#it is based on the fact Lisa called him baby brother | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rustedhearts · 1 year

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Got It Bad (Boxer!Steve x Librarian!Fem!reader)

summary: steve's sudden rise to pro-boxing fame comes with a change of scenery, and new (old) friends

uses she/her pronouns and female anatomy.

♡ the steve collection ♡

♡ the rockstar!eddie setlist by @carolmunson ♡

warnings: a dash of angst, the return of our lovable rockstar (actually our first time meeting him in this au though), a smidge of smut, mention of alcohol, mention of drugs/addiction.

a/n: for reference, libby is 19, steve is 23, eddie is 25

february, 1990

Steve's rise to fame came faster than either of you could imagine.

The man himself seemed unprepared for how quickly endorsements flocked to him, willing to make up contracts and pay him a large chunk of change to promote them on his his first hop around the country. Steve signed a ten month contract at the end of December that went into affect New Year's day: his legal agreement to professionally beat the shit out of people on camera and make money doing it. His first televised fight was at the end of January, and he was a nervous wreck the whole month leading up to it.

When he inevitably won, he spent a little too much money on celebratory champagne and a hotel room, where you spent an entire weekend living a life you just couldn't get used to. Chocolate-covered strawberries, room service, sex all day, rose-petal baths, and everyone willing to make your stay as comfortable as possible. It didn't seem real, all this attention.

Now that he was making a name for himself—and making money he didn't know what to do with—he needed a manager. Big, his coach, made some calls and found Mikey Santorini, an LA based manager willing to take Steve on.

And for the promise you made to each other? Well, you didn't break it. Maybe that was the problem.

You told the library you'd be back soon, but you knew that was a lie. They made you a "bon voyage" basket, full of special edition covers of your favorite books and handmade bookmarks. You cried when your coworker, Lisa, presented it to you. The library wasn't just a job—it was your safe haven. You'd memorized every aisle, knew where every author lied. You had no idea when you'd see it again.

"We can visit a library in every city, I promise, baby," Steve told you when you came to his apartment sniffling.

You tried not to dwell on how easily he brushed aside the fact that you were putting your career on hold for him. You tried not to stop and think about that for too long, either. You loved Steve, didn't that matter more?

On the first of February, you said goodbye to your family.

Steve carried your luggage down the stairs from your bedroom. Your parents and younger brother, Nick, lined up near the front door, watching silently as he came in and out. Every time he hurried down the snow-coated front steps, your bedroom looked a little emptier.

When the last of it was in Steve's hands, you trudged down after him, heart tugging at the sight of your family all huddled together. Your mother wasn't doing much to conceal her tears, though your father seemed to be doing his best to console her. Nick looked unimpressed, a bored expression plastered across his chubby cheeks—but you knew him better than that, and those big eyes said it all. He was just as sad as you were to say goodbye.

Steve stopped near the front door, turning to flash you a small smile. "I'll give you a minute, okay?"

You nodded, accepting his gentle peck on the mouth. You watched him go, pulling the screen door closed behind him to bring warmth back to the house. A black SUV sat on the curb, supervised by Big in the driver seat. You only had a few hours before you had to be on the road. It would take all day to drive to California from here.

Rubbing your slick palms on your denim thighs, you turned to face your family.

"Um, so...this is it, I guess."

Your mother sniffled, wiping at her glistening cheeks. Her wedding ring glistened in the morning light. When she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around you, your heart burst. She smelled just how she always did, her perfume sweet and soothing, her hair drenched in the same hairspray she'd been using since you were a girl. Her sweater was soft, her skin warm, and you could feel the cool metal of the necklace she never took off pressing against your neck.

"I can't believe my baby girl is leaving," she hiccuped.

Your father reached forward and pinched the back of your mother's sweater, gently guiding her away from you. Tears pooled in your eyes and lodged in your throat, but you swallowed them down as your father opened his arms. You knew if you cried, so would your father, and then they'd never let you leave. But it suddenly felt so real, this departure.

"Call us every day, okay, pumpkin?" Your father muttered against the top of your hair.

You nodded, pressing your cheek to his chest, squeezing your arms tight around his stomach. He rubbed your back for a moment before letting go with a kiss to the head. You knew it was for his own good that he didn't hold on for too long.

You turned to Nick with a grin, punching his arm as hard as you could. He scowled, rubbing at it with a yelp.

"Gonna miss me, squirt?"

Nick rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure. Whatever."

You swallowed hard, chest growing tighter by the second. He was only a freshman in high school, and you grew up looking forward to helping him through it. Now, you wouldn't be here to see what sort of shit he got into, or bail him out of any trouble he'd inevitably get roped into. You'd miss his first homecoming, his first football game, his first girlfriend.

"I'll miss you," you admitted.

Nick's eyes cast down at his socked feet, arms dropping to his sides. He balled his hands into fists, and you knew he was inches away from tears.

"Whatever. Don't die, I guess."

You giggled. "Okay."

"Hey." Steve came rushing back into the house, cheeks pink from the wind, your luggage shoved into the trunk of the SUV. "Ready to go?"

You nodded, flashing your family another smile. "I guess I'll see you guys soon. I'll call the minute we get there. Steve's fight is on channel three, you can watch it!"

Steve cocked a sheepish grin, crossing his arms over his chest. Your mother barely glanced at him, reaching out to give you one last firm squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. You didn't even mind the glossy lip print she left in her wake.

Your father reached out and clasped Steve on the shoulder.

"You take good care of my girl, you hear me? If I find out anything happened to her, I swear to fucking god—"

"—Dad!"

Steve remained steadily stoic under your father's disapproving frown and sharp glare. "I understand, sir. I'd never let anything happen to her, I swear."

Your father nodded curtly before releasing Steve. Steve's hand instantly sought the small of your back, pulling you into him gently. You waved at your family, blowing your mother a kiss.

"Bye, I love you guys."

On your way down the street, you watched your mother cry in the front window, and your father wrap his arms around her.

♡ ♡

You had three days before the fight, though they all seemed jam-packed with events and training. You barely had a second to unpack your clothes at the hotel before you were being hauled off to another sweaty, humid gym.

But on the second day, Steve woke up early and rolled toward your side of the bed, smacking kisses all over your bare neck. You squirmed in your sleep, waking with a gasp when his teeth sank into your throat.

"Steve," you squeaked, sighing contentedly when he tugged you flush against his bare chest.

"Morning, my angel," he murmured into your bare skin.

Half-asleep and bleary, a hum rumbled through your throat, hand rising to bat around for Steve's fluffy hair. When you found it, you pushed your fingers through the heap of it, stroking for your own comfort. Steve nuzzled further into your neck, unable to control himself from pressing another eager kiss to the underside of the jaw. You smelled so good in the morning, and you skin was always so warm and soft.

"Morning, Stevie."

Your voice sent a jolt through his chest. He smiled to himself, tightening his arms around your waist. He couldn't believe this was his life.

"Got a call from an old buddy ," he announced, playing with the satin of your sleep tank. "He lives in California now, said he wants to get together and catch up. Invited us to his band practice today."

You hummed, rubbing at your eyes. You still weren't used to sleeping anywhere other than Steve's lumpy mattress at his old apartment, or the same bed you'd been sleeping in since you were young. Sleep didn't come easy away from home.

"He's in a band?" A yawn split your mouth open. You tossed around a moment, still caged in Steve's arms, until you were on your back.

You pried your eyes open and smiled at Steve, reaching up to scratch at the stubble on his jaw with your nails. He eased into it like a cat. He forced his eyes open, propping himself up on one elbow to gaze down at you. Fondness drenched his features, eyes twinkling with a look only you were lucky enough to see. He swept two fingers across your forehead to brush your hair out of your eyes, letting them drag down your cheek gently.

"Yep, ever since Hawkins days."

Your brows jumped. "Oh, he's from Hawkins, too?"

Steve pinched your chin between his thumb and knuckle, tipping your head up to bare your mouth to him.

"Yep." He bent and pressed your mouths together. "Went..." Another kiss, head tipping to explore different angles of your mouth. "...to high school..." He flicked his tongue along your bottom lip and nipped at it. "...together."

You squirmed on the mattress below him, cheeks warming and thighs squeezing together. Your fingers dug into his bulging biceps with need as he situated himself over you. Your thighs stung with the stretch needed to accommodate him.

"Can't wait to meet him."

Steve lowered his pelvis to press flush against yours, snatching a sharp gasp from your throat. His erection throbbed against your panties, satin sleep shorts abandoned on the floor from last night. He smirked at the little sound, running the tip of his nose along your collarbones, blowing hot air across your tender morning skin. He had you shivering like the cold and he'd barely even touched you.

"Mhm, later. Right now, I gotta take care a' my girl."

He disappeared beneath the covers, wedged between your legs thrown over his shoulders. He spent thirty minutes suffocating between them just to hear you whine and cry, and didn't let up until your face was burning red.

♡ ♡

After three hours in the gym and a quick shower, you climbed into the SUV with Steve to meet his friend. It was much warmer here in California—you weren't used to having bare shoulders and exposed legs in February. You wore one of Steve's favorite dresses, a piece from your mother's closet that she gifted to you when she could no longer fit into it. Steve said it made you look like "one of those disco girls, but in a really hot way."

You expected to arrive at a shabby house with a garage full of instruments, so all you could do was frown in confusion when Steve pulled against the curb of The Troubadour.

"Um...Steve?"

Steve popped the glovebox, rifling through the mess of papers and cassettes before pulling out his sunglasses. He shoved them over his eyes and slammed it closed. "Huh?"

You were slow to take your seatbelt off, still glancing through the window with a pout. "What band did you say your friend was in?"

Steve hopped out of the car, and you instantly pulled the visor down to check your lipstick and the state of your hair before he reached your side. When he helped you out of the car, he was quick to wrap his arm around your shoulders and guide you toward the door, though he hadn't answered your question.

Inside, any glimpse of the California sunlight disappeared into darkness. The stage was massive, much too big for a small time band, and you found your eyes bouncing around frantically toward each band poster on the wall for some sort of hint. Steve seemed to know exactly where he was going, though, and guided you toward a door just off the stage.

The plucky twang of guitar strings and the rowdy chorus of male laughter echoed from a room down the hall. Your nerves suddenly felt cold. This was a big time band, and you were just some small town girl.

Sunglasses and brown bomber jacket on, Steve stomped down the hall with you under his arm like he'd been here all his life. You admired that air of confidence and ease.

Steve shoved the door at the end of the hall open, revealing a small cinderblock room with a sectional, tables of alcohol and food wrappers, and a gaggle of men in black leather.

Corroded Coffin.

"Holy shi—"

"Harrington! You made it, man."

Eddie Munson, frontman for Corroded Coffin, came staggering toward Steve with his arms out. Steve kept one around you as he clasped Eddie on the back; two large, leather-padded smacks rang through the room. Your cheeks suddenly felt very warm and swollen. You glanced past Eddie toward the rest of the band, talking amongst themselves and nursing beer. They all glistened with a sheen of sweat, and the room reeked with a haze of alcohol and cigarettes.

You never thought you'd see them outside of the poster on your closet door or the album on your bookshelf.

"And who's this cutie?"

You turned, feeling the heat of the sun gather in your face at the sight of two black eyes steadied on you. Eddie's hair was as large and wild as ever, eyes rimmed with smudged eyeliner, a heavy silver chain around his neck, another one clinking on the low belt loop of his jeans when he crossed his arms and smirked at you. You swallowed, pressing closer to Steve.

"This is my girl, Libby. Libby, this is—"

"—I know who you are," you squeaked. You seemed to be growing hotter by the second, though that seemed out of the realm of possibility.

Eddie's brows shot up, and he tossed a quick glance toward Steve. "That so? Harrington, you didn't tell me you caught yourself a little metalhead."

Steve pushed his glasses to the top of his head, sliding his hand down to your waist. "News to me, Munson."

To ease the sudden stiffness between the two hulking men, you shot your hand out toward Eddie with a saccharine smile. "Nice to meet you."

Eddie's laughter made you start to pull back, but he suddenly bent at the waist and accepted your hand, shaking it with a gentle bow. "And you, sweetheart. C'mon, take a seat. I wanna hear all about this fight, Harrington."

Steve pulled you onto his lap when he sank down on the leather sectional, and you were slightly grateful for it after seeing the sight of those sticky cushions. His big hands splayed across your bare thighs, pulling the hem of your dress down a little further.

Eddie sat across from you, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, ringed hands reaching toward a bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor. He pulled the top and poured a stream into his mouth. You inwardly winced when he gulped it down like water, wiping his shiny mouth with the back of his palm.

Eddie held the bottle out, but Steve waved his hand dismissively. Eddie angled the top of the bottle toward you, brows raised. Steve's hand tightened on your thigh, and you smiled sheepishly.

"Oh, no thank you."

If Eddie thought you were lame for denying the alcohol, he didn't show it. Instead, he took another swig and set the bottle on the floor.

"So," he mused, easing back on the sofa, "how'd you two meet?"

Steve drummed his fingers on your thigh, making small tapping sounds, and you slid your fingers through his to interlock them.

"At a party," Steve replied.

Eddie stretched his arm along the back of the sofa. The band lingered in the corner, chatting amongst themselves, though curiously glancing at the pair of you on the sofa. You averted your gaze when the one with shaggy hair dropped his eye in a wink, cheeks burning. If Steve had seen, you knew he would've tossed you aside and gotten his knuckles bloody in a heartbeat.

"Oh! Still the life of the party, Harrington?" Eddie snickered.

You giggled, but Steve only mustered a combination of a smirk and a scowl. "She's from Hawkins, too."

Eddie's eyes rounded with delight, plump lips parting with genuine surprise. He turned to you, and you squished a little closer to Steve, who tapped the side of your thigh with his open palm. "Get my lighter for me, baby?"

You nodded, dipping your hand into the inner pocket of his jacket to fish out the silver zippo. In that time, he'd swiped a cigarette from the table in a random pack, and you brought the lighter to his mouth where the cigarette waited.

"If you're from Hawkins, how come I don't remember you?" Eddie inquired, watching the interaction with amusement.

You snapped the lighter shut and dropped it back into Steve's pocket, watching him inhale a deep drag before blowing it away toward the door. The stench of tobacco used to make you sick, but now it smelled like Steve.

You turned to Eddie and grinned, full-cheeked and sweet. "Oh, you were already in the band by the time I got to high school, and Steve had graduated."

Eddie's smile slipped, eyes sliding to Steve beside you with a slow cock of his head. You tried not to let your smile mimic Eddie's—of disappointment and dismay—and tapped Steve's shoulder.

"I'll be right back."

You placed your heels on the floor to push off and stand up, but Steve tugged you back gently by the arm, cigarette propped in the corner of his mouth. Brows furrowed and lips pulled into a frown, he shook his head.

"Where y' goin', angel?"

You giggled nervously, the back of your neck gathering sweat. "Just to the bathroom, Stevie."

Eddie snickered, sliding a cigarette out of the pack on the table. He brought it to his mouth with his eyes trained solely on the two of you. Steve released your arm and you stood to your feet, bending to press a quick kiss to his cheek.

"Be right back, promise," you cooed.

You were a few steps from the door when you heard Eddie chuckle. "Yeah, Stevie, she promises."

You skittered down the hall toward the ladies' room, closing the door and sliding the lock over.

While you were gone, Eddie lit his cigarette and leaned forward again, hunched over his lap toward Steve.

"Harrington, how the fuck old is this girl?" His voice was low and grumbly.

Steve rolled his eyes, plucking his sunglasses from the crown of his head to tuck them into his jacket. "She's nineteen, Munson, lay the fuck off."

Eddie chuckled, spluttering clouds of smoke into the air.

"Harrington, be honest with me, did you 'nap her?"

Steve shook his head, tonguing away a sideways grin. It'd been a long time since he'd seen Eddie. Though they went to high school together, they never ran in the same crowds. It wasn't until Steve graduated that he met Eddie at a party, woozy out on coke and Jack with a girl under each arm. At first, they just nodded to each other at parties. But when they got to talking, they realized they could make each other laugh, and bonded over their mutual love for women. That was all it took for a friendship to form.

It seemed Eddie had fallen drunk to the rock and roll life. Steve eyed the end of a tied baggie hanging out of Eddie's jacket wearily. He'd been here with his friend before.

"Nah, man, she uh...she's really great," Steve admitted, trying not to let it show just how much he truly ached for you.

"God, she must be. Callin' you Stevie, laying all over your lap. You got it bad, Harrington," Eddie teased in a musical tone.

Steve tapped his ashes toward the floor, shooting Eddie a glare.

"Not bad enough to stop me kickin' your ass."

Eddie's hands flew up with a giggle. "Oh-ho-ho. C'mon, lemme see those jabs, King Steve. I heard you're taking bodies in the ring."

Eddie leaned over the table, a quick fist appearing to shoot out and punch Steve's arm. Steve quickly retaliated, smacking Eddie upside the head in a much more humiliating act that had Eddie's cheeks burning pink.

The door chittered on its hinges, and all heads turned to watch you quietly tiptoe in. You kept your eyes on the floor the whole brisk journey toward Steve, taking tiny but quick steps. You instantly slid back into his lap, comforted by the weight of his arm around your waist, the callused feel of his hand on your thigh.

Eddie leaned back into the sofa again, all wide shoulders and black hair. He hollowed his cheeks around his cigarette and pulled at his jacket until his arms were free of it, revealing two ivory biceps cut with lean muscle. You instantly burned at the sight of them, scrawled with tattoos, and placed your eyes on your lap.

"So, what d' you do, sweet thing? You in college?" Eddie asked, words escaping him with a coil of smoke.

You glanced at Steve, shaking your head in response. Steve was as stoically blank as ever, and you weren't sure if Eddie's use of pet names bothered him or not.

"Um, no, I'm a librarian—"

"—ooh," Eddie interrupted the moment your occupation left your mouth, lips pouted in an 'o' shape, brows furrowed and eyes scrunched, "sexy."

Steve's fingers dug into your thigh, his spare hand ripping the cigarette from his mouth. You barely had a moment to turn your head and clock the angled position of his brows, the crease in his forehead, before he was pointing his cigarette at Eddie.

"Munson." The single utterance was sharp with warning.

The room went quiet for a split second. You brought your hand to the back of Steve's neck, playing with the ends of his hair, and Eddie's face slowly relaxed into another wide, dimpled smile. His hands rose again, though this time in surrender.

The men shared a look of understanding that went unseen by you. But Steve could see it, the appreciative cock of Eddie's head, the small 'I'm happy for you' coded in the way he nodded. They both knew, deep down, that all Steve ever wanted was to know he could be loved.

"So," Eddie cleared his throat, clasping his hands together with a sharp smack, "you guys stickin' around for the show tonight?"

You visibly perked up, grin returning with a twitch of your lips. Before Steve could even dismiss the idea, you pushed your fingers through his hair and turned to Eddie.

"I'd love to!"

Eddie mirrored your grin, his all dimples and charm, and turned his attention to your scowling boyfriend. Only Steve could see through his friendly joy, and note the mocking amusement that lingered beneath.

"She'd love to, Harrington," Eddie cooed.

Cheeks burning, you peered down at Steve with big, round eyes. "It'll be fun, Steve. Beats being cooped up in that hotel room all night."

You stroked the back of his head languidly, feathering his satin locks between your fingers. You could see the gears turning in his head, thinking over your request. His fingers drummed on your thigh again, arm pressing into your spine. Steve hated saying no to you, but he wasn't sure he could handle a crowded club full of screeching guitars and girls too young to be throwing bras and panties at Eddie.

"Ah, nobody wants that! Come on, Harrington, your girl wants to rock!" Eddie reached out and slapped Steve's knee with the back of his hand.

Steve made a "psh" sound, pinching the bridge of his nose. You pressed a kiss to his cheek, sweet and scented of vanilla flavored lipgloss, and Steve's resolve fizzled into nothing.

"Fuck—fine, whatever," he grumbled.

That earned him a soft squeal of excitement from you, and his face scrunched when you grabbed it with both hands to plant a sticky kiss on his mouth. Eddie grinned at it, the way you could squish Steve's cheeks together and smear pink glitter across his face without being reprimanded for it. It was the clear the hulking athlete had it bad for you.

As Steve gently pulled your hands away, the trill of a phone broke through the muffled chatter and low strum of guitars in the dressing room. Before either of you could stop to wonder where it was coming from, Eddie leapt from the couch. He toppled over bottles on the floor, half tripping on the end of the coffee table on his way to the phone hanging on the wall.

"Hey gorgeous," he gasped into the receiver, slamming himself against the wall, out of breath and eager.

The rest of the band assumed Eddie's side of the sectional, and it was the shaggy blond, Gareth, that leaned forward and grinned. "That's gotta be Rink."

You pulled your brows together. "Rink?"

"Stella? Stella Rink? His girlfriend," Gareth explained.

Your head snapped over to Steve, eyes blown wide. "Stella Rink? Eddie's dating Stella Rink?"

Steve shrugged, pulling the hem of your dress down again. He glared toward the band, whose eyes were skimming over the shape of you.

"Dunno who that is, angel."

You cocked your head at Steve, eyes rolling. "We just saw one of her movies last week. She was the main character, Steve, the really pretty one."

Steve let his head fall back against the leather couch cushions, fixing you with an unamused look.

"Now, why would I be lookin' at another girl when I got you, hmm?"

Your eyes rolled again on their own, though your cheeks grew sore from your giddy smile. Steve ate it up, wrapping a hand around the underside of your jaw to pull you down and attach your mouths together. The band of men on the other couch became forgotten at the taste of foreign cigarettes on his mouth, the stiffness of his lap beneath you.

"You're so full of shit," you giggled against the swipe of his tongue.

Steve nipped at your bottom lip and shrugged. "S' the truth. Can't deny the truth, baby."

The phone returned to the cradle on the wall with a bell's chime, and you pulled away from Steve just in time to see Eddie trudging back. Steve brought his arm up to rest around your shoulders, yanking you down until your head knocked into his.

"How's America's sweetheart, Munson?" Gareth snickered, watching Eddie pout.

"Too busy," the rockstar huffed.

You gnawed on your lip a moment, cheeks warm again. "So, you're really dating Stella Rink?"

Eddie spun to face you with such fervor that you recoiled into Steve, and his hand tightened on your thigh to pull you closer.

"Dating her? Honey, that's my wife."

Confusion twisted on your face, but the band just snickered at Eddie's whole-hearted declaration.

"They've been dating for, like, three months," Jeff, the bassist, chuckled.

Eddie waved his hands, brushing off the band's dismissal. He perched on the arm of the couch on the other side of Steve, all pale limbs and black attire. He placed one foot on the cushion next to Steve and bent over his knee, speaking to the pair of you like telling a secret.

"Well, when you know, you know. Right, Harrington?"

At this angle, Steve got a better look at the baggie in Eddie's pocket—a familiar white powder coated the plastic. Steve tore his eyes slowly away from the baggie and met Eddie's gaze, making sure the shaggy-haired man knew what Steve had been looking at.

Eddie swallowed, smile slipping, but Steve's eyes were steadily narrowed with suspicious warning.

"Right," Steve agreed.

They continued to stare at each other—Steve unnervingly calm and Eddie a little squirmy—while you murmured amongst the band members about Stella and Eddie, and how bloody Steve's fights usually got. They were surprisingly curious about how violent boxing could get.

But Steve put an end to the conversation with a gentle tap to your thigh, pushing off the back of the couch to sit up and guide you with him.

"C'mon, baby, you wanna go eat?"

The question seemed rhetorical, the both of you already on your feet and your hand grasped tightly in Steve's before you could even excuse yourself from the band conversation. You waved goodbye to them, pairing it with a cute, rosy-cheeked smile that made them swoon.

"See you guys tonight, right?" Eddie asked, following the pair of you toward the door. "And we should get together again sometime, Harrington. It's been a while."

A big, ringed hand clasped down on Steve's shoulder, and the boxer stopped short in the doorway to turn to his friend. You stopped with him, leaning into his side. For a moment, you were certain they'd have another vague and ominous staring match. But then Steve leaned forward, jerked his chin toward Eddie's legs, and blinked blankly at Eddie.

"You watchin' that?"

Eddie blinked back, his scoff a secondary, delayed reaction yanked from him by disbelief. He glanced at you for a moment, uncertain how much he wanted to say in front of you, and placed his hand on the door.

"I got it covered, Harrington, but thanks."

His tone was sharp but not cruel, and it took you a moment to even pick up on the underlying stiffness between the two men. Clearly, there was something wrong, but you just couldn't figure out what. Did Eddie have an accident, were his legs okay? The dimpled grin he flashed Steve seemed irritated.

Steve clapped Eddie on the arm: a friendly, smidge-too-hard pat. "Alright, man. Catch you guys tonight, gotta go get some earplugs."

The irritation was slow to melt from Eddie's smile, but he chuckled all the same. You cleared your throat, raising your hand in a tiny wave toward Eddie.

"Bye, Eddie, it was nice to meet you."

Eddie bent at the waist again in another bow, and you couldn't help but giggle dazedly. "And you. See you tonight, sweetheart."

♡ ♡

At dinner, Steve smoked another cigarette on the patio of a Mexican restaurant, sunglasses shielding him from the evening sun. He hadn't said much since you left Troubadour, and you could only sip your lemonade for so long in silence before you huffed.

"Baby, what's wrong? Are you mad we're going to the concert tonight, because we don't have to if you really don't want to."

Steve tapped his cigarette over the pavement, head shaking. "Nah, angel, s' not it."

You frowned, reaching over to grab his hand on the table. His watch knocked on the white cloth, and you traced your finger over the leather band.

"Then what is it?"

Steve took a drag of the cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke toward the street.

"Nothin', baby. Just a headache."

You nodded, flashing a tight-lipped smile. You dipped into your purse on the chair beside you, fishing out the metal pill container you always carried on hand. You swiped two pain pills for him and placed them beside his Coke. Steve followed your movements, a huff of laughter shooting through his nose. He placed his cigarette in his mouth, refusing to drop your hand, and collected them in his hand.

"Thanks, angel."

You beamed. "Of course, Stevie. Now come on, I wanna go to the hotel and get ready. I can't believe I'm finally seeing Corroded Coffin live."

Steve stamped out his cigarette and plopped the pills in his mouth. He watched you, unable to contain your ecstatic smile, though you tried by pursing your lips and gazing down at your plate. He'd been watching you since you sat down—he watched you gaze around Sunset Strip like you were in another world, wide-eyed and curious.

He said nothing of Eddie's drug habit, or his mother's when he was a child that made him weary around Eddie because of it. Steve said nothing about hearing you sniffle in the bathroom at one a.m because you tried calling your parents and they didn't answer, and you missed them so bad that you seemed off in your own world ever since you got here.

Because right now, you were happy. And that's all that mattered to Steve.

"Let's go, baby."

♡ ♡

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innocent-chris-evans-slut · 4 years

Text

Sunday BBQ

My Masterlist ✨

Requests are open.

Chris Evans x Reader

Word Count: 2,5k

Type: smut

Summary: Lisa had hosted a barbecue at her house, her four children and some close family friends. It was a hot August day in Boston, and you were wearing your fav skirt and a simply white crop top, which highlighted your tan. Chris couldn’t take his eyes off of you and you noticed it. He was wearing a blue t-shirt, which tightened around his muscular biceps.

Warning(s): dirty talk, daddy kink, spanking, rough sex

A wave of heat had hit Boston that day. You couldn’t go to the beach -it was too hot-, neither could you stay in for the entire Sunday. Then your mother had called, saying that Lisa Evans had organized a barbecue at her place, and you took the chance almost immediately.

You wore the first thing you had caught in your wardrobe and got in your car, never living behind Toby -your dog. You jumped in your brother’s red Jeep and in less than fifteen minutes you were parking in front of Lisa Evans’ house.

It wasn’t the biggest house you’ve ever been in, but Mama Evans knew how to take care of her garden, in fact you loved how it was arranged and the beautiful and colorful flowers on the grass. Not by chance Lisa hosted almost every Sunday a big barbecue with family’s friends and her children’s families and friends. Since when you were a child, you’d always waited the Sundays only to go to the Evans’ and have fun.

“Mum and dad are already there”, Tom told you while you were getting out of his car. Together you crossed the road and reached the Evans’ front door, “Aideen and Cristal are coming”.

Toby barked as soon as the door was opened, and you watched him disappearing into the crowded living room. You panted and turned to greet Shanna, who had welcomed you in her mother’s house.

“The guys are in the backyard”, she informed your brother, who crossed the living room and made his way to the yard. Instead you followed Shanna in the kitchen, where you met your mother and Cristal, your younger sister. “So, how is it going at school? Do the children already love their new teacher?”

“It isn’t that simple”, you answered, thanking Lisa as she filled a glass of lemonade for you, “But…they trust me and laugh at my jokes. That’s my biggest achievement so far”, all the women in the room laughed at your statement, including your mother, who had heard that story a couple of times before. “It’s been a while since last Sunday at the Evans’.”

“I know, my dear. This summer I’m determined to re-establish the tradition”, Lisa caressed your back and sent you a reassuring smile, before being interrupted by her husband.

“Ladies, lunch is almost ready.”

You, as all the women in the room, headed out the kitchen and followed Mr. Evans in the backyard, where you brother and other men were grilling meat. You approached Scott, who had been waving you since you had stepped out of the house, “Hey, man!”

“Hey, stranger. I haven’t seen you in ages”, Scott, being a child, as always, teased you and poked your nose, “What’s going on?”

“I’ve been busy with kids at school. I’m officially a teacher!” you cheered and made a quick happy dance, just like when you were a child and happy danced basically for everything, “I’m so…uuh” you stopped talking when you felt something slimy on your ankle. You looked down and saw a tiny white dog licking you, “Hi, baby. Already tired of playing with other dogs?” you grabbed him in your hands and petted his head, just as he liked it.

“He’s a hairball and he’s lazy. Prove me that I’m wrong”, a strong, deep voice said, and you knew who was trying to make you angry, “Just like his owner”.

Chris Evans stood in front of you, one arm around his brother’s shoulder and a cold beer in the other hand. “Hi”, he stuck out his tongue at you and it reminded you how much a child he was.

“What are you doing here?” you asked in a harsh tone, succeeding in not let your excitement to show up, “No movie? No Hollywood Star appointment?” You let Toby rush to his food as you saw Shanna reaching out for him

“Nope, unfortunately for you”, his attention was completely on you, once that Scott had excused himself and ran away from the two of you, “Free for my family and friends”, he took one last drink from his beer and threw the bottle in its proper can, “And you, of course”.

“Good luck with that. Last time didn’t go so well”, having said that, you left him alone, with his thoughts, and made your way back to where your mother and brothers were. “Is that anything left for me?” you took a plate and filled it up with chips, grilled vegetables and an infinite amount of sauces.

Basically, everything that was on the long buffet table, except for the meat -which was being grilled by the men. Logan, your older brother, dragged you in front of the grill and made you wait there with a huge, ceramic dish in your hands. You looked at how all the men were focused on their portion of the grill, but only one caught your attention and it was Chris.

He had his sleeves rolled up and his broad biceps fully on display for everyone. His pecs tensed underneath the think material of his blue shirt and you could clearly see them.

“D’you like what you see?” his tease snapped you out of your thoughts. He saw you blinking and gasping, before, eventually, addressing him an annoyed face, “What? You’re basically drooling over me”, he flipped the grilling meat, interrupting your exchange of gaze, “I have eyes, Little One”.

“Stop calling me like that!”

“It’s not a nickname, it’s a matter of fact” Chris pierced various steaks of meat and nodded you to get closer to him, which you did -even if reluctantly, “You’re ten years younger than me, if I’m not wrong”, he started filling up the dish in your hands with steaks and hot dogs.

“Yeah, you’re right”, you rolled your eyes and stuck out your tongue, “And I hate you”, you saw as he put down the big fork and the spatula and grabbed the plate from your hands -which was becoming hotter.

“Nah, you don’t”, he nodded towards his beer -the second of the day- behind you and you got you had to grab that, “You secretly love me”.

“And that’s such a secret that I didn’t even know it”, you stated and look at your feet as you got down of the area where the grills were. “Thank you for enlightening me, by the way”.

After placing the dish down on the buffet table, you gave the beer back to its owner. While you were handing it to him, your fingers slightly touched, but it was enough for you to shiver.

You couldn’t deny that; Chris had been your first serious crush and being friend with him didn’t help you cause. Moreover, being him very friendly with quite everyone, he’d never missed the chance to hug you, kiss your cheek, or touch your thighs while laughing together -and you loved him being touchy with you.

But that, damn, that wasn’t something you looked for, it came and brought butterflies to your stomach. You taught to kids in elementary school, yet at that moment you felt like a teenager, inexperienced with guys.

You raised your eyes and found him already looking at you. It was like a movie scene; with the two characters whose lives changed once their hands touched. But it was real life, and, in the real life, things didn’t go as in a movie. Your special moment was ruined by your mother yelling your name and searching for you in the yard.

“I gotta go. That’s yours”, and without saying another word, you rushed across the garden and disappeared, leaving Chris speechless and jammed.

You were stuck with your mother and sisters for three hours. You ate with them and told them how your teaching life was going that far, which had been exciting for the first fifteen minutes, then it annoyed you, too. You found yourself often searching for a pair of blue-green eyes which had your knees tremble not long before.

When you could no longer listen to your mother talking about your happy childhood and how your parents had been crucial in your academic choice, you excused yourself and got up, heading to the bathroom. It was occupied at the first floor, so you made your way upstairs and quickly found the room you were looking for.

“Sneaking in my bedroom?”

You flinched when you heard a male voice coming from behind you, and you knew whose voice was that, “You’re unbelievable”.

“Nah, I’m incredible”, Chris put his phone in his back pocket and lowered his gaze at you, “And you’re really cute today”.

You shook your head as the grip on the door handle tightened, “Cute?” you lowered your gaze, looking how you were dressed and looked back at him, “Are you noticing it only now?”

Chris didn’t reply to you, he had a quick glance at your surroundings and wrapped his arms around your waist, pushing you against the door behind you, “I did notice it”, his hand reached the handle and pushed it down. Chris pulled you inside and locked the door once inside, “And I’ve thinking about one-hundred ways to get you under me”.

You weren’t surprised, not at all. To everyone’s eyes you and Chris were just friends who liked hanging out together whenever it was possible. The truth was that you two had history, behind everyone’s back.

You felt his biceps flexing under your hands and you smirked, “And which one is you favorite?” you placed your hands at the base of his neck, “C’mon, tell me”, you encouraged him when you saw he wasn’t going to answer your question.

“We’re in my parents’ house, what makes you think I’m gonna fuck you here?” his grip tightened around your waist and that made you gasp, “C’mon, tell me”, he mocked of you when you didn’t reply to him immediately.

“You become ruthless when it comes to fuck”, you moved your hands behind his neck and pulled a string of hair too long. You brushed his cheek with your lips, and you heard him groaning. Not completely satisfied with yourself, you pulled closer to him and crushed your hips against him.

“Bend over.”

His firm and harsh tone made you shiver. It had always done. When talking like that with you, Chris knew he had you wet, trembling, and throbbing for him. He knew you would have begged him until you were no longer capable of speaking.

You did as he asked, and your face met the cold marble surface before you could hear an abrupt sound and warm spreading on your left ass-cheek.

“Did you just-?” you lifted your head and looked straight at him, startled by what he had just done.

“You can bet you ass I did”, having said that, Chris let his hand fall on your ass once more and the vibration of that spank went straight to your throbbing clit, “Now…tell me what I wanna hear”.

You heard metal noises coming from behind you, acknowledging what he was doing, “Please”.

“I’ll show your ass to the word if you don’t say the magic words”, his big, callous hands went raising your baby blue skirt up to your hips, and soon after they automatically found their way to your chest. Chris dangerously shoved his hardening cock against your core and hissed in pleasure.

You couldn’t endure it anymore; the pleasure growing inside you was too much that it was becoming painful and you knew he wouldn’t let you come if you misbehaved. Your clit was hurting, and it was a matter of time before you would drip yourself wet. You closed your eyes and gave up: “Please, daddy, fuck me”, Chris’ hand went down on your ass-cheek abruptly once more and encouraged you to go on, “Pleeease. I’ve been craving you all day”, you pushed your ass towards his hips, and you heard him cursing under his breath.

“You’re acting like a brat”, he set his buckle next to your face and you shivered, “Do you know what brats get?”

You didn’t reply to him, not because you didn’t want to, but because the pain was becoming too much that you couldn’t assemble a sentence.

“What-”, spank, “-do-”, another spank, “-they-“, Chris changed side, “-get?” one last spank.

“T-they…don’t g-get to c-come”, you were a trembling mess. Your weight was completely on your chest as your legs caved in when he’d started spanking you, “B-but, please, make me cum, daddy”.

“If you keep it quiet and low, I can consider making you come”, Chris’ hands searched for your underwear and, once found it, he pulled it down to your ankles, “Quiet and low, remember”.

You closed your eyes and prayed the God as Chris pushed himself inside you, stretching all your inner muscles. You moaned when he pulled out, only to go back where he left and boost his entire length inside your channel. You arched your back as you felt his thumb teasing your asshole, “P-please”.

“Oh, God…” Chris groaned as increased his pace. Thrusts became quicker and fiercer, leaving you breathless, “Keep it low”, he warned you not a second before adopting an ungodly speed.

You couldn’t form a word anymore, the only things coming out from your mouth were moans -which you had to hold on. You could only beg him for your own release, which wasn’t far away since the familiar warm had already formed and was spreading in your stomach.

“As much I want to take my time with you-“ Chris lifted your chin and made you look at him while speaking, “-I’ve thought of taking you like this the whole day-“, he kissed your forehead and left a trail of sweet kisses from there to your mouth, “-after this, we call it a day and leave”, as he pinched your clit, you both came and you had to repress a scream.

You were out of breath, bent over the furniture in the bathroom of Lisa Evans’ house, and at the mercy of her older son. In less than fifteen minutes Chris had transformed you into a whimpering and sweating mess, you were sticky between your legs, and you back hurt for the countless times you had arched it, “Chris”, you called him, who didn’t appeared better than you, “You gotta help me”.

The man behind you giggled, but helped you standing back on your feet, he re-dressed you and rested a kiss on your collarbone, jaw, nose, and, finally, lips, “Have I ever told you how much I actually like you?” he rhetorically asked, looking straight at your eyes.

“Only every time you fuck me. And before fucking me another time”, you wrap your arms around his waist and rested your head in the crock of his neck, inhaling his strong, musky, after-sex scent -the one you loved so much, yet you weren’t brave enough to tell him that.

“Don’t fall asleep. We have a long afternoon and a long night in front of us”, Chris rub a thumb on your left cheek, and you closed your eyes, wallowing that sensation, “Let’s go, Princess”.

Tag List:

ALL MY STORIES:

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ALL CHRIS EVANS:

@stargazingfangirl18

@rororo06

#chris evans #chris evans imagine #chris evans x y/n #chris evans x reader #smut chris evans #smut #captain america #steve rogers #marvel #marvel smut #real life #ransom drysdale #knives out

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finnoky · 3 years

Note

AU where Quirin takes and raises Eugene after the DK falls

•| Send me a potential AU and I’ll tell you five fun facts |•

Oh you have no idea how much this enables me - I stand by Quirin raising Eugene until the end of time bc it’s what they BOTH deserve

1) Oki so, here we see Eugene taken away as a baby without disclosing an EXACT location — that will not stop Quirin though, who had a stance against cutting him off completely despite it being Edmunds orders [It made sense to send the boy away but to send him to an ORPHANAGE was another story] Quirin finds Eugene a month or so after they get separated, during that time he found a house and a stable farm to raise a kid on [Gotta have an income] and then promptly goes to the orphanage and adopts Eugene.

By then, Eugene’s name has already been changed and frankly... Quirin thinks it suits him, though he occasionally slips up and calls him Horace. He feels a duty to raise the Prince but also kinda has a “My son now” mentality! Disagrees with Edmunds choices + decides... His kingdom is doomed, so he’s gonna ensure Eugene gets a stable upbringing with KNOWLEDGE of the Dark Kingdom without necessarily telling him “Oh BTW you’re the prince”. Being a father is hard and he struggles a lot, esp in early days, it’s a whole new challenge from being a knight but... Not one he really regrets?

Cue some fluff! Knight-dad trying to raise a baby and establish a life in a new country — Over time he grows and becomes Village Leader + Develops a bond with the monarchs based on his knowledge and previous high-rank in society from being a knight! Gets offered a guard position but turns it down in favour of spending time with his toddler son. Eugenes first word is Dada and Quirins never felt so content. Baby fluff of Eugenes milestones — Quirin has Eugene helping on the fields as soon as he can toddle without tripping (tho it’s mostly Eugene playing and running around while Quirin works) Toddler Eugene is a little darling and knows exactly how to use his cuteness to get praise and sweets

2) Eugene starts thievery / acting out soon after Quirin dates and marries Ulla, though it soon become a hobby he usually indulges in with his friend Arnie [though they take on the names of the coolest book characters Flynn Rider and Lance Strongbow!] Quirin thinks it’s just a phase and leans into the whole calling Eugene ‘Flynn’ because... He really loves the books, that’s not too odd? Though he doesn’t know of crimes + just thinks they go out to play a lot. Eugene ignored Ulla for the first few weeks because he doesn’t like the idea of someone new staying around — He doesn’t hate her, it just raises a lot of questions about his mum that Quirin doesn’t know how to answer... He resolved on the explaination that she was very sick and couldn’t take care of him anymore, though loved him dearly — it’s enough to placate him.

Eugene doubles down on stealing when he’s 10 and suddenly there’s gonna be a new baby in the house. [He doesn’t WANT a sibling + worries Quirin will love the baby more than him since he knows he’s adopted & all that though is too scared to ask] Eugene grows an attitude and Quirin finds himself exhausted and constantly caught in petty bickers as Eugene keeps running away + acting up, especially to his wife (Who loves Eugene very much, of course) ‘Flynn’ declares he wants to travel the world and be far away from step-mums and nasty babies, uhhh Domestic fall out stuff?

Things change when baby gets here and suddenly Eugene is a big brother and Quirin is MORE distracted, sometimes they forget to even read him a story and he can’t stand the squirmy little creature... All it does is cry and take what little attention his misbehaviour had earned him... So naturally, petty crime continues + Eugene starts caring less about getting caught, so it becomes more risky. He and Lance befriend some bad influences and start taking Big Kid Crime. It’s fun! Until Eugene is brought home by a guard and Quirin gives him the silent treatment for the next week. Quirin... He loves his sons, both of them, but he just isn’t sure how to handle a distressed 11 year old and a baby, it feels like there’s not enough hours in the day and Eugene is SET on making life harder for everyone.

Eugene stays against ‘Varian’, frequently makes the baby the villain in his games and makes him cry on several occasions. It gets even worse when he starts crawling bc now he can’t get anytime alone, it’s just frustrating! The solution probably comes when Varians starting to talk and he says ‘Oo-gee’ as one of his first words — ‘Lisa’s first word’ style — and Quirin and Ulla admit that Varian is obsessed with Eugene. It’s sorta a wake up call for Eugene to start trying to get along with the kid, and it works! He finds it fun to teach him things & have someone to talk to (even if he just babbles back) By the time Eugene is 12 he’s calling Ulla mum and love spending time with his little brother

3) Right! When Eugene is about 18 he picks up theiving again, mostly because he isn’t suited to the farm life and it’s easy money (Plus how else is he gonna achieve his dream of financial independence?) He moves out the farm under the guise of finding a new life with his best friend, though they quickly realise it’s not amazing when they get tangled up with the Baron + his antics. Eugene visits home every so often and claims everything is fine, it’s going great, he doesn’t need any extra help + his life is just dandy. His dishonesty mostly bc he doesn’t wanna worry Quirin and there’s been a bit of a strain since Ulla passed away.

Life keeps on like this. Eugene ages, steals alchemy supplies for Varian and hides his true income source because he wants to make Quirin and Varian proud! Varian grows up to be more headstrong in what he wants because he has someone standing up for him and telling him he’s proud, though the longer Eugene spends away the harder it gets? He loves it when Eugenes here! But the house feels empty without him, and Quirin is so busy + stressed from Varians experiments that there’s still that desire to do more, prove himself.

4) Movie diverts a bit! Eugene finds out about the hair glow and thinks... If one person knows about this then it’s him, and takes Rapunzel to Old Corona over night rather than a campfire. Varian is ecstatic to see him though gets confused by a random girl Eugene claims to have just found — He’s about to ask questions when Eugene asks if Varian could do his magic thing to find out about her hair. Varian insists it’s alchemy and agrees, dragging Raps down into the lab! Boop gothel talks to her when Varians gathering all the equipment and talks her ear off about how cool Eugene is and asks how they found each other since the story is weird... Experiements start!

Meanwhile Eugene is talking to Quirin, when Quirin pulls out a wanted poster and puts it on the table. He finally found out about how bad Eugenes crimes are and wants answers. Now. Eugene sits and tries to explain its not what it looks like, but Quirin doesn’t wanna hear it. The disappointment is evident and Quirin criticises “I thought you grew out of this, what role model is this for Varian?” Eugene doesn’t have an answer but argues his case that it was to be reliant — and he doesn’t wanna do it anymore anyway! Quirin accuses him of using the girl, while Eugene insists her name is Rapunzel and he’s just helping her, get the crown, be set for life and never have to bother him again.

Their argument is cut short by a Varian coming back upstairs looking frazzled, says there’s something about the magic that’s familiar but he can’t place it — sure is strong tho, and continues gushing and asking Eugene for all the details of what he’s been up to. Eugene... Explains, his usual light-hearted rendition of a great quest, while Quirin leaves and stays upstairs the rest of the night.

Varian sees them off in the morning! Hours after they’re gone Vari is still looking into the magic thing — that’s when he remembers the old legend about a sundrop... about how it saved the Queen... About the Princess. Varian sneaks out the house and heads up to the lantern festival to tell Eugene and Rapunzel his revelation, but he gets there just as Eugene is being lead away by guards. Varian finds Max and tells him how they need to free Eugene + basically... Helps him escape with fewer pub thugs and more alchemy. When they get to the tower Eugene tells Varian to stay on the floor and climbs up to help Raps - Varian stays at the bottom of the tower for approx 10 minutes before finding the back entrance and climbing up. Figure he gets there just as Gothel deages, it’s suddenly and before anyone knows it Varian is the one pushing her out the window bc he saw a stabbed Eugene and put two and two together. Then! Cue New Dream scene, except Varian is sitting on the floor in shock a distance away... After New Dream hug Eugene looks at him and Varian admits that “Ok, magic isn’t that bad”

5) Oh god the series! First off — Raps is closer with Varian in this (that’s becoming a theme...) so doesn’t just throw him out into the blizzard when he comes asking for help. Instead he and Eugene go back to Old Corona together after the storm, Varian isolates himself from guilt + has a tough time dealing with what happened, but he lives in the castle as Eugene starts getting angrier with the king and wants answers for what happened. He’s the one that finds Dark Kingdom stuff and he and Varian work on it together... Eugene has a suspicion he came from the Dark Kingdom so when the rocks start pointing there he’s like dope!

No villain Varian joins them on the trek to the Dark Kingdom + it’s all fun and games, Eugene tries to get more answers from Adira as they travel but she says it’s not her place to say... All he needs to know is the kingdom fell, and everyone was evacuated... She’s almost annoyed as she explains it, then Hector is treble annoyed when he finds out Eugene was raised by QUIRIN since that went against the direct orders... Though Adira defends it and says he was doing his duty of keeping Eugene safe, it’s basically a rift between them that’s confusing until they get to the DK and the revelation happens.

I feel... Moongene could be a thing in this AU? but since I’m running out of points I’ll leave it with Cass taking her canon role! I will point out! when Quirin is freed initially only Varian runs into his arms... Eugene hadn’t really spoken to Quirin properly since their movie fallout & he’s not sure he belongs... Until Quirin holds and arm out to him and pulls him into the hug too (PARALLLELS) and we get a happy reunited family (tho with some issues to work out regarding somethings... they need to rebuild trust, but work on it slowly. Edmund stays ‘Edmund’ to Eugene. He sees Quirin as his father & doesn’t push as much to reconnect with Edmund... Though that makes it easier in a way. There’s less pressure once Edmund understands and they form a friendship, but Quirin is Dad 100% (Sometimes Edmund gets called Dad 2))

#tts #tts au #ask #au ask meme #tangled the series #tangled #varian #Eugene #quirin #alternative universe

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

Text

The Original Karens: From Emmett Till’s Accuser To The White Woman Who Sparked The Tulsa Massacre

Written by Clay Cane

In this current climate of protests and demands for justice, the entitled and indignant white women known as “Karens” appear to be falling apart.

From Amy Cooper, whose over dramatic 911 call on a birdwatching Black man blew up in her face, to Lisa Alexander, who was shocked to discover that no one needs her permission to write “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on their own property, Karens are in a rage. Not even a camera in their face will stop their toxic entitlement, which has led to a string of viral sensations.

When thinking of the country’s experiences with white supremacist violence, the discussions are typically centered around men. However, white women have historically been at the helm of this terror, using their tears and imaginary delicateness as ammunition for victim hood and ultimately destroying lives or at its worst, taking one.

Once upon a time, even the slightest hint that white womanhood may be in danger resulted in the lynching of Black children or a thriving town full of Black families being burned to the ground.

Here are some of the most horrific stories of Karens going wild before the term came into existence.

Sarah Page

There has been a lot of talk around Tulsa, Oklahoma due to this month's 99th anniversary of the tragic race massacre that took place there in 1921. Many people may not know the race massacre began with a 17-year-old named Sarah Page.

Page was an elevator operator in what was called the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. On May 30, 1921, reportedly, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, was getting on the elevator to use a segregated bathroom on a higher floor. He allegedly tripped when entering the elevator, accidentally grabbed Page's arm and she reacted by screaming. Rowland fled but the police were called. The next day, Rowland was arrested and word spread that a Black man assaulted a white woman.

According to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report via The Washington Post, Rowland was accused of assaulting Page “on a public elevator in broad daylight."

Within 18 hours, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street, was annihilated. In 1921, The New York Times described the massacre as “one of the most disastrous race wars ever visited upon an American city.”

No one knows what happened to Sarah Page or Dick Rowland after the massacre.

Fannie Taylor

On January 1, 1923, 22-year-old Fannie Taylor began screaming outside of her home. A neighbor rushed to the distressed white woman only to find her beaten and bruised, yelling for her baby. Miss Fannie claimed a Black man broke into her home and attacked her. The neighbor searched her house to find the baby safe and no signs of a break in.

Rumors quickly spread that Taylor was raped and robbed by a Black man. Taylor’s husband, James Taylor, gathered a group of men to find the imaginary criminal, even calling on the Klu Klux Klan for assistance.

A pack of 400 terrorists headed to the neighboring area, an affluent Black town in Rosewood, Florida, accusing any Black man they could of the crime. Fannie’s fraudulent tears was the excuse these envious hellions needed to purge out their rage.

Their first victim was Sam Carter, a local blacksmith, who was tortured and hung. They eventually began looking for a man named Jesse Hunter, who they claimed was an escaped convict.

The Black residents of Rosewood fought back but there were many casualties, including Sarah Carrier, a woman who did Fannie Taylor’s laundry. She was shot in the head, according to History.com. Her son Sylvester Carrier was also fatally shot.

The race massacre lasted for a week, burning Rosewood to the ground and killing countless Black people.

As for Fannie Taylor, she reportedly had an affair with a white man who beat her, which is why she had been found abused that night. She thought it was better to accuse a Black man of assault then to take accountability for her own actions.

The 1997 film Rosewood, directed by the late John Singleton, depicted the massacre.

See the clip below of actress Catherine Kellner as Fannie Taylor.

Eleanor Strubing

In December of 1940, Eleanor Strubing, a wealthy white woman in Connecticut accused her 31-year-old Black chauffeur, Joseph Spell, of raping her four times and throwing her into a river. Spell was arrested within hours and immediately sent to jail to wait for trial.

The New York Times famously ran a story with the headline, "Mrs. J.K. Strubing Is Kidnapped And Hurled Off Bridge by Butler; WOMAN KIDNAPPED; HURLED OFF BRIDGE." The article claimed he “confessed after 16 hours" of questioning.

Spell was facing 30 years in prison.

Thankfully, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and its head lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, represented Spell. Marshall and his co-counsel proved evidence that Strubing lied. She, in fact, had consensual sex with Spell and jumped in the river because she was terrified that she might become pregnant from their affair. In her mind, the only option was to accuse Spell of rape in order to justify a possible pregnancy.

An all-white jury found Joseph Spell not guilty, which was shocking for the time. Nonetheless, if this accusation would have been made in the South, Joseph Spell certainly would have died by public lynching.

Wil Haygood, the author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, wrote about the ruling, "It was a miracle. But Thurgood Marshall trafficked in miracles.”

Strubing, whose father was an investment banker and the former governor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, suffered no punishment for lying under oath. Her husband, John K. Strubing, died in 1961 and she remarried to John W. Barclay. Stribing died at 92 years old in 2000.

Joseph Spell moved to East Orange, New Jersey after the trial. It’s not clear when he passed away.

The 2017 movie Thurgood was based on the Joseph Spell trial. See the clip below of Kate Hudson as Eleanor Strubing.

Carolyn Bryant

In August of 1955, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of touching her and whistling at her in a store (he reportedly had a lisp and was unable to whistle.) Till, who was visiting from Chicago, was in Mississippi for the summer spending time with family. Within hours, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s home. The child was tortured, mutilated and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His naked body was weighed down with a fan blade.

Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law J.W. Milam, the terrorists who lynched Till, were found not guilty by an all-white jury.

In the 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant admitted to lying and claimed that she actually didn’t remember what happened that day in the store.

She is still alive today, living in Mississippi at 86 years old. Emmett Till would have been 79 years old on July 25 if it wasn’t for Carolyn Bryant.

The 65th anniversary of his death is August 28.

Victoria Price and Ruby Bates

Before The Central Park Five in 1989, which would become the Exonerated Five in 2002, there was the Scottsboro Boys in 1932.

On Mach 25, 1931, a group of Black and white teenagers were riding freight trains looking for work, which was common during the Great Depression. The white teens wanted the Black teens off the train and a fight broke out. The white teens attempted to forcibly throw the Black teens from the train. In defending themselves, the Black teenagers instead kicked the white teens off the locomotive.

The angry white teens went to a local sheriff who demanded the train be stopped.

Nine Black teens were removed, ages 13 to 19. However, two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, were also on the train and spent their time wrongfully accusing several of the Black boys of rape.

Similar to the Exonerated Five, that one accusation stole the innocence of nine Black children.

The teens were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama: Haywood Patterson, 18; Clarence Norris, 19: Charlie Weems, 19; brothers Andy Wright, 19 and Leroy Wright, 13; Olin Montgomery, who was nearly blind, 17; Ozie Powell, 16; Eugene Williams, 13, and Willie Roberson, 16, who could barely walk due to severe syphilis.

The all-white and all-male jury trial was over in a matter of days and all of them — except 13-year-old Leroy Wright — were found guilty of rape and given the death penalty. There was no evidence of course since Bates couldn’t identify the men she claimed raped her.

The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal wing of the American Communist Party, joined the case. By November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel. Shortly after, Ruby Bates admitted she lied.

Nonetheless, the back and forth with the courts continued for years.

By 1936, Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years. In 1948, he escaped from prison and made it to Michigan. The governor refused to extradite him to Alabama. By 1951, Patterson was convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl. In 1952, he died of cancer. He was 39 years old.

In July of 1937, Clarence Norris was eventually convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 1946 and moved north, where he married and had children. His autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys was released in 1979. He passed away in 1989 at 76 years old.

In July of 1937, Andrew Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. He was released in 1950 at 38 years old. Charlie Weems was also convicted of rape and paroled in 1943. He spent the rest of his life in Atlanta. It’s not clear when or if Wright and Weems have passed away.

Ozie Powell’s rape charges were dropped but he pled guilty to assaulting a deputy, which happened while in custody. He was released from prison in 1946. After spending four years on death row as adults, all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Leroy Wright were dropped.

It is not known how or when Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, or Ozie Powell died.

After being released, Leroy Wright, the youngest, went on a national lecture tour and then joined the Army. In 1959, according to PBS, Wright accused his wife of having an affair, fatally shot her and then committed suicide. He was 41 years old.

As for Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Price never recanted her testimony and died in 1982 at 77 years old. Bates had the privilege of going on a speaking tour, bizarrely, for the International Labor Defense (ILD), which defended the Scottboro Boys. She claimed to have lied because she was "excited and frightened by the ruling class of Scottsboro." Bates died in 1976.

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crashdevlin · 4 years

Text

Centerfold 5- Waiting For You

Centerfold Masterlist

Author’s Note: Written for Meghan who requested some fluffy A/B/O smut and then I came up with an idea and ran with it. Smut will start after the plot is established. Also, this is gonna go toward my @spnabobingo squares. This chapter fills my Motor Oil/Cut Grass/Gunpowder square and is rated T for Teen.

Summary: Dean heads to Vegas with Sam to crash the AVN Awards in the hopes of meeting up with Taffy Rose.

Pairing: Alpha!Dean x Reader

Word count: 2069

Story Warnings: A/B/O dynamics, pornography, mentions of multiple partners, Sam being a bit of a creeper asshole

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dean was sure it was a bad idea. There were a thousand ways it could go bad, taking his soulless little brother on a trip to Vegas. But Lisa was pretty much done with him, hadn't answered the phone since he was a vampire, Sam's loss of soul was stressing him out, and he needed a break. The fact that the AVN Awards were going to be taking place the next day was a coincidence...mostly.

"So, you're taking your soulless brother to Vegas to chase down some porn star?" Sam asked, amused. "I can think of a dozen reasons why this would be a bad idea."

Dean sighed. "Yeah. Well, we're going because Vegas is tradition, soul or no soul, and Taffy isn't just 'some porn star'. Jenna Jameson is 'some porn star'. Lisa Ann is 'some porn star'. Taffy Rose is the woman of my dreams and the future mother of my children, okay? She just doesn't know it yet. When I find her and remind her who I am, she's gonna be mine."

"Yeah. 'Cause all the porn stars wanna settle down and have a bunch of pups with some hunter they knew for a week of high school in 1996."

"'95, Sammy, and she's gonna remember me. No way I'm the only one who remembers that." Dean sighed heavily and shook his head. "I mean, I was her first! No way she forgot about me."

Sam just shrugged and pulled out his phone to distract himself. Porn awards could be fun. He could find some willing woman to sink into. It'd been a few days since he got laid, he was itching for some relief. Some tiny thing with giant fake tits would be perfect. And if there was an entire category of omega actors, maybe he could find a nice omega to fuck.

Dean got two rooms when they got the motel. He was confident he wouldn't want anything to do with whatever Sam picked up at the AVN Awards and he didn't want Sam interrupting when he managed to get Taffy, Y/n, back to his room.

Dean had trouble choosing what to wear. Plaid seemed too hunter, too redneck, too Kansas to approach a Cali-based porn star at an awards show. His FBI suits and his old Homeland Security suit both seemed to strangle him with formality. The Pink Floyd concert tee was too casual. All of his tees were. It took a while but eventually he settled on his best jeans, the ones that made his ass look awesome, and his light grey Henley. Nothing that said he was trying too hard, but also not something that made him look like a lumberjack sans the beard.

Sam was already in the Impala by the time Dean left his room. Sam was in a dark red v-neck shirt and jeans and had obviously not agonized over his wardrobe. "Took you long enough, Dean. What, were you rubbing one out so you'd last longer than five seconds when you meet up with her?"

"No!" Dean exclaimed, but he couldn't help but think that was a missed opportunity. "Shut up. Let's go."

They talked their way in, it was second nature to lie to get into places they weren’t supposed to be, and the guard really had no problem believing that the two imposing alphas were bodyguards for some of the actors.

“All right. Let’s split up. If you find Taffy, call me...then, ya know...have at it,” Dean said, gesturing to the right side of the theater before taking off to the left.

Sam rolled his eyes and walked away into the theater. There were hundreds of attractive actors mulling around and they were all wearing various revealing, shiny outfits...all of whom Sam would be willing to nail. He stopped a particularly busty redhead and smiled. “Have you seen Taffy Rose? I’m supposed to deliver a message.”

The redhead looked him up and down like she wanted to eat him and licked her lips. “Taffy’s on the mezzanine with the other omegas. They won’t let an alpha through the door. I could go get her for you,” she offered, her voice seductive.

“That would be great, actually.” Sam let his eyes run down her body. “But don’t stray too far.”

She bit her lip as she walked away on six inch high heels. She was hot as fuck, her dress tight and riding up as she walked. Sam could definitely see her wrapped around his cock. She would be fun to play with. She would be more than satisfying. She would be-

Sam’s jaw dropped a little as a small woman in a light pink crossover dress with a pink plaid skirt walked out. She had nude colored Mary Jane shoes on, natural tits...and looked so completely out of place surrounded by half-dressed, silicone-filled women that it was like a beacon of light shined on her. Sam wanted her. Dean would forgive him for having a little fun before he delivered her to him, right? And if not, Sam didn’t care.

“Hi, Sunny said you had a message for me?” she said, approaching him. Sam loved the size difference between them. Even in heels, he eclipsed her.

“Taffy, right?” Sam asked, stepping closer. He’d seen the pictures, he knew exactly who she was, but he wanted to talk to her longer, get a bit more time to scent her. She was something floral and pretty.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

Sam stepped closer again and she cleared her throat. “You don’t remember me. You shouldn’t. I was, what, twelve when we met.”

“We’ve met?” she squeaked. She swallowed and took a step back. Sam could smell arousal leaking into her scent and he smirked. She was so easy. Dripping slick already. This is what an omega gets for staying unmated so long.

“Yeah. Back in Olympia. Seems like a million years ago, Y/n.” Sam stepped closer again and Y/n gasped as she backed away and her back hit the wall behind her. “Neither of us were presented back then. I didn’t realize how good you smell.”

“S-sorry, I...who are you?”

“Always knew you were pretty, though.”

She took a deep breath and put her hand on his chest, lightly pushing him away. “I don’t recognize you and you’re making me uncomfortable so if you don’t back up and say what you came to say, I’m gonna have to-”

“Sam, you soulless bastard, get away from her!” Sam rolled his eyes at his brother’s voice and stepped back as Dean ran up. “I told you to call me if you found her, dammit!”

Sam shrugged. “She’s hot. Had to try it.”

“Go...away,” Dean growled and Y/n shivered. He watched his brother’s large frame disappear into the crowd before he turned to the omega, his omega. “Taffy, sorry about him. He’s...got some issues right now. Mental...issues. Um...I…” His words faltered as he looked into her eyes. She was right there in front of him. “Y/n,” he whispered and she gasped.

She took a deep breath and stepped close. “Dean?”

“You remember,” he whispered, taking his own deep breath of her floral scent. There was a tinge of arousal to it and he almost whimpered.

“Of course I remember. I’ve been waiting to smell that special blend of motor oil and fresh cut grass and…” She leaned up and groaned as she sniffed at his neck. “...burning gunpowder. I’ve been waiting for you for half my life.”

“That’s what I smell like to you?” Dean asked, smiling. “And you know what burning gunpowder smells like?”

She licked her lips and let out a small giggle. “I got shot...in one of my films. They shot a blank at me, I recognized the smell immediately...so I started to hang out at the range every once in a while.”

He smiled proudly. His omega liked guns. Awesome. “I saw you in last August’s Playboy. I never thought I’d see you again and...there you were in the centerfold, lookin’ so much hotter than you did in high school. But somehow just the same. You looked, you look amazing. So beautiful and...somehow innocent.”

“I’m very good at that. It’s my signature look.”

“I don’t know how you pull it off, buck naked, but you do.”

“So...um...I…” She looked away, trying to clear her mind. “So...You saw my Playboy and had to come find me?”

Dean licked his lips and stepped closer. He wanted to touch her, grab her waist and pull her against his body, but he didn’t. Not until she was ready. “I saw your Playboy and I went home and watched every clip of every video I could find with your name. ‘Taffy Rose’, huh?”

“Well, I really like pink. Taffy, rose, they’re shades of pink.”

“I remember. I see you still favor pink clothes,” he said, gesturing at her dress. “It’s a cute dress.”

“It’d look better on your floor?” she guessed, looking up into his eyes. His cheeks burned at her words. “I’m sure it would. Your freckles still pop when you blush.”

Dean laughed. “Yeah, some things never change.”

“So, your omega didn’t mind you coming to Vegas to see me?” she asked, biting her bottom lip.

“No omega. No wife, no girlfriend. You?”

She giggled, setting her hand on his shoulder. “No wife or girlfriend for me either.”

“Seriously, Taffy.” His voice went soft. “You got somebody waitin’ at home for you?”

“Yeah.” She smiled as his stomach dropped, and ran her hand up his shoulder to the back of his neck. “I have a husky dog named Wolf. Real original, I know, but she was a rescue...already named.” She pulled his head down and bumped her nose against his. “No husband, no boyfriend...no alpha.” He gasped as she kissed the corner of his mouth. “I’ve been waiting for you, Dean.”

His head went a little dizzy at her words. “Y/n.”

“Have you been waiting for me?” she whispered into his ear.

“Betas only, baby. Never had a ‘mega. Only ever wanted you,” he answered.

She smiled bright as she pulled back and looked into his eyes again. “I’ve only ever really wanted you, too. I think about you all the time, Dean. Never thought…” She looked soft and innocent as she sighed. “I’m so happy you found me.”

“Me, too.”

“I might be getting an award, so I...I can’t leave yet, but...after the show’s over...why don’t you come back to my hotel with me?” He was just about to say ‘God yes’ when she finished with, “I can show you all the things I’ve learned over the past fifteen years.” His jaw dropped, words frozen in his throat. All he could do was nod. “Good. I’ve been dreaming of this since high school. Put my number in your phone. You won’t be allowed on the mezzanine with me, so I’ll have to find you after.”

Dean pulled out his phone and entered her number as she rattled it off, immediately sending her a text so that she had his number, too. She shined as she looked down at her phone screen to see the text ‘Hey mega <3’. “God, you’re cute.” She giggled and wrapped her arm around his neck again, pulling him down for a quick kiss.

What should have been a quick kiss, anyway, because he couldn’t let her go once he had her on his lips. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him. She tasted just like he remembered. Her hands buried in his hair as he pushed her against the wall and licked at her tongue. She moaned as his hands moved down her back to grasp at her ass. He was panting when he pulled back. “Sorry. I...suddenly, I’m sixteen with no control of myself again.”

She giggled that laugh that he loved with all of his heart and patted his cheek. “Well, I just can’t wait to see you really lose control, Dean,” she said before spinning away from him and the wall, her skirt twirling as she headed back toward the mezzanine.

Dean sighed and watched her until she disappeared from his sight. She was so much better than he remembered. She was perfect. She was his.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Kitchen Sink - @emoryhemsworth @flamencodiva @wasabiwitteks @rainbowkisses31 @rissbennett @mariekoukie6661 @officiallyunofficialperson @dolphincliffs @mrs-meghan-winchester @gayspacenerd @foxyjwls007 @ilovefanfic86 @marvelfansworld @f-yeahfandoms @wonderlandfandomkingdom @hhiggs @sev3nruby @hobby27 @paintballkid711 @divadinag @thewhiterabbit42 @fantasymyth-1 @queenoftheunderdark @cosicas-cuquis @superfanficnatural @letsby @supernatural-bellawinchester @onethirstyunicorn @swinchester27 @chalicia @sunnyroadtrips @screechingartisancashbailiff @death-unbecomes-you @dayasvalkyrie Hunter Tags - @atc74 @sandlee44 @spnbaby-67 @kalesrebellion @tumbler-tidbits @hoboal87 @stoneyggirl @kbl1313 @cookiechipdough @mrswhozeewhatsis @winchesterxfamilybusiness @holylulusworld @pretty-fortune @screechingartisancashbailiff @we-are-all-a-bunch-of-idjits @imperiusimpala @supernaturalenchanted Gaga For Green Eyes Tags- @typicalweirdbookworm @deanmonandnegansbitch @jadesupernatural @stoneyggirl @4fareader @squirrelnotsam @lyarr24 @akshi8278 @pretty-fortune @we-are-all-a-bunch-of-idjits

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#cassie writes stuff #spn fanfic #reader-insert #a/b/o dynamics #alpha!dean #alpha!sam #omega!reader #pornstar!reader #dean x reader #SOULLESS SAM

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subarubi · 4 years

Text

Desert Days

Pairing: Sam Wilson x Reader

Summary: “If this war ever ends-- and he assured you that it will eventually-- you’ll tell Sam Wilson you love him.”

Warnings: 18+, profanity, angst for days, extreme injury and death (blood), mentions of PTSD, implied smut

A/N: 9.6k word count, goddamn. This is a very Sam heavy one-shot. Also, I tried to make the reader as gender neutral as possible!

2001.

A colossal mountain of mutilated steel and concrete rubble sits, smoking, in the center of the world. Lower Manhattan. Financial District. Eight blocks that make up ‘Wall Street’, some elusive playpen for the invisible but potent power of ‘stock’. Destroyed. And with it, lives, hopes and dreams. 2,606 bodies buried there in the debris. An illusion of invincibility crushed in too. In the flames that lick at ruins of the Twin Towers, an Indian summer. The warm September haze forcefully burrows itself in the guts of New Yorkers, Americans, the world. It’s fear, not flush. It’s anger.

How could this happen? To us?

The news outlets evoke the memory of a vastly different war. They call it a day that will live in infamy. Which, it will. Undoubtedly. Yet, it’s hardly the same as Pearl Harbor. Perhaps, the only thing comparable, but dissimilar all the same. Since the greatest generation created generations of their own, the pastime of waging war happened elsewhere. On other lands. In other homes. To other people.

September 11th, 2001 burst the bubble of willful ignorance. War is happening. And there is a debt to be paid for crimes. All crimes. Even American.

Sam Wilson is only twenty when it happens--

--waking up next to a girl from English class that he’d been playing footsie with in the library the day before. Her cellphone, pink and bejeweled, rings at 7 am drawing them both from slumber. Sam rubs the hangover from his temple as she unwinds her limbs from his, both sticky with sweat. Through tears she turns and tells him.

Four planes hijacked. Two crashed into the World Trade Center. One at the Pentagon. Another in a Pennsylvania field.

Sam’s from New York City. Harlem. He’s stood at the bottom of those towers before-- a kid with a skateboard carving lines over all five boroughs. But he hasn’t been back to the East Coast in years. No reason to. Mom was laid to rest next to Pops and Sam ran away to the other side of the country not long after. The news isn’t any less devastating.

He’s at UCLA, majoring in philosophy of all things. It all seems so pointless then. Studying knowledge, reality, existence, when the rest of the world is bleeding.

Everyone is in pain.

Soldiers. Doctors. Accountants. Car Salesmen. Kindergarten Teachers. They demand their pain be spread. They want revenge. They want blood. War is now felt by all.

In October, the US invades Afghanistan.

Sam enlists in November.

2003.

“Superman School” is what it’s called. Sam thinks it should rather be called simply, “Hell”.

Indoc is easy. Sam has always liked the water and it’s just nine weeks of basically swimming. But what follows is two grueling years of vicious emotional and physical exertion. The events, the ache inside that led him there, are practically forgotten when the training starts. In Combat Dive School, he’d panicked the first few times an oxygen tank was strapped to his back and a regulator shoved in his mouth. In Paramedic training, he’d slipped and stabbed his fingers practicing sutures so much that he lost feeling there for a week. During SERE, Sam lost a toe nail; that hurt like a motherfucker. It was probably the most physical pain he’d ever been in at the point of his life. The guys, other PJs in training, don’t let that one go for a couple of months. At least.

The best part, perhaps the only remotely good part, is Army Airborne and Military Free-fall Parachutist training.

“It’s not exactly flying, but it feels like it,” Sam speaks animatedly into the receiver after chow on a Tuesday night, “It feels like fucking flying and you always imagine that flying is cool but then you do it and, I swear--”

He spends the next fifteen minutes going on and on and when his girlfriend, Lisa from English class with the pink bejeweled phone, finally hangs up, Sam feels like there’s so much he still hasn’t gotten to say about it.

In a different life, I might’ve been a bird, he says during a poker game later that night.

They're all chasing their own highs after the first jump, but no one’s as dumb with it, as corny about it as Wilson. They give him shit for it. Sam is too hopped up on finding his first love to care.

It’s easy to forget why they’re there and what they’re working toward. Graduating. Deployment. War.

Afghanistan is a long way from Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. But with every day, every training course completed, Sam Wilson closes that gap with flying colors. And eventually, in May of that year, he found himself in Nevada with the 58th Rescue Squadron. Impossibly, closer now to Afghanistan.

There, he’s given a maroon beret and dubbed a “Guardian Angel”. Small consolation prizes for the news he’s being deployed.

2004.

It’s hot in Afghanistan, he’s heard. Sam had never expected it to be so bad; it’s summer, everywhere’s hot in the summer. The hottest place on earth is the Lut Desert in Iran. Barren, sparsely vegetated, open scrub. 70.7 Celsius recorded. That’s about 160 Fahrenheit. But nowhere, not even the hottest place on earth, is as sweltering as Bagram Airfield in July. With fatigues stuck to his back with sweat, stomach coming up on ‘E’, split red knuckles being bandaged: 40 Celsius feels like 5,000 Kelvin. Dry heat with nowhere to go but through him. It adds ten pounds at least to the weight in his shoulders.

Sam made one comment. Just one. But a scathing reply from his least favorite Squadron member was enough to unravel him.

This is the land of your peoples, Wilson, stop bitchin’.

Sam flexes his fingers on his bouncing knees, sitting and waiting stoically; internally, he’s burning.

When he enlisted just three years ago in a fervent bout of passion and patriotism, he didn’t anticipate the racist pieces of trailer park trash he’s supposed to call brothers. The amount of self-control it would take to not punch the asshole square in the jaw. The fucking heat.

Three years after waking up that fateful morning, turning on the news with Lisa taking calls non-stop, flames and smoke reflected in his brown eyes and he’s stuck waiting in a tent for disciplinary action. At least it’s reprieve from the merciless Afghanistan sun.

The tent flaps rustle softly, heavy boots command Sam reflexively to stand at attention. It gets his knee to stop bouncing. It’s in his face when he sees you. The faltering expression in his eyes that he tries to hide behind a stone slate. You’re not his CO there to NJP him, he’s never seen you on the base and he’s sure he would’ve remembered your face had he, but the patch on your chest dominates him anyway. A stray bead of sweat tickles Sam’s temple underneath your blank stare. You’re not, but you look ten feet tall over him. He’s never been someone so easily intimidated, but you? You are formidable.

He wonders which part of you gets to him the most.

It might be your impossibly straight posture, one that he could never fully get right much to the ire of his commanding officers. Or maybe it’s the sharpness to your eyes, dissecting him piece by piece before he even hears your voice. Or, it could be, that you’re really fucking hot.

Christ, are you.

But that last one might be skewed by the fact that he’s been on tour now for a couple of months and his girlfriend, not Lisa, now Kerry, has been giving him blue balls. Sending letters so salacious, they’ve found home in the john for everyone’s personal use.

He’d remember you if he saw you. He’d never be able to forget.

Another body entering the tent brings a breeze to save him from the downright oppressive warmth of your stare. A man, another Sam has never seen around, stands much more relaxed and close to your side. He’s tall and blonde and somehow pale even after hours spent in the sun.

You look at him and smile. So nice and pretty without any trace of your previous hardness.

“So, you’re Sam Wilson?” he asks with a hint of a smirk in his voice, “Heard a lot about you.” There’s laughter playing at both of your smiles and Sam’s fists instinctively clench. Are you making fun? He’s not in the mood. It’s hot and sticky, and he might be fighting down an embarrassing and painful semi.

“Yes, sir.”

The man at your side laughs, digging his elbow into your side, “You hear that? He called me sir!”

“Fuck off,” you roll your eyes, flicking his ear so hard it draws a hiss. The first words he hears spill from those lips, twisted now in a smirk, don’t match your silvery voice.

Fuck off, so rough and yet said in dulcet tones with affection.

Sam’s hot again when you step forward, away from your partner-- the breeze was only fleeting. Nowhere is as hot as in that tent on Bagram AFB, you, just five feet from him, hand held out with a soft smile to introduce yourself. Warm and sweet, but somehow it burns.

God, he needs to get laid, like, yesterday.

He didn’t even realize he shook your offered hand until he misses the feel of it as it slips from his own. “And this is Riley, he got dropped on his head as a baby,” straightening beside the man in question, Sam catches an all too short flash of white as you laugh.

“So, what did he say?” Riley asks. At the quirk of Sam’s head to the side, he gestures to the wrapped right hand, “I mean everyone’s talking about it. You’re gonna be on latrine duty for weeks!”

“Riley,” you sigh, smacking his chest that shakes in laughter with the back of your hand. A comforting smile when you turn back to Sam, “We have business to do.” The file you hand him, which he had not noticed was in your hand until it was heavy in his, it changes everything.

Why me? Sam doesn’t let the question slip past his tongue, but it’s there.

You shrug, as if you’d heard him, “You’ve made quite the reputation for yourself, Sam Wilson.” A soothing smile, big and easy. Like the one you sent Riley. He’d like to see it his way again.

And you’re not lying.

9 months in Afghanistan and word carries of a PJ falling from the sky like some vengeful archangel of salvation, laying suppressing fire steady as breathing, healing hands flipping the bird at death. Sam Wilson, orphan boy from Harlem, amateur philosopher, provider of quality spank bank material, was made for this.

The first time he sees it, Sam doesn’t know what the hell he’s looking at.

Like a big black horseshoe crab, washed up dead on the shore, metal back shining slick with sea water. Three of them, laid out on a table in a hangar removed from the rest of the air base. Engineers rattle off all sorts of specs, some Sam understands, some he hasn’t the slightest idea the meaning of. He looks to his right, at you, then Riley. The pair of you, grinning at each other, bouncing on the balls of your feet like children. Always so lively with each other. Always overflowing with enthusiasm-- in each other, something you now extend to him.

All happening so fast. Too fast. Sam’s queasy from the whiplash.

A month ago, he’d only just gotten used to the cycle: Jump. Find cover. Fire back if need be. Don’t mind the blood. Do what he can. And if he can’t, say a prayer. Swallow his vomit. Back to camp. Brush his teeth. One. Twice. Rinse. Repeat.

How did the saying go? ‘These Things We Do, That Others May Live’. Sam’s swallowed enough of his own vomit that the taste doesn’t even phase him anymore. Partially because he’s scrubbed his tongue raw and numb with toothpaste.

Then, you and Riley ripped him from it.

Bought him dinner in Kabul. Offered him a cold beer. Which, he hadn’t had one in a year and fuck if it wasn’t orgasmic on his tongue. You two wined and dined him, told him he was special, he was meant for more. Made him feel good. Reminded him he wasn’t just some cog, some tool in a war that was quickly losing support. That he had a chance to do something important. Christ, he was surprised there wasn’t a good old fashioned fuck at the end of it. He’d put out on the first date.

EXO-7 Falcon. In a different life, I might’ve been a bird. He maintained a year out that jumps were everything.

But wings? Actual wings?

It’s unbelievable. No. Fucking insane. He can’t fathom it. Not free-falling and convincing himself its as close to flying he’ll ever get, but actually flying without the disappointing fact that eventually he’ll have to pull the chord.

It’s just a prototype, don’t blow your load too soon, you laugh, hand on his bicep, for now, we just get to ogle them looking all nice and pretty.

He doesn’t have the balls to tell you he already has. In the showers. Numerous times. Your smile flashing behind his eyelids.

It’s just a waiting game now for the prototypes to be approved.

Sam finds his stride again, much quicker than the last, in this new routine. He suspects his easy adjustment has everything to do with you and Riley. PT at 0600. Showers at 0800. An emergency non Falcon rescue mission about two, three times a week. Chow together in the mess at 1730. Sometimes, the three of you eat MREs outside instead, watching the sunset like a bunch of cornballs.

You guys talk a lot, typically always over a meal. And Sam, who usually speaks a mile a minute, is slowed and forced to take a breath. Between the three of you, the fight for air time is intense.

Everything is learned and shared in that small circle of three, sometimes too much.

In some sleepy Georgia town, five houses away from each other, you and Riley spent your entire childhoods not meeting until basic.

Kismet, Riley grinned between mouthfuls of a macaroni and chili MRE that he traded for. That green sucker had no idea what he was getting into with Riley’s chicken a la death.

The pair of you, southern belles, you’d joked. Attended the same Sunday service, learned how to ride a bike on the same stretch of asphalt, enrolled in the same high school but different years. Riley lost his virginity to your older sister in the back of his dad’s wood paneled station wagon. You remember she complained about a cum stain on her favorite skirt around that same time.

Too much? you ask with a widening smirk at Sam’s grimace.

The two of you are so close, Sam can only be grateful for how easily you’ve let him fall into place by your sides. As welcoming, as kind and as warm as you are, in those early years, Sam can’t help feel an outsider sometimes.

You and Riley are so so close.

He’s sure he’s only seen you guys separated by bathroom breaks and sleep. An inordinate amount of time side by side. Fond smiles come often and effortlessly. Only ever fully at-ease in each other’s vicinity. You’re left handed and Riley’s right handed and your elbows always knock when eating. Which seems purposeful because once, when Sam suggested you just switch your normal places at the table, he was met only with blank stares and shrugs. And when the three of you walk across the airfield together, Sam naturally has to fall back slightly because he’s pretty sure you and Riley are tethered together with an invisible string, footfalls in sync. Your right leg in time with his, strides equal.

He’s not sure he’s met a pair of friends ever more suited to each other.

So, are you guys, like, together? Sam asks Riley hesitantly one night when you’ve gone to speak with some other officers. The pair of them lay on their backs on the rocky ground, gazing up at the clear expanse of stars. The new addition to your little merry band of friends tries to appear casual when asking. But really, it’s been nagging at him for months now.

It’s a valid question.

You and Riley are almost abnormally close for two people that have only known each other for a couple of years. Sam’s never seen anyone, not even his disgustingly in love for 30 years parents, so attached. If he were honest, sometimes it’s scary. Uncomfortable.

Mostly, because it’s never been defined. And Sam is, by nature, curious.

Partly, because the things he thinks about you... well, he doubts Riley would appreciate him thinking about his significant other that way. Especially a friend thinking that way.

Riley’s bellowing laugh draws angry hushes from surrounding PJs trying to sleep. He cackles so hard with hands clutching at his abdomen, he practically rolls.

You’ve got it bad, Wilson, is his only reply before getting up to go take a leak.

2005.

Euphoria. That’s the only word Sam can use to describe it. Like sex. Maybe, even better. Up there, in the clouds, where everyone below are just little black dots, his stomach lurches and flips and folds itself over and under. Actually flying, not free-falling and biding his time until he eventually must pull the chord. He’s shaky with it at first. Like a baby on fresh legs, wobbly and awkward. Even still, he’s fucking flying.

Back on the ground, him and Riley gush with it. Joy. Freedom. Ecstasy.

They talk a mile a minute, even though their burning lungs are screaming for them to just breathe. They brush off the medical staff urging them to put on oxygen masks for a few minutes. Can’t, Riley rejects it, too fucking wired.

You’re up next, burning with the need to get yours too.

It all moves so fast. Sam and Riley each in one of your ears, telling you how amazing it feels. How much you’re gonna love it. They watch, chests heaving, hands on hips, as you’re strapped in, take your place 50ft away and nod along to all of the instructions given. Giving you pointers like they’ve been doing this for years. You roll your eyes. The pricks only have an hour of experience each. Though, that’s an hour more than you have, so you listen despite your pride.

You fail. And just as everything you do is, you fail brilliantly.

Sam and Riley watch helplessly as you crumble in the clouds, tumbling in the wind, barreling towards the hard rock and sand beneath their boots. The limp wings thrash in the wind, punching sharp welts into your sides. Your blood curdling scream rips out above, echoing in the valley. They can see you scrambling, panicked brain searching for a fight or flight response. But you can’t do either.

Can’t fly.

Can’t fight the merciless pull of gravity.

You get ahold of yourself long enough to pull the emergency chute at the lowest possible altitude. A heap of nylon lines and cloth on the ground, your impact striking up a cloud of dust.

Their feet can’t move fast enough, rushing to your side, hearts in their stomachs and stomachs in their asses.

Don’t fucking touch me!

Riley’s hand that gently grabs your bicep swiftly retracts as if you’d burned him. You won’t let them help. You just lie there, forehead pressed into the sand, body shaking with adrenaline, pained wails vibrating behind your grit teeth.

Silence except for the sick sound of your brokenness.

More than the acid cuts on your palms and cheek. More than a cracked rib. More than the ugly smattering of red and purple that will appear on your torso later. You mourn what is lost in your failure.

Back on the ground, you gush with it. Wrath. Anguish. Woe.

Sam feels sick beside Riley. Watching you there is the hardest thing he’s ever done. He reminds himself of the careful routine. Don’t mind the blood. Do what he can. And if he can’t, say a prayer. Swallow his vomit. He remembers the taste now.

The prognosis is: you are a no-fly zone.

You barely hear the flurry of words thrown at you, in front of you, around corners when you’re not supposed to hear. Cracked rib. Major contusions to the trunk. Sprained wrist. Can’t handle it. Right side too weak. Six weeks recovery, then return to regular duty. Maybe, you can work on it in PT and try again in 6 months. Not likely. Third prototype destroyed. Only two Falcons.

Weren’t supposed to hear that.

The next few days are eerily quiet. Filled with silent tension, Sam and Riley sending worried glances your way, forcing down winces at your every labored movement. You’ve abruptly walked off at seemingly random points of conversation. You’ve lashed out at Riley when he tries to help a little too much, pushes back against your attitude a little too hard. You’ve retreated. No joking around, no smiling. They have, at least, the clemency to avoid any mention of the Falcon jetpacks in your presence.

When they train, you avoid it like the plague.

The crowds they draw. The hooting and hollering cheers of the other PJs as Sam and Riley defy all odds in the air. The time will come soon, for them to employ the EXO-7 Falcons in an actual rescue. You pray that you aren’t healed by the time the first mission comes.

God, whomever, hears your pleas whispered into the tough canvas of your cot.

Four weeks after your failed flight test, an Apache helicopter goes down in Taliban infested territory. You haven’t been cleared.

Sam walks up on the Chinook, dressed for the first time in his full suit. It would feel so gratifying, had you not been standing there with Riley, heads bowed lowly in short whispers underneath the raucous whirring of the engine.

You haven’t talked to Sam in more than a few words. Only Riley. You only really talk to Riley. Sam has walked in on an abruptly cut off conversation a few times now. Shut out. It burns at him in the middle of the night, keeps him from drifting off in much needed slumber. You and Riley are his people now. Confidants. Friends. Comrades. Family. He wants to be there for you both, but you don’t let him. Just, give her time, she’s upset, Riley had supplied a dejected looking Sam when you stormed away at his advance for the third time.

Now, at his careful approach, you look up and force a tight smile across those lips he sees in his dreams. An awkward, heavy hand on his shoulder that makes his heart clench, Good luck, Wilson.

He’ll still feel it burning through his fatigues hours later.

When they successfully return with the entire crew safe and sound, the base is alive with celebration. A friendly football scrimmage is thrown together by Riley in amber skies of late afternoon, their focused play-calling set behind 50 cent blaring on the boombox.

You’re noticeably absent.

Sam stands outside of your barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets, uncertain if you’ll even speak to him. You haven’t before. Why would you now? When everyone is happily relishing in something you can no longer be a part of. His boots scuff in the sand as he debates leaving. Letting you alone for the night to surely lament in your loss.

“Shouldn’t you be out there kicking ass, superstar?”

Your face, a familiar smile there that he’s been desperate to see for weeks, evokes an overwhelming sense of guilt in his gut. It was you and Riley from the start. Always you and Riley. The two of you had recruited him. And now he’s taken your place and they’ve left you in the dust.

His return smile comes out more like a grimace without his permission.

The large tent, usually filled to the brim with airmen stacked atop of each other, is empty. Everyone’s either getting chow or at the makeshift field spectating or playing. It’s just you sitting on a makeshift bed on the ground, softly closing the book you were reading when he entered. Sam doesn’t think the two of you have actually ever been alone together. Not like this. No Riley, no one milling about in the background, no rescue mission. The closest thing might’ve been the first time you met. And even then, you hadn’t said anything to each other until Riley joined.

“Honestly,” Sam swallows hard, shaking his head in what looks like a humorous gesture, but really, he’s trying to find his footing again. “How does Riley have so much energy?”

You smile wider and his heart, it fucking aches. For you.

Knees pulled up tightly to your chest, ignoring the sharp pangs in your ribs at the action, you tilt your head softly up at him, “It’s all sugar and tai chi.”

Sam nods, a ghost of a chuckle humming from his throat. He sits on the ground next to you, knees bent, forearms hung over them. Tries not to make the hitch in his breath known when your thighs brush against each other ever so lightly.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks.

You shake your head at the ground, sighing deeply in defeat-- as if it would magically ease the pressure in your temples. “I think I forgot, it’s so easy to forget. But I dunno, all this self-pity and for what? Because I don’t get a cool pair of wings?”

“You’re allowed to be upset,” his hand hovers over your back. Half afraid of hurting you, half afraid of you rejecting him.

Eyes like the cosmos lift to his and you lean back to close the distance for him. The press of his palm over your shoulder is warm, his fingers flexing slightly in the contours of your back. Gooseflesh fanning out from where they indent your skin, hidden beneath the fabric of your shirt.

“My last rescue op, that kid whose lower half was blown to shit?” Sam nods solemnly, he remembers. How could he not? “He couldn’t stop crying about how his girlfriend was gonna break up with his dickless ass. And then he broke into a whole other fit because he didn’t have an ass either,” you laugh humorlessly, “I’m alive and in one peice. I’ve got a sweet ass and a fucking elephant trunk of a dick swinging between my legs.” Sam snorts, can’t help the gap-toothed grin that makes his cheeks ache.

You pause, licking your lips. Sam’s got a smile is like the sun. All warm and bright. The way it feels to bask in it’s glow, a personal beach day, you don’t think you’ve ever been so content to just be looked at.

“I guess, I just-,” brows furrow, struggling to find the words. “You spend months preparing for something, with your best friends, you’re all excited about it, mostly because you’re doing it together. Me. Riley. You. Demented three musketeers,” you smile sadly, a cracking phantom of a thing Sam has come to love. “And then it all goes to shit. So easily slips through your fingers.”

There are tears that you’ll never let fall, but you trust Sam enough to let him see the way your eyes shine with it. The glossy finish of your glum and how it paints you blue.

“I’ve been with Riley since basic. Never been an op where I haven’t had his back and him mine.”

You know. You know you’ll never fly again. No one’s said it outright, but they look at you like a kicked puppy enough for you to get it.

“Will you promise me something, Sam?”

Sam. Sam. Sam. He’s heard his name said a million times in a thousand different cadences, but never like that. Never so soft and honeyed and certain. All at the same fucking time.

“Anything.”

“There are going to be ops for just the two of you that the rest of the unit, that I can’t go on. Will you look after Riley?” You’re so close, practically whispering. Sam could count your lashes if he wanted to. “I love him, but he’s a fucking idiot. Just doesn’t think sometimes.”

Without question. Fervently. For you, “Absolutely.”

And you just listen to each other breathe. In and out. So steady and sure. Content in just the sweet sound of each other, living.

2007.

Hands, calloused from fast-roping down from a helo, splayed out on the contours of his shoulders. Hot and urgent, everywhere and nowhere at once. The emotion in them permeates through his skin-- flooding him, filling him to the brim. Had he always been so empty before? Or had that space always been carved out for your touch? Your eyes are above him, searching, pleading. Lashes fluttering down at his face. Lips falling open in soundless utterances, mouthpiece of the gods. Breathless. His ears are ringing, eyes blinking away that white hot blindness licking at the edges of his consciousness. You’re so beautiful there, rays of sun peeking out behind you, he might pass out.

Wilson, can you hear me?

And then a laugh. Loud and boisterous and Holy shit! You just got your world rocked! Riley beside you, his face a picture of delight, buzzing with adrenaline.

Along with the rapid pops of gunfire and cracks of an AK returning, gentle jingling of hot casings hitting the ground, steady lines of communication running down the line of airmen, Wilson, I need you to confirm that you are okay.

He nods dumbly at your insistence. Remembering suddenly how to breathe when you grab him by the vest and yank him up off the ground. He’d been blown on his back by the sheer force of a screaming mortar impacting the earth nearby. Your smack on his helmet is enough to refocus him, and all attention is back on the vic, packing the wound, applying pressure. You radio in controlled and calm-- GSW to the leg and shoulder, hoist out exfil necessary, popping green smoke on our location.

Helmand is hell. But you grin and bear it so well.

Things have levelled out. The three of you adjust to yet another new routine; much remains the same. The months are filled with morning PT, showers, any and every conversation under the sun shared over chow, a game of Slapjack or Bullshit after the sun’s gone down. Standard combat search-and-rescue, thankfully, for your sake is unchanged. But you have to get used to watching Sam and Riley soar through the sky like it’s what they were born to do. You stick to field medicine when they become something altogether different than PJs. Though, they were never just PJs. And you pretend it doesn’t just ache the tiniest beat when they leave you behind for some confidential mission.

Being the failure is hell. You grin and bear it to keep the pain from spreading to them.

Hours later he finds you pelting the metal floor of the HH-60 Pave Hawk with an unwavering jet stream of water, diluted blood dripping from the sides.

“Any special plans for when you get home?” Sam watches your face as it remains focused on lazily hosing down any memory of a bleeding young Corporal laying slack in your helping hands from the bird.

Six weeks. His tour ends in six weeks. He plans on sleeping-- sleeping hard, sleeping in, sleeping around. Riley joked about Sam burying himself in alcohol and puss, ‘it’s a toss up which addicts anonymous circle he’ll end up in’. Sam laughed and cheered in good fun, but the scent of JP-8 stung his nostrils. You and Riley have three more months left in this tour. Sam doesn’t like to think about the fact that he’ll be home, smelling apple pie and boob sweat, and you’ll be stuck here, sniffing jet fuel; that’s the smell of freedom, airmen say.

“Might take up yoga,” he quips.

Your eyebrows raise slightly, lips spreading into an easy and knowing smile, “Bet you would, you horndog.” Yoga pants, nylon and lycra second skins that hold everything just so, are all the rage all of the sudden.

Sam laughs, leaning against the side of the helicopter with a cheeky smirk. That smirk you know so well now after three years. You count on that smirk. Pray on it. How something so small can bring you so much comfort, impossible to say.

“If you come to LA, I can take you to all the studios. You’d love it.”

Sam Wilson’s always been a social butterfly. The lifeblood of every party. The guy that gets along with everyone. The funny, effortlessly cool guy. He thrives on meeting new people and cracking jokes.

But really, if Sam could do anything when he gets home, it would just be to see you. And Riley, of course. He wants you to come to LA, go to a bar, hide in some corner and just talk. Like you always do. Except, in civvies and heavily lubricated. He’d wait that excruciating month and a half before you’re back stateside too. He’d wait, not so much as think about alcohol, if it meant the three of you could share that first cold one together. You and Riley, you’re family. The first he’s had in a long while.

He can’t help himself. “Will you? Come to LA?”

You smile, so nice and pretty, big and easy, like the one you’d once reserved only for Riley.

2008.

Hands, softened with shea and two months R&R, fisting the back of his shirt so tightly he fears the fabric might disintegrate. Feverish and needy, fingernails digging into his warm skin, leaving ardor shaped crescents in wake of their campaign to conquer his back. Scorched in the spots first touched, soothed by the soft sound of sliding skin.

Panting. Clenching. Burning.

Your eyes squeezed shut, tears pricking at the edges. Lashes, all 359 of them -- he’d counted -- fanning his cheeks. Sweet wetness. Trembling fire. Mouths, hot and urgent, moving against one another. Whiskey tongues, sliding together, worshipping every inch. Lips numb. Teeth clanging. Both chests heaving, humming with moans too gentle and too desperate. You’re so beautiful there, in a bar’s dark and dirty bathroom stall pressing chest, groin, thigh, and leg against him.

Gushing with it: joy, freedom, ecstasy. Overwhelmed by what he swallows from that heavenly spout: wrath, anguish, woe.

You’re so beautiful he might die-- without question, fervently, for you.

2009.

The world works in strange ways. People will pay a 1,000 USD for a mattress that perfectly shapes to the curves of their spines. Commercials demonstrate you can balance a wine glass and simultaneously jump like a giddy kid in a hotel room without any risk of stain-- and for good measure, in the event it does stain, some special formula ensures it’ll come right out. Such strange desires of men. Sam sighs into his pillow-- zero cost, no secret formula. Sand, his mattress covered in 1500 thread count egyptian cotton; rock, his feather pillow that corrects his posture; a heavy coat of dry heat, his comforting New Zealand sheep wool blanket. Riley snores soundly beside, drool dribbling from the right corner of his mouth, chest spluttering in his exhales-- his white noise machine.

He’s never been more comfortable. And in strange ways, he’s glad to be back, just starting his second tour at twenty-seven now, another successful Falcon mission recorded with the capture of Khalid Khandil.

Sam’s almost disgusted with himself. He’s so stupidly content to be there, in the middle of the Afghani desert, sleeping on the ground. As if it’s not a fucking war.

Well, as the world turns.

Do you ever think it’ll be over? you’ll ask one night, a whisper on his lips as soft as the dripping beside you. Never defined, never talked about, but most nights, when sleep evades you, you’ll slip from the barracks to the empty showers. And you’ll sigh in pleasure in time with the echoing splash of leaky faucets.

And Sam has to bite his lips from saying the words ‘God, I hope not’ into your neck.

Stateside, he has a joke of a life. The year in between tours was almost unbearable. He’s supposed to call that land home? It feels more foreign to him now than Afghanistan. A place where people create mattresses with different settings on two sides for maximum comfort.

Strangers see him in uniform and either say ‘thank you for your service’-- which always feels hollow-- or looking like they want to spit on him. Suffocating. He could only breathe the three times you visited him in Los Angeles and the five times he came to Virginia for you. Only felt comfortable there with his face in your thighs, heart and breast in his hand, lips in his teeth.

Here, he has structure. Purpose. Brotherhood. You. In war, he’s important. He’s helping people, not in any misguided, easily skewed fight for freedom and self-righteousness. He’s actually helping people. ‘These Things We Do, That Others May Live’. It’s what PJs do.

In Afghanistan, he gets to fucking fly.

In the US, his wings are clipped and everything feels so dull in comparison.

Eventually, it has to, he’ll murmur back to spare you from his terrible thoughts. You’re so soft and sweet under him, and Sam knows just how much this war tears you apart.

The guilt that plagues you because not everyone can be saved, but everyone should be. You’ve said before that the PJ credo implies death yourself. ‘That Others May Live’. But you’re alive and so many have died beneath your palms despite best efforts. Those trained fingers that sometimes feel useless apart from bringing Sam to bliss.

If you knew how he truly felt, how even if he’s a good man he harbors such selfish thoughts, it would only hurt you more.

So he keeps it to himself and kisses your worries away. Soft pecks at your eyes that never cry but are always on the brink; the tip of your nose that’s become immune to the overwhelming metallic scent of blood; the crease between your brows that screw together in torment; lips, that despite all of the above, smile for Riley and for him.

He’ll hold you so tenderly with strong steady hands, that it’s easy to forget the two of you are pressed together in a shower stall. You seem to have a habit of getting into compromising positions in bathrooms with Sam.

A soft moan of appreciation escapes your lips, just to see that charming gap-tooth grin it draws from him. A taste of his light. So wanting, so desperate for that warm glow that emanates from Sam Wilson, you peel the shirt from his back sticky with sweat. Fingers scrambling to run across the smooth, hot skin there, chasing that tranquil day at the beach that is him even in the middle of a goddamned war. Greedy hands draw silken lines down the length of Sam’s spine, smiling in his mouth at his shuddering. How he leans into your touch reflexively.

You’re drawn tight against him, his arms snaking around the base of your back, your hips flush against his, heels digging into his hamstrings. So close you become almost indistinguishable from him, simply a heap of warm skin and desert camo bracing the shower walls.

A single kiss, languid and saccharine, suddenly turned quick. Sam is urgent in unfastening your top, splaying it open to lay you bare and panting before him. Each snap undone, a breath more labored. Your own hands, fumbling for the belt at his waist, mourning the loss of kissed raw lips against you. Hurried, as if at any moment one of you will perish. And the other, having tasted a body so divine, would simply crumble into dust-- there could never be another that they craved the same. Disappear forever in this desert, to perhaps be stamped down by another set of lovers’ boots. Here, in the sand soaked with your blood, Sam’s sweat, Riley’s tears

A vow taken in the sighs of pleasure quieted by amorous mouths.

If this war ever ends-- and he assured you that it will eventually-- you’ll tell Sam Wilson you love him.

2010.

He’d wished for this, hadn’t he?

To live in War. This ungodly, disorienting flurry of chaos that feigns a sense of order. Mayhem, no matter how many hours ripping apart his muscles to put them back in place in accordance with military regulation, how much firepower there is to decimate enemies. A messy, merciless machine, endless. Running on the energy expelled from eating-- young men chewed up and spat out, shoved back into the hungry mouth, and chewed and spat again. And again. An emulsified puddle of blood and sweat leaking from the bottom.

This, is war. Not fucking in the showers, watching the sunset while playing cards, and trading MREs like it’s elementary school.

Structure. Purpose. Brotherhood -- all of the things Sam craved. It all means jack shit once someone steps on an IED, the distinct crisp sound of AKs firing off, or staring an RPG straight in the eye.

Sam can’t stop looking at the way the blood squeezes through his shaking fingers. Thick and scarlet and slippery, bubbling through the cracks, seeping into the lines of his skin. Unyielding to Sam’s hands desperately clasping at the ripped flesh, trying and failing to apply pressure to the wound. No matter how much pressure he applies, the blood persists. Gushing, oozing, turning black under his palms. Because it’s everywhere and he only has two hands. Why did God make man with only two hands? Why?

Come on, man!

It’s a pathetic sound, the way it rips from his throat, raw and pleading. His arms, trembling so hard they shake the body beneath him too.

Sam removes one hand to pop a yellow smoke outside of the ditch he’d pulled them into, using his teeth to pull the pin from the canister.

He’s whimpering, choking down the sobs he so desperately wants to let out, communicating in broken sentences through the radio. Deaf to the return chatter.

His eyes refuse to leave his bloodstained hands when the Pave Hawk is hovering above, his team of six fast-roping down, quick and methodical in employing care under fire protocol. Four of them stationing themselves at a pole just outside of the ditch, laying suppressing fire.

You’re there, he can feel you rushing forward with your pack already slung over and onto the ground at their sides. But Sam won’t look at you, can’t-- if he sees your face, he’ll lose it.

Moving, but nothing feels like it’s by your own volition. Rather, muscle memory. Flipping up your NVG, your eyes flit over the scene fast, thinking, but not feeling. And somehow, you’re thankful you’re numb at the sight.

You’ve never seen it quite so... he doesn’t look human.

It was just supposed to be a standard op. A marine stepped on an IED, and no one had metal detectors so the normal PJ unit couldn’t land. They were supposed to fly in and out, barely even touch the ground.

And it all got fucked. How had it gotten so fucked?

Helpless. Nothing he could do. Like he was up there just to watch. Squint in the dark night for a body barreling towards the ground. So much like your first flight test. That sickness churning his gut.

Sam. Sam. Sam!

His eyes flit to meet yours wide and white in the dark and just can’t bear it. He careens over to the side, retching this morning’s powdered eggs ugly and loud. Emptied, body too spent, the sobs finally overtake him.

Quickly, you cut open his top, pulling the tattered fabric from where it tangled up with his body. Your hands take up the spot where Sam’s once pressed, pulling out combat gauze with your teeth. Deperately packing until you run out of gauze. It does nothing. The white is quickly stained so red that it just resembles more mutilated strings of flesh.

“Okay,” you breathe, but it does nothing to return the oxygen to your lungs, “okay we need to stabilize the wound, tourniquets”-- the wound, he’s more wound than whole-- “and I need someone on chest compressions.”

You’re met with stares. Seven red-rimmed eyes, just staring as the very fluid of his life drains from him, body going cold under your hands warm, soaked in his blood. The only thing holding him, all mangled chunks of burnt tissue, together is you.

“But-”

“But what?”

But, it was an RPG. So what? We’re fucking PJs, aren’t we? But, he’s lost too much blood. We’ll do a transfusion. But, he’s dead.

“Just do it!”

No one has the heart to stop you.

You work over Riley’s corpse for the entire ride to the hospital. They have to rip you from him on arrival. Because he’s dead. And you’ve just spent an hour elbow deep in a mess of blood and guts that feel like your own, exhausting yourself-- keeping nothing alive but your own sanity.

Riley’s a pair of boots, an M16, a helmet, and two shiny dog tags clenched in your fists.

That’s it.

The rest of him was put back together as best they could, shoved in a pine box shrouded in stars and stripes, and sent off to Georgia. He’ll be received by his parents, two little brothers, three nieces, and his dog. They’ll write about him in the paper, a hero he’ll be called-- when really, he was a dumbass that got dinked by a rocket.

He’d enjoy the fame in your small town.

Idiot.

Dropped on his head as a baby.

As you squeeze the dog tags hanging from his M16, so do you squeeze a tear from your eye. A warm thing running down your left cheek that feels just like Riley’s blood in your palm.

Sam’s behind you, head bowed low, maroon beret in his hands. The amount of times he’s said sorry, some blubbery, some frustrated, some murmured in your hair, some screamed at you.

You’re both raw.

Hands scrubbed with soap, but stained Riley red.

Those showers have been tainted now with the fresh memory of pink streams circling the drain. Where once you found yourself lost in lust, now, in misery. Riley in your hands disappearing into the pipes, into nothing forever.

“My tour’s up in three months,” Sam watches you carefully as you release the silver tags imprinted with Riley’s information. You stand and face him, wiping away that traitorous tear. “I’m going to leave active duty.”

When he was twenty, and the world was bleeding fresh scarlet, he’d hardly imagined he’d be retiring at thirty. But twenty seems so far now, just as the aftermath of 9/11. Now, the blood has caked into a mountain of pain, dried brown. Revenge, and then some.

He enlisted for patriotism, duty, selflessness. He stayed for you and Riley, for flying.

He can’t stay anymore-- can’t see you die too.

"You’re retiring?” your cloudy stare, brows pulled together, eat at him, “Okay.”

Okay. Sam never tried to guess what you’d say, but ‘okay’ somehow seems like the only thing that would ever make sense on your lips. So soft and simple. You. Always supportive, always sure.

You nod with a gentle smile, and while he doesn’t know where you’re headed-- somewhere that’s not Riley’s makeshift shrine-- Sam trails closely behind. Partially because he has more to say, but mostly, because he’s bound to you now. His chest is tethered to yours, feet instinctively falling in line. He heels, like a dog. For you.

The barracks are empty for chow again. Neither of you are hungry. Meals are different without Riley.

So familiar, the two of you sitting side by side on the ground, knees bent, forearms resting on them, thighs brushing. Alone together.

Sam has ocean eyes. Warm brown eyes that look like the ocean. They’re still on you but they move. You’ve never noticed. How they swell and glimmer, so constant yet always in motion-- pure in how he allows himself to live so freely. Going with whatever flow his heart takes him: dropping out of college and enlisting; punching ignorant airmen; and giggling like a girl at the feeling of flying. Making promises you both know he has no control over. Kissing you in a bar because he can’t take the longing for a second more. Leaving the Air Force because it’s getting in the way of his light. Even if it means giving up flying.

Sam slips his hand in yours, so warm and soft, his squeeze, a plea.

“Come with me.”

You’ve never met a person who lives like him.

You laugh, fondly. Sam Wilson is so earnest in almost everything he does.

“Can’t.”

So tempting. You remember now, how close those words once were to falling from your tongue. I love you. It seems pointless to say now, he’s leaving, you’re staying.

“Come on, don’t be a martyr.”

Like Riley, he says without ever needing to flex his vocal chords that way.

Morbid as it may be, you’d be glad to die like Riley. He always believed in the cause more than either of you. He was dumb and goofy, but he truly believed in it. All of it. You’ve never been so bound by an unearthly force like that-- religion, ideology, patriotism.

Must be nice, Riley mused, not having to answer to God. No, it really isn’t. It’s... lonely. You want to try your hand at it now. Might do you some good. You’re looking at another two years, or whenever your tour is up, alone now. Why not fuck around and find some higher power? God, the PJ creed, macaroni and chili MREs. You’ll figure it out.

“Eventually, it has to end. Right?” It’s his own words. You knew he never believed them. And neither do you now, really. “So I’ll see you then.”

Or in a pine box.

Ocean eyes are wet with his sorrow. You are so lovely. Love. He loves you. He thinks he might’ve loved you from the moment he first heard your velvet voice. Fuck off. So lovely. Sam kisses you, and the waves have come to drag you out to sea. If he could, he’d beg you to come home in his riptide.

Wherever that is.

2012.

A Goliath building with tall glass windows that turn sunbeams into rainbows with rows upon rows of fresh tulips surrounding. Brilliant yellows and oranges-- like poppy field sunsets in Afghanistan. In the center of the free world. So much meaning there now behind what it means to fight for freedom. No place knows it quite like this house of warriors. This is a place of healing. Of mending brains put in a blender, frozen in some eagle shaped mold, and then thawed out with guns in their hands and a burning vendetta to satisfy.

Sam Wilson is thirty-one now, and remains a man of routine.

He wakes to darkness. Unfolds himself from the tight ball he’d curled into at some point. On the floor. Again. Sam gives himself just five minutes to lay blinking at white walls painted 5 am blue, bleary eyed birds just starting up their morning songs.

And then he’s up. His teeth are brushed, sneakers laced up, keys thrown into the pocket of his shorts. Sam runs along the Potomac with the familiar soft pink aura of dawn crawling along the horizon. Around the Washington Monument, past the Lincoln Memorial, down Pennsylvania Ave.

He feels so small among those giant monoliths of the land of the free. Not purple mountain majesties, but the marble Hill.

Sometimes, he feels you and Riley running beside him, like all those years ago bright and early for 6 A.M. PT-- wearing ankle high socks, grey t-shirts with white wings splayed across the chest and those little navy shorts Riley complained crushed his balls.

God, he misses Riley.

He misses you too.

In college, Sam was a philosophy major of all things. He studied questions of human nature while picking up ‘cerebral chicks’.

A decade later, the questions he once pushed away have all come up again. It all seems so important now.

When he closes his eyes he sees your smile, yes, but he sees fire and smoke too. Like the rubble of the Twin Towers, his memories of war are shrouded in destruction.

Sartre said, Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from defeat.

So much cost, tangible and not. Cities riddled with bullet holes and missile craters, conquered and hailed as a successful operation so long as it forces the Taliban back. Beautiful landscapes marred with IEDs and shrapnel which will make the Americans wish they never step foot in Afghanistan. Invisible things too, like a mass grave of men, women, and children-- some military, some civilian. Glass shards of minds, not broken, but cracked.

Sam is bleeding. Veterans are bleeding. Everyone is bleeding.

The puddle of blood and sweat at the bottom of that machine, fathomless.

He ends up in D.C., staring up at that Goliath building with the scent of fresh spring tulips in his nostrils-- Department of Veterans Affairs. He needs help and he needs to help. Post-traumatic stress disorder is such a big name, and he never fully understands his meeting. What he does know: sleeplessness, irritability, paranoia, numbness, waking nightmares.

Healing is a process, but Sam’s doing it now. Himself, through others.

Things are getting better.

He’ll never be completely whole, but the circle helps. ‘It’s a toss up which addicts anonymous circle he’ll end up in’, Riley joked. Sam laughs up at the sky, his dumbass friend was probably sporting a smug smirk wherever he is.

This morning Sam is chipper, today is a good day. He smiles wide at the girl at the front desk; she’s pretty and shy and always tucks her hair behind her ear when he’s flirting. Sam snags a classic glazed from the box of free donuts from Astro and it hangs from his mouth as he goes about setting up for a meeting. Unfolding chairs, he arranges them in a comforting position. In a circle, everyone is equal-- no one is alone or an outsider.

And then he waits with a welcoming smile as everyone filters in. Some are regulars and he’ll exchange ‘how are you’s. Some are new and uncomfortable so he gestures to an open chair and says ‘Welcome’ with that beach day grin. Soothing, calm, comforting.

Sam listens so well.

For as much as he likes to talk, listening is sometimes better. He only speaks when he’s sure they’re done and comfortable, offering what has helped him best.

Adjusting to civilian life is hard. No one expects how hard it truly is, because it’s never talked about it. They’re supposed to push themselves to the extremes of human experience and then come back as if any of that was normal. As if they didn’t just come from a war, that still persists. Even if by a different name, in a different place, against a different group, it persists. And no one ever tells them how hard it is to just sit there, surrounded by friends and family where you’re supposed to be happiest, and act like it’s not burning you from the inside out.

But it’s important to remember the good things too, he’ll tell them. When the dark shadow threatens to swallow them up whole, there is always light. It’s important to know that and make sure they stay separate.

Like Astro donuts and playing soul music all the time and showering without a dozen people next to you. And the freedom of getting to do whatever the hell they want.

Sam tells them, if it makes them happy: do it.

“You’ve made quite the reputation for yourself, Sam Wilson.”

He’s seeing you, looking just the same as the last. With that smile, that’s only his now-- nice and pretty, big and easy. You are beautiful, so beautiful Sam wonders how he’s survived so long without seeing it.

His own smile falters when his ocean eyes travel from your face.

You are exactly the same, except, you’re missing a few pieces.

Your left arm, which he expects to lead down to those calloused hands somehow impossibly soft, is cut off abruptly, cruelly, above the ghost of your elbow. The left hand, your dominant one, that he had known the comforting feel of on his shoulder, burning through the cloth of his uniform, gone. The hand that breathlessly trailed down his torso, tickling and seducing, leaving goosebumps in its wake, missing.

He’ll ask another time. You’ll tell him of more casualties of war, this one visible, and of others invisible.

But for now, he’s rushing at you, and it’s still not fast enough to quiet his screaming heart. He grabs you, doesn’t care if there are still people lingering from the end of the meeting, and really kisses you. And your right hand still finds its way to his torso.

I love you, breathless. It was never pointless to say.

No, the war is not over, maybe not even eventually, but you’re here in D.C. wrapped in his waves, alive.

He’ll never be completely whole, but you get him damn near close to it.

#sam wilson #the falcon x reader #sam wilson x reader #falcon #marvel #fanfiction #reader insert #one shot

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incarnateirony · 4 years

Note

In what season and episode did you realised that Destiel went from subtext to actual text?

Difficult question really. I don’t exactly have a magic switch of some weird personal set goalpost I have, and frankly, wasn’t even really a shipper, just defended shippers, until... 13.5/6. I think I started slipping after 12.19 because I’m not a moron, I don’t live under a rock, I have eyes and know what the fuck a mixtape means to Gen X. But I kept it at arms reach because even Carver era was so totally subtextual-- atop all the stuff that got cut S10 after the S9 blowout, I didn’t exactly want to invest myself as much as point out shippers weren’t crazy for seeing what they saw, especially S8/9+ and even prior the resonance of the hero’s journey over our entire human civilization and historical othering of queerness made earlier readings or notices of it completely fair even if not really like, directional by the crew?

But to begin, Carver era was when I saw /intentful and meritful construction of the body of text, via subtext, to subtextually tell a story with classic queer coding./ Because a lot of what this fandom calls queer coding makes me want to hide my face behind a quantum hole of facepalms and is often like, pretty much the reverse of what should be advocated or considered. All those retro old “he’s been written as queer from S1″ make me want to kick puppies or something because oh my god it’s Not Good, most of the content there is Very Bad And Hugely Problematic, and it’s an attempt to retroactively prove what old canon was doing without any substance.

Carver era was the shift to substance, but silent substance. Subtext that’s genuinely thematically scaffolded into the storyline in a way that while the events themselves were largely cued on subtext, consideration of that subtext was critical to understanding the full body of text and people that refused to grow into and adapt with that text as the tone shifted are the ones that got more and more confused and angry.

Dabb era was the threshold crossing into (often low-visibility) text. Fandom intentionally arguing points that require complete removal from social structures (which is everything from regional meanings of major symbols, social codes, language, or why-letters-mean-things) doesn’t mean shit doesn’t mean what it means. A mixtape isn’t subtext any more than getting on one knee and popping open a box is subtext even if they don’t verbalize the words. We know what these fucking things mean and anyone who doesn’t is in DESPERATE need of going outside and experiencing the real world before making any kind of social commentary on a body of text.

When it comes to dialogue text, Last Call is where Bi Dean or at least Queer Umbrella Dean was textualized. Again, it doesn’t matter if people don’t understand the long argued history that was put to bed about repeat sexual encounters with men, it doesn’t matter what the gender of the other triplets were, literally none of that matters. It doesn’t matter if the person understands it. It doesn’t matter if they know their queer culture enough to know their arguments were already buried. It is what it is.

There’s this disillusionment that unspoken physicalized shit like kissing or sex, or verbalized ones like “I love you,” but “I love you, in a gay way, specifically and only you, and want to be romantic with you” because every other statement of the like so far has people crying or arguing about it as not enough either.

These things are nice, but it is not the only way to deliver a textual romance. These are things we want and deserve, and people aren’t wrong for wanting them, the only wrong comes in deleting other text because it isn’t the style of text they want. 100% unhelpful.

Text in AV is complex. No matter how decontextualized people try to pretend this all is, throwing pasta at the wall and calling it an argument worth validating, AV media study doesn’t just incorporate social codes on shit like dialogue -- though anyone that applies those social codes wouldn’t be arguing anyway, as per my old post on that -- but visual language and TV literacy are a long studied topic and are just as relevant as understanding of textual/verbal language and having textual literacy. People trying to eschew these in the interest of favoring fanspaces to try to keep them equal within the canon, which is NOT what fandom space equality is supposed to be about, is just... lol.

When that soap opera reporter that doesn’t even watch the show wandered in commenting on the full mise en scene of the 15.03 breakup being classical “Dark Point in the Romance” framing, that’s not subtext. In a book, characters aren’t running around on a blank canvas. Their environments are the text.

What people may draw symbolically out of an environment varies, and if someone’s /interpretation/ holds up, that’s fine. But being able to digest the entire presentation of a work, that is to say, to read an entire scene in a book and understand their setting and the relevance of that setting is simply a form of text. And when literal fucking randos can spot classic cinematography, it’s time to consider what the full cinematic framework is telling you both in incremental minutiae of texts and in the full body of work.

So basically, I acknowledged lowkey text based on the most basic understanding of social codes, by 12.19, even if I was still kinda eyerolling about it. By 13.5/6, Castiel returned to Dean in something later echoed by Eileen for the zoom shot, but the rest of the arrangement was verbatim identical to the original ending of Swan Song with Lisa, with the only difference being “Never too late” wasn’t a verbal line, but an entire sound track they applied to highlight the scene.

Despite the Swan Song parallel ending reactives went up in arms about the fact that they weren’t having big romantic moments anymore and kinda failed to wrap braincases around the fact that the endgame reunion that was literally the ORIGINAL endgame shot, which ALSO didn’t include physicality (in fact, the text read, “this isn’t sexual at all. He’s a lost soul, and she’s his home” in the script for Lisa), and this dumbass fandom would go “SEE PROOF THAT MEANS THE TEXT MEANS IT WASNT SEXUAL AND HE JUST BECAME BEST FRIENDS THAT WAS HER BEDWARMER MAYBE SHE HAS COLD FEET AT NIGHT” and that’s not how this fucking WORKS. Common sense is NOT removed from fucking discussion and what sense is applied needs to be levelly-- again, social codes.

So at 13.5/6 I had considered it textually paramount to the original endgame arrangement. S14 was just... blatant ass domesticity. Dean got his happy ending. He had his family. He got his win, his everything. They spoke frequently in the kitchen -- only vaguely over cases, more slapping around idioms, eyerolling over barbarous eating, and occasionally discussing how to raise their son. In fact, if you look at non-research-non-casework S14 kitchen scenes I’m gonna let you sit there and map out what all those domestic moments in the heart of the kitchen was, minding 13.5/6.

It was something gained. It was their life. And it was something to lose. 14.18 already advert framed it, we all saw it. Troubled family. People delete history of what is connected where to pretend “we” is vague or makes the romance any less of a canon piece and lmao guys

And season 15 is their year long run where they’re spearheading a huge part of the plot and will be a critical final resolution.

Speaking of 13.5/6 and social codes, anyone remember that Jack hadn’t met Dave Mather and looked at one nonphysical picture of them and recognized “he’s her boyfriend”? SOCIAL CODES MEAN SHIT GUYS.

So there’s no magic moment. There’s S8/9 coding and subtext. There’s S12′s tape and other elements -- tape is just the easiest to nail down but several through the year tbh -- there’s S13′s Never Too Late, and all things that followed that in waterfall. There’s S14′s established domesticity with Castiel having essentially moved into the bunker, something that wasn’t even entirely established in S12 yet even if he was more frequent there than Carver era.

Without social codes, I could argue that “Dean loves pie” doesn’t actually mean he loves pie. In fact, I could argue those letters mean nothing, because basic social codes are what even give words meanings. Without them these are just squiggly lines on a screen. If I eschew social codes, I could take a “love me some pie” line from Dean and say it means he fornicates with children and make long convoluded excuses around it instead of the observable fucking fact that Dean fucking Winchester likes goddamn pie.

Waiting for your perfect personally dreamed magic moment for a landmark to call text generally disregards the full body of the text and merit of the work. The amount of time and effort this FUCKING shipping fandom has put into -- even Destiel shippers -- bashing down and calling blatant ass text subtext because it’s not the text they want -- just because they want to argue with people that threw the logic baby out with the destiel bathwater they thought was dirty -- it’s fucking embarrassing tbqh. Imagine if people’s competitive fandom BS was muted how anyone here would be addressing this body of text.

Like. “After Carver directed Misha to play Castiel as a jilted lover in season 9, Cain through S10 escalated it into Castiel as Colette, which was confirmed by both the author and actors, seating him as a lover, as Sam was Abel the brother; by season 11, pining and connected hearts becomes the driving theme of the show, repeatedly denounced both in text and showrunner commentary that it wasn’t Amara that was that romance, and instead, a different one rose; by season 12, domestic arguments were many, mixtapes were shared, coming into rooms and playing people for things secretly stashed under pillows were a hinging plot moment, by season 13 he was the Never Too Late Big Win as a far more powerful version of Lisa, by season 14 Castiel moved in, by season 15 their giant sacred marriage euchartist ceremonies on repeat are driving the entire body of the season while overtly making the straight pairing a secondary parallel to the primary Dean and Castiel pairing by 15.09 such as the AU scene, or the ending where they mimicked the same phrase, truncated by physicality. But anyone viewing this text is an adult not competing for their preferred fandom playbox to be considered in the text, and had eyeballs, saw Sam and Eileen were clearly courting, flirting, and/or romantically engaged for a long time before this.”

Can we hope for the equality in that, sure. I want that, sure. That doesn’t erase all the other modes of text before that though.

But there, I just addressed 4 consecutive seasons of storytelling as its stands in the critical themes, without breaking down the dozens of independent scenes themselves that have already been analyzed to death and yall have scorched in your eyeballs by now like angels have prophet names.

I’ve seen people desperately, desperately try to reinterpret this text, or this story structure, in inconsistent ways that fall short. They’re never held accountable for their entire shit falling flat on their face, they just keep building new shit that falls on its face too and keep using it as a base. People can *interpret* ~text~ however they want. Anyone that tells you that “true text is inarguable” is either an idiot or selling you something for your subscription to their blog. Anyone CAN make any jackass interpretation of anything they want.

So sure. You can make some nonsensical explanation around every core theme their relationship is shadowed by, removing all social codes and context from basic elements understood by adult human beings natively, whatever. You can take 200 pages writing around it and degaying it. Generally when I see this, I see unhinged, incomplete writings with no central thread, just a thousand disembodied excuses that don’t even make a story. They’re just that. Desperate excuses. Years of it at this point. And they’re free to /interpret the text like that/ if they want. But that’s their /interpretation/ of a /text/ and as-above generally in /intentional, willful, conscious denial and erasure of the basic social codes we all understand./

Just because they /can/ warp the most left field interpretation doesn’t make it not text. If I pulled an “I don’t know I can’t english suddenly” and threw those codes out the window that doesn’t mean that the shit doesn’t mean the shit it means just because it’s inconvenient to me lmao

And this isn’t necessarily at you, Nonnie, I just feel the need to expand on this because any single time I don’t nail down these conversational stakes, someone breezes through and intentionally hotboxes the conversation to go down these very predictable manipulations and extremizations of the conversation that I really am far too tired to repeat the arguments raging in my mentions again, so I head ‘em off before the shit ever reblogs.

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morganas-pendragons · 5 years

Text

Love Made Me Better | Castiel

I had a Sam fic fully written before my computer decided to delete it, and the last episode broke my heart for our angel in particular... so thanks to @webcricket ... this is my first Castiel x female!reader insert, and she’s loosely based off of my OC in one sense: They’re married.

Prompt: you fell in love with an angel a long, long time ago. now your angel wants to leave the humans left in his charge, and you can’t blame him. So instead of staying in the Bunker, you leave with him but not before Dean gets a piece of your mind.

---------

“Loving you has been my greatest honor.”

It started about a decade ago when a fallen angel caught your attention across a little playground in Lawrence, Kansas. He was tall and fair skinned, azure irises piercing your very being even from where he stood across the playground. Eventually, the fallen angel came to introduce himself as Castiel.

And everything has been a roller coaster since.

‘’My greatest privilege,”

You had lost count of the amount of times he’d made you cry, both tears of rage and tears of joy, in the six years since you’d married in a little courthouse in Detroit. You’d lost count of how many times he’d made you laugh or loved you just a little more deeply then you ever thought he would, or how awestruck he looked when he met the daughter that the two of you had created together.

“And my greatest tragedy.”

You’d lost count of the times you’d watched him die and remained helpless to do anything about it, how he was always finding fault in himself when something wasn't even his fault to begin with, you’d lost count of how he’d wept over your injured and battered form before forcing himself to come to terms with a simple fact: You were human. You were fragile, your life was finite, but the way you loved him was so reckless and free that the way he loved you in return made him just a little bit more human too.

Then Chuck took your daughter. Chuck killed your mother, took Castiel’s baby girl, and your entire world came crashing beneath your feet because your tiny family who you’d spent so long trying to keep safe and alive was gone. Your best friend, your baby’s godmother, was dead. Ketch was dead. Jack was dead. It was just you and Castiel now, and even then.. You wondered how long it would be before circumstances separated you.

The Seraph you’re looking for was standing pensively in the doorway at the top of the staircase of the Bunker, casting one last look over his shoulder to beckon you to follow him before the door quietly shut behind him. You stopped in the doorway between the dormitories and the War Room, fingers tightly wound around the straps of your duffel bag as you pivoted to look at the elder Winchester who hadn’t moved from his spot.

“Are you going to let your enhanced senses kick me out of the Bunker too? You always were an angry drunk.” Your words were venomous, as they should’ve been. You and Dean had once had a closely knit relationship where you could confide in each other over almost everything, including the angel you’d harbored feelings for, but ever since Mary had died it was like something vital in him had snapped and could not be fixed. “Because this whole spiel of how everything bad that’s happened to you is on Castiel? It’s bogus.”

“Did you not hear what I said?” You didn’t even flinch when he slammed the decanter on the table and nearly shattered it on impact. “If he hadn’t killed Belphegor, Rowena would still be alive! How are you so blinded by love-”

“Me?! Blinded by love?! Where were you when Chuck took Claire, Dean?” Dean winced at the mention of his niece but made no move to speak. “Where were you when Chuck killed my mother and took my daughter? Where were you when Chuck took my son? Where were you... you were right there, gun in his face, threatening to end the life of a two year old. In fact, that’s all you did from the minute he was born. I don’t know what happened to you when Mary died, but Castiel wasn’t even in the vicinity when he killed her! Rowena was.” The rage in your voice died at the thought of your best friend who had sacrificed herself to save the world. Who had took one last look over her shoulder before throwing herself into the Rupture and winked at you, bless her, as if she was trying to ease your anguish one last time. “If you’re gonna blame anyone, blame the dead. Blame everybody but yourself, right?’’ You clucked your tongue and rolled your sleeve up to show him the Enochian tattoo of Castiel’s name on the inside of your forearm. “You think I’m blinded by love... but love has made me a better person. Loving that angel you just kicked out of your Bunker? He made me a better person, a better wife, a better mother.”

“If you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you just go with him?”

Ah, there it was.

“For better or for worse, till death do us part. That was the promise I made and I intend to keep it.” Your gaze flickered towards the hall you’d just come from where Sam was blissfully ignorant of what he’d be waking to the next morning: a very empty bunker. “You’re not even going to let me say goodbye to Sam?” Your heart sank at the thought of Sam waking up, his grief still fresh from Rowena’s death, only for it to fester and deepen when he realized you and Castiel too had been released from the safety of the Bunker. “I have done so much for you and your brother, Dean. I was there for you whenever no one else was, I loved you like you were my own siblings, I helped you get over Lisa and I helped Sam get over Eilieen and now he has to come to terms with the fact he killed another woman he loved-”

“He didn’t love Rowena. Death always said he’d be the one to kill her, and he did. It’s fate playing out like it’s played out for our entire lives. Oh, which by the way, were never real to begin with. We were always just God’s broken play things.”

“Wow.” His ignorance really was astounding. “Did you not hear any of the times that Sam said he wanted to change Rowena’s fate? I might not be the greatest hunter in the world, but even I have eyes to see that Sam and Rowena loved each other and never said anything about it. You getting what I’m saying here? It was love that made Rowena throw herself into that rupture. Love for Sam, love for this tiny little family she’d been given that she believed she didn’t deserve. Love made her better, love made me better, and love is why I’m walking out of this Bunker with my husband.” You bent down and gripped the straps of your duffel bag, not daring to look behind you for fear that Dean’s stoic expression would crumble upon realizing that the last two people in his life were leaving him alone. “Until you get your act together, don’t call on us. And if everything really is Castiel’s fault, then you don’t want to call on him either. He might screw up your life again.”

“Y/N-”

“Goodbye Dean.”

Castiel was standing outside your car just a couple of feet away from the Bunker’s main entrance, his gaze softening when you walked out and caught sight of him, lips curling upward in a feigned smile that still made his knees weak. “Is he okay?” You threw your bags into the trunk and pressed your lips together, pondering what the best way to answer his question was. Even after all of that, after sticking up for himself and leaving when it was best because otherwise staying would kill him, his very human heart still feared for the man he’d rescued from Hell.

“Hey Angel.” You peered over the trunk door and wiggled your eyebrows, grinning at the rumbled laughter it earned you as he opened the drivers door and raised his hand for your keys. You tossed them to him easily, the two of you simultaneously climbing into the car before you turned yourself towards him and caught his chin between your fingers. “My angel.”

His eyes fluttered shut as you pressed yourself against his side and wrapped your hand around his nape to lower his forehead to yours. Your body softened when he moved his hand to press against the small of your back, deeper and deeper until you were chest to chest and close enough to feel his breath fanning your face.

“My human.”

“It’s not your fault.” There was nothing you wanted him to know more then this one simple fact: despite what Dean had lead him to believe, what had happened was not his fault. “My beloved,” You leaned forward and captured his lips with your own in the ghost of a kiss. “My angel, my husband.” They trailed over the curve of his jaw and down the column of his neck, across the apples of his cheeks and across the ridges of his knuckles. His chest constricted at the sight of one so gentle with him, one who loved him unconditionally despite his wrongdoings and did everything in her power to show him that. “What has happened with the Winchesters, with Rowena.. with Jack.” His eyes slam shut to prevent the flow of tears at the mention of your deceased son. “None of that, none of it, is on you.”

He sighs into the depths of your mouth when you come back up and capture his lips in a searing kiss, a declaration to prove that everything you’ve just said is true.

Then Castiel realizes that this is what his heart has always desired. You and him, together even when everything else aspired to tear you apart, here in your own hidden corner of the world where nothing could touch you. He thought about what you’d said to Dean in the Bunker - love made me a better person - and realized that loving you might have been the best thing he’d ever done, his greatest choice, his best accomplishment.

That was on him too, and he was so proud for it.

“None of it is on me.” He whispered to himself, forced to pull away for fear your lungs would collapse if he didn't give you a moment to breathe. “But you are on me, and I can think of alot of ways to entertain ourselves that way.”

Did he... Did he just make a joke? A sexual joke?

“You’re so lucky I love you because otherwise I’d probably be punching you in the face.”

That earned you that breathless smile he so rarely wore as he started up the car and with very little trouble, put in the address for one Jody Mills in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

When Sam woke up the next morning, he found himself staring at one lone text message on his phone. One that made him feel a little bit better about what had happened between him and Rowena.

Y/N: Even after all you’ve been through, after all she endured, and after all the two of you had lost.. the love you had for each other made you better, Sammy. Remember that when you remember her, and you’ll remember her more fondly. I love you.

- Y/N

#Castiel x Reader #Castiel x Y/N #SPN imagines #SPN fanfiction #SPN fanfic #Castiel x you #Castiel oneshot #Castiel imagine

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let-me-love-you-loki · 4 years

Text

Waiting Too Late

A/N: Written with the help of the lovely @mox-made-me-do-it

It was hard to believe that almost three years had passed. Life had changed in more ways than one. Matt and Nick had joined a new company where they had creative control over large parts of the promotion. And they’d taken along their friends—Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes, Adam Page. With a TV deal, they were home more often. Instead of one or two days every few weeks, I saw them five out of seven.

And it meant more to me than they knew. The nights together were one thing, but the days were where my heart found even more love for them than before. The days were when I could watch them get quickly wrapped around the finger of the little girl who’d changed everything.

With thick, dark brown hair and wide blue eyes, Mattea Jackson, or Mattie as we called her, had become the light of our lives. She had come screaming into the world a little over nine months after I’d committed myself to the Jackson brothers. They were both at my side when she was born—Matt cut her chord, Nick was the first one to hold her. I was relieved when she kept her blue eyes, as if that tiny feature made it easier for the both of them to see parts of themselves in our baby girl.

She was nearing two now, and she was more beautiful every day. There was a bedroom in each house made up just for her—Nick had turned it into a fairytale forest with a castle bed and a thorn forest with a dragon on the wall while Matt had given her an island paradise with palm trees and sandy beaches—and she loved bouncing between the two. She was spoiled beyond measure, and, sometimes, I thought they one-upped each other in the process.

***

“Dada,” Mattie shouted as she came toddling across the living room in Matt’s house. She held a stuffed elephant in one small, cubby hand while the other reached out.

Nick turned at the sound of her calling for him and smiled so broadly that his eyes crinkled. He gave her a surprised face, eyes bright and wide, mouth in an O as he swept her up in his arms. He tossed her up into the air and then cuddled her against his chest, giving her a dramatic smack on the cheek. “Yes, my love?”

Mattie grinned and returned the kiss to his cheek, doing her best to be as dramatic as her Dada. “Wan ooce.”

He nodded seriously. “You want juice? Then let’s get juice.”

I watched him carry her into the kitchen on one arm. Mattie held onto her elephant with one hand and reached for his ponytail with the other. We’d found out very quickly that she was fascinated by their hair. I was sure they’d lost handfuls of it to her when she was just learning to grab things.

Matt gathered me close against him on the sofa. He lay stretched out on the cushions with me curled against his side, my head on his chest. I felt his lips press against the top of my head, and warmth spread through me. “How are you feeling?”

I nuzzled against his chest and breathed in the scent of him. “Good. A little tired, but nothing more than what I was with Mattie.”

His smile curved against my forehead as he settled one hand on my stomach. I was three months along and, now that they were home far more often, Matt and Nick had been spoiling me almost as much as they spoiled their daughter. “Let us take care of Mattie today. Go get your nails done or something. Relax a little, Mama.”

“Don’t you guys have a production meeting today?” As EVPs of their company, they had to take an active role in planning out the next week or months’ worth of shows.

“Yeah,” he said nonchalantly. “But we can handle her for a couple hours. The guys won’t mind. Besides, she’ll have them wrapped around her finger just like us after a few minutes.”

I propped myself up on my elbow and pressed a faint kiss to his lips. “You guys are amazing dads, do you know that?”

“And you’re a great mom,” Nick said as he carried Mattie back in from the kitchen. She grasped a sippy cup between her hands, having given Nick the responsibility of holding onto her elephant. “Isn’t she, Mattie? Mommy is the best mommy.”

***

The boys had their laptop on the kitchen table as they waited to join the conference call with the others. Matt had our daughter on his lap, counting Cheerios on the edge of the table and watching her pick them up and eat them. Nick had his glasses on and a notepad next to him, looking desperately adorable. I leaned against the wall as I slipped my shoes on, taking a moment to look at them, to take in the feeling of having the three of them in my life. To be grateful that this strange life of ours was working.

Nick glanced up and gave me a faint smile, but his attention was quickly drawn to the computer. It looked like their call was about to start. I crossed the kitchen quickly.

“I love you, sweetheart,” I said, dropping a kiss on my daughter’s head. Then I turned to the boys. “I’ll only be gone a little while. If you need me, call me.”

Matt grinned up at me. The way he looked at me was open and beautiful and wonderful. I felt like the greatest thing in the world when he looked at me like that. “We’ll be fine. Enjoy some time to yourself. You deserve it.”

I smiled and leaned down, kissing him softly. “I love you.”

He squeezed my hand and murmured, “I love you, too,” just as I turned and kissed Nick goodbye. “Love you.”

Nick watched me with something like adoration in his eyes. “Love you, Y/N.”

I swept my gaze over the three of them once more before grabbing my purse and walking toward the door.

***

“Wave bye to Mommy,” Matt said, giving her an exaggerated wave. Mattie followed his lead, flexing her fingers at her retreating mother. “That was a good wave, sweetie. Wasn’t it, Dada?”

Nick grinned at his brother and his daughter. “Yes, it was, my love. You did a good wave for Papa.”

He kissed the little girl on the top of the head and turned his attention to the computer, surprised to find three completely surprised people looking back. Kenny, Cody, and Brandi all stared, openmouthed, at the two of them. Nick swallowed hard and looked to his brother, kicking him under the table to get his attention.

Matt barely looked up. “Hey guys. Give me a minute and we can—” He’d finally taken a good look at the computer screen. “What?”

“What the fuck?” Kenny said, pointing his finger at the camera, moving it between the two brothers.

Matt put his hands over his daughter’s ears. “Language, Ken! Jesus.”

“I’m seeing things,” Brandi added a moment later. “Because I thought I just saw Matt’s wife… kiss Nick?”

Nick leaned his elbow on the table and propped his head in his hand. He looked over at his brother, not quite sure what to say. It wasn’t that they were ashamed of the life they lived, but they knew that there were a lot of people who wouldn’t understand it. In the outside world, there wasn’t anything unusual. But very few knew the truth—it had been a hard time telling their parents and Y/N’s mother about it—and those that did knew enough to keep their mouths shut.

Matt scoffed. “Your connection is jacked,” he said, doing his best to keep a straight face. “Some lag going on maybe.”

He felt his brother’s foot pressing hard on his toes beneath the table. Matt readjusted his daughter on his lap and cleared his throat. “So what’s on the plate for this week?”

The call was quiet for a moment, as if none of them were willing to speak. Nick hoped that they believed his brother, that they hadn’t seen what they thought they’d seen. But he could tell by the furrow in Kenny’s brow that at least one of them wasn’t swayed. He cursed to himself. They’d been so careful for so long, and they’d slipped.

“We’ve got the tournament,” Brandi said at last. Nick let out a breath and picked up his notepad.

***

I rocked Mattie in my arms as I sat in the locker room with Nick and Matt. They were on the floor stretching, already in their Lisa Frank looking fringed tights. I watched them carefully, feeling unease at the worried looks on their faces. They’d been quieter than usual in the past few days, and Nick had even tried to get me to stay at home instead of coming to the show. I’d wanted to cry, but I’d worked to keep myself calm and blank. For a moment, I’d thought Nick and I were about to have our first real fight.

Although I knew it wasn’t the best time, I couldn’t stop myself. “Nick, why didn’t you want me to come tonight?”

Matt looked up, brown eyes wide as he glared at his brother. “What? What the hell?”

Nick dropped his chin to his chest and sighed. “I thought you might…” He stopped and swore. “They know. Kenny… Cody… Brandi… they know.”

Ice dropped into my chest. “What do you mean they know?”

“They saw you kiss me goodbye on the conference call,” he replied. “I didn’t want you to have to deal with the looks. Not until we had a chance to explain it to them.”

My pulse thumped at the base of my throat. I felt sick. “I’m sorry… This is my fault. If this gets out…” Tears blurred my vision. I couldn’t stay. But the problem was that I didn’t have the strength in me to leave.

“No.” Matt’s voice was firm as he suddenly appeared in front of me. “They aren’t going to say anything. I trust them… especially Kenny. We just need to make sure they understand. They aren’t going to make you feel wrong or whatever because of the fact that we love each other.”

“This could ruin your careers.”

“Let it,” Nick said vehemently. “We’ve got more than enough to live the rest of our lives. You’re the one we’re worried about. You and Mattie.”

Matt was about to speak when there was a knock on the door. He looked at it for a moment before he shouted for the person to come in. I curled Mattie against my chest, trying to hide her from whatever was about to come. Kenny and Cody slipped into the room, blanching a little when they saw me and our daughter.

Kenny tried to smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Hey, Y/N. You okay?”

All I could do was nod. My stomach churned.

Cody pushed the door shut and sat down on a bench against the wall. Kenny dropped down beside him, resting his elbows on his knees. “Guys… we need to talk about what… about the call.”

Both brothers stood almost in unison and planted themselves right in front of me, as if they thought their friends would attack me or something. “What do you want to know?”

Kenny took a surprised breath, like he didn’t think that they’d tell him the truth. “What’s… how…”

Matt reached toward us, settling his palm on the center of our daughter’s back. “You were at our wedding, Ken. You know what happened.”

“Yeah, but I thought you guys had settled this whole thing. Jesus Christ, Matt, you married her.”

“We did settle it. And I did marry her.” Matt’s voice was calm and even, his certainty in his decision to be with me.

“And Nick?” Cody prodded.

I reached for Nick’s hand, squeezing his fingers in comfort. “We settled it. Matt married her.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Kenny spoke up. “And Mattie is…?”

“Mine,” the brothers said in unison. They said it so perfectly, so matter of fact that it was almost impossible to deny it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tears dripping down my cheeks. Their steadfast, united defense of our lives was enough to make me fall in love with both of them all over again. In that moment, I believed Nick when they said that their careers didn’t matter. But that our lives together did.

Before anyone else could say a word, Mattie stirred in my lap. She whimpered in the middle of a nightmare and pushed away from me. “Papa,” she whined, thrashing.

Matt turned his back on Kenny and Cody to scoop his daughter up into his arms. He cradled her against his chest, her head on his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his neck and, for a moment, she was content. Then she let out another wailing whine. “Dada! Papa! Dada!”

Nick’s face twisted in pain as he crowded against Matt, his hand going to cradle the back of his little girl’s head. He pressed a kiss to her hair. “It’s okay, my love,” he cooed. “Dada and Papa are right here. You’re safe.”

I glanced to where Kenny and Cody sat watching the brothers, confusion fading a little. The more they watched my boys with our baby girl, the less they seemed to have something to say. Mattie whimpered once or twice more before she opened her blue eyes and yawned. She wriggled until Matt loosened his hold so that she could reach Nick. My heart burst as she hooked one arm around his neck too. They stood head to head, joined together by the little girl in the middle.

Kenny and Cody looked at one another and nodded, as if they’d decided something. The crossed the room and clapped the brothers on the shoulders. “We don’t understand,” Kenny said quietly, “but we understand.”

Cody gave me a brief nod before slipping out of the room. I assumed he was going to talk to Brandi. Kenny circled around behind the brothers so he could look at Mattie. “Now, is this gorgeous little girl going to come see her Uncle Kenny?”

Mattie looked up at her Dada and then her Papa. They grinned and nodded. Their little girl reached for their friend, hugging him around the neck and quickly settling in to go straight back to sleep.

#waiting too late #matt jackson #matt jackson fanfiction #nick jackson #nick jackson fanfiction #young bucks #young bucks fanfiction #sequel to almost too late #sequel to never too late #sequel to nothing too late #sequel to sometimes too late #polyamory #polyamorous #matt x reader #nick x reader #aew #aew fanfiction #baby #children

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thecleverdame · 5 years

Text

Soulless!Sam x Brunette!Psychic!Reader x Unnamed OFC

Warnings: girl-on-girl smut, Sam-on-girl smut, unprotected sex, oral sex (female giving and receiving), casual drug use (coke and MJ).

Summary: Soulless Sam is horny and a little obsessive.

Beta: @ilikaicalie

Dean’s all tucked into a nice little life with Lisa.

Sam goes to Texas.

He stops at the only house on Foley Road for more than twenty miles. The driveway is bone dry, kicking up a cloud of parched earth with his approach.

He's been there before. Twice before he died and five or six times since his soul left the premises.

There are two of them.

He spots the petite blonde right off the bat. She’s got small breasts and a body to match. Everything about her is little, tight and compact. He enjoys that by comparison, she makes him seem gargantuan. His cock looks twice as big with her slender fingers curled around it.

She's all over him as soon as the screen door slams shut. He can never remember her name so he calls her baby instead, she never knows the difference.

The brunette, Y/N, sits in the corner of the living room, draped over the raggedy armchair, as the oscillating fan sweeps back and forth across the room. He’ll never forget her name, she’s something special and one day Sam’s going to get her alone.

She’s all hips and curves and Sam fucking loves the way her flesh moves under his hands.

It's sweltering and she looks like some slutty advertisement for cigarettes from the 1950s as she fans herself with an old Reader's Digest and cocks her head toward him with sharp blue eyes. Her hair is the color of the crows in the yard and her legs are bare and tan all the way down to her cherry red toes. She's long and tall and lithe.

Y/N has always been the reason he comes back.

The three of them smoke a couple of joints, the blonde does a couple lines of coke and then they have sex while Simon and Garfunkel play on the stereo.

In the morning the before the sun comes up, the heat is bearable.

Sam can still feel the grimy layer of sweat from the night before. He watches as the blonde climbs onto him, fair-haired and needy. She bounces up and down on his cock, rubbing her clit until she comes around him. She finishes quick but Sam doesn’t mind.

He had more than his fair share the night before. He fucked her hard from behind while she ate out the brunette. He pulled her hair back so he could see her lick and nibble, sucking desperately with a face full of pussy until Y/N couldn't come anymore.

He always fucks the blonde, but Y/N is the end game. He wonders if she's ever had a man inside her.

Sam played God for the rest of the night. They always let him tell them what he wants to see. Then watches them touch, lick and play, pink mouths sucking on tits until he can’t jerk himself off anymore.

This morning the blonde works herself fast and slides off him while he's still hard. His dick is bobbing, shiny from her slick. He hasn’t come yet but she doesn’t seem concerned.

She mumbles something about sucking him off. It sounds like a half-hearted offer and she's still swimming in the haze of weed, cocaine, and half-sleep. He waves her off, watching her ass as she wanders off toward the shower.

Y/N is still sleeping peacefully beside him, her dark hair spilling over the lumpy pillow. She's naked on top of the sheet, lying on her stomach. Her back is fading red, color left from a sunburn he hadn't noticed in the fading light last night. Her cheeks are pink and her lips are parted, face smashed in the pillow.

Her whole body is flushed warm from sleep, he can feel it rolling off her. She’s more satisfying to watch than he remembers. Sam wants her more than he’s ever wanted a woman in his life.

It’s an urgent, desperate feeling he doesn’t care for.

He fists his cock and rolls on his side, running a hand down her back, over her backside and then further until he finds her pussy. She’s warm and still a little wet from the night before as she wakes up on his fingers.

“Sam.” She mumbles.

Her eyes blink open as a faint smile crosses her face with a happy moan.

"I dreamt about you. About why you’re different now." she murmurs. Her eyes are so blue he almost wishes she'd close them again. She’s a kind of painful pretty that makes his gut ache. It doesn’t feel natural.

She lets him pleasure her for a while before pulling away and scooting down to tongue his balls, bathing him carefully before sucking his cock. Sam watches her take him into her mouth, all the way back into her throat on the first swallow. Her nose squishes up when she tastes the blonde on him, but it doesn't phase her. Her eyes dart up to see him when her lips go wide around the base of his cock. He feels it tight in his belly and pulls her away with a fist in her hair.

She doesn’t protest when he pushes her onto her back, then moves between her thighs and spreads his legs wide to hold her open. Instead, she reaches for his shoulders, pulling him against her tits.

It's the first time they’ve ever fucked.

He bends her in half with his arms hooked under her knees and presses into her, deep as he can get. She's always been his little obsession and he knew she'd be like this; crazy tight and so fucking wet and warm and good, squeezing around his cock.

He kisses her as if they’re lovers, soft at first and then all tongue and need.

She takes him deep, moaning and groaning as he fucks her with everything he has. He comes inside her, pressing his forehead into her neck, whimpering as his balls go tight and release. Neither of them moves. Sam lies still on top of her, cock tucked in her pussy while she cradles his head and strokes the soft pads of her fingers down his back. He's already half soft when he pulls out and frees her legs.

Y/N stretches out beside him fingering her clit until she's close and then requests his assistance. Sam easily slides two fingers in her pussy. He doesn't have to do much, just in and out a couple times as she rubs her clit. This orgasm is quiet, just like everything else about her. Her mouth opens in a perfect ‘o’ as her cunt clenches around his knuckles.

“Sam”

She says his name when she comes, she's never done that before. Something inside Sam swells, his stomach rolling up to his chest. He watches her crescendo as her body arches and her long neck snaps back into the pillow.

After she comes back down she just giggles and smiles at him, unmistakably satisfied.

She collects herself and rolls back onto her stomach. Then lights a cigarette, moving the ashtray between them on the bed. He hates the smell of smoke but loves to watch it wafting from between her lips.

"You remind me of someone." Sam confesses, hooking an arm over his face, taking deep breaths to clear his mind.

"The girlfriend or the brother?"

Sam's not sure he heard her correctly, he sits up a little, propping himself up on an elbow.

"How do you know them?"

"And please don't say your dad, you'll hurt my feelings. Dead people are one thing, but your dad? I might not recover from that one."

"How do you know about him?" He asks again taking her cigarette from her fingers and snuffs it out. He’s never talked to either of these women about family. In fact, they don’t really talk at all.

They fuck.

She taps her temple and looks at him disapprovingly as if he should already know.

"It runs in the family, my grandmother says it’s a gift. I told you, Sam, I dreamt about you." She takes his hand and places it over her heart. "When you sleep in my bed…you put the strangest dreams in my head."

Christ, he wants to fuck her again already. Wants to thrust into her tight little cunt so hard she’ll walk funny for days.

“I wanna take you with me.” He husks, leaning down to nip at her shoulder.

“You don’t need me.” Sighing, she wiggles her hips closer. “Besides, I don’t think we’d be good for each other. I like to give you what you want.”

“I don’t care.” His eyes narrow as a smile pulls at the corner of her mouth. “I could just take you. Throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of here. I don’t need permission.”

“You could.” She shrugs. “But you want me to want it. To want you.”

“So you don’t..want it?”

“I never said that.” She blinks, refusing to look away as they both hear the shower turn off. “I dream about the things you want to do to me - the dark stuff. Things that hurt before they feel good.”

“Does that scare you?”

“It makes me feel excited. I’ve never met anyone who wants me the way you want me. You wanted me before but now that you're like this, it’s a deeper want. The impulses are darker, stronger.”

“I’m going to come back and get you.”

“Okay.” She shrugs, licking her lips.

“Do you stay here because of her?” His eyes dart toward the door to the bathroom.

“No. I stay so you’ll know where to find me.” Her whisper sends a shiver down his spine. He knows there’s something wrong with him, but with her, it’s worse.

She discards the ashtray and rolls onto her back. Sam’s propped up on his side and she wiggles close until her shoulder is touching his chest.

The blond wanders out of the bathroom, looks at both of them before discarding her towel and climbing back into bed.

Y/N watches him, doesn’t look away once, not even when the blonde dips between her thighs and sticks her tongue into the sticky mess of Sam's sloppy leftovers. She tastes his cum and looks up, gripping Y/N’s thigh.

“You let him fuck you?” Her tongue darts out to lick her lips, as if his spunk is sweet as honey. “I thought you didn’t like cock?”

“I like Sam’s cock.” Y/N shrugs, looking Sam dead in the eyes as her hands twist into the other women’s hair, bringing her head back down between her legs.

Her eyes roll back into her skull and he wishes he could fuck her and watch her get eaten out at the same time.

Everything about this place is filthy and indulgent.

Hours later he watches the two of them laid out over one another; breast to breast, bellies stacked as Y/N lays on top of the other girl, kissing her just right so that Sam can see her tongue slide in and out of pink lips.

Y/N pauses and pulls her mouth away long enough for both of them to look at him imploringly.

"Still with us Sam?" She asks, reaching out to him.

"Yeah," he taps Y/N on the butt and she slides off the blonde, so they’re lying side by side. Crawling on top he slides one leg between each set of warm thighs. “I gotta go soon, though. Gotta be in Oklahoma by tomorrow.”

“Can’t stay still for too long, huh?” Y/N’s lips part ever so slightly as Sam’s knee slides all the way between her thighs, pressing against her sex. Her thick eyelashes bat at him, looking up with bated breath.

He just snorts, running a hand up to cup the blonde’s breast but his eyes never leave his real desire.

“I always come back.”

This story was available on my Patreon on 1/22. For $2 a month you can have early access to all my stories and drabbles, as well as other Patreon exclusive content. Interested? CLICK HERE.

Tags: @smallgirlbigpersonality @mereka18 @gryffindorable713 @trainlikeawinchester @winchesterprincessbride @bamby0304 @saxxxology @notyourtypicalrose @mariekoukie6661 @little-big-mac2 @emoryhemsworth @mystriee @atc74 @holyfuckloueh @bunnybaby121115 @mogaruke @darkmystress00 @jaspesangriento @kazuha159 @mirandaaustin93 @crispychrissy-blog @schilj79 @wilde-abandon @hennessy0274-blog @bojabee @miss-samantha-winchester @impalaimagining @andkatiethings @astephez @ladycynthia @mrswhozeewhatsis @lenawiinchester @feelmyroarrrr @mrs-meghan-winchester @har-rystyles @mistressofallthingsgeeky @theamuz @maui137 @stars-and-seas @vale0413 @impala67trenchcoat @curly-haired-disaster @ericaprice2008 @livelikeawinchester @althehufflepuff @itsthesamegametoday @bohowitch @spnwoman @just-a-normal-eccentric @gallifreyansass @StoneyGGirl @lonely-skys @moonlitskinwalker @81mysteriouslyme @missrandomista @soupornatural7894 @stars-and-seas @natura1phenomenon @jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @81mysteriouslyme @likhelbentin @mrooks0205 @zombiewerewolfqueen @winchesterprincessbride @squirrel-moose-winchester @fortisetgloriosusinarduis @closetspngirl @dominodoll

#soulless!sam x reader #sam winchester smut #sam winchester x reader #sam winchester x you #sam winchester fanfiction

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dammitadolfnomorecake · 5 years

Text

CSUARAGC PRT 9 START

Juana was crying. As was Veronica. Shiro had his arm around the woman, who was confused over what had just happened. Preoccupied with Juana, Keith hadn't seen what happened to set his husband off, hearing the thud of Lance falling but not being able to see it due to the sofa in the way. When Shiro called his name, Keith finally knew that something was actually wrong. Passing Juana to Rachel, Marco was already on his feet watching as Lance tackled Shiro down. Keith rising in time to see his brother fall, and Curtis move to his side. Screaming at Lance to stop, Veronica only added to Lance's panic. Keith very nearly making it to his side before Lance bolted up the stairs and out of sight. With the slamming and screaming, Luis, Lisa, Marco, Jorge and Miriam all appeared from the kitchen, seeming bewildered over what had happened.

Coming to Veronica's side, Miriam pulled her into her hold

"What happened? What was all that screaming about?"

Slipping past her husband, Lisa retrieved Juana from Rachel. Nadia and Sylvio both moving to hide behind their mother. Keith wanted to follow Lance up the stairs, his hands clenched at his side as he kept himself there. He needed to know what happened so he'd know how to approach his husband

"I don't know, Mami... I was teasing Lance because his marriage to Keith is across the galactic news. They were photographed and captioned as married... then he... freaked out"

The what now? Sure there'd been reporters, but how did they know for sure he and Lance were wed?

"Shiro, what happened?"

His older brother cast his gaze in his direction

"Veronica put Lance in a headlock and messed up his hair. You should go to him. He seemed to be having a panic attack"

"His hair?"

Veronica nodded as she sniffled. It was so beyond weird to see Veronica crying

"I was trying to tease him"

"It's not on you. His anxiety was on edge earlier, especially when it came to touching his hair. I'm going to head up and check on him. He's probably thinks he's ruined Christmas..."

Sighing to himself. His heart hurt for his husband. He knew how badly Lance wanted things to be ok. Veronica's "attack" must have pushed him over

"Shall I come with you?"

Speaking softly, Daehra was genuinely concerned. If Lance was feeling anxious, both her and Lucteal must have been stuck feeling it too. Maybe there was something she could give him to help take the edge off

"Yes, please. Guys, he'll be ok. The best thing you can do is act like this hasn't happened"

"I didn't mean to upset him, please tell him that"

Keith nodded at Veronica, moving to the base of the stairs. The woman still being comforted by her mother

"He knows. He can't control when an attack hits. Just avoid his hair for now... I'm sorry Shiro, I'll be back soon. Why don't you see if mami and Jorge need some help, rather than taking up the doorway"

The names slipped off his tongue with ease. He didn't think twice about using them or again as he headed up the stairs two at a time. With the rest of the doors on the second floor open or partly open, the bathroom door was clearly the odd one out.

Knocking on the bathroom door, Keith tried the handle and found it turned but the door still seemed to be locked

"Baby. It's Keith. Can you let me in?"

Pressing his ear against the door, he didn't like the fact he couldn't hear anything. Knocking again, Lance didn't reply to him. If this hadn't been his husband's house Keith would have kicked the door in. He was tempted to do as much right there and then, but the last thing his in-laws needed was him breaking their house, or Lance launching himself out the window as he tried to escape the noise. Hovering, Daehra didn't know what to do

"He's not answering..."

"No. I'm assuming the door is locked from the inside or there's something against it. I didn't know how to get in"

"Can you use Kosmo? He can teleport?"

Realisation dawned. That was absolutely right... He'd kind of forgotten Kosmo had followed them up to the house, especially as he'd disappeared again

"Kosmo!"

Calling his wolf's name, there was a soft thud then the sound of his nails against the wooden floorboard. Padding out the room that had been Rachel's, his wolf had clearly been into trouble again. Crumbs caught in his fur that smelt suspiciously like gingerbread

"You're a menace. You know that. Mami is going to kick you out"

Thumping his tail happily against the wall, Kosmo didn't give two quiznak a about his behaviour

"You're lucky I need you. Can you teleport me in there? So I can open the door. Lance is in there"

With a nudge against his hand, Keith found himself in the bathroom. Lance was sitting with his back against the bathtub, Kosmo licking at his arms and hands. Leaning over without moving, he worked the bolt on the door across, giving Daehra access to the space, before taking the few steps over to Lance. Wrestling Kosmo off, Keith crouched down. Lance had his hands over his ears. His lip bloodied from where he'd bitten it

"Babe. It's Keith. I'm going to move your hands now"

As Keith moved Lance's hands, teary eyes filled with guilt and shame met his. Lance's breathing was more level than he thought it would, but his sniffling was coming from trying to breathe through his nose as he kept his mouth firmly closed

"There you are... want to cuddle?"

Keith let go of hands, his husband flinching away

"No. Hey... I'm not going to hurt you. It's me. Here... shit... ok"

Offering his hand like one would when meeting a dog, he held his loosely formed fist under Lance's nose, Lance recognising his scent better than he recognised him. Veronica had really freaked him. Then again, the comment made by Miriam about Lance bringing home someone decent combined with being physically intimate... and Lance's constant desire to make sure Christmas was perfect for them all. He'd stressed himself right out again. Softly Daehra called to him

"Keith?"

"Come in and close the door. He's a little disoriented"

Manoeuvring Lance to straddle his lap, his lover's hands clutched at his back as he let out a sob. Hushing him, Keith rocked him until he settled against him, he could feel how hard Lance was working to bring himself back under control as his eyes watered from the pungent scent his husband released. Sitting herself down on Lance's left side, Daehra placed her hand on his back

"Le-Lance, is there something I can do help?"

Lance shook his head, leaning into Daehra's touch

"I'm sorry"

"No harm done"

Scoffing, Lance replied bitterly

"I went Shiro"

"You went Shiro after because you are stressed. Have you been taking your medication?"

"Yes... is that why this happened? Because of that?"

"When did you take it?"

"About... 3 vargas early yesterday?"

Daehra sighed as she moved her hand from Lance's back to his arm

"It is important you take your doses at regular times"

"I know... I know, but... I wanted to be clear headed last night"

"I cannot hold this against you. You're trying as hard as you can to keep control for the sake of your family. They are lovely people... not at all like my home. I don't know how to offer comfort. It all seems so... as if you lack privacy and self identity in your close family state. You are seen for your childhood rather than who you became. It is must confusing, though I can assure you that all your family love you deeply. It's particularly strong from Rachel and Luis, as well as your mother.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html

I'd encourage all of you to read -- actually read -- the reported essays in the #1619project. If these ideas or facts are new to you, if they upset you or make you uncomfortable, if they challenge your idea of America, ask yourself: why?

For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it.

By Wesley Morris | August 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 18, 2019 7:52 PM ET |

I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. With two exceptions, they were all white. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth. I had to laugh — not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black.

I started putting each track under investigation. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes”; in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.”

Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It”arrived and took things far beyond the line. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning — teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more.

Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again. The problem is rich. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,”“Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait”remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.

It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.

And the spirit travels from host to host, racially indiscriminate about where it settles, selective only about who can withstand being possessed by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues so bewitched Elvis Presley that he believed he’d been called by blackness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ roll with uproarious guitar riffs and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve Winwood and Janis Joplin and the Beatles jumped, jived and wailed the black blues. Tina Turner wrested it all back, tripling the octane in some of their songs. Since the 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas writes in “Terrible Honesty,” her history of popular culture in the 1920s, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.

It’s in the wink-wink costume funk of Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” from 1999, an album whose kicky nonsense deprecations circle back to the popular culture of 150 years earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash. Flaws and all, these are homeowners as opposed to renters. No matter what, though, a kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness. Take Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly identified with black music, for real and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude who made “The Harlem Shake.”

Sometimes all the inexorable mixing leaves me longing for something with roots that no one can rip all the way out. This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating.

In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: “Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.

That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.

Rice repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly rocked that he was frequently mobbed duringperformances. Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.

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Other performers came and conquered, particularly the Virginia Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, burned brightly then burned out after only months. In their wake, P.T. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing wildly clamored-for residencies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies and dances. Before the minstrel show gave it a reliable home, blackface was the entertainment between acts of conventional plays. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, the ’NSync of the 19th century. The performers were beloved and so, especially, were their songs.

During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing. Edwin Pearce Christy’s group the Christy Minstrels formed a band — banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine — that would lay the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown. Some of these instruments had come from Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s body would have been a desiccated gourd. In “Doo-Dah!” his book on Foster’s work and life, Ken Emerson writes that the fiddle and banjo were paired for the melody, while the bones “chattered” and the tambourine “thumped and jingled a beat that is still heard ’round the world.”

But the sounds made with these instruments could be only imagined as black, because the first wave of minstrels were Northerners who’d never been meaningfully South. They played Irish melodies and used Western choral harmonies, not the proto-gospel call-and-response music that would make life on a plantation that much more bearable. Black artists were on the scene, like the pioneer bandleader Frank Johnsonand the borderline-mythical Old Corn Meal, who started as a street vendor and wound up the first black man to perform, as himself, on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, who took up blackface after a start in plain-old clowning. Yet as often as not, blackface minstrelsy tethered black people and black life to white musical structures, like the polka, which was having a moment in 1848. The mixing was already well underway: Europe plus slavery plus the circus, times harmony, comedy and drama, equals Americana.

And the muses for so many of the songs were enslaved Americans, people the songwriters had never met, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker or an uncle:

Den lay down de shubble and de hoe,

Hang up de fiddle and de bow:

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go,

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go.

Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-dead) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white critic Bayard Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs like this were the “true expressions of the more popular side of the national character,” a force that follows “the American in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s peak stretched from the 1840s to the 1870s, years when the country was as its most violently and legislatively ambivalent about slavery and Negroes; years that included the Civil War and Reconstruction, the ferocious rhetorical ascent of Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s botched instigation of a black insurrection at Harpers Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincided with the publication, in 1852, of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” a polarizing landmark that minstrels adapted for the stage, arguing for and, in simply remaining faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against slavery. These adaptations, known as U.T.C.s, took over the art form until the end of the Civil War. Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house.

What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.

But where did this leave a black performer? If blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay Negroes money to perform as themselves? When they were hired, it was only in a pinch. Once, P.T. Barnum needed a replacement for John Diamond, his star white minstrel. In a New York City dance hall, Barnum found a boy, who, it was reported at the time, could outdo Diamond (and Diamond was good). The boy, of course, was genuinely black. And his being actually black would have rendered him an outrageous blight on a white consumer’s narrow presumptions. As Thomas Low Nichols would write in his 1864 compendium, “Forty Years of American Life,” “There was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.

After the Civil War, black performers had taken up minstrelsy, too, corking themselves, for both white and black audiences — with a straight face or a wink, depending on who was looking. Black troupes invented important new dances with blue-ribbon names (the buck-and-wing, the Virginia essence, the stop-time). But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off. According to Henry T. Sampson’s book, “Blacks in Blackface,” there were no sets or effects, so the black blackface minstrel show was “a developer of ability because the artist was placed on his own.” How’s that for being twice as good? Yet that no-frills excellence could curdle into an entirely other, utterly degrading double consciousness, one that predates, predicts and probably informs W.E.B. DuBois’s more self-consciously dignified rendering.

American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish. It meant the cognitive dissonance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being very black and sounding — to white America, anyway, with his frictionless baritone and diction as crisp as a hospital corner — suitably white. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own, it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a 1955 television set. There was, perhaps, not a white audience in America, particularly in the South, that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the majestic singing of a real Negro.

The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness. Frederick Douglass wrote that they were “the filthy scum of white society.” It’s that scum that’s given us pause over everybody from Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is their blackness an act? Is the act under white control? Just this year, Harold E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Republican in his 70s, was quoted in The Times lamenting West and his alignment with Donald Trump as a “bad and embarrassing minstrel show” that “served to only drive black people away from the G.O.P.”

But it’s from that scum that a robust, post-minstrel black American theater sprung as a new, black audience hungered for actual, uncorked black people. Without that scum, I’m not sure we get an event as shatteringly epochal as the reign of Motown Records. Motown was a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral ideas (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the instincts of both the black church (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet “noisy.” Black men in Armani. Black women in ball gowns. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. Backup singers solving social equations with geometric choreography. And just in time for the hegemony of the American teenager.

Even now it feels like an assault on the music made a hundred years before it. Motown specialized in love songs. But its stars, those songs and their performance of them were declarations of war on the insults of the past and present. The scratchy piccolo at the start of a Four Tops hitwas, in its way, a raised fist. Respectability wasn’t a problem with Motown; respectability was its point. How radically optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, for it’s as glamorous a blackness as this country has ever mass-produced and devoured.

The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.

And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won't stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia. If freedom's ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also want to rock the bell?

In 1845, J.K. Kennard, a critic for the newspaper The Knickerbocker, hyperventilated about the blackening of America. Except he was talking about blackface minstrels doing the blackening. Nonetheless, Kennard could see things for what they were:

“Who are our true rulers? The negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

What a panicked clairvoyant! The fear of black culture — or “black culture” — was more than a fear of black people themselves. It was an anxiety over white obsolescence. Kennard’s anxiety over black influence sounds as ambivalent as Lorde’s, when, all the way from her native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap culture’s extravagance on “Royals,”her hit from 2013, while recognizing, both in the song’s hip-hop production and its appetite for a particular sort of blackness, that maybe she’s too far gone:

Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom

Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece

Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash

We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair

Beneath Kennard’s warnings must have lurked an awareness that his white brethren had already fallen under this spell of blackness, that nothing would stop its spread to teenage girls in 21st-century Auckland, that the men who “infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles” (as a contemporary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t black people at all but white people just like him — beetles and, eventually, Beatles. Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin. The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.

Last spring, “Old Town Road,” a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta songwriter Lil Nas X, was essentially banished from country radio. Lil Nas sounds black, as does the trap beat he’s droning over. But there’s definitely a twang to him that goes with the opening bars of faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy fantasy. The song snowballed into a phenomenon. All kinds of people — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper black promgoers — posted dances to it on YouTube and TikTok. Then a crazy thing happened. It charted — not just on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, either. In April, it showed up on both its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and its Hot Country Songs chart. A first. And, for now at least, a last.

The gatekeepers of country radio refused to play the song; they didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard determined that the song failed to “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This doesn’t warrant translation, but let’s be thorough, anyway: The song is too black for certain white people.

But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song’s sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.

The newer version lays Cyrus’s casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lackadaisical wonder. It’s been No.1 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart since April, setting a record. And the bottomless glee over the whole thing makes me laugh, too — not in a surprised, yacht-rock way but as proof of what a fine mess this place is. One person's sign of progress remains another’s symbol of encroachment. Screw the history. Get off my land.

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images; Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images; Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images; Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

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