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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

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If you're still taking prompts could you do Jiang Yanli/Jin Guangyao?

Four Worlds in which Jin Guangyao Marries Jiang Yanli

Yunping was a bit out of the way for the Jiang sect, but it was still a city in Yunmeng, so when there was a large enough night-hunt in their region, that was where the Jiang sect usually stayed.

It was always an event for the city’s children, that loved to run over to marvel at all those beautiful purple-clad cultivators walking through the streets – they usually didn’t fly within city limits, much to the disappointment of all.

Meng Yao loved watching them most of all.

After all, his mother told him that his father had been a cultivator, even a Sect Leader; one day, he would return to claim him, or perhaps Meng Yao would need to go present himself to him, but one day, she promised him, one day, he’d have his father’s name and no one would look down on him again.

That promise was everything to him, and yet that wasn’t what really drew him over to the Jiang sect.

No, what he went for was all Jiang Yanli – the girl he’d bumped into by accident, then shown around at her request. He’d shyly told her about his father being a cultivator, and she’d looked so happy for him; she’d even promised to bring him a proper introductory cultivation manual the next time she came so that his mother could stop spending all her money on fakes.

He hadn’t really expected her to remember actually do it, but she had. She’d confided in him that she’d met her future fiancé for the first time, that he was young and spoiled and didn’t seem to like her much, but that her mother wanted the marriage – and saying no now would be a slap in the face of the Jin sect.

“Jin?” Meng Yao said, dazzled. “Oh – that’s the sect my father’s from. If you have to marry someone from there, why don’t you marry me instead?”

Everyone had expected the young lady from the Jiang sect to have taken refuge with the Jin sect. After all, the engagement between her and the heir might be broken, but Madame Jin had still been her mother’s good friend – it would be comfortable with them, and safe…although people would whisper about it.

Perhaps that’s why she didn’t go there.

Meng Yao found himself unwillingly sympathetic. Who knew better than he did how much whispers could corrode the soul? Who knew better the idea of being faced with the disappointment of Lanling, and decided instead to turn to Qinghe, where merit was prized over blood?

The iron-hearted Nie Mingjue agreed to allow Jiang Yanli to stay in the Nie camp only if she agreed to work, but she was willing – even eager – to lend a hand to the war effort, whether by helping nurse the sick, mend clothing, or help in the kitchens.

One day, she brought him soup.

“Sect Leader Nie has already retired,” he said, blinking down at it.

She laughed. “It’s for you. Sect Leader Nie speaks so highly of his hard-working deputy – it would be a shame if you collapsed from hunger because you were too busy working and forgot to eat.”

No girl had ever made anything for Meng Yao before.

“Mistress Jiang,” he said, staring down at it. “Is this – I’m not the right son, you know.”

“If I wanted to make soup for young master Jin, I’d be in Lanling,” she pointed out, eyes curving with a smile. “This has nothing to do with that.”

He’d almost hoped it was; it would spare him the need to say the other part of it. “I don’t know if you haven’t heard,” he said, and if he didn’t know better he might almost think it could be the case – Jiang Yanli was not the type to gossip. “But my background…I wouldn’t want the taint to spread to you.”

“The circumstances of your birth were not your fault, and should not taint you,” she said gently, and she meant it, too; he’d always been good at reading expressions. “It’s just soup, Deputy Meng; don’t think about it too much. Eat it and regain your strength.”

She brought him one every night from that point on.

(“Sect Leader Nie,” Meng Yao said one night, some time later, bold in his desperation. “If I were to propose marriage to Mistress Jiang, would you back me?”

Nie Mingjue’s eyes widened. “I thought you were going to wait until you were reestablished in the Jin sect for that,” he replied, which wasn’t a no, and that’s what Meng Yao cared about right now.

“Sect Leader Jin would never allow a bastard son to have something that should have gone to his legitimate heir, even if his heir has already discarded it,” Meng Yao said. He wouldn’t even allow for sharing, and Meng Yao had had the bruises from falling down the stairs to prove it. “The only way it would work is if there was already an agreement in place before I go to Langya. Sect Leader, please –”

“Don’t beg,” Nie Mingjue said hastily. “I will, I will; did I ever say I wouldn’t? You’re a good man, Meng Yao; I can see no reason for you not to petition for her hand. If the lady agrees, I’ll speak to Jiang Cheng on your behalf.”

“I won’t let you down,” Meng Yao swore, and for the first time since he came to Qinghe, he meant it.)

Meng Yao was good at remembering names and faces, but he had grown up far away from the cultivation world – he was always behind the others in etiquette, having to learn everything all at once when even Jin Zixun, who didn’t care about anyone, could recognize most of his peers on sight.

So when he asked the kitchen girl at Langya her name and she looked surprised, he resigned himself to another embarrassing incident and having to apologize for not knowing what everyone else did.

Instead, she laughed lightly. “Why don’t you call me A-Li?” she said with a smile. “And I’ll call you A-Yao, and we’ll be friends.”

“I can always use friends,” Meng Yao said, and smiled back.

He expected it to be little more than a joke, but she seemed to take it seriously: she spoke warmly to him whenever he came to the kitchens, and in the rare times they were both free, she would come find him and they would spend time wherever there was a refuge from people.

“People gossip about me rather a lot,” she confessed when he asked her why. “I had an engagement to someone in the Jin sect, and it was rather publicly broken, and then I came here anyway…it was very nice to meet someone who didn’t know about all that.”

Meng Yao could understand that very well. She knew who he was, of course, but she pretended she didn’t, and that suited him very well.

And so they were friends, anonymously, right up until Jin Zixuan humiliated A-Li in front of the entire camp, accusing her of stealing another girl’s credit, and she ran away in tears – it would have been impossible for him to pretend he didn’t know she was the young mistress of the Jiang sect after that.

“He’s an idiot,” he told her, voice unusually fierce, having found her in their usual spot. Even Qin Su, who liked his face, treated him with a touch of pity for his poor background; Jiang Yanli, who was of even higher birth, had never done so, not once – perhaps the unlikelihood of that was why he had managed to stay ignorant of her identity for so long. “One day he’ll know it, too.”

“I don’t want him to,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t even mean it like that! It was only that our mothers were friends, so I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Meng Yao said. He hadn’t planned on telling anyone his plans, not even A-Li, but after a scene like that… “I’m leaving the camp tomorrow, with a plan to earn fame and merit enough to force my father to recognize me. It’s risky, and I may not survive, but if I do, would you marry me? We could rub it in his face.”

Jiang Yanli smiled at him. “Meng Yao, I would marry you even without that.” She thought about it a minute. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t feel nice, though.”

Meng Yao laughed.

Jin Guangyao wasn’t expecting the knock on his door.

Jiang Yanli was still wearing mourning clothing, all in white; with her pale face, she looked like a ghost, and only the rosy-cheeked baby in her arms indicated that she was alive.

“Sister-in-law,” he said, not quite sure if a smile was appropriate at this moment. “It’s late – how can I help you?”

“You want to be Sect Leader, don’t you?” she asked, direct and to the point, and the pleasant expression on his face stiffened. “Don’t deny it, I won’t hold it against you. You weren’t the one that killed him; all you did was tell him about the situation, which even I would have done.”

“Why do you ask?” he replied, still unwilling to commit himself.

“Because I don’t have much else to offer,” Jiang Yanli said simply. “Your father is gathering up cultivators to go to the Nightless City, where he’ll demand A-Xian’s life, and never mind that it was just a horrible accident. I don’t want that to happen, but no one will listen to me – but you’ve never needed anyone to listen to you to get what you want out of them.”

Jin Guangyao hadn’t known that Jiang Yanli was so perceptive. If he had, he might have been more cautious around her. “You want me to find a way to save your shidi’s life,” he said slowly. “Even after he killed your husband, and turned the vast majority of the cultivation world against him. And in return, you’re offering…what?”

“Legitimacy,” she said. “You’re the obvious next heir at the moment, yes, but Sect Leader Jin has dozens of children outside; he need only go and get one to put your inheritance in doubt. But if you marry me, even Sect Leader Jin won’t be able to resist the pressure of making you the heir.”

He stared at her. “I’m – engaged.”

“I don’t object to you taking Qin Su as a concubine,” she said. “Sect Leader Qin will be open to the idea if you’re the heir. But as a matter of dignity, I would insist that you refrain from intimacy before marriage during the time that you’re engaged to me – I know the two of you have been considering forcing your parents’ hands that way, but it would leave me with no face at all if you persisted with that approach.”

Yes, Jiang Yanli was far more perceptive than he’d previously believed.

Marriage to her would be – interesting.

“Very well,” he said. “I accept.”

#mdzs #jiang yanli #jin guangyao #meng yao #my fic #my fics #couldn't decide which one #so I wrote them all #Anonymous

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kumeko · 3 years

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A/N: For the Dandelion zine! I wanted to explore my favourite trio (though, Yennefer would not like being included like that XD) post series.

Summary: Jaskier’s prized possession was a crate of wine Geralt bought him as an apology. Twelve bottles that he only brought out for the most important of occasions: dates with Geralt, rants with Yennefer, picnics at Ciri’s castle, and more. A look at Jaskier over the years.

…

i. First bottle

There were very few things that Jaskier wouldn’t forgive. Oh, he could and would hold a grudge; he had mastered the art of pettiness by the time he’d turned ten. But that was something entirely different than carrying hate, to nurse it and feed it until it became an entity on its own. Jaskier preferred forgiveness; it was better to drink with old foes than avoid them. Besides, it never hurt to keep things friendly when he could.

He had enough enemies from past dalliances as it was.

However, forgiveness required an actual apology, which was why he wasn’t exactly excited when he found Geralt for the first time in months. It didn’t hurt that he was also sitting on his bed in the inn, expression carefully blank, as though they’d gone on another adventure together and hadn’t fought at all. It figured the Witcher would just wander in and expect everything to be fine.

“How’d you get in here?” Jaskier asked, quietly closing the door behind him. Innkeepers and maids liked to talk and this was complicated enough without bringing in half the neighbourhood to hear.

“Your door was unlocked,” Geralt answered simply, his voice low and rough as though he hadn’t spoken for days. Knowing him, that had to be the case. Despite his relaxed posture, his golden eyes remained fixed on Jaskier as though waiting for something. At his foot was a small, wooden crate and Jaskier didn’t remember seeing that before.

“You know that’s not an answer, right?” Knowing it’d take an army to pull Geralt off his bed, Jaskier settled for grumpily leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. He had forgotten how tiring it was to pry information from him.

Geralt studied him for a minute before admitting, “The cook let me in.”

Which was the answer, but that wasn’t the question Jaskier really wanted to ask. Why? After that day on the mountain, after months of utter silence, why now? With anyone else, he would have guessed loneliness or regret, but Geralt was ‘above’ that. Or rather, Geralt squashed his emotions into a pit of denial so deep it would take years to dig it out. Jaskier ran a hand through his hair. “Bribery. Of course. Next time, I’ll bribe them to keep you out.” Breathing in through his nose, he counted to ten before asking, “What are you doing here?”

This time, Geralt took even longer to respond. As a self-proclaimed ‘man with no feelings’, he didn’t really have any nervous ticks that gave away his thoughts, nothing that Jaskier could focus on and say, He’s anxious because he’s scratching his nose. “I came to meet you.”

“Again, that’s not an answer!” Jaskier growled, resisting the urge to toss his lute at him. All of this was sobering him up. “And here I was, happily inebriated,” he complained.

“I can fix that,” Geralt offered, nudging the box forward. A heavy thing, it slowly slid across the wooden floor. If it scratched the planks, he’d force Geralt to pay for damages.

“No thanks.” Jaskier wrinkled his nose, already imagining its contents. Though, with Geralt, it was probably ten times worse than what he was thinking. “What’d you put in there? A monster’s head?”

Geralt gave him a blank look, as though he were an idiot. Jaskier didn’t know why he felt a swell of fondness at seeing it again, he hated that look. “Why would I do that?”

It was a fair point. Not that he’d admit it. Jaskier looked away scornfully and scoffed, “I don’t know. Why do you do anything you do?”

There was something extremely annoyed in Geralt’s expression and privately, Jaskier was thrilled. A little frightened, but thrilled. It was getting to him. “It’s a case of wine,” he stated flatly.

“Wine?” That caught his attention. Jaskier eyed the box before resisting the urge to take one out. Knowing Geralt, the flavour would be terrible, but still. It was free wine. One should never look a gift horse in the mouth, especially one that would still get you drunk.

“Yes, for you.” He motioned for Jaskier to take the box. “Just take it.”

These were more words than Geralt used in a week. Jaskier withdrew his hand, resting it at his side. Even though he knew the answer, he asked, “And why are you giving this to me? Didn’t think you were one for presents.”

“It’s…” Geralt shifted uncomfortably, the bed creaking in response. With his hulking frame, he looked out of place in the small room, his shoulders hunching slightly so he’d take up less room. “It’s…for that time.”

“For that time?” Jaskier prodded, knowing immediately what he meant. At his core, Geralt was an awkward man. For all of his roughness and combative prowess, he was clumsy in the ways of the heart. Luckily, that’s what Jaskier excelled at. And he wasn’t going to let his friend stumble through life, unable to actually say what he meant. More importantly, he wasn’t going to let this go without a proper apology.

“On the mountain. When we…when I…” Geralt rubbed his neck, looking more and more embarrassed with each passing second.

“Ah, yes, the mountain where you declared we weren’t friends.” Faking a frown, Jaskier tapped his chin. “What was it you said, again? Something about—”

“Don’t be annoying,” Geralt grumbled. If Witchers’ could flush, he would be redder than a tomato by now.

That stopped Jaskier in his tracks. Glaring, he snapped, “Annoying? You came here to beg for my forgiveness—”

“I’m not begging.”

“—and you think you can talk like that?” Jaskier rested a hand on his hip, ignoring Geralt’s quick aside.

“You have a point.” Geralt paused, clenching his fist. He looked away. Taking a deep breath, he slowly unfurled his hand. “I was wrong then.”

“For?” Jaskier pressed, unable to stop himself.

Geralt glared at him and spit out, “Everything.”

Well, that wasn’t quite what he was looking for, but he’d take it all the same. Jaskier hummed happily as he reached for the casket. To be perfectly honest, he had forgiven Geralt the moment he’d laid eyes on him, but no one needed to know that. He had his self respect and dignity to protect, after all. Flipping open the lid, he pulled out a dark green bottle and held up to the light. “A red wine, huh? Perfect for a catching-up drinking session. I need some new songs.”

Geralt groaned.

-x-

ii. second bottle

There were many places Jaskier expected to bump into Yennefer—in a ballroom, at a court, in front of Geralt’s corpse. Ironically, she would probably be the reason his stupid friend got killed and not any of the monsters he hunted. The one place that had never crossed his mind was the broom closet of a minor noble, while he was on the run from said noble’s guards.

“Fancy seeing you here.” He smiled charmingly, or at least as charmingly as he could while still panting from exertion. Behind him, there were shouts and angry footsteps as the guards looked for him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked flatly, as though she wasn’t the one hiding in the closet. Somehow, she always appeared composed and he hated her for it. Yennefer glanced over his shoulder and smirked. “No, let me guess, another one of your affairs?”

“What gave it away?” As the sounds grew louder, he pushed her to the side and squeezed his way in. “Ugh, this is so tight.”

“What are you doing?” she hissed, stubbornly pushing back against him. “Find your own hiding spot.”

So she was hiding too. He tucked that info away for later, for when he wasn’t in life-threatening danger. Shoving, he wormed into the gap next to her. “There’s no time!”

“Oh for god’s sake,” she snapped, letting off a string of curses before grabbing his hand.

“Awfully forward of—” Before Jaskier could finish his sentence, the world turned topsy-turvy and suddenly they weren’t in the closet anymore. No, they were in his room in the inn and the world was spinning around him. Falling on all fours, he heaved as he tried to regain his bearings. “What…was…that…?”

“Teleportation.” He couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was rolling her eyes. Her heels clicked on the wooden floor as she slowly examined the room.

“Magic,” Jaskier groaned. He had always thought teleportation was useful before this—if he could just escape all of his trysts so easily. He had been utterly wrong. It was better to face the wrath of every guard than it was to go through that again. “Oh god, does it always feel like this?”

“Only if you’re not used to it,” she replied tartly, peeking out his window. Clearly she didn’t like what she saw, as she sniffed and added, “Quaint place.”

Jaskier wondered just how many times she had vomited before she’d gotten used to this feeling. It was a strange, humanizing thought, and he pushed it to the back of his head. “I’m not as rich as you.”

“No, clearly not.” The bed creaked as she sat on it. He could just see her hand pressing against the bedsheet. She clicked her tongue. “Definitely not.”

There was nothing like spite to force a man to compose himself. Jaskier forced down the bile in his throat and unsteadily rose to his feet. “Then go back to that noble, huh? Oh wait, you can’t.”

Yennefer looked at him sharply. Honestly, what did Geralt see in her? She looked like one of those governesses, never smiling, never laughing. Then again, neither did Geralt most of the time and he was still with him. “Don’t talk about matters you know nothing about.”

Jaskier waited a minute for her to elaborate. When she didn’t add anything else, he rubbed his forehead, frustrated. Of course she wouldn’t explain. Another thing she shared with Geralt. He wasn’t sure why he found one endearingly annoying and the other just plain irritating. “If you don’t say anything, obviously I’m going to know nothing about it.”

Her glare grew deeper. “I could turn you into a frog.”

“You wouldn’t,” he sneered, challenging her. At least, that was the plan, but his voice cracked half-way and he wobbled slightly as he tried to find a stable position. There was no bite to his words, he could tell it by the way she smirked. Stumbling onto the lone chair in the room, he sat on it backwards, leaning his chest against the chair back for support. At least he didn’t have to look as wobbly as he felt. Just how long was this motion sickness supposed to last, anyways?

“Hmm, don’t think I have to.” Every word from her felt like a taunt. “So what was it this time? Another fling?”

Averting his eyes, Jaskier didn’t bother to reply. Sure, he was predictable. Geralt just had to look at him to guess what he was up to, but he wasn’t sure how to feel about Yennefer of all people figuring him out. They’d barely even talked. They weren’t even allies, just people who sometimes worked together because Geralt forced them too. Maybe he really should reconsider his affairs business if even strangers knew about it.

Jaskier frowned. Or maybe Geralt had blabbed during pillow-talk. Sure, he wasn’t much of a talker, but she was a witch, after all. Maybe she’d gotten it out of him. “Did Geralt tell you?”

Immediately, Yennefer scowled. “No,” she hissed between clenched teeth, looking like a lioness ready to pounce. It reminded Jaskier of the Queen of Calanthe, and he swallowed. “Of course not.”

“Oh.” Jaskier wasn’t sure what to make of that. If Geralt had apologized to him, he must have gone to Yennefer too. He rubbed his neck. “So, uh, he didn’t try to give you an I’m sorry gift?’

Yennefer snorted, a completely un-ladylike and inelegant move. “I wouldn’t let him.”

“Oh.” Well, that explained it. Honestly, he would never understand their relationship, and he really didn’t want to. “He gave me wine.” Jaskier gestured at a box near the foot of the bed. “It’s surprisingly good, considering he picked it.”

“He must have had help.” Yennefer rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t understand himself, let alone others.”

Look who’s talking, he almost said, but he’d tested his luck once today. There was no point in trying it a second time. Jaskier had experienced enough curses to last a lifetime. “Probably. Wish I could have seen that conversation. ‘I need an apology gift for abandoning my friend on a mountain’.”

Yennefer replied scornfully, “At least he left you. He tied me to him, the bastard.”

This was the first he’d heard of it. Jaskier bit his lip. Geralt was his friend. Yennefer was a horrid woman. Geralt was his friend. This sounded really interesting. Geralt was his friend. “I don’t—”

At the same time, Yennefer looked out his window and if looks could kill, Geralt would be dead right now. “And that pig of a nobleman might have had a cure for it.”

“How’d you end up in the closet?” Jaskier asked, before he could stop himself. Internally, he sighed. Well, if he was going to do this anyways, he might as well go all the way. “This seems like a long story, want some wine?”

-x-

iii. third bottle

There were many idyllic ways Jaskier liked to while the hours away. Wooing a noble lady, practicing his songs, lazing about in the afternoon sun. Sometimes, as a treat, he liked to do all three at once. If he were entirely honest, almost anything he did was an utter waste of time and that was precisely why he liked doing them. There was no pressure, no demand, just time spent spoiling himself.

Therefore it was entirely unexpected when Geralt joined him on a grassy hill for cloud watching of all things. Sure, he had returned from yet another monster-hunting/city-saving adventure, so he was due for a little rest and relaxation. Yet he had never accepted that as a reason before. Flat on the ground, Jaskier glanced to his right, at the profile of his stoic lover. Quiet, unsmiling, it looked like Geralt.

“What is it?” Geralt asked, still staring up at the clouds. He hadn’t so much as moved and Jaskier wondered if he just had a second sense for observing things.

Well, it sounded like Geralt too. So it had to be him, as odd as it was. “You’re lying here.” Jaskier blurted, not sure what to say, how to say it aside from stating the obvious.

At this, Geralt turned his head and looked at him. “Yeah?”

“You.” Jaskier gestured at Geralt for emphasis. “Are. Relaxing.” This was the exact opposite of what Geralt did. Maybe he was sick. Or maybe he’d gotten cursed again. In Geralt’s line of work, this wasn’t exactly uncommon. A monster, a witch—Jaskier’s eyes widened as he found the perfect suspect. “Was it Yennefer?” He wouldn’t put it past her to pull some petty revenge for an inane argument

“Yenn—” Geralt cut himself off, rolling his eyes before looking up at the sky again. “She didn’t do anything,” he answered gruffly.

“But you know she would,” Jaskier muttered under his breath, a little put out. That answered his other question—Geralt had apologized and Yennefer had forgiven. Great. At least none of Jaskier’s flings had the tendency to put them into life-threatening situations. Maybe he should amend their open relationship to not include dangerous witches.

“I’m just spending time with you,” Geralt added and Jaskier felt the sigh more than heard it. Their arms bumped slightly, sending a tingle up his spine. “I can stop.”

Before Geralt could get up, Jaskier latched onto his hand. “No, it’s fine.” There was no point in ruining a day out over his suspicions; they had few enough of them as it was. Besides, with another day or two of lazing about, he’d be proven right. Curses always took forever to disappear. When Geralt gave him a dry look, he smiled. “Come on, just a little longer.”

“Fine.” Geralt lay back down, though he didn’t pull away. “A little longer.”

His eyes were soft, Jaskier noted silently. So very soft. He wondered sometimes, how long it took for Yennefer to forgive him, how long it took for them to finally talk. If they still looked at each other overwhelmed and as though they didn’t know what to do with their emotions.

If that look had ever changed to the one Geralt had now, domestic and gentle. There was such an easy thing between them now, where Geralt would scoff at Jaskier’s latest messy affair and Jaskier would bemoan his partner’s inability to be romantic. An easy thing that didn’t really need explanation or words, really. Even now, they just lay there, soaking in the sun, enjoying the breeze. Pure boredom at its best. “I wish we could just always do this.”

“Don’t you always do this?” Geralt asked, not a hint of mockery in his voice.

“I’ll have you know I do actual work.” Jaskier paused, before averting his eyes. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” Geralt agreed, and this time Jaskier knew he was teasing him.

“A lot of the times,” Jaskier corrected. “As fun as it is getting chased out of every kingdom, I’m getting too old for that.”

Geralt rolled over to his side, his brow furrowed. “You’re getting old?”

That was either a compliment, or Geralt was the densest man alive. Probably the latter. Pointing at a strand of grey hair, he nodded. “Not all of us are immortal.”

“I’m not immortal.” Geralt reached and gently touched the hair. “And that’s only one.”

Jaskier snorted. Why was he stuck with immortal beauties for companions? At least Ciri would understand his plight. “One can lead to more, and I want to have something nicer than a room at an inn when that happens.” Having had enough of the topic, he gestured at the picnic at their feet, utterly forgotten. “Let’s finish that bottle. There’s no point in lazing about if we can’t get drunk while at it.”

-x-

iv. fourth bottle

“You’re going into academia?” Mystified, Yennefer glanced at her goblet, at the ruby red wine inside, and then up at Jaskier. “I’m not that drunk.”

Regrettably, they were sitting in one of Ciri’s rose gardens, and not in Jaskier’s room, so he couldn’t just toss her out. Not that it had stopped him from trying before, but the guards refused to believe that Yennefer’s tongue was a lethal weapon and should be treated as such. It didn’t hurt that Ciri was taken with the older woman and he could only blame her terrible taste on Geralt. Like godfather, like goddaughter, and he worried about Ciri’s future partner.

“What’s so funny about that?” Jaskier asked, and immediately he wanted to take his words back. They gave her too many openings.

“Seriously?” Yennefer asked. When he glared at her, she scornfully laughed. “And I thought it was a prestigious academy.”

“Yeah, well, you’re also a teacher somehow, so I guess anything’s possible,” Jaskier snarked back. Luckily for her, she was seated opposite of him on the round table, or he’d have kicked her shins. Actually, maybe he could still—

“Don’t be like that,” Geralt sighed, dropping a hand on his thigh to stop him. He and Ciri sat opposite one another, and not for the first time, Jaskier suspected this seating was on purpose, to prevent some accidental fight.

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who invited her.” Jaskier pulled his wine bottle closer. Honestly, if he’d known she’d come, he wouldn’t have used one from his secret stash. “Why is she even here?”

“Oh? I thought we were friends,” Yennefer drawled, thatching her fingers and resting her chin on them. There was something utterly evil in her smile. Magic was the only reason no one else had noticed.

“Friends don’t make fun of each other,” Jaskier retorted before gulping down his wine. He was too sober to deal with her.

“Congratulations!” Ciri piped up, smiling at him over her goblet. “I think you will be a great professor.”

“Thank you.” Jaskier beamed back at her, though he couldn’t resist throwing one more barb. “See? This is how friends treat each other.”

Ciri giggled, amused. “You two are friends, though.”

“Loosely,” Yennefer muttered. “Very loosely.”

“Ciri, are you drunk?” Jaskier asked, worried. Actually, now that he thought about it, should she even be here, drinking with them? It wasn’t like he could tell the queen to stop, but still. Someone had to keep an eye out for her, and her other two babysitters were utterly incompetent with children.

“Not in the least.” Ciri smiled sweetly, before swirling her wine. At his disbelieving look, she added, “I have had a glass a night since I was eight.”

“Eight?” Jaskier’s first taste of wine had been at 18. Noble children really were nothing at all like the commonfolk.

“I know my limits.” Ciri took another delicate sip, her expression too dignified to remind him of any of his hometown’s children. “Now, what are you teaching?”

-x-

iv. fifth bottle

Jaskier woke up to a dry mouth and the lingering taste of vomit. There was an uncomfortable turmoil in his belly, one that promised he wouldn’t leave the toilet for hours, and his head pounded like a drum. Lying on his back, he stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling, his right hand curled around a cool, glass bottle. From the corner of his eye, he could just make out that it was one of Geralt’s apology bottles, and that it was utterly empty. Actually around him were several other vintages of alcohol, and he didn’t have to guess to know where they’d gone.

He was never going to drink that much again. And this time, he meant it.

There was something heavy and warm on his waist. Jaskier looked down to find a hairy, muscular arm, and followed it up to find a sound asleep Geralt. Memories of last night, in bits and flashes, returned, and he resisted the urge to groan. No wonder he was so drunk, it was the only way he would have agreed to this. Only way Yennefer would agree to it too. He didn’t have to crane his neck to know that she was already gone. If it weren’t for Geralt’s arm, he’d be gone too.

It had been a mistake. An utter mistake. No matter what had changed in their relationship over the years, he and Yennefer were never going to be more than friendly enemies. Drunken, sloppy kisses weren’t going to change that. Jaskier breathed out his nose, glancing up at Geralt. His expression was entirely unguarded and content. Well, at least one person had enjoyed it.

When Jaskier received a raven a week later, a letter informing him that this would never be repeated, his only regret was that he hadn’t sent it first.

-x-

vi. sixth bottle

It was hard, being a teacher. Harder than any job Jaskier had done before, and he’d fought monsters with the best of them. Well, to be precise, he had watched people fight monsters, but he had been on the front lines for each encounter and that had to count for something.

Still, none of that had prepared him for standing in front of a classroom, day in and day out, and having dozens of students watch him with bored eyes. There were a few eager beavers in his class, but the vast majority came in expecting a bird course. Or were from his fan club, and Jaskier took no small amount of pride that even as his hair greyed, he still had it.

And all of that was easy compared to grading all of his students at the end of their term. His table was swamped with papers, with tests and projects and things he probably shouldn’t be marking but got foisted on him because another teacher had seniority. There was a reason that Jaskier had made his final exam a pure performance one, he hadn’t wanted to deal with any paperwork nonsense after.

Leaning forward, he delicately plucked a paper off the table, grimacing at the tiny cramped writing that filled both sides. It was even worse than he thought. Immediately, he dropped the sheet and headed to his closet, pulling out a small box of wine he stored safely beneath his many clothes.

If he was going to do this, he might as well be comfortable.

-x-

vii. seventh bottle

“Why do you look so good?” Jaskier bemoaned, kicking his legs as he sat on the edge of the rooftop. A small part of him worried that this was dangerous, to be drunk and on a rooftop with no rails. The rest of him realized that while he hated it, Yennefer did have teleportation magic and the worst he’d suffer was nausea. However begrudgingly it was, she’d save him.

Probably.

“Hard work,” Yennefer replied bluntly, sipping her wine as she stared up at the night sky. Even now, there was something elegant about her profile, about the way her hair flowed in the cool breeze.

It only made Jaskier hate her more. “You and Geralt are stupidly good looking. And immortal.” He gulped his wine, ignoring the taste as he chased a blissful buzz. “You know how old that makes me feel?”

“As old as you are?” Yennefer hazard a guess, her tone completely dry and disinterested.

“Exactly!” Jaskier picked up the bottle, refilling his glass once more. He couldn’t remember just when they’d started sitting here on the rooftop, having monthly bitching sessions as they complained about coworkers or students. It seemed being teachers had done what Ciri, Geralt, life-changing experiences, or even time couldn’t: made them actual friends.

He would also never tell her that. Biting his lip, he shoulder bumped her. “You shouldn’t get both. Either be good looking or immortal, but not both.”

“It’d be useless to be immortal if we couldn’t move,” Yennefer pointed out, rolling her eyes. “I’m not living to a thousand and using crutches.”

They had this argument every year and, as far as Jaskier was concerned, they would continue to have it till he died. “You have magic, what do you care if you can’t walk? Another stupidly unfair thing.”

“Fine, it’s unfair. Life’s unfair,” Yennefer sneered, looking down at him. “What’re you going to do about it?”

“I’ll tell Ciri to ban you,” he immediately shot back, not bothering to think about his decision for a moment.

“Oh?” Yennefer grinned and if he were just a little more sober, he’d recognize it for the trap that it was. “Go ahead.” She held out a scroll of paper and a pen. He should have wondered where she’d gotten it.

He was too drunk to care. “Fine, I will.”

Jaskier spent the next three months too embarrassed to visit Ciri.

-x-

viii. eighth to tenth bottles

If there was one thing Jaskier had learned over the years, it was that there was no point in hoarding things. Time passed, people came and went, and it was better to enjoy the moment than to regretfully look back at it.

So he drank when he wanted to, kissed who he wanted to, and loved like there was no tomorrow.

-x-

ix. eleventh bottle

There was nothing Jaskier loved more than to lie by the riverbank, tucked comfortably into Geralt’s side. His head rested on his love’s chest, his breathing soft and slow as they watched the clouds pass. Lying like this, it was easy to forget how his bones creaked and complained when he walked, how his back ached when he stood, and how Geralt’s touch had turned even gentler with the passage of time.

It was easy to forget that Jaskier was old. Not getting old, not turning old, but old. His hair was entirely silver now, his skin wrinkly and paper thin. Geralt’s muscles were just as firm as ever, his body unchanging.

No, not entirely unchanging. Jaskier sighed contentedly, listening to his lover’s heartbeat. All those years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Geralt like this. It was harder now, to remember those early days, to remember that gruff Geralt. Harder, but not impossible, and perhaps the good thing about having immortal friends was that they never learned to let go of things. If he forgot, Yennefer was certain to remind him.

“Should we go back?” Geralt asked, his voice low and soft.

“Not yet.” Jaskier closed his eyes, content to just laze the day away here. “The bottle’s still full.”

It had been empty hours ago, but Geralt merely tightened his grip and nodded.

-x-

x. twelfth bottle

Geralt wiped the tombstone, his touch reverent as he cleaned Jaskier’s marker. Somehow, it was never as dirty or overgrown as he’d expected it to be. Maybe Ciri still had a guard come out to clean it every now and then. Crouched before it, Geralt ran his fingers along Jaskier’s name, along the numbers and words he had memorized over the year.

He had known before this, just how deep grief could be. How regrets could linger and fester until they haunted every step. What he hadn’t known was that a life lived happily, filled with memories and joy, could leave him feeling full even after loss. That death didn’t have to hurt, though it ached every now and then.

There was a soft pop behind him and he didn’t have to turn to know just who’d arrived. Leaning forward, he kissed Jaskier’s name before standing up. “I didn’t expect you to be here.”

“We were friends,” Yennefer replied, her expression soft. She’d been wearing it more often these days. “Somehow.”

“Somehow,” Geralt echoed, chuckling. Jaskier had that effect on everyone, worming his way into their hearts until it was hard to imagine lives otherwise.

“And I have the fitting marker for his anniversary.” Yennefer pulled out a bottle.

Geralt’s eyes widened and he snatched the bottle. The label had faded, worn with time, but even still, he recognized the bottle. They’d had too many of them over the years for him to forget. “There was one left?”

“Exactly one.” Yennefer gracefully knelt by Jaskier’s grave and set out three glasses. “I don’t know what he was saving it for, but maybe it was this.”

“I doubt it, he never looked that far ahead.” Still, he sat down beside her.

Taking back the bottle, she hummed her agreement. “You’re right, he was never one for thinking.” She uncorked the bottle, and carefully filled the three goblets.

“He thought sometimes,” Geralt half-heartedly defended Jaskier, unable to refute it entirely.

“Sometimes,” Yennefer agreed once more, picking up her glass. For once, she wasn’t in the mood to argue. She sniffed the wine and smiled. “Hmm, smells good. I suppose some things do get better with time.”

Geralt chuckled. “You should have told him that.”

“And let his head get any bigger?” Yennefer snorted inelegantly, before holding up her glass. “To Jaskier.”

“To Jaskier,” Geralt repeated, clinking their glasses together.

#geraskier #geralt of rivera #jaskier #yennefer #yenralt #the witcher #fanfic #art

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laadgovernorandsankadevi · 3 years

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IPK Rewatch: EP 02; the dori breaks

and so it begins!! The first meeting, the divine stars have intervened. Devi Mayyian watched over as Khushi drove away on the stolen scooter and just as she pulled her dupatta feeling his gaze over her, she slips and falls in the arms of her rajkummar.

Every single interaction between them, it's Khushi who breaks away or walks away. Every single one. She is the one to break the bubble by stepping back or wanting to break away from his grip. He doesn't let her go right away as she squirms and him pulling her back into his arms for that brief second as he takes all of her in, makes her realise her hand on his collar which the moment she removes he pushes her off him. I think bitwa realised what happened to him. He was angry alright, but this girl stirred something the moment he saw her and her trying to break free away from him, a man who girls flock after; he is not going to take these feelings lightly. I think he realised what happened when snapped at her taking her hand off his collar.

Khushi stands scared. Whether any feelings in her have risen or not, she was scared and nervous to begin with and it's clear that the way this man stared at her was not how men should be looking at anyone for that matter. The guards take her away from the premises but not without her dupatta falling off and landing at his feet.

I always found the Khushi's dupatta a character of it's own. Dupatta means a lot to south asian women. Hell I would say that when I find myself wearing a 6ft fabric around me, the realisation of what this garment means symbolically and what it communicates about my character to style is not something that can be a joke. For a girl like Khushi, the dupatta is a symbol is respect and how funny and ironic it is that the man who in next few seconds will declare his control over her life will be the one to return/restore the respect he tried time and time again to disapprove about her to himself. The dupatta under his feet, falling by his feet is such a big deal. But also I feel this moment signifies that Devi Mayyian did sent Arnav as Khushi's protector. If Arnav has been provided with the power and ability to choose his interpretation of what her clutching her dupatta means, then he is also the only one whose treatment of her dupatta protects her image and reputation in eyes of others.

The dupatta and the collar are recurring motifs. And beautiful ones at that! There's something that happens to my brown ghairat at the utilisation of these motifs. Maybe internalised sexist rhetoric?

Back at Gupta House, we get a glimpse of Bua ji's displeasure at Khushi's antics and everyone being worried about not being able to find the papers. Payal who had been hoping that Abhishek was unaware about the dowry, at finding out he's said nothing to defend the Guptas or his to-be wife, finds herself more upset. Meanwhile Garima figures out the connection between Khushi's absence and the mortgaged papers missing.

All while Khushi is being interrogated. In all honesty, I would be hella sus of Khushi being somewhere and ruining a major multi-million company's event. I tried listening multiple times but Barun really used to mumble a lot of dialogues on the beginning. He mumbles the name of a rival fashion house which the nosy person in me wanted to know!

When Arnav takes the first step forward, Khushi doesn't step back but it's from his second step forward that she starts taking a step back. A precedent is set between these two and the progression of their relationship with one taking a step forward, another taking a step back. Khushi doesn't willingly stop taking steps back until after Shyam's revelation. I think it also tracks Khushi's relationship with Arnav's anger. If Khushi's personality and actions give Arnav a reason to start falling for her or allow himself to trust his feelings for her, then none of anything that Arnav does ever allows Khushi to move past the confusion of having feelings for him. She is instead troubled at the aspect of liking someone she's doing her level best to hate.

In first 15 mins of the second episode, we get everything that's going to be the foundation. Arnav always being the one to catch Khushi, the collar, the dupatta, and the bubble which evolves into Rabba Ve, and the steps. I think this is the one of the reasons the initial episodes are beautiful and grip you. The show doesn't waste time in establishing the thesis of their relationship. We slowly start exploring their characters but the relationship, that's what all of this is about.

Sanaya literally looked like a goddess in this episode I swear. The make up is perfect, her face looks perfectly angelic and stands out in contrast to Barun's intense presence. the glowy backdrop of the make up room with mirrors and lights provides a perfect backdrop for who both of them are as people. Arnav being extraordinary and grandeur. Khushi being the source of light.

With Arnav narrating about aukat and wealth, Khushi's expression changes and she refers to caring about family members. She's here because of her sister. Eventually Khushi lands up in Shantivan because of his sister. If money is a motivator to regain the Malik's lost respect and turn them into Raizadas, the money is also something that Arnav equates with respect. He is after all still standing in Sheesh Mahal, and money along with respect was what he lost the day him and his sister were kicked out. He had to rely on Mami's assistance eventually to be able to build up a strong investment portfolio and a fashion house.

I also think Arnav used wealth and class as a reason to provoke Khushi. There are two types of people in middle class or lower classes. Those who take pride in their ability to not ask for help and earn their way through life, and those who would do anything for money. Funny how the damad of Malik's daughter is the one whose a gold digger.

But what is something poor girls have to prize more than their being? Their respect. And at the mention if his sister who Khushi made an assumption of existing, he is compelled to destroy everything about her.

badtamizi pe tou mein Abhi aya nahi hoon.

The way this show turned the dori and dupatta into a motif of what they actually are is beautiful to me. There's nothing romantic about preserving respect and dignity, but there is something powerful in someone's ability to be able to do so. Arnav ripping apart the pearls and having them scatter symbolises how his presence took the innocence away. From the release of this clip, there is no moment where Khushi's character doesn't come under question by either Arnav or Shyam. The pearl dori breaking also starts Arnav's journey of walking a path where he had to be apologise. He is going to be living with this guilt for at least the entirety of the year.

Back at Gupta House, everyone is concerned for Khushi except for Bua ji, who is definitely the one more concerned about appearances than Garima. Perhaps because for Garima, her husband is still present besides her. As much as I hate prioritising of appearances and the shame-based social approach of brown communities, it is something that unfortunately exists and our narratives exist within the existence of socially acceptable appearances.

Payal whose been asked concisely about Khushi doesn't budge but she decides to say something with her father returning. Perhaps because she also realises that the way she loves Khushi unconditionally and considers her as her closet confidant, Babuji also is accepting and understanding of Khushi's intentions even if they revert to a mistake. Payal's displeasure at Abhishek not speaking up for her also helps in being happy at Khushi's return and aiding Khushi afterwards as much as she could.

Shashi who had been apprehensive about dowry to begin with is relieved to see Khushi safe and sound, Garima who was adding by the norms of how girls family should behave was disappointed beyond words, and Bua ji was just straight up angry. I think Bua ji is the only character who despite loving Khushi, displays the bias in how she considers Payal to be perfect and Khushi to be imperfect.

While Khushi provides the explanation about going to meet the not-hone-wale jija ji, we do get an insight into why despite Manorama's objections and her own reservation on class issues, Payal agrees for Akash. Because Akash is honest about his feelings and about all that he hopes to provide. I have to say, the Gupta sisters have a really low bar for their men after having Shashi as a father. But honestly, don't we all just settle at crumbs half the time? It's truly a shame. -- Khushi admits her mistakes unless she's challenged or dared. and she doesn't hesitate in apologising except from Arnav. Khushi apologising is almost a norm for her character however Khushi apologising Arnav is not going to be one. I find that juxtaposition of how Khushi treats Arnav and him wanting apologies to be extremely hilarious! She forgives his gravers mistakes but not anything menial.

mat kaho humme amma!

oh, how it breaks Khushi's heart! Khushi is wholly accepted into her family even by Bua ji; so on the two occasions when she is reminded of her orphaned status, it crumbles her entire world. After all, she went to see Abhishek, Junior Engineer who wanted dowry for her step sister. She crosses over boundaries for those she loves and her family members are the people she repeatedly crosses these boundaries and social conventions for. Also in both the instances of Khushi being reminded about her orphaned status, Shashi and Payal are more understanding despite their disappointment or pain. They truly love Khushi whole-heartedly and perhaps unconditionally which is something that surprisingly Arnav does too even though the first marriage between the two was on the terms and conditions laid out by Arnav driven by his interpretation of Khushi’s betrayal.

The episode ends with Khushi opening up the sweet shop after being unable to sleep. I love the moonlight on both the girls face. It symbolises their inner turmoil and distress. With the divine clock on, the journey to rediscover themselves and them in love is going to rule the hearts of Gupta sisters.

#endlessly rewatching ipkknd #ipkknd 10 year rewatch #10 years of IPKKND #ipkknd #arnav singh raizada #khushi kumari gupta #arnav and khuhsi #iss pyaar ko kya naam doon #arhi #arshi

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miss-tc-nova · 4 years

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A SOLDIER’s Memories - Cloud Strife x Fem!Reader Pt 8

Ah, I love it!

ALSO CONTAINS MAJOR SERIES SPOILERS...Then again, if you don’t know already, what the heck?

Part 8: Frailty

Cloud’s been acting a little odd since our duel at the Gold Saucer. Granted, we’ve been through quite a bit of hell since then so I suppose I should clarify that Cloud has been acting odd around me. I don’t like it. I catch him often staring at me while in the midst of conversations with others. He’s increased his attempts to interact with me or at least put up with my antics. Of course, even in my ridiculousness, I ensure that there are clear boundaries drawn in the sand—there will be no personal bonding time; we’re “work buddies” now, not the love struck teens we used to be. And I will not let my brain convince me he’s the same when he’s not; I don’t need that.

I strut out of town towards the airship, kind of excited to show off my prize to the group. I hop up the steps and walk through the airship, singing, “Lookey lookey what the SOLDIER Queen brought back! Oi, Cid! Bring us some glasses!”

I set the crate on a desk as people gather around.

“What’re you yellin’ about?” grumbles Cid.

Reaching into the box, I hold up a bottle. “Your queen doth provide.”

Tifa peers into the box, a grin on her face like I knew there would be. “Is this what you’ve been getting into all morning?” she scolds playfully.

I shrug. “More or less. There was a monster problem and now there isn’t. They couldn’t afford to pay me though and insisted I take this.” Opening the drink in my hand, I take a swig. “I normally would’ve said no, but I’ve heard talk that you’re one hell of a bartender.”

I spot Cloud coming into the room but before I can focus on him, Barret reaches into the box. “Damn, I knew I liked you SOLDIER.”

“You threatened to off me on multiple occasions,” I quip.

He points at me. “That’s ‘cause you a threat.”

“Damn right. Now let’s drink!” I push the youngest of us away. “Not you, Yuffie. You’re a minor.”

“Aww!”

Tifa starts pouring out glasses and everyone gets to drinking, except Yuffie and Cait Sith; even Red has a one. This is the lightest any of us have been in a long time, just as I hoped.

It’s dark out. Most of the alcohol is gone and several members of our squad are out cold or have retired to bed. It’s only us girls and Cloud but he’s sitting quietly in the corner while we chat away.

“Hey, what’s this?” Yuffie asks, digging through the box and retrieving a piece of paper. She turns it over, revealing several numbers and a name scrawled across it. “Ooo. It’s a phone number. You’re naughty,” she teases.

“Is that how you really got us these drinks?” Tifa joins in.

This is an awkward subject and I kind of want to go back to talking about Barret and Marlene. Still, I go along with it. “No way. Though he was hinting really hard that he’s free tomorrow night,” I laugh, taking another swig of my drink.

“Maybe we can talk the others into staying another day. I think you should really consider going to see him.” I know Tifa’s just trying to look out for me, but I’m absolutely not interested in romance right now.

This is where I make my mistake. My automatic response comes out of my mouth before I can think about it. “Nah. I already got a boyfriend.”

Cloud’s spit take from the corner mirrors exactly how my brain is now panicking.

Why did I say that?! I’m such an idiot!

After the Nibelheim Incident, the reply had truly been an automatic response, but as time went on, I came up with this unrealistic hope that if I continued to say it, it would be true. That sure backfired on me. Anyway, I lost all desire to invest in any new personal relationships so I never curbed the habit; men that dared approach me were quickly put down with that statement. If they weren’t, they needed extra special explanations and I don’t want to go into that. I’d done so well in keeping these people, no matter how much I like them, at a distance, but now I’ve finally slipped up and it might be the worst mistake I could’ve made in front of them.

“Cloud, are you okay?!” Tifa shouts. The choking man holds up a thumb. I curse his resilience just a little when the two females turn back on me.

Yuffie puts her hands on my knee, bouncing in her seat. “You have a boyfriend?! What’s his name?! What’s he like?!” She’s a gossip depraved teenager.

I can’t contain the heat of embarrassment and fear rising in my face. “Sorry, no! I-I misspoke.”

She puffs out her cheeks. “What do you mean you misspoke?”

I stare eat the amber liquid in my glass, thumbs running along the rim while my brain attempts to regain composure. I guess I couldn’t hide everything from them forever. Full of nerves, I answer truthfully, well almost. “Well I…had a boyfriend. But he’s gone now.”

“Wait! When did you date? Where is he now? What happened?”

Dammit Yuffie! I just need her to shut up before I strangle her. “He died.”

Instantly, the atmosphere in the room goes south and the girl is no longer all that eager, just as I hoped. “Oh. I’m sorry…”

After attempting to lighten everyone’s mood, I have successfully ruined it for those of us in this room.

“What happened?” asks Tifa softly. I wish she hadn’t.

I heave a sigh. “It was years ago, before I met you guys and I was still in SOLDIER. He was an infantryman working for Shinra too so we ended up working together a lot. Then one day…we went on a mission that didn’t go so well.” My fingers slip around the pendant hiding my dearest memories, the thoughts burning against my fingers. “I know I should’ve let go by now, but I just can’t bring myself to find someone else.”

Tifa rests a hand against my back. “Hey, different people grieve in different ways. He must’ve meant a lot to you, so it’s okay that you still miss him.”

Yuffie’s got far less tact. “So what was he like?”

I didn’t want to share any of my life with these people; I haven’t shared it with anyone in five years. But somehow, in this moment, I can’t help talking about him. A smile sneaks onto my lips. “Heh, he definitely kept me grounded. He could bring me down from any fury within minutes. Got me out of plenty of sticky situations and we argued all the time, but it was never serious. Just for fun, ya know.” Gods, my heart aches, but these were the happiest moments of my life. “But he was always so sweet and would do anything for me. His hair was so soft and I could’ve spent hours looking into his eyes. The way he smelled was always so comforting. I just…” Against my will, my eyes flicker to the blonde. “I miss him.”

There’s silence and I can feel the seams I’d welded together so tightly beginning to crack. I went further down the rabbit hole than I meant to. Before I break, I need to get out of here. I give my head a shake and set my unfinished glass aside.

Putting on my usual guise, I stand and say, “Okay, I think that’s enough for me.” I hate that look they’re giving me. Still, I smile. “You guys have fun, but don’t stay up too late. I’m gonna go crash.” Nobody says a word; all just staring at me with a mix of awe and sympathy. “What?”

Tifa answers with concern. “You’re crying.”

I blink in surprise, realizing that my vision isn’t as clear as I would’ve declared. Now I’m definitely in trouble. I clear my eyes, bringing back my mask. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

The bartender stands. “Maybe you should hang out with us a little longer. We can keep you company.”

“No. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.” I’m not, but I’m not going to show her that. My muscles strain to maintain my composure and steady breathing and these damn tears keep trying to escape. I need to go. “I’m just gonna get to bed. I worked hard for that alcohol, you know.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” With a brief way, I head for the rooms. “See you guys in the morning.”

Just outside of the room, I pause, stuffing the screams back down. I can hear them.

Yuffie mutters, “I’ve never seen her cry.”

Tifa agrees, “No, even when Aerith died. She was sad, but she didn’t cry…”

More tears fall. Dammit!

I head quickly for my room, desperate to lock the door and hide away, hide my shame and misery. Just as I reach for the handle to my door, a hand grabs my wrist and pulls me back around. There’s no time; the tears just keep falling and I don’t have time to hide them from the very cause of it all.

“Cloud?” He can probably hear the grief in my voice, but I try to stay calm. Pulling from his grasp, I wipe at my face. “What’s wrong?”

The man just stands there, staring down at me with a look of pure pity that I loathe. I don’t want to see it, let alone from him.

My words come a bit more sharply this time. “What? What is it?” When I still don’t get a response, I turn back to my room, but again he stops me. This agitates my anger and weakens my control on my tears. “I don’t need your fucking pity! So if you don’t have something to say, you can fuck off!”

Those words get promptly thrown right back in my face. Cloud reaches out, his cool, calloused hand brushing some of the water from my face.

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment, it’s him and it shatters everything. My willpower breaks and I bury my face in his chest, hands desperately grasping at his shirt. All control goes out the window as I sob. At least I might retain some dignity; Cloud moves us from the hallway and into my room. I’m sure he’s uncomfortable, but he still sits on the bed with me, letting me fall to pieces. His presence, his embrace, his heartbeat, all of it makes this whole thing so much worse, but I’m far weaker than the persona I’d built to hide it all. I can’t bring myself to let him go or push him away. I’ve held onto this despair for so long it’s overwhelming; so I’ll take advantage of his presence at least for now.

#cloud strife #cloud x reader #cloud strife x reader #ffvii cloud #ff7 cloud #fem!reader

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chemicallyimbalancedboy · 4 years

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Closet Karma

Summary: Logan gets stuck in a closet and doesn't use the best choice of words when asking for Roman's help out.

Content/Trigger Warnings: Maybe a mildly suggestive joke if you squint.

Pairing: Logince

Word Count: 1,103

---

Logan stared at the blank spot on the couch with a displeased crease to his forehead, his foot lightly but quickly tapping on the carpet underneath him. He’d been reading on the couch earlier and while there was nothing unusual about that, what was unusual was his need for a blanket. The heater hadn’t been working properly for a while and although he’d put it on the schedule, no one had actually bothered to call anyone to come out and fix it. It wasn’t an issue - up until this cold front hit. He really should’ve just done it himself, but he’d figured at least one of his roommates would take the time to do it while he was busy.

That’s not the point though. The point is that it’s cold and when one is cold they generally acquire a blanket. So, he’d went to the closet and collected a blanket for himself. He’d been using that all morning, then he’d gone to make himself some tea and when he’d come back, the blanket was gone. He stares for a bit longer, trying to ponder the who and why of the situation, before deciding the most efficient option was just to go gather another blanket and bring it back. He’ll have a discussion with the other three about the theft later. Surely whoever had nabbed the blanket had seen his book on the coffee table indicating that he intended to return.

With a sigh, he turns and starts down the hallway. Thoughts for later. Right now he was still cold and still wanted to read. His nose wrinkles as he opens the closet door and finds that all the easily accessible blankets had already been hauled away to God knows where. The only one left was on the very top shelf and while he’s not particularly short, he’s fairly certain whoever put that shelf in was some sort of giant with no regard for those of normal stature.

Logan takes a moment to glance around behind him to ensure no one is in sight before he starts reaching for the blanket. His fingers brush the lip of the shelf. He stands on his toes, leans forward, and tries again. His hand makes it over the edge, only to push the blanket farther back. He quickly lowers onto flat feet again before his toes start to hurt and rests his hands on his hips, glaring up at the blanket as if he can intimidate it into flinging itself into his waiting arms.

No such luck.

He pauses to glance around once more before sighing in defeat, deciding to relinquish is dignity for just long enough to acquire the blanket while no one is looking. With determination in his eyes, he looks back up at the blanket, brows furrowed. “If I did not need you I would fully intend to set you alight once I get you down here,” he mutters under his breath. He still might, once he’s done with it.

Frustrations vented, he bends his knees and jumps with his arms outstretched. The blanket must’ve heard him - or the universe noted his threat on its behalf - because when his hands make contact, with the blanket and the shelf respectively, the shelf gives. There’s a loud crack as all the weight Logan was attempting to balance on the shelf went tumbling to the floor. More cracks and a few thumps fill his ears as he collides with what feels like absolutely everything they keep in this Godforsaken closet.

By the time the noise had stopped, he finds himself almost completely crammed within its confines and covered by more things than he can find it within himself to count. He heaves a sigh and lets his head thunk back against the wall, glaring angrily upwards as he processes the mortifying situation he’s found himself in. At least he’s got the blanket.

“Logan?”

Logan looks away from the overhead light and towards the voice, fighting the rising flush in his face as he spots Roman staring down at him with something between concern and amusement.

“Roman,” he responds tersely.

That’s all it takes for Roman to snort out a laugh, seeming to take the response as an indicator that Logan isn’t injured. Logan’s face grows even redder and he tries to make his way out of the pile - with little success.

“Would you just- ugh- Roman, help me out of the closet.”

A wide, toothy grin spreads across his face and Logan is immediately filled with regret, both at his wording and his request entirely. “Gladly,” Roman all but coos, his eyebrows wiggling in a way that really isn’t fair, but before Logan can rescind his request the other is offering his hand. He makes a show of considering the offer, but they both know he’s not really in any position to decline if he wants out of there with any quickness.

The second Logan takes his hand, he feels himself being pulled upwards and completely forgets to actually hold onto his hard-won prize as his chest collides with his theatrical roommate’s who looks way too smug about the whole situation. As soon as he’s regained his bearings, he wrestles his flustered expression back under control and frowns at Roman as he pulls his hand free. The man laughs and he crosses his arms, giving him a look that is most definitely not a pout. It’s a scolding frown and he will go to his grave with that claim.

There’s a laugh in his voice as Roman speaks again, “Need any more help getting out of the closet? I’ve certainly got the time and you wouldn’t be the first I’ve assisted with that endeavor - though they don’t usually ask me upfront.”

“No,” Logan says, turning to pick up the blanket he’d lost in the process, “That was sufficient.”

Roman presses a hand to his chest as he leans dramatically against the doorframe. “Sufficient? You wound me! When one is to assist another with coming out of the closet the results must be more than just sufficient or they’ve not done nearly a well enough job!”

“Better luck next time.”

“Next time? You plan to get stuck in the closet again?”

Logan flushes again at the expression Roman pulls, debating whether it would be worth losing his blanket by throwing it at the other’s face to make his escape.

No. Not worth it.

“For that, you get to clean up the mess.” Logan turns and quickly makes his way back towards the living room, biting back a grin at the indignant sputtering coming from the man behind him.

#sanders sides #sanders side fic #ts logan #logan sanders #ts roman #roman sanders #logince

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yandere-flower · 5 years

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Can I have a Junkrat x male reader? Maybe a soulmate AU have each others names on them. Junkrat is thrilled but the reader is not. Set in Junkertown? Thank you!

Hey, gosh this idea has been floating in my head but I can’t it took me so long!! So I hope you weren’t looking for something soft and fluffy cause this is smut buddy. I gotta admit I never felt the attraction to Junkrat but did I let that stop me? Absolutely not. Hope you enjoy!!

Non-con and poorly written blowjobs down below

You were on a routine mission, one of no particular note. It wasn’t like you weren’t a good agent, you just weren’t like the legends. Every organization needs their hard workers. Besides, the grunt work was a good way to deter you from thinking about the name on your wrist. You never met them, or even heard of them. You had to admit you started to feel like you’d never meet. But ever since you started working with Overwatch you found yourself caring less and less about the name marring your skin.

Who the hell was Jamison Fawkes and why should you even care?You had important things to worry about now, like the mission at hand. You’ve heard how dangerous Junkertown could be, but that didn’t stop you from signing up. You’ve settle for being a decent agent for to long but now you’ve wanted to commit yourself fully to your job. There was no room for love in your life right now, and you preferred it that way.

When the time came to run the mission you took the initiative to take charge. You felt confident and ahead of the rest, nothing was going to stop you from completing this mission fast and effectively. Things were going smoothly and you didn’t see any signs of enemies. It should’ve been a quick in and out mission, and it started looking like it would be the perfect case.

You should’ve listen to your mother’s superstitions. Knock on wood. To bad you were surrounded by metal at the time.

Caught right in the middle of your thoughts, an enormous sound ruptured the air around you and you were knocked on your back, your head crashing against the pavement. Debris surrounded you, and the high pitched ring in your ear led you to conclude that an explosion went off. The loud booms and fires in the distance told you that whatever was attacking was still there. You struggled trying to get up, but you could barely manage to open your eyes due to the splitting headache you were sporting at the time.

That’s when you first heard that maniacal laughter.

You tried your best to get up and defend yourself, to fight off and rescue what little remained of this mission but your attackers were well prepared for you. The criminal, the scavenger, the what ever the hell the sorry excuse for the man was, found himself wandering to you weakened and damaged body. You heard the sounds of scrapping metal, of something heavy dragging across the ground and you tried crawling away. He had a weapon of some kind and you didn’t want to stay and find out what. Your body tensed as he grew closer to you, bracing itself for the inevitable pain you were about to experience.

You managed to roll yourself around, grunting from the sounds of your fractured bones shifting in tow. You were going to fend the bastard off if it was the last thing you’d do. Fuck him if he thinks your going to just lie there and take it. Seeing his face for the first time was an experience in itself. His eyes were just as crazed as his hair, his skin caked in dirt and filth. His grin was the worst part. Like he was gloating about his victory of you. He muddy boot found itself smashed into your chest, keeping your already fragile body pinned to the ground. This was it. He was going to kill you and were going to end up just another statistic. As he searched through his various tools of mayhem, you tried pulling off his foot, clawing at his leg, any sad attempt you could muster to achieve something.

You should’ve quit while you were ahead. Your pathetic attempts at a win only alerted the man to a much bigger prize than another notch on his kill count. What cruel fate it was the your only good arm was the one that had that stupid name on it. Immediately the animal stopped in his tracks. His face frozen and his body stiffened at your fruitless attempts to escape. But before long that disgusting smile came back, and wider than ever. You wanted to ask why, or bait him, or say anything to try and distract him but before you knew it something heavy busted against your head and everything went dark.

———————————————————————————————————–

You found yourself in a way worse situation when you awoken. Everything was dark, and your first thought was your were dead. However, most people don’t wake up dead. Judging by the feeling of a rough fabric against your face, you came to the conclusion that you were blindfolded. You could tell you were sitting upright in a hard chair, with your ankles bound to the legs and your wrist securely tied across the back if it. You tried to use what little strength you had to free some part of yourself, but its was pointless. All you could do was wait.

You mentally tried counting, reaching all the way to 2,396 before you head the creaking of what sounds like a door. That same scrapping sound you heard before you fell unconscious filled your ears, and you were immediately filled with a sense of dread. Without even realizing your were practically gasping, your anxiety increasing as every minute passed. You were bound, sightless, and barely holding onto your life. Regardless of your options, none of them would help you.

The noise stopped and you could feel something against your knees. The bastard was standing right in front of you, taunting you were touch while depriving your of your ability to see him. You tried to keep your composure, holding your breathing to try and regain some sense of dignity. You tried to figure out what he was going to do but you suddenly felt the palm of his hands holding your knees before slowly spreading them apart. Judging by the amount of pressure his hands were placing on your knees and the rough grunt from him you thought perhaps he was getting down to kneel. Your confusion on grew as the hands on your knees starting frantically rubbing against the rough fabric of your pants. You thought maybe he would speak, taunt you and laugh about your helplessness but he only continued his task. Before long his hands started venturing up your thighs, and you started to panic.

“What the fuck do you want already” you spat out, each would fueled by the pained by the tightness in your chest. You couldn’t tell if it was the nerves or internal damage. You didn’t particularly care to find out at this exact moment as the man only chuckled in response. As if encouraged by your sounds, his fingers began kneading into your muscular thighs, bruising your already mutilated body. For a brief second the man stopped molesting your body, but your relief was short lived as you felt pressure against your crotch accompanied by sound of your zipper being undone. That was the final straw for you, dignity be damned.

“Cut it the fuck out, I don’t want to play your sick games” You spat out, desperately jerking your body anyway you could try and find a weak spot. Your anger was ignored as the man fought with your body, freeing your cock from it’s own restraints. You gasped as the cold air hit your organ, shuddering at the little bit of freedom you received. Your reaction elicited a response from your attacker, who cooed at your helplessness. There wasn’t anything you could do to fight him off. You were at his mercy.

Yet there was little mercy for you here in Junkertown.

Your breathing quickens as he clasps his rugged hand against your member, roughly working your soft cock. You grimaced at the sensation, wanting to retain what little of your dignity you had left but the pleasure coming off from the movement telling you to succumb. As much as you wanted someone to rescue you right now, your pride was telling you to just get through this. His pace quickens, furiously rubbing your now erect cock while his hot breathe hits tantalizingly close to your tip. Frustrated grunts escape past the tight lock of your lips, giving the man the encouragement he so desperately desires. Every noise that flees your lips leads to another harsh tug and euphoric moan from the criminal, as if his pleasure is tied to your own. Your aching dick was crying out for more attention, coating his hands in your pre-cum as you still tried to deny yourself fulfillment. He already had your cock in his hands, the last thing you wanted to do was give in. Although perhaps if you cummed on his face you could count that as some kind of sick win in whatever kind of disgusting game this was.

Minutes have passed since he first started pleasuring you, and judging by the erratic tugging at your member and his increased panting your assumed he was getting off to this as well. At least this wasn’t just about humiliating you. However that panting lead to puffs of heat against the sensitive skin of your dick, and you gave in to your hopelessness.

“Please, just..hurry up and do something else already” you whine out, pleading out for release of any kind. The breathe against you stops and is instead replaced by the incredible feeling of his gnarled lips engulfing your cock and practically swallowing you whole before sucking you back to your tip. You’re practically mewling at the loss when he painstakingly runs his tongue up your length, somehow managing to chuckle against your member as you whine out in delight. As his tongue swirls around your tip, his mouth once again wraps around you cock, his mouth a warm, slobbering mess surrounding your length.

The overwhelming feeling of your captor sucking you off in god knows where while you are bound and blindfolded hits you like a train as you come undone with his mouth still firmly encasing you. Your hot seed flooding down his throat as he moans against your softening dick, unraveling himself. Your weary and exhausted body slumps in its chair, only being held up by the rope still restraining you.

You’re so out of breathe than you merely sit there panting as he finishes sucking you, coming off your mouth with a loud, wet pop. Out of breathe himself, he rests his head against your exhausted member, practically nuzzling into your crotch as he wraps his arms around your waist.

“I finally have you.”

#yandere x reader #yandere overwatch #yandere scenarios #yandere imagines #junkrat #yandere #male yandere #fic

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jeusev · 4 years

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h-hewwo it’s my dragon age oc, his name is Tarenan. He is an ancient elf who went into uthenera after the fall of Arlathan. He fought with the rebeliion along with Solas ;w; im up for RP/HCs! also english is not my first language so please excuse my grammar / vocabulary errors dshsdhhsdh

Tarenan

Taren : Mind

Nan : Revenge

Renan : Voice

Taren was born in Arlathan, to healer parents, servants of Elgar’Nan. He was born conveniently attractive, wrapped in smooth, fair skin. Silky jade coloured hair draped along his shoulders gracefully, he was fit, slender built with average height. The glint of his emerald orbs were mesmerizing. He was unblemished.

However, alas, it was like the universe was trying to nerf him, Tarenan was lacking the ability to wield magic, much to his dismay. Taren had 2 older brothers, so naturally, his parents did not really mind his “defect”, however the elvhen did not took it so kindly. Slithering whispers on his back whenever he went was inevitable, and it always riled him up. The discrimination and the pity stares he received shaped him into an ambitious, prove-thirst chaotic individual. He was notorious, he’d pick a fight whenever one of his peers started to pity his inability to use magic. “I’m still better than you even if i could not wield magic.” Taren would always find a way to prove that he was indeed better than everyone, and easily enough, he realized violence solves the problem. Taren did not really care about his academic achievements, for he saw the best on academic matters would probably ended up working in the grand library doing monotone research anyways. Boring.

So he trained, ceaselessly, with a goal in mind to become Elgar’nan’s elite warriors, so no one could ever belittle him anymore. If someone without magic like him can join the elites, then who are you to belittle him, right ? Taren was not gifted in terms of strength and muscles, but his assessment were always on point. Thus, he realized something crucial – The ancient elves... DID mind about their gracefulness when they fight. They thought so highly about having to look good even when you’re about to bathe in someone else’s blood, which is… bullshit, if Taren must say. So Taren took advantage of that, and developed his own fighting style. It was definitely.... beastly, wild, its “ugly” ; according to everyone. But he won. Mostly. Him, against elves with magic.

Ultimately, his notorious achievement reached on Elgar’Nan’s ears, and so he was recruited and joined the legion. Even though Taren was still a rookie, he worked harder than most, and showed an indomitable determination. As a gift, Taren was given a chance to receive a “lyrium marking”, which enables those so called “defected” elves to use magic. Sometimes Elgar’nan would send his troops to the dwarven underground for the lyrium, and only the maker knows what Elgar’nan would do to those lyrium. (x) (I suspect the Tevinter / Fenris’s lyrium markings was a technique derived from the elvhen) Taren was delighted, and after a series of excruciating experiments, it finally happened.

Strange markings appeared all over his body. Levitation was the first thing he tried to master, he was able to phase through objects, and then shapeshift, though it requires extreme concentration to be able to keep up the transformation for a long time, and ultimately, Taren were totally unbeatable in the battlefield. He soared the sky, killed Elgar’nan’s enemies as much as he could, hoisted Elgar’nan’s flag on every landmark he could see, all he did to show his loyalty to Elgar’nan. To spat, on those who underestimate him. Pride and arrogance filled his heart, it blinded him to the bitter truth he chose to ignore. Then, Taren became an arcane warrior, one of Elgar’Nan’s elite bodyguard, appointed exclusively by Elgar’Nan himself. Tarenan did not possess the tall and bulky body like other warriors. In fact, he was probably one of the smallest elite bodyguard Elgar’nan ever had. It becomes an advantage though. People unfamiliar to him would underestimate his physique. Little did they know, Tarenan was one of Elgar’nan prized champions. Taren was deadly and impeccable. Strong, boisterous, never wavering. Naturally, having such title comes with great burden and responsibilities too. As a champion, it was one of his duty to do Elgar’nan’s dirty work. Taren understands, and he tremendously enjoyed the title bestowed upon him.

Until one day, he found a baby. Crying. Under the bed, where her supposedly parents killed by Taren. Taren had killed widows, whores, rebel teenagers, concubines, men with families, soldiers, but not…. A baby… When Taren picked her up, her crying stopped. She stared at Taren, wide eyed, curious. Using the last of his conscience, Taren decided that it was.. better that she was brought back, rather than killed. She could become a nurse, or farmer.. and so he jumped from the window, flew to the horizon, with a baby slept soundly on his arms.

It was NEVER on his thought, to actually have a kid. He did had meaningless dangles obviously, but a family ? To become a father ? Never. But there he stood, changing her diaper. The baby started to cry whenever Taren was not around, and she looked like she was the most comfy baby when sleeping on Taren’s arms. In the end Taren decided that she will be his responsibility, because she threw the biggest tantrum when she was handled with the midwives and milk mothers, and Taren did not trust those lame ladies anyways. They treat babies as if they’re fragile creatures, must be protected at all costs. For Taren, babies had to be taught the cruel world from early ages. Let them fall when they learn to walk, so that they will understand pain and refrain from doing the same mistakes again. Besides, the baby seemed to like being handled with Taren. It cried when the midwives put her in frilly dresses, she seemed to grow fond of the lame, comfy baby onesie Taren picked for her. She giggled cheerfully when Taren threw her up on the air, and snorted adorably when she was being carried upside down by him.

Taren the savage arcane warrior ? The beast who always wore armor and kept his wings visible all the time ?

It was a surprise, really. So Taren could not really blame them, he did not believe it at first either. People were worried about the girl’s future, about how Taren would accidentally sit on her or drop her. Or stab her with that stupid claw armor he wore all the time. Little did they know, Taren was actually a great father, and he loved his daughter, dearly, as a father should. Gold ain’t always golden, and he named her Minaya.

Minaya grew into a sensible, gentle woman in nature. She was his pride, she was Taren’s 80% impulse control. Taren used to teach her everything, now she taught Taren about compassion, to let go of all the hate and hatred Taren kept, to find his own happiness in the harsh world they live in. It changed how Taren saw the world. Every path Taren took, he calculated how it’d affect Minaya in some ways, he realized how his path were always against what Minaya had taught him. Finally Taren was forced to acknowledge all his past misdeeds. He realized how filthy he was by doing Elgar’nan’s dirty works. He realized how despicable the lies Elgar’nan preached to comfort the soldiers when the poor souls were about to be deployed to an unjust war. He was furious at the evanuris. He was angry at how Elgar'nan’s pride could cost innocent lives, gallons of blood spilled for unworthy cause. He was enraged, for the pride he sought turned out was an illusion. Sweet lies Elgar'nan whispered on his ears, glorifying what was horrible. Exasperated, because the most guilty had the cleanest hands.

When he came back from the battlefield, the pain changed him.

Taren could not just escaped and ran away from Elgar’nan, he could not just joined the other “better” evanuris. He could not defy Elgar’nan, he could not risked Minaya. Elgar’nan was merciless, he was utterly cruel to those who oppose him. He was called a “god” for a reason. Taren was helpless against his fate.

Minaya, of course, realized it. Taren’s pain was her own, she was always there for him during Taren’s difficult times. She gave him a reason to keep thriving for a better future, to keep the fuel burning. She turned his pain into wisdom, helplessness into fortitude. His daughter was the only light in his dark path that kept him away from being astray.

Just when Taren thought about starting over, to do things right - Mythal was killed. It was a catastrophe, the world was on fire. The sounds of the blacksmith forging metals filled the sky, soldiers kept marching day and night, the whispers of prayers were heard everywhere Taren goes. Taren had to accompany Elgar’nan, and left Minaya to her own. She was already a healer at this point and she’d be safe at the shelter, while tending those who were injured. If he kept Elgar’nan close, then Taren would knew what was his enemy up to, right ? Because Taren knew, the death of Mythal was one of many Elgar’nan’s shenanigans all along. Because Taren, was indeed, involved in some ways. Elgar’nan overthrew his own father, what made people think that he would not overthrow his own wife too ?

Mythal was justice, she cared about her people. Taren never saw Mythal soldiers being sent to an unjust war, when she waged a war it was because of a good cause. Never for her pride. Taren secretly respected her, and Mythal’s right hand too. Solas. War after war raged on, it was pointless. It never ends. Until finally Taren found out that the dread wolf led a rebellion army against the Elven gods. Taren always played the obedient pet role to Elgar’nan, so naturally, it would never occur to Elgar’nan that Taren would betray him. And so he did.

Taren joined the rebellion army, along with Minaya. He wanted a redemption, a chance to regain his dignity back after all he had done. His vallaslin was removed by Solas, for Elgar’nan was no longer his master. The path he took now was even more bloody and jaggy, but it also gave him freedom; a privilege to choose his own actions. It felt right.

Minaya married one of the healers she worked along with. He was a great, honorable man. Taren cried during the ceremony, the joy he felt was overflowing from his chest. She told Taren to not worry about her anymore, and that he should focus on his dreams, on things that made him happy. So Taren did. He worked along with Solas, they gave the freed slave sanctuary from their tyrannical masters. His people defended the valley in which the sanctuary sat, and he protected them all. Many joined him in his fight for freedom from the gods. (x)

The war did not stop though, and at this point Taren and Solas knew that the evanuris would eventually destroy the world, because their lust for power was insatiable. Taren spent most of his life serving under Elgar’nan, he knew what the gods were capable of. So Solas came up with a solution, and he needed Taren’s help to achieve it. The price for it was tremendously huge, but Taren agreed because it was necessary.

Kill hundreds to save thousands. It was judicious.

Eventually Solas sealed the elvhen gods within the veil, and for that Taren was utterly grateful, but he also felt intense despair and guilt as he watched the fall of Arlathan. His pain was so great, even Minaya could not made it better. She watched him cried all his tears. Taren succumbed into his depression, his life was now devoid of emotions, it extinguished the fire ignited within him.

So he went to uthenera afterwards, and slept for eternity.

Only to be awoken from his long slumber after the Inquisition disbanded. Confused and not knowing whatever happened to his world, he started his journey to relearn his new world, and to find out what happened to his daughter.

---

ps. Minaya is my Lavellan’s ancestor

#dragonageoc #dragon age #ancient elvhen #elgar'nan #original character #oc #dai #dragon age inquisition

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muertawrites · 6 years

Text

Immunity (or Make It Work, Part 2) [Loki x Reader] {nsfw}

Summary: Reader reveals the dress she made for the gala, causing Loki to lose all his shit at once. When Loki spies his half brother taking a liking to her during the midst of the party, he gets hella possessive and makes a point of showing her how much he cares (... with a rough quickie in a hallway. You know, romantic stuff).

Word Count: 3,300

Author’s Note: I thought I was done with the first draft of this until I read it over and absolutely hated it, so I rewrote the middle part and now it’s better and my sleep schedule is totally fucked. As if it wasn’t already fucked before, tho. Also, this installment of Make It Work is lowkey (Loki, lol) inspired by @maiden-of-asgard‘s Frostbite series, which is super great and I’m addicted to it and you should 100% go check it out if you love yourself or even if you don’t love yourself, it can be your first step in learning to love yourself. I’m starting to get delirious with lack of sleep, so I’m gonna post this and hope that I can be a functional adult tomorrow. Goodnight, ya horny bastards, I love you.

~ Muerta 🌸💀🌸

(Part 1)

You had always believed that the key to sex appeal was subtlety. This was apparent in everything you designed, each garment focusing on the suggestion of a person’s body without ever showing too much of it. A bit of mesh or lace, a slight peeking of skin, a cinch in the waist that revealed what sins lie just beneath the fabric; these were all your weapons in making a piece of clothing maddeningly sexy, and you had applied all of them to the dress you’d made at Loki’s request for the gala he was hosting.

You stood in the hall just outside the reception room of the Asgardian royal palace, smoothing out the fabric of your gown and swallowing the lump that had formed in your throat over the last few minutes as you anticipated the arrival of your escort. Hours ago, a hoard of beauticians had been sent to your apartment within the palace, styling your hair and makeup to suit the dress you’d crafted for the evening. Your hair had been pulled back into a tight, plaited bun that fanned out at the base of your head, with a few loose tendrils falling elegantly over your cheeks. Your lips had been painted in a dark berry shade, and you were adorned with large golden earrings and a matching collier and headdress, chosen from a selection that Loki had sent for you. You were stunning, the picture of an Asgardian goddess, and you had grinned smugly at your reflection as you’d inspected your final look. You had transformed your mortal self into a creature that could put the otherworldly beings of the realm you now called your home to shame, and were endlessly proud of what you had done. You only hoped that Loki would be just as impressed.

The god’s footsteps coming down the hall startled you, pulling you abruptly from your thoughts as you turned to face the direction he was coming from, your heart slamming against your ribs. He turned the corner to where you were standing, and when you came into view, he stopped dead in his tracks. His frozen blue eyes drank you in, scanning your body up and down so that no inch of you was left unseen. He had given you a challenge, and you’d obliterated his expectations; the gown you had designed was absolutely breathtaking, made of a silk so deeply evergreen that it was almost black, shifting and changing hues with the light. The neckline was cut into a severe plunge, stopping just below the space where your breasts met, leaving him thirsting to see more of your skin. Mesh panels mirrored each other on either side of the dress’s bodice, extending down into the skirt until they where lost within its cascade of lush fabric, and a belt cast in gold hugged your waist to accentuate the voluptuous curves of your body. The gown’s sleeves were long, laden with more panels of mesh and accented with lace decorated in Nordic patterns, matching those etched into Loki’s helmet. You were exposed to him, but only just, and the promises of what was hidden beneath your latest work had his mind racing. He swallowed, clearing his throat and bowing politely to you.

“I see you took our conversation to heart,” he said as greeted you with a devilish smirk. You grinned back, offering a shallow curtsey in return.

“I was hoping I’d stun you enough to shut you up for once,” you replied.

Loki held his arm out to you, allowing you curl your fingers around the crook of his elbow as he led you to the doors of the reception room.

“Almost, darling,” he hummed. “Almost.”

As the twin doors swung open towards you, you were greeted with the sight of an entire room populated by the lofty, vexing creatures known as the Jotun. You had never seen them in person, but you knew from the history books in the palace’s library that they had a rocky past with the people of Asgard, characterized by war and bloodshed, and Loki was attempting to pose a sort of treaty between the two realms by hosting their royal family. They were enormous, some of them spanning over ten feet tall, and entirely blue in color, their skin patterned with grooves that supposedly meant different things and were unique to each creature. Not a single one of them was clothed in full, each of them sporting various levels of exposure to supposedly assert dominance and status (as you had read), and you noticed as Loki led you further into the room that many of them had their teeth filed into vicious, shark-like points. You looked up at the king standing beside you, shuddering at the fact that his lean, rangy stature was dwarfed by theirs, finding it hard to remind yourself that he was, under his alabaster skin, one of them. You pulled him a bit closer to you, thinking of how tiny your human form must have looked to the giants. Didn’t you read somewhere that they used to keep Midgardians as pets?

“My kin,” Loki addressed the room as he came to stand in the center of it, your shivering self still huddled beside him, “I welcome you to my adoptive home. Being of Jotun blood, raised by the hands of Asgard, I hope to bridge the gap between our two peoples and move our realms toward a peaceful future. Enjoy your time here. Indulge in our culture and our warm hospitality. We are happy to have you.”

He bowed to the crowd before him, and as the band in the mezzanines circling the reception room began to play, he spun you about and led you away from the fray, raising your hand to his lips in a gentle kiss.

“I thought you were fearless,” he murmured into your skin, teasing you. “I can feel you shaking like a leaf.”

“These people are the size of small buildings,” you quipped back at him, giving the hand holding yours a light squeeze and digging your nails into the back of his palm. “I also don’t think I need to remind you that they used to keep humans as playthings in their recent past.”

Loki smirked.

“Reading up on your history?” he mused. “What a good little thing you are.”

For a significant portion of the evening, Loki paraded you around to his guests, showing you off as if you were a prized trophy. His Jotun visitors poked and prodded at you, intrigued by your soft mortal body, the women toying with your hair, petting it and admiring its silkiness, while the men inspected your figure, some of them getting a bit handsy and groping at your breasts and backside with fervent interest. Their touches made you wildly uncomfortable, wanting nothing more than to slap their hands away and inform them that you were, in fact, a sentient being and not just the dumb little pet they perceived you to be, but their intimidating stature and the shaky relationship they had with your employer made you wary, reminding you that they could literally dismember you if they had a reason to – or even if they didn’t have a reason to. Loki stayed at your side throughout the ordeal, however, skirting you away when his guests got too intimate for you to tolerate.

After two hours of being handled by what could easily have been every single frost giant in Jotunheim, you were able to steal away to the large banquet table that had been set up on one side of the reception room, pouring yourself a strong glass of Asgardian mead and stuffing a few hors d’oeuvres into your mouth, trying to regain some of your calm. You had just scarfed your fifth mini quiche when your indulgent stress eating was interrupted by a soft voice addressing you from behind.

“Miss?”

You turned, coming face to face with yet another giant, but noticing that this one was considerably younger than the others, probably only a teenager in Jotun years. He was also more sparsely dressed than the rest of them, leading you to believe that he was a member of the royal family. He gave you a slight bow, his eyes wide and nervous, not leaving yours.

“I am Prince Býleistr,” he introduced himself, straightening his back once again. “King Laufeyson’s half-brother.”

You had heard of Býleistr fleetingly before, knowing him only as the child of Loki’s biological father, Laufey, and the current Queen of Jotunheim. You brushed a few crumbs from your fingers and onto the skirt of your gown, attempting to maintain what little dignity you had left as you dipped into a curtsey.

“It is an honor to meet you, Your Highness” you addressed him.

Býleistr looked you up and down, his eyes gaping as he took in the sight of you.

“King Laufeyson says you are mortal,” the young prince said, sounding almost breathless. “Is that true?”

You nodded, unconsciously taking a step back from him as you prepared yourself for more unwanted contact.

“Yes,” you replied. “I’m from Midgard.”

Býleistr’s eyes widened in wonder at the confirmation, and you couldn’t help but feel slightly endeared by him. He was just a kid, after all, and it was very likely he’d never seen a mortal in person.

“May I…” the prince lingered on his words a bit, as if unsure they were the right ones. He swallowed, then held his hand out to you.

“May I touch you?” he asked.

Shocked by his considerate act of asking for your consent, you silently gave him permission, raising a bewildered hand for him to take. He grinned excitedly, clasping his massive fingers around your much smaller ones and raising your arm above your head, being cautious in his movements as if afraid he would break you. You smiled faintly back as you allowed him to twirl you, spinning so he could take in your foreign appearance.

From across the room, Loki’s eyes fell upon the scene that was unfolding. He watched, indignant, as his sniveling little weasel of a relative spun you about, laying his grubby fingers on your cheeks, your hair, your waist, your back, and Loki felt the searing sting of envy rising in his chest as you allowed it. You actually allowed him to touch you without any of the hesitation you’d had with the other frost giants. Loki slammed down the rest of his drink and glided furiously over to the two of you, fueled by rage and the alcohol in his blood.

Býleistr was holding your hand, marveling at the minute size of your fingers when Loki interrupted the two of you, clearing his throat and causing you both to jump, startled.

“Dear younger brother,” Loki crooned, his lips spread into a malicious grin and words dripping with acrimony, “as much as it pleases me to see you making such diverse connections of friendship, I am afraid I have come to retrieve my favorite toy.”

Loki took you by the arm, not waiting for Býleistr’s response as he wrapped his arm around you protectively, skillfully maneuvering you through the reception room and slipping with you through a hidden side door, into one of the palace’s many empty corridors. You wheeled on him as soon as you were alone, smacking him hard in the chest with the side of your closed fist.

“What. The. Fuck. Loki!” you snapped, hitting him with each word and glaring up at him. He glowered down at you, his mouth turned downward into a furious grimace.

“How could you?” he growled, taking you by the wrists to stop you from beating him.

“How could I?” you exclaimed, incredulous. “How could you, you piece of shit! Why the hell would you let them molest me like that?!”

Loki smirked, his eyes lazily drifting down to where your chest met his as he held you against him, then back up to meet yours.

“I wanted to see your scared little face, my dear,” he chided. “I am the god of jokes and trickery, after all.”

“You’re the god of some kind of fucking bullshit,” you spat at him.

A guttural hiss escaped Loki’s throat as he pushed you forward, pinning you to the wall on the other side of the corridor. His hands splayed out on either side of your head, and he kept you in place by pressing his body against yours, his hips pinning you harshly to the surface behind you. If your senses didn’t fool you, you were certain you could feel him harden beneath the leather material of his pants.

“I tire of your games, my sweet little pet,” he growled mockingly, his lips pressed to your ear. “You have always been such a tease to me, even when you haven’t meant it.”

You simpered, tilting your head back so that you could stare up into his eyes, your hands pressed firmly to his chest.

“I thought you had an immunity to my mortal charms,” you taunted him, mocking him right back.

Loki shook his head slowly, one of the hands beside your head moving to capture your chin between his fingers as he fervidly licked his lips.

“My darling, you are the one thing that makes me weak…” he purred as he leaned in, taking your lips in a heated, passionate kiss that left your body burning and your lungs gasping for air. You immediately kissed back, your mouth opening and tongue clashing with his as your hands moved upward to clasp the sides of his face, fingers tangling in the abyss of his black hair. You could feel him in full now, his erect cock pressing up against your heat through the fabric of your dress, straining against the crotch of his trousers. He was going to fuck you, right then, right there against that wall, and you barely had time to worry about one of his guests stumbling in and interrupting you, as he was already lifting your skirt above your knees, desperate to be inside you.

Your lips didn’t leave his as you reached one of your hands down to palm at his member through the leather dividing you, the corners of your mouth curling into a smug grin at the needy whimper that escaped from his throat at your touch. You could feel the wetness that had been pooling between your legs start to drip down the insides of your thighs, thankful for once for Asgardians’ aversion to undergarments, as it would make the task at hand much easier and much, much more savory. You continued to work Loki as his hands kept traveling up your legs until every bit of skin below your waist was exposed to him, two of his fingers moving to stroke tentatively at the lips of your pussy, letting out a deep growl when he found you soaked and ready for him. He broke the kiss then, moving his lips to knead at your neck, leaving red marks where he sank his teeth hungrily into your flesh.

“Oh, how long I’ve wanted you, my sweet girl…” he purred against your skin, the fingers that had been stroking you gently slipping inside you, working you tenderly as he marked you as his own with is mouth. You let out a soft moan into his ear, the hand that had been resting on his cheek falling to grip lightly at his shoulders.

“Loki…” you murmured wantonly, your lips pressed into the shell of his ear.

As if halted by some greater power, Loki stopped everything he was doing and fell perfectly still. He pulled away from you, just enough to glare down at you, frozen in place as every muscle in his body stiffened. You gazed up at him, wondering if you’d done something wrong, when you noticed the blood red hue that suddenly flooded his eyes, his blanched skin taking on a deep cerulean tone as he gazed at you like he was going to rip you limb from limb. You swallowed, fearing what would come next as Loki let out a guttural snarl and reached down to where you had been stroking him, shredding the material of his pants so that his cock sprang free from them, promptly wrapping one of your legs around his hip and thrusting inside you without ceremony, groaning at the sublime feeling of your silken walls closing around him.

You yelped as he stretched you to your limits, never having had such a considerable width inside you and savoring the feeling of nearly being split in two. It was painful – so, so painful – but in the most delicious way, and you bit down into the meat of Loki’s slender, glacial hand as he pressed it to your lips to silence you.

Loki wasted no time being delicate with you, immediately slamming his hips into yours as he worked himself in and out of you at a beastly, rapid pace, his monstrous groans filling your ears like heavenly music. You were totally and utterly consumed by him, gazing up lustfully into his crimson eyes as his clawlike nails buried themselves in the plush flesh of your thigh so harshly they drew blood. His stare met yours, cutting into you as he took you without mercy or remorse, pounding into you so deeply you could almost feel him in your chest. You peaked within moments, the current of divine electricity swallowing the whole of your being under a veil of carnal bliss. Loki followed soon after, his cum filling you until it began to spill out, his own cry of absolute pleasure echoing through the hall. He leaned over you for a long moment, keeping you propped against the wall as his forehead rested in the crook of your neck, his chest heaving against yours as he panted with the exertion of having given you the quickest, yet most mind-blowing orgasm you’d ever experienced. You were dazed in the aftermath of his sex, uncertain you were still on the same astral plane as you had been just minutes before.

Once Loki had collected himself, the shade of his skin and eyes returning to their Asgardian palette, he slid out of you, clearing his throat as his hands followed the folds of your skirt as it cascaded down your legs once more, his nimble fingers smoothing out the fabric to hide the remnants of the delicious sin you’d just shared. You dragged yourself back to reality, reaching up with trembling hands to adjust the lapels of his coat, fixing his extravagant horned helmet where your touch had set it askew.

You sighed in defeat as your eyes fell on the tattered fabric of his trousers, tugging and clasping his coat closed to hide the damage.

“I spend a month killing myself to make clothes for you and look what you do to them,” you huffed.

Loki chuckled, the sound rumbling in his chest as he leaned forward and kissed your forehead.

“I suggest making the seams more durable next time,” he teased.

“Fuck you,” you mumbled, your words swallowed by his lips as you pulled him into a heated, affectionate kiss. Loki hummed, smirking as you parted.

“Later, my love,” he promised you, taking you by the arm and leading you back into the reception room, lips pressing to your knuckles as he did. “We still have a party to host.”

#loki #loki smut #loki laufeyson #loki laufeyson smut #loki x reader #loki x reader smut #loki laufeyson x reader #loki laufeyson x you #loki odinson #loki odinson smut #loki odinson x reader #loki odinson x you #loki x you #loki fanfiction #loki laufeyson fanfiction #loki odinson fanfiction #muerta's works

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i-am-my-opheliac · 5 years

Note

77 for the prompt thing :)

Hi and thank you

77. “Sorry…just the noise you just made was…really hot.”

1287, M - Read on ao3

I just need a minute, Dan thinks as he buries his face against the pillow, taking deep breaths to try and calm his racing heart.

He can still hear the sound of Phil’s game over the rushing of blood in his ears, deafening in the sheer force of it.

He only needs a minute, a minute to regain control, a minute to stop the blush from coloring his cheeks, a minute to will his embarrassing boner away.

It’s surprisingly hard, harder than he could ever imagine, because Phil is still grunting and groaning and cursing on the other side of the webcam, focus completely on the game, oblivious to the way his groaned “fuck” has managed to send Dan’s horny brain in overdrive.

He already know he’s gonna be thinking back to that sound that same night, or maybe he won’t even last that long. Maybe he’ll start wanking the moment they interrupt the Skype call, because he’s already aching to get a hand around himself, come with the sound of Phil in his ears.

God, Dan should’ve known it would end up like this, should’ve imagined it the first time he spoke to Phil, late into the night, voices barely louder than whispers as they exchanged excited opinions about Muse, about video games, about everything.

It’s surprisingly easy, to share his every thought with Phil.

He tries hard to keep his darkest, most secret thought to himself, to not let anyone else get close to them. He’s guarded, that’s how his mum would describe him. Not closed off, because he genuinely tries to make friends, to have people like him, to seek that validation that he so desperately crave. It’s just that during the years he erected walls around himself, to protect the parts of himself that he can’t risk losing.

But Phil has destroyed every single wall so effortlessly, in such a short period of time, without even trying.

It should scare him, the idea that a person that he’s barely known a couple of months could have this much power over him - an understanding that not even his girlfriend has.

But then again, it’s unfair to keep comparing her to Phil when it’s clear that his heart has already decided, declared the winner of a challenge that neither of them was aware they were competing in.

“Dan?”

It seems like Phil has interrupted his game to check on him, probably confused by the lack of encouragement from Dan’s end. Dan is still hiding his face, still painfully aware of his boner. He can barely resist the urge to hump the bed - barely.

He wonders if he could get away with it, if the quality of the camera is good enough that Phil could pick up on the way his hips would move against the bed. The idea that Phil could see him, could watch him do exactly that, maybe even say his name over and over in an effort to get his attention - Dan gasps out loud, breathless, the idea far too tempting and dangerous.

His gasp is obviously loud enough that Phil picks up on it. “Dan?” he calls again, this time an edge of irritation in his voice. It’s that edge that pushes Dan to turn his head so that he can look at the laptop at the foot of his bed, angling his body just enough that his crotch is out of shot - or at least he hopes so.

“Sorry, I - sorry.”

“What happened? Are you okay?” Phil’s voice sounds concerned and slightly louder, almost like he’s leaning as close as possible into the screen. Dan doesn’t have to see him to know what he looks like, hair messy and eyes wide open, lips close enough to the webcam that he can trace the shape of them with one finger - Dan has done so countless of times, trying to commit the image of them in his memory so that he can come back to it during sleepless nights, fist moving furiously inside his pants, chasing an orgasm tainted with guilt.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he reassures, trying to ignore how warm his cheeks feel, how hyper-aware of his body he is.

“Why are you - are you bored?”

He hates the hint of hurt that he can hear in Phil’s voice. It makes him sit up on the bed, so that Phil will have a more clear picture of him when he shakes his head.

“Then why are you lying over there? What’s going on?”

Phil’s eyes are focused on him, giving Dan their undivided attention. It’s ironic, that Dan has been wanting that since the very beginning, but now he wishes Phil was looking away. He must have some kind of attention fetish, he thinks, because his boner doesn’t seem to be going away.

“Can you - can you turn around, please?”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“I just have to -” Dan says, scrambling to reach behind his head to grab at the pillow he was using to hide, trying to subtly moving it to cover his crotch and failing miserably. So focused on watching Phil to make sure he can’t see the bulge in his pants, he manages to kick the laptop with his foot, almost throwing it on the floor. The only option he has it to launch himself to grab it, trying to save his most prized possession.

It’s only when he sees the look on Phil’s face does Dan realized that the camera is perfectly pointed to show the way the pillow is placed right against his crotch, obvious in what it’s hiding underneath.

They watch each other for what feels like forever, and Dan feels almost naked under Phil’s gaze, the way his eyes go wide with understanding before closing in what looks like defeat, his cheeks turning a delicious pink that Dan wishes he could appreciate rather than wishing for the ground to open up and swallow him whole.

“Dan, were you -”

He hides his face in his hands, beyond mortified. He doesn’t know what’s worse, Phil knowing the cause of his sudden boner, or Phil thinking he was jerking off while he was on the other side of the internet connection. Neither option will save what’s left of Dan’s dignity, he supposes, so it’s best to just be honest - the way he always is with Phil.

“Sorry…just the noise you just made was…really hot.”

“Oh, uh -”

“I’m so sorry,” Dan squeals, unable to say anything but that. He doesn’t want to know what Phil is thinking right now, doesn’t want to know if he’s as disgusted as Dan is picturing him.

“Do you want to talk later, take your time -”

He doesn’t think he can survive any more embarrassment for today, doesn’t think he can stand Phil’s attempt to make him feel better. “Please, shut up,” he begs, shaking his head in his hands to resist the urge to cry, because he knows that it’s the only way he’s going to feel better.

Except. Except Phil surprised him.

“Or you could. You could stay here.”

Dan can’t believe his own ears. He has to raise his head to look in disbelief at Phil’s face, see the way he bites at his bottom lip, hands fidgeting on his lap. “What?”

“Just - stay. I don’t mind watching.”

“I -” He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t.

“Let me watch you.”

And how can he say no to that, how can he deny himself the feeling of Phil’s eyes on him, watching him take his clothes off, watching him pleasure himself to the sound of his encouragement, the sight of Phil joining into this much more pleasurable game they can play together?

He will have time to regret it later.

#my works #prompts #phan #phanfiction

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bluewatsons · 7 years

Text

James Duesterberg, Final Fantasy, The Point Magazine (2017)

Neoreactionary politics and the liberal imagination

Like every virtual world, there is something seductive about the online realm of the new reactionary politics. Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored. All of the values that have guided the center-left, postwar consensus—the equal dignity of every individual, the guiding role of knowledge, government’s positive role in shaping civil society, a general sense that we’re moving towards a better world—are inverted. The moral landmarks by which we were accustomed to get our bearings aren’t gone: they’re on fire.

Trying to regain their footing, the mainstays of consensus thought have focused on domesticating the threat. Who are these Tea Partiers and internet recluses, these paleoconservatives and tech futurists, and what could they possibly want? The Atlantic mapped the coordinates of the “rebranded” white nationalism or the “internet’s anti-democracy movement” in the previously uncharted waters of 4chan and meme culture. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild peers over the “empathy wall” between her and her rural Louisiana Tea Party contacts, while in Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio-born lawyer J. D. Vance casts a melancholic look back—from the other side of the aisle, but, tellingly, from the same side of the wall—on the Appalachian culture he left behind for Yale Law and a career in Silicon Valley.

These efforts follow a line of center-left thought that begins with Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Its guiding assumption is that those who balk at its vision are fundamentally mistaken: victims of an unfortunate illusion, perpetuated by big businesses or small prejudices, lack of education or surplus of religion. But now the balance of power has shifted, radically. And as reactionary ideology has grown—seemingly overnight—from a vague and diffuse resistance to a concerted political force, the veneer of objective interest and pastoral concern has started to crack.

“Darkness is good,” proclaimed Steve Bannon, the self-styled architect of Trumpism, to the Hollywood Reporter. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” This is the face the new reactionary politics presents to the technocratic elite: mysterious, evil and dangerously potent. It promises that some other way of doing things is possible. Since the election, the media, too, seem to be lured by it. As this alien force approaches, concern shades into fear, and fear starts to mix with attraction. Like Mulder in The X-Files, we find comfort in imagining some other power out there, even if it means us ill.[1] The shame of seeing one’s own impotence laid bare can also feel like a relief: unshouldering the burden of Universal Progress, we make room for a secret desire to flourish.

●

The political imagination of the last thirty years has largely been shaped by the paradoxical belief that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “there is no alternative”: that beliefs themselves are powerless to change the world. Life in the post-industrial West would be the happy end of history, and thus of ideologies, a calm and dreamless state. But the world into which we have settled has begun to feel cramped, and its inhabitants are increasingly restless. It is no longer possible to deny that there is a dream here, and it’s starting to seem like a bad one.

Since 1979 the divide between rich and poor has widened, while real wages for the non-managerial work that most people do have fallen and economic mobility has decreased. “Think different,” Apple urged in the Nineties: words of wisdom, to be sure, for the new economy, although the rewards seem to concentrate in the same place. Apple is 325 times bigger than it was in 1997; the average real wage for college graduates hasn’t increased at all. Like postmodern theory, Apple’s slogan makes “difference” into an opaque object of worship, a monolith or a space-gray smartphone: something intelligent but not quite human. “Think different,” not differently: the point is not to change your mind but to contemplate something else. Meanwhile, as the Silicon Valley tech giants grow ever more “different,” we sit around thinking about it in the academy, and living it on our phones. Tech executive or Uber driver, we find ourselves stuck in what Hito Steyerl calls “junktime,” an empty expectancy, somewhere between work and play and going nowhere.

It is in this context that the new reactionary politics have generated such a strange mixture of excitement and fear. The alt right seems really to want something. And within this nebulous (and mostly virtual) world, a group of writers who call themselves neoreactionaries offer the most concrete and detailed map of an “exit” from the status quo. Amid the diffuse politics and intractable ironism of the alt right, neoreaction promises a coherent ideology, a philosophical backbone and a political program directly opposed to what we have: they call it a “Dark Enlightenment.” If these thinkers are especially disturbing to read it is because, unlike the meme warriors of 4chan and Twitter, they seem to have reasons for the nasty things they say.

As a rule the alt right is scattered, anonymous and obscure—thriving, as the curious metaphor has it, in the “dark corners of the internet.” By contrast, neoreaction is centralized and public: darkness enlightened. It revolves around two well-known figures. The first is Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who made money in the first internet boom developing an early protocol for mobile browsers. His current startup Urbit—backed by Peter Thiel— is a platform promising to “reboot” the internet by privatizing the virtual real estate where cloud computing takes place. Since 2007, his other big project has been his blog, where, under the name Mencius Moldbug, he has written millions of words of revisionist history, pessimistic philosophizing, racist fearmongering and intellectual parlor games. His writing constitutes the canon of neoreaction, and it has found readers from Steve Bannon to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the finance expert known for predicting the 2008 crash, to New York Times editorialist Ross Douthat. While alt-righters trade memes about campus snowflakes, Moldbug one-ups the enemy soldiers of Enlightenment, drawing on David Hume, Thomas Carlyle and the obscure nineteenth-century English historian James Froude to prove that slavery is natural and monarchy is the only stable form of government.

Less prolific, but more charismatic, Nick Land is neoreaction’s guru. An academic philosopher turned gonzo theorist, Land baptized the emerging movement the “Dark Enlightenment” in a 2013 commentary on Moldbug’s writing. In the Nineties Land taught in the philosophy department at Warwick University, where his Deleuzian “schizoanalysis” of the postmodern world formed the basis of a group called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru). The Ccru became a hub for radical thought about the intersection of technology, capitalism and desire. Out of it came a new school of philosophy (speculative realism), Turner Prize-nominated artists (Jake and Dinos Chapman), a hugely influential electronic music label (Hyperdub) and one of the dominant strains of Marxian political theory (accelerationism). For Land it catalyzed an eventual break—from sanity (too many amphetamines, he admits) and from the strictures of academic philosophy. Since the early 2000s he has been living in Shanghai, where he turned to blogging, and to the defense and encouragement of an unbridled techno-capitalism.

Land’s techno-Darwinist account of race (“hyper-racism,” he calls it) is strange to read next to his early academic work, in which he called for “feminist violence” against the racist patriarchy “without limit.” A YouTube search for Yarvin produces equally jarring results. Ponytailed and painfully self-conscious, he reads his poetry on nineties Berkeley public-access TV (“this is, um, dedicated to my mother”). One click away is Yarvin at a 2012 TED-inspired “unconference,” baby-faced and affectless, asking his audience to “get over [their] dictator phobia.”

Yarvin and Land continue to thrive in the liberal milieu into which they were born. “I live in San Francisco,” Yarvin brags, “I grew up as a Foreign Service brat, I went to Brown, I’ve been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine since the mid-Eighties.” Both can be considered architects of the emerging tech- and knowledge-based economy; they are the “autistic nerds” that, Land says, “alone are capable of participating effectively” in the emerging economic system. But even they do not feel at home in this world they have helped to build. If the new anti-liberal politics runs on ressentiment, as commentators on both the left and right have suggested, the nerds of neoreaction channel this sense of betrayal at the heart of the American liberal project into an either/or Boolean clarity. Their passion rivals that of their avowed enemy, the “social justice warrior.” And what they believe is, quite simply, that everything about the modern world is a lie.

Western democracy, Mencius Moldbug tells us, is an “Orwellian system,” which means that its governments are “existentially dependent on systematic public deception.” Nominally, a democracy like the U.S. is founded on the separation of church and state, and more fundamentally, of government policy and civil society. With a state church, government power shapes what citizens think, which means citizens can no longer shape government policy. Rather than expressing or even guiding the will of the people, the state aims only to increase its own power by producing the people it needs. But a state church, according to neoreaction, is what we have: Moldbug calls it “the Cathedral,” and exposing it, critiquing it and trying to destroy it is neoreaction’s avowed goal. The Cathedral, like the Matrix in the 1999 film (a favorite reference point for neoreaction), is everywhere; it infects every experience, shapes all aspects of our waking lives. Its main centers of power are the university, the mainstream media and the culture industry.

Want to earn enough money to support your family? You’ll need a college degree, so you’d better learn how to write a paper on epistemic violence for your required Grievance Studies 101 class. Want to keep your job? You’d better brush up on climate-change talking points, so you can shift into regulatory compliance, the only growth industry left. Want to relax with your friends after work? It’s probably easiest if you like movies about gay people, pop music that celebrates infidelity and drug use, and books about non-Christian boy wizards. Want to communicate with other people? Better figure out how to use emoticons. Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?

And so on. Living in the Cathedral, we may not notice this web of norms, mores and social rituals as such; it is simply the texture of our daily lives. But neoreaction is keen to point out that this constitutes a distinct vision, a way of life: they call it “universalism” or “progressivism.” Neoreactionary writing—and the whole culture of “SJW fail” videos and 4chan humor about political correctness that goes along with it—is directed to getting us to notice it, and to ask why we live like this. The idea is that once we start asking these questions, we will start to see things very differently.

But progressivism doesn’t just coerce people into seeing the world in a certain way; according to neoreaction, it also exacerbates the very problems it claims to correct. The Cathedral amounts to a massive system of what economists call “perverse incentives,” or in Land’s words, an “automatic cultural mechanism that advocates for dysfunction.” Yarvin’s excruciating “Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”—11 parts, 100,000 words—essentially boils down to this claim:

The intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both. The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc., etc. … The consequence [is] a new system of government by deception—the Modern Structure.

On one level this is just econo-theism: every direct attempt by government to fix a problem, to play God, interferes with the unknowable logic of the all-powerful market, resulting in just the problems it aimed to fix. Imagine yourself above the market, and you will feel its wrath. But there’s a more savage bite to neoreaction. Why, the neoreactionaries ask, do we make this error in the first place? Or: why are we required to believe in political correctness, rather than simply being forced to accept progressive policy as the rules of the game for our time? And why, after all, are liberals so threatened by dissent?

The neoreactionary answer is that the goal of the policy is not to fix the problem. Progressivism is not self-defeating but massively successful (a mantra of Yarvin’s: “America is a communist country”). The dominant, liberal-contractarian understanding of democracy descended from Locke is that it is a crowdsourcing technique for the rational administration of common resources, a “free market” for political opinions. But the recent history of democracy offers scant evidence of its efficiency. It is enough, the neoreactionaries point out, to look at authoritarian zones like Shanghai, Singapore and Dubai, which combine high growth, significant personal “liberty” and almost zero political participation to see just how unnecessary democracy is—or has become—if the goal is simply capital growth. The neoreactionary account of democracy emphasizes something that its partisans, at least of the (neo-) “liberal” variety, do not: the ultimate justification for democratic politics is not good administration—the ordering of resources toward a particular goal—but rather, simply, more politics.

It is not an accident, then, that the keywords of progressivism, according to Yarvin—“humanity, progress, equality, democracy, justice, environment, community, peace, etc.”—are difficult to define; really they are “philosophical mysteries … best compared to Plotinian, Talmudic, or Scholastic nonsense.” Democracy is like the divine revels of the monk or the mystic, enjoyed publicly; its guiding concepts do not accomplish worldly goals but rather “absorb arbitrary mental energy without producing any rational thought.” In the neoreactionary view, democracy amounts to a belief in belief: it imagines that the world itself is a product of the collective imagination, something that we aim to realize and that, without our investment in it, ceases to exist. As the Cathedral becomes more and more powerful, it remakes the world in its image; beliefs start to matter, to give shape to our experiences. In such a world, as Land puts it, “nothing except politics remains.” (A sixties version: “the personal is political.”)

The neoreactionary looks upon this world incredulously, as an increasingly strange and disturbing spectacle, careening toward disaster. Democracy is “not merely doomed,” Land writes, “it is doom itself.” As the actors seal their fate in this tragedy by their very attempts to avert it, only one option remains: get out. But if the problem with this world is that it is a collective fantasy, what could they be imagining in its place?

There is a famous scene in The Matrix, near the beginning of the film. “Neo,” played by Keanu Reeves, is a corporate programmer by day and a renegade hacker at night. Something about his world feels wrong; it is a world compressed between grays and greens, and the pallid daylight in nondescript Mega City, USA blends uncannily into the neon glow of the MS-DOS underworld he haunts after hours. Cryptic messages referring to “the Matrix” have been appearing on Neo’s computer; increasingly curious and unsettled, he follows a trail of mysterious symbols and characters, and eventually finds himself alone in a room with a man named Morpheus. This legendary hacker, whose name recalls the Greek god of dreams, promises to reveal the secret, to explain to Neo what it is that’s been bugging him:

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain—but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life: that there’s something wrong in the world.

This is the Matrix. The Matrix, Morpheus explains, “is everywhere. It is all around us. … It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Neo has been on a quest to find out what the Matrix is, but it turns out that it was right there, all around him: indeed, it’s the only thing he knew. What he didn’t know is that it was fake. The Matrix is a computer simulation, an illusion—but an illusion so pervasive, so powerful, that it literally constitutes “the world.” Everything that Neo experiences is not just unreal but blocking reality: a world that “blinds him from the truth.” Morpheus offers Neo a choice: blue pill or red pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will return to his dull and easy life; this worldly prison will be a home again. But after the red pill, there’s no going back. Neo takes it, and he is ejected into the “real world”: naked, cold, alone and for the first time in his life, “awake.”

This is how neoreaction describes the Dark Enlightenment. The Cathedral, like the Matrix, is an illusion, a system of mass deception; at the same time, it shapes every aspect of our lives, constituting our world. Neoreactionary writing is “the red pill,” the “genuine article,” as Yarvin puts it. To read it is to see the Matrix from the other side: the “redpilled” neoreactionary, like the “woke” leftist, has escaped from a dream. Instead of the Cathedral’s comforting bromides, with the red pill you get something brutal, painful, unquestionably real: it has a “sodium core” and it “will sear your throat.”

But there’s a pleasure in this pain. Like the religious ascetic turning himself toward the joys of the next world by mortifying his flesh in this one, the neoreactionary’s painful process of “disillusion” offers its own satisfactions. Yarvin’s “Unqualified Reservations” promises to be “an ultimate ascent. Out of the Computer’s infinite fluorescent maze. Into the glorious air of pure, unfiltered reason,” but his writing lingers stubbornly in the “black, unthinkable madness” that proceeds it, describing in loving detail the Cathedral’s massive apparatus of deception. Part 9a of the “Gentle Introduction,” over eighty thousand words in, finds us still savoring “the true red-hot pill of sodium metal—now igniting in your duodenum. Smile grimly! You have almost passed through the flame.”

The Matrix trilogy has been a massive cultural and economic force. It made $1.6 billion at the box office, shaped how we saw the emerging internet-mediated world, and generated a passionate and vibrant fan culture, of which neoreaction is certainly a part. After its release, a flood of books with titles like The Matrix and Philosophy appeared; a decade later, neoreaction is trying to be something like “The Matrix and Politics.” The appeal is primal: like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which imagines the ordinary condition of human life—life, that is, without philosophy—as that of men who sit in darkness, chained together and enthralled by a shadow-play projected on the wall in front of them, The Matrix is a fiction that promises to lead us to reality, life unleashed from all arbitrary, social confines. The exquisite tortures of the red pill are supposed to lead us to a better world; with the right political theory, politics can finally fulfill its promise and get rid of itself. “We can hope to escape from history,” Yarvin argues, by coming to “understand how completely we’re still inside it.”

But this escape route from history, or fantasy, leads in a loop. Neoreaction borrows its “realist” politics from a fictional film, and sustains it through a thriving online subculture, sparking with arcane references and “meme magic.” What’s fascinating is that people love the movie. The “autistic nerds” and failsons, sitting in their man caves or their parents’ basements, dream of a world realer than their own: primal and gooey-thick, the real depth behind the flat image. But it is Neo who wakes up into this world; and Neo exists in our imagination, his image on our screens. If we wonder at the rise of the alt right—at the fact that the ideology most capable of galvanizing political passions is the one that promises to overcome politics once and for all—we should notice that their fantasies in fact look a lot like our reality. Man caves exist, and they shape our world; the neoreactionary is not the only one who lives in their shadows.

●

Neoreactionaries have another name for the Cathedral, which they take from the work of the early twentieth-century American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s synthesis of scientific detachment and occult mysticism reached an apex in the figure of the sublime, otherworldly sea creature “Cthulhu.” For neoreactionaries Cthulhu is a totemic image of the world they hate. The Matrix is from the future, an artifice laid on top of reality, a veil “pulled over your eyes”; Cthulhu is primitive, monstrous and natural, lurking deep, behind, below. “Cthulhu always swims left,” as Yarvin puts it in one of his most quoted koans. The mystery is in how he moves.

A sea monster—winged, tentacled, humanoid—he is unknown to men of science. He first appears in the strangely synchronized dreams, recounted to the narrator of Lovecraft’s tale, of “artists and poets”; further research reveals that others may have more intimate knowledge of his existence. While the artists and poets dream, “voodoo orgies multiply” in Haiti, “African outposts report ominous mutterings” and policemen in New York are “mobbed by hysterical Levantines.” Finally, the narrator, a reclusive New England professor, discovers the existence of an ancient cult, dispersed across the globe and yet strangely united in their reverence for this monstrous creature.

The connection is not, exactly, in the object of their worship: after all, Cthulhu himself is forever shrouded in darkness. It is something in the worshippers themselves. “Degenerate Esquimaux,” “half-castes” in “African outposts,” “hysterical Levantines” in New York: as Lovecraft details repeatedly, it is a “dark cult,” the men are “low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant,” the sites of worship in a region “of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.”

Lovecraft was a timid New England recluse who concealed his abject poverty with a veneer of Mayflower-descended gentility. In 1924 he moved from Providence to New York City, and his encounters with urban life transformed him. Vivid letters detail the “Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid” creatures that confronted him on the Lower East Side:

The organic things … inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of the earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. … From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating.

A strange and unknowable power lurks in these dark masses; their messy organicism dissolves clear distinctions, revealing some deeper, more primitive, “collective” thing. Lovecraft was thrown into a frenzy. “The New York Mongoloid problem,” he wrote to Frank Belknap Long, “is beyond calm mention.” “The Call of Cthulhu” was published four years later. The “deep-sea unnamabilities” now had a name, and other writers in his New York coterie (among them Belknap Long) began to build what is now a rich and diverse Cthulhu mythology.

Though neoreaction, unlike much of the alt right, does not identify with white nationalism as a platform—anyone, technically, can live in the authoritarian city-states they imagine—the figure of dark and threatening masses plays a similarly charged role in their writing. Yarvin makes constant, specious use of historical crime statistics, and he describes the “old cities of North America” as “overrun and rendered largely uninhabitable by murderous racist gangs” (he’s not talking about police); white flight, for him, is a form of “ethnic cleansing” inflicted on whites by non-whites. In sum: liberal democracy is Cthulhu, a creature so monstrous he cannot be known firsthand. In the frenzied pleasures of his worshippers, though, he makes his presence felt.

The French writer Michel Houellebecq explains Lovecraft’s deep racial animus as ressentiment; Lovecraft, he suggests, “knows full well that he has no place in any kind of heroic Valhalla of battles and conquests; unless, as usual, the place of the vanquished.” His anemic, professorial heroes are “stripped of all life, renouncing all human joy, becoming pure intellects, pure spirits tending to only one goal: the search for knowledge.” The only thing left for them in this world is the meticulous cataloguing of their own obsolescence. Yarvin begins many descriptions of the Cathedral with sentences like this: “Suppose you are an alien…” In this act of imagination, the neoreactionary seeks to dissolve his human form, to become a pure thinker like one of Lovecraft’s heroes—or, for that matter, like an Anglo-American philosopher.[2] Supposing himself an alien, he aspires to a voice at once purely objective and totally ironic, infinitely exacting and light-years away. “The Western civilization show has been discontinued,” Nick Land wrote in “Circuitries,” from 1992. In his last philosophy classes, he would teach class lying on the floor, referring to himself as the collective entity “Cur” and monologuing nonsense intercut with lines from the poetry of Artaud. Around 2000, Land suffered a schizophrenic break; this was the end of his academic career, and the beginning of his life as a political guru.

Writing on the Alternative Right blog, Land eschews backwoods “ordinary racism” for a futuristic “hyper-racism,” according to which accelerating technological progress will create intense and highly specific evolutionary pressure: for example, the traits needed by Mars colonists, or the reproductive success afforded to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The result will be not just eugenics, but “neo-speciation” on a fantastic scale. You get to become the something else that ordinary human “races” prefigure—or to use another phrase of Land’s, “think face tentacles.”

The neoreactionary imagines his back turned, as others warm themselves by this strange fire, call it the cult of Cthulhu or the cult of progress, Enlightenment. “Coldness be my God,” proclaims Land’s Twitter bio. But ultimately the fantasy is to get sucked up into this omnipotent, alien force, whether it’s an artificial intelligence or a dark and primitive other. Networked computers or slimy masses, the advent of the Matrix or the return of Cthulhu: the neoreactionary looks for signs of the arrival of this strange entity, either the origin or the destiny of man, and either way his end. In the meantime, the neoreactionary waits, listening for the call. By describing it, he hopes to slip away without having to respond. When Cthulhu came, Lovecraft wrote,

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

●

Life in the Cathedral is nasty and brutal, a nightmare: this is the picture neoreaction paints. What they want, though, is not exactly to destroy it. They want rather to get outside of it, in order to, as Morpheus promises Neo, “know what it is.” In the end the problem with the Cathedral is not that it’s bad, but that it’s dishonest. So what would honesty look like?

Basically, the internet. If a state church exists in the U.S. present, “Google” is probably a better shorthand for it than “progressivism.” The only real problem, according to neoreaction, is that we haven’t made this explicit: that we don’t yet know that our lives are lived inside an Internet of Things.

Yarvin and his friends are one step ahead of the progressive policy nerds: while the beltway wonks look to Silicon Valley for innovative techniques for “disrupting” social problems, Yarvin the entrepreneur-theorist wants to cut out the middleman and “reboot” the state himself. He has a simple plan: dissolve the U.S. government and replace it with a “gov-corp.” Retire all government employees (“R.A.G.E.”), “draft ten thousand Googlers,” and perhaps—as Justine Tunney, former Occupy Wall Street leader, current Google engineer and vocal advocate for neoreaction, proposed on a Whitehouse.gov petition—“hire [then-CEO of Google] Eric Schmidt as the CEO of America.” Or better, break the country up into smaller city-states: maybe a red and a blue America, an Apple America and a Ford one. Right now the U.S. is the “Microsoft of nations”—much too bloated. Smaller, affinity-based states will be leaner and more efficient. What you choose is up to you; “if you like your country, you can keep it,” as Balaji S. Srinivasan promised in a talk (“Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit”) at Y Combinator’s Startup School.

We thought the Cathedral was about politics, but actually it’s economics; we thought we were choosing, but in fact we are merely pawns. Freedom for the neoreactionary then means simply knowing that you are “a slave.” While the cyberpunk reference points for neoreaction (The Matrix, Blade Runner, Neuromancer) are usually called dystopian, neoreaction amounts to the wager that if you could figure out how to actually live in these fantasy worlds, they would be good. Since they’re imaginary, you can do whatever you want, like Neo—stopping bullets, flying around—when he figures out that the rules of the Matrix are “no different than the rules of a computer system.” In other words, absolute; but once you know how they work, infinitely hackable. The Matrix is about getting out, but all the cool shit happens inside (“I know Kung Fu”).[3]

The goal of neoreaction is to harness the power of the state church by getting rid of the fantasy that it is an expression of popular will, that we want it. Seeing the collective imaginary as an autonomous, alien force—call it technology or capital, ideology or world-spirit—rather than a form of human life (i.e. politics) paradoxically frees us to embrace it. In Silicon Valley they call this force “the Singularity.” Those who believe in it predict that computers will soon learn how to improve themselves, resulting in a “liftoff” moment in which technology becomes autonomous and self-sustaining, rapidly freeing itself from the biological limitations of its human creators.[4] In The Singularity Is Near, futurist prophet Ray Kurzweil, who is also the director of engineering at Google, writes that by allowing us to “transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains,” the Singularity (always capitalized) will erase the distinction “between human and machines or between physical and virtual reality.” He pictures this as the moment in which humans finally get “power over our fate,” but it could also be described as the moment when we finally submit to it. The idea of the Singularity implies that technology is not just humanity’s essence, but ultimately a force that transcends it.

In Silicon Valley, the Singularitarian hears the rumblings of this primitive, chthonic power as it prepares to shrug off its merely human form; by acknowledging this force’s absolute supremacy, he hopes ultimately to upload himself into the cloud, to become part of it and live forever. “We have come to the end of the series,” Land wrote in an early essay, still published as academic philosophy. “Can what’s playing you make it to the next level?”

●

Trump’s election, in which the alt right’s ideological warfare certainly played a part, is not the end of this story. Bannon, for one, described him as a “blunt instrument for us” who may not, himself, “get it.” But the imaginative investment in Trump, however temporary, reveals something important about politics in the present. If he can be, as posters on 4chan put it, “memed into existence,” then perhaps miracles can happen; a route out of the omnipresent Cathedral starts to seem mappable.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, Reince Priebus, flanked by Steve Bannon, described his excitement: “We love being here,” even though “we actually hate politics … What we were starving for was somebody real, somebody genuine, somebody who was actually who he said he was.” It’s not so ironic that Trump played this redemptive role for Priebus: though insincere, Trump is in a sense “authentic,” a word which (not just for the right) has become almost an antonym for “politician.” Trump is nothing if not an exemplary product of the system the neoreactionaries want to tear down. But this is his virtue. His brand of politics is “pure” in that it does not pretend to aim at anything other than increasing its own power. Like Neo, so crushingly ordinary in his day job—or Keanu Reeves, so fantastically vacant in his acting—Trump serves as a pure vessel for something else.

We cannot explain away the strangeness of the current moment in U.S. politics. But we should not turn away from the even deeper strangeness it reveals. From Puritan fantasies of an American apocalypse to the Manson Family’s hippie inferno, American culture has always been obsessed with the thought that its utopian visions might flower into something rotten. The American dream is of a waking life likea dream, a definite world with no limits; it is the dream of a society bound together by individuals’ pursuit of just whatever they want. It’s a dream that slides easily into a nightmare, of a world that, without any limits, careens straight into the abyss. The Puritan patriarchs ruminated endlessly, in their private journals, about the unprecedented corruption into which their new world had fallen. In the virtual world of the neoreactionaries, our modern priestly class of professors and technologists make these apocalyptic fantasies public.

The fear of political life—of the uncertainty that comes with wanting and doing things with others—has long been a driving force in modern democratic politics. The fantasy worlds of reactionary thought present themselves as an absolute break with the postwar liberal consensus, even with “politics” as such; they are not that, but they are not just illusions, either. In the end, the dream of an “exit” from the contingency and unpredictability of worldly life is still a human one. Against its own claim that “there is no alternative,” neoreaction’s fantasy of an “exit” from history gives evidence, as brutal and real as it imagines, of the political life that we are destined to share.

Footnotes

Since 2001, U.F.O. sightings in the United States have tripled.↵

Imagining yourself an alien observer is a classic trope in analytic philosophy, a thought exercise bootstrapping up to the “view from nowhere.” But the academic left, too, has its Cthulhu dreams. In 1985, Donna Haraway inaugurated the field of posthuman studies with her “Cyborg Manifesto,” a frequently cited text in the humanities and cornerstone of the postmodern left. Her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, looks in a different direction. Recalling us to our biological roots, she enjoins us to see ourselves as “means and not just ends,” and to try to reduce the human population from a projected 11 billion at the end of the century to “two or three.” “We are compost,” she says now, “not posthuman.” Rather than the currently popular “anthropocene,” she suggests we should see ourselves in the “Cthulucene.”↵

Note that neoreaction’s examples of good governance—Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore—are also where cyberpunk imagines its vaguely Asian futures.↵

In the mid-Nineties, Land described technology as an “invasion from the future”; perhaps now he sees himself as a kind of Terminator, sent back in time by Skynet to destroy in advance the human resistance and clear the way for “Judgment Day.” Yarvin, for his part, got his start in the early Aughts as a prolific commenter on “Overcoming Bias” (later LessWrong), a site run by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and who devotes his life to figuring out how to make artificial intelligence “friendly.” Discussion on the site collapsed in 2010, when user Roko posted a decidedly unfriendly thought experiment: Imagine a future AI that punishes those who had impeded its development. If people had known about this future, malevolent AI, they would have had a strong incentive to assist it. But now you (or rather, the rest of us) have a problem: your own thought experiment has created the threat against which you must try to protect yourself, further increasing the threat…↵

#politics #modernity #anthropocene #the way we live now #neoreactionism #postmodernism

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forgottenbones · 4 years

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In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me, my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I. But I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?

I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order to regain peace I have had, in short, to come to terms with a too generous fortune. And since I cannot live up to it by merely resting on my achievement, I have found nothing to support me but what has supported me through all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and of the role of the writer. Let me only tell you, in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as simply as I can, what this idea is.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche’s great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

By the same token, the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.

None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment – and a commitment not only to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons – these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think that we should understand – without ceasing to fight it – the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer’s craft, I should have put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who after all this can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults, it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft. It is helping me still to support unquestioningly all those silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world only through memory of the return of brief and free happiness.

Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits and debts as well as to my difficult creed, I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon the extent and the generosity of the honour you have just bestowed upon me, freer also to tell you that I would receive it as an homage rendered to all those who, sharing in the same fight, have not received any privilege, but have on the contrary known misery and persecution. It remains for me to thank you from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude, the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.

Albert Camus, Noble Prize Banquet Speech

#albert camus #writing #art

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anonymouswasawoman · 7 years

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Invisible voyeurism

My observation of the 'dancing' industry this side of the Atlantic, a few short digressions about Hollywood, and why #meToo? Strap in and strap up because we have been living in these contradictions for far too long. I’m not a Madonna or a whore, nor have I ever been.

5/11/2017

My birthday

It has recently come to my attention through a series of significant events, including Hugh Hefner's death, and Harvey Weinstein's downfall- which highlights an issue coined by Emma Thompson as 'a crisis of extreme masculinity', and defended by Woody Allen, who fears a 'witch-hunt atmosphere'- for a man and men in general who don't know how to keep their hands to themselves- that there may be a topic for discussion regarding my unique position in the current gender climate. I did not initially write this as a comment on the Weinstein situation, fearing, not only being seen as someone who is jumping on the bandwagon, or coming out of the woodwork, but simply because I wrote the bones of this article before it happened, wanting to comment on the cultural aftershock of Playboy magazines creation. After the scandal, I felt obligated to #meToo. There is a reason so many women are 'coming out of the woodwork'. It is because this is endemic. It is because we should follow suit, if we want to regain the respect and trust we were pressed to lose for ourselves when we saw any type of this behaviour either as necessary, commonplace, or 'just a bit of fun'. To all the ‘uninterested’ or ‘unaffected’ women out there, let me stop you and say that you should remember that you have a duty to women in general. To any male readers: “Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights,” Hilary Clinton.

I have been victim to this kind of conduct, seeing it, almost in a clinical way, as entirely necessary, not only if I wanted to feel, somehow, illogically, safe in my environment (a strip club- if you hadn't guessed), but also, more alarmingly, able to keep my job. While the imminent issue at hand is, indeed Harvey Weinstein's 'pestering' of women and girls of all ages, I want to question this from my perspective, as I am not a semi-famous, or famous actress hoping to advance somehow in Hollywood, yet I am still stuck in this web of ignored bad behaviour working on what you could say is 'the front line', where everything is as exaggerated as it is allowed to be, despite the signs stating in Caps: No touching, No swearing, No prepostitioning, No shouting and No mobile phones. Hugh Hefner's death made me question whether Playboy still determines the standards of this industry, or any which sells seduction and implies the selling of sex, and whether the working conditions of dancers are affected by this standard. Whether he was pioneering or damaged, and still is damaging progression, so this relates to my (some would say unfortunate and powerless) situation and occupation. It also raises the question of the self-destructive nature of female sexuality. It raises the question to me about whether I am a weak woman & it makes me think about what queen Elizabeth said in 1588; "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king"

It appears to me that in order to create a fair and 'safe' discussion space, we must not only talk about the 'crisis of extreme masculinity', but also question whether there is too, a mirrored crisis of extreme femininity, and who is to blame for this, who is in power, and who is allowing who is in power to engage in such acts, in order to achieve acclaim and/ or financial security. Whether we have reached peak fake ass fake tits fish lips threshold; or whether that is a (sub)culture which can live on without repercussions for the wider gender conscious community. The question is; is it avoidable, as a woman, to be a part of this sexist culture, are we all participating, like the citizens of Germany did under Nazi rule? I say to myself that I wont be affected, again, like I was when my boss fired me for not 'going away with him', or took me upstairs to 'smoke' 'on the balcony', but that wasn't the first time and it may not be the last that I called my morals into question. I questioned why I allowed this to continue, engaging with him, not crossing any moral lines, as far as I was concerned, but not removing myself from the situation. I question why I still don't want to completely tear his reputation to shreds by naming names and even talking about this right now, and who I am trying to protect by not doing so- him or myself? Emma Thompson said that someone needs to be the one who will speak up and name names but who wants to be a snowflake in this situation? Who wants to be the bad sport? Is naming names really what we need? Is this what woody Allen meant by witch hunt? Maybe I am discrediting this article and #meToo movement by not naming names like the women who named Weinstein, but I am not trying to shake up the life of a man who was living as it was (arguably, in a way) acceptable at the time and in that place, I am trying to shake up the establishment which makes this acceptable. Maybe the fact that Weinstein has been named is enough, for now, in that it has created this tornado of shit for the biggest image fearing industry in the world today. I question if I was just another girl who wanted to gain something from the older man with reputation, power and wealth. Maybe I wanted the Midas touch, and maybe that's what these women who obliged sacrificed their dignity at the time for too. Maybe you're a better woman than me if you didn't oblige. Maybe it was circumstance. Maybe that's why individual name naming is in some cases worthless, and in my case arbitrary and perhaps even damaging for the girls I've worked with.

Either way, I will end this specific discussion here, telling you that I believed that if I were to continue on in life, stable, secure, and respected, I had to allow this to happen. I knew that I was singled out for a reason, so it was my own ego and sense of pride that told me to endure. Men do not experience this choice. And it is this choice I have to come to terms with. Perhaps men experience the choice to risk being viewed as a perpetrator, as Harvey Weinstein is now, in order to further their career, and get massages from young girls, but he is never faced with the issue that, if he does not, his career will be harmed, I believe. I could end this article here, but I would rather open up the discussion about how women can perpetuate this behaviour in men, and whether we are to blame for this choice between our own idea of ourselves and our dignity, and whether the sacrifices are or have been inescapable because of our culture. Perhaps we will never come to a conclusion but at least we are talking.

Questioning sexuality is essentially the most important way of questioning humanity. I think that since up until the last decade, arguably, we were separated into two genders makes it therefore the most uniting way of questioning humanity. I'm not trying to talk about transgender issues although that is somewhat on the same agenda when we are talking about sexuality; specifically female- I am trying to question humanity and therefore the meaning of life. I think that there is no meaning of life, only the right way and the wrong. Mine is still wrong even though I know this fact. My world is a world where they put us on a pedestal for our beauty, femininity, and sexuality. However volatile this pedestal is, and despite the fact that we know that these men are stood at the base of it holding onto it and rattling it evermore violently, we continue to stand because these are three thrilling things we are not able to obtain simultaneously or indeed individually in our daily lives because we are not able to uphold the best parts about being a woman when we are not regarded as a delicacy any more. No, it's not that we are not a delicacy, and it's not an innocence we have lost, it's the previous hitherto lack of knowledge that humans lack humanity whenever money is present. This job is wanting to be one of these ruthless people, but feeling intensely uncomfortable with the notion of doing so and defeated by not being able to. These people have never experienced what it is to lose and then continue to lose solely because you are in a vicious cycle of losing. We may have any number wins on our hands but the world is not a feminine one.

I would like to help you represent the subjugated girls of this underground occupation who have been quietly forgotten about by general society, because we can. I have only ever worked in one club, in Liverpool, so I have loyalties to the girls and management there, despite any negative experiences, and I hope there is an answer for all the girls, who are scraping by in an occupation and industry which no longer has any glamour and freedom attached to it because we forgot to fight for them in the midst of our hair shaving, bra burning, armpit hair sporting feminist revolution. I understand that these two ways of life and the girls that live them are ideologically at odds, and sisterhood is involved, but we could have the decency to expect more for the girls who are forced into these roles by their circumstances, surely that is what feminism is about. I am a (as staunch I can be without being awful) feminist, but as women I feel as though we may be at a point where we have to accept compromise somehow, like we do in relationships, because if nature is anything to go by, the Alpha will a lot of the time be male, with the women as the prizes and baby makers.

This brings to light the question of whether, as predators, we are pack animals, and whether the male is always the Alpha, guarding territory and defending his right, as a male, to protect the females. This motivation by sensual, physical, or carnal appetites is something that I feel is somehow binded to the discussion in this article, how animal instincts can affect human behaviour and its impact upon gender equality. The top wrung of our society does well to perpetuate this idea of the male Alpha. Don't get me wrong I like Future and Kanye West but their song "I won", talking about "you the number one trophy wife", happens to be really good and listenable, yet it is misogynistic to its core. My mum calls most black rap music "shouty rap", and indeed there is anger and oppression also at its core, and so there should be. I don't want to cross over into the issue of race but maybe the two are intrinsically linked. This is a very fine line to be treading on or over, but these are issues which call to be discussed, in connection with womens issues. Maybe writers who strip or strippers who write are not a common combination, and I hesitate to call myself a Stripper anyway, since the word, I feel, has become definitive of Woman who has no power, similar to the way 'Negro' did to black people, before they claimed it as their own. But back to the music, Kim Kardashian, who we all know is married to Kanye West, is potentially said Trophy, but this is a woman who has earned her own fame and fortune. We all know that she earned it by having sex with Ray J on camera, except when the time comes to choose who is the woman of the year, Caitlin Jenner, her step-father, is chosen, for completing gender-reassignment surgery with an overwhelming audience, and apparently becoming a role model to women because of it. If anything she should be a role model to men! People only knew of Caitlin, née Bruce Jenner, because of her appearances in Keeping up with the Kardashians', and for winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Please do not somehow take this as a dismissal of Caitlyns' bravery. In my opinion she just would have been more of a role model to transgender people if she had been more clear that she was not trying to be a role model only to women, but also to men, as all trans stories should resonate equally with both sexes, as it is not a struggle with being one sex, it is a struggle with being the wrong sex. It is a struggle with sexuality in general, not a struggle with either sexuality separately. It felt to me as though Caitlyn was accepting this Women's award simply because she had been led down that route by the fame and fortune of her family. It may have been more empowering to the transgender community if she had said, I won't accept this award on the basis that I am not a woman, I am a trans woman, and that has a struggle entirely seperate and arguably more difficult than that of a woman born in a womans' body who is still a woman. The Kardashians seemed to me to be all too keen to cash in on Caitlyns' struggle, by making it about them, and how it felt ‘from their perspectives’, N.b. Kardashians not Jenner’s, which is why I feel she would have done her struggle more justice if she had not taken her platform on the world stage for granted by simply saying she can be a role model to transgender people just because she managed to transition in the public eye and with all the scrutiny that the Kardashian family is under. Family values is something that the Kardashians have always kept at the top of their agenda which is why I was surprised when such an important part of their whole empire was treated with such suspicion. However, it is obviously difficult for me to be impartial, I just wanted to make a comment on an issue which is equally as important as and entirely connected to the issue of womens rights. Treading on thin ice, and with that aside, I know I'm going around in circles and with Trump as the president of America, there is no need to dispute the misogyny of our/their society, but there is a need to dispute who big brands employ as their role models, and there is a need to question blind faith.

Having said that, I like to have dinner bought for me even if it means I pretty much have to have sex with him at the end of the date no questions asked, but I will be the one to cut ties, because I think this is where our control comes in. Let me rephrase that, I have had dinner bought for me and had sex with him at the end of the date no questions asked, but I was the one to cut ties, because that is where my control came in. I met a guy in work, and danced for him, and there wasn't any question of who would pay for dinner, it was basically already decided before we got there because we both knew what we wanted from each other. Obviously I offered, though.

I understand that the paradoxical question is; how can we expect men to be okay with paying for our dinner if our wages are equal? But wages are not equal so does that then change the question to; How can we expect men to gladly pay for our dinner if sex is off the menu? If sex is on the menu, then, how can we expect men to want to have sex with us if we do not present ourselves as sexy? But then when you turn that on its head, it becomes a question about rape; How can we expect men to not want to have sex with us if we do present ourselves as sexy? And if you expand the ideology further, it becomes a sales technique: How can we expect people to buy from our company if we are not selling sex? These are no longer questions, they are just expectations, and they start at the top. We should have bigger expectations of brands to not do the obvious and put a rich white privileged girl with famous parents who therefore has millions of instagram followers, who stands for nothing of importance, as their brand ambassador.

So, should I feel weak for letting him pay for my dinner and using sex to repay him, when society is tipped in his favour? Do men and women not need to go on an equal amount of dates in order to find love? How am I supposed to pay for all of these dates when you earn more than me? Does you paying for my meal automatically mean homeboy should get it, or am I being too polite?

I have always hoped that this wouldn't be the case for women but writing this article I had a depressing thought that in a lot of cases in nature, monkeys, lions and wolves to name a few, without having done further research, the females have a role which is non-negotiable. I just wonder if we have plateaued somewhat with feminist progression, but perhaps it is just the way we are viewing it and attempting to progress. Maybe its easy for us to believe that we could start from the top down not the bottom up, but women with money don't need equal rights as much as girls like me who feel oppression on a daily level. Jennifer Lawrence doesn't need that extra 10 million as much as my friends need to not feel outnumbered and unsafe in their workplace. I think we are all confused about how things are to change accordingly when our wages do, and about what we can do on our level, which doesn't involve tweeting about which male member of staff tried to hit on you or came onto you in the lift or at the Christmas party. Or, from a mans perspective, not joking with your female colleaugues for fear for saying something un-PC. I know I sound anti-men but just because we bear the children and have less physical strength, should you be allowed to have expectations of me which are not morally defensible? Its these ingrained expectations you have to change. Real chivalry is opening doors, pulling out chairs, and lending me your jacket, but what if I don't expect that? And anyway, isn't part of that just being well-mannered? You earn more than me, so should dinner not be something I am entitled to, until you agree that you should hand over some of your well earned cash and title as CEO to me, or another woman, just as deserving of the role and the pay, as you? Speaking theoretically ofcourse. As men, in light of this whole situation, it seems it has become necessary to ask yourself, on what level have you participated in this culture of belittlement? There is obviously a spectrum, and it is understandable that this is confusing for men as well as women. There's a viral tweet going round of a comedian called Peter White offering advice to men on how to behave: "I think the golden rule for men should be: if you're a man, don't say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn't want a man saying to you in prison." While the sincerity of this quote is questionable, seeing as most men won't see themselves in that situation, it helps to lighten the mood, when the real scenario is that one day it could be your daughter whose career is disrupted, or whose worth is demeaned by creepy advances from a higher ranking male colleague. As a man, you should not let yourself be lulled into a false sense of self-security because you have never assaulted or raped a woman. There is a spectrum. Turning a blind eye still makes you complicit.

I feel as though it is weak for me to say that as Women, in expecting equal pay, equal power and in a way, equal rights, we have to wait for men to accept our sexual equality, however, it seems to me that its not only men who are not able to adjust and account for this change yet. Women still want to get their nails done, their hair blow dried, and do sparkly eyeshadow, which is all fine by me, especially when their partner gets his beard trimmed and styled, puts cream on his face at night, and tries on her clothes when shes away for the weekend. But I think that the void of equality opens when a woman accepts something she can not repay, maybe not literally, maybe non-physically, a kind of spiritual debt, thereby consigning herself to an antiquated gender role, eg, at a base level: you have paid for me to get my nails done so I will pick up your dirty underwear/ wash it for you. In a strip club, this could be: you have bought me a drink, so I will turn a blind eye when you put your arm around my waist or try to touch me during a dance. The kind of women and girls that allow themselves to be treated this way are the kind of women and girls that allow other women and girls to be viewed as the lesser sex, as it could be said that this is, in some way, solicited honourably by the man's kindness. I feel as though we have all, in some way, been guilty of this, and this is where the spectrum comes in for women. We are turning a blind eye to our own position of inequality. It could be said that we do it for comfort, an easy life, but, from my perspective, I did it because I didn't want to sit in the corner with a face on because men are pigs and all I want from them is their money, and I wish to GOD THEY WOULD JUST SHUT the fuck up and stop asking me why a pretty girl like me is still single.

The catch-22 of this whole situation is that the girls who are being forced into jobs like stripping are not able to help themselves. The beauty of this is that neither are the girls in the opposite extreme, wildly pushing feminist ideologies, getting locked up and pushed out for it. Maybe this means they should work together and be less suspicious of each other. Maybe we should start, as educated women, by seeing what it would be like if the Pleaser shoe were on the other foot. I don't mean do a pole dancing class, I mean go to a strip club and get a lap dance, or even just for a drink, however much it hurts to see girls feel that level of oneness with their own repelling urges. The reality of it is that this oneness with ourselves is not optional as a stripper. We are nothing but the way we look, so owning it is necessary. Making girls who come in to the strip club feel uncomfortable is the only way we can have power over them, but the only girls that we desire to have power over are the ones who take our money from us, come in with a group of guys and command all of their attention by bending over the table in their mesh tops and camo mini skirts, dancing like they're a Stripper. If you do take me up on this, don't be one of these girls. If you don't take me up on this, don't be one of these girls...

So, this is my self-indulgent, self-centred, #meToo piece, because I think, at a time like this women can afford to think of themselves and say how they've been damaged, and not care about who thinks its inconvenient. Having said that, I think consciousness-raising exercises like #MeToo only work when we combat them in our daily lives, and silence means nothing changes, so I am sticking a probe right into the wound, into the cold hard long days nights that we've worked, come home with pimples on our bums, and had to watch the water run dark and dirty off our skin, had to wash all of our clothes to make sure that the unclean doesn't mix with our daily lives because that was not us, it was not a release, it was finding a way to move when we were in chains, and sometimes the only place we could move was wrapped around a pole, or, less literally, tied to the floor. I am writing because I hope that one day period supplies could be free, and the abortion pill could be taken at home, and maybe so that I could play a part in helping more women come into the positions of power they deserve through hard work, to be in. I am writing because America shouldn't have a president who thinks he can 'grab women by the pussy'. I am writing because this occupation still exists, in all its hypocrisy. I am writing because this job will make you hard, it will make you feed on your softness, on your own young soft flesh, it will make you cut yourself on camera in return for credit, and cash. This world is men gazing at how much we are able and willing to degrade ourselves, and enjoying it too much to help us to stop. It's about how highly we regard ourselves versus how much we want something which isn't ours. It's not dancing it's love addiction. The only thing harder to come by than money is love in here. So that's what I never forget to aim for. I never forget that feeling love is my primary objective. I never forget that I'm still here because I would rather feel my heart beating, than feel it's pulse quickly slow each day, colder, each day I work 9 to 5 knowing that my rung on the ladder is that of someone who has earned a hell of a lot less in life than I have. What is the path of less resistance? There is less resistance waking up each day better than the last only to lose it all again at the weekend, that's why years go by and the girls find themselves at once older and less desirable but still with the exact same problems. I'm not saying I want to help everybody. I just don't want to not show love to them because that will make me weak and painful. My expense then for not being ruthless, is that I don't make enough to escape. I wouldn't like to be a loveless entity so I keep on keeping me because you can't see me here.

Here’s where I get passionate. I’m writing this because what is activism without activity? What is activity without activism? Oh well done you went to this place and wore a dress by this designer and then you posed for a picture of it on your Instagram. Well fucking done. Are you aware what the hell message is that sending? That you’re vapid and only care about yourself. Not saying don’t go places and do things and take photos of it, I’m just saying you could consider doing it for a cause. Activism isn’t posting a lil message in your Instagram captions about how sad and disappointed you are that America still houses Nazis, or that you think guns should be illegal, or that Harvey Weinstein is a bad man, or that assault on women indeed exists, activism is acting upon that. It’s going one step further, in a way that says, I really care about this and so should you. Activism is not talking about the example, it’s setting it.

I actually sent this to vice to publish, and I have to say, I know they were looking. Instinct is powerful. So powerful that I knew why they wouldn’t publish it. It’s because it was neither one thing nor the other. It wasn’t too much or too little, it wasn’t too personal or too objective. It has no references so it’s not journalism or academic, but there’s no characters and it’s obviously not fiction, So I’ll stop fucking around and just complete it. They ‘said’ there was something missing, So I either strip it back and add references, or I go more personal.

I’m not one to shy away from the truth, and it’s value, so I will tell you my story. Whether you are still reading, want to continue, or don’t, that’s up to you. I believe in all this balance, chaos theory, good vs evil and if you don’t then that’s on you. Here’s how I’ve struggled with hirsutism, I wrote this about two weeks before I published this ‘article’. This is the first time I’ve talked about this in writing, and I would like to add now in hindsight (6 months after I wrote this originally) I am now proud to be able to claim this as my own, especially in its perhaps not comparability but connection to the trans movement.

If you know what that is, you are probably either recoiling in disgust, or also suffer from this condition, or are a doctor. If you don’t, I’ll tell you. It’s excess female body and facial hair.... While on first inspection I look to be a ‘normal’ girl, closer inspection is something I’ve avoided my whole lifetime, because it’s not something that is easy to deal with. Basically, I have a line of hair up my abdomen, reaching just beyond my belly button. Pretty normal hey? Well it’s also around my nipples. Solvable. It’s also on my chest, underneath my clavicles, a fine layer of short dark hairs. Complicated. Oh yeah it’s also on my neck and the side of my face. That’s okay it’s being lasered. So what’s the diagnosis, you may be asking? Am I quite mannish? Do i have too much testosterone, big hands and feet, broad shoulders and more muscle mass? No. That is not the case. There is no problem with my hormones and no underlying medical condition like polycystic ovaries. It is not hereditary in any way and no one else in my family suffers in this way. So where does that leave me? In no mans land, literally, I am unsolvable by anyone. My body is a rubix cube which has been fixed so that it has no conclusion. I am currently undergoing laser hair removal which I did not qualify for on the nhs as I am undiagnosed. Bear with me, pun intended. Laser usually costs around £700 per treatment area. But I have negotiated for that cost to be for my face neck and chest due to them being relatively small areas. Still, I can’t really afford that on top of other normal financial considerations, like rent, food travel, and credit payments. I am on medication to try and make my apparently normal hormones be more feminine. They are steroidal. Side effects include depression, dry skin and lowered libido. While we are on the subject of sexual desires, I am not allowed them, by society. I do not allow myself them. Take your chances of getting hurt in a relationship and double them for me with this invisible problem.

The last person I had sex with was a married man who paid me £400. I have no problem saying this as it’s the only time I’ve ever been paid for sex, including in gifts, as I feel that is included. I have never been gifted anything by a guy except a teddy bear in my first year of high school as a present from a guy I kissed at the disco. I met the married guy at the strip club I work in. He managed to convince me to go outside of the usual terms I work by because we helped each other understand the hypocrisy of the situation. He was married like half the guys that come in. He payed me for a dance and we sat and talked. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always wanted to dance because talk is cheap and I don’t want to owe anyone anything. I ended up owing him, so I took his number and texted him the next day. I went on Sunday night, after work at 4am. We had a coffee, he paid me in a wad of cash which I didn’t count, then we undressed, beside either side of the bed, he climbed into bed, and me after him.

I’m not able to work when I have my laser treatment because I have to shave the area. Since I have shaved, plucked, and bleached my chest since about age 15, it is already quite scarred. I cannot use any healing or commodogenic moisturising products because it leads the hair follicles to break out. Needless to say I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I’m not apologising for all these details otherwise you won’t be able to see the reality of the situation. I know that other people have problems, and invisible weaknesses, and other girls suffer from hirsuitism, but it’s hard to find them when they are hiding too, and this needs to be talked about. That’s why I need to address the brutal and uncomfortable details, as much as it hurts me to.

So, now I don’t have a job because I can’t even work at a strip club. When I could work there I had to bleach my face and chest every night before every shift. That meant I was late and looked unprofessional. That is a theme for me, having to look as though I’m unprofessional when I’m actually an extremely meticulous and focused person.

I have worked retail jobs, but since I no longer really have friends, as they’ve moved away, and don’t have a boyfriend, I find it hard to relate to people on a normal level. I get depressed, stressed, alienated and I have no release. Working in a strip club helps with these things, although the girls are from different backgrounds and a lot of them have it worse than me, admittedly. I believe I don’t have female friends because I think they find it easy to use me to their advantage because I am in a perpetual state of fear and loneliness. This is also why I’m not a lesbian, aside from the fact that I’m not attracted to women. I have been raped twice, albeit neither time entirely involved assault. I do not consider sexual experiences to be entirely pleasurable, of the few that I’ve had, due to the disconnect between who I present to them and who I really am. They see the ideal and expect only that. I have told one guy about my problem, and although he was understanding, I can tell he feared for his own comfortable normalcy. I told him after a one night stand. We met at the club. Due to my situation, I have done everything through life, alone. I dropped out of university, unable to deal with the workload and the mental workload that comes with this condition. They say now that a lot of mental health issues are reported at university and there is more awareness. There wasn’t really, a few years ago, and I got passed around a couple of uninterested councillors who made me write my depression and anxiety on a whiteboard in a blue pen because I was white and came from an almost middle class background and had no really visible problems, I wasn’t allowed to be troubled. I am 25 next week and I still live at home. My credit rating is extremely poor due to my not being able to find and keep a suitable job over the years. I used a loan and credit card in order to buy a dog, to sustain me through terrible loneliness. My family have always been supportive and have tried to overlook my strange self-imposed situation. They are trying to help because they know that a lack of stimulation from a dead end job that I am able to acquire with my current qualifications will be the death of me. I hate to sound morbid but it’s an option. But because of my family, I admittedly have had it very easy compared to many others. So while I am telling you all of this, I’m not doing it for pity, or even understanding or compassion, I’m doing it because telling you this can hopefully mean that I am able to affect people positively instead of hiding myself behind smoke and mirrors like I have always been encouraged to by society, because there was no other way. There has always been a huge disconnect between who I really am and who I am able to present to the world to be perceived, to the point where I have multiple Instagram accounts where I put pictures which express myself in a way I am not able to on my normal one, because I know that the people who follow me would find them unacceptable. Nobody follows or likes my secret account pictures because I am strange, hyper sexual and come across as hostile and aggressive, plus, they don’t know me. I am creative, and all the creative jobs I’ve applied for demand a built up and established person with flawless pictures of travel, food and good times to show on their social media. I have been beaten down into a corner by the world, and have nothing left but these words. I know you think that given what you’ve read, you probably wouldn’t be one of the people that are pushing me down but if you still have a question in your mind that despite every medical practitioner telling me that “there is nothing wrong with you”, my chest, with small hairs on it, is wrong, then you are one of these people. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying that when I remove it all, my body temperature is not able to regulate itself. My body has learnt, through a terrible vicious cycle, that this is what it needs to exist alone. That is my only theory for my situation, and I like it because it’s more reassuring than being a medical anomaly. I hope that if you saw my problem, you wouldn’t recoil, but I know you would. I hope that all my other flaws, all somehow attached to this issue, stemming from my lack of control over this profound weakness and wrongness of my body, would be overlooked due to their clearly self-destructive nature, but I know that they will not be. I know that even if someone came and handed me everything I needed to be ‘normal’, or ‘happy’, I still wouldn’t be. Because when I forget my difference and have enough to sustain me, I am normal and happy. I know that is life, and life is not black and white, but also, it is. I don’t know what I need, so I need you to know. I don’t know if I need to feel like everyone else, or not. Here I talk about going on living but I’ll leave that bit out because I don’t want this to sound like I’m threatening, at any point, apart from in my lowest moments when it feels way too real. I just want you to consider all my options. I have told people my problem, I have not told people my problem, neither more beneficial. I wonder if the world would miss me if I were gone. I wonder if they would gain more from seeing the pain in my eyes before or after I died. I have no answers here, only problems. I have no questions to ask you because there’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know. Because of this, hirsuitism (I don’t like saying the word), I have nothing but things to stand for if I were ever somehow lifted out of this situation. Being lifted is something I’ve always fought against- you can’t lift me because I am unrelatable, and not in the bad way. This has been cathartic, but nothing else. See all of these paradoxes, and hopefully you will see that what I’m trying to say is that mine and every other girl, who is even slightly afflicted by this issue’s, potential is hugely affected because it’s yet another thing that we have to think about and men, and the ‘femme-inists’ don’t. We are hiding it not only from men, and other judgemental women, but therefore ourselves and our families and friends. When I look down at my chest with a few hairs on it, when it’s grown out, it looks, to me, almost perfectly normal. I say almost because I know that if most anyone else saw it in it’s raw form they would not agree. Honestly I’m just glad that lasers exist so that I have the potential to be ‘just like everybody else’. But that doesn’t stop me from being curious about why this happened to me, and whether, as the doctors’ said, I am perfectly normal, it’s just that society doesn’t believe that’s so. Honestly I want this to be read from an objective view, because I know everybody has their own set of problems, and I don’t want to make out that mine are any worse or better than anyone else’s. What I’m really saying is- why can’t it be an option for women to want, not to be just as good and strong as other powerful and influential women, but to be just as good and powerful as other men, humans. Please tell me, if I want to compete with men for power, how I’m supposed to do that if I’m expected to be like all other women. Shave my armpits, shave my legs, have long flowing hair, dress sexy in dresses and skirts, instead of logically and unfussily in a suit and tie, don’t come off as too brash or aggressive lest you seem manly . That’s my question. Why is that perceived as wrong? Why, when I see my unshaven armpits in the mirror now that I’m not working and it’s winter, do I feel a little repulsed? From the perspective of my own struggle, I am privileged enough to be able to ask this, and attempt to provoke. Of my situation, I kind of want girls to say, can you imagine that? And not in a judgemental way. And guys, I want them to say, it doesn’t, shouldn’t, doesn’t, matter. Then try to ignore this. Try to be indifferent. Try to keep me hidden. See if you can.

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