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johnwickb1tsch · 26 days

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Yandere Tex Johnson x Witness!Reader x John Wick (AND x Constantine😜) Imagine WIP Part 9

Here we go my lovelies! @treedaddymcpuffpuff @sweetwolfcupcake @tammykelly @lilspookymeh @kurai-hono-blog

Wick could have been an asshole about buying a brand new kitchen, sundries included–but instead he merely shrugs off Constantine's hostile question. "Seemed like the least I could do."

Constantine glares, but lets it go, begrudgingly sitting down to a delectable meal cooked by the man he knows, deep down, that you've never been able to forget.

At Tex's midday administering of magical medicine, he takes your hand after you finish, refusing to let go. "Set with me a while, Rattlesnake." He pats the couch, on which there is no room unless you were to sit in his lap–undoubtedly his hope.

With a sigh and a knowing smirk you settle back in your chair. Your eyes are drawn to the burn upon his chest. He will carry that mark for the rest of his life, even if the magic is lifted.

You think on what Papa Midnite said to Constantine. "Take some big feeling..."

It kind of floors you, to think of the energy it took for Constantine to conjure that working out of thin air.

For you.

You told him a little bit about the boys. How they hurt you–and, how they saved your life. How you loved them, and how they destroyed you in their abandonment. No matter how you framed it, Constantine blamed them for the bullet wound forever seared in your side.

However, it wasn’t so simple as that.

"Whacha thinking, baby girl?"

You just shake your head with a tired smile. "Nothing important."

"Hmm. You gonna make me guess? Alright. You're thinkin'...bout that time in Mexico it was just you an me and the stars, out by the pool in our birthday suits."

You snort–quite against your will, it turns into a giggle.

"No..."

"Uh huh. You’re missin' my wicked tongue up between your thighs. I know that look."

"That's enough of that," you say, trying to stand. But he has your hand, and he tugs you so that you fall down to sit on the edge of the couch–and half on him. Your faces hover just centimeters away. You watch with horror a he tries to lean in, capitalizing on the opportunity. By the skin of your teeth, your heart in your throat, you just barely manage to turn your head.

"Didn't you miss me, rattlesnake?" he asks, his deep voice all sultry and low just wrecking you to the bone.

You dare reach up to caress his cheek with the blade of your thumb. "Of course I did. But there’s no going back, Tex. Maybe...that time is behind us." Just saying it hurts like a knife between the ribs, but you go on, “Maybe you and John did the right thing, letting me go.”

He just narrows his dark eyes at hearing that. You hate the way it gives you such a thrill, to the base of your spine, and lower still. “I thought you were mad about that? Hell, I’m still mad about that. I miss you so much I can hardly think straight. There’s just…” He frowns while he says it, but you know it’s just because he’d literally rather take a bullet than talk about his feelings. His grip on your hand tightens; he glares down at your silver rings like they owe him money. “There ain’t no point to anything, when you’re gone. Do you know what I mean?”

You close your eyes; for a moment you feel as though the floor has dropped out from under you, because you know exactly what he means. You lived it for months after they booted you, drifting from country to country, an empty husk of a woman, a gaping black hole where your heart used to be. Only after moving to LA, thinking about going back to school, and meeting Constantine, did your life start to feel like it had some meaning again.

“Yeah. I know what you mean,” you answer quietly. “But how did you think this would go? You’d knock on my door, and I’d just uproot my whole life for you again?”

“Maybe?” The confusion on his handsome face is almost cute. You realize he really did think it would be that easy, and you snort, looking away to a framed Tibetan Thangka painting on the wall. This man. As ever, you’re torn between kissing him and killing him. You have to keep reminding yourself that the former option is not even on the table.

“At least give me some credit. I coulda come in with guns blazin' but instead I brought flowers."

“You want credit?”

“Yeah. I’m practically a changed man. And I wouldn’t mind an apology from Wizard Boy either.”

"You've got to be kidding me." The pair on this man never ceases to amaze you.

"We were just having a little bit of friendly fisticuffs, but he fucked me up pretty good. That’s called unnecessary escalation.”

He would know.

"Spare me the macho bullshit. There’s no such thing as friendly fisticuffs. You were going to hurt my boyfriend, and you absolutely deserved what he gave you. You’re lucky he got Midnite to lift it."

Only a beat later do you realize you called Constantine your boyfriend within earshot of everyone, which you never do, because you both hate labels and the word just seems too high school for what you actually are to each other–but there’s no going back now.

“But–”

At last, at last, you are in a position where you don’t have to swallow his gaslighting. “No buts. You can behave yourself, Tex, or you can go. I mean it.”

Maybe drawn by the sound of your raised voice, Constantine chooses that moment to intervene, appearing at the foot of the couch with a magnificent frown.

“Well well, if it ain’t The Boy Who Lived.”

You know he’s just making yet another Harry Potter reference, but considering Constantine’s history, this nickname makes you flinch. Maybe it’s a mistake on your part, but you bristle. “Don’t call him that.”

Constantine, however, betrays nothing, just crossing his arms with that blandly judgy expression. “It’s alright, y/n. He loves childrens’ books–a man has to stick to his reading level.” You don't feel like arguing about the complexity of the later books, so you let the arrow fly.

You lift an eyebrow, side-eyeing Tex. “You do know an awful lot about Harry Potter for a grown ass man your age.”

For possibly the first time ever Tex actually looks sheepish. “Had to read something while I was in the shit.”

Tex never really told you much about his tour of duty in the Middle East. Bradford had intimated that it didn’t end well–but you weren’t exactly keen to take everything that asshole had said with any sort of seriousness. The thought of him holed up in a mud hut reading about Hogwarts kind of pulls at your heartstrings for some ridiculous reason.

“So what you want, Wizard Boy?” demands Tex, insouciantly refusing to let go of your hand, despite you tugging on it.

“I was going to check your chakras for malevolence, but I'm having second thoughts now.”

“Sounds illegal in five states.”

Constantine snorts. “You want me to double check Midnite's handiwork or not? If there's a trace of darkness left it could spread– and you'll be fucked all over again.”

“Not the way I like, I'm guessin’.”

“Probably not. But then again, you seemed to like Desdemona at the club. You want an introduction?” Constantine has a sly look on his handsome face as he asks this. It must be the succubus you'd run off– the thought of Tex in contact with her again makes you vibrate with jealousy. It is sharp, and fierce, and utterly fucking irrational.

You should encourage Tex to find someone else.

Your heart just doesn't agree.

“I'll…leave you two to it,” you say, reluctantly standing to pull away out of Tex's grip.

Only belatedly, after you've retreated to your room, do you realize that maybe Constantine interrupted your tête a tête with Tex for his sake, rather than yours.

***

John Wick whips you all up a beautiful dinner of sauteed meat and vegetables, complimented with a nice bottle of dry red wine that you're sure did not come from Trader Joe's. You play his sous chef, chopping up veggies, and it almost feels like old times in the kitchen, although he never would have given you access to a big sharp knife before. As though you ever would have had the nerve to stab him.

Tex was another matter.

At first you all sit down to share a semi-awkward meal, peppered with halting silences–until the second bottle of wine comes out, and then things flow more smoothly. It starts with Constantine cracking a joke at Tex's expense, which is surprisingly backed by Wick with a witty aside. Tex responds good naturedly, for once, and you just sit back and watch with a smile, a warm glow in your chest that feels too close to bliss to possibly last.

You help Wick with the dishes, drying as he washes because your dish rack is tiny. “You look tired, sweetheart,” he says after the last plate, bending down to kiss your forehead. You forget. You fucking forget that there are two other people there, one of whom is your current lover, and out of longing and pure habit you tilt your head back for the second staggeringly sweet kiss on your lips that always followed.

Only a long beat later do you realize what you've done, with Wick's shining dark eyes looking down on you, missing nothing. You gasp like a scandalized school girl, taking a small step back. “You're right,” you agree. “I am tired. Good night, everyone.” You're such a coward you can't even lift your head to look at any of them, though you can feel their eyes upon you as you scurry away.

Once in the sanctuary of your room you collapse on the bed, clutching the coverlet in your claws for hands, so embarrassed by your slip that you could die. You know that Constantine loves you, even if he’s never outright said it, and honestly probably never will–and this is how you repay him.

You really are a piece of work.

***

After you retreat, a silence falls over the kitchen, the three formidable men eyeing each other like wolves amidst a power struggle, trying to decide who is the weakest link and who is alpha. It’s Constantine who stands without a word, fetching his green glass bottle of Ardbeg single-malt scotch and setting it down in the middle of the table with a thunk. Then he produces three glasses–none matching–and pours out a finger for each.

“Gentlemen.” He looks between the two assassins seated at his table, a part of him flabbergasted as to how he’d even ended up in this situation. Before he met you, if someone told him someday he would find a woman he loved more than the air he breathed, he would have laughed them out of the room.

Not now.

How the mighty are brought low, and pride goeth before a fall, and all that proverbial biblical bullshit that is old as time and yet somehow still applies. Despite all our advances, humans are still essentially the same animal we were when we first left the cave and started walking upright–or when God created Adam out of dirt, whichever you find more believable.

“I believe we find ourselves at an impasse.”

“How you figure?” asks Tex, knocking back his drink and helping himself to another.

“Does being in love with the same woman ring a bell?”

Wick smirks, watching the exchange between the two, sipping his scotch sparingly. He does not contradict Constantine’s assessment, but in his succinct way he drives home the finer point. “More importantly, that woman is in love with all of us.”

The thought pulls something like a growl from deep in Constantine’s chest, but in the end he acknowledges, “Exactly.”

Tex smirks, leaning on his elbows. “Don’t be sore, Wizard Boy. Be grateful we broke her in for you.”

Constantine seems to count to ten under his breath, restraining himself from unleashing a curse on this fucking cowboy again. “You’re gonna have to give me pointers on how you manage not to murder him daily,” he says to Wick.

“I only listen to about half of what he says,” Wick admits with a smirk, a humorous glitter in his dark eyes.

“Good to know. My point is, if I curse you both into the Seventh Circle, it would hurt her. Likewise, if you two were to dig me a shallow grave out in the desert. You hurt her enough the first time. Do you follow?”

Wick nods, grasping Constantine’s train of thought immediately. Tex, however, has to chew on it a little–maybe because he’d hoped, for once, to finally have this girl to himself.

“You’re saying you don’t mind sharin’,” finally says Tex with a shit-eating grin, leaning back in his chair.

“Oh, I mind,” Constantine is sure to clarify. “But it’s up to her, if she wants you or not. If she decides she wants you to go–I will make you go. If she wants you to stay…” He spreads his big hands, as though to say, we’ll figure it out. Somehow.

Tex narrows his eyes, clearly debating if he should pick a fight over the make you go part, or take it as it sits on the table. “And how do you propose we let her know what we decided about this?”

Constantine snorts at that, draining his glass and standing from the table. “That’s your problem, Howdy Doody. Good night–and may the best man win.” The two assassins watch as John Constantine crosses to your bedroom, and practically shuts the door in their faces.

***

You are drifting on the edge of sleep when Constantine crawls into bed with you. You smile as you feel the familiar pattern of the depression in the mattress, and moan with surprise as he covers your mouth with his. You taste the Ardbeg on his tongue, which explains some of his ardor, but not all. The fury of his kisses on your lips and neck pulls an involuntary moan from deep in your lungs, his big hands digging into the flesh of your thigh, pulling you on top of him.

“John…?” Utterly star-struck, you blink down at him, disheveled in your pajama t-shirt and your hair a mess. He reaches up to cup your cheek, dwarfing your face in his large hand, studying you like there will be a test later. He opens his mouth like there’s something he wants to say to you, but he can’t quite get it out, the words stuck in his throat.

You think you know what it is, and your heart warms for it, that tingling thrill filling your chest and spreading outwards. You’re not even mad, that he can’t say it, because you get him. This is not the week you’re going to push him out of his comfort zone, more than you already have. Most of LA would laugh to hear it, but John Constantine has been a veritable fucking saint the past couple of days, and you’re so grateful to him.

“It’s ok,” you say softly, tracing the line of his square jaw. “I know.”

He frowns, almost like he wants to argue, but in the end he just shakes his head and pulls you to him.

You want to apologize for almost kissing John Wick right in fucking front of him–but that sticks in your throat too. You guess you’re both just a little raw tonight.

He peels off your t-shirt greedily as he guides you down. Hungry lips and a teasing tongue find the sensitive tips of your breasts, making you squirm with longing above him. You know you’ve already soaked through the laughable barrier of your panties, and are probably leaving an unsightly stain on his nice (200 dollar, he likes to tell you with a smirk) white shirt–but if the Chinese laundry down the street can get out demon blood stains, what’s a little cum?

You let out a cry of longing as he releases your nipple with a pop; the ache between your thighs is already nearly unbearable, and you can't stop yourself from grinding against his lean torso. You shut your mouth as soon as you open it, conscious of the paper thin walls and the two dangerous men on the other side of them.

“You like that, baby?” he taunts, hooking his fingers in your panties to tug them down.

“You know I do,” you pant.

“Then let me hear you,” he invites with a wicked smirk, shifting down so that you are nearly sitting on his face. You don’t know what was said out there, but you are starting to get the idea that John Constantine is up to something. But before you can even begin to think what to do about it, he pulls you forward with an undeniable grip on your thighs, and his tongue is laving up your slit.

“Fuck.”

This exclamation is not quiet, and neither are the ones after it. You practically shake the walls with your cries when you cum on his tongue, your body rendered into a quivering mess of over-stimulated nerves. He does not grant you mercy, even when you beg him, and by the time he is done with you, you are halfway to your second orgasm.

“Do you want me baby?” he demands, panting from his champion cunnilingus league exertions as he undresses himself. There is a desperation in his tone you’ve never quite heard before, and you have a feeling he’s not just talking about sex.

“I need you,” you tell him, and you mean every word. It wins you every inch of his hard cock buried inside you, and you can’t stop yourself from moaning, as though there is no room for breath in your body when filled with his impressive manhood. He grips you hard enough to bruise, his face buried in the bend of your neck.

He drives himself inside of you, hips pumping with the fury of his need, but he’s prepared you for it. It’s all you can do just to hold on, to the bed, to him, letting him use you exactly the way he wants to, because you know the past couple of days have been anything but easy for him.

When his thumb finds your clit you think you might die from the overwhelming sensation of it. “No,” you beg, somehow smiling through your exasperation. “Please. Mercy.”

He just pays you that impish curl of lips that always seriously makes you question which side he's playing for. “You can take it,” he informs you. “For me?” The way he pouts down at you while simultaneously rearranging your insides should be illegal.

“Fuck,” you swear again, and he grins down at you, knowing he’s got you in the bag. With your ankles around his ears he slows down for you, but still fills you to the absolute brim, working you in just the rhythm he knows you need with the tip of his too-clever thumb. There is a heart wrenching beauty in making love like this. The two of you have reached an understanding of each other's bodies, a point of familiarity in which you just know, and yet somehow each time is better than the last.

It isn't long before you cum on his cock with a ragged scream that you know there’s no way in hell the boys didn’t hear, yet you cannot stop it, you cannot care, because the man inside you has rendered you into a vessel for this mind-bending pleasure and in this moment, you belong completely to him. His hips snap against yours, and soon he follows with your greedy little cunt fluttering around him, spilling himself inside you with a loud groan.

He collapses beside you, pulling you into his arms. You revel in the sticky warmth of his seed seeping between your thighs, his heart a furious drumbeat beneath your ear. “Jesus fucking Christ,” is all you can manage to wheeze against the warmth of his chest.

“Right initials,” he pants, pressing lips to your hair. “Wrong guy.”

Thinking you really might have lost your mind, you start to cackle, and you can’t stop until you literally can’t breathe. You do not even have the energy to clean up, falling asleep in the beautiful mess John made of you, and maybe it’s just you, but even in his sleep John Constantine seems to hold you more tightly than he ever has before.

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😬

it's on? 😈😈😈

@sweetwolfcupcake @treedaddymcpuffpuff @tammykelly

#wicked johnson fic #constantine x reader #constantine x you #john wick #john wick x reader #keanu reeves #john wick x you #john wick x y/n #keanu reeves x reader #yandere john wick #tex johnson #tex johnson x you

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cypherverze · 1 year

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CHAPTER FIVE

Hardest Part of Ending is Starting Again

an avengers x john wick crossover fanfic

You can access the previous chapter here: Chapter Four | Series Masterlist Access

PAIRINGS: avengers x teen!reader (platonic) , tony stark x niece!reader , john wick x daughter!reader , peter parker x female!reader

SUMMARY: After having a self declared immersion in the continental, you began thinking about your life choices. Things that happened in your past and of what will happen in the future, and these thoughts had given you an answer to Tony’s offer.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: hello! here’s chapter five. yay for progress (?) anyways, i hope that you’ll like this chapter. chapter six is already in the works, if i finish them soon, i’ll be able to post it on the weekends. likes, reblogs, and comments are very appreciated. thank you for sticking with my story! as always, pls excuse the typos ><

REMINDERS: this story is pure fiction. i do not own the characters of avengers, spider-man, and john wick franchise. this work is originally written by the author (me), please do not copy or repost my work in other platforms.

WARNINGS: foul language, violence, guns and knives, mention of death

WORD COUNT: 3,155

You almost gave Peter your marker.

Keyword, almost. But after what had happened back at Abram’s warehouse, you felt like it was your last day. You’re not going to lie to yourself though, a man had put a plastic bag in your head, you found it very hard to breathe that you almost past out, and you were thankful that you had managed to get away. You had never expected for Peter at all, of all people to come bursting in the warehouse and helping you. You still find everything crazy.

As you walk along the pavement, the sun was already rising when you had arrived in the continental, you greeted the concierge and grabbed your new set of keys. You just want to rest and sleep, maybe go AWOL for a day or two.

“We have taken it upon ourselves to move you belongings to your new room, Ms. Jovanovich.”

“Alright. Thank you so much.” The concierge nodded.

The new room was much better than the first. You locked your doors and hoped that the repeat of the incident last night won’t happen again, but you’re sure of it. After the stunt that Anya pulled, she won’t be able to enter the hotel anymore. She almost killed Lee, and it’s one of the most important rule in the hotel—no blood in the continental, it doesn’t matter if Lee was saved or not, there had still been a blood spilled in the continental. It’s wise if she should just steer clear, but no matter how much she ran away from it, she’ll still about to get executed by the management anyways.

When you had finished freshening up and changing to some comfy clothes, you laid down on the bed, certainly missing the comfort of it after being seated on a chair for god knows how long that it made your butt numb. You stared at the ceiling, grabbing your blood oath marker on the bedside. You looked at it, and opened it.

“I almost gave you away, huh? It’s hard for us assassins to ask for a help, but if we asked for help from others as a last resort or had been helped by others because they needed to—which is a rare occurrence for the latter, who the hell would help an assassin anyways? It’s silly that we always turn to you as a sign of owing someone for the help that they did for us. A small metal thing as an exchange for their help.” You chuckled.

“I don’t really want to owe someone. But if ever it’s Peter, then it’ll just be alright, I guess? Peter is a far much better choice than those people under the High Table.” You sighed and put back the marker on the bedside.

You’re planning on staying at the hotel for another two more days, and heading back to the avengers compound. At some point, you are considering on accepting Tony’s offer of staying at the compound, maybe you can live with him while your house is getting rebuilt—in which you have to start planning on, and accepting his offer as well in transferring to Midtown. Maybe this can help you get Abram off of your trail, the more you’re surrounded by a lot of people, the better. It’s least likely for Abram to target you out in the open that’s full of teenagers.

You continued on staring at the ceiling, until you felt your eyes closing and falling completely asleep.

It was three weeks later that you found yourself checking out of the hotel in the middle of the night. You were about to leave after two days, but ended up leaving after a whole ass month. You figured out that you needed a couple weeks of silence to yourself. No thinking of everything, just a couple more weeks to be by yourself. Basking in the temporary safety that the hotel gives you before going out again in the real world.

“It’s a pleasure having you with us, Ms. Jovanovich.” The concierge told you as you were checking out of the hotel.

“Likewise. Please send my thanks to Winston.” The concierge nodded.

“We hope to see you again soon.” You nodded and began walking towards the exit.

As you leave the continental, you began walking the direction towards the compound, blending once again into the night.

It was at around five in the morning when you arrived at the compound. You would’ve arrived a bit earlier, but you stopped by for a coffee at one of those 24/7 coffee shop and managed to have a chat with the nice girl that was working the graveyard shift. You pretty much had lost track of time, and when you arrived, you saw Steve doing some laps around the compound, and saw you.

“Hey, where have you been?” Steve said as he gave you a hug, “You’ve been gone for a month.”

“Out on a business trip. Didn’t Friday told you? I left him a memo to pass to you guys when you arrive from your mission.”

“Yeah, we did. But still wanted to know directly from you.”

“I’m back now, no need to worry.” Steve smiled at you and ruffled your hair.

“Good to have you back at the compound, kiddo. The rest of the guys are missing you, you’ve been gone for too long. Especially Tony, been calling you and you never answered, been driving him on the edge.” You chuckled.

“No phones allowed on business trips.” You shrugged and smiled, he laughed.

“Well you go on now and get some rest.”

“Thanks, cap.”

“No problem, kid.” You hugged him and made your way to the entrance.

The compound was still quiet, no sign of any of the team being awake yet. That’s good, you’ll be able to go to your room in silence. You took the advantage while everyone is not up yet, you want to deal with their questions once you’ve fully regained your energy, because some of them won’t make it easy for you.

Arriving to your room, you see Koda sleeping on your bed. You missed your little fluff ball so much. When Koda noticed you, he quickly jumped off of the bed and tackled you. You closed your room to block the noise from coming out. You lift him up and put him down on the bed, you changed into a comfy clothes and joined Koda on the bed.

“Hey buddy, how are you? Were you a good boy while I’m gone?” You ruffled his head, “Hey Fri?”

“Welcome back, Ms. Jovanovich. What can I help you with?” The AI greeted you.

“Thanks, Fri. Was Koda a good boy while I wasn’t around?”

“Yes, Koda was a good dog. Mr. Wilson had taken him out with him for a run every morning while you’re away,” You smiled, happy to know that Koda is getting taken care of amazing people, “He would also accompany Mr. Barnes when he goes to the city, he spends time with Mr. Banner and Mr. Stark on the lab, sometimes Mr. Parker takes care of him.” You smiled, happy to know that Koda is being taken care of amazing people.

“Mr. Stark had built Koda a dog bed inside the lab.” Your eyes widened at what the AI told you.

“Did he now? So much for no animals allowed in the compound, yet he had spoiled Koda by making him a bed, in his lab out of all places.” You chuckled, “Thanks, Fri. That’s all.”

“Okay. Have a good rest, Ms. Jovanovich.”

You laid down on the bed, with Koda beside you, and staring at the ceiling again—it had been your favorite pastime, staring blankly at the ceiling while you contemplate everything that had and will happen in your life. It did felt good to be back home again together with the team. You mentally noted that you needed to talk to your uncle later when you wake up.

It was already 10:30 in the morning when you woke up, you had decided to sleep in and not getting up at your usual time. You stretched your limbs and got out of bed, heading to the bathroom to freshen up. Koda was already waiting by the door and is excited to go out, so you two went out of the room and head to the dining area to grab some coffee.

“There’s our little killer superstar!” Sam’s voice boomed, “Sleeping beauty finally awake.”

“Morning.” You laughed at Sam and greeted everyone, guessing that they just woke up too because they are all just beginning to eat their breakfast.

“Hey pretty girl, come on and join us for breakfast.” Natasha smiled and gave you a hug.

“Lady (Y/N)! It is good to have you back. Friday said that you were away on a business trip, I was afraid that I won’t be able to see you before I leave. How was it? I reckon you had a good time!” Thor said while smiling at you.

You were touched by what he said, it’s rare for you to see Thor in the compound, so you make the best of it. He’s a really fun guy, you get along with him very well.

“The trip was fun,” You said as you sat beside Wanda, “Was productive, at most. Not done with it yet, though. I may be leaving again real soon.” You took a sip of the coffee that was handed to you.

“How soon?” Wanda asked.

“Maybe in two months? Not sure yet, depends.” You shrugged.

“Well, we’re glad to have you back again. This time, in one piece and no scratch.” Natasha said.

“Had taken a few hits, and my wounds had managed to heal back just in time. But can’t speak too soon Nat.” You took a sip of your coffee again.

“Good, you’re here!” You heard your uncle’s voice, “Been waiting for you to come out of your room ever since Friday informed me that you’re already back.” Tony hugged you.

“That’s great then. Needed to talk to you as well about something.” You finished your coffee and put it on the sink.

“Alright, you know where to find me.” Tony left right after he got his coffee.

“Hey buddy, I’m just gonna go and have a talk with uncle Tony, okay?” You pat Koda’s head.

“Speaking of Koda, can we take him with us?” Sam asked.

“Where to?” You raise an eyebrow at Sam.

“Wilson and I will be going out to run on a few errands.” Bucky said.

“Yeah sure, no problem. His leash is in my room, by my shoe rack. You can just go there and get it.” You decided to tease them, “You two gonna be going on a date?” Everyone laughed.

“Hey! You getting back at me with all the spider boy teasing that I made at you?” Sam fired back at you.

“You always both bicker like an old married couple, so…” You shrugged, “Maybe or maybe not. But hey, enjoy your date with Koda!” You winked at Sam and Bucky and left the dining area.

“Hey, guys.” You greeted Bruce and Tony when you entered the lab.

“Hi, (Y/N). Welcome back!” Bruce said as he hugged you.

“Thanks, Bruce. Mind if I borrow my uncle for a while?”

“By all means. I needed a break from him, he’s been cranky the past few days, up until now.” You laughed.

“Care to walk with me around?” Tony nodded at you.

He dropped the tools that he was holding and followed you out of the lab and the both of you began treading the halls of the compound, until you had reached outside. It’s a cloudy and windy day today, so it’s perfect for both you and Tony to take a walk around ghe compound. The surroundings are also quiet, so you both have a little bit of privacy.

“I need to talk to you about something.” You began.

“What is it? Don’t tell me your pregnant.” You slapped you hand at his arm, causing him to laugh.

“No! What the fuck! But hey, I’ve been thinking about your offer.” You sighed, placing both of your hands at the pockets of your sweats, “Of transferring to Midtown and living here at the compound.” Tony smiled at you brightly.

“But I can only live here temporarily, until the house had been finished rebuilding. Which I haven’t gotten onto yet, but I’ll be in touch with some professionals later when we get back inside.” Tony rolled his eyes at you.

“Hmm, don’t you think it’s time for you to move? If you keep on rebuilding it over and over again, those people that are after you would just come back for you there, because they know that you frequent there.” Your uncle reasoned out.

“You know that I can’t uncle Tones. That house holds a lot of memory for me, I can’t just throw it away that easy.” You sighed, “We have already been over this a hundred of times.” You frowned.

“Look, you can’t really blame me for being worried so much for you. I am always worrying about you when you go home. It’s much better if you stayed here with us permanently, where you’ll be around of many people from time to time.” You’re about to say something, but he quickly cut you off, “I know what you’ll say. I know that you can protect yourself, but until up to what extent? You’re a kid, a teenager, I know that there’s one hell of a fighting spirit in you. But don’t you think it feels so much better if you can be at ease and be in a place where you can feel safe? Even at least for a bit?”

Your uncle was making a very valid point. After spending weeks at the continental, you never felt so at ease. It feels good to be in a place where you can at least feel safe. You had been set on not involving the avengers in your business, and maybe you had been too strict with yourself. The people that you’re with, they’re a freaking superhero with actual super powers, they are the people who you can count on. Maybe it’s not that bad in permanently staying in the compound, Koda won’t ever be alone when you go on business trips. Maybe it’s time for a change, I’m sure that if you’re father is alive, he would want you to make the choice.

“Okay, how about we compromise.” You sighed, “I’ll be moving here permanently at the compound, but I want the house to be rebuilt and you’re going to help me with it. I will live here, but I’ll be visiting my house from time to time.” Tony smiled at you.

“I’ll gladly help you with that. We can even put some Stark tech on the house, for safety measures.” You smiled.

“Now that it had been decided, we now move to the second agenda to talk about. About me transferring to Midtown.”

“What about it?” He crossed his arms behind him.

“While I was back at the continental, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I wanted to feel like a normal teenager, I wanted to know what it feels like, just for once. I have been living in fast forward, to the point that I have forgotten what’s it like to have a normal life. I’ve never even set foot on an actual school, I’ve been homeschooled all my life. I wanted to know what it felt like to be surrounded by a lot of people that are close to my age, not with a bunch of old people that wanted me to kill someone for them all the time. I know very well that my life will never ever be normal or peaceful, because none of what I do and involve myself with is normal and peaceful to begin with, it was a choice that I had made, but I would like to experience it at some point in my life. Before the time comes and it gets taken away from me.”

You sighed and looked at the ground while walking and felt an arm around your shoulder. You felt Tony’s gaze linger at you, and you looked back at him, shrugging your shoulders.

“What? You can’t convince me otherwise that it’s not true because it’s really true. It’s the reality of it. It’s the reality of what I do.” You chuckled bitterly.

“No matter what happens, I’ll always be here to support and help you, you remember that, okay? You’re the only memory of Helen that I have, the only blood related, a kin that I have.” Tony pulled you in for a tight hug.

“Speaking of my mom, do you want to come with me and visit them?” You looked up at Tony and smiled at him, “Been planning on visiting them again, and please remind me to get some flowers. It’s already embarrassing enough that their daughter doesn’t visit them that often and when I’ll visit, I always forget bring any flowers at all.” You scowled.

“I would love to, kiddo.” He smiled back at you and ruffled your hair, “So when do you plan on starting school?” You both continued walking.

“Not really sure. Don’t know how it really works.” You shrugged and scratched the back of your head.

“How about we visit the school and take a look?”

“You sure? Aren’t you a big shot or something? Wouldn’t that be weird if the Tony Stark suddenly went to Midtown on a completely random day?” You raised an eyebrow at him.

“We’ll go there when the classes are in session, if you want. To avoid a few people.” He shrugged.

“That’ll work.”

“Then it’s settled, we’ll go first thing tomorrow morning.” Tony smiled at you.

“Huh? Don’t you have one of those fancy businesses meetings to attend to?” You raised an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, so?” He replied, “I decided to reschedule it. My niece comes first, business second.”

“Wow, I’m touched.” You put a hand on your chest in a dramatic way.

“You should be!” Tony sassed, “Imagine, the Tony Stark rescheduling his business meetings for his niece.” He began walking faster.

“Hey! Wait up for me your old geezer!” You shouted and ran to catch up to him.

“The hell did you just call me?”

When you had catched up to him, Tony quickly put an arm around your shoulder, placing you in headlock and ruffling your hair, looking like a chicken had ran on it, and you were laughing so hard. The last time that you had laughed this hard is back when you’re father was still alive.

You are happy.

Finally happy, and you pray that it won’t get taken away from you in just one blink of an eye.

TAGLIST:

@sirimiripetrichor @nimo-jay @preciousbabypeter @graysonmalik2550 @khaleesihavilliard

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spinningwebsandtales · 1 year

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Imagine Protecting John and Saving Koji’s Life

Koji Shimazu X FemReader

Rating: M

Warnings: Blood, mentions of death, injuries, slight spoilers, and AU-ish

Word Count: 895

Requested by @severusmanit0-0

(A/N:) It feels so good to be writing again and I was really excited to write this one as I love a good AU. Cause sometimes we fangirls have to make matters into our own hands and make everything right with the world once more! Thank you for your request and I really hope this is everything you hoped for! Until next time happy reading! ~Countess

Koji placed the list into your hand, his gaze unwavering as your lip trembled. Your yukata was suddenly too stifling as you tried to make Koji change his mind.

“Koji please don’t send me away,” your lip trembled.

He shook his head, “The hotel needs these supplies if we’re going to continue forward.”

“Is one friendship really worth your life and possibly the life of your daughter?”

He sighed, embracing you tightly and gently, “Sometimes you have to do what’s right not matter the cost. Akira can take care of herself and I’ve already told her what to do. John has been an important friend in my life for a very long time. I cannot turn my back on a friend, it’s against my very code.”

You sniffed holding onto him tightly, “You were always a sucker for a good sob story.”

He chuckled, kissing your cheek, and sent you on your way.

Walking through the downtown market of Osaka, trying to maintain a calm and cool demeanor. After working for Koji several years in the hotel, he had trusted you enough that he sent you on purchasing all the hotel’s supplies. Most of the time he came with you and you both would enjoy time in doing whatever the city had to offer. It let you both forget the secretive business it seemed like you both were born into. But now you were alone, knowing something bad was coming and he sent you away to protect you.

You were talking with the local fishermen when you heard talk of a commotion happening at the Osaka hotel. You abandoned your mission and fled back to the hotel you called home and the man you had come to love. You ran as fast as you could, trying to dodge people blocking the way when you finally had the hotel in sight. You could hear the fighting from outside and when you burst through the front doors, chaos had erupted in the lobby of the Osaka. Koji and his men going against the High Table thugs there to kill John Wick. Koji caught sight of you and his shoulders sagged in defeat. Of course he couldn’t keep you away as you felt like you owed him so much. He jerked his head towards the ceiling, his meaning perfectly clear. You gave a nod in acknowledgement as you unsheathed the Tanto you kept hidden in your yukata. You pulled the ties keeping your robe together to reveal the armored bodysuit underneath and a pistol strapped to your thigh. One last look at Koji and you were sprinting ready to go to John’s rescue. A High Table man broke away to pursue you when Koji stepped in his way, keeping him from you.

“Your fight is with me,” he snarled.

You fought savagely through the High Table men before you found John. Blood drenched your hands as you fought with John back to back. You saw Akira holding her own against her own enemies and your heart swelled in pride. Using Koji’s instructions and fighting hard and long John was finally able to make his way to the streets and escape his death once more. You breathlessly looked around as Caine had also disappeared. Your heart dropped when you noticed Akira gone as well. Racing through the blood soaked rooms, littered with the bodies of friend and foe alike you knew exactly where Koji and Akira would be.

The sight before you made your blood freeze. With Akira at the side, unable to interfere Koji sat on the steps, bleeding profusely from several cuts. He and Caine had yet to notice your entrance in the room. You gripped your Tanto tightly, watching everything mentally begging Koji to stand down. But his pride would not let him. Your heart clenched seeing him pursue the blind assassin. Caine was beginning to swing, to take the life of Koji when you leapt into the fray. Your Tonto taking the brunt of the blow, causing your arms to give a little but you kept your grip strong and put yourself before Koji protecting him from his certain demise.

“Enough,” you pleaded. “Don’t let pride and duty make you kill one another!”

Akira melted in relief as you refused to back down until Caine stepped away. You kept Koji from stepping forward anymore, before he collapsed from his injuries.

“Live,” Caine replied softly before turning away and disappearing from your sight.

You held on tightly to the man that had once saved your life and now you were able to repay him by saving his. Though he was ready to throw himself away for his ideals, you couldn’t let him. It wasn’t fair for him to die in front of his daughter so soon. You kissed his forehead gently, keeping pressure upon the knife wounds.

“Thank you,” he whispered holding tightly to your arm and his daughter’s hand.

“Just repaying the favor I’ve owed for awhile,” you laughed trying to fight the tears.

“You already did that a long time ago,” he replied.

With Akira’s help you were able to get Koji back to the doctors within the hotel where he was patched up and left to heal as long as he needed to. Though your debt finally cleared, you still remained to live out whatever life you had left with Koji and Akira.

#Koji Shimazu X Reader #Koji Shimazu / Reader #Koji Shimazu #John Wick #John Wick Imagine #Imagine #Not My Gif #My Writing #Request

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seaside-writings · 7 months

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Hello, again all you wonderfully, wicked people!

As we know black cats are an essential part of the spooky season as well as an essential part of everyday life! So in honor of that, I made a prompt list dedicated to one of my favorite black cats Salem Saberhagen, who in my opinion had some of the most iconic dialogue in TV history!

I hope you all like this prompt list, and I hope it helps you create! And if you do use it, please credit/tag me so I can check out what you've made!

I hope you all stay blessed and safe throughout your day.

Lots of Love & Wishes: Celia 🖤🎃🕸🔮

P.s. I did change some of the dialogue so it would flow easier when it came to writing for different types of characters.

“You’re the only one who understands me,” “Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I care,” - “What are you doing?” “Nothing!” “You’re in a chatroom again pretending to be a woman, aren’t you?” “I like the attention.” - “I have lighted the fuse. Now I just have to wait for the kapowie! Muahahaha!” - “I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt you; I just wanted to rule you,” - “You’ll be able to look back on all of this and get revenge,” - “Show me the tuna!” - "I never cared for the name Mildred," - “And let’s give a big warm welcome to sadness,” - “Someone’s gonna end up crying. Probably me,” - “Finally, someone whose life is more pathetic than mine!” - “You don't have to order me a pizza, but make it half sausage, half clam,” - “I need a little fresh air and a latte,”

“As long as you drop everything and stay focused on me, I should be fine,” - “Dogs guard. Cats watch and judge,” - “When I’m happy, I eat! When I’m upset, I eat!” - “Hooray, the toast is stuck! Danger, here I come!” - “They left behind. Be strong. Don’t cry,” - “Still want to take over the world?" - "Cheetos should be served at room temperature, you know,” - “Curse my sarcastic nature!” - “If you misbehave for just one instant, I’ll cut you, man,” - “Dear lord, you picked up a guy at the bus station,” - “It's the 90s, no one eats mortals anymore,” - “I’m rich! Rich, I tell you!” It’s only a few hundred dollars,” “I’m well-off! Well-off, I tell you!” - “Let's destroy everything that's dear to him. Let's indoctrinate him into the cathedral of agony,” “I'm going to write him a very stern letter,” “You're a regular Mad Max, aren't you?” - “A tassel! Don’t you toy with me, you saucy minx!” - “Wow, you must feel like a huge loser,” - “Would you be terribly upset if I threw up in one of your shoes?” - “You laugh, you die,” - “I will not be ignored!” - “All I’ve done all day is eat, sleep, and stare off into space. What an awful existence,” “Hey! I don’t dump on your lifestyle," - “Could you either remove the bandages or kill me?” - “Sorry, thirty waffles is my limit,” - “You think a mirrored ceiling would be too much?” - “Why didn’t you stop them!?” “I was busy,” “Doing what!?” “Playing with my scrunchie,” - “We need a plan,” “How about we weep uncontrollably,” - “I urge you to accept me as your ruler!” - “I’ll be having a quiet weekend, curled up with Memoirs Of A Geisha,” - “Delivery. I want a pizza as fast as possible! And don’t forget the crazy bread!” - “And your face is a bit of a trainwreck too,” - “Tell Elton John he can’t start singing now,” - “I wasn’t always the stud muffin I am today,”

“You owe her an apology. Now! “I’m thinking of how to word it,” “Try 'I’m sorry,'” “Somehow, that just doesn’t feel right…” - “I’d rather be locked in the dishwasher again,” - “Does she know who you are?” “Why does everyone think that’s a necessary part of love,” - “I’m the ultimate bad example,” - “Don’t ask me, I was an English major,” - “Hey, leave the sarcasm to the professionals,” - “Get a real job. And some pants,” - “I’m a cat, I’m curious, so kill me,” - “Still want to take over the world?” “Yes! Wait, no! I meant no!” - “I’d be more nervous if I weren’t so good-looking,” - “Hey chicks, what’s the haps?” - “I’m trying to set the world record for grooving,” - “Sometimes I just like to hear myself talk,” - “You know me any excuse to wear taffeta,” - “Oh, right, I forgot. I’m an animal, I have no self-control,” - “Why am I finding it hard to summon sympathy?” - “Wow, I love a woman who can take charge!” - “I’ll be downstairs creating a distraction,” - “I’m trying to concentrate on expanding my intellectual horizons,” - “Wake up, woman! You’re not a princess, you’re a dragon!” - “Her new obsession is doing wonders for my wardrobe!” - “Please hurry! I’ve been in here for over an hour!” “Why didn’t you call us sooner?” “It wasn’t a problem until I ran out of peanut brittle!” - “So it's true. Taste does skip a generation,” - “I want to say something wise and wonderful right now, but I can't think of anything. Except I love you, and I hope the band knows some Ohio Player,” - “BOO!” “You look ridiculous,” “You were terrified, and you know it,” - “Halloween. Is it just another date on the calendar, or is a state of mind, or is a state of… being?”

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caltropspress · 3 days

Text

Spittin' Wicked Randomness with Small Professor

or, Bizarre Rides II the Pharthest Cyde;

or, A beginning doesn’t need an ending, only a portal

Make your body a temple. Make your home a shrine. You are a God, live like one!

—Timothy Leary, “You Are A God, Act Like One!” (1967)

Psycholinguistic structural confusion leads to insidious beat wrecking missions and continuous speech recognition, prescription, vocal anecdotal object impressions…. Synergistic sample arrangements.

—Jungle Brothers, “Trials of an Era” (1993)

EXORDIUM

I long for the anonymity the internet once provided. Everyone was faceless. Vacant visages—not even an avatar. I’ll often try to remanufacture this premillennial experience for myself. I deliberately avoid seeking images to accompany the names I see on the screen. Many people nowadays—most people, the writer bemoaned—make this nearly impossible. Vanity of vanities—all is vanity! But I do try, I do. I look away; I increase the scroll speed; I squint to blur and becloud. Like Iris DeMent desired, I try to let the mystery be. On Rakim’s plodding “The Mystery (Who Is God?),” the God MC suggests you can solve the mystery if you realize the answer revolves around your history. But I need the mystery to stay intact. So many years on, and I’m still figuring out da mystery of chessboxin’, looking all the way back to when Wu-Tang was in black hoodies on the man-sized chessboard—cloaked rooks shouting peace to all the crooks with bad looks. “You cannot hook up a 100 million years of sensory-somatic revelation to your puny, trivial personality chess board,” so says Timothy Leary. I’m inclined to agree.

Aside from his music, I’ve known Small Professor—Jamil Marshall, if we split the veil—only through his words, through his text on my chosen screens: pixelated patterns of character images. But late last year, I stumbled across an image of him appearing not unlike a cloaked rook. Draped in a black robe, Small Professor appeared beside his Wrecking Crew brethren as a Sith Lord. The occasion was a Halloween performance at Cratediggaz Records in South Philly. Small Professor’s face was hidden, and so I could fuck with this type of qualified exposure. His shrouded appearance elevated my intrigue rather than diminished it. This was no flashbulb, soul-capturing, photographic evidence of existence; this was no selfie self-absorption; this was simply some spooky shit.

Of the many messages that Small Professor measures out into the ether[net], the ones that have frequently caught my attention make some mention of hallucinogenic drugs. Here again, we have [e]strange bedfellows—that being technology and drugs. Twinned conceptualizations: drugs as teknology; teknology as drugs [scanned as tricknology, too, two]. Programming in the Silicon [Uncanny] Valley with the capital-I Internet reformatted as a Third [Eye]nternet. You scream as it enters your bloodstream. “Build, elevate to a higher comprehension, / Let your third eye rise above evil interventions,” if we’re properly tuned in to the Jungle Brothers’ “Troopin’ on the Down Low.” Teknology and drukqs might be more familiar than we (Eye) thought.

As we know from Jesse Jarnow, psychedelic saints were known as “heads,” which, underground hip-hop stalwarts of a certain age will wreckonize as an honorific for their own dedication to a way of life and listening. Stewart Brand, author and publisher of the Whole Earth Guide, would later speak of computers and online communities as the most auspicious collective force “since psychedelics.” Hua Hsu brings this to my total attention, but with my full cooperation (word to Def Squad), so there’s a few more things I’d like to mention. Computer science research centers saw networking and information sharing as devout acts “borrowed directly from Deadhead communalism.” Again, not dissimilar from the tape trading so crucial to the spread of this thing of ours called hip-hop. John Morrison writes of how “hip-hop owes much of its early development and propagation to an underground economy,” to the “recording and circulation of cassette tapes of park jams, live battles, DJ sets, and radio broadcasts” that brought a burgeoning and insurgent art form to the masses. The backchannels and clandestine conduits that made this dissemination possible suggest a secret organization with figures like Geechie Dan and Elvis “The Tapemaster” Moreno as its stewards. These cross-cultural, cross-generational connections exist despite Jerry Garcia’s abhorrence of rap as a legitimate musical form [see below: “Deadhead” diss-poem]. Small Professor centers himself within the radial lines of this complex mandala. His production isn’t strictly for the psych heads, or the hip-hop heads—his musick is For the Headz at Company Z.

Small Professor understands the possibility and catalytic practices of rappers, much like William S. Burroughs did: “With computerized tape recorders & sensitive throat microphones we could attain insight into the nature of human speech & turn the word into a useful tool instead of an instrument of control in hands of a misinformed and misinforming press.” Somewhere you can hear the echoing call of Newwwspaaaaperrrr from the Jungle Brothers’ “Book of Rhyme Pages,” a song with a prophetic register, a song that reads.

In Burroughs’ essay “Academy 23: A Deconditioning,” which appeared in the San Francisco Oracle (c. 1966-1968), the beatific junky proposes that “academies be established where young people will learn to get really high…high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark…high as the Karate master when he smashes a brick with his fist…high…weightless…in space.” As high as Wu-Tang get, I might add, Allah allow us pop this shit. Burroughs believes it’s “[t]ime to look beyond this cop rotten planet.” The students in Academy 23 “would receive a basic course consisting of training in the non-chemical disciplines of Yoga, Karate, prolonged sense withdrawal, stroboscopic lights, the constant use of tape recorders to break down verbal association lines. Techniques now being used for control of thought could instead be used for liberation.”

Small Professor is already present in such an academy, his “lab”—be it Albert Hofmann’s Sandoz Laboratory or RZA’s antediluvian lab. Like Bobby Digital, Small Professor experiences the “Lab Drunk,” the studio stupor: Stumbled into the lab half-drunk—honey-dipped, stinking blunts. The neural activity of Madlib’s psilocybin; the mind expansion of MKUltramagnetic; outlaw practices: tripping on LSD or sampling on an MPC—same diff, really. “The experience,” Leary wrote in the East Village Other, “must be communicated, harmonized with the greater flow.”

PART I

[December 23, 2023 | 9:10 PM]

Small Professor: Ah, fuck. I was supposed to plan this out. Just took 2 tabs to the dome officially at 9:00 PM. At some point tonight I will be looking around at my room like I just got here from outer space.

[10:14 PM]

Caltrops Press: Where’s your head at right now?

SP: Difficult to see. Always in motion is the right now (to paraphrase Yoda). Right now I am listening to “Right Now” (HAIM, live).

CP: Are you alone?

SP: I believe that to be true, but we can never be 100% sure, can we? I don’t presume to speak for you of course, but I’d wager that you may have, at least once, considered that The Truman Show could be real life, after all. According to this, though, yes:

CP: Somebody once said, “Every day is Truman Show. True men show their face and expose flesh…” Do you think acid allows you to see beyond this reality?

SP: No. It allows me to see this one more clearly. Time, or whatever it is that we collectively agree is this forward feeling momentum, seems to slow. So you (me) see the same things that you see everyday, but that your brain kinda knocks aside after a while. Things look new.

CP: Are you typically playing music when you trip? Does the music slow down? Not literally. But do you process it differently? And, of course, I’m curious if you ever try to make music in this state?

SP: I like making music that barely makes sense in whatever state I’m in at that time, so when I come back to it I’m even more confused. Like leaving yourself a drunk voicemail, but on purpose. I’m generally high—it’s just a matter of how. And to the last question: Do or do not, there is no try.

PremRock: I think [Small Professor's] work has benefited from discovering [hallucinogens]. He’s pretty passionate about ’em! I think it’s made him more expansive and he’s more eager to try far out ideas. He was always psychedelic in nature, but this just provided more of a conduit.

Zilla Rocca: Even without shroomz he always had a bugged-out sense of melody, rhythm, and layered samples. Smalls has always been a seeker. We connect like that. We love unearthing old rap to learn from it while appreciating all the new styles.

When brothers start buggin’, I bug the most.

—Jungle Brothers, “Simple As That”

CP: I’ve never fucked with psychedelics, so I generally have either a romantic or sensational notion of what it must be like. Have you ever had any experiences where things went really weird, or have you ritualized it enough so that you know what to expect? Like it’s become yoga or meditation for you by this point.

SP: Yeah, it’s pretty meditative. The first time I had acid was so surreal that nothing else could dream to compare.

CP: When was that? Do you still remember the details?

SP: Well, first of all, I couldn’t have started such a journey without such caring guides, for they did not have to take time from their lives to explain how much to take, how much not to, to be mindful of the kind of media you’re ingesting while in that space—like nothing too scary and shit like that. They specifically said, “Maybe watch a comedy tonight. Something on the lighter side of things.”

CP: I’ve heard that’s important, having a guide.

SP: So I believe I initially started off with the smallest amount I could take, cuz I didn’t know any better. But the effect was immediate. I remember going outside and just standing in an empty parking spot in front of my crib and watching it rain. It was night already. I was like, Wow, this is the best rain I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of rain. And then I went out to get more tree. On my way home though, so…okay. How do I explain this? So, my Lyft driver on my way back to my house, he and I strike up a conversation. At the end of our talk, which included a phone call to someone of high stature in the 5% community who spoke to me directly, I embarked on the path to knowledge of self.

CP: Like, sincerely? Or only until you stopped being high?

SP: Well, I know now it started there. But I’ve always known that I am god, in some way. It’s just that, after you find out, what do you do with that knowledge of your own god-dom? That’s one thing I can appreciate about psychedelics. It’s like, Alright, well, if I know my brain is capable of such a thought or a piece of music in this one state, then I should be able to get back to it.

CP: I get that. Like, “I’ve done this before, so I can surely do it again.” But, for so many artists, they struggle to capture whatever it is. I know a lot of times I’ll look back on something I’ve written and then ask myself, How did that even happen? Because the process—the making of something—is often so unconscious.

Curly Castro: Smalls calls me after the fact (bka “a trip”) and regales me with a cornucopia of odd and odder occurrences. I will say that one time [redacted] and that’s when [redacted] and what could say after [redacted]. I just told him, Say Less.

CP: How long will this trip last? You took two tabs at 9 PM, and it’s been 4.5 hours.

SP: Oh, I’ll be up for a while. Night hasn’t even begun.

CP: I need to crash because I’ve got to be up early. But keep dropping whatever random thoughts you have here. We’ll call this Part 1.

SP: Fantastic, Pt. 1

SP: “God is never small.” Those are the words that man said, and my reply was, “...I am? I am. Ohhhh. I am.”

[Small Professor links me to a video showing Donald Lawrence & The Tri-City Singers performing “I Am God.”]

SP: Also, I’m quite proud of the fact that my government name [Jamil], oddly Arabic considering how Christian my dear mother is, quite literally translates to “Beautiful Ruler,” with my first name actually meaning “god” in certain places (“Jamil” is one of Allah’s 99 aliases—I found that out earlier this year). My mom HATES THIS BOYEEEEE. She thought it just meant “handsome.”

SP: Words mean things but don’t have to.

SP: [Denmark Vessey & Scud One’s Cult Classic] (This is my official trip soundtrack.) “Throw bricks at him if you can’t build wit ’em, / Whoever marquee, top bill, I’ll Kill Bill ’em.”

SP: It’s 8:23 AM. Still trippin’.

PART II

[December 24, 2023 | 9:15 AM]

CP: You awake? If so, talk to me about “Dettol.”

SP: I feel like that beat was made along with a few others in that same span of time with Roc Marci in mind. Not only in terms of the drum un-emphasis but also being intentional about giving an MC room to operate, to breathe. On Midnight Marauders, both “Electric Relaxation” and “Lyrics To Go” are special beats because they operate within the parameters of 4/4 time but the bar lengths aren’t the typical 8. On “Dettol,” you have mostly 8-bar loops until it shifts to 12 for one measure, and then it starts over. (Not sure about my beat math there.) So the Armand Hammer guys had to each approach that in their own way. Couldn’t have drawn it up any better. “Numbers look crooked like King Kong shook it.”

CP: (That’s your second Slum Village reference in this convo.) Paraffin was the first album I heard by them, so that beat would’ve been the third Armand Hammer song I heard overall. And that “giving them space” idea definitely benefited me—a guy who hadn’t been paying attention for years, specifically because lyrics weren’t grabbing me like they used to.

The psychedelic experience is not just an internal, private affair. The “turned on” person realizes that he is not an isolated entity, a separate social ego, but rather one transient energy process hooked up with the energy dance around him.

—Timothy Leary, “You Are A God, Act Like One!”

CP: How did you originally connect with woods and ELUCID?

SP: I may have been aware of ELUCID as early as 2005 by way of his Tanya Morgan/Lessondary/Okayplayer fam associations, but 2007 when he dropped Smash & Grab is when I instantly knew, Ah, this guy’s one of the best rappers ever. By 2009, that became, The best ever. That was the Myspace era, so we connected on there musically but also on some homie shit. We were working on a song of his in like 2011 or ’12 for the BIRD EAT SNAKE mixtape, “Dumb Out.”

ELUCID: BIRD EAT SNAKE is a whole lifetime ago. I had just met woods. I was also just beginning to develop the Cult Favorite record with AM Breakups. I was super charged creatively and was fortunate enough to have a lot of space to develop that. “Dumb Out” was such a strange beat that made my pen move immediately. Nothing overthought or drawn out. Just really chunky, vibed out, and punchy energy. I just began to acquire these attributes during the making of that tape.

CP: “Don’t eat the brown acid…”

SP: Originally woods was supposed to be on there. I distinctly remember this being one of the first times I heard him because…okay. He recorded a verse on this beat and ELUCID sent his acapella but no reference to guide from. And I’m very good at matching up acapellas, so the fact that I could make no sense of his flow—where to place it in the mix—always stuck out to me.

CP: Is that why he didn’t end up on the song?

SP: I don’t believe so. That would be funny if true, though. Because it feels like I have more music with those two than what tangibly exists.

CP: Also funny because, as their audience has grown—exponentially of late—the “discourse” returns to whether woods raps “on beat” or not.

SP: Once I understood that the question of if he’s rapping on- or off-beat is the wrong one—when it should be, Why do I hear this as off-beat? How do I hear what he heard to deliver it that way?—that’s when it clicked for me.

CP: Was “My Blank Verse” your first beat for them officially?

SP: That was the very first song me and ELUCID made together. Don’t think it was for anything in particular, initially.

CP: Got it. So it wasn’t approached as an Armand Hammer track, per se. Just ended up on an AH project. When did you connect with ELUCID in person?

SP: I wanna say I met him in person at a show in Philly, at the Khyber. But the time I remember the most is when I was in Brooklyn with him (this actually might have been when we met up to record “My Blank Verse”), and he showed me the block where B.I.G. grew up. I like to imagine my power levels increasing on that day due to the residual holy hip-hop energy on the premises.

CP: That’s dope. I’m surprised to hear you recorded the track in person. Both because so much is done remotely now—the producer and the MC separate—and also because ELUCID, I’ve read, is pretty private when it comes to recording. Maybe that came later, though.

SP: Yes, that did come later to my knowledge. But also, I’m special.

ELUCID: This was the era when Willie Green’s studio was still in his apartment. I had just started recording with Backwoodz, and “My Blank Verse” was indeed recorded that afternoon. I usually don’t have people hanging in the studio while I record, but I think my comfort level with Jamil speaks to the ease I feel in our dealings.

SP: I also remember going to meet ELUCID in New York specifically to get a flash drive that had he and woods’s verses for the Sean Price “Midnight Rounds” song they all should have been on together. His internet was down.

CP: Why didn’t that track come to fruition?

SP: woods’s hook was an interpolation of Apache’s “A Fight” (because, midnight rounds). The label was like, “Oh nah!” Word for word! Bar for bar! Sean P would have appreciated it.

CP: Jersey’s own.

billy woods: At that point in my “career,” I was kinda disappointed to get cut but not surprised. I guess I had a long history being snubbed regularly by peers and institutions in the indie music scene, so it just seemed like, Yeah, more of the same. I was pleasantly surprised to be invited, and unpleasantly unsurprised to be disinvited.

SP: So, kept ELUCID’s verse and subbed in my man Castle, making this song the spiritual successor to a track I did on me and Guilty Simpson’s Highway Robbery, also featuring those two. Things fall apart, but they also come together. How they’re supposed to.

CP: What’s the story behind “No Grand Agenda”? Also, where are we at in terms of the trip?

SP: It’s slowing but at a light jog now. The beat for “No Grand Agenda” was originally part of an album I did made up entirely of exactly 1-minute long songs called You’re Killin’ Me Smalls. There were 60 songs. ELUCID was one of the only rappers I sent it to, specifically because it wasn’t “supposed” to be for raps. I had an ex who stomped out my computer and hard drives one day, including the original files for this project. All except for that one.

SP: “Are we sure there’s no grand agenda?” And ELUCID took my stems and arranged it how he heard it. It was meant to loop in on itself, like the other songs on that project. It was originally named “Kelvin Spacey,” and I’m sure I’m misremembering but I wanna say “Dettol” was originally named “Kelvin Duckworth,” if only to verify Zilla Rocca’s guess that I was the producer in question that had sent woods a beat named after his favorite Portland Trailblazer.

CP: So you’re saying, like any good friend, ELUCID jacked that beat?

SP: Oh, I remember him asking to rap on it, perhaps for nothing in particular at the time. But who am I to deny the goat? And it’s obvious to me that this is how it was supposed to go; ain’t nothing coincidental or accidental, dunn.

ELUCID: The making of “No Grand Agenda” was a cornerstone for a foundational era of style for me. I felt like I made a song that seamlessly weaved both verse and chorus in a way that felt absolutely hypnotic. It was a new belt for me, this sense of control. Small Pro was one of the first producers to trust me enough to send his beat stems. During this period is where I began producing more of my own music, so I also wanted to arrange the song how I heard it. Thankfully, Jamil dug it.

CP: What do you like about ELUCID’s rapping?

SP: Some of it is the voice. Some of it is the things that he’s saying. But mostly, my favorite rappers all share this in common: they can get busy on any style of beat, any tempo, any sound, any Small Pro time puzzle. I was listening back to his older stuff a little while ago and heard him doing whole specific styles on one song, and never doing it again. The versace, versace flow, in particular. It felt like he was bored at the time and peered ahead three years to see how everyone was rapping, came back, did it, and that was that.

ELUCID: [Working with Small Pro] is a special thing. Something that I’m still exploring. I think a Small Pro x ELUCID tape would be ill. Knowing his attention and care in the translation of my bars and flows is the type of partnership real MCs aspire to. It just hasn’t happened yet!

SP: He and woods both have had a way of inspiring me through specific lines. “Go where the drummer commanded me,” for example. It’s me. I’m the drummer. And woods, a few songs before “Dettol” says, “Beg producers to take out the drums,” which he said was meant to be a joke, but I took it literally and started making beats that could exist with or without drums equally.

All of my Backwoodz-related songs are credited as “Small Pro,” not “Small Professor.” I was on shrooms the week after my birthday earlier this year when I realized those are now different entities. Especially because woods was once like, “Wait, you did ‘No Grand Agenda’?” And I was like, “I did….I think? No, that was Small Pro.”

The last full project I—or I—did before moving back to Philly was a reimagining of A Jawn Supreme 1-3 from the Small Pro remix perspective. It was my—or my—first time remixing my own music, hearing things without the drums I put on them originally. It was an enlightening time. I hear voices at the fortress.

CP: I think it’s rare for a producer to be so attentive to what the MCs are saying, let alone to look at what they’re saying as guideposts. The idea of a differentiation between “Small Pro” and “Small Professor” is interesting. Where does the Small Pro path ultimately lead? Into this larger Armand Hammer universe?

SP: I feel like when I started out making beats my natural inclination has been to make things as busy as possible. Small Pro is like, What if I take away instead of adding? Or, How can I still have a million things going on in the track but it sounds bare or like, not done? “My girl say this beat sound unfinished, / I said, ‘Yeah, that’s where my voice go.’”

SP: (Not sure when I passed out. I knew the crash was inevitable.)

[December 24, 2023 | 6:47 PM]

SP: To your point about it leading to the AH-verse, that may be part of it too. They’ve both inspired me as rappers but also their production decisions and choices—ELUCID quite literally, as his production has always confounded me, but woods too. Two producers who have had just as much an influence on me as anybody I worshiped when first starting out are August Fanon and Messiah Musik—modern legends. Fanon can make beats for literally anyone. But Messiah’s natural style is one that both Hammers can sound great on from the get-go, whereas I have to consciously get myself into that mode. They also both sometimes do odd and potentially challenging things regarding time in their beats, as I do, but in their own way.

CP: Do I remember seeing you mention somewhere that you still use Fruity Loops and Cool Edit?

SP: Yup. I wanna say since 2008. Well, technically since 2003. But I’ve been using the same versions of those two programs for a minute now. Still using Windows XP, too. It’s comforting to me. And ridiculous. Like Rasheed Wallace faithfully wearing Air Force 1s his whole playing career.

CP: I love that. Some real “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” ethos. Any rules for yourself when it comes to sampling? Strictly vinyl or are you irreligious when it comes to source format?

SP: 98% of my beats are made from mp3s. The remaining fraction is YouTube or some other source. Haven’t used vinyl for sampling purposes in many years but ironically try to make my beats sound like vinyl. As far as rules, everything I thought was law were things I later learned the musicians I look(ed) up to sneered at.

CP: Ain’t that the truth. Very little is sacred when it comes to process, I find. That’s a lot of ego. What efforts do you make to have the beats “sound” like vinyl?

SP: On “Dettol” is my go-to record crackle sample. That’s also in 98% of my beats, and something I specifically remember was like, corny or something, but—ah, here it is: Slum Village reference #3 to fulfill the rule—on “Hold Tight” Dilla uses a needle pop as a snare bolster as well as the accompanying static. It’s there for added depth and texture but also can act as a counter-rhythm to your percussion. Reality features an inherent level of static in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation around us at all times. Art imitates life.

[December 25th, 2023 | 11:41 AM]

CP: “No Christmas this Christmas…”

CP: I always like to think of the story—apocryphal or not—of Evil Dee using bacon grease hissing on the stove for extra crackle.

SP: The turntable hum is freakable too. Makes for a great bass sound but also something you can feel.

CP: Do you ever have acid trips accidentally interfere with other obligations? I imagine you’re always planning for a blocked out number of hours. But best laid plans…

SP: There’s a recovery period the next day, so that can be interesting to navigate. But yeah, I usually am in my room avoiding external interactions on whatever kind of trip it is. In my experience with acid, you gain more control over your “self,” and shrooms is the opposite, where your sense of self and awareness is reduced. Go home, brain—you’re drunk.

CP: The loss of control is something I just can’t handle. Have you ever found yourself in a situation on shrooms where you emerge later, like, “Damn, that was a bad look”?

SP: Yeah. My first time taking an 8th to the face (I ate it on a burger) after getting to and past the point of looking in a mirror and not recognizing my face for a sec. I later came upstairs and my BM had made some, like, lasagna? And it was so good that I’m just there demolishing it over the stove—like I was Garfield. Her friend walked in the kitchen at that moment and I should have been mortified, but in that moment there was only delicious lasagna.

CP: Real Gs move in silence like lasagna…

CP: Listening to Terror Management on Xmas morning. Is “Marlow” your beat/song with the most synchronicity between you and the rapper?

SP: It’s up there. That album is interesting to me because of the repeating motif of having two beats from different producers for one song—always thought that was cool. The intro on that beat had the spoken part added after the fact, so it did really feel like some good ole fashioned teamwork.

CP: And specifically the serendipity of you naming the beat for your late father, correct? I imagine an artist won’t typically name their song after the name of the beat. Was there a reason you named that beat, out of so many, after your father?

SP: Originally it was a play off of the artist’s name I sampled (a lot of my song titles are born this way), but I can also say it makes me think of my father’s dark side. He was one of the happiest, generally cheerful people I’ve ever known, but I’ve seen him go into green belt mode when pushed too far—only a few times, but it was like, Oh snap.

woods closed his set with “Marlow” at a Philly show last year shortly after my pops passed, and it’s one of the nicest gestures anyone has done for me. I was at the bar crying like a newborn fucking baby, god.

billy woods: That was a special moment for me, too. I really love that song. Pro and I have not worked that much together, but a lot of what we have done is really dope. He has produced a handful of Armand Hammer songs but they all hit, in my opinion. But [“Marlow”] is a song I really love and has come in and out of my setlist, but always makes it back in. The fact that it happened at that moment, and that it had that extra meaning for him was an honor for me.

SP: That album [Terror Management] as a whole has always intrigued me because of the repeating motif of two producers each having a beat on one track (this happens on some Armand Hammer albums too, now that I think about it, but it’s a different effect when it’s two MCs on each beat instead of one).

CP: Lots of doubles—the name, the sides of your father, “Small Pro” versus “Small Professor,” two beats, etc. Double-consciousness, perhaps. Not necessarily in a Du Bois sense; more so in the sense of realities.

SP: I’m all about man’s rugged duality.

CP: Did you and your father connect over music?

SP: Oh, absolutely. Our music rooms were down the hall from one another when I got started in college, and over the years he would start wandering in to hear what I was working on. Eventually, as he started transitioning into working in DAWs, he would ask for advice with things he knew I would be able to help with. He loved showing me whatever he was working on, and I knew he valued my opinion as one of the people responsible for a lot of my music edumacation in the first place.

[December 26, 2023 | 12:26 AM]

CP: Would you reciprocate and show him what you were working on? Did he look upon hip-hop favorably?

SP: He was from probably the last generation that didn’t grow up with hip-hop, and by and large it was probably offensive to him on two fronts: as a pretty religious dude the language and subject matter was too much, and musically all he heard were the loops, repetition, and sounds he loved and recognized being used all over again in an inferior, simple way. (I found a lot of the samples from Mobb Deep’s second album amongst his tape collection.) But over the years, as he saw how seriously I took it—as well as being impressed as a person who played 7-8 instruments by what I was able to do with two computer programs and mp3s—he was able to appreciate it as an artform (at least, the production side) even if it wasn’t quite his thing.

He’s also half the reason I’ve always been enamored with non-common time signatures, a key feature in a lot of the music he dug—that Weather Report, Yellowjackets, Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, late ’70s, early ’80s chamber. My mother was more into “traditional” jazz and classical. They shared gospel personally—and professionally—as working church musicians. On my first album, there’s a 5/4 beat that I remember excitedly showing him because it took me forever to get the chops lined up in an un-choppy fashion, and there’s a switch on there between drum pattern grooves much like what you would find on a jazz fusion-type song. I felt like if I could impress him, I must be doing something right. The last time we hung out before the cancer did him in, he was showing me how far he had gotten learning how to play drums, and I got on the sticks and tried to replay the patterns on some of my beats (emphasis on tried). The “trouble don’t last” jawn, in particular, to which he responded by telling me I was already a drummer. Memories live.

The times I saw his email pop up in my Bandcamp purchase notifications, I figured it was just a proud dad supporting his firstborn…nah, he was actually listening. His favorite project was the album I did along with my group Them That Do, which was my version of Madlib’s Shades of Blue on the beat tip. Besides digging the actual sound (updated jazz rap), I think he was most taken by the fact that he couldn’t quite tell what was sampled from where and that I had made all these sound from sometimes vastly different records seem like they were supposed to be together, and the beats made sense from the perspective of a person who understood music theory.

CP: “I said, Well Daddy, don’t you know that things go in cycles.” Beautiful that you guys got to share those moments.

SP: (I even said the part about two beats on Terror Management twice.)

SP: My brother (the actual drummer of the family) just sent me “Spain” by Chick Corea, one of our dad’s favorites. Speaking of my brother—who I credit with teaching me how to program drums and how to count bars and all that—one time we were on our way to church with my dad, and Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” was on. Pops started to try to explain the lyrics, what a “black cow” was, why they were very high…all that.

So a few years back I was proud to send [my father] “Gas Drawls” from Operation Doomsday because this story has always cracked me up, but also that’s a great-ass sample chop (and one that he appreciated, as opposed to the time my broski and I were buggin’ out over the beat for Jay-Z’s “Kingdom Come” and he was like, Is nobody doing anything original anymore?).

[December 28, 2023 | 12:56 AM]

CP: You should’ve sent him Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz after “Gas Drawls” and been like, “See.” As a drummer, does your brother fall more in line with your musical tastes or your father’s?

SP: I’d definitely say my brother has a much more diverse and varied musical vocabulary/understanding/tastes than I. We both grew up hearing, and then eventually listening, to rap. Twenty-three to twenty-four years ago when the neo-soul era was beginning, we were smack-dab in the middle of it, in the literal eye of the storm. Things Fall Apart, Like Water For Chocolate, Black on Both Sides, Reflection Eternal were just coming out. Musiq Soulchild was on the radio. Voodoo (which I didn’t get into until much later when I listened to it riding through Zanesville, Ohio countryside in 2007 [it’s still “Brown Sugar” over everything, though]) was everywhere. But there was also his actual school music education from primary to college, as well as listening to people from all instinctive travels and paths of rhythm, so he knows it all—or because he’d be like, “Shiiii, no I don’t!—a bit about a bit.”

I keep saying “my brother” when I have two. My younger bro is the drummer but my older brother’s tape collection was everything in high school (actually, even before that I was stealing his It Was Written tape when I was in seventh grade to play on the way to school). Being eleven years older, he was in high school when the great 90s east coast revolution was happening, and his Nike shoebox archives reflected the sounds of the time. As far as his tastes go, if DMX was still with us and dropped an album today, he’d get it without a second thought.

[December 28, 2023 | 11:10 PM]

CP: Sorry to trail off. Got a bit busy on my side. Would you be down to hit me with a handful of your most interesting beat names at the moment?

CP: This is art.

SP: The “Will Smith as…” series is new. They all slap.

[Small Professor posts a since-deleted message on X quoting Werner Herzog talking about stealing a 35mm camera from a Munich film school. The quote: “I don’t consider it theft. It was just a necessity. I had some sort of natural right to this tool. If you need air to breathe, and you are locked in a room, you have to take a chisel and hammer and break down a wall. It is your absolute right.”]

CP: I love this. “A natural right” to make something. Like a compulsion within. (I also love Herzog, so I appreciate the anecdote.) Do you remember where you first acquired that cracked Fruity Loops (and maybe Cool Edit, too)? If I think back, I probably had a friend hand me a disk, a CD-RW, back in like 1999 or something. God knows what sketchy site he downloaded them from.

SP: In college when I first started doing beats, I torrented everything—movies, programs, especially music—with nary a second thought. It’s a good way to give your computer a bad cold, which I did on several occasions. And I too appreciate Herzog because I love no myth more than my own as well.

CP: Have you got any myths on par with rescuing celebrities from wrecked cars or nonchalantly brushing off bullets to your abdomen?

SP: No, but I can say I did albums with both Sean Price and MC Paul Barman.

CP: Indisputable. I think this is an appropriate spot to (un)officially close this. Anything else you want to talk about?

SP: Gotta give a shout-out to the Jungle Brothers for making Crazy Wisdom Masters in 1991. PremRock told me legend was that they made it on shrooms and when I listened to it on acid I was like, Oh, yeah, y’all were high as fuck when this was made. I could tell not only because the music itself is bugged out but even the pace of the record is accelerated. They had some songs on there that were a minute-and-thirty-seconds but so much was going on , sometimes different things in either stereo channel that it gives off the effect of being on a trip and you’re noticing—for what feels like the first time again—that everything is happening everywhere at once.

Listen to Crazy Wisdom Masters when you get a chance. It’s a personal classic that I’ve listened to at least fourteen times this month. Warner Brothers did them dirty (this was their M.O. apparently—this was the same time period they were beefing with Prince) by delaying the entire record two years and having them clean up the tracks, and disrupting the carefully curated listening experience by taking tracks away and rearranging the entire thing. J Beez wit the Remedy, the resulting hodgepodge, would drop on my birthday in 1993, and when I first heard it, I was like, Hmm, something’s awry here, and that’s how I found out about Crazy Wisdom Masters.

CP: I think I downloaded it or thought about downloading it recently when people started talking about it again. Is there a “definitive” version to look for? I know Bill Laswell had uploaded a version to his Bandcamp page a while back.

SP: That’s a good question. The version I found that concludes with “For the Headz At Company Z” is the album as the god(s) intended.

Just as Small Pro is distinguished from “Small Professor”, “Crazy Wisdom Masters” is a distinct personality from “Jungle Brothers.” Small Pro is a definitive, lost Laswell version—a ra ra kid who catches wreck with randomness. He doesn’t channel, but grooves, as the most psychoactive Afrika Baby Bam and Mike G doppelgänger. We end up doubled-over; “dope-sick,” if you will. You sleep on it, then you wake up in the morning and dwells on it, as Small Pro casts his spells on it. (It’s as Simple As That.) SP’s Comin’ Through, and when he does, multiple realities accelerate as he explores radical possibilities. He’s chewing on the chemicals and raising up the levels on the decibels. We—his audience of lab assistants, his dilated pupils [and peoples]—“experience the ultimate, the infinite.”

Images:

Most images are from the Vol. 1, No. 10 October issue of the San Francisco Oracle or unknown issues of the Chicago Seed | Small Professor “Sith Lord” photo courtesy of Matthew Shaver for WXPN | The Grateful Dead tapers section photo, Unknown | Screenshots by Small Professor | Apache tape photo by Caltrops Press | Gilbert Shelton, “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” East Village Other (detail) | “Deadhead” poem by Joseph Rathgeber

#small professor #backwoodz studioz #underground hip hop #elucid #billy woods #zines #armand hammer #wrecking crew #zilla rocca #premrock #curly castro #acid trip

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ripeteeth · 10 months

Note

for the book asks--15 please! and also 20 if you don't mind a double ask <3

15: recommend and review a book.

Okay, so you KNOW what book you're gonna get for this lmao.

TO EVERYONE OUT THERE, PLEASE READ FRANKENSTEIN BY MARY SHELLEY.

I swear, that book UNHINGED me. I will never be the same. God, fuck, I can't believe I lost my 48-tweet love song to Frankenstein and why everyone should read it, but I cannot believe that at all of 19 years old, she could pack so much pathos and humanity in only 250 pages. It's everything. It's a spoiled terrified young twink brat only just realizing what he has brought into this world, that this squirming, naked, needy thing is his alone. His responsibility. And he flees into the night, a terrified new mother, desperate to pretend it never happened. I cannot ever stop thinking about the fact that she wrote this at 19 years old, all of about 18 months after losing her firstborn infant, who died during the night while Mary slept. How much of herself did Mary see in Victor? In the Creature? I lose my mind at the way Victor and the Creature are seen in popular culture, as this mad old scientist and his lumbering dumb awkward creation, when in reality Victor is all of about 22 at MOST when reanimates the Creature, all up there in his weird creepy attic apartment lab. He's a college dropout. An obsessive mess. And he abandons his child in his son's moment of need.

And the Creature! He's so passionate and eloquent, haunting and wounded. This should be the man who dogs our steps and keeps us up at night. This preternaturally strong man, who is largely impervious to cold and is wicked fast, who had each of his body parts chosen for their special beauty by Victor, but there is something about him, a living corpse with crepey skin and watery eyes, lips as dark as a dead man's, that terrifies everyone he comes in contact with.

And this is the thing!!!! He is not a monster. Look at him, turned out, born into that accursed attic with nothing. He could not yet see. He did not know language or how to defend himself, feed himself, warm himself, care for himself. He was left to die. But he stumbled along, covering himself with a coat he stole from the attic as he fled, naked and cold, and learned to start a fire, to feed himself on berries and plants, he taught himself to speak, read, and write simply by observing - and he observed humans from afar and yearned only to be loved and accepted. To be one of them.

It's such a fundamental, heartbreaking story. It shatters me. It compels me. I can't ever get them out of my head. Two men who damned each other, Victor by denying his creation the very real care and comfort and humanity that he owed to someone he brought into the world, and the Creature who sought to reduce Victor to that same state by killing everyone he loved, so that Victor would be like him, isolated and miserable. Alone.

And yet, even in the end, they're entwined. Victor's death ends the purpose of the Creature's life and he mourns his father-creator, even after all of it. It's such a complicated story of parent-child relationships, of the exploration of new boundary-pushing science, of pseudo-incestuous themes and tones between two men who have knotted themselves up so well into such a perfect tangle, that they can never be picked apart.

20. what are things you look for in a book?

Hmm. Good question.

I like to be fascinated. I love beautiful prose, but I'm particular about it and am not generally fond of it being too precious or purple. I love things with a bit of monstrosity that get into the gross and horrible details of life, like J.G. Ballard's Crash and John Gardner's Grendel, two absolute favorites. I love books that fuck with narrative structure and keep me guessing, like Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch. I love a certain sense of interiority and confessional voice, like Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I love things that make my skin crawl but have a certain compelling beauty, like Patrick Süskind's Perfume: Story of a Murderer. I love a sense of awe and hope and hushed connection, the way Susanna Clarke's Piranesi left me.

#book asks #yo let me tell you about frankenstein i promise it will be real quick #tbh if they'd just fucked that would have saved both their asses #well not victor's ass because you know he picked a huge dick for the creature #rip victor frankenstein's ass you've got a big storm coming

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zutraeumen · 10 months

Text

Hawthorne Island

Adele watched as the man slowly, painfully descended the staircase, his pearly white dress shirt stained with spots of crimson red. The tie dangled under his head like a noose without the black lounge jacket, his movements sluggish, so unlike him, when he lowered himself onto the steps, breath short and arms shaking from the efforts.

She had known John Wick for a long, long time. Longer than he probably remembered from their childhood in Padhorje in 1974.

But never had she seen him this done with life.

Perhaps back when Helen died, but then again, there was still something that kept the man above the water.

"When Helen died, I lost everything. Until that dog arrived on my doorstep. A final gift from my wife. In that moment, I received some semblance of hope. An opportunity to grieve unalone."

He had once confessed to her in a moment of vulnerability - rare as they had been. It was at that moment she knew he didn't see her as a threat, and that had been enough for her.

Trust among hitmen wasn't easy to come by, loyal friends were an unheard commodity, but she had hoped that he would come to see her that way one day.

There was much Jardani wasn't aware of, and she made sure to keep it that way even when they'd finally breached the mistrust. The last thing Adele wanted for him was to feel indebted to her, John had already been in enough of a pinch owing a blood marker to Santino D'Antonio.

If there was one thing Adele most regretted about her involvement with John Wick, it was that she couldn't prevent him from seeking help from that treacherous snake D'Antonio. His spineless treatment of John after he had paid his debt forced her out of the large shadow he had cast. With a $7,000,000 bounty on his head, even if he was the man you would send to kill the boogeyman, he needed help.

After being branded Excommunicado, he told her to leave his side, he wouldn't doom another to treason.

"Krovavaya Meri sleduyet za Baboy Yagoy v izgnaniye."

She had told him in Russian, she could still remember the way his eyes grew large as dinner plates. It might have been the first she had completely taken him by surprise. Nevertheless, being the man that he was, that is, a man of action and few words, he took it exactly as she said it and delved no further. Accepting her help.

They ran. They fought. They bled. They killed.

Adele Cole and John Wick.

Bloody Mary and Baba Yaga.

Two of the most renowned assassins in the field - excommunicado.

A grand tale in the making...

But like any tale, even this was nearing its end. And so it seemed like his journey would come to a close in Sacré-Coeur.

A church of all places!

If there was such a thing as a God, she imagined he would have a good laugh about it.

Adele would have had one, if her heart wasn't so occupied with hurting for her friend. Tears had evaded her for a long time but now they returned with vengeance as they trickled down her dirtied cheeks, already mourning what was to come.

Exhaustion gripped him greatly and it showed in the way he didn't even realize that Adele was making her way towards him. John showed no recognition of her presence even when she sat down right next to him and it sent another pang through her heart.

Adele did not speak to him, even when her mouth forcefully jugged down the words that tried to escape her.

Adele did nothing but sit in utter silence, waiting for him to sort himself out. She was already feeling as if she was intruding into his personal space and moment, thereof. But she was selfish too, and despite knowing better, still desired to be a part of it.

Out of the corner of her trained eye, she watched him lift his head up in the direction of the rising sun, and he looked mesmerized. But Adele only ever had her gaze set on him because missing the final moments of his life seemed unacceptable to her.

She would not have him die alone after all they had been through.

"Helen..." she heard him whisper softly, and a tearful smile etched its way onto her empathetic visage. Her humanity, at last, peaking through.

No matter how many cruelties he had enacted, no matter how many lives he had taken - it was all for his wife. To hold her memory intact. John Wick had been clinging to life through killing, but in the end, he learned how to live by dying.

Killing remained killing, and violence remained violence, no matter how justified, but for the first time in years, John had done something on his own terms. He chose this end on his own. He chose how he wished to be remembered, memorialised by his loved ones, friends, and allies.

A man of honour, of devotion, of love - a loving husband.

"Do you think she will be there?"

The last thing Adele expected of him was to steer his dark orbs to meet hers, eyes drooping in the wake of blood loss as his posture waned and he decided to rest his head on her shoulder, leaning into her as if she were the only thing keeping him from collapsing.

And indeed she was.

Unblinking in spite of the curtain of greasy, black hair, the woman held his gaze and replied gently, "She will."

There were no lies in her words, Adele had never hoped for something so much than seeing him happy and fulfilled, even if it was in a place she couldn't follow. They deserved to be together.

He closed his eyes then, breathing growing shallow, and Adele expected no more of him, resolved to one last selfish act; she slowly let a kiss land on his brow - her goodbye to a brother in arms.

"Thank you, Adele, for everything."

Thank you, Jardani, you have saved me in ways you would never know.

The ever-present tension on his face disappeared as he completely slumped over her sitting person, lax as a dying body could be while Adele carefully manoeuvred him to span across her lap for his final rest.

Her tears had dried by then, but threatened their return as she watched over him in relative silence. The usually sharp lines of his face softened, overtaken by such peacefulness she would have wanted to see more often on him.

She had lost a good friend that day, and the world had lost a good man.

And the Bloody Mary disappeared with him.

A nautical bell. Foghorns. Waves lapped the shore. Seagulls.

The rotund honk of the small boat jolted her back to the present, Adele should know better than to succumb to stray thoughts but she had been in this business long enough to rely on her instincts alone.

The soft wind tickled the untamed bangs of wavy black hair on either side of her face before she put one side behind her ear, only for it to stubbornly fall back. Grunting, Adele would have to visit a barber to thin it out as it began to obscure her vision too much for her taste.

A young couple stood alone on a dock. They were dressed elegantly for a big night out. The young woman stared off, a little bored. Her partner drummed his hand against his leg. His eyes darted around, a little panicked.

"Babe, please don't smoke it will kill your palate," Adele overheard the young man say to his girlfriend, she spied a hint of berating in his voice, but it was small. The girl in question was a pretty thing; slim figure, big eyes, delicate facial features...

"Then my palate will die happy."

A spitfire that one was. She could recognize another woman with balls. It didn't take her too long to realize by listening that those two weren't a common couple. They barely knew each other to have a serious relationship. Adele figured she must be a high-end escort for the brunette man. She had seen many of her sorts in more luxurious establishments than the docks.

A foghorn blew close by, startling the three of them. A small but gorgeously appointed boat pulled into the harbour.

Leaning back against the stone pillar a fair distance from the boarding platform, she watched as a few other guests began to file into the small boat. She couldn't recognize them by face but - was that Aurelio over there?!

Sure enough, the man looked down to the boot like Aurelio, John's acquaintance. Adele only met the man twice, they weren't close but she had a good memory of all the people she met. It took only a second glance to realize that this man wasn't Aurelio at all. Perhaps an estranged twin? It didn't matter.

The other guests on the other hand...

There was that air of arrogance about them as they strutted about. They intently took up too much space, more than they needed. This misconception of magnified importance in comparison to the other 8 billion people on the planet.

The elite. Egocentric, narcissistic...

They made Margot and Tyler stand out like a sore thumb, but at least through his running mouth, she got a vague sense of who she was dealing with. After counting the total amount of eleven guests, her employer being among them, there seemed no one else left to board the ship other than her, so it was time to join them on the deck.

Ravel's 'Une barque sur l'océan' played dreamily in the distance.

The staff greeted them with impeccable attentiveness and professionalism the guests met with shallow smiles to uphold etiquette, dismissing the quality of the service because of their preconceived notion that they were worthy of such. They all shined with smugness and vaunted their privilege of having been personally invited by the ingenious Chef Slowik to come to dine on his island - it excited them, and must have made them feel even more special than they in reality were.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please make yourselves comfortable for our 30-minute journey to Hawthorn."

There wasn't much unoccupied space left for Adele to roam without drawing attention, so she decided to keep her movement abroad the ship slow, to get as much information about the guests and their motives as possible. However, no matter how stealthily she moved it seemed she could not escape the dutiful butlers ready to serve their customers.

They offered her a glass of wine, appearing even redder against the rays of sunshine. The butler had given her a detailed, crisp explanation of the wine and its origin that Adele had already forgotten half of.

She opted to inspect it, there appeared to be no fault in colour and there was nothing she could sniff out. But the small pink flowers gave her pause. For anyone unsuspecting, this could be mistaken as a common flower meant for aesthetic purposes but to assassins, this was one of the most uncommon poisons known.

Nerium oleander.

A small meal was served to get their mouths prepared for the evening, oyster with lemon caviar.

Not something she would consider eating, so, as the waiter turned corners she dumped it into the sea - Sorry, not sorry.

At this point, Adele would take no chances because as she knew all too well, one could never be sure with unidentifiable substances like Thallium or Polonium-210. Arsenic had also been quite popular for some time until it wasn't. The dish had seemed safe to consume but with the wine poisoned, the message was sent.

Someone didn't want her to make it into the evening.

The beat in her heart increased slightly at the prospect but that was just her body tuning in for yet another dangerous mission. There was more to it than met the eye, and instead of feeling angry, Adele felt it was a somewhat ironic turn of events.

"The world can't just let us retire, isn't that right John?"

The seagulls sang their songs as the boat rode the calm waves well into the evening. The weather was beautiful, and the sun's rays offered plentiful warmth, too much to handle in her black turtleneck, leaving her no choice but to either take off the lounge coat or vacate to a more shadowy spot.

Choosing the latter, the assassin moved away to see what the other guests were up to before they reached the island.

The front of the house lined the dock, smiling, poised. The assassin followed the others out, disembarking onto trusty land. It was very ceremonial. Adele was a bit unnerved by all the pomp.

The ride was short, but the guests were as lively as ever as they skipped in pairs of two to maître d' that awaited them at the shore, asking about their reservations and then welcoming them to Hawthorne Island until it was Tyler's and Margot's turn.

"Welcome to Hawthorne, Mister Ledford and... Miss Westervelt?"

There was a beat of silence where the lady butler looked puzzled. Margot, equally puzzled, looked at Tyler who began sputtering, "Umm... sorry... yeah, no... that was, uh... it's not Miss Westerv... she had a change of plans so this Miss..."

"I am Margot, hi, nice to meet you."

Margot made a move to lock their arms at his elbow, but he continued not to take her hint and reciprocate. Really convincing act. He couldn't even recall the surname of his plus-one, how utterly embarrassing. And it showed on his face as he offered a small, insecure smile towards the maître d' whose eyes flickered conspicuously between them.

Adele could see the cogs in her head turning as if the last-second replacement posed an unexpected complication; a ripple in the still water.

With a guarded smile, the small lady butler turned her sharp eyes towards the redhead, "Margot, welcome..." she nodded acknowledging, followed by a cold smile offered more out of pleasantries than anything, "... we endeavour to make your evening as pleasant as possible. Right this way."

Adele scampered back to the end of the line, only now realizing that the boat wouldn't linger for their return. She wondered if she was the only one who noticed this. It wasn't a challenge to secretly manoeuvre through the wealthy pairs at all. Many of them couldn't hold a flicker of attention on anything else than themselves and such lack of awareness suited her just fine.

All the leftover pairs went by smoothly until it was her turn at the end, the only one without a plus-one and she was quite unsure what to expect of the exchange.

"Miss Cole?" Adele was possibly a head taller than the diminutive Asian maître d' but the woman stared her down none the same.

"Yes, Ma'am."

A flicker flashed, could have been a trick of light, through the lady butler's dark eyes. There wasn't much in her expression that would give away something the assassin could pick up on. Perfectly neutral; and professional. Nothing threatening... for now.

"Right this way, please," The woman guided her back to the small flock of their group before beginning to guide them through the island's premises, which Adele had studied meticulously beforehand.

Weapon and armour were important, yes, but careful planning and information were invaluable.

She and Wick were of one mind in this regard.

Anna Liebbrandt and her husband excused themselves but not before her client exchanged a few glances with Adele - the assassin understood. The older couple had been frequenting the establishment the most out of anyone present, so it would be silly for them to accompany the rest for a tour.

The lady butler going by the name Elsa guided them first shoreside, "Hawthorne Island comprises 12 acres of forest and pastures. We have the bounty of the sea surrounding us. Out there right now, we are harvesting scallops. You will eat them tonight."

She pointed at the lone fisherman throwing the net into the sea. The guys beside her hollered at him with handwaves, rowdy and slightly tipsy, and he answered back. Adele mentally noted that his motorboat may come useful if she needed a way to escape.

They trotted along the set pathways to the different plants and gardens, which were seamlessly incorporated into nature. There were no modern installations, everything seemed to point out that most preparations were done manually. The maître d' kept talking even when the guests showed no real interest in it, they chattered away about their affairs in clamorous voices.

That was until they reached a singular smokehouse of Nordic fashion when the finance trio got suddenly interested, "We use the meat of dairy cows only, which we age to an astonishing 152 days to relax the protein strand."

"So," Dave began, all smiles and gestures, "what happens if you serve it on the 153rd day? All hell breaks loose or...?"

What a stupid question, anyone who had ever learnt cooking would be able to answer it, but I guess to those three, it seemed all the better joke.

"Well, I suppose the bacteria would introduce itself to the consumer's bloodstream and spread into their spinal membranes after which point he or she would become incapacitated and shortly thereafter expire."

The assassin nudged her head to the side thinking it was quite an elaborate way of saying they would die.

"So yes, all hell would break loose."

The boys shared a nervous laugh about it while Madam Elsa turned to address the rest with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes, "Good thing we're pros, yes? Come --"

The subtle dig at them went woefully unnoticed but Adele had to hold in a scoff because the maître d' clicked heels and resumed their little tour. Next on was something that sent off the first red flags in her brain.

Madam Elsa led them into another building, one fairly bigger than the smokehouse.

Entering what looked exactly like military barracks, complete with bunk beds. Tiny shower spigots, like at a YMCA, and a row of toilets with no walls or doors, like at a prison. At the centre, the lady butler stopped to speak, "This is where we live."

"You actually live here? All of you?"

"All of us. Except Chef."

Esprit de corps. Lovely.

Julian Bloom's partner, Ted, commented with a swipe of his glasses, "Wow, it's free decor, no?"

"No, Mister Feldman, it's very much more than that. Here, we are family. Each day starts at six, with five hours of prep work. We harvest, we ferment, we slaughter, we marinate, we liquefy, we spherify, we gel."

Tyler smiled, inspired, everyone else, was less sure.

Margot murmured something that had the maître d' correcting her forcefully, and some even jumped at her raised tone. Everybody went really quiet and Elsa used that to pick up where she left off, "Dinner is typically four hours and twenty-five minutes."

That long?

"Each day ends at well past two in the morning. So yes, it's best that we all live here."

A different tech bro, the one named Soren, who decided to lounge on one of the beds offhandedly asked if they wouldn't get burned out from such ridiculous working hours but the lady butler merely looked at him, disgusted, but composed herself in time, "Burned out?"

"Yeah, sorry, sorry, like tired of doing the same thing?" Soren rephrased it, meekly.

"Chef holds himself to the highest standard and so do we. We never burn anything unless by design. Now. Who's hungry?"

It might have been subtle but Adele spied it with her trained eye. The venom leaked through the crease of her right eye, mask cracking every so slightly. There was the viper Adele suspected. The assassin fortified her guard subconsciously, looking at this bunker and its implications made her feel uneasy, her gut agreed with her.

They encountered no other soul on their way to the restaurant, but for those with attentive eyes, the chef's house could be discerned among the trees of the nearby forest. Tyler even asked if they could visit it, which the Madam swiftly turned down. If the staff had no access to the boss' lodging, then neither could the guests.

Two guards awaited them at the entrance, one opted to open the massive, sliding door with the press of a button while the other accompanied Madam Elsa and led them further in. The room was minimalist and faux rustic. A touch sad even. A museum mood where one doesn't necessarily 'enjoy' eating.

Her sharp eyes flitted across the large room, analysing: six guards (seemingly unarmed), two butlers with pitchers, Madam Elsa and a Sommelier, fourteen sous-chefs, two hallways, one exit, and large windows (bulletproof?).

The kitchen was open, visible from the dining area, and the bustling staff was hard at work. With Chef Julian Slowik nowhere to be seen.

It hosted reasonably big, round tables for two for each couple with small reservation cards on them. Anna and her husband Richard were already seated, but the man went somewhat pale out of nowhere and then switched seats with her client - hmm, strange.

Margot stayed back with her, not knowing where to sit before the maître d' showed her her seat next to Tyler.

"Feel free to observe the cooks as they innovate but please DO NOT photograph our dishes. Chef strongly feels that the beauty in his creation lies in their ephemeral nature."

Then the lady butler came back for Adele and with a guiding hand at the small of her back, led her to a smaller table abutting a wall where an older lady already presided. Adele greeted her politely before taking her seat, but got no sort of response back.

The woman across her already nursed a glass of wine and looked as forlorn as any abandoned grandmother. Another guest? Adele sighed lowly, so no small talk then. At least she had the time to look around until the other guests settled.

At her left, there was a buzzing open kitchen with focused sous-chefs working on the dishes with rapt attention to detail. They didn't even look up once to assess their customers, not even when Tyler bothered one of the cooks with his questions, he was promptly sent back to his seat afterwards with a quiet Margot in tow.

You can take the jacket off, dear.

The Bloody Mary, for one, was utterly rubbish at cooking, and had no finer tastes or demands of her meals other than to be nourishing. Her motto: if it tasted better than from a trashcan, then it was already up to her standard. Props to growing up piss-poor.

Adele turned back to her table companion when the cheery Sommelier offered her another glass of wine, "More Lambrusco, madam?

The madam nodded silently.

Not poisoned this time.

To avoid suspicion, the assassin agreed with a grateful nod, a guarded expression in place. She might actually consider taking a sip, it looked expensive to waste, but found her mood thoroughly soured as the last contained a portion of a poisonous plant in it. Well, one could play with that glass in the meantime, giving the illusion of mindful savouring.

The other guests all the while, engaged in their own bouts of conversations. Not even showing a remote interest in the ongoing preparations of their soon-to-be meal. While the assassin might benefit from observing the masters at work by writing down a thing or two, she had to sadly fall in line with the other toffs.

Maybe she could ask them questions like who put FUCKING OLEANDER into her wine!

Adele was having enough of this and the evening barely even started!

If it wasn't for Tyler and his overexcited fussing that could be heard from miles away, she would have missed entirely the crucial appearance of Chef Slowik in the kitchen, being seated with her back to the dining room made it harder to observe what happened behind her back but made it remarkably easier to fall off the radar.

Bringing the glass to her lips without drinking, she observed how the man strode in. Brooding, intense. Utterly focused as he glided from station to station swiftly, tasting. Elsa approached the Chef and spoke to him softly, without the usual edges in her carefully manufactured face. Adele couldn't hear what was said, but Slowik looked in a certain direction.

For a second she thought he was looking at Tyler, but it was Margot instead. They locked eyes. The assassin spied recognition in his eyes - no, a sadness perhaps? A longing? The chef tersely broke eye contact and resumed his tasks. The cooks around him continued to work with an almost sinister focus.

That settled it, there was something going on backstage and both of them were definitely not meant to be there - especially Margot.

It was not her first time arriving somewhere technically uninvited (definitely the last time though), she couldn't keep track of how many times she crashed into the Continental over the course of her career, covered in blood and wounds. The face of Charon behind the counter always managed to brighten up her mood in the end. He had been such a good friend.

Ugh, where was the appetizer? She was growing hungry and depressed. Deadly combo.

Ah, like being summoned by her thought, the servers marched, trays in hand with the first taste of the menu. Sitting up properly, the assassin waited for a plate to be put down in front of her only to find out the elder lady was not given one. That ruled her out as a customer.

"Here we have a compressed cucumber melon, milk snow, and charred lace. Enjoy."

What kind of bullshit is this?

#the menu #julian slowik #chef slowik #julian slowik x ofc #john wick #john wick chapter 4 #winston scott #ralph fiennes #margot mills #horror #john wick 4 #keanu reeves #eventual relationship #eventual comfort #eventual smut #enemies to lovers #romance

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blackandwhlteaesthetlc · 1 year

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A long weekend means more time for movies! Forgive me Florence, I just wasn’t in the right headspace for A Good Person. Maybe next weekend. ❤️‍🩹

I was, however, fully in the mood for some escapism and ultimate movie magic. And this weekend delivered!

youtube

I could watch Keanu beat the shit out of dozens of stunt performers for hours. Gimme, gimme, gimme! 🤩 What a ride, I absolutely love this franchise and hope it keeps going. I can’t believe I haven’t gotten sick of the formula yet. But then again that’s the power of Keanu Reeves. If you’re not too turned off by violence, take yourself to a dark theater, get your favorite snacks, and take in all the beautiful fight choreography and wonderful performances from the whole cast. I need Bill Skarsgård and Donnie Yen in everything.

And then we have Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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I love you forever, Chris Pine! Goddammit is that man charming, funny AND ridiculously good looking. I owed him one for not supporting the last film he released in theaters. To be fair, he didn’t do too much to support it either. 🤭 But I’m so happy he’s been promoting this one across the globe. Serving looks and charisma everywhere he goes. I just saw this one beat John Wick at the box office this weekend.

Fingers crossed this encourages the studio to green light a sequel. It has the potential to develop into a franchise too. This cast deserves it, their chemistry was fantastic. If you’re cool with the same level of action you’d get out of a Marvel or DC film, this one gave a similar vibes. Also, did I mention Chris Pine??

#john wick 4 #dungeons & dragons #oof and regé-jean page in dnd?#🥵🥵🥵#this weekend was about watching pretty men get knocked around #god bless the movie gods #captain fine #the immortal #keanu reeves #chris pine #Youtube

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silverynight · 2 years

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You. I have these KyoTan ideas, cause you indulge me! Okay, hear me out! Modern day!Assassin!Kyojuro, who is still very friendly, cause Kyojuro, ("Like, honestly? I'm sorry I'm doing this to you, I really am...I really need money that badly!"), who is hired to assassinate Tanjiro for some reason. Kyojuro dosen't understand as he trails this boy; he's so nice! Like, he saw the boy move a spider that crawled onto him into a bush, instead if squishing it!

Also, he works at a bakery! Like, what? What, did the anonymous client get turned down, (probably nicely), and he's one of those crazies that think anyone they flirts with owe them the time of day? Yeah, no. Kyojuro dosen't do that...also, he may have fallen for the boy, so...

(FYI, Kamado family is actually super, duper rich. They have a chain of bakery stores...but, they also still like running their original shop, so no-one knows this. Tanjiro is targeted, as he is the current owner of the bakery empire and refuses to sell to a certain Blue Spider Lily Corp. :3c )

I imagine Kyojuro being like John Wick in this one; he's the best assassin, everyone is afraid of him, but he has so much love in his heart to give and of course he decides to give it to Tanjirou.

And he really turns into a very scary man whenever someone hurts or tries to hurt his Tanjirou.

#demon slayer #asks #ask silverynight

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chapeleiralunadocemaldicion · 8 months

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These events take place before Jon Wick 4 It was difficult to say what to expect from him when he himself never spoke. I knew Wick before he even had that name, before he was the big bogeyman.

XX: Senorite, tengo noticias sobre John wick que creio que no vas te gustar mucho(Miss, I have news about Jon Wick, but I believe it won't like it)

Y/n: o que Elle fizestes desta vez castian? In English please

Castian: yes ma'am, he challenged the dome by keeping it inside the continental.

It's funny the way this was said to me, I was in Spain having some quiet time from the murders when I heard that the bogeyman had returned. But now why did he come back? According to the stories he retired to live a life with his wife...Helen, right? Y/n: prepare my things I'll see the old man

Castiano: yes ma'am Confused is all I can say about this future day, what he did is far beyond my power, in the end why am I here?

Y/n: hello wick - I say sitting in your house on the sofa, next to me is a glass and an open bottle of wine, in my lap my gun is cocked - you're old, and finished - I say look from top to bottom - beautiful dog, by the way.

Jon: what are you doing here? - oh, even though he's hurt he's still tough, was I that insignificant to you Wick?

Y/n: I was curious about the death of the continental - why am I here? -you're not one to break the rules Wick, much less to go back on his words-I smile at my last line, seeing him clenching his fist, from the corner of my eye I see his dog sitting next to the sofa.

Jon: did you come to collect something? - I notice your gaze on my necklace where I keep all the blood oaths I have with the assassins who owe me, ironically John is one of them - no, I didn't come to charge you for anything Wick, I just came to bring you a document from the top. I get up, taking my bag that was just next to the sofa out of his sight, I take out a sealed black folder with the dome's mark printed on it.

Y/n: you're free, as long as you don't kill anymore and follow the rules of retirement, the leadership will forget what you did to Santino - I say handing him the folder - it was good to see you jardani - I walk past him hearing him opening the envelope . John: what did you do? - he asks when I'm leaving the room for the door.

Y/n: - I thought "I honored what little we had left" but I could never say that to him after what I did "I gave you the freedom I found with her" that sentence weighed on my heart" - I let you go, fly . I only hear silence, so I continue to walk to the door with a heavy heart, what little I know, my sacrifice was not in vain. I leave the house waiting for him to hug me or something, but I see pictures of her everywhere in the house and I see that there is no more space for me, I hope that one day he will forgive me when the truth comes out It's a snippet of what I'm working onstar_border

#john wick x reader #john wick x you #keanu reeves

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johnwickb1tsch · 6 days

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THE DEVILS' TRIANGLE

A Yandere Tex Johnson x Witness!Reader x John Wick (& now John Constantine) Imagine Part 8 by:

@treedaddymcpuffpuff @sweetwolfcupcake @johnwickb1tsch and @tammykelly (with honorary dream weavers / shit stirrers @lilspookymeh & @kurai-hono-blog 😘)

Warnings: So many dead doves! Do not eat! Unless you like dead doves, that is. You're in good company here. 😘 Violence, sexual content, blood, murder, kidnapping, possessive behavior, dubcon, yandere sh!t...it's all here! Please take care! 😘

ALL CHAPTERS

PART 9

Johnwickb1tsch:

Wick could have been an asshole about buying a brand new kitchen, sundries included–but instead he merely shrugs off Constantine's hostile question. "Seemed like the least I could do."

Constantine glares, but lets it go, begrudgingly sitting down to a delectable meal cooked by the man he knows, deep down, that you've never been able to forget.

With a sigh and a knowing smirk you settle back in your chair. Your eyes are drawn to the burn upon his chest. He will carry that mark for the rest of his life, even if the magic is lifted.

You think on what Papa Midnite said to Constantine. "Take some big feeling..."

It kind of floors you, to think of the energy it took for Constantine to conjure that working out of thin air.

For you.

However, it wasn’t so simple as that.

"Whacha thinking, baby girl?"

You just shake your head with a tired smile. "Nothing important."

"Hmm. You gonna make me guess? Alright. You're thinkin'...bout that time in Mexico it was just you an me and the stars, out by the pool in our birthday suits."

You snort–quite against your will, it turns into a giggle.

"No..."

"Uh huh. You’re missin' my wicked tongue up between your thighs. I know that look."

"Didn't you miss me, rattlesnake?" he asks, his deep voice all sultry and low just wrecking you to the bone.

“Yeah. I know what you mean,” you answer quietly. “But how did you think this would go? You’d knock on my door, and I’d just uproot my whole life for you again?”

“At least give me some credit. I coulda come in with guns blazin' but instead I brought flowers."

“You want credit?”

“Yeah. I’m practically a changed man. And I wouldn’t mind an apology from Wizard Boy either.”

"You've got to be kidding me." The pair on this man never ceases to amaze you.

"We were just having a little bit of friendly fisticuffs, but he fucked me up pretty good. That’s called unnecessary escalation.”

He would know.

“But–”

At last, at last, you are in a position where you don’t have to swallow his gaslighting. “No buts. You can behave yourself, Tex, or you can go. I mean it.”

Maybe drawn by the sound of your raised voice, Constantine chooses that moment to intervene, appearing at the foot of the couch with a magnificent frown.

“Well well, if it ain’t The Boy Who Lived.”

You lift an eyebrow, side-eyeing Tex. “You do know an awful lot about Harry Potter for a grown ass man your age.”

For possibly the first time ever Tex actually looks sheepish. “Had to read something while I was in the shit.”

“So what you want, Wizard Boy?” demands Tex, insouciantly refusing to let go of your hand, despite you tugging on it.

“I was going to check your chakras for malevolence, but I'm having second thoughts now.”

“Sounds illegal in five states.”

Constantine snorts. “You want me to double check Midnite's handiwork or not? If there's a trace of darkness left it could spread– and you'll be fucked all over again.”

“Not the way I like, I'm guessin’.”

You should encourage Tex to find someone else.

Your heart just doesn't agree.

“I'll…leave you two to it,” you say, reluctantly standing to pull away out of Tex's grip.

Only belatedly, after you've retreated to your room, do you realize that maybe Constantine interrupted your tête a tête with Tex for his sake, rather than yours.

***

Tex was another matter.

You really are a piece of work.

***

Not now.

“I believe we find ourselves at an impasse.”

“How you figure?” asks Tex, knocking back his drink and helping himself to another.

“Does being in love with the same woman ring a bell?”

The thought pulls something like a growl from deep in Constantine’s chest, but in the end he acknowledges, “Exactly.”

Tex smirks, leaning on his elbows. “Don’t be sore, Wizard Boy. Be grateful we broke her in for you.”

“I only listen to about half of what he says,” Wick admits with a smirk, a humorous glitter in his dark eyes.

Wick nods, grasping Constantine’s train of thought immediately. Tex, however, has to chew on it a little–maybe because he’d hoped, for once, to finally have this girl to himself.

“You’re saying you don’t mind sharin’,” finally says Tex with a shit-eating grin, leaning back in his chair.

***

“It’s ok,” you say softly, tracing the line of his square jaw. “I know.”

He frowns, almost like he wants to argue, but in the end he just shakes his head and pulls you to him.

You want to apologize for almost kissing John Wick right in fucking front of him–but that sticks in your throat too. You guess you’re both just a little raw tonight.

“You like that, baby?” he taunts, hooking his fingers in your panties to tug them down.

“You know I do,” you pant.

“Fuck.”

When his thumb finds your clit you think you might die from the overwhelming sensation of it. “No,” you beg, somehow smiling through your exasperation. “Please. Mercy.”

“Right initials,” he pants, pressing lips to your hair. “Wrong guy.”

Sweetwolfcupcake:

The first signs of dawn begin to show on the dark sky, timid but consistent in pushing back the darkness previously reigning over the sky when you open your eyes-- blinking lazily as you register your dry lips and slightly open mouth. You feel parched, but the arms wrapped around you feel like a slice of heaven by your side and you are too lazy, too sleepy. You try to ignore it but your throat feels like it would scream for water any minute.

Sighing, you gently remove Constantine's arms from your body, not an easy task though-- his arms are firm vines around you, holding you close with a distinct gentleness that you've seen so often in his eyes when they gaze at you.

After you are finally off the bed without waking up Constantine (you're surprised), you tip-toe out of the room and into the kitchen for a much needed glass of water.

It's quiet, you notice as you gulp down a glass of water. With the overpowering sleepy haze gone, you grow more conscious of the environment.

Such an hour is supposed to be quiet. But there is a severe lack of tranquillity in the quietness--- it's more of a deafening silence. And you do not have a good feeling about this. Emptying the glass, you put it silently aside and turn around to rush return to the safety of---

Your eyes widen as you blink away the reminder of sleepy haze from them at the sight of John Wick's looming form in the kitchen doorway.

lo spettro

Indeed, he is like a ghost who appears right when you least expect it to. Though at the moment, he looks more like a formidable predator-- or maybe it is you who feels threatened like a prey.

Whatever it is, it does not settle easily in your stomach. There's chaos, flipping and swirling in there. All are born out of jarringly conflicted emotions and thoughts you feel simultaneously.

You stand still, eyeing him warily. He isn't dressed in his classic three-piece. In fact, he is in simple trousers a white t-shirt, that bulges at all the right places. No, he isn't dressed to hunt, but he seems very much ready to with the way his eyes are set upon you. You know the stare all too well. The thought brings back memories that are now the source of your heartache and you stiffen again.

"Had a busy night with your plaything?"

Ah, of course...

"He's not a plaything." You snap without a second thought.

John smiles faintly, but there is no softness to it. Instead, it looks sharp and somehow feels bitter as he diminishes the distance between you both in two strides.

"Was he good enough? Better?" He invades your personal space as smoothly as he invades your dreams.

This time though, you are determined not to back down and bend to his will. You stand-- stiff and with your heart hammering-- but you are determined to not let it show.

"Our bedroom is none of your business."

Oh, you know the way his chocolate orbs darken. Your words have ruffled him. He presses closer and you know, you just know that he can feel your heartbeat, but there is nowhere else to go, and you are sandwiched between the counter and him.

"Yeah? That's a pity, thought I could show this boy how it's done."

You glare up at him.

The audacity.

If this is a game of riling you up, he was unfortunately winning. But being away from them and being with Constantine has evolved you in ways you are thankful for. You are not going to bend easily under his games anymore.

Your glare charges into a sardonic smile--

"Oh, don't bother. It is blissful when you don't feel like a disposable toy."

To a degree, even you are surprised at the venom in your voice. But the surprise is overshadowed by the sight of John Wick faltering. You admit, the sadness do not make you happy, but having gained power in the conversation does satisfy you.

"I am exhausted after a long so..."

With that, you slip away from him and walk back to the safety of your bedroom, there is a rush in your steps, and the moment you lock the door from inside, relief floods withing you.

A part of this whole encounter reminds you of your childhood ritual of switching off the lights before running upstairs to the safety of your room-- but as a child, it was just your active imagination, right now, your heart thunders the same way it would as a five-year-old, running from the 'ghosts'.

Constantine calls your name lazily from the bed, eyes half-open and hair dishevelled. There is a certain domesticity in the air and your heart unexpectedly flutters-- not an anxious, thrilled flutter, but one that confirms what you are afraid to admit.

You fear losing this. This sight of Constantine laying so unguarded, so vulnerable and open on the bed. You are afraid to not feel his arms wrapped around you again. You are afraid not to feel his lips on you another morning.

You are afraid to lose him.

You are afraid to be abandoned again.

In your fear, you find courage. The courage to finally acknowledge this fear of losing him, losing what you both share.

Silently, you make your way back to bed, slipping under the covers and back in his waiting arms.

You know Constantine can probably sense the shift in your energy, but he chooses silence. He puts your comfort before his curiosity, his doubts. That makes you snuggle closer to him, to his warmth.

Tammykelly:

Songs to get in ya feels:

Karma by Summer Walker

Stand still by Sabrina Claudio

You lay awake under the silk covers, with Constantine quietly breathing beside you in a deep peaceful slumber. You shift your focus to his pace of breath so you can match your own in hopes to fall into the calmness of the space bubble around you. The limbs of your body are heavy, and yet your mind is ever so awake, having drifted towards conscious awareness of bitterly sweetened memories, rather than much needed sleep. Your eyelids flutter shut, as a yet another frustrated sigh escapes your mouth. The silence of the late hours is mockingly embracing the racing thoughts in your mind and pumping heartbeat, uncomfortable heat continues to fill every particle under your skin, amplified by the feel of rushing bloodstream, as if no concept of rest exists in this moment. A small furry body curls itself closer, next to your side, and your hand slowly reaches to brush its fingers through Baby Killy’s soft fur, more purring gently filling your ears, as you give into what your subconscious can’t seem to stop replaying, guided by the whisper of the shadows.

- a flashback -

You feel a warm breeze rush past you, carrying the salty scent of the Mediterranean coast, disrupting the shattered shadows. A tiny glimpse of sunlight pervades through the thin crack between your eyelashes, your narrowed eyes taking in the sunny serenity of French Riviera that envelops you again in its natural flow and beauty, before you hear a stream of rapid gunshots that only alert a flock of birds, rising from your garden.

You watch a tall man’s broad back stiffen, as he reloads the gun. You lazily get up, not taking your eyes off his powerful muscles moving under the skin, as he takes the position again. You feel your chest contract, breath caught in your throat, as his whole body seems to have become one with the weapon at the highest alert, before all the motion subsides, and he fires more shots at the moving targets.

You’re not sure whether it’s the thumping of your heart, ringing in your ears, bringing rising heatwave to your body, or it’s the sun that collects the multitude of nervous specks across your subconscious, melting them through all the layers onto the surface, forming a deeper shade of blush on your cheeks. He looks majestic, engulfed by sunlight, a gun in his hand, akin to an innate extension of his hunter-like, perhaps, hereditary nature. Your gaze traces the sweat dripping down his skin, as a gentle sigh leaves your lips, making it hard for you to look back up.

You don’t try to make your presence known, the sound of your steps remaining almost entirely silent, for even your slightest movement echoes through his awareness. He turns around before you reach him, his long hair sticking out from under the bandana.

“Princessa”, - his deep voice greets you.

“John”, - you playfully reply, watching his eyes wash over your silhouette, while you take one more step.

“Skuchala po mne [missed me]?”, - his calloused palm makes contact with the exposed skin below your silk bralette, hiding under unbuttoned oversized linen dress shirt. His fingers snake around your waist, urging you to move closer, slightly dipping under the waistband of your linen shorts. A shiver across your skin doesn’t escape his attentive gaze, a smirk quirking the corners of his mouth up. You look into his eyes, as you feel his hand brush against your back gently, the same fingers that were just holding a weapon, now playing a dirty game against you.

“Vsegda [always]”, - you tease back, your irises catching the way John smiles when you stand on your tippy toes to kiss him, as he melts into your lips, meeting you half way. The scales of gentle and sweet is something you’re unable to control anymore, for the tender anxiety in your heart flutters away with the wings of passionate fire that is the reflection of him.

One of your hands finds its place at the back of his neck, pulling him into you, which he eagerly complies to, as if pouring all the adrenaline of the practice shooting onto your tongue. You gently trail your fingers down his spine, as you break away from his devilish lips, a sly smirk that is a mirror of his, appearing on your features when he lifts you up, walking to the tent, and puts you at the edge of a poolside bed that actually looks like it belongs in a bedroom.

You calmly stare into the abyss of his dark eyes, your chest filled with the scent of excitement and your own game that quickly escalates to something entirely else the longer you hold eye contact. A different kind of heat knocks on your heart, opening doors to a more subliminal feeling. The type of warmth produced not by the midday sunlight, but by the golden hour sun, its muted colors appearing the brightest only for a slight sight, before its remnants reveal their beauty along the way of one’s attention.

His eyebrows twitch, while his eyes search yours.

“Opasnaya igra, malyshka [it’s a dangerous game, babygirl]”, - John says in a raspy voice, seeing the way you let him read you, akin to an open book with no secrets.

“Rasve ya dolzhna boyatsa [why, should I be afraid?” - your hand grazes his cheek, as a feeling that is bigger than your heart settles down in your chest, upon relishing the way he’s sitting in front of you on his knees, looking up at you, as if you’re God’s greatest creation. The fear and sense of uncertainty long forsaken in the tangled forest of what’s left behind.

“No”, - he tells you, his hands on your thighs, “if that’s what you wish for”. A moment passes in between the eternity that stretches across your souls.

“I don’t think I’ve ever hugged you, have I?”, you tell him, suddenly, his fingers freeze in their place. John’s eyes go blank for a split second, before another emotion replaces it, something deep and so raw, your heart almost explodes. An emotion that is swept away by the ever flowing current when his irises go back to that same deep shade of darkness that is the palette of his whirlpool.

“Come here”, you tell him, your hand gently tugging at him. A shallow breath of his doesn’t dissolve away unnoticed, as you get up and switch positions, him - sitting on the bed, you - standing in between his legs, holding his face and stroking his sharp cheekbones. There’s no sense of reality anymore, just his black chocolate eyes, looking up with the devotion of a man found. Time stood still, its heartbeat paving the way just for you two.

You feel him slowly moving closer, as if testing the limits of his own game of chess, before he nuzzles into you. You wrap your arms around him, patting him with all the gentle love you can master, as if not to break a wounded child. Gradually, you sense his calmness unravel itself when his body melts into yours, drinking every bit of peace that you generously get to offer.

A tear rolls down your cheek, the space around you collapsing on itself and blossoming into an eternal tangible softness that revolves around you and John.

John sighs, pulling you closer, letting every piece of your ethereal gentleness and love that is the reflection of you seep into him, beyond the subliminal, into the deepest infinity of his oblivion that is the code of his own sense of self.

Treedaddymcpuffpuff:

You wake up with a startled gasp, giving Killy the same little fright. She runs away, bells dangling at her neck, the sound fading underneath the bed where she hides from you.

“Killy,” you groan, “I’m sorry, come back.” You wish you could actually tell her in some way you didn’t mean to scare the shit out of her, but it’s too late. And Constantine is gone, too. There’s a little note on the stand. Something about having to run out for a while on a job.

It’s around noon. Your black out curtains can’t contain all of the leaking sunshine, so you decide to follow that biological clock that runs deep and get up. John isn’t here, either, and Tex is snoring on the couch.

“Tex,” you whisper, nudging him a little bit.

His groggy voice sends a pang of reminiscent longing through you. “Hey, honeypie.” He fades out a little bit, and you have to tug on his arm. “You’re snoring,” you tell him, trying to get another pillow under his head to elevate him. “You don’t snore. Sit up a little bit.” You’re worried that he’s not getting proper oxygen while he’s sleeping because of his recent brush with death, so you use most of your weight and a little bit of his to sit him up and lessen the deep rattle of his throat.

“C’mon,” he lays a big arm around your shoulders, tugging your upper torso down against him. “Lay with daddy, huh?”

You push against him. “Tex, you freaking weirdo, lemme go.” The temptation is definitely there, to crawl on top of him and snuggle in, but you’ve already committed to waking up and doing something on this lazy weekend day, so you squirm out of his heavy grip.

He goes back to sleep with a big, satisfied smile on his face. You resist, with all your might, leaning down to kiss his cheek. Adorable fucking idiot.

You make scrambled eggs, plate some for Tex, and leave them in the fridge for when he wakes up. Then, you get a piece of paper, write SCRAMBLED EGGS on it in big letters, and set it on his now peacefully rising chest.

It’s beautiful out here today, sunny with a tropic, warm breeze that reminds you of beachy days with John and Tex. Although the beach is about 30 minutes away by bus, you hop on with a little bag in tow, sporting cute cotton capris and a flowy tank top over your swim suit.

You spend a few hours at the beach, walking up and down the sand, looking at shells, playing in waves and watching the surfers board out past the break. There’s a little food and drink stand nearby, and you packed plenty of sunscreen, so you can stay out as long as you like.

You enjoy this as long as you can, because you have classes coming up and know you won’t get the free time again until next weekend.

You feel free-untethered. Able to go anywhere and do anything without anyone holding you down. There was such a long time, where you didn’t have that freedom. Over half your life, probably, between childhood and witness protection, where you were trapped. And, now that you have a taste of independence, you’ll never stop injecting it. Of course, with this freedom comes a little emptiness, but it’s nothing you can’t handle. You’ve been lonely before, you’ll be lonely again.

Maybe that’s an absurd thought, when three men are waiting for you at home, and for a minute you feel terribly, achingly guilty about wanting freedom and love, protection, shelter-all at the same time. Sometimes women don’t get any of that let alone one. But then, that’s bullshit, isn’t it? The notion that you have to settle and compromise just because you’re a girl. Maybe you want all three of them-no, not maybe. You do want all three, and your independence. And maybe if testosterone wasn’t such a heavy drug, you could mention that to them. But you can already just see John strangling Constantine with his bare hands and Constantine burning John alive if you even dare to mention them sharing you.

Plus, would you even be able to handle all three of them? John and Constantine themselves are insatiable; Constantine, fueled by ancient magic. John, fueled with physical endurance. Tex would be simpler to please, but he’s a wild card of his own.

A group of surfers ride a wave in to shore, and you watch curiously-maybe even a little bit enviously-as they laugh and joke and splash each other in the pink sinking dawn of the day. One of them-tall, broad shouldered, bronze, the god Poseidon himself rising from the frothy ocean bank-makes eye contact with you and you look away quickly, a hot flush that’s not from the late sun flooding your skin.

“Y/n?” You look to the sound, and see a familiar face among the group of ocean dwellers.

Katrina gives you a little wave while she climbs out of one. You tip your chin at her. “Hey, Trine.” She’s one of your classmates, a good friend and study partner. You had no idea that she surfed.

She introduces you to her little group of friends, and one in particular’s name you know you haven’t forgotten. His grin is stark white against beautiful, salt crusted skin when he takes your hand in his bigger one, warm despite the cool water he just rose from, and shakes it. “We meet again.”

“Hey, we were just gonna go to Bodhi’s house for a party. Wanna come?” Trina pulls you from Johnny, giving you a strange, knowing look. You were absolutely entranced by him, staring way too much, still holding onto his hand, so you understand why she’s a little suspicious.

“You alright?” Johnny asks, bringing you back to him.

“Don’t think so,” you say, feeling like you’re absolutely dying.

Now everyone absolutely notices this strange tension between the two of you, and they seem delighted by it. Bodhi, you think his name is, grabs Johnny’s shoulder and shakes him a little. “Utah, you dog. Close your jaw.”

“Seriously, Johnny, stare a little longer,” Trine grumbles.

“Sorry,” he tells you sheepishly.

“Same,” you reply.

“So, you wanna come?” He asks, motioning to the group. “To the party?”

“I would, but I have to take care of something.”

You propel yourself through the darkening LA streets, the bus system, the crowds of people, the bustle of the city. Keep your eyes ahead, focused, goal driven. The big Bouncer in front of Midnite’s is the only thing that stands in your way to the inner club.

He holds up a card, prompting you. Fuck. You have never come here without John. Probably because he forbid it, but that’s beside the point. You have no idea what to say, so you just do what you’re best at and guess. “Rabbit?”

His facial expression reads “are you fucking kidding me?” All he says is “no.”

“Please. I need to see Midnite. It’s about John Constantine.”

He eyes you for a long while, and then motions for you to sit on the bench in the lobby.

•

“How’s my favorite girl?” Midnite takes a seat beside you. “What kinda shit did Constantine get into this time?”

“it’s actually my shit.”

He laughs. “Tell me about it.”

“No, I mean, really, I think there’s something strange happening, Papa. Everywhere I go, doesn’t matter how far, I see this… guy.”

“You have a spirit following you?” He asks, scanning your body with an open palm, tilting your chin this and that way.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is-what he is, but there’s many of them. They all look the same.”

“The same? I’m confused, y/n.”

“They all look like… John Constantine.”

•

“Tex, wake up.” John kicks the couch lightly, alerting the snoring Tex.

“What the fuck.” Tex groans.

“Where’s y/n?”

Constantine has tried to call you ten times, texted you at least twice as much, and still no answer. He’s pacing through the kitchen, hand in his hair, debating on whether or not he should tear down LA to find you. You’re never gone this long, you always keep him updated. This isn’t like you.

He walks into the living room, where Tex and John are looking at the note you left alerting Tex to breakfast.

“You just let her go?” Wick demands of Tex, snatching the slice of paper and tearing it in the process. “When did she leave?”

“Fuck, I didn’t think we were dictating her life anymore,” Tex replies, “she came out here once… I think. It was daylight. I was sleepin. Fuck.”

“She always comes home,” Constantine says, more to himself than the two other men. “It’s almost one AM. We have to find her.”

“Tex, are you able to drive?” Wick asks.

“Yeah.. yeah. I’m good,” Tex nods.

“Take the car, go to her school, her bank, her favorite restaurant. Constantine?” Wick turns to address the still pacing man. “Are you able to try and locate her with some kind of magic?”

“The fuck you think I’m trying to do?” Constantine mumbles, eyes on the floor, hand in his hair, damp sweat gathering on his tshirt.

“Keep doing it. I’m going to look on foot.”

•

Maybe it was a bad idea, to drink with Midnite. Not because of him. The morally grey, powerful voodoo master has never been anything but good to you despite his wavering tolerance for Constantine, and he stays by your side diligently while you both sip on steaming, sweetened cocktails.

No, it’s a bad idea because of the shady characters lurking around you and making you feel a little like you just stepped into Mickey’s House of Villians. The lady with purple, slithery tentacles attached to her just seals the deal on that.

Midnite flips over your other divination card, the gold foils of it catching a rogue neon light and flashing bright in your eyes, before you see what it holds; 10 of spiders. “Something is tightly attached to you, something that draws dark energy. I could see it when we first met, you know. Just like the curse on Texs’ chest made him vulnerable to the wicked dark, you have naturally.”

“I’m so confused. Why?” Your words come out a little slurred, and you realize you’ve been hitting the tap too hard. This is your fifth… fourth cocktail? You’re not sure anymore. “Am I in danger?”

He looks at you with a bit of pity in his fathomless dark eyes, like he doesn’t know what to do for you. Like you’re fucked. “Always.”

Before he can elaborate, give you a warning or message, something, a heavy commotion picks up at the front entrance. Glass smashing, screaming, pounding on something metal and floppy. Midnite sighs and puts his hand on your shoulder. “Stay here. I have to deal with this.”

You ask the bartender for a glass of water to help nurse and coat the alcohol sloshing inside of you and making you pleasantly numb and prickly, and try to ignore the other patrons of the club. Kind of hard when one of them, one you very well recognize, takes the stool beside you.

“Where’s your tall friend?” The succubus asks, those bleach pink eyes doing strange, unearthly things in their sockets; changing shape, reflecting colors that usually don’t exist, sliding from side to side rapidly.

“He’s taken,” you tell her, not bothering to hide the scowl on your face.

“Really?” She asks, voice unnaturally low and seductive, titling her head. “Because I could feel the desperation on him from a league away. Most taken men with that kind of need aren’t satisfied at all.”

“I’m not entertaining this conversation,” you tell her. You remember all the anger you felt toward her after she tried to pull Tex away, and wonder where it is now that you need it. Instead, there is a dull, needy, perplexing throb beginning in your lower belly. It’s a strange way to feel arousal, but unmistakable nonetheless. Usually, all libidinous feelings begin in your brain and trickle downward, but this feeling is severed from your mind, spreading through only your lower body and making you twitch and writhe in the seat.

She grins with sharp little bone white teeth. “Interesting.”

You try and open your mouth, tell her to fuck off, but she reaches over and touches your cheek, and any words you could have said die in your throat.

Replacing speech and sense and sight, is a burly heat that rips through you. A desire like you’ve never felt. A claw-your-skin-off, teeth clenching need to be fucked. Debauched. Ruined.

An inner beast guides your way, now, and she’s hungry for cock. Luckily, there’s some place you can get it. Unluckily, it’s a few bus rides away. And you can’t fucking last that long, that’s for sure.

gif from pinterest

You stand up, make for the door, and run into something solid and familiar and warm. Just seeing his angled face make your clit tighten painfully, your cunt flutter around nothing. You jump him. He can fucking take it, and he does, handling you like a champ while you claw up his body and latch onto his mouth with your own.

John Wick doesn’t stop you. Maybe it’s the vicious arousal leaking off you that infects him, too. Or maybe it’s because he missed you, needed you that bad. Either way, he’s kissing you back, picking you up, walking you toward the nearest private place to fuck in, hopefully….

#wicked johnson fic #john wick x reader #tex johnson x reader #constantine x reader #with hon mention #johnny utah x reader #keanuverse #keanuverse fic #keanu reeves x reader #john wick #constantine 2005 #tex johnson #johnny utah #john constantine #john constantine x you

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roman-catholic-mass-readings · 1 year

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10th November >> Mass Readings (Except USA)

Pope Saint Leo the Great, Doctor

Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time.

Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Colour: White)

(Readings for the feria (Thursday))

(There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Thursday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

Philemon 7-20

He is a slave no longer, but a dear brother in the Lord.

I am so delighted, and comforted, to know of your love; they tell me, brother, how you have put new heart into the saints.

Now, although in Christ I can have no diffidence about telling you to do whatever is your duty, I am appealing to your love instead, reminding you that this is Paul writing, an old man now and, what is more, still a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for a child of mine, whose father I became while wearing these chains: I mean Onesimus. He was of no use to you before, but he will be useful to you now, as he has been to me. I am sending him back to you, and with him – I could say – a part of my own self. I should have liked to keep him with me; he could have been a substitute for you, to help me while I am in the chains that the Good News has brought me. However, I did not want to do anything without your consent; it would have been forcing your act of kindness, which should be spontaneous. I know you have been deprived of Onesimus for a time, but it was only so that you could have him back for ever, not as a slave any more, but something much better than a slave, a dear brother; especially dear to me, but how much more to you, as a blood-brother as well as a brother in the Lord. So if all that we have in common means anything to you, welcome him as you would me; but if he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, then let me pay for it. I am writing this in my own handwriting: I, Paul, shall pay it back – I will not add any mention of your own debt to me, which is yourself. Well then, brother, I am counting on you, in the Lord; put new heart into me, in Christ.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 145(146):7-10

R/ He is happy who is helped by Jacob’s God. or R/ Alleluia!

It is the Lord who keeps faith for ever, who is just to those who are oppressed. It is he who gives bread to the hungry, the Lord, who sets prisoners free.

R/ He is happy who is helped by Jacob’s God. or R/ Alleluia!

It is the Lord who gives sight to the blind, who raises up those who are bowed down. It is the Lord who loves the just, the Lord, who protects the stranger.

R/ He is happy who is helped by Jacob’s God. or R/ Alleluia!

The Lord upholds the widow and orphan but thwarts the path of the wicked. The Lord will reign for ever, Zion’s God, from age to age.

R/ He is happy who is helped by Jacob’s God. or R/ Alleluia!

Gospel Acclamation

1 Peter 1:25

Alleluia, alleluia! The word of the Lord remains for ever: What is this word? It is the Good News that has been brought to you. Alleluia!

Or:

John 15:5

Alleluia, alleluia! I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty, says the Lord. Alleluia!

Gospel

Luke 17:20-25

The kingdom of God is among you.

Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was to come, Jesus gave them this answer, ‘The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation and there will be no one to say, “Look here! Look there!” For, you must know, the kingdom of God is among you.’

He said to the disciples, ‘A time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man and will not see it. They will say to you, “Look there!” or, “Look here!” Make no move; do not set off in pursuit; for as the lightning flashing from one part of heaven lights up the other, so will be the Son of Man when his day comes. But first he must suffer grievously and be rejected by this generation.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

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

Saint Leo the Great, Pope, Doctor

(Liturgical Colour: White)

(Readings for the memorial)

(There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Thursday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

Ecclesiasticus 39:6-10

The wise man will be remembered for generations.

If it is the will of the great Lord, he will be filled with the spirit of understanding, he will shower forth words of wisdom, and in prayer give thanks to the Lord. He will grow upright in purpose and learning, he will ponder the Lord’s hidden mysteries. He will display the instruction he has received, taking his pride in the Law of the Lord’s covenant. Many will praise his understanding, and it will never be forgotten. His memory will not disappear, generation after generation his name will live. Nations will proclaim his wisdom, the assembly will celebrate his praises.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 36(37):3-6,30-31

R/ The just man’s mouth utters wisdom.

If you trust in the Lord and do good, then you will live in the land and be secure. If you find your delight in the Lord, he will grant your heart’s desire.

R/ The just man’s mouth utters wisdom.

Commit your life to the Lord, trust in him and he will act, so that your justice breaks forth like the light, your cause like the noon-day sun.

R/ The just man’s mouth utters wisdom.

The just man’s mouth utters wisdom and his lips speak what is right; the law of his God is in his heart, his steps shall be saved from stumbling.

R/ The just man’s mouth utters wisdom.

Gospel Acclamation

Mark 1:17

Alleluia, alleluia! Follow me, says the Lord, and I will make you into fishers of men. Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 16:13-19

You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi he put this question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say he is John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he said ‘who do you say I am?’ Then Simon Peter spoke up, ‘You are the Christ,’ he said ‘the Son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, ‘Simon son of Jonah, you are a happy man! Because it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. So I now say to you: You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

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johnhardinsawyer · 1 year

Text

“Who sinned?”

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

3 / 19 / 23 – Fourth Sunday in Lent

John 9:1-41

“Who sinned?”[1]

(Narrow Vision and New Insight)

I feel like I still owe a pan of brownies to my son’s old preschool classroom. You see, I had signed up to bring brownies for their St. Patrick’s Day party on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, but. . . some of you might remember that by that date, three years ago, most of the world was shut down because there was this little global pandemic that had arrived in New Hampshire. Actually, it wasn’t little. It was huge. It was the largest collective disruption of our lives. Some of you might remember those early days of the pandemic, hearing about a virus making its way from the other side of the globe all the way here – passed from person to person.

I don’t know how many of you were thinking this way at the time, but one question being asked by a lot of people was, “Who is to blame for all of this?” Was it some kind of lab leak or did it come from a wet market where the virus had passed from animals to humans? Who was patient zero who first passed it along? Who had gotten on that airplane or on that cruise ship with the virus already in their system? There were so many questions like this, that the idea of answering them by tracking down all the answers became too much – especially for those of us who were not infectious disease experts. Besides, we had bigger fish to fry as we stayed at home, trying to stay healthy while stress-eating the brownies that we had initially purchased for our son’s St. Patrick’s Day party. Someone was to blame for the brownies not getting delivered and I’m sure it wasn’t me.

Who is to blame when a bank collapses, or when the markets crash, or when a global pandemic sets up the economic conditions for bank collapses and market crashes? Yes, fingers will get pointed when things like this happen, but it’s really hard to pin it on just one person – or even group of people. There are times when individuals or groups need to be brought to justice and held to account. But big problems are, by their nature, very complex. And simple answers are not always easy to find. Oh, how we want answers, though. The simpler, the better.

In today’s scripture reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus is presented with a man who was born blind and Jesus’ disciples come to him for an easy answer. “Who sinned – this man or his parents – that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). Just to clarify, the disciples are not asking if God caused this man’s blindness – because, in their minds, of course God caused it. Instead, the disciples are asking who had sinned – thereby deserving some kind of punishment from God – for God to cause this blindness. In the Old Testament, there are multiple references – in the Books of Exodus, Psalms, and Isaiah – to how the sin of someone’s parents or other ancestors can get passed down as punishment.[2] It should be noted, though, that sometimes scripture can conflict with scripture, because the authors of Ezekiel and Jeremiah[3] do not agree with the idea that sin is passed down. As Eugene Peterson translates:

As sure as I’m the living God, you’re not going to repeat this saying [that children are punished for their parent’s sins] any longer. Every soul – man, woman, child – belongs to me, parent and child alike. You die for your own sin, not another’s. . . The child does not share the guilt of the parent, nor the parent the guilt of the child. If you live upright and well, you get the credit; if you live a wicked life, you’re guilty as charged.[4]

I tend to lean more toward this passage from Ezekiel than I do toward the whole “children are punished for their parent’s sins” concept. Yes, there are so many ways in which children will sometimes suffer – unintentionally – because of the poor and sinful choices of their parents, but is this God’s punishment? I can’t really answer that question, but my heart says, “No.” My heart also says “No” when someone will ask the question, “Why is God doing this to me?” when something tragic occurs. Again, we want a simple answer – a “Why do bad things happen to good people?” answer.

There are so many people who get stuck on this question. In my experience as a pastor, this question is the primary question that causes people to lose faith in God. “I don’t believe in a God who would cause suffering or allow suffering,” they will say. To which I will often respond, “I don’t believe in that God either.” If the answer to the question “Why do people suffer?” is “Well, God causes them to suffer,” then I don’t want to – I can’t – believe in a God like that. So, I don’t. Instead, I believe in a God who is at work for good – the God revealed in the compassionate person of Jesus Christ, who is always about the business of redeeming, restoration, and resurrection. I find the question, “Where is God at work for good in the middle of this awful situation?” to be a more constructive – a more hopeful – question. In today’s passage, we see Jesus answering this more constructive question.

“Who sinned?” the disciples ask.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” Jesus responds. “You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.”[5]

Don’t look for someone or something to blame. “Look instead for what God can do,” Jesus says. And then Jesus heals the man – putting some mud on the man’s eyes, getting physically dirty and “working” to make the mud on the Sabbath, drawing the ire of the Pharisees who saw and heard about this strange act. The man is then sent to the Pool of Siloam, which was a part of the ancient city of Jerusalem’s water system. The water was “sent” through a tunnel from a spring to a reservoir, which was used for bathing and drinking.[6] The name “Siloam” means “sent” but in this story it can take on a missional meaning – as one person is sent by Jesus to be washed and then is “sent” by the Holy Spirit to share the good news of a new life and new vision.

Not everyone sees it this way, though. “How did this happen?” the man’s neighbor’s ask. “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” (9:11) Word spreads about all of this and the local religious authorities send in some investigators. “How did this happen?” they ask. “He [Jesus] put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” (9:15). Then they call in the formerly-blind man’s parents and ask them how it happened. “Why don’t you ask our son?” they say. “He is old enough to speak for himself. All we know is that he was born blind, but now he sees.”[7] Then they call the blind man back and ask him, again, “How did this happen?” The man looks them in the eye and says:

“I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”[8]

“If Jesus were not from God, he could do nothing,” the formerly-blind man says, saying and seeing things quite clearly. But the Pharisees just don’t see things the same way and they push him out, calling him names. God is at work for good, but they’re just too caught up in the “whys” and “hows” of it all to see this. They’re just too caught up in the “we should be the ones in charge; we should be the arbiters of how those who are different from us – born different or otherwise – get labeled, and categorized, and shuffled off somewhere so that we can feel more comfortable, so that we can protect our children and ourselves from those who are not like us; we should be controlling the narrative of what God can and cannot do – and for whom.”

The life of Jesus – the Jesus we see in today’s story – spins a different narrative, though: one that is always at work for good, one that does not see difference (what we might call a handicap, or a weakness, or some other designation that we do not understand) as anything other than a means by which God’s grace can be seen anew, one that is always open to the possibilities and opportunities of God’s grace – possibilities and opportunities that most of us ignore, to our own detriment and the detriment of other people.

The Pharisees push the truth-telling, gospel-bearing, formerly-blind man out – saying that he does not belong, that he is not welcome. But, as the story goes, when Jesus hears that the man has been driven out, Jesus seeks him out, and finds him, and offers him the good news of welcome, revealing God’s grace and God’s loving presence. And then Jesus offers this stark word of rebuke: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39) Another possible way of translating this is, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.”[9]

Some Pharisees overhear Jesus say this and they say, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” (9:40) To which Jesus responds with the first-century equivalent of “Duh! Ya think?��

Surely we are not blind, are we? Not us. . . Not blind about the people that we blame, not blind about our enemies or those who are different, not blinded by our own version of reason or deafened by our own version of the truth, or struck dumb in our search for easy answers? Not us. . . not at all. . .

But. . . what if we are. . . just a little? What if we could see ourselves as God sees us – frightened of losing control, frightened of things (and people) that we do not understand and cannot explain, frightened of letting someone else get ahead, frightened of letting someone else get the last word, frightened by just how loving God is compared to how sinful we can be? What if we could see ourselves – and one another – as God sees us: people in need of love, and care, and healing, and wholeness, blind since birth to so many things, blinded by the world to so much more?

I wonder. . . if God could help us see, just how much God might change us – softening our hard hearts, opening our closed minds, loosening our clenched fists.

May the One who was sent into the world to open the eyes of the blind, grant us new eyes for seeing, new minds for thinking. May the One who is always seeking us out, and finding us, and forgiving us, grant us new hearts for loving, and new spirits for bearing God’s grace. . .

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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[1] Sermon title that serves as a prompt, from a set of materials written by Sarah Are Speed and the Sanctified Art Collective.

[2] See Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Psalm 109:13-15; and Isiah 65:6-7.

[3] See Jeremiah 31:29-30.

[4] Eugene Peterson, The Message: Numbered Edition (Colorado Springs: NAV Press, 2002) 1152. Ezekiel 18:3-4, 20.

[5] Eugene Peterson, 1471. John 9:3-5.

[6] Watson E. Mills, ed. The Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1990) 824-825. “Siloam Inscription,” George L. Kelm.

[7] See John 9:18-21. Paraphrased, JHS.

[8] Eugene Peterson, 1472. John 9:27-33.

[9] Eugene Peterson, 1472. John 9:39.

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