#if i wrote/sang a song about how women are talked down to and not allowed to be capable individual human beings and some insta bimbo took it

[gayvampyr]

the way that no doubt’s “just a girl” has become a tiktok/instagram anthem for girls who don’t mind being infantilized and denied agency is extra annoying if you know the lyrics and theme of the rest of the song

#if i wrote/sang a song about how women are talked down to and not allowed to be capable individual human beings and some insta bimbo took it #and turned it into an anthem for the new wave patriarchal tradwife movement id go crazy #text post

[mercy-burning]

Say You’ll Remember Me (Songbird Chapter 1)

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader Summary: After performing at open mic night at a bar downtown, Reader meets someone that could change everything for her. Rating: 18+ Warnings: Smut (oral sex - male and female receiving, fingering, male masturbation, cockwarming, penetrative sex, unprotected sex, creampie), Language Word Count: 7.1k

SERIES MASTERLIST SERIES PLAYLIST (new songs added with the release of each chapter)

***

Love never came easy to me. Truth be told, a lot of things never came easy to me, and I was okay with that, but love was probably the one thing I wish I could just let myself feel with no problem.

For as long as I could remember, I've wanted to be in love with someone as much as I'd seen my parents love each other. My older sister got a boyfriend when she was 17 and I was 11, and they've been together ever since. They're married with two children now, and just as in love now as they'd been when they met.

I've never seen anyone love the way I've seen my family love, but for some reason I was never able to give as much as them. I mean, I felt love obviously, but it was never that all-consuming, life-changing love that was supposed to make your head spin and your soul ache.

Maybe I just never found the right person, but every relationship I've ever been in ended because of my inability to give out as much love as I was given. And that's not to say that I didn't care about the people I've dated, they were all really great people in fact... But I could never fully be in it, you know? Some people give their all to another person, would do anything and everything for them if it meant they got to spend the rest of their lives together, but I never felt that. Sure, I could have settled in any of my relationships, but if I was going to actually spend my time building a life with another person, I was going to really feel like I needed it to survive. Or, like I deserved it, if I was going to go that far.

For the past few years I've pretty much given up on relationships. I've been on a few dates, had a few hookups here and there, but at this point I was almost certain that love wouldn't find me any time soon.

However, the one thing that filled that love-shaped void in my soul was music. Words, melodies, stories... It all made me feel the way I was convinced love was supposed to make you feel. Even if I never wrote songs about my (positive) experiences with love, I loved love songs, and most music in general. That was the one thing I was sure of. Music was the one and only love I knew I could count on. It kept me safe, it ensured that I wasn't alone, and it hugged me in a way where I've never felt more at home.

Which would explain why I was here on a Friday night, singing in front of an entire crowded bar. Performing and sharing my music with people was the best way I knew how to outwardly show... well, anything about myself, really. I didn't go to open mic nights often, but when I did it felt better than anything in the world.

Tonight was... different, though. Not in a bad way, of course, but there was something in the air that made me feel like something great was going to happen.

It was the same feeling I got whenever I knew I was about to get laid.

Now, say what you want about it, about me, but even if I sucked at finding love I sure knew how to have one-night stands. I loved sex. It was another way I was able to get that happy rush of feelings while being with another person without actually having to be in love with them. Truly, sex was the perfect outlet for me, and my music was a great tool that helped me get it. Not that I needed help—if I wanted sex bad enough I could easily look for it—but the fact that I could play several instruments and sing well definitely made things easier.

And tonight I wanted it bad.

I hadn't realized it until I tried to figure out what song to sing for open mic night, and in turn came to the conclusion that I hadn't had sex with another human being in about a month. Which wasn't a bad thing by any means, but it didn't change the fact that I wanted someone else to help me out in chasing that high this time.

So I opted to go with a cover of a song I knew would do the job no matter what. I brought my electric guitar with me and mirrored the Wildest Dreams performance that Taylor Swift did from the GRAMMY Museum. The song itself was sexy and sweet, but with the electric guitar and the electric guitar only, it made for less sweet and more sexy. I'd always loved that performance from the second I saw it, so as soon as I was able, I bought an electric guitar and taught myself to play it. It was a hit every time I performed it.

I was wearing a maroon, long sleeved turtle-neck crop top that exposed my belly-button ring (which was sparkling silver and caught the light in the bar beautifully, if I were to say so myself), a pair of tight jeans, and black glittery heels that I only ever pulled out when I was feeling brave. My hair was half-up and half-down, leaving a good amount of my face exposed which donned silver eyeliner, sheer lip gloss, and my eyebrow ring. Paired all together with my black and white guitar and shiny nail polish that matched the deep maroon of my shirt, I felt hot as hell. Better than I'd felt in a while if I was being honest.

It felt even better when I was performing. I was confident in my abilities as a musician, to which I considered myself fortunate. If only I could have been that confident in other departments, I feel like I would have been dead-set for life.

But tonight I didn't want to think about that.

I played the song just as well as I had every other time. Probably even better, if only for the fact that I was working to get myself a lay. But whatever the scenario, I was feeling good and that's all I'd ever wanted to accomplish.

I saw him immediately after I sang the last note and the final chord of my guitar faded out into the applause.

He's just... where my eyes decided to wander, I guess. I don't know exactly what it was, but I was thankful for it, even though I almost forgot to breathe with the way he looked back at me. I couldn't tell what color his eyes were because of how far away he was, but I'd have bet on my life that they were some shade of brown. He bit his lip rather nervously when he noticed me staring at him, unable to tear my eyes way, but nevertheless he kept his gaze trained on me. It was so strong I could have sworn they burned holes into my soul.

Or, more likely, my libido.

Either way, I knew it then, when I packed up my guitar and walked through the crowd to find him, that I wasn't going home alone for the first night in weeks.

That was a good feeling.

So good, in fact, that I allowed myself to be a little more vulnerable than normal. It wasn't anything huge, but it also wasn't like me at all.

While generally, guys are more notorious to be the ones kicking out the women after a one-night stand, I always found it the opposite. I hated waking up in the morning and having to kick some dude out of my apartment. They always put up some sort of fight when it came time to leave, and I didn't get why. All the women I've hooked up with were easier to communicate with on that front, so I didn't mind as much, but still made it a point to be the one coming and going no matter who I slept with.

There was something different about this guy, though. Again, my sex drive was probably getting the better of me, so it maybe wasn't the best idea to let him come to my apartment, but I truly believe that a part of me wanted this man to see where I lived. I... don't know what it was, or why it happened, but it felt exciting. It felt new. It sparked some newfound adventure in me that I didn't really know I craved until I had it.

That being said, I could almost tell immediately within minutes of talking to him that he was going to be a hard one to get to leave. But the thing is...

I didn't mind that.

Something deep inside me wanted to feel what it was like to wrap this man around my finger, to have him so invested in me that he didn't want to leave me, and it was a weird feeling. I didn't know what to do with it, exactly, other than test the waters and see what was going to come of it.

He was about to tell me his name. That's when I started to realize it was a bad idea, and I was already in a vulnerable position. So I held my hand out to his face, pressing my pointer finger to his lips and seductively licking my own.

"No names. Is that okay?"

Something in those brown eyes (I was right) practically begged me to let him say his name, and a part of me wanted to know what it was just so I could scream it. But I knew that if I knew his name, I was ultimately going to be in trouble.

Like I said, there was something different about him. I didn't know what it was, and I didn't want to know because if I did, then I was going to be even deeper in uncharted territory. Besides, if anything the mystery of having no names would make this even sexier. Right?

Reluctantly he nodded, and I slid my finger down his lips and under his chin, then over his throat. I saw the goosebumps form on his skin as I went lower, lightly over the navy blue sweater he was wearing and stopping at his lower stomach. I grabbed one of his belt loops and pulled him close to me, smiling softly as his eyes never stopped searching mine.

"You ready to show me a good time, Pretty Boy?"

He exhaled at the nickname , but I couldn't tell if it was from nerves or what... Either way, he said, "Yes," and I twisted his belt loop tighter with a wink.

***

She was the most captivating woman I think I'd ever seen.

She commanded every room she was in, made everyone pay attention to her, and even if she couldn't sing or play the guitar the effect would have been the same. Granted, I only ever saw her in the bar. So, technically only one room.

But it was about to be two.

I didn't even want to be in the bar, and I was going to leave since Derek, Emily, and Penelope ditched me for their own endeavors, but at the very last second a voice in the speakers cut through the radio-generated music announced that someone would be performing, officially kicking off open mic night.

It wasn't that that stopped me. But it was her name.

Y/N.

I had to wonder if, when she said, 'No names," she remembered or even knew that I'd already known it. Or maybe she just didn't want to know my name. Whatever that meant, it didn't deter me in any way from trying to take up any space or time that she had. After she locked eyes with me on stage, I sent out so many signals, hoping to whatever higher power was up there, if any, that she would come to me. I just... needed to know her. To see her up close.

Truthfully I don't know what made me think I had the right amount of confidence or skill to do anything other than babble incoherently or just stare in her presence, but thankfully she didn't have much of a knack for talking.

When she finally stood in front of me, I didn't know where to look. I knew ultimately that I should look at her face, but damn it if I couldn't help but look at all of her, my stomach naturally doing flips when I caught sight of her belly-button ring, and... Her hands... Good God, I couldn't stop staring at her hands. I realized once she was closer that that's mainly what I looked at while she was on stage. The way her fingers worked the guitar, making it look like it was the easiest thing in the world, it was enough to send me into a tailspin.

Truthfully I don't think there was one single flaw about her. Naturally all human beings have flaws, but as far as I could tell, from this first meeting, this woman was nothing but an angel sent from Heaven, specifically to destroy me.

My favorite part about her, though, was by far her voice. I didn't listen to much mainstream music, but if it sounded anything like that, then I wanted to hear all of it.

Forget angel... She was a siren.

Yeah. That was the perfect way to describe her.

And when she touched me...

I'm pretty sure I blacked out.

I say pretty sure, because I distinctly remember telling her, "Yes," when she'd asked me indirectly to leave with her, but everything else only came in one-second flashes. A moment where I was in her car, and more clearly a moment when she pulled me out of it and shoved me against the door after she closed it, running her glorious hands through my hair and attacking my neck with harsh, sloppy, butterfly-inducing kisses.

But I made myself remember when we were actually in the apartment, because there was no way I was going to let myself forget that moment.

So I was completely well-aware of everything around me when she unlocked the door, pulled me inside, and shoved me against another door for a second time that night. This time she kissed my lips, and I all but melted into her. Her tongue didn't waste any time slipping into my mouth, but I didn't waste any time trying to fight it. I would have given her anything she wanted, she didn't even have to ask for it.

That being said, she broke away from me, looked me dead in the eye, and asked, "Can I take your pants off?"

I nodded eagerly, choking out a breathy, "God, yes," as best as I could.

That seemed to be what she was looking for, because she all but groaned as she squatted on the floor and worked at my belt. I didn't know what to do with myself, my hands seeming to wander aimlessly before settling behind me on the door. Once she got my pants down, she looked up at me through those silver-painted eyelids and leaned forward, pressing a hot, wet kiss to my dick through my underwear.

Any other time in this sort of situation, I most likely would have felt embarrassed by whimpering the way I did, but seeing the primal lust widen her eyes as I did it completely erased any doubt I ever had. By the time she pulled my boxers down and licked a large, slow line up the underside of my dick, those doubts were completely wiped off the board, no evidence of them ever having been there.

I wanted to look at her more than anything, to memorize the way she looked wrapped around me, but my eyes wouldn't stay open. Everything I was feeling, every sensation that ran through my veins, every hot lick of her tongue as it swirled around my tip, every small stroke of her hand when she took a break to whisper filthy things to me... It all rendered me completely unable to think straight.

At one point I was almost at the breaking point, and she knew it, too, because she pulled away from me completely and stood straight, running one of her hands along the inside of my thigh as she went up. I opened my eyes to meet her, her mouth slick with a smear of her lip gloss and her saliva. She looked like she was on the brink of tears, but none of them had fallen. But the gleam in her eye, that's what stood out to me. She was so utterly consumed with burning desire that I would have done anything to satiate every need she had.

She waited a beat, studying my face and the way my lips were no doubt still smeared with her lip gloss. And then she grabbed one of my hands and brought it to cup her crotch, tilting her head to the side and practically sighing at the touch.

"Aren't you going to return the favor, Pretty Boy?"

My first instinct was to tell her I needed a second to breathe. But somehow I knew I wouldn't be breathing well regardless of what happened. I stumbled out of my shoes and pants as quickly as I could, using my hand to lightly rub along the seam of her jeans. As soon as I was free of constraints, I made a point to turn us around so she was the one with her back against the door. I helped her pull her pants off, and once they were, along with her heels, I draped one of her legs around my shoulder so the process would be easier for the both of us.

I've only ever gone down on a woman a few times, so it was safe to say I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to satisfy her. But even if I hadn't had much practice, I knew I was a good listener. I practically read people for a living, and I knew how to read behavior and body language. So I knew that that would be my strong suit here.

That being said, I did have some idea of where to start. So I looked up at her while I brought my tongue out to her panties, lightly dragging the tip of it along the seam that met the corner of  her thigh. On my way to the other side I pressed the lightest of kisses to where her clit would be through the fabric, and then repeated the process a few times, feeling her squirm beneath me. Once I could tell she was getting close to frustrated, I made it a point to drag my tongue upwards in a long swipe until I reached her clit. I kissed it again before using one of my fingers to come up and slide under the fabric, though not pushing it entirely aside.

She sighed out as my finger ran along the very tops of her lips. When I pushed it in just the slightest, gathering her wetness as my tongue still gently worked at her clit through her panties, I took the moment to look up at her.

If she wasn't already the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, and in that moment she was even more perfect, her lip bit and her eyes on the verge of fluttering closed, I could only imagine what she would look like when I was inside of her.

I almost collapsed thinking about it, but went back to my task quickly, knowing that if I stopped thinking for once in my life then I wouldn't have to imagine it, and I could experience it instead.

So I finally pulled her panties aside and used the tip of my tongue again to taste her, just as lightly as I'd done it before. Only rather than fabric I was met with the smooth, slick taste of her pussy. I think I could actually hear her tremble under me as I flicked my tongue over her clit a few times, though everything I was feeling in that moment was so strong that it was more likely that I was losing every ability to think straight.

As time progressed I deepened my every movement, bringing my tongue deeper and harder through her gradually until the point where I was practically eating her out like a man starved. You could argue that I was starved for her in every sense of the word, but that moment wasn't about me. I was focused solely on making her feel good, paying attention to how tightly she gripped my hair when I briefly sucked on her clit, or the way she bucked her hips forward whenever I pushed my tongue inside of her as far as I could will it.

She seemed to like it best, though, when my fingers pumped slowly in and out of her in tandem with each swirl of my tongue around her clit. I took my time, savoring every second I could as my eyes stayed shut. I could barely keep them open.

When I finally did look up her, that seemed to finally be the thing that pushed her over the edge. Well, started to, anyway.

"Wait," she breathed, and for a second I thought maybe I'd done something wrong. I pulled away from her and raised an eyebrow, and all she did was look down at me, her eyes just as lust blown as they'd been before, if not even more. "I want you to edge me, can you do that? Just... keep bringing me there, but don't give me what I want. Not until I tell you to."

"Anything," I told her truthfully, keeping my eyes locked with hers as I brought my tongue to her once more. She shuddered under my touch as I worked at her clit again, quickly flicking over it as my fingers came up to hold her hips. It wasn't long before I brought her to the edge for the second time that night, and this time when I pulled away, I leaned my head into her thigh, pressing soft kisses to the inside. She was so focused on watching my face that she must not have noticed my fingers coming to slide into her again. She fluttered her eyes closed and leaned her head against the door with a soft thud as I fingered her, quickly picking up the pace as my tongue came out to lick at her thigh before I bit into it softly.

"Fuck, you're so fucking good with your hands," she managed to say through a moan.

I laughed a little, glancing over at her hands briefly and just letting the words fly from my mouth. "You're one to talk. The way you played that guitar? The way you touch me? Good God..."

She hummed hungrily, opening her eyes and pulling me up by my hair to pull me away from her. Her leg dropped from my shoulder and I stood up to meet her, towering over her by a good four to five inches.

For a moment we just stood there and stared at each other, both pants-less and desperate for each other but unwilling to do anything about it.

Until she pulled at my hair, craning my head to the side so she had access to my neck before running one of her hands down the side of my face, neck, and finding purchase gripping my shoulder. Her nails lightly scratched at my skin, sending a mess of goosebumps down my whole body, right before she took the other one and grabbed my bare ass.

"Baby, I've barely even touched you, yet."

I don't know what it was that made me so bold, but I smirked as both of her hands squeezed, causing her fingernails to leave indents into the skin on my right shoulder and my left ass cheek. "Touch me, then."

She was more than happy to oblige. Within seconds, both of her hands were slipping up my sweater and roaming my back and stomach as she leaned up and kissed me again. I met her lips happily, allowing her all the access she wanted to my tongue. At this point I was growing restless, wanting more than anything in the world to have her push me onto the bed, or the couch, or even the floor, and do to me whatever she saw fit.

My desperation must have broke the surface somehow, manifested in a way I hadn't noticed, because she laughed against my mouth, pushing me away and ripping off her shirt in one fluid motion. Which left her in only a grey bra that matched her panties.

"Take off your shirt," she said.

I didn't hesitate, doing as I was told and tossing it on the floor with our other clothes.

"Go sit on the couch."

I went there as quickly as I could, only feeling slightly embarrassed being the only one completely naked. But almost as soon as I sat down on her couch—truthfully one of the most comfortable ones I'd ever been on—she'd come up behind me and started massaging my scalp. I closed my eyes at the way it almost lolled me to sleep. If she did that any longer, I'm sure I would have.

Eventually, though, she slid her fingers down my neck and over my shoulders, resting them finally on my bare chest and drawing circles. She brought her lips down to my right ear and grazed it with her teeth before whispering, "Touch yourself for me? Go slow."

I didn't have to be told twice. As I'd quickly learned, I was pretty sure this woman could have done anything she wanted to me and I wouldn't have rejected her.

My hand firmly gripped my dick and went slow, just like she'd asked. With every long, meaningful stroke, she mirrored it with a swipe of her tongue along my neck. Her hands remained at my chest, reaching down to circle my nipples in very light, goosebump-inducing motions.

"Faster," she told me, and I listened. Each stroke of my hand was met with even faster, sloppier kisses along my neck and jawline, and I could have sworn I felt her fingernails digging themselves harshly into my chest.

"Faster."

By this point I was occasionally bucking my hips forward to meet my hand, and Y/N laughed lowly against my jaw, mumbling against it. "You wanna cum, Pretty Boy?"

"Not... Not yet," I stuttered truthfully.

"Aww," she cooed, tilting my head to the side and giving me a kiss on the mouth. It was probably the sweetest kiss we shared that night. "You want to cum inside me, don't you?"

She kissed me again immediately after she said it, and I moaned into her mouth, my hand working faster. If she didn't stop me, I was going to be done for, and I knew I wouldn't be able to go again. Not for a few hours at least. And I didn't know how long she'd want me to stay, or what we would even do while we waited.

Thankfully she seemed to take some semblance of pity on me, because she brought her hands away from my body, pulling back completely and telling me to stop.

I removed my hand and practically sighed in relief. I waited for further instruction, a sound, a touch, anything... But I almost had the wind knocked out of me when she appeared in front of me, having taken off her bra and underwear. What I found shouldn't have surprised me, but somehow it did. This woman was just full of surprises.

She had nipple piercings that matched the silver color of her eyebrow ring, not sparkly like the belly-button ring, but it was the cherry on top to what I'd already found practically perfect in every way.

As she sauntered to me, I couldn't decide where to look. Much like before. So I started from the bottom and worked my way up, eventually meeting her eyes when she straddled me on the couch and took my face in her hands.

"You clean?"

"Yes," I stated clearly, not wanting any signals to get crossed. I even nodded to accentuate my point.

"Good. Me, too. And I happen to be on birth control, so..." She leaned into my ear again and ground her hips into mine, the hot wetness of her pussy slightly grazing my dick. I almost fainted right there. "You can cum inside me all you want..."

She bit down on my shoulder then, and I groaned, bringing my hands to rest at her hips.

Then she pulled back and looked me in the eye again, grabbing my dick and lifting her hips to hover above it. She sunk down completely and quickly, letting me adjust to the feeling for all of two seconds before she gripped my chin in her right hand and smiled, batting her eyelashes. "But only when I tell you. You can't cum without my permission, got it?"

I breathed out a weak, "Yes," and then she got up and sank right back down, setting a quick and steady pace right away.

Both of her hands gripped my shoulders while mine stayed planted firmly around her waist, and if they were too tight she didn't say. In fact, by the look on her face I judged she probably enjoyed how tightly I was gripping her. So I decided to test it out. And sure enough, every time I let up my grip on her waist she would clench around me and move a little faster, making my grip tighten, and then she hummed, digging her nails into my shoulders.

Every high moan and whimper she let out as she rode me was just as melodic and beautiful as her voice when she sang. Added to the way she moved and the way she worked her hands, she was a rhythm all her own, constantly creating some sort of song, some piece of art that begged to be heard, to be felt in the deepest part of any soul that would embrace it...

I wanted it to last forever. I wanted to drown in her song forever.

Maybe that was a little dramatic. I mean, I only just met this woman under two hours ago at least (I wasn't sure how much time had passed truthfully), didn't know a single thing about her other than her first name, her musical ability, and her body. And all she knew about me was... well, my body.

Regardless, I was determined to make this last as long as I could, so I let go of her hips and brought my fingers to comb lightly through her hair, bringing her head up from the crook of my neck to meet mine, our foreheads touched together.

As if she knew what I was thinking, she slowed her hips, and then pressed her lips to mine gently. I'm pretty sure I felt my heart melt.

"What's wrong? Not gonna last much longer?"

I couldn't tell if it was a taunt or a genuine question. Either way, I shook my head and cradled her face. "I don't think so... But I want this to last."

"Hmm," she contemplated, but not for long, because seconds later she stopped moving her hips altogether and stayed sitting on my dick. She leaned back a little, bringing her hands to rest on her thighs as she took me in. "Well, then I guess I'll have to get creative."

I genuinely had no clue what she was about to do, but when she moved one of her hands to her breast and pinched at her nipple, I didn't care one way or the other. I was curious, sure, but ultimately I knew I would welcome whatever she did.

"I noticed you've been eyeing my piercings all night," she said sweetly, continuing to play with her nipples. She bit her lip softly before grinding down onto me and making me suck in a breath. "But I have to say, these two are my favorites... Aren't they pretty?"

"Fuck, they're beautiful," I breathed, splaying my hands over her stomach. "You're beautiful..."

"Aww,” she drawled. “Thanks."

Then she promptly removed her hands from herself, grabbed my wrists, and brought them to her breasts. My hands instinctively squeezed, feeling the contrast of soft skin and cold metal in my palms. I licked my lips before flicking my eyes up to meet hers. "Can I?"

"You can do whatever you want, baby," she purred, grinding her hips once more. A groan ripped from my throat before I leaned forward and brought her right nipple into my mouth, immediately swirling my tongue around the metal of her piercing. I think she might have groaned also, but I was so caught up in the way she grinded onto me and the feel of her skin on my tongue that I couldn't tell you for sure.

I kissed across her chest until I reached her other nipple, and gave it the same careful attention. Meanwhile I suddenly felt her hand slip down between our bodies so she could touch her clit. I brought my head up and peppered kisses up her neck.

"Let me help," I whispered against her skin, bringing one of my hands to replace hers.

She grabbed my wrist before I could get there. "No, keep doing what you're doing. Please..."

And that was that. I moved my mouth back down her neck, down the slope of her breast, and went back to flicking and swirling my tongue over her nipples. Eventually I took one and just slightly tugged at it with my teeth, causing her to buck her hips forward and send a shockwave of energy through me. At that point I was pretty sure I was almost feral with need, not caring how long it took anymore.

So right after she brought herself to orgasm, the movements on her clit slowing to a stop, I shifted our weight and pinned her to the couch so that her back was arched off the armrest. With an amused laugh, she wrapped her legs around my waist as I held one of my hands to the back of her head, the other on her waist, and pushed into her with one, long, fluid thrust forward.

I didn't waste any time with adjustments. I didn't care that my knee was only slightly hurting at the angle it was placed in. The only thing I cared about right then was fucking this woman so good she'd have to remember me. Which wasn't like me at all, but I didn't care.

So that's what I did. My hips set a ruthless, quick pace that had her sliding back until she was almost off the couch, the only thing keeping her anchored being my arm cradling her neck and head and her legs wrapping around my waist. Her heels dug brutally into my lower back, and if I had to guess, they were probably going to leave bruises. Not to mention her hands were clawing desperately at my shoulders to hold on, grabbing any skin she could as I pounded her into the arm of the couch.

I tried to keep my head up, but I was falling into oblivion. And I think she knew it, too, because she used her hands to keep me upwards, even doing so much as looking down between our bodies as best as she could to see me drilling my hips forward. The sight seemed to send her into a tailspin, because she bit her lip and groaned out.

"Fuuuuck, baby, just like that, don't stop, don't stopdon'tstopdon'tst—"

She came hard and fast, trying her best to keep her eyes open, right before looking up at my face. She clenched around me, and I knew I was done for. Any second now and I would finish. Just before it happened, she slid her hands up my neck, brushed the hair from my face, and brought me down to kiss her.

I moaned in her mouth as I came, keeping my hips pressed flush to hers and holding myself deep inside her. She moaned right back, swiping her tongue against mine as she squeezed her whole body around me and pulled me impossibly closer to her. In that moment, I didn't feel like it was just an orgasm... Which might sound cheesy and kind of stupid in retrospect, but it really felt that way. Right then, with her whole body holding mine and daring itself not to let go, it felt like every sense I had was stripped away and all that was left of me was her. As good as it felt to cum, it felt even better just being wrapped up in her in every capacity.

And that was why—even after we were finished and exhausted—we stayed just like that, wrapped up together on the couch with our lips moving lazily together until I felt myself start to drift off.

At that point, she'd somehow managed to pull me off of her and lean me back into the position I'd been in before, and my eyes struggled to stay open.

"I'm gonna go clean up," I thought I heard her say, and I wondered how she had the energy and stamina to stand up and walk around. But then again, I was so exhausted that I wasn't sure if anything that happened after we came down from our highs was even a coherent experience.

That being said, I managed to mutter an "Okay," while she disappeared and I tried to catch my breath. It only took about a minute before I realized that I was alone, and that she'd left to clean up the mess that I made. That seemed to snap me out of it, though not by much; I was still a little light-headed when I got up from the couch and started to collect my clothes from the floor.

I almost had my pants all the way on when I heard her voice from behind me.

"You don't have to leave... if you don't want."

I turned to face her, noticing that she was wearing a large nightshirt and probably nothing else. Even after she'd just gotten obliterated on the couch she still managed to look like the most angelic thing I'd ever seen. Or maybe I hadn't actually done as well as I thought, and she was the one who'd obliterated me... Either way, I felt bad for staying, especially knowing that she didn't even want to know my name.

So I shrugged, stifling a yawn. "No, it's fine, I... I should go. I don't want to intrude or anything, I—"

"Oh, please," she scoffed, walking up to me and placing a soft hand on my forearm. "As far as intrusion goes, I think we're way past apologies, don't you think?"

I smiled at that, admittedly leaning into her touch as her hand drifted up and to my cheek. "Okay. But only if you let me sleep on the couch."

"Don't be silly. You just fucked me on said couch, it's okay if you sleep in my bed with me."

I only shook my head, placing my hand on top of hers. "You didn't even want to know my name, which tells me that you probably aren't the type of woman to let men sleep in your bed with you after sex. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but... I don't want to make you uncomfortable. And, I... I feel bad enough, I didn't help you clean up, I should have—"

"I'm gonna stop you right there," she said, removing her hand from my cheek and placing it on my bare chest instead. "That right there is why I don't mind if you sleep in my bed. Plus, it's late, you don't have a ride, and I can tell you're sleepy because you've been nodding off as we've been standing here. You can barely stand straight."

I didn't know what to say. Probably because she was right and I was nodding off right now.

She spoke again. "At least stay and rest for a few hours before you leave. And if it'll convince you to stay... You can have the couch."

I smiled lazily, leaning forward to kiss her on the cheek. "I'll be gone before you wake up."

"Well... In that case, can... Can I kiss you one more time?"

"You can do anything you want to me," I told her truthfully, and not even a second passed before she pressed her lips to mine.

Despite everything we'd just done and the fact that I was almost asleep, it was the hottest kiss we shared that night. I was sure of it. It was lazy and wet, and so filled with the aftermath of all that we'd experienced together that I almost fell to my knees, and not because I was tired. Her tongue grazed mine in the most purposeful way I'd ever felt in a kiss my entire life. The way she held me to her, her hands weaved in my hair and mine pressed firmly to the small of her back, had me tingling from head to toe.

To this day, it's still the best kiss I've ever had.

I swore to myself I would never forget that kiss, and I never have. I couldn't have, even if I tried.

When she pulled away, I almost chased her, but I let her go, opening my eyes to stare deeply into hers. She didn't move for the longest time before clearing her throat and taking a small step back.

"Goodnight," she whispered softly. She looked almost as dazed as I felt.

"Goodnight," I whispered back as she turned around and padded into the darkness.

***

As I stood at her kitchen counter four hours later, a pen in hand and hovering over the back of a receipt she'd had crumpled on it, I tried to think of what to write, even though I knew it probably didn't matter to her one way or another if I said anything at all...

At the very least I wanted her to know just how much that night meant to me, even if she didn't feel the same way. Even if she didn't want to remember my name, I needed her to at least remember my face, remember what we did... Remember me...

I recalled the song she sang. And then I wrote it down.

I had the best night, thank you. Say you'll remember me... —S.

***

"Nothing lasts forever But this is gonna take me down."

—Taylor Swift, Wildest Dreams

***

TAGLIST:

@bluesunrise02 @meowiemari @teenwolfgirl90

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid smut #criminal minds #spencer reid #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds smut

[youllallriseintheink]

Sammy and Jack. “Can we stay like this forever?”

Crisis of Faith, chapter 2

Sammy didn’t dream of Jack again until his next crisis of faith, and Sammy’s faith was very difficult to break. It had begun while Sammy, now a lost one made of fluid ink, was hiding in a wall, watching as a severely ink-infected woman raved.

“Mother, why do you punish me!?” she shouted as, with all the power left in her body, she tried to force open the padlocked doors of the women’s washroom. Her veins, prominent due to age and leanness, were a pitch-black web on her skin, and her wiry muscles had wasted away to bone.

Sammy had, on Joey’s command, overseen dozens of ink infections by now, and knew that there was nothing unusual about Emma Lamont’s case of it. Every single victim he had overseen had held some kind of delusion. Some believed that they were being poisoned by the government or their enemies, or that they were developing a mental illness. A very common one, however, was that they were receiving some sort of punishment, test, or reward from an all-powerful being- either God, or from a seemingly random entity that they’d decided to treat as one.

What if... Sammy’s beliefs were no different from this madwoman, screaming at the ghost of her mother?

Sammy moved on to check on the other infection victims. Even if Bendy wasn’t to be worshipped, the thought of ascension was all that kept him going. He sacrificed people on Joey’s command because the ink had told him to. He wrote his scriptures because he believed they were meaningful. He led the lost ones to Bendy and away from the lies their voices had told them because he truly believed that his voice had been the truth, and it seemed to give them hope, too.

Sammy passed  through the prison of ink creatures as he made his way to Joey’s sanctuary, where he now slept. A Charley was repeatedly banging its head against the bars of its cage. Lost ones wept. Ink stained every surface, making the brightly-lit room feel suffocatingly dark. Sammy was glad to phase through the wall into Joey’s sanctuary, where he could lie down on the couch and rest.

All this had to be leading to something. He couldn’t take it otherwise.

---

Sammy woke to the feeling of someone softly shaking him awake. He opened his eyes to see Jack, tears in his eyes and that disarming smile on his face.

“Hey. How are you feeling?” Jack asked gently.

Sammy, with a bit of difficulty, sat up and realized that he was in a hospital room, complete with an IV in his arm. He felt very weak, but also lighter- like a burden had been taken off of him. “Awful,” he admitted.

“Well, you want some good news? The ink is gone. All of it. You still have a lot of organ damage, but it’s nothing they can’t fix in a couple weeks. In other words, it’s over, Sammy. You’re gonna be okay.”

It took Sammy a half a minute to even process that. Once he did, though, he broke into tears of relief and hugged Jack as tightly as he could.

“Thank you. God, thank you for making me come here. You saved my life.”

Jack hugged him back. “Hey, I didn’t make you do anything. I know this took a lot of courage for you. And... I’m really glad you did it. I was so scared when I found you in your sanctuary. You were so sick... I thought I’d lose you. Sammy, I think I love you. But... we can talk about that later. Right now, you need to rest.”

“I love you, too.” Easiest words Sammy had ever said.

After a little more chatting, Jack left. Sammy wandered over to the bathroom to get a look at himself in the mirror. Admittedly, he didn’t look great. He looked like a person who’d narrowly survived a life-threatening illness, because that’s what he was. His skin was still pale and sunken, and he was still pretty gaunt, but the black veins, the bruise-like purple splotches on his skin, and even the staining in his mouth and his long, blond hair- it was gone. When Sammy woke, he would have given anything to see his human face again.

---Two years later---

As often happened whenever Sammy decided to play his banjo, a small crowd had gathered around him. Today, the crowd consisted of three lost ones, Jack (of course), a moderately ink-infected woman, and one of their last healthy men. The song Sammy was playing was "I’ll fly away.” He wasn’t singing it today, but he had sang it for his followers in the past, simply replacing the word, “God’s” with “his,” since “Bendy’s,” unfortunately, was two syllables.

“You know, it’s amazing how you can remember music like that,” said David, the only non-infected person in attendance. “I'm already forgetting the words to my favourite songs since it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just turn on a radio. How do you do it?”

Sammy would have smiled if he still had a mouth. “Well, a part of it is just natural ability,” Sammy admitted. “But. I have a secret to tell you. A part of it is faith. Faith can do great things. Collective faith in Bendy is the reason that we are the largest organization in this dimension. This village was built on faith. Faith keeps us united! Faith keeps us safe! And... faith allows me to to see into the old world every night when I close my eyes. I hope that all of you one day achieve that absolute belief that something in this world is good.”

“Heh. I’m trying. But all I have are nightmares of Bendy,” a lost one complained.

“Well, keep trying. Believe in his benevolence.” With that, Sammy got up and left for bed, patting Jack on the head on the way out. If only they knew that he used to be plagued by those same nightmares.

---

Sammy’s dream came in to form. He was on a bus, sitting next to Jack. Outside their window, snow was falling gently over a pretty,  snow-covered forest. For a while Sammy just sat in peace, holding Jack’s hand and enjoying the scenery.

“Excited to see your parents again? I know I can’t wait to meet them.”

Sammy nodded. “I can’t wait.” Sammy had always wanted to introduce Jack to his parents. He remembered that there was a strong reason why he hadn’t done it while he was alive, but he couldn’t remember what it was. “My Dad is going to love you. You’re a lot like him, you know. Do you remember why we didn’t do this sooner?”

“Because I’m a man,” Jack answered, totally calm.

“Oh!” Sammy had forgotten a lot about the outside world since his transformation, but nothing so big as the existence of homophobia. It was kind of alarming that the ink was affecting his brain that much. “God. I’m so... forgetful. I’ll just have to introduce you as my musical partner or something. It’s unconventional, but they've seen me do weirder.”

“You  know, Sammy, it’s like you got new lease on life after the ink incident. I love that. But yeah, you’re forgetting things left and right!” Jack teasingly jabbed him with his elbow.

“Yeah... Hey, can I tell you something?”

“Of course,” Jack said. Sammy worried what Jack would think, but looking into those calm brown eyes, he trusted him to not to react badly. And it would be nice to have one person he didn’t have to lie to.

“This is a dream. In the real world, I never got help for my ink infection, and now me and dozens of other people are trapped a dimension full of monsters. I’m holding a large band of people together by convincing them to collectively worship one of them. And you,” Sammy took a deep breath, “you’re there, too. But you haven’t had a coherent thought in years. I keep hoping that one day, we’ll make it out, and I’ll be able to confess to you and we’ll actually build a life like this. So... I’m forgetful because that ink is affecting my mind, and I’m happy because this world is my escape. And because you’re here, of course.” Sammy couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes. He’d probably just made himself sound like a lunatic.

Jack turned Sammy’s head to look at him. “Hey. I believe you. And... that sounds really rough. I wish I could help you.”

Sammy smiled. “Thanks. But you've been helping me all along.” Sammy laid his head on Jack’s shoulder. Maybe once the bus stopped, they’d get some hot chocolate and look at some shops before seeing his parents. It would be nice.

---

Sammy was violently shaken awake by a trio of searchers. More were behind them- as though half the village had crammed itself into his bedroom.

“Bendy is here!” one of them yelled. “What do we do?”

That was a good question. Sammy reached for his axe, but then he stopped. This was, according to the gospel he’d been feeding them, their saviour. “Go out to greet him,” Sammy instructed, trying not to sound as hesitant as he felt. “Bring him offerings of bacon soup. Bring everyone, even the Boris clones- they used to be human, too.”

The crowd of lost ones dispersed. Sammy watched with bated breath from the balcony of his lost-one village home as a massive crowd- lost ones, searchers, people both infected and healthy, and their three Boris clones- gathered along the ink river. Dozens of cans of bacon soup were placed along the river bank as an offering. Bendy stood on the other side of the river. Their drawbridge lowered, but Bendy decided instead to walk on the ink’s surface like the God they treated him as. The crowd gasped and made way. Bendy took an ink-infected man in one arm, stroked his cheek, and bit his face off.

Screams filled the air. People ran in all directions. Sammy was frozen for several seconds before he took action.

“Everyone! Run for cover! We have displeased him! I repeat, run for cover!” Sammy's booming, demonic voice covered the great distance it needed to. Upon seeing the people run and Bendy chase after them, Sammy himself slammed shut his doors and windows and listened in horror to the screams.

When it was over, all he could think to tell his people was that they needed to reconsider how they were paying tribute to the ink demon. If they changed their methods just a little, then the demon would be helpful instead of violent, and they would be freed.

To Sammy’s mixed relief, they actually believed it.

---

eleven years went by. Within the first three, every single flesh-and-blood person in the sketch dimension was infected, killed, or both, and became a lost one.

Their minds were rotting. Increasing numbers of lost ones struggled to remember anything about themselves or the outside world. Wandering aimlessly or resting in ink puddles, they were helpless as zombies.

But not Sammy. Sammy remained- comparatively, at least- as sharp as a whip, and told the lost ones tales so vivid about the outside world that they could almost taste its brilliance and freedom. Sammy only wished that Jack- the real Jack- could understand any of it.

There was nothing to do about that but what Sammy had been doing all along: keep the community together. Keep the lost ones moralized and sane. Figuratively and literally dream of a  better world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sammy didn’t want to forget a thing about the real world, but little pieces had fallen away, bit by bit. In his dreams, there were now places he couldn’t visit because he didn’t remember what they were like. His reflection in the mirror had become a human-shaped blur as he forgot his appearance. The same thing had happened to the faces of people he used to remember clear as day. One day, he would forget it all, too- just as everyone else had.

It was hard to keep hope.

One of Sammy’s dreams found him walking down a beach with Jack at his side. Sammy knew that the two of them had relocated at some point, but he didn’t know to where. His American geography was rather fuzzy at this point.

“Can I vent to you about the other world?” Sammy asked.

“Sure,” Jack said. Jack was one thing that Sammy’s memory hadn’t gone fuzzy on. Sammy still remembered every soft curve of his face, every freckle, every detail. His dark brown hair was starting to grey, but not because Sammy remembered him that way- it had been many years, and growing old together was part of the fantasy.

“Bendy came to the village again today. He killed a few lost ones and then left. People are losing faith in me and I don’t know how to get it back. And to make matters worse, a false prophet is going around saying we should worship the angel instead! She’d enslave us if we did that!" Sammy chucked a baseball-sized rock into the water, then composed himself a bit. “And you know, we’re all going to be mindless drones eventually. I’m thinking... maybe I won’t fight the false prophet. I could leave the village, hide in a vent, and spend as little time awake as possible. Ink creatures can sleep for days, you know. What do say? Can we stay like this forever? Enjoy this world until I lose my mind like all the rest?” Sammy took Jack’s hands and looked desperately into his eyes.

Jack hesitated, but by the look on his face, Sammy already knew what his answer would be. “I’m sorry. You know I have to say no. The lost ones need you.”

“But why am I the one who has to stay strong for them? I’m sick of it.”

“Because you’re the one who can. I know it isn’t fair, but you’re the reason they’ve been protecting each other. And it sounds like if you leave them now, they’ll throw themselves at Alice. Do it for them. And if you can’t bring yourself to care about them... do it for me. The real me. You still love him, right?”

“Of course...” Sammy probably would have done this sooner if he didn’t care about the well-being of his searcher friend.

Jack put a hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “I don’t know how, but you’ll get out some day. And in the meantime, I’m here.”

Sammy tried to think of some objection, but he couldn’t. He muttered a “thanks” and kept walking along the beach. Jack followed. It was, if nothing else, a beautiful night, and he might as well enjoy it.

“Jack... tell me what I look like. I don’t care that it’ll just be something you made up. Tell me anyhow.”

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #Jack Fain #sammy lawrence #sammy x jack #my fanfiction #threadedsafetypin #thanks for the ask

[the-hopeless-haze]

My Emo Author’s Ending Note :)

I've been writing this goddamn story since May 2020.

I was bored during quarantine and I was watching Glee and Kurt Hummel came on stage during the winter showcase for NYADA and he sang "Being Alive". Immediately I was enraptured by the song. I loved the lyrics, the way it was set up with all these specific instances of a relationship, the parallels when the song's narrator changes his mind and comes around to wanting a relationship, wanting a marriage. I was obsessed with this song. I went and looked up the original Broadway versions - and was reintroduced to Raul Esparza.

I knew him from the shitshow that is Hannibal (yes I hate Hannibal lmao come talk to me about it sometime) and I did use to watch SVU back in the day. And then it clicked - I was like, okay, I am going to write this fic with these lyrics as the chapter titles because at the time it was so interesting to me.

Here's some problematic backstory if you're interested lmao that I’ll leave under the cut lol

So I used to be a libertarian and like I was into all the questionable right-wing stuff, like Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro... gross. And like they would always say, "Oh women shouldn't waste their 20s, they need to get married" and like that's what I wanted too because that's what I was being force-fed. And Company came out in the 1970s. Marriage was a lot different back then. So it kind of reaffirmed my narrative, that I needed to settle down and get married (mind you I am turning 21 in like three days lmao). But it also came with this character, Bobby, who is so emotionally vulnerable and riddled with anxiety, and we don't know why. So we insert ourselves onto him, or at least I did. I have awful social anxiety, and I don't have many friends never mind lovers lmao. I was in a long-term relationship with a guy and he was an absolute dick but I tried so hard to make it work with him and I would've married him because I was so desperate not to waste my twenties like I was told. But... I gained a lot of new anxieties from that relationship and related to Bobby even more.

So writing this was cathartic. I got to work out my thoughts and worries in a way that wasn't exactly connected to me. And I worked out a lot of stuff throughout this. I came to terms with being hella bisexual and that is why everyone is canonically fruity in this story lol. I came to terms with the fact that I was manipulated into doing sexual things with my ex that I was not comfortable with and that is why I dealt with the reader's anxieties when it came to sex in depth. I deal with mortality a little too because that fucking scares me lmao.

But I came to terms with the fact that it's not a woman's sole duty to get married. And I'd argue that's not even entirely the point of Company either. The point is to live, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and not discount the good just because it comes with some bad. And that's why the reader and Barba do not get married within the realms of this story. It's up to you to decide what happens to them but I did give them a happy ending because I'm a sap lmao. But due to the pandemic and just doing some critical thinking I am now a huge leftist... but that's a side story.

I also proved something to myself - that I can actually fucking finish something. I've written like a million fanfics and never finished them lmao but this one is the only one I did! (Except for the Hunger Games one I wrote when I was 11 that has since been deleted lol). So even though I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to hang it up I am so happy I powered through. I kind of never want to watch SVU again though lmao

But anyway... thank YOU SO MUCH to everyone who commented and reblogged and liked and read this story. That just means the fucking world to me. You have no idea. I love to write and idk I was like, fuck it, I'm going to put this out here and let people comment... and you know that's a kind of vulnerability in itself. But the response has been overwhelmingly positive and I want to thank all of you so much for that. This was not easy for me lmao especially not when all I wanted to do was throw in the towel... But I am so fucking happy I did it.

Thank you all of you so much :) Special thanks to @isvvc-pvscvl and @thatesqcrush for being here from the start and all the support :)

And thank you to all of the people on here who messaged me privately about the story - I won’t name you for privacy reasons but it means the world that my words had any impact on anyone!

#brb going to go cry NOW omg fdkfjdkj I can't believe I fucking finished it still

[walkerwords]

“Firehouse Blues” Part 1 of 2 - Negan x F!Reader

PART II

Request from anonymous:  can you do a negan imagine where the saviors find a woman who's living alone in a huge building and has a lot of supplies and guns and the saviors try to take the supplies but she used to be a engineer and has a strong security system so no one can access the building. and one day she meets negan and agrees to a trade. thanks :)

Word Count: 3448

Warning: Swearing

Song I Wrote To: “It’s A Man’s Man’s World” by Jurnee Smollett-Bell

Note: Another two part request! I was originally going to post this as one, but I wanted to post something for ya’ll so here you go. I had a lot of fun with this one. Mostly cause I love writing flirty Negan! Part 2 will be up soon! Thank you!

Reminder: If you want to be added to my main taglist or individual lists, just let me know!

------

The first time you met the Saviors, you had given them a single warning. 

It was early morning when the trucks first rolled up to your firehouse. You had been living in the old fire station for about a year now and it had quickly become a fortress. With a mixture of scavenging and inventing, your home was not only well-armed but equipped with sophisticated security systems that included both machinery and the Dead. Being an engineer before the Turn, when you found the firehouse, it quickly became your new project. 

A multitude of traps, alarms, and mirrors was placed around the property. From certain vantage points, you could see every entrance and it would be a miracle if anyone or anything could breach your walls. The collection of Dead was your most recent idea and so far it was working. It had taken you a few weeks to get everything perfect, but soon enough, you kept at least ten Dead ones confined within the entrance area of the firehouse. If anyone was to get through the front door, they would have to get through a group of the Dead that you could release with a single pull of a lever.

When you heard the caravan of vehicles approaching your home, you acted quickly. With a few adjustments and two pulls of a lever, two large hoses deposited gasoline out front of the building, ready for you to ignite it if necessary. The entrance to the main yard out front was lined with two large fire engines that blocked the other traps that you had set up, two tripwires that would activate a loud siren, calling any Dead within a few miles towards the building. You were safe behind your brick walls, but your enemy wouldn’t be so lucky.

Sliding down the fire pole that was just off your makeshift bedroom, you crept towards the main area of the station. In the main garage, you could hear your Dead on the other side of the door as they waited in the administration area. It had taken you a while to get used to the noise, but now if you didn’t have the constant groans of your hungry companions, everything felt too silent. 

Climbing up one of the fire ladders, you looked through one of the windows at the top of the accordion door. In the bright sun of the morning, five trucks parked just behind the fire engines. Armed men and women exited the vehicles and gathered around your barrier, looking up at the firehouse in confusion.

You were aware that there were groups in the area. Some were considered safe havens, but of course, there were those who wanted what others had. Based on their weapons and how each of them carried themselves, you were certain they were the latter. 

You climbed down from the window and ran for your armory. You kept your weapons in many different places throughout the station, never all together in one place. In the garage was where you kept most of your smaller pistols as well as your explosives. Grabbing two pistols, you slid them into your holsters. You also grabbed your parabolic listening device. You had found the long-distance microphone on a run a few months ago. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked great when listening to conversations that were right outside your home. 

Making your way to the top level, you checked your traps along the way. Your Dead were secure, the tripwires fully ready, and every door was reinforced alongside automatic weapons that could be triggered with a few tugs of a rope. You then headed for your main “nest” as you called it. On the top floor of the firehouse, you had a full view of those who threatened your home and that is where you waited.

Peering through a rifle scope, you watched as a man with a rather impressive mustache exited the last truck. He walked with a swagger and a cocky grin on his face. He stared up at your fire station with gratification as if he had just won the lottery. Switching on the microphone, you held the disc towards the slightly open window and you listened.

“You know, when our new friend said this place was well-guarded, I thought he meant by actual men,” the man said. A woman to his left followed his line of sight with a frown. 

“Maybe he was wrong, Simon,” the woman said. The man, Simon, shook his head and walked between the fire engines, gauging his surroundings. You watched on in silence. 

“I don’t think so, Arat,” Simon said. “He said this place was a fortress. A fortress with guns,” he said with a wicked smile. At his words, your stomach turned. You knew who he was talking about. You had invited someone into your home a month earlier. His name was Justin and he had been starving, weak, and in need of shelter. He was a former Sailor with the Navy so you had offered him sanctuary. Clearly, that had been a mistake. The bastard had betrayed you and brought these pirates to your doorstep. “Spread out!” Simon ordered. “Find a way in.”

The men and women nodded to their leader and began fanning out over your property. You ignored the teams that went to the sides of the building. They would need a bulldozer to get through your doors and even then, you were prepared to take on any intruders. Your main focus was the man with the mustache. He seemed too confident in trying to take your place by force.

You watched him carefully, gauging all his reactions and how he scanned his surroundings. There was a moment when you considered taking him out. A single bullet to the heart would kill him and allow you to add him to your collection downstairs. However, you had a feeling that if you did, the cavalry would return and conflict was not what you were aiming for here. 

Simon picked his way towards the front of the building. You were surprised to see that he noted your tripwires almost instantly. He didn’t bother to disarm them as he stepped over each one and placed his hands on his hips. “I know you’re in there!” he sang, smiling up at the windows you sat behind. “Why don’t you come on out and we can discuss this like friends?”

Your eyes went to the gasoline that shimmered in the sun. Simon noticed it as well and toed it with his boot. “Careful, Simon,” Arat said, still behind the barrier the wires provided. 

“Something tells me, we aren’t going to get the full welcome wagon,” Simon sighed. “Okay then! Guess we will have to do this the hard way!” Simon then whistled and three of his men approached with a battering ram. You were annoyed when they also took care to avoid the wires. Clearly, you had to do a better job at camouflaging them. The men placed themselves at your front door, ready to take it down, but all you did was smile. Reaching over to your left, you pulled up on a yellow-painted-lever and released your Dead.

As soon as the ram broke down the door, ten lumbering Dead men and women attacked your intruders. You heard the screams first. Two men went down as the Dead converged on them. “Fall back!” Simon yelled, running back to avoid gnarled hands and teeth. In his hurry, he didn’t avoid the wires this time and instantly your home lit up with a fire siren. 

Simon and the others panicked as the Dead began appearing around corners. You had purposefully baited them with dead animals whenever you could. You found the Living avoided highly populated areas of the Dead so it played in your favor. Panic ensued instantly as the men and women retreated to their vehicles. You pushed open your window and leaned out slightly, making sure Simon could see you. Meeting your eyes, he glared, cursing. You smiled widely at him and then lifted your middle finger to the sky.

“You might wanna hurry up!” you hollered at him, “I don’t think they’ve eaten in a while!” you shouted, gesturing to the Dead that stumbled towards his people. Simon looked as if he wanted to shoot you right there, but he made the smarter choice and ran for his truck. 

“Go!” he yelled, jumping into the passenger seat and slamming his hand against the roof. The trucks raced away from your home, firing at stray Dead as they did. You couldn’t help but laugh as you watched them flee. However, it was then that you realized you had to reset all your traps and you sighed in annoyance. The Dead would be easy to replace, but it was always a hassle to reset the wires and disperse the hungry bodies that surrounded the area after the siren. 

Speaking of which, you ran to the other side of the room and slammed your hand against the emergency shut-off button, turning off the deafening sound. Listening to the increased groans of the Dead, you picked up a length of chain that hung on a hook. “This is gonna take all night,” you said with a deep sigh, but you knew it was worth it.

You were considering adding more than ten this time. The only thing that would make the situation better was if you could get your hands on Justin and hang his traitorous ass on the front gate as your first warning. Perhaps one day you would get the chance, but for now, you had work to do. 

--------

It was two months later when you finally met the man in charge.

You were on a run for parts to fix a radio you had found in the boiler room when you heard the sound of clashing metal. Running towards the sound, you saw a supply truck tipped over on its side and the Dead circled it like sharks after prey. You thought about turning away. It wasn’t rare for people to come through your area of town. They would get into rough situations and either they lived or they didn’t. You never felt as if it was your duty to intervene. However, when you saw who exited the truck, you reconsidered. 

Climbing out of the passenger side window, a tall, handsome man slid to the ground. In his hand, he held a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat, and as soon as he got his bearings, he swung it, crushing in skulls immediately. You watched this man fight through the small herd of Dead as they attempted to make him their lunch.

His leather jacket was splashed with black blood and it seemed as if he was limping heavily. You figured he was injured from the crash, but it didn’t seem to stop him. It was clear to you that he was a survivor and that was what made you pull your weapon. 

You ran towards the man, firing on the remaining Dead. He turned to you in surprise before going back to swinging his weapon. Neither of you spoke as your dispatched the rest of the corpses. You then found three feasting on a body that hung limply out of the truck’s windshield. You pulled your knife and took them out, stabbing each of them in the back of the head.

When all was quiet, you turned to find the survivor bent over, leaning on his bat for support. “You alright?” you asked, slightly out of breath. 

“Am I alright?” he asked, slightly amused. “Shit, Darlin’, you’re the one who went all fucking Rambo on these dead assholes. I am more than alright considering how much badass I just witnessed,” he said and you found his deep voice incredibly soothing, even when he was swearing like a sailor. 

“Your injury,” you said, pointing at his leg, “is it a bite?” 

“Nope, just your average big ass cut,” he said, pulling up the leg of his pants. The wound looked deep, most likely from a piece of metal. Looking around, you made a quick decision. 

“I can patch you up if you want. My place is just around the corner,” you said, already regretting it. He looked at you for a moment before shrugging. 

“Figure I don’t have any other options,” he said, “Lead the way.” You went to his side and pulled his arm around your shoulders, giving him support. 

“Ya got a name?” you asked as you pulled him towards your firehouse. 

“Negan,” he grunted, clearly in more pain than he first led on. “And what can I call you, my white knight?” he asked, smiling down at you. 

“(Y/N),” you said, “and I’m no white knight. Just figured you’ve already had a shitty day. No need to make it worse.” Negan laughed, a broad smile encompassing his bearded face. 

“I’ll take it,” he said and you smiled slightly. You took Negan through a back alley and then down the main street that led to your home. As you got closer to the fire station, Negan swore under his breath. 

“What is it?” you asked, suddenly on alert for any danger. 

“You’re her, aren’t you?” he asked. 

“You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific there, bud,” you said, hauling him down the pavement. 

“The firehouse chick,” he explained. “My men tried to take this place a couple of months ago and you unleashed a shit ton of corpses on them!” he said, extremely exuberant. “Simon said you were a spitfire, guess he was right after all.” Hearing Simon’s name, you jerked away from Negan, throwing him to the ground. “Shit!” he swore. You pulled your pistol and aimed it at his head. “Whoa there!” he said, raising his hands.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you and mount your head on my wall?” you asked him, releasing the safety on your weapon. 

“How about the fact that you’re all about defense and not offense?” Negan offered as he stared down the barrel of your gun. 

“And how would you know that?”

“Simon said that everything that happened that day was all bells and whistles. Shit worthy of a badass and a badass you are,” Negan said. 

“Your men tried to rob me, take my weapons, and they didn’t seem to care about whether I had people inside,” you told him. 

“And did you? Have people?” he asked, his eyes flashing between the gun and your face. With a sigh, you dropped the gun.

“No, I prefer to be alone. Tried to have someone with me once and well, he went and told your boy Simon about my place. Haven’t seen him since, but I plan to gut him from head to toe when I do,” you said, holstering your weapon. “Do I have to do the same to you?” Negan grinned once again. 

“No, ma’am,” he said, wetting his lips with his tongue. “I’m quite fine with whatever you decide to do with me.” You rolled your eyes at his innuendo. 

“If I bring you inside, are you gonna try to take my shit?” you asked, your hand still resting on the pistol at your side. 

“Wouldn’t dream of stealing from the woman that is offering to nurse me back to health,” he said, tilting his head to the side. You offered your hand to him.

“I’m holding you to that,” you said and he took your hand. You helped him to his feet and resumed your earlier position. “I meant what I said about mounting your head.”

“I have no doubt that you did,” Negan said. “All the more reason for me to behave,” he said with a wink and you tugged him along with a jerk that had him tripping on the buckled sidewalk. 

------

Arriving at the station, you took him through the side entrance.

Negan leaned against the brick wall as you unlocked the steel door with a series of latches and the help of a small crowbar. “What the hell did you do before all of this? CIA?” you looked up at him, annoyed. 

“I was an engineer, genius,” you explained, and with a kick, the door opened. You grabbed his arm again and hauled him into the building. 

“Yeah, I guess that makes more sense,” Negan said, leaning heavily on you. You closed up behind you and then took Negan down the hall towards the stairs. 

“If you fall, try not to take me down with you,” you said. 

“Have some faith, Darlin’,” he said as you started to ascend the stairs. “So, why a firehouse?” he asked. 

“It was convenient,” you explained. “And I like the area.” 

“Prime apocalyptic real estate, huh?” he joked. 

“Something like that,” you said as you finally made your way to the top level. You dragged Negan over to your bed and dropped him. “You’re a lot heavier than you look,” you panted. 

“It’s my big...personality,” he said with a suggestive smile. 

“More like your big ego,” you said before heading over to the cabinet on the wall. Negan peeled off his jacket, dropping his bat by his feet. You grabbed your first aid kit and a bottle of water and went back to him. Negan leaned back against the wall and you sat at his feet, prepping a bandage and antiseptic. “Roll up your pant leg,” you said. “And no, you do not need to take your pants off,” you said before he could say the lewd remark that you knew was on the tip on his tongue. 

“Damn, you’re good,” Negan said, but did as you asked. Placing a towel under his calf, you cleaned the wound the best you could. You were right before, it was pretty deep.

“Needs stitches,” you said, grabbing the sewing kit. 

“Go for it,” Negan said, placing his hands behind his head. As you stitched his wound closed, he almost seemed content with the situation. 

“You don’t get a lot of downtime, do you?” you asked. 

“How can you tell?” he asked with a chuckle.

“Because you’re practically asleep while I tug your flesh back together.”

“I got people to lead,” Negan explained. “Doesn’t allow much leisure time.”

“Right, the people that you lead to steal the supplies and homes of others,” you said bitterly as you soaked the freshly stitched wound with alcohol again.

“We all do what we have to in order to survive,” Negan said, his tone more serious. 

“You don’t have to be a looter,” you said, wrapping his leg. You tightly secured his wound and then gathered up your supplies. You gave Negan the water and got up, turning your back on him. 

“Why are you alone?” he asked after a few minutes. You leaned against one of the steel columns and stared at him, trying to make your mind up about the man before you. 

“I stopped trusting people years ago,” you told him, “And every time I decide to try it again, they screw me over. No people, no problems.”

“Sounds lonely,” he said, his eyes softening. 

“You get used to it,” you said, pushing off the column and going over to your work desk, fiddling with pieces of tech. You were bent over the radio, trying to rewire it when you felt his presence behind you. “If you rip your stitches, I won’t redo them.” Negan laughed and took a seat in the chair by your desk. 

“I want to offer you a deal, (Y/N),” Negan said, watching you with curious eyes. 

“I nearly killed your man, Simon, what makes you think I want to make a deal with you?” you asked. 

“Look, Simon, he means well...sometimes and while he is my right-hand, he’s not me. My men do many things in my name, but when it comes down to it, I’m the one who should be shaking hands and kissing babies.”

“And that’s what you want to do with me?” you questioned. 

“I think you and I can have a very beneficial relationship,” he said, running his hand over his chin. “Strictly professional, of course.”

“Of course,” you mocked. “Negan, I appreciate that you want to make some kind of deal, but I don’t deal with people that prey on others.” Negan leaned forward. 

“Darlin’, I am more than happy to go by your rules,” he said slowly, “but I want you to hear me out. Who knows, maybe you’ll find I’m not that bad after all.” You leaned towards him as well, staring him down. He glanced down to your lips. Quirking a brow, you smirked.

“Don’t hold your breath, Darlin’.” 

TAGS: @thanossexual​ 

#the walking dead imagines #the walking dead imagine #the walking dead #negan imagine #badass reader #reader x negan #reader insert #walkerwords #twd imagines #twd pre season 7 #Simon #Arat #Saviors #walking dead fic #walking dead fanfic

[path-of-my-childhood]

The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

By: Brian Hiatt for The Rolling Stone Magazine Date: September 18th 2019

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more.

Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.

In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.

In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”

The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.

How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.

Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”

She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong. Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it? I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation. The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning? I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived? Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other? It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself? The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

You once sang about a star who “took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” In 2016, you wrote in your journal, “This summer is the apocalypse.” How close did you come to quitting altogether? I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right? Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Hayley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap? Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it? There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said. It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though. I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret? The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me. When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.” But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19. But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, “I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,” and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, “MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!” [His exact words: “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, “You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.” So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”? [Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”? It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation? It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button. Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that. A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums. That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track. It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose. Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

For the more organic songs on this album, like “Lover” and “Paper Rings,” you said you were imagining a wedding band playing them. How often does that kind of visualization shape a song’s production style? Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”? There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title. I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is? It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

You’re in this weird place of being a blond, blue-eyed pop star in this era — to the point where until you endorsed some Democratic candidates, right-wingers, and worse, assumed you were on their side. I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team? I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November? Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire? That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums. It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale? Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya. I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was. That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places? I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you? Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling... There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it? I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager. Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder... It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016... [Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

You once said that your mom could never punish you when you were little because you’d punish yourself. This idea of changing in the face of criticism and needing approval — that’s all part of wanting to be good, right? Whatever that means. But that seems to be a real driving force in your life. Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience? No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession. I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

But, yeah, that line is indicative of my anxiety about how in life you can’t get everything right. A lot of times you make the wrong call, make the wrong decision. Say the wrong thing. Hurt people, even if you didn’t mean to. You don’t really know how to fix all of that. When it’s, like, 29 years’ worth.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.” That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context. You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever. [Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, “I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.” And I was like, “Well, I’m an archer. We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.” So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception. And oftentimes I’ve had this delay in feeling something that hurts me and then saying that it hurts me. Do you know what I mean? And so I can understand how people in my life would have been like, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was how you felt.” Because it takes me a second.

If you watch the video of the 2009 VMAs, I literally freeze. I literally stand there. And that is how I handle any discomfort, any pain. I stand there, I freeze. And then five minutes later, I know how I feel. But in the moment, I’m probably overreacting and I should be nice. Then I process it, and in five minutes, if it’s gone, it’s past, and I’m like, “I was overreacting, everything’s fine. I can get through this. I’m glad I didn’t say anything harsh in the moment.” But when it’s actually something bad that happened, and I feel really, really hurt or upset about it, I only know after the fact. Because I’ve tried so hard to squash it: “This probably isn’t what you think.” That’s something I had to work on.

You could end up gaslighting yourself. Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks. I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

#uhhhh #just by copying and editing text I see it's gonna be good =) #can't wait... #taylor swift #interview #by taylor #lover era #Rolling Stone magazine #Brian Hiatt

[the-ipre]

gonna do 💕 (yes here have an excuse to talk abt them) 💔 (bc i am curious) and 🎶 (bc the album slaps)

gonna do skyjacks for this one because its the biggest part of my brain worms atm

💕 tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them!

this is big tough because i could go on a ramble about hildred margaret or gable tbh lasdkjf but !! margaret just Gets to me, magic coming from intimacy and her ability to read social cues (going from being Nice to seeing how travis showed affection and Being Spicy) and the absolute tragedy of changelily but also her having the space to process it on her own, shes just ??? so cool??? and ‘rivers child’ and having been alive for so long and moving through life without putting down roots same as travis and gable, but she still made connections and lived a life instead of just a waiting game, having a second chance and choosing to actually make something with it, i. care about margaret skyjacks very much. just look at my blog title lasdkjf

💔 tell us about one of your LEAST favorite characters and why you dislike them.

ok this is me being petty and having a grudge against patrick rothfuss but i’m just generally not a fan of jolly jack. i like p much all the characters on this show so very much which makes him stick out but the way patrick rothfuss wrote women and sex workers especially in the kingkiller chronicles colors anything else he does for me tbh

🎶 if your hyperfixation has songs/an ost, what is your favorite song from it?

lighthouse gets to me!!!! toast the axel is a banger and ‘eris take my hand’ will always destroy me but the quiet intimacy and yearning of the shared knowledge of every cobble that they tread just GETS to me. shoutout to my second day of work before i was allowed to play music where i just sang the chorus to lighthouse on repeat and thought about lighthouse keeper gable and fishermans daughter hildred

#ask #aslkdjf thank you!! love going on a Ramble™ #also the patrick rothfuss thing is like. he did So much worldbuilding and so much of it was genuinely very cool #and down to the exchanges of currency between different countries #but then it was still overwhelmingly heterosexual and sexist and didnt treat sex workers as people #all that worldbuilding and he still kept those things makes me a grudgeful fool #skyjacks #not-from-the-absence-of-violence

[theotherackerman]

My Mind Turns Your Life Into Folklore

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: Any recognizable elements belong to Attack on Titan.

NOTES: New Year’s Day January 1st, Friday

Trigger warning: mentions of self harm and suicide.

song credit:

marjorie- taylor swift

CHAPTER THREE:  glitter on the floor after the party

Mikasa stood there, absolutely dumbfounded.

Had Eren really just walked away from her again?

The door opened again.

An unmasked Zeke Jaeger stepped back out and sighed.

“Fucking idiot,” he muttered under his breath as he lit a cigarette.

Mikasa looked over at him.

She knew he was right.

She was an idiot.

As if he was reading her mind, Zeke spoke again.

“Him, not you.” He took off his leather jacket and wrapped it around Mikasa’s shoulders.

“Why are you being so nice to me? If it’s out of pity…”

Zeke laughed, “It is not you, I pity. It is him. Eren. He is a fucking idiot. I cannot blame him though. I understand it. My father kept my mom and I a secret, that was bad. What he did to Eren, that was worse.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “Not my place to tell you or I would.”

What could she even say to that?

Eren didn’t want to tell her, he didn’t want to let her in.

Instead he had left her...twice. She didn’t know what she would do if he left a third time.

“Didn’t your dad die of lung cancer?” She asked.

She knew he had.

She had been at his funeral, holding Eren’s hand as Grisha was buried in the ground.

Zeke couldn’t help but laugh, “yeah, he did. Fucker deserved worse.” He stomped on the cigarette before turning to go inside. “Do not stay out here too long. Do not want you getting sick. I should find out where Eren wandered off to.”

She began to remove his jacket.

Zeke held up a hand. “Keep it. It’s Eren’s anyway.”

The door swung open to reveal four very angry women and a very angry Armin.

“I’ll take out his knee caps. Annie, you tackle him and take him down,” Ymir called out.

“I feel awful. I really had no idea Niccolo was in a band with Eren…” Sasha sobbed.

Everyone froze when they saw Zeke and Mikasa.

“Hello,” Zeke said with the tiniest of waves.

“Zeke?” Armin questioned.

“Hello, Armin. Mikasa probably needs you all right now. I have to find out where my brother wandered off to this time.”

“Well then you can take Annie and me right to him. Today is the day he loses those kneecaps!” Ymir cracked her knuckles.

Zeke just laughed, “Eren deserves it, there is no doubt, but as his brother, I must protect him. He only began to walk again..”

Everyone’s eyes began to widen as Zeke realized what he had said.

“Fuck! I shouldn’t have said that," Zeke remarked.

Mikasa felt as if she was lost at sea, she was drowning.

Her eyes began to fill with tears.

Her heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest.

Eren hadn’t been able to walk?

What was wrong with him?

She couldn’t breathe.

“Zeke, what is wrong with Eren?” Armin spoke up.

“Mentally or physically?”

“Both,” Historia whispered.

Zeke ran his hand through his hair before he lit up another cigarette. “He is going to kill me for even saying that much...I suppose there is no problem with telling you what is already common knowledge.”

“We already know he’s bipolar. I found the band’s website on Instagram,” Annie said as she walked towards Mikasa. She took her hand, slowly pulling her in front of the girls. Sasha took Mikasa's other hand and rested her head on Mikasa’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Mika,” Sasha whispered.

“It’s okay,” Mikasa replied.

They all turned their attention back to Zeke who seemed to be observing them all with great c uriosity.

“Then you already saw that his liver went bad too. I cannot tell you much else. There are other things wrong with Eren but like your loyalty to Mikasa, my loyalty is to my brother. He may be an asshole but he is my family. My only family. I do not ask you to understand or even forgive him. I think he is acting like an idiot,” Zeke paused to take a drag of his cigarette. “ While he is my only family, I was not his. I do not agree with him leaving his other family because things got hard. He is acting like our father by doing that.”

“Is he going to die?” Mikasa’s voice cracked.

“We’re all going to die but no. Not anytime soon. The treatment of his liver was successful. I should really go find him and you all should get out of the cold. Goodnight, ladies and Armin.”

And with that, Zeke Jaeger disappeared into the night to find his brother.

No one moved to go inside. They all looked to Mikasa for what they should do next.

“I’m tired,” she whispered.

“Let’s go back to the hotel then. Limo is out front already. I thought we’d need a getaway car,” Historia laughed.

Mikasa’s eyes were still filled with tears, her heart was still racing, and it was hard to breathe.

But she wasn’t drowning or lost at sea anymore.

No, she was safe.

She couldn’t help but feel bad for Eren.

She had once been his anchor but now, he had no one. So she began to cry.

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

Zeke didn’t have to go very far to find Eren. He was sitting in the passenger seat of the van they had rented to move the equipment. Zeke walked around the driver’s side and opened the door.

“You want to tell me what that was about?” Zeke asked as he climbed into the car.

Eren said nothing.

“Should I schedule you for a session?” Zeke asked.

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

No, Eren wasn’t sure.

He felt more broken than he had when the night had started.

He hadn’t expected to see her here. The last he had heard, she had moved away to pursue her dreams with her new band.

Eren was not ready for this. He had thought he had been when he had sent her the letter.

But how wrong he had been.

“Am I sure I’ll be fine? No. I just want to go home and go to sleep. Is that okay?” Eren answered as he clicked his seatbelt into place.

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

Why had they all slept on the floor of their suite when there three bedrooms each with two beds attached?

Well it was simple.

No one wanted to leave Mikasa alone. Mikasa was very grateful for her friends.

After stopping for breakfast, they all went back to the Ackerman house.

“I’m sorry, Mikasa,” Sasha apologized again.

“Sasha, really. It’s not your fault. Go be with your family. Isn’t Connie coming over so you, Jean, and him can watch movies? I promise. I’m not mad.” Mikasa hugged her friend tightly so she knew they were okay.

Annie and Armin were awkwardly standing by Annie’s car while Ymir and Historia were standing by the limo.

“You guys can go too. I’m fine. Levi is here. Hange is here. Besides, there’s something I have to do today.”

Armin gave her a look.

He knew exactly where she was going.

She nodded.

Ymir, Historia, and Annie look at each other.

“Text us if you need us,” Armin said before he got into Annie’s car.

The other three followed his lead.

As she opened the front door, two furry creatures moved in for the attack. They began to bark and run around her legs.

“Ahh!” She screamed as she shut the door behind her and dropped her bag.

“Sawney! Bean!” Hange yelled as the dogs continued to run laps around Mikasa’s legs.

“Puppies?” Mikasa was very confused at the moment.

“Levi’s. Late Christmas gift. His therapist said that a pet would be good for him. I found these guys. They’re corgis! Look at their little legs!”

The two potato size golden furred creatures jumped up trying to get Mikasa’s attention.

“They’re extremely smart! They can herd cattle with those tiny legs!” Hange picked up one of the puppies and handed it to Mikasa. The puppy began licking her face.

“Tiny legs...sounds like someone else I know…” She muttered as she petted the corgi.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Those jokes never get old, brat,” Levi remarked as he walked into the room holding two flower bouquets. “Sure you don’t want me to come?”

Mikasa sat the puppy down on the floor and took the flowers from Levi.

“No, I’ll be fine. Keys?”

Levi handed her the keys.

“I’ll be back soon.”

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

The graveyard was always empty on New Year’s Day which was why Mikasa always made a stop here. She strolled through the headstones before coming to a stop. She gently placed one the flower bouquets on the grave.

“Hey, Mom. Hi, Dad.” She sat down in front of the grave. “I wrote 40 songs since I saw you last. Historia and I are really making good music together. I wish I had her voice though. She can hit those high notes and my voice just can’t. Levi said you were the same way, Mom. Your voice was lower when you sang. He said when you’d come over, you'd go play the piano and just sing. Even though it was Dad’s family…..it didn’t matter. You just came in and made it yours too….” She could feel the tears rolling down her face.

“He let the piano get out of tune. Hange bought him two puppies. They’re corgis. He thinks I don’t know how hard he’s struggling. He wants me to live my own life but some days, I just wish he’d admit it. He’s too proud.”

She wiped the tears from her eyes.

“Ymir and Historia are having problems. I hope they figure it out. I know they're meant to be together. Armin and I made up. I missed him. He wasn’t really to blame anyway. Eren’s bad off...I saw him. He’s not...I don’t know. I don't know what is going on and I don’t know why I care. He’s still got your ring, Dad. He sent me the box back so I don’t know what’s in it. I’m afraid to open it. I….I just don’t know and I really need you, Mom. I need you to be here and be a mom. I can’t talk to Levi about this. I can’t talk to my friends because they hate Eren and I hate him too...at least that is what I tell myself.”

She began to cry harder, “I miss him. I really do but...what do I do?”

She fell silent as she allowed herself to cry. The ache in her chest from losing her parents was indescribable. She could have used a mother right now.

After she stopped crying, she stood up. “One more person to visit today. I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

Mikasa began her walk to the other side of the cemetery.

As she grew closer to the grave, she heard the soft music of an acoustic guitar playing.

Her heart leapt up into her throat.

It couldn’t be.

Fate could not be that cruel.

But it was.

She saw Carla’s grave and Eren sitting in front of it. His hair was pulled up into a bun. He didn’t look up or acknowledge her at all. She placed the flowers on Carla’s headstone before sitting down next to Eren.

The music was soothing.

She closed her eyes and just listened to him play. She hadn’t heard him play since his dad had died until last night. She remembered the hours he had put into learning the guitar, even more than she had put into learning piano. One day, he had played until his fingers bled, Carla had taken his guitar away. Carla had told Eren that he needed to learn balance. He couldn’t push himself that hard.

A lesson that Mikasa knew Eren still hadn’t learned yet.

She couldn’t help but smile at the memory.

As she continued to listen to each cord, she realized this was an entirely new song that she had never heard before. Had Eren written this on his own or was this something he had created with his band?

Every note began to swim around in her head. She could create lyrics from these notes. Lyrics about what? She remembered where she was but it was almost as if she could hear her parents and Carla speaking to her through the music.

“[lyrics redacted due to copyright],” She sang quietly causing Eren to stop playing for a moment. She didn’t open her eyes, she didn’t want to ruin this moment.

“[lyrics redacted due to copyright],” she sang again.

Eren resumed his playing.

It felt so comforting.

It was as if everything else melted away.

She opened her eyes, daring to look at Eren.

He held her gaze from a moment which allowed her to really see him.

There were dark circles underneath his eyes. It was clear he hadn’t had any sleep. He looked away from her.

She couldn’t help but become self conscious.

Should she leave? Had she intruded on a moment between mother and son?

“[lyrics redacted due to copyright],” Eren sang, making Mikasa realize truly how much she had missed his voice.

Sure, she had heard it the night before but this was different.

This felt private like it was  something only to be shared between them.

They had written songs together before, yes.

Nothing like this though.

Nothing so deeply personal.

When Eren stopped playing, Mikasa was pulled from her thoughts.

“See you later, Mom,” he said as he stood up and readjusted his guitar.

He looked down at Mikasa before offering her his hand.

She took it, allowing him to pull her to her feet.

They began to walk together out to the parking lot.

Mikasa didn’t see Eren’s car in the parking lot.

“Zeke will be back in a couple hours,” Eren muttered as he looked down at the ground.

“I can take you home...to your home.” She looked up at him. He was staring at her. “Carla would kill both of us if I left you here in the cold for hours.”

“I’ve been through worse,” he muttered before he nodded.

The awkwardness between them was almost too much for Mikasa to handle.

She should have left him in the cold.

She should have never offered to take him home but she couldn’t leave him.

Even after all the horrible things he had said to her, done to her, she couldn’t just leave him here alone in a cemetery parking lot.

She unlocked Levi’s car and climbed in.

Eren hesitated for a moment before he got inside.

“I’m at the old house,” he told her before buckling his seatbelt.

Mikasa reversed the car and backed out of the space.

#mmtylif #my writing

[crystalgirl259]

The Flame and the Dragon Ch4

Chapter 4: The Duke

Kai sighed in relief as he dropped the bags at his feet and plopped down next to the equally exhausted Lloyd on the side of the town square fountain. The large, glistening fountain outside of city hall in the dead center of the entire city. Built only a handful of years ago, this fountain at the old town center was there to represent the importance of all generations, both young and old, and what they have to offer. Its position within the city was meant to represent the strong mind and balanced way of life the city strived for.

It was designed by Nya.

She had wonderfully captured the natural beauty of the region and used a personal style to convey her vision in this piece of art. Every element was crafted and created with deluxe materials from local suppliers, ensuring this monument will remain an important aspect of the community spirit for many more years.

"Think we got enough food?" He teased.

"Well, we got everything on Nya's list." Lloyd smiled. "You remembered the chocolate right?"

"Yes, I remembered the chocolate." Kai rolled his eyes playfully. Lloyd smiled and dug into his big brother's bag before pulling out a folder and opened. He thumbed through the pages until he found a small back of stapled pages and pulled out the top one, smiling before placing the pack in Kai's lap.

"Care to show your favorite little brother what you've been working on?" He flashed a bright smile and his infamous pleading look.

"Maybe later," Kai replied calmly, earning him a look of pure shock from the blond boy. Kai could never resist Lloyd's babyface when he wanted something. Kai just laughed and scooped his collection of papers in his hands before looking at the one Lloyd picked out. The poem was written in his hand above the image of a field of roses. At the heart was an ancient castle that dated back to the early 18th century. The only difference was this castle was pure white, each stone chiseled from stabs of pristine marble.

Lloyd leaned over his brother's shoulder, immediately engrossed in the detailed sketch of his big brother's.

"Jeez Kai, you could give Nya a run for her money."

"It's just a sketch."

"It's still awesome! Now, can I see the poem or not?" Lloyd pleaded with a whine in his voice.

"No!"

"But it's amazing!" He begged and giggled as Kai blushed.

"You think everything I write is amazing." He smiled, rolling his eyes.

"Because they are!" He insisted, kneeling over the side of the fountain to dig through Kai's folder. "Didn't you say that one goes with another poem or passage? Here it is!" He cheered in victory pulling out another passage Kai wrote and placed in his lap. "This one! I remember cuz when you were reading you had this really dreamy look on your face." His smile almost split in half at the dark blush suddenly covering Kai's face. He snatched both things away and stuffed them back in his folder.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, green bean." Kai insisted with a small smirk. It would have convinced anyone else despite the faint scarlet dusting Kai's cheeks, but not to Lloyd and Nya.

"Yes, you do! You wrote that about the Dragon Lord didn't you?" He smirked playfully. The brunette's eyes nearly bulged out of his skull at Lloyd's innocently smirking face.

"How do you know that?!" He spluttered, completely flabbergasted. The youngest Smith almost burst out laughing at his older brother's panic.

"I didn't, but it's written all over your face!" He gasped in between laughs. Growling in defeat, Kai ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

"Yes, they were inspired by the fairy tale, but no it's not about him, I wrote them after I had a dream." He explained as Lloyd blinked in bewilderment. "I know silly, right?"

"No! I wanna hear it!" He insisted widening his eyes. Rolling his eyes again, knowing Lloyd wouldn't let the subject drop, he continued.

"Alright, well, every night, I dream I'm in a field of flowers outside the castle and while I'm there, I hear a song playing and I follow it; then I see a man standing there holding the most beautiful music box I'd ever seen."

"Is he handsome?" Lloyd asked, teasingly, but Kai chose to ignore that question.

"The music was so lovely; it reminded me of the songs Mom and Dad used to sing to us, but in the most amazing voice I've ever heard." He sighed in awe. "The second I woke up, I just wrote the poem down and then I just couldn't get that man out of my head; I kept dreaming about him more and more." He explained unwittingly, letting his hidden passions seep into his voice; something that didn't go unnoticed by Lloyd. His smile only widened until it nearly split his face in half.

"You're in love~" He sang and Kai almost fell off the fountain. "You're in love with your dream prince!" He teased, with a smirk that put even his siblings to shame as he leaned over his older brother. "And don't try and deny it either, that might work on someone else, but not someone who's known you as long as I have!"

"The Dragon Lord is only a fairy tale, he's not real." Kai sighed, saddened, looking heavenward for assistance to his dilemma.

"Don't worry, bro; I'm sure you'll find your true love." Lloyd encouraged, leaning against the brunette's shoulder. Kai chuckled and ran his fingers through Lloyd's blond hair.

"You're a hopeless romantic, green bean."

"Hopeful." He corrected mischievously. Both boys broke into a fit of laughter until they were interrupted by the sound of a carriage and horses pulling to a stop. Just like that, everyone in town stopped to carry out the weekly ritual that was as practiced and routine as everything else in Ignacia. Everyone was more than happy to greet the two people that were exiting the carriage. The first to exit the expensive, flamboyant carriage was a middle-aged woman wearing a simple but expensive pale green dress.

Her long black hair was tied in a high ponytail by a pretty dark green ribbon, while her toxic green eyes glowed against her deathly-pale skin.

She was a noble maiden without a doubt, but she was not the reason everyone had stopped to stare. The man she turned and bowed her head to was. The brothers recognized his walk before he even stepped out of the carriage. He looked nobler than the woman. The man stepped out of the carriage adorned in a black suit that looked like the most expensive embroidery anyone had ever seen and a necklace of the finest craftsmanship. The outfit was only a simple outing suit but it was still the most expensive thing either brother had ever seen.

The pants alone probably cost more than their entre combined wardrobes.

His white gloves were molded the man's perfect hand and the suit hugged his muscles tightly. The newly polished shoes shined as he stepped down from the carriage. Men and women became lovestruck at his appearance and some people were instantly struck with jealousy or admiration. That combined with perfectly smooth, unblemished white skin, a perfect face, long jet black hair with a green streak in it, and ghostly green eyes, Duke Morro Vento was in every inch a fairy tale prince.

After all, Morro's family had founded the town and still owned it to this day.

Kai never realized how rehearsed Morro's walk was. It was coy and arrogant, just like his glances and his audacious smile. Morro must have returned from a successful trip because he seemed more arrogant today. Kai's gaze turned to Lloyd who nodded in understanding. Both boys picked up their books and the groceries, ready to leave. But a second too late, the duke's gaze found them and he smiled, a seductive smirk that Kai hated more than anything else.

Again he strolled over, cutting off their only exit before the two boys could sneak away.

"Hello, Kai." He smiled sweetly, but the teen saw right through it.

"That's Mr. Smith, your grace." He retorted with a hard gaze. At one point he may have been allowed Morro to call him by his first name, but he had lost that right years ago. Morro's predatory gaze immediately hardened when the brunette used his title instead of his name, though he'd told him time and time again he was allowed to. Kai simply refused to. It was so hard to believe that this arrogant and pompous man obsessed with luxury and social position was the same sweet and free-spirited kid the Smiths knew as children.

Morro's grandfather and their father Ray had been close friends for years.

It was solely because of Morro's grandfather the family moved to this town in the first place. Morro's grandfather had been Duke of the city and the peasants for almost sixty years. He had made it perfectly clear he was just as much a citizen of the town as the rest of the valley. He never cared for social status or reform and only for the well-being of the town and the citizens. As a result, the two families had been quite close. Morro was only two or three years older than Kai.

Sometimes their parents joked about the two of them getting married one day.

This was something Morro's parents took to heart for the future, especially as the children entered adulthood. Ray never considered the idea, especially since he knew none of the children seemed to like Morro in that manner. But once Morro's grandfather died and Ray fell ill, everything changed. Once Morro and his family took the role of Duke and Duchess, and delighted in the royal lifestyle, the Smiths saw less and less of Morro. He'd become too comfortable in the position of his family.

"How many times must I ask you to call me Morro, Kai?" The Duke smiled sweetly, hoping for a romantic response. The brunette just rolled his eyes and gathered his papers together before tying his folder closed. He lifted it to put it away but Morro suddenly snatched it.

"What are these, beautiful?" He asked with mock curiosity, flipping through the papers.

"Your grace, please return my property." He said and it took every ounce of Kai's willpower to remain civil. It was for the sake of his family's good name that he didn't snatch it from his hands and scold him like a child.

"Did you write all these, darling? You must have way too much time on your hands if you waste it scribbling away and reading books." He laughed and Kai growled at the mockery in Morro's voice.

"That's not true!" Lloyd exclaimed and was on his feet faster than anyone expected of the young boy. "Kai's an amazing writer, if you even bothered to read them instead of spending all your time in that stupid shack you call a palace, you'd recognize some good writing." He growled at the duke. A few eyes widened and jaws dropped at Lloyd's comment, but Morro paid the boy no mind and snapped the folder closed, holding it as if it were a discarded garment.

"Oh darling, you have so much promise; don't you think it is about time you got your head out of those silly stories and started paying attention to more important things?" He asked and his voice held a seductive purr that made Kai shiver in aggravation. "I mean, the whole town is talking about it! You spend all your time working at that little shop or reading, it is such a shame." He spoke in such a dreary tone as if Kai's life was that of an unfortunate pauper.

Kai closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair.

He let the duke rant, knowing full well he wouldn't care if he was paying attention to him or not. It had been this way since Morro became the Duke. He accepted the position with a smile and had since turned his ambitions to accustoming Kai to the royal life. The trio lost touch with him as a result, especially Kai, who rejected the idea of the rich and nobility; preferring a life of freedom away from petty, materialistic things. After all, he was perfectly happy living with his siblings where the three could carry out their dreams.

Of course, Morro didn't notice or even care.

"Of course, if you were married to a more... privileged person you wouldn't have to work a day in your life." Morro grinned as his emerald eyes fixed in a cruel seductive glint and met Kai's amber orbs.

"Marriage?" Kai repeated as his eyes widened. "I don't think so Morro, I like working and besides, I don't want to marry just anyone; now, please return my folder." He ordered, attempting to mask the hostility in his voice, holding out his hand.

"Oh, but it wouldn't be just anyone." Morro continued, ignoring the brunette, and held the folder out of his reach so Kai's gaze was fixed on him. "You of all people deserve far more than just anyone; you deserve someone beautiful, wealthy, well-respected-"

"Those are all material things, Morro, not what you should be looking for in marriage." Lloyd cut him off, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

"Give me my folder back, Duke Vento."

"You need someone who's known you since you arrived in this town, who's courted you for years." He smirked as he leaned closer to the brunette, irritation marring the seductive charm.

"I won't ask you again Morro, now stop acting childish and give me my stuff back!" Kai thundered in a harsh tone. Taken aback by the scolding and the looks of the townsmen, he regained his composure and with as much dignity as he could muster returned the folder to Kai.

"Very well, we'll talk later than; come along, Bansha, let us return home." He smiled as he gestured to the raven-haired girl, who followed obediently. Kai's amber eyes were almost red with rage until Lloyd pulled on his arm a bit. Kai's gaze turned to his little brother's curious stare.

"Is he really so naïve that he can't tell you're ignoring his flirting on purpose, or is he just acting?" He asked as he cocked his head cutely, making Morro suddenly freeze in his tracks and Kai burst into laughter, his anger forgotten. Morro turned around with a mortified look on his face. Did Kai's brother just insult him? Without even trying?

"How dare you!" He snapped, pointing accusingly, his composure shattered.

"Now, now, my lord." Kai chuckled. "He's only joking, come on Lloyd, let's get home before Nya wonders where we've been." He smirked and Lloyd smiled as the two scooped up the groceries and books and strolled past the duke and the noblewoman and down the street towards home. Once they were out of earshot of town and Morro, Kai turned to his smiling little brother.

"Thank you for that, green bean; I swear I would have beat the crap outta him if he called me 'darling' one more time."

"I don't know why you put up with him!" Lloyd asked with a snort. "You'd think it would finally penetrate that thick skull of his that you're not interested!"

"I doubt that." Kai sighed, annoyed. "Morro never was one to give up." He added and he knew that was true from experience. Morro had waited and tried for years to coax him to his side. "Hopefully when Nya wins this year, we'll finally have enough money to leave this miserable place." He smiled, confidently.

"I hope so!" Lloyd cheered. "Even I'm getting sick of this town, but I'd miss Dr. Saunders and Brad." He admitted. Kai hummed in understanding as he looked at the large clock tower and his eyes widened.

"Oh shit! Look what time it is!"

"We didn't even make dinner yet and you know what happened last time we got home late?" The youngest Smith groaned as he turned to his middle sibling with concern.

"Don't worry, Nya's a smart girl; she's not dumb enough to repeat her mistakes," Kai assured him. No sooner had Kai said those words, however, an explosion erupted from the Smith home, and thick black smoke pooled from the chimney and kitchen windows...

#The Flame and the Dragon #ninjago #ninjago zane #ninjago cole #ninjago kai #ninjago lloyd #ninjago jay #ninjago nya #ninjago morro #lavashipping

[lu-undy]

Chapter 38 - SBT

Here it is!

The melody of the piano resonated in the venue where silence had fallen to appreciate the music from the artist who Duchemin sold as "immensely talented." 

The mask hid the singer's emotions as his heart beat hard under his costume of the most famous of French kings; the one and only who ordered the construction of the palace of Versailles, the same one who wanted such a luxurious palace that it would be regarded as the greatest of all Europe, at least…!

Mundy was in the crowd, at the very front. He could jump in fast if needs be. Jump in and do what? God only knew, but he couldn't leave his friend alone. No, he needed to support him. 

Lucien got his lips and his mask closer to the microphone. 

"I would like to dedicate this song to my dearest of friends." 

Mundy felt someone nudge him with their elbow. He turned his head and realised Duchemin was standing next to him, a glass of champagne in his hand.

"Lucky you, hm, Mike? Having the favours of such a man."

"Y-yeah." Mundy knew the song wasn't meant for him at all. It was for Perle, no doubt.

Lucien started singing.

{To the reader, the song is "Bridge over troubled water" by Simon and Garfunkel.}

"When you're weary, feeling small

When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all

I'm on your side, oh, when times get rough

And friends just can't be found

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will lay me down"

Mundy's jaw dropped behind his mask. He went to put a hand on his mouth to hide it and bumped on the mask. 

"When you're down and out

When you're on the street

When evening falls so hard

I will comfort you

I'll take your part, oh, when darkness comes

And pain is all around

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will lay me down"

Mundy was astounded. L didn't only look like Lulu, he didn't only sound like him when he spoke either, no… L was singing with the same intensity, with the same voice that could be as delicate as a whisper, and yet punch Mundy's guts to mush. That last note he kept singing and Mundy's pupils shrank as he started understanding…

It wasn't just the same accent, the same eyes, the same lips. It was the same voice, from that suave man, that elegant silhouette, that charming and alluring voice from another world that Mundy couldn't get out of his head. It was from one man only, and not two.

The chords on the piano grew louder as Lucien drummed his fingers on the keys. He was now completely in the song, absorbed by it. And he wasn't singing for his lady kitten, non, of course not. He was singing to that man who was worried to the bone for him. The same man who was willing to step in and play the saxophone in his stead, even though he surely hadn't touched one in years; that fool whose legs were threatening to give up, but who insisted to sacrifice his shyness for him. 

Lucien frowned under the mask as he measured the effort that Mundy was ready to do, just for him.

"Sail on silver girl

Sail on by

Your time has come to shine

All your dreams are on their way

See how they shine

Oh, if you need a friend"

The silver girl was obviously not Perle as Mundy thought it was, non. It was Lucien's voice itself. He wanted it to sail to Mundy, and he begged for forgiveness. He begged in tears under his mask. He knew that the act was over now, he knew Mundy had no doubt understood that L and Lulu were but one and the same…

He sang louder, crying, like the desperate man he was. Desperate for forgiveness, desperate for those sweet times where Mundy didn't know what game he was playing. Lucien sang, and he cried.

"I'm sailing right behind!

Like a bridge over troubled water!

I will ease your mind!

Like a bridge over troubled water!

I will ease your mind!"

Lucien held onto that last note, as long as he was singing it, the song wasn't finished and if it wasn't finished, then he still was in those times, before Mundy would confront him, before he would insult him and turn his back to him. 

"Gosh…" 

Mundy was paralysed among the crowd. He couldn't breathe but only squint and blink repeatedly as he didn't know who he was looking at. Was it L? Was it Lulu? Were they twins or something? No… No, the bastard had lied. All along. He had lied. He had played with Mundy like a puppet. An idiotic and blind puppet. 

The crowd applauded loudly but Mundy didn't hear anything else but a rumble.

"I know a lot of women who would give a lot, just for a night with him. Look at him! Such grace, such refinement! " 

Duchemin's voice was, as they say in French, the drop of water that made the vase overflow. It was that tiny thing that just made Mundy's insides flip. He clenched his jaw and turned on his heels. He needed air. Fresh air. A lot of it. 

"Excuse me." He mumbled as he headed for the gardens. 

"Oh, sure."

Mundy went out of the ballroom as fast as a gust of wind. He hurtled down the marble white stairs and went in the maze of hedges and bushes. He needed some time alone. He only stopped walking when he deemed himself deep enough in the gardens and far enough from anyone else. He found a stone bench and threw his mask on it before taking a seat. There was a fountain in front of him. The lapping sounds that the water made only got to his nerves more...

"Bastard." 

He said, more to himself than to anyone else. 

Lulu and L were one and only person, and that person had thought the best way to do things was to lie to him. Mundy hadn't lied about anything. He had been as honest as he could be, true to the bone. Why would he have lied, he was going to his death anyway, he was marching to it, making all and any sacrifice that he thought he was incapable of doing. 

He had gone out of his hiding. He had met again with Phil, Matt, and Maurice. He had dug the ground, got his cursed rifle again, pulled the trigger again. For him, for L. He had come out of his shell, talked to people, put himself out, in danger and he had always followed what the Frenchman had told him, blindly! He had absolutely no way of telling if L was to be trusted or not! So why did he trust him anyway?

Because he had lost as much as Mundy himself did. That's why. 

Mundy had lost his family and Lucien had too. That's why Mundy thought he could trust him because he could understand the pain of that loss. And he had burrowed himself in his own self for ten years too, which Mundy had started to think he was crazy for doing. But no, another human being had gone through that too and reacted the same way.

Wait. Hold on. Maybe that was a lie too? Maybe L had lied about everything? Where did the lie begin and where did it end? Was there ever something that wasn't a lie?

Mundy lowered his head and hid his face in his hands. 

Bloody hell…

And it had to happen now? In the middle of Duchemin's party? Where he needed to play that bastard's lover…? Nah, it could hardly be worse. 

"I apologise." 

Mundy's head jerked back up and he saw L sitting next to him on the bench.

"I sincerely did not mean to cause any harm, on the contrary. If you knew, you would understand that the less you know me, the safer it is for you." He calmly explained. 

"What else was a lie?" Mundy asked. "Was there any truth in anything that you said?" 

"Oui. A lot of it was true."

"A lot of it is a load of nonsense too, eh." 

"I am afraid so." 

Lucien took his cigarette case out and flipped it open. 

"You're lucky we're here or I'd have made a necklace outta your teeth." Mundy said. 

"And I deserve it. As soon as we are out of here, be my guest." Lucien answered. "Cigarette?" 

"No." 

"Hm." Lucien shrugged and lit one for himself. He shut the case and put it back in his pocket.

"What else is a lie?"

"I cannot answer this-"

"Yeah you bloody can but for some odd reason, you don't want to." 

"Not here, not now." 

"Was there anything that was true?" Mundy asked. "Any bloody thing?" 

"Oui." 

"How can I know you're tellin' the truth now?" 

"I'm afraid you will have to believe my words." 

"Your words are worth shit." 

"Sometimes, oui." 

"All of the time." 

"Non." 

"Yeah." Mundy sighed. "I… I trusted you. I believed you and I followed you. Guess that makes me an idiot." 

"Maybe. But look around you. You may be an idiot but your gut feeling was right and trusting me led you to meet with the man himself, Duchemin." 

"Still. You played with me. Why not tell me the truth?" 

"I already told you that I would answer you, but not here and now." Lucien answered. 

Mundy frowned. 

"So everything I told Lulu… Wait, even the letter?! You knew it was me who wrote it?!" 

Lucien nodded. 

"Bloody hell…" Mundy hid his face in his hands. "And even the conversations I had with him and all… Oh, bugger…" 

The Aussie realised that the Frenchman in fact knew much more than Mundy wanted to allow. 

"I do apologise sincerely. In fact, I knew you were true to your words and that did not prevent me from lying to you about a few things." 

"A few things? A few th-?! Gosh you're lucky I can't give you what you deserve here and now…" 

"I might, oui."

Lucien finished smoking his cigarette. 

"Let's go back, I guess Duchemin will be lookin' for us." Mundy said. 

"Non, I told him that this whole show got me tired and that we would be going back home." Lucien stood up. "Come, let us get to the car." 

Mundy stood up and dragged his feet behind Lucien all the way to the parking lot. He unlocked the car and they both slipped in before he started the engine. They soon found themselves racing through the dark, empty desert. 

Mundy was trying to remember all the things he had said to Lulu that he now regretted. And he felt ashamed, it was awful. 

"Stop the car." 

"Bushman, we are in the middle of now-"

"Stop. The bloody. Car." 

Lucien rolled his eyes and sighed. He parked the car on the side of the road and Mundy came out. The Frenchman wasn't understanding what was wrong with him.

"Bushman? Are you ill?" 

Mundy went in front of the car lights. He undid the ribbon in his hair and his long brown locks flew free. He then threw the waistcoat on the car bonnet. He removed his glasses and gently put them on top of it, next to the windshield.

"What are you doing?" Lucien asked as Mundy got closer to him. He took him by his collar and headbutted the Frenchman. 

"Aïe! Bushman! Do you want to do this here and now?! Really?!"

[Ouch!]

Mundy pushed him such that they were now in front of the car's lights. 

"I trusted you, you mongrel." 

A punch flew and connected with Lucien's jaw. 

"I told you whatever you wanted to know." 

Another punch on the other side. Blood was dripping from his lip. Lucien removed his gloves in a haste and put a hand below his lips. It was really blood.

"And you found nothing else to do but to lie to me!"

Lucien's head twisted under the blow and he spat some blood out. 

"Bushman-"

"Shut up! Shut! Up! I don't want to hear you! You keep your bloody mouth shut! That'll save you some lies - aargh!" 

That punch made Lucien fall to his knees and Mundy shook his aching fist. 

"Get up." He said. His voice was calm but the growl betrayed how much rage boiled inside him.

"Wait…" Lucien breathed heavily. 

"I said get up." Mundy repeated.

Lucien raised his hand to ask for a second of peace but Mundy wasn't having it. He took him by his collar again and pulled him up before pushing him on his car's bonnet. Lucien's back hit it with a thud, barely cushioned by Mundy's waistcoat that was resting there. 

The Aussie pushed him down against it as he hit the masked face again and again. He also gave him some in his stomach and Lucien spat out some blood in a gurgle, gasping for air. The plastic of the mask bent, cracked and broke, punch after punch, and Lucien could feel it lacerating his skin, when the angle of the punch was right. Or when it was wrong. 

"I told you everything, bloody hell! And I thought you got me! I thought you understood! I thought you could understand! I thought you felt the same! I thought you'd help me, bloody mongrel! I thought you too were goin' to kill that bloke! I thought you too wanted to see him pay! Why?! Because you said so and I believed you!" 

Mundy's shouts, like ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream, diffused in the desert and reached no other living soul but his. 

"I told you bloody everythin'! I listened to you! I followed you without questioning…!" 

Punch. 

"Any!"

Punch. 

"Bloody!"

Punch. 

"Thing!"

Mundy stopped for an instant and shook his fist. Looking at it, he realised it was covered with blood. He winced and took a look at Lucien's face. He pushed the bits of mask here and there. There was nothing to make out of the mess of a face he had. Entirely covered in blood and miraculously still breathing, albeit with his mouth wide open. His nose was destroyed and Lucien could feel his entire face stinging. 

"Bushman…" He coughed and spat some more blood away. "Please, stop… Let me tell you…"

Mundy pulled him by his collar, his long hair flowing after him. Lucien's body wasn't resisting at all. He was wincing under the pain and couldn't keep both his eyes open. 

"Was anything true?" Mundy asked with a voice as calm as he was out of his mind. 

"O-oui… Argh…" 

"What was true? And I swear if you lie to me, I'll kill you, cut you in pieces and bury all over our four counties, six feet under the desert's ground. Not even the vultures will find you." 

"Everything… Everything I told you as Lulu… Everything was true…" 

Mundy tightened his grip on Lucien's collar and clenched his teeth. 

"Tell me exactly what was true and what was a lie or I swear your sheila won't find you tonight."

Lucien's eyelids completely fell on his eyes.

"Oi! I'm talkin' to you, you wanker!"

No answer. Lucien's body was as limp as it could be between Mundy's fists. 

"Oi!"

The only answer he received was from the infinite and empty desert. Silence. He let Lucien's body rest against the car's bonnet and bent to his mouth and nose. He was breathing with difficulty, but he was still breathing. Mundy had knocked him completely out. 

-- The next day -- 

"Huh…?" 

Lucien opened his eyes in a place he did not recognise. He blinked repeatedly and frowned. He turned his head and saw a green curtain. 

He remembered that curtain. He was at the Doctor's. 

"Mon Dieu…" 

He sat up. 

"Argh?!"

He slammed a hand on his stomach. It ached.

"Qu'est-ce que…?"

[What the…?]

He panted and screwed his eyes shut for the pain to pass. And he realised it wasn't just his stomach. His entire face was in pain. He put a hand on it and felt bandages. 

"Nnh…" 

He sat with his back against the wall. He looked at himself and realised he was wearing an old, washed out, red polo shirt and a brown pair of trousers. Both were one size too big for his slender silhouette.

"You're finally up?" 

Lucien's head twisted fast and he saw M lying on another bed next to his. He was dressed normally, well, not with his eighteenth century costume that is. Lucien looked around Mundy. He saw a book and he noticed the Aussie's shoes were at the bottom of the bed.

"What happened?" Lucien asked. 

"You don't remember?"

"Barely. I remember you beating me up. And then nothing."

"D'you at least remember why I beat you up, or do I need to do it again?"

Lucien growled. 

"You lay a finger on me and I'll-"

"You won't do anythin'...!" Mundy answered as he sat up. "You can't even sit straight, you mongrel. What are you gonna do? Stare at me through the bandage to death? Pfff… Your face is better wrapped up than a mummy's!"

Lucien winced out of pain. The Aussie was right. He wouldn't and couldn't do anything. 

"You hit harder than when we quarrelled at Maurice's." Lucien said.

"Yeah well, part of me wanted to kill you." 

"I am glad it wasn't the entirety of you." 

"It was close." Mundy said. 

"What held you back?" 

"I could ask you the same. I know you can fight. Why didn't you do anything?" 

"Because I deserved it." Lucien answered. He saw his cigarette case and his lighter on the small table next to his bed, and grabbed them. "Cigarette?" 

"Nah."

The Frenchman lit one for himself and started smoking. 

"And you didn't kill me because…?" 

"Because you still didn't tell me." Mundy answered. 

"Tell you what?" 

"What's true and what was a lie." 

"Ah." Lucien took a deep breath. His ribcage was sore somehow. 

"You said that everythin' you told me as Lulu was right." 

"Oui, it is." 

"What else is true?" Mundy asked. 

"Your sharpshooting skills are godly." 

"Yeah, I know that, thanks. I meant what else was a lie and what's the truth."

"Non, I mean it." 

Mundy turned his head to Lucien. 

"I don't need you to tell me I'm an excellent sniper, wanker!"

"I have served in the army, in France. I have seen war. I have seen slaughters and I have seen death. I also have seen sharpshooters, none of them with your skills however."

Mundy sighed. 

"What else is true." He repeated.

"Louis is my second name, my first one also starts with an L. I come from France indeed and everything I have told you about my past is true."

"Your fiancée and kid too?"

Lucien frowned under the bandages. 

"Oui. They… They are the reason Duchemin needs to die."

"Hm." Mundy was watching the Frenchman with great attention when the door to their room opened wide and fast. 

"Ah no! No smoking here!" 

The Doctor entered, snatched the cigarette off of Lucien's very lips and crushed it before tossing it in the bin. 

"Though that does mean that you have woken up… Anything is aching?" The beggar asked.

"A better question would be if anything is not." Lucien answered.

"You got a very decent and thorough beating." The Doctor answered. 

"How bad is my face?" Lucien asked and Mundy rolled up his eyes. 

"Don't worry, I didn't wipe out your mascara, princess…" 

Lucien gave him a black stare. 

"You were lucky as you didn't need any stitches. But healing will take a long time." The Doctor answered.

"How long?"

"At least a week." 

"Merde…" Lucien shook his head. "And how long will I stay on this hospital bed?"

"You could go back home today as far as I'm concerned."

"Ah, good."

"But you will need to change those bandages frequently."

"Fine."

"That gives us a week to set things straight." Mundy answered. "You got a lot of explainin' to do." 

The Doctor fished a box of pills out of his pocket. 

"Take two every six hours, preferably during your meals."

"Merci, Docteur."

[Thanks, Doctor.]

"Hm." He nodded and left the room. 

"So…" Mundy resumed. "What else did you lie about?"

Lucien tried to stand off of his bed but his ribcage and stomach hurt so much that he was bending his back forward and holding his ribs. He felt a hand on his shoulder and raised his head to see Mundy standing next to him.

"Where are you goin'?"

"I need a glass of water to take these pills." 

"Go back to bed." Mundy slipped on his boots and went out of the room. 

When he came back, he saw Lucien sitting on the bed, fiddling with the Aussie's hat. 

"Here," Mundy gave him some water. "And would it kill you to ask before taking my stuff?"

"Well presently, it might." Lucien answered. "But thank you." 

He took his pills and drank some water. After a few seconds, he nodded to Mundy and put the glass next to him. 

"There are things I did not tell you. They are not lies, but things you have misunderstood about me, or you have barely any idea about."

"Like your name?" 

"Oui, amongst other things."

"I don't mind if you don't give me your full name. A name is personal." Mundy answered. "And you said it yourself, it's the first gift your parents give you."

"Indeed."

Silence fell for a while. 

"Listen, M." Lucien started. "Everything I sang and everything I said as Lulu was true. There wasn't a single word of it that I did not mean. And now I regret it. I should not have told you so much about me." 

"Pff…" Mundy chuckled out of nervousness. "Me too, eh. If I'd known it was really you I wouldn't have said half the stuff I did." 

"I…" 

Lucien's hesitation made Mundy raise his eyes to him. The Frenchman was fiddling nervously with Mundy's hat. 

"What?" 

"I know you probably won't believe me but I sincerely apologise. The temptation was too big to lie, to have my own way with you, to feel I had everything in my control as opposed to life just making me eat dirt." Lucien explained. "But I want you to know that I am not proud of it and my intention deep down wasn't to play with you. Non. I just saw an opportunity to lead things the way that I saw fit and I seized it. Had it been anyone else, I would have done exactly the same. Except maybe for one thing…"

"What?" Mundy kicked his boots away and laid on the bed again.

"I wouldn't apologise." Lucien answered, raising his eyes off the worn-out, brown hat, to the Aussie. "I… I behaved like a simpleton and put my pride before the respect that I have grown to have for you."

"Hm."

"Do you accept my apologies?" 

"I don't know, Spook. I mean… We'll see." 

Lucien sighed and with a grunt, he got off his bed, grabbed his cigarette case and lighter, and went to his shoes. He tripped on the leg of the trousers that were too long for him and fell until two strong arms stopped his fall. 

"Oof-! You're heavier than you look…" Mundy helped him back up. 

"Thank you, M." 

"What are you doin'?" 

"I want to go back home." 

"Alright, I'll drive you back." Mundy answered as both got ready. 

"What did you do with my car?" Lucien asked. 

"Don't worry, I know a bloke who's gonna fix it."

"Fix it?" Lucien asked while trying to put on his jacket. Mundy came to help him. 

"Yeah, I beat you up on the bonnet and it got all dented."

"Ah…" Lucien nodded. "I see."

"Don't worry, I let Maurice know too. He knows that bloke, they'll know what to do with the car." 

"Merci." 

[Thanks.]

"De rien." Mundy answered with quite a thick accent.

[You're welcome.]

Lucien looked up at him and put the hat he had been holding on to on the tall Aussie's head. 

"Nah, you can keep it." Mundy took it from his head and dropped it on Lucien's. 

"Really?" 

"Yeah. Just makes it more bearable to look at your ugly mug now." He opened the door for the Frenchman. 

"My mug, as you say, is very comely."

"Shush, you look like a mummy and walk slower than one, c'mon, old man." Mundy took Lucien's arm and put it behind his shoulders. The Frenchman rested part of his weight on Mundy and both walked out. 

They went to the van. 

"Right, where's home?" Mundy asked. 

"The Grand Palace hotel."

"Seriously?"

"Oui, please."

"Christ, can you even get more posh than that…?"

"I think I set the bar quite high." Lucien answered and they exchanged a smile. 

"I'll drop you off at the entrance and then I'll go off."

"Non, please, come inside and please let me offer you a coffee, for your trouble."

"My trouble?"

"Oui, you have taken me to the Doctor's, lent me some of your clothes and you have come to see if I was woken up."

Mundy chuckled. 

"I didn't come and visit, I stayed there the entire time, you idiot."

Lucien's eyebrows jumped. 

"What?! The entire night?"

"Yeah. I didn't want you to die."

"Didn't you?" Lucien teased.

"Not yet." Mundy answered. "First, answers." 

"Ah, oui, I understand."

"And here we are, your majesty the mummy, your hotel." Mundy parked on the open parking lot. 

"Many thanks." Lucien undid his seat belt and turned to Mundy. "Please, I insist."

"What?"

"Come inside with me."

"Mate, it's nice of you but please, your sheila must have died worrying why you didn't come home last night. So go and see her."

"I want you to meet her."

Mundy's eyebrows jumped. 

"What?!"

"I want you to meet Perle." Lucien repeated. 

"Mate-"

"I will not exit this van alone." The Frenchman crossed his arms over his chest and waited on the passenger's seat. 

Mundy sighed. 

"Right then… Let's go and meet your sheila…" 

"Merci." 

[Thanks]

They both exited the van and Mundy helped Lucien walk in the hotel.

#tf2 sniper #tf2 spy #sniperspy #SBT

[aspiestvmusings]

ZEP SPOILER PREDICTION?

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD, SO BEWARE...

BASED ON EPISODE 1x01 - 1x10 + MY PREDICTIONS FOR 1x11 - 1x12

LONG & RANTY POST. NOT SO “POSITIVE” THOUGHTS, SO BEWARE: 

So... I’ve had this “feeling” since the Pilot & I kinda got confirmation for my theory in this weeks episode. And if I combine it with the s1 finale (1x12) episode summary, then it could fit, because “Zoey tries to stop something bad from happening” according to the description. 

Everyone thinks that that’s related to her dad, but... ever since that spoiler came out, I’ve suspected it’s related to someone & something else (even though it is pretty certain her dad will be gone at the end of ep 1x11 or early 1x12). I think that’s a reference to something Simon related instead. 

Zoey’s first “real” interaction with Simon was in the Pilot episode, when she heard him sing “Mad World”. In the latest episode, 1x10 he sang the same song again. And I am predicting that the song MIGHT even be heard the third time during the season...in the finale. (or maybe she’ll just come to realize why she heard him sing that again.. in 1x10)

We’ve seen how Simon has been unable to deal with his grief, to move on, to let go. We’ve seen how it has destroyed him, his relationships... everything. And if we listen to the lyrics (original song by “Tears for Fears”, the extra sad newer version by Gary Jules), and think of Simon’s behaviour (he really is the great pretender”!...as demonstated well in many little scenes in 1x02 & 1x03...for example), I think it’s possible he’s gonna try to go down the same path his dad did. And that’s the “bad thing” Zoey is trying to stop in the s1 finale. 

On this note: I can’t believe that Zoey still hasn’t figured out why Simon was put in her path..at this time. She’s not just supposed to help him, he’s supposed to help her. She’s supposed to learn from him and not make the same mistakes (since she’s not figured that out yet, she’s going down the same path as he is). Simon has been avoiding his grief, and it has made him a mess. He’s not talked with anyone about it..really, he’s not talked about it with his loved ones, and it lead to destroying himself, and his relationships. 

And guess what Zoey has been doing...ever since we met her? She’s avoiding dealing with “her daddy issues”, and it has made her a mess, and ruined many of her relationships (best friends, relatives...). Until she realizes that she’s not supposed to make the same mistakes, and she’s supposed to learn from him, it’s not good. She’s ignored or forgotten (by the next day) all good advice from her friends and family...on this.. and she can’t take it all on her own..she needs to share the grief with people who care about her... to be able to deal...with it all... 

Yet...

                      *************************************************

This weeks episode (1x10) did what I expected, and I know that the show is trying to claim everything Zoey is doing is affected by her grief...and that’s why she’s a mess, and that’s why... all... but I still can’t believe that (even if it’s the “anger” phase of her grief) she still hasn’t figured out that the lyrics of the songs that people sing tell her how she must help them. And she still, to this day, has not helped Simon with his grief. And according to the rules Mo wrote down...that’s “no good” - she must help the person singing...with the “problem” they have. She might’ve not wanted the power & it might not be fair to have to help people...especially at a time when she’s losing her dad... but they established that she must... in order to make all good. 

She can “hear” (thanks to her power) how Simon feels, and yet she hasn’t actively helped him with his grief. And I know the writers are trying to say that it’s because of her own grief (and going through the stages herself), but it has just surprised me how she focuses all her energy on pursuing the engaged (until recently) man...romantically... (obsessively, so), instead of helping him (and instead of focusing on the #1 man in her life..her dad... and I still can’t believe she’s avoided that til now... cause she’s wasted so much precious time... til the very last minute... and she now has so little time left with him...cause she’s been focusing all her energy on trying to repeat her past relationship mistakes... -- and go for the complicated, exhausting for everyone... option,-- ). She’s spent so much energy on obsessing over the engaged (til 4 days ago) man, while claiming she has no time for any romance... (her words & actions don’t match!). 

Her heart song to him in 1x08  also said “didn’t I see you crying?”, so she is (deep down) aware that that’s the emotional state she was him in, and yet they have not had a real, proper, discussion on how to deal with the grief! And hearing him sing the same song again in 1x10 should’ve told her that the man is still “stuck”...still... and that means she didn’t really help him...yet. Which means she must try to help him...again...til it works. (and in helping him she’ll help herself... and learn from his mistakes..and not repeat them..)

Also looking forward to the day when Zoey realizes that the thing that bothers her about Simon is what bothers Max about her: She doesn’t like that Max is pursuing her & yet she is pursuing Simon the same way....at a time when she claims she needs to focus on her dad. She doesn’t like that Simon has no clarity (doesn’t return her feelings... doesn’t want to start anything), but she doesn’t understand that she’s doing the same thing herself...to Max - she has no clarity herself. And if she’s allowed to not like how Simon doesn’t give her an answer & be upset that he doesn’t like her back...then it should be OK for Max to not like how she doesn’t give him/her BFF an answer & be upset that she doesn’t seem to like him back. 

The moment when she realizes tha parallels..is what I'm looking forward to. For her (and some of the viewers) to realize how the things that bother her about Max’s behaviour are parallel how she herself has behaved. (fans claim “Max is pushing Zoey to love him back & going after her...strong”, but what has she done all season? “Zoey has been pushing Simon to love her back & going after him...strong”) The two storylines are exactly the same. And that’s done on purpose on the show. 

She claims she has no time to focus on romance, cause she’s so caught up with her dad & grief, so it’s not the right time to pursue romance, yet she spends much of her screentime actively wishing for & pursuing a romace with Simon. She has the time to go to dinner with him (at a time when I expected her to practically move in with her parents...for the last few weeks), yet she doesn’t take time to actually get her BFF a “congrats on the promotion” gift...when in contrast she gets the “just-broke-up-his-engagement” man a housewarming gift... (she had 4 days to buy that pen/mouse... but she didn’t, but she got the plant for the same night. Same with telling Mo how she’s upset about the Simon news...while not even a mention of Max’s news - move to 6th floor. It’s like they really never were friends...cause she voices no concerns about losing a good programmer & friend...only “worrying” about her office crush...). #WhyAreTheyWritingHerLikeThat  #SheCanGoThroghTheAngerPhaseWithoutBeingExtraRude

To me..that shows just how much she really “cares”. And she might be grieving & a mess..but right now...she does not “deserve” Max...as her BFF (even though she needs her BFF...at this time) Until she’s done processing her grief & done some therapy, and focused on herself... she should do as she says, and focus on her dad, her family, herself. Make her words match her actions. (and yes, this latest ep provided that “turn” ..for her...and all the characters... as the sun will shine again...after the storm... but not before another “storm cloud” passes)

Or...in other news: I LOVED!!! how everyone told their truths to Zoey in this episode. She might be grieving & going through the stages of grief (but so are a lot of people around her....and they don’t create conflicts over this), but that doesn’t make it OK how she sometimes behaves. (Just like Simon grieving does not excuse any of his behaviour...where he was emotionally cheating on his fiancee, and kissing other women while still enaged... etc) So... the scenes where everyone told her the harsh truth...were some of my faves in this episode: Mo, her mom, (even Joan...through looks), Simon, and especially Max!) IMO she really needed to hear all of it! (and more) 

And this makes me sad that I am saying this, but... I wish Max/Zoey wasn’t the endgame...after all this. But it’s a fact that they are. But Max is a much better person than I am. And unlike me (I see the world in black & white only...and while I know it’s very human & all.. I am not a fan of “messy human feelings” -  it’s all just too irrational for my taste), he sees all the colours. And mostly...he loves her..unconditionally, so he’ll “forgive her”. But for me her indecisivness, “1 step forward, 2 steps back” w. Simon (”we’re done, this is over, no more” claims... which she takes back/forgets the very next moment/episode... because... -- she won’t be doing this no more.. but then she finds out his engagement ended...so she’s back obsessing over pursuing him...even though she just made a promise to herself to not do just that --) behaviour, and all that.. cannot be “excused” or “explained” with grief. It hasn’t worked...on screen...for me. But it has allowed some TOP acting from Jane, and Skylar, and John, and Alex...and everyone else. This  cast just keeps being amazing!

But no matter how much I’ll “fangirl” over the S1 finale M/Z moments and possible future M/Z endgame... for me it’s not the payoff... anymore (due to how S1 was written) ..it’s gonna be the unfortunate end result. Some people love TV drama, I just aren’t a fan of such messy drama... I’m simply too rational to get irrational behaviour (what writers & people call “very human” & “this is what grief & hurt does to a person”). I get the intent & get the reasons behind it, but it’s too irrational for me to like it. (cheating is cheating, you can’t take back what you’ve said/done...especially if you make the same mistake again...) #hurtpeoplehurtpeople

I’ve expressed some of these every thoughts in my previous tags and online comments... and now I just have confirmation from the ep that they did really take the exact route I did not ever want the show to take (once is a mistake, twice/three times is a pattern...). But nonetheless... M&Z is endgame. So...my only hope & wish is that there will be a S2, so we would see REALLY work on earning back her BFF (Max’s) trust and friendship. She has to work for it IMO. And she must be compleely honest with him...as she promised...and this now includes telling himall about her grief, “the triangle”, her moments with the engaged/just broken up man... That is the one thing that is a must. 

(And no, Max isn’t that much hurt because she didn’t ask him to stay or petty cause she doesn’t return the feelings, he’s upset cause no-one even came to say “good luck”, and his best friend didn’t even bother to get him the “good luck gift” - to him it’s like confirmation that they don’t care or appreciate him as a co-worker. It’s like his peer reviews... He’s said why he’s upset. And he’s not upset cause she doesn’t return his feelings, cause through her heart song he knows for a fact that she has romantic feelings for him + he noticed how she checked his body out (Mo’s makeover)...and that “she’s his”. He’s upset that even though she has feelings for him, she avoids them & him. And that she’s pursuing the engaged man, making him her second choice & no one wants to be the “other/second (wo)man””. She claims she can’t do more than friendship right now...cause of everything related to her dad & yet... she is pursuing more than friendship with the other guy... so once again she wasn’t honest with him... and that’s gotta hurt cause they’ve been BFFs forever...)

This latest episode, once again, used parallels...lots of them. 

Z: “You should know...what you did yesterday was really rough.”

M: “I was just..taking care of me. It wasnt personal.” 

Z: “When I told you aboout my powers, I also told you I was gonna be 100% honest with you, do you remember that? OK, so here’s the truth: I think it is personal. I think youre mad at me. Youre mad at me for not saying what you wanted to hear. And now youre trying to teach me some kind of a lesson.” 

M: “Oh, is that what you’re think?” 

Z: “That’s what I think. Why else would you take the 6th floor side? You’ve been there wor whoppin 2 days.”

M: “I dont know. Maybe because people actually like me on the 6th Floor. Do you know that Ava has said to me mor ein those 2 days than Joan  has in the last 5 years? Oh and it’s also a huge opportunity for me and my career. have you ever thought about that?” 

Z: “So you’re just gonna leave behind everybody that helped you get there? Is that the idea?” 

M: “See it how you wanna see it.” 

Z: “Nobody down here understands why Ava wanted you in the first place. Just FYI.” #ThisWasLowAndTotallyCruelThingsToSay

M: “Maybe it’s becase I’m a good person.” 

Z: “...or a very selfish one.” 

M: “YOU are calling ME selfish? Look... I have spent far too much time worrying about other peoples happiness more than my own. Especially yours. And I think that its finally time I focus on my own happiness for a change.” 

Once again the use dialogue about one relationship to parallel another relationship. If we change the words a bit & apply it in reverse, we get: 

M: “You should know...what you did yesterday was really rough.” [their 1x07/1x08 conforntation - her revealing she has feelings for him...but then taking back the words & running to another man... while claiming your focus has to be only on your dad]

Z: “I was just..taking care of me. It wasn’t personal.”

M: “When you told me about your powers, you also told me you were gonna be 100% honest with me do you remember that (Think back... have you really been that?)? OK, so here’s the truth: I think it is personal. I think you’re mad at Simon. You’re mad at Simon for not saying what you wanted to hear. And now youre trying to teach me/him some kind of a lesson.”

Z: “Oh, is that what you’re think?”

M: “That’s what I think. Why else would you avoid your best friend & obsess over an engaged man...while claiming you can’t deal with romance at this time when you should focus all your energy on your dad? You’ve known the new guy for a whopping 2+ months...compared to your best friend of 5 years.”

Z: “I dont know...:” 

M: “So you’re just gonna leave behind everybody that helped you get here (ditch your best friend, end your traditional movie nights together, dive into yet another overly complicated-exhausting for everyone-not good relationship with an engaged & grieving man...? You’re avoiding the most important man in our life = your dad, & dealing with your grief, you’re pushing away your best friend, whose always been there for you. And you’re opening up to a stranger instead of your best friend...and saying that’s a positive behaviour. Is that the idea?”

Z: “See it how you wanna see it.”

And Max’s decision in 1x09 & 1x10 was explained by Zoey's speech in 1x09..once again the two storylines are parallels as I already mentioned after last ep: 

Z: “I will never be “the other woman”. Nonetheless..I care about you. A lot. We have a chemistry & a bond that’s undeniable. And I guess I was hoping that after the kiss you’d have some clarity... about all of it. Clarity ... you still don’t have. And maybe never will. So... I have to make a change.... instead of just sitting around, and waiting...and hoping for something to happen...So..this is me...saying to you...officially... I can’t, and I won’t do this anymore. 

If we change the words a bit & apply that to M/Z, we get  why Max made his decision & what he’s really saying to her: 

M: “I will never be “the second choice (when youre my first...but clearly I am only 2nd choice for you)”. Nonetheless..I care about you. A lot. We have a chemistry & a bond that’s undeniable. And I guess I was hoping that after the heart song you’d have some clarity... about all of it. Clarity ... you still don’t have. And maybe never will. So... I have to make a change [move to 6th floor, putting distance between us].... instead of just sitting around, and waiting...and hoping for something to happen...that might never happen. So..this is me...saying to you...officially... I can’t, and I won’t do this anymore.”    

She is a complete mess & she still doesn’t realize the parallels. How what bothers her about Max’s behaviour (towards her) is exactly what bothers Max about her behaviour. If she feels she “has the right” to be upset with Simon over these things (no clarity, not telling her he likes her back), then she has to realize that her BFF also “has the right” to be upset with her...over the same things. And she keep projecting...her own fears and denial..into others. And I get what the writers wanted to say, but for me personally... it’s made me dislike the character, and the writing, and all, because I don’t really “understand” why she/writers would “excuse” it all with her grief making her “act crazy”. She keeps avoiding her best friend & her dad’s situation.

We know that it’s because with Max she’s got a lot to lose (the connection is deeper, there’s more to lose), while with Simon it feels “easy” and theres nothing to lose, cause they don’t have that deep connection. Just grief bond....which she keeps mixing with something other. And she doesn’t listen to reason from her friends: Mo, Max... and they can’t help her get through this all if she won’t let them in... 

And in the next eps...when THE DAY she’s been most scared of..arrives (her dad), shes gonna need her best friend, Max. And he’ll need her, cause he was close to Mitch, too. So they’re both gonna acively grieve. But before that they needed/need to “have hard conversations” and be completely honest with each other. The 1x10 “fight” was the turning point, now they just need time to figure things out...separately (as individuals, not as a duo) and realize...things. 

#ZEP #SPOILER #ZEPspoilers #ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST #ZOEYS EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST #ITS NEVER A GOOD SIGN WHEN THE WRITING MAKES ME DISLIKE THE MAIN CHARACTER ON A TV SHOW #BUT THIS SHOWRUNNER HAS DONE THAT...IN JUST 10 EPISODES.

[bluewatsons]

Claudia Roth Pierpont, A Raised Voice: How Nina Simone turned the movement into music, The New Yorker (August 4, 2014)

Simone with James Baldwin in the early sixties. Her intelligence and restless force attracted African-American culture’s finest minds. Photograph courtesy New York Public Library

“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two worlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.

A lot of black women have been openly angry these days over a new movie about Simone’s life, and it hasn’t even been released. The issue is color, and what it meant to Simone to be not only categorically African-American but specifically African in her features and her very dark skin. Is it possible to separate Simone’s physical characteristics, and what they cost her in this country, from the woman she became? Can she be played by an actress with less distinctively African features, or a lighter skin tone? Should she be played by such an actress? The casting of Zoe Saldana, a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along European lines, has caused these questions—rarely phrased as questions—to dog the production of “Nina,” from the moment Saldana’s casting was announced to the completed film’s début, at Cannes, in May, at a screening confined to possible distributors. No reviewers have seen it. The film’s director, Cynthia Mort, has been stalwart in her defense of Saldana’s rightness for the role, citing not only the obvious relevance of acting skills but Simone’s inclusion of a range of colors among her own “Four Women”—which is a fair point. None of the women in Simone’s most personal and searing song escape the damage and degradation accorded to their race.

Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation. At Motown, in the early sixties, the wildly popular performers of a stream of crossover hits became models of black achievement but had virtually no contact with the movement at all.

Simone herself had been hesitant at first. Known for her sophisticated pianism, her imperious attitude, and her velvety rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” (which, like Billie Holiday before her, she sang without the demeaningly ungrammatical “s” on “loves”), she had arrived in New York in late 1958, establishing her reputation not in Harlem but in the clubs of hip and relatively interracial Greenwich Village. Her repertoire of jazz and folk and show tunes, often played with a classical touch, made her impossible to classify. In these early years, she performed African songs but also Hebrew songs, and wove a Bach fugue through a rapid-fire version of “Love Me or Leave Me.” She tossed off the thirties bauble “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with airy insouciance, and wrung the heart out of the lullaby “Brown Baby”—newly written by Oscar Brown, Jr., about a family’s hopes for a child born into a better racial order—erupting in a hair-raising wail on the word “freedom,” as though registering all the pain over all the years during which it was denied. For a while, “Brown Baby” was as close to a protest song as Simone got. She believed it was enough.

And then her friend Lorraine Hansberry set her straight. It speaks to Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” A milestone in Simone’s career was a solo concert at Carnegie Hall—a happy chance to show off her pianism—on April 12, 1963, which happened also to be the day that Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, and locked up in the local jail. The discrepancy between the events was pointed out by Hansberry, who telephoned Simone after the concert, although not to offer praise.

Two months later, Simone played a benefit for the N.A.A.C.P. In early August, she sang “Brown Baby” before a crowd gathered in the football stadium of a black college outside Birmingham—the first integrated concert ever given in the area—while guards with guns and dogs prowled the field. But Hansberry only started a process that events in America quickly accelerated. Simone watched the March on Washington, later that August, on television, while she was preparing for a club date. She was still rehearsing when, on September 15th, news came of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young African-American girls who had just got out of Bible class. Simone’s first impulsive act, she recalled, was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people.”

This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists. At the Washington march, John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was forced to cut the word “revolution” from his speech and to omit the threat that, absent immediate progress, the marchers would go through the South “the way Sherman did” and “burn Jim Crow to the ground.” James Baldwin, in a televised discussion after the bombing, noted that, throughout American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” But the center held. Simone’s husband, a smart businessman, told her to forget the gun and put her rage into her music.

It took her an hour to write “Mississippi Goddam.” A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words—“Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest”—that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: “And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (“Too damn lazy!”), government promises (“Desegregation / Mass participation”), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to “Go slow,” a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, “Too slow!” It wasn’t “We Shall Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: “Oh but this whole country is full of lies,” she sang. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”

She introduced the song in a set at the Village Gate a few days later. And she sang it at a very different concert at Carnegie Hall, in March, 1964—brazenly flinging “You’re all gonna die” at a mostly white audience—along with other protest songs she had taken a hand in writing, including the defiantly jazzy ditty “Old Jim Crow.” She also performed a quietly haunting song titled “Images,” about a black woman’s inability to see her own beauty (“She thinks her brown body has no glory”)—a wistful predecessor to “Four Women” that she had composed to words by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. At the time, Simone herself was still wearing her hair in a harshly straightened fifties-style bob—sometimes the small personal freedoms are harder to speak up for than the larger political ones—and, clearly, it wasn’t time yet for such specifically female injuries to take their place in the racial picture. “Mississippi Goddam” was the song of the moment: bold and urgent and easy to sing, it was adopted by embattled protesters in the cursed state itself just months after Simone’s concert, during what they called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, and what President Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.”

There was no looking back by the time she performed the song outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965, when some three thousand marchers were making their way along the fifty-four-mile route from Selma; two weeks earlier, protesters making the same attempt had been driven back by state troopers with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The triumphant concert, on the fourth night of the march, was organized by the indefatigable Belafonte, at the request of King, and took place on a makeshift stage built atop stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes, and in front of an audience that had swelled with twenty-five thousand additional people, drawn either by the cause or by a lineup of stars that ranged from Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to Joan Baez. Simone, accompanied only by her longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, drew cheers on the interpolated line “Selma made me lose my rest.” In the course of events that night, she was introduced to King, and Schackman remembered that she stuck her hand out and warned him, “I’m not nonviolent!” It was only when King replied, gently, “Not to worry, sister,” that she calmed down.

Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.

She recalled that racial anger first arose in her when she was eleven. Born Eunice Waymon, in 1933, she was the sixth of eight children of John and Kate Waymon, who were descendants of slaves and pillars of the small black community of Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother was a Methodist preacher, a severely religious woman who made extra money by cleaning house for a white Tryon family; her father, who had started off as an entertainer, worked at whatever the circumstances required. Even during the Depression, the Waymons made a good home. Simone’s earliest memories were of her mother singing hymns, and both the house and the church were so filled with music that no one noticed little Eunice climbing up to the organ bench until, at the age of two and a half, she played “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” straight through.

Yet as rare as the little girl’s musical gifts is the way that, in that time and place, those gifts were encouraged. She began playing for her mother’s sermons before her feet could reach the pedals, and was soon accompanying the church choir and Sunday services. She especially enjoyed playing for visiting revivalists, because of the raptures she discovered that she could loose in an audience with music. At the other end of the spectrum, she was five years old when the woman for whom her mother cleaned house offered to pay for lessons with a local piano teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich. The British-born Miz Mazzy, as Eunice called her—and also, later on, “my white momma”—inspired her love of Bach and her plans to become a great and famous classical pianist. Giving a recital in the local library, at eleven, Eunice saw her parents being removed from their front-row seats to make room for a white couple. She had been schooled by Miz Mazzy in proper deportment, but she nevertheless stood up and announced that if people wanted to hear her play they’d better let her parents sit back down in the front row. There were some laughs, but her parents were returned to their seats. The next day, she remembered, she felt “as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But, the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

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Her skin was very black, and she was made fully aware of that, along with the fact that her nose was too large. The aesthetics of race—and the loathing and self-loathing inflicted on those who vary from accepted standards of beauty—is one of the most pervasive aspects of racism, yet it is not often discussed. The standards have been enforced by blacks as well as by whites. Even Harry Belafonte wrote, in his memoir, about his mother’s well-intentioned counsel to “marry a woman with good hair,” and he added, in unnecessary clarification, “Good hair meant straight hair.” (Reader, he married her.) But Nina Simone, strong and fierce and proud Nina Simone? “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in a note to herself, not during her adolescence but in the years when she was already a successful performer. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”

Countering the charge of physical inferiority, in her youth, was the talent that her mother assured her was God-given. Music was her salvation, her identity. Thanks to a fund established by a pair of generous white patrons in Tryon, she was sent to board at a private high school—she practiced piano five hours a day, and graduated valedictorian—and then to a summer program at Juilliard, all with the unwavering aim of getting into the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, where admission was terrifically competitive but tuition was free. Her destiny seemed so assured that her parents moved to Philadelphia before she took the Curtis exam. The fact that she was rejected, and believed that this was because of her race, was a source of unending bitterness. It was also a turning point. In the summer of 1954, in need of money, Eunice Waymon took a job playing cocktail piano in an Atlantic City dive—the owner demanded that she also sing—and, hoping to keep the news of this unholy employment from her mother, turned herself into Nina Simone, feeling every right to the anger that Nina Simone displayed forever after.

At times, it seemed that she could outdistance her feelings. In 1961, after a brief marriage to a white hanger-on at the Atlantic City club, she married Stroud, a tough police detective on the Harlem beat whom she initially sized up as “a light-skinned man,” “well built,” and “very sure of himself.” The following year, she gave birth to a daughter, Lisa Celeste, and Stroud left his job to manage Simone’s career; they lived in a large house in the leafy Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon, complete with a gardener and a maid. Although she complained of working too hard and touring too much—of being desperately exhausted—her life was not the stuff of the blues. And then, before a concert in early 1967, Stroud found her in her dressing room putting makeup in her hair. She didn’t know who he was; she didn’t quite know who she was. She later remembered that she had been trying to get her hair to match her skin: “I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always skin—involved in there somewhere.”

The full medical facts of Simone’s mental illness became public only after her death, in 2003, thanks to two British fan-club founders and friends of Simone’s, Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan, whose account of the singer’s career was aptly titled, after one of Simone’s songs, “Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out” (2004). Subsequent biographies—the warmly overdramatizing “Nina Simone,” by David Brun-Lambert (2009), and the coolly meticulous “Princess Noire,” by Nadine Cohodas (2010)—have filled in terrible details of depression and violence and long-sought but uncertain diagnoses: “bipolar disorder” appears to be the best contemporary explanation. Excerpts from Simone’s diaries and letters of the nineteen-sixties, published by Joe Hagan (who got them from Andrew Stroud) in The Believer, in 2010, added the news that Simone’s personal hell was compounded by regular beatings from Stroud. The marriage dissolved in 1970, but it was many more years before she received any helpful medication.

All the more remarkable, then, the strength that Simone projected through the sixties. As the decade wore on, she began to favor bright African gowns and toweringly braided African hair styles; she became the High Priestess of Soul, and though the title was no more than a record company’s P.R. gambit—Aretha Franklin was soon crowned the Queen of Soul—she bore it with conviction. It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that her songs were mostly about civil rights. Stroud, with his eye on the bottom line, was always there to keep her from going too far in that direction. In concert, she even pulled back on “Mississippi Goddam,” singing “We’re all gonna die, and die like flies” in place of the gleefully threatening “You’re all gonna die . . .” Although she did record the classic anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” in 1965, and she could give the most unexpected songs an edge of racial protest (listen to her harrowing version of the Brecht-Weill “Pirate Jenny”), she had a vast and often surprising musical appetite. By the late sixties, she was so afraid of falling behind the times that she expanded her repertory to include Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and, covering all bases, the Bee Gees. One of her biggest hits of the era was the joyously innocuous “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life,” from the musical “Hair”—which, in her hands, became a classic freedom song.

But womanly strength was in everything she sang: in the cavernous depths of her voice—some people think Simone sounds like a man—in her intensity, her drama, her determination. It’s there in the crazy love song “I Put a Spell on You,” in which she recasts the crippling needs of love (“Because you’re mine!”) into an undeniable command. It’s there in the ten-minute gospel tour de force “Sinnerman,” when she cries out “Power!” like a Southern preacher and her musicians shout back “Power to the Lord!,” and especially when she takes the disapproving voice of the Lord upon herself: “Where were you, when you oughta been praying?” If you’d never before thought of the Lord as a black woman, you did now.

The civil-rights songs were nevertheless what she called “the important ones.” And the movement is where she gained her strength. It’s also where her private anger took on public dimensions, in the years when patience gave way entirely and the anger in many black communities could no longer be tamped down. Onstage in Detroit, on August 13, 1967—two weeks after a five-day riot had left forty-three people dead, hundreds injured, and the city in ruins—Simone, singing “Just in Time,” added a message to the crowd: “Detroit, you did it. . . . I love you, Detroit—you did it!” She was met with roars of approval, which one Detroit critic said he presumed had come from “the arsonists, looters and snipers in the audience.” Another critic, however, wrote that her show let white people know what they had to learn, and learn fast. Was she the voice of national tragedy or of the next American revolution?

And then King was shot, on April 4, 1968. Sections of Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and more than a hundred smaller cities went berserk. Despite her rhetoric, Simone was profoundly shaken, and her views of what might be accomplished in this country only grew more bleak. At an outdoor concert in Harlem, the following summer—it’s available on YouTube—she went for broke.

Majestically bedecked à l’africaine, she opened with “Four Women,” singing now before a crowd where an Afro was the norm. After several other stirring, politically focussed songs—“Revolution,” “Backlash Blues”—she closed with something so new that she had not had time to learn it, a poem by David Nelson, who was then part of a group called the Last Poets and is now among the revered begetters of rap. She read the words from a sheet of paper, moving across the stage and repeatedly exhorting the crowd to answer the question “Are you ready, black people? . . . Are you ready to do what is necessary?” The crowd responded to this rather vague injunction with a mild cheer, prompted by the bongos behind her and the demand in her voice. And then: “Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” Now a bigger, if somewhat incongruous, cheer rose from the smiling crowd filled with little kids dancing to the rhythm on a sunny afternoon. It had been five years since the Harlem riot of 1964, the granddaddy of sixties riots; New York had largely escaped the ruinations of both 1967 and 1968. “Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?” she cried. “Are you ready to build black things?”

Despite her best efforts, Simone failed to incite a riot in Harlem that day in 1969. The crowd received the poem as it had received her songs: with noisy affirmation, but merely as part of a performance. People applauded and went on their way. There are many possible reasons: no brutal incident of the kind that frequently set off riots, massive weariness, the knowledge of people elsewhere trapped in riot-devastated cities, maybe even hope. Simone had her unlikeliest hit that year with a simple hymn of promise, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” based on the title of a play that had been put together from Lorraine Hansberry’s uncollected writings. Hansberry, who died in 1965, had used the phrase in a speech to a group of prize-winning black students, and Simone asked a fellow-musician, Weldon Irvine, to come up with lyrics that “will make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever.” Indeed, it is a children’s song (or it was, until Aretha took it over). Simone’s most moving performance may have been on “Sesame Street,” where she sat on the set’s tenement steps wearing an African gown and lip-synched her recording to four enchanting if slightly mystified black children, who raised their arms in victory toward the end.

It was not a victory she could believe in or a mood she could sustain. By the end of the sixties, both Simone’s career and her marriage were in serious trouble. Pop-rock did not really suit her, and the jazz and folk markets had radically shrunk; the concert stage still assured her income and her stature. And if the collapse of her marriage was in some ways a liberation she was also now without the person who had managed her finances and her schedule, and who had kept her calm before she went onstage (by forbidding her alcohol, among other means), and got her offstage quickly when the calm failed. She was left to govern herself in a world that suddenly had no rules and, just as frightening, was emptied of its larger, steadying purpose. “Andy was gone and the movement had walked out on me too,” she wrote, “leaving me like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.”

Looking back on the historic protests and legislative victories of the sixties, one may find it easy to assume a course of inevitable if often halting racial progress, yet this was anything but apparent as the decade closed. When, in 1970, James Baldwin set out to write about “the life and death of what we call the Civil Rights movement,” its failure seemed to him beyond contention. As for the black leaders who had “walked out” on Simone, they were in cemeteries (Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, King, Fred Hampton), in jail (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale), or in Africa (Stokely Carmichael), or else had “run for cover,” as she put it, “in community or academic programmes.” White liberals had diverted their efforts to Vietnam; this was now the war being fought on televisions in living rooms every night. According to Simone, “The days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever.”

She left the country in 1974. Travelling to Liberia with her twelve-year-old daughter, she stayed for two years, during which she performed hardly at all. She left Liberia for Switzerland in order to put her daughter in school there. Eventually, she moved to France, alone. It seems to have been only the recurrent need for money that spurred her to perform again in the United States, although she took great pride in an honorary doctorate that she received from Amherst, in 1977, and insisted ever after on being called “Doctor Nina Simone.” Meanwhile, her concerts tended increasingly toward disaster. As she now sang in “Mississippi Goddam,” “the whole damn world’s made me lose my rest.”

The remainder of her life, some twenty-five years, is a tale of escalating misery. At the worst, she was found wandering naked in a hotel corridor brandishing a knife; she set her house in France on fire, and once, also in France, she shot a teen-age boy (in the leg, but that may have been poor aim) in a neighbor’s back yard for making too much noise—and for answering her complaints with what she understood as racial insults. Yet the ups of her life could be almost as vertiginous as the downs. In 1987, just a year after she was sent to a hospital in a straitjacket, her charmingly upbeat 1959 recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was chosen by Chanel for its international television ad campaign. Rereleased, the record went gold in France and platinum in England. In 1991, she sold out the Olympia, in Paris, for almost a week.

She toured widely during her final years. In Seattle, in the summer of 2001, she worked a tirade against George W. Bush into “Mississippi Goddam,” and encouraged the audience to “go and do something about that man.” She was already suffering from breast cancer, but it wasn’t the worst illness she had known. She was seen as a relic of the civil-rights era, and on occasion she even led the audience in a wistful sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” although she did not believe her country had overcome nearly enough. Once she became too sick to perform, she did not return to what she called “the United Snakes of America.” She died in France, in April, 2003; her ashes were scattered in several African countries. The most indelible image of her near the end is as a stooped old lady reacting to the enthusiastic cheers that greeted her with a raised, closed-fisted Black Power salute.

Thirty-four years after Simone released “Young, Gifted and Black,” Jay Z reused the title for a song that describes the fate of many of those gifted children—“Hear all the screams from the ghetto all the teens ducking metal”—in twenty-first-century America. The rap connection with Simone is hardly surprising, since rap is where black anger now openly resides. Simone disliked the rap she knew, however, in part for displacing so much anger onto women—or, as she put it, for “letting people believe that women are second class, and calling them bitches and stuff like that.” Back in 1996, Lauryn Hill rapped an anything-you-can-do retort to a male counterpart, “So while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone / And defecatin’ on your microphone,” but no one has really taken up the challenge of Simone’s example. There was a minor uproar last year over Kanye West’s sampling of phrases from Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” (with her voice speeded up to an unrecognizable tinniness) in “Blood on the Leaves,” in which Simone’s evocation of lynched black bodies is juxtaposed with West’s personal concerns about “second string bitches,” cocaine, and the cost of paying off a baby mama versus a new Mercedes. Some people have seen a social statement here, but one can’t help recalling Simone’s broader reaction to rap: “Hell, Martin and Malcolm would turn in their graves if they heard some of this crazy shit.”

As for jazz, Simone was largely excluded from the history books for decades. Will Friedwald’s seminal “Jazz Singing,” of 1990, mentioned her only in passing, as “off-putting and uncommunicative” and as the center of a cult “that only her faithful understand.” But Simone’s eclecticism has slowly widened the very definition of jazz singing. And, ever since Presidential candidate Obama listed her version of “Sinnerman” as one of his ten favorite songs of all time, in 2008, the cult has gone mainstream. There’s now a burgeoning field of what may be called Simone studies—Ruth Feldstein’s “How It Feels to Be Free” and Richard Elliott’s “Nina Simone” offer two highly intelligent examples—and Friedwald’s even more authoritative volume of 2010, “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” includes a lengthy entry on Simone that pronounces her “more important than anyone” in her influence on twenty-first-century jazz singing.

Last year, two Broadway shows depicted Simone as an inspiration for a couple of unexpected figures: in “A Night with Janis Joplin,” she helped to provide her white soul sister with the gift of fire, and, even stranger, in the crude but enthusiastic “Soul Doctor”—which reopens Off Broadway this winter—she was the force behind the “rock-and-roll rabbi” Shlomo Carlebach. Nutty as it seemed onstage, Simone’s acquaintance with the rabbi appears to have some basis in fact, and helps to explain the Hebrew songs she performed at the Village Gate (where he also performed) in the early sixties. While it may be a show-biz exaggeration to suggest that the rabbi and the jazz singer had an affair—the show featured an Act I curtain clinch that, on the night I saw it, had its largely Orthodox audience literally gasping—the point was the universality of Simone’s message about persecution, the search for justice, and the power of music.

Back in 1979, at a concert in Philadelphia, Simone followed a performance of “Four Women” by scolding the black women in the audience about their changes in style: “You used to be talking about being natural and wearing natural hair styles. Now you’re straightening your hair, rouging your cheeks and dressing out of Vogue.” In 2009, the comedian Chris Rock made a documentary titled “Good Hair” because, he explained, his young daughter had come to him with the question “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” For an African-American child, nothing had changed since Harry Belafonte’s mother’s advice, more than half a century earlier. (According to one contented businessman in Rock’s film, African-Americans—twelve per cent of the population—buy eighty per cent of the hair products in this country.) As for skin tone, the cosmetic companies have been expanding their range ever since Iman established a line of darker foundations, in 1994, although in March, 2014, a former beauty director of Essence, Aretha Busby, complained to the Times,“The companies tend to stop at Kerry Washington. I’d love to see brands go two or three shades darker.”

The question of skin tone and hair and their meaning for African-American women exploded on the Internet with the announcement of the casting of Saldana in the Hollywood bio-pic about Simone. When the idea for such a film was initially floated, in the early nineties, Simone herself gave the nod to being played by Whoopi Goldberg. When, in 2010, the present film was announced in the Hollywood Reporter, Mary J. Blige—the reigning Queen of Hip-Hop Soul—was announced for the lead. Once Blige was replaced with Saldana, however, a woman whose skin tone is more than two or three shades lighter than Simone’s, the cries for boycotting the film on the basis of misrepresentation—on the basis of insult—were instantaneous. Why not cast Viola Davis? Or Jennifer Hudson? Production photographs showing Saldana on the set with an artificially broadened nose, an Afro wig, and—inevitably, but most unfortunately—dark makeup that is all too easily confoundable with blackface rendered any hope of calm discussion futile. It’s been suggested that the filmmakers might as well have cast Tyler Perry in full “Madea” drag.

Simone’s daughter has come out against the film because its story focusses on an invented love affair as much as for the casting of Saldana, although she is quick to point out how much her mother’s appearance shaped her life. (Lisa once told an interviewer that her mother would sometimes “traumatize” her because she is light-skinned—“and I’d remind her that she had chosen my father, I didn’t.”) The fight over the film ultimately extended to a lawsuit filed by the director, Cynthia Mort, against the British production company, Ealing Studios Enterprises, on the very eve of the screening at Cannes. Since then, though, the suit has been dismissed, so “Nina” may yet show up in a theatre near you. And Saldana may give a compelling performance—may well prove that she can play not only women who are sci-fi blue (as in “Avatar”) or green (as in “Guardians of the Galaxy”) but real-life black. Still, there is no escaping the fact that her casting represents exactly the sort of prejudice that Simone was always up against. “I was never on the cover of Ebony or Jet,” Simone told an interviewer, in 1980. “They want white-looking women like Diana Ross—light and bright.” Or, as Marc Lamont Hill writes in Ebony today, “There is no greater evidence of how tragic things are for dark-skinned women in Hollywood than the fact that they can’t even get hired to play dark-skinned women.” Well beyond Hollywood, these outworn habits of taste reverberate down the generations, infecting all of us.

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Simone’s favorite performer in her later years was Michael Jackson. She brought cassettes of his albums with her everywhere, and recalled having met him on a plane when he was a little boy, and telling him, “Don’t let them change you. You’re black and you’re beautiful.” She anguished over his evident failure to believe what she’d said: the facial surgeries, the mysterious lightening of his skin, the fatality of believing, instead, what the culture had told him, and wanting to be white. Simone appeared onstage with him just once, amid a huge cast of performers gathered for Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday, in Johannesburg, in the summer of 1998. She was sixty-five years old, and photographs of the event show her standing between Mandela and Jackson, overweight yet glamorously done up, her hair piled in braids and her strapless white blouse a contrast to the African costumes of the chorus all around. But she was also very frail. In one photograph, Jackson—in his glittering trademark military-style jacket, hat, and shades—holds her left hand in both his hands, in a gesture of affection. But in another shot he has put one steadying arm around her, and she is grasping his hand for support. Few people seem aware of what is happening. The stage remains a swirl of laughter and song, a joyous African celebration. And at its center the two Americans stand with hands clasped tight—one hand notably dark, the other notably fair—as though trying to help each other along a hard and endless road.

#nina simone #greats #performing artists #civil rights #embodiment #culture #the black experience #art #music #self-expression #self-image #civil rights movement

[everlastingdreams]

Jaskier x Reader : The Green Eyed Monster   chapter 1/3

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Notes: First of all ^ not my gif. Decided to break this story up in 3 longer chapters instead of 5. It will flow better that way. Leave a like or a comment if you liked it :) Or even a holy reblog lol Oh and let me know if you want to be added to the taglist for this story.

Summary:  You meet Geralt and Jaskier while you were after the same monster for coin. Soon you find yourself falling for the bard but he seems to be oblivious to that. You have killed many monsters to survive. One monster seems to be too strong to beat. The Green Eyed Monster.

Chapters:   1/3

Word count:  2359 words (in this chapter)

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They had made it sounds so easy. One little monster had attacked a child recently and you had to track it down. Kill it and get paid, quick and easy. It's home was in a cave and even though you tried to sneak up on it, it turned out to have good hearing. Really good. The monster, who wasn't actually little, swung it's scaled arm backwards. Knocking you to the ground with force. You scrambled back up on your feet again just as it turned and charged towards you. You grabbed your sword from the ground and spun as you stepped out of it's way. The sword left a deep wound in it's side. It growled and lashed it's clawed paws at you. You ducked away but it was still able to strike your arm. Taking a step back you tried to figure out it's weak spot, the scales made it look like there wasn't one. You grabbed a dagger in your other hand and charged at the monster. Using your sword to block it's close attack, you dragged the dagger along the only part with less scales. The front of his neck.

Blood splattered around, covering you in the stuff within the blink of an eye. It's sunk to it's knees before falling over. You stayed alert until you were sure the monster was dead.

You took a moment to catch your breath whilst trying to wipe the yellowish colored blood from your face.

Someone gasping pulled your attention and you quickly turned to where the sound came from.

Two men stood not far from you the one you could identify easily by his looks as Geralt Of Rivia, was looking at the dead creature on the ground. The other, unknown to you, was staring at you.

His mouth was slightly agape and you turned your sword in your hand, always expecting trouble.

“Absolutely stunning..” he breathed out loudly and it made Geralt look up at him like he was insane.

“What are you talking about ?” his gruff voice pulled the man's attention away from you.

The man looked at the witcher before looking down at the creature “Wha-” his eyes darted between you and Geralt “No-no- I don't mean that thing I meant HER!” he awkwardly responded.

Now they both looked at you, covered in the monster's blood, making your hair stick to your face. Geralt looked back to the man, who had once again started to stare at you as if you weren't covered in blood, torn armor and clothes. He shook his head and walked towards you, making the man snap out of his odd trance.

You raised your sword at him “State your intent, Witcher.”

He stopped, not even looking at the sword “Came here to kill the monster. Looks like you took care of that.” You eyed him suspiciously, who could you trust in this world ? Many had stabbed you in the back. They could kill you and collect the coin for killing the monster themselves.

The man leaned from behind the witcher as if he was his shield “Hello fair maiden..” he stepped from behind the witcher, his eyes darting between the sword and you “ Please, allow me to introduce myself.”

He tried to bow put thought otherwise as you followed his every move with your sword. The witcher groaned at the awkward display.

The man let out a nervous chuckle before “My name is Julian Alfred Pankratz, but please call me Jaskier. And this is my friend Geralt Of Rivia. You may have heard of us.”

“He's not my friend. He's a bard that keeps pestering me.” Geralt corrected him.

Panic flashed on Jaskier's face “Perhaps now is not the time for this discussion again.” he nodded his head towards the sword.

“You're a bard... hunting monsters ?” the combination was odd, to say the least.

His attention snapped back to you and he flashed you a bright smile “Oh, well.. actually he-” he nods to Geralt, not looking away from you “-is the one doing the hunting part. The adventures we experience makes for great inspiration. Have you heard of the song Toss A Coin To Your Witcher ? I wrote that. It has become quite popular, I could sing it for you if you wis-” he rambled on and you started to lower your sword. The more he spoke, the less of a threat these men appeared to you.

“Jaskier !” Geralt snapped at his rambling companion.

Jaskier fell silent, but only for a moment.

Geralt was about to speak to you but the bard interupted him.

“Would you be so kind as to tell us your name, Miss ?” he stood nervously and the witcher looked like he wanted to throw him of a cliff.

You tucked your sword back behind your back and it instantly made the men relax. Enough proof for you that they didn't mean you harm. Pondering the thought for a moment before you held out your hand “My name is y/n. Pleasure to meet fellow hunters..and bards who still have manners.”

Jaskier eagerly took hold of your hand and to your suprise he bend down as to kiss your hand before noticing that there was also blood on your hands. He settled for a handshake and then didn't let go of your hand until Geralt cleared his throat. A smile formed on your face at the action. You weren't used to meeting people like the socially awkward bard, he was quite endearing. You held out your hand to Geralt next, he looked at you as if to figure out if your trustworthy. Then he shook your hand “Nice to meet you, y/n.”.

“A beautiful name, fit for a beauty.” Jaskier chimned in, a big smile still plastered on his face.

He was so openly flirting with you that you didn't know how to react.

You laughed nervously “So uhm.. this will not sound good...” you started a little embarrassed “Do you guys happen to know how to get out of this place again ?”

The two men looked at eachother, Jaskier shooting Geralt a pleading look for reasons you didn't understand yet.

Geralt nodded “Yes. Follow us.”

And you did follow them.

Actually you got quite attached to the witcher and his charming bard.

You had followed them for a while now, helping out different towns with problems. Sharing the coins you earned between the three of you. Soon you also met Yennefer, and were suprised at how well you two got along and you were quick to notice how it was the opposite with Jaskier. Yennefer was very open of her dislike of him.

After helping out another person you all decided to go and relax at the local bar before returning to the Town's Inn for the night.

The bar was rather small, the fireplace warmed it without much trouble. The lit candles placed on the tables gave the bar an almost cozy appearance, only failing to be so considering the bar was full of people. A lot of them drunk, some even managed to focus on a game of gwent. Others enjoying their drinks in silence, others loud enough for both. Some occasionaly bumping into the chair you were sitting on, quickly apologizing once they saw the small dagger at your hip.

The first notes played and the bar became a little quieter as the people listened to the sound of the lute trying it's hardest to become louder then the crowd. Just like it's owner.

A smile crept on your face as you watched him start to sing. You quickly glanced over at Geralt, who was standing at the other end of the bar with Yennefer. Right on time to see him close his eyes and muttering something to himself. You contained your laughter as you saw his reaction to Jaskier starting to sing. Some things never change.

Some things, but other things do..

You watched Jaskier as he put his heart and soul into his music, he pranced around the bar as he sang. Often almost bumping into someone as he did. Some paid him no attention, but you couldn't help but stare as he moved around the room. Watching him as he moved closer to the table you were sitting at. You were so enthralled by the passion he put in his music that it distracted you from what the lyrics were. He turned and stopped for only a moment as he sang

“Share a drink with a lady.

 Delight in their company.

 For who can resist,

When all they wish is to be kissed.”

he made a little bow and winked to you as he sang the lyrics, as if he was aiming them at you.

Or maybe you wished those were really aimed at you. He walked past your table and made his way through the crowd still playing the lute effordlessly.

Soon the song ended, and those who were not too busy holding their drinks clapped. You clapped as well as he gave the audience a small bow. Then he spotted you again in the crowd and bowed dramatically and a laugh escaped you when you saw him do it. You shook your head, trying to contain the smile on your face. That's what you liked about him. How he was able to charm a crowd yet be such a lovable goof at the same time. He was so different from the other men you had met, he wasn't a warrior or a hunter. A lover, not a fighter. The opposite of you in more ways then one, and it was fascinating to you.

Then the smile disappeared from your face as you saw three young women form a small crowd around him, drawing all his attention away from you. He of course was happy with the attention he was recieving from the women who praised his music and him. You snapped your eyes away from it all and put your attention on the drink in front of you. Even though you were not thirsty, you took a big swig from the tankard and swallowed it in one go.

You looked at Jaskier from the corner of your eye and one of the women had her hands on his left upper arm. The frustration you felt was mostly aimed at yourself.

Why couldn't you just tell him ?

You feared risking your friendship, risk things getting awkward. And with Jaskier, it would get awfully awkward. You didn't want to stare at them, but even when you tried to focus on your tankard or anything else, your eyes still drifted to him.

Yennefer stood next to Gerald, watching the scene unfold before her eyes. She didn't need magic to see what was going on. She had seen the way you acted around Jaskier before. The way you stared and how your smile only grew bigger when the bard was near you.

"Poor thing, if falling for the bard wasn't worse enough, now she has to see that happen." Yennefer remarks and Geralt looks at her confused. She scoffs at his asking gaze "Oh, you are as oblivious as he is." She discreetly nods in your direction, Geralt follows her gaze and he finally understands that Yennefer is talking about you.

"She likes him." the corner of her lips turned up a little as she sighed. "Likes who ?" Geralt still asks oblivious yet interested. Yennefer stares at him, thinking how blind he could be to something so obvious. But then again, so was the bard. She rolls her eyes in frustration "Jaskier !"

Geralt's head turned in your direction instantly “Oh.” he uttered and then realisation fully hit him “Fuck.”  

He groaned and Yennefer shook her head.

You tried to ignore it. Tried to ignore the pit forming in your stomach. But when one woman started to touch his Jaskier's hair, something in you snapped. You stood up instantly, shoving the chair back loudly as you marched to the exit of the bar. You were stopped by someone grabbing your arm. Your head snapped back, ready to punch anyone who was trying to bother you. You sighed when you saw that it was Geralt. "What ?" It came out colder then you had intended it to. He let go of your arm "Let's have another drink." You narrowed your eyes at him, you could feel that he was trying to distract you "No, thank you. I've already had a few. I think I'll go and get some fresh air. The smell of this bar is getting stuck in my clothes." He gave a short nod but did not seem pleased at his failed attempt to cheer you up and distract you from Jaskier being surrounded by the female company. He breathed out and groaned as he walked over to his occupied friend.

Jaskier was conversating with the enthusiastic women when he noticed them staring at his hair all of a sudden. He nervously brushed a hand through his hair “Is there something in my hair or..”

Geralt cleared his throat and Jaskier spun around, coming face to face with him.

The women giggled at the sight. The bard couldn't think of any reason why his friend looked unpleased.

“Have you seen y/n ?” Geralt knew but all too well where you were, Jaskier however seemed to be oblivious to your absence.

Jaskier's eyes shot to the now empty table at which you had been sitting “She's... she was right there just a second ago..” brows drawing together as he scanned the bar looking for you.

“Hmm.” Geralt tried to sound serious “I'll look around the bar.”

Jaskier looked at him questioningly before realising the plan “And I'll go look outside ?” it was more of a question.

Geralt didn't bother answering as he walked through the crowd, pretenting to keep an eye out for you.

Jaskier looked around him once more, trying to spot you in the crowd before he finally made his way to the door. Geralt watched as Jaskier left before he went back to Yennefer and finished his drink.

#jaskier x reader #reader x jaskier #reader/jaskier #jaskier/reader #jaskier #imagine jaskier #the witcher #witcher jaskier #witcher #geralt of rivia #you/jaskier #jaskier x you #jaskier reader insert #yennefer #geralt #witcher fic

[allamericansbitch]

well since y’all asked

everything will be below the cut so people can just ignore this lol

the wild thing is like... everything everyone was saying from both sides makes sense. the good and the bad. i’ll start off with a pro and cons and then do a short track by track

pros:

i agree with what people are saying about how well this style suits her voice, it perfect. it’s smooth and calming but also doesnt stick her in a box and will allow her to kinda move with it and change things up as she sings, which i know she loves to do.

the production is exactly her too. it’s r&b beats with classic strings... liek that’s completely ariana grande. it’s so interesting and it weirdly works well? 

i feel like you can tell she was just in her element making these songs. i feel like she tapped into something that can be so endless for her and new ideas will be constant.

idk if it’s just me adjusting to hearing her sing but her pronunciation is getting a lot better

every song has at least one good and attractive part to it... there are no songs that i am so completely confused as to why it’s on the album.

it’s for sure my favorite era for her in terms of style

also her best album cover (but sweeter is close second) 

cons:

okay... there is a pattern with this album. every song had a really solid start. so many times i was in love with the verses and the melodies she was singing but... my god are the choruses weak. it’s just one line... repeated... like 4 times... then we move on... and i was sitting here like ‘oh that’s what we were building up to?’ and it happened with every song. so i completely agree about it kind of falling flat most of the time.

it’s so repetitive. besides the choruses mostly all being weak, the themes are all the same. like the 14 songs on the album are all about two things: her being horny or her being in love. that’s it. why did we need 14 songs to tell us two things.

another point: why were there 14 songs? so many filler tracks that just add nothing to the album for me. she could’ve honestly made a solid 10 track album and it would’ve been a good clean piece of work. 

the lyrics... oh my god the lyrics. the one thing i saw people saying, both fans of the album and not, was that the lyrics were really bad... liek they had to prepare people. and my god. there were some points that straight up sounded like 14 year old stan accounts arguing on twitter... ‘you sound dumb... shut up’ SHE USED THAT LYRIC AS A HOOK... she thought it was so good it deserved to be the hook like? and also there’s a lyric that just straight up says ‘read a fucking book’ lol. the good or tolerable lyrics are basically ones she already used before on other songs? like how many time's has this woman sung about fucking while watching movies... 

she needs to stop putting out albums so frequently. a lot of the complaints i see people having is just that it doesnt feel finished or polished enough to be an album. like she should have waiting a few months and refined things. it feels like a stepping stone rather than a destination. she doesnt have a clear vision, narrative or purpose driving the album at all. 

track by track

shut up: this was the first taste of bad lyrics like this is the song about being dumb and i fully was like omfg this is the whole song isnt it. i dig the production though.. this might have the best production of the whole album for me. 

34+35: i felt like i was listening to a horny 13 year old boy during the chorus lol. it just felt really immature at some points... like the giggling every time she alluded to 69 wasnt necessary. also the end where she says ‘mean i wanna 69 with ya’..... sweetie you didnt have to tell us we know we can add. i did like the melody of the pre-chorus. the ‘i’ve been drinkin coffee, i’ve been eatin healthy’ is really catchy and good

motive: god i had such high hopes for this. it first started and i loved the production and the prechorus worked really well... but again that chorus weakness really fucked it. and doja’s part doesnt really fit the song for me? it feels out of place and like she should’ve been put on a more upbeat song

just like magic: first song i actually liked and added to my library! i finally heard a good chorus that didnt feel like it completely slowed down the momentum of the song and helped move it along. and the lyrics are cute. i think for me she needs to improve on the difference between a cute lyric and a cringy lyric... like cute: ‘middle finger to my thumb and then I snap it’ and cringy: the rest of the album. also one thing there’s a lyric about her listening to music she wrote and like girl you had 34 writers on this album... what are you listening to two words? every time she brags about writing it’s kinda embarrassing like.... at no point am i impressed

off the table: this production would have been so good.... if it actually did anything else or went anywhere. it stayed the same the entire time.... for 4 minutes. also stop letting men on women’s music because it seriously never works. her vocals are really pretty though.

six thirty: i really like her vocal delivery in this... like kinda dropping off at the end and just starting to talk? it’s interesting. also the chorus really had potential because it actually got bigger and more layered and interesting but again with the one lyric ‘are you down’ repeated like 3 times then the chorus is just over it’s like... oh okay

safety net: again amazing verse delivery and melody... IF SHE TOOK IT ANYWHERE it would have been great. and again with the male features... not necessary. the bridge is cool with them both singing but other than that it feel flat for me. 

my hair: that smooth electric guitar intro is everything. and this sound of this song is so good.... but.... am i the only person who kinda feels weird about ariana, a white girl, being like ‘you can run your hands through me hair... dont be scared’ like?? why would they be scared... your hair is straight lol. it just toys with the whole idea of ‘don’t touch a black women’s hair’ for me. idk it could totally be a me overanalyzing thing. but god is she sang about anything else this would be my favorite song. second song i added to my library.  

nasty: if i had to pick one song that was my exact expectations for this album before listening to it it would be this one. the electronic hip-hop beat with the harmonies and vocals, all paired together for a song about her being horny (again), like yeah this all fits. it feels lost in some places though. like some points i feel like i have no idea what part for the song we’re on or what’s happening and we’re just treading water. and another weak chorus with 1 lyric repeated over and over again. (also random side not that intro of her talking reminded me of when she gave that billboard interview and people were mad at her bc she starting talking with an accent even though shes white... like thats what i thought of i was like ma’am you are a rich white theater kid form florida you do not speak like that)

west side: the production in the beginning is so cool? where is sounds like a tape rewinding kinda? love that. but other than that like... no point to this song being included on the album... it’s 2 minutes and it falls flat pretty early on.

love language: this was the one i saw most people agreeing was the best one/most hyped. i expected to be a ballad but it’s one of the more upbeat ones and honestly thank god. a chorus that actually has structure and goes somewhere? wild. good and creative lyrics? WILD. anyway the production is great and reintroduces that kinda 70s vibe from motive but in a refreshing way. really good tie in. third song added to the library. 

positions: i honestly didn’t even listen to this when it came out so i really had no idea what to expect. again the strings and orchestral pairs so well together... one of my favorite instrumentals on the whole album. i 100% see why this was the lead single and i agree with it completely. the most catchy chorus and it moves the song forward WHAT A CONCEPT. also very good placement on the tracklist because it was really refreshing. at this point it kinda started to drag on a little but this picked it right up. it also kinda threw me completely off balance because i was so familiar with the pattern of good verse weak chorus good verse weak chorus, but this is the opposite? weak verses but amazing chorus. forth song added to library.  also i am genuinely curious why it’s the album title? it doesnt really fit the theme of the album but then again one of my complaints is that it doesnt really have a theme to begin with so... 

obvious: the imagery i got when the music came in was like a dark 80′s lounge with dark wood furniture and i loved it lol. the same thing with positions, a surprising and refreshing combo of weak verse but good chorus which was nice. i can see it easily getting me stuck in my head, especially that hook. fifth song added to my library. 

pov: this is the other song off the album i heard everyone generally loved. i would say this has the best theme and story of the entire album. it has an interesting concept that isnt overly used and the whole song is pretty good decent verse and decent chorus. i love the end where she gets powerful and has more grit in her voice and we get more emotion out of her... wish she didnt wait until the last 30 seconds of the whole album to finally deliver with that but sure. sixth song to be added to the library. 

overall i was pretty surprised at how much i enjoyed it? i really expected not to the way everyone was talking about it. i think it is a good album with just some clear flaws, that could have been easily fixed if she didnt rush the album out so quickly. better lyrics and better judgement/deliberation of which songs deserve to be on the album and it would have been so solid. i would give it an overall rating of 6/10. 

here’s my current ranking:

#text #send me asks about yalls opinons too!!

[camillemontespan]

a week at aunt olivia and uncle leo’s [part one]

So, @sirbeepsalot messaged me saying she would like to see a fic where Leo and Olivia have to look after Lily for a week, since they’re not exactly the most.. kid friendly of couples. So I wrote it. 

This is a one shot that will be split into two parts! So a two shot? All the fluff! 

@jovialyouthmusic @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @pug-bitch @sirbeepsalot @moonlightgem7 @emceesynonymroll @burnsoslow @i-bloody-love-drake-walker @katedrakeohd @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @emichelle @notoriouscs @be-still-my-aching-heart @carabeth @drakesensworld 

          **************************************************************************

Day 1

'Okay, so here's her books and her teddy bear,' Camille said, handing items over. 'Make sure she eats her vegetables, she'll lie and say she has but don't believe her, bath time is at 6.30, her hair gets tangled easily so here's the shampoo we use to help with knots and breakfast is her favourite Unicorn Wish cereal. She has playgroup tomorrow morning at 9am, it finishes at 12. Got it?'

Olivia was leaning against the kitchen counter biting her fingernails while Leo opened a beer.

'Camille, relax,' Olivia sighed. 'Lily will be fine with us.'

Camille winced. 'It's just you've never looked after her for longer than an afternoon..'

Leo chuckled. 'Don't worry yourself, hun. How hard can it be?'

'Ha!' Drake scoffed. He was helping Lily take off her coat. 'Spoken like someone who's never had a kid. Oh Leo, good luck, man.'

Leo gave him a happy shrug. Camille sighed. 'Any issues, call us.'

'Babe, you're going on holiday!' Olivia scolded. 'Relax! Just be Drake and Camille pre-babies. Get your groove back. Have you packed the vaseline I lent you?'

Camille blushed. 'And the clingfilm..'

Leo clapped Drake on the back. 'Go get her, buddy.'

Drake and Camille crouched down to say goodbye to their four year old daughter. They were going away to the south coast for a week to soak up sunshine, swim, hike and have lots of sex. Lots and lots of sex. It was their anniversary holiday after all.

'Okay so we'll see you at the end of the week, baby! I'll miss you!' Camille cooed, bringing Lily in for a cuddle. Drake then reached out and pressed a kiss on her head.

Lily was bouncing up and down with excitement. She was so ready to spend seven days with her Aunt Olivia and Uncle Leo.

'Thank you so much for doing this,' Camille said, giving Olivia a hug next. 'You're the best.'

Olivia and Leo waved them off before coming back into the kitchen where Lily was unpacking her books. 'So, let's show you your room!' Leo said cheerily.

He took her upstairs. Their house was very modern and minimal, white walls with floor to ceiling windows, a glass staircase and expensive artwork decorating the walls. It was, to put it bluntly, not a child friendly home. The sharp edges and glass was enough to give Camille a panic attack but she trusted her friends to look after her daughter.

The guest bedroom was white and minimal but with flashes of red. Red cushions, a red rug and red silk curtains. Lily jumped onto the bed and lay like a starfish. 'Comfy,' she said. It had her seal of approval.

Leo put Lily's rucksack on the chair. 'Okay, so it's nearly dinner time, I was thinking spaghetti with ALL OF THE MEATBALLS?!'

Lily squealed. 'And cheese!'

'A dinner for champions!' Leo hollered. He took Lily downstairs to start getting dinner ready. Drake had told him that she loved helping with mealtimes, though she couldn't do much, she still felt felt pleased when she was allowed to stir the bowl or taste test.

Olivia was helping herself to a glass of wine and jumped when Lily bounded in. She wasn't used to kids in her own space. It felt weird.

'We're having spaghetti and meatballs,' Leo told her. Olivia wrinkled her nose. 'Ugh, carbs.'

'Have spaghetti with us!' Lily cried. 'Pleaaaaase!'

Leo gave Olivia an amused look. Olivia sighed. 'Fine. But only a small portion for me.'

She sat down at the kitchen island with her wine and magazine, occasionally looking up to watch her boyfriend make meatballs with her god daughter. She felt a twinge in her heart. Oh god, sentiment.

'Now we're gonna sprinkle some oregano on the meatballs to give them a good flavour,' Leo instructed. Lily watched him carefully and copied him. She was sitting on the tall chair of the kitchen island with an apron over her body to protect her wooly white jumper and her blue leggings with silver embroidered stars. On her feet, she was wearing furry UGG boots. Olivia had to admit that Lily looked adorable. 

‘Hey, let’s play some music while we cook,’ Leo suggested. He turned to the Alexa pod. ‘Alexa! Play.. Wake Me Up Before You Go Go!’

‘Playing Wake Me Up Before You Go Go by Wham,’ Alexa said in her monotone voice. The song began to fill the room. 

‘Jitterbug!’ Leo sang, twirling around. Lily clapped her hands and giggled as she watched him. It was like Leo had turned into her Uncle Maxwell, who was the best dancer she knew. 

Olivia stared at Leo with a look of bewilderment on her face. Who was this guy? What had he done with her usually cool and sexy boyfriend? Since when did he like Wham?

She asked him that very question. Leo shot her a lazy smile and gestured to Lily. ‘Look at her.’

Olivia looked at Lily and saw that she was swinging her feet along to the music while sprinkling oregano on the meatballs.  She was in her element.

          *************************************************************

After dinner, Olivia took Lily upstairs for her bath. She studied the shampoo that Camille had given her for Lily’s hair. It smelled like lavender. 

‘Right, arms up,’ Olivia instructed. Lily raised her arms and Olivia gently pulled Lily’s jumper off. Soon, the little girl was in the bath, sloshing around in the water. 

Olivia poured some shampoo into the palm of her hand and proceeded to rub it into Lily’s hair. 

‘Aunt Olivia...’ Lily said, her voice questioning.

‘Yeah babe?’

Lily looked at her shyly. ‘Will you take me to playgroup tomorrow? I want everyone to see you.’

Olivia smirked. ‘Of course I will. What are the kids at playgroup like?’

‘Nice,’ Lily said. ‘Milo's my favourite.'

'Who's Milo?'

Lily blushed. 'A boy.'

Olivia stopped washing her hair and fixed her with a steady stare. 'Lily.. Do you have a boyfriend?'

Lily burst out laughing and ducked her head under the water. When she emerged, she wrinkled her nose. 'Ewww.'

'Lily?' Olivia's voice was lilting. 'Are you k-i-s-s-i-n-g?'

'Nooooooooo!' Lily shrieked. Olivia laughed and began to comb conditioner through Lily's hair. She wondered in amusement what Drake would say if he knew. She had a feeling that Drake would be the stereotypical overprotective father who vetted boyfriends or girlfriends with a shotgun in his lap.

'Babe, it's okay to like boys.'

Lily turned red. 'He's nice. My friend Violet likes Harry but he pushes her over which makes her cry. Katie says it's because Harry likes Violet.'

Olivia rolled her eyes. 'Ugh, boys. By the way, if Milo starts pushing you in the playground or tugging your hair, that's not because he likes you, it's because he's a d bag.'

'D bag?'

Olivia smiled conspiratorially. 'You'll understand when you're older.'

                           *************************************************

Day 2

Olivia got out the car and took Lily's hand to cross the road. Lily was fizzing with excitement - aunt Olivia was taking her to playgroup! Her friends would see her! She could show Olivia her classroom!

Olivia studied the playgroup mothers who were kissing and hugging their four year olds goodbye.

Ugh, if I ever wear pyjamas to a school run or whatever, kill me.

Olivia was not dressed in pyjamas. She was wearing black leather trousers, ankle boots with a spindly heel, red sweater and black leather jacket. She looked, if she said so herself, hot. 

They reached the school gates. The mothers turned to gawp at Olivia - for one thing, she was the Duchess of Lythikos, she was famous. They had met Camille and Drake many times but they always exuded an air of normality.. Olivia didn’t. Olivia looked intimidating, she looked regal, she looked powerful. 

One mother cleared her throat and went over to say hello. ‘Hi there. I’m Stacey, Milo’s mom.’

Olivia gave her a smirk. ‘Milo, huh?’

Stacey blinked. ‘Yes, my son, that’s him over there.’ She pointed to a small boy with dark hair down to his shoulders. Olivia felt he would become a surfer boy type when he grew up; not a Duke, no, but still good for Lily. 

Lily jumped up and down. ‘This is my aunt Olivia!’ 

Olivia extended a hand and shook Stacey’s. Stacey grinned. ‘Olivia, the Duchess of Lythikos! So nice to meet you at last.’

‘Charmed,’ Olivia said shortly. 

‘So where is Camille?’ Stacey asked. 

‘She and Drake are having a sexcation,’ Olivia replied. ‘They need it.’ 

Stacey blinked. ‘Oh, okay. Good for them, huh?!’ 

Lily had left the women to drag over Milo and another little girl with glasses and plaits. ‘Aunt Olivia, this is Milo and this is Violet!’

Olivia looked down at the children; they stared up at her in terror. ‘She’s my favourite!’ Lily whispered. 

Olivia smiled. ‘Okay, babe, let’s get you into class.’ 

She took Lily’s hand but was stopped by Stacey. ‘Oh, sorry, just a moment.’ Stacey said. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to join our book club?’

Olivia stared at her. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, we keep asking Camille to join but she’s so busy that she always says she can’t. We meet up every Wednesday night at mine for  a cup of tea and to discuss our Book of the Month, it’s just nice to get together without the kids, you know?’

‘But I’m not a parent..’

‘No, but you are now at our gates!’ Stacey said excitedly. ‘You can be an honourary member. Plus, it would really boost our membership if we had a Duchess join.’ 

‘Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m too busy to talk about books?’ Olivia asked bluntly.  Stacey went pink. ‘Oh. I didn’t mean to cause offence..’

Olivia smirked. ‘You didn’t, I don’t get offended easily. Tell you what; if the tea is replaced with wine, then I’ll consider it.’ 

Stacey clapped her hands in delight. ‘Perfect! I’ll suggest that to Jennifer!’ 

Olivia took Lily and guided her into the building, keen to get away. Why had she said that? She hated all that kind of crap. Well done, Nevrakis. You’re now part of the mommy set. Good effort seeing as you’re not a mom and you hate kids. 

Lily looked up at Olivia as they walked to her classroom, giving her a wide beaming smile.

Okay, I like one kid. 

      ********************************************************************************

‘Hey Liv, how’s it going with Lily?’ Camille asked down the phone. 

Olivia was reclining on the chaise lounge with her feet up on the table, drying her toenails that were now painted red. A glass of red wine sat on the table beside her, despite the fact it was 11am. 

Well, it was five o’clock somewhere, right?

‘Great,’ Olivia said. ‘Dropped her at playgroup earlier. I’m now part of their book club, kill me now.’

‘How the hell did they get you to join that?’ 

‘No idea. I suggested they replace the tea with wine, Stacey said she would suggest it, now I’m a member. How have you managed to avoid it?’

Camille laughed. ‘I just keep acting like I’m an important person with very important things to do. They’re lovely women, honestly, I just don’t want to join the book club.. I’d rather stay home with Drake and Lily, you know?’

‘Speaking of Drake, how’s the fucking?’ Olivia asked. ‘Vaseline and clingfilm going down a treat?’

‘It’s... interesting..’ Camille replied. 

Olivia smirked and had a sip of wine. ‘You’ll thank me at the end of the week.’ 

‘I gotta go, actually,’ Camille said. ‘I just wanted to check in and see that you’re surviving.’

Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘We’re fine. You got a good kid, Camille.’ 

The two friends hung up. Olivia stretched out and wiggled her toes which were now dry and looking beautifully red. 

‘Hey, gorgeous.’ 

Leo came into the room fresh from his shower with his towel wrapped around his waist. ‘Ooh, nice nails,’ he commented, before leaning down to kiss her on the mouth. Olivia’s hand roamed down his chest to under the towel area, until she found what she wanted. 

‘Hey, big boy.’

Leo gave her a wolfish grin and took the towel off. He was all golden; golden skin, golden hair. His abs were chiselled and his shoulders were broad. He was a golden God. 

‘Come here and fuck me,’ Olivia said. Leo’s eyes darkened. 

‘I was going to.’ 

          ***************************************************************************

Lily was excited to finish playgroup so she could see Olivia and Leo. They were all she had talked about all morning. Olivia picked her up, and they talked about her day in the car as Olivia drove them home.  She then spent the afternoon building a fort with Leo. 

That evening, Olivia got her ready for bath time before bundling her up in a wooly dressing gown. Olivia then wrapped her own silk red dressing gown around her body. 

In the kitchen, Olivia poured herself a glass of wine, aware that Lily was studying her in fascination.

'What are you drinking?' she asked.

Olivia smirked. 'Grape juice.'

'Can I have some?'

Olivia laughed. This child was so funny. 'Sorry, it's adult grape juice, babe. But hey, wait a second.'

Olivia found a carton of cranberry juice and poured it into a wine glass for Lily. Lily's eyes lit up. She felt so fancy with her own wine glass. Much more fun than the plastic cups she had at home. 

The two of them settled down in the living room dressed in their dressing gowns and wine glasses in hand.

'Can we watch Peppa Pig?' Lily asked. Olivia shrugged. 'Sure thing, babe. One episode then bedtime, okay?'

Lily snuggled up into Olivia and they watched Peppa Pig, cosy together. Olivia looked down at Lily who was entranced with the TV show. This wasn’t hard. Why were Drake and Camille always acting like they were exhausted? Having a kid was a walk in the park. She’d have to give them pointers. 

After the episode finished, Olivia took Lily up to bed. She kissed her softly on the forehead and tucked her in, a rare display of love. When Olivia went to leave the room, Lily cried out, ‘Wait!’

Olivia turned. ‘What’s up hun?’

Lily wrung the duvet in her hands, her eyes wide. ‘Can you leave the door open?’ she asked quietly. 

‘Why?’

‘I’m scared of the monsters.’

Olivia sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Lily, there’s no such thing as monsters.’ 

Lily nodded quickly. ‘There is. They live under the bed.’ 

Olivia looked down below the bed; there were just storage boxes underneath. ‘Babe, monsters aren’t in here.’

‘Because you’re here, they hide, but when you go, they will be under the bed,’ Lily replied, her voice becoming high pitched with panic. 

‘Shh babe..’ Olivia whispered. She thought to herself. Sure, she could leave the door open but Olivia had been taught from a young age that to feel fear was a silly emotion and by keeping the door open, Lily was letting that fear control her. Of course, Olivia had a shit upbringing but she could use some of the stuff she had been taught as a springboard. 

‘Okay, wait a second,’ she said. She rushed out and came back in a moment later holding a teddy bear. 

‘So, this is my old teddy bear,’ Olivia said. ‘His name is Ernest..’

‘Ernest..’

‘Yup. Now, Ernest protected me from monsters all the time. He taught me how to be brave. He kept me safe. Here, take him. He will keep you safe. Now, monsters don’t exist but if they ever did, Ernest will sound the alarm! He will tell me and I will come through and protect you too.’ 

‘You will?’

‘Yup. Ernest watches over you all night. If he sees anything, he will tell me so fast that the monsters won’t stand a chance.’ 

Lily smiled and hugged Ernest to her body. ‘Okay.’

‘Now, I’m going to shut the door, okay?’ Olivia said gently. ‘I promise, there’s nothing in here. But you’ve got Ernest. Ernest is a good bear.’ 

Lily nodded bravely and settled down under the duvet, holding Ernest close. Olivia kissed her again and left the room. 

In the dark, Lily clenched hold of Ernest tightly. She then quickly moved so she was hanging over the side of the bed and she hissed, ‘If you get me, my aunt Olivia will kill you!’

She snuggled back under the duvet, feeling much better now. 

                          **********************************************

Day 3

Olivia had her kickboxing class at 8.30am which meant Leo was in charge of taking Lily to playgroup. Lily had insisted on wearing her pink ballerina outfit and furry UGG boots and Leo wasn't going to argue with that. Each to their own. 

He shrugged on his leather jacket and put on his aviator sunglasses. He carried her Tangled rucksack which was emblazoned with images of Pascal, Flynn Rider and Rapunzel as they wandered to his Cadillac, which was his second favourite thing in the world, after Olivia. 

Leo blasted the radio for them and they sang along to the songs as Leo drove through Cordonia to get to playgroup.

When they arrived, Leo escorted Lily into the building where the mothers were standing outside the classroom talking. They stopped when they saw Leo.

'Oh my god, it's the Prince..' one of them breathed.

‘He looks like a model...’

‘Do we have to curtsey?’

Leo crouched down to say goodbye to Lily. 'Right kiddo, I'll pick you up at 12.'

Lily hugged him tightly.

'Make good choices!' Leo told her. 'Don't do anything I would do!'

Lily skipped into the classroom with her tutu billowing around her. Leo stood back up, watching her go, until he became aware of the five women staring at him with their mouths hanging open. He gave them his lopsided smile and raised his hand in greeting. 

‘Hey there.’ 

He turned and walked away, shaking his head in amusement as he heard the women squeal. 

Maybe he should go to playgroup more. 

#trr fanfic #the royal romance #drake walker #olivia nevrakis #leo rhys #lily walker

[anathtsurugi]

All right, my fellow chickadees, a lot has been going on in the world of Anath Tsurugi. Much more than computer breakdowns and the allure of a shiny new fandom. While I don't imagine those of you who've recently started following me for my Good Omens content expected anything like this, I feel like those of you who have been with me for Star Wars and Red vs. Blue and longer might want to know some of this. Might want to know some of the things that have gone into the recent chapters of my work. I just feel like, maybe, I owe you all some sort of explanation?

No. That's wrong. I know I don't owe anybody anything. I suppose I just want to get it out into the world, get my thoughts in order, as it were. It doesn't matter so terribly much if nobody reads it; it will be a lot to take in. Mostly, I just want to tell you all a story. Because telling stories is how I cope, how I interact with reality. My need in all of this is to try and create something beautiful out of something that was painful.

So...would you mind if I told you a story?

As most things are with me, this is a story about love, about love and friendship and heartbreak and family and resilience. At the end, though, it's nothing more and nothing less than a story about love.

As some of you may have heard or picked up on, my wife and I have been attempting to have a baby. At this point, it's been roughly a year since the process began (financing, insurance coverage, choosing a donor, etc.). The first attempt didn't take, but the second one did. My wife got pregnant and we were both suddenly anxious/excited/hellafuckingnervous parents to be.

As honesty is the name of the game tonight, I would have to say that 'The Colder the Winter, the Warmer the Spring' has largely been fueled by my own anxieties over becoming a parent. Like...am I good enough to properly raise another human being? What human in their right mind would even give me the chance? What is it possible for someone as emotionally stunted as I am to give to a child? Is the love between my wife and I strong enough to do for a little one in a world that will already be against them merely for the crime of being born to two women?

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, I imagine you'll have seen a lot of this in my telling of the story of Zeb, Alex, and little Arkalia, and will probably see it more now that you know it's there. But really, that seems to have happened with a lot of the major storytelling undertakings in my life. The 400K Sleeping Beauty epic I wrote for the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle fandom was fueled almost exclusively by my pining for my then roommate, now wife. The MCU and Red vs. Blue verses I crafted sprang up around the planning of our wedding. I suppose this was just the natural next step, for us and for my craft. If you see genuine terror in my writing of Zeb's and Alex's fears over not being good enough parental figures for Ari, that is why. This is my way to ask and to hopefully deal with the answers to these questions.

So things were going well on planet Earth, or at least they were in our little corner of it. First trimester was plugging along. We were dreaming up names and having conversations about how we wanted to parent. I was going ugly early on the whole 'wait on your wife hand and foot' thing and upping my nutritional game in the kitchen. We were designing a Miyazaki nursery of epic geekdom and talking about how we'd be covered on all bases, since she's such a huge Harry Potter fan and I'm nothing if not an uber Star Wars nerd. I was learning she considered me a more fit parent (which makes zero sense to me, given that she's the one with a decent head on her shoulders, whereas me? I'm just a dreamer, and sometimes it seems that's all I'll ever be, but...yeah, that's a conversation for another time), but the point is that it was all fine. Sure it was nerve-wracking, but we'd figure it out somehow, just like we did everything else. It was what we wanted. We were in it together.

Then we got back the results from the genetic testing the doctor's office advised we have done.

And oh, no. No, it wasn't fine at all.

Trisomy 18.

I had never heard of Trisomy 18 before we got those results. I suppose Trisomy 21 is the one you hear about because it's actually survivable. With Trisomy 18, the 5% of babies who aren't stillborn largely don't make it past the first year. It was not, they informed us, an infallible diagnosis. They would schedule us an ultrasound to be certain, but the numbers were not in our favor.

We didn't talk to anyone but each other that week, not really certain how we wanted to handle things until we knew more. Some of the extended family is fairly religious and conservative and we just didn't need that bullshit on top of everything else. We didn't need other opinions. It was our decision, and the conclusion we came to was that if the diagnosis was truly that bleak, then we would terminate the pregnancy before things got out of hand...before continuing would bring harm to my wife or suffering to either her or the baby. At that point, it becomes a question of 'Do you love your child enough to take the decision onto yourself, even though it will break your heart? Do you love them enough not to force them to suffer for someone else's misguided notion of what is and is not life?'

I didn't consider much during that week the effect all of this was having on me. I told myself I had accepted and was prepared to move forward should the worst happen. My concern was largely for my wife and what she was going through. She was, after all, the one who'd been experiencing it all. We were barely out of the first trimester and she wasn't showing yet. So far as I knew, we hadn't reached the point of quickening. It was all still distinctly her experience. If I hoped for a miracle, it was for her sake, not my own. I thought, 'I can take it. I'm tough. Put the world on my shoulders and I'll carry it for you. I would give everything I am to take your pain from you.'

I am, as I mentioned earlier, very emotionally stunted. I know it was far from their intention, but the impression I received from my own parents growing up was that my thoughts and my feelings on any given matter were not particularly important. Oh, I was consulted, certainly. The veneer was there, but if the correct answer was not given, it was little better than if I'd said nothing at all. So I had long since ceased to say anything of any real value out loud. (In truth, my wife was one of the few people to make me feel that my thoughts and feelings had value, but again, that's another story.) I don't often give of myself outwardly. Trying to draw words from my throat is oftentimes comparable to trying to pull a ball of razor wire up from the pit of my stomach. Sometimes the only way I can give of myself is in writing. All the things I can't give voice to come out in my work. So I am, probably to an unhealthy degree, somewhat proud of my own stoicism. With me, it's always 'No. You don't get to break. No matter what they throw at you, you will not feel it. You will remain unharmed, unbent, and utterly unbroken.'

(Heh, shit. Writing it out like that now, I'm suddenly left wondering if that isn't the reason I'm so damn good at breaking characters. Because writing out those moments of absolute shatter are the only way I'll ever allow myself to feel them...because it isn't me breaking. But...in a way, it is. Isn't it.)

Point here being that allowing that mentality to boil beneath the surface will eventually erupt to sucker punch you in the face. That happened to me as I was leaving work to go and pick my wife up for the ultrasound. The thoughts I hadn't allowed myself to think all week suddenly started to creep in on me.

Is this...somehow my fault?

(At the level of logic, you know it's not. It's a bloody game of genetic roulette. A one in five thousand chance. But there's always the one. Somebody's always going to take the bullet.)

Was I not ready for this? Did I not want it enough?

(Ridiculous. I know what it's like to get shafted at the genetic lottery. I've been dealing with PCOS since I was 18. While the disease isn't fully understood, there is a genetic component. Saying that this was somehow either of our fault was akin to saying that my own illness was somehow my fault. Even so...even so, you can't help but ask...)

Bloody fucking hell! Did I do this? Was there something- anything I could've done to stop this?

(You know. You know you couldn't have done. But still the thought haunts you.)

I hadn't allowed myself to feel it...to cry. I don't doubt that we both hoped for their numbers to somehow be wrong, but I think we both already knew at that point that it was over, and I hadn't let myself start to grieve. So there I was, hurtling down the highway with tears pouring silently down my face.

Traffic depending, it takes anywhere from a half hour to an hour to get between the bookstore and her office, so I had time to get myself back in order. I didn't want to make this any worse for her than it already was. I know what it does to her to know I've been crying, since I do it so rarely.

(You don't get to break.)

But...well...then something happened on the way to the hospital. I had my iphone on shuffle playing the playlist I'd compiled to listen to while working on Star Wars fic, and while we were driving, our wedding song came up in the shuffle. 'Boxes' by the Goo Goo Dolls. We had our first dance to it and I sang it to her while we danced.

I need a family to drive me crazy

Call me out when I'm low and lazy

It won't be perfect, but we'll be fine

'Cause I've got your back and you've got mine

I should probably have it understood that I have 'Boxes' on all of my writing playlists. It's just the love song to me now, and as far as fic writing goes, I tend to gravitate to ships that reflect the relationship my wife and I share. Kalluzeb, KuroFai, Bagginshield, Stucky, SpiritAssassin, MaineWash, Shallura, Kanera, Klance, Sterek, Zutara, and now, of course, the Ineffable Husbands themselves. The list goes on, believe me. Every word I write for each one of my couples is my love song to her, and my experience of the love between us. If you've ever commented on the depth of love and emotion you felt when reading one of my stories, then you've felt what I've felt, and I hope I've made your world a little brighter for it. In this particular instance, though...this...our love song...if we were going to have a miracle that day, that was it. (I know. One song on one playlist, nothing particularly miraculous there. But a one in seven hundred chance during a fifteen minute drive? I was going to take what I could get.)

You are the memory that won't ever lapse

When twenty-five years have suddenly passed

Wherever you take me, it's clear I will go

Your love's the one love that I need to know

You are the sun in the desolate sky

Your life's in these words and it can't be denied

Wherever you take me, it's clear I will go

Your love's the one love that I need to know

If I hadn't been driving, I would've reached out to hold her hand then. Normally, we sing the song together when it comes on, then we play it again, maybe a third time if we're really feeling it. I couldn't sing this time, not during the first play through, anyway. I was a little too choked up. But I managed a few of the lyrics the second time through.

I don't have the words to tell you what a comfort that song was in that moment. It could've been any song on that playlist, but it just happened to be that one.

(This hurts. We're both writers, but I don't think either of us could hope to express just how much it hurts. But remember...I chose you and you chose me. You were my dearest friend and I love you more than I can ever hope to say. It hurts now. It may never not hurt, but we'll get through. We'll be fine. We'll get through it together, like we came through everything else to stand at the altar together...and how we'll come through it all again to hold a new little someone. We're here together.)

So we faced it together, got the news we were expecting. There were other tests they could've done, but neither of us saw any point to it by then. Even if it wasn't specifically Trisomy 18, it was plainly something just as bad. We made the call there, and I do want it understood that we made the decision to  terminate the pregnancy. Despite what ultimately ended up happening, I won't have that spun any other way.

So calls were made, insurances were checked out, and the procedure was scheduled. We were, unfortunately, just a touch too far outside the first trimester to safely be able to just take a pill. The abortion had to be done surgically, and my wife preferred to be put under for it, fearing she might panic if she were conscious.

And I did, of course, promise to tell you how this all started to align with the writing of the more recent chapters of TCTW, along with my beginning scraps of Good Omens fic. It began that same day, actually – the day of the ultrasound. Because I had to come home from that and write Ash's birth scene.

That wasn't all that difficult. Largely numb at that point, I didn't have much trouble writing out the dream of a happy birth. But it started to get harder a few days later when I was sitting alone in the waiting room. By then I was working on the scene where Kallus is finally able to contact Zeb after coming out of his two week coma. It wasn't even a little bit of a stretch for me to write Zeb's desperation and panic during that scene because they were my own (though I suppose I managed to spare myself a little grief writing the scene from Kallus' POV instead of Zeb's).

Another thing I ought to tell you about myself is that I'm...something of a method writer, I suppose is the term, in that I will attempt to write when I'm angry, when I'm in pain, when I'm exhausted, when I'm heartbroken, in an effort to convey the experience of these things faithfully. So, in some strange way, this was almost...familiar territory for me. To write my own feelings into the scene as it was happening. Everything came off without any trouble. The doctors came to me after it was over and told me that he'd already had no heartbeat by the time they'd begun the procedure. It was comforting in its own way. Eliminated several question marks as to whether or not we'd made the right choice. I brought my wife home once she was awake enough to be discharged, and it seemed we were pretty well on the road to recovery. But, as some of you may have already noticed, this is where we come to the part of the story where something more is lost.

My wife needed something to turn her attention to, so it seemed to us a good time to handle OS updates for my eight-year-old laptop, which was an odyssey of itself. Point being that somewhere in the middle of all this my WIP draft of that chapter was lost to the digital ether.

Everyone around me was asking why it should be so hard to rewrite the lost scene. After all, I'd written it before, hadn't I?

Yes. Yes, I had.

I had written that scene when I was alone in a hospital waiting room, heartbroken and afraid, conscious every moment for an experience my wife was blessedly able to sleep through. This was why it was so devastating to me to lose that scene. Bitter as it was, it was a piece I'd poured a large part of my heart into in a moment of despair. In its own odd way, it had been beautiful in its desolation. I had already lost something precious that day. Why did I also have to lose what I had managed to create from that anguish?

It was a moment I knew I never wanted to revisit. Nor could I ever hope to recapture the emotion of it in writing, no matter how many times I tried. I could never portray the rawness of what I'd felt in that moment. So I didn't try. The scene as it exists now is particularly disheartening to me, not because it's bad, but because it's just...not what I wrote. The scene currently in the story is hollow and has no heart. There's no truth in it. The piece of my self that I gave in that moment was lost, and I can never get it back.

So, with yet one more loss endured, I continued on. I managed to make the rest of that chapter what I wanted it to be, so I could at least be proud of that. Chapter 15 was also easy enough to handle, as it was far removed from the family and childbirth aspects of the story, simply building upon what already existed in Rebels canon. But then the time came to write chapter 16, and once again I struggled.

By its very nature, TCTW has always heavily featured pregnancy and childbirth, so there was never going to be any skirting that, but another aspect I had always planned for was Zelina experiencing the death of one of the babies she was delivering. It was always meant to be part of her character arc as a rising medic and I knew I couldn't turn away from it. My wife asked me if I could change it, but I wasn't going to do that. If I was going to change something like that, it was going to be because the story merited it, because it would benefit from such a change. It was not going to be because of my own weakness. Even so, I know I delayed writing it for as long as I feasibly could. (That was also when Good Omens started to come into the picture, but we'll unpack that in a moment.)

For all I claimed to be a method writer just a few paragraphs ago, I can tell you now that I've never had such a visceral response to a scene I was actively writing as I did that one. My fingers trembled on the keys, feeling a little weak as I moved through the words. In fact, my whole body felt weak and I had to bite down hard on my lip to keep back the feeling of nausea, everything inside of me rebelling at the notion of describing the death of this little baby. For all Zelina's experience with Akinah and her stillborn son is such a small part of the overall chapter, of the overall story, it was still the hardest thing I'd ever had to write. As with everything else, though, it seems I managed to keep this in, too, as my wife tells me none of this was outwardly visible while I was writing. I sat next to her the whole time and, apparently, the only indication I gave that anything was wrong was the fact that I was still and quiet throughout. (To give you a better standard of comparison for what she's used to, I'm normally much more expressive when I write. I'll start mouthing dialogue or testing out expressions or gestures I'm describing. I once had to explain to my brother-in-law that I was actually channeling a character when he was concerned over a horrified look I had in my eyes at the time. If I, personally, were horrified, you wouldn't know it. All you would get would be a blank slate. So of course my wife would notice something was off this time.)

It was such a little thing...such a little thing, but still it was hard. It was a relief to move on, to have death and despair conquered throughout the rest of the chapter, but even near the end of it, when Zeb is lingering over saying goodbye to Arkalia, knowing he'll have to give her up...in some small way, he speaks with my voice...saying goodbye to the son my wife and I might have had.

Of course, that particular goodbye will turn out much happier than my own did in the end. But will you be seeing me continue to deal with this a lot in future pieces? Most definitely. TCTW will continue to bear most of the emotional fulcrum (yup, little in joke there), but it's also why I've been getting into writing Good Omens fic of late. Though the theme of parenting's remained the same, it's allowed me to turn my energies toward things a little more light-hearted. This was all about the time I started piecing together my little Good Omens 'Star Wars' AU, and when I put out my mini one shot of Crowley and Aziraphale as parents. Though I have started to come up with a wider verse for that particular ficlet (because it's me; how can I not? There's actually an in joke with my wife and I whenever the subject of long fic comes up with me. She'll ask, "What's the one thing I asked you not to do?" "Write Sleeping Beauty." "And what did you do?" "Wrote Sleeping Beauty," I respond meekly.).

And for all I said my Good Omens fic is giving me the opportunity for more light-hearted fare, I have also got a story idea that deals with Crowley and Aziraphale losing a pregnancy, but also with the one they don't lose. So you'll be seeing me deal, yes, but hopefully you'll also see some worthwhile stories come out of it all since, as I said, telling stories is how I cope. You'll be seeing my newly blended concoctions of angst, loss, and sorrow, but you'll see joy from me, as well. Because, as a great storyteller once said, "...let there also be Hope. It may be a grim, thin hope...but let us know that we do not live in vain." Really, that's what writing and storytelling are to me, whether they be fan fiction or any other kind – torches against the long nights that are pain and sadness, and blades against the endless tangles of thorns that are self-doubt and fear.

Wow. Heheh. Waxed hella poetic for a minute there. But no. I don't think I'll tone it down. It's a truth, and whether that truth is used to discover the strength to be a parent through a Rebel warrior and an ex-Imperial, to find a way to live through pain with an angel and a demon who have endured for over 6,000 years, or even just to find the way to a smile with a ninja and a mage in a coffeeshop AU where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts...a truth is a truth. My wife and I might not ever be facing down giant planet-killing super weapons or averting the Apocalypse with nothing more than a flaming sword and a tire iron, but when our IRL challenges feel as insurmountable as those things, well...it helps to be able to weave a story and begin to find some of those truths.

And yes, we are doing better. It's been a few months now and we're starting over again. The going can just be a little slow since not every attempt is successful and, let's face it, assisted reproductive technology don't come cheap. And as much work as I put into my fic writing, there's not a whole lot of money to be made in the field (none at all, in fact, but...turning away from it...who really wants to read another publishing hopeful's dewy-eyed delusions of sci-fi grandeur?). So if the going seems slower with me, I do apologize. Know that I never cease to write (as I'm quite certain that if I did, I would simply go mad...*backward glance* er...well...madder, at any rate, but that's neither here nor there) and I'm hopeful of creating some good things from all this. It just...sometimes it takes a while to slog through everything. So, as always, I hope I continue to do for you. Whatever capacity you might support me or my work in, know that my wife and I appreciate it.

It won't be perfect, but we'll be fine.

#Adventures in storytelling #Kalluzeb #Star Wars Rebels #Misadventures in reproduction #Ineffable Husbands #Good Omens #Miscarriage #Abortion #Fandom and how it relates to my life my love and my work #I guess you could call this a behind the scenes look #Personal