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lovinglokilaufeyson · 4 years

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188 - S.R

Pairings: Spencer Reid x Reader, Derek Morgan x Penelope Garcia

Warnings: Gore, crime, kidnapping, mentions of sexual assault, little bit of a sexual scene at the end

Wordcount: 3727

Summary: Hotch calls you in for a mission. However, your intelligence may prove as a downfall, as Dr. Reid becomes insecure, comparing himself to you. This leads to a break in the case, but is it too late?

A/N: So, once again, it looks like I’m switching things up just a bit. Let me know what you guys think! I love doing multiple different types of fanfiction, with many different characters. I will of course, still work on my Loki and Draco stuff. I also noticed that “Naughty” has reached over a thousand notes! Absolutely insane, guys. Thank you for all the love. I’ve now entered college and things are a lot different than when they were in high school. I’m a lot more invested in doing well in my classes, and it’s definitely been a large adjustment for me. Thank you all so much for your patience with everything. I also recently checked my inbox and found so much love as well as some requests that I will be working on. I’ve had quite a bit of extra time as I was exposed to COVID and I am currently in quarantine housing at my university. I’ll try to get them all done soon! Hope you enjoy this change of pace.

“For this case,” Aaron Hotchner explained “we’re going to need all hands on deck. We’re leaving in the morning.” Hotch knew exactly who to bring in. The newest graduate of the academy - he had worked with her before, and she was extremely in tune with criminology, profiling, and she had several doctorates. However, he was nervous about how one Spencer Reid would feel about one piece of information. She had an IQ of 188. If Spencer were to find out this information, he would feel - inadequate. But Hotch knew that Y/N L/N was vital to this case. They were looking for a replacement for JJ’s maternity leave. She could be the perfect fit - at least for a while. He had made his decision. Picking up the phone, he dialed her number.

You walked nervously into the BAU for what seemed like the millionth time. It was only 32, in all actuality. You’d only been asked to assist in a handful of cases, you had just graduated the academy and were therefore deemed “ready” only a few months ago. You were born ready, you thought. You took snapshots in your mind as you entered the building. You could easily tell you the exact differences between the surroundings on this day in comparison to the first 31 times. There was a cup of utensils on the very front desk starting on October 26th of last year to today. You could tell anyone exactly how many pencils and pens were there each time - including what color. October 26th - 5 black pens, 6 blue pens, and 3 pencils.

You shook your head. There were more practical uses for your “genius” brain. “Stop it, Y/N” you told yourself. You entered the elevator, when you were stopped by a tall, lanky boy about a few years older than you. He was quite attractive, but you were awkward in these situations. When you were simply playing a part, it was a lot easier to “play” guys. However, when you were actually attracted to one? You couldn’t handle yourself.

You let him in, immediately asking “what floor?” “7th” he answered, neglecting to make eye contact. However, upon glancing at the buttons, he realized that you too, were heading to the floor of the BAU. He couldn’t stop himself from making a slightly rude remark - accidentally, of course. “Do you have the wrong floor?” “Shit,” he thought to himself, facepalming internally. “There’s a cute girl, Reid. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Oh, the BAU is on the 7th floor - right?” You responded quickly, to which he nodded. “My bad.” “No worries” you noted, kindly.

The boy was wearing a maroon colored cardigan, a light blue button up, a navy tie, and black slacks. He had a brown over-the-shoulder bag at his side, and he twittled his thumbs quickly. “Was he nervous?” You asked yourself. Or bored? You couldn’t get a proper read on him. He made you feel - odd. You couldn’t wrap your mind around it. You couldn’t wait to get out of that elevator.

After what seemed like days (26 seconds) you were out of the elevator. Thankfully, Agent Hotchner was there to greet you immediately. “Agent Reid, I see you’ve met Y/N L/N. She’s assisting on this case.” Hotch nodded at Reid, who had finally made the connection. “Not properly, but it’s lovely to meet you, Y/N.” Spencer made a point to smile at you, who came off as young and naïve. You had to have been a few years younger than he, Spencer thought.

Hotch lead you into the debriefing room, where you met one Penelope Garcia. You immediately smiled at her presence, Penelope seemed to light up a room with no effort. “Oh, she’s a cute one, isn’t she!” She remarked, smiling at you. From a few feet away, in the doorway, Derek Morgan stared in amazement at Garcia’s kindness towards the new member. Derek then approached, going to shake your hand with ease. Afterwards, he let his hand travel to squeeze Penelope’s waist, teasingly. He lightly kissed her cheek. “Alright, you two. I need to debrief Y/N on this case. Go ahead and - do what you need to - elsewhere, please.” Hotch shook his head. The pair headed towards the door, where Morgan placed a large slap on Penelope’s ass. You winced, slightly uncomfortable with the sexual gesture. “Don’t worry - they specialize in different things here. Derek’s out on the field, while Penelope works as a technical analyst.”

You sighed in relief. You never did take well to sexually affectionate partnerships. You always felt - awkward. You never knew how to handle it. You assumed, however, that other people felt the same way. Hotch began going over the case, and you seemingly remembered every single detail. 3 police officers have been kidnapped in Boise, Idaho. You remembered the locations, the appearances, the crime scenes, and the badge numbers of the officers. In your head, you made a map of the unsub’s comfort zone. You began thinking of what the officers were kidnapped for - no dead bodies had appeared yet. Each were physically fit, attractive, between 25-30 years of age. There’d be more time to think of theories, you thought to yourself. Hotch, now exiting the room, gave a quick “wheels up in 30.”

You took this as a signal to leave the room as well, leaving the file that Hotch gave to you on the desk. Soon, you’d both realize, that this was a mistake. Upon entering the plane, you snuggled soundly into a seat, hoping to get some rest before arriving in Boise. They had quite a while before arriving. You calculated, with turbulence and other factors, as well as averages, that they would be there in roughly 6 hours and 12 minutes. Your to-go bag was safely stashed in the backside of the plane for now.

However, you forgot one key detail. The team was heavily up for a discussion with regards to this unsub and their victims. In order to prove yourself, you thought, providing information to the conversation was incredibly important. Even in your sleep, however, you could probably retain key points from the conversation. Nonetheless, you sat at attention, ready to discuss this police kidnapper. Suddenly, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “Secured for takeoff, our approximate flight time is 6 hours 15 minutes.” You couldn’t help yourself. “Actually, with turbulence, average flight times, and wind speeds right now, it should be more like 6 hours and 12 minutes.” You cursed yourself immediately after the words came out of your mouth. Prentiss, who had not yet introduced herself, smiled and muttered a quick “Slow down there, Dr. Reid.” When she looked over at Reid, he looked relieved, as if you beat him to it.

Prentiss now went to greet the you, apologizing for not doing so sooner. “Emily Prentiss,” she reached out her hand. You smiled, shaking Emily’s hand. “Y/N L/N. Lovely to meet you.” Hotch came out with several files, all pertaining to this case. You had worked with kidnapping of law enforcement several times, which is why Hotch felt you would be such an asset to the team’s efforts.

“Alright, let’s begin.” Hotch sat down. Opening his file, he began to look over the scenes where officers were taken. “Each of the men were taken on duty. There’s no evidence of them being taken, besides the fact that they left their patrol cars out in the open. The keys were thrown out beside each one of the cars. No blood spatter at the scenes. They may still be alive.”

“Maybe the unsub is a rejected or former cop?” Prentiss suggested, and the team nodded in agreement. “These police men are some of the most successful and attractive in the field. It’s possible that this unsub feels “less than” them.” Morgan added. Turning to a screen showing Garcia, “Baby girl. I need you to search for fired, laid off, or rejected police officers from the Boise Police Department. Check for within the last month first - that could have been our unsub’s trigger.” “On it, sugar!” Garcia signed out, ready to search for whatever was out there.

“Reid, Derek, and Y/N, head to the abduction sites to analyze once we land. Prentiss and I will meet Rossi at the station to speak to the families, as well as any other officers that were on duty at that time.” You were excited, hearing Rossi’s name. You had met and worked with him several times before, and were a bit of a fan. Not that you’d ever admit it.

“The faster we build this profile, the higher our chances of saving these men.”

By the time you arrived in Boise, it was mid-afternoon. The first scene was relatively untouched, a parking lot in downtown Boise. Owen Thomas, 24, was on duty there, and was kidnapped around 10:30 pm. At this time, he stopped responding to any calls. You suddenly spoke: “It’s an obvious blitz attack. If our theory is correct, then the officers wouldn’t have responded positively to the unsub.” “Y/N’s right. These officers probably don’t have a good history with someone rejected from the force. It could’ve been someone they went to the academy with.” Prentiss agreed.

Prentiss met up with Hotch during break, which left you and Reid. You were nervous. He made you nervous - more so than usual. You both weren’t very hungry, and decided a small coffee shop would be the best place to go. “So, did you just do generals at the academy?” Reid asked, and you smiled, nodding politely. “I’ve always found it difficult to only be interested in one thing. That’s why I’ve found myself pursuing so many different paths.” You stated. Reid stood in awe for a moment. He honestly felt the exact same way as you. “You enjoy aerodynamics?” He asked, and you nodded once more. He was obviously referring to the estimations you made on the plane’s route. “Yes, but that’s not one of my main studies.” Reid looked at you, perplexed, almost. “I have Ph.Ds in criminology, medical science, medicine, and modern languages. Two bachelors, psychology and engineering. I’m looking into another one as well.”

Reid sat dumbfounded. He felt, for the first time in his life, less than someone else. Is this why Hotch called her in? As his replacement?

“That’s cool - I have three doctorates and B.As.” You looked at him in amazement, now. It wasn’t everyday that you met someone as young as you with roughly the same amount of knowledge. “What are they in, Reid?” You asked him. “Ph.Ds in chemistry, engineering, and mathematics. B.As in psychology, sociology, and philosophy.” “Wow, that’s amazing.” He felt like you were teasing him, in a way. You weren’t, in all actuality. Reid just couldn’t seem to rationalize his emotions. You had a nice time with Reid. You just weren’t entirely sure if the feelings were reciprocated. Reid excused himself to the bathroom, where he quickly called Garcia. “Garcia, I need everything you have on Y/N.”

Spencer, after being teased relentlessly by Garcia, would soon discover a lot about you. You were born in Y/H/T (your/home/town) and you studied, at a very young age, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You received perfect scores on both your ACT and SAT, and you had an IQ of 188.

You studied last crime scene along with Prentiss and Reid, though it was getting dark. The most fresh, you noticed that some dirt nearby looked as if a body had been drug through it. This unsub, despite going through months of relentless physical and mental training - could not fully lift up the body of any of the victims. Instead, they had to be dragged to where the unsub wanted. None of the victims were presumed dead, which means the unsub was using them for something. Reid had disappeared, supposedly off into the crime scene further.

“Prentiss, I think we’re missing something.” You announced, and she nodded, agreeing. “Do you think the unsub could be a woman?” Her eyes widened, but she nodded. You immediately called Garcia. “Garcia. I was wrong. I was convinced by the overwhelming statistics that this unsub was a male. I think this unsub’s a woman. Look for woman in the area that recently lost family members, possibly an officer and a child.” “On it, sista. I’ll hit you back.”

In the meantime, Prentiss reached out to Derek, Rossi, and Hotch to discuss the profile. They all agreed with you wholeheartedly. However, there was something on your mind. Reid. He had completely disappeared from the crime scene. You were worried. You tried calling his cell, which you quickly learned, was a failure. The call went straight to voicemail. God. No. God fuck. Not one of your own. Prentiss and yourself immediately called Hotch, who told you to get back to the station as soon as possible. You headed there, your mind filled with thoughts of Dr. Reid.

Hotch realized that delivering the profile was the most important in order to obtain Reid safely. “I believe the unsub is a younger woman, who’s looking for replacements from a lost husband and child.” You stated as soon as you approached. Hotch nodded, hoping you would slow down and become less anxious. You wouldn’t. You simply refused to. Reid was out there. He was in danger, on your watch.

“She’s probably around Reid and I’s age, so 20-25. She must’ve lost the child and her husband in some sort of freak accident.”

“What are you proposing, Y/N?” Derek asked quickly.

“I think the unsub is using the officers to become pregnant.” You shivered in horror at your own words, anxious at what would be happening to Reid. “Ask around, ask the officers here if something happened to one of their coworkers. It could be on the federal level as well.”

“We believe the unsub we’re looking for is a white female between the ages of 20-25. She recently lost a husband or partner, as well as a child. This loss has triggered a need for family once more. She has kidnapped several officers as well as an FBI agent. We believe she gains their trust by either impersonating an officer or by asking for help in some way. Then, she lures them towards her vehicle or a more convenient location, where she manages to blitz attack and kidnap them.” Hotch started.

“This woman is in a very fragile state due to this loss, and can become very hostile and aggressive if she has what she wants taken away from her. Though she may not be armed when we find her, it is very important to be cautious around her.” Prentiss stated.

While the rest of the team was giving the profile, you were hoping that Garcia would be able to ping Reid’s phone at some sort of location that could lead you to him. Unfortunately, the phone was dead and the process, therefore, was unable to receive any location from Spencer. You were scared out of your mind, and Penelope’s nervous energy didn’t help you much either.

A call back from Penelope distracted you from your nervous thoughts. “Sugar, I’ve found something really interesting to peg your brain with. I’ll let Hotch know about this soon. All of the kidnapped victims are from Nevada.” “Okay - I’ll think on that Garcia, and let you know. Maybe crosscheck the families from before and find out which of those moved to Idaho from Nevada in the last few years?” “I already checked, baby, and nada. I’ll check with Hotch and the others to see if they have any ideas.”

You soon met up with Derek, Rossi, Prentiss, and Hotch once more. They had gotten Garcia’s call, and they were brainstorming ideas on who the killer could be. Somewhere, somehow, the profile was incorrect. “Okay, if I was a kidnapper - I’m taking law enforcement personnel. To fill some kind of void. But why would I have to fill that void?” You asked.

“This person obviously underwent some kind of loss. Somehow. We just need to figure it out.” Hotch spoke.

“Do you think there was another victim, originally from Nevada?” Prentiss asked. The team nodded in agreement, and Derek dialed Garcia’s number. “Hey babygirl, we might have a lead. Do you have any victims from Nevada or Nevada cases that involved a male victim who was kidnapped?” He started.

“Quite a few. You’re gonna have to give me a bit more than that, sugar.” Derek nodded, before Hotch stepped in. “Garcia, were any of the males law enforcement? Possibly unsolved?” “Yes, yes.” She started, “one Ryan Walker, a police officer, was victim - in Carson City Nevada. They did find the perpetrator, 16 year old Ashley Davey. She was visiting on a school trip. He was able to I.D. her, as she kidnapped and raped him using chloroform and - viagra to get him up. This was after he rejected her advances - looks like she lured him by asking for directions and then using a taser to knock him out. Apparently he tricked her into believing that they could be together, and she let him out of his restraints, he made a run for it and escaped.”

“How was she able to keep him, Garcia?” Rossi asked, curious. “Looks like her Grandma and Grandpa owned some isolated property in Carson City, she stayed a few days after the trip had ended. She had a ticket back but didn’t use it. And - oh my god.”

“What is it, Garcia?” Hotch questioned her. “Apparently the sex with Mr. Walker was also unprotected, she gave birth to a baby boy 9 months later.” “Where is the child now?” “Joseph Davey is currently in foster care, after the mother was deemed unstable by the state. Walker filed a restraining order, and Ashley is not allowed to contact him in the slightest. She spent several years in a correctional facility for troubled teens and young adults - and she is currently residing in her parents’ home here in Boise.”

“Address please” you begged. “Sending it to you now.”

You immediately rushed towards the door, waiting for the team to follow. Yes, it was late, but you were deeply worried about Spencer. Who knows what could be happening to him right now. You took off towards the address, and once you arrived, you immediately noticed a shed near the back. That had to be it. You and Derek headed towards the shed, while Rossi, Prentiss, and Hotch headed into the house. It took one simple kick from Morgan for the door to slam open. Inside, you found several men. The three police officers, all tied up but - relatively sound. Spencer was laying on a small cot in the corner of the room, tied to the bed. You immediately went to him. He was drowsy, in an almost relaxed state. Each of the men were stripped down to mere boxers, they looked very cold. Derek undid knots for the three officers, helping them outside.

Meanwhile, you struggled. Spencer must’ve fought more - that’s why the knots were so tightly bound around his limbs. You also struggled with the strange state Spencer was in. As soon as you released one arm, his hand was around your waist. “I want to fuck you.” Spencer stated, and you continued to work at the second knot. “Reid, you’re in a hypnotic state. Don’t trust yourself.” The next thing you knew, Spencer’s hands were settling on your ass as you worked at the last two knots around his ankles. These two were a bit easier. You decided to let his hands be, what harm could they do? He was just in a delirious state, you told yourself. However, once you released the last of his limbs, he launched himself upon you, grinding a bit on your heat. “Reid, Reid, don’t do this-” It felt good, and yes, you liked him and were attracted to him. But not like this. Not with his fragile mental state and aphrodisiac coursing through his veins.

You somehow got Reid up off of you, and you slugged his top half over your shoulder, his legs walking next to you with ease. As you walked out of the shed, Morgan and a paramedic were waiting. They took Spencer off of your shoulders, and a huge weight was lifted. He’d be okay after being stabilized at the hospital. Morgan went to assist the others, and you got the okay from Hotch to ride with Reid to the nearest hospital.

You were the one that Spencer woke up to. He saw your face immediately, smiling almost instantly. “You okay, Spence?” He nodded. “What happened?” “Well, um- Ashley Davey kidnapped you, along with the other officers. You were given a pretty hefty aphrodisiac, so you were really out of it when we got to you. But good news - they ran a rape kit on you and there was no evidence of rape or sexual assault. We think we got there just before it was about to happen.” You sighed. Spencer looked at you gratefully. “Thank you, Y/N. I’m sorry I ran off at the crime scene. I was feeling insecure.” He stated.

“It’s okay, Reid. But why?” You questioned, and he sighed. “My IQ is only 187.” You had to hold in a fit of laughter. “Spencer. Oh my god.” He looked at you, puzzled. “Only 187. I know, it’s a number. And it’s wonderful it’s a measure of your intelligence and ability. However, you don’t have to let that number define you. We’re both, technically geniuses. But we have different interests, different specialties. Our IQs do not define who we are. Us geniuses have to stick together, not tear each other apart.” Spencer smiled at your remark. He felt drawn to you, to put it simply. He reached out towards you for a hug. Afterwards, he lingered just a bit, and you looked at him. He had to have something to say. “What is it?” You asked.

“Y/N, could I take you out on a date when we get back to Quantico?” He looked at you hesitantly. You could tell he was nervous. “Spencer Reid, I would absolutely love that.”

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kob131 · 4 years

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https://spectralscathath.tumblr.com/post/190909103203/fight-analysis-rwby-vs-ace-ops

So let’s start with the set up for the fight, specifically, these quotes from Marrow and Harriet.

Marrow: We’re not actually going to slug this out, are we?

Harriet: We’re not doing anything. They decide what happens next.

This puts a heavy emphasis on the fact that team RWBY starts this fight. They are the aggressors in this situation, which then makes it both incredibly cowardly and utterly manipulative when, seconds into the Harriet vs Ruby fight,

Hold it hold it hold it.

How come you don’t mention the music in the background or the alternative to Team RWBY here? The foreboding music indicating a fight is inevitable and the alternative is Team RWBY being arrested while leaving people to do, something fundamentally against their morals?

That line is more of a confrontation Team RWBY will be offensive instead of being ‘the aggressors’ (AKA negative connotation).

... This is gonna be intensely biased in the Ace Ops favor isn’t it?

Ruby: Come on, Harriet! We’re playing right into Salem’s hands! You know we need to be working together!

A quick aside, Ruby’s voice is pitched up with this line, compared to her earlier bragging that the Ace Ops aren’t the best anymore. Her cocky smirk is replaced by a wide-eyed, fearful look, and I’d like to point out that this only happened after Harriet landed the first blow of the fight, kicking Ruby into the elevator doors. This is entirely faked, purely because Ruby’s suddenly realised that Harriet poses a threat and is trying to put on her cute ‘I’m just an innocent kid don’t hurt me’ act, while also trying to heap all the blame of this fight onto Harriet.

Her tone was also pitched up when she was talking into her school. That’s the result of raising her voice. To say nothing of how her look is PLEADING in nature, not FEARFUL.

Harriet doesn’t take any of this crap, thank the good lord, and decides to put her focus on pummelling the ever-loving aura out of Ruby.

... I really should just ignore you huh?

And boy, does she manage it. I went through and counted every single blow landed in each fight, so let’s start the blow-by-blow, literally. I’ll focus on each specific match-up one at a time, to properly break it down.

Yeah huh, sure. And Tyrian would be unbiased moderator in a debate between Ozpin and Salem right?

I’ll just keep the Ace Ops fight open in another tab so I can peer into reality.

Also, just so we’re all on the same page, I am a trained martial artist, having studied Karate (specifically Zen Do Kai), and boxing. Let’s keep this in mind as we analyse this fight.

Also keep the rest of what they’ve said in mind as well, as in ‘I have already shown an intense bias for the Ace Ops’ so you really shouldn’t be listen to.

Hits Taken Harriet: 2 Ruby: 7-8

Wanna know what isn’t counted? The amount of time or the number of times Harriet and Ruby used their semblances. Wanna know long/many times Ruby used her semblance? Five times. Two times for extended distances, once for a quick defensive deflect and two for split second dodges and maneuvers. The longest being 7 seconds.

Harriet? Fuck, I don’t even know how to measure her because EVERY MOVE SHE MAKES is using her Semblance. She uses it CONSTANTLY. So naturally, her aura would drain faster.

Does the OP consider this?

Now, if we take into account aura levels, we are aware that Harriet’s are noticeably lowered, as seen from her fight with the Megoliath. She and Ruby are both using their semblances a lot, hard to say who’s using theirs more. Possibly Harriet, but Ruby isn’t far behind.

Fuck no, they keep it VAGUE so you don’t see how much Harriet uses her Semblance.

I shouldn’t even consider the rest of this post considering how FLAGRENT this shit is, but we’ll move on.

Hit 2: Harriet kicks Ruby in the chest with both feet. (Some of these screenshots are hilarious but I’m doing it as categorical proof of the hits)

Yeah, see how Harriet’s feet are ON Crescent Rose?

That’s a block. So -1 hit.

Hit 3: The next one is a little hard to count, as it’s the shot where Harriet blitzes by Ruby. The first hit is hard to tell if it connects or not, while the second hit most definitely does, meanwhile Ruby blocks the third strike. The first of these is the only hit that is ambiguous.

Yeah, it looks that way in screenshots...in animation Ruby doesn’t react correctly, meaning she wasn’t hit AT ALL. So -1 as well here too.

Hit 5: Harriet restrains Ruby’s hands behind her back, enough to cause Ruby pain. However, that is an unfortunate side-effect of having arms pinned in that manner, so I’m not going to call it excessive. After all,

Harriet: It’s not excessive if it’s necessary.

Quick fuck you: This can be said of Team RWBY fighting the Ace Ops, necessary to defeat them and try and save as much as Mantle as possible.

It’d be reductionist but that’s OP’s speciality at this point.

Hit 6: Ruby escapes Harriet’s pin, ties the bolas around Harriet, before yanking Harriet backwards into Ruby’s uppercut to the spine, which appears to go near the area of Harriet’s nape and the back of her head. (I’ll come back to this)

Yeah, that’s a pretty serious hit. Most people would suffer serious pain from that. OP even tries pointing this out as a failing of RUBY.

Yeah. That one. I study in Australia, which, had a certain event happen that leads me to be somewhat biased against punches specifically to the nape/back of head, you know, that place where your spine meets your skull? From Wikipedia, just for a basic rundown: ‘During 2013 and 2014, significant media attention was paid to two violent killings involving one-hit punches in Australia. Noting that 91 people had died in Australia in the previous fourteen years from brain trauma as a result of being so hit, a media campaign was launched to refer to them as coward punches.’

91 people. Yep.

So, if I sound like I disrespect Ruby for the single hit she landed, while Harriet seems to get a pass for punching Ruby in the back and the throw to the ground, I would like to point out first of all, Harriet only started going for attacks to the head and neck area after she had been restrained, in which case she is trying to put Ruby down hard and fast. Secondly, Ruby not only pulled Harriet backwards into the uppercut, she’s fucking grinning.

How triumphant. None of the Ace Ops show this level of glee at landing hits, I’m just saying. Also, calling back to Harriet’s line about it not being excessive if it’s necessary, Harriet was at that point restrained, only showing she is capable of fighting despite that after being punched. While hitting Harriet may not have been excessive, you would also think that perhaps a leg sweep, or a kick to the back of the knee, would be enough to stop her, instead of a King Hit, specifically one that Harriet could not have even tried to block due to how her arms are tied.

Rant about my own personal biases towards coward punches is over let’s continue the actual analysis now that I’ve copped to it

P.S. No admission of your self evident bias for the Ace Ops? yeah, not gonna buy this.

Hit 7: Harriet headbutts Ruby in the face. This one doesn’t have an impact SFX like a lot of hits do, but the way Ruby reels back makes it clear Harriet connected the blow

Notice how OP doesn’t have an image here?

Yeah, -1 again.

Hit 9: Harriet runs into Weiss’s ice wall, her aura is shattered, and she is knocked unconscious.

What isn’t shown: Harriet running head first USING HER SEMBLANCE (which makes her faster than Ruby in close quarters) into a thick ice wall.

For demonstration: run as fast you can, leaning into it, at a wall of ice. Actually don’t because people have DIED from that too. And we don’t have super quick powers in INCREASE the damage.

But how, the pray tell fuck, does Ruby apparently have enough aura to tank at least 7 hits, most of which are kicks, from a combat-trained runner, and come out smiling? Tyrian gave her a few scratches and one kick to the stomach and that had her aura flickering. Now, yes, Tyrian is on a level all his own that only Qrow and maybe Clover can match, but also; are you fucking kidding me?

Difference: Ruby used her semblance a fuckton, Tyrian is probably stronger than Harriet considering he was equal to QROW and could block bullets with his tail FROM SOUND ALONE.

Ruby barely used her semblance in comparison to Harriet spamming the thing while the OP says she had LESS Aura.

All while taking FOUR hits, maybe 5 since OP manipulated shit.

Suddenly doesn’t seem so implausible huh?

Ruby’s a speed fighter/sniper, a DPS main, and I’m supposed to believe she’s all of a sudden more of a tank then Yang?

Because fictional characters in a world without definitive roles unlike an RPG fit neatly into all roles and not like certain circumstances gave Ruby more durability that you CONVIENENTLY ignored.

So… yeah. Take that bit as you will.

Take it as an indication you’re biased as fuck? Okay.

Anyway. Shall we move onto the next round?

You’ve sunk your creditability with that last fight and I REALLY shouldn’t listen anymore out of sheer offense at the lack of principles here, but fine,

Blake and Yang vs Elm and Vine

Hits Taken Blake: 4 Yang: 4 Vine: 3 Elm: 4

Ah huh, what is said about Semblances?

Okay, so. Elm and Vine use their semblances liberally enough, while Blake and Yang barely use their semblances outside of finishing moves. I’ll grant them all that.

...After all that with Harriet and Ruby, you don’t even BOTHER discussing the use of semblances?....

You know, they don’t even really ANALYZE the fight. Wanna know what they say beyond stating hits (NOT a good indicator of whose winning)?

And aside from the suicide bomber attack, this fight is solid enough, animation-wise at least. Elm proves herself to be an absolute goddamn beast of a woman whom I love, but… it’s a little sad that the only hits Blake makes are team attacks. Once again, even worse then it was with Bees v Adam, Yang carries the fight while Blake is near-useless, aside from a few token team attacks.

I do wish Elm was more of a tank, though. It’s what she deserves.

Honestly, this feels so INSULTING. What, you didn’t have problems so you skipped the fight effectively? Analysis doesn’t mean ‘bitching about what I don’t like’, I learned NOTHING from this.

All I can say is-

It’s not even necessary? Anyone remember this handy lil trick Blake has?

Look at that! It’s an exploding clone that doesn’t rely on someone else to pull the pin on the bomb!

What the actual fuck was the point of this move, other then to make me worry about Blake’s mental health? Who approved this? Who said ‘what’s the ultimate show of trust? Having the former member of a terrorist group put bombs on herself that someone else detonates! Brilliant!’

This is utterly bizarre.

Just sayin’.

Blake’s clones are BLATANT when infused with Dust. Vine wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Weiss vs Marrow

Hm. Hmmm. Well. Weiss got her first solo fight win. Unfortunately,

Harriet: Marrow! Cut the crap, will you?

Marrow: I’m trying to arrest her, not kill her, Hare!

Her opponent was holding back. Looks like Weiss’s special power is still ‘losing every fight she’s in with an opponent who’s not self-sabotaging’.

Marrow: I know you Schnees are used to getting what you want. But it's time to let this one go!

Yeah, don’t buy it.

Hits taken Weiss: 0 Marrow: 1

Yep.

Weiss takes no hits, at all, while Marrow blocks and dodges every single one of Weiss’s hits aside from the last. I’m serious. So I can’t go by hits for this one, I need to go by attacks.

So you say basically nothing about the actual fight but the dodgefest you say more? Really?

Hm. Yes. Hmmm. There’s some rather, shall we say, unfortunate implications here, since this looks, to me, rather more like an execution than anything else. As pointed out to me by a friend, when I showed them these screenshots, Marrow’s posture in the last is a very submissive pose. Head down, tail drooped, arm slack, reliant on external support (his boomerang), and kneeling. Also, what is with Ruby and Weiss and going for the back of the head?

He JUST got done dealing with the Knight and had to use his Semblance to stop it. After dodging and blocking a fuckton of hits. After all of the shit with the Grimm before. For someone trying to make the Ace Ops look as innocent as possible, why would you ignore how tired he must be?

Also that isn’t an execution pose. You have to be aiming for the NECK for an execution, not the HEAD.

There’s also the unusually heavy focus on Marrow’s tail getting burnt, and this tone-deaf line, if we’re going to point out all the ‘faunus racism’ implications that show up.

Marrow: I know you Schnees are used to getting what you want, but it’s time to let this one go.

Weiss: This is my home, and I’m not giving it up without a fight.

...

You mean like when Kefla was launching her barrage of lazers at Ultra Instinct Omen Goku and they focused on his hair just barely getting grazed? It’s to emphasize how close the attack was.

Weiss, honey, you’re from Atlas. Mantle is a separate city. Twin cities, at the most, but you’re Atlesian. Also, this came right the heck out of nowhere. Absolutely nowhere in Weiss’s arc this season were we getting anything about her giving a damn about Mantle beyond ‘I kill grimm there’.

... HER ENTIRE ARC IS ABOUT CARING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE!

And, just because unfortunate and hopefully accidental implications are the order of the day on Weiss vs Marrow, she’s saying this to the faunus that’s managed to get racism humansplained to him by the same woman who calls him ‘Wags’ as a funny nickname.

Sorry, I don’t speak wet farts.

Seriously, how the fuck is this a racism thing when Weiss is assumed to be someone who always gets her way, even in THIS Volume.

Weiss: Don't you think "tyranny's" a little dramatic?

Forest turns around to respond and looks surprised upon realizing who had just spoken.

Forest: Easy to say for a Schnee heiress, living comfortably up in Atlas.

Weiss: (sighing sadly) Not anymore.

Marrow deserves more respect than this, guys. I don’t even want to get into how bizarre it is that the final shot of his defeat puts the focus on his shackles, putting them even more in the foreground then Marrow himself. That’s just weird.

To emphasize he has them. Dumb I know but considering this post’s bullshit, you guys kind of earned it.

To conclude:

Ruby should have gotten her aura broken three hits in, sorry not sorry. Ruby is also a cold-cocking manipulative lil brat who has lost even the dregs of my respect for her. What a shame.

Which was complete horseshit beyond even Adel Aka or Dudeblade.

Harriet and Elm’s defeats seemed to have been framed in ways that were meant to be a little humiliating, with Harriet making dumb faces as she passes out and Elm landing in an awkward position. I disapprove of this. I would prefer if they were defeated with dignity.

It’s called humor.

Blake continues to be a useless damsel in distress in Actually Important Fights, while Yang is Angry All The Time and does all the heavy lifting.

That had fuck all to do with what you said, and as if being evasive and wasting enemy resources and acting as support for one of the BIGGEST HEAVY HITTERS IN THE SERIES is bad?

Weiss v Marrow has some weird implications that make me uncomfortable.

Which says more about you than anything else.

Credit where credit’s due: the voice acting, sound design, and the fight animation was great. Do I think the Ace Ops should have won? I would have found it more interesting, to be sure. Can I live with team RWBY winning? I can, but I could have done without the smugness.

Smugness you inserted.

Is there anything I would have changed? Bees vs Elm and Vine was fine, but I’d have either made it Ruby v Marrow and Weiss v Harriet (for a speedster vs Schnee fight, and a Lil Rd vs the Wolf fight), or would have let Harriet break Ruby’s aura.

Instead of personal stakes, bland ideas! Wonderful!

Also: War should and hopefully will be an Ace Ops’ song, not a team RWBY song. If anyone got betrayed here, the Ace Ops were the ones who put their trust into four liars who hid vital information and had the gall to act offended when they got told what a dick move said information-withholding was.

*insert equally shitty take about Ace Ops with bias in favor of Team RWBY here.*

Anyway, thanks for reading, I’d love to hear other thoughts on the matter. Ta, luvs.

Which is why the reblogs do nothing but regurgitate what you said while I’m blocked.

Speaking of reblogs....

https://jadekitty777.tumblr.com/post/190942492544/fight-analysis-rwby-vs-ace-ops

A lovely read dear! I’d also like to add, just because I was curious:

During the Qrow &Tyrian Vs Clover fight, I decided to do my best to count the amount of hits Clover and Qrow took.

I’m going to start with Qrow - he took about 5. One toss and 4 punches, mostly to the face (jeez Clover, I thought you liked his pretty face lol). Keep in mind Qrow is also primarily more a close-range fighter and took front lead in the Tyrian fight in the episode prior AND just went through a plane crash. The same plane crash that knocked Robyn unconscious - despite the fact she was only back-up during the other fight and hadn’t been down in Mantle during the evacuation efforts up until the end to lure Tyrian out. The point is, his aura should be hurting, but it doesn’t even flicker.

For Clover? It added up to be about 11-12 - one of which was a point blank shotgun blast to the chest, 3-4 hits from Tyrian’s bullets in the back, and one more sword slice from Harbinger to his back. I highlight those ones because they’d be the hardest to tank. The rest were various kicks and punches, most to his face and midsection.

(Also really Qrow,you should not be surprised Clover’s aura broke. You guys were killing him).

But the point I want to make is… Clover was down in Mantle just like the rest of the ops fighting for who knows how long before they went for Tyrian - considering they were coming back only slightly behind team RWBY and the others, we can surmise only maybe an hour or so they diverted to deal with our little scorpion. It’s also worth mentioning that ALL of our team members have been up an entire night and these fights in c12 happened closer to dawn, considering the sunrise at the episode’s end. They are all equally exhausted.

So to circle back around: Clover got struck with double to triple the hits his own team got - a full team of Atlas specialists. It feels like Clover is the only one who seems to be treated like he’s on Qrow’s level, wherein they really ALL should be at his level. Instead, it’s like the rest of the Ops had to be significantly nerfed to be beaten by Team RWBY.

If you want me to believe Team RWBY can beat them, then you also have to make me believe they can beat Qrow. And yeah, I don’t.

...

Clover never used his Semblance.

Qrow hits harder than ANYONE.

He was also attacked by Tyrian.

And Qrow was in a PLANE CRASH.

Fucking hell, this is one of the worst analysises I’ve read. Yes, including RWDE slock.

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hoshi-cola · 4 years

Text

Madison Collins Info

-Madison has shoulder-length wavy chestnut hair, vanilla skin with a pink tone. She has roundish-almond cobalt blue eyes. She often keeps her hair in a messy bun outside of training. In training, her hair is pulled back into a more professional bun or the occasional pony-tail.

-As mentioned in her bio, Madison stands at 5’7” and weighs 139 lbs.

-Madison has 6 total siblings. 2 older sisters, 2 older brothers and 2 younger twin sisters.

-Madison has chubby cheeks. She doesn’t mind them but just don’t start pinching or squishing them unless given permission to. She will throw C4 in your toilet and make sure you don’t get one for years to come.

-Seriously, don’t touch the chubby cheeks. Either pair. Don’t touch her cheeks.

-Madison narrowly avoided death 3 years before joining Team Rainbow. A sniper nearly killed her while she was attending wounds on the field. She was saved by a comrade and romantic interest of hers, who took the shot for her and unfortunately passed a few hours in the hospital.

-Madison has a knack for engineering. It’s more of a hobby rather than a job.

SAS

-Sledge and Madison are on good terms but Sledge does think Madison should stop her constant pranks on Thatcher. This causes a few small arguments but those are often forgotten about the days afterwards.

-Thatcher is a common target for Madison’s pranks. He does find them annoying and will occasionally get pissed off. He will be the better man and often calm himself before confronting her which will make Madison a little salty she didn’t get a reaction she wanted.

-Madison and Smoke get along very well. He, unlike Sledge or Mute, praises Madison’s pranks on Thatcher. He’ll occasionally join in too. The two share a few drinks every few nights and a small rumour has started the two may have spent a night in the same bed if ya catch my drift.

-Mute and Madison don’t get along. At all. She tried being friendly but Mute shut that down almost immediately and a little rudely. It doesn’t help that he isn’t a fan of her pranks either. They don’t enjoy each other’s company.

FBI SWAT

-Madison and Ash are very distant. The two don’t talk much, but neither has a bad opinion of each other. When the two do talk, it is because of their jobs.

-Thermite was actually one of Madison’s first friends when she first joined Rainbow. The two share a lot of bad jokes with each other over a few drinks. He’s the one that tends to cheer her up during tough times.

-Castle and Madison have gotten along very well. Their relationship is more neutral as the two don’t talk much but when they do, it’s a joyous conversation and the two can’t stop joking or laughing. Add Thermite in the mix and the base won’t be silent for hours.

-Pulse and Madison have a semi-close relationship. The two often talk when it comes to missions, training or their gadgets and how they can improve them. Pulse has actually taken her under his wing when it comes to combat training.

GIGN

-Madison and Twitch don’t have any opinions on each other. In fact, they don’t talk at all. Madison can’t recall the last time they talked to each other. Madison is interested in Twitch’s drone, perhaps she’ll inquire about it soon.

-Montagne and Madison have a good relationship. She appreciates his kindness and his ability to keep calm when others can’t seem to do the same. He’s usually the peace-keeper between her and Lion’s fights.

-Doc and Madison are at odds. They don’t appreciate each other’s ways of medical care/treatment. But at the request of Harry, Doc has begun to mentor Madison.

-Madison often protects Rook as if he’s her child, despite their close age-gap. Rook doesn’t mind, he actually likes the sweet attention she gives him.

SPETSNAZ

-Madison has shown her distaste for Glaz. She doesn’t like what he does, which is sniping. Glaz doesn’t seem to care and doesn’t acknowledge her or her feelings.

-Fuze and Madison haven’t talked much. They’ve shared their greetings but the two don’t seem interested in becoming anything more than just co-workers.

-Kapkan and Madison got off on the wrong foot when Madison shared her distaste for Glaz. The two have gotten a bit better although there still is that odd atmosphere. The two occasionally go for drinks with Tachanka every few weeks.

-Tachanka and Madison have gotten along great. The two talk a lot during and outside training. They go out for drinks every few weeks but there have been a few arguments between the two. Mainly over the Spetsnaz and JTF2 quarrel.

GSG 9

-Blitz and Madison are very close. The two get along swimmingly, especially with their senses of humour. They chat a lot in their free time and enjoy each other’s company a lot. Even if Blitz doesn’t like most of Madison’s pranks.

-IQ and Madison have an odd standing. Their conversations are awkward and a tad bit uncomfortable. Both avoid each other for now.

-Jäger and Madison are good friends. She enjoys chatting with him when they’re in the same room. With their shared creativity and curiosity, the two create new devices or odd ways to improve their own devices. Which doesn’t always work out but at least they try.

-Bandit is Madison’s prank buddy. The two are best friends and it’s been like that ever since Madison joined Team Rainbow. The two just kinda clicked and it’s a given since the two might as well be twins from different mothers.

JTF2

-Buck has piqued Madison’s interest romantically. The two met in the Canadian Armed Forces but the two never talked before Buck left. She tries to be around him and socialize with him but Buck keeps his distance like he does with other operators. Madison is confused about how Buck feels about her.

-Frost is a good friend of Madison. She’s often the down-to-earth support and adviser Madison needs when she has some problems. The two have a more serious, less-joking kind of friendship and both seem to keep it that way.

SEALs

-Madison and Blackbeard get along surprisingly well. Madison was actually a bit timid when she first saw Blackbeard, she thought he’d be some sort of no-nonsense, all serious business kind of guy. But she was only semi-right. Blackbeard is actually a laid-back guy outside work and the two get along fine during those times.

-Valkyrie and Madison are more casual acquaintances. They’ll greet each other in the halls and occasionally talk during gatherings but it’s nothing more.

BOPE

-Capitao and Madison don’t talk. At all.

-Caveira and Madison don’t like each other. Their personalities clash and they disagree a lot over the littlest things. Atmospheres tend to grow tense when both are in the same room.

SAT

-Hibana and Madison are naturally close through Pulse. The two have grown a sisterly bond and often defend one another against others. Hibana will occasionally train Madison when Pulse isn’t around to do so.

-Echo and Madison are neutral on each other. They’ve met but their relationship won’t be going anywhere.

GEO

-Jackal and Madison have had some conversations. She’s mainly concerned over his insomnia although he tends to reassure her that nothing is wrong. The two aren’t good friends, more like acquaintances.

-Mira and Madison have become good friends. Mira will teach Madison a few things while she works on some of the gadgets. The two have also become secret gossip buddies.

SDU

-Ying and Madison are acquaintances. They don’t talk often but Ying will admit that it is nice to have Madison around, it cheers her up.

-Lesion and Madison haven’t talked much but neither has gotten any gut feelings about each other so they leave each other alone.

GROM

-Zofia and Madison don’t like each other. Neither can explain why, other than “she takes things too seriously” or “she’s too laid-back”.

-Ela and Madison have done the occasional prank on each other or another operator. Madison isn’t as close to Ela like she is with Bandit but they’re good friends

707th SMB

-Dokkaebi is also like a sister to Madison although, she isn’t as friendly as Hibana. Dokkaebi’s a little more direct and blunt to Madison which Madi appreciates a lot because she needs someone to slap her with the cold, hard truth sometimes. Overall, a strong relationship.

-Vigil and Madison haven’t talked yet but Madison considers Vigil weird and odd. Madison wanted to talk to him at first but after a week of joining Rainbow, that desire died down.

CBRN

-Lion and Madison hate each other. They can’t stand each other and display this almost daily. The two can often be found in arguments over the tiniest of things. Look at them in the wrong way? Huge fight. Overall, they wish to murder each other.

-Finka scares Madison but the two do talk when they go out drinking. Madison often has to keep Finka from jumping onto Tachanka while drunk. The two don’t talk much but when they do, it’s pleasant conversations.

GIS

-Madison finds Maestro pleasant but a little forward. She enjoys his jokes and loves his stories. She could listen to Maestro’s stories for hours and she actually has. She considers the two good friends.

-Madison and Alibi have neutral opinions on each other. Well, Madison does, Alibi keeps her eyes on Madison. Alibi doesn’t fully trust Madison just yet.

GSUTR

-Maverick and Madison have talked occasionally. It’s a pretty neutral relationship but Maverick has made it clear Madison could come to him if anything is bothering her. Madison appreciates the offer and has returned his offer, telling him he could come to her as well.

-Clash creeps Madison out and plus, she’s kinda scared too. A screaming British cop with a shock shield? Madison will pass.

GIGR

-Nomad and Madison are good friends. The two enjoy each other’s company and Madison loves watching Nomad sketch out a few drawings. She finds it peaceful. She’ll go to Nomad if she needs to calm down which happens often when she’s been around Lion. Nomad doesn’t mind, Madison always makes her laugh.

-Kaid and Madison don’t get along. Madison doesn’t like Kaid’s strict training and retaliates against him. This causes him to get stricter and it starts the loop all over again. The two tend to avoid each other.

SASR

-Gridlock loves Madison. She loves teaching Madison all about engineering and considers Madison her student when it comes to the topic of engineering. Madison enjoys Gridlock’s enthusiasm and actually looks up to Gridlock as a role model.

-Mozzie and Madison love creating new gadgets or drones together. The two get together to edit their gadgets, during this time, Mozzie also teaches her about engineering. Mozzie’s been considering allowing Madison to become an aunt-like figure to his twins.

Jaeger Corps

-Madison barely sees Nokk. The two haven’t even greeted each other yet.

Secret Service

-As much as Madison loves to listen to stories, she finds Warden a little annoying. She will listen for a bit but she’ll leave after a half hour if she could. She can’t stand Warden, he annoys her so much.

APCA

-Amaru and Madison don’t talk much, neither seem to care for each other.

FES

-Goyo and Madison have had some chats and like Amaru, Goyo and Madison don’t seem to care for each other.

NIGHTHAVEN

-Madison doesn’t trust Kali. She has this gut feeling that Kali is up to something and is very wary of Kali. Kali doesn’t seem to care for Madison.

-Similar to Kali, Madison also doesn’t trust Wamai. Her gut is telling her that something is wrong about NIGHTHAVEN.

#rainbow six siege #r6s #r6s oc #oc #madison roy collins #madison #r6 siege #operators

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in-a-cave-with · 4 years

Note

What are your favorite fanfictions based in any of the Marvel comics universes?

ok this is certainly a . question. lmao . so i..have bookmarked like Three 616 fic on my actual ao3 account and i honestly dont know why. i have read so much 616 fic but i never bothered to make it a habit to .. save them . so rip me. this will be an incomplete list! huge f in the chat lads

there’s also the issue of like. pretty much all of the comics fic i like being, uh, stevetony. im a loser.

anyway.

When The Lights Go On Again by elspethdixon, seanchaiSummary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.rec note: i JUST read this fic and it ruined my life. go read it and ruin your life too

Resurrection, Reconstruction & Redemption by elspethdixon, seanchaiSummary: Doom brings Steve back from the dead. Hijinks ensue, some of which might vaugely be considered plot.rec note: a classic! i think this was the first stevetony fic posted to ao3? you should def go ahead and read the rest of the series (yes it is a series yes it is 300k+ words yes it is worth it)

The Roughest Day by elspethdixon, seanchaiSummary: Steve is in a motorcycle accident, Tony catches a cold, and someone is after the New Avengers.rec note: this gives me warm fuzzies because it’s the new avengers avenging and there isn’t enough of that

King of Infinite Space by elspethdixon, seanchaiSummary: A villain from Tony’s past comes back to cause trouble for the Avengers. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy, if things weren’t already so awkward over the events of Execute Program.rec note: it’s not a tony stan created reclist if there isn’t a tiberius stone fic somewhere on it

Winter Is All Over You by KiyaarSummary: Tony can’t remember why he’s running.rec note: *soft wheezing noises* oh,

My Mallory Heart [Add Violence Remix] by KiyaarSummary: He keeps seeing that bundle of metal set into Tony’s bare chest, the raw edges around it like Tony’s body was rejecting it. Keeps wondering: what have you done to yourself this time.rec note: *incoherent blubbering*

Sea Stars by MuccamukkSummary: Steve comes back to life somewhere entirely unexpected; Tony doesn’t remember being a hero; something is rotten in the province of British Columbia, and the 2010 Olympics are doomed.rec note: i LIVE for this fic it’s so good. the setting…the mystery…the characterization…top notch

Indelible by PenumbrenSummary: When an experiment goes awry, Tony thinks he may have found an answer to his problems and Steve faces something he’s been avoiding for a very long time.rec note: this turned out to be way sadder than i thought it was going to be

(Not So) Lonely At The Top by foldingcranesSummary: Riri has a bad day, and Tony tries to be An Emotionally Available Adult for her. It doesn’t go so bad.rec note: there isn’t enough riri fic out there…

if you leave by CapnShellheadSummary: After so many months passing each other in silence, Steve and Tony find a marriage counselor to try to work through their issues with communication.rec note: warning: fic is akin to a bat swung to the knees

Marvels: The Bloodstone Odyssey by teaberryblueSummary: The year is 1940. In the middle of the Blitz, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts set out to London to recover Howard Stark’s lost work. But it turns out that they’re not the only ones hunting for it. Tony finds himself contending with Nazis, crooks, and perhaps his most formidable adversary yet: a scrawny, asthmatic, bullheaded kid named Steve Rogers.rec note: this gives me huge indiana jones vibes and it’s GREAT

Emanata (The Comics Will Break Your Heart Remix) by teaberryblueSummary: Steve Rogers has the opportunity to fulfill his childhood dreams of becoming a comic artist when eccentric billionaire, superhero patron, and obsessive comic enthusiast Tony Stark offers him a job drawing Iron Man. But Tony Stark has no idea that Steve Rogers is really Captain America, the newest member of the Avengers. And Iron Man has no idea that Captain America is really Steve Rogers, up-and-coming comic book artist. And Steve doesn’t know what to do about the fact that he’s falling head over heels for them both.rec note: this one has a special place in my heart bc it’s the one that got me into 616 stevetony! the identity shenanigans make my head hurt and i love it

Genesis by teaberryblueSummary: Reluctant to make the truth about their secret weapon known, the American Government tells the world that Captain America is a man named Steve Rogers. According to public record, he died, tragically, in 1945, and he became legend. In 1998, the Avengers find a body trapped in ice. She’s alive. Her name is Eve. She has Captain America’s shield.rec note: i think this is the..only steve centric fic here lmao . and also technically this is a mix of 616/mcu/ults but i’m still putting it here bc it’s…very good

Highest fall you’ll ever grace by laireshiSummary: “You’ll probably want these back,” Tony says at last, and it hurts almost physically to pull the dog tags over his head and offer them to Steve. But they never really belonged to Tony, did they? Steve seems to hesitate for a second, but then he takes his dog tags with a weird expression. “Yeah,” he says. “They’re mine.”rec note: *clutches heart* hhhh

Transmission by laireshiSummary: The incursions are stopped. Steve hopes for things to go back to normal. Instead, he finds himself stranded in an alternate universe with Tony. Getting home won’t be easy. There are too many things they haven’t told each other, too many arguments they’ve never solved. Now, with just each other for company, they might have to face them all—especially as they seem to be telepathically bonded, and can’t keep anything unsaid anymore.rec note: oh boy am i a sucker for Stevetony Finding Out About The Confession

Chasing Shadows by laireshiSummary: Steve is still adjusting to the future. Tony hopes he is helping, but Steve’s and Iron Man’s morals might be too different for them to work together. Then Steve starts to act strangely, and all Tony can do is chase at shadows.rec note: this fic hurt me . that’s it that’s all i have to say

The Counselors Are In by cptxrogersSummary: Steve and Tony from Avengers Assemble open a counseling service for all the other Steves and Tonys from across the multiverse. God knows they need it.rec note: come on Other Universes GET IT TOGETHER

Think of This as Solving Problems (That Should Never Have Occurred) by SinealaSummary: No one knows Tony is Iron Man. Then Tony gets amnesia, and literally no one knows Tony is Iron Man.rec note: ok here comes the sineala spam in the reclist lmao

The Jar by SinealaSummary: The Avengers are ridiculously competitive people, and what starts out as a silly late-night team discussion quickly becomes a contest: their names. Not the code names – the nicknames. Who can go the longest without using them? They pledge to spend a week not nicknaming each other, and they’ll pay up every time they mess up. This hits Tony the hardest, and not just financially. Tony’s got a lot of nicknames for everyone, but most of all for Steve – and when Tony can’t use the names he’s already got, the names he uses reveal feelings he had no idea he had.rec note: super cute! lov those funky avenging dudes

Changeling by SinealaSummary: Instead of deleting his entire brain and reloading from a backup, Tony attempts to erase just the SHRA database from his mind. As Steve later finds out, this is unfortunately not what he actually did.rec note: *ugly sobbing* ttngngjfgnTONY ,.,,,,CAROLLLLL ,,FDF..,,KSDJBVSD ,,,S T E V E..,,,, FVKJD,,,,SFDJKDNFVNKDJFD

If You Want to Live (The Historical Present Remix) by SinealaSummary: The Civil War is over. The SHRA is gone. Steve has been brought back to life. He’s settling into his new duties as America’s top cop. His longtime friendship with Carol Danvers – Avenger, former director of SHIELD, and former leader of the pro-Registration forces – is now a tenuous one. But something is very wrong in the world. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Someone is missing. Tony Stark was killed at the age of seventeen, and it’s up to Steve to travel into the past to save a man he doesn’t remember from a man he knows all too well: a mysterious assassin from another time and place, a man with a metal arm. And the truth is more complicated than anyone could ever have guessed.rec note: super interesting fic! the Plot is,,……. some güd shit

Straight on till Morning by SinealaSummary: Tony Stark resigned his commission in Starfleet five years ago, after a disastrous away mission, and he swore he’d never go back. He just wants to be left alone to build warp engines in peace. But the universe has more in store for him than that, as he discovers when Admiral Fury comes to him with an offer he could never have expected and cannot possibly refuse: first officer and chief engineer aboard the all-new USS Avenger, a starship of Tony’s own design. What’s more, the Avenger’s captain is Steve Rogers, hero of the Earth-Romulan War. Believed dead for over a century, Steve is miraculously alive… and very, very attractive. But nothing is ever easy for Tony. As he wrestles with his secret desire for his new captain and his not-so-dormant fears, another mission starts to go wrong, and Tony becomes aware that Steve has secrets of his own – and the truth could change everything.rec note: ok there is, like, really weird porn in this fic but it’s a STAR TREK CROSSOVER and that’s all that really matters. and also it’s very heartfelt and the action is r e a l l y i n t e n s e

Your Name on Every Wall by SinealaSummary: The Time Gem throws Steve into the past rather than the future, and in doing so, it gives him the opportunity to undo his past mistakes. But when it turns out that all of his mistakes involve Tony Stark, Steve begins to wonder if he’s ever going to be able to mend things between them.rec note: wow…….stevetony…….. am i right boys?

Get Some Now by SinealaSummary: Avengers Mansion has a mysterious feline infestation. Meanwhile, Steve just can’t figure out how to ask Tony out on a date. And the thirteen teleporting cats sure aren’t helping matters any.rec note: as you all may know. i am an active member of the “tony…..but give him a cat” movement and this fic brings me great joy

Sucker Punch by Sineala Summary: Steve never quite warms to Tony Stark, Avengers benefactor. The Molecule Man never strips Iron Man out of his armor. Life goes on for the Avengers, but as disagreements split the team – and Shellhead and Winghead – again and again, Steve wonders why Iron Man always picks Tony over him. And when Steve finds out, it happens in the worst way possible.rec note: and here is a fic that does NOT bring me great joy and instead goes out of its way to hurt me in every way it can

Tony Stark Advises The Avengers by copperbadgeSummary: Somehow, Tony Stark ended up Team Dad.rec note: ANAD AVENGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Zero Sum by CraitSummary: Did you do your best, Anthony? And did your best only make things worse?rec note: let ao3 user crait write marvel comics, they clearly understand tony’s character better than anyone who’s written him in the past 10 years

#fic rec #long post #lmao tumblr user in-a-cave-with exposed as angst leech #a couple of these delve into potentially triggery topics (i.e. suicidal ideation/alcoholism) but theyre all properly tagged #except for. uh. the first two which talk abt the 2nd drinking arc in vol 1 a lot. so just b careful

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kiruuuuu · 5 years

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Bandit/Jäger oneshot in which they’re on holiday, and maybe, just maybe, Bandit is up to something. Includes Sledge/Maestro, Smoke/Mute, Blitz/Rook and my recruits!! (Rating T/M, chaos, shenanigans + fluff, ~9.3k words) - written for @grasshopper643! This was an absolute blast, thank you so so much for commissioning me, and also for including the recruits 💖💖

Bandit awakens to birdsong, crickets chirping up a storm, bright sunlight falling into the comfy room smelling of old wood, and another body draped over his. Mind blissfully blank, he takes advantage of the marvellous situation he finds himself in: a deep breath fills his lungs with warm, fragrant summer air, and when he tilts his head to feel the soothing rays on his cheeks, he just happens to snuggle closer to the man atop him. Hands wander over exposed skin, travel down the dip of the lower waist, climb the gentle rise a bit further down, fingertips digging into inviting flesh.

Jäger stirs, not much, just enough so Bandit knows he’s awake, and wraps even tighter around him with a contented sigh. Normally, an embrace this snug would feel suffocating, and normally, the start of a new day would be met with unwilling groans and mutual shoving, but they’re on holiday. Bandit’s mind is at peace here, aided by the floral scent of all the flowers thriving not only outside the small house but scattered inside, too, inhabiting vases everywhere and mixing with the building’s own organic smell. Jäger’s personal one is merely the cherry on top.

Lazily, Bandit mouths at his lover’s shoulder while continuing the really quite lovely groping, massaging plump cheeks in preparation of early morning sex, something for which they rarely have the time. But they’re on holiday. They can do what they want. If he was any more awake, he might endeavour to take Jäger apart with his tongue until his moans turn into these hoarse pleas which never fail to drive Bandit insane, yet he’s afraid they’ll have to make do with languid humping amid deep kisses – travelling to their destination yesterday was surprisingly exhausting and they needed the sleep.

Nibbling at Jäger’s nape of the neck earns him his first moan for the day, so he uses more teeth, continues down that vein and grins to himself when Jäger stretches into his ministrations, sees a shadow move by the window and looks up, over Jäger’s shoulder, to -

- to be faced with five pairs of eyes. Very wide, and very curious.

His gaze must’ve turned murderous as all five idiots drop out of view immediately and, from the quiet sounds of it, scramble to get away. Vague regret befalls Bandit not for the first time: this half-baked plan might come to bite him in the arse eventually.

Oblivious to this distraction, Jäger curls into him and captures his lips in a sloppy kiss, and just for a moment, Bandit considers not getting up at all. Give ‘em a show, who cares – part of him wants to show off his boyfriend with his long limbs, the adorable little smiles, confident movements so unusual for him. And Jesus fucking Christ, not even twenty-four hours in Italy, and he’s already let its sappy atmosphere seep into his thoughts.

“Off”, he orders and slaps Jäger’s backside hard enough to leave a bright red mark. With a dissatisfied grumble, Jäger obliges and rolls off him, but not without reaching between Bandit’s legs and hell, he really doesn’t make anything easy, does he? There’s a brief scuffle accompanied by sleepy giggling on Jäger’s part and vanishing resistance on Bandit’s, and when he ends up pinning the other man down by the wrists, he still hasn’t won. Because Jäger beams up at him so unguardedly that it feels like a stab to the heart. He’s just, he’s just so -

Out of the corner of his eye, he spots movement once more and that’s it.

“I’ll be right back”, he promises and, despite being incredibly pissed, briefly sucks on Jäger’s neck for good measure just so his smile doesn’t fade before untangling their limbs and getting up. On the way out, he pulls on a t-shirt and underwear since he doesn’t feel like digging through their luggage for his sweatpants, takes one set of keys and leaves the house to face his delegation of idiots.

The five recruits have piled up outside the door, the majority visibly uncomfortable.

“Sorry for interrupting, chief”, the Irish lad, Shay, brightly addresses him and gets shushed by the others immediately before continuing much more quietly: “We just wanted to report back.”

“Did anything happen?”, Bandit asks and looks to the only competent one of the bunch, the Russian lurking in the back, always seeming uninterested yet no doubt watching like a hawk out of the corner of his eyes. Bandit probably likes Ivan Ivanovic the most as he has him largely figured out – he’s familiar with the cool façade of nonchalance hiding a sharp mind, while he never has any clue what’s going on in Shay’s, Jojo’s or Gian’s heads. Nor is he particularly curious. And Valenti reminds him too much of Blitz sometimes: an overachiever, someone who fancies himself a leader.

“They had romantic breakfast, so Gian called cops on them”, Ivan Ivanovic replies levelly.

Bandit waits a second to see if they’re joking, but Shay merely nods encouragingly and since he can’t lie for shit, they must be serious. He massages his temples and, to buy time in order to process this revelation, barks at Valenti and Jojo: “If either of you glances at my cock one more time, I’m going to shove it up your ass.”

Both gazes snap up in instant terror and both faces flush a satisfying crimson. Well. He could’ve phrased this better.

“To be quite frank, we were in a state of non-negligible panic”, Gian points out calmly. “An interruption seemed the necessary course of action, yet revealing our presence unwise, so I acted swiftly.”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal anyway”, Jojo cuts in, sensing Bandit’s disbelief, “they turned out to know some of Maestro’s relatives, we think, so they had a pleasant chat and left and were none the wiser.”

“So let me get this straight – you made a false emergency call and are patting yourselves on the back now?”

Valenti opens his mouth to protest yet realises much too late that this is exactly what happened. His sheepish expression soothes some of Bandit’s anger, though it does nothing to improve the situation. “You did say we could use whatever means necessary”, Shay chimes in good-naturedly and Bandit belatedly understands how in the world these five usually land in these kinds of situations.

“Not only did you fucking violate the law, but you also ogled my boyfriend in order to tell me that ultimately nothing happened?”

They exchange uncertain glances until Valenti of all people attempts to appease him: “Well, we figured -”

“Fuck off. Don’t talk to me again unless it’s urgent, and if you miss me so much that you can’t bear living without me yelling at you, text me. Got it?” His razor sharp tone has them all nod and flee into different directions, leaving him to consider just aborting the entire mission.

But no. He has to get revenge.

The infuriating incompetence at least does have a positive side effect – he’s not only awake but also riled up enough to tongue punch Jäger into never-never land, and when he returns to a long body prettily stretched out on the bed, one hand wrapped around a very interested member, he only needs to grit out a turn around to spark a smile full of anticipation.

He still closes the curtains for good measure.

When it comes down to it, it’s Jäger’s fault. He fed Bandit genuine laughs, secretive grins and all the attention he could ever ask for whenever he let the other German in on a joke, and over time Bandit got used to it: shenanigans mean admiration, a few stolen kisses here and there, a re-telling both excited and exaggerated, and even pride. Jäger used to be proud of his innovations, all the creative ways in which he terrorised those around him. Therefore, when Bandit changes all of Blitz’ personalised ring tones to – as he finds – fitting alternatives and merely garners a crushing, accusing look together with a devastating sigh, his world view crumbles.

Admittedly, it did take Blitz an entire weekend to set up the system Bandit single-handed destroyed during two afternoons. Admittedly, most of the song choices were in poor taste and some of them genuinely offensive, but that doesn’t make them any less funny, does it? And admittedly, maybe, just maybe choosing Weird Al’s ‘Fat’ for Rook when the Frenchie only recently voiced wanting to lose a few pounds was a tad misguided. Especially when Blitz hadn’t noticed Bandit’s stunt and asked Rook to call him to locate his misplaced phone.

Well. Alright. Maybe he did deserve the tired look Jäger gave him.

But after that? No matter how hard he tried to impress him, how much of a menace he was, he never managed to regain Jäger’s favour. Instead, he got a talk.

Please stop, was the baseline. Don’t play pranks anymore. Focus on other, more constructive activities. Stop wasting all these resources on messing with people.

And so Bandit stopped. Not because Jäger told him, obviously, but without his partner in crime it just wasn’t fun anymore. It took most of his self-discipline not to tamper with Rook’s new shoes – heelies, of all things, it would’ve been child’s play to make him eat shit – and leave Mute’s new jammer prototype alone, despite him forgetting to lock it away one day. God, it could’ve been glorious. Bandit could’ve strapped it onto Diana and declare her a denial of service dog.

But no, he didn’t even want to mess around anymore anyway, and if he stretched towards Jäger’s resulting affection like a sunflower, it merely was a pleasant side effect. If only the others didn’t notice.

Smoke was the first. Out of boredom, he taped the kitchen door shut and texted Bandit about Monika having baked fresh brownies, then recorded him enthusiastically giving himself a black eye, and Bandit couldn’t retaliate. Because that night was going to be the fourth night in a row on which Jäger would pet his hair until he’s asleep which he’d never really done before, and Bandit wasn’t going to let anything get in the way.

Then Mute hacked his phone and literally every link led to fucking Rick Astley and every time Bandit typed ‘I’, his keyboard replaced it with the entire lyrics to the song, and Bandit still couldn’t take revenge because Jäger was in the middle of watching a series together with Bandit despite not being super into it, and he didn’t want to finish it alone.

And when a handful of others got wind of being immune to his wrath, it turned into hell. People openly approached him to criticise the way he led his team during a training exercise, and sure, he did a shite job due to acute laziness, but who does that? Others let him know they appreciated all the extra care he put in during their most recent mission and fucking Christ, if they don’t even stop shy of compliments, he might as well quit because what’s even left of him in that case? Horrifying.

Obviously, he keeps track of every misdeed. Just in case Jäger gets deployed for a few weeks, allowing him to punish all the wrongdoers. Even if he has the feeling he’d be too distracted to really make it count in that case.

But Sledge puts the cherry on top. One day, he pulls Bandit aside and says a few things which are inexcusable. Unforgivable. And thus, Bandit hatches a plan.

They have breakfast in a small café together with Smoke and Mute, both of whom immediately expressed the wish to tag along when Bandit mentioned his plans to go on a short holiday to the beautiful Western coast of Italy and who is he to turn down their company (especially when they potentially distract Jäger, allowing him some breathing room)? The Brits share the vacation house next to theirs and Bandit just hopes they didn’t notice the early morning commotion, but then again it seems as if Mute ensured they haven’t noticed much since their arrival.

“I’m going to eat fucking ten of these overpriced cardboard pastries”, he announces mid-chew and chases down the second half of Smoke’s cornetto with a sip of Jäger’s coffee before anyone can stop him.

“Babe”, Smoke tries to gently reason with him and earns a wild glare.

“Don’t ‘babe’ me, not my fault they fold up the footpaths at night, I’m starving.” He gestures to the vaguely horrified-looking waiter to bring more sustenance and finishes Jäger’s latte in one go.

“If I’d stayed up all bloody night high on energy drinks I’d be starving too”, Smoke mutters with a helpless shake of the head which alright, that explains both Mute’s manic restlessness as well as the bags under Smoke’s eyes.

“Are you sure you should be getting more caffeine?”, Bandit wants to know dubiously and realises too late that the young lad’s gaze is worryingly unfocused.

“Huh?”, he makes and it’s obvious he hasn’t been following anyone’s conversation but his own so far. “Bloody hell, if this horrifically sweet stuff is all they eat for breakfast it’s no wonder Seamus is getting fat. I’ll ask whether they have bacon. They must have bacon. Right? Everyone has bacon. Or sausages at least. Fucking cold cuts, anything. Maybe there’s a salt shortage going on in Italy, though the people definitely had more than enough. Bacon.”

The other three stare after him as he makes a beeline towards the poor guy stuck serving them. “I would be salty, too, if some asshole insisted on New York style pizza being better than the original”, Smoke points out drily.

“Is he gonna be alright?” So far, Bandit has witnessed Mute on caffeine overdose (result: the attention span of a squirrel), sleep deprivation (result: endless ideas better suited for a mad scientist, particularly terrifying coming from someone who can actually implement most of them), and excessive hunger (result: an exceedingly sharp tongue plus an infinite supply of irritation), yet never all three together. He has to admit, it’s a sight to behold.

Smoke shrugs. “The crash is gonna be hilarious, no lie. He did tell me he hates energy drinks but didn’t specify why. Had I known, I would’ve put up more of a fight.”

Just as Mute returns triumphantly with an entire plate of fried eggs probably meant for all of them despite him making no move to share, Bandit notices that Jäger has been unusually quiet ever since they’ve left the house – and it’s even odder that he’s just watching Bandit with a small smile. Does he… does he know about his plan? Is he suspecting something? “What?”, Bandit asks defensively.

The smile widens. Uh oh. “Nothing. I’m just happy we’re here.”

Abort mission, abort mission. “Yeah, me too, and isn’t it a shame Elias and Julien have to rot at base without -”

“I was really surprised when you made the suggestion to come here, I would never have expected anything like this from you.”

“Well, we’re here now and we should make a list of everything that’s bad so we can annoy Maestro when we’re -”

“But it’s wonderful. The house is pretty, the beach is gorgeous and the town picturesque. It’s really romantic and I like it here. A lot.”

Bandit just laughs nervously. His face is on fire and he has to get out of this as soon as possible. Maybe he should split up the dumb recruits and have two of them watch him so he can give them a secret signal whenever a situation like this happens because holy shit, this is -

“Even so, you could’ve chosen any place and it would’ve been great, just because you’d be there. Thank you, Dom.”

He’s scarlet. Across the table, Mute is still stuck in the motion of salting his eggs while gaping at the two of them, unaware he’s created a veritable heap crowning one of the yolks by now. Jäger continues to smile at him and there’s no way he can bear another second of this. “I have to take a piss”, he declares loudly before fleeing to the men’s where he sits down on the lid, trying to will away the blood from his cheeks. Maybe coming here was a mistake after all.

To distract himself from the odd sensation in his stomach, he checks his phone and finds a message from Valenti: two lovebirds heading to the water, unsure how to interfere.

Alright. At least he can do something on this front. Once he’s cooled off a little, he returns to Mute nearly dunking half an egg into Smoke’s glass and Jäger observing them with a shit eating grin. “We should go to the beach afterwards”, he suggests and tries his best not to react to the hand straying to his thigh as soon as he’s sat down.

It wasn’t pickpocketing per se. Not really, because the odd object was half sticking out of Sledge’s trousers anyway, screaming to be taken. A rectangular box, while not too bulky, definitely not made for being carried around in front pockets for an entire day, and so Bandit merely… relieved the Scotsman of this burden. After all, he might’ve lost it otherwise and who knows how valuable it is. Better keep it safe for him than fill him with panic when he can’t find it and has to retrace his steps.

Bandit can’t deny it came at a pretty fucking opportune time seeing as he’d been obsessing about vengeance for Sledge’s uncalled-for insults, and so he nicked the velvety item without thinking and, as he hopes, without anyone noticing. For once, having to sit next to Sledge during meetings paid off. He’s patient for the rest of the day, carries his prize around without taking a proper look in case anyone catches him, yet when he opens it at home, he blanches.

Oh the possibilities.

For a few seconds, his mind is filled with delicious scenarios, one better than the other: replace the ring with one from a bubblegum dispenser. Replace it with bees. Add a noisemaker which produces a fart sound whenever the box is opened. Superglue it so it can’t be taken out. The more he thinks, the more absurd his ideas become: have it reduced in size. Engrave it with a random name. Coat it in a substance which dyes skin for weeks.

It’s a really tasteful ring. If he’s honest, it’s gorgeous. At the same time, he knows Maestro will flip the fuck out no matter what it looks like because it’s the act that counts, the intention.

Not only that, but Sledge is certain to inspect the entire box with extreme prejudice once he gets it back, and if he identifies any tampering, Bandit is dead meat.

“You dropped this yesterday”, he says the day after and hands the box back.

Sledge, as expected, examines it thoroughly before nodding – he doesn’t even hide it and alright, that’s fair. Given Bandit’s history of messing with him, he wouldn’t even bat an eye at Sledge sending it in to some lab. “Thanks”, he replies, and Bandit isn’t even offended at the astonishment in his voice. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

Relationships really do turn most people into utter fools if Sledge deems it a fruitful idea to ask Bandit for his opinion. Fortunately, he’s very different. He’d never change himself just because of Jäger or fall into the trap of hopeless, helpless infatuation. He’s always in control. “It’d be way too small for me”, he shoots back, unimpressed, “but hey, you measured it, so I’m sure Maestro will love his new cock ring.”

The genuine laugh he gets in return tells him that Sledge really has it bad. “I’m planning to propose to him on our trip to Italy next month”, he foolishly divulges and Bandit’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Oh?”, he prompts politely. “Tell me more.”

If looks could kill, Bandit would’ve dropped dead the instant Sledge catches sight of him. He would’ve spontaneously combusted and his ashes been blown away by the wind, because the Scotsman must know instantly that he’s up to something, judging by how the sun itself darkens along with his mood. He’s stretched out on a towel on the beautiful fine-grained white sand, shielded from the harsh sunlight by a large parasol and ready to wring Bandit’s neck.

“What? How?”, Mute is still going on, not having recovered from this remarkable coincidence. “It’s impossible that we end up in the same vacation spot by pure chance!”

“Yes”, Sledge grits out. “Impossible.”

“Adriano recommended this place to us”, Smoke jumps in and Bandit owes him so many drinks, “and I thought you were gonna visit his family?” Some of Sledge’s suspicion fades, even if Jäger throws Bandit a curious glance. He still needs to be careful, so he keeps quiet.

“This… isn’t a set-up? You’re not up to anything?”, Sledge wants to know accusingly and Bandit just snorts.

“Of course not, as if I didn’t have anything better to do in my free time. Are you getting paranoid?”

Sledge looks like he has a few choice words to say, but when Maestro joins them, his attention snaps to him like metal to a magnet – not like Bandit could blame him, not with the Italian’s tan skin glistening all over and his dangerously short swimming trunks clinging to his body. Bandit takes note of this: should he ever need to divert the Scot’s attention, he merely needs to dump some water over his boyfriend.

“Amici miei! What a wonderful surprise, how great to see you!”, Maestro greets them warmly and smooches their cheeks, in the process getting all of them wet, and then turns to where Mute is chasing seagulls while screeching along with them. “What, uh, what happened with my cucciolo?”

“He’ll tire himself out”, Smoke assures him with a sigh.

“How do you like it here? I will show you everything! Isn’t it such a fortunate coincidence, cioccolatino?”

“Marvellous”, says Sledge.

“We can spend all our time together and I will teach you the most important phrases!”

And while the Scotsman looks like he bit into a lemon, Mute rushes over to detail all the sand castles he’ll build.

No more than five minutes later, the youngest Brit is already conked out and snoring softly on the very towel Sledge had occupied previously, and when he seems to be wholly unperturbed by the others talking around him, they set up their own beach equipment and share their experiences and impressions of Maestro’s home country. He seems genuinely delighted over their presence, unlike Sledge, and generously shares anecdotes about this particular holiday favourite. Normally, Bandit would rather chew off his own leg than allow the Italian to chew off his ear, but Jäger’s holding his hand and so he really has no other choice. Besides, his lover seems stoked over the opportunity to ask about everything local and his enthusiasm is contagious. At least a little bit.

Eventually, the group breaks up a little, with Sledge announcing his intention to go for a walk along the beach with Maestro, and Jäger urging Bandit to go swimming as well. He shoots Ivan Ivanovic a message about keeping an eye on the unlikely couple and interrupting them should the atmosphere become a little too amorous, and notices a text from Rook: the Frenchman seems to be making the most out of being stuck in Hereford and challenges the holidaymakers in a group chat to snap the best ‘out of context’ selfie they can. Attached is a peace-signing Rook in the foreground, with a half-naked Buck getting his chest hair shaved behind him, looking not at all amused with a doubled-over Valkyrie.

Half a minute later, Blitz contributes by sending a photo of him giving a cheery thumbs-up, while Rook in the background is apparently getting yelled at by a half-shaven Buck. Days since the last superglue accident: 0, Blitz adds.

Bandit, despite being highly entertained, silently vows to upstage him, upstage all of them really, even if he hasn’t figured out how yet.

“At least he’s prepared if he wants to compete with Meghan in the pool again”, Jäger comments good-naturedly, following the chat on his own phone. He turns around to photograph himself grinning while also capturing Smoke drawing a dick on his boyfriend’s unconscious body with sun cream. “You guys are cute”, he adds inexplicably.

Smoke takes one look at the drooling man haphazardly flung onto the fabric, shirt riding up enough to expose a canvas for him to abuse, and nods. “I’ve never loved another human being more”, he responds gravely and adds a few cum spurts shooting from the tip.

“Give the balls some hair too”, Jäger suggests sweetly before dragging Bandit off towards the splashing waves.

The hot sand burns their soles, so they awkwardly skip towards the sea, tackling each other once they’re largely submerged and nearly lose the beach ball they brought. Bandit supposes it’s a bad time to mention how he never really liked going on holiday, figures it’s usually more effort than it’s worth, and hanging around at the beach all day not having anything to do seems like a massive waste of time – but since his presence here has purpose and the cogs in his head never stop turning, it’s actually not that bad. He keeps one eye on the couple strolling along the beautiful shore, almost far enough away that he can’t see them anymore, and focuses the rest of his attention on Jäger.

Because dear God.

He belatedly understands Sledge’s distraction upon seeing his boyfriend emerge from the sea, cheeks rosy, rivulets running down exposed skin, playful smile plastered on his face and -

- and there’s an entire pack of dogs swarming Sledge and Maestro in the distance.

Bandit stares because what else is there to do? It looks as if all stray dogs from the region had assembled to circle the two, jump up and apparently try to slobber all over them, and while his brain is still trying to process the view, he gets thwacked in the head full force by the beach ball, losing his footing in the process.

He’s still coughing up salt water as Jäger drags him towards the sand, unsuccessfully trying to stifle his laughter and apologising simultaneously. He should be more upset, seeing as not only did the recruits choose one of the flashiest ways of bothering Sledge again, but also he’s got a headache now and his lungs are burning, he will probably end up with a nasty sunburn on his scalp as he refuses to wear any kind of hat, keeps stepping on sharp seashells, hates the way sun lotion feels on his skin and despises the taste of tangy water – but when they trip and fall, and his field of vision is filled with nothing but Jäger, and his lover smiles and quietly asks whether he needs CPR, and when there’s warm lips on his own cool ones, none of it really seems that dramatic.

Mute is awake and has aged by ten years as they return, but at least he seems to have mellowed out considerably – even though he doesn’t look at all amused with the jellyfish Smoke keeps lining up next to their shadowy spot. “Can someone tell him that sleeping for sixteen hours is a worthwhile activity?”, Mute sighs, massaging his temples.

“If I hadn’t sent you out to get some food, you wouldn’t have let me sleep last night either, babe. Stay up till evening and reset your sleep schedule.”

“I’ll reset your fucking schedule if you don’t stop with these stupid gelatine blobs. We’re not taking one home and that’s final.”

“Glad to see everyone else also enjoying their holiday!”, Jäger pipes up cheerfully while towelling himself dry. “But what happened to you two?”

Sledge, sipping what looks suspiciously like coffee instead of his usual tea, glances down at his scratched up legs, at Maestro’s paw print covered loafers as well as the general dirt smeared over them, and replies flatly: “We’ve gone to the dogs.”

“This has been a really odd trip so far”, Maestro adds, “the first evening we couldn’t turn off any of the lights in our house though they switched off by themselves some time during the night. Just this morning, we were approached by policemen about allegedly causing a disturbance even though I’m fairly sure we had the curtains closed the entire time -”

“He’s referring to the fact that he likes to sleep naked”, Sledge hastens to explain due to several pairs of eyebrows shooting up at this comment.

“Then someone threw a few Playboy magazines through the letter slot, and just now we became an irresistible attraction for the local wildlife.”

“It’s almost as if someone was up to something.”

And while the others continue discussing these odd and unfortunate turns of events, Bandit pretends he missed Sledge’s meaningful comment.

“I think I’ve got sunburn on my hands”, Smoke mutters to himself as Jäger and Maestro encourage each other to come up with the most complicated conspiracy theory which would explain all that’s happened to the happy couple, with Sledge merely shaking his head. “They’re pretty red.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your collection”, Mute prompts tiredly and indicates the shrivelling, dead creatures by Smoke’s feet.

“You see, most of them are just see-through slime, but this one is real pretty. Looks like an omelette almost, don’t you think, babe?”

Mute blinks slowly. “Go and buy some vinegar with Adriano, will you? Doesn’t matter what kind, and don’t ask.”

The suggestion makes most of them spring into action as Jäger was considering heading out for lunch anyway, yet he lingers when everyone but Mute and Bandit trail after a happily bubbling Maestro. “Don’t you think it’s weird that all these things happen to the two of them?”, he asks and it takes all of Bandit’s willpower and focus not to smirk. “You’re not up to anything, are you?”

“Of course not”, he promises as sincerely as decades of professional lying allow it, and sends his boyfriend off with a kiss to his nose.

Once he’s out of earshot, Mute mumbles: “You’re absolutely up to something, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am”, he scoffs and blames it on the energy drinks that it took Mute this long to realise.

“It’s a fucking fried egg jellyfish”, Mute explains without being prompted. “Nothing serious, but the bloody idiot is probably gonna feel it for a few days.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

“And have him start early with asking me to piss on his hands? No thank you.”

~*~

“To be fair”, Valenti, the little fucker, tries to justify himself, “you didn’t say not to use perfume bombs.”

The effects of just 24 hours of Italian air are noticeable on the five recruits: Valenti has gotten even cockier than usual and revels in the warm weather, Shay has turned a lovely shade of lobster red, Jojo has bought a new wardrobe and, remarkably, looks just as fashionable as Maestro, Gian is distracted by everything and anything around him, visibly enjoying himself and writing novellas into his notebook, and even Ivan Ivanovic is smiling. If only Bandit himself felt the soothing touch of the country, he probably wouldn’t be this close to shaking some sense into the confident tiny Frenchman.

“You’re extremely lucky Seamus isn’t into crossdressing or any of that shite, because his soon-to-be fiancé smelling of several whorehouses at once caters pretty well to these fantasies and would’ve set him off, and then you’d have to keep two randy lovebirds apart and not just two sappy ones.”

“How do you know that’d happen?”, Jojo chimes up curiously.

The five of them are eating ice cream while sitting on the stone balustrade separating the promenade from the beach below and Bandit develops the sudden urge to toss the other German off it. “Look”, he starts and immediately gets interrupted by Shay smushing his face into his chocolate ice and Gian starting to giggle uncontrollably.

“The hell are you doing?”, Valenti wants to know, aghast, and rolls his eyes at Ivan’s reply: “I told him milk good for sunburn. Takes off heat.”

“I do feel much better already!”

Jojo grabs the cone out of the Irishman’s hand and sticks it against Shay’s forehead. “Shame you’re not called Shaun because now you’d be a uni-shaun.” Without any hesitation, he leans in and starts licking the ice cream off of Shay’s cheek, causing him to squeal and wield his damaged cone like a weapon and mere seconds later, they’re having a lightsaber fight in the middle of the fortunately empty street, with Valenti acting as referee.

Bandit’s earlier headache is starting to come back, and this time he’s sure it’s not related to heat stroke.

“Like children”, Ivan comments. He’s still got that smile on his face.

“Regardless of how we might achieve the goal you set for us”, Gian addresses Bandit, “our reward remains unclaimed. You’re confident you can procure it?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you what you want, provided you guys keep your end of the -” And then he’s cut off by a screaming Shay colliding with him full force, sending him stumbling and dangerously close to the low banister but not yet over – though when he tries to turn and yell, Jojo joins the dogpile and sends them flying.

Jäger looks fucking gorgeous when Bandit returns to their cottage, shorts and boots really hitting the spot and if he complains about having forgotten lighter shoes one more time, Bandit is going to show him just what he thinks of his outfit by having him keep it on as he blows both him and his mind. Thoughts like this one have become second nature and he’s still not entirely sure how.

“Don’t touch me, I need a shower”, he warns his lover before he can wrap around Bandit the way he usually does, no matter how long he’s been gone, “I’ve got sand everywhere, even up my arse crack.”

“What did you do?”

“Slipped and fell on the beach. And other people might’ve also slipped and fallen on me.”

“Odd. Seamus had ice cream tossed at him from inside a bush.”

“Huh. Did he find out by whom?”

“It was a thorn bush, so he stayed away from it.” Yikes. Bandit feels like his conscience shouldn’t be as clear as it is, but on the other hand he’s largely paying for their trip. So if he gets free entertainment out of it, he’s not going to complain. “Look, Elias and Julien sent another selfie.”

On screen, the happy couple is smooching in front of Echo sleeping on one of the workshop tables, with a variety of objects stacked on top of him in an impressive display of balancing skills. Next to him, Dokkaebi is showcasing a veritably demonic grin, much to Hibana’s concern. “Cute”, Bandit comments sarcastically yet it seems Jäger takes him at face value.

“Right? I still don’t understand why you kept gagging next to them when they were freshly together. They’re so good for each other.”

And he’s never understood how Jäger can support kitsch on four legs this openly. “This might come as a shock to you, but I’m not really the romantic type.”

The knowing smirk following his statement is what drives him away, ears burning, and it’s still adorning soft lips when Jäger joins him in the shower a few minutes later.

~*~

“Mutiny”, Bandit repeats after a grave-looking Jojo. “Are you taking the fucking piss?”

“We’ve spent almost three days of constant surveillance, spontaneous action, consistent communication as well as doing a remarkably good job, if I may say so”, Valenti jumps in, eager to support his mate, “and you’ve not met your end of the deal.”

They’re huddled behind the very stone balustrade which has painted Bandit’s back a hideous shade of yellowish-green due to an acute case of getting bodychecked over it, and he’s beginning to feel like a repeat performance is preferable over dealing with these numbskulls. “My end of the deal?”, he parrots in disbelief. “I’ve paid for your fucking vacation, you ungrateful little shits, and all you’ve done is ruin their holiday.”

“I wouldn’t go that far -”

“Well I fucking would. You nearly gave Seamus food poisoning, caused him to fall into the sea, harassed him with prank calls which weren’t even remotely funny -”

“Billy’s roadkill diner – you kill ‘em, we grill ‘em”, Shay interjects cheerily, earning a snort and an addition from Jojo: “You frag ‘em, we bag ‘em!”

“- and you even egged Maestro’s favourite shirt.”

“That was little funny”, Ivan Ivanovic butts in, and alright, the string of expletives exploding out of the hot-blooded Italian was admittedly hilarious, especially when even Sledge seemed genuinely scandalised over some of them.

Still, he’s understood by now that engaging any of the clowns leads to madness, so he simply keeps talking. “Besides, what the fuck do you want me to do about a Scot who flat out refuses to take off his shirt at the beach? I can hardly go and undress him, can I?”

“You could show creativity, like we have. Aren’t you supposed to be resourceful?”

If this had come from anyone but the Russian, Bandit might’ve slapped some sense into them, yet this gives him pause. “I mean – I tried, but he wouldn’t budge. Why is this so fucking important to you anyway, are you that bloody horny?”

Jojo looks ready to hold an entire speech as to why it’s crucial for mankind’s survival that they witness the buff Scotsman shed his shirt, but fortunately it’s Gian who speaks up instead: “I cannot help but feel your heart is not in this endeavour.” How fucking dare he. “You informed us of your wish to exert revenge, yet your glee has been muted, your undertakings half-hearted and your satisfaction with our actions astonishingly low.”

Bullshit. Bandit enjoyed watching the one guy suffer who usually throws wrenches into his plans, who reprimands him constantly and sabotages his pranks – it was extremely satisfying, he enjoyed it so much that he’d say it was the best part of his holiday so far.

…he would say that, wouldn’t he? And simultaneously know he’d be wrong.

Because his focus really wasn’t on Sledge, and with passed time it’s gotten harder and harder for Bandit to remind himself of why Sledge’s words stung so much. Why what he said sent Bandit into a white hot fit of rage.

Five pairs of eyes are staring at him expectantly. They might’ve gone about it arseways, but they did indeed accomplish what he asked of them, to the best of their capabilities. They even managed not to get caught, and while there’s no doubt someone is up to something, no one has been able to prove it was Bandit, even if Sledge, Smoke and Mute continuously side-eye him.

Maybe he should call the whole thing off after all and enjoy what’s left of his holiday.

“Give me a minute”, he asks and thankfully, all of them nod. When it comes down to it, they’ve proven reliable in the way a thunderstorm is – no way of telling when the next lightning strikes, but thunder always follows. Besides, now that they’ve overcome their terror of speaking with him, their natural banter reminds him of the familial atmosphere of his own team. Fuck. He’s starting not to mind them, even if they look like vaguely reverent meerkats staring up at him for any kind of signal as he paces back and forth next to them.

This is when he spots Sledge and Maestro, a short distance away from where Jäger, Smoke and Mute are building a proper sand fort: they’re holding hands, facing each other and seem to be deeply moved and fucking shite, it’s the perfect atmosphere with the gentle sea retreating in low tide behind them, the sun sliding lower and lower and flooding the beach in a warm, orange light. Sledge is gonna go down on one knee any second now and Bandit has no way of stopping them.

Shay must’ve noticed the horror in his expression as he peeks over the banister and immediately rips open Valenti’s backpack. “Code red”, he announces more professionally than he’s ever sounded in his entire career, stands up and -

And lobs a water balloon at the two lovebirds. A water balloon which bursts upon impact with Sledge’s broad chest, no doubt interrupting their little moment. A water balloon filled with neon yellow paint.

There’s a second of perfect silence.

Then Shay throws a second one.

In an impressive demonstration of his skills, Sledge catches it without it detonating in his hands and hurls it back full force, a detail the other four recruits quite obviously missed as they rise to get a better look, and when the second paint bomb explodes on the balustrade in front of them, literally all five end up coated in hot pink, with Bandit only suffering a light dose.

Well. That could’ve gone better. For another brief moment, the spattered recruits, Bandit, and the eye-wateringly yellow couple stare at each other.

“You fuckers”, Maestro then screams, and Sledge yells: “Dom, you little prick!” And the recruits and Bandit exchange a single glance before individually coming to the conclusion that an escape is in order. Especially when the two star-crossed lovers start running.

Shay shrieks like a little girl, Ivan takes a brief moment to wipe some of the paint off Valenti’s eyes with the inside of his shirt, and Jojo is already halfway down the street. Bandit is in great company. Gian nearly gets run over by a scooter and apologises in fluid Italian, Bandit slides over the hood of an expensive-looking car and leaves behind frankly hideous pink streaks, and Ivan seems to consider scaling the nearest building while Valenti is still coughing up paint. Shay trips and gets dragged along by Gian, and together the six of them scramble their way through the picturesque seaside town, garnering more than a few odd looks from the locals.

“Whose fucking idea was this?!”, Bandit wants to know and struggles to make it up the steep stairs to another busy road, though he does appreciate Ivan lending him a hand eventually.

“I didn’t think he’d catch it”, Valenti admits between breaths.

“He played fucking rugby, you moron!”

“May I suggest postponing this argument and instead focusing on the task at hand?”

“This colour actually suits you, Jojo, did you know?”

“Let us make left here, come on.”

“Jesus fucking Christ”, Bandit mumbles to himself though he can’t curse away the rush of endorphins in his system – he’s started to become complacent, and though Jäger will no doubt be disappointed in him, he’s missed this, the chaos, the knowledge of doing something forbidden, the guilty laughter bursting out of them now and then as they weave their way through alleys and between cars. He wastes no thought on what’s going to happen once they’ve successfully evaded their pursuers, right now he’s preoccupied with feeling the wind in his hair, jumping obstacles, running with the pack, rushing around corners and -

And apparently colliding with what feels like a brick wall. Something that doesn’t look like one though. Because it’s neon yellow.

“I will fucking castrate you and shove your own balls so far up your ass you’ll be able to taste them”, Maestro growls while Sledge causes another pile-up next to him by letting the recruits bounce off him easily.

It seems like this is it.

“How on earth are you so fast?”, Shay wants to know with wide eyes as the five of them take turns shoving each other to the front to face the Scotsman glaring daggers.

“Shouldn’t have let the one guy among you with no sense of direction lead”, Sledge explains. All eyes slide over to Jojo whose face starts matching the paint he’s covered in.

“Who’s the ringleader here?”, Maestro demands to know. All eyes slide back over to Bandit.

“It was a group effort?”, he tries.

“Will you let us live if we tell you?” Hell, he really should’ve gotten rid of this French gremlin sooner. A single nod from Sledge, and now five fingers are pointing at Bandit.

“Look”, he begins and gets interrupted by being slammed into the wall next to him, and it’ll be a miracle if the furious Italian lets him get away with mere bruises, though fortunately a hand on Maestro’s arm stops him.

“Adrianito. Let him go.” Sledge’s intervention is welcome yet Bandit’s relief short-lived when the two of them part to reveal the rest of their group: Mute and Smoke who are only missing popcorn, judging by the unadulterated amusement in their expressions – and Jäger.

A very unimpressed-looking Jäger. This is worse than a few bruises. He pushes to the front, brow raised and demeanour so calm it instils paralysing fear. For the first time ever since they came here, there’s not even a hint of a smile on his lips and it does unpleasant things to Bandit’s insides. He wasn’t meant to prank anyone, let alone follow Sledge and Maestro like this just to terrorise them. Whatever will come out of his lover’s mouth next is sure to be devastating.

“What were you doing?”, Jäger asks quietly. So far, so good. Around them, everyone seems to be holding their breath.

It’s the perfect opportunity. Seeing as Bandit won’t be able to interfere anymore after this, he could mention his plan off-handedly, complete his revenge by spoiling the surprise waiting in Sledge’s pocket. He can see it in Sledge’s eyes that he knows it too: a few words, and he’d be forced to show the ring, do it all on Bandit’s terms. He holds power over the Scot he never thought possible, and even if he doesn’t ruin his proposal right now, he could use it as an excellent source of blackmail later. The idea of Sledge having to do whatever he wants is more than enticing. “Annoying the hell out of him”, he replies, buying himself time. Sledge’s hazel eyes are boring into his.

Jäger just shakes his head a little. “And, what, were you planning on following them to his parent’s place too?”

Maestro senses his hesitation and though he hasn’t overcome his animosity, he doesn’t leave Bandit in the dark: “My mamma invited us for a family reunion. We’re leaving tomorrow morning and spending the rest of the week with my family.”

Oh. He didn’t know this, their plans must’ve changed since he talked to Sledge about their vacation. It’d be lovely. He pictures it, Sledge kneeling down, surrounded by Maestro’s relatives, all of them freaking out and cooing over them. It sounds heart-warming. And he could destroy it with a single sentence. If he doesn’t do it now, the two will be gone tomorrow and he’ll have missed his chance.

“Well”, he says. Jäger looks ready to cross his arms. “I hope you two have a great time.”

And Sledge gets it. His smile speaks volumes, he relaxes and even graces Bandit with a slight nod. Despite how much they clash the rest of the time, Bandit doesn’t want to do this to him, not like this. There are other methods he can employ without messing with Sledge’s love life and potentially ruin what could’ve been a wonderful memory.

Even so, he’s not out of the shite yet, there are still five recruits looking like they’re going to be gutted any second now, a seething Italian just waiting for his signal to rip them apart, and Jäger. So far, he’s not done one of his sighs. There is hope.

“Why did you do all this?”, he wants to know and Bandit realises something belatedly: namely just how truly fucked he is. Conveniently forgetting about this little detail, he pushed it to the back of his mind, merely holding on to his rage about Sledge’s words yet ignoring their content. His gaze snaps to Sledge and oh boy, how the tables have turned.

You’ve been behaving well recently, Sledge said to him that fateful day Bandit swore revenge at all costs. It’s Marius’ influence, isn’t it?

Bandit grumbled a little, waved him off, tried to change the topic but Sledge wasn’t having any of it: Have you told him you love him?

And fucking Christ, how presumptuous could any one person be? Not only wasn’t it his business, but also was he plain wrong. One fact Bandit had accepted long ago was that he cared about no one but himself. His life was littered with selfish decisions, no matter how much he tried to care, tried to hold on. Ultimately, the only one he ever protected was himself. He said something along those lines, unusually earnest with his nemesis, and felt more than just irritation rise in him when he received the response: Stop running from him and ask him to move in with you.

Preposterous. Frankly insulting. And Bandit silently vowed to have Sledge’s head for this.

“Oh well, who cares, just yell at me and let’s move on, alright?”, he hastens to change the topic and doesn’t miss Sledge’s grin amid everyone’s bewilderment.

Jäger doesn’t seem happy with this answer. “What do you mean? You can’t tell me there was no reason for you to pull this shite.”

“He pissed me off, I wanted revenge, here we are, now let’s stop dwelling on the past and -”

“What did you do?”, his boyfriend turns to the Scotsman in question, fuelling Bandit’s panic.

“Don’t ask him, he probably doesn’t even -”

“Be quiet. If you won’t give me an answer, Dom, let him.”

This is bad. Bandit’s and Sledge’s eyes meet and he’s well aware to be completely at his mercy – and he doesn’t harbour much hope, not after the past three days of constant torment, not after he very nearly spoiled their holiday. The recruits are holding their breath, neither of them fully aware of what’s going on but Bandit knows they treat the members of Rainbow like celebrities, so it must be exciting for them to witness drama like this up close. Smoke and Mute are following the conversation silently, gazes darting back and forth like in a tennis match, and Bandit wouldn’t be surprised if they’d placed bets on the outcome. Maestro has postponed his fury, though he’s clearly waiting for his time to lay into pretty much anyone involved.

Sledge seems to have made a decision and there’s no way in hell he’s not disclosing Bandit’s innermost thoughts to the world. He simply has to take this opportunity to humiliate him, uncover the secret he carries in his heart, waiting for the perfect moment to reveal it. He fixes Bandit with a level stare and says: “I insulted his bike.”

A beat.

Oh, thinks Bandit.

“You did what?!” And suddenly, Jäger’s composure has vanished. “How dare you! It’s a piece of art!”

Like a real trooper, Sledge keeps it up. “I called it a death trap waiting to happen and the decals juvenile.”

“Luce dei miei occhi, you can’t be serious!” Unbelievably, even Maestro looks offended. “It has fire, spirit, passion – that motorcycle has a soul, who are you to call it names!”

“I bet you’ve never even ridden it, it sounds like a large cat purring”, Smoke chimes in as well now, and all of a sudden, nearly everyone is directing their ire at Sledge who admittedly takes it like a champ. It’s a miracle. And Bandit instantly forgives him everything he’s ever done, from uncovering his candy related Ponzi scheme which not only involved Rainbow’s recruits but even spread to the SAS ones, to winning against him in hand to hand literally every time. He can’t believe it, merely gapes at the outrage directed at Sledge of all people and vows to try and never cross the Scot again.

Even so, there’s something he still has to do. “We need to talk”, he quietly informs the very upset Jäger and gently drags him a few steps away from the loudly arguing group, ignoring Mute’s encouraging about time! and Smoke’s meaningful wink. For some reason it seems that pretty much all people present know more about Bandit’s emotions than he does, and though he should find this fact concerning, his mind is currently trying to wrap around what he’s about to say. It’s been a while since this particular phrase has left his mouth, indubitably much too long. He doesn’t use it nearly enough and is painfully aware, so now’s his chance.

He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

Jäger simply blinks at him. “What for?”

Now it’s Bandit’s turn to be gobsmacked. “Wha – for doing all this behind your back. For not listening to you. For almost ruining this holiday.”

His lover softens and shakes his head with a smile. “Dom. I knew you were up to something. I may be horribly in love, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind.” Bandit almost chokes on nothing. He what. “It was never about the stupid pranks, it was about them getting so elaborate that we spent less and less time together. I’m fine with you doing whatever as long as you pay enough attention to me. Which you have in the past days. I’m really happy with this vacation – and besides, you’re adorable when you’re shifty.”

Closing his mouth seems impossible at this point. “You – I’m -”

“We’re staying here for the rest of the week, right? So let’s make the most of it.”

The friendly, unguarded smile is killing him. Killing him. How can Jäger say – how can he stand there and just – it’s impossible, and his face is on fire yet again, and maybe, just maybe Sledge was spot on with what he said. He should stop running. For now, he merely nods, disarmed, and avoids Jäger’s much too intense gaze. There’s so much he still has to tell him, but it can wait. He doesn’t think there’ll be a shortage of romantic moments any time soon.

Looking towards the others, there’s at least one battle he can win. Maestro has switched to yelling at the poor recruits and doesn’t seem to notice anything else, so Bandit calls: “Seamus! Could you take your shirt off for me?”

The selfie Bandit posts in the group a minute later has him and Jäger in the foreground, lips touching and both ears crimson, but the background is pandemonium. A neon yellow Maestro is giving the splattered recruits a well-deserved bollocking, though neither of the five seems to be listening – instead, they’re staring over Maestro’s shoulder, eyes wide and transfixed on a shirtless Sledge who seems ready to humour anyone (probably courtesy of the fact that Bandit will leave him alone from now on) and is flexing for their benefit as well as showing off suspicious scratch marks and bruises all over his chiselled torso. Next to him, Mute has donned Sledge’s paint-soaked shirt and dragged his fingers through the viscous liquid to write TWAT on the bandages around Smoke’s hands, both of them beaming into the camera while making obscene gestures.

Blitz’ reply summarises the scene quite aptly: wtf, he writes and adds a row of appropriately dumbstruck emoji. Are those our recruits??

You guys are cute, is Rook’s contribution and for once, Bandit wholeheartedly agrees. And while he holds on to Jäger’s slim form, ignoring the chaos next to them and grinning at his lover’s suggestion of involving him in future plans so they can kill two birds with one stone, he decides to let the recruits enjoy the rest of their holiday unbothered.

After all, everyone deserves a bit of peace and quiet now and then. And it just so happens that he’s currently embracing his own.

#rainbow six siege #bandit #jäger #bandit/jäger #sledge/maestro #smoke/mute #blitz/rook #recruitverse #fanfic #oneshot #commissions #boy it wasn't easy fitting all of them in here #sledge and bandit make the best frenemies #next to everyone is a disaster in this #thank you again!!!! I really enjoyed myself :)

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manifestoonmoralmanlove · 5 years

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Chapter 7 – Stalking? No, slut dads who slutted each other.

A well-meaning friend gave me a book series that is hilariously bad. The first book was Souless and my riffs were entitled brainless. This second book is entitled Changless and these riff are then gormless.

I mean to say I have entitled them gormless! Not that my riffs are dumb, and the effort I spend on them stupid since I’m the only one who enjoys them. HAHA!

The story is SUPPOSED TO be about how a badass lady wearing a rad-looking carriage dress hits baddies with her umbrella and bangs her hot werewolf husband. In reality it’s mostly poor attempts at being witty, flirty, and superior.

For the last book check out the brainless tag.

If you want the TL;DR version but want to read these new riffs anyway?

This story is set in supernatural Victorian steampunk England. Alexia is our NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS protag. She is a soulless, which means she’s able to negate the abilities of vampires and werewolves by touching them. She’s recently married a big oaf, named Lord Connel Maccon. He’s the manchild in charge of the supernatural police with a zillion dollars and he’s totes super hot too ok. Their relationship is mostly arguments about how Maccon can’t tell her fucking anything. Alexia has also recently become head of ~Soulless affairs~ in Queen Victoria’s government. She has a dumb friend named Ivy, a gay vampire friend named Akeldama, a family who’s evil because they do the same shit as her but while being blonde, and most importantly Alexia is better than everyone cause…cause.

Last time on Gormless:

There’s some mysterious force that’s turning the Vampires and werewolves into humans. Alexia is in charge of figuring out that deal, and she is doing a bad job at it. Her husband is in charge of the Supernatrual Police (BUR) so he’s going to Scotland about it.

Alexia is also going north to help her husband with a crew crafted for a comedy. and oh boy I can’ts wait.

Chapter 7 – Stalking? No, slut dads who slutted each other.

Tunstell has been poisoned! So Alexia and LeFoux tell him to puke. Ivy gets really offended that they asked him to puke. Like it was actually kinda shocking how nasty Ivy gets about this. Ivy insults Alexia, and laughs condescendingly while saying it’s just regular old food poisoning. Like that’s pretty fucking cold Ivy damn.

I know this is supposed to be a comedy of ~manners~ this hubbub is because it’s gross and ~untoward.~ But a secret part of me wants to believe that Ivy is pissed at Tunstell for giving her feels and wants him to suffer.

Also I love how Alexia and LeFoux just TELL him to puke, and when Tunstell is like…what? How? They’re like you’re an actor just puke wtf do we have to explain everything to you?????? But eventually they concede, he takes some ipecac, barfs, and doesn’t die. Ivy was fluttering around him all a tizzy over this incident. A part of me is like, why didn’t they just leave Ivy and Tunstell alone here to sort out some shit? But I mean, Ivy seems salty enough to allow him to be in horrible pain. If they weren’t careful she was going to pull a fake eggplant off of her ugly hat and suffocate him with it.

LeFoux gets fed up with all of Ivy’s tittering so she gives her a bit of Cognac. She takes what are described as two nips. So I was picturing itty-bitty sips, and Ivy immediately becomes blitz out of her fucking mind. I’m not exaggerating, 2 sentences after the nips, she’s staggering in zig-zags. She bumps into doors, spills drinks, and giggles like a mad woman. I haven’t had cognac before but like….REALLY? To me, they might as well have written, “Ivy was within 15 feet of an alcoholic beverage, so she’s sloshed. She starts laugh-crying while singing Danny Boy incoherently and trying to give Tunstell a handy under the table…but it wasn’t Tunstell it was just an empty chair. Which was actually lucky for Tunstell cause at this point she couldn’t do more than just play bloody knuckles with his nut-sack anyway.”

But anyway Ivy and Tunstell retire to their rooms and Alexia and LeFoux go to have a chat on the deck. Alexia is like, “Why would anybody want to poison Tunstell it makes no sense!” To which LeFoux, with more patience than I could ever muster, points out Tunstell ate HER meal. Alexia has a moment before she’s like, “Oh yeah, people are always trying to kill me.” LeFoux is a bit flummoxed that Alexia seems pretty chill and incurious about almost being murdered. Alexia continues this track of being an intellectual giant by asking LeFoux if she’s a spy or assassin out to get her.

She, of course denies it, by saying she could have easily killed her earlier cause gosh what a badass she is. But like what the hell Alexia!? All you did was alert LeFoux to your distrust of her. What were you hoping is going to happen by asking that question? Denying it is hardly going to prove one way or the other, were you hoping you’d get,

“Yes! KER-STAB! U DEAD!”

Yet it’s almost as if her wish came true because a mysterious figure shoves Alexia off the deck, to meet her doom splattered on the English Countryside.

NO this isn’t where the chapter ends. Here we are 4 pages in and we have a much better cliff-hanger than TUNSTELL DUN BE POISONED!

Unluckily for us Alexia’s descent is cut short because a random protuberance on the dirigible catches her dress and she hangs on for dear life while LeFoux fights for hers against the mysterious shoving assassin.

But just as you were getting caught up in the action, a port-hole opens near Alexia to reveal the still hammered Ivy. We have a very appropriate bit of comic relief where Ivy slurs out how extra it is of Alexia to be climbing around on the outside of the dirigible. Which, to be fair, I wouldn’t put it past her. But eventually LeFoux scares off the attacker and they rescue her. The attacker was wearing a mask so we CAN’T SAY who it could possibly be. I bet it’s Angelique.

However LeFoux goes back to Alexia’s room with her, and Alexia sees she got a scratch on her neck from the fight. So she takes off LeFoux’s cravat and cleans it up. It’s very intimate.

Gotta be honest, I am so here for the lesbian flirting. I think fewer people should be flirting with Alexia, but I hardly care at this point. I’m happy that this book isn’t afraid to throw a masc-presenting lesbian love interest. I mean, this is perhaps quite a low bar since modern romance novels don’t tend to be homophobic, but I appreciate a stronger inclusion regardless.

But as she’s doing so she spies a tattoo on her neck of that OCTOPUS SYMBOL! YANNO THE HYPOCRAS CLUB THAT TRIED TO KILL HER, HER HUSBAND, AND THE TOKEN GAY MAN LAST BOOK! OH NO! But Alexia pretends she didn’t see it. She asks LeFoux why she’s following her around. LeFoux is all like, “Oh GOSH I WISH I COULD TELL YOU BUT I CANNOT! I AM MYSTERIOUS!” I really hate this cop-out, and I particularly hate this one cause I can already taste it now…the reason she can’t tell Alexia is for a really dumb reason that would cause 0 damage if she told her right now. (Also going back and editing this after I finished the book, I was right. SHOCK!) It’s also kinda infuriating cause Alexia (rightly so for once) is like, “Just tell me!” To which LeFoux rolls her eyes and is like, “Oh you soulless are always so annoyingly logical.”

HEY LISTEN GIRL, PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL HER ALL THE TIME, IT’S NOT FUCKING ~DISPASSIONATE~ OF HER TO BE DISTRUSTFUL FOR CHRISTS SAKES! UGH!

In order to appease Alexia’s outrageous line of questioning, LeFoux barfs out some totally unrelated backstory. She was an illegitimate child from a slutty dude who died soon after she was born. She was raised by her aunt. As a child she met a man who used to be gay lovers with her dad. TURNS OUT THAT RANDOM MAN IS ALEXIA’S FATHER! WOW! What does that have to do with her following Alexia around like a dog trying to hump her leg?

BEATS THE HELL OUT OF ME!

But Alexia is swayed with that and they part ways.

Say something nice Faps:

It’s getting even gayer up in here. Seriously Alexia, if you were seriously considering getting deep-dicked by Douche-canoe, douche canoe, of the dickwad douche canoes you better be considering this.

In particular I like the idea that Alexia’s father was openly bisexual. In part because she describes him as basically down for any person who wanted to fuck him. I am the kind of slutty stereotypical bisexual that relates to that. Also the more gay characters the better my friend.

I mean, I’m not super happy with the direction they continuously drag Ivy’s character but it’s at least it’s more of a personality. And I’ll take the comic relief, even if it isn’t good.

#changless #gormless #riffs #soulless #riffing

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toolatetofall · 4 years

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Before

Okay, I am so fucking excited. I’ve finished the first draft of part 1 of 6 of my mass effect fanfic. Going long-term, it’s going to be a ShepShep fic, but I think I’m going to characterize their relationship more as queerplatonic than sexual. It’s a 2 Shep AU (obviously) where male Shep is the “main Shepard”, but it’s told from femshep’s POV.

Anyway! It’s in second POV for femshep, and the events in the prologue are prior to joining the Normandy. She has the Earthborn/Sole Survivor background. This is a rough draft, so I haven’t posted it on AO3. To that end, I’d really appreciate hearing thoughts on characterization, writing, any minor mistakes, etc. Please feel free to message me!

I’ve never done a TW before, so if I miss something, please tell me and I will add it! I think the things that need a TW have to do with the backgrounds, so death, physical violence, gang activity. Again, if I miss something, PLEASE tell me.

Before

The memory of your mother is a hazy one. You know you loved her- her face is harder to conjure. You have the vague memory of citrus perfume, too-blonde hair, shoulders shaking with laughter. You have a holo from her case file, and you suppose you look enough alike, mostly around the nose, but you just... you can’t place her in your childhood.

It was a Tuesday evening when you found out she was missing. You’d been staying with your neighbor while your mother was at work, parked in front of the TV munching crackers as the characters on screen sang a song about friendship.You can remember every stupid word.

Amanda, your neighbor, had been getting testy; your mom was late. It was almost three hours past when she got off work when Amanda got a call and chaos broke.

The rest of the evening comes only in flashes now. The itchy, pink and yellow jumper you’d been wearing with snot-drenched sleeves. The worn, leather seats in the back of your caseworker’s car. An unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place.

It’s a blur; you didn’t understand completely what was happening. You were six. You knew that mom was gone, but you didn’t understand where or why. You asked when she was coming back.

They didn’t have an answer.

----

Your mother was never found. Maybe she died, either back then or since, maybe she’s still alive somewhere, a survivor of the Reaper war. You have no idea, and frankly you aren’t sure that it matters. At least now. It mattered then.

Because your mother wasn’t declared legally dead, at least until you were fourteen, you couldn’t be adopted. You didn’t have any family to take you in either- not your mom’s family, she’d never talked about them, and certainly not your father whose name wasn’t even on your birth certificate. Instead, you floated from home to home every few weeks, months, years, hauling all your worldly possessions in trash bags along with you. Some placements were better than others. There was one where you’d only lasted two and a half weeks, but there was another that was almost 18 months.

The Shepards. You’d liked them; Nick and Silas. They were an eldery couple that you’d moved in with after your 9th birthday. They moved off-planet when you were ten. They’d petitioned to adopt you and take you with them, but your mom was still legally alive, and you were moved.

You found it hard to settle after that; nothing was comfortable. It couldn’t be. The moment you got comfortable was the moment you’d be moved again.

The Reds were different. You don’t remember how you fell in with them, not specifically, but you do remember having that aching need to belong somewhere, and that they fulfilled that need.

You were useful to them. You could crawl into places that the others were too big to get into. You could get into a building and squirrel away cargo, or let others in. You weren’t a bad pickpocket either. You were a child; if (when) you got caught, you could play innocent, not like the others. You could claim ignorance, youth. The Reds protected you. You were indispensable.

Until you weren’t.

----

Your biotics announced themselves with an explosion of blue light. You’d been in the middle of a job with Miller, trying to sneak some cargo out of a warehouse outside of Vancouver. He’d said something (you can’t remember what now, but it had pissed you off), and suddenly there was a flash of blue, he’d been thrown into the shelves a few meters away, and the bones in your arm had wrenched themselves apart. You’re sure you screamed, that both of you did, but you don’t remember. The pain had been so blinding that you’d passed out in seconds.

When you woke up in the hospital, you weren’t alone. Your caseworker, Cecil, was there, accompanied by a dour faced person in navy blue. Sargent Blake, Cecil had told you. Sargent Blake was there to invite you to the Alliance.

The System’s Alliance needed biotics; they’ve always needed biotics, and the state wasn’t really equipped to handle them. The Alliance had a program for biotic children. They’d taken care of the criminal charges you’d faced, and they would provide food, lodging, and education. You were a ward of the state, and the state transferred your custody while you’d slept. Invite. Feh. Like hell. The decision had already been made.

Still, you were luckier than Miller. You found out later that he was comatose for almost eight months, and arrested after he awoke. To say the Reds would no longer welcome you would be an understatement. They would’ve loved to get their hands on you.

Didn’t matter. The Alliance had you.

----

“Jane Shepard? The doctor will see you now.” You’d hesitated before following the nurse out of the waiting room. Shepard. It felt so odd. You hoped the change would keep the Reds from finding you, and you knew Nick and Silas wouldn’t mind.

Still, there were a lot of changes in a short amount of time. New ability, new name, and now new place and new species. Well, new to you anyway. As your salarian nurse took you to your exam room, you’d tried hard not to stare as they ran you through a standard medical battery. The alliance had brought you and all of their other new trainees to the citadel to get your physicals and your implants. It was surreal. You’d never seen an alien before, at least in person. Everything was so new, you’d never felt so... off balance before. But this was your new normal, and you had to adjust eventually.

----

You officially enlisted in the Alliance on your eighteenth birthday, to the surprise of no one. You’d already been engaged in their biotic training program for almost two years, and you were close to completing your secondary education under the program.

Every single teenager in that program ended up enlisted. Sometimes you guys liked to think of what you guys could do outside the Alliance; teachers, writers, cops, scientists, everything, but for the life of you, you’d never been able to imagine anything else. The Alliance felt inevitable; biotics weren’t exactly welcome in civilian life, and you didn’t have the money or support system to try to strike out on your own.

Basic was split, biotics separate from the others. It was weird. In this place of training and strength, there was an underlying understanding. The biotics were more dangerous. They had had training before. They didn’t need a weapon; they were weapons. But at that point you weren’t sure how to be anything else.

----

Nomination for ICT wasn’t a surprise. You’d worked your ass off for the Alliance and anyway, if there was a push for biotics to join the military, there was a shove to get them into special forces. You’d been a good little biotic; kept your head down, temper in check, taking and conquering even the most basic assignments without problem or complaint.

Despite the competitive atmosphere of Vila Militar, you’d ended up making friends for the first time in years. Or maybe they made you. Shaw, a too-energetic, puppyish engineer, was never going to let you shrug off his friendship, he was too damn persistent. John Shepard had also been pulled into his orbit, and the two of you had bonded over your exasperation with Shaw, mutual love of shit beer and competition, and frustration at sharing a name.

The three of you were an odd group, but it worked. Shaw was excitable and personable, keeping you together with sheer will. John (not Shepard, you’re Shepard) was responsible, a group mom through and through, trying in vain to keep you out of trouble. And you? Well, you’ve always been a bit... brusque, but they balanced it well.

They were family, or the closest you’d had in a long time. The rest didn’t matter.

----

John-fucking-Shepard, the big-fucking-hero. Of course he was on Elysium during the Skyllian Blitz, and of course he kicked ass to the point he was getting the Star of Terra, not to mention his damn N7 commendation.

“Just in the right place at the right time,” he’d said sheepishly when you and Shaw had caught up with him after the ceremony. You’d never rolled your eyes so hard. John always had a lucky streak a mile wide and it wouldn’t end anytime soon.

“That’s okay,” Shaw had replied with a grin as you pulled John into a headlock and messed his hair. “We’ll get you next time.”

He’d laughed because of course he did. “I look forward to it.”

----

When you had landed on Akuze with your unit, you’d expected pirates. Slavers. A straightforward explanation to the missing colonists. Instead, the only thing to greet you were empty, undisturbed buildings. It was like everyone just got up and left.

Your platoon, all 49 of them plus you and Shaw, searched the colony on your commander’s orders, but there was nothing. The terminals were all wiped clean, the data pads were gone, there weren't any tracks. Hell, there wasn’t even dust.

You all made camp nearby as the sun sunk below the horizon. None of you would say so but there was something eerie about the lost colony. Haunted. Like the planet was holding its breath.

The first maw came near midnight, announcing itself with a roar and with trembling ground that shook you out of sleep. They caught you by surprise. You may have had guards and scouts, but there was no warning.

You don’t remember much of the attack, dammit, you don’t remember. There are flashes of chaos- gunfire, screams, thresher maws pulling whole ground transports full of soldiers beneath the Earth. You remember running so hard your breath was just quick gasps, the cobalt corona of your biotics expanding around you, flashes of Shaw’s face contorted with resolution, the red of viscera everywhere you look.

You’re not even sure if those are real memories, or just echoes from your nightmares. Maybe it’s your brain filling in the gaps from what you’ve been told.

You were found 11 clicks away from camp, splattered with blood and armor corroded from acid, and passed out from pain (or so you were told. You don’t remember). Both of your arms had broken during the ordeal, likely from over-extending your biotics. You were alone. No platoon, no Shaw, not even a single body. The team that found you said that the colony was in a maw nest, that six thresher maws had attacked the camp. They destroyed the colony, the camp, and your platoon. In return, the unit only managed to kill two of them, but the bastards had the element of surprise.

You didn’t put it together until you were in a hospital, but something was wrong. More wrong than losing your whole platoon, losing Shaw, to fucking worms. They’d said the colony must have been destroyed by the maws, that they must have killed the colonists, but that’s not right. Those buildings were spotless. There were no bodies. There was no anything. The maws didn’t kill the colonists. They’re not that clean.

You tried to tell the brass. They’d given you your N7 commendation for surviving that hell; you thought that meant they’d trust you. They didn’t.

“You’ve been through a lot,” they’d told you at the memorial. “Maybe you need to take some time.” Maybe they were right, but you still knew what you saw. If you wanted answers, you’d have to find them on your own time.

----

You hit a lot of dead ends fast, and used up most of your leave following up leads that took you nowhere. It’d barely been a year before you only had one path left. The Shadow Broker.

It took every last credit you had, but they agreed to send an agent to meet you.

John agreed to go with you to the meet up point on the Citadel, in some hole in the wall cafe. It felt like time was slowing down as the agent approached. You were finally going to get answers. Then time stopped with a loud CRACK, and the contact fell dead, a hole left in the middle of their head.

You were paranoid; you’d always been paranoid. That day, it’d saved your ass. You’d been trying to get the fuck out of there when another bullet ripped through your barrier, bruising your back but, mercifully, nothing more.

You’d been far from the door. There had been two shooters, above, out of sight.

You and John didn’t say so after you’d escaped, but it had been a warning shot. Any snipers worth their salt could have killed you.

Stupid, you were so stupid.

You’d returned to your apartment, head pounding. Before you said a word, John had pulled you against his chest, squeezing hard. You remember looking him in the eyes, seeing the naked fear there.

“Stop looking.”

You’d promised you would.

You didn’t.

----

Well, at least not intentionally. When you contacted the Shadow Broker again (or their intermediary anyway), you were informed the price for the information had doubled. You were already broke, you couldn’t afford the information. You tried to double back and get your hands on the report from that day in the cafe, but there was nothing solid to follow, no leads.

What you got instead was a new assignment.

Operation Adrestia. The words tasted odd in your mouth. It’s internal affairs, sort of. Monitoring and chasing leads on operations led by humans that would wreck Alliance credibility with the Citadel. Monitoring and thwarting fringe scientists, extremists groups, keeping tabs on category sixes...

You didn’t do the investigation, just acted on information the brains gave you. If you were honest, you actually liked it. At least it was more interesting than your service had been. Lead to some good stories at least.

Disrupting a Terra Firma attack on a predominantly salarian transport.

Stopping colonial governments in the Traverse from antagonizing batarians to trigger Alliance/Hegemony conflicts.

Even the less ostentatious operations like quietly discharging an Alliance attache who’d looked a little farther than legal into AI.

It kept you busy, but it was work you loved.

----

It was 2183 when you were contacted by Admiral Kahoku. He had found out his squad was lured to their deaths with a false distress signal in the middle of a maw nest and correctly assumed you’d be interested in following the thread. Akuze was common knowledge, and Kahoku was the first member of the brass to even humor your idea that it was anything other than a tragic accident.

He’d gotten in touch with the Shadow Broker. They’d given him a name and a location.

Cerberus.

Binthu in the Voyager Cluster.

Finally, a chance for answers.

He was planning to go and wanted back up. Probably smart, considering how Cerberus disrupted your previous contact with the Broker.

It was quick and quiet, like everything you did for the Alliance. Scans of the planet reveal three active Cerberus strongholds.

The two of you decide that time was of the essence, that you needed to be quick to get information before they noticed you.

You decided to split up.

That was a mistake.

#mass effect #fanfiction #commander #shepard #femshep #shepshep #wip #2nd POV #kahoku #akuze #earthborn #sole survivor #pre mass effect #pre ME

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bluewatsons · 7 years

Conversation

Nathaniel Rich, James Ellroy, The Art of Fiction No. 201, The Paris Review (Fall 2009)

Interviewer: You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why’d you come back?

James Ellroy: One reason--Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

Interviewer: Did you miss the city?

James Ellroy: While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Interviewer: What’s wrong with LA now?

James Ellroy: I fear the sloth, the disorder, and the moral depravity. It makes me want to hole up in my pad for days on end.

Interviewer: And what about the LA of the fifties has a hold on you?

James Ellroy: A lot of it is simple biography. I lived here, so I was obsessed with my immediate environment. I am from Los Angeles truly, immutably. It’s the first thing you get in any author’s note; James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. I was hatched in the film-noir epicenter, at the height of the film-noir era. My parents and I lived near Hollywood. My father and mother had a tenuous connection to the film business. They were both uncommonly good-looking, which may be a hallmark of LA arrivistes, and they were of that generation of migrants who came because they were very poor and LA was a beautiful place. I grew up in a different world, a different America. You didn’t have to make a lot of dough to keep a roof over your head. There was a calmness that I recall too. I learned to amuse myself. I liked to read. I liked to look out the window. It’s rare for me to speak about LA epigrammatically. I don’t view it as a strange place, I don’t view it as a hot-pot of multiculturalism or weird sexuality. I have never studied it formally. There are big swathes of LA that I don’t even know my way around today. I’m not quite sure how you get to Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach. I don’t know LA on a valid historical level at all. But I have assimilated it in a deeper way. I had lived here for so long that when it became time to exploit my memory of the distant past, it was easy. Whatever power my books have derives from the fact that they are utterly steeped in the eras that I describe. LA of that period is mine and nobody else’s. If you wrote about this period before me, I have taken it away from you.

Interviewer: What did your parents do?

James Ellroy: My mother was a registered nurse. She worked a lot. At one point she had a job at a Jewish nursing home where movie stars brought their aging parents. She was fluent in German, and when the patients spoke about her in Yiddish, behind her back, she could understand them. She was a big reader of historical novels, and she was always listening to one specific Brahms piano concerto—I remember a blue RCA Victor record. I have more memories of my dad. He was a dipshit studio gofer, a big handsome guy, a scratch golfer. He worked for a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He was always snoozing on the couch, like Dagwood Bumstead. He was a lazy motherfucker. God bless him. He was always working on some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. This is what my dad was like. I’d say, Hey, Dad, we studied penguins today in school. He’d say, Yeah? I’m a penguin fucker from way back. Dad, I saw a giraffe at the zoo today. Yeah? I’m a giraffe fucker from way back. That’s my dad. My dad was a giraffe fucker. He said to me once, I fucked Rita Hayworth. He said that he once introduced me to Hayworth at the Tail O’the Pup, circa 1950. I would have been two years old at the time, but I don’t recall it. He said I spilled grape juice all over her. I never believed that he had worked for Hayworth, but after his death I saw his name in a Hayworth biography. Sure enough, for a period of time, he was her business manager.

Interviewer: You have said you dislike profanity, but you use it a lot.

James Ellroy: I learned it from my father. He was raucous, profane, and freewheeling. I say fuck routinely—my generation is the first generation to say the word routinely, across gender lines. I love slang. I love hipster patois, racial invective, alliteration, argot of all kinds.

Interviewer: What was your childhood like before your mother’s death?

James Ellroy: I don’t remember a single amicable moment between my parents other than this--mother passing steaks out the kitchen window to my father so that he could put them on a barbecue. I had my mother’s number. I understood that she was maudlin, effusive, and enraged—the degree depending on how much booze she had in her system. I also understood that she had my father’s number—that he was lazy and cowardly. There was always something incongruous about them. Early on, I was aware of the seventeen-year age gap. When I knew her, my mother was a very good-looking redhead in her early forties. My father was a sun-ravaged, hard-smoking, hard-living guy. He looked significantly older at sixty than I do now. Everybody thought he was my granddad. He wore clothes that were thirty years out of style. I remember that he had a gold Omega wristwatch that he loved. We were broke, and then all of a sudden, one day, the watch wasn’t there. That broke my heart.

Interviewer: In My Dark Places you describe a sense of foreboding not long before your mother’s murder. Where did that come from?

James Ellroy: Near the end of January 1958, my mother sits me down on the couch. She’s half blitzed, and I can tell. She says, Honey, you’ve never lived in a house before, so we’re going to move to a nice little town called El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley. I sensed that there was some other, more sinister reason we were moving to El Monte, but I still haven’t figured it out. I think she was running away from something, or someone. We go out there, and it was very upsetting. It was a dirty little stone house with a single bathroom. It was half the size of the apartment that we had in Santa Monica. Five months later, I come back from a weekend with my father. He put me in a cab at the El Monte bus depot. The cab pulls up to my street, our little stone house is on the left, and there are men in brown uniforms and gray suits standing around. And right then, I knew it, my mother was dead. I knew it in that moment. Someone said, There’s the kid. A cop got down on my level and said, Son, your mother’s been killed. I swooned. My field of vision veered off in one direction. But I didn’t cry. I started calculating. I began performing almost immediately. I loved being the center of attention. The cops took me to our neighbor’s garage, and they took a photograph—often reproduced—of me standing in front of a workbench. I was goofing, mugging and making faces. The El Monte police chief was dispatched to pick up my dad. Of course, he was the first suspect. At the police station, they sequestered my dad and me in separate rooms. They gave me a candy bar. When they finally let my dad out, I ran to him and put my arms around him. We went back to his pad on the freeway bus. I recall a stream of cars going by with their lights on in the opposite direction, and I forced myself to cry for just a few minutes. I remember thinking that I should. I was already at a great emotional distance from my mother’s death. When I got back to my dad’s crib, I immediately fell asleep. I woke up on Monday morning, June 23, 1958, and I swear to you, the whole world seemed light powder blue, like a ’56 Chevy Bel Air.

Interviewer: It sounds like you were in a state of shock.

James Ellroy: It technically could have been a state of shock. I had a nervous breakdown much later in life, and I’m still subject to panic attacks; big swells of emotion and anxiety, an aging person’s unsuppressable fear of catastrophe and death. All I can tell you is what went through my mind at the time. I couldn’t express my thoughts about my mother, because my relationship with her was too compromised. I thought, I got what I wanted. My mother is dead. Now what do I do? I felt death all around me. For a period of some weeks, my dad was very permissive. I began to wonder how much time he had left. I’d stay up late watching TV, waiting for him to come back from sporadic all-night accounting jobs—if indeed he wasn’t out fucking every woman who’d let him. I began to read mystery books--the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt. My father would buy me two of these things a week. I could read the damn books in four or five hours. I started stealing them when I was ten years old. At the time I had no creative outlet, no indication of genius or a literary gift. I was fearful and occasionally violent, physically outsized, and out of my mind. But I knew right then that I had discovered a secret world.

Interviewer: Were you lonely in those years?

James Ellroy: Yes, but I enjoyed junior high. That’s where I began to perform for the first time. I was a provocateur. I gave oral reports on books that I had invented in my head. I’m a huge kid, I don’t do well in school, I’m girl crazed, and I’m already peeping in windows. Here we are in this cheap apartment, no air-conditioning, and an unhousebroken dog. One block away, a bunch of Tudor mansions. They’re there, and I’m here. I want the girls, I want the family life, I want something that isn’t malodorous and fucked-up.

Interviewer: Is your voyeuristic impulse related to your need to write and tell stories—to go into the lives of fictional characters?

James Ellroy: Those impulses are one and the same. I already had the massive creative will. Now the performer in me is starting to act up. How do you stand out as a kid with no gifts at all? How do you enact your estrangement, your alienation, your self-loathing, your feelings of oddness and being unloved? The status quo at John Burroughs Junior High School was Jewish, so I shouted, Heil Hitler. I’d say, Bomb Russia, I hate JFK, fuck the liberal hegemony. Of course, I never hated anyone, and most of my friends were Jewish. I got significantly crazier. I joined the American Nazi Party while I was at Fairfax High School. I painted swastikas on the dog’s water dish. I always had a flash roll. My dad would give me a twenty-dollar bill to go to the store. I’d steal the food and I’d bring him change for a ten. I watched The Fugitive religiously on TV. If you’ve seen the original run of the series, it is all about sex and dislocated men and women. They drink highballs, smoke cigarettes, and sizzle for each other every Tuesday night at ten. It was everything that I wanted.

Interviewer: You claim to be ignorant of contemporary pop culture, but it seems that you were completely immersed in it as a boy.

James Ellroy: I was, but back then I didn’t know what it meant. I just felt compelled to read, go to crime movies, and watch crime television shows.

Interviewer: What does it mean to you now? Why is crime an important subject in American fiction?

James Ellroy: We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the shit out of the reader.

Interviewer: You’ve said film noir hasn’t influenced your writing, but you watched a lot of it in your formative years—and you say you were born and raised in the heart of film-noir culture.

James Ellroy: I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You’re fucked. There are a few very fine films--Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and, of course, Out of the Past. Robert Mitchum sees Jane Greer in Acapulco, and he knows. She sees him, and she knows. He’s passive, inert, but very resourceful. She’s murderous and altogether monstrous. He just wants to forfeit to a woman, to give up his masculinity. She wants to be enveloped in her masculine side. They each want the other. When film noir is deeply about that, it can be very powerful. But noir is overexposed now. I’m over it.

Interviewer: You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

James Ellroy: Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me. Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important, too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.

Interviewer: How did you do in high school?

James Ellroy: I did poorly, and I had an unimaginably dim social sense. I was horrified when the civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in ’64, but I made light of it in school. I knew it was wrong, but I had to be superior to the events themselves. You can see this in my books. There’s the reactionary side of me as well as the critique of authority, the critique of racism and oppression. Back then, though, I possessed no social awareness.

Interviewer: Did you graduate?

James Ellroy: No. I flunked the eleventh grade and got expelled. I decided I wanted to join the marine corps, because I wanted to be a shit kicker, which I certainly was not. I did not want to go to Vietnam, I never thought about Vietnam. I had a vague desire to shoot guns. My father’s health was deteriorating ever more rapidly—he started having strokes and heart attacks—and he let me enlist in the army.

Interviewer: How long did you last?

James Ellroy: If you think I’m skinny now, at a hundred and seventy pounds, picture me at a hundred and forty. I got shipped out to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Flying bugs all over the place. Right away, I went from being a big egotistical bully to a craven scaredy-cat dipshit. My dad had another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.

Interviewer: Is that when you started writing—after your father died?

James Ellroy: The first thing I did after he died was snag his last three Social Security checks, forge his signature, and cash them at a liquor store. From ’65 to ’75, I drank and used drugs. I fantasized. I swallowed amphetamine inhalers. I masturbated compulsively. I got into fights. I boxed—though I was terrible at it—and I broke into houses. I’d steal girls’ panties, I’d jack off, grab cash out of wallets and purses. The method was easy--you call a house and if nobody answers, that means nobody’s home. I’d stick my long, skinny arms in a pet access door and flip the latch, or find a window that was loose and raise it open. Everybody has pills and alcohol. I’d pop a Seconal, drink four fingers of Scotch, eat some cheese out of the fridge, steal a ten-dollar bill, then leave a window ajar and skedaddle. I did time in county jail for useless misdemeanors. I was arrested once for burglary, but it got popped down to misdemeanor trespassing. The press thinks that I’m a larger-than-life guy. Yes, that’s true. But a lot of the shit written about me discusses this part of my life disproportionately.

Interviewer: Aren’t you responsible for this? You’ve written a lot about this period, and you frequently talk about it in interviews.

James Ellroy: I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

Interviewer: Still, writing couldn’t have been exactly in the forefront of your mind at the time.

James Ellroy: But it was. I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist. I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. I had a fantasy of what it meant to be a writer--the sports cars, the clothes, the women. But I think what appealed to me most about it was that I could assume the identity of what I really loved to do, which was to read. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a novel. I didn’t live in the world of graduate writing schools. I wasn’t part of any scene or creative community. I happened to love crime novels more than anything, so I wrote a crime novel first. I didn’t buy the old canard that you had to start by writing short stories, and only later write a novel. I never liked reading short stories, so why the fuck should I want to write one? I only wanted to write novels.

Interviewer: Did you feel that your period of homelessness and delinquency was giving you experience that you could turn into a novel?

James Ellroy: If I did, it was false. The real education I had was from the books I read and TV shows and movies I saw. When I watched a film or read a book, I was engrossed. I learned in an unmediated way. I didn’t know what I was taking in—I wasn’t thinking about theme, content, or style—but I took it all in.

Interviewer: You started caddying at golf courses near the end of that period. Did you think you needed the stability of a paying job in order to write?

James Ellroy: What happened was that I quit drinking. I knew I couldn’t write a novel as long as I drank or used drugs. And I was on fire with a sense of urgency. A buddy took me to an AA meeting, and I quit drinking in June of 1975. I continued taking uppers and smoking weed up until August 1, 1977. That’s when I really got sober. I started writing a year and five months later, in late January of 1979. I was not quite thirty-one.

Interviewer: Did you have an idea for a novel? Or just the general notion that you wanted to write one?

James Ellroy: I concocted a story idea. A friend of mine at the country club had taken a job as a process server. He asked me to come work for him. He said it was fun. So I went out as a process server and looked for a couple of witnesses that we never found. It was like being a private eye. I was a big guy in a suit. I started to plan a novel about a guy who gets involved with a bunch of country-club golf caddies, who does some process serving, who grew up at Beverly and Western, who was a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy with glasses, all of which is me. But he was an ex-cop, which I am not. I invented a nice arsonist—a psychotic, anti-Semitic firebug named Fat Dog Baker. I knew a caddy who was called Fat Dog who slept on golf courses. That’s Brown’s Requiem. It’s wish fulfillment, it’s crime, it’s autobiography. But it’s mostly a work of imagination.

Interviewer: How, after fourteen years of telling yourself that you were a writer, did you actually begin to write?

James Ellroy: I was on the eighth hole at Bel-Air Country Club and I said, Please, God, let me start this novel tonight. And I did. Standing up at the Westwood Hotel, where I had a room. Using the dresser as a desk, I wrote, “Business was good. It was the same thing every summer. The smog and heat rolled in, blanketing the basin; people succumbed to torpor and malaise; old resolves died; old commitments went unheeded. And I profited . . .” Native talent—who knows? I sat down and did it—and I had it. The beast was loose. I felt like I had created myself entirely out of sheer will, egotism, and an overwhelming desire to be somebody. All of a sudden I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I haven’t stopped since.

Interviewer: What did you learn from your early novels?

James Ellroy: When to use first person versus third person. How to set a scene. Where to put a line break or a new paragraph. How to write an ending. How to develop a tragic sense of the world. Where to put a love scene. When to stress autobiography. When to realize you’re actually not that important.

Interviewer: What inspired you to write Killer on the Road, a novel told from the perspective of a homosexual serial killer?

James Ellroy: Killer on the Road is the only book I ever wrote for the money, because I needed some dough. It was my first large advance, ten grand. In part, I was influenced by Thomas Harris’s brilliant Red Dragon—to me the best pure thriller I’ve ever read. With Killer on the Road, I deliberately set out to shock. I wrote it in four months. It’s the only one of my books that I regret.

Interviewer: Why is that?

James Ellroy: It’s a good book, but I had a hot date with Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia victim—and I wanted to get to her fast. The Black Dahlia had been building inside of me for a long time. I became obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case shortly after my mother’s death. I didn’t openly mourn my mother, but I could mourn Betty Short.

Interviewer: Why did it take so long for you to turn to the Black Dahlia case in your writing? It’s your seventh novel, after all.

James Ellroy: Because I thought for a long time that the success of John Gregory Dunne’s novel about the Black Dahlia, True Confessions, would preclude a successful publication. That’s a wonderful novel, but it doesn’t truly adhere to the facts of the Black Dahlia murder case. Mr. Dunne calls the Black Dahlia “the Virgin Tramp.” Elizabeth Short becomes “Lois Fazenda.” When I took on the murder for my novel, ten years later, I adhered to the facts of the case more than Mr. Dunne did. His book is phantasmagoria. My book is a much more literal rendering of the truth.

Interviewer: How did that book change your career?

James Ellroy: It liberated me. It was a best seller, I was earning a living as a writer for the first time, and I was exponentially more committed to creative maturity. I’m the most serious guy on earth, but I can bullshit with the best of them, and I play to my audience. There’s a concept in boxing that you fight to the level of your competition. You’re in with a big guy, you bring the fight. You’re in with a bum, you do just enough to win. But if you get lazy, then you put yourself at risk. I’ve always come to fight, from the very first page.

Interviewer: You do certain conventions of crime fiction particularly well. How do you go about writing a great interrogation scene?

James Ellroy: You have a good deal of information that needs to be conveyed to the reader. There has to be reluctance on the part of the suspect to give up that information. There has to be a level of coercion and guile in the interrogator. It has to be physically interesting. You have to be on the side of the interrogator, but at the same time you have to identify with the victim, and experience his horror at encountering official brutality. I’m thinking of a scene in White Jazz when Lieutenant Dave Klein is beating on some black guy who’s handcuffed to a chair. Klein says, I’m not enjoying this, but you’re not getting out of here unless you talk. But, of course, Klein is enjoying it. Most importantly, the scene can’t go on too long. It has to be fast.

Interviewer: Why do your interrogators always beat their suspects with phonebooks?

James Ellroy: Two reasons--they don’t leave marks and they don’t hurt your hands.

Interviewer: Some authors say that their characters are flesh and blood. Other authors say that they are puppets that the author moves around on the page.

James Ellroy: It’s disingenuous when writers say that they have no control over their characters, that they have a life of their own. Here’s what happens--you create the characters rigorously, and make clear choices about their behavior. You reach junctures in your stories and are confronted with dramatic options. You choose one or the other.

Interviewer: You take great pleasure in making your characters commit heinous acts, yet at the same time you rail against immorality. Is there a contradiction here?

James Ellroy: I can describe depravity without being depraved. I wrote My Dark Places, a memoir about my own slimiest actions, but I’ve refrained from such actions for many years. Breaking into houses was a thrill, peeping was a thrill. But these practices need to be curbed and regulated in order to ensure a safe society. There has been a great deal of chaos in my life, and there remains chaos in my creative life, so I crave order. This is what the superstructure of the novel allows me—ultimate authority in the creation of an ultimate order, even as I describe flagrant disorder in wondrous detail.

Interviewer: Are you religious?

James Ellroy: I’m a Christian. I’m a proponent of Judaism, and I see Judaism and Christianity as the through-lines of the rule of law in world history. I love the Reformation. I am of the Reformation—that moment when you stand alone with God. More than anything else, I am an enormous believer in God, the God who saved my wretched, tormented ass so many times. I feel that I have a responsibility to portray the spiritual, religious aspect of life. I hate squalor. I’m always astonished when people come up with the nutty idea that my books are nihilistic. I try to show the result of immoral actions--the karmic comeuppance, the horrible self-destructiveness. I explicate the dire consequences of historical and individual misdeeds. What happens to you when you do not know that virtue is its own reward.

Interviewer: How do you begin writing a novel?

James Ellroy: I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed, so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly.

Interviewer: What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark phase?

James Ellroy: I take notes. Ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline. The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book.

Interviewer: Your outlines resemble first drafts. Is that how you think of them?

James Ellroy: I think of the outline as a diagram, a superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a given scene.

Interviewer: Do you force yourself to write a certain number of words each day?

James Ellroy: I set a goal of outlined pages that I want to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel. The outline for Blood’s a Rover, which is three hundred and ninety-seven pages, is exponentially more detailed than the three-hundred-and-forty-five-page outline for The Cold Six Thousand. So the ratio of book pages to outline pages varies, depending on the density of the outline.

Interviewer: Is it important for you to have a steady writing routine?

James Ellroy: I need to work just as rigorously on the outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible, because the outline is there. Take today. I woke up early, at five-thirty. I worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky. Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.

Interviewer: Do you write at night?

James Ellroy: I write some nights, and I edit at night. I write by hand. I correct in red ink. When I’m close to finishing a book, I will write more and more, because I’ve got finishing fever.

Interviewer: Does it matter where you write?

James Ellroy: No, but this pad is perfectly outfitted. Some people find my place appalling. It’s too neat and clean. Nothing’s out of place. If you look in my clothes closet, you’ll see that everything is arrayed by fabric, style, and color. I’ll do anything I can to simplify my life.

Interviewer: Where does this obsession with order come from?

James Ellroy: Chaos in my early life, fear of incapacity and death, an attempt to control my overweaning emotionalism, my Beethovenian drives and lusts. I’ve become more single-minded as I’ve gotten older. My subsidiary obsessions have fallen by the wayside, with one big exception.

Interviewer: Women?

James Ellroy: Of course.

Interviewer: What happens after you finish writing a book?

James Ellroy: I go over it, editing fifty pages a day. I send it to a typist, who enters the changes. Then I proofread it once, make some more additions and subtractions. At that point, there are two sets of corrections. In copyediting, I continue to make small changes. Every opportunity that I have to reach perfection, I take.

Interviewer: What do you do once you have a draft that you’re happy with?

James Ellroy: I show it to my agent, Nat Sobel, who is a stickler for the logic of the dramatic scenes. He makes certain that each character’s motivations and actions are sensible. I’m a perfectionist. I go to great lengths to get it all right. It’s the biggest challenge I face when I’m writing. If you’re confused about something in one of my books, you’ve just got to realize, Ellroy’s a master, and if I’m not following it, it’s my problem. You just have to submit to me.

Interviewer: How do you conduct research for your novels?

James Ellroy: There was no research required for my first six novels. I made the stories up from scratch.

Interviewer: What about The Black Dahlia?

James Ellroy: The LAPD will not let civilians see the file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started working on the novel, I was still caddying. I was living in Westchester County and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four hundred bucks in quarters—that’s a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then I extrapolated a fictional story. The greatest source, however, was autobiography. Who’s Bucky Bleichert? He’s a tall, pale, and thin guy, with beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women, with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a woman’s death. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

Interviewer: Did you conceive of all four books in the LA Quartet at once?

James Ellroy: No, it was only when I decided to write The Big Nowhere that it became a quartet. Thus, the last three novels—The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were linked more closely with one another than with The Black Dahlia. My intention was to recreate the world that my mother lived and died in, as an homage to her, a conscious address to her, and a sensuous capitulation to her. I wanted to tell big love stories, big crime stories, and big political stories. I wanted to honor Elizabeth Short as the transmogrification of Jean Hilliker Ellroy. Whenever someone asks me what the LA Quartet books are about, I say, Bad men in love with strong women.

Interviewer: What kind of research did you do for the extended sections on the homosexual underworld in The Big Nowhere?

James Ellroy: I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin movie from 1980, Cruising. It has a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.

Interviewer: After the LA Quartet, you said you wanted to go in a more “mainstream” direction. I wonder what that word means to you.

James Ellroy: I realized that I had taken the police historical novel as far as it could go. I had written a series of masterworks about LA, so I decided to do the same thing with full-scale America. Hence, the Underworld USA Trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover. Most of all I credit Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo’s novel Libra was published in ’88. I was astounded by it. The book detailed the JFK snuff, largely through the eyes of that horribly persistent loser Lee Harvey Oswald. I said to myself, You can’t write this book—DeLillo got there first. He had created the entire metaphysical worldview of the Kennedy assassination. Jack Kennedy was responsible for his own death. His death was no more than the world’s most overglorified business-dispute killing, on a huge geopolitical scale. I was kicking myself that I didn’t come up with this idea first. And then, very slowly, I started to see that I could write a trio of novels, placing JFK’s death in an off-page context, with a giant social history of the United States to follow. When Knopf was slated to publish American Tabloid, I sent Mr. DeLillo a copy in advance to thank him for the influence. I included a thank-you note, telling him that I would attribute his contribution in all my big interviews. I got a very nice note back from Mr. DeLillo. He sent it on March 4, which is my birthday. It was 1995, but he incorrectly dated his note 1955, which seemed appropriate. He praised the book, and that was that.

Interviewer: Why, after American Tabloid, did you interrupt the trilogy and turn to a new form—the memoir?

James Ellroy: I was forty-five and very happily married. I was living in New Canaan, Connecticut. Life was good. For Christmas one year, my wife got me a photograph taken of me by the Los Angeles Times at the time of my mother’s death. She had it framed. She said, Do you remember this? And all of a sudden—boom. It was like a little knife to my heart. I thought I had locked my mother away after The Black Dahlia. A month later, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News told me he would be seeing my mother’s file, as part of a piece he was doing on unsolved San Gabriel Valley homicides. Immediately the opportunist in me said, I have to see my mother’s file and write a piece about it. GQ gave me the assignment. I visited the unsolved-homicide unit at the LA County sheriff’s office, and I met Sergeant Bill Stoner. We joked around a little bit and talked about other murder cases. I realized that I was avoiding looking at the file. Finally, he showed it to me. I looked at the pictures first. They weren’t terribly shocking, perhaps because I’d lived with the event mentally for so many years. Then I read the police reports and saw immediately how I would write the book. I knew that it would be my autobiography, my mother’s biography, and Bill Stoner’s biography. I knew I’d get a significant advance. I knew each of the book’s sections would begin with italicized addresses to my mother. I knew that we would try to find the killer. I knew that we wouldn’t find the killer. I knew we were going to get a lot of publicity, and that it wouldn’t help the case. The book would be about my journey to reconcile with my mother. And all of this came about just as I had thought it would.

Interviewer: How did Stoner become so central to the book?

James Ellroy: Because, like me, he was driven by a chivalrous notion of saving women in jeopardy. I identified with his emotional maturity, his intelligence, his resignation. He’s worldly, in the sense that he has a great knowledge of people, but he’s not in the least sophisticated. He says “excape” rather than “escape” and “eyetalian” rather than “Italian.” He has horrible taste in books and movies. But, God, does he know people. You don’t see that often.

Interviewer: For a novelist’s memoir, there is remarkably little about your own experience as a writer.

James Ellroy: That would be irrelevant to the main narrative, which was my mother and me. I did not want the book to be a discursive autobiography. I fear self-absorption as a writer. The book had to be about something more than me.

Interviewer: Has anything new happened in the case since the publication of the book?

James Ellroy: No. Bill Stoner and I continue to get phone calls, but nothing of real merit.

Interviewer: Is your mother as present in your life now as she was when you were writing the memoir?

James Ellroy: There is a quotation from Dylan Thomas that I think of often, “After the first death, there is no other.” He was writing about the firebombing of London, but for me the first death will always be my mother’s. She’s with me still, but no amount of effort will allow me to touch her concretely. I have fulfilled my moral debt to her to the best extent that I could. I have granted her a mythic status through my work. The price for that is public exposure. I am a gloryhound, I’ve always wanted to be famous. She never sought these things. I have a need to refract myself through her, and I owe her a deep spiritual debt.

Interviewer: There’s a line at the end of My Dark Places where you write, “She was no less than my salvation.” Salvation from what?

James Ellroy: From the horrifying, lustful, self-destructive aspects of my masculinity. She’s always there in the wings going, Ha-ha, you dipshit, you exploited my death, and now you’re doomed to have women kick the shit out of you the rest of your life. She also represents a powerful negative example. She’s an alcoholic, I’m an alcoholic. She never got sober, I did. She was a woman of the American fifties with appetites, and was harshly judged for indulging them. I would daresay that she indulged her appetites with a great deal more dignity than I have. I was a man in the sixties and seventies, and I got to drink and fuck with an abandon that she never dreamed of.

Interviewer: You’ve called yourself “the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,” and it’s difficult to think of another living writer who presents himself as aggressively as you do. How important is it for a writer to have swagger?

James Ellroy: You want swagger, look at Norman Mailer. I don’t go around beating people up. I’m just James Ellroy, the self-promoting demon dog. It comes naturally to me. You call it swagger, I call it joie de vivre.

Interviewer: You did say about Blood’s a Rover, “This book is going to be better than War and Peace.”

James Ellroy: Tongue-in-cheek. Wink, wink. The highest compliment ever paid to me was by Joyce Carol Oates. You know what she called me? The American Dostoyevsky. Stop right there, I’ll take it. Ultimately, I’m impervious to criticism. The ass kicking I got by a lot of critics for the style of The Cold Six Thousand was a real motherfucker, but I stopped reading the reviews. You can’t start thinking that critical consensus is a guarantor of quality. This is something I feel very strongly about. I remember that when L.A. Confidential went to the Cannes Film Festival, a critic from The Hollywood Reporter wrote a negative review. He just didn’t think the movie cohered. But by then all the other critics had loved the film, and this guy at The Hollywood Reporter had to join the club, so he included L.A. Confidential on his list of that year’s best films. The irony is that I think much of what he wrote in his original piece was actually dead-on.

Interviewer: L.A. Confidential marked a significant change in your writing. You adopted a “telegraphic style”—extremely short, clipped sentences. How did you come to this?

James Ellroy: When I handed in the novel, my editor told me I had to cut more than a hundred pages, without altering the thematic emphasis or shifting any of the specific scenes. Because the story was violent, and full of action, I saw the value of writing in a fast, clipped style. So I cut every unnecessary word from every sentence. I wrote White Jazz, the direct sequel to L.A. Confidential and the last book in the Quartet, in the first-person style, and in a normal, discursive voice. But it didn’t seem to fit the main character, Dave Klein—a fucked-up, racist cop bombing around black LA in ’58, who inexplicably gets hooked on bebop. I saw that if I eliminated words from his speech, I would develop a more convincing cadence for him--paranoid, jagged, enervated. I reverted to a more normal, albeit still terse style in American Tabloid and My Dark Places, but then I went back and did an extreme telegraphic style with The Cold Six Thousand.

Interviewer: Do you think the extreme style of The Cold Six Thousand was a success?

James Ellroy: Helen Knode, my second ex-wife, is my best friend and the greatest Ellroy scholar on earth. Helen said to me, Big Dog, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult. As a reader, you want less style and more emotion.

Interviewer: Did she tell you that before it was published?

James Ellroy: Yes. I ignored her.

Interviewer: It seems as if most sentences in that book are four words or fewer. It’s been called minimalistic.

James Ellroy: Minimalism implies small events, small people, a small story. Man, that’s the antithesis of me. Telegraphic means straight sentences—subject, verb, repetitions with slight modifications. The book has flaws. It’s too long, and the style is too rigorous for such a complicated story—the JFK assassination and its aftermath, the plotting of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, Howard Hughes’s takeover of Las Vegas, all told through the overlapping stories of three morally compromised and traumatized men desperately in love with strong women. It’s a big picaresque mess, and too demanding a read. But the stamina of it is sui generis. If you get it, you get it. It might not be your favorite of my books, but you can appreciate its scope, its audacity. I try to write books that no one else would have the balls to write. They require the reader’s intense concentration. Most writers, as they age, write shorter and tidier. My books are getting bigger and more stylistically ambitious. And my style will continue to evolve.

Interviewer: In Blood’s a Rover, as in many of your novels, several of your main characters undergo extreme shifts of allegiance—from fascistic reactionary, say, to Castroite leftist, and sometimes back again. Why?

James Ellroy: I wanted to dramatize the seismic shifts that took place during the sixties and seventies. I wanted to show the positive effects of ideological transformation. So I have two right-wing-toady assassins who can’t live with the horror of their misdeeds, chiefly the assassination of Martin Luther King. They are two men who embrace revolution, driven by a hope for redemption and by the women in their lives. It’s a more hopeful book than the others in the trilogy. As a character says at one point, Your options are do everything or do nothing. This novel also displays my greatest diversity of characterization. Karen Silfakis is a mother and a revolutionary. Marshell Bowen is a homosexual black man who goes undercover for the FBI. These characters think about their actions and analyze what they mean. They’re not afraid to write down their thoughts. There are a lot of diary entries and correspondence that give us different perspectives on American history between 1968 and 1972. It’s all about conveying the complex, ideological nature of that era.

Interviewer: When you’re writing about vast political events, do you have a particular political agenda in mind?

James Ellroy: No. I do have a complex relationship with authoritarianism. I’d rather live in a society that errs on the side of authoritarianism than a society that errs on the side of permissiveness. Try telling that to a woman and see if you get laid. But in my fiction, the two major arch-villains are authoritarian, reactionary conservatives; Dudley Smith, a corrupt LA policeman in the LA Quartet, and J. Edgar Hoover in the Underworld USA Trilogy. And the overarching moral voices of the trilogy are Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Interviewer: Where did you get the idea to introduce document inserts—FBI transcripts, tabloid copy, police reports—between chapters?

James Ellroy: Sometimes I need to get outside of the perspectives of the characters in order to convey information that they don’t know, and offer occasional editorial comments and historical facts in a compressed, direct way. That’s where the document inserts come in. It’s also a great excuse for me to write copy for Hollywood gossip rags.

Interviewer: As far as literary influences go, Confidential magazine seems a big one for you.

James Ellroy: I loved Confidential. Along with the Lutheran Church, it’s probably the biggest cultural influence of my life. Who’s a homo? Who’s a nympho? Who’s got a big one? Who’s got a small one? Who fucks people of color? Who’s getting head at the Griffith Park john? Who’s a muff diver? That shit was important to me then, and it’s important to me now.

Interviewer: You like to read your work before an audience. How do you prepare for the performance?

James Ellroy: I semimemorize the passage so that I can stand at the podium and share eye contact with the audience. I read shorter sections with as few differentiations in dialogue as possible. Never go long. Never try the audience’s patience. Never put in something too plot deep. Never hem, haw, pause, or do anything that isn’t dramatically effective. How many times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening. I walk in and situate myself. I hunker down and read something outrageous. Something with race, class, dope, sex, insane language. I read a section about rug burns—that’s when you’re fucking on a rug and you scrape your knees. Do you want to hear some candy-ass artiste saying, Oooooh, I’m an artist, my characters do things that I didn’t intend? Or do you want to hear about rug burns and get some yucks? I don’t read for more than fourteen minutes, tops. Then I answer questions for twenty minutes. Afterward, you don’t short-shrift anyone—you talk to everybody. You scope out the women. You have a gas. You’re happy, you’re grateful, you’re God’s guy.

Interviewer: You claim not to read books anymore, yet you seem extremely well-read. How do you account for that?

James Ellroy: There are big gaps in my literary knowledge. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I haven’t read anything by William Gaddis or James Baldwin. I tried to read True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, because I met him, but I didn’t buy his style. I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks? I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book and saw that there were six or seven consecutive pages in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant. My name isn’t Juan Ellroy, OK?

Interviewer: You’ve been criticized at times for being racially insensitive. Why do you think that is?

James Ellroy: Critics want racism, and secondarily homophobia, to be portrayed as a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. Racist language uttered by sympathetic characters confuses hidebound liberals. Who gives a shit?

Interviewer: Are your books received differently abroad?

James Ellroy: I’m a god in Europe—the dominant American writer of our time. And that’s no shit. America is the cultural top of the world, and my books are viewed in Europe as realistic critiques of America—at least by those Europeans who worship and loathe America equally and wish they were Americans and wonder why they’re not the height of culture for the entire world. I sell more books in France than in America.

Interviewer: You’ve talked about your competitive instinct. Who do you feel you’re competing against?

James Ellroy: No one. I’m only fighting myself. I have a duty to God and to the people who love my books, and that is to get better and better. At this stage of the game, I’m entirely self-referential.

Interviewer: Is posterity important to you?

James Ellroy: It is. I don’t want to die. And I’m not going to.

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