#the lazy shark runs the universe

[lazysharkart]

The cat has decided playtime is now.

#art #artwork #artists on tumblr #drawing #doodle #illustration #comic #comics #funny #cartoon #funnycomic #originalcomic #shark comic #animal #animal art #shark #lazyshark #the lazy shark runs the universe #cat #cute #cute cat #playtime #cats decide when they get attention #your opinion doesn't matter

[stillness-in-green]

Hori really baited me with this chapter for one panel we get to see the thoughts of Hoseface making me think “omg are we going to get some characterization for my favorite advisor” only to then have him be shafted like a page or two later

+

Scarecrow continues to be, against all odds, the best-treated of the PLF lieutenants, and isn’t that a bar that’s about as high off the ground as a water main?  But in truth, I’ve been Preemptively Tired of Hori’s lazy characterization of Hose Face ever since the latter’s gratuitous, ham-fisted reference to killing Midnight.  It never read to me like he was aiming that at the U.A. kids themselves as a dig or an attack on their morale; he’s pretty clearly talking to the group he’s leading, and with that being his audience, why highlight some random teacher at U.A. instead of, say, Crust, one of the Top 10 heroes, or the HPSC’s President Pearls?  No reason in-universe that I can see,* and even from the meta perspective, it’s not a reveal that has the slightest impact on the plot.

But that aside, yes, “float gas” is a damn fool quirk to give a guy in Hose Face’s position, both in his organization and the narrative, and it’s even worse to give him a quirk like that and then characterize him the way Hori does.  Being able to maintain the high ground is nice and all, but without a better way to cinch fights, you’re really just running out the clock, as it were.  Fuck’s sake, Piercings Guy has got a better quirk than that, and if Hori really wants to sell the MLA as championing quirk supremacy to the exclusion of all else, what’s the justification for Hose Face outranking him?

I do wonder if this is some remnant of what was once intended to be a bigger plot thread.  I mean, seriously, Hose Face being the one who killed Midnight has no impact at all on this scene.  None!  What's the point of mentioning it at all? Maybe, in a version of this endgame that had more set-up and more room to breathe, Mina knowing that she's confronting Midnight's killer might have been an important factor in her actions in the scene. Maybe we could also have found out what Hose Face specifically has against teachers and/or U.A. that Midnight is the kill he uses to underline his rhetorical points.

As things stand, though, the only thing the blood on his hands does is guarantee that the average reader is not going to be asking inconvenient questions like why no one is bothering to try and “save” this particular villain, despite that nice line from Tsukauchi about remembering that all villains are human and finding their origins less than ten chapters prior. God forbid Team Hero be ideologically consistent towards villains that haven't cried for them first, though.

Bah.  I’m afraid I have virtually nothing but salt on this topic, @plf-advisor-stan.  But thanks for the asks!  All my sympathy for your favorite advisor getting shortchanged; I wonder if we’ll ever get back around to Pinstripe Shark/Brand?  We can watch Horikoshi try to convince us that he’s a total quirk supremacist, too, despite the fact that his quirk is apparently so staunchly non-combat in nature that he brings a katana to quirk fights.

---

*At best, Midnight being a teacher makes her more a “purveyor of falsehoods,” than a non-teacher hero, but I would think Prez Pearls still has Midnight beaten on that front.  Anyway, he refers to everyone they’re fighting on-site as being such purveyors, so there’s no reason to assume he highlights Midnight on that specific basis.

#bnha #plf advisors #pink alien on parade #stillness answers #stillness has salt

[awgeezitsthetoiletnator]

October Finds, Pt. 2: Plushies, Clothing, Accessories, Dinnerware, Prints

As we are getting closer to the holiday season, I thought it might be nice to share links to cartoon merchandise I've seen floating around. I use a lot of the websites listed for gift-giving inspiration or to fill up any wishlists that friends and family ask me for. I've tried to keep most things on this list under $50, and most items are on clearance or discounted heavily.

I know items from Hot Topic and Box Lunch can be very hit or miss, so I've tried to only pull items that I have felt were high-quality in the past. Also, I would encourage you to have your items shipped to their stores and pick them up in-person if you are able / comfortable, and help us keep malls alive for a little bit longer.

All of the prints from Gallery Nucleus were designed by people who worked on the show, worked in the same studio, or were very big fans of the show. I encourage you to look up the names behind any print that catches your eye and find out what they're working on now!

In the same vein... While this post was made to share semi-official to official pieces of merch, please support fanartists on platforms like INPRNT and Redbubble! I guarantee that many of the artists you follow on Tumblr sell some of their pieces online, and it's a great way to show your support in addition to reblogging their work.

You can find Pt. 1 of the list here, where I share links to music, books, comics, and graphic novels.

NOTE: I am not affiliated with any of the stores linked under the read more. I'm just someone who watches a lot of TV and reads a lot of books and likes to celebrate that by buying merch every now and then.

PLUSHIES

Hollow Knight - Hornet Plush

Nimona

Nimona - Shark Form Plush 

Nimona - Whale Form Plush

CLOTHING

Avatar: The Last Airbender Fire Nation Zuko Crew Socks 2 Pair

Bee And PuppyCat: Lazy In Space Duo Boyfriend Fit Girls T-Shirt

Steven Universe Group Phone T-Shirt

ACCESSORIES

Avatar

NYCC Exclusive - Avatar Debossed Elements Mini Backpack

The Legend of Korra Mini Backpack

Disney Afternoons

Disney Afternoon Cartoons Color Block Mini Backpack

Disney Afternoon Cartoons Color Block Zip Around Wallet

Pokemon

Pokémon Pumpkin Pikachu Mini Backpack

Pokémon Pikachu Halloween Costumes Allover Print Wallet

Pokémon Pumpkin Pikachu Cardholder 

Ms. Marvel Cosplay Mini Backpack

Rocko’s Modern Life Zip Around Wallet

Over The Garden Wall x Nucleus Enamel Pins (scroll down)

Infinity Train

Alan Dracula - Infinity Train x Nucleus Enamel Pin

Ugly Irwin - Infinity Train x Nucleus Enamel Pin

DINNERWARE

Moomin Summer Dive Glass Bottle 1L

Avatar: The Last Airbender Jasmine Dragon Stemless Glass

Disney Afternoons

Darkwing Duck 16 Oz Tumbler Cup

TaleSpin 16 Oz Tumbler Cup

Pokéball Ramen Bowl with Chopsticks

PRINTS

Cartoon Network - Gallery Nucleus Prints - Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Over The Garden Wall

Disney - Gallery Nucleus Prints

Star Vs. The Forces of Evil

Gravity Falls

A Normal Poster Encouraging Children to Read

Just Gold

Romance Academy 7

Trust

Waddles Takes Flight

Disney Television Animation Tribute Exhibition

Big Hero 6 

Darkwing Duck "The Terror That Flaps In The Night"

Darkwing Ducky 

Ducktales

Gummi Bears

Picnic Surprise

Rescue Rangers

Take Off!

Tangled

Infinity Train

Roasted

The Crew's All Here

The Steward

LAIKA 10th Anniversary - Gallery Nucleus Prints

MISCELLANEOUS

Hey Arnold Digital Downloads (Shop run by Craig Bartlett)

#hollow knight #nimona #infinity train #hey arnold #darkwing duck #ducktales #tangled: the series #craig bartlett #laika #coraline #paranorman #kubo and the two strings #boxtrolls #chip and dale rescue rangers #talespin #gummi bears #gravity falls #star vs the forces of evil #adventure time #over the garden wall #steven universe #rocko's modern life #avatar: the last airbender #the legend of korra #moomin #pokemon #ms. marvel #bee and puppycat #finds

[thewizardmus]

PLEASE TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR MORGAN FIRE EMBLEM AND LILITH FIRE EMBLEM SHIP

You know how to butter me up my friend

So first things first the in-universe ship often is either Grimaspawn!Morgan(no mother involved) or Tiki!Morgan for Dragon Reasons but absolutely works without Morgan being a dragon(when in doubt make Morgan related to one of the Awakening Trio, never fails)

There's a lot of Fire Emblem Dragon headcanons involved too this is very much a "there wasn't enough Canon here so I made the rest myself" thing going on. Sue me I'm ace I like dragons.

One of my favorite dynamics with them is Morgan practically watching her own past through Lilith and trying to make it as easy on our beloved fish-sister as possible, even if it means a little bit of either tough love or making Morgan look like a monster(because she is rawr)

Lilith: I don't deserve Corrin, after all I'm the reason our father is dead

Morgan: What would have happened if you said no at any point prior to meeting Corrin? If you had hypothetically learned your lesson before killing him? I'll tell you. You would have been killed because *he* never cared about you, you were a weapon to be used until you were useless or a threat. Then you'd be desposed of, tossed aside and he would have made a second, worse, Lilith.

Honestly from the first conversation with Lilith I think Morgan was ride or die for her, but I think falling in love happens much later and more importantly, without her realizing. She'll teasingly flirt because Lilith is cute when she's embarrassed but it's not like she has a crush... unless? Truthfully she didn't realize she was in Love Love until she was already cuddling whenever they happen to sit next to each

As for Lilith she's still punishing herself for killing Anankos Soul so I think that she would realize she loves Morgan much faster and immediately try and reject it cuz she's not allowed to be happy(she said like a liar). It takes a while before she realizes she doesn't need to make herself miserable in order to atone for something that no one blames her for.

As for how they actually show their affections:

Morgan is extremely affectionate, she loves to just be right next to Lilith, cuddling while reading, she's the smallest big spoon known to man, and LIVES for scratching. She also infodumps. A lot. Her ideal date in a Modern AU would be watching anime at home, lazy day with bae.

Lilith's Love Language is absolutely service. There's nothing that quite makes her happier than seeing something she did make someone she cares about life better. Her ideal date is going out and doing something, from an aquarium to a hiking trail to a sports game, just something out and about.

Of course you really can't have a cross game ship without talking about how they'd interact with each other's friends and loved ones.

Lilith + Awakening characters

Lucina- listen Lucina is either Morgan's (former?)nemesis or best friend and there's no in-between and either way Lucina has threatened Lilith. Once that's out of the way they get along decently, Lilith stays on the other side of her from Falchion though.

Noire- Noire and Lilith are besties and Lilith might be more willing to kill for her than for Corrin. Their friendship started just trading recipes because Nohrian and Plegian cuisine are so different and expanded from there.

Nah- the two of them get along great, Nah is the newest member of the Norther Fortress Book Club and that's an exclusive club. Also Nah is free to run around guilt free in the Astral Plane when she gets the Dragon Zoomies.

Yarne- Lilith is half shark half koi and she smells blood in the water with this poor boy. He's safe from Morgan's pulling but can never escape the most accurate and effective teasing known to man.

Gerome- Gerome would have tolerated anyone Morgan brought home, she's one of the few that he interacts with willingly. However once Minerva got her talons on Lilith, Gerome knew she was a keeper. The two of them get along like peanut butter and jelly and will rip INTO anyone who disrespects wyverns. Don't get them started on the alpha theory.

Cynthia- Canon didn't put Cynthia in fates because they knew they'd be too powerful of best friends. The perfect support for the brightest hero around who also knows to keep her grounded. Honestly a second crack ship I just haven't thought of plots for it.

Inigo- I know they're already friends but let's be honest Lilith has nothing in Fates so I have to set up something. Inigo has never intentionally flirted with Lilith and is a open shoulder at any point in time. Lilith has just pulled him away from Xander and dared him to do anything about it. He's also one of the most ardent supporters of Corrin's music and Lilith often helps in writing lyrics, but never singing you couldn't possibly get her onsta- hey how'd that crowd get there.

Owain- first harmed by Lilith and first to forgive Owain Emmet Darache is a heartfelt protector of the beaten and broken and maybe Lilith's first crush(not that she'd ever admit it). Owain's storytelling never gets old and several nights in the Fortress were spent listening to him talk about the tales behind the constellations both in Nohr and back home.

Severa: Severa took one look at Lilith and said "is anybody going to get her out of her comfort zone so she can grow" and then didn't wait for an answer. Severa is the one who told Corrin Lilith was related to them because Lilith was clearly never gonna. Severa very much took Lilith under her wing and made it everyone else problem.

Robin- Listen I think most of Robin and Lilith's first interaction was Lilith crying because Robin has perfected the "comforting a traumatized teenager who doesn't realize it" routine at this point. Their second interaction was Lilith yelling at him for being the cause of most of Morgan's bad habits.

Morgan + Fates characters

Corrin- Morgan LIKES Corrin, and is honestly one of the most consistently reliable parts of Corrin's very inconsistent and confusing life. The two are kinda close knit like that, Corrin provides the ultimate source of entertainment and enrichment for Morgan's enclosure and Morgan is, while not a mentor figure, absolutely going to tell Corrin where they're wrong and how. I can absolutely see Morgan going "I'm never going to directly lie to you. But I may withhold the full truth depending on the circumstances. About serious things I will lie to you if it's funny" and immediately getting Corrins seal of approval for being willing to tell them how their life got to this point. Honestly Corrin and Morgan is an entirely separate headcanon filled explanation of their dynamics. My first idea for a Fates AU was specifically Morgan as Corrins retainer and while I don't think Morgan works well in an official role like that she remains the perfect stray cat that keeps coming back. I also totally see Corrin as being one of the only members of royalty/nobility Morgan respects(our girl is a princess because her grandfather was the leader of a death cult, of all characters to see that the royalty is a sham it'd be her). Is this two of my blorbos slapped together and saying they'd be best friends? Yes. Am I wrong? No.

Laslow- More so explaining a headcanon that adds to their existing relationship. Inigo gets Morgan to stop working for a pot of tea at 2:00 on the dot every day. It's break time, tea time with Inigo to the point that Morgan can only drink tea made by Inigo, he just gets what she likes. It's also one of the only things that actually gets Morgan to take a break, no tea time? No break. No Inigo? No tea time. It's part of Morgan's System(tm) and very important.

Jakob- Lilith and Corrin are the only reasonz that Jakob still lives. He's difficult to get along with even IF he likes you and unfortunately he and Morgan are completely incompatible. It's kinda like Morgan and Laurent's relationship without the underlying respect for each others intelligence, or the shared interest in deepening their studies. He can't even make a cup of tea to save his life. Morgan would be down to hang out with Dwyer though. He's chill.

Flora- After a bit of a chilly reception originally Flora warmed up quite a bit to Lilith and will put any threat to her happiness on ice. I hc that Flora is the only person that Lilith told that she's related to Corrin, on accident when complaining about Camilla. Flora immediately understood and felt a kinship between the two of them because they both want to protect their younger siblings from King Garon's ruthlessness. Also HC this slip up is why Flora canonically was mean to Corrin and then was kind to them. In terms of Morgan, Flora approaches her with concerns about leading the Ice Tribe when the time comes and Morgan's advice isn't as useful as the livelihood of an isolated Tribe is very different than a country.

Felicia- Morgan used the spell to temporarily rewind time in order(from the Henry Sumia support) to save a few papers Felicia spilled ink all over and Felicia begged her for how to use it until Morgan taught it to Flora. Morgan also teaches her some tactics from time to time given her skill as a commandee.

Gunter- a couple fics I have in mind start with Morgan meeting Gunter instead of being called by the Awakening Trio or something. There's something about him that Morgan just respects. He can take snark and hits and he's a knight without a stick up his butt and he's actually nice?? Somethings wrong here. Gunter already is collecting teenagers and this one is entertaining.

Nyx- Being 4'8.5"(did not check that number) for the lengthy foreseeable future Morgan is one of the only people who treats Nyx like an adult on the first try. She's also an amazing study-buddy, if Owain doesn't know something about Nohrian spellscript, Nyx is a safe bet. The two of them try and teach each other as much as they can and Morgan really wants to show Nyx the College of Khadein where Plegia's best mages trade research freely.

Camilla- Lilith and Morgan both hate Camilla for different reasons, Lilith because she effectively flaunts her being Corrin's big sister right in her face(not that she'd tell him) and also doesn't know how to care for anyone without holding them so tight that they can't escape her because she's a broken woman(Lilith recognizes that should make her pity Camilla but she's too busy being mad) and that directly affects 3 of the people closest to her, including Beruka. Morgan hates Camilla because she gets in Morgan's bubble and when she hugs she picks Morgan up.

Stories I have in mind for the pairing:

A pokemon AU where Morgan is a Professor involved in a Pokè abuse case where a large amount of Aron where starved so they vould be released in the city. Lilith a Nurse who's called in to give check ups on the Aron. After the case the two get closer and end up calling upon each other for more of their expertise in their fields. More of a pokemon headcanon fic than a serious plot one. Morgan specializes in Steel Types and Lilith specializes in Psychic types.

Morgan gets called to/tricked to go to Izumo by Moro to be either his upcoming replacement or the replacement for Grima. On her way she meets Lilith post-father killing and pre-Corrin meeting and talks with her. Morgan ends up being the second person to ever actually show care for her and Lilith crushes hard. When Lilith works at the fortress she often takes trips to Izumo to visit Morgan(everyone assumes she's just very religious) on these trips she is being escorted through Hoshido because they noticed the Nohrian traveling to Izumo 6 times a year. It doesn't take long before Reina starts escorting her personally and letting Mikoto know of her old war buddy Gunter's new maid. A lot of the plot ends up being Mikoto trying to find out what Lilith knows about Corrin, Lilith trying to keep her girlfriend being the real reason for her travel secret from Nohr, and Corrin trying to figure out why some of the souvenirs Lilith brings back give him Deja vu.

Immediately after going Revelations path(it didn't go well) Corrin ends up traveling to Ylisse looking for 1) someone to fix Lilith and 2) someone to teach him how to use magic to make music like his Good Friend Odin told him about. More so an Awakening fic with Corrin and Lilith slapped in but hey they fit so well with the Awakening cast. A Corrin/Lucina slow burn with Morgan/Lilith in the background. Corrin is honestly peak sopping mess here.

Corrin's tabletop group swings by his and Lilith's house just after dinner and Lilith fully intends on hiding in her room until Morgan shows up early with a cavalcade of plushies to use as minis. Corrin poker fun at her for obviously only playing because she has a crush for the full night and Morgan is blissfully oblivious because she has a murder mystery to set up.

I'm gonna have to stop Because I've been working on this ask on and off since I got it last night and it's probably incomprehensible I just love these two so hecking much.

#fire emblem awakening #fire emblem fates #morgan fire emblem #fire emblem morgan #lilith fire emblem #fire emblem lilith #fe morgan

[beevean]

Surge doesn't look cool or appealing to me at all, she just looks like a combination of silly and ugly that made me feel like I shouldn't take her seriously

Her design is so ugly to me

That stupid ass black splotch clashes with the yellowish-green of her fur and the yellow of her clothes, it should have been made dark green

or better yet, no stupid black splotch, give her black eye markings! She's supposed to be punk, right?

Her teeth are so dumb, peak 3edgy5me, how did she get them? Was she born with shark teeth? Did Sonic's DNA give them? Did Starline decide to change her teeth to make her look more menacing? I only know that it's such a lazy way to say "yo she's evil", same for Scourge, it's as cliché as giving your villain horns, and my god Thomas Rothlisberger draws her mouth in such an unappealing way

Her clothes are a punch in the eye, you can't tell me that running around in those poofy pants is comfortable, also why poofy pants? Why one round element in her triangular, jagged, punk-inspired design? Why not shorts, or form fitting pants like in one of her concept designs?

What's the point in Riders-style gloves? What's the point in wings on her shoes? They do nothing but clutter her busy design

Her metallic accessories are also overkill but at least they have an in-universe explaination. I'd personally just limit myself to rings and those things under her shoes, since she mainly uses her powers through her hands and feet - unless you're telling me that her ponytail sticks up because she electrifies it through her band lol. But her earrings, bracelets and studs on her shoes are too much.

Her spines are nice. They give her an unique silhouette, and without her ponytail she'd have very long hair, which is uncommon in Sonic characters but wouldn't be as out of place as Sally's human hair. This is the only element of her design that I can fully praise. Oh, and her tail, it’s unique and cute.

You know a character with a good combination of silly and menacing? Infinite.

He has so many edgy design elements that it's hard to take him seriously, like the clawed gloves, the pointy boots with his own symbol under him, and of course the tragic one-eyed mask. And yet he also has big ears, long flowing hair and a fluffy tail. He's a canid like Tails. He's endearing to me.

And still his design isn't nearly as much of a clusterfuck as this one:

And this is an artist that can draw her well. Rothlisberg sure can't, and he was the main artist of IS. Bleh.

#sonic the hedgehog #fans don't look #the only fanarts of surge i liked were like of exceptional quality #and didn't show her teeth lmao #there was also one with purple clothes and her hair down #it was cute ngl

[rickythompsonx]

Bio and Info

The Basics:

Name:  Richard Lee Thompson

Face Claim: Joseph Quinn

Age: 28

Birthdate:  June 23, 1994

Neighborhood: Maple Hills

Occupation: Works at Critical Roll, Twitch streamer.

Pronouns: He/Him

Sexuality: Bisexual

Relationship Status: Dating Nicole Peters

More Facts:

Nicknames: Ricky (preferred name) Rick, Rickysaurus,

Positive Personality Traits: Compassionate, Witty, Outgoing

Negative Personality Traits: Sensitive, Emotional, Lazy, Irresponsible

Likes: Video games, 80's culture, longboarding, snowboarding, weed, animals

Dislikes: Letting people down, Hard labour, Animal abuse

Hobbies and Interests: Streaming video games on twitch. Playing table top roleplaying games. Anime.

Family:  Don Thompson (father), Nancy Thompson (mother), Renee Thompson (sister), Ruby Austin (cousin), Daniel Austin (cousin - deceased)

Other Relationships: Matt Wheeler (ex-boyfriend and current best friend), Nicole Peterson (dating), Harrison Lee (step-dad)

Pets: Huey - Pug

Physical Appearance:

Height:  5'8

Hair color: Light brown

Eye color: Brown

Nationality/Heritage: American born, of mixed European descent

Tattoos of piercings:  Zelda Triforce on upper mid back, Death Eater serpant on inner right arm, tiger shark on ankle

Distinguishable Traits:  Curly hair, large brown eyes. Outfits often inspired by 80's culture or 90's grunge. Smoker.

Quick Run Down

Trigger warnings: car accident, death, addiction, incarceration, divorce

Struggled in school due to having dyslexia and also had behavior problems due to his parents divorce.

Came out as bisexual in high school and started dating his best friend Matt Wheeler but Ricky started partying and using drugs so they broke up after high school. Tried living with his mom and working but was too lazy to hold a job. Tried to make a career of streaming games on twitch.

Started hanging around shady people who offered him work dealing drugs. Was arrested in 2020 when police found pills in his car.

Spent 8 months in jail before he was released and moved back to his mom's. Got a job working with Matt at Critical Roll. Cut contact with the people he use to hang out with pre-jail and has been trying to get back on track. Hasn't used hard drugs since his release.

Met Nicole Peterson in an online game which she was streaming. After talking for a while they discovered they lived in the same area and had even gone to the same school (though a few years apart). They decided to meet up for coffee which turned into a date and started officially dating in December.

Wanted Connections

Sister

Gaming friends who play online or ttrpg with him

Former classmates at either high school (graduated 2013) or East Haven University (studied in 2018)

Former co-workers from the many jobs he's quit

Full Bio:

Trigger warnings: car accident, death, addiction, incarceration, divorce

Richard "Ricky" Lee Thompson was the first born to Don and Nancy Thompson, and lived in East Haven all his life. His sister was born a few years after. His memories of his early childhood were mostly good ones, until he was six and his parents decided to divorce. Being too young to understand the reasons, he just became frustrated and didn't get why his dad had to live somewhere else. He started to exhibit some behavioral problems in school as well as some difficulties reading. After some testing, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, something that made his school years a struggle and deflated his confidence. He would slack off in school and as he got older, his behavior became more alarming.

By thirteen he was hanging around older kids he met at the skate parks who introduced him to cigarettes and alcohol. He was often getting in trouble at school and fighting with his parents. Around this time, he met Matt Wheeler whom he became close friends with. Matt was a more positive influence in his life and introduced him to table top gaming. He would spend a lot of time with Ricky's family. During his early years of high school, Ricky realized that he was bisexual, although he was nervous to tell anyone. After his friend Matt came out, he found it easy to do so himself and they decided to try dating. They remained a couple for a few years, and after they graduated ended up living together. However, Ricky's main interests outside of gaming seemed to be getting high and loaded, which didn't align with what Matt wanted. They eventually broke up, and taking some time apart.

During this time, Ricky moved back in with his mother and tried to work several different jobs but he never had the strongest work ethic. He would end up getting fired or quitting within a few months. After losing several jobs his parents tried to encourage him to go to university and find a career that made him happy. Having always been an animal lover, Ricky decided to try a veterinary program at the university of Newport, living outside of East Haven for the first time. He started in 2017, and his first year he found himself struggling to meet the criteria and just wanted to party instead of taking his studies seriously. That was until he met a young woman named Shayla who pushed him to do better. Eventually they went from close friends to dating. They were together for five months before they decided during spring break to take a road trip with two of their friends to see a concert. On the way there, the unthinkable happened when the driver of the car fell asleep and ended up getting into an accident. Ricky was injured, breaking a few bones and suffering a concussion, but he was the only one who survived the crash because of where he was seated.

The tragedy led him to drink more and use harder drugs. He started using non-prescription pills at parties telling himself that they weren't as harmful as other drugs, but quickly became dependent on them to escape reality. He lost touch with a lot of his friends and the people he hung around with were shady and had ill intentions. Some of his new friends ended up hiring Ricky to help them deal drugs by delivering them. On the surface things in his life seemed perfectly fine to him. He was having fun and making money but the party came to an end one night when he was pulled over for speeding. The police searched his car and found large quantities of pills. He was arrested, but fearing the disappointment of his parent, he opted not to tell them. Instead they were left frantic for several days thinking he had gone missing. When they found out, he had already been sentenced to ten months in prison. His parents decided it would be best if he served his time and learned something that might prevent him from going back to his dangerous lifestyle.

In June of 2022, Ricky was released a few months early on good behavior. Although he was hurt by their decision to not help him out, Ricky saw how much his actions had hurt those around him and made the decision to stay clean. He was able to get a job through his friend Matt at Critical Roll, which was owned by their favorite teacher in high school. A few months later, while playing and online game, Ricky met a girl named Nicole who streamed as well and happened to live in his town. They hit it off, despite some bickering over the game, and decided to meet in person. They have been close ever since and Ricky also started spending more time with Matt again. Although he realized they may have been better off as friends, he was always someone who kept him grounded. Ricky is currently still living with his mom while working at Critical Roll and attempting to grow his Twitch following to stream more professionally.

#bio #tw incarcaration #tw divorce #tw car accident #tw death #tw drug mention

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the IMF loan-sharks the global south

When you take out a loan or get a credit card, the headline figure is the “APR” — the annual percentage rate of interest. But anyone who’s ever borrowed because they were poor and needed money has learned the hard way that APRs are pure fiction.

To get the true APR (what economists politely call the “effective” APR) you have to factor in the fees, penalties and other gotchas that turn reasonable seeming interest rates into perennial, inescapable debt-traps.

Take student debt. During the 2020 presidential campaign, we had a debate about student debt forgiveness, whose opponents frequently cited the “unfairness” of allowing people to “escape their responsibilities.”

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

In their telling, student debt forgiveness would reward fecklessness, allowing people who got the benefit of an expensive education to duck the costs.

Now, even if you ignore the farcical inflation in university tuition and expenses (for example, the 1000%+ hike in textbooks driven by ed-tech monopolists), that’s still a highly selective account of how student debt works.

Student debt is negotiated from a position of weakness and naiveté, which allows lenders to attack the poorest grads with incredible fees and penalties. “Chris” took out $79k in student loans in 1982. He’s paid back $190k. He still owes $236k.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/student-loan-horror-stories-borrowed

That’s not the magic of compound interest. It’s the magic of loan-sharking. If you’ve ever used a payday lender (aka a “fintech startup” AKA a “loan shark”), none of this will be the least bit surprising. This form of usury is as old as Christ casting out the money-changers.

The payday lending industry didn’t invent these tactics, but they refined, automated and industrialized them, then they spent millions at Trump hotels and (in a stunning coincidence) all those tactics were blessed by the US finance regulators.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-payday-lenders-spent-1-million-at-a-trump-resort-and-cashed-in

The normalization of loan-sharking sent the entire finance sector into a race to the bottom. America’s largest banks saw their profits soar during the pandemic due to record overdraft and other fees — in other words, collecting fines for being poor.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

The sums are jaw-dropping. In 2020, Jpmorganchase made $1.5b on overdraft fees, Bank of America made $1.1b and Wells Fargo made $1.3b. The biggest rake came from the worst months of the pandemic.

https://prospect.org/economy/big-banks-charged-billions-in-overdraft-fees-during-pandemic/

78.3% of all overdraft fees come from just 9.2% of bank customers. At $35 a pop, these fees turn the banks’ overdraft facilities into loans with an “effective APR” of 3,500%.

Three thousand.

Five hundred.

Percent.

These are the cold, bloodless numbers of the debt trap. They conceal a vicious cycle in which those with the least pay the most, a cycled that can’t even be outrun in death.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

Take a moment to (re)read Molly McGhee’s Paris Review essay from May 2021, “America’s Dead Souls,” about her mother’s death. McGhee’s mom made less than $10k/year and suffered “debilitating depression while caring for aging parents.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

Her mother was haunted by two warring clans of ghouls: debt collectors who harassed her through legal and illegal means, and con artists who located her through databases of struggling debtors and tried to sell her predatory consolidation loans.

48 hours after her mother’s death, these blood-suckers switched to harassing McGhee, as she grieved her loss. Unlike her mother, McGhee had the resiliency and wherewithal (a credit card) to hire a lawyer, whose boilerplate letter reduced the debt by 90%, over $250k, poof.

If you can afford a lawyer, your parents’ debts don’t become yours. If you can’t, you enter a cycle of intergenerational poverty, with each generation sinking deeper into debt.

When you have nothing and owe everything, debt collectors know that they have to terrorize you into putting their bills ahead of the others. The cruelty is literally the point — without it, you might pay your rent ahead of your mother’s old credit-card bills.

To quote Umair Haque, “America is the the world’s first poor rich country.” an “advanced economy” where a sizable portion of the population lives in conditions typical of the global south.

https://eand.co/the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-c411afc68539

Not for nothing. The same tactics that impoverish the vast American underclass also work to keep the world’s poorest countries — rich in resources and talent — poor. The loan shark here is far more powerful than a payday lender or even JP Morgan — it’s the IMF.

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research dissects the way the IMF uses fees and penalties to trap the poorest countries in the world in unbreakable cycles of debt — fees that drive up the IMF’s notional APR to dizzying, usurious heights.

https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IMF-Surcharge-Report-2.pdf

Like any predatory loan, these “surcharges” are levied against the countries that have the least ability to repay. They target countries whose debt:GDP ratio passes an arbitrary line. For the poorest IMF debtors, surcharges account for 45% of all non-principle repayment.

These numbers add up. In Egypt, surcharges gobbled up $1.8b between 2019��24 — triple the cost of fully vaccinating the whole country. Small wonder that the world’s 64 poorest countries spend more on external debt payment than they do on their own health care.

In its defense, the IMF offers the same tissue-thin responses that any arm-breaker offers. The claim that penalties and fees are a way to “incentivize” debtor nations not to overborrow, and to seek their credit from the private finance sector.

But these countries are borrowing to pay off their debts — often debts that date back to colonial times, in which the rich (white) world mercilessly looted their resources and fomented destabilizing political divisions.

This undermined domestic resistance to imperialism and allowed kleptocratic, corrupt leaders to thrive — leaders who borrowed heavily to finance vanity projects, corrupt enrichment of domestic elites, and militarized suppression of opposition movements.

All of that was funded by debts, often from the IMF, who tied lending to the dismantling and sell-off of state enterprises, from power to water to sanitation — which is how the world’s poorest get gouged by the world’s richest to drink their own water.

These countries don’t borrow because they want to live outside their means — they borrow because they want to live. They don’t borrow from the IMF because they’re too lazy to ask a multinational bank for credit — they borrow because they can’t get credit elsewhere.

But the IMF has another excuse for this: they claim that the fees they extract allow them to originate more loans, creating a virtuous cycle. But as the report makes clear, this is absurd on its face.

The IMF went into the pandemic boasting about $1 trillion in “firepower” (that’s creepy-cutesey IMFspeak for “cash reserves”). Meanwhile, the annual revenues from these fees is $1b — that’s three orders of magnitude less than that “firepower.”

That means that the IMF could simply give up on these punitive fees, levied against the poorest people in the world, at an annual cost of 0.01% of its reserves. Literally, the cruelty is the point.

The point of all of this? The victims of usury are all in the same boat — in the USA and around the world. The same tactics, the same excuses, the same misery, from Cairo to the Caribbean to Cleveland.

Not all debt is created equal, of course. If you’re Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, you can get sweetheart loans and roll overs that let you avoid almost all taxation through the fiction that you earn no income, even as you amass hundreds of billions.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich

And of course, if you’re a government with debts denominated in the currency you issue, it’s not really “debt” at all — the only way the US government can run out of dollars is by ordering its employees not to type more dollars into existence in a central bank spreadsheet.

Indeed, you couldn’t ask for a starker example of the difference between monetarily sovereign nations and postcolonial countries that owe debts in the currencies of their former conquerors. Venezuela can’t spend its way out of US dollar debt by creating bolivars.

Like McGhee’s mother, whose debts turned out to be fictions that disappeared as soon as a professional with credentials and access to the levers of power printed out a boilerplate letter, these countries’ debts are cruel fictions.

The powerful and wealthy can indulge these fictions or ignore them, as they choose. For example, finance-friendly politicians can insist that the “debt ceiling” must not be raised, for political purposes.

When the US declines to do the trivial data-entry that would make the money to pay its sovereign “debts,” the consumption that the money would have funded still takes place — financed not by the democratic state, but rather by a loan-shark.

National financial “prudence” interrupts the normal and benign process of sovereign money-creation, opening space for usury — private borrowing from the vampires and ghouls whose 3,500% APRs are redeemed through terror.

The cruelty is the point.

Image: Sbw01f (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Developed_and_developing_countries.PNG

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Image: А. Н. Миронов https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%98%D0%B7%D0%B3%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B3%D1%83%D1%8E%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%B8%D0%B7_%D1%85%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0._XXI_%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BA.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

[forestwater87]

Chapter 15: Grand Gesture

Summary: GRAND GESTURE: He or she must be willing to put it all on the line now or risk losing the one thing they need to become whole-hearted. It’s life or death now.

CW: Smut in the last third of the chapter. Questionable quality.

Summer 2017

“Fuck!” Gwen felt her center of gravity shift as she leaned forward, overbalancing on the rickety chair she’d been using to reach the ceiling. It tipped perilously on two legs, then lost the fight with physics and sent her sprawling with a crash that shook the dozens of tiny papers taped around the room. She hit the ground with her hip and the side of her face, one of them making a disturbing crunch sound and both shooting bright white pain down her entire right side. “Shit!”

She was halfway to her feet, wondering if the crossed-eyes dizzy feeling was from lack of sleep, hitting her head, or marker fumes, when fingers closed around her upper arm and she was hauled upright. “Gwen! Goodness, are you okay?” David let go of her, his gaze roving around the room as he took a step back. “What happened in here?”

She looked around, taking a deep breath and noticing for the first time in hours the thick perfume of tacky glue and paint, as though David walking in had turned her senses back on. It was done, mostly. Well, no — it’d never really be done, but it was enough to prove her point.

She hoped.

While she was panicking, David had wandered over to the center of the room, ducking to avoid a string of origami animals dangling from the ceiling. “Is this for camp?”

“Yes — I mean, no, it’s from camp, and maybe we can reuse some of it but no, it’s . . . not really . . .” She’d planned this, during her mad crafting frenzy: how David would come home, wonder what she was doing, and she’d carefully tour him through everything — or maybe she’d let him get on with his morning routine while she added a few more things, made it just a bit closer to perfect.

But his presence had pulled her to a halt. She’d been like a shark all night, afraid to stop moving or she’d die, but now that he was here she felt drained, the giddy, terrified adrenaline that’d been keeping her going evaporating in an instant.

Though hey. At least she had a good reason to be tired, for once.

He frowned at her discarded supplies strewn carelessly around the room. “Are these from Art Camp?”

The question jolted her into action, and she stumbled forward jerkily, like the Tin Man without oil. “Yeah, but I already took it out of my paycheck, it’s fine. I’ll go shopping tomorrow for new stuff.” She wanted him to hear what she really meant, what she was trying to put together through exhausted babbling: that this was important, that it was worth sacrificing sleep and money for, that she loved him and she respected him and she wanted him to know that.

Finally, finally, he turned his attention to the walls. “Gwen, what is all this?”

“It’s you,” she blurted out, then winced and rested her forehead in her palm. “No, that’s not — it’s — some of the stuff you’ve taught me, look . . .” She took his hand, her nerves trembling at the brush of his fingers against her own, and pulled him toward the doorway. She’d made a messy semicircle around the room, right to left like a supermarket. Dropping his hand, she took a step back, steepling her fingers like she was praying and pressing them to her lips with another steadying breath.

She had one chance.

“Okay,” she began. “So . . .”

---

Gwen looked like she was on the verge of falling over, listing dangerously to the side as she led him across the room. There were feathers in her hair, and scraps of paper; she was speckled with color, marker and paint and even a smear of glitter glue on the tip of her nose, the pads of her fingers nearly black with a rainbow of ink that stained his hand as she held it. It was obvious she hadn’t slept, even more obvious that she desperately needed to.

But her eyes were bright even if the circles under them were dark, and she thrummed with an energy and animation David hadn’t seen all summer.

And he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt her, not when it finally felt like she’d returned to him.

“— song you taught me last year,” she said, and he felt a flash of guilt that he hadn’t been listening. She tapped the paper she’d stuck to the wall, the lyrics of his Camp Campbell song scrawled across it in uneven lines. “All the camp activities, remember? At least the most important ones.”

(It was really just the ones that fit best into the rhyme scheme, but he didn’t correct her as she moved on to a second piece of paper.)

“This is a list of all the facts about nature I’ve learned since I started here,” she continued, gesturing. This one was crammed so tightly with writing that he could barely read it, bullet points snaking in all directions and increasingly smaller handwriting as it moved down the page, until finally Gwen had started attaching sticky notes to the wall below and around the list. “I had to keep going back and adding things as I thought of them. I know I’m forgetting something, but I can’t —” She gestured around her head in a classic “scatterbrained” motion, chuckling weakly. “I’m kind of all over the place right now.”

Next: a bullseye, a pencil stuck point-first into the wall. “I couldn’t really shoot an arrow,” Gwen explained, “but remember that summer you taught me archery? I’m still pretty good at it — we went to a shooting range for Claire’s birthday last year and I was the only one who hit the target every time.”

Next: a messy drawing of a forest, a little stick figure kneeling next to a moss-covered rock. “That one time we got lost in the woods trying to find a good place for bug-catching, you got us out because you knew how to find north. You’d be pretty great in a zombie apocalypse.”

Next: a sheet of black construction paper poked through with holes, hastily taped to the back window so light from the lamp outside shone through in little pinpricks. He leaned closer and realized that they were in the rough shape of the constellations visible above Lake Lilac. “I didn't know much about stars and shit outside of, like, horoscope stuff — I mean, in the city you can’t even see them — but you always pointed out which constellations and planets were out during the summer and now I know them all too.”

And on, and on. Scale models of the crafts and activities they’d done at Camp Campbell, nature facts, and on one wall she’d tacked up a typewritten letter to the Director of Admissions at Queen’s University Belfast. Skimming it quickly, it looked to David like an application.

“I was trying to get into their Environmental Science program. I wrote about Sleepy Peak Peak and Lake Lilac,” she admitted, looking almost embarrassed. “I got in. And I mean, they’re not the best program out there, but they’re still in the top 300 worldwide so that’s pretty cool, I guess —”

“Belfast?” He leaned in closer, confirming that he’d read correctly. “Isn’t that in England?”

“Yeah.” She looked impressed, and he suppressed a weary smirk; yes, he did know a bit about the world outside of Camp Campbell. But she surprised him by adding, “I had to look that up, actually.” She shrugged. “Guess I should’ve just asked you, huh?

“Anyway, that was a couple years ago. I didn’t go, obviously,” she added, responding to his unspoken question. “International travel’s a bitch. I needed a scholarship, and my grades weren’t good enough. I think I only got in at all because of my letter.” She gestured at it, not quite meeting his eyes. “Which I never thanked you for. Or most of the stuff I’ve learned from you. I’ve been . . . kinda taking all that for granted. So, uh . . . thanks, David.”

He wanted to tell her she was welcome, that she didn’t need to thank him at all. That sharing these things with her had been the highlight of his life since they’d met, even if it hadn’t seemed like she cared about any of it. But there was a lump quivering dangerously in his throat and he didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

After a second she cleared her throat awkwardly and led him over to a row of stick figures hanging from the ceiling. “Some of these are from Yoga Camp,” she said, pointing at a few of the ones contorted into uncomfortable shapes, “but also all that other stuff you do. Like smile exercises —” and yes, one of the stick figures had a big pink smiley face, “— and breathing techniques and stuff. I use those sometimes when I’m having a panic attack. They really help, even if smile exercises still make me feel like a dumbass most of the time.”

The decorations started to get more abstract as they made their way around the room, simple crafts and trivia giving way to colorful scribbles and symbols, representing things he’d said to her about her relationship with her parents, her love life. “You have really good advice, you know that? You could be the next Dear Abby or something, seriously. I think that’s still running.”

(It was; he read it every morning with his pre-breakfast tea.)

“These get worse, sorry . . . I was getting tired.” Gwen jerked her chin up at a wobbly butterfly — or was it a bird? — dangling over their heads. “I use your advice about hummingbird-ing all the time. With writing, mostly, but sometimes at work or something, too.”

He gently reached up and touched the bird’s feet, watching it spin in a lazy circle. Technically the idea had been his mother’s, a way to avoid burnout by flitting from one project to another and adding just a little bit to each, instead of devoting all energy and resources to one thing and slogging through until it was done. The whole idea was part of his ethos of being a counselor — wasn’t Camp Campbell a place to get a little taste of everything, after all? He remembered explaining it to Gwen during her first week at camp, just over five years ago.

He wouldn’t have ever imagined that she’d actually remembered.

He didn’t think she remembered any of this.

But the evidence was all around him — on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, dozens of examples, mementos of the tiny moments that meant everything to him. Immortalized, remembered, in increasingly sloppy handwriting and doodles.

In the corner was a bright red card that looked familiar. David moved over to it and laughed in recognition: it was one he’d sent her after her first or second summer at Camp Campbell, when he’d seen on Facebook that she was looking for work. He tugged it off the wall, careful not to damage the cheap cardstock, and smiled down at the deer wearing a plaid hunting cap, which he’d made out of tissue paper and markers (he’d gotten much better since then, thanks to a few years of Decoupage Camps).

‘Good luck on your job HUNT! I know you’ll slay the interview!’

“I’ve kept that for years to show my friends,” Gwen said, making him jump; he hadn’t realized she’d come up behind him, but she was close enough to nearly rest her head against his. “I felt like it really captured the kind of guy you were.”

Her breath prickled the side of his neck, and he distracted himself by opening the card — ‘oh deer, is this joke going on too long? I feel like it’s overkill!’ — noticing how worn the crease was, like she’d opened and closed it hundreds of times. “Does it?”

He felt her shake her head without having to face her, stray wisps of hair that’d escaped her ponytail tickling his cheek. “Not even close.”

Unable to resist, he looked back at her over his shoulder, and she took his arm, turning him around the rest of the way. He thought she was going to kiss him — she was close enough that he could see a smeary glue thumbprint on her cheek and what looked like half a smiley-face sticker in her hair — but she just took the card from him, setting it carefully on the couch before taking hold of both his hands. Her expression was grave, shining faint with hope, and between the craft debris and her naked earnestness, she looked incredibly young and vulnerable.

“There’s more,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the far wall, “and I’ll let — I want you to look at it, but . . . I just had to tell you, I’ve been taking you for granted and it’s not right. I’ve been pretending I still think of you as this —” Pulling one of her hands away, she picked up the card again, her fingers shaking so the deer’s toothpick antlers clacked together, “— sweet, silly, kinda childish David, who belongs with someone sweet, and silly, and kinda childish. And I tried to be that and . . . I mean I sucked at it,” she said, breaking off with a weak laugh, dropping her eyes to their joined hands. “And it . . . kind of broke me. But I didn’t even think to ask if that was what you wanted, because I thought I knew what you needed, and that was — so, really fucked.” She looked back up at him, her eyes dancing with purple fire, her grip on his hand tightening. “And I — I don’t, you know so much that I don’t — I could fill the entire cabin with stuff I’ve learned from you, this doesn’t even scratch the surface.”

She paused, like she was waiting for him to interject, but David felt like he’d been turned to stone, paralyzed and unblinking while his brain whirled.

“But none of it matters if it doesn’t show . . . if you don’t know —” Her voice cracked, and she dropped his other hand, pressing a fist to her mouth. “— h-how amazing you are, how much you matter to this camp and to me and . . . and I didn’t know people could actually be happy 'til I met you. I mean, I guess I knew technically, but not that it was a real thing people actually were. But you figured it out. You’ve known what you wanted since you were a kid and then you got it and I’ve never done anything without second-guessing myself a million times but you just did it, and it meant making so many decisions about your life that could’ve turned out wrong but they didn’t because they were the right ones for you. And you knew it. You always have.” She swiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands, crying in earnest now. “You’re a marvel, David. I should’ve said that every fucking day. And I know it’s probably too little, too late, but I’m sorry. For not telling you and — and for everything.

“And I . . .” She swallowed hard, taking a few heaving breaths before continuing, and he knew she was trying to hold onto her composure even as tears poured down her cheeks, “I don’t know what you wanna do. With — with us, I mean. But you’re right, I haven’t been a good girlfriend to you, and if you don’t want to . . . if you want me to leave right now or after the summer ends or if you just wanna be friends or whatever , that’s fine. A-and — if you do . . . y’know . . .” Her face crumpled, her shoulders curling in on themselves. “I love you so much,” she managed, her words harder to make out through damp, hiccuping breaths. “Whatever — whatever you want — I — I — I trust you.”

Understanding pierced his chest, a small pinhole that allowed light to pour, warm and white, into his heart.

“I trust you.”

David hadn’t realized how desperately he’d needed to hear those words until that moment.

He stepped forward, plucking the card from her hand and tossing it onto the floor (he could make her another one, dozens if she wanted, hundreds) and tilting her chin up so he could kiss her. Her cheeks were wet under his palms, her mouth salty and acidic with the taste of not-quite-morning breath, and each brush of his lips against hers was broken by her pulling back to drag in a sobbing gasp, her mouth moving clumsily like she was as close to fainting from exhaustion and emotion as she looked.

It was, without question, the best kiss of his life.

He broke away to press his forehead against hers, sliding his hands from her face to cup the back of her neck and closing his eyes. “I love you too, Gwen,” he murmured, his heart fluttering at the giddily-incredulous, teary laugh she gave in response. “And I think you need to go to bed.”

She leaned back, and the bleary confusion on her face was so precious he rose up on his toes to press a soft kiss to her forehead. “Huh? But what about . . .”

“I’ve got some stuff to think about,” he said, then gestured at the crafts she hadn’t shown him yet, “and look at. And after that . . . we should talk. But it won’t be a very good talk if you fall asleep,” he added with a laugh as her eyes drifted closed.

She opened them halfway, just enough to glare at him, but the effect would’ve been more intimidating if she hadn’t been swaying slightly. “’m fine.” The adrenaline that’d been keeping her going was clearly wearing off fast, and David was a little worried she wouldn’t make it to bed, that he’d just find her unconscious on the floor of the hallway. “You didn’t sleep either,” she accused, pointing at him with a finger stained silvery with graphite.

Goodness, he loved her so much he couldn’t stand it. “I had a nap.” Not a long one, but he was used to not sleeping much. “Get some rest. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“It’s already the morning,” she complained, but like a sleepy robot she turned and shuffled back toward the front of the cabin. “I’m gonna brush my teeth and shower and stuff. So I look less like a sludge goblin.”

“You do that, Gwen.” He waited until the bathroom door had clicked shut before turning back to the mess she’d made of their living room. It was almost hard to tell the difference between what was art and what was trash left over, there was so much of both; it looked like an explosion had hit a crafts store.

Gwen wasn’t someone who put a lot of effort into things she didn’t care about. It was one of the most frustrating things about having her as a coworker, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t love how unabashedly honest she was, how he could read her feelings just by looking at her work.

There was the soft sound of tape unsticking and one of the decorations sagged, a corner curling away from the wall and drooping down. He pushed it carefully back into place and fumbled for his phone, setting it to camera mode.

This was worth remembering.

---

Gwen was positive she’d never be able to fall asleep; how could she, when things were still so up in the air? But she wasn’t twenty anymore, and after the exhaustion and emotional turmoil of the last few hours — days, weeks; hell, if she was being honest it’d been years since she’d truly felt well-rested — and despite the anxiety buzzing inside her skull she was out in moments.

Soft fingers in her hair drew her back to earth, and when she opened her eyes David came into focus, crouching next to her bed so they were at eye level. He smiled as she blinked at him, warmth and sunshine he probably didn’t even know he was emitting. “Goooood morning, Gwen!” he chirped, his voice way too loud for how close they were, and she winced. “Sorry,” he added, his voice dropping to a murmur. “Habit.”

“It’s fine,” she said, because she’d missed his morning bellow so much more than she could ever miss having non-punctured eardrums. She sat up, clumsily swiping at her face to double-check for drool or errant eye gunk. “Morning.”

“How are you feeling?” He hopped onto the bed, making her and everything else on the mattress bounce. He was being so . . . normal, like all the drama last night had been a dream.

Fuck it. They had some hard, painful conversations coming; she could enjoy a little bit of normalcy while her brain booted back up. “Good,” she replied, yawning. “I mean, tired, but I’m always tired so —” Her blood chilled, and suddenly she was wide awake.

There went normal. All because she had to remind him of what an unloveable disaster she was.

But when she looked back up he didn’t seem annoyed. He leaned against the wall, stretching his legs out so they dangled off the edge of the bed. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” She scoffed before she could stop herself, and his gaze flicked up to hers, taking her breath away. (God, how she’d functioned for almost four years without feeling more than a flicker of attraction to this man was unfathomable.) “Really. I want to know what’s going on with you.” His hand landed on her knee, light as a bird but blazingly warm even through her blankets. “All I want is for you to let me in.”

A swell of emotion swept up from somewhere in her chest, causing her eyes to prick with tears for the thousandth time. She looked away and sniffed as discreetly as possible — which wasn’t very, she assumed, since he immediately reached over and handed her a tissue from the pack he kept stashed in his pockets. “I mean, if you want me to complain, I can do that,” she muttered, tamping down another flow of tears through willpower. “I can complain about fucking anything.”

David’s laugh made her turn back toward him, because it didn’t have a trace of sadness or pity or anything she’d expected. It was so purely, entirely delighted , more than even he could fake, and he was looking at her like she’d said something surprising and wonderful.

“You really like it,” she blurted out, unable to hide the awe in her voice. “That I’m like this. Whiny and —” she waved vaguely “— bitchy, and whatever.”

“I don’t.” He shook his head and her stomach plummeted. But as she took a breath to respond he shifted closer, gently cupping the back of her neck so he could tap his forehead against hers. “I love it, Gwen. I love everything about you.”

A laugh burbled out of her before she could stop it, and she pulled away to hide her face. “Oh my god. You bastard. You’re so cheesy.”

His fingers closed around her wrists, tugging her palms away from her face. “I love you,” he said, kissing the skin she’d covered with her hands — the tip of her nose, each cheek, her top and bottom lip, her eyebrows.

“I love you, too.” She could already tell that if he was going to keep saying that to her she’d spontaneously combust, because this was all too cute and romantic and lovely and she still didn’t fully understand how this was happening, why he didn’t hate her.

But she’d promised she wouldn’t question his decision, whatever it was. She owed him that much.

His smile faded slightly, a faint line appearing between his eyebrows. “What’re you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she lied automatically, and when that only made him sigh she added, “I said I was going to trust you,” hating the note of defensiveness in her voice, because of the two of them she didn’t have much grounds for righteous indignation.

“Then trust me with how you feel.” It should’ve sounded too much like a cliche, something she’d tease him for, but he was right and they both knew it.

She’d put him through hell by not telling him the truth, and they both knew that, too.

Gwen closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and forcing herself to relax. Things were — they seemed okay, didn’t they? Almost normal, but better, because all her ugliness was out there for him to see and he knew about it and he didn’t seem to mind. And wasn’t that something she’d never thought she’d ever actually find? “I don’t get it,” she admitted, her voice sounding small and stupid. “I keep feeling like . . . like I tricked you somehow. Like I didn’t explain well enough why you shouldn’t want me, because if you really got it you wouldn’t be here. Not because I think you’re stupid,” she added quickly, desperately, “because I don’t, really! But — but even smart people can be . . . I don’t know, manipulated?”

The confusion in her voice made her pause, sit back. Manipulated? That couldn’t be right, could it? She wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone, and she was pretty sure you couldn’t manipulate someone by accident.

Or maybe you could; she hadn’t always paid a ton of attention to her psych classes in college.

“I’m sorry,” she managed after a few deeply uncomfortable moments of silence. “I’m trying, I promise, but I understand if . . . you know. Whatever.” (She still hated saying it, especially now that it seemed like it might not happen. Breaking up with David was hard enough without having to say it.)

He put his arm around her shoulders, tugging her into his side and kissing her temple. “Thank you for telling me, Gwen.”

“You’re not mad?”

She felt him shake his head as she rested hers on his shoulder, scooting down to make up for their (lack of) height difference. “I wasn’t really mad when I came back this morning,” he said, “even before I saw everything you’d made. I had some time to cool down, and I . . . started thinking, I guess.”

Gwen wanted to look up at him, but she wanted to soak in his warmth more so she nuzzled into the curve of his neck, inhaling the smells of floral detergent and piney-woodsy cologne left over from the day before. “About what?” she asked, like there could possibly be more than one answer. Like maybe he’d been pondering the sociopolitics of Malaysia or something.

He let out a little huff of laughter, and she knew without looking that he’d glanced up at the ceiling in a slow blink (that he insisted was less rude than rolling his eyes outright, even though it was just as obvious). “You. Everything that’s happened this summer — and before it.” His shoulder shifted slightly under her cheek, a shrug aborted halfway through so she’d be comfortable. “Things started making more sense after everything we talked about tonight. Like the day we . . . well, when you told me about that gentleman you . . . almost took home.”

“He wasn’t a gentleman, he was a douchebag,” she interrupted, immediately feeling like an asshole. But David chuckled and squeezed her closer, like he enjoyed her company even when she was being annoying (which he did; somehow he actually did) and she let herself relax against his side, believe that maybe things were going to be okay after all.

“I’ve thought about the stuff you said a lot since that day. Mostly the parts that made me feel the worst.”

She flinched. “I’m so sorry —” she began, but he cut her off with a kiss to her forehead.

“I have trouble with . . . rejection,” he continued, sounding embarrassed. Like that minor character flaw even came close to the millions of ways she was fucked up. “I — I guess you could call it ‘abandonment issues’? But at first, and for a while, all I could hear were the ways you didn’t . . . seem to want me around anymore.”

“But I did —”

“I know.” Another soft kiss, and she wasn’t sure if it was to reassure her or himself. “I know that now. And I think, knowing that . . . it made what you said sound different.

“You were drunk — I know, you downplayed it, and it wouldn’t have excused . . . but your judgment was still impaired. And you didn’t kiss him. Thinking back, it didn’t even sound like you really wanted to. Did you?” She shook her head, not willing to look up at him because no matter how gently he tried to frame this she still felt like it was her fault. “And I just couldn’t stop thinking, how if this had happened a few years ago you would’ve told that story so much differently. If we were still just friends, maybe. You would’ve stormed into the cabin raging about how some jerk had ‘put his mitts all over you’ —”

Gwen couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing, pushing away from him and resting her head in her hands. “That can’t be how you think I talk!”

“It was an edited version,” he admitted, flushing. His smile was wide enough to illuminate the room, catching and refracting the dreary dawn light. “Please come back?”

She snuggled into his outstretched arms, her heart panging at the plaintive note in his voice. She wrapped herself around him, legs entangled with his and arms squeezing his waist; she’d missed him just as much. “Your impression of me is really bad,” she said with an uncontrollable giggle that made her feel like she was fourteen.

“I’ll work on it.” For a moment he just held her, soaking in the relief of being together and being okay. (At least, that's what she was doing.) “Why did it bother you so much?” he asked after a minute or so. “It doesn’t . . . well, it just doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong.”

“I guess — yeah, maybe not, technically anyway. But you’d just visited and saw how terrible my life is, and I was having an even harder time being a less-shitty version of myself . . .” He made a soft noise, almost pained, and pulled her closer. “So when this asshole showed up and was, like, exactly the type of guy I usually go for, it felt like . . . I don’t know. Like the universe was telling me we didn’t belong together. That sounds stupid. Never mind.” She pressed her face against his chest with an embarrassed groan. “Pretend I said something that doesn’t make me sound like I write horoscopes for a living.”

“I like horoscopes!” he replied, because of course he did. After a moment he added, “Thank you for telling me. It . . . helps confirm some things I was thinking earlier, when I left. Because what you said, and what you’ve been saying for a long time . . . I’ve been hearing it the way that’d hurt me the most, but I think you meant it to make me hate you.” He paused for a second, then added, “Do you think I’m right?”

Gwen shrugged, feeling more than a little like one of his campers receiving an aggressively pacifist talking-to. “Yeah. I don’t . . . like myself all that much.”

“I’ve noticed.” And David pressed another kiss to the top of her head, like he was rewarding her for being honest. Or like he just couldn’t help himself. “You haven’t treated me very well lately, Gwen. And I was — am very unhappy about that. But I don’t think it holds a candle to how you treat yourself.”

She wriggled away enough to sit up and look at him, frowning. “So you’re, what? Willing to come back to a shitty relationship because you feel sorrier for me than for you?” she demanded, even though it would’ve been smarter to just not say anything and enjoy his pity while she still had it.

But again, she said she’d be honest. And the true Gwen was kind of a bitch.

His smile turned sad, and he carefully tucked a flyaway hair behind her ear. “See, that’s what I mean. You never give yourself the benefit of the doubt.” When she frowned, not understanding, he took her hand and began playing with it, wiggling her fingers and twining them with his. “I understand better, now. How you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. And I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m a kid, or — or stupid, or whatever. I know you don’t really think that,” he added as she opened her mouth to argue. “There’s a whole cabin’s worth of proof in the living room that you don’t really think that. That’s why I wanna try again. Miscommunications, misunderstandings . . . those are fixable. And now that I know what’s been going through your head, I don’t think you’ve done anything I can’t forgive.”

Her eyes filled with tears — again, and she was going to die of dehydration if she didn’t get ahold of herself — but this time she couldn’t resent them too much, not when it felt like she was brimming over with hope that was eager to burst free. “What’re you saying, David?”

He shifted back, turning so he was sitting cross-legged facing her, and took both her hands in his. “I keep . . . trying to find a way to say it,” he admitted, looking down at their twined fingers and flushing pink, “because ‘do you want to be my girlfriend again?’ is maybe too middle-school, but ‘dating’ sounds too casual, and —”

Gwen pulled out of his grasp and closed the distance between them, straddling his lap and taking his chin in one hand. His face lifted toward her before his eyes did, darting from her chest to over her shoulder before finally meeting her gaze. She wound her free arm around his shoulders, sliding her fingers into the short, soft hair at the nape of his neck. With the hand cupping his jaw she gently swiped her thumb across his lower lip, slightly chapped but still warm and softer than it looked, each breath skating across her skin feather-light and making her skin prickle. “Yeah,” she said, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead to his, holding back a laugh — or maybe a sob, she wasn’t quite sure; the emotions roiling inside her were too much to separate between happy and sad. “Whatever you’re asking, yes, I want it.”

She felt his smile spread under her thumb before he brushed her hand away, tilting his head so he could kiss her. “Good,” he murmured with a breathless chuckle, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her closer. “I mean, I was pretty sure you’d say that, but still — that’s a relief.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “You idiot.” Her blood turned to ice, and she pulled away from him, stricken. For fuck’s sake, couldn’t she be anything but herself for five minutes? “I didn’t mean — !”

David smiled, far more fondly than she deserved. “I know, Gwen.”

Groaning, she buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m trying, really I am.”

“Don’t.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back until she was upright, looking down at him again. “Please don’t try so hard to be what you think I want. Just be you.”

“Right.” She forced her shoulders to relax, tilting her head back and rolling her neck until it cracked. “I’m . . . gonna have a hard time with that. ‘Just me’ is kind of the worst.”

“I know you think that,” he said, pressing his half-open mouth to the hollow of her collarbone and making her shiver. “And I’ll keep reminding you until you don’t think it anymore.”

She managed a weak chuckle, leaning into his lips as he moved up her neck. “Good luck with that.”

His answering laugh rolled over her skin, warm and teasing. “Haven’t you heard, Gwen? I like projects.”

Jesus. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she tugged him upright, taking a moment to appreciate his gasp that wasn’t just surprise. “I love you,” she said, loosening her grip and kissing his forehead, petting away the furrows her fingers left in his fluffy red hair.

His expression softened. “I love —” he began, and Gwen tightened her hold on his hair and pulled back, just so she could watch his eyes flutter shut and his breath catch, “— y-you too.”

Dragging her palm down the side of his neck, she settled her thumb on his throat, feeling his pulse flutter rapidly, and bent to kiss him again. She hadn’t necessarily meant to turn it into anything, just wanted to feel his lips against hers, but her fingers tightened involuntarily in his hair and he moaned, and it was a lit match dropped down her throat to a stomach full of gasoline, a whoosh of heat blazing to life in the pit of her belly. “David,” she breathed, not so much because she had anything to say but because she needed to say it, to roll the sound of his name around in her mouth, let it melt like chocolate on her tongue and infuse her whole body with sweetness.

“Gwen,” he said, and she thought he was doing the same thing, saying her name just because he could, but then his hands were on her shoulders and he was pushing her away, gentle but firm. “Gwen, wait, we should — talk about this —”

“Oh, shit, yeah. Okay. Sorry.” She sat back, her face warming. But as she settled her weight more firmly in his lap he jolted; and if she’d thought she was embarrassed it was nothing to the way his already-flushed cheeks flamed pink, spreading in blotches up to his hairline and the tips of his ears, down to disappear underneath his bandana. He stammered out an apology, avoiding her eyes even as his cock twitched, like bashfulness could disguise how hard he was against her. She quickly rose back up — the last thing she wanted was to make him feel ashamed, or pressured; everything between them was as tremulous and new as the first time — but realized almost instantly when David squeaked that this just shoved her chest in his face.

She hovered there for an awkward second, the two of them staring at each other in mortified horror. Then his whole expression wavered, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth before quickly flattening into a thin line, and the break in his composure took hers out too. She snorted, and they both burst out laughing. “I’ll just sit over here,” she said through giggles, rolling off his lap and settling on the other side of the bed with her feet curled under her so they were no longer touching. He made a small sad sound like a squeeze toy deflating, and Gwen rolled her eyes and stretched out one leg until her foot brushed his knee. “Here, hold my foot if you’re that lonely. It’s practically holding hands.”

His eyes widened, hands closing around her ankle and setting it on his thigh with something like reverence. “Thank you,” he murmured, gently tracing the outline of her foot with his fingertips. “That was very sweet, you know.”

God, she was blushing, wasn’t she? She had to be. “Yeah,” she agreed, trying to ignore the ticklish feeling as he kept playing with her foot like it was a toy doll. “Felt weird, too. I kinda wanted to insult you or something, just to balance it out.”

He smiled, wiggling her big toe like he was playing that little piggies game she used to do with her nieces when they were babies. “That’s my Gwen.” And he sounded pleased, almost proud, like she’d done something wonderful.

But that was David; even though sometimes he was completely oblivious, sometimes he noticed and appreciated the tiniest, most inconsequential things. That’s my David, she thought, her heart swelling like it was going to burst. “You wanted to talk about something?” she reminded him, waggling her toes to get his attention.

“Oh! Right.” He gently took her foot and set it on the bed next to him, grabbing a pillow and hugging it to his chest. “Sorry, I was getting distracted, and that was the whole point of you moving over there.” (He said it with a pout, like she’d gone to Spain instead of just out of arms’ reach.)

“I thought the whole point of me moving over here was so you could cool down, tiger,” she teased. But when he didn’t respond except to flush darker, his gaze firmly on a fraying edge of the pillowcase in his arms, something weird and hilarious clicked in her head. “Oh my god, are you into feet?”

“No!” He lifted his head to give her a tragically betrayed expression. “Not a weird amount!”

She grinned, poking his thigh with her outstretched foot. “What’s a weird amount?” she asked.

He shrugged, not quite able to maintain the kicked-puppy look when a smile kept trying to break through. “I don’t know. Watching people in heels step on fruit. I don’t like that sort of thing, I’ll have you know,” he added defensively, and for a second Gwen was sure he’d stick his tongue out at her.

“Sure, but you’re into them enough to know those videos exist.”

“I think I’d like to go back to you being nice to me,” he muttered, and she felt a stab of panic before he gently patted her ankle and met her gaze with a slight smile. Like he knew what she was thinking.

So she shoved past her nervousness and said, “But I thought you wanted me to be myself. And as myself, I can’t believe you never told me you were a foot guy!”

“I’m a you guy. And . . . you know. All of you. You’re perfect.”

“Yeah, but the feet are a thing, huh? At least a little bit.” When he didn’t answer she laughed, shaking her head. “So do you, like, want a footjob or something?”

“I really don’t.”

“How have we been dating this long and I didn’t know about this? What other freaky sex things are you hiding?”

“Nothing!” he said, hugging the pillow tighter. After a moment he looked away and added, “I didn’t want you to think I was weird.”

“David.” She leaned forward, waiting for him to look at her and see in her expression just how ridiculous that was. “You can’t get weirder than I am. You know that.” When the color in his face receded just a little bit, and his eyes flicked back toward her hopefully, she sighed and attempted to dredge up one of the strangest kinks in her vast library. “I’d totally fuck Drogon.”

He frowned thoughtfully. “From Game of Thrones? So would I- Iiiiiii mean, s-so would most people.”

“No, not Khal Drogo, Drogon. The dragon. Not like a humanized version, either — just full lizard.”

“Oh.” He smiled a little, almost a smirk, and Gwen felt distinctly, lovingly judged. “That does make me feel better. Thank you.”

“No problem. And tomorrow I’m gonna go into town and get a pedicure, just for you.” She wiggled her toes at him, grinning. “I’m thinking something slutty, like hot pink.”

“Gwen!” He shoved her foot away, laughing. “I was trying to have a serious conversation before you started talking about — about slutty toes and dragons!”

She cracked up too, falling over onto her side and nearly toppling off the bed. “Slutty toes,” she repeated breathlessly, and it took a few minutes to recover; every time they tried to make eye contact they burst out laughing again.

“Okay, okay.” Gwen finally sat back up, trying in vain to smooth her hair out of its mass of tangled bedhead. “I’m sorry, you were trying to say something serious. What’s up?”

“Right.” He took a deep breath, fingers knotting in her blankets until his knuckles were white. “It’s just . . . it was starting to seem like we were going to — um, you know. Be intimate.”

She resisted the urge to tease him for his word choice. “I was open to it, yeah.”

“M-me too! That’s why . . . well. Okay.” He took a deep breath, dragging his hands down his face, and Gwen noticed for the first time how tired he looked.

“Hey, we don’t have to do anything,” she said, shifting closer so she could put her hand on his shoulder. “You know that, right?”

He nodded, patting her hand before brushing it away so she didn’t feel rejected, and once again she felt a rush of love so intense it almost brought tears to her eyes. He could be so simply, effortlessly kind, without even thinking about it. “I do. At least, I think I do. I- I mean, I know I do, but it’s hard to . . .” He waved his hand around his head like his thoughts were scattering birds.

“The night before we . . . well. Ended things.” He flinched at his own words, and she felt the same pain flicker over the surface of her heart.

It’s okay, she reminded herself, wishing she could sweep him up in her arms and block out all the bad memories she’d put there. It still hurts, but we’re going to be okay.

Like he’d been thinking the same thing, David stretched out his hand to find hers, squeezing her fingers. “I said I didn’t want to,” he continued in a rush, “you know. Be together like that. And you . . . seemed to get mad — at me. And then the next day you broke up with me.” He squeezed his eyes shut, taking a shuddering breath that had tears behind it, and she tightened her grip on his hand. “It’s okay,” he said, opening his eyes and giving her a slightly-watery smile. “I’m okay. But I just need to know . . .”

“God, no,” she jumped in, taking up the thread of his question as it trailed off into nothingness. “David, no, it had nothing to do with — I freaked out, but I was already — I mean, I was gonna fall apart over anything, it didn’t have to be that. You didn’t do anything wrong, I promise.” She couldn’t stand it anymore, so she pulled his hand to her lips, kissing his knuckles because she wanted to respect his need for space but she had to touch him or she was going to die.

He swallowed, watching their joined hands for a moment before looking away. “You — that really hurt me, Gwen. I just needed to tell you that.”

All the anger he’d thrown at her in the past several hours, all the pain and frustration, and it was those small, matter-of-fact words that slashed her heart in two. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

She hated apologizing — it always felt weak, or dangerous, or something. Like it was an opening for someone to hate her even more, like she was handing them a weapon to hold over her head for the rest of her life. (It was why she hated receiving them, too; she could be spiteful and vindictive as anyone, but it was uncomfortable watching someone flay themselves in front of her.)

But with David . . . it didn’t feel like she was giving him leverage when she told him she was sorry. She wasn’t scared he’d hold onto it and throw it back in her face someday. She wasn’t resentful of him, and she wasn’t worried about how he’d react.

She wasn’t anything but truly, genuinely sorry.

And he didn’t brush it aside, act like she had no reason to apologize the way she’d half-expected. Either she hadn’t been giving him enough credit, or he’d grown up while she wasn’t paying attention. Maybe a little of both. But whatever the cause, he just stroked her cheek with the backs of his knuckles and nodded, a ghost of his smile returning for a second. “It’s okay,” he said, looking at her like she was — god, like he loved her. “Hearing it helps.”

She wasn’t sure if he needed more than that, but she wasn’t going to let a single doubt linger in his mind. “Seriously, David, you can — I won’t ever be mad at you for saying no, ever. For any reason, or no reason or . . . whatever. It’s okay. It’ll always be okay.”

“I — um, I had a reason.” He spoke fast, his eyes wide like he’d surprised himself. Still, he pressed his lips together into a flat line and met her gaze, clearly nervous but just as clearly not intending to end the conversation until they’d said everything they needed to. He was so brave. “I should’ve mentioned it at the time, but I guess I was scared.”

Gwen snorted, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, I can relate to that.”

He rewarded her with a small, soft smile before continuing, “The thing is, everything had just been so gosh-darned strange between us, and it felt like you were avoiding me all the time — except when we were together like that.” He scratched the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. “It sounds silly, but I couldn’t help but worry that maybe that was . . . all you were interested in me for.”

Her stomach sank. “And then when you said no, and I freaked . . .”

David nodded, his throat moving as he swallowed again. “Yeah,” he murmured, looking away. “It — it sure felt like you only wanted me for that one thing, all of a sudden, and when you couldn’t get it . . .”

“I dumped you,” she finished, covering her mouth in horror. “Oh, David.”  

“I was a little nervous to tell you to stop.” He pulled his hands from hers so he could fidget, twisting his long fingers together. “Earlier — just now. A minute ago. So we could talk. I — I know it wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t stop thinking you might get mad at me again.”

“I wasn’t mad,” she replied, her hands shaking with how badly she wanted to hug him. (And god, what a change from their normal paradigm, that she was the one who had to hold herself back from a hug.) “I mean, I was, but never at you. I was mad at me, for screwing things up. I — you’re right, I was avoiding you, or avoiding talking to you, I guess. Because I didn’t know how to talk to you, how to act so you wouldn’t find out that I’m . . .” Her throat closed, thick and gummy with tears, and she took a deep breath and swallowed them back. “Rotten,” she finished, which was a stupid, melodramatic word but it felt right; it described the way she still felt despite everything, squishy and overripe and putrid. “It was getting harder to hide, once we were together all the time. And when we were fucking —” She couldn’t tiptoe around the words like David, not when she could just say it and watch him flush red. Even her rotted heart skipped a beat whenever he smiled. “It felt like I didn’t have to try so hard. I couldn’t be amazing, but I could make you feel amazing. And if I could do that . . .” She sniffed, looking away and wiping her face clean. “I thought I was letting you know how much you mean to me,” she admitted, the realization coming right on the heels of the words. “I mean, obviously I wasn’t — add that to the list of things I suck at — but when you didn’t want to have sex, it . . . I took it really hard.”

Her face was turned away, so his hand on her shoulder made her jump. “It felt like I was rejecting the only thing you had to offer,” he guessed, his voice soft and sad but no longer on the verge of tears. “Gwen . . .”

“It’s fine,” she said, shaking her head like she could rattle her self-pity out of her head. “That was just me being stupid, I know that. More importantly — seriously.” She looked back at him, at his beautiful open face, at the way he was watching her like she could possibly have something to say that mattered. “It’s never been about sex with you, David,” she said. Felt the encroaching tears yet again and decided to ignore them. If they came, they came; they weren’t going to stop her, because it was the most essential thing in the world that he knew, that he believed her. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, the sex is really good —” He chuckled, blushing exactly the way she’d hoped he would, and it gave her a little glowing spark of strength, “— but it doesn’t even come close to being what I love most about you. None of that stuff —” She gestured toward her bedroom door, and the mess of crafts cluttering their common room. “— comes close. It’s — everything, a billion other things I don’t know how to explain or describe or show you but I love you, so much, more than I’ve ever loved anyone and it scares me, and — I’m rambling. Sorry.” She shrank back, feeling like an idiot again. “I just wanted you to know that. It . . . we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, ever, and I’ll never be mad at you, or disappointed, or anything like that.”

“Thank you, Gwen.” He was quiet for a minute, and she felt the tension ratcheting up in her shoulders with each long, spiraling second. Part of her wanted to snap at him to just say something, finish the damn thought before he gave her a heart attack, but that was her anxiety and regret talking, and she never wanted to take her own issues out on him ever again.

(She probably would, considering what a mess she was. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to do it on purpose.)

“You’re right, though.” David’s voice was a surprise, as was the soft laugh accompanying his words. He was sitting with his head tilted back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling like he could see through it to the fading stars and brightening sky. His gaze dropped to meet hers, and he immediately looked down and away, biting his lip to try and hide a smile. “We are pretty darn great together.”

A massive weight dropped from Gwen’s chest, rolling away like a stone. “Yeah,” she agreed. Then, to test the waters: “I taught you well.”

It worked; he turned back toward her, his shyness replaced with half-serious indignation. “I like to think some of it was natural talent!”

“Ehh,” she teased, holding her hand out flat and seesawing it back and forth in a “so-so” motion. “Pretty sure enthusiasm was doing most of the heavy lifting in the beginning there.”

He crossed his arms over his chest with a disbelieving scoff. “Well, I never!”

She pressed her lips together to keep from giggling. What a dork. “Y’know, I should say we were insanely good. But I dunno, for all I know you’ve totally lost it.” Shaking her head mournfully, she quickly glanced over to make sure he wasn’t actually offended.

His mouth dropped open, his eyes growing wide before narrowing. “I haven’t lost anything!” he snapped, and — oh, the playful irritation in his voice made her stomach twist. Not in the awful sick way she’d been tied up in knots earlier, but with a flush of heat that took her breath away.

Managing a smirk, she laid back on her elbows, a warm glow of satisfaction blooming in her chest as his gaze dropped to her stomach, to the narrow strip of skin where her camisole had ridden up. She waited until he dragged his eyes back up to her, dark and intense like the ocean in a storm, then grinned at him.

“Wanna bet?”

His face lit up — or, not quite. Because his smile was bright and warm as sunshine, but underneath the tenderness was a sharp competitive edge that he almost never turned on her. It was almost intimidating, but the shiver it sent down her spine had nothing to do with fear. “Always,” he replied.

Before she could respond he’d pushed himself to his knees and grabbed her just above her calves; a quick tug forward and Gwen was pulled flat on her back, dragged down the bed until her body was sprawled out beneath him. He let go of her, bracing his hands on either side of her head and bending down to capture her mouth in a kiss.

She curled one hand around the back of his neck and pulled him closer, bending her knees so he was caged between her legs and arching her back to bring as much of her skin against his as possible. He was warm, almost uncomfortably so — her furnace, her own personal sun, and she wanted nothing more than to melt into him. When he abandoned her mouth in favor of trailing long, suckling kisses down her neck she pressed her lips together, biting hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound.

“You could’ve —” A gasp, too sudden for her to swallow it back, and she felt David’s satisfied smirk against the base of her throat as he bit down again. “— given me a concussion, you asshole.”

He hummed in assent, his lips skating up to her ear and his tongue lapping at the sensitive spot just behind it. “I know,” he said mildly, “but I didn’t.”

He gently took her earlobe between his teeth, and she couldn’t help the strangled noise that was somewhere between a moan and a sigh. Grabbing his hair again, she dragged his mouth back for another kiss, enjoying the shudder that rolled down his spine and made him tremble everywhere his body was touching hers. For a few dizzying minutes she held him there, barely allowing either of them to draw breath. His mouth was blood-hot, warmer than even her fevered skin, and she didn’t know exactly where she wanted it because she wanted it everywhere — against hers, his tongue lapping at the roof of her mouth and making her shiver; around one of her nipples, his teeth catching on the pebbled skin; sucking bruises into her inner thighs, closing around her clit, dipping inside her cunt, her asshole, along the sensitive strip of skin between the two. She wanted him to kiss her places that weren’t even close to erotic but she knew would burst into flame if he so much as brushed his lips over them: the bone jutting out from her ankle, the ticklish spot inside her elbow, wherever the fuck he wanted to press the gorgeous wet heat of his mouth she wanted to let him, because from the very first kiss he’d been good, better than he’d had any right to be but time and experience had worked their magic and now his mouth could ruin her; without even trying he could reduce her to twitching, shuddering goo.

“Take this off,” she gasped, not sure if she meant her clothes or his because she was wriggling out from under him and trying to remove both at the same time, her fingers clumsy and shaking with how badly she needed to touch him without any fabric in the way. She struggled to her knees, practically yanking her camisole off and throwing it across the room before hooking her fingers in his belt loops and dragging him close enough for her to undo the buckle. “Come on —”

“So I won?” He laughed breathlessly, untucking his shirt and pulling it over his head in one fluid motion, smugness making him unfairly graceful like he was trying to show off.

“Sure, whatever,” she muttered, because who cared about some bet when he was kneeling half-naked in front of her? They’d had silly, jokey sex but that was not this, not when he was so beautiful she was having trouble looking directly at him, hair mussed and lips damp and swollen and pink blooming in blotches under the light constellations of freckles across his skin. He looked debauched, flushed and obscene even with half his clothes still on, and there wasn’t room in her brain for humor when all she could feel was clawing shaking need. She dropped onto all fours, leaning down to trace the hard outline of his cock with her tongue, and even through his shorts he was burning warm. He sucked in a sharp breath, his pulse spiking under her mouth, and Gwen couldn’t resist closing her lips around the shape of his erection, breathing in the salty-ammonia smell of precome and feeling her mouth water. “David,” she began, but there was no end to that sentence so she lifted her head slightly, bit the delicate ridge of his hipbone where it peeked out from the waist of his shorts, caught him as his hips stuttered forward. She kept him steady, one hand splayed across his lower back, as she rose to her knees without lifting her mouth from his skin: over the barely-there softness of his stomach (no werewolf six-pack here, despite his lean strength), tongue swirling among the faint red hair below his belly button, following the curve of his ribs, just barely brushing one nipple — he made a small, strung-out noise in the back of his throat, almost despairing as she moved on up to his neck — until she found his lips again, dragging him into a bruising, breathless kiss.

When she pulled away David’s smile was gone, drawn out of his mouth and leaving him panting. “Okay,” he murmured, soft and almost reverent, but before she could figure out what specifically was okay he hauled her forward like she weighed nothing, capturing her lips for a second before trailing down her throat, pausing at a sensitive place above her pulse point and biting down hard, sucking the skin between his teeth.

Pain bloomed under his mouth, rippling out into shockwaves of cold-hot pleasure, and when he bit her again she couldn’t hold back a moan. “You’re gonna — leave a mark,” she gasped, gently shoving his head away and running her fingers over the damp skin. It was already tender, and judging by David’s expression, contrite and amused and darkly heated, it was going to be a hell of a hickey. “I can’t hide this!”

“I’m sorry!” he tried, but it wasn’t close to convincing when he couldn’t hide his grin. His eyes drifted down to the mark again and he licked his lips, expression growing dazed for a moment before he snapped back up to look at her face. “I can make you a bandana, if you want. Just until it fades.”

“Fucker.” Gwen laughed, not so much because it was funny but because it was him, and she loved him more than she could possibly stand. Tired of the overheated, confining clothes she was still wearing, she shimmied out of them, tossing her pajama shorts and half-soaked underwear without bothering to see where they landed. “Come here,” she said, pressing her legs together and shivering at the wet slide of her inner thighs and labia, a thousand nerve endings sparking to glistening life. “You can make it up to me.”

She swore she could almost see his mouth water, his gaze dropping between her legs as he took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am,” he said — and they’d never tried that before, but judging by the way his cock twitched and his eyes jumped sheepishly to hers, it was something he’d thought about a lot. Filing the information away for later, she held out her hand and pulled him closer when he took it, resting her forehead against his. It took just the slightest shift in the angle of her head to kiss him again so she did it without thinking, her hand sliding between their bodies to curl loosely around the outline of his erection.

He gasped shakily against her mouth, his hands fluttering up and down her waist like he couldn’t decide where to touch her. One of them dropped to her ass, a light, almost hesitant touch, and she rewarded it with a soft groan; he made a weak noise in the back of his throat and pulled her closer, kneading her ass before slipping lower, between her legs. The heel of his hand brushed teasingly against her clit as he pressed two fingers into her, and she mimicked his pace, gliding her palm down the length of his clothed cock and relishing the way his fingers twitched against her inner walls.

He fingered her like that, slow and steady, for — she didn’t know how long. Lost track of the strokes that sent warmly buzzing tendrils up her spine, lost count of the breaths gasped raggedly between their lips, of the kisses that melted into one another until she wasn’t entirely sure where she was, she was hyper aware of the heartbeat pounding in her clit and every too-gentle drag of his hand but numb to literally everything else that wasn’t right here, wasn’t David —

“Fuck,” she breathed, pressing her forehead against his shoulder with a shuddering sigh. She turned her head and lapped at his throat, sucking his skin into her mouth and biting down hard enough to make his fingers jolt inside her, pressing against her g-spot for one delicious moment. “God, I -- please, David, just make me come, please --”

Another shiver, another twitch of his fingers that took her breath away. “Okay,” he said, his voice strangled and hoarse. He pulled out of her and sat back on his heels. “Lay down, all right?”

Yes, yes, whatever he was thinking was 100% all right with her. She almost kneed him as she scrambled into position, but her embarrassed giggle evaporated as he lowered himself onto his elbows, scooching her up the bed like she weighed nothing and settling between her legs. Alarm cut through her arousal, her mind immediately trying to calculate the last time she’d showered, let alone shaved --

His eyes flicked up to hers, a small smile tugging at his lips. “I know,” he replied before she’d even opened her mouth. “I promise, I really want to.”

Oh, god. She covered her face to muffle a squeak, flopping onto her back and looking up at the ceiling. “I’m that predictable, huh?”

David hummed thoughtfully, the sound vibrating up the inside of her thigh. “Only with some things. Other times you surprise me quite a bit.”

“Yeah?” He kissed the top of her mound, his tongue dipping into the V formed by her lips and just brushing her clit — a teasing touch, his mouth moving away even as she lifted her hips instinctively. “I’m surprising?”

“You are,” he said, the camp-counselor cheer in his voice making what he was doing feel even more obscene. He traced the line of her cunt with his mouth before gently fingering her open. “The first time you did this, for example. That surprised me quite a bit!”

“This?” She knew exactly what he meant — her stomach still dipped and swooped at the memory of kneeling on the floor of his shower, the heady rush of confidence and vulnerability she’d felt looking up at him with his cock at her lips — but she tilted her head back with a sigh and breathed, “Pretty sure I’ve never eaten you out before. Not that I wouldn’t be into that, just saying.”

He gasped and spluttered, pulling back to wipe his mouth and staring at her with wide, shocked eyes, then coughed, tapping his chest with his other hand. “Excuse —?!”

When he lowered his head to cough again and take an unsteady breath, Gwen sat up on her elbows, not sure if she should be amused, worried, or mortified. “Oh my god, please tell me you did not just choke on cunt juice!”

David gave her a disgusted look, shaking his head and clearing his throat. “There had to be another way to word that,” he said, as primly as he could while still struggling to catch his breath. “But — um, you didn’t…w-was a joke, or…?”

“I meant it,” she admitted, “but I get it if you don’t want to, don’t feel pressured either way —”

“No — I want to.” He looked startled by his own words, and immediately dropped his gaze, smoothing his palms down her thighs like he could disguise how his fingers trembled. “Sometime. If — if you do.”

Gwen let the awkward silence linger for another moment, not quite sure how to move forward. “Good. That’s…something to put on the to-do list.”

“Y-yes. Okay.” He did meet her eyes then, brightening. “See, you did it again!”

She frowned. “Did what?”

“Surprised me.” He leaned over her body to tug her into a slow, sweet kiss. When she pulled back to breathe he cupped the back of her neck, holding her close and brushing his nose against hers. “You’re an adventure every day, Gwen,” he murmured.

“Yeah, I’m a real goddamn roller coaster,” she grumbled, shifting her hips upward in a blind search for his touch. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d fucking ride me already.”

David laughed softly against her mouth before turning his attention to her jaw, throat, collarbone — a damp, shivery brush of his tongue against her skin moving down her body. “Well goodness, Gwen, now I’m confused.” She both hated and loved the smug, teasing tone he got whenever her composure cracked. “I could make love to you,” he continued, nipping the skin just below her bellybutton and making her jump, “but I thought you wanted me to do this first.”

He closed his lips around her clit and sucked gently, catching her with an arm behind her back as she arched toward the maddening wet heat of his mouth. Lowering her hips back to the bed with infuriating tenderness, he paused, resting his cheek on her inner thigh and looking up the length of her body. When she met his eyes he smiled, pausing to press a chaste kiss to her leg before returning her gaze.

“What do you want, Gwen?” And he asked it untauntingly. Seriously. Like he wanted nothing more than for her to tell him what to do, and like he’d do it without question.

His sincerity was going to be the death of her, she decided with a groan, burying her hands in her hair and shielding her face from his view with her arms. “Fuck. I don’t know. Everything.”

When it came to David, she always wanted everything.

“That’s a real swell coincidence, then!” He traced the seam where her hip and leg met, then dipped down, dragging his fingertips through the wetness smearing her thighs before swiping them up to circle her clitoris. “Because ‘everything’ is exactly what I’d like to give you.”

She barely had time to absorb the statement before his mouth was on her again, sliding the hood back with his lips before swirling his tongue beneath it and around the exposed clit. It was almost too much, too sensitive, bordering on painful and if he stopped she might actually die; she knotted her fingers in the flimsy sheets to keep from pushing his face harder against her, vaguely aware that she was mumbling nonsensical pleas, an incoherent litany of “oh god yes please fuck don’t stop” —

He didn’t. Without lifting his mouth he braced one hand under her knee and pushed it toward her chest, bending her leg and using two fingers of his other hand to enter her. It took him a second but when he found her g-spot he pressed up hard, stroking with the same rapid pace of his flicking tongue. It was more pressure than she was used to, strangely achy but pleasurably so, and it was impossible not to writhe under his touch as the need to come coiled tighter, dragged her higher, kept her suspended on the brink for a frustrating, dizzying, electrifying moment that stretched like a rubber band…

Then it snapped — a dam breaking, a wave cresting and finally letting gravity take over — and she curled forward with a sob of relief, pleasure rippling through her limbs and turning her bones to liquid, trembling through the aftershocks.

The shift from overwhelmingly perfect to just plain overwhelming was a split second. “Nngh, stop, stop —” She pawed weakly at his head, just barely smacking the edge of his fringe with her fingertips, but he lifted his mouth from her with a look of concern. “You’re fine,” she added quickly, struggling to catch her breath and shivering from the buzz of overstimulation, “s’just too much.”

David nodded, relieved, and sat back, wiping his face with the back of his arm. “Wow,” he murmured, eyes wide and awed. “Wowzers. Gwen, have you ever done that before?”

She sat up, frowning. “Come like a train? Like every time we — whoa.”

The sheets between her legs were wet. Not damp, wet like she’d spilled a glass of water (and cooling rapidly, she realized with a grimace, shifting to avoid the blotchy patch). Presumably the same wetness dripping down David’s chin.

“Oh my god.” She groaned, hiding her face in her hands like if she couldn’t see it, it would disappear. Or feel it slicking her inner thighs. “And uh, not really,” she finally muttered, a belated answer to his question. “Once or twice, but you’ve really gotta work over the g-spot to make it happ --” She glanced up just in time to catch his expression, a flash of recognition mixed with pleased sheepishness. “Which you were.” David quickly looked away, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and flushing pink. “On purpose?”

“I -- I’d read about it, that’s all!” he said, meeting her gaze defensively. “I knew it was, well . . . a thing. That some wom- people can do. And I was -- I’ve seen -- I was curious!” Gwen tried to stifle a laugh and failed, turning it into a choking snort, and he blushed even darker. “I know I should’ve just asked, but I couldn’t figure out how to say . . .”

She waited for him to finish the sentence, but when it became clear he had no intention of doing so, she injected as much demented cheer into her voice as possible and chirped, “‘Golly gee, Gwen, could I try making you squirt sometime?’”

Her imitation of his voice was passable -- she’d spent enough years making fun of him to get good at it -- and though he turned his head away she was positive he rolled his eyes at her. “I don’t know if that counts as bad language or not.”

“Oh no. It’d be so shocking if I said one of the no-no words.”

He chuckled, trying and failing to disguise it as a sigh, and climbed out of bed, tugging the rest of his clothes off. (As he picked up his shirt and wiped his face clean, Gwen quickly bent forward and sniffed the damp spot on the mattress. A little like saline, mostly like nothing. Good to know.)

“So how often do you trawl the internet for sex tips?” she asked, grinning. “Or -- god, tell me you’re not checking out books from the library.”

“Of course not!” He looked horrified at the thought. “And . . . sometimes. More often, after we started dating. I . . .” He paused, looking like he was reconsidering the rest of that sentence, and joined her on the bed to lean back against the headboard. “The time you visited, when I -- used my mouth on you for the first time.” (And what was it about his delicate tiptoeing that made it sound so much more filthy than if he’d said it outright?) “I thought -- or, well, I hoped . . . anyway, I did a little reading. Online, obviously. Just in case.”

So that was how he’d been so goddamn good right off the fucking bat. Always prepared, her boy scout. “Well, I appreciate it,” she said, and sat up, throwing one leg over his lap and draping her arms around his shoulders. “Can I please fuck you now, Mr. Greenwood?”

He sucked in an unsteady breath, his cock twitching up against her; the tip of his head slipped between her outer folds, making them both gasp. “C-condom,” he breathed, his voice raspy and uneven, and she scrambled off his lap before she could give in to the voice in the back of her head insisting they didn’t need to stop and get anything, he was right there , if she’d angled her hips right he could’ve been inside her already --

Her fingers were shaking as she retrieved the foil packet and brought it over, letting him take it with relief. (There was no way she wouldn’t have ripped it, with the way her whole body was trembling like the room had dropped ten degrees.) She watched him roll the latex down his cock, unable to tear her eyes away from how beautifully flushed it was, precome beading at the tip and slicking the inside of the condom.

God, she needed him inside her. Immediately.

David caught her with a breathless laugh as she vaulted back up onto the bed, curling his fingers around her hips and holding her steady. “Careful,” he murmured, and she rolled her eyes, fumbling blindly between her legs to line him up. “Have I- hhha --” He cut off, squeezing his eyes shut with a sigh as the head of his cock pressed into her, “t- told you how beautiful you are?”

Gwen frowned. It was kind of hard to focus on the question when her body was fluttering and pulsing as it adjusted to the welcome intrusion. “A lot?” she guessed, sinking down the last few inches too fast and bottoming out with an electric shock of pain and pleasure. “Fuck.”

“No. Not like that.” He slid one arm between their bodies, parting her folds to see the way she stretched around him. “I -- think you’re so pretty,” he managed, gently tracing her inner labia with his fingertips. “I like your colors. And how we -- um, contrast.”

No one had ever told her that her cunt was pretty before. It was just the kind of stupid, romantic thing David would do. And he was right; his cock looked so pale against her, where she faded from shocking pink into a dark purplish-brown that lightened as it blended into her normal skin tone. There was something about it that reminded her of a sunset -- which was just the kind of stupid, romantic thing David made her think.

“You’re an idiot,” she said, pressing her forehead against his and raising up a few inches, “and I love you so much.”

“I — love you too.” Suddenly he froze, his eyes widening and his grip tightening around her waist, keeping her from moving.

“David? Everything okay?” God, he wasn’t having some kind of terrible flashback, was he? Maybe they shouldn’t be doing this.

His eyes flicked up to hers, and a wide, sunny smile spread across his face like spilled honey. “This is just like the first time.”

It took her a moment to understand what he was talking about, but then it hit her: this was like the night they’d first had sex, from the position to the location to the dizzying, giddy strangeness of it.

God, he was perfect.

“Sort of.” She pressed a hard, quick kiss to his lips before grabbing a fistful of his hair and tugging his head to the side so she could reach his neck; he whimpered and twitched twice, each pulse against her inner walls taking her breath away. “Except I know you way better now.” She punctuated the statement by licking a wide stripe up the side of his throat, then sucked a mark right beside his Adam’s apple, where it’d be safely hidden by his bandana. “All your weak points.”

“I—” He swallowed, tilting his head obediently as she trailed a line of open-mouthed kisses up to his ear, “d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She just hummed; that wasn’t worth dignifying with a real response, and the vibrations against his damp skin made him shiver. Instead she toyed with him: tracing the shell of his ear with her tongue, nipping at his earlobe with just a hint of teeth, exploring the delicate area around his ear and neck she knew so well, had staked her claim to a hundred times before.

David’s breathing quickened, roughened, and she had to tighten her grip on his hair to keep him from squirming. Her hips weren’t moving but his were, minute jolts she was positive he couldn’t control. “Gwen,” he gasped, “please, I -- hhit's too much, I can’t --”

“Could you come like this?” she asked, fighting to keep her own voice level. She could feel his pulse pounding in his cock and in his throat, under her lips; her clit throbbed in response, a metronome perfectly attuned to him. “Without me even moving? Or just . . .” She squeezed her internal muscles, clenching around him in a quick staccato pattern, and lapped her tongue against his neck in time.

“Nnno. Or -- yes?” His fingers tightened around her hips, a helpless spasm. “I don’t know. It’d . . . be torture.”

His voice was so low, wrecked, and Gwen’s stomach went into a dizzying, delicious free-fall. “Good,” she said before she could stop herself, think it through and reject it as sounding weird and freaky. David successfully pulled back from her, his eyes wide and blown out with arousal, and he looked so beautiful she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, “I want to torture you sometime. Nothing you’re not okay with -- and not now, but . . .”

“Yes,” he breathed, and the word was barely out of his mouth before his hand curled around the back of her neck and he was dragging her mouth to his, a kiss made of teeth and desperation with words gasped out against her lips: “yes, god, whatever you want Gwen please I love you --” His other hand slid to cup the curve of her thigh, urge her up onto her knees so he could fuck her properly, pull her back down to set a rhythm that bordered on frantic.

She couldn’t help but laugh, even as she braced her palms against the headboard for better leverage to ride him faster, harder. “Told you,” she teased, biting his lower lip hard enough to drag a breathy whine from him. “Weak.”

That made him moan, drawn-out and broken, and he slipped one hand between their bodies; curling it into a loose fist, he splayed his index and middle fingers just enough for her clit to glide between them, adding an extra jolt of friction every time she moved her hips. Gwen gasped, clutching at his back with one hand as her second orgasm coiled tighter at the base of her spine.

She bit his shoulder because she could, because she had to, because he’d like it and because it was that or scream loud enough to wake the entire camp. “Fuck, god, David --”

He shuddered and buried his face in her hair, his breath hot with a stream of pleasured mumbles beginning and ending in her name --

Gwen didn’t know which of them came first. It didn’t matter, really, because they dragged each other over the edge. His cock was almost painfully hard, unyielding as iron as her muscles tightened and fluttered around it, and the sudden snap upward of his hips as he came nearly knocked her breathless.

She was going to be sore tomorrow. Or . . . later today. She turned her head and mouthed at David’s neck, relishing the sweet-salt taste of his sweat, and let him hold her up as they caught their breath.

“I love you too,” she whispered belatedly. David huffed a weak laugh into her hair, stroking her back with a touch that was light and ticklish. “But we’re sleeping in your room tonight. I don’t wanna deal with the wet spot.”

Yeah, she was going to be sore, and exhausted, and facing a hell of a cleanup both in her bedroom and outside of it.

David groaned and gently pushed her upright, sliding out from under her and taking her hand, like she was a camper who needed to be ushered back to bed. “Phone,” she bleated, weakly reaching for it as they walked past, and he paused to pick it up for her, and in that second she loved him even more, more than she’d ever thought possible.

Worth it.

#campcamp #camp camp roosterteeth #gwenvid #cc gwen #cc david #this ending is too awkward to put in the main tags but fuck it #i spent weeks working on this okay #maybe even months #i am exhausted and cannot look at this anymore #hope y'all like your smut interspersed with pages upon pages of talking #because that's what you're getting #the only reason this isn't a total disaster is raenbows and don't anyone forget it #forestwriting

[joi-in-the-tardis]

30 Questions Meme

I was tagged by @goodtobealunatic Somehow you wind up being the last blog in my notifications most nights when I'm checking my notifications. And I get to you and think !!friend!!. Which, might be a bit strange because I don't think we've actually ever talked. But, I dunno, your blog is a happy place for me. (:

Rules: Answer these 30 questions then tag 20 people you wanna get to know better.

1. Name/Nickname: Joi

2. Gender: I think someone handed me one, but I dropped it and it rolled under the fridge.

3. Star Sign: Capricorn

4. Height: 5’4” (with shoes on)

5. Time: 3:57am

6. Birthday: 12/27

7. Favorite Band: Imagine Dragons (but I don't like their recent releases... sigh)

8. Favorite Solo Artist: Hmm, I dunno

9. Song currently stuck in your head: Asking the Guard from the Tales from the Loop Soundtrack

10. Last movie watched: Greatest Showman

11. Last show watched: Some old episode of Shark Week. 2013, I think?

12. When I created this blog: March 2013? I think. I'm too lazy to look it up. But I didn't use it for a year.

13. What I post: Stuff about me and my life, cute/fluffy things, pretty places, encouragement, nerdy stuff, ocean life, dinosaurs, artwork, various fandoms... My blog is a mess and it is me.

14. Last thing I googled: "Cincinnati Health Dept Complaints"

15. Other blogs of yours: My good omens blog is @sushiandstarlight

16. Following: 691

17. Do you get asks?: Every great once and a while

18. Why you chose your URL: It fit better than the one I had originally

19. Lucky number: Not lucky, but I love the number 3

20. Followers: 1,147

21. Average hours of sleep: 6

22. Play any instruments: Nope, sadly

23. What’re you wearing: Purple halloween pusheen hoodie, grey fuzzy pants with stars, mis-matched fuzzy socks

24. Dream job: I don't dream of working

25. Favorite food: Maryland steamed crabs, most anything potato related

26. Nationality: American

27. Favorite song: Wow yeah I can't pick just one lol

28. Last song you listened to: Climbing the Tower from the Tales from the Loop Soundtrack

29. Last book you read: I read a little bit more of Christpher Eccleston's book I Love the Bones of You

30. 3 fictional universes you’d love to live in: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Marvel (but Wonder Woman specific... I just wanna live on Themyscira)

Tagging: I have run out of time, but anyone who wants to play and blame me is more than welcome! And, yes, if you're thinking "nah they don't mean me"... yes, I mean you.

#30 things #tag game #i got tagged in a thing #joi rambles

[lazysharkart]

Cute AND funny. What a catch.

#art #artwork #artists on tumblr #drawing #doodle #illustration #comics #comic #funny #cartoon #funnycomic #originalcomic #shark comic #animal #animal art #shark #lazyshark #the lazy shark runs the universe #cute #flirting #burp

[border-spam]

Leech Lord: Worries

Tyreen - Troy

Always. Constantly, inescapably, Troy.

He's smouldered in the back of her mind as long as she can remember, like a fever. She couldn't not worry about her twin, even as a child it was impossible to block out the cold tightness in her belly that would rise whenever they were apart for any length of time.

She couldn't play alone for an hour without a pang of concern, was he ok? He'd been in bed days... was there something he'd like out here she could bring for him? Maybe Mom would let them play rock soldiers on the mattress if she found some good ones, ones with the little shiny flecks he liked.

The gnawing bite when he'd set out to hunt and she'd be left home with Pop, when keeping him and dad fed was a real problem even without Mom around anymore, the fear that one day he wouldn't come back. He got tired so easy, he only had one hand to grip rock-faces with, he was stubborn... and the concern he'd not forgive her when she'd lash out with words she didn't really want to say after he'd return each time, lost as to how else she could vent how scared for him she'd been.

He nearly died within a week of hitting Pandora. A week.

She didn't like being far from him after, what if his heart started playing up again, what if he fell? What if he was having a weak spell and she wasn't around to pulse energy into his bones with a gentle squeeze of his cold hand in hers. What if he was pushing himself too hard while she was off-world, what if he wasn't sleeping so he could get that stupid stream recording finished for upload, he never listened! She couldn't trust him to stay safe, so she worried.

Always.

That never changed, but what she worried about did over time.

The fear turned sour - less a concern he was overworking and more he was slacking off. He'd not been meeting deadlines recently and she knew it was because he was getting lazy... what if he was whispering behind her back while she was touching base with Maliwan, plotting with his backstabbing Saints to usurp power to his own parasitical throne?

What if he was turning on her? What if he didn't love her the way she loved him anymore, what if he didn't care about their crusade, their holy right? What if he didn't believe she would reach the glory the universe owed her?

...What if he started saying no.

She worries about her twin constantly, and what would happen if he knew how important he really was.

Troy - his "Meds"

(tw: drug use)

The battered little tin is always in a pocket on his left.

Doesn't matter if he's in sweat-stained rags as he grapples with JK's vanguard in the barrack's arena, or full gold and silk regalia at an off world banquet, it's there, rattling quietly, just a hand's reach away if needed.

And when he needs it, he needs it.

The contents are an unorganised medley of chems. He doesn't plan or measure, that's the realm of addicts after all, and he ain't one regardless of what he's scared the people who know him might think. These are tools, not dependencies.

It's stocked with pressed pills and powder sachets stamped with bandit symbols based on instinct, how he's been feeling lately. What he's afraid will rise from the darkness.

The idea of not having it, not being able to run trembling fingers over the pitted surface as he hides the shake by slipping a hand into his coat when he's feeling off, is terrifying. It hadn't been that many years ago when the dented little box mostly contained painkillers and antibiotics, but that shifted over time. Now its purpose feels more sinister than holding back the waves of illness Pandora would throw at him. Now, the drugs help keep him him.

Mood stabilisers, anti depressants, tranquilisers. Hallucinogenic spore powder pressed into the God King's palm by a Bandit high priest with a bone carved mask and reverence in their touch. High quality Blow from that club he trashed in Promethea... The good shit, always clean, always sourced. He's a King - shady deals in alleyways are beneath what he's sweated blood to craft himself into.

Each hits different, clouds his brain and blow his pupils in unique sensations, and he knows his custom assortment by heart. Knows exactly which to snort in a private stall when he feels a rage that's not him creep up his spine in sponsor negotiations. Knows what pill to discretely pop under his tongue to calm the shakes that snake through his ribs on offworld trips, when the corporate suits around him have their bullshit begin to be drowned out by waves of hissing terror clutching at his guts.

"Anxiety", his specialist had said.

Bullshit.

He knows anxious. He knows anger. He knows fear... This is something else.

The drugs haze it away, uncoil the tendrils of something that's not Troy from his mind. Dull the link. Blur his sight and slow his heart - it's enough.

He hates that tin, but the worry of forgetting it one day keeps his hand slipping into that left pocket like a nervous tic, over and over and over.

The contents are probably killing him, but it doesn't matter, least it's his choice. Only Troy controls Troy.

Only he decides what act he plays.

There's no such fucking thing as ghosts.

Seifa - How she looks

It's a constant worry in the back of her mind when in public, that she's going to be outed. That the aesthetic she wears as Ur-Machina, or her sultry little trade-shark persona will fall apart and she'll be left a laughing stock.

The Sei she shows the world is a carefully curated version and that's how she's known.

That mask is how people recognise her character, it can't slip or it could mean people will see her for what she actually is, and THAT ain't acceptable in the slightest. Nuh-uh. She's been pretending to be someone of importance far too long now to let the reality of what a useless piece of junk she is be noticed.

She doesn't give a shit if it comes across as being vain, that's fine! That's easy to work with, part of the persona. Let them think the side glances at her reflection whenever she passes something shiny are outta pride, all she has to do is throw a quick smirk in and it's totally believable that she's checking herself out, not looking for mistakes.

Is her hair ok, does her foundation look rough? Jacket pulled up weird? Nah she's fine - good, check her skin next pass though cause she's feeling nervous and sweating off makeup doesn't do wonders when you're trying to come across as in control. Suck in the goddamn gut. Ass out, cock a hip - power stance. There we go.

She stresses ABOUT stressing about how much she worries.

Maybe it's not actually normal? She has no basis for comparison so can't be sure - this is how things have always been. This is how she survived, by knowing exactly how she needed to look to shift an outcome to her favor or broadcast a confidence that wasn't entirely real.

Keeps a sharp eye on friends, rivals, people she's interested by to see how they manage - does anyone else does this? Is it just her struggling so badly to keep a persona intact that other people don't even have to give a second thought to? She thinks it is... and that just makes her worry about it falling apart even more.

Sei isn't sure if who she is is the makeup and confidence she wears to match an outfit, or the person she is underneath when she's alone. Or, used to be when she was alone anyway, nowadays it's... nicer. Years together and slow steps they may not have noticed her tentatively making have helped her come to grips with how her friends seem to see her the same either way. She doesn't have to be groomed, dressed well, they see Seifa even if she's not sure she is.

Ven doesn't act differently if her hair is done or not, same way he's still Ven if he's in a coiffed updo or messy locks - she's still Sei to him if she's fully styled or looks like a Rakk nest, and it helped.

JK doesn't alter how they treat her regardless of a face of makeup or not, same Sei, same deep chuckled jokes from them or gentle wisdom on long night talks, it doesn't matter what face she's wearing, just like the mask they use has never changed who it belongs to for her.

Troy speaks to her with the exact same close respect or gentle mockery when she's in full ritual gear as when she's just standing in old socks and loose pajama pants she should have tossed years ago. She's not sure he even sees a difference really, or if what she is to him is something that's visual at all. Maybe she's an idea, or a presence. Maybe what Seifa is to him is what he feels when he sits close enough to accidentally brush against her side.

How he looks at her never shifts - it's her he's seeing, and she matters to him regardless of what role she's playing.

It's helped, having friends. Knowing they see her as what she is and not an act, but it's not changed the constant nervousness that goes hand in hand with acting in public as Saint Ur-Machina, or Seifa A'rosk.

Little steps... little steps.

#borderlands #borderlands 3 #bl3 #troy calypso #tyreen calypso #calypso twins #seifa #leech lord #my hcs #my writing #fanfic

[starry-kin-cafe]

~ intro ~

welcome to my cafe!! here i give out a lot of things to anyone and everyone! i refer to this blog as starry cafe and everything is cafe themed. this blog is mainly for those who kin from the media i do orders for. please read through everything before interacting! 

the rest of the post is under the cut!

im mod alex, and im a trans demiboy that uses he/they pronouns! i am a neurodivergent minor and am currently the only mod working on orders. i may not be able to deliver orders for some periods of time due to school, and i apologize in advance!

you may call me starry or lati if you’d prefer to!

you may also call me by my kin names too! 

current kin name list: sorbet, hunter, koto

~ dni criteria ~

do not interact if you are:

racist

ableist

a p\dophile/MAP

lgbtq+phobic (homophobic, transphobic, etc.)

anti neopronouns

anti xenogender

transmed

a terf

a nazi

kinphobic/anti kin

“super straight” or anything similar (the identity is inherently transphobic) 

a proshipper/anti-anti

a nsfw and/or kink blog

inc/stual or support inc/st

just here to troll/spam the ask box

if your name is tyr, i would prefer if you use a different name

~ sources ~

main sources: 

danganronpa (localized games only)

cookie run: ovenbreak

doki doki literature club

the owl house

animal crossing

bug fables: the everlasting sapling

other sources: 

(i may have to deny requests for these due to limited knowledge)

danganronpa 3: end of hope’s peak academy

danganronpa zero

genshin impact

my little pony: friendship is magic

undertale/deltarune

steven universe

~ blacklist ~

h/ji towa

monaca x nagisa shingetsu (danganronpa)

despair!junko enoshima x anyone (non despair is okay! i have separate non despair junko sprites i can use) 

boscha x willow (the owl house) 

pre-timeskip spike x any adult character (examples: any of the mane 6 x spike will not be done) (mlp:fim)

~ the menu ~

edits:

icons (can have multiple characters, specific themes, and/or lgbtq+ stuff!)

backgrounds (phones and pc only)

aesthetic/mood boards

ship edits (only if the characters have fullbody or halfbody sprites i can use)

minor sprite edits (danganronpa, cookie run, bug fables, and ddlc only) 

art/writing:

doodles (mainly sketches, i will not accept requests that are too complex or have more than 5 characters in them)

headcanons/small write-ups (they might be called something else but im not sure. ill basically do a bulleted list of how i believe the character would react) (these will take longer to come out and can only be done for main sources)

misc:

kin help (basically what other blogs would call kin assigning. i take kinning to be very personal so i am uncomfortable with assigning people kins, but i can recommend some characters for you to consider!) (please specify which sources you’d like for me to pick from or ill default to my main sources) (this is not for canon calls, all asks in that style will be denied)

meme edits/doodles (please specify the character[s] and specify the meme. i can edit videos as well, but those will be a lot more simple)

opinions/personal headcanons (ask for my opinion for anything from any source, includes fandom specific things as long as they dont have things that are on the blacklist)

~ other important things ~

you will have to like a post if you use anything in it. reblogs and credit are also encouraged and appreciated!

i have a main blog mainly for my art and ramblings. it is undergoing some rebranding so i cant link it rn!

if i use my art in any of my edits, credit is required

the blog is currently cafe themed so tags and such will have that theme. i will be referring to requests as orders and anons as customers and other terminology that has not been decided yet  

i use tone indicators when i feel they should be included

i use they/them for chihiro fujisaki 

i use he/they for sorbet shark cookie (i will try to use they but im a dumb kinnie that self projects way too much so i will slip up sometimes sfhhdfjg) 

i may use they/them for mukuro ikusaba (when im in a mukuro shift i get uncomfortable with mukuro being related to things that could be perceived as feminine, which includes her canon pronouns [she/her]) 

~ outro ~

that’s it! im sorry for such a long introduction post, im too lazy to make a carrd haha

i hope you enjoy your stay at the starry cafe!! 

#kin blog #kin help #kin edits #intro post #also gonna use this as a tag dump #~ mod alex #~ customer question #~ customer small talk #~ ooc #~ order up! the request has been delivered #~ returning customer #~ the menu doesnt have that item! the request will have to be denied #~ this item needs some specifications. the request needs some more information to be accepted #~ promo #~ personal order

[heartslogos]

mafia rewrite - The Nightwing

Richard Grayson walks out of the thick, steel, mirrored elevator doors straight past the shining, gleaming, modern, glass and chrome waiting area and straight into the heart of the cool, elegant Iceberg Lounge.

The Iceberg Lounge has been host to ambassadors, vandals, thieves, presidents, models, princes, billionaires, genius savants, call girls, bus boys, and every single person in between. The Iceberg Lounge has seen catastrophe, it’s seen ruin, it’s seen blood and murder, it’s seen parties that, from street level made the glass walled lounge look like a shining beacon of pure white. The Iceberg Lounge has had many names, many renovations, many changes of management, and withstood them all with a timeless grace.

The Iceberg Lounge, currently, plays host to a — compared to its normal volume — small and subdued crowd. Murmurs of death, blood, change, and escape carry over martini glasses, underneath swirling kinetic aluminum and steel light fixtures, slithering and insidious into the ears of every single moving body present. All of them, in their gossip, complicit.

Richard Grayson cuts the crowd and cuts a terrific — in the oldest sense of the word — figure. His suit is the black of Gotham, the black of its royal Wayne blood. The black of omens and death and the distant winter sky come to bear down on the trailing ends of summer as it runs in the opposite direction.

He’s always been known as the least violent Wayne. But least violent does not mean non-violent. Not when the comparisons are the rest of the Waynes.

A nurse shark is still a shark, even if you compare it to a megaladon. A butterfly knife is still a blade even, when compared to a zweihandler. Carbon monoxide is still a poison, even when compared to cyanide.

A bullet is a bullet no matter what kind of name you give it.

This one’s name is the Nightwing.

Even as a boy, he flittered and floated and glided through crowds like this. A strange figure in the gowns and tuxedos of Gotham’s socialites, and university night club crawlers, and the booming and bustling pub crawlers down narrow sidewalks with sports bars and dives.

A man made to fly through the night.

Richard Grayson glides into the Iceberg Lounge. Orca, seal, predator. And through schools of silver and gold glimmering fish that part as though they had suddenly turned hydrophobic he is untouched. Unmoved.

He keeps walking.

He walks up the spiral staircase to the VIP lounges. He walks towards the edge of the platform that overlooks the rest of the lounge. He walks up to a table set for one and he sits across the other occupant.

As he sits a chair materializes for him before he could fall. As though the universe and gravity had joined hands and conspired. As if the world could not conceive of a place where Richard Grayson does not get a seat at the table. As if this dimension could not fathom the golden son of Gotham being disappointed.

Or, more realistically, as though a panicked attendant realized that blood could be spilled tonight if even one thing fell out of place and quickly kicked a chair into motion, into another attendant’s body and that other attendant, carrying the same fear as the first, hustled to have the chair in position and ready to slide it in as Richard Grayson’s body entered its sure and unbothered controlled fall.

Richard Grayson unbuttons his suit jacket as he sits in this seat provided by fear, long legs crossing as he looks around the lounge. And then he does a slow, quiet, dangerous scan of the person in front of him.

He gestures around them with a lazy twist of his wrist.

“Ten million.” His beatific smile spreads like a plume of blood in water. He waits. The best predators know how to do this.

Eric Shin closes his eyes and breathes what could possibly be one of his last breaths and opens them again. Richard Grayson is waiting for his response.

“What?” He croaks out instead.

“That’s how much it cost to buy you,” Richard Grayson says. “Ten million. For someone from your circuit of the market? Entry to the VIP are of the Iceberg is at least five million per quarter. Minimum. Trust me. I know how much it costs to get into these kind of places. And you haven’t earned VIP seating. The Lucky Hand is lucky to barely be alive right now. Remind me, by who’s grace?”

“Yours,” Eric whispers against his will. The word slides out like bubbles from a drowning man.

“Exactly right. And when was that?”

Eric closes his eyes, and prays for a swifter death than this one of small cuts. “Seven years ago.” He swallows, throat dry, eyes stinging. “When the Dubelz ran across the Whispers on their hunt for the man who killed their leader and the violence spilled over onto into a war along the entire Port Adams and started getting the Lucky Hand’s shipments sunk in harbor as collateral.”

“Right, right. Excellent memory, Eric. Excellent memory. So. Where was I? Ah. Five million per quarter, which the Hand hasn’t been pulling in for you of all people to be getting into the VIP Iceberg Lounge. So it’s not coming from that business. The car is new. Imported, based on the interior and the relatively new plates. That’s about seven hundred just to bring over. And I know that thing isn’t going to be meeting US standards of emissions so that’s — let’s lowball it, say two grand? Three grand? To get enough people to rubber stamp those forms. Now, I’m not too hot on the numbers. So let’s make this easy. I’m going to place your car, fees and bribes and all, somewhere in the range of three hundred grand.”

Grayson taps his middle and index finger on the white cloth covered table as he watches Eric with bright, terrible eyes.

“And if I’m right that’s about — well. Still a lot more than you’d be worth normally. But you’re being paid for silence. And you’re being paid for dying.” Richard Grayson’s mouth twitches up at the corners. “You sold your life for ten, Eric. So far you’ve got VIP entrance to the lounge — which, mind you, isn’t going to last and isn’t refundable. The Penguin’s got a nose for business and he knows that you having entry to his lounge is just going to be earning him a whole lot of grief —, you’ve got a nice imported car that ignores US regulations, and let’s see. Let’s have a look at you. That’s tailored. You’re not buying that off the rack and that takes out everything under five hundred. At a glance I’d say that’s eight thousand. And the watch? A Submariner? Can’t get that in store unless you’ve got a name like mine. You’re looking black market and if you’re smart you’re paying extra for paperwork and someone to scrub it. Base price alone for the green dial is twenty grand. You’ve been burning through that blood money.”

“What do you want?” Eric asks.

Grayson leans forward, leopard seal and killer whale, and descending fury.

“You’re a smart man. The Waynes interfered to spare the Hand because you made a very good case for why we should. And for the past seven years we’ve been good neighbors. We’ve never had a problem with you. Until today. One hell of a problem to choose to be, Eric. I want you to tell me who paid you ten million dollars to give up your life and keep your silence. Because we traced the guns used at the shootout. And those guns and those cars came through Port Adams. And we traced records of those cars and plates and found them cruising up the Old Highway. And if they’re going up Old Highway and if they’re being supplied through Port Adams there’s no way in hell that the Lucky Hand didn’t see that coming.”

Grayson’s blue eyes burn with awful fire.

The Nightwing circles. The Nightwing descends.

“And you didn’t say anything. Someone paid you off. And how damn cheap of a pay off it was. Ten million? If I were in your position and being asked to keep my silence about any kind of whisper of a hallucination about Tim Drake being hunted like a dog through the streets of Gotham in broad daylight I would be asking for the keys to the diamond vaults. I’d be asking for the moon and the stars. Ten million.” The man leans back in his seat, face incredulous as he takes Eric in. “That’s all you were worth. I mean. Sure. I wouldn’t have paid you ten million  to tell me this information before hand if I knew about it. But you’d still be alive, you know?”

Grayson flags a waiter over.

“You must have realized,” Grayson says as he peruses the liquor menu, “That regardless of whether Tim lived or died, someone would have found you.”

Eric doesn’t cry. He signed his death certificate weeks ago when he watched those first ships start to unload their guns into the storage facilities next to his own; when he took the money; when he failed to call any of the Waynes to say something, anything, over the past days when the plot came to its finalization.

“He’s alive, by the way. In case you were wondering.” Grayson raises his voice a little so it projects over the dead silence of the lounge. “My brother’s faced worse before. He’s alive. And you know that egghead remembers every single face that was present. License plates, too. Kid’s messed up, his priorities are all wrong. If it were me I’d be focused on wondering something more simple, you know? Like who I last talked to and if I said anything cool. Well. That’s why he’s head of W.E. and not me. I don’t have a head for business.”

He taps something on the liquor menu, handing it back to the waiter.

“Out of consideration for the past years of you being a good neighbor, I’ll let you have one last drink,” Grayson says. “My treat, seeing as how the Penguin is revoking all your access. Don’t worry. You’re not dead yet. I’ll be needing you later. You haven’t given me any names yet. And I promised Cobblepot I wouldn’t make a mess of his lounge. He just got this floor redone, you know? I missed the grand re-opening.”

Grayson looks around, smiling and nodding his divine approval.

“Personally, I think it’s a little too minimalist modern, but compared to before I like it. It’s quiet. Easy on the eye. Excellent balance and color coordination, though. Spot on. I’d ask Cobblepot who his designer was except I don’t have anything I want to tear down and rebuild. I’m more in the mood for the tearing down, frankly. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a list of people to get to before someone else does.”

Grayson pauses. “And by someone else I mean another Wayne. The rest of the people in this family have no respect. Between Jason and Cassandra there isn’t enough to around, you know? They ruin everything they get their hands on. Usually so no one else can use it. Mostly so that I don’t get to use it, really. So I’m in something of a race against the clock to get everything I want done tonight. Lucky you, you were near the top of the list. Alright. I’ll leave you to that final drink. And when you’re done with that drink you’re going to get into the car I’ll have the Penguin pull around for you. Before I leave is there anything you want to say?”

Eric swallows roughly, slowly moving his eyes to met Grayson’s. A dead man has nothing to fear of asking a last second boon from his executioner.

“In punishing me will you spare the Hand?”

Grayson looks momentarily surprised.

Eric gestures around them. “They bought me. Not the Hand. My silence. My trespass. My wrong. Not a single cent of the money has gone to the Lucky Hand. You can check the accounts. It’s all with me, still. Tell me now. Give me this one certainty. Will you spare the Hand, or have I doomed us all?”

Grayson considers him. And then he leans forward, all blue eyes and terrific face.

“Tell me,” He says softly, “Tell me why you accepted the pay off.”

“Because no matter who won to rule Gotham — the Waynes or the plotting syndicates — it wouldn’t matter for us,” Eric confesses. “The syndicates have a backer. And under this backer the Hand would never have made it. Stay silent and earn the Wayne’s wrath is to perish. To speak to you of this plot and be turned on by the plotters who surround the Hand’s territory on all sides is immediate suicide. If the plotters won this battle but lost the war we would perish. If I was silent and you lost the plotters would still remove the Hand from the playing field for whatever excuse they could find. In every situation the Lucky Hand would have to fold.”

Grayson closes his eyes, bringing up a hand to press at his temples. It obscures his face for one moment of relief on Eric’s part.

“I will not act on the Lucky Hand for this,” he finally says, drawing up, buttoning his suit jacket once more. “That’s my personal statement on the matter. But as you can guess, the Wayne family’s many arms are rarely in agreement. Pull a repeat of seven years ago. Convince us. For what it’s worth — I think you have a shot at it.”

#heartsfic #c: a star going red giant

[inclineto]

Books, November - December 2020

The Relentless Moon - Mary Robinette Kowal [I...was not prepared for an eating disorder to drive as much of the plot as it does; maybe you should be]

How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea - Tristan Gooley

Spoiler Alert - Olivia Dade [This could have gone so wrong; honestly, I expected to ditch it in the first two chapters, because usually I HATE giddy novels about fandom...and yet! it turned out to be wish fulfillment in the best possible way, somehow despite the inclusion of multiple tropes that I also dislike (least spoilery: “I betrayed your trust by not telling you my terrible secret that involves you when I had the opportunity, and now you can never know,” when that will obviously only make the eventual inevitable reveal much worse). Anyway: if you wanted actor RPF/fandom AU for a canon that doesn’t exist, here you go.]

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait - Bathsheba Demuth

Desire and the Deep Blue Sea - Olivia Dade

The Way Past Winter - Kiran Millwood Hargrave [dnf]

Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism - Seyward Darby

Swordspoint - Ellen Kushner

Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat: A Biography - Oliver Soden

Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers *

Yes, I’m Hot in This: The Hilarious Truth About Life in a Hijab - Huda Fahmy [I introduced this artist to a former boss, whose reaction was to immediately purchase and lend me every book she’s published; I’m overdue to mail this one back (and if your thought was “that book exchange sounds backwards,” well, ...yes)]

One by One - Ruth Ware [it’s fine, I didn’t have anywhere to go the next morning, I didn’t mind staying up until 2:30 to finish this, it’s fine]

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik

Solutions and Other Problems - Allie Brosh

The House of the Four Winds - Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory

There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People - Emily McDowell and Kelsey Crowe [self-help is not usually my genre, but given that I’ve written so many condolence cards this year that I’ve run out of condolence card-appropriate stationary - archives love using scenes from Hamlet on their exhibition giveaway cards, and they’re absolutely not okay to use for...really any occasion, but especially death - and am utterly unable to tell whether anything I’m writing is any good, and that my standard How To Be A Better Person manual is an etiquette book from the 1930s, what could it hurt?]

Orlando - Virginia Woolf

Around My French Table: 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours - Dorie Greenspan

Return of the Thief - Megan Whalen Turner

Spectred Isle - KJ Charles [still really fond of this one; still really want the lesbian ghost sequel]

Division Bells - Iona Datt Sharma [there’s one scene that threw me out of the world, and I’d kind of love to see whether it got editorial notes and if so, what...but on the other hand, I wasn’t expecting this to make me cry, and it did]

Serpentine - Philip Pullman, illustrated by Tom Duxbury [the story is slight; what you want to read this for are the illustrations, which are delightful]

The Rakess - Scarlet Peckham

The Midnight Bargain - C. L. Polk

The House of Green Turf - Ellis Peters

Beach Read - Emily Henry

Not the End of the World - Kate Atkinson

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments - Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Eleventh Hour - Elin Gregory

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick - Richard J. King [Let’s get this right out there: “Cetology” is my favorite chapter in the entire novel; I think it’s brilliant and fabulously funny and I loathe the lazy “everybody hates ‘Cetology’” trope that shows up everywhere - looking at you, Dave Malloy! - (although my mother tells me that her students did, indeed, universally despise it, which I find incomprehensible), so I’m always a little salty on approaching any Melville criticism: will they disrespect ‘Cetology”??? Sure enough, it’s there, but at least it’s on the way to explaining why you ought to appreciate it.]

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love - ed. Anne Fadiman [the essay to read is Diana Kappel-Smith on the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America]

Why Birds Sing - Nina Berkhout

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country - Louise Erdrich

Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

Where the Wild Ladies Are - Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton * [completely won over by this linked collection of present-day yōkai stories]

Ammonite - Nicola Griffith

Or What You Will - Jo Walton

Vesper Flights - Helen Macdonald

La Belle Sauvage - Philip Pullman [I’m fascinated to discover that the sequence I remember from reading this the first time doesn’t start until more than halfway through! He can tell a riveting story, so I wish I trusted Pullman even a tiny bit...but I don’t.]

Written in the Stars - Alexandria Bellefleur

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) - Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling [some of this would never be funny; it’s possible I’d find parts of it funnier if libertarians didn’t make me so damn angry]

The Glass Magician - Caroline Stevermer

#books 2020 #books practical and pleasurable #apparently 2020 in romance novels is the year everyone has a cathartic boundary setting conversation with their parents #the duodecimo whale

[0000507]

Into the Spider-verse, but make it about the Umbrella Academy

Album challenge: Umbrella Academy Edition, i.e. I take a songlist and try and attribute each song to a character.

Song lyrics and (my personal, probably inaccurate) character analysis under the cut. Fair warning, long ass post is long.

So I’m starting this challenge with the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse album because I’ve been listening to it (a lot) lately.

01. What’s Up Danger by Blackway & Black Caviar is, to me, very much a Five song. Like, just check out these lyrics:

Ayy, gettin' old, they doubted us Makes it that more marvelous … Two-hundred miles-per-hour wit' a blindfold on (on) Mama always askin', "Where did I go wrong?" (wrong) What's up, danger? Ah, what's up, danger? Traveled two-hundred miles, I'm knockin' at your door And I don't really care if you ain't done wrong, come on What's up, danger? (Danger) D-don't be a stranger (stranger) I like it when trouble brews, I won't dare change I like it when there's turbulence on my airplanes I like it when I sense things I can't see yet Swimmin' with sharks when they ain't feed yet 'Cause I like high chances that I might lose I like it all on the edge just like you, ayy I like tall buildings so I can leap off of 'em I go hard wit' it no matter how dark it is If I'm crazy, I'm on my own If I'm waitin', it's on my throne If I sound lazy, just ignore my tone 'Cause I'm always gonna answer when you call my phone Like, what's up, danger? (Danger) Like, what's up, danger? Can't stop me now I said, "I got you now" I'm right here at your door I won't leave, I want more What's up, danger?

02. Next up we have Sunflower by Post Malone & Swae Lee which, to be honest, gives me such heavy Vanya vibes I can’t even. More so due to the song itself than the lyrics, but they’re still pretty accurate. That smooth af sound, tho.

Give me a reason to (to, to) Oh, every time I'm walkin' out (ayy) I can hear you tellin' me to turn around Fightin' for my trust and you won't back down Even if we gotta risk it all right now, oh (now) I know you're scared of the unknown (known) You don't wanna be alone (alone) I know I always come and go (and go) But it's out of my control And you'll be left in the dust Unless I stuck by ya

03. Next we have Way Up by Jaden Smith, which, despite being a boppin’ song, really didn’t remind me of anyone in particular until I really sat down and read the lyrics. So I’m going to attribute this one (tentatively) to all of the seven, though I’m leaning a little heavier towards Luther than the rest. 

I went from boy to a man, wow (man) Opposition had to stand down Man I had to make a perfect plan, now I'm on the wave (Wave, wave, wave) I had to fight for the city (for the city) I had to fight for the people (for the people) You gotta do what all leaders do (go) Everyone here, we believe in you (yeah) Know you can be a hero 'cause we seen you do it (woo) And this is the time that we needin' you (you) Everyone is here to see you move (move) Winnin', we winnin', we winnin' (we winnin') We put a world on a wave (wave) And every time you swinging through the city You are the saving the day (let's go) ... We had to fight for the town (town) Now there's no villains allowed ('lowed) Everyone cheer in the crowd But I'm still way up, I'm over the clouds (clouds) We had to fight for the city (city) Competition was lethal (lethal) Honestly it's no biggie (biggie) I had to do what all leaders do ... They always hate on us, but they can't do it without us Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, we out here cleanin' the streets (streets) We don't accept the defeat ('feat) We keep on going until we win (win) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all of 'em weak in the knees (knees) Deer in headlights when they freeze (freeze) But we keep on going until we win

04. Familia by Nicki Minaj & Anuel AA ft. Bantu is, without a single doubt, representative of all of the Hargreeves siblings. Full stop.

Father, father, unforgivable This is my house, you made it personal It's always trouble when they go too far Nobody mess with my familia Father, father, could you bless his soul? He talking crazy, I may lose control

05. The lyrics don’t necessarily fit in some places, but the general tone and feel of Invincible by Amine still makes it a Luther song in my book.

I wanna, I wanna fly right now I wanna see all my homies get down I wanna feel like I can't come down I got a dream so I can't stop now I gotta stop feeling invisible And start feeling invincible Hate feeling impossible The hardest thing is believing in your dreams Stop feeling invisible And start feeling invincible Hate feeling impossible The hardest thing is believing in your dreams I feel like a stranger to myself And sometimes that feels dangerous But I'll bet you'll see me For who I truly am, maybe not if it wasn't bland Some days I look in mirrors and I wonder who's that man

06. Start a Riot by DUCKWRTH & Shaboozey is Diego’s official anthem don’t @ me. The dude probably blasts this when he’s taking down bad guys. A bit of shade, a bit of bass, I can fully see Diego rocking to this song. 

When I say, "Brooklyn, stand up" (stand up) You better just fix your posture And every hero needs his theme song So, who in here tryna You ain't got a chance, boy What you think? (Huh?) I thrown in everything but the kitchen sink (yeah) I try to be friendly in the neighborhood (okay) I know all the little grannies wanna sip they tea (yeah) And here you come, all barging in (huh?) All ugly like a brown fur cardigan We receive the monologue and the arguing I'm like who in here tryna start a riot? … If you bump that action, it don't matter Just let me know, oh, know Make way (make way) I'm comin' through With my crew to make 'em pay I don't need no super suit I'm feelin' brave Don't be a hero Turn around and walk away … Every day is like a sticky situation When evil's looking for a chance (for a chance, ooh) And I know we are the newest generation (newest, newest) We got the power in our hands

07. Hide by Juice WRLD ft. Seezyn is, for me, all about Allison and how having and losing Claire changed her as a person. This is a more sorrowful song, but I still think it fits her. Slow, more laid back, but still heartfelt.

She made me leave the thrills at home And I'm fine with it She really made me lose control I'ma let my love unfold We're just two lost souls But we're fine with it There's love at my front door, short notice You're not like the same girls I notice Think I met my soul mate Yeah, I know it When it gets dark outside In you I confide You help me face my demons I won't hide, hide Girls like you are hard to find I hope you don't mind If I give you the time of your life … Life is not the same With your pictures in my frame Now that you're here I want nothing to change You pick me up when I'm down I need you around You seen me through my darkest times Girl, is there something that you try to find? You brought meaning to my life All because of you, I do right Because of you, I have a purpose Fight for the world, because you're worth it

08. Oof, this next song. Despite having a nice little lo-fi beat and a lighter sound going on, in the context of his experiences I really do think that Memories by Thutmose personifies Ben (both the Umbrella and Sparrow versions) and, to an extension, Klaus (seeing as dead!Ben can only interact with the world through him). 

My memories came back In the form of someone else … Memories It's gon' take some getting used to Memories Feel the pain when it hits you Memories Don't you ever let them fool you Don't you ever let them fool you 'Cause I know that you know that it ain't true I learned the hard way about trust About us, about us You sin and be on your high horse We're not so stable anymore What's left if I give you my all?

09. Save The Day by Ski Mask The Slump God & Jacquees ft. Coi Leray & lougotcash was a tough one, because the sound really didn’t fit in with anyone and I wasn’t really feeling it in regards to the group at large, but then I started digging into the lyrics and...

I pull up and save the day Don't want any problems, I'll be a call away I'm ready for action, fly without a cape I'm one of those ones, they'll never beat me

Okay, fair enough, this one can go into the “All” category. But, y’all, when I tell you I felt my soul ascend when I read this line:

You could still be adopted even though you a sibling

I am positive this song represent all of the siblings, now.

10. It’s time for the angst track, everybody. And let me tell you that Let Go by Beau Young Prince has the reverb, the tone, and the soul crushing lyrics for the job. It’s universal angst, too, because this could honestly apply to any of the seven.

Sometimes I don't really know myself Devil on my back, pray for me, need help Angel in the front tryna guide my steps Who do you call when you need some help? Who do you call when you by yourself? Who do you call when you feel down low? I just wanna scream, I just wanna explode … Violence in the streets, I just wanna calm the beast All these problems I'm just fightin' with myself are enemies Looking for my peace while I'm (Looking for my peace while I'm) I just wanna swing and fly away (fly away) I just wanna see a better day (yeah) I just wanna soar and never drown (never drown) I'm looking for my happiness now (now) I just wanna swing and fly away (fly away) I just wanna see a better day (a better day) I just wanna soar and never drown (drown) I'm looking for my happiness now, yeah

11. Scared of the Dark by Lil Wayne & Ty Dolla $ign ft XXXTENACION is one of those tracks that immediately hooks you, pulls you in, and then sucker punches you in the feelings. With that in mind, in both a literal and figurative sense, this song is all about Klaus.

I'm not scared of the dark I'm not running, running, running No, I'm not afraid of the fall I'm not scared, not at all Why would a star, a star ever be afraid of the dark? I'm not scared I'm not scared, even from the start I'm not scared of the dark Of the dark, mmm Tunechi I ain't never scared and I ain't never horrified I just look down at my Rolex, it said it's the darkest times I ain't never terrified, I ain't never petrified You know I see dead people, I just tell 'em, "Get a life" I ain't never scurred, I'm not sure if that's a word, but I mean every word, feelin' like, "Do not disturb, " wait … You know I can read your mind like I'm the author There's a line for tomorrow and that line's gettin' shorter I'm behind the trigger, what if I am the target? Deep sigh, a sayōnara, I ain't afraid to die It's either goodbye or good mornin', and the skies start to fallin' And I'ma shine in the darkness

12. Elevate by DJ Khalil ft. Denzel Curry, YBN Cordae, SwaVay & Trevor Rich has that kind of upbeat tone, can-do attitude, and fun tempo that immediately makes me want to see a scene where the Hargreeves siblings fight a bunch of baddies (together) to this song.

No millimeter, this is my arena I'm the black widow with a bad stinger And I'll make you scream like a bad singer I'm everything that you wanna be plus more Since there's no heroes anymore Jump out the window, then put the mask on Who the bad man that a man gotta bash on? … They will slander me, I just plan to be Somethin' powerful for my family Tried to balance life and my sanity Show a different side of humanity So amazin', keep appraisin' Save you from a home invasion Chasin' robbers from the bank … When the light shine, I go python I've fallen, on my last lifeline There's no way in my right mind My city up on my back tight How can I possibly act right? I'm Robin Hood, I'm the Black Knight I know you heard 'bout my last fight 'Cause I win, over and over again Battlin' evil, I'm hopin' to win Fightin' my demons, I'm nice for a reason Enticed with the bleedin', I'm showin' my sins How can you expect me to stay sane? Protect me My technique go X speed on high waves and jet skis I jump off this building to save these civilians My strength and my honor is trusted by children I'm ready and willing to fight all these villains No chaos or killings, my style is so brilliant … I may have lost the battle but I will not lose the war I can promise you I will not lose this time

13. And finally, Home by Vince Staples has a soulful kind of sound to it that, combined with the lyrics, reminds me that Five will quite literally do anything, endure anything, kill anything, to get back to and protect his family. It also has a kind of epic choral-esque start and finish to it that felt really nice to listen to.

This morning I woke up in a fortress of distortion I'm at war with my emotions, I'm at war with they enforcement Tryna fight for what's right and got sidetracked Where your mind at? Never mind that Can we think in a blink, you swimmin', you sinkin' You win, you leavin' a head where I've loaded my weapon I stay with my brethren, I pay for protection My prey in my sight so I'm doing what's right and not askin' no questions I wanna be home free Where's one that was lonely? But I'm ready and waitin' For my day of salvation, and I'm patient I'm coming home now I'm coming home … Right where I belong now Right where I belong They looking for saviors, I'm looking for safety They never gon' break me, take me Down on my knees, believe I'm never gon' beg or plead Yeah, I never say never, but I guarantee Gather my strength, goin' hard in the paint Paint you a picture, it's put on display I'm gonna get, they don't give then I take Can't take me down now My feet on the ground now Fight 'til I'm down now Say it out loud now Say it out loud, are you ready for war?

And there you have it. If anyone has any suggestions or questions about this challenge feel free to wander into my ask box.

- 57

#the umbrella academy #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #allison hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #five hargreeves #ben hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #tua #tua luther #tua diego #tua allison #tua klaus #tua five #tua ben #tua vanya #horrance #alluther #fiveya #song lyrics #song list #album challenge #into the spider-verse #umbrella academy #my stuff

[centvr]

𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐃𝐔𝐂𝐈𝐍𝐆

          [  mat bar/zal  .  20  .  male .  he / him  ] just saw 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐔𝐒 '𝐂𝐀𝐙' 𝐙𝐄𝐂𝐊𝐇𝐀𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐑 dragging their suitcase up the steps of 𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 .  good luck living with 𝐇𝐈𝐌 ,  word around campus is that they’re 𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐄 ,  𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐅𝐈𝐒𝐇  ,  𝐀𝐌𝐈𝐀𝐁𝐋𝐄  &  𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 .  makes sense they chose that house now  ,  doesn’t it  ?  let’s hope this new living situation doesn’t affect their 𝐉𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐎𝐑 year of 𝐁𝐈𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐘   [  oliver .  22  .  they/them  .  est  ]

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒

          the son of one of the most prominent nflers not following in his father's footsteps, shunned for choosing the wrong sport ( perhaps his father should have known, naming him CASSIUS after the betrayer ) ; a graduate of the us national team development ( hockey ) program where he really came into his own as a TWO-WAY CENTER & continues to grow with his college team ; in his third and final year studying BIOLOGY, because if the nhl didn’t pan out he always wanted to be a vet ; a sharks prospect, but A MINNESOTA BOY through and through, from his love of frozen lakes to his love of hockey ; just someone who hides everything with a smile and a nonchalant attitude even when he’s about to break and knows failure is not an option when he's come this far.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘

( tw for death & verbal / emotional abuse )

— cassius adrian zeckhauser was born on a chilly november day, the first snow flurries of the year fluttering outside the st. paul ( minnesota ) hospital window. star nfl quarterback robert zeckhauser at the tailend of his career and his beautiful model wife welcomed their newborn son into what should have been the perfect life — with a name like that though, it probably should’ve been obvious that he wasn’t destined to be happy.

— and it was extremely close to perfect for almost twelve years. time was split between st paul and a summer and vacation home in monterey, california. caz followed in his father’s footsteps playing football, and also hockey as all good minnesota children do. it was a snowy night not too long after his twelfth birthday when his mother passed away suddenly of what doctors claimed were natural causes. they never were able to identify what exactly it was that ended her beautiful life, all caz knows is that after that things changed.

— now in retirement from playing, his father sold their main home in minnesota and moved them permanently to monterey. grief changes people, and not always for the better. in the wake of the loss of his wife, robert zeckhauser threw himself into the bottom of a bottle and coaching rather than face his grief and became obsessed with what he saw to be his son’s god given path to nfl stardom.

— caz, to his credit, did show great potential at football. his father’s additional coaching only gave him an edge : no one could argue that he was talented just because of his father’s influence — unless they were just referring to him inheriting his genes. caz loved football actually, but that was before his father’s dogged obsession with him succeeding in it. then high school came and thing became much worse. the more robert zeckhauser became obsessed with his son following in his football career, the more caz began to hate it.

— the field was soon associated with negativity, even though his coaches did their best, it wasn’t enough to tamper the infamous temper of robert zeckhauser. he never laid a hand on caz, but that was only because he didn’t have to — caz was simply too afraid.

— and so caz began to spend more and more time at the one place that seemed to bring good memories for him : the ice rink. growing up in minnesota, caz knew how to skate and how to play the game, of course ; it was pretty much inevitable. he’d shown what same said could be elite PROMISE at that too before robert zeckhauser packed up ship and moved them to sunny california. hockey wasn’t just for the frigid sub-zero temperatures of canada. 

— with the extra time on the rink to calm his mind and escape the noise of the outside world, caz became even better, standing out boldly on his hockey team as the BEST by miles ( and that meant catching the attention of scouts for a certain program ). robert would yell at dinner about priorities ; for once, caz wouldn’t listen. it all came to a head when caz received an invite to try out for the us national team development program before his junior year of high school. and then caz finally saw a chance at salvation : a way out. ( all robert zeckhauser saw was his son personally spiting him by picking the wrong sport and throwing away millions and tainting the family legacy ).

— but regardless, caz ended up making the squad by the skin of his teeth, playing for them for two years — and best of all, being able to spend the school year back in minnesota away from the presence of his father. it was evident early on that he made the right choice, and under the usntdp coaches he made progress in leaps and bounds — going from barely making it into the program into one of their best. but with that came his father’s wrath — caz only went home to monterey when he had to, and sometimes not even then, preferring to stay with one of his teammates if they would have him. summers were near inescapable though, filled with loud, toxic beratements and even longer, more toxic silences.

— fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, caz was climbing the prospect charts though — and the only thing robert zeckhauser hated more than his son was bad press, and that meant all their arguing and deeply negative relationship was kept under tight wraps from the public eye. caz’s development and talent and increasing prestige was probably the only thing that kept his father from actually cutting all ties with him, which at least meant he never had to want for money to support himself.

— caz had plenty of schools clamoring for him to commit by his senior year, but most intriguing was a personal visit from the head coach and athletic director of the west coast halston university. meant to bring an east coast flavor to the west, they’d just recently received their division i designation for their men’s hockey team only the season past and wanted caz to be their defining piece to keep them there. there were other schools of course, boston university, minnesota, north dakota, a handful of ivies, and yet caz’s mind kept going back to halston and eventually he signed on the dotted line for them.

𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐂

— his major is bio because if the nhl doesn’t work out he always wanted to be a vet and has a deep love for animals. a dog is something he’s always wanted, but has never had the time of physical stability to adopt one. he doesn’t have much time during the school year but in the summer he volunteers part-time at an animal clinic.

— drafted before his freshman year in the 2018 draft 21st overall to the san jose sharks :) he’s a two-way, playmaking center with exceptional skating skills. centers the first line and plays on the powerplay, and more recently has become a fixture on the penalty kill as his defensive abilities have gotten better ( i’m thinking jack eic/hel in style, but like... if you walked jack back to an appropriate college level lmAO ). wears number 13 bc im lazy in edits and has an A.

— caz is in his third and final year of college. thanks to a heavy number of ap credits, summer classes, and a much sharper mind than most people give him credit for ( and far too much stress and sleep deprivation ), he’s close to pulling off his plan to graduate in three years. ideally, the sharks would have liked him to be playing with their ahl team this year, but caz had made it clear he wanted to graduate before joining the nhl, upholding a promise he’d made to his mother before she passed away. it was agreed caz would have three years, and he hopes to make the team straight out of training camp come next august.

— caz was sixteen, finally away from his father and thriving under the guidance of the ntdp, when he realized he liked guys just as much as he liked girls — maybe even a lot more. it’s something he had to come to begrudging acceptance with ; a difficult task for him at first. it was simply a fact and facet carefully explored behind locked doors and then carefully buried where no one could ever find out ( he doesn’t know which would be worse : his father or the media ). currently, he’s extremely careful about his approach with the same sex, often just sleeping with guys also in the closet or at least those who understand the sensitivity of the subject — often fellow athletes.

— when it comes to destressing, caz is unsurprisingly one to frequent the rink or go for a run. he has recently taken up yoga though which has had the added benefit of improving his flexibility so win-win, he guesses.

— caz keeps a pretty steady schedule somehow, rising at nearly the same early time every day even if the time he goes to sleep fluctuates and even if he doesn’t have a morning practice to get to. he believes it’s a good habit to establish. he’ll go down to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast. that being said, that doesn’t mean he’s a morning person — he’s grumpy and near mute until he’s had at least two cups of coffee, but he will offer to make anyone who’s also up that early an omlet.

— any positive traits caz exudes are certainly in no way thanks to his father, but rather a series of people who stepped into that role when he left at sixteen. he didn’t realize it at the time, but running away from something also become running toward something else. his coaches stepped into fatherly roles in his real father’s absence. they and his billet family and the parents of his friends in the program kept him grounded and level-headed when he could have turned out much differently.

— he’s a regular at a cafe near campus that he stops at after morning workouts/practices before going to his first class. he drinks his coffee black.

— he’s no chef but he’s decent in the kitchen and very cognizant of the food he puts into his body. because of that, he’s also not a huge drinker either and rarely consumes soda.

— there’s a pullup bar on his door and he starts and ends his day with situps, pushups, and pullups.

— caz was raised roman catholic but his own beliefs have trended strongly toward agnostic as he’s gotten older.

— he goes by caz and pretty much caz only. he’s doesn’t make it very well known what his actual first name is, and almost everyone who does know has found out on accident be it a rookie mistake in the hockey team’s promoing ( doesn’t happen much anymore ) or a curious eye on his driver’s license. cassius is what his father calls him, and he’d prefer it if no one else did.

— the décor of his room is extremely minimalist. a photo of a night sky over a frozen lake in minnesota on his wall and one from his time at the ndtp on his nightstand are the only ones in his room. a sharks pennant hangs on the inside of his door as a reminder of what he’s working toward. it’s otherwise kept bare and clean. his sheets are gray, his comforter plain black. he keeps thinking about getting some plants but has never gotten around to it.

— since caz’s start at halston, his father picked up a sports analyst job in the bay area where he also rents a lavish apartment. this means he’s thankfully usually absent in their monterey home which caz usually frequents in the summers save for the month he’s on campus for summer classes.

— accolades : silver medalist ( 2019 world junior championships ), 21st overall 2018 entry level draft, silver medalist ( 2018 IIHF world u18 championships ), gold medalist ( 2017 IIHF world u18 championships ) 

— i imagine that halston’s d1 hockey program functions very similarly to that of arizona state university in that it is an independent program not affiliated with any conference. upon creation of the program, they played a hybrid season against a variety of D1, D2, and D3 programs and transitioned to playing against exclusively D1 programs starting the season before caz arrived on the team ( 2017-2018 ). they have made the frozen four final once last season ( 2020 ) and lost in the semifinals.

𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘

PRIVATE  ,  SELFISH  ,  AMIABLE  &  HARDWORKING

— caz is someone who puts a hundred percent into whatever he does : practice, homework, a friendly game of volleyball in the backyard. no one would call him a slacker by any means, except of course his father. his focus and motivation is unparalleled, and that’s helped him greatly through his life in school and his endeavors toward being a professional athlete. but there are times when he puts too much of himself into something. he’s terrible at multitasking, focusing on one thing at a time in full, and has a tendency to burn out if he’s not careful ( or if no one’s looking out for him — which in his first year at halston, probably was more common than not ). he doesn’t like people who don’t try their hardest, though he’s sympathetic to those who do and still do not seem to get the results they want — especially those on the hockey team, often offering to lend them a hand if they want it.

— in his life caz has come to learn that only person he can fully trust and count on is himself. that’s resulted in a rather selfish streak in him, though he works to not let that appear too much on the surface. he’s not an unkind person who would walk over others to get what he wants, and he fears growing into the arrogance and blunt forwardness of his father, but the ultimate bottom line is he will always chose to help himself over someone else. there are a few rare exceptions to this of course : a handful of his teammates and very close friends.

— still, he’s a friendly person, someone who’d give off fairly good and relaxed vibes ; some may even call him kind. there are plenty of people who’d consider him a friend, though the truth is they might not know all that much about caz. he has the uncanny ability to make people feel like they know him without revealing anything of substance. he’s very much a two-way mirror or the façade in that manner : caz sees out but no one ever sees in. to most he’s happy, he’s fine, friendly, amiable, and never gives anyone a reason to doubt that.

— caz has a way of appearing calm, cool, and collected even when he’s not, and a lot of effort on his part goes into that to come across that way. there’s a lot that can hide behind a smile and an easy-going attitude and caz has perfected that armor meticulously. the truth of course is that he’s under an immense amount of pressure and a lot closer to falling apart then he wants to admit  — he’s afraid if anyone did manage to worm their way in that he’d fall to pieces.

— he’s most reserved at parties, always in attendance and participating enough for it to be socially acceptable but never letting himself go completely. there’s still a lot he can lose, and he’s not in the business of doing anything that could jeopardize that further.

𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄

— 6′0″ & 189 lbs : caz is unsurprisingly very fit and strong, with the large quads and glutes 🍑 common in hockey players, though his upper body and core strength is nothing to snooze at either.

— black hair with a slight curl, usually kept to a modest length and styled to look effortless, could be described as fluffy or tousled ( pretty much as it looks in most of the gif icons and visage gifsets ). when he’s stressed he has a tendency to run his hands through it and it looks even messier. caz isn’t much on his appearance, but he is careful to tend to his hair. it does get quite long in the summer, seeing as he often doesn’t get it cut between the end of the season until right before pre-season ; often needing to be kept back in a bun near summer’s end.

— gray-hazel eyes : their exact shade depends on the light. they’re very much his father’s eyes over his mother’s warm brown ones ; it’s a fact he hates but he does appreciate the fact he also inherited his dad’s 20-20 vision.

— typically clean shaven or with some stubble when he misses a couple days or so or sometimes slightly more esp around exams and project due date. the exception to this of course is during the end of year tournaments during which he doesn’t shave and looks rather scruffy.

— on a normal day, caz has the fashion sense you’d expect from a college athlete, liberally employing the use of sweatpants, nike and adidas track pants, t-shirts, hoodies, and sneakers and slides. he does have the ability to look nice when he has to though, often cutting a sharp figure in a suit on gamedays and formals, or a slim fitting pair of darkwash jeans and a button down when the occasion calls for it.

— jewelry : he’s almost always wearing a rather non-descript necklace with a small circular pendent that belonged to his mother ; an analogue watch with a brown leather band that doesn’t seem to match with his college athlete look that was a gift on his eighteenth birthday from one of his coaches who became a father-figure in his life ; his right lobe is pierced ( the result of a some very poor judgement in the summer before he arrived at halston, but at least it wasn’t a tattoo of something embarrassing like his friend zac ), very rarely is anything in it and most people don’t know it even exists, but he puts something in it frequently enough that it still hasn’t closed up.

— scars : a small scar over his right cheekbone from an accident on a frozen lake when he was young, near invisible unless you’re close or know it’s there ; two longer scars about two inches long on his right outside elbow from when a cat scratched him at the clinic ; several other small ones he can’t recall the injuries they’re from

— tattoos : a butterfly and a moth in flight together on his left bicep, the butterfly was for his mother, the moth in a way to represent himself ( they mean self-acceptance, after all ).

—  PINTEREST BOARD HERE

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒

          first and foremost, i love chatting and brainstorming with people. i think that’s where the most meaningful plots are formed, but here are a few ideas to serve as starting points :

— childhood friend ( any ) : someone who is also from a wealthy family, likely close to monterey or in the very least in california. they had to attend a lot of the same fancy diners and parties as him. perhaps this person is aware of his true relationship with his father and just how deeply negative it is.  — TAKEN BY BLAIR.

— the set up ( female ) : this was a last ditch effort from his father, not long after caz left for the usntdp when he was sixteen, his father set him up with this girl he deemed to be a suitable match, the daughter of another rich family ( perhaps sports related, or just wealthy ). most of their contact probably was over the summer when caz was more free. the nature of their relationship can be brainstormed, robert stopped pushing it when caz was drafted at eighteen ( two years ago ), but i think he still wants it to happen.

— the ex-girlfriend ( female ) : caz only has had one girlfriend in college from his freshman year. this is pretty open-ended but i do strongly believe that she broke up with him ( for whatever reason, but i imagine something along the lines of him not loving her nearly as much as she loved him ). 

— i hate your guts ( any ) : they were groomed to HATE each other, to carry on the stupid rivalry of their fathers that no one remembers the reason for — perhaps it’s as simple as there not being enough room for both of their egos. it doesn’t really matter what the reason that started this was. they don’t really know why they hate each other at this point, it’s just a fact as instinctive as breathing ; not a single conversation can be had without them clashing in some way  — TAKEN BY KIERAN.

— you know i’ve got your back ( male ) : honestly caz just needs a friend, guys...

— animal lover ( any ) : someone who’s run into him at the animal clinic over the summer or is just somehow otherwise aware of his love for animals. i just want to write something about that facet of him.

— the blind date ( female ) : someone his teammates keep trying to set him up with because they’re certain he’s lonely. i mean... he is but that’s not the point. honestly so open ended.  —  TAKEN BY FRANKIE.

— hookups, project partners, people on campus he randomly runs into, fans of the hockey team, fans of him, crushes on him, housemates, the world is our oyster lads.

— also i know the ratio is kinda off on this list but i’m a lot better of coming up with plots for males on the spot so honestly just come vibe w me. okay thank you 😔

𝐎𝐎𝐂

          hello everyone !!! i’m oliver or ollie, 22, they / them pronouns, and in the est timezone. i am very excited to be finally bringing caz off hiatus with the very sexy mat as his fc ( which if you know who he is u probably were like ‘ whiteguyblinking.gif ’ when you saw him on the list but i promise this is gunna work, i’ve been making gif icons like crazy ). he was always my first choice fc for caz but i was always too lazy to make it happen until NOW. also im censoring all actual nhlers names because i don’t need the mortification of this showing up in their tags somehow. anyway, i’m super excited to get things rolling and i hope we’re here for a good long time !!

#halston.intro #( in the instance u may recognize this character #pls know i rewrote most of this to be... #a lot nicer and more in depth so #kindly pls read ) #( new fc #MUCH better intro ) #( it went from 988 words to #3.5k #😭😭😭 )