#i also have like a litany of experiences of men doing this to me but thats like... the big one lmfao

[jcniper-backup]

Gale and I both have one thing in common: being self conscious about talking too much around people you actually care about because someone you cared about called you boring and said you talked too much!

#this is obv headcanon but you can basically infer this from how mystra talks to him that she would definitely tell him that #also maybe its just my neurodivergent experience but phew #i get so self conscious talking to people in anything other than ao3 comments its truly mortifying #also core memory: when i was five and really excited about magic tree house my best friend and also crush at the time called me boring when #i would talk about it #i also have like a litany of experiences of men doing this to me but thats like... the big one lmfao

[alexissara]

Baldur's Gate 3 - Amazing and Sometimes Awful [Quick Review]

Baldur's Gate 3 is a herculean feat of game development with amazing voice acting work spread across it's many many hours, fantastic character designs, interesting gameplay and more. It also suffers from D&Ds character progression systems, the way the games worlds are set up, and the system of true RNG that it is emulating. Beyond that the game despite it's own beauty is extremally buggy and faces significant late game performance issues. However, the game does some stand out things for queerness that a lot of other RPGs fail at. This game is a mixed bag that might also be game of the year.

With over 122 hours logged into the game I feel fairly confident in my ability to access what I experienced but given how big of an undertaking it is I genuinely think someone else's experience may be different. I chose to not side with either the grove or the goblins and moved onto act 2 without doing that and that may have added to the count of bugs but the fact that was an option means that it isn't "My fault" that I experienced so many bugs on my playthrough. I had party members despawning, quests saying I could do something that I couldn't do because the NPCs were not in the area they were supposed to be, getting ques for things that should have went into act 3 that were missing, in the end of act 3 characters missing from the end bits and at the very end textures just all vanishing for my last few hours.

I didn't really get to experience the romance the game had to offer. I started a fling with Lae'zel which apparently locked me out of most other romances but randomly gave me a Wyll Romance scene, a man I never deployed not once the whole game. I realized playing the game I didn't long rest enough and missed out on my chance to romance Shadow Heart whom I really wanted to romance and even though I broke things off with Lae'zel I could never progress a romance with Shadowheart, Karlache or Minthara. I want to feel this romances and see everything they have to offer but sadly the game denied me this.

The game lacks body diversity and the limited pallet of faces feels too limited in character customization. There is sadly no time in which despite being able to have a trans body I am able to talk to someone about being trans that I found not am I ever able to reject a romantic advance by stating my sexuality or disinterest in a gender. Instead it is taken as read that I am bisexual and that I am rejecting them for them and not because like from the onset they weren't on the table for my desires. I am however, not a bisexual but a lesbian and I would love to be able to say that.

That said this game does make strives to doing something I've not really seen other games do with playsexual characters which is to make them have queer history. I didn't get every characters backstories but I did get backstories for Astrian and for Shadowheart which both imply that previous to our adventures they had mostly been with their own gender. Astrian has a litany of male lovers which he courted and gave to his master, he seems to prefer men and he describes his attraction to them. Meanwhile, Shadowheart seems to have had a girlfriend before her memories were removed, perhaps an ex that was a Transgender Woman who turned to Sharr although this is more subtextual than Astrian's due to her memory loss.

These little bits of queer history make them feel much more lived and their sexualities not feel like it was because I am super special but because they are earnestly queer and I happened to have the kind of personality and body their attracted to. There is also some amount of queer NPCs not tied to our PCs although they are in the minority in a majority heteronormative cast.

The game does make some strives to fix some of the things that are terrible about D&D removing the alignment system allowing for characters to simply exist in a much more complex moral web than a box of 9 check marks for morality lets you do and a toning down of racial abilities which helps lessen D&Ds inherent eugenics. However, it does not escape D&D's racism problem with the game mostly having a lot of the characters be racist good and bad and not having counter examples of races like Goblins being good or like an important good drow or something. The companions "Racial" make up are very classic fantasy squad. 2 Elves, 2 half elves, 3 humans, 1 Drow, 1 Gith. In terms of race as we see it in the real world we got one black character and everyone else is pretty white or are a fantasy skin color and white coded maybe baring Lae'zel but idk what Lae'zel's culture is supposed to represent if there is a real world equivalent. Of course also everyone in the world able bodied and skinny or maybe if they are the right race buff. I haven't seen everyone fuck but it appears to me that everyone is cisgender. The game can't do everything but I certainty wish the game did more. The probably most offensive to me being the promoted and marketed Polyamory simply not existing and came from their own misunderstanding of the word, you can fuck around you at least in my experience can't be in multiple committed romantic relationships. That should be fixed given they marketed the game and I don't even need them to address each other just allow it to happen since it was sold to me on the idea I could kiss multiple girls romantically.

There is a total sense of wonder in doing the game thing in new ways and seeing all the ways you can handle situations and all the different outcomes. From multiple files to save scum stuff to hearing people talk about their runs I've seen tons of different ways even my highly buggy end game which did not run well I could see where if it wasn't having all the running issues I had I would have been blown away by all the options they gave me for the last 3 battles of the game. I still thought it was really cool even when it was bugging out. The game constantly threw fun new things at you, little challenges, great moments of roleplaying where it feels like your choices mattered and you could do something cool to get out of a situation. This game might be the game that has most successfully captured the magic of roleplaying in a video game.

The characters being a stand out factor in this in that I found several of the characters to be highly compelling even one man which if you know me is a massive accomplishment. I found Astrian's plot to be really captivating, I really loved Shadowheart's story, I thought some of the NPC stories were really well done too, as a character focused story teller I loved the character work that went into even characters I wasn't particularly in love with. Everyone feels like they can grow and grow in different ways too for bad or for good and often even pretending a pretty objectively bad choice can be flavored with enough deniability to understand why someone might make that choice as a character and not just like because video game let me choice bad choice. I think the characters stories make up a coherent theme I really wanna dive more into but will be restrained on here. They all deal with control. Everyone is dealing with different levels of someone's strings on them and a different relationship to those strings. How those relationships change and evolve over time is really compelling and how they compare to each other is really great. Overall, I love BG3, I think it might be my favorite game I played so far this year [but I do have a backlog, Stray Gods, En Garde!, Super Lesbian Animal RPG] and one of my favorite games in general. IF not for it's massive file size I think it's a game I'd keep installed all year round and just randomly jump into all the time. For now I am still playing, still enjoying but more than anything I am hoping by the time I beat the game a second time it is a lot smoother. If you enjoyed this kind of One Take review let me know, I wanted to try my Yuri manga format for a video game review because nobody reads my game reviews but I felt like I wanted to talk about the game. So instead of putting the huge amounts of work into the review like I normally do I wanted to just try this. If you did enjoy it one way to let me know is by supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi or you can just reblog or comment. I might revisit the game with a more in depth review or looks more in depth at how it handles queerness or about the story and other stuff like that.

#BG3 #baulders gate 3 #Quick Review #Review #Game Review #Queer #Queer Review

[littlemovieposters]

2024 Home Viewing #2: The Gospel According to Matthew. (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

Sure, I'm an atheist like director Pasolini who directed this film, but I don't care what the Vatican (who loved it) says: this is one of the most dismal, trying movie experiences you will have. There are some interesting bits here and there: I like the way the Angel of the Lord is depicted by a young woman, and she may be the sole interesting and capable actor in the entire production; it is bold and daring to use modern music such as American blues and black spirituals in an a movie about Jesus's life; and I suppose that technically, as a lover of Italian neo-realism, I think it is cool that Pasolini used mainly non-actors. That said, I hated the performance of 19-year-old Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus. The screenplay is basically the Bible, but once we get past Jesus's childhood and he's become an adult the film becomes an endless litany of Irazoqui walking around shouting angry sermons in the same monotone for what feels like 90 straight minutes. It's like listening to a post-Trump Republican give campaign speeches. I don't care that the content is holy or sacred, it is poorly executed and in the moment it wound up making me despise Jesus! When you somehow make Jesus look like an insufferable asshole, you're not the right guy for the job, and I suppose here I mean Pasolini as well as Irazoqui (but especially Irazoqui). Plus, and now I'm just being cruel, I could not take one more moment of looking at Irazoqui's unibrow (hence me including a poster full of glowing reviews rather than an image of his glowering visage). And as for the non-actors, some of them just didn't belong in their roles. Take a good look at the Three Wise Men used by Pasolini: you can't do worse if you go down to the local convenience store and get the three most inept teenage boys you can find. I'm not sure I've ever seen a good movie about Jesus's life (I remember The Passion of the Christ being terrible, but I don't remember what I thought of The Last Temptation of Christ), but what I do know is Pasolini's is a misery to endure. (Irazoqui eventually became a literature professor and a chess expert and very well may have been a lovely man. Also note I'm using Pasolini's preferred film title; "St." was added after the fact and against his wishes.)

[roobylavender]

when you say feminism theoretically frees us "all" from gendered oppression - i can understand why you feel this way, but the politics of that statement are about as radical as the barbie movie. an anticolonial movement like that of the Palestinians or of the vietnamese in the 80s didn't seek to free "both" the colonized and the colonizers, even though undoubtedly both IDF and american soldiers felt some negative effects like deteriorating mental health, etc from continuing their neocolonial occupation. the black american civil rights movement did not seek to free "both" black and white people, though some whites were negatively affected by gerrymandering and "separate but equal" laws. patriarchy harms men in the sense that the recoil of a gun hurts the one who is pointing it at his victim lol. true women's liberation WILL harm men just as the anti-slavery struggle disadvantaged white slave-owners, just as any liberation movement will cause the oppressor to lose the privileges he enjoyed beforehand. if you can't even acknowledge that the oppressor benefits at the cost of the oppressed, what sort of activism do you really believe in? or do you simply not take feminism as seriously as other liberation movements and ideologies?

also one more thing - "frees us all from gendered oppression" umm who do you think is behind the gendered oppression? do you think it materialized from nowhere, and it just suddenly appeared in society someday? if it benefited no one, if it helped no one, why would it exist? like this thinking is naive at best and actively misogynist at worst lol. men are the ones who are enforcing the gendered oppression in question, this is a non-controversial fact. imagine saying antiracism will "free us all" as if whites are harmed just as much by the system of domination that they enforce.

respectfully, that comment in the tags was a very generic one i made in reference to the male loneliness epidemic specifically and i really don't think you or i are stupid enough to believe that i think that all feminism boils down to generic inclusivism. obv oppressors will be at the other end of the gun by virtue of the way the movement would work on a material level and i wholeheartedly support that. my only implication by that comment is that it is baffling to see resistance to feminism wrt to how it revolutionizes relationships and human interaction, whether within the general international environment or within specific subcultures, bc it ultimately seeks to strike down gendered hierarchies that are harmful to everyone. that's something i speak to from my own experience as a pakistani woman living among other pakistani men and women. i can simultaneously acknowledge that certain gendered expectations have been made permanent via systems maintained by men and that this has in turn harmed men in my own immediate environment, many of whom i nonetheless have a litany of complaints of. i don't feel the need to explain my entire life story to you and frankly you aren't entitled to it but part of my feminism is very much driven by the hope that pakistani boys and girls younger than me are brought up and witness to a better ideology and means of maintaining relationships with each other than were any of our parents or grandparents. i really am somewhat baffled by you taking a split-second tag i made and reading whatever all of this is into it as if i've ever said anything else indicative of it. i would love to have a conversation with you on this in good faith if you're willing to bc i pretty much agree with everything you believe feminism to be. my comment simply was not directed at any of this nor should it have been taken to be

#like can we relax. jesus #outbox

[fluffy-critter]

#crosspost #busybee

[phobiadeficient]

BLU M!Sniper and RED F!Sniper split roasting their lover M!Scout?

(warnings for roughness and mention of jealousy, possessiveness, etc)

He had to know it was a long shot, but there he was, giving her puppy eyes and trying his best to explain himself.


It was a bold thing to ask. And he admitted as much, admitted that he knew she hated the guy, and besides that he didn’t know how fond she was of... well, sharing. She spent probably half the time she complained about things complaining about the guy being a bastard, and a shitty sniper overall, accusing him of being a prick and having a big head and being a coward first and foremost. But also, Scout just thought, y’know, maybe...

And she had a very confident ‘no’ locked and loaded, ready to go, but then she looked back over at him and saw those puppy eyes again, and the only word that she managed to say after a minute was a particularly grumpy “Bugger.”

And when she eventually said yes—with a few stipulations—he didn’t exactly need to know, that... some of the problem was the fact that after a few years, her frustration with the other team’s Sniper had gotten a bit... charged. In a few ways. And she made sure to stress that she wasn’t going to be the one putting in the leg work to try to convince the bastard of anything, but she would be calling the shots.

The speed at which Scout agreed to all of that made her a little concerned that she was somehow being played, still.

Then apparently he actually managed it, then they were meeting at a bar, and Scout tactfully placed himself between the two of them at that bar so they wouldn’t strangle each other before they could talk, and she knew him well enough to be able to tell that his smile was just slightly forced as he looked between them.

“Uh, so, Snipes,” he said, and she raised an eyebrow at him. “Uh, we figured the name thing might get confusing, so I’ll still be callin’ you Snipes, but, uh—“

“Mick,” the other Sniper cut in before he could keep rambling. “Just call me Mick.”

“Funny, rhymes with ‘prick’,” she quipped.

His jaw tightened. Scout fidgeted, hurried to cut in again.

“Uh, but, yeah, I couldn’t get into details much since I figured we could kinda figure that stuff out a little better once, uh... once we get there, y’know?” he trailed, glancing around their vicinity briefly, self-consciously.

“I get the gist of it,” Mick said. “Agreed enough to show up, at least.”

“Not worried we’re here to ambush and kill you?” she asked.

“Implying I’m scared of you,” he said, and her grip on her glass tightened, and she was about to say a few choice words when she felt Scout’s hand on her knee, squeezing lightly, and she just huffed, taking another drink.

“So, if you’ve got any, uh, questions—“ Scout tried.

“Here’s one,” Mick cut in. “What are we all telling our employers?”

And he was surprisingly civil after that while they talked briefly about the implications for their jobs, and came to the collective conclusion that if one of them was screwed over, they’d all be screwed over, so they didn’t particularly plan on being rats. Sniper then informed Mick about a few house rules, mainly that if Scout told him to stop or let up, he’d damn well stop and let up, and that he could get rough if Scout asked, and Scout flushed all the way up to his ears during the entirety of it but for the most part she considered this important enough to ignore him.

And then they were finishing off their drinks, and then they were heading to the motel, and then Scout was getting them a room key and left the two of them alone for a moment.


She had Mick by the collar in a moment, yanked down to make up for the two or so inches of difference in their heights. “Alright, you listen here,” she growled, sunglasses pulled off for the moment. “I bloody well mean it when I say that I don’t want you trying to make this into a contest. He’s my boyfriend, end of story. No matter what happens, I had him first. Clear?”

“Too bad you apparently need to bring someone else in to help keep him pleased,” Mick smirked, grinning like a bastard, and the only thing she could think to do that would wipe that stupid fucking smile off his face better than a swift punch to the nose was to kiss him like she wanted to maim in the process, so that’s what she did.

When Scout came back not even five minutes later, he found them both flushed, hair a mess, looking borderline murderous. “So... we’re doin’ this?” he asked feebly, and was yanked bodily towards their room.

She found herself on top of Scout in bed, boxing him in and kissing him like the world was ending while Mick mucked around in the bathroom. She didn’t waste time before starting to pull him free of his shirt, of his belt, and wasn’t surprised to find him already half-hard by the time she got a hand into his pants to cup at him.

When she pulled away enough to try and get her own shirt off, she registered the surprise that seemed to be evident on Scout’s face, the vague confusion largely overshadowed by awe. And she took the opportunity to bend down, mouth finding the space just under his jaw, stopping there to nip and suck hard enough to make him jolt, groan, grip at her shoulders—not pushing or pulling, just holding on for dear life as she sucked a mark and finally pulled away to look down at him again.

“Mine,” was all she said, voice a growl, and he nodded vigorously, clearly already dizzied by the entirety of what was going on.

And then she heard the door to the bathroom opening, and she pulled back enough to glance back in the direction of it, and was only half-surprised to see Mick already shirtless. Still had the shades on, though.

“Be patient,” she murmured to Scout, pressing a brief kiss to his cheek to quiet the beginning of a complaint when she sat up and climbed off him, moving to her bag to get what she’d need.

And by the time she’d untangled the increasingly-familiar harness and gotten it most of the way on, she was distracted by the sound of a stifled groan. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that apparently Mick had taken over for her, and was two fingers deep and carefully spreading Scout open, quieting how loud Scout tended to get with a biting kiss.

She paused entirely to watch for a few seconds, surprised by how hot that visual was making her, sending a shiver clambering up her spine, and even slightly more surprised at how quickly he was working. Clearly he had some experience with this.

“Bring a lot of men around seedy motels?” she couldn’t help but quip, trying to distract herself from the heat thrumming through her.

Mick pulled away from the kiss to raise an eyebrow at her. That was when she noticed that apparently Scout had coaxed him out of his glasses. “Enough,” he admitted casually, tone entirely more level than it should have been given the way that, now without a kiss to distract him, Scout had needed to bite down on the meat of his own hand to keep quiet, a litany of pleased little noises pouring out of his mouth.

“I imagine this is just another Saturday for you, then,” she huffed, finally managing to get that one buckle that always stuck to cooperate with her.

“Nah,” Mick replied, glancing back down at Scout for a moment while he reached and took his by then straining dick in his hand, giving it a brief pump just to hear the way Scout’s voice cracked high for a second. “Have to admit, this one here’s been caught on my scope a few times besides just to shoot him. He’s good-looking.”

Scout looked like he very much wanted to reply to that somehow, but his first word was replaced by a choked noise as Mick twisted his wrist just so and squeezed around the head, thrusting his fingers once, hard. She caught Scout’s eye, saw the same awe on his face, like he wasn’t entirely sure this was really happening, then saw the hunger flit into his expression as she pushed the toy into place on the harness and finished tightening it. “You’re right on that,” she agreed, moving over and cupping at Scout’s cheek, feeling the heat of his face under her hand and grinning at the fact that he couldn’t seem to decide whether to look at the strap or at her face. “But if you think he looks good now, you should see him here in a few minutes.”

“Might not be that long,” Mick replied, glancing over at the attachment and pulling his fingers free, wiping off his hand.

“I’m, I’m good,” Scout agreed, nodding hard. “So, how are we gonna do this, are we—“

Mick shut him up with a pair of hands bodily flipping him over and promptly pulling him up onto his knees, and Scout’s shiver of pleasure at the manhandling was misread by Mick, who squeezed his hips comfortingly for a moment. “Me in front, yeah?” he asked Sniper, who nodded, Scout hurriedly stammering out in the affirmative as well.

And she was slowed down in her attempt to arrange everything how she pleased at the visual of Scout fumbling his way through trying to open Mick’s pants one-handed, just a little bit too pleased at the notion of sucking him off, taking him into his mouth with enthusiasm that was just a touch too much, made that jealous streak flare up for just a second, and she didn’t bother reining herself in as much as usual as she dug fingernails into his hips, pushing in.

That groan he always made at that initial push was muffled, then echoed by Mick as Scout sank further forward and apparently did something very right. She couldn’t tell as well from the angle she’d found herself in, and didn’t particularly care. She’d only care if those noises started sounding too strained.

“Pull his hair,” she suggested, pleased to find that at the very least, she got to be the most put-together. Mick glanced up, expression hazy. “He likes it.”

He did so without further commentary, threading a hand in through the longer hair up at the top of his head and tugging, using it for leverage to push him down further. Scout groaned his appreciation, a distinct flex in his back letting Sniper know he was honestly leaning in to it just as much as Mick was pulling.

Alright, she was coming around. He won. Scout was right. This was a good idea.

She didn’t bother warming him up into things, knowing that he’d sometimes complain about her going too slow when she did it on normal nights, and he’d be even more frustrated if she did now. She just started straight into rocking her hips in steady motions, knowing by then just the right rhythm to leave him breathless without making her get too out of breath. She could keep it up for a good, long time, and always ended up enraptured at the way Scout melted, arching into it and gasping and moaning and gorgeous.

This time, he was a little distracted by clearly putting a good amount of effort into sucking off the other man, but even then he was noisy, and that only made Mick buck into his mouth all the more often.

“Gorgeous thing,” Mick choked, petting through his hair for a moment before snaring it and using it to buck into his mouth with more intent than before, and Scout just moaned, tilting slightly to accommodate. “God. Like you’re bloody made for this.”

“You have no idea,” Sniper said, breath a bit hard but still even, rhythm speeding for a moment to make Scout squirm. “I go too long without doing this to him and he gets so needy. He’d probably beg, if I made him wait too long. The way he begged for this tells me that much.”

“He’s blushing,” Mick informed her with a breathless sort of chuckle, and she saw that his ears were indeed turning red. “Poor thing. Can’t even defend himself with his mouth full.”

Scout made a quiet noise in the back of his throat that might have had something to do with the little extra roll Sniper put on the end of her next thrust, but Mick raised an eyebrow, pulling him back from his hair.

“Somethin’ to say, there?” he asked, hand falling to tip Scout’s chin up, and Sniper heard the way he was panting and slowed down her thrusts, knowing how close he had to be if he was making that kind of noise on the exhale.

Scout panted for another few moments, and finally made a disgruntled noise, shifting his weight. Sniper had to move forward with him a little bit, and he choked on breath for a moment before he recovered enough to speak. “If you’re gonna fuck my mouth, do it already,” he said, voice harder than expected. “And, and you can pull my hair harder than that.”

Sniper chuckled at Mick’s expression, slightly taken aback but clearly thrilled by this turn of events. “Alright then, get back down here,” he rumbled, and Scout did with enthusiasm, and then the pace was shifting.

She waited until Mick found his rhythm before she matched it, stepping up a notch, moving in double-time with the thrusts into Scout’s mouth. The skin of their thighs slapped together and Scout made desperate little noises every few thrusts, clearly completely overwhelmed by the way he’d gone so lax she needed to hold up his hips some amount for him. She only stopped occasionally to try and catch her breath or to readjust, shifting to long, slow strokes aimed as best she could to drag mercilessly against his prostate, and Scout whined helplessly each time it happened, bucking for emphasis until she started back up into the speed she’d had before again.

Mick seemed to sense something she didn’t—probably aided by the fact that he could see Scout’s face, feel his moaning—and told Scout to stroke himself. He did, moaning kicking up in pitch with his desperation, and that pushed Mick over the edge, swearing and fucking more roughly into Scout’s mouth before he spilled with a hard shudder. Scout moaned his pleasure when he could get air, strokes slowing down as he focused on not choking, and then his mouth was freed and he was panting and groaning against Mick’s thigh, rocking more firmly back into Sniper’s thrusts.

“Gonna come for me?” Sniper crooned in the sweet, teasing voice that always made him shiver when he was like this. “C’mon, we wanna see.”

Mick hummed in the affirmative, petting through his hair. Scout’s head was tilted a bit now, and Sniper watched Mick’s thumb drawing across his bottom lip, watched Scout’s eyebrows screw together with it, eyes falling closed, and Sniper filed it away as something she should try on him later. She moved to those long, firm strokes again, and Scout choked on nothing, going tense, jerking under her.

“Gorgeous,” she praised, rocking once and twice more for good measure, and he unclenched his teeth enough to gasp at it, and then he was relaxing, breathing hard.

She pulled free slowly and carefully, and Scout’s grunt of vague discomfort was muffled, Mick having leaned down to kiss him, still dominating but considerably more gentle than before. She left them to it as she stood to unclasp the harness, a little out of breath herself.

She’d only gotten one leg free when a pair of arms snaked around her waist, a familiar nose pressed into her hair, a breathless little chuckle fanning against her overheated neck. “Hey, c’mon, what about you?” Scout mumbled, half teasing and half hopeful.

She scoffed, but it was hard to get much feeling behind it. Seeing him like that, and the way the strap pressed against her as she’d been fucking him, and how hot the whole situation was, it all added up to make her feel… well. A good bit more turned on than she’d thought she would be. “What about me?” she asked, kicking free the rest of the way and trying not to separate from him.

“I want you to like this, too,” he said, and she jumped a little at the feeling of fingers trailing at her inner thigh.

“You don’t need to do that, I’ll be—“ she started, and was cut off as her breath hitched, Scout having gotten bold enough to push his fingertips against her more firmly. Her exhale was shaky as he trailed his fingers against her, the slickness there under his callouses apparently taking both of them by surprise if Scout’s little gasp was any indication.

“Jesus,” Scout whispered, sounding a little awed, a little desperate. “C’mon, please? I can’t just leave you like this, I wanna—“


His index and middle fingers found either side of her clit, rubbing with just the right amount of pressure, and her knees threatened to buckle for a moment. “Ngh,” was what she managed instead of a proper response, pulse hammering, and she gasped outright as Scout’s other hand rose to cup and squeeze at her breast, making her arch. “Christ, I, fine, just—“

He nosed her hair aside, pressing a kiss into her neck and kneading at her just so, his own breathing a little shaky.

“Wait,” she bit out, and he stopped, freezing in place.

That gave her time and brainpower to move, turning around and pushing him down onto the bed again, boxing him in with her legs before leaning down, kissing him absolutely silly. His noise of confusion morphed into a noise of contentment, hands finding her waist almost automatically. When she pulled away again a long moment, he was flushed and clearly a little dizzied, his lopsided smile on display. “That a yes?” he asked, hopeful.

She glanced him up and down. “Mostly I’m just surprised you’re still up for more,” she admitted. “Figured we’d put you through the paces already.”

“Nah,” he said, squeezing appreciatively for a moment. “You know I’m always up for more of whatever.”

“Even after getting fucked two ways in one go?” she asked, eyebrows raising.

“Especially,” he admitted, head turning for a moment to glance at the other man, who admittedly she’d almost forgotten about. Mick appeared to be about halfway through a cigarette, shamelessly ogling the two of them, making no attempt to cover himself up and grinning a little when she met his eyes.

Mick looked at her for a moment, then down at Scout, who she felt shift a little under her, clearly preening at the attention, at the heat there. Mick stretched his neck from one side to the other languidly and reached to tap out his cigarette before he looked back over at Sniper. “You’ve got rubbers, yeah?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her. She nodded. “How about I take back and you take front this round?”

She blinked, glancing him over, then down at Scout. She was honestly a little surprised to hear they were ready to go again already, having not expected much more than that first round and maybe an attempt to crowd into one mattress if Scout was feeling particularly needy after. But then she looked at his face, and Scout seemed to be trying his hardest to give her his best puppy eyes.

“Bugger,” she sighed, and Scout grinned.

#//sniperscout #//fem!characters #//teasing #//powerplay #//begging

[joseeapologist]

Can you make some Ice Dancers and Bloggers friendship headcanons?

YAYYY!!! I honestly believe that this is one the friendship the Ice Dancers could have with others that would absolutely work:

I feel like Tom and Jen would help Jacques and Josee be better people as in “seniors adopting freshmen in high school” kind of way. I believe a writer said Tom and Jen are two years older than the Ice Dancers, so that helps.

Both teams are obsessed with fashion, so you just know there are many conversations about that. 

Tom and Jen compliment them, saying they have “impeccable taste.” Josee and Jacques are confused because... oh??? appreciation??? they missed that. They really just want to be loved.

Tom and Jen also have an appreciation for all things French; the fashion, the language, the culture etc,. so much that they’re trying to learn how to speak the language, and Josee and Jacques raise their eyebrows at people taking the time to learn about France and Quebec. Needless to say, they’re pretty happy that they ask questions.

Then they get to the big question: “Can you tell us about Ice Dancing?” Josee and Jacques’ eyes get so big and excited because no one from the RR has ever asked them that before.

They’re all smiley, and like, they’re genuine smiles too, none of those fake ones they have for the cameras, and they say: “What do you wanna know?” And the Bloggers just ask their questions and the Ice Dancers are so happy and eager to answer it’s adorable. They’re just really passionate for what they do.

I feel personally that if people made an effort getting to know about the Ice Dancers outside of competing and get them to talk about their passions, they get super friendly like in this case. It really brings out the best in them.

However the Ice Dancers end up hogging a whole conversation with each other in front of the Bloggers about memories from ice dancing as kids for like... 5 minutes.

Then they realize they’re being rude (they’re trying to work on being nicer) and ask Tom and Jen about how they became friends and got into fashion.

Then the bloggers eyes get so big and excited, because fashion is their passion and go into this long litany and they hog a conversation about fashion since they were freshmen in high school.

Then they realize that they’re being rude. But Josee and Jacques totally understand and Josee’s like, “I hate when people dismiss your passion.”

And Jen’s like, “I know right? Imagine putting your blood sweat and tears into something you love for someone to just be rude about it.”

“Finally, somebody gets it!” Jacques said. Josee is speechless, because Jacques took the words out of her mouth.

Then Tom is like, “My dad dismisses it... he says that men shouldn’t be in fashion, ugh. He’s such a jerk.” 

And then Jacques is like, “MY DAD HATES WHAT I LOVE TOO.” And then they have a whole conversation about how their dads aren’t as accepting of their career paths. (It low-key turns into a therapy session, and it’s really helpful)

Then this prompts Jen to talk about her mom and how she lives with just her because she never knew her dad and Josee is like: “same.”

Jen tells Josee she’s close with her mom, but they fight a lot, and Josee relates to that and then thinks that Jen has the same home life as her so she casually drops this: “My maman would lock me in a closet whenever I messed up.” And she laughs it off like it’s normal.

Everyone immediately stops talking, and Jen is like... that’s not normal at all and that’s not okay. And Jacques gives her a look that says I tried to tell her that. And there’s like... a whole therapy session right then and there.

Jen would absolutely be a big sister to Josee and be that mom friend, because Josee really needs and deserves that. She, along with Jacques (and eventually Tom) would continue to try and tell her that the way her mom raised her was not normal.

Jen’s also there for her whenever she’s upset, and learns from Jacques and how to calm her down when she has panic attacks in case he isn’t there. 

Meanwhile Jacques always seeks advice from Tom on how his friendship with Josee can improve after competition, and Tom is so patient and helpful and is surprisingly insightful. 

Tom tries using his own experiences whenever he would argue with Jen and how they would make-up, and how they could do things differently.

Tom and Jen serve as a good example of how a friendship should be, without all the toxicity, and Josee and Jacques really learn a lot from them.

The four of them play board games a lot sometimes while drunk.

They also paint each other’s nails, don’t fight me on this.

They have movie nights. 

The bloggers and Ice Dancers sew their own clothes and exchange them as gifts during Christmas time.

And the Ice Dancers teach the Bloggers how to ice skate! And they’re learning how to be patient teachers by helping them and it’s wonderful.

Overall this is a wholesome friendship that we should’ve gotten.

#total drama #the ridonculous race #td josee #td jacques #td jen #td tom #ice dancers #fashion bloggers #tw abuse #tw neglect #asks #answers #this ended up a lot more angsty at the end sorry about that

[gumnut-logic]

“On the surface, Gordon Tracy is a simple man. A sunny smile, always likes a joke, give him a body of water and you can lose him in it.

“Any body of water.

“I once lost him in the bath.

“Though, you could probably relate that back to point number two and the liking a joke thing.

“Yes, Gordon is a simple man.

“On the surface.

“But only on the surface, because really, he is anything but.

“Meeting that smile under those laughing brown eyes and strawberry blond hair, you could be forgiven for thinking he is a joker out to make fun. You could miss the assessing eyes, the grace with which he walks, the hidden tells of experience and trial. You can’t see the scars; you can’t see the knowledge or the training.

“You could shake his hand and share that laugh and not know how many times that hand has reached out to grab another, to offer another chance, to save a life. You’ve never watched it dance across a control panel leagues under the ocean surface in the dark. You’ve never seen it push down on a ribcage to keep a heart beating.

“You’ve never seen it gently cup a handful of seawater to save a tiny fish caught in a drying rock pool.

“If you shared that joke, you would not know its history and how such jokes kept him from the edge during some of his darkest days.

“You could know of his brothers and the billions, of International Rescue, the Olympic Gold Medal, the party scene he played for all of six months in his teens. You may even know of his military career with WASP.

“But you won’t know Gordon.

“Because the laughter and the jokes? They are only his facade, a method to cope, a philosophy to guide his life. They are a reason to laugh rather than cry.

“Underneath there is a man of great feeling, a young mind full of wonder that has been slapped back so many times that now getting back up is the default.

“You could look at him and think ‘a billionaire, what does he have to worry about?’ But really, it only takes one life changing disaster to crush a man. Gordon has faced so many more.

“He has four brothers, a sister and a grandmother all of which it is obvious he cherishes deeply. He has friends and heroes and a growing love that needs nurturing like a flickering flame. But he is ever aware that these things are temporary, that they can be taken away suddenly and irrevocably. He has seen the glassiness of death and faced down the reaper himself.

“So.

“The laughter.

“The dye in the shampoo.

“The pillow in the pool.

“The itching powder on the bath towel.

“The hell let loose on April Fool’s Day every damn year.

“They are but a symptom of the man you are facing, and yet so why you are going to regret what you are doing.”

Virgil blinked and as if on cue, his brother stepped out of the shadows behind Virgil’s tormentor and, with a move Kayo would have applauded, wrenched his arm behind his back, took his knees out from under him and pinned him to the floor. Another blink and the man was restrained and gagged.

A pair of russet brown eyes swam into his vision, dark in the sharp shadows of the harsh lamp light. “Hey, Virg, that was some speech. Who knew you could be so eloquent under pressure.”

“He’s strong. He’s going to kick your ass.”

“Hey, hey, Virgil. I’m Gordon, remember? The joker guy you said was going to save your ass.” There were fingers fiddling with his restraints. “C’mon, we gotta get you out of here. Won’t be long before they discover I escaped.”

“Don’t underestimate my brother. He’s funny, but he’s so much more.”

“In any other circumstances, I’d be lapping this up, but Virgil, we need to get you onto your feet. I’m strong, but not strong enough for your heavy lifting. C’mon, up you get.” He was being pulled up. His body creaked.

“Gordon is going to come. You’re going to regret it.”

“Yes, yes, help me here, Virgil. I did come. I’m here. It is time to go.”

“You’re going to regret it.”

“Okay, arm over my shoulder, we gotta move!” A grunt. “What the hell did they give you?! Some kind of truth serum?”

“You want to know the truth?” Oooh, the world was wobbling. “Gordon can be scary. You’re going to regret it so much.”

“Ah, yeah, you’ve mentioned that, Virgil. Um, you’re going to have to be quiet for a bit. We have to sneak past some bad guys.”

“Bad guys want to hurt Gordon. Can’t let them hurt Gordon. Tried to kick their asses, but I’m not like Gordon or Scott, couldn’t do it. Too many. Now they want to hurt Gordon. Can’t let them hurt him. No, no, can’t...”

“Shit. Virgil, shhh! Just be quiet for a minute, please.”

Quiet. He blinked. Augh, the world was even wobblier. Gordon was coming. Gordon was coming. “Can’t let them hurt Gordon-“ There was suddenly a hand over his mouth. He panicked and struggled. A muffled yell and he found himself falling, the world spinning until his head hit something hard and he saw stars.

The world became only sound from then on. Voices, more yelling, the thud of flesh hitting flesh, a gunshot. Virgil jumped at its sharp crack. Someone swore. A snap that could only be bone. A thud and then silence.

The world began to drift away.

“Virgil?! You with me? C’mon, bro, please.”

A slow blink. Blurry images. “Gordon?”

“Yes. You with me?”

“Knew you would come. Kick their ass.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that.” A sigh. “Can you stand?”

Another slow blink. “Don’t mess with my brother, he’ll kick your ass.”

“I’ll take that as a maybe.” Gordon was tugging on his arm, so Virgil tried to stand. Woah. The whole world tipped on its edge and swung him around. “Shit!”

“Sorry, bro, but we gotta move now. You can throw up on my shoes later.” And then he was in motion.

The blurs burred together. He squeezed his face shut and clung to the man holding him, desperate for it all to stop.

Make it stop.

“Not much longer, Virgil, I promise.” It was little more than a whisper.

Another stomach churning drag across a blurry room and suddenly everything went green.

Oh.

Oh.

He knew that green. That smell. Oh, his beautiful ‘bird.

“Sit here.” He was being lowered onto a hard surface. “I’ll be back in a moment.” And Gordon was gone.

Gone.

“Gordon?”

A yell, followed by a scream and a thud. A litany of curses he didn’t know his brother even knew.

“Gordon?”

“It’s okay. I’m here.” Hands on his. “We’re okay, but we need to be fast.” He was pulled up again, his arm wrapped around shoulders and they were moving.

He lost a moment only to find himself sitting in a chair. A familiar chair with a familiar roar building in his bones. “Two.”

“Yeah, Virg, we’re on your ‘bird. Hang tight, because I’m afraid I might have to scratch her paintwork.”

“You wouldn’t do that. We only joke about it.”

“Well, I’m not in a joking mood right now.” The sound that followed that statement cut through the roar.

Her laser. He was using her laser.

He forced his eyes open and yes, he could see the red glow through the blur. “What are you doing?”

“Cutting our way out of here.”

“Where?”

“They stole your ‘bird, Virg. Remember?”

Voices on the edge of his hearing. Yelling. Another gunshot. Men.

It had been a trap and they had been caught and Virgil had been separated from his brother. His little brother. Please don’t hurt his brother. Please!

“It’s okay, we’re escaping. Another five seconds. Hang in there, Virgil.”

But Gordon was strong. He would kick their asses.

Oh god, please don’t hurt him. Please don’t. I tried. I really tried. Not enough. Not enough. Please don’t hurt him.

A loud crash and his body was shoved back into the seat. His head spun again.

His Thunderbird roared. Her rear thrusters kicked in and sung in his bones. His body lifted from the Earth and tore into the sky.

He let out a gasp, the sudden familiarity heart-stopping.

“Thunderbird Five, you there?”

“Gordon! Thank, God. What happened?”

“Brief you shortly. I need to get Virgil to a hospital, but first I want to put some distance between us and the bastards who hurt him. Please advise Wellington that we will be...”

His brother’s voice faded out, taken by the blur and the hissing of blood in his ears.

-o-o-o-

“C’mon, Virgil, I know you’re in there. Time to wake up.”

What?

“Viiiiirgiiiiil.” Gordon. It was Gordon and he was singing his name.

Ugh.

He shoved his eyes open and glared at his brother. “What?!”

“Ooh, welcome back to the land of the living. Nice entrance.”

“Gordon, what the hell? Let me sleep.”

“Nope.” His lips popped on the ‘p’.

Virgil’s eyes closed a moment and it took him a second to realise they had. He shoved them open again.

Ceiling tiles.

He was in hospital.

“Why am I in hospital?” He searched his slowly booting brain, but found no recollection of injury other than...

He sat up in bed. “It was a trap! They stole my-“ And the world caught up with him and whacked him around the head.

Two sets of hands caught him as he fell back towards the pillow. “Shit.”

“Take it easy, Virgil, you’ve been through quite a bit.”

His body sunk into the bed. Scott. Thank god. So happy to hear his brother’s voice.

He frowned. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

“Callout. Central Texas. Gas explosion. No fly zone. It was a trap. Nabbed me. Nabbed Gordon. Wanted Two...” He frowned. “Gets fuzzy. A fight. I lost?”

“We think so. You have quite a lot of bruising, a couple of cracked ribs and two head injuries.”

“Two?”

“Yeah, and you also had a bloodstream full of some nasty chemicals. They drugged you pretty bad. Took the doctors some time to identify with exactly what. You’ve been mostly out of it for a couple of days.”

“Days?!”

“You were unconscious for most of it.”

A frown. “Most of it?” He didn’t remember any of it.

“Yeah.”

He eyed his eldest brother and was somewhat unnerved by the fact he wasn’t keeping eye contact. “What did I do?”

“Nothing of importance.”

“Like what?”

“There was some delirium. Look, Virg, you were ill. Don’t worry about it.”

He stared at his brother a moment longer. Perhaps not knowing was a good thing, but then...perhaps he could third degree his brother later when he had more stamina.

“How did we get out?”

Scott nodded in Gordon’s direction. “Gordon got you out. Five couldn’t find you. They had tech enough to baffle our sensors.” And it was obvious that Scott hated that with a passion.

Virgil turned to his younger brother. “You got us out? How?”

“Oh, with my wily skillz and sense of humour.” Gordon grinned at him.

Virgil’s lips thinned. “Does that mean you’re not going to tell me, or that I should nag you until you do?”

“Have at it, big bro, and we’ll see how it slides.”

Augh. He so did not have the energy for this. “Gordon!”

“Yessssh, Massster?”

He closed his eyes and grit his teeth. “Fine. We will discuss it later.”

“Cool. I’ll bring snacks.”

A sigh and he opened his eyes to assess his little brother. “You okay?”

“Yep, just fine and dandy. You’re the one sporting all the bruises this time, bro. You’re the one who will have to be nagged to rest regularly, eat regularly and get tortured by Grandma’s home cooking.”

Virgil stared at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yepper doodles.”

“What?!”

“Virg, don’t you worry your little head about it. Just rest and take it easy.” A hand landed on his arm and squeezed gently.

He was still staring. “Scott, did he get checked over?”

“He’s fine, Virgil. Stop worrying.” A sigh. “He’s just being Gordon...and if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to kick his ass.”

Kick his ass.

Virgil blinked. “You got us out of there.”

“That I did.”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime, bro.” A grin split his little brother’s face, but something flickered in the depths of his eyes for just a second. Virgil frowned, but it was gone too quickly. Gordon’s grin took over everything.

“Anytime.”

-o-o-o-

This is The Joker. Here is the WIP sequel - The Hero. Sooo much WASP!Gordon.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Gordon Tracy #Virgil Tracy #nuttyfic reblog #the joker and the hero

[lizardkingeliot]

Fic Writer Questions

tagged by: @lazybakerart thank you! 💖

How many works do you have on AO3?

147 (jfc)

What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

789,230 (i did the math recently and over 400k of this is Queliot fic from the past two and a half years lmaooo)

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

According to my expanded fandom list on ao3 these are the numbers:

Hannibal (TV) (64)

The Magicians (TV) (33)

Supernatural (18)

Queer as Folk (US) (14)

The Exorcist (TV) (13)

The Magicians - Lev Grossman (2)

Vikings (TV) (2)

Historical RPF (1)

Hannibal (TV) RPF (1)

The Walking Dead (TV) (1)

Mænd & høns | Men & Chicken (2015) (1)

Basic Instinct (Movies) (1)

15th Century CE RPF (1)

Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris (1)

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

I am going to choose from my Magicians fic only here since it’s what I’m most proud of:

wellspring

time cast a spell on you (but you won't forget me)

as it was

and this is the map of my heart

life fades (but you remain)

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes absolutely. Comments are very important to me and I want everyone who takes the time to leave one to know how much I appreciate them. 💖

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

prooooobably throw your shadow over me. there is zero resolution since it’s a missing scene set in late season 3 and, well..... lol. it’s seriously miserable.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Just the one Hannigram AU I think???? I have never been super into crossovers tbh.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

lol yes, but it’s been a while???? although i did get one comment on a fic last year that wasn’t technically hate but it put such a bad taste in my mouth it might as well have been. it’s never a good idea to tell someone you don’t like the way they write a character, regardless of your intent. it is okay to simply hit the back button and move on with your day. :)

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

So much. Maybe too much???? Whatever. I really love writing deeply meaningful and descriptive sex that feels like an entire ~experience for my readers.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t think so??????

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yep. :)

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! @lazybakerart and I collaborated on a Hannibal fic years ago and we had so much fun.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Queliot now and forever. I have never in all my life had my heart completely fucking consumed like this. I’ve written close to a half million words about these bitches since 4x05 aired and I think I’m physically incapable of stopping at this point.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

That season one AU I started writing when season 4 ended that’s an entire 70k mess sitting in a doc I haven’t touched since 2019. There were some really cool ideas in it (including an alternate mosaic timeline that was like a probability spell sorta?????) and I mayyyyy one day incorporate some of it into another fic, but as a whole I simply do not think it’s worth the effort it would take to make it good enough to post.

What are your writing strengths?

I think I write sex and romance well??? Also: conversations, similes, and sensory language.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Last night I had to describe the suspenders Quentin was trying on. I will probably have to spend an entire day editing that paragraph alone. I can go on for pages and pages about this deeply meaningful and emotional shit and then freeze up when I have to get a character dressed or make them move from one room to the next... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

This is a deeply ironic question for me to answer at the moment because I generally do not do this BUT there’s a moment in the new chapter of a litany of dreams that I’m working on where Eliot says... something. In another language. During a very specific scene. And it just sort of happened???? It’s a term of endearment (that I googled about ten different ways just to make sure I wasn’t fucking it up lmao) and I’m still 50/50 on whether it will make it into the final draft of the chapter but right now every time I think about my heart mayyyybe starts to beat a little faster. Eliot Waugh is a goddamn sap, y’all.

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

For this one I will direct you all to this recent tweet of mine lmao...

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

My time cast a spell on you series without a doubt. I am SO PROUD of the work I’ve put into the 200k written for this ‘verse so far. It’s the biggest challenge keeping everything tonally consistent, but so deeply rewarding every time I finish a chapter and read it over and feel like I’ve accomplished just that. I’ve learned so much about my process and who I want to be as a writer from this ‘verse. And I’m so excited about all the messy and emotionally complex stuff I have planned for the remainder of part two. And allllll the other fics I have planned for this ‘verse in the future. 💖

tagging @thelucindac @nellie-elizabeth @akisazame @allegria23 @biblionerd07 @defilerwyrm @imaginedmelody @rubickk7 and anyone else who wants to talk about their fic. 💖

#writing tag #myfic

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

summertime sadness .3.

first day

Sequel to kiss me in the d-a-r-k

Part 1 Part 2 (masterlist under construction)

Warnings: dub con sex (intercourse, oral)

This is dark!(dad)Steve and dark(professor!)Bucky explicit. 18+ only.

Summary: You start your new job as you juggle the men in your life.

Note: back at it again with part 3. I'll keep y'all updated about a possible new posting schedule and an announcement regarding Patreon. Apparently writing every day and stressing myself out is not good for my mental health lmao. But I'm enjoying this one and I'm not sure yet if we're gonna be able to stick to 6 parts. Bon appetit. 💋

<3 Let me know what you think in a reblog, reply, or like. I'm loving the feedback from y'all and the excitement! You guys are gold. Also as always, memes accepted.

💋💋💋

You woke to the buzzer. You rolled over and grabbed you phone from the table. Your voice was thick and groggy as you answered it. 

“Hello?” You nearly coughed through your dry throat.

“Delivery,” The monotone response came.

“Okay,” You shook your head confused and hit the button to let him up. 

You dragged yourself from the bed and staggered to the door. You watched through the peephole as the carriers appeared at the top of the stairs. The two men in their brown uniforms carried a large box between them. They knocked once before you managed to unhook the chain and opened the door. 

“Um?” You stared at them confused.

“Delivery for apartment 6,” The man read off his tablet. “Signature?”

He turned it toward you and you read your name across the top. You hadn’t ordered anything. You couldn’t afford to. You signed, still confused, and held the door open for them to drag the box inside. You thanked them and watched them go before you shut the door. You crossed your arms as you stared at the package. You needed coffee.

You brewed your usual morning potion and sipped it slowly as you paced around the box. It took up much of the space you had left. You set your mug down and grabbed your keys to slice through the plastic tape. Within was an instruction booklet and a litany of boards and screws. It was a desk.

Your phone vibrated on your night table and you stood. You grabbed your coffee and sat on the edge of your bed as you opened your phone. 

‘You got your present?’ Steve’s message popped up.

‘You?’ You responded with an O face.

‘Figured you needed something better than that lumpy double,’ He returned and you tutted.

‘Thanks’ You replied with heart eyes.

‘Don’t worry. I ordered the smallest desk I could find.’

‘Still don’t think it will fit.’

‘You should be used to a tight squeeze.’ He kidded and you finished your coffee.

‘Uh huh. Well I guess I gotta day ahead of me, don’t I?’

‘Good luck.’ He sent a winky face alongside the taunt.

You returned a smiley and tossed your phone on the mattress. You stood and sighed as you once more ruminated over the box. Well, a little something to keep your mind off your nerves on your last day of freedom.

💋

You were pressed, preened, and as professional as you could get. Button up blouse patterned with small daisies, blush-toned blazer, and ironed beige pants. In your bag, you had a fresh notebook, your laptop, and about a dozen pens, including the golden on gifted to you. 

You strode through the front doors of the city tower as your nerves jittered in your chest. You hadn’t been there since the workshop. You and the other students had gone on a tour of the offices and your submission earned you a page in the company’s Sceptre Magazine. It also gained you the unexpected offer for this job.

After an elevator ride which seemed to make time stand still, you stepped off into the shining offices of Adder Press. It was just as you recalled only even more intimidating. You approached the receptionist’s desk tentatively and resisted your habit of wringing your hands. The buoyant redhead greeted you with a bubbly smile.

“Hello, you must be the intern,” She chimed.

“Um, yeah, I guess that’s me,” You answered.

“Well, I’m Stacey, I don’t know if you remember me, and you can just head on over to his office. He’s waiting for you.” She clicked something with her mouse and hit the intercom button on her phone. “Mr. Laufeyson, your 8 a.m. is here.”

“Very well,” His voice replied from the speaker.

She nodded for you to you pass her desk and you ducked your head down as you left her. You vaguely recalled the layout of the office. The round desks and the cozy seating all around. You bit the inside of your lip as you wandered cluelessly through the maze of employees who knew what they were doing.

You looked up and a familiar slim figure appeared in the doorway of the office along the back of the immense space. Loki Laufeyson, the editor and owner of Adder Press, greeted you with a handshake as you neared. His green eyes sparkled above his trademark smirk. In your brief introduction, you found he always looked as if he had a secret.

“Good morning,” He let go of you and stepped back to let you into his office. “You’re early.”

“A habit,” You assured him as you entered his roomy office.

“An admirable one,” He followed and passed you as he rounded his desk. “Sit,” He waved to the seat across from him before he took his own. “First, we’ll go over the job and your expectations. Any questions you have…” He checked his watch as he crossed his legs and leaned back. “And then we have a long day ahead of us.”

“Okay,” You said as you cradled your bag in your lap.

“You’ll be shadowing me for the most part. You’ll get an idea of how the business works and everything that goes into publishing.” He explained. “And we’ll get a taste of your editing skills. I’ll hand you a few minor pieces and go from there. Meetings, pitches, and so on.”

You nodded and listened to him as you sat on the edge of the chair. 

“I trust you will attune well. Your article was exceptional and I have no doubt there is a place for you in this business. Literary or otherwise.” He continued. “You are the first intern we’ve had that wasn’t a fourth year. I hope you realise the gravity of this position. Of this opportunity.”

“Of course,” You assured him. “And I’m am grateful for it.”

He tilted his head and squinted at you as he thought. He sat forward and smiled again. 

“Well then, we should get started. I’ll show you your desk before we attend the morning meeting. Then you can sit in on my next. The board must select the winners of the contest for our Pride Issue of Sceptre, among other significant decisions.” He stood and tapped his desk with two fingers. “Tomorrow, we’ll deal with the marketing side of things. Just as important as the content itself.”

“Alright,” You rose, excited though too nervous to show it.

He seemed amused and turned to guide you out of his office. Your stomach flipped a second time that day and you swallowed down the storm. You had to keep reminding yourself that this was what you wanted. An actual dream come true.

💋

Your first week flew by. The workload kept you busy and your desk was quickly cluttered from it; both at work and at home. Your nights were late and mornings early. The true university experience but not for the usual reasons, though it was just as thrilling as any party.

To your surprise, Loki was an accommodating boss; in his own way. His expectations were clear but not easily met. His standards fueled you; encouraged you to fight harder to meet them. And when you didn’t, he wasn’t disappointed; rather encouraging in his singular discerning manner. That he did expect so much of you, was flattering on its own. 

And your first edited piece, a quarter page review, had passed his grueling rounds of criticism. You couldn’t help but beam as he read over your final submission and uttered that single word, ‘adequate’. He looked up from his screen and across his desk. “It’ll print.”

You were still smiling as you walked out onto the street. You took out your phone, long ignored for your work. The screen was filled with notifications. Both Steve and Bucky sent identical messages; ‘How was your first week?’

You answered Steve first. ‘It was good. I think I’m getting the hang of it.’

Then Bucky. ‘Great! I’m learning so much.’

‘Awesome. Facetime tonight?’ Steve replied and you accepted the invitation.

‘Have you eaten?’ Bucky’s text popped up.

‘Not yet.’ You answered.

‘You still downtown?’ He asked. Another confirmation sent.

‘I’m at the Beer Garden. My treat. They have amazing tacos.’

‘Ten minutes,’ You promised and opened up your Maps.

When you got there, Bucky was waiting. A pitcher sat before him and two glasses; one empty, the other half-finished. You neared and set your bag on one of the tall chairs as you climbed up on another.

“Hey,” You greeted. “Didn’t think I’d ever be here again.”

“Why not? Good beer, good food,” He poured you glass as he spoke. “Good men.”

“Sure, sure,” You laughed as he set the pint before you. “So, how are classes?”

“Ugh, can we not?” He grumbled. “I didn’t come here to think about school.”

“Only to get me tipsy, eh?” You sip from the foamy stout.

“It never takes very much,” He grinned. “And I figured, we could take a walk after. There’s a nice little bookshop down the street.”

“Books? So this night will be worth it after all?” You kidded.

“Free food,” He reminded as he slid a menu over to you.

“I can get food at home, cozy in my bed with a good doc on my laptop,” You chided. “But new books? That’s better than--”

“Sex?” He ventured coyly.

“Almost.” You answered as you lifted the menu. “Though the more I think about it, free food might just change my mind.”

💋

Your stroll to the bookshop led you past Adder Press once more. It was a small nook between a cafe and a foreclosed business. As you entered a bell chimed and the smell of aged paper filled your nostrils. The walls were lined with shelves and small desk sat along the left side of the store. Books; used, new, rare, surrounded you.

You followed Bucky to the back of the shop and perused the non-fiction section as he looked over the military memoirs. The shelves between you and the front of the store blocked the view of the street through the wide bay window. It seemed darker back there; quiet.

As you scanned the back of a book on the old studio system in Hollywood, you felt a tickle along your side. Bucky’s hand gripped your hip as he turned you and slowly edged you back against the shelf. He glanced towards the front desk but cared little as he leaned in. He took the book with his other hand and blindly put it aside.

“Long week,” He purred.

“It was,” You said. “But I think you can wait a little longer.” You patted his chest and tried to push him away. “Maybe until we’re somewhere more...private.”

“Ah come on, have a little fun, miss priss,” He rubbed his nose against yours. “Just a kiss.”

He pressed his lips to your and you squirmed. You kissed him back as he trapped you in the corner. His arms wrapped around you and he slid along the shelves. Several books fell behind you noisily and he pulled away at last. You sneered and bent to pick them up as the cashier craned to look around the shelves.

“Sorry,” You waved to him as you gather the books. “Clumsy.”

You put them back on the shelves as you stood and Bucky watched you with a smirk. You growled and grabbed his arm. 

“Fine, let’s go,” You snarled.

“You want that book, baby?” He teased as you dragged him back down the aisle.

“I want sleep,” You said. “And the quicker we’re out of here, the quicker I get my wish.”

He chuckled as you shoved him out onto the street. “You’re sexy when you’re mad.”

“I’m not mad.” You insisted.

“Sure,” He slung his arm over his shoulder and led you back down the street. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll find a way to cheer you up.”

💋

Bucky had never been to your apartment before. You always met at his; it was bigger, cozier, and less stressful. When he pulled up to your building, he killed the engine but you didn’t say anything as he followed. Surely he knew a student couldn’t afford a condo.

When you showed him into your meagre flat, he glanced around and smiled. “Quaint.”

“Affordable,” You said as you set your bag on the chair. 

“Cute.” He commented as he neared your desk.

“New addition,” You explained. “Steve sent it last week.”

“Of course he did,” He mused. “Always practical, isn’t he? Well, in most things.”

“Mmm,” You grumbled and took off your blazer. “I suppose.”

“Did you send him a pic?” He asked and you lifted a brow. “Of the desk?”

“No,” You said. 

“Well, why don’t you?” He winked. “We can do a little photo shoot for him.”

“I don’t think so,” You scoffed.

“For me too,” He said. “Sexy school girl. Classic.”

“Stop,” You neared him as he pulled out his phone and tried to take it from him. “Or I’m gonna send you home early.”

“Take your clothes off,” He held his phone above you. “Come on.”

“No,” You squealed. “Now put that away.”

“You can keep your panties on,” He bartered. “Just give a smile.”

“Bucky…”

“Hey, if it’s gonna be another week, I need something to keep me from getting lonely.” He argued. 

You stepped back and stared up at him. You sucked your lip in and nibbled on it.

“You’re thinking about it,” He said. “I know that look.”

“One photo. That’s it.” You sighed and unbuttoned your blouse. “And it stays between you and Steve.”

“You have my word,” He grinned.

He watched you undress until you were in nothing but your bra and panties. You went to the desk and stood in front of it stiffly. You smiled. “Okay?”

“I said panties,” He intoned. “Nothing about your bra.”

You frowned and swiftly unhooked your bra and tossed it aside. 

“Up,” He gestured with his hand as he held his phone up. 

You pushed aside the chair and turned to clear a spot for you to sit before you climbed up awkwardly. You turned back to him and leaned on your hands.

“Stick your chest out a little,” He directed. “Good, and cross your legs. Mmm, yes. Like that.” He hit capture and lowered his phone. “Wow.”

“What?” You leapt down and scrambled over to him. “I must look awful.”

“You look… hot,” He growled the last word. “Fuck. Get those panties off while I send this to Steve.” He rubbed his crotch as he flicked his thumb over his screen. “I can’t wait much longer.”

You rolled your panties down your legs as you turned away from him. You heard him set his phone down as you neared the bed. 

“No, I want you back on that desk,” He said. “Now.” You spun back and put your hands on your hips. He shook his head in warning. “You know what happens to bad girls.” He warned.

You strutted over to the desk as he pulled his shirt over his head. He kicked off his shoes as he slowly closed in on you. He stripped deliberately until he was before you, naked and hard. You stared up at him and he lifted you up onto the desk. He pushed your knees apart and stepped between your legs.

“Do you remember that first time? On my desk? Hmm?” He inhaled your scent as he dragged his nose along your cheek. “I’ve been thinking about that all week.”

“Oh yeah,” You breathed as you felt along his sides and around his broad back. “Do you think about me when you teach?”

“Always,” He snarled. “I think about fucking you, front and centre, right in front of everyone.”

“Really?” His lips tickled your temple as he plied kisses one at a time. You leaned back and bared your throat.

“You know, what I really want,” He nuzzled your neck as he spoke. “I want you under my desk as I mark… help keep me focused.”

“Oh?” You moaned as his fingers inched along your stomach. “When do you mark?”

“Whenever you’re free, baby,” He nibbled at your skin between words.

“Tomorrow?” You felt long his thigh and brushed your fingertips along his sac. He shivered.

“Tomorrow.” He gulped as you gripped him. “Meet me at my office.”

“Mmm,” You pulled him close as rubbed his tip along your folds. “What about tonight?”

“Tonight,” He lifted his head as you guided him to your entrance. “Tonight I’m gonna fuck you till you scream.”

He pushed into you and you gasped. You wrapped your arms and legs around him, hungry for him. Each time he thrust, the desk wobbled and clattered against the wall. You clawed at his back as you curled your pelvis towards him, longing to take every inch of him. You moaned and locked your legs around his ass.

“Make me scream,” You taunted.

He grunted and plunged into you harder. You were at the edge of the desk, entirely at his mercy. He pushed his hand between your bodies and pressed his thumb to your clit. He rubbed you roughly, painfully almost, yet the thrill of it was delicious. Your moans grew louder and louder.

He reached back with one hand and tore your arm from around him. Your other arm slipped as he pushed you onto your back and pulled your ass over the edge of the desk. Your grasped onto the desk above your head as he crashed into you. Your body jerked across the painted white wood and you gritted your teeth as your voice rose.

“Come on, baby,” He rutted into you, harder and harder. “Come on.” He hissed as his thumb worked your clit. “Scream.” 

He impaled you entirely and you obeyed. He wrenched your orgasm from you and your legs quivered around him as you shrieked. Your head lolled and you covered his hand with yours as his thumb kept its motion. When it stopped, he dug his fingers into your hips and began to thrust again.

His own climax was barely smothered as he hung his head back and bit down on his lip. He pulled out and his cum spilled onto your vee and dripped down your cunt. You gulped and gasped as you tried to catch your breath and he lowered your legs back to the floor. Your sat up as his cum cooled along your thigh.

“You still mad, baby?” He asked as he framed your face with his hands. 

You pulled his hands away and placed them on your tits. “You still have some work to do.”

#Steve Rogers #Bucky Barnes #dad steve rogers #dad!steve rogers #Professor Barnes #professor!bucky barnes #dark!steve rogers #dark!bucky barnes #dark steve rogers #dark bucky barnes #dark!steve rogers x reader #dark!bucky barnes x reader #dark!fic #Fic #series #au #Dark Fic #summertime sadness #kiss me in the d-a-r-k #Sequel #mcu #marvel #captain america

[nox-artemis]

Isidro brings out the worst in Berserk (or, me going on a long, dumb tangent like the old days)

Tis’ time.

I was watching The Kavernacle’s recent upload about how a lot of anime capitalizes on this weird fetishization of women and girls - which is for the most part true and is why I personally try to stay clear of a lot of anime. Honestly, any anime that focuses way too much on the “Japanese school girl” archetype and anime that depict nearly all female characters as though they’re still in the adolescent stage either behavior-wise or “phenotypically” (like that moe shit) kind of weirds me out. 

Berserk has kind of stayed away from this, but it seems like it teeters on that because so many of the female characters in the series are under the age of 20. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that but I noticed in the chapters where the Guts’ party first arrived on Elfhelm, the character designs were on the borderline of giving characters that round cherubic type face, but especially with the female characters. In the recently chapters (From the last two years) Miura seems to have chiseled the style again, which is more preferable IMHO.

But I think this kind of tangles into some wider problems I find with some character designs. If people remember me and my content, probably my biggest gripe with Berserk as a series was its usage of sexual violence toward women. It still bugs me but I can give Miura credit in that he seems to have teetered away from using it so exploitatively. THAT SAID, I think as an older fan (and an older person altogether) I think a bigger overarching issue with Berserk is that Miura was never really that good at creating female characters.

(I can have so many interesting opinions now that I don’t care about making friends within this fandom)

No I’m not saying people shouldn’t draw any adult female character with more youthful features (I mean, as some who is at that age where I experience ageism, a lot of people - particularly men - believe that as soon as a woman hits 25 they’re suppose to shrivel up??? 🤨) just -

DON’T KNOW WHY A LOT OF (MALE) CREATORS DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WOMEN CAN HAVE DIVERSE FEATURES AND DIVERSE PERSONALITY TYPES.

I think that diatribe is for another day (I know I’ve been explaining this to other people on my other social media during my Tumblr hiatus). But to condense what I’m saying, I notice that there isn’t a lot of age diversity of female characters: most of the female characters are in adolescent. Now, I don’t think it was a big issue in early Berserk because - and even though I still take some issue with how over-exploitation was handled - we still got to explore these young girls as characters whether it were girls like Casca, Theresia, Rosine(Rosalind), Jill, or even Erica and we’re meant empathize with the cruelty (or potential cruelty in the case of Erica) that the world dished out to them. Even with Luca and her gang we got explore the concept of sisterhood if just for a bit.

Now there’s less of that - WHICH CAN BE A GOOD THING because not every female character’s traumatic origin has to be rooted in a gender-based violence backstory. I like having Schierke not having a clear backstory and being “wise beyond her years” and we can just keep it that way. Only problem is that I see a lot more that weird lol!con humor when it comes to her - especially with her relationship with Guts. 

I’m thinking of the excuse they use in hentai where, “the young prepubescent girl character is really a 7000 year old demon-lord from another dimension - so it’s not really p*doph!l!a.” Schierke is way mature for her own age, so she’s practically an adult. 😒

This isn’t just an issue with Schierke. Like, I notice a lot of up-skirt shots with these newer young girl characters; with Isma it’s kind of worse because she also embodies that “too naïve to know that she’s a turn on” when she’s like what? Thirteen? Fourteen?? I guess we’re also given the excuse that a lot of these characters are magical/supernatural/near-human so you can away with a lot more. Now that they’re on Elfhelm and there is a litany of these female characters  we just have a bunch of the fantasy-universe version of the Japanese school girl shit, where we enter - 

Ugh. Isidro.

I wasn’t too fond of him the beginning but I could appreciate his place a little. But his introduction was the point where we we start to see more of that typical dumb, pervy schoolboy humor in the series. I get it: Isidro is a teenage boy.

So was Guts.

And Griffith.

And Rickert.

And it’s just as important to have a diversity of young boy characters as well, but it’s just that for the amount of spotlight Isidro is given, not much of it is meaningful, especially in recent chapters. If anything his character is devolving IMO. MAYBE it’s some weird affect that Elfhelm has on him and other characters that is yet to be explored, but I somehow doubt it. Maybe it’s a phase that’ll be gone soon. I dunno. 

Maybe just overall the time spent on Elfhelm isn’t being spent as productively as I had hoped for. I mean BY NO MEANS AM I OVERLOOKING THE FACT THAT AFTER OVER 20 YEAR OF WAITING CASCA IS FINALLY CURED WHICH IS BY FAR THE BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THIS SERIES EVER but I think with so much anticipation of what comes next for her and Guts it’s frustrating to see other side stories that aren’t focused on their to reconciliation spent so frivolously. We got a bit with Guts and the Berserker armor; we got a bit with Schierke and her training; we got a bit with Farnese and her training; we got a bit with Casca retraining her self and her trauma.

See what I’m getting at a bit? We’re just getting bits and shit, it seems. No streamline story arc. We get introduced to one bit and then POP where at some other point with some other character. I get that things are a bit different in this setting because this is the first time in a long while that Guts, Casca and their company are actually physically safe from the affects of the formers’ brands. I with so much rest and recreation time I WANT there to be more retrospective time as well. 

I’ve said elsewhere that I’m super duper disappointed with how Puck has gone downhill, especially in regard to he and Guts’ relationship. We haven’t gotten any sort of meaningful interaction with him since Isidro came into the story. AND EVEN BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM IT’S MORE OR LESS MEANINGLESS FRIVOLITY. Couldn’t Puck and Isidro be using their on-screen time more wisely, even if it has to be away from each other. What happened to Isidro wanting to be a bad-ass swordsman? Like, just being associated with two badass swordsmen (now that Casca is active again) is not a replacement for character/skill development. DO SOMETHING. BE INSPIRED OR SOME SHIT (INSTEAD OF LOOKING UP WITCH SKIRTS).

And what the hell is Serpico doing? And Roderick? And aren’t there like three or four other -

- OKAY this is what happens when have these big ass fantasy adventure parties where only a third of the occupants actually contribute shit of merit. That’s why the O.G. Band of the Hawk worked; I guess that’s neo Band of the Hawk technically works but I just don’t give a shit about them because #fuckgriffith.

GOD DAMMIT I JUST NEED THE STORY TO GET BACK TO THE HOLY TRIAD CHARACTERS ALREADY (GUTS-GRIFFITH-CASCA). PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET MOONLIGHT BOY BE A BRIDGE TO THAT HAPPENING SOON. щ(ಠ益ಠщ)

I think I have to stop here.

Don’t you miss this? Me starting on one note and ending on something completely different but universally important?)

#berserk stuff #my berserk stuff #isidro #casca #guts #schierke #anime was a mistake

[brighteyes-darkhearts]

I read the Iliad, the project of a sun-drenched, blood-soaked semester in Florence. I loathed Achilles. What a stupid, selfish, dishonorable man. Homer originally called the epic The Wrath of Achilles, which is a far more appropriate title, all things considered. Sixteen thousand lines of dectilic hexameter to which thousands of people have devoted countless hours of life and countless jars of ink reading, translating, pondering; a civilization destroyed, innumerable lives lost, children left father-less, all because of one terribly petty man. The most terrible part of all of it, though, is that he is right, and successful.

Achilles strove for immortality, and he achieved it.

He died over two thousand years ago and everyone in modern Western civilization still knows his name. I hated him most because I knew , I know, his name, too, and because I see myself in him and him in myself. We all want a legacy; we all want immortality. Not in the sense that we fear the deaths of our bodies, though some of us certainly do, but rather in the sense that we fear the deaths of our names. They say we all experience two deaths: the first when our bodies cease their function, the second when our name falls from someone's lips for the last time, never to be spoken again, the memory wisps of smoke, uncatchable even if someone wanted to.

People would rather go to war and fight and kill and die instead of fulfilling some kind of peaceful pastoral idealism if such happiness means they will be forgotten.

Have you ever really considered the implications of that?

Have I? Has anyone?

To have or leave or create, cultivate, curate, a legacy, one needs to have a name. Sounds obvious, no?

A name is something everyone has, the second gift we're ever given, one longer lasting than our first gift of life. Names can be terribly old fashioned and boring, staunchly traditional, wildly new age, or if one is the child of a celebrity, they can be bizarre and unfortunate.

I never thought too much about my own name until recently, except in comparison to that of my twin sister, against whose monumental combination of syllables most others pale significantly. However, as my young adult self nears the expectations of marriage and motherhood, which many my age have already fulfilled, the concept of names has been on my mind with increasing frequency. On a superficial level, this consists of thoughts like "Could I marry someone whose last name doesn't sound good with my first," or "since my children will be saddled with my husband's last name, I get to pick their first and middle." I have been informed by my mother, however , that that is, in fact, not how the partnership of marriage works.

Marital disputes aside, as I thought about having to change my name for my eventual husband's, something I had always planned on doing when I got married, and something I had never considered much of an option, I found myself developing quite a resistance to it.

Why am I the one required to upend my identity, and not my husband? As previously referenced, isn't marriage supposed to be the ultimate collaboration, a team endeavor? Sure, I can keep my name, but then I designate myself as an "outsider," an "other," concepts that shape the very foundations of the human behavioral matrix. This, in turn, led me to the whole "why" question.

Names function to provide order to society, categorizing people in a clearer way than "hey, you" for everyone we meet. They also delineate strict patrilineal origin and hierarchical status within said society, often emerging from one's trade. I am referring, of course, only to men, because up until astonishingly recently, and sometimes still today, women were considered the property of men. Women would not own property or function independently from the man to whom they belonged.

The names of women, like the names of fields and houses, denote ownership.

Even then-names are a privilege, because they provide an avenue through which one can form an identity, through which one can be remembered. Throughout history, not everyone was considered important enough to warrant remembering. Enslaved people on plantations in the American south were not given last names of their own; they had to create them themselves or take on those of their owners, and with it, a clear signifier of their forced place in society. Considering the last names of Jewish Europeans both unnecessarily difficult and too clear a sign of the identities they sought to erase, Nazi Germany renamed millions of the Jews they killed or enslaved with unconsidered combinations of nouns and adjectives- Rosenberg, pink mountain, or Gardenschwarz, black garden. The immigration operatives of Ellis and Angel islands did the same to thousands of newcomers whose names they did not want to attempt to spell, so here, you take “Smith,” and you get “Jones.” Your connection to family history and national culture? You won’t need those here. Welcome to America.

Our names are the greatest gifts our parents can give us, planting us firmly within family lineages or tying us to historical figures and concepts; again, another moment in which the memory of another is re-embodied to continue its arduous trek towards immortality. We become our names as we mature, growing into or out of them. There were several options for my own name floating around before I was born, all of which seem entirely inappropriate and unfitting now, though occasionally I feel nostalgic for the Gracen I could have been but never was, a multiplicity of personalities never given the chance to realize themselves. Friends of mine whose names were mercilessly anglicized have slowly begun to reclaim them in their original, intended forms, building back conversation by conversation, introduction by introduction, the bridges back to who they are, who their parents named them to be, the cultures and histories from which they come.

Perhaps, in contemporary society, none so acutely feel the pain that names can bring than members of the trans community. Claiming their true name as an act of courage and authentic life in the cool sunlight of every morning and having to defend it in every hour that follows, having to suffer, too often in silence, the sting of a deadname used by those with no empathy or understanding or common sense in their hearts. Sometimes, the names our parents give us are simply wrong, and reclaiming our true names, those given from the deepest depths of truth at the core of our hearts, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the utmost respect we can give to others.

Identity is a smoky concept to pin down concretely, but names are the first iteration of this idea, translating conceptuality into physical manifestation. It should come as no surprise, then, that our names are the first to go whenever someone seeks to dehumanize. Ayn Rand bestows upon all her characters a litany of numbers, distinct but uninspired, parts of a machine, easily replaced, insignificant.

Names are dangerous, because they allow for and support the construction of an individualized consciousness. There is no greater threat to oppression than a fully realized, highly actualized, wildly individualized consciousness. We most certainly cannot be the masters of our fate or the captains of our souls if we don't even know who we are.

#identity #my writing #poets on tumblr #mortality #immortality #what’s in a name? #how to life #achilles #philosophy #personal essay #late night writing #writers on tumblr #excerpt from a story i'll never write #writers #nonfiction #writtenconsiderations

[starman-john-tracy]

Radiation Poisoning | Chapter Ten

by @starman-john-tracy and @asteria-star

In which John Tracy gets exposed to uranium and nearly dies, The Hood is evil, and Star generally freaks out a lot.  

Chapters: [One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Eleven]

Virgil shoves his fingers into his hair, burying his head in his hands.

“He must take after Mom, dammit.” He wants to swear a lot worse than that, but even as tired as he is, it feels inappropriate when John himself is dozing lightly just the other side of the room. “He’s got her blood type after all,” Virgil rambles on, “and the rest of us inherited Dad’s but I thought at least one of us would be a match for...” His fingers scrub hard through his locks, mussing his hair about, incredibly frustrated. “I can't believe how unlucky this is.” Virgil  blows out a hard frustrated breath, “He’s gonna have to go to Melbourne, but the risk of infection out there is so much greater and….”

Virgil’s sore and tired and his spine feels like there’s still a massive needle in it, and there the oppressive, crushing guilt resting on his shoulders that he’s the most medically competent member of International Rescue and yet he still can’t help his own brother. Virgil’s fingers are shaking and he sounds just so genuinely distraught over the whole thing that no one would blame him if he wanted to cry.

“I feel like I’m sending him to his grave, Star.” Virgil manages, soft and strained, “I... I don’t know what to do...”

“Test mine,” Virgil looks up at her like she might have gone mad, and Star just shrugs as nonchalantly as possible in their situation, “See if I’m a match for John.”

Virgil just shakes his head, reluctant.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” He tries to let her down gently, “I’m worried about how the test might disrupt your venous system, particularly as it winds all around your heart. After that little fainting spell of yours yesterday . Plus if your heart rate speeds up because you’re in pain and you still haven’t recovered from gravity...”

"But if I'm a match it could save John, right?" She points out, and it's hard to argue with that really.

"It could,” He says, though he shakes his head with it, “but without any genetic relationship the chances of you being a match are, like, one in three hundred, even if you are the same blood type and I don’t want to put you through the whole process for such a slim chance. It could be dangerous...“

"Virgil,” Star interrupts, “I know. This is me giving you my informed consent. Just do it." 

Virgil watches her for a long, long moment. Then sighs. 

“One in three hundred.” He reminds her, then makes his way wearily across the room to set up another test. He glances over a John on the way past, his expression skipping between scared and miserable. His brother needs someone’s healthy, matching marrow or he’s probably going to die. Star’s might be that match. It’s worth a shot. “Can you hop up here for me…? Same process, lay on your side and try and make yourself comfy with your knees as close to your chest as you can get them.”

“Well,” Star gives him a tight smile as she climbs up onto the bed and lies on her side. “This can’t be that much worse than being stabbed, right?” 

Privately, Virgil thinks she has a very different pain scale to anyone else. Which explains a lot, really.

What she doesn’t mention is bullet wounds and torture, days in the forefront of a gang war, having a tongue so tightly sealed behind her lips grown men resorted to trying to cut answers out of her, and always coming out on top. She survived that, she could last a simple test. But… that was a lifetime ago, and she hadn’t exactly enjoyed it at the time. At least this time, the cause was worth it. 

She pulls her knees up to her chest, and John’s sweatshirt is so big that she has to hike it up into a clump at the front for Virgil to have any chance of finding her bare back. Virgil, a frown on his face, reaches over to where her hands are tucked under her face and clips a monitor to her finger. 

“It’ll be okay, Virgil,” she tells him, and looks away. The breath she draws between her teeth shudders, and the monitor spikes unhappily. “It’s all going to be fine.” 

The only answer Virgil gives her is the rip of sterile packages opening, the snap of fresh gloves on his hands. In that moment, Star is both glad and disappointed that she can’t see his face. A cold hand rucked her shirt up the rest of the way and came to rest on her hip. 

“You ready?” 

Star just nods. 

He numbs the area first, like he’d done with the others, but it still takes her breath away a little, and Star chokes back her gasp by putting the base of her thumb in her mouth and biting it. Virgil is murmuring his tried and true litany of comforting words, but Star can’t make out a single one, reducing his voice to a background hum. She holds completely and utterly still, breathing through the burn, not realising her eyes have squeezed until it’s over and Virgil is holding something over the point of entry. Virgil’s fingers press to her carotid artery, watching her pulse racing across the monitor like they might somehow tell him different stories. 

When Star opens her eyes, breathing slightly uneven and sweat gathering under her eyes, she can see John looking at her from his bed, a frown tugging at his face. 

“Alright?” Virgil is asking, he’s still facing her, so he doesn’t immediately notice that his other patient is awake. “You did really well. Gonna be alright while I go test this?” He’s reluctant to leave her while her heart is still tachycardic.

“What’s going on?” The soft voice from behind him nearly makes Virgil jump. It’s just as well he’s set all pointy objects and the little vial of precious marrow aside in a metal tray so that he can’t drop them. Virgil turns, finding John propping himself up on his elbows, weak and a bit shaky, but doing a lot better than he had been the last Virgil had seen those blue-green eyes of his open.

“Good Morning Sunshine.” Virgil grins at him, relieved, “Nice to see you up.”

John blinks slowly at him, processing the shape of Star curled on her side on the opposite bed. She shoots him a thumbs up to reassure him. Awkward skinny fingers make a fist with his own thumb poking up out the top, to return the gesture. It’s a little ridiculous.

“We’re just checking everyone’s bone marrow for matches for you,” Virgil seems to decide there’s no point in telling his brother anything but the bleak truth, though he leaves out just how many mismatches they’ve already had. “Star volunteered hers just now for testing, think you can keep an eye on her for fifteen minutes while I have a look at the sample? She’s got to keep herself still and, here,” He folds a heat pack into her hand, “Apply this to where the ache is the worst, ok?”

John nods agreeably, watching Virgil limp (why is he limping?) across the room as he shuffles himself slowly into a sitting position.

The astronaut has rapidly lost weight while he’s been bed bound and ill and his arms are rapidly beginning to resemble toothpicks covered with a thin layer of wasted muscle, making the movement a bit of a struggle, but not impossible. He looks much better sitting up. His hair needs a good wash though, and he could definitely use a clean set of clothes.

There’s a glass of water staring at him from the bedside table. He reaches out and grips the slippery glass with both hands, taking small, cautious sips to try and clear his dry throat. When he doesn’t immediately throw it back up, John counts that as a victory.

“You need to eat something,” Star tells him, and it's so stupidly familiar that it manages to bring shaky smiles to both their faces. Star wants to sit up, and Virgil is otherwise occupied with his back to her, but the trembling in her arms and John’s pointed look team up to keep her in place. 

John’s eyes dart to the monitor Star is still attached to. He has enough experience with gravity to know when something isn’t entirely right.

“You didn’t have to do this.” He sounds ever so sad about that. Star brings up the smile again.

“I know, but you can’t exactly tell me you’re surprised.” 

Something that might have been a laugh shakes John’s frail shoulders, his thin fingers gripping the bed weakly. 

“Are you- how are you feeling?” Star tries to ask. 

John looks ready to try lying to her in response, or he might shock them and be honest, but he doesn’t get very far into either option before something by Virgil clatters, and the darker Tracy starts muttering. 

It doesn’t sound all bad. 

“Star you’re- she’s a match!”

“What does that mean?” John, having slept through the morning, has missed out on a lot. He blinks up at Virgil celebrating, confused. “Her bone marrow is the same as mine, somehow?”

“Her stem cells are very similar to yours,” Virgil tries to make it clear, even as he’s collapsing deeply relieved into the chair by John’s bed. “She’s a match!” He barks out a slightly delirious, very relieved laugh. “Ah, sorry.” He notices John is still looking confused over his brother’s seemingly excessive joy. “So, stem cells are, like, special cells that get produced by bone marrow, that’s, uh the spongy tissue found in the centre of some bones, the stuff we took a sample from last night, if, um, you remember that.” From the flicker of a wince that comes across John’s face, it’s clear that he does, at least in part.

“Stem cells turn into three different types of blood cells when they’re in your bloodstream.” He goes on, wanting to make sure everything is very clear to his ill brother, “The red kind carry oxygen around the body, the white ones help fight infection and there are also these things called platelets, which help stop bleeding. All three of which in your body have been badly irradiated by the uranium exposure.” John nods, quiet and serious like he’s taking it all in. It’s perhaps a bit simple of an explanation for him, who already has a good knowledge of the types of blood cells, but it’s important to Virgil that he understands completely. There’s a squeak of the feet of Virgil’s chair as he scooches it in closer to his brother

“So, we need to do an allogeneic transplant of these stem cells, to replace your damaged ones with healthy ones, got that? To do this we need to get hold of some of these healthy cells, but they also have to carry a special genetic marker, something called a human leukocyte antigen, or HLA, that's identical or very similar to that of the person receiving the transplant, or else there’s a very high chance of the transplant failing. Usually these stem cells come from family members but, uh, I don’t quite know how to tell you this but…”

“None of you are a match.” The realization dawns on John, fearful, combined with the fact Virgil had just admitted all his brothers had had the horrible test. “So you had to look elsewhere and…?” His eyes flick over to Star, where she’s just starting to sit up on the bed, a heat pack clamped to her back. “Star… is?”

Star grins at John once she’s upright, all teeth. Her hair isn’t contained by the plait any more, giving her the slightly deranged look of having been dragged through a bush backwards. She’s breathing slightly heavier than she should be from sitting up, propping herself upright on her arms, but she doesn’t seem the least bit sorry about any of it.  

“Yeah.” Virgil sounds so deeply relieved by this, it’s not hard to think he might cry. “Her tissue type happens to be a match for your tricky one, so, lucky for you, she can donate some of hers to you. Uh… If she chooses to, that is.” He looks up at her as well, his brown eyes liquid. “You do have a choice in this.” Virgil points out, though, if the alternative is John dying, they both it’s not really much of a choice at all.

“Ah!” He holds up a hand to prevent her from insisting that yes! Of course, she’ll do it! Star is halfway through what would have been a somewhat elated agreement in her mind when Virgil cuts her off, and she very patiently shuts her mouth and lets him finish. “I want you to understand the risks before you agree. You and John. It might be… I… you don’t have to go through this either John. If you don’t want to, if you think it’s too dangerous and your quality of life...” His voice is thick, a little shaky as he trails off. The idea his brother might not want to do the risky transplant, even if it could save his life, fills him with a kind of helplessness that he’s never had to face before. There’s always some way to rescue people, but John might think it’s too much to even try. Virgil’s fingers clasp tightly in his lap, trying to stop his hands from trembling. 

“Star’s poor health-” Star snorts in disagreement, but shuts up when Virgil glares, “-your recent surgery, and the fact you live in space so much of the time.” Virgil sounds a little bitter about that, “They all complicate things.” He takes a breath. “I’ve got to give you options, John, before you decide, ok?”

“Option one,” He starts with what he thinks is the best, “We run regular tests on Star, until she’s healthy enough to donate some of her bone marrow’s stem cells to you. Sounds simple, really isn’t.” He shakes his head again. Someone really needs to get that man a coffee. “Option two, we can put you on the list at the Royal Melbourne and find you another donor, already in full health, but that could take weeks, and we risk exposing you to a great deal more germs than exist on our little Island. Either of the first two are going to be long, drawn out fights for your life.” He can’t lie to him, “It could be up to years of being unwell. Option three,” he takes a ragged breath here, steeling himself, “You can choose not to pursue treatment.”

“And what would that mean?” John asks tentatively.

“It means there’d likely be a marked decline in your health, over a period of months or, perhaps weeks, and…” Virgil shakes his head, “You could get better or…”

“Or I might die.” John finishes off for him, his voice light like that’s perfectly reasonable. “Thanks for letting me know Virgil, but I’m not just going to sit around and wait to get well or not.” Virgil looks absolutely miserable about the idea that John might not follow his advice. It feels selfish to worry them any more than he already is. It might be his body and his choice, but John Tracy’s not a man who gives it up so easily. “Even if it’s going to be a lot longer and harder, I think… I think I should take the treatment.”

Virgil looks like he might topple out of his chair from relief, and, with the way he sways, heady, he nearly does.

“I… you’re taking this very calmly.” Not that he should have expected much different from the most composed and patient of his brothers. “I’m really grateful you’ve got such a positive outlook on it.” Virgil’s got this fear that, once it’s all sunk in, John might break down later though. “You can change your mind at any point, none of us will judge you for it. You probably have a lot of questions.” John nods like his head is heavy, but he still seems alert enough that Virgil, selfishly, kind of wants to get all this over with.

“What does Star donating cells mean for her?” He asks, because of course he’s thinking of her over the massive, terrifying threat over his own head. Virgil shuffles around in his chair to face Star, the explanation is more for her benefit than John’s at least. 

“John,” Star tries to scold, but submits at the look Virgil shoots her. 

“Well,” He begins, “The whole thing is a long and complicated process. Harvesting stem cells will involve a slightly longer procedure than the one we did to collect a small sample. We would have to remove around a litre of bone marrow from your hip bone using a similar needle and syringe to the one we used before. The needle may have to be inserted into several parts of your hip to ensure we get enough bone marrow. We, Brains and I that is, would do this under a general anaesthetic, so you'll be asleep and won't feel any pain while it's carried out, but the area where the needle is inserted will probably be painful afterwards and you'll have marks on your skin where the needles were inserted on either side.” Virgil is careful and clinical at explaining but the sympathy is bright in his expression. Star doesn’t care for it. She might be able to save John, she doesn’t need Virgil’s sympathy. “To boost the number of stem cells in your blood, we’ll give you a medication that stimulates their production about four days before we schedule in the transplant. On the fifth day, a blood test will be carried out to check there are enough circulating stem cells, and if there are, we’ll do the extraction.”

“Sounds like fun,” Star says dryly, giving the two boys a clumsy shrug. “I’m in.” Virgil just nods, like, despite his worries, he hadn’t really expected any different.

“Before we can do a transplant for you, John, we’ll need to check a few things on your end as well. Transplants tend to be more successful in people who are in good general health, despite their underlying condition, but the radiation poisoning isn’t exactly being gentle on you. I need a blood test to check how well your liver and kidneys are working, another electrocardiogram for your heart, and a CT scan to check the condition of organs like the lungs and liver.”

“Then,” And this is going to be the real bombshell for him, “We’ll have to do a round of what’s called conditioning treatment. It’s a course of chemotherapy, in a high dose, to prepare your body for transplant.” He says it ever so quickly, as if to get it over with. “The chemo will destroy your existing irradiated bone marrow cells, to make room for the transplanted tissue, and it’ll stop your immune system working almost completely,” Which sounds ludicrous when the astronaut’s weak immune system is endangering him so to begin with, “which will reduce the risk of the transplant being rejected.”

John takes a long moment to process that, his fingers wandering up to the fine ginger strands on the top of his head. Star watches the trail of his hand, stomach bottoming out on his behalf.

“It might not fall out.” Virgil offers, optimistically, knowing that while his brother is hardly vain, losing all your hair is still a distressing experience. “Some patients undergoing chemo do keep all their hair.”

“But it’s not likely.”

Virgil shakes his head.

“It’s not likely.” He doesn’t want to go into the whole slew of side effects the chemo could have right now, he doesn’t think he’s got the strength to tell his brother how he’s going to feel tired and sick and weak all the time, even worse than he does now.

“And after the chemo?” John asks, looking like his energy levels are fading fast. It’s almost a shame Virgil’s going to have to ban him from caffeine for the foreseeable. “What then?”

“The transplant will be carried out a day or two after conditioning has finished.” Virgil reaches out to flick a distracting monitor off on his left, “The stem cells will be passed slowly into your body through a central line.” He gestures to the PICC implant in the crook of John’s elbow, protected by a tube-like section of sleeve that has been slipped over it at some point he’s been asleep, to keep everything safe and sterile. “The process will probably take a couple of hours. The transplant itself won't be at all painful and you'll be awake throughout.”

“And recovery, after that?” John tucks an elbow beneath him, trying to keep himself propped up for this important conversation, “What should I be expecting?”

“Maybe we should talk about that later.” Virgil’s keyed onto the fact his brother is rapidly drooping, like a plant that needs watering. “If you get a few more hours sleep for me I might even let you back up to your bedroom.” John’s going to be seeing far too much of these four walls soon enough, while he’s still got some strength in him to have his own independence, Virgil wants to give him it.

“I want to know, Virg.” John protests, even as his brother gets his hands under his back and helps him lie back down, ginger head sinking into the pillow. There’s a poorly disguised yawn from the spaceman that doesn’t help his case. “I need to know what might happen, what about the side effects?”

“Are you really going to remember it all if we have this conversation now?” Virgil hovers over him, concerned. It’s a bit of a redundant question though, and John Tracy just raises an eyebrow at him. Even like this his memory is impeccable. Sometimes, Virgil thinks, his brother is more computer than man. He wishes, ever so briefly, that he was fully computerised, protected from the fragility of the human body. “Ok, ok.” He concedes, “Once the transplant is finished, you'll have to stay down here, as germ-free as possible, for a week or so while we wait for the stem cells to settle into your bone marrow and start producing new blood cells.” Virgil is always careful to say we when talking about John’s treatment plan, and the astronaut can’t help but be grateful for it. It makes him feel just that little less alone in all this. Star can see that sick relief at his brother’s words and wishes she could hold his hand, not entirely sure she won't end up on her ass if she tries getting up.

“You’ve got to understand, bone marrow transplants are complex treatments that carry a significant risk of serious complications.” Virgil knots and unknots his fingers in a rapid, ever shifting pattern of anxiety. “You’re young and Star is a strong match, so that improves your chances. You’ll probably feel weak, and be frequently sick, and you won’t want to eat much.” That doesn’t sound too different to now, but John imagines if Virgil’s talking about it so grimly, it’s only going to get worse. “We’ll try and get you to drink lots of fluids, or, if you can’t keep them down, give you them through a tube running from your nose to your stomach, to prevent malnutrition. You’ll have to have regular blood and platelet transfusions, as you'll have a low number of these, and you’ll be at risk from infection for maybe even a couple of years after this.” John’s eyes flutter closed, that’s a lot.

“Side effects wise, with the transplant, we’re looking at a chance of something called graft versus host disease, or GvHD.” He really does want John to have all the facts, “This sometimes happens in allogeneic transplants, transplants from another person, when the transplanted cells start to attack the other cells in your body. We can give you immunosuppressants for that but…” Reduced immune system. John’s seeing a pattern here. “Other than that, the main danger is from having a further reduced number of blood cells. We’re talking anaemia, excessive bleeding or bruising, and yet more increased risk of infections.” He gives John the first, wry smile of the past thirty minutes, “We’re going to have to wrap you in bubble wrap at this rate Johnny.”

“Scott’s gonna be unbearable.” He groans, in sudden realization, “You guys are gonna get microscoped before you can get within five feet of me.”

Virgil laughs, short and startled, because that’s probably true.

“I’ll try and keep him at bay.” He promises, warmly, “But I do think it’s lucky you’re by far the most patient of us.”

“Mmm.” John doesn’t sound convinced, or perhaps he’s just well on his way back to sleep. “Remind me of that when he’s getting on my nerves.”

“Will do.” Virgil ever so gently tucks the covers back up over his sibling’s chest, his voice dropping much softer and lower as he senses him slipping away to sleep. “Night John.”

“Mmm… S’night Virg…”

#Thunderbirds #Thunderbirds Are Go #Thunderbirds 2015 #John Tracy #Radiation Poisoning RP

[stereostevie]

‘Exuma’ at 50: How a Bahamian Artist Channeled Island Culture Into a Strange Sonic Ritual by Brenna Ehrlich

The performer known as Exuma channeled his Bahamian heritage into a captivating 1970 debut. Fans and participants look back.

Chances are, you’ve never heard a boast track quite like “Exuma, the Obeah Man,” the opening song off Exuma’s self-titled 1970 album.

A wolf howls, frogs count off a ramshackle symphony, bells jingle, drums palpitate, a zombie exhales, all by way of introducing the one-of-a-kind Bahamian performer, born Tony Mackey: “I came down on a lightning bolt/Nine months in my mama’s belly,” he proclaims. “When I was born, the midwife/Screamed and shout/I had fire and brimstone/Coming out of my mouth/I’m Exuma, the Obeah Man.”

“[Obeah] was with my grandfather, with my father, with my mother, with my uncles who taught me,” Mackey said in a 1970 interview, referring to the spiritual practice he grew up with in the Bahamas. “It has been my religion in the vein that everyone has grown up with some sort of religion, a cult that was taught. Christianity is like good and evil. God is both. He unlocked the secrets to Moses, good and evil, so Moses could help the children of Israel. It’s the same thing, the whole completeness — the Obeah Man, spirits of air.”

The music world is hardly devoid of gimmicks, alter egos, and adopted personas. But Mackey’s Exuma moniker, borrowed from the name of an island district in the Bahamas, was never just that — he lived and breathed his culture, channeling it into a debut album so singularly weird, wonderful, and enchanted that it’s not surprising it’s remembered only by the most industrious of crate-diggers. A cuddly Dr. John dabbling in voodoo Mackey was not; Exuma is a parade, a séance, a condemnation of racist evils.

“The eccentricity of [Dr. John’s 1968 debut] Gris-Gris is, like, ‘Let’s roll a fat joint,'” says Okkervil River frontman and devout Exuma fan Will Sheff. “The eccentricity of Exuma is more like PCP.” Sheff became hip to Exuma when his former bandmate Jonathan Meiburg (singer-guitarist of Shearwater) happened to hear “Obeah Woman,” Nina Simone’s 1974 spin on “Obeah Man.” Sheff was entranced by Exuma’s debut, especially the sincerity of its lyrics and Mackey’s whole-hearted earnestness. “There’s something about when somebody is very devoutly religious, where you trust them not to sell you something,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I mean, they may be trying to sell you their religious beliefs, but their religious beliefs are so vitally important to them that they kind of stop trying to sell themselves.”

“He was unique. He was good,” says Quint Davis, producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where Exuma became a mainstay later in his career. “He was like a voodoo Richie Havens or something.”

Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey grew up in Nassau, Bahamas, steeped in both Bahamian history and American culture. Each Boxing Day, he witnessed Junkanoo parades — a tradition dating back hundreds of years and commemorating days when slaves finally had time off — replete with music, masks, and folklore. At the movies, accessed with pocket money earned from selling fish on weekends, he saw performances by Sam Cooke and Fats Domino.

“Saying the word ‘Junkanoo’ to most Bahamians gets their hearts beating faster and their breathing gets shorter and faster,” Langston Longley, leader of Bahamas Junkanoo Revue, has said. “It’s hard to express in words because it’s a feeling, a spirit that’s evoked within from the sound of a goatskin drum, a cowbell, or a bugle.”

“I grew up a roots person, someone knowing about the bush and the herbs and the spiritual realm,” Mackey told Wavelength in 1981 of his life back home. “It was inbred into all of us. Just like for people growing up in the lowlands of Delta Country or places like Africa.”

In 1961, when he was 17, Mackey moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to become an architect, according to a 1970 interview, but he abandoned that dream when he ran out of money. He then acquired a junked-up guitar on which he practiced Bahamian calypsos and penned songs about his home. “I started playing around when Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Richard Pryor, Hendrix, and Streisand were all down there, too, hanging out and performing at the Cafe Bizarre,” Mackey recalled in 1994. “I’d been singing down there, and we’d all been exchanging ideas and stuff. Then one time a producer came up to me and said he was very interested in recording some of my original songs, but he said that I needed a vehicle. I remembered the Obeah Man from my childhood — he’s the one with the colorful robes who would deal with the elements and the moonrise, the clouds, and the vibrations of the earth. So, I decided to call myself Exuma, the Obeah Man.”

Mackey’s manager, Bob Wyld, helped him form a band to record his debut album, including Wyld’s client Peppy Castro of the Blues Magoos. “It was like acting. Like, ‘OK, I’ll take a little alias, I’ll be Spy Boy,’ and all this kind of stuff,” Castro tells Rolling Stone. All the members of Mackey’s band adopted stage names, which wasn’t that strange to Castro, who originated the role of Berger in the Broadway show Hair.

“Then I met Tony and then I got into the folklore and I started to see what he was about — this history of coming from the [Bahamas],” he adds. “It was great. It was inventive. We would do a little Junkanoo parade from out of the dressing room, right up to the stage. It was about the show of it all. Coming from somebody who wanted to learn music in a more traditional form, that was kind of cool.”

The band recorded Exuma at Bob Liftin’s Regent Sound Studios in New York City — where the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Elton John also laid down tracks — giving the bizarre record a slick sheen. Mackey once said that the music came to him in a dream, and he set the mood in the studio accordingly. “It was so free form. We turned the lights out, we’d put up candles, he’d get on a mic and he’d just start going off and singing crazy stuff and we followed it,” Castro says. “You would go into trances. In those days, I was a little hippie, so yeah, we’d be smoking weed there and getting high. It became a séance almost. It was like, ‘We’re going into this mode and we’re going to see where it takes us.’”

“There were no boundaries with Tony,” he adds. “It was free for him. It’s kind of like what people felt like when they played with Chuck Berry. If you talk to any of the musicians who played with Chuck Berry, you just had to be on your toes because he would change keys in the middle of the song. But there was also the spiritual stuff, you know, just the crazy voodoo-ish stuff. It was just so free for him.”

Everyone Rolling Stone talked with for this story compared Mackey to Richie Havens, but the similarities only really extend to, perhaps, Havens’ role in the Greenwich Village scene and the rich quality of his voice. “You can put on Dr. John and Richie Havens and water the plants. It’s good background music,” Will Sheff says. “But if [Exuma’s] ‘Séance in the Sixth Fret’ comes on shuffle, you’re going to skip it. It’s active listening; it sends a chill down your spine.”

Exuma is a kind of aural movie — fitting, as Mackey went on to write plays — that starts off boastful and proud with “Obeah Man” then descends into darker territory. The second track, “Dambala,” is a melodic damnation of slave owners: “You slavers will know/What it’s like to be a slave,” Mackey wails, “You’ll remain in your graves/With the stench and the smell.”

“It reminds me of Jordan Peele movies — movies that deal with sort of the black experience, a collective trauma,” Sheff says of the song. “He’s cursing a slaver and there’s something so intensely powerful about that.”

Then there’s zombie ode “Mama Loi, Papa Loi,” a frankly terrifying story of men rising from the dead, featuring guttural yelps and groans. “Jingo, Jingo he ain’t dead/He can see from the back of his head,” Mackey sings. That leads into the comparatively peppy “Junkanoo,” an instrumental that recalls the parades of the musician’s youth. Things get dark again with “Séance in the Sixth Fret,” which is just that — a yearning ritual in which the band calls to a litany of spirits. “Hand on quill/Hand on pencil/Hand on pen/Tell me spirit/Tell me when,” Mackey intones. The more accessible “You Don’t Know What’s Going On,” follows, leading into epic prophecy “The Vision,” which foretells the end of the world: “And all the dead walking throughout the land/Whispering, Whispering, it was judgment day.”

The strange, gorgeous record was released on Mercury Records, and at the time, the label had high hopes for its success, as it was apparently getting solid radio play. “The reaction is that of a heavy, big-numbers contemporary album,” Mercury exec Lou Simon said at the time. “As a result, we’re going to give it all the merchandising support we can muster.” But the album apparently failed to break through, and Mackey left Mercury in 1971 after releasing Exuma II. His legacy lived on in the corners of popular culture: Nina Simone covered “Dambala” as well as “Obeah Man,” with both tracks appearing on It Is Finished, a 1974 LP that failed to take off. Mackey himself went on to drop still more albums but mostly operated in a quiet kind of obscurity.

“What he didn’t have was the commercial base, you know, the formula,” Castro says by way of explanation. “Let’s face it, the music business is very fickle and it boxes you in. And if you’re going to join that world, it’s in your best interest to commercialize yourself and to come up with a formula that works. He didn’t have that formula.”

Mackey did find a home, though, at the newly minted New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1978, an atmosphere that seemed more in keeping with his spiritual aesthetic than mainstream radio. “New Orleans is the most receptive place in the world to the artist, this music spirit that flies around in the air all the time waiting to be reborn and reborn,” he told Wavelength in 1981.

“He was a Caribbean Dr. John, so to speak,” festival producer Davis says. “When I heard [his album], I said, ‘Well, that’s us.’ This guy with feathers on his head, his big hat. Everybody loved him and he became part of the festival family.”

“I think he was the first Caribbean act that we had,” Davis adds. “I hesitate to say that he was a trailblazer because there weren’t a lot of people following in his footsteps.”

#bahamas #blue magoos #caribbean #exuma #nina simone #okkervil river #dr. john #obeah #richie havens #rollingstone #music #spirituality

[nellie-elizabeth]

Outlander: Never My Love (5x12)

I... Have... Issues.

Cons:

I don't want to blame the show-runners too much for the story-line with Claire, as it is lifted straight from the books. But do you know what occurred to me as I was watching this? The rape was actually completely unnecessary to the story. Like - seriously. Change nothing else. Show Claire being beaten and bloody and tied up, and it's awful and it's hard to watch and the performance is raw and honest and all that jazz.

But why rape? Why rape again? We've already had a story-line about Jamie being raped, and a story-line about Brianna being raped. At some point it's just torture porn. And the fact that she is sexually assaulted makes Jamie and the other men's journey feel like this really gross macho revenge fantasy. Again, I know this is all lifted straight from the books. And let me tell ya - it's one of my least favorite things in the books, too.

They added in this interesting thing where Claire is fantasizing about a happy life in the twentieth century with all her family around her, at Thanksgiving. So we keep cutting between Claire tied up and crying in the forest, and these happy idyllic snapshots, of Jocasta and Murtagh, Ian in a uniform, Marsali and Fergus and their kids, Claire and Jamie happy together. There were things about this idea that I liked, but I had two big problems, as well.

For one thing, the thought that the fantasy Claire escapes to is of the future, of her own time, is... really sad, isn't it? It's not poignant, it's just depressing, to think that while Claire fantasizes about Jamie and the rest of her eighteenth century family, she longs for the trappings and safety of a twentieth century existence. That's not the sense I've gotten from her character at all, that she's still missing her old life. It felt really awkward and out of place.

And secondly, why did Brianna and Roger and Jemmy die in this little fantasy escape of Claire's? I guess it has something to do with the pain she feels at not thinking she'll ever see Bree and Roger again, but it felt out of place in the fantasies, which in turn felt out of place in the scenes.

Speaking of Brianna and Roger... I already felt like last week's goodbyes with them were really tepid and unmotivated. I didn't understand why they were leaving at that exact moment. In the book, as I said, there was a very clear reason for their departure. But here, they go through the stones, and end up back where they started. Ian is startled to see them, and it turns out that when Brianna and Roger thought of home, it took them back to where they started, because the Ridge is home to them now.

Ugh. Barf. That's... way too cheesy for my taste, I'm sorry to say. And it makes last week's weirdly underwhelming goodbye... even more underwhelming. After all of that, the Mackenzies are just content to stay in the past? And it just made the plot more confusing, because this final episode wasn't about them, and their choice to stay after all. It was about rescuing Claire from Lionel Brown. So Roger shows up, Jamie is glad to see the family, but there's no time to really process it - Roger is coming along on the mission to save Claire. Why not change it up, so that Roger and Bree decide to leave, but before they can set off, the attack happens and they have to stay because Claire was taken? Then they could have a talk, after it's all over, about how they don't want to leave while things are so uncertain, and maybe they don't want to leave at all.

This season's timeline is very disjointed to me. We just saw Marsali give birth to her baby girl, right, but now she's pregnant and showing again? When was it that months passed without my noticing? Did anyone else feel some whiplash with all of that?

I'll finish off this "cons" section by circling back to a complaint I already made last week, which is that this did not feel like the natural culmination to a season of television. The Browns were barely characters, the whole subplot about Claire being Dr. Rawlings was hardly a thing. This was a season about Bonnet, about Roger almost dying (and oh boy that didn't get very much screen-time did it?), it was a season about the War of Regulation. This attack on Claire feels like it came out of nowhere and only existed to make something dramatic happen in the finale.

Pros:

Okay so I didn't actually despise this episode, despite my litany of complaints about it.

To start with, while I had some problems with the revenge fantasy aspect of Claire's rescue, I did think the fight choreography was really good and conveyed the brutality of the violence being committed. That's something Outlander very often gets right. The image of Ian and Fergus looking down on Claire as Jamie kneels beside her, so much compassion and honor for their mother-figure... that was really powerful. And Roger taking a life, the significance of that, and the way he confessed it to Brianna in the dark... all of that left quite an impact. I also love how seriously Jamie takes Claire's oath as a doctor, that she will do no harm. It's a great moment from the books that was borrowed here, where Jamie says that Claire cannot kill for herself - "it is I who kills for her."

While I question the whole point of the twentieth century fantasy stuff, it was still fun to see everyone in more modern, recognizable clothing and hair-styles. Very much of the '60's, but still. It was strange to see Marsali with the long straightened hair, and Jocasta and Claire with their conservative shortened styles. Seeing Ian and Jamie in modern garb was legitimately disconcerting, which goes to show how wonderful this show is at total immersion. The setting and time period is very solidly 1760's, and I get totally swept up in that to the point where it was really fascinating and kind of fun to see them all in this different setting.

I'll go ahead and say that Caitriona Balfe did a great job with her performance. It was hard to watch the torture porn but I did appreciate her dedication to Claire's experience, and she did a great job with some frankly clunky dialogue when she was listing all the trauma she's experienced and talking about how she won't be broken by this.

The real show-stealer of the night, though? Marsali. This is the best thing that the show-runners have changed from the book to the show. Placing Marsali in the position as Claire's protege, giving her more personal agency and more to do outside of being a wife and a mother, paying off the difficult beginning of her relationship with Claire. All of this is top-notch stuff. When Claire comes back after Jamie rescues her, we see her and Brianna embrace, and that's sweet or whatever, but I felt so much more when I saw Marsali approach, with her face all bruised, to embrace Claire. They weathered the attack together.

And then Marsali killing Lionel Brown... chills. When she said "I've taken no such oath," and then Jamie finds her and she's freaking out about killing him, asking if she'll go to Hell. There was just so much going on in that performance, so many layers to what was happening, and I was totally spell-bound.

I try not to harp on and on too much about the books vs. the show, but in this case I want to praise the show for taking out a part of the book that I hate, which is Jamie being worried that Claire might be pregnant from one of her rapists, and wanting to have sex with her right away so he can have plausible deniability that he might be the father. I am just... grateful that they didn't include this aspect in the show. It's gross. I don't want to deal with it.

In place of that we see Claire grieving what has happened to her, we see her telling Lionel Brown: "I will do you no harm," we see her breaking down but finding inner strength, and we see her curled up in the arms of her husband, taking strength from him. I really wish this story hadn't happened like this in the show, but I did appreciate the care and attention given to the aftermath.

So there you have it. This season was... disjointed at best. I really do wonder if season six will be the end of Outlander. It would make a certain amount of sense, given how many of the plot threads from the books have been excised/shortened into a more streamlined format for the show. Unfortunately, I feel like there were a lot of misses this season, and I hope they can come back with something stronger in the future!

6.5/10

#review #outlander #outlander review

[cinnaminsvga]

🌀 social media au where namjoon is the head of research and development for the korean intelligence and he has to protect an innocent civilian from a mafia attack –– except that he’s got the wrong person 🌀

A/N: The last two (three?) updates for this series will mainly be in prose, mostly because I didn’t know how else to convey the Scenes™️ in text form without it being weird... Anyway. Here’s this! || W.C. 2.6K

prev // part 23 // next links added later.

[updates every mwf + sat/sun at 12PM PST]

When you finally regain your consciousness, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to their surroundings. The cold cement underneath your body is unfamiliar and disconcerting, helping you snap out of your dizziness long enough to realize that you had no idea where you were.

“Fuck.” Panic seizes you as you stare at the concrete cell you find yourself in. There is nothing inside the small room except yourself, some empty wooden shelves, and a metal door to your right, though you imagine that this room might have been used as a supply closet at one point. That doesn’t help you understand where you are, however.

“I was… at home? And then… I was texting Mafia Man and... oh fuck. The mole. Hoseok!” You exclaim, scrambling to your feet before falling face flat once more onto the floor. “What the hell..?” You see that you had tripped over the ropes that were binding you, as it seems that the ones near your legs had untangled somewhat.

After a bit of fidgeting and clawing at the rope, you manage to free yourself with only a small rope burn by your thigh. Whoever had tied you up must not have had much experience with tying people up, but luckily for you… Well, let’s just say being a horny weeb has its perks in times like this.

Unfortunately, your captors had remembered to lock the door, and no matter how hard you slammed your body against it, it didn’t look like it was anywhere near buckling down. “Let me out!” you scream, despite how futile and stupid it is. You continue to bang your fists against the metal regardless. “Once I get out of here, you guys are gonna get absolutely fucked by my yakuza boyfriend!”

No response. Either your guard was scared of the prospect of your (not) imaginary boyfriend, or they had left you alone without a guard. Frankly, you’re more offended if the latter is true because that means these mafia assholes were certain that you wouldn’t make it out on your own anyway.

“Well, it’s true but they still shouldn’t do that,” you mutter angrily to yourself, sliding down to the floor and hugging your knees to your chest. Well, guess you should start getting comfortable if this is going to be the way you’ll live for the rest of your short lifespan.

“Let’s hope Mister Mafia-Slash-FBI Man figures out I’m gone and comes to rescue me,” you say, though the dejected tone of your voice makes it all apparent that you hold no faith in those group of bumbling idiots. “They didn’t even know they had a mole in their presence! I’m gonna fucking die all because of stupid FBI man…”

At the very least, if you make it alive… FBI Man definitely owes you, and you already know what you want in return. “Hot yakuza boyfriend… wait for me,” you sigh dreamily to yourself, closing your eyes as you wait for whatever your future will bring.

“I don’t get paid enough for this,” Namjoon growls lowly to himself, the beginnings of a migraine starting to form. He had just turned off his phone to keep it from ringing, just in case Jungkook doesn’t listen to him and tries to call him and consequently give away his cover. “I can’t believe I’m saving this stupid weeb dumbass. I could die. Or worse, I could lose my job! Fuck!”

Namjoon would have loved to recite a litany of curses for a longer period of time, but the sound of footsteps from behind the abandoned warehouse walls causes him to clamp his mouth shut. He can feel his heart jump to his throat as he strains his ears to hear the conversations of the men behind the walls, trying to pinpoint the recognizable voice of the man he thought that he could trust.

“Did you see that girl that Hoseok brought in to the compound? She looked like a piece of work.” A rugged voice laughs, his deep timbre reverberating even through the walls. “Wonder why he would go through so many lengths to capture her.”

“Maybe Hoseok just likes his women like her,” another voice replies. They sound like they’re getting closer to where Namjoon is standing, and he hopes that they don’t suddenly decide to open or close the door that someone had left ajar. “Bit of a surprise really. Didn’t think he even swung that way.”

“I guess he just didn’t like the girls up in the clubs we go to. Either that, or I didn’t think he was interested in that sorta thing. He looks pretty young, probably the same age as my lil bro. It’s a wonder why he even joined the gang in the first place,” the first man says, and Namjoon can’t help but wonder the same thing. “He’s a real weirdo, that one. A great spy for us, though.”

“I know! Can you believe he got through the resident genius of Korean Intelligence? What was his name again? Kim Namboob or something?” Namjoon almost whines at that, having to shove a fist into his mouth to keep himself from yelling at that rude piece of scum. Namboob! He didn’t graduate university at the tender age of 10 to be scorned like this!

Another pair of footsteps sound like they’re coming closer as well. “You guys talkin’ about me?” The new intruder giggles, and Namjoon feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in attention.

It’s Hoseok.

“Not at all, kid. Though, now that you’re here, we wanted to ask how your little whore is doin’. You gonna keep her all to yourself or are ya sharing her with the rest of us?” The two men laugh loudly at that. Namjoon grits his teeth in anger, wanting nothing more than to burst through the doors and punch them right where it hurts (though he imagines his limited upper body strength would only cause his fist to break in the aftermath). As much as he thought you were an annoying piece of shit, no one deserved to be spoken about like that.

And it sounds like Hoseok agrees. “Fellas, I’d really appreciate it if you don’t make jokes like that. Ever. These people might be our hostages, but they’re still people. We’re living in 2019, for fuck’s sake.”

The gruffer man snorts. “Geez, kid. Learn to take a joke. Ain’t none of us touching her, anyway. She looks like one of those crazy bitches who spurts their gurts for 2D guys or something.”

Though Hoseok doesn’t reply to that, Namjoon nods his head in agreement. Oh, how right he was.

“Anyway, we’re heading out. Boss says you can keep your girlie in there for another two days, but then you’re gonna have to deal with her after. He’s getting pissed since the feds won’t give up the ransom money for that Halsey girl, so you better not get on his bad side today.”

“Right. See you boys around,” Hoseok says, and it takes a second for Namjoon to scramble away from his position and hide behind a lone metal barrel. He makes it just in time as the two men exit the warehouse, the glint of their guns visible even in the moonlight.

Close one, Namjoon thinks, breathing hard as the adrenaline in his veins refuses to die down. Now’s his chance to sneak in and follow Hoseok to where you were likely being held captive!

He waits for Hoseok to walk away first before poking his head through the door, trying to keep his movements as silent as possible (a feat in itself, as his limbs tended to have a mind of their own sometimes.) He sees Hoseok turn the corner, and Namjoon hastens to follow him, carrying his footsteps while also trying to keep up with the traitor’s quick pace.

They walk through a few corridors, passing a few rooms that Namjoon is itching to investigate, but he focuses himself on the task at hand. Get Y/N, make sure she’s okay, then leave. Anything else other than that can be handled by the Six once they arrive. He wonders if he should make a detour and try to find Halsey as well, but it sounds like from Hoseok’s conversation a while ago that she would be more heavily guarded, so he swallows down his guilt and trudges on towards the lesser important hostage. (You suddenly sneeze in the distance.)

When Hoseok stops right in front of what looks like a supply closet, Namjoon has to skitter to a halt, holding his breath and hoping that Hoseok hadn’t heard the squeak of his shoes. Lucky for him, Hoseok seems none the wiser as he pats his pockets for the keys to your makeshift holding cell, opening the door wide open and revealing your prone form on the floor—

“YOU FUCKING BITCH!” Your sudden shout causes Hoseok to flinch back in shock. In a flash, you stand up with your hands raised, landing a punch against Hoseok’s left cheek that left him groaning in pain. “What the fuck!” you screech, clutching your fist in pain. “Damn you ikemen boys and your sharp jawlines! You fucking hurt my hand!”

If Namjoon was in an anime, he’s sure there would be one of those cartoon sweatdrops illustrated just above his head right now.

But Hoseok was quick to recover; he grabs you in a chokehold, subduing you to the floor with a grunt. “Please, don’t make this any more troublesome than it has to,” he murmurs, forcing your face onto the dirty concrete. “I’m so sorry, Y/N. I really don’t want to hurt you but I can’t let you run off just yet.”

As Namjoon watches you struggle against Hoseok’s hold, he feels searing anger and protectiveness suddenly surge through him in waves. How dare that fucker touch you like that! Are we in some sexist BDSM Wattpad fanfiction or something? Hell no! It is that overwhelming wrath that causes Namjoon to jump out of hiding, wrenching you free of Hoseok’s grip with a strength he did not know he possessed.

“Y/N! Are you alright?” Namjoon huffs, struggling to keep Hoseok in place. When Hoseok realizes who it is, he stops squirming. Namjoon ignores him for now, accessing you for injuries. “They didn’t do anything bad to you, did they?”

“Who the fuck?” You splutter, your eyes bugging out of their sockets. You stare at Namjoon, unmoving for what feels like hours. Namjoon still has to latch onto Hoseok to keep him from lunging at you again, though he seems just as perplexed by Namjoon’s sudden appearance as you were.

“Namjoon?” Hoseok tries to twist himself to face him, jaw agape. “What the..? You never do fieldwork! What are you doing here?”

Meanwhile, you were over there like, “Huh? Hughhdfh? HHSHJFHDF?” Truly a person of many talents, you were somehow able to verbalize a keysmash in real life. “HHSFFJKFSKFS?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m here to turn you in and save Y/N, you filthy traitor,” Namjoon growls, surprising everyone with how menacing his voice had gotten. “I can’t believe you fucking drugged our teammates! You betrayed all of us when we had accepted you like you were family!”

“I know, okay? Believe me, I fucking know,” Hoseok sighs, shoulders sagging. “If there was any other way, I would’ve—“

“YAKUZA BOYFRIEND?” You scream, interrupting the heated conversation in front of you. You have your hands splayed dramatically across your chest, the expression on your face comical. You raise a trembling finger towards Namjoon, pointing almost accusatorially at him. “You’re the dude from the picture! Hot yakuza dude! What the fuck? Am I dreaming? Is this some twisted joke, or am I having a wet dream again?” You pinch yourself. “Ouch! Nope, I’m not fucking dreaming.”

“Y/N, I can explain later, but we have to get out of here,” Namjoon starts, but Hoseok takes this as his chance to escape Namjoon when he feels his grip loosen slightly. Hoseok elbows him straight in the sternum, stealing Namjoon’s breath and knocking him down to the floor. He goes to grab you again, holding his arm around your neck and facing the two of you towards Namjoon. Then, you feel a hard cool metal object pressed above your right ear.

“Don’t you dare move, Joonie,” Hoseok warns, holding you tighter. You whimper pathetically, going stock still as fear encompasses you whole. Oh shit, you forgot that you weren’t an anime heroine for a moment there. Namjoon goes still as well, hands raised mid-air as he stares pointedly at the gun placed by your head.

“Hoseok, don’t do this,” Namjoon says as calmly as he can. He can feel his heart hammering against his chest, and his vision is beginning to swim from the nerves. This is where his lack of fieldwork training is made apparent, and he’s never regretted skipping out on PE more than he did right now. “Let’s not get hasty here…”

He doesn’t falter. “Leave, then. If you don’t want to see Y/N hurt, then it’s best you stay far away from here. Call off back-up as well. I don’t want any fighting going on tonight.”

Namjoon grits his teeth. “You know I can’t do that.”

You gasp when you hear the sound of the gun clicking. “Joonie, I’m asking very nicely,” Hoseok says, calm. “Is this girl really worth risking your life over? You and I both know that I can easily kill the both of you. Why don’t we keep the casualty count as low as possible and go on our merry way.”

“Yeah?” Namjoon feels himself laugh, but he doesn’t quite know what’s funny. He’s running on pure adrenaline right now, trying his best to stall for as long as possible. Any minute now, back-up should come… If he knows Jungkook at all, he’ll have tracked his phone even after he had told the younger to leave him be, so at the very least he can rely on him arriving. But the only question remains is… when? Hurry, Jungkook.

“How can I be so sure that you won’t just kill Y/N and I once I turn my back, huh? I know I’m an idiot when it comes to real-life battles, but even I’m not that naive.”

“I swear on my life,” Hoseok says. His gaze is stoic, but there is a fire burning behind them. “I swear on my father’s grave.”

Namjoon stops, hanging onto Hoseok’s words. His father… If he remembers Hoseok’s personal file correctly, he knows that Hoseok’s father had died at the hands of loan sharks. Was that why Hoseok was working with the mafia? To pay back his debt? Or to exact revenge?

“Hoseok… Is that why?” Namjoon mutters to himself, posture slackening. He feels the flames of guilt licking up and down his spine. Hoseok watches him curiously, though his grasp on you doesn’t wane.

“Why what?”

“Your father… He’s the reason you’re with the mafia, aren’t you?”

Hoseok’s face gives it all away. As much as he is a spy, he’s still an expressive type of guy, especially when it came to his family. His mouth crumples into a ㅅ shape immediately. “Namjoon. Please, just leave, alright? I’ll take care of Y/N. Even though it seems like I’ve betrayed you, just… Just trust me, okay? I don’t go around betraying family unless there’s a reason.”

Namjoon hesitates. He feels his guard slowly falling, despite knowing that this could just be another trick Hoseok is employing to dig up his weak sentimental side. Curse me and my stupid empathetic heart! he thinks disappointedly to himself. 

Just as Namjoon is about to make a decision, the three of you are surprised when you hear the telltale sound of another gun clicking behind you. From the shadows, another figure appears.

“Freeze. Nobody fucking move.”

Then, you scream.

#btsguild #btsboulangerie #bts social media au #bts texts #bts scenarios #bts imagines #bts fake texts #bts #bangtan #namjoon scenarios #namjoon imagines #namjoon fake texts #namjoon texts #kim namjoon