#he may have taken all the bad habits from his uncles but he's also taken my heart

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

do you have any headcanons or ideas when the current adult cats like Munkustrap, Macavity or Tugger reach their senior age? What becomes of them? How’s the tribe like etc.

Sorry if I worded this question weird it’s been on my mind for a while and I figured you might have some interesting ideas about it :)

That's actually a super interesting question! I stuck with the three prompted in the ask, but I'm happy to talk about others as well, if you'd like!

(Slight TWs for mention of illness and death)

🎸 - Tugger gains weight as he gets older, around the middle and face particularly - the slowing metabolism catches up to him, even with his picky eating habits. No shame in that; he's healthy, lives a good life and he's happy. He has a very prominent nasolabial fold on the right side of his face that no longer goes away when he stops smiling, because he would half smile and smirk so often that the muscles in his face got weaker on the left, leaving it permanently crooked (no less charming though), and the smile lines on one side are far deeper. Like is tradition, he lets his fur get even longer, but pays a little less attention to it, so it's often wild (he digs it - says it looks "very bad boy" which has his kids and niblings and grandkids groaning at him). Gives him a very regal "king of the jungle" type of look, and that combined with the lower tilt of his brow give off the impression that he's grown more serious, but he hasn't. One quick grin will attest to that. He's secretly *very* self conscious about his aging (let's be real, he was the type to have started dying his hair the minute anything even resembling grey showed up in there - grey only exists on his dad and Munk), particularly that the others may start to lose interest in him (and Tugger does love his attention), but does a good job at hiding it, and lbh if you know anything about any rockstar, it's that aging eliminates absolutely zero appeal to their fans - a sex symbol is a sex symbol.

His role in the clowder stays mostly the same. He never really moves up or into any real role of responsibility, though he does stay on as an advisor after Sillabub steps up. Most of his troublemaking is now quietly whispered and advised to the next generation, with "old innocent Uncle Tugger" watching gleefully from a distance. Gotta train them young, y'know? He also takes up the Grandpa Gus mantel in nicknaming everyone with very particular calling cards, or settling on the more neutral "babe" and "honey" - particularly for the younger kittens. He also came into his own as quite the storyteller, when you get him to sit still long enough (which isn't often but they'll take what they can get).

A fully senior Tugger started developing problems with wandering off and mobility, but his family keeps close tabs on him (even though it annoys him).

🌙 - Munkustrap has taken remarkably after Old Deuteronomy in that he aged very slowly, and then almost all at once. For the longest time, it seemed like he would never age; every year that passed he looked the same (having grey fur already does wonders for hiding the grey that pops forward). Maybe a little fuller in the figure, maybe with a few deeper lines around the eyes, but still the same old Munk he'd always been even a dozen years ago. He isn't at all concerned with appearances; he takes them as they come.

He's mellowed out over the years in stress levels (not good for the blood pressure, you know - he has several cats who pointedly remind him of that when he starts), though you know when something doesn't please him; that familial look of disapproval is very strong in him. But it doesn't stop him from following in Aunt Jenny and Uncle Skimble's footsteps in that "slowing down" are not words in his vocabulary. He's still as busy a body as ever, and remained in charge of the yearly plays at the Ball until he needed to be forcibly retired (at least in being the lead director - he still goes to every practice). Part of that comes from the rather severe arthritis he develops later down the line, which was part of the contribution to that "all at once" aging I mentioned earlier, but he remains cheerful and as active as is tolerable with it. He (regrettably if you ask his daughters and grandchildren) has become the "back in my day", kind of guy, which you can tell he's about to launch into when he manages a claw up and pointing. He absolutely adores his grandchildren and grandniblings, and takes over his father's spot as the first cat that often gets to meet very new kittens (and pass on their teachings), and while he doesn't have Old Deuteronomy's full knack for it (doesn't quite have the developed magic for it), it is still a time honoured tradition and you know Munkustrap adores babies (and they all adore Granddad).

Munk remains the leading song-storyteller in the clowder, and takes on a role as one of their mentors/teachers until his fading memory prevents him from doing so. He is very proud of his apprentices that take up after him, and takes up every opportunity to tell any cat how good they are and how he taught them everything they know. He ends up passing peacefully in his home at around 32 years of feline age after being sick a while - not bad for a cat; the Deuteronomys live rather long, you know.

💀 - Macavity...is Macavity. No, actually, you know what scratch that. Macavity becomes who he was meant to be the entire time: Professor Moriarty (but like book canon Moriarty - think like Victor Evgrafov). His shoulders droop forward and begin to protrude as he loses more weight, as though wings would sprout from the shoulder blades behind him, his jaw and whiskers begin to sag and his fur gets thinner (even moreso) and that "highly domed" head of his becomes literal as the "fur line" pushes back further. He is patchy and unkempt, but somehow retains his cool, unbothered posturing (kinda...unless he's angry, but that doesn't come with age). The cataracts he develops (and, with no desire to be anywhere in the vicinity of humans, retains) are white and clouded, and while this means the intensity of his gaze has softened a notch (literally and figuratively - his vision is permanently blurred), it is somehow even more frightening than before.

He no longer goes out to do any of his bidding (though he never really did to begin with - having a web has its perks in that you don't get the paws dirty) - they are brought to him. Not particularly difficult, as he has abandoned a *lot* of his threads - he grew bored of them; they no longer interested him. His voice has become softer, more difficult to hear, but it's bone chilling. He's often caught talking to cats who aren't there (or at least that no one else can see), and staring blankly at walls, and his paranoia has tripled. Possibly CDS; no one was close enough to him to really know.

Macavity disappears one day; no one really knows what happened to him, though you can take a few guesses.

#The Rum Tum Tugger #Munkustrap #Macavity #my headcanons #jellicles ask because jellicles dare #realreulbberband #macavity does not reenter jellicle society - honestly if he reaches older age i'd be surprised #thank you for the ask it was really cool! #this is something i never fully considered but also you know what? i love talking about older munk and tugger

[rainbow-nerdss]

Finding You (Part 4)

Written for @augustwritingchallenge day 29: Dark Buddie, 2k Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Read it on AO3

Buck's eyes caught on the photo frame, just as they had every time he walked into Eddie's house since the picture had been placed there, close to two years ago now.

It was them, arms around each other, though they'd been complete strangers the night before it was taken. Standing in front of a vintage fire engine — it felt something like fate, like a promise from the universe, bringing them back together.

Beside that picture were two more — one of Christopher and Shannon, and the other— the most recent addition — taken in the photo booth at May's graduation party a week before, Chris standing between Eddie and Buck, all three of them grinning at the camera.

"Eddie?" Buck called. "Good to go?"

"Almost!" Eddie's voice came from down the hall. He emerged from Chris's room holding a Lego set. "He forgot to bring it with him when Carla dropped him to school, apparently he needs it for show and tell. Do you mind making a stop?"

Buck laughed. "’Course not. We'd better get going, though, unless we want Bobby to write us up for being late.”

They’d been car-pooling, ever since Chris had done a project on climate change and insisted they start doing something to reduce their carbon footprint. He’d also been strictly monitoring their recycling habits, leaving sticky notes every time he found something in the wrong trash can.

Buck could never say no to that kid, and a little extra time with Eddie before and after work was always welcome.

They just about made it to work on time, slipping in the door just as Bobby was beginning his morning briefing.

It was a good day.

Until it wasn't.

A fire at a storage facility, which wouldn’t have been too bad, except it was on an auction day, and there were an unknown number of civilians inside the units.

Buck and Eddie walked through the hallways, knocking on each door they passed, making sure nobody was left behind.

They found one container with the door slightly ajar. No response, but Buck went in just to check, and Eddie followed him.

The door swung shut, slamming with a heavy thud.

They couldn't open it.

"Try the light?" Eddie suggested, but Buck couldn't find the switch.

Eddie radioed the team, letting them know what happened.

"Any sign of fire near you?" Bobby asked. "Any injuries?"

"Just to our pride," Buck answered. He heard Chimney laugh, meaning he'd taken the time to hit the button on his radio just so they would hear.

Rude.

"Alright, sit tight, guys. We'll get this fire under control, take care of our victims, then we'll come get you."

"Got it, Cap," they both confirmed.

Buck felt along the wall until he found a spot where he could sit.

"Guess we've got some time to kill," he grunted, shifting his weight slightly to get comfortable.

He heard Eddie moving around, then a clatter, swearing, and Eddie was tripping over Buck's legs and falling to the ground.

"Shit!" Buck reached out to help him up. "You okay?"

"All good," Eddie groaned. "Just a little bruised, I think."

"Maybe we should stay in one spot, while we're stuck here in the dark," Buck suggested, helping Eddie get situated sitting beside him.

"Probably for the best."

Their shoulders pressed together in the dark space, and Buck turned his head in Eddie's direction, even though he could barely see his outline.

"How long d'you think it'll take them?" Buck asked.

"No idea. It's not so bad here though."

"Are you kidding? It smells like something died."

Eddie laughed, Buck slowly joining him.

"You heard Maddie's news, right?" Buck asked after a few moments. Her and Chimney had just started telling people about their pregnancy, and Buck had been dying to talk to Eddie about it.

"You were there when I heard it, Buck," Eddie laughed. "Or should I be calling you Uncle Buck?"

Buck snorted. "You know, I had no idea what Chim was referencing when he said that at first? He had to sit me down and make me watch the movie so he could keep making jokes about it."

Eddie laughed again. "Why am I not surprised?" 

Buck nudged him.

"How are you feeling about it?" Eddie asked.

"Honestly? I can't wait. I'm gonna spoil the shit out of that kid."

"Really? I remember when Adriana had her first kid, I was… Well, excited isn’t the first word that comes to mind.”

Buck frowned. “How come?” 

He felt Eddie shrug beside him. “I just… I couldn’t picture myself as an uncle, you know? Then three years later, I was a dad, so.” Buck wanted to say something, but that was all so long ago, he didn’t know what he could say. He did the math in his head — it mustn’t have been long after Buck met them, he figured. He thought of the Eddie he had met back then, so young, so unsure of what he wanted. “I guess it’s different for you though,” Eddie continued. “You have more practice with kids than I did.”

“Thanks to you,” Buck said. They weren’t the first words that came to mind, though. No, the first thing Buck thought at Eddie’s words was I already feel like a dad. A frankly ridiculous thought to have about a kid he’d known for all of two years, not even a quarter of his life. 

Sure, he knew Chris cared about him, that he enjoyed their time together as much as Buck did. The three of them, Buck, Eddie and Chris, they just… fit together, in a way Buck had never allowed himself to think too closely on, for fear that it would all fall apart if he did. 

“You know,” Eddie’s voice broke through Buck’s thoughts. “When I told Chris the news, he was excited too. He said he couldn’t wait to have a new baby cousin.”

Buck turned red, suddenly grateful for the dark that surrounded them. “He did?” 

“Yeah.” 

“What did you say?” 

The pause before Eddie answered was a long one. “I didn’t correct him.” 

“Oh. Really?” The thought Buck had pushed aside before came back to the surface. If Chris thought of Maddie’s kid as his cousin, then it would suggest…

“Buck, I need to tell you something.”

Eddie’s voice was heavy with something Buck couldn’t recognise. It sounded serious, though. 

“You need to tell me something now? Here?” 

“I’ve chickened out too many times already, when there was somewhere else I could run, or when I could see your face.” 

“Okay. What is it? You’re making me nervous.”

Buck was ready for Eddie to say something which would hurt him. To say that he didn’t like how close Buck had gotten to Chris, how involved Buck was in their lives, that he was a burden on them in some way. Buck was the one who wanted to run now, to escape this conversation which neither of them would be able to move on from without something fundamentally shifting.

“I think I’ve been falling in love with you.”

It took Buck a full minute to process Eddie’s words. They couldn’t have meant what he thought they did, but he replayed them in his mind, and he couldn’t find another meaning beyond the obvious. 

Beyond Eddie loving him.

“Buck? Say something, I can’t see your face right now, and I need to know what—” 

Buck kissed him. Or, he tried to. In the dark, he sort of misjudged the distance between his face and Eddie’s, and the kiss landed what felt like somewhere between Eddie’s nose and his eye. 

He redirected, though, and this time he hit the mark.

He felt Eddie leaning into the kiss, lips soft against his own. “Eds, I started falling for you the day you sat next to me in a doorway in Boston, and I don’t think I ever stopped.” 

“Really?” Eddie whispered against his mouth, the sound sending a shiver down Buck’s spine.

“Really,” Buck assured him, preventing any further questions with another kiss.

Eddie’s gloved hand reached up to touch Buck’s face, and after a frustrated grunt it disappeared, replaced a moment later by Eddie’s warm hand. Buck pulled his own gloves off, pulling Eddie closer, sliding his hands under Eddie’s turnout coat, finding the warmth of his skin through his work t-shirt. 

Buck’s tongue darted out, and Eddie let him in with a soft noise. Buck moved, trying to get a better angle. This time, he was the one who fell, but Eddie didn’t help him up. He followed him down, until they were tangled together on the floor.

“Fuck, Eddie,” Buck sighed, feeling Eddie’s fingers slide through his hair. He lost himself in the kiss, the feeling of Eddie pressed up against him, lips pressed against lips, bodies flush from head to toe.

Buck didn’t know how long they stayed like that, but it was long enough for him to forget where they were and why, until he heard a crash from outside, followed by a stream of light pouring through the now-open door.

Eddie sat up, eyes wide in surprise, and Buck craned his neck to see the entire rest of the team standing in the doorway, staring at them.

“Why didn’t you guys radio to say you were there?” he asked. Eddie turned to look back at Buck, and it took everything in him not to pull him back down now he could see the kiss-swollen lips, glassy eyes and flushed cheeks, knowing he’d done that.

Chimney was grinning, gesturing to his radio. “You guys were kind of hogging the channel,” he said. 

Buck frowned and turned to look at his own radio. Sure enough, he was broadcasting. He must have hit the button when he fell back. His face heated up even more as he wondered how much they’d heard.

He pulled himself up to a seated position and switched the radio off, grumbling. 

“We thought you’d been injured at first, but… I guess not,” Bobby said. Buck fixed his gear, then helped Eddie to his feet. There was a moment, when their eyes met and Buck felt giddy, remembering those words. I think I’ve been falling in love with you.

Eddie smiled, almost shy, and Buck nodded, the smile on his face feeling like it might never leave. 

“We’d better go,” Hen said, interrupting their moment in a tone that Buck was sure meant they’d be discussing this later. 

The rest of their shift dragged. Teasing from the rest of the team, twenty minutes in Bobby’s office filling out HR forms, laying awake through the night in the bunk room because Eddie was right there in the next bunk over, just out of reach when Buck could be holding him close. 

He kept wishing for a call, just to stop him from saying screw it and doing something which would absolutely necessitate sitting through another round of HR bullshit.

Finally, their shift ended, and Buck followed Eddie to his truck, pressing him against the door and kissing him again. Eddie smiled against his mouth, then broke the kiss. 

“I gotta get home in time to bring Christopher to school. Meet me there?” Eddie asked. 

Buck nodded, kissing him once more, just because he could. He was barely inside his jeep before his phone was lighting up with a call from Maddie. He was surprised it had taken this long for Chimney to tell her, honestly, but maybe she had just been waiting for their shift to end so he couldn’t get away with inventing a call.

He turned towards Eddie’s, answering Maddie’s call on speaker and bracing himself for her to yell at him about being the last one to find out. 

He couldn’t even feel bad, not when he pulled into Eddie’s and let himself inside, not when he helped himself to a cup of coffee and waited for Eddie to get home from the school run, staring at the pictures of them on Eddie’s wall. He couldn’t feel bad, not when they’d greet each other at the door with a kiss when Eddie got home, then stumble back to Eddie’s room together, falling onto the bed to pick up where they’d left off in the storage facility, this time with light coming through the blinds so Buck could see every expression on Eddie’s face, every inch of his skin.

How could he be anything but the happiest he’d ever been?

#my fic #au gust 2023 #au gust fills #buddie #buddie fic #buck/eddie #evan buckley #eddie diaz

[2000semocat]

I am brainrotting so badly, so have these dumb headcanons from my silly test subjects AU. (There's going to be some Patrick, Henry, Habit, Jeff, and Toby mentions. As well as my sona, Aster.)

But small TW for mentions of corrupted science experimentation, lots of death, and also quite a bit of swearing. If any of this makes you uncomfortable, don't read any of this.

Ok, those who decided to read this, here they are!

Alex is the most easiest to anger of all of the group. It's so bad that Tim usually has to be the one to step in, and if he's not home, it's Brian (with Habit's help).

Despite the tired resting bitch face that Tim has, he is just a bit happy deep down. He doesn't show it after what he had to go through with the Operator and shit, but he's trying.

And to add to the one above, he is rarely spotted smiling. If anytime at all. The only few souls who saw him smile were Habit and Jeff, who bully him for smiling when Brian is around.

Brian looks so sweet, but he's scary if you anger him enough. Considering he's a golden retriever and pitbull mix, it makes sense for him to become protective of his beloved, Tim.

Jay is like the socially awkward and overly protected sibling of the group. If anyone makes Jay cry, the others will go after said person.

It doesn't mean that Jeff and Habit won't bully him. They do, they just keep it tame.

NOT PATRICK THOUGH. This man is a cruel man, and he's usually smug about it all.

Alex and Patrick fight A LOT. With Alex's short temper and paranoia, it just makes Patrick's cruel self find it amusing to see Alex fight back.

Henry, on the other hand, is calm and is only cruel when rescuing more tested subjects. He doesn't even bother being the boss anymore, as Aster has taken such position now.

Oh, Aster, she's the "boss." She may be the smallest and probably the weakest of them all, but she is the only way they can be freed.

She's persuasive, can lie like it is a fucking job, and can read body languages. But she can't read Patrick, that man breaks her when she tries to do that.

The oldest of the group is Habit, being 28. And the youngest is Toby, being 19.

Here's them all in order of youngest to oldest: Toby (19), Jeff (21), Aster (22), Jane (23), Jay (24), Alex (25), Brian (26), Tim (27), and Habit (28)

Toby is the one Habit bullies the most.

They can all transform into their human disguises! It's just easier and less energy consuming for them to stay as their humanoid selves.

They live in the woods due to humans wanting them dead and the scientists wanting to keep on experimenting on them.

Jane is like the mom of the group, and she's very tired.

Tim is the dad of the group. He's also very tired. They both need a break from the bullshit that the others do istg-

Brian is the cool uncle that only becomes threatening if you hurt his family or when annoyed.

Meanwhile, Aster is the mediator and almost motherly person in the group. "Almost motherly" because of how sweet and forgiving she can get.

Jay and Toby are the siblings who are always shielded by the family from any danger.

Habit is the brother who is high, somehow.

Jeff is the emo brother. It makes more sense in my head.

The animals for them are as follows: Alex is a calico, Aster is a maine coon/ munchkin mix, Tim is a wolf, Brian is a golden retriever and pitbull mix, Patrick is a hyena, Henry is a cougar, Jay is a ferret, Habit is a rabbit, Jane is a dove iirc, Jeff is a raven, and Toby is undecided as of now.

These are some of the ones I could think of, but I just had to brainrot on main.

#marble hornets #alex kralie #mh tim #jay mh #mh brian #habit emh #jane creepypasta #ticci toby headcanons #jeff the killer #creepypasta au #creepypasta headcanon #patrick hockstetter #henry bowers #this is a silly au #so much headcanons help

[burninghorizon]

Hello, and good now. You can call me Pyro or Nico. I am an adult genderfluid individual and I use any pronouns. I would prefer that minors DNI with this blog. You've been warned.

My main blog is @birdwizardofficial where I post about anything I like. Mostly memes.

This is a spiritual and astral projection focused blog; Although you may find some posts here that have a humorous tone, this is a serious aspect of my life. None of this is "role play" or "playing pretend."

I have been a closeted alterhuman for some time, and recently discovered fictionkin, who has found their soul family. Expect a lot of posts about them. More information below the cut.

(This post will be edited as I add new information I find pertinent.)

Soul Family

Mother: The Goddess Hekate

I have been a devotee to Her for many years, but have only recently known that She had a hand in making my very soul, and therefore I regard her as Mother. I love Her dearly, for She is exceptionally kind to all and loving to me.

Father: Dante (his public name)

My father is a demon who you may refer to as Dante. His personality and mannerisms are basically the same as Dante's from DMC, so we're using his face and name to refer to him. He's great, he loves me, he's an ass, he's annoying, and I can't live without him.

Uncle: Vergil (his public name)

Just like dear old Dad, my uncle bears a striking resemblance to Vergil. I don't talk to him much just because he scares the shit out of me, even though he's actually a pretty nice guy. Don't tell him I told you that, though.

Cousin/Half Sibling: Nero (their blog is @tomboydevil )

And now for the crown jewel of the family, my cousin-sibling (cousibling?) Nero, who has taught and shown me so much and for that I will be eternally grateful. May we commit many crimes together.

Me: Nico

And finally there's me! I resonate a lot with Nico so I've taken the name. I love artificing in the astral and apparently I'm a natural at making weapons and prosthetics. I also talk a lot of smack and smoke like a broken stove. What? You ain't perfect, so don't criticize me on my bad habits!

My other kintypes include: Dragons, The Fae, Demons, Fire/Heat, Nature(specifically the seasons) and Clouds.

#burnt words #astral projection #spirit work #alterhuman #otherkin #fictionkin #pagan #paganism

[friendly-neighbor-spiderman]

About Peter

Please read History before interacting with Cannon Peter Full name: Peter Benjamin Parker

Nicknames: Pete, underroos, Spiderman Birthdate: August 10th 2000 Age: 19 Gender:Male Height:5'8 Weight:170 Body type: Small ,Thin and lanky but very muscular. Predominant Features: messy curly brown hair and bright hazel eyes. Strengths: Super Strength, Super Flexibility, Spider Sense, Super Healing Weaknesses: Can be a bit hard headed sometimes and A bit to good for his own good. oping to do whatever it takes to help someone even if it ends up being a detriment to himself. Weapons: Home made Web fluid and Web shooters. also a stark tech Spider man suit. Also the Iron spider suit for more protection. Habits: Loves Photography and takes many pictures as he can. Loves to hang out in the lab or tech room tinkering with all sorts of stuff Alignment: Lawful Good. He does his best to follow the laws and has a strict code to not kill anyone. Occupation: MIT Honors Student as well as Intern for Stark Industries Personality: Caring and kind hearted he has deep respect for his Team members and especially Tony. Has good manners but isnt’ afraid to speak up. Also has a bit of sass when hes comfortable with people. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ History/Background: As a child he was loved by his parents blank and blank Parker. However Blank and Blank were actually shield agents. And while Peter was still young were both taken from him in an mission gone wrong. And ended up in the care of his aunt and uncle Ben and May Parker where he lived for all of his childhood and his high-school years. Peter was extremely smart and got all As in his studies. But he also had a passion for photography. Starting young he always would take pictures whenever he could. Of his Aunt and uncle and of the city he grew up in Queens New-York. By the time he was 15 He had already been accepted into Midtown Science High School for his grades and academics. It was while he was at this school that he went on a field trip. One to Oscorp. He was excited to go as he always loved science and everything in it. But while he was trying to take a pictures to have some memories to look back to no one noticed that one particular spider experiment had gotten out. It was then that his life had been turned upside down. literally. It happened almost over night. Searing pain followed by what could only be described as a the coolest thing to ever happen to him. It scared him at first of course it did. but within weeks he was already experimenting with his newly gained powers and crafting his own suit to go with it. No one was the wiser. Not even his aunt and uncle. Which made the next part hard for him. He had signed up for a shady underground ring battle. He thought it could be an easy way to make some money. He wanted to help his aunt and uncle out so bad and lied to his uncle to convince him to take him there. He knew he should have been honest but he knew he’d never approve. And might even freak out about the power things. But he soon realized that caused him the worse mistake of his life. He got upset. Rage filled and let someone leave that shouldn’t have and it cost his uncle his life. Peter wasn’t the same after that. He knew that he had to do something. anything and flung himself head first into his persona. It went on for 6 months before a particular Billionaire Superhero just appeared in his apartment. The same Billionaire Superhero Peter had been idolizing for years. Ever sense his Aunt and Uncle had taken him to the Stark expo 6 years ago. Where none other then this man had saved his life. He defiantly owed the man but it didn’t explain why he was here. That however was answered quickly after they got some time alone and Tony had approached him about being spiderman. He was shocked he even figured it out but if someone could hes not surprised it was him. He convinced him to go to Germany. try to convince Steve Rogers and everyone else to come back to the Avengers. But sadly it was all for nought as All of them went on the run Leaving Tony to try and have Peter get back to just having a normal life but Peter could never have a normal life not anymore and soon after alot of careful thought at age 16 Tony had invited him to the Avengers. Peter was stoked but Decided to stay the little guy for just a little bit longer. Tony looking upset but at least they stayed in touch. It wasn’t until a year later that shit hit the fan. Thanos came and even though all of them had tried their best to stop them. the fact that the team was no longer a team had hindered them enough that separate they were powerless and lost. The last thing Peter remembered was looking into his mentors eyes and slowly fading away to nothing. What was moment for Peter ended up being Years for everyone else. Peter awoke to a battle. Dr. Strange a man he had met while trying to fight Thanos had filled him in enough to fight and in the end. With the team as one. They managed to become victorious. But in the haze of the Battle Tony had gotten gravely inquired. His right arm smoked as the only thing that kept him alive was his suit. Peter rushing to his side but luckily with some magic and hope Tony lived. He lived and everything was alright. It was after that that Tony managed to convince the team to get back together and even offered Peter a spot again which this time he happily agreed. Eager to make his mark and with Tony alive Was able to take care of Mysterio while on his vacation and once he was done with school he officially moved into the compound with the rest of the Avengers. getting his own room and Place among the greats. Attending MIT between missions and Happy as he could be. He even got a job at Stark Industries part time. and now at 19 he was fully grown up and ready to tackle anything that laid ahead of him.

#links for roleplay #Bio

[no-droids]

Mercy, Sabotage, and Dead Space

(gif credit to @redwyyne-archive)

Part One of The Bet series

Pairing: Poe Dameron/Reader

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 12.7K

Summary:

1. No sex.

2. No touching yourself.

3. No orgasms.

Warnings/Tags: DUBCON/NONCON elements, fuckboy Poe (OOC), Enemies to Lovers, degradation/humiliation, mentions of oral sex, SMUUUTTTTTTTT also I’m not sorry for what I did but you’re not allowed to read if you’re gonna get mad at me okay byeeee

***

This.

This shit, right here.

If the question was ever, “What’s the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever let Poe Dameron somehow talk you into doing?” then the answer is this stupid shit, right the fuck here.  This is like.  You remember that one game, Mercy?  The one where you’d dig your nails in and twist arms and just needlessly inflict pain on each other as children until one of you cried uncle because someone somewhere once decided to turn torture into a matter of pride?

You always thought those games were fucking ridiculous.  Who can hold their breath the longest, who can handle a lit deathstick against their flesh the longest, who can take the hardest punch—who cares?  It’s child’s play.  It’s self-inflicted agony for the sake of bragging rights and even as a youngling, you refused to fall for it.

But then you met… fucking Dameron.

You know those people that… they don’t just rub you the wrong way, but literally every single aspect about their personality is sandpaper against wet skin and your whole entire being feels chafed raw just by existing in their general vicinity for an extended period of time?

You’re… you’re not usually a competitive—much less aggressive person.  You never have been.  It’s just not part of your nature.  If you ever excel at anything in life, it isn’t because of some secret, deep-seated desire to win or be better than anyone else.  You just… do you.  You do whatever you do, and if it’s good, it’s good.  And if it’s bad, it’s good.  Because at the end of the day at least it’s still you, and you’re okay with that.

But this?

This shit?  Right here?

“This is fucking dumb,” you say, because you know it’s what you both must be thinking so you may as well just get it out in the open.  “This is the dumbest fucking thing, Dameron.  What are we doing?  Why are we doing this?”

The grumpy, orange-jumpsuited figure sitting behind you just sighs heavily and slumps even further down in his bucket seat, as if it isn’t the first time you’ve tried asking this incredibly valid question (it totally is), bringing a palm down to thunk the top of the guidance controls between his legs in a quiet irritation you’re almost certain has everything to do with the very topic you’re trying to bring up. 

“Because,” comes that infuriating drawl.  You can only see his face from this angle by looking at his reflection in the transparisteel barrier directly in front of you, but even just imagining the way his mouth moves while he rounds out the words makes your jaw clench.  “The coordinates we picked up were scrambled and this rendezvous could be going down at any one of thirty-six locat—?”

“No,” you interrupt him with a scowl, “not why I’ve been floating in dead space in this Maker-forsaken ship with you for eight fucking hours a day since… fuck, what’s today?  Thursday?  Friday?  Nope, can’t be Friday, Friday’s our off-day.  Thursday, then. …Thursday?”  You shake your head.  “Ugh, see?  Time doesn’t exist when I’m not allowed to cum, life is like one never-ending nightmare.”

“Oh.”  He takes a second to think about it in silence, the calloused tips of his fingers scratching the side of his face while he considers.  It wouldn’t usually be as loud as it is right now.  Maybe it’s the haunting quiet of space surrounding the ancient powered down hunk of metal you’re both stuck in, inadvertently isolating and amplifying the sound—or maybe it’s because your copilot’s jaw is currently covered in a thick, dark beard that you swear barely took his testosterone-overloaded ass a fucking week or two to grow, if that.  Regardless, the dark bristles crunch loudly under his short fingernails and it takes you about a grand total of five whole uninterrupted seconds of the scraping sound to realize you’re grinding your teeth along with it.  “Well,” he finally says, “that was your stupid idea.”

“Hmmmmmmmno,” you contest firmly, wiggling your elbow back to poke at his shin with your index finger once, twice, thrice, until he finally slaps your hand away in quiet irritation.  To the misfortune of you both—and likely the other hundred or so pilots concurrently taking rotating shifts in these tandem x-wings in a glorified mass stakeout, the cockpit of this ship is just way too fucking small.  Your arm is squeezed uncomfortably against machinery and electronics to get to him from this angle and a light slap isn’t going to stop you now that you’re here.  “You—” (poke) “—have a superiority complex and decided to turn it into a competition, not—” (poke) “—me.”

“Oh, I have a superiority complex, okay,” he scowls and nods in vehement, fake agreement, finally giving up and letting you poke at will, but the appeal is lost as soon as you realize he’s over it and your arm eases back into your lap.  You watch his reflection look out of the viewport and scan the empty void of space for the twentieth time in the past five minutes, clearly just as desperate to get back to base as you are.  “So what is it you call saying—wait, no no, not even saying, loudly declaring—‘Of course I can go longer without sex than “wham bam thank you ma’am” Dameron, you brainless fucks, it’s a simple fact!’”

“Alright—I don’t sound like that, fuck you very much,” you return, in reference to his shrieking, high-pitched impression of you surrounded by your fellow pilots in the rec room when you’ve had a bit too much to drink.   “Also, you don’t have to finger-quote literally every single syllable of my fucking sentence, Dameron.  First and last word, that’s all it takes.  And if it’s so superiority complex-ey of me to state simple facts, then what is it you call saying ‘betcha two weeks worth of pay you can’t, pretty baby’?”

“Uh, easy credits?”  He immediately asks, side-eyeing your reflection through the transparisteel.  “ Easy credits.  Just begging for it.  Two weeks of your slutty, sexy, easy fucking credits just begging to be taken and used— ”

“You need to get laid,” you cut in to tell him bluntly, scrunching your nose in what you hope looks like disgust.  As per protocol, the power to the x-wing was cut at the beginning of your shift—what feels like a fucking eternity ago—as a preventative maneuver in case the target falls out of hyperspace unexpectedly.  Avoiding the scanners of a fleet that may never actually show means it’s cold and dimly lit in here—just starlight in front of either you, but you’re hoping he can gauge the severity of your revulsion with your back to him.  “You just turned my money into a sex object.  It was vile.  I feel violated on its behalf.”

“Sounds like you’re the one who needs to get laid,” he tosses carelessly back at you, and you roll your eyes with as much sass as you can physically muster, so tired of all the dodging.  You know this hasn’t been easy for him either, he just has too much pride to admit it.  “Besides, you’ve gotta be past the withdrawal stage by now.  Is it really all that bad?”

“The fuck you mean, ‘Is it really all that bad’?”  You snap at him, shuffling around grumpily in your seat, hating the way the bulky weapons controls sit right between your thighs and prevent you from closing them.  Withdrawal stage, ha.   “Of course it’s all that bad.  It’s horrible.  It’s the fucking worst.  And more importantly, how are you not having any trouble with this?  Oh, wait—that’s right,” you answer yourself before he has a chance to.  “Because you cheated.”

“I did not cheat,” Dameron’s reflection immediately challenges with an accusatory finger pointed at you.  “I did not.  When the fuck did I cheat?  I swapped housing assignments with your shitty roommate and slept in the bunk below yours for a month and a half—all because you don’t believe in the honor system—just so you could tell me I fucking cheated?”

You scoff, feeling your annoyance spark even more.  He’s always been able to get under your skin, but the neglect you’ve been forcing your body to endure is just throwing gasoline on an already roaring fire.  “Okay, first of all?  Rude.  I am a fucking joy to have as a roomie, alright?  I put up with your snoring, your 2:00 AM dinners, you blasting your radio while I’m trying to sleep, I barely complain about your body odor—”

“My snoring is adorable, I get snacky at night, only sad people with fucked up lives hate music, I smell amazing,” Dameron casually lists off on his fingers, the self-confidence so easy and unshakeable that you swear he’s almost preening at the compliments he just gave himself by the time he’s finished rebutting everything you can think to throw at him.  And, while you’d never admit it, he does smell good.  He smells… unbelievably fucking good.  Always.  Something dark and woodsy, you can never quite put your finger on.  It pisses you off, so much that you’ve made a habit of pulling a face of disgust whenever the warm, rich scent noticeably reaches you, hoping it deflates his ego just a little bit.  No such luck so far.  

“Whatever.  The point is I’m a good fucking neighbor, alright, I’m neighborly as fuck,” you grumble, crossing your arms over your chest defensively.  “And don’t make it sound like I’m putting a chastity lock on your balls every night, because you can fuck anyone you want.  In fact, I strongly fucking encourage it—I just want to know about it when it happens.”

Dameron smirks and you groan, already knowing what’s coming.  “You wanna hear it?”

Yep, there it is.  “Second of all—”

“Feel the whole bunk rock with it?”  He goes on, completely ignoring you.  “Use the excuse that you’re trapped up top so you can just stay there the whole time and listen?  You know you can do a lot more than just—”

“Second of all,” you project over him, “you’re seriously telling me you haven’t had any wet dreams then, hm?  No snorgasms?  Hmmm?  No happy naps?  No captain midnights?  No mattress fracking?  Hmmmmmm???”

His voice very quickly sounds… shocked.  “How many fucking euphemisms—?”

“Wait wait, one more—” you quickly interrupt, too much momentum to stop now, “—sleepskeet.”

You watch in immense satisfaction as his expression seems to progress through all five stages of grief, before he exhales a long, unamused sigh and scratches his beard again.  You want to pluck each strand of it out of his face one by one.  “Anyways.  Wet dreams are totally different and don’t count.”

“It’s not different!”  You burst out, unable to help yourself, “it’s an orgasm, and rule number three is no orgas—”

“I know what the rules were, Gold-Ten,” he returns calmly, and it infuriates you, how he’s always able to make it seem like you’re the instigator who’s overreacting.  And he knows exactly what he’s doing by calling you by your flight designation, and it pisses you off even more because calling him Black-Leader in any other situation besides active warfare just feels like an unnecessary reminder of his skills.  Why he’s currently behind you manning the guidance controls and why you’re currently stuck in the front seat with the bulkier weapons systems.  “The question is if you’re seriously that bad enough of a sport to automatically disqualify me because of something that happens to any human with a dick indiscriminately when we blueball ourselves.”

“But that’s the entire fucking point, Dameron!”  You shrill, throwing your hands in the air in pure exasperation.  “There it is!  You need it more than I do, you just said it yourself!  Not to mention I said I can go longer without sex than you can— sex , not orgasms, but as it turns out I win at both.  Now can we please call this shit off so I can finally cum?  This isn’t fun anymore.”

“Nope,” he says immediately, popping the P with a bit too much hard emphasis to be genuinely amused.  He’s frustrated, too—his voice is too pleased, too fake to not be masking irritation underneath.  “Sorry.  But this was also your stupid idea, so.”

“You’re insufferable,” you grumble, anger flaring equal to his, just way more… verbal.  And descriptive.  “Wet dreams don’t count, fucking right.  Tell that to the oceans of Kamino I got going on down there, huh?  I move on this seat wrong and I’ll slide off it—”

A loud slam of a palm against the controls suddenly echoes throughout the small cockpit, causing you to jump slightly.  

“Don’t,” Dameron snarls, “... say shit like that to me.  Not right now.  Not right now, fuck .”

You go quiet for a moment, not expecting that much of an outburst at something you considered to be a throwaway remark, but then… oh.  Something occurs to you, something… sinister.  Oh, well, now there’s an idea.

Everything inside you immediately surges up and burns at the thought—the mere whisper of a way out of all of this, quickly, without giving in and letting him hold your surrender over you for Maker knows how long.  It’s so fucking simple, you don’t know why you didn’t think of it before.  You don’t have to wait him out at all; instead, you just need to… entice him into giving in first.

Neither of you say anything for a while, and you don’t know what he’s thinking (nothing, probably—a dry tumbleweed bouncing across an empty desert landscape, you imagine) but you take the dip in conversation to consider a plan.  You can’t go at it too outright, it’ll be too big of a turnaround and he’ll see it coming lightyears away.  A halfhearted joke about your pussy tossed out without thinking is what catalyzed the most substantial reaction from him you’ve seen, so… maybe you can keep steering the conversation towards the idea.

“How many wet dreams have you had?”  You suddenly ask, your heart beginning to pick up in your chest as soon as the words are out of your mouth.

“Excuse me?”  Dameron grunts from behind you, and you catch his reflection raising a thick eyebrow at you.

You take a deep breath and disguise it by stretching your back out just a little bit, lifting your shoulder blades and arching the sore muscles there, before settling back down in your normal crappy posture once more.  “Now many times did you cum in your sleep?  Had to at least been once for you to claim they don’t count.”

“Why does it matter?”  He asks, completely sidestepping the question for the second time.  “It was involuntary.”

You shrug.  “Just so I know how many freebies I can get tonight.”

“No,” Dameron instantly counters, his voice dead serious.  “Not fucking allowed.”

“Why not?”  You ask, and this time, there’s significantly less challenge than you’d typically deliver it with.  Instead, your voice is soft, questioning.  Not argumentative, but curious, and there’s just enough of your point left unsaid that it’ll seem like he conjured the rest of the image himself.

There’s silence while he considers his response to the perfectly executed bait.  You assume you’re both picturing the same thing, because it’s what you’ve pictured almost every single night spent in this celibate hellscape.  The cool darkness of your shared quarters, the standard-issue sheets that still feel crispy and rough on your skin no matter how many nights you’ve slept in them, with one of your hands pressed tight over your mouth and two of your fingers circle your clit.

“You only get to do it if I’m in the room,”  he poses instead, and you swallow thickly, feeling your body tighten with an unintentional drop of pure heat through your tummy at the thought.  Maker, it must be really bad if Poe fucking Dameron is getting to you like this.  The bane of your existence shouldn’t make your insides twist in on themselves—at least, not in a good way.

“Not like I’d have much choice,” you eventually respond, keeping it purposefully ambiguous.  “It’s your room, too.  Unfortunately.”

Stars, it’s been so long since you’ve done this, since you’ve walked the fine line between flirtation and seduction, wanting to turn on the charm slowly—gradually ease it up like a hyperdrive lever under your fingertips so that you’re at maximum by the time he realizes you’re even there.  You take a moment to glance at his reflection, watching Dameron look back at you curiously, a flash of interest in his eyes.

“By the way, how does that one girl feel about us doing this?”  You ask out of nowhere, suddenly remembering the existence of his pretty little number.  You’ve seen her under his arm around base at least a few times, which is more than you can say for the rest of them.  “Red-Six.  Tall brunette with the tattoos—I don’t bother learning names, they all come and go.”

“Nihla,” Dameron nods with a wistful sigh, tilting his head to rest against his shoulder.  “Or, wait… Neah.  No—it was… Nalal.  Yeah, Nalal, I think that’s right…”

“Unbelievable,” you mutter.  “One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is how many people get in line for you, I’ll never fucking understand it.”

“They just want me for my cock,” he tells you without missing a single beat, sounding like he’s not joking in the slightest.  “It was starting to get obnoxious.  Glad I finally have an excuse to turn them down.”

“Unbelievable,” you repeat, stunned by how truly, mind-blowingly full of himself he is.  “You’re… fucking…”

You end up just staring at him and making a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, at a complete loss for words, and Dameron eventually shrugs and continues on after you fail to form a coherent thought in the allotted time frame he provides.

“Now I can just tell them I’m in a long-running bet with Gold-Ten over who can sexually deprive themselves the longest and weirdly enough, they don’t seem all that interested anymore,” he remarks, tilting his chin up and rubbing at his beard again, and for some reason… the sound of it bothers you somewhat less now, the way he phrased that resonating deeper inside you than it should.  Lower than it should.  You blink a few times, almost shocked by your body’s unprecedented response to his admission—Poe Dameron uses you as an excuse to turn down sex with pretty girls?  Happily?—and your mind goes blank for a second while he watches you through the transparisteel.  “It’s alright,” he eventually goes on, tilting his head.  “Sometimes a sabbatical is good.  I do really miss pussy, though.”

“Well,” you finally tell him, oddly not having much else to offer at the moment.  “I’m sorry?  And… you’re welcome.  I guess.”

Dameron shrugs once more and makes an apathetic sound without opening his mouth, and you drop your stare down to the machinery between your spread thighs after feeling like you were looking at each other for too long.  The position started uncomfortable and seven hours later, it’s still fucking uncomfortable.  At first the discomfort twinged at your hips and lower back, but now the sensation seems to be… centering itself a bit more, finding a spot right between your legs, especially when his words echo through your subconscious and make you naturally want to push your thighs together.  I do really miss pussy, though.

You try to snap out of it a bit, try to stop hyperfixating on the way your underwear has felt sticky and wet for fucking hours now, but it’s so fucking difficult to chill yourself out when your body already went into this whole situation with a month and a half long stumbling block.  He’s not really doing anything at all—he’s leant back in his chair and staring out the window into the black emptiness of space when you steal a look once more, but something about how his casual responses are affecting you makes it seem like he’s the one currently seducing you.

Maker, you have to focus.   You have to control yourself.  You’re starting to feel a little warm in your thick jumpsuit—a particular shade of orange that does not compliment your complexion but you normally rejoice in wearing regardless.  It’s baggy and uniform and hides most of your curves and most importantly, it keeps you toasty on missions like this.  Space is cold —especially this far out in the Cauper Void, and there’s no fucking reason this powered down hunk of floating metal should feel as muggy and stifling as it does in here.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” you suddenly hear yourself say, spontaneously, no thought put into it whatsoever.  One last try, one last attempt to avoid it, a last-ditch go at flight before he gives you no choice and you’re left with this one remaining option.  “This isn’t a good idea.  It’s… not healthy.  I don’t want to do this anymore.”

This gets a small chuckle out of him.  “I know you don’t, pretty baby.”

“Then let’s just call the whole thing off,” you propose once again, trying to lighten your tone, make it a… a friendly thing.  It sounds so fake, even to your own ears—since when would you be desperate enough to let the dreaded petname slide?—but granted, you know what they say about time and measures and all that shit.  “We can call it a tie, just go back to the way things were befo—”

He cuts you off and pins you with his gaze through the reflection.  “You realize that you begging me to put an end to your suffering is—ridiculously hot, mostly—but also only an incentive to make me keep pushing until you finally give in?”

You groan and comb some of your hair off your forehead, not liking the way it’s getting just the slightest bit damp.  “Fine, we won’t call it off, but can we at least just stop—”  You immediately catch yourself, not wanting to unintentionally push this too far too quickly, but your hesitation is clear and compelling enough for him to prompt you.

“At least just stop what?”  Dameron asks, and though you don’t think it’s intentional or even noticeable from his perspective, something about the way his voice sounds… husky.  Low to the ground.

“Stop dragging it out,” you breathe, your heart pounding.  Why is your heart pounding so fucking fast?  This is a fucking sting op, a facade, so why are you getting so caught up in the lie you’ve spun for yourself?  “Finish it.  Sooner, rather than later.  Quit being masochists about it, just fucking put it to—”

Maker, your eyes instinctively snap to his at your poor choice of wording, having almost said bed on complete accident.  Genuinely, you didn’t mean to phrase it that way, but at the same time, the thought of it almost burns you alive.  Fuck.  Dameron, and you, in bed.  It could be mean.  It could be rough.  A fight for dominance more than anything.  He’s bigger than you and he could make it fucking hurt, especially after going without it for as long as you have, but something about how double-edged that type of relief would be isn’t really sinking in for you right now.  Like a person slowly dying of thirst that’s fantasizing about drowning.  Regardless, the idea of a night with him and the sudden assortment of vivid imagery it provides is enough to get you to shut up and take a deep breath, just wait with your mouth shut for whatever his response is.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to wait long at all.

“This is cute,” he suddenly tells you, and you jerk back and sputter a bunch of consonants stupidly like he smacked you.

“Fuck you?”  Are the first recognizable words that can be heard.  “I’m not—this isn’t fucking— cute?”

“It’s cute,” Dameron repeats, hiding a soft smile from you with a few of his fingers pressed to his lips.  “You,” he says as he points at your reflection, twirling his finger around in circles, “trying to be all sneaky about it, go about your little performance.  It’s like… watching a little kid just blatantly fuck up a magic trick but they’re naive enough to think it’s working.  Keep going, I’m enthralled.”

You hold still for just a second as ice suddenly sinks through your tummy and clears away any trace of warmth you may have once felt from before.  Of course.  Stupid.  Stupid, you shouldn’t have even tried something like that, you don’t know why you thought…

Horrifyingly, you go dead silent and the lack of an immediate response from you hangs awkwardly in the still air.  You’re usually so quick with him, so fiery, letting the things he throws at you just glide right off you, but for some insane reason, you’re actually fucking… embarrassed?  A little bit?

You should say something, but your whole body is just frustratingly blank, almost buzzing in mortification, and it gets worse and worse the longer you stay quiet.  You don’t usually put yourself in a position to be compromised, and you certainly didn’t think the place he decided to jab this time had particularly thin skin.

You… you’d forgotten what it’s like to have someone laugh at you when you’re genuinely trying your best to flirt.

Well, it’s too late to say anything now, you think.  Now it’s just uncomfortable in here—true discomfort, not the typical angry silences.  You’re used to that, you’re used to huffing and crossing your arms and ticking your jaw through the breaks in conversation, refusing to say a word because you’re beyond pissed off.  This is different.  This quiet sits different in the air, this emotion hits different in your chest, somewhere vulnerable.  A crack in your armor he found without even necessarily intending to, but at this point, the stupid way you can’t seem to hide the wound from him is just as much to blame.

“So, uh…”  Dameron clears his throat as you shut your eyes tight against the awkwardness, but you can still feel a strange little shift in the air from behind you.  There’s something about the enclosed space, the quiet darkness surrounding you both, you feel… too close to him.  Sharing his air, feeling the energy when it’s cramped and you’re not able to just get up and storm away from him like normal.  You don’t like it.  You don’t like that you can immediately tell something has changed without being able to see him, that type of intimacy between you is pushing a boundary you can’t quite pinpoint but know exists.

You snap your eyes open and look over at Dameron’s reflection when he’s quiet for too long, and though you try to glare as fiercely as possible at him while you do it, the look on his face almost stops you dead.  The pure intensity raging in his expression, the way he’s got his eyes narrowed, flicking back and forth between yours, carefully studying you, wondering if perhaps he may have gotten it all wrong.  “I mean, y’know.  Theoretically speaking, and all.  If I broke, you’d let me fuck you?”

You… aren’t expecting that.

You don’t know why but your heart suddenly starts to race again, but it’s not the same as before.  Before it was speeding up and at an angle, like a rocket trying to escape a body’s gravitational pull, to go somewhere, search for something.  This time it just feels like it’s ricketing downhill, unsteady and out of control, about to break apart with every single pothole that rattles and slams through you.  Shit.  You didn’t expect the ultimatum would be presented to you so up front like that—you thought there’d be… some resistance, at least.  

Fuck, you take way too fucking long thinking about it, and your face feels warmer and warmer the more you mentally pick apart his specific phrasing, wondering where you should even begin.  You still haven’t said anything, but the damage is already done.  What should've been a firm, instantaneous go fuck yourself is left suspended, unanswered, open for interpretation.  You miss your window of opportunity to shut him down, you overshoot it by a longshot, and then you feel that spark of a what-if flare deep down once more.

No, fucking stop it.  Stop it.  Maker, your eyes do everything they can to not look at him while you concentrate and work to tap into your anger, stoking the flames of your fire to avoid feeling… temptation.  How dare he?  How fucking dare he do this to you, especially when there’s no chance to get out of here, to abort mission and cut your losses?  You clench your jaw and isolate that fury, magnify it until it’s the only thing you can feel anymore.

“My turn now,” Dameron eventually breaks the silence to clarify, blinking at you, and by this point you’re so fucking pissed off that you don’t recognize that isn’t actually a question.

“No,” you immediately snap, strung far too thin to deal with this new, treacherous territory with him.  Defaulting to normal is best, it’s easier.  “No, it’s not your turn, and fuck no, you can’t fuck me, not even if it means I win this stupid bet.  No to everything that has anything to fucking do with you, alright?  Don’t talk to me.  You’re lucky if I agree to sleep in the same fucking room as you tonight.  And—and?—I think your beard looks dumb.”

Okay, so maybe the last part was just a little bit childish, but you’re in such a bad fucking mood and you want to insult something he’s clearly just trying out for right now, hasn’t yet solidified as part of his usual appearance and unshakeable confidence in it.  It’s a downright lie—you think he might look more attractive with it than he ever has.  Effortlessly rugged and masculine, framing his face and making his eyes all the more piercing.

You don’t think it works, but regardless, he heeds your sharp words and says nothing for a good few minutes at least.  You had hoped the break in interaction would allow you the ability to reset a little bit, give yourself time to work through it, but it’s like the pressure in the air steadily increases regardless of how silent it is in here—or perhaps, because of it.

You can’t help it.  You flick your eyes to the transparisteel in front of you once more and catch his reflection staring directly at you, unmoving.  It jars you as much as it sparks your anger, and you glare down at your hands and give him a few seconds.  A few seconds of grace, of mercy, before you try again.

Sure enough, he’s still got his dark eyes pinned to you when you go to check once more, like he’s actually fucking thinking about something right now, which is just… astounding, for obvious reasons.  Mainly, the nerve of him.  The fucking nerve of him to be able to look at you like that, like he’s just entitled to study your every feature, searching your eyes for things you’ve never looked deep enough to find within yourself, making incredibly loud assumptions with his mind that he has absolutely no right to be making.

“Shut up,”  You snap at him defensively, feeling like you’re sweating buckets even in the freezing emptiness of dead space.  You can’t figure out if it’s a cold sweat or if your body is legitimately just malfunctioning under his stare.  “Shut up.”

You watch as his reflection suddenly drops his head back against the seat and rolls out the stiffness of his neck, blinking his eyes shut and raising his eyebrows like you’re completely overreacting, like he has absolutely no idea.  “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re not that dumb,” you challenge.  “You’re… plotting.  Evil plotting.”

A thick eyebrow drops so that only one is quirked up, and a grin pulls at his lips.

“You’re right,” Dameron admits casually after a moment with his eyes still closed, his voice pitched low in the cramped ship.  “I was thinking about what it’s gonna take to get you to lose.”

You swallow against the dryness in your throat, starting to unintentionally bounce one of your legs up and down without even realizing it.  Fuck, this ship is small, it’s too fucking small in here—you gaze wistfully out at the vast endlessness of space, wanting to grit your teeth at the irony of being surrounded by the one thing you so desperately wish you had.

“I just have to find a weakness,” he shifts forward in his seat and reveals to you, bewilderingly shameless in his honesty.  Like all of a sudden you’re an accomplice to this endeavor instead of its target, as if he isn’t spoiling the secret by letting you in on it.  “Something that you like, that gets you going.  Something that riles you up, gets you all hot and bothered down there—”

“So you can exploit it,” you huff, slouching over a bit and trying not to sound like you’re pouting.

“—so I can exploit it,” he finishes happily, collapsing back into his seat like he’s glad you caught on so quick and he doesn’t have to explain further.  “Now we can do the whole routine—the bickering, the tension, the undeniable sexual chemistry we have—or we can skip all that and you can just tell me flat out what it’s gonna take to rev that pretty little engine up, because I want it purring.”

And, it’s so fucking weird, because the specific verbiage that would normally make you cringe just hearing it spoken aloud doesn’t inspire the typical response, even though it feels like it should.  It feels like you should be grossed out, it feels like a moment you should screw up your facial expression and act offended, but you’re… not.  This is actually fucking working, it’s unbelievable.  The undeniable fact infuriates you just as much as it stumps you.

“You do realize that everything you say is a game that two can play at, right?”  You point out, not really sure where you’re going with this but feeling heated about it all the same.  “What’s stopping me from exploiting something you like?”

“See now that’s a great idea,” Dameron announces, clapping his hands together happily and sending you jumping a few inches in your seat at the sudden sound, your hand automatically shooting up to rest on your thumping heart.  “I can tell you what I like, and you can just listen.”

Alright, no, wait—backtrack—

“How about I tell you what I don’t like,” you snip breathlessly, tucking your hair behind your ear and feeling all the blood rush to your cheeks.  Default to normal, default to normal.  “Your fucking attitude.  Your demeanor.  The way you talk down to me.  You don’t listen.  You walk around like you’re such hot shit just because you’re a good pilot but none of that means anything when you don’t ever fucking listen.  You’re terrible at it, doesn’t matter who’s talking—you don’t listen to me, you don’t listen to people who actually like you, you don’t listen to orders, you don’t listen to reason—”

“You think I’m a good pilot?”  He suddenly asks, and you have to take a second.  This cockpit isn’t designed for anything other than sitting, much less turning all the way around, but you’re sure you can find some way to throttle him from here.  He chuckles as you let out the loudest sigh you’ve ever heard yourself make—which, is an incredible feat you think both of you should be congratulated for—before Dameron eventually carries on.  “You could tell me that,” he admits with a shrug, a hidden smile on his face that he’s trying to bite back.  “Or you could tell me the truth.”

You shouldn’t encourage him, but you just can’t fucking help it.  There’s something inside you, something you can only compare to a morbid sort of curiosity.  Maybe you’re just a glutton for punishment, even more so than agreeing to this bet has already confirmed.  “And that would be—?”

“That you use anger as a defense mechanism because I touch a nerve you didn’t realize you had,” Dameron replies breezily.  “Have since the moment we met.  And that you maybe want me to touch something else, but you’re too stubborn and proud and committed to hating me to ever admit it.  You can admit it, it’s okay, I can touch whatever you need me to tou—”

“How about the emergency eject button?”  You hiss, finally feeling your frustration peak.  “Pop the top on this bitch.  Put me out of my fucking misery, right now.  You’ve got such a big head that the blood flow will probably keep your tiny little brain warm enough as long as you strap yourself down beforehand, I’ll wait.  And then you can go back to base, alone , and find another poor girl to emotionally torture since you probably don’t get enough of it from the ones you work your way through but can never remember the most basic things about.”

Remarkably, that actually shuts him up.  You’re doubtful the jab really hurts him, but you’re not going to feel bad about it either way.  He deserved that.  You cross your arms over your chest and don’t even bother looking at him, huffing and flushed with the climax of your ferocity, now left feeling strangely exhausted in its wake.  Eventually your breathing evens out and disappears into the silence, until nothing at all can be heard.

It’s like that for a moment—only a moment, before the loud tearing of velcro suddenly shreds through the quiet in the cockpit, completely rattling you.  Automatically your eyes shoot over to his reflection, watching large hands pull the orange jumpsuit apart at his chest and then shrug it over broad shoulders.  It’s not sexual.  It can’t be sexual, because there’s just no fucking room to allow it—it takes him forever to pull the long sleeves down his arms, but the way he drags it out somehow just increases your anticipation for an event you should have absolutely no interest in spectating.  He’s wearing a white sleeveless undershirt underneath and the jumpsuit bunches at his waist, making him look all the longer and more defined as he finally collapses back into his seat and reclines in it, the distant constellations bathing his lean torso in dim speckles of starlight.

Your gaze catches on every good part of him—it falls down the muscular lines of his neck and follows the thin gold chain wrapped around it, disappearing into the white of his scooping neckline.  His toned body finds a place to rest and stretch out without looking awkward or uncomfortable, coarse hair darkening his jaw and dusting the strong lines of his forearms—but it’s his eyes that make your heart stutter.  They’re endlessly deep and dark and knowing , and you can’t seem to look away from him, not even when he opens his mouth to address you.  

“You’re always so fucking mean to me,” Dameron remarks, and for just a split second—just a split second, you feel a stab of regret.  “I should eat you out tonight.”

Fuck, he hits the nail right on the head on his very first try, and just hearing the words come out of his mouth so effortlessly makes your pussy clench in on itself in need.  Nothing about his inflection changed from one sentence to the next, nothing in his voice made it seem like he just flipped the fucking galaxy upside down with just a few words.  To an onlooker who doesn’t speak Basic, they’d have absolutely no hint as to why your face is suddenly radiating heat at an industrial capacity, blazing hot enough to warm the whole cockpit.  You feel like you’re literally burning up with it.  You have to put a palm to your cheek to make sure it’s not actually on fucking fire.  “What— what did you just say to me?”

“That’s what you need,” he drawls, unbothered by the sharpness of your tone.  “What you’ve needed, ever since I can remember.  Should’ve done it a long fucking time ago, now that I’m thinking about it.  How long’s it been?  Tell me the truth, I know it’s been awhile.”

You feel like you’re being roasted alive like one of those hairy little Kowakian monkey-lizards that you’re pretty sure have sentient designation but are the first to be skewered and cooked over the firepit regardless.  Your heart is slamming against your sternum and you scramble to come up with an even slightly clever response after such an ambush.

“This is your plan?”  You raise an eyebrow at him, feeling a bead of sweat drop down your temple and onto the corner of your lashes.  Oh fuck, be cool, be cool.  “You think this is gonna work?  Ask me if I want a weak orgasm and rugburn on my thighs?”

“I can shave,” Dameron proposes quietly, lifting his chin and gently scrubbing the side of his cheek.  The sound of the thick bristles against his fingers makes you swallow thickly and push back very vivid thoughts of how his face would feel between your legs.  How soft and wet his mouth would feel at the center of that thick, coarse beard.  “Tonight, I’ll shave it off.  Make it nice and smooth for you.”

Something inside you surges up to assure him he absolutely should not shave, and you actually have to bite your tongue to keep it buried at the last second.  Stars, that was a close one, what the fuck prompted that?

“I don’t give a shit what you do,” you quickly return, resisting the urge to wipe your brow.  “Beard or no beard, makes no difference.  Foreplay is overrated, I’m not big on wasting time.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” he immediately laments—so quick , and the worst part is that the sympathy in his voice actually sounds sincere.  You’re having trouble looking him in the eyes right now, hearing the genuine pity come through in his tone.  “Who… who did this to you?”

“You said you want to figure out what I like, what turns me on,” you return, tucking your hair behind your ear once more and trying not to sound self-conscious.  Maker, how long until your shift is over?  You need to get out of here, this shit is… way out of your league.  “I’m not into it, so try again.”

“Really?”  Dameron takes a moment to look at you, furrow his thick eyebrows at you in barely concealed curiosity, before his head tilts sideways and drops to his shoulder.  “Normally I’d respect that, but I meant it when I said you need it.”

“We fucking hate each other, Dameron,” you hiss, a reminder to him as much as it is to yourself.  Fuck, you really don’t like where this is going.  “You don’t know anything about me, you don’t know what the I n—”

“I bet you think we’d fuck hard,” he murmurs, low enough that you have to take an unsteady breath and physically brace yourself for whatever is going to come from that dirty mouth next.  “You think that maybe I’d throw you around a little, give it to you from behind, teach you a fucking lesson for always talking back to me.  But that’s primitive shit, Gold-Ten, that’s not for you.”

Resist.  Resist .  You’re part of the fucking Resistance, for Maker’s sake, you’re taught to hold out until death in torture scenarios.  Since when did this tin can suddenly become a new POW camp simulation you have to train for?

“I want to take you apart so slow that you can’t talk at all,” Dameron continues quietly, and you close your eyes, biting your bottom lip hard enough to sting.  “We don’t even have to fuck—I mean, I want to, but mostly I just want to taste you.  Go nice and slow.  I want you on your back, so I can look in your eyes and see all that anger just… fade away.  I want to watch you try to fight how fucking good I’ll make it.  How hot it’s gonna be when you can’t glare at me anymore, when your pretty doll eyes go all soft and sweet and you finally realize that I’ve never hated you at all.”

Maker.  This is a trick.  It’s not a question, it shouldn’t be presented like one—this is a dirty rotten trick , and you’re not gonna fall for it.  You can’t fucking fall for it.  It’s a low blow, and you refuse to even acknowledge he said anything at all.  He’s lying to get your guard down.  He laughed at your flirting.  He’s a shit person, he’s using you, this isn’t real.

Real or not, you still gulp loud enough for him to hear it.

“We could go back to our room after our shift is over,” he offers out of the blue, and you have no clue why, but when he pauses and lets it hang in the air for a second, you don’t interrupt him.  You stay completely silent while he waits for you, waits for your typical snarky comeback.  You have it in your head instantly, you know what you’d normally say.  Your room.  It’s not ‘our’ room, it’s fucking your room that you’re generous enough to let him bunk in, a privilege he’s this fucking close to losing—but you can’t find it in yourself to say it right now.  Your anger is gradually losing the war to your arousal and you’re forced to watch every single small defeat inside you happen from the sidelines.

His reflection blinks at you through the transparisteel, his eyebrows raising just slightly at your prolonged silence, before he suddenly sits up a little and leans forward.

“And I could lock the door,” Dameron continues, lowering his voice, both in volume and register.  “The lights in there are way too fucking bright but I don’t want to be in complete darkness, so maybe we can turn them off and open the port shade, let just enough light come through to see.  I could turn on the radio, find something quiet, easy to listen to.  Something you like, I’ll let you pick it out.  And then… Wait, hang on, which bed?”

You clench your jaw and purposefully say nothing even as your pussy squeezes, glaring right through his reflection into the black void of space.

“Mmm.   Your bed,” he eventually decides.  “I want you comfortable.  You shower at night.  Your hair will be wet and you’ll be in those baggy pajamas that you think I can’t see your nipples through, the ones that I know you take off under your covers and then put on in the morning when you think I’m still asleep.  That’s good, I want you relaxed, so that maybe… maybe you’d let me take your panties off at some point.  And you could lay back and open your legs, and I could go down on you for a little while.  However long you need.”

Fuck.

No, this isn’t fucking happening.  Your lower muscles aren’t twisting in so hard that it actually fucking hurts, your pussy isn’t leaking through two layers of fabric under your jumpsuit, your body isn’t outright revolting against the sheer neglect you’ve put it through.  Maker, it’s fucking painful.  You have to clench your hands into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms before you can open your mouth.

“You want to know what I need?”  You nearly wheeze, a drop of sweat sliding down the back of your neck this time.  Your body feels like it’s three sizes too big for this cockpit and your skin feels like it’s three sizes too small for your body.  “I need you to shut the fuck u—”

“What you need,” Dameron purrs, sliding up closer behind your seat and sighing soft against the worn material of your headrest, “is a warm mouth to cum in.  Don’t be shy, pretty baby, you can tell me.”

You growl out his last name as threateningly as you possibly can before he purrs yours right back in your ear, and fuck, you’ve never heard it sound so sexual before.  Last names allow pilots to maintain a respectful distance from each other.  Flight designations are Resistance-wide, but last names are just… allies.  Not friends, not companions, but a vast network of people brought together by a common enemy.  It hurts to lose a first name.  But the way yours sounds rolling off of Dameron’s tongue is just too sinful, too intimate when calling you that is meant to sever intimacy by design.  He says it slow and makes it dirty, muddies it in the back of his throat as he slides up even closer to you, until his face is right next to yours as you stare at each other through the transparisteel.

“I’m really…” he pauses, before exhaling through his nose and swallowing thick enough to make his Adam’s apple drop and bounce up again, his tongue coming out to wet his plush lips as he blinks slowly at you with a heavy gaze, “… really good at it.  Call me Poe and I’ll do it for you all night.”

Shit, your pussy is just a fucking mess right now.  It feels like it’s melting sweet and syrupy all over your thighs, throbbing and pounding and clamping up and screaming at you to do something, at least press your hand down there to alleviate some of the aching tensi—

No— stars, no touching yourself is rule number two.  You drop your hands to your thighs and squeeze them, trying to reign yourself back in.

“I think you’re—just projecting,” you try, but turns out responding in general is just an all-around bad idea.  Nothing about it comes out right.  The ‘just’ sounds like your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and your voice cracks on the word ‘projecting,’ but you don’t even have time to be self-conscious or embarrassed at how much you’re giving yourself away—all your energy has to go towards fighting the tightness between your open legs, how you’re so fucking turned on that you’re worried you’ll cum without even touching yourself.  Oh Maker, can you imagine?  How fucking proud of himself he’d be?  You can’t let that happen, but fuck, holding back something so appealing is so much harder than it sounds.

Tap into that anger, tap into that anger—only, you can’t suddenly find it.  Where’d it go?  Fuck, doesn’t matter, conjure it.  Quick, before it’s too late, get mad —don’t let him lure you into a… a false… 

Dameron tilts his chin down towards the line of your shoulder and then slowly turns his head towards your neck, breathing you in gently.

A false sense of…

His soft exhale makes goosebumps break out all the way down your arms.

… What?

“Maybe you’re right,” Dameron acknowledges, talking just under your ear.  You watch his eyelids dip and the dark beard brushes against your skin and you catch just a hint of that woodsy, spicy scent engulfing you.  Like… teakwood, maybe?  Stars, you don’t know, you think you’re starting to lose your mind.  What the fuck does teakwood even smell like?  “Maybe it’s just what I need.  You should exploit it, chances are I’ll still cum first.”

That rockets another painful spasm down low.  It hurts so fucking bad—fuck, maybe you could… rub yourself up against these weapons controls?  Just a little bit?  That joystick, right there, just ease yourself up against it just to nurse this wound a little bit…?

No, fucking— bad.  That’s bad, you have to stop—

“This isn’t real, this isn’t—y-you just…”  You flutter your eyelashes shut, digging your fingernails into your thighs like it’ll help break through the fog of his lulling voice, how fucking amazing he smells right now.  “You just want to win th-the b—”

“ Fuck the bet,” he tells you quietly, his head dipped low enough now that his lips brush against your neck, and you shudder so hard at the sensation that your shoulder almost knocks into his chin with it.  “You really think I’m doing all this for a fucking bet?”

Don’t trust him, don’t trust him, don’t—

Your deep breath is so stuttery and uneven that it’s technically just a series of shallow inhales all anxiously strung together, too desperate for oxygen to go about it legato.  It’s painfully obvious to him by now, it has to be, but you very quickly miss the shaky breathing as soon as he takes away your ability to do it all together.

“Let me taste you,” he whispers, his voice almost breaking with how gentle it is, how it sounds like it flips in and out of his register when he speaks this low.  “Right now, let’s make it real, let m—I know you have to be soaking fucking wet, baby, just let me try a little bit of it, please—I’m… holy shit, I’m so hard just thinking about it.”

“You c-can’t,” you stammer, reaching up to pinch the bridge of your nose in frustration.  At him, at the situation, at the painful throb of emptiness between your legs.  “Fuck, it’s not allowed, it’s against the rules—”

“It won’t be,” he assures you, and you hiccup when you suddenly feel his hand brush against your side, strong fingers branching out to curve against your ribcage.  “You don’t have to do anything, you can stay just like this.  Just a few seconds and then I’ll stop, I promise.”

Oh, Maker, it’s on the very top of your tongue, so unbelievably close to telling him something—but you don’t know what it should be.  You’re right at the tipping point, on a tightrope right between what you want and what you should want.  And, knowing you’re this close to giving in, Dameron slowly eases his hand down your side and starts to trail it inwards, and just the lightest brush of his warm tongue against your neck shatters any composure you have left.

You whimper and instinctively try to close your legs, but you fucking can’t— your knees are forced wide apart by controls and your whole body freezes when his hand slides down and folds gently along the curve of your pussy through the thick fabric of your jumpsuit.

The feeling of being held like this by him is just too good , cradled so perfectly in his palm as he opens his mouth and flutters his tongue out to taste your skin again, giving you a little more of it this time and letting you feel the roughness of his beard with the way his lips move.  Your breath catches, then he hooks his fingertips up just the slightest bit and pulls back, and you suddenly have to smack your whole hand over your face in a terrible attempt to stifle your loud gasp.

“Oh, Maker, I c-can’t,” you stammer against your fingers, not being able to trust him or your own body.  You continue to protest even after he moves back up, resting his palm low on your abdomen, letting the heat bleed through the fabric and transfer directly to your floor muscles as he lifts his head up from your shoulder.  “I can’t, we can’t, I…”

You can’t see him, but you know he’s looking at you.  He’s staring right at you through the reflection, studying the way you’re hiding your face from him, how you’re still melting, still losing your composure just from the warm palm pressed tight your tummy.

His touch leaves you for a second. But then the deafening sound of velcro ripping at the crotch of your jumpsuit has you dragging your hand down your mouth and your eyelids dipping.

“Dameron,” you breathe into your fingers, just as his carefully slip into the small opening and begin to work at the button to your pants. “Dameron, this isn’t—you don’t want—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I don’t want,” he grunts at you, and you try not to bite yourself at the sound of him unzipping things and yanking fabric to the side.  “What I really fucking want is the real thing, but I guess this’ll have to do for now.”

“I—”  Your mind whirs desperately, trying to process when his fingers wedge under your panties and down.   But he doesn’t give you a single fucking second.  As soon as the tip of his middle finger reaches your slit, he’s dropping it and sliding it through your slick, hot, unbearably neglected cunt.

“Fuck,” he spits, and you feel like you might be about to break your own fucking jaw with how hard you’re clutching it, trying so desperately not to make a noise.  The pad of his finger is rough and calloused as it drags against your clit in slow, tight circles, and you clamp your eyes shut and try to breathe normally, but it’s no use.  Fuck , it’s been so long .  You’ve been aching for it for a full fucking month and a half now and you know that even if he couldn’t feel it, he can hear how drenched you are right now.  It’s making an obscene sound as he steadily masturbates you with one heavenly finger, giving your body what it’s desperately craved for so many weeks.  “Fuck, baby’s pussy got fucking wet hearing me talk about how good I’d lick it, huh?”

That sends a bright flare launching through you and you gasp raggedly, both hands whipping out to snatch at his forearm where it disappears between your legs.  “No, shit, wait, stopstopstopstop stop , I—”

His hand slips out immediately and yet you continue to tremble like his finger is still right there, like your clit is just imagining it so vividly that it’s successfully convincing itself of the illusion.  The aching bit of flesh is burning, that good burn, the one that’s searing and bright that makes your muscles continue to chase the sensation long after the stimulation is gone.  Fuck, he almost made you cum.  He barely touched you for a few seconds and yet your fingers have to tighten into claws to slow your body down the fuck down, flexing against your thighs and trying your best to halt the impending climax.

By the time you’re able to wrangle yourself back from the edge and look at his reflection, his middle finger is already in his mouth and he’s blinking slowly at you, his pupils blown wide.  You’re breathing hard at him, staring open-mouthed at the way his lips are closed below his second knuckle, how he takes forever dragging it back out again.  You have to close your eyes.  You have to clamp them shut and keep them that way, knowing you won’t be able to look at him through whatever he’s going to say next.

Except, oddly, he doesn’t say much.

“Shit,” he breathes, dropping his mouth to your neck once more.  “Shhhit.  I…”

Your eyes snap open in sudden, blind panic when he doesn’t continue, horrified at the possibility that he doesn’t like it.  Dameron always has something to say, he doesn’t go speechless.  “Oh—Maker, is it not—?”

“Mmmfuck, just—” he grits, panting hot air against your skin, “—fuck.  Give me a second.”

You can only see the crown of his head with the way he’s angled, but you can see his shoulders a little further back.  They start… moving slightly.  Just the littlest bit, a smooth motion, like his whole body is slowly easing back and forth—

The nav controls are between his legs, you immediately realize.  He’s grinding up against them with how close he is to you and your seat.

And suddenly, it’s like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.  A ray of sunshine that breaks through the raging storm.  Dameron might cum in his pants like this.  Which means you’ll win, and arguably more importantly, you’ll finally be able to cum.  You don’t even take a moment to consider the potential consequences—how you’re going to have to withstand the stimulation until he succumbs to it, how you’ll have to outlast—but you’re not thinking straight.  You’re not really thinking at all.

“You can…” you suddenly hear yourself whisper, and your heart pounds in your throat when he instantly stops moving.  “One… one more.  If you want.  You can put your finger inside this time, it’s where I’m the… w-wettest.”

“Fuck,” Dameron croaks into the crook of your neck, his voice scraping low and rough and sending a tremor through you.  “Fuck, okay, yeah—”

His hand slides across your hip and down, but you catch him just in time.

“But don’t touch my clit.”  You try to sound as firm as possible through the breathlessness, still trying to put your foot down even when you’re giving in, and Dameron’s teeth come out as he stifles a soft groan into your neck in response.

“Yes, baby,” he murmurs obediently as his hand sinks down once more, and so diligently, he avoids it altogether.  His fingers slide under your panties and fall straight down to your entrance, down to where you know you’re the hottest, where your pussy is flexing and pushing wetness out with a steady, wicked throb.  The pad of his middle finger presses gently against the tight muscles there, rubs just the slightest bit to feel that resistance, and then the length of it eases inside you so slowly that your knees rattle against bulky metal.

“Fucking Maker , ” he hisses as he slides it in, his body making a sudden jerk against the controls.

Your eyes roll back at the feeling of something inside you after so long, after such a torturous buildup, and you grasp at his forearm again when it curls naturally up against searing pleasure.  Oh, it’s so good, it’s so good, your hands shake while he very carefully moves it in and out, the raw sparks of heat threatening to incinerate you as your muscles cling to every ridge of his finger.  He gets it sopping wet, bathes it so completely in your slick that you’re almost certain it’ll come out pruny and drenched.

“Shit, okay,” you pant, squeezing desperately around his finger, “o-okay, fuck, that’s enough.”

His hand pulls out… slower this time.  He slips his finger out of you quick enough, but he drags the tip of it through your folds as he retreats, just barely grazing your clit and making you jolt in your seat.  Shit, you don’t know if it felt intentional enough to fault him for it—mostly it just excites you, thrills you to have him edge you like this without really needing to put any effort at all into it.

Dameron lifts his head to sink his finger deep into his mouth once more, and you tremble as you watch him enjoy it, staring at the way his shoulders seem to relax as soon as your taste is on his tongue, how his face goes soft with it and he almost slumps.

Relief.  Genuine, not embellished.  He still doesn’t say anything after he slowly slides it out and blinks at you, no sugar sweet drawl telling you how amazing you taste, no candied words to make you give in and let him have another go.  You’re both breathing hard at each other, staring, waiting to see who will break first.

Stars, you… fucking like this.  You want him to keep going, but you can’t offer it again.  It’s just too exposing, too revealing to let him you’re actually really fucking enjoying this, you can’t—

“Do you w—?”  Your voice automatically comes out through the silence without your permission, sounding just absolutely fucking wrecked by this point, but his palm is already slithering back down as soon as you speak, and you make the softest little submissive noise in your throat at him taking immediate initiative like that.  He’s not as careful about it this time—his hand finds its target with less frill, his finger slides in quicker, sinking deep into your heat with little hesitation, lighting you on fire from the inside out, and you bite the meat of your thumb to stay quiet.

“Fuck, this is so hot,” he suddenly breathes next to your ear while your legs spasm and you gasp brokenly.  “This is so—fuck, pretty baby letting me do this to her, I can’t fucking believe—”

Dameron eases a second finger inside you this time, letting you feel that delicious stretch from this angle, unable to lift your legs or shuffle around to help and subsequently resigned to simply experience it the way he gives it to you.  Your teeth have probably permanently indented your bottom lip from how hard you’re clamped down, a testament to how much you’re trying to hold back the loud moan you miraculously haven’t released yet.  Somehow it makes it sexier, not letting him hear you, not having your own noises to drown out the spark of urgency in his voice beginning to peek through.

Shit, it’s too much.  You can only let him touch you a few seconds at a time before you feel that familiar tug towards mind-numbing bliss, and the more he does it, the more appealing that feeling then becomes.  It’s teasing you, floating right in front of you and calling into question what could possibly be so bad about just reaching out to meet it?  You could.  You could cum right now.  What’s two weeks of pay?  You could cum all night long if you want, that is a thing you can do—

Quickly snapping out of your hypnotic downfall, your trembling hands snatch at his forearm once more, and Dameron, the fucker, drags his fingers slowly over your clit on the way out— so not accidental, not even close to it this time, but the sensation makes your hips stutter upwards and chase it nonetheless.

“Fuck you,” you groan at his audacity, your chest arching as you drop your head back, “I said don’t touch my—” but two wet fingers slipping past your lips and onto your tongue muffle the rest of your sentence.  Your heart does half a somersault before slamming down early, the taste of your pussy filling your mouth as you automatically start sucking on them.

“None of that,” Dameron tells you softly, massaging his fingers along your tongue before pressing a sweet kiss under your ear.  “Be nice.  I’m being nice.”

You should bite him.  Instead, you just close your eyes and mphh weakly around his fingers, your body sagging as you give into it and let him explore your mouth with them, your lower muscles cramping up in painful desperation even when he’s not anywhere near that part of your body right now.  Your tongue even comes up to lick between them, swirl around them so soft compared to how hard you’re puffing through your nose.

Dameron slowly inches his fingers out, letting the tips of them rest against your bottom lip for just a brief moment, before his hand is moving again.  Not down, but back and around, so he can open his mouth and taste you another way this time.

Shit, you feel like you’re dying.  You need air.  Your hands clench into fists and you use the back of one to wipe the sweat from the bridge of your nose while he takes his time sampling you like this.  If anything, he looks just as blissed out as before, continuing to rub his crotch up against the solid metal between his legs and teasing you with it as much as he’s teasing himself.

“Maker, let me do this for real tonight, okay,” Dameron pants after dropping his fingers from his mouth, sounding like he’s fighting for his breath while you can’t find yours at all.  Your eyes flick down to watch the way his hand disappears behind the chair to grab the controls and push his cock up against them even harder, how he drops his forehead to your neck like he just can’t fucking handle it anymore.  “Fuck, I’ll shave, I’ll do anything you want, just let me—”

“Cum,” you gasp out before you can stop yourself, and there’s a moment after it where his hips suddenly stutter against the controls, and you both freeze.

Shit.  Shitshitshit, did that actually work?

No, you very quickly realize, his body isn’t spasming like it would if he finally emptied his load after a month and a half.  He’s just… holding there, his head buried in your neck, completely still.

You didn’t mean it like that.  Well… fuck, you did, but you didn’t realize you’d be that reckless about it, that upfront about reissuing the challenge.

Dameron pulls back to look at you from the side this time, but it’s too cramped—he keeps his head turned facing you even as his eyes flick up to the transparisteel to take in the finer details of your features, the thin sheen of sweat on your forehead, and the slightly alarmed way you’re blinking back at him, worried you just shot your blaster at him in the midst of a mutual ceasefire and you fucking missed.

You see the understanding in his eyes instantly fall into place, and it’s not fucking good.  Ohhhhhh no, it’s not good.  Your chest starts rising and falling rapidly, suddenly registering the position you just put yourself in.  Fuck, you didn’t think—you saw your opening, so clearly, you didn’t have time to think about the consequences.

“D-Dameron…” you try your best to placate.

“Don’t touch your clit?”  He asks quietly, the raspiness of his voice ripping a hole through you while his hand suddenly shoves its way back down your body once more.

“Dameron,” you whimper, your heart stuttering in panic as you grasp weakly at his arm reaching between your spread thighs, “Dameron, this is—this is against the r-rules—”

“You keep saying that,” he comments, his fingers easily finding the opening in your jumpsuit no matter how hard you flex your thighs against bulky mechanics to try and close them.  “How clearly do you remember the rules?  What were the rules again?

You open your mouth to respond but his hand sliding under your panties and down just obliterates any chance you were going to attempt.  No words, nothing comes out but a shaky whine as his finger sinks into your soaking heat, going right for the kill.

“Come on, baby, the rules,” Dameron reminds you when you never give him an answer.  “Tell me.  No fucking, no jerking off, and…?”

You suddenly struggle forwards in a last-ditch attempt at preventing the inevitable, hoping you can scoot up enough in your seat to escape his reach from behind.  But fuck, your thighs have been shoved wide open for nearly eight hours—none of the muscles are working the way they should be anymore.  There’s just enough room in front of you to get there and you probably would’ve been able to do it at the beginning of the shift, even with his hand between your legs like this, but you’re sluggish and your thighs pull sharp and urgent with the movement.  The frantic maneuver enough to veer his fingers off course just slightly, moving one of your lips to the side at an angle, and you keep pushing against the pain no matter how useless it is.

“—No cumming,” he finishes for you, and his other hand is slithering up under your arm and groping one of your breasts through the jumpsuit before shoving you back tight up against your seat once more, totally helpless against it.  “Probably have another fifteen minutes or so before our shift ends.  Better hold it in, pretty baby, because this one is all you.”

“This—this isn’t fair, this is—”  The second the slippery pad of his finger presses hard against your clit, you’re biting your lip to cut off a breathless whimper that slips out.  “This is… is sab— sabotage— ”

“Oh, I know,” he moans next to your ear, mocking your high plea of distress with a fake, overly sympathetic whine.  “Feels so fucking good though, doesn’t it?”

Fuck, it does.  The build feels like an orgasm in itself, just working your way to it.  You’re already so unbelievably close after just a few seconds of direct stimulation, an obvious consequence of originally agreeing to such a hardcore edging workout.  You’re pouring sweat, so swollen and tight between your legs as you do everything you can to revolt against your body’s needs.

“Oh fuck, stop touching my clit—” you gasp raggedly, heart thundering in panic while your lower muscles start to immediately seize up, “oh—fuckfuckfuck— Poe, take your finger off m—”

Instead of doing it, his hand just slows down until the tip of his finger comes to a halt, maybe less than an inch over top of it.  You still can’t catch your breath though, not when you feel yourself throbbing against absolutely nothing, the calloused pad holding perfectly still over the bundle of nerves.  The swollen bud still arcs and flares at a steady frequency, building and building, and you choke out a wordless garble, absolutely fucking furious that this is what’s gonna make you cum.

“Don’t make me cum,” you switch up your sentence but not the terrified plead in your voice, the way it’s pitching up and out of control in the dead quiet of space.  He doesn’t even acknowledge it.  “Don’t make me cum, don—”

“Say it again,” he prompts instead, and lightning arcs up your spine.

“Poe,” you wheeze, the words coming from you without thought, your fingernails digging into his forearm even as your hips jerk up into his touch, “fuck, don’t make me cum, Poe—please don’t make me c—”

“But it’ll be so good,” he counters lowly, and your clit throbs in desperation at the richness of his voice when he speaks like this, saying things from deep in his chest.  “It’ll be so fucking good when it happens.  Stars, you’ll feel so much better, won’t you?  Cum right now and I���ll give you as many as I can until we have to go home.”

“N-No,” you whine, feeling his teeth scrape at the crook of your neck.  “No, I can’t—”

“Cum for me,” Dameron raises his voice, sharpening it into a direct order.  “Right now.  Come on— fucking make yourself lose.”

“But I—I—” you sob, starting to feel your body curl inwards, nearly about to succumb to the burning, the tightening, right on its last breath, “I-I don’t want to cum—”

“And I don’t fucking care,“ he hisses while your hands start flexing unintentionally, grasping helplessly at his immovable forearm where it disappears between your legs, the dark hair sliding under your fingertips as you claw desperately at it.  “You’ll fucking cum when I tell you to cum and you’ll like it, you disrespectful, cock-deprived, bratty little—”

And then everything goes dark.

No, literally.  The stars disappear.

The cockpit is suddenly shrouded in pitch blackness, and you’re almost certain it’s because you pass out, except then Dameron is all but ripping his hand out of your jumpsuit and cursing repeatedly in alarm.  You crumple in on yourself, eyes clamped shut and not hearing anything, right at the peak of your ecstasy and ready to soar into the light completely unassisted, your muscles doing all the work on their own—

“—shit, they’re way too close—” you hear his voice shout, “—we have to turn the engines on—Gold-Ten, baby, turn the fucking eng—”

You’re almost there, you’re almost there, you’re gonna cum, you’re gonna fucking—

Your first name, roared out in startling, blinding panic.

You don’t often hear it.  Just during roll calls mostly, but only if you’re flying with a different squadron and need a new temporary flight designation for the day.  First names hurt.  You can’t remember a time you’ve ever willingly told anybody yours.

Your head jerks up to look at his reflection but something else beyond the transparisteel takes immediate precedence.  Your brain takes about two seconds to catch up before thundering terror slams through you and halts your previously inevitable orgasm in its fucking tracks.  A runaway train about to launch off its tracks suddenly slamming directly into a megaton force-field of cold, hard fight or flight instincts.

A staggering fleet of First Order ships silently plunging out of hyperspace on all sides—your powered-down x-wing stationed right in the middle of the drop location.

***

Stay tuned for part two coming soon!!

#poe x reader #poe dameron #poe dameron x reader #SMUTTTT #reader insert #star wars #fanfic #the formatting on this one is downright horrendous but im so mad that i cant even fix it right now so thatll have to come later im sorry

[starglow-xx]

(About the brother!atsushi) aRE YOU READING MY MIND MISS?! Because that has been on my mind for MONTHS. TYSM For writing it was amazing!! If you don't mind, may I request (if requests are open) atsushi, still an older brother, but with a sister that's 10-13 yrs old? It's totally fine if you don't wanna do it. Keep up the good stories, ily mwuah!

*sobs* you’re so kind thank youu 🤧🤧

i wrote this a bit differently i hope that’s okay anon! at first i planned for this to be mainly abt atsushi and the reader, but i decided to add in relationship hcs with the agency bc i ran out of ideas

if you guys liked this don’t worry! im planning a special part two for this one so be the look out for it hehe

atsushi with a tween! sister

ft. the armed detective agency

like in my baby sister hcs, you’re still the most important thing to him period

the two of you got picked up by dazai and kunikida when he was 18 (obviously) and when you were 12

for a 12 year old, you were a bit small bc of malnourishment (which makes atsushi feel so bad) so both dazai and kunikida thought you were a bit younger than you actually were

they assumed you were about 9-10ish

you and atsushi both share a favorite food !! chazuke :)

so when kunikida treated the two of you, he made sure you got more bowls bc like i mentioned above, he feels really bad that you were malnourished and under weight

(don’t bring this up but kunikida felt bad too hehe)

when dazai went with your brother to the warehouse, you were with kunikida

imagine the surprise of the other ada members when kunikida came in with a little girl dressed in rags that popped out from behind him

kenji was the one who vocalized his thoughts 

“kunikida-san you have a daughter?! wow! i didn’t know that! :D”

when you found out your brother was a tiger, you were a bit concerned but you were actually kind of excited

you were even more excited when you found out the two of you were going to be taken in by the agency

anything was better than the stupid orphanage

and besides!

you got a tiger for an older brother and a bunch of other super powered agents to take care of you! who could want anything else?

at your age, you’re very impressionable and can be influenced easily so atsushi makes sure to teach you more in depth of good morals and the importance of kindness

his heart swells with pride and relief when he catches you being kind to others

pride bc he’s proud that even after all the two of you have gone through, you still ended up being a good kid and having a bright view of the world

and relief bc he hasn’t failed as a big brother

pfftt like he could ever fail

but please, from time to time reassure him that he’s perfect and the only big brother that you’d ever want bc he rlly needs that kind of validation

with his salary and savings, he tries to buy nice things for you

what a sweetheart 🥺

he saw you eyeing that one dress at a store window? fast forward abt a week and half and it’s inside a pretty gift bag for you

you wanted to try that dessert from the nice bakery? that’s dessert after dinner at one point

but other than buying you things, he sets money aside for you

like all the time

(y/n), here have this, you might need it”

“but nii-san you just gave me—”

“take it”

#1 spoiler

also your #1 confidant and source of physical affection

you tell him anything and everything (except crushies and those kinds of things)

atsushi loves it when you talk abt your day and he can see the big smile on your face and the sparkle in your eyes

it gives him the strength to keep going 😖😖

the two of you aren’t as touch starved as you’d probably think, but that’s only bc the two of you had each other

in your opinion, no one can match the hugs of your big brother

and it got even better bc YAYY he has tiger arms now ٩(◕‿◕)۶

if you ask, he’d carry you around too hehe

you also get nightmares quite often so he’ll always be there ready to calm you down, talk if you need to, and rock you back to sleep

god i love him 🤧🤧

atsushi will do everything in his power to protect you and make sure you get to grow up happy, supported, and loved

port mafia attack? oop he’s already taking you to the nearest escape route

someone is starting to harass you? they just got suckered punched into the next week

you want to go out to have some fun? he’ll go ask the president for a day off

you’re not feeling well? he’ll take another day off and take care of you

whatever you want to do, he’ll do it with you! (as long as it’s within reason)

will always be your #1 supporter! and he’s the president of your fan club hehe

he loves you so so much and will do anything for you; your life and happiness will always be more important to him

you are his reason to keep going

agency head canons !!

atsushi is your big brother, but kunikida is most definitely some sort of father figure

everyone can see it

except kunikida of course

kunikida scolds you lightly if he thinks your manners need work or if you make a mess in the agency

you listen to him of course and in turn as some sort of a reward, he’ll give you pieces of stationary

he always gives you the nice, good quality kind and you’re over the moon

atsushi adores it when you come running to him showing your new notebook or fountain pen and blabbering what you’re going to do with it

sometimes it isn’t even as a reward for being a good child; he’ll just give it to you and he’ll say smth like “i noticed you’ve used up your last notebook quite quickly, so here’s another one” or “did you run out of ink? here have this then”

he usually has a soft spot for children in general, but he most definitely has a soft spot (or a thousand) for you

yosano is kind of like a motherly figure to you

she gives you the guidance a mother should and goes on shopping trips with you!

atsushi always gets dragged along by you, but he thinks it’s worth it seeing you look so happy

yosano being a doctor also tries to teach the things you should know, or things that would be helpful to you

she’ll teach you the basics of cooking, sewing, how to treat a cold/fever, etc

also gives you excellent advice 1000% of the time

“remember (y/n)-chan if someone hurts you come tell me and then i’ll chop them into—”

“yOSANO-SENSEI DONT TELL HER THAT—”

fukuzawa is like a father to most in the agency but you see him more as a grandfather figure

bi weekly tea and gossip sessions hehe

along with cat talk!

most of the time though, it’s just you talking and him listening to you, but the two of you enjoy it nonetheless

“and then kunikida-san ended up crashing into a pole and dazai-san started to laugh at him and i did too because it was really funny but we ended up getting scolded—”

“hmm i see...”

he’ll let you stay in his office as he fills out paperwork; you’re usually doodling or drawing in your notebooks

sometimes he’ll meditate and you’ll join him, but 4/7 times you’d fall asleep

you always wake up with a blanket over you

dazai is like a cool but a highly concerning and kind of high maintenance uncle

frequently takes you out with him when he ditches work

walks in the park, eating at uzumaki so he has the excuse of treating you so he doesn’t have to pay his tab avoiding kunikida and sometimes chuuya and akutagawa, all that fun stuff

also tries to not talk abt suicide in front of you especially if it’s just the two of you alone

he knows that you mean the world to his pupil and that said pupil would probably hate him for putting suicide inside your brain

he teaches you random but useful things like how to pick a lock, how to steal kunikida’s notebook if you’re looking for some information, how to sweet talk your way out of things, etc.

is also the one to tell you that if you ever get a significant other to introduce them to the agency first

he always wants all of your gossip; some of them work pretty well for blackmail

“dazai-san! dazai-san! did you know that kunikida-san lost his glasses and he was looking for them for nearly an hour when he was just holding them the entire time??”

“woah really (y/n)-chan?! hey hey can you say it again into this recording device so kunikida-kun would believe me when i tell him—”

always ends up giving kunikida a heart attack when he says that you’ve been with him all day

ranpo is also like a cool but a highly concerning and kind of high maintenance uncle

will share some of his snacks, but don’t push it or you might not get anything at all

loves it when you compliment him

if you tagged along with him and your brother on a case, he will show off to impress you

“...and that’s how the crime happened”

“UWAHH RANPO-SAN YOU’RE SO COOL”

atsushi is lowkey and kunikida is highkey stressed that ranpo’s eating habits will rub off on you

“ne (y/n)-chan do you wanna try this highly caffeinated drink and this concerning amount of sugar filled snack?”

“can i really?!”

“rANPO-SAN NO—”

ranpo definitely does stuff like that on purpose 

the tanizakis are like siblings to you!

a weird set of siblings but siblings nonetheless

the two of them adore you and think you’re precious

atsushi definitely knows how to do your hair whether it’s long or short but he got even better at it when he asked the two

hehe braid trains are definitely a thing + kyouka and kenji (and maybe even dazai)

sometimes you have sibling swap days

you’re with junichiro for most of the day and atsushi is with naomi

strange i know

each of the tanizaki siblings try to make it fun bc they know that the two of you did not at all have a happy upbringing

junichiro likes spending time with you by taking you out to different places that naomi likes to frequent

like the mall, different stores and restaurants, the park, places like those

naomi does the same thing with atsushi so if you ever bump into them, you go out and eat together :)

besides atsushi, the next one in line who spoils you the most would be junichiro (and yosano & kunikida both coming in at a close third)

he honestly can’t help it; you remind him of how naomi was when she was younger

and besides

he’s always been a sucker when it came to the happiness of a little sister

“would you really buy this for me junichiro-san?!”

“of course! don’t worry about it” :)

wanna talk abt boys/girls/celebrity crushes things like that? naomi is your girl

you feel a bit embarrassed to go talking to yosano or your brother abt that and kyouka does not know a thing abt them either

“uwahh naomi-san look at all these people in this magazine! they look so good!”

“right?! but of course onii-sama is still the best—”

you get along with kenji and kyouka quite nicely being roughly the same age as them; they’re also like siblings!

just pure, wholesome vibes from the three of you

you’re over the moon when she finds out that kyouka is staying with you and your brother

atsushi is twice as happy seeing you talk your mouth off and finally having a girl around your age to talk to

“do you think demon snow can change how she looks?”

“hmm... im not sure...”

you and kenji talk abt anything and everything

he even teaches you how to take care of plants!

sometimes the two of you are kind of in the same boat bc you don’t know much abt yokohoma being stuck in the orphanage and kenji doesn’t know much abt cities in general

“wait where are we again kenji-san?”

“ah we’re close to the ports! but im not really sure how close because i don’t know what the symbols on this sign mean”

“don’t worry! neither do i!”

bonus things!

yosano was kind of too late teaching you abt you know what

“NII-SAN IM BLEEDING IN BETWEEN MY LEGS”

you’re sobbing in the agency’s bathroom and atsushi is panicking trying to get you to open the door

“Y/N?! H-HOLD ON LET ME GET YOSANO SENSEI”

ranpo overhears and cackles making everyone around him confused

suddenly atsushi bursts in the agency basically on the verge of tears rambling incoherent sentences abt the bathroom, you, and blood

it just clicked for everybody in the room

(im going to pretend that kenji has sisters back home so that atsushi is the only one who remain oblivious here hehe)

atsushi is genuinely confused and sort of concerned that no one is freaking out with him

yosano waves her hand saying smth like that she’d take care of it and junichiro pulls atsushi to the side to talk to him

fast forward like half and hour and dazai and ranpo are cackling on the looks of both of your faces

honestly not sure who’s more traumatized, you or your brother

“why does this have to happen” :(

“ne ne (y/n)-chan!~ you’re too young but at some point you’re not going to have it!”

“uwahh really dazai-san?” :D

“yeah! but first you have to have ANFK—”

next thing you know your ears are being covered by your brother and dazai is thrown across the room by kunikida

you know

the normal

you’re twelve and have never gone to school, but the agency takes care of that

it’s too dangerous to go to school so they teach you what’s necessary and whatever else they can

kunikida takes care of math (obviously)

yosano takes care of science/biology/anatomy/health (whatever you wanna call it)

ranpo even dragged poe to help you with english

atsushi even got lucy to help you out with english too!

as tanizaki and naomi used to be students, they give you their old work books and they try to teach you all the other subjects

sometimes kyouka and kenji are there learing with you too!

sorry if there’s some errors! i’ll read through it again later :)

and as always, reblogs and shares are appreciated! i hope you all stay safe! and just in case nobody told you they loved you today, i love you! you are enough! <3

writing belongs to me! please do not plagiarize! the reblog button is there for a reason

#bungou stray dogs x reader #bsd x reader #bsd anime #bsd manga #nakajima atsushi x reader #atsushi x reader #nakajima atsushi #atsushi nakajima #x reader #x female reader #plantonic headcanons #armed detective agency #ada #armed detective agency x reader #ada x reader #kunikida x reader #dazai x reader #ranpo x reader #yosano x reader #fukuzawa x reader #kyouka x reader #kenji x reader #tanizaki x reader #fluff #headcanons #anime #bsd headcanons #bungou stray dogs head canons #bsd scenarios #bunogu stray dogs scenarios

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

[wri0thesley]

May I request some La Squadra childhood headcanons (upbringing/family/habits/demeanor) :)) Maybe Mista and Abbacchio too if it’s not too much trouble since we already saw a bit of baby Bruno and it made me so curious about the other two! I always imagined Abbacchio to be a bit of a teacher’s pet as a kid lol. Your writing brings me life tysm!!!!

warnings for abusive family, human experimentation, misogyny, illness, hospitals, death, etc! 

Risotto’s family did not care much about him. He’s the middle child of five - they grew up in a rural part of Sicily, in a house that used to be a farmhouse but was merely a house by the time Risotto came along (aside from a flock of chickens constantly in the gardens). He had a traditional Italian family full of people - various aunts, uncles and cousins - but his cousin was his favourite, seeing in Risotto’s quiet nature something similar to his own. Risotto was uncomfortable with there being too many people around and found his home life cramped and uncomfortable and loud. At the local village school he was often hunted out for games of sport (his height and muscle growing in at an early age), but he shied away from making friends, not sure how to handle himself around people who shouted and laughed, envying his siblings for everything seeming so natural. He often stayed with the cousin, and it’s through them he discovered metal music and his now signature look. His parents didn’t have time for him, but his cousin always did, becoming a makeshift father figure where Risotto’s failed. He grew very attached, and as we know, his cousins death hit him hard. 

Formaggio grew up with a single father; his mother simply disappeared in the middle of the night and he never heard from her again. He was always loud, brash and cocky - his father was much the same way. They moved around from place to place, his father taking odd jobs to sustain them and never really getting the hang of them. His father was fairly young and a perpetual teenager, and Formaggio was much the same way. Despite living in occasional poverty, he always had a smile and he and his father were close to one another. He did not really make friends - other children were aware of his unwashed clothes, the fact his lunch was not made as neatly as theirs, the fact that his address was a one-bedroom apartment on the bad side of town - so he turned to acting out and violence, gaining a reputation as a Badly Behaved Child. His father fell into Passione in the need to support his son, and like father like son, Formaggio followed in his footsteps at fourteen (finding a camaraderie and sense of responsibility he never had at school and subsequently just stopping going there). 

Illuso got into Passione for the money and the power. He was an only child and he had a nice upbringing, honestly - he just found himself not special at anything, and he desperately wanted to be. He flitted from hobby to hobby and interest to interest; he was clever and he noticed things, and neither of his parents really knew how to deal with their sharp-tongued child. He was a bit of a bully at school, but not the kind that is ever found out - Illuso’s bullying was quieter than that, whispered words and rumours that never seemed to find their way back to him. He was well-acquainted with blackmail before he turned sixteen. He knew how to sniff out weaknesses in other people - he was always surrounded by people, but it was a lottery as to whether they liked Illuso or whether they just didn’t want to be on his wrong side. Always willing to volunteer for things, too confident for his own good - eventually, he stopped caring about being ‘special’ at something, and just worked on being the ‘best around him’. 

Melone’s backstory can be found here. Both of his parents were academics and lecturers in genetic science, and he’s the eldest child by eight years. His family moved around rather a lot. He has two younger sets of twins as siblings; one set of boys, and one set of girls. Growing up, his parents considered him less interesting and a little slow - he turned to science and genetics as a way to get their attention and praise; despite the fact he showed a natural affinity for it, by this time, they were far more interested in experimenting on their younger children and Melone was ignored. His nature is curious and insistent - he learnt to insist or to be ignored. He had to look after his younger siblings a lot growing up; they were home-schooled where he was not, and the strange separation of them and him and all of the children at school (Melone not quite fitting into either group) meant that he always seemed just a little off. 

Prosciutto is a mafia man through and through. His family are entrenched in old bloodlines and uninvestigated deaths - unfortunately, though, they are a family that had somewhat fallen from grace by Prosciutto’s birth. The definition of faded glamour and keeping up appearances; rooms in a big, drafty old house that have an old bed and a falling apart dressing table. His father always talked to him about how it was his and his brothers’ job to keep the bloodline going - a traditional chauvinist of a man. His mother was very quiet and pretty; she encouraged him to small interests like old music and fashion, but was always silent around her husband. He grew up knowing his life was expendable. Youngest son of two; his elder brother died within months of finally being given his assignment within Passione and honestly, Prosciutto knows his father would rather he have died. A quiet little boy who did not make friends (he had a tutor) and had too much of the weight of the world on his shoulders in the knowledge of how many of his mother’s jewels were pasteboard, where the guns were kept, and just how many people he saw regularly were murderers. At his assignment at sixteen, Prosciutto had to learn exactly how to blend in, because many of the mafiosos he was suddenly surrounded by did not appreciate what they saw as his superiority. 

Pesci was an only child of a single mother; his father passed away when he was young. He was rather sickly growing up, and it made his mother indulgent - despite growing up fairly middle class, he never wanted for anything, and they lived well beyond their means. His mother fussed over him, always afraid that he was going to have a relapse into his childhood illness - very much a child wrapped in cotton wool. It gave him his own complex about taking risks; he didn’t want to get hurt. He didn’t want to be rejected by other children. He was slow at his schoolwork but devoted to his mother, and other children saw him as a prime target to bully. He was kicked around a lot at school and it eventually made him too easy to subdue when he suddenly filled out and shot up and became a threat; found himself, too often, a henchman to more articulate, meaner children. Grateful to be accepted, he went along with the flow, despite feeling in the very core of his gut that he was disgusted by them. He ended up in Passione because his mother needed medical treatment and in trying to sort it out realised just how much debt they were in.

Ghiaccio just had a normal run-of-the-mill described as ‘average’ by everyone upbringing - both of his parents, an only child, a mother with a professional job, middle-class. His father was partially deaf - in my experience, people with deaf parents either speak very loudly or very quietly, and Ghiaccio has gone for the former. He learnt LIS at a very early age, and it’s part of the reason he can be so anal about pronunciation and language as a whole - he’s utterly fascinated by it, and that fascination started in early childhood. His parents were also indulgent of him, but having a younger brother meant that he didn’t get the full brunt of that indulgence - his brother was a little more of a ‘rough and tumble’ boy. He liked football and weights, and when he took up a sport Ghiaccio’s parents decided Ghiaccio should learn to do something too and asked him what he thought - they were surprised when he said ice skating, but figured he would go into ice hockey or something. He didn’t. For a while, he was fairly well-known in the competitive figure skating under eighteens circuit. It gave him two things; one, a competitive need to win and be good at things (and a propensity to tantrum when he lost) and two, a taste for flashy, expensive things (have you seen this man’s car). His parents eventually didn’t know how to deal with his arrogance, and he fell into Passione based on a ‘sponsor’ he ended up embroiled with at nineteen when his parents didn’t want to fund his ‘hobby’ anymore (they kept pouring resources into his younger brother, of course - Ghiaccio always felt a bit like they didn’t take him seriously). He left ice skating competitively behind, but he couldn’t leave behind the nice things or the anger issues he accrued. 

I’ve written about Sorbet and Gelato’s childhood/backstory here! But a brief, shorter version:

Gelato had a loving family and a privileged upbringing. Always enough money, always enough to eat - an only child, who perhaps was a little rowdy at school but whomst his parents were very proud of. Both of them were traditional types; thinks a man should be strong, should be the real driving force of all relationships - they were extremely proud of him going into the army. Cleverer than people tend to give him credit for, sharp-eyed, a constant humming need to be doing something with his hands. 

Sorbet was orphaned at a young age in a house fire and taken in by a church orphanage. He’s quiet but equally clever; his cleverness tends to be a little less in your face. He was a comforting presence to other people and took care of the younger boys (even now, he feels a sense of duty to some of La Squadra) - being low-voiced, soothing and commanding. He spent a lot of time reading. The church orphanage was poor; Sorbet has learnt to appreciate luxury where Gelato takes it for granted and it’s part of the reason he’s so concerned with finances even in his forties. 

Abbacchio grew up in a houseful of women. His father left when he was still young; he was . . . not a nice man, and Abbacchio has vague memories of his mother carefully applying concealer over black eyes. It’s part of the reason Abbacchio became a police officer - knowing that he was still out there, not paying for what he’d done . . . Abbacchio wanted to ensure other people did not go through it. He had a little sister (by six years) who adored him, and his grandmother (who had once been an opera singer and still had a touch of that old-time glamour). He was fairly well off; at least, after he and his mother went to live with her mother again. His grandmother was EXTREMELY indulgent of her serious pretty-eyed grandson (his affinity for opera comes from her) who wanted so hard to be a Good Man. He was made fun of as a child for being a teacher’s pet and a nerd, you’re right - he adopted being a goth and dressing like that fairly early in his life. Nobody was going to threaten to punch him in leather and black lipstick, he thought - and nobody, too, needed to know that his CD player was blasting Monteverdi and not heavy metal. 

Mista was the only child of an unreliable mother and a father who left when he was four (he kept very vaguely in touch; Mista has three little sisters who he sees occasionally but keeps quiet about his employ to. After the events of VA, he’s established a fund for each of them, but he wasn’t really permitted to see them much growing up). Even after his parents leaving and his neighbour’s loss of an eye (and the subsequent setting in of his fear of the number four), he was an easy-going child who made friends easily and smiled at all and sundry; he was never particularly book-clever, but he was good-natured and had many friends. His mother’s lack of reliability meant that he became very fond of simple things other people took for granted - when she died, he was sad, but his life did not change much. He’d already learnt to fend for himself when it came to food and the like; often coming home to an empty house and simply making do. (The lack of food in the house is part of the reason he gained such an affinity for things he saw as luxuries like wines and cheeses). He learnt to use his dark eyes and charming smile and warm nature to win sleepovers with schoolfriends and evening meals with their parents. Always a little bit behind his peers in having cool gadgets or interesting stories, Mista was content just to have a simple life and good health. 

#jjba #jojo headcanons #risotto nero #formaggio #illuso #prosciutto #pesci #melone #ghiaccio #sorbet #gelato #leone abbacchio #guido mista #Anonymous

[maxwell-grant]

Captain Fray: The Trash Superman

Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s... an ugly, homeless bald man cackling evily while raining trash on the city with an army of sludge monsters, shortly before getting beaten up by a group of meddling kids. It’s just dumb old Captain Fray again getting foiled by Monica’s Gang, nevermind him. He does that every Tuesday. 

Monica’s Gang are arguably the most iconic of all Brazilian comic book characters, having maintained popularity for 60 years and with unmatched worldwide recognition. They’ve had cartoons, a cinematic universe of films both cartoon and live-action, plays, a long-running manga spin-off that turned them into teenagers, crossovers everywhere ranging from The Big Two’s superheroes to Osamu Tezuka’s properties (as Monica’s creator Mauricio and Tezuka were acquaintances), at least one theme park, and much, much more. Even past Brazil’s borders, where they are a cultural institution on a scale matched only by Disney, these are some of the world’s most popular characters, starring in just about any kind of adventure imaginable and then some. 

However, if you go into the world of Monica’s Gang, and look for a flying man with a chest logo, a cape and impossible superpowers, you’ll instead find their greatest arch-enemy: Captain Fray (actual name Capitão Feio, which translates to Captain Ugly), real name Feioso Araújo. Who will be happy to remind you time and time again of what a rotten, no-good scoundrel he is, even if he has to pick a fight with the Big Blue himself to prove it.

So let’s talk about perhaps the most iconic “caped superhero” of Brazilian comic books, even if he’s ultimately a long, long shot from being one.

Despite the long, worldwide spanning history of the superhero, the idea of the superhero as a cape-wearing uniformed superpowered do-gooder has remained a largely American concept, as different regions have their own unique icons. The titular 4 members of Monica’s Gang have on many occasions taken the role of superheroes, and they’ve built up a massive Rogues Gallery over decades, despite not looking like the usual idea of a superhero. Monica, Jimmy Five, Smudge and Maggy, for the most part, look and act like kids, with odd quirks. 

To briefly describe the 4: Monica is the pudgy, bucktoothed ruler of the group as well as the neighborhood, being super strong and more than willing to hit people who mock her with her stuffed rabbit “Samson”. Jimmy Five has a speech impediment, and he constantly schemes to take Monica’s role as leader, best described at times as a junior Lex Luthor to Monica’s Superman. Maggy is Monica’s friend with an uncontrollable appetite, and the witty and perpetually dirty Smudge is Jimmy Five’s friend and accomplice in schemes. Smudge is defined by his complete and total refusal to take a bath or even come into contact with water under any circumstances, and some stories play up Smudge’s dirtyness to the point of superpower.

It’s Smudge in particular who’s gonna be relevant to this post, because the first time Captain Fray was introduced, he was introduced as Smudge’s good-natured and humorous uncle, a comic book addict surrounded by piles of dusty comics, particularly those of Smudge’s favorite superhero, Captain Pitoco, a sort of Superman/Buzz Lightyear analogue. Eventually, Smudge’s uncle is surrounded by dust, and out of it, he transforms “back” into a former alter-ego, Captain Fray, a megalomaniac supervillain horrified at just how clean the world is, and who decides to sully it as much as possible, flying around the city spreading dirt rays and even transforming the population into pollution-fanatics. Eventually he’s defeated and transformed back into normal, only thinking he had a weird dream. 

Upon subsequent appearences, Fray would acquire things like sludge minions, underground lairs and ever increasing powers (like in the above sequence where he somehow destroys a rainbow and darkens the sky with a single gesture), although he would eventually gain a Kryptonite-esque weakness to water. Captain Fray would go on to become the most reocurring villain of Monica’s Gang for the next 40 years, as the former concept of him being Smudge’s uncle was dropped and he became instead the ruler of an underground race of sludge monsters created by him, who’d occasionally come on to the surface in order to engage in supervillain plots to take over the world and spread dirt and pollution everywhere, sometimes in stories with an environmental angle, and often when the story calls for superhero antics. 

Fray’s got a very standard Grinch/Captain Hook cartoon villain personality, all cackles and snarls and shaking fists at the meddling kids who ruin his plans everytime, proud of being evil and rotten, but never too rotten to the point he betrays the kid-friendly nature of the stories he’s in, nor too rotten that he can’t do something nice for a change like allow his monsters to celebrate Christmas even if it ruins his bad guy image, or begrudingly do a nice thing for Smudge. 

Although for the most part, the “mainline” comics have dropped the angle of Fray being Smudge’s uncle, the two having a particular dynamic has stayed consistent still. Sometimes, Smudge is portrayed as the only member of the Gang who’s got little to no problem with Fray, even welcoming the change of scenery he brings, although he will stick with his friends, as often he’s the only one who’s got no problem being hit by Fray’s dirt rays. While sometimes Fray singles out destroying Smudge so his claim as the dirtiest being in the universe can never be challenged, he is more often depicted as having a soft spot for Smudge, sometimes considering him a pupil or potential successor to inherit his powers, and plenty of times, Smudge has done just that, although inevitably it never sticks, partially because Fray gets jealous or misses his former life, and partially because Smudge gets bored of supervillainy and just wants to go play with his friends again. 

The dynamic between Smudge and Fray has led to a lot of adventures between the two, and it’s something that’s been played up in the aforementioned manga spin-off, Monica Adventures. In it, the cast’s all been aged up to teenagers, and the adventures they get into respectively have taken much more of a shonen manga edge, much darker and weirder than anything the original kid comics could get away with, although not necessarily to it’s benefit, because I could not begin to describe just how much grimdark nonsense is in those, let’s just call it the Monica’s Gang equivalent of Jorge Joestar in terms of lunacy and leave it at that (although, to be clear, even the original “mainline” comics could get very, very weird themselves). Captain Fray has been a mainstay of said manga from the start, going through a series of redesigns, including one where he turns into a bootleg Sephiroth, and one where he tries rebranding himself into a suit-wearing gangster named “Black Dust”, which nobody really takes seriously. 

It’s also granted Fray a backstory: As a kid, when he’d gone to the basement to read comics, his house was buried in a landslide. Afraid of death, he was met with a milipede claiming to serve “The Serpent” (the in-universe stand in for the devil, maybe, just bear with me here), claiming it would protec him so long as it returned the favor someday. He was afterwards transferred to an orphanage, teased by kids over his lack of hygiene and liking for superheroes and nicknamed “Captain Ugly” (again, his name, Fray is just the English translation), with rumors that his touch granted disease. After the orphanage closes, he’s adopted by a nurse and gains a step-brother in Smudge’s dad. 

Years down the line, and Feioso’s managed to acquire a house and make a decent living. He spends a lot of time with his nephew Smudge, teaching him how to build toys out of garbage (a habit of Smudge in the strips) and fly kites and so on. Until one day, in an update of his original story, he’s cleaning his house packed with dusty comics, and a shelf falls atop of him. The millipede from his childhood appears to recollect the debt:

"Your mission is to pollude the Earth...rot it's soil...change it's atmosphere...darken the skies with smoke...so that the sun's rays may never again hit the surface of this planet!

"No! No, please! I-I don't want to hurt anyone!"

"You think you can refuse? You think you have a choice? Do you think you can escape your destiny? Evil does not tolerate weak servants. If you don't fill your end of the bargain, if you don't pay your debt...it will be transferred to the person you love most."

"Smudge? NO!! H-How do you know about my nephew?"

"We know of all that happens. Our eyes...are everywhere."

"Smudge has nothing to do with this. Leave him alone, please...I-I'll do anything you guys want!"

"So be it...Filthy powers will corrode your soul...This is the day of your rebirth! How would you like to be rebaptized?

"The nickname I was given at the orphanage...it's perfect! Captain Ugly strikes again!"

How “canon” the events of Monica Adventures are is a question best left unspoken, since it ultimately doesn’t change anything about the original strips. But regardless of what made Fray who he is, he would spend the following decades in many, many attempts to complete his mission and defeat Monica’s Gang, to be foiled and stopped time and time again by his nephew and his friends, little more than a dumb, cartoon villain there to be smacked again and again, too dumb to quit and too mean to stop. So he was, and so he will always be.

But something interesting’s happened recently with him. As part of the Graphic MSP initiative that’s allowed creators to reinvent the many, many characters of Monica’s Gang for stand-alone graphic novels, Captain Fray’s received one in the form of Capitão Feio: Identidade, which isn’t so much an origin story as it tells the story of a homeless man with no knowledge of his past or where he acquired the superpowers that force him to be on the constant run from society, and it tells the story of how said man eventually became the infamous supervillain, despite his many attempts to be a superhero. 

The comic and it’s sequel, Tormenta, acted more of a proof of concept to test whether or not a serious reimagining of Captain Fray can work, and considering their reception and the newfound love that the Captain seems to have attained in recent years, I’d say they succedeed pretty damn well. He’s ostracized for his appearence, poverty, smell and bad manners, and there’s hardly anything he can do about it because his powers make him a toxic abomination by default. He spends portions of the book trying to create living beings with his powers, and once he succeeds in creating a Godzilla-esque monster to protect him from the authorities, he ends up having to put the monster down, before getting fed up with constant rejection and promptly announcing that, if he’s just gonna be known as an ugly monster by the people, even after he saves them, he’s gonna make it a point to be Captain Ugly Monster, the most rotten supervillain they’ve ever seen. 

The comic constantly grants upon Frey iconography of several of the biggest icons of comic books, from Batman and Superman to AKIRA, playing up not just Frey’s association with comic books but also the fact that he's been mired in that aesthetic from day one. He wanted to be a hero, he wanted to be like Captain Pitoco, and regardless of continuity, all that he ends up as is becoming a gross caricature of a superhero. And still, Frey owns it. He owns his grossness, his rage, his bitterness at everything that he understands to be the opposite of himself, everything clean and good and decent, and he tries time and time again to tear it down, even if he ultimately can never get far enough to accomplish his goals, or lose all of his humanity in the process.

I’ve remarked once that, to many in some regions of South America, the “traditional” superhero does not hold much appeal, and most of the more popular protagonists and icons tend to be outlaws far away from caped antics. Which is why it’s particularly interesting that, not only is the most famous caped superman of Brazilian comic books a villain, but also that, perhaps unintentionally, Fray has undergone the kind of development that most reocurring cartoon villains never get, and one that seems almost poised to last. In a current zeitgest of villain protagonists, it’s successes and failures, I could very easily see Captain Fray becoming the star of a popular film or series, one that takes a look not just at his personality and role, but also at Brazilian culture’s relationship with superheroes and supervillains. Maybe Fray as an anti-hero, trying to make the best of the horrendous powers he’s burdened with, could work.

So long as it’s not revealed that he likes dirt because his mom got pushed off a cliff by cleaning products, I could see it working very well.

#character profiles #comic books #captain fray #capitão feio #turma da monica #mauricio de souza #brazilian superheroes #brazilian supervillains #superman #monica's gang

[elvish-sky]

The Temptation of Regality: The Road Ahead

Inspired by this Anon Request from Tumblr: Hello! Happy new year! I love your writing! I was wondering- if you're still taking requests- can I ask for a Thorin x human!fem!Reader angst? Where she misheard something or was insulted by angry/jealous Thorin and they have a fall out- but get back together?

Word Count: 1,570

Pairing: Eventual Thorin x Reader

Warnings: A tad bit of fluff.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

****

The Road Ahead

You balanced in the tree, bow drawn as you watched the odd group of travelers below you. You saw dwarf after dwarf on pony pass underneath your vantage point, and had you not known they would be coming this way you would have been very confused. You decided to make your presence known, and, firing an arrow between the heads of the two in the lead, you flipped off of your branch, landing in a crouch in front of them with daggers drawn. 

“Y/N!” came an exclamation from the rear of the caravan as a tall rider cloaked in grey rode up next to the dwarves. “You came!” He turned to a dwarf, this one with long black hair streaked grey and an air of authority about him. “Thorin Oakenshield, may I introduce Y/N L/N, Ranger of the North, Dunedain, and my dear friend.” “Gandalf!” you sheathed your daggers on your back and  made your way over to embrace him as he clambered down from his steed. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t turn up!” “Ah, well, it took a little longer than I had expected to get our burglar on board, but here we are!” As he mentioned the burglar your eyes were drawn to a smaller figure in the center of the group. He was clearly a hobbit, and looked rather out of place with his tailored coat among all the rough, ready-for-war dwarves. “You must be Master Baggins,” you nodded to him, “Gandalf was telling me about you when he invited me to join you last month. You seem to be a very promising addition!” He looked pleased and slightly worried at your praise, but before he could say anything in return your attention was taken by the figure of Thorin swinging down from his mount and marching over to you and Gandalf. 

“Gandalf, I do not recall you mentioning that you had invited another to join our quest.” He stared up into the wizard’s eyes, clearly angry. He was taller than other dwarves you had met in the past, and you had to admit that his bearing gave him a alluring sense of regality. “I cannot allow another stranger to join our group without some sort of proof that she is up for the task.” You were rather offended by his insinuation that you couldn’t handle yourself, and decided to resolve the issue in the best way you knew how. “I’ll prove myself to you by dueling you right now, dwarf.” Thirteen heads whipped towards you in shock at your challenge, while Gandalf just looked resigned. “If that is what it takes for Thorin to allow Y/N to join us, then so be it.” He settled back against a tree and lit his pipe.

You decided that it was better to just get this done, and so casting aside your bow and quiver you drew the two daggers from your back and fell into a stance, circling the dwarf who had a large sword drawn. He lunged in at you and you parried, and then swung at his neck, causing him to roll under your blades as they whistled above his head. He stood and charged at you, and you neatly crouched and tripped him, his momentum causing him to fly over you and hit the ground with a thud. Noticing that he had had the breath knocked out of his lungs, you quickly straddled his chest, pinning his body to the ground. You drew a smaller knife from your boot and held it to his throat, effectively winning. 

You heard chatter and the jingle of coins being tossed, several small purses of which you saw thrown to Gandalf. “That settles it.” Gandalf turned to the rest of the group and mounted up, gesturing for everyone else to do so as well. “Y/N will be joining us on our quest to reclaim Erebor.”

“Y/N, let me introduce Dori, Ori, Nori, Bifir, Bofur, Bombur, Oin, Gloin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, and Kili.” As Gandalf spoke he pointed to a dwarf, each of whom waved when their name was called. You were concentrating on committing their names to memory, and forgot about the dwarf who you had pinned to the ground, until he grunted. Blushing, you quickly scrambled off him and stood, redonning your cloak and hanging your quiver from your shoulder. 

“Who is she to ride with, Gandalf?” came an inquiry from the hobbit, and to that Gandalf seemed to have no answer. “You know, Master Baggins, I hadn’t considered that.” “I can keep up with you all on foot.” You had no problem with walking, in fact, you thought you might prefer it to being stuck on a horse with one of the dwarves. “Why doesn’t she ride with Ori for now, as he’s one of the lightest, and we’ll see how the pony is doing later.” So you swung up behind the young dwarf, who politely offered you a knitted hat to keep your head warm. Thanking him, you donned it over your hair even though it was rather warm out, sure it would come in handy later, and off you went, missing the glare that Thorin shot at your back as you rode ahead of him.

As you sat behind the young dwarf, you marveled at the scenery surrounding you and at the group you were with. You knew these forests well, having hunted in them all your life, but the sheer beauty of the green foliage never ceased to stun you. You were also surprised that Gandalf had actually made this journey happen. You had thought him foolish when he had told you of it weeks ago, but here you were, surrounded by dwarves, on a quest to reclaim a mountain. The dwarves were not quite what you had expected, you had only met several in your life. The one sitting in front of you, Ori, seemed very polite, as did Dori, his brother, who had spoken to welcome you. Your mind kept drifting back to Thorin, though. You had heard stories of Erebor, and knew of how it had been lost. You felt sympathy for him- it must have been incredibly hard to lose your home and people. He had an air of noble sadness about him, you could see it in the way he carried himself. He was also rather attractive for a dwarf, something you did not want to admit but couldn’t help noticing. 

You had been riding for several hours without pause when a shout came from the rear of the line, “Thorin!” You saw the company leader’s head turn to the dwarf who had spoken. “Yes, Gloin?” “We’re all getting a little sore. May we rest for a short while?” Thorin nodded, once, and all the dwarves began dismounting with sighs. Some sprawled on the grass, while others grabbed some bread. “Why did you let me fight him, Gandalf?” The wizard’s face broke into a small grin at your question. “Because Thorin has a bad habit of underestimating people. He needed to know your worth for this quest.” “But how did you know I would win?” “He’s used to fighting opponents bigger than him. That crouch and trip is one of your signature moves, I knew you would use it and that he would not be expecting it.” Shaking your head at Gandalf’s foresight, you finished your bread in companionable silence until Thorin decided you had rested long enough. 

“Let’s get moving!” The handsome dwarf straddled his pony, sitting there with an air of impatience as the rest scrambled to get ready to set off. “I do believe that Ori’s pony might be getting a little tired of carrying two beings.” You stroked the horse’s velvety nose as you spoke to the wizard. “Perhaps it’s best if I ride with someone else for the rest of the day.” “You can ride with me!” came a cry from atop a pony near you. Gandalf patted you on the shoulder as he made his way over to his own horse. “Ride with Kili. I’m sure you two will get along well.” 

You climbed up behind Kili, and as you set off began to speak. “Why did you want me to join you?” you inquired of the young dwarf. “I wanted to talk to you about archery. I saw the shot you pulled off earlier between Uncle and Dwalin’s heads. It was amazing!” “Thank you!” you were pleased to have found someone who appreciated your skills. “Wait- Uncle?” “Yes. Uncle Thorin is my mother’s brother, so Fili and I are his nephews.” as he spoke he gestured to a golden-haired dwarf behind you who seemed to be arguing with the one you believed to be Nori. “But I wanted to talk about archery, not my family. What kind of bow do you use? It looks different than mine.” You quickly settled into a discussion of the different kinds of archery with him, enjoying yourself immensely as you talked about longbows versus recurve, and whether you liked fighting in close quarters or picking enemies off from a tree. Before talking to Kili you had worried that this quest would be lonely, with no one you knew except a rather vague wizard. Now that you had formed a real connection with someone you were excited to see where the road ahead would take you. You did worry about your attraction to the company leader, but brushed it off as the temptation of his regality. 

Everything tag💖: @boyruins @entishramblings @anjhope1 @itgetsatadhazy

#lord of the rings #jrr tolkien #the hobbit #the hobbit thorin #thorin x y/n #the company of thorin oakenshield #thorin oakenshield #thorin #thorin x you #thorin x reader #the hobbit fanfic #thorin fanfiction #the hobbit fanfiction #kili son of dis #fili and kili #fili #ori #gandalf the grey #thorin fic

[exn0bisstudios]

As a preface: no need to answer if you don’t feel comfortable with it,I know people sometimes don’t like these questions so no pressure if you’re one of them! Who likes kids, who would like to be a parent (if their partner also wanted that of course!), and who is good with kids? Thank you!

Well, firstly, thank you for your concern! I'm okay with these topics so long as it's not about me personally, so don't worry! That said, though, I'll put this under a cut since the topic might be uncomfortable for some people.

CW for: talk involving conception, infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage

Edited 5/16 - Changes to include more inclusive language. My apologies! 

Since we're talking about the ROs and kids, let us talk about MC too for a sec.

It should be noted that it is typically challenging for a Seer to bear children/impregnate someone. The corruption that comes with their Void powers usually renders them infertile, or at least close to. However, it's not unheard of for a Seer to have children. Still, it usually results in a difficult pregnancy and can be dangerous to both the carrier and the child. Additionally, any child born from a Seer (either parent) would be Dream-touched.

That said, as we know, MC is a very special Seer. Canonically, their powers have not rendered them infertile, though their kid would still end up Dream-touched. However, I will be leaving it up to players to decide if their MC can or can't have biological kids for other reasons. And, obviously, adoption is also very much an option!

Now on to the ROs!

Mira

Mira likes kids well enough, and they're usually very good with them. They struggle a bit with dealing with noble children. Still, Mira's kind and empathetic nature tend to have children warming up to them regardless. They used to help take care of the young recruits back at the Order, both daily routine stuff and some training.

They would absolutely love to have a family one day, but it's something they kinda push to the back of their mind and try not to think about. Their lifestyle doesn't lend itself to the stability and safety necessary for raising children, considering they could be killed in action any day. They think it would be grossly irresponsible to have a family, then end up dead somewhere and leave them hanging. Mira was an orphan themself, and they know firsthand how hard life is for kids on their own. They have no desire to contribute to that lifestyle or put their own potential child through that.

If there ever came a time where they could lay down their weapons for good, though, then yes. They'd want to start a family in whatever way they could. Though not opposed to having biological children, both masc & fem Mira would prefer to adopt. Again, being an orphan themself, they would choose to take in a child. Mira would ideally like 2-3 kids so they can have a big family to grow old with, and they'd be a very supportive and doting parent. They'd probably struggle with discipline.

Nova

Children confuse the absolute shit out of Nova, and the way mortals procreate admittedly terrifies them. Nightmares are not born in the same sense that mortals are; they just kinda pop into existence fully formed. When Nova first learned about mortal procreation, they had a minor mental breakdown. The idea of another, smaller living thing growing inside someone strikes them as distinctly horrific. They've done their best to accept the idea at this point in their life, but mainly they cope with it by ignoring its existence. They see a pregnant person and basically go, 'suddenly I have no eyes.' Babies and children continue to confuse them despite their best efforts, and they have no idea how to interact with them. You put a child around Nova, and you're liable to hear them genuinely asking the kid why they are so small and dumb.

Nova's mortal body is also infertile by design. They chose this shortly after they realized they actually enjoyed sex and would do it again. They don't know if it would be possible for them to become pregnant/impregnate someone, considering they're not actually mortal. Still, they didn't want to risk it.

The only time Nova would consider starting a family is if it was something their partner(s) really, really wanted. They'd sit down and have an honest talk about how it's something that they know nothing about, that the process scares them, and that they are absolutely going to need help learning how to handle it all. But, if their partner is willing to accept all that, Nova would be willing to try. Though again, they don't know if they can procreate with a mortal, so they'd probably recommend going for a surrogate or adoption. Eventually, Nova'd grow into a good parent, very supportive, and surprisingly level-headed.

Stella

They don't have too much of an opinion on children, which shows in how they don't really know how to interact with them. Stella feels super awkward around kids, and they're more likely to tell them to shoo. Their own childhood has tainted their views, and being around children brings up things they'd rather not think about. Honestly, the fastest way to make Stella disappear is to put a child nearby.

Deep down, though, they like the idea of starting a family. It would take a lot of encouragement to get them to admit that. It'd take even more to help them process long-ignored family-related trauma and unlearn a whole lot of unhealthy habits. With the proper support from their partner(s), though, they'd really like to give things a try. Fem Stella wouldn't mind carrying a child. Still, both fem & masc Stella generally don't care if their kid is biological or adopted.

Stella would make for a very nervous parent, and they'd be absolutely terrible at discipline. They'd probably helicopter and be overprotective and would have to be reminded by their partner(s) that things will be okay.

Désiré

So a bit of history: Dez is one of the only two ROs who already has child-rearing experience. His best friend and second-in-command, Alix, was born and raised in the brothel with him. While he grew up to be an errand boy and bodyguard, she became one of the courtesans. He took up smuggling and worked his ass off to get them out of there, but unfortunately, Alix became pregnant before they could escape. Alix's son, Dimitri, was born in the cabin of the first ship Dez ever owned.

Alix eventually married Catarina, the crew's healer, who has acted as Dimitri's other mother. Thus, while Dez is 'officially' Dimitri's uncle, he has always been his only father-figure. Dimitri is 14 by the time of the game and is still a very active part of Désiré's life. You'll actually get a chance to meet him in-game since he's got a place on Dez's crew (he's the cabin boy)!

Now that history is managed, it's safe to say that Désiré would love to start a family one day. It doesn't matter to him how, though going the biological route, let it be known he's excellent at tending to pregnancy needs. He's a wonderful parent, generally gentle while supportive and encouraging, and is comfortable being stern when it's called for.

Vittore Simone

Sadly I can't get into the specifics of Vittore Simone's thoughts on kids and family without it becoming a spoiler. However, I can say that he vowed when he was young that he'd never have kids and has never thought of it since. Going forward, it would never be something that crossed his mind unless brought up by his partner and would be something he'd defensively refuse at first. Later, he'd come back with apologies and to have a more open conversation on the matter to express his reservations and fears.

Suffice to say that the idea of being a father absolutely terrifies him, and he has always taken great pains to avoid it ever happening. Even just the thought is enough to send him into panic attacks. His partner will need to be patient with him and accept that this is something he may genuinely never be able to do for the sake of his own health and any future child's. It would take a lot of time, reassurance, work, healing, support, and understanding before Vittore Simone ever agreed to give parenthood a shot. It will not be an easy road for him or his partner. It would likely be a road that never truly ends, and he'd need to be sure that they can both accept that without damaging their own relationship. He would try, though. He would do his damnedest. And, thankfully, there will never be any doubt that he genuinely does love his kid.

As a father, initially, he would constantly be terrified he was hurting his kid somehow. He would struggle with being overly permissive & overprotective at the same time. He's liable to have a panic attack any time the kid cries for the first several years. His partner will have to help him get through 'I'm a terrible father, this was a mistake' breakdowns periodically. Slowly, though, he'll build some confidence and be more comfortable interacting and expressing himself with his kid. He'll always be supportive, and he'll work his hardest to be sure his family knows he loves them unconditionally. His partner will have to accept the role of disciplinarian, though. That's never going to be something he'll be able to do on his own (but of course, he'll be there to support them in those conversations. He doesn't want to make them the 'bad guy' by any means).

Andrai

The other RO with child-rearing experience! Andrai has 15 younger siblings (yes, you heard me correctly) and absolutely adores them all. They're all grown now, but he loved taking care of them when they were little, and he still dotes on them whenever he can, in his own way. In general, he loves kids. He just thinks they're adorable. And, despite appearances, he's excellent with them. Kids love this man, they flock to him, and he has no problem with that. It confuses most onlookers.

The idea of starting his own family turns him to absolute mush. And, he'd love to, so so much. Adoption, biological, and surrogacy are okay with him. It would be up to his partner to limit exactly how many kids they have since Andrai would just say he wants them all. He makes an excellent dad, albeit quiet, and is unwaveringly supportive. He's comfortable with discipline and is the type to encourage self-assessing behavior. He's excellent at giving advice and genuinely just likes spending time with his kids and being involved in their lives.

He's probably not the one you would peg as the 'domestic bliss' type, but he absolutely is.

Vzridmi

She's very comfortable with kids since communal rearing is very common in ork communities, and she'd love to have a family one day. Some kids unused to orks might find her a bit intimidating just because of her size, but in general, children think she's fun to be around. She doesn't necessarily think about it too much, though, at this point in her life. It's not something she sees as being on the table for quite some time - she has research and exploration to be doing, after all.

Whenever she was ready to settle down for a family, she'd be comfortable with carrying a child herself, surrogacy, or adopting. She would really like to have at least one biological child if possible, though. She would make for an entertaining mother, excited about her child's life and ever-supportive of their interests and pursuits. She's comfortable with all the aspects of child-rearing. Still, She would definitely need her partner's advice if they ever discovered their kid was dealing with bullying. She'd need to be reminded by her partner not to be overprotective - she's not above threatening others with her war-hammer if they upset her baby.

#none of the ROs would be bad parents and they'd all love their kids #but some will definitely need more time adjusting than others #Anonymous #answered #TTO: Main Tag #TTO: Lore #TTO: Answers #TTO: RO Asks #Mira Twilight #Nova Dreamreaver #Stella #Désiré Desrosiers #Vittore Simone Armati #Andrai Freestrider #Vzridmi Ri'kho've #pregnancy cw #infertility cw #miscarriage cw

[umbralstars]

Basically an "All you need to know" about how I personally write Byleth/All of my Byleth headcanons. This is probably not everything but it's still long enough I have to put it under the cut.

* His birthday is 26 day of Blue Sea Star Moon 1159

- I know that 20 of Horsebow is probably the canon date but I've always used this one since my first playthrough and keep it cause I find it funny

* Byleth has all kinds of memory issues

* Demi-panromantic & demisexual

*Trans masc (He/Him & They/Them)

- He remembers and has dreams of things that are from when Sothis was alive

- He sometimes has trouble recalling facts about the world he lives in (such as who is currently ruling, his teaching plans or things that he has taught before, sometimes can't recall where he is). He keeps a journal of important things that he saw, learned, needs to know etc

+ Caused by being misaligned with Sothis' soul and her consciousness trying to overtake his own

+ He doesn't lose memories outright and can recall things if given the right direction. Once a memory is solidified as more long term it's much harder for him to forget it

- Sothis' memories can cause bad flashbacks that can take him minutes to get out of

+ Jeralt and the other mercenaries look out for him when episodes happen. They often have him talk about them afterwards if he wants too (ie like Jeralt and Byleth's conversation at the beginning of the game after the dream about Seiros/meeting with Sothis)

+ He can't speak during them and gets very spacey

- Fighting and strategy is instinctual for him so memory issues in those areas are non-existent

- When his soul fuses with Sothis' his memory problems mostly cease. All the memories about his own life are permanently solidified and he can somewhat tell the difference between his memories and Sothis'. He still can be paralyzed by her memories but has a much easier time getting out of dazes

* Has a love for learning about the history and culture of Fodlan and everywhere else

- When he was little Jeralt would often tell him stories and folktales about Fodlan while they were riding across the country side. The pre-month cutscenes during White Clouds are Byleth recalling those stories

- Loves learning about the places outside of Fodlan just as much as learning about Fodlan itself

- His favorite books are about history or folklore

* At a crossroad between trusting people implicitly and keeping others at arm's length

- His life as a mercenary certainly wasn't easy, even though he doesn't resent it, so he tends towards giving others the benefit of the doubt even when he may doubt their intentions. Cautiously trusting if you will. Some people may view him as naive because he's willing to trust off the bat and he's fine with that.

- Does fall in line with mercs not really trusting nobles but he points that more towards the parents currently in power and not the kids he knows

- Goddess help you if you break his trust. Once you break his trust it's very hard to actually get it back unless you give him cause for why it was broken in the first place

* Very protective of the people he cares about

- Death or injury of people he care for has always been his biggest fear. His family has always tried to tell him it's just a fact of life, their life especially, but he would rather fight tooth and nail to keep someone alive then to just let them die

* Really good with children actually

* Takes his job as a teacher very seriously. He knows how rough Fodlan and fighting can be, so wants to impart good lessons in the hopes of making his students' lives easier. He knows that some of them have already seen horrors or have been on battlefields, so he treats each person accordingly

* Has a really bad resting bitch face so people think he's really intense/scary when first meeting him

- He has complicated feelings towards being perceived as "intense" or "terrifying" since on one hand it's very useful when he needs to be perceived that way, but on the other hand he feels like that first impression makes it hard to connect with people afterward

- He doesn't ever go out of his way to make people perceive him differently mostly because it would be a hassle and he's thinks people who really know him would understand he's not like that

* Byleth is actually very introverted and somewhat has social anxiety

- He spent almost his entire life around the same people moving from place to place so introversion aside he's not the most experienced about talking to new people

- He never stops people when they want to talk and doesn't really hate talking to people it's just that he doesn't go out of his way to do it unless he likes talking to someone or it's important

* Jeralt's mercenary company is his family and the people he's closest to until Garreg Mach. The Mercenaries are an elite group of about 13 people of various backgrounds

- All of them are basically his aunts and uncles cause they practically raised him alongside Jeralt. He does call a lot of them Aunt and Uncle as well

- One or two are also like siblings to him cause they joined with their parent or when they were younger (like 15)

- They were the only people able to get close to Byleth or get him to talk for the first week or so after Jeralt's death

- I need to expand on them more cause they're very important to me and him

* Byleth has trouble outwardly expressing emotions and understanding his own. He actually feels very deeply but just has trouble really expressing it. Very monotone and straight to the point when he speaks and only slight shifts in tone tells how he's really feeling. Actually has hyper empathy

- Grew up like this despite Jeralt and the Mercenaries' best efforts. Jeralt was always best as reading him because he acted so much like Sitri

- Caused once again by a misalignment with Sothis' soul

- After his awakening, Byleth has a better ability to express himself, and even took on some of Sothis' characteristics, but he still has trouble explaining or talking about what he's feeling

* Generally very calming to be around for most people. Won't ever force anyone to talk but will talk if you start conversation

* Has done some very questionable work as a mercenary

- He has taken on a few assassinations in the past despite Jeralt's insistence he never get his hands dirty like that. The Remire Medicine Incident is one not spoken of much within the company

- He's dealt with brigands, putting down rebellions, guarding caravans, guarding nobles, helping train the standing armies, etc everything under the sun. Will practically do anything if the pay is right

- He does have standards and expects a full rundown of the job beforehand like his father and the rest of the company though

* Loves cats and dogs

* Actually pretty religious and devout by the time of his awakening

- He wasn't completely raised without knowledge of the Church as some of the mercenaries are religious, but he was agnostic for a good portion of his life

- As he lived at Garreg Mach and learned more about the Church's teachings he grew to appreciate it more and more

- Rhea taught him a lot during his many conversations with her

- As Archbishop he does his best to learn every aspect of the Church and exemplify them best he can. Really emphasizes giving aid to those in need, leans heavily into the "Goddess" aspect of his soul, reforms many aspects whilst keeping the core of the faith

- Personally speaks to Sothis on more of an equal and friend level then true God and devotee

- Does become known as the Holy Saint and Avatar of the Goddess within the Church years after he steps down as Archbishop. Doesn't really know how to feel about it but can't say his inclusion is wrong

* Byleth doesn't have the highest opinion of Edelgard

- As I write AM/VW Byleth he was never close to Edelgard at all during his time at Garreg Mach

- He really only sees her as the person who started the whole continental war (which he despises as he very much dislikes war in its entirety) and the person he believes to at least be complicit in his father's death (do not debate with me how much Edelgard knew Kronya's plan. This is entirely how Byleth views what happened)

- He never wished for her death, but does view her as someone very misguided and only wishes she never went as far as she did

* Very terrified of sleep after waking up post-Time Skip

- Fears falling asleep and loose more parts of his life an leaving everyone behind again

- Prefers to have someone close by who can wake him or being woken up in the morning

- Got into the unhealthy habit of just working himself into exhaustion and having a very irregular sleep schedule until his friends had an intervention to talk about what was going on

#fe3h #fire emblem #byleth eisner #m!byleth #fe3h headcanons #there's probably more things I forgot about #may add to this if I remember them #angst #cause some of these tend toward it

[baoshan-sanren]

Chapter 52

Emperor Wei WuXian And His Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Birthday

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 Part 1 | Chapter 8 Part 2 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 Part 1 | Chapter 15 Part 2 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 Part 1 | Chapter 22 Part 2 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 | Chapter 27 | Chapter 28 | Chapter 29 | Chapter 30 | Chapter 31 | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47 | Chapter 48 & Chapter 49 | Chapter 50 | Chapter 51

“Perhaps I do not actually require a palace,” the Royal Companion says.

XiChen hears the words clearly, each one perfectly audible over the sounds of the guqin. The Rogue Prince had taken his leave only moments ago, but Lady Jiang is still present, having settled at the head of the bed. The Royal Companion had settled at the bottom, with an ease that suggested he had done so frequently in the past.

The words sounds nonsensical to XiChen’s ears, but the atmosphere in the Imperial chambers noticeably shifts, the Emperor stiffening in WangJi’s arms. A silence descends, just as incomprehensible as the words had been. XiChen is not familiar with the Royal Companion’s mannerisms, but the young man is holding himself stiffly as well, his lazy posture doing little to conceal the tension of his muscles.

Perhaps the sentence is a code that only the Emperor and the Royal Companion understand?

Still being held up by WangJi, the Emperor turns his head and whispers softly, words that are clearly meant for his brother’s ears only. He is reclining easily in WangJi’s arms, their heads close together, their cheeks nearly brushing.

XiChen turns his gaze back to the guqin.

It is not uncomfortable, precisely, watching his brother be so easily intimate with a person he cares for, but it is very much out of the ordinary. WangJi’s cool demeanor conceals a heart prone to excess of emotion, a depth of feeling that has always existed beneath the surface, rigorously concealed from the world. To see the Emperor so easily coax that emotion out into the open is miraculous, but it is also unsettling; XiChen does not know if the Emperor comprehends the true extent of WangJi’s affection, or how precious and rare it is, to have it so visibly displayed.

“Young Master Lan,” the Emperor says, startling him out of his thoughts.

Lady Jiang and WangJi are helping him shift into a better position, propped up against pillows and covers, no longer having to rely on WangJi for support. Despite his obvious physical weakness, the Emperor’s tone is clear and forceful. It is a skill, the ability to don a mantle of power and authority all while being maneuvered about one’s bed in such an undignified manner. XiChen both respects and envies this ability.

“Your Majesty?”

“I am grateful for your assistance, but I believe you are long overdue for some much needed rest. Would you be so kind to escort my shijie back to her chambers? Lan Zhan will continue the Cleansing in your place.”

“As you wish, Your Majesty.”

Of course, the insistence that he pass his duties to WangJi and rest, is nothing more than a polite method of removing him from the Emperor’s chambers. Any doubts he may have had would have been dispelled by WangJi’s vaguely apologetic look as he replaces XiChen at the guqin.

XiChen does not require an apology. He is tired and restless, his aching wrists welcoming any interruption of the tedious task. The two Imperial guards at the entrance are also ordered to take their duties outside, leaving WangJi and the Emperor alone with the Royal Companion.

In the hall outside the Imperial chambers, Lady Jiang smiles, “I hope you are not offended by such an abrupt dismissal, Young Master Lan. I am sure, once the situation at court has been stabilized, the Emperor will properly express his gratitude. We are in your debt.”

“There is no need,” XiChen says, realizing that he had not expected gratitude, nor does he know what to do with such a sentiment, “I am sure anyone would have done the same.”

“They would not have,” Lady Jiang says easily, her tone unchanging, “but thinking so does you credit. Please do not feel obliged to provide an escort. I am sure the Imperial guards will prove equal to the task, and my chambers are not far.”

Taken aback by the frankness of her words, he only bows in response.

He had not yet considered all the political repercussions of the Lan Sect having saved an Emperor who is so frequently a subject of assassination attempts, but Lady Jiang’s words raise many questions he cannot answer.

What will be the consequences of the Lan Sect aligning themselves so firmly with a Divine Ruler who does not intend to father an heir? Will their actions, committed over the course of the last day and night, be seen as monumentous as the assassination of the Empress had been? Can any succession of honorable deeds ever erase the dishonors of the past?

At this very moment, uncle has many more pressing issues to consider, and will doubtlessly remain occupied by them for days to come. But XiChen wishes he could simply yield to his uncle’s understanding of the matters, as he often had in the past, without having to reason out the answers to these questions on his own.

Chagrin immediately descends, propelling his restless feet to move, as if urging him to run away from such uncomfortable thoughts. XiChen is to be the future Sect leader, to occupy the same seat that uncle now holds. He should never shy away from being guided by those who came before him, but his deference has always been a little too excessive. It is a frequent source of his brother’s frustration, XiChen’s insistence on ceding ground to avoid disharmony and conflict.

It is not for the lack of firm beliefs that XiChen so often gives way. It is simply a habit, one borne of insecurity. In order to hold firm in the face of opposition, one must believe that their own understanding is impeachable, that their opinions have been properly formed, that they are indisputably in the right. XiChen firmly believes that Nie MingJue’s intentions are honorable and genuine, that his own affection is steadfast and unimpeachable, but he has never possessed the necessary self-confidence to insist on this belief in the face of uncle’s disapproval.

Lack of a spine is not a virtue, but XiChen had dressed it up as such, so that others may admire his amicable nature, while he, alone, is left to despise the roots from which it grew. He wonders how long he would have gone on this way, draping his self-doubts in a cloak of respectful deference, had Nie MingJue not entered his life.

As if summoned by his thoughts, Nie MingJue appears at the head of the hall, his stride quick and purposeful. Guards had been sent to inform him that the Emperor is awake, XiChen remembers, and the man doubtlessly expects to be admitted to the Emperor’s chambers without delay. XiChen is certain that Nie MingJue will be disappointed in his expectations. Any conversation that requires the removal of both Lady Jiang and the Imperial guards from the Emperor’s presence must be highly sensitive in nature, and is likely to go on for some time.

The General of the Emperor’s army is no longer wearing his armor, his Nie Sect uniform silver and black, the cut severe, clearly intended to project authority. In the early morning gloom, his face is a collection of shifting shadows, his mood impossible to discern. Faced with such a presence, the few servants finishing up their nightly tasks scurry out of the way with their heads bowed, the guards straighten their shoulders as if expecting to be scolded, even the walls themselves seem to stand at attention.

It strikes XiChen fiercely, how the attributes he admires so fervently in Nie MingJue are those he has always felt a lack of in himself. Even the man’s boldness, so often displayed in mortifying ways, is a trait that XiChen wishes he can possess. It has inspired a boldness of his own, although it appears pitiful when compared to MingJue’s. In the same vein, his own temperance is likely to have suppressed at least some of MingJue’s brashness. They fit, the two of them; one yielding while the other remains unmoved, one sure to hesitate while the other barrels bravely onward.

Do you truly think that there is a single part of you that I will not admire?

MingJue does not have a chance to express his obvious surprise at encountering XiChen during such an early hour, nor is he given an opportunity to ask any questions. XiChen is not certain what his course of action would have been, had MingJue resisted the firm grip on his wrist, had he refused to let himself be steered. To his relief, MingJue obediently allows XiChen to pull him aside, to push him past the unguarded doors of the Emperor’s study.

The room beyond faces south, the early morning light some hours away from reaching the single window hole. XiChen is relieved. He does not want MingJue to see the flush across his cheeks, or to discern the anxiety in his eyes.

Under his hands, MingJue’s braids are impossibly intricate, each one a tiny, delicate wonder. Under his mouth, MingJue is made rigid by surprise.

XiChen had not exactly expected an immediate response. This action, this impulse decision, it is so unlike himself that MingJue may as well think he has been accosted by a stranger. Still, each breath is centuries long, each one riddled with seeds of doubt.

Perhaps XiChen was wrong after all. Perhaps Nie MingJue does not wish to--

He is pulled forward with such force that he stumbles over his own feet. The cold steel of MingJue’s belt scrapes across the tender flesh of his stomach, an earth shattering contact even through two layers of robes. MingJue’s tongue, hot and insistent, licks into his mouth, sliding against his own. The sensation is a shock; XiChen feels it all along his spine, curving around his limbs, pressing into each sensitive stretch of his skin. He does not realize he had tightened his hold on the handful of braids until MingJue makes a sound, a pitiful noise that seems to border on pain. Even as XiChen struggles to release his grip, the arms around his body tighten, a searing hot palm pressed against his shoulder blades locking him in place.

XiChen has never kissed, or been kissed. The few times he had imagined such an act, it had been a rarely reached conclusion of some distinctly chaste fantasies, gone no further than lips pressing together, breathing each other’s air. He does not think that any stretch of fantasies could have prepared him for this.

He is certain that his lack of skill must be obvious. Yet, each hesitant lick of his tongue is followed by a series of shudders he can clearly feel cross MingJue’s shoulders. His own trembling, impossible to suppress, is made less shameful by the knowledge that MingJue is equally as affected. It seems impossible to concentrate on anything but the movement of their lips, the slick slide of their tongues, but XiChen manages to release the handfuls of braids he had gripped. MingJue whines softly, a noise that sounds suspiciously like a complaint.

When their lips part, XiChen finds himself struggling to breathe normally, his chest both too tight for the air he needed, and somehow larger than the space it must occupy.

“XiChen,” MingJue rasps.

His voice is raw and thick, the sound unexpectedly arousing. XiChen is moving to kiss him again before realizing that he has done so, and manages to pull back just in time.

Firmly placing his hands on MingJue’s shoulders, he tries to say what must be said, words he had avoided since his last argument with uncle, “You-- my uncle will only allow your presence at Cloud Recesses if I enter secluded meditation for the duration of your visit. I will not attempt to convince him to change his mind. He does not trust me to behave-- in a virtuous manner, nor do I intend to persuade him otherwise.”

MingJue makes a soft sound, but XiChen does not look up; he is embarrassed enough by the admission as it is, he does not want to know what expression MingJue’s face may hold.

“You had said once that your situation is not nearly as inflexible as my own. If you are still willing-- to offer me a lifetime, I am ready to listen.”

He has hardly finished speaking when MingJue’s mouth finds his own again, infinitely more careful this time, the act very close to the chaste kiss of XiChen’s fantasies. XiChen is the one who presses closer, deepening the kiss, feeling brave and reckless in the wake of his confession.

Perhaps he may never possess MingJue’s boldness, but he has managed to find some of his own in the process; as paltry as such a thing may appear to be, if it serves to ensure him a lifetime of happiness, he will never again view it with scorn.

#the untamed #cql #mdzs #nielan #m #ficlet #wwx emperor au #xichen is being silly and self-deprecating #the emperor's study sees some more action #some things are decided #but no things are fully resolved #and onward we go #ily chickens

[beclynn-herondale]

What are your headcanons on Clary pregnancy with her first child?

I think Jace will be fussing her like a Mother hen, super concerned

Anon, you lovely-awesome -pinto bean

I am so glad you asked.

So when Clary first found out she was pregnant she was worried it would be miserable (she is obviously grateful for the fact they could have a kid but it is also a hard thing to go *I have heard women who have had babies say this* and I think they should be allowed to express their feelings) but only the first trimester was that way.

Jace was constantly worried though, because he didn't want to see Clary so miserable and he'd tear up when she got sick *but shush🤫* Alec caught him crying once and had no idea why he was crying. But sat by him and was like "what's wrong, man?" And Jace was like "Clary's miserable" and Alec patted him on the back "she'll be alright. If anyone can do this it's her." (Alec reassured Jace when he doubted himself constantly)

After the first trimester it still sucked at times but Clary was thankful the sickness from being pregnant wasn't as bad anymore. Jace still made her a herbal drink to help with her sickness (he taught himself how to make many kinds of drinks with herbs, etc.) Giving up coffee was hard on Clary so Jace made her other kinds of drinks and teas.

After they found out Clary was pregnant, Jace read many books on pregnancy and birthing (as well as how to take care of Clary the best he could) he wanted to be as prepared as possible when the baby came

Jace made sure Clary took her vitamins and ate enough (when she could) and did his best to make sure she was comfortable and taken care of.

He also went shopping with her for maternity clothes cause she didn't want to go alone (Magnus and Izzy would pick out the fanciest stuff while Simon would pick out the geekiest stuff. She loves them though don't worry) but Jace would let her get what she wanted and would only suggest colors he thought she looked best in and may suggest a few funny ones. Clary did get one that said along the lines of "don't touch if you aren't given permission" because she is definitely the kind of person who wouldn't want people constantly touching her pregnant belly.

Jace fussed about the littlest things. if Clary made any sound of pain, he would stop what he was doing and check on her immediately. One time they were walking down the stairs and she slipped but he caught her before anything could happen, he asked her a dozen times if she was alright and after that he insisted she hold onto him when they went down the stairs.

Jace flipped out when the baby kicked for the first and went "Clary! The baby kicked! It's a strong kick! They're gonna be a badass!" (Clary sighed lovingly at this)

When Clary's stomach started getting bigger she balanced stuff like bowls and plates on it and even a book. One time she balanced her phone perfectly and then the baby kicked. She was very amused with herself (Jace would watch his wife with love and amusement)

Jace sang and read to the baby, once Clary was to the stage in her pregnancy that they were sure the baby could hear. He also told the baby how loved they would be and how they will have many uncles and aunts (Clary almost went into tears every time) and he also made it a habit to kiss Clary's stomach each night

One time when Max and Rafe were visiting, Max kissed Clary's stomach and said "I love you baby. I'll keep you safe." And was the one who lost it and broke down in tears. When the baby started kicking Clary would take her nephews' hands and let them feel the baby kick. Max was amazed and would laugh happily while Rafe was curious and his eyes went wide every time

Emma bought them a onesie that said "Badass Angel baby" and another that said "Hello, I'm a super Angel baby" Jace decided their baby would wear them a lot

Jace helped Clary manage her stresses as well. Reassuring her when she got anxiety.

Jace made her all kinds of food and let her have what she craved during it.

He always made sure she was comfortable when they were going to bed and if she wanted cuddles and kisses would give her them (they cuddled a lot)

He wouldn't let her lift very much while pregnant and if she tried would tell her why she shouldn't and if she so much as got a paper cut would fuss over her

When Clary went into labor Jace was by her side the entire time and because of all the books he read, knew what to do. He supported her through it all and knew which stages that were in. (Catarina was there to deliver the baby) *my personal headcanon*

And after the baby was born Jace still fussed over her and made sure she rested enough (Shadowhunters have healing stuff themselves and I'm sure Catarina healed her up pretty well) but Jace would also be worried about her mental rest.

They both were a pile of emotions and tears when the baby was placed in Clary's arms for the first time (and they both silently vowed they would raise this baby with love. Also they'd give this bebe many kisses and hugs.

And Jace started fussing over the baby after they were born and constantly kept an eye on the little one. He also couldn't stand hearing them cry and would always check on them (Clary did too, but Jace was always worried the bebe was hurting somehow) Clary cried often over the love she had for her two loves.

They also didn't name the baby right away (both wanting to pick the perfect name. They kept going over their list of names.) So Jace called the baby Celery for the first month of their life.

The Celery credit goes to @khaleesiofalicante cause if not for her we wouldn't have the nickname Celery

Hopefully you like this Anon. I loved writing it.

#clary fray #clary fairchild #jace herondale #jace lightwood herondale #clace #clace babies #tsc #tmi #beau peeps 💛🧡

[janeofcakes]

Soulmates: How John Met Sherlock...Again  Chapter 5

Hello, my lovelies. Another post on Saturday?? You spoil us, Jane! I know it's crazy, but I love you all and being in touch again means a lot to me. Hmm. Well, that was more heartfelt than I'd planned. Suffice it to say, I'm in a bit of a mood. I got some bad news yesterday and will know more on Tuesday. I don't want it to keep me from posting because you all DO mean a lot to me and your support does to. We'll just have to see how things go.

---

Sunday morning is awash with breakfast and icing and wrapping Olive’s gift for Mycroft. Sherlock struggles to keep his mind off John at first, but he is quickly caught up in their preparations and Olive’s constant chatter. Soon they are in one of his brother’s sleek black cars and on their way to a luxury flat all too near their own. Of course, another country wouldn’t be far enough away for Sherlock. There were only two reasons Mycroft had become more tolerable over the last eight years and one of them was sitting next to Sherlock asking questions and telling him her plans for the party. When Olive came into Sherlock’s life Mycroft finally believed, once and for all, that his little brother would not use again and would take care of himself. For all the modifications he made for raising a child, his life was significantly more simple without Mycroft’s interference.

Sherlock stares straight ahead, not really seeing the back of their driver’s head or the rear view mirror. He hears Olive as she continues talking at top speed, but is not listening at all. He would never ignore her, of course, and he will pay for it if she realizes he is distracted. Sherlock will risk it though to review the particular thoughts running through his mind.

John is back in London. He does not live far from Sherlock and has a daughter in Olive’s class. Mycroft knows it. He must know it and yet, he said nothing to Sherlock. Not even so much as a hint or, more likely, horning in to advise Sherlock to stay away from the doctor. He said nothing, did nothing. Mycroft could have stopped Sherlock from ever meeting Gracie’s father if he had wanted to. Why hadn’t he?

Sherlock rolls this around in his mind as they turn a few more corners, traversing the busy streets of London. Mycroft has always meddled in Sherlock’s life, always tried to control things. In spite of the improvements to the situation, Sherlock knows his brother would never pass up the chance to keep him away from John. We wouldn’t want you to be reminded of the past and return to old habits, would we, Sherlock? That’s what the pompous ass would say. Sherlock glares ahead unseeing, his grey eyes narrowing and the delicate skin beneath them contracting. Mycroft has done nothing that Sherlock would have expected in this scenario and the most likely conclusion is also the most ludicrous. Can it be that Mycroft wants Sherlock and John to meet again? If he is not actively trying to keep them apart, has he somehow orchestrated John’s move back and their subsequent meeting? The world is seldom so careless.

“Dad?” Olive’s irritated tone breaks Sherlock’s concentration and he looks to her instantly, trying to keep a guilty expression from his face.

“Hm?” Sherlock hums a reply, picking apart what words he had heard her speaking.

“Are you even listening?” Olive asks, her eyes narrow slits of suspicion. Knowing there is no escape, Sherlock opens his mouth to confess, but Olive barrels on before he can say a word. She obviously cares less about what he was doing before than she does about having his attention now. “I’m going to tell them all about Gracie and our pirate adventures in the park and that she likes Nancy Drew and what’s going on with Samantha Jones and…”

“You have so much to tell that they won’t get a word in,” Sherlock interrupts her with a light tease in his tone. “You may have to wait for another time. It is his birthday, after all.”

“Pfft,” Olive blows out a dismissive breath that makes her lips vibrate. “Dad, you know how much Uncle Mycroft likes my updates.”

Sherlock inhales slowly as he quickly considers the truth of her statement. He tilts his head and nods, his lips pressed together and brows arched.

“We’re here!” Olive squeals suddenly as the car comes to a stop in front of a very stylish 19th century building. The little girl throws open the door and leaps out of the backseat, making a b-line for the front door. She has barely taken her fingertip off the bell before the door opens and she dashes inside to find her uncles.

Sherlock follows at a more leisurely pace, making his way to the kitchen. He knows the two men will be there preparing lunch for four together. John’s face invades his thoughts again as he walks. He has more grey than Sherlock remembers, but the blonde is still more prominent. John would disagree, no doubt, but it suits him. He looks very dignified, which is a good look for a doctor. John looks good in general. He is still fit, his eyes still bright and clear, and still the eye-catching blue Sherlock saw in his dreams for years after John left. There are a few additional lines around them, but they are still gorgeous and so is John. God, how Sherlock has missed him and in so many ways.

Finally reaching the kitchen, Sherlock pushes the swinging door open and is greeted by a sight that warms his heart every time, in spite of Mycroft being one of its major players. As per usual, Olive ran headlong into the room and jumped into her uncle’s arms. The result is a penny-clad Mycroft holding her off the ground in a tight embrace as she hugs him to within an inch of his life. Sherlock has to admit he could never imagine his brother as an uncle and certainly not a good one, but Mycroft has adored Olive and his role in her life from the day she was born. The man certainly has changed. Of course, having a lighthearted partner has helped considerably.

“There he is,” Greg Lestrade says loudly with a smile on his face. Olive twists around to look at her father, eyes sparkling silver.

“I told you he wasn’t far behind,” she beams as Greg approaches the detective, reaching for the cake holder in his hands. She turns to Mycroft and tilts her chin up proudly. “I put the icing on your cake myself, Uncle Mycroft. I even tubed happy birthday on it.”

“Piped, sweetie,” Sherlock corrects her as Greg takes the covered container with a hello and a ta. The detective trails behind and places the two bags he is holding on the table against the wall. Greg looks up after depositing the cake on the same table.

“You did?” Mycroft asks with as sincere a smile as he will ever have. “Thank you, my sweet. I can’t wait to see it.”

“Daddy says we have to wait until after lunch,” Olive states in a serious tone laced with excited energy.

“He’s right, you know,” Mycroft says, lightly touching her nose.

“What?” Sherlock cocks his head, wearing an expression of mock surprise. “Would you mind repeating that? Greg, where’s your mobile? I want this documented.”

“You are entertaining as ever, brother mine,” Mycroft says wryly as he returns Olive’s feet to the ground. “Come on, Olive, you can help me check the ham.”

“Can I wear the oven mitts?” she bubbles on the way to the oven.

“Of course,” Mycroft says, motioning for her to hold up her hands like a doctor who has just scrubbed in for surgery. He puts one large mitt over her right hand and another on the left, then tugs on his own and adopts a similar posture. “Ready?”

“Ready and waiting,” Olive replies. Mycroft picks up a meat thermometer and hands it to her. They nod once at one another and bend down to open the oven door and peer inside.

Greg and Sherlock can neither one stifle their chuckles as they watch. After eight years, Sherlock can still scarcely believe it. He turns back to Greg in another minute, observes the man’s curious expression and cocks a brow.

“What’s all this then?” Greg motions toward the bags. 

“Olive insisted we bring gifts and candles,” Sherlock tells him and Greg begins to laugh. “I told her fire alarms may sound if we actually light 59 candles, so we agreed the orange ones represent ten candles each.”

“Fantastic,” Greg laughs, patting Sherlock’s shoulder with one hand. Meanwhile, Mycroft gives his baby brother a perturbed look that vanishes as soon as Olive asks if she can fill everyone’s glasses with ice and water in the last few minutes before the ham is finished. She goes to the freezer as Mycroft fills a pitcher and they both push through the swinging door to the dining room. Greg drops the smile as soon as they are out the door and fixes Sherlock with a serious gaze that genuinely startles the detective, but cocking his brow again is the only hint of the emotion.

“So you saw him,” Greg says without preamble. It is not a question and confirms what Sherlock has suspected since the moment he laid eyes on John Watson in Regents.

“Why?” Sherlock snarls. He might have saved his ire for Mycroft alone, but Greg going in on the deception stings and more than a little. The CDI glances toward the door and squares his shoulders with Sherlock’s, looking into the detective’s death glare without wavering.

“I didn’t know until last night,” Greg’s tone is urgent and in much the same style it is on a crime scene. “Myc told me when he got home. How are you?”

“Why?” Sherlock repeats with no less anger.

“He thought it best you not know,” Greg tells him with a shrug that is somewhere between apologetic and my life partner is an idiot, “but knew he couldn’t keep the secret once Gracie turned up in Olive’s class.”

Sherlock is silent. His anger does not lessen, but Greg no longer shares its focus. That honor belongs to his brother alone once more. Greg eyes his glowering face and shifts his weight back for a better view of Sherlock’s body language. What greets him are muscles stiff with fury and a clenched jaw. Sherlock has told Mycroft many times what will happen if he continues his attempts to control Sherlock’s life. Obviously, Sherlock has not yet made his position clear.

“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?” Greg cringes, watching the muscles in Sherlock’s jaw work.

“Yes,” Sherlock glares, not mincing words. Greg squares his broad shoulders and raises his hands, palms out.

“Okay, but let him explain why,” he begins.

“You told me why,” Sherlock snaps, growing tired of the conversation. He blows out a petulant breath and straightens his spine to stand at his full height. For all his posturing, Greg does not even seem to notice. 

“Yeah, but I didn’t say anything about his reasoning,” Greg presses. Sherlock fixes him with narrowed eyes and a look that screams ‘You must be kidding’.

“His reasoning,” Sherlock repeats, annoyed and incredulous. “Oh, for god sake.”

“You’ll want to know what it is,” Greg says lightly, arching his brows. “It makes sense. Well, by his way of thinking.”

Sherlock’s whole face drops into an expression of indignance that says it all.

“I’m not saying I agree with him, or that he isn’t being an ass AGAIN,” Greg admits with a shrug of his shoulder, “but it makes sense. To his…”

“Way of thinking, yes,” Sherlock finishes with a growl. He opens his mouth to launch into a tirade on his brother’s incessant interference when Olive suddenly bursts through the swinging door, followed by the man himself. If Mycroft notices the tension in the air, or Sherlock’s thunderous expression, he does not show it as he and Olive walk straight to the oven.

“It is definitely ready to come out now,” Mycroft is saying while putting oven mitts on Olive again, one by one. “We’ll take it out and transfer it to the platter. Then I’ll slice it while you hold it steady with this.”

He holds up a long, two-pronged meat fork and Olive’s eyes go wide. She nods enthusiastically, chanting ‘yes, yes, yes’ and hops from one foot to the other.

Sherlock and Greg break away, taking side dishes and rolls into the dining room. Within minutes, the four of them are seated at the table and passing around food. Sherlock pushes down his anger and engages in comfortable conversation with the others, although Olive does most of the talking. She answers her uncles’ inquiries about school and the most recent experiment she and Sherlock have done. She tells them about the seeds they planted in a window box they had just installed in the kitchen as part of a science unit, but she mostly talks about Gracie and all of the things they do together.

“Wow,” Greg leans back in his chair, slightly pushing away his plate. “She sounds like quite a best friend. Almost like the perfect one for you.”

Greg turns his head slowly and stops on Sherlock with a pointed expression. The detective meets his gaze and gives a nearly imperceptible twitch of his head in response. Mycroft does not so much as glance at Sherlock, just as he has done throughout the meal. It isn’t that he is avoiding Sherlock’s eyes and with it, his ire, he merely knows his little brother and his “moods” well enough to wait for the appropriate time and place. In the past, Sherlock would have been more than happy to press the issue no matter who was in the room, if for no other reason than to humiliate Mycroft, but not now. Not with an excited child in the seat next to him and especially not on his brother’s birthday when said child is practically falling out of her chair from fidgeting for cake, songs, crackers and presents. 

“She certainly does,” Mycroft says in his usual tone. It sounds condescending when he speaks to Sherlock, but is fond and pleasant when addressing Olive. “You two have so much in common. Have you had your playdate yet?”

His voice rises at the question, but in the way he uses only when he already knows the answer and is actually prodding Sherlock. The detective blinks slowly, not rising to the bait as Mycroft finally glances his way with a knowing expression. Damn him.

“Not yet, but we’re working on it,” Olive replies with a significant nod and raised brows. She tries to wink at him, but only succeeds in contorting her face and deliberately blinking both eyes very slowly. Greg just stifles a laugh, but cannot hide the grin on his face. He clears his throat to cover and begins to rise while reaching for his plate. 

“Why don’t we get the cake, Olive?” he suggests. “You can put all the candles on.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Olive chants, jumping out of her seat. She grabs her own empty plate and turns to Sherlock. “Can I take yours, Dad?”

“Yes. Thank you, sweetie,” he hands it to her and she follows Greg through the swinging door. Sherlock inhales deeply, gathering himself so his annoyance does not spill forth now that he and Mycroft are alone. He lets his gaze slide over to his brother, who is already watching him expectantly with narrowed eyes. Sherlock looks at him coolly and says nothing. They can hear Olive and Greg giggling in the kitchen as they ready the cake and dessert plates. Mycroft keeps his eyes trained on Sherlock, waiting for an insult or snide question. The detective’s face remains neutral as he continues to sit in silence. He will not give Mycroft the easy out of beginning this conversation with a fight, not to mention he has no intention of starting something Olive could walk in on.

Mycroft finally sighs loudly and shifts in his seat to lean forward, resting his forearms on the table. Sherlock cocks a brow and narrows his eyes, lips pressing together in a thin line.

“Sherlock,” the elder Holmes’ tone is back to condescension. 

“No,” Sherlock’s hand shoots up with the command. Mycroft’s brows arch in response. He looks as though he might try to continue speaking, so Sherlock pins him with a glare that demands Mycroft keep his mouth shut. Nevertheless, he parts his pursed lips and draws a breath.

The swinging door flies open as Olive and Greg burst in.

“Happy Birthday, Uncle Mycroft!” they cry together with big grins on their faces. Greg carries the cake, complete with burning candles and Olive holds a tray with a stack of four shallow bowls, spoons and a container of vanilla ice cream. Before either Holmes can react, the merry duo is singing Happy Birthday and placing their wares in front of Mycroft. Sherlock does not join in, but they don’t seem to notice.

“Blow out the candles,” Olive exclaims as soon as the song is over. “Wait, wait! Make a wish.”

Mycroft blows out the breath he sucked in noisily for show and makes quick work of the tiny flames. Olive cheers and claps while Greg leans down and drops a quick kiss to Mycroft’s lips.

“Happy Birthday, love,” he murmurs, his gaze soft.

“I want to pull off the candles,” Olive declares, climbing onto her chair and sitting on her knees for more height. She yanks one out of the icing immediately and places it on the tray at Greg’s direction. Once she is finished and licking icing off her fingers, Greg cuts a piece for each of them. Mycroft gets the first one, but he waits until everyone has been served before his first bite.

“Oh, Olive, this is delicious,” Mycroft smiles at her grin and bright eyes. She shoves her own fork in her mouth and chews. “You and Sherlock really have outdone yourselves.”

Sherlock bristles at the sound of his name on Mycroft’s lips. He ignores his brother’s attempts to draw him in, unsure he will be able to keep the anger from his tone, and eats in silence.

“Thanks,” Olive beams, taking another bite. “I know how much you love chocolate cake and Daddy suggested the icing.”

“Did he?” Mycroft’s gaze turns to Sherlock. The elder watches carefully as his brother makes every effort to maintain a mask of indifference. “How nice.”

“Uh-huh,” Olive inhales the last of her cake and drops her fork on the table. Still sitting on her knees, she hops a little as she watches her uncle daintily slip his from between his lips. “I want to give you my present! Did you get any presents yet?”

Olive shifts her dancing eyes to Greg, who promptly grins like an idiot and glances at Mycroft. Sherlock shifts in his seat uncomfortably as he analyses the expression. Greg ducks his chin down and gives a slight shake of his head, along with a quiet laugh. He appears almost bashful. Oh, god.

Sherlock can barely hold in a disgruntled huff. He is not a prude by any stretch of the mind. In spite of what Mycroft may think, sex does not alarm him. However, that still does not mean he wants to know anything about what happens in his brother’s bedroom.

“As a matter of fact, Greg gave me his present this morning,” Mycroft smiles sweetly at his partner. It is an expression Sherlock never thought he would see on his brother’s face, but seemed instantly natural once he and Greg began dating. Mycroft is still sharp as ever, especially on the job, but Greg smoothed out a lot of the edges in his personal life. Greg had even helped mend fences for the Holmes brothers, a daunting task if ever there was one. He is the other reason Mycroft has become more tolerable.

Sherlock brings his glass to his lips for a drink as he considers his friend, a man he took for an ordinary idiot when they first met, and lets out an amused breath through his nose at how far they have all come since then.

“You mean like sex?” Olive’s voice asks and Sherlock spits his water onto his own cake, fortunately missing anything of consequence. Everyone stares and Olive jumps off her seat with a start. Sherlock grabs a napkin and dabs at all of the droplets he can see on the table around him, mumbling apologies until Greg finally catches his hand to still it.

“It’s okay,” Greg tells him. “No worries.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen at the softness on his friend’s face and immediately dart to Mycroft’s left hand. No ring. That doesn’t make sense. He glances at the pockets in Mycroft’s waistcoat and sees the slight bulge of a small box. There it is. He leans back in his chair and extricates his hand from Greg’s, setting aside the napkin as he moves. 

“I see congratulations are in order,” Sherlock remarks. Greg’s eyes brighten and he claps the detective’s arm.

“I knew we couldn’t hide it for long,” the CDI laughs. “Thanks, mate.”

“Brother,” Mycroft nods somewhat smugly, no doubt because it remained a secret for as long as it did.

“What?” Olive asks as her gaze shifts from one man to another. “What’s going on?”

She puts her hands on her hips and stamps a foot when no one answers, her brows knitting on her wrinkled forehead. Taking pity, Mycroft turns toward her and fishes the box out of his pocket. He holds it out to the girl, who is frozen where she stands, face lit up like it is Christmas. Her palms fly to rest on either side of her face, pushing together until her lips are bunched up comically in between them.

“Actually, he gave me this,” Mycroft says in a tone of quiet anticipation. Olive reaches for the box inquisitively and takes it only when her uncle nods his approval. She pops open the lid as soon as it is in her little hands and gasps loudly at the simple platinum band. 

“It’s perfect!” she squeals, jumping up and down. She thrusts it back at Mycroft, still hopping wildly. “Put it on. Put it on!”

All three men are laughing at this point, Olive’s glee filling the room with light and energy. Mycroft takes the ring from the box and slides it delicately onto his long finger where it rests comfortably like it was always meant to be there. Olive yelps happily and leaps into his arms.

“I’m so happy for you!” she cries and turns to Greg, not loosening her grasp on her uncle. “And you too, Uncle Greg!”

“Thanks, sweetie,” Greg answers, reaching for Mycroft’s shoulder and touching it warmly.

“I want to be in the wedding!” Olive nearly shouts. “Can I be in the wedding?”

“Of course you can,” Mycroft assures her with an uncharacteristic grin, “and you can even pick out the dress.”

“With ruffles?” Olive gasps, hands covering her mouth.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Yahoo!” Olive is off his lap in a second and dancing around the room. Greg and Sherlock laugh as they watch her twirl and spring from one spot to another. 

“We were actually hoping someone else would be in it too,” Mycroft says guardedly, eyeing his baby brother. Sherlock’s smile falls instantly and he freezes in place with his gaze on the elder. “Would you stand up for me, Sherlock?”

Sherlock does not even twitch with an answer. Even Mycroft, with all his secrets and intelligence, seldom surprises the detective, but at this moment, he is speechless. Nevermind he had not expected his brother to ever marry. Hell, he honestly never thought Mycroft would fall in love. Sentiment is a weakness and all that, but the last few years with Greg had certainly changed Mycroft’s opinion on that. This though. This implied his feelings toward Sherlock had changed as well. He had always claimed his meddling was out of concern and Sherlock had seen it for the lie it was, but now. The possibility seemed impossible, even with the evidence right before his eyes.

“Yes, Daddy, you have to!” Olive runs for her father and dives into his lap. Sherlock’s heavy limbs catch her clumsily as she wraps her arms around his neck. “You can wear one of those tax-idoes and stand next to Uncle Myc and I’ll stand next to you. We’ll be beautiful.”

“Yes,” Sherlock replies slowly, not wanting to spoil her mood with his true answer, “it will be lovely.”

“Yay!” comes her cheer, only to be silenced with another gasp. “My present. You have to open my present!”

Olive gestures toward Mycroft as she runs out of the room, dodging furniture and throwing the door open. She pops back into view as it swings back into the dining room, a twelve by fourteen inch box in her hands that is wrapped in paper covered with brightly colored balloons.

“I wrapped it myself,” she says proudly, straightening up tall. “Daddy only gave me the pieces of tape this year.”

“My, my. You are growing up, aren’t you?” Mycroft says in admiration and takes the box when she thrusts it at him. 

“Go on,” she flashes a toothy grin, minus the one she lost the week before. “Open it.”

Mycroft smiles mischievously, throwing a glance at Greg and Sherlock, and tearing at the paper. He used to open packages carefully, sliding his fingers along the tape, but Olive made it clear the practice was unacceptable when she was four. 

With the paper gone, Mycroft opens the box and pulls a tall cylinder with sticks glued around its outer surface. The sticks are clearly ordinary twigs one might find on the ground, but each one has been relieved of its bark and stained a lovely medium brown. They are cut to the size of the cylinder, which is actually more of a glass, and glued on vertically so no part of the glass shows through. Small knots are visible on some of them, but the quality of work cannot be denied. Surprise showing on his face, Mycroft looks over the table to Sherlock and then to his niece. 

“It’s a pencil holder,” Olive tells him with pride in her voice. “You always have so many laying around on your desk.”

“Yes, I do,” Mycroft replies airily. “It’s beautiful, Olive. It really is. You made this yourself?”

“Dad helped,” she answers. “We collected the sticks in the park and he showed me how to make them pretty.”

“Well, you have done excellent work, my dear,” Mycroft pulls her close to kiss her forehead. “I love it.”

“There’s more,” Olive hops a little at his side.

He puts the pencil holder on the table and fishes into the box again, pulling out a drawing of three men and a little girl standing around a table with a cake sitting in its center. The cake is brown for chocolate icing and absolutely covered in candles. A few even stick out from its sides and every one of their tops is colored with orange marker. Mycroft can easily tell which man is which by the clothing and can’t help the small smile forming on his lips. His character wears a waistcoat with matching pants, Greg’s has a dark green shirt with short sleeves and blue pants, and Sherlock simply wears his signature long, dark coat. That is what tickles Mycroft the most. He turns to look at the little girl again.

“It’s us celebrating your birthday,” Olives says and points out who everyone is. She points to the cake too. “There’s 59 candles on it. That’s what I wanted it to look like, but Dad said we had to pretend some of the candles were really ten candles instead. I still think this is better.”

“Be that as it may, I think I agree with your father,” Mycroft remarks pleasantly, in spite of her frown. He hands the paper over to Greg who laughs heartily.

“It’s perfect,” Greg agrees. “You have your dad’s coat and hair down to a science.”

“Thanks,” Olive rushes over to hug him.

“And what’s this?” Mycroft asks, pulling what looks like a brown tail cut out of paper. Olive scurries back to his side and starts pulling out more. Mycroft has a blue scarf in one hand that is twisted into a long coil like a blindfold. With an uncertain look on his face, he directs his attention to Olive, who holds up a paper with a brown horse drawn on it in crayon. 

“It’s a game. Pin the tail on the donkey,” Olive explains happily. “People play it at parties. We can all play. I made lots of tails.”

Everyone is still for a moment. Mycroft’s eyes find Sherlock’s and broadcast the need for a conversation before Olive gets too carried away. Sherlock’s face hardens, but he makes no other movement.

Greg, ever the peacekeeper, is the first to move when he rises from his chair and takes the box from Mycroft.

“Let’s put all the bits in here,” Greg begins collecting tails. “You and I can set it up in the lounge, so these two can talk for a minute.”

“Aw, but I wanted all of us to play,” Olive whinges.

“Olivia,” Sherlock begins in a stern voice, but Greg cuts him off.

“We will. Uncle Myc and your dad just need a minute,” Greg takes her hand and starts leading her to the door opposite the swinging kitchen one. He leans over slightly to speak in a fake whisper. “We’ll play once or twice and have the advantage.”

Olive inhales quietly through her mouth and looks back at the Holmeses with shifty eyes. She presses her lips together as if trying to make sure she doesn’t spill the beans and give away their conspiracy.

“We’ll be right in there,” she points to the door and what lies beyond, “just setting up, but NOT playing.”

Sherlock and Mycroft both raise a skeptical brow in unison. Olive giggles, not trying to hide her intentions in the slightest, and looks back at Greg. He flashes a knowing smile at the brothers and steers Olive to the door again.

“Come on. They won’t know what hit them,” he and Olive chuckle together as they pass through the door and out of the room.

Not looking at his brother, Sherlock’s face hardens immediately and he lifts his chin defiantly. The fury fueled by Mycroft’s attempts to hide John from him boils to the surface quickly. The detective parts his lips as he chooses from the words running through his mind. How he has tired of Mycroft’s need to control his life, to “protect” him. He has a tolerance for it no longer.

“You have questions,” Mycroft states in his damned, know-it-all voice. Sherlock inhales sharply and bites off the urge to curse.

“One,” he replies in an even, but strained tone. “Why?”

There is a moment of silence. Enough that Sherlock turns his head to look at his brother. The elder’s eyes are dull and his face bland. 

“I thought that rather obvious, don’t you?” is Mycroft’s only response. 

“You have let me be for years,” Sherlock ignores his words. Growing more and more angry at Mycroft’s carelessness in shattering the peace between them. Of course, he is just as frustrated with himself. Sherlock had been a fool and should have known Mycroft would jump at the chance when the right situation presented itself. Old habits are hard to break and meddling in Sherlock’s life is as central to Mycroft as his nervous system.

“John Watson has stumbled into your path again,” Mycroft’s voice is stern and commanding. Sherlock recognizes it from when he has issued orders to underlings and it makes the detective’s blood heat within his veins. “Even more dangerous than the last time.”

“Dangerous?” Sherlock barks furiously. “I put him in danger. It was not reciprocal.”

“We both know that’s not quite true,” Mycroft says quietly, purposefully. Sherlock nearly flinches at those words. The words of his mortal enemy that had so opened his eyes.

“You bastard,” Sherlock’s voice is hoarse with emotion. He wants to rise, punch Mycroft right in his smug mouth and stalk out of the room, but cannot make his body listen to the signals from his brain. A wave of frustration washing over him, Sherlock tries to gather himself. He pushes out everything other than his anger with Mycroft, but his efforts are derailed completely by his brother’s next words.

“You love him,” Mycroft’s face is stony. “You did then and you jumped off a building. You still do now. You always have.”

Sherlock stares blankly. His lips part with no words, his mind racing.

“But Olive needs you now,” Mycroft continues, his tone growing more forceful. “You do not have the liberty of giving up everything for him again, should the need arise. I thought it best he not be a part of your life.”

“And then Gracie met Olive,” Sherlock says in barely more than a whisper.

“Yes,” Mycroft murmurs. “It was a possibility I had not considered. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock straightens, rising from his chair. He walks to the window and looks out, seeing nothing but a pair of blue eyes. “John wants nothing to do with me. He won’t even let Gracie come for a playdate.”

“I can’t believe that won’t change soon enough, Sherlock,” Mycroft tells him doubtfully. Sherlock rounds on him and clenches his fists at his sides.

“What would you have me do?” the detective demands. “I will never shut him out. I did that once and it cost me everything.”

Mycroft looks into his brother’s determined grey eyes and sighs.

“Be careful, brother mine,” he says in a sage tone. “Guard your heart. Let me help when you need it. Please.”

Sherlock notices Mycroft said when and not if, but chooses not to comment. That conversation is not one he wants to have now. Instead, Sherlock merely fixes him with sharp eyes and nods once.

---

I had a lot of fun with this chapter! The image of Mycroft interacting with Olive in exactly this way fills me with such happiness. Olive holding her hands up for the mitts like a scrubbed-up surgeon and Mycroft playing right along tickles me. And then there’s Greg's line "You're going to kill him, aren't you?" as he cringes at Sherlock - I can see the actors playing this scene to perfection! Lol. I hope it gave you as much pleasure as it did me.

Love, Jane

@johnlock-rocks

#Sherlock Holmes #Sherlock #sherlockholmes #sherlock fanfic #john watson #johnwatson #johnlock #Johnlock fanfic #Mystrade