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disgruntledspacedad · 3 years

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The White Room

The Better Love Series || Join My Tags

a sequel to Shit Hits the Fan

pairing: Javier Peña x Fem!Reader (Ears). Part of the Better Love ‘verse.

summary: Bill Stechner makes his move. You never even saw it coming.

words: 6.1k

warnings: 18+, plot, a little angst, a little fluff.

notes: unbeta’d. this is a big one. notes at the end.

<< Shit Hits the Fan || These Hands are Magic >>

MASTERLIST

You take the embassy steps two at a time, wishing you’d have been notified about the change in your schedule just half an hour earlier.

You’d gotten a page just as you were headed out the door of the apartment. Stechner has decided to pull you from Centra Spike’s night flight over Medellín. He wants you at headquarters this evening instead. He didn’t say why.

Part of you isn’t sorry. Escobar has been getting desperate lately, and between the outbreaks of violence in Medellín and the continued bombing campaign in Bogotá, you’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Javi, too. He’s been spending more and more time at the base in Medellín, and you’ve been spending more and more time in the skies, pulling random shifts through all hours of the day and night.

It hasn’t put a strain on your relationship, exactly. In fact, in some ways, the little moments that you steal with Javi when your schedules just happen to mesh are all the more precious because of it. You’re both exhausted and a little cranky, but there’s been an underlying desperation to your recent interactions that’s only served to stoke the flame that flickers between you.

It’s a bittersweet feeling. You cherish the time you get together, but on the other hand, it seems like even when Javi’s right there next to you, you miss him so much that your chest aches.

Which is why you’re miffed that Bill couldn’t have shuffled you around a little sooner. Javi’s been in Medellín for the past two days. He’d caught an early flight back to Bogotá just as you’d been finishing up another late shift flyover. You’d just happened to run into him at the embassy airstrip, a perfect coincidence. Your eyes had met over the tarmac, and like a pair of magnets, you’d crashed into one another. Javi had wrapped you into a fierce hug, and you’d pulled him into a heated kiss, and the two of you had spent a good five minutes canoodling in a hidden corridor near the water fountains, kissing and whispering and grappling for position as he’d pinned you against the wall. He’d breathed you in, and you’d reveled in the taste of him on your lips, each of you pressing frantically against the body of the other as if it had been weeks and not mere days since you’d been together.

“I’ve got to go,” Javi had apologized into your mouth, breathing the words between a series of soft, desperate kisses. “Fucking… fucking early meeting with Martinez.”

“It’s okay, baby,” you’d reassured him, feeling very much like it wasn’t okay. You hardly get enough of him as it is. This tiny little taste had only deepened your aching need, and you’d felt your heart splitting in two as he’d pulled away from you, a small little grimace of frustration twisting his face.

“I’ll see you soon,” you’d called as he’d hurried away, and he’d responded with a tight lipped smile and another dark look of longing.

Now, you round the corridor toward the DEA office, walking as quickly as you can without drawing attention to yourself. Javi is working late again. If you hurry, you’ll have twenty five uninterrupted minutes with him before your night shift starts.

“Ears!” You stop in your tracks, a little shudder of resentment flashing down your spine at Bill’s overeager greeting. “Just the lady I’ve been waiting to see.”

You school your face into a neutral expression of polite interest. Most days, you like Bill just fine, despite the fact that you really don’t trust him for shit.

Today, damn him straight to hell.

“What’s up?” you ask, quirking your lips into an intrigued little grin. There’s a certain informality and blasé banter that Bill’s grown to expect from your encounters, and he’s sharp enough to sense that something’s off if you don’t perform.

“Oh, loads and loads,” Bill says, leaning casually against the corridor wall with his arms folded.

You bite back a sigh. You really, really don’t have the patience to dance around him today. “Oh, really?”

Bill arches a questioning brow at you, and you remind yourself to be convincing, dammit. Usually, this isn’t an issue. Most days, you like your job, and your boss, just fine.

Most days.

“You’re bored, aren’t you, Ears?” Bill continues, pitching his voice deep, those probing eyes piercing straight through you.

“I -” you start. Bored isn’t how you’d describe it, lately.

Tired, more like.

“No, no,” Bill’s expression is patient, endearing. “Don’t deny it. I’ve been watching you. I know that hungry look when I see it. You want more. You came to Colombia to do something important with your life, I can tell.”

Six months ago, hell, even three months ago, Bill’s words would have been true. Now, the very thought of more is enough to send you crawling into bed and sleeping for a week.

‘Isn’t tracking down Pablo Escobar pretty fucking important?’ you’re half tempted to ask. You hold your tongue.

Obviously, it’s not to Bill Stechner.

“What do you have for me?” you say instead, hoping you sound intrigued, carefully not confirming or denying Bill’s suspicions.

“Real work,” Bill says with a sharp smile. Something cold jolts down your spine at the his use of the word ‘real.’

As if everything until now has been a sham.

“Follow me,” he beckons, and you have no choice but to obey.

Bill leads you past the DEA offices. You catch a glimpse of the top of Javi’s head from the corner of your eye. He’s hunched over his desk, pouring over an open manilla file. You can barely see the deep furrow in his brow. He doesn’t notice you pass by, and you don’t pause to acknowledge him.

Something throbs in your chest at that.

You follow Bill through a few more winding corridors, down into the basement, past Centra Spike’s room, right up to an unassuming little bookcase built into a nondescript wall in the middle of nowhere.

Bill pauses here, turning to look at you with shining eyes.

You meet his stare, giving away nothing.

With an enthusiasm that borders on theatrical, Bill huddles over a little keypad that’s tucked away at the edge of the bookcase. He punches in a series of numbers, glancing over to confirm that you’re still watching.

You definitely are.

Bill steps back, and like something from an Indiana Jones film, the entire fucking bookcase slides aside, reveling a reinforced steel door built into the wall.

“Whoa,” you can’t help but breathe.

Bill’s eyes glitter. He’s eating this up, impressing you.

And truly, you’re impressed. That little spark of interest that had died in the past months of your burnout has flared with a vengeance.

This is the shit that you joined the CIA for, and Bill Stechner knows it.

“Welcome to the white room, Ears,” Bill announces lowly. It’s the soft, knowing voice of a man sharing a deeply guarded secret. He opens the steel door with a flourish, and it swings slowly aside, heavy and creaking, as if its weight alone could announce the gravity of what you’re about to see.

Carefully, you step inside the room, ducking a little to avoid knocking your head against the low hanging doorway, crawling past the steel corridor entrance before you can straighten.

You blink, astounded at what you’re seeing.

Of course, you’ve heard whispers of CIA’s fabled “White Room,” a repository of classified files tucked away somewhere in the embassy basement. Even Javi’s mentioned it a couple of times, always with a hint of resentment, like he’d give his left arm for even a glimpse inside. Rumor is, Steve Murphy’s been in here before, but just once, and he was heavily supervised the entire time. It’s a fucking goldmine of intel, stacks upon stacks of carefully organized file folders, all at the fingertips of the few individuals who are important enough to be need-to-know.

“Okay,” you whisper beneath your breath, taking it all in. Reality is a little different than you’d pictured. The entrance is impressive, sure, but what you’re staring at is even more so. Box after carefully labelled box is packed atop one another, stacked six deep on a never-ending series of steel shelves.

You could spend an eternity here learning all of the secrets of Colombia. The implications are mind-boggling, and distantly, you wonder how many other well-hidden rooms the CIA has tucked away across a spread of foreign countries, a never-ending fountain of secrets related to god-knows-what.

Your brain stutters at the thought.

You realize suddenly that Bill is watching you carefully from the corner of his eye, observing your reaction as if he’s surreptitiously taking notes on every thought that flits across you brain. Again, you school your expression, reverting to that practiced, dead-eyed stare of careful neutrality.

“Cool,” you say, a little breathlessly, knowing that Bill’s eager to wow you, and not seeing any reason not to acknowledge the fact that, yeah, you’re pretty fucking wowed. You turn to face him, ignoring the temptation to sweep your gaze over the many, many labeled files at your eye level. “So, what are we doing here?”

Bill laughs. “I’ll show you.” He leads you past the shelves, and now that you’re behind him, you can’t stop your eyes from tracking over the labels at your eye level. You’re appalled by what you see.

Shelves upon shelves devoted to Escobar, and even more to the Cali Cartel, all broken down into sections of the individual godfathers. Rodriguez, Herrera, Bejarano, Moncado are all names that catch your eye. There are folders on each major sicario that you recognize from Javi’s info board: Mosquera, Lucumí, Vásquez, Gaviria... the list goes on. Even more files files are labeled Castaño. There’s a whole series of boxes on M-19, and a little past that, an entire shelf devoted solely to FARC.

It’s more than your mind can possible comprehend in one quick sweep, and hell, that’s just what you could catch at eye level.

It occurs to you that this is what Steve and Javi are always bitching about. Sure, you’re aware of the ever present pissing contest between the DEA and the CIA, but it’s always been peripheral information to you. Steve in particular is pretty vocal about his frustration with the ‘fucking CIA.’ “Goddamn file’s so redacted that it might as well be scrap,” you can just hear him muttering.

Christ, if this is the kind of intel that the CIA has open access too, you can kind of see his point.

Bill stops at a table in the center of the room, indicating it with a sweep of his hand. Reluctantly, you sit, a little annoyed that you’ve got your back to him now, but not feeling comfortable enough to twist around to track what he’s doing. Your instincts are screaming at you that this is a test. A big one. So you wait demurely in your tiny plastic chair, your hands folded primly in your lap, listening intently as Bill shuffles for something behind you.

After a long moment, Bill leans his hip heavily against the table, just a hair too close to your shoulder for you to be totally comfortable. You don’t have time to think on that, though, because he’s sliding a black and white photograph under your nose for you to view.

The man that leers up at you has a pinched face beneath a deep brow. His nose is long and lopsided, as if it’s been broken at least once. His thinning, limp hair hangs low over his eyes, giving him a mysterious, almost rebellious look. His mouth is wide, crooked teeth exposed in an open-mouthed grimace. He’s angling toward the camera, obviously unaware of its existence, leaning forward with a machine gun cradled to his chest.

“Feo,” you say instantly, your mouth working before your brain can catch up. You recognize him from the evidence board in the DEA office, and even more from your conversations with Javi.

Feo is a low level sicario, one that’s just now caught the attention of Search Bloc, mostly due to the recent chatter that Centra Spike has picked up. You’ve yet to get a positive ID on his voice, but he’s been mentioned in several conversations lately, always in reference to ‘drops.’

Javi’s been working deep in the night to decipher these conversations, eager to learn what ‘drops’ Escobar and his sicarios are so desperate to come by.

“Feo,” Bill drawls, a hint of something sharp licking at his tone. You glance up at him, curious. “That’s an unfortunate nickname.”

He’s staring down at you with eyes that are too aware. Probing, assessing.

Fuck.

“I’ve seen him on the DEA board,” you explain, grateful that you can provide an answer so quickly. You don’t like the way Bill is looking at you, like he’s daring you to confess a sin.

“I didn’t realize there were many photos of him floating around,” Bill says casually. But you aren’t stupid. You read the threat in his statement, loud and clear.

“It’s a new one,” you reply automatically, feeling as if you’re scrambling to claw yourself out of a hole.

But this is also true. Feo has been an ongoing mystery to Search Bloc, one that they haven’t taken seriously until recently. You wonder what it is about this man that’s got Bill so on edge.

Bill hums. “Good eye.” He hunches over the photograph, so close that you can feel his body heat against your neck.

“This is Raul Manriquez.” Bill taps the forehead of the man in the photograph, then turns to leer at you. “Apparently, he’s known to his friends as Feo.”

He’s watching you for a sign. You refuse to give it.

“So,” you ask after a beat. Bill folds his arms across his chest, waiting for you to continue. He’s not giving any signs either, the dickwad. “What does the CIA want with Raul Manriquez?”

Bill has never behaved this way with you before. There’s a certain weight to the way he regards you that hints at paranoia. He’s deeply, almost obsessively interested in this man, and it doesn’t make sense.

Feo is a sicario, sure. But sicarios are far, far below Bill’s pay grade. The thought is laughable, even.

Something drops in your stomach. If Feo is more than a sicario, as it seems he must be, then it is far, far above your pay grade to be this involved.

Bill pulls out a chair beside you and sits heavily. He leans on his elbow, swinging his legs so that his knees brush your thighs.

You echo him, carefully positioning yourself so that you’re facing one another, but no longer touching.

“We have intel to suggest that Raul Manriquez is connected with a Russian weapons ring,” Bill starts. You notice for the first time that he looks tired, too, his eyes a little bloodshot, heavy bags dropping darkly beneath them.

Something clicks in your brain. “He’s Pablo’s weapons guy,” you breathe. The pieces fall together with startling clarity. The drops that the sicarios had mentioned. The fact that Feo seems to stay at the periphery of things, not nearly as involved with the day-to-day bullshit that other sicarios seem to thrive on. “He’s running guns.”

“Among other things,” Bill drawls, seeming thoroughly bored by the turn in the conversation.

You ignore that. Your thoughts are spinning wildly, forging connections, solving problems. Escobar’s got to get his weapons from somewhere. In the back of your mind, you’ve always sort of known this, but the significance of it has stayed firmly out of sight, swamped by other things that, at the time, had seemed far more important.

But if you could catch Feo… If you could choke off Pablo’s lethality directly at the source…

“We could end this,” you whisper, sitting up to look Bill directly in the eye. Your voice rises. “Bill, if we neutralize Feo, Escobar’s lost his access to his guns.” Something swoops in your heart, and you feel brighter, more energized than you have in weeks. “We can end this war!”

“Oh, the fucking drug war.” Bill scoffs, waving his hand in a casual gesture of lazy dismissal. He looks frustrated, disappointed. “Ears, broaden you horizons a little, sister. Escobar is on the run. When he’s gone,” Bill leans in, the glint in his eye damned near dangerous. “And he will be gone, Ears, trust me.” He huffs a deep sigh, shaking his head as he pitches away to balance on the far feet of his chair, rocking back and forth in a way that reminds you of a restless kid in a elementary school classroom. His eyes are sharp, possessive as they pin yours. “What then?”

You stare at him flatly, a little miffed to have nearly a year of your life’s work brushed aside as if it’s just petty bullshit.

You shake that emotion away, blinking hard, reminding yourself of where you are, of who your boss is. With the lines as blurred as they are in Colombia, and your unique position dancing between Centra Spike, the DEA, and the CIA, and Search Bloc, it’s easy to forget that ultimately, it’s Bill Stechner who owns you.

For the first time, that thought deeply unsettles you.

Bill falls forward heavily on his elbows, looking at you with a furrowed brow, and you remind yourself for the umpteenth time that this meeting is a performance, one that you’ve utterly and completely bombed until now.

You brain spins, processing the little bits and pieces of information that you’ve been given. Bill sees Escobar’s fall as in inevitability, inconsequential, even. He’s concerned about Feo in the context that he’s connected to the weapons trade in Colombia.

Quickly, you consider what you know about Bill Stechner. A CIA big wig with a shady-ass military background. A man who’s mind lives in the future.

A future without Escobar. He’s made that much clear.

“You’re looking to fill a power vacuum,” you announce suddenly, knowing instinctively that you’re not far off the mark. Bill Stechner is a man who is always thinking ahead, studying the political chessboard to analyze his next move, and the one after that, too.

And that truth bomb jars free even more thoughts that have been floating untethered in the back of your mind. When he’s not skulking around his office, Bill is gone for weeks at a time, supposedly off in depths of the amazonian jungle, brushing shoulders with his right winged military buddies.

Commie hunting.

The pieces fall perfectly into place, painting a sobering picture, and all the while, Bill watches, a sharp little grin playing at his lips as you connect the dots.

“Bill,” you say, refusing to accept any bullshit. You thump your finger hard against Feo’s leering smirk, pinning Bill with a dark stare. “Is this guy connected with FARC?”

Both of Bill’s brows arch skyward, and he leans back, looking at you with a new light in his eyes. You get the impression that once again, you’ve impressed him.

You’re not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

“I don’t know, Ears,” Bill admits, glancing away to his hands, which are suddenly curling into fists in his lap. You can tell it really grinds his gears, the uncertainty. “That’s what I want to find out.”

You consider him carefully, keeping your face expressionless. This is the most open response you’ve ever gotten from Bill, and you file away that information along with everything else you’ve learned today.

It’s a lot.

“What do you need from me?”

It’s a valid question. Part of you, the part that is equally intrigued and enraptured by Bill Stechner and the CIA as a whole, genuinely wants to help.

The rest of you is just desperate to get out of this room.

Bill’s lips slide into a knowing smirk. “Well, Ears,” he drawls, eyeing you in a way that makes something sink in your gut. “I’m glad you asked.”

“I’m listening.” You deliberately leave off the ‘sir,’ that you’re tempted to tack on to the end of that statement. Damn your army background.

“This is the moment that we’ve put you in place for,” Bill confesses, hunching forward on his elbows. Again, you get the impression that he’s trying to reel you in, seducing you with a show of honesty.

You brace yourself.

“The DEA is interested in this man, too,” Bill starts, shooting you a pointed look that says ‘I know you already know this.’ You keep your face carefully blank, so Bill continues. “I know that they’ve been working to track his location.”

Something cold coils in your heart. “Are you asking me to spy on Search Bloc?” you ask point blank.

Bill shakes his head. “No, no, no, Ears,” he chides with an expression of extreme patience, as if you’re a child to him. “That would be counterproductive. We’re all on the same team, after all.” He pins you with a dead-eyed stare that sends a shiver down your spine. “I’m asking you to fully engage in your position with the CIA.” Bill stresses the last point, again reminding you of who you are, who you answer to. “You’re a liaison.” He hums a little, all casual disinterest, disarming you, reinforcing the bonds of loyalty that he’s forged with a simple shrug of his shoulders. “So, liaise.”

You realize with a starling, icy jolt of clarity that Bill Stechner has tolerated your relationship with Javier Peña for this very reason, that he’s garnered your favor - accepting your transfer request, giving you a raise, buying you drinks, playing your buddy - all in preparation for using you as his own personal mole in the ranks of Search Bloc.

And you’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

Your throat works hard to swallow against a suddenly dry mouth. “I understand, sir.”

For the first time, Bill doesn’t correct your formality. You hardly notice the shift, though. You’re still reeling from the implications of what he’s asking of you, of how he’s exploited you, taken advantage of all of your vulnerabilities. Suddenly, you feel as if you’re choking, like a noose is tightening, tightening around your neck. You have to stop yourself from reaching to massage your throat, clenching your hands into tight firsts into your lap instead.

Bill watches it all in cool amusement. “Atta girl,” he praises, and you swear you taste bile. He stands, and you copy him absently, feeling detached and awkward, walking on legs that require all of your attention to keep from trembling.

Bill claps a heavy hand on your shoulder. His eyes flash with something like pride, and you decide in that moment that you hate him, this motherfucker, almost as much as you hate yourself for falling for his bullshit.

Goddammit, you’re so fucking stupid.

“Good talk,” he says, and you nod in a way that you hope is contemplative without being telling.

You follow Bill out of the room on wooden legs, your mind spinning with the implications of your conversation. He nods to you as the bookshelf slides shut behind you, and you nod back, relieved to see that he turns to head the opposite direction from the DEA office.

You glance down at your watch. You’ve got ten minutes if you hurry. With all your heart, you hope that Javi is still working.

You need to see him.

You push past his glass door, swinging it open hard enough that it bangs ominously against the wall. Javi is still slumped over his desk in the exact same position as before, studying a jumbled series of papers, a half-spent cigarette dangling from his lips.

Your breath catches at the sight of him.

His head snaps up at your noisy arrival, dark eyes narrowed at the intrusion. His expression softens when he sees that it’s you.

“Ears.” His voice is a sigh, a release of that same tension that you feel leaking from you own bones, and you dart forward, heedless of who might be watching beyond the glass walls.

“Hey,” you say, shoving aside an opened manilla folder to create a bare space for you to lean against. Javi doesn’t seem to mind that in the least, so you flop up onto his desk, pressing your thigh against his elbow, enjoying the feeling of just sharing the same space.

Javi glances at you, and your something lurches in your chest as you take him in. He looks haggard, exhausted, dark bags gathered beneath his bloodshot eyes like he hasn’t had good night’s sleep in far too long.

“Another little chat with Stechner?” he grouses, peering up at you with narrow gazed suspicion.

Your heart sinks, and you have to blink hard against the onslaught of his ire. Javi’s always been grouchy when he’s tired, and there’s nothing that drives him into a funk faster than any mention of Bill Stechner. It’s as if he has a sixth sense in that regard, like he can smell Bill on your skin.

And that’s a gross thought.

Until now, Javi’s attitude had irked you, and you’d written it off as petty, just another brand of that delightfully obnoxious possessiveness that he’s continuously displayed since your apartment was bombed.

But dammit, you’re the moron here, not Javi. He’d been right not to trust Bill.

You shut your eyes tightly. You wonder if Javi should even trust you, given your most recent assignment.

“Please don’t,” you whisper, not knowing how to put your many worries into words, and Javi must read your conflicted mood, because he lets the subject drop. He huffs, his attention falling back to the open file on his desk, his long fingers working little tapping patterns into its intricate woodgrain.

You follow his gaze, noticing that he’s been pouring over the same photograph that Bill had shown you in the white room. Feo’s ugly mug leers back at you, a knowing, secretive smirk playing at his upturned lips, like he’s mocking you, the motherfucker.

A flood of emotions swamp you. You’ve watched Javi squinting down at this same photo for days, his mind spinning as he attempts to tease out connections, completely stumped as to how this unassuming, ugly man fits into the bigger picture of Pablo Escobar and his sicarios.

And now you know, but there’s not a damn thing you can say about it. Bill’s going to be watching you. Hell, he’d admitted as much today. Verbatim. If he thinks that his little spy is sharing classified CIA intel with her DEA boyfriend…

Well, honestly, you’re not sure what would happen. You just know that it would be bad news for you, and probably even worse for Javi.

You release a deep, broken sigh, exhaling though your nose. You wonder how you’re going to balance it all, working for Bill without betraying Javi.

Well, you absolutely refuse to do that. Fuck Bill Stechner for even asking.

But now, watching Javi huddled over his messy desk, squinting in the dim light because he refuses to wear his fucking glasses, frazzled and careworn and a little cranky, something pulls at your chest.

Refusing to share this intel feels a lot like a betrayal already, and suddenly, you’re desperate to confess it all to him, to crawl into Javi’s lap and spill your guts and cry and beg for his forgiveness for blowing off his concerns about Stechner, for even entertaining the thought of withholding information from him.

Just as you feel like you’re ready to burst, Javi sighs deeply, flopping the file shut. He grinds out his cigarette and turns to glance at you, his eyes dark with need.

Your breath catches.

Then, without a word, Javi pitches forward to rest his head against your thigh. He nuzzles there for a moment, and you find yourself carding your fingers through his hair, helpless against the temptation to touch him, comfort him.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs after a long moment.

“Shh,” you whisper. Guilt gnaws at you. You’re the one who should be sorry.

But Javi huffs a hot little breath against your leg, and you brush aside all thoughts of who should trust who, of loyalty and ethics and treason and chain of command. Right now, your entire universe is resting his head in your lap, and you’re determined to enjoy this moment, fallout be damned.

“Baby,” he murmurs into the rough denim of your jeans, and your heart flutters. You bring your opposite hand to rest at the back of his neck, savoring the softness of his skin there, winding your fingers through the curls that brush against his collar.

Javi shudders at your touch, and you remember belatedly that you’re stroking at his number one erogenous zone, teasing him mercilessly without meaning him to.

Reluctantly, you pull away, resting your palm at the slope of his shoulder instead. “Whoops.”

Javi snorts, craning his neck just enough to arch his only visible eyebrow in your direction. The rest of his face is squished into your thigh.

It’s fucking adorable, and it reminds you all over again how little you deserve him, this precious, perfect man.

“What’s wrong?” Javi asks, like he’s sensed the direction of your thoughts. He twists further to frown up at you. One hand comes up to rest at the juncture of your hip, his thumb pressing deeply into your skin.

It’s a comfort.

“Nothing,” you mutter, because you can hardly say ‘everything.’ You busy yourself with working little circles at the base of Javi’s ear, hoping it’s enough to distract him from his line of questioning.

It’s not. Javier Peña has a mind like a steel trap, and he notices everything. “Bull,” he breathes, shutting his eyes despite his best efforts. “You’re worried ‘bout something.”

God, he looks wrecked.

“I just…” You struggle for the right words to to offer him, come up empty. “God, I hate this.”

That one dark eyes flutters open again, soft with concern.

“I miss you,” you blurt before he can dig any further. And oh, god, that’s not a lie. You miss Javi so much it fucking burns, even with him nuzzled right here in your lap.

Javi draws a deep breath, rolling over to expose the entire left side of his face. His opposite arm comes up to wrap around your waist so that he’s almost hugging you, his fingers digging gently into your flank. “What time is your shift over, baby?” he mumbles, his one visible eye glinting, nearly feverish with need.

“Mmm,” you hum, your pulse hammering away in response to the how he’s looking at you. “I can probably be home by eight,” you say sadly.

And really, that’s pushing it. It all depends on what you hear over the frequencies, and how quickly you can vet it. Anybody’s guess at this point in the game.

Javi blusters a deep sigh that prickles hotly at your inner thigh. “Dammit,” he groans, clenching his eyes shut in frustration.

“What’s your morning like?” In the craziness of the past few days, you’ve completely forgotten his schedule.

“Early,” Javi mutters darkly. He doesn’t look at you.

“Fuck.”

“Hardly,” he pouts against your jeans.

And god, you can’t blame him. Resentment wells hot in you. You just want a break, dammit, just a single fucking day to spend with the man you love.

Is that so much to ask?

Suddenly desperate for more contact, you bend down to drop a gentle kiss at his temple.

Javi inhales sharply as your lips meet his skin, and you lay there like that, contorting over him in a way that makes your sides ache and probably displays half of your bare back to anybody who happens to walk past the glass walls of the DEA office right now.

You don’t fucking care. You need this.

“Can I meet you for lunch tomorrow?” you ask as you finally pull away. You haven’t bothered glancing at your watch, but instinct is telling you that you’re already running late for your shift, and your back is killing you.

Javi sits up, slumping against his office chair with his legs splayed sideways. He’s all wild hair and furrowed brow, and if you weren’t at work, you’d be tempted to crawl into his lap and kiss that contemplative look right off his face.

“That might work,” he says slowly, licking his upper lip a little in that way that means he’s thinking hard. Something coils deep in your belly, and you have to shake your thoughts away from those lips and that tongue, and what all they’re capable of.

Javi cocks a brow at you, tilting his head a little. “What are you thinking?”

Fuck it, it’s late. You slide off his desk, planting yourself in his lap with your legs spread across his, grinding subtly against his thighs. His belt buckle digs into your belly, but you don’t give a shit. You tilt his face to yours, reveling for half a second in his confused, awestruck expression before you plant your lips on his for a deep, gentle kiss. Javi moans a little at the contact, plaint and responsive against your advances, his hands coming to graze at your back reverently.

“I was thinking I’d ride,” you whisper against the stubble at his lower jaw just as you lean in to suck at it.

Javi twitches against you, a tiny jolt of his hips, like he’s tempted to take you right here in his rickety office chair, damn the glass walls.

“I need to see your face,” you continue, pulling his hands up to rest at your ribs as you rock gently against him, a subtle preview of tomorrow’s menu.

Javi shudders beautifully beneath you. “What, this ol’ thing?’ he teases, nuzzling against your breastbone. You can tell that he’s pleased by the thought.

“This pretty thing,” you correct, working your way back to his lips.

Javi bites back a groan as you kiss him. “Was asking about food,” he murmurs against your mouth. “But this is better.”

“Don’t worry about food,” you say, falling forward to nuzzle against his neck. “I’ll take care of it. And it will be perfect.”

Javi snorts. “Better be takeout, then.” He gathers you against his body with strong arms, cradling you close. You breathe him in, reveling in the distant smell of coffee and stale cigarette, all mixed in with a hint of musky sweat and something smoky and dark that is uniquely Javier Peña.

“God, baby, I’m looking forward to it,” he confesses against the hollow of your throat, and you throw your head back, shut your eyes and let him ravage you there, just for a moment.

Javi pulls away far too soon, and you shudder at the loss of him, your body damn near trembling with need.

He rolls back in his chair, glancing up at you with an apology in his eyes. “It’s eight oh five,” he tells you somberly, and you wince, disentangling yourself from him, stumbling out of his chair and straightening your shirt and threading your fingers through your wild hair in an effort to smooth it down.

“How do I look?” you ask after a moment, backing up enough to give him the full effect of you.

Javi’s eyes are burning as he takes you in, damn near shimmering with want and exhaustion and pent up emotion, and you curse Bill Stechner once again for butting his big nose into your relationship, for complicating things that should be so fucking simple.

“Perfect,” Javi says lowly, his lips pursed into a thin line, his eyes glittering with some thought that you can’t name. “Fucking perfect.”

Something wrenches in your chest, and you catch your breath, feeling tears prickle at your eyes. You suck them down, frustrated at how often life in Colombia seems to draw your emotions to the forefront.

Nobody needs that.

You lean forward, unable to resist dropping one last, chaste kiss to Javi’s forehead. “Go to bed, Javi,” you whisper against his skin. You pull away, a gentle, teasing smile spreading across your face. “Seriously, baby. It’s just getting stupid now.”

You wink at him, and Javi huffs a little laugh. “Get out of here, Ears,” he grouses, waving a lazy hand at you, but his smile is gentle and soft, and you know that he’s recognized the reference for what it is.

Feeling lighter than you have in days, you shoot him one last cheeky wave. Javi blows a little kiss at you in response, and your heart stutters at the gesture.

God, he’s such a sap.

You damn near dance to the Centra Spike office, slipping into your headphones a full ten minutes later than you really should. Nobody bats an eyelash, though, and you busy yourself with the normal nightshift bullshit, sipping your coffee and switching to the proper frequencies, the promise of tomorrow glowing in your heart.

♠

notes/confessions:

I struggled so hard with this. I still don’t love it, but I’m sick of looking at it, so here ya go. Enjoy.

Okay, I know I have thrown some massive plot things at you this week. I know it’s complicated, and I know it’s a lot. Feel free to ask me questions. I’ve tried to make things as clear as possible, but I’m only human, Narcos is complicated af anyway, and Better Love is even worse, probably.

Look for updates to slow back down again, because a) I actually do have a job, and b) we’re getting close to the point where I’m going to have to start posting If I Fall, and I want to have my chapters outlined a little better and maybe even a few deep before I do that. Look for a few little fluffy one-shots scattered between then and now, but guys... for the most part, the pieces are in place, and we are in the home stretch - of the setup, that is.

Holy fucking shit.

Tags: @jedi-mando, @perropascal, @hotspacepilots, @mostly-megan, @starlight-starwrites, @thirstworldproblemss, @knittingqueen13, @yespolkadotkitty, @lv7867, @pascalisthepunkest, @sarahjkl82-blog, @corrupt-fvcker, @artsymaddie, @leonieb, @justanotherblonde23, @princess-and-pedro

Javier Peña tags: @magpie-to-the-morning, @tiffdawg, @danniburgh, @1800-fight-me, @mandoandgrogu, @hybrid-in-progress, @va-guardianhathaway, @speakerforthedead0, @feminist-violinist, @herefortheart, @dontmindifidontt, @blo0dangel

#Javier Peña #Javier Peña x reader #pedro pascal #narcos #narcos fanfic #Javier Peña fanfic #pedro fandom #pedro fanfic #reader insert #fluff #narcos netflix #narcos fanfiction #Javier Peña fanfiction #Javier Peña imagine #better love #fanfic #fanfiction #pedro pascal fandom

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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913: Quest of the Delta Knights

Or, as I’ve taken to calling it, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1.

Long ago it was a time of brave knights and fair maidens, bubonic plague, public hangings, spiral perms and really stupid hats. The tyrant of this land is Lord Volcher, who acts a lot like Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves only not so subtle. Opposed to him are the Delta Knights, who have a prophecy about a young sage from the North, and a wizard-looking dude called Baydool thinks he’s found this chosen one in a skinny kid named Travis who might have precognitive powers, I don’t know. Supposedly Travis is destined to lead them to the place where Archimedes hid the lost knowledge of Atlantis. Wasn’t that the plot of an episode of MacGuyver?

This all takes place when Leonardo da Vinci was in his early twenties, which would place us in the 1470’s. Despite being so theoretically specific, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1 doesn’t actually try very hard to be set in anything resembling the historical past – it’s kind of like The Undead in being a quasi-Renaissance fantasy thrown together by people whose ‘research’ consisted mostly of watching other quasi-Renaissance fantasy movies. The only historical detail they got noticeably right was the death of Archemedes. Supposedly he really was cut down by the Romans while trying to finish some math, his last words being roughly, “don’t disturb my calculations.” Legend credits him with inventing a heat ray and a couple of other superweapons that may or may not have been used in the siege of Syracuse, which I guess is what inspired this movie.

That’s a fun idea, I suppose, and could make for a sort of medieval Indiana Jones type adventure. Problem is, I’m really not sure what kind of movie Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1 is trying to be. The tone shifts sharply depending on who’s in a given scene. When the villains are onscreen one gets the impression that this is a comedy, but nothing that happens is actually funny. Indeed, a lot of the so-called ‘jokes’ are downright mystifying. What the fuck is with the thing about Whampool having been a bearded lady in a carnival? What is supposed to be the punchline of that? What’s supposed to be funny about any of Volcher’s interactions with the Mannerjay, whoever she is? Why is he loyal to her when she treats him so badly?

When we’re watching the heroes, we have the opposite situation: it seems like this is all meant to be riveting and sometimes heartfelt, but everything that’s happening is silly. I want to speculate that there was some kind of failure of communication here, that some of the actors thought they were making a serious adventure movie and the rest thought this was a medieval sitcom, but Baydool and Volcher are played by the same guy so I got nothing.

The result feels uneven to the point of being nearly incomprehensible. How the hell does Leonardo da Vinci exist in the same universe as the Wizard Whampool with his neckbeard and Brooklyn accent? Why do characters keep talking about filing their paperwork in a world where very few people can read? How do real countries like Italy and Germany exist, and yet we’re in a land ruled by a Dark Queen who never does anything and a forest full of ziplining people who live in the trees like fucking Ewoks? How is anybody talking about the country of Turkey four hundred years before it existed?

I guess the film-makers figured nobody would care because it’s just a silly fantasy movie, right? Maybe that’s true – maybe I’m just anal about it because I did undergrad work in medieval and renaissance history. The way I see it, though, once you’ve decided to mention real people like Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci, you’ve got to at least try to be set in the real world. If you’re going to make up things like the Golden Newt Award from the College of Alchemists in Istanbul, you can also make up your ancient scientist and your artistic prodigy. Otherwise your movie comes across like it was written by a twelve-year-old.

(Don’t ask me why Volcher and Baydool are both David Warner, by the way. Maybe it’s supposed to be a two sides of the same coin thing? Maybe there was a subplot about them being long-lost twins and it got cut from the movie? Maybe they just couldn’t afford to pay another actor and thought nobody would notice?)

There are major characters who are totally useless. Volcher’s Evil Overlady is a woman referred to as ‘the Mannerjay’ – I googled this word to see if it actually meant anything but all that comes up is pages about this movie. I guess somebody thought it sounded cool. She appears to sit around all day belittling the people who are running her kingdom for her. We never find out who she is or what she wants or why she’s in charge, and she appears to be in the movie only so it can make jokes about how totally whipped Volcher is. Her pet wizard, Whampool, is important for about thirty seconds while Baydool and Travis sneak into his lab to copy the map to Archimedes’ library, but he keeps popping up again after that for short scenes that are supposed to be comedic but aren’t, and contribute nothing.

Equally wasted is Thena, the woman Travis springs from a brothel because she saved him from being beaten up once. She turns out to be the Lost Princess of the Ewok People, which comes across as a lazy way to get her out of the movie again. She shows up to shoot one guy at the very end but can never really be said to have an effect on the plot. She’s not even anyone’s love interest. She’s only in the movie because the casting director thought her tits looked good in that corset.

The plot never seems to escalate. The middle section of a movie is supposed to be ‘rising action’ or at least ‘rising tension’, but the characters in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1 just seem to be wandering around. Part of this is because of characters like Whampool, or Thena and the Ewok People, who come and go without having any effect on the plot. A major part of it is because the bad guys are idiots who can’t seem to get anything done. Sometimes the good guys don’t seem able to get anything done, either, as when Travis attempts to rescue Baydool from prison but only ends up getting him killed. This is supposed to be the heartbreaking tragic scene where Travis loses his mentor, but it mostly feels like wasted time.

I’ve already mentioned a number of anachronisms in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1, but there are always more, and the biggest of them is the one the entire plot is founded on. Baydool tells Travis that the Delta Knights are ‘a secret society dedicated to bringing mankind out of the dark ages.’ Right. So first of all, ‘the dark ages’ usually means about 400-800 AD in Europe, when we don’t know much about what was going on because everybody was too busy killing each other to write it down. They weren’t called that, however, until the seventeenth century, when scholars began contrasting what they considered an age of ignorance with the ‘light’ of Greece and Rome beforehand and the Renaissance (a period of fetishism for all things Greco-Roman) after. Notice how neither of these periods overlap with the supposed time of this movie. This brings me to my second point, which is that dark ages are dark only in retrospect. Nobody who was actually alive at the time knew they were living in the dark ages and they probably wouldn’t have cared if they had.

Of course at the end of the movie, they find the secrets of Atlantis but decide to bury them again so that Volcher can’t use Archimedes’ death ray to conquer the world or something. Throughout the movie Volcher has gone around murdering random people and yelling orders, but he’s so dumb and incompetent that he never really seems like a threat to our heroes. I got the idea that if Travis hadn’t blown him up he would have done it to himself within the next fifteen minutes. The Mannerjay, sitting around in her hilltop castle (always introduced with a thunderbolt sound even when the sky is blue), certainly isn’t a threat to anybody. I don’t think she knows what goes on outside her room. Keeping this stuff out of their hands seems totally unnecessary. These clowns wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Besides, if you’re trying to fit this into actual history, shouldn’t the end be the Delta Knights using the contents of Archimedes’ Library to bring about the Renaissance? That’s what they wanted, wasn’t it? To re-introduce Greco-Roman ideas of science into this backward, superstitious society (not that they ever bother to establish society as backward and superstitious)? Instead they just blow the whole thing up and all that’s left is things Leonardo was later inspired to sketch in his margins when he got bored of drawing penises with legs. Congratulations on defeating the entire purpose of your own secret society, guys.

Why would anybody make a movie like this? Wizards of the Lost Kingdom -1 clearly had some kind of budget, because the costumes are pretty nice even when they’re not very historical. Archimedes’ ray gun is realized through effects that aren’t very special but at least they work. There are horses and props and things like that, but the script and story are so juvenile, un-funny, and pointless that it doesn’t feel like it deserves them. Nothing here was worth my time or the film-makers’ money and effort. It doesn’t make me as viscerally angry as Kitten with a Whip, but man, it sucks.

#mst3k #reviews #quest of the delta knights #90s

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marjaystuff · 5 years

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Elise Cooper’s Author Interview of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Verses for the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child brings back the return of their beloved character FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. There is a slightly new recipe for this famous crime solver with a new boss, partner, and medical examiner.

A welcome relief in this story has the authors moving away from anything supernatural and deciding to stick to crime-solving, understanding that the story and characters are riveting by themselves. In this old-fashioned mystery, a Florida woman while visiting her husband’s grave has her dog find a human heart with an apology note. The current victims are women whose throats have been slit and breast bones split open to remove their hearts, all in quick and expert fashion. The killer leaves notes at the graves of women who committed suicide and signed it “Mister Brokenhearts.” As other body counts mount up it becomes apparent that the notes left have a tinge of literary verses from T. S. Eliot to Romeo & Juliet.

Unlike his past supervisor Pendergast must now deal with Walter Pickett, an FBI assistant director recently assigned to the New York City field office, who is determined to keep this maverick agent under his control by assigning him a partner, Special Agent Coldmoon. The new partner is expected to report back on any of Pendergast’s deviations from the rules. Both Agents are a contrast of each other. Coldmoon is part Lakota Indian and part Italian. Pendergast dresses like an undertaker, and always seems to have more money than the average FBI agent preferring the luxuries of a fine hotel, private jet, and nice car. Soon Coldmoon realizes his partner is astute, smart, observant, and has a way of looking outside the box. They enlist the help of the medical examiner who is willing to go against her supervisor to find clues.

Sorting through betrayals, lies, and deceptions, readers are treated to a unique storyline that is highly volatile. An added treat is the humorous banter between the characters that is both refreshing and amusing.

Elise Cooper: How did you both decide to write together?

Lincoln Child: I was an editor for St. Martins where my job was to find new properties. I specialized with non-fiction that included the sciences. I visited the Museum of Natural History in New York and saw peculiar objects, a bizarre history, with eccentric people. I thought this is worthy of an Indiana Jones movie. I did some research and found the guy who wrote most of the historical articles. We became friends after I edited his first non-fiction book.

Doug Preston: I was sitting at my desk at the museum and this distinguished editor gave me a call asking me to lunch at the Russian Tea Room. What struck me is that he appeared younger than I was; and impressively at the tender age of twenty something he was already a Senior editor.

EC: How was Pendergast born?

DP: I wrote the first few chapters of this novel that had two policemen. Lincoln said that these two were essentially the same character. He wanted to fold them into one character. In about fifteen minutes Agent Pendergast was created. When he arrives at the scene of a murder it becomes obvious he is not a conventional FBI agent, and looks more like an undertaker with his black outfits.

EC: How would you describe Pendergast?

DP: A person out of place and out of time. A gentleman from the Old South, specifically New Orleans. He is looked upon as a total freak. He does things off the books, unorthodox, wealthy, and an iconoclast. He is like a twisted, dark Sherlock Holmes.

LC: We have fun writing him. He is an over the top character that is eccentric. He enjoys his comforts. He has become legendary to go rogue and work on his own.

EC: How would you describe Agent Coldmoon?

DP: He is one of the finest characters we have written. Very iconic that keeps to himself. One scene we wrote in the book shows their different tastes. Pendergast is a terrible coffee snob while Coldmoon likes camp coffee with that foul smell. At a certain point Pendergast buys his partner a fine expresso coffee. Coldmoon takes one sip and pours it out. This shows their differences, but they both end up respecting each other.

LC: One thread of previous Pendergast books is saddling him with lazy and incompetent law officials that he had to work with. Coldmoon is not a boring person and we hope he made an impression on the reader. He looks like a Native American with long black hair and piercing eyes. Quietly he shows Pendergast he is an equal with the same intelligence and observations.

EC: There are many contrasts from loyalty to betrayal, the coldness of Maine to the hot humidity of Miami?

DP: We like moving our characters into different places literally and figuratively to see how they would react. Coldmoon is from South Dakota so the Maine coldness does not bother him, but he could not stand the Miami muggy heat. On the other hand, Pendergast in Northern Maine is freezing to death, but from New Orleans is used to the Miami weather.

LC: Regarding betrayal versus loyalty Coldmoon is assigned as Pendergast’s partner with a secret agenda. As time passes he realizes it is wrong. He must choose loyalty to his superiors or loyalty to his partner. Whoever he is loyal to the other will see it as betrayal.

EC: Another contrast is insubordination versus thinking outside the box?

DP: The FBI has evidence gathering rules to collect for trial. Pendergast has a high closure rate of his cases, but rarely do they reach trial because the perp is dead. At first, Coldmoon is appalled by his partner’s tactics, and the treatment of the FBI rule book. They have quite a bit of conflict about this.

LC: Pendergast only accepts one dollar a year because he is wealthy and is doing the job for the enjoyment of the work. He thinks of it as solving a puzzle. As the story progresses his new partner sees the reasons behind what Pendergast does.

EC: You have humorous banter?

DP: We write it by playing off each other. We keep re-writing it to make it funnier. Sometimes our level of amusement gets out of hand and we have to take a step backwards. The author Joyce once said, “Tragedy is merely underdeveloped comedy.” We read what we write, books with a certain level of humor.

LC: The partners try to one up themselves which can be humorous. Finally, there are scenes influenced by the setting. For example, Coldmoon thinks he has a ten-minute drive, which turns into two hours because he got the name wrong.

EC: Can you give a shout out about your next book?

LC: The next Pendergast book is out next winter. We are discussing if Coldmoon will return in the next novel or sometime in the future.

DP: We are starting a new series that will have two characters first introduced in the Pendergast books. The recurring characters are Corrie Swanson, a newly minted FBI agent, and Nora Kelly, an archeologist. The two of them get tangled in a horrific case that has taken place in California’s Sierra Mountains. This is where the Donner Party got stuck in the snow in 1847. Half died of starvation, and half ate those bodies. In the present, Nora does an excavation of the campsite, and something happens that puts the party in mortal danger. It will come out this summer and is titled Old Bones.

THANK YOU!!

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disndatradio · 6 years

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Nicole Dollanganger’s Honeymoon Phase

Lately, Nicole Dollanganger has been spending a lot of time in abandoned love motels. In March of this year, she released five tracks from her forthcoming album, Heart Shaped Bed — her first full-length record since Natural Born Losers, the 2015 breakout that brought her to the attention of Grimes. Soon after, she departed for the Poconos, ancestral homeland of the honeymoon resort, to film a handful of music video with Grimes’ brother, director Mac Boucher.

“I went there assuming it was still this land of love,” Dollanganger, 27, told me on a scorching summer afternoon in New York, just a few days after she finished the video shoot. But when she arrived, she found the area hollowed-out and in disrepair: “A lot of the abandoned resorts developed weird reputations of being, like, unsavory swingers’ joints, and it developed a seedy reputation so they all shut down,” she explained. The viscera of the motels’ previous tenants still litter the rooms — keys; customer complaint forms; dangling bits of tinsel. She eagerly dove in, collecting these memento mori as if they were evidence or forgotten relics.

“She could probably be Indiana Jones in another universe,” said Boucher.

Though the Poconos were not quite what Dollanganger expected, somehow, what she found in rural Pennsylvania was even better. “It had this weird Sleepy Hollow meets dystopian Las Vegas kind of vibe,” Boucher told me. “Everything is love-based, but it’s broken down and destroyed, which is one of the coolest paradoxes that you can find.”

Heart Shaped Bed was already about the ugly, fucked-up, dark parts of love; standing there, amid the ruins of the honeymoon resorts, Dollanganger thought there was more she could do with the unreleased second half of the album. And then she started working on it again.

“There’s no more obvious metaphor for a bad relationship or a doomed relationship than an abandoned honeymoon resort,” Dollanganger explained. (“It felt like we were walking into the record,” Matthew Tomasi, her frequent collaborator, told me.) A recurring theme on Heart Shaped Bed, she said, is how a person’s sense of individual identity can become blurred inside a relationship. “Some of the songs, though they were still love songs, were almost me trying to reclaim personal identity. After the Poconos, I could still feel that, but it just became a bigger scope.”

Dollanganger was staying in Newark, New Jersey, where she and her keyboard set up shop in a rented apartment to continue writing. Through her publicist, I had asked if there was anything she wanted to do while she was in, or near, New York; her manager had suggested Ellen’s Stardust Diner, in Times Square. Before even looking it up, I said yes: I, like Nicole, really love a diner.

But Ellen’s Stardust Diner is not really a diner. At Ellen’s Stardust, the Broadway-hopeful wait staff belts out show tunes and dances across tables while patrons of varying degrees of patience try to eat their all-day breakfast. (For me, a grilled cheese; for Dollanganger, an egg sandwich.) Occasionally, our conversation was punctuated by such musical interludes: the dramatic finale of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific; the fateful meeting of Anna and Prince Hans during “Love Is An Open Door” from Frozen; and also the song from High School Musical.

Heart Shaped Bed, out today, is Dollanganger’s sixth record. (Despite the fitting title, it’s named not for the literal heart-shaped beds found at honeymoon resorts, but for its association with “one of the most expensive, rare items” on Neopets.) In the art for the album’s lead single “Lemonade,” Dollanganger appears bathed in a blue glow, gazing back over her shoulder. Her eyes are rimmed with black, her hair a long blonde wig.

All year, she’s been posting similar photos, taken from various love motels, to her Instagram, an immaculately curated feed of retro slip dresses and heart-shaped bathtubs that creates a vivid visual world for Heart Shaped Bed. When we met, though, she wore a simple black dress with a sheer kimono, a velvet headband holding back her hair. She texts with flourishes of emojis — the flower bouquet and the deep red heart — and exclamation points. She’s generous and open, frequently turning the conversation back to me.

Dollanganger grew up in Stouffville, Ontario, a small town an hour outside Toronto that she described as half-farmland, half-suburbs, where she started going to hardcore shows in high school. After graduating, she attended film school for a couple years — and adopted the Dollanganger name, borrowed from a series by her favorite writer, VC Andrews — but dropped out when she was diagnosed with an eating disorder in her early twenties. While in recovery, much of which was spent on bed rest, she started furiously writing and recording her own songs. She uploaded a few to her Tumblr and then to Bandcamp, where they found a small but fervent audience.

Dollanganger wrote relentlessly: By the time her music came to the attention of Grimes three years ago, she had already put out four albums. She never returned to film school, but her love of film — especially horror — still girds her work. In the Poconos, she and Boucher tried to capture the violence of a horror film without being exploitative: “How do you do that in a way that’s not going to be triggering or offensive or turn people off, but is an add to the beauty of it, while still being true?” Boucher wondered.

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As the myth goes, Grimes heard “You’re So Cool,” the closing track of Natural Born Losers, and decided to launch Eerie, the label-cum-music collective, in order to put out the album. “It’s a crime against humanity for this music not to be heard,” she said at the time. (Dollanganger remains Eerie’s only musician.) Where Dollanganger’s previous bedroom recordings had been almost diaristic in their intimacy — her voice and a quietly plucked guitar — Natural Born Losers dispensed wholly with the twee edge of her early work, replacing it with the thrum of slide guitars, distorted electric chords, and looped vocals lushly illustrating images of sexual violence and rural poverty.

At the same time, Grimes selected Dollanganger to open for her on the Rhinestone Cowgirls tour in support of 2016’s Art Angels. It was Dollanganger’s first foray into playing live, and she recruited her longtime friends Tomasi and Kevin Jenkins to accompany her. I saw them play at Montreal’s Metropolis in November 2015: Dollanganger stood center stage, dressed in a black three-quarter sleeve dress and fingerless gloves and backed by two big dudes with hair obscuring their faces. (Tomasi pulled double duty as guitarist and drummer; Jenkins played bass.) They covered Type O Negative. The juxtaposition between her delicate voice and the otherwise metal look and feel, as pointed out in reviews at the time, was irresistible.

Shy and withdrawn, Dollanganger didn’t immediately take to being on the road. She battled stage fright, often needing a drink to prevent her hands from shaking as she held the microphone, and strained her voice, naturally breathy and soft, against the backing of a full band. She slept in shady motels with a bunch of men. “Just, like, rough living,” she told me. “It was basically all my fears happening at once.”

It wasn’t without its benefits, though. “Everyone that I’ve toured with, they’ve all been very experienced, so they’ve all had great advice, but especially [Grimes], because she is a powerhouse, she works alone, she’s just doing her thing,” Dollanganger said. “There were a few times when I was just really struggling on the road or whatever and she was just really great with bringing me back to reality that this can’t always be perfect and that’s not what it’s about.” (“Claire respects how hard it is being a solo female artist,” Dollanganger told The Fader in 2015, shortly before the Rhinestone Cowgirls tour.) They’ve stayed in touch, occasionally exchanging music, and Grimes’ brother, whom she met during a show in Toronto, offered to help her shape the visual landscape of Heart Shaped Bed.

After Rhinestone Cowgirls, Dollanganger kept touring, playing with (Sandy) Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, and Teen Suicide, and hardcore outfits Code Orange and Free At Last. And when she wasn’t touring, she was planning for touring. “It consumed everything,” she told me, adding that she found it challenging to write while on the road. She put out the odd single — “Chapel,” “Beautiful & Bad,” “Have You Seen Me?” — but this was practically radio silence compared with the record-a-year pace she had maintained when she started out.

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Eventually, she had to go back home, back to Stouffville — and she had to start writing again. Touring “changed everything,” Dollanganger told me. (We paused for a minute as our waiter stepped on stage to perform “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton.) “It was almost like I had to relearn how to make music,” she went on. “When I got home, I would be writing songs and I would just be like, ‘I can’t play this live.’ I went from someone who felt very — almost to an extreme degree — I’ll just say whatever. I felt very free. Coming home from touring and that exposure, I suddenly felt like I lost that inhibition.” She found herself critiquing her work before she could even finish getting the song down on paper, trying to forecast how it would be received by a theoretical audience.

Here, a waitress belted out the Phantom Of The Opera theme, briefly pausing our conversation. We decided we had to leave. We paid the bill and packed up what remained of our lunch, high-tailing it down towards Broadway as a waiter singing “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies — connection to Broadway unclear — bore down behind us, practically chasing us out the door. Outside, it was one of those days where you could practically see the heat rising off the pavement; even midtown Manhattan felt suppressed, quieter, its energy sweated out. We walked a few blocks north, towards Central Park, where we found a shaded patch, the sun unremitting. A pair of dogs frolicked nearby; at one point, a pair of tourists asked Dollanganger to take a photo for them.

After the success of Natural Born Losers, she thought perhaps she could replicate it — “There was a lot of conversation about the creepy-cute, and I felt a lot of pressure to deliver something that would be gross but not,” she said — but it came out contrived. It wasn’t just that she was second-guessing how her music would be received; she was also trying to suppress her impulse to write love songs. Dollanganger simply did not want to write another love record. (The first was Ode To Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs, in 2013.) She wrote, and discarded, hundreds of songs, wrote entire records she would never put out. She tried not to write another love record. But, eventually, that’s what came out. “I don’t think we super get to choose these things,” she said, describing Heart Shaped Bed as “the darker side” of the previous record.

There was no one moment where Dollanganger found herself writing freely again — it’s still hard, she said. But a producer friend, Arthur Rizk, who she met in March around the time of an early scouting mission to the Poconos and who helped produce three tracks on Heart Shaped Bed — “Chapel,” “Snake,” and “Lacrymaria Olor” — offered her some particularly valuable advice: “You don’t second-guess yourself; you just keep going with it,” she quoted. “At the end of the day, if the song is finished and you don’t like it, that’s fine.”

Heart Shaped Bed started to come into focus last August. Dollanganger and a handful of other musicians, including Tomasi, set up camp in an abandoned elementary school, where they spent two weeks honing her demos and writing new songs.

“I didn’t fare very well,” she recalled. “For me, music has to be very personal, very self-contained.”

A couple relics from that session made it onto the completed record: the piano parts in “Uncle” and “Lemonade”; some slide guitar and piano in “Lacrymaria Olor.” One night during that period, Dollanganger couldn’t sleep. It was early morning, maybe two or three, and she crept away to write. “It just kind of spilled out of me at this weird hour,” she said. The song was “Tammy Faye,” which she later re-recorded in Tomasi’s studio. “For me, the songs that happen like that,” she said, “They speak to me the most.”

After the elementary school, Dollanganger and Tomasi continued working on the songs they had demoed in his basement studio. “When I got home and I was listening, I was like, ‘OK, I know I feel good about these songs, it’s more like the delivery of them that doesn’t feel right,’” she said. “When we started working on it and I could be fully producing and everything, that was when I was like, this is it.”

youtube

So here’s what this is: Heart Shaped Bed, with its recurring images of ambivalent marriages, incest, and the big and small violences that can be found inside romantic relationships, depicts the ugliness that can accompany such intimacy with another person. But in looking so deeply, so unflinchingly into the ugliness, it peers through to the other side. And over there, it’s beautiful. “Make something gross feel romantic,” Dollanganger instructs on the title track, urging her lover to take her to a love motel where they can enact their own fantasy world. “The sign says, ‘Heaven waits on the other side.’”

If the first five tracks — the sampler songs, “Uncle” through “Heart Shaped Bed” — describe a bleak landscape of broken love (“I will always come to you when I’m weak and empty,” she chants on “Uncle,” named for a lost VC Andrews short story called “I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night.”) Then the second five songs form the album’s sunken underworld. Heart Shaped Bedcloses with “Lacrymaria Olor,” a song named for a bloodthirsty little single-celled organism known colloquially as a “swan’s tear.” The song begins and ends with a piercing, unearthly wail, Dollanganger’s own voice pitch-shifted and warped beyond recognition.

She recorded the track at Rizk’s studio in Philadelphia in the fall, and listening back through it, she recognized as the conclusion to Heart Shaped Bed. “There needs to be something on a record that ties everything together, otherwise it’s just a compilation of songs,” Rizk told me, “and I feel like that is definitely the roof.” Tomasi echoed this: “I was like, this is a genius track,” he said. “This is going to be the record closer.”

At first, Dollanganger thought she’d call the song some variation on “Tears Of A Swan” — “tears just falling into the pond are meaningless,” she explained — but first, she did a quick search to make sure that wasn’t something that already existed. She became strangely captivated by the tiny ciliate that, when decapitated, can grow a new head within moments, and she gave the song its name.

It came into strange alignment with the cover art for Heart Shaped Bed. Dollanganger, decapitated, stands on a heart-shaped mattress, paddling her way down the River Styx. Her head, severed from her shoulders, bobs alongside the raft, and she’s in the process of scooping it up with an oar. She’s Ophelia, plucking her own head from the lake.

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source https://disndatradio.com/nicole-dollangangers-honeymoon-phase/

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theultraknight · 7 years

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The Guard Chapter 1 How to make a hero

My name is Mother Earth, spirit of this planet.

Long ago I created beings designed to be heroes. To protect this world, and its inhabitants. But they weren't what I thought they'd be.

I force this duty upon them. And because of that, many paid the the price for my mistake. So one by one they were locked away until now.

One of my guardians has been awoken. She is a threat humanity is not ready for, and if not stopped, countless lives will be lost.

Now I must call upon those, with the potential to be the protectors I wanted. Hopefully they will be strong enough to stop her.

My children, I welcome you to the guard.

"Dr. Eisner, what are you doing?"

"Making History." Dr. Eisner said, as he tried to pry open a tomb with a crowbar.

"So we find a crypt, and your first instinct is to destroy it." "Not destroy, excavate."

"We can't disturb anything, we might ruin the greatest discovery of our careers."

Struggling to open the tomb, doctor says. "You worry too much, where's your sense of adventure?"

"It's being overruled by my common sense, you know you're not Indiana Jones right?"

"Why not I'm a daring, handsome archaeologist, ah yes." He had finally pried open the tomb. "Now let's what we have here." He pushes the lid off, and takes a look inside.

"Oh my god Dr. Eisner!" everyone start screaming in horror til suddenly silent.

Ours story takes place in Moss City an average boring town, and like most stories, it will become the epicenter of the incredible.

Now let's get to know ours main characters. The first is Amore, a black girl who lives in the middle of nowhere, in the countryside of Moss city. She'd been homeschooled, her entire life until now. Today is her first day of school.

She wakes up, with a smile on her face. Excited for what the day will bring. she rushes into the bathroom to get ready frantically grabbing clothes. Minutes later she emerges from her bathroom, grabs her bag, and runs downstairs.

To sees her parents eating breakfast. "Mom what are you doing, we have to go?"

"Hold on honey we have plenty of time, and you haven't even ate yet." "I'm not hungry."

"Oh really?" Amore's mom said placed a plate of waffles in front of Amore.

Who grunts in defeat, and takes a seat. "Where's the syrup?"

Amore's dad looks at his watch. "I have to go, they need me early at the firm."

"Okay bye dad." Amore said with a mouthful of waffles.

"Amore don't talk with your mouth full."

"Sorry mom." She said, again with a full mouth.

Amore's mom shakes her head, her dad just laughs. "Bye honey, see you tonight." And kisses his wife.

"Bye." She says. Then turns to her daughter. "I think it's about time leave."

"Yes!" Amore cheers with her hands in the air. After realizing what she did Amore tries to cover with. "I mean let's go."

Amore's mom just sighs, and smiles as they leaves.

Now across town. A black boy is about to leave for school.

Caesar puts books in his backpack, as his mother approaches. "So, how's school?"

"Fine." Caesar said putting his books in, not even looking at his mom.

"That's great, so have you made any friends?"

"Mom." He gives his mom an exhausted look.

"Don't, mom me, you said you were gonna try to make friends this time."

"Mom you know I'm not good at making friends."

"You could be if you wanted."

"But I don't, I just wanna be alone, and read a book."

His mom sighs. "Okay but, can you at least promise me you'll try to, start a conversation with someone, just for a minute, that's it?"

Caesar sighed. "Okay mom, if it will you make you happy I will."

His mom smiled, and hugs him. "Oh, thank you."

"Okay mom can you let go of me, I'm gonna be late." His mom lets go.

"You got everything you need."

"Yes ma'am." He throws his backpack on his shoulder

"Then let's head out."

Now in another part of town. A white boy is in bed sleeping.

"Dillon get up." his mom says as, she pulls his bedsheet from over his head.

"No." he pulls the sheet back over his head.

Yes, now get up." His mom pulling the sheet back off.

"Ugh, we've barely unpacked, I'm sleeping on a mattress, and nothing else, why do I have to go to school?"

"Because you've already missed enough school days with the move, and you're not missing anymore, now for the last time get up!" She snatches the sheet off Dillon carrying it away. "We leave in twenty minutes!" she yells, as she walks away.

Dillon just lays on the mattress and groans.

Meanwhile Amore and her mom walk into Moss City High School. Amore looks at her mom, and can tell something's off. "Mom is everything okay?"

"Yes, everything fine."

"You sure, you seem really nervous?"

"No, I'm fine." Mrs. Valentine tries to put on a brave face.

But Amore doesn't buy it. "Mom really, what's wrong?"

"I'm gonna fall on my face."

Amore scrunches her face together. "What?"

"I haven't taught in years and, they're not gonna listen to me and..."

"Mom, it's okay you're an amazing teacher you've spent the last sixteen years homeschooling me so I speak from experience."

"Yes, but just you I'm about to teach a whole classroom full of students." "So, would let me run wild in class?"

"God no." Mrs. Valentine looks horrified at the very thought.

"Exactly, they're gonna listen, and you're gonna be fine, you got this." Amore's mom smiled, and pulled her into a hug.

"Aren't I supposed to be helping you with your nervousness, not the other way around?"

"I'm not nervous, I'm excited, I've waiting for this forever."

Mrs. Valentine just smiles. Her head laying on her daughter's. "How did I luck out with a daughter like you?"

"Good parenting."

"Well I need to go get my classroom ready, you okay by yourself?"

Amore says, with utter positively. "Yeah go, and remember you got this."

Her mom grins, and walks off.

Amore's ready to go, all she need is to get her schedule. Except she realized she has no idea where to go, to get it.

Just then, a boy with short blond hair runs into school. Amore stops him, looking into his hazel eyes, she says. "Hey, are you a student here?"

"Yeah." Dillon says as he stares, at the pretty brown eyed brunette.

"Can you please show me around?"

"Yeah sure." He says a little too eagerly. "This way, um..."

"Sorry, Amore." She holds out her hand.

"Dillon." He replied shaking her hand, and they walk down the hall.

A few minutes later, they walk back into a now packed hallway. "Thanks for your help Dillon."

"No problem."

"Well I should get to class." Amore starts to walk off.

But Dillon stops her. "Wait, um we have a few minutes before class start, and everywhere is filled with people, but I have idea of where it might not be so crowded."

"I should get to class, I can't be late."

"We have a little time, and I promise you won't be." He said with his hand over his heart.

"I guess." Amore said unsure. "But only a couple minutes."

"I promise." He grabs her hand, leading her to their destination.

It's not long before they arrive at the library. "So you hang out here a lot?"

"No, I just moved here, but I thought no one would be in here this early." Dillon says walking backwards. He bumps into the chair, knocking over it, and the braided hair boy sitting in it.

"Oh my god, are you ok?" Amore asked the boy.

"I'm fine." He said picking himself off the ground.

Dillon says remorsefully. "Sorry man, I didn't see you."

"It's fine." He persists, picking the chair back up.

"Sorry about that, I'm Amore." She extends a hand to him.

Caesar stares at her for a second, before hesitantly extends his hand, and they shake. "Caesar."

"I'm Dillon, really sorry about that dude."

"Like i said it's fine, you don't have apolo...gize" Caesar eyes widen, and he freezes.

Dillon and Amore turn their heads to what's left Caesar in such dismay. A shining neon green light taking the shape of a woman.

"You guys are seeing this too, right?" Dillon asked Amore and Caesar.

"Yeah." they both answer.

"Well good, at least I know that I'm not going crazy." Dillon said.

"Hello my children." The glowing green woman greets.

"Um I already have a mom." Dillon said partly sarcastic, partly scared to death.

"Who are you?" Amore asked. "What are you?" Caesar added.

"I am Earth." the woman said. "The earth?" Caesar asked. "Yes." she responds.

Caesar holds his face in his hands. "This has to be some sorta shared hallucination."

"This is very real my child, I am earth, but you can call me what your civilization has dubbed me, Mother Earth."

"So you're kinda like mother nature?" Amore thought out loud.

"Not just nature, I am the earth itself given sentient."

"By what?" Caesar asked. "Magic." she responded.

"Of course." Caesar just throws his hands up.

"I appear before you, because I need your help, humanity is facing a threat they are not ready for and, I will need warriors need to triumph."

"I don't think any of us are warriors." Caesar said.

"You can be warriors." Mother Earth said.

Screams pour from the outside. They look out the window, and see cops pointing their guns, at two men in ski masks who, have guns point at two women's heads. "Put your weapons down!" One cop demands.

"One step closer, and we shoot." One of the gunmen says.

"Can't you help?" Amore asks Mother Earth.

"I have limited power, that's why I'm need your help, but I can give you the power to help."

"So if we accept that power and help them, we have to help you?" Caesar asked.

"No, all I ask is you think about all the good you can do, deal?" Mother Earth offered.

"Yes." "Yeah." "Okay." "Amore, Dillon and Caesar answered.

"Well then." Mother Earth's hands glow and, Amore, Dillon and Caesar are each enveloped in a different color glow. "Let's start, by the forces of nature, and the very essence of this world, I bestow on you the power to summon strength from the forces of love, animals and knowledge."

The clink of metal rings out, as the transformation completes. The teens take a look at their now armored selves. Amore's armor pink with matching cape, Dillon in white, Caesar with black.

"Now my children you stand before me, Amore guardian of love, Caesar guardian of knowledge and Dillon guardian of animals, always remember you summon strength from these forces, from within and around you, focus on that power, magic is energy and it's tied with these, and everything in this universe, and if your heart, mind and soul are strong even, and you can do anything."

Screams start coming from outside again. They look out the window.

"We said get back, or they take a bullet." one of the gunmen says.

The three teens look back to Mother Earth. "Now go, and be the heroes I know you can be." She waves her hand, over the three sending them outside. Hidden by the trees.

Dillon walks forward. And Caesar pulls him back. "What are you doing?" Caesar asks.

"Going to be a hero." Dillon said looking at Caesar like he's crazy, and Caesar returns him the same look.

"We can't just walk up to them without a plan, someone could get hurt." Caesar explained.

"Ok so what's your plan?" Dillon asked.

"I wouldn't call it a plan, more like steps to making a plan, first we need to figure a way to protect the hostages." Caesar answered.

"I got that." Amore said. "How?" asked Caesar.

"Mother Earth said we can do anything, let's see if that's true." Amore focuses on the hostages. Trying to form a shield around them, but nothing will happen.

Then she hears the voice of Mother Earth in her head. "Remember child you are powered by love, think of those you care about, then whatever needs to happen will happen."

Amore closes her eyes, thinking of her parents. With that childhood memories of her with, her mom and dad flash through her mind. "Amore." Caesar called. Amore opens her eyes to see the hostages emerged in a bright pink glow.

"Good job Amore, now Dillon I'll create a distraction, while you take down the gunmen." Caesar said.

"Okay, but how you gonna distract them?" Dillon asked.

"I'll figure something out, you get just get ready to ambush them." Dillon gives him an army salute, and runs to get in place.

"Of all the things I could have gotten, knowledge how is that a superpower is that, why couldn't I get super strength, or telekinesis, okay take a breath Caesar you have to think of something quick, before someone gets hurt." Caesar thinks to himself.

"Caesar." A voice calls. Caesar can't see where it came from.

"I'm in your head child." Caesar realizes it's Mother Earth.

"Caesar your knowledge is not just facts, or the things you've learned, it's thoughts, ideas, it's life, and with all that together you can solve any problem."

Caesar mulls over Mother Earth's words, but the sound of gunfire draws him from his thoughts. With one cop takes a bullet to the arm.

Caesar starts to panic, thinking people are in danger, and he's just standing there. He looks around for anything that might help, and sees a picnic table.

And everything slows down. "Caesar your mind now can move at, such speed that everything appears to be moving in slow motion but, it won't last long."

After Mother Earth's parting words. A math equation appears all around. Once he understands what it means. He knows what he has to do.

He runs faster than he ever could, before kicks the picnic table. Sending it flying in between the gunmen and the cops. Landing on its' side.

"What the..." the gunmen say simultaneously. They notices Caesar, and open fire. Caesar braces for impact, only to feel nothing, as the bullet bounce off his armor. While that's happening, Dillon sneaks a few feet behind the gunmen.

"Okay here goes nothing, chameleon." But he can still see himself. "Chameleon, chameleon, chameleon." But still nothing happens. "Why can't I turn invisible?"

"That's because you're trying too hard." "Mother Earth?" He asks.

"Hello Dillon, now as I was saying before, you are trying too hard, you see animals are controlled by instinct, you know what you must do, you know the animal you need, so when you summon the power of an animal don't think, do."

"Okay Mother Yoda, let's do this." He rubs his hands together. And runs towards the gunmen, the image of a chameleon in his head, and within a second he's camouflaged.

As soon as he reaches them, he thinks of the kangaroo. Balls his fist, and knocks one of the gunmen clean out. He thinks he might be stronger than before.

At the same time his camouflage wears off. The other gunman sees him shoots. Only the bullet ricochets off Dillon's armor, and hit the gunman in the leg.

The hostages run away, as the two officers point their guns at the criminals. One cop handcuffing the unconscious gunman. While his partner makes the other one put his hands behind his head.

Amore walks up to the first cop who's bleeding, from the gunshot he endured earlier. "Are you okay?" She asked.

"It's just a flesh wound, I'm assuming by the pink, that you're responsible for whatever it was, that appeared around those women."

Before Amore could speak, police squad cars arrive. The cops exit their cars, and draw their guns pointing them at Dillon, Amore and Caesar. "Freeze!" One cop yelled.

The two cops from before, stand in front of our heroes, and the injured one informs his fellow officers. "Put your guns down, these guys saved ours lives." It takes a moment, but the officers slowly puts their guns down.

The former hostages run up to Caesar and Dillon, and hug them. "Thank so much." one of the women says.

"You're welcome, but we can't take all the credit." Caesar said.

Dillon pointed at Amore. "She was the one who protected you with that glowy thing."

"An energy shield I think would be the right term." Caesar said.

"Yeah that." Dillon said.

"Thank you." the other woman tells Amore.

"Just glad to help." Amore said with a smile.

"Who are you?" "What are you?" a couple of bystanders asked.

The three teens hear Mother Earth's voice, once again, and she tell them what they are, and they repeat it aloud. "We are The Guard."

"We need you to come to the station, and give your statements." One of the cops says.

The voice of Mother Earth says. "Fly."

"We can do that?" the three teens said in unison.

"Excuse me?" One of the officers said.

"Focus my children, and take flight." Mother Earth says. The teens close their eyes focus and within seconds. Dillon has eagle wings on his back, Caesar has plane wings with jets attached, and Amore is levitating.

"Wait!" The cop yells.

"Gotta go, secret identity and all." Dillon said.

"We'll be back when we're needed." Caesar assured.

"Hope everyone has a great day, bye." Amore waves goodbye, and the teens fly off. Leaving the police and bystanders with shocked expressions.

Our heroes fly across the city, its' citizens look at them in awe. Once they make it back to the school. They enter the library through an unlocked window.

"That was awesome." Dillon raves. Still on an adrenaline high.

"That was incredible." At this moment Amore felt like she could do anything.

Caesar remains unaffected, but. "Okay I have to admit that was really cool, but how do we turn back to normal?" Caesar pondered.

Mother Earth appears out of nowhere. "Good job my children."

"Still weird anybody but my mom calling their child, but it's slowly getting less weird." Dillon told.

Mother Earth smiled. "To answer your question Caesar, say guard to transform and to transform back."

"Guard." The three say in and, instantly their armor dispel.

"Cool." Dillon remarks.

"Now we had a deal, I give you the power to stand up to those criminals, and you think about helping me with my mission, so have you made your decision?" The three take a moment, looking at one another.

"I'm in." Dillon responds.

"That was the most amazing thing I've ever done, I'm in." Amore answered.

"I'm still not fully convinced this isn't a dream or hallucination, but either way I'm one hundred percent in." Caesar said.

"Caesar is that you?" Said a feminine voice.

"It's the librarian." Caesar whispers.

"I'm proud of you all, and next when I see you I will tell you the threat you will face." Mother Earth said, as she disappeared.

The librarian walks up. "Oh Caesar, have you been here the whole time?" She asked.

"Yes ma'am, I came in when you weren't here, I've been here since." Caesar replied.

"Okay, and who are your friends here?"

"They're not my friends, I just met them." Dillon and Amore looks at him for a second, then turn to the librarian to introduce themselves.

"I'm Dillon, I'm new here." "Amore, I'm new too."

"I'm Mrs. Newbery, nice meet you both."

Then the library doors bust out, to reveal a frantic Mrs. Valentine. "Mom?" Amore said to her mother.

Mrs. Valentine runs to her daughter and, hugs her tight. "Thank goodness you're okay I was so worried, where were you?"

"Here." "Don't worry, we took good care of her ma'am." Dillon assured her.

"And you are?" Mrs. Valentine looks the boy up and down.

"Dillon King." He said with a smile, holding his hand out. Mrs. Valentine stares him down, before taking his hand, and shaking.

"And you?" she asks.

"Caesar Read, we were talking about books for awhile, I'm sorry you were worried."

"That's alright. She turns to Amore. "Why didn't you answer any of my calls or texts?"

Amore checks her phone. "Oh my god, I put my phone on silent for class, I'm sorry."

"Check your phone next time."

"I'm sorry I will." Amore's mom hugs her again.

"I was so scared, I'm just happy you're okay, with those bank robbers out there I..."

"Bank robbers?" The three teens interrupt her.

"Yes, they robbed a bank, the police chased them, then they took hostages in the park across the street, that's why the school went on lockdown." Now they know where the gunmen came from.

The loudspeaker turns on. "The lockdown is over, the situation is now under control, it's safe to leave the school premises, classes are cancelled for the rest of the day."

"Well this has been enough excitement for one day, let's go home." Mrs. Valentine says to her daughter.

"Can I goodbye real quick?" Amore asks.

"Fine, I'll be right at the door." Mrs.Valentine says, and walks up with Mrs. Newbery.

"Give me your phones." Amore says.

"What?" The two boys says.

"Give me your phones, so I can put my number in." She explains. The boys hand over their phones, and seconds later she returns them.

"If we're gonna be superheroes we need to stay in contact." She says.

"Could you try not to say that in public?" Caesar says.

"Relax I mean today we were taking down robbers, tomorrow we'll be beating down evil." Dillon says.

"How do we know it's evil?" Amore asked.

"I doubt the earth itself would need our help it wasn't some dangerous evil." Dillon said.

"Dangerous and evil are two different things." Amore retorted.

"She said it was a threat so, whatever it is we have to stop it." Caesar said.

"Amore!" Her mom called.

"Coming, bye guys." Amore waves to the guys.

"Bye Amore." The guys say, as she runs over to her mom.

"Let's put our numbers in each other's phone." Caesar suggests. They switch phones, put in the numbers, then switch back.

"Well bye man see you later." Dillon says walking off. Caesar waves goodbye. He picks up his backpack, and walks to the door.

"Bye Mrs. Newbery." "Bye Caesar." And he walks off.

Later that night on a small farm. A boy is woken up by a noise. He leaves his house and, goes to the barn. "Hello is anybody there?" He hears the sound of a bucket hit the floor. "Who's there?" He asks walking closer.

"Stay back." A female voice commands.

"You realize you're a trespasser in my barn?"

"I'm sorry, but you have to go." The boy walks up, and is face to face with the trespasser. "No!" The trespasser yells.

"You have five seconds to explain why you're in my barn or, I'm calling the cops."

"How, how are you, What are you?" The girl asks.

The boy is taken aback. "Wow that's a new one, I guess you've never met a blind person before."

"You can't see." The girl said realizing it.

"No, now tell me what you're doing or, call the cops." Silent. "Okay fine." He says and, starts walking away.

"Wait!" The girl yelled. "I needed a place to stay, that's why I'm here."

"Okay let me tell my parents they can help."

"No, Please you can't tell anyone." "But." "Please." She begged.

The boy let's out a deep sighs. "Okay you can stay here, and we'll figure something out in the morning, deal?"

"Deal, thank you so much mister..." The girl says.

The boy chuckled. "Call me Jacob, what's your name?"

"My name is Medusa."

#the guard #writing #creative writing #fiction #fantasy #magic #wattpad #tapas #adventure #action #ongoing #mythological #wattys2017

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