#Thinking of making my monkey men more chunky

[tohot4u]

sketch dump x2

#Thinking of making my monkey men more chunky #Like #Artstyle wise #I’ve been doing to style studies #And what I like #and lighting and cuteness was a big factor #They need to be silly #macaque #lmk fanart #liu er mihou #lmk sun wukong #sun wukong #lmk tang

[popculturebuffet]

CODENAME KIDS NEXT DOOR:OPERATION NAUGHTY REVIEW (comission for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy mutants. It's been way too long since i talked something x-men related and given the last time I did was … this

It's been even longer since I talked about something GOOD from the house of X. Thankfully Kev had an idea left over from last X-Mas that I was eager to jump on this X-Mas: Operation N.A.U.G.H.T.Y, Codename :Kids Next Door's classic christmas episode spoofing the strangest heroes of all. And the fantastic four because apparently this episode wasn't personally targeting me enough as is.

For those Krakoans not as familiar with KND, in short KND follows the Kids Next Door, a group of child superspies trying to fight adult tyranny. KND takes place in a world where many adults take up supervillany just to impose their will on kids, from forcing braces on them, to shipping kids to the moon so their parents have no excuse not to work a billion hours, to bras actually being battle ready armor and teens all being douchebags who want to bully kids. In short it's every sterotype about kids and childhood taken up to eleven, and given cool gadgets. The show evolved from our main five kids, super cool british super spy and tightwad Nigel Uno, carefree pilot Hoagie Gilligan, spacey plushie lover Kuki Saban, perpetually angry aussie Wallabe Beatles and cool as a cucumber second in command Abigail Lincoln, Numbahs 1 through 5 respectively.

The show evolved, starting as simply the kids ocasoinally harassing people and fighting weirdos who werne't taken seriously by the rest of the world into a complex epic with the KND becoming a global orginzation and our heroes being one of a large cast of other KND agents, kids and characters. The show had a tight, expansive continuity that I ate up as a kid and even now wish to go back and rewatch some day. IT's a show I deeply loved and still do admiring it' screativity and having a continuity way thicker than most shows at the time, but gloriously so.

The show also LOVED it's pop culture refrences, including an entire episode that was just a parody of a short form the Animatrix, a two parter following empire strikes back, and many more. If the creators could squeeze in something they loved, they would. So it's not a shock that.

So it's not a huge shock the show would one day tackle x-men, which is another franchise about disenfranchised outcasts fighting an unfair system that has a massive cast, mythology and nice dollops of batshit insanity. The fact the storytelling is similar to the claremont run of x-men, i.e. fun one off adventures with ocasoinal bigger multi parters with a tight continuity and clear plans for the arcs, just makes it all the more obvious to me as an adult. Not only that they did it TWICE, though we'll save operation S.A.F.E.T.Y. for another day. The fact they made their x-men shout out a christmas episdoe and based their elves of x more on the comics than the movies, depsite the movies being red hot at the time and rightfully so, is just icing on the cookie. So join me won't you for some KVX as we dive into operation N.A.U.G.H.T.Y.

We open with a Stan Lee style narration which just warms my heart. See back in the 80s Stan Lee did a LOT Of narration for marvel cartoons, including the failed 80's X-Men Pilot, Pryde of the X-Men, which I intend to review eventuallys. And while obviously I wa stoo busy not existing to see most of this, I did get a vhs tape of Firestar's origin episode in spider-man and his amazing friends, and I THINK pryde of the x-men as a kid, so I got to hear it plenty. So seeing someone tribute that and do a pretty good job capturing his energy if not his voice at all.. it really hits me right there.

It's Christmas Eve and the elves are all hard at work. THey even sing their own verison of the rainbow monkey rainbow monkey all very round and super chunky theme song, which is imbeded in my skull on a load bearing lobe. One elf isn't so jolly and that's Elf Logan, codename Wintergreen aka Weapon G. He's just here on santa's orders to keep an eye on things not to sing and dance and make presents.. which is fair. It'd be like asking your CIA assigned body guard to knit for you. That's not what there here for. There's one thing Wintergreen does best and what he does isn't very jolly.

Things quickly get all humbuggy as 5 familiar figures show up.. figures SEEMINGLY matching the KND.. but wearing masks and acting unusual. I mean showing up somewhere and shooting a bunch of adults with tranq dart,s including about 40 for Elf Logan because ti's the only way he sleeps at night. Otherwise he just strokes that picture of Elf Jean Grey longingly. It weirds the rest of the team out.

Still there's clear hints it's not them: besides the makss they dont' talk or yell. While they CAN be quite on a mission, it's usually not fo rlong and usually nigel would at least have to give out some order. Most dammingly.. you have Number 3 in a room full of Rainbow Monkeys and she DOSEN'T react? That.. that's not possibly her.

The elves reactions are also gold as their all holly and jolly even as their getting some mmmmm drugs. Even the one who yells at them for entering the REINDEER room tells them merry christmas. So they enter it and kindap the santy claws as we get our holly jolly credits.

One title explination later, we're back with what's the REAL sector V, though the special does do a good job keeping it ambigious: While most audiences first instnct, even child me, is to say "well of course it's not them" Numbah 4 mentions an icy fortress, and their all returning from somewhere that isn't revaled till later. Given this franchise it could just as easily be that Santa was evil or undre mind control or they stole it to save it from a greater danger. It's not of course but the fact we don't know if they did it and if it wasn't them who adds nicely to the tension and their are hints as to who.. but we'll get to those at the reveal.

Our heroes prepapre to head home, with Numbah 3 being the most excitable and kind of the group, happy to give Numbah 4 his gift. They have a very drawn out will they or won't they thing, though it's a bit more tolerable than most series as their children and Numbah 4 is in DEEP denial. Like jason fox or calvin insertlastname here levels of girls have cooties I don't have feelings YOU HAVE FEELINGS. STOP ASKING QUESTIONS. Their just kids so it works that it dosen't go anywhere and Kuki is empathetic enough I coudl see her patiently waiting for him to finally stop being a butt.

Turns out theres a snag as Wally didn't get her a present. Which is typical for him. What really clearly distresses numbah three.. is that NO ONE did. When she mentions a gift exchange EVERYONE else whitstles nonchanlantly and Nigie tries to change the subject as soon as possible. That makes what she does in the climax more understandable.. whlie Numbah 4's actions are crappy.. their typical for him. She's used to this dance in their relationship by now and for once he seems genuinely regretful till of course Numbah 5 teases him with a predictable response

But NONE of them, including Numbah 5 herself, bothering to get her a gift when she clearly wen tout of her way to get all of them one , especailly given how their one big family? Yeah that's far less forgiveable. She does, to her defense brush it off as it's better to give and receive but the gang has bigger issues. Someone has stolen the treehouse

Yeah this went from the ocasional shocking moment.. to being so common Nigel has a melt down over it and rightfully so. You'd get pissed too if your second home got kidnaped every other week. Though to answer his rhetorical question of "why", simple: it's your base of operations with all your stuff in it. Granted their flying bus thing MIGHT have some weapons stashed.. but given the KND also puts "blow up the engine buttons" on it's vehicles and how numbers 2 3 and 4 can be when it comes to actually doing their jobs at times, it's just as likely the emergency slot has a bunch of candy, broken rocks, comics, and rainbow monkeys instead of weapons. I mean it's still all useful it's just not when the best at what he does and friends come a knocking.

Naturally for wolverine's bootleg, Wintergreen is waiting propped on on one of the plane thingy's wheels with a candycane in mouth. Because if Marvel won't let the man who cannot get cancer and is in no remote danger of it smoke because "drugs are bad mkay" then Cartoon Network sure as heck won't.

I do love how they get Logan down so well though: After seein Garth ennis' attempts at parodying logan which were

That… it's nice to see one done with affection that really GETS the character: his manerisims, his attitude, his competnece, his sideburns, hell even how he looks shirtless. Which may be a weird thing to get down, but it's something that's been hilariously and weirdly consitant. That and the fact he goes shirtless a lot. The movies got some things right and other things horribly wrong, but the one thing they just downright nailed was that logan shows off those canadian abs a LOT. Him being shirtless is about as much of a costume to him as the old yellow and blues or the less used but still awesome browns and slightly lighter browns.

Point is it's very clear the writers of KND REALLY loved the x-men and this parody was done in good fun. The idea of making the X-Men into christmas elves is the weird kind of redressing this show is REALLY good at and it fits the x-men like a glove. As I like to repeat the x-men are REALLY fucking weird and i'm just skippy with it. Cyclops lived on the moon for a whlie, mutantkind as a whole lives on a sentient island that tried to murder them once, death is such a non factor that Mr. Sinsiters advice to seeing if ressurction will fix nightcrawler growing horns is just to shoot him, Storm is queen of mars with Magneto as one of her staunchest allies, and there's also Doop.

And most of that is just recent events. THey've fought demons, been to space so often mutankind is in good with a space empire with Xavier's clone daughter leading them, storm has merged with a space whale, an extradimeisdonal tv exective wants to record them for his shows, and one of them has a space dragon. The X-Men are so inherently gloriously insane that having an elf equivleant isn't the weirdest thing that's happened to them and finding out which one would be near impossible. Like I said though Wintergreen acts like Logan and it's thankfully not early days "will kill you just for looking at him sideways" logan, but later "calm and resonable but will cut a bitch if you cross him" logan. He asks for the REINDEER back civily wanting to avoid a fight. Our heroes are the ones who draw on him and while sure Elf Logan took their treehouse, they didn't bother to try and talk things out.

So we get KVX.. or KVE as the x-men here are Elpha Strike, a nice nod to alpha flight, a candian super team. Their really more like the avengers, down to having their own hulk in sasquatch, but since they started out in X-Men and are old friends of wolverine despite trying to kidnap him a few times, as you do with your buddies, their frequently part of the x-men. It helps they never really QUITE broke out like creator John Byrne was hoping.

So for this parody the team stuck with the classics, the four longest standing x-men who served as the teams core during Chris Claremont's legendary franchise defining run: You've met wintergreen who had peppermintium in his bones, but we also have Nutcracker, based on demonic looking german teleporter and badass preacher Nightcrawler (complete wtih telepoting and being mildly unsettling), Snow Angel, whose primarily based on queen of mars, former queen of wakanda and always survivor storm having her apperance and beign associated with the wather but also has shades of two other x-men; Ice man (having snow powers) and angel (having half the name and the wings), and finally conferous, based on Colosus. Sadly they didn't bring Elf Deadpool, nor an elf cyclops with visons of sugarplums. Maybe he was busy with Elf Madlyn Prior. I dunno.

Point is the fight is fun if mostly one sided: While the KND are good, they only have some chillip peper guns against people as strong as the uncanny x-men's best and just as skilled. The only reason the KND even turns the tied is their trying take the present Numbah 3 got for Numbah 4 thinking it's the reindeer and well.. Kuki may be one of the sweetest kindest people you'll ever meet in fiction but for fucks sake DO NOT. PISS HER. OFF. The fact she juggernaughts Elfa Strike all her own proves that. She even pantses Wintergreen and pushes him off the tree house stump.

Not wanting to do this because Numbah 3 would make a good new child sidekick but out of options Wintergreen calls in their strongest attack, the 12 days of christmas attack. Which is just dropping all those things on her. Including a danny partridge in a pear tree.

Wintergreen gets the present but SUPRISE it's just a special edition rainbow monkey which was where they were: in line at the offical store to get it as you can ONLY get it on christmas eve. Good thing it wasn't a tickle me wiggly. Wintergreen realizes wait something's off and BACK AT THE NORTH POLL, because Elpha Strike didn't think to check the room where the REINDEER you know was or comb it for Santa or the REINDEER itself as Kev pointed out to me because.. I guess they were hungry ? I mean I know how much wolverines love turkey

WE find out who it was: The Delightful Children From Down the Lane, a creepy hive mind of children and our heroes arch enemy. Their so called good children.. who instead bully and harass other children and try to take things from them as they feel entitled to it. Since they all loook similar enough, they easily pulled this off. It's also nice foreshadowing for a twist of just where they came from later. I dont know if this was setup or they just decided on it later and it fit into place but well played.

Naturally their NOT on the nice list being you know, evil little shits, but being ENTITLED evil shits, they've decided to use the REINDEER to get the presents they feel owed while everyone else gets coal.

The REINDEER itself is a clever concept, santaizing another X-Men concept; Cerebro. It's a cool looking metal helmet that telepaths, i.e. Charles Xavier or Jean Grey mainly, can use to find any mutant. It's also now backup for any mutants personality so they can be brought back from the dead.

This is the only part of the parody really taken from the movies as a big metal walkway leading into a giant dome room wasn't really a thing for cerebro till the movies, though its now so iconic it wasn't relaly changed till charles started wearing it full time. And it';s as dope looking as it sounds

It also has a neat grid and is how santa delivers presents: he links up with it and gives presents to any kid he finds nice and giving coal to the naughty. He also warns that like Cerebro it's a LOT. Not everyone can handle it which the Delightfuls naturally ignore.

So as the Delightfuls try to steal christmas, our heroes arrive at the poll, now all on the same page as most superhero team ups go: you fight a bit, realize you were bamboozled and then kick the ass of who made the misunderstanding happen. The Delightfuls just.. shut the door and reveal their contegency: Edna Jucation, a bitter susbtitue teacher whose mad Christmas overshadows substitute teachers day

And who unelashes the faculty four, a teachertastic verison of the fantastic four. WE have mr physically phtiastic, who instead of the skinny and stretchy genius reed richards is a buff gym teacher who can stretch, the unteillgible tutor who instead of the mepahtetic and unstoppable invisble sue storm is an headache inducing branaic, the human text , the human torch but made of paper instead of fire and fuckboy energy, and thesarsus rex… whose a dinosaur made of books instead of a grumpy brooklyn rock man because the pun was too awesome not to use. They were apparently suppsoed to be the secretary squad.. but Cartoon Network didn't think kids would get office jokes. Which sucks.. but is probably right and the faculty four fit the knds rogues better nad honestly i'm shocked they didn't fight our heroes again. They aren't any weirder or less specific than the foes our heroes usually face

Elfa Strike takes them on while Winty has our heroes sneak in. They find the delightfuls… all with grinch face and BEGGING for help. Turns out that's what abusing the REINDEER does, so our heroes yank it away from them with Santa's help and all is well right? Everyone's ready to call it a day, with Santa being greatful and it's a nice touch that Santa is one of the few non-parent adults our heroes fully trust. Even Nigel, who distrusts any adult who isn't a parent on sight, is happy to see the big guy. Even an anti-adult orginization knows Santa is an ally.

Problem is.. Kuki found the reindeer and while she intends to use it for good, to give her friends even more presents.. power corrupts and even the nicest soul has her hate and reseintment over her friends screwing her over take her over, going full Dark Phoenix and preparing to do what the delightfuls did. Santa has only one option: Send Numbah 4 In

We get a nice bit too as Santa outright tells Numbah 4 "You think if I had another option i'd be sending YOU?". And he's right as Wally giving Kuki his french fries is a warm enough gesture, she drops it instantly. Santa thanks the knd, but asks them to get stepping as he only has minutes to undo the damage. We do get a really nice moment with him and Numbah 3 though: she's genuinely sorry, on the verge of tears. .but he forgives her. He gets that the REINDEER is simply THAT powerful, and that she's truly sorry. SHe's a goo done. We also get a nice gag to cap things off as it's reveald Elfa Strike simply used the tree as a christmas tree for ice skating ala time square. Merry Christmas to all and al la good night bub.

This episode is excellent, a true christmas classic that not only combines two great tastes that taste awesome togehter, but is just a fun christmas story. It's not every show that could pull off christmas of x.. but not every show is KND. Thanks for reading.

#x-men #codename kids next door #wolverine #storm #nigel uno #cartoon network #kuki sanban #wallaby beetles #numbah 1 #numbah 2 #numbah 3 #numbah 4 #numbah 5

[boop-le-snoot]

@buckyownsmylife hey babe! Remember that one time you threw that cool challenge? Here's my entry. Prepare to get absolutely ruined because daddy!Bruce is exactly that sort of man.

main masterlist ☀️ taglist

emotional support nerd

Your best friend's dad, Dr. Bruce Banner, is hotter than you thought he would be. 6k words, NSFW. Kind of Alt!Reader - she refers to herself as 'goth' in one instance. Tony Stark makes an appearance because God forbid I write a fanfic without him in it.

This is filthy pron, ft. age difference (reader is college aged) daddy kink, throat fucking, dirty talk, praise kink, cream pie, possessiveness, belly bulge and ending with a hint at a threesome. I really crammed all I could from Eyre's wheel in here, didn't I. Oh well.

"How much longer, dad?" Lyra's annoyed voice struck a chord within me. I tried to hide my snickering - unsuccessfully might I add - causing my best friend to shoot me a hurt look, equally fed up with me as she was fed up with her forgetful adopted father. "You know what, we'll take the subway."

Lyra's father's voice, both agitated and apologetic, reached my ears in bitten-off phrases as the traffic noises around us grew in volume, NYC rush hour rapidly approaching its peak.

With a sound huff, Lyra removed the phone from her ear, staring me down with the most amount of petulance I've ever seen on her usually reserved, placid face. "It's twenty more minutes. Apparently he's driving Tony's car," she offered in the way of explanation, like it actually did anything to better the cold, wet situation we found ourselves in. "Please, and I can't stress this enough, please don't be weird."

I felt a flood of amusement at Lyra's pleading tone. "Darling, if you wanted a normal friend, you should have looked elsewhere," I gestured to my outfit. I looked like a goth boy's wet dream: chunky platformed boots, fishnets, heavy eyeliner. Of course, all in black.

"You know what I mean," she whined, waving off my pointing hand and fixing me with a hard stare. "The least my dad needs is someone that is terrified of him just because sometimes he turns into a big green monkey. It's not as exciting as internet thinks, anyway," the last part of the sentence was mumbled but I heard it nonetheless as Lyra stared out into the traffic, clever eyes looking for a particular car model.

What Lyra didn't know was that I was not at all considering to be terrified by the man who dosed himself with radiation and developed an advanced version of split personality disorder. I could be intimidated by him, sure, because he was incredibly intelligent, a world class scientist with more PhDs than I had zeroes in my bank account, but even despite his green problem, Dr. Bruce Banner was about as far away from 'scary' as a man could be.

The few scarce pictures of him on the internet showed a short, stocky man with kind eyes and salt-and-pepper curls, always dressed in un-ironed, crumpled button-ups with dorky patterns. Looking at him, I mused that there was a high chance he spoke with a stutter and that fact amused me to no end. Jekyll and Hyde, alright.

Lyra was much the same way. Shy and reclusive, with curly brown hair and doe eyes, she spent a good chunk of her first semester in college being avoided by everybody because of her last name; I, on the other hand, avoided everyone out of habit, I'd never been a social butterfly, but the way people subtly made sure to exclude Lyra from all the activities filled me with quiet, seething rage, and I stepped over my general distaste of people and removed my bag from the seat next to me so Lyra could at least study in relative peace.

Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all, I'm sure. Weird goth chick adopts a socially awkward, shunned nerd and they become best friends forever. I had to admit that under the shy exterior, Lyra was smart, witty and even funny sometimes. She was willing to entertain my crude jokes without moaning, at least, and I was perfectly okay with listening to her rant about science every now and then.

Rain banged on the slanted roof of the café we were hiding in, the autumn wind howled, making both of us shiver at the prospect of having to go outside, even if it was for a short moment to run to Lyra's dad's car. The day had started out warm and sunny, but much like a badly calculated chemical formula, it all went downhill a split second after we had set out to leave campus.

"There he is," the grouch in Lyra's expression had me once again unsuccessfully attempting to conceal my snorting.

Nonetheless, I followed her out into the rain, struggling to keep up with the brisk running in my platformed shoes, unceremoniously crawling into the car behind her without sparing a glance at the driver in my eagerness to get out of the freezing downpour.

"Hi, dad," Lyra's tired voice spoke up at the same time as I angrily shook out my hair.

"I've just about McFuckin' had it with New York," I was afraid the dye in my hair would bleed out into my clothes, or even worse, the nice, cream-colored car seats.

"Hello, ladies," the voice that greeted us was low, gravelly and apologetic to boot.

My eyes shot up, meeting an expression full of surprise and amusement. I stared at the shockingly handsome face of Dr. Bruce Banner like a deer in the headlights.

The fine mimic wrinkles had stretched into a resemblance of a smile, soft, plush lips revealing a set of straight, white teeth. The five o'clock shadow framed his jaw, giving it a sharp, defined edge, his clever brown eyes slid down my form, faltering on the pentagram on my belt and my fishnet-covered legs, settling on my chunky boots before hastily snapping back up to my face.

"Dad, this is..." Lyra's voice was full of suspicious bewilderment as she attempted to dissipate the sudden awkwardness.

"Oh, yeah, I'm Dr. Bruce Banner, but you can call me Doc or Bruce," he cleared his throat, turning himself towards the windshield and starting up the car.

"Nice to meet you," I busied myself with putting away any stray hair just to occupy myself with something during the time I needed to recuperate from being just... Looked at by Lyra's dad.

It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I was so taken aback by his handsomeness and his aura of a gentle but powerful man that the ride to Stark tower, however swift, went on in slightly awkward silence. The streets outside were, thankfully, noisy, and the lack of an attempt to have a conversation could easily be attributed to Bruce's need to focus on the road, but Lyra's increasingly concerned looks did very little to settle the sudden racing of my heart.

"C'mon, I'll give you some sweats so you can let your..." Lyra's vague gesture towards my upper body disappeared behind her side of the door. "Hey, Tony," she suddenly interrupted her sentence, very obviously addressing another person who I managed to miss as Bruce parked in the spacious garage.

"I've been told you're finally bringing your friend, Green Pea," a voice I'd heard a thousand times on the TV poked fun at Lyra.

She bent down to retrieve her bag, shooting big eyes at me and mouthing an exaggerated "Sorry!"

Tony Stark looked about a week in debt on sleep, a contrast to the way he usually appeared in public. The exaggerated eyebrow raise made me shuffle awkwardly in my spot; the Led Zep tee caught my eyes as I lingered on it, aware of my own Mötorhead top on display. He noticed it too, causing his face leave the snide territory.

"Wow, I didn't expect kids these days to have any resemblance of taste in music but you've surprised me, Corpse Bride," he gave me a quiet wolf-whistle, watching me through lidded eyes.

I felt my eyebrow crawl upwards at his attitude but Bruce spoke up before I could say anything: "Tony, no," so firmly, I had to raise both of my eyebrows. I felt a smile tug at my lips, the situation strikingly familiar in it's essence. Like father, like daughter...

"No," Lyra's identical expression, fond and annoyed, topped up with an accusing finger pointed in my direction had everyone snorting a giggle at the situation.

"Lyra," I whined, just so I could coax her grin that she was very obviously trying to conceal. "See, I told you, every crazy genius needs their emotional support nerd," I fixed her with a pointed look.

She promptly grabbed me by the arm, leading all of us to the elevator as the two men behind us shared a hearty laugh at my well-timed joke. It was either that or I would have completely embarrassed myself by gaping and drooling over both THE Tony Stark and Lyra's father.

The rush didn't stop there. I was promptly and generously offered not only a spare pair of pants but also a whole room to stay in after an invitation to dinner I simply could not refuse. Dr. Banner firmly coaxed me into staying overnight with his pleading eyes and a hearty seasoning of guilt tripping, softly crooning how he simply could not let a young woman to wander the cold, rainy night in NYC alone.

Tony added something too, in a tone way too surefire and patronising. I guessed he noticed my eyes lingering on Dr. Banner, being a genius and all.

In a short amount of time, I found myself seated at a dinner table next to a happy, giggling Lyra who'd downed a glass of wine and was well into her second. I found it adorable how much of a lightweight she was; not hesitating in the slightest to point out that fact when she made hands for a pitcher of water.

Tony was the first one to snark back something vague about his college days and all the wild parties he used to throw, booing Bruce upon discovery that he, in fact, actually studied in college in favour of partaking in various illicit activities. That had both me and Tony giggling with Lyra promptly joining in, both of us losing it over the running joke or her being either a test tube baby or the result of immaculate conception.

Bruce's face blushed scarlet. He sputtered, a few stray drops of his lemonade landing on the (ironed!) collar of his purple shirt, cough disappearing in the wake of Tony's truly amused cackling. Dr. Banner was well on his way to either choke on his Lo Mein or turn green; thinking quickly, I decided to defuse a situation by sharing a harmless, funny story that happened to me as a freshman.

"I went on a date with this guy who said that music was the most important thing in his life, and I thought, wow, that's so beautiful!" I began my story over Lyra's incessant snickering. "So we had dinner and went back to his place because I'm a whore," the whole table erupted in laughter at my deadpan remark, Tony reaching over to give me a high five.

"And as we got there, he put on one of his demos which was just a bunch of sampled and remixed Guns'n'Roses songs, and I thought wow, that's gotta be one of the worst things I've ever heard," I pointedly looked away as Lyra's cackling grew in volume, having heard the same story several times by now and the outrage I expressed at the situation first hand.

"But instead of that I said, wow, that's so cool! Then we did the thing and his whole bedroom was covered in Axl Rose posters and I'm sure at some point Mr. Rose stared right up my asshole," there were tears streaming down Lyra's face as Tony flopped his upper body onto the table and Bruce convulsed helplessly in a silent fit of giggles. "And then I thought to myself: wow, I would have to pretend to like his music if I dated this guy and I just couldn't do that..." I breathed out, succumbing to the mirth at the dinner table. "It was good but not November Rain good, y'kno?"

Bruce snorted loudly, sliding down his chair with a hand over his face. The table shook with the force of Tony's cackling; I didn't see his expression but the howling, rasping noises sent me into another fit of laughter, right on par with Lyra.

"Is this..." Tony rapidly inhaled the much-needed oxygen. "Is this why you keep wincing whenever I play the 'Roses in the lab?" Tony wheezed and Lyra nodded.

"I just... I can picture it, and I-" she made a vague, encompassing gesture and a face.

"Please, don't," I urged with a snort. "There are better ways to get disappointed."

Dinner went on by smoothly after that, everybody happily making remarks on my dating fail, the topic of Lyra's birth and Tony's college shenanigans dismissed.

I caught Dr. Banner's pointed look as we finished our dessert - he was studying me, eyes searching for something that he very obviously wished was there. From the damp roots of my hair to the soft, cotton top clinging to my chest, I wasn't left unscrutinzed and unexamined. Like one of the many specimens he studied on a daily basis, Bruce lingered on the many characteristics that made me stand out in the grey crowd.

"Would you like to see the labs?" He asked, appearing behind me without a single sound.

The freshly cleaned dishes clattered in my arms. I'd almost dropped them, startled, but Bruce's hand landed on the top of the stack right before the top plate would have slipped off and shattered into pieces on the cold tile of his kitchen.

Blood rushed to my ears. "I'd love to," my brain had briefly returned to reality, the rush of meeting both Stark and Banner succumbing to logic and reason. My and his fields of study briefly overlapped, the question he posed was more than reasonable. In fact, many people would cheat, lie and steal to be in my position.

Bruce smiled, opening a cabinet and taking half of the dishes I was holding to stack them up in their proper place. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, exposing wide, muscular forearms littered with dark, coarse hair.

I was sure my face was flaming. After waving off Lyra's attempts to put shoes on me and leaving her to watch her TV show, a wide, warm palm rested on the back of my waist, gently steering me towards the elevator.

I tried to keep my eyes off Bruce in the large mirror on the walls of the car as it swiftly moved down, scrutinizing my appearance instead. My throat bobbed, the elevator car suddenly too small and too hot.

His eyes left marks on me - invisible ones, the kind that I knew were there just from the scorching heat sizzling on my skin.

There was a certain je ne sais quoi about him. Perhaps, it was in the way he was acting - a polar opposite of what I'd had expected, Dr. Bruce Banner possessed a quiet confidence and his patience appeared to be endless, heartily doused with an appreciation for his closest ones. The way his eyes lit up in response to people smiling around the dinner table was hard to miss.

When Bruce spoke about his research - whatever wasn't classified, anyway - the spark expanded into a mischievous fire. I could hardly understand the nuances in his work, scratch that- I could not understand a single word he was saying, at all. The individual syllables registered as they should, but my traitorous brain could only focus on the way he licked his lips in between quickly inhaled breaths.

"You're not... Following, are you?" The corner of his mouth lifted upwards, clever brown eyes fixed on my face.

God, I hoped I wasn't drooling. But to deny the obvious would have been a stretch. "No, not really," I swallowed, willing my eyes to lift from the large veins on the hand that was pointing at a set of equations. Reasonably good at math any day, they looked like the scribbles of a madman to me at the time.

Dr. Banner sighed, letting silence creep among the whirring machinery in the lab for a brief moment. "I don't scare you?" He removed his glasses, cleaning them with the corner of his shirt.

The question reeked of self-doubt and, perhaps, insecurity. "No," I answered simply, not giving him the slightest chance to find doubt in my words. I was barely holding my voice from shaking, afraid he'd misunderstand my reaction to the sudden change in atmosphere.

He was closer to me than I recalled. My hip was almost brushing his, the bulk of his shoulder millimeters from touching against my bare skin, the smell of something herbal, like tea, and sharp chemicals clouding my senses. It was such a contrasting experience.

Bruce turned to me, an expression between hunger and regret forcing me to shiver and look him straight in the eye. A hand landed on my waist, holding me in place with gentle firmness. "I'm a monster, I could hurt you," he whispered, leaning into me like a touch starved kitten. The man screamed contradiction. "We shouldn't."

Vivid images of the Hulk and the rampages years prior flashed through my mind; the rubble, the collateral damage in the form of many lives. I barely remembered it, having been too little to really understand what was going on. One thing, though, I knew for sure: ever since the world became aware of Lyra's existence, there had been no incidents. Sure, the Hulk still appeared when there was a threat, but there were no documented incidents of the green creature running amok, accidentally.

"You won't hurt me," I spoke with conviction. Perhaps, I was bluffing just slightly but I wouldn't lie like that to myself. The variable, the... Twelve or so percent chance of things going... Awry, it made a small, malicious worm inside of me rejoice and fill my limbs with familiar adrenalised yearning. "You're not a monster. Far from it, actually," I used the hand that was not supporting me against the desk to gently cradle the side of his face, letting my fingertips brush over the rough five o'clock shadow on his cheek.

Bruce emitted a sound somewhere between an agitated grown and a pleading whine, sagging with the sound exhale, pressing himself flush with my chest. His face slipped from my palm, the warm tip of his nose running a steady line up my neck, sending goosebumps running wildly down my back as his hot breath tickled the arch of my throat.

"Baby," the nickname punched a stuttered gasp out of me with the intensity contained in just that one word. "I've been hearing all these amazing things about you," his voice dropped, low baritone rumbling straight into my ear. "I won't be able to hold back. I'll want you all to myself," his bicep flexed under my hand.

My knees would have bucked if I wasn't grasping onto Bruce for dear life after those words. I had some sense of personal pride in me, so while my body was an easy, traitorous thing, my mind was more than eager to participate in this game, to ping pong a little bit before... "Yeah? What things?" I breathed.

Teeth briefly closed around my tender skin, nipping for just a second. "You're kind, beautiful," his hand took a steadfast hold on the back of my neck, exposing my throat to his mouth. More skin to mark, more time to whisper. "Intelligent, bright and clever," the more he spoke, the fiercer he became. Bruce's grasp tightened until I was pliant in it, willingly following his silent commands. "A bit of a pain in the ass," a healthy dose of humour was added into the mix as my ass was roughly grabbed, our fronts pressed together at his insistence.

"That sounds about right," I didn't resist the sudden urge to snark, thoughts lazily floating in my head, like clouds on a bright sunny day, fleeting and sparse. None of them caught on. I was focused on feeling the need, on my need to feel.

A sharp smack landed on the plump of my ass, the sound resonating in the eerily quiet lab. The sounds of machinery had dulled at some point, leaving just the two of us panting our lust into each other's space. "I know you can be a good girl. Will you, princess?" His fingertips dug into my flesh, surpassing the soft sweatpants as if they weren't even there.

I could only nod, dumbly, overcome by the sudden rush of blood to my body. The life coarsing through me sang, demanding a release of the pent-up tension.

"What's that?" Bruce removed himself from my neck, catching my unfocused eyes with a crooked smirk on his lips.

"Yes," I swallowed, breathing through my mouth.

"Mmm," he hummed, running both hands over my sides, over the frayed edges of my Mötorhead top. He admired it, briefly, setting his eyes on the band logo that was right over my breasts. Having decided something to himself, Bruce promptly removed it, lifting it over my head with ease and leaving it right on the science lab table.

Taking hold of my hand, he walked over to a hidden set of sliding doors that revealed a rather large, frequently used bed, shutting them just as I walked in, wearing only my bra and borrowed sweats. My back was pressed to the door in mere seconds, hot palms chasing away the chill of the lab as Bruce slotted his lips over mine.

He tasted like something I've never had before. His lips - so plush and supple, took hold of the kiss with practiced gusto, sucking me in without a chance or the desire to escape. I drank from him, sucked on the bottom lip as his tongue explored my mouth, danced with mine.

The room was spinning, the ringing in my ears growing in volume. I was only partly aware of the sensation of sliding down the wall; our knees thudded on the carpeted floor simultaneously, heavy breathing the only noise I could distinguish.

"Breathe, baby, that's it," Bruce coaxed, gently stroking my nape. The soft cotton of his shirt crumpled under my fingers where I held onto him, desperately searching something to ground myself with.

The buckle of his belt clattered and then clinked again as he wrapped the worn leather around my wrists, bringing them together in front of my chest. I exhaled sharply at the intimate gesture, a whine bubbling up from my chest when Bruce used a single fingertip to raise my chin.

My eyes met his; a brown iris tinged with the faintest of green around the outer edge. "This okay, princess?" He sought my face for confirmation, for agreement, for anything.

I nodded, stuttering mid-gesture, remembering our previous interaction. My mouth did not want to cooperate but I forced it to, even if it came out as little more than a pitiful mewl. "Yes, daddy," the word, sweet and sticky like fruit syrup, poured from my lips.

My eyes slid shut as my conscience - or was it common sense? - took hold of the situation. I was on my knees in front of my best friends dad, a virtual stranger, and I'd just-

Bruce's soft chuckle stopped the negative spiral of my thoughts. "That's my girl," he sounded a tad more breathless now, a hairliner in his perfect façade of self-control. As if he'd sensed my indecisiveness, he tugged on the makeshift restraints, pulling me closer, closer and into his lap.

A warm, solid chest with a healthy amount of fluff greeted me. Bruce let my lax, pliant body fall into his arms, catching me effortlessly and bringing my face to his lips. "You have nothing to be ashamed of, you're my good girl," he peppered soft kisses all over my flaming cheeks, my twitching nose, my fluttering lashes.

"Please," I begged, shame giving way to the flood of arousal that seemingly hit me all at once. I was aware of the dampness collecting in my panties, the stiffness of my limbs from holding back the ravenous desire to paw at Bruce like a wild animal. "Please, daddy..."

"I know, I know, baby girl," he soothed, not stopping his tender assault on my face. "Daddy will make it all better. I know just what you need," Bruce finally pulled away. I heard the sound of him undoing his zipper and then the awkward shuffle of him shucking off his pants.

Somewhere in between of all that, he'd ended up sitting down on the bed, wearing only his boxers, his shirt hanging open. The red crawled down his chest, partially masked by the coarse salt and pepper hair; his lips were cherry red and his hair was sticking out in odd directions. Bruce looked sinful.

My eyes inadvertently landed on the impressive bulge in his boxers; in response to my widened eyes, he reached out for it, stroking the outline of his thick cock through his boxers. "Like what you see, baby?"

"Yeah," My mouth watered.

"Baby wants a fat cock?" He teased, sounding like he knew exactly what he was doing, testing my self-control like that. With a flick of his wrist, it sprang free, slapping against his tummy, coating the fine hairs with drops of clear, musky fluid.

I swallowed, feeling the taste of him from afar and yearning for more where I was parked between his spread legs.

In a gesture almost loving, he tugged on the belt still wrapped around my wrists, bringing my face to his leaking shaft and my hands to the base of it, letting me feel the weight of his balls in them. The cock throbbed, neglected, weighed down by the heaviness of his full balls.

"Go ahead, baby, suck my cock," the encouragement came with a gentle push to my head.

I obediently followed, wrapping my lips around the pink, moist crown of it, a hum beginning in the back of my throat. My God, Bruce tasted heavenly... I whirled and slipped my tongue a around his head, I dipped into the slit to drink the nectar right from the tap, idly coming to awareness of the broken, choked moans coming from the man above me.

Raising my head got me a view of his chin; head thrown back, the lax O of his mouth glistened in the meager light. My eyes slid lower, to the flex of his abs. Bruce fought hard to stay still. The desire consumed me, a sudden rush of power at having Dr. Bruce Banner's cock in my mouth and the man at my mercy; I inhaled, sliding my mouth further and further down his throbbing length.

"Fuck," I heard him mutter before his hands gripped the sides of my face. "Hungry, baby, are you?" His eyes glowed a faint green; I shuddered at the power he held within himself. Held back for me. "Tap my thigh twice," he spoke and I had no choice but to obey. "Okay. Do that if it gets too much, alright?" I nodded. He gave me a wide, beaming smile. "Good girl," he praised, experimentally bucking his hips into my mouth a few times.

In and out. I focused on my breathing, sharp, little inhales: his girth took up all the free space in my mouth, the tip of it barely fit into my throat. The burn, the stretch; I felt every tenth of an inch, every bulging attempt of my body to accommodate Bruce's huge cock. It was delicious, I couldn't help but crave the same stretch in my neglected, sopping wet pussy.

"Fuck, you're taking it so well," Bruce moaned wetly. "Your mouth... S'like heaven... Could fuck it all day, that's my good girl," the rambling increased in it's intensity as the pace of his hips hastened. Drool and tears flowed like a river; my chin was dropping with it, spit connected my face to his pelvis. "Oh," there was a brief pause to his movements; suddenly, he pulled out, fisting the base of his cock, staring me down with a ferocious gleem in his eye.

I must've looked a straight mess; my face like a crime scene, my clothes disheveled, covered in fluids and most of all - I was desperately grinding against my own feet, too focused on the glorious cock in front of me to notice the weakness of my own flesh. "Daddy?" I questioned, wincing at the grating of my own voice.

Without a word, the belt was tugged once more; in a set of movements just slightly north of acrobatic, I found myself laying on my back in the middle of the bed, my sweatpants suffering a haste demise in the corner of the room.

Bruce crawled atop me, leaving a trail of sloppy kisses on every inch of my skin he could reach, mouthing something inaudible into every pore of my body. As he drew closer, I discerned bitten-off phrases, stringing my desire into sticky, tangy mess at the apex of my thighs.

"My perfect baby girl," the words reached me; all tongue, he kissed me once more, arching into me as much as I arched into his hot grasp. A brief inspection of my face - he was satisfied with what he saw - and Bruce crawled back, settling in between my spread legs, breathing hot air on the lips of my sex still covered by a sopping wet piece of fabric.

"Oh fuck," I yelped, feeling him smooch it soundly, the hot wetness of his tongue penetrating the meagre lace barrier with ease.

He moved it aside anyway, with a single finger, giving my pussy a broad lick, moaning into my cunt like a man gone mad. It took a few more licks for him to feel sated enough to surface, all the while holding my hips down. I was so sensitive, I felt even the tiniest flicks to my clit, I was sure if I didn't cum then and there, I would explode.

"Such a pretty pussy, princess," his heavy breathing paused briefly. He nipped my thigh. "So wet, is that all for me?"

"Yes, yes, daddy," I rasped, pushing my cunt into his face, losing all shame and trepidation.

"So tasty," he continued the torture, outlining my lower lips before taking another nosedive right into it, swirling his tongue around every fold, sucking onto my clit.

Bruce ate my pussy until my thighs shook, until my core quivered and I could no longer hold back the choked, ragged screams starting somewhere in the low of my belly and coming out as unholy, all-consuming yowls filled with unadulterated lust.

"Louder for me, baby," he inhaled rapidly, and then, he sucked on my clit.

The world stopped, halted on it's axis, every muscle going rigid in my body and every nerve ending simultaneously coming alive. Faintly, I heard a chant, repeating two syllables over and over, it sounded like my voice - but I had no control over myself. All I could do was weakly grind my hips against Bruce's mouth, faltering when the crashing waves of my orgasm began to recede.

The infuriating overstimulation stopped; blinking hazily, I saw Bruce's eyes glimmer brown and green in front of my face. His nose and his chin was glistening with a thin coat of sticky fluid; disheveled and red, he looked a man on the verge of a revelation.

Something hot and blunt nosed at my cunt, bringing back the moment to me - I realized, with a great deal of impatience - how empty I felt. The decision was minute. "Daddy, fuck me, please, I want your cock," the words came easily.

"That's my girl," his eyes fluttered shut as the first inches squeezed through the snug of my cunt. I was sopping wet and as relaxed as I'd be, but even then, it was a stretch. "Good girl, good baby," the mumbled praise made me whine and my pussy clamp on his cock. "Relax, let daddy fill you up." Breathing through it, I consciously unwound myself around him, letting my palms rest freely on his shoulders. "Let daddy take care of you."

Like melted sugar, his husked words stuck to me inside and out. Short, sharp thrusts; Bruce was patiently burrowing himself inside of me, making his way to reach the deepest parts of me I didn't even know existed. His cock head pressed against something hard and spongy inside of me; stars burst behind my eyes I'd clamped shut on reflex.

I moaned weakly, tugging on his arm, pressing myself closer. It felt so, so good. Like a raw nerve had been exposed and he was stroking it, pushing that little switch with every stroke of his hips.

"I'm not gonna last," he muttered as once again, my cunt squeezed him snugly in place, just as greedy as I was to feel that tiny explosion spark up within me again.

"I want..." I panted. Bruce set in a punishing pace after that, a palm under my ass, squeezing it so hard there would definitely be bruising. I craved it, I needed to see the evidence this was not some elaborate fever dream. "I want... Daddy to fill me up," words came out garbled; it sounded like gibberish to my ears but Bruce - they spurred him on.

"Oh yeah?" That breathless, boyish cockiness was back in his voice again; despite how fucked out he sounded, I prepared myself for something truly out of this world. I just knew.

He sat back on his shins, dragging me by the hips with him, making me shiver and moan and twitch and clamp onto him again as his throbbing cock hit that special spot again. And again. And again.

"Look at me, baby," a hand on my belly and his eyes burning right through me. As they slid down, towards the apex of my thighs where he was still moving within me almost lazily, I saw it.

"Oh fuck," I couldn't utter much more than a two-syllabled profanity. There was a bulge in my belly, just above my pelvis, moving in rhythm with Bruce's hips. And then he pressed on it and I-

Something, someone, somewhere was screaming. The noise was loud and pitched, but even then, I could barely hear it though the neverending waves of bliss that enveloped my whole being. Gold and silver at the edges of my rapidly darkening vision; I was drowning in something that smelled and felt like Bruce. The safety of his arms, the warmth of his heated body, the rapid snapping of his hips-

Oh.

"I'm gonna, fuck," the last word was but a ghost of a human speech. Growling low and filthy, Bruce leaned into my ear, his breath hot and moist. "Mine," his hips stuttered, his cock nestled deep, the sensation bordering on painful, forcefully extracted pleasure. It throbbed with every spurt of his seed; each one felt like a solid punch in the gut to my abused pussy.

"Daddy," I mewled, my body jerking away from him but my mind and my soul yearning for more. His rapidly softening flesh made the idea of being separated unbearable.

"S'good, s'my good girl, m'so proud," he mumbled, looking slightly disoriented as he removed himself from me, immediately pressing me to his side and interwining any free, flailing limbs.

We laid in silence, each of us slowly coming back to Earth after the completely unreal experience we just had. I didn't know what to think, didn't know what to do as the realization set in, the post-orgasmic haze giving way to a sudden rush of clarity.

"I can hear you overthinking," Bruce's voice was fond.

Before I could muster up the courage to snark back, the divided doors opened, one very concerned Tony Stark standing there, armed with a tranquilizer gun in one hand and a pack of cookies in the other. His mouth, previously open to (probably) yell at us, remained as open when his eyes had registered the scene in front of him.

I stared at Bruce. Bruce stared at Tony.

"The noise," he offered in the way of explanation, dangling the pack of cookies, looking, for once - speechless. He recovered quickly, however, even if the remark was a thin ghost of his usual sass: "You pick the nerd over me? I'm hurt," he scoffed in mock irritation, although I was pretty sure I saw some satisfaction in there, too.

Bruce looked at me. I looked at Bruce.

A mischievous grin slowly crept up his face, an identical one beginning to appear on my own face seconds after.

"Hey, two nerds is better than one, right?" My response is what did it; or, rather, it was the evidence of my previous throat-fucking clearly audible in my voice... Tony dropped the cookies and then, the tranq gun.

Bruce Banner taglist: @pilloclock @mikariell95 @letsby @sleep-i-ness @toomanyrobins @persephonehemingway @mostly-marvel-musings @schemefrenzy @lillsxd @bluecrazedandbeautiful @slothspaghettiwrites @sapphicnoodle69 @couldntbedamned @xoxabs88xox @marvelsbanner @tripleyeeet @tatestripedsweater @stuckybarton

#bruce banner x reader #bruce banner smut #bruce banner x you #bruce banner x y/n #Bruce Banner #bun writes #I haven't written shit in a month and boom #6k words in three hours #i don't like the ending #I'm bad at them #okay #okay .

[newtonsheffield]

So, regarding Uncharted, which I love btw…I’m curious about Monday night. Kate in her Spice Girls t-shirt and Anthony’s shorts sounds so soft and sweet and domestic. How did they spend the evening after Anthony showed up? I’m sure we know how it ended 🔥

This can be for Spicy Sunday 🌶 if you feel up to it, or not, because I love hearing the mundane details too.

I mean… why not both? We can have boring domestic Anthony and Kate details and Spice no?

(Also I’m really glad you enjoyed Uncharted. I was very worried it was a little too full of nothing.)

Let’s see what happened on Monday night!

As terrible as it sounded, Kate was maybe using Monday night as a bit of a test for Anthony. No, that’s not true. More so a test for herself. To see if she was comfortable having him around while she went about her normal life. Because the weekend had been intense. They’d gone out, and she’d worn pretty dresses and she had taken her contacts out, when Anthony had fallen asleep. But tonight she couldn’t be bothered.

Yes, she’d felt a very intense attraction to him all day, her skin prickling when they ate lunch together with their knees knocking together and part of her had been a little desperate to drag him down to her car and do some very not safe for work things with him. And she really did want to spend the night with him, wanted to feel the heat of his body tight against her as his voice rumbled in her ear while she drew breathy moans from his body in the way she was learning was probably a little too intoxicating. But then she’d gotten home, and she was tired, and her eyes were stinging from her contacts (probably because she definitely hadn’t been looking after them properly the last few nights) and she sort of just… gave up. Sliding into her comfortable clothes , Anthony’s soft pyjama pants fished from the clean laundry basket after he’d given them to her on Saturday. Sighing as she put her glasses on, she’d barely gotten onto the couch when Anthony knocked at the door.

She’d walked a little nervously to the front door, Newton scampering about behind her with Morton clutched in his teeth as Anthony entered, kissing her softly, his eyes sweeping over her darkly. His voice light,

“You wear glasses.” He tilted his head curiously and anxiety bubbled in the pit of her stomach, her fingers twisting in her Spice World Tour shirt.

“Yeah Umm the contacts sting my eyes so I usually take them out after work. Sorry.” She had no idea why she was apologising, but it slipped out anyway. Anthony looked even more curious.

“I like them.” And suddenly she didn’t even know why she’d been so nervous.

Hours later they were wrapped together on the couch, Anthony laying behind her with his arms tightly around her waist his chin resting on her shoulder humming occasionally as she fed him Chunky monkey from her spoon. The Tv largely ignored, their legs tangled together.

“I really like being here with you.” Anthony said softly, his thumb skating over her stomach under her shirt, and Kate felt stupid tears prick at her eyes as she hummed in response, not trusting herself to speak. Content Silence echoing through the room as the ice cream was finished.

“So… Spice world huh? Wouldn’t have taken you for a Wannabe fan.” Anthony’s voice was rough in her ear sending a shiver down her spine as his hand started to ghost over her legs.

“Well, there’s a lot you don’t know about me. Including the fact that my favourite Spice Girls song is actually 2 Become 1.” Kate ground out, ignoring the way her heart stuttered as Anthony’s hand played with the drawstring of her shorts. He hummed happily.

“Is that so?” He waited for her to nod before continuing. “I like the idea of that. I’m afraid though the rest of your clothing leaves a little to be desired. You can’t just go around stealing men’s clothes Kate. Whatever will they think?”

Heat tugged at her stomach as he tugged the drawstring his hands inching into her shorts, his arms still tight around her, his lips ghosting over her neck now, teeth nipping at the bit of collarbone exposed there, worrying at the skin.

“If this isn’t okay you need to stop me.” His voice was thick in her ear. His hand stilled just about to dip into her underwear, his fingers rubbing soft circles against the waistband.

“Please Anthony.” A needy whine escaped her, his hands hot against her, so close to what she was suddenly desperate to have.

And he didn’t make her ask twice, he slid his hand between her legs, a soft gasp escaping both of them when he reached his goal, his other hips grinding into her from behind, his teeth still in that same spot, his tongue hot against her. A slow build between them, sizzling and simmering, Anthony’s voice hot in her ear nearly more than she could bear You feel so good Kate, this is so right, I thought about this all day, I couldn’t stop. His hand moving over her, into her relentlessly until he said firmly, Let go. And she did, a low whine escaping her, as the wave crashed over her and Anthony held her tightly against his chest.

“Well that, was very pretty.” Anthony said, his voice still far too hot. “I think I’d like to see it again. But this time, I need you to scream.”

And honestly, Kate barely had it in her to be annoyed when she saw the bruise he’d left on her collarbone the next day.

#bridgerton and sons au #kathony #anthony x kate #kate sheffield #anthony bridgerton #kate sharma #spicy sunday🌶 #uncharted: a bridgerton and sons fic #molly's asks and answers

[badartfriend]

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

Sign Up for The Great Read  Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go. Get it sent to your inbox.

Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”



Image



Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real.

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

[butterflies-dragons]

Sansa, Jon and Sweetness

I know that “sweetness” could be a bad omen for other characters in different contexts, but in these quotes of Jon and Sansa “sweetness” means innocence, family, dreams, beauty, desires and love.     

Sweet Lady

Remember when Jon Snow called his mare “Sweet Lady”?

The mare whickered softly as Jon Snow tightened the cinch. “Easy, sweet lady,” he said in a soft voice, quieting her with a touch. Wind whispered through the stable, a cold dead breath on his face, but Jon paid it no mind. He strapped his roll to the saddle, his scarred fingers stiff and clumsy. “Ghost,” he called softly, “to me.” And the wolf was there, eyes like embers.

—A Game of Thrones - Jon IX

As I said before, there are so many things to say about this quote:

Jon Snow, the guy who is supposed to like the warrior woman type, whispered to his mare “Easy, sweet lady”. He could’ve said “Easy, girl”, but he said: “Easy, sweet lady”. Oh Jon, you are such a romantic dork.  

Lady is also the name of Sansa’s direwolf.    

Lady and Ghost are mentioned together and linked in many passages of the Books. I love it.

At this point Lady is dead, so she is literally a ghost.

Later in the Books Jon also dies. So we have a direwolf with a dead master and a master with a dead direwolf.

And guess who is the female character that is called ‘sweet lady’ the most? Yes, the answer is Sansa.   

Red haired girls calling Jon Snow “Sweet” & Jon Snow calling red haired girls “Sweet” 

Ygritte:

Tormund frowned down at Jon. "Best go, if it's the Mance who's wanting you."

Ygritte helped pull him up. "He's bleeding like a butchered boar. Look what Orell did t' his sweet face."

—A Storm of Swords - Jon II

Sansa:

“There's a new High Septon, did you know? Oh, and the Night's Watch has a boy commander, some bastard son of Eddard Stark's."

"Jon Snow?" she blurted out, surprised.

"Snow? Yes, it would be Snow, I suppose."

She had not thought of Jon in ages. He was only her half brother, but still . . . with Robb and Bran and Rickon dead, Jon Snow was the only brother that remained to her. I am a bastard too now, just like him. Oh, it would be so sweet, to see him once again. But of course that could never be. Alayne Stone had no brothers, baseborn or otherwise.

—A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

Jon:

Blood meant little and less amongst the free folk, Jon knew. Ygritte had taught him that. Gerrick's daughters shared her same flame-red hair, though hers had been a tangle of curls and theirs hung long and straight. Kissed by fire. "Three princesses, each lovelier than the last," he told their father. "I will see that they are presented to the queen." Selyse Baratheon would take to these three better than she had to Val, he suspected; they were younger and considerably more cowed. Sweet enough to look at them, though their father seems a fool.

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon XII

Red Hair exists Jon Snow: Lovely! Sweet!

Sweet Dreams of Winterfell

Jon and Sansa really want to go back to Winterfell, their home:

If I could show her Winterfell . . . give her a flower from the glass gardens, feast her in the Great Hall, and show her the stone kings on their thrones. We could bathe in the hot pools, and love beneath the heart tree while the old gods watched over us.

The dream was sweet . . . but Winterfell would never be his to show. It belonged to his brother, the King in the North. He was a Snow, not a Stark. Bastard, oathbreaker, and turncloak . . .

—A Storm of Swords - Jon V

That was such a sweet dream, Sansa thought drowsily. She had been back in Winterfell, running through the godswood with her Lady. Her father had been there, and her brothers, all of them warm and safe. If only dreaming could make it so . . .

She threw back the coverlets. I must be brave. Her torments would soon be ended, one way or the other. If Lady was here, I would not be afraid. Lady was dead, though; Robb, Bran, Rickon, Arya, her father, her mother, even Septa Mordane. All of them are dead but me. She was alone in the world now.

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa IV

Sweet flowery smelling

Jon is OK with sweet flowery smells:

"Maybe he never washes, so he smells as rank as a bear."

"Then I'd push him in a stream or throw a bucket o' water on him. Anyhow, men shouldn't smell sweet like flowers."

"What's wrong with flowers?"

—A Storm of Swords - Jon V

The shield that guards the realms of men. Ghost nuzzled up against his shoulder, and Jon draped an arm around him. He could smell Horse's unwashed breeches, the sweet scent Satin combed into his beard, the rank sharp smell of fear, the giant's overpowering musk. He could hear the beating of his own heart. When he looked across the grove at the woman with her child, the two greybeards, the Hornfoot man with his maimed feet, all he saw was men.

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon VII

Sansa smells sweet like flowers:

Sansa Stark, he mused. Soft-spoken sweet-smelling Sansa, who loved silks, songs, chivalry and tall gallant knights with handsome faces. He felt as though he was back on the bridge of boats, the deck shifting beneath his feet.

—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion III

On the morning her new gown was to be ready, the serving girls filled Sansa's tub with steaming hot water and scrubbed her head to toe until she glowed pink. Cersei's own bedmaid trimmed her nails and brushed and curled her auburn hair so it fell down her back in soft ringlets. She brought a dozen of the queen's favorite scents as well. Sansa chose a sharp sweet fragrance with a hint of lemon in it under the smell of flowers. The maid dabbed some on her finger and touched Sansa behind each ear, and under her chin, and then lightly on her nipples.

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa III

Sweet as Song

Jon seems fond of sweet voices and singing:

The wildlings seemed to think Ygritte a great beauty because of her hair; red hair was rare among the free folk, and those who had it were said to be kissed by fire, which was supposed to be lucky. Lucky it might be, and red it certainly was, but Ygritte's hair was such a tangle that Jon was tempted to ask her if she only brushed it at the changing of the seasons.

At a lord's court the girl would never have been considered anything but common, he knew. She had a round peasant face, a pug nose, and slightly crooked teeth, and her eyes were too far apart. Jon had noticed all that the first time he'd seen her, when his dirk had been at her throat. Lately, though, he was noticing some other things. When she grinned, the crooked teeth didn't seem to matter. And maybe her eyes were too far apart, but they were a pretty blue-grey color, and lively as any eyes he knew. Sometimes she sang in a low husky voice that stirred him. And sometimes by the cookfire when she sat hugging her knees with the flames waking echoes in her red hair, and looked at him, just smiling . . . well, that stirred some things as well.

—A Storm of Swords - Jon II

With their black hoods and thick black cowls, the six might have been carved from shadow. Their voices rose together, small against the vastness of the night. "Night gathers, and now my watch begins," they said, as thousands had said before them. Satin's voice was sweet as song, Horse's hoarse and halting, Arron's a nervous squeak. "It shall not end until my death."

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon VII

Sansa sings sweetly:

It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother’s fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. 

—A Game of Thrones - Arya I

So the singer played for her, so soft and sad that Arya only heard snatches of the words, though the tune was half-familiar. Sansa would know it, I bet. Her sister had known all the songs, and she could even play a little, and sing so sweetly. All I could ever do was shout the words.

—A Storm of Swords - Arya IV

He thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon's breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady's coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair as tangled as a bird's nest. I made him a warm cloak from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell … I want my bride back … I want my bride back … I want my bride back …

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon XIII

Sweet Bran

Jon and Sansa remembering Bran’s sweetness: 

When the dwarf grimaced, his scar tightened and twisted. "The boy's earned himself a dagger, wouldn't you say?" Thankfully Tyrion did not wait for her reply. "Joff quarreled with your brother Robb at Winterfell. Tell me, was there ill feeling between Bran and His Grace as well?"

"Bran?" The question confused her. "Before he fell, you mean?" She had to try and think back. It was all so long ago. "Bran was a sweet boy. Everyone loved him. He and Tommen fought with wooden swords, I remember, but just for play."

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa IV

When nine-and-ninety hostages had shuffled by them to pass beneath the Wall, Tormund Giantsbane produced the last one. "My son Dryn. You'll see he's well taken care of, crow, or I'll cook your black liver up and eat it."

Jon gave the boy a close inspection. Bran's age, or the age he would have been if Theon had not killed him. Dryn had none of Bran's sweetness, though. He was a chunky boy, with short legs, thick arms, and a wide red face—a miniature version of his father, with a shock of dark brown hair. "He'll serve as my own page," Jon promised Tormund.

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon XII

This post was so sweet to write ♡  

#Sansa Stark #Jon Snow #Sansa x Jon #Jon x Sansa #jonsa

[scorchviox]

Your Touch [ShigarakixOC]: Chapter 11

Chapter Index

The skates’ wheels slipped from under the brunette, but she was quick to hold onto Shigaraki, who had decided against wearing skates. “Oh, fuck,” she cursed under her breath as she felt her heart nearly leap from her chest. “That was too close.”

          The streets on the way to the prestigious hero academy were absent of people early in the morning to Shigaraki’s surprise. Usually, there would be a morning rush where they would have to fight against the flow of people, but today it was relatively empty. “Keep reaching for me like that every time you almost fall and my arms going to be out of commission, idiot,” he spoke in turn. “We could have gone out to skate tomorrow.”

          “What would be the fun in that?” Souseiki said with a slight huff while she pushed away from him to slowly attempt skating once more. “Today is my birthday everything is way more special on your birthday, you know?”

          “No,” but Shigaraki knew all too well. His birthdays had been much more entertaining the past few years since she has been around. A stupid slinky he had on his shelf was far more important to him than it should have been. “Do you remember where you’re supposed to be?”

          Souseiki slowly turned to try and skate backward and surprisingly managed without eating shit. “Yeah, across the street. Come on. You think I’d fuck this one up for you?” Came her rhetorical question. After all the little “missions” they’ve been on the only one she had managed to lead astray was when she dropped Kurogiri’s coffee just as she entered through the front door. “Oh, this is it,” she smiled slowing down. “Go right on ahead, leader,” she giggled while teasing the man.

          Shigaraki watched as she sat on the curb and began undoing her skates. “See you back home?”

          From her spot on the floor, Souseiki hummed in confirmation. “Yeah. I’m going shopping first. Need anything?”

          “I’m out of orange soda.”

          Souseiki nodded as she stood up with her sneakers now on. “Have fun,” She smiled softly and watched him walk off across the street towards the academy doors that were crowded with the press. Soon his blue tresses blended into the multitude of people and she walked off towards the shopping center. On her way there, she pulled her phone out and dialed Kurogiri, who unsurprisingly always picked up on the first ring.

          “Yabe Souseiki, are you alright?” He immediately asked thinking the worst. “Should I go right now? What’s your location?”

          The addressed woman snickered as she entered the grocery store. “Hi, Kuro. Did you want anything specific from the store?” Souseiki asked picked up a basket. “We were out of some stuff, so I took it upon myself to do the shopping for you this time.”

          On the other side of the line, Kurogiri let out an audible sigh of relief. “Thank you, Yabe Souseiki. Would you get me chunky monkey ice cream?”

          Souseiki nodded her head as she picked up some fresh fruit, “Chunky monkey and orange soda, got it.”

          Another sigh came from him, but this one a bit more irritated, “He shou-“

          “ldn’t be drinking those,” She finished for him, “We know, Kuro, but come on he likes them. It’s not going to hurt him. Look, I’ll make sure to water it down for him, okay?” Souseiki bargained as she picked up a six-pack of the orange soda. “There are few things he enjoys in this world and this sugary drink is one of them. Let him live a little.”

          “He’s living out his dream right now.”

          Souseiki rolled her eyes as she walked around the bright grocery store. “Trying to better the world is not a dream. It is a god-given right,” she said in all seriousness. This she wasn’t joking about. If the hero fell at the hands of a villain the rest would be easy to overtake. Or so that is what Shigaraki has embedded into her head. The secret to a perfect world is one where the justice system isn’t determined by heroes. Heroes would need to be eradicated for everyone to live a peaceful life.

          “Of course, you are right,” he responded in what seemed to be a strained voice. “There’s an incoming call. He must be ready.”

          Souseiki smiled as she reached for the pint of ice cream, “Be safe, Kuro. I’ll see you two tonight,” she said in confidence. As the call ended, Souseiki stuffed the phone in her pocket and pushed the skates higher up onto her shoulder by the laces they hung from. In her mind, there was no doubt that they would come out to be victorious. Shigaraki had been working hard alongside some men to gather enough villains together for an attack no matter when it would come. This had to be it and even if it wasn’t she knew Shigaraki would not yield in his pursuit to destroy the hero society. Whatever would happen, she swore to help him and All for One in their journey in any way possible with her quirk. “This stupid quirk has got to be good for something,” she sighed as she scanned her items in the self-checkout lane before bagging them and walking out into the world once again.

          Shigaraki and Kurogiri had attempted to strategize the fight between her, Shigaraki, and All Might, but it was no use. Their tag team was flawless with others who had “lower XP” as Shigaraki put it, but they alone did not have enough experience points to take down the number one hero all on their own. Since lack of experience was their dilemma, Shigaraki figured more lives were what he needed in order to help him achieve the goal. However, more lives would mean Souseiki could not tag along. Her quirk would get in the way, especially since she had no off switch to it.

          Finally home, Souseiki unlocked the door and pushed it open with her hip. She juggled keeping everything in hand before dumping it all on the single couch. For once the place was silent, the sound of Kurogiri cleaning wasn't around nor was Shigaraki's button clicking disturbing the peace.

This silence was eerie and unsettling to her. It was new if anything. The brunette was now used to hearing some kind of soft noise, but here she was looking around the empty and silent home wishing for Kurogiri to warp into the living space. It took her a few minutes to realize the two weren't coming any time soon. By then she began putting away the food she had brought home and before treading into her own room to sit on the large bed and thumb through a comic book she had swiped from Shigaraki's shelf.

By two in the afternoon Souseiki was sound asleep in her room with the book beside her head. She slept peacefully until a loud thud sounded from the living space. Startled, the brunette sat up slowly and lowered herself off the bed with as much grace as she could muster to keep silent. The sound made her believe someone had knocked down the front door and an intruder was wandering around. Afraid of such a thing, she softly started turning the doorknob, but then she heard his voice, "Souseiki! Get out here and help!" Shigaraki's voice ricocheted off the walls as he groaned in pain.

          At the sudden command, she ripped the door open and rushed out without hesitation. "Tomura!" Souseiki gasped as she saw him on the ground with bleeding limbs. Never had she actually seen him in distress or in pain, but the view made her heart thud. "I'll- hold on!" She said in a rush as she ran to gather bandages and some alcohol. "Kurogiri! What do I do?" Souseiki asked hysterically as she dropped herself beside Shigaraki on the floor with the supplies.

          Kurogiri huffed beside him on the floor out of breath and sat up slowly to take the supplies from her, "I've got this, Yabe Souseiki. Please calm down. He will be alright."

          Petrified for his life, Souseiki scrambled to her feet and helped Kurogiri set him up on the couch. "What happened? Did someone have guns?"

          Shigaraki hissed in pain as Kurogiri began digging for the bullet in his shin, "No, Souseiki. I put these in myself," he replied with a sarcastic tone of voice. "Of course a hero had a gun." The brunette bit her lip as he gripped her hand and tightly. "It was a good call that you didn't go," he said through gritted teeth as a small piece of metal clashed onto the wooden flooring.

          Souseiki sat on the floor beside him with her hand in his. She was speechless as she watched the invincible Shigaraki vocalize his pain for once. At that moment she realized the man she looked up to was merely a human. This didn't lessen her image of him; in fact, it made a fire churn in her stomach. She would somehow find a way to become stronger so nothing comes to harm him ever again.

          As Kurogiri finished dressing his wounds, Shigaraki sat up so Souseiki could sit down. He laid back down slowly and set his head in her lap with a low groan. "Want to tell me what happened?" Souseiki asked while her fingers lightly touched the fresh scratch marks on his neck. She frowned at the sight of the scratches while taking back her words, "Never mind. Rest up.”

Next

#shigaraki tomura #shigaraki manga #shigaraki fanart #boku no hero academia shigaraki #Shigaraki #shigaraki x oc #shigaraki fanfiction #boku no hero oc #boku no hero fanfiction #boku no hero academia #my hero fanfic #my hero academy oc #league of villains #lov fanfic #bnha fanfiction #bnha fanfic #i do slow updates dont hate me this shit isn't even planned out lmao

[somefantasticplace]

MISTER AND MISTER

We asked comedians Vic and Bob the same questions in separate rooms. Then we compared their answers…

HERE for pictures.

What are the rules in your relationship?  Is there a line that you'd never cross?

Vic: We've never needed to have rules - apart from who makes the tea next.  We never speak to each other on the phone unless it's to say, 'I'm not coming in today,' or 'Will you bring some milk in?’ We have completely functional phone calls because we see each other every day.  We live about 10 miles away from each other. We're very medieval in that we do all our writing with a pen and paper.  Bob tends to hold the pen more and write things down more, but that's entirely down to my idleness.  I have to do the drawings because his drawings are indecipherable.

Bob: If we don't want to work, we don't have to and we never make an issue of it.  We never phone up and say, 'I'm really sorry, I've got to do this or that.' We just say, 'I'm not working today.  See you tomorrow.' We're both quite unassertive, so there's no obvious dominance.  It could be [why neither of them is the straight man].  We compromise - it's unspoken. We talk about most stuff, but not sexual things.  I don't know why that is.  You always imagine that everyone else does. If he's been out with a lass, I'll say 'So how did it go?'  I don't really ask anything like, 'Did she have nice tits?'

Tell us a secret about the other.

Vic: He's got an anal dysfunction.  Let's just say there's some kind of angle involved.  He backfires.

Bob: He collects a percentage of his used condoms in a jar and keeps them.  He does!  Last time I saw it was in his house.  So there you are!

What surprises can we expect in the new BBC TV series of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)?

Vic: I think the best bit is a very camp psychedelic episode, set in a big toy shop, with giant puppets and evil mannequins. it's got that late-60s Avengers feel.  I fly through the air a lot.  I was hurled down a corridor by a flaming man [no need to swear- ed].  No, he was on fire. It's always good working with Tom Baker.  When we're together we camp it right up.  He even gives me a kiss - it's quite full on and I wasn't expecting it.  He was telling me something really close up and he finished off by grabbing hold of my face and going mwwwwwww. I was pretty startled.  You don't think, 'Oh, he's a good kisser!' You think, 'What's he doing?'

Bob: There's one bit where we're in a jungle and Derek Jacobi is in a wheelchair with his face peeled off; Dervla Kirwan is on a sex machine (a punishment machine that gives women orgasms continually until they hate it); Emilia Fox is having a fight with a huge lady prison officer; and I'm being beaten up by two huge men.  It's a lovely little tableau.

Hopkirk (Vic) is Randall's (Bob's) spectral minder.  Who would you choose as your spirit guide?

Vic: Don Johnson from Miami Vice because he'd be suave.  Or Michael Knight from Knight Rider.  Or Peter Glaze [of Crackrjack].  He was quite short with little round specs and he'd look good if he appeared behind a bush in spectral form.

Bob: it would probably be quite good to have Jim [Vic's real name is Jim Moir].  He'd do anything you asked.  I'd get him to spy on people and report back.  I think he'd Iove it. I don't suppose he could carry a camcorder, but I'd like to see images from D-grade celebrities’ homes and Jim would be up for doing that.  I'd send him to spy on Anthea and Grant.  Could it be true that no one watched Anthea's show?  I take no pleasure in that.  I just couldn't believe her viewing figure was zero.  You'd think Grant would have tuned in, though.

Who has the better sense of style?

Vic: Bob has his own particular sense of style, which I admire. He’s a very clean man, but he wears dirty clothes.  I admire that because he pulls it off.  He sometimes buys unsightly shoes and I'll say, ‘I think we should burn them.' I've burned a lot of clothing and taken photographs of it.  I took a photograph of a pair of old woman's shoes on fire beneath a standing stone with a pool around the bottom.  I had eight copies printed; I'm going to frame them and offer them out at Christmas.

Bob: I have no sense of style and I get a lot of abuse for it.  But I'm beginning to think that I'm the more stylish man because I have no style.  I don't buy anything.  This is all bought for me by my girlfriend [points to his chunky sweater and scuffed jeans].  I hate male perfumes, male jewellers.  I hate walking into a room and the first thing people see is your suit.

Vic/Jim has said: 'People can't seem to understand that Vic is just a character I play.' Are they two different people?

Vic: It just goes back to the fact that not many people can pronounce Moir [rhymes with lawyer]. I changed my name because I was only going to do one night - and I thought it was right for that night.  'Vic' is when I'm on TV.

Bob: I think Vic and Jim are one and the same.

Who would you least like to be chained to a radiator with?

Vic: Terry Waite. Or Donald Duck.  I don't like the way he looks, I don't like the way he speaks.  His attitude is all wrong.  And his nephews!  If they were chained as well I'd slit my throat.  Eat them?  I'm not sure anyone's ever eaten a cartoon yet.

Bob: Bubble from Big Brother.  I'd probably irritate him - it wouldn't be a good mix.  I think Vic would pick Bigfoot out of Bigfoot And 7he Hendersons - that big hairy thing.

You wake up one day to discover you are women.  What kind of women would you be?

Vic: Probably much the same as the men that we are.  Vaguely interesting.  I don't think we'd be smart.  Eclectic.  I'd be wearing Victorian clothing, a high-necked, long, black dress, looking like a widow.  Or Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.  Dusty and dowdy.

Bob: I'd be the same as I am.  I’d be a mummy. I’d be like Nigella Lawson, but anonymous. Jim, he would be like Ulrika.

Complete the following: I’d die if I ever had to… again.

Vic: …live.

Bob: I couldn’t face doing the conveyancing on a house again. I used to do that in another life.

How do you make your kids laugh?

Vic: Stupid walks, fart jokes – they always win. I can’t fart to order, but I can belch to order. Words always make kids laugh. You’ve got to get on their level and sing things like, ‘There’s a woman on a bike, wike, thike, nike, fike, like.’ They love it.

Bob: Repeating a non-word such as ‘uballah’ over and over, very loudly – that seems to get them going. Or walking like a monkey.

What would you never, ever lend the other?

Vic: My car [a Jaguar], as he’s always crashing cars. The interior of his car [a Lexus] is like a council tip. When we were filming, we had a boot sale and put everything from his car on a trestle table. There was cat litter, one shoe, a bra, plants, food, jam – everything you could possibly imagine - stashed away.  He doesn't have his cars long.  I'd say it takes him about an hour and a half to fill one and perhaps two hours to wreck it.

Bob:  My dog and my cats.  He'd be useless.  He'd probably feed them the wrong stuff.

How do you know when he's down and how do you help him snap out of it?

Vic: I ring up Middlesbrough Football Club and tell them to pull their finger out.  He doesn't know I do this.  He gets into a terrible depression if they aren't doing very well, but that's the only time he does get depressed.  He always cheers me up with his cheeky grin.

Bob: I don't bother, he's always down, so there's no worries.

Who has the better body?

Vic: My body is turning into what it was like as a young boy - there's nothing there really.  Bob's is very manly - a big hairy chest, broad and brawny.  I'm in pretty good shape.  I do a lot of walking.  But Bob's in better shape than he's ever been.  He has this secretive world where he does a lot of digging.  He moves gravel around and stuff like that.

Bob: We fluctuate.  You'll see photo of him sixth months before and he'll be as trim as a tuppence.  But at this moment in time, I might be able to top him.  One thing Jim does is put weight on his face.  If he's had a Christmas where he's scoffed and drank for a week, it all goes on his face.

If you could send the other on a course, what would it be?

Vic: Fly-fishing.  I think he's got a secret wish to be a fisherman. We've been fishing about twice in 10 years.  I think it's something he'd be into.  I think he'd also benefit from learning how to draw. I would imagine his children can draw better than him.

Bob:   An assertiveness training weekend.  He came into work yesterday and said, 'The builders are after me for money.' I said, 'Have they done owt?' He says, 'Not that I can see.' So I said, 'It's very difficult, Jim, but when they phone up, if they haven't done the kitchen, the dining room and the bedroom, at least say, "Could you have the kitchen finished by five?" before you give them the cash.' He says  'Yeah, I'll try and get something out of them.' So he phones the builder and says, 'So you want some money? I'll put the cheque in the kitchen drawer.' He couldn't do it!

You’re in a room full of smart, beautiful women.  Who do they gravitate towards?

Vic: Neither of us, I'm convinced. They'd probably turn their backs us. Maybe they'd gather around Bob first because they'd want to mother him and I think that's the first urge of a group of beautiful women in a room.

Bob.  Jim.  He's sassy.  He's a single man and there's an air about him. You wouldn't notice me walking into a room.

Could you order for each other in restaurant?

Vic: Definitely.  He'd have what you consider old person's food  - tongue, potatoes and cabbage, and a steamed pudding with custard, with tea or a lager.  If he chose for me, he'd go for something more obscure. If there was something odd on the menu, I'd try it.

Bob: Jim always has the most bizarre thing on the menu.  He likes to try things.  He'd order me potatoes.

If you were invisible for a day, where would you hang out?

Vic: Can I breathe underwater or be ethereal?  I'd float over the capital and blow down chimneys and through windows at quite high speed.  I wouldn't be that interested in spying on anyone.  I might like to creep into a tiger's cage or maybe get inside an apple.  I wouldn't find anything interesting in being a peeping Tom.  I'd rather spy on a cat than a person.

Bob: I'm tempted to say at Grant and Anthea's again, but the truth, of course, is that I'd hang around wherever in 24 hours you'd see the most nude women.

How far would you go for friendship?  Would you: a) lend him your underpants; b) give him your kidney; c) help him on the toilet?

Vic:  a) I wouldn't want to wear his underpants.  Have you seen the state of them? b) I'd give him my kidney, depending on how many I had spare on my plate.  He'd enjoy it. c) I would help him on the toilet, yes, if I had to.

Bob:   a) Yes, I'm sure I would. b) Can you survive with only one?  I'd think about it. c) Yes, definitely.

What is the other's most irritating habit?

Vic:  He would probably say blowing his nose on his clothing.  But he quite often leaves some marmalade or something on the front seat of his car, so, when you get in, you really need to put a towel down first.

Bob: Not buying drinks.

What's the most endearing thing he's ever done?

Vic: Just being him really.  He always makes me laugh.  We're not present givers.  We ignore Christmases and birthdays.

Bob: There's lots. He bought me a very rare record, which surprised me. It was an original copy of Free Live! He always looks after me. With the odd lives we have, we do have to look out for each other. It's one of the stabilising things about being in a double act. You can't start being poncey because you've got the other person with you. You can help each other out.

What scares you?

Vic: I've got a terrible fear of heights.  Before I pass out, the sky comes in and I start ducking.

Bob: The thought of my children getting hurt.  You see something on the telly and think, 'God, if that were them, I couldn't bear it.'

Do you go on holiday together?

Vic: We do.  We've been off on our own a few times - we've been on motorcycling holidays, we've been camping.  We're probably quite insular.  We act like children.

Bob: On holiday, he's a bit too busy for me.  He can't sit down.  We're in a cafe and I just like watching people.  He'll be saying, 'Have you finished your fag?  Come on!'

If the partnership ended tomorrow, what would you both be good at?

Vic: I'd probably just paint pictures.  I think he'd like being a gardener or maybe do up houses.

Bob: I'd like to be a gardener, if I was financially able to just garden.  I can't act, so I wouldn't go down that line.  Jim does it already, but I suppose he'd like to paint.

What sort of old people will you be?

Vic: I will sit in an old people's home, staring out of the window, listening to a distant Alsatian.  I've often imagined myself sitting on a park bench with a dusty novel.  And a bottle of milk. If they stop putting milk in bottles, I'll be cantankerous and lead the march to Trafalgar Square to reinstate bottles of milk. I'd imagine Bob would be very much the same, but he'd be sitting on a dusty chair with a bottle of milk watching the TV - anything that's on.  He's a channel hopper.

Bob: Quite traditional, really: nice tweed suits, brogues, lonely. Together would be nice. We would probably be... [sighs at the inevitability] in a pub.

Former solicitor Bob Mortimer (42) was born only a few months and a few miles apart from Vic Reeves in Middlesbrough .  They didn't meet until 1986 when Vic was performing at the Goldsmith's Tavern in London.  Vic thought Bob was 'quite quiet' but it transpired he was eating a macaroon and didn't want to talk with his mouth full. Bob lives with his girlfriend Lisa Matthews and their children Harry (4) and Tom (3) in Kent .

Vic Reeves (42, James Roderick Moir to the Inland Revenue] lives in Kent with his wife Sarah (though they are separated) and their children, Alice (8), and Louis (4). It’s just down the road from Bob, at whose house they write every day. The two have had many series on TV including Shooting Stars, Families At War and Bang Bang It’s Reeves & Mortimer. Vic has also published a book of his paintings, sunboiledonions (Michael Joseph, £12.99).

Eve

Nov 2001

[adrenaline-roulette]

Is this just fantasy? Chapter 2

Pairing: Brian May x Reader

Warnings:

Summary: "Want me to bring back some ice-cream, and you can bitch about how horrible you day was?”

The idea of ice-cream had never been more appealing. “I believe Ben and Jerry’s is on sale at the moment, I could really go from some chunky monkey.”

“I never understood why you like that one so much!”

“I try to convince myself that because it’s banana flavoured then it must be healthy.”

“As a dietician in training, it is my duty to tell you, that that is not by any means true.”

“For a dietician in training, you eat an awful lot of instant mac & cheese.”

“Whoa now, there is no such thing as too much mac & cheese!”

Chapter two: Listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness

If you haven’t read chapter One yet, check it out here! 

Roger sauntered his way over to the bar, his eyes focused solely on the woman who had entered the pub only minutes earlier. The fact that she was currently face planted into the counter didn’t bother him too much, his standards were relatively low tonight, he would happily take home anyone just to prove Brian wrong! He couldn’t care less if the woman he was quickly approaching was a mental case who was actually licking the counter, rather than just resting her head. Anyone would do, so long as they said yes. As he stepped up besides the woman, he cleared his throat, a coy smirk donning his boyish face. He had expected her to swoon, or perhaps blush, that’s what usually happened when he presented himself to the opposite sex. This reaction, however, was entirely unexpected, and had him fearing he had lost his charm!

                                                          ********

You startle at the noise beside you, not having expected anyone to disturb your self-wallowing. You had found yourself spiralling into a panic attack as the realisation of what was going on around you, really began to sink in. Somehow, you really were in 1970’s London, and for the life of you, you couldn’t figure out how. The last thing you could remember, before falling asleep was talking to Sara about ice-cream flavours, after that, everything seemed to be a bit of a blur. The feeling of falling remained with you after your dream, but surely a dream couldn’t have caused this? The person clears their throat again, and his time you look up at them, your slumped shoulders lifting so you sat gracefully on the stool. Your eyes travelled up the body beside you, trailing from the feet, past the bellbottom jeans, over the masculine chest, and finally resting on the stunningly attractive face, of the one and only, blue eyed beauty, Roger Fucking Taylor.

Your face must have given away just how shocked you were, as Roger visibly stepped back, a flicker of surprise passing his baby blues. The ever so slight sliver of hope that this was all an elaborate prank, that had remained with you vanished in a matter of seconds. Your eyebrows creased together, as your mouth opened and closed in an excellent impression of a fish, as you desperately tried to form words. “You’re Roger Taylor” You breathed out, your voice raising a few octaves as you looked at him.

Roger blinked his eyes three times, before leaning his hip against the counter, grinning down at you. “Ah, you know me then do you? I’m positive that I would remember someone as lovely as you, but just in case I did somehow forget, what’s your name love?” He practically purred, trailing his index finger along your jaw. The logical part of your mind argued that you should keep quiet, there was far too much at stake, and knowing your luck, you would say something that could completely change the course of history entirely! The only problem with that however, was that you had never been a very logical person, and were more inclined to speak first, think later. This meant, the moment those thoughts entered your mind, you found yourself voicing the exact opposite.

   “What? No! You don’t know me at all. You’ve never met me, and I’ve never met you either! But I used to have your posters up in my room when I was growing up. Well not just posters of you, all of Queen! I had my first kiss to sail away sweet sister!” And there it was, the word vomit. By the time you realised what you had said, poor Roger looked utterly terrified. His eyes had grown impossibly wide, and he seemed to be shaking, and you could swear you almost heard his heart hammering away in his chest.

“I have no idea what you are talking about, but I think I’ll leave you be now. Have a lovely night Miss.” He mumbles, taking a half step backwards. The moment he moves, you leap up from your stool, clasping your hands around his biceps, unaware that the two men he had been sitting with just before were making their way towards the two of you.

                                                                                      ****

Brian reaches the two of you first, he had been watching the exchange between his band mate, and the young woman with a great deal of interest. Brian knew what to expect, after having watched Roger use his charm on many a woman before. Though something was different this time, he could tell, from Roger’s expression, that things didn’t appear to be going the way he had been expecting. The poor man looked visibly shaken, and like he was about to go running out of the pub. The moment the woman stood, and grabbed Roger, he knew he had to do something. He pushed his chair away from the table, and leapt to his feet, Tim following his lead soon after. The two men appeared beside Roger in a matter of seconds, the moment they arrived Roger seemed to relax somewhat. “Miss, is everything alright?” He asked gently, as Tim stepped away a few paces with Roger. The poor woman looked terrified, and on the verge of tears, perhaps Roger had picked the wrong woman to chase tonight?

                                                                                    ****

You feel like you’re about to collapse as you look up into the deep brown eyes of the world-famous guitarist before you, he’s so young, yet still so incredibly handsome. His words shake you from your thoughts as you stare up at him. “No of course I’m not bloody alright!” You practically shriek, how could any of this situation possibly make you alright? “You’re Brian May, And you! You’re Tim Staffell!”

Both men look rather surprised at your outburst, as Roger simply nods along. “That’s exactly what she said to me too! Scared the bloody life out of me.” He mutters, just loud enough so your small group could hear him. Your hands hover mid-air from where you had been clinging to Roger, and you find yourself unable to bring them down.

Brian is the first to come to his senses, stepping forwards and in-between you and Roger, he reaches out to, wrapping his long, slender fingers around each of your wrists, carefully lowering them down to your sides. “Ok, lets start slowly. Can you tell us what your name is?” He asks carefully, guiding you over to the table he, Roger and Tim had been seated at minutes before.

You sit gently down on one of the wooden seats, the leather cushion peeling at the edges of the old seat. The three men sit around you in the vacant seats, all looking at you intently. The last time you had had people looking at you like this, you were introducing yourself to your new class at school, the teacher had kept pressuring you to talk about yourself, wanting to know all about your hobbies and interests. You take a deep breath in, releasing it slowly out of your mouth, this was the tricky part. What damage would it do if you introduced yourself? Just by being here alone, you had surely broken just about every law of physics! What if by using your real name, that only caused more damage to the world as you knew it? Your breathing was becoming shallow once again, as you look frantically around at the three men before you, your eyes finally resting on Brian’s. You had never been embarrassed to admit this before, but now sitting here with the curly haired brunette, you found yourself blushing, the knowledge that he had starred in many of your late night ‘quiet’ moments, stirring something deep within you. “I’m, um, Eleanor- Eleanor Ribgy!” Perhaps that wasn’t the best name choice, but for the life of you, you couldn’t remember when the song had come out! Maybe it was yet to be released and you would be in the clear?

“Okay, so we all now that that’s a lie.” Tim smirks at you, and you find yourself wanting to slam your head against the table once again.

“How about we try this again, what’s your name? You know ours, it’s only fair we get to know yours.” Roger grins, as he takes a gulp of beer, before placing the glass back on the table with a loud clunk.

Right, well, that didn’t go the way you had hoped. Maybe you should just tell them your name, besides as Shakespeare once wrote, what’s in a name? “It’s Y/N Y/L/N.”

“See, that wasn’t so hard now was it?”

You almost glare at Roger, if only he knew how difficult all of this really was for you, maybe then he would wipe that cocky grin off his face. “You have no idea.” You mutter.

Brian twirls his glass between his large hands, frowning down at the amber liquid that was nearly gone. “Can you explain to us what happened just before?”

“Yeah! What did you mean, you had a poster of me in your bedroom? And who is Queen?” Roger butts in, causing Brian to scowl at him. Brian had been trying to approach this situation carefully, but clearly the blonde drummer had other ideas.

You groan deeply, this time, allowing your head to swing forwards and rest against the table once more. Face planting was becoming a habit of yours in the 1970’s, and you can’t help but think it’s likely not a good thing. “Honestly, I don’t even know what to tell you. It’s all too much, even for me to comprehend!”

“Try us, we’re smarter than we look!” Tim offers with a smile of his own.

Your shoulders slump down, before you pick yourself back up from the table, folding your hands in your lap. “Trust me, I know how smart you all are.” You almost whisper, before shaking your head gently. This was your chance, you could explain this bizarre situation to the men sat before you, perhaps one of them would believe you and help you find your way back? Brian has a doctorate in Astrophysics, surely, he would know what to do? But then again, that is Brian in forty plus years, and not the young man sitting with you now. “This is going to sound insane, I know that.” You begin, the three men leaning in closer to hear you quiet voice. “I woke up in the middle of a fucking field today, no idea where I was or how I got there. And now I find out I’m somehow in the 70’s.”

 Roger scratches his heads, mussing up his already messy locks. “I don’t see the problem? I’ve woken up in a field before, maybe you just had too much to drink last night”

A laugh bursts from your throat, as you shake your head no. “Oh Roger, you don’t understand! The biggest problem with this whole situation isn’t me waking up in a field, it’s the fact that it’s the 70’s!” At this, Roger returns to looking rather confused, just as Brian and Tim do. “When I fell asleep last night, it was 2019. Somehow, I’ve gone back in time forty odd years!” You raise your voice at the end, earning a few confused looks being thrown your way.

“Y/N, look I’m not trying to be rude here, but maybe you’re hungover? I mean, time travel? That isn’t possible!” Brian begins gently, reaching out and placing one of his hands over yours. The gesture sends a jolt of electricity through you, and in any other situation you would swoon, but not right now.

“Brian, I know how crazy this sounds! When I fell asleep last night, I was happily living with my housemate, stressing about work, and looking forward to her bringing me home ice-cream!”

He bites his lower lip for a moment, looking directly into your eyes as he thinks over your predicament. “I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s possible. I of all people would know if time travel was real, I’m studying to be-“

You cut him off before he can finish, “An astrophysicist. I know, and one day, you will be Doctor Brian May.”  

“How do you know what I’m studying?”

At this, you almost wish the ground would open you up and swallow you whole. “Because I’m from the future! I know about all of you Brian, Roger, Tim, even Freddie and Deaky!”

Tim and Roger look between each other with equal looks of curiosity. “Who are Freddie and Deaky?” Roger asks.

Ah right, shit, maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned them just yet. “You’ll know them when you meet them.”

“Wow, that was cryptic.” Tim mutters, causing Roger to chuckle quietly. You shoot them both a glare, neither of them were taking this seriously! At least Brian seemed to be attempting to understand and believe what you were telling them!

“Look, I’ll prove it to you! I know just about everything there is to know about Queen, fuck, I mean Smile. Just, I don’t know, tell me what the exact date is?”

The men look between each other, before Brian shrugs and turns back to you, reciting the date to you. You nod, smiling in thanks as you go back through your mental log of notable Smile era happenings. A spark of recognition flashes behind your eyes, and you leap up from your stool, grinning broadly. “Tim! Today is the day you quit Smile to join Humpy Bong!”

Tim freezes, his hand halfway to bringing his glass to his lips. Brian and Roger and caught between looking at you and Tim. “Tim’s quitting?” Roger mumbles. Oh, okay, so that clearly wasn’t common knowledge yet.

“I- um yeah. They’re going places guys, and we really aren’t, lets be honest.” Tim sighs, drumming his fingers against his glass.

Brian turns to stare at you, a small smile spreading over his lips, you were an absolute scientific anomaly, and he loved it! “Wait, what the fuck are we supposed to do without a singer and bassist?”

You shrug lightly, not sure how much you should give away. But fuck it, you’ve likely already ruined multiple timelines by just being here, you may as well continue. “I believe, this is where Freddie and Deaky come into the picture.”

My Masterlist

#brian may x you #brian may x reader #brian may fanfiction #time travel fic #queen band #queen fanfiction #roger taylor #tim staffell #1970s london #confusion #roger does in fact strike out #shocking i know #reader continues to spoil things about the future #humpy bong #roger is actually terrified #brian saves the day #if you ever somehow find yourself in the past do NOT tell a celebrity that you have their pictures on your wall.... its creepy

[loulougoingsolo]

Sweet celebration!

1700 episodes, y’all! I think it’s safe to say that GMM wouldn’t be what it is today without all the Mythical Beasts, so this celebration is just as much for us as it is for the show. So, let’s eat icecream!

Had I known that the 1700th episode of GMM was going to be a Ben and Jerry taste test, I’d gone through the trouble of getting myself a pint. I seem to have a thing for men that come in pairs, because 9 times out of 10, the icecream that I buy myself is from B&J, and my go-to entertainment is GMM, hosted by Rhett and Link. These two duos have one thing in common: they never fail to make me happy.

It would be pointless for me to do a deep analysis of every flavour of B&J the guys tasted today, because the best way to analyze a B&J icecream is to eat it, not write about it. We only have a fraction of the 52 flavours available in Finland, but out of the ones in today’s taste test, my favourites are Cookie dough, Half Baked, and Cherry Garcia - in that order - and Cherry Garcia is only available on the menu of a particular restaurant these days, so it’s more like a fond memory to me.

I really loved the non-dairy Chunky Monkey, but turns out it has been discontinued this year (no wonder I haven’t seen it in a while). I should probably do a little taste test of my own, to find a new favourite. Only, I’d never be able to just have a spoonful - the only way I can stop myself from eating the whole pint at once is to not buy it in the first place.

I wasn’t able to keep score about the personal favourites - with the speed the tasting went on, the only specific moment that stuck to mind was Link giving Glampfire trail mix a 69, with a wink.

I do think it was pretty amazing that after tasting all these icecreams, all of the top 4 flavours had peanut butter in them. In their defence, they really like peanut butter. And Jimmy Fallon.

The messages from Mythical Beasts in More were heartwarming. It’s amazing how so many of us fans have similar experiences about how GMM has affected our lives, regardless of our backgrounds.

To keep things short and simple, here’s the email I sent to Mythical when they asked us to share our thoughts in celebration of this episode:

When I first stumbled on my very first episode of GMM, I was mentally in a dark place. Watching that first episode was the first time I'd laughed in months. With every episode, laughter was a little easier to produce. I've since found my passion to make art, and today I'd say I'm happy to be where I'm at. GMM has introduced me to other mythical beasts, and I genuinely love my fellow beasties. And in all the years I've known you, GMM has never left me unhappy - instead I laugh louder and more than ever. And smile. Smile is important. Congrats on 1700 episodes!

Leena, mythical beast from Finland

#gmm 1700 #gmm #gmmore #rhett and link #all the ben & jerry icecreams #ultimate taste test #notes from mythical beasts #celebration

[izzy-b-hands]

Dancer Chapter One

This is set in a Post-Golden Circle AU wherein nobody in Kingsman died (aka we still have Merlin, Roxy and JB, but we also got to meet the Statesman folks through...we’ll save that for when I eventually do my rewrite of Golden Circle lol.) 

For now, the point is everyone is alive, and Eggsy has a very important mission he must undertake.

In booty shorts.

For the greater good (and because why couldn’t Rocketman and Kingsman share wardrobes you know. Why not. There is not reason why not is the answer.)

Warning, we get NSFW in this. A lot. Just. Be ready for that. Violence because spies, sex because of lots of things (emotions and other things, you’ll see when you read.) If that ain’t your cup of tea, maybe skip this one. 

And yes, I did title it after the Queen song. 

Shout out and my thanks to @bearkare for helping me figure out how to chop this up into chapters properly; I owe you one big time!!!

My love to all who read/like/reblog!

“These are...necessary?” Eggsy asked, and snapped the waistband of the golden shiny booty shorts. 

“Absolutely,” Harry replied, and handed over another stack of similarly shiny clothing. “These should get you through the rest of the mission without needing any laundry done.” 

“Are they all...” 

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Harry smiled. “Besides, these missions can be...fun. I quite enjoyed one I did, in the seventies, in a club where you could-” 

“Oh, you could tell me about that later,” Eggsy interrupted, shoving the stack of multicolored booty shorts into his bag. “A reward for finishing the mission.” 

“It was a swingers club, is what it was.” 

“Aaah, you said it anyway,” Eggsy sighed. “And the tops are all-” 

“Mesh,” Harry finished. “But there are also sweatshirts, in case you get cold.” 

“Booty shorts and mesh shirts in December, how could I possibly get cold,” Eggsy murmured. “Sweatpants?” 

“One pair that I could find, so be careful,” Harry answered, and handed over a pair of Juicy Couture sweats that read ‘Bitch’ in sparkling fake jewels on the back. 

“...you found these?” 

“I did.” 

“So who previously used these here at Kingsman? Just...wondering. Or was that you, at the club? I presume you still go, since you’re keen to talk about it-” 

Harry cut him off with the toss of a pair of heels. 

“Male strippers don’t have to wear these, I thought?” 

“Some do, some don’t,” Harry shrugged. “Most anyone can wear most anything. Give them a try. We’ve got platforms as well, if you’d prefer.” 

“I would, I think. Might break an ankle either way,” Eggsy sighed, and handed back the heels in exchange for a pair of golden, shimmering, chunky platforms. “Shoes for after work?” 

An extra pair of Adidas were the last thing he tossed into his bag for the mission, before taking a final look at himself in the mirror. 

“I don’t know if I can do this.” 

“Why not? You look fantastic, and the club we need you to infiltrate doesn’t even require you to strip every night. Hell, intel has revealed that some of the men that work there don’t even strip, they just work the floor and go about sitting in laps and whatnot. You could stick to that, whatever, so long as you find it.”

Harry’s confident words echoed as he stepped out and headed down the street to the waiting Kingsman cab. ‘It’ was a chemical formula, that the biochemical weapons dealing club owner was threatening to use to create what he called ‘the ultimate weapon.’ Whether that was really true they’d find out after, when they could see the formula and what it actually contained. 

But that all came down to him.

The club was a four hour flight away, in Ibiza. Even on the Kingsman private plane, he was restless, plucking at the elastic edges of the shorts, pacing in the platforms to try and practice balancing in them. 

“Where’s all this coming from?” Merlin asked from the pilot’s seat. “All I can hear is those damned shoes; on a regular plane, you know I’d have to make you sit down, right?” 

“It’s nothing,” Eggsy muttered, even though it was indeed something. Tilde was less than pleased he’d been called in for a mission, and unhappier still that involved him working in a strip club. Never mind that they’d spent weeks arguing over how he could continue to complete his princely duties while staying out of the limelight and skipping public events. She wanted him to be able to show his face and be at her side, but couldn’t understand what it would mean. 

Giving up Kingsman. Giving up the thing that had helped him become the man she loved. 

Or that she might still love. Maybe. He wasn’t so sure anymore. 

But he’d asked Roxy to stay with Tilde, so he could provide them both with mission updates (edited as needed to protect Tilde from the club owner and anyone he might send out should their communiques somehow be discovered) and he hoped she would see that as a sign of his love and care. 

“I don’t believe that,” Merlin sighed. “But we’re nearly there. Have you got everything?” 

‘Everything’ consisted of not just his bag of clothing, but one bag of regular make-up, eco-friendly glitter, pasties that he did not understand the point of his having, and another bag full of...’make-up.’ 

Eyeliner that could be used to essentially draw a fuse on a surface and lit on fire, perfume that was in a super-pressurized nozzle and contained a flesh eating toxin that acted as soon as it hit skin, eye shadows that if brushed on a finger and then dipped in a drink could knock out a bull elephant in a minute (what it would do to a human...well. Better not to think about that, and to use it only if absolutely necessary.) 

That, plus the regular Kingsman kit, of course, carefully hidden in among all three bags, very carefully in the case of the pistols and ammunition. 

All of it banged against his legs as he did his best to look...however he figured he was meant to look. Confident, and not like he was worried about whether or not this was a mission he could pull off, and not like he was worried he might come home to Tilde too upset to be consoled or worse. 

“You!” the man that called out to him from the club’s doorway was a fierce-looking person, literally. A tiger with open mouth was tattooed on the front his neck, down onto his chest, with blood dripping from the fangs. “You’re fucking late! You know, in my day, when they sent a new boy, they sent him on time! No fucking respect for the show anymore, none at all.” 

“I’m sorry, my flight ran late,” Eggsy tried. “But if you let me set my things down, I can get started right away, get out on the floor, serve some drinks, you know.” 

The man scoffed, and pulled him into the doorway, nearly knocking him off his platforms. “Serve some drinks, pah. You’re tonight’s main entertainment. How else is the boss supposed to know if you’re worth the investment money? After all, your agency doesn’t get paid until we see how you work.” 

He led Eggsy by the arm down a dark hall, and shoved open a door which led to a small green room. “And you should know...not many of you work out.” 

“Then I’d be headed home, I suppose,” Eggsy replied as he stepped into the room, taking in the cracking paint on the walls, the cushions with stuffing coming out of them on the couch, and the filthy mirror on the make-up table. 

The man laughed. “Home? Is that what they told you? I thought they weren’t going to lie anymore...ah well. Not my monkey, not my circus, as they say. Sure. You would be sent home, let’s say that. Just hurry the fuck up, get into something good, and when I knock, you take a left, then another left, and come out on stage. We’ll be waiting.” 

Eggsy dropped his bags carefully by the couch, and as soon as the door was closed rifled through the clothing one to find the earpiece hidden in it. 

“Merlin!” 

“Eggsy! Safe and sound then, good to know. Now, I’ll be laying low around town, got myself a little set-up so I can assist you if needed and-” 

“You can assist me by telling me why the fuck none of you warned me they’d want me to strip the first night. I literally just got here, and they want me on stage, now!” Eggsy spat. 

“Okay, alright. Keep calm,” Merlin soothed. “This isn’t like you anyway; are you sure you’re alright?” 

Eggsy sighed, and contemplated spilling his heart to Merlin now. But he couldn’t, not really. For his own sake, and for the sake of the mission. 

“Just...I’m sorry. They made it fairly clear they kill any performer who doesn’t make the cut, so I’m a bit tense, is all.” 

“...sure,” Merlin replied, and Eggsy could hear the disbelief in his voice. “We can talk later, perhaps? Just in case there would be anything else you aren’t telling me. Not that there is! But...if there were.” 

“I’d like that,” Eggsy said softly. “So, any suggestions on...” 

“The stripping? Oh Jesus, no. Could you imagine, me? Be like watching an Ent strip,” Merlin chuckled. “You’ve got this, you’ve done your research, I know you asked us not to watch you practice, but I do know you spent a good few hours in the studio space we rented for you. Just do what you’ve researched, put your heart into it, and you’ll be fine for the night, at least. From there...we’ll figure it out, alright?” 

“Okay,” Eggsy muttered, and hid the earpiece back in its spot. From the bag he pulled a purple glittery mesh tank top, and a black thong that, as far as he could tell, was held together purely with wishes and will for as little material it was made of. Over that went a pair of black velvet booty shorts, and the top-

“Oh good, I caught you before you were all done,” a younger blonde man, his make-up bright gold and glittery with eyeliner winged sharp, in a black feathered mesh robe strode in. “Your agency said they weren’t sending your whole wardrobe, so here-” 

He yanked open an apparently half-broken closet door at the side of the room that Eggsy hadn’t even noticed, to reveal a sea of bright colors and patterns on all variety of clothes. “What you have on looks fine, but he’ll want you to take off more layers than that. I’d say, this, this, and ooh! I bet you look handsome in a suit, so this as well.” 

The man tossed a black T-shirt, a pair of loose tear-away joggers, and a suit jacket and pants towards Eggsy. 

Eggsy stared. “Thanks. Do you-” 

“Oh!” the young man laughed. “Not anymore. No, I oversee. Like a manager, but better, because I don’t have to fuck the boss anymore to keep my pole and my space in the club. Well, at least I said I was done with doing that now.” 

Eggsy realized he must have made a face, because the man laughed again. 

“Oh darling, bless you. How else do you think you keep your spot? Any other club would make you pay to rent the pole, the stage, right? Well, here at El Tigre, we don’t make you do that. You get paid to be here, to do your work. But, in order to stay...” 

The man shrugged. “Life is dirty, and difficult. It could be just as bad anywhere else, so make a garden out of the mulch you’ve got, I say. I’m Evan, by the way.” 

“You aren’t from here, I take it?” 

Evan smiled. “No. I don’t think anyone who dances here is actually from Ibiza. No, the ladies and gentlemen who come in like their...imports, if you will. Even if that means us white-bread boys raised up on fish and chips, you know? And the boss has his tastes as well, and that’s the final say on it, really.” 

Eggsy nodded. “Thank you. For the clothes, and the information. I didn’t realize they’d want me to dance right away, I mean I just got off the plane and made my way over here, and-” 

Evan interrupted him with a hug. “It’s intimidating, I know. And ignore Tony, he’s an ass, but he only hurts people if ordered to. He’s loyal like that.” 

“That man with the tiger on his neck?” Eggsy tried and failed to bite back a giggle. “His name is...Tony.” 

Evan giggled right back. “He hates it, but yeah. We all call him Tony the tiger behind his back. Long as you don’t let him hear you say it, you’re safe. Now, you finish up. Oh, and match your shadow color to the color of your thong. Boss really goes for that.” 

Evan was gone with a clack of his heels and a swish of his robe, and Eggsy wished he’d have stayed. Not even to gain more intel (though it was all good and needed), but just to not be alone in the moment. 

But he managed it, and after choosing a new pair of platforms (shiny black vinyl with purple laces) he made it to the stage. 

The club was empty, except for Evan, sitting on one side of the stage. Tony was on the other. 

And at the end of the stage, dead center, was the man he needed to get close to, close enough to find and steal the chemical formula that might destroy thousands, millions, if sold to the wrong hands.  The club owner, the “boss” as everyone apparently called him, Boniface Gagneux. 

He wasn’t the stereotypical ‘club owner’ at least not in the way movies would show, to Eggsy’s memory. He was sharp-looking both in handsomeness and in the way a canine poked out just a bit from his top lip as he smiled at Eggsy, as though he’d bite if he got too close. His dark hair had just a touch of grey in it at the sides, and the dark suit he wore was beautifully tailored, sprinkled with sewn in tiny rhinestones on the shoulders, so he actually sparkled under the club lighting. 

“Mr. Wyn Morris, we meet at last. I haven’t heard much about you, but-” Gagneux’s eyes traced him from top to bottom. “You look even better than your picture. Hopefully you dance as pretty as you look.” 

Eggsy bit back a comment. That wasn’t what his character, Wyn, would say, not at all. Wyn was happy to be here, and happy to please, even if Gagneux’s glances made him feel sick to his stomach. 

He simply nodded, and the music started. 

The song he didn’t know, but it was something that seemed it would have fit only in setting like this, something about ‘being wanted at seventeen.’ The beat wasn’t too fast, nor too slow, but it took him a minute to find it nonetheless, to roll his hips the way he’d seen in every video lesson he could find online. 

Even with practice, he still felt horribly out of it, and was sure he had to look ridiculous, as he tried to vamp it up, stripping off the suit jacket and tossing it to Evan, who blessedly gave him a smile. 

Gagneux’s face was an imperceptible mask now, watching him with piercing blue eyes. Was he impressed, did he hate it, was he busy worrying if he’d accidentally left the stove on? There was no way to tell. 

The suit pants were rip off just like the leggings beneath them, and those he tossed to Tony, who glared at him so sharply he almost looked for a stab wound. 

Instead, he kept on, and bemoaned that they’d chosen such a long song. Actually spacing out when to rip everything else off was difficult with music he hadn’t used before (and Tilde, upset as she was, had refused to be a practice audience to help him get it right, though he’d begged her to do it, and had thought he might find it all funny.) 

It felt too soon to shed the T-shirt as he strode on-beat further down the stage, but he did it anyway before dropping to his knees and rocking backwards on his haunches, hips gyrating the entire time. It fucking hurt, and he realized he should have used his time on the plane to stretch, not to worry. 

He leaned forward, then crawled a bit further down, locking eyes with Gagneux. Still no change in expression though, not even when he ripped off the joggers and tossed them to a happily laughing Evan, who caught them and hugged them close. Evan was the hype man he desperately needed, and he made a mental note to thank him later for the help as he dropped again to his knees at the end of the stage. 

Gagneux reached a hand forward, and plucked at the string of the thong, then raised an eyebrow at him. 

There had been no mention of that, full frontal. But everything about the damn mission had been a surprise so far, why should this be any different? 

He tossed his mesh tank top to Tony, then with a bit of effort, snapped the string of the thong, and handed it to Gagneux, who had leaned forward so close he could have pulled Eggsy off the stage. 

He half thought that might be what would happen, but instead Gagneux just held the destroyed thong tight, and raised a hand to stop the music. 

“Not bad. Go back, down the hall, and take a right.” 

Eggsy nodded, and slowly stood. “I’ll be a just a moment, to grab some clothes.” 

“No.” Gagneux said softly. “Come as you are.” 

The DJ started up another song once he was off stage, and he could hear Evan chattering to Tony. He wished he could have another moment with him, to ask what to expect now. He had an idea, but hearing it from someone who’d actually been in the moment would have been better. 

Instead, he did as he was told: down the hall, and to the right, into an office. It was elegant, all in black, a black marble desk and black velvet couch. The chair he when to sit on had a towel emblazoned with his fake name, also black, sitting on it. A blessing, he certainly wasn’t about to sit his bare ass on a chair that likely was meant for use by whoever came into Gagneux’s office day-to-day. 

The song that was playing outside filtered in just before Gagneux walked in, then shut the door. The aggressive beat was just audible through it, but Eggsy had a sinking feeling not much else would be audible to anyone listening in on the office from the outside. 

“Look at you,” Gagneux smirked, and ran a hand along Eggsy’s jawline. “Those thighs alone will earn you fans, but with the face? Forget it. You’ll have men and women coming in here begging for you.” 

He sat behind the desk, and chuckled. “That means you’re in, if you weren’t sure.” 

Eggsy laughed lightly. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. We set up a schedule now then, or?” 

Gagneux smiled. “We’ll get to that. First, I need to know you won’t be swayed by any of those offers.” 

“From patrons? No, of course not.” 

“Good. Because, as Evan may have already mentioned, when you’re working for me, you’re mine. Is that understood? Dancing, and the club, and me-those are your three priorities,” Gagneux said, holding up a finger with each word. 

“And myself?” Eggsy asked before he could stop himself. 

But Gagneux just shook his head. “I look after you. Mutual caring: you look after the club and your work and our patrons, and I look after you.” 

Eggsy could swear Gagneux had the DJ doing this on purpose, changing up the music to manipulate the moment, as a slower, but still bopping and more romantic song came on. 

“Come here,” Gagneux stood and walked to the front of the desk, in front of Eggsy. “Stand up.” 

He obeyed, and waited to shiver as Gagneux would presumably do something horrible, or god only knew what else and-

The kiss was soft. And sweet, and not at all what he was expecting. He didn’t mean to kiss back either, but it took him by such surprise, and it was just something else. 

Gagneux pressed his forehead to Eggsy’s, a hand gently holding his chin. “I’m excited to work with you. Tomorrow, starting 22:00, we’ll have you just work the floor, to get used to the place when it’s full. I close completely the days I’m getting new talent in, so what you saw out there is far from the norm. Just lap dances and drinks on the floor. We’ll let you get your sea legs before putting you back onstage, though I don’t think that will take you long. Evan will walk you to your apartment; nobody leaves the club alone is one of my rules.” 

He let go of Eggsy’s chin and moved away from him. “Have a good night, Wyn.” 

Eggsy swallowed hard, and nodded. “You as well, Mr. Gagneux.” 

“Boniface. No need for such formalities here,” Gagneux...or rather, Boniface, said, leaning back against the desk. 

Eggsy nodded again, and picked up the towel before trotting back to the green room, his head spinning, and his heart beating entirely too fast for comfort. 

#text post #LeeH writes #Kingsman fic

[as-was-written]

All the ice cream flavors

@theresastargirl​

Under the cut because there’s a lot of them!

Almond Chocolate Coconut: a touch headcanon.This Doctor isn’t especially physically affectionate, but it’s because her touch telepathy is extremely strong in this body and she doesn’t know her limitations yet. But if you stroke her hair she will love you forever.

Bacon Ice Cream: a "what were you even thinking" headcanon.She eats bathbombs. She thinks they taste flowery and nice. (i am surprisingly passionate about this headcanon i’ll be honest)

Black Raspberry Cheesecake: a sexuality and/or romanticism headcanon (romantic orientation, sexual orientation, etc).This Doctor is asexual and panromantic. With a strong preference for women.

Cactus Fruit Sorbet: a "this shouldn't work but it does" headcanon.She reorganised the library according to the colour of the books. To be fair it looks really pretty.

Cherry Garcia: a role model/inspiration headcanon.Her fam. Her friends have always given the Doctor inspiration and Yaz, Ryan and Graham are no different from that.

Chubby Hubby: a body image/self esteem headcanon.It took a long time for the Doctor to get used to her new body’s appearance, longer than she’d want to admit. All the curves and body parts that were new threw her and even in the TARDIS there was a lot of experimentation with clothing to see what was most comfortable

Chunky Monkey: a names, addresses, nicknames, etc. headcanon.The reason she is so chill about Graham calling her Doc when her first body wasn’t is partly because it reminds her of those first human friends of hers. Also character development in general.

Cookies and Cream: a family headcanon.One of the Doctor’s greatest regret in life is leaving behind Susan the way she did. She still has the shoe with a hole in it belonging to her granddaughter and she misses her every day.

Cotton Candy Explosion: a childhood/child(ren) headcanon.For a while as a very young Time Tot, Brax was her hero. Until Koschei came along and she found a new person to follow after.

Death By Chocolate: an indulgence/guilty pleasure headcanon.The Doctor loves chocolate of all kind, but especially sweet ones. At night however she enjoys settling down with a bar of dark chocolate.

Devil's Food Chocolate: a vice headcanon.This is based on the audio drama The Master so spoilers for that, but the Doctor managed to remember killing that boy when she was a child. She still has nightmares about it and it’s the one thing she won’t ever talk about.

Dulce de Leche: a happy/sweet romantic or queerplatonic headcanon.The Doctor’s favourite way to relax with a partner is to curl up on their lap and have her hair stroked. It makes her feel safe and secure and loved.

Elderberry: a hurt/comfort headcanon.If she’s in a relationship with someone she enjoys being cared for when injured. Not that she will ever, ever admit it in a million years. But it’s nice to be fussed over. 

Entangled Mints: a friendship headcanon.For the Doctor her friends are her priority. She’s happy to just hang out with them and wants to show off the universe. She just wants them happy.

Espresso 'n Cream: a coffee/tea/coffee-shop (AU)/caffeine headcanon.The Doctor adores coffee. She will be that one person at Starbucks who gives the poor barista a really complicated order though.

Fudge Behaving Badly: a misbehaving/getting into trouble headcanon.Even now the Doctor is constantly getting in trouble. In the Academy her teachers despised her because she and the Deca were always causing mischief and it’s something she has never been able to grow out of. She takes pride in the fact she has the record for most detentions in Gallifrey’s history.

Ginger Crème Brûlée: a gender headcanon (gender identity, gender presentation, butch/femme, gender feels, etc).Although the Doctor now identifies as a woman and much more feminine than before in human terms she would still probably refer to herself as non binary. She experimented for a while and definitely prefers female pronouns though.

Half Baked: a bad idea/poor planning headcanon.Although the Doctor likes to act like she’s organised and knows what she’s doing, usually she doesn’t. She’s been winging it for the last three thousand years and most of the time it’s worked.

Heartbreak Healer: a sad/angsty romantic or queerplatonic headcanon.The Doctor still has room in her hearts for every person she’s loved. Including those all the way back in her first body like her wife and Cameca.

Jasmine Peach Tea: a self-care/self-love headcanon.When the Doctor just needs a quiet time to herself, which happens more often than you’d imagine, she enjoys to get herself a herbal drink and read a book in the library. Either that or sit in the entrance of the TARDIS, feet dangling, and watch the universe.

Kahlua Almond Fudge: a language/words headcanon.The Doctor feels most comfortable speaking Gallifreyan. If she is on Earth she tries the speak English out of courtesy and because the translations are easier if she’s in a different country, but otherwise she speaks her first language.

Kiwi Midori: a creative arts headcanon.Disappointed she can’t play guitar anymore, the Doctor spent some time figuring out what this body enjoyed doing artistically. She soon found drawing. They’re usually sketches and she’s best at people, specifically faces.

Lemon Angel Food: a virtue headcanon.The Doctor tries very hard to keep to her promise of being kind. She is sick of being the Time Lord Victorious. She wants to simplify things and start again as just a friendly traveller and helper.

Lemon-Lime Sorbet: a sexual/NC-17 headcanon (alt: a secret(s) h/c).My Doctor is asexual, but whilst I was figuring out her sexuality I decided she would be a sub and have a major praise kink

Magic Mint Cookie: a magic/supernatural headcanon (alt: a taste h/c).I don’t know what to do for magic?? So I’ll do taste instead. 100% inspired by real events from Jodie, she can’t handle spices as much as she wants to. That won’t stop her eating very spic food though.

Masque of the Raspberry Sorbet: a fear/horror headcanon (alt: a costume(s)/facade(s) headcanon).Since being ducked as a witch, she has a fear of being submerged under water and drowning. It’s something she’s trying to overcome in her swimming pool because she doesn’t want anyone else to find out.

Neapolitan: an intimacy/vulnerability (or lack thereof) headcanon.The Doctor only really lets herself be intimate with people she has a long history with. She is a lot more eager to hug family members and old friends.

Orange Pineapple Whip: a kinky headcanon (alt: an eccentricity h/c).The Doctor is almost the definition of eccentric. Many people would call her whole outfit alone eccentric. She doesn’t notice though, and she doesn’t care. She is happy with who she is and that’s what matters to her.

Oreo Cheesecake: a physical health/disability headcanon.She doesn’t have any physical disabilities. The closest I can think is that her touch telepathy is stronger than other incarnations because they are the main sense for Time Lords.

Peanut Butter Plum Cherry: a soulmate/soulmate AU headcanon (alt: an unconditional love headcanon)She tries very hard not to fall in love with humans. Jamie was the first long term human relationship she had and losing him crushed her. Since then she’s tried and failed to stop falling in love with humans.

Phish Food: a music headcanon.I was discussing this a few weeks ago so this is perfect. The thirteenth Doctor is really into cheesy pop like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. She also likes K-pop and J-pop. She likes the beat and rhythm of the music. She also likes how happy it all sounds.

Purple Daze: a stoner/drugs headcanon.In the Academy she would have ginger with Koschei (for anyone who doesn’t know, ginger canonically gets Time Lords high). The less said about those times at the Academy the better.

Rainbow Cream: a nature headcanon.If given the choice, the Doctor would enjoy spending the day relaxing next to a shallow river. That’s the most relaxing natural environment she can think of. Also a secluded beach.

Road Trip: a travel or escapism headcanon.Travelling is the Doctor’s life, it’s the most important thing to her. She loves the freedom it brings, the ability to go where and when she wants. She can’t imagine a different life style for her.

Rocky Road: a difficulty or struggle headcanon.The main thing the Doctor struggles with is the new sexism she has to face. Even the more minor things like how patronising men are towards her, literally and metaphorically looking down on her. She despises it and it makes her so angry.

SNAFU (Strawberries Naturally All Fudged Up): a mistake(s) headcanon.The Doctor really doesn’t like making mistakes. More than anything else she finds it embarrassing. And that’s really annoying.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crunch: a mental health/neurodivergent headcanon.The Doctor has PTSD definitely. Not just from the Time War but the many horrific things she has seen through her long life. I also see her having a Time Lord version of ADHD, but I need to do more research on that before I nail anything down.

Tennessee Mud: an alcohol, drunkenness, intoxication headcanon.It takes a lot to get the Doctor drunk, but when she does she’s giggly and affectionate. She will probably end up on your lap laughing at nothing.

Tuxedo Strawberry: a well-dressed headcanon (any headcanon about clothes).The Doctor tried to wear a dress the first time she had to wear formal clothing, but she just couldn’t with how impractical it was. Instead she prefers dressing up in a smart tux.

Vanilla Fudge Ripple: a strength headcanon.She has incredible upper body strength. She doesn’t get the chance to demonstrate it much, but it’s something she’s always had. She is also very emotionally and telepathically strong.

White Raspberry Truffle: a weakness headcanon.Daleks are her main weakness. They break down any morals she has set out and will do whatever it takes to get rid of them all. But losing her friends? That destroys her.

Wildberry Chocolate Chunk: a social life headcanon.She spends all her time with her fam. She tries not to spend too much time with other people because she’s scared of losing more people.

[simplyshelbs16xoxo]

I was tagged by @jumbledfangirl thanks, darlin!

1. Who was the last person you held hands with? idk I haven’t dated anyone in over 6 years lol

2. Are you outgoing or shy? Shy at first, but outgoing most of the time

3. Who are you looking forward to seeing? I may be seeing Heart in concert this summer!

4. Are you easy to get along with? I like to think so.

5. If you were drunk would the person you like take care of you? I don’t like anyone in that way right now

6. What kind of people are you attracted to? Kind. Funny. Nerdy.

7. Do you think you’ll be in a relationship two months from now? my sources say no

8. Who from the opposite gender is on your mind? nobody

9. Does talking about sex make you uncomfortable? Not really. I guess it would depend on who I’m talking to. I don’t like talking about it with guys at all, so yeah.

10. Who was the last person you had a deep conversation with? my brother

11. What does the most recent text that you sent say? it was a photo of Mulder and Scully from @penelope1730 lol

12. What are your 5 favorite songs right now? Writer in the Dark - Lorde, Half Life - David Duchovny, Thinkin’ Bout You by Ciara, bury a friend - billie eilish, and obsessing over Taylor’s new unreleased song lol, sucker by the jobros

13. Do you like it when people play with your hair? I love it.

14. Do you believe in luck and miracles? Yes

15. What good thing happened this summer? Last summer, I met my childhood heroes!!

16. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again? hell no

17. Do you think there is life on other planets? Yes I do.

18. Do you still talk to your first crush? No.

19. Do you like bubble baths? I do but I never take them anymore lol

20. Do you like your neighbors? Nope. 

21. What are you bad habits? Overthinking until I’m in the middle of a mental breakdown

22. Where would you like to travel? UK

23. Do you have trust issues? Only with men tbh 

24. Favorite part of your daily routine? Food. Lol.

25. What part of your body are you most uncomfortable with? None

26. What do you do when you wake up? Different things, but I usually watch a couple episodes of x-files before I even leave my bed lol

27. Do you wish your skin was lighter or darker? neither

28. Who are you most comfortable around? My best friends, my mom, my brother

29. Have any of your ex’s told you they regret breaking up? Yes, but I always initiated the breakups, so it was more that they wanted another chance.

30. Do you ever want to get married? Nah

31. Is your hair long enough for a pony tail? Yep.

32. Which celebrities would you have a threesome with? ew no

33. Spell your name with your chin. shelby

34. Do you play sports? What sports? Nope. I played soccer in middle school and did a bit of unofficial cheerleading (I say unofficial, cause there wasn’t an actual cheer squad but some of us still formed one lol)

35. Would you rather live without TV or music? TV

36. Have you ever liked someone and never told them? Yes, but only one person

37. What do you say during awkward silences? Anywho

38. Describe your dream girl/guy? Same as I said above. Kind. Funny. Nerdy.

39. What are your favorite stores to shop in? Hot Topic, Barnes and Noble, Game Stop, Aeropostale

40. What do you want to do after high school? I’m long done with high school lol.

41. Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance? I think it depends, honestly. If someone cheated on me, then hell no, seeyabye

42. If you’re being extremely quiet what does it mean? I’m usually exhausted or upset

43. Do you smile at strangers? Sometimes.

44. Trip to outer space or bottom of the ocean? neither; both have 2 of my top 3 fears nope.

45. What makes you get out of bed in the morning? Food

46. What are you paranoid about? Being abused again if I were to ever go into another relationship

47. Have you ever been high? No

48. Have you ever been drunk? No

49. Have you done anything recently that you hope nobody finds out about? Nope I have nothing to hide.

50. What was the colour of the last hoodie you wore? Green

51. Ever wished you were someone else? When I was younger, but not since middle school

52. One thing you wish you could change about yourself? My fear of some things.

53. Favourite makeup brand? Hard Candy, L.A. Colors

54. Favourite store? Hot Topic

55. Favourite blog? I don’t have one

56. Favourite colour? Purple.

57. Favourite food? any kind of mexican/tex-mex food, and pizza. and wings. and ribs.

58. Last thing you ate? sugar free jellybeans

59. First thing you ate this morning? chips, but that wasn’t until noon.

60. Ever won a competition? A couple of talent shows are under my belt

61. Been suspended/expelled? For what? No, but I got detention for wearing the wrong fucking shade of blue.

62. Been arrested? For what? Nope.

63. Ever been in love? Yes.

64. Tell us the story of your first kiss? It was in the hallway outside the apartment I lived in at the time. 

65. Are you hungry right now? Not really.

66. Do you like your tumblr friends more than your real friends? I don’t have any ‘real’ friends outside of social media, so yes

67. Facebook or Twitter? Twitter

68. Twitter or Tumblr? Tumblr.

69. Are you watching tv right now? Nope.

70. Names of your bestfriends? Cheyenne, Julia, Kathi, and Tracy

71. Craving something? What? Burrito

72. What colour are your towels? Purple

72. How many pillows do you sleep with? Two 

73. Do you sleep with stuffed animals? Sorta. they’re on my headboard thingy

74. How many stuffed animals do you think you have? I have 4 on my bed,8 on shelves, and a few more in my closet, so about 25-30

75. Favourite animal? puppies

76. What colour is your underwear? multi

77. Chocolate or Vanilla? Vanilla.

78. Favourite ice cream flavour? Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey

79. What colour shirt are you wearing? black

80. What colour pants? blue jeans

81. Favourite tv show? Shows. Sherlock, Kim Possible, X-Files, Outlander, Doctor Who, to name a few

82. Favourite movie? 13 Going on 30. I always say that one even though I have other faves too

83. Mean Girls or Mean Girls 2? Mean Girls.

84. Mean Girls or 21 Jump Street? Mean Girls.

85. Favourite character from Mean Girls? Kevin G lol

86. Favourite character from Finding Nemo? Crush

87. First person you talked to today? brother

88. Last person you talked to today? Tracy

89. Name a person you hate? Dislike, you mean. My dad

90. Name a person you love? Lots of people.

91. Is there anyone you want to punch in the face right now? Yes.

92. In a fight with someone? Nope.

93. How many sweatpants do you have? 8 or more lol

94. How many sweaters/hoodies do you have? like 20 lol

95. Last movie you watched? Does that 2 hour Downton Abbey series finale count?

96. Favourite actress? I don’t really have one

97. Favourite actor? Benedict Cumberbatch.

98. Do you tan a lot? Never.

99. Have any pets? I wish

100. How are you feeling? Tired

101. Do you type fast? yes

102. Do you regret anything from your past? sometimes, but then I think better of it lol

103. Can you spell well? yes

104. Do you miss anyone from your past? not anymore

105. Ever been to a bonfire party? yes

106. Ever broken someone’s heart? Yes, i suppose

107. Have you ever been on a horse? twice

108. What should you be doing? sleeping

109. Is something irritating you right now? Not really.

110. Have you ever liked someone so much it hurt? Yes. 

111. Do you have trust issues? I try not to, but I do

112. Who was the last person you cried in front of? I don’t like to cry in front of people

113. What was your childhood nickname? peanut

114. Have you ever been out of your province/state? Yep.

115. Do you play the Wii? I have, but I don’t own one

116. Are you listening to music right now? No but I should. Lol.

117. Do you like chicken noodle soup? yes

118. Do you like Chinese food? some of it

119. Favourite book? I have lots

120. Are you afraid of the dark? Sometimes

121. Are you mean? No

122. Is cheating ever okay? Never.

123. Can you keep white shoes clean? Idk I never owned white shoes...well I have white heels, but they’re pretty clean

124. Do you believe in love at first sight? No

125. Do you believe in true love? I do. I’ve seen it.

126. Are you currently bored? not really; bored with this questionnaire? yes

127. What makes you happy? a lot of things

128. Would you change your name? I’d change my last name to my mother’s maiden name

129. What your zodiac sign? libra

130. Do you like subway? Not anymore

131. Your bestfriend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do? I don’t have a best friend of the opposite sex. If I did, I’d probably be thrilled lol

132. Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with? brother

133. Favourite lyrics right now? idk honestly, i’m too tired

134. Can you count to one million? If I cared enough.

135. Dumbest lie you ever told? Idk

136. Do you sleep with your doors open or closed? Closed and locked

137. How tall are you? 5’1”

138. Curly or Straight hair? I like to curl my straight ass hair

139. Brunette or Blonde? Brunette

140. Summer or Winter? Fall lol, but between those 2, summer.

141. Night or Day? Night.

142. Favourite month? October

143. Are you a vegetarian? Nope

144. Dark, milk or white chocolate? White

145. Tea or Coffee? tea

146. Was today a good day? It’s been okay.

147. Mars or Snickers? snickers

148. What’s your favourite quote? the only one I can think of off the top of my head right now is my blog title: though she be but little, she is fierce.

149. Do you believe in ghosts? I do.

150. Do you tag anyone else to do this? Not unless someone wants to

#tag games #long post

[buuspickett14-blog]

How attain Customers Online Business

The Wolf Network Jordan Belfort Reviews You should start by understanding why it seriously important understand first if you would like to earn an online income. Quick questions.Do you know how produce a website? Are you aware how to make a blog? Are you aware how set an image on a page? Do you know tips to get visitors to your web page? Well, believe it or not, these the situation not challenging. But guess what.you need to understand how to execute them in an effort to make cash on the internet. Worldly riches and the unbridled interest in getting more of which have derailed many initially humble and sincere individuals. People whose priorities may happen to rooted and grounded in these things as family, friends, faith, along with a loyalty back to their origins often become "changed" somehow after realizing financial fortunes and also the luxuries that such fortunes can secure. A developing arrogance and a gradual withdrawal from former associations is usual among lots who reach "stardom" whether that through sports, acting, entrepreneurship, or "climbing the corporate ladder". Without needing to one who hasn't allowed his success to adversely affect him in any way, while in that regard he highly rare indisputably. Most affiliate marketing programs will offer you a a website to sell your products from. Could potentially be a easy to get started, but ultimately you will probably want to develop your own website. This front entry doors is providing people with the freedom to work when they want and where. No more of getting up going to work, being around men and women that you don't want to be around. The world is doing things with electronics, Computers that is without question. Giving us the power to work from home and enjoy life. To be honest, starting off is problematic part. We can avoid so much pain and struggle an individual do your homework and know what to do and what not to can. I spent more in comparison year crafting my business idea, doing research and learning from successful people young and old. When I finished writing more than half of my first book, I decided to change my business growth plan completely. Yet it turned in order to be on the list of best decisions I produced in my agency. because I wasn't totally sure could was going to make money! Like you, there would be a time as i used to wonder the way i could make money online. There was no one I turn to at that time because nobody I knew could analyze how I should work from their home and still earn huge salary. These days, you will find plenty of resources available on the internet that can instruct you a person can earn good money by working at home. My Chunky Monkey thighs and I'm able to tell you easy it easy to get caught in thinking, "I have three hours. I can take a 15-minute get." Off you go to the fridge. If you can pry that spoon regarding your hand after 15 minutes, you're set. Yet. "I think I'll turn more than a TV just for a few minutes while I have my goodies." That fifteen minutes can turn into an hour or three in the blink a good eye. You must create an email list so possible capture purchasers. This will make it easier in foreseeable future when uncover similar services and goods. You can promote them for any list of already associates. This is by far swiftest way to generate money as you may already have a crowd.

[sydrave]

I’m gonna have to do a few of these but here y’go Charlie

1.) URL meaning

Sydrave was just my first ever social media username and it stuck. I don’t really remember why, but I do know it has nothing to do with raves. I was 12.

2). A picture of me

3.) Tattoos

Don’t have any (yet). Will probably get some at some point.

4.) Last time I cried and why

A professor sent a very affirming email and it made me so happy 💛

5.) Piercings I have

Absolutely none. I didn’t “like the idea of a hole in my body” when I was 10. Still don’t.

6.) Favorite Band

I don’t super obsess over bands, but I’ll put my best friend Saddoc here even though he’s a solo artist.

7.) Biggest turn offs

Cishets

8.) Top 5 songs that represent your life right now

1. Dream — Priscilla Ahn

2. The Village — Wrabel

3. 14 Year Old Me — K Anderson

4. The Greatest — Sia

5. Non-Stop — Lin-Manuel Miranda

9.) Tattoos I want

I want the forte “f” for my pup and also as a recognition of my progress health wise.

I really like the rainbow dots — maybe as the trans flag?

Probably will want more as I think about it more.

10.) Biggest turn ons

Respect for personal boundaries. Asexuality(?)+trauma=not a lot of turn ons.

11.) Age? 19

12.) Idea of a perfect date

Oh my GOD literally anything. I’m such a romantic. Nice walk? Super. Dinner? Awesome. Movies and pjs? AMAZINg Blanket fort? Bet. Studying? Sure thing. Just as long as there’s quality time spent together I’m down for whatever.

Also though, I am a big fan of being outside. Adventuring. Going new places.

13.) Life goal

I want to make sure middle schoolers are doing alright. Tbh people don’t check up on them enough. I want to be the support I needed when I was a kid.

14.) Piercings I want

None at the moment.

15.) Relationship status

Single and happy about it, but also would be happy not being single.

16.) Favorite movie

Finding Nemo

17.) A fact about my life

I’m an ordained minister

18.) Phobia

Bees. Actually. Will cry.

19.) Middle name

This is rigged next question

20.) Height? 5’3

21.) Virgin?

Virginity is a social construct and it depends on who you ask 🤷🏼‍♂️

22.) Shoe size

8-9 women’s 6-7 men’s

23.) What’s your sexual orientation?

Panromantic, a(?)sexual. I usually just say queer though.

24.) Smoke, drink, or take any drugs?

Hell yeah. I pregame HARD w/ ibuprofen.

25.) Someone you miss

Alex in Seattle

26.) One thing you regret

Letting a relationship last as long as it did.

27.) First celebrity you think of when someone says attractive

Can we TALK about Amandla Stenberg

28.) Favorite ice cream

Chocolate is rad. Blue moon if I’m feeling fancy.

If I really need it, B&J Chunky Monkey or Karamel Sutra

29.) One insecurity:

My voice

30.) what my last text message says

“You’re not pregnant I promise” (my friend was craving salt she’s not pregnant I promise)

31.) Have you never taken a picture naked?

Not all the way

32.) Have you ever painted your room?

Yes but not since I’ve transitioned :/

33.) Have you ever kissed a member of the same sex?

*screams in non-binary*

34.) Have you ever slept naked?

Again, not all the way. Boxers are good though.

35.) Have you ever danced in front of your mirror?

Not well.

36.) Have you ever had a crush?

Have I ever not?

37.) Have you ever been dumped?

“Dumped” is a strong word, but technically yes

38.) Have you ever stole money from a friend?

Nah my dad and I aren’t friends

39.) Have you ever gotten in a car with people you just met?

Yeah. Senior year was rough.

40.) Have you ever been in a fist fight?

Yeah. Eighth grade was rough.

41.) Have you ever snuck out of your house?

It wasn’t “sneaking”; I’ve walked out.

42.) Have you ever had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back?

Yep. I wasn’t a “real boy.”

43.) Have you ever been arrested? Nope

44.) Have you ever made out with a stranger?

Not even the people I know would make out with me

45.) Have you ever met up with a member of the opposite sex somewhere?

*screams again in non-binary*

[dream-wrecker-blog]

Dear Diary #5

On a much lighter note. I have to say that I love myself, even more than I thought I could ever could. I was at work. Rushing to the bathroom because well I have been hydrating like theres no other. Being in the service. I have to say fitness is key and well I have been slacking. And now I'm getting bak on tract. So It have been drinking. A shit ton of water every day. Well, I look too dame good..

I've always been relatively thin! Hungry looking, as I jokingly say now a days. So I'll just SSAYY... with quotations "Thin." Because now! I'm not, but I use to be. At 24 I use to be 150 pounds. Currently I'm close to 260. I find that to be some what of an achievement because I never thought I was going to make it. Make it as in, alive.

I was on Columbia University campus. In the religious hall. Where one of the professors have taken a kindness to me. He began to mentor me. In the beginning stages of him mentoring me. He kept asking me critical thinking questions. At that time, I have never, ever been more annoyed with someone in my entire life.

The question was. "How do you see yourself living in a few years?"

To be honest, I did't know how to answer him. From the age of 16 - 24 I have to say I was literally left. In the wild I go, to figure out life. Drifting back and forth between NJ and New York. Trying to find my footing. Only too later on find a guy I though I could have spent the rest of my life with. Albiet that's a story for another time. My mentor's other question was! "What do you see yourself doing in the next few years?" This question was very challenging for me. Because I had absolutely no clue as how to effetely answer him.

Then he became more and more specific..... After seeing the lack of light in my eyes. He said out loud. "Do you even see yourself living"? Without hesitation I said "No!" When I answered. I was speaking metaphorically and maybe, just maybe, literally. I never thought about the value of my life. Because I was left to wonder the world or city streets of Manhattan.

It's moments like this that I like to reflect on because I am better than I was all those years ago. I have a stronger sense of self worth and a better sense of awareness in myself. And how I'm going to achieve what I'm going to achieve. I'm happier and heavier than I have been in a very long time. I'm no longer hungry and broke. I'ma chunky monkey that's stable. If I could I would love, love, love to say thank you to all the men who took the time to say what they had to say to me. To make me aware of what I was and was not doing. These were amazing and beautiful Black men.

On all of my moments of refection. I have to say that This, that moment was when I woke up. That I had something going on with me. With me Being a follower of Baccus in his non roman form. And quite literally being next to a statue of a Satyr. NO! Dionysus is not a satyr. It would correctly be closer to Pan. But! this statue gave me more of a Dionysus vibe at that time in my life. Quick tangent. I like him because I relate to how beautiful his spoken about in the stories. and how he was loved. How he lived in freedom. To me! How could I not want to be around an energy that gave that level of carelessness. Now a days. I'm a lot more of an Orisha man. But! I do love my Greco-Romans.

I'm not to sure how many people can say they can point out the moment where there life have taken a turn for the better. But to me I believe that that day in those moments. In that hour, of being questioned. I realized there's a lot more to life than existing.

Thank you Tumbler Diary for reading my words and taking my thoughts into your head.

#dear diary #blogging #family drama #stories being told #Stories #Newyorkcity #nyc #Diary #Harlem #New York