even more of a heavy-breathing mess beneath him.

He unhooks himself. I can’t help but smile massively at him as his face comes into view. “Don’t,” I stop his words with a whisper. His eyebrows raise. I do wish he wouldn’t always have that fuckboy smile on his face. “Go back to the couch,” I nudge him on the shoulder. As quietly as he can, he gets up off the bed. He comes close to my ear once more. “Bet you can sleep now.”

And I did.

Tag list:

@nevinna

If you are interested, here’s the link to Part Three :)

#jj obx #outer banks jj #jj maybank #jj mayback x reader #jj outer banks #jj outer banks smut #jj maybank smut #obx smut #obx jj x reader #obx jj smut

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inevitably-johnlocked · 4 years

Note

Okay, so my ask was about fanfics where either John or Sherlock hallucinates and sees the other one after him (allegedly?) dying. As in, actually hallucinates, not mistakes a real one for a hallucination. Have you encountered anything like that?

Anonymous said to inevitably-johnlocked: hi! i hope you're doing fine! i feel really bad for asking, but i really suck at searching, and as i see everyone asking you, i wanted to see if you could help me, if you dont want to, its fine, i feel like im taking adventage of you... im searching for fics post TRF in which John hallucinates with Sherlock, or fics in which Sherlock comes back but John cannot believe it because he hallucinated with him ... im sorry again for bothering you! hope you have a nice day

Hi Lovelies!!

Ahhh, I don’t have a LOT that have this premise, so I’m just going to give you all of the fics I have tagged with hallucinations :) I do suggest “The Quiet Man”, which has this as the primary plot point (down below) and it’s a long one so I think that will best suit you requests, but DO check out all of the others on this list! <3

And as always, Lovelies, if you have something more to what my Nonnies are looking for, please suggest them!

HALLUCINATIONS

Hallucinations can't open doors by Bespectacled dreamer (K+, 1,330 w., 1 Ch. || Reunion, Hurt / Comfort, Friendship, Hallucinations, John’s Wedding, Light Humour) – In which John gets married and Sherlock gets a broken nose.

Quite Contrary by Hollyesque (T, 1,805 w., 1 Ch. || HLV Fic, Sherlock Whump / After Mary Shot Sherlock, Hallucinations / Flashbacks / PTSD, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Lestrade POV, ) – A short one-shot, alternate scene to Greg's hospital visit in HLV. Instead of Sherlock disappearing, Greg is faced with an unexpected reaction to a hospitalized Sherlock and winds up figuring out something that he really would have rather not known.

Bitter Nights Turned Sweet by Hyliare (T, 4,076 w., 1 Ch. || Pre-Slash, Insomnia/Hallucinations, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, POV Present Tense John Watson, Cuddling/Snuggling) – Sherlock has always had trouble sleeping; he hasn't always had someone in his life willing to help.

Between Asleep and Awake by katydidit (K, 4,309 w., 1 Ch. || Friendship, Sick Fic, Post-TRF / Reunion) – John is sick. Incredibly, extremely, dangerously sick. Plagued by a high fever, he begins to hallucinate, start seeing things that aren't really there. Because they can't be there. Can they?

A Is For Aftermath by ElvendorkInfinity (T, 10,567 w., 1 Ch. || Injury / Whump, Hurt/Comfort, Friendship/Pre-Slash/Bromance/Platonics, Hallucinations, Introspection, Insecure / Worried John, Big Brother Mycroft, Alternating POV, Anxious Sherlock, Self-Deprecating, Mildly Possessive Sherlock, 3G Moment) – John is still hallucinating, Sherlock cannot sleep, and Lestrade has a new case for them. But will life at 221B ever be able to return to normal? Epilogue to M is for Moriarty.

I Will Take Care Of You by SailorChibi (T, 16,664 w., 15 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Sick Sherlock, BAMF John, BAMF Lestrade, Reunion Fic) – Two years after Sherlock's death, John comes to find him on the sofa. Wounded and ill, Sherlock is convinced he's hallucinating and refuses to share any details about Moran or the fact that Mycroft has been compromised. That doesn't stop John from stepping up and taking care of the last of Moriarty's web, BAMF-style.

Wonderful, Etcetera. by VictoryCandescence (T, 16,955 w., 3 Ch. || Wonderful Life AU || Alternate Timelines, Brotherhood, Homophobia, Suicidal Ideations, Mentions of Drug Use, Friendship, Different TRF, Sherlock’s Past, Victor Trevor is Past Boyfriend, Depression, Hallucination?, Love Confessions, Christmas, First Kiss) – Sherlock thinks everyone would be better off if he had never existed, including and especially himself. When he finds himself in a world in which his wish has been granted, he begins to think perhaps even he could be wrong – but it takes an unlikely chaperone to make him not only observe, but understand.

I Think I've Come A Long Long Way To Sit Before You Here Today by ArwenKenobi (T, 18,251 w., 3 Ch. || Grief/Mourning, Passage of Time, Major Character Death, Alternating POV, Sherlock Whump, Pining Sherlock, Hospitalization, Coma, Revenge Murders, Hallucinations, Love Confessions, Brutal Accident, Mystrade, Ghost John) – One year after John is killed Sherlock starts to wonder whether John has actually gone anywhere.

A Home for Us by sussexbound (M, 30,581 w., 12 Ch. || Scars, Bedsharing, Grief, Doctor John, Hurt/Comfort, Post-TRF, Implied/Referenced Torture, Sherlock POV, Pining Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation, Heavy Emotions, Clingy Sherlock, Hallucinations, Disassociation, Emotional Turmoil) – He has been on the road for two years, and he is exhausted. He’s almost accepted that he will never see London (John) again—almost. But then there are nights like tonight, where he is weak, and all he can think of is the warmth of the flat they once shared, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the teasing smile playing at the corner of John’s lips, the boxes of half-eaten Chinese takeaway balanced precariously in their laps. He aches at the memory of it, at the realisation that it is something he may never experience again.

Impossible to Feign by achray (M, 49,204 w., 12 Ch. || TRF Rewrite / Reverse Reichenbach, Suicidal Ideations / Discussions, Drug Use/Abuse, Mutual Pining, Friends With Benefits, John Accepts his Sexuality, Anxious Sherlock, Meddling Mycroft, Depression, Hallucinations, Secret Agent John, BAMF John, Reunion, Make-Up Sex, Ambiguous Ending) – Sherlock leant forward, his long fingers curving round to grip John’s.“I won’t let him win,” he said, eyes hard. “I will do whatever it takes to get you out.”

Lunar Landscapes by J_Baillier (M, 57,046 w., 21 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || S3/TAB Fix-It, Slow Burn Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Confessions, Drugs, Pain, Medical, Injury, Sherlock Whump, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Romance, Secrets, Tragedy, Trauma, BAMF John, Doctor!John, Drug Addict Sherlock, Injured Sherlock, Grieving John, Idiots In Love, Protective John, POV John Watson, PTSD Sherlock, Sherlock is a Mess, Medical Realism) – An accident forces John to face the fact that Sherlock's downward spiral had started long before his flight to exile even left the tarmac.

The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel (CanadaHolm) (M, 72,684 w., 18 Ch. || Post-THoB, John Whump, Protective Sherlock, Guilty Sherlock, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD John, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Suspense, Virus, Sickfic, Big Brother Mycroft) – They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril. They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear. Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods. Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him.

The Summer Boy by khorazir (T, 94,706 w., 6 Ch. || Post S3/Post TAB/Alternate S4, Friends to Lovers, Asexual Sherlock, POV Sherlock, Flashbacks, Bullying, 1980′s Kid Sherlock, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Inexperienced Sherlock, Grief/Mourning, Pining Sherlock, Case Fic, Sherlock’s Past, Awkward Conversations, Anxious Sherlock) – About half a year after the fateful events at Appledore, Sherlock and John embark on a private case in Sussex. For Sherlock, it’s a journey into his past, bringing up memories both happy and sad that he has locked away for almost thirty years. For John, it means coming to terms with the present – and a potential future with Sherlock. Part 1 of the The Summer Boy series (possibly Imaginary Friend)

Against the Rest of the World by SilentAuror (E, 151,714 w., 20 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Post-TRF, Hiatus Fic, POV First Person Sherlock, Present Tense, First Kiss/Time, Big Brother Mycroft, Escaping from Capture, Soft Sherlock, Toplock, Insecurity, Infidelity, Travelling, Introspection, Pining Sherlock, Depression, Fantasies, Yearning for the Past, PTSD Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation) – Sherlock has been away from London for nine hundred and twelve days and counting, and has no idea what sort of reception to expect when he finally returns.

The Quiet Man by ivyblossom (E, 157,369 w., 58 Ch. || Post-TRF, John First POV, Grief/Mourning, Angst, Present Tense, Imaginary Sherlock) – "Do you just carry on talking when I'm away?"

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #my fic recs #hallucinations #Anonymous

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l8rhader · 3 years

Photo

It was Tuesday which meant it was Losers Family Game Night. Except, as far as most of the Losers knew, Eddie Kaspbrak had a study group that he just couldn’t get out of.

In truth, he had needed a minute. And a drink. And a quiet walk around the city. All that had done for him was solidified his realization. He needed to get his shit together. For over a decade, he’d pined. He’d watched as Richie went on a never-ending string of increasingly frustrating bad dates. He listened as he bitched about each of them after they’d all, inexplicably, failed to realize how wonderful he was. At 22, in his senior year of college and living with his six best friends in a rented house just off campus, he was really, truly living, and- He’d had enough waiting. He wanted Richie.

He headed back to the house and snuck in the backdoor, heading up the kitchen stairs to sit, cross-legged on Richie’s bed, and just waited, picking at a tiny hole at the bottom hem of his faded old T-Shirt with the demon car. He didn’t want to deal with Game Night or anyone else until he saw Richie.

Downstairs, the rest of the Losers Club were chatting happily and setting up the board for a friendly and Not-At-All-Competitive-Beverly-Remember-What-Happened-Last-Time game of Monopoly. Richie stood up from the ottoman and moved for the stairs. “Hang on, guys, don’t start without me. I just want to change into sweats,” he said, adding “Stan, pull the-”

“Shoe,” he predicted, plucking it out of the box from under Beverly’s fingers as she huffed, reaching from the couch behind him, nearly knocking the wind out of Ben with an accidental kick to the gut, securing the Top Hat for herself before Stan could swipe it. His call doubled as an encouragement to getting him out and back. “Got it,” Richie shot him a thumbs-up behind his back. “Hurry, it’s already 6,” he called, knowing that, at this rate, they were going to be up until way later than he’d like. He had work in the morning, even if no one else had class until noon.

Richie was already upstairs and opening the door to his room, though. He already had the top of his jeans unbuttoned, heading to his dresser for something more comfortable. He let them drop, stepping out of them in just his boxers.

Momentarily stunned by the situation he found himself in, Eddie found his voice quick enough. “Hey Richie,” he said quietly. “Can we talk?”

Jumping backward and knocking his dresser drawer shut on his finger, though managing to come up with the pants he’d come in search of, Richie yelped. “Ow! Fuck,” he hissed, popping the injured digit into his mouth instinctively. “Eds, what-” He stopped, looked down at himself, and immediately felt his face flush hot. “What’s up?” he asked, covering himself up with the hastily retrieved garment before realizing he could indeed put them on.

“I need to say something to you and I need to say it all before you interrupt me so can you be uncharacteristically quiet for like 5 minutes before you say anything that’s going to make me potentially jump out of your bedroom window in embarrassment,” Eddie said, taking a sharp intake of breath before adding a quiet, “please?”

Brows furrowed behind his glasses, Richie moved to his bed and sat beside Eddie. “Of course,” he said, fighting off the instinct to point out that anything that was going to take Eddie five minutes to say would take 30 from anyone else- maybe 15 from him, but what’s 10 minutes between friends, right? “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” he said quietly, picking at his cuticle before dropping his hands into his lap. He looked over at Richie, who was looking at him so softly that he could hardly stand it and stood up. “Can you not look at me while I say any of this? I can’t deal with your face and those big fucking eyes staring at me while I try to put my thoughts together because if I do, Richie, I swear I’m never going to get through this,” he said as he started to pace.

Richie stared up at him incredulously for a moment, wondering just what in the hell he’d gotten himself into, before shaking it off. “Sure. Whatever you need,” he said, plucking the plush beaver Eddie had won him at the carnival one year. At the time, he may have buried it under a dirty joke or ten, - and by may have, he absolutely did, but it made Eddie laugh that big, open laugh that always twisted a knot in Richie’s gut he couldn’t place at the time but he definitely had figured out by now, so it wasn’t for nothing- but it was, and remained to the day, one of his most prized possessions.

It appeared, though, that Eddie didn’t need Richie’s agreement for any of this. “I mean, how couple I possibly focus when you’re there and you look like that and you’re my best fucking friend and you just get whatever it is that I’m trying to say without me having to try which is impressive considering that I try really fucking hard all the time and you’re always there! And you always play along! And you’re-” he looked back at Richie and clenched and unclenched his fists quickly. “I just don’t get it and of course you’re going to say no because, I mean, you’re you and why would you even want to so it doesn’t-”

“Eds, I don’t mean to interrupt this conversation you’re having with yourself when you did ask for five minutes but,” he said, standing up and placing the stuffed animal back on his bed with a lightly confused expression, “you haven’t actually said-”

“AND THEN, here you are, six-fucking-two and cheekbones and shoulders and hands and-” he spluttered, struggling, “and-and-and I can’t even focus on anything at all because you’re this fucking hot AND you’re quite possibly the funniest person I’ve ever met, despite all of the fighting and calling me names that are absolutely mortifying but I don’t hate as much as I say I do because I know that it’s endearment from you,” he said, taking the hand that he hadn’t even noticed Richie had reached out to him. He rolled it thoughtfully in his own hand and smiled. “But, then, you have to be such a fucking idiot, like there’s not a brain under that perfect mop of curls you call hair, and go on all of these stupid dates with these stupid assholes who don’t see how sweet and smart and brave and funny and gorgeous you are and I have to wonder why the fuck it’s always them and not me when I’m right fucking here. And every time one of these shitbrained lowlifes breaks your heart, I end up here in this exact spot, surrounded by your dirty laundry, wondering what in the hell happened to make you ignore what was right in front of your face the whole damn time; trying to figure out why it’s them and not me because I swear if I had you, I’d never let you go.” Eddie took another breath that might have been a little huffier than he’d intended, but he was mad. He was madly in love with Richie. So sue him if he thought that it was stupid that, after over ten years, he was going to have to admit it before he, maybe literally, exploded.

Even though he was hearing every word and, practiced as he was in the art of Eddie-fication, Richie was having trouble following. “I need something a little more linear here, Eds. Give me something to go on.”

Give him something to go on, he did. Eddie launched himself onto his tiptoes, arms draped over Richie’s shoulders as he kissed him. If Richie had had any warning at all, he might have been quicker on the uptake. He settled into the kiss quick enough, pulling Eddie up into his arms eagerly. It still wasn’t close enough for Eddie. He wound one hand into Richie’s hair, adjusting his neck for a better angle.

“God, why are you so fucking tall?” he panted when he finally came up for air. “One of us is gonna end up needing a chiropractor if we keep this up,” he added.

Letting his hands wander lower, he gripped the back of Eddie’s thighs and hoisted him up so they were a little closer to even and kissed him again. “Better?” he asked, despite feeling pretty confident that it was.

Richie smiled at him. That was sort of what he thought. “You drive me insane, too,” he said, moving his strong hands to Eddie’s biceps and pulling him in closer. “And I love you, too.”

Eddie looked up at him, quietly stunned. He thought back over everything he’d said but he was pretty sure that he’d left that bit out. “You-”

“That was the general takeaway of your rant, right? Because, honestly, Eds, it was a little all over the place but there was a good bit of mentioning different physical attributes, some jealousy and frustration with my past dating experiences, some mentioning of things other than my body, but,” he drew his lips into a straight line and shrugged, “to be fair, I’m sure you had a speech but I came in here and dropped trough and shot that all to shit,” he laughed, getting a slight blush from Eddie, “followed by a good deal of insulting which is Spaghetti-Speak for I love you.”

Richie leaned forward, wrapping his arms tightly around Eddie’s waist. “Is it?” Eddie asked, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t had much of a plan past this part.

Nodding, Richie leaned back a little. “I’ve wanted to be your boyfriend for a long time,” he admitted. Beneath his hands, he could practically feel Eddie vibrating with excitement. “That is, if you want me, too?”

A bright smile crept along Eddie’s face, initiating those dimples Richie liked so much he could fucking scream. “Of course, I want you,” he said, letting his hands rest wrapped tightly in the buttons of his shirt. “I want you more than anything else I can think of.”

“Good. Because you’re stuck with me, my man,” he said, swaying them both back and forth happily, a slow dance. Then, realizing what he’d said and the implications of it, he simply smiled. “My man.” Eddie leaned up on his tiptoes and kissed him once more, pulling him in by his shirt before hooking his arms around his neck. From the living room, there was a chorus of shouts for Richie to hurry the fuck up. “Are you gonna come down with us? Because I don’t want to stop this, but-”

Eddie released a heavy sigh. “Go,” he groaned, shoving him out the door and toward the steps. It was stupid, he realized, waiting this long. Grinning broadly as he watched Richie pad down the stepsHe ducked toward the front door and opened it, pulling Richie toward him as he closed it, giving them the option of making it seem like Eddie had just gotten home. Still, his hand in Richie’s felt right. The way Richie had instinctively moved his hand to Eddie’s hip might have made his heart skip a beat as he hovered closer, obscured from the Losers by the wall with their coat rack on it.

Leaning in, Richie captured Eddie’s lips with his own, pressing himself flush against him. It was exhilarating. He had never in a million years thought that it would happen like this, if it happened at all. He thought there would be some long, pitiful conversation. Some dramatic scene. He’d expected tears and panic- maybe even some puke, on his end.

But this?

Kissing Eddie was easy. Having Eddie as a boyfriend- being Eddie’s boyfriend- that was going to be even easier. Effortless. Inevitable. He could feel it. He could tell.

Still, he had to stop. He had to pull back for a moment before he lost his head entirely and they got caught. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked, thumb grazing lightly over Eddie’s cheek.

Eddie leaned into his hand and looked up at him, a hint of mischief in those deep, brown eyes. He entwined his freehand in Richie’s hair, kissing him with an even more determined fire than he had the first time. Richie hummed in surprise against his mouth, then melted against him dramatically, like the snowman turning into the little boy in that soup commercial. He tilted Eddie’s face up and and leaned into him, feeling their hearts running a race. For once, Richie thought, just a part of him might be faster than Eddie.

When he finally pulled back, breathless and flushed, Eddie nodded. “I really, really do.”

“See you in there, then,” he said, kissing him lightly one last time for the moment, smiling briefly against his lips.

Hearing Stan call out to him again, Richie turned and practically bounced back into the living room Eyes wide, Eddie whispered a harsh, “Wait. I didn’t mean to tell them. I just meant yes to you!” Richie settled in against the pile of throw pillows on the far side of the room, and busied himself collecting his money from Stan and bitching at Mike for stealing his seat. “Richie? Richie!” Eddie continued to hiss, digging his fists into his hair. “Fuck.”

He peeked around the corner and took in the set-up. Bev and Ben were still on the couch but she was sitting up, poised for battle. Stan was on the floor with his back against the couch, knees against the coffee table, bank assembled in the lid and safely under the table where Beverly couldn’t reach without alerting him. Bill’s chair was still vacant, because he was still in the kitchen making drinks. Mike sat cross legged on the ottoman with Richie nested in the pillows beside him. His heart skipped another beat- it really needed to stop doing that- as he realized that that caught-the-canary look Richie had was because of him. He looked so happy. And fuck- he was, too.

“Was that the food?” Mike asked.

“No,” Richie answered, then paused. “Well, I mean. It’s something I plan on eating later,” he added quickly, raising his eyebrows as Eddie ducked out of sight. He laughed a little, knowing he was gonna hear it for that later.

From the entryway, there was the sound of a definite thunk of head against wall. “What was that?” asked, moving to get up, spooked.

“Probably the pasta coming to a boil,” Richie offered, situating his loudly colored money beside him. Beverly looked at him curiously.

Still missing the point, “What? What pasta?” Mike asked, looking over at the rest of the group as Bill came in from the kitchen with their drinks. “Didn’t we order pizza? I don’t-”

Once he’d freed his hands, handing Richie and Mike their beers, popping the open wine bottle down in front of Ben and Bev passing Stan his 7 and 7, Bill asked, “Richie, did you hit your head? How many f-fingers?” offering two individual fingers for him to focus on as he plopped down into his chair, taking a swig of his own beer.

“Three if I play my cards right,” Richie winked. Off to his left, Stan squinted at him. Not that it was any different from his normal schtick, per se, but there was something different about Richie. Bev picked up on it, too, swatting Stan on the shoulder and fixing him with a deliberate stare.

“Oh my God!” Eddie groaned, spinning in a circle. He buried his face in his hands. That wasn’t what he meant. He hadn’t-

“Eddie?” Ben asked, craning his neck to get a better angle to try to see into the entryway. “I thought he had that study group he couldn’t get out of tonight.”

Perking up, Bev leaned across the arm of the sofa, shouting, “Eds! If that’s you, get your ass in here!”

Eddie let one deep breath fill his lungs as he dropped his head back, closing his eyes. He was going to have to kill his boyfriend. Even with attack mode activated, he still smiled at the thought. The word boyfriend meant Richie which made him go warm all over. He shook it off and peeked back around the corner. “Hey, guys,” he said, sheepishly.

Bill turned around, more than a little shocked to find the seventh Loser home. “What g-gives?”

“You said you wouldn’t be home until super late tonight?” Bev asked, gesturing for him to come sit with her and Ben.

There was a chorus of agreement as he fully entered the room, arms folded protectively around his waist. He looked down at the floor, trying to avoid eye contact that would clearly give him away, until “Yeah, Spaghetti. What gives?” Richie said with a crooked smile, cocking his head to one side as he leaned back on his elbows.

“Fuck you, dude. I take it all back. Every fucking word,” Eddie growled, crossing to Richie and swiping one of the pillows out from under him to smack him in the gut with it. “You’re such a dipshit, you know that right? I meant yes to you not yes to whatever the fuck you took me saying yes to mean.” Richie opened his mouth, meaning to point out that the rest of the Losers were still in the room. Instead, all he could do was gape at his boyfriend. “Oh, fucking forgive me if I wanted to take a minute to enjoy the fact that I finally got over my shit, marched back here, and made a fucking move! Maybe I wanted to keep it between us for, oh, I don’t know ten minutes before you broadcast to all of our friends that I just asked you out.”

Richie blinked a couple of times, stunned. He held his hand up, preparing to count off on his fingers. “So, to recap, you came home completely unannounced-”

“I live here, asshole! Do I have to tell you all-”

Flexing his outstretched hand, Richie added his index finger to the list, “Started fucking yelling at me about my face, my dating habits, my laundry habits, and my mouth,” added a third, smiling as he glanced past Eddie at the shocked faces of their friends, “kissed me, started yelling at me again for being too fucking tall but if I’m not mistaken,” he said, letting his hand spring back to his chest with a loud thud, “I am the one who made the startling confession and did the boyfriend asking and then returned to the game night that you were invited to in the house that we share with our friends without so much as a fucking word past reiterating that you really did want to be with me,” he listed, counting them off on the three fingers he’d joked about just moments earlier. He reached up, and took Eddie’s hand. “You, light of my life and pain in my ass, are the one who came in here guns blazing and broadcasting it for all of these Losers. I was simply being casual!”

Eddie squeaked out a laugh. “As if! You came in with all of the jokes and the fucking commentary! What the hell did you think they were going to think” Something I plan to eat later? What the fuck, Richie? I swear-”

“Because you’re so cute, cute, cute, I could just eat you up, Spaghetti,” Richie said, tugging at his boyfriend’s hand, chewing at his lower lip.

Stan sighed, pulling the box out from under the table and starting to count out Eddie’s starting pile. “He’s always talked about you like that,” he said flatly.

“Yeah, as s-soon as you came in we would have just let it g-go as him being a dickhead,” Bill laughed, reaching into his pocket for his wallet and pulling out a fifty, taking the one Mike was flagging toward the table and tossing them both at Ben. Bev and Stan both dug through their Monopoly money and tried to pawn that off as fair, receiving nothing but a disapproving tut from Ben, now $200 richer- in real currency, even.

Settling back into his spot, Stan glanced over at his friends, thoroughly happy for them. “So, if you two are done, we were just starting on Monopoly and I had the car set aside just in case,” he offered, sticking the pawn on the stack of brightly colored bills and handing them up to Eddie who just stared blankly at him. “I open tomorrow. In or out?”

Richie swiped the pieces and laughed. “C’mere,” he said said, a little roughly, tugging Eddie down to sit between his legs. Snuggling back against his boyfriend, he smiled, rocking back and forth a bit.

All it took was one subtle moment- Richie pressed his lips to Eddie’s neck gently, whispering in his ear and Eddie shut his eyes smiling happily. Mike cooed some nonsense about it being ‘about damn time,” and Eddie blushed, admitting that, yeah, it was. That’s all it took for Stan to lock eyes with Eddie, claiming that now he was vulnerable. The peace was broken with unrelenting trash talk as Eddie took first roll.

“Is it a g-good idea to play Monopoly, of all things, the day they actually g-get together?” Bill asked Ben quietly as he walked back to the kitchen to grab the second round. As oldest, he always went last for every game, making him the barmaid, most nights.

“It’s not like they’ve never played together before,” Ben answered, watching the new couple with a gentle smile as his own girlfriend batted his hand away for distracting her. “Besides, Richie’s pretty calm with Monopoly.”

“It’s not Richie I’m worried about,” Bill said as Richie cursed. Eddie had given an evil laugh, teasing that Ben had always been on his side and, in throwing his head back, nearly concussed him. “Although, maybe I should be,” he laughed, shaking his head, passively wondering if, maybe, he could see the future or something because hadn’t he just asked-

#reddie #richie tozier #eddie kaspbrak #bill hader #finn wolfhard #james ransone #jack dylan grazer #it chapter 1 #it chapter 2 #it ch 1 #it ch 2 #stephen king's it #r + e #the losers club #it 2019 #it 2017 #he knew well enough #i fucked your mom

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midnightprelude · 3 years

Text

For @14daysdalovers from @oftachancer and I!

Pairing: F!Lavellan x Cassandra Pentaghast Rated: Teen Prompt: Ask me to stay Word Count: 2,043 Read here or on AO3!

Cassandra

It was the middle of winter, but she was sweating. Her fingers ached but she pressed anyway, wedging into the tight crevice-

“Oh, Creators,” she heard Lyanna sigh and she smiled. Worth it.

Cassandra leaned up on her elbows from the floor, setting the screwdriver to the side. It had taken them the better part of a week to transform what had once been Dorian’s room in the flat into a nursery. Lyanna’s cousin had left wood shavings all over her living room, hauling lumber up into the flat and sculpting it into the parts for a rocking chair and the crib that could connect and separate for the twins. Cassandra had spent her off hours from the office painting the walls, then installing soft-edged dimmable sconces and baby monitors and cloth mobiles, before child-proofing everything she could get her hands on.

“I think she likes it, eh,” Esha grinned.

Cassandra watched Lyanna pressing her fingers to her lips. “You weren’t supposed to see it until we were finished,” she chided softly, climbing to her feet. The room felt like a small forest. Warm wood and green walls. Shelves that looked like branches and clouds.

Cassandra set the screwdriver into her toolkit, wiping her hands off on her jeans, grateful for the summer lightness of the tank top. Outside, there would be snow in a few days, but in this room, it was warm from their labor.

“You- It’s-“ Lyanna glanced between the two of them, wrinkling her nose and wringing her hands. She was seven months into her pregnancy and looked as though she’d stuffed a watermelon under her shirt, the bulge stark against her thin frame. “It’s wonderful. You- All of this? You did all of this yourselves?”

“See,” Esha crossed his arms, leaning over the hand-made crib. “I told you we could have sprung for strippers.”

Cassandra snorted softly. “Yes,” she answered. “But if there’s anything you don’t like, we can change it. There’s time.”

“No,” Lyanna’s voice was shaking as she crossed to Cassandra, pressing her cheek to her shoulder blade, belly pressing up against her back. “No, Cass, it’s perfect. It’s so- Creators, are all of those toys handmade?”

“Your cousin,” Cassandra mumbled, “insisted that his kin shouldn’t be saddled with ‘shem corporatism’.” Only a few months before, Lyanna had been able to press flush against her. Now Cassandra could sometimes feel the twins kick her in the spine when they slept. Her tiny lover was a big spoon no matter the size of her belly. “It’s fortunate my uncle insisted I learn to sew.”

“It is fortunate,” Lyanna chuckled, nuzzling her nose against Cassandra’s back.

“The blocks are my doing,” Olivier’s voice called from the doorway, laden with takeaway boxes and bags. “Well, with some help. The tour bus was covered in sawdust for weeks, nearly sent Ril into a conniption.”

“Nearly,” Esha laughed. “If that was nearly, I’m genuinely afraid of what a real conniption looks like. He made me clean his harp with a toothbrush.” He grinned, resting his chin on his arms. “I thought for sure you’d spill the beans, but she looks genuinely surprised. Well done.”

“We can always get less lopsided stuffed animals when they leave,” Cassandra murmured, wrapping her arms back around Lyanna.

“Lopsided is perfect,” she chuckled, “I love them, each and every one.”

The words sent a curl of warmth through Cassandra’s core; she felt a smile curve her lips before she bit the inside of her cheek to control it. “Good.” She took a breath. “That’s good to hear.” She glanced across the room to find Lyanna’s cousin smirking. “Go away.”

“You’re welcome.” Esha hugged Lyanna on his way out the door. “Proud of you, asa'var'lin.”

“If I find either of you listening at the door, you’ll be in trouble,” Lyanna lifted her brows, kissing Esha’s forehead. “Save some food for the pregnant woman. The pickled onions in particular.”

“Those you can have,” he laughed, slipping out the door. “Ollie, she says she wants us to eat all the pickled onions!”

Cassandra rolled her eyes, uttering a sigh. “He talks so much.”

“He does,” Lyanna laughed brightly. “How long have you two been at this without me realizing?”

“Since they came to Val Royeaux for their tour.” Cassandra turned to wrap her arms around Lyanna, kissing her cheek. “The planning, in any case. We worked on some of it separately and pulled it all together in the last week.” She leaned back, studying Lyanna’s upturned face. Her sharp chin and kissable nose and pleasure warmed cheeks and bright, brilliant eyes. “I wasn’t sure which room it would be, but when Dorian elected to take the other lease… He loaned me his key so I could sneak in and take measurements while you were at work. You really didn’t suspect anything?”

“Well, perhaps something,” Lyanna admitted with a grin. “You’re not a very convincing liar.”

Cassandra shook her head. “You’re right. I’ve never really seen the point of pretending to do or be something that I’m not. But I wanted to do this for you, and I had a feeling if we told you, you would be on your hands and knees putting furniture together and breathing paint fumes. It’s alright?”

“More than,” Lyanna lifted on her toes to brush their lips together, eyes as green and shimmering as the freshly painted walls. “You know me too well. I love everything you’ve done, and that you did it with Esha and Olivier, and most of all…” She grinned, squeezing Cassandra’s hands. “Most of all, I love you. That you wish to be a part of not only my life, but theirs. It means everything.”

“I do,” she lifted Lyanna’s hands to her lips, kissing her fingers. “I want to, very much.” Cassandra cleared her throat. “It’s- I want to be with you for all of it. I’m aware it’s only been a few months, but this - us - Sometimes I can barely remember what it was like not to share my life with you.”

“What are you saying?” Lyanna lifted her brows, tilting her head curiously. “Of course you can be there.”

“I like making your tea in the mornings. I enjoy driving you to work and talking with you at the end of each day.” Cassandra brushed her thumbs over Lyanna’s fingers. “I miss you when we sleep apart. And when the twins come- I want to be able to help you with them. Not drive halfway across the city at odd hours. I want- I want to be with you. If that’s what you want.”

“You want to-“ Lyanna blinked, her brow furrowing. “Here? With… You’ll never get any sleep, once they come. At least I can take leave, for a time.”

“You forget I’ve raised multiple puppies. I’m more prepared for midnight feedings and sleepless nights than you are.” Cassandra watched her carefully. “Let me worry about what I want and what I can handle. What matters is whether or not you want me here. You don’t have to make a decision now. I only wanted you to know where I am, so you can consider it.”

Lyanna nodded, wringing her hands. “You wish to stay here. You want to-“ She closed her eyes, massaging her brows. “I didn’t realize you wished to- I hadn’t considered you might-“ Lyanna met Cassandra’s gaze, steady and serious. “Yes. So long as you keep your flat, at least for a while. In case… In case you decide it’s too much and want some space. Yes. Yes, if you’re sure.”

“You remember that I come with three appendages?” Cassandra thumbed her cheek. “It’s alright if I bring them here?”

“Please do,” she chuckled, “now that Dorian has officially moved out, we shouldn’t need to worry about allergies. I like waking up to a cold nose or a furry bum in my face in the morning.”

“I know you do, but also I have the dogs and the cat.” Cassandra bit the inside of her lip. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call my bum furry.”

“No, but Valentina’s is,” Lyanna rolled her eyes. “Fenedhis, I was speaking about your pets.”

“Oh, was that what you were doing?” Cassandra murmured innocently, trying to ignore the heat working its way up her neck into her cheeks. “So I shouldn’t try waking you with my bum in your face? Fuzzy. I would accept fuzzy. Like a peach. Yours is.”

“Mine is-“ Lyanna sniffed, crossing her arms at her chest. “What exactly are you getting at?”

Cassandra smiled despite herself. Somehow in a matter of months, she’d gone from fearing those consternated expressions to wanting to kiss Lyanna every time her nose wrinkled. “I love you,” she chuckled, smoothing her hands down Lyanna’s arms. “And I want to live with you and blend our lives and argue with you every day and every night about ridiculous things like how much I love your body. I want your children to grow up with Valentina and Alexei and Czyzy nuzzling them and giving them unconditional love and hopefully distracting them from the rabbit I made that has one ear shorter than the other.”

Lyanna seemed to melt before her, her features softening before her. She pressed her forehead against Cassandra’s shoulder, sighing as she wrapped her arms as tightly around her as she could manage. “Then stay,” she murmured, tilting her chin up to meet Cassandra’s gaze. “Stay. If you’re certain, I want you to stay.”

“I’m certain,” Cassandra kissed her forehead gently. “And I’ll keep my flat in case you change your mind. Until you realize you won’t.”

“I can start making room for you in my closet. You’ll need somewhere for all of those suits of yours.” Lyanna closed her eyes and stood still for a moment, arms wrapped around Cassandra’s shoulders. “I think I can have things sorted here by next weekend.”

“I can have things sorted,” Cassandra held her close. “You can tell me what to do and put your feet up while you eat pickled onions.”

“You are always sorting other people’s problems,” Lyanna leaned up to kiss her, lingering over her lips as her hands trailed down her back. “Just let me have this one little thing, make myself useful. And then I’ll have pickled onions and ice cream.”

That had been one of the most horrifying things Cassandra had ever witnessed. “You’re very useful.” She kissed her cheek. “And very beautiful.” She kissed her other cheek. “And very edible, somehow, despite all the onions.”

“They’re delicious,” Lyanna tutted, nudging her with her nose “I only just realized. The doctor says I need more salt. I won’t be distracted from my task by sweet nothings, though. I need to sift through my own belongings. Perhaps there are things I might not want you to find!”

“Like what?” Cassandra kissed her nose. “Your collection of bawdy magazines? I found those ages ago.”

“What?” Lyanna reddened, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t even have- Oh. Actually, I might. You were snooping, though.”

“I wasn’t snooping,” Cassandra laughed. “I was trying to find where you’d put your gray sweatshirt. It’s the only one that fits me.” She skimmed her hands down Lyanna’s sides. “One more reason it would be nice to have some of my things here.”

“Yes. Infinite sweaters and tee shirts for me to steal,” Lyanna chuckled, “though even those are getting a bit tight around the middle. Why don’t we eat and then we can clear out my room together?” She tilted her head. “Suitable compromise?”

“Yes.” Cassandra skimmed her fingers across a fallen bright red curl, tucking it back behind Lyanna’s ear. “You’re beautiful. Truly, wonderfully beautiful. I like the way you look, tight shirts and all.” She smiled, heat idling up her neck to her cheeks. “I like the way you look when sweaters stretch over you. I like the way you look when you’re slurping onions like a madwoman. I like you.”

“You’re terribly, horribly biased,” Lyanna rolled her eyes, wrapping her arms around Cassandra’s shoulders and stepping backwards from the room, fumbling with the doorknob behind her. “And I’m very glad you are.”

Cassandra kissed her temple as they headed down the hall. “As am I.”

#14DALovers #cassandra pentaghast #lyanna lavellan #cassandra x f!inquisitor #modern au #ask me to stay #midnight writes #oftachancer writes

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thejustmaiden · 4 years

Note

Oh no, I’m not the same anon from the VA! 😅 I also dislike that they tell antis not to watch it or to blacklist it. Why should I have to blacklist something that I enjoyed as a child just because I disagree with them? Why should I listen to them and not watch it? It irks me how they have the audacity to say that just because we don’t like their ship. I don’t think they understand how harmful this could be for people.

Oh then, my bad!! Hi again anyway! 🤗

You said it, nonnie. I can't tell you how many times I've seen certain Sessrin supporters tell us "if you don't like it, then stop watching." Hmmm I can't help but wonder if the tables were turned how they'd like it if fans were telling them the same. I mean, Sessrin may very well not go canon and I doubt some will take kindly to it.

I recently brought this same issue up in another answered ask of mine (maybe your last one? I'm losing track! lol), because it also irks me beyond belief. Why aren't we as viewers allowed to be critical of our entertainment? Take movie critics for example. They may give a movie they're reviewing an overall positive rating, but that doesn't mean that all of them enjoyed every single minute of the film. It's their job to praise the parts they liked, but it's also their job to discuss the parts they didn't like as much and point out areas that could be improved.

A lot of us fans who identify as anti-Sessrin are obviously invested in Inuyasha as much as the next fan. For many of us, it was our first-ever anime or maybe it's just that it brings back some really fond childhood memories. Whatever the case may be, it's clear that Inuyasha isn't just some show. It means a great deal to many of us in this fandom, and a lot of us (antis at least) feel that it would be a completely out of character move for Sessrin to go canon. It just wouldn't make one ounce of sense.

Even Sessrin shippers themselves will claim that there wasn't any foreshadowing while Rin was young, which is why you'd think they'd understand why we're so perplexed by the sheer possibility of a romantic future between the two. Then again I've seen conflicting reports, because there are times I'm not so sure I can take some of those shippers' word for it. That is when they make comments like "props to Rin for bagging the most handsome and powerful demon just by flashing a smile" because then it really makes you wonder. Granted, that's not verbatim but you get the gist. The takeaway message here is that she was just a girl and they're making inappropriate comments to imply Sessrin in fact started a lot earlier than they themselves claim would've been allowed.

Nowhere should Sesshomaru's opinion of Rin as a child factor into this ship's potential for going canon. What I think is happening is that they want us to think they don't believe there are any hints at a romantic future already planted in Rin's childhood, but it's evident that's not true at all. Admitting to that out loud would of course prove them wrong and they just can't have that, hence why you'll rarely see them make these kind of remarks in an openly public space. That's the case for Tumblr, at least, however Twitter and Reddit are a whole other kind of beast.

These stories we invest so much time and energy into are more than capable of impacting real people, believe it or not. I'm not gonna lie, since this sequel was announced I've been on Inuyasha mode pretty much every damn day. It's like I've gone back in time and I'm 13 all over again! Except this time around I'm not able to fully embrace it as I once did. That reason being because I'm an adult now who can understand the profound and far-reaching effects fiction can have on our lives. Why else do you think so many of us on here are as passionate and involved as we are? Our fictional stories are important to us because they reflect our real life stories. That's how they resonate with us!

So it really kills to me see that actual adult fans still don't seem to understand by now the strong links between real life and fiction. They will refuse to accept the truth even if it slapped them in the face.

In case some of you reading misinterpret my words and suggest I'm telling you shipping Sessrin is wrong, you're mistaken. I'm not sure how many more times I need to repeat myself, but I suppose once more wouldn't hurt? (Here we go- wish me luck!):

LIKE SOME OF YOUR VERY OWN SHIPPERS HAVE ADMITTED THEMSELVES, Sessrin wouldn't be appropriate in a real life situation. Because of that reason alone, it shouldn't be appropriate on a show aimed at a young audience either. That's it, that's literally it! Ship away if it pleases you, but just agree that it'd be safer to keep a ship with this particular dynamic to mature and/or adult-themed entertainment AKA not Inuyasha. So can we shake on that? Fist pump?? Blood oath?! (Too far? Lol)

Alrighty, nonnie, appreciate you stopping by again. Hoping I answered your ask the way you wanted and that this finds you well, dear!

#inuyasha #hanyo no yashahime #anti sessrin #anonymous asks #answered ask

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multific · 5 years

Text

Not a Player Anymore

Chris Evans x Reader

Summary: You knew he was a player, yet you fell for him, that was the first mistake. The second was that you actually made yourself believe that if you stay by his side, he’d notice and learn to love you.

Warning: Swearing, Angst

Chris was a player.

He loved the attention that women gave him. He had a different woman in his bed every night, sometimes even two.

And you, being his best friend had to be there for him. Even if it broke your heart.

You always wanted more than just friendship with him, when he wasn’t flirting with someone, he was the sweetest and most genuine person you have ever met. He always made you laugh and was kind to you.

You remember that in the beginning, before you knew about his lifestyle, you really tried to win him over and to become his girlfriend. You saw potential in him, he was an amazing uncle, he was good with animals and had the sweetest laugh. But that image of him crumbled when you went to the club with him Mackie and Sebastian. Sebastian told you everything about Chris and after a few shots, maybe a bit too much.

The once sweet, caring, handsome man became a player, unreliable mess. Although you never told him that.

And you don’t really know why you stayed after the fact. Maybe it was his blue eyes and his smile that convinced you to stay and be his friend.

And that you became one of his best as a matter of fact. He often came to you when he had problems or in need of advice. He often came to you when he was bored or needed to spend some time with someone.

He became that shameless friend who would make you come to his place, just so he can pretend that you are his wife so his one night stand would leave quicker.

It always broke your heart, both to see him with someone else and to know that it was normal to him. You remember one time he called you over because the girl he picked up the night before didn’t want to leave since she thought that it was more than a one night. When you got over there she yelled at him and in the end, she slapped you in the face. Of course, Chris apologized and tried to do everything to make it up to you.

And you don’t really know why you stayed after that.

Maybe it was the love that you began to feel for him. A hopeless one-sided love. You always wondered what will be the last straw. The last thing that he can do that will make you completely forget about him or that will make you confess everything for him.

You didn’t have to wait long though.

After three long years of friendship, three long years of you hoping for something that will never happen, he did it.

He managed to fuck up so badly, that it made you both yell your feelings at his face while leaving him behind forever.

You called him after a long day at work, you were desperate for some movie with him and a little alcohol and chocolate maybe, a nice relaxing day after a horrible and stressful week of work.

Of course he agreed and you headed to his place after work.

Since you knew were given a key to his place, you quickly walked in and you immediately heart the undeniable sounds of sex. Moaning, groaning and skin slapping against skin.

It wasn’t the first time you came over while he was with someone, but this time, you were pissed.

You talked to him about how tired you were. He promised a day where it was only you two and that bottle of wine you just brought. You heard the woman moan out his name and you thought you recognized it, but you were so full of anger, without even taking your shoes or jacket off, you stormed into the house and to his bedroom. They obviously heard you since you stormed down like a horde of buffalos would.

As you swung the door open you got another slap in the face but this was like a cold shower of reality. The man, the man you were in love with was not only in bed with any woman, but your best friend. The friend you told him about. The friend who knew about your feelings towards him. The friend who knew you for so long it felt like she was your sister. The same friend who comforted you when you cried over him was now on his bed naked. And there you stood, stunned watching them as they tried to dress up. You found your voice a second later.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt, please, continue.” you said and slapped the door behind yourself. You silently begged that he wouldn’t come after you. You knew that if he would start talking, you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself and you’d end up telling him everything.

You were nearly out of the house when Chris came after you.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Y/N?” you immediately stopped at his voice. All you saw was red. You were crying from both anger and the betrayal that you just felt.

“What? I told you I’d be over around six! And you not only fuck someone when you promised that we would have a relaxing night, but you are fucking my best friend! I came here to spend some nice time with you. You knew I was coming and yet you choose to do this instead, just how addicted are you?” in the middle of your yelling, Chris just stood there stunned, he never heard you raise your voice. Your friend arrived at the front door as well, trying to leave but you had none of it. “And you. Bitch of the year. You knew how I was feeling towards him! You knew I loved him and yet you just can’t keep your legs closed, what kind of friend are you?!” you turned to leave but Chris grabbed your wrist.

“Hey! Don’t leave, what feelings are you talking about? Y/N!” you jerked your hand back, making him let go.

“Don’t ever call me or look for me, I don’t want to see either of you ever again!”

And you stormed out, not looking back.

Of course after the incident, both of them tried to contact you, but you never picked up the phone or opened the door for them. You didn’t want to see their faces. You thought about moving away and starting a new life.

After about a week they both stopped trying to reach you, Chris even went to your workplace trying to talk but you were lucky and that day was your day off and your boss didn’t give him any information thinking that he might be a stalker of yours, you will forever be thankful for that to her.

***

Weeks, months and even a year passed.

And now, you were over it.

Only your memories of Chris was left and that empty void in your heart that he left. You thought about way you can make yourself feel full again. Maybe a new job, a new pet, a new relationship or a new car, new clothes? Nothing was inviting enough.

Then you heard a knock on your door.

Must be the takeaway. You thought as you stood from the couch to grab your dinner.

But it wasn’t the delivery guy, it was Chris.

You let out a long disappointed sigh. You didn’t want to talk to him. It already has been a whole year you thought he forgot about you just like you did.

“If you brought me my Chinese, I’ll take it, but if not, please leave.” you waited for a second and just as he opened his mouth a guy came up from behind him.

“Delivery for Miss Y/L/N.”

“Thank you!” you gave a nice tip for the guy and grabbed your food, you wanted to close your door but Chris’ foot was in the way. From behind the door, Chris heard your voice call out.

“Take your foot away or I’ll break it. You are trespassing. Don’t make me call the cops.”

“Please, I just want to talk!” he begged. You opened the door just enough to look at him.

“And what makes you think that I want to?”

“You left so abruptly on that day! I had so many things to say.”

“Too bad you’re thinking with your dick instead with your head, right? I really thought you noticed my feelings and this was your way of making me fuck off. If that was the plan, it worked. Now, leave, go, get out, never come back, forget me, my address, my phone number, everything and LEAVE!” you really hoped that he’d understand and leave once and for all.

“I-I, please just let me in, give me ten minutes to explain myself.” you let out an irritated groan. But you knew, he’d be back if you hadn’t let me speak, so you let him in. You were sitting at the table across from him eating your dinner like it was the normal thing to do while drinking your ice tea. You looked at your watch and then at him.

“You have two minutes, go.” you grabbed your fork again and waited for his excuse and explanation so you can finally close that chapter of your life.

“Ok. I did not know about how you felt for me. When Anna left that day she told me. I felt horrible. You knew how dense I used to be. But I changed. And I have been trying to talk to you for a year now. Now that I think back, I can see that you tried to make your feelings obvious to me, but it didn’t work. I remember when we went to the club one time and Seb complimented you, you wore that nice dark green dress, you looked stunning. And to be honest, I had and still have feelings for you. I was just an idiot and pushed them aside. But now, I want you, even as a friend is fine. Just-“

“Thirty seconds left.”

“I know that it is my fault that your heart was broken, and I get why you are cold with me. But I’m asking, no, begging you to take me back as your friend and let me prove my love for you.”

“Time’s up.”

You set there in silence, he assumed that you were thinking about his suggestion, and when you finally spoke up, his heart got broken into millions of pieces.

“You’d honestly think that after what you have done, I’ll waltz back to you. You embarrassed me, I felt both betrayed and stupid. I had such deep and true feelings towards you. I saw myself with you, I told myself that I will help you stop being a player, a playboy and become a real man. But instead, you turned into a pig. And I don’t care about the strangers that I had to get out of your house for you. I’m not talking about the woman who hit me because you lied to her. I’m talking about that bitch, Anna. She knew about my feelings, yet she choose to do that. You, I wasn’t really surprised, but she… she disappointed me. And the fact that you’d think that after it all, after everything I’d come back to you and fall in love with you again? Fuck no. And now, as you promised. Leave and never come back.” you were done. Done with it all. He was crying in front of you but you didn’t even feel sympathy for him.

“I will die without you, Y/N. You are everything to me.”

“Sounds like a you problem. Maybe next time, be honest with your feelings and don’t fuck everything that has legs and boobs and you’ll notice the real thing in front of you.”

“Please, one chance is all I need.”

“Don’t make me say things that I will regret just to make you leave me the fuck alone.”

“You can’t.”

“Don’t give me a challenge.”

“You can’t say anything that Mackie or Sebastian hasn’t said already when I told them why you left.”

“Chris, please just go. Find yourself someone for the night and forget me.”

“I stopped having one night stands.”

“Wow. What happened? Someone left you a nice disease? Or you finally managed to knock someone up?”

“No, and no. I realized that I’m in love.”

“Disgusting.”

“What?”

“The fact that you’d think I’d touch you even with a stick after I saw you with her.”

Chris didn’t know what to say to that. He was stubborn, yes, but it was obvious that you just said those things to make him leave, and he won’t give up so easily.

“I love you.” was his reply.

“Don’t.”

***

For the next week, Chris has been coming over to your place but you never let him in. He stood in front of your door for hours and then he left. Every. Single. Day. Didn’t he have a life?

But you were also surprised how determined he was, he stood there no matter what. However, when a storm happened, you couldn’t keep your cold, defensive façade up any longer.

As the rain poured and the wind blew you opened your door and yelled at him.

“For Christ’s sake, get in!” he didn’t need to be told twice. Like a lost puppy, he got into your house. “Wait here, I’ll get you a towel.”

You went to get him the towel while he took his soaked jacket and shoes off.

You threw the towel at him.

“Go take a shower. You will catch a cold.”

Without saying a word, Chris left to take a hot shower while you prepared a cup a warm tea for him.

He sat down right in front of you at the table, just like a few weeks ago when he came over. He slowly drank his tea.

“Thank you for letting me in.”

“You should have left, it’s not fun to stand in the rain.” you’d know. On the day you found him in bed with Anna, you did the same thing. And you got yourself a nice cold that lasted for a long time.

“I need to prove to you that I’m serious, that I’m not a player anymore. I’ll keep repeating it until you believe me.”

“I do.”

“Y-You do?” he looked so surprised.

“I believe you stopped. But I can’t see anything other when I look at you but the time I saw you with her.”

“I know that it’s something you find disgusting that I was with her. But I changed. I was such an idiot back then. You were right, I didn’t see the good when it was right in front of me. I’m not here to give a big speech about why I did it, I’m only here to ask for your forgiveness and to get you back into my life.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to get hurt, not again.” all that confidence that you built up during the year left, all you had was nervousness and fear in your heart. Fear that he might repeat, fear that he might go back, fear of another heartbreak. Just like the old saying fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. And you weren’t ready to be led by your nose and then thrown away.

“I can promise you that you won’t! I will do anything in my power and more. I want this to work, us. Give us a chance. Please, this is the first time in my entire life I have felt like this. It actually hurts. Love is both the worst and the best thing that ever happened to me. Thanks to love I can feel this amazing thing towards you, I can be happy, but I also lost you.”

“Chris, I don’t know.” you felt so conflicted. You wanted to give him a chance but at the same time, you didn’t.

“I’ll give you time. How about that? I won’t come here. You still have my phone number?” you shook your head. “Okay, then I’ll write it down and leave it for you. If you are willing to try even as friends, call me. Anytime, any day and I’ll immediately come for you. If you are not… then just threw the number out and forget me. I won’t come here ever again and even if I know that it will be hard, I’ll try and forget you.”

Surprisingly, he kept his word. He didn’t show up. Which was a hard thing for Chris to do since he was so used to going over to your place and wait for you like a lost dog. Chris found himself staring at his phone even at work, he didn1t even notice this habit only when a cast member called him out for it.

“Waiting for the lady to call?” the person hit the nail right on the head and he didn’t even knew it.

You on the other hand, contemplating your options, you even wrote a whole page full of cons and pros of the situation and what the future might hold.

It was true, even if your heart got broken and defeated, there was still love in it. Love for Chris. And that tiny part was aching and begging for you to call him already.

And you ended up not calling him.

You texted him.

Come over tonight at 6pm.

Chris’ heart fluttered and filled with hope. While yours just got more anxious and nervous.

He was there 6pm sharp. With a single white rose in hand.

“Here, this is yours.” he said and handed you the flower.”

“Thank you.”

He watched as you placed the delicate thing into a vase while he sat at the couch. His eyes shined as you smelled the flower and smiled at the sweet scent.

“Look, I won’t make you suffer any longer and just say it as it is.” you said and he was too afraid to breathe let alone speak. “I will give you a chance, but and this is a huge but, be yourself please. Be the funny, caring, kind Chris who a known and learnt to love. Be the one who makes me laugh until I can’t breathe. Don’t be the desperate Chris who wants me back. Please. It hurts me to see you like this.”

“I promise, yes. Thank you, oh Y/N thank you for trusting me again! I will take you on a date! A proper one!” he was so caught up with his thoughts he didn’t even realized when he hugged you and kissed your head. He was going on and on about the dates that he was planning and one thing he established right at the beginning.

“I will treat you well! Like a real princess, I promise!” he made a lot of promises on that day. You ended up smiling and laughing at his expressions so much that your face began to hurt.

You were happy to have his old side back, the one you knew and loved. And you were more than happy to finally be over with your grudge and happy in life, with him.

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nineteenseventeenbarnes · 4 years

Text

Good Thing

Pairing: Bucky x OC x rest of the Avengers Genre: idek Word Count: 2457 Warnings: n/a

You sit on the kitchen counter in your PJs, sipping your tea and scrolling through your phone. You look up when you hear someone walking into the kitchen, and you greet Nat good morning when she waves at you.

"Up to anything today?" Nat asks as she pours herself a cup of coffee.

"Pepper told me there's this amazing cake shop that just opened last week on Fort Street. Might go check it out," you answer her as you continue scrolling through your phone. There was an eye shadow palette by Anastasia Beverly Hills you really wanted, and you were looking at which store closest to the cake shop had it in stock to grab one on your way back.

"You're going alone?" Nat questions and you know she wants to see if you have a date. You look at her and roll your eyes. She knew what that meant.

"I can't believe you, Y/N," Nat sighs. "You're young, have no family left, have zero interest in men or women, how can you be so contented with your life?"

"Nat, we've been through this," you remind her in a sing-song voice. "You guys are my family, remember? And it's not that I have zero interest in people; I'm just not interested in relationships."

"So whatever is going on between you and Barnes is considered nothing?"

"Yes, Nat, it's nothing," you tell her. This was probably the 20th time you've said that since you and Bucky started sleeping with each other casually. One night, you wanted someone to warm your bed, Bucky offered, and so it began. "It means nothing, trust me."

"How do you know that?"

"Because..."

"Because?" And right on cue, they hear a door open and slam shut before a half-naked Bucky walks into the kitchen.

"Good morning, Buck," you greet him, passing him an empty mug. "Chloe's over?"

"Mornin'. How'd ya know?" he asks you before popping his neck and making his way over to the coffee machine.

"It's 11AM on a Sunday, you're usually up by 8, and you only get up later when you have company," you explain, jumping off the kitchen counter.

"Didn't know you were so interested in his life, Y/N." Nat teased.

"Observation skills, hun," you wink at her before turning around and heading back to your room.

Nat didn't miss the way Bucky watched your retreating figure, and at that moment, she knew.

Two hours later, at precisely 2PM, you emerge from your room and make your way to the lounge where Steve and Bucky sat watching the Sunday news.

"You look nice, Y/N," Steve compliments as you pop yourself next to him on the sofa, not missing the new coat or make-up you had on. "Got a date?"

Bucky tried to ignore your presence when you walked in the living room, but at the word date, he focused on the conversation you were having with Steve.

"Nope," you tell him, popping the P at the end. "Just spending some me time."

You bid Steve and Bucky goodbye after receiving a text from your Uber driver and make your way downstairs.

"Looking good, Y/N!" Tony calls out as you two pass by each other on your way to the elevator.

"Thanks, Tony!" you get to add before the elevator door closes.

"Is she going out with someone?" Tony asks Steve and Bucky.

"She said she wasn't," Steve answers Tony. "You think she is?"

"Probably not, she always looks nice when we're not on missions, nothing new," Tony shrugs before making his way to find Bruce in his room.

Bucky groans as he hears his phone ring. Steve throws his friend a sympathetic look as Bucky picks up.

"Hey."

"Baby, are you free this evening?"

"Chloe, you just stayed over."

"I KNOW, but I miss you."

"Steve says there might be a mission tonight, I'll see you another day." he doesn't even wait for her to reply before he ends the call.

"Must be tough having a girlfriend," Steve teases Bucky, who looked like he wanted to rip his hair out.

"She's not my girlfriend," Bucky mumbles with his arms crossed, focusing back on the news reporter on TV.

"Well, it's even tougher to be pinning someone who doesn't even like you back," Nat adds, coming out of nowhere and joining to two on the sofa.

You walk into the brightly lit shop. The counter was lined with almost 50 kinds of different cakes and you couldn't wait to try at least 5 of them.

"Y/N!!!" you hear someone call out from your right. You turn to see Chloe in line to order.

"Hey, Chloe," you greet as she waves you over. She had been seeing Bucky on and off the last 2 months, so you two were acquainted. Bucky had told you they were just seeing each other, so you still occasionally slept with him. If Chloe knows or not, isn't any of your business.

"What a coincidence! Did you come alone?" you tell her you did come alone, and she offered to sit with you.

Both of you sit down with 10 slices of cakes to share and start chatting. It was the first time you've exchanged so many words with her and you were beginning to see how in love she actually was with Bucky.

"So, Y/N, enough about Bucky and I," she giggles. "What about you? Seeing anyone?"

"Not really," you honestly tell her. "I mean, I sleep with people occasionally and I think it's fun to talk to randoms on Tinder, but other than that, nothing serious." "You're so gorgeous though, Y/N," Chloe tells you, a pout on her face. "Bet you have the people you sleep with waiting for your every command."

You laugh at her statement and sip your tea quietly.

"James Buchanan Barnes!" you call out when you return to the living quarters of the compound. "We need to talk!"

"Full name doesn't sound good," Bruce mumbles as he, Tony, Steve and Bucky hears you call from the dining hall.

"That's our cue to leave," Tony tells Bruce and Steve before dragging them both away.

"BARNES IS IN THE DINING ROOM!" Tony shouts loud enough for you to hear before winking at Bucky and disappearing with the other two.

Bucky gives you a small smile when you enter the dining room and you give him a smile back. You drop a take away box in front of him and sit on the seat across from him.

"It's for you, I know you like cheesecake," Bucky peeks into the takeaway box to see 2 slices of cheesecake.

"Thanks, Y/N." he grins.

"And Chloe knows that too," you add.

"Excuse me?"

"You haven't been very fair to her, Barnes. She's clearly madly in love with you, but you brush her off like she's just some random chick from a bar."

"She fell for me too fast," he mumbles, stabbing the cake with a fork and taking a bite. "I don't really like her."

"Well damn, Barnes," you shake your head. "Stop leading her on then!"

Bucky just stared at you. If only you knew the emotional conflict he was going through, you wouldn't be saying these to him.

"I think we should stop sleeping with each other till you figure things out with Chloe, Buck."

It's been a week since you last spoke to Bucky about anything personal. You tried your hardest not to make things weird, but the owner of a particular pair of steel-blue eyes refuses to let you play it off as nothing. He'd try to walk up to you and talk about what had happened, but you kept playing it off. You've started avoiding missions altogether now too.

"Hey, Y/N," Steve greets as you enter the kitchen one morning.

"Mornin', Steve." you greet back, pouring yourself a glass of coffee.

"So, there's a mission tomorrow and I was hoping you and Buck-"

"Sorry, Steve, I promised to help at the pet shelter tomorrow," you tell him with a smile and walk out of the kitchen.

"Not like you can tell her no, she's helping animals," Nat comments as she walks into the kitchen after listening in on the conversation.

"Why is this so difficult?" Steve mumbles, running his hands through his hair.

"Maybe because you're meddling," Nat tells him while walking over to the counter and pulling out a pan.

"I'm just trying to help!" Steve defends. Nat shakes her head before getting back to her eggs.

"Y/N, can we talk?" Bucky asks, grabbing your wrist as you pass by him in the hallway.

"Yes, Buck?" you face him, a fake smile on your face. "What can I help you with?"

"Why are you avoiding me?"

"I'm not," you let out a chuckle, lightly pulling your wrist from his grasp. "I've just been... Busy."

"Y/N, please-"

"No, Buck, you please," you finally break the facade and tell him. "Stop messing with other people's feelings. Chloe is such a nice girl, and you made her think-"

"I called it off." You stare at him, trying to process what he said.

"Excuse me?"

"I stopped seeing Chloe."

"Oh my God," you shake your head at what he said. "Did you at least lay it down slow? Or did you just ghost her?" Bucky didn't say anything.

"Unbelievable." you mutter.

"I like YOU, okay?" Bucky finally admits. "It's always been you!"

"Goddammit, Barnes! That's not what we agreed on!" you yell out before walking away.

The next few days were unbearable. Word of you and Buck's falling out had gotten to the rest of the team, and they didn't want the team falling apart. You had always been the friendliest one, the one that acted most ordinary, and that gave them a sense of normality too, but the last few days, you've started to pull away, and that kind of scared everyone. Nat might have thought meddling was unnecessary, but she began to meddle too.

By week 2, you've had it. Stark had thrown enough parties and organized enough team building activities the last 2 weeks to last the year, Steve and Nat had tried to get you on as many missions with Bucky as you could, and everyone else has tried to get you to sit next to Bucky at every meal.

"That's it," you mumbled after dinner one night and headed back to your room. The rest of the team was confused, but Wanda knew what was about to happen.

"Hey, Y/N?" Wanda called out, knocking the door to your room. "Can Viz and I come in?"

"Yeah," you yell as you continued to pack your clothes.

"Where are you heading to, Miss Y/N?" Vision asks, looking at the suitcase on your bed.

"Away for a bit, Viz," you tell him with a smile. "I was thinking of sipping some coconuts in the Bahamas or something."

"That's a far place to go to sip coconuts..." Wanda mumbles, a sad tone to her voice, but you knew she understood.

"I think it'll be good for the team if I went away for a while, Wanda," you tell her, pulling her into a hug.

"But Miss Y/N, does Mr. Stark know?" Vision asks.

"Viz, there are somethings Mr. Stark doesn't have to know," you tell him.

The next morning, the whole team woke up to an unoccupied room at the end of the hallway and a handwritten letter on the kitchen table.

"Dear World's Mightiest Heroes," Steve reads out loud, chuckling at how she addressed it. "You guys, I don't know where to start. But also, before I start, hand Wanda a tissue because she probably cried all night, and it's probably gonna happen again."

"Wait, you knew?" Tony exclaims, looking over to the brunette and cutting Steve, who was reading the letter, off. "You didn't stop her?"

"Don't blame the poor girl, Tony," Steve continues, reading off the letter before Wanda could defend herself. "Did I assume what he was gonna say right? Anyway, none of you blame yourselves for what happened, please. I chose this path, and it was inevitably gonna happen, ask Bruce."

"I- what?" Bruce mumbles, thinking about what the letter had just said.

"Has she ever said anything to you about leaving before?" Nat asks him, her eyes getting teary.

"She mentioned wanting to live somewhere deep in the mountains or on a secluded island before... Would that be it?" Bruce questions.

"Keep reading," Sam tells Steve as he glances at Bucky, who looked deep in thought.

Steve clears his throat before continuing. "I'm still deciding between going to live in Bhutan, buying an island in the Bahamas or getting a house built in Africa -"

"Wow, nice flex, Y/N," Clint snickers.

"Where did she get all the money?" Tony mumbles.

"We get paid for missions, Tony," Nat reminds.

"Yeah, but not enough to buy a private island? Or build a house in freaking Africa?" Sam adds.

"Yeah, well, she used to take some of your photos candidly and sold them to fanboys and fangirls online," Nat nonchalantly adds in.

"Yeah, I remember that she made tons off of those," Wanda nods.

The rest of the team stares at the two girls in disbelief. Unsure on how to process that new bit of information.

"Steve, the letter?" Bucky reminds, finally speaking up. He wanted to know everything the letter contained.

"Can we please try to minimize the interruptions?" Steve tells the team before glancing back at the letter. "No one should feel sad or upset that I've left. I came into the team as a temporary when Rhodey was unwell, and all of you extended your arms and welcomed me into this family with no questions asked, especially Thor, and I will forever be grateful for that. The feeling I had when Steve asked me to officially be part of the team? Best feeling in the world, I felt like I finally belonged somewhere. But even then, I had told Steve I would leave the team eventually, he knew I would."

"All in all, this isn't about who was the reason for me going away," Steve continues as Bucky glances out the window. "Or if you guys weren't worth the blood, sweat, and tears for, but I just wanted to be a bit more selfish and think of myself. You all know my history with HYDRA, I think I've done enough good for this world, I think I deserve this retirement. I know Tony can find me effortlessly, so can Clint and Nat, and I won't blame you if you do, but please remember that I chose this for me. I already have a good thing going for me, so don't tell me I can have better."

#bucky x reader #bucky fanfic #winter soldier fanfic #avengers fanfic #bucky x oc #winter soldier x you #bucky x you #marvel fanfic

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