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linkspooky · 4 years

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Eren’s Dissocation

This month’s chapter has a lot of people confused on Eren’s actions. Why would Eren choose the worst option possible? Why force himself to do something he clearly doesn’t want to do? Why, when he’s given options to back out, does he instead double down on the bad decision making? Why, when no one is holding a gun to his head does he pick the worst available choice?

The narrative obviously isn’t sympathizing with Eren so we’re meant to question his choices. So let’s get into Eren’s headspace. A place where clearly even Eren doesn’t want to be.

1. Other People

Eren displays a lot of paradoxes in his reasoning this chapter. His every action is a contradiction. He goes out of his way to save a child, and then crushes them later without lifting a finger to help. He says he wants to do this all for the sake of freedom, and yet he’s espousing ideas like a fixed future, and acting helpless to his eventual fate. Eren begs and cries for the child to forgive him for what he must do... when nobody is actually forcing him to do anything.

It’s not only that Eren makes bad choices, but he also acts like he’s the victim of his own bad choices. He acts like he’s completely helpless to do these things. Eren says one thing, and then deliberately does another to contradict it when he DOES NOT HAVE TO. It seems like Eren is going out of his way to ruin everything and people are questioning what pushed Eren to this point of deliberate self destruction and acting like he was all out of options when he very, clearly wasn’t.

Eren’s motivations make no sense. Yeah. They make no sense because Eren is trying to reconcile two irreconcilable ideas. The ideas of predestination and freedom are complete and total opposites ideas that cannot coexist in Eren’s mind. Eren can’t reconcile them. So he doesn’t. Rather than try to justify himself or struggle to find the right answer Eren settles for the wrong one. Rather than try to justify his actions Eren avoids any confrontation of his actions all together. Eren distances himself - from his actions, the consequences of his actions, and his role in everything that happens.

It’s a simple idea, but also a complicated one which I will do my best to explain. How does Eren do this? How does Eren end up in this very contradictory mindset, where he just keeps making things worse, on purpose. And it starts with the way Eren sees other people.

There’s a reason that Eren is made out to be so childlike and petty in this chapter. It’s because he is. This line is very vague, but if I were to explain it I would say.

Eren is very bothered by the fact that other people exist.

What I mean is, other people have thoughts, feelings, and entirely different opinions from Eren and Eren doesn’t really want to deal with that. While yes, it could be a line about how Eren saw the same oppression outside the walls as he did in Paradis, I think it’s a lot pettier than that. Eren got really, really, bothered by the fact that the world he imagined as empty was in fact crowded with other people besides him.

In child developmental psychology there’s an experiment called the “Three Mountain Problem.” In the experiment a child is shown a model of a mountain from one perspective and asked to draw what it looks like. They’re asked to draw what they see.Then, a doll is placed behind the mountain looking at it from a completely different angle. The experimenter then asks the child to draw what the doll sees. The doll would see something completely different - but the child doesn’t comprehend that. They draw the exact same picture the first time. Children lack the ability to imagine that other people don’t. A child only sees the world from one point of view.

You know what’s really frustrating? Arguing with other people. Sometimes even if you know you’re right, even if you state your argument perfectly and show the facts that person still won’t agree with you. It’s frustrating to deal with the fact that you can influence, but you can’t really control the opinions of others.

Eren is fundamentally, unable to see, and deal with other people as people. By that I mean, their perspectives, their feelings, he can’t really see or understand those things outside of his own perspective. Other people ask things of him, require things of him, that he can’t give. Other people disagree with him, fight with him.

Eren’s not an eco-terrorist. He’s not bothered by the fact the world isn’t a natural paradise outside the walls. It’s the people themselves, that Eren finds disappointing.

Eren can’t deal. On a micro-level. Let’s forget about the plot at large and just focus on Eren for a second. Who are the people that Eren has chosen to surround himself post-timeskip.

If Eren’s ultimate ideal is freedom why does he choose to trust Floche of all people? A sycophant, and someone who is practically begging to have all of his choices taken away from him?

It’s also because Floch is also someone who won’t disagree with him, or question him the way his friends might. Eren just can’t deal.

Eren claims that everything he does is out of love for his friends. He fights for his friends, sacrifices for his friends. He has to be the one to die so his friends can live.

But, when Eren hears that Mikasa has the exact same motivation for him. That Mikasa wants to protect him, and fight for him the same way he wants to fight for her. When Eren hears that Mikasa might love him and show that love by always fighting for him, which is the exact same way Eren tends to show his love for his friends he doesn’t... get it. He can’t accept her feelings in any real way. He can’t even really understand them.

Eren wants to love Mikasa, he wants to love his friends, but he either can’t accept their feelings, or he just doesn’t want to. He’s allowed to love Mikasa, Mikasa can’t possibly love him back. Even when Zeke just straight up tells him to his face, Eren dismisses Zeke and says what Mikasa feels for him doesn’t even matter because he’s going to die in four years. Eren avoids her feelings, otherwise.

That’s the key word here. Eren’s avoidant. In every single person he deals with, he’s avoidant. That’s how his very contradictory views of people are maintained. There’s a lot of examples I could list of this. Eren wants his friends to be free, but he goes out of his way to lock them up. Eren says he’s doing this for the sake of his friend’s happiness, and then antagonizes them as cruelly as possible. The reason he’s able to do these things, is that he avoids truly looking, or confronting his actions, and also the people he’s surrounded with in any real way.

Not only with Mikasa, you can see it in his interaction with Historia.

Eren and Historia grew close because Eren said he wanted to get to know the real Historia. But, then he specifically asks Historia to do something that is the opposite of everything she stands for. When she disagrees with him, because she wants to live as an individual with her head held high with pride and make her own choices, do what she thinks is right as Ymir told her. When Historia tries to assert herself as an individual who doesn’t completely agree with him, Eren then switches tactics and tries to browbeat her into doing what he wants of her.

Eren’s view of the world is very isolated, and insulated from others. Whenever somebody challenges his view, he makes the choice to retreat back inside of his own head rather than try to change.

That’s also a natural consequence of Eren not seeing people as people. Because he avoids the thoughts, feelings, opinions of others it means his own thoughts never really change. He deprives himself of the ability to see things in a different way. Eren is stuck in a rut, but also Eren doesn’t want to leave that rut he wants to bunker down.

2. Eren Himself.

Eren’s head what a terrifying place to be inside.

Dissociation is a mental process that causes a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memory and sense of identity. Dissociation seems to fall on a continuum of severity.

Dissociation is a defense mechanism of the brain. So is avoidance. They are both learned defense mechanisms that the brain uses to protect himself, and they are also behaviors that people fall into to protect themselves.

This is why Eren is depicted as a child over and over again. This is why Eren is shown constantly flashing back to his mother’s death. It’s because Eren never really got over that initial trauma, Eren has been stunted and never grew or developed from that point.

Eren’s a big old manchild, and that makes sense just from what he’s been through. It’s easy to forget that Eren is a child soldier who like, never had a stable environment after losing his home. The reason he hyper focuses on his mother, and that initial incident is because that was the start of everything all the insecurity of his life. Eren adopted all these mechanisms to cope in a situation where he was truly helpless, and yet even after the situation changed, Eren’s internal mechanisms never truly did change and he kept on coping in the same broken way.

Dissociation, and Avoidance.

Dissociation is when a person divorces themselves, from their actions, from their own body, from their thoughts and feelings.

Avoidance is when Eren deliberately goes out of his way to avoid any kind of real conflict with other people or having to deal with their feelings because he’s not equipped to handle them.

Eren is hopelessly stuck inside of his own head right now. I don’t know what’s a better metaphor for that, then Eren literally... just being a head. It almost lapses into solipism. Eren has distanced himself from other people so far that he has... literally become a brain in a jar.

Eren’s perspective is the only one that exists to him. But he also disagrees with himself.

Eren wants the freedom to do whatever he wants. But he also, doesn’t really want to be doing what he’s doing right now. So, why does he use his freedom to do these things?

If Eren distances himself, both from the thoughts and feelings of other people, but also his own thoughts and feelings, where is he?

He’s god.

Eren imagines his ideal world as one where he’s above the clouds, in an completely open sky. These are the symbols associated with the idea of god in most religions. Somewhere distant. Somewhere far away.

Eren’s key operating word is distance. He is distancing himself from both other people, and his own actions at the same time, because he can’t really bear or even process the guilt of dealing with both.

Let me explain Eren’s bad decision making with a simple metaphor.

So spiderman, right. Spiderman gets bitten by a radioactive spider. He has kind of a shitty life. He has no parents, he’s bullied in high school. He’s an average every day loser. Suddenly, he gets all of these super powers. It makes spider man feel special. He has super strength now, he doesn’t need to wear his glasses anymore.

Then a robber runs by him, and Spiderman doesn’t lift a finger to help. Even though he has the special ability to help, he doesn’t take any responsibility for it.

As a result of this choice, his Uncle Ben dies.

Spiderman wanted the super powers, but he didn’t want like any of the added responsibilities of having super powers. In essence until Uncle Ben died, what Spider Man was living out was a power fantasy.

That’s what Eren is in the middle of. He’s always been this very weak and helpless child. He’s always felt like the person who just watched, unable to do anything when his mother died right in front of him. The way he’s dealt with that has always been imagining himself as getting stronger, and stronger, and stronger.

Eren wants power, but he doesn’t want responsibility.

The Sasha scene is literally the Uncle Ben scene. Eren kills a lot of innocent people, he makes a choice to do that, and as a direct result of his actions, someone else important to him dies. It’s a direct story consequence. Eren steps on Gabi’s friends -> Gabi becomes vengeful -> Gabi goes the extra mile to avenge the deaths of her friends sneaks on board and shoots Sasha.

Eren’s mechanism however, is avoidance. He doesn’t want to be at fault. So he’s not. Which means when Eren makes bad decisions. When those bad decisions result in things getting wrose. Eren ignores the consequences of his actions, and is therefore unable to deal with those consequences in any real way.

That’s why we see Eren get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse. Because he’s not learning from any of the choices he is making. Because from Eren’s perspective he doesn’t have a choice.

To summarize the contradiction: Eren wants to kill people, but he doesn’t want to feel like a murderer.

Eren can’t make sense of that, because there is no making sense of that so he looks away. He looks away so he can’t learn, or even really see what he’s doing to people. This causes Eren to spiral. When people have gotten genuinely that bad, when people spiral to the point where it seems like every single thing they’re going to do is going to make things worse what do they start wanting?

Eren’s dream of killing all the titans, is paralleled exactly with Reiner’s urge to just, kill himself so he can be done with everything. That’s the real reason essentially. Yes, it’s extreme, but Eren might be y’know, an extremist? The micro-level informs the macro-level.

Eren has gotten so bad in his mental spiral he’s reached the point where nothing else matters, where he just wants to give up and committ suicide. He wants to make the world disappear. He can no longer deal with the struggle against the world. He sees the only way to escape his problems is to either just wipe everything away, and wipe himself out. That’s metaphorical suicide.

It’s just Eren’s always projected outward.

Rather than deal with his own internal flaws, he tries to change the world around him. Eren has just externalized his own internal conflict to such an extreme extent.

And yeah, Eren is literally just a head right now. Only his own internal conflict, only his own hurt feelings, matter. That’s what Eren does to the child.

The reason that Eren draws the comparison to Eren is because that’s what Reiner did exactly to him.

Eren is the hurt and injured party here. Reiner’s direction actions and choices killed Eren’s mom. However, it’s not about Eren’s feelings, Reiner makes it entirely about his own feelings. His own guilt. His own regret for what he did. How bad he feels about it. Reiner breaks down crying and is so self-involved he forgets that Eren is the one who is hurting here.

Eren repeats the same action. He breaks down crying in front of a child and apologizes again and again. But it’s really about Eren. Eren makes it about himself, and his own guilt and remorse rather than the person he’s wronging.

So yeah. It’s the end of the world and Eren’s just making it about himself. That’s the best way to explain it. It’s easy to kill another person if you don’t see, or truly care about their pain.

Eren is a tool. And by that I mean he wants to take certain actions. Eren is violent, and wants to stir up conflict. He is because he’s a child soldier who has been raised that way all his life. Eren also knows that these things are wrong. Which is why he wants to take these actions, but in no way feel responsible for them. A gun is not responsible for a bullet leaving the barrel and shooting someone. Eren wants to be the gun, rather than the person holding the trigger.

Which is why Eren is now inside of a giant flesh monster that’s bent on destroying everything. He is the mechanism that destroys the world. It’s the extreme result of that line of thinking. But once again Eren’s entire character can be summarized in one line.

“Eren Jaeger is an extremist.”

#aot 131 #snk 131 #snk 131 spoilers #aot 131 spoilers #attack on titan meta #eren jaeger #eren jaeger meta #eren jaeger theory #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #aot meta

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grimmradiance · 3 years

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Close to Me: How the Hollow Knight's Fighting Style Reflects Their Trauma (and the Radiance's as well)

So I've been trying to actually beat the Radiance, which means I've been fighting the Hollow Knight. A lot, as a matter of fact, since I'm beans at this game sometimes. I've also been thinking about @lost-kinn's meta about how fighting styles are how Vessels, especially the Little Knight, communicate.

In trying to apply this to the Hollow Knight, I've been coming to some very interesting conclusions, especially taken in context of...Everything Else in the lore, and Everything Else implicated in this by the psychology of it.

There's a lot to cover here, and it tracks through a LOT of different places, including trauma psychology, the relationship between chronic stress and lifespan health, and shape symbolism. Two warnings first:

One: this essay is gonna get heavy. It includes fine-grained discussion of the Hollow Knight's trauma, including discussions of the real-life machanics of psychological abuse, as well as the Extremely Concerning Implications of them harming themself during their boss fight. please read with caution and when you're in a safe emotional place to do so.

Two: This post is not a place for justifying the Pale King. If you read this essay in its entirety and still want to do that, please make your own post; my relationship to the Hollow Knight themself is deeply rooted in my own experiences, so in the context of this discussion I can't promise I won't take it personally.

With that out of the way, let's talk trauma and fighting styles:

We know that the Hollow Knight is trained to be a paragon of fighting skill, through the Pure Vessel fight, and this gives us a fantastic way to compare what they were like before they were made Government Assigned Radiance Jail, and after. Or, in other words, we're given the perfect opportunity to see what the Radiance is doing (i.e. context effects), and what Hollow is (i.e. what we can conclude is reliably consistent as a part of them). Listed here, for reference:

Hollow's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Radiant Shade Soul, which launches a volley of Infection blobs in arcs

A Radiant Desolate Dive, which produces pillars of entwined Void and Light at random intervals

The Infection bursting out of them in random arcs, covering a significant amount of the aerial space of the arena

The Radiance ragdolling their body around trying to hit the Knight

Contact damage from them stabbing themself and falling over atop you

The Pure Vessel's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Pure Shade Soul, which launches a volley of nails in straight lines

A Pure Desolate Dive, which produces nails at specific intervals

A Pure Focus, which causes circular explosions across most of the aerial space in the arena

Lashing out with a Void Arm (word choice intentional)

I've highlighted attacks from each battle that are different, since those are our points of interest here. In addition, both the Pure Vessel and Hollow are exceedingly fond of teleport-spamming in a way that is usually reserved for a specific group of bosses.

Another very important distinction between these two fights: the Pure Vessel doesn't scream. Well, they certainly try to, but no sound comes out. No voice to cry suffering, after all. All of these points have a lot to go into, so let's address them one at a time.

All That Remains: Theoretical Background On The Significance Of Constants

Making comparisons across time is important specifically because humans (and human-like bugs) change. Most personality traits aren't set in stone--they exist as an interaction of someone's internal tendencies, their experiences, and their environment. Speaking of those last two points, not all experiences and environments are created equally. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs for short) are known to have lifelong implications for a child's health, both physically and mentally. These are events that are so stressful or stressful for so long that they exceed a child's ability to cope and become toxic stress (yes, that's the term in the literature, because it actively damages your organs). They compound, as well--the stress of one ACE makes it harder for a child to cope with another, especially if they overlap.

Some examples of ACEs? Being exposed to physical danger or the threat of physical danger, deprivation of normal social relationships with peers of a similar age, being forcibly seperated from family members, witnessing a loved one being hurt or killed, chronic illness in oneself or a family member, neglect of a child's emotional needs....

Poor fucking Holly. It's a miracle they didn't disintegrate under the pressure. The only other option is that they bent and adapted under that much stress--in other words, most of their personality has been forcibly reshaped by what they've gone through. Anyone who has up-close experience with parentification or complex child abuse already knows: this was by design. I'm not saying the intent was to traumatize the Pure Vessel past several points of no return, but the intent definitely was to reshape their personality for the purpose of being The Vessel. We only see them (the Pure Vessel) in battle after this process is mostly or entirely complete, but we do see them a few times beforehand. I'd like to draw attention to the Path of Pain cutscene right now.

I've seen people talking about the look the Vessel and the King share as a sign that TPK really does love his child. That might be true, but it's definitely not relevant when it comes to how abuse works. This is, in fact, exactly how the cycle of abuse uses affection as a tool. Long periods of abuse or neglect, smoothed over by small periods of affection that placate the survivor? That's textbook love bombing, the kind that forms stubborn trauma bonds and facilitates unhealthy dependency. Forgive me for not giving the Higher Being of knowledge and prescience the benefit of the doubt on that one. (/s)

Team Cherry knows about the importance of parallels and dissonance. There's a reason the music in the second phase of the Hollow Knight fight plays in the Path of Pain. There's a reason it cuts out the moment the battle with the Kingsmoulds is over, instead of at the room transition. There's a reason it doesn't cut out in the Black Egg. Actually, there's two potential reasons, which could also coexist: either little Hollow trusts the Pale King to keep them safe, even after the borderline torture that they were just subjected to, or big Hollow is so hypervigilant that they're in full functioning-through-trauma mode even while they're at death's door.

If you don't see how much the Pale King scarred his child at this point, I'm not sure we were playing the same game.

Walking the Straight Line: How the Pale King's Teachings Show In the Pure Vessel

The Pale King loves order and control. Everything about the White Palace and every decision we see him make implies this. Everything is spotless white walls and well-maintained gardens; the only signs of disorder are hidden away, either in his workshop or in The Pit™. This also reflects in the Pure Vessel's title--pure as in holy, but also pure as in without flaw. Considering the Nailsmith's emotional state after completing the Pure Nail, TPK's fate with his Perfect Controlled Kingdom, and the Godmaster ending as a whole, attaining perfection is not a good thing in any sense.

We know the Hollow Knight isn't perfect--that's the whole catalyst for the plot. But considering their upbringing and their fighting style as the Pure Vessel, their imperfections absolutely kill them emotionally. I'll spare the lecture on how perfectionism affects neurodivergent kids even more severely than neurotypical kids, if only to keep this post to a reasonable length (look up "twice-exceptional children" if you'd like to know the theory I'm glossing over in more depth). But, in essence, the deck is doubly stacked against them--they have a higher goal to reach, and far more obsctacles in their path, including their own emotional scars.

I've already discussed how Hollow isn't meant for this kind of stress in a physical sense in other posts. They're not prepared for it emotionally, either--the Pale King wants perfection, and they can't even stand up straight (every spoonie in the audience already knows how exhausting people's obsession with Standing Up Straight is). There's another page on their stack of emotional baggage, even BEFORE you consider that the Pure Vessel knows their perfection is what bought them a ticket out of the Abyss.

Bringing Teleportation To A Sword Fight: Where The Pure Vessel Reveals Their Fears

How else are they going to cope with that need for perfection, that need to prove themselves worthy of the reason their life was spared, by being flawless in any way they can? Being a mechanical, flawless fighter puts so much pressure on them, both literally (repetitive strain injuries fucking HURT) and figuratively--if you're predictable, the only sure way to win is to mop the floor with your opponents before they figure you out. Hell, that's the way most people play their first run of Hollow Knight, by throwing themselves at the bosses over and over until they figure out the patterns. That strategy is inherently going to fail against an opponent that's, say, an immortal higher being.

There's no way that the Vessel didn't figure this out, and yet none of their TPV specific attacks are positioned randomly--the nails are always evenly spaced, and the Focus explosions are always in a specific height region of the screen. That's clinging to survival strategies even when they become maladaptive in its purest form.

Another dip into psychological theory: let's talk about disorganized attachment. Attachment styles describe how someone's relationships to their main caregiver(s) influence their understanding on relationships in general. Disorganized attachment is a result of an upbringing of inherently unstable parent-child relationships, where there's no way of a child predicting whether an adult is going to be delighted to see them, ambivalent, upset, or otherwise. If my parent woke up some days saying "all right my child, time for the Infinite Buzzsaws Obstacle Course," I'd be the same way. In adulthood this manifests as an inability to form a stable sense of self-concept as well as concepts of others. Mission accomplished, TPK, there's no will to break if you broke it yourself.

This is where the fighting styles as communication comes in--Hollow needs to keep Ghost at a distance to fight, but also wants to be closer to their sibling (the only being who has a chance of understanding what they've been through), BUT also has a trauma-rooted fear of attaching to people, as their experiences with attachment are inherently unpredictable and dangerous. Hence, both the teleportation that doesn't seem to match their fighting style any more reliably than "aim at the thing attacking you" and the second attack unique to the Pure Vessel--they're quite literally lashing out in pain to push people away. There's a reason that attack is so reminiscent of the Thorns of Agony.

Of note is that Holly does seem to teleport like the bugs of the Soul Sanctum do (favoring the edges of a screen, rather than going wherever like Dream Warriors do), which makes sense--they're the most obvious answer to the question "how did they learn how to teleport, anyways?" However, Sanctum bugs have abilities designed to capitalize on this, like homing spells and slashes from above. I can only assume this means that someone saw Holly's proficiency with the nail and assumed it translated to other forms of combat, and didn't feel the need to give them at least a bit of a primer on how to make the best use of it. There's another tally for the Hollow Knight as an autism metaphor.

Trauma Bonds: How the Radiance Speaks Through Hollow

Now, we're back to the Black Egg, and two people stuck in the same sinking ship. The thing that makes this hurt so badly is that Holly and the Radiance are at complete cross purposes here, and yet they both want the same thing:

They both want out, no matter the cost. For the Radiance, this means forsaking the pacifistic nature of the moths and nuking Ghost personally.

For Hollow, this means forsaking the way they were raised and everything that was bludgeoned into their personality: the only way out is to fail, give up control, and trust that Ghost will do what needs to be done.

Imagine how much pain they're in to actually go for it. Going against a literal lifetime of conditioning is something that takes the average person years to even consider, let alone go through with. It's a form of learned helplessness--if you try to break free and fall, again and again, it actively discourages further attempts. Breaking through learned helplessness is an interesting process, because it generally involves re-establishing a sense of control by recalling previous events where the person was able to change their situation.

Which, as far as we know of, are nothing but traumatic memories for Hollow. It's very unlikely that they'd break through it on their own, but we know they have by the time we see the second phase of their fight. This is them at their most desperate: the same music as the Path of Pain, the way they let, or can't stop, the Radiance throw their body around, the way they actively try to let the Radiance out by stabbing themself.

You'd think that giving up and learned helplessness are inherently compatible, but when giving up both goes against your core personality, and involves your active participation, they're in direct opposition. So either Holly was able to process all their trauma by themself (which I doubt, judging by how much effort the player has to go through to even see Ghost's and Hollow's traumatic memories), or someone gave them a nudge or three in that direction.

Considering that there's been someone living in Holly's head who has a vested interest in them Not Doing Their Duty, I think we know who. And the thing is, I think we watch Hollow have this breakthrough during their battle. Imagine for the first time in decades, at least, you can move. You're in pain from being in the same position, probably hallucinating from sensory deprivation, with an infection sucking at what strength your body has left. And there's this little creature who looks ready to fight you, who seems to have let you go for that exact purpose.

And you look down, and both you and the Radiance recognize them from a place rooted deeper than consciousness, in the murky depths of trauma. You see the other Vessel who just as easily could have been you, and who looks so much stronger for not being you, for being an imperfect, willful creature. And the Radiance sees history threatening to repeat itself, another one of the Wyrm's cursed children seeking to lock her away once more.

What else do you do when you're triggered? You scream, and you go on instinct, and you retreat into your head. Those first blows, with the epic music? That's the Vessel the Pale King forged, the fighting machine that will endure unimaginable stress because it knows no other way. What snaps you back out of dissociation? Usually, either the passage of the triggering stimulus, or an even more relevant stimulus (severe pain from getting beaten up by a nail, for example).

The tragedy is this: we know this isn't a triumph. I think most of us went into that fight the first time, knowing we'd be putting the Hollow Knight out of their misery. The music turns tragic, Hollow screams, and then we see the Radiance and Hollow themself break through: the Radiance trying to fight Ghost directly with the resources she has, and Hollow trying to help her along.

For what it's worth, Hollow even had the right idea, when it came to letting themself rest while helping Ghost stop the madness their father started--they were just digging for the Radiance in the wrong place. The dynamic between the Radiance and the Hollow Knight is something I could write on for pages and pages, but this has gone on for long enough. Tune in next time, where I'll presumably talk about this same topic but in reverse with regards to the Radiance.

#hollow knight #hk #the pure vessel #the pale king #the radiance #my meta #the higher being speaks #i hate fact-checking my abuse infodumps because the ableism against personality disorders is EVERYWHERE #but here this monster of an essay is #anyways the hollow knight as a character sniped my trauma on sight #so i may be a tiny bit biased here But Also I'm Right #abuse //#child abuse //#emotional abuse //#i legit do not know what tags to throw on this #also the overarching title is a reference to the song of the same name from just shapes and beats because. yeah

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crookedmusician · 3 years

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Once Again

A/N:- This is just a drabble that popped up in my head and is based on "The Amazing Spider-Man" universe, NOT based on the Marvel mcu. If you haven't watched the movies then pls read this with an open mind. The drabble is also fixed in a time that is five years after Gwen dies and is completely based on my thought and universe. Please don't read it if you're not comfortable.

Peter Parker x Fem Reader

Genre : Slight Angst, Comfort, Slice of Life

Warnings : Very Slight and descriptive mentions of wounds and death, the characters are all adults, Y/N has a defined profession for the sake of the plot

*This is also not proof read so please bare with any errors if there are any*

It's been Five years.

Five years since Gwen's funeral. Five years since New York city was almost destroyed. Five Years since an innocent boy lost his sanity to death. Five Years since Peter Parker was too late to save his love, his best friend and his emotions to grief.

It had been Five years since that faithful day that still seemed to haunt Peter from time to time.

After the......incident happened, five years ago, Peter had shut off. He didn't talk, eat or even go to work. His job was willing to let him off that time, but the mental pressure that had bundled up inside Peter's head had refused to go. As a result, even after Peter came back, he was only a shell of himself, an empty treasure from which the gold had been stolen - just like how life was stolen from the eyes of so many he failed to save on that one dreadful day.

But If anything broke Peter more than his incompetency to save the lives of those millions he failed, it was the death of Gwen. Death of the only person Peter beleived to have given him a purpose to be Spiderman and save the city and it's residents. His reason to survive every battle he fought. His best friends, girlfriend and his reason, to just live.

Peter still remembers that day, that moment as clear as day. He still remembers the catastrophe that was caused that day, the destruction, the smell of death and spilled blood that matted the air in a heavy silence. He still remembers how the life wilted out from Gwen's eyes as she fell from the tower, as he held her afterwards; he still remembers how her once warm body turned deadly pale, her cheeks stopped sport the regular blush - and they all haunted him. They Traumatized Peter through his day, haunted his nightmares and swam in front of his mind each and every moment he lived. So Peter did the only thing he thought might help, he shut off everyone out of his life, he shut off the flow of emotions in his being, & he swore to never let anyone in, he vowed to not care about anything except defending NYC against the new villains attacking everyday.

Cause Peter Parker may have been a hero, but his emotions flowed through his veins as thickly as the spider's venom in his blood. So promised, to shut out and never let anyone in. That became his coping mechanism.

Yet again, five years later that same spider-boy found himself in the exact position he had been in, five years prior - sitting on the bed of a rooftop apartment while the huge scratches on his chest were being cleaned by the slender hands of a young woman sitting in front of him. It was an awkward kind of deja vu for Peter - Both hurting and comforting to know that someone - other than May cared for him still, however the recollection couldn't help but bring those ugly thoughts back into the forefront of Peter's mind. The same thoughts that occupied his mind in the waking hours.

The scratches burned and sizzled under the alcohol, even though it was applied with softness and expertise; but Peter didn't Flinch. Yes, there was a slight wince here and there, but no reaction revealed was too strong. Years of constant battle against the seemingly never-ending villains of New York happened to make Peter a bit more cautions and tolerating of his injuries - something that seemed to work greatly in favour of Peter at the moment - so as to not make the budding doctor in front overthink her capabilities.

Was New York always so needy and loud for the Spider-Man? This was something that occupied Peter's head often.

However, when he thought back on it, perhaps it was better for him to put his life on the line than have someone innocent or desiderate to live to fight the devils.

I mean, he did fit all the requirements for this job didn't he?

He was young, had the abilities, tolerant of the aftermaths of the fights he carried carved in his skin, bones and blood. Moreover he didn't have anyone to rely on or care for - May would be able to live with him, his job wasn't so special to him if he didn't require the money either. On the contrary Peter thought it to be a blessing to die - to forget all the turmoils, catastrophes of the world; to forget how many villains needed to be fought or how many people needed to be saved - to just forget.

Peter always thought, that maybe he wasn't made for love. That maybe he didn't deserve it. He thought about how everyone he loved left him, deserted him and thinking back on them, he just wondered how much love favoured him in this life. Maybe love didn't favour him at all, maybe love hated him, maybe that's why death always won in each of his chapters. Maybe that's why, Peter had become a void - because love refused to favour the life of this boy. He never really understood why lover never looked upon him with a smile. But guess there was never really an explanation for some grudges.

But if love never favoured him, Then what was this sudden weird electric sparks coursing through his body? This weird fluttering that seemed to keep him up at nights thinking about this one person that flew in his life and and broke past all his resolves to nestle herself comfortably inside the confines of the walls surrounding his heart?

And Peter really never could understand what was happening in his body. At first he thought that perhaps it was his spidey senses. But after a while, when he actually came to a conclusion, he was dumbfounded. Being deprived of love and refusing the comfort of any other hands rather than his own for such a long time - the revelation - was actually quite unexpected by him.

But to say that Peter didn't see all of the unfolding and development of feelings, would be a mistake. Mayhaps, Peter did knew what was happening, did knew that he was falling in a bottomless hole; but the feeling of letting go, the feeling that encompassed the journey was so blissfull it was hard to deny himself the pleasure after denying it for such a long while.

So we recount to a faithful afternoon, two years prior, to an empty & silent alley in one of the bustling streets of NYC.

XXX ♤♡◇♧ XXX

It was just another day in the life of Peter Parker - waking up, packing his suit, taking an early leave or going on a feild trip for his job only to fight the villains and end up all bloody. The only difference was the gushing wound on one of Peter's upper legs that seemed way worse than his regular wounds.

Peter seeked sanctum in one of the empty alleys of the New York Streets to treat the wound only to find himself looking sideways at a young bespectacled woman with curious eyes, hair in a messy bun, clutching one strap of a heavy-looking backpack with some folders and pages in the other - she was staring at him with worry in her orbs.

Usually it wouldn't have been a problem, he'd hit up some pick up lines and flee as far as possible with his wounded leg and never meet the girl again - it was simple and easy without any damage to either his social or personal life. And it would've been easy and simple - Only if Peter had been wearing his mask. But he sadly wasn't, and now he gazed back like a deer caught in the headlights as the figure approached him slowly and cautiously and stopped a few feet away.

"Can you walk?" The words were almost whispered with caution.

"Excuse me?" Peter said in a breathless voice; swinging through the city with an almost torn-off leg does hurt more than Peter imagined, after all.

"Can You walk? With that leg of yours?"

"Yes, I suppose. But why?" Peter asked with confusion and weariness.

"Then please come to the top floor. I can treat your wound."

The clutch of the strap got a bit tighter as the words tumbled out of her lips in the hushed silence of the alley. To say Peter was surprised would be an understatement; it had been a while since someone willingly wanted to help him. But then again, Peyer wasn't weak, was he? He surely could handle that little much laceration wound on his own, right? So just like Peter have always done, to all his colleagues, his neighbours, supposed friends, associates and May, he declined.

"Thank you for the offer but I can Handle this on my own," Peter uttered in the same dazed voice, opting to turn his head down as if signalling the end of the conversation.

"I'm sure you can," the voice chirped again to fill the whispery silence, "to the best of your abilities, but It would be better if I had a look at it. I'm a medical student so I'll be able to ptch it up reall quick too. Besides to treat you'd have to either swing or walk back to your home, and you really can't do either with that deep of a cut anyways. So let me have a look at it, please."

"I said I you do-"

"No you can't, you may clean it or patch it up until you can do it up but the slash is huge, don't you see? If you don't treat it immediately, your whole leg would either get infected or you'll bleed to raw. And I don't think you'l be able to swing your way around the city with a half infected leg anyways. So Please for your leg's sake enter the third window from the right on the top floor of this building so I can nurse the damage. I'll try to get there ASAP," and with that the girl hurried inside a door on the side of the monument on right.

Peter however, was still failing to recover from his daze, and by the time her words actually registered in his head the wound had started to sizzle with wind. He gathered his own stuffed backpack and as slowly and painlessly he can, followed the instructions.

Peter swung to top of the building & crept insided the bedroom of a rooftop apartment that looked very comfy despite being a complete definition catastrophe to found himself in a pair of freshly washed shirt and jogging shorts half an hour later - the girl said they belonged to her father and brother previously.

Peter stared at the unknown woman as she wrapped up the incision in a white cloth. Her fingers were skilled & worked in a quick yet sure manner.

"You can handle pain very well you know?" The woman broke the awkward silence with a glance at Peter's face only find him staring back at her with a monotone face, "the area around the gash had already started getting infected, if I found you a bit later your leg might've fallen off. Still you're very lucky. Thankfuy no valuable nerve was heavily dama-"

"Why are you helping me?" The rambling was interupted by the strict and straight voice of the spidey

"Excuse me?"

"Why are you helping me?"

"Because I can? Am I not allowed to help you? You looked like you needed some serious help though," The woman asked tilting her head slightly.

"Is it a plot?" Years of practice had certainly helped Peter maintain a Poker face, which came in handy as he stared at the confused eyes of the woman in front of him - his heart deeming the expression to be cute.

"A plot?" The woman repeated as she looked at him in disbelief, "You think l'm helping you because l'm involved in a...a...a stupid gang or something that wants to murder you?"

"Or it could be an individual plan," Peter shrugged nonchalantly as he dared not remove his eyes from his supposed - captor.

"An individual pl-?"

"Why else would you help me? If not for your own benefit?"

At this The woman seemed to become a little pissed at Peter's words as she sputtered with her next sentences before finally giving a coherent reply, "Maybe fighting with evel people all your life makes you heroes feel as if good people don't exist but trust me, they do. And quite contrary to your assumptions I just so happen to be one of them."

The woman tied the cloth around Peter's leg in a tight knot & rose from her seat collecting the equipments back in her first aid box, opting to leave the room, offended - instead finding herself halting mid-step at peter's voice calling out to her.

"I'm Peter," Peter gazed at her retreating figure and as she turned around to look at him with judging eyes, "Peter Parker."

The words were uttered into the sunset in a softer tone - as if the speaker was almost shy, which - looking back at the circumstances - Peter probably was. And as the dying rays of the sun filtered through the drawn back curtain of the only window in the room - the one Peter had entered through - encasing the room in all it's ethereal glow, Peter was able to finally get a glimpse of his healer, clearly.

The rays fell on the bed and on womanly figure, bathing her in the delicate glow of dusk, highlighting her dainty features. She was handsome, very much so in the afyernoon light; and despite being pissed and offended a few mintues prior, she took her time in tilting the corners of her lips into a soft amd pleasant smile as the injured man stared at her in awe - that was perfectly hidden beneath his Poker Face.

"I'm Y/N L/N." The names etched itself in Peter's brain ringing sweet bells everytime, serenading him into calmness.

And so since that fateful day, it became a regular event. Whenevr Peter would get hurt - no matter how small or big the wound, he'd always find himself on the doorstep (or window sill), of the tenth floor building on the same street he never remembered the name of. And slowly as the days swept by, the visits weren't just limited to treating wounds. Infact, contary to either of their professions, Peter found both of them had quite a lot in common, and their opinions generally matched - and for the ones that didn't, both of their adjustable manners suited the situations. And as the days brew into nights, Peter found a companion in Y/N - one that Peter hoped lasted for life.

Peter found a best friend to look after him and talk with on rainy days and summer evenings.

××× ♤♡◇♧ ×××

Now, two years later as Peter sat on the same bed he had so many times before, he thought back on all the bitter and sweet memories Life gifted him, and perhaps they were needed for Peter to bring him to this point in life - and Peter never wanted to go back.

It was late. The sun had gone down a few hours prior and the moon glowed brightly in the sky, peeking in through the windows as Peter observed the familliar figure beside him - nursing another one of Peter's daily unwanted gifts.

She looked dainty, almost unreal as the moonlight illuminated the room casting it in the soft glow of night time. As Peter gazed at her, he started carving out all the plains and roughs of her faces, the shape of her eyes, lips and nose, the way her lithe fingers glided across Peter's skin - and Peter couldn't find it in himself to intrupt the dance her fingers were engaged in on his chest. A light breeze swept in through the wind making rounds of the room and messing with the strands hanging around Y/N's face as Peter gazed at the seemingly engaging spiral of movements infront of him.

"Staring is rude, you know?"

The peaceful silence occupying the room was suddenly broken, giving Peter a small start, as Y/N lifted her head barely so as to glance up at Peter's face, her lips curving into a small smirk at the look of slight surprise on his face, before her skilled hands resumed their work.

After a breif moment of comprehension - and more staring as Y/N wrapped up the gashes and stood up to starighten the sheets on the bed as much she could with the tall figure lying on top, Peter finally found his voice strong enough to utter the two words - that he hoped would convey all that was unsaid and all that he wanted to say but couldn't.

"Thank You."

Y/N looked up once again at Peter with a teasing yet soft grin and breathy chuckle, "Pete, don't be so modest about yourself. Patching up your wounds provide me an excuse to practise my skills on a regular basis. And as a junior doc, It's more benifitting to me that it is to you."

Peter let out a breathy chuckle, rubbing the back of his neck as Y/N turned around to put the first aid box at the top of one of her bedroom shelves, "Still thank you, for everything you've done for me. I really appreciate it."

And this time as Y/N turned around to look at her best friend, she paused for a second, taking in the scene before her. The moon casted the same glow on Peter's form as it had on her back - except this time, the star gazed one was Y/N.

She had always wondered how she never once felt awkward with the close proximity, she always seemed to share with Peter. Her heart once whispered because they were menat to be; but the rational part of her brain was quick to shut down the irrational daydream before it could flourish. However the warmth of her cheeks when Peter looked at her, the tiny fluttering in her stomach whenever he'd smile, the warmth in her being when they hugged couldn't be stopped from spreading all through her body.

There were nights, when she wondered how it would be if she was brave enough to turn the page to the next chapter and just ask her best friend out. But then again, even though happiness was granted if the proposal was accepted - the pain, heartbreak and loss of warmth in their friendship, at the refusal was granted in a much greater probability. And thus Y/N drifted off to sleep every night thinking of all the 'ifs' of the world.

But this wasn't the world of dreams, it was the waking world, and as Y/N realised the soft glow in Peter's eyes when he looked at her, she wondered - no, hoped that her feeling might probably be reciprocated.

"It's honestly no biggie Pete. It really isn't," She neared the bed as she said the words, finally sitting upon it with one leg folded on the matress and the othe rdangling down the side, her eyes searched Peter's face carefully noticing the genuine-ness behind Peter's words, "however what is a problem is that you've hadn't had a single mouthful since the meager breakfast this morning. Honestly dude, don't you ever get hungry? If I wa sin your place I'd be starving! Heck, I'm starving even now!"

Peter let out a small breathy laugh at Y/N's dramatics. She always tended to be the more dramatic one, especially regarding matters of food. So sporting a soft smile he looked up Y/N.

"No I'm fine, I'd just have something to eat when i get home."

"Home? Do you even know how late it is?! It's," she hekd up the digital clock on the side of her bed, "9.15 already! You literally live on the other side of the city! By the time you reach your home it would be way past 10! I ain't letting you starve till then boy!"

By now, Y/n had stood up on her feet in front of the bed with her hands on her hips - and Peter found it to be way too cute for her, "Call up Aunt May and tell her that you'll be eating here today. I'll go and start whipping something up in the kitchen, ok?"

"Ok."

"Good," Y/N turned around & exited the room heading down the halls to the kitchen, to scour how much she can that would fill both her and Peter up, while Peter rested on her bed.

Ever since that incident five years ago, Peter had always wondered that maybe love wasn't really meant for him, that maybe love didn't favour him. But now, as he stared at the moonlit retreating figure of Y/N L/N, he prayed to all the love gods in existence, to favour him just this once as he drafted up the same confession, he had been drafting for the past years, to finally come out of his heart and in to minds of the beauty he called his bestfriend.

A/N : Pls tell me how you like it in the comments this is my first story and I would really appreciate the feedback!

Please don't repost or rwupload my work anywhere apart from here.

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koushisatori · 3 years

Text

Surprise

kuroo x f!reader

genre: birthday fluff

warnings: none

word count: 2.3k

note: I made it !! Happy Birthday to you, Kuroo ! <3 - Also I’ll beta it later when i’m home from university, bc it’s 3 am here, oops x.x

Kuroo wasn’t jealous, really because logically there was no reason to be

You were his girlfriend and you did not mind sudden Hollywood blockbuster worthy kisses when he got a spurt of…possessiveness towards you

He is in no way overbearing or anything, both of you share the opinion that even though you’re a couple you don’t have to be together all the time, spend afternoons with your friends

Then again, you two spend quite a lot of time together, with you being the Volleyball Clubs manager, always staying behind with your team when they practiced way past the official clubs' training's hours

But sometimes he woke up and felt the need to have you all to himself

On those days a slightly lingering gaze by other would irk him enough to permanently glue himself to your side or back

Because of the rareness of that situation, you generally give into that specific mood and take him either with you if you had plans or adapt to whatever your handsome boyfriend seemed fit

(usually, it consists of getting snacks from the store to make watching movies more fun after you both finished your homework. And also cuddles. Lots and lots and lots of cuddling and kisses.)

Anyway, normally he’s a super laid back, relaxed, and ‘’the best boyfriend in the world, right, baby?’’

Kuroo was happy with being ‘’a bit (big times) nerdy’’ as kenma liked to remark, liked that things had their reasons and were logically intelligible

Well…he quickly realized that, while emotions were chemically explainable this also was as far as logic was helpful with them

Sooo…there was no reasonable excuse for him to feel that ugly burning in his chest watching you ruffle through Lev’s hair and giggle so cutely

But it was his birthday, and you should be all over HIM because HE was YOUR boyfriend and in general, maybe he had one of those not so great days bc not only did he get stuck in his bedsheets and face planted to the ground first thing in the morning but his breakfast toast also landed with its face on the kitchen floor just after he put away all the things he used

You were…not avoiding him but kind of distant with your thoughts

At lunch, he was telling you something you’d usually find at least funny if not hilarious because your humor was so fantastically similar to his, but all you did was smile lightly

You even whispered with Yaku instead of talking to him !! how dare you

Rest in peace, Kuroo (you will survive one day with a bit less attention of your s/o)

He wasn’t jealous of Lev or thought that you suddenly developed feelings for the younger boy

He was jealous because that tall child hoarded all of your attention, while you had looked at him maybe twice, three times tops, in the last hour

‘’Kuroo.’’ To the untrained ear the small setters voice as passive as usual. Kuroo though is able to easily distinguish the various different layers of Kozume Kenma’s very real, emotional bandwidth. The captain did hear Kenma and his questioning as well as slightly worried tone, he simply chooses to not react in favor of shooting (barely) decently hidden death glares at the to-tall-for-his-own-good-boy.

‘’Kuroo.’’ The slight change in his childhood friend's voice was enough for the black-haired player to grudgingly turn away from you and Lev to look at Kenma.

‘’Yes.’’ Tetsurou huffs out, giving his best to not sound like a petulant child. ‘’You’re so dumb.’’ Kenma said dryly, definitely analyzing him. The questioning sound leaving Kuroo was close to embarrassing, a quick cough and back straightening later, he adds ‘’You wound me. Right here.’’ While pressing his hand flat against his chest. ‘’Where’s my understanding childhood friend to put balm on my hurting heart by sharing emotionally charged, empathic words with me?’’

Instead of offering the desired words, the smaller boy rolls his eyes before he averts them to his hand-held gaming console. ’’Can you put that thing away, we’re at practice Kenma.’’ Kuroo all but unintentionally whined.

Everything was stressing him out today. Usually, his childhood friend at least stuck to the general rule of not using it outside the breaks. But obviously, there was a plot against him going on with the goal to annoy him more than usual because, of course, why not doing it on his damn birthday. Nice friends and their nice presents.

Just like Kuroo did mere minutes before, Kenma decided to simply…ignore his request half voiced as some kind of instruction. Well…things didn’t work like they were supposed to, he didn’t feel like arguing with his friend so he let him be for now. Rather than that, he turned back to you and Lev, who – for once – seemed eager to train his digging and passing game because you threw the volleyball for him to dive after.

‘’Where in freaking hell is Yaku…’’ Kuroo muttered grumpily, before repeating louder ‘’Yaku! Why am I the only third…Noboyuki!’’These definitely aren’t my friends, he thought while finally giving in to his deepest desire of ripping you away from the grey-haired future wannabe ace.

‘’You truly are dense when it comes to (Y/N),’’ Kenma says, moving away towards the benches, before swerving around them to leave for the clubroom. ‘’The definition of tunnel vision.’’

The thing is, Kuroo heard Kenma say it, but his brain refused to acknowledge them, too focused on finally being in the spotlight of your focus.

Meanwhile, you were watching your dark-haired boyfriend closer than he realized. You carried the whole plan. Or rather your ability to make him lose focus on anything that isn’t you, with just the right amount of addressing the slight possessive side of his and deprivation of your attention.

Even though all of this was just so the others could fulfill their part of the plan, you hate how it led him to mope around the whole day. It was so hard to not laugh about his stupid science joke at lunch and overall, not tell him all day how glad you were that he was born. This is his special day, why wouldn’t you tell him how much you loved his presence and his annoyingly attractive smirk? If not for the others and them begging and bribing you, you would smooch his kissable cheeks, nose, forehead, and lips all day long to honor this special date.

You are an amazing and emphatic girlfriend, so…of course, you realize that his mood in general is rather on the bad side today. He wants you close and to himself, and you did the complete opposite! Tetsurou would absolutely give you an ear full later when he finally understood the whole plan.

Nonetheless, it is kind of cute how he tried to hide that he was sulking. Your big baby of a boyfriend was currently trying to kill poor Lev with his gaze alone, staring holes into the back of his head all the while directing puppy dog eyes at you to relent and come over.

Usually, your Tetsurou was the perfect team captain. Attentive, clever, strategical, and just the right amount of authoritarian and approachable. But with his mind stuck on questioning why you were being weird to him on his birthday, he had yet to realize that through the whole time of today’s practice all of his teammates inexplicably went missing for about 15 minutes before they either sneaked back in (the first years and some of the second years) or openly announced a little too detailed information on how, for example, the bathroom visit has been absolutely necessary and could not be postponed.

The only problem: Lev wasn’t allowed to know of the plan until a second beforehand to not accidentally spoil the surprise out of pure excitement to surprise his Kuroo-senpai.

When you see your better half starting to approach the two of you, yelling for his vice-captain and the libero simultaneously, you whisper ‘’Lev, when I say now, you have to start running okay and call for Yaku. Ask him to practice your receives as loud as you can, and take off over to the clubroom as fast as possible, alright? Also, please don’t fall, we don’t need a bloody and broken nose, Tetsu is pissed enough already. Please do it for me, okay?’’ It was a bit unfair of you to look at him hopefully like that, but as the team manager, you posessed a certain power none of the other third years had over the younger players.

Just a moment before Kuroo got the chance to grab the clueless middle blockers shirt collar, you voice out a hushed ‘’Now!’’. You immediately look up innocently to your boyfriend and finally put the warm smile on your lips that wanted to sit there since your eyes fell on him the first time this morning. ‘’Tetsu...is everything okay?’’ - ‘’Yaku-senpai, please help me with my receives!’’

‘’Lev never asks for receiving practice...’’ is…not the thing you wanted your boyfriend to say. Panicking that he might find out now, still a bit too early, you do the only thing that you know WILL take his mind off of it. You cup his cheek with your hands and pull him down to press your lips against his.

His reaction was immediate, wrapping his arms around your waist and pulling you so close to him that not even a feather would fit between the two of you. Getting into the spontaneous moment, you happily loop your arms around his neck, smiling softly into the kiss.

Yeah...you definitely had missed that.

When you break apart, he pecks your lips a few additional times for good measure before he bends down even more to bury his face in your neck, enjoying how your fingers softly stroke through and play with his hair, in all the right ways, helping him to relax for the first time in hours. ‘’Baby,…’’ he murmurs against your skin ‘’…no one is training the way they should, let’s just ditch practice. We get a cake from the bakery down the street and eat it in bed, okay?’’

For the second time today, you feel bad. Your boyfriend's voice sounds tired and that was not how a birthday boy was supposed to sound. With his face in your neck, you were able though to watch the entrance. They should come in any second now. You feel tempted to give into Tetsurou’s wishes.

Can they hurry up?!

The thought desperately shoots through your head, because even though he was currently not paying attention to anything but recharging and breathing you in, Kuroo is way too perceptive to not get behind the ruckus going on in the gym the whole afternoon.

‘’We can cuddle later, Tetsu, I promise my whole afternoon is all for you. If you want I can even sleep over.’’ Your soothing words made his invisible cat ears prick up and listen interested. You knew that, from the moment you both enter the comfort of his home, he would drape himself over you for permanent, never-ending cuddles. The only reason for him to let go of you - unwillingly so - will be you whining about having to use the bathroom. For everything else, you would have to carry a (nearly) dead weight of the size and weight of your boyfriend everywhere.

‘’I haven’t heard Tora for a while now….’’ The raven-haired middle blocker mumbles, and your heart picks up some speed again.

Looking for words you stammer some intangible syllables, which lead Kuroo to look up, suspicion swirling in his hazel eyes. ‘’Baby…what’s wrong?’’ he asks, cocking his head to the side, watching you like a cat its prey. Quickly waving your hands in front of you, you hastily answer a ‘’Nothing.’’ And try to smile away the panic.

Before he got the chance to repeat his question and pry it out of you, the gym darkens, and you breathe out a sigh of relief. Just on time. With the door opening a little source of light illuminates his teammate's faces with his closest friends at the front. Yaku holding a cake stabbed with 18 sparklers, and Nobuyuki holding an unholy amount of the ugliest birthday ballons you had ever seen. All of them together slaughtering the happy birthday song in such a passionate manner, that you could see yourself being able to forgive them the torture they put you through in the near future.

‘’Come one, birthday boy.’’ You say with a loving smile, and grab his hand to pull him to the rest of the group.

The moment the lights flicker back on and everyone is cheering out loud one last time. You realize belated that Kuroo (intended) and you (unintended) were besieged with confetti and glitter. (You, until this day, suspect Yamamoto who looked a bit too innocent for your taste.)

‘’All of that…for me?’’ Kuroo questions, his gorgeous eyes shining tell telling in the remaining light of the sparkles. Following his words, Kenma takes a small step forward quickly handing over a small book – filled with birthday wishes, pictures that were taken with each and all of them, inside jokes and doodles - just to move out of the spotlight again as quickly as he jumped into it. ‘’Surprise, Tetsu.’’ You say with a sweet smile, that makes him move closer to you to gift himself a taste of your lips.

Before things get to turn mushy and emotional, a chant of Cake! Cake! Cake! – started by Lev and Tora, joined by everyone, disrupts the moment the two of you had.

‘’Okay, okay! I hear the will of the people, I’ll submit to it!’’ Kuroo gives in laughing. ‘’But…’’ a theatrical moment of silence ‘’I want to cut the cake with (Y/N) together!’’ Your boyfriend proudly announces, and, to his delight, you blush furiously. Yakus laughing remark of ‘’Oi, Kuroo, this is not your wedding, you know!’’ was followed by various joking wolf whistles and some hollering. You didn’t know how you ended up being in the center of attention together with him, but when Tetsuro easily replies ’’Well, I need to perfect this skill it for the real ceremony after party one day.’’ You knew that you wouldn’t want to be somewhere else.

#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu scenarios #Haikyuu imagines #haikyuu headcanons #kuroo x reader #nekoma x reader #haikyuu #haikyuu!!

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shihalyfie · 3 years

Note

If there’s ever a character in a series I like who made mistakes and hurt people but were clearly capable of making up for them but then died before being given that second chance, that character will instantly be my favorite character and I will make AUs where they live. So it’s not really a surprise that I latched onto Osamu. However, I’m kind of struggling with:

It feels like cheating somehow, to imagine a universe where a dead character is alive, despite the entire situation being fictional to begin with. As a result, I end up putting Osamu through a lot more suffering than is probably necessary in order to “make up for” it.

Because of various headcanons I won’t get into (since your area of expertise is analyzing actual canon) Osamu being alive means Ken can’t become the Kaiser. Usually I have someone else become the Kaiser, but it always just feels like a rehash of Zero Two with roles shuffled around.

So my questions are how to reign in this temptation to torment Osamu pointlessly out of some weird sense of guilt, and what kinds of themes or ideas from Zero Two could I maybe take in a different direction so this AU feels less pointless?

Also, what kind of character arc do you think makes the most sense for Osamu if he’s made a protagonist, or a deuteragonist with Ken? (Becoming kinder is obvious but also fairly broad.) And what about Ken, if he didn’t have this backstory of his brother dying and feeling irrationally responsible for it?

(Disclaimer before we continue: I'm tagging this with #shihafic because it's my catch-all tag for "I make things up wholesale for fun instead of making any real attempt at sticking to the spirit of canon," and I by no means am attempting to claim your fic ideas or write it myself.)

I think Osamu has perplexed a lot of people for quite a while and, indeed, the AU of him living has crossed quite a few people's minds, but as you said, the plot of 02 itself so heavily relies on what happened between the two in the exact way it did to the point where making even a small adjustment causes everything to fall apart like a series of dominoes.

I think the best way to go here (if both brothers are meant to be left alive) is to explore the fact that the gap was widening between them even before a single thing happened -- my meta on Osamu dealt with the idea that Osamu was fostering his own jealousy of Ken for having something closer to a "happy normal life" of having fun that he himself was being deprived of through all of the expectations being put on him. Moreover, it's also implied that he knew he was losing his grip on his ability to be kind and didn't like this about himself (whether he knew this consciously might be up for debate, but in any case, he wasn't happy this way). So while of course an AU where he was alive still gives him a better opportunity to make reparations between himself and Ken, you still have a lot of questions remaining about what Osamu thinks about the person he's turning into, how the gulf between him and his own younger brother is widening, and whether he enjoys doing all of this. (For instance, knowing that Osamu's probably not very happy about his own emotional descent, you can potentially imagine himself having regrets about his behavior towards Ken -- canon even somewhat supports this, with Ken saying that Osamu being in a "bad mood and cold to him" was his seemingly normal behavior, yet he still wanted to make sure he was warm at night under the blankets.)

The bubble metaphor in 02 episode 23 has Osamu imply that Ken is more fundamentally inclined to be kind than he is, but the question is, was this something that just came up "naturally" because of how each brother is, or did this happen because they were raised with a gap between them and Ken was allowed to have more freedom while Osamu's sense of empathy was dulled? I feel like either interpretation is valid here, and so a potential character arc for him could deal with that question of recognizing this in himself. Regarding friends or deuteragonists, unfortunately, since the Ichijouji brothers' backstory relies so heavily on them being isolated, the only canon-compliant recourse is probably Akiyama Ryou, and since we know so little about him (especially due to Tag Tamers not smoothly fitting in 02's timeline without modification) that's where things had to be made up, but I think it's reasonable to assume Ken must have enjoyed his presence as a friend, and I imagine he must have been at least somewhat acquainted with Osamu as well. The way things went, it's unlikely he was emotionally involved with them enough to help solve their problems, but nevertheless, in canon he disappeared right when Ken needed support most, and in an AU where this doesn't happen, well...?

My personal impression of the Dark Seed (no basis in canon) is that it actually does very little with the person in question other than dulling their ability to feel empathy or self-restraint (so for instance, that whole part about being good at academics or sports actually still uses the person's natural abilities, but it'll push them to spend all of their time and energy focusing on those things and to the level of self-harm and exhaustion). So I think the point here is that either of the Ichijouji brothers had the potential to lose grip on themselves like this with the right combination of pressure and such -- of course, going all the way to being the Kaiser and trying a massive takeover would still require that "push", but even if left by itself, that gap would keep widening and Ken would be very confused as to why his brother is like this, as long as they're not communicating properly. Osamu's death made Ken take the responsibility for assuming Osamu’s role in the family and forcing himself into the role of the "perfect person" he thought Osamu was (especially since he thought of himself as personally responsible for it by latently wishing for him to be out of the picture), but even had Osamu not died, Ken's feelings of paradoxical resentment versus seeing Osamu as a "perfect person" and "strong" role model would probably be there, as he's unaware that Osamu's behavior isn't from being "strong" but by slowly having his emotions eaten away.

#shihafic #shiha's ask box #ree-fireparrot

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adamdriverwrites · 4 years

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Carpe Noctem || Part 4

Plot summary: Mob boss’s daughter & bodyguard au ft. Kylo Ren. Based off this plot bunny (x)

Warnings: none today, kids

Word count: 5329 (prepare yourself)

Pairing: Kylo Ren/Reader

A/N: Here is part 4 finally! NZ is in quarantine, so i’ve been trying to write and gif a lot more! expect another update soon! let me know what you guys think!

Taglist: @helloimindelaware, @dandydragonz, musicalcoffeebean, @driverficarchive, hazydespair, @mp938368, @maybell88, @bikinibrattoms, @fanfic-fangirl, @stillreadingfantasy, @um-well, @OnevergrowoldnevergrowoldO, @jay-ta-blog, @wildwood-trails, @stephhaniee14, @flowerniche, @sanfranciscroc, @little-miss-mischief1, @pami-yui, @lex-bb13, @deepblueswift13, @allknowingnerd, @shawnme-boy, @whymalu, @simonsbluee, @jons-angel, @whymalu, @mixtapes-books, @amazing1rl, @ambrosia-v-black, @souriemickey, @toads4days, @xsar-bearx, @lunarlung, @bubble-t-r-o-u-b-l-e, @cutiepiepotatoes, @bangtan-savage

Masterlist here

Just family.

If you weren't so opposed to the idea of making a scene, then you would have confronted your father about why he was such a deceiver.

It was clearly not strictly family. After you had gone to your room to change, you met your siblings down in the formal dining room, where they had been drinking and waiting for you to arrive. You all moved to the dining room. Roman, Ares and Lyon sitting on either side, your father taking his legendary seat at the head of the table. However, with Kylo sitting next to your Dad, the only space available was opposite, also next to your father.

Phasma was also seated at the table, thankfully separating Ares and yourself, which you did not mind one bit. In fact, a part of you was almost excited to catch up with Gwen after all this time.

As you stared at your food in front you, silence permeated the room. Save for the lone conversation between your siblings, few words exchanged, otherwise it was a tense, quiet affair. The dining room was huge, with a table fit for easily 20 people and with the 7 of you spread around one half of it, you still had a sizeable space between each other.

You gathered it was your fathers disposition that put everyone on edge. Sitting at the head of the table, nursing a glass of amber liquid. His food completely untouched as he watched everyone. The only one who seemed completely unperturbed by it was Kylo, eating the rack of lamb with a citrus and blue cheese salad without a care in the world it seemed. He was his usual stoic form, though unperturbed by the lack of conversation or apparent awkwardness that lingered, he ate dinner and kept to himself.

Your mind wandered to what Hux had told you about him earlier. About how he was your fathers sword and shield, apparently unflinching in his ability to spill blood. You had been gone for a number of years, and before you left for good you were still rather young - however you were perceptive. Due to your perceptiveness however, you knew he hadn't been around for a long time, not since you were a kid. So where the fuck did he come from?

"Is it always like this?" As conversation ensued at the other end of the table, you leaned over to Gwen to whisper quietly.

She chewed through a piece of meat, swallowing before answering, "We don't usually have dinner like this. Ever, really."

You nodded, not really receiving an answer to your question - you wanted to know if everything was usually this tense. Or if the day of Mallory's funeral was such a reason. "Good to know that we won't have to be subjected to this too often then."

"Don't worry," Phasma smiled down at you, "This isn't awkward because of you."

Your eyes drifted down the table, Roman and Ares laughing about something quietly to themselves - Lyon's eyes however - were locked on you. A hard stare as he pushed his food around his plate, haphazardly shoving some into his mouth before looking over at your Dad.

"Sure." you offered, though not completely convinced of her assurance; however kind of a gesture it was intended to be. You knew it was because of Mallory's funeral, that was the predominant proverbial wound, though your presence was pouring salt into said wound.

It made it so much worse, this you were sure.

Roman's voice quietened your internal monologue, speaking your name to gather your attention. You looked over to see him looking at you. "I'm going to Starkiller later on. You wanna come with?"

Starkiller was one of the only legitimate businesses your family had. One that wasn't used to launder money like the Supremacy, it was purely for profit. Though as you grew up you guessed it was your father's way of keeping your brother out of trouble. He had something to do, something to look after, and it was away from the dangerous dealings that could prove fatal. It was a club on the outskirt of your father's turf, under Roman's management though you didn't think he did much 'work' while there.

"What time were you thinking?" You spoke quietly, as not to disturb other conversation happening at the table and not to alert anyone eavesdropping. Your eyes flickered over to your new bodyguard, eating quietly, not even looking at you.

Roman shrugged, "After dinner sometime."

You nodded, "I'm a little jet lagged still. I might have a nap and come later?" You didn't want to go particularly, and you were definitely not jet lagged. To the contrary, you felt quite awake, you just had other ideas and perhaps it could prove a useful alibi.

"Sounds good." He smiled, then went back to eating food off his plate.

"How's school?" It was now your father's voice that pulled your attention. He looked at you while he asked, still not having touched his food. Only nursing a glass and looking over his family.

"It's going okay, thanks."

Phasma piped in next to you. "What do you study exactly? I don't think I've ever actually asked."

"I have a double major; law and psychology." You nodded, it sounded like a brag though you didn't intend for it to be. Although other members of your family looked down on education, others did not.

"Wow, interesting choice. Impressive." Phasma shot you a little smirk.

"You going to be ready to be my lawyer soon?" Roman joked from down the table.

"Or mine." Your father spoke up.

You gave them a half smile in return. Unable to tell the truth- that you had no intention of being a lawyer, it was just something you were studying because you wanted to possess the knowledge of the judicial law system and all the rules in place. You didn't particularly have intentions of breaking the law but if you did... then it would prove extremely fruitful. Psychology was another interest, you found it imperative to understanding your enemies - not that you had many of those either. Yet.

But you were the daughter of Andrew Snoke, and being made to feel so powerless in your youth gave you a complex as you grew up. You needed to acquire knowledge like no one had in your family before, and maybe then you would feel worthy. Powerful.

Dinner passed by quickly. As soon as everyone had finished, your father offered to move it to the office in the west wing of the manor for more drinks. You were going to decline, playing the excuse of jet lag almost immediately, however, you decided to acquiesce and have one drink. For Mallory.

Lyon and Ares started racking up the polished balls on the pool table, setting up for a game. Roman talked lightly with your father, pouring drinks from a crystal decanter for everyone who wanted one. Kylo was back to a dark corner of the room; finding a seat to watch over everyone and smoke a cigarette. He didn't fraternize with the others, or try to relax with a friendly game of pool. Always stoic and always working evidently.

You followed Gwen, finding a seat near the tall open windows facing the backyard. Curtains parted slightly, cool breeze blowing in faintly. Too dark to see out but the fresh air helped ease your mind, if only for a moment.

"Here." Gwen offered you a cigarette from her pack and you kindly accepted. A horrible habit, you knew, but to you it was a small price to pay for stress relief. A hit of nicotine helped your thoughts calm down, and deprived any ill feelings purchase in the forefront of your mind. You could have a few moments not totally at the behest of your anxiety or depression.

"Thank you." You accepted, along with the flame she held up so you could light it. Inhaling deeply, you gave yourself a second to appreciate the reprieve before you exhaled. And then braved to ask Gwen a question. "So come on, be honest with me."

Her pale eyes met yours, and quirked a brow. "I almost always am."

A short laugh escaped your lips. "Thanks for the honesty." Your eyes drifted around everyone, to see if anyone was paying particular attention. "But I mean... how serious is my Dad about all this bodyguard shit?"

"I'd say pretty serious. He assigned me to Roman after all."

This made you sit forward. "Really?" That was particularly serious. "I thought it was a sexist thing, that he didn't think I could take care of myself but, huh..." You sat back in the chair, thrown for a loop. You didn't think it was really that serious. Sure, there were aspects of Mallory's death suspicious but he was on high alert. Enough to warrant some of his most ruthless and trusted men - and women - to become glorified sitters for his children.

"You've all been assigned someone."

"Why didn't I get you? Why did I get him?" Your eyes shot over her shoulder, the furthermost corner of the sprawling room. Kylo sat with your father, drinking. His dark eyes trained on you; already watching.

Always fucking watching. You pulled your eyes away immediately, though you were positive he would not have been able to hear a word from the distance, or over your siblings shouts and taunts. His eyes were on you regardless and it made you uneasy.

Any hint of a smile covering Phasma's lips instantly dropped. The furrow in her brow set in again. "Well... you're you." She took a drag of her cigarette. "And as much as I hate to admit this, he's the best. Snoke is just being cautious."

"The best at what exactly?" You took a drag of your own cigarette, ashing in the crystal ashtray on the coffee table between you. Something flared in Gwen's eyes, what, you were not sure. Worry? Anger? Jealousy? Or was it fear? You had no idea.

"You're smart. I think you already know." She looked like she didn't want to talk about the subject anymore. You weren't sure if it was your father's presence, or Kylo's that deterred her from spouting any more honest truths.

Your mind went to Hux, and the words he had so freely spoken before dinner had you wondering. Calling Ren your father's right hand man, the problem solver.... a rabid animal. You knew your family was bad. By conventional terms with a modern sense of morality, they were evil.

Criminals, murderers, extortioners, torturers, tax-evading, wealth-hording, gun-shipping, drug-running psychopaths to be exact.

And as bad as you all were, everyone in the Snoke manor was scared of only one person; your father. He was a much older man now, and though he still held a significant amount of power over everyone in the house - it appeared he now had passed the torch on. All physical bouts and messy jobs were now Kylo's to execute, and it seemed he did them perfectly.

You had never seen or heard of him before. You wondered how new he was exactly, and how quick he had risen in the ranks to become your fathers most trusted man. He would have had to prove himself immensely, and the concept of what that possibly entailed both scared and intrigued you. You wondered what types of violence your father found to be grounds for proof of trust.

You made a mental note to ask Armitage how long he had been around, along with a few others things flying around your brain. Weirdly, they were all questions about Kylo Ren.

You decided to cool your thoughts, and continue small talk with Gwen. You asked about your brother, and what her new schedule was like since it hadn't appeared he had changed much. She confirmed that she spent most of her nights at Starkiller, watching your brother party with his friends.

You shared a few jokes at the expense of your family, especially when Lyon lost a game of pool and almost snapped the pool cue over his knee in anger. A glare from your father and his anger simmered down almost immediately. You finished your cigarette, though enjoying talking with Gwen you were thoroughly over this fucking situation. A drunk sausage fest with your family in which none of them even wanted to talk to you, to spend time with you. Your father could hardly stand the sight of you.

You gave him the benefit of the doubt - he had buried his daughter today, and looking at the face of your other estranged one was certainly not a priority he had to have. You expected nothing on arrival, and had already had a few days of drama free bliss. Really, your sisters death had the opposite reaction on your Dad than you thought it would.

You supposed you would enjoy it while you could. You thought it was going to be utter chaos here, loud arguments between you and your father, leading to a crescendo in which you would be forced to leave once more.

You decided to bid Gwen goodnight, finishing your drink in two big gulps you braved the walk to your father. Zig zagging around your brothers and the Snoke enforcers, you found your way to your Dad and Kylo. His eyes were focused on the drink in his hand, amber liquid swirling in a glass slowly. Kylo noticed you before he did.

"Dad?" You pulled him out of his reverie and he looked up. "I think I'm going to head to bed, I’m not use to New York time yet."

"Oh." He nodded, "Okay. Sleep well, kid."

You gave the faintest smile, eyes shooting to Kylo who stared you up and down. A curious look behind his eyes - like he knew you were lying. Though your father seemed completely fooled. You left immediately, trying to ignore the awkward goodbye with your father, you snuck out the doors and headed to your bedroom.

Checking your phone, it was only about 10 p.m. You figured jetlag would set in eventually, but after today’s days events you felt wide awake. You didn't want to go to sleep yet. Maybe you couldn't.

You shed out of your funeral clothes, getting changed into something far more comfortable. A white cropped t-shirt, dark jeans, and your trusted leather jacket. Slipping on some fresh socks and swapping you shoes for your black doc martins. You checked your appearance in the mirror before sighing. You looked good considering everything you had been through today.

Usually you looked like shit.

Grabbing keys, money, phone and smokes you locked your bedroom door, turned off the light and left out the window. It may have been almost ten years since you had done this, but it was a tried and true trick for sneaking out when you had more than 10 people staying at your house at any given time. Especially when some of those people's job were specifically to make sure people didn't get in or out without the family's knowledge. There was no way in hell you were going to make it out the front door without anyone finding out.

Or worse, Kylo.

You were hellbent on deterring his body-guarding for as long as you could; hopeful it would serve as eventual proof to your father that you did not need to be looked after. You didn't even want to think about how uncomfortable he made you feel.

Not in a bad way, you weren't scared of him like everyone seemed to be. But being in such close proximity was jarring in a certain way, despite his stoic, murderous presence, you couldn't stop staring at his face. At that scar, at those deep, brown eyes.

And at those lips.

He was hot, in an unconventional way, and you almost never found men sexy. For this reason alone you wanted to stay as far away as possible. You didn't even want to broach the reason of whatever the fuck had you thinking about Kylo Ren's lips.

There was a large trellis that covered almost the whole wall underneath your window. Covered by thick ivy vines that sprawled up most of the 3 story Snoke manor, you used this to sneak in and out of your room up until you were sent off to boarding school. And even when you came back for a Christmas once. It was a trick you had learned from watching Mallory sneak out when you were younger.

You poked your head out first, making sure you couldn't see anyone on a perimeter watch, another thing your father's lackeys did sometimes. Seeing the coast was clear, you positioned your feet and then moved out, leaving your window open for entry later. Making sure your footing was placed carefully and with a strong grip, you made your way down the side of the house. Your bedroom was on the second floor, though your house was notorious for high ceilings and you were pretty high up off the ground. Adrenaline kicked in and cooler heads prevailed as you made the climb down to the ground. Once your feet touched the grass underneath your window, you breathed a sigh of relief.

The garage was big enough to house all the vehicles of the multiple people who lived at your house. The entrance was under the south wing of the house, which was an easy, quick walk from your room. You made it there in a minute or two, careful to stay away from windows in case you were seen by anyone randomly gazing out. Opening the last garage door, the one that housed your precious car, you hopped in and started it up. Leaving the lights off, you shifted gears and made it out onto the driveway. Careful that anyone looking out a window or wandering around the property wouldn't be alerted by bright car lights. You were trying very hard not to be seen and you were hoping your hard work was going to pay off.

You had spent years perfecting this technique of Mallory’s.

You drove down the long, winding driveway guided by moonlight alone, until you reached the end. You flicked your lights on and took the exit onto the road. You exhaled a deep breath, one you didn't know you were holding. Paranoia relieved a little bit as you made your way down the street, your eyes still glanced at the rear view mirror looking for car lights that might follow.

You were half worried that Kylo would be trailing you, someone seeing you slinking around the property in the dark and sneaking out would definitely pique interest. You didn't want a bodyguard, especially one who's presence made you uneasy. In which way in particular, you weren't sure. But you wanted to be alone right now.

You had been alone for years and years on end before this moment - what had changed now that you needed a bodyguard? Mallory's death? Most likely. Being back in the country could've proved you to be an easier target too, you guessed.

However, you had been gone for so many years, and being the black sheep of the family did provide one comfort - no one outside the family really knew who you were. You were a taboo subject, rarely talked about and never seen. You weren't involved in the family business like your brother's were, and didn't go to classy fundraisers and socialite parties like Mallory did.

Not to mention you took Brazilian jiu jitsu for years when you were a kid - and you remembered some shit. You weren't lying when you tried to convince your father that you would be fine on your own.

It didn't take long to enter the city, and then find the towering skyscraper that was the Finalizer. It was a tall, dark building with gothic architecture encompassing the facade, contrasted beautifully with its elaborate but minimalist, neutral toned interior. A 5 star safe haven for the rich, famous and criminally inclined. Your father had made sure whatever secrets were experienced within, never had a chance of escape.

You pulled your vehicle into the valet area, shifting into park you hardly had enough time to grab your stuff before a young man opened your door for you.

“Welcome to the Finalizer, ma'am.”

You gave a half smile in thanks, walking forward to the grandiose gold double doors that served as the entrance. Another young man opened them with a smile, welcoming you to the hotel.

Gold light from over hanging chandeliers illuminated the room. Bright mosaic patterns intertwined with white marble made up the floor. An expansive room with nothing but elevators behind a desk with two more people behind it. You were glad you remembered the pass code, unwanting to make conversation with people you didn't know. Not today.

You made a beeline straight for the elevator, stepping into the mirrored room, throwing a smile at the girl behind the desk as you passed. The numbers for all the floors were illuminated by a dim light, the top 3 floors reserved penthouses for permanent residences given out by your father. The very top floor was for family, a sort of unusual halfway house. For when his children couldn’t stand being near him but lacked the funds to move into their own abode. It was Roman's home once upon a time, then it was empty save for the odd weekend or two when your brothers were too drunk to leave the city, and then eventually Mallory’s home. You didn't know what your father was going to do with it now. If your sisters body hadn't been found in it then you would have been tempted to move in.

Although, depending on how bad it got at home - maybe you could be easily convinced.

A small keypad was situated next to the floor buttons, and you entered the pass code for your sisters floor, something that wasn't required of irregular hotel stayers who had simple key cards for their rooms.

The elevator rode all the way to the top, and you were lucky to be alone. The surge of the lift paired with the g-force, you felt your heartbeat rapidly fasten. You tried to peg its inception down to the anxiety that now clouded your mind. You were about to enter your sister's apartment after all.

The last place she was when she was alive.

You remembered your father telling you the place had been cleaned after the forensic evidence had been collected. You hadn't been here in so long that you hardly remembered it. You were shipped off to boarding school long before you were old enough to spend drunken weekends here.

The doors to the elevator opened right up into the apartment. Separating with a 'ding' it revealed the almost pitch black penthouse. A little stream of light from the lift exposed a golden beam down the otherwise dark hallway. You turned the torch on your phone to it's brightest setting, walking out into the penthouse. The doors shut behind you as you found the light switch, and the penthouse was suddenly bathed in light.

Tall, white walls of the hallway gave way to an open planned penthouse. Floor to ceiling glass revealed the neon New York skyline below. The spacious living room gave way to a kitchen on the far left and bedrooms on the far right. A garden laden outside area showed numerous seating with a table, a hot tub, and an infinity pool that disappeared off the edge.

It was clad in dark fabrics and white paint. A shiny, new, modern penthouse that was starkly different than the Snoke manor. It was sparse with furniture, minimalist in its decor; simple but effectively pretty. Mallory had kept the place nice and tidy, artwork and pictures littered the penthouse walls, giving it a burst of colour that was proof of her bubbly personality living here.

You shed your jacket, throwing it over the back of the couch, your items discarded along with it. Your eyes darted around the apartment, eager to find something out of place, unusual enough that you would notice. Though, your lack of experience with the space provided some trouble.

Mallory had taught you a lot growing up - how to escape down a trellis on the side of the house to avoid being detected was one of them. One of the others was having a good hiding spot.

Andrew Snoke was a controlling father growing up, especially with his daughters. And even more so with his favorite, Mallory. You didn't blame her for turning to drugs in her turbulent youth, not with the pressure she was under. Your brothers had done all that and worse and they hadn't been crucified for it.

And because of all of that, Mallory had taught you that hallowed out books, sun-glass cases in underwear drawers, and envelopes behind hung pictures were all great hiding spots.

You made your way to the bedrooms, finding the master that Mallory called hers. Everything was clean, put away, though a glance at the walk-in closet and the mass of designer dresses it was easy to deduce her presence. There was a large bed in the middle, side tables either side. Various artwork hung on the walls and the long, wooden shelf in the room was littered with pictures of her and her friends.

You noticed a few of them by face, probably knew all of them by name the amount she talked about them - though you couldn't tell who was who. Mallory's smiling face was what caught your eyes and cause you to still. Shining, bright eyes and a wide smile that you were familiar with. One that you would never see again. Your throat tightened at the thought.

You darted over to the side tables with purpose, to forget the overwhelming sadness creeping into your mind and replace it with something productive instead. You rifled through its contents, opening drawers and quickly sifting through objects. Pushing things to the side you safely checked for a false bottom of each shelf, but found nothing in particular. Moisturizers, sleep masks, and a pack of cigarettes - though nothing special.

You continued your rampage through her room, looking behind artwork hung on the walls, looking under the bed, under the pillows, in between the mattress and the bed frame, then moving to the closet. You checked in her boots, making sure nothing was concealed in there, before becoming desperate and looking in her shoe boxes and the pockets of her coats. Heaving a sigh of contempt, and resigning to the notion that there was nothing in this room you decided to move on.

You made your way to the kitchen - checking cereal boxes, and the freezer, large tins that she kept nestled in the pantry. You checked anything and everything you thought could be a possibility, but nothing seemed suspicious. Nothing was awkwardly placed, nothing moved every so often that dirt patterns formed; everything was normal.

You ventured over to the living room. You checked behind the artwork first, and behind one you find a safe built into the wall. Your interest was piqued momentarily before realizing these were in all your fathers properties - and housed usually large amounts of cash, jewels, important legal documents and the like. You were looking for something in particula, and figured it would not be inside a safe your father had access to.

You knew Mallory kept a journal, she had as a teenager, and once she grew up and tried to stay sober she had one documenting her thoughts. Something her sponsor told her might be able to help with her sobriety. You hoped if anything her diary would hold some impertinent information. Anything.

However, you were not inclined to think a diary she wrote in everyday was kept in a safe in the living room. Too many processes for something so ridiculous as a journal. You figured she was still like she was growing up - in that she preferred to hide things from the prying men in our family - but she wouldn't go to those lengths. Not if our father had the code to said safe.

You would ask him about it later, but resigned to not give up. It had to be somewhere. You were confident it was not in the safe.

A large flat screen was set against the wall, a wide fireplace underneath. Built into the wall either side were some bookcases, not housing anything but photos, some CDs, and ornaments that Mallory had collected over the years that obviously meant something to her. And a card from you, from her last birthday. Nothing pretty or pink, or particularly special but simply declaring your love for your sister.

You placed it back on the shelf, eyes moving over to a trophy from Mallory's high school days, a cheer-leading trophy, sitting next to it a picture of her winning prom queen, next to her tiara that she blatantly kept. You smiled, if only at the ridiculous nature and stark reality of how different you two were. Things she cared about weren't even on your radar - you two didn't have anything in common. Lived on different continents in fact, and still the two of you got together and it was some of the only moments you felt you were truly happy. You would drink, or maybe smoke a little pot together and would end up in stitches of laughter, faces and sides burning in pain. You were definitely going to miss her humor.

A smile curved your lips and you glanced over, eyes catching a gold trophy that caused you to still. You had seen it before, you remembered it briefly, and as your eyes shot down to the engraved tag, it read your name.

Your hands gripped the trophy, a gold metal showing a girl doing a roundhouse kick in a martial arts stance. "Holy shit." The words flew from your mouth without thought.

Mallory had kept it.

~~~~

You and competed in over 6 different competitions, fought in over 22 different matches, becoming the champion for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the tri-state area for girls under 18. And you were only 13 years old at the time.

Years and years of rigorous training had led to this point, years of your youth spent on grueling grappling techniques and perfecting your punches. To this referee now announcing your name, a round of applause from all the parents in the stands stung your ears. He shook your hand, handing you the trophy. A flash from a camera blinded you momentarily, and you searched for familiar faces in the crowd.

Your eyes locked with Mallory's. She was standing up, clapping as hard as she could, a proud smile on her face. You looked at the seat next to her - reserved for your father.

It was empty.

Your heart dropped. You mustered a smile, praying for it to be over so you could go back to the changing rooms and release the tears that pooled in the corner of your eyes.

You locked your gaze with Mallory once more, and noticing the look on your face, and you glancing at the empty seat next to her, her mouth uttered an apology, providing a sincere look.

You bit your lip, squeezing the trophy as hard as you could in your hands until it was over. Once you were clapped off the stage with the girl who came 2nd and 3rd place, you ran to the changing rooms to find a lonely corner you could get out of your fighting robes.

You prayed for the tears to go away, to any God who was out there that could show one ounce of mercy to you. But no one answered. You were alone, and once one tear fell it was hard to stop the rest. Your father couldn't even come to your championship fight? He never devoted any time to you ever, and you were doing this because it made him vaguely proud in some way. Even still, he couldn't give you one second of his fucking time?

He had given you nothing, and you had done this all for him.

You sniffled, throwing your bag over your shoulder and haphazardly slipping your shoes on, you exited the changing room to meet Mallory outside the stadium.

"Oh my god! Congratulations!" She swept you up in a hug, perfume wafting through your nostrils, your face was buried in her blonde hair. "First place? Hell yes!"

You scoffed. "Yeah..."

She dampened at the sight of you, facade falling slightly. "Oh, come on, kid. Let's go get some ice cream, my shout."

"I don't know," you hitched the bag up your shoulder, "I don't really feel like ice cream."

She sighed, stepping forward to grab your hand that clutch the trophy. "I'm so sorry he didn't come, okay, but-"

"Did he say why?"

"Well, he just said he was busy and he had to-"

"He's always too busy." You interrupted her again. "He doesn't give a shit about me. I haven't seen him in weeks, and he's the one that put me into this martial arts bullshit!"

Mallory's weakening facade was demolished, and she burst into tears. "I'm so sorry."

You sighed deeply, though it had been evident you had been crying you chastised her regardless. "Why are you crying?"

"Because," she wiped her tears away, shifting her large handbag further up her shoulder, "Because I'm sorry. I'm sorry for Dad, for how he is and how he treats you." You weren't sure how but it seemed like she got even more upset. "And I'm sorry that I was fortunate enough to be nourished by her growing up and you were too young to experience-"

"Whatever." You cut her off again, before she could finish, she was crying with sympathy, empathy, whatever the fuck it was that caused her tears. If she finished her sentence you knew you would be reduced to the same fate. "Can you please take me home? I'm done."

You glanced over to the side, a stadium bin free standing. You walked over, taking one last look at the trophy before you threw it into the trash can. You glanced at Mallory, and then walked to the car park where she had her vehicle.You didn’t look back.

~~~

The two of you had made your way home, driving in silence. You remembered that day vividly now. Mallory was 8 years older than you were, so she had her license, and her own car. A whole life of her own. She was in college, eager to drink and socialize with her friends.

And then something changed.

You had never been close when you were younger, but after that day she had made a gratuitous effort of being in your life. Of supporting you emotionally and providing wisdom and comfort when you needed it. Of being a constant in your life, even when you left for boarding school. She was the only lifeline you had in this family. She had taken the role of father, and mother, and adopted those qualities to try give you a better life.

And she had kept it.

You clutched the trophy in your hands, even tighter. She must have picked it out of the trash, put it in her handbag and then followed you to the car.

And she kept it all this time. Never telling you about it, never trying to offer it back to you. She kept it as a proud memento on a shelf in her living room for herself. Your throat tightened, your lip trembling as you felt tears gather in your eyes. You couldn't hold it back, irrevocable sadness you had been keeping at a simmer turned into full on misery. You wept for times passed, over memories you shared with Mallory and the reality that you would never create any more. You cried over the possibility of the suspicious circumstances that surrounded her death, that someone could have taken her away from you before her time.

And you cried because you were alone, once again.

#carpe noctem #kylo x reader #kylo ren x reader #kylo ren fanficiton #kylo ren au #kylo ren imagine #adam driver x reader

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chaoticneutralwriter · 4 years

Text

Intermission: The Demon In Detail

You think a great way to enhance your experience in watching anything supernatural related is to have an actual demon beside you but.... that’s just your opinion.

guardian demon! Jimin x reader

word count: 2.6k

genre: fluff, romance, supernatural, slow-burn, comedy

Related Works: see Masterlist under guardian demon!Jimin

A/N: An intermission! Can you guess what I’ve gotten myself into recently? LOL I thought it’d be cute to have something like this happen since once we get the ball rolling...not so many cute moments later on 🤐🤐🤐 (and the next chapter I have a feeling is going to be CHUNKY so...a little treat for you before that ;)) So anybody who hasn’t watched Good Omens yet but were planning to, some spoilers in that chapter! And as such, I don’t own anything related to Good Omens the show or the characters involved. Otherwise, enjoy!

“I thought you were supposed to be napping?”

Your gaze only shifts marginally away from your laptop screen to the sound of your sudden guest before flitting back.

“I was gonna just watch one episode….” You mumble petulantly but it was the honest truth. You really were planning on watching one episode of this series you picked up as a way to get you started and use it to give you that final push to knock out from being so tired.

Clearly that’s not gonna happen anymore.

Jimin gives a shake of his head, a little exasperated from your antics, not really annoyed but he does have to wonder; why are you lying on your bed like that? From his place by your doorway, all he sees is a mound of blanket that had been wrapped up into a lump with no doubt you underneath it. You’re using the giant plush calico cat shaped like a bean as a pillow, the one he got you on a whim one day and he hasn’t seen you without it since. He thinks its cute but there’s an actual, perfectly good pillow that you could use just laying not even two feet away, in fact, there’s plenty of room for you to be laying comfortably in and yet for some reason —

You’re curled into a ball, at the very end of your bed, your desk chair facing you, laptop propped onto the seat.

It’s like you MacGyver-ed your way into making things a lot more difficult for you.

You feel your mattress dip, causing you to shift with a grunt, pausing the episode so that you don’t miss out on anything as you turn your attention fully to your supernatural guardian. He’s taken a seat beside your head, one muscular thigh resting temptingly close to you. You bury your cheeks further into the plushness of your stuffed animal in hopes of hiding a creeping blush and smother the urge to jump ship with your pillow for something better.

“What are you watching that’s so interesting you forget the need to sleep?” Jimin asks, dark eyes staring inquisitively at the paused screen which has David Tennant and Michael Sheen bickering about what to do once they find the antichrist.

“It’s called ‘Good Omens’ — it’s about a demon and an angel who’s trying to prevent the apocalypse from happening when the antichrist, who’s a kid, realizes his true powers.”

You miss the way Jimin blinks, brows furrowing and absolutely flabbergasted at you when you push play again to continue the episode. He cocks his head from left to right like a puzzled puppy before he’s able to finally let the synopsis settle.

“I’m sorry what now?”

“So there’s a demon named Crowley, right? He’s the one in black there and an angel named Aziraphale who’s the one in white and they’ve somehow became really good friends throughout the years so they’ve like — oh you know what,” You pause, getting distracted yourself and not being able to re-explain the plot up until now while also taking in new developments. “Just rewatch the last two episodes, the series is only like six episodes long anyways.”

Jimin goes to complain, thinking how utterly ridiculous it would be from your paraphrased explanation alone but you’re already clicking back to the first episode. He clamps his mouth shut, purse his lips and exhales a quiet sigh through his nose, leaning back to might as well get comfortable. He’ll never quite understand a human’s obsession with his kind and angels to the point where they’ll come up with a million different ways to interpret their image — from monstrous looking creatures (on both sides) to simply more human-like supernatural entities, he thinks he’s seen them all over the years.

Oh whatever, he thinks, it’ll just be one episode and that way, he can at least say he didn’t give it a shot.

Four episodes later, you’ve somehow managed to sprawl out over each other, both equally as invested in the show. You had to hide your smile every time you glance over at Jimin who, every so often, tilts his head and then either snorts or hums noncommittally at the show’s interpretations. It also piques your curiousity on what Jimin finds approving or disapproving so whenever that happens, you usually ask him a question, even if you do sound like a two-year old discovering the world for the first time.

“So are there really four horsemen of the apocalypse?”

“There are…. Or were. They’re like Greek Titans now…. It’ll take a lot to summon them all at once.”

“Like the anti-Christ?” 

“I can probably assure you that Satan won’t be having a son any time soon.” Jimin replies and as an afterthought, his nose wrinkles. It’s weird to imagine one of your bosses having a kid, let alone imagine him to be the father type.

“…Huh.” You leave it at that, flopping your head back to rest against the mounds of pillows. Halfway through episode three, Jimin started to scold you in the way you’re laying on your bed and took it upon himself to actually drag you to the head of the bed so he can prop you on the pillows. Well…For the most part you were resting on the pillows behind you but with Jimin’s arm thrown out in the mix, you find at times you’re lying on the pillows and using Jimin’s arm as one too.

The stranger thing is that he hasn’t said anything about it.

“Have you ever met Beelzebub before? Are they like the ‘celebrities’ of demons?”

“They work in a different office division than mine, so I never see them — heard they’re not that great though.”

“Office division?” You laugh, tilting your head to shoot him an incredulous look. “So Hell runs like a corporation?”

“Where do you think concepts like capitalism come from?”

You let out another boisterous laugh, head flinging back and knocking lightly against his forearm. “Well, damn…”

His own lips curl into a smile at the sound.

It’s late into the evening by the time you get to the last episode where Crowley and Aziraphale help Adam have the confidence to tell Satan that he’s not his dad (always wanna hear something, ugly ass fucking…). You were very taken aback by the scene when it happened, finally seeing Satan for the first time, the big reveal but you found yourself more interested and far more amused by Jimin who had bursted out laughing so hard he was squeaking and creasing over himself. It then goes on to Adam restoring the world but then Aziraphale and Crowley get captured to be punished for treason.

“Is there such thing as ‘The Great Plan?’”

You vaguely feel Jimin’s fingers idly twirl and comb through strands of your hair as he thinks. Normally you’d feel embarrassed and shy away but the sensation is so nice and relaxing that you’re practically melting into his side. Plus, you’re very warm and cozy next to him.

“No, not that I’m aware of. I think angels already have too much of a superiority complex to instigate a war on Earth just to prove that they’re better than demons.”

“Well, that’s reassuring to hear I guess…”

You hear him chuckle breathily. “If it does happen though, I’ll save you…I guess.”

You scoff playfully, “Oh don’t worry, you won’t be able to get rid of me even if you tried.”

“And strangely, I don’t doubt that.”

It makes you smile smugly. The scene plays out in front of you as Crowley, disguised as Aziraphale and vice versa, gets their appropriate sentences (death by hell fire and death by holy water bath tub) but come away unscathed thanks to their switched disguises. You’ve long since learned holy water does in fact, harm demons the way its portrayed in the show (at least common demons, Jimin had explained killing someone like Satan with holy water would probably require a whole tank full and a soak for seven days) as well as other confirmed myths, like how demons and angels are actually supposed to look like.

“Demons and angels both have the ability to take on any sort of appearance they wish, as proven.” He cups one hand against his cheek and bats his eyelashes at you. You shake your head with a roll of your eyes but point taken.

“But how do they really look like? No glamour or anything.”

Jimin pauses, face slipping into a sort of rueful pensive look before he says, “Not pretty, I’ll tell you that. Demons are creatures deprived of the light, so they lurk in the dark, twisted by their very nature and obsession to corrupt. Only those who are foolish or wish to die would stand in the true face of one.”

You blink, taking in his words completely entranced even though he’s explaining something that should be terrifying and sounds a lot like a warning. Well, you suppose it would’ve worked if you didn’t already have your fair share of encounters (and would also help if you weren’t currently snuggled up against one). Besides that, you could’ve also sworn that you had seen Jimin in his ‘true’ form before, right when you first met him in fact. But then again… You pause, correcting yourself by recalling back the memory — he had been shrouded in shadow so the most you had seen of him were his striking, glowing red eyes.

So in conclusion, you hadn’t seen his true form.

Your lips purse; call it morbid curiosity but you’re a little disappointed. You’re pulled from your thoughts by a tap on your nose.

“Don’t get any funny ideas.” Jimin reprimands and though it sounds lighthearted enough, you hear the underlying seriousness of it.

“I wasn’t.” You say defensively, but then add, “What about angels? Do they fit the stereotypical halo and wings image?”

Your guardian smiles but it comes off more like a grimace and simply says, “I think you’re better off not knowing.”

Well that doesn’t sound ominous at all.

You voice as much however Jimin never goes into further detail than that. You begrudgingly drop the topic.

The episode closes with Aziraphale and Crowley changing back to their original selves and going on a lunch date. You let the credits roll, too comfortable to move otherwise. Jimin doesn’t bother moving either, that or maybe it’s the fact that you have his arm trapped underneath your head.

“How’d you find the series?” You ask, turning slightly to Jimin.

You see him shrug, angling his face towards you as he says, “It was…interesting; got a few things right surprisingly. But an angel being friends with a demon….” He shakes his head, “Yeah, that will never happen.”

“Hey now, I’m sure not all angels are assholes…” You argue, “Just like how not all demons are either…”

“Oh? And how are you so sure of that?”

“Well, I’ve met you and Jungkook and you’re both not that bad.”

Jimin hums, a low sound that vibrates from his chest and you barely register the flex of his arm beneath you before you’re hauled up from your spot. A squeak escapes past your lips as you’re suddenly chest to chest with Jimin, face mere inches from each other and those gleaming red ruby eyes staring straight back at you.

“Such sweet words, but I’m afraid that’s how you get killed my cherub — if not by them,” His voice drops until it’s nothing but a husky whisper when he says, “then by me.”

You think you stop breathing for a second, so caught off guard from how close you are to this unnecessarily gorgeous demon. His warm breath tickles your cheeks and you can practically count each long lashes over those mesmerizing eyes, and how full those pretty pink lips are….

You swallow nervously, only hoping that he wouldn’t notice but who were you kidding, being this close to him — if that doesn’t give you away then no doubt the rapid beating of your heart would’ve. You turn away, no longer able to withstand eye contact lest you want to end up drowning in those crimson depths and in a last ditch effort to distract him by any means, you mumble weakly, “D-Don’t be a such Crowley….”

Jimin blinks, confused. You think he’s going to laugh at you until his brows furrows, completely displeased. “I’m not a Crowley… at all.”

“Yes, you are.” You shoot back, grinning at the way he pouts. He scoffs, rolling you off of him in disgust and you laugh as you go, plopping back onto the bed.

“Be grateful I don’t have big creepy snake eyes. I could if I wanted to you know, but that would completely ruin my aesthetics.” Jimin argues, arms crossed.

“…What about wings?” You ask, blinking owlishly to meet Jimin’s eyes which had faded back to a warm brown. When he quirks an eyebrow at you, you elaborate. “You never really told me if demons have wings like in the show. Or if it’s even possible.”

His mouth opens as if to respond to you but then after a brief thought, he stops himself. You don’t mean anything by asking, simply curious is all but the way Jimin looks off, deep in contemplation has you a bit concerned. Just when the thought to break the sudden tension crosses your mind, Jimin exhales through his nose.

“To be honest, I don’t really know the answer to that one cherub. Maybe we did or maybe not at all — demons were once angels after all, or so I was told.”

You think he sounded a bit wistful near the end, the quiet sombreness of his tone tugging at your heart strings. However, Jimin doesn’t let you linger on it as he abruptly gets up, stretching his arms over his head and letting out a loud, exaggerated groan, effectively erasing any traces of it. “Anyways, I’m off. Your roommate should be home soon so I’ll see you whenever.”

Jimin turns to walk out of your room but you’re overcome with the urge to ease whatever emotion you unintentionally triggered for him. So you find yourself blurting out, “Well whether you did or not, I think wings would’ve looked p-pretty cool on you regardless…”

Your face feels like it may as well be on fire as you tense in trepidation, seeing Jimin halt in his steps. You can’t tell what his reaction is with his back turned towards you, so you wait, teeth chewing on your bottom lip and your calico plushie clenched in your hands like a stress ball. Then, you see him tilt his head, throwing you a look over his shoulder and that infamous smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

“Well, obviously that’s a given.”

The breath you’d been holding wheezes out in a silent laugh. You shake your head and watch Jimin disappear, obviously very pleased with himself if the swagger in his step is anything to go by.

He might deny that he’s anything like Crowley, but to you, Jimin is more like the fictional demon than he realizes. Perhaps that was why he was your favourite character in the series. However when it comes down to it, you'd choose Jimin over Crowley being your guardian demon any day.

With or without wings.

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sleepless-in-starbucks · 5 years

Text

If You Love Me Let Me Go (Please Don’t)

Read on Ao3

Summary: It's just ten minutes. Ten minutes to make sure Virgil actually goes to bed, and then Logan will get back to work. Just ten minutes... Warnings: Sleep-deprivation, a mug breaks (no one’s injured though), Logan’s techincally overworking himself but it’s not a main plot point or anything Pairing: Platonic analogical Author’s note: Written as a birthday present for the oh-so-incredible @blinksinbewilderment She’s awfully talented, so please go give her Tumblr a look. Also she’s techincally in this fic ;)

It was not uncommon to find Logan up at three am. Between editing Roman’s ideas, planning schedules for Thomas, and generally making sense of everything that had gone on throughout the day, he was often too busy to get his work done during the day.

Normally he’d work in his room, to avoid being caught and given a lecture about the importance of sleep from the Moral side, leaving his work in his room when he got water so he could claim it was just a late night wake-up instead of a work break. He was more behind than usual, however, and had brought his laptop downstairs with him for the water run.

He set the kettle on the stove, sitting down and organizing Thomas’s schedule for the week while he waited for it to warm. He planned to take the water upstairs with him, back to the safety of his room.

Logan’s plans for this were foiled when the kettle started to hiss and he stood up to grab it, having to pause for a moment when the room shifted around him. Or, more accurately, he perceived the room shifting around him as he wobbled. Sleep-deprivation was starting to rear its metaphorically ugly head with physical symptoms.

Logically, the best way to counteract this was with sleep. But Logan had a schedule to finish and three more rather nonsensical ideas to edit, along with one possibly usable one. Logan would sleep once those were finished.

With this in mind, Logan poured his hot water and sat back down at the table to continue working. He was fairly certain attempting to make his way back to his room would result in exhaustion. Whether that would take form as not finishing any work or collapsing halfway down the hall was unclear, but both were situations he’d rather avoid. Even if staying in the kitchen risked being found out by Patton.

It had been an hour since that decision, and more water was warming as Logan worked on editing Roman’s first nonsensical idea. The schedule was hesitantly finished, and now Logan was trying to decide if the words he had been trying to read for ten minutes weren’t making sense because he was tired, or because the words were written by Roman.

He was happy to decide this was a Roman problem as he moved to the next one. The kettle started to quietly squeal, and Logan moved from his work to take it off the burner before anyone woke up.

The sound of uncoordinated movements and thumping that suggested someone coming down the stairs told him he had failed. Logan sighed, pouring his glass before turning around, already resigned to finding a sleepy Patton ready to lovingly, but toughly, chew him out for working at such an early hour.

Patton wasn’t there, however; instead, Logan found Virgil watching him, looking both tired and high-strung. Before Logan could say anything, either in self-defense or otherwise, Virgil asked, “Tea time?”

Logan frowned, not sure how to respond, before he realized Virgil was less looking at him than he was the kettle behind him. “Oh.” Logan said in understanding, glancing at the kettle before looking back at Virgil. “Would you like some tea?”

Virgil just blinked in bewilderment at him, and Logan decided even if Virgil hadn’t come down for tea, the soothing drink Logan knew for a fact to be his favorite would do him good. While Virgil continued to stand in place and stare, Logan pulled a dark mug covered in constellations out of the cupboard- his own, but he had seen Virgil trace the patterns between the stars before to help calm him down- and found a chamomile tea bag.

He poured the water, plunking in the bag. He filled his own cup with the hot water as well, watching the tea bag and cheating a little bit with the powers of the Imagination (something he normally preferred to leave alone) to soak it faster. By the time his cup was full, Virgil’s tea was ready.

Picking them both up, Logan turned to offer Virgil his, only to find him no longer standing where he had been. Logan turned his head, looking for Virgil, and startling almost hard enough to drop the cups when he found him a few inches from the right side of his face.

“Apologies, Virgil.” Logan said, noticing Virgil’s eyes seemed very wide and assuming his own startle had frightened the clearly very tired side. “I didn’t see you there.”

Virgil didn’t respond, simply extending his hand. Logan tentatively placed his mug in Virgil’s hand, worried for a moment that it would slip right through the other’s fingers. It didn’t, Virgil clutching it tightly as if he were afraid of that exact possibility.

Taking a small sip, Logan watched in relief as Virgil’s shoulders lost their stressed hunch and his eyelids drooped. He yawned before starting to shuffle towards the stairs, singing off-key to himself. Logan wasn’t upset he hadn’t thanked him- Virgil was very clearly out of it. He’d probably remember in the morning and thank Logan by leaving him a note slipped under his door.

Logan leaned against the counter, sipping his own drink and listening to Virgil’s quiet singing, giving himself a moment to breathe before plunging back into his work.

The gnashing teeth and criminal tongues conspire against the odds

But they haven’t see the best of us yet

Logan furrowed his brow when Virgil stopped, halfway through the kitchen, taking another sip of his tea before singing,

If you love me let me gooooo

Holding the ‘go’ at a shaky pitch, Virgil let go of the mug, watching it as it shattered on the floor. Logan jerked backwards, cursing slightly as he slammed his hip into the counter he had been resting on.

Virgil, staring at the mess, giggled to himself. “Spill the tea, sis.” He said before giggling even more, as if that was the funniest thing in the world.

Logan placed his own cup down, carefully walking around Virgil and the mess, keeping an eye on Virgil as he continued to laugh to himself. He had already guessed that Virgil was tired, but it was apparently worse than he had suspected.

Now standing in front of him, Logan noticed Virgil was swaying slightly in place. His feet were bare, and with the danger zone of still hot tea and shards so close around them, Logan didn’t want to try and guide the unbalanced side over.

Instead, stepping as close to the mess as he could in his socks, Logan awkwardly picked up Virgil and lifted him over the circle, the other side still laughing to himself while Logan set him down on the nearest counter. After checking that his feet weren’t injured, Logan left Virgil to swing his legs while he cleaned up the mess.

“There.” He said to himself, throwing out the last shards before focusing once more on Virgil. He was still wearing a lopsided smile, stringing together words that made no sense as he sang them with no tune.

Logan sighed. “You need to go to bed.”

Virgil shook his head, sobering at the idea. “No. Bed’s cold.”

“It can’t be any colder than it is any other night, Virgil.” Logan reasoned, offering a hand to help Virgil off the counter (he had doubts as to Virgil’s ability to do so by himself). Virgil just shook his head again.

Logan frowned. He knew he couldn’t just let Virgil stay up any later, but the anxious side wasn’t going to make the task of getting him to bed easy.

He took a moment to analyze the situation. He and Virgil were the same size, given they shared the exact same figurative body, and while Virgil could outpower any side in moments of fight-or-flight, he currently didn’t look up to the task of holding himself upright. Plus, Logan doubted Virgil weighed much more than a complete set of Harry Potter books, maybe two.

With these thoughts in mind, Logan once more approached Virgil and, before the other could react, swept him off the counter, holding him bridal style. Where he was expecting resistance, however, Logan found Virgil more than happy to be carried, snuggling closer into his chest.

“Where we goin’?” Virgil mumbled after a moment, Logan slowly climbing the stairs.

“To your room.” Logan answered. “So you can get some sleep, as you are clearly in need of it.”

“But bed cold.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Don’t wanna be cold.”

Logan gently pushed open Virgil’s door with his foot, shivering slightly as he entered. Virgil wasn’t kidding. His room was chilly.

“I am sure that with a sufficient number of blankets you will be perfectly warm.” Logan assured him as he approached the large, dramatically goth-style bed in the corner of the room. To his satisfaction, he noticed there were already several blankets spread about the bed, saving him the effort of searching for some.

Gently placing him down, Logan reached over Virgil to pull the mass of blankets over him, Virgil wiggling and mumbling about the cold as he did so. Once he was sure Virgil was securely cocooned, Logan made to leave the room.

He was stopped, however, by Virgil’s arm snaking out of his blanket burrito to grab Logan’s wrist. Logan attempted to pull away, but Virgil’s grip was surprisingly strong.

“Warm.” Virgil tugged on Logan’s wrist. “Stay.”

“I have work to do.”

Virgil didn’t respond this time, instead flopping his head to look at Logan with sleepily blinking eyes and his tired attempt at puppy eyes. He tugged at Logan’s wrist again.

Logan sighed before taking a seat next to Virgil on his bed. He doubted it would take Virgil long to fall asleep, the anxious side already curling up around his arm, and he could get back to work then.

He gave it ten minutes tops before Virgil would be asleep. Yawning, Logan pulled his legs onto the bed, stretching them out. Ten minutes to relax. Then he could get back to work.

Virgil curled closer to him, pressing against Logan’s side as he tugged more of Logan’s arm into his grasp, the blankets falling out of place as he sought out the better heat source. Logan leaned a little into Virgil as well, moving his free hand to run fingers through Virgil’s hair, almost completely laying down on the bed to make the position more comfortable.

He yawned again. Virgil’s bed was surprisingly comfy, but it didn’t change the fact that Virgil really was right about it being cold. Subconsciously, he shuffled even closer to Virgil.

Virgil shifted in response, pulling Logan’s arm around him as he rolled over. So it’d be a little harder to escape the hold. Once Virgil was asleep it would still be relatively easy to slip away. Logan ignored the blurring at the edges of his vision as he sunk deeper into the mattress. Ten minutes of relaxation, and he’d be ready to get back to work. His eyes fluttered shut.

Just ten minutes.

Humming happily to himself, Patton bounced into the kitchen, expecting to find Logan sipping coffee and already working.

He stopped when, instead, he found Logan’s laptop open at the table, the screen black. Attempting to use the mousepad, Patton found it wasn’t just asleep, but instead completely dead.

Frowning, Patton closed the laptop and headed upstairs, paying more attention to the rooms than he had when he first woke up. He stopped at Virgil’s before he got to Logan’s, curious as to why the door was ajar.

Patton peeked in and couldn’t help but quietly coo at the sight he found- Logan and Virgil were sprawled across the bed, Virgil tucked into Logan’s sleepy grip, both of them fast asleep.

He quickly snapped a pic- both to look at and treasure later, and to show proof that he knew they would get together before they inevitably did- before silently closing the door. After all, his boys really did need their sleep.

And their cuddles.

#ts logan #ts virgil #ts patton #platonic analogical #blink #happy birthday blink!!!#ts sides #sander sides #fanfic #fanfiction

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soldierswar · 4 years

Text

Oh Baby

Dad!BuckyXReader. Angst/fluff

You could read this as either the first one-shot to my fic, sick. Or you could read this as a prologue. Either way works. :)

Plot: You have a new baby that you are madly in love with. But the baby blues are stealing some of that joy away from you. Luckily you have Bucky, a great father and husband to help you get through it.

TW: Depression

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You were madly in love. You loved your 3-week-old baby more than anyone you had ever loved in your whole life. In your eyes, she was the most beautiful human being that you had ever set eyes on. She had her dad’s sky-blue eyes, with tiny flecks of the exact same color green of your eyes around her pupils. When she was born, she had a full head of Bucky’s chocolate brown hair, your nose, your chin, and even some of Bucky’s facial expressions. You wondered what other features of yours and his she would inherit as time went on and she grew older. Suddenly the thought of her growing older than she was now started to make you feel sad. A lot of things made you feel sad nowadays.

You didn’t know why you felt this way almost all of the time. The day Frankie was born was the happiest day of your life; despite the idea of ever having a kid was one of the most unplanned event that you could ever imagine. You and Bucky had disclosed, and agreed that you never wanted to have kids. Your lives were too busy, and you both loved what you did. Plus the idea of having a kid was absolutely terrifying. You didn’t know how to be parents. But one day almost 7 months ago while minutes away from taking off on a mission that didn’t involve Bucky, you were called off of the jet only to be yelled at by your CO for trying to get on a mission while 12 weeks pregnant. 12 weeks pregnant? You had scoffed at your CO for even suggesting that that was a possibility. In fact, you laughed in his face as though it were some weird prank. Someone had obviously planted those results on you. There was no fucking way. True, you had admittedly skipped out on your bi-monthly medical check-ups three times until that day. So you came to the conclusion that someone found out about it and planted it on your medical records so that they could get away with doing what they wanted for at least a little while longer. 3 pregnancy tests later, and a follow-up doctor’s appointment the very next day confirmed their own statements. And yet, although you had both been scared out of your minds for nearly 24 hours, when you heard the sound of that strong heartbeat echo around the room, you felt an overwhelming sense of calm. You had a hard time mustering up the courage to look at the screen at first, but in Bucky’s eyes you could see an expression of awe…even love while fixating on the footage of that little form resting calmly inside you. That look alone gave you the courage to turn around and see what was your little girl. You were then both immediately in love. So why were you feeling like this right now? This was supposed to be the happiest time of your life. Sure, you were a little (very) sleep deprived, our nipples felt like raw, engorged chew toys, and you were recovering from an incredibly long, and difficult labor/birth that bordered on traumatic. It was eventually the best day of your life, but even thinking about that pain made you start to tremble. Why did everyone say that you would forget the pain in a split second? Now for the past week or so, Frankie would start wailing, and she would not stop for a long time. You had no idea what she was crying about, or how to fix it. You felt so helpless in those moments, especially when she would cry angrily as though to tell you to figure out what the fuck she needed, and now. Now was one of those moments. Her diaper was clean, you tried feeding her but she refused; you tried rocking her, and putting her down for a nap. And yet, nothing was helping. You stood in the middle of her nursery with her head resting on your shoulder as you softly bounced her, rocking her side to side. Nothing. You felt tears start to form in your eyes. You didn’t know what you were doing wrong. Maybe she just hated you. Bucky swiftly walked into the room. “Y/N, is everything oka-” “We’re fine,” you snapped. “Y/N, just let me take her for a little while,” “I said, we’re fine! You think I don’t know how to take care of her?” This caused her to cry even harder. You shot him a severe look, signaling him to go away. When he finally left the room, the tears that you tried to hold back began to flow, and you broke out into silent sobs so as to try not to upset her even more. You were failing, and you didn’t know what to do about it. . . . After another half hour, she had finally tired out and went to sleep. But God knows how for how much longer now. You made your way to the living room and plopped on the couch and hugged your knees in an upright position. You nearly started rocking yourself, but you didn’t have it in you to even do that. You didn’t even have the energy to push yourself sideways to make yourself comfortable to get some sleep. So you just stared off into space. You didn’t even have enough energy to even have thoughts at this point. “Y/N,” Bucky sighed, sitting next to you on the couch, setting a light hand on your shoulder. You jumped, not expecting the physical contact. Especially after how badly you had treated him not too long ago. “Y/N, you really should get some sleep.” You shook your head, just barely as you continued to stare off into space. “She’ll probably need me soon, so there’s no point,” “Then let me take care of it.” You shook your head once again. A little bit stronger now. “Y/N, do you not trust me with the baby?” You frowned, but didn’t move your eyes or head to his direction. “Y/N…” Now you snapped your head towards him, feeling a burst of energy fueled by anger come out. “How could you say that?” You exclaimed. “Y/N, you never let me take care of her, much less touch her nowadays. So I’m asking you again. Do you not trust me to be around her anymore?” You sighed, fighting another burst of tears attempting to make their way through. It wasn’t that you didn’t trust him with the baby. In fact, it took a little while for him to even trust himself to hold her. On the day that she was born, you decided that you needed to spontaneously enforce the sink or swim method on him. So you just handed her off to him giving him no option but to hold her, or she would fall. And you knew that he was never going to let that happen to his precious little doll. So who the fuck was he to accuse you of that? You shot up, crossing your arms. “Great, so now I’m not just a horrible mother, but a terrible wife too? Is that what you’re saying?” “Y/N,” he said softly, keeping a short distance from you. And that’s when the tears came out in loud sobs. You couldn’t control it, or hold back as you did before. You turned your back to him with your head in your hands. You suddenly felt him wrap his arms around you, and turn you around. Your head was now resting on his chest forming a large wet spot onto his light-grey shirt. He rocked you side to side as though you were the baby now that couldn’t stop crying. You didn’t deserve him. He sat you back on the couch and had you lay down with your knees curled up, and your head resting on his legs. “Y/N, I’m sorry for what I said, but please just tell me what’s going on. You act as though you have to do this alone.” That was it. You felt like you did have to. You felt an immense amount of guilt about how much you had put her in danger for the first three months of your pregnancy. You had carried on doing missions, and engaged in multiple rigorous, and dangerous fights. All because you neglected to go to those stupid check-ups. When you found out about her presence, you felt a desperate need to protect her. Since she was inside of you, it hardly even felt like a task. As long as you were safe, she was safe by default. She was comfortable, secure, and had all of her needs taken care of by default. Now that she was out in the world, it was a different story. You had been so close to her for so many months. It was the closest bond that one human could have with another human. On a technical scale, you were the only one who had any sort of physical contact with her until the moment you gave birth to her. Now that she was out in the world as an autonomous being, that thought scared you. You wanted that closeness back. You wanted her protected in your belly once again. Now it felt like she couldn’t even bond with you. She hated you now. You didn’t know how to properly be a mother. So you tried, and you tried day and night and but continued to fail nonetheless. But while trying to learn how to care for her properly, you didn’t realize that in the process you had been alienating her from her father. Or rather, you had been alienating her father from her. It wasn’t fair to him to feel that way. So, you explained the exact thoughts that you were feeling as you continued to sob on his lap. He did nothing but listen while stroking your hair. “Y/N you’re not a terrible mother,” he said in the hushed tone that he knew soothed you. “And you shouldn’t feel like you have to do this alone. You’re crashing, and I see it happening more and more by the hour. You can’t keep going on like this without eventually ending up in a hospital.” You sniffled, finally regaining the ability to stop the tears. Within a split second, he scooped you up and carried you upstairs to your bedroom to set you onto the bed, covering you up in the warm blankets. The pillows underneath you felt so soft. Softer than they had ever felt in your life. “Now rest,” he whispered before kissing you on the forehead. “What if she gets hungry?” you muttered drowsily. “Fridge.” Oh right…You had completely forgotten that you had left milk for her in there. You just felt too guilty to use it to let him bottle feed her. But the bed was so comfortable, before you could even finish the thought, you drifted off into sleep. … The next few weeks were still hard; but not nearly as much as before. You let Bucky help you, sharing the load. How you had felt before didn’t go away overnight, and you still felt tired a lot of the time. But you didn’t feel like you were going to crash as hard as before. Slowly over time, the spontaneous waterworks began to subside. Eventually the more you got the hang of things, it was much easier to take care of her. With the added help of Bucky of course. You didn’t realize how much less of a weight on your shoulders it was when you let him share some of the load. You bonded with her more and more, and so did her father. You melted when you secretly watched that tiny baby lay comfortably in his arms. One time you broke out into sobs at the sight of them. Bucky had fallen asleep with her in his arms as she slept comfortably. When he woke up hearing the tear induced gasp, Bucky thought that he had done something wrong. But it was the opposite. You smiled through the tears and explained that they were happy tears. And as the months went by, you celebrated the new milestones that she accomplished. You weren’t as sad as you thought you would be in the process of watching her up so fast. You loved seeing how much her fire-like spirit and determination to learn how to do new things and navigate the world flourished. She would give you the biggest, and happiest one-toothed smiles when crawled around the living-room floor with her chunky baby legs; and oftentimes would explode into the most infectious bouts of laughter. It was impossible for anyone not to light up at the sound of it, especially in public. As mentioned before, it still wasn’t easy adjusting into parenthood. But you set your mind into realizing that this was another journey in life that you would conquer every day, and enjoy every step of the ride. But when those moments came when you felt like you were failing, Bucky stepped in and reassured you that it was just the opposite. He reasoned that you felt that way not because you were a bad mother, but because you wanted to be the best damn mother you could be. And that you were doing a hell of a good job at it. And he was doing a hell of a good job at being the best father. Parenthood may have been a journey that neither of you had wanted in the beginning of your relationship. But now, you couldn’t imagine life without your little family.

(PS note: Hope you enjoyed. Thanks for reading my stuff, I love you all. Feel free to send in requests!)

#buckyxreader #buckyxreader fluff #Bucky Barnes #dad!bucky x reader #dadbuckyXReader #Parent!BuckyXReader #BuckyXReader angst #Winter SoldierXReader #WinterSoldierXReader

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 4 years

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inspired by @honeybabydichotomy some time back / me wildly needing a series of small brain breaks from trying to plan this remote lesson while sleep deprived because i simply could not fall back asleep after 3:15 this morning and my brain is feeling A Wee Bit Totally Deranged, here is my vague/wishy-washy to-write list!

things you can more or less properly call WIPs:

*the story i am actively working on right now, in which eliot & quentin take a miserable vacation together and i attempt to set a world record for number of words devoted to cultivating the precise emotion of Agonized Horniness. i thought that this was going to be short and it is definitely going to be well over 20k, big lol @ me for wildly underestimating the quantity of feelings i had about eliot waugh! but actually i am having extreme amounts of fun with this deeply self-indulgent project, which has both let me try out some things that feel new for me and also unexpectedly become very personal but not at all in the way i usually mean when i say that a story is very personal, to the extent that not only am i not (as i usually am by this point in a fic) incredibly impatient to finish it, but also i am a little sad at the prospect of no longer living with it in my head all the time! i have superstitiously grounded myself from posting any more snippets of it but taken as a set i think these do capture the vibe.

*a quick & slightly goofy resurrection fic set as a kind of episode tag for 5x03 set in an alternate universe where the “plot” of season 5 is not really happening but alice and eliot still wind up on the top of grief mountain. my motivation for this one decreased as season 5 continued to be Like That to the point of erasing any desire to keep anything from it in my personal magicians canon, but i like the central conceit which involves rewriting alice’s golem spell as a collaborative spell because i’m a sucker for any and all pieces coming together imagery, and also i feel like for me personally actually succeeding in writing something light and breezy would be a really instructive and cool learning experience!

*i am too bashful to publicly describe the last item on this list and may yet prove to be too bashful to ever finish it but it started out as me trying to imagine a conversation in which quentin tells eliot about Ye Olde Sex Magic Escapade and has sort of evolved into like me thinking a lot about eliot’s ability to trust himself? trying to find the right tone/voice for this one has been a beast largely because quentin turning 800 shades of red while he explains to eliot that a stranger had to give him advice about how to give his girlfriend the orgasms he didn’t know she wasn’t having is the funniest thing in the entire world to both me and eliot, but then every other Concept i have for it is, you know, not so much. i would like to persevere though for precisely the reason i am so bashful about it, which is that i am interested in trying to do what like 80% of people into fic do several times a year, namely write a story that moves through characterization & emotional beats mostly through the mechanism of Doing It.

wisps of half-assed notions floating idly in my brain which may or may not ever result in any actual writing:

*i have two vague epilogue/coda notions for wild geese. one is that i’d like to just check in on that version of quentin a few months later and get to see him feeling like a functional person and enjoying & reflecting on the novelty of that, learning to lean in a little more to who he is and what he wants, possibly via [redacted for reasons of bashfulness], possibly just further toying with the hugely entertaining to me notion that one lingering side effect of his death/undeath is that he suddenly becomes a foodie. or he gets into, i dunno, kickboxing. just very Wow I Have A Body times. the other idea is that i am charmed by the notion of quentin and julia getting a brakebills grant to do summer fieldwork at a hedge coven/hippie commune in like maine or something, both because i like the idea of q & j getting to have a fun low-stakes magic adventure together (they deserve it!!!) and because i’m amused by the extent to which julia would be like “this is an extremely fun way to spend exactly 2 months of my life after which i would fully go out of my mind” while quentin is like “idk maybe i do want to join a hedge commune? i wonder if eliot would be into it.” also q & e writing interdimensionally transmitted letters!

*some.... thing... about julia and eliot becoming friends, either like a snapshot of them bonding while trying to resurrect q, or else a post-resurrection fic where the process was very quick so they never really bonded but now that eliot and quentin are dating julia just shows up one day like “hello eliot who is dating my best friend and therefore also my best friend now! :D” and eliot’s like “wait what now” because he’s so used to imperiously friend-seducing people in the weirdest way possible that julia texting him a link to showing of john waters shorts at metrograph is not something he knows how to process

*some... thing... about alice figuring out how to Be Okay after quentin undeads and they break up. she gets really into some niche hobby or takes herself to some scenic location and hates it or finally tries pot. shit, maybe i am accidentally talking myself into casually shipping alice/josh. but also maybe she doesn’t hook up with anyone? maybe she gets to just have... a... friend? (kady?)

*the night of the s5 finale what i really wanted more than anything was some kind of wildly, exuberantly happy ending for eliot and the mechanism for that which popped into my head was an old school kinda 5-times-ish fic centered around a series of new year’s eves. (1) yes i have written this exact conceit before (2) yes this was partly influenced by the fact that new year’s day by taylor swift REMAINS the eliot love song of all time and “i want your midnights / but i’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on new year’s day” is still the most infuriatingly perfect description of eliot in love humanly conceivable. the heart wants what it wants.

*something exploring my vague headcanon that quentin and julia absolutely accidentally did magic as kids but it was always in the structure of being dreamy kids playing at magic and half-convincing themselves in that dreamy-kid way it was real, so that when later they outgrew that they also mentally filed those experiences away as playing pretend with great intensity.

*some............... thing........... involving present day post-s4 (alive) quentin and arielle’s... grave? great-grandchild? i dunno man, like, teddy never existed without quentin going back in time, but arielle was presumably a real person and not some weird quest-generated cipher, and i just can’t imagine that a version of quentin who remembers even as much as her name and that they were married has access to fillory and some free time and doesn’t try to figure out what did happen to her. or, like, eliot comes across someone in a familiar town with familiar eyes and is like, q i think there is someone you maybe have to see. for most of my half-assed notions i would probably be almost as happy to read a fic that already exists instead of writing it myself but for this one in particular if anyone has read one please do send it my way. it just feels like an odd gap to read so many fics where quentin and eliot are thinking about The Mosaic and Their Family and not at all interested in the branch of that family that like, concretely in this timeline lived. in my brain this is NOT a depressing story but it is admittedly hard to see how that would work out in practice.

*as you can tell from this list i am not generally a big AU person in terms of writing, because by the time i’ve exhausted the things poking at me from canon to resolve or play around with i have historically lost my stamina for that fandom. BUT, the one gratuitously self-indulgent non-magic AU i want in the world is one where quentin and alice were college sweethearts who got married at 23 and divorced six months later and quentin reacted to this by deciding that love/joy/hope/happiness/dreams are for children and stupid people, and now it’s like... 6-10 years later idk and quentin is “fine” in that he shows up to work on time and pays his bills on time and doesn’t often feel sad but lives a very small life in which he doesn’t often feel much of anything or have much of a connection to himself or other people, enter of course eliot having gone through some Rough Times but eventually turned a corner towards getting his shit together and whose joie de vivre / general hotness / open-hearted affection shakes things up in ways that are both thrilling and totally horrifying!

uncategorizable by the headings listed above:

*on december 28, 2019, i started a google doc titled “magicians underworld breakout fic” which i have sporadically been adding notes towards ever since, inspired mostly by how much i think it was a missed opportunity to never have quentin and penny come to any kind of mutual understanding of each other (or even of their own reactions to each other!) except via fake pod person underworld nonsense, and how potentially fun it would be for them to team up to make it back to life. it currently contains just under 3600 words, but they are exclusively things such as:

hades and the underworld library? hades and the whole library? what’s cool about god motivations is they are almost definitionally stupid

or:

They have been taught certain things and those things are lies - connecting to how Margo got her axes

similar to #3 on the WIP list above, the reason i may never write this is the same as the reason i very much want to actually write this, which is that it is by necessity very plotty, something i have never, ever, ever done. i started brainstorming in the last few days i was wrapping up wild geese partly because i was so excited to have written a story where like magic events happened and only like 96% of the plot could be described as “and then a person has a feeling” as opposed to my usual 100%. i have generated a lot more ideas than i really expected to (some of which i like a lot!) but also am still extremely far from having a workable story, although i also have not dedicated any purposeful time to it really, just kind of let it percolate. also it is tough because every version of how it might be told i come up with definitely involves multiple POVs and so far seems to involve more than 2 partly because like a bunch of my other magicians grudges/missed opportunity wishlist items keep sort of working their way in, which is... a lot. i feel like a sensible thing to do would be to come up with at least one (1) kind of mid-tier plottiness concept, somewhere between “50k words of And Then A Person Has A Feeling with a couple thousand spent on Magic Things Happen, Which Are Also Feelings, But Whatever” and like “5 strands of plot drawing together for me to work out every single one of the 700 beefs i have with this show at once” but AS YOU CAN SEE i literally do not have any ideas that fall into that category at the moment, so. we shall see!

#the magicians #this wound up truly unhingedly long but sleep deprivation is rly jostling my brains!#also first real of quarantine qontent is there are no rules of quarantine qontent

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razberryyum · 4 years

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The Untamed and The Living Dead movie Thoughts

SPOILERS AHEAD!

If you haven’t watched the movie, it’s best not to proceed cuz you will be spoiled.

OR, if you have already watched the movie and love it completely, AND you stan Yu Bin and will not put up with any criticism about his performance, it’s also best not to proceed cuz you’ll most likely be annoyed/upset with me. Let’s just agree to disagree right now and move on with our separate happy lives.

Overall Rating for The Living Dead: 3 Lil Apples out of 10

Yeah, I know that’s pretty harsh…I waffled between 3, 4 and 5, but I had to settle on a 3 in the end because I don’t think I’ll ever rewatch this movie and there were just so many problems I had with it, that I realized I can’t say I liked the movie much at all.

Before I go on, let me first address the big white elephant in the room: no, WangXian does NOT cameo in The Living Dead nor are they even mentioned in any capacity that would assure us they are still together and happy in the movie’s timeline. At one point Wen Ning does mention them in the same sentence, but only in relationship to himself (that they saved him) and the past. For those of us desperate for confirmation of WangXian happily ever afterness in the world of CQL (“us” meaning me only most likely), we get no assurance whatsover. This is especially disappointing since the movie apparently take place years later after the events of The Untamed so it’s really sad that we have no idea if they are together. Of course in the world of the novel, we know they are absolutely together, happily married, everydaying everyday, but it would’ve been nice if we were given some tiny morsel of comfort for WangXian of The Untamed.

Not only does Lan Zhan not make an appearance, he’s only mentioned by Wen Ning once, as I indicated above. As for Wei Ying, he’s mentioned a few times and he kiiiiinda makes a cameo…but honestly, I wish they didn’t even attempt that cameo cuz it was so bad. It’s basically the backview of some extra dressed as Wei Ying and dubbed over by someone else that’s not Lu Zhixing-laoshi. Or if it is, the dub was so bad that it didn’t even sound like him anymore.

That’s actually one of my main problems with the movie: the dubbing or sound mixing just sucked. Every time there was dialogue it sounded very obviously that it was on a different track. I didn’t even feel like the characters were saying the words because their voices sounded detached from them. Whereas in The Untamed, I sometimes would completely forget that with the exception of Nie Huaisang, everyone’s line reads were performed by voice actor because the voices were blended so well within the scenes. I don’t know the technical terms of all this dubbing stuff so hopefully I’m making some sense.

Another big problem was the CGI. Holy crap was it bad. It was so bad at no point was I able to immerse myself into the action scenes…I didn’t feel anyone was in danger because they were being attacked by a bunch of obvious and bad CGI. One of the worse scenes that they showed THREE times was when the sister (Xiao Qing) being burned up in CGI flames. First of all her acting was horrendous (why was she covering her ears while she’s being burned alive??) and then the fake fire just made me groan out loud. I didn’t even want to look it was so embarrassingly bad.

I’m trying to figure out when they shot this movie…in order for them to be able to release the movie so soon after the show, the filming had to overlap with The Untamed’s filming, right? So I guess budget was still tight, probably even tighter than the main show, since CQL probably didn’t start actually seeing the money it made from ads, etc until towards the end. Either way, it feels like they didn’t put much money into this movie, especially not the effects. And if I’m going to be honest, I think they probably just had their second…nay…probably third unit direct it. Or at least, they had their third unit decide on some of the casting cuz some of the performances were…OOF. One thing I really appreciated about The Untamed is that even with most of the background actors, there was hardly a glaringly bad performance. I’ve said before the worse really was the actor who played Wen Ruohan, which is a shame cuz he’s more than an extra, but overall all the performances by the supporting characters ranged from decent to strong with hardly a weak link. Here, in this movie, I would say most of the performances from the new cast members were very mediocre. In fact, the only truly consistently good performances from beginning to end was Zheng Fanxing (Sizhui) and that cute little girl in the beginning:

I was kind of sad when she got killed off cuz she was adorable and definitely a MUCH better actor that the dude who played her older brother…at no point was I remotely convinced he was scared so on the other hand I was happy he died. But I thought she was going to burn to death or something because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have her hide in a wooden cupboard with a lite stove…that was so stupid and weird. Btw, what the hell was with that cat screeching sound effect?? Sounded like someone was throwing a cat, but like WHY?

As for the three new players introduced for this movie—Gao Han as Xiao Yi, Wang Yifei as Xiao Qing and He Longlong as Zhou Zishu—I’ve never seen their work before, and nothing about their performances in this movie makes me interested in what they will do in the future. To be fair, Gao Han tried…you can totally tell he was trying REALLY hard in some of his scenes, but for the most part, he either overacted or strangely enough, underacted. He was just really inconsistent. I know Zhou Zishu was supposed to be a red herring so the fact that he started out looking sketchy AF was supposed to be a ruse since our narrator was entirely untrustworthy, but even in the context of that false narration, he was really bad. As for the sister played by Wang Yifei…just look at her performance as she’s being burned up again.

By the way, I’m gonna say this now: if Wei Ying and Lan Zhan don’t even get to share a fucking real hug between them throughout the entirety of The Untamed, then I don’t think some generally unimportant-in-the-greater-scheme-of-things couple should be allowed to freaking KISS in anything related to the world of CQL.

I understand it’s all about the censorship, etc etc, but if any hetero couple deserved to share an onscreen kiss, it would’ve been Shijie and Jin Zixuan, and since even they were deprived of that, then these two nobodies should not have been granted this privilege. Seriously, fuck whoever decided to stick that moment in the movie. That’s just fucking unfair and really annoyed me. There better not be any more of that kind of nonsense in the Nie brothers‘ movie.

The last I’ll say about performances is that sadly, I felt as if there was something off about Yu Bin’s. I totally understand that this is a different Wen Ning than the one we saw in the show—he’s older, more mature, since God knows how many years have passed already—so I don’t mind that he’s more serious. But at the same time, he was just so uneven that I couldn’t get behind his performance at all. He was always one key off, if that makes any sense, so it almost felt like someone else was playing Wen Ning entirely, someone who is completely unfamiliar with that character. And his work in the…whatever fuck that place was…Yin Metal purgatory?? (and for those who are familiar with Guardian, that place was giving me bad flashbacks to Dixing)…was kind of cringey overall.

I wanted to love seeing Wen Ning be a badass wise uncle, so I actually feel really sad that I couldn’t enjoy his performance in general. However, what I absolutely did enjoy was seeing uncle and nephew bonding and working together…

…just wish those moments weren’t marred by all that bad CGI.

Wen Ning’s new look gave me pause though: not that I didn’t appreciate the whole metal look, but I kind of couldn’t figure out why Wen Ning added the chains back to his ensemble when he got rid of them back in The Untamed already.

I mean, if the black veins on his neck don’t attract attention, walking around wearing heavy, clangy chains sure would probably alarm people as well, I think.

Last thing on Wen Ning: again, not that I didn’t appreciate his newfound ability to hulk out, but yikes, that whole effect was ruined by yet again bad CGI AND a really goofy score. Sounded like something they ��borrowed” from Naruto.

Except for that one piece of music, I did like the score for the rest of the movie, especially in the opening credits since it definitely evoked a sense of creepiness. The images in the credits were good too. I can easily imagine that being the OP creds to a horror anthology.

As for the story, I was fine with it. I liked that they related the family to Nightless City because apparently they are the ones who helped make Nightless City nightless? Here I thought it was the surrounding lava but I guess there were lanterns lighting the place up that I just somehow missed completely. I liked the plot twist with Xiao Yi and his “sister”…although I did guess there was some incesty thing going on in the beginning…just didn’t think I would be right and wrong at the same time. I thought they would relate their relationship back to Wen Ning and Wen Qing somehow, considering the sisters shared the same name…this was before the “incest” part was confirmed of course…but they never really did so having Wen Qing share the same name as Xiao Qing felt like an oddity in the end. It’s also odd how they used the same phonetically sounding last name of “Xiao” since of course I immediately thought of Xiao Zhan (different characters). Like, couldn’t they come up with completely different names? Overall, the plot wasn’t bad, as mysteries go, at first I couldn’t figure out why the Yin Metal all of a sudden had all these new powers and why the metal wielder, Zhou Zishu, would become a ghost puppet himself, but with the plot twist, all of that was explained so I was fine with it. The last shot of “Xiao Yi” in the Yin Metal purgatory made me guffaw; yeah, that didn’t look suggestive AT ALL.

The Living Dead actually makes me look forward even more to the next movie, The Fatal Journey. I’m hoping that since it’s potentially about the Nie brother’s past and Jin Guangyao, that perhaps there will be less need for CGI as it will focus more on just dialogue and story-telling. Not to mention, again, apologies to Yu Bin fans, but those three actors are generally stronger performers, so with them at the helm, I’m expecting/hoping for greater things.

Since I’ve been mostly negative, I wanted to leave on at least one positive note: Sizhui is still an adorable puppy. His dads, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing during the movie, must be so proud of him.

#The Untamed #陈情令 #CQL #The Living Dead movie #Wen Ning #Lan Sizhui #Mo Dao Zu Shi #魔道祖师 #WangXian

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ceep-it-kanon · 5 years

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Ruby and Silver are so freakkin difficult to get straight. I mean, they’re both extroverts by nature, but plot happened and hit them hard & they ended up distrustful introverts. They ended up the exact opposite of the kind of person they are, and with Silver especially it makes circumstances difficult for them and self-conflicting. It’s fascinating, unbelievable, sad, and frustrating all at the same time, to think what kind of great person they both would have been if pl*t hadn’t happened to them and messed with their senses of right and wrong and their abilities to trust other people. I don’t mean that they’re the same; by nature they’re different (Silver has a very submissive personality underneath all that corruption, while Ruby had a sensitive, outgoing, personality, sort of like Black, except a lot more people-oriented, among other things) and the people the ended up becoming are just as different (Ruby has a tendency to run away from things, and because of that he feels guilt and because he feels guilt he tries to be self-focused and selfish as a method of coping with the reality of his actions hurting people, and his experience with the world is that once a bridge is burned it can’t be repaired, it’s probably his fault, and he runs from that guilt. Silver… has many many layers to him, more than his simple, just-want-to-do-right personality could normally manage. [Also hc that’s a double burn on Giovanni, cause that’s the kind of person Red’s dad, Giovanni’s little brother, was, and Giovanni hated mediocrity and how he all he needed to make him happy was to please others, while part of Giovanni wished it could be that simple for him, etc.] Silver ends up a very confused, conflicted, corrupted shell of what was only ever a child in an unstable world, with his only desire [after Pryce was defeated] was to find a place where he had both a belonging and purpose, but found only fate at every corner, found that the past he had been longing to know and return to was the fall in development of the Team Rocket empire, and that his existence was not only the catalyst to cause the destruction of the era of prosperity of those who had long been downcast, in taking the power and glory of the privileged, and giving to them the fear, exile, and punishment that they of different moral had been forced. They of team rocket were the outsiders, those in society who were smart enough to see the corruption of the world, who had morals of personal justice which would remove the wool over society’s eyes to their world, that would disrupt the careful lies those in power preached to maintain it, and under one man united to take the lifetime they believed their kind��the thieves & the cold-hearted, the homeless and disadvantaged–should be given, and had been deprived from them and their ancestors since Kanto began the inevitable corruption of a society’s order and hierarchy, the government. I’ve started rambling crap help And for Silver, to have been taken as a product of that corruption and to be used as a tool for a corrupted man, struggling to understand his humanity, happened to get into what we would of course call the “right crowd” (but which all Team Rocket would for different reasons disagree), and his experience was twisted a third time into something he couldn’t make sense of, and upon finding his purpose–both why he was conceived and what he could do to make his impact–to become the leader of Team Rocket and shut everything down before the three warring factions that were shards of the glory the team was under Giovanni’s leadership before Ariana (his mother, ironically) and the other executive admins tore the region–and those following them, who were once again suffering most, in a place where they had nothing left and nowhere to go–apart. In Petrel’s strange obsession with messing with Silver’s mind; in Archer’s loyal delusion of returning Giovanni to Team Rocket and refusing to accept his death for what it was; in Proton’s fear of losing his power, of needing to be right and uncontained; and most importantly Ariana, who, as Kanto crumbled in the fourth reign to being more corrupt than ever before, sought to gain power during the chaos, to mess with other’s minds and know how to gain control over any human on earth, to prove that she was more worthy than justice-loving Giovanni (who before you ask there was never anything between them & Silver was not in the slightest notion an accident, and she never wanted nor had to have anything to do with him, from the deal they made. and yes, Giovanni didn’t intend to, but he had loved Silver more than he had ever loved anything. Also if it isn’t obvious Silver got his personality from his father.) To her, life was a game. She only ever wanted to control people. She had no interest for the long run, or in keeping the power she gained. She was strange in that either the way her brain was wired or her upbringing or both left her unafraid of the world. She didn’t fear dying for her mistakes, as Pryce had; it hardly crossed her mind. She had no inhibition whatsoever and lived for the thrill of the present, which made her all the more dangerous of an antagonist, for all her actions were in fear of nothing, so for her even the unthinkable was doable, for she failed to care for the retributions to her or others caused by her actions. (Again, the opposite of Pryce. It’s interesting that two major villains for Silver to face were both motivated and made dangerous by fearing the effects of their mistakes and paying no heed to the effects of their mistakes respectively.) At the end of the fourth and final reign of Team Rocket, and era of either greatness or fear for three entire generations, it came down to Silver’s mother, as it began with his father. And he was the once who was neither hero, nor bad guy, nor bystander, for what he was, what he caught caught in, and what fate brought him to would not allow him to be any of those, yet he was all at once: in being loved, in the blood which he never got a chance to know love from, and in who he is without the corruption of the Masked Man and that world. In his hatred, in his regret, in his loyalty, his despair, and his desire for simplicity, Silver is human. His father, a great, sensible, intelligent man, sought nothing more than to pursue the justice he believed in, as a boy from rich family on the wealthy side of society, seeking the company of others with intelligence, and finding it in the criminals society hated and feared, whose views are too harsh, too close to the truth for the blinded and softened multitudes to accept and thus take everything from them out of fear and disbelief. Giovanni’s truest desire was to understand why he hated the mundane, why simple oblivion disgusted him, why he couldn’t love his sipping-wine-patio-party-go-entertain-yourself parents, his what-will-make-you-happy-I’ll-do-it-that’s-what-makes-me-happy brother, and the life where everything, even education, was given to him without having to lift a finger. No one else he knew felt this way, so he looked elsewhere for others like him. And he found thieves, and at once knew what kind of life he could dedicate his incredible intelligence to, instead of wasting it away sipping wine. Silver’s mother, who found her happiness in manipulation of others. She had a desire to play the devil. She was not born with it, but as she grew the love of control grew with her, to an amount that could not be fulfilled by any life other than the one she lead. Like I said, her only desire was to play the devil. And as the Team Rocket era began with Giovanni, whose ability to understand others and to bring those at their knees to their feet and those at their feet to their knees, to gain the trust of those who never trust, to fulfull every promise and create a network of thieves, assassins, and the like, over half of which would die for him… Giovanni was near a god in that sense, and he was to many of those poor who joined Team Rocket. Ariana was the devil among them, and it all ended with her. After all of Team Rocket had been finally disassembled by the dexholders and the remaining of the the remaining unwanted masked children, and Silver, the human product of the two, fulfilled his father plea to him and rescued the poor Team Rocket members, who had suffered brain damage from Pryce’s ice-alchemy control, who had been hated even more than ever before by society after Giovanni’s death, and who again now were suffering the most under poor leadership, with the executive admins all either insane or of a selfish motive, and these poor thieves who had known nothing but hate from society for who they were, who believed in Giovanni and gave up what little, prideful life they had to follow him. Giovanni’s plan for a world that valued what he believed to be right, which I may add was entire possible for a godly man like him to achieve, was cut short, and the power he had gained over others to use for “true justice” had no cap, no government to pull the wool over society’s eyes and keep them from panic, no human greed to settle the system, just confusion, chaos, fear of both sides from both sides, and likewise with hatred. This all could have settled and been figured out, but those who had some of that power, who should not be in power without a fair-minded leader above them, who should be in jail, the smartest admins of the fallen team, they sought to take advantage of the chaos and confusion and hatred and fear and grab as much as they could for themselves. And the kind-hearted, the misunderstood, those who wanted this new regime for everybody because it was the morals they believed to be right, ended up, as they always have in history despite Giovanni’s attempt to change that, suffering most. It was Giovanni’s last wish that Silver, though not indebted to Giovanni in any way, become the leader of a great new world he had been created with hopes of becoming, and stop this unneeded suffering of “those who are truly great, but misunderstood” before it leads to even more suffering for all. (Remember that Giovanni valued “well-distributed intelligence” in people above all other things.) All of Team Rocket, even those who had used Giovanni’s dream to gain power for themselves, (Courtney is an example of that kind of person, just saying), both respected and feared Giovanni, and while the great man who was like a father to so many without one had not the power to stand, his hope was that they would listen to Silver. And for Silver, who had gone from “team-rocket-is-bad-and-must-be-destroyed” to “is-this-where-I-belong?-it-can’t-be-these-people-are-scum-and-I-hate-having-it-in-my-blood-thus-I-hate-myself” to “these-people-aren’t-really-at-fault-it’s-the-greedy-ones-like-Petrel-who-take-advantage-of-people-with-good-hearts” to “I-have-to-do-this-it’s-not-who-I-am-but-it’s-what-I-can-do” to finally after all that suffering for him alone and weight he didn’t want on his shoulders etc he goes to “the-seven-of-us-have-been-a-family-all-along” and I’ve literally been on the computer typing this for almost four hours and it feels like thirty minutes and I still have to get started on homework and crap cause I’ve literally been writing this since I got home five hours ago and it was supposed to be a quick observation of how Ruby and Silver are very similar in one way, but lol I guess sometimes fate has other plans.

#pokespe #ceeping it kanon #long post -

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rosalind-of-arden · 5 years

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Smoke and Iron Reread chapter 21

More Wolfe! More trauma!

Troll hasn’t reappeared. Has Zara not been able to get him back into the prison? Has he been there but not done anything significant enough for Wolfe to think about?

The Library has complete control of the prisoners’ sense of time. Earlier, Wolfe used the changing of guard shifts to track time, now he’s using the brightening of glows. There are also possibly regular mealtimes to track time by. All of those things would be very easy for the Library to manipulate to cause stress or fuck with prisoners’ heads. If they’re not doing it here, they probably did in Rome.

Wolfe is very certain Qualls was an illusion. As for the rest of us, we’re just waiting to see what Sword and Pen has to say about that.

Like Thomas, Wolfe can construct 3D mental images, in this case, of the prison hall.

“They hadn’t even used torture yet.” Wolfe is defining torture as the kind of extreme violence and psychological abuse used on him in Rome, but there’s quite a bit about this prison that is arguably torture. We have some degree of starvation, at least one instance of sleep deprivation, and keeping the environment uncomfortably cold. Probably lack of treatment for prisoners with medical conditions (Ariane doesn’t seem to be getting any medical attention). For Wolfe specifically, just putting him in this triggering environment would amount to torture even under perfectly humane prison conditions, and the Artifex damn well knows it. And then Wolfe himself recognizes the psychological impact of the constant threat of impending execution.

The prisoners are organized so well that it takes only seconds for them to pass word of who is being taken by the guards. Wolfe has done a good job here. He also knows about at least one prisoner held on an entirely different floor. Just how big of an information network has he built?

Notice the shift in Wolfe’s attitude toward his responsibility for the rebellion. Back in chapter 7, he was annoyed when Saleh blamed him for getting the Seif family locked up. Now he accepts that he is responsible for whatever is happening to Khalila’s father. In the process of working with these people, he’s started to feel responsible for them, much as his adoption of his students started with the sense of responsibility that came from teaching them. This is what happens when Wolfe gets close to people. He’s also had time to reflect on the fact that even if he didn’t do anything wrong, from an ethical perspective, in helping his students go against the Archivist, he’s still responsible for the consequences. And, on a more immediate level, he’s got everyone in that prison involved in his scheming now, and if anyone is hurt in connection to that, it’s his fault.

Is the Archivist (Artifex, whoever is running this show) starting with one of the most respected and vulnerable prisoners to provoke the others? Seems like his sort of tactics.

It isn’t, strictly speaking, a logical decision for Wolfe to throw himself into danger to protect Khalila’s father. He just recognized that they won’t kill Father Seif right away, so there isn’t an immediate need for rescue. Except that in his mind, there is. He sees torture as worse than death, and if they aren’t going to kill Khalila’s dad, what else would they be doing to him? Also, Wolfe just had a truly horrible night, and he sees himself as fragile and in danger of losing his mind. This is a last straw for him; he’s been struggling for weeks, and the knowledge that the Library has started torturing people might be enough to push him over into insanity. He doesn’t know how much longer he can stay sane, and he needs to do something to help while he still can. It’s possible that Wolfe also has enough awareness of the time remaining until the executions to know that he's running out of time to try to organize an escape.

But this decision also shows that after the previous night’s crisis point, Wolfe has gained some control over his fear. He was so scared of Qualls that he couldn’t even open his eyes. Now here he is effectively volunteering to be tortured. If he could survive facing Qualls again, he can survive whatever the Archivist is going to do to him this time. He’s traumatized and terrified, but he isn’t letting that stop him.

It also fits the overall pattern of Wolfe’s behavior in response to his trauma. He helped rescue Thomas, even though it meant risking prison again and required him to relive traumatic memories. He is determined not to be limited by his trauma, and especially determined to prevent others from going through the same things he did.

Wolfe weaponizes his contempt. Of course he does.

Wolfe is pushing himself through a panic attack here. It starts with a fast pulse, then there’s nausea and dizziness, exhaustion, fear, and “screaming panic.” All of which he has experienced before enough times that he is confident in his ability to conceal these symptoms.

Another sign of increasing distress? He’s quite talkative when he’s provoking the guard into taking him, but in response to being told he’ll suffer for any deception, he has only one-word responses, and he communicates only non-verbally with the other prisoners. He also starts imagining Santi for comfort again.

We’ve heard Santi’s version of the story of Wolfe’s return, now here’s Wolfe’s. Some key differences from Santi’s: stumbling rather than crawling through the door, no mention of blood or injuries, added description of how Santi cared for him. From this, we learn that Wolfe came home not only bloody, but dirty enough to need bathing, and that he could neither sleep well nor speak that first night. For Santi, that first night back is a traumatic memory, and what stands out most to him is how badly Wolfe was hurt. For Wolfe, it’s a comforting one, and what stands out most is Santi’s love and support.

Unintentionally, Santi took two things that Qualls used against Wolfe in Rome - baths and clean clothes - and associated them with comfort again.

An addition to the list of places we know Wolfe has traveled: Leeds.

Only after getting himself taken out of his cell does Wolfe start planning what he’ll do once he gets to the Artifex and Archivist. He's averted the immediate threat of Father Seif being hurt, and now he has to figure out what he can do with the situation he just threw himself into. He starts with an ambitious end goal: either sabotaging or taking control of the Serapeum. Then he jumps back to start plotting steps toward that goal. This is also a coping mechanism. If he isn’t scheming, he’s going to be thinking about what the Artifex will do to him, and he can’t handle that.

This, right here, is where we see Jess’s mistake in not trusting Wolfe come back to bite them both. Wolfe would have gone along with the plan. He’ll say so later, and right here he’s basically just done the same thing by offering himself up as a sacrifice to protect Khalila’s father. If he’d been in on it, he wouldn’t accidentally blow Jess’s cover with this “lie.”

To what extent is this “lie” Wolfe comes up with based on his own considerations of potential strategies back in Brightwell Castle and in the time since? At the end of Ash and Quill, Jess suspected Wolfe might have been onto him. If he ever was suspicious of Jess, Wolfe either forgot about it in that initial day of mental breakdown, or he dismissed that suspicion as unlikely. Now here are his earlier considerations or suspicions coming back in this urgent round of brainstorming.

Also, a Wolfe-Dario parallel. Both find themselves captured and seeing Khalila’s family threatened. Both, to different degrees, unintentionally betray the others in their efforts to protect Khalila’s family, Dario by saying the pack will go to the Black Archives without realizing that’s where they actually went, Wolfe by saying “Brendan” is Jess without realizing he actually is.

#The Great Library #smoke and iron reread #smoke and iron spoilers #torture

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citizenscreen · 5 years

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This is a special guest post by Scott Holleran:

◊

My first experience of this movie was probably on television, probably in fragments. It made an impression but the movie ranged into my memory as a series of scenes disembodied from the whole work. For example, I remember watching the burning of Atlanta and certain, distinctive scenes and not much else. So, my first impressions were perfect for today’s conceptual-deprivation culture. That’s the poverty of being among the TV generation.

It took a long time to appreciate this film as a work of art, which now I know it is. At some point, as I began to take a serious interest in movies, I rediscovered it on home video. Then, again, on disc and possibly again in a revival house on one of those scratchy prints with popping sounds. That a civilization could be gone with the wind came through and I was an admirer. Later, I read about the novel upon which the movie’s based, which, with a romance novel-type jacket design for the mass market paperback edition, was off-putting.

At some point, it dawned on me that Gone With the Wind is an important epic motion picture so I sought its source and read the novel. I was astonished at the brilliant writing. I instantly observed a similarity to my favorite novel, also an epic of American literature and also written by an author who happens to be a woman. Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell conveys the romanticism, scope and grandeur of Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand and it’s worth noting that Rand’s first novel, too, involved a love triangle woven into the end of an era in her own 1936 novel, We the Living.

After reading Mitchell’s novel, I saw the movie again — and again. Each time, I was more impressed. And, each time, I was more impressed that I was able to be additionally impressed. This is because, as you probably know, the more you know and study a motion picture, the more easily the film can lose its newness, its ability to hold and sustain interest or focus, suspense, tension or sense of plot progression and, as a result, the less likely it can be to stir one’s original passion.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw Gone With the Wind, which, this year, marks its 80th anniversary in a culture in which it is extremely likely to be impugned or maligned. I saw it for the first time at one of the grandest movie theaters on earth: Sid Grauman’s Chinese theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

And, this time, for the first time, I was moved … to tears.

The nearly four-hour motion picture begins with three characters in Georgia talking about war. This is an essential starting point. The novel more or less begins with this starting point, too. Gone With the Wind frames its story within an argument over the fact of an oncoming war. It’s not that they’re debating the merits of war. They’re discussing the prospect of war as such; they’re considering the impact of war on their lives. So, this, the fundamental choice to face the facts of reality, is the starting point. Not the war itself. Not slavery, the issue in dispute.

Gone With the Wind is not a war movie. Gone With the Wind is not a slavery movie. Any discourse of it as either entirely misses the movie. It is also, strictly speaking, not a romance, though war, slavery and romance factor into its drama to various degrees. Gone With the Wind dramatizes an entire civilization through the life of a single individual.

Her name is Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her best).

Shallow, scheming and self-centered, she’s enraged when she learns during this discussion, in which she’s attempting to ignore the reality of impending civil war, that the object of her desire, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), plans to marry his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). In subsequent scenes, the men who will become pivotal to the young, impetuous Scarlett’s life, including her father, Gerald O’Hara, but also Frank Kennedy, Ashley Wilkes, Charles Hamilton and a cad named Rhett Butler, argue war on the merits, whistle “Dixie” and, with the recklessness which exemplifies the pre-Civil War American South, crow about going to war.

In this sense, there is real substance to this movie in terms of its grasp of facts and history. Every Southern deficiency is depicted here. The staggeringly affected manners, the pompous preposterousness, the asinine traditions but also the proportionately and wildly irrational inflation of people’s sense of themselves with regard to their actual merit and worth, let alone the source of their wealth, not the main focus and therefore largely unseen. The fact of slave labor is, however, shown, even if it’s not dramatized, though it is more explicit than most films of the era. House, field and overseer are each crucial elements of Twelve Oaks and Tara, the plantations where Gone With the Wind takes place.

What’s good in the South, too, is depicted. The stunning visuals, the land, manners, socializing and courtship and the gentle way of life. Pretty and feisty Scarlett, who’s earned a reputation for being bolder than her peers, holds court and gets talked about by other females and looked upon by men. The outbreak of civil war occurs within her context.

The plot revolves around Scarlett O’Hara; there is a sense in which her pettiness will be tested by war — and what’s impure about Scarlett is fundamentally what will be Gone With the Wind.

The early evidence is Scarlett standing at the window, looking down upon newlyweds Melanie and Ashley. Here’s the heroine on the inside looking out. Yet think about the meaning of her dilemma; she’s really trapped within the Old South, as the opening titles refer to this archaic slave society. In this sense, Scarlett dramatizes how the South’s ways impair the powerful, too. Her only real saviors, friends and comrades, as far as Scarlett knows, are slaves and an angry Irishman. Everyone else is happily, some even stupidly, off to war. In a flash, again like the title, they are gone. Scarlett is left behind — abandoned, lonely and alone.

What comes next builds character, with an outbreak of measles, a move to Atlanta and the entre of the ridiculous Aunt Pittypat, as cartoonish a figure as in the novel. Scarlett’s Mammy (Hattie McDaniel in one of the screen’s greatest performances), knowing all along what exploits the ambitious young missy has in mind, represents the best of Scarlett’s youthful vigor; Mammy fosters, shapes and marks her charge’s growth. Amid a dance, a bid and donation of a ring, Scarlett learns from her new companion, Melanie, wife of the man she thinks she loves.

Here are women in service at war. This, too, is to the film’s credit. Gone With the Wind remains one of the most intelligent, insightful portrayals of women at war ever made, better and more knowing than the hordes of depictions of today’s mindless women on screen who rarely if ever think about anything having to do with serious issues, let alone war or the men sent to fight them.

With intermittent titles, David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, famously directed by Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz), with others also filling in, shifts from breeze to gust with news from Gettysburg. Then, come the war-torn faces of those in Atlanta cast down in bonnets amid news of mass death. Fleming lingers on a list of those killed in action. It is words, not pictures that tell the horrid tale. The camera scrolls down, down, down and down on the same three words.

Cue the theme song “Dixie” as a reprise to the earlier tune’s sense of false jubilation and enter a man of reason, Doctor Meade (Harry Davenport), whose role in the picture is a crucial representation of what will become Scarlett’s education. In a shift to black-and-white color schemes from the rest of the film’s vibrant colors, Gone With the Wind goes from sad and mournful “Dixie” to a musically infused projection of a funeral procession in which Johnny comes marching home.

As Pittypat, Meade, Mammy, Melanie and a young slave named Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) besides Scarlett get dragged, plunged and thrust into the South’s mass death and destruction, in comes Rhett Butler (Clark Gable, brilliantly cast and stellar in the role) with vitality, passion and rage — at the Old South for being the Old South. Butler represents the New South, post-slavery, post-Civil War, though it’s never fashioned or made explicit. What a waste of human life — this is the meaning of his every form of his disgust and he makes no attempt to conceal his emotions or suppress himself in expressing what he feels. Like Scarlett, he is a liberated soul stifled and trapped by the way things are.

There’s music, humor and, during a dance which captures and underscores the surrealism of life during wartime, a total breach from traditionalism. Life remains drab as Scarlett and Atlanta face severe deprivation. Butler has a prostitute, Belle Watling (Ona Munson), to help him ease the chronic anxiety, guilt and agony of war and she’s more than a cliché. The pictures show rain, shadows and the hotly feared Union General William Sherman’s shelling of Atlanta, with churches coming on like a holy calling from God to cease and desist with the Old South rebellion. Pictures of Jesus Christ accompany the sound of moans, the sights of a church and, in one of the movies’ most iconic scenes, the camera pulls back for a scene of mass death and dying.

“Peace be within thy walls“ incongruously graces the screen after Scarlett O’Hara encounters a patient with gangrene. Perhaps you don’t know or remember the grit of Gone With the Wind but it’s there. Between marriages, the making of Scarlett from romantic Southern belle to seasoned war bride happens during Atlanta’s silence and siege. And it isn’t even Intermission.

Before that comes, as Rhett Butler finally kisses Scarlett and enlists in the war for a kind of misintegrated sense of honor, slave Prissy hinges the plot. Prissy’s trauma triggers a key reaction that results in the story’s classic and quite penetrating tale within a tale of three women and a baby. Though this famous scene is generally regarded as humorous, I think after seeing Gone With the Wind in the Chinese theater that simple-minded Prissy’s meltdown underscores the folly of slavery even as it echoes as a call and response to Scarlett’s own earlier cluelessness.

A foreshadowing scene on a bridge marks the end of slavery preceding a scene in which women take refuge in reading (in the novel, it’s a story by Victor Hugo; here, it’s fiction by Charles Dickens). The self-made theme continues with a rainbow followed by blackness, fog and a strange yet familiar place.

The shock and violence of post-war Tara soon becomes clear. Scarlett strikes her sister, Prissy and pretty much everyone else except her mother figure, Mammy, and she forges a secret bond with Melanie over the death of a soldier. By the time war widow Scarlett, who’s remade herself as a businesswoman in post-war Southern society, meets again with her true love Ashley Wilkes, who tells her that he admires her for “facing reality“, the heroine grips the earth and grasps her property rights, legacy and life lessons and vows … to herself and her own ego.

Gone With the Wind essentially carries Scarlett in conversation with herself throughout the epic movie. From that first conversation at Tara with her suitors, the Tarleton twins, to becoming a Confederate captain’s wife in New Orleans and hiring as her subordinate the man to whom she’d once pledged to worship and motherhood, Scarlett O’Hara is both intransigent and indomitable. She will not be struck down.

Like Mammy, the former slave woman whose respect everyone respectable seeks to earn and keep, Scarlett keeps company with herself as a worldly woman alone. She makes mistakes — she makes a terrible parent — and she makes money and love. Scarlett liberates herself from tradition for capitalism, egoism and her own way of life. Gone With the Wind traces her journey in this sense from selflessness to selfishness, in time for the man whose love she finally earns to come full circle with his own mistakes, i.e., drinking alone and taking pity on himself, to reject her with the movie’s most famous line.

“Frankly, my dear…” and the precision with which Mr. Gable delivers the line redeems the film’s previous strife and tension into a single moment. It is tempting to root for what at first might seem like his own redemption. But Gone With the Wind is not the leading man’s story and, on the movie’s terns, it’s a mistake to jeer or cheer the line.

‘Frankly’ spends itself on a serious dramatic moment; it signifies Rhett Butler’s ultimate betrayal of himself — in particular, his idealism — and everything he loves. And it signals one of the screen’s greatest victories.

While the ‘Frankly’ line endures in audience memories, it is tellingly uttered only after man and woman stand as equals on the landing of the staircase from which Scarlett has literally taken a tumble in a penultimate descent — only to rise again — and, also tellingly, it comes before the movie’s last and final line.

“I’ll figure out a way to get him back … tomorrow is another day.”

This is the triumph, the meaning and the glory of Gone With the Wind. It is not a film about the slavery. It is not a movie about civil war. It is not a picture of what war does to a slave, a woman and a man — or a family, a home and way of life, though it rarely gets credit for its insights into each of those dramatizations. There is depth to this movie about Prissy, the overseer, Pittypat, India, Charles, Sue Ellen and more, not just Ashley, Melanie, Mammy, Dr. Meade or Scarlett and Rhett Butler.

Like We the Living, Atlas Shrugged and other epic novels by Hugo, Rand and other great works of literature and movies, it is an expression of the ability of the individual to resist the times, the trials and ruins of the day, rise and never let one’s ego be destroyed. It is the story of a man, or, in this case, a woman — or, in any case, a girl who becomes one — and it is certainly not a romance for romance’s sake. Gone With the Wind depicts the promise not to yield, suffer and be beaten down. It is in this sense, to paraphrase one its admirers, Ayn Rand, a paean to forging the “I” one must learn how to say before one can learn to say “I love you”.

This is why it ends where it vows to once again begin.

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Gone With the Wind screened during the 10th anniversary Turner Classic Movies festival on April 14, 2019 for its historic 80th anniversary at the Chinese movie theater designed and built by Sid Grauman. This was the 25th anniversary date of the film’s initial airing — the first motion picture showcased without interruption or editing — on Ted Turner’s Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable channel’s first day of launch. The movie was introduced by TCM’s festival director, Genevieve McGuillicuddy, before the original Robert Osborne introduction from April 14, 1994 was shown before the movie.

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Scott Holleran began his professional writing career as a newspaper correspondent in 1991. He’s worked in a variety of media, including magazines, broadcasting and Internet ventures. His news, cultural commentary, sports and other topical articles has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Philadelphia Inquirer. You can find Scott on Facebook, Twitter or on his website. I’m thrilled Scott reached out to feature this entry on Once Upon a Screen. I hope there will be others.

Analysis: GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) This is a special guest post by Scott Holleran: ◊ My first experience of this movie was probably on television, probably in fragments.

#Butterfly McQueen #Clark Gable #David O. Selznick #Gone with the Wind #Harry Davenport #Hattie McDaniel #Leslie Howard #Margaret Mitchell #Olivia de Havilland #Ona Munson #TCM #Victor Fleming #Vivien Leigh

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