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barelymaddy · 11 months

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General love reading

Pile 1 Pile 2 Pile 3

Pile 1

Cards:4 of swords,3 of wands,6 of wands,Judgement(Tarot of the Divine);Release your ex(Romance Angels);Pansy(Botanical Inspirations oracle)

Hello Pile 1!First of all,i feel a very exciting energy coming from this pile,so maybe you feel ready to get back into the dating game!I see that your love life might have been stagnant for a while,maybe even heartbreaking for some,but no worries!Your efforts were noticed by The Universe!You are encouraged to step out and go outside if you didn't already.Try and join as many events and you will notice many people admiring you.Now its the time for you to shine!I get a feeling that you will meet someone special in the near future who will really help you grow.It is possible that some of you will live the fairytale romance that you always dreamed of this summer!No matter what,your love life will certainly not be dull anymore,Pile 1.For some of you,this connection will help you release old lovers or old habits that stayed in the way of your emotional growth.Try to be optimistic and you will surely be rewarded by the universe!There is a lot of focus here on being confident (hot girl summer💅).Im also picking up on fire energy so either you or your person could be a fire sign or things will move very quickly for you.

Other messages:the color orange,ladder, sunrise,bondage,horse,carnaval,mountain,text message,night time,garden

Pansy meaning in flower language:"Think about me"

Song:

Pile 2

Cards:10 of coins reversed,Page of cups,5 of swords,Queen of cups(Tarot of the Divine);Healing family issues(Romance angels);Peony

Hey there Pile 2!So i noticed very quickly that your energy is blocked,which also affects your love life.You recently have gone through a betrayal of some sorts.This person really took advantage of you and made you feel very unstable.Spirits told me that you need to open up your heart to others and seek out help.It is not good to bottle up your feelings.I'm also hearing that this person might have been from your family or your family is an important element when it comes to your love life.This events left you without hope for the future but you mustn't give up!There are lot of amazing things held in store for you!If you learn to open up The Universe will help you to move on and find the love that you always craved for.I'm hearing that a female figure in your life is worried about you and really insistent in talking with you about your feelings.Don't let anybody hold you back from working towards your dream life!Try to appreciate your present a bit more,and you might find some surprises!For some of you,there's a person who has a crush on you but they're refusing to tell you in fear of rejection and because they know that you're going through tough times.No matter what,you'll come out stronger from this, but you don't have to do it alone.There is love all around you you just have to notice it!

Other messages:baby pink,crib,downtown, forest,Last Night in Soho(movie),knife,flowers, napkin,crying session

Peony meaning in flower language:"Anger and shame"/"Prosperity and compassion"

Song:

Pile 3

Cards:Knight of cups,The World,The Hanged Man,10 of cups reversed(Tarot of the Divine);Getting to know each other(Romance Angels);Hyacinth

Hey Pile 3!So it looks like you have been talking recently with a person that you tought will be your future partner but it just didn't work out.The spirits say that you're too fixated on finding love and you need to take a break and enjoy life.Only then you will be able to receive romance into your life.You've worked very far to get here and it would be a shame to not enjoy your acomplishments.Try and give the same attention you give to other people to yourself.You will then benefit from a glow up!You will also start to enjoy your presence so much that you wont even think about love,and then BAM!💥Love will come knocking at your door!I'm also hearing that you need to take things slow.Maybe try to really get to know the people around you instead of romanticizing them.You will be surprised by some of them!(in either good or bad ways).You need to learn to fall in love with the person,not the idea of them you created in your head.I know you may feel very unfulfilled right now in your love life,but it will get better,you just need to learn to choose the right people for you.Don't be a doormat to them!(this was for a specific person lol,their spirit guide was screaming at me🤣).Overall,don't take things too seriously,try to be a bit more playfull and remember to have fun and put yourself first for once!

Other messages:rose garden,greenhouse,water, warm weather,vacation,pink,shopping,Hawaii, cabin,friends,lovers,big birds,Mexico,family time

Hyacinth meaning in flower language : "Constancy"/"Playfulness"

Song:

That's it,hope it resonate with you~

#pick a pile #pick a card #pick a card reading #love reading #love life #romance #tarot reading #divination #witchcraft #flower language #flowers #Spotify

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magicweirdos · 1 year

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A completely unranked and entirely uncategorized list of non-audio drama things I loved and made me a better audio drama writer/creator in 2022:

Andor

Have faith in your audience, and remember that it doesn’t matter how fleshed out you think your world is — there’s something there no one has ever seen.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

There’s no limit to the disbelief people are willing to suspend if you can marry real emotion with outrageous circumstance.

Nope

If you can make an audience question a character’s reckless and goofy-ass decisions just before realizing they would do the same thing, they’ll leave changed.

Glass Onion

Rian Johnson has figured out how to thoroughly eviscerate greed and demagoguery with silliness and he’s my hero because of that.

The Legend of Vox Machina

Magic happens, real magic, when a group of people trust each other enough to be vulnerable with the stories in their souls.

God of War: Ragnarok

Making characters think they have no agency in their own lives is an *excellent* way to showcase their intellect and resilience.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Even with a simple core story, you can provide a rich, rich experience through layers of theme injected into setting.

Horizon II: Forbidden West

I would take a course on the way Ashly Burch gave each of her characters — WHO ARE FUCKING CLONES — the slightest tweaks in tone to differentiate character. A must for audio drama creators.

Werewolf By Night

Every story has a rhythm, and every medium can express that rhythm in a unique way. More composers should direct.

Saga: Volume 10

Grief is sneaky, and characters need time to process it properly. Sometimes the strongest way to communicate emotional distress is to make the character think they’re over it… until they aren’t.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

The classic struggle is between solving problems with intellect or violence, but Captain Pike teaches us that the first step is always empathy.

Rings of Power

The most touching conflict is sometimes simply “I’m mad at you because I missed you so much.”

Honorable mentions:

Last Night in Soho, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Ms. Marvel, Ghostwire Tokyo

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salvadorbonaparte · 4 months

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2023 in Films

I watched way too many films this year. Here are my opinions on some of them

January

Las Cosas Del Querer (1989) - Amazing if you love sad hot people and flamenco

Canadian Bacon (1995) - Incredibly silly and Alan Alda plays the US president

Nope (2022) - A highlight of the year

February

Hellraiser (1987) - This film is actually about miscommunication in this essay I will-

Predestination (2014) - Time Travel and Gender Moments

Malignant (2021) - Camp horror masterwork

Late Phases (2014) - Mediocre werewolf film with some really interesting comments on ageism, ableism, suburbia and religion

March

Sterne (1959) - Plays into some problematic stereotypes from today's perspective but revolutionary for its time, first German film to address the Holocaust

Major League (1989) - A film I only watched to confirm that it uses a weird phrase I also found in my thesis project

Carry On Screaming (1966) - Camp. Gay. Horror. Parody.

Glen or Glenda (1953) - A product of its time and no longer up to date in its understanding of gender but surprisingly revolutionary in its compassion and earnestness despite the bad reviews

April

Taxi Driver (1976) - Isn't it frustrating when annoying people tell you a film is good and then it's actually good?

June

Mr Deeds Goes To Town (1936) - Mr Deeds has autism swag

El Espíritu de la Colmena (1973) - I really wanted to like this because civil war era Spain and Frankenstein are super up my alley but unfortunately it was so much slower than expected

Das Boot (1981) - Very long and claustrophobic but holds up to the hype

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) - RIP King

July

Nimona (2023) - His big wet eyes bewitched me

First Blood (1982) - You're telling me the film is about Americans fighting an enemy they view as simultaneously weak and dangerous, escalating the situation, and then sending more and more men into a rainforest to die through guerilla warfare after being warned again and again they can't win this? sounds familiar

Barbie (2023) - Insert a bunch of pink emojis

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) - Made me crave bagels

Jojo Rabbit (2019) - God I love war satires

Sweet Liberty (1986) - Alan Alda having fun and also using his own film as a therapy session

The Majestic (2001) - A rewatch but it's so tragically underrated, Jim Carrey is very good in dramatic roles and McCarthy-era media is like catnip for me

Joker (2019) - This is just Taxi Driver with extra steps

August

Tin & Tina (2023) - Probably one of the worst films I have seen in a while

Battle of the Sexes (2017) - I love women

Four Lions (2010) - The ending really got me, I love when satire gets serious

The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid (1979) - Can we talk about how the theme song is just going "I'm the sheriff" "yes you're the sheriff"

Happiness (1998) - Nauseating but in a "good film but what the fuck" way

They Call Him Bulldozer (1978) - Italian Lagaan

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) - Sad and Gay

Twister (1996) - So much better than expected

Magnolia (1999) - Cloudy with a chance of frogs, a really long but really good film and I'm not entirely sure I got it

Doubt (2008) - Somehow I watched 5 films with Philip Seymour Hoffman that month because I was haunted by his ghost or something

September

The Terminal (2004) - I assumed this to be more of a classic romcom but the whole concept (based on a true story) is so terrifying and tragic that it made me feel all emotions at once

Apocalypse Now (1979) - I knew a lot of trivia about the film but for some reason I didn't know anything about the cast so every single actor was a surprise and made me go "!!!", Also I kinda wanna write an essay about it

October

Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984) - Some of the gay jokes absolutely killed me

Last Night in Soho (2021) - I'm Not Like the Other Girls to Time Travel Murder Nightmare Pipeline, actually I really enjoyed this one but it's also super silly

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) - How do you say poor little meow meow in gaeilge

The Menu (2022) - I go to the murder restaurant I order the beesechurger, I was super surprised there's no cannibalism but tbh that would have been low hanging fruit

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) - Explains a lot about religion in the US, I love that she was pro lgbt, also I googled her ex husband and he has a prepper/survivalist thing going on now and scams more people

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) - we can't eat pray love ourselves out of this one boys

Holes (2003) - Hated the book as a teenager for school reasons but gave the film a try and really enjoyed it

Renfield (2023) - I expected werewolves but I enjoyed it nevertheless, My Chemical Romance is on the soundtrack, it's very silly, the effects are great

Interview with the Vampire (1994) - Oh people weren't lying about it being homoerotic

The Big Lebowski (1998) - I've had days that feel like that

November

Pappa ante Portas (1991) - Funnier now that I'm an adult, basically half the jokes my mum makes are from this film

The Meg 2: The Trench (2023) - I watched this while sick and really wanted to see a giant shark fight a giant octopus and boy did it deliver

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) - Very nice animation style

JFK (1991) - I actually fell asleep halfway through because it's so long but can we talk about how this film is just A-listers but has some of the worst wigs and makeup I've seen

Bottoms (2023) - A spiritual sequel to Heathers

December

When Harry Met Sally (1989) - They deserve each other (derogatory) but that one restaurant scene was pretty funny

The Royal Nanny (2022) - one of the many Hallmark films my mum made me watch and this is perhaps the worst one, incredibly sexist even for a Hallmark film and they clearly mean Mi5 but say Mi7 which was a WW2 propaganda service? Also they really want me to believe there is a British prince called Colin and that he doesn't look like his family tree is a circle?

I forgot the title but there was also the one where two people get stuck in a time loop while trying to make a sponsored youtube video about baking and I didn't really pay attention much but man that was bad

#film log #films #2023 in films #this is mostly just my letterboxd review lmao

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denimbex1986 · 3 months

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'When Andrew Haigh was shooting his new film, All of Us Strangers, in his parents’ old house in Croydon, something strange began to happen. “I started getting eczema again, and I’d not had eczema since I was a kid,” says the director, who is now 50. “It was coming up in the exact same places. I thought, ‘What the fuck is happening to me?’ I feel there is a sense that your body remembers trauma. Somehow things get almost embedded in your DNA, and they find ways to leak out.”

In All of Us Strangers, this leakage happens to Adam, a 46-year-old gay man exquisitely played by Andrew Scott. He’s a blocked, depressed screenwriter whose parents died in a car crash when he was 12, and who lives in a mysteriously empty tower block in London. One night after a fire alarm, a younger man called Harry, played by Paul Mescal, drunkenly comes to his door. Although Adam initially rejects him, the pair later embark on the love affair he has always yearned for – and Mescal and Scott are explosively convincing as a couple. “Casting is like running a dating agency,” says Haigh. “I have to be careful to pick the people who will be good together.” When Adam decides to return to the house he grew up in, he discovers that his mum and dad – played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy – are still living there, the same age they were when they died, in a perpetual 1987.

The film – which won best film and best director at the British Independent Film awards in December – somehow blends a love story, a ghost story, and a time-flipped coming-of-age narrative. The result is a masterful exploration of loneliness and grief, the relationship between children and their parents, and a demonstration of the fact that time, far from healing, can bring childhood trauma rearing up stronger than ever in middle age. But it’s also a tender, aching expression of the insatiable human need for love and connection, which Haigh depicts as being so powerful that it can annihilate the border between life and death. “All the people in the film are longing for something – to be understood, to be known,” Haigh says.

All of Us Strangers is a “very free” adaptation of a Japanese novel called Strangers by Taichi Yamada (who died last month aged 89), which the film-maker wrote during the pandemic while living in Los Angeles. “There’s a pandemic emotion at the heart of it,” he says. “We all spent a lot of time staring out of the window, didn’t we?” Sitting in a Soho hotel suite, Haigh – whose previous films include Weekend and 45 Years, and who also made the TV series Looking and The North Water – was keen to make the film “as personal as I could. It’s about someone having a reunion with their own past so it made sense that I had to do the same thing. As I was writing about the home Adam goes back to, I started thinking about my own childhood home, and when we were talking about where to shoot I thought, ‘I’ll just go down and see if it’s still there.’ I couldn’t remember where it was on the street because I left there when I was nine or 10” – when his parents divorced – “but I had the photo that Adam lifts up in the film, with Claire Foy put in instead of my mum.”

Haigh found the house and the owner agreed to let him film there. “It was a strange choice, emotionally, because I knew it wouldn’t be the easiest place to be. But I wanted the film to have a certain honesty and vulnerability, to feel grounded in some kind of reality. The only way was to make it my own reality, as a way to make it specific in the hope that it would speak to all those details of life that end up feeling universal.”

The reality he’s talking about is that of a middle-aged gay man who was a young teenager at the end of the 80s, when the Aids crisis unleashed a wave of savage homophobia (a survey in 1987 discovered that 75% of the UK thought homosexuality was “always” or “mostly” wrong). “I wanted it to be very specific about a certain generation of gay person, which was our generation,” Haigh says when I tell him I’m also gay, and a year younger than him. “It wasn’t an easy time. Growing up, I felt, ‘If I’m going to become a gay person I’m not going to have a future, and the only other alternative is not to be gay’ – which of course you can’t not be. So I wanted to tell that story.”

All of Us Strangers depicts someone struggling with the lasting effects of a childhood disfigured not only by bereavement, but also by prejudice and hatred. “There’s a generation of queer people grieving for the childhood they never had,” Haigh says. “I think there’s a sense of nostalgia for something we never got, because we were so tormented. It feels close to grief. It dissipates, but it’s always there. It’s like a knot in your stomach.”

Much of All of Us Strangers’ emotional power comes from the brutally repressed Adam attempting to dispel his feelings of shame and isolation in order to be seen and loved for the person he truly is. To this end, he takes the opportunity, denied to him by their death, to come out to his mum and dad, separately. His mum is shocked – “Isn’t it a very lonely life?” – and worried about Aids. His dad, not unkindly, says: “We always knew you were a bit tutti-frutti.” Says Haigh: “The coming-out scenes are about the importance of being known. It’s very hard to move through life if you feel you’re not understood. And if you’re not understood, you feel you’re alone.”

Adam asks his father why he would never come into his room to comfort him when he was crying after being bullied at school – something else Haigh suffered. “I was about nine, and the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did,” he says. “So you’re like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names.’ But they could feel it somehow. When my mum saw the film, she was like, ‘Is this what happened to you?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different, and that’s the last thing you want. It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family – you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.”

Haigh came out to his parents in his mid-20s. His father now has dementia, and went into a care home during the making of All of Us Strangers. Visiting him one weekend, the film-maker discovered his dad no longer remembered his son was gay. “He was like, ‘Are you married? Have you got a wife?’ I’ve been out to my dad for a very long time and he’s been beautifully accepting, and it had completely gone from his mind. I found myself suddenly having the same fear I had when I was in my 20s, of having to come out to him again. And I realised I couldn’t do it because I didn’t want to upset him. But in the end he was quiet for a while and then he said, ‘Well, as long as you have found love.’ It felt like such a beautiful thing for my dad to say. He just understood what was the important thing, and in so many ways it spoke so much to what the film is about. And then I had to come down again and shoot that scene with Jamie and Andrew in my old lounge, so it was emotionally complicated.”

The film also draws on Haigh’s relationship with his own children, who are 10 and 12. “They don’t live with me full-time, but when I’m with them and I’m their parent, I’m always worried. Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing? Am I helping them? As I’ve got older I’ve realised you don’t need a parent to give advice, necessarily. You don’t need them to solve things because sometimes you can only solve it yourself.”

Beyond fulfilling the needs of a child, there is something about being a queer parent that makes one wonder how you and your children will fit into broader society. “It’s like, ‘Are we different?” Haigh asks. “Do we have a new way of being? Do we have a different way that our families can exist, because we don’t have a model? I know a lot of queer people who have kids and they’re all trying to navigate that. Are we trying to be like our parents were to us, or are we trying to be something else?”

All of Us Strangers is particularly acute in its use of 80s hits such as The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Johnny Come Home by Fine Young Cannibals and Build by the Housemartins, all of which Adam listens to while mulling over his childhood, and which then becomes part of the supernatural world he visits (he and his parents joyfully put up festive decorations to Pet Shop Boys’ Always on my Mind, Christmas No 1 in 1987). To young gay boys denied role models – especially when section 28 made it illegal for schools and local authorities to offer positive representations of homosexuality – and who were too terrified to disclose our queerness to our dads, gay pop stars like Neil Tennant and Holly Johnson, and also gentle straight frontmen such as Roland Gift and Paul Heaton, were the only people who seemed to point the way to how we might be able to live as grown men.

“Paul Heaton and Roland Gift aren’t queer artists, but they so spoke to me,” Haigh agrees. “I’m sure my political viewpoints are based on listening to the Housemartins” – who were avowedly socialist at the time of the Thatcher government. “Pop music was so important – it gave me hope as a kid. I used to sing The Power of Love to myself in my bedroom, not really understanding anything about myself at that point, but knowing that it was longing for something, and believing that something could be possible. When I put this song in the film, I was thinking that my childhood self would have been so amazed that I’m doing what I’m doing now – able to tell a story about queerness for other people to see, and not be terrified.”

“I never dreamed that I would get to be / The creature that I always meant to be,” as Pet Shop Boys put it in Being Boring? “Don’t!” Haigh says, who is a diehard fan. “I can’t even listen to that line – it makes me want to burst into tears.”

As he comes out to her, Adam explains to his mother that things are much better for gay people now, and his relationship with Harry, a northerner in his 20s, allows Haigh to explore the personal effects of those changes – and whether they have really gone as far as one might think. For instance, Harry identifies as queer, and when Adam says he uses the term gay, Harry tells him the word was a ubiquitous insult when he was at school: “Your haircut’s gay. Your schoolbag’s gay.” Harry says his family are relaxed about his sexuality, but their focus is on his heterosexual siblings and their children, not the tache-wearing, whisky-swigging black sheep of the family.

Is Haigh saying that to be gay is to be alienated? “I don’t think so,” he says. “I know a lot of young gay people who do not feel alienation. I imagine some of them will watch this film and be like, ‘Why are they all complaining? There’s nothing to moan about, life is absolutely fine.’ But I also know people close to me, younger than me, who’ve found it very difficult. So I don’t want to pretend that everything is all great either. But also, it’s important to me that both characters are not lonely because they’re gay – they are lonely because the world has made them feel different. Harry has moved to London, which can be a very alienating place. There are lots of reasons why you can slip gently into aloneness and if you cannot find something to get you out of that, you can stop caring about yourself, which is Harry’s problem.”

Like Weekend, All of Us Strangers is frank about drug use. In a moment of gay inter-generational misunderstanding, Harry gives Adam white powder on a key, which Adam lustily sniffs thinking it’s cocaine – but it’s ketamine. “To pretend that drug use isn’t part of the gay scene is just an absolute lie,” Haigh says. “I think I’ve always tried not to glorify drug-taking, but to be honest – drugs can feel wonderful and also make you feel paranoid and afraid and alone. You can slip away, you can lose your grounding. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should go out and take drugs!”

As its narcotic, dreamlike feel sets in, All of Us Strangers increasingly wrongfoots the audience. “I saw the film as a spiral, and it kept getting woozier and stranger,” Haigh says. Adam starts to get feverish, which is unexplained in the film, though Haigh points out that it happens after his mother mentions Aids. “I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we had a bit of a sweat if we were having sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we were going to have HIV,” Haigh says. “A swollen gland was not just a swollen gland. I wanted to have that trickling under the surface, that Aids is another fear that Adam has buried. I’m telling a ghost story – what are the things that haunt him?”

The film’s more surreal moments include a trippy, time-warping scene set to Blur’s Death of a Party and filmed at gay pub the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, where Haigh used to go to the club night Duckie; and a setpiece in which the adult Adam, wearing his childhood pyjamas, gets in bed between his parents. “However old you are, you feel like a kid,” Haigh believes. “You can’t escape that feeling of wanting to be with your parents again and have them look after you. I loved the idea that these pyjamas didn’t fit, because we want to go back to our childhood, but of course it doesn’t fit.”

Towards the end of the film, Adam’s parents take him to a deserted diner in the Whitgift shopping centre in Croydon, Haigh’s childhood haunt (“at Fairfield Hall next door I saw Bucks Fizz, which was the first concert I went to, which may be the gayest thing anybody’s ever done”). In this tacky, mundane setting, something painfully bittersweet occurs. Then there’s the film’s conclusion, which can either be read as romantic and hopeful, or a vision of overwhelming sadness. “More than anything, I wanted you to leave the cinema and have the film continue on within you,” Haigh says. “45 Years was the same, and even Weekend.”

This month, the LA Times named All of Us Strangers as the best film of 2023; at the New York film festival, the critic Mark Harris said the cinema was awash. The consensus so far appears to be not only that it is a masterpiece, but a profoundly moving one. Haigh is relieved: “When you make something personal, you’re putting it out into the world, and if the world turns round and says, ‘I don’t like that and I don’t care about it’, you can’t help but think, ‘OK, you basically don’t care about me.’”

Although the film has a particular, queer point of view, he believes its universal themes make it accessible to everyone. “All of us are children, a lot of us are parents, a lot of us are in a relationship or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this film when I was 15, it would probably have made a big difference to me.”'

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ang3lik · 1 year

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me immediately reblogging and participating is so true. i love that you're a lana girl just like me <333 congrats, angel you deserve the absolute world!

❤️ please ! fandom: scream + here's my funky little description!

full name: allyson. ( it's actually my middle name ), entj, she/her, 19. my favorite colors are pink and navy blue. i'm 5'11, afro-latina, and a scorpio sun, taurus moon, and pisces rising (according to my chart i'm ruled by jupiter and the sun). i am a lana truther but some of my other favorite artists include banks, lorde, bad bunny, and coco + clair clair.

i'm bisexual, but i have a larger attraction to women than men. my relationship with my mum is a bit strained but i'm close to my dad (not in the internalized misogyny way though). i was raised in the south (to this day i don't know why my parents did this to me) but spent a lot of time up north and went through the catholic girl phase including ending up wanting to kiss girls lmao. i'm deeply spiritual but not religious and wear a lot of jewelry (gold and silver).

right now i'm in school for cosmetic chemistry to learn how to formulate makeup. i am obsessed with aesthetics. i'm very sentimental and emotional but not when you first meet me. when it comes to love i fall last but the hardest. i love to read (currently rereading beautiful creatures which is an all-time fave) and some of my favorite films are jackie, arrival, last night in soho, thoroughbreds, and the great gatsby. i can be kind to a fault but i don't care because i'd rather die than be known as mean.

according to my friends here are things that they associate with me: leaving long messages for them that connect to bluetooth in their car, coconut and vanilla scented anything, spiced coffee in the mornings bc i learned it from my mum, bamboo hoops, slowed lana songs, minimalism w art deco accents, annotations in my books to the point where the pages are cracking, long box braids, almond shaped nails, pinterest, the almond blossom painting by van gogh (this made me cry), birth charts, going to the cinema alone, upstate new york, and vacations on film.

i am so sorry if this is way too much info but i love you and i'm so proud of you!! you deserve everything you're getting and you are so sweet to top it all of! can't hug you in person but know that i'm always sending you my love, all of it.

my love !! you’re so sweet and all the best girls are lana girls i swear !!

honestly you give me such aqua, mermaidy, beachy, beautiful vibes ! i love earthy girls and with you being an earth sign i feel like your aura and vibe just ties all in so well ! you seem so pretty and peaceful i can just tell you’re a wonderful person ! 💗

but i totally ship you with… jill roberts.

you’re both complete opposites, but opposites attract! you wear the pink shirts and jill wears the blue plaid! a pisces and a taurus are a terrific match! you’re both able to comfort each other in times of need and are a strong, stable couple! you bring a lot of love and brilliance to each other, and help each other find the happiness and delight in things!

you’re both lana lovers! you help jill bring out her emotions and express them to you, it t as yes a-lot for her to open up towards you but you’re her rock! you both share a love of reading and recommend books to each other! you’re both very much vanilla girls, you both smell very sweet, always stealing each others coconut scented body sprays and if you ever trade clothes you can smell each other on them!

you definitely do each others nails! painting them pastels with french tips or even just giving each other manicures sometimes! jill has plans to visit new york at some point and she really wants to take you with her, and explore the big apple with you! she can’t wait for all the adventures and exploring you’ll get up-to! but you both live a very simple life too! you both enjoy just relaxing and being in each others presence.

i hope you like it ! i would love to see you and jill together oml ! 💗

#「 ally .ᐟ 」#— celebrations ִ ࣪𖤐 #scream #scream iv #scream 4 #jill roberts #emma roberts #❤️ lust for life

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xaharadesert · 4 months

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7 More of My Favourite Horror (Adjacent) Movies and Why You Should Watch Them

(Not in any particular order or subgenre. TW are vague, spoiler free, and from my memory, but you should Google any of these before you watch them. Not all triggers are listed because it’s horror and stuff like death and murder is common)

Part 1 here!

1. Fractured

A man waits in a hospital for his daughter and wife to return from some tests, but they seem to have gone missing.

If you like being sad and also confused (like me), then this is a great film for you! Don’t worry, the end will clear things up, but until then you’ll have a hundred of your own theories developing. Definitely a movie that you have to pay attention to, but it’s not difficult once the mystery begins.

Scary: 1/10

Gore: 2/10

Disturbing: 4/10

Psychological: 9/10

Actual genre: psychological thriller

TW: insanity

2. The House

An animated anthology of three short films all centring around the same house.

Gorgeous animation, fast paced, and constantly off-putting. Each of the short films is vastly different, but they’re all very unsettling in their own way. The second was my personal favourite, but I’d say the first was the most disturbing. The third one is a nice way to ease you out of the absolute horror of the first two so you can go about your day without letting the film consume your thoughts.

Scary: 3/10, 3/10, 1/10

Gore: 0/10, 0/10, 0/10

Disturbing: 6/10, 5/10, 2/10

Psychological: 3/10, 4/10, 2/10

Actual genre: horror comedy

3. I Saw The Devil

After a man’s wife is brutally murdered, he puts his life on hold to hunt down the killer and make him suffer.

As far as non-horror movies go, this is by far one of the most disturbing. The murderer is one of the worst you’ll see play an extended part in the movie, which would be awful if it weren’t for the fact that most of the film is the protagonist purposely letting the killer get away just so he can hunt him down and attack him again. The protagonist isn’t an objectively good character either, but there is something very satisfying about watching him take out his extended revenge.

Scary: 3/10

Gore: 7/10

Disturbing: 7/10

Psychological: 3/10

Actual genre: action thriller

TW: rape, sexual assault, graphic gore, cannibalism

4. Hard Candy

A 14 year old girl decides to meet up alone with an older man she met on the internet and go to his house.

Elliott Page my beloved. One of his earlier works, but still amazing. I’m not sure if these one really qualifies as horror, as it’s definitely more of a revenge fantasy, but the first 20 or so minutes had me very worried. Definitely an unsettling atmosphere, but after the first little bit it’s absolutely amazing. Would recommend to anyone, but especially to women who are tired of seeing other women and girls victimized by the narrative.

Scary: 2/10

Gore: 2/10

Disturbing: 4/10

Psychological: 3/10

Actual genre: psychological thriller

TW: pedophilia, surgery, suicide

5. Last Night in Soho

A young girl rents a room while off at college and starts dreaming of the life of the girl who lived there before her in the 60s.

This movie made me cry more than once (but in a good way). I genuinely forgot it was a horror movie for the first 45 minutes or so, and then was very rudely reminded. Gives off the same vibes as Coraline, but in a more adult sense. Absolutely gorgeous cinematography and the character arcs make me feel so many emotions. Also it has Matt Smith, and that immediately sold me on it. Another movie I would recommend especially to women.

Scary: 3/10

Gore: 3/10

Disturbing: 6/10

Psychological: 8/10

Actual genre: psychological horror

TW: rape, prostitution, suicide, insanity

6. As the Gods Will

Every high schooler in Japan is abducted by aliens and made to compete in murder games to determine who is the most worthy.

Absolutely batshit insane movie with some of the weirdest… everything. Genuinely hilarious at times, but also immensely gory and occasionally heart touching. I urge you to go into this with zero expectations. Just have fun. Probably the type of movie to watch with your friends when you’re drunk, or alone at 3am when you’re sleep deprived.

Scary: 2/10

Gore: 6/10

Disturbing: 5/10

Psychological: 3/10

Actual genre: supernatural horror

7. Tusk

A podcaster visits an old man’s remotely located home to interview him.

OKAY HEAR ME OUT. I know this made the rounds on TikTok for being awful, but it’s seriously one of my favourite. Also batshit insane, but with a perfect blend of comedy, psychological horror, and really creepy practical effects. There’s no one to root for in this film; everyone is awful. But seriously, a great movie to watch if you have no expectations. I’ve seen it 3 times. Also, oddly specific, but I feel like if you like Angel’s of Death for the psychological aspects, then you’ll like this too.

Scary: 3/10

Gore: 2/10

Disturbing: 6/10

Psychological: 4/10

Actual genre: body horror comedy

#horror #horror movies #horror movie recommendations

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mariska · 1 year

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so last night was halloween of course and i made like one post about it i think but. unfortunately because in all seriousness i do struggle with a lot of overlapping mental illness that is a bad combination with my physical health issues and neurological disorders, halloween almost always ends up being a very stressful anxiety inducing thing for me because its my absolute favorite, like, officially recognized holiday and my fav day of the year but i think because of that i always unintentionally put this huge amount of pressure on myself to Do Everything Perfectly with whatever costume or outfit or activity i have planned for myself and pretty much every year with a few exceptions since i was like 15 its resulted in me getting halfway or entirely dressed into a halloween costume only to have something relatively small trigger my fight or flight reaction and make me have a complete emotional breakdown or autistic shutdown or sensory overload attack

anyways. that unfortunately happened again with me yesterday where i was *almost* finished getting dressed in the halloween costume i'd been planning for a little while (Sandie from the movie Last Night in Soho) and i had bought this cheap drug store hair extension bump-it to put under my wig to try and do that semi-beehive style that character wears her hair in, but i have never used hair extensions that aren't just hot topic clip on strips before and my motor skills were failing rapidly on me since i'd spent all afternoon putting makeup on and was very very overloaded and i just couldn't figure the hair bump thing out in time and the breakdown just happened very fast and before i could really process that i had accidentally tried to do too much on my own in one day i had already cried a lot of my makeup off and was realizing that i wouldn't feel comfortable taking any photos in my outfit because it was very visible from makeup streak lines and my red puffy eyes that i was Very Upset For Real And Not For Pretend

the whole reason i am saying any of this is because luckily i was able to turn the night around by hanging out with some of my dear friends online later and doing our yearly rewatch of Over The Garden Wall, but before that i needed to take the ruined makeup off and change into pajamas so i wouldn't continue to be in a complete shutdown and could start to move on to a better activity. and as i was slowly and sadly taking my wig off and trying to un-tangle the bump it extension from how horribly i had tried to attach it to the wig, for some reason my first thought when i got it free was 'it would be funny if this little hair piece was my whole head of hair'. so i put it facing front on my bald wig cap head and opened my phone camera and immediately starting laughing over how incredibly silly i looked and i juat wanted to share those pics here because i woke up a little while ago and suddenly remembered those pics existed and its still very funny to me

#NDSHDJSSYEBRWNEIFJHD MAN ITS STILL VERY FUNNY TO ME #the whole back of my head was bare since this wasnt a wig its just this section of wig hair #i sent it to my friends' group chat and was like 'ryo asuka having a breakdown but its the 1960s'

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daniellew150 · 4 months

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Things of 2023, Part 1, Books.

I enjoyed sharing this last year, so trying to make it a tradition. Managed a few more books this year, and there are some I bought but didn’t have time to read, so I guess they will make it into next year’s list.

So let’s get into it.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens.

Not a new one, but quite possibly one of my favourite books of all time, I think this is the third copy I’ve owned over the years. It’s fun, dark, and the characterisation is just wonderful. I always enjoyed Newt’s journey of trying to find who he really is, but I think that is probably true of all the major characters.

The adaptation on Amazon was brilliant, and season 2 has set up the finale nicely, really looking forward to finding out what Terry and Neil came up with.

Ben Aaronovitch: Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho.

Rivers of London was a recommendation from a work friend, was a great call, part supernatural thriller, part police procedural. It’s got plenty of laughs, some proper scares. The main characters are superbly rounded and made me want to read the rest of the series. Managed book two, Moon Over Soho, and it follows on brilliantly. It has plenty of ongoing themes, but with a great new mystery (or two) to deal with. Will definitely be looking at the rest of the series (I think I have another 8 books to go!).

Hiron Ennes: Leech

Wasn’t sure if I should include this one as I haven’t finished it yet, but decided I would definitely have finished it by new year, so counts towards 2023. Very creepy and dark, with a bit of body horror but a really intriguing plot. Can’t wait to find out what happens.

Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus.

This one didn’t make it into the picture as I’ve lent the book to someone. This was another recommendation and was mind blowing. A centuries long magical battle, which is also a love story. Not just between the protagonists, but people who they meet along the way. The description of the circus is so vivid that it really comes to life. If I get my copy back, this is one I will definitely read again and again.

Neil Gaiman: Sandman (book 1).

I’d obviously heard about this for years, and really enjoyed the Netflix series last year, so decided I should go look at the source material. Definitely worth it. Great stories and wonderful illustration. Another one where I will have to get the rest of the series at some point.

Robin Ince: Bibliomaniac.

I’ve read a few of Robin’s books now, and I love the narrative style. This one is a tour of Britain’s bookshops (the book tour for The Importance of Being Interested that I read last year). Couple of bits that really made me chuckle, one about my home town, quoting another author as “a dull spot which even drink can’t enliven much” . Another was Shakespeare themed pun shop names (a chiropodist called Two Gentlemen of Verruca for example).

Matt Parker: Humble Pi.

Another one that didn’t make the photo, I was lent this one, and have now returned it. This is right up my street, stories of maths and engineering and how they can cause problems if not used properly. Feels like a book version of the Well There’s Your Problem podcast.

Cariad Lloyd: You are not alone.

Feels reductive to call this a spin off from Cariad’s podcast, but that is definitely the starting point. A fantastic book on grief and grieving, interwoven with Cariad’s own story of her father’s death when she was a teenager. I found it so useful to process some of my own emotions around death of family members, but also other forms of grief (loss of relationships). This is an amazing resource, and remember the five steps of grief were never meant for the way they are used today.

Mattie Lubchansky: Boys Weekend.

I came across Mattie as a guest on various podcasts, and their cartoons on The Nib, so when Boys Weekend came out I ordered it immediately. A great graphic novel about navigating old friendships as a trans person, but also giving capitalism an absolute kicking. Loved it, and recently heard there will be a sequel in 2025.. stay tuned.

Julie McDowell: Attack Warning Red!

Another book from one of my favourite podcasts (Atomic Hobo). An amazingly well researched book on Civil Defence in Britain as it came out of the Second World War, and into the potential atomic horrors of the Cold War. A wonderful mix of whimsy and terrifying details.

Jake & Hannah Graf: Becoming Us.

I’ve read quite a few biographies of Trans people at this point, but this is two stories in one, with a proper happy ending. Reading two very different lives, but both with a common thread. A chance encounter leading to a wonderful family. It really is a book about hope.

Munroe Bergdorf: Transitional.

Another Trans life story, but with a really interesting twist, how life is change, and everything is a transitional state in many ways. Wonderfully written with again a huge amount of joy. So many of these books have changed the way I view myself and how I approach the world, this is another one that has moved my mindset again.

Garbage: This is the noise that keeps me awake.

A proper coffee table book. A lovely object, that charts the history of one of my favourite bands. Garbage mean a lot to me, they are one of the groups that helped me realise I could be myself. I love the inclusion of the band cocktail recipes.

James Hetfield: Messengers, The Guitars of James Hetfield.

As a Metallica fan, and a guitarist this is a fantastic book. Some band history, some truly fantastic photography and just some wonderful guitars. Will always love the ESP V with the Hot Rod flames, but seeing an authentic 1958 Gibson Explorer is brilliant.

#books #trans rights #guitars

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kylekozmikdeluxo · 4 months

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"Good morning, young master, it's 1882..."

The early years of Paul McCartney's post-Beatles group Wings have been on my mind for the past few weeks, even before the untimely passing of the one Wings member who stuck with Paul and the late Linda McCartney through thick and thin: Denny Laine.

15 years ago... Early 2008...

By March, I was scalp-deep in the solo output of McCartney. I had already went through a Beatle-obsessive phase, now I was onto Paul's stuff. His first two albums and such, the first couple of Wings album, just endlessly fascinated by a lot of it...

One day, I had come across a bootleg of a song called... '1882'...

It was in its home demo form, taped sometime in mid-to-late 1970. Presumably a little after the release of MCCARTNEY... The song, in any form, wouldn't see an official release until 2018...

youtube

... and this one fascinated me the *most* out of the unreleased material.

1882 would later be turned into a dreary near 7-minute epic in the studio in 1972, and a similar take was played live throughout the Wings Over Europe tour that took place from July to August of that year. At several points, a live recording from Berlin was to be used on Wings' second album - and Paul's fourth overall - RED ROSE SPEEDWAY, which was released in April 1973 after being cut from a double-LP to a single-disc.

Anyways, where was I? Winter 2008... January-March, precisely... Life was rough. I don't want to get too into it, but my brain was in a very low place... It was small special interests like these that got me through such miserable days, and probably made worse by the bitter winter conditions. New England isn't particularly nice during this time of year, you get some truly bitter days mixed with some inexplicable near-summerish ones. Something something Mark Twain-

And when I heard 1882 for the first time... I felt like, for a moment, after so much going on... It's like I woke up in 1882... Like the opening lyrics of the song... I had such a vivid picture of waking up in a vintage old house in the woods.

At the time, I frequently saw my father on the weekends, when he was living in a city. His house, that he got from his parents, was largely not updated since around the early 1980s I want to say? It still had wood-paneled walls, green shag carpet, '70s wallpaper on a vintage stairwell, and the room I slept in... I might as well have stepped into a bedroom from the 1960s. Like how Thomasin McKenzie's lead character, when she stays in that apartment, in LAST NIGHT IN SOHO.

I honestly miss that house sometimes.

But that all just rammed home the vintage-ness of the song, especially in its home demo form. It sounds like Paul recorded it on his Scottish farm, a bucolic and remote setting far off from Liverpool and London. For sure. I feel that sleepy farm life, a post-Beatles wind-down and restart, is captured so beautifully on MCCARTNEY, RAM, and WILD LIFE, and there's some of it left on RED ROSE SPEEDWAY. (It also helps that two songs on that album are RAM leftovers.)

I also really enjoy the studio and live versions, too, but the home demo fits the time period nicely. It's almost a vivid picture into a mundane, if not grim life in the late 19th century. It really inspired me to write stories set in the late 19th century, British period pieces, stuff like that. Not necessarily Victorian ones, but ones set in the countryside, quaint and relatively uneventful, but very much full of feeling and vibe. Almost like an early Disney film or a Miyazaki film. To this day, I still incorporate those kinds of aesthetics and ideas into what it is I do... It's just endlessly fascinating to me, and I do wonder how a song like this would've been received had it come out when it was supposed to.

And even to this day, sometimes, when all feels like a flurry. An utter tornado, a rush of emotions, happenings, and anxieties... I create a mental black out in my head, and then imagine a character waking up... And it's 1882... Somewhere in the countryside...

(The oil painting is apparently titled A VIEW IN HEREFORDSHIRE, Thomas British, fitting name, made around the 1880s)

#Youtube

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megvsmovies · 2 years

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'West Side Story' - Spielberg's First Venture into the World of Musicals

"now it begins, now it starts" -- María, 'One Hand, One Heart'

My first film review (albeit one taken from a university assignment). Let's roll up our sleeves and take a dip into this new venture...

2021 saw the long-awaited release of several films pushed back (and back) due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and numerous lockdowns: No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021), The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021), and Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021) to name but a few. Perhaps the most anticipated, especially within the musical theatre circle, was the release of Steven Spielberg’s debut movie-musical West Side Story; based on the musical conceptualised by Jerome Robbins in 1957, it features music and lyrics by legendary Broadway composers Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (respectively), and a new screenplay written by Tony Kushner – who has previously collaborated with Spielberg on Lincoln (2012).

Set in 1950s New York, the film follows two rival gangs: the white youths, known as the Jets, and the Sharks – the Puerto Rican gang who live in the San Juan Hill community, where the Jets wish to gain control. The story is based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and thus follows the romance between the Jets’ leader Tony, and the Sharks’ leader’s sister María. The film tackles themes of immigration and racial inequalities, youth gangs and crimes, as well as the poverty linked to the aforementioned. The film features pairs of friendships, romances, and rivals, and what can happen when these dynamics are shattered.

The cast of this film is spectacular. Everyone, from the ensemble to the individual Sharks and Jets, was masterfully cast and each actor impressively performed their role, but I do believe that three actors in particular must be applauded (I could extend this easily to at least seven, but I fear I may never stop singing this outstanding cast’s praises!).

In her feature film debut, 20-year-old Rachel Zegler becomes María Vasquez, but this time she is a María for the modern era: María exudes passion, independence, and wisdom, and Zegler transforms every bit of her New Jersey-native self into the character. To think that she was cast in this role at only 17-years-old, and to have developed such an iconic musical theatre character into her own, is astounding. I truly cannot praise her enough for her performance in the film, as well as the positive representation she now provides for young Latina girls. As Sondheim himself said, she sings “like a nightingale” (Appler, 2021), and I am certain he is proud of her.

Often found opposite Zegler was María’s sister-in-law Anita; played by Broadway actress Ariana DeBose, musical theatre fans may recognise her from Netflix’s The Prom (2020) as well as the original Broadway cast of Hamilton (2016/2020). As Anita, DeBose portrayed optimism and rawness within such a tumultuous character and was riveting to watch throughout the emotional rollercoaster she took me on. Her duet with Rachel Zegler ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’ portrays such deep, heart shattering emotion that truly made me wonder if she had gone through similar, to be able to perform as she did. In such stark contrast, her performances at the gym dance and her number ‘America’ filled me with the same optimism as Anita has that she may achieve the American Dream – and helped solidify DeBose as a true triple threat within musical theatre.

This film must also be commended on its inclusivity, diversity, and representation it provides to a range of communities. For me, the character Anybodys stood out from the first frame he was featured in, to the last. Played by non-binary Broadway actor iris menas (it should be mentioned that menas presents hir name in all lowercase), the previously tomboyish character was played strictly by women, as a woman. Anybodys is a character that many lesbian and transgender people related to in past productions, and to therefore see him (menas has specified that hir portrayal of Anybodys uses he/him pronouns) as a transmasculine person brings the well needed, positive representation of a community so often outcast and abused to the big screen. As a queer, non-binary person myself, the joy I felt watching Anybodys and realising – without it even needing to be said – that he is transgender was euphoric, and something I had yet to experience in a film. To experience such a personal reaction to seeing representation of my community, especially in a film directed by a cinematic legend such as Spielberg, was at first surreal – but more importantly inspiring. I believe that cinema should represent its audience, and I hope that Anybodys is the opportunity filmmakers needed to open the floodgates and showcase more queer and trans stories.

So, Spielberg’s take on West Side Story: a rehash or a revamp? In comparison to the 1961 film adaptation, it is definitely a great improvement – just contemplate the (obvious!) casting of all Latinx Sharks (whoever cast Natalie Wood, I’m looking at you…), or the out-and-proud representation of a transgender character, or the consideration taken into employing an intimacy coordinator to ensure the safety of Ariana DeBose. However, it must also be considered whether you can improve what some consider the greatest musical film of all time. There is a certain element of spectacle and ‘wow!’ the 1961 film still holds on audiences today, and even more when it was originally released. We must perhaps ask if this new adaptation can wow us even more than any previous production has. I would argue that Spielberg’s take does. One moment that remains in my memory, even a month after my first viewing, was the gasp I let out as the gym doors opened to reveal the dance. The sheer delight on every single actor’s face during the gym dance scenes – as an audience member I felt transported, as if I was sat on the bleachers watching it unfold in front of me. And that is how I felt at every twist and turn of the film: truly transported to 1957 New York, rooting for and urging on each character as if they were a friend.

~~~

I feel it should be said, as I conclude this review, thank you to Stephen Sondheim. Without him, this film wouldn’t have been made – simply put. But on a personal note – without his work in musical theatre, I wouldn’t be here, writing this review, as I am.

May his memory be a blessing.

~~~

Sources: Appler, M. (2021) Steven Spielberg and ‘West Side Story’ Cast Remember Stephen Sondheim’s Legacy at New York Premiere, Variety, 30 November.

#west side story #film review #film student #steven spielberg #musicals #rachel zegler #classic film #stephen sondheim #lgbtq #new blog #first post

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laputaindefrenchgirl · 2 years

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you’re my world, you’re every move i make.

This is the story of a girl who’s chasing a past she never lived yet, almost broken-hearted.

Yesterday, I saw Last Night in Soho, and it left me feeling strange, hopeful, and with a sense of déjà-vu. Alexandra Collins went through believing that she could do whatever she ever dreamt of to getting cheated on in the ugliest way. She saved herself. I understand her and I do not understand why.

I’ve never been more beautiful than I am these days, and I still want it all. Last month I did a photoshoot inspired by the seventies and its glamour and it was like travelling in the past. How can I feel nostalgia for a decade I’ve never lived? My eyes, they never lie, and when I see the photos, I know that I am more me than ever I’ve ever been, as if I knew it. And as I’m writing this, I’m confused, am I speaking about the movie or am I speaking about the fantasy I’ve had ever since that I was a little kid?

Maybe that’s the disability thing, maybe that’s the old-kind-of-soul trope after reading Fitzgerald or Austen but honestly, the late sixties always felt like I could have a chance to belong. It doesn’t stop me though, it never will, and I am blooming into the woman I am and it’s precious and romantic. The music flooding into a never ending dance, and how everything seemed possible and free. After two WW, nothing could stop anyone’s creative hunger. Everybody could have a chance to become who they are and dream, bigger than everything (darling). If my words could convey the way it’s calling me, how it makes my stomach sing and my eyes starstruck! I wish I could have felt that freedom and that vibrant lust for life. Maybe I had. The current era we’re living will make me, I don’t doubt it a single second, but my romantic side craves the past.

At the same time, what’s in the past is in the past, I don’t look back and barely hold the word regret in my vocabulary. But as an artist, and as a young woman, I just can’t help but feel the way the satin kisses my shape and the way eyeliner make my eyes become killers. I can’t help but embrace the fantasy that I was born too late or feel connected to what might have been, once upon a time.

Even the violence seems too familiar. Alexandra, just like Eloise did, I wish I could have told you “I understand” because I wish someone would do the same for me. Women who go for it, who are bold, and witty, shameless and talented, I love you.

All these night where I dreamt of (and will probably keep on dreaming on) untold stories like they were holy secrets, with awe and romance, and gut wrenching accomplishments. I’ve lived these moments but were they mine? And I took them for what they are, precious hours that the universe gave me, and in return I kept the love, pain and smiles close to my soul, to never forget.

This is my love letter to the person I could have been in the past and who kept going after everything that happened to her. You are who you are and it’s vivid in my mind as if we’re one and maybe, you could have used a friend or a savior. I know it doesn’t stop you from saving yourself, no matter what. You’re too much. You got the thrill life needs for and you don’t take no for an answer. Drugs didn’t kill you and weapons neither, even if it does hurt. They look at you as if they think they know but they don’t know shit. You dress in colors and have magnetic eyes and it’s how you convey the truth. The cupid bow of your lips. You fell in love with a city and it doesn't change a thing, in the best and in the worst, but you keep going. And you live as if you had nothing to lose, I admire you for that so fucking much. Your heart might be broken but you know how to put it back together to try again. And you’re beautiful, so bloody beautiful. You’re a part of me and a part of who I might have been once, somewhere, someday in the long forgotten past. But I’m emotional and feeling like we already met. Is it possible?

-Audrey

nb : Thank you Edgar Wright for the kaleidoscope trip.

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denimbex1986 · 3 months

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'WHEN Andrew Haigh was shooting his new film, All of Us Strangers, in his parents’ old house in Croydon, something strange began to happen.

“I started getting eczema again, and I’d not had eczema since I was a kid,” says the director, who is now 50.

“It was coming up in the exact same places. I thought, ‘What the fuck is happening to me?’ I feel there is a sense that your body remembers trauma. Somehow things get almost embedded in your DNA, and they find ways to leak out.”

One night after a fire alarm, a younger man called Harry, played by Paul Mescal, drunkenly comes to his door. Although Adam initially rejects him, the pair later embark on the love affair he has always yearned for — and Mescal and Scott are explosively convincing as a couple.

“Casting is like running a dating agency,” says Haigh.

“I have to be careful to pick the people who will be good together.”

When Adam decides to return to the house he grew up in, he discovers that his mum and dad — played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy — are still living there, the same age they were when they died, in a perpetual 1987.

The film — which won Best Film and Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards in December — somehow blends a love story, a ghost story, and a time-flipped coming-of-age narrative.

Masterful exploration

The result is a masterful exploration of loneliness and grief, the relationship between children and their parents, and a demonstration of the fact that time, far from healing, can bring childhood trauma rearing up stronger than ever in middle age.

But it’s also a tender, aching expression of the insatiable human need for love and connection, which Haigh depicts as being so powerful that it can annihilate the border between life and death.

“All the people in the film are longing for something — to be understood, to be known,” Haigh says.

All of Us Strangers is a “very free” adaptation of the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada (who died last month aged 89), which the film-maker wrote during the pandemic while living in Los Angeles. “There’s a pandemic emotion at the heart of it,” he says. “We all spent a lot of time staring out of the window, didn’t we?”

Sitting in a Soho hotel suite, Haigh — whose previous films include Weekend and 45 Years, and who also made the TV series Looking and The North Water — was keen to make the film “as personal as I could. It’s about someone having a reunion with their own past, so it made sense that I had to do the same thing.

"As I was writing about the home Adam goes back to, I started thinking about my own childhood home, and when we were talking about where to shoot I thought, ‘I’ll just go down and see if it’s still there.’ I couldn’t remember where it was on the street because I left there when I was nine or 10” — when his parents divorced — “but I had the photo that Adam lifts up in the film, with Claire Foy put in instead of my mum.”

The only way was to make it my own reality, as a way to make it specific in the hope that it would speak to all those details of life that end up feeling universal.”

"The reality he’s talking about is that of a middle-aged gay man who was a young teenager at the end of the ‘80s, when the Aids crisis unleashed a wave of savage homophobia (a survey in 1987 discovered that 75% of the UK thought homosexuality was “always” or “mostly” wrong).

“I wanted it to be very specific about a certain generation of gay person, which was our generation,” Haigh says when I tell him I’m also gay, and a year younger than him.

“It wasn’t an easy time. Growing up, I felt, ‘If I’m going to become a gay person I’m not going to have a future, and the only other alternative is not to be gay’ — which of course you can’t not be. So I wanted to tell that story.”

Prejudice and hatred

All of Us Strangers depicts someone struggling with the lasting effects of a childhood disfigured not only by bereavement, but also by prejudice and hatred.

“There’s a generation of queer people grieving for the childhood they never had,” Haigh says. “I think there’s a sense of nostalgia for something we never got, because we were so tormented. It feels close to grief. It dissipates, but it’s always there. It’s like a knot in your stomach.”

His mum is shocked — “Isn’t it a very lonely life?” — and worried about Aids. His dad, not unkindly, says: “We always knew you were a bit tutti-frutti.”

Says Haigh: “The coming-out scenes are about the importance of being known. It’s very hard to move through life if you feel you’re not understood. And if you’re not understood, you feel you’re alone.”

Adam asks his father why he would never come into his room to comfort him when he was crying after being bullied at school — something else Haigh suffered.

“I was about nine, and the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did,” he says. “So you’re like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names’. But they could feel it somehow. When my mum saw the film, she was like, ‘Is this what happened to you?’

"And I was like, ‘Yes’. If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different, and that’s the last thing you want.

It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family — you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.”

Haigh came out to his parents in his mid-20s. His father now has dementia, and went into a care home during the making of All of Us Strangers.

Visiting him one weekend, the film-maker discovered his dad no longer remembered his son was gay. “He was like, ‘Are you married? Have you got a wife?’ I’ve been out to my dad for a very long time and he’s been beautifully accepting, and it had completely gone from his mind.

"I found myself suddenly having the same fear I had when I was in my 20s, of having to come out to him again. And I realised I couldn’t do it because I didn’t want to upset him.

"But in the end, he was quiet for a while and then he said, ‘Well, as long as you have found love.’ It felt like such a beautiful thing for my dad to say. He just understood what was the important thing, and in so many ways it spoke so much to what the film is about.

"And then I had to come down again and shoot that scene with Jamie and Andrew in my old lounge, so it was emotionally complicated. My childhood self would have been amazed I’m telling a story about queerness, and not be terrified for others to see it.”

The film also draws on Haigh’s relationship with his own children, who are 10 and 12.

“They don’t live with me full time, but when I’m with them and I’m their parent, I’m always worried. Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing? Am I helping them? As I’ve got older I’ve realised you don’t need a parent to give advice, necessarily. You don’t need them to solve things because sometimes you can only solve it yourself.”

Being a queer parent

Beyond fulfilling the needs of a child, there is something about being a queer parent that makes one wonder how you and your children will fit into broader society.

“It’s like, ‘Are we different?” Haigh asks. “Do we have a new way of being? Do we have a different way that our families can exist, because we don’t have a model? I know a lot of queer people who have kids and they’re all trying to navigate that. Are we trying to be like our parents were to us, or are we trying to be something else?”

All of Us Strangers is particularly acute in its use of 80s hits such as ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘Johnny Come Home’ by Fine Young Cannibals, and ‘Build’ by the Housemartins, all of which Adam listens to while mulling over his childhood, and which then becomes part of the supernatural world he visits (he and his parents joyfully put up festive decorations to Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Always on my Mind’, Christmas No 1 in 1987).

To young gay boys denied role models — especially when section 28 made it illegal for schools and local authorities to offer positive representations of homosexuality — and who were too terrified to disclose our queerness to our dads, gay pop stars like Neil Tennant and Holly Johnson, and also gentle straight frontmen such as Roland Gift and Paul Heaton, were the only people who seemed to point the way to how we might be able to live as grown men.

“Paul Heaton and Roland Gift aren’t queer artists, but they so spoke to me,” Haigh agrees. “I’m sure my political viewpoints are based on listening to the Housemartins” — who were avowedly socialist at the time of the Thatcher government.

“Pop music was so important — it gave me hope as a kid.

I used to sing ‘The Power of Love’ to myself in my bedroom, not really understanding anything about myself at that point, but knowing that it was longing for something, and believing that something could be possible.

"When I put this song in the film, I was thinking that my childhood self would have been so amazed that I’m doing what I’m doing now — able to tell a story about queerness for other people to see, and not be terrified.”

Both characters are not lonely because they’re gay. They are lonely because the world has made them feel different.

“I never dreamed that I would get to be / The creature that I always meant to be,” as Pet Shop Boys put it in ‘Being Boring’?

“Don’t!” Haigh says, who is a diehard fan. “I can’t even listen to that line — it makes me want to burst into tears.”

Coming out

For instance, Harry identifies as queer, and when Adam says he uses the term “gay”, Harry tells him the word was a ubiquitous insult when he was at school: “Your haircut’s gay. Your schoolbag’s gay.”

Harry says his family are relaxed about his sexuality, but their focus is on his heterosexual siblings and their children, not the tache-wearing, whiskey-swigging black sheep of the family.

Is Haigh saying that to be gay is to be alienated? “I don’t think so,” he says.

“I know a lot of young gay people who do not feel alienation. I imagine some of them will watch this film and be like, ‘Why are they all complaining? There’s nothing to moan about, life is absolutely fine.’ But I also know people close to me, younger than me, who’ve found it very difficult.

"So I don’t want to pretend that everything is all great either. But also, it’s important to me that both characters are not lonely because they’re gay — they are lonely because the world has made them feel different. Harry has moved to London, which can be a very alienating place.

There are lots of reasons why you can slip gently into aloneness and if you cannot find something to get you out of that, you can stop caring about yourself, which is Harry’s problem.”

“To pretend that drug use isn’t part of the gay scene is just an absolute lie,” Haigh says. “I think I’ve always tried not to glorify drug-taking, but to be honest — drugs can feel wonderful and also make you feel paranoid and afraid and alone. You can slip away, you can lose your grounding. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should go out and take drugs!”

“I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we had a bit of a sweat if we were having sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we were going to have HIV,” Haigh says.

A ghost story

“A swollen gland was not just a swollen gland. I wanted to have that trickling under the surface, that Aids is another fear that Adam has buried. I’m telling a ghost story — what are the things that haunt him?”

The film’s more surreal moments include a trippy, time-warping scene set to Blur’s ‘Death of a Party’ and filmed at gay pub the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, where Haigh used to go to the club night Duckie; and a setpiece in which the adult Adam, wearing his childhood pyjamas, gets in bed between his parents.

“However old you are, you feel like a kid,” Haigh believes. “You can’t escape that feeling of wanting to be with your parents again and have them look after you. I loved the idea that these pyjamas didn’t fit, because we want to go back to our childhood, but of course it doesn’t fit.”

In this tacky, mundane setting, something painfully bittersweet occurs. Then there’s the film’s conclusion, which can either be read as romantic and hopeful, or a vision of overwhelming sadness. “More than anything, I wanted you to leave the cinema and have the film continue on within you,” Haigh says. “ 45 Years was the same, and even Weekend.”

Last month month, the LA Times named All of Us Strangers as the best film of 2023; at the New York film festival, the critic Mark Harris said the cinema was awash. The consensus so far appears to be not only that it is a masterpiece, but a profoundly moving one. Haigh is relieved:

“When you make something personal, you’re putting it out into the world, and if the world turns round and says, ‘I don’t like that and I don’t care about it’, you can’t help but think, ‘OK, you basically don’t care about me’.” Although the film has a particular, queer point of view, he believes its universal themes make it accessible to everyone.

“All of us are children, a lot of us are parents, a lot of us are in a relationship or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this film when I was 15, it would probably have made a big difference to me.”'

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aethelflaedladyofmercia · 3 years

Note

Fluff prompt #38? "Are you alright?" "I will be."

Well, this one certainly went in an unexpected direction! The quote winds up a bit altered, but I think it fits the spirit of the thing.

I’m working off this prompt list - send me an ask or @ me with your request!

The Bentley rolled to a stop in front of the bookshop just as the all-clear signaled the end of the night’s bombing. They hadn’t been in any danger during the drive; exhausted as he was, Crowley still had the strength to make sure of that. Probably.

Crowley only had to keep it together for another minute, maybe two. His feet ached from the burns, stinging like a sunburn as high as his knees, flaring every time he shifted his feet on the pedals. But he’d made it this far. He was fine, and he could continue to be fine until Aziraphale was in the shop.

He pressed his lips together, kept his hands on the wheel, and resisted the urge to fidget.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, still clutching his bag of books as if it was a life raft. “That was certainly a thrilling experience.” He frowned tartly at the dashboard, making his true feelings for the Bentley abundantly clear.

“Nh. Got you home, didn’t it?” Crowley glared out the window at the shop, shifting his feet between the pedals as inconspicuously as possible.

“Yes, and the fact that we’re still in one piece is clearly the most incredible miracle of the night.”

“You really haven’t changed, have you?”

“I should think not. I am an angel, and the nature of my being is incorruptible, eternal, and unaffected by the comings and goings of mortal beings—”

“Meaning you’re just as much a smug bastard as ever.”

Well. That hadn’t taken long to fall apart.

Really, the entire evening had been one disaster after another. His intelligence had revealed a team of Nazi spies was meeting with a contact at an old townhouse in Soho, so Crowley had settled in to wait it out. He had his fingers in everything these days, from British Counterintelligence to street gangs, and the opportunities for a bit of chaos during the Blitz were never ending.

Then he’d received word that the drop had been changed. And that the contact was a certain local and well-established bookseller. Meaning that the idiot being duped by the Nazis was his idiot. He’d barely been updated on the new location in time, and of course Aziraphale had picked a church, of all the places in the city, a church to meet his bloody spies, and Crowley had to charge in, no plan, no preparation, and now he hurt and Aziraphale seemed determined to make this as miserable as he possibly could, and really was it any surprise after the last time—

Crowley didn’t want to part angry, not again, but his feet hurt and he didn’t know how to stop himself.

In the silence, Aziraphale shifted in his seat, looking at the door but not opening it. “I…Crowley, I am…very glad…that you were there tonight.”

“Don’t thank me,” Crowley blurted, mostly out of habit. “Just. Be safe. Be smart.” One quick glance to the side, then glaring at the windscreen again. “And stay away from Nazis, it can’t be that hard.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t. I just thought…ah, well.” He opened the door, but didn’t try to leave.

“So,” Crowley started.

“So,” Aziraphale agreed.

Deep breath. “Guess I’ll see you next century—”

But at the same moment, from Aziraphale, “Do you want to come in?”

More than anything.

Aziraphale still didn’t face him, and his stiff shoulders gave no hint of his emotions, but Crowley wasn’t going to let this – whatever this was – pass him by.

“I mean…I could…I can…” His hand fumbled for the door latch, popping it open, almost leaping out onto the pavement before the invitation could be withdrawn. In his urgency, he entirely forgot about the pain in his feet.

Until he put his weight on them.

“AAAH!” With a strangled gasp, Crowley collapsed like felled tree.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale was beside him, impossibly quickly, hands fluttering over his face and chest. “Oh, my word. What – what happened? What’s wrong? Oh, Lord, is it—”

“Calm down, Angel.” His voice still sounded tight, but there wasn’t much Crowley could do about that. “Told you. Hallowed ground.” With some effort, he managed to sit up, one hand braced on the floor of the Bentley.

“I thought – you said – ‘being on the beach in bare feet’ – this isn’t—!”

“S’nothing.” Crowley eyed the distance to the driver’s seat. He could probably get himself in, but it wouldn’t be dignified. Well. Any and all dignity had long since gone out the window. “Just need to…”

He pulled his legs in and tried to stand – the pain hit him halfway up – and with another cry of “NrrrrrrAAAH!” he toppled over, slamming his head against the street.

“Oh, oh, Crowley!” His eyes blinked open, and behind the flashing supernovae that filled his vision loomed Aziraphale’s concerned face. “My dear fellow, are you alright?”

“Told you. S’nothing.” He’d need another minute or two before trying to sit up. “Be fine in the morning.”

“Yes, I’ll see to that.” Before Crowley could ask what that even meant, Aziraphale scooped him up, one arm under his knees, the other across his back, cradling him like a child.

“What? Angel – stop – you – Ngk!”

“Would you rather lay in the street all night?” He nudged the Bentley door shut with his foot. “Let’s get you inside.”

“But—”

“Hush.” He held Crowley a little closer, the demon’s head against his shoulder, and started walking. “Do hold on to my neck if you need balance, and try to relax.”

There was no chance of relaxing, not when his entire body was pressed into the warm curve of Aziraphale’s stomach, not when his vision was filled with that soft face, jaw hardened in determination. Especially not once he realized he could feel the angel’s heartbeat, steady and calm. His own was racing erratically, and every nerve in his body was raw, on edge.

As Aziraphale stepped past the Bentley into the street proper, Crowley’s heels taped lightly against his side, and sharp pain shot up to his knees. Crowley flinched, just slightly, but immediately Aziraphale stopped to shift his arms, making sure Crowley’s legs wouldn’t swing as much.

“Better?”

“Nh. Yuh.” Not knowing what else to do, Crowley slipped his arm across Aziraphale’s shoulders. He wasn’t sure it was any more comfortable, but he liked it.

Only when they reached the steps to the shop did Crowley realize something was missing. “Your books!”

“Still in that horrid vehicle.”

“But…” Aziraphale loved his books. Especially the prophecy books. He’d carried some of them around the world for the better part of a millennium. Crowley knew that, it was why he’d made sure to protect them from the bomb blast.

But, counter to all logic, Aziraphale just shook his head, as if they didn’t matter at all. “They’ll keep for an hour or two.” He nudged the door with his shoulder. “I have more important matters to attend to first.”

And he stepped across the threshold into the brightly lit shop.

It hadn’t changed. Eighty years since his last visit, and everything was still the same.

Oh, there were a few more tacky figurines and baroque sculptures scattered around; the books were piled even taller, suggesting Aziraphale had acquired far more than he’d sold in that time, and cloth bindings seemed to be giving way to leather again. The lights were electric now, but the gas fixtures clearly hadn’t been replaced, merely altered. The shelves, the columns, the furniture – everything was just as Crowley remembered.

He sat on the sofa now, feet soaking in a basin of hot water. Aziraphale knelt beside it, carefully applying angelic healing a little at a time. Crowley’s body couldn’t take much more holy energy without breaking.

His feet were much worse than he’d thought. Bright pink and deep red in patches, covered with angry swollen blisters that started between his toes and wrapped back around his ankles. When he’d rolled up his trouser legs, he’d found smaller burn patches all up his shins, as if the hallowed ground had somehow splashed him almost to his knees.

“Does this usually happen when a demon walks onto hallowed ground?” Aziraphale ran a dampened cloth across Crowley’s leg, gently wiping away a burn.

“Dunno, I’m the only one stupid enough to try it.”

“Crowley,” he murmured, somewhere between warning and exasperation.

“Sssss.” He slumped a little further on the sofa, wiggling his aching toes. “I’ve seen a few demons get close to holy ground or objects. Burns and blisters, yeah, that’s normal. But I’ve never seen it this bad.” Aziraphale’s fingers ran down his ankle, setting off more sparks of pain. “Mmmmph. Should heal though. Almost everything heals eventually.”

Demonic self-healing took time, of course, and hurt all the while.

“They’re coming along,” Aziraphale commented, gently lifting Crowley’s left foot out of the water. His hand on the back of the ankle was as gentle as possible, but still made Crowley squirm.

“Nnnnnnnrk. Why did you have to meet them in a bloody church?”

“I…” Aziraphale carefully brushed the cloth across Crowley’s foot. It tingled – not entirely pleasantly – but the skin left behind was less burned, and the blisters a little smaller. “I’m not really sure.”

“C’mon, Angel.” Crowley shifted again, fingers curling into the sofa cushion. “I know you changed the spot at the last minute. And don’t tell me that was their idea.”

“No…” For a long moment, Aziraphale didn’t say anything further, just continued to wash Crowley’s foot with slow, gentle motions. When he’d cleared the left foot as much as he could, he lowered it back into the water and started on the right. “I just…I was so flattered. To be asked to help. To trap spies and book thieves! To…be part of a team.” The cloth slowed to a stop. “I just…I suppose some part of me hoped that Heaven would look down and, and see…”

You wanted them to be proud of you. Not that he could say it. Aziraphale’s feelings towards his superiors were as complicated as ever.

“Well.” Aziraphale started into his task again, perhaps a bit too briskly. “Good thing no one did look, considering how it all turned out.”

“Angel…” Crowley pushed himself up a little, to better watch the white curly head bent over his feet. “Are you alright?”

“What? Don’t – that’s absurd – you’re the one who’s – why wouldn’t I be—?”

“You trusted her. That woman. And she pointed a gun to your head.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale quickly lowered Crowley’s foot into the water, but not fast enough for him to miss how the angel’s fingers trembled. He gripped the sides of the basin. “Do you…do you think me very foolish? To fall for…such an obvious trick?”

“Not at all.” But Aziraphale didn’t look up, didn’t move from his spot. “This…isn’t the first time it’s happened, is it?”

He shook his head. “Never this bad, but…I always throw my lot in with the worst sort of people, don’t I? Or if I do find decent types, I just – just drive them away. I never learn my lesson. Good lord, there must be something wrong with me.”

“Of course there isn’t.” Crowley wished Aziraphale would meet his eyes.

“And it was so obvious! If I’d just stopped to think for five minutes…”

“You can’t blame yourself for humans being—”

“Why? Am I so desperate for approval, I just – just throw my lot in with whoever comes by? Why do I keep—”

“Because you’re lonely!”

Crowley hadn’t meant to say it, never mind with such feeling. He wanted to take it back, but Aziraphale’s head jerked up, finally met his eyes – oh, yes. He could see how right he was.

Eighty years, with no one but humans for company. Crowley could remember how awful that was. How much worse, when you knew there was another way? When you understood what you were missing?

“Angel…I’m…” The word stuck in his throat. “I’m sorry. I should have come back sooner, instead of just…just sleeping it off.”

“And I could have gone to you,” Aziraphale said softly. “I wanted to, you know. So many times, I just…”

Crouched beside the basin, Aziraphale slid his arm around Crowley’s legs, leaned forward to rest his head against the demon’s knees. Crowley laid his hand on the angel’s head, fingers burrowing into soft, feathery curls.

They didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say, not with words at least.

After a time, Aziraphale whispered, “Do you think – is it – are we…alright?”

Crowley stroked his hair one more time. “We will be.”

#good omens prime #good omens fanfic #ineffable husbands #aziraphale and crowley #hurt comfort #hurt crowley #sad aziraphale #love #foot washing #hey finally got a foot washing fic written go me #my writing #prompt fic #tumblr fic

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happyandticklish · 3 years

Text

Smile, Parrish

Notes: Based off the anon suggestion for Noah & Adam tickles, because the prompt was too cute not to write.

Summary: Adam is working himself too hard yet again, and Noah decides to give him something else to focus on.

“What are you doing?”

Noah’s voice, spoken softly and suddenly over his shoulder, startled Adam out of his earlier intense concentration. Having been dead for several years now, the former had the eerie quality of near silent footsteps that made it too easy to sneak up on others. Adam glanced down at the mess of papers in front of him, math homework he had been putting off for a while now, what with the sudden increase in Gansey’s quest for Glendower. Now though he only had tonight to finish it and he had been staring at the same problem for almost an hour by that point. Adam sighed, running a hand through his hair and tugging at it a bit too harshly, frustration catching up with him.

“Nothing. Homework.”

“Homework?” Noah repeated, peering over his shoulder. With his face so close, Adam could feel his breath on the back of his neck and he instinctively drew his shoulders up. “Maybe I could help?”

“No,” Adam said too hastily, then repeated in a calmer tone, “I mean, no, no thank you. I got it. I just need to finish this last problem and then I’ll be done.”

Noah wrinkled his brow. “It looks like you’ve only done one problem, thus far.”

Adam glared down at the worksheet, hating the truth of that statement. It was late and his brain wasn’t working. He was supposed to be staying the night with Ronan but instead he was sitting here doing homework while the other lay passed out on the couch, after falling asleep waiting for him. Gansey, the other resident of Monmouth Manufacturing, was experiencing one of those rare nights where the insomnia waned and allowed him to finally get some rest; Adam had considered waking him up earlier, as Gansey was much better at the subject than him, but the other needed sleep and Adam could get by without him, if needed.

Noah didn’t sleep, and thus was the only one awake to witness Adam’s outburst of exhausted annoyance. Noah took in the look on Adam’s face, the dark circles under his eyes, the sweat sprouting on his forehead from concentrating too hard, the clench of his fingers around his pencil. “You seem exhausted.”

“I’m not,” Adam snapped, trying to ignore how every time Noah spoke that close to his neck it sent goosebumps prickling across his skin. “I’ll be fine, Noah. Just go to bed, or go do… I don’t know, whatever the fuck you do at night.”

Noah frowned. “You don’t have to be rude about it.”

“Look, I’m sorry okay, I wasn’t trying to—can you stop breathing on my neck, please?” he huffed at last, his shoulders nearly parallel to his chin by now. “It tickles.”

Noah’s eyes widened as though he had been unaware of his actions, and he stepped back a bit. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.” As he watched Adam lower his shoulders, rubbing the back of his neck, an idea occurred to him. Possibly, this could go very wrong. Possibly it would be just the thing Adam needed. Noah was willing to risk it regardless.

Adam had returned to his work by now, either assuming that Noah had left already or would soon leave. With that creeping silence that made others around him nervous, Noah managed to move behind Adam. He reached out hesitantly with one hand and wiggled gentle fingers against the back of the other’s neck.

The reaction was instantaneous. A yelp, followed by Adam’s head slamming backwards in an attempt to trap Noah’s hand. “Shit! Ah, Noah, that tihickles!”

“I know,” Noah agreed simply, moving closer and using his other hand to torment the sides of his neck, so that no matter which way Adam twisted he couldn’t escape him. “It was supposed to.”

“W-Well stop thehehen!” Unwilling giggles were pulled from Adam with each twitch and scrape of those nails against his skin. His neck had always been abnormally ticklish, and when combined with Noah’s eternally cold ghost fingers, he found himself quickly forgetting all methods of defense. He chose instead to simply squirm and cover his mouth with his hands, trying to prevent the involuntary noises.

“This is for your own good,” Noah informed him, smiling a bit at the sight. “I read an article somewhere that said tickling was good for mental health. If I tickle you, maybe you can finally relax and stop stressing out so much.”

“Thahahat’s s-soho stuhuhupid!” Adam spluttered, reaching a hand back finally and attempting to slap him away. Noah merely danced his fingers out of the way, easily avoiding his grasp. “Ihihi cahahan’t rehehelax ihihif yohohou’re tihihickling mehehehe!”

“Is that not relaxing you?” Noah inquired innocently, fluttering his fingers over his ears and prompting a shriek from the other.

“Nohohohoho!”

“Hmm…” Noah mused, eyeing his ribs which were exposed on either side of the chair. “Maybe I’m doing it wrong then. I’ll try somewhere else.”

“What do you mean—ahaha, shihihit!” Adam’s confused reply was cut off as hands dug suddenly and vigorously into his sides, vibrating into his lower ribs. “Nohohohoah!”

“What?”

“Thahahat reheheheally tihihihickles!”

“Does it?” Noah replied brightly, happy at his accomplishment. “Good.”

“Nohoho!” Adam denied, giggling ecstatically in a way Noah had never seen him laugh before. “Ihihihit’s nohohot gohohood!”

The strangest thing about being dead that Noah had found, aside from the fact itself, was how his emotions were often muted. He could feel the vague stirrings of happiness or anger, and the pull of grief, but it was almost like an echo of reality as opposed to the true feeling. There were moments, however, moments when significance made the echo more solid, anchoring the feeling to him. As he watched strange, annoyed, bookish Adam laugh like this, more a boy now than he had ever been allowed to in his childhood, he felt the gentle glow of happiness settle in his chest.

“You should smile like this more,” Noah said in his abrupt, honest way. “I know the others think so, too. It makes you seem less scrunchy, more—open. I like open Adam.”

Adam flushed, the compliments only working to fluster him more. “W-Wehehell, ohohopen Ahahadam cahahan’t tahahake muhuhuch mohore ohohof thihis!”

“Bullshit.”

Hands grabbed his wrists suddenly, pulling them far above his head and thus taking away what little defenses he had. A quick glance upwards told him the hands belonged to Ronan. Evidently he had been woken up by Adam’s laughter, which, to be fair, was entirely not his fault. His gaze was met by a taunting grin that had Adam’s heart stuttering in his chest. It was truly unfair how with a simple glance Ronan could unravel Adam completely.

“I happen to know,” Ronan said, enclosing his wrist in one arm so that his other hand was free to poke and scratch at the upper part of his armpit that always had Adam shrieking. “That you can handle much more than this.”

“Trahahahaitor!”

“I also happen to know that you don’t hate it as much as you claim.”

“Really?” Noah asked curiously, peering down at Adam. “Do you like being tickled?”

“Yohohou guhuys ahare sohoho mehehean!” Adam protested, arching back as Noah’s fingers closed around the sharp bones of his hips.

“Don’t listen to him, Noah,” Ronan said. “He just needs a bit more provocation to admit it. What do you think?” The question was directed at Adam. “Do you want me to show him what it takes to make you admit it?”

“No, no, Rohohonan, noho!” Adam protested, his giggles becoming nervous and anticipatory. “I k-knohow whahahat yohohou’re gohonna dohoho, ahahand ihihit’s nohot fahahair!”

“Don’t be a child, Parrish.” Ronan handed over his arms to Noah, who accepted them cautiously but firmly after a glance from the former. Ronan leaned down, resting his hands calmly on each of Adam’s knees. Every once in a while he would twitch or curl his fingers lightly, causing Adam to jerk away from him with a strangled yelp.

“Don’t,” Adam warned him, trying to make his voice serious despite his growing smile. “C’mon, seriously, I can’t.”

“Can’t what?” Ronan asked innocently, turning his hands so that his thumb just brushed against the place on the inside of his knee, his fingers curled against the bone on the other side. Adam tensed, sucking in a sharp inhale of breath. “Can’t handle it?”

Adam waited in heart-stopping anticipation, his smile a flushed grin now. “Yes.”

“Good.”

Adam shrieked as both his thumb and fingers dug in suddenly sending shocks of feeling scurrying up his legs. He twisted in his chair and tugged hard at Noah’s grasp but was unable to free himself. He kicked his legs out wildly, but no matter which direction he pulled Ronan’s hand followed him, insistent and oh-so-devastatingly ticklish.

“RoHOHOHohonan!” Adam squeaked, head thrown back in wild and uncontrolled mirth. “Plehehehease! Dohohohon’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Tihihihickle mehehehe!”

“If you insist.”

“WahAHAHAhait nohoho!”

As Adam fell into another round of helpless laughter, Ronan shook his head incredulously. “I still don’t know how you fall for that every time.”

“He’s quite beautiful like this,” Noah said, tilting his head to one side. Ronan threw him a quick glance, eyebrows drawn down in careful discernment, but after realizing the comment was meant in simple honesty he allowed himself to agree. “How come I never realized he was ticklish?”

“Foolish Noah,” Ronan said, pinching his way up and down his knees and delighting in Adam’s hiccupy squeaks. “Parrish is far too prideful to admit to something as human as being ticklish. It’s why you have to force it out of him. It’s the only way you can help him be true to himself.”

“Nahahat hehehelping!” Adam screeched, managing to clip Ronan on the shoulder with one foot. Ronan winced, shaking his head in disappointment.

“Shouldn’t have done that.”

He grabbed Adam’s leg suddenly, pulling it out taut and revealing the sensitive underside of his knee. Adam’s eyes widened and before he could protest nails were scratching over the spot, leaving him in a fit of giggly hysterics. “Stahahahahap!”

“Will you admit that you love it?”

“Ihihihi—” Before Adam could answer in another denial, he felt the soft fluttering of fingers against his neck again, Noah evidently feeling left out of the fun, and he scrunched his shoulders up desperately. “Ohohokay fihihihine! Ihihihi lohohohove ihihihit!”

“What do you love?” Ronan asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Beheheheing tihihickled! Ihihi l-lohohove beheheing tihihickled!”

“And will you take a break?” Noah added, scratching behind his ears and pulling a frantic squeak from the other.

“Whahahat? Thahahat wahahahasn’t pahahart ohohof thehehe deheheal!”

“It is now,” Noah said happily, though he did admit he would be a bit disappointed to stop. It was nice seeing Adam like this—carefree for once in his life. “So?”

“Fihihine! I-I’ll tahahake ahaha breheheak!”

“That’s all you had to say.”

Ronan and Noah both released him and Adam slumped back in the chair, breathing heavily. “You guys suck.”

“You love it,” Ronan teased.

“What’s going on out here?”

They all whirled around to see Gansey, illuminated by poor lighting in the doorway, rubbing tired eyes. He blinked at the scene in front of him, Adam’s flushed, giggly countenance and Ronan and Noah’s triumphant one. Noah had froze at the sight of him, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Ronan merely sat back on one hand, a confident, lazy grin stretching across his face.

“Hey Dick,” he said, emphasizing the word in a way that implied a capital. Gansey frowned, as he had expressed many times in a variety of expressive words his distaste for the name. “We were just getting Adam here to smile. He needs to relax more.”

“Oh,” Gansey said, before pausing as confusion set in. “Wait what? Smile? How?”

Ronan’s grin inched wider into something dangerous and he stood up, sauntering over to the other. “I’m glad you asked, oh Gansey, my king. Why not let me show you?”

The room was soon filled with the sounds of laughter once more and in the chaos of it all Adam managed to gather his books and sneak off to Ronan’s room. His plan had been to study in secret in the sudden distraction of Gansey’s presence. As he sat down on Ronan’s bed, however, he found his head hitting the pillow before he could stop it, and sleep like an unwanted stranger whisking him away.

Maybe he had needed that break after all...

#tickle fic #noah czerny #adam parrish #the raven cycle #ronan lynch #gansey #pynch #richard campbell gansey iii #trc #tickling #fanfic #fanfiction #requests #fic request #not really a request but im gonna tag it as one anyway because who cares

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frustratedpoetwrites · 3 years

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter Characters: James Potter, Lily Evans Potter Additional Tags: Morning After, Goodbyes, Sharing a Shower, reluctant goodbyes Series: Part 2 of The Marauders Pub Soho Summary:

The morning after a night of passion Lily has to leave a soundly sleeping James, but she doesn't want to.

Lily lay staring at the skylight, and watched the patch of sky turn from black to indigo. She just gazed without moving, hardly even blinking as it gradually grew lighter and lighter. She had not been able to find any rest for more than a few brief snatches, as tired as she was. Her whole body zinged with electricity, her brain abuzz with everything that had happened last night and had continued to happen throughout the night. She glanced over towards the body sleeping soundly beside her, the sheets pooled around his waist showing his toned back. He had acquired some new tattoos in the six years since she had last seen him. When she’d remarked on the delicately detailed Lily that was now inked on his right side sweeping across his ribs, he had quipped back that it marked the spot where she had stuck her knife in him when she’d left him to pursue her career. That remark had stung more than she wanted to admit, even though she did deserve it.

She had told him last night she never wanted to leave his side again, and she had meant it. Especially at that moment, standing in the bar he basically built, surrounded by the memories of their childhood. Engulfed by the overwhelming scent of James himself. At that moment it had been so easy to say yes to all of his questions, say yes to coming here to his place instead of going back to her hotel as she had planned. She wished she could stay in this moment, with the old day finished and the new not yet begun. In this bed with this man forever. But all too soon she would have to leave. She needed to get on a plane in a few hours. If she didn’t, then any dream she had to live in London permanently would be gone.

She glanced around James's attic room trying to see if he even had a clock. She was amazed that he still lived like this. There was a rail for his clothes and a bed so low it was almost like the mattress was on the floor. That was it. She hoped he didn’t live like this all the time, but she suspected his life and energy was spent at the bar.

It had looked so beautiful, the large dark polished oak panels and the brass rail, the small stage with the piano sitting proudly. And all the pictures on the walls of their schooldays. It had always been his dream to run a bar, and the four Marauders had made it a successful reality, but she knew who had been driving it from day one, and she was incredibly proud of him for that.

She reached for her clutch bag and fumbled in it for her phone. It did not light up when she tapped the screen. Her battery must have died.

Fuck.

She glanced over at James, still sleeping soundly, and contemplated waking him, but she knew he was exhausted. She had wiped him out, she thought to herself, suppressing a giggle, it had been a wonderful night. He had not forgotten any of the things he used to do to make her whole body hum, and he had learned a few new things too she had discovered. His strength and stamina had greatly increased. Not that she had expected him to hold himself chaste for her, but she still had a pang of jealousy at the thought that other women had touched him, had been with her James. Had they asked about his tattoo? She always thought of him as hers, even though she hadn’t exactly expected to ever come back to him that day she had left. Any time before now when she had considered it she talked herself out of it because she was convinced he would be with someone else.

She rolled over onto her back again, and looked up at the skylight.

What time was it?

She’d hoped she wouldn't have to do this but she slid off the edge of the bed and took James’s phone out of the pocket of his jeans and opened it, shaking her head at the stubborn distrust for technology that meant he still used an old flip phone. Although at the moment Lily was grateful because she didn’t have to worry about unlocking it.

She tapped in the digits for her assistant's number as she crept into his ensuite, slipping on the dressing gown that was on a hook behind the door.

The phone rang just once before she heard an unsure “Hello?”

“Hey, Jess it’s me…”

“Lily!” came the scream, causing her to jump and nearly drop the phone. “Where the fucking hell have you been? I’ve been calling you all night. Your meeting has been moved up, you need to get to the airport right now!”

“What? Oh, fuck!” Lily took a breath and closed her eyes as her assistant kept rambling over the phone, talking so fast Lily could hardly understand them. “Jess, Jess, Jessie!” She tried to speak urgently and sharply without making too much noise. “I need you to bring me my bag and my suit, the green one. Put an extra pair of underwear in my bag.”

“I’m sorry, Lily, but your overnight bag won’t be enough, I've had to pack your suitcase, you’ll be staying for a week. They’ve sent a whole itinerary, but when we left Hong Kong I didn’t think to pack any of your formal wear. I’ve arranged for the concierge to book a fitting for after your first meeting, once you’ve checked in. Where are you anyway? I need to let Terrence know where we need to come and get you.”

Lily went to answer then realised she had no actual idea of the address. It wasn’t far from the bar, she didn’t think. But she had been interested in other things besides looking out the car window to notice what neighbourhood they were in. Lily looked up as the door to the bathroom swung open gently, revealing a conscious James leaning against the frame wearing only his battered looking jeans, his tousled hair framing his tired-looking face and his glasses perching on the end of his nose, as if they were mere moments from falling off.

She let the phone fall from her ear slightly as he continued to stare at her, a wry smile reaching only the edge of his lips.

“Something tells me you aren’t staying for breakfast.” His tone was light but she heard the resignation behind it. As she looked over at her childhood sweetheart, an idea struck her.

“Jess? You still there? Pick me up outside the Marauders’ Pub in Soho. Yeah? And Jess? I'm gonna need another plane ticket.”

“Well, okay boss but they are sending you a priv…..” Lily did not hear the last of her assistant’s words as she closed the flip phone and tossed it back to him.

“I can't believe you still use that antique.” He caught it deftly in his left hand and dropped it into his back pocket.

“I can’t believe I’m letting you dick around with my life again,” he replied, barely even trying to mask the disappointment.

“As much as I'd love to have this argument again, I really need you to pack yourself a bag. Do you have a good suit that fits you?”

He shook his head and blinked at her as she brushed past him to his rail of clothes and started looking through them. He still had some nice attire here, a lot of it she remembered from their life before.

“Lily, wait,” he called after her but she took no notice. She had no time. Already, in her head, she was mapping out what she needed to do. A whole week with these people. The one day originally planned would have been torture, but this... If she had back up maybe she could make it work. “Stop.” He placed a hand on hers as it rested on the next coathanger. She looked up into his gorgeous eyes as they shone with all the colours as his emotions played out across his face. He was always so expressive. “What are you doing?”

“I want you to come with me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You’re your own boss, you could take the time off. It’s not like you’re the only one in charge. What about Sirius? Or Remus? Or even Pete?” She paused, “Is Pete doing okay? I thought he wanted to go in a, erm, different direction but I saw his name up there with the rest of you?”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “Pete is a silent partner, he helps out when he can but his wife made him join their family business, he helps by keeping them away.” His hand dropped to his side. “Lily I can’t afford to just drop everything, everybody else has other responsibilities, I’m the only one left to run it and I won't let it fail. My staff depends on me.”

“James, this is me telling you I don’t want to leave you again. I don’t want to go on this trip without you by my side, I could use someone in my corner. I could also use a devilishly handsome, charming, charismatic–” he raised an eyebrow at her seductive tone but didn’t stop her putting her hands on his chest, tracing the antlers that spread across them.

“My tattoos aren’t very corporate,” he murmured, his voice sounding deep and throaty. she shrugged in reply,

“You’d be surprised what people hide under their suits these days.” She told him with a twinkle, sobering when his lips thinned. “Please James. I need you.” She hadn’t realised how true those words were until she had spoken them to the universe.

“I’m sorry Lily, but my staff need me more. They rely on me.”

“So you’ve never taken a day off? Never had to call in sick?” Before he could answer her questions an idea struck her. “What if I pay your staff for the week? How much would that be?” He stood for a moment apparently stunned then started laughing and stepped away from her, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She tried not to look upset at his reaction to her suggestion. She stood watching him and waited for his mirth to subside.

“Oh, you are actually serious? You want to pay me so I will spend time with you?” He shook his head as his mirth still rippled through him. “This isn’t Pretty Woman and I’m not some, some...rentboy you picked up off the street.”

Now he sounded angry. James’ phone started buzzing in his back pocket. She had not thought that offering to pay his staff would equate to her hiring him as an escort service. Her brain hadn’t gone that way at all. She let him answer his call, as she rushed back to the bathroom for a much needed shower and tried to clear her head.

James may have skimped on bedroom furniture but he hadn’t skimped on his wet room. The shower was a walk-in style and big enough for four people, the naturally textured tiles on her feet were warm as she walked in, the large slabs of highly polished sand-coloured stone on the walls were so neatly fitted she couldn’t even see the joins.

Turning on the shower filled the room with hot steam and the reassuring splats of water droplets peppering the tiles. Stepping into it, she gasped at the pressure. It was like standing in a tropical rainstorm. She just stood there unmoving, letting the water rush over her enjoying the sensation as it beat down on her head.

“That was your PA on the phone. I gave them this address so you can leave from here.” James said as he stepped into the bathroom like they did this kind of thing all the time. “Thought you might want to have some fresh clothes to wear.”

“You really won’t come?” She asked, trying one last time. She forced herself to keep her eyes forward when she realised he was joining her by the sound of his jeans hitting the tiled floor.

Despite their recent intimacy, or perhaps because of it, being this close to his naked body turned her core white-hot. She tried very hard not to react as she felt his naked skin brush up against hers. His arm reached past and grabbed an unlabelled metal bottle from the small alcove. Then his fingers were in her hair and her nostrils were filled with the scent of an English summer garden.

“Is it okay that I join you in here? Thought it would save some time.”

“Yes, okay, it’s absolutely fine,” she tried to keep her voice as neutral as his but even she could hear the breathiness.

“I told your assistant I can’t, it’s not my scene at all,” he told her conversationally, as if he wasn’t standing butt naked behind her in the shower. He was trying to calm her down, trying to talk about what needed to be talked about. The fact they were taking a shower together didn’t seem to phase him at all. Determinedly, she tried to follow his lead.

“This is not me running away from you. I need you to understand that.” She hummed in pleasure as his fingers massaged deeper into her hair. “I’m sorry if I offended you, offering to pay.”

“I’m still not sure if I find it more funny or offensive,” he began. “I can’t say I’m not tempted to run away with you, but you know as well as I do how much of a distraction I would be. You need to be at your best. I will be fine, I’ll just have to trust you’ll come back. That you're not making me the poor jilted lover once more.” He told her. She wanted to tell him he didn’t need to worry, wanted to say all the things that she had agonised about saying as she lay awake beside him in his bed, but no words could adequately explain how she was feeling. So she turned and reached for him, pushing her fingers up across his stubble studded cheeks into his hair and kissing him soundly. Breaking the kiss he tilted her head back as his lips dragged kisses across her throat. She didn’t need to ask where his mind was right now, she could feel his arousal pressing against her stomach. All too soon her brain caught up with her and soundly put on the brakes. “Not that I don’t enjoy where this is going, but we need to stop.” She took a few quick breaths as his hands continued to soap her breasts. “I don’t have the time and I’m a little tender.”

“You were the one who started things, Evans. I was just helping you wash,” he said innocently, amusement dancing in his eyes. But he did take his hands off her body and even though she had asked him to, she mourned the loss of contact. “In all honesty, I don’t think I have it in me right now to perform at my best anyway.”

“Let’s just put this on pause for now then shall we?” She told him, giving him a gentle kiss, hoping he understood how much he continued to mean to her. Lily dipped her head to rinse the bubbles out of her hair. It felt like silk as she combed her fingers through it.

“What is that shampoo? It’s amazing!”

“It’s a prototype. Remus’ company makes it, the only thing that’s come close to making my hair behave. He’s made it his personal mission to tame it. He gives me a new formula just about every week.” He pointed to the small bathroom cabinet above the sink. “The conditioner’s in there, it's one you have to leave in. I put towels on the hook.” She stepped aside once she was rinsed, letting him have the full force of the shower.

“Does he always make it smell like flowers?”

“Yup.” She expected him to elaborate but when he didn’t she just let it go and stepped out of the shower. She found the small spray bottle in the cabinet simply labelled conditioner and scrunched some into her hair as she watched James wash his. The bubbles slid down his frame in ways that made her wish she could just step back in there with him.

Lily wished she could continue to stare at him but her logical brain was kicking in to tell her all that she still had to do. Moving back to the bedroom, she twisted her hair up out of the way while she looked for anywhere he would store things. There wasn’t even a cupboard in the bedroom so she padded her way through to the living space. She barely remembered it from the night before, and she was stunned at how minimally he lived.

It was a beautiful apartment, the exposed red brick looked amazing with the warm honey-coloured wooden floor. The living space was a good size for London, the kitchen looked brand new with a wooden worktop that matched the floor and clean white cupboards. She spotted the coffee machine, and hunted in the cupboards to see if he had any beans, suppressing her irritation when every one was empty.

The more she looked around his place, the less it felt like he lived here at all. There was a giant modular brown leather sofa taking up the majority of space in the living area, a coffee table that looked like it was made out of granite, and a giant tv on the wall.

“What is this place to you James Potter?” She mused as she looked around. She was tempted to start rummaging in drawers (if there were any) but it felt like possibly a step too far for now.

The intercom buzzed impatiently making her jump guiltily and nearly drop her towel. As she stared at the white box on the wall and wondered how to operate it James came striding out of the bedroom holding a hand towel around his waist, hair still dripping. He lifted the receiver then buzzed to let the person come up. “It’s your assistant.” He explained before vanishing back to the bedroom.

Lily stood looking through the peephole until she saw her assistant's blonde head appear from the stairs.

She opened the door and ushered them in quickly. Taking the bag from them awkwardly with one hand.

Jessie looked around and hummed appreciatively. “This is nice, you could do a lot with this place. When are they moving in?”

“I don’t know,” Lily replied quietly. “I’m going to go change. Can you play nice with James, please? It would be great if you two get on.”

“Well I’ll behave if he will,” Jessie swept an invisible strand of hair out their face before relenting to Lily’s reproachful look. “Alright, alright. When we spoke on the phone they were pleasant so I can be too.”

“Great, I’ll be super quick,” as she made her way back into the bedroom James stepped out wearing that same pair of jeans he seemed incredibly fond of and one of his many black Marauders Pub t-shirts. He put out a hand to stop her as she tried to slip past him.

“I’m going to get out of your hair,” he said quietly. She could tell by the tone he didn’t want to be here when she left, didn’t want to be the one left waving by the door. She understood that in an instant, saw it in his sad eyes, and the hesitant touch he placed on her arm.

“Okay.” With a glance at her assistant she walked him back into the bedroom. “This was not how I wanted this to go,” she said, keeping her voice down once she knew they were alone.

“Saying goodbye brings back bad memories,” he told her shuffling his feet and running a hand through his hair. “I want to believe you're coming back this time.”

“Of course I’m coming back. I’ll call you, every day. But could you do something for me?” She asked, reaching to snake her arms around his neck.

“Can you get yourself a new phone so we can video chat?”

“Yes, Evans I think I can manage that,” he told her, leaning down to kiss her goodbye for the last time.

#jily #james potter #lily evans #barman james #business boss lily #tj writes #jily fanfiction #jily fic #slightly mature #there is a shower scene #but no smut

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