#wanted to do a quick something between two anatomy exercises | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alfredosauce50 · 3 years

Text

The anatomy of the obsessed artist [2p! Italy x reader]

Synopsis: You have the golden opportunity to display your art at a newly opened gallery. Nobody stops to look at your work until an eccentric connoisseur praises it, even asking you if he can buy it. Touched and fascinated by his personality, you agree to meet him over coffee. Now that he’s no stranger, he keeps inviting you over to his lavish estate until he realizes it’s not the art he’s so obsessed with. It’s the artist. Wordcount: 3, 686 The reader is referred to as she/her. “Nihilism represented a crude form of positivism and materialism, a revolt against the established social order; it negated all authority exercised by the state, by the church, or by the family.” - Encyclopedia of Britannica

“It's hideous.” He murmured, his eyes narrowed with contempt. They were a hot magenta hue, quick-moving and critical of everything they fixed on. How much he wished to say he was standing back to admire a masterpiece. Tossing his paintbrush into the kitchen sink with a sigh, he sauntered to the couch and plummeted down on it.

A loud clang was heard, but it never fazed his companion, who barely dodged the trajectory of the brush. “Oh, really?” They snorted. “It looks the same as every other painting you've done.”

He whipped his head to him and glared.

“Like you'd have an eye for these things, Lutz.”

Said man gave a shrug. This was probably the hundredth time they had this conversation, so he could practically predict what Luciano was about to say—and how he would wind up listening unwillingly to his passionate spiels.

“Just listen to me speak for once.”

Lutz scoffed and poured himself a hot cup of coffee. “Here we go again...” He grumbled with a distinct droop to his features.

Rolling his head back to the pristine, white ceiling, Luciano threw his hands up in emphasis. “It's the only damn thing that gives this room some color. I need to do better, Lutz. Otherwise, I'll tear this whole place down!” Even then, his animated movements were minuscule compared to the tall walls that surrounded him.

The other sipped on his mug. “If you're so stuck—” He smacked his lips. “—how about going to the new art gallery downtown? Anything to get you to shut up.” Lutz grinned at that, half-expecting him to launch a few throwing knives his way. But he never did. Instead, he jumped up and extended an index to point at him accusingly.

“You think you're so smart, huh, cazzo? Well, I might just go. Just to prove you wrong.” Grabbing his coat hanging over the couch, he threw it on and marched downstairs. As the echoes of his footsteps faded, he gave one final reckoning. “You can't rush art, dumbass! I'll turn the place upside down, and I still won't find anything worth my time.”

The volume of his thoughts had never been so loud. It was the only thing he heard in this quiet institution during its downtime. Nobody was around, save for him, but that allowed him to ramble to himself--whatever he was staring at, it was everything he had been looking for.

“This was definitely worth my time.” He muttered with a pistol grip on his chin. As he scanned over the canvas to take in the brushstrokes, he shook his head. “I hate to think he said something smart for once.” They were so violent, yet so gentle. A unique balance of nihilism and faith. Reaching up to his dark maroon hair, he dug through it and laughed in awe. “This is magnificent. Bellisima!”

“I hope you mean what you say, sir. That means a lot to me.” He turned to the voice ended up gawking at a woman. As he processed the words, he was at a loss for his own.

“Oddio--you don't mean you painted this, do you, signorina?”

She nodded coyly, much to his delight.

“Mhm. The name on the label is mine.”

At the sound of that, he gleamed and took both her hands into his own. “How much?”

She blinked, unsure of whether she heard him correctly. Was he offering to buy her work? “Sorry?”

“How much do you want for your painting? I'll pay you handsomely. One grand. Ten grand. However much you desire! I just need this in my living room. Whatever you ask for, it's a done deal!”

In your short career, you never imagined capturing someone's attention so passionately with your work. Your initial impression of the man was a rich art collector of some kind--an eccentric enthusiast--and not a connoisseur by any means. He even dressed the part, having adorned himself in a loose, silky blouse with a coat tied around his waist. His fashion was flashy and exuded confidence, though nothing else could have suited his personality.

As you talked to him over a coffee, however, it became clear to you he was much more than that.

“I've never seen somebody use color like that! You must've done lots of practice to get that good, eh?” He mused, watching you light up at his praise. There was no denying the sincerity in his voice, so you couldn't help being drawn to him and his zeal. “I'll be honest with you, bella. I'm not letting you run off before we settle on something.”

He could tell from the way you leaned in so subtly, never once breaking your eye contact as you listened to him. And knowing this did wonders--he slowly found himself drawn to you.

“Thank you, Luciano. I'm really flattered, but I can't just sell it to you. It's part of the gallery now.” You smiled gently, curling your fingers around the cup handle. Even as you sipped on your beverage, your gaze on him never faltered. And before you could catch any disappointment on his part, you waved your hands at him.

“I don't mean anything by it, honestly. I'm glad that you understand what I'm trying to say--like, you could've interpreted it completely differently. I wouldn't be able to stop you, either. But the fact that you didn't...” He followed you attentively with those sharp and mysterious orbs, but you were strangely comfortable under his scrutiny.

“Maybe we have similar minds.”

The man had been studying you as you spoke. While he did, this one, singular thought occurred to him. There was nothing in the world he loved more in the world than being heard.

“Hearing you talk is the same as being listened to,” Luciano admitted with a small laugh. Deep inside, he knew Lutz always listened. Unwillingly, that was. But being heard and understood was another story. “You take the words right out of my mouth, bella. I don't know how you do it, but you have to stop reading my mind. It's invasive.” He darted his eyes over your expression that morphed into dumbfoundedness--which served as a prelude for embarrassment.

So he couldn't help but smile flirtatiously. “Take me out to dinner first. Only then will I let you finish my sentences.”

You furrowed your brows together, but his smile was far too contagious to be staved off. The end result was an endearingly stupid face that was a cross between a frown and a grin. “Does lunch count then, you impossible little man? I mean, it's around noon.”

He shook his head, amused. Luciano expected you to pull away, but it seemed like he bit off more than he could chew. You were a handful. He was never a fan of handfuls or really anything that required his energy, but he'd be damned if this was the last time he saw you.

“But seriously, (F/N). I need your paintings. And it doesn't have to be something you've already painted.” Standing up at that, he neared your side lowered himself to your level. He settled a hand on your shoulder, much to your surprise. But you never tried to pull away. “I want you to paint for me at my place. I'll do whatever it takes. I'll drink my weight in this mediocre coffee if I have to.”

With his intoxicating personality, all he needed was a few more espressos to do the convincing.

“I can tell from your taste that you're pretty nihilistic.” You commented with a hint of disbelief. “But this is just crazy! What do you even do for a living?” All the expensive decor and extravagance of his stupidly large mansion must have costed a fortune! Lifting your head to take in the sheer size and height of his living room, you then shot him an incredulous look. “Well? I'm curious.”

Luciano leaned against the couch and folded his arms. “Oh, you don't want to know, trust me.” He grinned devilishly.

“What, are you in the mafia or something?” You joked.

He craned his head from right to left.

“Eh. Something like that.”

You blinked, not expecting him to be so frank. Then, you laughed sheepishly, suddenly feeling as if you've walked right into a trap. “... Are you serious?” The man sensed your uneasiness and walked over promptly. Before you could react, he held your arm, but it was much too gentle to stir any panic.

“Don't worry. Nobody would go after an artist I hired.” He leaned in to keep you hostage to his piercing eyes. The close proximity only heightened the tension you didn't know existed. What he said next, however, would have you blushing like a bride. “To have a target on your head means you're a liability. So unless we were an item--”

He smiled contently at the sight of your reddening cheeks. “--nothing will happen.”

Fortunately, your mortification was short-lived as you remembered your circumstances. Giving him a light shove, you walked off to his hallway. While your back was turned to him, he bit back a sharp grin, but to no avail. Man, were you feisty.

“Stop being such a womanizer and show me your studio, Luciano.” You mused, pausing in the doorway to glance at him over your shoulder. Was that playfulness he saw in your eyes?

“It isn't very professional.”

He hung his head and threw his hands up. Being scolded and ordered around was his worst pet peeve. But when you did it, he was only more compelled to misbehave.

“Mi dispiace. But I was only kidding. If I was part of the mob, my windows wouldn't be this big. Nor this abundant.” Making his way to your side, he walked with you to the said studio.

“And Luciano is a bit of a mouthful, no? You call me Luci.”

Unbeknownst to the two of you, someone else had entered the kitchen to pour themselves a drink. And boy, were they in for a show.

“You got it, boss. You call the shots.” A voice spoke in a gravely-exaggerated mobster accent.

“You're milking it...”

“I'm just joking, Luci. Let me have this moment.”

“Fine. Maybe I should've kept pretending. That'll get you to be a little more obedient.”

“And where's the fun in that?”

“Hmph.”

Lutz narrowed his eyes once the voices faded into silence. And he thought he hated being called Luci.

A mischievous smirk plastered across his face.

“Looks like somebody's found their inspiration.”

A few hours later, he appeared in the studio with a canned beer in hand. Even in such a lavish estate, no form of entertainment could beat pestering an old friend. Waltzing inside like he owned the place, he grinned toothily at what he saw. You and Luciano were busy working on a painting. But rather than using brushes, you both used your fingers.

“Hey.”

Luciano glanced at him and immediately felt the beginnings of anger simmer inside. “What do you want?”

Lutz laughed breathily. “Heh. No knives today?”

“If you don't get out, there will be!” The other whisper-shouted.

You stopped painting and turned to the newcomer with nothing short of curiosity. “... Hi. Are you Luci's henchman?” The joke was probably long dead, but you couldn't resist. Not when the stranger was built on six feet of pure muscle. “Nice to meet you.”

So this was the mysterious artist who managed to tame the bastard, huh? Lutz flattened his lips thoughtfully. “... In a way.”

“No, he's not. Now, get out. Your presence is ruining the mood... And killing my brain cells.” At the sound of that, you exploded into a burst of hearty laughter. Seeing Luciano push him out and leave colorful handprints on his tank only intensified those laughs. Once he managed to get his henchman out of the room, he whipped his head to you with a flustered glare.

“What's so funny?” He frowned. For one, he was rather taken aback at how he wasn't annoyed at you. At all. If someone like Lutz pushed their luck by teasing him, there would be more than one scar marring that punchable face of his.

“Nothing, nothing. I just thought... Maybe we could ask for his top and sell it. That was definitely a masterpiece.” You sighed, catching him off guard yet again. “It's the best work you've done today...”

The blush on his face deepened. A comment like that should've ticked him off, but he only found himself thoroughly infatuated. But that was preposterous! He was only letting this slide because you weren't that German bastard of a bum. That had to be it. But no matter what you did, he didn't have a single mean bone in his body for you. And he was about to test that theory.

“If you thought that was a masterpiece, I'll make you some more.” Marching over and undoing your apron, he wiped his fingers all over your once crisp white shirt. Looking down with a gasp, you weren't prepared for him to clap your cheeks and leave two brown handprints.

“You bitch!”

In his whole life surrounded by the worst potty-mouths, himself included, he'd never heard somebody cuss with so much sincerity. So the most logical reaction was to return the favor, if not be a little annoyed. But even as you ruined his blouse, which happened to be more expensive than everything in the room, he was cackling hysterically.

By the time you both calmed down, he had settled his chin atop your head and wrapped two arms around your neck. The paint on his face was drying up, but he was in no hurry to wash it off. Giving you a squeeze, he leaned down and pressed his cheek to yours. “You're coming tomorrow, aren't you?”

“Mhm.”

“And the day after that?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Then what about the day after that?”

You faced him and pinched his cheek affectionately, but he never complained. “If I was, what's the point of leaving, hm? I have something on that day, but I'll update you.”

Standing up at that, you felt his arms slide off of your shoulders. Luciano pulled away reluctantly, and as you left his studio, he found himself trailing after you against his own will. As quiet as he was, inside, he was tearing himself apart, torn between asking you to stay in the guest room and driving you home. But in the end, he got in the car.

Once he arrived outside your house, his body acted out unexpectedly when he shot his hand out to grab yours. The sudden contact startled you, though you could only gleam at his paint-smeared face that stifled back a thousand words. “What, do you miss me that much already?” You chuckled, much to his pleasure.

“You're just missing me too less.” He closed his eyes for a satisfied look. When he opened them again, he added this. “I'll pick you up here. Same spot. 9 am. If you don't show up in five minutes, I'll break inside and pull you out of bed.” Only then did he let you go.

“You got it, boss.”

With that said, you waved at him and made your way inside. Once the door clicked shut, he returned his gaze to the dashboard and shook his head with a defeated smile. “Oh my god.”

When he climbed the flight of stairs to appear next to the kitchen, the hiss of an espresso machine was heard. Rolling his head to it absently, he dropped his keys on the island and dug his hands through his sticky hair. Without addressing the blonde, who took an obvious interest in his disheveled appearance, he sauntered to the couch and flopped down on it.

“... Luciano.”

“What do you want?” He muffled his voice into the cushion.

Lutz walked over with a mug in hand and sipped it. Pointing to his own face, he swirled his index in circles. “You have a little something there.” When the other rolled his head to him, so did their colorful face.

The next two days saw steady progress in the project he paid you to do. While the painting moved closer to completion, he cared less and less about the finished product. At the same time, his eagerness for you to come grew exponentially. He could never admit it, but that didn't mean Lutz couldn't see right through him.

A single glance at him working in the studio was more than enough to deduce the conclusion that he was hopelessly head over heels for you. For one, it wasn't right to say he was even working anymore. Instead, he was staring at you, and sometimes, for twenty minutes or more if you were particularly immersed in your art.

This was only confirmed in due time.

Trotting downstairs to the cellar, he discovered that over ten bottles of wine had disappeared. And the culprit promptly made an appearance when he returned to the living room. Luciano was holding an empty bottle when they bumped into each other, the contact on his shoulder causing him to drop it. When it shattered on the marble floor, so did his patience.

“What the fu--watch where you're going, you fucking idiot!” He hissed, giving the other a strong shove back.

Beer fizzed out of the can and splashed onto his white tank. Lutz couldn't care less about ruining his clothes, but wasting beer? He pulled back with a growl. “I could say the same for you. I'm not the stumbling drunk here cuz' I can actually hold my weight.”

Luciano rolled his eyes and inhaled a deep breath.

“You know what, just leave me alone.” He huffed, kicking the shards on the ground. Once he scattered the glass all over the hall, he stormed off to his studio. Letting out a frustrated string of colorful words, he tore through more canvases than he cared to count. Punching a hole in one, then using another as target practice, half of the artwork was completely destroyed by the time Lutz showed up.

“I don't get it! Why am I so angry? Why can't I paint something like this?” Luciano exasperated, gesturing forcefully to the painting you were working on. Then, he marched up to the man and gripped the front of his tank. “Am I just that shit? But that can't be!”

At this point, Lutz was done with arguing.

“... You know what I'm about to say.”

Luciano threw his hands up as they chorused the same line simultaneously. “It looks the same as every other painting you've done--yeah, I know! I didn't really expect you to give me any useful advice. I just wanted you to listen to me.”

“Don't I always listen to you?”

“No--”

“Wasn't it me who suggested for you to go to that art gallery?”

“Yeah, but it's not like--it's not like you knew she was gonna show up! (F/N) being there only happened once in a blue moon. You were just lucky, so don't think you're a genius or anything, ha!”

Lutz scoffed, but his unimpressed expression quickly morphed into a shrewd one. “Accept it, liebling. You're down bad. Down astronomically. Just invite her over, and when she comes, you'll know what I mean. It's not the paintings you're making a fuss over.” He watched Luciano's hair spike up like a cat, then him light up like a Christmas tree. That little man was many things, but an honest person was not one of them.

“You think you're so smart, huh, cazzo?” Luciano pointed at him accusingly. “Well, I might just do it. Just to prove you wrong.”

When he left, Lutz clicked his tongue with raised brows.

“That's what you said last time...”

And invite you over he did. When he spotted a silhouette on the other side of the blurry glass, he sprung up from the couch and swung open the door with great gusto. There you were, as effortlessly charming as he remembered, and a little startled. You never had the chance to knock, nor process his scruffy appearance.

“Luci--hey! You look... A little more tired than I remember.”

Without a shred of hesitation, he grabbed your hand and pulled you to his bedroom. Yet again, his body was acting against his will, but perhaps, this was what he wanted in the first place. He just never admitted it. As he slowly came to terms with it, his eyes widened to dinner plates, and his heart pounded obnoxiously in his chest.

“Hey, what're you--”

He pointed wordlessly to the bed.

You shook your head, unable to figure out what he meant. “What do you want me to do?”

Luciano glowered at you, but it served as a stark contrast to the softness in his voice. “I'll pay you. As much as you want. Just stay there.” Seeing that you had yet to go along with his requests, he marched over to you and laid you down. Before you could object, he threw the blanket over you and tucked you in.

Sliding himself in from the other side, he scooted in and coiled his arms around your stomach. “Now, sleep.”

Breathing out a soft sigh, you rolled to him and brushed his mussy bangs back. “For someone so straightforward, you're not very honest, are you?” Sitting up to unzip your jacket, you proceeded to take your shirt off. When you stripped down, blood rushed to flush his cheeks as he came to realize he was completely love-struck.

“... Holy shit.”

Climbing onto his lap, you laughed over his lips and squeezed his neck. “You're really bad at hiding things. But like you said, I can read your mind.”

Luciano knitted his brows together. Then, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to your mouth. “And it's very invasive. Please stop it.”

“Only if you promise to pay me in the morning.”

“... You're not a prostitute.”

“Oh, but you are one too. We're all whores, if you think about it. We just sell different parts of ourselves.”

“Go to sleep, idiota.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

#hetalia fanfiction #hetalia fanfic #hetalia x reader #x reader #reader insert #xreader #2ptalia #2p! italy x reader #2pitaly #2p italy x reader #2p!italyxreader #2p hetalia #hetalia world series #aph #axis powers hetalia #request #ask answered #alfredosauce50

143 notes · View notes

genderhoax · 3 years

Note

I used to want to be an artist but then i stopped drawing for like 7 years. I want to go back but i'm scared and dont know where to start. So yes, i am interested in those drawing videos can you post them if you dont mind? ^_^

Of course!! I am in the same situation as you actually. I used to draw a lot in middle school (2010-2012) but my depression worsened during high school and in college, I’d only draw as a distraction, never seeking to study or improve. I decided to get back this year, since I decided drawing was the only thing I could see myself doing professionally. I felt very lost, because how do you get back? How do you know what’s your actual, current, art skill? What are your weaknesses? Your strong points?

That’s how I learned to study the fundmentals of art. Because visual art is not a skill. It is a set of skills, if you are very good at anatomy but not really when coming to painting your art is going to look differently than someone who learned anatomy in how to draw manga books but paint like a pro. I am going to divide this post in categories, Also, all the videos I link I also recommend all the channels they are from! My favorites are The Drawing Database, Sycra and Ganev, Sycra and The Drawing Databse have a little of everything and are great at explaining. Ganev is a bit sarcastic but I like the way he teaches. I took some parts of the text of this post from here.

How do I begin? How do you even get back at art? What tips should you use? These are general tips videos, usually nice to draw along. /the fundmentals and how to get started/ /5 tips for better drawing/ /perfect pratice/ /beginner’s guide/ /5 tips for digital art/ /10 tips to improve/ /why your drawings are stiff/ /what level is your art/ /improve your art fast/ /drawing basics/ /how to hold and control your pencil/ /intuitive drawing method/ /iterative drawing/

The Fundamentals: Proportion & Placement Proportion is relationship between one element and another. In the visual arts proportion relates most importantly to the abstract quality of scale and placement. You know how stereotypically an artists puts a pencil to their eye when looking at an object? They’re mesuring the proportion of the object in question and how to represent it corectly in the drawing. /principles of proportion/ /ways to create illusion of space/ /drawing the human figure/ /how to draw proportions playlist/ /how to use proportion in character design/ /basic anatomy and proportions part one/ /part two/ /part three/ /part four/ /proportion basics/

Form & Construction The idea of form is how we see the 3D objects in or world and transform them into 2D in the paper/canvas. It’s understading that eveyrthing is made up of basic forms. /dynamic sketching part one/ /part two/ /how to draw forms/ /structure/ /building form/ /another how to draw forms/ /how to visualize 3D forms/ /form study process/

Perspective & Depth Perspective is knowing that as things move away from the viewer’s eye, things seem to get smaller. Get familiarized with terms like horizon line and vanishing point. This is the basic that must be understood to learn perspective. Here’s a good article about this. /an intro video on the subject/ /step by step tutorial/ /perspective basics part one/ /part two/ /part three/ /part four/ part five /part six/ /another basics video/ /20 perspective lessons/ /eye level tip/ /linear perspective/ /simple form perspective/ /drawing the figure in perspective/

Anatomy Anatomy is something I think it’s one the most crucials things to learn in order to make your drawing look good. Once you understand how joints work you’ll be able to see how bones and muscles move. And this goes for anything with a skeleton. It’s one of those things of you learn the rules before breaking them. I am linking different playlists, since linking different videos on various parts of anatomy would take forever. Just study a body part at time: head, eyes, nose, lips, ears, shoulders, neck, hairline, breats, torso, hands, feet etc. /how to do an anatomy tracing/ /playlist 1 / /draw the head from any angle/ /anatomy for artists/ /draw facial features/ /how to draw and paint/ /playlist 2/ /draw 3/4 head with loomis method/ /playlist 3/ /drawing a head in 3 hours (this one is great to draw along with the artist)/ /how to draw a body/ draw a head with loomis method part 1/ /part 2/ /part 3/ /decipgering bridgman’s anatomy/ /anatomy quick tips/

Gesture Gesture drawing is a method of capturing figures in exaggerated poses, usually drawn quickly. It is important to undersand that the goal of all gesture is to study the figure and see how it moves. I like looking at poses and copying them. Here’s a good article. /how to draw gesture/ /how to draw any pose/ /draw interesting poses/ /a guide on gesture drawing/ /tips for expressive dynamic poses/ /figure drawing tips/

Composition The overall layout of a piece is very important. Artists often consider things like the rule of thirds or the infamous golden ratio. Neither truly defines a composition, but they can both go into your decision making. /composition in art/ /understanding composition/ /10 composition tips/ /beginner’s guide to composition/ /art fundamental: composition/

Value Studying value is very much the study of light and shadow. But there is a technical side of light that you’ll want to pay attention to if you’re going for technical rendering. /guide on rendering/ /seeing light and shadows in daily life/ /10 minutes to a better painting/ /understaing colors and values/ /shading basics/ /ambient occlusion/ /shadow colors/ /tips on how to shade/ /draw shadows on objects and people/ /lighting tutorial/

Color Theory Color theory is understanding which colors go good with eachother, and knowing the pyschology behind it. (what are cool colors? what colors make someone feel comfortable?) It is fundamental in art for you to understand the relationship between colors and what makes them look good. Best color theory books. A comprehensive guide to color theory. /hue value saturation in photoshop/ /color theory for noobs/ /understanding color/ /what you should know about colors/ /warm and cool colors/ /the basic elements/ /choose colors that work/

Traditional Media If you draw in traditional media, all videos above can be used easily. These are just videos for general tips in traditional media, there isn’t many since my focus is digtal ^^’ /watercolor tips/ /draw with colored pencils/ /blending colored pencils/ /4 how to draw lessons/ /Block in colors/ /holding the brush/ /

Digital Media Digital art is how everyone’s been doing art these days. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing with your phone or your computer. I don’t do art on my phone, I know the most used app is mediabang for android and procreate for apple, and I think anyone who is able to do art with their finger is very skilled. If you are like me and prefer doing art on your computer, you probably have your tablet. If not, well you should have. Not having a tablet is not an option if you want to get better at art ^^’ Best tablet for beginners in 2020. Or you can just buy an old used one, if it still works, and you are a beginner, a small intuos is all you need. When talking about softwares, the three big ones I see people using are: Photoshop, Clip Paint Studio and Paint Tool Sai. The best one is CPS, but I find Sai easier to navigate, but CPS is extremely complete and I hope to be able to master it someday. CPS Tutorials. I don’t have much to say about photoshop, people use it mostly because they’ve been using it forever lol I divide my digital painting process in steps: Sketch/Lineart/Color Blocking/Shading/Blending/Color correction. Sketch is the basics, draw your idea. Lineart is to clean your sketch. Color Blocking is to color your drawing one color, so it’s easier to work in it. Shading is to understand where the lighting sources are coming from and apply them. Blending is to blend the colors of your drawing with brushes. Color correction is when I use filters of hue/saturation and others to make the drawing more appealing. These require understadings of the software of your choice which I am not very good at the moment so I can’t give you more tips than that ^^’ Hopefully these videos can help. /perspective grid/ /clean line art/ /coloring process/ /make lineart interesting/ /best brushes for digital painting/ /skin shading tutorial/ /lineart vs painting/ /art in clip studio paint/ /hair tutorial/ /3 tips for improving/ /10 digital art mistakes/ /color block tutorial/ /shading skin/ /from lineart to painting/ /cleaner lineart/ /add texture to your art/ /improve your art with better shadows/ /the importance of brushes/ /use layer modes/ /improve your lines/ /how to blend colors/ /another blending tutorial/ /color blocking/

Exercises It’s no secret that to improve on art, you must pratice. Everyday, even if it’s just a little! A great way to pratice is make use of youtube picture in picture function to draw along in your software of choice. /pratice drawing forms/ /proportion exercises/ /perspective exercises/ /value studies/ /creative drawing exercises/ /simple drawing esercises/

Resources Senshi stocks, a deviantart page full of poses photos. Quick poses, pictures of models, contains nudes. Character design references DesignDoll, create a personalized sketch doll and make it pose.

Phew!!! This took forever to make and is way more than you asked for, but I decided to go all in so I can have a masterpost for me too and for anyone else interested in art. As soon you can understand the fundamentals, you can do your own research and study, youtube is really great for this. I hope this helps, let’s get better at drawing together!!! Ganbarimashou (ง •̀_•́)ง

#anon #askbox #I feel there's a lot more to add but I'm tired I've been working on this sicne yesterday ^^'#Like there's more softwares and resources I could link you I know of that #So when I think of something else I may add to this psot #post #if you feel overwhelmed because this is a lot of info you can start with the beginner section of this psot #and sycra's channel

82 notes · View notes

cannibalcreeps · 4 years

Note

Can I request a Hilliker Brothers x Reader lemon.

Ah some fun Hilliker Brother lovin~ 😏

4275 Word count, 18+ only please

PSA. I will be using ‘female’ anatomy for parts for Reader, but that doesn’t make Reader cisfemale

-----

When being integrated into the Hilliker brothers family, you learned pretty fast that there was no way you could be with only one of the boys, this was a sharing family and oh did they share everything.

They shared food, kills, clothing, weapons and now they shared you.

Saw-Tooth x Reader:

Large, aggressive and demanding, three words that perfectly describe what Saw-Tooth is in both everyday life, killing and fucking, because that’s all he does.

There is no love-making with Saw-Tooth only fucking, sure you get to cling onto him for dear life and maybe press a kiss here and there on his chest and neck, but with how he holds you down and thrusts so roughly into your core you’re better of just using your mouth for screaming out in a string of pleasures.

Sex was anywhere and anytime with Saw-Tooth may it be on the bed, on the floor, in the forest against a tree, if he got his grubby hands on you then that was it for whatever activity you were doing prior, cause this cannibals dick was much more important than cleaning clothes or gutting victims.

It wasn’t hard to tell when Saw-Tooth was in the ‘mood’, unless he just grabbed you by surprise, but most the time the oldest Hilliker would lumber in behind you and place his hands on your hips to give them a squeeze to tell you he was in that ‘mood’ and that was exactly what was happening when you were cleaning one of the axes on the island tabletop.

His presence was so large you felt it before the man’s whole frame was leaning against your back, his hot heavy breathing tickling the hairs on the nape of your neck. If you didn’t respond quick enough, you could say goodbye to your feet on the ground, the first time he ever did this you had been thrown over his shoulder because you took longer than two seconds to accept his advances.

But now you knew better, with a curved smile you placed the weapon down with the cloth and leaned into his stomach and chest, looking up at his scarred-up face and reaching to brush your fingers through his tangled messy goatee. “Hey handsome, looking for a good time?” Was all you needed to say before you got spun around and his large arms were wrapped around your waist, lifting you off the ground to place you on the tabletop.

Your legs were already being spread as whatever clothing you wore was being yanked off you fast, Saw-Tooth was impatient as it was and no pants or underwear was going to stop him from getting to that pussy. His fingers were the first to enter you, his thick digit would curl and push in deep through the heat and wetness, the big man had learned that sticking it in before he got you worked up was not as fun as watching you squirm and wiggle beneath him.

As Saw-Tooth fingered you, he would use his free hand to pull his cock out from his pants and began stroking himself, tilting his head slightly as he watched his finger vanish deeper inside your body, causing you to let out small whimpers and sighs. He’d continue the fingering until you were wet and sleek enough for his liking, slipping his finger out so he could slide his cock in.

Despite the many times he has fucked you, you were always such a tight squeeze for Saw-Tooth, having the thickest cock in his family made sex with him a very rough experience and today was no exception. You dug your nails into his forearms until your fingers started to ache, the man pushing deeper inside you, not stopping until you took him all and his hairy sack pressed against your squishy ass cheeks. Once Saw-Tooth was pleased with being snug inside your wet heat he grabbed onto you leg and hip to begin pulling out and thrusting back in, his breathing loud and wheezy as he watched you arch your body up and open you pretty mouth to let out the most tasteful cry, it made his mouth drool at seeing you so open and vulnerable under his hands, how he could mold you into whatever he pleased and you simply allowed it all because you loved him.

Your body was on fire, the mix of heat and pleasure made the seconds of every thrust and gasp feel like hours. You were never quiet about expressing how Saw-Tooth made you feel, allowing every gasp, moan and cry escape from your lips so the large cannibal could know he was doing an amazing job, though keeping your eyes open was difficult as you tried to concentrate on not falling apart from each jolt of the mans cock slipping back into your body.

“F-Fuck! Saw-Tooth Baby! Yes, Fucking God!” Was what you usually could sputter out from your chokes and groans, the man’s responses were usually grunts and moans of his own to show he was enjoying what he was doing to you, but if you spoke to much, a few fingers in your mouth covered in your wetness was enough to silence your tongue.

The tabletop counter was starting to crack and creak under the weight and movement of the two of you fucking, creating squeaky noises that mixed in with the sounds of your cries and his heavy breathing, as the pace picked up more with Saw-Tooth chasing his high that the table let out a sickening snap as wood splintered and left a large crack in the base of counter, luckily missing your ass and back, the axe you were cleaning with the cloth before now both completely forgotten as they had fallen on the ground ages ago.

This didn’t stop the both of you from going at it, your body was starting to tighten and tremble as you were reaching your orgasm, reaching up to wrap your arms around Saw-Tooth’s neck to hold him close as your body spasmed and came around the mans length, juices dripping down onto the now broken tabletop. When your walls squeezed around him so deliciously, it was the final nudge he needed to cum inside, letting out a heated deep growl as he let himself spill inside every crevice of you, his seed mixing with your own slick. He would hold himself up above you as to not crush you under his weight, taking the time to take in deep breathes and calm his body, it was always an exercise when fucking you and it showed how exhausted you were flopping onto the table and letting out wheezes and groans as the high was slowing seeping away.

You were spent, lazily reaching up to pat his chest as a way to say ‘good job’ which only received a grunt for a reply. The big man stood up and slipped out of you, which let all the juices to slowly ooze out and create a small gooey puddle between your legs, you had no energy to move other than resting your arm over your face and muttering sweet nothings.

Saw-Tooth on the other hand simply ran his palm from you cheek, over your neck, down you chest and stomach before giving your thigh one loud smack, giving you a jolt of surprise and shooting an annoyed stare at the man who only smirked back, zipping himself up and left you to deal with the mess.

One-Eye x Reader:

If you needed a good cuddle or just a welcoming warm hug, One-Eye was your man and oh did he give the warmest of cuddles, also the wettest if he was drooling onto your cheek and neck from the amount of kisses he left on you.

Whenever One-Eye wanted some sweet romantic loving, his usual tactic that you started picking up on was something you found to be extremely cute. Unlike the more forward advances like his two other brothers, this big sweet man would just watch you shyly from afar, slowly making his way over when he felt brave enough until he was standing beside you to reach out and caress your arm, hip or thigh ever so softly.

So when you felt his fingers brush against your hip and heard how heavily he was breathing, you glanced up to his soft face with a sweet smile, reaching up to run your fingers across his scarred cheek. One-Eye leaned into your hand, closing his eye as he felt your palm against his skin, it was enough to make him step closer and tug at your clothes, an indication he wanted you and him to find a more private place.

One-Eye enjoyed the privacy of your alone time, it was easier to not get bullied off of you by either Saw-Tooth or Three-Fingers, especially when he was balls deep inside you, if the both of you were somewhere that neither brothers could find you and him then it was going to be one perfect love making.

And love making it was, when you both had found a nice little alcove in the forest, you had grabbed One-Eye by his button up and gently pulled him down a bit to be closer against you, placing a small kiss against the side of his lips. Your show of affection was rewarded by the cannibal wrapping his large arms around your waist and pressing you against his chest, letting out a string of snorty giggles which made it a bit difficult to keep your little make-out session drool free.

You could feel One-Eyes hands move up to the buttons of your shirt and began to fumble with each button, having difficulty with the lower ones until he began to just tug and pull at your clothing instead to try and get them off. As much as you found it cute to see his big sausage fingers try to handle your clothe so delicately, you had to stop him in case the big boy got upset and accidentally rip your nice shirt, so instead you would unbutton each one yourself and gave a little show by squishing your boobs together as you let the top fall down, giving the man some eye candy wiggle that got him even more excited than before, reaching out to smooth his hands over your exposed skin and cup each breast, giving them a naughty squeeze that caused the both of you to giggle.

You would continue the stripping with the removal of your jeans, kicking them to the side with your top and now shoes, sock and underwear, leaving you bare and exposed for his eye to stare at all of you.

“Alright, mister funny man, it’s your turn” You’d purr, reaching to unbutton his clothing, this being more faster than him doing it himself. Soon enough clothes would start to pile up and you were pressing your naked form up against his, reaching up to wrap your arms around his neck as his arms slipped around your waist, pressing your lips against his with a hum as the both of you swayed together. “You’re such a sweet man” You whispered against his mouth, pressing for more kisses.

One-Eye could only respond back in whines and hums of his own, along with running his fingers delicately down your back. It was always such a tender moment with you, allowing himself to just feel your skin and take in your presence, but all sweet times were cut short as he was starting to get on the ground and pull you down with him.

It was go time now and you had to laugh at how silly the man was being hugging you close and turning the both of you around until you were laying atop of some of your clothing, not the most comfy on all the grass and rocks but with how much kisses and nips One-Eye was placing on your neck and collar you could easily forget the scrapes you will definitely be getting from laying on the forest floor. Usually it was you who would take lead on sexy time with the large cannibal, but for some reason he was not having it, pushing away your advances to touch his cock or have his hand on your boobs, instead he just wanted to suck and lick your skin, pressing kisses down between your breasts, moving down towards your stomach.

Your face started to heat up when his head kept going down south even more feeling yourself become heated and wet at now knowing what this big boy had planned for you. Both his hands gripped onto your two thighs and began spreading your legs apart, licking the bottom of his lip as you let him expose your vagina out to the whole forest.

It felt a little surprising, it was a rare occasion when any of the boys went down on you, you sometimes had blown them off but it was just as rare as them eating you out, they only knew the basic fucking positions and you were not sure when you should start teaching them newer stuff but for now that thought process was being thrown out the window when you felt the flat of his tongue drag across your folds and up to you clit, making a squeak leave from your lips and toes curl. You instinctively wanted to slam your legs together, but One-Eye’s grip kept you from moving an inch as he was going to town munching on your muffin.

His methods were slobbering and wet, clearly not knowing what he was doing at all but when did he ever know what to do, either way it felt like heaven and he was licking all the right corners. You reached down to grip onto his bird nest of a hair and mewled at how his teeth grazed over the sensitive skin. You almost slammed your head back into the ground when he placed his mouth over the top of your clit and ran his tongue back and forth, his saliva oozing down your folds and dripping down onto the forest floor.

Your body couldn’t hold out much longer from the brutal attack from his mouth and tongue, screaming out from the wave of pleasure that webbed through your core towards every part of your senses, legs snapping from One-Eyes grip and squishing his head, making him jolt a little in surprise as you orgasmed against his lips. Like the good boy he was, he continued lapping up the juices until he was satisfied with his work.

Sitting up, he would snug himself neatly between your spread legs, you were a moaning mess at this point, arm over your eyes, breathing heavily as you tried to catch your breath. As you were letting your mind calm down you could feel him moving quite rapidly between your legs, grunting and groaning loudly which made you glance down to see what he was up to and surprised to see the silly man was jerking himself off against your pussy, his mouth gaped and drool dripping down and landing on your skin. You were about to sit up and help him out but One-Eye already let out his hoarse moan and came over your stomach, the cum dripping and rolling down your sides as you stared at his audacity to just masturbate on you.

He slumped and groaned at feeling spent, running his hand up and down your stomach, smearing the cum over your body as though painting a picture “One-Eye! hunny, stoooop!” You protested with a laugh, wrapping your legs around his hips and giving him a shake, both your laughs echoing through the forest.

Three-Fingers x Reader:

The youngest Hilliker, a wild little nutter of a man, who still towered over you despite his smaller frame, was a mix of intense roughness and gentle sweetness when it came to being with him. One minute you could be crawling into his arms for a hug, feeling his deformed large three fingers run through your hair, hearing his heartbeat against his thin chest while receiving sweet kisses on your forehead only to have the next second go past and your suddenly lifted of your feet and being thrown onto a pile of clothes and wrestling the man to prevent him from poking or tickling you, his giggles sharp and loud in your ears, drowning out your screams of protest against his need to torture you with fun and laughter.

When it came to loving though, it was just as random, whilst Saw-Tooth was rough and brutal and One-Eye was sweet and soft, Three-Fingers was both of best worlds and you never really knew what you were going to get at times but eventually you started picking up tell-tale signs.

If he wanted to go buckwild rough on your pussy, the man would creep up on you like a predator stalking prey, he was quiet and you would rarely ever catch him before he wrapped his arms around your waist and carried you away to a spare room or the bed to get fucked stupid on.

But for when he wanted gentle, soft loving, you didn’t have to search to find him.Most the time it happened after a long day of work, you two could be finishing up cleaning up the meat and he would reach over and run his knuckles along you hip and over to your ass cheek before giving it a good ole’ squeeze, a good indication he wanted to have some loving fun after getting the chore done.

The both of you were tired, you were desiring more a nap than an activity but seeing how he was eyeing you and kept moving closer to press his crotch against your ass and hips was a good indicator he wanted to get frisky soon. A small smile curled on your lips as you wiped up your hands and reached out to tug on one of the suspenders of his overalls “You finish up and I’ll wait in bed?” You whispered to him, the two other boys were out in the forest, perimeter checking so the two of you had lots of time to spend alone time together. He would grin at your suggestion and nod, now being a bit more quicker at packing up as you made your way to his specific bed in the corner of the room.

Three-Fingers would sneak looks at you stripping down, peeling off your clothing and throwing them onto the dirty pile, he almost bumped into the corner of the kitchen counter when you slipped your underwear off and exposed your bare ass to him, giving it a bit of a shake was enough encouragement for him to move faster on getting the chore finished.

As you waited for Three-Fingers to finish up you slipped under the covers of his bed and wiggled into the old mattress, stretching out your body and getting comfortable rubbing your face into the pillow with a soft yawn thinking about how that skinny bean better get his ass into bed quick before you just fell asleep from getting comfy. You shut your eyes just to rest them for a bit while listening to the soft clanging and shuffling of whatever the cannibal was doing, you had almost drifted off to sleep when you felt the mattress dip from a foriegn weight and soft lips pressing against your temple, the tell-tale giggle from Three-Fingers making you smile as you lifted up the sheets and let him crawl under to wrap you up in his arms.

The man was butt ass naked just as you were when he pressed up against you, his fingers diligently smoothing themselves along your hips and sides as he was making himself comfortable above you and situated himself between your legs. You wrapped your arms around his neck, watching him look over you body, Three-Fingers was soaking the sight of you in, every part of you was perfection to him, even if you didn’t think so, every divot or scar he could just trace over with a finger, or tongue, forever. His gaze would eventually connected with yours, you stared back into those blue globes and saw more than just a crazed killer of a man, you saw someone who was loving and protective of his family, a hard worker and wonderful fun guy who took no shit from anyone. You tangled your fingers into his messy white hair and pressed your lips against his, your tongue brushing up against his crooked sharp teeth and wrapping with his own.

One of Three-Fingers hands cupped one of your breasts, giving it a tender loving squeeze and running a thumb over the perked nipple, whilst his other, more deformed, hand ran down your stomach and between your legs, the thickest of the three fingers dipping between your folds and over your wet slit, causing a shiver to run through your body. When the finger slipped itself inside you, your arched into Three-Fingers and gasped against his mouth, which amused the mutated cannibal who let out a string of giggles, running his tongue along his teeth as he watched you start to squirm and moan from how his finger slipped back and forth inside you.

When his finger curled against your walls you leaned you head back and groaned, Three-Fingers taking the chance to run his tongue along your exposed throat and began sucking on the skin, leaving large hickeys, which you knew he was going to point out later in the day just to fluster you. “Oh god, don’t stop please!” you moaned out, tugging hard on the man’s wiry white hair, enough to make his eyes roll back and a groan escape from his lips. The pleasure was starting to build up in your stomach, your heavy panting being an indicator to Three-Fingers that you were close, your groans getting louder as you felt the orgasm build up.

Only to be ripped away when the scrawny cannibal slipped his finger out from your pussy, which made you snap your head to look at his smug ratty face and whine “W-What are you doing!?” That only made Three-Fingers cackled as he placed his wet, deformed finger into his mouth and licked up your taste, letting out groans and sighs to let you know he enjoyed your taste, your face going red from the fact he was denying you your orgasm. You gave him a large pout, you almost wanted to just push him off and go find one of the other boys to finish you off. But as though he was reading your mind, the man leaned back to sit up, the sheets that were covering you both being lifted and falling behind him, the cold air tickling against your bare skin, making you shiver. You stared at him confused for a bit, but when he lifted up your legs forcefully you let out a small yelp and gripped the mattress as you legs being tucked above his arms and spread as he moved in closer between them until you felt the head of his cock press against your folds. Tilting his head slightly, his eyes watching how his length slowly began to slip into you, smirking when he heard the groan you let out. When pleased with how deep he was, Three-Fingers began the gentle rocking of his hips and moved inside you, his breathing getting louder and heavier from each movement, drooling at the heat and warmth you provided around his dick.

You groaned at each time his cock slipped in deep, reaching up to run your hands from his chest and down to his stomach, leaning back when his thrust started to pick up a stronger pace. Sucking on your bottom lip, you reached down and began rolling your fingers over your clit, your body tightening from the new pleasure starting to build up inside you. The both of you began to get louder in your moans and cries, enough that it could be heard from outside and scared away the birds in nearby trees though they were not the only ones to hear you both. The bed started to creak as Three-Fingers thrust became rougher and wild, your legs wrapped around his waist and trying to pull him in closer as he fucked you hard.

You leaned you head back and opened your mouth as you let out a cry of pleasure, feeling the wash of euphoria fell from your head and down to your toes, Three-Fingers on reaction was to dig his fingers into your hips, leaving red welts as his nails pierced skin, a guttered cracked cackle left his mouth as he came deep inside you. With you both spent and breathing heavily, Three-Fingers moved to lay beside you, lifting one of your legs to rest on his hip as he kept his cock deep inside your cunt, warm, slick and comfy. You peppered kisses along his neck and pointy chin before letting your head fall onto the pillow as exhaustion finally hit you. Three-Fingers was the first to pass out, having his arms wrapped around you to keep you close and soon enough you followed after.

The door opened only a minute later, both One-Eye and Saw-Tooth having heard both your cries over the forest had got them slightly worried at what was going on, but seeing how you both were passed out asleep with their youngest brother balls deep inside your cum filled body only made them scoff at how loud you two were.

#SCREECHES: I FINALLY FINISHED IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT #i think it's been months #jesus damn that was a while #Hilliker Brother Lemon #Wrong Turn lemon #Wrong Turn x reader lemon #lemony goodness

105 notes · View notes

victimeyez · 4 years

Text

An Exercise in Trust

A short fanfic of Somewhere In the Woods by @knivestothroats , I just recently discovered the series and immediately became obsessed. Will definitely be playing with these two more in the future.

Here’s the link to the original work!

https://knivestothroats.tumblr.com/post/620647367171096576/in-the-woods-somewhere-masterlist

______________________________________________________________

“Do you have a pair of scissors I can use?”

Fletcher looked up from their book with a raised eyebrow. Buck felt small under their gaze, transported for a moment back to being a child asking for permission to go out and play.

“Why, so you can stab me to death?”

“What? No, I want to cut my hair.”

“Oh. Well let me do it, so you don’t fuck it up.”

Buck bit his lip, shifting on his feet.

“Uh...I can do it, I just need to borrow some scissors.”

Fletcher looked unimpressed and met him with a level stare.

“No, I can’t trust you with scissors, you tried to shoot me, remember?”

Buck grimaced, rubbing his wrists instinctively against the memory of hanging from them for countless hours.

“You could...supervise?...” Buck suggested lamely, but Fletcher held fast.

“No scissors, and no fucking up your hair. Kitchen, now.”

Buck hovered by the small kitchen table as Fletcher unlocked one of the secure drawers they had installed sometime after Buck moved in.

When they turned around, holding up long silver scissors and snipping the air with a devious smile, Buck’s stomach gave a little lurch - but Fletcher’s hands found his shoulders and firmly pressed him down into a chair.

“You can relax, you know I’m good with sharp things.”

Buck chuckled weakly, but Fletcher seemed genuinely in good humor. Their hands carded through his hair with surprising tenderness, catching a few snarls and combing them out with their fingers. He could feel nails in his scalp, but instead of hurting him, they teased along the crown of his head pleasantly.

“So, what’ll it be - the usual?”

“Could you cut it short?”

Fletcher hummed behind him.

“How short?”

“Uh…,” Buck reached up, taking a handful of it and tugging lightly, straightening out the hair to a few inches from the scalp.

“...this short?”

Fletcher’s fingers caught his, pinching the hair where Buck wanted it cut.

“Why the drastic change?”

“Just...for comfort, you know.”

Fletcher hummed again, placing a hand back on his shoulder.

“That’s a shame. I like the long look on you.”

Buck swallowed, surprised by the compliment. Sort of...compliment.

“And besides…” Buck could hear Fletcher lean in, until their lips were right beside his ear.

“If I can’t take you by the hair, I’ll just have to take you by the throat.”

Buck shivered at the idea, instinctively ducking his head as if to protect his neck, and Fletcher laughed.

“Maybe just - maybe a few inches off the ends, then.”

Fingers carded through his hair again, pulling the strands back away from his face, and he felt a section lifted.

Snip.

The soft snipping of the scissors fell into a fairly even pattern, and Buck closed his eyes. He used to like getting his hair cut, even if it was just to trim the dead ends. Back before, in his old life, when he could make his own decisions without having to beg. There was something very intimate but soothing about having your hair touched and toyed with and trimmed.

It felt strange to have that done by the same person whose hands had inflicted so much pain.

A sudden, forceful snip beside his ear startled him out of his reverie, and a hand cupped the other side of his head, holding him still.

“Does it make you nervous?”

A finger hooks the hair beside his face, tugging it a little harsher than necessary before tucking it behind his ear. Then something cold presses to the upper shell of his ear and pinches, a pinpoint of pain, and holds him there.

“If I cut off your ears, do you think you would listen better, or worse?”

Buck’s mouth goes dry, and he swallows with a strained click before his tongue nervously darts out to wet his lips. The scissors closed slightly more, and he couldn’t tell if it was cutting into his skin yet or not, but he couldn’t help the whimper that came unbidden at the pain.

“P-please, please don’t, I - I’m trying to-”

A low chuckle cuts him off.

The pressure eases and his hair is tugged free from behind his ear. The sharp sound of each snip doesn’t sound so relaxing anymore. Buck doesn’t close his eyes again, but instead focuses them on tracing the grain in the finished wooden walls of the lodge.

“You could use a shave.” Fletcher murmured, seemingly to themselves.

Buck reached up, touching his face self-consciously. He could feel some shadow growing out, but hardly enough to bother removing before at least tomorrow morning.

“Wait here. Don’t move.”

Fletcher’s presence behind him vanished, and he watched their long shadow depart across the floor.

When they returned, they were holding a towel, a can of shaving cream, and a small black case, and they set it on the table beside Buck. With quick hands they unzipped the case and flipped it open, revealing an old fashioned personal grooming kit. Buck’s eyes were immediately drawn to the shine off of a folded metal knife.

“Head back.”

Fletcher’s hand covered his mouth, pulling his head back by it to expose his throat to them. Buck shivered at the cold drizzle of the shaving cream over his trachea, smoothed and spread a moment later with a soft, bristled brush.

Fletcher seemed intent on focusing on his throat first, and they dropped the brush to the side, the newly freed hand reemerging into Buck’s sight brandishing a gleaming silver straight razor.

Buck immediately moaned in fear at the sight, his body tensing up and hands instinctively reaching for Fletcher’s unyielding grip on him.

Fletcher pressed closer, and Buck could feel the warmth of their body pressed against his back through the slats of the chair. Their arm ensnared his head like a snake, restraining him in a headlock as if preparing to slit his throat. Buck tugged weakly at them and they did not budge.

“Consider this a little exercise in trust. Hands down.”

Buck whimpered, tears welling in his eyes as his blood rushed in his ears. With a flex of their arm, Fletcher pressed on his windpipe, restricting his air and blood flow. He spasmed in his seat as the blade drew lazy circles in the air before drawing out of view, close to his throat.

“F-Fletch-”

“Hands down, Buck, or I’ll tie them down.”

Buck could feel the tip of the razor press right below his chin, playing there. He stiffened, swallowing down a frustrated sob before he dropped his hands, squeezing the sides of the chair seat anxiously instead.

“Good, very good.”

The blade skimmed his skin, carving away the shaving cream with lazy, practiced strokes. Over the cigarette burn that had started to scar over on the side of his throat, more cuts Buck couldn’t even remember sustaining. His skin was pulled taut by his head forced over the back of the chair, throat offered up to them, and he felt unbearably vulnerable under Fletcher’s ministrations. Agonizingly slow, the razor blade was scraped along his trachea, too many times to pretend to still be just a shave. As the knife trailed down, just under his Adam’s apple, it turned, slicing shallowly into his skin. He choked in fear, digging his nails into the bottom of the chair’s seat until his fingertips throbbed urgently.

“Oops.” Fletcher purred, and Buck could hear the indulgent smile in their voice.

The new wound stung fiercely, and he could feel the warm blood ooze out onto his soapy skin. Fletcher caught it with the towel before it dripped below his collar, and the coarse fabric felt like sandpaper against his freshly shaven skin.

“Closest shave of your life, huh Buck?”

Buck made a vague sound of acknowledgment, but it sounded like a whimper even to his ears.

He didn’t feel the razor’s bite again when they shaved his face, but any nerve he might have worked up had been long lost, and he was trembling beneath Fletcher by the time they pulled the blade away, wiping it off on the towel with finesse before returning it to it’s case.

Once he was cleaned up, Fletcher patted his cheek with a warm hand, startling him.

“Good boy, Buck. Go take a look in the mirror.”

He stood from his chair a little shakily but made over to the bathroom, flicking on the light to see himself in the mirror. His hands strayed to his hair, pulling it in front of his shoulders to take a look. The length seemed uniform, with no stray uncut strands hanging below the rest, and his hair looked shinier and healthier with the dry ends clipped away.

He leaned forwards, studying his face. He could barely recognize himself, when was the last time he really looked in a mirror? The scar curling to his cheek was an angry dark red, still painful, and he could see the faint dots of the stitches’ punctures lining both sides. His nose was still healing from it’s split at the bridge, but the swelling had started to go down, and Fletcher had dutifully set it every time they broke it. Yellow bruises still ringed his eyes, fading slowly into his pallid skin. Between the lack of sunlight he got while largely trapped in the lodge and the injuries he sustained, he looked pale and sickly. It seemed trivial after everything to be judging his looks, but he still struggled to swallow the shame that welled inside of him.

To Fletcher’s credit, his face was smoother than it had been since he was a boy, seemingly without a single stray hair left by accident. Clean, methodical, and well executed - Fletcher’s signature, among the other more painful ones that littered his face and body.

When he reemerged, Fletcher had cleared everything away, and was standing with a broom they handed off to Buck when he approached. Without needing the command, he started sweeping up the last hairs Fletcher had cut up from off of the kitchen floor.

“What do you think?”

Buck didn’t look up at them.

“It’s fine.”

He didn’t hear them move, but Fletcher’s boot came down on the broom, halting his sweeping. Buck looked up and met their eyes then. Fletcher didn’t look angry, but was studying them with an expectant look.

Buck’s shoulders sagged. “It looks very nice, thank you.”

Fletcher gave a curt nod, an appeased look on their face, and they walked away, presumably to return to their book.

Buck touched his face absentmindedly, his cheek unexpectedly smooth, and wondered what kind of life Fletcher must have led to become the enigma that held him captive today.

#Somewhere In The Woods #knivestothroats #Somewhere In The Woods fanfic #captive whumpee #threat of restraint #scissors #knives #shaving kink #unhealthy relationships #unbalanced power dynamics #manipulation #sadistic whumper #descriptions of injuries #blood

25 notes · View notes

imagineclaireandjamie · 5 years

Text

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.), Part XXVI (Baile na Coille)

This is the penultimate chapter of HRH, guys. Much love to everyone who has supported me along the way with writing this story. Your support means a ton, and this would not have happened without @notevenjokingfic, @smashing-teacups, and @desperationandgin. xx. K

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.) Part XXVI: Baile na Coille

For the sake of appearances alone, Fraser’s belongings were mainly situated in Baile na Coille. He had not slept a single night under the gabled roof of the two-storyed cottage. In reality, Colonel James Fraser (“the Queen’s Lover” as all of the nation’s newspapers - from veritable rag to legitimate press - had started to call him) had made his summer home within the same four walls as the commonwealth’s oft-maligned royal matriarch.

Beneath her duvet, his long body and his hand drawing one of her thighs between his (“ye canna be close enough as ye sleep”) before resting along the curve of her waist.

At the breakfast table, the serrated edge of his grapefruit spoon slicing through thick-skinned citrus fruits, the spritz of fruity acid hanging in the air as she read letter after letter as her fingers toyed with her earlobe.

And in the griffon-toed tub that steamed the mirrors and tile floors, her careful step as she shed the skin of a silk robe to the floor and climbed into the water with curls piled atop her head. “Coming?” she asked, looking over her shoulder and letting out a slight sigh as she brought a second foot into the tub’s depths. He would nod, shedding his own robe and following her, marveling at the fact that neither had to shuffle their limbs to fit. With a toe carefully tracing the hollow lines that separated Fraser’s abdomen into pockets of muscle, Claire sank further into the bergamot-scented bath water. “Did you know that this is the only place I truly own?”

The massaging attentions of Fraser’s fingers on Claire’s calves paused for a moment. “I hadna ever really thought about what ye own or dinna own, a nighean.”

She hummed, smirking as his eyes fixated on her big toe, which was traveling the sloped line of wiry hair beneath his navel. “Do you know how Baile na Coille came to be?”

“Ye could use some help wi’ the pronunciation,” he commented as he shook his head. His brows furrowed as he added, “And I’ll ask that ye move yer wee feet from that part of my anatomy.”

Ignoring his pronunciation guidance but swiftly relocating her foot to hook behind his waist and draw him closer, she rolled her eyes. “Queen Victoria had a lover. She built the cottage for him, or so the story goes. All manner of lascivious scandal was born in that cottage and paid off before it passed those front gates.”

“So ye’re sayin’ that perhaps someday yer wee stables’ll become a thing of lore, too, then?”

With a well-worn shrug, Claire rose out of the water just enough to reach for the glass of lukewarm champagne resting on the windowsill next to the tub. “Perhaps. I think what happened in London would already have gone to print if it was going to. I trust my staff here, but it is only a matter of time before the Accidental Queen and her Not-So-Accidental Lover are front-page fodder.”

He massaged a knot out of the arch of her foot, and she moaned appreciatively, finishing the last of the fizzy liquid in her flute. “Do ye think they’ll compare me to Queen Victoria’s lovers?”

“Not sure,” she said truthfully, leaning forward as he caught the green neck of the champagne bottle to fill her glass. “It seems an apt comparison–”

“Ye have a much bonnier arse than Queen Victoria, Queen Claire.”

If she hadn’t been utterly fatigued from their day’s worth of galavanting about the property, she would have asked him to declare as much only upon further investigation.

Neither had done much thinking about what life would be like after the declaration, when the Queen’s speech ended and tellies across Britain went dark. While they had steeled themselves against an oncoming storm at the cabin, their arrival to Balmoral and the subsequent days had been quite ordinary, really.

They picnicked alongside a forested area and a stream, surrounded by a meadow of too-sweet butter-yellow flowers. He made her a posey of the flowers as they ate (bundle tied with the green string that had trapped their egg mayo sandwiches in brown paper). She made love to him on their tartan blanket with the bouquet discarded to the side. He wrapped the tartan around them afterward while their steeds grazed just until their hearts stopped pounding. She tapped his shoulder, suggested they should finish exploring the property. He was dressed first and folded their blanket as she hopped about bare-footed, attempting to coax her riding pants back up over her arse with her curly hair in a floating cloud about her. He felt like a fifteen-year-old boy with wanting her again.

They walked hand-in-hand and talked about things. He wanted children, an admission hastily given with his feet catching and his body stumbling forward. Her hand found the small of his back, steadied him. When he asked, “and you?” in his slow, easy way, her response was quick, but just as easy (“of course” she wanted children with him, fingers flexing into the marred flesh just above his beltline).

She told him that she loved Balmoral more than any other place on earth – the smell of the Highlands, the privacy, the accents of the staffers, and the way mist hung heavy even at the warmest part of the day.

“It feels like the cabin here,” she whispered when they finally exited the bath (his lips kissing each of her pruned fingers, hands smoothing the half-soaked curls at her nape before wrapping a pre-warmed robe around her frame).

The real world felt ten thousand miles away at Balmoral, and he traced a thumb across her cheek – a rounded, glowing place after the bath that topped off a day of exercise, sunshine, and sex. His Queen had the lightest smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He stilled his thumb, kissed the dusting of pigmentation. “Yer family cabin ‘tis a wee bit grander than my family cabin.”

She smacked his arm, making a rather serious face before dissolving into a fit of giggles when he blew a raspberry against her throat.

There came a time, after a number of weeks, when summer was giving way to autumn and their return to London was imminent.

Fraser was fitted for a number of suits with Claire sitting across the room on the floor – cross-legged and chewing on the end of a pen as she responded to some letters. Her smattering of freckles had given way to what she called “a decidedly un-royal suntan.” It was unspoken, but he would go public in London. As the leaves crisped with the last gasps of the season and fell to signal an oncoming winter, the nation would see him.

The man the Queen saved. The man the Queen loved.

That night, Fraser made the offhand comment that his fitting had made him realize that her arse was fuller after weeks of decadent food. He called it her summertime arse, and vocalized no small amount of pleasure at the way she’d blushed at the declaration. “I didna realize how well ye’d filled out this summer,” he announced, making a determined, awed kind of face and approaching her to take two handfuls of her backside. “It’s as though ye’ve reached yer natural, full-arsed state, and I couldna be happier about it.”

Had he not been pressed against her (his anatomy an urgent and quite unsophisticated lie detector), she might have taken offense. All societal expectations of a slim queen aside, Jamie Fraser did like her just fine. Feeling brazen, she had lowered her nightgown beneath her breasts. Voice low, she whispered, “Show me.”

Later, when they were stretched out on the duvet, and he had shown her quite fully what he meant, she whispered something that verged on a full-throated laugh: “I love that you can appreciate me at my fattest.” Her skin puckered with goosebumps at the first touch of his hands going around her hips.

“I like ye fat. Fat and juicy as a plump wee hen.”

She purred, winding her arms around his neck. “My summertime hen arse,” she continued, holding onto the moment. “I was thinking I would marry you in the autumn; perhaps we can hang onto it for awhile since you hold it in such high regard. Let it fill out a wedding gown.”

His eyebrows rose, his lower lip migrating between his teeth. “Ye want to marry me?”

“I do, yes. In a military uniform made with today’s measurements.”

“I didna ken that today was a fitting for a wedding suit.”

“Do not be an idiot,” she mumbled, sweeping an errant curl from his forehead. His hair had been cut a little closer than was his norm, but she had made it her strictest instructions that the barber leave enough length that it would still curl. Her voice was light, high on the moment and the enchanting power they held over one another. “It was always part that, and this is a proposal, since you have not bothered to do it.”

“It sounds like an order – marrying ye.” He was joking with her, eyes glittering as his hand cupped her jaw, thumb traveling an unmannered perimeter around her lips.

“Well, do you want to marry me?” There was not even the slightest hint of concern in her voice as she asked the question. It was as if she knew the answer, like it was the one thing that lived freely on his carefully-guarded face. A single syllable.

Before he kissed her, the most elemental groan came from him. Something of ancient stock – needy and base, just truth. “Oh God, yes.”

And then he kissed her in a way he’d never kissed her before. Part of her took flight then as he hitched her thigh up over his hip and leaned into her – a part with steadily-beating gossamer wings that lived beneath her breastbone, that had been carefully hatched under his care those first nights aimlessly wandering together on horseback. A part that he had nurtured somehow despite not knowing it existed in her, but that she had tended to all along, equally unknowing. He took her firmly then, in a way that for a handful of minutes drove any tenderness of their earlier encounter in the meadow away, but was no less saturated with their love for one another.

And when they were finished, dark having fallen and the world outside the cracked window gone silent, they were left without even the grayest, shadowiest hint of amorous intention. Eyelids drooping with mutual pure exhaustion, they laid together, completely bared. It was then that they somehow wound their way around a bend in their relationship.

To talk of loss and family, of longing and fate’s plans for them in a way that they never had. Stripped bare, they peeled back their naked skin to expose something deeper, rawer, redder, rarer.

Fraser told her in a clinical, detached way of his parents’ death. The loss of a son that stole the very life and light from his mother’s eyes, molded her like clay into something his mam had never been before (dry hands pouring cereal into bowls with eyes fixed on the window, like she was awaiting someone to round the bend that would never come).

The slow way his father slipped away – an undiagnosed condition that made his eye droop, his body eventually no longer cooperate in the performance of basic functions, until one day he was gone and cold in his bed in the morning (eyes open and dull-blue in their fixation on something beyond the ceiling, his fingers folded over a knit afghan in prayer).

An economy of words described the prison camp (words he learned in German so he would never have to speak aloud in English). The dampness of the cells, the length of the interrogations, the blood on the snow. The wounds that seeped from cracks in the flesh just above his forehead, the never-ending red stream that caked his eyelashes and made him wonder if one could feel an oncoming death. The smell of men shitting themselves and dried vomit on ragged clothes. The way he had slept face-down for two months after his back had been whipped into ribbons that sent red streaks of infection along his ribcage and over his shoulders. How the second time he’d been flogged was worse, each bit of scar tissue giving way so his muscles met the air, this time the odor of infection choking him when he stripped his camp-issued shirt off.

They laid silent for a long time after that, his hand charting a course over her spine again and again and her fingers tracing the scarred etchings of war in his flesh in a way they never had before.

And then he asked her.

So Claire told Fraser for the first time at any length about her parents and her sister.

Before that moment, there had been the natural snapshots of them in casual conversation (locations on the grounds of Balmoral taking on meaning with reference to them – her father’s study, her mother’s dressing room, her sister’s playroom; meals that reminded her of them – her mother’s favorite chicken, her father’s preferred tea, the buttery biscuits that Anne ate smeared in raspberry preserves; the bottle of perfume on her nightstand that had yellowed with age and no longer smelled sweet, but somehow still reminded her of Julia).

But this was the first graphic retelling of it.

The iciness in her veins – the frost and chill of it sucking the life out of her with each of her mother’s screams. The taste of copper in her mouth, the breaking of her bones and the lifeless feeling of no longer gulping for air, of just waiting with the icy water in her throat and lungs. The burning of vomiting the water again and again, her broken ribs screaming at her to just die now as she rid her body of the contents of the creek. How the burning in her lungs and throat had eventually given away to something more primal, a need to survive.

She said their names.

Henry. Julia. Anne.

Claire breathed in, looking away from Fraser as she explained that she hated herself in the back of the ambulance because she was afraid she was going to die. She did not think of them at first – of Henry, Julia, or Anne. She laid still, shivering as the navy-uniformed men tried to warm her, told her she would be okay. She had not thought of them as she willed herself to live.

Papa. Mum. Oh Christ, Anne.

In the retelling of it, Claire did not cry until Fraser reached for her, touched her forearm, whispered “I’m sae sorry, Sassenach.”

She dissolved over their loss then, feeling it new and blooming beneath her breastbone. Under his touch, she leaned into the sensation for maybe the first time in years, since well before her coronation and well before Lamb had passed. A confession: Claire loved her papa and her mum, of course, but Anne was the one she loved the most, a feeling that made her feel sick and wrong. “It was never supposed to be me, Jamie,” she confessed, closing her eyes as he touched her hair. “Anne, maybe, but never me. We played. Toilet roll sashes and our mum’s shoes. She was always Queen. You and me? We could have been free of all of this… gotten a flat in the city, you would not have to live like this–”

He quieted her, shook her head. “Dinna ever think that the tragedy ye experienced, or yer job, has made me do anything that I didna want to do. Being wi’ ye – however I can be wi’ ye – is perfect. Ye canna pull one thread and have an entire tapestry stay the same. I’m no’ sayin’ that yer parents died for a reason. It was senseless. Ye canna wish away yer position for me. It’s how I found ye, and I’d ‘ave found ye somehow, but as it is now, I’m yers, Claire. It’s as it’ll be forever. Irrevocably. In my entirety. And I intend to marry ye come autumn.”

She reached absently for the heavy, well-formed curl just above his temple and ran her fingertip around its circumference, thoughtful for a moment. “I was never really one for planning a wedding, Fraser. Autumn is beautiful, but there is something about springtime. The daffodils and the lilies. The fat bumble bees and the trees coming back to life.”

“Then springtime it is, a nighean.”

But two weeks later, the Queen would realize that she had not had her courses in two months.

The wedding would not wait until springtime after all.

#Her Royal Highness AU #HRH #jamie x claire #outlander #outlander fanfiction #Part XXVI #the penultimate chapter

463 notes · View notes

moraleewright · 4 years

Note

Hmu with your most shameless rivamika smut...

Dirty, dirty little anon. Here, have a deleted scene from my latest @rivamikaevents submission, Lie From Truth, after the jump. You can read the complete (and clean) story here. Or not. There’s really no context needed when it comes to a 🍋. Let’s see how long this will fly under the Tumblr Smexdetector! radar.

The moon was full that night. A disincentive for Titans, and a beacon for his restless brain. The encounter with the abnormal the other day had been more than humbling—a morbid reminder of just how far he’d fallen. If he’d been but a few moments later…

And then there had been her mouth.

Careful fingers found the place at the corner of his lips where her own had touched. Hardly a kiss. And yet…

Whipping back the covers, Levi swung both legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the stiff ache in his muscles. He dressed quickly, mindful of his hand as he fastened his pants and boots. Perhaps he’d train, work with the blades some more or do a few exercises. He needed movement, something physical to clear his head.

Hange’s faint snores rumbled down the hall as he crept to the stairs. He was midway through the foray, nearly to the door, when an eerie sensation ghosted up his spine and stopped him in his tracks—the feeling of being watched, of two coal eyes burning into his back.

“Can’t sleep?” Her voice was a muted hum, prodding the part of him that longed for sleep.

Levi turned from the door and met her shining gaze in the dark. “Can’t sleep.”

The coal eyes gleamed unblinking, assessing him, assessing the space between them. Steam rose from the cup in her hands to curl about her face. “Neither can I.”

Part of him wanted to linger, to join her at the table and talk about things. Anything, really—the war, their name, his injuries, the kiss that wasn’t a kiss…

Instead, he turned the knob and stepped into the night, leaving the door open behind him. He didn’t know if she’d follow, didn’t really know what he planned on doing, just knew he needed movement.

This time she followed.

It was oddly cool outside, a sign the weather was starting to turn. Bathed in the white glow from the moon, the earth held an eerie stillness. Levi followed a faded fox run as it lead into the woods, aware of Mikasa’s muted tread not too far behind. He felt an odd sort of anticipation, a tingling in his gut and his palms, and he wondered how she would react if he suddenly launched into a spar right then and there in the forest.

“Levi.”

By the distance of her voice, she had stopped. Levi turned, witnessing the ethereal glow of her beneath the moon.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

Mikasa’s mein of bravado faltered and she shifted onto her back foot. The posture wasn’t defensive, merely resigned. “For a lot of things.”

“We all are, brat. Why are you telling me?”

“Because I’m apologizing.” When he didn’t reply, she gave one of her customary sighs and continued. “I nearly got you killed today.”

Levi snorted, hoping the moonlight properly illumined the protracted roll of his eyes. “You really are a brat. Only you would flagellate yourself over walking into a trap.”

“But it was my fault.” Her voice rose, silencing the crickets in the vicinity. “I should never have gone through such an open space where my gear was useless.”

“Brat—“ The words died in his throat when her gaze shot to his mouth, lingered. He inhaled and her lashes fluttered, eyes lifting back to his.

Silence stretched long enough for the crickets to resume their trilling. The pale stretch of Mikasa’s collarbone appeared nearly translucent in the white glow—not for the first time, Levi found it striking how unusual it was to see this part of her anatomy exposed. He wondered if the skin there was as smooth as her lips had been. “Fine, I accept your apology. Stop moping.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He didn’t know why he kissed her, and she seemed just as perplexed as he, mouth rigid against his own. Then she reacted, delivering a few rapid strikes with her fist against his pectoral. They lacked power, more astonished swats than a real attack, but he broke the kiss nonetheless.

A beat passed, two. Mikasa blinked at him with those dark, doe eyes. Then, with the same vengeful hand, she grasped his shirt and hauled him back to her. This kiss was deliberate. The scar across his eye smarted a bit, but he was too content in the slant of her lips across his to care.

Just when he thought they would stop, when the kiss was ending, it started all over again. Levi’s entire body buzzed, trembled. He grasped her waist to steady the shake in his hands. She was so warm against him, firm and soft and receptive.

Then her hand snaked behind his head, nails skimming across his scalp as her fingers wove into his hair and pulled.

A groan escaped Levi’s throat as his head was forced to tilt, and his mouth was overcome with the warm intrusion of Mikasa’s tongue. The action was so exceedingly dominate, so unexpected. It both irritated and galvanized him, and suddenly he was painfully hard.

Any compunction had well and fully left him. His eye no longer hurt—fuck, he felt he could grow those damn fingers back with each button of her shirt he pulled apart. With a growl, he cornered her against one of the towering trees, mouth assaulting her jaw, her neck, lower still.

Mikasa gasped air like she’d just run a mile, writhing and twisting beneath his ministrations. “Your belt,” she panted, seeing to her own with trembling fingers.

The crickets had ceased again, the only sound the desperate rustle of belts and pants. Cold air kissed his exposed flesh, and he pulled her to him eagerly. Leaning her shoulders against the tree, Mikasa hiked a leg around his waist, angling him closer, closer still…

Oh, a goddamned Titan could strike him down right now and that would be okay. That would be the way to go. He’d truly be without regrets then. Levi half gasped, half laughed into Mikasa’s shoulder, willing the remaining cells in his brain to fire back up so he could not blow his load in her then and there.

Mikasa’s foot shot forward to brace against a neighboring tree, the angle bringing him deeper into her and making them both groan. She grasped his shoulder with a sweaty hand and hissed, “fucking move.”

Still waiting for contact from a brain cell, Levi jerked his hips forward at her command, gritting his teeth against the roll of pleasure sourced at his loins. “Fuck.”

Mikasa’s head lolled, mouth parting in a quiet inhale. He found the plush curve of her lips appealing, sensual, and he suddenly imagined every place he’d like to feel them. He witnessed the stunned widening of her eyes when his hand snaked between them, thumb locating the tender apex at her sex. He kissed her again, if only to stifle the little groans and whines he worked from her with that digit. She came surprisingly quick, mouth falling away from his in a silent cry. The tree’s bark bit into his ruined hand as he braced against the wall to chase his own release. He didn’t hold out much longer, indulging once, twice, before withdrawing to spill himself on her thighs.

They stood there for a few moments, panting and sweating in the dark, half leaning on the tree and each other. “Brat,” he rasped, voice barely audible. Her breath fanned quick and hot across his face, eyes wide and searching. He forced his gaze away from her features, forehead coming to rest against the exposed plane of her shoulder. There was a beat, two, and then her lean arms wrapped around his shoulders.

A lone cricket started up again, soon joined by its compatriots. Mikasa began to shiver against him.

#well then #sorry mom #all these thirsty anons #rivamika #anon #request #n #s #f #w #bad mora #levi x mikasa #fanfic #writing

54 notes · View notes

secretgamergirl · 5 years

Text

A Little Fact Checking Primer on Trans People

As a trans woman, I literally can’t go a day without encountering at least a dozen horrible bigots shouting disgusting things directly at me, which I’ve come to accept, but I notice every time it happens there’s this whole crowd of confused people who don’t have that sort of burning hatred for trans people, but do think they raise a couple good points. And people think this because nobody has ever taught them enough basic facts about trans people to recognize the most obvious lies. So let’s work on that a bit.

Trans women are men who wear dresses. - FALSE

This is THE most common lie that gets floated around. Before I even begin to address it, let me just hit you with a few photos of actual trans women to hopefully show just how far off the mark this is.

It should be pretty clear from looking at these photos that these are all plainly women, and as a bonus. I also wouldn’t describe any of these outfits as “a dress.”

So, how is this lie as popular as it is? Well, for a number of reasons I’m going to get into in more detail, it is very rare for the average person to see a trans person and realize that person they are looking at is trans (would you have guessed any of the women above were if I hadn’t said so?) and nearly every time you see a trans person depicted in the media, rather than hire or accurately draw/describe a real trans person, they just take some man and put him in a dress, or take some woman and put her in a suit. Since such portrayals are basically all you ever see when being told you’re looking at a trans person, that’s what you grow up thinking. But, no. Trans women are women, who just look like any other woman, and trans men are men who look like any other man.

Trans women are men who got a bunch of plastic surgery to look like women - FALSE

The photo set used above came from me doing a quick search for trans models, because it’s a lot easier to disprove the “costume” lie if I can show you women wearing clothes skimpy enough to show they aren’t stuffing their bras or concealing big burly hairy arms or anything like that, and I didn’t do any background checks beyond verifying that every woman pictured is in fact trans, so it’s possible some of these women may have had nose jobs or other minor cosmetic surgeries to achieve more idealized faces, but the “bunch of plastic surgery” referred to in this lie refers to some sort of comic book fantasy where you can somehow take someone who looks like Sylvester Stallone or something, bust out a scalpel, and somehow carve away flesh and bone to leave behind some sort of idealized specimen of womanhood like these. That just isn’t how it works. Such surgeries do not exist, and bodies like these women have are all quite attainable without any kind of surgery at all. Just be a woman, eat the right diet get the right sort of exercise and be lucky enough to have a pleasantly symmetrical face, and tada.

I’ve totally seen “before and after” photos of trans women which pretty damn well look like a man and a woman side by side - TRUE

Here’s a truly mind-blowing example from a friend of mine, in fact.

So what’s going on here? Well, the short version is, trans people are people who are actually of one gender, but for some reason, usually a hormone production imbalance or insensitivity, look like another gender until getting that treated.

The effects of this can be pretty damn impressive and dramatic, and some tend to be observable immediately from birth, so what typically happens is our parents attempt to just go off appearances, give us names based on how we look, and do their best to just raise us as that gender, stubbornly ignoring every sign, no matter how obvious the signs that they’re forcing the wrong identity on their child at best, and trying to force us to be what they want in some really messed up ways.

This screws with our heads badly enough that a lot of us go along with it for decades, just being utterly miserable and feeling like fake people for reasons we can’t necessarily articulate. It certainly doesn’t help that society’s overall ignorance about this keeps us from learning all we have to do is take some combination of cheap supplements/blockers for a couple years and everything will just fix itself. Even after hearing that this sort of hormone replacement is possible, and just from off-label usage of extremely well tested and common drugs, normally used for birth control, menopause, and acne treatment, most of us refuse to believe how effective this can be. Which is why I once again have to thank my friend Kiva for permitting me to link that amazing pair of photos showing just how dramatic the effects of fixing this sort of imbalance can be.

Trans people basically walk around in disguise and can make themselves look like men or women at will. - FALSE

I think I already covered this in the first of these, but just to reiterate the point, let me pull another photo off the stack.

Put a woman like this in a man’s suit and you just have what’s clearly a woman in a man’s suit. There’s no weird Cinderella/werewolf thing going on. Trans women look like women (because that’s what we are) all the time. Actually let me do one better. I have a trans woman in a suit right here.

Trans women have penises - SOMETIMES SORT OF TRUE

This is a tricky one to talk about because I try to keep this blog safe for work, and it’s hard to get this across without some sort of visual aid.

Here is a NSFW image in the form of a black and white sketch of human gonadal structure, as far removed and abstracted from looking at someone naked as I can find, but again, hedging my bets, click at your own peril.

You’ll notice, if you click, that this is the same exact structure. So, one of those things that the above-mentioned hormone imbalances tend to do is inflate this structure in women, and shrink it in men, making it appear that most trans women have penises and trans men clitorides (a few other things in that region are affected in similar fashion). This is the main thing that leads to us being miscategorized as babies. And the functionality can even match the size while the hormone issues responsible are untreated.

This too is treatable though. The same hormone replacement leading to Kiva’s shocking before and after photos have a pretty major impact, to the extent that having been on such for years now, if I were to attempt to indulge in self-pleasuring techniques in the fashion a man would, it just plain would not work Structurally, mechanically, texturally, it’s just not on the table. Grabbing a woman’s sex toy and using that accordingly though would work just fine. Now, if I posted a very intimate photo, things would look a bit weird (not manly really, it’s sort of a unique oddity down there), but there’s a surgery that can restructure everything and get it back to the standard factory settings most women have going on, with the exact proper appearance and functionality. It’s expensive, and there’s only like a dozen or two surgeons in the world who perform it (I actually have a full list on my desk somewhere). So some of us can’t do that because we don’t have the money or insurance that will cover it, or surgery is too dangerous, or we can’t reach those couple dozen surgeons, or we can and we’re stuck on waiting lists for years, and some of us don’t care about about standardizing our anatomy enough to want to bother with all that.

The idea that we’re effectively men from the waist down though is a sensationalist exaggeration though, and the notion that those of us who have things corrected have anything “chopped off” is a grotesque lie.

Trans women are fetishists and likely sex offenders - FALSE

I mean, t’s way more common than average for us to be lesbians or bisexual (I think the straight/bi/lesbian ratio is something like 30/40/30), which might qualify as some sort of “sexual deviance” if you’re some weird homophobe from the 1950s or something, but the idea that we get some kind of thrill out of the way we look or the clothes we wear is a total myth. I have a closet full of women’s clothes because I’m a woman. Those are the clothes that fit me best and look good on me. If I tried to put on a pair of men’s jeans or something it’d be really uncomfortable because like most women I carry most of my extra weight on my thighs and butt, and personally I have a good bit of that. If I put a bra on it’s because I need the support and/or don’t want creepy dudes trying to make out the outline of my nipples through my shirt. Nothing particularly sexy about any of that.

And on the predatory front, any stories about trans women being sexually aggressive pretty much just come from hatemongers. This is something they’ve even publicly admitted to. Statistically, trans people are way less likely than anyone else to commit any sort of sex-related criminal offenses, and even in consensual relationships we tend to be real real timid about approaching anyone. A lot of that is because in addition to being orders of magnitude more likely than others to be the VICTIMS of sexual assault, there’s this really horrifying state of affairs where if you aren’t in one of the yellow states, it’s a valid legal defense to murder a trans woman after having sex with her if you decide you aren’t comfortable with that. Or even if you just feel like one of us might be hitting on you.

An overwhelming majority of us just avoid the risk entirely by dating other trans people exclusively.

Trans women have to trick people into dating them - FALSE

This is a basic supply and demand issue really. We are super rare. Depending who you ask, the trans population is somewhere between 1 in 300 people and 1 in 50 people. We tend to look damn good, because years of being mistaken for the wrong gender tends to encourage putting a major effort into presentation to keep it from happening, and again, most of us just hook up with each other because people who decide we’re really exotic and want to hook up have a scary habit of fipping out after the fact (or during, or just before), or have their egos bruised when people bring in the baggage of all the lies covered above an picture them hooking up with men in dresses) and murder us to be sure we don’t tell anyone. And again, like the map above says, the court system buys into us being scary predators enough to give them a pass for that.

So the brave few trans women who put themselves on the market in non-trans dating circles never lack for willing partners.

Men can just self-identify as trans women and barge into women’s restrooms and changing rooms and exploit programs to hire more women - FALSE

Self-identification is a term thrown around in British law regarding trans people in the specific context that trans people are seeking the basic right they have in more enlightened countries to just tell therapists and doctors that they’re trans, and start down the long red-tape filled road towards proper medical treatment and legal recognition, as opposed to going to one specific singular clinic, the only one in the country, and prove that they are trans to the staff thereof. Which in addition to being a decidedly arbitrary barrier. People who aren’t trans don’t have an interest in altering their hormone balance to radically alter their bodies, and even if they did, the effect on their brain chemistry would mess them up severely (meanwhile, one of the most immediate benefits of HRT for trans people is fixing brain chemistry issues that allow us to think more clearly, feel emotions properly, and otherwise end years of feeling like some kind of broken fraudulent zombies, because our brains aren’t getting enough/getting too much of certain chemicals).

It also can’t be stressed enough how this is just the first step of a very long process, with tons of red tape. Here’s the 110 page international manual doctors and lawmakers all over the world follow.for this stuff, when they aren’t adding even more arbitrary hoops on top of this. Before getting that little F on my ID, I had to spend two years “living as a woman” at least a year on HRT, and have multiple medical professionals sign off, who all had their own months or years long requirements to deal with. And that’s in a country where self-identification is the law of the land.

A lot of people also use the term to make disgusting jokes like “I identify as an attack helicopter” or “I identify as black,” in an effort to compare trans people to con artists like Rachel Dolezai or generally paint us as absurd. So, that’s fun.

Trans women completely dominate in sports - FALSE

OK, just pick a sport. Look at the top level competitors and champions in it. None of them are trans. “OK but didn’t I hear about some trans woman running track and just crushing everyone?” No, you didn’t. You’re thinking of Caster Semenya. She isn’t trans. Bigots spread rumors that she is because there’s a long disgusting tradition of racists claiming black women “look like men,” especially black lesbians, and in particular, this one whiny little white supremacist started whining like crazy about how unfair it was that she finished every race behind a bunch of black women, and has been campaigning to have them all kicked out of the sport so she can finish 3rd instead of 6th.

It’s also worth noting that the BS ruling proposed to force Semenya out of her favored event wouldn’t actually affect any trans athletes, as legally qualifying as women already requires us to address hormone balance issues in a way that, if the effects of high testosterone levels weren’t decidedly exaggerated, would put all of us at a severe disadvantage to everyone else in a given sport.

There are actually a good number of trans people involved in various professional sports, none of whom really excel as an additional data point here. The closest thing to an exception is the story of a trans boy on a high school wrestling team who, thanks to poorly thought out rules put in place to preemptively keep trans girls from playing on girls’ teams by ignoring everything but birth certificates, was forced against his will to join the girl’s wrestling team. Something absolutely no one involved, least of all him is happy about.

There are a whole ton of new laws trans women are pushing for that would suddenly mean they were treated as women for purposes of walking into bathrooms and locker rooms and all sorts of other things - FALSE

The existing status quo already has us in such places, as it should, because, again, trans women are women and don’t actually appear to be anything else, and this standard has existed for decades. You’ve been in public restrooms and locker rooms at some point in your life with at least one trans person being present unless you actively avoid ever entering such. You didn’t notice, and there was no reason you should have cared. Because, again, what is there to be upset about exactly?

There’s a scary new trend of diagnosing young children as trans and giving them irreversible surgeries and hormone treatments - FALSE

If you haven’t picked up on it, nobody is proposing any sort of new legislation anywhere to expand the rights of trans people, outside of the aforementoned self-ID thing in England, which is just getting up to speed to where the rest of the world has been for decades.

And again, as previously covered, nobody gets “diagnosed as trans.” Bigots constantly talk up these hypothetical situation where parents who, for some baffling reason, want their children to be trans, take them to specialists for some sort of examination potentially giving them a label as such. Parents like that don’t exist. Specialists like that don’t exist. There’s no trans test. It’s just something you innately know about yourself and have to start twisting arms to get medical help with. And if there were such a test, I’m still not sure how running it on people would be a bad thing. It only makes sense if we’re acknowledging these children really are trans, but want to avoid any sort of official labeling or treatment in the hopes it can somehow be tortured out of them through conversion therapy (which for the record is proven not t work for anything but making those subjected to it suicidal);

Furthermore, we’ve already addressed that radical full body reconstructive surgery is not an actual thing, but even if it were, outside of immediate emergency treatments for failing organs, we generally don’t perform any sort of surgeries on minors. The WPATH standards I linked earlier are pretty clear on all of this as well.

Hormone replacement is also completely off the table for minors. Personally I don’t agree with that, and feel that if a child has worked out that they’re trans before starting puberty, the thing to do would be to start fixing their hormone balance at that age, so they properly develop alongside all their peers, but I’m not out there making a push for it, nor is anyone else I’m aware of.

Instead, the standard we have for such children is to put them on puberty blockers, otherwise typically prescribed for cases of precocious puberty, where children start puberty when they’re like 6 years old and there are potential health risks. These drugs don’t cause any sort of permanent changes. In fact, the entire point is to delay any changes that would otherwise be made by increased hormone levels during puberty, either putting it off until the appropriate age, in the case of the more traditional use, or in the case of trans children, preventing the hormone imbalance rendering them trans in the first place to flood their bodies with the wrong mix, which again, causes really horrible problems with brain chemistry and really undesirable effects like breast/hair growth etc. I lived through it. It was hell. And of course in the hypothetical event that a child was put on puberty blockers until they were 18 who wasn’t trans, the only effect it would have would be them not starting puberty until 18. Really not the end of the world, particularly since no child gets put on such unless they personally request it.

Otherwise the only thing done for trans children is encouraging those around them to use the correct pronouns and not be weird about policing what they wear, so they don’t have to deal with years of abuse, torment, and confusion when they age up to a point to get medical treatment, and get to live a totally normal life, without all their childhood friends having the wrong idea about what gender they were growing up.

Trans people are getting way more common all of the sudden, or only just came into existence recently - FALSE

Trans people have been around literally forever (and this is documented in historical sources should you be curious enough to look), and while, again, different studies disagree on exactly how rare we are, it’s because we’re rare enough that it’s hard to get an accurate count. We make up the same small percentage of the population world wide, with even distribution. We’re not contagious. There’s no “trans gene.” People don’t decide to become trans.

AWARENESS that trans people exist has been on the rise, but that’s just because horrific bigotry towards trans people has been on the rise. And that’s simply because all the people who spent the last couple of decades flipping the hell out over gay marriage have generally conceded defeat on that front, and on the front of keeping gay characters out of the media, preventing gay couples from adopting children, and otherwise keeping gay people out of public life. They felt they needed a new wedge issue to drive down support for LGBT+ people, and figured the total dearth of public awareness about trans people meant they could spread all kinds of scaremongering crap without anyone calling it out as hateful BS, and... yeah they’ve been pretty successful in doing that. Otherwise I’d have had no reason to write up this primer. It also helps that they’ve been so successful in painting a bunch of far-right religious extremists as scholarly left-leaning feminists, so it isn’t as obvious that it’s the same hateful crap coming from the same hateful sources.

But again, BS is what it all is. Hopefully I’ve linked enough reputable sources to make that clear here, and answered at least the bulk of questions you may have had about trans people. There’s one more though.

There are only two genders and the singular they is grammatically incorrect - FALSE

I’ve kept the vast majority of this focused on trans women, because the vast majority of hate and disinformation is focused on women specifically, but not all trans people are women. Trans men also exist. As I did above, I can easily show you a bunch of attractive models who are undeniably men.

I can give you another of those amazing before and after photos too.

And in addition to there being trans men and women, there are people out there who realize that being labeled as boy or a girl when they were wrong was clearly a mistake, but switching to the other label also doesn’t feel right, so they find another option to go with. The English language doesn’t really have any sort of terminology to cover that concept, and for whatever reason, Christian missionaries really did their darnedest to stamp out every culture that has the appropriate language and concepts. Again though, historical records on this go back forever.

Because English sucks for discussing such people, we generally throw them under the catch-all label of “non-binary” (since they don’t fit in with the binary choice of being either a man or a woman, see) and either need to work out new pronouns, or just refer to them as, well, them.

A lot of people who get prickly about this since, well, they’re big ol’ bigots, attempt to rationalize their discomfort with claims that this isn’t grammatically correct, but, it is. The English language has used “they” as a singular pronoun for longer than it’s used “you” as a singular pronoun.

In fact, even the people who raise such objections pretty constantly make use of the very thing they’re complaining about. It is hilariously commonplace for some bigot to get into this big huge speech about how they refuse to use the singular they, get into disparaging a hypothetical person using it, and start rambling about how they were taught to always say ‘he or she’ in such situations, and that they couldn’t possibly adapt, using the word, in that context, about as many times as I just did in this paragraph. It’s so natural nobody ever even realizes they’re doing it unless they’re actively trying to be a jerk about it.

I might edit this if there’s anything big I forgot, but tada. You are now less woefully ignorant about trans people.

#trans #transgender #transphobia #educational resource

55 notes · View notes

rosalind-of-arden · 4 years

Text

Sword and Pen Reread, chapter 13 part 1

It’s Wolfe chapter time! I am sure it comes as no surprise to anyone at all that this is my favorite chapter in the book. Splitting the post because this is looooooong.

In the ephemera, we have some Russia-Archivist collusion. The assassins that killed Murasaki were Russian spies. The Archivist sold weapons to Russia. It’s been just two days since the Archivist lost power. There’s no way he set all of this up so fast. He’s been scheming with Russia and developing secret weapons for some time. How did he get the weapons to Russia, though? Were they hidden somewhere outside Alexandria? Translated out by Vanya Nikolin?

The Russian ambassador is surprised the Archivist never used the new weapons in Alexandria, and a little suspicious. I suspect the Archivist would have done just that if the pack showed up at the gates with an army instead of taking control from within Alexandria.

Wolfe’s discomfort with violence: describes Anit’s forces as “unpleasantly good at killing”, doesn’t want to kill the Elites who surrendered. Here’s some foreshadowing of the stabbing moment. He recognizes that killing the Elites would be easier, but he considers that “a terrible thought.” (Is it just because of circumstances that Wolfe sends the prisoners with Anit? Or is he glad for the opportunity to let someone else do the dirty work?)

But also, Wolfe’s appreciation of skill at violence: he has appreciative comments about the fighting skills demonstrated by the Elites, the criminals, Jess, and Glain.

Glain is not ok: “She looked pale and strained now as the adrenaline departed.” (Coincidence that Wolfe is good at recognizing signs of adrenaline rush wearing off? I think not.)

Dad Wolfe, overestimating his warrior daughter’s abilities: “And if I’d come with just you and Jess-” “We’d all be dead,” she said. At his look, she smiled. “I’m good, Scholar. Nobody’s that good.” “Well, perhaps you’re-” YOU ARE SUCH A DAD, WOLFE.

How much of Wolfe only just recognizing that Jess is dying was because Jess was hiding symptoms well and how much was Wolfe being in denial?

“He’d been afraid of this. Afraid that his obsession, his lack of sensible caution, had finally cost a life. Worse still, the life of someone he cared for.” First of all, you know things are bad when Wolfe admits to feelings. But also, echoes of the conversation between Wolfe and Santi after the training exercise in Paper and Fire, when Santi yelled at Wolfe for being reckless and getting the recruit in Glain’s squad killed. This is an argument those two have been having for a long time - I’d guess it even predates Rome. Recklessness is a flaw Wolfe knows he has, and his self-criticism when he recognizes it is brutal. He’s not giving himself a break for recent traumatic experiences or the extreme pressure of the situation.

“Glain had a soft streak in her. In that she reminded him of himself. Rather strongly.” Wolfe has just admitted to having feelings, y’all. This is a sign of how bad things are. But also: yes, you asshole, we’ve known about that soft side all along. You were fooling no one.

A lot of “boy” in reference to Jess. With Jess so weak, Wolfe is thinking of him as more of a child. It’s bringing out Wolfe’s dad side more. Or, I mean, I’m sure there are sinful things that one might make of this.

“I’ve killed him. The thought struck deep, and it hurt so badly he drew in a startled breath.” Wolfe is having Feelings and I just cannot get enough of it. Uncontrolled, audible to others Feelings.

So what does Wolfe do after showing undeniable emotion? Pile on the praise for Jess’s contribution to the fight and threaten to nail the mask to Jess’s face.

Wolfe and Santi have already worked out pretty much everything that the Archivist tries. They know each other’s thinking well enough that Wolfe is very confident in telling Glain that Santi has already thought of the places she suggests the Archivist might attack. The only things they missed were the Tomb of Heron and Archivist’s ability to get assassins and himself into the Serapeum.

Wolfe’s struggle to think of where the Archivist might go next is another sign that he isn’t at his best.

Wolfe: I am very polite and totally not reading other people’s Codex messages except that I kind of accidentally skimmed it and got the important bits.

High Garda and smugglers both pay and care for the families of people killed in battle.

“There was a certain chilly certainty to that, and Wolfe felt it down his spine. He made his tone especially bitter when he said, ‘Enough chat, children.’“ Wolfe: *has a feeling* Wolfe: *acts like an asshole to cover it up* You are fooling no one, Wolfe.

Wolfe has a soft spot for Anit. First he gives her a lion in Ash and Quill, now he’s offering her two or three favors as long as those favors aren’t books from the Archives. Wolfe’s not just a dad, he’s the dad who makes sure that his kids’ friends are all taken care of, too.

Wolfe threatens to have Jess strapped down to a hospital bed. Wolfe worries because Jess doesn’t argue with that. He knows how much Jess is like him.

Wolfe seems to intuitively grasp that the sphinx is being controlled. He feels the Archivist’s presence in it when it comes back. He doesn’t seem to know about the magic mirrors. Is he sensing something with his limited Obscurist talent that he isn’t consciously aware of?

Archivist’s first name, which Wolfe “hadn’t used in ages”, is Theo. This is the only use of his name in the entire fucking series. Short for something? Theodore (Greek origin, meaning “divine gift”, which I’m sure the bastard thinks he is) comes to mind first, but a quick browse through a couple baby name sites shows that there are a lot of other variants. Notably, I do not see any Russian versions of the name, so we can probably rule out the possibility that he’s so cozy with the Russians because he’s Russian himself.

But it’s also such an awesome moment for Wolfe to get to call the Archivist by his first name. Wolfe has been putting up with people in power calling him “Christopher” without permission, now he gets to turn the tables. It’s even more insulting to the Archivist, and Wolfe knows it.

Santi made sure Wolfe wore armor. This is good protectiveness: not controlling Wolfe’s actions, but urging him to take reasonable safety precautions.

“he felt a sharp twinge in his shoulder that warned him he was neither as athletic nor as limber as he’d once been” A sign of age here, yes, and a potential long-term symptom from torture, but I’m also seeing this as a sign of how Wolfe’s life has changed in recent years. Even just the events of the books would take a toll. Then along with the obviously devastating physical effects of his imprisonment in Rome and the effects of PTSD, there was Santi keeping him “locked up” for 6 months between Ink and Bone and Paper and Fire. How many of his normal activities weren’t safe/permitted for him in the time between Rome and his teaching assignment? The kids see Wolfe as impressively athletic for a Scholar, but this line suggests that he used to be even more so.

Glain says she can’t use Greek fire. This means that Glain has Greek fire. Did the promotion come with Greek fire carrying privileges?

Wolfe, with his arm in a sphinx’s mouth, has to resist the urge to respond to Jess with a lengthy, snarky answer.

Another addition to Wolfe’s knowledge: anatomy. He’s very aware of what arteries the sphinx could claw open.

“Stay alive for Nic, if not for yourself.” Another little hint that Wolfe isn’t entirely ok. Echoes of his statement in Ash and Quill that he stays alive for Nic even though he has suicidal thoughts.

“Dying in a graveyard seemed like the most ignominious end of end of them all. He wasn’t having it.” First, even in his own thoughts, Wolfe backs off from emotional intensity with sarcasm. Second, Wolfe-Dario parallel here, with Dario later complaining about not wanting to die like a commoner.

For all his “I’m not that athletic” thinking, Wolfe is... pretty fucking athletic here. He’s worn himself out, though. He has to catch his breath while the automata are fighting, and he can only run part of the way back. Once the adrenaline wears off, he’s walking.

Wolfe has a nasty bruise from the sphinx bite. @thegreatlibraryfangirl, how does that play with your injured wrist headcanons? Any chance this injury is worse than Wolfe thinks it is?

#the great library #sword and pen reread #sword and pen spoilers #long post

1 note · View note

tmarie82 · 5 years

Text

Snatched

Pairing: Dr. Bryce Lahela x MC (Dr. Blake Reyes)

Book: Open Heart

Word Count: ~3,200

Rating: PG-13

Author’s Note: There really is no good excuse for this completely gratuitous and self-indulgent fic. I worked all weekend and needed to write something ‘easy’ and fun, and what’s more fun than a sweaty, half-naked Bryce Lahela?

I’ve long been convinced that our favorite scalpel jockey maintains his stellar physique with a strict CrossFit regimen, and since perhaps I myself have spent too much time ogling these fine masculine specimens at my local box (that’s what she said, @lizeboredom 😂), this fic (which turned out much longer than I meant it to) happened. I’m sorry, I had to do it … but I hope the vivid imagery will earn me your forgiveness.

Please let me know if you would like to be added to my tag list. You can find all of my fics in my Masterlist on my homepage.

~~~~~~~~~~

Buzz buzz. Blake stretched her arms over her head, her eyelids fluttering slightly open to find her room had already been infiltrated with mid-morning sunlight. Tucking her head back into the downy softness of her pillow, she allowed the drowsiness to seep in again and threaten to pull her back into its grasp when- Buzz buzz. This time she consciously rolled over, fumbling her hand along her nightstand until she found the thin rectangular electronic culprit guilty of awakening her on this glorious lazy Saturday. Grasping it in her palm she rolled to her back, unlocking the screen of her phone with a press of her thumb before placing it before her face. She blinked a few times as she focused on the screen … My God, did I really sleep until 9:37? After the initial shock wore off she opened her messages to find an unread one from Bryce.

Morning Sunshine 😉 I’m about to start at the comp and should be done by noon. Come by whenever you’re ready and we can grab lunch after.

Smiling at his note, Blake slowly moved to sit up in bed and type out a response. I’m up, I swear! I’ll be there before noon. Can’t wait to see you in action. Good luck xoxo 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

Buzz buzz. Bryce’s response flashed across her screen. 😉

Throwing her legs over to side of the bed, Blake dragged herself out of bed and shuffled towards the bathroom to brush her teeth and get ready. After months of training and weeks of not-so-subtly dropping references in conversation, today was the day of Bryce��s CrossFit competition at his box. Eeugh … Box. Why couldn’t CrossFitters just call their gyms what they were instead of a slightly sexual reference to the female anatomy?

Knowing how hard Bryce had been working, hitting the 5am class every morning and training after class for weeks, Blake was eager to finally witness him doing his thing in person. Every time he had attempted to explain the various Olympic lifts and physical movements she tended to zone out, the terms and lingo so foreign to her that it was like a different language. But seeing how excited he was every time it came up, how his eyes lit up like a little boy on his birthday, she couldn’t help but share in his enthusiasm. Not to mention, the things that his exercise routine had done to his body … nope, she was definitely not complaining about that.

An hour later Blake was showered, dressed, caffeinated and ready to go. Grabbing her purse and her keys on her way, she called out to her roommates as she walked out the door. “Later guys, I’m going to meet Bryce!”

“Have fun with the Crossfit cultists, Blake!” Elijah responded from the couch.

“If you come back with a new pair of booty shorts and knee socks I swear on all that is holy I will disown you.” She met Jackie’s smirking face peering around the corner from the kitchen.

Shaking her head, Blake opened the door to slip out. “Very funny. I’ll be sure to get an extra set for you.” She shot Jackie a wink and ducked out quickly before she caught any more flack from her supposed friends.

~~~

Walking through the front door of Crossfit Edenbrook, Blake found herself in the middle of some kind of ordered chaos. The bass thumped from the speakers hung high in the corners of the ceiling, the deep beat of hip hop music resonating through the airwaves. People lined the massive warehouse-style room, situated under the open air metal rafters atop large wooden boxes or sitting directly on the firm black foam floor. The spectators cheered loudly from their locations surrounding the competition floor in the middle of the room, taped off and divided into lanes for each competitor. Amidst the noise and the crowd, Blake couldn’t help but feel like she had just walked onto the set of Rocky during the final match-off.

Her eyes searched the room, scanning over some of the most physically fit human beings she had ever encountered in her entire life, until she found her own personal Adonis. Woah. Blake’s breath faltered when she locked eyes on Bryce, standing with three other athletes on the opposite side of the cavernous building. His long hair, which he hadn’t had time to get cut over the past month due to his intensive training schedule, was pulled back from his face in a sloppy knot at the crown of his head. Whether he had shown up in a shirt or not was a complete non-issue as she raked her eyes across his defined shoulders and chest and down over the ribbed muscles in his abdomen, his bare olive skin glistening under the bright lights with a thin sheen of sweat. Even the various accessories he was sporting gave him a little something extra in the sex appeal department, the knee sleeves hugging his toned calves and the fabric wrist wraps accenting the veiny curvature of his forearms. Damn … maybe I should have been more supportive of his training sooner.

Bryce must have felt the heat of her stare, instinctively turning his head in her direction to meet her eyes. He flashed her a wide grin, and Blake tried to stifle the blush in her cheeks as he maneuvered his way through the crowd to meet her. As he approached, she was pleasantly surprised to see that he looked even better the closer he got, the rosiness of his cheeks and excited twinkle in his eyes causing her stomach to do somersaults.

“Hey you.” He murmured as he pressed a quick kiss to her cheek, the dampness of sweat apparent when his skin grazed against hers. Despite keeping her at arms length, Blake could smell the sweet tang of sweat tinged with a musky masculine smell as he brushed his lips across her skin.

She smiled in return, her eyes flitting about the room with uncertainty. “So, this is your box?” She tried to suppress the laugh bubbling in the back of her throat, but was betrayed by mischievous look in her dark eyes that Bryce had come to recognize.

“Laugh all you want, but this place is so much more than a gym, yet without all the pretenses. The term ‘box’ just makes sense.” He stopped as he saw the amusement in Blake’s face while she bit her tongue, trying not to make any further sarcastic remarks. He rolled his eyes, placing his palm against the small of her back and leading her in the direction where he’d been standing. “Come on, I’m about to do my last wave. You can stand over here and watch.”

Blake allowed herself to be lead around the floor to the spot where Bryce had been before, occasionally looking up to glance at the athletes currently competing in the middle of the room. They seemed to be alternating between three exercises, first dropping to the floor and then jumping back up before hopping over a large weight on the floor. After so many times of these two motions, the athlete would grip the weight in both hands and essentially pull it from the ground to their hips to overhead in one swift movement. Then they’d drop it to the ground, grip it in both hands and do it again … over and over until it was time to go back to the floor jumpy move again. “Um, is that what you’re going to be doing?” She asked as they arrived at their destination, pointing a finger towards the competitors.

“Yeah, ascending reps of burpee bar jump-overs and snatches.” Bryce explained matter-of-factly.

Blake snorted audibly at his explanation, raising an eyebrow at him sardonically. “Excuse me, did you say ‘snatch’ without laughing, Bryce Lahela?”

Bryce merely shook his head, struggling to keep a straight face as he sighed with exasperation. “Mind out of the gutter, Reyes.” He poked her in the side playfully, then gestured towards the competitors. “A snatch is an Olympic weightlifting move where you pull the barbell from the floor all the way over your head and catch it in a squatting position. And yes, they should have picked a better name.”

“See, I knew your mind had been in the gutter way before mine.” She chuckled before turning her attention back to the athletes. “So how long are you supposed to do this?”

“This one is a 7 minute AMRAP and you-“

“An Amra-what?” Blake interjected, her eyebrows knitted in confusion.

Bryce laughed. “Sorry, I forgot about the lingo. An AMRAP. As many reps as possible. It means you do as much as you can before the time limit, which is 7 minutes in this case.”

She nodded in understanding, surveying the activity again until her eyes focused on the stack of weights lining each bar. “And how much weight is that? It looks heavy.”

“The weight for this one is 135 pounds.”

Despite the certainty in his tone, Blake tilted her head and waited for the joke. And when it didn’t come … “I’m sorry, you are planning to throw 135 pounds over your head repeatedly by choice? That’s how much I weigh!” Her eyes bugged out of her head.

Forgetting the sweat still lingering on his skin, Bryce hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her tight. He nuzzled his face against her neck, his voice gruff in her ear. “And if you remember, I was throwing you around in your room the other night quite easily.” Blake shivered at the memory, the feel of his fingers digging into her flesh as they defiled every surface within her bedroom just three nights ago. He chuckled low under his breath as he pulled back, a cocky smirk on his lips. “It’s all about skill and technique, and you should know that my technique is always exemplary.” He flashed her a wicked wink just as the buzzer sounded, the loud noise reverberating throughout the large room.

The next few minutes were chaotic, and Blake was thankful for the opportunity to steady her breathing after Bryce’s naughty insinuation. The competitors slowly picked themselves up off the floor where they’d collapsed and filed off the main floor to the outer ring of the room, each of them dripping in sweat and breathing heavily. One woman, a petite yet muscular brunette in booty shorts and knee socks with arms that vaguely resembled those of cartoon Popeye’s, caught a glimpse of Bryce and Blake and made her way over to them. “Lahela! Is this your lady friend you keep ditching us for?” She glanced up at Blake and caught her eye, shooting her a warm smile.

Blake thought she saw a tiny flush of pink tinge Bryce’s cheeks before he shifted to conduct introductions. “Hey Teresa, this is Blake. She’s a doctor over at Edenbrook with me. Blake, this is Teresa, another one of the 5am-ers.”

Teresa waved, her sweaty form maintaining a safe distance from the couple. “Sorry, I’d shake your hand but I don’t think you’d want that right now. It’s great to meet you, Blake.”

“It’s good to meet you too, Teresa.” Blake echoed, instantly feeling at ease with her new acquaintance. “So, how was it?” She asked, nodding towards the competition floor. “It looked pretty rough.”

“Ugh, yeah, it really was. Snatches and burpees, two of my least favorite moves. At least it wasn’t thrusters.” She shrugged nonchalantly, taking a swig from her water bottle, not noticing as Blake’s eyes widened at the last word.

Bryce laughed out loud at the look on Blake’s face, patting her on the back reassuringly. “Thrusters are another type of Crossfit movement. I guess I never really realized how bad all these names sounded to an outsider.”

“At least you can recognize it now so I don’t feel so bad.” Blake locked eyes with him, giving him a thankful smile.

Teresa stepped forward, patting Bryce on the shoulder as she brushed past him. “Well good luck out there Lahela, looks like you’re up.” She turned to Blake and gave her a small wave. “Glad to finally meet the woman who tamed this one.” She shoved a embarrassedly groaning Bryce aggressively in the arm. “Take care, Blake!”

“You too, Teresa!” Blake called after her, then turned to face her boyfriend. “Tamed you, huh? If this is tame, I’d hate to see you wild.” She gave him a playful smirk and squeezed his hand, her heart warmed by the way he returned it defenselessly and, for once, had no sarcastic retort. She pulled his arm gently and gestured towards the other competitors filing to their places. “You better get out there. I’ll watch from here.”

Bryce’s lips curled up into a slight grin as he leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss to her lips. “I’ll see you in seven minutes.” As he pulled away, Blake could see the affection sparkling deep within his dark eyes, making her whole body tingle with joy.

“Good luck.” She mouthed as he gently pulled away from her grasp. He held their stare as he took a few steps back before finally turning to move to his spot in the middle of the room.

Blake watched as Bryce settled himself in front of the heavy weighted barbell, shuffling his feet and taking deep breaths as he tightened the wraps around his wrists. The judges took their places before each contender, and shortly thereafter the head coach called out the countdown. Ten, nine, eight … Bryce steadied himself, bending down and gripping the bar with a wide grip, his eyes locked in place before him … four, three, two, ONE!!! He shrugged the barbell up to his hips as he stood upright quickly, then dropped to a squatting position as it soared overhead in one seamless motion. As soon as he stood upright he released the entire 135 pounds to the ground in front of him with a loud clatter, dropping his body to the floor and then hopping back up to smoothly jump over the barbell to the other side. Round one complete. He then bent over to grip the barbell and pulled it up over his head yet again, doing it twice this time before completing two burpees and two jumps.

Blake found herself mesmerized as she watched Bryce proceed, the combination of the clanging barbells, chatter and loud music doing little to distract her as he moved in steady, fluid motions with each rep. After a few rounds she began to pick up on the pattern and the muscles being used, admiring how they tensed and released in rhythmic waves. With each snatch (still a horrible name, but she was catching on at least), the definition in his abs would stiffen as he braced his torso to shrug the weights overhead, his shoulders and forearms tight as he gripped the bar in the air. With each burpee, the crease of his tricep would deepen as he pushed himself up off the floor, tiny drops of sweat trailing down his bare skin as he flew upright. Before each jump he’d crouch down low, the curve of his quads peeking out from underneath his shorts before his thick calves would propel him over the bar. Blake watched the scene over and over again, unsure whether the warmth in her cheeks was due to all the hot, sweaty bodies in the room or the visual foreplay she was witnessing on repeat. Bryce dropped to the floor again, hopping back up and wiping a sweaty tendril of hair from his brow before hopping over the bar, the image stoking something deep in Blake’s belly. Nevermind ... she was positive the heat she was feeling was 100% related to one specific hard body in the building.

Seven minutes flew by, the sound of the buzzer startling Blake from her hormone-induced trance as the time came to an end. She observed as Bryce finally halted his movements at the deafening noise, collapsing to the floor in exhaustion, the sweat-slicked skin of his chest rising and falling rapidly as he panted. When he was finally able to peel himself up off the floor, he sauntered slowly over to where she was standing, catching high fives and fist bumps from his friends along the way.

“Wow, that was incredible!” Blake squealed, throwing her arms around his neck and pulling him tight. She immediately felt the comforting heat of his body pressed against hers, not even minding the dampness of her shirt as his sweat seeped through the layers of fabric.

Bryce chuckled breathlessly, still not quite recovered from his vigorous workout. “I’ll invite you every time if I get this type of enthusiasm.” He squeezed her tight, then pulled away to trail a finger across her cheek. “You can be my own personal cheerleader any day, Reyes.”

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m happy to be your cheerleader every day, Lahela.” She beamed up into his dark eyes, a soft smile upturning the corners of her lips.

“Awww, Reyes, bringing out the cheese …” Despite the playfulness in his tone, Blake recognized the emotion behind his stare. It was an emotion that mirrored her own, a confession not yet spoken out loud but communicated nonetheless. She allowed herself to melt into his touch as he cupped a palm against her cheek, guiding her lips to meet his in a soft kiss.

“Get a room, Lahela!”

“Aw, come on you guys!”

The heckles from the others surrounding them broke them from their blissful embrace, Bryce laughing as some of the guys smacked him on the back or shoved him in the shoulder when the pair separated. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of these jackasses for today!” He called out the last sentence loudly, eliciting a few snickers from his friends again. As he glanced back down at her, he noticed the darkened fabric of sweat stains adorning her t-shirt. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry … I can loan you an extra t-shirt before we go grab lunch … “

“Do you really think I’m going to go out to lunch with you looking like a sweaty mess, Bryce Lahela?” Blake quipped, arching her brow to give him a challenging look. With a dramatic sigh and a shrug she laid out her proposal, feigned innocence in her tone. “I suppose we’ll just have to go back to your place and get you cleaned up in the shower.”

Bryce’s eyes flashed with mischief, one side of his mouth curled up in a crooked grin. “Whatever you think is best, Dr. Reyes. Although I may need some help in there … I’m pretty worn out.” He gave her his best come-hither eyes as they walked to the lockers and he retrieved his stuff, slipping a dry t-shirt on his upper body.

“I guess I shall have to make that sacrifice.” Blake sighed, leaning into his firm body as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “But only if you promise to teach me all about these thrusters …” she stifled a naughty giggle as her voice trailed off.

With a low growl Bryce squeezed her tighter, leaning down to whisper in a husky voice into her hair. “Have I told you how much I love it when you talk dirty?” Blake only smiled proudly, nuzzling in tighter to his side and allowing him to lead them through the crowd towards the exit.

END

~~~~~~~~~~

End Note: What’s amazing to me is that this is the tamer version of this story. I actually held back on all the horribly inappropriate Crossfit references for fear of boring you all. Hit me up if you ever want more 😉

Perma-Tag: @abbiebishops @akrenich @alesana45 @asprankle @bella-ca @blackcatkita @blackwidow2721 @boneandfur @catlady0911 @choicesarehard @choiceslife @choicessa @choiceswreckedme @client-327 @cocomaxley @crookedslimecreatorpasta @darley1101 @debramcg1106 @domainoflostsouls @drakelover78 @drakewalker04 @eileendannie @enmchoices @flowerpowell @gardeningourmet @harlequinash @harrington-sinclaire @hopefulmoonobject @indescribablechoices @indiacater @innerpostmentality @jadedpixiescribbles @lizeboredom @lolablackwrites @marikagia @mfackenthal @mrsnazariowrites @ritachacha @romancehereicome @sawyeroakleyscowboyhat @simplyaiden-blog @snyggflicka @stopforamoment @sweetfluffyunicorn18 @tabithacarlisle @the-everlasting-dream @thequeenofcronuts @walkerismychoice @wickedgypsymoon @writtenbycandy

OH (Bryce) Tags: @aworldoffandoms @divergentofhogwarts @halcyonhaarry @keira1416 @mariamulroney @radlovedreamer @simsvetements @timecanaryy

#bryce lahela #dr. bryce lahela #bryce x mc #open heart #tmarie82 fanfic

105 notes · View notes

pressedonjess · 5 years

Text

act 1 scene 1

In small towns you should be mindful of what you could become known for. If you want to become known for anything at all, that is. It’ll definitely happen if you want it to. It’ll probably happen if you don’t. Did you slip in the rain one time while running for the bus? Congrats, now every time you go outside in the rain, someone is going to yell ‘Watch your step!’ or ‘Hey, be careful now!’ with that annoyingly cheerful smile, maybe the odd finger gun. Of course, small townsfolk can have a selective memory when it comes to what they know about you, or at least what they’ll shout at you in the street. Have a month’s-long torrid affair with the neighbor’s husband, completely wreck two families and end up living in the one motel in town for weeks? They’ll all remember, but the judgemental looks will stop after a year or so has gone by. God forbid you ever fall flat on your ass in public though.

Jesse Preston was a torrid love affair and a slapstick public fall wrapped into one.

Or at least she felt that way. Ever since sophomore year before her first day at a new school, where the kids her age had grown up with one another since pre-k. Penelope Preston had sat her daughter down that Sunday night before school, told her

‘Everyone’s gonna be watching. Doesn’t matter whether you stick with the crowd or cartwheel down the hall. They’re gonna see you either way. But you get to choose what they see.’

Penny Preston was cheesy as hell, but she’d never been one of those stage moms you see on Toddlers and Tiaras or whatever. Penny always encouraged her children to be themselves and to be loud about it. Both of her kids were super queer to some degree, and she had provided them with an environment where there hadn’t been a need for a nerve-wracking ‘coming out’ event. They just were. Mika Preston blamed the regular viewings of Rent for their gayness.

Of course, fifteen-year-old Jesse Preston chose to ‘cartwheel’. Terrified though she may have been, Jesse let her blonde curls go as big as they wanted, stole her brother’s star-shaped pink-tinted sunglasses and her mom’s fur lined coat and strutted down the hall to first period on that Monday morning, channelling her inner Penny Lane from Almost Famous and Maureen from Rent rolled into one. Over the months, drama club followed, as did afterschool art class, volleyball, and marching band. The youngest Preston had many items on the list titled: Things to be Thankful to Mom For. Somewhere near the top would be a thank you for not moving with her two queer kids to one of the many small towns that are outrageously homophobic and racist, because Jess sure did exercise her rights as a young queer woman. Or at least she tried to.

From reasonably early on Jesse knew she was pretty in the conventional sense. She had the blonde hair, blue eyes and legs for days going for her. When she hit sixteen and junior year, her new kid in school novelty had long since worn off but the nervous interactions and glances didn’t stop. Only problem was, she didn’t know what to do with it at first.

She’d always been a smooth talker. Talked her way out of a speeding ticket that one time when her flight touched down late and she didn’t want to miss the town’s new year fireworks display. Schmoozed her way into the leading role of the high school production of The Twelfth Night so she could ‘rehearse’ with the girl playing Olivia. But the moment someone reciprocated – who wasn’t acting opposite her – Jesse Preston the confident wannabe leading lady turned into a blushing stuttering mess. It led to rumors of her liking girls but no one being completely sure, because there’d never been a relationship for the students to see and gayness to quantify. So all the boys bar the extremely confident one or two stayed away, and the girls… everything with the girls happened under bleachers or in dark unused rehearsal rooms.

Ten years later, after burlesque classes, several stage productions under her belt and now a debut album… it was more or less the same deal, only the stakes were different. There had been dates, which sometimes led to making out, one time led to a relationship. Nothing that lasted.

These days Preston had all the outward confidence of a woman who knew what she wanted and was good at getting it. In reality, she was the woman who needed a shot of Dutch courage in most high-stakes social situations, and even before the one thing she was best at and supposed to be most comfortable doing: being on stage. An extrovert bordering on exhibitionist who also happened to have stage fright? Typical.

So Jesse deployed an artistic approach to the armor she wore. An application of richly pigmented pink or red powder along her cheekbones and up toward her temples meant that girls could go ahead and make her blush. The bright colors and statement fashion choices meant that the attention she invited was hers to command. Even in a room full of people, most of which she didn’t know but who knew her Preston could feel the nerves pulling at the base of her spine.

She hadn’t been home for an extended length of time in around a year and a half. She was in the process of making a name for herself, so now that was what the town knew her for. Not little Jesse Preston the new girl, the theater kid, the enthusiastic volleyball player. Now she was a singer. Now there were expectations. All the thirty-somethings in town had heard her voice on Grey’s Anatomy, for shit’s sake. There was no turning back now… but she kind of had.

It was the wedding of some local high school sweethearts. She had been roped in by her friend Benji, one of the groomsmen who’d offered his services as ‘behind the scenes’ wedding photographer and hers as the wedding singer. She’d done her part, finished her set about an hour ago, providing her voice for the first dance. It had been an honour, she supposed. Most people settled for the DJ, they had asked for her to sing ‘their’ song live, the one that meant something to their love and the one they wanted to remember dancing to as a newly married couple for the rest of their lives.

Benji approached her as she leaned back against the bar, almost done with her second cosmopolitan but nowhere near finished her perusal of wedding guests on the dancefloor, or sat at the tables surrounding it.

“Are you gonna?” He reclined on his elbow next to her.

With her finger pressed absently to her chin, Preston angled her head towards him, not peeling her eyes from anything in particular. “Hm? Gonna what?”

Benji stepped in closer to her, she could feel his springy curls push against her cheek as he directed her gaze to where he must have assumed she had been looking already. Following his finger, she immediately found who he meant.

“Subtle.” Preston pushed Benji’s arm back to his side. It was hard to get a good look at the woman from the bar. Every now and again a dancing body would get in the way, or the light would hit her a certain way that would obscure her features. Preston couldn’t tell whether her hair was purple or blue. When the reds of the lights hit her, her hair shone almost metallic grey. It was a wonder Preston hadn’t noticed her first. Alas, Benji had. “Please,” she gestured with her glass, “by all means.”

“Oh, no no, no,” he immediately contradicted her, encouraging her to face him with a tug on her elbow. “Why do you think I called you?”

Preston complied, turning to lean forwards against the bar now, making sure the surface was dry where she folded her arms on the counter. “To hear me sing Sara Bareilles songs?”

“To be my wingman, man,” he corrected. His eyes shifted from Preston to the mystery-colored-hair woman and back. “Reel her in for me.”

Preston scrunched her face in response to the term, “Ew, she’s not a fish,” chancing a look over her shoulder. She couldn’t see what the woman was drinking, or even tell if she was with the people at her table or just occupying a chair. Nevertheless, she waved the bartender down and gestured at her near empty glass for another with a smile.

“Mm,” she conceded around her glass, finishing the last mouthful. “You obviously need the help. As if you don’t owe me enough already, Benjamin.” She smoothed down the fabric of her jumpsuit, making sure the tit-tape was still doing its job in keeping the edges of the low cut ‘V’ in place. The more modest dress she’d donned for the earlier part of the reception had been abandoned the moment she’d finished her set and the party was in full swing. “Alright,” she breathed, “The things I do for you.”

“Wait,” he caught her arm again, reaching up to fix something in her hair. She’d pinned it up since the performance, shoved three of the red roses from the centerpiece of the tables into her hair to make a head wreath. Matched her cheeks. “One of your flowers was coming out. There.”

“Aw,” she patted his cheek, “Might be hope for you yet. I’ll be back,” she gave herself a quick once over in the mirrored back wall of the bar, catching herself between the bottles and glasses. “Get a drink, stay there, look mysterious and aloof, but approachable.”

“You do know aloof literally means unapproachable, right?”

Preston waved him off over her shoulder to begin carefully meandering through the dancefloor towards the woman, expertly keeping her full glass from spilling. Once she was a few paces from her target, Preston glanced about to make sure she wouldn’t be interrupting something already in progress when she made her entrance, but she didn’t much care if she was.

Pulling up an empty chair into the space beside the woman, Preston first sat her glass on the table between them - close enough to the woman that it could be seen as an offering, but still within reach in case she didn’t want it, or in case one of the glasses of varying levels already on the table was hers.

“Hi,” Preston regarded the woman, injecting as much charm into her red-lipped smile as she could muster. Resting her elbow on the table and her chin in the palm of her hand, she inquired “Are you single? Are you single at this wedding? Wow,” She sat up straight, let the hand that was supporting her head fall to the table. “That totally sounded like I’m trying to sell you something. Hi,” she took a breath, offering her hand to the woman as she started over. “I’m Jesse Preston, and this is my attempt to wingman for my friend over at the bar there. I’m usually better at this."

3 notes · View notes

kpopchangedme · 5 years

Text

Starboy II: Out of your League

#TB to your first mistake; the night you met Jaebum and asked him to take you home, way back in September.

Mini-Masterlist M A S T E R L I ST

Protagonists: Im Jaebum & You

Word Count: 3k

Genre: SFW – University!au – Baseball!Au – Romance – *Hook Ups* – *Socially offensive language* – Mini-Series

Lysandre’s note: FRET NOT! IT’S HERE ANON! 💗

You nod along to whatever the man-with-the-man-bun is saying; he’s hot but obnoxious. Feeling the buzz of the alcohol through your veins, you let your eyes survey the crowd of prospects at the welcoming Sport’s Dep party. Makayla and your other friends all disappeared one by one with dates, you wish at least one was still there to coach you on men.

Do and do not.

You’re certain your interlocutor is a definite do not. He’s handsome, but the fact that he’s been pestering you with Rick and Morty references is a major turn off. He’s a Frat boy, the type to start calling his dick pickle Rick as soon as his pants are off and that’d be a huge – or small, let’s be realistic – let down. You take a sip of the beer you brought over, amused by your train of thoughts.

Feeling observed, you search the crowd for familiar faces. That’s when you spot them: three members of the baseball team. They’re standing in a corner of the living room, across the dance floor, in deep conversation. One is named Choi Youngjae, the middle one is a stranger and the last one is Kim Yugyeom. You kind of recognize them since the school’s med clinic you work at has a tight relationship with the teams. Also, they’re always wearing their team’s jacket, probably just to show off and get girls.

It’s quite ironical, since baseball is probably the least sexy sport ever. Still, sportsmen are perfect for a casual one-night stand, perfect for a commitment-phobic like you. This is what you’re out looking for tonight a hook-up. You let your friends convinced you this was a good idea because you needed a quick fix. Now, you just need to choose one of those baseball guys, they’d be perfect since you don’t even want a callback...

You start with studying Yugyeom as a potential; the youngest addition to the team. Totally ignoring the Rick and Morty guy still trying to bore you to bed, you detail the man-boy with an expert gaze; sharp eyes, long legs, strong hands. Not bad, he could do just fine. He is quite handsome up close, you know because you’re his rehabilitation practitioner. He injured his wrist at practice last week. It looks like you’ll have to cover for Dr. Tran at the clinic again this year, but you don’t mind if his patients are as cute as this.

You gave the young player exercises to fortify his wrist and you’re supposed to meet weekly as a medical follow-up for a few months. Realizing this you blush heavily, you aren’t a Doctor though; there isn’t technically anything inappropriate about a kinesiologist relationship with a patient. You hold no real authority over Yugyeom, still, you cringe remembering he’s only twenty-one years old.

You need good sex – a guy more your age would probably be a safer bet.

Moving your evaluating gaze to the two other men next to him, a giggle escapes you. There is something ever so fulfilling in the idea of being the hunter tonight. Your friends were right, you should stop asking yourself too many questions and just go for it. You haven’t had sex in over a year and no mid-twenties commitment-phobic should fear one night stands.

No strings, no questions, no small talk.

Those were Makayla’s rules. Just pure filthy sex.

“Everything a’ight?” The man next to you stops his monologue, startled by your impromptu giggle. Thankfully, a simple nod is enough to start him again and you’re glad to resume your analysis of the jocks at the other side of the room.

The second player to be considered, you only know by name; Choi Youngjae.

He was the cute guy in your Human Visceral Anatomy class last year. He was memorable; he threw up when the class dissected a human dead body. You still remember how he changed colours when the teacher began to cut the hard skin of the torso with the scalpel. People teased him after that, but he didn’t drop out, ranking second-best in the class – after you – at the end of the semester. Right, determination and a certain love of challenge are probably useful qualities in a lover.

That’s it – he’d do – Let’s have meaningless sex, Choi Youngjae. Downing your beer, you fish for a new one in your purse and open it right away.

No strings. No questions. No small talk.

You start to walk towards the baseball trio with fake confidence, heartlessly leaving the Rick and Morty fan hanging in a middle of a sentence.

You can do it, y/n! You can have sex with strangers too… A stranger… Not strangerS. Oh my god, sex with one guy at a time! It’s enough for a first one-night stand experience, right? It’s a proposition between two consenting adults, there’s nothing to be ashamed of... You can do it! Fighting your own anxiety, you continue to walk forward with an almost convincing determination.

Just as you are getting close enough to capture the attention of the players, a petite silhouette appears out of nowhere, wraps her arms around your target’s waist and walks away with him.

Abort mission, girlfriend alert. ABORT.

You stop dead in your tracks but halfway through turning around, Yugyeom calls you out since you’re in the middle of the place and were obviously heading towards them. “Hey! Miss y/n!”

Wincing, you face him with a bright fake smile. “Hiiiii, Yugyeom! Please, call me y/n, just like everyone else.”

“Jaebum, this is y/n, she’s studying Kinesiology, she helps me with my wrist! That’s Jaebum, he’s on the baseball team too.” Obviously.

The young man smiles, vaguely gesturing the man standing next to him – the third one you haven’t taken the time to consider as a potential lover and...

Holy shit.

That guy is drop-dead gorgeous. Way out of your league. Since you spend several seconds staring, he raises an eyebrow, entertained.

“Hi, y/n”, your name rolls off his tongue like he knows you, so wrongly it feels right, “thanks for taking good care of our youngest.” He nods, holding your gaze too intensely.

“Hi-i, it’s nothing – H-How’s the wrist?” Highly intimidated, you turn your attention back to Yuygeom, looking at his hands only to find them wrapped around a red cup. “Are you drinking?” You shake your head, disapproving. “Athletes shouldn’t get drunk!”

The man-boy drops his eyes, blushing at your scolding, but his teammate only bursts out laughing. “Did you actually bring your own beer to a Uni party?” He asks, and you turn to face him, surprised by his playful tone.

Everything about that Jaebum’s face is knifelike; his eyes, nose, chin. You would’ve assumed his personality to be as intimidating as his features. When you don’t answer, he taps the glass of the beer in your right hand to illustrate his point, offering you a dangerously perfect smile. He’s enjoying this random interaction a little too much, as though he’s interested in an actual answer.

Oh my god, is that guy flirting with me?

“Y-yes, it’s safer”, you gulp, mind turning to Jell-o and forgetting all about your sexy plans. You sound so dumb and boring, exposing that a party like this isn’t your crowd at all. You need to change the subject asap. “Anyway guys, you shouldn't drink. Don’t you have a game in two days?”

“Yes, we’re on water actually!” Yugyeom pouts cutely, sorry about it as he shows you what’s in his cup. “Besides, let’s be real, I probably won’t even get to pla–”

“Gyeom?” His teammate cuts him off, leaning against the wall behind him nonchalantly. You’re hyper-conscious his eyes haven’t left your face yet and he doesn’t even look to Yugyeom as he speaks. You feel seen. You’re sure the room wasn’t that warm 2 minutes prior.

“Yes, JB?”

“You said you wanted to dance, go have fun. Remember, the curfew?”

You watch in awe as the younger player agrees and obeys his friend. He promises to see you at his next appointment and says goodbye, disappearing in the crowd in the blink of an eye. Did Jaebum get rid of him to be left alone with you? Is it as easy as this for athletes to get girls? – Oh right, you’re here to hook up too. You study the man in front of you anew while drinking your beer slowly, he probably has meaningless sex very often. He looks way too relaxed about this smooth and flirty leave us alone move.

“So, are you coming to our game on Sunday?” When you shake your head, he lets out a low chuckle and rubs his nape. “All that talk about drinking and you’re not even coming to see me play?”

See him play. You stare, blinking dumbly as he bites his lower lip, hopeful. He is flirting – the way out of your league guy is flirting – Holy shit, no one prepared you for that.

“W-what’s your favourite position?” Shit shit shit, too forward, too raw. Why are you so shitty at this? Why can’t you be normal with guys for once? No wonder your last relationship was forever ago and was so damn messy.

God, you hate yourself. You wish the ground would open and swallow you whole. The baseball player frowns confused as you’re filled with instant regrets and dread. That’s probably not how people insinuate to strangers that they want to have sex with them. Even animals have more complicated mating rituals. You’re about to run away or slap yourself across the face when he answers your horrible pun attempt.

“Favourite? I only have one, clearly, you’re not following our team.”

Before you can feel embarrassed about being called out on that, Jaebum laughs, flashing perfectly white teeth, the sound weirdly endearing. You’re not sure if he didn’t get your appalling sexual innuendo or if he’s mercifully choosing to ignore it.

“I’m the pitcher.”

“Oh! I know about baseball pitchers… T-Throwing and stuff…” He chuckles cutely at your awkwardness and you wash your shame down with another gulp of beer. “I mean, I know from a medical point of view. It’s straining...” You raise your closed fist, not noticing how Jaebum becomes more uncomfortable every time you enumerate common injury with a finger: “An overused arm can often cause a labral tear; rotator cuff injury; shoulder instability; thrower’s elbow; UCL sprai–”

“Okay, stop! I get it.” He stops you, raising both hands to lower yours in short panic. “I’d rather we don’t talk about that... It’s bad luck!”

“S-Sorry...” You falter, watching his hands disappear as soon as you shut up. Shit, you always forget about how superstitious athletes can be.

“It’s fine...” He grins at your guilty expression, trying to ease you. “So, you know about pitching injuries, but nothing about me? I’m deeply hurt.” When he pauses, it’s to stare at you again, gaze heavy, and your cheeks burn even more. You suddenly feel like you should know everything about that guy, like you’re supposed to know him.

“Sorry. Despite my work, I don’t really follow any Uni’ teams.” It’s true, you only knew about their baseball game in two days because your co-worker at the clinic is a fanatic. You’re too busy with your studies and although you wouldn’t say that to Jaebum’s face, there’s virtually no sport quite as boring as baseball to you.

“It’s alright, Gyeom said you’re in kinesiology?” He nods pensively, but you barely hear, lost because you’re gawking at him. Suddenly, you’re remembering you came to this party for one peculiar reason and just thinking about it makes you even more anxious. And that guy...

There’s something freakish about how symmetrical he is, no human should look this perfect. You gulp, either you make a move right now or find another – easier – target already. It isn’t late yet, but you planned on working early at the clinic tomorrow.

“It’s odd, I really thought you were in literature or something from the Art Dep!” Since you still haven’t said anything back, Jaebum fills the growing awkward silence between you two.

His words take you by surprise once more. Litterature, why? Do you look like a bookworm tonight? Surely not, you wore one of Makayla’s outfit. You don’t take upon yourself to ask for his reasons aloud, distracted again, by the way, his pink tongue darts through his parted lips. You must look so damn stupid, you need to say something, anything.

Make a move or move on.

Jaebum speaks again, apparently not appalled by your mutism. “It’s just… I hadn’t seen you on this side of campus before tonight. Except for Baseball, my Minor actually is–”

“Let’s go elsewhere.” You cut him off, finally opening your mouth. You need to act before you change your mind and end up going back home alone. “Don’t you want to get out of here with me?” Jaebum pushes himself off the wall, startled you got your voice back.

Less to no small talk was one of the hookups golden rules when the girls coached you earlier. You’re not here to make friends and learn about that guy, that’d be dangerous.

“Hum – Sure, is it because of that soccer douche?” Jaebum turns to the crowd of drunk students stumbling across the living room, eyes stopping on the Rick and Morty dude who’s glaring at you two. Apparently, he spotted you talking with him earlier. “Do you wanna talk outside?”

“N-No, I meant els–” “AH, STARBOY! That’s you, ain’t it?!” Before you can explain what exactly you were proposing, a tall stranger appears out of nowhere, slapping Jaebum’s right shoulder. The pitcher winces at the hit, offering you a somewhat embarrassed look as you stare, bewildered. “Wanna play beer pong? HEY EVERYBODY! STARBOY IS GONNA THROW FOR ME NEXT RO-”

“No thanks!” Interrupting, Jaebum naturally grabs your hand, pulling you behind him towards the exit and your heart rate accelerates. “We were going to get some fresh air!” He yells back at the man above his shoulders, ignoring the fact the small crowd around was already cheering at the announcement.

When you’re outside he stops on the house’ porch to face you.

“Jeez, that was a close call, I suck at beer pong!” You laugh, and Jaebum chuckles. dropping his head to stare at his feet, strangely flustered.

“Who’s Starboy?”

“Don’t call me that – It sounds weird coming from your mouth.” He pulls a face, finally releasing your hand and you wish he didn’t. “See? everyone knows me but you! You’re lucky I’m not offended...” He leans in closer, chest grazing yours, as if about to kiss you. The passing coyness completely disappeared from his eyes.

“R-Right, University sports stars and their gigantic egos. Your reputation precedes you!”

You shiver in the night breeze, looking up at him, it has more to do with his proximity than September’s cool weather. Still, Jaebum shrugs off his baseball jacket instinctively, wrapping it around you. He only chuckles at your attempted teasing, not even bothering to defend his kind. Your hook-up resolution wavers for a second, even if he seems close to making a move on you himself. Even though he’s a Baseball player, Jaebum seems too sweet for this kind of thing.

“Sorry”, you apologize for the umpteenth time, softening, “I’m just–”

“It’s alright, there’s Jaebum and their Starboy, ya know… They’re like… Very, very different guys, but we ‘sports stars’ are used to the reputation – Listen, I know you wanted to get out, but this isn’t a better spot if you’re freezing.”

His hands find your arms to rub some warmth to them through the fabric. Your whole body is afire at his touch, but he seems oblivious to that.

“We should probably go back inside, I can keep the soccer douche away if he’s annoying you.”

“When I said we should go elsewhere, I didn’t mean outside…” You take a deep breath, finding some courage in the fresh air.

Makayla said no man would ever refuse your proposition; you can do this. Even if he’s intimidatingly handsome and kinda caring, Jaebum’s still a player and you know too well how athletes are with women.

Didn’t he just admit to his own reputation?

“I meant somewhere more private...”

It takes a few seconds for him to register what you’re asking. You don’t doubt he’s used to girls throwing themselves at him but then again, they probably aren’t as straightforward. Perhaps they flirt until he decides to bed them, not the other way around. At first, his expression turns blank, then to surprise and finally, incredibility.

“Like – private private?”, his lips part in disbelief, “Us. N-Now?” But what he probably really means is – already.

Your mouth dries, and your stomach drops from embarrassment, you need to get laid, but maybe not at the price of your dignity.

“You don’t want to... Then nevermind.”

Oh my God. You have misread him, he isn’t interested at all. He just made polite conversation most probably since you were all alone and Yugyeom wanted to dance. You bite your cheek, turning around to go die somewhere in a ditch. There’s probably still an easier target inside, but you don’t want to go through all that again.

“Wait!” You freeze, staring down in awe at his hand wrapped around your forearm. You don’t move since you’re too nervous to meet his eyes. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to! You’re a very curious girl, that’s all.” You look up, shocked. Curious, is that good? Does that mean yes?

“Oh–”, you clear your throat, “Ugh, I mean good... Uuuum, your place or mine?”

Jaebum laughs so you don’t notice how uneasy he is, eyes creasing and disappearing. He pauses to rub the back of his nape before taking your hand in his again.

“My bedroom is at the sports dorm, no one will be back before the midnight curfew...”

You smile, heart pounding. “Let’s go then…”

Makayla was right, getting a guy to bed is easier than you thought, even someone that’s way out of your league.

Mini-Masterlist M A S T E R L I ST

#beommienet #JB GOT7 #Im Jaebum #GOT7 Fanfiction #Im Jaebum Scenarios #JB Fluff #JB Imagines #JB Fanfiction #Jaebum Fanfiction #GOT7 Imagines #GOT7 Fluff #GOT7 Scenarios #JB Scenarios #Jaebum imagines #why do i suck so bad with tags?#ugh #this shit is always the worst part #GOT7 Fanfic #Starboy

39 notes · View notes

howtosingtv · 5 years

Text

Voice Training Through Singing

All right, so you want to sound like the girl you are, right? Well, you already do, seeing as your voice sounds like you, and you’re a girl, but most people don’t understand that. I never could find a single, comprehensive guide for vocal feminization that included a step-by-step process (though I never paid for any of those programs either, so they may be there) but I did find some that gave me important information on certain sections and stumbled through the rest myself.

By “stumbled through” I mean that I tried to do everything at once instead of one step at a time, and took a lot longer than I should have to see any results. I also nearly caused serious damage to my voice a few times, at one point losing it entirely for a day. As I’ve thought about the different aspects of what I’ve done though, I was able to easily separate them into steps that build on each other instead of throwing everything into a blender and hoping that what comes out is what you want.

I won’t be adding any before/after clips to this, for privacy reasons as well as lack of a decent sound setup at the moment, but I have been correctly gendered every time I am on the phone or going through a drive-through for the past few months, and I’ve been doing this for about a year. Most of the things I do heavily involve matching the voice of various singers, which I can do easily thanks to nearly a decade of music training. If you have trouble with this, I would recommend using headphones to start with; they make it mucheasier to tell if you are at least harmonizing well. Eventually your ear will probably get better and you can pay more attention to your voice instead of the singer’s, at which point you can quit using the headphones if you want.

You might also end up getting really good at matching voices, and that’s not even the coolest part. Do you like singing right now, and have some male artists you like to sing along with? You won’t lose that with this! All it will do will make your range increase, and eventually raise your “normal” voice in that range. Here’s a good example of the sort of thing we’re going for (I can’t hit the highest notes yet, but I can hit most!)

Step 0. Self-care – Don’t overdo it!

Before we get started, it’s important to note that going too high before you’re ready (or warmed up), or doing too much too fast can really hurt your voice. I’m trying to get into a more responsible schedule for the last bits of mine, but I tend to do most of my training in the car, which means I end up with days at a time of not doing anything beyond using my feminine speaking voice, followed by 2-3 hours in a single day of nonstop training. Needless to say, that tends to push my voice a bit harder than I like if I’m not careful.

Most people already know what it feels like when you start to lose your voice, and definitely pay attention to those symptoms, but a new one that I noticed after starting this training caught me off guard. Often the first warning sign that I’m pushing too hard is that I start coughing and feeling like I’ve got something stuck in my throat. Nothing’s actually there, but that doesn’t change the fact that the coughing happens. Just be aware of your body, and try to stop if you notice signs of strain. After all, any voice is better than none!

If you do end up pushing things a bit, hot drinks like tea or coffee can do wonders to relax everything again. My personal treatment is freshly brewed black tea with about 2 tablespoons of honey in it. It won’t make everything magically better so you can go right back to it, but it will make it so you have a voice the next day.

Another trick to help with a strained voice, though it may bother you, is to talk as low as you can. Not deep (you don’t need to try singing bass opera parts!), but low and smooth (like you’re pretending to be a guy trying to seduce someone quietly). Do that for a few minutes and it should loosen everything up again, at least enough to get back a normal speaking pitch.

Step 1. Basic Anatomy – Your Apple is your friend

Normally this section would be a boring, basic section with odd pictures that have long names of things we don’t care about. As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t care for that approach much, and I’m also very impatient. So, here’s a quick rundown of what you need to know, and at the end you’ll be able to see just a bit of progress too!

Now I know most of us don’t like our Adam’s apples (me too!), but the technical name for what it covers is the larynx, so I’m going to call it that instead. You can feel where it is, right? Touch it, then swallow. Feel how it moved? Now try doing that without swallowing. Chances are that you can’t right now, but that’s okay! Swallow again, but this time hold your larynx at the highest point, where it feels like it pulls back slightly, then let go when you need to breathe.

Doing that exercise a few times a day will get you to the point that you can move your larynx up at will, which will help out with resonance and tone later on. You may even notice a difference if you try talking with your larynx up instead of relaxed, though it’ll probably be a bit difficult at first. This part took me about two weeks to get right, but since I haven’t met anyone who’s tried the same thing I don’t know if that’s fast or slow. If you want to, feel free to send me some feedback on how long it took you (On any of the sections, for that matter)!

Step 2. The Voice – Raise the Voice, not the Pitch

Now you can move your larynx up and down. Great! But you’re only halfway through the basics right now. Go ahead and try to keep your larynx up for the rest of the training, but if you can’t don’t worry; this part can be done without that.

I’d like to point out here that, while I was trained musically, it was notin singing (I was a tuba player), so some of the terms I’m using are probably not correct in that sense. I’m going to use them anyhow though, because it makes sense to me and I’m pretty stubborn, so just roll with it.

Sing a note in the comfortable part of your range. Doesn’t matter how loud, but hold it for a bit. Feel where the vibration is? I’m going to guess that it’s right around your collarbone, at the base of your neck. That’s called “Chest Voice,” and it’s almost always a masculine thing. This next part is kinda tricky to explain, so bear with me.

Now try to picture your voice as a light or an orb or something that’s in that area. It doesn’t matter what, so long as you do it. Raise that light/orb/whatever up slowly while you hold the tone. The sound will probably shift up as you do; that’s fine. The important thing is to note the different feeling of where the vibration is. As it reaches the halfway point in your throat you might feel a sudden change. That change over is what I call the “Throat Voice” and is probably where your voice will want to go for a while during training.

Once you get past Throat Voice and visualize the light/orb/whatever entering your mouth you’re officially using “Head Voice,” a.k.a. where most women talk from. Congrats! Now go even higher, till you have to pull your larynx back almost to where it goes when you swallow. You probably sound like a really bad Mickey Mouse or chipmunk now, but that’s normal. This is the upper range of your voice, what I call the “Falsetto.” Once you’ve got the hang of moving between these (and moving your larynx up during them as well) you can move on. I think this part took me about six weeks to really get down.

Step 3. First Steps – a.k.a. Why I do this in the car

This is where we begin the real training! Quick question: Do you like My Little Pony? If so, that makes this step a lot easier. If not, then you’ll have to use “chipmunk” songs or go look up “nightcore” on Youtube and find some songs you like. Actually, I’d do that last one anyhow, especially if you find some that the originals feature a male singer.

Either way, the point of this step is to find some songs you like that force you to use that “falsetto” range you discovered last step. At first you won’t be able to do much in that range that doesn’t sound like a squeaky wheel that somehow learned to talk, but as you keep at it you’ll start to get a little more flexibility up there. Remember though, you’re not going for a “good” sound right now; you’re trying to match the song as best you can. Read more here.

#music #singing #vocal exercise

1 note · View note

twilightdreamersmith · 6 years

Text

Voice Training Through Singing:

This one’s for the girls

I won’t be adding any before/after clips to this, for privacy reasons as well as lack of a decent sound setup at the moment, but I have been correctly gendered every time I am on the phone or going through a drive-through for the past few months, and I’ve been doing this for about a year. Most of the things I do heavily involve matching the voice of various singers, which I can do easily thanks to nearly a decade of music training. If you have trouble with this, I would recommend using headphones to start with; they make it much easier to tell if you are at least harmonizing well. Eventually your ear will probably get better and you can pay more attention to your voice instead of the singer’s, at which point you can quit using the headphones if you want.

Step 0. Self-care – Don’t overdo it!

Step 1. Basic Anatomy – Your Apple is your friend

Step 2. The Voice – Raise the Voice, not the Pitch

I’d like to point out here that, while I was trained musically, it was not in singing (I was a tuba player), so some of the terms I’m using are probably not correct in that sense. I’m going to use them anyhow though, because it makes sense to me and I’m pretty stubborn, so just roll with it.

Step 3. First Steps – a.k.a. Why I do this in the car

There really isn’t too much else to this step. You just have to keep at it till you are able to match the songs, or at the very least are able to move around the range without sounding like a Disney character anymore. I use songs from MLP and some nightcore songs as well for this, in particular any songs that have multiple singers to maximize the flexibility and control (yup, I’m still working on this part a bit, but I reached what I’m saying here in about two months). Once you are happy, onto the next step!

Step 4. Pitch – Removing the Turtle Shell

You know that part in the original Dragon Ball anime where Master Roshi had Goku doing a bunch of weird tasks while wearing that really heavy turtle shell? Then he got to take it off at the tournament, only to find he’d gotten a ton faster and stronger without noticing it? Yeah, that’s kinda what the last step was for us, and now it’s time to see the results! Unless you’ve been skipping ahead (can’t judge here!) this will be the first step where a real, usable feminine voice starts to take shape. Excited yet? I hope so, because this is also the second longest step, and the one with the least guidance.

All you need to do in this step is find songs that aren’t in the “falsetto” range and learn to match them while using Head Voice. As you start singing, you may notice that you revert to Chest Voice, or that your larynx drops again, or any number of things. One positive thing you should notice, however, is that you are much better at being aware of how your throat and larynx feel as you speak and sing, which translates to being better at imitating a singer. It really comes down to trial and error at this point.

One recommendation I would have is start with Queen songs, then move into your chosen artists. Queen’s songs are pitched perfectly as a jumping off point for raising said pitch, as most are right where the masculine and feminine ranges overlap, without worrying too much about tone or resonance. Those can come a bit later, especially resonance (which gets its own step later). Disney songs are another excellent choice, though you have to be careful at first. The male parts also make for a good vocal warm-up, to help avoid straining anything.

As for other artists with women singers that work well for beginners, go for someone with a “husky” voice. My personal starting band (after Queen) was Blackmore’s Night, and I moved into LeAnn Rimes, Trick Pony, and a few video game songs once I got more advanced (If you are curious, I recently moved into singing a few Jordin Sparks and P!nk songs, as well as only having a little trouble with some of the more famous Disney songs like “Part of Your World” and “A Whole New World”).

One thing to watch out for here, especially as you start moving into higher pitches and approach the alto range, is a tightness or fatigue in your jaw after singing. That comes from using your jaw muscles to force control over a pitch above your current non-falsetto range, and that can actually hold you back considerably.

I looked this up after hitting a plateau for nearly two months and found a singing coach that referred to the fix as “lazy jaw.” Basically you should be able to hold a note while moving your head around (even if it is slowly) or moving your jaw with a hand. Once you work that in your tone will improve as well, so double win!

Once you start to get the raw pitch down you’ll probably notice that there’s still something different between yourself and the singer, which is where the next part comes in. There isn’t really a point where you are “done” with this step, but I reached a decent point in around six months with the original songs.

Step 5. Resonance – Why a Choker Can Actually Help

I don’t wear a choker, mainly because I can’t find any that are affordable and fit me, but the title does not lie. This step is all about the little shifts in vibration and position of the larynx that I, at least, couldn’t feel without something touching it constantly, hence why a choker would help. I just use a free hand and lightly touch just above and below the larynx occasionally.

This part is a little iffy, and I’m still working on the fine-tuning of my own voice, so the guide might go a different way than your voice wants to. I would strongly recommend recording your voice every now and again during this step, or possibly getting someone’s advice, especially if you have trouble recognizing perfect harmony while singing (for me that’s where I can’t hear any difference at all between the singer and my voice). I can offer a few pointers though.

First, you should have enough control of your larynx by now to have some sense of how far “forward” or “back” your voice is as well as the “up” and “down” of Chest/Throat/Head. If you want to sound airy or breathy, then move your voice “forward” and “up.” If you want to sound husky of earthy, “Back” and slightly “down” are the directions to go. Don’t forget that where your larynx and voice are will affect your pitch a bit, but with practice you can go lower in pitch while still maintaining Head Voice.

Second, try to only vibrate half of your throat. Sounds confusing, I know, but the most feminine voice I can use right now only vibrates below my larynx, not above. I have heard other people discussing the exact opposite, but I do know that masculine voices use both above and below, so as long as half is still I think it’ll be fine. Just use your ears (or a friend’s!) to figure out which one works for you, and try not to stress too much about it. I still have issues with this a lot on certain songs and artists, and I’ve been working on this step for 8 months now. Remember, your goal isn’t actually to be a perfect singer (at least, not for this guide), it’s to develop a feminine speaking voice.

Third, add some heart! I know it sounds corny and cliché, but if you can feel the singer’s emotions and add that to your singing it can make a lot of this automatic. Masculine resonance mainly uses volume for emphasis, but feminine resonance tends to use pitch and emotional emphasis instead. There is a big difference, even if it doesn’t make sense at first why.

Lastly, if you are still using headphones or earbuds, take advantage of that to really match the singer! If you think you are close, but it sounds really bad and wavy, that actually means you’re really close (within a half-step, to use proper music terminology) so keep moving up and down to get it. Very few things are as satisfying as singing in perfect harmony with a feminine singer for the first time.

Ending – You’re Still Here?

As I mentioned in the last step, this is about as far as I’ve gotten in my own training, so I can’t share anymore tips. Basically you take all the skills and awareness you got learning to sing (which is its own useful skill, I might add) and apply them to your normal speaking voice as well. In my case the pitch of my voice started raising without me even thinking about it, so I only had to train myself to automatically use the correct resonance and Head Voice before I had a convincing, feminine voice.

The only other thing I have done that is not in the steps above is try to sing parts of the Broadway musical Wicked to improve my volume in my voice, but all that seems to have done so far is shred my voice whenever I try. I can’t say I recommend that, and if you follow the steps above instead of trying to do it all at once like I did you may not even need it!

Once again I would like to mention that this guide is based on my own experiments and trial and error, so Your Mileage May Vary is definitely applicable here. Feel free to contact me @twilightdreamersmith on Tumblr if you need something clarified, or if you have any suggestions as to something I missed.

Happy training!

#transgender #trans girl #voice training #voice feminization #trans women #long post

3K notes · View notes