#say what you will about the later seasons but I would die for any domestic bunker content | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

horizon-verizon · 7 months

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You said: '...their grand theme of "women-good-men-bad" plot (as in violence vs nonviolence).'

Not the same anon but I've been thinking a lot this week on that line of thinking.

On my first viewing I liked the show in general even if I didn't agree with several things but the more and more I thought about it the worse it became and now I feel that the show is MORE sexist and misogynistic than the original material.

It took me a while to realize that not only are women not allowed to gain any kind of power or have active decisions, but they purposely exchanged and eliminated things to create the dichotomy of man=violent and woman=pacifist.

Alicent is not only no longer the mastermind behind the entire movement but she is not even included in the plans, her only moments of power are when she exercises it in the meanest way and it really doesn't have much impact.

She actually just wants her children to be saved! She never wanted to govern! And she thinks Rhaenyra could be a good ruler (until 5 minutes pass and she changes her mind).

Her gloating line about Visenya dying and wishing Rhaenyra died in childbirth? Eliminated and even with all the anti-bastard prejudices that left her I doubt they would let her tell Rhaenyra that the death of their children doesn't matter as much because they were bastard blood.

Rhaenyra cries for a damn page instead of being allowed to be upset that the usurpation led to her having Visenya early. Revenge? Oh no, there is a prophecy and I must think about it. She also doesn't want power or rule, not even because it is a position that her father assured her was hers and she feels entitled to have it. Show!Rhaenyra has moments where she seems ready to quit or the weight of responsibility would crush her.

Rhaenys who fought to be recognized, campaigned for her son and then made sure it was ride or die with Rhaenyra? Well, she's allergic to any kind of female friendship, she's resentful of what she could never have forever, but she'll abandon ir in a heartbeat because her only ambition is to support her (biological) family in la la la, nothing happens here Land.

I don't see this Rhaenys dying believing it's for the best and will be defiant to the end and I certainly don't see her stopping Joff (who I don't think he likes that scene either) goes on a suicide mission.

Baela is the only one who remains more or less the same and yet she looked askance because... She and Rhaena miraculously appear.

On the other hand: Otto who was fired by Aegon for not being bloodthirsty enough? Yeah, I don't see that happening.

Daemon? A psychopath who will jump at the opportunity to kill in a heartbeat, even his wife who was too far away to commit the crime. Redeeming traits? Nope, there isn't. We also have child neglect and domestic violence, good change no?

Corlys is supposed to be the one to advocate for pardons later, here he doesn't see the big picture but instead becomes blinded by his own greed and goes to war because he is unable to talk to his wife.

They are not nuanced characters, they are tell me that the ambition is bad and we must not allow it to contaminate women and men are inherently violent.

Anon talks about this post.

I realized why I really couldn't totally like any of the characters beyond their looks (and only sometimes not even then, I'd say 25% of the looks in season 1 were good) when I read this one reblog by @rhaenyragendereuphoria HERE. They mentioned Robin Morgan and the terfness of the idea of women being the peacekeeping managers of male natural violence and it clicked for me. Goes to show how we can't exclude transphobia against trans women when talking about gender studies, violence, and anything to do with cis women bc as we realize that gender itself is a social creation and not dependent on genitals alone, the better we understand how the traits assigned to women (all but in different ways) are meant to be twisted according to the masculinized male's interests of control and domination. Homophobia also can't be totally discussed or fought against without understanding that it is about rejecting the "feminine" or anything coded as "of women". Such things require a sense of fixedness of gender and sexuality for masculinized male control.

This post by xenonwitch showing what others wrote about the male gaze can also help you out to understand how the HotD writers are writing in the male gaze--yes, even Sara Hess one of the women.

The show just feels too shallow BECAUSE they seek to reduce the idea and sense that this conflict is in feminist interest AND they do not invest or follow through with many proposed themes or potential motifs that they brought bc they don't really understand what they have to change nor its consequential implications in-world for the sake of bothsideism and checking boxes.

Plus, if you look carefully, even the most active persons in canon lose their activeness for the sake of the "theory of accident"--as Seth Abramson kinda calls it--where a major or critical character does not intentionally cause harm or prepare for the worst and the point is that we are supposed to see how they react to things happening to them.

Instead of making critical plot points happen through willful action! the "nuance" and intrigue of say, Aemond's killing Luke, is that he didn't mean to kill him, but it also wasn't an accident but also he was so mad about his eye and followed him for more than 5 mins in anger on a giant dragon in his big age of 19 versus a 14-year-old. Aemond has all the control until the very last minute when Vhagar goes ham and munches on Arrax and Luke; Alicent has no real control and "accidentally" takes Viserys' words the wrong way instead of her just ordering the castle shut down for the green council and actively trying to bring them to her side, being the spearhead of that anti-black function. Rather, it vacuums out all real stakes because the people feel like paper to write on.

The show makes a lot of their characters not have to make them confront some risks, build the right tension, or cross certain boundaries--example Alicent, doesn't have to confront her own long fears about her kids dying and the question of a woman ruling because she heard Viserys say that Aegon should rule. In other words, no accountability.

Finally, the characters also seem stupid as to how: Alicent thinks a page is going to stave off any threat of violence from Rhaenyra or herself, and Rhaenyra for reasons goes along with it!--she has been harassing Rhaenyra for years, and said page is of Nymeria (the woman who made her destiny and conquered regions...while Alicent is usurping Rhaenyra); when she accepts Rhaenyra's apology at the feast after the stain of her slicing her and almost causes the blacks/Luke to lose Driftmark but wouldn't listen to her before in episode 4 about not sleeping with Dameon AND again, sh's been trying to get Rhaenyra and her sons killed for 10 years from the belief that Rhaenyra would cause her oen kids deaths indirectly or directly!, basically just bc she now feels Rhaenyra respected her status as Queen and Viserys presented himself as a victim of their infighting...that he is actually largely responsible for...so she isn't protective of her kids and does have an severe inferirority complex or her main motivation is social power over protecting her kids, but the show would ahve us think that she hated Rhaenyra bc she was trying to prptect her kids.....her problems--as she saw it--remained the same after Rhaenyra's apology, wtf?!; Rhaenyra suddenly does not want to act at all against the greens, even give up -> based on violence and the prophecy, but said prophecy is actually all the more reason to stamp out the green usurpation bc her father couldn't have given Aegon that information and if he did he would have told her his plans long before he died...so why is she thinking of just giving it up if she were responsible?!!!!

no repercussions for Laenor's beau getting his face smashed in under the king's roof during a wedding feast (makes more sense during a journey, not a feast) --> lack of empathy towards Joffrey there, he couldn't die doing something considered honorable in his society, no he has to die like a dog [wanted to complain]

Because of this nonsense that one has to unpack while whatever episode is playing, I couldn't enjoy the characters and dialogue apart from the most superficial things. Apart from some scandalous behvior and Rhaenyra being savvy (episode 4 & daemyra in episode 5). Rooting and intrigued by the fashion of the wedding. I'm not even excited for Rhaenyra's maybe-bloodthirsty reaction to her son's death bc I know they will somehow ruin it, esp since they are only putting in 8 episodes for this coming season. They already didn't do enough for the first!

They also have a chance and when asked to explain take it to the most discriminatory level that turns you off if you have a modicum of respect for people. An example of this if claiming the Velaeryons being black is useful to make it "more obvious" that Rhaenyra's first sons were not Laenor's as if that means we should look at Rhaenyra's situation as being just her fault, that she should have just rolled over and "done her duty" when in fact the circumstances were almost set up against her...why? BC she is a woman! And why are we making the Velaryon's blackness or PoCness just a tool for denigrating another character instead of something for themselves?!

#asoiaf asks to me #hotd writing #hotd critical #hotd misogyny #transphobia #misogyny #male gaze #hotd male gaze #mini rant

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shrinkthisviolet · 2 days

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🧡💛💚💙💜🤍💖💀

🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?

The theory that Iris loved the Flash and not Barry. Her confession in s2 is literally her stating otherwise. People love to cite Armageddon, but…aside from that being very victim-blame-y (sure, guys, put that on Iris instead of the guy literally messing with her mind), people also forget that she literally shot Eobard, whom she thought was the real Flash, for the sake of Barry, whom she thought was the Reverse Flash. And then whispered “Barry, I love you too” with enough power to motivate him to set things right. Does that sound like someone who only loves the Flash??

💛: What is a popular ship you just can't get behind, and why?

I see the appeal in Barry/Snart as a ship, but I don’t ship them. Same for Harry/Cisco, though in that case, it’s because I don’t see their dynamic that way

💚: What does everyone else get wrong about your favorite character?

Iris’s “you are not the Flash, Barry, we are” is a supportive line, not a dismissive one. It’s “let’s carry these burdens together”, not invalidating him! Really, it says the same thing as “there is no Flash without Iris West” and “without you, there wouldn’t be the Flash”…both of which Barry said, pre-s4 (and also, Barry says “we are the Flash” in a later scene 👀 the line everyone attributes to Iris is in fact first said verbatim by Barry)

💙: Which character is not as hot as everyone else seems to think?

…listen I’m very much biased because I’m not ace and don’t see people as “hot” 😂 in terms of “attractive” tho…maybe Oliver Queen? Idk, he just doesn’t do it for me.

💜: Which character is way hotter than everyone else seems to think?

Idk if anyone in the Arrowverse is underrated in terms of attractiveness tbh 😂 maybe Cisco? I’m not totally sure.

🤍: Which character is not as morally bad as everyone else seems to think?

I’m not sure if people still hate Harry for killing Turtle, but the people who do need to bffr.

First of all, Turtle was not a helpless victim, and I despise how the show, and the people who hate Harry for this, constantly ignored that when talking about how Harry killed a man. Turtle is a domestic abuser who killed his wife and gloated about it, and then gloated about doing the same to Patty.

Second of all, the context: Harry did it to figure out how to steal Barry’s speed, so he could give it to Zoom, who dangled Jesse in Harry’s face to remind him of the consequences of failure. He wasn’t killing in cold blood. He wasn’t even doing it because he wanted to. He even warned Team Flash that he’d choose his daughter over them!! And even Barry defended his decision to the Team, as he should, because any of them would do the same thing/similar things to protect their loved ones, AND THEY HAVE! And we don’t hate them for it because their motivations are understandable!

💖: What is your biggest unpopular opinion about the series?

Doesn’t seem to be much of an unpopular opinion on Tumblr lol but I don't like s3. I like some parts of it (and the Westallen moments in it are (mostly) to die for), but it’s such a mess. It even pisses me off because it could've been so good (and also because parts of this fandom will call it the "best season" unironically...and a subsection of them still call for the death of a certain leading lady)

Also Savitar was a boring villain until he was unmasked, and idk why so many people liked him before that

💀: If you had to choose one major character to die, who would you choose?

Oooh this is a hard one, because usually my inclination is to save characters they’ve killed 😅 I guess Nash? I mean, his biggest contributions were kicking off Crisis and housing the Wells. Crisis could’ve happened so many different ways, and for the latter…they could’ve just bought back Harry instead of having Nash be his very boring mouthpiece. I wouldn’t remove him from the show entirely unless Crisis happened a different way, but…post-Crisis, he’s entirely extraneous

unpopular opinions ask game!

#the flash #anti coldflash #anti harrisco #i don't hate them or anything #but just in case #anti nash wells #opinions ask game #i don't necessarily think nash had to DIE but like. did we need to deal with him for another half-season

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deancodedbrainrot · 3 years

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I am really enjoying my rewatch (especially because it’s the first time I've done it in years) but god I just want to hit the later seasons with dad!cas and the bunker and all that stuff

#say what you will about the later seasons but I would die for any domestic bunker content #spn

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amjustagirl · 3 years

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Chapters: one. ~ two. ~ three. ~ four. ~ five. ~ six. ~ seven. ~ eight.

Wordcount: 2.9k

Summary: Being with Miya Atsumu is like chasing a storm - equal parts exhilaration and danger. After all, it’s impossible to tame a storm

Masterlist link here

AO3 link here

Author’s Note: And we’re at the final chapter! Thank you so much for going on this wild ride with me, and I’m rly excited to hear what you guys think - so please, drop me an ask, a note, a comment, anything!!!

It takes time and effort to rebuild a home wrecked by a storm, and reconstruction efforts aren’t necessarily smooth sailing, especially at the start - after all, he’s still the same Miya Atsumu, arrogant and brash and foulmouthed and hyper focused on volleyball, and they both have baggage from years of regret and pain to work through. But he has determination to spare, and she loves him too much for her own good, so they start from the very foundation and work their way up, step by step, one day at a time.

‘I’ll kill ya if ya ever hurt her again’, Osamu threatens darkly when she and Atsumu break the news to him.

‘Go find yer own girl and stop being sweet on my wife damn it! ’ Atsumu growls, but the kiss he presses to her forehead when she smacks the back of his head for being mean to his twin is achingly sweet.

‘Ugh, soppy. Get yer shit outta my house!’ Osamu scrunches his face in mock disgust.

Both brothers are surprised when she beats Atsumu at flipping Osamu off.

Atsumu moves back home (he’s not even going to hide how happy the sound of that makes him), and they mark the occasion by slipping his wedding ring back on his finger and eating take-out pizza on the living room floor.

Her burly brothers turn up on their doorstep with a glint in their eyes and too much teeth in their smiles, determined to drag Atsumu off for a couple of drinks and what she assumes will be a very unpleasant chat. She’d insisted on patting them down to make sure they’re not packing any knives - ‘what do you take us for, little sis’, they’d protested - but she’s not taking any chances, and begs Osamu to join them, ‘please ‘Samu, I don’t want to be a widow right after I decide not to divorce his ass’, and he agrees despite grumbling that he might as well be Atsumu’s glorified babysitter at this rate.

She’d woken up in bed the next morning to find the space beside her empty, but the living room crammed full of those four silly men. Atsumu and Osamu share a single futon between them, snoring back to back. There are faint bruises on Atsumu’s cheekbone and telltale scrapes on her own brothers’ knuckles, but otherwise they all seem relatively unscathed.

She bends over, tracing her thumb along the contour of Atsumu’s jaw, and he stirs, eyes half lidded with sleep.

‘Hey darlin', I’ve come home’, he tells her, warmth flickering in his smile.

‘Welcome home, 'Tsumu’, she says, tucking the blanket under his chin and he hums in contentment, falling back asleep.

His nightmares of brown envelopes and harsh neon lights distorting her face slowly fade, and he dreams instead of weeknight dinners and weekend picnics at the park, relishing the quiet domesticity of grocery trips and laundry loads, and delighting in home games with her and Shino cheering him on.

Some piss poor excuse of a gossip hound corners him after a match to ask him about whether he regrets leaving for Milan since his season ended in injury - and he freezes when the reporter slyly adds ‘especially since we all knew it’s a move that required you to leave your wife and daughter behind ‘. His manager is about to intervene when she sneaks up on him to slide an arm around his waist, apologising to the reporter that ‘she’s just so excited to give her husband a congratulatory kiss!’ .

Sakusa and Meian have to join forces to pull Atsumu back from punching the reporter when he grins shark-like, thinking he’s spotted easy prey and asks her whether she felt abandoned in Japan due to his move - ‘pardon me Miya-san for my unwieldy choice of words’.

‘Not at all’, she says without missing a beat, and Atsumu wonders if he imagines the flash of a knife in her smile. ‘I’ve always supported my husband in all his endeavours. It was a joint decision that I should stay in Japan to ensure our daughter has some stability in her life.'

‘She’s good’, his manager tells him when the reporter slinks away with his tail between his legs.

‘Yeah - I don’t deserve her’, he answers with a rueful smile.

When he tries to thank her that night, she levels him with a look that could knock a grown man (i.e. him) off his feet, but her voice is gentle and her words are soft.

‘Don’t thank me’, she says. ‘Just be a better husband and father, ok?’

He’s not ashamed to admit that he actually cries.

He learns to tell her he loves her at least once a day. She starts to smile back cheekily and reply ‘of course’.

The game is in between sets when the skin at the back of his neck crackles with nerves. From the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of Osamu sprinting right into the stands. Then his ears pick up on his little girl’s scream - ‘mama’ she cries, her shrill voice ringing above the confusion rippling through the crowd and his legs move of their own accord, leaping over the barrier into the audience, as he snarls and shoves his way to her usual spot.

He thought he’s had his fill of nightmares to last him a lifetime. He’s evidently wrong.

She lies crumpled on the ground, head resting on Osamu’s lap. Her lips are pale and her eyes are closed but thank god - thank whichever deity’s listening - her chest still moves with her breath. He’s not quite sure what happens next - he knows he dives to his knees and pulls her towards him but everything else is a blur until her eyes flutter open and she groans.

‘Darlin’, can ya hear me? Can ya tell me where you are?’ he asks, forcing his voice to remain calm.

‘Tsumu? Why are you here? Aren’t you in the middle of a game?’ she murmurs, confused.

‘Fuck the game’, he snaps. ‘Are ya feelin' ok?’

‘Something hurts, Tsumu’, she rasps, eyes glazing over. He can feel the chill of ice seep into his spine.

'Yer fine, yer fine, yer going to be fine' he mutters, over and over and over again, willing her to sit up and tell him she's fine, she's ok, she'll just shake it off - but light starts to shutter out of her eyes and frost creeps up his throat.

‘I need a medic!’ he shouts, voice cracking on every word. ‘I need a medic, now!’

‘Tsumu’, he hears his brother interrupt urgently. ‘Tsumu, she’s bleedin’.

He’s never been more grateful for Osamu when his twin turns to yell for an ambulance and yanks Shino away with him. The little girl is kicking and screaming for her mama but he knows she would kill him if he lets their little girl be traumatised from seeing her mama lying in a pool of blood on the floor.

He can’t breathe - not even when the medics finally come and whisk her off to the hospital, his mind hardly able to process anything, terror still coursing through his veins when the doctors press brown envelopes full of forms into his bloodstained hands for him to sign so the relevant procedures can be carried out.

‘Don’t!’ Osamu says sharply, when he drops his head into his hands and starts to whimper about how he’ll die if he loses her again and what the fuck is he gonna do, ‘Samu, if she doesn’t make it out alive – ‘she’s stronger than ya think, don’t ya dare give up on her like that’, and he promptly shuts up after that. Time in the waiting room passes agonizingly slow, seconds feeling like minutes, minutes stretching into hours, and he would have drowned from the weight of his despair if he weren’t anchored in place by his twin’s hand on his back.

His breath rushes back into his lungs when the doctors later tell him she’s fine, they carried out the standard operation - but she doesn’t look fine, doesn’t seem fine, is very clearly not fine when they wheel her out, huddled into a ball with her head between her knees, like her world has just collapsed into itself. She doesn’t even look up when he sits beside her, the bed dipping under his weight.

‘I’m sorry’, she eventually says, voice barely a whisper, and he fights the urge to break down into tears – because ‘Samu’s right, she’s so much stronger than he thinks. They'd been talking about trying for a sibling for Shino for some time now, since they've both grown up with brothers of their own and can't imagine life without them. But the doctors tell him that it’s just bad luck - the baby was never going to survive, and her collapse was probably exacerbated by stress, overwork, perhaps even fatigue from her skipping lunch for work and dinner to rush to his match.

‘Don’t be. It’s not yer fault at all’, he manages to pull himself together to reassure her, but she just stares blankly at the wall.

His grandmother calls when they find out the baby they lost would have been a boy, and he fails her again when he’s too late to snatch the phone away before the old lady’s poison drips into her ears and traps her in a deadly fog. He’d cursed the old bitch out relentlessly, but the toxic words fester beneath her skin and she fades into a ghost before his eyes. He desperately tries to stop her spiral into frozen silence, but he’s away for games more than half the time, hands tied behind his back by the stranglehold of contracts and commitments he has no choice but to fulfil.

He’s never been so thankful before when the season finally ends - but he is, at least this time, so he can talk her into taking two weeks off from work. They drop Shino off with her indulgent grandparents, and drift down the coast on the back of her bike. She doesn’t try breaking any speed limits - and he knows he should be happy about that, but there’s no spark in her eyes, no smile to answer the wind - there hasn’t been, not since she collapsed.

(not since they lost their child)

He buys her mochi at every town, but she picks at it listlessly, just like she does these days when Osamu tries to tempt her with his latest creations. He insists they stay at ryokans, traditional inns with onsens attached, hoping the heat from the water might chase the chill from her bones, but colour does not return to her cheeks. There are shadows beneath her eyes, and she seems to wilt under the vibrant red and gold of autumn leaves.

They go for a walk after dinner one night, tracing a path along the shore. He’d been talking non-stop the entire trip to mask the gaps left by her silence, but tonight he falls quiet, allowing the hum of the waves to wash over them. Her hand is cold in his, so he wraps his jacket around her shoulders and hopes the warmth from his body bleeds into hers.

She comes to a standstill, feet sinking in the sand, and tilts her head to face him.

‘Tsumu?’, she breathes, a question in her eyes.

‘I’m here’, he says, a prayer in his heart.

There is a lighthouse on the cliff just a few miles ahead, illuminating the shadows of the waves. The faintest reflection of light pools in her eyes, and he stills as she lifts her gaze to meet his.

‘I know’, she says, offering him the smallest of smiles.

He interlaces their fingers together firmly, and tugs her towards shelter, as a storm brews over the horizon.

That night she tucks her head under his chin, and he holds her until she falls asleep, cradled in his arms. He keeps slumber at bay by counting her breaths, and only falls asleep himself when the storm breaks.

'Why did I wake up to a blonde octopus wrapped around me', she mumbles, voice heavy with sleep.

'Nah. More like a seahorse, cos I'm not letting ya go, sweetheart', he replies, tightening his grip on her waist. 'Ya got a problem with that?'

Her only response is to burrow herself deeper into his chest.

'Guess not', he chuckles fondly, nuzzling his nose into her hair, hope blossoming anew in his heart.

Time turns their wounds into scars and they heal together, one breath at a time.

She stays away from their first few matches when the season begins again. The press is coerced into passing over reports of her collapse by the dual forces of the MSBY press machine and their legal team, but they are forced to ride out the gossip generated in internet forums by a fringe group of deranged fans. His teammates treat her like she’s made of glass - even Bokuto dials himself down a notch, all save for Shoyo, who slips her his mother’s number, telling her gently that the six year gap between him and Natsu wasn’t deliberate, and that she would find a sympathetic ear in the older woman.

He knew he was right to anoint Shoyo as his favourite wing spiker - not only does he fly high enough to answer the demand of every single one of his sets, but his sunniness drags her out of the fog into yoga classes and meditation practices, and slowly but surely he watches her bloom again. It’s a powerful combination - Shoyo-kun’s friendship and his mother’s gentle conversations, Osamu’s cooking and her love for Shino, capped with his determination to show her he loves her and prove that he’s here to stay.

‘It’s like Kintsugi’, she tells him, with a wide smile. ‘All of you poured gold into the cracks of my heart and made me whole again’.

The years pass.

Shino turns seven – a very respectable age for his very best girl, he tells her (I'm your only girl, Papa, Shino informs him archly), and obliges her demands of a bicycle in MSBY colours and volleyball lessons, forcing all his teammates to turn up for her birthday party, volleyball themed of course. The look of unadulterated joy on his princess’ face is worth every ounce of effort to put up with Sakusa’s complaints at having to turn up for a kiddie party full of loud noises and far too much candy, and the sweaty afternoons spent hand painting the bicycle black and gold.

The day Atsumu discovers his first white hair makes her thank her lucky stars that she’s immune to his nonsense by now, because the wailing and gnashing of teeth she has to put up with makes ‘Samu offer her his couch as refuge. She slaps tape and salonpas on his aches and pains, and points to the deepening lines on her face when he complains about his age.

‘Those lines aren’t wrinkles. If they’re caused by laughter, it doesn’t count’, he reasons laughingly. She’s left befuddled by his logic and shakes her head.

Meian Shugo retires, and Hinata throws a party to celebrate in his honour, cramming the entire MSBY team and assorted friends into his penthouse apartment on a rainy Saturday night. Osamu’s hired to cater the food but remains as a guest, shooting a smirk at him when Shoyo drags her off to dance during his favourite song, twin flames burning bright in the night.

‘A hundred yen for your thoughts?’ she asks, when Shoyo returns with her breathless but wreathed with smiles.

‘Was just wondering when you were gonna save a dance for this old man’, he teases.

‘Oh?’ she says with a laugh. ‘Thought you said your back hurt, and you didn’t want to move?’

‘Meh - I was hoping you’d forget that’, he says airily, then frowns when he notices there’s no drink in her hand.

‘Not drinking tonight, sweetheart?’, he asks, curling his fingers around her empty hand.

‘The doctor warned me not too’, she answers, her smile growing impossibly wider. He blinks in confusion when she leans on to her toes to whisper into his ear - then oh.

‘You’re pregnant?’ he repeats, unable to trust his ears, eyes filling with tears when she bites her lips and nods.

‘Are you happy, ‘Tsumu?’, she asks, her face alight with hope.

There is so much he wants to say to her, starting with thank you loving me enough to give me another chance all those years ago and ending with I love you, so ridiculously much – because he can never say it enough, she’s given him more than he deserves – her heart, Shino, a happy home and now the promise of another child.

But there's salt and water welling up in his throat, and it’s all he can do to choke out a shaky ‘of course’, before gathering her in his arms, warmth pooling in his eyes, love overflowing in his heart.

They stay that way for most of the night, entwined in each other’s arms, so drunk on happiness and love and warmth that they don’t even notice the storm clearing and the moon rising in the clear night sky.

#haikyuu #haikyuu!!#hq #haikyuu x reader #hq x reader #hq imagines #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu writing #hq writing #haikyuu angst #haikyuu romance #haikyuu fluff #miya atsumu x reader #miya atsumu x y/n #atsumu x reader #miya atsumu #miya osamu #inarizaki #haikyuucreations

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demonslayedher · 3 years

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Love Breathing Not Fully Bloomed: A Kanroji Mitsuri Meta

Some thoughts that have been brewing since we got a deeper look at the birth of the Breath of Love in the Rengoku Gaiden, boiling down to that Mitsuri had not yet reached her full potential.

SPOILERS AHEAD~!

While we don't have any reliable timeline for this series, we know that Mitsuri has been practicing swordsmanship for only about two years, likely less. The "two years ago" stated in her flashback to her failed engagement was back when she was 17, so let's be generous and say that was 2.5 years ago. But, we must also keep in mind that she's been a Pillar for at least several months by the time Swordsmith Village arc takes place. The Pillar meeting Tanjiro met her at was possibly her first of the twice-a-year meetings, but I wouldn't put it anywhere beyond her second. After the failed marriage discussion she would have spent some unknown period of time dying her hair and starving herself, before deciding to join the Demon Slayers. She accomplished her Flame Breathing training under Rengoku in six months, roughly half the time most Breath users train under their cultivators. Tokito is noted for becoming a Pillar in two months after taking up the sword, but Mitsuri probably stumbled her way into Pillarhood within months of passing the Final Selection; making the Kamaboko squad's quick ascension up the ranks look like nothing as she blows away the usual five years it takes someone to become a Pillar (or if they are especially skilled, more like two years, as stated by Gotouge in Taisho Secrets). While the way of swordsmanship and battle became Mitsuri’s everyday way of life, thereby leading to huge improvements, that's a really short time to develop actual battlefield experience. Among the Pillars, she is the least seasoned or naturally inclined for battle, it really is by accident of her bizarre strength that she’s gotten so far. That's hardly surprising, given her background and motives. For context, her interests are very domestic what with all the pet-keeping (four cats, a rabbit, and a whole hive of bees, by my count) and sweets and recipes, and her stated hometown would have been in the heart of developing city culture, with shopping and restaurants and movie theaters. There would have been no exposure to swords and the culture that goes with them, making her justifiably embarrassed of how monstrously her strength makes her stick out. Her inability to fit into a normal family life makes her feel worthless, even if she does have a base of love and support. (*Put a pin in these things, I'll be drawing a comparison to another character later.*) However it was that she was introduced to the Corp, it must have taken a huge leap of hope and/or desperation to leave the otherwise comfortable lifestyle for a life of battle. While Rengoku's home is not terribly far from hers, it still would have been a total break from the life she knew before, so she must had been betting everything on both her ultimate wishes; living in accordance with who she is, and finding a husband. Let's refer to these respectively as Wish A and Wish B. Note that "becoming a strong swordsman" and "elimating demons" are not among these goals; they are merely means to her goals. Now if we try to to follow her path as a swordsman chronologically, six months since taking up the sword under Rengoku, she's passed the Final Selection. On a mission with Rengoku, who now treats her as a peer, she's nonetheless filled with shame that she hasn't really picked up much skill and just waves her sword around with brute strength.

I love this bit of characterization because that is so, so easy a trap to fall into with martial arts. Even if you understand things in theory and do your best on proper form when taking things slowly, all of that very easily goes out the window when you're using them in the heat of the moment. The less experience you have, the far more likely one is to do this. Falling back on just throwing a punch as hard as you can instead of throwing a good punch makes Mitsuri so, so, so relatable. She is a normal girl with abnormal strength, not a battle genius. Like us normal people, and even like Tanjiro, she can only improve her battle sense with experience. This puts her in a very different situation than the other Pillars, who she meets either when they are very experienced, or when they are outright geniuses. This gives her a different sense of shame, which we'll come back to. While feeling ashamed that she can't live up to Rengoku's teaching, her fighting suffers with this lack of self-confidence (which, again, makes her very relatable because this is applicable to just about all of us normal people), and she only realizes the Breath technique when applying it through her own unique emotion-driven fighting style. While she goes on to name this Breath after Wish B (given that this is a romantic version of "Love"), it's powered more by a philanthropic love, realized only when she is protecting other people. This becomes a newly discovered third wish, as well as a source of confidence.

In the side story novels, Mitsuri later on suffers another blow to her confidence which compromises her fighting and makes her fall back into wanting to hide herself, for she is ashamed of how her motives compare to Shinobu's. Besides Shinobu's encouragement and giving Mitsuri a venue in which to openly express her love and appreciation for other people, another child whom Mitsuri has rescued looks up to her and says a few things to restore her confidence. Getting that feedback and being able to express herself openly (Wish A) is the cycle that powers Mitsuri's confidence and keeps her ultimate weakness, shame, at bay. This, combined with words of encouragement from Ubuyashiki and Rengoku, is what really empowers her to embrace her unusual constitution and develop the Breath of Love. While it's said that this is an offshoot of the Flame Breathing she's formally trained in, it's more of a stretch than the relationship between something like Snake Breathing stemming from Water Breathing, and more like she's hit at the basis of Breathing itself to create a technique suited to her, like Inosuke did with his entirely self-taught Beast Breathing. (*Put a pin in this self-created Breath style thing, we're going to come back to this too.*) So, Mitsuri went on to become the Love Pillar. With the rate at which Pillars cycle in and out (based on how many the Upper Moons claim to have killed), I have to wonder how fast the Lower Moons getting cycled in and out too. Even though these are her peers and we never see any other Pillars looking down on her, she sees herself in a lower position than the rest of them. Case in point, one thing I love that the anime did is that when Tokito chips the rock at Tanjiro and tells him off, Mitsuri is silently fangirling, and then when Tokito orders the Kakushi to draw back/leave, Mitsuri silently and automatically obeys and shrinks back. That wasn’t directed at you, silly!

Though her Breath requires confidence, she still has a ways to go. When we see her again later, she's in a position of being a protector to everyone around her; the swordsmiths and her juniors, and she's treated with the awe and respect and acceptance of a Pillar; in this kind of setting she is fully in accord with Wish A (reinforced by her less formal third wish) and, thanks to Shinobu's encouragement, not ashamed of Wish B, thereby eliminating a big part of her shame-based weakness. She's added all this power and just as importantly, experience to her preexisting raw strength and flexibility.

The experience is key here; she's gained a lot of battle sense since her first mission. She's not as taken off guard by demon abilities, and with her risen confidence, she's also gained more flexible thinking and can make quick adjustments in battle as needed.

Not entirely, though. At her core, she still relies on that brute strength.

Ultimately, though toward the end she thinks she might be overpowered after all, it's that boost of confidence and cycle of philanthropic love from her juniors and desire to protect them than she recovers and makes use of her mark. (I'm glad no one's told her that this means she's doomed to a short marriage, should she ever even get one.)

Following this historic feat; acting in a way that is natural to her and to her Breath to unlock a mark she didn't even know existed, she still feels a little shamed among the other Pillars for being so shamefully inarticulate about battle technique; despite this being what she's dedicated her life to. Again, it was never her natural desire to be a fighter, so it’s unsurprising that this part doesn’t come as naturally to her as it does to all those geniuses in the room.

Moving on to the battle with Nakime, this is mostly played for laughs because Mitsuri's lack of battle sense compared to other characters is put on full display. She's emotional from the get-go and easily overwhelmed and this affects her concentration drastically, leading to stupid mistakes and ultimately having to fall back on her brute strength to break through pieces of the fortress instead of survive and fight through observation. Getting called out on this is meant to help her, and she absolutely does her best to summon back her battle sense, but it's all downhill for Mitsuri and her Love Breathing technique from here.

As the battle with Muzan starts, that third wish is thrown back in her face as so many of her juniors die protecting her. Since he's powered by philanthropic love and confidence, she cannot recover any battle sense, and quickly falters so much that she must be removed from the battle rather than weigh everyone down. The difference between her and the other Pillars here is stark; her inexperience and lack of natural fighting inclination is, again, painfully obvious and relatable to a lot of readers. She has natural strength, but not natural talent. When she does return to battle, she only has that core strength to rely on again--no room for peace of mind, only brute emotional strength resulting in a panel that made me throw my fist in the air and cheer out loud because damn, that is hardcore, girl.

But, in the end, Mitsuri succumbs to her injuries, and only right before death does she get closer to Wish B. Even with Iguro's promise, it's too late.

This is super frustrating for a number of reasons, but if we're focused solely on the actualization of Love Breathing, it's because Iguro could have said something much, much, much sooner if he wasn't so ashamed of his own blood tainting her in this lifetime (not that she would have cared). Words from other people have such a huge influence on Mitsuri that if she had actualized Wish B, for which her Breath is named, she could have made humongous gains in confidence before being romantically loved, and having someone to openly shower in love. Imagine what she could have unlocked, if that shame she still carried for being too monstrous to be married could have been eliminated. But that's not all. What if the timeline had been different? What if she had not two, but five years’ experience? Or even more than that? What if, for a long duration of her experience as a swordsman, she was also experiencing a happy marriage? I invite you to consider the implications of a Mrs. Iguro Mitsuri who has the comfort and confidence of being herself with a husband, in addition to being in a leadership role in the Corp? A Mrs. Iguro who, with a little honesty from her husband who feels bothered that she’s embarrassed, stands up to Maeda-san and says that as a married woman she needs a more modest uniform?* A Mrs. Iguro who gained a level-headed battle sense that can only be refined through experience, not based in brute strength alone? She'd be such a happy badass. *(Not looking for a modern-era Western culture based debate on this; this is defined based on Mitsuri's desire for a proper Taisho Era marriage.) Now, remember those pins I put in place? Consider someone else who realized a natural Breath technique all on their own, who attained a mark without any intention to, who felt like a monster due to super human abilities that made them shamefully unable to fit into the ideal family life, despite only wanting a peaceful, happy wedded life? Someone who valued bonds with other people, a kind person who lived to protect others? Now, I'm not saying that Love Breathing is as powerful as the Breath of the Sun, or that Mitsuri is as innately powerful as Yoriichi (their natural skills were of different types entirely). But, as all Breath techniques stem from the same natural Sun Breathing source, Love Breathing might have found its way back a little closer to that source, in some way or another. Which is all to say, never look down on Love Breathing or on Mitsuri just because she didn't play as big of a role as the others in the final showdown. After all, that Breath was not yet all it could have been, and as a swordsman, she was not yet in full bloom.

#KnY fandom theories and meta #Kanroji Mitsuri #Kimetsu no Yaiba #Demon Slayer

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dotthings · 4 years

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Let’s talk about why Dean dancing with a lamp is subtext, but it’s subtext that supports textual arcs. Dean dancing with a lamp is not random. Meta on why Dean dancing with a lamp is part of the build of a textual arc for Dean, thematically, which also connects to his relationship with Cas. This symbolic moment being tacitly about Destiel will only feel like reaching if you ignore context, ignore canon, ignore long arcing, ignore textual material surrounding it. This isn’t just me talking about a ship, this is an important arc for Dean himself emotionally and the way canon’s working, Cas has become the star player in this specific emotional Dean arc about yearning.

Here are some canon quotes. I could just leave these here and not write another word of meta because the canon wrote it for me. But I’ve added some further commentary to spell out clearly what I’m getting at.

Dean in 8.14 “Trial and Error” by Andrew Dabb:

“You see a light at the end of this ugly-ass tunnel. I don't. But I tell you what I do know – it's that I'm gonna die with a gun in my hand. 'Cause that's what I have waiting for me – that's all I have waiting for me. I want you to get out. I want you to have a life – become a man of Letters, whatever. You, with a wife and kids and – and – and grandkids, living till you're fat and bald and chugging Viagra – that is my perfect ending, and it's the only one that I'm gonna get.”

Dean in 10.16 “Paint it Black” by Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner:

“You know, the life I live, the work I do…I pretty much just figured that that was all there was to me, you know? Tear around and jam the key in the ignition and haul ass until I ran out of gas. I guess I just thought sooner or later, I’d go out the same way that I live – pedal to the metal, and that would be it....Now, um… recent events, uh… make me think I might be closer to that than I really thought. And…I don’t know. I mean, you know, there’s – there’s things, there’s…people, feelings that I-I-I want to experience differently than I have before, or maybe even for the first time.”

Sam and Dean in 11.04 “Baby” by Robbie Thompson:

SAM: Really? You don't . . . Ever want something more? DEAN: I'm sorry, have you met us? We're batting a whopping zero in domestic life, man. Goose eggs. SAM: You don't ever think about something? Not marriage or whatever. But . . . Something? You know, with a hunter? Somebody who understands the life?

Sam and Dean in 13.23 “Let the Good Times Roll” by Andrew Dabb:

DEAN: But on a beach somewhere, you know? Can you imagine? You, me, Cas, toes in the sand, couple of them little umbrella drinks. Matching Hawaiian shirts, obviously. Some hula girls. SAM: You talking about retiring? You? DEAN: If I knew the world was safe? Hell, yeah. And you know why? 'Cause we freaking earned it, man.

Sam and Dean in 15.08 “Our Father, Who Aren’t in Heaven” by Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner:

DEAN: Look, man, I didn't want to say anything, okay, 'cause I was kind of in in a bad place, and, uh, yeah, I didn't want to jinx it or whatever, but, you know, I tried the family thing, right? SAM: Yeah, me too. And that's not for us. DEAN: No, not really. But I'm just saying if it was to work, Eileen, you know, she gets it. She gets us. She gets the life. She's hot. SAM: Dean. I mean, I'm not even- DEAN: Look, all I'm saying is you- you could do worse, okay? And she could certainly do better. Like, so much better. I'm happy for you, Sammy.

Dean and Garth in 15.10 “The Heroes’ Journey” written by Andrew Dabb:

DEAN: You know, I gotta say, aside from pincushion in there… this is pretty nice. GARTH: Yeah, better than I ever thought I'd get. I mean, hunting -- I figured I'd be dead before I'm 40. You know, go out young and pretty. But now I've got a great wife, great kids. I guess...sometimes things work out.

Dean in 15.10 “The Heroes’ Journey” by Andrew Dabb:

Dean, wistful, watching through the window as Garth and Bess dance: You know, I always thought I could be a good dancer if I wanted to be.

Ok, let those roll around in your brain for moment.

Now: CONTEXT. CONTEXT. CONTEXT.

There’s this long running arc about maybe Sam and Dean could each find a significant other, not white picket fence, but...something, with someone already in the life, who gets their life. There’s Dean’s move from despairing and believing the only ending he could have, the only ending any hunter could have, is dying with a gun in hand, to Dean’s enthusiasm for the concept of retirement, Dean’s wistfulness about finding a significant other, for what he thinks he can’t have, and he starts the cycle all over again, if he can’t have it, then he wants Sam to have it, so Dean encourages Sam with Eileen. Saileen, the Dean-blessed, Dean-approved Sam ship. Dean ships it. And that is how the canon is trending, complete with Sam and Eileen kissing goodbye and saying “this is real” and even God himself saying their feelings were real, “that was all you,” even if God manipulated events around them. Which is an overt mirror to Dean and Cas and Dean’s expressly stated doubts about what’s real and what isn’t, and Cas telling Dean “we are.”

Much the way Sam has been witness to Destiel, and has often pointed out Dean’s Cas feelings. Dean’s got a front row seat to Saileen and approves; Sam’s had a front row seat to Destiel and approves.

Let’s throw in Robert Berens’ work in The Trap here, since that’s relevant to this specific topic as well, because why did Sam and Dean in the potential future timeline where they’d killed Chuck give up and cave in to their vampire instincts? The world being overwhelmed with monsters...and losing Eileen and losing Cas. It’s right there in the dialogue. I’ll give you the quote and everything:

Sam and Dean in 15.09 “The Trap” by Robert Berens:

SAM: You want to quit? What's happened to you, Dean? Ever since -- DEAN: Ever since what? We lost pretty much everyone we've ever cared about? Ever since the Mark made Cas go crazy? Ever since I had to bury him in a Ma'lak box? Ever since then? Yeah. You know why? 'Cause the monsters -- they're everywhere. Everywhere! What we do -- it's not even Hunting anymore. It's whack-a-mole. We don't even save people. Every friend we've ever had is either dead, or they got wise and they packed it in. SAM: Jody's still fighting, and Bobby -- DEAN: Bobby has a death wish, and you know it. And Jody -- ever since what happened to Donna and the girls, she does, too. And after Eileen... so do you.

“Ever since” Dean had to bury Cas in a Ma’lak box. “After Eileen...so do you.”

So there’s this canonical long, long thread across multiple authors (and those weren’t even all the quotes, I’m sure people could dig up more) about Dean in particular yearning towards finding a significant other, some contentment, with someone who already is in the hunting life, who gets it, who understands.

An episode that flat out shows how losing their significant others is the final straw that rips out Sam and Dean’s last will to fight, and they lose themselves, and after they’re turned into vampires, they just...give into the darkness. Where Sam gives up their shot at destroying the big bad because losing everyone they love is too high a cost. Where losing Cas makes Dean lose hope, where losing Eileen sends Sam into a death wish mindset. Sam and Dean don’t just need each other. That’s not canon, it never has been.

And then right after that, along comes meta episode The Heroes’ Journey. Sorry if you don’t like The Heroes’ Journey, but it’s what the canon did, it’s textual, along with everything else I’ve pointed out here, and in among the crackish humor are some real emotional narrative points.

In The Heroes’ Journey, Dean gets to see Garth’s life. Garth found his significant other, Bess, and she’s another werewolf. Now, Garth’s life resembles the traditional white picket fence idea a lot more than what Team Free Will are headed for. Garth has a big house with a porch, and he’s a dentist. He’s also a werewolf and his wife is a werewolf and his kids are werewolves because Bess is a pureblood werewolf, Garth didn’t exactly leave the life, and he helps Sam and Dean on a case. But nothing’s been indicating to me that anyone in Team Free Will is headed for that kind of settling down, with a house, becoming a dentist. However, the canon has been practically shouting now, as we near final episodes of SPN, to make the point about a desirable outcome--some kind of stability, contentment, and a significant other. Dean gets a front row seat to seeing a hunter can have that. Garth’s a hunter who turned into a werewolf and he can have that.

When EP’s talk about how they aren’t headed for a white picket fence or driving off into the sunset or settling down, none of that rules out them finding...something...with someone, and some form of stability and contentment. Nope, I can’t really imagine them in the suburbs becoming dentists. But canon sure is putting up big neon arrows to...something. Think outside the box. This isn’t about the white picket fence.

And in The Heroes’ Journey, Dean, conked out on the good gas so Garth can fix his teeth, has a trippy dream where he dances with a lamp.

Rewatch the ep. Look at how the dance is choreographed not just the use of light, because that’s a clue too. The whole dance could have been Dean and Garth being dancing bros, but Garth fades off the stage, and Dean dances alone...until he grabs the standing lamp. In a season where Dean and Cas’s relationship is an A-plot, define it how you like, it’s A-plot. Their breakup and their reconciliation, which played like a marital breakup and reconciliation, are tied to major mytharc beats. In a season where a long-running textual theme about Dean’s developing hope for retirement and his wistfulness about “things...people...feelings...” is getting further play. Where Dean and Cas’s relationship continues to be one of the show’s most central ones.

Dean dances with a lamp. While his emotionally fraught, intense close relationship with Cas--A BEING MADE OF LIGHT--has a long-running arc and recently more and more textual level content spelling out the sublimated romantic interest in small words, while there’s an arc about Dean’s yearning for that stability, contentment, a significant other.

CONTEXT.

We don’t think Destiel’s “going canon” because Dean dances with a lamp, it’s that Dean dancing with a lamp is kinda loud serving as reflection of canon textual arcing. Sometimes subtext adds a layer. Sometimes subtext is directly tied to the surface layers, an echo, a highlighter.

I’ll just be over here, crying because Dean danced with a lamp.

#Dean Winchester #Castiel #Destiel #Destiel meta #spn meta #spn #supernatural #Saileen

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lokilickedme · 3 years

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The Way

I’m writing horror again. I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason. And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly. Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note: I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you. But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed. It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case. We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to. There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did. If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us. We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew. Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care. It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE. There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish. As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me. I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story. Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway. Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption. Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances. We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks. Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well. You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave? The one who died under mysterious circumstances? That one.

He left the way he always came in. Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking. She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998. I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband. He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live. It wasn’t bad. He’d tell you otherwise. The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it. I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times. But now I know. That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back. It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway. This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of. The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon. My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other. James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him. Perception bias, he said. Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly. We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe. We meant it. He made people nervous. He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know. It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones. We were the smart ones, in retrospect. I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family. But mostly the congregation. It was always more important than anything else. And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking. Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right? The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition. They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home. Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed. God’s not like that. And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it? I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain. A moral code, yes. But isn’t that what God is, really? Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us. But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result. Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned. And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water. The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow. He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest. So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay. I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that. Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself. It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day. The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further. Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different. What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person. I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then. You were just weird, or you weren’t. And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking. But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to. He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known. And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now. I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult. There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it. My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later. My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though. He took the easy way. He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

----------

December 22, 1998. Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us. The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work. We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years. The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires. Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making. He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot. Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time. I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother. He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior. The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong. Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult. It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

----------

My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation. They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise. I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son. I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy. She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather. Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much. He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders. My grandmother couldn’t swim. We could make another Ruthie, he said. But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice. I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy. I was never close to him. But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me. I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life. But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak. I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear. And I felt bad. I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized. My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying. Granddads are supposed to be fun. Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam. And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him. She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on. She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown. That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next. How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand. It affected her. She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it. And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for. He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad. The homestead. The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived. A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives. James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for. She’d wanted us all to stay. We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said. That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be. We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke. It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me. James was dead, had been for years. Robbie was dead now too. Dad was gone, so was granddad. Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them. We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life. And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts. Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land. And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew. The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it. It was just an old grave. The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground. My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it. He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line. It was a cool jacket. Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era. He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door. To this day I can’t sort it. It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for. It was cold. I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it. And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said. He’s in his house. I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told. He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants. There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do. And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point. He said he didn’t know. He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important. Something tells me it was. Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again. He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow. I’m sorry.

What do we do? I asked him. I’ve never felt more blank. What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother. I remember thinking that was a good idea. Robbie would know what to do. He always did. Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them. He would get on it, whatever needed doing. He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut. I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it. Someone you saw just yesterday. Someone who was alive. Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow. And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from. The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life. I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him. I never saw him. I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van. I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with. And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that. Some days it helps. And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped. I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill. Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable. We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm. Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office. There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down. And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice. By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose. The end report was obtained two months later. It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue. There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death. His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life. There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery. He was a secretive person, intensely private. He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family. He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep. There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box. He simply hadn’t woken up to use it. Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said. He was melted, literally. It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say. He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me. I’ll go with you if you want to go. But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead. I never saw any proof that he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore. There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on. He’d always been stoic, terse, strict. My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years. The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him. He was nicer suddenly. Mellow. Kind. After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny. The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before. He and I became friends. I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it. But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again. And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again. He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him? She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished. Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes. I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager. I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well. She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority. She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me. I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down. I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever. It changed me forever. That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either. She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me. It was the first of several disownings over the next few years. I got used to it. We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk. It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together. It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him. The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there. I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric. James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end. The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it. I don’t know why. It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day. James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted. And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me. He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him. He was unknowable and therefore unbindable. But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub. I’m not sure what it went to. Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on. There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it. Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before. Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved. David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his. I told him to take it. It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something. One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

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My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived. After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge. He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another. There had been several more on the floor around the bed. My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone. Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how. Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with. My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing! We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common. Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation? Dad was the only one that spoke to them. They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that. My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

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The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it. Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us. There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway. There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret. In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring. We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death. We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me. James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway. The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

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We never felt safe on the hill again. Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession. She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice. We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness. But we knew she was evil. We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right. But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself. She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive. The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife. He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails. He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat. One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death. She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming. She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies. Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come. At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized. She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load. She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house. The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would. She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it. The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to. They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out. I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her. She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently. No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face. It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment. That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are. I can’t do that. I won’t let her win that way. I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name. I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away. My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said. He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered. But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking. He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west. The way we were going. And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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luci-in-trenchcoats · 3 years

Text

15x20

Spoilers for Season 15x20 finale

Summary: This is a semi-rewrite of episode 15x20...

Pairing: Dean x reader (reader is treated more like an OC than a typical reader)

Word Count: 2,000ish

Warnings: language, major 15x20 spoilers

A/N: I wrote this for myself honestly. I know it is idealistic and was never going to happen. Again, I’m sharing simply if you’re interested but please feel free to ignore. This picks up from a very obvious point in the episode...

______

Dean POV

“Fuck,” said Dean, his hand over his chest. Something big was stabbing into his back. This felt wrong though. A dull, achy pain trickled up and down his spine and across his chest. His heart was racing up and slowing down when it wanted and Dean shut his eyes as he recognized the feeling in his bones.

He was dying. The kind of dying a doctor can’t fix.

“Jack!” shouted Sam, Dean peeling open his eyes as he realized Sam was besides him, hand covered in blood. A few seconds later Jack appeared in front of them eating a bar of nougat. “Jack fix him. Please.”

“He said he was hands off,” said Dean with a wince, his whole body shaking. Jack cocked his head and walked over, touching Dean’s forehead. The next thing he knew, Dean was sat on the ground and taking a deep breath, the pain gone as he looked up. “You said you were hands off.”

“You’re my dads. Why wouldn’t I help you?” he asked, a confused look on his face. Dean chuckled and nodded, still holding onto his chest. “You seem upset. I’ll pop you guys home.”

“Kid there’s-”

“Those boys are okay,” said Jack, snapping his fingers. Dean was suddenly sat on the steps up into the library, Jack mentioning something about taking some nougat from the pantry before he headed out.

“You alright?” asked Sam. Dean shook his head and he took a seat. Dean rubbed the heel of his palm against his chest and shuddered. “Jack got there in time.”

“If he hadn’t-”

“Dean-”

“If he hadn’t...because it was bad, Sammy. If he hadn’t...I’m so proud of you and I love you, so fucking much. I couldn’t have asked for a better baby brother, a better best friend. You just gotta tell me something. When the time comes, you’ll be okay without me. Tell me Sam. Please.”

“I’ll be okay,” said Sam quietly. Dean nodded and moved his hand to his lap, Sam scooting closer. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“Let’s get a house. We can get a big yard for Miracle. Run an operation like Bobby did, do the occasional case. Let’s go live more,” said Sam. Dean paused but rubbed his chest again and smiled.

“Dibs on the master bedroom,” said Dean. Sam chuckled and nodded. “Yeah. This place is home but I wouldn’t mind an upgrade.”

Two Months Later

“Miracle!” called Dean when he ignored the ball Dean had just thrown across the yard and ran around the corner of the house. “Miracle!”

“I think your daddy’s looking for you,” Dean heard a voice giggle. He walked around the house and saw a woman knelt down and ruffling the dog. “You’re so cute. You’re so cute.”

“Yes, I am,” smirked Dean as the woman popped her head up. “So, how can I help you and why are you parked in my driveway?”

“I’m Y/N. Y/N-”

“I heard of you. Hunter out of Alaska right?” he asked as she nodded. “You work a lot of Canada cases.”

“I did,” she said with a shrug. “I was thinking of retiring down south. Wondering if you got any tips on how to adjust.”

“A dog helps,” he said and she smiled, Dean looking her up and down. “You do realize this is Austin, Texas right?”

“This is south to me,” she said. “I know Donna through a friend of a friend. She said it’d be cool if I came and talked to you?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” said Dean, Miracle running over to the ball and rushing back with it. He nudged Dean’s hand and Y/N smiled. “You mind chatting while we do some fetch?”

“Not at all, Winchester.”

“Kinda funny how Eileen and Y/N know each other,” said Sam, Dean looking out the back window to where the girls and Miracle were sat on the back deck after dinner drinking a beer. Dean hummed and dried a plate, Sam nudging his arm. “You like her, don’t you.”

“You like her.”

“Dean.”

“Yeah, I like her. What’s the big deal?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A gorgeous, former hunter with your kind of humor, love for pie, muscle cars and classic rock that’s single just happens to have stuck around long after she got done talking to you.”

“I invited her to dinner.”

“She understands the life Dean. All the shit we carry. You’ve never tried with a hunter. Give her a chance.”

“Tried what?” said Dean, putting the plate in the cupboard.

“You can have a relationship Dean. I’m pretty sure she likes you too,” said Sam.

“Hello, Dean,” said Castiel, both guys jumping as they spun around. They stared at the angel as Cas looked around. “I enjoy your home. The air is fragrant.”

“It’s a candle,” said Sam, pointing to the flickering light on the countertop. He blew it out and Dean walked around the island, shaking his head.

“Where the fuck have you been?” said Dean, giving Cas a hug. Sam joined them and Castiel shrugged.

“Rebuilding heaven is labor intensive process,” said Cas before turning to Dean. “I felt you would be coming there soon a few months ago.”

“Why didn’t you pop down when you knew he was dying?” asked Sam.

“You are humans,” said Cas with a pout. “You will die someday. It’s an inevitable fact. Time is very strange in heaven in its relation to earth. I assumed you were an old man.”

“No, not old,” said Dean.

“Would you two like for me to prevent your deaths until a certain age?” asked Cas.

“No,” they both said, Dean smiling.

“But if we ask for help, you will help?” asked Dean.

“Always,” said Castiel. He tilted his head and looked out the back window. “Who is the woman with Eileen?”

“Y/N. Hunter from the Yukon area. Dean has a crush,” said Sam. He smirked when Dean whacked his arm, Cas still cocking his head. “You know her?”

“She’s quite drawn to Dean. Metaphysically speaking.”

“Yes cause whatever you just said was very clear. Like I’m five Cas,” said Dean. Cas sighed and pursed his lips.

“Jack has given me some extra power to help assist him better. I can see more of a person now,” said Cas. “Their energy, soul, things of that nature.”

“Okay...so what does that mean?” asked Dean.

“Oh your souls are quite intertwined. She’s your soulmate,” said Cas.

“Really?” said Dean, allowing a brief smile to cross his face.

“She also has a growing inoperable mass in her head that will kill her in the next few years. She suffers from headaches quite frequently,” said Cas. Dean sat down at the counter and stared out the back door, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Why can’t I be happy?” he breathed out. “For a fucking minute I can’t even be happy before the rug gets pulled out.”

“...Did you not want me to heal her?” asked Cas. Dean rolled his eyes and Cas’ glowed blue for a moment. “She’s fine now. You seem...emotional.”

“Well I am Cas,” said Dean.

“You’ve been off since that hunt and the barn,” said Sam.

“Sam I shouldn’t be alive,” said Dean. “I got lucky.”

“You have sacrificed your entire life for others, Dean,” said Cas, Sam taking a seat next to Dean. “You should take advantage of your powerful friends. Let others care for you now. I will speak to Jack about the remaining monsters and their relocation to somewhere better suited for them, perhaps a new world.”

“Everything alright?” asked Y/N, slipping in through the back door with an empty beer bottle.

“Yeah, we’re all good,” said Sam.

“Liar,” she said, smiling at Dean. “I’ll be right back.”

She excused herself to the bathroom, Sam and Cas going outside. Dean got another set of beers out just in time for Y/N to return.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said.

“Shoot,” said Dean, handing her the drink.

“Your friend, the angel, did he just heal me? I’ve had constant headaches for awhile now. Brain tumor. I feel different. You guys wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with that would you?”

“You deserve to enjoy your retirement,” he said. “A very long retirement. You’re fine now.”

“I won’t be mad about that,” she said, leaning against the counter by him. She took a long sip and smiled. “I like you, Dean.”

“I like you,” he said.

“I’m gonna stick around town for a bit, see if things work out,” she said. He nodded and smiled, watching her smirk. “So there’s really no more monsters?”

“Uh, what?”

“I overheard Castiel when I walked in. Guess we’re really out of jobs now,” you said.

“I got an offer for a construction manager,” he said.

“You gonna take it?” she asked.

“I think so. What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “Gotta keep busy somehow.”

“What’s your retirement look like?” he asked. She shrugged and smiled. “Now that death isn’t imminent.”

“Maybe I’ll find a guy, try the domestic thing,” she said, a soft smile staying on her lips. “Know anyone who might be interested?”

“I’m sure I can think of someone, sweetheart.”

One Year Later

“So what do you think?” asked Sam as he spun around in his suit in the family room.

“What do we think junior?” asked Dean, the baby on his lap clapping his hands. “He says dad’s gonna score tonight.”

“I fear for you teaching my son things when he’s a teenager,” chuckled Sam.

“That’s what Uncles are for,” said Dean as Y/N got up from the couch and started fixing Sam’s tie.

“And what Aunt’s are for to rein them in,” she said, smoothing it out.

“Thank you,” said Sam. “Hey, when you two gonna have a kid?”

“Who says we aren’t?” smirked Dean. Sam went wide eyed and she rolled hers.

“We’re trying just recently. You will literally be the first to know once we do,” she said. She winked and Sam narrowed his eyes, looking back and forth between them then down to her stomach.

“You’re so pregnant.”

“Ugh, we were gonna surprise you guys. Let us surprise, Eileen at least,” she said.

“You guys are pregnant!” said Eileen from over the balcony upstairs. Y/N laughed and headed up, Sam taking a seat next to Dean and plucking his son into his arms.

“You’re gonna be a real good dad. You got a lot of practice,” said Sam. Dean shrugged and Sam gave him a side hug. “I’m really happy he gets to know his Uncle, Dean. You’re gonna do great.”

“I’m really happy I get to be here too,” said Dean. He sat back and shut his eyes. “I owe you one.”

“For what?”

“The barn. I thought Jack wouldn’t come. I didn’t even bother. I thought that was gonna be it,” said Dean. “I didn’t want to go yet.”

“You don’t owe me for that,” said Sam, handing the baby back when he heard feet on the stairs. “Be good for Uncle Dean, baby boy.”

“Go have fun on your date, Sammy,” said Dean.

“You have fun on your stay at home date,” chuckled Sam. “See ya later, De.”

“Later, Sammy.”

_________

#spn #spn spoilers #dontspoilthefinalhunt #spn season 15 spoilers #supernatural #dean x reader #dean winchester #sam winchester #supernatural dean winchester #supernatural sam winchester #one shot

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uwuwriting · 3 years

Text

Breaking in pt.2 w/ Aizawa, Shinsou and Bakugou

Request: Hi!! SoooOO I recently found your stuff and it's safe to say I am ✨obsessed✨ I LOVED the post you did of the BNHA reacting to someone breaking in with Hawks, Dabi and Todoroki. I was wondering if you could do another one with like Shinsou, Bakugou and Aizawa. I feel like Baku would throw mad HANDS. love your work stay stuff and have a good day x - anonymous

Okay I too love rescue fics and being kidnapped or held hostage is one of my favorite tropes. Throwing your kids in the mix is immaculat at least for me because I’m a die hard fan of domestic AUs. So of course I’m gonna write this trope again with these three idiots. I enjoyed writing the previous one so hehheehehehhe. Love ya. 💖💖💖

masterlist II rules

warnings: some descriptions of violence, some crying but fluff/comfort in the end.

Aizawa Shota II a son (Kaito)

-He was running late.

-He hated running late.

-Today the class had extra training hours and it lasted longer than he expected, so much so that he had to call for someone to fill in his spot on patrol tonight.

-In reality he really wanted to spend the night at home with you and your 2 year old son, canceling his patrol because the kids didn’t finish training was just an excuse.

-He had shot you a text informing you that he would be home tonight but a little later than usual.

-You had just picked up Kaito from his aunt when you got Aizawa’s message.

-You were excited to spend some time with your husband.

-Between your time teaching and his midnight patrols, the only moments you truly got to spend with him were in between the classes or when he came home for dinner and then immediately left.

-You knew he felt bad leaving the two of you alone for so long and you knew he beat himself up for missing precious time with his son.

-Opening your apartment door you were met with complete silence which was odd.

-Usually your three cats, Mochi, Mocha and Coco would meet you at the door, mewing and purring at your feet, Kaito always wanting to be put down so he could pet them.

-Now though none of them came and you immediately knew something was up.

-Your spidey senses were tingling.

-Setting your stuff down you held Kaito closer to you as you slowly walked around your living room and kitchen.

-Nothing seemed amiss.

-Kaito let out a small whimper and shifted in your grip as something moved behind you.

-Just because you retired from being a hero doesn’t mean your skills have disappeared.

-Oh no, as a new mom you were hyper aware of your surroundings and you easily dodged the blow that was aimed at your head.

-Whipping around you came face to face with a hooded figure that seemed more like a burglar than a villain.

-The dude's eyes quickly landed on Kaito and he let out a shaky breath.

-They definitely weren’t villains.

-People were aware of Aizawa’s family and any villain who tried to get to him through you would have known about Kaito’s existence.

- “Shit…. Yo she has a kid!”

-Another one came pounding from the hallway, eyes quickly landing on the baby you had clutched to your chest.

-Letting out an exasperated sigh the second intruder rolled his eyes, grabbing an umbrella from the hanger and slowly making his way towards you.

- “Just knock her out and tie her up, put the kid in a crib or something.”

-You weren’t about to let them touch your son, they wouldn’t even be able to come remotely near him.

-Activating your quirk, thrumming filled the air as you were prepared to fight them, to keep them away from the crying child in your arms and that’s when you saw him.

-He is always so silent, his footsteps so gentle on the marble floor of your apartment that you have convinced yourself that he is indeed half cat at this point.

-Aizawa was burning holes at the back of their heads, hair up as he activated his quirk, cancelling theirs.

-You kissed Kaito as Shota let his capture tool fly across the room successfully trapping the two burglars.

-In six strides you were next to him, checking for injuries on each other while simultaneously trying *and failing mostly* to calm your 2 year old down.

-The police were called, naming this whole incident as a random burglary and not a scheduled attack, relieving both of you; you didn’t wanna move again.

-That night Kaito slept in your room, cuddled on Aizawa’s chest as you were nestled under his arm.

-Three fur balls were curled at the foot of your shared bed, purring away lulling you to sleep.

-You found those three locked in your bathroom.

-Apparently Mocha had scratched the living hell out of one of the burglars and they had locked all of them in the bathroom for safe measure.

- “I’m sorry for this.”

- “Burglaries happen Shota, it wasn’t your fault. I’m glad you came when you did, fighting while holding Kaito would have been kinda difficult. I think I might be getting kinda rusty.”

-He stroked Kaito’s plush cheek before letting out a sigh.

- “I have never seen him cry like that. When he sees me he always calms down but now-”

- “He was scared, Shota. He saw them before I did and the whole situation shook him up. But he’ll be fine, he’s got us.”

-Giving you a kiss and then placing another one on his son’s forehead, he closed his eyes, arms tightening around the both of you a little.

Shinsou Hitoshi II a daughter (Kei)

-Hitoshi had been to every single pharmacy in the area searching for Kei’s medication.

-She had gotten sick and you had asked him to fetch some antibiotics your pediatrician had suggested you give her if her fever didn’t go down.

-Now, Hitoshi was getting desperate.

-It was the flu season and almost all the pharmacies had emptied their shelves from this particular antibiotic.

-He was ready to pull his hair out.

-Apart from that, he also hated leaving you alone like this.

-You both needed him at the moment and he wasn’t helping at all.

-Kei was suffering from her fever while you were about 7 weeks pregnant and he was out here running around like a maniac.

-In one last desperate attempt he entered another pharmacy and to his surprise they had what he was looking for and he was out the door in a flash, leaving the store without giving the clerk enough time to say a single ‘thank you, come again.’

-Sprinting home, he dashed into your apartment complex and up the stairs, fumbling for his keys as he neared your door only to find it already ajar.

-Slowing down he looked at the open entryway; he was sure he closed it on the way out.

-Why hadn’t you closed it?

-Pushing it open he came face to face with a disheveled living room, Kei’s toys scattered everywhere while one of your armchairs was knocked over.

-A small whimper suddenly pierced the air and Hitoshi would recognize his daughter’s cries from anywhere.

-A deep voice told her to shut up which was answered by your angry voice threatening to beat the living shit out of them if they touched her.

-With silent steps, Hitoshi tiptoed to your daughter’s room where he could hear the talking only to stop dead in his tracks when shuffling came from your bedroom.

-Another figure emerged from your bedroom halting once they saw Shinsou.

- “What th-”

- “Sleep.”

-Without bothering to check if the intruder passed out, Hitoshi pushed open the door, his anger radiating all around him at the very thought that someone had touched his family.

-The second person whipped around at the sound of the door opening, eyes wide as they met Hitoshi’s, fumbling to activate their quirk.

-They made the fatal mistake of speaking though and soon they were unconscious just like their friend, laying on the pastel carpet of Kei’s room.

-In one swift motion he had Kei in his arms and untied your wrists, rubbing the irritated skin and checking for injuries.

-Kei wouldn’t calm down, her grip on his shirt turned to iron once the police dragged them out of your house.

- “I wish I could beat their ass.”

- “You know you can’t use your quirk right now kitten.”

- “Yeah but they pissed me off.”

-Your doctor had forbidden quirk use during the pregnancy and that’s why those two morons had managed to catch you.

-The scowl on your face had become almost permanent and Shinsou couldn’t decide if he should find it cute or terrifying.

-Kei became attached to Hitoshi’s chest.

-Hitoshi refused to let her go just like she refused to let him go, staying in his embrace for the rest of the day, any attempt to get her away from him resulting in tears.

-You are kinda salty but some ice cream will fix that.

Bakugou Katsuki II A son (Tatsuo)

- “Okay kids, you have a nice weekend and don’t forget to finish your family portraits for Monday. Tatsuo and I would love to see them.”

-A multitude of goodbyes came through the screen as your kindergarten class, some of your students even opened their cameras to wave at you and your son who was sitting on your lap.

-Tatsuo babbled back at them, little byes leaving his lips as he too waved back at your laptop.

-Being in quarantine wasn’t that bad for a kindergarten teacher.

-Your online classes weren’t difficult to manage and you got to spend more time with your two year old son.

-The class loved seeing him and would ask if he was joining them each morning.

-Closing your laptop, you hugged your mini Katsuki as you started heating up his milk.

-You were humming, gently rocking him as you waited for the milk, giving him stray kisses here and there just to see his little nose scrunch up reminding you of Katsuki more and more everyday.

-Checking your phone for any new messages, you let out a sigh at your husband’s message saying he was coming home; that was thirty minutes ago.

-Hero work didn’t let up despite the quarantine.

-Bakugou was as busy as ever, leaving first thing in the morning and most of the time returning home late in the afternoon sometimes staying out even after midnight.

-Today though he had managed to get off earlier than usual, promising to cook for both of you tonight.

-You knew he wanted to spend more time with Tatsuo and the fact that he was gone for the majority of the day was eating him up.

-He was so worried that he was neglecting his son; he even convinced himself that Tatsuo would soon come to hate him.

-Your son on the other hand was attached to Katsuki’s hip, always searching for his dad in the morning and beaming when Katsu came home.

-He could never hate him.

-The sound of the door opening snapped you out of your little Katsuki infused dream state.

-Turning around you expected to see your husband in the living room, arms stretched out as he smiled at the two of you.

-But you were met with three strangers; three hooded strangers holding a crowbar and two bags.

-It was a staring contest for a solid five minutes before either of you moved.

-One of them noticed Tatsuo and nudged his “coworker” who then informed the leader of the trio.

- “Better not make a sound sweetheart, I’d hate hurting that pretty little face of yours.”

-He took a step forward only for you to take a step back, until your back hit the cupboard.

-He let out a chuckle and motioned for his rookies to search the place as he continued walking towards you.

-Tastuo was gripping your shirt, eyes trained on the man, his brows downcast in anger.

-Your phone lit up on the counter and in one swift move you grabbed it, pressing your emergency call button as the intruder rounded the counter.

-You sprinted for the front door just as Katsuki picked up only to be grabbed by one of the other two and dragged back inside the house, Katsuki’s yells echoing through the phone.

-Now you are aware that your husband is one of the top pro heroes.

-You know that in order to rise to the top charts in this industry you need to have certain attributes like strength, tactical thinking ….speed.

-You felt him more than saw him.

-You were wrestling to get the hands of the intruder off of you when you felt the windows rattle.

-And before you knew it, your husband had tackled the man holding you to the floor, knocking him unconscious with a single punch before pouncing on the other two.

-Tatsuo was letting out small hiccups as tears rolled down his cheeks, his grip on your shirt never wavering but he refused to sob.

-He had his father’s pride okay? Even at the age of two.

-Katsuki had you both in his arms in a flash, calling the police before checking both of you over for injuries and what not.

- “Did they hurt you? I swear I’ll kill them if they did.”

- “We are fine Katsu, just a little shaken.”

-The moment Tatsuo was in Katsuki’s arms he began to cry, burying his face in his dad’s chest still holding on to your shirt.

-It took an eternity to calm him down and even longer to put him to sleep, even though he was sleeping in your bed.

-The next morning Katsuki was on the news for marching to the police station and beating the living hell out of the burglars.

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alex-claremont-is-a-mouthful · 3 years

Note

What is your top 5 BEST and WORST Malec moments (in the show) and why?

I had to think about this waaaaaay too long and I’m sorry for taking so long to reply.

I didn’t know how to interpret the worst moments, like did you mean bad acting or just bad stuff happening to them and being like aaaaaaaah why? I went with the second option bc in my opinion malec did not do bad acting.

Anyway, here are my top 5 worst moments with one being bad and 5 being the absolute worst and jee that was a difficult one. Why would you torture me like this?

1. The argument about immortality. Magnus not wanting to even think about Alec being gone. It. Broke. My. Heart.

2. The balcony scene. I know it was a spell but it just enhanced already existing emotions. Just think about Magnus seeing Alec stand on that ledge. If he was even a second later it would’ve been too late. Imagine Magnus already losing Alec even before they had a real chance at a life together.

3. Magnus destroying the lock. This scene, the song, the feelings. It’s partly a happy scene because we get to see them being in love and sharing this lovely moment but then Magnus destroying the lock, it killed me. It literally killed me.

4. The break down/proposal dinner. The raw pain Magnus was in, Alec trying to be there for him. Magnus physically trying to resist Alec but Alec just not letting him go. Again, such a good yet heartbreaking scene.

5. The second break-up. I mean, do I have to say more? That just shattered my heart (and magnus’). Everytime I hear the song from that scene I just want to cry in a corner.

Now that I’m done crying over these sad moments, my top 5 best Malec moments.

1. The shampoo scene. I mean, domestic Malec is just best Malec. Alec sniffing (wasn’t the first time he sniffed it, he does that everytime he showers) and Magnus being like is something wrong with my shampoo. That scene is gold.

2. Them repairing the ley line shit in the institute. I mean first of all, have you seen their outfits in that scene?

For some reason I am extremely weak for both of their outfits. Also BAMF Malec is the best and this scene was just * chefs kiss *

3. The wedding (the real one). Although the Lydia wedding is definitely an awesome scene, the real wedding means so much more to me. The pure happiness on their faces, Maryse walking Magnus down the isle, their vows, brother Snackaria, Madzie... Everything was perfect.

4. Alec seeing Magnus’ eyes the first time. That whole scene is perfect. Magnus being so insecure because so many people rejected him for something that is basically him. Also the fact he fucking lost control because he was kissing Alec, they were just kissing. And then Alec being nothing but accepting. To him his eyes are nothing more but beautiful, just like Magnus. And Magnus being like shit I am falling so hard for this man. I think they already both knew they loved each other. They were not ready to say it yet but actions speak louder than words ya know. And I think Alec already knew back then this is the one, this is the one I want for the rest of my life. I am so weak for that scene.

5. The first I love you. Alec being frantic because he can’t find Magnus and he doesn't know if he’s even alive. And then the hug and Alec just HAVING to tell him because he can’t keep it in any longer because I think Alec was feeling the sentiment for quite some time and he was waiting for the right moment to tell Magnus but then shit happened and Alec was like fuck it we can die anytime with this Valentine shit I HAVE to tell Magnus right now. Anyway, I have a lot of feelings about that scene.

Also I have so many more scenes I loved so this was really difficult.

Honorable mentions:

- the Lydia wedding

- the scene in lorenzo’s mansion where they break in

- pretty boy get your team ready

- the training scene

- the proposal

- the whole first season

- the whole second season

- the whole third season

EVERY FRICKING MALEC SCENE IS THE BEST OKAY

#I have strong feelings about this ask #shadowhunters #malec #alec lightwood #magnus bane #anon #ask

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insertdeeplyrics · 3 years

Text

On the ending of Supernatural

Hi, I’ve never actually posted anything on Tumblr of my own creation (I mostly reblog stuff), but I’ve just seen the ending of Supernatural, and given that this is where I’ve been fed my SPN content, it felt right to share my thoughts here. I’m sure nobody is going to read this, but whatever, I just need to get this out of my chest. Sorry in advance if this is too long, but I have to type this out if I want to move on.

I still need to take some time to process everything that’s happened, because it is a lot. I did have my hopes up for the finale, thinking that Cas would at least show up, but like many of the fans, I was let down.

So I guess that would be the first issue I had with the episode. Regardless of what Dean felt towards Cas, if he reciprocated his feelings or not (which he totally did, I mean, we have all been watching the same show for 12 fucking years, and if you don’t believe me, there are plenty of metas that would support this statement), he still is his best friend and it doesn’t sit right with me the fact that he doesn’t even try to find a way to rescue Cas from the Empty. And okay, maybe he didn’t, make Cas got resurrected by Jack, then why the hell wasn’t he on the final episode? He was a pivotal character for the series, I mean, the proof is in the ratings: Season 7, when he was killed off to apparently never return, the ratings were at their lowest. The show may have started as just Dean and Sam, but over the years it became much bigger than them, and it is so disappointing that the show runners failed to acknowledge it. But I’ll get back to this point later.

Okay, I need to talk about Dean’s death, the only part of the episode that made me cry, because my poor baby had to suffer so much! Like, when he started saying that Sam never put up with John’s crap (which reinforces my headcanon that John was abusive towards the boys) and how much he admired him for it, my heart just shattered. I just love Dean Winchester so freaking much, and they did him so dirty... Don’t get me wrong, Jensen and Jared’s acting was 10/10, like, I thought I had a grip of myself and then Sam started crying and tears came back to my eyes. Nonetheless, I felt that the scene was so freaking long! I mean, Dean was dying, and he had time to make a 10 minutes-long speech! C’mon! Also, I get that Sam and Dean’s relationship is quite deep and strong and whatever, but I felt a bit unconformable watching it: it didn’t feel like a brotherly goodbye, more like a lover’s one. They were too touchy and intimate, and, overall, their relationship from this point on was coded as a romantic one, in my opinion. And Chuck, did I hate it! I have an older brother and I know what it is like to be close to your sibling and to love him more than anything else in the world, but the way they portrayed their relationship on this last episode felt incest-y, which makes me believe that this scene was originally written with another character in mind (cough CAS cough) or the writers don’t know the difference between romantic and brotherly love. To finish off, the way they killed off Dean??? I mean, I did expect Dean to die, but this was such a horrible and ridiculous way to go... I would have accepted it if he died actually fighting, but impaled??? After all he’s been through, after fighting so many demons, angels and deities, that’s how he dies??? That just felt cheap and rushed. Dean did not deserve that ending and I refuse to accept it. In fact, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of this whole fucking mess of an episode. Also, I just can’t believe that no one showed up to Dean’s funeral. I just can’t. I get that maybe it was difficult to bring in a lot of actors due to the pandemic, but they could have added them on post-production...

Next, we have Sam’s ending. He quits hunting and finally obtains his white-picket fence life. I did like the fact that he honored all of his friends and family that he lost along the way, especially Dean. Like, yes, if my brother died, I would like to keep a token (don’t know if that’s the actual word for it, my first language is not English), to have something with me that reminded me of him and to have him with me wherever I go. And I did like that he named his son Dean, in honor of his brother. However, we don’t know how he met his wife, we don’t even know who she is. They set up Sameileen for what?? Like, Sam and Eileen deserved better, tbh. And, again, even with Covid restrictions they could have done something to signal that Sam got married to Eileen, you don’t need the actor there. In fact, we never actually found out what happened to her, and just like I can’t believe that Dean didn’t even try to save Cas from the Empty, I can’t believe that Sam didn’t reach out to Eileen. Furthermore, the montage with his son felt cheap and a way to try to appeal to the audience’s emotions... (Btw, as a side note, the grey wig and the glasses, my god, they did Jared dirty 😂😂). But it wasn’t doing it for me, I didn’t care much for the kid, and while I do believe that was always going to be Sam’s ending, I didn’t like how it was executed.

And the worst part of it all: that suuuuuper long scene with Dean driving in Heaven, waiting for Sam. They could have used that time to show something more meaningful, even to develop a bit more Sam’s new life, how he adjusted to domesticity and fatherhood and all that crap. Or, I don’t know, A TEAM FREE WILL 2.0 REUNION??? And I guess this is my biggest issue with the whole episode. I get it, Sam and Dean are the central characters, the ones that started it all, but family don’t end with blood, and they were not the only ones who deserved a goodbye. They had formed so many bonds and friendships over the years, and to not have them address them on the final episode just feels infuriating. Especially Cas. His arc was not finished, he deserved to be on the finale. We never got Dean’s reaction to his confession, we don’t know how he felt about him, nor did Cas get to say goodbye to any other character. How did he get out of the Empty? What is he doing now? Is he still an angel? Also, he gave his life to save Dean, only for Dean to be killed not long after. My headcanon that is helping me cope with Dean’s death is thinking that he was so quick to accept his death because he was hoping to reunite in Heaven with Castiel. A girl can dream, ok??? But also, what about Jack? He is the new God, but I highly doubt it that he won’t drop by the Bunker from time to time, after all, Sam and Dean (AND CAS, ESPECIALLY CAS) raised him. And Charlie? Did she get back with Stevie? Did she and the boys go for drinks from time to time? And Jody? Donna? Claire? Sorry to be so repetitive, but I just can’t understand why the writers thought that these characters weren’t important enough to deserve a spot on the finale, and not just an off-hand mention (and not even all of them got that). Of course, the brothers are the main characters and their goodbye must be the longest and the most emotional of them all, but like I said before, the show stopped being just about the Winchesters on season 3, when Bobby was first introduced, maybe even 4, with Cas.

Overall, the finale left a lot of questions unanswered, most of them regarding secondary characters (but not less important for that!), completely destroyed Sam and Dean’s character development (Dean never got to be free, like he had been fighting for all season, probably all his life; Sam’s development is non-existing, as he ended up as he would’ve if he never had gotten on that hunting trip with Dean 15 years ago), and completely disregarded all the themes they had been setting up this season, probably on previous ones as well. It is sad knowing that the writers, either don’t know the show good enough to give it a proper goodbye, or they just didn’t care to do so. I don’t know who’s to blame here (definitely not the actors, though, probably someone higher up the chain), but I just know that I am so fucking disappointed. I expected more from the last episode of a 15-season TV show, one that has been part of my life for 7 years. I guess, that despite all of it, I can’t hate Supernatural. Maybe I was not a hardcore fan like some people on this site, but I did care for the characters and what happened to them. This is the show that introduced me to the world of shipping (Destiel will always hold a special place in my heart, it doesn’t matter how badly their relationship was treated, as well as the characters) and I got to discover one of my favorite characters, Dean Winchester. He is just such so complex, one that I relate to on so many levels, and his relationship with Cas has been the source of many short stories that I’ve never posted anywhere, but that have made me take up writing again. That’s the reason why I love the show so much, it has helped me tap into my creativeness and go back to writing, a passion of mine that I seem to have forgotten over the years. Anyways, maybe one day I’ll publish some of those stories, and maybe even write my own fix-it fanfic, but right now, I can’t deal with anything that has to do with the show, I am too hurt. Maybe once the five stages of grief are over, I might give it a try and read all of the amazing codas and fanfics that I’m sure will be posted here or on AO3. But for now, Supernatural is dead and gone, and I don’t want to talk nor think about it anymore. I’m done wasting my time here, because I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing this past 7 years after watching this crap of a finale.

To finish this long rant off, I just want to say thank you to some meta-writers, the true heroes of the fandom. Thanks to them, I carried on watching the show, because they made me have hope that things will get better. They are the ones that have made this experience worth something, and even though I’ve never spoken to any of them, I see you and I love you. Thanks for everything ❤.

@tinkdw @charlie-minion @dotthings @heliodean @verobatto-angelxhunter @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover

#supernatural #spn s15 #spn #carry on #destiel #supernatural finale #personal rant #dean is bi #dean winchester #sam winchester #disappointed #dean winchester deserved better #destiel forever #jack also deserved better #every fucking character deserved better #character development who? don't know her #castiel #spn spoilers #spn 15x20

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mego42 · 3 years

Text

Shamelessly stealing @foxmagpie’s monthly rec thing without the ability to get my life together to do these on a monthly basis so, seasonal recs! So excited to see if I manage to do this again with anything remotely resembling consistency but i’ve been keeping the notes for approximately 43 years (or since ~september, whatever that means) so by god i’m gonna use them.

found my thrill - s_t_c_s / @sothischickshe

Turner POV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

guys turner is SO OBSESSED with Beth and Rio

both canonically and in this fic

it’s gr9

also features a weirdly soothing and relatable cord untangling moment as a metaphor

truly disturbingly relatable turner pov tbh

relentless boomer disdain, always a plus

led to the creation of this monstrosity, not sure what kind of a monster would do that

War In My Mind - mintletters16

Backread!!!!

post-213, gorgeous character study

guaranteed to make you feEl stUfF

I really love the like, cyclical, fractured pattern of Beth’s internal monologue, it gives the whole thing a really affecting at times dreamy, at times haunted vibe

the end twist is *chef’s kiss*

mourning bells - Ejunkiet / @ejunkiet

Backread!!!!

Later s2 era, Rio’s at a funeral, gets drunk and calls Beth

V short, kind of…..mmm, not sweet, but almost? Idk

It’s got a wistful sort of almost/i can be quiet with you vibe that i go extremely bonkers for

delinquents - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie

Lol are any of you actually not reading this yet?

g o d ch 8 where do i start

First off how ABSOLUTELY VERY DARE for the tragic angst that is delinquents!beth boland. This poor baby, this precious bean. MUST PROTEC

SHE’S TRYING HER BEST AND I LOVE HER

zero percent deserves dean’s clammy hands, no i have not forgotten, tattooed on my brain, will never forgive

I also love love love love LOVE the ruby/stan subplot happening

(and ruby’s mom!!!!!) (seriously though you write the best moms)

oh god and baby beth starting to have confusing feelings about rio?????? *chef’s kiss*

p sure i was just like, straight screaming the entire end of the chapter

the dugout is like, pure serotonin

I can’t even talk about the closet

tHe teNsiOn

thank you i will take eleventy billion

don't give it a hand, offer it a soul - medievalraven / @medievalraven

am a desperate heaux for any fic that features rio and mick friendship

you are all incredibly shocked i know

still would not be mad if this swerved into rio x mick fake dating but beth x rio is cool too i guess

Speaking of things i am a desperate heaux for: DIANE!!!!!!!!

and DATING ANNIE???????????? Blessed

honestly this fic is worth it purely for the assertion that mick watches queer eye

Why don't we go to Venus? - watermelonriddles / @bensonstablers

another grief study!

apparently i was working through some stuff in september, idk, that was like 4 years ago

considering it’s the premise of the fic, i don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this fic is canon divergent and working with the premise that rio killed beth in 302

he is uh, not coping well

extremely haunted you might say

lots of marcus and rhea which is a delight!

rhea is to good for him tbh

i said what i said

truly top notch dream (nightmare?) sequences

the conversation at the end is extremely uncalled for

drop the game - Ejunkiet / @ejunkiet

Backread!!!!

Am going to die mad Beth and Rio didn’t hook up in 211 but luckily this fic scratched the itch

(temporarily, it’s a fairly permanent itch)

Bonus rec: missing scene series i wanna do bad things to you featuring 2x02 and 2x04

Viva Voce - zetuslapetus / @querenaxx

Whoops we woke up married Vegas shenanigans!!

So cute!!!!! So sexy!!!!!

What more do you want?

am desperately obsessed with how beth can’t help stalking rio

feels right, feels organic

this makes me feel a lot of stuff about how they could be without their canon garbage between them

🎶 we could’ve had it aaaaaaaaaaall 🎶

you showed me colors (i can't see them with anyone else) - gild_fire / @gild-and-fire

really into the use of color to illustrate beth’s emotional state, i feel like there’s a word for that but idk what it is

UNIMPORTANT

really nice job capturing beth’s inner vulnerability balanced by her outer stubbornness

am DESPERATELY into Mick playing matchmaker

more please???????

Both Sides of the Law - JoeyLee / @joeyjoeylee

LAW SCHOOL AU! I suuuuuuper love Beth and Rio here (alt pov!! a gift!!!!) I love how initially prickly they are, I love how it’s evolving into a grudging respect, I love how INCREDIBLY AND HILARIOUSLY OBSESSED WITH EACH OTHER THEY ARE and neither one of them seems to see it

listen I know we’re all already foaming at the mouth over this one but as it’s gonna go down as one of my all time favorites it bears repeating/rereccing

cannot stress enough how masterful the use of POV is here, both voices feel completely true and distinct and I love how the alternating chapters revisit, reveal and emphasize pieces of each other

i can’t talk about this fic without hyperventilating

I LOVE IT SO MUCH YOU GUYS

the slow burn is going to ACTUALLY KILL ME

rip, no regrats

Earned It - wakeupflawless / @wakeupflawless

spanking

that’s it that’s the pitch

H O T

living for beth’s exit in the first chapter, rio and i are both incredibly into it

second chapter also features violently possessive Rio who cannot deal with anyone messing with his girl so if that’s your thing boy howdy get on it

shake, baby, shake - openhearts

backread!!!!!

according to my bookmarks this was a reread but ???????

must’ve read it in the fugue state that followed reading for a moment we were strangers which is gr9 and I believe I have recced it before. If not, horrible oversight, reccing it now

beth and Rio POV lead up to the bathroom break, beautifully done, low-key feel bad reccing it bc the end point of both chapters makes me want to throw things but it’s super worth it for the tEnsiOn. ENJOY

What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have - flashindie / @pynkhues

I’m assuming all of y’all are already reading this

If not OH MY GOD FIX YOUR LIVES

P I R A T E A U

I’m sorry maybe you didn’t hear me piRaTE aU

meticulously researched, brain-meltingly vibrant, already painfully sexy slow-burning PIRATE AU

god where to start okay so first off, the world-building here straight up breaks my brain, sophie’s put in the work and it SHOWS

second, the atmosphere. i’m generally a pretty like, vague mental picture sort of reader but the sensory detail here grabs you by the throat and like, forcibly hauls you in whether your brain’s wired that way or no

and hey speaking of throats if you, like me, go a little funny about the knees at the idea of beth holding a knife to rio’s throat (he’s fine, calm down), there’s a v excellent beth-in-a-barrel moment for you

oh christ and the sexy tension

it’s gonna be a race to see which slow burn takes me out first, this or law school

Stunner - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie

Another high school AU, this time with baby Rio absolutely head over heels for his older sister’s bff

stunner!Rio has an emotional earnestness about him that I feel like delinquents!Rio has already outgrown and it’s so SWEET I can’t get enough

Desperately cute!!!!!!

alL he waNts iS foR beTh tO bE hiS girL

also unreasonably angsty???????

ANN ARBOR IS NOT THAT FAR MEGAN

A Heart's A Heavy Burden - tooshyforthis / @bathroombreaks

Howl’s Moving Castle AU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love Howl’s!!!!!!!!!!!

perfect opp to roast Rio for being a Dramatique Heaux

and it’s gonna be 9 chapters?????? H Y P E

author’s note boldly presumes I did not know I needed this AU when the reality is I did in fact know I needed this AU, I just wasn’t expecting anyone to deliver

so blessed

author also claims to not be team nose stud and yet it features prominently in all its magnificent glory

what is the truth dot gif

A Bit of a Stretch - septiembre / @septiembur

SO????? CUTE?????????

would be on this list for Rio calling Beth E alone tbh

really really really really really love this Rio POV of being settled into a relationship with Beth

It manages to be sweetly domestic af while still holding the edge that makes brio brio which is a neat trick

@septiembur may be a witch

beth’s approach to getting rio to do yoga with her is hilarious and exactly right, canon-typical amounts of subtlety

1000000/10

Post Break-Up Sex - femalegothic / @bethsuglywigs

stg this was called Hit Shuffle

no matter

h O T

with a side of damn i’ve made some questionable choices in my life haven’t i introspection

(no regrats tho)

(esp not with this fic)

not the point of the fic by a long shot but i’m also extremely obsessed with Weed Eddie, so real

She drains my soul... she drains it not - niham87 / @niham87

ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED WITH THIS CONCEPT

am a complete sucker for paranormal world building that satirizes bureaucracy

Is that a trope? If so that’s my favorite

I did it. I’m picking a single favorite. You know what that is growth dot gif

ANYWAY i love the concept, i love the humor, i love beth instantly clicking with annie

I love her and mick’s sort of grudging professional courtesy

Love beth as a champion of environmental responsibility and all of the underworld being like …...okay??

cannot wait to see where this goes

Nine-Tenths - riosnecktattoo / @riosnecktattoo

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

sometimes i think about rio putting beth’s hair in a ponytail and have to go lie down

science please explain why this rUinS mE

wait hold on i skipped ahead

HEY KIDS DO YOU LIKE UNBEARABLY CUTE DOMESTIC TENDERNESS

opens with rio sleepily holding beth’s hand to his heart so that’s the kind of thing you’ll be dealing with

uGH theY’RE sO CUTe

idk why precisely but rio adding hair ties to his bracelet collection is my undoing every time

Missed Call - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie

Rio doesn’t come home from a job when he’s supposed to. Beth (and I!!!!!!!) slowly loses her mind

Truly a masterpiece of rising tension

Will literally never forgive her for calling this light angst

I was SO STRESSED OUT

The first person to point out there was an author’s note at the beginning I obvs didn’t read is getting blocked

crush - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie

Listen even though this is centered around two OCs, they are OCs FROM a (n iconic) brio fic AND Beth, Ruby and Rio all make cameos (I mean, Rio’s pretty present since he lives in Mar’s mind rent free bc they are THE SWEETEST MOST ADORABLE BEST OF FRIENDS so idk if i’d call it a cameo but whatever)

and even if it didn’t feature any official GG characters I’d still rec is bc that’s mY SON AND this fic is TOO CUTE

I have so many feelings over mar and rio growing up and not knowing how to cope with girls becoming a Thing in their life and how it affects their friendship and mar feeling left behind but (SPOILERS) at the end of the story rio starts feeling that too and it’s so poignant knowing how that’s going to continue in delinquents

while mar may be my son, i also claim elena’s #1 stan status

before you’re like meg you’re only reccing it bc it’s a bday present ask yourselves do i really strike you as the kind of person that wouldn’t be equally obnoxious about this either way?

truly cannot fathom how hard i have fallen for these OCs i don’t normally do that

@foxmagpie is definitely a witch

The Ottoman - Niham87 / @niham87

look i will be the first to admit that i don’t go near as bonkers over the ottoman line in 308 as y’all do

(don’t get me wrong, i love it!!! I love that he laughs and i love that she’s pleased it just doesn’t hit my lose my whole mind button like idk, the dubby or the 306 convo, idk why)

BUT i v v v much love the context this delightful Rio POV pwp gives it

am also absolutely feral for 209 missing scene fic

and anything that captures the complexity of Rio’s s3 feelings for Beth and how twisted they’ve become

so this scratches a bunch of itches, is what i’m trying to say

Bet On It - zetuslapetus / @querenaxx

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

That’s what my brain does when I think about Beth and Rio meeting in ch 1

am DESPERATELY OBSESSED WITH the tension between the two of them in this fic

I love how it plays with the ways they have to rely on but don’t trust each other

plus FAKE DATING and BED SHARING (fair warning hasn’t happened yet but the set up is there)

originally supposed to be 2 chapters, already up to 4, prayer circle it goes on forever

do you like drugs (tonight) - s_t_c_s / @sothischickshe

v important focus on hydration, other fic should take note

extremely about the use of cut to and then flashback to enhance the ‘we were on drugs’ vibe

speaking of, beth and rio absolutely would take ecstasy to prove they are fun bc they are the exact kind of idiots that would peer pressure themselves

so glad beth kept her purse, got a bit stressed there for a second, clutches in that kind of circumstance are A Risk

not that i would know

FLAWLESS USE OF VOICEMAIL TBH

really love the ongoing denial that they are remotely into each other while proceeding to demonstrate how they are in fact, extremely into each other, great vibe

rio dances

I know my brain broke too

mmmm bacon

Navigate A Broken Path - flashindie / @pynkhues

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

I have a long standing tradition of getting unreasonably obsessed with side characters so i’m not like, entirely surprised by how obsessed i am with both Mick and Mary Pat but i never in a million years considered them as a ship

AND Y E T

they fit????? so perfectly?????? It’s amazing how she developes them individually enough that i look at them together and think ah yes this makes perfect sense for both characters

and they’re such an amazing foil to Beth and Rio?

can ships have foils? do i know what a foil is?

unimportant

GUYS you dON’T uNDERStAN d

hell i don’t understand

how absolutely very dare you make me care about YET ANOTHER set of gg ‘verse children

do not read this fic if you have no interest in feelings you zero percent asked for

wHA t hAPPeNED iN aLASkA?????????

A Moment’s Silence - femalegothic / @bethsuglywigs

*makes sign of the cross*

y’all are gonna make me rediscover religion

extremely appreciate the author’s note approach to backstory top notch prioritization

listen it’s basically 3k of beth deep throating rio idk what more you need me to say about it

it is…..good stuff

bless the kinkmeme or fest whatever we’re calling it

praise - civillove / @blainesebastian

I mean you had me at “three times rio calls beth a good girl and one time he really means it”

ephemeral rio

I left that note for myself in here in the middle of the night and haven’t the foggiest what i was thinking but i stand by it none the less

okay okay i think i know what i meant, this fic (as do all of my fav civillove brio fics) has this sort of like, liminal, in the quiet moments feel to them that makes the moments and feelings somehow feel like i’m catching a glimpse of something secret and precious???

idk i just really like it okay

Heart and Soul - riosnecktattoo / @riosnecktattoo

oh look more unbearably sweet domestic tenderness, this time to music

thank you ma’am for my life

rio remembers beth used to play piano and gets her one and revoltingly cute shenanigans result

also hilarity

and sexiness

this fic has it all, truly

shout out to mick who sees no reason to keep rio’s feelings to himself

good girls tumblr fic - prettylittlementirosa / @hypermania

cheating and reccing a whole series

It’s my list and i can do what i wanna

stop crying about it, it’s four fics and they’re all AMAZING absolutely impossible to pick a fav

truly flawless characterization, next level ability to capture evocative mood, cannot get enough

three’s a crowd: who knew ballroom dancing while dean watches and grinds his teeth could be so sexy

(trick question everything about that premise sounds A++++ and boy howdy does it live up)

feel it on the way home: rio tries to break up with beth, it goes about as well as you’d expect

(thE angSty tenSioN)

i want to play the game: [from the floor] i’m still not ready to talk about it

(rio/turner, missing scene, 10000000% a taste of what went down in that hotel room)

june after dark: pitch perfect annie pov, really really love the take that Annie is the baby whisperer, can’t fully explain why but it feels incredibly right

(ANNIE X NANCY COULD WORK SO WELL YOU GUYS)

#fingers crossed these links are right i did not double check #i like to live on the edge #truly mind boggling amount of fluff on this list i surprised myself on that one #no i will not at any point get my shit together enough to write out thoughtful commentary this is a shit posting blog first last and always #fic recs #gg fic #nbc good girls #i'll come up with a tag for these if i ever do them again #check back 37 years from now #or ~~~~~~march #whatever that means

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you-cant-spell-subtext-without · 3 years

Text

Sigh. It’s quiet today, so I guess it’s about time to talk about 12x06: Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox.

This is an episode without Cas, so clearly it revolves entirely around Cas (I'm kidding, but only a little bit). It’s also a bottle episode and a meta writer’s wet dream, so excuse me while I nerd out - this is a long one to unpack, and I have spent too much time doing it for you. That’s ok because, as Sam says:

DIVE IN AFTER THE CUT BUDDIES!

The Asa montage is where we start.

Asa is a Dean mirror. The parallels are pretty clear - he’s a scruffy rough around the edges hunter, Mary is the reason he got into hunting, he wears a ton of flannel, etc. If you remain unsure, the writers throw this in at the very beginning in the montage of Asa’s life as a hunter So That You Know:

Bucky: Hey, you know they make new cars, right? Asa: I don’t want a new car. This is my lucky car.

***Canadian!Dean confirmed.

Shaine Jones may also be the Canadian Jensen Ackles.

I don’t make the rules ok?

Back in the US, the boys surprise Jody with a visit.

In case you forgot the episode prior to this one:

Side note: domestic Jody gives me life.

We’re clearly supposed to see how Jody is a mom figure for the boys, and it feels nice for them to have that, especially since Mary is Taking Some Space. Their entire dynamic warms even my cold black soul.

[romantic scene of a couple silhouetted against a sunset while sweeping music plays on Jody’s TV. The couple kisses.]

DEAN

[his mouth full of pizza] Jody, you watching some kind of chick flick here?

JODY

Well, Dean. I’m a chick.

Kim Rhodes YOU ARE A DELIGHT. A side note - I know this exchange is supposed to be funny, but I feel sad for Dean (who clearly is a rom com chick). This is a perfect example of Dean struggling to present some fabricated image of heteronormative masculinity that’s not the heart of who he actually is. His surprise that a “badass sheriff chick” can also enjoy rom coms makes me fucking upset.

ALSO:

Anyway, Asa has passed on and the boys tag along with Jody to the wake in support.

SAM

Yeah, no, Jody. We… we know you’ll be fine, but… you know, we never go to hunter gatherings, outside of bars. Dad always said they were trouble, so…

DEAN

Yes, you’d be doing us a favor if you let us tag along.

***more receipts that John Winchester was an isolating abuser. They could have at least had a normal HUNTER life and friends who hunted.

SAM

That is a big house. [Music continues playing, coming from inside the house now]

***We now establish one “theme” of the episode.

JODY

Family home. Asa was just a guy.

AKA pretty brutal implication that Asa didn’t have a family of his own.

Speaking of implications:

[Jody removes her coat and the three of them begin mingling. Dean finds his way to the kitchen and a cooler full of beer] DEAN

No label. Well, that’s a red flag.

****LOL WHAT THE FUCK IS THE REASON****

....

GIRL SEND HELP

Enter Bucky, who is actually (SPOILER!) the villain of the episode.

Do all hunters just walk around with this manly flannel/weird symbolic necklace combo? Looking at you Bucky and Dean.

Dean is surprised to find that people know who he is:

But doesn’t seem to have an issue with it until -

***Someone who just bragged the entire five hour car ride about killing Hitler shouldn’t be this concerned about what people are saying about him right?

Or is he thinking it may involve something he isn’t comfortable sharing - since apparently there are things Dean doesn’t feel comfortable sharing as established by the prior couch conversation with Jody? Hmmmmmm...

***Compare the expressions. The “you’ve died four times” response is the same as the smug/proud “I killed Hitler” face. The reaction to the “stories” is the “hey this is my personal business” reaction Dean had to Sam’s Japanese erotica art form comment. He is thinking specifically about something personal.

I wonder what it could be.

I don’t think any one had to teach Max Banes the art of seduction, but also thank you.

Also, manifesting Dean being raised by Max and Alicia’s Cool Witch Mom instead of John Trash Winchester. Because that’s what we’re supposed to think here, correct? Two sibling hunters usually present a brother mirror.

Worth noting Sam’s surprise that witches can also be hunters. The John Winchester Bigotry Brain Rot runs deep. (GOD the Sam-witch thing would have driven him crazy I LIVE FOR THAT).

Dean escapes to Asa’s office/room and proceeds to go through his things.

[Dean is in Asa’s office and finds an angel blade mounted on blue velvet inside an ornate glass-lidded box. He opens it, reaches in and pulls out the angel blade, comfortably spinning it in his hand when Sam walks in.]

SAM

Hey.

DEAN

Oh, hi. This is a real Angel Blade. I mean, this guy was legit.

***that’s weird, why does Canadian!Dean have an angel blade? We haven’t heard anything about angels yet, and it wasn’t in the opening montage. Hmmmmmm, I say. Hmmmmmmm...

***Sam is also concerned about The Stories They Tell

This one particularly:

Honestly I don’t know why he’s THAT surprised that people know he was possessed by Lucifer? Didn’t he start like multiple apocalypses? That’s something people tend to be in the know about. Anyhoo.

DEAN

Yeah. Apparently we’re a little bit legendary.

SAM

Yeah, but, I mean, so was Asa. Then a hunt went bad, and he ended up hanging from a tree, alone in the woods.

DEAN

He died on the job. No better way to go.

SAM

You really believe that?

DEAN

Yeah. What, you don’t? I mean, come on, Sam, it's not like we're in the “live till you're 90, die in your sleep” business. This? [Dean points at Asa’s hunting wall] This only ends one way.

***Insert deep internal screaming about 15x20 here***

It’s Jody’s turn to be uncomfortable as we find out she and Asa were more than just friends and everyone knew it and Said Things About It and Told Stories About It.

HMMMMMMM...

Dean is surprised that Jody not only enjoys rom coms, but ruggedly hot men. Another thing they have in common.

As Dean comes to terms with the idea that Jody can be a mother figure and also a human person with a life and her own feelings and needs and thoughts, enter the person whom said lesson is actually about:

This is a Kim Rhodes Facial Expression stan account now.

So cute how Jody knows immediately that Dean is not okay. Time to reach:

JODY

Huh. Is that why you spent the entire ride up here telling me in extreme, excruciating detail how you killed Hitler, but, uh, you neglected to mention the fact that your mom is back from the dead?

***look, it’s another Dean doesn’t like others knowing personal information parallel!***

DEAN

Yeah, no big deal.

JODY

That’s a lie.

DEAN

JODY …

JODY

Look, maybe this isn't my place, and this is epic stuff, but

JODY

Yeah. Because what if I’ve changed. What if they changed? What if it just didn’t work out the way I wanted? If you wanna talk about anything

***Killing Hitler used yet again to show Dean doesn’t care about oversharing hunting stories, but he doesn’t like for people to know personal ones. Also, Jody mentions her son and her husband. Her family and her romantic partner.

Dean wasn’t just reunited with Mary this season. He was also reunited with Cas, after saying goodbye to him at the end of Season 11 when he headed to what he thought was going to be his death as the Amara-bomb.

So, this conversation isn't just about Mary (the “anything”). It’s also about Cas (the”...absolutely anything”).

Mary chats with Mama Fox and more Points Are Made about hunters not getting to have a “normal life” or family:

MARY

I saved his life.

LORRAINE

[scoffing] What am I supposed to say to that? After you, Asa got so… Hunting was his whole life. He never married. Never had a family, kids. And now… enjoy the wake.

***sending Mary on a guilt spiral about Asa (mirroring her other guilt spiral about hunting as a life for her own sons)

Speaking of mirrors:

BUCKY

And Asa loved that Jeep. Fuses were shorted, fuel line was busted. Ah, he didn’t care. He’d just roll up his sleeves, he’d get right to work.

Time to learn about today’s Big Bad.

BUCKY

Jael. He’s a crossroads demon. And he hangs people. It’s his thing. Snaps their neck, slits their throat. He’s a real piece of work.

***Wait a second. Jael is a demon? Don’t...angel’s names usually end in “el” in SPNverse?

Samandriel.

Uriel.

Gabriel.

Raphael.

Gadreel.

Castiel.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Anyways the demon [questionable] killed Asa and now everyone is trapped and also In Grave Danger.

BUCKY

Exactly. Right, so five years later, Jael– he came back, and he came for Asa.

JODY

How so?

BUCKY

Asa was seeing this woman, right? She had a kid.

LORRAINE

Marlene.

BUCKY

Yeah, Marlene. Jael got into her. It didn’t matter that he was killing people, he wanted Asa to know it was personal. He gets off on it.

***that’s so weird, didn’t someone else in the show start seeing a woman with a kid -

what a sexy little coincidence.

oh and didnt a supernatural being come back right around that time too -

HMMMMMMMM. No killing though. That’s the difference between angels and demons, I guess.

(meanwhile Dean has been drinking alone outside - as he does, and is realizing he can’t get back in)

HI QUEEN

Also, this immediately took me to

this show isn’t fair.

****sob break****

Jael Posession 1:

So curious how there are two siblings and then one gets possessed by something Satanic and the other one is good at seducing men.

SO FUCKING CURIOUS.

Jael Possession 2:

Elvis. Random. Though he was the guy who brought up the Stories Sam Was Surprised Were Circulating -

He was also oddly interested in it. Methinks Elvis thoroughly enjoyed the Jael possession.

Bilie gets Dean back in the house. The words “one-time deal” are said a lot of times.

BONUS: Jensen why are you so pretty:

The hunters get to work, and I live for Max Bane’s pentagram aesthetic.

MAX

I like a Fifth Pentacle of Mars. It’s got more character.

***TBH, same.

Jael possession 3:

****Kim Rhodes is even better when she is playing evil.

JODY/JAEL:

I had so hoped you’d kill your mom. Wouldn’t that be a riot?

[Mary draws the angel blade and charges at Jody. She cuts Jody’s arm before Sam wrestles her away.]

SAM

No! Mom!

MARY

What are you doing?! She’s a demon. We kill demons.

******WOOF MARY - I REPEAT TO YOU THAT THE JOHN TRASH WINCHESTER BRAIN ROT RUNS DEEP.

Also did you immediately flash back to this with me?

Gets me thinking that Dean’s feelings for Cas are made twice as complicated by the fact that he is also a supernatural creature. Another Reason Why John Winchester Would Disapprove.

****Just as he would Disapprove of Sam Being Possessed By the Devil and all that (never forget he told Dean to kill him because of the whole made unclean by demon blood thing).

Right on cue:

JODY/JAEL

Oh, I have heard so many stories about you Winchesters. And I desperately want the Lucifer thing to be true.

***Stories again. Jael proceeds to go into Stories That Are Dark Personal Shameful Secrets:

JAEL

As for the rest of you, I have been inside your heads. I know all about you. For example, the twins. Too frightened to tell anyone that they actually came to say goodbye to their daddy. Or the grieving mother who hated the fact that her son was a hunter so much she’d hide his gear, she’d sabotage his Jeep, anything to keep him from hunting. Not that it worked. Could’ve tried harder, huh?

[She gestures at her own face] And this meatsuit you all seem to care so much about. She actually fantasized about a life with Asa. Can you believe that? Like that worthless man–

***HMMMMMMMMM

[Bucky gets off the floor and sneaks up behind Jody/Jael]

BUCKY

Shut your filthy mouth.

[Jody/Jael grabs Bucky by the neck and forces him to his knees]

JODY/JAEL

And you. Bucky. Brave, brave Bucky. I was there that night. Tell these nice, stupid people what you did. Tell them what you took from me. Asa was mine.

***Excuse me? THIS IS GETTING VERY...subtextual. A dark timeline supernatural being/hunter relationship [ending badly because demons only know how to take, consume and possess]? ...Asael? CURIOUS.

They chant the exorcism, a different hunter doing each iteration (beautifully done)

and send Jael back to hell, but not before Bucky shares his Shameful Story - he’s the one who killed Asa.

Elaboration:

BUCKY

Asa, he was just all– he was just always so stubborn. Look, we were in the woods. [We see the scene play out as Bucky describes it] Jael, he… he was taunting him. Asa wanted to chase him, but he didn’t have the angel blade. I said, “Let’s go back.” He called me a coward, and he shoved me, so I shoved him back, and he fell. He hit his head. Asa? I didn’t mean to do it. But it was a mistake. Asa. Asa? An accident. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. Asa hated that damn demon so much that I just…

DEAN

Oh, you thought people would buy that Jael killed him? So you hung your best friend to cover your own ass.

BUCKY

What are you gonna do to me?

ALICIA:

Tell everyone, every hunter we meet. They’re gonna know your name, Bucky. Know what you did.

MAX

You like stories. This is the story everyone’s gonna tell about you. Forever.

***Shameful Stories that Define You, what a theme. Also, definitely a supernatural being potentially having some subtextual feelings for Canadian!Dean. Hmmm.

***Funeral pyre and side discussion about how Asa did have a family, and children, and a potential supernatural sidepiece.

In conclusion, Supernatural is a love story. Thank you for watching this dark timeline/Canadian dub. You’re dismissed for the day. Go eat bacon.

#destiel #spn #spn meta #spn analysis #spn fandom #spn family #hellers #hellerism #supernatural season 12 #spn 12x06 #celebrating the life of asa fox

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iwillhaveamoonbase · 3 years

Text

Love at First Bite

Rayla is taken by a client to eat at the Italian-Korean fusion place in town and falls in love with the food, and later, the chef.

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

Rayla smiled at her client as they waited for their server to come. Her boss had told her that they had to keep the contract with the client’s company no matter what, and if that meant going to a Korean-Italian fusion restaurant that would probably be too spicy for Rayla’s Scottish, fried-food-loving taste buds, so be it. The client, Ms. Danvers, had been hyping the restaurant up all evening. “You said you like potatoes? This place as amazing kimchi-style potatoes and potato pancakes.”

Rayla nodded. “My grandmother is Irish and there are always potatoes cooking in her house.” Rayla subtly looked around the dining room. The walls were mostly white with a few panels a beautiful red. There was artwork on the walls, ranging from sceneries to portraits. They all looked to be done by the same artist but Rayla couldn’t place a name to them. The air was warm and smelled of spices and herbs and cheese. Rayla could see a row of cheeses on one of the shelves. “Do they use a lot of cheese here?”

“Korean food pairs wonderfully with cheese. There’s a rumor that all the vegetables here are from the local farmer’s market as are most of the cheeses. It’s fusion, but it’s as domestic as possible, too.”

“You’ve really been talking this place up.”

Ms. Danvers flushed. “It’s my favorite restaurant. I come here for lunch once a week and get take-away whenever I’m having a bad day. This place is known for Korean-Italian fusion, but they make a delicious Thai laksa and a vegetarian Tom Yum that is to die for.”

“Really?” Rayla didn’t know that much about Asian food, but she knew that Tom Yum was common in Thai eateries.

“The chef is a quarter-Thai and a quarter-Korean, his grandparents being from Thailand and South Korea. He knows the flavors well and plays with them, but when he goes authentic, he’s the best in town. He will also make almost any dish vegetarian if you request it.”

“How accommodating.”

A server came up, a smile on their face. “Good evening and welcome to Sarai’s Place. Any wine to start this evening?” Rayla shook her head, surprised when Ms. Danvers asked for Thai iced tea for the both of them. “And what can I get started for you?”

“Ms. Burrows?”

Rayla looked down at the menu again. “Hmm. I’m not sure what to get. I don��t have a very high spice tolerance.”

The server nodded. “Scale of 1 to 10?”

“Maybe a three.”

“Do you like kimchi?”

“Never had it.”

“Then I recommend trying the kimchi potatoes, if you like potatoes, or the risotto, which features chopped kimchi, sesame oil, and garlic. The chef makes two kinds of kimchi, one mild and one spicy, so he’ll use the mild for you. For the main dish, if you enjoy cheese, a pasta dish that has mussels, a Korean chili paste and tomato sauce, and fresh parmesan. Everything that can be local, is local and if you eat vegetarian, the mussels will be taken out and instead you will get mushrooms.”

“My grandmother is Irish so I’m very snobbish with my potatoes.”

“I would rate his potato pancakes a ten. He takes the traditional Korean recipe and adds parmesan cheese and some rosemary and its cooked with the house chili oil, so when you cut into it, it’s cheesy and subtly spicy. The house chili oil is made with both gochugaru and the type of dried chilis usually used to make olio di peperocino.”

“I’ll go with the pancakes and the mussels pasta you suggested.”

“Excellent choice. And for you?”

Ms. Danvers smiled. “Did he make Tom Yum or laksa today?”

“Laksa.”

“I will take a bowl of laksa while Ms. Burrows is eating her pancakes and I will also take the mussels pasta. Can we also get an order of garlic bread?”

“Of course. I’ll get your Thai iced teas ready. Anything else today?”

“What’s the dessert of the week?”

“Since it’s summer, mango pudding, Thai coconut pudding, and strawberry-lime cheesecake.”

“We’ll each take a slice of the strawberry-lime cheesecake.” The server nodded and walked away after reading back the list. “I hope you don’t mind me ordering dessert for you, but he only makes that cheesecake when the strawberries are in their peak season and it’s worth it.”

Rayla nodded. “No problem, Ms. Danvers. I wouldn’t really know what to order otherwise.”

They chatted while they waited, pausing when the garlic bread came to the table. Rayla had been expecting the kind of garlic bread Americans seemed to adore, buttery and almost artificially garlic-y. Instead, they got small, fresh loaves that had pieces of roasted garlic and thyme baked into it, served with the house chili oil and garlic that had been cooked until it spread like butter on the bread. Rayla was impressed with the flavor and how the pieces of garlic were not overpowering.

When the potato pancakes came, Rayla could smell the spice but trusted the server had not led her astray, eyeing her glass of Thai iced tea just in case. One bite and she was in heaven. The cheese and the heat from the chili only enhanced the potato flavor as did the light smattering of soy sauce and vinegar-based sauce. Rayla almost ignored Ms. Danvers when the pasta came, inhaling the dish. At the end of the meal, once the excellent cheesecake had been finished, Rayla was in love with the food. “Well, Ms. Danvers, I suppose I should be thanking you for introducing me to my new favorite restaurant.”

Ms. Danvers chuckled. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

“I would marry the chef in a heartbeat if I got to eat like this every day for the rest of my life.”

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

Rayla brought all her clients and her coworkers to Sarai’s Place in the following months. She tried almost everything on the menu, though she was still mildly terrified of the spiciness of the laksa if the smell alone was anything to go by. Every Monday and Thursday, she got take-away and ordered the dessert whenever she ate in on Saturdays. She was thankful she was single or else she would have to come here every week with someone and she liked dining alone in the quiet restaurant.

Sometimes, they played classical music, other times K-pop, and Rayla would always remember the night they had played an opera medley when several people with the Katolis Opera Company had dined that night. The chef seemed keenly aware of who came to his restaurants at what dates and times and played music to fit their tastes but also made sense with the theme.

It was a popular spot with not only Foodies and high school kids, but a lot of Asian-Americans dined there. Rayla had looked up the reviews and had seen it was highly recommended by the Katolis Korean and Thai communities, the Katolis restaurant circles, and the Commission for the Promotion of Local Ingredients and Farmer’s Markets. No one said anything bad about Sarai’s Place without at least ten people defending the restaurant’s choices.

And now Rayla was sitting with her boss, Ahling Patel, and having to stop herself from inhaling the food in front of her. The risotto was so satisfying and paired with chicken breast stuffed with kimchi, perilla, and ricotta. “What do you think, Mr. Ahling?”

“It’s delicious. I’ve always felt that fusion was a gimmick, but I’m sold by this young man’s food. Young lady,” Ahling called the server, smiling good-naturedly when she nodded at him and finished up with her current customer. When she came up to their table, she greeted them again. “Is there anyway we can speak to the chef?”

The server blinked before nodding. “I’m sure I can arrange it. Dinner service is almost over and there are only you and two other tables. Can I bring you dessert while I’m talking to him?”

“What do you recommend?”

“Our pastry chef made yakgwa, which are little honey pastries made with pine nuts, ginger, and sesame oil and they also made a yuja polenta cake and a play on Italian lemon cake, but with yuja.”

Rayla ordered the yakgwa and Ahling got the polenta cake and waited for the news. Rayla couldn’t recall having ever seen the chef even though she came there at least twice a week, closer to three. She hadn’t seen any pictures of him, either, surprisingly enough. He was said to keep to himself and shunned the limelight, which is why he never made TV appearances.

A few minutes later, it wasn’t their server, but a man who looked be about 26 arriving with their desserts. His green eyes were striking, as were his cheekbones and sharp jawline. He gave them both an awkward smile as Rayla noticed his ring finger was bare and didn’t seem to have a tan line. Was this the chef? His coat would seem to say so. “Nice to meet you both. I’m Callum Evans, the owner and executive chef here at Sarai’s Place.”

Ahling smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, young man. I’m Ahling Patel and this is my employee, Rayla Burrows.” Rayla nodded her head in acknowledgement. “Your food is delicious. How on Earth do you even think of this?”

The young man flushed, looking down at his feet. “Um, I’m not that special. Many people before me found that Korean and Italian food go well together. Most of my recipes are riffs on family recipes and all my Thai dishes are family recipes. I was originally going to go traditional Korean or Thai but there were no fusion places in the area and I’m part Irish and German on top of being a quarter-Thai and a quarter-Korean. It felt…right, I guess. I’m mixed and grew up with a variety of food cultures in my house, so why not do fusion? Korean and Italian just made the most sense, so…” He looked embarrassed at the praise, rubbing the back of his neck.

Rayla leaned forward a bit. “I’ve eaten here at least twice week for the past six months. I can tell you, without a doubt, it’s my favorite place to eat.”

“Thank you.”

Ahling cleared his throat. “Are you single, Mr. Evans?”

Callum flushed even deeper. “Ah. Yes. Being a chef requires long hours and running a restraint requires even more.”

“You need a good partner to help you find balance in your life!”

Rayla remained quiet as she watched them talk. The only thing going through her mind was ‘I’m going to marry this man for his food. I’ll eat well for the rest of my life.’ She stayed when Ahling said good night and while the restaurant emptied out. Callum stayed at the table, fidgeting under her gaze. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“A date.”

Callum blinked. “We have a sticky rice made with dates-”

“No. A romantic excursion. An outing.”

He gulped, looking her up and down. “A date? Really?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I fell in love with your food almost immediately after I tasted it and would like the chance to know the man who cooks it.”

Callum blushed. “OK.” They exchanged info and Rayla smirked as she left with his number in her cellphone. There was no way she would be letting this one go.

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

After four months of dating, Rayla could confidently say that she was now just as in love with Callum the man as she was with his cooking. Learning that his restaurant was named after his mother who died when he was in high school had endeared him to her, as had the knowledge that all the art on the walls were his paintings. Was there anything he couldn’t do?

They were currently in Callum’s kitchen, him developing a new recipe while Rayla took down notes for him. Even on his days off, he was always thinking about what he would do next and Rayla admired his passion to his craft. When he brought her up to try the dish, she groaned. “I will marry this man if it’s the last thing I do,” she muttered.

“I can hear you, you know,” Callum chuckled.

Rayla raised a brow. “Then why haven’t you accepted my proposal?”

“Because you proposed to my food?”

“I hardly see the difference.” Callum laughed at her, shaking his head. “Hey, move in with me.”

“We’ve been together for four months.”

“Is that a problem? Too short?”

Callum stared at her. “You’re serious.”

“I told you; I fully plan on marrying you to eat your cooking ‘til the day I die.”

“So, it’s my cooking you love?”

“When have I hidden this?” Rayla reached for his hand, pulling him closer. “I’m serious. Move in with me.”

“Why?”

Rayla shrugged. “I’m happy when we wake up next to each other. I like the idea of coming home to you or you coming home to me. I don’t like sleeping alone, and, for the past month, the two of us have been alternating sleeping at each other’s places and it doesn’t make sense to pay rent on two places when we could be happy together?”

“That and I’m the only person willing to put up with your stubborn ass.”

Rayla gave him a mock offended looking, giving his arm a playful smack. “You love my stubborn ass.”

“I do.” Callum leaned down and captured her lips, letting her taste the dish he had been working on for the past hour. When they pulled apart, he looked down into her eyes with his bright green ones. “I think I love you.”

“That’s good, because I think I love you, too.”

Rayla would take that for now. And in two years, when she would be standing next to him in front of their new house, matching rings on their fingers, and a very pregnant belly, she would remind him that he had his food to thank for their relationship. “I fell in love with your food first.”

“I’m glad you did, because you kept coming back.”

“Lucky you.”

“Lucky me.”

#moonbase fanfics #rayllum #rayllum fanfic #the dragon prince #au #love at first bite #this was just for fun

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