#then they realized they got the same gig after they got their callbacks

[stagemanagerssaygo]

Heaven and Hell: or my experience being a person of color in Disney’s Hyperion Theater

by Cooper Howell

Heaven and Hell: or my experience being a person of color in Disney's Hyperion Theater. #holdingtheateraccountable Im just gonna go ahead and be straight up. This is pretty scary to share. HEAVEN: Once upon a time Liesl Tommy cast me as Prince Hans in Frozen: Live at the Hyperion. And I was gooped. GOOPED. There was nothing in my prior history that gave any indication this was possible. Up until then every role I played had to do with my race. Every. Single. One. And even ones where it didn’t (Shakespeare or classical pieces mostly) I was always made aware that the novelty of me being a poc in that role that gave me the part. So much did I not expect to get this part that when I got the callback I rolled my eyes and didn’t take the actual callback seriously. I mean, there was a zero percent chance that Disney would ever let me play a Prince, especially when the dude in the movie is a ginger. But then I got it. And immediately everything I thought was possible about my career changed. My whole life I’ve never inwardly felt black. I’ve never inwardly felt white. I’ve always felt like I was Cooper, you know, on the inside. But whether it was every single white human in Utah reminding me that I was “the whitest person they ever knew/saw” (which DIDNT mean how white my skin was. It was how white I ACTED) or Mr. Johnson, my 7th grade drama teacher, telling me that he “wanted to put Velcro on the ceiling to see if I’d stick” or Mr. Smith, my high school drama teacher, saying “finally we can do black shows” as soon as I entered high school and then not casting me in roles because of the "optics" of it, or even my best friend in high school Tanner Harmon who called me "blackie", I was always reminded that I was an other. So imagine getting paid good money to put on that $10,000 costume and waltzing out to 4000 people a day to play a really amazing part. A fantastic, evil, complicated, person who sings a killer duet and then grabs the show by the throat with a vicious about-face monologue... and not once was my race ever mentioned cuz it didnt matter. What was being prized was Cooper, my talent, not my skin color that I never asked for. Heaven. Liesl MADE SURE, almost overly sure, that the poc’s in the cast felt equal. The kingdom of Arendelle, after all, is a make believe place. It can be whatever. From having Disney executives come and tell us that they were happy to have us there, to side conversations with John Lasseter, we were made to feel overly welcome playing the parts we were playing. She encouraged us to dive deeper into the script of a cartoon that I didnt really think much of until I was in it. We were encouraged to ask why. We felt seen as talent and not commodities. There were, of course, detractors. Gosh, I remember people at a party of cast members from "Mickey and the Magical Map" another show at Disneyland which features a princess and the frog number and many of those casts mates angrily claiming that “if that black girl Tiana Okoye can play Elsa than I should be able to play Princess Tiana” and then looking at me to confirm that was okay to say, not realizing that a) she’s one of my best friends, b) that I’m in the show with her also playing a role that wasn't created to be a poc, c) how racist that sounded, and d) why there's a difference there and why that wouldn't make sense. On Liesls final night I came up to her and said “I don’t know why you did it but thank you so much for casting ME in this part” to which she replied “you mean why would I cast a handsome, talented person in this role?” And I stuttered something like “well, I mean, I’m black. You know...” to which she tilted her head to her side and said “no. I don’t know why. Tell me why that matters.” And I had no answer. Seeing that I had no answer she smiled. That was the answer. There was no reason. On the spot my outlook about myself changed. Windows into what I thought was possible for me opened. -------------------------------------- HELL: And then Liesl went back to NYC and she was replaced by a man named Roger Castellano as show director. Rogers task, he told us on the first day, was to "change the show". We were not told what needed to be changed or even why, but that changes were on the horizon. You've got to understand: to a full cast of actors who had just spent more than three months dissecting a 60 page Disney script with a Tony nominated director like it was Shakespeare, we were initially emotionally/mentally/spiritually resistant to changes. But then it became clear that the spirit of collaboration was over, and the show changes were to be given without the same care, consideration, and thematic explanation of why they were being made. Everyones initial reaction was to push back, but when people who questioned their notes or their changes started getting days removed their schedule or being replaced entirely by a new actor, the Hyperion theater became a place where no one was allowed to speak out. Injustices were happening left and right and no one felt they could do anything for fear of losing their livelihood. And that's when the Frozen: Live at the Hyperion became a living hell. In my first note session with Roger he pulled me into a room with Domonique Paton, my best friend and incredible costar who played princess Anna in the show I was in. She just so happens to also be black. Almost all of Prince Hans’s scenes in the show are with her character and so most of my notes would be primarily based on those interactions with her. Earlier in the day I performed with a different (white) actress but it was the show with Domonique that I had a note session about. Imagine my surprise and dismay when, with how Liesl set up the show experience, we were told this: “WHEN THE TWO OF YOU PERFORM THE SHOW TOGETHER ITS TOO… URBAN.” Urban. What else could that have meant, do you think? He could have said maybe “too contemporary” emphasizing that we were maybe too modern in our speech patterns or movements. We weren’t. He could have said “too lax” or “too loose” meaning that maybe we were being unprofessional and goofy up there because we’re really good friends. We were not. The best me and Ms. Paton could think of was a 8 count moment of improv dance that me and Domonique decided to use as a synchronized moment of unity. It happened to fall on the line “our mental synchronization can have but one explanation” and thought, with the freedom that Christopher (the original choreographer) had given us, was appropriate, especially considering everyone behind us was doing the robot. As in the 80s robot. But he didnt clarify. He just said “WHEN THE TWO OF YOU PERFORM THE SHOW TOGETHER IT’S TOO… URBAN” And when asked what he meant he smiled with a little shrug and said "you can figure that out. You're smart." And thats how I became Black Hans and Domonique became Black Anna. My every moment onstage afterwards became about the optics of being a poc in that show. It was if I was suddenly made aware that I was LUCKY enough to be there and under any normal circumstances, or this new directors circumstances, me getting this part would have never happened. But the message was clear. It was especially clear when me and Domonique Paton shows together durastically decreased and made even more clear when the vast majority of the new hires were not people of color. But no one said anything. And made even MORE clear when, over the next few weeks, both Domonique and I got COPIOUS notes, ten times that of our coworkers that played the same parts. It was almost a game. In fact we did turn it into a game, seeing who would get the least amount of notes from him in a day. Our costars would even joke about it onstage with us, during the ballroom scene, and jokingly whisper "The shows been up 15 minutes. How many do you think you got today?" But no one said anything. And the notes were about all kinds of things. How we held our hand. If our inflections went up or down on a word. Which side of a couch we leaned on… which was fine! When you're an actor, thats the gig... until we started comparing our notes with the actors that played our same parts and none of them, NONE, would get the same notes. Our notes would be outrageously longer, the note sessions sometimes lasting 10/15 minutes. Others would get the “Oh hey, try doing this or that next time, okay bye” walk-by notes. Sometimes I would sneak into the audience and watch as some of the other Han's, some of whom changed lines, changed entire intentions of scenes, some of whom adding in all types of vocalizations and cackles and dance moves and what have you, and would receive ZERO notes. But I was watching them to see what was wrong with me. What was my performance missing? What am I actually doing to feel this singled out. And then I realized that the thing that was wrong with me was that I was a different color than the 5 other white Hans's they cast. And then I started getting notes about my penis. Most of the time these “penis sessions”, as I called them, were given in private rooms without another stage manager present. It was incredibly unpleasant and unprofessional. In fairness, those Prince Hans pants are TIGHT! And yes, Mr. Howell is indeed a party in the front and a party in the back, but so were a lot of those fellas. And thats where I put my foot down. If Disney was going to provide me with a costume it is not my responsibility to fix their problem, especially when other of my (white) costars had been given a dance belt for the same thing. But they never got penis notes. Private session notes about what their penis looked like in that show. Over and over again I was told to fix it, to not make it (my dick) so apparent, and that “if my daughter were younger I wouldn’t want her to come to a show you were performing at" all the more insulting considering his daughter, a cast member in the show, was a friend of mine and the loveliest person. He started demanding that I buy a dance belt. It was “my fault”, “my responsibility” …and thats where I took my stand. And then it really became hell. Penis sessions were now done out in the open. Once, he screamed at me, in the green room in front of all of my costars during lunch, about how incredible unprofessional I was, about how he was tired of seeing my dick, and that if I didnt go buy myself one I didnt deserve to be there anymore. Followed by a huge litany of notes. That doesnt compare to some of what Domonique went through and I invite her to share them if she’s willing. During this time I went to every stage manager in the building and told them about being singling out and about my penis. They all told me to write a complaint report and it would go to some place called "HR". Which I did. Numerously. More months passed. Nothing from "HR". Multiple cast members who witnessed my note sessions encouraged me to go to the HR themselves. I didnt honestly know what an HR was. As soon as it was explained to me by my allies even what an HR was I went to the head of HR at Disneyland herself and waited outside of her door. I asked her if she got any of my HR reports and she told me that she had received no HR reports from the Hyperion. Ever. And then asked me to fill out a HR form. As we went over it, she asked me some questions, and then set up a second meeting. On the second meeting she said that in order for my report to be given credence I would need witnesses to give their testimony. The witnesses, in fact the very people that told me to go to HR in the first place, said no. They didnt want to lose their jobs. In retrospect that might be the thing that hurt the most but, whatever... anyway, I was told "“well… without testimonies we’ll do an investigation and we’ll call you when we’ve completed it.” I never received a phone call. With absolutely zero protection from the stage managers from both the sexual harassment or my obvious racial targeting I (and others) were experiencing, not to mention that HR reports were doing nothing, aka not being forwarded, I thought about quitting. And when a white stage manager made a show mistake and laughed it off to the cast by saying an entirely offensive lynching joke, I quit. I didnt matter to Disney. How I felt and what I was being put through didnt matter. I was a commodity. My departure was unceremonious. Bizarre. 100% un-magical. I hung up my costume one last time and it was given to a new Hans, one who looked very much like me oddly, and stepped out of the theater. The park was playing “every wish your heart desires will come to you” and I remember laughing at how dead that song felt. The director has since moved on but still works as a musical theater director in Southern California. This one time 4 years ago I got to feel something other than my color for the first and only time in my professional career. It lasted from about March 2016 to July 2016 and never again since. I will never forget in those early days looking at all the beautiful princesses I got to woo and thinking “wow. I’m a prince right now.” Im sure that sounds stupid. But it didn't feel stupid. And a Disney prince! Yeah, a shitty prince kinda... I mean, he's a sociopath... BUT still a Prince! Especially special was being able to look in Dominique’s eyes and I could see the same glimmer of “can you believe we get to do this right now” reflected back. We never knew it was in the cards for us. My race always has and will always be part of my career equation and a determining factor of its projection. It will always be a determining factor in how im treated, by creatives, by people, by the those in authority over me, including the government and the police. #wasitmyskin

Copied in its entirety here from Cooper Howell’s public Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10163696376095054&set=a.10151302685610054&type=3&theater

[a-small-batch-of-dragons]

Go the Distance

Prompt: Hello, I absolutely adore your work 🥺😍🥺 your Sanders Sides angst is just so goooood!!! If you're up to it, I'd love to request a fic <3 Virgil has noticed [side(s?) of your choice; they're all good choices, I can't decide ;-;] has been distant and avoiding him and he just can't figure out what he did wrong but it's actually because [side] loves him and are trying to take some time to 'get rid of/push down their feelings' The angster the better but don't push yourself ^ Feel free to add or change whatever Have a great day and no worries if you don't do this 💜💜💜~@im-an-anxious-wreck 💜🖤

Thanks for the prompt babe you’re the best

Read on Ao3

Warnings: self-doubt, some lite™ angst

Pairings: prinxiety, background platonic dlampr because found family dynamics motherfuckers

Word Count:  4191

Virgil and Roman's relationship hasn't always been, well, great. But it's been getting better!

Or, at least, it was.

Listen, Virgil knows he and Roman haven’t exactly had the most…painless history. Virgil’s introduction to the series was Thomas telling Roman his dream was to get rid of him and, well, Roman was first and foremost loyal to Thomas. Then the whole…insult thing, ducking out, and the absolute mess of the callback wedding debacle, it’s not exactly been smooth sailing.

 But—okay, and maybe they’d been a little harsher about things than absolutely necessary, and maybe Roman got hit with the consequences of their fights more than Virgil, and maybe Virgil hadn’t exactly been…overwhelmingly accepting of all of Princey’s little ticks.

 But they’d still been talking!

 After the wedding, no one was on good terms with anyone save Patton and Janus—and wasn’t that the shock of a lifetime—and Remus and Virgil. Because they made the smart choice and decided ‘nope, fuck that, I’m out.’

 It was a good choice. You have any idea how high their scores are in GTFO now? The first rundown’s a fucking cakewalk.

 Anyway.

 They’d been talking! Virgil still doesn’t know exactly what happened right after—he saw the video, of course he saw the video, but Roman sunk right to his room and there’s a good twelve hours between that and the next time Virgil saw him—but Roman had come out and approached him!

 Probably because he was still hurt by the end of the video—which oof, Virgil does not blame him for, that was harsh—and his only options were Logan, Virgil, and Remus and Logan, um, didn’t want to see anyone for a while and Remus is Remus.

 Side note: those two have been getting on better. Something about their twin Creativity thing meant Remus knew that Roman was hurting bad before even Thomas did.

 But Roman did seek him out, asking him quietly if he had a moment, just a moment, to sit together. Virgil had shrugged and passed it off as nothing only for Princey to literally sit on the floor and not make a fucking noise. He’d frowned and poked his shoulder, asking if he was alright.

 “Perfectly fine, Dark and Stormy,” Roman had said lightly, “and I’ll leave you in a moment.”

 “But you’re…” Virgil had waved to his silent form. “…not acting like you normally do.”

 Roman had laughed. “And here I thought I’d never hear you say you missed me being loud.”

 “Now let’s not jump to conclusions.”

 Sure enough, a few more seconds had passed and Roman had gotten up, quietly bid Virgil good day, thanked him, and left.

 You bet your ass Virgil sunk straight into Patton’s room to ask hey what the fuck did you do to Roman.

 Patton had sighed and said that they’re not sure what to do now—‘they’ being Janus and Patton. Virgil, still recovering from the whiplash of those two being close had shaken his head and told them to get it the fuck together.

 If he sunk into Remus’s room to ask how to take care of Roman, that’s his business. It’s also his business if he tackled Princey in a hug two minutes later.

 So. Talking.

 Roman, for all he talks, doesn’t really say much. The few things he does say are easily passed off as jokes, off-handed comments that no one really pays much attention to.

 Not that anyone pays nearly enough attention to Roman, come on, guys, he makes it easy.

 But Roman talked to Virgil. He’d come in and sit and Virgil would sit next to him, trying to make sure his arm didn’t burst into flames from where it was pressed against Princey—the dude’s a fucking space heater, okay?—just to listen. Some of the time it was Disney rants—okay, most of the time it was Disney rants—but some of the time…

 “Virgil?”

 “Yeah?”

 Roman looked down at his costume. Today was repair day, unofficially called when Virgil’s hoodie ripped during the night and Roman’s sword cut through his sleeve. Virgil looked up from his own mass of fabric, needle stuck in carefully so he wouldn’t prick himself. He frowned at the look on Roman’s face.

 “What’s up, Princey?”

 “Do you think my logo looks bad?”

 Virgil blinked in shock. Roman didn’t look up and see the surprise on his face, instead running his thumb slowly over the patch on the costume.

 “What the fuck are you talking about, Princey?”

 “It’s so complicated,” Roman said, still looking down, “Logan and Patton have really simple ones. You have a pretty simple one.”

 “Janus doesn’t. Remus doesn’t.”

 “Yeah, but they’re…”

 Virgil frowned deeper, putting his hoodie on the ground and shifting closer to Roman. The prince didn’t even look up, still clutching his logo in his hands.

 “They’re what, Roman?”

 Roman swallowed. “…allowed.”

 A growl sounded from Virgil’s throat before he knew what was happening.

 “And you’re not?”

 “Hmm?”

 “And you’re not allowed, Roman?” Virgil gripped his shoulder. “Look at me, Princey.”

 Roman looked up. Virgil swallowed another growl at the despondent look on the prince’s face. Instead, he gripped Roman’s shoulder tighter.

 “No one,” he said firmly, “is allowed to tell you your logo is bad. You hear me?”

 Roman blinked.

 “I mean it, Roman,” he said, softening his voice a little, “it’s you. It’s yours, no one’s allowed to tell you it’s wrong.”

 “So that’s…okay?”

 “Yeah, Princey, it’s okay.”

 “Oh.” Roman looked back down at his costume. “Okay. Thank you, Virgil.”

 “Anytime.”

 Virgil would come to be astounded at how much he means that.

 Because, really, now that Roman’s talking? Virgil’s fucking shocked that they didn’t realize how much Roman actually has to offer.

 First off, Princey’s smart as hell. Sure, L’s the resident braincell but you can be big of brain and dumb of ass at the same time.

 If Logan tries to tell you he’s not a dumbass sometimes he is wrong.

 Roman can puzzle solve with the best of them. Do you have any idea how much brainpower it takes to write a story? A script? Understand how all those moving parts fit together and make sense as a whole? Virgil sure as hell didn’t. He spent one afternoon trying to help Roman only for it to end up as Roman explaining what he was doing and Virgil frantically trying to keep up. Don’t even get him started on how impressive the Imagination stuff is.

 “It’s my job, Fall Out Brood,” Roman laughs every single time Virgil expresses how fucking cool this is, “have to be good at something.”

 And Roman is. He’s good.

 Second: Patton may be the heart, Logan may be the brains, but no one is as good at reassuring him as Roman. Probably has something to do with the Creativity gig. Roman had asked, politely, if Virgil would be comfortable telling him what to do when he gets really anxious, whether to leave him alone, get him somewhere safe, get him things, what have you. Virgil had told him, bemused, only to be shuttled into somewhere that screamed safewarmcomfortableeverythingisokay the next time he had a panic attack. Roman, with the lack of shame truly becoming of a theatre kid, had no problems cheering him up by loudly declaring he would fight whatever shadowy figures plagued his little nightmare, swatting at the air with his sword until Virgil’s sobs had turned into giggles. He never made Virgil talk about anything if he didn’t want to, didn’t try to sit and work through things if they weren’t ready, and never touched him unless he’d gotten the okay. The first time Virgil told him he’d be fine with receiving hugs in the aftermath was the warmest he’d felt in years.

 Princey gives really good hugs.

 Third: Roman’s fucking funny.

 Remember the whole ‘smart as hell’ thing? Know how Logan’s funny as fuck too when he lets himself be?

 Virgil’s lost count of how many times he’s had to gasp out for Roman to shut the fuck up because his sides hurt too much from laughing. He ends up sprawled across the fucking floor or the couch or Princey’s bed, dying very happily but painfully because Roman won’t stop making him laugh.

 Most of the time it’s due to something they’re watching and Roman’ll notice some detail that he picks apart until they’re both howling or Virgil will make one sarcastic comment that turns into a full fucking bit for like…ten minutes. Roman will just keep riffing off of the smallest thing until he’s laughing too hard to keep going—not very likely—or Virgil will flail out desperately and smack him—much more likely.

 Princey said he makes fun of the things he loves.

 …maybe that’s why he doesn’t make fun of Virgil anymore.

 Virgil curls tighter around the pillow, clutching it to his chest. As he rubs his cheek against it, he grimaces. It’s too rough. It’s not warm enough. It doesn’t smell right.

 They’d been talking. It had been good.

 But that was before.

 Before Roman had cautiously approached Logan with an apology, the offering of a new planner for him, the promise to listen to him, hear him out, give him space to speak. Logan had accepted.

 Before Roman had opened the border between his and Remus’s side of the Imagination, sending a little puppy scuttling over to his brother’s castle with a note, a dagger, and a vial of acid. It returned as a kitten with a beautifully poisonous rose.

 Before Roman had finally, finally, after days of trying, opened the door when Patton knocked, letting him come inside so they could talk, about everything that happened since…well, ever. They hadn’t stopped hugging long enough to walk down the stairs.

 Before Roman had let Janus, Janus, take care of him.

 And now…

 Now Roman didn’t want to be in the same room as him.

 It feels as if they’re walking on eggshells around each other again, Virgil appearing in a room only for Roman to completely disappear, getting up and leaving a conversation entirely just to avoid him, Virgil knocking on Roman’s door only for Roman to shout that he’s busy, not to come inside, Virgil, trying, trying to figure out where Roman’s gone, what’s happened, only to receive the cold shoulder.

 A problem none of the other Sides seemed to be having.

 He clutches the pillow to his chest.

 Did he—did he do something wrong?

 Does Roman—does Roman not like him anymore?

 Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed so hard about talking to the others. Roman needed space, needed time, he didn’t need someone else breathing down his neck. He should’ve let Roman set the pace, listened more, been kinder to him when he needed reassurance.

 Maybe he shouldn’t have made Roman think it was his fault that the others were taking so long, or suggested that if he wanted things to get better he should try talking first. Roman had been taught by everyone else that things were his fault already, Virgil didn’t need to jump on that train too.

 Maybe he should’ve been kinder to Roman, less focused on making the others understand that they hurt Roman. Everyone in the Mindscape knew that Roman was hurt, Virgil should’ve helped fix that, taken care of Roman, not pushed the blame onto everyone else.

 Maybe Roman didn’t like what he had to say about Disney films. They were Roman’s comfort watches, the last thing he needed was for someone to cruelly rip away his enjoyment of one of the few things he could enjoy.

 Maybe Roman didn’t like Virgil’s way of taking care of him. Virgil never pushed, never did Roman the courtesy of asking, like Roman did with him, just assumed he knew best how to comfort someone and left it there. Roman might’ve needed more hugs, more time, less distraction, just something other than what Virgil gave him.

 Maybe Roman didn’t like how much Virgil ended up hoarding him to himself. Not letting him go to the others for comfort, just to work things out. Maybe he thought Virgil was just keeping him upset so he could hang out with him more.

 Or maybe…

 Virgil muffles his sob in the pillow.

 Maybe Roman needed or wanted him anyway.

 Maybe Roman was just waiting until he could get the comfort he actually wanted. Maybe he waited until the others were easier to talk to so he could go back to what he really needed. Maybe Virgil was just a placeholder until Roman could get hugs from Patton and Remus, talk with Logan and Janus, not him. Never him.

 Maybe that’s…okay.

 It’s not, it won’t be fucking okay for a long time, but one day, it will be okay.

 Virgil curses and throttles the pillow in his arms, wishing for it to be real, to be warm, to be a chest of white and gold and a splash of red, for it to wraps its arms around him and say it’s okay, shadow-ling, I’m here, I won’t leave you, shh.

 But it’s just a pillow.

 Has his room always been this cold?

 Have Disney movies always looked this flat?

 Has music always sounded this gray?

 Has Virgil always been this alone?

 He can hear them in the living room below him. He can hear Roman and Logan throwing quips back and forth, can hear Remus tackling his brother into the wall, and Roman protesting. He can hear Janus scolding Remus and checking to make sure Roman’s not injured, can hear Roman wave him off gently and go right back to verbally sparring with Logan. He can hear Patton laughing too hard, falling off the couch and begging the two of them to let up, let him breathe, can hear Roman coo and call him sweet, adorable, in that soft voice he only uses when he’s talking to someone he cares about.

 Can’t hear any of them worrying about where he is.

 Maybe it’s better this way.

 He got greedy, took too much of what was never his to take, what wasn’t given to him freely. He latched onto the first thing he thought was for him and didn’t stop to think that it wasn’t. He may think he’s been included in the famILY but he knows he’s still an outsider.

 He may be Virgil now but deep down he’ll always be Anxiety.

 So here he will stay, in the cold of his room, in the dark of his face smushed into a pillow that will never be real. He will stay and he will be happy.

 But not today.

 He sniffles and smears his nose on the sleeve of his hoodie, not bothering to pull away from the pillow long enough to wipe tears properly. His limbs start to protest as he hugs it tighter, tighter, tighter, but it’s no use. He can feel his own arms through the pillow. There isn’t enough—there’s too much give in the pillow. It’s just a fucking pillow but it’s not enough.

 Another laugh from downstairs and Virgil growls, burying his head in the pillow until he can’t hear himself think.

 Can’t hear anything but his own muffled sobs ringing in his ears.

 Can’t hear anything other than the thought swirling around and around his head that he’ll never be enough, that he’ll never be wanted, that he’ll never be anything other than Anxiety.

 Can’t hear the soft knock at the door.

 “Virgil?”

 The voices in his head must be getting pretty powerful because he’s certain he can hear Roman calling for him. He buries deeper in the pillow.

 “Virgil? Virgil, can you hear me?”

 Yes, he thinks, yes, I can hear you, which means I’m not crying hard enough.

 “Can I come in, shadow-ling?”

 Yes, he thinks, come in and make me forget that you don’t need me anymore.

 He must really be losing it because he thinks he can hear the door open and close again with a soft click, followed by a sharp intake of breath and a soft coo.

 “Oh, shadow-ling,” the imaginary Roman murmurs, “come here, little Stormcloud.”

 Oh, his imagination is being cruel to him right now because the sensation of warm arms around his waist and shoulders fucking burns. He buries his face in the pillow until he can’t tell which way is up anymore, not sure how he’s tricked himself into imagining Roman’s cradling him but too unwilling to let the illusion go.

 “That’s right, Stormcloud, relax for me, I’ve got you, I’m right here, shh, shh, you’re alright,” the imaginary Roman keeps whispering in that cruelly soft voice, “you’re doing great, shadow-ling.”

 Virgil wants him to be real. So bad he aches from it. But he knows he’s not.

 What happens next breaks his fucking heart.

 The imaginary Roman kisses him.

 It’s chaste, a barely-there brush of his lips against his forehead but it tears a whine out of Virgil’s throat before he can stop it. The imaginary Roman hushes him gently, pressing another kiss to the part of his cheek not buried in the pillow and it taunts him with how real it feels. The slightly chapped lips, the warm rush of air as Roman breathes, the light brush of his nose as he pulls away.

 It’s too much.

 It’s too much and he wants it to be real so badly but he knows the instant he pulls away it will vanish and that might just break him.

 Then he realizes the imaginary Roman is talking to him.

 “Breathe, Stormcloud, you’ve got to breathe,” he coaxes, “I know it’s tempting to stay buried in a pillow all day, but you can’t breathe properly like that, sweetheart.”

  No, no, don’t call me sweetheart, I’ll break.

 “Shadow-ling, Stormcloud, my darling,” the imaginary Roman says instead, “come on…”

 Well, now he’s disappointing imaginary Roman too. Figures. He can’t do anything right.

 “Of course you can,” the imaginary Roman pleads, “just breathe for me, shadow-ling, I’m right here, I’ve got you, you can keep your eyes closed if you need to, just breathe.”

 Another whine. Another kiss pressed against his head. The whine grows louder.

 “Shh, shh, my darling,” imaginary Roman murmurs, “breathe, come on, just—trust me, okay? Can I ask that of you, Stormcloud?”

 And goddamnit, this is why Virgil can’t do anything.

 Virgil trusts him.

 So he prepares himself for heartbreak and lifts his head.

 “Thank you, shadow-ling,” imaginary Roman—wait, he’s still here?—murmurs, rubbing his back, “there you go, now just breathe—oh! Oh, come here, lean on me, I’ve got you.”

 Having listed to the side horribly, Virgil lands against a solidwarmsafereal chest and—and—

 “R-Roman?”

 “Yes, my darling,” not imaginary Roman says, still kissing Virgil’s forehead, “I’m here, I’m here.”

 White-hot rage burns Virgil’s tears.

 He lets out a yell and shoves, not caring that it throws them both horribly off-balance, threatening to send him tumbling to the floor. He hears Roman cry out, trying to keep ahold of him, but he scrabbles and gets his hands around the bedpost and pulls.

 “Virgil—Virgil stop, you’re going to hurt yourself—“

 “Why do you care?” The rage coats his tongue. “You fucking left, you—you—you fucking didn’t care about me anymore, you decided you didn’t want me anymore and you fucking left so don’t try and care now!”

 “Virgil—sweetheart, I—“

 “Don’t fucking call me that!” He keeps his eyes squeezed tight. “You didn’t give a fuck about me when you left, when you got your fucking family back, you think—you think you can just waltz back in like you didn’t abandon me?”

 “Virgil—“

 “Because you did, Roman!” Virgil blindly shoves at where the prince was before, knocking him into the wall. “You fucking left me as soon as you got the others back like I—like I never did anything for you and now you—now you can’t even look at me.”

 “I’m looking at you now.”

 Virgil laughs.

 He throws his head back and howls until his chest and throat ache.

 “You didn’t give a shit when the others started talking to you. You just fucking up and abandoned me like you never cared about me in the first place. You replaced me with them or—or abandoned me as your placeholder and I’m fucking hurt, Roman.”

 “I know.”

 “Then why did you do it?”

 Silence.

 Virgil’s heart stops.

 No.

 No, no, no, no—

 He fucked up.

 He fucked up so bad.

 Roman left.

 Roman’s not here anymore.

 Roman left again, he made Roman leave, he—he fucked up so bad, he shouldn’t have yelled, he’s fucked up, he hurt Roman, no, no, no, no—

 On instinct, his hands hook into claws.

 Only to be caught by warmsolidreal hands and brought to something soft.

 “Don’t,” comes Roman’s softsaferealhurt voice, murmuring in his ear as he holds him still, “don’t scratch, sweetheart.”

 “Don’t—“

 “I know, I know,” Roman says immediately, “you said not to call you that. I’m sorry. I’m so, so, sorry.”

 …what?

 “I didn’t realize I was hurting you,” comes the voice again, “that’s no excuse, I know, but please, Virgil, I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to abandon you.”

 Virgil swallows. “What the fuck do you call it then?”

 “I didn’t want to push my luck.”

  What?

 “You were being so good to me, Virgil,” Roman murmurs, oblivious to the internal struggle Virgil’s currently facing, “so kind, so supportive, that I…I realized I wanted to ask more from you. Things I had no business asking. And the longer you kept on being you, the harder it was to resist the urge to push and risk shattering everything you’d let me build with you.”

 “What—“ Virgil swallows— “what the fuck did you want?”

 Roman stills in front of him. With his eyes still shut, he can’t tell what’s going on, but when Roman speaks next his voice is hoarse.

 “Before I ask,” comes the whisper, “I want you to know that you have every right to say no. You can push me away, shove me out of your room, stay angry at me for as long as you want. I’ve hurt you, badly, and I have no right to ask this of you. I want you to know that. That I’m okay with you asserting that right.”

 Fuck, Princey.

 “…what do you want?”

 A pause. Then a soft rush of air, right on his face.

 “May I kiss you, Stormcloud?”

 Oh.

  Oh.

  Oh, no.

 “R-Roman?”

 “That’s it,” Roman murmurs and oh, his mouth is right next to Virgil’s, “that’s what I want, shadow-ling.”

 He shifts a little until Virgil can feel Roman’s warmth.

 “That and everything that goes with it.”

 “Why—why did you leave? I-if that’s what you wanted?”

 “Because that would mean to push,” Roman says immediately, “and the last thing I wanted was to push you away. I thought if I could…rein it in, control it, I could…I wouldn’t hurt you.”

 A soft chuckle.

 “Look how well that turned out.”

 “But the others—“

 “I needed Remus to tell me what was going on,” Roman says wryly, “Janus to point out that I was okay in wanting something, Patton to help me figure it out, and Logan to kick my ass into doing it.”

 “To…to ask me?”

 “Yes, Stormcloud,” comes the whisper, “to ask you.”

 “And if I say yes?”

 He can feel Roman’s lips turn up.

 “…then I’ll kiss you, Stormcloud.”

 “Are you really here?”

 The question bursts out of him before he can stop it, immediately biting his lip in reprimand for letting it.

 “Open your eyes, Virgil,” Roman says softly, “look at me.”

 He shakes his head, not wanting it to be imaginary. Not now, not after this. Roman squeezes his hands.

 “Look at me, Stormcloud,” he whispers, “look at me.”

  Fuck it.

 Roman smiles at him, real and warm and soft and here. He squeezes Virgil’s hands again and takes the smallest step closer.

 “I’m here,” he says, wrapping Virgil’s arms around his neck, “I’m right here, shadow-ling.”

 He’s here.

 This won’t fix everything. But it’s one hell of a start.

 “Ask me again.”

 “May I kiss you, Stormcloud?”

 Virgil shakes his head. “Not like that. Ask me properly.”

 Confusion dances on Roman’s face before realization hits. His smile widens and he brings a hand to Virgil’s head. Virgil clutches Roman tight as he gets dipped into the prince’s arms. Roman leans forward until his mouth almost catches Virgil’s.

 “May I kiss you, sweetheart?”

  “Yes.”

 General Taglist: @frxgprince @potereregina @reddstardust @gattonero17 @iamhereforthegayshit @thefingergunsgirl @awkwardandanxiousfander @creative-lampd-liberties @djpurple3 @winterswrandomness  @sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes  @iminyourfandom  @bullet-tothefeels  @full-of-roman-angst-trash  @ask-elsalvador @ramdomthingsfrommymind @demoniccheese83  @pattonsandershugs @el-does-photography @princeanxious  @firefinch-ember  @fandomssaremysoul  @im-an-anxious-wreck  @crazy-multifandomfangirl @punk-academian-witch  @enby-ralsei  @unicornssunflowersandstuff  @wildhorsewolf @thetruthaboutthesun @stubbornness-and-spite @princedarkandstormv @your-local-fookin-deadmeme @angels-and-dreams  @averykedavra @a-ghostlight-for-roman @treasurechestininterweb  @cricketanne  @aularei @queerly-fluid-fan @compactdiscdraws @cecil-but-gayer  @i-am-overly-complicated  @annytheseal  @alias290  @tranquil-space-ninja @arxticandy @mychemically-imbalanced-romance @whyiask @crows-ace @emilythezeldafan @frida0043 @ieatspinalcords @snowyfires @cyanide-violence @oonagh2 @xxpanic-at-the-everywherexx @rabbitsartcorner @percy-07734 @triflingassailantofmyemotions

 If you want to be added/taken off the taglist, let me know! 

#sanders sides #dragonbabbles #fic #roman sanders #virgil sanders #logan sanders #patton sanders #remus sanders #janus sanders #deceit sanders #sympathetic remus #sympathetic deceit #romantic prinxiety #prinxiety

[carmenxjulia]

I put together a transcript of the 1 hour Q&A Interview the Carmen Sandiego Discord did with Abby Trott (Ivy) and Rafael Petardi (Chase Devineaux). All of the questions were submitted by server members. You can read everything below the break!

PizzaHorse:

Hello everyone! Please welcome Abby Trott and Rafael Petardi to our Q&A today.

Abby Trott:

Hiiiiiiiiiii!

Rafael Petardi:

Hello Bonjour!

PizzaHorse:

Let's get started. How did you get started as a voice actor? Was there anything that inspired you to pursue it as a career?

Abby Trott:

Oh MAN. Long story.

Rafael Petardi:

Mine is very short. I'm an actor and my agent started sending me on voice auditions and eventually I booked some!

Abby Trott:

This is a novel so I started typing it ahead of time, haha. I was an acting/theater major, and when I graduated from college I moved to Japan on the JET program to teach English because I wanted to travel so freakin' badly. I had never even been on an airplane. I was placed in rural Akita, (inaka), and absolutely LOVED it. The only problem was I wanted to be and actor/singer… womp womp. At that time, I also started to mess around with characters and voices - I would record voice memos and conversations with myself while driving around. One day, a friend was in the car and my phone was on shuffle and one of my "scenes" started playing - I was absolutely MORTIFIED. But that moment solidified for me that I need to move to the big ole city if I wanted to really pursue acting. I ended up heading to Tokyo, where I performed in children's musicals, and did other gigs here and there. That's where I started doing VO professionally! I was able to do some character voices for the shows I was in, and some other side projects. I realized how much I loved VO, and eventually decided to move back to the States to pursue it, since most English VO for games and animation is produced here.

When I moved back, I started searching online for VoiceOver opportunities, and stumbled across a contest hosted by Bang Zoom! Entertainment. I BARELY got my entry in on time. The contest took place over several months, and in the meantime, I moved to NYC and started taking VO classes. For the finale of the contest, they flew me to LA. I ended up winning! Still can't believe it. (O-O) I got to dub my first anime "Miss Monochrome," and realized that if I wanted to work in games and animation, I should probably move to LA… and the I DID.

THE END

PizzaHorse:

What do you think are the best and worst things about being a voice actor?

Abby Trott:

Oooh. The worst things? Job insecurity... constant rejection...

Rafael Petardi:

The incredibly talented and cool people you meet and work with.

What Abby said

Abby Trott:

The best things? Working with amazing people, AND it's so much fun - even auditioning is fun!

PizzaHorse:

How did you land your role on the show?

Rafael Petardi:

I auditioned

Got the job

pretty boring I know

Abby Trott:

I auditioned through my agency, and got a callback. I went to the callback and their note was "more Boston." Then I had a second callback and their note was "even MORE Boston." So I went WICKED BOSTON and got the job

PizzaHorse:

What was your favorite/the most fun thing to record (episode/scene/line)? Any least favorites?

Rafael Petardi:

For me, the funnest scenes to record are the ones I got to play opposte the incredibly talented cast.

The least favorite... did not have enough scenes with the Wonderful Abby Trott

Abby Trott:

Awww Rafe! Singing was the MOST FUN! The Karaoke Ep, and the choose-your-own adventure one, where we got to sing the theme! Mikey (Zack) was cracking me up constantly.

Least favorite was the last ep because I didn't want it to eeeeeend

PizzaHorse:

Were you allowed to suggest lines to be said by your character, or improvise the script at all if you thought something would add to the scene?

Abby Trott:

YUP! And Mikey and I definitely did, hahaa. It was encouraged. Always fun to see what they keep...

Rafael Petardi:

Yes we were. I improvised mostly sounds and noises. Words once in a while but not very often. Thank God for Duane

PizzaHorse:

What was the hardest part of voicing your character on Carmen Sandiego? Was there a particular episode that was difficult to record?

Rafael Petardi:

Keeping the consistency episode to episode of the Chase's accent, pitch and energy

I did not want hime to sound different ever

Abby Trott:

I think the hardest part was keeping up the EXTREME Boston accent. But it was also SUPER fun...

PizzaHorse:

What traits do you share or have in common with the character you play?

Rafael Petardi:

I am like Chase in the sense of a Dog with a Bone. If I get pasionate about something, I go to extremes. Abby Trott has scene this for example in my bread making endeavors

Also, I'm an idiot in life too sometimes

Abby Trott:

Ivy and I are both... from Mass! we both have brothers who we argue with but really do love when it comes down to it. We love chocolate, aaaaand... I think we're both brave. (brag?)

Can confirm Rafe is v. passionate about bread. And and idiot.

Rafael Petardi:

All True

PizzaHorse:

What character on the show would you voice if you had the chance?

Abby Trott:

Chase

Rafael Petardi:

I would love Maelstrom

Abby Trott:

Jk... Coach Brunt seems SUPER fun

PizzaHorse:

If you could meet a character from Carmen Sandiego in real life, who would it be and why?

Abby Trott:

Carmen! she is the coooooleeest. I'd ask her to teach me some tricks

Rafael Petardi:

Julie Argent. She's cute

PizzaHorse:

Which character do you think you are most like or that you most identify with?

Rafael Petardi:

CHASE

I think that's partly why we're doing the roles we do

Abby Trott:

I think Ivy, for real! Casting was ON IT. I can be serious when I need to be, but I'm a giant goofball (if you couldn't tell from my latest tweet/insta post...)

PizzaHorse:

Who is your favorite character, other than your own?

Abby Trott:

Mime. Bomb.

Rafael Petardi:

Other than my own? Hmmm... uuuh... mmmm. tough...

Abby Trott:

Seriously, I think Mime bomb is hilarious.

Rafael Petardi:

Yes Mime Bomb!

PizzaHorse:

Do you wish your character had more interactions with another character in particular?

Rafael Petardi:

Yes, I would love to interact with Ivy and Maelstrom

I think the interaction would be odd and awkward and funny

Abby Trott:

Yes. I would love to see how Ivy handles the specific VILE members... I would love to see IVY try to go to VILE academy...

PizzaHorse:

Are there any themes or lessons from the series that you would want people to remember?

Rafael Petardi:

yes, don't jump to conclusions and be an idiot

Abby Trott:

Yes! That! also, don't be evil. ALSO also, be loyal to your friends.

PizzaHorse:

Do you ever look at fan content?

Rafael Petardi:

yes all the time. It helps when I'm tagged rafaelPetardi on Instagram

Abby Trott:

Yes! I look at fanart sometimes, and see what cosplays are happenin'

Rafael Petardi:

I've posted many as well

Abby Trott:

Haven't read much fanfic... but I know it's out there.

PizzaHorse:

What did you think about your character's development and arc throughout the series?

Rafael Petardi:

I absolutely loooooooved Chase's arc

Love redemption stuff

he was just misguided

just was alway his thing

Abby Trott:

I love Ivy's journey - she really grew up, from a troubled kid to an adult, accepting responsibility and accepting new challenges. Donning the hat, if you will.

Rafael Petardi:

*justice as always his thing

PizzaHorse:

How do you feel now that Carmen Sandiego is at its end?

Rafael Petardi:

sad. miss evrybody so much

we will have to have a cast reunion when this pandemic thing is over

Abby Trott:

SAD! But grateful. It was THE MOST fun to record, and I wish it could continue forever.

Rafael Petardi:

I'm grateful too. yes

Abby Trott:

and YES reunion!

PizzaHorse:

Yesss can't wait for that group photo to pop up on social media!

Were there any moments in the series that had you legitimately emotional?

Rafael Petardi:

yes ofcourse

losing Julia was tough

Abby Trott:

A lot. But one that stands out for me is after Carmen gets stuck out in the snow, and is reunited with her crew. (:_;). Also the stuff with Shadowsan and his brother... and anything with baby Carmen...

Gah. So many...

PizzaHorse:

Did you enjoy how the show ended? Is there anything you would have changed or would have liked to see more of?

Rafael Petardi:

I loved the way the show ended! I think Duane did a fantastic job tying loose ends and bring the story to a satisfactory close for all characters

I do hope for an ACME Ivy, Zak, Julia and Chase spin-off

Abby Trott:

I love how it ends. I think it wrapped so well considering the number of eps - the writers really got it done. I WISH Ivy and Zack could follow Carmen forever, but she has her own story to unravel it would seem.

And Ivy does look good in that suit let me tell ya

PizzaHorse:

Can you share a favorite behind the scenes moment?

Abby Trott:

Mikey. Is. So. Funny. Hard to choose one moment - he would make me laugh harder than anything. Especially when we were singing. Or any time he had to gag...

Rafael Petardi:

OMG!

That singing stuff we had to do together was hilarious

we could not stop laughinh

PizzaHorse:

What, in your opinion, are the best pizza toppings?

Abby Trott:

Cheese. Caramelized onions. Roasted garlic. Spinach. Mushrooms.

Rafael Petardi:

buffala mozzarella and tomatos period

oooooo fancy Abby

Abby Trott:

Rafe why aren't you as obsessed with pizza as you are with bread? And can you be?

Rafael Petardi:

I am

Abby Trott:

!

Rafael Petardi:

I just don;t like to share pizza

PizzaHorse:

Here's a specific question for Rafael. Did you sometimes get mad at your own character for the way he behaved towards Julia earlier on in the Series?

And one for Abby. As a Massachusetts native, how did you feel about voicing a character from Boston with the iconic accent?

Rafael Petardi:

I did not. I always felt, however misguided Chase was, he was always on the path of turth and justice no matter what was in his way. It's the same principals that led hin to see the truth about Julia

*principles

Abby Trott:

I think it's so cool, and kind of an honor, in a way. I was worried about it being too much, and people saying it's over the top. Turns out comedy wins, haha.

PizzaHorse:

Were you familiar with the older animated series when you started work on the Netflix original?

Rafael Petardi:

I never heard of Carmen Sandiego before I did this series

Abby Trott:

Yes! I had seen a bit. I also remember watching my brother play the game. Someone gifted me a mini arcade version of the game this year, and I'm excited to play :slight_smile:

Rafael Petardi:

Which I think helped when I had to say the iconic line

"Where in th world..." there was no pressure

LoL

Abby Trott:

LOL

PizzaHorse:

Okay, last question. Do you have a favorite quote from the show?

Abby Trott:

"La Femme Rouge!"

or Mime Bomb's classic "..."

Rafael Petardi:

"the game is over!"

PizzaHorse:

Woohoo!

Abby Trott:

Hooray!

PizzaHorse:

Thank you so much Rafael Petardi and Abby Trott for joining us today! I hope everybody had a wicked awesome time.

Abby Trott:

Thanks for having us! What a pleasure.

Rafael Petardi:

It was great! Thank you to all the great questions.

Abby Trott:

Thanks for watching the show! Great questions. I'm sure I'm going to think of more quotes as soon as I log off... haha.

Rafael Petardi:

See you all soon!

Abby Trott:

Stay safe, take care, and see you all on various social media platforms!

#Carmen Sandiego #Ivy #Chase Devineaux #CS Crew #Rafael Petardi #Abby Trott #Carmen Sandiego Discord #Carmen Sandiego Discord Server #Interview #Transcript

[boyneriver-fraser]

How ‘bout that early release of Episode 1 The Fiery Cross? Spoilers, shmoilers. Pfft… what’s a 75-hour Tumblr embargo* when you’re accustomed to a 25-hour one?

After much whining, Season 5 finally arrived chez moi. What did I think?

Cold Open: Gave me chills, despite having seen it during promo. Murtz. In a kilt. Walking across a grassy field. Wind blowing through his hair. Reassuring a bereaved child. What’s not to love?

Theme Song: Missed (Mrs. Bear McCreary) Raya Yarbrough’s solo, but the choral version is already growing on me.

Opening Credits: Quietly thrilled to see Producer Caitriona Balfe, Producer Sam Heughan, and look forward to seeing their influence mid-season forward. (Remember, they received the new gigs after S5 production was well underway.)

Wedding Preparation: Beautiful dress with so many details to highlight the Scottish heritage the bride only recently discovered. So many sweet moments between Claire and Brianna and between Jamie and Brianna. “Je suis prest.” Da, your daughter’s a Fraser.

The (New) Wedding: The Frasers of the Ridge are here! (Chills 2) Loved the callback to S1E7 The Wedding — Jamie and Brianna’s walk through the doorway into the sunlight. Thought the juxtapositions were poignant — A reluctant bride in a dark church, hesitatingly saying her vows. A joyous bride in the great outdoors, eagerly saying hers. A small group of men, a tavern hostess, a prostitute, and no family-of-the-bride as guests. A huge gathering of friends and tenants of all genders and ages, and the bride’s parents, son, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, great-aunt… and great-godfather, who managed to catch a glimpse from afar, as guests.

Fraser-MacKenzie Kids: Germain and Jemmy and Joanie, oh my! And Fergus and Marsali’s privately celebrating Félicité “in utero” was a lovely moment. (For anyone confused about number of the babies, Lizzie looked after Jemmy during the wedding ceremony, while Marsali held Joanie on her knee.)

“Some Shakespeare, anyone?”: Really, Lord John? 🤦🏻‍♀️

L is for the way you look at me: If you’ve never had someone pick up a guitar and sing a love song just for you… well, let’s just say Murtz wasn’t the first man to steal my heart. Rik Rankin truly has a lovely singing voice, and I will dearly miss Roger’s when… well… you know. Sigh.

Favourite Line: “I’ve got more on my mind than kissin’ and what have you, Mr. Fraser, Sir.” (Josiah Beardsley) What have you… 😂

Jocasta Cameron: Snob? Sly? Slut? All of the above?

Black Jack The Sequel: What is it with these corrupt redcoats? Governor Tryon annoys me more with each scene.

Hair Tics: I’m confident me ol’ pal @saint-hildegard-of-bingen​ is unable to count the number of times I’ve referred to myself as a heretic while talking to her, something I never did prior to reading the Outlander series, particularly The Fiery Cross. 😎

The Kilt: Oh, the kilt! (Chills 3) And the callback to S2E9 Je Suis Prest with the song Moch Sa Mhadainn. Powerful Scottish stuff.

Lighting Of The Cross: (Chills 4) I loved it and I’m not sorry. Highland chieftains set fire to a cross to call their men to arms. Period. Jamie lit his cross 90-something years before someone bastardized the long-held Scottish tradition.

Stand By My Hand: (Chills 5) So. Many. Feels. Loved the callback to S1E4 The Gathering. Isaiah Morton’s** realizing Roger didn’t quite get Jamie’s invitation, and teaching by doing, made me smile. Jamie’s being impressed Roger didn’t need to “Repeat what I say” made me smile more. Jamie’s looking to Brianna for confirmation before accepting Roger’s pledge made me tear up. Marsali’s pride at Fergus’s pledging his fealty — and at her not having to prompt Jamie to recognize Fergus’s worth — released those tears. The rest of the men’s lining up to more Moch Sa Mhadainn sealed the deal. Favourite scene, hands down.

Ghoistidh: Jamie’s knowing he’ll abandon Tryon eventually to fight alongside Washington, conflicting with Murtagh’s need to lead the Regulators and antagonize Tryon now, breaks my heart. And don’t get me started on Jamie’s releasing Murtz from his decades-old vow. 😭

Forewarning: If Murtz dies as a Regulator, and if Jamie is directly involved in his death, I will be inconsolable… about losing TV-Murtagh. Real Life Murtagh™ is safe, at home with me. 

Sadly Absent: Young Ian. I really missed Ian. And Rollo. (Which is more than I can say for Lizzie. She looked at Josiah Beardsley on the big house verandah the same way she looked at Young Ian on the Cape Fear boat.) Hurry home…

Reality Bites: Too clean? Too modern? Too fancy? Too funny. Three of the four main characters touched a rock and instantaneously travelled 200 years. One of them three stinkin’ times. Reality left the building at 37:41 of the first episode. (Well, Frank saw a ghost at 24:20, but who wants to talk about Frank?) Embrace the fiction…

Closing Credits: Reports of Ronald D. Moore’s executive-producer death have been greatly exaggerated. Like the author’s, we see his name in big, bold font immediately before and after the episode. **I recognized Isaiah Morton by John Quincy Myers’ “Come on, Morton, time waits for no man” during the drinking game (if you didn’t catch him there, Isaiah was the first man to pledge fealty to Jamie), but I can’t put faces to book-familiar names Murdina & Arch Bug, Margaret Chisholm, Duncan Innes, or Ronnie Sinclair. Could you? 🤔

Get your act together, Starz, and offer your app to the rest of the world. *On W Network in Canada I’m able to start watching Outlander 25 hours after Starz app users in the USA and Puerto Rico start watching it. Of course when you change your cable package without subscribing to W Network and discover your thinking it’s available for free preview in February is a mistake, 75 hours extends to 85 hours, minimum, what with having to wait till morning to call to subscribe. Blah blah blah. 🧀 🧀 🧀 to accompany the whine.

Note: If you choose to read my recap/review(s), and think, “Of course she’s all positive and happy about the show; she wouldn’t say shite if her mooth was full of it,” you’re sadly mistaken. Few things come more naturally to me than being negative and critical. I grew up in an environment where, if you have nothing nice to say, you make sure everyone can hear it. I wrestle with the ghost of that environment every time I open my mouth. I refuse to let it haunt my blog. #TV #Fiction #Fun

__________

Gifs: @mclintocks​ (1 & 2), @thewanderingace​ (3)

#Outlander #Personal #Review #TFC #S5E1 The Fiery Cross #Claire Fraser #Jamie Fraser #Brianna MacKenzie #Roger MacKenzie #Fergus Claudel Fraser #Marsali Fraser #Jocasta Cameron #Ulysses #Too Much Of Frank #Murcasta shmurcasta 🙄 #Slut #190 #021820

#Outlander #Personal #Review #TFC #S5E1 The Fiery Cross #Claire Fraser #Jamie Fraser #Brianna MacKenzie #Roger MacKenzie #Fergus Claudel Fraser #Marsali Fraser #Jocasta Cameron #Ulysses #Too Much Of Frank #Murcasta shmurcasta 🙄 #190 #021820

[stebeans]

She-ra Inspired Actor AU - II

Maya Sanchez as Catra

Taylor Cruz as Adora

Jessica Cho as Glimmer

Marcus Patterson as Bow

A She-ra Actor AU fic where She-ra and the Princesses of Power is a popular tv series and our lovable characters are played by actresses/actors. Inspired by the amazing fanart and concept by @sunzho and @hey_adora on instagram #cayaactorau, see link below and please follow them!

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/cayaactorau/

P.S. I also changed the “real-life” name for Adora’s actress that sunzho and hey_adora came up with from Claire Cruz to Taylor Cruz . Not that I hated the name but I have bad experiences with Claire’s in my life and it felt odd on my part to write about a character with the same name...please forgive me!

Callbacks and the Chemistry Test

Unlike the day of auditions, callbacks was less hectic yet all the more nerve-wracking. The waiting room held a handful of actresses and their mothers and/or managers, sometimes they were one and the same as Taylor, unfortunately, knew quite well. Taylor herself had come alone. There was no mother, no manager, no agent, no friends or even distant relatives. As her mother had so eloquently last told her: she had made her bed and laid in it. Mother of the year, she was not.

Taylor sat in a chair situated in the corner, isolated away from the others and their curious looks. She had showed up late (again) and as soon the other occupants had glanced up to see who had entered, their eyes had immediately darted away in uneasiness. Letting out a gruff sigh, Taylor understood the tension that radiated around her. She didn’t look like the typical cheerful, all fake smiles, blonde actresses that overflowed the waiting rooms for auditions. And it didn’t help that she had caused a scene her first day.

But seriously, that bitch had it coming. Who the hell did she think she was going around telling people to “go back home to whatever backwards country they came from” or some shit along those lines. And it wasn’t like the other girl was going to say anything back. She was practically shaking with fear. Pathetic. And Taylor was sure as hell wasn’t going to let anything like that slide.

Tilting her head back until it thumped against the wall, Taylor counted the tiles of the ceiling to calm her racing heart. Though Taylor radiated a “no-fucks-given” exterior appearance – very successfully she might add— inside, she was a bundle of nerves. Ever since she had been labelled “difficult to work with, irresponsible punk, worthless actress” from her last gig, she had been flailing ever since to land a role. Casting directors who have heard down the grapevine barely gave her a shot these days and scripts barely ever made it into her hands. Nineteen and peaked. Wonderful.

Taylor let out a hiss at the thought before giving her head a good shake. No. She was not out yet. She may be down but definitely not out. This lead for She-ra was going to change her career around, she just knew it. Taylor could feel it in her bones that this role was going to be life-changing.

With everyone in the room avoiding eye contact with her it allowed Taylor to observe them blatantly. None of the faces really stood out to her and she smirked smugly when she didn’t see the bitch who’s face she almost caved in hadn’t made it to callbacks. Well, serves her right. Although with a second browse around the room Taylor failed to notice the one person who would’ve stood out right away. She’s not here, Taylor thought.

A wave a disappointment washed through her. She was selfish and she knew it and there was no one but her good enough for the part of Adora/She-ra but she had hoped the other girl…Mana or was it Mara – that last one sounded familiar – would defy the odds and at least be called back. Taylor did appreciate a good underdog story.

The room emptied and soon it was just Taylor lingering. The other actresses left, some looking dejected but most wore expressions that were hard to read. Maybe they saved the best for last? That was the famous saying was it not? At last she was led down the hall and back into the same room with three familiar smiling faces. “Hi Taylor. Great to see you again.” The casting director greeted. “We were really impressed with your audition.”

Taylor couldn’t help the smile that grew on her face, ears slightly burning. “Thanks.”

“So the producer and I have something a little different planned –” The casting director was cut off by a soft knock on the door and immediately Taylor’s eyebrows shot up. Was someone crashing her callback? What the hell?

The door opened slowly until eventually a mop of brown hair, bright eyes and a sheepish smile peaked into the opening. “Uh hi? I was told to meet here?”

“Mara?” Taylor exclaimed, her guard up. What on earth was she doing here? And during her callback? None of the other girls had their callback rudely interrupted.

“Ma-ya.” The girl corrected, her furrowed brows conveyed that Taylor wasn’t the only one confused by the turn of events. She met Taylor’s eyes and it was clear that she recognized her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt I must’ve gotten the time mixed up.”

“No, no there hasn’t been a mistake. Please come in Maya! We are so glad you can make it today.” The casting director cheerfully beckoned the girl into the room. “You’re actually just in time. I was just explaining to Taylor here what you can expect today.”

Maya shuffled in gawkily until she stood a respectful distance apart from Taylor. They eyed each other warily until the producer cleared her throat. “We just wanted to say we were really impressed with both of your auditions and instead of reading from the script that was sent to you we want you two to read from this. We’ll let you two a quick moment to familiarize yourselves with the scene.”

Unable to fathom what was happening Taylor nodded absentmindedly and reached for the new script. She gave it a quick read-through, noting that it was a more detailed script of the first altercation between the leads Adora and Catra, the villain of the show, from what Taylor had grasped from the pitch and initial script that was given to her. The new scene was quite the pivot Taylor had been expecting.

                                                  ADORA: I’m not going home Catra.

(screams from the burning village echoes in the background).

ADORA: I can’t. Not after everything I’ve seen. (ADORA reaches for CATRA’S hand). 

ADORA: Come with me! You don’t have to go back there. We can fix this.

This scene was much more expressive and heartbreaking than the solo scene she had been preparing as she thumbed through the first few lines. Taylor had finished the read through first, allowing herself to study the girl next to her. Closer, she could note the sprinkling of freckles that spread from one cheek to the other. And Taylor wasn’t sure if Maya was even aware of the way her tongue stuck out slightly when she read. Cute.

It took a couple more minutes but when Maya looked up from the script in her hands, Taylor straightened and pulled her eyes away from the girl and back to the producer who grinned slightly. It was clear that she had noticed Taylor  blatantly staring. Good going, way to look like a creep in front of the big bosses.

“I know you two must be confused but we wanted the callback today be a chemistry test of sorts.” The casting director explained. “I know that the both of you were hoping for the role Adora but we wanted to try something out.  I know this is unexpected but we wanted to see if our gut feelings were right. If I can have you, Taylor, read the part of Adora. Maya if you could read the lines for Catra?”

At the request Taylor couldn’t help the sense of relief wash through her though from the corner of her eye she could see Maya’s shoulders drop in disappointment. It took a moment but Taylor realized the extent of the read. “Her?” Taylor raised a disbelieving brow at the girl beside her. “You want her to play opposite of me?”

Maya let out a little huff, crossing her arms in front of her. “What’s wrong with that?”

Taylor took a moment to eye her critically. Sure she had a pretty mean glare when she got going but at the same time “She’s like…five-foot tall and a hundred pounds when wet. My grandmother looks more intimidating than her. You got to admit she isn’t very…villainy. ”

Maya spluttered indignantly. “Excuse me! For your information I’m five-foot-two!—”

Taylor scoffed. “Oh, my mistake. Five-foot-two. My apologies –”

“— and I’m stronger than I look! Just because I don’t have like…a billion piercings and an obnoxious devil-may-care attitude doesn’t mean I can’t be badassed. You haven’t even seen me act. I bet I can act circles around you any day!”

“Evidently not.” Taylor shot back, cheeks heating up in anger. “Seeing as they just offered me the lead role. You’re like…my sidekick or whatever.”

Taylor smirked as Maya unfolded her arms, strolled right up into her personal space in a fit of rage and pointed an accusing finger in her face. “Have you even read the script? Catra isn’t a sidekick.” She said the last part in disgust. “If anything, she’s her equal! She’s just a little misguided and hurt but she isn’t a bad person! And I'm pretty sure they didn't offer you anything.”

Distantly Taylor could see the casting members whispering between one another. In the far part in her mind Taylor could register that she was blowing this but the anger that was seething just below the surface was taking precedence.

“Ladies!” a booming voice cut through their argument. It was the executive producer. Oh great. They sure showed off their stuff. As if remembering where they were, Maya took a couple steps back so she was no longer evading Taylor’s space, quickly lowering her accusing finger at the same time. “Thank you for that…performance but I think we’ve seen everything we needed to see.”

The faces of the three women were hard to read and besides the polite smile they all wore, they weren’t giving anything away. Honestly, Taylor thought they’d be thrown out by security by now after what had to be the worst chemistry performance in the history of acting. “Thank you once again for your time ladies and I hope you both have a good day.”

Ugh. If that didn’t sound like a brush off than Taylor didn’t know what was. Taylor and Maya packed up their things in silence though both were trying to control the annoyance and frustration that surfaced during the performance. “Thanks a lot.” Taylor sneered as soon as they cleared the building’s exit.

Maya whirled around with narrowed eyes. “No. Don’t you dare blame that all on me.”

“No? Than who should I blame?”

“If only you would have just done the read-through with me without getting all snippy we wouldn’t had to have resorted to bickering like a bunch of immature babies.”

“That reminds me don’t you have a babysitter to run back to? I’m sure you’re missing nap time.”

Taylor watched in amusement as Maya ran her hands through her long dark locks, seemingly looking like she was resisting to pull her own hair out. “Oh my God! How old do you think I am?”

“…Like twelve? or something?”

Taylor would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy making Maya lose her composure. It was quite fascinating actually. To watch someone as shy and introverted as Maya break out of her shell. “I am almost eighteen and I’m graduating from high school in a few weeks I’ll have you know!” Maya exclaimed hotly. “And not all of us are lucky to be born as freaking bean stalks!”

“I should thank you.” Taylor snickered as Maya’s nose bunched up in confusion. “Having you around is good for my ego. You make me sound waytaller than I actually am. If anything, I’m of average height. Just five-foot-six of pure American muscle.” She even raised her arms to flex, though it was hard to tell through her the thickness of her leather jacket.

“Ugh. I liked it better when all you did was glower.” Maya muttered with an eye roll. “Why do you have to be so difficult?”

Difficult?

It was almost instantaneous. Taylor could feel herself go numb and her features darken at the word. Lowering her arms to her side, Taylor shoved them into the pockets of her jacket in an attempt to hide the shakiness of her hands. “Difficult?” She echoed. “Fine whatever. Think what you want of me but I’d rather be difficult than some stupid, naïve little girl.” Taylor hissed.

As soon as those words left her lips Taylor wish she could reach out and pull them back in before they did any damage but it was clear on Maya’s hurtful expression that it was too late. Ignoring the pang of guilt hammering inside her chest at the wounded look on Maya’s face, Taylor steeled herself as she often done. “Well as fun as this has been, which it hasn’t and I’m lying, I have places to be.”

Tightly sealing the apology that sat on the tip her tongue, Taylor shouldered her way past Maya, knocking the girl a step back as she stepped onto the sidewalk and down the street, never once looking back where she left the stunned girl. It’s better this way, Taylor thought numbly. It wasn’t like there was a likely chance they would ever see each other again.

#she-ra #spop #catradora #catra #adora #live action au #Maya (plays Catra) is a nerd #Taylor (plays Adora) is a big grump #now on ao3

[hbwbyniall]

Ways To Love

Sooooo it’s finally here, I may have to fix some grammar in there but I couldn’t wait to post. Also not very sure about the part before the end but it’s already done and I’m all for unnecessary drama.

(ao3)

-

It’s not easy. He knew that the second he stepped into Los Angeles when he was only nineteen and he felt the world was at his feet as he was chasing his dream of becoming an actor. He did some musicals and school plays back home, and yes, he was good at it but when he finally told his family he was going to America to truly pursue his dream, his mother almost had a heart attack.

He had a stroke of luck when he started, a bunch of gigs as an extra and some small roles in criminal shows for a period of two years but then he hit a wall. He couldn’t get anything bigger than that so he had to get a job, anything that would help him pay the bills and allow him to go to auditions. He had a bunch of part-time jobs that barely left him with enough to eat, and even in that situation, he couldn’t give up, he couldn’t go back home and admit he failed.

But it has been six years and nothing has happened. He doesn’t have an agent and he has to hunt down auditions trying to get something, anything. He was alone and tired and frustrated, he’s not a kid anymore, he can’t keep pretending that some miracle is going to come his way and fix all his problems, he can’t keep waiting for an opportunity to come knocking at his door, he realizes now that the idea of an agent finding him and giving him his dream role is just not going to happen. And he’s been trying so hard, trying to pay singing and acting classes with the little bit that he had left every month when he cut off some expenses, but it still wasn’t enough.

Maybe the problem wasn’t the world trying to sabotage his inexistent career, maybe the problem was him, maybe he wasn’t talented enough. The idea always runs around his mind every time he leaves an audition with a good sensation in his guts but he never gets a callback, or when he does get a callback but gets rejected anyway. Maybe this wasn’t for him at all, maybe he made a huge mistake leaving everything he knew to chase a kid’s dream.

He had decided he would go home at the end of the year, this wasn’t working for him anymore and he missed his family too much to carry on anymore. So when he made peace with the idea that he completely wasted six years of his life, had no profession and almost ruined his relationship with his mother, he gets a call.

“I have an audition for you,” the voice on the other end says, sounding excited and reminding him of the hundreds of times this has happened before.

“Louis…” he sighs, giving up entirely.

“No, Niall. Listen,” Louis cuts him off quickly, trying not to lose Niall’s attention.

It was an indie movie. A love story about a frustrated artist who rides the same train every morning only to draw people, until one day a girl sits in front of him, swollen eyes and bitten lips, looking like a mess, so he draws her. It wasn’t exactly the role he would’ve gone for in the past but anything sounds good at this point and the best part of it? It’ll be shot in London.

It’s based on a book Niall never read before; it was published five years ago but apparently, it only got attention three years later and the author sold the rights for the movie a year ago. Louis sent them his resume some months ago but when he didn’t hear back he decided not to tell Niall.

And Niall trusts Louis; he’s his best friend and the only one that cares enough for him to actually pretend to be his agent for a while. He came to Los Angeles after he broke up with his girlfriend to a party and try to forget her. His parents have money so it wasn’t a big deal for him until he knocked up an American girl and got himself a son. They met one night at a bar when Louis was very drunk and buying everyone drinks and Niall appreciated it because he just came out of a horrible audition and was beaten up about it. That night Louis listened and then cried when he told Niall about how much he missed Eleanor and how he’s never getting her back after the pregnancy but after hearing his son’s heartbeat for the first time that morning he wouldn’t change it for a thing.

He spent the next nine months in America, with Brianna and Niall, helping him get auditions and filling up his fridge when he wasn’t home, but after Freddie was born and was old enough to travel to London, Louis took him to meet his family. A couple of weeks went by when Louis called to tell him Eleanor wanted to meet with him. He was happy for him, but a part of him broke when he knew he wouldn’t have Louis next to him the way he had grown used to.  

Louis was in England at the moment, people still had his number when they wanted a cute blond guy to appear dead in some episode of any CSI show, so occasionally he would call Niall to send him to some auditions. But Niall stopped dying his hair when he thought that would help to get better roles, and when that didn’t happen he decided to stop once and for all. He told that to Louis, so this call must mean something.

“They did the cast here in London and they didn’t like anybody,” he says, rushing up, “just read the script I’m sending you and go to the address I texted you earlier at five.”

Niall vaguely remembers seeing an unopened text from Louis after coming out of the shower. He pulls back his phone from his ear to look at the time and sees the text with the shared doc Louis sent as well.

“I’ll check it out,” Niall sighs.

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Louis yells, only to be shushed in the other side of the line.

“You know…” Niall says, looking at his sides before crossing the street after getting breakfast. “You’re not actually my agent.”

“You couldn’t afford me, darling,” Louis snorts, cutting the line as Niall enters the nearest library-café and searches for the book Louis was talking about.

He finds it in the best seller section, even five years later. Shit.  

So he takes the book and pays for it, he orders a cup of coffee and starts reading. The story starts on the train, of course, it’s slow and careful at the beginning with details, he’s one chapter in, getting to know the character, and suddenly he gets trapped in the story, not really feeling the time passing by.

Niall is not a crier or a fast reader, but four hours and three cups of coffee later he’s read all five hundred pages in one sitting. It was a beautiful story about falling in love with a hero and the choices they make in life; it’s about growth and power and mystery and understanding; it’s about art and empathy, and Niall hates the fact that he likes it because if he doesn’t get the role now it will hurt him tremendously. So he skips lunch to study the script and by the time five pm arrives, he’s already outside the hotel room’s door where the auditions are being held, waiting for his name to be called.

*

“I know what you do is important Violet, but-” His voice cracks just a bit and his eyes start to well up. “I can’t take it anymore.” Niall shakes his head, rubbing his nose and looking everywhere but the person in front of him. “I can’t pretend that it doesn’t kill me, seeing you like this,” he yells, grabbing his own shirt, trying to regularize his breathing. “I can’t stop thinking one day you won’t come back to me!”

He didn’t have time to change his clothes and he saw the line of guys dressing up as the character in the book. A frayed burgundy sweater or a navy one, black jeans and boots, the only two outfits he wears in the first five chapters and Niall only had his green shirt and a hoodie on. He tried to keep that out of his head when he was called into the room and when they told him what scene they wanted him to perform, everything faded away.

The room is silent. Niall can hear his heartbeat in his ear and he can feel his breath come out sharply over his lips. The line waiting outside is still long, it’s almost seven and Niall is hungry and sleepy but until five seconds ago, he felt like he gave everything left in him and maybe that’s the problem, maybe there’s not much left in him to make it count. Sometimes he wishes he had the same confidence he had when he first came to Los Angeles.

He focuses his eyes on the people in front of him: Matthew Lessall, the casting director, Elena Stevens, the author of the book and the script, a couple of producers and Chloé Zhao, the director of the movie. He felt their eyes on him the moment he entered the room, he felt how they start turning the pages of his resume – with no interesting material on it – that Louis sent them, he heard them whisper as he read his lines. But now, they are all looking at him and he can’t read them, their faces are stoic and he can’t get anything from them. A couple of seconds pass and Niall feels like he could drown on air if he has to stand still for another second. He feels the last tear fall down his face and when he brushes it off with the end of his sleeve, the people in front of him seem to finally wake up from a very deep dream. Elena whispers something in Chloé’s ear and she nods.

“We’ll call you,” Matthew says.

And just like that, Niall’s entire world falls down at his feet.

*

He cries and not because of the movie playing on the screen in front of him or the brain freeze he got from the ice cream he’s eating; it just hit him. He’s going back home, almost in his 30s with nothing accomplished or any other aspirations in life. Music was always an option but after living in LA for this long, he feels like there’s nothing left for him other than working with his dad in Mullingar. Perhaps he’s crying because he doesn’t want to be a butcher.

As he stands up from the couch to go for a wee, he passes the mirror in the hallway and catches a look on his reflection and, quite honestly, it makes him laugh. He’s a mess, an exhausted and heartbroken mess. Niall washes his hands and stretches before going back to his Netflix marathon. He picks up his phone to look for the conversation he had with the girl he works with at Starbucks who recommended him a movie when he sees the two missed calls from an unknown number. He checks the time and yes, it’s 2 in the morning and then his phone starts ringing again.

“Hello?” Niall answers, a little bit worried because who the hell could be calling him at these hours?

The only person that comes to his mind is Louis or his friends back in Ireland who forgot about the time difference but the number is unknown and he hasn’t spoken to them in years.

“Niall Horan?” A voice comes from the other end of the line and it sounds slightly familiar. “This is Matthew Lessall,” Niall holds his phone tighter to his ear, “I’m calling you to tell you that we’d like you to make a screen test in London. Are you up for it?”

Niall cries again in the middle of the night, but this time he has a smile on his face as well.

*

Louis goes to pick him up at the airport and Niall cries again on his shoulder. It’s dumb, especially because he didn’t sleep at all on the plane to London and he also cried for a couple of hours before landing. Nothing is certain yet, he hasn’t signed a contract, but as far as he knows – and what Louis has told him – he’s the only one that has been called for a screen test, and he’s losing his mind over it. He didn’t know how popular the book is or how high the expectations are for this movie. It’s not a Hollywood movie but the only reason for that is the author. According to fan blogs she was eighteen when she published the book and she didn’t have much creative freedom, she had to change big parts of the plot to get it accepted because no other publishing house was interested in her.

So she wants power over the movie that she didn’t have for the book. Even like that, this movie is big. And Niall is scared, but he’s decided to work his ass off because this is his last chance.

“Now, I am your agent,” Louis says right into his ear and Niall laughs as he lets him go.

Louis takes one of his bags and walks him to his car parked outside the airport. Eleanor is there, holding Freddie in her lap and having, apparently, a very serious conversation about red bikes when they arrive. Niall gives them each a kiss on the cheek and then sits in the backseat. Louis slips into the driver’s seat after he puts the bags in the trunk and then turns the radio on as he waits for Eleanor to place Freddie in his safety seat next to Niall before he stars driving to his apartment.

Eleanor asks him about LA and what he’s been doing lately. He tells her he just quit both of his jobs and packed everything he owns in the three bags in the back because if this doesn’t work out, he’s going back to Ireland. When Eleanor turns his whole body to face Niall in shock, Louis laughs so loud they almost miss the beginning of a song.

“I love this song,” Eleanor says as he turns the volume up and Freddie laughs.

Louis and Niall have the same reaction: they roll their eyes. Niall has heard this song an awful amount of times in the last year; it’s by this British fella, just released his third album or something like that, pretty huge in both England and America, maybe even the whole world.

Eleanor starts singing from the top of her lungs as Louis and Niall try to have a conversation. He doesn’t want to make plans, but it’s hard when Louis is this excited, it makes him feel good like everything is going to be okay from now on, that his work and the last six years have been for something, that Niall can finally take control over his life for once.

“You know he did a movie, right?” Eleanor says when the song ends and Louis looks at her for a second before turning back to the road. “Harry Styles, he made that war movie.”

And Niall knows, he didn’t watch it, but he knows so he nods at her and shares a glace with Louis, knowing this is how the rest of the drive home is going to be.

*

It’s been two weeks and it’s been great, besides the fact that he had to shave for this role.

Niall got to see people he hasn’t seen in years, he’s been reading and learning his lines, done a couple more auditions for the role of this movie, a wannabe artist called Charles, and he doesn’t want to jinx it but he only has the screen test and a meeting with the writer left before shooting starts, so it looks like he has this one in his pocket.

Well at least it did until this morning when Niall had to wake up because of Louis yelling in the kitchen, so he takes his time to brush his teeth and wash his face before he goes downstairs to face whatever Louis is upset about, but he can feel it in his guts. It was too good to be true.

By the time he gets to the kitchen, Louis’ phone is already facing the table and he’s clenching and unclenching his fists like he’s ready to hit something or anything, and Niall feels sick.

“I’m guessing that was the casting director,” Niall says, walking to the coffee machine to pour himself a cup.  

Louis looks up to him like he didn’t hear him enter the room or maybe he is too absorbed in his thoughts that he really didn’t notice anything else happening around him.

“Um, something like that.”

“So, I’m not talking to the writer today.” It sounds more like a question than a statement, so he avoids Louis’ expression and goes to see what’s in the fridge.

He can feel Louis’ eyes at the back of his neck.

“Eat and then get changed, I’m going to talk to them.”

Niall frowns and hears Louis’ keys before the door closes. And that’s it, his last chance slipping away and Louis starting his car trying to save what’s left of it. So he does what Louis told him to, he eats and goes upstairs to take a shower, twenty minutes later when he’s about to turn on the TV, he gets a text from Louis.

Come here, right now.

It doesn’t take him too long to get there or maybe it does and he’s just too immersed in his own thoughts, looking all melancholic through the Lyft’s window and exanimating every single decision that got him to this point. The so close and yet too far dilemma that his life seems to be, and yes, he could be overreacting but this truly feels like the end of the tunnel for him, he just doesn’t know what he’ll find on the other side.

He’s nervous and he feels like a kid waiting to be caught for doing something he shouldn’t. Maybe he’ll never really mature. He doesn’t behave like a man of his age, he doesn’t dress like a man of his age, he doesn’t even eat like a man of his age. He’s like a kid. A stupid and stubborn kid holding on to the last bit of dream that he has left for his dear life. And perhaps that’s why he doesn’t have any regrets.

When he arrives he sees Louis waiting for him at the entrance, frenetically talking to some guys but he stops and sends them away the moment Niall steps out of the car. Louis walks to him and puts his arm around his shoulders, moving him closer so that he’s able to break it down to him in a whisper. And it’s bad. “Someone” or more like a representative of an A-list-celebrity-someone, whose identity is being protected from the public, called yesterday asking to talk to the producers and the writer because they’re interested in the role of Charles.

Niall could have an anxiety attack right this second.

“Who?”

“They won’t tell me,” Louis says as they walk into the crowded studio. “That’s why they canceled on us today. This A-person, the A standing for Asshole,” Louis explains as if it was a fact, “is coming to talk to them.”

“Why are we here, then?” Niall asks. He stops walking and it takes Louis a couple steps before he notices that Niall isn’t following him anymore.

He turns back around and promptly grabs Niall by the shoulders. “Because you’re getting into that meeting too.” And the determination in his eyes makes it pretty clear it wasn’t a suggestion.

*

Niall is fucked. He’s sitting across from Harry Styles and two members of his team, who seem more than angry. Niall can definitely see why after Louis almost made a scene talking about lawyers he doesn’t have and dropping names of people he doesn’t know, only to get them into this room. Right now he’s sitting next to Niall with a big smirk on his face, not bothered at all by the tension in this room. Almost giving off the same sense of carelessness is Harry Styles and Niall hates him already but he’s also amazed. It’s incredible to think about these people as unreachable human beings; you see them on TV and in movies or you hear them on radios, but sitting at the same table, a couple of feet apart, seems like a product of imagination.

But he’s real, Harry Styles, all talk and handsome looking at the screen of his phone, making time pass. He looks expensive as well with that giant coat and those pants too big to be his size, and even though the clothes look like they could be from the thrift store, something about him makes it look like they’re worth a million pounds (which they probably are). Something about his wavy hair falling in front of his eyes, his rosy lips half-open, and his sharp jaw…He is attractive and Niall hates him even more for it. He can’t compete with that.

They’re waiting for Elena Stevens and everyone seems to be on edge. Niall feels like everyone’s blaming them, or Louis to be more specific, but he is doing it for him so the heated glances are also directed at him. Louis got his phone out as well, trying to appear busy probably, but Niall is sitting next to him and he can see him close and open the same three apps since they sat down.

“No word about this to Eleanor,” Louis whispers at him without looking up, the same second the door opens and Elena walks in with her assistant. She’s opted for a casual outfit with her hoodie and jeans, and it makes her look so young, Niall realized with a start that she was only 19 when she got published. Her hair is tied up but strands of hair have come loose and are framing her face, she looks like she just woke up even though it’s close to midday.

Harry puts his phone into his pocket and stands up to greet her with a kiss on the cheek and a hug, longer than any strangers could be comfortable with. She clears her throat and he lets her go, scratching the back of his neck.

“I’m so sorry, I’m just… a huge fan.” He smiles.

Great.

She nods and tells him it’s okay, rubbing his arm and then she turns to look at Niall and smiles. She approaches him and hugs him, taking Niall by surprise but also making him exhale. Maybe he has a shot in this after all.

“Niall! It’s so good to see you again!” She says, tapping his shoulder before moving to sit down. “Mr. Horan here gave a beautiful audition back in Los Angeles.” Elena smiles again, but this time looking at Harry.

“Mr. Styles sent a tape-” A woman, Niall assumes it’s Harry’s agent, throws in.

“Yeah, we asked agencies and agents for tapes three months ago. I can’t say I watched it,” Elena interrupts in a heartbeat and Niall can see Louis’ smile from the corner of his eye.

“But I did. It’s good, Elena,” Matthew interferes and Niall wants to punch him in the face.

Harry clears his throat. “I can read some lines.” His voice is deep and mellow not sounding at all worried.

“We’re way past that, Mr. Styles.” Elena stands up, taking her notebook with her. “We start shooting next week.”

Niall feels like he can breathe again and Louis is possibly feeling the same if the way he touches his arm says anything. But the relief doesn’t last long because Matthew stands up as well and says something in Elena’s ear, which starts a whisper discussion between them like there was no one else in the conference room. But finally, she sits down again and crosses her hands over the table.

“All right, Mr. Styles,” she says. “You’ll read some lines but Mr. Horan here will read Charles’, you’ll be reading Violet’s.”

“I’m okay with that,” he says.

Niall doesn’t want to be nervous. Apparently, Elena likes him a lot or maybe she just dislikes Harry Styles a lot but it seems like Niall has a safety net right now, he knows his lines and he’s ready for it, but when he looks at the person in front of him with three people behind him handing him the opened script at the scene Elena chose for them to read, it almost feels like a courtesy before a goodbye.

“What are you doing here?” Harry says, exalted as it says in the script.

“You weren’t answering my calls,” Niall says and he doesn’t need a script, he’s been reading, learning and breathing those lines since Louis called him back in LA.

“So you break into my house?!” Harry yells, and Niall can see the distress in his eyes when he looks at him. He’s good. “I could’ve killed you.”

“You’ve been acting weird, disappearing in the middle of the night, getting bruises out of nowhere.” His voice breaks a little as he holds onto the last chance of saving his dream. “What’s going on, Violet?”

Harry bites his bottom lip and his hands turn into fists over the table. “I need you to leave,” he whispers, looking down at the script.

“I’m not leaving until we talk,” Niall answers right back in a heartbeat, not letting himself get left behind by Harry Styles.

“I can’t,” Harry replies, and that son of a bitch is crying.

“I don’t understand. You know you can tell me anything-”

“Not this.”

“Why?” He demands angrily, willing him to look him in the eyes.

“Because I couldn’t bear the hatred or the fear in your eyes!” He yells and if the room wasn’t quiet before, it sure is now. “When I said I could’ve killed you when I turned on the light, it’s because I could.”

Finally, Harry lifts his head and looks him straight in the eyes, taking Niall’s breath away.

The room stays silent for a whole minute before Elena and Matthew stand up, claiming five minutes before leaving the room. Niall is fucked. It’s not even been a minute but it already feels like hours. He’s aware of his foot tapping the floor but he can’t help himself at this moment, so Louis places a hand over his knee and tells him he did great but it’s not enough because, by the look in his eyes, he can see Harry also did great.

Harry Styles looks calm and of fucking course he does. Niall guesses after fame you don’t really have to try much harder to get what you want. Niall, on the other hand, is fighting against a superstar who’s trying to take away his last chance. He hasn’t really had the time to think about this side of the job, getting to meet famous people, talk to them, act with them. Instead, he got stuck in the memories of school plays and small-town theaters, the craziness backstage, the countless rehearsal hours and the effort one has to put in for a play to do well. The only thing on his mind was stories and scripts, he almost forgot about the glamorous side of it; he doesn’t even know how much he would get paid for this project. He wonders if it’s the other way around for someone like Harry Styles.

As the seconds pass by, Niall starts spiraling again. He starts thinking about Mullingar, his parents, and his friends. Even though he told himself he wouldn’t tell anyone about this role, he couldn’t stop himself from telling his parents. He just wanted them to be proud of him at least once in his life and he doesn’t want to go back home empty-handed now. He tries to shake off that thought and focus on other things, like his rival. His chair is turned to his team and they seem to be angry, but not Harry. He’s actually all smiles and laughter, trying to calm his agent. His chin is resting in the palm of his hand and Niall can’t seem to be able to look at anything else. His hands look big, at least bigger than Niall’s, and his long fingers are all adorned by shiny and expensive rings.

As if he had felt Niall staring at him, Harry suddenly turns around to meet his eyes, giving him no time to play it off, so he just looks down quickly and then awkwardly turns to Louis, his self-proclaimed agent.

Louis starts to get nervous when the five minutes’ mark passes and they’re still not back and Niall can still feel Harry’s eyes on him, so he reaches for his phone and starts looking for something to do. He’s tempted to text Eleanor a photo of Harry only to see her reaction but that wouldn’t help anybody. She has a lot of followers on social media platforms and it’s not like she’s the type of person who would post that, but the man sitting across from Niall is one of her favorite artists and people have done crazier things because of their idols. Instead of texting her, Niall starts typing apology notes to his parents and anyone who supported him over the years. He’s not being pessimistic; he just likes to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. And this, by far, is the worst.

Niall knows he’s not really a competition. How could he be? Harry Styles is almost from another species: apart from being wildly famous, he’s also more than attractive with his long legs and the face of a model. Niall is pretty sure he has won awards for being sexy or something along the line and he’s more than positive he has a six-pack under that loose sweater, it’s ridiculous. He is just Niall, a normal Irish lad who drinks too many beers for his body to be forgiving. He has stubble on his face and his nails are bitten down due to all the stress. He can’t remember the last time someone who wasn’t his mom told him he looks handsome. Niall lets out a sigh and locks his phone. Leaning back in his chair he closes his eyes and tries to clear his mind and when he opens them again a few minutes later he’s face to face with one Harry Styles. He looks even better from up close and Niall feels the urge to punch him in the beautiful face.

“I think we haven’t been properly introduced, I’m Harry Styles.” He smiles and holds out his hand, waiting for Niall to shake it.

“I know,” Niall says simply, and his mother would be horrified but this is a war and he has no time to make friends.

“Um, well,” Harry clears his throat and scratches his arm with the previously extended hand. “My agent didn’t think it was a good idea to come over to say hi.” And there’s that smile again, the one that probably gets him the world. Niall only blinks.

“It sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.”

“Niall-” Louis cuts in next to him, reaching out to touch his arm.

“I’m not trying to steal your job,” Harry says, keeping his voice down and getting closer to him, maybe to avoid the other people in the room from listening in.

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” Niall laughs because he can’t believe it. Louis lets his arm go because he knows he’s right.

“You don’t understand, this book means a lot to my sister and me,” he tries to explain and he actually seems distressed but Niall has seen him act now and his mere presence here compromises his position in this movie.

“And this is my last chance,” Niall replies and it hits him once more, like saying it out loud to a completely stranger makes it more real. After this, there’s nothing left for him and Harry seems to understand because he backs out a little, like Niall’s words actually mean something to him.

He looks at Niall for a few beats, and then clears his throat before he leaves to talk to his agent. They seem to argue about something, but Niall doesn’t have the interest or the energy to pay attention to them.

“It seems like we’ll be here for a while, I’ll order your lunch,” Harry’s agent says louder like she wants the entire room to know or maybe to make a point. It doesn’t matter and he doesn’t care.

“I’ll order our lunches too,” Louis echoes, making everyone turn to them as he stands up with his phone already to his ear.

*

Five minutes turned into an hour and a half and Niall is bored out of his mind by now. He stretched out his feet on a second chair and he’s trying to sleep, but the fluorescent is right over his head so it’s impossible. The table is filled up with empty takeaway boxes and containers; Harry ate some kind of salad and Niall felt bad for about two seconds before diving into his burger again. They finished lunch thirty minutes ago and he has nothing else to do but stress about everything.

And he would’ve done that for a long time if the doors didn’t open right then, making everyone stand up for some reason.

“Mr. Styles and Mr. Horan with respective agents can stay,” Matthew says, “the rest of you can go.”

As the room starts to clears out, Niall’s head does too and he can see clearly what is about to happen, and it seems like Louis does too because he feels him rub his back when they sit down again in front of the same people he auditioned for in the States, which doesn’t seem to matter anymore. He’s about to get fired.

“When I started writing this novel, I had one thing in mind,” Elena starts and her eyes are shining with excitement, “but I was too young and my editor wanted me to do some major changes to be published and I did because I couldn’t fight for my work just yet and I just wanted the book to sell.”

She seems inspired and happy with that giant smile on her face and Niall is happy for her and wishes her all the best with this movie, but it just leaves a bad taste in his mouth because he’s not going to be a part of it.

“So, we’ve talked about it and we’ll take the risk.” Elena claps her hands excitedly and Niall is reminded once again of how young she is. “We want to make ‘Ways to Live’ like it was always intended to be.”

“You want to make the character of Violet a man,” Harry concludes and she nods enthusiastically. Niall has no idea what they’re talking about.

“Yes”, she sighs, “We’ll use the name of my first draft. His name was Jonathan and I want you, Harry, to be Jonathan.” Everything is happening so fast and Niall can barely catch up. He feels Elena holding both of his hands and he blinks to find her looking at him. “You’ll still be Charles, of course-”

“I have no problem with it,” Harry says, matching the giant smile on Elena’s face.

“Neither do I,” Niall replies before even thinking about it. He’s not losing this opportunity.

*

He’s lying in his bed, looking at the ceiling with his phone resting next to his head. It’s been a couple of days and he signed his contract as well as some kind of document that makes Louis his manager of some sort and it’s good, it’s certain now, but it’s also different from the excitement of the beginning is gone. He has the job and they’ll start shooting in a couple of weeks, the only thing he has to do, besides relearn some of his lines, is imagine the story a bit differently - kissing Harry Styles at some point kind of different.

He just ended a phone call with his mum to let her know he has the gig but there’s been a change and she will be seeing her son on the big screens in about two years kissing another boy. She laughed asking him why he sounded so worried, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen him kissing a boy. She caught him making out with his first boyfriend at sixteen in his room, which had let to him telling her he was bisexual and then they both told his dad. It was an emotional time and Niall would’ve never thought his parents would be so supportive.

The room is quiet now and Niall feels like he should appreciate this moment, something tells him his life won’t be quiet for a long time soon. He’s going to star in a movie with a huge pop star who has never defined his sexuality and has a lot of people talking about it, guessing, asking. Niall doesn’t know what that feels like, but he doesn’t think it’d be nice since it was awful enough to come out to his catholic all-boys high school and now that he thinks about it, he may have to come out to the rest of the world. Maybe he’s overthinking this, maybe he won’t be that important. All the questions and all the attention will be on Harry and that’s good because Niall can’t handle the pressure.

Everyone knowing about his sexuality wasn’t in his plans for the near future, so yes he might have been panicking in his room in Louis’ house for the last hour and a half. He may be creating hundreds of different scenarios in his head where everything goes wrong because of him, maybe they realize he’s not that good mid-shooting, maybe Harry Styles hates him and so does the rest of the world by extension. Sometimes Niall wishes he could shut his brain down for a couple minutes. So he does the next best thing and closes his eyes while trying to slow down his breathing, something he’s been doing since he was 16 and his anxiety started to give him problems.

He does that for what feels like hours, until the sun goes down and the bell starts ringing over and over again. He hears the people entering the house, he hears the laughs and the steps as they come in, he hears children playing and dogs barking, he smells food cooking and bottles of wine being opened and wonders when Louis had the time to pull off a party. He wonders if this is for him and this job he always wanted to have, but now that he has it he feels like he’s being hunted down before it has even started. Niall wonders who could be downstairs right now, if these people remember him or even know him. He knows he’s too old to be feeling like this but maybe it was the phone call with his mom that put him in a very sensitive mood or maybe he’s too overwhelmed by everything all the time and by the time he feels his eyes watering, he realizes it has become an everyday thing.

He feels the tears running down the sides of his face and the cold air hitting their trail. His phone is ringing but he ignores it; he’s not ready to meet people and smile and talk and laugh, not yet. Everything is happening so fast, he’s barely catching up. He needs a second to breathe and clear his head before starting to actually think about how his life could change if this actually works out, how everything that he has dreamed of since he was a kid might be happening at this very moment. It’s a lot, so anyone can excuse him for another fifty minutes.

Louis, on the other hand, is not anyone and rules do not apply to him, not even courtesy or good manners. He makes his own path and he always gets his way. A lot of people would say Niall is good with people and that may be partially true, he’s a people person, he’s good at listening and laughing with people, he can be a good friend, and if he has the possibility to help, he will. But Louis, he understands people, he knows them from a five-minute conversation, so he always knows where to aim.

With Niall, there’s no boundaries or restrictions, there’s no limits or considerations. He has seen him in the lowest and highest points of his life, he has heard him say the most stupid shit ever spoken but he has also seen him talk about topics that matter to him deeply. Louis knows Niall from inside-out, he doesn’t ask for permission or forgiveness when it comes to him, so even when Niall has ignored seven of his calls, he goes into the room anyway.

“I like this panic attack a lot more than the ones in clubs,” Louis says, closing the door behind him.

“Those are trigged by my claustrophobia and anxiety,” Niall replies, not bothering to open his eyes.

“And this one?” Louis asks sitting down on the bed, his thighs touching Niall’s.

“Self-hatred and anxiety,” Niall laughs.

Louis sighs and lies down, putting his hands over his chest and looking at the ceiling just like Niall was an hour ago.

“If you don’t want to do this, just say the word.” And for the first time in the entire time Niall has gotten to know Louis, he sounds regretful, so he opens his eyes and turns his head to him.

“It’s not that,” he says and looks at the ceiling as well clearing his throat before asking the question he’s been too afraid to ask. “Do you think I’m good at this?”

“What do you mean?” Now it’s Louis who turns and he looks confused.

“Acting.” Niall can’t look at him in the eyes; his mind has been screaming at him non-stop and he’s starting to believe some of those things.

“Hey.” Louis pinches his arm and Niall exhales, turning back to him and finding Louis sitting on the bed with his full attention on him. “If I didn’t believe you have talent, I wouldn’t have fought so hard all these years for you, for this.”

“Then how come I never got anything until now?” Niall sits up as well and he’s starting to get irritated.

“Because sometimes people don’t need talented actors to play a role, they need the perfect person to play a role and I’m sorry to tell you but a white Irish dude is not trending lately.” Niall laughs at him because that, the other superpower Louis has, he magically makes everything right. “But a white bisexual Irish dude? Man, you’re going to kill it!”

He makes Niall laugh like he always does, till there are tears running down his face. He makes him laugh so hard, he bends down and holds his waist because his tummy hurts. And it’s nice for a second, hearing how their laughs slowly die instead of the noise coming from the floor beneath them. It’s nice to have someone like Louis in your corner, so brutally honest and protective.

“Who are the people downstairs?” Niall asks when he is able to breathe again.

“Oh!” Louis exclaims, like he is just remembering now about this surprise party of his, “A few friends and family members, you know?” He explains with a big smile on his face, adorably excited. “They want to congratulate you. It was Eleanor’s idea.”

“Yeah, right, Eleanor’s,” Niall says sarcastically.

“Okay, fine.” Louis stands up and starts putting his sneakers on again and then his hands on his waist. “It was my idea, you ungrateful prick,” Niall bursts out of laughter, “but this is more for me than it is for you. I deserve to be celebrated.”

And yes, he does, so he changes his clothes and goes downstairs to meet people he doesn’t remember or doesn’t know, and he smiles and laughs and saves some numbers on his phone. It feels like an out of body experience, all these people calling his name, putting an arm over his shoulders and moving him from one place to another only to introduce him to some other people with meaningless conversations and empty laughs. The oppressive feeling is starting to crawl up his chest and poisoning his mind once again when he sees Eleanor coming his way to save him with two glasses of champagne and he could cry right at that second. But he doesn’t, he just kisses her cheek and thanks her with a whisper in her ear.

The rest of the night goes by easily. Good food, good drinks and a lot of people to please.

*

His first shoots entail him walking down busy London streets filled up with extras. The wardrobe fitting was only a week ago and Niall had a couple of weeks to familiarize himself with sketches, paintings, and other art utensils just like the ones he’s holding in his ink and graphite covered hands right now. He has earphones on and he’s walking on the beat, crossing red lights and mumbling indie song lyrics. Those shots take them almost two weeks to shoot: three days a week of getting to set early in the morning and getting back home late at night.

His first scene with Harry is actually the first time their characters meet. They have a permit to shoot in the public underground for three days so they have to get it right and fast. Niall hasn’t talked to him since that day in the meeting when they told them about the drastic new direction of the movie. It’s not like they exchanged numbers or anything, especially when Louis almost had a catfight with his manager outside the studio.

Right now they’re all waiting for him on set. Niall already shot the bit where he almost misses the tube and barely gets in while losing some pages of his sketchbook in the rush, so he’s now sitting, waiting for Harry Styles to take the seat in front of him.  He does, fifteen minutes later with the make-up done, looking all beat up and bloody. Harry says hi and Niall says it back, but that’s about it. They start shooting then and don’t say much either since their characters don’t share any lines in that scene.

The next couple of days Niall falls into this new strange routine of waking up early, getting his coffee in a coffee shop near the studio after taking the actual tube there, and then dealing with twelve hours of shooting almost every day. It’s good though, it’s everything and more that he’s ever dreamt of, and he’s learning a lot. Elena is there almost every day and gives him notes alongside Chloé. And Niall is lucky, he knows it.

The anxiety in the middle of his chest starts to slowly fade away as the days pass by. He feels more comfortable and even though Harry and Niall still haven’t built a real connection, they seem to have good chemistry. Niall has made him laugh on set a couple of times between shots which wasn’t even intentional and he really dislikes how confident it made him feel nonetheless, but it’s still progress of some kind. He’s also learned that he knows very little about Harry Styles but people around him seem to genuinely like him, people in make-up, the wardrobe team and the ladies from craft, they always talk about him every time Niall is around, so Niall’s wary about making his own opinions about Harry without really knowing the man.

The chaos starts two months into shooting when the official statement regarding the cast gets released. Niall knew it was coming, Louis even specifically told him, but he forgot because he had other things on his mind, like deciding what to eat before bed that that wouldn’t make him so dense the next morning. So when it happens he isn’t prepared at all. He’s getting his morning coffee when his phone starts to blow up with text messages, phone calls, and social media notifications. Suddenly people he hasn’t talked to in over ten years were sending emails, asking if he was The Niall Horan the articles were talking about. He gains over fifty thousand followers on both Instagram and Twitter in a matter of hours. He only answers the calls from his mom and dad and then he turns his phone off before he freaks out.

When Harry sees him that day he frowns and stares at him for a second too long and Niall begs any higher power there is that he doesn’t see the panic in his eyes because he wouldn’t know what to tell him without starting to hyperventilate, but before Harry can even approach him they call him to film. That same night Louis gets his accounts verified and Niall deletes all the embarrassing photos he can find.

*

They have a late-night shoot when Harry’s fans find them, which is great if you combine it with Niall’s nerves since they’re shooting the first kissing scene under the rain. They’re not in the fans’ vision range, they’re behind the fence and they’ve been asked to stay quiet so Harry will come and meet them for a few minutes after he finishes his scenes for the night. It’s not completely successful since Niall can hear them scream and laugh from time to time but he admires the dedication, especially because they don’t know that Harry won’t be leaving at least until three in the morning.

“So, are you ready?” Niall feels the whisper on his neck and he almost falls off his director’s chair. When he whips around he’s faced with a smirking Harry Styles. “I’m so sorry,” Harry laughs. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Niall takes a second to recover and looks at him through narrowed eyes but before he can even think of a reply, they get called to shoot.

The thing is, he hasn’t kissed anyone in a while. Two years to be exact after his last girlfriend dumped him and he found himself in a point in his life when one-night stands weren’t appealing to him anymore or even worth the effort. So, he was a bit worried about messing this up or making it look awkward. Harry looking gorgeous under the rain didn’t help a lot, mostly because Niall was running out of things about him to dislike.

This is the first scene where Niall’s character learns about Harry’s character abilities – he has telekinetic powers- and the reason why he’s so secretive – he haunts down the organization that killed his mother, according to the plot. So Niall gets wired around his waist and the rain machines start going, they both stand under it for a couple of minutes to get entirely wet and then they go to their respective marks. Niall fiddles with his fingers as Harry moves to the middle of the alley, showing Niall his back. He’s a bit distracted by it when Chloé calls action but his brain reacts just in time.

“What are you doing every night that gets you looking beat up every morning?” Niall yells, following Harry as he keeps walking.

“Go home, Charles,” he says under his breath.

“I worry about you!” Niall screams and Harry stops walking. “Since I met you I go to sleep thinking about you and I feel like I can’t breathe if I don’t see you in the same fucking seat in the subway every morning.” He cries quietly and Harry turns around with red eyes and his hands turned into fists.

“I’ve told you-”

“I could never be scared of you,” Niall says, gently, walking slowly to him. “I could never hate you.”

Harry extends his hand at him, which makes Niall get pulled in by the wire around his waist until his body collides with Harry’s. He holds Niall by putting one arm around his waist while the other one hangs at his side. Niall is out of breath because of the impact and the script telling him to. He looks around him in shock and whispers, “What? How?” Harry’s hand appears on his right cheek, making him look up at him. They share a long look and Niall feels his him breathing deeply over his lips before he dives in, crashing his lips onto Niall’s.

Niall is taken by surprise. Which is stupid because he knew it was coming, he’s known for months, but when he has Harry holding him this close, his hands touching him so urgently, for a second he forgets it’s not real and he freezes a couple of seconds before he reacts and closes his eyes because according to Elena’s instructions it’s supposed to be hard and desperate.  He feels the rain slipping into his clothes but other things are more important right now, like his hand gripping Harry’s neck when he slightly opens his mouth and immediately feels his tongue begging for entrance.

“Cut!” Chloé says through the megaphone and Niall pushes Harry away breathlessly. “It was good and I liked the bit where you freeze, Niall, but the impact was too hard. Roll again since ‘I could never be scared of you’, please.”

They go back to their marks wordlessly and Niall prays to the heavens his face is not as red as it feels. This time, when he looks up at Harry, he’s smiling at him in a way he hasn’t before. He looks cocky. Niall tries to shake it off and delivers his lines when the director calls action again. The second body collide is as pleasant as the first one, but apparently looks better because no one cuts them off when they start kissing again. It’s longer than before, he can feel Harry grabbing his jacket in the back and he takes the liberty to lose his fingers in his wet hair. Niall feels his face heat up even more and he hopes that’s not a problem on camera but they still haven’t cut yet so he just keeps going until they run out of air and slowly move apart looking at each other, sharing heavy breaths.

“Again, just the kiss!” They hear through the megaphone and the same cocky smile appears on Harry’s face.

So Harry goes for it, a third time. Niall waits a couple of seconds and then closes his eyes, losing himself in the kiss, letting himself enjoy it just for a bit. This time when Harry’s tongue licks over his lips, he opens up immediately and starts reciprocating which lights up a spark between them, making them more eager. Some part of his brain is still aware of all the people watching them, the six cameras pointing at them, and the chanting of Harry’s fans somewhere in the back, ignorant of this happening at that very moment, but at the same time, he feels like it’s just the two of them. He doesn’t want to think too much into it, but when they separate Harry doesn’t let his lips go right away but instead, he bites his bottom one until Niall pulls at his hair, and then Chloé calls cut.

“What are you doing?” Niall whispers. It’s meant to sound furious or at least annoyed, but it’s just making Harry laugh.

“I’m sorry, I got caught up in the moment.” Harry gently pushes some wet strands away from Niall’s eyes before holding him around his waist again as the hair and makeup team comes running to fix the hair.

“Again.” They hear from the director.

“That’s not professional,” Niall whispers once more time before kissing for the fourth time in the middle of the night, wet from head to toes.

It takes them two more kisses before they have the final shot. Niall finds himself doing things he learned Harry likes by the way he lets out little gasps, just like Harry would do things to make him nervous, like tightening his hold on his waist or doing other things that weren’t in the script, making them waste more time than necessary and when they finally hear Chloé calling cut and Elena squeaking in excitement after having the perfect kiss, they stand in front of each other, their lips slightly swollen and their chests moving up and down heavily. A team comes in to free Niall from the wires but his eyes seem to still be attached to Harry who hasn’t moved an inch.

They say nothing for the next few minutes they spend on set, not even when he turns around and still feels Harry’s eyes on him. Niall takes a hot shower in his trailer and puts his own clothes on to finally go home and get some rest, even though he’s sure it won’t be easy for him to fall asleep tonight. He calls an Uber and gets his stuff together before stepping out of the trailer.

He’s looking at his phone and walking to the gate when he hears people shouting his name. As he looks up he sees at least fifteen girls calling for him behind the fence. He stands where he is for a second, looking around him until the girls point at him and call his name again. He doesn’t have to go, he knows that he’s tired and cold and they’re not here for him anyway, but he doesn’t want to be rude so he walks up to them and they start screaming even louder.

“Neil! Neil!” A redhead, no older than eighteen, calls him. “Can we take a picture with you?”

“It’s Niall,” he smiles and the girl goes red.

“I’m so sorry-” she apologizes and he laughs.

“It’s okay.” He takes her phone and takes a picture with her and three other girls.

“How’s working with Harry?” Someone in the back asks and he freezes for a second before getting a grip and smiling.

“Great! He’s a good lad,” and it’s not a lie, even though it’s coming from someone who has exchanged more kisses than sentences with the guy. “Very professional.”

“You are so cute!” Someone yells from the other side of the fence and the other girls laugh, Niall joining in. “Thank you.”

“Can you sign my copy?” A girl makes her way to him and Niall can see her holding her copy of ‘Ways to Live’ up to her chest. She hands him a sharpie and extends the book, Niall looks at the purple cover before opening it and writing his name too big to be pretty right under the title. “Was it the kiss or the shooting?” She asks.

“Excuse me?” Niall says, still looking at his awful handwriting and feeling bad for this girl’s book. He just gave his first autograph.

“We saw rain in the back,” the girl explains and the rest of them go silent as they eagerly wait for his response.

“Um,” Niall freezes once again but then his phone saves him, which bleeps with a text from his Uber driver. “I gotta go, guys, I’m sorry. Goodnight!” Niall leaves them with a smile and practically runs to the car with the help of the security guy at the entrance.

*

Niall gets the flu after that. The kissing scene took longer than it should’ve and it was a cold night so he woke up the next morning with a fever and a sneeze he couldn’t stop. He was in bed for two days before he could go back to set. Production told him to take an extra day to avoid spread the virus to any other actors, reading: Harry Styles.

He tried not to think about him, which was a little difficult when he had so much free time and nothing to occupied his mind with. Niall has kissed a lot of people, not only in his personal life but mostly his short roles in music videos or tv shows involved kissing, so he’s not a stranger to it and maybe that’s why he doesn’t understand why is he so affected by this kiss. Perhaps it had to be the fact that Harry was the most famous person he has kissed or even be around for the matter, maybe he was way too nervous, to begin with, and it’s not actually a big deal.

So, when he is finally back on set holding his hot cup of coffee and greeting everyone as he walks to the make-up trailer, he doesn’t look for a glance of Harry Styles as he goes, his schedule was re-assigned for all that Niall knows since he had to use those three days to shoot his alone-scenes. The deadline for the shooting hasn’t moved so Niall is shooting two scenes today instead of one as planned. Before he could arrive at the trailer, he sees the little craft area that he loves and smiles to himself when he sees the warm food steaming from the distance.

Niall doesn’t think it would be a problem if he catches breakfast before start getting ready, he came in early for this exact reason so he doesn’t feel bad when he grabs the muffin to accompanied his coffee after thanking the craft team, he’s not exactly been eating well these last couple of days. He’s just tasting the blueberries in the first bite he doesn’t feel him sneaking in from his right.

“Look who’s back!” He says and Niall almost drops his food.

“Jesus!” Niall turns to him and sees his characteristic smile, big and bright in his face. “You gotta stop doing that, man!”

“I’m sorry!” Harry laughs, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Yeah, right.” Niall gives one more bite and returns his path to the make-up trailer.

Harry growls under his breath and Niall turns around to see him catching up with him.

“I don’t know what else to do.” He says, looking at Niall like he’s the one offending him.

“What are you talking about?” Niall frowns and suddenly, he’s not hungry anymore.

“To stop you from being so hostile,” Harry says and Niall never wanted to punch a guy so much before this day. “If looks could kill I’d be dead by your eyes a long time ago.”

Niall takes a second to breathe and closes his eyes to remind himself he is in a workplace and that Harry’s net worth is more than he could aspire before laying a finger on him, he doesn’t have the money to cover the pleasure.

“You tried to steal my job,” Niall opens his eyes to find Harry extremely offended, hands-on-hips and his eyebrows almost touching his hairline.

“That is not true!” he says in an irritable low tone so the people walking past them wouldn’t listen.

“You walk in all fancy with your designer clothes to tell the writer and director you wanted to play my role.” Niall says, pointing at him with his cup of coffee, spilling a bit on his expensive shirt but he doesn’t back off. He feels good.

He sees how Harry slowly loses his position, his arms fall to his sides and his posture gets shorter, just like his chest doesn’t stand up all proud and strong. His cheeks get red and he scratches the back of his neck.

“When you say it like that-” Harry whispers.

“It was like that,” Niall reassures and turns around, but before he could take one more step, Harry stops him by grabbing his arm.

“I’m sorry, okay? What else is there to say? I really am sorry,” his tone is sincere, just like his green eyes and Niall wishes he could find something at that moment, any reason at all, to be mad at the person in front of him, but he fails. “Can’t we put it in the past and move forward?” Harry says and he sounds so gentle that has Niall disoriented and when he finally holds his hand he doesn’t even realize. “Or at least start over?”

Niall stays quiet for a bit, looking at Harry’s hand covering his entirely. And it’s funny, almost like a joke from the universe showing him how beautiful Harry looks with the sun right over his head with those big green eyes open waiting for a response and he looks genuine like he genuinely wants to be his friend and this is not a recommendation coming from his publicists so they have better chemistry in scenes and don’t screw up each other in interviews. Louis told him about this, he made the recommendation himself and now Niall is here, witnessing the whole thing by himself.

“Unless you wanted to kiss Lily Collins more than kissing me,” Harry laughs, uncomfortable with the silence and the fact that he was still holding Niall’s hand.

“Lily Collins?!” Niall yells, dropping Harry’s hand, “she was supposed to play Violet?!”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Harry smiles, starting to turn around.

“Wait!” Niall calls, getting Harry’s attention only to run to the nearest trash can to drop the cold coffee and run back to him, standing right in front of those green eyes. “Let’s start over.”

When he sees Harry’s smile starting to grow again, he knew he made the right decision, he has to look up for his career as well and having someone like Harry Styles on a bad side is not smart. So Niall says his full name, playing along and extends his hand only to hear the name he has heard too much already and shake hands.

*

His interactions with Harry change. For instance, it becomes more frequent. He runs into him too many times to be a coincidence: on his way to the loo, in craft, walking out of scenes to his trailer. Their conversations start to increase as well, going from small talk to actually ask each other about things they like or their families. They start laughing and joking around with each other as well and Niall doesn’t know what to do. He never thought about becoming friends with Harry Styles, he doesn’t know the implications of that. But still, he can’t really say they are friends. Niall stopped being so harsh towards him, yes, but he wouldn’t consider him a friend yet, it’s not like he wants him to be his friend either.

Niall is not completely comfortable with the idea of having Harry’s number in his phone or getting indecipherable text messages in the middle of the night or even having him around his trailer, it’s weird, sometimes he forgets the giant-sized baby that tries to get him to drink healthy juices and jog with him at sunrise is actually a multimillionaire superstar. It’s hard to think in that way about him when they lay in the floor of their trailers and talk between scenes when he tells silly jokes and Niall just laughs because Harry is expecting him to. Maybe Harry Styles is growing in Niall Horan and that’s okay.

He realizes that in his regular coffee shop when he orders one of those fancy drinks with almond milk for Harry for the third day in a row alongside his black coffee, he’s not even certain he likes that drink, he just brought one the other day and the look on Harry’s face when he handed the cup to him made him feel warm inside, so he kept doing it. He’s paying when his phone starts to blow up in notifications, for a second Niall thinks he messed up his schedule and he’s late for a scene, but when he finally opens Instagram, he sees it.

The post has been made, his face next to Harry’s and the name of the book followed by an article is all that’s needed to send Niall’s followers count to the roof. He takes the coffee and walks to set, speeding up for some reason he doesn’t understand yet but suddenly he feels like he’s been watched and the back of his neck starts to heat up. He starts to ignore calls and turns his phone off by the time he gets into the make-up trailer.

He allows himself to close his eyes when Jenna starts applying the foundation, it’s too relaxing and he’s a bit sleepy from staying up all night going through his lines with Harry by the phone. He smiles when he hears the team talking about the next drink night they have planned, they invite him over and Niall nods only because no one is really serious about it, especially when it’s girl’s night.

“Look at that!” the door bursts open and the ladies laugh, “if it’s not my favorite Irish man!” Harry yells, giving kissing on the cheek to the three women inside the trailer, making Niall open one eye to see him wearing those clothes two sizes bigger, looking cozy and warm.

“Morning, H.” Niall says, closing his eyes again.

“Don’t be jealous,” Harry walks to him. “I have one for you too,” he says before kissing him in the cheek, longer than necessary.

Niall pushes him away, making him sit in the chair next to him, only to allow Linda to work on his hair. Harry leaves his phone on the table in front of them and turns to Niall, making Linda’s job a bit more difficult, but it’s not something out of the ordinary.

“You’re mistreating me now that you’re famous, huh?” Harry says accusingly.

“Oh, fuck off.” Niall laughs it off.

They get quiet for a bit; Niall actually falls sleep for about twenty minutes before Jenna taps his shoulder telling him she’s finished, when he opens his eyes, everybody is gone but Harry so he does the only thing he knows what to do when he’s alone in a room with Harry: he ignores him. Niall looks at everything but him until Harry clears his throat to get his attention, just like he’s doing in that moment and Niall turns to see him in his chair like it’s the first time he’s seeing him in the day.

His legs are tangled in the chair, make it seem impossible for a man of his size to fit in but he makes it work, he even looks comfortable. Harry has this magic in him that makes you feel like everything is the way it is supposed to be like it was always meant to be like that. After Niall started to let go of the childish resentment he had for him at the begging of this project, he could actually enjoy seeing him work. Harry is so talented, he knew that coming into this, but the way he carries himself in a work environment, the way he treats people, his ability to play around and be completely professional at the same time, amazes Niall.

And that’s why he ignores Harry most of the time, because his mind dives away when he looks at him for too long and if Harry’s little smile is telling something is no other thing that Niall is staring again.

“Sorry?” Niall says, moving around awkwardly in his chair.

“You okay? You look tired.” Harry asks, leaning his head to the side, like he’s taking a better look him, almost like he’s examination every inch of this face.

“If so, this is not making its job,” Niall laugh, pointing at his face, referring the make-up but Harry doesn’t laugh.

Niall doesn’t know what he’s trying to do since he knows exactly why he didn’t have a full night of sleep. Harry called around ten in the night asking for some help with his lines, Niall told him it was late and they had work early in the morning but Harry starts talking about how this was bothering him and every time he closed his eyes the lines appear in front of him, almost like making fun of him and Niall recognized the feeling. Harry was feeling insecure, and Niall knows a lot about that.

So he agreed. He ran to his desk and took his script and looked for the scene Harry was having trouble with and they spent two hours working on that, the last hour they got carried away in a conversation Niall doesn’t recall anymore, at some point Louis came to his room to shut him up because he was laughing in the middle of the night and Freddie was already sleeping. That was the moment they said goodbye and four hours later, Niall was walking to get his coffee.

Niall blinks when he sees Harry waving his hand at him and he wants to slap himself, because he’s doing it again, in a range of five minutes. He opens his mouth to asks him if he was saying anything but Harry gets ahead of him.

“I asked you if you wanted to grab dinner later,” he repeats himself with a different smile, a cocky one.

“It’s seven in the morning, Harry.” Niall squints at him.

“I mean after shooting, you know what I’m talking about.” He answers, rolling his eyes and Niall does the same.

“Who’s coming?” Niall stands up, fixing his hair looking in the mirror and turning his phone on.

“People,” Harry whispers, looking at his phone the moment Niall turns to him.

“Who-”

But Niall doesn’t have the time to repeat his question when the trailer’s door opens.

“Niall, we’re ready for you.”

So he just nods at Harry and steps out.

*

“Ready to go?” Niall boggles when he was putting his head through the hole in his hoodie the moment he hears a voice behind him in his supposedly lonely trailer.

“You really need to stop doing that, man.” Niall finishes putting the hoodie on and turns around to see Harry standing in front of the door wearing a black shirt and some fancy white pans and those ugly ‘grandpa-looking’ Gucci shoes. “Do I need to dress up for this place?” Niall asks, looking at his sneakers and his dark jeans.

“Nah, you’re good.” Harry puts both of his hands on his shoulders and drags him out of the trailer.

They start walking side by side, talking about their day since they didn’t have any scene together to shoot and the only moment they saw each other was that morning in the make-up trailer.

“Wait for me in the car.” Harry abruptly says when he sees the tumult of girls at the front.

Niall nods and takes his right where he knows Harry parks his car, he walks alone with his hands on his hoodie’s pocket and looking at the ground. It’s starting to get colder at nights and Niall is not much of a winter person. He’s starting to get shivers for the wind blowing behind his neck and he feels it in his whole body, so he just shakes his head and finds Harry’s driver, Marlon, leaning on the car.

They chat a bit, about London, the weather and the crazy hours of a superstar, Marlon jokes with Niall and lights up a cigarette that doesn’t last long because he gets a text from Harry after a couple of minutes. Niall gets inside the van and Marlon drives them to the open gate where Harry is still smiling at his fans, hugging them and taking pictures. Niall sees him from through the polarized windows and he looks so sweet and kind that he has to look away before his brain starts to get lost again.

Harry speeds things up when he sees his car, he gives kisses on cheeks and opens the car’s door before anyone could get any closer. They rode quietly for a bit before Harry clears his throat and asks Niall about his day, the conversation dies quickly when Niall realizes he’s unusually nervous, so he asks the question he has on mind since the morning.

“Hey! So,” he says, gaining Harry’s attention, “you never told me who’s coming to dinner.”

He moves awkwardly in his seat and looks through the window.

“Yeah, about that,” the car stops and Niall looks around. “It’s a couple, friends of mine,” Harry says before coming out of the car and running to the side to open Niall’s door.

“Okay?” Niall says stepping out of the car.

The couple is waiting for them at the entrance and Niall wants to kill Harry.

“You said I didn’t need to dress up for this place!” Niall whispers in Harry’s ears when he takes him by the arm before they could walk to the door.

“I didn’t want you to freak out,” Harry whispers back with a smile on his face as he drags them to meet the couple at the door. “Orlando, Clara, ciao.”

Niall doesn’t know if Harry transforms himself for people or he just brings out other parts of his personality he keeps hiding like he’s doing right now. He introduces the Italian couple as the owners of the restaurant to Niall and he feels like a five-year-old taking his hands out of his hoodie’s pocket to greet them.

Harry has his arms over the man’s shoulders, he’s tall and broad and very much Italian with his accent and his thick black hair. His wife is equally as attractive, thin and brunette with beautiful brown eyes. They’re standing next to each other, smiling and laughing at Harry’s jokes, finding everything about him amusing with his arms around each other, looking happier than half of the people in England. Niall feels like he’s out of place in every single way. He looks up and sees the frontage of the restaurant and he knows immediately, he can’t afford anything in here.

He feels Harry’s arms grabbing his elbow to make him come inside the place and guide him to one of the private rooms when they finally sit down at the table, Niall realizes no one else is coming, the only thing he doesn’t understand is what is he doing there. The first twenty minutes feel like two hours as they order and Niall only asks for a salad only to have Harry ditch that and order some fancy pasta he never heard of before.

Niall catches a bit of the conversation and recognizes some Italian words here and there, he stars feeling a bit lost when a sentence gets his attention.

“Harry dijo que hablas español.” Orlando says looking right at his direction and Niall blinks, realizing he has everyone’s attention.

“Un poco, no mucho.” Niall answers, praying his smile doesn’t look as uncomfortable as he feels.

“El italiano es muy parecido.” Clara says and Niall recognizes the Spanish accent.

And that’s when Niall starts to get involved in the conversation, hearing sentences in Italian trying to make it have a sense in Spanish and the man is right, it is pretty similar. He knew that but never had a reason to apply it and now he’s sitting there, pretending to talk in Italian and making them laugh. The wine and the food arrives and that’s when Niall starts to let loose a bit, one moment he’s doing accents and then two bottles of wine are gone and he’s hugging Orlando and getting an open invitation to come to the restaurant any time he wants. So he talks about Louis and Eleanor and how she would love the place and how well she and Carla would get along.

He’s laughing and he can’t even remember why was he so nervous at the beginning of the evening. He finishes his glass of wine and when he’s putting it down he sees Harry sitting in front of him, both arms over the table with a glitch of a smile, looking directly at him. This glass of wine is full like it hasn’t been touch and Niall moves in his seat, turning his head to the man who was talking at him second ago only to find him kissing his wife, smiling mid-kiss. He doesn’t mean to stare, he knows it’s wrong, invasive but something warms up in the middle of his chest, maybe is the wine, maybe is Harry’s eyes staring right at him, he can almost feel them in his neck.

“Ya nos vamos,” Clara says and then she laughs, realizing she wasn’t talking in English. “It was a pleasure, Harry. As always.” She stands up to hug Harry and give him a kiss pretty close to the lips. “Y tú,” she points at Niall. “You are gorgeous, te amo.” She runs to Niall and he laughs because she looks adorable.

Niall stands up to kiss her cheek and hug Orlando as they approach the door.

“Stay for dessert, dinner is on us.” He taps Niall’s shoulder and before Niall could argue, they walk out of the room.

“Lovely folks.” Niall laughs and turns to Harry who’s still sitting, looking at him with a smile on his face.

“Sit.” He says, tapping the chair next to him and Niall hesitates for a second before he sits. “You could have started enjoying yourself way sooner if you stop overthinking everything.”

Niall nods, looking away because he doesn’t want Harry to be right, he doesn’t want to thank him either. He picks up Harry’s glass but he takes him from him before Niall could take a sip.

“That’s enough,” Harry laughs and the door opens. A waiter comes in, bringing two pieces of fancy cake and some strawberries with chocolate. Niall thanks him and helps him put the food on the table and pick up the empty glasses and plates.

When the door closes again, the room seems heavy and quieter. He slowly sits down, putting a strawberry in his mouth and chewing it quickly, making the juice drain down his lips. Harry is not eating, Niall is very much aware of that, just like he’s aware of his eyes following Niall’s lips and he is following his movements too, so he notices the moment Harry picks up a napkin to clean Niall’s chin.

Niall feels his fingers in his jaw as the napkin touches his lips. He swallows what is left of the fruit and opens his mouth to thank Harry but he gets closer and takes his breath away. His eyes are incredibly green and it would not be the first time getting lost in them but now he has a bottle of wine on him so he doesn’t exactly trust himself, he’s also pretty sure his whole face is red so he does the only thing that comes to his mind, he puts a strawberry on Harry’s mouth when he leans his head to the side and Niall turns to eat a big piece of cake.

*

The next day on set is a headache, quite literally. Niall has a massive hangover and he doesn’t recall much of the ride home after Marlon drops him off at Louis’. He fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow and he almost missed his alarm in the morning so he comes into the make-up trailer rushing up. Harry is not there when he sits on his chair so he is not that late. He takes his phone out of pocket, checks some texts, replies to some e-mails and finally, he opens Instagram.

He has now, a little more than half a million followers, which is shocking considering he reached only a hundred a couple of days ago so he checks his tagged picture to find out what could be the reason, and he does find one. A bunch of blurry zoomed-in pictures of him and Harry from last night start to pop up, first in fan accounts and then magazines, even E!News, and other well knows magazines, even some English tabloids and he starts to feel a little bit sick, but again, it could be the hangover.

He taps one of the picture’s set. It’s getting out of the car and greeting Orlando and Clara, the photo is very grainy and you can barely see the people in there but Harry’s silhouette is very characteristic so there’s no doubt it’s him. Niall swipes right and starts seeing the rest of the picture, a couple from inside of the restaurant and finally a video of them giggling as they head out.

He tries not to, he really does, but he starts reading the comments. Mainly is just people praising Harry’s outfit even if you can barely see it, others talking about how the Italian restaurant has become his go-to spot to take dates and then people start to recognize Niall. Most of the comments are people tagging him asking if that’s him, some saying it’s cute how they hang out after work and then, the inevitable, the bad ones. More of them is just people critiquing his outfit of choice for the restaurant, others the way he manages himself, then some assholes saying that Harry needs to stop taking on charity cases.

His phone is taken from him and he stares at the palm of his hand before turning around and seeing Harry standing behind him holding his phone, doing who knows what, turning it off and then hanging it back to him.

“I’m sorry about that,” he says and he sounds genuinely angry, Niall shakes his head.

“It’s not your fault,” he says in response but Harry is looking at his shoes, avoiding his eyes. “It was a really fun night! The food was amazing and…”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Harry says, finally looking at him and cutting Niall off.

“This is really not your fault, and now I have five times more followers since the last time I checked so…” he laughs it off but Harry’s expression is the same. Concerned and ashamed.

“Come to my trailer after shooting?” he asks, whispering when the make-up team comes into the trailer after their breakfast.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Niall says, reassuring.

“But I want to,” Harry repeats. “It may not be my fault but it happens because of me.” Niall shakes his head but because he could say anything, “It would make me feel better so it’s actually selfish.”

Niall laughs again and whispers an “okay” before starting his day.

*

Niall knocks Harry’s trailer’s door a couple of times before Harry opens it almost slapping Niall in the face. He sticks his neck out looking at his sides, drags Niall inside and closes the door all in the same second.

“I have weed.” He says and Niall bursts into laughter.

Forty minutes later they’re lying on Harry’s floor smoking weed and laughing out of nowhere. Niall doesn’t feel a thing and it’s great since Harry’s been telling the same story for about fifteen minutes without going anywhere and now it has become a blank noise in the back of his mind when he hands it the cigarette.

Niall feels fussy and light, he’s looking at the light in the ceiling and his vision starts to get blurry and this takes him to when he was doing week to treat his anxiety until his mom found out and almost gave her a heart attack. He tried to explain and she wouldn’t listen so it was easier to give it up for her peace of mine, so he did. It’s been a long time since the last time he was high, it’s not like he has missed it, but lately, it seems like exactly what he’s been needing.

“What was I talking about?” Harry asks after a couple of seconds of silence and Niall laughs out loud. He sits downs, leaning his back to the couch and rubbing his foot in Niall’s legs.

“I have no idea, mate, but I’m starving,” Niall says, fishing his phone into his pockets to order something.

“I have no idea, mate,” Harry says with a terrible Irish accent, making Niall look up to him and looking extremely offended.

“Are you imitating my accent?” he says and he just notices how strong his accent is when he’s high, which makes Harry laugh even more.

“You make an English accent all the time!” he laughs looking right at his face, his eyes are red just like his cheeks and he holds the cigarette with two fingers right next to his lips.

“That’s for the movie, asshole!” Niall jumps on him to take the cigarette from him but Harry holds it above his head and grabs Niall by his waist so he couldn’t move and for some reason, Niall is high enough to be comfortable with that position.

Harry does the thing again, where he looks at his whole face, from his hairline to his chin, slowly and carefully avoiding his lips because when he does, he doesn’t look away. Niall starts to heat up and squeezes around but he wouldn’t let him move, so when he finally looks at his lips, Niall gets closer to distract him and it works because he starts to raise down his hand to hold Niall’s face and he takes advantage of it and takes the cigarette from him and rolls down the floor to where he was earlier, leaving harry with his hands in front of him, holding nothing.

Niall takes a long drag and lets it out slowly.

“You think anyone knows we’re here?” he asks, looking at Harry.

“Well, the lights are on.” He shrugs and takes his phone out too, it’s almost one in the morning. They shouldn’t be there but they don’t have shooting until midday so it wouldn’t be that bad.  

“I’m gonna order some McDonalds, then,” Niall says, taking Harry’s order as well and they sit still for another forty minutes waiting for their order.

A security guy from the studio comes knocking to Harry’s trailer with three paper bags and Niall know he knows the second Harry opens the door letting the smoke out of the small trailer, he tips him even when he refuses and then leaves the door open as they take the hamburgers, the fries and the spicy nuggets out.

Two burgers, one box of nuggets and one large fries later, Niall is still lying on the floor but now his hands are on his tummy and he feels so much better. His head is spinning and his eyes are closed but he can still hear Harry finishing whatever is left from their order.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Harry says and Niall opens one eye to see him lick one of his fingers.

“Mm-hm,” he says, closing his eyes again and starts feeling a little sleepy.

“Are you into guys? I mean-,” Harry coughs and Niall opens both eyes this time to see him struggle with his words, it’s funny. “Have you ever kissed a guy?”

Niall squints and leans at him over his arm.

“I’ve kissed you, Harry.” He says, laughing.

“Yeah, but that’s for the movie,” He looks away and Niall doesn’t know what’s happening right now, but it doesn’t feel so good anymore. “What I mean is-”

“I’m bisexual,” Niall says and he’s comfortable enough with it to have to come out to people over and over again. “I’ve had a couple of boyfriends before, yes.”

Harry opens his mouth and closes it again. He scratches the back of his head and Niall smiles because suddenly he looks so small and so cute that it’s difficult to imagine he’s this big superstar with tons of confidence who can have whoever he wants.

“You can ask; I know you want to,” Harry whispers, looking at his hands.

“Ask what?” Niall says, leaning his head to the side.

“If I’m into boys,” Harry looks at him for the first time since they start eating and Niall can see it in his face, he can see the same fear he had all those years in his eyes but he doesn’t know if it’s the fear of struggling with his sexual identity or the fear of being rejected.

“I really don’t care, Haz. That’s up to you.” He says with a smile and Harry stares at him for a while before closing the trailer’s door with his feet and scrawling to Niall, getting closer and sit right in front of him.

“That leaves one last question,” he whispers and takes Niall’s hair out of his eyes, he swallows. “Can I kiss you?”

Niall should have seen this coming. The signs were all over the place but still, something in the back of his mind kept telling him he was making it all up, there was no way someone like Harry Styles would fancy someone like him and now they’re there, sitting in his trailer, while he holds his breath waiting for the kneel to drop and Harry would start laughing because there’s no way he can be serious.

But the seconds pass and now his hand is on his cheek and he doesn’t seem to be joking so Niall nods and he smiles so big it makes Niall smile too. So Harry gets closer until their noses touch and he closes his eyes the moment he feels their lips touching. This kiss is different from the ones they’re have been shooting, there’s no directing and neither of them knows what to do, so Niall does the only thing he could think of to ease the moment: he opens his mouth.

Harry starts slow but his hands are all over the place, first in Niall’s back and then he’s holding his waist for dear life. Niall puts his hands around his neck and Harry smiles in the middle of the kiss. His lips are soft and they’re very high so the kiss is sloppy which makes Niall laugh.

“What?” Harry says, deeply offended.

“Maybe we do need directing,” Niall laughs, “You’re lacking passion, mate.”

Harry looks at him and opens his mouth in disbelieve, he pushes Niall’s chest, making him lay on the floor, laughing.

“I’ve been wanting to kiss you since the first day of shooting-” he takes both of his arms and holds them above his head with one hand and Niall almost forgot how big his hands are, “-and you make fun of me?”

Harry gets on the top of him and Niall stops laughing when he sees the look on his face, the green is almost gone and the only thing he can see is the black of his retina for a few seconds before he dives in. And maybe he was holding back because Niall can feel this kiss in this entire body, so he stops his mind running and his fear and doubts for a moment and he kisses him back.

The moment seems so big now, both of them lying on the floor somewhere in the studio with no one near, kissing in the middle of the night as they’re hiding from their responsibilities, being highly unprofessional and enjoying it very much.

Harry does a thing with his tongue and Niall moans. His entire body feels warm and his mind is numb so he doesn’t feel the moment Harry’s hand starts going under his sweatpants until he’s holding him. Niall breaks apart the kiss and opens his eyes to find Harry’s face biting that cocky smile of his. Niall’s breathing starts going faster and he’s reminded once again, how big Harry’s hands are.

“Harry, I don’t think-” but he’s cut mid-sentence when his hand starts moving and every ration thought left in his mind is gone.

“Should I stop?” he asks, with no intention of stopping, instead, he goes faster and Niall could easily start shocking with the air if he intended to talk so he just shakes his head. “You look so pretty.”

“You don’t need to talk,” Niall says, dragging Harry’s body on the top of him once again and he’s right about the no taking because of his heavy breathing right next to his ear and his lips on his neck are doing it for him.

It may be the weed but everything feels too much. Harry’s hands around him, his lips all over his shoulders and the dead silence in the trailer, so he starts feeling the pressure in the lower part of his stomach he knows so well, so he tries to hold it for a few seconds more because he doesn’t want it to be over. This is definitely not the first time Harry does this, the way he presses and rubs and pulls is right in every way and it may also be because he’s high but he could easily say this is the best handjob he has ever received, he just wouldn’t say it out loud. Especially not to Harry.

To stop himself from saying something stupid he holds Harry’s face up to kiss him, making him moan this time but he couldn’t keep the kiss for too long when Harry starts kissing down his neck and biting earlobe and when he licks it, Niall comes. His breathing is harder and now Harry is the one laughing, biting his neck with his hand still inside his pants.

“Don’t leave marks,” Niall whispers, “Sarah will kill me.”

He kisses his neck and then his red cheek, it’s warm just the rest of his body. Harry lays next to him and lays on his side to return the favor but when his hand goes inside his flannel pants, he sees that’s not really necessary.

“And you laugh at me.” He says, but he doesn’t move, resting his head on his chest.

Harry starts playing with his hair and they stay like that, looking at the ceiling until they fall asleep.  

*

The next two months left of shooting is spent by them stealing kisses from each other when no one is looking, locking themselves in their trailers, texting till three in the morning and Harry daring Niall to give him ahead in the studio bathrooms in the middle of their late-night shooting until he finally did.

Niall knows exactly how this ends. There’s not really another way. Shooting ends in a week and then Harry will go back to his real life and they won’t see each other until the press junk. Even when he knows this, he can’t stop himself, he understands now why people can’t get enough of Harry. He makes you feel like you’re the only person on Earth like there’s no one more important for him to spend his time with and Niall loves that rush of energy and attention, but he also can’t get enough of him, his eyes, his lips, his hands. And he’s scared that it’s too late for him, that he fell for Harry and there would be nothing left after he’s gone.

So when the wrap party comes, he tries to stay away. It happens on a Wednesday because why not. They closed a bar in mid-town London for the occasion and the place looks great, they showed the movie poster for the first time and after the speeches were made, the bottles of champagne were open. The whole team is there since stage operators and the camera crew to executive producers, the directors, the writer and of course, the cast.

Niall had a plan. He was gonna stick to Louis’ side the entire night and avoid Harry’s view as much as he could but that went out of the window the second he stepped into the bar and Harry’s arm fell into his shoulders like it was made to be there. He’s been carrying him from one side of the place to the other, greeting people and thanking everyone involved, giving hugs and kisses on the cheeks, not letting him leave his side for one second, not even to go to the loops.

It’s harder and Harry acts like he doesn’t know or care, like after this night it won’t be nothing else to do and he’s smiling and drinking and laughing like he doesn’t regret a thing, and maybe he doesn’t, maybe this was just a stop in the crazy ride that is his life and it was Niall’s turn to share it with him. It’s not like Niall didn’t get anything from this, he did, he enjoyed too much and meet amazing people thanks to him and he appreciates it but he’s also the one that has more to lose.

So he drinks too, to keep himself of thinking too much of how pretty Harry looks under the golden light of the bar or how soft feels his chest on his cheek or how warm is his hand on his waist because it has made its own home at this point in the night, he doesn’t want to say how effortless beautiful is his smile or how much he looks his lips, how he pretends to find his jokes annoying when they’re actually amusing, not because they’re funny but the way he tells them with genuine excitement it’s what makes them worth a laugh. And when they dance in the middle of the bar as no one else was there, Niall doesn’t tell him how much he will miss his lips, his hands, his eyes.

The moment the lights start to fade away as the song ends, Niall realizes that he may have fallen in love with him, which is stupid since he met him only six months ago and they started to fool around the last two months. He just stays there, staring at him, wondering how could he be such an idiot when Harry asks if he wants to go home. He has only a couple of seconds to consider but the only thing in his mind is: “If this is gonna end, don’t you want it to end right?” so he nods and Harry takes his hand to take him out of the bar.

They don’t say goodbye or answer when their names are called. Harry taps in Marlon’s shoulder and whispers in his ear when he turns, following them. They go to Harry’s car and the moment they step in, Harry starts making out with him. The thing is, they have fooled around with each other for the last seven weeks but they haven’t slept together, Niall never had the intention of it but right now, there’s nothing he wants more.

He gets in the top of him and Harry stars rubbing his hands on his back, kissing him with open mouth and going down his neck. Niall pulls his hair and Harry laugh when his phone starts ringing. He ignores it the first time but the phone won’t stop ringing and lifts his finger, making Niall stop so he could get his phone from his pocket.

The conversation goes on quickly; Niall doesn’t hear all of it but he doesn’t have to understand what’s going.

“What? Jeff, you said next week- I already told my mom I was having lunch with her on Friday. You can’t do this to me right now. Okay, fine.”

Niall gets off his lap and sits next to him waiting for him to end the call as he fixes himself up wishing the alcohol wouldn’t have lost all effect seconds ago. He’s not looking at Harry when he finally puts his phone back in his pocket and turns to him.

“I have a plane to catch in six hours, I’m so sorry, Niall. Can we leave this for another time?”

Niall nods but he doesn’t say anything until the moment they leave him in front of Louis’ door.

“See you around, Harry.” It’s the only thing he says when he closes the door.

“I’ll call you!” Harry yells from the window before the car disappears from his vision.

He doesn’t.

*

Louis takes the manager job pretty serious, they hide Tara, which is one of the best publicists around and they get him an interview with Vaniety Fair Magazine, which is huge so Niall doesn’t really understand how did they manage to get it, Tara only tells him that they already had a schedule but the artist programmed for one of august canceled so Tara’s contact in the office got them the gig. Niall can’t figure it out how they’re able to afford her and Louis wouldn’t explain it to him, so he just rolls with it.

The photoshoot takes place two months after finishing the movie and they publish the number two months after that. It was a good interview for being his first one, they really tried to avoid the ‘Harry’ subject of the conversation as long as they could and they ask about his childhood, ‘the acting call’, his time in L.A. and how he got the part before asking about his co-star. Niall was ready for it, he knew they would ask about it, so he had an answer ready and it went great.

His mum calls him the day she gets the magazine and cries on the phone about how handsome is baby looks. They gave him different suits to put on and he has to admit it, he looks good.

He did a bunch of casting and got some call-backs so they’re evaluating jobs right now, everything is going exactly how he’s dreamed of and yet, he can’t stop looking at his phone, waiting for a call he knows it won’t come. He’s with Louis at the moment, looking for an apartment since he can afford it now but he’s visiting the third one of the days and he hasn’t really been looking around.

“Okay, you gotta stop that,” Louis takes his phone away and puts it on his jacket.

“I’m waiting for a casting call!” he says in defense, trying to get his phone back.

“That’s bullshit! I get your casting calls, moron.”

Niall ends up getting the first place they went to see and the magazine comes out three weeks after that.

*

Niall gets invited to the Vaniety Fair party the week after the trailer gets released and Tara gets him a Paul Smith’s suit to wear. Surprisingly enough, a lot of people are interested in him. He bumps into movie stars and musicians in his way to get drinks and they stop him to greet him. He has talked to people he had only seen in movies or concerts and he needs Louis to pinch him a few times.

His cover is hanging next to other portraits in the walls and it’s almost incredible to see. Eleanor insists to take a picture of him next to his cover, so he does, he points to the picture behind him almost as big as a billboard and Eleanor manages to post it in his Instagram for his, almost, a million followers before he could have his phone back.

He’s holding a glass of champagne when he feels someone patting his shoulder so he turns around to find Lily Collins wearing a red dress that makes her look like royalty and her beautiful hair hanging in a loose ponytail, he’s speechless for a moment until she waves her hand and smiles. Niall apologizes and introduces himself, kissing her cheek when she leans over.

“I wanted to say ‘hi’” She laughs. “And maybe meet my almost co-star.”

Niall stares at her for a second, not finding meaning to her words until he remembers the conversation he had with Harry the day they agreed to try to become friends, also known as the day he fucked everything up. They were fine ignoring each other or barking at the other directions every once in a while but they had to make everything more complicated. Niall is not like that, he’s a very simple guy who stays away from drama and avoids problems at all costs. Harry, on the other hand, he’s completely different, he likes adventure and complexity, he likes taking risks and try new things and when you mix all of that together, alongside the circle and the money he gravitates with, it could turn into a disaster.

“Oh! Maybe you didn’t know,” she touches his arm, bringing him back from that place in his mind he’s starting to get to know very well, it’s turning into the ‘Harry’s space’. She laughs again, draining the tension out of the situation without even knowing. “I got offered the part of Violet. I was reading the script when my agent told me somebody else took the part.”

She crosses her arms over her chest, which makes her look incredibly younger, Niall smiles. Right now, these little details are a breath of fresh air.

“But I would have never guessed Harry Styles stole my role!”

And that’s when he laughs and Lily Collins seems pretty pleased with herself about it.

“Yeah, I think he told me once.” Niall moves the liquid in the glass he’s holding with his left hand, a thing he has started to do when he talks about Harry, distract himself. “I’m sure it would have been amazing to work with you.” He smiles at her, not knowing why is he so nervous all of a sudden.

“I watched the trailer, it looks amazing, I’m convinced it’s gonna do great. It’ll be big.”

“Well, I certainly hope so.”

And for some reason, he finds himself talking to Lily Collins for the next hour, and it’s great. They talk about music and movies, about food and school, their hometowns and families and she seems so down to earth and sweet and funny that he forgets for a second that she is one of the biggest movie actors in the industry.

“I’ve heard that Harry will be here in an hour or so, we should mess up with him.” She says out of the blue, leaning over like she’s telling him a secret that apparently a lot of people know about.

Niall’s smile slowly fades away, he drinks up what’s left of the champagne which is warm and tasting like sour apple juice. He looks around the room trying to find him, to hide from him because he doesn’t want to see him, he is not ready to stand in front of him and ask him why. Why did he never call back? Why did Niall keep waiting for that long? Why is he still waiting? Why did he lie? Why did they even start whatever that was?

He blinks repeatedly until his eyes focus on Lily, she’s not laughing anymore and she starts shrugging around thinking she did something wrong so Niall puts his hand over his arm to reassure her everything is right.

“I didn’t even look at the time!” Niall laughs this time, “I gotta catch a flight tomorrow, I was supposed to leave forty minutes ago!”

It’s not exactly a lie, he is taking a plane to Ireland the next day to visit his mother, but his flight is not until 4 in the afternoon, but now at the idea of the possibility of Harry showing up in this place, the chance of seeing him after almost eight months it’s terrifying and he’ not ready so he has to leave.

“Oh no,” she pouts but starts looking into her purse to take out her phone, “give me your number so we can arrange a little vengeance to Harry.”

He just smiles and takes her phone, writing down his number and calling himself so he can save her number as well, later, after he gets back to his flat where there’s still unopen boxes and he only has a mattress in the middle of an empty room waiting for him to lie down and look at his ceiling, thinking about Harry, which has been happening almost every night since he moved in.

“Now I gotta go.” Niall smiles at her and kisses her cheek before he starts walking to the door.

He’s getting out of the place when he hears them, the flashes and the screaming, people calling his name and other people opening the door and making his way inside. Niall can’t help himself so he turns and stoles a glance. His hair is curlier and longer and looks just as soft as he remembers, Harry is wearing a green suit with a white tank top underneath and brown boots, he has sunglasses on in the middle of the night and his nails are black.

He looks nice, he looks incredibly handsome and for a second, it takes Niall’s breathe away, even if he’s a couple of meters away, getting closer to the company’s car Tara got for him to drive around London, even when he’s far apart he can almost feel him, his lips on his neck, his smiles on his cheeks and still hurts when it shouldn’t. They didn’t spend too much time together and the time they’ve been apart it’s the double they shared.

So Niall doesn’t understand and it frustrates him, which is the reason he’s distracted enough to not see Harry turn around and take his sunglasses off as if he felt Niall’s glance in the back of his neck, as if his body responses at Niall’s by the mere presence of each other in the same place, as if he craves Niall’s heart too. When he looks up, it finally hits Niall, he is in love with Harry.

Niall turns and walks directly to the car.

*

The next night, he is in his childhood room in Mullingar. His mom makes him a big dinner and forces him to watch the trailer with her again for what it feels the hundred times. Niall tries not to rush things, it’s been the first time he’s been home in four years and he wants to take it all in before he has to go back to London to start the press junket. So he is present, he leaves his phone in his room for most of the time, he helps his mom cooking and he goes with his father to fishing, he even goes to visit his brother.

Greg is divorced now, Theo is living with his mother and for what Niall can see, he is not taking it well. His flat is a mess and he forgets Niall was coming over so he makes him take a shower and takes him out for a beer and for a few hours Niall forgets about his life to focus on his brother for what it seems the first time in their story. Greg cries and Niall stays quiet as he hears how his marriage shattered into pieces and how Theo was in the middle of it all.

Niall finally sees a man instead of the asshole of a brother he used to have. Suddenly, everything they did to each other, everything they said is left aside. It seems like it has no importance, it never did. Greg doesn’t talk about the movie or the fact that Niall can pay for a place to live and buy him drinks, he just asks him if he wants to see Theo the next day and Niall nods because he would love that.

The next day, they both go fishing with his dad to later have breakfast in the market like the used to do on Sundays after their parents got divorced as well. After that, they picked Theo up, Niall kisses Denise’s cheek when they arrive and she congratulates him for the movie and they chat a bit before Greg clears his throat to gets them going.

And it’s a good day, a good week. His mother overfeeds him, his father overworks him and his brother overshares, his nephew, on the other hand, is just perfect. He has a lot of energy but is old enough to sit in the car and sing songs with his uncle as the drive around town and Niall wonders if he wants this at some point in his life, drive around Mullingar with his kid, going fishing in the mornings and having drinks with his school mates.

He checks his emails drinking his tea in his mother’s kitchen a Friday afternoon. Most of them are from Louis reminding him something in his schedule from when he comes back to London, other are notifications from Twitter or Instagram and just one that catches his attention, one popping at the top of his unread messages: Elena Stevens.

15:32

Hello, Niall.

Louis told me you are in Ireland at the moment, visiting your family. I hope you’re having a great time!

Please, when you arrive in London come to see me at my apartment, I have great news.

Elena.

He stares at the message a little longer than necessary and wonders if Harry got one of these too. And then, panic strikes. Did he do something wrong? Do they need him for retakes? Are they gonna fire him after all? It makes no sense worrying about it, he knows this, the message said great news, as well. So he replies saying he will call her as soon as he gets in town and leaves his phone on the table.

*

Harry Styles releases a song while Niall is in Mullingar, it’s called Lights up and he hears it the next day in his father’s truck as they drive to the market. He was laughing at something Mully said in the backseat to Deo when his name is pronounced by the radio host and then he stays quiet, trying to hear his voice in the middle of the conversation.

It’s a good song, of course, it is. It’s some kind of melodramatic rock balladry and has this part where his voice gets all high and it brings all kinds of unwanted memories. He listens to it a couple of times when they get back home like a teenager locked in his room with the earpods on and he feels ridiculous but he asks himself if this song was the reason he never called or even text. He sure hopes it wins a fucking Grammy.

His last night doesn’t go as well as the rest of the two weeks, he’s been home. He’s drinking with his friends and they’re chatting and yelling his name and for the first time, strangers start to come to him, people he has never met just hug him and take pictures of him and suddenly he wants to run home to sleep in his bed because he has come to his bar since he was eighteen, he has a record on the wall and a million stories to tell but at the same time the place looks completely different, he feels sick.

And maybe it is a sign –  not the good kind – when he sees Holly entering the bar at the exact same second Harry’s song starts playing and his whole body aches. She looks older but just as beautiful and his heart doesn’t race for her anymore it couldn’t after everything that happened, after everything she’s done but his heart races for the voice over his head, the base and the guitar loud in the bar as she looks at him and smiles. Niall wants to laugh because she’s biting her lips as she walks to him like she didn’t break his heart when they were sixteen like she never said she couldn’t be with someone who wouldn’t accomplish anything in his life like she didn’t ruin his best friend's life and move on with her life as if nothing ever happened.

She called him a loser and now she says hi, she says she has missed him when she told him she never wanted to see him again in her life, it’s funny how life works. He doesn’t believe her but she needs her as the song ends and the only thing he can see when he closes his eyes to kiss her is another pair of green eyes that he knows way too well by now.

He goes to her apartment that day and there’s only one thing in his mind, a phrase.

Do you know who you are?

*

Niall walks around Elena’s flat looking at the books on her shelf in the living room. She has some awards as well and Niall smiles with some kind of pride to it since the movie poster is frame right next to it. Niall is in the back of the picture but still big enough to be seen and it makes sense, Harry was always mean to be the front page man and he looks incredible doing so.

It’s difficult to escape from Harry or even ignore him when he sees his face everywhere he goes. He prepared himself to see him tonight in this little meeting but it’s been forty minutes and Elena is making tea for two so he doesn’t think he will be arriving any time soon. He hears her coming down the hallway and he turns to help her carry the tea and the biscuits she carries with her.

She tells him to sit on the couch as she sits in the chair in front of him and then she watches him drink his tea with a huge smile on her face.

“So…” he laughs, “Is everything okay?”

She claps and gets up from the chair to sit on the floor, only looking at Niall. They’re about the same age but it wasn’t until now that Niall stops thinking about her as some kind of boss.

“We were watching the last scene; you remember? Jonathan’s death?”

She sounds excited and Niall remembers that day. It was exhausting, full of rain, a mug, and fake blood. They wanted it to be the last scene to shoot in the movie because they wanted them to feel tired and sad and all kind numbness to film a death scene and it works because they only need one take and everyone was silent after that.

For Niall, it was different. He knew what he had with Harry was ending that day, just as he knew he had to shower after the death scene to go to a party where Harry would walk out of his life the same way he walked in, by force, without asking for permission and with a smile on his face. So when he held Harry in his arms that day as he pretended to die, a piece of his heart dyed with Jonathan too.

“I do.” He answers, reaching for a biscuit.

“Well, when we watched the footage, the camera kept rolling after calling cut and the second the scene ended, you look up to the camera with such rage and anger in your eyes, Niall. Your knuckles were white holding onto Harry’s coat.” She explains and her eyes shine, just like she was telling the best story she has heard in her life.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was doing that,” Niall starts apologizing, clearing his hands on his pants and moving awkwardly on the couch.

“It was perfect.” She interrupts him, placing her hand on his arm. “It gave an insight into the story I didn’t know it could have.”

She stands up then, telling him to wait for a second and then she disappears to the hallway again. Niall stands up and walks around the room. So they are reshooting some scenes? Does Harry know about this? Does he even have time to reshoot scenes? Probably not. He must be doing radio shows and traveling around the world promoting the single.

When Elena comes back, Niall has eaten all the biscuits remained out of pure anxiety. She makes him sit down again and put the bunch of paper she was holding under her arm. He sees the title on the white page: “Ways to Die” a sequel by Elena Stevens.

Niall opens his mouth multiple times but finally closes it when she tells him to read as she goes to the kitchen to make more tea and he does. He reads for three hours until is nighttime and Elena goes in and out of the room, seeing Niall process the hundred and fifty-nine pages of an unfished sequel that he has in his hands.

He can’t believe it. The story picks up six months after Jonathan’s death, Charlie has disappeared to prepare himself to find the people that Jonathan spent his whole like trying to kill to avenge his mother’s death. Charlie becomes a totally different person, he impersonates Jonathan for most of the book, making these people believe he is a ghost of some kind, wearing the coat Jonathan was shot in, playing tricks to appear have telekinetic powers and training to haunt them down. Niall is delated.

When he finally puts the pages down, Elena is sitting in front of him, covered with a blanket and drinking hot cocoa.

“I have planned to finish it by the end of the year,” she explains, and he nods. “We’ll announce the second book at the credits of the movie and start shooting the next year, what do you think?”

And again, Niall is speechless.

“Will Harry be in this one?” and that’s the only question that comes out of his mouth.

“We have to talk to him, we want him for some throwback scenes.” She says, moving her hands as she tries to draw whatever she has in mind. “We want you to keep the beard. It looks sexy.”

Niall laughs this time and rubs his hand on his jaw. He let the beard grow after they finished shooting and he’s starting to feel like himself again.

“The book is amazing, Elena,” He says laughing out of excitement and pure anxiety as she joins him.

“My editor loves it too,” she bites her lips and stands up, Niall knows it’s time to go home. “When Harry entered that room, he gave me back my story,” she says with a shy smile and Niall nods, “When you walked out of the set, you gave me a new one and I’m so grateful for that.”

He doesn’t know he’s tearing up until he hears her laugh and feels her hand on his cheeks, cleaning the tears on the side of his eyes.

“I gotta hit the gym if I wanna do all those things.” Niall laughs pointing at the manuscript over the table.

*

Louis is over the moon, so the concept of ‘not telling a single soul about the sequel’ is not applying very well to him and he decides to organize a secret “congratulation” party in Niall’s apartment. The good news is that it’s only a party for three – Eleanor, Tommo, and Niall himself –, there’s a lot of wine and soft music playing in the vinyl record player in the background at the corner of the living room and Niall feels already dizzy.

In a blink of an eye, it’s already December and the movie comes out in four months. Harry Styles’ album came out a week ago and somehow, Eleanor manages to get three tickets for a full concert presenting the album in London. Here they are after the concert, with a drunk Niall feeling completely stupid because Harry was still in love with someone else as he was making up with him in the middle of corridors in the studio, having Niall built up to ridiculous scenarios and expectations on his head, so what if he screamed “arrogant son of a bitch” at Harry with every bit of himself with the rest of the crowd.

“Why couldn’t we go backstage?” Eleanor asks for what it feels the thousandth time.  

“I told you, babe,” Louis says, drunkenly lying on the sofa. “Not everyone that makes movies together become friends.”

Eleanor pouts and pulls out her phone to play the same three songs that have come out so far and Niall doesn’t even flinch, he’s used to it by now.

“Rachel McAdams played Harry’s mom and he hasn’t even met her yet,” Niall says under his breath as he finished another glass of wine.

He stands up to pour another glass.

“How is it to kiss Harry Styles?” Eleanor asks behind him and he turns to see her.

She’s holding Louis’ head on her chest, running her long finger through his hair, mumbling melodies as he slowly falls asleep holding her waist. Niall’s heart shatters a little more and decided to take the whole bottle with him when he returns to the sofa.

“Nice,” he answers, drinking directly from the bottle, “really fucking nice.”

*

Niall goes back home for Christmas and New Year, by that time, the movie is already making some noise and people start to reach out to him, so he ignores them, he sticks to the same couple of people he sees every time he’s in Mullingar and gets drunk with his pops and his brother after giving Theo tons of gifts he brought from him.

He finds himself being quiet, more than usual. He holds his beer on his hand and hears his high school mates talk about how they do, what has changed, how Holly finally left town like she wanted and apparently, she’s doing fine since the last time Niall was there, and he doesn’t want to think about it – or about her –, he doesn’t really care but he gets this itchy feeling at the back of his neck when people mention her, so he drinks more.

The day after Christmas, he’s walking down to his house carrying the list of groceries his mom gave him to get for dinner on his arms when he sees it on a shelf in a library. It’s the book, a whole pile of it under the category “Best-seller”, but the cover is different is the movie poster and it reads ‘special edition’ in big golden cursive letters on the top of it. Niall stops in front of the showcase holding the three big paper bags almost covering his entire vision and he sees himself in the book, at the right side of Harry’s profile, wearing sunglasses and looking mysterious.

He smiles and bites his under lip because is pretty crazy. He used to buy all his school books and comics from his place and now his face is there for everyone to see. Niall looks around and decides to go inside, he shakes the snow over off his head and his shoulders as the bell rings, making the workers turn to see him for a second before continuing whatever they were doing.

He walks to the column of books he saw from the outside and tries to take one from the top but he can’t really do much when his arms are full. Now he feels a bit dumb when he told his mum he didn’t need to take the car to walk three blocks.

“Do you need help?” a soft voice asks behind him and he turns.

It’s a girl, a redhead. She can’t be older than sixteen and she’s wearing the blue apron with her name embroidered.

“Yes, Lizzie.” He reads, “Can you grab a copy for me?”

“Of course!” she smiles and takes a copy with her and walks to the register machine.

She is also a talker.

“Is it a gift?” she asks, “a little late for Christmas, huh?” she laughs and Niall lets her talk.

“Kind of,” Niall leaves her bags over the table next to the register and searches for his wallet as she scans the book. “Have you read it?”

“Oh, I love the book,” she turns the copy to face her and traces Harry’s profile with her index finger, Niall smiles and looks away. “This is the original version; you know?”

Niall turns his head to the side and she takes it as an invitation to explain herself.

“The story started off as a magical-mythical gay story but no one would buy Elena’s book so she had to change it, which is crazy because of today's times, right?” Niall nods, “but every time she talked about the book, she gave hints about the main character being a guy and it was all the fan blogs talked about until she confirmed it for the movie!”

“Oh, you are a fan,” Niall laughs.

“Am I being weird?” her green eyes wide open and she looks so scared.

“You’re okay,” Niall gives her his credit card and pays for the book.

“Do you want me to wrap it?” she asks returning the card and Niall looks at her for a second before nodding, why not.

“Are you excited about the movie?” Niall asks, testing the waters and suddenly, he feels terribly nervous.

“You know how they always say the movie is never as good as the book?” she asks him before disappearing from behind the corridor to get the wrapping paper, Niall assumes. He hums. “I have a good feeling with this one.”

She returns with two choices and Niall goes with the golden and white wrapping paper.

“Good choice,” she says and Niall can’t believe he’s actually relieved after the validation of a teenager. “Also!” she jumps and gets closer to the table as she’s gonna tell Niall a secret, “the guy playing Charles is from here! As from Mullingar!”  

“Oh, is he?” Niall starts moving his feet in circles but he doesn’t want to leave the store yet.

“Yes, that’s him,” she holds the book up to her face and points Niall in the picture and looks at him before frowning. “You kinda look like him.”

“Really?” Niall turns to the side so she will see his profile. “I don’t see it.”

“No, that’s Harry Styles! I’m talking about Niall Horan.” And this time, when Niall turns back to see her, she drops the book. “Oh my God.”

She whispers and Niall laughs.

“Oh my God.”

“Are you okay?” Niall stops laughing when she notices how red her face is turning.

“I’m so sorry- oh my,” she takes the book one more time and looks at the cover and then she looks at Niall, “It’s really you! You are playing Charles!”

Niall doesn’t really know what to do when she starts jumping around.

“Wait here, please.” She runs to the showcase and grabs one copy herself, getting the book out of the plastic and looking for a pen under the table and extend it to Niall, “would you sign this copy for me, please?”

So Niall does, he also leaves a little note laughing at himself because he never imagined he would be signing books as if he was a writer but he does and then he takes a picture with her and keeps nodding as she keeps thanking him. He leaves the store holding his three paper bags full of groceries and a new bag hanging from his arm carrying an unwrapped book.

*

He lays on the couch in front of the fireplace after dinner and takes the glass of wine his mom gives him when she lays on the sofa next to him with a book of her own and Niall looks at her for a second. She’s wearing the white sweater he brought her from London, her cheeks are already a bit red from the wine and she looks beautiful with her red nails turning the pages.

Maybe he is a little bit drunk too, but being home in her mom’s house, hearing his dad chatting with his stepfather in the kitchen as they clean the dishes and Greg looking for something to play in the vinyl collection makes his chest incredibly warm. So that’s how he opens the book, with a sloppy smile on his face and he reads in between wine sips and getting himself lost in Bruce Springsteen’s songs.

It’s not only until he feels his mom kissing his cheek and wishing him good night when he realizes all the lights are off and everyone is upstairs sleeping and he’s almost done with the book. He decides to read one more chapter before going to sleep. The book doesn’t change much, but there are things that are different, some scenes told in a different light, different dialogues, different touches, and kisses, and Niall knows is dumb and senseless, but he reads the book seeing Harry’s face, wishing he could touch him and kiss him one last time.

He’s having breakfast two days after when he gets a text from an unknown number.

It’s a picture of the book with the movie poster on it and a cat sleeping over someone’s leg holding the book.

“Look what I found in my hometown’s library! I hope you’re having a jolly time! – H.”

Niall stares at the text for quite some time because his dad has to call his name twice to asks if he wanted milk with his tea, he shakes his head and put his phone on his pockets and eats a plain toast.

He had his number all this time and he never called.

*

New Year goes by way too quickly and suddenly, Niall is in a hotel room in New York with outfit options left by Ellie on the bed to wear in his first-ever press junket day. It is the first week of February and Louis has been going over and over the two-month press junket schedule for the last two weeks. They’re going to do some – a lot – interviews in the hotel, some radio shows and appearances in four talk shows before going to Mexico, Korea, Germany and finally London for the premiere.

Niall was anxious about this part of the job. He’s good with people when he is not overthinking things and now, he’s overthinking everything. He takes a couple of pauses a day to breathe and remind himself that this is bigger than him and he cannot fuck this up. He chooses a grey sweater a plaid pair of pants to match and opens the door to Sienree so she can do his hair.

He’s also being anxious about Harry. After he didn’t reply to his text, he’s been the only thing on his mind and he’s not ready to see him, but it doesn’t really matter. He’ll be seeing him in less than an hour because they have to do everything together from the next two months. So he eats the breakfast left in the table as he lets Sienree do her thing and takes the coffee with him to the room assigned to the interviews of the day.

Niall gets there first and chooses the chair at the left facing the cameras. He doesn’t feel Harry comes in until he sits right next to him and he almost chokes on the coffee he’s drinking. Niall starts coughing and tries to ignore how his arm is rubbing against his but it’s difficult when Harry taps his back, trying to calm him down.

“Are you okay?” he asks with that raspy voice of his, “I keep scaring you, huh?”

Niall doesn’t have time to answer because the reporter comes in with a huge smile on her face and Harry stands up to greet her, so he does the same.

She only has ten minutes with them and she spends the first five talking about Harry’s new album and the rumors about his ex and Niall doesn’t know where to look or what to do with his hands so he just crosses over his knees and looks at Harry until he hears her say her name.

“You are really supportive of each other, right?” She asks looking at Niall and he blinks, surprised a question was actually address to him, “You were in the listening party, weren’t you Niall?”

And this woman must follow Eleanor in her private Instagram to know this because he didn’t see this coming, ever. This time is Harry who turns his whole body to his direction and looks at him, waiting for him to answer.

“Yes,” he says with a smile, keeping up with the conversation, “one of my best friends is a huge Harry fan so we went over.”

“Did you have fun?” Harry asks looking at him like there’s no one else in the room. “I forgot to ask that night with all the commotion.”

Niall turns to him and sees how Harry is trying to hide the surprise of his face under that cheeky smile. “You know I did.”

“3 minutes.” They heard from one of the producers behind them.

“So… the movie!”

Harry talks about the plot and Niall laughs along in the right moments and just like that, the first interview is done, eighteen more to go until lunch.

“You didn’t come to say hi,” Harry says the moment the woman leaves the room.

Niall laughs. “That’s rich coming from you.”

He finishes his cold coffee from one sip without even looking at Harry.

“What are you talking about?”

He’s very grateful for the man that enters the room. Niall stands up to greet him and rushes to start the next interview. And he performs, he laughs with Harry, he shares little touches and answers the few questions he gets after they’re done with Harry’s album and have left only two minutes to ask about their roles, the book, and the movie.

When the interviewers leave, he goes back to ignore Harry like he has been doing for the last year. Harry handles it for five interviews before he breaks after some blogger leaves the hotel room.

“So we’re back from scratch?” Harry asks highly irritated.

“Why you care?” Niall finally meets his eyes.

“What are you mad about now?” Harry asks as if he was the one that was supposed to be mad, “what did I do?”

“Are you for real?”

*

“How can you not love that face!” Harry squalls, taking Niall’s face with both hands. “A cute little cherub,” he tights up his hold and Niall smiles as big as he can. “He’s Irish, did you know?”

“Yes, I did,” the woman in front of them laughs and Harry lets Niall’s face go.

“Your time is up.” Harry’s publicists say from behind the cameras and the reporter visibly pouts.

“It was a pleasure, guys.” She stands up and shakes both of their hands.

“Likewise,” Niall replies and finally sits down when she leaves.

“Lunchtime.” Someone screams at the back and Niall could cry of happiness.

This bickering with Harry has been going on for hours now and Niall is afraid the hostility may be going through the screens at this point. They’re being way too sarcastic and even if Niall is enjoying it, they could actually be hurting themselves more than they realize.

Louis walks in looking at his phone and he stands next to Niall, maybe waiting for him to get up so they could go grab a bite together, so that’s what Niall does, he stands up but Louis is not moving yet. He sends a text and directs his eyes to Harry.

“Hey.” He says.

“Hi, Louis,” Harry replies, taking a sip from his water bottle.

“Jeff texted me, I’m gonna get the two of you some lunch, let’s go.”

Niall stares at Louis in disbelieve. Whose team is he on?

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Harry says looking at Niall. “I can order something in my room.”

“Just walk.” And with that, Louis walks out of the room, leaving both Niall and Harry staring at his back.

*

They sit at a table in the hotel’s restaurant because they only have an hour and a half to eat and no energy to actually move from the building. Niall and Harry order in silence, sitting at opposite ends of the table with Louis in between as a mediator. He’s still on his phone, looking like a real agent and it’s almost funny how he got this job by accident, as a joke even and now he has dedicated his time and effort to Niall in a way that leaves him speechless. There will never be words to express how grateful he is for having a friend like Louis.

He finishes whatever he’s doing and turns off his phone, leaving it over the table as they wait for the food. It’s awkward to say at least. They’re just sitting there, looking at each other and not saying anything until Louis clears his throat and makes them turn to see him.

“It has been brought to my attention by the people putting in and out the mics from you, that you have been fighting all morning.” Niall looks at Harry to find the expression he’s sure he has on his own face.

The fear of being caught, like they’re just kids that have been hiding in their parent’s garage after being called for dinner way too many times. Eyes wide open, lightly blushing as they play with their fingers over the table.

“What the fuck is going on with you two? I thought you buried the ax.” Louis says, looking between them as he was watching a tennis match.

“So did I,” Harry answers at the other side of the table, leaning his head to the side acting all confused as he doesn’t know what he has done, making Niall look bad, making him even angrier.

But Niall can’t say anything to defend his childish behavior, can he? He never told Louis about them or their thing going on filming, he never told him about how Harry promised to call and never did and how he kept waiting and waiting even though he knew he would have ended up heartbroken like a fool. Louis doesn’t need to know that because he has enough on his plate and he has been there for Niall to cry too many times, this is the part he deserves, he bit where he gets to be successful and Louis gets to enjoy it.

So he decides to bury himself even deeper.

“He just acts like we’re best friends,” Niall says, looking down at his hands to avoid looking a Harry. “You know I don’t like that.”

“I thought we were friends,” Harry whispers, hurt.

We were way more than that, Niall thinks and it hurts him more.

“Well, that’s stupid, Niall.” Louis sounds angry and Niall gets it, he’s acting like a kid.

But at that moment the food arrives and Louis can’t lecture him like he’d like, so he just waits for the waitress to be done, he thanks her and then takes his knife and the fork on his hands.

“You’re gonna get along for the rest of the two months if you don’t wanna fuck this movie up, after that, you can kill each other for all I care.” And then, Louis starts to eat.

Niall looks up, to find Harry and his stupid salad staring at him, a blank expression on his face but he can see behind all that, how his dead eyes are actually grievous in a way that he doesn’t really understand. Why is he upset? Why is he offended that Niall can’t forget what they did so easily?

Harry shakes his head and stabs the vegetables with the fork so Niall starts eating too, in silence.

*

The rest of the day goes by like a really painful summer drought in Los Angeles, asphyxiating and hopeless. Harry is a good actor, Niall knew that but after a bunch of interviews, even himself could believe they were inseparable all this time. They don’t talk much in between setups and interviews, they also don’t complain when they learn about the team dinner at the end of the day, they just move along. They go to their room to change; Niall decides to take a second in the shower wondering if this is worth all the effort.

Yes, he is mad but there’s no really anything to do about it. Shit happens, relationships – or things – happen and people move on. He should’ve already moved on. Indifference sucks, hypocrisy sucks and wanting someone who doesn’t want you the same way sucks. But Niall is a grown man, he shouldn’t be reacting this way, especially when it can hurt a project that involves more people, a project that’s loved and anticipated. He stays there under the water for a bit realizing he has to talk to Harry tonight, maybe even apologize and bite his tongue to not say everything in his mind for the movie’s sake.

He buttons up his white shirt and puts his phone on the back pocket of his black pants and leaves the room.

They go to a nice restaurant in Brooklyn this time. It’s a good night, everyone is excited and the lights are low. Rachel McAdams sits next to him and Niall tries to play it cool, which is easy when someone is as sweet as she is. Harry is sitting next to Chloé and she keeps whispering on his ear, maybe talking about the sequel and the next book that’s coming in June, but he seems fine, he’s smiling and laughing and telling stupid jokes. For some reason, it warms Niall’s chest, they didn’t have much time together but it was good while it lasted. So Niall drinks whatever wine they put in front of him looking at Harry for the rest of the night. It’s around one in the morning when he starts feeling dizzy and blushy and he’s laughing about something Rachel said but now can’t remember.

He feels Harry’s eyes on him but he doesn’t turn around, he knows he’s a mess, his shirt half open and his hair everywhere after touching it all night. People talk to him from all directions and Niall lost sight of Louis about two hours ago but it doesn’t seem important at the moment, he’s having a great time, a breath of fresh air in the middle of the drought.

Niall’s eyes skip to Harry’s direction only to find an empty chair. He waits for him to come back from the restroom but after minutes he realizes Harry left and so did Niall’s predisposition of having a good time for the rest of the night, so he kisses Rachel’s cheek saying goodbye to everyone. He hugs Chloé and asks her about her day as he gets up to get his coat, she only answers because she’s getting up with him and they walk to the door together but she has a car waiting for her and Niall hasn’t even called an uber yet.

He walks her to the car and closes the door to later pull out her phone and wait for his car to arrive. It’s cold in New York, it’s February and there’s still snow in the streets. He closes his eyes and feels the wind kissing his cheeks. He didn’t speak to Harry the whole night and he knows he should have but he’s also aware he avoided him sitting too far from him in dinner. Now he has to wait until tomorrow to start over.

The uber driver doesn’t talk for the duration of the ride and Niall is grateful for the silence. His battery has run out and he only has the energy to close his eyes and lean his head to the window to see the reflection of the light on his closed eyelid. He asks for his key in reception and takes the elevator. He opens his eyes the moment the doors open and he expects everything but seeing Harry at his door, his back lean against the wall next to the door, one leg up and his phone on his hands.

When he looks up, Niall can see he’s pissed. Not as drunk as Niall, but way more upset. His eyes are red, his hair is a mess and his rings seem to shine from the distance. The elevator’s door starts to close again, but Niall steps out, walking through the hall to his room, to Harry.

“What are you doing here?” Niall asks and only then he realizes how tired he is, of everything.

“We need to talk,” Harry says, his voice as plain as the expression on his face.

“It’s late Harry, we should sleep.” Niall takes the key on his hand and walks to the door. “We can talk tomorrow.”

“No,” Harry puts himself in between Niall and the door and he sighs. “Now. Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you and even when you’ve been treating me like shit all day, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”

And Niall has been trying to be good, to be patient and eat all his feeling up but Harry doesn’t get to say that when he has done nothing to see him or even talk to him.

“Stop, okay?” Niall says, finally looking at him in the eyes. “Stop acting like you care about me.”

For some reason, that’s like a bucket of cold water thrown at Harry.

“Niall, you are not listening to my words.” Harry steps in, getting closer to him but Niall moves aside.

“Harry, go to your room. I’m gonna open that door and go to bed so we can pretend this didn’t happen.”

“Open the door so we can talk inside,” Harry says instead, but Niall doesn’t move, so he takes the key from his hands and lets himself into the room, leaving Niall standing in the middle of the hall.

He takes a couple of deep breathes and walks in. Harry is sitting in the table near the window, Niall takes out his shoes and coat and leaves in the corner of the bed.

“You didn’t call,” Niall finally says letting the air leave his lungs, “you promised and I waited and you never called.”

“I lost your number,” Harry starts but Niall laughs.

“You just texted me for Christmas.” He sits on the bed, on the edge near Harry but he doesn’t look at him.

“You know why I didn’t call,” Harry says and Niall looks at him, his expression starts to change and now he looks confused. “You don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Niall smiles looking at his hands.

“It’s not like you tried to reach me anyway,” Harry says putting his arms on knees, leaning closer to Niall.

“The cards were on your table, Harry,” Niall snorts, “you went out to finish your album or whatever. We never really stand a chance.”

Harry frowns and takes Niall’s hands in his. “Niall-”

But he stands up and puts his hands on his hips. He can feel Harry’s eyes on his back but he doesn’t turn around.

“We don’t really need this right now.” He says, “I’m busy, you are very busy.”

“You don’t even want to try,” Harry whispers and now he’s standing right behind him. Niall shivers, Harry can feel it but he moves before he can touch him.

“No, I don’t,” Niall says opening the door.

Harry sighs in defeat and walks slowly to him.

“Goodnight, Niall.” He places his hand on Niall’s cheek and gently kisses him on the lips before leaving.

*

The next morning things are easier; it hurts a little less and Niall can also feel it healing somehow. The conversations are easygoing, the laughs are more genuine and the glances are softer. It’s better and Niall can finally smile at something Harry says without feeling guilty or irritated. They have lunch and dinner together without the awkward silence and the tension over their heads.

They catch up in what they’ve been up to avoid the fact that they have hurt each other in some way. Niall tells Harry about what he’s read of the second book since he just signed for the next movie and knows nothing about it. The day goes by quicker and Niall feels like the next two months are not going to be as bad as he thought.

So he doesn’t expect his door to be knocked at the end of the day after he has showered and is laying on his bed watching some cable movie. He doesn’t expect it to be Harry once he opened the door, he doesn’t expect him to see him crying with his swollen eyes and red nose, the dry tears on his cheeks or the trembling lips, he also doesn’t expect him to grab his neck and kiss him as if it was the last thing he could do before the world ends.

Niall can’t explain what happens next, he only knows Harry closed the door with his foot and then he’s taking his shirt off and kissing his neck. Niall wants to ask if he’s okay, he wants to know why is he crying but he has the feeling Harry won’t talk about it, so he kisses him back and helps him undress. He knows this is not right, he knows they shouldn’t be doing this, at least is not the way he imagined it but right now he can’t think of a reason not to, especially when his back hits the mattress and Harry goes down on him.

He wants to keep his eyes open and engrave the picture of Harry between his legs at the back of his mind one last time but he can’t, it’s all too much too fast so he just closes his eyes and buries his fingers in Harry’s hair. And he feels everything, the kisses and bites on his hips, his fingers on his butt cheeks pressed so hard he can already feel the bruises and his mouth. Oh, his beautiful mouth.

“Niall,” Harry whispers as he gets on the top him, kissing his tummy, his arms, licking his neck.

He just nods and that’s all Harry needs.

Niall tries to distract himself to not think of how good he feels. It’s been a long time and the last time he had sex, he doesn’t even remember it, he doesn’t want to either. But he tries, he tries to remember a better lover, a better kisser, a better taste, a better pair eyes or a better smile but he can’t, so he lets himself hold Harry closer and pull his hair, he allows himself to bite his lobe and make him moan, he lets himself look at his eyes when he enters him and he can feel the tears falling down his cheeks so he closes his eyes when Harry kisses the tears away.

He goes slow first, mumbling things in his ear neither of them understands, holding his hands over his head and biting his lips. Niall can’t speak, his brain melts and the only thing he can do is open his mouth and look at the ceiling hoping it doesn’t fall over them. Harry goes faster as he gets closer to come and Niall holds him when he lets his hands go and finally falls on his chest.

His breathing is heavy but so is Niall’s, he takes the hair out of his face and wraps his legs around his waist and they fall asleep like that.

*

Niall wakes up to find a naked Harry holding him from behind. He slowly unwraps his arms around his waist and goes to the shower and leaves the room before he could wake up.

He needs to think. Step aside for a bit and get his mind around what happened last night. They talked, they understood each other and then, they fucked. Niall goes to the hotel’s gym to burn some of the energy left, they don’t have interviews till three in the afternoon so Niall can make something from the free time.

He must have been there for at least two hours when someone gets in the treadmill next to him.

“Are you running from me already?”

Niall turns to his right to find Harry running with a towel around his neck.

“Was that a pun?” Niall asks, taking the other earbud out.

Harry smiles, looking down at the machine as he speeds it up.

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Niall says instead. “Do you want to talk about what happen last night?”

Harry’s smile fades and he shakes his head looking at the mirror wall in front of them.

“Okay, then.”

*

They fall in a vicious circle after that, sleeping together, going from one room to the other from New York to L.A.; going out in Mexico, kissing in clubs as if no one knew who they were, fucking in the plane to Korea, disguising themselves to walk in the streets of Germany, which was funny because Harry was very paranoid about everything. Somehow, in-between Korea and Germany, they reach the same point they were when they were filming the movie and Niall knows how this goes, he can recognize the signs.  

The recognizes the silence Harry falls in after they’re chatting for a bit, he recognizes the zones out looking at the wall in front of him as he keeps playing with Niall’s hair when they lay on the bed but he feels it coming when Harry storms into his room to kiss him and do just that, hold his face standing in the middle of the room, kissing him until their lips start to feel numb. He recognizes when he gets sad out of the blue or stops talking midsentence, he feels it when their hugs last longer than usual but are not as warm.

He also can see the sign he’s falling in love, again. Niall recognizes the little tells from the time he thought he was in love before, the way his heart skips a bit when Harry smiles at him like it used to happen with Holly when he was eighteen, how he blushes when Harry kisses his cheeks like when he was briefly dating Barbara before she got that modeling contract, or how his body warms up with excitement when Harry kisses him like those first times with Connor but there also things he has never felt before, like how Harry leaves him breathless when he whispers on his ear or touches his thighs, how his neck goes red when bites his lobe and how his chest hurts from laughing so hard.

Niall wishes he wouldn’t fall so easily but then again, maybe it’s Harry who makes it easy. Maybe it’s his smile, his touch, his lips. And he knows he’s heading to a broken heart, again, but he can’t stop himself, he doesn’t want it. He just lets his clothes hit the floor and he falls on his knees on the bed. It’s easier, it’s better.

They’re in a bath in Germany when it occurs to him. Harry is washing his back and kissing his neck, giving him goosebumps and make him close his eyes when he thinks about it. A gift, for Harry, to make him remember the time they have spent together, to let him know he doesn’t regret it, he just wishes he could hold on to it a little longer. He needs to call Eleanor before they go to London for the premiere and then Harry has to disappear to start his tour.

Harry’s phone rings and he tense up behind him. It’s not only until he sees the number that he gets out of the bath and answer the phone call in the room. Niall doesn’t think about it, they’re not there anyway, they won’t be. Instead, he calls Eleanor and asks her where can he get a custom made necklace, it’s for his mum, he says.

By the time Harry returns to the bathroom, Niall has already ordered the gift to be delivered at Louis’ flat and given Eleanor the heads up to hold it for him until he gets home. Harry is fully dressed when Niall turns to see him.

“Sienree is about to come in, get dress.” He says and leans down to kiss Niall on the lips. “Last event before London.”

And somehow, it sounds like a goodbye.

In London, they do BBC’s and Graham Norton’s interviews the two days before premiere night and the city seems to be buzzing for both of them. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is talking about Niall since the movie has already been out in Korea and South America for three days now. Niall hasn’t seen it yet but his social media is blowing up, he has around five million followers on Instagram and his mentions have been going crazy since Harry appears in the back of one of his stories for less than a second.

Niall has gotten better at interviews; people seem to enjoy him. They laugh and play along, they have learned to resume the plot with key sentences and not give away anything important for the people who haven’t read the book. They talk about Ireland, their families, and Harry’s album and upcoming tour, they make Niall do accents since he did it for Jimmy Fallon and people seem to love it and now he has to do it in almost every radio station.

But it’s good, it’s a great laugh and Harry loves it, he also tries and miserably fails to do it but he’s too cute for anyone to tell him something. People also comment about their chemistry for what they can see from the trailer and the movie clips out there and they joke around with it, they sit closer and put their arms around each other before bursting into laughter and talk about the movie.

They also have been sleeping apart. In their respective houses, which makes it easier: saying goodbye and end it.

Niall flies his mom and dad to the premiere and has a car pick them up to get them to the hotel where everyone is getting ready to go to Trafalgar Square for the main event. He’s wearing a nice Paul Smith’s navy suit and is the middle of buttoning up his shirt when someone knocks his door, he’s checking his phone when he walks to open it and fins Eleanor wearing a beautiful black dress holding the box he’s been waiting all week.

“We need to talk,” she says, handing it to him.

“You opened it,” Niall says, putting his phone on his pocket and finishing button up his shirt to take the velvet blue box.  

“Of course I opened it!” she walks into his room and sits on the bed. “Now… how long you and Harry have been sleeping together.”

Niall rolls his eyes and checks the time on his watch.

“I don’t have time for this,” he says palming his pockets, trying to mentally check all the to-do things on his list. “See you there.” He takes the jacket on the back of the chair and puts it on, with that, he disappears down the hall, looking for Harry’s room.

It doesn’t take too long to finds it, he knew which one was anyway so he just knocks and waits for Harry to open. And he does, a few seconds later but Niall has to hide the gift on the inside of his jacket when he sees the girl inside Harry’s room, talking to Jeff.

“Holly?” he asks, making both of them turn and then he looks at Harry whose eyes are wide open and his hand grabs the door frame, as he could hide the people behind him as if it matters now.

Niall removes his arm and walks in.

Holly is wearing a red dress and has her hair up in a ponytail. She looks good, she has always looked good, that’s one of the reasons Niall fell so hard for her when they were in school.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, looking at Harry.

“I asked to be here,” she says with the most annoying smile on her face. “I wanted to watch the movie.”

“I don’t understand,” he repeats to Harry but he doesn’t say anything, he’s not even looking at him.

“Yeah, right.” Is Jeff who talks and he sounds mad.

“Jeff-” Harry is the one speaking now, stepping in between Niall and his agent.

“You’re gonna tell me now he doesn’t know shit.”

“He doesn’t.” Harry and Holly say at the same time.

“Your friend here has been blackmailing Harry for the last eight months,” Jeff says over Harry’s shoulder and that feels like being hit by a truck. “She has conversations, voice notes, pictures.”

“What?” He is looking at her now and remembers the things he heard the last time he was in Ireland, how she got a new car and a flat in London out of nowhere and Niall feels sick. “How? How fucking dare you?” he’s not having it anymore.

“Don’t fucking talk to me like that,” she goes pass Harry and starts pointing Niall in the chest. “You humiliate me!”

Niall frowns because he can’t think for a moment any situation where that could have happened.

“When?! If I’m remembering correctly, you were the one who called me a loser in front of everyone in school and told me I will never accomplish anything in my life after I asked you to move with me to Los Angeles.” He reproaches her forgetting there are other people in the room.

“The night we went back to my place, you called me Harry and then you called a fucking cab.” She says without missing a beat. Niall can feel his neck turning red. “You fell asleep waiting for it. Your phone code is the same after all these years.”

“Holly.” He takes her by the arm but she brushes him off quickly.

He has to fix this. He can’t let this happen. Niall can see everything now, he understands. The reason Harry didn’t call, why he was so angry at him, how his mood changes so quickly and can’t bear to look at him for too long. He’s starting to struggle to breathe and the walls seem to get closer and closer. He can’t have a panic attack now, no when he’s alone in this room and Louis is not close enough to calm him down, he can’t show more weakness in front of Holly.

So breathes, in and out like the thousands of therapists have told him to do and look at Harry’s back, stopping Jeff from coming to him.

“You’re gonna end this now,” Niall’s words tremble out of his mouth. “Or I’ll tell Sean what really happened in that farmhouse the summer of our senior year.”

Holly’s face went pale as she remembers the one thing Niall swore never talk about again. He promised because he was in love with her and then he kept the promise because it would ruin Holly’s life and he didn’t want that. Now, things have changed and he can easily go home and tell Sean she’s the one who pushed him down the cliff when they were drunk the night of the bonfire, she’s the reason he can’t walk anymore and why he couldn’t close that contract with the football team interested in him. Holly was already eighteen and it has not been ten years yet. Sean can take legal action if he wanted and they both know he does.

“You can’t.” she shakes her head. “No one will believe you.”

“I think they will.” He puts his hands on his pockets. “Sean was my best friend, Holly. I should’ve known at that moment you would ruin everything and everyone that comes close to you.”

She swallows and fixes her dress, finally, she nods.

“Okay, I’ll leave.” She’s walking to the door but Niall steps in front of her to stop her.

“You will also return the car and the flat.” Niall stands his hand and sees her eyes fill up with hatred, but she doesn’t say anything, she opens her purse and puts both sets of keys before leaving the room.  

After a couple of seconds of the three of them staring at each other, Jeff runs out of the room chasing Holly down the hallway.

“What just happened?” Harry asks when they are the only ones in the room.

“Small towns have dark secrets, Harry.” Niall smiles from the side and sits on the chair near the door. “You should’ve told me.” He covers his face with his hands and rubs his closed eyes.

Harry takes the hands out of his face. “We didn’t know if you were on it,” he apologizes and Niall nods.

“And yet, you came to my room that night,” Niall looks up to find Harry duck down in front of him, “why?”

He smiles, lovingly. “Because I can’t stay away from you.” Niall shakes his head. “I never know who to trust but with you, I didn’t care-”

Niall kisses him. It’s been urging him to do it from the moment he got the necklace from Eleanor that’s now burning him in his jacket so he pulls away to look at Harry and clear his throat.

“I came here because I wanted to give you something.” Harry frowns, waiting for him to continue. “It’s silly now, but-” he pulls out the velvet box from inside his jacket. “I wanted you to have something from me, even if this thing we have going on ends here or-”

Harry opens the box and sees the neckless. It’s a golden guitar pick with the initials of the movie and date of the premiere on one side and Niall’s initials on the other. It’s long and not too big like the ones he has seen Harry wear lately. He looks at it longer than Niall is conformable with and he can feel his cheeks blushing but he can’t move, not when Harry is holding one of his hands and he uses the other to put the necklace over his head and fall where the butterfly tattoo is covered but that silky shirt with the Gucci suit.

“I love it,” Harry says, holding the guitar pick in his fingers. “I love you.” Then he looks up and Niall’s mouth open to speak but Harry kisses him before he could say anything like he’s afraid he won’t say it back so Niall pulls him away one more time.

“I love you too.”

*

Niall was never hyperaware of his own body until this very moment. Flashes coming from every direction, lots of voices yelling his name and asking him to turn to them and he just has Louis’ voice in his head: “I don’t know, smile?”. He pulls his hands in and out of his pockets, he smiles and looks at every side he can as he walks down the red carpet, so he’s distracted when Harry walks to him looking like he owns the place, making finger gun at everyone and grabbing Niall by the waist to they can take some pictures together.

He has brought his family too. Niall met Anne and Gemma in the reception of the hotel just the same way Harry met Bobby and Maura, the only difference is that Harry whispered and his sister’s ear the fact that they were fucking before following Bobby for a beer at the hotel’s bar and leaving Niall there to answer all of Gemma’s questions.

They have decided to try, at least that’s what Harry said in between kisses on their way over as he tried to pull Niall together before walking in for the photos. They also decided to keep it down at first but Harry whispering into Niall’s ear and grabbing his ass, making him laugh so the paparazzi can take their shots is not exactly what Niall had in mind for a low profile. People will talk, at least he hopes if they do it at least it's about the movie as well.  

Once inside, the actors get together for some last shots with the director and the producers, Elena runs to them and hugs them before saying she will be sending a copy of the manuscript for both of them before the final check with her editorial. She promises surprises before all of them walk into the room of the screening to answer some questions and play the movie.

Harry and Niall sit together, the movie is over two hours and has an extra scene and the realized date of the second book, ‘Ways to Die’, at the end which makes some people scream at the back and Niall laughs because he has never felt excitement like this before. People clap and Niall cries a little when the lights come one so he can see some faces. Anne and Gemma are crying because they just saw Harry died in front of them but Harry tells them he is not actually dead and they laugh, and Niall smiles when he sees them and smiles when his mom hugs him and tells him how amazing he was. Bobby has his eyes red and doesn’t say much, he just hugs Niall and kisses his forehead.

When Niall looks back he sees Harry looking at him and he doesn’t think he has been this happy before.

*

Niall goes to the premiere in Los Angeles and sees his friends there, he goes out for a beer and for the first time, he has to leave the place because of the commotion he causes. Harry couldn’t be there, it’s been a week and his tour already started. He’s somewhere in Europe when Niall calls him to tell him they’re the number one movie in America and the UK but he doesn’t really care, he just asks him if he missed him. The answer is always yes.

He’s booking again and scripts are now being sent to him. The reviews are good and Niall tries not to think about all the aspects on their favor for this movie and lets himself have a moment of satisfaction. He did a good job; he gets to enjoy it now. So he goes home when he’s done in America and calls Harry every night after the show and until he gets to England and then, he will follow him around like a groupie.

Things are good, way too good and they’re both having trouble accepting that this may be the new normal. It’s too easy, it feels great and nothing seems to be against them, except the fact that only a few people know about them but there’s time and they are still figuring things out as they go but Harry is putting everything from his part, he has open up and hope for the best, he has trust Niall and all he can do is take it. Piece by piece, secret by secret, moment by moment and they’ll be ready someday, to tell everyone and hope they won’t react like Louis did, screaming and punching Niall in the arm because how dare he waited so long to tell him.

But they don’t wait too long to tell their families because it’s too easy, Anne knew right after the premiere when Gemma couldn’t keep the secret another hour and Niall had to tell his parents the next week because Anne couldn’t wait to have a proper dinner as soon as Harry lands in London. So they do, they eat at Harry’s place after the concert and Niall may be a bit drunk when he rests on Harry’s chest and sees his mother talk to Anne and Gemma while his dad is having a conversation with Harry and his sister’s boyfriend. And he was wrong, that day at the premiere, this is the happiest he has ever been.

*

Harry has a week off before he has to go to America for that leg of the tour and then finish in South America, so they’re in Niall’s apartment and he’s helping him reading some line but he got bored in after forty minutes and now he’s just looking for excuses to kiss Niall when the bell rings and Niall looks at Harry as if he was expecting someone. Harry shakes his head and shrinks so he has to stand up and get the door.

It’s a box from Elena and Niall remembers the manuscript.

“Ok, don’t open it yet, I’m gonna bring you wine and grab a beer.” He leaves the box on the sofa and disappears into the kitchen.

It’s been fifteen minutes when he hears Harry scream.

“Niall, I’m not dead!” he runs to the kitchen with the book opens in the middle, “Jonathan is immortal!”

“For fuck’s sake, Harry!”

#my writing #wtl #fanfic #narry #narry fanfic #my fic #ways to love #niall x harry #harry x niall

[lihikainanea]

hear me out. pennywise audition bill w the fluffy hair, coming home to tiger all like “i think i got the part :)” and she’s just so proud like “duh, i knew you would” which of course results in celebratory sex because hello, she has to reward him somehow and he looks so delicious and what follows us lots of tugging on that soft, beautiful hair of his as they go at it 😜

God that hair is just.....uuuuuunf it’s so tuggable.

And she’d be SO PROUD of her big dude, wouldn’t she? Yes, she would. She’d give him a good luck blow job the morning of the audition, just to get those good vibes flowing early, and afterwards when he got home she’d sit on his lap and listen to him recount every single detail of it. And she was there when he got a callback, at the bar with him and some friends, and she went outside and held his hand while he took the call and she jumped into his arms after when he told her.

And the second audition he got another good luck blow job, and she did the same thing when he got home. He cooked dinner with her that night and they finished a bottle of wine while he obsessively recounted everything.

And when he found out he booked the gig, she tackled him and kissed him all over and was just so happy and proud and thrilled for him.

But like, also, I’ve been watching the behind the scenes footage and I can’t watch the movie so I never realized how much he wrecked his voice. 14 hours on set doing that, his throat and vocal chords must have been completely ruined. There’s no way he had a voice after leaving set. And when tiger went to visit him a few times, I HC that when he came home she had a scarf waiting for him, would wrap it around his neck. Hand him a hot mug of ginger tea and a little chalkboard where he could write down what he wanted to say.

And every night he just put his head in her lap while she gave him head scritchies, writing sweet things like “tell me about your day” on his little chalkboard.

[mtvswatches]

Wynonna Earp 3x03 Colder Weather

Click here for previous recaps!

Stray thoughts

1) They’re doing a Dolls retrospective in the previously-on and oh God, it’s going to be one of those episodes, am I going to cry my heart out?

2) Wynonna is sad, drunk, and angry – a dangerous combination. Yep.

3) God, they even changed the music for this episode… They’re really going for emotional devastation, aren’t they?

4) So, the vampire lady that had Doc all tied up in the season opener is back. He called her Countessa, but then she begged him to say her name, and I wonder if this has some other meaning? Like, maybe she needs him to say her name for some spell or something? I don’t know. Anyway, apart from being a vampire, she moonlights as a seer. And she tells Doc that she’d seen a warrior would die – Dolls – and that he should give up trying to get with Wynonna because she loved Dolls, too, and he’d be forever competing with Dolls’ ghost. Ouch.

5) Really, dude?

6) Waverly and Nicole are having a very important conversation that everyone should have with their loved ones – what happens with my remains when I die? I’ve had this conversation several times with different people and they’re all very much aware of what I want to be done with my body, but I guess I’ll be dead and they can do whatever they want and  I’ll never find out. Anyway, Nicole’s wish is to have a sky funeral, which sounds whimsical and cute but it’s actually pretty gross.

7) Uh-oh. Waverly has just found out that her father – well, not her father-father, you know what I mean – had only made arrangements for her mother’s and Wynonna’s burials, not hers… and that’s so unnecessarily cruel? Did they adopt her or were they charged with her? I really need to find out what’s the whole story about Waverly and the Earps!

8) Wynonna is in denial. She continues binge-drinking and shooting Peacemaker, but she’s not finding any peace. It’s Doc who can finally comfort her and convince her to pay their respects to Dolls. They actually comfort each other…

9) Who dis?

10) Waverly is kind of freaking out, saying she’s hungry and how that reminds her that Dolls will never eat again and then she starts laughing (her little breakdown reminded me a bit of Anya’s in The Body…) and Doc then smashes a glass against the wall (kind of like what Xander did in The Body…) They’re preparing a wake for Dolls at Shorty’s, which I guess we’ll end up being more like a sad party with everyone getting drunk and shots being fired because nothing can go right in Purgatory, not even a wake.

11) So, I took an instant liking to Star Hand guy for some reason, and thankfully, he seems to be Dolls’ friend. Doc is demanding evidence, as he should. Question is, how did he find out Dolls was dead? Is he a Black Badge agent, too? Did he come here to say his goodbyes or is he going to be a mainstay? And with this I’m reminded of…

12) Hmm. I have some questions…

NICOLE: My parents were travelling again and they told me I could go to this music festival with my aunt and uncle. Here. WAVERLY: In the Ghost River Triangle? NICOLE: There was an attack. A man in leather. So much screaming and blood. WAVERLY: The demon Dolls killed at the cliff? Bondage Bob? NICOLE: For years, my parents just told me that everybody died in a forest fire and that I had... I had somehow escaped, but... you know, it just didn't explain the nightmares. WAVERLY: Yeah, I've... I've heard them. NICOLE: Last spring, when... Widow Mercedes said his name... Bulshar... it was like this shotgun went off in my head. And Dolls helped me. He got me files, he... he told me that... Black Badge had been covering up these massacres for years. The Cult of Bulshar.

I’m not sure I’m on board with this backstory they gave Nicole literally out of nowhere? And the same demon that committed this massacre is the guy Dolls killed on the hill? The one Waverly names “Bondage Bob”? I just… I don’t totally buy it. I know it could be completely possible for her to have suppressed these memories because of trauma, but… it all feels a bit thrown together at the last minute? Why couldn’t she just be a human, a kickass human but a human nonetheless? Why does she also need a supernatural and traumatizing backstory? I don’t know, I’m still a bit iffy about the whole thing.

13) Will this turn into a supernatural version of “P.S. I Love You”?

14) Obviously, Dolls knew he was going to die, hence the ominous letter. Wynonna takes it out on Jeremy because he knew and he was trying to help Dolls but he didn’t say anything to anyone else, trying to respect Dolls’ wishes. Wynonna feels betrayed, but I don’t really get why? First of all, all of them know they can die at any time, that’s part of the gig, right? So yeah, Dolls being aware of his own mortality shouldn’t be that surprising considering his line of work. Second of all, they all witnessed that this dragon-power was taking a toll on him, didn’t they? Am I crazy? So yeah, Wynonna might have pretended it wasn’t an issue, but she knew, they all knew… I guess it’s easy when you’re mourning someone’s death to have someone to blame, but Jeremy hardly deserves it.

15) So, Quinn, Xavier’s friend, is all chummy with Doc and I’m here for it. Wynonna asks Doc if he knew Dolls was dying, and Quinn is like “duh! Of course, he was!”, which was exactly my reaction. Wynonna is not an idiot, so she had to be in complete denial not to see that he was dying. Anyway, apparently, he was also Black Badge.

16) Oh, great. The fucking revenants stole all the serum Doc had concocted for Dolls and are streamlining it. This should end well.

17) So, Jeremy placed a coded message for Dolls’ friends to come to his funeral. See? How can you be angry at Jeremy?

18) Wynonna wonders why Dolls didn’t attempt to do anything to get better, and the answer is blatantly obvious for both Quinn and Doc – because of her. I’m guessing she’ll take this information to further flagellate herself over Dolls’ death.

19) The vampire lady, Katalin, stole Waverly’s purse, for some reason, maybe she’s a klepto or something, but she didn’t use any of her vampire powers to do it? Like, she just grabbed and took off, awkwardly running in her heels? Kind of disappointing, but also super hilarious.

20) Ay…

21) Waverly enlists Doc to help her get Dolls’ letter back, and they sneak out all secretive, but… it’s a wake with literally 5 freaking guests… I think the three people left will eventually notice they’re gone?

22) “Why torture yourself? I don’t.” HA! Yeah, right!

23) Quinn suggests that Black Badge is not really gone – well, duh – and that they might come to retrieve what’s left of Dolls…

24) Yep. A bunch of jacked-up revenants have just crashed the party. Coolio.

That’s alright, Wynonna’s got it.

25) I do appreciate a good early 00s callback…

26) WTF

27) OMG, Waverly trying to lose it and turn the table but realizing it’s too heavy and then just throwing the cards on the floor and giving a little shout? *chef’s kiss*

28) Oh, shit, Katalin now knows what Waverly is?! What is she???

29) Aw, Nicole just set Wynonna straight, told her that everyone is grieving Dolls just as much as she is and that she should go apologize to Jeremy. I do really love their quiet yet strong bond.

30) Quinn is fucking torturing Jeremy with a goddamn stapler and why does everyone keep treating Jeremy like crap? Quinn wants to get Jeremy’s drugs to become a dragon and storm BB headquarters. Wynonna gets through to him by admitting that she is also haunted by the ghosts of the people she lost, but their best revenge is to go on living. Be brave. Live. For me.

31) Ouch, I didn’t know that something as small as Wynonna giving Quinn Dolls’ badge would hurt like a bitch, but it did.

32) Damn, damn, damn.

That whole scene simply destroyed me. Wynonna finally decided to cremate Dolls’ body to prevent BB from coming after it to continue experimenting on him. And then they bury him, each of them placing a personal item that symbolizes their relationship to Dolls. It fucking devastated me.

33) Waverly asks Wynonna what her plans are for when she passes, casually mentioning that she doesn’t have a spot on the Earp’s burial site. Wynonna doesn’t make a big deal of it, and instead, tells Waverly that they will live for about another 80 years and then, they’ll be buried together at the homestead. That’s all the reassurance Waverly needs. She might not be an Earp, but she’s Wynonna’s sister, and that’s all that matters.

34) Damn, Dolls.

35) Does Katalin spend the whole day playing with her Tarot cards? #quarantinemood

So… she admits that she only stole Waverly’s purse to get Doc’s attention. They have a short conversation about the days of yore and then…

Damn Doc, he can’t just keep it in his pants, can he?

36) That was an emotional rollercoaster of an episode. Dolls wasn’t one of the characters I loved the most, but I understand how important he was to the narrative and to each of the characters, so I’m glad to see he got a proper send-off. I really hate it when shows gloss over the aftermath of a main character’s death and skip forward all the grieving and uncomfortableness of mourning. That being said, this being a supernatural show and all, I’m skeptical that this was the last we’ll see of Dolls. Anything can happen, right?

37) Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi. Thanks!

#Wynonna Earp #Xavier Dolls #Doc Holliday #Waverly Earp #Nicole Haught #Wynonna Earp 3x03 #WE 3x03 #WE recap #recap #mine

[bigskydreaming]

What would the dynamic have been if Kyle had been Teen Lantern alongside Kid Flash Wally and the og teen titans?

Aaaaaand I just realized this said Titans after I posted it lol. Not YJ. Oops. Okay I’ll do that one later. Lolol.

Kyle would have been new to the ring and superheroing in general, so he would be the wide-eyed fanboy who is still freaking out whenever they get a new hero as their latest Den Mother a la Red Tornado, because he has to stop himself from asking for their autograph each time and being like how is this my life.

So there’d be some crossover with M’Gann, but her enthusiasm is focused on more just new Earth experiences in general while his are on superhero stuff. But they’d be fast friends because of that same omg this is so cool energy they have about various things.

Meanwhile, just like M’Gann and Connor bonded over feeling new to life on Earth in general, just for different reasons, Kyle and Artemis would bond over being new to the superhero gig. But Kyle would show his nerves and excitement more openly than Artemis, which allows for fun opportunities to play with.

Also, Kyle’s a flirt so he’d flirt with Artemis too...but then he’d wink at her while Wally gets heated over that and tries to one up him, because really he’s just doing it to fuck with Wally, which Artemis gets and fully endorses. A Wally and Kyle rivalry that only eventually softens into friendship is of course a callback to their comics dynamic.

And of course, Wally’s gripes about Kyle, the new kid who thinks he’s so great and why does everyone like him so much anyway, they’re only half about him flirting with Artemis....they have just as much to do with how much time Dick and Kyle spend hanging out, not that Wally would ever admit or even realize that he’s more threatened by the idea of Dick preferring Kyle’s company to his, in any form.

Because of course Dick and Kyle would be fast friends as well, given their fondness for a lot of the same humor, pranks, etc....basically the very things Dick likes about Wally. Also Kyle’s a huge fanboy of Dick’s because like....Robin was the first child hero, the one that started it all for the rest of them and before he got his ring, Kyle thought Robin was like the coolest ever, and meeting him hasn’t lessened that much.

And then with Connor and Kaldur, Kyle acts like a bridge between them and their shared outsider status, similar to what M’Gann and Connor had in common but that the show never explored being a commonality between him and Kaldur as well, largely because they used it as the basis they built Connor and M’Gann’s romance on.

That wouldn’t be a problem with Kyle in the mix though, because his presence neatly circumvents overlap there when instead he makes it his personal mission to get Kaldur and Connor to both lighten up and enjoy life more, and while Dick and Wally are off doing BFF stuff and Artemis and M’Gann are hanging out on their own, Kyle drapes himself between Kaldur and Connor, an arm around each of their shoulders as he’s like yes, guys’ night out, time to paint the town red and live like legends, whose with me! And then he basically drags them from one ‘must experience at least once’ surface world/Earth experience to the next until they admit they’re having a good time.

Also he’s the ultimate wingman and so the second he spies Kaldur giving someone a second look, he’s like, oh it’s on, we are gonna get you laaaaaaid. And Kaldur’s like, I would be fine with starting out with a nice conversation over coffee, my friend, and Kyle’s just like ugh fine, spoilsport, but just so you know, you’re totally harshing on my toxic masculinity here, you’re lucky I like you. Okay c’mon, let’s go get you your conversation and coffee.

[sole-cuore-amore-e-droga]

Lithuania brings yellow fever to Rotterdam 2021

...okay...

...I feel the rhythm...

*swoosh*

...something’s going on here...

*another swoosh*

The music flows through my ve-e-e-ve-veins𝒔𝒔𝒔𝒔𝒔𝒔𝒔

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

IT’S TAKING OVER MEEEEEE

oh NO IVETA WTF ARE YOU DOING HERE IN LITHUANIA REVIEW GO HOME

ARTIST & ENTRY INFO

‘Bout the fucking time I am gonna talk about our bois, eh?

The Roop formed somewhere in around 2009, back when the lead singer Vaidotas Valiukevičius probably felt like he needed to be in a band, after many years of twists and turns of being a solo pop sensation and then it all ceasing a year prior. In 2009 he did get to cross paths with the drummer Robertas and the guitarist Mantas, one of them not being very fond of working with a former pop sensation but eventually giving into it. They had a small start, kinda went nowhere, but in the end they did start get some gigs at some point, and the gigs were small. For a band existing for so long and needing recognition, something eventually happened and they ended up on the Eurovizijos 2018 with “Yes, I Do”, which is more closer to the band’s older repertoire, because of course, they hadn’t hit big with their new sound just yet.

And when I first heard it, I was mindblown how good and stylish did it sound??? Yeah, somehow, I would never have had this sort of expectation in my life that I would’ve been mesmerized by a band I’ve never heard of (but I’ve heard of its lead singer and his past career but haven’t thought of him in years), but it’s just nowadays the thing that happens to me, when artists I don’t have many expectations for by name just slay my existence. (Major paragraphs about one such act coming up on my last review before the 2021 final)

What clicked with me is that song has the undertones about overcoming depression, because Vaidotas was diagnosed with one a year earlier, and it’s coming from Lithuania of all countries... Lithuania, the fucking country that’s number 1 or at the very least top 5 in suicides in handful of categories. And I would’ve loved to see us send such anthem of hope and light for those in need of it, but alas... we preferred love story and husband on stage (who broke up with her anyway sometime later because mutual reasons idek). Not that I’m mad, but it left me miffed and clamouring for The Roop to one day make their big Eurovision break.

And they did! 2 years later we saw the group re-emerge in the new Lithuanian NF’s format, Pabandom iš naujo 2020, with a song that’s different to their usual back-then style, the sleek and quirky dance hit “On Fire”. All was swell and we were actually doing well in the odds and were many people’s faves, but once again, for The Roop it was not meant to reach their dream of reaching out to more audiences, for that Eurovision that they were going to was cancelled, but the panini didn’t stop them, and they still ended up becoming one of the biggest current Lithuanian acts, still getting gigs during the panorama and all that, and awarded for all they had to be awarded for in the Lithuanian Grammy’s equivalent M.A.M.A. This indeed was just the beginning for them. Oh right and they also won the German Eurovision event thingy in place of the real one. And got a silver plastic miniature of the Eurovision trophy. Life is fine.

Then they got a record deal with Warner Music Baltics, went to Finland to do some music work with another Warner branch, and that’s just a part of how “Discoteque”, their entry, was born. It’s a dancy upbeat song, and its lyrics are all about the freedom to dance alone. Nothing to do about quarantine eventhough the “alone”ness suggest otherwise, lol.

REVIEW

I was craving this moment ever since. Though, I kinda thought that the “Discoteque” title was weird on the first glance at the participants/entries list, and not because of it being written without an h. It’s because... The Roop? Going funky? Throwback-esque? After the modernity that “On Fire” was?? hmmm k show what you got mwah mwah xx

And then when it released, it hit me very unexpectedly. Like. Okay. This sounds weird. Very bass-driven, in a way. It has an opening monologue, and a clicking chorus with a KILLER INSTRUMENTAL SECTION???? The one where it makes their hands go crazy when it goes on???

There’s just so much that was put into “Discoteque” that makes it stand out. They even explained certain parts of their song in the music video’s description, like, the extremely syllabic staccato chorus harkens back to the Lithuanian folklore days the way the melody is sung, the bridge made up of odd beatbox noises is meant to symbolize the first human music to ever exist (possibly from mouth sounds), and there’s also this out of key tinkly tune on the bridge that I can’t help but note everytime I listen. As well as I like noting that moment when his voice glitches out in the intro before the verse, and the hi-hats clapping 4 times before the second verse stars. I just love me some little details.

The lyrics are somewhat simplistic, with still some grammar gripes (never heard a soul say “wounded soul” without indicating if it’s “a” or “my” wounded soul???), but at least somewhat better and less cliche than rhyming “fire” with “desire” WHO DOES THAT. But props to The Roop for simply just making people not mind that lyric (at least at large) and now we ended up with an OGAE voting winning song / contender with the “fire / desire” rhyme thrown in there. Mad respect lol. (Yeah and also not a huge fan of the “body’s shaking” line, I guess that’s just me that hates certain words/word combos or think they’re just too weird in context. Apologies)

No but for real, they have crafted and put down a LOT of details in this song, and not just it, but also the choreography (according to them, all inspired by their childhood) and the video (same inspirations as for the choreography), and the whole vibe, and the outfits, and the color scheme (predominantly yellow with purple backdrop and also checkered visuals)... every single thing was crafted out to perfection and I fucking adore it, and I couldn’t have wanted any other way. The MOVES are in THAT specific order they want, although hard to memorize in sequence though, no matter how many times the Roop taught us to dance like them. Also this finger fucker dance move which I still cannot practice without realizing mine are jerky:

No wonder you got them pointing at you, mister, shit’s hard to practice!

And the music video trajectory, oh the music video trajectory (that is still not uploaded on Eurovision’s Youtube channel for some reason. Has it got anything to do with Warner?). Okay, it starts with an “On Fire” callback, with the band leaving to their dressing room, and Vaidotas is by the mirror with his white turtleneck, while a riff begins and he just starts feeling the peculiarity and reveals his yellow suit, and everyone goes for a dance, firstly just with all of the crew that is back from last year (the three Roop members + dancers Marijanas and Miglė), then with a bunch of people in stylish bowl wigs, and then they go back to the dressing room for one final mirror selfie.

my absolute favourite moment is this though. ahh yeah go ahead and feel yaselves

Though I gotta ask, was this move really inspired by Arvydas Sabonis or did Arvydas Sabonis influence The Bangles to walk like an Egyptian first?

It’s yet another quirky song from them, in a somewhat less conventional but at the same time more conventional way. Might have taken me a little time to get invested in it a a bit more, but if it’s an instant success with audiences, I can’t fault them for it, absolutely.

Approval factor: Absolutely. I wanted them for a long time, I am not disappointed. Follow-up factor: Both songs from The Roop are amazing, and also, LRT trusted in them to participate in the next selection once it will be held, and so they did give in, and LRT appointed them an automatic spot in the NF final (which they haven’t done since 2008), and they won fairly and squarely with an unimaginably big amount of televotes lol. We love our Roops. So the follow-up is just as good as the previous entry, which I still sometimes do prefer and think it would’ve stood a bigger chance to win unlike “Discoteque”, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Qualification factor: lol this is like the surest we’ve been about our qualification in years. Now I don’t wanna last-minute jinx it or anything, but we do have a slick performance and a song that’s somewhat of a clicker at first listen, so yeah, there’s your reasons why we pretty much shouldn’t fail, even if as semi openers. (And mind you, the openers to Eurovision in the 2020s, at least the actually happening Eurovision! Sorry Sweden 2020, The Mamas at least started the 2020s for Melodifestivalen xx)

NF CORNER

Now, just because The Roop were the clear standouts of an otherwise so-so NF, doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any decent songs. Like for instance:

• Gebrasy - Where’d You Wanna Go? I’ve actually been slightly rooting for this guy ever since he didn’t go by his stage name yet and sang a song co-penned by Michael Schulte (yes, THAT Michael Schulte, apparently) in 2018, and now it’s just astonishing about the amount of recognition he received with his fairly competent pop ballad piece (if it wouldn’t have done a Jurijus this year) about what sounds like a road accident. Many people said that if The Roop weren’t in this year, he would’ve won easily, but if not for The Roop, who knows how else would’ve the lineup sounded?

• Gabrielius Vagelis - My Guy Sounds like a love song to a guy, is actually about your own personal cheerleader that you can call “my guy”, I guess... simple synthpop piece performed by a competent and yet also very underrated by the televotes every single year he’s competed in singer, with his constant fashion choices additionally bringing him down a slight notch. Also would be a nice future ESC candidate, who knows when though, because Gebrasy is the main focus first, I guess.

And a few other songs I kinda liked, but I don’t wanna go too much in detail about each.

NF CORNER (NON-COMPETITIVE)

Organization-wise, we gotta say that we’re getting towards a pretty neat and tidy organized NF ever since Pabandom iš naujo format had even started. Sure, there were some withdrawal dramas from before the lineup (one of them being Evelina Sašenko who represented Lithuania 10 years ago already), and also the pressure of The Roop ending up as automatic finalists, and making some competitors feel like their tries are not worth it when there’s an obvious elephant in the room? But otherwise, not much notable has happened.

Except interval acts. Some good fucking food. Each and every time. Lithuania’s refined talentry jumped out constantly. My faves were Sisters On Wire though.

Maybe they could bring the chilled out pop rock sound that The Roop tried to carry out in 2018? Who knows.

Also this guy called Voldemars Petersons sang his entry in multiple different styles, trying to give versatile genre roulette artists a run for their money. Good for him I guess

Also, manly tears on live TV

ANY LAST WORDS?

The Roop knows just how proud the nation Lithuania is of them tonight. If I know them right, they’ll stay cool, calm and collected before the show and manage to give out their best to bring Lithuania a certified final placing, and possibly a good final finish. I am grateful for them ever having had an opportunity to showcase themselves, and I will forever look back on “Discoteque” as one of the best we’ve ever sent.

SĖKMĖS LIETUVA!!! SĖKMĖS THE ROOP!!! LET’S DISCOTEQUE WOOOOOOOOOO 💛🖖💜

#eurovision #eurovision 2021 #rotterdam 2021 reviews #lithuania #the roop #discoteque #gif

[spaceorphan18]

Finding Kurt Hummel: Puppet Master

Masterpost

5x07: Puppet Master

Just when you thought season 5 couldn’t get any weirder - they decided to throw in drug-related hallucinations and puppets.  Because why not.  I actually love this episode, but, I mean, can you imagine the writers room discussion about early season 5? They just lost a castmate and friend - so they decide to go take the show in kind of a crazy direction (which also, let’s be honest, feels a little like vamping until they get to their 100th episode).  

Anyway - there’s a ton of Blaine meta here - which I’ll mostly be ignoring! It’s just interesting to me that I always think the Kurt story line in this episode is a lot bigger than it actually is.  And yeah, I’ll say this early on - Kurt is a puppet master just as much as Blaine is (they both have issues with control) - they just took Kurt’s story in a different direction.  Actually, I think it would have been interesting to see fallout of Kurt not having things work out for him, but Glee seems to have forgotten how to do its infamous parallels at this point. 

A Puppet Master

Kurt bounces into the episode on a high - he just booked Pamela Lansbury’s first gig -- at a Broadway hangout.  (Which also happens to be the place where his fiance sang a broken down version of their love song - so I don’t know, I’m torn between Kurt having sentimentality towards Callbacks and never wanting to set foot back in there again.  The show, meanwhile, didn’t seem like they wanted to create somewhere new, so Callbacks it is.)  

Rachel’s on board, but Elliott, Dani and Santana are not.  And in a scene much like the previous Blaine with the choir room scene, they proceed to tell Kurt that Callbacks isn’t such a great idea.  I tend to agree, for marketing purposes, probably best to find some place that’ll get you the right audience, but this is Glee, land of magic where the plot needs it.  (I say in loving jest) 

Kurt’s astounded they’re not on board with this (he looks to Rachel, who looks sad for him - it’s an interesting little moment of subtly in an otherwise kind of over the top scene).  And he insists that Callbacks is a funky place (why does the writing for Kurt sound like a 50yo trying to reclaim his youth? Was Ryan Murphy 50 at this point?).  And that they should trust his instinct and go with him on it.  

I love the little moment where Dani says she doesn’t think anyone else will come and Kurt says he disagrees (Dan-ni!).  Demi Lovato’s reaction is priceless.  She was so under used in this show.  

Anyway, Kurt has a vision of his band playing Madonna songs.  When has Kurt ever had rock star ambitions? Well, now apparently.  (Though - I will say, while not pronounced, Kurt does love and appreciate the attention from performing nearly as much as Rachel and Blaine.)  

So -- we get Madonna’s Into the Groove.  Hm.  

On the con side: I wish they had gone full on 80s.  I mean the clothes are there, but the hairstyles are not.  The juxtaposition feels a little weird to me.  I also wish it wasn’t so autotuned.  It’s nice that Kurt gets a fun, upbeat number, but it’s almost entirely electronic sounding.  I realize that’s supposed to match an 80s synth sound, but I guess it doesn’t work for me.  Also I don’t have a lot of meta for it.  It’s a fun dance number.  I suppose - for all of you complaining that Kurt doesn’t have enough lack of meaning songs - well here you go. 

On the pro side: Kurt’s having so much fun - he’s taking the lead on this one (I can barely hear anyone else on it), and his dancing is adorable and flirty.  It’s great that they let him relax in his own fantasy.  You work that crowd (and those hips)!!  

The intensity at the end cracks me up.  Even in Kurt’s fantasy - Rachel is way super intense.  

Does this sequence remind anyone else of Saved By the Bell’s Rocumentary episode where they sing Friends Forever? Just me? Okay moving on.... 

Oh - Kurt’s getting a call from his fiance - talk among yourselves.  

On close inspection, this scene is hilariously ridiculous.  I mean, I love that the show remembered the two of them were in a committed relationship.  I love that they’re making an effort to show them talking with each other on a pretty regular basis.  (And interestingly, the Klaine stuff has been consistent on the NYC side, though more so absent on the Lima said.  Weird? I know but true.)  

Let’s recap the episode so far: 

Blaine: I have awesome ideas for the direction of our musical group.  Everyone else: Yeah, we think your ideas are dumb  Kurt: I have an awesome idea for the direction of our musical group. Everyone else: Yeah we think it’s a dumb idea.  

Then this scene: 

Blaine: People think my ideas are dumb.  Kurt: Instead of letting you know I understand exactly what you’re talking about, I’m going to remind you that people don’t like it when you try to tell them to do things they don’t want to do - even though I’m going through the same thing at the moment.  

Okay Kurt - a) why the revisionist history considering the glee club.  no one ever had an equal vote on anything and b) hello pot, meet kettle.  Show, I mean what even?!? 

Okay, you know what though, I think this scene is hilarious though.  As it continues - Kurt’s all excited about his news and asks Blaine to come see him.  Blaine is like, yeah whatever.  Kurt’s thrilled about Blaine coming to see him again but Blaine is like KURT WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS PUPPET MASTER THING!!  

No, they aren’t really listening to each other in this scene.  I don’t really care.  It’s comedically satisfying.  

Oh - and can we take a moment to see that Blaine’s inbetween classes at the moment.  I wonder how many times Blaine texts or calls Kurt during his school day.  Idk - that cracked me up too for some reason. 

Kurt Puppet.  Okay, I’m not talking about Blaine’s stuff really - but can I just say I think the Kurt puppet is adorable, even if oh Blaine - you’ve got some issues.  However, I just need to throw out there that Sue doesn’t want to catch Blaine with his hand up the anything that isn’t human.  Uh...Sue? Does that mean you’re open to...oh never mind.  Oh - and I do kind of love that the Kurt Puppet comes alive after Sue confiscates it.  

Crushing Disappointment

Okay - so twenty minutes and a bunch of hallucinations later - Kurt’s chilling waiting for Blaine in the back room of Callbacks.  Kurt’s not gonna like the news.  Dude - you really need to stop inviting Blaine to Callbacks - it’s never gonna end well.  

Anyway - Blaine’s been putting this off (oh Blaine) but he tells Kurt he’s not there.  And Kurt’s first reaction - concern! It’s not until puppet Kurt appears that the anger is apparent.  

And so we get the shift from real Kurt to puppet Kurt.  How much of this conversation is real? How much a fantasy? (caught in a land slide - no escape from reality...)  

I’ve seen this scene be debated quite a bit - and to be honest, I can go either way on whether it’s real or not - so I like to take the happy medium approach.  I do think Kurt was frustrated (as evident as he throws his phone down after the conversation) -  that Blaine not only couldn’t make it, but that Blaine avoided talking to him about it until the last moment, too.  It is interesting, too, to note that Blaine being there for Kurt is really important to him.  

Meanwhile, I think a lot of the anger going on in the scene is Blaine’s own internalization of the situation - and the disappointment he keeps finding in himself.  Puppet Kurt’s reaction is a reflection of how he’s feeling with himself at the moment, and not necessarily a true representation of Kurt’s feelings on what’s going on.  

Still - I wish there had been a clearer resolution to the Klaine conflict (?) than how the episode ends.  (I hesitate to even call it a real conflict, tbh - more so a frustration on Kurt’s end and Blaine issues on the other.) Idk - I still think it feels a little unresolved.  

Meanwhile, Kurt’s got other problems as there’s only one person waiting to see Pamela Lansbury perform - and it’s not even a real fan.  (Dude - are there no other people in that bar?  Seriously on a Thursday in NYC?)  

What does a fox say?

It really is tragic that I can’t get a full shot of this outfit.  What even are those pants Kurt?  

Okay, so let’s recap the second half of the episode: 

Blaine: **has extensional crisis about being called a puppet master, has extensive hallucinations, plays with puppets, but at least gets some character development** Everyone else: Hey Blaine, we talked it over - and your ideas aren’t so bad.  Bonus - you get to be the star!  Kurt: **gets absolutely no development** Everyone else: Hey Kurt, we talked it over - and your idea wasn’t that bad.  Bonus - You get a second gig due to a ridiculously contrived plot point (that will be used again in a few episodes with Mercedes).  

Idk - I love this episode, but I could have done without the the Sue plot in favor of letting Kurt’s band be more than showcasing Adam Lambert and Demi Lovato.  

Meanwhile, the semi-ish conclusion to the Klaine stuff??  Blaine sends an “I’m sorry” box.  (How often does that happen?)  Kurt looks pretty pleased...until he opens it and seems really confused.  Kurt - I really think you may want to call Blaine and see if he’s okay.... 

Oh What Does the Fox Say.  Some people hate it (Lea Michele - it’s her least favorite Glee song apparently), some people love it (My 5yo niece thinks it’s the greatest thing ever), I’m cool with it.  It is super weird - but so is the rest of the episode.  

I’ve seen some interesting meta floating around about how Kurt is the fox because he does not sing in the song (he doesn’t even lip sync the back up vocals - he’s pretty silent).  I wish I remembered what people had said about that.  It was kind of interesting, even if I think this episode is purely a ‘for fun’ number.  

Fun fact: Originally Miley Cyrus’s We Can’t Stop was supposed to be the ending number.  No idea why it changed - but that would have been interesting to see, actually.  Probably makes more sense with the episode than The Fox, lol.  

#finding kh #kurt hummel #yup there we go #I want to get to the Christmas episode hopefully before Christmas....

[deniscollins]

New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

More than half of the 54 million American workers over 50 lose longtime jobs before they are ready to retire, If you were recruiting for a quality manager, and the quality manager applicant had significant experience and aced the phone interview, would you offer the applicant a job if, upon showing up for the interview, you realized the applicant was 71 years old: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Across the United States, mammoth corporations and family businesses share a complaint: a shortage of workers. As the unemployment rate has tunneled its way to a half-century low, employers insist they must scramble to lure applicants.

The shadow of age bias in hiring, though, is long. Tens of thousands of workers say that even with the right qualifications for a job, they are repeatedly turned away because they are over 50, or even 40, and considered too old.

The problem is getting more scrutiny after revelations that hundreds of employers shut out middle-aged and older Americans in their recruiting on Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms. Those disclosures are supercharging a wave of litigation.

But as cases make their way to court, the legal road for proving age discrimination, always difficult, has only roughened. Recent decisions by federal appeals courts in Chicago and Atlanta have limited the reach of anti-discrimination protections and made it even harder for job applicants to win.

It is complicating an already challenging juncture of life. Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.

More than half of workers over 50 lose longtime jobs before they are ready to retire, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute and ProPublica. Of those, nine out of 10 never recover their previous earning power. Some are able to find only piecemeal or gig work.

“If you lose your job at an older age, it’s really hard to get a new one,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist who worked on the analysis.

‘The Look in Their Eyes’

Tom Adair dressed in a sharply pressed white shirt and a blue blazer with gold buttons for the weekly meeting for ExperiencePlus, a group for job seekers over 50 held in the small library at St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, Ala., near Huntsville.

A former quality manager at Toyota and an Air Force consultant, Mr. Adair said he has had temporary consulting assignments over the last decade but has not been able to get a steady full-time job since the recession’s nadir in 2009.

“I ace the phone interviews,” Mr. Adair said. “They say: ‘Your résumé speaks volumes. You could hit the ground running. It looks like you’re the perfect fit.’”

“But you come in, and you’re D.O.A.,” said Mr. Adair, who is 71 and has neatly clipped gray hair. “You can see the look in their eyes.”

“My wife says: ‘We need to get you a face-lift. We need to get your hair dyed,’” he said.

Older workers are much more likely to wrestle with prolonged joblessness than younger ones, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, a 54-year-old job hunter will be unemployed for nearly a year.

Repeated inquiries can go unanswered, like space probes lost in a distant galaxy. In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.

Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.

It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.

As for Mr. Adair, he said he had been through the same job-application routine so many times that it felt like “Groundhog Day.” Over the years, he consulted three lawyers about age discrimination. Each time, they advised that an individual lawsuit would not be worth the legal costs.

With a small pension and Social Security, he said, he and his wife are “just getting by.”

“It’s devastating,” Mr. Adair said. “You go through the stages just like dying. First you can’t believe it. You’re so sure and your wife is so sure, and even the recruiter is. Then you get mad.” By the end, you feel like giving up, he said.

Wanted: Greener Employees

Hiring complaints and lawsuits are rarely filed because they are difficult to prove and the cost is high, said Robert E. Weisberg, a regional attorney with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Florida.

To bring a case against Seasons 52, a national restaurant chain, Mr. Weisberg said, the commission looked to establish a pattern of bias over a period of years by combining statistical analyses with testimony from applicants.

The agency examined whether the chain could have hired so few applicants 40 or older if there had been no age discrimination, and calculated the odds at less than one in 10,000, according to court documents. The commission also collected affidavits from 139 applicants at 35 restaurants.

George Simmons was 45 when he applied at a Seasons 52 in Lone Tree, Colo., in 2014. “My interview was going well until the interviewer asked me my age,” he stated. After he answered, he said, he was shown the door. “I asked what was the problem,” he said, “and the interviewer responded that the restaurant was looking for younger people.”

Heidi Barsaloux was 44 when she applied for a bartender position at a Seasons 52 in Schaumburg, Ill., in 2010. “An interviewer told me that they were not looking for people with that much experience and wanted people who were more green,” she said.

A third applicant was told, “We are not looking for old white guys.”

Ultimately, the chain, part of Darden Restaurants, agreed last year to pay $2.85 million and hire a monitor to prevent discrimination against applicants over 40. As part of the settlement, the chain denied any wrongdoing.

There have been other legal offensives.

The Communications Workers of America has filed a lawsuit on behalf of millions of older Americans against Amazon, T-Mobile and Cox Communications, accusing them and hundreds of other major employers of systematic age discrimination in hiring based on targeted online advertising.

The union and several workers have also filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against more than 70 employers and employment agencies related to age discrimination in recruiting. It expects that some of those will turn into class-action lawsuits.

By exposing so much of the help-wanted process on the internet, “the transformation to digital recruiting has shined a spotlight on how discrimination happens, and it’s made it much easier to do so,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer at Outten & Golden working with the union. “We’re going to start going after these companies, one by one.”

And in a broad settlement with civil rights groups and the union, Facebook agreed to eliminate the ability of advertisers to screen out minority groups, women or older job seekers from seeing particular help-wanted listings.

Facebook itself can control which ads users see by delivering them based on age, gender and ZIP code.

“We want the E.E.O.C. to declare that this type of exclusionary advertising is unlawful” on any online platform, Mr. Romer-Friedman said.

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, said the company had taken steps to combat hiring discrimination and was exploring what more to do.

A Cap on Experience

Dale E. Kleber had been out of work for three years when he saw a posting in 2014 for a legal position at CareFusion, a medical technology company. At 58, with three of his four children living at home, in a suburb of Chicago, he was feeling the financial strain of prolonged unemployment.

So even though the ad specified that applicants should have no more than seven years of experience, Mr. Kleber applied. CareFusion ended up hiring a 29-year-old.

Mr. Kleber, a veteran lawyer and former general counsel of a national dairy and food company, sued, arguing that a limit on experience effectively ruled out older applicants.

“Litigation is a terrible way to settle disputes,” said Mr. Kleber, who during his career had defended companies against complaints filed with the E.E.O.C. “It’s a very uncertain process, it is fraught with risk, and sometimes it comes out wrong.”

Putting a cap on experience, though, “just seemed so egregious,” he said.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not agree. In a ruling this year supporting CareFusion, it stated that recruiting practices that have the effect of screening out older applicants — what is known in legal terms as having a “disparate impact” — did not violate the law.

The decision mirrored one involving R. J. Reynolds Tobacco made earlier by the Court of Appeals for 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which the Supreme Court declined to review. It ruled that unlike employees already on the payroll who can show that a policy has a negative impact on a group regardless of the motivation, applicants would have to prove intentional discrimination.

Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesman for Becton Dickinson and Company, which owns CareFusion, said, “We are deeply committed to providing equal employment opportunities and a workplace free from discrimination, and as such we are pleased with the decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.”

In April, Mr. Kleber and the AARP Foundation asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case.

“It defies common sense,” Mr. Kleber said, to think Congress “intended to offer greater legal protections to people who have jobs than people looking for jobs” when it passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967.

Other older workers and advocates elsewhere are making the same argument, pushing for a broader interpretation of the law.

In a federal court in California, a class-action lawsuit against the global accounting firm PwC that claims “substantial evidence of age disparities in hiring” was certified in April. The company noted on its career website and in reports that the average age of its 220,000-member work force was 27, and that 80 percent of the staff members were millennials (born after 1981).

PwC responded that the company’s “hiring practices are merit-based and have nothing to do with age.” It added, “The plaintiffs’ accusations are false, and we will prove that in court.”

#Age Discrimination

[dorothydelgadillo]

4 Reasons Why Older People Should Make a Career Change

People interested in changing up their professional lives are often given pause by one factor: if they’re too old to make a career change. Whether people are in their 20’s, 40’s, 60’s, or beyond, there’s a lot of angst around the idea of it being “too late” to make a change. But the simple fact is that it’s never too late—if you’re alive, you’ve got time and a chance to transition your career into work that better supports you financially, satisfies you creatively, fits into your life schedule-wise, or whatever your specific needs may be.

However, if you’re 40 or older it’s easy to think this doesn’t apply to you. As someone who changed careers at the age of 40 myself, I can tell you that mid-life career change is not only possible, it’s actually an ideal time to make that change. In order to give you a clear picture of why, I spoke with other professionals who made career changes later in life and broke down the key reasons why older people are uniquely positioned to do so.

Career Change Can Be a Vehicle for Mid-Life Flexibility

Younger workers are either just starting out in their career path or establishing themselves in their career field, and so it’s natural for people in their 20’s or 30’s to be fully immersed in work. However, things can start to change by age 40 and beyond. For those of us older adults who are looking at middle age, we often find ourselves facing a different set of responsibilities and personal needs. Whether we have kids that we’re caring for, our own aging parents who need help, or we’re simply so settled into our familiar work routine that we’re craving new challenges and ways to contribute to the world, many older workers are in a time of shifting focus and increased responsibilities.

Of course, there are only so many hours in a day, and if most of those hours are spent commuting to an office job, working at that job, and schlepping back home, there isn’t much time left to do anything else. This a challenge for anyone who works in a physical workplace, but it’s particularly limiting when you’re an older adult juggling the needs of so many different people. The good news is, work doesn’t have to be a limitation. One of the most ideal kinds of career transition for older workers is one that involves flexible work—it’s precisely that need for flexibility that turns middle age into a perfect time for making a career change. But what exactly does a flexible career look like, and how can you get there?

Flexible jobs range across a number of categories, with the amount of positions considered “flexible” continuing to grow in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2017 more than 16 percent of U.S. workers participated in flexible contract work as their primary job, which was a 56 percent increase over the previous 10 years. These jobs can vary from high paying part-time work as dental hygienists, registered nurses, and librarians, to freelance roles, many of which can be done remotely from your home or personal office. These freelance and remote positions include jobs like front end website developers, digital marketers, and copywriters. Of course, one of the hurdles to mid-life career change is the time it might take to learn the skills or get the credentials necessary for career reinvention—changing careers to something with a more flexible schedule sounds great, but not necessarily if a successful career change takes years of retraining.

While some new careers do require credentials like a bachelor’s degree in a subject you don’t have (and don’t necessarily want to spend the time picking up), there are plenty of flexible options whose skills can be learned in a matter of months or less. Getting versed in the basics of front end web development, for instance, can be completed in months, and HTML (one of the most fundamental web development skills) is learnable in weeks. With these timeframes in mind, it’s clear how artificial many constraints keeping people stuck in their current job really are. With the BLS citing median web developer pay at $67,990 a year, you can see that a minimal investment in time and training can pay dividends in a robust career that can be executed from your own home, adding precious time back to your schedule to care for your family, volunteer in a community garden, or write the novel you’ve been meaning to get to since you were in your 20’s.

It’s also worth noting that career change doesn’t always require a complete change of industry. Finding ways to work for yourself in an industry you’re already familiar with can be another gateway to flexibility and work-life balance (and one that comes with the bonus of transferable skills). Nicol Stolar-Peterson is a child custody evaluator and expert witness who jumped to her current role around the age of 40, after spending 11 and a half years working for Child Protective Services. Stolar-Peterson says that her former employer had the option to move her between offices within 50 miles of her home at will—which they did. “Two hours a day in a car and leaving my children to be raised in daycare was horrible,” Stolar-Peterson says. “Ironically, I was at an agency for child protection but I wasn’t set up to support my own family schedule and time.”

Stolar-Peterson eventually used the skills and experience she had to enter private practice, and now has the flexibility of being her own boss—something that not only allows her to spend more time with her own children, but also gave her space to develop a sideline career selling skincare products. “It’s something I do because it’s fun,” Stolar-Peterson says. “When I’m selling skincare products, no one wants to kill me, it makes people happy, it has nothing to do with child abuse, and it’s residual income—which is great when you come from a pay by the hour type job. It’s also something I wouldn’t have been to able to do before changing careers.”

New Careers Offer New Retirement Solutions

For older adults in our 40’s and beyond, we grew up with the idea that people worked until the age of 65, after which they retired from the workforce. As it turns out, we might have been the last generation raised on that model. Just like the traditional paradigm of the 9-5 office job has shifted in recent years, so have traditional notions of retirement. According to the BLS, in 2014 40 percent of people aged 55 and older were still working or actively looking for work. The BLS adds that this participation rate among older workers is expected to increase—particularly among baby boomers aged 65-74 and older—through 2024. People are working later in life for a number of reasons: longer life expectancy, higher rates of education, changes to Social Security benefits and employee retirement plans, and the need to save more for retirement when it actually comes.

Through both want and need, older adults are working longer than ever before, but that doesn’t mean doing the same job all the way into your golden years. Hand-in-hand with a need for flexibility, the need or desire to extend your working life makes mid-life career change a golden opportunity. Depending on your financial needs or personal desire to stay active, the same kind of jobs that allow flexibility can also give you a platform for working on your own terms without staying on the grind of full-time employment for the rest of your life. Again, the BLS points to self-employment, freelance “gig work”, and part-time work as new career alternatives increasingly occupied by older workers.

Shonda Brock spent eight years in the United States Army, followed by 17 in medical sales before making the jump into running her own home care company at the age of 47. “Around my late 30’s and early 40’s I started to realize I had no vision of a career end-game,” Brock says. “I was doing well, I’d received promotions, but my gut was telling me I wouldn’t be able to retire in medical sales no matter what title or achievement I accomplished. I knew it wouldn’t be enough to secure my future. The industry was too fickle. Eventually I decided the answer was to run my own company.” Once she came to this decision, Brock spent a few years analyzing her professional strengths and weaknesses as well as what the market could bear to generate an income, and eventually landed on home care. “Now, as a CEO, I still worry about profitability and how it will contribute to retirement down the road, but I feel confident that it’s achievable and sustainable,” Brock says. “I feel better about my work overall, too—I enjoy what I do and I love the service I provide. The business is mine, and—most importantly—I have a vision for my future.”

Skill Set and Flexibility Trump Ageism

As much as making a career change fits the needs of older workers, and despite the fact that older people are active in the workforce more than ever before, the BLS points to data that shows ageism is still a real obstacle facing mid-life job seekers. In a study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, researchers found that the callback rate for sample job interviews was lower for older applicants across the board. In summary, from a pool of more 40,000 job applicant profiles, statistical evidence showed that job seekers 64-66 years of age experienced more age discrimination than job seekers aged 49-51, while older women experience more age discrimination in hiring than men do.

So does this suggest staying put at a job you already have as an older worker makes more sense than trying to start over with a new career? Not necessarily. The jobs applied for in the BLS-cited study were administrative assistant jobs for female job seekers, janitorial and security guard jobs for male job seekers, and retail sales positions for both genders. While obviously unfair and backwards, these are jobs where perception of appearance and physical ability are primed for age-related prejudice—which again speaks to the advantage of jobs that rely entirely on a learned skill set and that can be performed flexibly or remotely. Web developer skills, for instance, don’t discriminate. You either know how to code a website or you don’t. And the remote nature of jobs like web development mean that prospective employers may not even meet job seekers face-to-face—which doesn’t excuse ageism on the part of hiring managers, but it does put you in position to outperform expectations a prejudiced hirer might have in a more conventional office setting. Similarly, self employment allows you to rise and fall based on the ideas, skills, and entrepreneurship you to bring to market.

Lisa Wells worked for 20 years as an in-house staff publicist for brands like Reem Acra, Tumi, and Hickey Freeman before transitioning into owning her own consulting business six years ago. While her age never felt like a constraint to her, she started to face age-related challenges to her career around the time she turned 50. “I had been interviewing for a few months for a new staff position and found that I wasn’t getting anywhere,” Wells says. “I can’t help but think my age was the main reason I couldn’t find a new staff position when I started looking.” Some of Wells’ colleagues started to recommend her for consulting projects, which led her to start her own business, and hasn’t looked back. “For the most part, as a consultant, my age isn’t an issue.” Wells says. “I stand behind the work that I do for my clients and the accounts appreciate my hard work.”

Of course, age prejudice and discrimination will persist, but flexible work arrangements like freelance jobs and self employment are key tools for remove those barriers and proof that mid-life career change is not only possible, but beneficial as you move into your next phase of life and work.

Happiness Is a Critical Factor

Often overlooked in conversations on work and career is the notion of happiness—productivity, success, and professionalism are presented as the tenets of work, while happiness is relegated to the rest of your life. But guess what? It’s hard to be productive, successful, or professional without a healthy work-life balance, and general happiness relies on that balance. The BLS cites a National Bureau of Economic Research study that finds a direct correlation between happiness at work and a smaller “weekend effect”—the degree to which employees’ emotions on the weekend affect their experience during the work week. This study reveals that full-time workers receive double the impact from weekend feelings of happiness, anger, enjoyment, and stress than their part-time counterparts. Meanwhile, weekend effects are three times as much for employees in work environments they consider negative than those who report having good social interactions at work.

Studies like these show that work can never be completely walled off from the rest of our lives, and therefore happiness at both work and home are essential to personal wellness. By the time you’ve reached your 40’s and beyond, why go any further selling yourself short? It’s time to find a career that fulfills you financially, professionally, creatively, and emotionally. Making a career change mid-life won’t be without it’s challenges—leaving the security of a boring or negative but stable job for the uncertainty of self employment or a new industry takes courage—but the positive results can be life-changing.

Stolar-Peterson admits that the combination of changing her career and doing so in her 40’s definitely caused her some concern. “I was so worried that people would think I was having a mid-life crisis, or that I’d lose my life and identity as a social worker and I wouldn’t know who I was anymore,” Stolar-Peterson says. “My doubts were like explosions of fear going off in my head, but I decided that my desire to show up for my kids and for myself was larger than my fears. So I did. I had to tell my own head noise that it was okay to succeed. It was okay to make money. It was okay to show my daughters that you can make changes. Ultimately I realized that even by changing my work to something else, I was still me—well actually a smarter and better me.” And now? Stolar-Peterson says she feels so much better about her career and her life: “I love being my own boss. I ‘appreciate’ my workload because I truly earned it myself. I appreciate walking my children into school and getting to know their friends and their parents. I can proudly say, ‘I am a business owner.’ It’s not easy, but it was so worth it and I am so glad that I jumped.”

Whatever specific career change your path might take, the takeaway here is that there’s no time like the present. You’re never too old to change, and—in fact—those of us who have been around the block a few times are actually in a perfect position to make that change happen.

from Web Developers World https://skillcrush.com/2018/05/08/older-people-should-make-a-career-change/